My Five Year Plan

…my five year plan doesn’t involve abnegating the duties of my blog for weeks at a time, despite what my regular posting habits have been like lately.

It’s Thanksgiving! (or at least it was recently) I have a lot to be thankful for. I won’t discuss it here, but suffice the ups and downs of this year, I think 2006 will generally go down as a minor notch in the ‘good year’ category (take that, 2005!) if only for the sheer eventfulness of it all. I’d sure like for 2007 to not have that qualifier, but we’ll see how things go. So. Lots of things to catch up on:

1. Watched a lot of movies. What else is new? Particularly memorable ones included Curtiz’s The Adventures of Robin Hood (the colors!) and Fast Food Nation, which I saw with my friend Max yesterday - it’s perhaps the most thoroughly unapologetic polemic released by a mainstream company in a while, and with good reason - there can be no equivocation in a film whose central problem is that there is crap in the hamburger meat served at a major fast food chain (here coyly named ‘Mickey’s’). It’s for me the stronger of the two Linklater films of the year - every shot is a strong and biting message, all building to one inevitable conclusion: that our society of mass production turns the consumer into the ultimate product.

2. Got chewed-out by a coworker. I’m not going to go into this in depth, because I’m well aware of the troublesome relationship between employment and blog posting without any self censorship (OMG JESSA JEFFRIES GOT MARRIED - CONGRATS). Needless to say, he chewed me out for not being able to accomplish a 90 minute task in 80 minutes that he was, I gather, actually supposed to have done himself earlier. Oh well!

3. Progress on Mariko Clemens: A War Wife. This is actually going fairly well! It’s shaping into exactly what I was looking for in this idea - a sort of maximalist, almost Romance-comic emotional plot wedded to offensively provocative political and social commentary. And a giant crocodilian beast destroying a major city. Though I don’t have anything to show you guys yet, I should have a step scene outline relatively soon - when I can I go to the park near my apartment and plan stuff out while looking at the beautiful vista of the East River and Roosevelt Island. It’s a nice, peaceful place completely divorced of the temptations of Internet surfing and moviewatching (i.e. the dangerous zone known as my apartment) that really allows me to get thinking done. I’ll probably go sometime tomorrow, but today I’m going to the Whitney with my friend Sydney, who’s in town for the holiday.

Oh, and for Tyson, the other member of the unofficial Paul Dano fan club (this kid, a living talking personification of all that is awkward about teenagers, is the best thing about at least two movies he’s in): Klitz is in Fast Food Nation!