7 June 2009
When Bartlett Left the Bear
Disclaimer:
With no less than 9 partially written movie reviews dating back to Watchmen, I’m going to try something else with this blog. I wanted it to serve as a dumping ground for writing I wasn’t fully comfortable with, while at the same time trying to learn a “voice” that might work on a blog (how apropos!). It seems I’m pretty bad at it, and instead of panicking about the fact that The Day the Earth Stood Still is the featured post going back two months, I’m going to start dumping writing I’ve been doing for a story the past couple months here. It came from a writing exercise Ken gave me, where I had to look at an image and then write about it. I’ve had a story about a zoo knocking around in my head for quite awhile (say, 3 years, since rediscovering Karen Tweedy-Holmes’ photography) and on top of this, I haven’t actually written anything I could call “finished” in awhile. This is because I get wrapped up in line-to-line editing, which is one of my weaknesses (thanks, VM!). So here it is – a dumping grounds for unfinished, unedited writing. I.e., if for whatever reason you’ve subscribed to my blog, this is ample reason to part company (if you like). I’m going to try and post a couple sentences a day, maybe a week – I don’t know. But a lot of this is going to be writing done directly within WordPress (maybe even from my iPhoneTM. I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. But I’ve found myself writing around the story a lot, not really sure yet what it should be and I’ve never approached a story in this manner yet, but it does seem to at least be producing something.
A failed experiment of the zoo was its upscale museum/café, the intent of which was to lure tourists and residents into the zoo’s quarters and give them something to do beyond grabbing a bite to eat and moving onto the Arctic Mammals’ refrigerated confines, which were so popular on hot summer days in the city, and the whole idea (that of the upscale museum/café) was based somewhat backwardly on the notion that baseball stadiums and recreational animal containment facilities were more alike than they are dissimilar, which is to say, a specious observation in the least.
Yet the idea itself was not so bad: a hamburger and fries in a zoo is a common occurrence and won’t raise any eyebrows, so why would someone expect a more gourmet offering like an ostrich burger for $10.95 to cause such an uproar (served with fries and a half-pickle, sliced diagonally), and yet the burger itself was less a confrontation than the museum section’s piece de resistance: a taxidermy exhibit in the museum corridor that led to the darkly lit dining area where elegant leather booths and beech plywood designer chairs surrounded tables made of mahogany that lined tinted windows looking out onto the Courtesy of Arthur J. Schlesinger path lead to the Arctic Mammals’ refrigerated confines, which featured the Puffin and Penguin exhibit that was so popular with children.
Other movies* you might want to read about:
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-8)
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-13)
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-9)
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-14)
- When Bartlett Left the Bear (6-11)