Today's Fortune

Today's fortune, Gate, reads as follows:

"When winter comes, heaven will rain success on you."

It would be nice if heaven would get on with it and begin raining, winter or spring, because we are as dry as tinder up here. That aside, its clear from this fortune that the writer lives in a semi-tropical climate where there are winter monsoons and not much, if any, snow. I dare say that if you lived in, say, the Alps or in Nunivut or in Finland there is a lot of winter rain.

This weekend I picked up the dvd of Guy Maddin's film The Saddest Music in the World. I'd heard enough about the film from various friends to know this would be something I'd want to actually own, as opposed to just see once. It's a brilliant black comedy shot in a peculiar dream-like style that's reminds me of some whacked out German or Russian silent film of the early 1920s. Whether Maddin intended it or not, there were numerous shots and sequences that reminded me of F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang and Sergei Eisenstein. From the accompanying documentary, I gather that Maddin's other films are shot in this style.

M. went to see Bloodhag Friday and it sounds like it was a great show. Bloodhag is a speedcore band based around sci-fi geekiness. As I mentioned earlier, their songs are about various sci-fi writers ... Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick among others. The band members wear button down shirts and ties and thick hornrimmed glasses. Imagine the aggressive sternness of speedcore combined with the nerdy geekiness of the average teen sci-fi fan and you've got a hilarious send-up of the two genres. They even throw sci-fi books out to their audience. Apparently they've got quite a following in this area, too.

Our cocktail party this weekend has been canceled due to an overwhelming lack of interest. Ah, well. Since Saturday is my day off, it's rather hard to motivte myself to go back to P.A. ... that's almost like going to work.

Our resident downtown lunatic, David Dingo, has been on the prowl again. When I say "resident lunatic" this implies that the Dingo is the sole possessor of this title. There are many, many other lunatics downtown, most of them harmless, but all of them irritating in one way or another. David Dingo is supposedly an attorney, he's even got his state attorney number on the cheques he bounces. He's mentioned going before the Supreme Court on several occasions which ... I don't know ... I mean ... ??? He came in the store yesterday and said to me "The jury's still out, but I'm pretty sure I've got my murderer off."