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What It Is: 6/21/10

What I’m reading: Imperial Bedrooms

What I’m listening to: Walking Wounded, You Could Start a Fight in an Empty Room, and High Violet

What I’m watching: Honeymoon in Vegas, Boondocks, and the end of the NBA finals. And then I watched these highlights from Ron Artest’s postgame press conference, which is one of the most joyous things I’ve ever seen:

(The full-length version is here, but I couldn’t get the embed to load properly. Grr.)

What I’m drinking: North Shore #6 & Q-Tonic

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Discovering a turtle, re-enacting Kung-Fu Hustle, and lounging around.

Where I’m going: Nowhere. Except for a visit or two to my office, I likely won’t leave the house much in the next two weeks, except for dog-walks and lunch-breaks.

IMG_2532What I’m happy about: Taking a break from Saturday’s work and going to the NJ Comics Expo (it was about 15 minutes from my home), where I met some older cartoonists and editors and saw a bazillion comics from my youth, now 50-cent fodder in longboxes. Oh, and I saw the Batmobile. I also met Irwin Hasen, the guy who created Wildcat and co-created Dondi, whose solid-black eyes made him the Antichrist of Little Orphan Annie’s world. Mr. Hasen looks about as 91 as he is.

What I’m sad about: How I basically give up the month of June every year. But that’s the job, and it’s preferable to the alternative.

What I’m worried about: Top Companies issue. I’m one profile off-schedule already.

What I’m pondering: Why I downloaded Imperial Bedrooms onto my Kindle. I mean, sure, it was only $9.99, but am I really that interested in how Bret Easton Ellis treats middle age for a bunch of rich Angelenos? Maybe I just need some mental decompression for the next week or so, while I’m writing around 2,000 words a day of pharma company profiles.

Also, I was catching up on past issues of Interview this weekend, and it struck me that there’s just about nobody who would be The Great Get nowadays, that interview subject whom no one else could reach. I mean, sure, there’s Thomas Pynchon, but how many people really care about his writing nowadays? So, I guess I’m wondering, is there one interview that you’d hear about and say, “Wow! I can’t believe they got [x] to sit down for an interview!”?

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What It Is: 6/14/10

What I’m reading: Less Than Zero. I never read it before, but there was a neat interview with Bret Easton Ellis in Fantastic Man a year or two ago, and I thought it’d be interesting to read this one and then the 25-years-later sequel that’s coming out next week, Imperial Bedrooms.

What I’m listening to: The Singular Adventures of the Style Council, The Things We Do, Green, and Meet Danny Wilson

What I’m watching: I Knew It Was You: Rediscovering John Cazale. Because when you only made 5 movies before your death, and the weakest one was The Conversation, you deserve a documentary. The other four? Dog Day Afternoon, The Deer Hunter, and the first two Godfather movies. Wonderful documentary, albeit too brief at 40 minutes. Bizarrely, Israel Horowitz looked younger than just about every other interview subject, esp. Al Pacino, who seems to be heading toward the Phil Spector level of odd looks. Also, we watched the deleted scenes from In The Loop, after I stumbled across this totally NSFW montage of great Malcolm Tucker moments from the movie:

Most of the deleted scenes warranted cutting, but there are one or two that would’ve made the movie even more awesome. I admit that Jamie “The Crossest Man In Scotland” McDonald’s great monologue about There Will Be Blood is tremendous, but it would’ve just eaten up too much screentime.

What I’m drinking: North Shore #6 & Q-Tonic

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Handling a couple of days without their dad while I was at a press event in Chicago (and Madison, with a stop in Milwaukee on the way home). Also, Otis demonstrated his complete disregard for my authority when I took him to a kiddie-park and threw a squeaky tennis-ball about 50 feet away. He chased it down, caught it on a bounce, and proceeded to run all over the park, squeaking and leaping. Not once did he listen to me when I called his name. Eventually, he settled down and chomped on the ball while Rufus & I watched. A day later, he and Rufus did a bang-up job as ambassadogs at our local farmers’ market.

Where I’m going: Nowhere! I mean it!

What I’m happy about: That I stayed in the same hotel in Chicago as Common and Kanye West last week. Also, that my room had a Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin stereo. The sound quality was awfully good, so I plugged in my iPod and listened to some good music while I was working/showering/ironing/otherwise-ing. Here are a couple of pix from the trip (non-hip-hop).

What I’m sad about: That Zeppelin speaker is $600.

What I’m worried about: As ever, getting the Top Companies issue done in time.

What I’m pondering: Why Less Than Zero was a success. I’m about halfway through, and it’s a remarkably flat piece of writing. I mean, I get that that’s the point, that 18-year-old rich kids in L.A. led flat lives in the 1980s, and I enjoy some of the time-capsule aspects of it, but it’s simply not a very interesting narrative and the prose itself is artless. Maybe it gets better in the second half. Or maybe our literary standards were just as shitty 25 years ago as they are now. Maybe I’ll find out when I read that sequel.

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What It Is: 6/7/10

What I’m reading: Pattern Recognition

What I’m listening to: Around the World in a Day, Wake Up the Nation, and The Finest Thing

What I’m watching: Extract and In The Loop

What I’m drinking: Budweiser Select 55. Don’t judge me. I was at an impromptu crawfish boil. See?

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What Rufus & Otis are up to: Gallivanting with their pals Ruby & Willow while we were away for the weekend in Louisiana (see the pictures!). Also, getting used to their new beds. Rufus is settling into his, but Otis has never had a new bed before, and is unaccustomed to its thickness. He tends to slide off of it, like a fat guy trying to get on an inflatable raft.

Where I’m going: Chicago & Madison, WI for a client’s press event. For two-and-a-half days. The last day will include a three-hour bus-ride to Madison, and a Madison-to-Milwaukee-to-Newark flight home.

What I’m happy about: Not dying from eating a bad crawfish.

What I’m sad about: That only two of my friends sent me this Slate story about gin the moment they saw it. I expected at least a half-dozen of you to forward that to me.

What I’m worried about: Well, I was worried about my eyesight, because I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my contacts in the past few weeks. If I read on the computer or the iPhone for a little while, I found my eyes just couldn’t focus well. Only this morning did I discover that my optometrist, or the contact lens company, sent half of this year’s lenses in my standard prescription, and the other half with a stronger prescription. So, for 6 weeks, I’ve been using lenses that are too strong for my eyes. Grar.

What I’m pondering: How much my life has changed since I first read Pattern Recognition. I wrote about it in the very early days of this blog (Feb. 2003), and was pretty dismissive. Now I find it much more fulfilling, even if one of my earlier critiques holds up (the McGuffin is still too similar to that of his second novel). I’m no longer so sensitive about its 9/11-ness, and my own awareness/interest in fashion and corporate brands has helped inform this re-reading of the book. The really jarring thing this time was the first chapter or so, which felt embarrassingly like “SF writer not quite ready to downshift into a here-and-now setting.” The opening descriptions feel like they’re from another novel, before he got the hang of writing about “the present.” But I’m much more forgiving, this time around.

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What It Is: 5/31/10

What I’m reading: Comics weekend! The Search for Smilin’ Ed, Low Moon, Black Blizzard, Pim & Francie, and (the opening of) BodyWorld!

What I’m listening to: High Violet, Squeeze: Singles, 45s and Under, and Heligoland

What I’m watching: Fantastic Mr. Fox and The Commitments

What I’m drinking: D.H. Krahn’s & Q-tonic.

What Rufus & Otis are up to: Skipping Sunday’s greyhound hike in favor of a party hosted by their grey-girlfriends Ruby & Willow. Otis tried to impress everyone by eating vegetation until he puked, while Rufus cooled down by lying in a kiddie pool.

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Where I’m going: Louisiana for Amy’s godson’s birthday!

What I’m happy about: Finding a new linen suit, a watch, some slip-ons, and a few other articles of clothing in the last week-plus.

What I’m sad about: That my credit card company thought those purchases were so out of keeping with my regular spending patterns that they froze my card until they could call to confirm that a 39-year-old man was indeed buying Vans.

What I’m worried about: Getting the July/August Top 20 Pharma / Top 10 Biopharma Companies issue written; the month of June tends to be pretty exhausting for me.

What I’m pondering: How a bat got into our house on Saturday night. We took the dogs out downstairs for their pre-bed bathroom break, but I always close the door right after we get outside, to keep bugs from getting in. After we got ’em upstairs, I noticed a fluttering wing reflected in the window of the kitchen. I thought a bird had gotten in and was bashing into the walls, but once I turned the kitchen light on, I realized that it was a bat. I hurried the dogs down the hall into the bedroom, since they would’ve gone bananas trying to catch it (and maybe rabies). Since the kitchen only has a half-wall to the dining room, and there’s no partition between the dining room and the living room, the bat zoomed around among the three rooms for quite a while, hitting corners and not necessarily dive-bombing me. I started out trying to swat it with an old issue of SI, then graduated to trying to smother it in Amy’s cooking apron so I could get it out. The area’s cluttered, so a tennis racket would’ve led to my demollishing half the space. After 5 to 10 dizzying (literally, in both cases) minutes of chasing it around, ducking when it came at me, and spinning repeatedly to keep an eye on it, I got the idea to hang a bunch of dog-blankets from the ceiling beam of the dining room, where it connects with the living room. This managed to confine the bat to the dining room and the kitchen, giving me a slight advantage. Then I grabbed an old curtain I was getting ready to throw out, and after a dozen more failed attempts, managed to get the bat tangled up in it. It was heading straight at my face when I got the curtain up. I’ll carry its harrowing squeaks to my . . . well, not my grave. I mean, it wasn’t so scary, but I saw where Bruce Wayne was coming from when he got the idea. Anyway, it was a good thing for me that we were directly in front of the Sliding Glass Door To Nowhere (which once led to our deck). I tossed the curtain, bat and all, out the door, and heard it land in the back yard. The bat was caught inside, still squeaking panickedly. I hurried downstairs, shook up the curtain, and freed the poor creature. I like to think its last squeak before it flew off was one of, “Thanks! Sorry about the misunderstanding!”

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