Yuri’s got a brand new MP3 player, 8-Gigabyte Sandisk Sansa Clip. It is small, black and beautiful. It does not need a separate charger since it can be charged via USB. Even before he’s got it, Yuri drafted the list of albums to put onto it. (That’s what we did on Monday.) Here it is:
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With all due respect to Jean-Luc Godard, I think that Two or Three Things I Know About Her is not his best movie, and certainly not “one of the ten greatest films ever made”. Saying that, it is well worth watching. I liked acting there, especially when Juliette (Marina Vlady) and other women characters talk straight to the camera giving us various bits of unsolicited information. One of the best scenes is the one where Christophe reads aloud his essay on Friendship.
In my new school, the boys and girls are all together. That makes it co-ed. Is friendship between boys and girls possible? Yes and no. Yes, because some girls are very nice. Maryse, Martine, Ghislaine, Roseline. With these girls we can talk. ‘Hello, kid’, I say. ‘Hello’, they reply. Then we talk until we disagree. ‘You’re impossible’, she says, I kick her, she throws an ink-ball at me, teacher comes in. In this case friendship is not desirable or possible. I’d rather be electrocuted with my feet in water. Both nice and nasty girls are quite clean... and most are nice, so I feel better about it. |  |
Music by The Real Tuesday Weld (London), animation by Alex Budovsky (New York). According to Budovsky,
This film is about The Great Revolution of the British Cuckoos, who bravely took over London, forcing all the people to move inside the cuckoo clocks.
Another good thing about Arco Iris events is that I get to know places in and around Cambridge that I would never visit otherwise. Today we played from 3 pm at a street party on Norfolk Terrace, a small street parallel to Norfolk Street. It was really great family atmosphere, with doors open, food and booze on the tables outside, people actually dancing to our music. (Some kids were even bouncing, but that’s because there was a bouncy castle.) The coziest gig so far.
I guess it is difficult not to fall in love with (music of) an artist whose records are named Aye, Fifa and Djin Djin. But it is impossible not to fall in love with (music of) somebody who records an album called Oyaya!.
This was the first album of Angélique Kidjo I heard. I fell in love with her music and language (Kidjo invented her own language with words like Batonga) instantly. Five years later, I got hold of almost all her records, but Oyaya! remains on top of my desert-island record list.
The Holy Grail may be not as coherent as Life of Brian; it is more like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, a series of rather disjoint sketches interspersed with crazy animations of Terry Gilliam and shouts of “get on with it”. I have this two-disc box set, with the second DVD full of assorted junk including the LEGO version of Knights of the Round Table song (with a guest appearance of the ex-parrot). Still, I prefer the original: you can’t do facial expressions with LEGO.
We’re Knights of the Round Table |
P.S. 2024. I went to Filmoteca de Cantabria to see this film, for the first time in my life, on a big screen. It was shown as a part of the Arthurian legend cycle and free of charge at that. Perhaps this could explain a great number of primary school-age children in the audience whose parents, evidently, thought the movie was age-appropriate. The Knights of the Round Table song, as expected, was met with loud laughter. The adventures of Sir Galahad in the Castle Anthrax provoked a slew of ¿Qué? from the kids just behind me; immediately after, some of them were led away.
Over the years, Zap Mama recorded a number of great albums but their self-titled debut remains my favourite: funky all-girl a cappella singing at its best. As much European as African (in the States, this album was re-issued as Adventures in Afropea, Vol. 1), they even have a go at the Spanish Renaissance hit Din Din.
