C.A. Hall's Blog, page 12
November 11, 2014
Selby, The Smiths & The Bird
The beauty and the bitch of The Smiths is deciphering what the hell Morrissey is talking about. His lyrics are so full of double and triple meanings that the messages split off like daisy petals in every direction. The Smith's were English, the whole damn world knew that and so it's no surprise that the word "queen" referrs to the monarch of which Moz is "the eighteenth pale descendant." But what was a surprise, was picking up Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. and realizing that "Th...
November 5, 2014
How I Met You Mother
I have a strange relationship with sitcoms. Ok maybe not strange, I usually hate them. I hate them because as a general rule they are vapid & disposable. They present life in way that reinforces apathy. They preach obedience and abhor deviation from the status quo. No one ever gets away with even the pettiest of transgression on a sitcom. Negative karma always follows.
That said I do still watch sitcoms, often to understand what the hell everybody is talking about. (Not having seen many episod...
November 4, 2014
Ellroy's Unexpected Vulnerability
"I stood up, looked at the four bodies and blood-covered sidewalk, stumbled to the curb and vomited into the gutter until my chest ached. I heard sirens approaching, pinned my badge to my jacket front, then turned around. Lee was pulling out the stiffs’ pockets, tossing shivs and reefers onto the sidewalk, away from the pools of blood. He walked over, and I was hoping he’d have a wisecrack to calm me down. He didn’t; he was bawling like a baby."—James Elroy, The Black Dhalia
That passage kill...
November 3, 2014
The Sacrament
It was Halloween. Just Sarah, Joy and me. We were staying in this year and we wanted a to watch a horror movie. And I don't know if you've ever noticed, but there are a lot of goddamn horror movies to chose from. We had no idea what to watch. We were in this endless indecisive cycle. Candyman? Hellraiser? What about Fright Night? (I thought Fright Night was something else and got lost hunting on my phone only to find out that I meant Creepshow.) What about Friday the 13th? Or Silver Bullet?...
October 29, 2014
As A Man Thinketh
Somebody bought me this book several years ago and until now, I never even attempted to picked it up. The person who bought it for me was very religious so I expected the same from the book, but to my surprise this book doesn't mention god, dogma or any thing like it. I also went into this book expecting some woo-woo self-help treatise on "attracting good" or thinly veiled god references like "the loving universe." Instead what I found were practical, and stubbornly realistic...
October 28, 2014
Joyce's Eternity in Hell
How does one begin to describe the intangible? In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, JamesJoyce creates the metaphor of bird carrying grains of sand in its beak. The tangibility of that image not only gives the reader something to grasp onto but it also serves as a counterpoint to the vastness which is attempting to exemplify. By shifting focus away from the abstraction, heseems to somehow make the immensity of eternity just a tiny bit more comprehensible.
"What must it be, then, to be...
October 25, 2014
New Purpose
When I started this website I had one goal: to force myself to maintain a weekly blog for longer than a month (which, until I started this site, was roughly the longest period of time that I had ever maintained any other blog). As you can imagine, it was a challenge (something with which I still struggle today) but I was at a point in my life where I needed a challenge; I needed a purpose. It didn't need to be a grand, sweeping purpose, just a purpose—a small one. I just needed something that...
October 14, 2014
Chaplin's Speech
It's not something I want to admit but I look at my blog stats daily. I watch the numbers trying to deduce how to provide the most value to visitors. Call it obsessive but I've quit a lot of bad habits and that nervous energy has to go somewhere. One trend that I've noticed is that about five days after I post a blog, my subscriber numbers dip. The only sense that I can make from that is that I'm not posting often enough. So, I'm going to attempt doing two posts a week. (FYI: I also post blog...
October 11, 2014
Sobriety
I can't drink anymore. My liver is damaged and I'm on the border of full-blown diabetes. Welcome to reality.
You can do fucked up things in your life. You can break people's hearts, break people's arms and spread pestilence like piss from a dog dick. But it isn't glued to you. You can always change and become a better person and sooner or later your past will become less tangible. It's all just stupid shit that you can out-run by living better. But, the one thing that you can't escape is the f...
October 5, 2014
Gratitude
"Coulro/phobia"
If you follow me on any social media, I'm sure you know that I had my first art show on Friday. Hence my lateness on this weekly blog. I'm just finally sitting down after a few days of time spinning off into sky on a wheel.
In the days approaching the show, several people asked me if I was nervous or anxious. I wasn't. Hell, when I look back, I wasn't even excited. It just happened so fast that I didn't have time to think. On the night of the show I had to keep reminding mysel...
