iMagus

After getting to know Jon Boden and his colleagues (cf. Bellowhead) it’s hard to go back to ordinary folk music. It’s a bit like plain Kleenex after the tissues with eucalyptus (but much more so).

Jon Boden in a photoshoot for the album Songs from the Floodplain

I don’t think I hugged my Dad even once. It wasn’t done in his and my generations. And I regret it.

I finally got around to watching The Dunera Boys (Ben Lewin, 1985). I was confused: at the outset, I thought it was a bad dramatised doco; by the end I thought it was a minor attempt at mistakenly trying to make art out of life.  It prolly suffered from being the 150′ movie version of a four-part TV mini-series – which I assume would have lasted for most of four hours. Very disappointing.

Reading about oggies (because of Cyril Tawney’s song) I found this.

The word “oggy” in the popular Cornish rhyme “Oggy Oggy Oggy, Oi Oi Oi” is thought to stem from Cornish dialect “hoggan“, deriving from “hogen” the Cornish (Kernewek) word for pasty. When the pasties were ready for eating, the bal maidens at the mines would shout down the shaft “Oggy Oggy Oggy” and the miners would shout “Oi Oi Oi” meaning yes, or all right.

This would be familiar to Australians.

I bought a Blu-ray player, and mentioned it in Facebook, and am surprised at the negative reaction. I thought it was just the next … thingy.

First day of Spring, by the usual standard, tho some people would have the vernal equinox (22 September) as being the marker – tho that’s astronomically the middle of Spring.  Bloody cold in Perth today, but.

Hard to see this in relation to other Nolan movies: so, working on this. But it’s a ‘philosophical’ text, in that it explicitly raises ethical questions (what kind of hero [ = President] do we need?)
But it’s also an action movie that cost more than the GDP of a central American country to make. An amount of money that could have had significantly retarded global warming?
And the sad appearance of Heath Ledger. Is he brilliant, or just another over-rated Brando with stuff stuck in his mouth?
Food for thought.

There are two kinds of westerns (for the purposes of this post).  One is exemplified by the conventional genrist Appaloosa (Ed Harris, 2008; for example) the other by the realist-recreationist Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (Andrew Dominik, 2007). The commercial, industrial intentions of the first are a little more obvious. There’s almost always a ’social-realist’ entree to any narrative as well as some other generic approach.  You can read either of these films psychologically, despite the stylistic gap that divides them.

Jon Spiers & Jon Boden fronting Bellowhead

I’ve been writing dourly about politics, so here’s a little musical interlude. I’ve been greatly enjoying getting to know the big folk band, Bellowhead. Just to look at the photo of the lineup is exciting. More here.