But This One's Eating My Popcorn Part II: The Spawning

I USUALLY don't blog two times in a row, for no real good reason. It's what I commonly call Voodoo: something I do because it makes me feel like it iomproves my chances of a favorable outcome. You know, just like practicioners of Voodoo have no @#$%ing idea what they're doing or why, and only have the most esoteric explanation as to why what they're doing might work.

The lunch of the day is the empanada etc. etc. I felt like posting the picture because it looks like it has a face. Like the face of a metal monster, maybe? Either way, it was lovely. And the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale was a great compliment. This displays the wisdom of providing variety. I'm sure the Carlsburgs would have been as great a compliment, but still. Good to have a choice.

One more thing, then off to the other half of the entry. As I have said before, @#$% is my basic euphemism for "fuck," which I started using in work environs years ago, and kept because I think it's funny in it's consistency. This consitency (which some people seems to have missed) amuses me because the whole point of using those symbols to represent profanity is that the audience can insert whatever their dirty minds desire, so the profanity can be as light or as dark as they wish. Whereas I have put it in code? I dunno. Maybe it's kind of a purile thing on my part. He he he he. I just made you say FUCK!

The movie of the day may be The World According to Garp. It's early yet. I generally like this movie, but sometimes it is hard to take. Additionally, a few years back, I tried to read the book. Now, when the thing first came out, one matter in which the critics were in ubiqutous agreement was that people who like the movie wouldn't like the book, and that people who like the book would hate the movie. Which stands to some reason. In the book, Garp is a mean spirited prick who hates his mother; in the movie, Garp is Mork from Ork, New England. Small example: at one point in the book, the adult Garp is given some good news about the success of a rival author, and he thanks the messenger by lifting him up and placing his ass in the sink on the other side of the New York bar in which they happened to be standing at the time. (I think I knew this bar: it was a dive in that part of the city where the rich and successful went to act boorish and crude, just north of the Bowery. It's long gone now; in the words or Radar O'Reilly, I was only there the once, but I really liked it.)

George Roy Hill was picked to direct, which seemed like a very odd idea at the time (to those who knew the work), but in retrospect makes perfect sense. Hill was capable of making every dark theme, every perverse turn, play for light comedy or slapstick or caricature. Which is why, in the end, four or five of the plotlines ring a little false for me. A few things seem too quickly forgotten or overcome. A couple of the darkest aspects of the book, having to do mainly with the way one may choose to see the world, come off as quirky when they're meant to highlight a particularly disturbing (as Irving saw it) fact of human nature. All of which would have seemed less puzzling to me had I read the book at the time, but I didn't get around to it.

While I was reading it (later on), I had an intermittent co-worker who was a trained librarian, and a heavy reader as well, who had read this, and many other Irvings (the only one I have successfully read is A Prayer For Owen Meany, which probably says more about my personality than I want it to). So I asked him; "Is there any reason to finish reading this?"

After thinking it over briefly, he answered: "Well, no one does that particular brand of cruetly humor as well as Irving." So I quit reading it. I had made it about a quarter of the way through.

So this is one of those day when I will be watching the movie in order to appreciate the contrasts. Every confection-light scene, I will appreciate for the dark, drear, dire counterpart in the book that it ever so mockingly represents.

Wow. Just think what Hill coulda done with Deliverence!

Oh, and the conclusion of yesterday's review: Nah. Seeing Nickelodeon every coupla years is fine. I don't think I would stick it in on general occasion, just for something to watch. It's a little too much work-- although I appreciate why: each of the films three acts represents a different era in moviemaking, metaphorically, from the silent era through the seventies.

Yeah. Just writing that makes me wonder why I even like the thing. But I do, and I will watch it when it is available.

This is a Godiva chocolate covered pretzel, which the Wifey procured for me from a spread they had in her office the other day. It is diabolically delicious, sweet and creamy and crunchy and salty, and I had four of them with the last of my Sierra Nevada Pale Ale after lunch. It is, I think, crucially important to appreciate contrasts.

Cheers.