A Good Book and A Good Marketing Campaign

Nothing is more fantastic than seeing a preview for the cinema version of your favorite book. Inevitably, the movie itself will be a total let-down. But the sense of exhilaration that comes from seeing the literary vibrancy of a rich plot converted into a visual vibrancy that includes flashing colors and emotion-drenched actors that you can actually see and drink in the beauty of- that's fantastic. I would argue, however, that reading a book AS a movie is about to be released is even more of a thrill. Contrary to reading a book before filming is even mentioned and forming a whole opinion of the characters and setting from only the black type inside a colorful jacket, reading a book for which a movie is about to come out as the preview are being shown on TV nightly is a full experience. You get to collaborate with the brilliant, artistic mind who deliver you a stunning set, you get to utilize their beautiful cast to fill in the story you read, you hear that one song that sums up the human emotion that drives the novel. Though the actual movie may not fit your interpretation in whole, the components you are given during the preview allow you to visualize the plot and connect with the characters more completely than you could possibly keep track of on your own. Some art prospers by collaboration.

Currently reading Water For Elephants as the DVD is coming out.

Because I can afford to sound crazy here

A song like the hallow tone of wind around cool metals poles, lining the beach in summer. A light and air and smell that seeps into your skin, blending itself within you, rather than allowing you to observe, an isolated bubble of the artificial warmth and smells of humanity: hard walls, classy, pristine and detached. Here you are a part that exists between grass and sunlight, cool soil and tender breeze. You are an element of your own, but also nothing more- an element. There is land and sea and air and human, and they all run into each other as the sand runs into the ocean and the ocean runs into the horizon. And there is man, standing atop one, within another and breathing life from the third. He crosses all these lines that run vertical as he stands, erect, and blends them all. He is the link that keeps them attached, and therefore dissolves himself in each one, to get a firm grip which ties him to reality, like glue seeping into the crevasses of these substances, holding them together and changing their very state of being. Being changed in his own state of being.

The Future of American Government: As Told by Ted Williams.

Take a nation- struggling to break out of economic catastrophe: hopeless, desperate, frustrated.
Add one man- still dizzy in the aftermath of addiction, thrust into the big break of a lifetime.
What do you get? A former addict who becomes a nation-wide symbol for the American Dream, whose success in sobriety will ultimately lead to the restoration or the final demise of America's optimism.

Ted Williams has no idea what he, unwillingly, has gotten himself into. At a time when our country struggles to restore its own stamina, when Democrats and Republicans battle relentlessly over government regulation, there is no way that this poor man, thrust into the position of national symbol, will ever be able to slip back into normality, whether he is successful in his attempt to clean up or not.

If he succeeds, then maybe there's hope, right? Maybe if this one man, who has made so many wrong decisions in his life, can find an inherent sense within him to take this divine opportunity and make a good man of himself, then society really does have a chance. Maybe the individual is good, and maybe capitalism can be a success.

But if this man falters, the notion of the "truly rational" individual will be crushed forever, swiftly followed by an onslaught of government regulations in an abundance that this country has never seen before.

The saddest part is, when you look into Ted William's timid, helpless eyes, he has no idea the kind of martyr he will become.