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dog walking at Clermont
Monday, October 24 2011
This morning I watched Shallow Grave, another obscure scary movie I'd learned about during a segment of the Madeline Brand Show. It's an excellent psychological thriller from 1994 and is Danny Boyle's first film. (As a sort of foreshadowing of Slumdog Millionaire, at one point one of the characters settles in front of the television with a tube of Pringles to watch a gameshow called Lose a Million.) Three roommates get a fourth roommate who promptly dies. When he is found to have a suitcase full of money, his new roommates cut him up and hide him in a shallow grave so they can keep the money. But of course, nobody with a suitcase full of money lives in a vacuum, and that's where the plot's relentless pressure forward comes from. By the end, the character development has completely misled you in terms of what each of the three main characters are capable of.
Interestingly, hair and clothing styles from 1994 already look to be from a significantly different time.
I haven't made computer housecalls now for years, but a good web client named Alex had me come to his house in Tivoli today because he couldn't figure out how to get his WiFi stuff to work. I'd been out of the game for so long that I found Alex's computer environment a bit unfamiliar. He was running Windows Vista in its default trying-to-look-like-a-teenager's-take-on-Macintosh-OSX mode, and it wasn't immediately obvious how to bring up a CMD window to do such things as an IPCONFIG. But I figured it all out and got everything the way it needed to be. Afterwards Alex and I walked our dogs at a new (for me) place called Clermont State Park. I'd brought Sally and Eleanor and he has some sort of large purebred terrier with a proper decaninifying haircut and a barbarically docked tail. Clermont is just inside Columbia County on the bluff above the Hudson. It consists of the old estate mansion of the Livingston family as well as the ruins of their old burned-down mansion, and scrubby forests that must have once been lawns. The dogs had a great time while Alex bemoaned his treatment at the hands of his penny-pinching corporate masters (the people whose stock images he professionally keywords).
Gretchen had a rough day; she's been ghostwriting a book for a friend, but that friend is a self-centered procrastinator, and the deadline for the first draft is rushing up quickly. So that friend has dumped a bunch of fucked-up material on Gretchen's lap at the last minute, having ignored multiple entreaties to work on the book back in the summer when she (Gretchen) had more time to work on it. There have been plenty of excuses ranging from the really?-inducing, "Oh, but I have to give a talk at a yoga retreat this week," to the not-so-passively-aggressive, "I didn't expect to have to do so much rewriting; the editor warned me not to work with someone who had never written a book before." So when Gretchen came home from her day job at the prison tonight, I made a delicious meal of pasta with tempeh red sauce. The tempeh was done in our preferred tempeh method: boiled in hot water for ten minutes and then sautéed in oil.
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