Almost a year ago now, I bought a Canon point-and-shoot camera from my friend. It was a useful sort of thing to have around. I did take a few pictures with it, but I quickly ran across a pretty serious problem: I didn’t get the charger with it, and it didn’t take long at all before the battery ran dry. Funny thing, I have repeatedly forgotten to either go get a charger or take the camera and have it charged.
There are a lot of people out there who use photography in the same way that I use writing. Generally speaking, a good photographer will give you just as much with a photo as a writer can give you with a short story. Photography tells stories in a different way, but it, like all art, is about storytelling.
Thinking that way, you would have assumed that I would have been more keen to use a camera to help tell my stories. But I haven’t been. I haven’t been telling any stories whatsoever, and that’s a serious problem. Recently, I’ve been doing a lot to remedy this problem, and another step I’ve got to take is getting that camera working.
The funny thing is, I don’t even know if I can tell a story through a camera lens. But I need to find out.
I took today to do a lot of chores (well, errands, more accurately) that had been piling up. Going to the post office, making a few phone calls, that sort of thing.
No one cares about any of that.
Chief among those errands, however, was getting my totally sweet bicycle back in working order.
It’s been almost a week now since I unceremoniously lost my job. I’ve only fallen asleep before 4am once in that time, and even then I was awake by 3am.
Things were going quite well. I was, for probably the first time in my life, content with all aspects of my being. Was it perfect? Not a chance. Are there several to many things that could have been improved? Absolutely. But I was happy.
A friend counseled me with the advice, “It will get better. It always gets worse before it gets better.”
“I didn’t need it to get better. It was perfectly peachy the way it was.”
I swear it’s like they’re trying to kill me. On purpose.
Riding my bike home tonight, I was riding in the bike lane on 21st near Broadway. A guy in a minivan opened his door (like you do). As I usually do when people do that (look in your mirrors before you open the door! Please!), I dodged, but it was just too close. I got half way around, but he finished opening his door into my leg. As one can guess, I ended up skidding sideways into a car sitting in (mercifully unmoving) traffic and ruining my back wheel. Which, just so we’re keeping score, means that I’ve completely replaced my wheel set on this bike.
In an unusual stroke of luck, there was a police car with a pair of cops in it in traffic two cars behind the one that I was pushed into, and they saw the whole thing. In an even more unusual stroke of luck, those policemen were sympathetic to me. The upshot of this was that the cops were talking to the guy that doored me before I even picked myself up off the pavement.
I had plenty of time while they were going through the motions of reporting an accident to check over my bike, and as far as I can tell, the only thing that got damaged was my back wheel. Since the whole show is going on their insurance, I will probably be able to get the wheel set replaced. Which is good.
Still, let’s see if we can stop this, okay?
Anton Corbijn is one of the key image-makers from the post-punk era, so obviously, when I heard that he was directing a movie based on the life of Ian Curtis, I had to see it.
Here’s the part where I speak—again—about how awesome it is to live in New York, where the movie is playing at the Film Forum.
Control is crushing. The movie tells the story you need to know, even without a familiarity with Joy Division. Curtis is not a sympathetic protagonist, but he’ll still break your heart.
The never-ending battle between my cycling self and traffic continues.
On East 86th St. in Manhattan, there are several to many new buildings going up. When new buildings are built in New York, the sidewalk is blocked off and pedestrians are rerouted into the street. They are protected from traffic by plastic barriers.
That’s all well and good, until someone, say, me (just for example, mind), is riding his new bike (which is similar to this) for the third time along said street and is cut off by a driver and forced into a collision with said barriers.
(Just so we’re clear, the barriers are very much able to withstand the impact of a bike. Unfortunately, my front wheel was less able to do so.)
(Just for example, mind.)
On the plus side, I was mistaken for a messenger by a messenger. That’s pretty excellent, if you like messengers, which I do. Even if they are total nutters.
I saw The Darjeeling Limited on Saturday.
To start with, things like this are among the reasons I love living in New York City. Knowing that a huge number of good movies will open here long before they open elsewhere—if they open at all—is very gratifying to me.
The movie itself was quite good. It fits well into Wes Anderson’s oeuvre of dysfunctional family stories. It comes across as a bit strange, though, compared to the intensive melancholy that has increasingly become the focus over Anderson’s career. It’s much more manic than The Life Aquatic, and this is probably a good thing.
In short, I’m still not clear, exactly, on how I feel about it. The themes are the same as usual, but it’s so wildly different in how it goes about addressing them that it strikes as a bit weird. Nevertheless, it comes recommended, as does its prologue/part 1, Hotel Chevalier.
It’s not every day that a new Wes Anderson movie opens on my birthday. Discuss.
There’s no clearer step back, I don’t think, than returning to the place you left when you took your last step forward. Now, I’m going to try twice as hard just to get back to where I was.
Such is life when everything decides to pull a full collapse.