emperor_norton

After a long silence, I have returned to Journal-Land. Reasons for said silence? My roomie has gone away with his family for a holiday cruise, leaving me all by my lonesome. I've taken advantage of this temporary solitude by trying to scale the mountain of unwatched DVDs accumulating on my shelf. After I come home from work, I make some dinner, write/read a bit, and then instead of watching TV, I end up watching 2 films(sometimes 3 movies a night; I usually don't end up crashing until 4 am during those cinema binges). While I do still watch movies when Grant is around, I tend to refrain from watching foreign/obscure stuff around him, simply because I hate explaining what I'm watching to someone (in my defense: I love my room-mate dearly, in spite of his unspeakable affection for latter-day Metallica albums, but it'll be a cold day in hell before he shows any interest in watching something with subtitles that ISN'T anime), especially if they have no actual interest in that sort of thing in the first place. It was the same problem I had when I was reading on my breaks back at my old movie theater job: I loathed the inevitable "whatcha reading?" question because none of the people asking it knew anything about what I was reading (and I am LOUSY when it comes to verbally explaining something in a succint fashion). So I've been using/abusing this alone time to drown myself in film-geekery, and I must say that it is divine: in the last two weeks, I've watched Fellini's "Nights Of Cabiria", "Seduced & Abandoned", "Spirit Of The Beehive", Powell & Pressburger's "Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp", a menage a trois of Hitchcock films ("Rear Window"/"Shadow Of A Doubt"/"The Man Who Knew Too Much"), "Cleo From 5 To 7", "Picnic At Hanging Rock", "Stray Dog", "A Nos Amours", and "The Leopard". Sometime in the next couple of days, I'll probably post an avalanche of little capsule reviews of all those films. Not a bad one in the bunch, and some just knocked me the fucked out (in particular "Spirit", "Cabiria", and "Blimp") with their genius.

As for the holidays:

Christmas Eve was a gas. The only downside was that my little brother figured out what I got him with only one guess (I decided to give the gift of Guitar Hero 2). As for my father, he was considerate enough to give me a 3 month extension on his present (I had promised to finish a novel to give to him during the Christmas season, but I've been monkeying with the story recently and I've had to practically start over, so I couldn't have possibly got somethin' finished by the end of this month). My brother Elliot is in good spirits: he's lost a bit of a weight lately, so he looks a lot better, and he's happy that his basketball team at school is actually winning games (unlike the baseball team he was in last year, who were just beyond "Bad News Bears" atrocious; I tell ya, going to his games was a masochistic experience),

Christmas Day was spent with my adopted family. Christmas Eve= quiet get-together with my biological French Catholic side of the family. Christmas Day= boisterous, drunk, shouting "chickenshit" at each other get-together with my adopted French Jewish side of the family. Everyone at the dinner was in rare form: my brother-in-law getting into a drunken argument with my aunt over picking up a pelican in a pool in Mexico (yeah, I still don't get quite what caused that argument to start, or why Richard would pick up a pelican in the first place, but there ya go), my sisters proved yet again that they are miracle workers in the kitchen (home-made brioche, tender filet mignon, sublime potatoes au gratin... just the thought of all that top-shelf grub makes me weep, considering that I've been living on rice right now back at the Fortress Of Solitude), and I got to watch my delightful niece Alex chase my sister's dog around the house for nearly an hour. All in all, a really nice evening. I haven't had such a good time with that part of the family since our last Passover dinner.

On a side note: I have never felt old until that Christmas Day dinner. Early on, my aunt Yvette asked me a question I've been dreading, one that acts as an official sign-post that I am now indeed descending into Jewish Hell: "how's your love life?" (abysmal, by the by, but thanks for asking). She all but announced her intention to see me married, and started asking me what I felt about blind dates, asking my sisters if there would be any single ladies 'round my age attending our family's New Year's bash, etc etc. So it has now been etched in stone: whether I like it or not, there are now 6 Sephardic, vehemently bourgeoise ladies in my family out on the lookout for a possible Empress Norton. 90% of me dreads the awkward horrors that will probably await me at future dinners, while the remaining 10% sees it as a possible means of getting a little strange. Then again, that 10% is always on a fruitless quest for ass, so its really just doing what it always does.*

*On the subject of fruits and ass and what not: in addition to being convinced that I am a raging alcoholic (in spite of all evidence to the contrary; I'm a charming, moderate lush), my dear, dear (and still quite unwell... sigh...) mother is convinced that I'm gay (using the time-honored Eternal Bachelor line of logic: "no current foxy ladies= potential for Liberace-ness"). Its now become the new family joke: I'm the token drunken commie fairy of our fair clan (surpassed in pinkie commie-ness only by my cousin Paul, whom my older brother and I suspect of being involved with some radical eco-groups: the signs, like his never-use-deoderant-ever stink, are all around him) In all honesty, there are moments in life where I do wish I was gay. I've been hit on far more often by men than by women, so odds are I would be having a much more active sex life than the one I have right now (which is nonexistent). But I digress... as always .

So things are looking good right now. I've been blessed with a bit of cash lately (thanks to the company Christmas bonus), so I'm not living quite as close to the edge of Ramen-4-Life as I normally do. Been listening to a lot of good music (the new Clipse record, Boris "Pink" album, still feelin' the Mastodon records, and I'm digging both the new Decembrists record and the Nas record, as well as the sweet reissue of Sebadoh's "III" album). Currently reading John Ralston Saul's "Voltaire's Bastards", which has been slow reading, but definitely worth the time and effort. Grant will be back here on Friday, so my Cinema Vacation will be shortly coming to an end. In truth, part of the reason why I've been binging hard on media this month is because I know that come January I've got to really start doing things differently. As I laid out in a previous entry, I can't shake this feeling I have of emptiness, of squandered potential. This year has been very fun and pleasant but aside from broadening my cultural horizons, I haven't really done much of anything. Come 2007, I've got to evolve into a higher species of primate (i.e. I do NOT NOT NOT want to still be working in retail come 2008).

On a final note: my apologies to anyone who has sent my comments since my last entry. I'll try and reply to them tomorrow. I'm shedding my hermit skin, so its time to make up for lost communiques.

Hope everyone had a good holiday season!

P.S. R.I.P. James Brown.