Tag Archives: one eyed jacks

Friday 2nd January 2015 – I WAS IN CREWE …

… last night, back at Gainsborough Road. The four members of Golden Earring were in bed, which was a mattress on the floor in a smallish room rather like back at La Batisse, and they were giving a concert to about four people while they were in bed. It was all rather weird.

What was even more weird was that someone was writing up a schedule of the “concert” and I noticed that, even deep in the arms of Morpheus as I was, that I could tell that the address that they had written was incorrect.

For some reason that I don’t quite understand, Golden Earring feature quite often in my nocturnal ramblings.

I was awake at 07:00 this morning but there was no possibility of hauling myself out of my stinking pit. I stayed there until about 10:00 instead and then had breakfast. I watched More Than Murder, the second part of this Mike Hammer spectacular. Its French title is “Il pleut des Cadavres” – which crudely translated by Yours Truly means “It’s Raining Corpses” and that sums up the film quite well.

These films are about 90 minutes long and more people die in them than died in the 90 minutes that it took to sink the Bismark. I don’t suppose that the films are too bad but they are full of plot holes and non-sequiturs and the action moves on at such a speed that there’s no time for a substantial plot to build up. They are clearly aimed at the truncated attention span of the American MTV generation.

It does make me wonder that if the Director hadn’t had the time constraint of 90 minutes and all that had to be crammed into it, what would these films have turned out like? Marlon Brando, when he directed One Eyed Jacks ended up with a “Director’s Cut” of about 9 hours or something like that, and the savage editing clearly showed. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Director’s Cut of More Than Murder would double that with plenty to spare.

The Boulangere was late today but the time wasn’t wasted. When I built the woodshed Iused a pile of old pallets and there was tons of wood left over – the feet of the pallets and the like. So I separated all of the feet from the planks – some of them were quite substantial – and brought them up here. They didn’t half get the fire going.

And apart from that, nothing else happened today.

Now apart from FC Pionsat St Hilaire, I don’t usually talk about football very much on here. But I follow the antics of Bangor City Football Club. This is the largest and best-supported club in Wales, and I started to follow them when I used to go to Bangor to see a girlfriend who was at Uni there. They are having a dismal season this year, languishing at the foot of the Welsh Premier League and running around like a bunch of headless chickens directed by a manager who seems to have lost the plot completely in my opinion and a spineless Board of Directors who, it seems to me, have totally abandoned their responisbilities.

Had they won today, they would have risen off the bottom of the table because the team above them lost, but instead, they gave another clueless and inept performance and lost 3-0. It’s already looking like an odds-on relegation certainty, and this is a fine end to the biggest club in Wales.

It’s high time that the Board of Directors accepted its responsibilities, dismissed the manager, released some of the underperforming players and brought in a manager and some players who know how to fight..

What’s going on at Bangor City is a total shambles and the Board of Directors must accept total responsibility for the disaster that is staring them in the face before it’s too late.

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Friday 21st February 2014 – I WAS WATCHING …

… Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince last night. And so consequently all through the night I was running around at Hogwarts.

Yes, three bad nights of sleep in succession – no surprise that I crashed out for a couple of hours when I returned home late this afternoon.

But as for Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince, that’s a perplexing film. It’s full of holes, more like a succession of scenes with no interlacing connection rather than being a continuous film.

Scenes start off at random in the middle of action, so you don’t know how the actors arrived at the situations and emotions that they are expressing.

I realise that you can’t cram 700 pages of novel into just 151 minutes of film, otherwise you’ll end up with something like One Eyed Jacks, where the original director’s cut ran to well over 5 hours, but nevertheless there was tons of stuff that was irrelevant that could have been left out, just as there was tons of stuff that was relevant that should have been included.

But two things came to mind during this film –

  1. If Professor Dumbledore were to put on the market the magic wand that he used to tidy up Professor Slughorn’s house, he would … errrr … clean up. I would give all that I had, and more, to own something like that where a simple flick of the wrist would finish the repairs here and have the place all spick and span.
  2. Ginny Weasley is ordinary, banal, boring even. Whyever didn’t Rowling develop a romance between Harry Potter and Luna? She has much more character and personality than poor Ginny and would have been an ideal foil for Harry to bounce his ideas around. She’s definitely my favourite character in the films and, ironically, when there was one of these apps on a social networking site to “answer 30 questions to find out which Rowling character you are”, I came up with Luna. No – I’m convinced – Rowling got it all wrong. The ideal partner for Harry Potter should have been Luna.

So once I had woken up and crawled rather unwillingly out of my stinking pit, I crawled even more unwillingly off to Marcillat-en-Combraille to record the rock programme for Radio Tartasse, and when Liz arrived we recorded the English-language information programmes.

From there, we went on to Liz and Terry’s fir an early lunch (and that car was still in the ditch after all this time) and then on to Gerzat and Radio Arverne for the other lot of programmes.

By this time I was about flaked out and so I didn’t even stop at Liz and Terry’s for a coffee on the way back. I managed a stop at the Intermarché to do my weekens shopping (save me going anywhere tomorrow) and that was about that.

But I need to find a proper sleep rhythm from somewhere.

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Sunday 3rd January 2010 – I’ve had a western day today.

Seeing as it was below freezing for most of the day I didn’t feel like going out. I have 6 more westerns to see out of that batch that I bought and so today it was the turn of Stagecoach, Man Of The Frontier and One Eyed Jacks.

Of course, Stagecoach is by far and away the most famous of them all. It was the film that catapulted John Wayne into the limelight back in 1939. Mind you, any self-respecting band of native Americans could have done us all a big favour. 60 Indians on horseback – fleet-footed Indian ponies at that – racing after a Studebaker (and in reality it should have been a Concord) stagecoach and 9 passengers with an all-up weight of three or four tons being pulled by 6 horses and not only could they not catch it, not a single one of the Indians had the intelligence to pump a pile of lead into the horses pulling the coach. But then, what would you have done with the remaining 1 hour 29 minutes and 30 seconds?

Mind you it was an exciting chase through the Utah and New Mexico desert across the foot of the Mokee Dugway across to Medicine Hat – a route that regular followers of my outpourings will have seen before.

One Eyed Jacks wasn’t anything like as bad as I expected it to be – in fact it was quite watchable. It starred and was the first film to be directed by Marlon Brando. After the film was released he complained bitterly that his film had been ruthlessly cut by the editing crew and it had destroyed the whole synthesis of what he was trying to achieve. He had a point but then again so did the editing crew – Brando’s version of the film was over 5 hours long! Imagine the “Director’s Cut” of that!

Gene Autry was another contender for the role of “The Singing Cowboy” (or “Cattleyouth as you have to say these days) and my mother, being the kind of woman that she was, made us sit through all of his films until we knew the lyrics off by heart. Funnily enough, I’d forgotten all about Man Of The Frontier (that’s not even a cattleyouth film seeing as it was set in the 1930s and is about the construction of a dam – a kind of Campbell’s Kingdom in reverse) until he burst into a rendition of “Red River Valley”.

And then it all came flooding back (well, we are talking about dams here). My mother proposed me to enter this talent contest when I was knee-high and told me to sing “Red River Valley”. But I was rebellious even in those days and was hurled off the stage and told never to come back, after merely singing –
I can sing all the songs by Gene Autry
But my singing is certainly vile
When I sing of the Red River Valley
Well the cowboys they all run a mile!

But we were talking the other day about coincidences in Hollywood. And one of the films that cropped up was of course the legendary Blazing Saddles. In that film the baddy was played by Harvey Korman and his sidekick was Slim Pickens. In One Eyed Jacks the baddy was Karl Malden who just happens to be the spitting image of Harvey Korman – you had to look twice to see any difference – and his sidekick was … errr … Slim Pickens. Yes – I reckon Mel Brooks owns the same Western collection that I have!

And that’s not all! In Stagecoach the coach driver was Andy Devine. And I’ve seen Andy Devine before – he was Roy Rogers’ sidekick in The Bells of San Angelo that we saw the other day. And in the 1966 remake of Stagecoach the stage driver was none other than Slim Pickens.

I did manage to get outside though and having found by coincidence a piece of gas pips that was of 32mm diameter I’ve assembled and erected my weather station. The anenometer goes round nicely and the rain gauge will have its work cut out as it’s snowing like hell outside.

In other news, you have all heard about the fraudulent election in Afghanistan – obviously Karzi has been taking lessons from the bushbaby and Florida. Despite the acknowledged widespread fraud, the parliament has shown some teeth by rejecting Karzi’s proposed cabinet more-or-less en masse citing ethicity bribery or money as the reasons for Karzi’s choice of most of them. However, the United Nations finds “the rejection of Karzai(sic)’s cabinet worrying“. So despite having tried to force the Karzi to work hard to outlaw corruption in Afghanistan, the United Nations – and hence the west – are dismayed that a corrupt and illegitimate puppet government would go so far reject nominees for posts where the nominee is either a fellow-tribesman or a significant sum of money has changed hands re the post. So a corrupt election “electing” a corrupt government led by a corrupt President with a cabinet stacked with corrupt ministers is acceptable to the west because it’s pro-western, yet a democratically-elected government next door in Iran is deemed to be unacceptable and a suitable candidate to be undermined, because the democratically-elected government there is anti-western.

The hypocrisy is staggering. You couldn’t make up a story like this!

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