Sunday, September 27, 2009

Fleetingly observed, and probably devoid of significance

1.An utterly pointless Guardian article in the form of an appreciation escalation, which is a really bad description made up by me. I just read a feature on Abigail's Party by Mike Leigh, where they interviewed Leigh, Steadman, and a host of people that have nothing to do with the film to ask them how it was significant to them. The importance of the work escalates to such a point that the last person probably described it as a 'slightly more historically momentuous event than the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Qu'ran if they happened to be made up simultaneously'.

2. Wine related metaphors should be banned. I noticed on the copy of Metropolitan that I took out last week that there were TWO wine-related descriptions: 'Fizzes like champagne' and 'A real vintage'. Roundabout (I didn't write them down, but they really were no wittier - Whittier?- than that).

3. Everyone should have a favourite James Bond, or at least a convincing opinion on which one is the best. I always feel at a loss when people talk about the latest 007 film, as I haven't seen any since the last time I had to stay in during a Bank Holiday. I had an idea about a series set in James Bond's retirement, where he has to go on really mundane missions, like stopping speeding milk floats. He has a younger son, with modern non-sexist attitudes, who doesn't understand his dad's philandering, Casanova treatment of the ladies at Bowls Club. Bond - meets some BBC 1 90s Sunday evening generation gap 'comedy' - meets Werther's Original ad.

Saturday, September 26, 2009

All About Eve




Miss Claudia Caswell: Oh, waiter!
Addison DeWitt: That is not a waiter, my dear, that is a butler.
Miss Claudia Caswell: Well, I can't yell "Oh butler!" can I? Maybe somebody's name is Butler.
Addison DeWitt: You have a point. An idiotic one, but a point.

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Bookshelves



Solves the usual books/heaviness problem when packing for holidays.


Woosh, this is incredible.

This blog for bookshelves, staring hungrily at lots of beautiful book covers (and an interview with the man behind the great artwork on Jonathan Safron Foer's books): http://covers.fwis.com/

I'm starting to feel sad looking at my books. I think I want to move somewhere else for a bit, in a year or so, and I'm not sure they can all come with me. Despite getting annoyed at my own materialism on a frequent basis, it's good to have cumbersome possessions, I think the mental and financial impossibility of contriving free storage options if I was to become completely down-and-out is in itself a motivation for erm, working. Looking for work.

Emotionally stunted non-heroes

Is this a TREND? I'm like going totally confused to Confusicus here.*

In a couple of recent-ish films I have noticed that the central characters were men in their early thirties, who were clearly odd in some developmental sense, but that this remains unacknowledged throughout these films. I could be wrong on Lars and The Real Girl but there was definitely something odd about Joaquin Phoenix's character in Two Lovers. The guy was monosyllabic, and withdrawn, and there was no explanation as to why he was still living in his parents' apartment despite his age. I guess the cinematography, and design - dark colours, claustrophobic interiors - didn't help.

By wrong on Lars, I mean that his strange behaviour - you know, hanging out with his sex doll, taking her to Sunday service, inviting her out for dinner - was humoured by the local villagers. He was supposed to be traumatised by a family death, but surely falling in love with a sex doll would be also be a cause for concern? There just seem to be fewer contemporary films about relationships between men and women where they function as intellectual equals (the Seth Rogen-starring films Knocked Up and Zack and Mirri Make a Porno are totally guilty of perpetuating this). I think dick-flicks are er, filling that void - men can be 'normal' with other men.

* I stole this from a really bad terrible TV programme.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Sun's Burial

Monday, September 21, 2009

I like this blog entry by Wil Wiles who edits ICON magazine.

"By stepping into someone's home you're stepping into a kind of myth of themselves, a hard projection of their psyche into the physical world. Once you start seeing homes like this, they can be pretty unnerving places."

http://willwiles.blogspot.com/

* He mentions the strange film The Cell, which stars J-Lo as the world's most glamourous pyschotherapist. She is given an extraordinary new treatment which allows her to enter the mind of a serial killer. This treatment is an excuse for some hallucinatory H.R. Giger inspired MTV-bright visuals. J-Lo watches this cartoon near the beginning of the film:

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Sunday, September 20, 2009



A great essay on Depression-era art discussing James Agee, Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts, and the gender politics behind screwball comedy dialogue.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/09/21/090921crbo_books_crain?currentPage=4

Saturday, September 12, 2009

Fish Tank

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Thursday, September 10, 2009


"Where “individuality” once meant inseparability – the Latin term individuus could be used to describe friends or lovers – it now connotes personal identity, inviolable oneness. It is what sets us apart, not holds us together. The resolution of duality within the individual provides the core motif for the vast psychoanalytical literature that stems from Freud’s inference of conflicts between conscious and unconscious motivation and Jung’s dramatisation of the psychic landscape in the figures of anima and animus, the self and the shadow. At the opposite pole from the mystical, consummatory sense of two-in-one is our fear of the divided self. In Dostoevsky’s story The Double, the appearance of Mr Golyadkin’s doppelgänger marks a personality in the final stages of disintegration, as the psychic auto-immune system turns on itself. While Golyadkin struggles to preserve the modest routines on which his self-esteem rests, his double, like a fiendishly competitive twin brother, knocks away every prop."

http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue1/article7.html