The Writing Desk of Jakebe Rabbit

A few thoughts on the Oscars:

+ Ellen did a pretty good job this year; she was a perfect fit for an awards show that didn't want to get too pointed or mean, and that wanted to make people feel at ease. I do hope they ask her back next year. :)

+ The Departed wins Best Picture? I was pretty aware that Scorsese would win the 'futility vote' and finally nab Best Director, but let's be honest: this was not his best work. And with the other contenders in the field this year, Best Picture should definitely have gone somewhere else. My vote was for Babel which was just as complex as The Departed and carried out better. I definitely have to see Little Miss Sunshine, though, and Notes From a Scandal, The Lives of Others and West Bank Story.

+ Best awards speech? I'm now smitten with Jennifer Hudson, who goes from American Idol-loser to Best Supporting Actress 2006 for Dreamgirls. There's just something about someone who lets their emotions run away with them up there on the stage in a completely honest way. And she's also endearingly ghetto. :) Helen Mirren and Forrest Whitaker gave pretty good speeches, too.

+ Pan's Labyrinth got upset for the Best Foreign Language Oscar? The Lives of Others looks like quite an interesting movie, and now I have to see it all the more to gather what the fuss is about.

+ I picked 13 categories correctly (though to be fair, a few of those were just lucky guesses), swiping second in the Oscars Derby amongst the party-goers. *shakes his fist at Malin* Next year, victory...WILL BE MINE!

+ Though the party was a lot of fun, I did miss bamboofae. Oscars night was one more excuse to throw a big party with the proshest hors d'oeuvres and make a day out of fagging out together. Hope your party was just as fun, V. :)

I almost caved yesterday when I learned there would be carrot cake(!!) for dessert. Thankfully, Ryan swooped in as my Jiminy Cricket and suggested we go home early, so I had a box of raisins and tried to put thoughts of cream cheese frosting out of my mind. :)

It's getting steadily easier, actually, so I can focus more on the writing end of the deal then the not-sweets-having. That's been a bit more difficult to maintain. The hardest part, obviously, is getting started, but once I'm in the groove I'm there for a while -- increasingly longer periods, in fact. It's odd, because I'm starting to notice a shift in how I plan my day...things are becoming less geared towards what brings me pleasure immediately, towards what will make for optimum writing conditions when I get to sit down and do it. I do like the feeling.

Anyway, there's a lot of writing I should probably be doing now, as well as cleaning, so I guess I should run off and do that.

toob and I saw Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest last night, and I really liked it. It was fun and clever and well...exciting. The swordfights were amazing, especially the three-way between Sparrow and Turner and Norrington, and the set-up for the third movie was pretty well-done. Better than the first in almost every way! I shudder to think what daroneasa thought of the Kraken! Also, pirates arguing the etymology of a word is just a shining example of great comedic writing. :)

I had a dream last night that I got my paycheck from Bookbuyers, and it was a lot smaller than I was expecting it to be. Disappointed, I rooted around in the accompanying paperwork for an explanation and found a second check. Combined, the two was a month and a half's work; I was pretty happy. Then I got a third check that was even bigger than the other two combined. I was thinking, This has to be a mistake. I woke up just as I was about to tell my boss about it. The moral of the story? Orange juice and mouthwash don't mix. No they don't.

Oh! sailor_atma is starting up a D+D game! Hooray! I will be playing a gnome cleric, toob will be an elven ranger, and mut will be playing a human fighter full of finesse! This is inherently amusing to me. :) No word yet on possible other players, but I'm excited already.

Now, it is time for breakfast and tea.

Today's Workout

Time: 20:00
Distance: 1.70 miles
Top Speed: 6 mph
Calories: 175
Weight: 165.2 lbs

At lazarusrat's request, I won't be putting stats behind a cut tag. If folks have a problem with it, let me know and I'll just create a filter.

Couldn't manage the whole 30 minutes today. I was wearing boxers instead of boxer briefs, so there was...bad stuff happening, and my calves are burning like mad. I still think it's not enough water, but it might be fatigue as well, so I'll take Sunday off, rest up a little bit and hit it like mad on Monday.

This first week has been pretty surprising. I didn't think I'd be able to run as far as regularly as I have been, so that's definitely a plus. Though the fact that I've somehow *gained* 3 pounds over the week makes me cast a rather suspicious eye on my diet. Am I not eating right? Not eating enough? What the hay is going on here?? I've dropped almost all fast food (literally, the last time I had any was about a week ago, when Tube and I went to Taco Bell), and the food I've been eating at home hasn't been really terrible. I'm kinda scratching my head over that one. Maybe the weight will come down once I start working, and doing a lot more moving around.

Tube and I tried to watch Evita last night, only I started nodding off about 40 minutes in, during one of the best parts. I'm sure this frustrated the otta to no end. ;) The music was actually very good, with just enough Latino flare to spice up the traditional musical arrangements, and the visuals were quite nice as well. The more musicals I watch, the more I'm able to pin down why they don't grab me in a particular way. I think it's just...too much music for me to really connect with. For me, music is...a sort of climax in a movie. You use it sparingly when something major or very exciting is about to happen. When a musical goes from one song to the next to the next, it strikes me as...kind of bombastic. It's all loud, and there's lots of noise and dancing and many other words, it just tires me out pretty quick, I guess. I keep trying to think why something like Moulin Rouge worked for me and most others don't (including, say, Rent), and I think it's just...the value of the spoken word. The characters in Luhrmann's movie lived in a world that was undoubtedly chaotic, but they gave a go at speaking and when they simply *couldn't* express things in any other way, they resorted to song. It gave the music a certain purity, like...these stratospheric emotions I'm having can't simply be *said*. They must be *sung*.

Then there are the...I guess we'll call them modern-day operas. Every piece of dialogue is sung. You have to rely on the lyrics for characterization, plot advancement, context...everything. You also have to keep up with the visual tone, the instrumentation, the arrangement. In most cases, it's just too much. I appreciate...variation, an alternating between word and song. This might make me look slow or uncultured, but that's fine. :) I think I'd like the cast recordings of musicals a lot better than sitting through one, perhaps. It's much easier to focus on the lyrics, which I'd prefer to do anyway.

That being said, I do like Evita, and I plan on watching it. But maybe with breaks every half-hour or so. :)

I had a dream last night about the Bookshop. I was wearing brown short shorts, and late for work. I went to this restaurant on Dickson St. that only exists in my dreams; they make Old World Pizza from scratch, in brick ovens, and the list of toppings reads like an encyclopedia of vegetables and herbs. I was ordering a personal pizza for breakfast, and some root beer for the folks at the shop. For some reason, the cashier just could not get my order right, and this made me even more late. When I finally got there, I was kind of depressed for some reason, and then started feeling really ill by the time I started shelving books. If I were into dream interpretation, I'd say this might be a sign that trying to get another job in used books might not be the best thing right now. But what does my subconscious know?

Now, on to breakfast. Which will probably be two grapes and a cup of yogurt. ;)

My love of Green Day has reached obsessive levels now; I've had "Jesus of Suburbia" stuck in my head all day and I've been humming it all the time. Apologies especially to Lazarus and Tube, who will doubtless have to hear me mention it at least 80 bajillion times over the next week before I finally burn out of it. Sorry, guys.

Saw Mirrormask last night and it was a total blast! To be honest, I've never been a *huge* fan of Dave McKean's work, but now I know what Gaiman sees in him. His lovely sense of color and broken, fluid form matches Gaiman's sense of whimsy really well. There were tons of really neat sequences that more than made up for the almost inconsequential story.

One of my absolute favorite things about modern fantasty settings are the odd little quirks that will be tossed in for no reason other than "hey, this is a really neat idea." In Jonathan Lethem's Amnesia Moon, for example, one of the characters can only be interacted with after you've shot him into your veins through a syringe. Or, in Peter Beagle's Tamsin, the Pooka is always called THE Pooka, even though he's not the only one *and* no matter what form he takes, his eyes always stay the same...which tends to make even his more 'benign' countenances the slightest bit menacing. The movie is chock-full of those kinds of 'rules,' where this creature does this and not that, or the world behaves this way for whatever reason and anything else is an affront to its very nature. Devices like that in stories *always* make me want to ask questions about it, find out *why*, or at least how something/one developed the way it did. But then...the whole point of modern fantasy is its just better to wallow in twilight.

My favorite 'rule' in Mirrormask had to have been anthropomorphizing the books. In one of the earlier moments, Helena and her companion escape death by sphinx (who're actually really, really creepy) by insulting books and throwing them down on the floor. "As long as they believe you really don't like them," her companion/guide says, "they'll migrate back to the Public Library...and we'll get a free ride out of this place." What a brilliant piece of dream logic! :D

Speaking of dreams, I had a really odd one last night. I was working late at the Bookshop, which always seems to morph into something more...Victorian once the sun goes down. You know, gas lamps on the wall, strange dolls and knick-knacks...and sweltering heat. Anyway, I'm walking out of the back when I see this...rocket touch down in the middle of the intersection and morph into a short, dumpy robot. This robot then pulls out a flyswatter and threatens to turn everyone watching into flies by hitting them with it. For some reason, this absolutely terrifies people, and there's pandemonium in the streets. The rest of the dream was spent hiding from the carnage in the relative safety of the hot, dark Bookshop. :P

Tonight, Cy's Werewolf game. Last week was a really good game, though you'll have to stay tuned to smileydanq to find out why. Oh, yes, I am a shameless pimp.

There's a lot I could say, but...mmm, I don't really have time today to get into it. There's work and Arlekin's game this evening, and rozberk is coming down this weekend (hooray!), so I don't know if I'll have the time until Sunday. Either way, thanks for all the thoughts and wishes, and especially the comments about the minefield topic on racial...you know, ideas. It's given me a lot to think about the past few days.

Anyway, here are memes.

( On my birthday... )

( Five things to bribe me with! )

Speaking of movies, bamboofae and I saw The Corpse Bride last night. It was surprisingly good; the story itself was incredibly straightforward and the villain was inconsequential (really, they could have explored the idea of loving two women a bit more and that would have been fine), but the characters were really endearing and the songs were pretty damned catchy. Stupid Danny Elfman. :)

We also saw this little documentary called My Date With Drew, which was so so incredibly sweet. This fellow decides to spend $1100 he won from a game show (in which Drew Barrymore was the winning answer) to try and get a date with her in 30 days. He's had a crush on her since the age of 7, and he figures that the serendipity was no accident, that it's finally time to go for it. Throughout the movie he tries to angle it as an 'average Joe reaches for the unattainable' kind of deal, and within the context it really works. I don't want to give away the ending, but I will say the look on his face at one point, when all the work pays off (when he least expects it to), is just priceless. :)

Good night last night.

I found this little blurb in a review for "Last Night" by Roger Ebert. This was a film that Potoroo recommended for me, and has since become one of my favorites.

Note: On a talk show in Toronto, I was asked to define the difference between American and Canadian films, and said I could not. Another guest was Wayne Clarkson, the former director of the Toronto Film Festival. He said he could, and cited this film. "Sandra Oh goes into a grocery store to find a bottle of wine for dinner," he said. "The store has been looted, but she finds two bottles still on the shelf. She takes them down, evaluates them, chooses one, and puts the other one politely back on the shelf. That's how you know it's a Canadian film."