Archive for June, 2009

Big Trouble in Paradise

Saturday, June 27th, 2009

Sexy Beast, 2000. Directed by Jonathan Glazer.

Gal Dove relaxes in "Sexy Beast"

Gal Dove relaxes in "Sexy Beast"

“Sexy Beast” opens on a scene of simple, Hockney-like geometry. A square pool. A horizontal white plinth of lounge chair. A male body, roughly rectangular. Many shades of blue. The establishing shot marvels at a near-African sun.

Two overlapping pink hearts, candy-shaped, feature in mosaic at the bottom of the perfect blue pool. These are the kind of hearts that, like tiki torches and umbrella-laden drinks, suddenly look agreeable, even touching, and so deeply right in a tropical setting. Totally tasteless and totally sincere. No impoverished labourers created that mosaic, no: those hearts are made of pure love.

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R.I.P. Michael Jackson

Friday, June 26th, 2009

Michael Jackson with baby tiger

The sentence “Michael Jackson is dead”, which I have already read at least twenty times, is utterly surreal.  It strikes me as a logical impossibility.  This is like reading that “Frosty the Snowman is dead”.  This is like reading “my childhood is dead”, and I know that it is that way for billions of people around the world.  The world seems enchanted, filled with the grieving citizens of Cape Verde and Paraguay and Nepal.   It is dark right now where I live. I see these other citizens in my mind’s eye, flickering like the lights at a million different vigils on every square inch of the map of the world.

We seem to be in for one of those disabling celebrity deaths that take a week or more to process.  Where nothing gets done globally.

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