Let's not go to work

T.J. Hooker is also on in the afternoons here. Yesterday Hooker chased a stolen car into a fuel truck, which exploded. Last week he chased a fugitive down a boat ramp fuelling station, which exploded. There is an explosion in every episode, and a scene where Hooker jumps onto a moving vehicle, and often there is a strip club. I'd make a joke about combining all three but they may have done that.

For all the silliness the scripts are pretty solid: the stories are true to their own internal logic. There is a post-modern case to be made that the show is a 20th century version of Shatner's other series, Star Trek. Certainly the strip clubs look like alien worlds: doors to the Orient, the other. If you believe that you probably also believe pyramids sharpen razor blades but it's how we used to read it at art school, while enjoying the explosions. Heather Locklear co-stars: her nose was always like that. The most beautiful nose in a TV police series however remains Melina Kanakaredes' in CSI: New York, before she had it done.

Saturdays are boring, aren't they? Especially when you rise early in a heavy drinking town. I have a stack of notes to write up. I'm itching to start but I'm telling myself I need a day off.

Friday

A Guide to Modern Cinema

Furry Vengeance
(Contains mild violence)

Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs
(Contains one use of mild language and scenes of mild comic threat)

Crazy Heart
(Contains strong language.)

Four Lions
(Contains strong language and sex references)

A Nightmare On Elm Street
(Contains strong bloody violence and threat)

Hot Tub Time Machine
(Contains strong language, crude sex references and drug use)

Iron Man 2
(Contains moderate violence and bleeped strong language)

Robin Hood
(Contains moderate violence and sex references)

Streetdance 3D
(Contains mild language, sex references and violence)

The Ghost
(Contains strong language, once very strong)

How To Train Your Dragon
(Contains frequent mild threat)

Nanny Mcphee and the Big Bang
(Contains no material likely to offend or harm)

Warnings courtesy of Odeon Cinemas UK. Really looking forward to the summary for this one.

WIP

I'm too tired for havin' fun

Laying new track today. My great grandfather center, white jacket, Waiuku, 1921.

Oracle Id (old joke)

David Brooks writing about something else entirely in the NYT, labels it:

About a decade ago, one began to notice a profusion of Organization Kids at elite college campuses. These were bright students who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities.

If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life. They were not intellectual risk-takers. They regarded professors as bosses to be pleased rather than authorities to be challenged. As one admissions director told me at the time, they were prudential rather than poetic.

In the end she dies

Off to watch the Martin Scorsese restoration of The Red Shoes tonight at the BFI Southbank. I went to see Scorsese speak at the BFI earlier this year on a completely separate subject and he still managed to steer the conversation towards Powell and Pressburger, so in a way he's talked me into it. Uncle Marty rates The Red Shoes as one of his top ten movies of all time. He turned up at the lecture wearing a suit so sharp you could cut yourself on it and huge spectacles like Swifty Lazar's.

Although I've watched Black Narcissus on TV and the big screen, I've seen the obsessive story-within-a-story The Red Shoes only once before, on TV, and in black and white. Manohla Dargis, writing for the NYT, says the restoration is remarkable:

This born-again version of “The Red Shoes,” digitally resuscitated from battered prints and negatives, should surprise even those who have watched the fine Criterion DVD. A film like few others, made like few others — the Powell and Pressburger partnership remains sui generis — it reaches high and strikes its mark, at times improbably. It’s an insistently designed work of non-naturalism, daubed with startling, unreal, gaudy colors that seem to have been created to blast away the last traces of wartime drear.

That should make up for the fucking horrible weather outside then, and round off an otherwise happy day sitting inside the Russian café scribbling revisions.