Destiny

Bayliss: What if the one true love of your life was an Eskimo, and you lived in Des Moines?

Pembleton: There are a lot of nice girls in Des Moines.

from Homicide: Life on the Street

Up In the Air

Oh my God, a Hollywood movie that romanticises the sacking of thousands of American workers. You don’t have to be Barbara Ehrenreich to find that utterly repellent.

Recipe

I’ve figured out what it is that makes George Clooney so sexy.

Fuck you if you think I’m telling.

Viral

People send you links to videos, thinking they’re the first. But they found the link via someone else. What is wrong with this picture?

I think we need to have badges according to the amount we use the net. Then a badge no. 2 would know not to send me, a badge no. 7, anything at all. Everyone lower than 7 would have to leave me alone, and I’d only have to take links from Sal Towse and Jason Kottke.

(link)

Beard

One of the main problems about letting your beard grow, is that sooner or later you begin to ingurgitate your own hairs. Unlike other foreign-body hairs, your own seem to be less readily rejected by your body.

I guess this is a problem only men have. I’ve seen old women with facial hair, but none with hair like I’ve grown since last September. Now we know there’s a price to pay.

Bite

I don’t often look in the mirror, for obvious reasons, but today I happened to catch a glimpse. And found a bite-mark.

No, not a sexy vampirish twin puncture. The imprint of a full set of choppers. Not a bite, a bruise.

Where have I been? And what have you been doing to me?

Horse

I have a grey horse, who shares my bed with me. He’s about one hand to the shoulder, and in fact you can hold him in one hand. My children gave him to me one Fathers’ Day; they’d been looking for a donkey, my beast of choice, but this would have to suffice. They may have been unsure, or even imagined I wouldn’t spot a ringer.

He’s pretty useless for snuggling (and he’s indifferent to my philosophising and snowman-building) but I keep him in my bed anyway, so that the children will see him from time to time, and know that he’s still close to me.

TIA

You think you're being polite when at the end of an email you go, "Thanks in advance". In fact you're being insufferably presumptuous. Thanks in advance means, Get it done, bitch.

Whatever happened to "Your humble servant"?

The Lovely Bones

There's a very effective, Hitchcock-like moment in The Lovely Bones, involving a creaky floorboard, a desperate sister and a serial killer. Watching it, I was not only reminding myself that I already knew the outcome, I was also admiring Hitch's definition of suspense, and director Peter Jackson's willingness to wring every last drop from the scene.

But please OMG, don't hope for anything else from this dreadful, bungled movie.

Alice Sebold's novel may not be great literature, but her description of how a family reacts to the death of one of its members was, for me, utterly convincing, and I've been in the situation. It's terribly hackneyed to claim the film wasn't as good as the book, but all film adaptations are better than this one. It failed not only to capture the narrator, who without spoiling is a murdered girl. It also failed to capture the father, who goes a bit nuts; the mother, who bolts; the sister, who becomes an avenging angel; the brother, who doesn't understand anything, until he does; and the detective, played by Michael Imperioli from The Sopranos, and getting less to do than if he were the guest on an episode of Extras.

Oh yeah, and it fails to develop the Indian boy, the clairvoyant girl, the Indian boy's mother -- all of whom were characters in the book, all well-developed.

How could a film miss so much? Partly it's in the nature of film, as we all know. That doesn't excuse why things went so wrong. Maybe Peter Jackson is just a crap director. He's famous for Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Maybe he's out of his depth when doing things on a human scale.

(Trailer)

I don't believe in miracles

Colin Blunstone via last.fm

Yes, it has been a while, hasn't it.

I remember I was aware of Rod Argent (Hold Your Head Up, very prog-rock) before I ever heard of Colin Blunstone, his band's vocalist by that time, whose version of Russ Ballard's song I don't Believe in Miracles put Argent out of our minds forever. biggest hit.

Blunstone had, and may well still have, one of the most beautiful male voices in rock music. As a man, as a former vocalist, as a singer still, I can only dream of singing like this. He is, I suppose, a lyric tenor. I think singing the way he does, on a song like this, he reaches far beyond what most operatic tenors ever get to sing.

The lyrics themselves are not much to write home about. The first two lines could hardly be more mundane:

I walk along the road and past your door
Then I remember things you said

The story is a very ordinary one. What matters is what he makes of it. While making it clear she's vanished without trace, he's in no doubt it's because she's no good:

I don't believe in miracles
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are

He then goes on to explain how manipulative she is:

I believe I was your game, your ball (your ball)
If you tossed me up then I would fall
And so you've won again, ah, you win them all

Before making it clear that he's the victim, a knowing victim, and a willing victim after all:

But I believe I'd run to you, if you should call

That is, of you do the research, an unexpectedly common sentiment in pop songs -- much more common, in my experience (though these things are tinted by our own life-experiences) that the view that the victim was somehow a dupe.

That ambivalence continues in the next verse:

I believe that somewhere there's someone
Who's gonna light the way when things go wrong
The bullet that shot me down came from your gun
The words that turned me round were from your song

And that's all. He was treated bad, got dumped, would go back in a heartbeat. I think a lot more pop sings than you think would fit that description.

Here are the full lyrics:

I walk along the road and past your door
Then I remember things you said
I know in time we could've been so much more
But if you wanna come back home, go right ahead

But I don't believe in miracles
I don't believe in miracles
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are

I believe I was your game, your ball (your ball)
If you tossed me up then I would fall
And so you've won again, ah, you win them all
But I believe I'd run to you, if you should call

But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are (tell me where you are)

I believe that somewhere there's someone
Who's gonna light the way when things go wrong
The bullet that shot me down came from your gun
The words that turned me round were from your song

But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are (tell me where you are)

But I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
I don't believe in miracles (don't believe in miracles)
But I thought you might show your face
Or have the grace to tell me where you are

And the video performance:



It appears Argent and Blunstone are still touring to the faithful. They were once at the top of the pile, and one of them -- Blunstone -- has an unusual talent. You can see the band's performance of their most well-known song here, on the incomparable Old Grey Whistle Test from 1973. The singer here is Russ Ballard, composer of I don't believe, and no mean singer in his own right. So much more of a compliment to Blunstone that he was allowed to sing Ballard's classic.

Short shameful confession

I've posted the short, shameful confession meme to this blog 20 times. And I'm not particularly ashamed about any of the things I confessed. All the really shameful stuff stays hidden.

Meanwhile this blog has now moved up to third place in a Google Search for "short shameful confession".

Flemish Brabant

This is one of the best photos I've ever taken.



I got lucky by being in a great Brabant landscape, in the first place, and a heavy rain in the second. Because I only have a point and shoot Cybershot thingy, the way to make a long exposure is to push the film-speed (there is no film, I know, but we can recreate the conditions) down to ASA400. The point of that was to catch something of the rain, but it also had the secondary effect of blurring everything slightly, since the grass was blowing in the wind, and since I was holding a camera no heavier than a slice of toast and honey in my unhandy German bands.

But being in the right place was half the battle. That's what all art is about, after all. That's what you're seeing when the trees in the distance seem to fade away. That's called aerial perspective, and it was an effect artists like Leonardo were at pains to reproduce in works like the Mona Lisa. But in real life, it's all a question of where you're standing. Painters use it to try to fake an effect which our eyes see by themselves.

Click on the image to biggify, and feel free to d/l to zoom right in and get that Impressionist feel, where every plant and nettle looks like a brush-stroke.

And since it's all about photography and painting, I'm dedicating it to nn, snapper of my tattoo ordeal, who has a painting jury later today. G'luck, kid.

Love is everything

Image via Wikipedia

I suppose it shouldn't, but it surprises me that with the sheer number of songs that are written every year and come to our notice, so few contain a word or a string of words that cause one to pull up short and think, That's exactly the right way to put it or, I never saw it that way before. Oh, I know that's not what people are always looking for, or even ever -- how else to explain prog-rock? But it's what causes a song to get its hooks into my memory.

Having said that, if I were to make a playlist of songs I think worthwhile, they would all be selected on that criterion: that the words say something to me in a new way. And there would be thousands of them. There are an awful lot if you're listening for them, even though as I started out by saying, it's not much more than a drop in the ocean.

I'm busy compiling a post, which will be quite lengthy because filled with quotes, which illustrates this idea within the despised genre of country music, but that's for later. A good example of one that's just plain powerful is Love is Everything by Jane Siberry, a Canadian singer-songwriter who now apparently wants to be known as Issa. She's an intriguing character I'd never heard of, until she was chosen to provide two tracks for the kd lang covers album Hymns of the 49th Parallel, dedicated to Canadian artists. Only Leonard Cohen was as highly-rated, and one of his was Hallelujah, which everyone thinks is a Jeff Buckley number. But I digress.

The lyrics are below. The lines that caught my attention:

Love is everything they said it would be
Love made sweet and sad the same
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You're chickening out aren't you?

The first line is probably the only occurence of that sentiment in popular music, where a singer looks back on a love and finds it good. The second line provides a reason why. But be careful, that line is a twin-edged blade. If sad is the same as sweet, then sweet is also sad. Doesn't that turn out to be the case? It does in hindsight, because any feeling looked back upon, even a sweet one, is now beyond us, lost and gone. The melancholy among us have learned to regard all emotions that way, not solely with hindsight. While the rousing slogan "This too shall pass" is never true for pain, it is always true for pleasure.

In the third line Issa, as she does in the first, takes a cliche and turns it into something else. Love is blind, we say, but love is not blind when it is ending. Any fool can see when, and pinpoint when, the point of no return is reached, even though we never admit it until it's much too late, and until we've lost not only the love we received, but also the love we gave, and all dignity and honour in the interim. There's at least half of the output of all popular musicians and songwriters that's an attempt to deny the obvious, the whole Come Back Baby school of lyrics. Melancholists reject that whole school of thought; acceptance is a large part of melancholy, and what distinguishes it from mere sadness. And this song rejects it, too: Love forgot to make me too blind to see.

There's more of that strain of naked truthfulness at the end of the song, when the lover is asked to look back and make a reckoning of how he/she loved. It's brutally truthful:

And find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn't I?
And I gave it big...sometimes
And I gave it in my own sweet time
I'm just leaving

Lyrics later, but first a performance by Jane Siberry herself, which is new to me. I can see why kd lang would be attracted to the song, which benefits, I'm sorry to say, from not being given the big torch production treatment kd brings to everything.




Here's the whole song:

Love is Everything
Jane Siberry

Maybe it was to learn how to love
Maybe it was to learn how to leave
Maybe it was for the games we played
Maybe it was to learn how to choose
Maybe it was to learn how to lose
Maybe it was for the love we made

Love is everything they said it would be
Love made sweet and sad the same
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You're chickening out aren't you?
You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait 'til you make
The whole kingdom come
So I'm leaving

Maybe it was to learn how to fight
Maybe it was for the lesson in pride
Maybe it was the cowboys' ways
Maybe it was to learn not to lie
Maybe it was to learn how to cry
Maybe it was for the love we made

Love is everything they said it would be
Love did not hold back the reins
But love forgot to make me too blind to see
You're chickening out aren't you?
You're bangin' on the beach like an old tin drum
I cant wait 'til you make
The whole kingdom come
So I'm leaving

First he turns to you
Then he turns to her
So you try to hurt him back
But it breaks your body down
So you try to love bigger
Bigger still
But it...it's too late

So take a lesson from the strangeness you feel
And know you'll never be the same
And find it in your heart to kneel down and say
I gave my love didn't I?
And I gave it big...sometimes
And I gave it in my own sweet time
I'm just leaving

Love is everything...

A question of gullibility?

The question of how this:





could ever come to be considered a genuine work by Johannes Vermeer:



is the subject of an outstanding article by Errol Morris in the New York Times blogs, though it's about as far from the usual blog post as Middlemarch is from a Twitter update. Morris bases his story on two books which have appeared in the last year on the case of Han Van Meegeren, who produced the top painting and sold it to Goering as a Vermeer, but not before receiving the authentication of the art establishment of the time.

It's in seven parts, the last of which has just appeared.

Short shameful confession

Image via Wikipedia

I haven't read a book since February.