I have more time on my hands these days since I can remember. The summer between grade 12 and York, probably. It's...weird. On the one hand, I love that I can go to the studio with the beach boys, or the beach, or out for coffee, or to a movie (SATC2 was every bit the amazing ridiculousness it was meant to be), or whatever, whenever...on the other hand, I hate being bored, and not being 110% booked up is a good way to become bored. Especially when the weather is shiiiite as it has been recently.

I've had more time to read and watch documentaries and stuff though recently, which has been nice! I recently saw No Impact Man, which is about a family of three in NYC who decide (well he decides and she goes along with it; the 2-yr-old doesn't really care) to live for a year without making a net negative impact on the environment. This includes 6 months of living without power, not using paper (including toilet paper), shopping for unwrapped food so as to not create any garbage, only using foot and pedal power...pretty intense and interesting. She works for Business Week and he's not a *total* hippy, so it was interesting to see them asking the questions around what we 'actually' need to use/consume/etc. Of course, they blogged about it all once he borrowed a solar panel to power his laptop (but not his fridge), this man has his priorties straight!

I also saw 'RiP: A remix Manifesto', which was almost as interesting for the fact that the director grew up on Gabriola of all places! It looks at the development of copyright and its current state, and how we need to move on to copyleft. Interestingly, it looks in pretty great detail at one of my favourite DJs, Girltalk, who samples and remixes dozens of songs into each track. To do it legally, he would have to pay some $284,000 per song to buy the licensing rights, even though he only uses a second or two of each track. Crazy. In contrast, the whole documentary is copyleft/CC and open to remixing. [film homepage]

Reading-wise, I finally decided to get to Siddartha, given to me by a dear friend before I left Japan, who told me that I was 'on a journey and needed to read it.' I know I'll be re-reading it soon, but I'm glad I did. There were some great things about loving and listening in there.

Continuing a strangely Indian theme, I'm also working my way through Shantaram right now, which is a 900+ page memoir-style novel about a semi-fictionalised decade in India. Written by ex criminal/drug dealer/arms dealer/prison escape artist/etc. etc., Gregory David Roberts, it's well worth the time. Apparently he's working on two other books to make it a trilogy and the movie rights have been bought, though there's no way a film could do the rich description of this novel justice, so I don't think I'd go see it. (Plus I think it would be at turns depressing, gruesome, scary, and stunningly gorgeous and I'm not sure I can handle all of that plus Johnny Depp all in one sitting). I have 650 pages, or roughly a week, to go, and I'm already mourning the end of this book. Here's hoping the sequels don't take the 13 years this one was rumored to take to write.

Happy reading!
D