Got a very lovely piece of encouragement from a friend the other day that's going to get me back to my [writing] desk at last. I hope. The friend basically told me to shut up my whining and insecurity and just work. So I hope to carry out this excellent advice sometime in the near future.
When that sometime will be, I don't know. Matt's parents were in town this weekend, so I did no work, paid or un-, from Friday to Sunday. I did get to see some fabulous stuff in Los Angeles, but it's at the cost of having to buckle the hell down this week and make some Benjamins. Or, you know, Lincolns.
One of the things I got to see was Grauman's Chinese Theatre. I've been wanting to see it for, oh, 15 years? Maybe a shorter time than that, but with enormous desperation. It was pretty much just as awesome as I'd dreamed it would be; it's an elaborate palace devoted to cinema, nothing more or less. I wanted to meander around in it for hours, dreaming about the people who'd sat in those seats and the glorious things they'd seen on that screen. Yet that whole part of Hollywood [the district], I learned, is given over to tourist trappiness, and I get kind of stabby around tourists, so it wasn't all fun.
We also went to the Getty Center, which was extremely cool. That one is theoretically a palace devoted to the advancement of art, but it seemed to me that it was more devoted to ostentation of the mighty Getty fortune. Still, it's brilliantly situated, the architecture is miraculous, I saw some interesting art (and some amazing illuminated manuscripts, which are just so inspiring), and the views were incredible even despite the overcast day.
I finished Stardust yesterday, and adored it. It's just what a book should be. I'd seen the movie and really liked it, and although I wouldn't trade the experience of reading the book for watching the movie, just as in Coraline I thought the movie kind of re-upped the great stuff in the book and made it even more Gaiman. (I could be wrong about that, I'm not him.) I wonder why so many movies do the opposite to writers' work (King movies spring to mind) and yet all the Gaiman movies I've seen have been just wonderful.
I bought a subscription to The Sun a couple of months ago and finally got my first issue last week. It's good. Not 100% what I expected in a good way. I also bought copies of Tin House, The Paris Review, and Zoetrope: All-Story when I was at various B&Ns this weekend. I don't expect to love all of the stuff in all of these - and I've already seen from the tables of contents that they, too, do that male-writers thing that high-end litmags have been depressingly proven to do - but I bought them more for research than pleasure and it'll be nice to stretch outside what I like a little bit.
That's all for now, folks. I have Lincolns to pull in. Bacon to bring home. Etc.
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