strange radiation: the pool of radiance archive
Adventures with an unreliable narrator.
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Feb 28 05: still more snow
We’re supposed to get 6-10 inches overnight here in NYC. When I find that @#$% groundhog I’m gonna kick his fuzzy little ass.
On top of yesterday’s existential yadda, I am also really really tired of winter. I needs me some sunshine, and soonest. I shall keep a vigil for the approach of the wam day by constantly reloading our local National Weather Service page. Everybody needs to know about the NWS/NOAA forecast service, by the way: all the weather information you could possibly want, presented in a straightforward manner and without ten thousand Flash-based ads and surveys and ‘click here for your weekend golfing weather report’ stupidity. Go forth and make ye a bookmark.
Feb 27 05: excuse my dust
It’s been a mostly quiet weekend, which was good, because the job has been nutso exhausting lately. We had another couple of performances with the NYC Ballet (of Chichester Psalms, now in repertory—more performances of that in April if you’re interested), but beyond that we’ve mostly lolled about the house. Paul made chocolate-chip cookies. We ate many of them. Bliss.
This evening I skipped the Oscars completely. I have no opinions on any of the performances being considered, which I missed one and all; going quickly down the complete list of nominees I see that I have seen maybe four of the films that have been mentioned in any category whatsoever, and those are all the kind of movies that get nods for things like art direction. What happened here? I used to be a big movie fiend. I seem to have lost the knack; or maybe it’s the $12 ticket price. Shocking. Anyway, instead I’ve been doing an early sortie into the Terrifying Project.
The Terrifying Project is yet another attempt to get the stuff under control. My desk is constantly under eight inches of random crap: manuscripts and CDs and bills that need paying and bills that need filing and mail that I haven’t even looked at and scraps of paper and CDs of photographs that I have to post to the swim team’s website and comic books and nonfunctioning wristwatches (there are three) and souvenirs of various travels; stories people have sent me and manuscripts I should collate and the Big Blue Folder from Viable Paradise (back in October) and Ziploc bags full of office supplies; unread magazines about swimming and mailing labels with little cartoon versions of me and Paul and a pair of broken goggles that I’m saving because I’d like to buy a pair just like them; rubber bands and a coaster and bottles of fountain-pen ink; a Daruma doll with two empty, staring eyespots. I look at all this and despair, and the despair means that I never try to tackle it—I just shove it out of the way when I need enough space to sign a check in or a place to put the mouse when I play computer pinball games. Similarly, the e-mail inbox has gotten totally out of control: when I get home from work I have just enough energy to answer anything that is plainly an emergency; everything else tends to get marked as unread so I know to come back to it, which I’ll never do, because tomorrow another twenty things will end up in the queue, and that’s why I now have over 700 mails marked “unread” in the primary inbox alone.
As I said, stuff. The stuff cloud is a slow death by smothering. I am unable to believe I’ll ever get it tamed, and that despairing certainty means that I never try. I just blanket the whole thing in an SEP field for another day. But somewhere under that field is the spark that I could be using for other things. Because I don’t see the manuscript that needs to be resubmitted, I don’t resubmit it. Because I don’t want to go into the big scary e-mail inbox, I never write to anybody anymore.
Tonight was a first step. Anything that I could identify as useless trash in under three seconds has been discarded. A vast quantity of what had been on my desk is now in the paper barrel. There’s still a lot to be done, of course: documents to file, books to shelve, lent-things to be returned to their owners, e-mail to sort. But it’s a start. I even found a manuscript of a story I banged out last spring which, upon re-reading, is actually as good as I remembered it being. It gave Paul the creeps when I waved it under his nose and forced him to read it, which is a good sign. Last summer I toyed with the idea of using it as the foundation for a longer work, but maybe I should leave it as it is.
In service of the bigger picture, I’ve also been reading a book called Getting Things Done, which seems to be mentioned around the net with some frequency these days. It’s one of those ‘get yourself organized and productive’ self-help books, only this one seems to work well enough that there are devoted hipsters maintaining whole websites devoted to the general theories contained therein, plus interesting ways to hack those theories to make them useful to your particular mode of living. I figure, what the hell. Anything’s better than what I got. I’ll report back as appropriate.
Finally: one of the big reasons I’m trying to get my act together is to get enough of the distractions off the table that I’ve got some energy I can divert to writing again. Because I really haven’t written anything substantive since, oh, October. The occasional idea, but the general vibe of oh jesus why do I even bother when it all ends up a scrap of paper in The Pile I think I’ll watch television instead has pretty much quashed anything further. And that part is already starting to work. I had a big epiphany during the pre-performance rehearsal last night—a plot thread that ties the first part of “Slow” to the later two parts, and gives me some new handles on what happens in those as-yet-unwritten later episodes. So that’s encouraging. Wish me luck. For now, though, I’m going to bed.
Feb 20 05: double-wide!
Okay, time for some movie trailers. For instance, you’ve found the decent versions of the Hitchhhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trailer by now, right? Ah. Here you go then.
Meanwhile, Tim Burton’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory looks fun, kinda Kubrickian and surreal and c’mon, Johnny Depp as Wonka, how can you go wrong? Burton also has another animated feature coming out: The Corpse Bride due out at Hallowe’en, and that looks like a good time, too. The big comic-book movies are shaping up to be the usual mixed bag: the trailer for Batman Begins suggests that the franchise can still be salvaged after the ignominies perpetrated by Joel Shumacher. And Sin City may actually pull off Frank Miller’s noir-o-rama fabulosity. On the other hand, there’s Fantastic Four. After seeing the international version of its trailer, my fears that it would turn out to be, well, sucktastic were eased a bit. But then I saw the American trailer and now I’m not so convinced. You can judge for yourself. (There was a fifth astronaut? And it was Doom? And he got electrical powers? Excuse me?)
And just to prove that I’m not all about escapist frivolity, how about a documentary about Klaus Nomi? No, I hadn’t heard of him, either, but it does seem interesting. Adventures in avante-garde clubland! Ann Magnuson’s in it! And probably less likely to shock your parents than something about Leigh Bowery, although whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing I’ll leave to you.
Feb 19 05: squee
The Tiger Lillies! Have brought Shockheaded Peter back to Broadway! And we have tickets!
Oh, I’m beside myself with excitement. The Tiger Lillies are this…gosh, how to describe? They’re a post-punk cabaret group. Bass, accordion, and found-objects percussion section, backing dark and/or sordid lyrics delivered by an astonishing countertenor. This show is a musical presentation of Dr. Heinrich Hoffman’s Struwwelpeter, a disturbing ninteenth-century children’s book. (Those who read Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol back in the day may recognize it as the source of the horrible Scissormen.) Anyway, we rarely go see shows, but there was no way I could pass this one up.
The Tiger Lillies have also done an album with the Kronos Quartet of songs based on unpublished verses by Edward Gorey. You will not be surprised to learn that it is deeply fabulous and that you should buy it immediately.
Feb 12 05: the gates
“The Gates,” the latest site-specific installation by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, has been unveiled at last in Central Park: 7,500 saffron-colored doorways of nylon and plastic, marching down the promenades and winding through the woods. Paul and I went to see.
It certainly changes the experience of Central Park. Against the wintry greyness of everything, these things blaze with orange exuberance. Sometimes they are a river; sometimes a parade; sometimes a mob. The whole damn town seemed to be there to look. I took some pictures.
Feb 8 05: science experiment
Hey, I was wondering: If you were to open browser windows to engrish.com (which chronicles noteworthy appearances of faux-English in Asia) and Hanzi Smatter (which concerns itself with misuses of Chinese and/or Japanese script in the West, esp wrt tattoos) on one computer at the same time, would there be a huge explosion? Somebody try this and tell me.
re-emergence
Well, this was fun. I came down with the stomach flu on Sunday evening, but I think it’s all over now. In the last 48 hours, I have consumed one jug (and a little) of Gatorade, about twenty Ritz crackers, a cup of yogurt, and a jar of applesauce. The lingering not-a-cold-but-you-have-to-clear-your-throat-every-forty-seconds seized the opportunity to upgrade itself into an actual cold, as well, but I can deal with that. I have slept a lot; my waking hours have been filled with DVDs. (Reading seemed to be a little too focus-intensive, especially when the fever was going up and down and up and down.)
I am bored out of my mind. I am even…is it possible?…hungry for actual food. Both of these suggest that things are up and running again, but it’s disconcerting that another ‘sign of health’ is that I’m looking forward to getting back to work so I can clear out the unspeakable backlog that awaits me in my inbox. Still, it beats the hell out of a night spent vomiting. I guess.