found drama

Take a breath and organize your thoughts, eh? The year is off to an interesting and exciting start in nearly every dimension. Fortunately, most of those dimensions are good. Not all, but certainly enough of them to think optimistically about the big year that is setting up and stretching out before us. More recently…

First: I dashed off to see Cloverfield with my brother last night and gave it the usual haiku treatment.  Not all together bad but still not sure it was worth the full $8 they charged at the door.  As far as the “found footage” format goes, I think they did a good job with it.  But I could do without the first half-hour.  That said, the movie hit a few sweet spots that I can only think to describe as a surreal nexus of our worst fantasized fears and how we really do cope with events around us.  The scene where the crowd gathers around the Statue of Liberty head to snap pictures with their phones was simultaneously hilarious and palpably frightening.  The zen-like calm over each actor’s face as each fixed their respective attentions not on the statue’s severed head but on the 1″ x 1.5″ screen right in front of their faces.  My first response was to laugh out loud ¹ and then I started to think about the subway bombings in London back in 2005.  That, my friends, was when the terror set in.

Second: assorted “social networks” stuff keeps cropping up on the conversational radar lately.  Mostly Facebook and LinkedIn stuff.  I continue to resist.  I started to write a long ranting exegesis of this USA Today article (via Smart Mobs) but decided against it because I don’t believe I have anything new to contribute — even to my own understanding of the phenomenon.  For all those proponents that keep hailing it with all that future-is-now/next-big-thing status, I’ll continue to disagree; I think it’s just one of those personal preference things.  You get it or you don’t.  You’re not left out in the cold if you don’t.  And if “you don’t” then maybe you’re doing yourself and your privacy ² a big favor.  You have got to want the overlap that comes with it, you have got to want the friends-as-points hangers-on…  But I’ll cut myself off there before I reconstruct that ill-fated essay.  I wash my hands of the subject once more, for the foreseeable future.

Third: A. & I will hit our calculated halfway point this week.  Progress is made.  Seems safe to mention it since the secret is more/less out at this point.

Lastly: currently plowing through Freakonomics while A. finishes up with the library’s copy of Ghostwritten — which I’m told is the next book on my agenda.  As for Freakonomics: the opinion jury is still out but we’ll see where we land.

Gotta go: cookies are ready.

currently playing: Underworld “Juanita/Kiteless/To Dream Of Love”

1. I think I was the only one in the theater that laughed at the precise moment.[↩]
2. Read as: “the imaginary boundary between your public/professional and private/personal lives”.[↩]

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