I'm Major Jackson, and this is The Slowdown.

33 minutes and 11 seconds into the 1976 film Mikey and Nikki.

You can catch a glimpse of my father.

He's sitting in the back of a bar.

He sports a jacket over a white turtleneck.

His left arm is around his girlfriend, Ruby.

He is a 24-year-old extra.

The film stars the actors Ned Beattie, Peter Fault, and John Cassavetti.

Nikki is on the run from the mob.

In one of the scenes, he and his best friend hide out in a bar in a black

neighborhood. This film, with my father as an extra, will outlast my memories of him. I imagine the

director yelling, cut, and redoing the scene over and over again.

At some point, they get it right.

If only life were directed to perfection,

today's shrewd poem ardently shows how time shreds memories

into a dreamlike sequence of events.

Yet, we are preserved in our stories.

Second Paradise by Chard De Norde. Poetry is a dream made in the presence of reason,

Adam Zagayevsky. I went for a walk with a girl I hardly knew

when I was a boy. On a trail by a river for a film I didn't know was being made, by a director I couldn't

see or hear. Behind his hidden camera in the clouds and trees, as we recited

our lines unwittingly with no idea of the plot or ending, as we walked for miles in that

...