Wednesday, June 23, 2004 Media consumption update Books: Started Hey Nostradamus! the day before yesterday. Remained true to what I'd heard before; namely, that the first chapter is fantastic, and then we get onto the rest of it. Not that the rest of it is bad. I'm liking it a helluva lot more than I did All Families Are Psychotic (by far my least favorite Douglas Coupland book ever). But I am eager for things to start happening again. Comics: Last week's Birds of Prey is still unread -- I may sit down with it and the new Astonishing X-Men, out tonight, after I get some work done. I did finish Crisis on Infinite Earths, however, which was certainly interesting. A lot of the whizz-bang-multiple-dimensions-technobbabble elements don't really grab me; but there's some interesting character work and it was fun to pretend, for an hour or two, that I was a twelve-year-old gobstoppered by the death of Supergirl. Crisis certainly made me feel the sting of mortality a great deal more than... TV: This week's Six Feet Under, which totally left me cold. Part of it was that it reminded me of the bad SFU spec I wrote for a class a year and a half ago -- that spec is also replete with sitcom-y dialogue, hamhanded metaphors, and extreme shifts of character, but it's also a first draft. Of a spec. That didn't air on a network. I'm giving the show one more week. But I have less time these days, and little energy for things that displease me. Especially things that used to be so good! The Jury, meanwhile, is a pretty decent hour of television -- now that we're a few episodes in, the regular cast members are growing more distinct (though I still have a hard time telling the two brunette defense attorneys apart, especially when the brunette secretary is in the room) and the formula is sitting better with me. Maybe this is just the summation of my deep and intense love for 12 Angry Men, my interest in the legal system, and my own looming jury duty (rescheduled for September). Or maybe Barry Levinson's made himself some damn good TV. Movies: I'm gonna try to see Dodgeball sometime this week. I have a Saturday matinee rendezvous with Michael Moore planned. And perhaps someday I'll watch one of my Netflix picks. But otherwise, I'm running low on time. Music: The other night I listened to this guy named Marvin Gaye. He was pretty good. | permalink blog • archives • photos • about • contact This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. All content © 2004.