Puck’s Prattle

Wow, this is just brutal and wrong.

Goddess Kate Bush is 49 today. Let’s look back to her stunning 1978 debut, “Wuthering Heights.”

Like an angel come down from heaven to enchant us. No one had ever done it like this before.

What a totally excellent song. I love the brass near the end.

Although their clothes are absolutely revolting/delicious.

And what are they doing at an airport? Is there some jet-set international intrigue going on in the background that I’m totally missing? Were they originally supposed to do a montage?

When I was a little boy, sometimes on Saturday mornings I’d be watching cartoons in the family room, and I’d smell something wonderful wafting from the kitchen. (We had a split level house, so the kitchen overlooked the family room.) My sister would make muffins—plain muffins from a recipe card from my mother’s old recipe card collection—but with strawberry jam in the middle, as a little surprise.

It was always so wonderful.

…or maybe not:

Cheney to be in charge during Bush colonoscopy

I’m sure Dick wields a wicked endoscope.

I first heard this song at the end of a third season episode of “Absolutely Fabulous”, when Patsy is unceremoniously getting rid of her parasitic older sister Jackie. I finally did a little search, and found the English version of the Jacques Brel original, “Jacky,” first performed by Scott Walker:

British singer Marc Almond, of Soft Cell, did a techno remake in the early 90s.

It’s a pretty excellent song.

Midnight Cowboy is a cinematic masterpiece; one of those films that, for some reason, stirs some of my most inscrutable emotions.

Today’s splashy, action-oriented opening sequences dripping in CGI have nothing on the brilliance of economy. John Schlesinger leads us gently and simply into the film: the camera gently tracks Joe Buck, full of unbridled optimism, as he leaves his ramshackle hutch in Texas for what he is sure will be a life of fortune as a hustler in New York City.

Backed by Harry Nilsson’s now-classic version of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’”, this is a fantastic example of nearly subliminal emotional exposition in film.