Happy birthday Rosanna.

Today marks the 48th birthday of Rosanna Arquette. Has it really been that long?

It would have been unthinkable twenty years ago that I'd almost have let it go unmarked. But I did.

But only almost. If I still take peeks at What About Brian, it's for her. That's worth something.

I hate stress.

Flooding delayed my new debit card. Postal strikes delayed it as well. And I have to wait until after work to get paid tomorrow because they didn't get to do the direct payments into our accounts again. This is not good. Things have to swing upwards soon.

Everybody sing along...

The way you see, if I move the t.v.
she looks so good, and she's not make believe
She's black, and white, and Sin City
C'mon now honey, just do it for me
She's good, she's bad, everything I need
I need you here now to put me to sleep
Into the blue, we touch so deep
I'm hoping that one day you will

Walk with me, let's walk into the night
Jessica, come home with me tonight
Superstar, you mean so much to me,
To me,
I'm never giving up

Let's fight, tonight you're my dark angel
Let's go, and run 'til we trip and we fall
So take, the sky, 'coz the world's too small
Let's follow you with the fantastic
For the first time I kept staring down across the floor
Now walk with me tonight

Walk with me, let's walk into the night
Jessica, come home with me tonight
Superstar, you mean so much to me,
To me,
I'm never giving up

*Instrumental*

I'm never giving up

Walk with me, let's walk into the night
Jessica, come home with me tonight
Superstar, you mean so much to me,
To me,
I'm never giving up
Walk with me, let's walk into the night
Jessica, come home with me tonight
Superstar, you mean so much to me,
Walk with me, let's walk into the night
Jessica, come home with me tonight
Superstar, you mean so much to me,
To me...

Elliot Minor wrote "Jessica" because, according to them, she's fit. No arguments from this corner. Listen to the song here.

Another day, another disappointing film music look (apparently).

As you might have noticed (unless you're reading this anytime after Monday), the last thing I listened to was Gary Chang's Under Siege, the score for Steven Seagal's most successful movie (and one often mistaken for a good movie on account of it having proper actors like Gary Busey [in drag] and Tommy Lee Jones [leading a rock'n'roll band!], but then again it does have Erika Eleniak popping out of a birthday cake topless...). Unfortunately apart from the main title the rest of it is a textbook case of "Great with the film, not so good away from it" with some shameless ripoffs of other scores not helping at all. Bleh.

Anyway, it's safe to say that it wouldn't get into Lights! Action! Music!, which was reviewed in today's New York Times by Stephen Holden thusly. It does sound less Music from the Movies: Toru Takemitsu and more that episode of Lights! Camera! Action! which somehow went from Hans Zimmer to 1930s British musicals...

Classical music for people who are afraid of classical music: that’s one way of looking at traditional film scores, which bring symphonically orchestrated music to more people than most serious composers are ever likely to attract to concert halls. As movie audiences are emotionally swept up in the synergy of photography, acting, settings and costumes, it is music more than any other element that effects what the director Francis Ford Coppola calls the “fusion” of these ingredients into “a critical mass.” It usually works best if it is only half-heard.
Those are among Mr. Coppola’s insights in Lights! Action! Music!, a fluffy, disorganized, woefully incomplete compendium of interviews and film clips about movie music that begins this month on public television stations. (It is shown tonight on WLIW in New York.)
In a show that flits among more composers and directors than it has the time to accommodate, Mr. Coppola offers the most trenchant commentary. Many of the rest of the comments by various composers are reduced to hyperbolic sound bites included to give viewers a chance to connect a director or composer’s face with a few shallow observations.
Mr. Coppola recalls the Academy Award acceptance speech of the composer Dimitri Tiomkin, who wrote the thundering heroic scores for westerns like Red River and High Noon. In his speech upon winning best film score for High Noon, Mr. Coppola recalls, Mr. Tiomkin mischievously ran down a list of classical composers from whom he had stolen.
The show offers a tantalizing glimpse of Mr. Coppola’s forthcoming Youth Without Youth, with music by Osvaldo Golijov, an Argentina-born composer who grew up in Eastern Europe, won a MacArthur fellowship in 2003 and teaches in the United States. A snippet of the movie, in which the director instructed Mr. Golijov to evoke a mood of personal regret, is shown and analyzed by the composer. As fleeting as the moment may be, you feel it.
The composer David Shire recalls how Mr. Coppola asked him to write piano music that evoked “the subtext” of Gene Hackman’s character in The Conversation. The tricky, obsessive piano motif reveals a nagging psychological complexity that only music could distill so precisely.
The survey jumps awkwardly from subject to subject. One section, called “Obscurity,” seems to have been created simply to bring in the name of Henry Manciniwho is otherwise unacknowledged; his tango from a flop 1969 film, Gaily, Gaily, though catchy enough, is far from Mancini’s best. In another section the director Ang Lee offers a fascinating tidbit about instrumental sounds and particular actors: Tobey Maguire, he says, is best underscored by a clarinet.
One promising section, “Collaboration,” focuses on the long-running relationships between Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, and between Spike Lee and Terence Blanchard. But it is far too short. The relationships of Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, or of John Williams and Steven Spielberg, go unmentioned. A fragment of Ennio Morricone’s music from Sergio Leone’s spaghetti western For a Few Dollars More is seemingly shoehorned in just to mention that composer’s name. But who’s in and who’s out ultimately seems completely arbitrary.
Beyond its relationship to classical music, the history of film music is given no historical context. The rise of the contemporary pop soundtrack in movies like The Graduate should at least have been noted. And no one describes the grinding drudgery endured by film composers sitting in front of a Movieola and completing the painstaking, moment-by-moment synchronization of sound and image.
The best way to appreciate Lights! Action! Music! is as a sampler for a larger and deeper exploration. Even on its own terms, it is a frivolous diversion.

Harry, meet Rory. Rory, Harry.

Apparently some of my online friends like these Harry Potter books, but I've yet to read any of them or see the movies. I'm still waiting patiently (sic) for Hallmark or Nickelodeon or somebody in the UK to air the final two seasons of Gilmore girls, but as far as I know Mike (possibly), Gugs (definitely - he doesn't watch anything :) ) etc don't tune into Lorelai the Elder and Younger. Some enterprising YouTuber married footage of the former to the signature tune for the latter, and here's the result.



Many thanks to AnneUK for getting me DVD copies of all of season six (and part of season seven, even if I can't get DivX to show on screen for the latter), by the way.

Cindy is amazing.

Here's my Cindy after a night out in St. Tropez earlier this week. Even drunk (or maybe just sleepy) she's utterly divine. Now that is what I call classy.

Perez Hilton is a dick and Hayden Panettiere is emphatically not.

That is all.

Okay, maybe I should expand on this. If you

a) put up a photoshopped picture of an underage - until August 21, that is - woman hefting a dildo and claim it's the real thing,

b) have a history of regularly slagging off said young woman for no reason at all,

c) have said picture watermarked so everyone who reproduces it will know it's from YOUR site,

d) later try and cover it up when you get called on it by other sites,

and e) have a reputation for being so loathsome even other celebrity bloggers want to knock seven shades of shit out of you...

Hayden often comes across as wiser than her years. This does not seem to be the case with him.

Rubber bands.

One of the things I do at work is clean up (after a fashion). Unfortunately the workers on the polywrapping machine fling the rubber bands that keep the letters together on the floor - and there are a lot of letters. And a lot of bands. And it's usually your friendly neighbourhood muggins who has to pick them up in the mornings. And it drives me completely insane. So messy (the place generally is, but the bands are the worst). Cleaning up if I'm there late on Fridays helps get the weekend off to a really bad start, but at least when I go in there on Monday morning it won't be so fucking depressing. Maybe that'll be the thing that drives me to move on; I'm not really sure I should be a glorified janitor. Then again, keeping places tidy is nothing to be ashamed of, and it makes you feel better if it's straightened up a bit.

Meanwhile, my bank card's expired and my new one hasn't come yet (according to the lady in the Abbey National up on Muswell Hill - cough, spit - things have been delayed because of the flooding, and the Royal Mail strikes can't have helped). You wanna hurry up?

Going back to work, I'm on one of my listening-to-everything-I-have jags (go to and from work listening to tapes... yes, children, before iPods there was an invention called a Walkman which allowed people to listen to cassettes, and since I have a hefty amount of soundtracks on cassette a tape player is of more use to me... and CDs at work), but annoyingly I decided to try and synchronise the tapes and CD, subject-wise. CDs are up to the great Danny Elfman, tapes up to Bruce Broughton, and it's one disc a day at work until I catch up. And it's very painful to put up with playlisted Radio 1 (the other stations are even worse). Especially with Scott Mills, the twat.

At least the sun's out.

Reixedyri, Cindy and Hayden.

IM catchers kept alerting me to someone called "Reixedyri." I thought it was another piece of spam. It turned out to be Mike's new ID... which serves me right. Anyway, we're now back in touch. Reixeyri is his name translated into another language - he'll enlighten you if you ask him.

And now, a bit more of Miss Crawford and (because I said I would) Miss Panettiere.

Dear Megan Fox, No offence but Cindy owns you. Love, Victor

MuffinMan writes: Seeing your two goddesses, CindyC AND Hayden P., looking beyond scrumptious in bikinis (and from what I've heard re. the former, in even less than that! ;D )...mmmmmm bet you'd have no problem imagining BOTH of them undressing, preferably each other (or is that a given? ;) )... I know I have no problem with that :))

Unsurprisingly these and many other pictures of Cindy on a yacht in St. Tropez (which, if Alba/Hewitt fan par excellence Darren Lockhart is reading this, is not in the Caribbean) have been all over the Interweb, especially the topless ones. Sadly rules prohibit my inclusion of those, but this place and many others have them. Still wonderful... just... wow.

Hayden, you'll have to wait till later. But so will everyone else, so don't take it personally.