rock over London. rock on, Chicago.

I just saw a midnight showing of “300.”
I beat you Smith, you fucker. I know you’re going right after work. I fucking now it.
it was pretty cool. you know what to expect when you go in. and it gives you exactly that. if you want to see some ripped abs, absurd battle scenes, some junior varsity pep rallies about honor and freedom and a healthy handful of titties, it is all that you could have dreamed of.
and since this is all I asked for and all I expected, I was happy with the result. I gotta say it’s worth your dollar. if you like titties, then god damn; it’s worth two of your dollars.

I appled for my passport today. trying to keep the options open until the last minute. I’m thinking “island paradise” right about now, but eastern Europe would be even more fun. I could sleep in a hut made of palm fronds. eat berries and coconuts. never worry about building another newspaper page full of AP human interest stories …
yeah, you’re right, Mike. work. sucks.

alright, I applied here, here and here. I was hoping on the Post-Tribune. really. but I’m getting nothing. so fuck it.

I have an interview at the North County Times Tuesday morning. should be interesting. I have to rustle up “interview clothes” and drive my ass all the way out to Escondido. I’ll fuck that up, getting there on time, for sure. southern California traffic. wonderful.
I’m afraid, though, that I’m making a mistake. nothing has chronicled my whining over the last six months like the good ol’ blog, and as we all know, I want to move closer to home. this would actually, you know, be farther away, which you wouldn’t think possible, but it is on the beach. I’d be working in Oceanside.
but there are only so many places I can apply to in Indiana that wouldn’t make me want to pull my hair out. I’d fucking kill a man to get on at the Post-Tribune, but I’m not moving to Warsaw. so maybe this’ll make me dance around for a few years until I find something I like. I hope so. I’ve seen people who work in the newspaper business for years as copy editors, and I don’t think I have the disposition to be them. I don’t know. I understand the journalistic profession, I can adhere to it, but I don’t feel devoted to it. not if it’s going to be years of this bullshit. work fucking sucks, man.

also, I’m trying to apply for a passport, but I can’t find my copy of my birth certificate. if I left it in a place where I’d never touch it, I couldn’t possibly lose it, then. right?
right?
I probably threw the fucker away. how you throw away the original copy of your birth certificate is beyond me, but I never cease to astound. christ. I’m slipping.

my review has been published. the paper’s Web site is pretty weak, though, so there isn’t a link directly to it. if you want to read it, you have to go there and click on the button near the top right that says “e-edition.” and then, wait for five minutes for that page to load, and click on the 03/04/2007 section and B-10. and as most of anyone who reads this isn’t going to take the time to do that, I’ll just copy and paste it here.

The serial killer has been a wonderful muse for the movie industry. The idea of premeditated, calculating murder is a great premise for any thriller, hor­ror flick, or combination of the two. I mean, look at the track record: “Psycho.” “The Silence of the Lambs.” Anything by Wes Craven. Or, even more importantly, “Se7en.”
David Fincher directed “Se7en,” and he directed the newly released “Zodiac,” a film based on the book San Francisco Chronicle car­toonist Robert Graysmith wrote about the still-at-large killer who murdered a half dozen people in the Bay area nearly 40 years ago. Fincher was at the helm of both. Both films were visually arresting. And beyond that, they’re completely dissimilar to each other. While “Se7en” was about a spree killer that fit every religious sociopath cliché you’ve ever heard, “Zodiac” was based on a single sub­ject. And the writers take great pains to present it as such. Great pains. Really.
The story reads like a computer manual. Pacing is apparently beyond the reach of those in charge of the film’s script, as every detail, however minute, is presented to the audience in rapid fash­ion. Honestly, in order to keep up with the endless files and faces and names, you’d do well to take a pad and pencil with you into the the­ater. Fincher presents an amazing amount of material, and the actors — particularly Jake Gyllenhaal as Graysmith and Mark Ruffalo as the police department detective assigned to the case — deliv­er their lines wonderfully. It all adds up. But the story just doesn’t do a very good job of keeping the audience inter­ested. The film shifts between short scenes of the Zodiac’s grim murders to endless conversations and miniscule facts. And I don’t think many people are will­ing to make that jump.
But to focus wholly on the outbursts of violence in “Zodiac” would be to miss its point. As circumstantial evi­dence mounts, time passes and memories fade, leads evaporate and dead end. Those charged with identi­fying the killer are left with about a million questions and no answers. Mark Ruffalo shuts off. Robert Downey Jr.’s Chronicle reporter takes up the bottle. And Gyllenhaal starts to unravel. The film’s tagline — “There’s more than one way to lose your life to a killer” — starts to take more shape. You realize that the movie is as much about those search­ing for the Zodiac as it is about the actual killer. It’s about closure and lack there­of. And with all of that in mind, “Zodiac” is good. It’s just not incredibly entertain­ing.
You won’t come out of the theater flushed and with a fast heartbeat. If you paid any attention, you’ll come out with an encyclopedic knowledge of a series of gris­ly murders and the open­ended investigation into them. There is no Leatherface, no Jason Voorhees, no Jigsaw. Zodiac was real, and the facts alone are scary enough.

if I get enough of these, I can start applying for low-level critic jobs. because, you know, more people need to hear my opinion.

I wrote a movie review tonight.
I saw “Zodiac.” little long, overly-thoughtful. but not horribly. it’s a solid B … just read the review later. it gets published sunday.
this’ll have been the first time I’ll be published in a professional newspaper. kind of a milestone. more of a nod.
I opted for this and hanging out at home over going to the G-Unit festivities. I had tickets that I haggled with a reporter for. ended up giving them to a girl at work, cause she digs that kind of bullshit. fair enough. she got another job and it was her last day, she was kind of a friend, and I could care less about seeing Lloyd Banks. I don’t think I’d even recognize the motherfucker.

I’ve been listening to the new Shins album, “wincing the night away.” I guess all the albums are kind of new to me. I never really grew that interested in them when they gained popularity. probably just an aversion to “Garden State” success. god, I hated that fucking movie.
but anyway, it’s alright. doesn’t make me anymore interested in listening through their back catalog, but it’s not throwaway. it does, however, suffer the fatal flaw of leading with its best shit.
I can’t stand albums that do that. take the obvious track, put it out front and lean on it. you’d think that bands that consistently put out records with one good track and a lot of shit, you’d mix it up if only to force people to listen to the weak tracks. but they tend to be top heavy.
either way, listen to “sleeping lessons.” the title fits, for the first minute or so …
… annnnd I just got off the phone with a drunk Neil Evans. and Good God fuck, but apparently Smith’s sister was all over Andrew tonight.
that’ll stay up until someone says it’s inappropriate. you know I love you, Mike. it’s okay if your sister is drawn to the raw sensuality that is a freakishly strong neuvo-Christian that dabbles in Judaism. no one can help that.
and by the way, Andrew. let the CD thing go. it’s not like I deliberately hijacked your CCR’s greats hits disc. besides, if you’re going to hold a grudge, hold it because I swiped your copy of “Labyrinth” on VHS. now that’s fucking savage.