In Which Dave Needs a Vacation
I always forget how miserable allergy season is for me, particularly in a year like this, when we go from tree pollen to grass pollen pretty much without any break. I'm groggy in the mornings and then end up staying up later in the evenings. This year, too, I feel like I still haven't made the adjustment to Daylight Savings Time. The days have no rhythm to them and I feel like I'm just stumbling through.
I am sputtering along through a short story that I have been working on for months. It's not bad but I have almost no momentum on it. I did come up with an idea for another story yesterday, although the question as always is whether I can pull it off. I'm waiting to hear from beta readers on the novel, so I'm in a weird limbo that feels ridiculously unproductive.
The other tenants in my building have taken up the hobby of slamming doors arrythmically, like they're part of some avant-garde musical composition. Occasionally I wander out to try and figure out what's going on, but I never find anyone in the halls. Possibly I have wandered into some sort of Monkees/Scooby-Doo chase sequence where no one involved could afford the music rights.
The new J.J. Abrams film "Super 8" is supposed to be a Spielberg homage, which leads to me to ask: "Why?" Spielberg is technically adept but heavy-handed, and his films are mawkish consolatory fairy tales for the middle class. I'll give you "Jaws," two of the Indiana Jones films (well . . . one and a half), the battle scenes in "Saving Private Ryan" and whatever is left over of "Empire of the Sun" once you subtract the syrupy fetishizing of childhood in the soundtrack and cinematography--although really, what's left probably belongs to Ballard and Stoppard, not Spielberg. Considering all the work he's done, that's not much of a track record. Although I suppose that if anyone should be doing an homage to Spielberg it's Abrams; "Cloverfield" is possibly the emptiest spectacle made since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Of all the things that are bad and wrong in the world, somehow one of the most depressing to me is the proliferation of those "Real Housewives" shows on Bravo.
I am sputtering along through a short story that I have been working on for months. It's not bad but I have almost no momentum on it. I did come up with an idea for another story yesterday, although the question as always is whether I can pull it off. I'm waiting to hear from beta readers on the novel, so I'm in a weird limbo that feels ridiculously unproductive.
The other tenants in my building have taken up the hobby of slamming doors arrythmically, like they're part of some avant-garde musical composition. Occasionally I wander out to try and figure out what's going on, but I never find anyone in the halls. Possibly I have wandered into some sort of Monkees/Scooby-Doo chase sequence where no one involved could afford the music rights.
The new J.J. Abrams film "Super 8" is supposed to be a Spielberg homage, which leads to me to ask: "Why?" Spielberg is technically adept but heavy-handed, and his films are mawkish consolatory fairy tales for the middle class. I'll give you "Jaws," two of the Indiana Jones films (well . . . one and a half), the battle scenes in "Saving Private Ryan" and whatever is left over of "Empire of the Sun" once you subtract the syrupy fetishizing of childhood in the soundtrack and cinematography--although really, what's left probably belongs to Ballard and Stoppard, not Spielberg. Considering all the work he's done, that's not much of a track record. Although I suppose that if anyone should be doing an homage to Spielberg it's Abrams; "Cloverfield" is possibly the emptiest spectacle made since "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."
Of all the things that are bad and wrong in the world, somehow one of the most depressing to me is the proliferation of those "Real Housewives" shows on Bravo.