A bevy of books (well, only three really)

 So....where was I when I last left off?

Oh, that's right - I had just been reading a book called Eye in the Sky.  This novel was very Twilight-Zone'y, in that the protagonists are drawn into a parallel universe in which one person's perspective and personality define what the universe is like.   As they struggle to figure out the 'who' of the universe, they learn a lot about their inner perspectives, but also how to manipulate each other to get what they need to survive.  The only way out of a universe is for the 'creator' to die, but even then, they all just move to a new universe with a new 'master'.  There were lots of tropes about stereotypes in this novel, and our sometimes-unconcious assumptions and beliefs about each other and ourselves.

I moved on from that one to The Man Who Japed.  I didn't know what japed meant (didn't even realize it was English), but got the sense of it very quickly - it refers to pulling off a stunt or trick, which happens in the first few pages of the book.   I have to say I really liked this one not for the writing (which was not PKD's best) but for the political symbolism that was present throughout the book, and for the behavior of the main character, which the reader never fully understands, but can sympathize with.   Candidly, too much of the social and political dynamic can be seen in today's political discourse and social media - that made it an even better read than it would have been 20 years ago.  I could totally see this one turned into a movie in the near term with some......recognizable leaders....featured prominently.

After a bit of a break (from reading anything, really), I picked up We Can Build You.  In this one, some engineers manage to create a simulacrum, essentially a working android, with the image and knowledge of Abraham Lincoln and one of his generals.  What ensues is totally not about that technology, which would have been interesting to follow, but of the exploits of the protagonist as he wrestles with his business partner's needs, his emotional connection to the partner's daughter, and the business magnate / romantic rival / potential investor, who is based in Seattle and described in surprising detail like Jeff Bezos.  It's also partially an examination of madness and what makes a person, be it flesh and bone or wires and circuits.  I noted here again a very difficult portrayal of the female character, mainly the lead, who is standoffish (attributed to her not-so-latest schizophrenia), but at varying times swerves between vulnerable and hostile in the blink of an eye.  I'm really wondering what type of relationships PKD had with women that drove these types of depictions.

On the movie front - no progress.  I decided to watch a few current year movies instead, but the other night, we watched The Third Man, referred to as one of the best British films ever made (I would not necessarily agree).  A film noir of fine repute, I was a bit underwhelmed, even adjusting for the differences in style and cinematography of the era.  My wife referred to the author Graham Greene, thinking the movie would have elements of humor that his writing did, but that was not evident either.  Overall, we weren't moved as much as maybe we expected.

Summer is here, so I'm not sure how much reading / movies I'll get in for the next couple of months, but I'm hoping to do some.  I'm in the middle of The Broken Bubble by PKD, which steps out of science fiction again and into the lives of some San Franciscans struggling with financial, vocational, physical and emotional ties to one another.  I'm about halfway through, and so far, so good....well, except for one of the female characters again.  I really should look into his personal history a bit.  

Half year down - seems like 90 days just flew by.....

 Hi - I'm back!  Did you miss me?

Probably not (as no one is actually reading this drivel), but it's been almost three months since my last entry, and I wish there was more to catch up on.  Alas, the past few months have been filled with lots of work excitement, but not so much on the 'personal enrichment' side (or the contributing to society, staying fit, or watching out for my spiritual sides either).  In short, the last few months kinda stunk!

Why?  Well, a bunch of reasons, but not with any real clarity or excess influence.  Work has been busy, as we had to navigate some thorny budget issues, and there were far too many nights and weekends working on projects there.  But there were also just minor things that seemed to eat into my free time a lot.  

Some of these were great, though!  Ian graduated from college, and started a new job.  Tim is prospering where he is.  We went to a concert all together, which involved a lot of driving people around, I had a couple of races, which occupied body and mind in the lead up to them, and then a week of Board meetings and our Annual Conference, which took a lot of time and energy to prepare for.  And recently, Kristen had some entanglements with the health care system, which, while no longer life-threatening, will be ongoing for a couple of months - that cost me a few weekends in the E/R and hospital, but the outcome was good.

So maybe I'm just tired right now after a series of weekends without a lot of rest and recover time.  It's July 4th weekend as I write this, and hopefully this weekend will be that recovery one.  At a minimum, we just ended our fiscal year at work, so some parts will slow down for the summer.

On my pursuits: All of this activity left scant time for doing the things I enjoy doing, and reading / classic movies took a back seat to other events (including current movies!).  With summer here, and the prospect of sitting on the deck reading once in a while, I'm hoping to get back on track soon.

I'll do a recap soon, probably this weekend, of the latest entrants in my novel and film project.  I did find time to read "The Man Who Japed"  and "We Can Build You" by PK Dick, but it's getting a bit harder to find some of his books in the library. I'm currently on "The Broken Bubble" which is a non-SF variety, another about life in San Francisco in the 50s, a common theme for him.    

I got absolutely nowhere on my film list, so "The Deer Hunter" is still next up, although tonight, I'm planning to go off list to watch "The Third Man", a classic noir film.  Why, you ask?  I couldn't get Kristen interested in the other options.  Today was supposed to be a good, gloomy, rainy day, so I thought I could get in 2 movies, but alas, the sun was shining and warm, so outdoor activities prevailed.

So, trying to get back.  July 1st is usually a 'restart' day for me in old jobs and new, so here's to a better (happier, more productive, and healthier) 2nd half of the year!

Whacked by a Virus (and not in a good way)

Almost a month later, including a trip to Europe, a difficult (and ongoing) battle with COVID-19 (unknown variant) and a birthday, and I've had a doozy of a time.

First, the health front - I managed to come down with something during my last two days in Paris on a business trip.  Tests in France said not COVID, but as soon as I got stateside, I tested positive.  (So I'm thankful I didn't have to stay in a hotel room for two weeks in Paris....)  It was a tough go for a few days in terms of sickness, but nothing worse than a stomach bug on top of a bad cold.  There was never a moment I thought I would need a hospital, thankfully, and as of now, about a week later, I'm feeling about 90% normal, and waiting for what I hope to be a negative test.

I wish that illness had just given me time to read and watch movies, but I'm not built that way - I worked through the week, and was actually pretty productive despite the fatigue and headaches.  No trip to Europe would be complete without a movie, though, so I did get a chance to watch Platoon on the plane.  I can see why it did well in the post-Vietnam environment, but I'm not sure it would stand up for the same acclaim today as it did back then.  I also watched the silent movie Wings from 1929.  A silent war movie about, well, slow motion war, and the people involved. I watched most of it while on my bike trainer, and I couldn't take my eyes off of it - if I had, I would have missed the dialogue.  Did I mention it was silent?  

Next up, the last of my war movie theme - the Deer Hunter.  Then I move onto racism, with 12 Years a Slave, Driving Miss Daisy, and In the Heat of the Night, and then to relationships, including Ordinary People, Kramer vs. Kramer, and Terms of Endearment.  That'll take care of most of the Spring.

On the novel front, I finished The World Jones Made, in which a man can see a year into the future, but is incapable of changing it, despite what power he has gained as a result of that knowledge.  It was an interesting concept piece, and a bit allegorical from what my limited interpretative abilities tell me.  It also serves as a reminder that each of us will come to an end someday - the best of us will make something of the time remaining.  Or maybe that's what my study of stoicism tells me, and I'm just projecting.

After that PKD, I read A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles, at the recommendation of my wife.  An excellent book, with superb writing, truly evoking the challenges of a man for whom the world is literally moving on around him without his direct knowledge of it happening.  Allegories abound here as well, but in the end, it was mostly a character piece about a whole hotel - the lack of a plot for most of the book is irrelevant, as the writing was quite absorbing in itself.

And now I'm back to PKD, reading Eye in the Sky, which is yet another very different type of novel than the others I've read - set in the present, but in an 'alternate universe' type of motif.  Interestingly, this novel seems a bit jerkier than his other ones, as if there were connections and fillers that he was going to go back and add in, but never did.  At times, the narrative gets lost in the musings of the protagonist for no clear reason.....but, perhaps I should not criticize a book when only half complete.  

On another plus side - being isolated for COVID did give me time to catch up on work reading as well, so a good bit of that is done.  On the downside, though, my running and workouts have now suffered for two weeks (I didn't get much done in Paris for a week either), so my running volume has gotten crushed. I only ran about 8 miles this week, and 6 of that was this morning.  My weight is in check though (my nutrition control is working okay), and hopefully the fatigue will pass in time, and I can get to my races later this month.  Ideally, a marathon in the Fall and a 50K in January.  Wish me luck (or at least, strength!) 

A Month of Long War Movies (the wars were long, and so were the movies!)

 Well, it's been a few weeks, some rather quiet and uneventful, but others pretty busy, with some international travel (!) thrown in for good measure.  Plane rides?  Great for movies  (This one will be long)

So on the movie front, in the past few weeks, I've managed to cross a few of them off my list.  In the current time frame, K and I went to see Licorice Pizza, a clearly nostalgia-driven movie for people just slightly older than me, but one I could relate to (other than me being from Jersey, and the movie about the movie scene in California).  It was cute, with a traditional ending, but not one that I would necessarily think was best picture worthy.  I also had to look up what Licorice Pizza was after the movie, 'cause there was no reference.  Duh, vinyl records.....

We also watched Drive My Car, a Japanese-language film (mostly) that explored close relationships as well as the distances we create (including separation of language, and culture even within a language).  Good film. Long film.  Lots of reading (for me), but it was rich with metaphor, and I found myself drawn into some of the themes in ways I don't always recognize.  Potentially Oscar-worthy, but might not have the weight this year, given the win by foreign-language Parasite last year.  On a side note, I've now seen 7 of the 10 Oscar contenders....I think that is a record for me ahead of the actual awards.  

Speaking of long films, I decided March would be War Movie month.  I started on my flight to Rome (and then from Rome to Amsterdam - did I mention long film?) with Lawrence of Arabia.  Coming in at 3:45, I knew I needed the time to spend on this one.  Excellent film, with beautiful scenery (that you looked at a lot) and a few epic scenes.  The acting was typical of the era, but I really like Peter O'Toole and the slow development of Lawrence from an arrogant, minor functionary to what appears to be his view of himself as a messiah, albeit with periodic realization of the fact that he was simply a man, and how the 'system' kept pushing him into that leadership role.

Another megalomaniacal movie - Patton, with George C. Scott.  This wasn't the development of a messiah - this guy thought he was the thing from the start.  Clearly a strong historian, (and maybe a reincarnated soldier/general?) based on this movie, Patton clearly believed he was the solution to all of the military problems of the day, but was constantly frustrated by the elements of leadership other than the straight out fighting that he wanted to do, and he wanted his men to do.  It was tough to figure out how to view this film - was it an honorific of a man who certainly accomplished great things in WWII, or a bit of a satire about the disconnectedness of generals (and field marshals) from the wants, needs, and plight of the people they commanded.  At various points in the movie, it seemed like both, so I suppose both the generation that fought in the war, and those who (at the time) were protesting Vietnam could see what they wanted to see.

Next up, my plan is to go WAY back to the movie Wings, the first Oscar best picture, about a couple of World War I pilots, and then finish the month with Platoon, a more recent film about the horror of war.  I've got another set of long plane rides coming up, so I'll probably use one of those.

On the book front - I read Doctor Futurity by PK Dick, and I'm now reading The World Jones Made.  I am again impressed by the diversity of futures this author created, often with limited cross-over in them (other than super human flight speeds - a taxi from Detroit to San Francisco in under 30 minutes?  Sign me up!)  Doctor Futurity was excellent in its portrayal of time travel, and the dogged consistency that explorations in this genre require, right down to the end scenes.  Jones also deals with time, in that one character simultaneously lives in the today, and in the world one year in the future, and knows what happens in both (so he feels like he's re-living a life).  I'm not done with this yet, but I like where they have taken it so far.  

Next up: a PKD break (although I have three more books on the nightstand) and a venture into Moscow in the early 20th century, with A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles.  Sci-Fi is great, but one needs to get back to Earth once in a while.  

Catching up after a few eventful weeks

 It's been a few weeks, and an eventful set, as my wife went through her surgery and we dealt with the aftereffects.  I thought that would mean lots of time on the weekend sitting around watching movies, but alas, my work schedule had other ideas.  The last two weekends had me spending a lot of time getting ready for some clutch meetings, which are now ready to roll.

We did manage to fit in another 2022 Oscar contender for Best picture, CODA, about a teenager whose family is all deaf, and the issues that result.  To date, I've seen half of this year's nominees, including Dune, Belfast, The Power of the Dog, and Don't Look Up.  50% is pretty good for me, and I expect we'll add Drive My Car, and maybe Nightmare Alley and/or Licorice Pizza at some point,  The other two (King Richard and West Side Story) don't really hit my must-make list right now.

That said, I expect I'll see the original WSS at some point, given it's a best picture in the past.  I'll be travelling in a few weeks, so I plan to put 2-3 movies on my ipad and knock out a few - either war movies or really old ones (think 1920s-1930s).

On the reading front, I re-read Foundation, by Isaac Asimov after watching the Apple TV version.  Turns out that show was actually a prequel novel combined with about 1/3 of the original novel, and they've already taken a few liberties.  I'm still looking forward to the next season, assuming there will be one.  Next up on my reading list: Dr. Futurity by PKD, as I continue that pursuit.....

Three-movie weekend!

 Last weekend, with time on our hands, it was movie time!  The weather was terrible, my wife had COVID, I had to quarantine with her due to contact (but I never did test positive), so I got to watch THREE movies in one weekend!

First up, my Oscar requirement - this time, Moonlight, the eventual Best Picture winner after the embarrassing La La Land announcement.   While the storyline didn't go the way I expected (I thought it was more about Maherasha Ali's character), it was a great look into the life of a man who wound up in a place he didn't want, and the (sometimes unexpected, sometimes predictable) forces that led him there.  Really well done (duh, it won Best Picture), I thought it was more relatable than a lot of the other BP winners in the past.

After that, I switched to the current year.  Lately, I've tried to watch at least half of the Best Picture nominees before the actual Oscar ceremony, so I can have a reason to root for / against some of the films.  I'd already seen Power of the Dog, Dune (Part 1 - let's wait for Part 2), and Don't Look Up (shouldn't be a contender).  So this week, we watched Belfast, a (mostly) black and white film about the experiences of a young boy too innocent to understand the forces at work around him.  This was another great film, worthy of the nomination, and probably a top 3 contender in the end.   I have a couple of weeks before the actual nominations come out, so we'll see if I can get half of them done before the awards.

Finally, a movie with an actress I really like - Carey Mulligan, in a film that was a little less deep than the other two this weekend.    My wife didn't expect me to like this show, Promising Young Woman, due to the subject matter, but I thought it was story well told.  Sad, to be sure, on just so many levels, but a well thought through concept.  A few twists kept the story moving, and helped to convey the reasons for the main character's actions, at least to a point.  For a simple movie goer like me, it didn't have that same type of 'missing minute' that I mentioned in Taxi Driver.  That's not to say that you didn't have to think about the character's motivations - it wasn't all put out there for you, but you could follow the thought process of the characters more clearly.  

This week - no movies for me....a bit too much work and football.  Next week, I'll be babying my wife while she recovers, but if she's out of it, it's two war movies for me.  Patton and Platoon are both on my list (how have I not seen some of these films?), albeit from two very different wars.

Books and Movies - a few throwbacks

 Two weeks ago, I got to watch two classic movies.  

After years of hearing about it, I finally watched Taxi Driver, Yes, I'm probably one of the few people my age who had never seen it, but it's just so often referenced in pop culture, I felt the need (even though it wasn't an Oscar winner, which is my current quest).  In short, it was a good movie in the context of what New York was like at the time, but there were elements I just didn't fully get.  Travis Bickle's descent into what he became wasn't as cohesive as I would have preferred....it felt like I missed a key 1-2 minutes of the movie that would have explained more of that.  The ending was certainly ambiguous in many ways, and in a good way - it does leave it to the viewer to sort out reality and the implications for the future.  Certainly not a pure "American" ending, where everything works out for everybody.

Less ambiguous of an ending came in my other film for the weekend, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.  I selected this one due to the recent loss of Sidney Poitier (whose best film was, of course, with Robert Redford - the classic Sneakers 😀 ). I really enjoyed this one, even though the premise of the film was intentionally uncomfortable.  I viewed it as a comedy, surrounding the various reactions of the characters in the film, but Poitier's steady performance really was striking....an island of calm in waters with turbulence just below the surface.  His portrayal of understanding of 'his place' only reinforced what I took to be the message of the movie - that we are all dealing with race relations, and it takes calm, rational thought to overcome the inherent biases we have against 'the other'.  It's a message that frankly still resonates in many ways in today's America.  

Finally, on my book pursuit to read everything by Philip K Dick.  This week, The Cosmic Puppets, a dramatic departure from the last two books I read.  While those read like precursors for Sci-Fi classic movies, this one was a Twilight Zone episode.  The initial premise is that a man returns to his hometown after 18 years to find everything different.  That's not surprising, as it has happened to many people after a long absence.  This is more than just years of progress though - all of the streets have been renamed, different buildings stand where old ones used to be, and no one remembers the same history that he does.  Soon, paranormal activities start happening, leading to a battle clearly between good and evil, though as readers, we're not sure which is which.  There's also an underlying theme about the value of remembering the places from which you came, which is an echo from some of his earlier work as well, and will probably arise in other novels.

Books and Movies: Watching all of the Oscars, Reading all of PKD.

For the last few weeks, I've been working on a couple of entertainment projects.  First, I'm trying to watch every Best Picture winner that I haven't seen already.   For some people, that might take a weekend, but for me, I started out with over 50 movies on that list, and I'm down to 47 as I start this year.  I have a long way to go.  

Added to that, I'm also watching some classics that didn't make the Oscar Best Picture, so this is going to take me a while.  It doesn't help that my wife is only interested in about 4 of the Oscar films (she's much more caught up on the recent ones, and has no interest in the old ones), so I'm working on the other classics with her.  Of course, she often tells me that the book was better.

This weekend, we watched Bullitt, with Steve McQueen.  This comes after we recently watched the French Connection and Six Days of the Condor, which helped us appreciate the films that were made when we were very young - all of them have held up, although Bullitt seemed a bit dated, and it was easy to tell that it was a prototype for many movies yet to come.  

Why am I doing this?  I don't know - it seemed like something to do when the pandemic started, and I just didn't spend a lot of time on it in 2020 (or the first half of 2021, for that matter).  But I am highly confident that I would not have watched movies like Marty, The Apartment, or the Treasure of the Sierra Madre without deliberately doing so.  I think my challenge will be to find some of the very old Oscar winners, but I'm hopeful that Netflix and Amazon will come in handy.

The other project I'm on is to read all of the novels of Philip K Dick, a prolific author who wrote the stories behind many, many popular science fiction movies.  These include Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Man in the High Castle, and others.  I'm intrigued by his writing, and his imagination, and I want to explore the other worlds he's created.

I started with a non-science-fiction novel called Voices from the Street, about a young man in 1950's San  Francisco seeking his place in the world, disappointed with what his life has become (at 25!) and a descent into a form of madness that followed.  Long and drawn out, it probably could have been 100 pages shorter, but it had a good sense of foreboding throughout the novel, and was an interesting exploration into the psyche of someone who feels like there should be more in his life, but not sure why he feels that way.

I moved from there to a few of his early sci-fi stories, including Solar Lottery, which has a number of elements that fed into his "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" (the source for Blade Runner), and Vulcan's Hammer, which was an early take on despotism.  Even in the short years between these novels, I can see the evolution of his writing and his storytelling.  I'm looking forward to this journey, assuming it doesn't fall into the story told multiple times.