back to it, then: May 2008

Been having trouble sleeping lately.

The transition from the two job/not a lot of downtime schedule to one of relative normalacy has been quite smooth this spring. The key, perhaps, was not going directly into a spell of complete lethargy (my general preset)... nor setting myself up with that old standby, "now I'll have time to get all those projects on the backburner done!!!" Instead it's been somewhere in between... dedicating myself to pushing creative and/or necessary tasks forward, but also nurturing my softer side... that would be the gradual spongification of the brain.

The only snag over the last few nights has been this null space between 2 and 4 a.m. where I start to shut down operations only to suddenly come back to (nearly) full wakefulness after only a brief, brief sleep. It makes for crappy, attention impaired days after, I can tell you.

So here we are.

What have I been doing lately?

One of my Spring projects has been a new job through Goose Lane Editions, a publisher here in Fredericton that I've done work for in the past. This time around they've retained me as a kind of blog editor for an online magazine of sorts called Branta. Essentially it will sit parallel to their website and provide entertainment, information, and a reason for people to keep coming back and... maybe... buy a book or two?? My part has been to secure regular contributors who will provide what I've been thinking of as bylines... periodic columns that will be either about the same broad topics each time, or something completely different connected aesthetically in some way. Pretty nebulous, no? Most posts will have some tenuous connection to writing, or being a writer, or reading... you get the idea. Initially this was all meant to launch back in April... but now it's been pushed back to a couple of weeks from now in June... corresponding with the website's relaunching.

On the fun side... I've been catching up with some film/series watching:

The good:

No Country for Old Men
I've always been a Coen Brothers fan, but they've been slipping lately with a couple of misses like Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers it shook my faith a little. This restored it. Though it's based on a Cormac McCarthy novel... one of the few of his I've not yet read... it has all the trademarks of the bros. best films: A loser who suddenly has an oppotunity for something better. Here that's trailer park cowboy Josh Brolin who finds a ton of drug money. In Raising Arizona it was ex-con Nicolas Cage who kidnaps a baby to save his marriage; in The Big Lebowski it was bowler Jeff Bridges who gets handed a satchel of cash to be bagman for a convoluted network of schemers. It has Javier Bardem as the cypher-like hand of doom (think Peter Stormare in Fargo or Randall "Tex" Cobb in Raising Arizona. It has Tommy Lee Jones as the overly-wise but still-stymied philosopher cop (Frances McDormand in Fargo). It's bone-dry and downbeat, too. Good times.

Cloverfield
So producer J.J. Abrams got his household name status on Felicity, then cemented it on Alias and Lost. The first show I made fun of, though I never watched an episode... the second I occasionally tuned into to see if Jennifer Garner was wearing something made of latex and the third I've avoided because I always avoid things everyone else doesn't. Here he teams up with fellow Felicity alum Matt Reeves... and despite the potential for getting things really wrong, they don't. It's a monster movie shot in the handycam aesthetic tacked on top of a framework of a guy who found the girl of his dreams and fucked it up. It works because (a) we can identify with the guy's bonehead moves and then the monster destroying NY becomes a massive externalization for his internal trauma and (b) the way the monster is shown in glimpses and distances makes it way more effective.

Battlestar Galactica Season 3
The cracks are beginning to show a little, especially in the latter half of the season. It happens in most television dramas and is perhaps unavoidable... that the focus turns more and more directly onto the characters and away from the situations they find themselves caught it. I found myself not really caring about the Apollo/Starbuck love affair. The device that is meant to create chemistry through tension has been overused since its initial (over)use in Moonlighting and Cheers. What is interesting was the gradual disintegration of order within the Cylon ranks. As they become more human, they become more and more fucked up. I don't know how the revelation of four of the five remaining Cylon models will play out... but I kinda wish they hadn't all been already established semi-major characters.

Well... I guess I'll take another crack at sleep.

Wish me luck.

The trip began Sunday Morning around 5:30 a.m. Atlantic. These were stoic men with a long day ahead:

Stoicism is not always defined in terms of capacity.

Nor the respect of property.

In Ottawa the weather allowed the enjoyment of plenty, both in it's basic form:

And cooked:

Three of us spent some time in Marc L.'s Ottawa estates... while Marc B. disengaged to a realm more "keggy." This is also a rare picture of John awake as he spent most of Monday suffering a stomach bug and sleeping roughly 18 hours.

On Tuesday in Montreal we ate soup.

The went to a Masonic Temple where we saw Christopher Willits wield a guitar whose sound was routed through laptop and various other electronics to fine results.