A Streetcar Named Homicide
Gee, I guess I haven't written in a few days. Time to play catch-up.
Of course, this was arguably a bad time for me to take a break from the journal, since my November 17 entry has gotten more than triple the number of hits a usual entry gets. I figure that one of my regular readers forwarded the URL to the DIARY-L mailing list or some other group of people who might have been interested in journaller Kim Rollins. Dorothy Rothschild has a similar but slightly different theory, as she's had a similar experience with her own journal entry on the subject.
(By the way, I see I'm coming up on my 5000th hit to my main journal page. If you're #5000 - or close to it - wanna drop me a line, just for posterity's sake, or something like that?)
Crawford plays the title character (for which she apparently won an Oscar), who is obsessed with providing a good life for her daughter Veda. She divorces her first husband, who doesn't share her vision, starts a chain of restaurants to support herself, and ends up marrying the man she originally leased the first restaurant's property from. Veda is basically a spoiled brat, and both of her husbands are basically selfish people, and their entanglements lead to a murder and a somewhat ham-handed police investigation. Crawford does a servicible (but in my opinion hardly Oscar-caliber) job as Mildred, but overall I felt this was an unremarkable film, except perhaps for some of the camerawork.
I'm not that enamored of my new office, but then, I really liked my old office a lot, so it would have been hard to top. The new digs' main attraction is that I can finally pick up my favorite local rock station, which I could not in my old office. On the other hand, I'm finding that I feel I've largely tapped out rock music as far as my interest in the form goes, and in particular that this station's play list is way too narrow for the way my tastes are evolving. For instance, although I like David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes", do I really need to hear it twice in 24 hours? Bowie has about 20 albums fergoshsakes! And they always play The Wallflowers' version of "Heroes", and never Bowie's original; what's up with that? Oh, well.
Also at work I slogged my way through one of those problems that most programmers dread. You see, programming is mostly about understanding your system, and having a good nose for knowing how to write new code, how to integrate it with existing code, and where the likely place is to find a particular bug. Debugging involves a lot of playing the odds: You diagnose the problem, and dig in to find out what's wrong starting at the place most likely to yield a solution.
The worst case scenario is just the same as for anything else in life: You find it in the last place you look. So after about 4 hours of debugging, I finally manage to find and fix the problem (the fix requires a couple more hours to test, since this is pretty critical code). And really I can't even take the credit for it, since it was a cow-orker of mine who found the real problem, although we had to talk it over for a little while until we were both convinced that that was it. Yuck.
Well, I also managed to find a nasty bug for someone else, so I guess it balances out.
(If you haven't been reading for a while, they do what I sometimes describe as a fusion of rock and gospel music, although I'm not sure it's really classifiable at all. They have three albums - my favorite of which is their second, A Day at the Beach - and they're an utterly fantastic live act.)
This show was better, in part because it sounded like they'd worked some variations into some of their songs which I hadn't heard before. "Zachary", their opening number, sounded a little different from usual, as did "Lay My Body Down" and "Airplanes and Satellites" (which are two of their fundamentally stronger numbers anyway, and allow for a lot of variation in them, which is always fun).
They also seem to be working a few more covers - mostly of older, R&B stuff - into their repertoire, especially for encores. Of course, one day they'll probably come out and do Yes' "Wonderous Stories" or something and I'll fall out of my chair in shock. (I also still wish they'd do "Would I Lie To You", from their new album.)
Anyway, a good time was had by all. Except for some cads who left early, but Karen quite plausibly theorizes that they may have been teenagers who had a curfew to observe.
Oh, and the opening act, a new band called Jukebox Gigolo, was okay. I liked them a little better than Karen did (she didn't care for their lead singer). My feeling is that they're caught in a point between rock, funk and soul, and they need to pick one and head in that direction. They reminded me a little bit of Basia, and a little bit of Seal. They claim they've only done a handful of shows; if true, they show promise.
I've been in this building four-and-a-half years and I very rarely meet any of the people around me. I've met the black couple down the hall who have their own cat, and I've encountered the woman next door with the British-sounding accent who says her parents spend half the year in Malasia, but that's about it. My city councilman lives downstairs from me, but I've never met him.
Eventually I straggled out of bed and went to see A Streetcar Named Desire - yes, the old Vivien Leigh/Marlon Brando film. And yes, the acting in this film is terrific; seeing Brando stand, walk and talk his way around the set gives me a new understanding of the phrase "chewing scenery". It's certainly a pretty rough story, since Leigh's character Blanche Dubois falls somewhere between being a cheat and a total nutcase, and Brando's Stanley Kowalski has a terrible time controlling his temper. But it's a good one. A great film, well worth seeing.
(While I was there, I saw a new VW Beetle that someone had bought in lemon yellow, and gotten a license plate that read, "YELO SUB". Cute.)
After the film I came back and watched a bunch of TV I'd stored up. I've started taping the daily re-runs of Homicide on Lifetime. Although a few people have gushed about how much better the show was in its earlier days (I think the episodes I'm watching are from the third season; the current one is the seventh), the three earlier episodes I've seen have not seemed markedly superior.
The best of the three was an excellent episode which takes place on Christmas Eve, and which is worth it just to see Munch answer the telephone, "Ho-ho-homicide"! But it's excellent for other reasons. The other two involve the character Kay (who is not in the current season) going back to visit her family for vacation and encountering a murder case there, and a 14-year-old kid shotting a 13-year-old kid in the head, and later finding out he shot the wrong person, and not understanding that murder is murder even if you kill the wrong person by accident. The latter episode is a pretty good exploration of some issues surrounding juveniles committing crimes, but the former was pretty thin. And I haven't warmed up to Kay, yet; for some reason I don't care for her.
There's another black character in these earlier episodes who isn't in the current season, either, and him I do like. I think the current character of Mike Giardello (the Lieutenant's son) replaced him. But Mike G is probably my favorite character on the show, so I can't complain.
Oh, and Ned Beatty, of all people, is also in these earlier episodes!
And I watched last night's new episode, which was pretty intense; probably the best of the season I've seen so far, involving bounty hunters, a car chase gone horribly awry, relationships starting up and fizzling out, and so forth.
I like this show.
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