Happy New Year
Posted January 2nd, 2007 by RD Heldenfels
We boxed up the Christmas decorations yesterday, and today I return to the office with a mental list of things to do. So vacation's over.
I tried to make it a real one this year, focusing on family time and avoiding work as much as possible. To a certain extent I succeeded. I did basically nothing work-related except a couple of "Pop Quiz" questions early in the break, and opening a bunch of mail that accumulated at the office.
Not that the pause was easy. I thought about work every day. Can't help it. Entertainment, media, popular culture — whatever you want to call it, it's more than just my job. It's what I wallow in, talk about, read about.
I did a lot of reading over the holiday — one of the nice things about the break was having the time for a lot of reading — and it concentrated on popular culture and politics. I was determined that, by Christmas, I would finish "At Canaan's Edge," the third and final volume of Taylor Branch's biography of Martin Luther King Jr. (and of America in his time); as much as I admire Branch's work, it had been a gift a year ago, and I didn't want to end up fighting for attention in a fresh holiday pile. But I made my deadline, thanks in part to the long airport waits that accompany travel this time of year.
Other reading: Donald Bogle's "Bright Boulevards, Broken Dreams: The Story of Black Hollywood," Alicia C. Shepard's "Woodward and Bernstein: Life in the Shadow of Watergate," John Dickerson's "On Her Trail: My Mother, Nancy Dickerson, TV News' First Woman Star." Right now I am about halfway through "Hello Americans," the second volume of Simon Callow's biography of Orson Welles.
They — and other books that await — will end up in the stew where my work comes from. (For one thing, I've been thinking about the bowdlerized version of "The Sopranos" coming to A&E in the context of the mangling of some of Welles's work — the whole issue of what matters in making entertainment, let alone art.)
So will, I suspect, the music I've been listening to: Ray Charles's Atlantic work, Sinatra in Vegas, Springsteen's Seeger sessions, Pretenders over the years. And some movies I caught up on: "X3," "The Last Kiss," "The DaVinci Code," "Syriana," "Happy Endings." All right, so I didn't entirely catch up on "Happy Endings"; was not involved enough to watch until the end. Some TV crept in there, too — poker, a big gulp of football, even a mini-marathon of "Next" yesterday morning.
It's all meat and potatoes and carrots and tomatoes. We'll be dining together.
