Welcome Back!

So welcome back...and it's been nearly a month!  The world has changed, we've moved forward in every facet imaginable and elected Barack Obama President, well President-Elect at least.  It feels so good saying that.  The first day after the election, there was a ubiquitous weight-off-our-chests elation permeating the city of Chicago and it's been electric every since--save the for the whole financial crisis thing, which has even trickled down to my silly restaurant job.

We've arrived at the Holidays and coming off of an unexpected and gut-wrenching break-up I'm actually, factually, breach-of-contractually not depressed out of my skull--scurrying to the nearest ledge, causing Fire Departments to rumble.  This is refreshing.  I totally recommend it.

But to pull a corny line from The Matrix 'I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end; I came here to tell you how it's going to begin.'  So, in our Grand Reopening here at Healthy Book Club everything is priced to sell:

- The script for Apartment Hunting is back in the lab and will be finished by the year's end.

- A website of the same Moniker is in the incipient stages as well.

As promised, once Apartment Hunting gets back in the lab you'll get a detailed, step-by-step of the whole racket.  I now have 3 feature-length ideas in the works so there's a lot riding on this.

Focus on the process...

Movies: I just had the intense, hey-I-found-20-dollars-in-an-old-jacket! pleasure of seeing Let The Right One In.  In a nutshell this is an indie flick from Sweden where 2 adolescents find each other in a dreary suburb of Stockholm .  The hook: one of them (Eli, the girl) is a vampire.  This deftly and with a subtle sweetness missing from so many movies today, turns the whole Vampire Genre on its head and were all better off for it.  There's no origin stories, villains, epic prophecies etc., rather a simple film on loneliness, morality and companionship.  The performances--primarily the kids--are pitch-perfect, and in their quiet embrace all pretensions of the plot make sense and work for the general purpose of the story.  I needed to be inspired, to focus on film once again.

In other news: BBC has just reported that Somali Pirates have been paid more than $150 million in ransom per the Kenyan Foreign Ministry.  I'm very curious how modern-day Pirating plays out: are there theatrics?  Are there costumes?  Do they have some sort of Pirate Lingo?  A logo?  Do people even take them seriously at first glance?

Obama is efficiently putting his Cabinet together, and the advent of Hillary Clinton as Madame Secretary of State looks like a go. I'm very pleased with this.  I just hope the entire economy hasn't been flushed down the toilet by the time he gets in office.  I may be giving copies of Apartment Hunting away on street corners for a bagel and a box to sleep in.

Welcome back; it's time to party...

-m