Fisheyeiana #2

The Golden Globe Awards were held a few weeks ago. I couldn't help notice that Drew Barrymore was allotted a seemingly unlimited amount of time in which to babble incoherently in acceptance of her award for a TV drama that looked to me to be a "very special" episode of the Waltons. Immediately afterwards, Michael Haneke, a true master of the cinema, was granted all of ten seconds to accept, in his halting English, an award for best "foreign language" film from the Hollywood Foreign Press. A puzzling moment for me, until I quickly realized that the television is always most effective when it is turned off.

I'm noticing that I seem to prefer my contemporary music without any words in them. Instrumental music -- isn't that a forgotten redundancy? Godspeed, you black emperors. Go do, make, say and think.
On a different note, I fully confess that I don't get the Tom Waits fetish. Or the Leonard Cohen thing. Uncool me, I suppose. Double uncool me.

The most superior library bathroom I ever enjoyed -- not the National Library and Archives, not the Library of Congress, not the Fisher at Toronto or UBC, nor the Firestone at Princeton. The Peabody in Baltimore has a gold toilet. Enough said.

Reasons to turn the TV off, part 2 -- watched half an hour of the Oscar extravaganza the other night, enough to take in the "tribute" to the horror genre, where the montage was interspliced with classics such as The Shining and Leprechaun 2, the auteuristic masterwork and commercial lynchpin of the lucrative Leprechaun franchise.

To be honest, I have the TV on as I write these initial entries. David Starkey is the shit. Now that I can't watch tv, or listen to music with words in them, what am I to do? I no longer need to watch films, as my funky body chemistry and addiction to sleeping pharmacology means that I can enjoy a nocturnal cinema every night, a baroque circus worthy of Fellini. I'd like to read, but it must be noted that a portion of my brain is sitting in a refrigerator at a mid-town hospital. I believe that it is periodically wheeled out for schoolchildren to observe in a perverion of Benthamite display.

Unfortunately, the radio isn't what it used to be. The new CBC has left me behind. Please return Brave New Waves and Jurgen Gothe post-haste. Strombo and Buck 65 are too cool for school. I miss the simpler days of Patti Schmidt's endless recitations of muscial genres. Apparently now I have to adjust to basking in my post-cooldom.

FEL