Well, dear readers, this week is flying by, like a gazelle in a hat shop. Does anyone still wear a hat? I’ll drink to that. And here I sit like so much fish, listening to Andre Previn’s wonderful score to The Subterraneans, a shocking film about – BEATNIKS and the beat generation. There are wonderful orchestral scoring cues intermingled with some pretty great Previn jazz with incredible players. Prior to that, I watched a motion picture I’d been looking forward to seeing entitled Licorice Pizza, written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. I liked a lot of Boogie Nights, I liked Magnolia, didn’t think much of Punch Drunk Love, hated There Will Be Blood, didn’t love The Master, and really didn’t love The Phantom Thread. Licorice Pizza is more in the mode of his earlier films and therefore I liked it better. It does meander a lot, but that’s his thing, really. You don’t really get a plot, just incidents and over two hours of ‘em. Once you kind of go with it, it’s fun and I enjoyed it and might even watch it again. What it really has going for it are the two lead performances, the first film for each of those actors – Alana Haim (Anderson wrote it for her) and Cooper Hoffman, the son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Both are really terrific, and both are getting much acclaim. The 1970s production design is excellent, and the film looks very good. The supporting cast is fun and weird, none weirder than Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, who agreed to let Anderson use him as a character as long as he used one of Peters’ favorite pick-up lines or something. Also, the film is based on a friend of Anderson’s who really did all the things that Hoffman does in the film. What’s funny to me is that no one has said boo about the fact that a twenty-five-year-old character gets romantically involved with a fifteen-year-old – but in the 1970s nobody would have probably said boo. Oh, and Christine Ebersole has one small sequence in the film in which she basically plays Lucille Ball and she’s absolutely hilarious. So, maybe not a great film, but certainly an entertaining one.
Yesterday was an okay day. I got about six-and-a-half hours of sleep because I was up late doing a little work on one of the book ideas. I’ll be calling Muse Margaret to discuss the two main choices. I answered e-mails, we began shipping the two errant and truant releases and hopefully all those will have gone out by Friday. Then I had a long call with a Facebook friend, very nice chap, about a book he sent me. This poor guy has been through the ringer or the mill with this thing. He really doesn’t understand any kind of formatting and why chapters aren’t where they should be, and he’s revised and re-uploaded about four times already. So, I tried to talk him through some basic stuff but it was going to take way too long because he’s just not savvy in Word. So, I told him to e-mail me the Word doc so I could play with it. I spent over an hour fixing the front matter, chose a real book font rather than Times New Roman, and chose a nice font for his chapters and subtitles. The biggest problems were spacing issues – there were spaces after every paragraph, which made the book close to 400 pages and then there were no indentions to the first lines in each paragraph, which is just amateur. I did the first three chapters – very time consuming – then sent to him and he loved the whole look of it. I thought about having another phone conversation with him about it but knew that would be an ordeal and told him I’d just finish doing it. I then figured out the expeditious way to do it in three steps, so that each chapter takes five minutes, so I may try and finish it tonight after I post these here notes. I also think when he imports a Word doc into the Amazon form it does things to the formatting, so I Googled and apparently you can upload a PDF and that can’t change, so we’ll try that and that should solve all issues, I should think.
Then I moseyed on over to the mail place and picked up some packages – two screeners and the final season of Adam-12 – oh, boy! I came right home, made two turkey sandwiches on two onion rolls, ate those – very good – and then finally sat on my couch like so much fish and watched Licorice Pizza.
After that, I did another couple of chapters for his book, then it was time to write these here notes.
Today, I’ll be up when I’m up, I’ll do whatever needs doing, I must do some writing, I’ll have a telephonic conversation with Muse Margaret, I’ll hopefully pick up some packages, I’ll eat something fun and light, I’ll pick the last four songs for the January Kritzerland, I’ll do the Gelson’s run to get the last few remaining items for the Christmas Eve Do, and then I can watch, listen, and relax.
Tomorrow, she of the Evil Eye is coming as she couldn’t do Friday until noon o’clock and I’ll be in the midst of cooking up a storm and also food, so I’ll go have a light breakfast somewhere until she’s done. Then, in the evening, I’ll make the big batch of tuna pasta salad, and cut up everything for the spaghetti sauce – garlic, mushrooms, onions, oh my. Friday, I’ll begin cooking around noon o’clock and then people begin arriving at six o’clock. I have no idea how many there’ll be, but hopefully not more than twenty and I’d be happier with fifteen. Christmas Day will indeed bring a visit with the Darling Daughter, and we’ll do our usual thing – eat, drive around, and have chatter. Sunday is a ME day, and then the final week of the year will be writing on the project with David Wechter. We’ll have our annual New Year’s Rockin’ Eve partay right here at haineshisway.com and then on New Year’s Day I begin writing a new book. I also like to have a few folks over in the afternoon, so we’ll do that, too.
Well, dear readers, I must take the day, I must do the things I do, I must, for example, be up when I’m up, do whatever needs doing, do some writing, have a telephonic conversation with Muse Margaret, hopefully pick up packages, eat something fun and light, pick the last four songs, and then watch, listen, and relax. Today’s topic of discussion: It’s Ask BK Day, the day in which you get to ask me or any dear reader any old question you like and we get to give any old answer we like. So, let’s have loads of lovely questions and loads of lovely answers and loads of lovely postings, shall we, whilst I hit the road to dreamland, happy to be listening to a film score to a movie about BEATNIKS. Yeah, man.