After something like eight months since the initial proposal was made, I am finally launching a website for a client tonight. I absolutely cannot wait to have it off my plate, although the upkeep of the site will also be my charge, and it’s going to be a substantial amount of ongoing work.

S’okay, though. Pays well.

Conversely, I have exactly one week to get a website up and running for your good friend and mine, Box Brown, who appears in this week’s Jersey City Reporter.

Meanwhile, I finally saw George Lucas’ early film THX 1138, which I’ve known about since I was 13, but have lost the mojo to care about over the years. (Thank the second Star Wars trilogy for that.) It’s anti-Capitalism message is a tad old-hat and heavy-handed, but on the other hand, you have to consider that, 30 years later, America has become a place where people are more engaged thinking about which kind of flat-screen TV to buy than they are considering a useless, unending war that’s draining our resources on every front. Even its portrayal of a society drugged into stupor has proven relatively prophetic.

Mostly, though, I was impressed with the visuals and the unorthodox storytelling. The film is eerie, no doubt about it. Like a nightmare with its own bizarre, internal logic, told in a language that’s just beyond the grasp of real meaning. Lucas’ vision of a jail cell that extends into an endless white horizon is oddly terrifying, and turns the Christian idea of Heaven upside down. Best of all are the solemn, slow-moving robot police, who say things like, “Everything will be all right. You are in my hands. I am here to protect you. You have nowhere to go. You have nowhere to go.”

It’s true that the film sometimes feel likes Kubrick lite—arty and cold, but without the intense intellectualism—but for the man who would later give us Jar Jar Binks, it’s an impressive achievement, nonetheless.

Lucas’ turn towards pop culture made his anti-authoritarian ideas more palatable, and, obviously, that approach proved to be massively successful commercially. But THX 1138 is the riskier, more adventurous venture, and, based on it and the great American Graffiti, it could be argued that the director would have been better off, ultimately, had he continued to make single, highly individualistic films. Less wealthy, perhaps, but then, what’s a few gazillion dollars to a man who’s artistically fulfilled? (D’oh!)

Pointless Detail of the Day: I have finally learned to enjoy a simple game of Sudoku.