Of Movies And Microwaves

I've spent the week watching movies On Demand. Last week I saw the horrendous The Darjeeling Limited and just when I thought there couldn't be a crappier movie out there, along came No Reservations. For those who follow Catherine Zeta-Jones-I-Married-For-Prestige-Not-Love's career, did you know her face now has no expression at all? When she cries, they put EVOO on her cheeks so the tears float down quickly and you can almost hear them saying to one another, "Quick, let's get the fuck out of here, this place is colder than Antarctica." Aaron Eckhart is too hot to badmouth and Abigail Breslin, the Fame Clock called, they want their 15 minutes back.

I loved Gone Baby Gone and have no idea why Amy Ryan didn't win over Tilda Swinton in Best Supporting category for this year's Oscars. Her performance is breathtaking and Swinton's is wooden and one dimensional. Ben Affleck has found his calling behind the camera, instead of behind Jennifer Lopez's career. I also saw Atonement and thought it was great. It was oil barrels better than Michael Clayton and the surprise ending was clever, unlike the dreadful ending of No Country for Old Men which should have been called No Country for Script Doctors.

My microwave is acting strangely, stopping the rotation one way just to go the other way and back and forth like that until the entire thing comes to a jolting halt and the buzzer sounds. Without cooking a thing. It finally started to work but exploded a cup of tea at the normal time I set it so now I can shave 8 seconds off my tea time.

If you know me, and know me well, you know that wherever I am, there is always hinky electronic activity around me. When I spent time trying to sell my Dad's place down in Florida I was having the Jacuzzi fixed. After two hours in the apartment, the electrician for the building asked me when I was going back to L.A. because he couldn't work on it while I was there. Alarms went off, wires didn't connect, extensions died. This was my dad's place and he was dead so I wasn't that surprised by all the activity but the electrician was as he'd worked in the apartment for 17 years and never had any problems before. I eventually returned to L.A. and over the next year and a half, until we sold the place, the electrician never charged me for another thing. But he made sure I was in L.A. before he stepped foot in the place.

In my own apartment, the bedroom TV has turned itself on twice and the stereo in the living room turned itself on twice, all in the middle of the night. When the TV turned itself on the first time, I walked to the kitchen and got a hammer, I guess in case the police came they would find clubbed spirits bleeding to (even more) death on the carpet? This activity has been going on since the late 1970's, when my French grandfather died and came to say goodbye to me in New York. Some of it is just hilarious, like the day I was watching a movie in the VCR and the VCR stopped, spit the movie out the slot and onto the floor and then turned itself off and went back to regular television programming. It had never done that before and never did it again.

I have so many stories like this that I put them all in my first novel, which is really a roman à clef called All The Bad Sex I've Had™. You'd think that sex and spirits wouldn't be related but you'd be wrong. After all, they were alive once and they couldn't all have been nuns and priests. I think we all have surmised that there is way more out there than what we see, things that can't be explained in any rational manner and that there is definitely more than just this lifetime. That is the entire premise of karma, after all, other lifetimes. So if you believe in that, well....

And because I'm open to all of this, I'm open to a lot more. And they find me!

End of chat.