Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, December 27, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Christmas meets New Year's! Oh, work, work, work. Even though I've been here almost an hour and had to do nothing more strenuous than surf the Internet, I still feel like someone has taken a pair of tongs to my frontal lobe, stretched it across an anvil, and commenced hammering with a weighty mallet. There are 400 places I'd rather be right now, and 399 of them are some variation on being curled up in bed with Edi and listening to the rain.The holiday, what with its five day state of non-workingness, was mightily great. We went to Reno to see Edi's mom for Christmas and stayed at the Silver Legacy, my favorite hotel in Reno since it puts us only one elevator trip away from the oyster bar. Perhaps because of our recent cruise, Edi and I were also willing to avail ourselves of room service at all hours and I have to say, as a non-organized-religion guy, if midnight mass is unavoidable, nothing takes the sting off like a 3:00 a.m. meal of quesadillas and Rice Krispies. We also managed to see close to five movies in five days (and although I didn't see all of Burt Reynolds' Hooper on TBS, I saw enough to act like I did) without really trying too hard, thanks to the hotel TV's movies-on-demand feature. I really need to figure out another way to do movie reviews since all the films we saw are deserving of greater commentary (if only to show the schizophrenia of the selection, consisting as it does of: (1) Hooper; (2) Anchorman; (3) Sideways; (4) Collateral; and (5) Moulin Rouge). For now, I'll simply say, as a non-Tom Cruise kind of guy, if a midnight showing of Collateral is unavoidable, nothing takes the sting off like a B.L.T., french fries, and Rice Krispies. More later? I could see how that might happen. posted by Jeff | 9:04 AM | Wednesday, December 22, 2004 The Pitch: It's like The Nightmare Before Christmas meets Office Space! The holidays are so close, I can taste them. Technically, they've begun for me but poor Edi Jo is tearing her hair out over this never-ending job still hurtling at full speed for its drop-dead deadline of 2:00. If she's not in a coma or heading out on a tri-state killing spree at 2:00, we've won!And yet, my unwilligness to declare the holidays without her hasn't stopped me from goofing off like a lazy poop up 'til now. I sort of want to pop La Dolce Vita in the player and relax, but I keep going back, again and again, to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. After initially cursing the annoyances of going through flight school, I'm actually pretty happy about it--flying under bridges is fun. And now that I've got the jetpack, it's even easier to just fuck off for hours. It's creepy that the game is growing more and more addictive for me, not less and less. Unlike the other GTA's, I'm actually spending more time playing all the side missions and doing all the unnecessary tasks in each town, playing the paramedic missions and crap. I'm just dawdling, quite deliberately, because I don't really want the experience to end. Other quick impressions, not about video games (thank goodness): Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is, just as it seemed, the most faithful adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel yet filmed (the fact it's ostensibly not based on a PKD book notwithstanding); Closer should actually be called C Loser, or, even better, C- Loser even though everyone does good work (except Julia Roberts, unfortunately) and Clive Owen is flat-out brilliant; and given a choice between Madvillainy by Madvillain and A Grand Don't Come For Free by The Streets, I much prefer A Grand Don't Come For Free even though I've barely listened at all to either, and Milk-Eyed Mender still triumphs over all. Oh, and the other night I had a dream about, of all things, The X-Files--go figure. I don't remember much about the dream other than it was lit beautifully and it showed me everything the actual show never could: Gillian Anderson was topless and David Duchovny cried convincingly. Almost made me nostalgic for that big mess. I think I'll update again before we leave tomorrow, but if not, have a very happy set of holidays. posted by Jeff | 1:10 PM | Monday, December 13, 2004 The Pitch: It's like Amadeus meets The Little Cloud That Cried! I am sad. Not only did I leave my cell phone at home, but after a two month absence I contributed reviews this morning to the Savage Critic. The response? Not a damn word. In fact, Hibbs' previous entry got two comments since my entry went up and I'm still up there sucking wind.My conclusions? Either (a) I suck; (b) I'm not really contributing to Hibbs' blog, I'm just riding his coattails; or (c) I suck and I'm riding Hibbs' coattails. Kinda depressing, paticularly since I could've tried to get a start on the new Fanboy Rampage and lightened this week's workload on the newsletter. In other news... Last night, I dreamt I was in a large room jammed with bunk beds, and from my top bunk I tried in vain to find my place in Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow (at one point, I read a section from Pynchon's V and realized I had the wrong book) but I kept being distracted by a loud popping noise. Looking around, I discovered the noise caused by Paris Hilton, in another bunk, popping a Tootsie pop in and out of her mouth. The Freudian imagery seems somewhat difficult to argue with, although I'm happy to report I awoke and with great relief saw the popping noise was caused by my lovely companion next to me on the verge of snoring, and not Ms. Hilton at all. And yet, possible interpretations of the dream still unsettle me. posted by Jeff | 5:31 PM | Saturday, December 04, 2004 And Why is it like Dreamscape, Again? Whoops. I was also gonna talk about how, even though my sleeping has been irregular and betossed and bad, the dreams have been pretty great--inventive and relevant and amusing. To choose a trivial example (and one I actually fear to reveal for possible theft), the other night I dreamt I was watching a TV show called Kung-Fugitive, which strikes me as a pretty good summation of approximately 40% of the network television aired in the 70s. A less trivial example, but one harder to explain would be the one about being driven by Courtney Love to see the Olsen Twins in concert while Tim sat silently disapproving in the back seat, or the one where Edi and I ended up in a house in a Swiss village where a pair of men posed with their cat for a pet calendar--one man posing naked and one man wearing an jigsaw suit that made him look exactly like Ben Grimm, The Thing. (Yeah, I know. Huh?)Oh, and thanks to fucking George Lucas with his fucking microwave transmitter that can beam images directly into people's brains (an expensive device in a price range accessible only to someone who's made billions of dollars off toys and product placement deals), I had a dream where I watched about ten minutes of Revenge of the Sith...and I'm sorry to say it was pretty fucking cool. Now I'll be seeing the damn thing, dammit. But, man. Kung-Fugitive. Wow. posted by Jeff | 6:58 PM | The Pitch: It's like Seems Like Old Times meets Dreamscape! Yeah, been a while, huh? Sorry about that.November was such a crazy month, with Nano and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and the Thanksgiving holiday, and me throwing in the towel on Nano and then picking it back up again repeatedly, that I'm only now getting around to writing anything at all, even though my most sacred oath on Nov. 30 was to jump right back in on the writing thing, even if just this blog thing. Even though my Seasonal Affective Disorder-like thing is back in force, due to the dark and the cold and the flavin!, and even though I feel like a fat and unsightly thing, and even though I would like nothing better than to crawl into bed and stay there until, oh, March or so, things are actually pretty fuckin' rad. I'm forty pages away from the end of Suttree, I'm something like, I dunno, 50% into GTA:SA which means there hopefully is an abundance of surprises and delight in store for me, I very much enjoyed The Incredibles in the theater and The Saddest Music in the World on home video (and am super-duper pleased that it was Edi's suggestion to rent it, since I had dragged her to the first few films in the Guy Maddin thingy at the PFA a few months back), and am absurdly delighted with The Milk-Eyed Mender, Joanna Newsom's album I was inspired to pick up after downloading a few tracks that Stereogum (a site I didn't know about until this week) was kind enough to post to get people interested. I was so eager to buy this album after downloading the tracks on Wednesday, I went to Streetlight on Thursday and, when they didn't have it, finally purchased the damn thing at Open Mind Records on my lunch break from Comix Experience. I played the album at the store to the instant and automatic disdain of not just Hibbs and Bennett (Hibbs: "She sounds like Tiny Tina." Bennett: "Dude, is this chick retarded?") but about everyone else in the store who was willing to express an opinion. (Even the chick who looked like a punk/goth Velma, after asking about the album, said, "Ohhhh. I didn't think this could be played unironically!") Only Joel, this guy who is a distressing number of years younger than me and just dead-on in shared tastes (this is the guy who lent me the copy of Ong-Bak) turned to me and said, "Isn't this album great?" It is great, god damn it, even though this woman sounds like, to use Edi's very apt description, like Bjork crossed with Adam Sandler. But she plays harp like an angel (I've always wanted to say that) and there's something about that goat-bleating voice when applied to super-smartly written lines like: And as for my inflammatory writ? Well, I wrote it and I was not inflamed one bit. Advice from the master dreailed that disaster; He said, "Hand that pen to me, poetaster!" While across the great plains, keening lovely and awful, ululate the lost Great American Novels-- An unlawful lot, left to stutter and freeze, floodlit. (But at least they didn't run, to their undying credit.) Which, I dunno, just knocks me on my ass--Bjork crossed with Adam Sandler singing lyrics that could have been penned by Cormac McCarthy? And then there's Peach, Plum, Pear which, through the magic of multitracking, makes the chorus sound like one of the Melanesian choir chants from The Thin Red Line while the rest of the song's a thwarted/failed love story that reminds me of one of Nancy's poems. (That line seems both painfully panderous and ass-kissy but dammit, it's true.) Interestingly, I've listened to people that other people haven't liked and I totally understood why--I became a fan of both Dylan and Morrisey long after I gave up on trying to even understand why anyone would like them--but I honestly don't get why people wouldn't love this. A lot of comments to the entry on Stereogum were like: "Ahhh, you're giving me ear Cancer!" and "the vocal equivalent of being ass-raped by dolphins" or like that. And while I can understand comparisons to Lisa Simpson or Alfalfa from Our Gang, I literally don't understand why, I dunno, that's a bad thing, you know? I find myself on the opposite end of the spectrum, where horseshit like American Idol drives me nuts, with its endless fixation on technique and presentation and where contestants take a song and skin it. So. Yeah. GTA:SA; Suttree; The Incredibles; The Saddest Music In the World; The Milk-Eyed Mender by Joanna Newsom; and of course Edi, fighting her way downtown in shitty ass traffic today so we can look at The Mechanic's Library because she also thinks getting married near a bunch of books would be cool. A few nights ago, we were at an all-night diner and although she all but tackled me to keep me from the CD jukebox, she either genuinely approved of my selections ("Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," The Smiths; "Message To You, Rudy," The Specials; "Don't Believe The Hype," Public Enemy) or was kind and loving enough to seem like she did. And while I'm old enough to know there's more to a good relationship than whether or not a person is going to take your hand in a diner and bob their head to music with you, it is in itself a wonderful and beautiful thing with a certain amount of power to it. posted by Jeff | 5:03 PM | |
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