So I guess I lied about updating last week, or the week before. But now I'm back, and I have a lot to write about.

Am downloading (and listening to), as we speak, Scott Walker's Tilt. Along with Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, it's one of ilm's quietly-touted masterpieces, and to my ear it certainly does sound like something strange, strange strange (and potentially wonderful). Melancholy Mark Hollis-like murmurings/lyrics, but articulated through a wholly operatic, unstoppable voice. Strings swell in the background - far more lush and classical than Talk Talk's minimalism - but there isn't an entirely direct relationship between the arrangements and the vocal melody. This contrast makes it something quite beautiful (but genuinely, as I said, strange). I have a feeling I may come to like this very much... but it won't be something that will be on my "you gotta listen to this" list when people first come over...

Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" clicked absolutely beautifully on the bus-ride back from Ottawa. It was dark, and I was floating across the bridge into Montreal, and his voice was whispering in my ear. My mum insists that the lyrics are mostly meaningless, but that doesn't stop the drifting images of body/rivers/mind/towers/honey/holy from affecting. this is music for when the clouds pass over the moon?

Saw Kill Bill: a gloriously bright, dazzling, ridiculous pastiche of all the best sorts of action movies, mixed with (and this is key) a fabulously cohesive New World, whose characters stride through it with absolute confidence and style, till stopped dead by a thrown knife or errant high-kick. I loved the limb-cleaving, the blood-spraying (Anyone for a game of tennis?), the colours and the music. Neale says that the music queues got old, for him, but me I felt a frisson of yesss! every time something badass started and the soundtrack punched in the door. i liked: snowflakes-like-petals, Nancy Sinatra ("bang bang"), David Carradine's hand, anime-calligraphy-lunacy, "square," last-line plot-twists, the eye-patch with the red cross. i liked most and much of it. this, from a self-declared action movie abstainer.

also: school of rock with mum and dad and my sister. Jack Black somehow endeared himself to me (though I find Tenacious D pretty intolerable), and the kids were wonderfully underplayed. That is to say, they were cute as characters, but Linklater didn't rely too heavily on them being cute as munchkins (see the Welch's/Jerry Maguire kids). Anyway - many genuine laughs, great character work from Joan Cusack, sweet and inspirational, and I felt a warm shiver when the little black girl solo'ed at their final Battle of the Bands show. hooray for well-engineered fluff!

i promise to get to the other stuff I foreshadowed some time soon. thanks for reading!