Marshall 2×12. 14 Oct 2013.

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This is an old Marshall 2×12 cab that I’d loaded with a vintage Celestion 30 and 25 speakers. I hadn’t played through it in 10 years and actually hated the sound at the time. Fast forward. It really sounds incredible. I think the difference is — at the time I was very much into PRS and humbuckers. Now more strat and single coils. It really seems to have come full circle.

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Shark. 12 Oct 2012.

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Shark 2013, William Vaughan
Conte Crayon on paper, 40″x40″.
(For Damien Hirst & TTIF Screenplay)

These are a series of drawings that arose out of a screenplay that I’m currently working on. They seem to have dovetailed nicely into the mishmash frames that that will go into a gallery show in San Francisco late next month.

And thank God for the words ‘late next month.’ Breathing room.

Or something like that…

Film. 11 Oct 2013.

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Le Week-End, directed by Roger Michell from a Hanif Kureishi script, is a small, perfectly formed triumph. It’s a triumph for what it doesn’t do as much as for what it does. It doesn’t bombard us with oh là là, as ageing marrieds Lindsay Duncan and Jim Broadbent embark on a shot-in-the-arm, shot-of-the-children anniversary binge in Paris. It doesn’t do Franglais gags or culture-shock coups. It introduces, almost shyly, the dark notes of a disintegrating marriage with two disintegrating souls.

Everything Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine was cracked up to be but wasn’t – a psychodrama with depth and astringency – Le Week-End is, though it probably won’t get the cracking up. (Too quiet, too subtle.) It even has Woody-style invocations, though unlike Blue Jasmine’s smash and grab on A Streetcar Named Desire they waft in organically like bees to pollen. It is purely serendipitous, for instance, that Ms Duncan looks so startlingly like Julie Delpy: so like her that we goggle at Duncan and her sad cherubic hubby (Broadbent’s brand-recognition bluster here becoming the poignant tatters of a burst balloon), discerning some mad, post-menopausal homage to Richard Linklater’s Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight trilogy.

Midway in the plot, after delicate tone switches between comedy (escape from a can’t-pay restaurant) and tragedy (“You’ve picked our anniversary to dump me?” quails he), the couple attend a party thrown by an old Cambridge pal, a charmer-charlatan brilliantly played by Jeff Goldblum. The party catalyses their break-up as darkness thickens and talk deepens – come in, James Joyce’s The Dead – but then their relationship takes a new, transmuting turn.

The whole movie, beautifully judged, keeps surprising us. And not even Joyce created a young character-interloper as succinctly drawn and haunting as Goldblum’s son (Olly Alexander). A wry, fragile, renegade product of pushy parenting, he quietly intones his dissident wisdoms like the caterpillar on the Lewis Carroll mushroom, in a bedroom fortuitously strayed into by a wandering Broadbent.

Brilliant film — what’s not to love? Life’s too short to mess with dumb shit or dumbshits. Refer below; to getting your $150K education for $1.50

Politicos. 11 Oct 2013.

At present the elite consensus in the U.S. seems to be that America is on the road to recovery and the only question is which Republican will oppose Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this ignores the possibility that the destabilizing political forces we see in Europe may find equivalents in America. Having earlier avoided the mistake made by the Europeans with their self-destructive austerity policies, thanks to the sequester the U.S. is now foolishly adopting the kind of contractionary economic policies it earlier spurned. Do not be surprised if several years more of high unemployment and the creation of low-paying jobs produces anti-system movements in American politics with more staying power than the flash-in-the-pan Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements. It can happen here.

This was an interesting but incredibly long article. The article did make reference to Perot and his party’s platform re: federal deficits. That notion had traction — all of the opposing political parties were grovelling for the Perot vote, ultimately. And ultimately fiscal balance was achieved. Perot also cited trade balance but, as we know, that’s not gonna’ happen. It is interesting and those that aren’t calcing alternative outcomes will always be caught with their pants down…

I love the Good Will Hunting quote: 50 years from now; when you finally start thinking for yourself — you’re going to realize — you dropped $150K on an education that your could have gotten for $1.50 in late charges from the local library. Ted Cruz?

What?

All of them!!??