Burns made me do it...

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1 May

A poem, written in the pub - if not over a malt - yesterday, because of seeing* :

How would you talk about the liquid of whisky.....? Is there a word you would say, or a formula or a poem, or what? pic.twitter.com/ffwPYUE1Fw

Thank you, @wildandmagic ! - I have written my first poem this year, soon on my blog... Called (after Burns) To a Dram.
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) April 30, 2013

Here goes:



To a Dram


Note one thing :
These words,
The water of life,
Are not


Metaphor,
Simile,
Analogy,
Allegory...


No, a direct
Statement
Of pure fact,
Pure as barley

 
As water
As living yeast,
Which drives
Sugar to thrive


Huge vessels
Whose real size
Defies our mind
(All those litres !)


Cannot contain
The breath of God,
A holy embrace
That blossoms


'Volatile', we say,
'Mercurial'
And all of these –
And none – is Scotch…



©   Copyright Belston Night Works 2013




End-notes

* This should be, for those in the know, 'an embedded Tweet', but Pratter tells me that I'm not authorized** - pretty rough Version, The Agent, not the Authorized Version...

** In fact, I now see that '@WildAndMagic's account is protected'. How lovely !


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My naive little thoughts about the red-carpet treatment...

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

16 October

@bfi Odd that, when a film's cast is shot again and again until the expressions are perfect, we set any store by them appearing in the flesh
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) October 16, 2012

My recent Tweet to this effect, that, when you have bought furniture from MFI and the clothes-rail collapses, that is a wardrobe malfunction, shows how even the words that we use about film and its principals are dominated by the big business behind celebrity and cinema : after all, there is no such thing - to my knowledge - as a wardrobe function*, unless it is the costume department having an end-of-filming pre-bash !

So we have this nonsense about Angelina Jolie's bikini body, as if - in some proper wardrobe - her real body keeps Dorian Gray company, or a nip showing, or whether that look is hot or not. All of it just lazy shorthand, used not to be bothered to express something other than through what is tritely ill thought out.

And, back where we started, we pay the ticket-price to see, say, @HelenHunt, as made up in the appropriate chair for the role and the part of the film in which her character appears in the scene to be shot. A lot of time, money and expertise is spent - if people know what they are doing with the film, and her prize acting isn't edited away - to get her looking a certain way.

So why, without those lenses, make-up artistes, costumes, studio lighting - why, in hell, do we expect her to look like that, nice enough as she is, when she gets out of a car outside a big cinema? To use a stupid parallel, why watch Madonna, say, doing some car maintenance from the vantage of a nearby tree and without binoculars, when you could buy a ticket to see her act the part of, say, Lucrezia Borgia on the cinema screen? (Not that I know anything about any such film-project, you understand...?)




End-notes

* And perhaps it was only as a bit of light relief from that tired dysfunction, which every family knows about, that they chose the prefix mal-.


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