Crazy Ass Planet

In yet another absence of a well thought out, cogent post, I offer these passing notions. (By the way, I do have honest-to-goodness posts, but they’re in my head and I’ve been too lazy to type them out.)

How movies have changed

When I was much younger, tonight’s problem simply would not have happened. But this evening, I wanted to watch a movie. I was torn between two: 2046directed, and written, by Kar Wai Wong and The House of Flying Daggers, directed by Yimou Zhang.

I went with The House of Flying Daggers because it’s romantic in an over-the-top kind of way (although the same can be said for 2046).

The point is, the directors’ names are not Joe or Bob and Junior the III. They are Asian films, albeit with a heavy Hollywood sensibility, and when I was younger this just would not have happened. More to the point, these days I’m finding films from places like Hong Kong and India are doing Hollywood better than Hollywood does.

Hmm.

Elvis Costello on the iPod

This weekend I bought the Elvis Costello CD My Flame Burns Blue(Elvis Costello live with the Metropole Orkest). I quite like it, though it may not be to everyone’s taste. One nice thing about it was that it sent me back to the Elvis Costello with Burt Bacharach disc
Painted From Memory(I think that’s from 1998), a disc I absolutely love.

Just thought I’d mention that in case anyone else out there likes Elvis Costello. (I love his songwriting – the construction and the lyrics. He’s nothing less than brilliant.)

The ghost of Sherlock Holmes

I’ve a post inside me that will get out one of these days but, until then, I highly recommend A Slight Trick of the Mindby Mitch Cullin. The main character is Sherlock Holmes, the style recalls the Victorian period (at least in parts) and it’s essentially a story about unspeakable loneliness, almost literally.

As the post I’ll one day write up will point out, the Holmes character seems to be getting channeled these days by a number of writers.

I want a weekend do-over

This weekend came and went with me doing nothing, accomplishing nothing, merely feeling like a slug as I slept, read, diddled on the Internet and watched movies. Not that I regret the books and movies and writing I did, but there are things that want doing in my life and they are still there, undone.

I don’t know why this weekend went this way, but I want a do-over. I want the weekend to start tomorrow, Monday, because I finally feel like I have some oomph to do something. Now it’s going to be wasted doing work crap.

And that ain’t good, is it?

(You’ll notice all the links I’ve put in here are to Amazon … That was a passing notion too, and not a very good one. For some reason their text links add spaces I don’t want and screw up the layout - which I find very annoying. More to the point, it makes me feel like a shill with this post, as if I’m pushing used cars. Although to be fair, I think all the film, music, literature mentioned here is worthwhile, though dependent somewhat on taste. But it’s late and I’m lazy so I’m not going to take the links out. Let’s just call it an experiment that failed. Oh well … so it goes.)

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