Surfin' the drift

Life's a beach and then you have to come back from one

Yep, two days of sea, sand and sunburn - it may be a fine line between the places where the sunblock can and cannot reach but it sure is a painful one. The best bit about this holiday was paddling around the shallows and clambering around the little rock pools looking for signs of marine life trapped by the receding tide - but it's back to interacting with the different life-forms on the trading floor and at least I have Hong Kong to look forward to next week.

More music stuff - this week, another cross-over folksy female singer songwriter whom I have always had mixed feelings about. Shawn Colvin - I have to admit when I first heard Sunny Came Home I did not think its merits ranged much beyond the catchy chorus and I quite hated her rendition of Van Morrison's Someone Like You (she just didn't get it - she could not get to grips with the "exactly" which perhaps may be a male thing not dissimilar to making lists and compilation tapes as depicted by Nick Hornby in High Fidelity. I don't want to get all prissy about it but she also missed the point about all the verbs - the searching, looking and even bein' up and down the highway, none of these really matter if you get what I mean).

But then, before you dismiss her outright as yet another Joni Mitchell wannabe with the voice but not quite the talent (actually her voice might just have an edge over Joni Mitchell's) listen to Polaroids and feel the grip of something that takes hold of some part of your anatomy (oh somewhere between the third rib and the top of your stomach) with a mighty tug. It really is that wrenching. Not that you could guess from the first couple of lines (I did and probably still would dismiss it as 'back to the womb' garbage) but the finale is nothing short of astounding.

I listened, read, listened to it again and wept because I could never hope to write anything as good in my lifetime. Taken on its own, it probably equals anything John Lennon, Paul Simon, Elvis Costello or Suzanne Vega has ever written and in terms of sheer cleverness, perhaps better. It really is that good, I think. Don't take my word for it - listen for yourself.

More sights and sounds - one of the things I hope to buy in HK next week would be a Cantonese version of 2046 the newish Wong Kar Wai film so I don't have to watch the Mandarin version. Usual suspects for the lead roles - Tony Leung, Faye Wong, Maggie Cheung, Karina Lau and the by-now ubiquitous Zhang Zhiyi. Others have criticised Wong for his self-referencing tendancies - this time round, some of his characters even have the same names as the ones the same leads had in In the Mood for Love but I'm not one to criticise. In fact, I rather like it - you may or may not know that one of the minor motifs in In the Mood for Love was the line "what a coincidence" which was what Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung would say to each other whenever they met on the stairs or along the passageway between their flats. The same line was used in one of Wong's early HK commercials for a soft drink in the mid-1990's and it always brings back fond memories of my early days in HK.

I've sometimes wondered if I made a movie of my humdrum existence, who would or could I get to play the principal characters in the 3 hour R-rated gore fest of fast food, bad wine and psychotic women? Answers on a postcard, please. I'm off to bed where sleep may elude but the dark horses of the night await.

Andiamo ....

posted by porcorosso @ 9:38 AM