I’ve just been lent Sigh No More, from Mumford and Sons. One track won Triple J’s Hottest 100 for 2009. I’ve resolved this year to try to be positive, so I’ll just say that I’m reminded of what I see as the basis of the popularity of ‘Pachelbel’s Canon’: the predictability of eight notes and five chords repeated ad nauseum. The difference between ‘classical’ uses of such patterning and Mumford’s is that the latter doesn’t bother with variations.
Its Noongar name is 'gnow', almost excusing the film's regrettable title.
There was a very ordinary doco on the ABC tonight, unfortunately called Gnow or Never, about the mallee fowl (Leipoa ocellata). Personally, I’m quite interested in this bird, but it’s not an important topic on a global scale, and all the doco showed were some people tramping through the bush, and some of the birds doing their thing. So it was quite surprising, for someone interested in film-making in Western Australia, to see in the major credits the names of not one but three local film-makers with many years of experience. The writer, Frank Rijavec, directed the Roebourne doco, Exile and the Kingdom (1994). One of the directors, Franco di Chiera, has made many docos here, including, for example, Joys of the Women, from 1993. The other director, Carmelo Musca, co-wrote and -directed (with Barrie Pattison) the 1986 feature Zombie Brigade.
If Siegfried has a leitmotif, so does John Malkovich’s character in Burn After Reading (Coens: 2008): “What the fuck?”
Kathryn Bigelow looks well.
Good to hear that Kathryn Bigelow’s boat is coming in, with The Hurt Locker (2008). The director of Strange Days (1995) Blue Steel (1989) – and yeh OK Point Break (1991) for the Keanu Reeves and Patrick Swayze fans – should always have been getting attention.
How to get something going: put a dollar sign in front of it. I refer to the possibility of exporting cane toads.
Australia Day used to be just another long weekend. Now it’s not, so ppl are thinking about it … unfortunately.
Some maniacs in Albuquerque are sending solar-power bibles to Haiti. They shd send dogs. I hear that companion animals are also comforting in a similarly mindless way – and at least the Haitians could eat the dogs.
Three days over 40ºC and ‘they’ are telling us to turn our egg nishners off. Because ‘they’ are incapable of producing enough power to run them all. Um, didn’t it occur to ‘them’ that it might be hot in summer?
Leigh sleeps through another role.
I just watched the earlier Roman Spring of Mrs Stone (Jose Quintero, 1961) only because it has my cousin Coral Browne in it. (I accidentally watched the later TV movie [R.A. Ackerman, 2003] first.) I didn’t even know T. Williams wrote the story. I should read more about Williams: the only thing I know about him is that he was homosexual. I hope that doesn’t have anything to do with the degradation – associated with sexuality – that crops up in his work.
I only just found out yesterday that Wikipedia is parodied, tho it’s been up since 2005. Good spoof; but omg what a huge amount of trouble! There are shaggy dog jokes – but this one is literally encyclopedic.