It's rainy out -- not entirely unusual weather for late November -- but it's also pretty gosh darn warm out, too.
Let's put it this way:
The forcast for tomorrow for New York City is for highs in the mid-60s (about 19 for those of you who speak Celsius).
The forecast for tomorrow for Los Angeles is for highs in the mid-60s.
Something's not right, folks.
I was on the phone last night with a friend I haven't spoken to in months. She asked me how old I was going to be.
I said that "all the digits" change this time.
She said that she doesn't think of me as being that old.
I said that I don't either.
Heh.
As David Brancaccio says, let's do the numbers:
I have much to give thanks for -- health, and the health of those close to me. I still have a job, which given the current economy, is definitely something to be thankful for. And the fact that I haven't lost anyone in the disasters that have recently befallen New York -- that too is something to be thankful for.
Coming back to Mulholland Drive for a minute. Yet another way to look at the film is to watch Last Year in Marienbad and look at the parallels between the films. I suspect that the resemblances are more than coincidental.
From all of us in Public Television, have a safe and very happy Thanksgiving.
Saw Mulholland Drive a few days ago.
What a film.
It's easily the weirdest movie I've seen in years, and it's probably the best film of the year. Of all the movies of 2001, I think that this will be the one that people still talk about in 50 years, long after Pearl Harbor and Tomb Raider have been (thankfully) forgotten.
I still haven't figured out entirely what it's about, though I think I've got a pretty good handle on it by now. It's a film about Hollywood, and it's a film about how Hollywood accidentally seduces people and chews them up. To say much more would be to give away too many of the film's secrets. If you really want to know what I think it was about, email me.
It's David Lynch's best film since Blue Velvet, and I think that it's a more focused film with more to say. Blue Velvet (as was Twin Peaks) was about the horrors lurking beneath the suburban facade, which is a pretty generic subject that's been tackled many times in many different ways; Mulholland Drive is specifically about something and he says something rather unique. I think. Certainly the way he says it is unique.
Perhaps the most amazing thing is that it was originally a TV pilot for ABC.
I think that "Mulholland Drive" the television series would have a very different beast than Mulholland Drive the movie, but I think it also would have been similar in many ways. Certainly the resolution of the film never would have made it to the small screen.
It's interesting that in a day and age where special effects rule the day, that the most technically advanced trick this movie uses is the simple expedient of having the camera go in and out of focus.
Crikey!
In a week's time I'm going to be preparing Thanksgiving dinner... the first time ever for me.
It's gonna be lots of fun, right?
Ah, la vie cafe. Reading something like this makes me want to move to Paris.
. . .
Shave and a haircut, 950 Afghanis. (NYTimes, free registration required)
I was going to write about how New York has changed and how it hasn't changed in the two months since the attack. But, as always, life got in the way.
I started on Saturday night, late. Fell asleep.
Sunday morning my mom calls and reminds me that we're supposed to go to dim sum.
I walked back from Chinatown with my brother. We came up Centre Street to Lafayette, and then on to Broadway up to 34th Street. We made couple of detours around, and ended up going straight up Avenue of the Americas (otherwise known to most New Yorkers as Sixth Ave) to 57th Street, where we turned and headed west. A stop at CompUSA, a few minutes to gawk at a huge fire on Eighth Ave., then on to my parents' house.
Over the dinner table, I negotiated with my mother over what was going to be served for Thanksgiving dinner. It was close-fought and intense. Kind of like Paris in 1972.
I left with an offer to cook dinner at my house, and went to Fairway. I came back home (it was around six) and watched the end of the Giants-Cardinals game (Cards basically gave the game away), and was relaxing on the couch (having assuming that the rest of my family was not planning on eating dinner at my house), trying to plan the rest of the evening (laundry and pontification seemed to float to the top of the list) when the phone rang. It was my mother, informing me that she and my brother were, in fact, planning on taking me up on my offer of dinner, and that they would be over in about 1/2 hour.
Which was fine, except that I hadn't even started to think about actually preparing dinner. (I knew -- roughly -- what I wanted to make, but I hadn't even thought about the hows or the wherefortos). So I scramble to make dinner.
And my cousin phones, saying that she's just landed at the airport and wonders if she could crash overnight.
So much for laundry and pontification. I guess you're spared my over-ponderous musings on the nature of things, the nature of my non-existent life, the meaning of life (there really isn't one), and so on. I'm sure that it would have been self-indulgent wallowing anyway, and who wants to read that?
. . .
Another plane down.
Enough already!
My fortune cookie today read:
A recent investment will soon pay-off.
Time to buy lottery tickets, I think....
Well, it's November now, but the weather isn't cooperating. According to New York 1, it's 64 degrees outside right now. Of course, I haven't actually left my apartment yet... at 1:04 p.m. on a Saturday afternoon... but I'm sure I'll get around to it soon.
There are just a few things to take care of first...