Friday night Pat, Courtney, Amber, and I went out to see
Mulholland Drive.
Now, the movie theater was great.
It’s in Oakland, and it has big comfy chairs and tables and couches — couches!
And you can order pizza and fancy nachos and beer.
As for the movie itself… it was a bit much. I think that unlike, say,
Memento,
Mulholland Drive cannot be reassembled into something that makes
sense in the light of day. Which bothers me. Pat and Courtney
and I talked about the movie on the way home, and I think we all
agreed on which parts of the movie were real and which parts
were dream/fantasy. But as for the niggling details — what was that
blue box? The monster in the alley? The old people? Well, who knows?
Unlike Memento, where it was fun to pick over the details
and marvel over the movie’s clever intricacies… the same process
in Mulholland Drive just makes me think that I’m wasting my
time. That there’s no there, there.

Which reminds me — I just sent a short story, “Ogress”, to
M’ris
for a critique. My main concern was whether the story made sense:
there’s a fair amount of backstory, and I tried to get some ideas across using
couple of flashbacks. Frankly, I’m wary of the flashback
device, let alone the dream/fantasy device. I want to tell my story, not dazzle
the reader with Stupid Narrative Tricks. In this case, I wanted the flashbacks to
provide the reader a few critical facts, while keeping the story from growing
much, much, longer than I wanted it to be. And as it turned out, M’ris
understood the story just fine. If she hadn’t,
I would have had to completely rewrite the whole thing.

Unfortunately, rather than polish up “Ogress” and ship it out, I’ve been finishing up the
Sandman saga.
I finally went out and splurged, bought all the books I was missing. Now that I’m done, I
have to say it was a heck of a story. I can’t see how Neil Gaiman could have told this
story in any other medium. I wouldn’t go quite as hyperbolic
as some of writers of the introductions did — and I’m thinking of Harlan Ellison in
particular — the Sandman comics were not Great Art. They were, however,
really good art. Which is good enough for me.

Finally, I’ve decided to start a Winelog. (Not to be confused with
Winerlog.) No, see, I have this
problem: I buy wine, drink it… and then
forget about it. And so I end up buying the wines I didn’t like again —
because here in California we are blessed and cursed with an enormous wine
selection everywhere we go, including Safeway. Which is where I get
all of my wine. Safeway, occasionally Trader Joe’s, and when I’m really feeling
like The Man, Ridge Vineyards.

Henceforth, I will keep a record of the wines I’ve tried. Now, first off,
let me say that I have no wine education whatsoever. I can’t even
grip the wineglass by the stem and swirl the wine properly — I have to cheat
and clutch the glass around the rim from the top. I don’t know what “body”
is. I couldn’t care less about letting the wine “breathe”. I evaluate
wine in the same way I evaluate doughnuts. I try it and decide right then
and there, “Yum!” or “Yuck!”

So here goes with the first one:

Bella Sera, Italy, 2000 Merlot: Yuck!

Hey, that was easy enough.