Drunken Owls and Other Delights

Our extended weekend vacation up in Mendocino was quite enjoyable! And by that, I mean that we hardly did a dang thing except go out to eat here and there, visit a few bookstores (including one with a cat, yay!), have a couple of good long nature walks, and sit around in our ridiculous rented room (which was once a water tower, with a lovely seating area with many windows and an open bedroom area with a weirdly high ceiling), doing little but reading and listening to music. 

(Our vacations are usually planned by way of doing all the exciting things early in the day so by afternoon and evening we can just have dinner and relax. It works out quite well.)

It took me a few days to get back to some semblance of order with my daily schedule, as I had some daytime errands to do when we returned, and some local pollen decided to burst forth and get me all stuffed up for a day and a half. By midweek I did manage to get somewhat back on track with my writing, including a stellar day on Thursday. Hopefully I'll be back on track come tomorrow.

Surprisingly, we've been to the movies three times in the last month or so as part of our post-vaccine celebrations. Two music documentaries (The Sparks Brothers and Summer of Soul) and one silly action film (F9: The Fast Saga). Looks like one of the upsides of the theaters being open again is that we can finally see all the movies that have been on TBA status for the past year! Still wearing our masks in public, though, not that it bothers us any.

And today while A remained indoors to deal with her own allergies, I headed to Green Apple to pick up the latest Susan Dennard (Witchshadow), whose books I'm currently rereading, then spent a bit of time and money at the farmers market up the street. We are now awash in fruits and veg! Which is good, because we were running desperately low. 

So! Any plans for this coming week? Not really, other than to get back into my daily schedule and maybe kickstart a few more submissions. I'm hoping the weather will comply, as we are really getting tired of the high humidity prodding our heads!


Hope everyone has a lovely week!

Not too much to report, really...I've mainly been busy working on revision of The Process of Belief...I just kicked off Chapter 4, so it's coming along relatively well. Like I said, the revision is not so much in the plot as it is in the prose, so I've just been doing a lot of editing and rewording. Lots of uncomfortably stilted sentences. Lots of stage direction ("Caren got up and walked over to the coffee machine. She picked up the carafe and poured herself a cup." GAAAH WHY DID I WRITE THIS CRAP). Nothing that can't be saved, though, so there's that.

The 750/"Townies" project hasn't so much stalled as I've been letting a few ideas stew in my head for a few days. I felt that making myself do the daily words for it would have been forcing it at this point. It's also made me think that perhaps it's time I can back away from the 750 Words site for the time being and focus the output elsewhere. That seems to be the issue...I can certainly do the morning words whenever needed or wanted, but I really shouldn't be forcing it if there's nothing to produce. We'll see where this goes.

In non-writing news, A and I are heading to a double-header movie date down the street at the Vogue! First up is The Spirit of'45, a documentary about Post-WWII Britain, and right after that is Good Ol' Freda, a doc about Freda Kelly, the Beatles' longtime friend and fan club secretary. Very typical choices for us, yes?

Other than that, not much planned for this weekend. We will of course need to head over to Safeway tomorrow for some grocery shopping, not to mention buying Girl Scout cookies! We were thinking of also heading down there relatively early so we could have brunch at Luis' Restaurant. That place fills up rather quickly, but we've learned over the years that no one wakes up early on the weekend her in the city (other than dog walkers, old people and joggers).

Hope everyone has a good long weekend! :)

...we're going to see this movie on Saturday at the Kabuki:



This totally looks like something I'd have watched in college. :p

...whether or not I want to go see Nine--not the animated movie, but the movie of the musical of the original Fellini movie 8 1/2--one of my favorite classic movies, actually. I'm not big on musicals, but this one looks interesting. If anything, the trailer I just linked to makes it look pretty good, and cinematically and performance-wise, it looks like they're trying to be somewhat faithful to the original. Daniel Day-Lewis is emulating Mastroianni pretty well there.

Oh, and while I'm here:

The opening to 8 1/2, one of my favorite movie openings. And yes, REM did in fact borrow from that scene. ;)

Words today: 723, for the Prologue of Can't Find My Way Home.

Time spent goofing off instead of writing: more than necessary

Times we watched the Indiana Jones trilogy on Sci-Fi: twice (last night and today).

The fact that Wilhelm Screams in the trilogy stick out like a sore thumb for me now: priceless

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So anyway, I'm back in the swing of things after being sort of listless and confused for awhile. Going to make a sterling effort to get back into writing daily, and hopefully get back into multitasking as well.

And I just recently recharged my Dana, and may be doing some work on there as well.

Yeah. Writing good. :)

Yoinked from head58 and editswlonghair...

1. Pick 15 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Fill in the film title once it's guessed.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search functions.

ETA: Quotes still unanswered are in bold.

( ...and they go a little something like this... )

This promises to be either really good or really bad. I'm tempted to go see this...

1. Look up TEN of your favorite movies on IMDB.
2. Click the "trivia" link in the sidebar.
3. Post a fun and random bit of trivia from each film.


YELLOW SUBMARINE--The scene in which the boxing dinosaur is smoking a Cigar (it has a band) is a parody of the long-running series of ad for Hamlet Cigars. "Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet" was a long-running campaign for Hamlet Cigars, lasting until tobacco advertising on television was banned in the UK in 1991. Radio and television commercials used an excerpt from Bach's Air on the G String, which is still frequently associated with the brand.

CATCH-22--The film has one of the longest, most complex uninterrupted scenes ever made. In the scene, where two actors talking against a background, 16 of the 17 planes, four groups of four aircraft, took off at the same time. As the scene progresses, the actors entered a building and the same planes were seen through the window, climbing into formation. The problem was, for every take, the production manager has to call the planes back and made to take off again for every take of the particular scene. This was done four times.

HEAD--Veteran actor Victor Mature agreed to appear in the movie after reading the script, admitting none of it made sense to him: "All I know is it makes me laugh." (His character "The Big Victor" is presumed to be a comic jab at RCA, who were the distributors for Monkees records - and also owned NBC, who aired their programs.)

SLACKER--The average movie has 500-1,000 cuts in it. This movie only has 163. And almost a third of them come from the last five minutes during the super 8 film scene.

CITIZEN KANE--The camera looks up at Charles Foster Kane and his best friend Jedediah Leland and down at weaker characters like Susan Alexander Kane. This was a technique that Orson Welles borrowed from John Ford who had used it two years previously on Stagecoach. Welles privately watched Stagecoach about 40 times while making this film.

THE THIRD MAN--The ending was the subject of contention during production. Surprisingly, Graham Greene, known for his bleak, depressing stories, wanted the film to have a "happy ending", with Holly Martins embracing Anna Schmidt after Lime's funeral; whereas David O. Selznick, known for his love of "Hollywood endings", advocated that Anna should ignore Holly after the funeral. Carol Reed agreed with Selznick and the sad ending was used. Reed, however, felt insecure about the length of the nearly 2-minute shoot he filmed where Martins waits for Anna and she walks by him without acknowledging his presence.

GOOD WILL HUNTING--Robin Williams's last line in the film, "That son of a bitch, he stole my line," was ad-libbed.

SAY ANYTHING...--The Smithereens were commissioned by Cameron Crowe to write the theme song for the movie, and they came up with "A Girl Like You." Crowe thought that the lyrics were too leading (they outline the entire plot), so he rejected it in favor of Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes." "A Girl Like You" went on to be included in the Smithereen's next album, "11."

RED DAWN--The plot for the movie, a Russian invasion from Mexico, etc., was based on CIA and War College studies of US weaknesses at the time.

THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT--Before the film was released, the three main actors were listed as "missing, presumed dead" on the IMDb.