enuff to go around

well, shit. just when it looked like i was getting back into a groove of regular posting (well, it felt that way to me, anyway), some latest MS upgrade made posting to blgger from Internet Explorer at first a big pain in the ass (see reference to lost post, below) and then completely impossible. hence, the hiatus.

so, a tip from a techie led me to download and install the free version of Mozilla's Firefox. and now everything works better than it ever has. fancy that. kinda makes ya wonder if maybe MS is working on its own version of blogger........

of course, now that it works again, i'm not much feel like writing. since you've been kind enough to check up on me, though, here's what i've been up to:

finished reading:

• Broken Music: A Memoir, by Sting. Interesting, on a number of levels, but nothing like I anticipated it would be. Turns out the Stingster is just a normal guy, the son of working class people, who struggled and worked hard to make it big, and who cites that and sheer determination more than any brilliant talent as the reason for his success. Perhaps he's just humble. When I finished the book, I was sad.
  
  
• Jarhead, by Anthony Swofford. A much better read, as books go. Swofford has the way, that's for damned sure. I intended to leave you an excerpt here, to get a taste of his style and the tone of the memoir, but I had returned the book before I was able to start posting again. Choppy at times, but only in that way that people who know how to write will notice, and only in a way that makes them (read: us) jealous that Swofford was able to either get past any worries he had that the style would prevent the book from being accepted by a publisher, or he's brilliant enough to have worked in the choppiness intentionally to reinforce that sense of the soldier waiting for combat -- who said it? -- "long periods of boredom alternating with tedium, with occasional side trips to ennui." Anyway, read it. Well worth it.

and yesterday, laid up with some undiagnosed sickness, I watched Tod Browning's Freaks, a dark and bizarre morality tale filmed over 36 days in 1931 and released for only a few months in 1932 before being pulled from distribution. The fillm is set behind the scenes at a turn-of-the-century traveling European circus and revolves around the lives of the side show performers, or "freaks" as they proudly refer to themselves. Strange and sad, along the lines The Blue Angel, the Greta Garbo classic filmed just a year earlier. Oddly enough, parts of the Freaks set were recycled from Garbo’s Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise; perhaps bits of her ambience carried over. One can easily make some parallels between the relationship of Cleopatra with the little person Hans (in Freaks) and that between the whore Lola and the Professor, in Angel. Each flick takes a look at star-crossed love through distorted lenses, and each in its own way documents the fast-wilting flower of forbidden love, and the sickly sweet and deadly fruit of betrayal. The sentiment appears today to be dated, over-romanticized, and idealized, but each film remains heartrending and poignant.

and, last night, like all of you, watched the debates. thought our boy John did pretty well for himself. let's hope that helps realign the momentum.

have a weekend.