My God, it feels fucking great to be back on a good old qwerty keyboard again. Don't know what you've got til it's gone, etc. I am feeling thirsty and unattentive so I don't know where this is going. My guess is all over the place.
France was a good laugh. The village we stayed in was a little place called La Garde Frenais, or something like that - near St Tropez and Cannes. Really pretty, great scenery (I shall endeavour to upload some photographs when my brother gives me my laptop back), international editions of the English papers, and camembert so cheap it made me want to fill a big black back with masses of the stuff to bring back with me. The obvious downside to such a nefarious scheme was that it would all have melted into one pongy, gooey, messy mass... but then I could have simply bought a baguette or three, and dipped, dipped til my stomach's content. Or just tipped it over my head and wallowed in an empty fountain somewhere. An orgy of camembert. I could even have used the word smorgasbord. But I didn't, and you'll not catch me paying 2 quid for a circle of the stuff in Sainsburys. (Ditto Yop. And decent wine. And Nutella.)
Bizarrely, on my last (scheduled) night, last Wednesday, the quaint little town of a few thousand people was overrun by a portable rave in its town centre. Completely incongruous and a joy to behold... complete with foam machine, superstar DJ spinninb techno and electro, glo-sticks, crazy lights, and a few screens providing visuals in the form of a few pieces of ker-azy Euro-iconoclasm (the tower of Pisa... leaning too far!!! The Eiffel Tower... shooting off into space!! Beefeaters.... being fellated by the Queen!! - I made that one up of course, there were a fair few Brits around so it probably wouldn't have gone down too well. Pun as intended as ever.) Little kids ran amok, and emerged from 6-ft-deep oceans of foam with smiles on their faces and, presumably, their sense of direction completely screwed; teenagers got hammered and ran around with glo-sticks, wondering what the hell had happened to their town; and the village elders looked bemused by it all. Truly, a bizarre evening.
Then on Thursday, with bags packed and coffee drunk, my dad happened upon News 24 and we saw all the hulabaloo regarding the terror alert, and the fact that Britain's new level was apparently 'CRITICAL'. (Which made me think cynically of Don DeLillo's SimuVac from White Noise, and 'Purple alert, purple alert' from some old Red Dwarf episode - I wanna say mauve....) Anyway, flight cancelled, and to cut a long story short I ended up flying from Marseille to Bristol on Saturday afternoon instead.... a day of delays. Good King Wenceslas: "Delay had fallen, delay on delay, delay on delay". Kind of.
So, from Bristol I decided to nip over the channel (Bristol, not English) to Cardiff and spend a few days in the company of Ed and Bardell and their new house - they've not wasted any time in moving from Student Digs to Young, Upwardly Mobile Professional Accomodation. Apparently it costs less, too... Now all they need are the jobs to go with it. Great to see them both.
We went to see Miami Vice last night, and had I walked straight from the cinema into a web page such as this then I had a ream of insightful analysis and pithy one-liners regarding Jamie Foxx... but, such is the nature of the film, all such cinematicity has disappeared from my head, leaving traces of well-formed opinion. I remember sporadic violence - impressive in a gritty, DV way, with muted gunshots and heavy breathing - but I also remember wishing that they'd just shown us the last hour and a half of Heat instead. I remember absolutely no character development - moreover, I remember not remembering any character development, so they really must not have done much. Colin Farrell gets a raw deal a lot of the time but he's not up to much here, especially since the last time I saw him he was unbe-fucking-lievable in The New World... apparently he finished the shoot and checked into rehab, and sure enough, he does have that Chandler-in-series-6 aura about him.
Jamie Foxx, meanwhile... well, I could not successfully watch him without cracking up; the interviews he gave to promote his recent album, "Jamie Gonna Make Love To You Nice And Smooooth, Uh Huh Huh" portrayed a slick lurve-machine with nary modicum of self-awareness - he doubtless played "Jamie Gonne Make Love To You Nice And Smooooth, Uh Huh Huh" in his trailer on-set while romancing whichever Miami floozy he'd picked up that night. All this meant that seeing him just made see Jamie Foxx, writer and performer of drops of lyrical perfection as "...in silk Chanel sheets, and it feel good baby, she looked back at me and said "you so craaazy"
After that she played me, I asked her who's pussy is this? And she screamed out 'Jamie's'", or "I can feel the mist everytime we kissed,
just didn't know a downpour like this, There's a flash flood warning,
Till we wake up in the morning, There'll be puddles in the bed" (I am not making these up - click this link if you want more Foxx lyrics: http://www.azlyrics.com/j/jamiefoxx.html - they're consistently amusing.) - rather than Jamie Foxx, Oscar-winning actor and Hollywood megastar. Which, now I think about it, probably made me enjoy the film more - especially his sex scene. Was it Foxx playing Foxx? An essay waiting to happen.
Mr. Foxx wasn't helped by some (intentionally?) cheesy scenes and soundtrack moments from Michael Mann. He plays the whole thing completely straight, which helps the film 80% of the time and hinders it the other 20. 80s revival without a hint of irony! Go get down with your bad pastel self.
Good film. But not great.
Football! Shit, there was the charity shield yesterday too - and I was in Cardiff, so walking around town I saw red shirt after red shirt after red shirt... but not a blue in sight. Was it because the M4 has been closed recently, or did the Chelski fans simply not give a shit? Hard to tell. No time to go into the match in any great detail, but I will say: Sissoko was good, and Essien was great, and Shevchenko is brilliant, and Gonzalez and Pennant looked fast if little else, and none of the Chelsea players seemed to know what they were doing after the first substitution. What formation were they playing at the end? Did anyone know? Did Mourinho know? Hmmmmmmmmmmm. So - maybe they won't win the league! here's hoping, anyway.
All this bally-hoo, and I haven't even touched upon my job-searching today. So, to be continued.