Once again I am county bound. I tried to bring Vick’s dogs over to my house yesterday, but they were just too hyper in the new environment - and that is a lot of dog to have spazing on you. So anyway I am starting to think of this place as my country house. The view off the deck is lake and trees, and there are ducks and geese everywhere making their post-reptilian vocal taunts at the less than aerodynamic monkeys that inhabit this condo conclave. It’s quite relaxing actually.

Sin City opens today so I might have to go see that tonight. I watched a few hours of ZD tv last night and got to feel like a big dork. Ziff Davis television is technology tv with a heavy emphasis on video games. I watched a documentary on the Metal Gear Solid franchise and a second one on Frank Miller’s progression from his reinvention of Batman in The Dark Night Returns to his Hollywood “career” writing for the Robocop sequels and through the full cycle of returning to comics with Sin City and now back to Hollywood with director Robert Rodriguez (of Desperado fame). My hopes are high for this movie.

I turns out that this book Hyperion, that has been so heavily recommended to me by my brother Phil and others, is in fact a science fiction version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, itself a retelling in part of Giovanni Boccaccio‘s Filostrato - or did Chaucer just translate the whole thing? I am under whelmed with the cleverness of this employed structure. Simmon’s, the author of Hyperion, has also given all his spaceships “Hawking drives” - as in Stephen - and has a “tree ship” called Yggdrasil which is a reference to the Norse tree of life (which is itself a pan-cultural reference to the human central nervous system - possibly of shamanic origin). It’s odd that Gibson’s use of obscure references made me enjoy him more, but these references just make me groan. I suppose it’s a question of style, Simmons is still a little clunky in his selections from the wellspring of history. Science fiction has long had the genre stigma of hack writing and a derivative structure like this one does little to dispel that presumption, especially when it wins The Hugo.

On the topic of things I can recommend I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigaretts last night. If you like the mood cinema that Jarmusch is know for you’ll love watching Iggy Pop, Tom Waits, Bill Murray and others hang out and drink coffee. It’s composed of a series of short films with repeating themes such as Tesla’s vision of the earth as a sonic resonator, coffee as a lunch substitute and the overlap of music and medicine.

Did you like that newspaper review structure in the last paragraph? “If you liked Four Weddings and a Funeral you’re bound to love….” Marketing speak is so pervasive it creeps unbidden into the fabric of our everyday such that I am pitching you a film that I like rather than simply describing it. We are all in sales now as sales is now in all of us.