God Friday is love

Oh hey! Is it, like, the late hours already? Ha ha, I knew that. Once again I curse NaBloPoMo for keeping me cursedly, nastily awake. And I suppose, since you're here, that you'd like some words. Sometimes I open a book or open up a web page and I can't believe that it's words I came for. It's just shapes and squiggles with a trace of aesthetic interest. I worry that you will come here and your eyes will scan over the shapes, then flick away. So keep your eyes trained. Otherwise you'll never know how many chicken wings from 7-Eleven I can eat before I notice that I'm eating a pile of grease and pale meat. The answer is eleven.

Following on Schmutzie's example, I'm going to give you three things that made me happy today, or at least three positive things. Let them be random and stuffed full of the caprice and shit.

1) Last week I called a meeting with my executive director. My term is coming to an end, and although I've had a casual promise that my term would be extended into 2007, I hadn't received official word. Today I found out that I would still be bringing home my allotment of bacon for another while.

2) Here's a video of Joanna Newsom playing her harp and singing through her nose. She looks like a Gelfing and sings like a chain-smoking twelve-year old, but I love her so. Her new album, Ys, archaic and hypermodern all at once, shows that you can play a harp and still kick the crap out of Loreena McKennitt. Not that you need a harp for that. Just a nice heavy halberd and a thirst for justice.



3) Sometimes an entry will generate paragraph on paragraph of junk, but every so often I'll find myself with passages that have their own worth but don't really fit anywhere, like a well-formed but superfluous limb (although I could always use another arm, for spooning of extra pudding and such). Here's a stump from my review of The Departed.

"We never lived in the Golden Age of Hollywood, when television was unknown and the shared dream was dreamed in dark places with crowds of strangers, and studios pushed out picture after picture, grand, good and indifferent alike. Between the wars, moviegoing was the quintessential shared media experience. By the 1950s, televisions were tunnelling their diodes in more and more households, the studio system that kept stars on screens was beginning to collapse, and that brief cultural bonding moment that was the movies had ended. Ever since we have lived in the receding echo of that moment. Sure, there are theatres, and yes, in those theatres they show shows, and we crowd into darkened rooms to watch the shows they show us, but the experience is different. I'm not calling out to a lost golden age of films - most of my favourite films come from long after the mid-'50s - but much of what we're watching is a half-hearted attempt to reproduce that experience, when movies seemed like a projection from the eye of an arc-lamp god. Now movies are billed as events, in the manner of grand Biblical stories, but studios miss the essential element, the continuum of movies, with epic films cresting the surface of a silver ocean like the blunt heads of whales".