Marching In

I didn't write one word in February. I played piano and performed a couple of times at Gingko's and saw lots of movies. It has gotten to be a habit: seeking out old movies to watch, sometimes picked out just for the title or a certain actor. They range in quuality from rotten to sublime, like the one I saw today. Green For Danger, with Trevoor Howard and Alastair Sim as a Scotland Yard inspector; it was worth watching just for Sim's performance. Anyway, I will try to write more often. I only wrote this because I was too tired to read but not tired enough to sleep, and extremely annoyed by some witless music. How often it is that the bad brings something good.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Finnegan's Wake

What a strange man James Joyce was, as clearly illustrated by his final novel. Or is it a novel? 628 pages and all I can think is what did I just read? Why didn't someone help that poor man? His literary journey from 'Dubliners' to 'Finnegan's Wake' reminds me of pictures done by a man who only painted cats, who became schizophrenic: by the time his malady had finished its course, one could barely see that he had painted a cat. So it is with Joyce and his work. He could only write about Ireland, and in this final book of his, one can hardly tell it's about Ireland. Still, despite some initial shock (I had to read a different book after the first two chapters), I managed to get through Joyce's great joke on the literary world, and found myself captivated. After I finished the book, I went back to the start to complete the sentence at the end that he finished at the beginning, and I found myself wanting to start the book all over again. I resiste...
Read more

Damnation Alley

Damnation Alley was a great science fiction novel written by Roger Zelazny. It was the story of an outlaw named Hell Tanner, who was coerced into taking a vaccine to the East Coast, but first he had to cross a post-apocalyptic wasteland known as Damnation Alley. It was also the name of the movie adaptation featuring Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard. That Peppard was in it was the first sign that the movie would suck. Though I find Peppard to be a fine actor, his character was not in the book, and instead of an outlaw on a solo trip through a living hell, it was about a military unit on the mission. The second sign of how bad the movie would be, Tanner's first name was changed from Hell to Jake. Readers of the book were confronted by a wholesale change in action and emphasis. What should've would've could've been a movie as good as Escape From New York instead became one of the biggest pieces of crap ever produced. Why someone would turn a great book into a rot...
Read more