We will do a little redefinition of objectives, here, I'm thinking. Date creep. I've made good progress along a number of fronts, examining both Extensis Portfolio and Adobe Lightroom for tracking photographs and cleaning up my not so slowly image clogging hard drives. Actually, I've set up catalogs in both programs and plan to use both for a time, as they can operate independently of one another without changing or mixing images. I'm waiting on the arrival of my label printing software, mailed from Florida on Monday, and once that's in place we'll be able to burn a lot of CD's and DVD's and get this project up another step. (Hup! Hup!) So I'm happy and don't feel I've been lagging.

Same with the day to day pictures. Some additions to Art & Life that make me happy enough, some pictures taken with a different eye and attitude (well, maybe), all of them good and the week productive in the proper sense of productive. That and a glass or two of sake in the evenings, how could anyone complain?

There are many basic things your life seems to lack that are considered important in any definition of success. Don't you think?

Now, now. There are many who might envy a man with a bought in the 70’s Halston jacket (that almost fits) sitting in his closet, a neurotic cat and a nice camera. Believe me, it's true. All that and a mat cutter, I might add, framing a subject I managed to gloss over in listing my deadlines for the week.

Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds is playing at noon today at the Grand Lake theater. Why not? All of the papers reviewed it at great length today, many of the magazines I subscribe to have reviewed it too, all without consensus. He's Tarantino, after all, and, for all my fickleness with movies these last several years, I do have to see it. Today? Well, we'll know next paragraph.

Later. Reading the reviews in the Chronicle and The Times, in The New Yorker and Atlantic, well, they were talking about the same movie, yes, but four individual takes from four different angles, four individuals describing an elephant after observing four different aspects of the beast. All four of their takes as true as any, none of them, perhaps, what you might have written in their place.

Like all of Tarantino's films, it was a cartoon story told through some very interesting and off the wall dialogue, riveting scenes and pieces of riveting scenes. It isn't the action, it's his unique and off the wall take, the words, the characterization, all of it in some incongruous corner where art meets life. You already know if you're going to see it, since you already know your feelings about Tarantino's work. It's good Tarantino, not at the level of Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, but you know immediately from the first scene who wrote it and who made it and, well, that's why you bought your ticket. Right?

And that's it?

Not the blood and gore I was expecting from the reviews I read, but more than enough for the squeamish. Not the end all and be all of Tarantino films. But a good afternoon at the movies and that's the idea, right?

Still the coughing, although I suspect it may ease off once I'm settled in. I have no illusions I'll get to sleep easily later. Lungs that develop fluid over a period of three weeks? Starting slowly, those first two weeks no more than some congestion in the mornings that soon went away? And now more? How much more? This is probably not the first time I've gone through this, but it's been a while for these lungs of mine and I seem to have forgotten how it eventually resolves itself. With a bang? With a whimper? Have my lungs been feeling ignored, wanting attention? Not anymore.