May 14 – 18, 2015

Thursday we went to a Bulls game, something (going to a Bulls game on a Thursday) we’re actually about to start actively trying not to do. A couple of weeks ago we made an impromptu trip to the ballpark on a Tuesday, and realized that part of what we find wearying at Bulls games nowadays is the volume of the audience chitchat all around us. 

So our new goal is to go to the home games with the lowest attendance possible. Go team!

Hung out for an hour at the game with a guy from NYC who works for Moog. He wouldn’t even say much off the record, let alone officially, but the fact that he’s spending time in Durham on a regular basis is an indicator that they may yet still be serious about bringing Moogfest 2016 to the Triangle. Should be an interesting year, these next 12 months. The pace of change seems still to be increasing.

Friday night was just the standard trip to Toast, and then a mysteriously nearly line-free Parlour. It was Third Friday so we stuck our heads into one gallery on the way home but didn’t see much to like. We often talk about doing the full tour on Third Fridays, but we’ve lived here for long enough to know that the hit:miss ratio is usually pretty low for our tastes, so it’s hard to summon up the energy. I always feel guilty about skipping out, though.

I talk about (and retweet) a LOT of stuff on Twitter, and honestly, as long as I’m stuck in this rut of only writing here once every four or five days, I’m unlikely to have the stamina to go back and recap all of it here. Which is kind of too bad, because that’s where all the current events happen. 

But then maybe Twitter is for Internet Events and this tumblr is for My Physical Existence, or something. I guess I can be OK with that.

Saturday we saw Mad Max: Fury Road. As you are probably aware by now, it’s mindboggling. Much like Snowpiercer, it captures the sensation of comic book action 1000x better than anything that has resulted from the glut of Marvel & DC comic book movies over the past 4-5 years.

And yes, it achieves it largely via actual physical bodies & vehicles moving through space, rather than computer graphics. Though I’m sure there was CGI deployed judiciously throughout – but to clean up, augment & color enhance, not to transfer virtual masses around the screen.

It’s also just sublimely fucked up, in a million different ways. Every frame features something that was clearly labored over lovingly by some production designer on a mission, and that mission was to saturate yr brain with the sensation that everything in this cinematic world is off-kilter. The costumes & makeup on all the War Boys, and all the other denizens of the Citadel. The milking chamber. The cars – all the cars! – and not just their exteriors but the detailing of their interiors. 

Plotwise, yeah, it’s fundamentally a 2-hour car chase, and yet somehow it still also manages to include multiple scenes that pass the Bechdel Test several times over, inasmuch as they feature a dozen women all talking to each other about topics other than men.

It basically makes nearly every other “action” movie made in the past, oh, 25 years, look like the stunted formulaic endlessly repeating mindless garbage that they are. 

And yet, even after all of that, it’s not even perfect. Some of the dialogue is just goofy. And although it’s uniformly exciting, it’s still literally just a 2-hour car chase. It may well be the best movie of 2015, and its biggest lesson is just how much higher our expectations could legitimately be.

Sunday night we tried to watch The Drowning Pool via Amazon Instant Video, but somehow their transfer of the original had been de-anamorphized excessively, so that rather than its 2.35:1 ratio, it was at something closer to 3:1. Not even sure how that happens – I know that physical DVDs would often ship with an anamorphic image that your DVD player would expand for widescreen, rather than using permanent letterboxes, but this was supposedly an HD transfer. Or at least I paid $1 extra for HD.

Anyway, we couldn’t watch it, and now I have to figure out how to get my $3.99 back from Amazon. And I still want to see the damn movie.

Today I worked from home & was reminded, yet again, that Parker & Otis makes a fabulous BLT.

May 14 – 18, 2015