I

Banalities:

• Peanuts aren't nuts
• Coffee beans aren't beans
• Strawberries aren't berries

II

Reading
I am continuing with The Road; I got a dozen pages in today on the bus to and from the grocery store. It was a strange shopping trip.

At 2p.m. I decided to taken the 2:28 bus to the East Transfer Point, from which I could walk a couple hundred yards to the store, so at 2:20 I set about gathering my bags, putting on my shoes and all the other prerequisites of going outside. It was, alas, around this point, as I descended the stairs and opened the front door, that I reached for my keys and did not find them. I returned to my room, remembering that the last time I'd been outside I'd worn my other coat, but when I checked its pockets I didn't find said sticks of metal, and by the time I did, buried under receipts and clean clothes yet to be stacked away in the closet, it was time for the bus to arrive, so instead of trudging a block only to have the bus to turn the corner without me, I instead set myself down for the next half hour and resolved to take the next bus.

But this time I'd have my keys.

My bus stop features a dispenser for two local papers, one of which was running a story about people living in self-storage units (and owners of said units making sure people were not doing so), and I realized, "hey, as long as there is electricity and a nearby bar with a restroom I could handle that!" The other, off in the "Lifestyle" or similar section, had a story about "Learning to see." I suppose it was not about blind people getting eye transplants.

A woman perhaps around my age and perhaps a few years younger crossed the street half a block away and walked my direction. She then wandered back into the street, and was soon at the intersection. A rolled up blue mat was over her left shoulder so I suspect she was coming from the yoga studio near The Weary Traveler, though I didn't ask. We instead kept matter civil and discussed the arriving bus, lost keys, and recycling bins frozen in place. On the bus I read The Road, and the man is now on the road with the boy ... bet that tells you a lot!

I can't say any more until I finish it, and although I should just sit down and give myself an hour or two to punch through it, I just do not feel like reading "at home," and so I only read (books) on the bus or at cafes.

This evening I consumed Uncanny X-Men No. 494, another entry in the "Messiah Complex" X-book crossover. Not to be too spoilerific, but we get Lucas Bishop here as the traitor, though he was revealed back in X-Men No. 206 on the last page. So far the story has been "good," by which I mean competent, but hardly inspired. The "regular" authors are penning their respective titles, and the coordination has been good, which hints at a strong editorial hand. The problem with the early issues is that they took so long to do anything worthwhile; they were, plotwise, just treading water; the problem with the most recent issues is a matter of tension from ignorance.

We have no reason to believe that Cable could not have gone to the X-Men earlier (not much earlier in Marvel-Universe-time, mind you, given the way the past few days in that "universe" have played out) and said, "Hey, there's a new mutant birth coming, and this is what we need to do based on my knowledge of the future. Sinister and company had an agenda regarding the child, but the X-Men did not, at least not one that appears to contradict Cable's own agenda, which, to date, revolves around keeping the child safe. Since Cable has, in the past, been portrayed as a master strategist and his (former) colleagues would have been happy to see him alive and would have been sympathetic to his position the elements of the plot revolving around his involvement—a matter of keeping characters separate and ignorant—is a mere external plot device. A gaping hole, in fact. Bishop is a different matter, and here the writers/editors seem to be digging into continuity for inspiration. This is not a bad thing, per se, but the Bishop plotline, now of central importance—since he shows up as the traitor trying to kill the child, and then he returns to the team, them none the wiser—has no setup. Bishop has been a non-character for years now, just a random team member in various titles. He had his District M mutant-police procedural for a while, and when M-Day came along they shifted him from the police to the military-political arm of things, effectively writing him out of all titles except as a guest-star whenever a major character had to liaison with the government forces. Then they just throw him, in a rather unmotivated (to date) manner, into the story as a major player.

Again, it's tension and plotting through ignorance. That having been said, the powers that be have played it up in what seems like a coordinated and thought-out fashion over the past several months (in the pre-Messiah-Complex X-Men story, for example), bringing back numerous what-happened-to-them-? characters and groups as potential antagonists and major players (Sinister and the Marauders, Lady Deathstrike, Exodus & Co—we know Magneto is coming back—so now I'm just waiting for the return of Apocalypse) and they've emphasized continuity-rich character relations (Mystique & Rogue, Rogue & Gambit, Gambit & Sinister, the whole Summers-Grey-clan, former X-Force relationships, and so on). Furthermore we could almost feel the Bishop twist coming as soon as Jamie and Layla ended up in a dystopian concentration-camp future 80s years from now; as soon as the "M" tattoos appeared it was almost a given. It somehow feels less random than most other major "Events" The House of Ideas has thrust upon us in recent years.

But their track record is so spotty that I expect the ball to be dropped.

Listening
Die Toten Hosen remain a guilty pleasure in my musical universe. It's their mid-career work with which I'm most familiar, for I was introduced to them in the early 90s, so after their punkish beginnings but before their greatest commercial successes in the late 90s. At times they seem to have gone from parody to self-parody.

They hold a soft spot in my heart also because it is through them that I encountered or rather first encountered other cultural objects. I didn't listen to "popular" music until midway through elementary school, at which point I told myself, sure, I'd listen to pop, but not rock. When I moved to "rock" I told myself that I could listen to this, but not "hard rock." And when I moved to that I told myself, "Perhaps hard rock, but metal is a step too far." Within this limited genre system there was a wide range of songs and groups available, and by the late-80s I was listening to the local rock radio station—Big Jack Armstrong (and the Wombat! [but not John Charles Larsh]) in the morning on KF95, past which my bus drove every morning and afternoon, as it was a mere mile from my old elementary school—but I had missed out—due to age, location, etc.—on New Wave, 80s Goth, and punk, for example.

And then when I listened to DTH I came to know their album Learning English (1991), essentially an album of covers (The Ramones, The Boys, The Rockafellas, The Flys, etc.) mixed with fake language lesson segments. In 1988 they released Ein kleines bisschen Horrorshau, a theme-album on which the songs relate to A Clockwork Orange (subtitle: "Die Lieder aus Clockwork Orange und andere schmutzige Melodien"). I hadn't seen the movie yet. I was 16, and when I did get around to watching it, during a summer break back in Idaho, I had my younger brother and father along.

My poor father.

I'm sure he's forgiven me.

Watching
The other day blixco recommended "Juno," but I'm not sure I'll be seeing it in the next few weeks. At some point, though. It "stars" Ellen Page, better known to most as Kitty Pryde in the 3rd X-Men movie, or as the girl in "Hard Candy," which, due to blixco's recommendation of "Juno," I might get around to watching. Tonight, tomorrow. Who knows. I don't necessarily need great (or even good!) movies all the time. If I'm not mistaken, "Hard Candy" sorta falls into the broad genre of "revenge films," an X-plotation genre I ten to enjoy, which is one reason that I love the Kill Bill flicks, even if they are, to an extent, formalist exercises. But oh what fun formalist exercises. I have "I Spit on your Grave" and "Thriller—en grym film" (aka "They Call Her One Eye," hell, it was directed by a guy named Bo) queued up.

Tonight, though, I went for something considerably softer: "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix." When it came out in theaters I told myself I'd go watch it, and my brother and I planned on doing so for a week or two, and then we forgot about it. The only one I've seen in the theater, to date, is the 4th, which I watch in a half-packed showing at Potsdamer Platz in December of 2005. Given the length of the book it was to be expected that so much had to be cut, and by cut I mean thrown away without even the barest of reference. As a movie it doesn't quite work. The first and second worked as stories because they just copied the books, but as movies they were unimaginative. I love the third, arguably the best of the books and the best of the movies, and even many stylistic changes have been made since, it is the landscape and architecture of the third that has been kept in the 4th and 5th movies. In the 3rd and 4th the child/teen actors finally become actors and finally become interesting, especially in the 4th, which, despite its faults regarding all the stuff that had to be cut, contains marvelous character moments, moments that actually make you care about the characters as such. The 5th doesn't quite manage that, perhaps because it tries to do too much in too little time and assumed you know what's going on, who everybody is, etc. As a result all the great adult actors are shafted. Wasted. You wonder why they showed up; it's not as if they're on screen much doing anything interesting. You just assumed they're off-screen doing the things they did in the book, which is a bit sad. The set pieces from the book all become small in the movie, such as Fred & George's final rampage and the entire Ministry of Magic sequence toward the end, which in terms of choreography and architecture, two elements that are highly detailed in the book, is entirely flat, trading bombast for liveliness. It's sad because so many of the young actors continue to become interesting but had little chance to show it here. Some middle-of-the-movie montage sequences, though, had movement and life; they illustrated plot points and captured characterization. It's a shame the rest couldn't have been as good, and you almost wish books 5 through 7 were done as television mini-series rather than theatrical glosses.

III

Days without:

• Alcohol: 5
• Ice Cream: 5