2011 — 2 April: Saturday
As last week, waking up during the second hour of the "Sounds of the 60s" means another good night's sleep.1 I'm off for my shower — I reckon it should help prise my eyes open.
Both the pear tree and the decorative cherry are now in full-on blossom mode... I'm currently working on a collage of the various coloured things out in my back jungle but, in the meantime, (and as I listen to the podcast version of yesterday's Kermode film programme [the podcast is an audio equivalent of the "extras" on a DVD]) here's a visual update on yesterday's tulip. Click the pic for a bigger image:
I was underwhelmed by Zack Snyder's film of "Watchmen". (And I never did bother to see "300".) The good doctor gives me no good reason to watch "Sucker Punch":
It is just unbelievably dull. You have these great big battle sequences played out. With war, and planes, and stuff, and leaping down and lopping the heads off... How is a movie that is so throwing everything at the screen in the way that Zack Snyder does the whole time... Believe me, watching the movie, you just, I mean I actually fell asleep. There was a moment in it during one of the battle sequences when they were all running round in the fetish gear with the knives and the stuff jumping out of planes and the thing and the dragony whatsit and the hoojamaflip ... and I had a little snooze, and I woke up, and they were still in exactly the same place... Assuming the film has anything like an ideology is doing it a service it does not deserve. It is the most boring, ploddingly put-together, infantile, crass, adolescent, stupid, chauvinistic twaddle that I have sat through in a very, very long time.
Other opinions are available. For example, Andrew O'Hehir reviewing it for "Salon" says he reckoned Snyder belongs near the top of a very short list of directors who are trying to reinvent a personal, auteurist vision of cinema at the most commercial, mass-market, attention-disordered end of the spectrum.
Sounds like me. Sorry, lost my thread for a moment there. I was in a state of shock having just read about my IBM pension increase. Where was I? It's 13:09 and I suppose I'd better start thinking about a spot of lunch.
There are days...
... when I don't notice things right in front of me. Or, in one case here, growing quietly under the vine. Click the pics for bigger images:
It's starting to look and feel a lot like Spring :-)
It's amusing to hear Moby (a guest of Liz Kershaw on BBC 6Music this afternoon) admitting how inadequate he feels as an exponent of the full-on rock lifestyle. He said if he lived in the way documented by Neil Strauss2 for just two days it would kill him, but if he stays busy he doesn't have to contemplate the void that awaits us all :-)
Somehow, it's now...
... time for me to twitch the dial away lest I find myself listening to the Wagner that (for some reason) the BBC is choosing to relay from the New York Met. I find a tiny bit of Wagner goes a very long way indeed. Meanwhile, I've inadvertently demonstrated the remarkable stability of my little Ubuntu server in surviving loss of power. Though I'd be happier if I could get the damn' screen to show me exactly what's going on — even though the Apache web server is once again servering away seemingly contentedly. Computers, heh?
I've only been having a...
... tiny tidy-up round here. How come it's now after 22:12 already?