You know, for all the build-up the holiday season receives, it certainly always seems to end on an abrupt note. Think about it — for weeks and weeks and weeks, people are decorating, shopping, cooking, and otherwise preparing, and then, come New Year’s Eve, it all ends in just a matter of seconds. The clock strikes twelve, the ball drops, somebody kisses Dick Clark, and it’s all over with. If you’re lucky enough to be at a good party, the festivities may continue for a couple of hours, but that’s just inertia and wishful thinking, right? The genuine propulsive energy of the season all evaporates at midnight and, come first light, the tinsel looks as outdated as muttonchop sideburns. I don’t know about you guys out there in the InternetLand, but the end of the holidays strikes me as a huge anti-climax.

Not that I’m especially bummed to see the holiday season end this year. As I mentioned the other day, I’ve had a hard time catching the Christmas Spirit this year. Even though I sound like a colossal grinch for saying so, it really is a relief to have it finished for another eleven months. Still… I will miss the lights. I always do when the Christmas season ends. I love driving around and seeing all the houses and trees and lampposts wrapped and illuminated by strands of red, blue, and green bulbs. It makes everything seem… quaint. And it makes me a little sad when those lights aren’t there anymore. There’s always a few die-hards, of course, who leave their lights burning until March or April, but the overall effect will be drastically diminished by tomorrow night. Sigh…

So, I don’t know about you folks, but The Girlfriend and I got a slow start this New Year’s Day. If you’re assuming this is because we were out half the night, festivizing, well, you would be correct. However, before you jump to conclusions about the sort of wild and crazy parties we typically attend, consider that the high point of last night’s activity was a screening of a weird little art-horror film called Incubus, which has the dual distinctions of starring a pre-Star Trek William Shatner and having all its dialog spoken in Esperanto. (If you don’t feel like clicking the link, Esperanto is a century-old “artificial language” that I used to think was the invention of a science-fiction writer I liked in middle school because he mentions it in so many of his novels. It’s kind of an interesting language, considering it’s entirely made up. Sounds a bit like Italian, or maybe Spanish.) The movie did feature some lovely black-and-white cinematography by Conrad Hall, who would win an Oscar a couple of decades later for American Beauty, and Shatner is always fun to watch (even when, as the Incubus trailer proudly proclaims, he’s speaking in tongues), but generally this movie fully deserves the MST3K treatment it received at the hands of my fellow partiers. Consider yourself warned.

Anyhow, these winter days certainly are short when you don’t get up until after noon and you don’t have breakfast until 1.30 or 2. Anne greatly amused me as we were leaving for our day’s activities by asking why the sun was already in the west.
Not that those activities were too terribly interesting. We grabbed some eats at The Belgian Waffle, a 24-hour greasy spoon and local institution that’s really hit-and-miss, but we figure we’ve been going there for years so why stop now just because the coffee stinks and you occasionally get a runny egg? Following our mid-afternoon brunch, we took a swing past Media Play to see if there was anything good left on the shelves. Things are pretty picked over at this point, but I managed to grab a few obcsurities for my collection: an 80s-vintage sci-fi/horror/comedy called Critters, the ’55 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Cannonball Run (hey, even I occasionally have a taste for car wrecks and Adrienne Barbeau in spandex), a nifty British neo-noir called Croupier (starring Clive Owen, who should’ve been the next James Bond instead of that blond dude), and, finally, that reliable old Harrison-Ford-in-Amish-country flick, Witness.

After buying more movies — just what I need, right? — we drove around for aimlessly for a while. Saw Salt Lake’s new Intermodal Transit Hub, which at the moment is nothing more than a fancy bus station. Also saw a really fabulous “ghost sign,” one of those old, mid-20th Century advertisements they used to paint on the sides of buildings, as was the style of the time. I think Salt Lake must have some kind of preservation effort going on, because I’ve been noticing a lot of these re-emerging from beneath decades of grime, grafitti, and more recent layers of paint. This particular sign was for the Utah Ice and Cold Storage Company, or something along those lines. It featured some really lovely, old-fashioned lettering, and it occurred to me that even simple things like font design are prone to one day becoming dated. A sobering thought. I would’ve liked to post an image here and show you all what I’m talking about, but I didn’t have a camera with me. I’m thinking I probably ought to pick up a cheap little digital and keep it in the car for when I see neat things like that…
Finally, we ended the evening by watching a really nifty documentary called The Kid Stays in the Picture, about the legendary film producer Robert Evans. (Evans produced, among other things, The Godfather and Chinatown.) If you have any interest at all in Hollywood, the films of the 1970s, or just a really damn interesting guy — he narrates the doc and would be impossibly arrogant if he weren’t also so charming and self-deprecating — I highly recommend this one.

Well, not much of a way to bring in the New Year, I guess, and probably none of this has been worth sharing, but I was still up, and there’s nothing much on TV at the moment…