Waiting for a takeaway to arrive (wonton soup and shredded chili beef); watching a BBC4 doc about the history and culture of the American Diner; looking forward to Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror on Channel 4 in 25 minutes; communicating to the world in semi-sentences like facebook status updates. Communicating nothing of interest for no reason other than to communicate something. Fully aware that more blogging should be done; many days missed; much catching up to do. Fascinated by the fantastic imagery in this diner documentary. An artist who paints scenes of diners lives in a fantastic home full of tin toys, tiny Cadillacs, plastic hula girls, and old diner signs. America is a wonderful foreign fantasy land of endless roads, bottomless drinks, and towering platefuls of pancakes, eggs, and burgers.
I want a chili-dog, a corn-dog, a coca-cola; grits; coffee, black; key lime pie; biscuits and gravy. To travel empty roads with untouched horizon and crushed scorpion in tire-treads; to see and walk in the scenes of movies seen a hundred times, Goodfellas, Ghostbusters, Godfather, Natural Born Killers, The Blob, Psycho, Tremors; to live the lyrics of Tom Waits, the sound of jazz and blues and country; the desert, the bayou, the hills, mountains, creeks and gorges. From diner to diner, eating so much my picture ends up on the wall and I win a t-shirt and a certificate.
Had my takeaway (v. Disappointing, disgusting chicken, boring rice; the wontons were alright though); watched Black Mirror (the ITV news just came on now and I half expected the headline to be about the PM and a pig) and still not quite recovered from the trauma; then turned over to watch the end of An Audience with 'singer' Beyonce – a pretty disgraceful performance as far as I'm concerned in which she dances around, holding a microphone but not using it, to a recording of her own voice. Imagine going to see Pavarotti live, and instead of singing he repeatedly thrust his groin at the audience while a CD of his 'hits' played. Yes, I know Beyonce is a dancer as well as a singer, but what's the point of doing both if you can't do both at the same time. Elton John plays the piano and sings at the same time; he doesn't play the piano in accompaniment to a recording of his voice.
Imagine if she did it the other way round: instead of dancing to a mechanical recording of her voice, she actually sang whilst a robotic system of ropes and pulleys, hoists and harnesses manipulated her body in a dancing motion.
Now it's Heston's Christmas Feast followed by Father Ted Christmas Special on More4+1. This is absolute - Xmas, winter festival, yuletide, solstice, Diwali, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and my own personal favourite Saturnalia – luxury.
No comments:
Post a Comment