I read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road during my move from Texas to Washington, DC. I started at the airport and ended one morning in my bed in DC while my girlfriend was sleeping next to me. It scared me. It wasn’t my first book or film about the end of the world as we knew it. (That would be Mad Max.) But it was the first one to make me truly fear that we could be approaching a time where everyone is forced to fend for themselves. A time where survivors would fear the open road, and who might be on it. It’s a scary thing to fear your neighbor. It’s a scary thing to feel as if cannibalism isn’t the plot device of a horror story, but rather a likely outcome for the weak.
The Road is about a world in decay. A unknown global event has stopped the world, and turned it into a desolate land filled with violent gangs hunting for food while a few innocents struggle just to survive. A man and his son are traveling to the coast for no particular reason. The Man tells The Boy that it will be better at the coast, but they’re moving just to move.
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Is it wrong of me to pass judgment on a book that I haven’t read? No, I say, on the authority of Malcolm Gladwell—who argues in Blink that a quick first impression is often correct—that I am justified in thinking myself enough of a littérateur to know before I reach the end of the first page if I will enjoy a novel or short story. I wasn’t always so confident. I spent a good number of years reading the first fifty pages of every book I picked up, thinking the author deserved to be given at least that many pages to convince me to read on. But as I grew older and time grew shorter, I decided to alter my approach.
Now, I give every book I read one page to prove itself. That’s it. The reason I feel so confident in the single page approach—aside from Blink, which is really very good—is that at a certain point I realized there is strong correlation between style and content. In my years of copious reading I have rarely encountered a book that is well styled yet dull, and conversely, it seems that an author who has stumbled across an arresting subject always manages not to botch the writing. That being said, I don’t want to give the impression I put a lot of books down. I wish life were that simple. Instead, I tend to find a lot of moderately interesting books by writers of mediocre talent.
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I won’t pretend to know what it is like to be an artist. I’m far removed from that moniker. I’m simply a viewer. I pay for a ticket. I sit in my seat and I wait for directors to move me. Who knows why I’m so in love with movies. Movies are escape. They always have been. Sometimes I go to the moon in a movie and sometimes I simply go to Italy. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the torturous process of creating something, something personal and all yours.
In 1962 Federico Fellini began filming 8 ½. It was an semi-autobiographical film about the struggles a director must endure to make art. It was a pretentious film designed to make the audience feel pity for the artist or Fellini. If there is one thing we as a people must never do it’s feel pity for artists. Especially performance artists. What the hell is wrong with those people?
I know this review has taken a drastic turn but bare with me. Fellini’s 8 ½ led to dozens of imitations. Each film was a personal narrative of the respective directors and their struggles to create their films. It’s annoying to think that there is a sub-genre in film about struggling artists. This is understandable if we want to talk about Jackson Pollack or Jean-Michel Basquiat or some other truly struggling artist from an outsiders perspective but to watch an autobiographical film from within the directors head, that is too much. Directors choose to become directors. No one forces them. They’re so pampered that I doubt they know the real definition of struggle.
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I live in a hotel for most of the year. Hotels all come with the standard internet connection: shitty. The available cable channels are only slightly better at crappy. Because of this, I’m behind on Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy and The Vampire Diaries. (That’s actually a lie. I’m very much up to date on The Vampire Diaries.) The worst part is with a bad internet connection I am unable to take advantage of my favorite Netlfix feature: Instant.
Yesterday I returned home to DC after a four month stay in Orange County. It’s good to be back home with my beautiful girlfriend, sorry ladies, and I’ve returned to the best Christmas gift ever: a Roku Digital Video Player.
I plugged that bad boy in this morning. It took about 7 minutes to get through the menu and add some channels and then I was off. I searched through the hundreds of movies in my instant queue to find a movie that I could watch while my girlfriend was at work, somebody’s gotta pay for my beard conditioner.
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