voyage to mars
Note to self: Two extra tall lattés in one day -- never a good thing.
The thing about web-journals, Blogs, diaries, whatever you choose to call them, they're often about food and/or coffee. Actually, most of them are. It's very strange:
"I just ate a pastrami sandwich. It was good. The best pastrami sandwich I've had this week, I think, maybe."
"This morning, on my way to work, I had a large cup of black coffee. It was hot. I couldn't drink it right away, so I waited until it cooled down, and then it wasn't so hot anymore, so I drank it. It was all right."
"Last night, for pudding, we had pudding."
And so on. What's this fascination with food on the Internet? Are we so self-absorbed that we think other people read the crap we post, no matter how deadly dull it is? Does anyone really care what a stranger had for breakfast this morning? Or, for that matter, how many extra tall lattés I had today?
It's like being a voyeur into the maddeningly dull bedroom of a 75-year old nun. Reality is
not entertainment.
Got myself a brand-spanking-new DVD player on Saturday, a Pioneer DV-444. Strictly speaking, I didn't need a new player: the one I have, a Sony DVP-S560D, is rather good, and it's less than two years old (I bought it in L.A. in May 2000). The only problem is that the Sony doesn't play CD-Rs (only CD-RWs, and it's still annoyingly picky about brand and recording-speed), and it only plays region one discs (i.e. North American DVDs). While all of my 200+ DVDs are region one, I do get a lot of American TV-shows on VideoCD (Buffy, Angel, Enterprise), and I wanted a player that could play everything I'd throw at it. I also wanted the freedom to play region two (European) movies. Last -- and admittedly least -- the MP3 capabilities of the player were a cool bonus: putting together a party-mix on a CD (with up to 250 tracks) and selecting random play... Convenient. The Pioneer also has progressive-scan capabilities, but since I don't have a progressive-scan TV, that's a feature I won't need -- at least not yet.
I haven't had a chance to really put the player through the moves in a proper audio-video test, but so far it looks and sounds quite nice; the DVD playback isn't all that different from my Sony, but the added features and choices make it a worthwhile purchase.
Also, I just
love getting new stuff. I'm materialistic and shallow.
The sun sparkles on grimy windows that have never been washed, not for as long as I've been here. The soft murmur from the highway mingles with the comfortable clatter of dishes and utensils from the kitchen next door. Air, clear and cold, washes through the open window in waves. Another Monday at the office.
In a few minutes, there's a management meeting, and those meetings usually last for a few hours. Mondays feel amputated; a day chopped in half by the lingering sense of weekend-time in the morning, long meetings in the afternoon, and reluctant work-outs at night. Dinner, then, is usually the victim of lethargy. Frozen pizzas or, if I'm lucky, left-overs from my Mom's Sunday dinners.
Time to run.
Yesterday was simply
packed, so my apologies for any lack of updates. Mea culpa. I'm sure a lot of you suffered withdrawal symptoms. Right.
Last night, I watched
David Lynch's
Mulholland Drive, a strange, steamy, seductive, and simply weird film, closer in tone to
Lost Highway than anything else
Lynch has done in recent years. This was no
Straight Story -- it was twisting, twisted, labyrinthine, and completely engrossing. At one point, about an hour and a half into the
movie, I was worried that the story would never make sense, but by the end it
did make a strange sort of
Lynchian sense. I'll have it watch it at least once more before I can say for sure what was going on, but the point of a David Lynch movie isn't always to
get it -- much of the charm lies in being beguiled by the mystery and the absurdity and the bizarre atmosphere that he creates using sound,
music, images,
words, and never-quite-real
characters and
actors.
Mulholland Drive was -- like
Lost Highway before it -- a strange dream that's hard to awake from. Don't see it if you're easily frustrated by red herrings, loose threads, and
puzzling plot-twists. But do see it if you're a
Lynch-fan; this is the director at the
peak of his career.
Oh, and there was lots of sensual lesbian sex. Which is never a bad thing. Trust me. If only more directors would understand this simple fact, the world would be a much better place.
This was cool:
20:02 on
20.02 in the year
2002.
That's never going to happen again! Ever!
Quick translation for my American readers: 8:02 PM on 02/20 in the year 2002. Doesn't have the same ring to it, does it? You guys have to adopt the 24-hour clock and the world date standard. I mean, really! Get with the program already. Pft.
But there you go, we survived this impossible moment without a serious rift in the space-time continuum. So there. Evil alien overlords be damned.
Oh, and I saw
The Man Who Wasn't There yesterday. Beautifully shot (in black-and-white; the lighting was quite stunning), acted, and directed...and a great story, too. Kept me on my toes all the time. Not the
Coen-brothers' best movie
ever, but certainly recommended.
I realised today (not for the first time, of course, but for the first time this
week) that I'm completely at the mercy of technology. I was supposed to send out a very important letter, but all the printers at work just refuse to, well,
work. So I've probably wasted several hours in a futile attempt to get one lousy page printed. It's not as though I can write it by hand, and does anyone under the age of twenty even
know what a typewriter is? Ack! Can you blame me for using lots of
italics? The short of it is that I never got that letter out, which really makes me...irate.
I can say "irate" here, can't I?
Currently listening to the
Buffy the Musical (
"Once More, With Feeling")
soundtrack:
great music from a
classic episode of the
best show ever.
I'm getting really fed up with my
MP3 collection here at work. It's
huge, but I've heard everything six hundred times already. I need something new. Any suggestions would be very
welcome. I'm currently listening to
Randy Newman's
Pleasantville soundtrack, by the way. Very...inspirational. And Newmanish.
By the way,
some people really don't have a sense of
humour. Check out their film and television reviews -- they don't like
anything. That must be awfully, awfully tiring.
One of the many non-work-related
projects I'm currently toying with in my spare time is a short flick, a "mini-musical", with three intertwining numbers. A friend of mine --
Bjørn Arve Lagim, who wrote the award-winning
score for
The Longest Journey -- is composing the music, while I'm writing the lyrics and the screenplay. It's a "just for fun" project, a seven-minute tribute to a genre I really, really love. We've wanted to do a musical for quite a while (if the
Anarchy Online animated series hadn't been put on hold, we might have done a musical episode at some point!), and since few attempt to do musical shorts (and I'm not talking about music videos), we thought, Hey!, why not? So there you go. We'll see what happens.
If-
slash-when we start recording the three songs, prior to shooting the short, I'll post some MP3 snippets on this site. They might suck. I've done lots of sucky stuff before.
I've felt sort of
off the last couple of days. Yesterday, I had that itch in my throat, the first hint of a headache, a mild fever, and general sense of
unwell-being that usually signifies a bad flu heading in your direction like a runaway freight-train. I expected to wake up this morning and feel like a discarded tissue; wet, crumpled, and filled with germs. Surprisingly enough, I felt pretty good. I still refused to get up on time -- simply because I'd prepared myself for a day in bed -- but I eventually managed to get myself to work, and the sneaky little flu-virus didn't attempt any guerrilla attacks on my body until just before six o'clock, when I was about to go work out. Even then, I was defiant in the face of the world's most virulent disease, and I managed to push and pull some bars and bells before I threw in the towel (literally) and headed on home.
And now I can feel the little buggers in my blood-stream, trying to stir up some trouble. They're just waiting for my immune-system to look the other way. But they're going to succeed only over my dead body! And I really, really mean that!
It's been a busy weekend, hence no updates.
Lo siento mucho. Much of the weekend was spent in darkness, watching the flickering light from a projector on a pearly-white screen: There's a film-festival in Oslo this week that coincides very nicely with the Winter Olympics.
On Friday, I saw the "new" Woody Allen film,
The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (it's new in Norway, but it's already out on
DVD). It was very funny, much more so than
Small Time Crooks (which was a relative disappointment in my book); the setting -- pre-World War II New York City (naturally) worked in the movie's favour, setting it apart from the typical contemporary Woody Allen movie. His insistence on pairing himself with young(er) and beautiful actresses (in this case, infamous
Saved by the Bell showgirl Elizabeth Berkley, and a sultry
Charlize Theron) wasn't as unlikely as in other Allen movies: This movie played with the discrepancy, and, besides, the May-September (or, perhaps more correctly, January-December) romance is a mainstay of the film noir genre and the epoch (case in point, Bogart and Bacall).
Saturday I saw
Gosford Park and
The Royal Tenenbaums one after the other, and although I thought both were excellent,
Tenenbaums was by far the better movie -- in fact, I'll now have to modify my "Best of 2001" list to include the latter film. I liked
Bottle Rocket, loved
Rushmore, but
Tenenbaums is
Wes Anderson's masterpiece, at least thus far. Funny, quirky, weird, and emotional; absolutely recommended.
Gosford Park was the best Altman movie in a long, long time, and it was an evocative look at the upstairs, downstairs dynamic of the English manor life. I probably would be more enthusiastic about it if I hadn't seen
The Royal Tenenbaums five minutes later.
Finally, last night, I saw
Todd Solondz new film,
Storytelling. I thought his first movie,
Welcome to the Dollhouse, was interesting and original, and
Happiness was a brilliant but utterly disturbing look at damaged people in awful situations, but
Storytelling -- although it again described flawed individuals under unfortuante circumstances -- was incredibly funny and engaging. Not quite as stunning as
Happiness, but absolutely worth watching again.
I still have two more flicks to catch;
The Man Who Wasn't There, and
Mulholland Drive. I'll post my brief thoughts on both of them later this week.
Not only was yesterday a bad post-crash day for me (see yesterday's entry), but it was also
Valentine's Day, and as such (at least this year), a day to fear, abhor, and avoid. Not because I'm
not a romantic, 'cause I
am, but because of the circumstances. When you're used to certain, well,
certainties in your life, it's doubly hard to suddenly wake up on
February 14th sans romance, and feel robbed.
But there you go. I'm sure I'm not the only one to feel blue, and besides,
Valentine's Day is a holiday created by and for the
greeting card industry. So there. Being
cynical makes me feel much better, thank you very much.
Good thing I'm seeing a
Woody Allen flick tonight. I think I need a good dose of laughter. Because, hey!,
laughter is the best medicine, didn't ya know?
Back to the daily
grind.
I was in my first car accident yesterday.
It wasn't a particularly dramatic accident, as such things go. I'd just picked up my mother: she'd been visiting my oldest brother, and I was going to take her home. It was quite late, around eleven o'clock, and freezing cold. The accident happened about ten or fifteen seconds after I picked her up. We were driving no faster than 20 kph down a narrow (and, as it turned out,
incredibly icy) residential street when I suddenly, unexpectedly, and completely lost control of the car. The whole incident felt rather absurd and quite unreal as we slid (ever so slowly) towards a parked vehicle where the street branched off left and right, and I remember thinking "oh, crap, I'm going to hit that car, aren't I?".
Luckily, I didn't.
I can't remember exactly
how it happened, but my car slid right, off the street, and towards a residential garden. We crashed through a rusty old iron fence and came to an abrupt stop as the car got stuck with one front tire suspended in thin air.
My first reaction was: "Great, fantastic, now I've done it; I've gone and destroyed my cool car." Not "Yay, we're alive!", because, frankly, we were going so slowly that I never felt we were in any danger. Looking back, however, the situation was potentially dangerous: had the car continued to slide further down into the garden, the metal railing from the fence could have punched through the windshield.
Still, materialistic as I am, my mind was -- still is -- with the car itself.
I remember feeling really, really sad as I turned off the engine and the radio and sat there in the dark. Not shocked, not angry, just sad. A couple of boys who'd been walking along the street when we crashed came over immediately to help out, although it appeared that we'd need a tow truck to pull the car out. They were incredibly helpful and considerate, however, as were the passengers of another car that passed by a few minutes later. Impressively so. My faith in mankind was restored.
But, like I said, it appeared we needed professional assistance, and these boys weren't it. Since the car had punched through the fence and got stuck beneath some bushes and trees, it was hard to see the extent of the damage, but it looked
bad. For sure, the hood of the car had been scratched and seriously dented in the impact with the railing, but unless I could get back onto the street where there was some light, it was impossible to say if the damage was just cosmetic.
By this time, my brother (who lived right up the road; I called him immediately following the accident) had showed up, and with his assistance I decided to try backing out from underneath the fence. Like I said, one tire was hanging in thin air, but the other tire -- the left one -- appeared to have some traction. How that could be, I have no idea. (Logically, if there was traction going back up, there should have been traction when I was sliding down, but...no.) So I got back into the car while my brother tried to lift the railing up from the hood (I don't know if he was able to or not, because it had basically embedded itself in the car), put the gear in reverse, and started backing up.
It worked! Within seconds, the car was free from the fence, out of the ditch, and I was able to roll down the hill and park the car off to the left so that I wouldn't block the street. And then I got out to take a look at the damage.
My car is a metallic blue New Beetle that I bought in August of 2000; my very first car, actually, and I love it to death. It'll need that love now, though, because it's not looking too good. Like I'd feared, the hood was smashed, scratched, and dented, and it needs to be replaced. In addition to that, the whole front of the car has been mangled and beat up. And there's bound to be some kind of damage to the undercarriage, although I haven't had a chance to look. All in all, it's going to be
very expensive to repair.
After experiencing something like this you're supposed to breathe a sigh of relief, smile, and say, "thank God nobody's hurt!"; and, sure, I'm happy we're okay, but the whole thing felt so
pointless and dumb and unfair. I was going really slowly, I've gone down this hill before, I've never had any kind of accident before (some idiot keyed my car on all four sides, but that's different), and I keep thinking my instincts misfired, and that I should have been able to avoid a collision if I'd only been a little smarter. After all, we're used to slippery roads here in Norway. True, this particular patch was
incredibly slippery, but...still! I pride myself on being a good driver! Grrr.
Oh, and on top of that, the woman who owned the fence (she came outside after we got the car out) was talking about "expensive and difficult repairs". I mean, it was a
really crappy-looking rusty fence, and after my brother did some on-the-spot repairs to the fence, it didn't look significantly worse than before. But I have a feeling she's going to pursue damages, so I guess I shouldn't say too much about that. More stress. Ack.
Now I have to start sorting out the papers, call the insurance-company, get the damage assessed, pay lots of money, and live without a car while it's being repaired... Hassle for me, but look at it this way:
You got to read an entertaining story! There's an upside to everything, right? Right.
I didn't get around to posting my Top Something list of movies from 2001 yesterday. My apologies to the three people out there who might have cared! Busy day ahead, and I just cut my hair. How those two things could possibly be related, I have no idea, but there you go. I was starting to look like
Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo (you won't believe how much I'm
not looking forward to that flick; I never much liked the cartoon in the first place, and with Freddie "
anti-Christ" Prinze Jr. -- lord of the
vacant, open-mouthed stare and "
worst actor ever" -- in a leading role, no amount of
Sarah Michelle Gellar will ever
compensate).
All right. Back to work. There's writing to be done.
I've just come across another fellow
Blogger that a lot of you are going to recognise:
Wil Wheaton (
Wesley Crusher on
Star Trek: The Next Generation; I actually
liked Wes), keeps an interesting and entertaining Blog over at his site,
WilWheaton.net. Go check it out. Together with the illustrious
Neil Gaiman -- and, of course,
yours truly -- he's providing the world with an insight into his life. Good man. Peeping Toms everywhere (me included) rejoice.
For some inexplicable reason, it's fascinating to read the daily ruminations -- no matter how utterly ordinary they may be -- of people we think of as "famous" (or at least "more famous than us"). In fact, the more ordinary, the better. Heck, if Wesley Crush-- oops, I mean Wil Wheaton -- writes about the weather, or about watching a video with his wife, not only do we feel as though he's letting us into his life (he's not), we also feel like our lives ain't as bad as all that (they are).
So what do people make out of
my Blogs? No, wait, please don't tell me. I don't want to know. Go read Wesl-- I mean,
Wil's Blogs
instead. You'll thank me later.
Trust me.
This year's Academy Awards nominations were just
announced, and
The Lord of the Rings came away with the most nods, 13 in total. Yay for
LOTR! It deserves 'em all, God bless it. Hopefully this translates into more box-office, which again would give Peter Jackson a bigger budget for effects, pickups, and post on
The Two Towers, due next Christmas.
Most importantly, though, this means that fantasy has finally become a genre to be reckoned with in Hollywood. About bloody time. Fantasy novels have dominated the charts for decades, and yet there have been few fantasy flicks (and almost no
good fantasy flicks). Problem is, everyone will now try to copy the success of
Harry Potter and
LOTR, and that usually results in a lot of crap being spewed out by the movie-making machinery. But we can hope. After all, there are dozens of great, great fantasy novels and comic-books just waiting to be adapted as respectfully and lovingly as Peter Jackson's ring-saga. And, of course, a bunch of great original screenplays. Including mine. Of course.
Just had one of those horrible lunches-on-the-run consisting of two McDonald's cheeseburgers and a bottle of carrot-juice. Yes, it was even more disgusting than it sounds. There are few things in the world as awful as McDonald's food, but (unfortunately) it's cheap, quick, easy, and there aren't a lot of choices around here if you're tired of sandwiches. It only works as a last resort, however, and trust me when I say it'll be a long time until next time; those burgers feel like a cancer in my stomach. Blah.
Listening to
K's Choice, and I have a meeting with the marketing-guys in, uh, two minutes ago. Ah, they can wait. They just work in marketing.
Tonight I'll hopefully be able to post a list of my favourite movies from 2001 that I've been putting together. Why? This is my soap-box, mine to do with as I please, thank you very much!
So winter came once more to Oslo. After a lovely, warm, and sunny weekend, Monday was big time
snow day, and now the world is as white and cold as a, uh, white and cold thingy. The sun is shining, and everything's pristine and pretty, but I still feel cheated out of an early spring.
Tossed and turned all night, and had some really vivid dreams (I was back in America, walking through a covered market straight out of something like
Blade Runner, trying to decide whether to get a
Nintendo Game Cube or a
Microsoft X-Box. Weird.). I ended up getting out of bed about one hour earlier than usual (aided in part by a text-message from a friend; my phone has the most nerve-wracking
beep you can imagine), and spent the morning sipping a tall Latté and browsing the web.
Busy day at work today; lots of stuff to get to grips with in
Anarchy Online, and Tuesdays are usually long and filled with meetings. I also have to wrap up and send out something I've been working on for a few weeks now -- hopefully, it's something you'll be hearing about in the near future.
It's frustrating to have this amazing opportunity to share my life and work through a public
Blog, while at the same time be so restricted in terms of what I can and cannot say. My life is pretty much about my work, and much of my work does fall under the heading "restricted" -- both what I'm doing at the office and the things I'm putting together privately. I'd love to share all of it with you, but I can't, and that makes it hard to find
other interesting things to talk about. I know that this is supposed to be a private and personal journal, but believe me, aside from my work (which does occupy most of my waking hours), my life is deadly, deadly dull. I can't really write about the drive to and from the office, my cat, my meals, my friends or family, the movies I see or the books I read...well, I do write about some of that stuff, but it's not particularly interesting to anyone aside from myself and the people closest to me.
Is it?
I know that quite a few people read my journal, and I plan to be a more active poster. But there are things I'd love to talk about that I
can't talk about, so bear with me; if, at times, it gets a little dull, you know why.
I'll get around to the confidential stuff sooner or later, though. I always do. After all, if what I'm working on never sees the light of day, what's the point?
The days have turned (reasonably) warm and rainy, and the sun is just breaking through the thick clouds over the Oslo fjord outside my office window. Quite lovely, really. And while the streets are still slippery with wet ice, there's no snow, and with luck this weather will last us a good while. If at all possible, I'd very much like to skip winter, thank you very much.
Time to go grab that extra tall Latté. I don't really
drink coffee -- never have -- but I make this one exception. Besides, it's an opportunity to grab some fresh air, and God knows there's a scarcity of that in these offices...both actual and metaphorical. Hmm. Right; time to see if Dag and/or Nico are thirsty.
Sid Meier's SimGolf is eating up all of my precious, precious weekend time. Bad game.
Evil game. I hatesss it.
