God bless Mark Eitzel. He’s doing a residency this month at the Knitting Factory in New York City, and is offering to write a song for a person every week. All they need do is email him the following information: Who they love, who they hate, what they do, what they don’t do, the name of their dog and maybe a picture. Is that too much or what.

My New Year’s Day was spent cleaning. Cleaning my room to Sleater-Kinney, cleaning the bathroom to Mission Of Burma.

Seeing the very bad Behind Enemy Lines last night put me in the mood to see a good war movie. Well after seeing Enemy At The Gates, I still want to see a good war movie, but the foul taste in my mouth is somewhat diminished. The visuals were very impressive – rebuilding a destroyed Stalingrad is some piece of work. The acting was adequate, though Ed Harris seemed more indifferent than intense and Jude Law was a little too perky. Bob Hoskins was just short as Kruschev. I won’t bother commenting on the fact that the Russians all had thick English accents and the Germans spoke German until Ed Harris showed up and spoke American English. Whatever, that’s not important. And I can finally tell the difference between Ralph and Joseph Fiennes.

I also rented The Man Who Wasn’t There for a later date.

np – Red House Painters / Retrospective

Again, Happy New Year. My New Year’s Eve was pretty quiet. Went to catch a late afternoon showing of Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind, then watched Behind Enemy Lines on DVD followed by the Leafs / Canucks game. That took me to around 12:30. A little reading, then to bed. Suits me fine.

Dangerous Mind was okay… I was expecting more, but it was just alright. George Clooney acquitted himself nicely in his directorial debut – it was stylish and had personality, but never overwhelmed. Sam Rockwell was terrific as Chuck Barris. I found that I couldn’t take the CIA assassin bits too seriously, and not just because they were probably fictional. Even though the movie plays it all as fact, it doesn’t manage to overcome the unbelievability of the premise, and I didn’t go in as a skeptic thinking, “There’s no way this could have happened”. They couldn’t convince someone who wanted to believe. Still, I have the book on hold at the library, it should be an interesting read anyway. And I think Rockwell beats Kevin Bacon’s record for most gratuitous naked butt shots in a single film. Geez.

Behind Enemy Lines was pretty awful. Dull, brainless and unrelentingly macho. Heavy-handed and just BAD direction from some guy who’s previous claim to fame was directing a commercial or something. Terrible soundtrack, in both song selection and application. There are two Owen Wilsons – the one who writes and produces terrific films like Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums, and the one who makes crap movies to finance the first Owen Wilson’s projects. This is SOOOO the second Owen Wilson. Yeck.

Finally, a 2003 concert date that I’m interested in! Sleater-Kinney are at the Opera House on February 17. Yay.

The Longwave album has apparently been pushed back a month to March 18. Boo.

I have to go back to work tomorrow! Boooooo.

np – Beth Orton / Daybreaker

There’s just under 12 hours left in 2002. I’m generally predisposed to extensive navel-gazing, so it seems natural that I close out the year with a year-in-review of sorts. It’s been an interesting year… I recall saying about 365 days ago, give or take, that this was going to be my year. That I kick ass in palindromic years or some such nonsense.

If I do a basic checklist of Jan 1 versus Dec 31, it looks like I’m not doing too badly – started the year unemployed, band-less , blog-less and single. Closing out, I’m employed, with band and blog-eriffic. The single bit… well, we’ll get to that later.

Amazing as it may seem, I like my job. A lot. I like the work, the people I work with, hell, even the clients don’t bug me. There’s a healthy level of pressure that only occasionally veers into stress, but all mangeable. I have benefits, a salary I can actually plan for the future with and I still get to leave at 5pm. There are days when I miss my freewheeling contactor days, when I could come and go as I please, but I’ll take the full-time employee sandwich, thank you very much.

It was a year ago tomorrow that I first met up with a slightly hungover Brad and also met 517, albeit in passing. I had no more or less expectations for this potential band than I did for any of the countless others I’d gone out for, but it seems like this was the one that was going to stick. We’ve played some good shows, made some recordings that I’m proud of more for the potential I see in them for the future than the actual finished products (which isn’t to say I’m unhappy with them – I’m not) and made some good friends. I am able to play music on a regular basis. I am a better player now than I’ve probably ever been. Hell, I’ve even learned to play drums. Sorta. I think someone somewhere sometime promised me groupies, but I guess you can’t win em all.

I’ve always been an introvert, so the idea of keeping a journal, let alone posting it online for potentially a world of strangers to read is pretty out of character. On one hand, who cares what I have to say, what I think about music or movies or comics, or even about me? Isn’t this just an exercise in self-indulgence and narcissism? And on the other hand, who cares who cares? I generally don’t have anyone to talk to about the pedantic little things in life, the tv show I watched last night, the CD I just bought, the new band I just heard about… so I’ll just talk to everyone. It’s fun, I’d like to think I’ve made some friends… and anyway, self-indulgence is healthier than self-flagellation.

Net results on my personal life are a little more mixed… Consider this – you have a shirt that you don’t like very much, maybe once you thought it was alright, maybe that it even worked for you, but you’ve had it for so long that you couldn’t imagine being without it. Habit and routine can be a slow death. But – one day, you find a loose thread. Just a small one, barely noticable, but it wasn’t there before. Unconsciously, you begin to pick at it. A gentle tug, then a more forceful one. It begins to come undone. The stitching is so old and worn, it almost wants to come apart and soon is, even without your encouragement. It all falls apart, and you are left naked, with nothing. What can you do? Weep, moan and grind your teeth. Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone? Maybe that shirt, as ugly and repugnant as it was, was what you were meant to wear? It was your lot in life? Either way, it’s gone now and nothing’s going to bring it back. You couldn’t remake it from the scraps left over anyway. Now it’s at this point you have to make a choice – die of exposure or find a new shirt. And maybe this time, make sure that the heart is located quite so close to the sleeve.

I’m feeling pretty good now, though. It’s like Buckaroo Banzai once said, “No matter where you go, there you are”. It’s true, so I’ve become more comfortable in myself than maybe I’ve ever been. There are still things I wish I was and wish I wasn’t, but life is a work in progress, is it not? There were times when I once might have felt deathly lonely, I now I appreciate those moments for the solitude. I’m not making other people’s problems my own if I don’t need to. No one owes me anything, but I don’t owe anyone anything either. Et cetera, et cetera.

So I look forward to 2003. 2002 may not have turned out entirely the way I wanted, but in hindsight, maybe it turned out how I needed. I used to approach the turning of the years with a sense of desperation, of “Oh God, I’ve wasted another year and I’m not where I want to be”. Well shit, who cares? I grow weary of trying to dissect that which is unknowable and uncontrollable. I have things to do.

Happy New Year.

np – Joy Division / Unknown Pleasures

So I finally got to go see Adaptation, and have to say it was absolutely worth the wait. Going in, I knew the premise and had read a good number of reviews, but I still didn’t really know what to expect, but that kind of goes with the territory. If you told me Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman were making a movie about a guy who waters his lawn, I’d still go in not knowing what to expect.

Nicholas Cage gives a performance that reminds you that he can actually be a decent actor with real depth, when he’s not tossing off asinine lines like, “You should have put the bunny back in the box!” and whatnot. He gives an excellent performance as both the schlubby and neurotic Charles and the vacantly chipper Donald.

A lot of people have taken issue with the film’s climax, like it was a cop-out and let down. I think it comes down to trust – do you give Jonze and Kaufman the benefit of the doubt? Was it the desperate final act of a writer who had genuinely run out of ideas or a very deliberate tongue-in-cheek construct to show how silly and unsatisfying conventional Hollywood devices could be? A little of both, I think. And if you’ve bought into the premise of the film to this point, you’ll understand that the final act plays an absolutely essential symbolic role in the character development of the protagonist.

This little review has (appropriately enough) taken an extraordinary amount of time to write and re-write, and I’m still not really happy with it… Adaptation is rich, complex, narcissistic, wildly funny and utterly original, and highly recommended.

np – Velocity Girl / !Simpatico!

Watched the extended version of Fellowship Of The Ring tonight. Actually, I watched the first part last night, and the second part tonight. I’ve seen it twice already, but needed to see the additional footage… For the most part, it definitely enhanced the film and it’s a pity it was cut from the theatrical version. Some of the footage wasn’t missed, like the extra scenes in the Shire, but the additional material in Rivendell and Lothlorian would definitely have helped explain some of the stuff we saw in The Two Towers and probably will in Return Of The King as well. The extra exposition also helped round out Boromir’s character and gave him extra depth as a tragic figure. Again – a pity, but it’s a good bet that most people who’d care about such details will see the extended versions anyway.

It seems that one of my New Year’s resolutions will be to read more comic books. Once again taking advantage of Hairy Tarantula’s Boxing Week sale, I grabbed another stack of graphic novels (since they’re the trade paperbacks, I can call the graphic novels and not comic books! Though they are comic books…). More of the Marvel Ultimate stuff – this time the first Ultimate X-Men collection, the first Ultimate Spider-Man collection and the JLA : Earth 2 paperback.

While I enjoyed the Ultimate X-Men and Spider-Mans, they didn’t impress me the way that The Ultimates did, which is funny because I was never an Avengers guy back in the day. Part of the problem, at least with the Spidey, was that it retold the basic origin for the umpteenth time though with some material taken from the movie version. It wasn’t as sophisticated or engrossing as The Ultimates. Sorry Vic and Kevin, but I’m not getting the Brian Michael Bendis worship angle. X-Men was better, though again, I’m biased towards mutant titles anyway. I will be picking up the other Ultimate X-Men collections… can’t necessarily say the same for the Spidey. I am definitely a fan of the Ultimate universe concept – taking the classic characters, stripping them of the 30-odd years of back story and continuity, and starting from scratch in the modern day with a very capable creative team behind it all. I just hope they keep things small, tight and mangeable and avoid the money-grabbing title sprawl that drove me out of comics years ago.

The JLA : Earth 2 is courtesy of Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. I’ve really liked their work on New X-Men, so I was pretty keen to see their take on the JLA. It’s classic Morrison… meaning I’m gonna have to read it a few more times to figure out exactly what went on. Some things never change.

np – The Soft Boys / Underwater Moonlight