A New Year's Self-portrait.

It’s hot, hot, hot! Clothes are worn only when absolutely necessary, but since we have excellent privacy, the only people we are likely to shock are each other.I took this self-portrait on New Year’s morning. Last night we went to dinner with friends after wisely avoiding the New Year’s Eve drunks the night before. The meal featured a pork-loin, marinated and roasted in wine, porcellum oenococtum, an ancient Roman recipe by Apicius, b. 25 bc. It was to die for! I wish all our dear lj friends the happiest of happy New Years.

Ho-ho-hum!

This picture sums-up for me that strange, timeless, kind of run down, zoned-out space between Christmas and New Year’s Day. We spotted him while we were on our search for the entrance to the water-lily ponds at Eastlakes. We still haven’t located it.I saw a documentary about the Mexican freetailed bats of Austin Texas and their migratory flights.honoriartist and our other Austin friends, why haven’t you told us about this amazing natural phenomenon? Are you so used to this spectacle that you take it for granted? I guess we get fairly blasé about our giant fruit bats. There were some good shots of Austin as well, so now I have an idea of what your city looks like.I’ve been feeling a bit tired and irritable. I don’t feel like cooking, which is unusual and reading, which I love, is making me doze off after about ten minutes. I suppose it’s a small dose of post-Christmas ennui. Roll on 2004! Surely the world will have a better year than it did in 2003?

I went to see...

I went to see The Lord of the Rings - the Return of the King today. It didn’t start until we had had at least a half an hour of ear-splitting commercials, which added extra strain to an already bladder-bursting experience. People could be seen in silhouette climbing over crowds and partitions throughout the last third of the film in a desperate struggle, as intense as any on the screen, to have a piss.And so to the movie itself. First the bad news: the Elfy bits with Elrond, Galadriel and Arwen are as boring as ever. Every time someone other than Sam or Gollum makes a speech longer than ”Let’s go kill the bastards”, there is much knitting of eyebrows and lowering of vocal registers and it’s all terribly sententious just like the book. A black vs white theme could be drawn from the movie but I suspect that Jackson just had hundreds of Maoris available whose exotic looks when compared to the white main cast allowed him to differentiate their looks from the men and hobbits when the orc make-up went on. This is possibly the most disturbing aspect of the three films, its potential for racist exploitation by idiots.Now the good news: the big battle is as exciting as anything ever put on screen. The acting of Elijah Wood, Sean Astin and Andy Serkin is excellent. The fantasy architecture, especially of Minas Tireth is everything for which a fan of fantasy architecture could wish. Shelob the spider is truly frightening and the climactic scenes on Mount Doom are an appropriate and thrilling climax to the story. The scenes with the oliphaunts are eye-popping.Do, however, have a whizz just before the movie starts and I would recommend that you don’t buy a soft-drink from the candy counter,The verdict on the trilogy as a whole: though it deletes a few fairly tedious bits, (Tom Bombadil and the scouring of the shire, which, while touching, is anti-climactic), the public got what it paid for, an as faithful as possible film adaptation of an epic cultural phenomenon.Like any epic, (The Bible, The Lion King) it is possible to extract dodgy supremacist messages from the story. Some people would lumber poor old Tolkein with the false philosophic burden of “Defender of European Values against the Encroaching Tainters of the Race”. Actually , with his son fighting in France, it was the encroachment of German facists and their Italian and Spanish allies that he was thinking of.A re-emerging bunch of Euro-neo facists have the usual wooly, absurd philosophic baggage which seems to be a nauseous blend of Opus Dei (renowned for its facist sympathies) and what they term archeo-futurism and plain old-fashioned racism, (we’re being infested with Chinese!). The words, as always, are slightly different but the stench remains the same. And, as ever, people of conscience are not fooled.Fans of the movies will be blissed-out.