It rained this morning, if by “rain” I mean a little bit of water fell from the sky and a few things got vaguely moist. After a soggy July, we’ve had effectively no rain thus far in August. The local paper claimed that we haven’t officially had a day over 100° yet, either, but the heat index has been over 110° a number of times, and my car thermometer has registered triple digits even after equilibrating.
Yesterday we moved our daughter into an second-floor, no elevator, outside access apartment. Man was it hot. Fortunately there wasn’t a ton of stuff to move, so it didn’t take us all that long, but I was drenched when we finished. I think I lost two pounds.
To the right is the cover for the forthcoming anthology I mentioned in my previous post. Click on it to get a larger version. The artist is a guy named Matt Mahurin, who does covers for Time as well as other magazines and has directed films, especially music videos where he has worked with artists such as U2, Queensrÿche, Metallica, Tracy Chapman, Alice In Chains and many others.
Mad Men was interesting this week. Peggy let her hair down and joined the counter culture. She’s found a lot of confidence since we saw her in the first episodes. When the secretary called Peggy’s new friend “sort of pretentious,” Peggy responded by saying, “I know,” in an appreciative tone. Still, Peter’s news knocked her on her back, almost literally, and there is still a lot unsaid between the two. Joan gets the last laugh on Don by giving him the sort of secretary he’s unlikely to offend. What to make of the ending, where an elderly couple plays out a little scene in the hallway as Don goes home. The woman is carrying groceries and her husband steps out into the hall and asks her three times if she bought any pears. She ignores him until she’s close enough to whisper, “We’ll discuss this inside.” Interpersonal dramas are kept behind closed doors in that era. Don’s former secretary tries to find a sympathetic ear with Peggy…behind closed doors. Peggy spies on Don over the transom. Peggy smooches a guy she just met…in a closet. But things are changing, and even Don realizes that people can’t tell what they might think about in the future. (Line of the evening: “No, but he’s renting it,” uttered by Peggy after her new lesbian friend tells her that her boyfriend doesn’t own her vagina.)
We went to see Eat, Pray, Love on Saturday. Made the mistake of getting there only five minutes before showtime and ended up sitting in the second row staring up at a huge screen. I remember seeing Good Morning, Vietnam under similar circumstances when it first came out, except we were also on the far right side so everything was skewed. The jeeps seemed to lean over. The movie is essentially a well-off person’s self indulgence. Few people could just chuck everything and wander the world for a year. Javier Bardem is good in his nonchalant way, but the standout is Richard Jenkins, who is almost unrecognizable behind a grey, wooly beard. He’s Richard from Texas and he calls Julia Roberts’ character “groceries” because the first time he met her he heard her eating before he saw her. More than anyone else she encounters, he challenges her, and his rooftop scene where he explains how he lost his family is heart-wrenching, and a lot of it seems to be from a single take. Unusually, both actors spend a lot of time looking away from the camera during that scene. The settings are grand (you don’t get to see Naples very often, a place where people are even mugged in museums), and anyone wanting to chuck it all and live on Bali could be forgiven. Still, at the end of the day, I wasn’t sure what Roberts’ character actually learned. She has epiphanies in each city but seems back to ground zero in her next setting.
Eureka was light and frothy this week, without a whole bunch of substance. In a week moment, I queued up Haven from OnDemand and regretted it. The most recent episode was the most ludicrous to date. Stuffed animals coming back to life to hunt down and kill the people who shot them. Give me a break. And the episode wins the award for the character with the worst Quebecois accent ever. There wasn’t even any Duke to balance things out. And why does it seem to me that the two actors playing the newspapermen are actually younger actors made up to look old?
