Happy New Year

Not sure if this is actual kitsch or a display of ironic hipster nostalgia for overripe album-cover psychedelia; using the appearance of irony to mask an unfashionable sincerity. Either way, the fact that it's Brit Grit tough guy Ray Winstone (older than we thought) who's the centerpiece of this kaleidoscope is what make it work for me.

Best wishes for an entertaining and prosperous 2011.


Unkle 'The Answer' - Director: John Hillcoat from Tom Lindsay on Vimeo.

It is of course unclear from the video alone whether Winstone is describing something that actually happened to him or working as an actor telling a fictional story. (And I have no intention of clearing up the ambiguity by doing any research.) There's a distant echo of this in a reminder sent over by Tulkinghorn:

I remembered that Peter Greenaway had made a short film about people struck by lightning, called "Act of God," which I saw sometime in the eighties.

Details here. According to Google, available only from pirates.

Greenaway sez:

"I was asked by Thames, a rather reactionary TV station, to make a half-hour program on any subject whatsoever. In my interest in taxonomies and attempts to classify information, I looked for the most unclassifiable events or phenomena I could think of - which was being struck by lightning. We advertised in the national press for all those people who had been struck by lightning and survived, to come forward to be interviewed - and that's what the film's about. I had hoped to find extraordinary religious experiences, people who felt they'd been punished by God. Most of their reactions were totally banal, but we came across some extraordinary events - girls riding fat ponies down English country lanes and entirely disappearing apart from a pool of cooling fat on the road. I put all these events together and of course everybody thought I had made them up."

And this, again from Tulk:

Sigur Rós - Glósóli from Sigur Rós on Vimeo.