Sunday Items

I've been bad when it comes to writing. I haven't done any work for a while, and that needs to be rectified toot sweet. I'm thinking that I should start working on that Love Like Blood rewrite that I've obviously been avoiding, and I should do what I did about ten or so years ago with another rewrite I did: give myself a finite schedule in which to finish it. I'm thinking I should give myself, oh, about one to two months. The shorter the better!

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Also writing-related, my Dana is staring me in the face every night and I've been neglecting it. I have to continue with the 'seekrit project' (yes, irysangel, I stole that phrase from you) instead of doing it as a 'when-I-get-around-to-it' thing. Writing won't get done if I just let it sit there.

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While out on the town yesterday, we stopped at Stacey's on Market Street (a great bookstore that is sadly not open on Sundays when it should be) and I saw the latest issue of Poets & Writers, and there was a rather interesting article about journaling. Now, I never took journaling all that seriously, as I always thought of it as a form of glorified diary-entry writing, and whenever I saw blank journals in book and stationery stores, I knew if I used them I'd get about four pages in, forget to fill a page one day, and then not pick it up again for about eight months, and give up on it soon after.

The reason I bring this up is because of my repeated and ultimately fruitless attempts at writing Decline and Fall/Radio, Radio. My most recent attempt had gotten about twenty handwritten pages in and I came to a standstill, and I'd given up as it didn't feel right at all. It's been only recently--about a month or so ago--that I picked it up again under the RR title that I just said hell with it and started writing chapter-length entries of stuff that happened in my life that was either writing or music related. I'm trying to keep it as chronological as I can, but there has been a bit of bouncing around within reason. It's been as cathartic as when I originally wrote the RTS: RR articles here on LJ, only the entries are a lot more detailed. I may or may not actually do anything with it, but it's been a great exercise, especially since I write most of it at work during lunch break and other slow times.

And the funny thing is that I didn't even think of it as a journaling exercise until I read that article.

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I think I have to agree with emmalyon that our MoMA here in SF has the right idea, but it doesn't have the greatest collection. It's definitely not worth the $12.50 per person admission, that's for sure...there's quite a bit of modern-art-as-'hey-I'm-so-arty' there. Although I will give them props for having a replica of Duchamp's Fountain there. ;)

One surprise was actually seeing some art by Devendra Banhart there. I don't really know any of his music to know if I like it or not, but in all honesty, seeing his art there was a bit unsettling. That is, a lot of his stuff was "shit, I can do that." Like a large piece of stained blue paper with a two-inch arrow drawn on it. Or a badly drawn fly. Stuff that arty students doodle when there's nothing else to do. I'm convinced that if one of my relatives had been in the art world, I could have already made a mint with the maps that I've drawn.

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A startling realization...I was thinking of my trilogy the other day while at work, and it occured to me that when we were up on Twin Peaks the other weekend (see my post a few nights ago with the picture), that view was exactly the view that the characters had from the crest of Breed's Hill, which overlooks Bridgetown in my novel. The only differences being:
--in my trilogy, a very large skyscraper in the center of downtown
--Bridgetown is on the east coast, not the west coast
--Bridgetown doesn't have nearly as many hills, but it is as densely packed as San Francisco
--Bridgetown doesn't get nearly as foggy :p

Still, it was a strange and startling realization, and now I want to pick up the trilogy again. Which may or may not be a good thing. :p

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Recent acquisitions at Amoeba yesterday:
--Musique Vol. 1 1993-2007, Daft Punk (damn you, Kanye West and evilzug)
--Out-Of-State Plates, Fountains of Wayne (yay! we have all their stuff now!)
--Meet the Smithereens!, The Smithereens (yes, Meet the Beatles in its entirety)
--Our Love to Admire, Interpol (it's about damn time I picked this up)
--You Could Have It So Much Better, Franz Ferdinand (a bit late for this too)
and the Doctor Who soundtrack--finally!--from our local PBS station KTEH (the leet PBS station, as we like to call it) because we gave money to them a few months back.

And it cost just a little over 20 dollars because we still had some store credit left! I'm still looking for Robyn Hitchcock's Queen Elvis and David Arnold's Shaken and Stirred compilation, but I should probably order those because nobody seems to have those two titles at all. Ah well...

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Ergo Proxy is one strange anime, but we're both enjoying it (thank you, Netflix) and it's got a killer opening theme song that I've already downloaded from iTunes. I found a cheap used copy of Volume 1 at Amoeba awhile back, and I'm hoping to pick up the other volumes at some point. Definitely worth watching.

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On tap for today:

--laundry
--a bit of writing-related stuff
--watching more episodes of Ergo Proxy
--perhaps some grocery shopping


Have a swell day, all!