Time was, if there was a new Clint Eastwood movie, by God I was right there. I saw The Rookie on opening night, for God's sake. (In fact, I actually paid to see it again, because I assumed the whole thing was some kind of joke that I just wasn't getting. I'm still open to that idea, but I think it's more likely that it just sucks.)
I'd been looking forward to seeing Flags Of Our Fathers because, well, it's a new Clint Eastwood picture. And when it opened last weekend, I...didn't go. Not because I didn't want to--I hope to catch up with it this weekend--but because there were other things to do.
It used to be so simple. I lived for movies, for music, for all things I deemed artistic. It was easy, too, because there was nothing else going on in my life. Even when I was married, my ex and I lived in a kind of bubble, with no kids, relatively few friends and a whole lot of leisure time. We were, in fact, prone to doing artsy crap, between my writing and her singing. (She found more success than me.) Briefly there was even an involvement in the nightmarish, backstabbing, depressingly insular world of community theater. This is the type of thing we did, the type of thing, it seemed, that I lived for.
But then, divorce. And debt. And other things, what I guess would be called real life, got in the way. Suddenly there were more pressing concerns than seeing a movie as soon as it opened...or even seeing it at all. There was more to life than I had realized, and other things to do. Not always good things, but necessary, and things I'd never dealt with before.
So I'll get around to Clint, and Nellie McKay's new album finally gets released next week, so I'll pick that up. It just may take longer than it used to, is all. To paraphrase the ad copy for Once Upon A Time In The West, it isn't good and it isn't bad. It simply is.
