What flavour!?

Watched You Can't Take It With You last night, another Capra with Jimmy starring. It was a little bit sappy at some points, but generally speaking hearts were warmed all round. Here's a scene where this fat horrible business man gets owned by a nice old man:



I like the way he says "human being".

Also watched Brewster's Millions yesterday afternoon, with most of the swearing and stuff cut out since it was for television (even though I picked up on Ricky Gervais saying "wank" on an advert for T4 just before it came on). It was pretty funny, and 80s-tastic, and also heartwarming, in it's own way:



Back to work today. It feels like going back to school after summer holidays; there's a kind of deep dread down in the pit of my chest. It's been nice lazing around, although I can't help feeling I kind of wasted the last weekend by getting drunk on Saturday night at Alex's party and spending the whole of Sunday recovering. The whole situation was like being a teenager again; having arduous and tedious work on the horizon, getting drunk and arguing pointlessly with random psychology students about God knows what for hours...

Anyway, gotta go to the junk shop.

Quiet on yo' ass

Recently I've been pretty silent on this blog o' mine, mostly because I've been lazy, but also because I've had little to say in relation to the things I've been posting; I'm neither qualified or capable of saying anything useful about these paintings, so I thought it better to let them speak for themselves.

I've been really interested in painting recently, which has been filtering into my dreams a lot; dreams about helter skelters set against fluorescent pink backdrops, extensive walks around art galleries, both as myself and as Sherlock Holmes, accompanied by Heather and Watson, respectively.

Here's some work by William Eggleston, about whom Heather and I watched a programme recently, presented by Alan Yentob, called Imagine:

Morton, Mississippi (1969-70):



Huntsville, Alabama (1971):



Untitled (1984):



Apart from anything else, it strikes me that the first two images, and much of Eggleston's work, seems to have been infuential on on the films of David Lynch; this was pointed out in the programme of course, so I probably had some help in making this amazing leap of reference. Regardless, they both have the same kind of facade of normality with an undercurrent of evil and loneliness that you would find in a film like Blue Velvet, with a similar subject matter of the American lower middle class. The first image is obviously more threatening than the second, which just seems very empty and sad.

The last picture is just odd; everything about it suggests a church or shrine to Elvis, and I think Kennedy, whose face I believe is in the American flag on the dresser. Obviously the owner of the house misses the 60s a great deal. In fact, I think it might have been taken inside Graceland, which would probably explain it.

Roy Orbison - In Dreams.