Slug on a Razor
My holiday raft of new DVDs and books is decimating my productivity with regard to nocturnal novel-writing, although yesterday I picked up two pieces of freelance work - one bizarre assigment for the bar magazine, another for a travel guide to the District - to kick off the first week of the New Year in a big way. Last night I was watching one of my new acquisitions, the British gangster film 'Layer Cake' (starring the scary-looking next James Bond, Daniel Craig), and near the end Michael Gambon's master criminal gives his climactic speech:
"You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake, son."
It's all about working your way up through the levels of the aforementioned metaphysical dessert; although from the perspective of the cold absolute, even reaching the pinnacle means nothing. In a related tangent, in the New Year I'm resolving to discard most of my pretensions to nihilism, maybe in favor of deconstructionism. Or Dadaism. One of those '-isms'; though subscribing to Dadaism as a guiding philosophy could have a negative impact on my work, particularly if I were to turn in a piece on, say, erectile dysfunction, and instead of an opener along the lines of, "In a new research report that will doubtlessly make stockholders of Pfizer nearly pee themselves with gee..." I wrote something like, "Der DADA, Every man has his Football. BY whom? I like electrons, HELLO..." It'd be enough to make any editor snap my neck.
Apologies for the absurdities ... It's been a very long couple of days down here in the Alamo.
There's been stress and caffeine and plotting galore. They canceled my main print magazine, and we ended up being pilloried by a large number of newspapers. We're the slug on the razor at the moment, and while I've made resolutions for the coming year, I have not even an inkling of what the next 365 days will bring. From my perspective, this is not a bad thing.
"You're born, you take shit. You get out in the world, you take more shit. You climb a little higher, you take less shit. Till one day you're up in the rarefied atmosphere and you've forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake, son."
It's all about working your way up through the levels of the aforementioned metaphysical dessert; although from the perspective of the cold absolute, even reaching the pinnacle means nothing. In a related tangent, in the New Year I'm resolving to discard most of my pretensions to nihilism, maybe in favor of deconstructionism. Or Dadaism. One of those '-isms'; though subscribing to Dadaism as a guiding philosophy could have a negative impact on my work, particularly if I were to turn in a piece on, say, erectile dysfunction, and instead of an opener along the lines of, "In a new research report that will doubtlessly make stockholders of Pfizer nearly pee themselves with gee..." I wrote something like, "Der DADA, Every man has his Football. BY whom? I like electrons, HELLO..." It'd be enough to make any editor snap my neck.
Apologies for the absurdities ... It's been a very long couple of days down here in the Alamo.
There's been stress and caffeine and plotting galore. They canceled my main print magazine, and we ended up being pilloried by a large number of newspapers. We're the slug on the razor at the moment, and while I've made resolutions for the coming year, I have not even an inkling of what the next 365 days will bring. From my perspective, this is not a bad thing.
posted by NiK @ 3:59 PM
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