Month: October 2013

Saturday night’s all right

My parents have been away for a couple of weeks, traveling in Portugal, Gibraltar, and Spain, and they returned on Thursday night. I went to pick them up at the airport after work and then returned home to a very happy-to-see-them dog. (It was very shortly like they’d never been gone — “oh, were you away? welcome back” — but clearly just him and me for two weeks wasn’t exactly what he’d prefer.

I was out of the office this week, except for Thursday and Friday, visiting campuses and talking with instructors (or being stood up them), and I was out the week before. So I’m slowly getting used to a regular schedule too, just as much as the dog.

This evening, I did let myself do something I pretty much refused to while I was alone in the house: I watched a horror movie. Seriously, I like horror movies, but I can be kind of a wuss about them. The house is three stories tall, it’s dark and mid-October, and it’s just me and the dog. I didn’t even want to watch Sleepy Hollow in the evenings.

So I was kind of looking forward to this…but disappointed when I actually decided on a movie, Resolution. It’s interesting — I’m seeing it described a lot as an indie Cabin in the Woods, which I guess is sort of accurate — but it’s not very scary, and it’s pretty disappointing in the end. It’s almost a parody of the genre, or a knowing commentary on it, except less knowing and and well-constructed as Cabin.

Anyway, that was my Saturday. My parents are still a little jet-lagged, I think, and maybe feeling a little under the weather too. But the dog is clearly glad that they’re back, if only because my father is the soft touch when the dog’s begging at the dinner table.

Random 10 10-18-13

Last week. This week:

  1. “Hey Bulldog” by Toad the Wet Sprocket (orig. the Beatles), guessed by random passer-by
    What makes you think you’re something special when you smile?
  2. “It’s Raining” by Inara Georg
    I guess I’ll just go crazy tonight
  3. “Lodestar” by Sarah Harmer
    Listen, the darkness rings
  4. “If I Ever Leave This World Alive” by Flogging Molly
    I’ll be here when it all gets weird
  5. “I Got Stripes” by Johnny Cash
    On a Monday I was arrested
  6. “Ohio” by Devo (orig. CSNY), guessed by Clayton
    We’re finally on our own
  7. “Joe’s Garage” by Frank Zappa, guessed by Clayton
    If you can load or unload, go to the white zone
  8. “Ramshackle Day Parade” by Joe strummer and the Mescaleros
    Taking the freight elevator from the incinerators
  9. “1921” by the Who, more or less guessed by Betty
    I had no reason to be over optimistic
  10. “I’m Losing You” by John Lennon
    Stop the bleeding out

As always, good luck!

Wednesday

I’ve been back to work, after taking last week off, although I haven’t yet returned to the office.

Yesterday, I was back in the city, but I spent the day downtown, meeting with instructors (and the bookstore, and a librarian) at Pace University. It went okay, and if nothing else I feel like I’m back in the swing of things asking these kinds of questions. I still don’t love it, particularly walking in somewhere I don’t have an earlier appointment (like the bookstore) and trying to explain the research I’m doing and convincing them to help me with it, but I’m not as nervous about the whole thing as I was at the start of this semester.

I may be again in the spring, or next fall, when I’ve had another several months off from it. But for now, I don’t mind.

Talking with the librarian was interesting, partly because she’s the first who has agreed to meet with me at any school. (It’s often hard just to find the person in charge of a school’s digital collections, which is who we’ve been asked to talk with.) And I had a really constructive meeting with an author who’s book I’m technically not working on anymore, but for whom I did a good chunk of market research.

Today, I was back on Long Island, but out at Dowling College, in Oakdale. It’s maybe not the prettiest campus — not that Pace, necessarily, is either — but it’s right on the Connetquot River and built on the site of one of the Vanderbilts’ former estates. I had some good meetings — they were particularly friendly at the bookstore and in psychology — and while lunch was perfectly terrible and a couple of instructors stood me up, it was not an unproductive day.

I have several more phone calls lined up, including some tomorrow, and I’m still hoping to connect with some of the people who weren’t where they said they’d be today. (Honestly, I understand the people who say no, and the ones who never respond, but the ones who say yes, they’d be happy to meet and then never respond to your follow-ups? What’s that about?)

Sunday

Last night, I watched His Girl Friday, which was fun and fast-paced, and then I watched The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, which was only infrequently the former and not even once the latter. Seriously, the idea that I am now only a third of the way done with Peter Jackson’s three-part movie just makes me feel weary. Rather than cut out the book’s boring bits — and I’m sorry, Tolkien fans, but there are plenty — Jackson somehow adds more. It’s not without its occasional charms — Martin Freeman is good, as is Andy Serkis, however much they do over-use Gollum across all the films — but it’s also just plain exhausting. Which is really the last thing you want a fantasy adventure story to be.

His Girl Friday was a lot of fun, though.

Friday

I wish I could say it had been an especially productive week, but it hasn’t been, really. I mean, I did watch the entire second season of Continuum and a bunch of movies, but I’m not exactly sure that counts.

I like Continuum, which I say having not always been the biggest fan of star Rachel Nichols. Of course, I say that, I now realize, only dimly remembering her at all from Alias and The Inside, and from small roles in the first GI Joe and Star Trek movies. This season may have complicated things with a little too much plot, but maybe that just leaves something for the (now confirmed) third season to make sense of. The show’s Canadian-ness also started to creep out in year two. I don’t necessarily remember them hiding the fact that it takes place in Vancouver in season one, but it’s firmly established in season two.

I also watched a bunch of movies. Earlier in the week, it was Point Break and The Sunset Limited, then Gravity on Wednesday, Magicians last night, and This Is 40, Room 237, and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing all today. (Oh, and I re-watched Pee Wee’s Big Adventure this afternoon as well.)

Gravity is more spectacle than story, more experience than anything else. It’s a pretty thrilling experience, and worth the (not insignificant) added cost of seeing it in IMAX and 3D — seriously, this is a film that will not benefit from DVD or television viewing — but there’s not a lot of weight to it beyond the often stunning visuals.

Room 237 is an interesting movie, full of lots of odd theories — most not very compelling — about The Shining and Stanley Kubrick’s intent. The theorists in the film — heard but never seen — who talk about The Shining‘s impossible geographies and recurring visual themes are much more convincing than the ones who claim it’s about the Holocaust or Kubrick’s involvement in the faked moon landing. (“I’m not saying we didn’t go to the moon, I’m just saying that what we saw was faked, and that it was faked by Stanley Kubrick.”) If nothing else, it made me want to re-watch The Shining, though I settled for Kubrick’s earlier noir film The Killing.

Magicians, meanwhile, was pretty terrible, as was This Is 40, although at least the former was just unfunny and didn’t feel like it was forty years in real time. I like a lot of the cast in both films, and it’s easy to see how Magicians might have seemed funny on paper…whereas This Is 40, on the other hand, is so shaggy and plotless it’s hard to believe any of it ever existed on paper. It’s telling when you’re sitting around in your pajamas on a Friday watching a movie and thinking, “Maybe I should have gone to work after all.”

Of course, I did kind of go to work. I sent and answered a whole bunch of e-mails this week, mostly trying to get reviewers looking at a project before I return to the office at the end of next week. I also went back to SUNY Old Westbury briefly yesterday morning, since that seemed easier than trying to schedule a phone call.

And that, more or less, seems to have been my week.