Well, dear readers, the long holiday weekend is a thing of the past and here we are with a brand spanking new week and not only that, the final week of November. I have never in all my born days seen a year go this fast. Maybe December will move really slowly to make up for all these months that have sped by like a gazelle in a Hupmobile. I gotta tell you. I spent the final day of the long holiday weekend doing not much of anything. I got up late, puttered around the home environment, then had a disgustingly poor lunch at the Eclectic Café – some sort or rip-off of Hugo’s Pasta Mama – scrambeled eggs with pasta, garlic, sausage, bacon, onions, but nowhere near as good as Pasta Mama. I felt completely nauseous after I left the restaurant. I then went back to the bookshop I went to yesterday, and carefully went through their entire fiction section, which is quite vast. I bought two books – one, a fine first edition of Binary by John Lange (pen name of one Michael Crichton) in a fine un-price-clipped jacket, and a fine first edition of Thomas Tryon’s The Other, also is a fine un-price-clipped dust jacket. The cost of each book was $7.50. I know that fine firsts of The Other go for about $75 to $100, sometimes more, so I knew that was a good deal. I knew that Binary had to be worth more than $7.50 in fine condition, so when I got home I did a little search and the most expensive copy on the Internet was $500 and the cheapest in like condition was about $275, so that was a great deal. That doesn’t happen much anymore, so I was delighted that for fifteen bucks I got about four hundred bucks’ worth of books. I then came home, put Binary on the shelf and The Other (I already have a fine signed first edition) on the “for trade” shelf). I did some work on the computer, and then I finally sat on my couch like so much fish.
Last night, I watched five more episodes of Twin Peaks. Three of them were key episodes and wonderfully done, none more so than episode sixteen, which solved the mystery that had been running since the beginning. It was a terrific episode with excellent scenes and performances, and very weird, as were the preceding fifteen episodes. So, one began episode seventeen with the sense of, “Well, where do they go now?” Unfortunately, episode seventeen was the worst of the series, with a writer and director who had no connection to the show, and it was pedestrian and bad. Thankfully, episode eighteen was better, and introduced some interesting things as well as bringing back several unfinished bits of business from earlier episodes. I’ll say again, this show was a real trendsetter and half of what we’ve seen on TV in the last few years would not exist were it not for Twin Peaks, especially its weird or cliffhanger/surprise endings of each episode. I can’t think of a show prior to Twin Peaks that had done that. One thing that keeps each episode unsettling and hypnotic is Angelo Badalamente’s music, which perfectly complements everything on the screen.
Well, why don’t we all click on the Unseemly Button below because I’ve got things to do, places to go and people to see, not necessarily in that order.
I know I have a lot of errands to do today, and I think I’m supposed to either lunch or have dinner with someone – the good news is I definitely remember that whoever the someone is will be calling in the morning to remind me. I do have lots of meetings planned for this week, and I will also begin the task of going room by room and boxing up stuff that I don’t need in the house, which will then go out to the garage for safe keeping. I do this every few months, because things just pile up and it gets very unseemly.
I also have to send out an eBlast for my book signing, as well as ship out a few orders that arrived over the long holiday weekend. I’ve had more amazon orders in the last week than I’ve had in the last three months, and yet this month’s amazon sales are the lowest they’ve been all year. Maybe they’ll go up this week – one can only hope.
It’s so funny – I couldn’t wait until the fundraiser was over so that I could finally have some relaxation time – and now that I’ve had a couple of weeks of it, I am so ready to get back to doing things. So, it’s good that I have things to get back to, including the show I’m mentoring. I’ve been doing a lot of work on the score, either rearrangements of the existing music, or writing new stuff for things that have been added. Plus, I actually have to start planning for the March start of rehearsals for The Brain From Planet X, and I’ve been making lots of notes for the new book, which I’ll actually begin writing in about five weeks time. There are a few other things, too, so it will not be a quiet December.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, do many errands, do work at the piano, do a lunch or dinner, and watch more episodes of Twin Peaks. Today’s topic of discussion: What pieces of music make you get weepy? Which make you smile the minute you hear them? And, in the days of 45s and LPs, what were the songs that you heard on the radio for the first time that you HAD to go out and get within hours of hearing them? And where did you buy your LPs and 45s? Let’s have loads of lovely postings, shall we, as we have a lovelier than lovely last week of November.