blah blah Donnie Brasco blah great film blah. blah blah Barry Levinson blah blah Avalon blah tedious but touching film blah blah.
But seriously, I've just found out that another college buddy of mine has been laid off. That's not something I really want to think about, as these guys are very good at their jobs (or at least should be) and I see it only as a harbinger of worse things.
Any future we have now will be its future's past.
That line just came to me, bringing with it a rhythm as though detached otherwise intact from a song or chant. Whatever that means. I'd meant to write about The Future for this entry but find myself needing to address the past. Namely, 1997, the year that Donnie Brasco premiered, just before the month of March. I was in High school then, wrapping up what was a pretty decent senior year, complete with angst-y relationships and college decisions. The extent of my exposure to sophisticated film culture was a fanatical devotion to all things Monty Python and the knowledge that a number of movies about The Godfather had been made and I should probably see them. The idea of DVDs had not occurred to me, let alone laserdiscs, and I owned a mere hundred and twenty CDs. And I missed Donnie Brasco completely—had no clue it had come out or anything like that. I probably knew only of The empire strikes back's special edition which also played that weekend. Knowing this really only helps me in my personal quest to determine exactly when the current version of my personality solidified, and it bears no meaning on the rest of you or the rest of this entry.
As I mentioned, I was thinking about the future recently. Wasting two dollars on an old widescreen laserdisc of Demolition man I watched the movie in all its letterboxed glory, and I can't say I was any more excited or disappointed from the last time I watched it, even with the additional visuals. I want to like that movie because the ideas underlying it (at least on the futurist side, not the meatheaded action) are pretty interesting and some even original. What gets me, though, is that all of the doors open themselves. Is energy so abundant that they can spare power to open every door, every time? Clearly we're not dealing with non-renewable resources here; though nobody ever mentions what makes San Angeles tick. Likewise the city in Blade runner and scads of other near future visions. I'd like to think that the future lies in clean nuclear power, but I doubt most filmmakers share my optimism. Is it so rare to find a Gene Roddenberry, who, in the course of creating a virtually completely original periodic table, invented a vastly powerful new power source such that ships hurtling through space would not only have doors that opened themselves but artificial gravity to boot? Lucas tackled the problem pretty feebly by mentioning power converters and widget generators and never showing how they work, though I am sure that in the books or comics the engineering is explained in great detail. I just don't read those books, sorry.
What books I do read are pretty varied. I'm working my way through Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and it thoroughly impresses me. Not since The curious incident of the dog in the night-time have I read a book so convincingly portraying a detective with a disorder, this time Tourette's syndrome. Of course all that I know about Tourette's is that which I've seen on TV, but the tics and compulsions as he presents them certainly have the ring of authenticity if not outright truth. Lethem's Gun, with occasional music was one of the best books I read last year and though this one's subject matter and setting differ, the hooks still pull me in just as much.
And I'd just like to settle the coolest house cat name debate now with Lethem's mention of a feline named Shelf.
Today my parents and their friends visited, and the six of us (them and me and my wife) all went to the Franklin Park Conservatory to see the Chihuly glassworks interspersed with the various plants. I'll admit it—it was pretty cool. I took some pictures with my digital camera and need to futz with them to see if anything came out. I'll be posting them on Fotolog (if I can get that to work) instead of on this site because I'm already at my ten megabyte limit.
Now that I've finished watching all of that C.S.I. I have noticed more errors. Surprisingly they screwed up another Camaro, among other things, showing one from the eighties in some shots and an older one in others. Also they've had a small TV dish pointed east or west, and the list goes on. But hey, it's just television.
Carina has been writing some really good stuff lately. Not just the part about me being interesting and engaging. Stop reading this site and go read hers—it's worth it.
The Japanese company that sells the wacky Bowlingual translator for dogs' barking (and the Meowlingual for cats) is developing a device that will let people program their dreams before going to bed. This news article makes mention of the device. More significant to me than the mere total control over dreaming is the gradual waking feature that uses
music and lights that simulate sunlight so that users of the gadget do not forget their dream in the shock of waking.
That's the key feature for me. I don't need to create my dreams beforehand as my imagination is more than capable of creating interesting dreams. Take for example this morning's masterpiece:
For once, I was me, though I think I was younger. High school age, perhaps, but I can't be sure; I always had been a mature kid (ha ha ha). Anyway I was at home with my parents and possibly a sister or two, and we had a problem. The house was infested with rodents. In the dream I had a vague recollection of seeing rodents around before, but not enough to worry or panic; now, though, the little bastards were everywhere. They scurried under tables, desks and the fridge. Anything leaning up against the wall would have several rodents under it when moved.
I keep using the word "rodents" because these were not conventional critters. They looked like large mice or small rats and they were grey with beady red eyes, but they looked to be stuffed animals--I could see seams and stitching and whatnot. They moved and acted like real rodents, though, which at the time didn't strike me as so odd but I know that I noticed it.
As is usual for my dreams, the beginning setup is long since forgotten and I was left only with a vague sense of responsibility and guilt for the sudden population explosion of the little fuzzy guys. This sense came to me in a store selling computer software as I was looking at buying something for DVD burning, but that too is vague and transition-less to the rest of the proceedings. Those proceedings were also somewhat disjointed and mildly non-linear but I will try to present them as well as I remember.
Until now I neglected to mention the other characters that figure into this dream. We will meet one of them now and the others later, so I'll introduce just him for now. Sitting at my dining room table was Ghostbusters' Winston Zeddmore, Mr. Ernie Hudson himself. I can't say for sure if it was the actor or the character at my table, and in the morning I was muttering the name Winston Smith (wrong movie, of course) to try and remember while the song "Girl all the bad guys want" by the band Bowling for soup played incessantly in my head. I'm getting off track here. Winston/Ernie had a particularly scene in the dream. I had given him one of the live rat things and asked him about them biting. Apparently he was an expert on such things; how fortuitous of him to be in my dining room. To demonstrate his rodent expertise he held it close to his left hand and allowed it to bite the heel of his palm. It kept chomping away, and Ernie/Winston was moving it around to effectively slice open the bottom of his hand. He set aside the now-still rodent (with his good hand) and reached into the gash. Fishing around, and spilling out some bloody innards that looked strangely like a lump of brain matter, he retrieved (from his hand, remember) a pair of fogged-up eyeglasses that he then donned over his sunglasses, and smiled like a madman. Which, under the circumstances, was entirely appropriate.
I wasn't the only witness to this gruesomely weird scene. With me in the dining room were two random short-haired girls, one blonde and one not. They were probably aged somewhere between eighteen and thirty but I cannot really narrow it down any further than that. Needless to say they were disgusted by Eddie/Winston's little demonstration. And then we were in a room that could have doubled as the deck of a ship for all of the exposed wood--floors, walls and everything. I had the impression then of it being a ship's deck, at least. We moved a table or cabinet thing to the center of the room and we joined by another random fellow who I will call Mr. Booze, because I think it sounds cool. He gave us a small corked yellowish bottle which was opened to reveal some bubbly champagne.
We poured out the champagne over the table thing, in the idea that it would do something to the rodents, and there was a discussion in which I always mispronounced 'champagne' much in the way that Christopher Walken's recurring SNL character "the Cosmopolitan" does. We will never know if I was doing this accidentally or deliberately. Then Mr. Booze, the girls and I all went to bed.
To try to get some sleep.
The morning after we were on a school bus. I still had the beer-bottle sized champagne and was sipping it, while Mr. Booze was gulping down a monstrous root beer of the sort that emphasizes "BEER" on the label and downplays the "root". He was across the aisle from me and the girls were a couple seats up. Evidently the blonde hadn't slept well, and I was getting ready to figure out a way to let her get some sleep when the alarm rang. Just as it was starting to get interesting.
And in other news, informal testing has revealed the shelf life of a Krispy Kreme glazed donut to be three days.
As I watch the second season of C.S.I., I can't help but think that those responsible (Bruckheimer, Littman et al.) need to have some people on staff as detail-oriented as Grissom's forensics team. I don't mean to nitpick too much (continuity errors with haircuts and the like) but I would think that when they display a car's registration and then have somebody talk about it on the radio they'd be sure to have them match. I may not know the difference between a 1976 Camaro and a 1978, but I can read and hear just fine.
Niggling details aside, it's a good show. I can't imagine having to wait a week between installments nor even the five minutes for commercials, though, now that I'm used to watching my TV shows on DVD.