The quiet days

Intellectually, at least. Have been out with friends/at parties/social almost every night, with days spent watching films and playing Fallout 3, as predicted. Have begun to look at the Hecuba script, and still need to re-read Psychosis and memorize my lines for Titus (again, *not* doing theatre here). Have a stack of books including Day of the Triffids, The Windup Bird Chronicles, T.E. Lawrence's memoir, and a sociology of violence. Stack of films, most notably including the including the original Godzilla. Also, today in perhaps an hour or so I'll head over to a friends for what I suspect will be a rest-of-the-day-long game of Lord of the Rings Risk. Intersemester break is hardcore nerd time.

Been consuming a lot more than thinking, but have been thinking a bit about narrative and the difference between "good" and "engaging", if there is one. There is a wall between pop culture and "art" in my mind, but I'm not sure whether I really believe that it belongs there. The film I've enjoyed the most lately was Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, a loving sendup of bad zombie films, featuring fake scratches and a missing reel, bad dialogue, unsubtle foreshadowing, a stripper with a machine gun/grenade launcher for a leg and helicopter decapitation of zombies. And done with such knowledge of its own ridiculousness that it was just thoroughly liberating and enjoyable.