If you use an electric toothbrush while listening to an iPod it makes anything sound like White Zombie. Strange but true.

I've worked a ton over the last week or so, hence I've been neglecting the blog. I devoted last night to watching Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, yet another starkly unhappy tale of vengeance and greed in the old west. I love those movies. Tonight I'm going to go see the Triplets of Belleville. Tomorrow I'll go see Jersey Girl. None of this makes good blogfodder, but I thought I ought to mention it for posterity or something.

I'm trying to get back into art somehow. Being marginally employed and dressing like a bum is only chic if you can back it up with some kind of art or philosophy degree. Also, I'm getting over the art school mind-fuxor that I was in for so long. I had the idea that much of what I would produce would be inconsequential and amateurish if I didn't devote every waking moment to art, eschewing all television and video games, most movies, and any form of fun that didn't involve recreational drugs. It has occurred to me that even if I had paid attention in my art history, graphic design, and sociology classes I would still be working retail. So, if fine art isn't for me, then I don't need to adhere to any sort of dogmatic standard of what an artist is, and I can focus on any sort of creative outlet I want. And it will be inconsequential and amateurish, but it doesn't matter. The point of my going to grad school is to develop myself as an individual, not as a cookie-cutter artist in the dubious tradition of thousands of Warhol devotees.

I just learned that my brother is going to a concert with Howard Shore directing his Lord of the Rings music. Live. For fifteen dollars. Needless to say, I am insanely jealous. He'd better blog about it in an overly-verbose and scantly-edited way when he gets back.

One last thing that I felt I should put here. In Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland there is a riddle that, at the time of the original publication, there was no answer for. The Mad Hatter's riddle; "how is a raven like a writing desk?" I was thumbing through a copy of the book the other night, and I found that Carroll had later responded to the many fan inquiries with this answer: "Because it can produce a few notes, though they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front." There you have it, the answer to the riddle with no answer from the man who first posed the question. I now carry it in my wallet for the giddy esoteric value of having such a thing.