My favourite film is Lenny, a movie directed by Luke Bassoon and starring Natalie Portal (right) as Madonna, a teenaged girl who is a hit-man (or hit-girl) and she employs an illiterate guy called Lenny to look after her while she moves around New York from hotel to hotel looking for a good place to live and to shoot people from the window. It ends with a corrupt policeman called something or other exploding because Lenny gave him a gift from Madonna, which was a bummer.
I don’t like movies much because they too often disappoint me. I can like them for about an hour or so, but usually when you get into the last half hour it's pretty obvious what's going to happen. And it usually does. I saw Cowboys & Aliens a little while ago. It was a little tricky because it was an illegal cam-copy streaming from the internet and the daylight scenes took place in darkness and the night scenes, of which there were many, I have no idea what was happening. Also sometimes somebody got up out of their seat in front of the camera to go to the toilet or somewhere. But it didn’t make much difference, because the film is rubbish, even by the movie industry's low standards.
But some movies I can watch over and over again, especially if they star Bugs Bunny or that other great actor, Laurence Oblivion. I watched him in Hamlet the other day. It's really good; you wouldn’t think a cartoon rabbit could pull off that kind of thing, but he did.
[N.B. Some of the above may contain errors.]
I love music. At the moment while I'm writing this I'm listening to a new record by a band called Cymbals Eat Guitars. It's not great but it's okay. My other new record this week is by I Break Horses, which I like much more. I also like their name, because it mentions horses, although I think they stole the name from the title of a song by someone else, which is acceptable because artistic theft shows initiative. If you listen to a record by Kanye West, half the time you're listening to someone else. But it's good. At least he steals good stuff.
(Oh, my legal team just told me that what Kanye West does isn’t theft, it's sampling, and he gets permission to use those things. Yeah, okay.)
Because I'm about a hundred years old a lot of people are surprised I'm so up-to-date with new music, especially seeing as how I live in a developing country where most kids only know Westlife and Lady Gaga but not much else. They think I would still be listening to The Everly Brothers or The Beatles, if they'd ever heard of them. (Some of them have heard of The Beatles: I remember one boy telling a class during a presentation how John Lennon quit the band when he got shot.) Well, I do listen to that old stuff sometimes, because it's great – one day last week I had a complete day of Otis Redding, which was amazing – but I like to try and keep up, even if it's an impossible task. You only have to look and see how much music is out there, and how many new records are released every week, to see how impossible it is. Even the guys at the cutting edge are often behind the times.
I'm trying to remember what I intended to write about today before I found myself thinking about films and music….
Oh yeah:
This morning I began a re-reading of the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare, because I'm something of a child, and in the preface Charles Lamb says this:
It was no easy matter to give the histories of men and women in terms familiar to the apprehension of a very young mind. For young ladies too, it has been the intention chiefly to write; because boys being generally permitted the use of their fathers' libraries at a much earlier age than girls are, they frequently have the best scenes of Shakespeare by heart, before their sisters are permitted to look into this manly book; and, therefore, instead of recommending these Tales to the perusal of young gentlemen who can read them so much better in the originals, their kind assistance is rather requested in explaining to their sisters such parts as are hardest for them to understand: and when they have helped them to get over the difficulties, then perhaps they will read to them (carefully selecting what is proper for a young sister's ear) some passage which has pleased them in one of these stories, in the very words of the scene from which it is taken….
Yeah, I was going to write about the good old days, when boys would (or even could) read to their sisters, selecting only what was proper for their ears. But then I realized it was probably a bad idea: a minefield, to put it mildly. And anyway, I have no idea what I was going to say.
But what I would like to say is it's been an honour writing here, and I hope some of you have enjoyed some of it. I would also like to leave with a song, from a record I've been playing a lot over the last few months. This is The Rural Alberta Advantage, and a song from their album Departing. (right click to open).