The Department of Useless and Ill-Informed Opinions

Stuff I'm Into

Something new here... A quick list of things I'm liking at the moment, movies or TV I've seen recently, books I've read, music I've heard, etc.

Movies:

• V for Vendetta: "Vendetta, vendetta!" But seriously, folks. I really enjoyed this movie. It looked incredible, and a little story about undermining a corrupt and overbearing government is, well, let's go with timely.
• Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story: Part One in our Steve Coogan double feature. The man might just be a genius, and this is a great way of telling the tale a seemingly untellable book. It made me want to read it, and for me to want to read an 18th century British novel that's saying something.
• 24 Hour Party People: Part Two... Going 3 years earlier, it's semi-true version of the story of a real person and a music scene. Funny and snappy, 2 hours flew by like it was nothing.

Books:

• The Biggest Game in Town: A 23 year old book about the World Series of Poker, from back when it was getting huge (by their standards then), but still actually small potatoes (by ours).

TV:

• Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance: Not to geek out or anything here, but in preparation of the upcoming 3rd season they're running twice-weekly shorts that will bridge the storyline gap between the 2nd and 3rd. The first is out, and I haven't even watched it yet, but if it's half as good as the series itself, it'll be twice as good as most of the other shit on TV. At least until Studio 60 premieres.

The Good Driver, The Bad Driver and The Ugly Driver

For whatever unexplained reason, I seem to have a lot of what one might be inclined to term surreal experiences. Nothing all Close Encounters or anything along those lines; just some very odd stuff.

The latest happened four weeks ago, on the Saturday night when the blizzard started. I was out with some friends at the newly-opened downtown branch of P.J. Clarke's celebrating a birthday. We all knew the snow was coming (or most of us did anyway, as the birthday boy and one other claimed it was going to be another meteorological bullshit job), but decided to go out anyway. As we sat having a nice leisurely, booze-filled dinner we watched out over the harbor outside the World Financial Center as the snow went from a light misting/dusting into big, wet, thick flakes, and we knew it had arrived. It didn't stop us though, we kept on going, and in fact adjourned to the rear bar for a few more once we settled up the dinner bill.

I'd have to put it somewhere around 1am when we all finally decided to call it a night. Not very late, but the snow was heavy, and there were already a couple of inches on the ground. Now, in case you're not aware of the geography, the WFC isn't exactly a hopping night spot. It's an office tower complex (and one that I worked in for a little while back in 1998-99), though with the recent residential boom of Battery Park City it's not quite the weekend ghost town that it once was. I figured between the neighborhood and the weather, cabs would be a bitch to come by (as did my friend Rob, who walked out the north exit of the WFC and hoofed it through the snow to City Hall), but there were a few waiting outside the south exit of the complex. Lucky me.

So I hopped in one, and the guy has his radio on. I knew that I knew the song, but I couldn't quite place it. It was an instrumental, and sounded vaguely Musak-esque, so I figured it was just another version of some song and the Guinness was blocking my brain. A few blocks go by, and the cab driver turns around (while driving through snowy streets, no less). He says:

"You know this song, my friend?"

"No, sorry, I don't." (I lied. I was drunk and tired, and it was just easier.)

"I see. You will know in a moment."

He turned back and reached for the car radio, hitting the Next Track button a few times. The next sound I heard, I knew quite well. And so would you. Even if you never knew where specifically it came from, it's one of the most recognizable movie themes of all time, and it happens to be from one of my favorite films.

So I'm enjoying it, but still a little bit on the drunk side, and my Tuco-loving cab driver turns again.

"You know it now, my friend?"

"Yes, of course."

"Is a classic, no?"

Now, as wonderful as this conversation was, I really wanted to get home, um, what's that word? Right: Alive. It's a fucking blizzard, we're speeding up the FDR, and this guy wants to chat about the Spaghetti Western genre. I'm not a big cab talker at any given point, but right about now I'm starting to fear that this dude might fancy himself a bandit, and we may go careening off into the East River, Thelma & Louise style.

This is where you might expect a climactic end, the final gun battle between Blondie and Sentenza if you will, but no such luck. He drove me home, the whole while listening to 15 seconds of a track and skipping to another, spinning around to ask what I think, his ADD in full effect.

There's all different types of crazy in this world, and we all own at least a tiny sliver of it. This guy was somewhere about halfway up the chart, I'd figure. Not crazy enough to do something drastic (at least not to me, God help the first passenger who says they hate Sergio Leone movies), but just crazy enough to want to chat about obscure movie soundtracks from 1966 while driving through a snowstorm.

Well haven't I been a

Well haven't I been a little bastard? I've always said that I wouldn't be one of those people to have a non-updated blog site. Maybe a week doesn't make it dead, but still... But there hasn't been all too much going on.

Since this is supposed to be about my novel, I'll hit that first, and say that I still haven't touched it since November 29th, the day the leak in my apartment happened. At first it was the immediate need to get my apartment fixed up, but since then it's been sheer laziness. Maybe there's nothing wrong with taking the past near-two weeks off, but I realize the need to get back into it. During the month of November, I got myself into the habit of writing almost every day, which had always been my biggest problem. I don't want to fall out of that habit, and have it be too difficult to get myself back into it. I also want to finish the story, and it is almost done. So I'm hoping to get back to it this week.

As for everything else... The apartment is totally fixed, and has been since last Tuesday night. I was back in my bed last Wednesday as planned.

We got nailed by the snow over the weekend, but it was fine. Snow in Manhattan is more of a minor hindrance than anything else. I think the worst part was that it took me an extra half hour to get home from work on Friday night.

That same night I had the extreme pleasure of going to the Bowery Ballroom to see a band that has been one of my favorites for about 16 years: Living Colour. Outstanding show, as always. They've always been a group of stellar musicians, and nothing's changed. So I feel this need to give them the plug, since most people respond something about Cult of Personality when they hear their name, and don't realize that there are 3 other albums. Check out their new album Collideoscope, and absolutely go see them live if they come to your town. I can't recommend a live LC show enough.

While I'm on the topic of raving about things, I'll add mine to the growing list for Angels in America on HBO. The play appeared on Broadway when I was in high school, and I remember wanting to see it but not getting a chance to. In retrospect, that's probably a good thing, because I somehow doubt that my 17 year old mind would've grasped all of the concepts. I've been reading the original play (finally) recently, which has been sitting on my bookshelf forever, and I'm almost done now with Part 2. But as for this movie, it really is incredible. Since this is all about writing, and since everything I've seen about this keeps focusing on the actors, I'll talk about Tony Kushner for a second, and that's all I'll do since this is running very long. There are very few writers who can emote in such disparate voices as Tony Kushner. It amazes me to no end that the same man can write neurotic Mormon women, a gay Mormon man, an ex-drag queen, and a racist lunatic of a lawyer all together. When I'd first heard that HBO was making this movie, I was afraid of what the screenwriter would do to the play. But then it turned out that Tony Kushner was writing it himself. All I've noticed was that he trimmed bits out, to cut the total running time down from somewhere around 8 hours to 6. That's all I'll say about this. I recommend that if you can find 6 hours to watch this, make sure you do. Just think, it's easier than reading.

I think that's all. I have my company holiday party tonight after work, so the novel certainly won't be resumed today. But there's always tomorrow...

-Jordan

Damn you, lack of productivity.

Damn you, lack of productivity. Damn you to hell.

I've done just over 1,700 words today, on what was supposed to be the big, bad catch-up day. My hangover wasn't helping earlier. I did pass a pretty big hurdle though, because I more or less finished one of the two major sections of the book. Much of the college years of the characters is finished being written now, with the exception of a few brush-up's that I'll get to in the first round of editing.

I now need to get my ass into gear and write the part that takes place in the present, and I'll follow that with a few random chapters here and there to explain the intervening 10 years from 1993 and 2003.

I'm going to try to get cracking after dinner and trudge forward, though it's much more likely that I'll watch the 3rd disc of Ken Burns' Baseball that I have sitting here from Netflix.. Anything else I do today is now working towards catch-up, since today's quota has been hit.

This was much easier when I was ahead of my limit, and everything was flowing. Now that I'm faced with having fallen behind it's become much more daunting. I think that next Sunday I may head to my local area's meetup to write, and that may help some.

My re-write is more or

My re-write is more or less done, and sooner than expected. I got most of it done last night, and finished up the last bit of it this morning. I finished the entire section of the story that I've been working on, the so-called college years of the story (so-called because it's the characters' college years). I wrote 5 pages in the very beginning of their adult lives, and that hasn't been converted to first person yet, but I'll do that when I go back to writing that section of it. I even ended up gaining 250 or so words in the process.

So it went better than planned. I'm now in the hole by around 500 words, which isn't so bad. But apart from the couple hundred words gained in the conversion, I haven't written anything new since Wednesday. Today should have been more productive, but I went out to see The Matrix Revolutions (in head-spinning IMAX no less), and I've been catching up on the TV that I've been recording onto my Replay all week.

I may get a little bit done before I go out tonight, but I'm not expecting much. And tomorrow I have a wedding, beginning at 6:30pm on Long Island. So I'll do what I can during the day before I have to leave. I think that Monday (which I've taken off) will prove to be my full-fledged catch-up day here, and I'm hoping to get back on pace then.

While I'm here I'll say a few words about the end of The Matrix... So far most stuff I've read (which admittedly has been limited, on purpose) has been pretty negative. A friend e-mailed me a list of reviewer one-liners that said how bad it was. I won't give anything away here, because I'm not that kind of guy, but I can say that it was 150% better than Reloaded. And still not anywhere near as amazing at the original was that first time you saw it.

That's all for now. Back to procrastination.

-Jordan