fine whine

I have nothing good to say today (though I could delve into yesterday's watching of Platoon, I won't) so I'm just going to complain about the escalating drug problem in this country. Every mass medium now is flooded with ads for prescription drugs (once relegated merely to the pages of Reader's Digest) and all of them smarmily order the reader/viewer to ask their doctor about this and that. Many of these (save for the ones in RD) don't even say what the stupid pill does or is intended to do when its not causing diarrhea and sexual side effects. What bugs me more than that, though, is the idea our doctors are not well-informed about treatments and medicines to such a degree that TV watching morons must inform them of self-prescribed new wonder drugs.

Why do drug companies spend so much money advertising to people who can only ask their doctors? Why not advertise solely to the doctors, and pocket the difference? You know, save money and waste less time? How can advertising to people who have no direct control over the drugs prescribed to them be at all profitable? It boggles the mind.

Wow, this has been such an original and insightful post.

Once again I could not fall asleep easily last night. I cannot be sure if it was thinking that kept me awake or being awake that kept me thinking, but I think I had a neat idea for a book. It's a mystery novel, quite possibly in the first person/bankrupt financially and morally/rooftop confrontation/etc. mold. The crime is a string of murders over almost a decade that get stumbled upon and ultimately halted. I'm considering doing it in third person and opening it up to the killer's POV as well (a la John Sandford) but probably won't; I've always had reservations about that style of writing though Sandford pulls it off with a certain finesse I can't hope to achieve. Anyway, the quirk about the book is that everybody in it is named Edgar, to a man (or woman). Naturally I'd provide other details and mannerisms to differentiate the Edgars, but if I can pull it off I don't even want to give them last names. So the killer's Edgar, all of the victims are Edgars as well as any potential suspects. As a bit of absurdity, I'd have the detective wonder "But who is the killer? What is his name?" or something like that that can only be idiotic in light of everybody being named Edgar. I'd picked that name previously for a quick ditty slash character study when an idea occurred to me that had no obvious use—so I made a page for it. It was only after an extra sleepless half hour that I remembered that the award given for particularly good mystery fiction is the Edgar, and to use that name so many times in a given novel could be considered name dropping or fishing. But I don't care. Silly books don't often win serious awards, after all.

In other news, I've targeted my GeoURL information as closely as possible. I believe the coordinates now pinpoint my fridge.

Two observations from the drive home today:

• A van in front of me with a small B&W TV on the dashboard, playing what looked like the news, though I didn't get too close.; Drivers like that scare me and he was obviously the one watching it—the other six seats were empty.
• A personalized license plate TSTGOD: what could this be?
  • Trust God?
  • Taste God?
  • Test God?
  • Toast God?
  • ...Gourd?
  • ...Garamond?
• I'm still stumped. Why did the guy keep the Ohio clipart instead of getting an extra letter for clarity? We may never know.

Once recently I was at a loss to come up with any of Stanley Kubrick's films other than The shining and A.I.. 2001 had slipped my mind, as well as A clockwork orange, both of which I've watched. I own Spartacus (and A.I. for that matter) and at one time also owned Eyes wide shut but traded that up for a Criterion Robocop. I even forgot the ones I'd liked, Full metal jacket and Dr. Strangelove. Why should I list them when imdb does it so much better? I hadn't known the guy even had his hand in The spy who loved me, one of the better Bond movies I've endured. Anyway, the whole point of this is that I don't appreciate ol' Stan for the work he's done. Take the film I watched tonight: The killing which he directed in 1956. It's a heist movie but it's so well made and unconventional to be elevated over what even then was already becoming a tired genre. Joe and the gang keep everything at a quick pace and the nonlinearity and narrator lend an original edge or two to the proceedings. I know now that the next Kubrick for me to watch won't be Lolita or Barry Lyndon but 1955's Killer's kiss, at least if I can track it down easily. Gradually I'm changing my opinion of the guy, and enjoying the process.

Without hesitation I'd say The Killing is one of the best movies I've seen this year, and without laughing I'd probably back it up for quite a while. Diner too would be on that list, and the more I think about it the more little things make me grin: the whole idea of holding a vengeance against a baseball team but explaining it only when only one is left to hit, throwaway lines about words like "nuance" and the immature guy banter are just the beginning. The rest of the movies this year are going to have an uphill fight to match these two gems, but that won't stop me from watching a whole bunch of them. Eventually I'll make a short list of the best films I watched last year; expect to see it in February, I'd guess.

This is unrelated to anything, but how cool would it be to have a song with the bass and/or guitar lines played backwards? I think such a thing would sound cool, though it may well have been done. This is something worth looking into, methinks.

You know what I like about Diner? All of the cars are dirty. Even the classic '57 Chevy is filthy. It lends a very authentic look and makes a believable film even more real because, after all, these cars aren't new nor are they well maintained by these teenagers. It's a good movie, too—I'm glad I picked this one up despite its prominence on greatest movies lists. Not to say that I'm going to go out now and rent Singing in the rain but maybe I won't be so jaded about the accepted canon of great movies of which I was not aware. I certainly liked it more than the more well-known American graffiti, one my earliest DVDs from Columbia house namely because it helped maximize my savings or something like that. Needless to say I was not impressed by it so much. I'll revisit it someday, likely before I unwrap my laserdisc of More American graffiti, but I'm not keeping my hopes too high. Setting my expectations too high has ruined more than a couple movies for me and I don't like having my movies ruined.

I had other things planned to write, but unfortunately I spent the afternoon laying in a half-napping state on the couch and forgot them. I wanted to ask people about the plot of a book I vaguely remembered, but now its details are lost to me. I suspect it was part of a Terry Pratchett book, given its zaniness, but I can't remember the details. I may well have dreamed the whole thing. I think I'm almost completely caught up on the Discworld series, having read Pratchett's Monstrous regiments within the last several days. It, like his others I've recently read, was more coherent throughout and didn't have an odd undercurrent building to a whirlwind of activity and confusion like some of his other books; this is about the only complaint I can level against the series.

I wish I could remember this lost plot of mine—I really wanted to know what it was so I could read it again. Not that I don't have enough books to be reading right now, being still in the middles of Michael Moore's Dude, where's my country? and Michel
Houllebecq's Elementary particles. And I still need to watch The omega code with Jessica so that I can complain about or laud it as I see fit.

In the title of this ("the horror, the horror...") I refer not to Apocalypse now but to The omega code that I will likely be watching tomorrow. To be fair I had allowed Jessica to pick out a couple videos this time around, and the latter was her choice, probably more to get out of there more than to see that particular movie. But at least it gives me something to write about, perhaps even as I try to watch it. Or, God willing, it might be good and I'll be so riveted to the screen as to not want to get up and, say, gag myself with a spoon after using it to gouge out my eyeballs—an action which had crossed my mind three fourths of the way through Willard but two days ago.

Even watching Repossessed yesterday wasn't that bad, and in fact it had a couple genuinely funny jokes. The two that I remember were the naming of the girl as Nancy (in the Exorcist she was Regan, get it? ha ha ha) and the other involved exercise bikes. You see the two priests were doing a training bit in a gym and just about outside the frame was a kid on an exercise bike wearing turn of the (last) century clothes and throwing newspapers. I laughed and it tided me over at least the next twenty jokes. Why, you may ask, did I watch this "gem", temporary insanity or perhaps a little demonic possession? Neither. I had stumbled across a laserdisc of said movie in the store for a cool twenty bucks and though I had passed it up (the supposed authentic signature of Linda Blair wasn't enough of a draw for the price—and it wasn't widescreen) the temptation to subject my wife to it remained long after I'd left the store. Oddly enough it wasn't available at the library in DVD form but they had a VHS copy that probably hasn't been checked out since the last Bush was in office, and we watched it yesterday. So it goes.

Speaking of the Bushes, I've been paging through the early sections of Dude, where's my country? by Michael Moore, and I can't help but think the same thing I always think about Michael Moore: I don't agree with everything he says nor all his logical leaps and bounds, but dammit I can't help but think that this country would be better off if there were more guys like him running around. He's just looking for the truth, and to reveal some of the insanity behind the curtains of the powers that gosh darn are gonna be whether we like it or not. Joe Conrad and Frank Coppola knew it too and that's partly how the engaging mishmash of Apocalypse now ever came about, though I cannot imagine an even longer version of it though I know that someday I will be watching that very "redux" edition, and probably soon. I already knew war was hell; now I know it's insanity too.

Here it is the year 2004 already, and dammit, where are the flying cars? This is the future, isn't it? Evidently I need to resort to science fiction to get my future fix, as I have recently read Norman Spinrad's Little heroes and the first story arc of Warren Ellis's Transmetropolitan series of comics. Each is a vision of the not-too-distant future and each presents a vision of the streets of New York. That's just a setting, though; one's about rock and roll and the other about freedom, truth and violence. Sort of.

What's funny to me is that it is the novelist, not the comic book guy, who is all hung up on sex (particularly its oral variants). Then again, the mantra is sex, drugs and rock and roll, so I suppose it goes with the territory.