I’m over that red team, fancy voting Jo out. Still, she’s what we in the industry call “a survivor”, and “two months later” she looks fantastic.
Jillian’s speech about wanting to turn Kristie into Linda Hamilton from Terminator was superb.
Whoever had the bright idea of adding me as an “External link” on this page, I’ve removed your handiwork–très amusant, but really you should just go all-out and link to Popjustice.
Steven Swarz of Songs From a Random House was kind enough to send me an MP3 of this eccentric New York band’s version of “I Feel Love”. It wasn’t without trepidation that I listened to it but it turns out to be completely charming. The band’s instrumentation is based around the not uninteresting combination of baritone and soprano ukeleles (to be honest I had no idea there was such a thing as a baritone ukelele), viola, double bass and percussion, with various other elements thrown in including at one point a steel guitar! (There is very little music that wouldn’t be improved by the judicious use of steel guitar, in my opinion.) My favourite bit, though, is right at the beginning when the viola plays a slow glissando from a sour minor third to a major third, which both uncannily replicates the same effect in the original and brings home how odd it really is.
The band have been going for 20 years are were also on the soundtrack for Raising Arizona, both pretty impressive facts, so check ‘em out.
Question for fans of cult 70s TV show The Prisoner: I’ve watched 8 episodes now. I get it. Do I need to watch the rest?
Question for fans of cult 00s TV show Little Britain: Oh dear, the third season looks really bad, doesn’t it? A pity, since I actually enjoyed the boys’ appearance on Parkinson (along with Will Young, making it the Gayest Parkinson Ever). Matt Lucas’s comments about the Dafydd character as an accurate reflection of the epistemology of the closet were spot on. And I was amused that Lou and Andy began life as bad impersonations of Lou Reed and Andy Warhol. But the less said about the show itself the better. Even “computer says no” wasn’t funny, which I would have thought was impossible.
I was going to dedicate this post to the memory of TBL trainer Bob’s mother, but I thought better of it.
Actually, while I have the attention of the world’s classical music public, I might as well indulge in a spot of nepotism and encourage you to check out this remarkable young soprano next time you’re in Hamburg…
Meanwhile, help! I didn’t realise TBL went for an hour tonight and my tape ran out after 45 minutes (yes, I taped it, SHUT UP!); can anyone tell me what happened to David after he left the show? (This is always the most interesting bit.)
Had dinner last night with Elsewhere, author of what is officially the second-best blog in the Northern Territory…and I see that she has already arrived home and blogged about it. Anyway, it was fun to reminisce about the quirks of mutual acquaintances, and Capote (a film that apparently is unlikely ever to appear in the Alice, but then, Capote himself was unlikely to appear in Kansas, so you never know…) was enjoyable, not so much a biopic as “The Making of In Cold Blood“, with a performance from Philip Seymour Hoffman that really is quite remarkable. I’ll still be barracking for Our Heath on Oscar night though.
Talking of famous people who write for The New Yorker…ironically, I was telling El last night that I thought my days of blogging semi-notoriety were behind me, and I looked forward to a future of labouring in obscurity, only to find when I checked my Bloglines subscriptions today that my Wagner joke from a few days ago had been linked to by Alex Ross, no less. I’m sorry to disappoint everyone who arrived here via The Rest Is Noise expecting lots of learned posts (or even jokes) about classical music; perhaps I’ll have to write some at some point. In the meantime, um, enjoy the Biggest Loser commentary.
Odd fraternal symbiosis–it turns out my brother has also recently recommenced blogging after a long absence. I remember we started blogging at around the same time too.
Odd, it’s only just occurred to me that soccer is a winter sport, but it’s in the Summer Olympics. Of course I know the reason for this. You don’t make it into the Winter Olympics unless your sport involves ice and/or snow. (By that logic, the only sports allowed in the Summer Olympics would be beach volleyball and surfing.) It also helps if your event has (1) the appearance of a novel form of ritual suicide, and (2) a funny name…”Moguls”??? And have you seen that thing called the Skeleton? It’s presumably named after what you are likely to become if you attempt to engage in it.
The Biggest Loser has been quite good so far. I like the fact that we appear to have a Team of Evil (blue) and a Team of Niceness (red). And Artie is openly lusting after Bob the Trainer, which makes things interesting. (He seems to quite fancy his chances…”I wanted to hug him, but I thought it was a bit early”–early in what?) Actually, he might be in the evil team but after reading this I’m starting to like Artie.
The bit about Artie collecting Smurfs is on the Channel 10 website which doesn’t allow direct linking to individual pages. This gives me an excuse to sink the boot in to my demographic’s network of choice. Their station promos are SHIT this year, after historically being the best in the business; what is that hideous “what I like about you” song, and why is everyone dressed for a school formal? Also, surely the reason Friday Night Games was a hit last year was because it was part of Big Brother! Whose idea was it to try to run with it as a standalone with random weekly celebrities, and was this idea actually thought about for more than two minutes?
I don’t know why I care, but somehow I do.
Love this.
As of tonight, The OC is officially BACK. My favourite line was Ryan’s “you do realise this is going to make it that much harder for you to leave” to Marisa…just before they have sex for the first time! Nothing wrong with a bit of self-belief of course. (And has it really taken them this long?)
But really, what with Kirsten’s creepy rehab buddy, Julie Cooper’s money troubles, and the evil new “Dean of Discipline” (does such a position actually exist in American schools, and if so what are the job description and key selection criteria?)…it all looks very promising indeed. Summer was in good form too. And Ryan’s hair is superb at the moment, it really can’t be too clean-cut.
Arrived home thinking I would catch the last five minutes of the new Aussie version of The Biggest Loser but they ended up offering a supersized episode (sorry) so I got to see a fair bit. The American version became a bit of an obsession of mine; I only caught the tail end of the first series but got totally hooked on the second. The premise–a show about people LOSING WEIGHT!–does admittedly have the prima facie appearance of some sort of nadir, custom built as the kind of thing you would cite for illustrative purposes in one of those “how much lower/more boring/desperate/exploitative can reality television go” kind of articles, and yes you can quibble about whether it’s really healthy/desirable for people to be competing over how quickly they can lose weight, but there is an awful lot that is compelling about the format, to wit:
…but having said all that, I wonder if they can maintain it for five nights a week, Big Brother style? The American version was one hour a week, and to be honest sometimes they had to, er, pad it out a bit (sorry again) to make it fill the full hour. I really can’t for the life of me think how they’re going to get half an hour every night from people doing exercise and not eating stuff, but I’ve been wrong before.
Then there was some awful Jenna Elfman thing, so I switched over to Channel 9 and watched a bit of Bert’s show about one-hit wonders. Which was enjoyable enough, there was certainly some majestic music (99 Luftballons, Funky Town, the sublime “Believe it or Not” from The Greatest American Hero) There was some boring commentary by people you ONLY WISH had been one-hit wonders including S. Noll, V. Amorosi and K. Ceberano, as well as the Glenn A. Baker appearance that is a legally mandated requirement of every Australian music-related program. BUT I would have to query the mention of The Muppets’ “Na na na na”. Surely the Muppets were not one-hit wonders? Unless I suppose you consider Kermit to be an artist in his own right, but even if you exclude “It’s Not Easy Being Green” and “The Rainbow Connection” there’s still the actual Muppet Show Theme, isn’t there?
Then after that there was what had erstwhile loomed as a “dilemma”, a choice between Supernatural and Desperate Housewives. Fortunately Supernatural turns out to be a bit rubbish despite the presence of the lickable Jared Padalecki, so not such a dilemma after all (and very dubious gender politics incidentally, it’s like Buffy never happened!) So Desp. H/W it is, still worth watching. Does anybody NOT HATE Teri Hatcher though? Just that whole cute simpering thing, abominable. Actually there seems to be a trend over the past few years for shows where the ostensible main character is deeply boring and unlikeable and one must look elsewhere than the top billing for actual entertainment: Sex in the City is an obvious other example as well as Grey’s Anatomy, which I have a guilty fondness for despite the utter deathliness of “Grey” herself and her dreary boyfriend.
I promised myself I was going to start blogging again during my 2 weeks of annual leave, so this entry, made at 5pm the day before I have to go back to work, can at least be filed under “promises kept”. But that’s enough about work, I don’t want this to become a Blog Of Angst, let’s get down to core business; here are some of the things that have occupied the months since I was last with you.
Brokeback Mountain Well, you’d be a fool if you thought I wasn’t going to like a film, any film, with gay cowboys in it, but one thing did niggle at me: was I the only person who found it odd that Jack and Ennis evidently did no fishing whatsoever on any of their “fishing trips”? (Ennis’s wife traps him, you may recall, with a test proving that his, um, tackle box has remained untouched for the duration of several expeditions.) Sure they had a lot of lovin’ to catch up on, but would it have killed them to throw a line in occasionally?
And I was also incapable of not getting some enjoyment out of that universally reviled Narnia film–I’ve been waiting my whole life for it!–but one of the things C. S. Lewis was very good at that the film did not get across at all was the sense that this whole business of having adventures was hard work, all that trudging across vast distances seemed to take forever and you always felt like you couldn’t possibly go any further but you had to. Everything in the film felt too easy, it was like “gosh, that stone table looks awfully far away…oh, here we are!” Lucy was, I’m sorry to say, rubbish. I quite liked Peter, though, he was a bit more unsure of himself than he is in the books; in the books, of course, he’s insufferable. (And yes, Tilda Swinton was great, but everybody says that.)
Books. This is going to be the year of reading proper books once again. No more worthless crime novels, not while I have key nineteenth-century, classical and modernist gaps to fill. To think, I’ve never read Martin Chuzzlewit! Or Daniel Deronda! Or (and this really is embarrassing) The Odyssey or for that matter anything by Kafka. All this will be rectified.
Music. I’ve listened to nothing but classical music for months (these things tend to go in cycles with me), so I’m afraid I can’t offer you any thoughts on the Top 40 or the latest iterations of micro/electro/whatever. But I can share with you my concept for the tackiest production of the Ring ever (I become an ever more disturbingly ardent Wagnerite). The whole thing is set in an American high school. Gods vs Nibelungs = Jocks vs Nerds. Wotan is the basketball coach; Valhalla is the new school gym he’s had built by doing dodgy deals with the Mafia (Fasolt and Fafner). The Valkyries are cheerleaders. Brunnhilde is the Natalie Wood/Molly Ringwald character who transgresses all social boundaries. Siegfried is the James Dean/Christian Slater figure who brings about the dialectical collapse of the whole rotten high school caste system, and the burning of the school gym at the end ushers in a new social order based on Tolerance, Good Citizenship and Academic Merit! Tell me it wouldn’t work.
Thanks to everyone who’s kept me entertained for the past months, and to those who’ve been in touch. As to whether “I’m back”, let’s play that by ear shall we?