FourBux

What did you do this weekend?

This weekend I made the mental point to not just sit around the house watching television. I also tried not to work, and being totally honest here, those two activities make up most of my out of office time. My brain was starving. I’ve been telling my wife for a while now that I wanted to read something. Something big that I can really get lost in. I’ve set her one-volume tome of the Chronicles of Narnia on my nightstand in the hopes that at some point I’ll pick it up and get hooked again, although I have yet to touch it. She’s been reading The Historian for months now and I’ve been waiting for her to finish it so I can start it (she hates it when I start reading something before she finishes it.).

No good way to make this segue, so just stay with me. I don’t consider watching movies the same as watching television. I saw an interview by Andy Rooney where he said that watching a movie in a theater is about the experience, and a little less so at home, and I couldn’t agree more. Television is designed to fill the space between advertisements. Interesting, considering I saw his commentary on 60 Minutes, you guessed it, on television. While I can get lost in a movie, a TV show, even with it recorded, I still only have to think for 10 minutes and they’ll hit me with another ad for a credit card or erectile dysfunction. I’m not entirely sure the two aren’t interrelated.

That little bit of rationalization out of the way, I watched the documentary Helvetica, (on Emon’s suggestion) and it was really good. I realize that saying that makes me sound like some sort of design nerd, but it was really well done, with great examples of design and insight from designers from the last 50 years. Once I was done watching it, all I wanted to do was design. I had been given that spark of creativity back, and rather than let it die while I slept, I decided to make use of it. In my current day job, explosive sessions of creativity are more of a burden than a benefit…I would go home terribly frustrated every night if I didn’t check my brain at the office door in the morning.

I went into the home office and went through my list of pending freelance work: a web site, a logo job, a company newsletter, three brochures and a postcard. All of these jobs are for large companies with really strict design standards or small clients with, shall we say, “conservative” images, and none of which lent them to that thinking-outside-the-box idealism.

Crap. No sense beating my head against that wall.

My wife was still asleep on the couch, the combination of her recent bout of insomnia followed by a ninety-minute documentary on arguably one of the the least exciting fonts in the world. To find a quiet activity, I picked up the copy of the original I am Legend that someone from work had loaned me. He told me if I liked the movie I wouldn’t like the book, but I don’t think that’s fair. They’re barely even the same story.

My wife and I saw the movie a few weeks ago, over Christmas. Nothing says “Christmas” like a movie about a virus that turns people into vampires, right? Anyway, the book and the movie are like two sides of the same coin. It’s almost as if the author and the filmmaker were given the idea of “there’s one man left in the world, everyone else has been turned to vampires…go!”, what they came up with was so different. The book was only 170 pages or something, so it was an easy read, but in my opinion, it was so much better than the movie!

And I really liked the movie.

I walked away from the movie with the sense that it was quite literally, a modernized redemption/salvation story, while the book is something more, maybe, Orwellian in idea? I won’t spoil the book for those of you who haven’t read it, but I would encourage you to read it if you have some time. It was on some list of the 10 best horror novels ever, and while it was a good read, it didn’t come across as a magnificent can’t-put-it-down read. And it didn’t strike me as particularly a horrific story, but maybe in 1953 when it came out it was. Seriously, give it a read, if for no other reason than to see how different the movie was.

It may even give you an explanation for the title, while the movie, eh, not so much.

All that to say, damn! It feels good to use my brain!

Too bad I’m off to work now and have to leave it at home.

Happy Monday,

Joe