C.A. Hall's Blog, page 11

5 Ways to Refill the Tank

Everybody's tank runs out of gas. I've been pushing myself very hard lately. If you haven't noticed, I am attempting to make this a daily blog. Put that on top of work for clients, daily drawings, household chores, exercise, book research,administering my website, running the Facebook page, & seeking new avenues of marketing to help my contributors then its no wonder that I only eat 1 full meal a day. I seem to run dry daily—but I'm starting to learn that that's normal. That's the way we're s...

Birth of the Living Dead

I'm not really caught up in the whole zombie-mania thing. I've never even seen an episode of The Walking Dead or watched World War Z. I'm not avoiding it, I just haven't got there yet. I have loved zombie movies in the past like Fido, Zombieland, 28 Days Later, Day of the Dead, and Lucio Fulci's Zombie. But to me the two best zombie movies are Shaun of the Dead and The Night of the Living Dead. These two movies live in a cozy spot next to each other on DVDshelf.

There's been a lot of revision...

Doctor Who

Rather than attempting to give my thoughts on decades of Doctor Who, or even trying to give my thoughts on the last eight years (most of which I haven't seen for years), I'll simply stick with my thoughts of Season 8.

At the beginning of this season, I spent a lot of time reading blog reviews of each episode but eventually I had to give that up. It was just pissing me off. "I found this element unbelievable." "The focus of the story veers to far into fantasy." "The deeper psychological issues...

Call of the Wild

by Jack London

Why haven't I read Jack London before? I never read what I was supposed to be reading when i was younger, which I suppose in this case is fine. I'm not sure as a young man I would have got as much out of Call of the Wild as I did now. There's just a certain agedness to it. You have to have lived long enough to know the ugliness of life and you have to have survived far enough past the worst of it to no longer strap it with anger and regret.

What a brilliant idea to write a book...

Stealing for T.S. Eliot

My quote of inspiration this week comes with a bit of baggage. One of my biggest pet peeves is lazy quotation attribution. In writing particularly, we see quotes which name the author, but give no reference to the source book, letter or speech. I know this sort of behavior would be ridiculousin oral conversation but what I often hear there is "As someone one famously said." Really? If they so "famously" said it then with don't you know who the fuck it was? There's just no effort to verify quo...

Star Trek: Enterprise

Call me crazy but I have peculiar viewing patterns with TV shows. First of all, and perhaps least odd, I limit myself to 3 hours a day. I know that doesn't sound far off from most of you but I work at home, so left unchecked I could loaf 14 hours a day watching shit and eating animal crackers. If I didn't limit myself, I would never read, draw, exercise or get anything of any value done ever.

Currently, within those 3 hours I break it down like this: I start the evening with two sitcom episod...

Bartleby, the Scrivener

by Herman Melville

I've always been a afraid of Moby Dick. (That's probably a great voiceover line for the beginning of a gay porno.) Like Moby Dick, there are some books who's length & reputation just plain frighten me, books like War & Peace, Middlemarch, Infinite Jest, Don Quixote, Ulysses & In Remembrance of Lost Time. So far, I've only braved two of them and have had mixed results. I've been inching my way through Don Quixote for years and I just can't get into it. I'm not even half way...

Lost in the Grey

I've written a lot in this blog about perseverance & strength, but standing beside them always are the pale, slovenly ogres of weakness and vulnerability. Maybe it's time to talk about those farting, belching bastards; maybe it's time to stab at their doughy, white bellies.

When we talk about paths in life, we talk about them as if they are the linear things; as if the line between the gravel and bramble is as clear as hopscotch lines on tarmac. But the paths in life don't travel along the gro...

Birdman

It's hard to categorize Birdman. It's hard to say what kind of film it is. Is it a drama, a farce, a comedy?—it's all of them and none of them. Birdman reminds me of the surge of independent film in the 90's and the type of movies that were being made then. Movies like Trees Lounge, Reservoir Dogs, Buffalo '66, Night on Earth and others that also defied categorization. I remember watching them and thinking "what the fuck was that?" and being totally exhilarated by the notion of a film that d...

The Stranger

by Albert Camus

It's been about ten years since I first read The Stranger. Going into it, all that I could remember was the basic skeleton of the story and that it's the basis for The Cure's "Killing an Arab." What surprised me most in re-reading it this week was how little there really is to it. Part Law & Order episode and part Johnny Cash's "Long Black Veil," The Stranger is a pretty direct novel with very minimalistic writing. Camus doesn't whirl off into vocabulary rich descriptions or...