Sitting here at work for the past couple of hours. After payday yesterday I broke down and bought a couple of movies, Almost Famous and High Fidelity. Actually that was earlier this evening. Finished putting the engine (blown 383) into John’s Camaro this afternoon, and for some reason I was feeling particularly antisocial, so I ate a couple of reheated fajitas (made from scratch last night) and skipped out on Stephen’s Halloween costume get-together thing under the pretext of getting new batteries for the digital camera (something I did do, by the by), and bought the movies and came here to work, where I have a DVD player on the computer. Don’t have one of those at home, and I could camp out here for a little while. I’m greatly enjoying it, actually. Just a little bit of solitude works wonders.
Watched High Fidelity first. I feel such a commonality with Rob Gordon (John Cusack’s character) it’s uncanny. The singleminded geekiness about a particular pursuit that had dominated his life in the past but has since taken more of a soundtrack role, but that he still feels a certain elitism about and creates metaphors out of it to define situations… the attempts at self-discovery through the obsessive rethinking of past relationships… the struggle between maintaining the status quo and forging ahead, and the uncertainty about how to undertake that… and definitely the underlying aversion to commitment and having to deal with the unpredictability of gut-reactions to people and situations… even the conversation style, the mannerisms, the two-edged sword of self-awareness, the geeky earmuff headphones planted on his head half the film… It’s all there. It’s nice to see somebody on celluoid that I almost recognize, and who redeems himself to a degree in the span of a couple hours. Refreshing.
It’s getting warm in here. Cracked a window. Bugs chirping. Sitting in the office chair, shoes off, bare feet propped on the computer. Cars and night noises outside. It’s almost…European. But not quite. Not quite.
nice movie choices.