Your arm is broken? You need a sling. Let me write you one. It consists of one, a thick flourescent glove, two, a push, three, some Pentecostal love, and four, a shove, so you don’t stop thinking of your arm, the sling it’s in, and the gelato love I have given you.
So I got a two-track mind.
Read plain text first (or better still listen), then Italics, all at once, second. Then all at once.
A man whose wounds are irrelevant since the whole movie takes place in flashback (Ralph Fiennes) gets to first base with a WWI nurse, so we’re off to a good start, right? Before that, he’s biffed some posh English totty (Major James Hewitt take note) in the sultry and oh so deserted desert. Meanwhile, someone with no apparent reason for being involved (Willem Dafoe) tries to make us think that this is a movie with hidden depths, when actually, it’s just Casablanca without the hookah.
- with gratitude to My favourite movies…
her: don’t you wish you could change your name to Regis Philbin?
me: no
After a big breakfast I felt full, and I felt like those hotcakes could caulk my insides, you know? So I came home and I lay down. What happened? All sorts of things, each one the kind of breakfast you don’t think you’ll be having again. So I get to where I am. And the hotcakes are gone, and so is the miracles. And I’m thinking, this is my three o’clock. The lights peeping through the night like cats’ eyes and the sky like a big black bird lowering down. Sat here, watchin’ the clock on the cooker. And the tick tock of my toes, tappin’ against the counter, as I type this, sittin’ here on my chair. So that’s my three o’clock, and what I’d like to hear is, how’s yours?
Got bored. Anyone care to razz off the last two stanzas?
I was instrumental
in a shocking spree of crime;
my transgressions monumental,
I did my 4/4 time,
I raided music retailers
(a Rockin’ Robin Hood)
but the devil’s in the detail, as
they say, so listen good:
If you ever steal a trumpet,
keep it well-concealed,
and if you have to dump it,
better dump it in a field,
or give it to a hobo,
or a roustabout or drunk -
but if you steal an oboe,
conceal it in a trunk.
Be wary of pianos,
which require sleight of hand -
you’re not in The Sopranos
or a military band,
so to mitigate disasters,
keep it nice and quiet,
and if it’s not on castors,
don’t you even try it.
[continued p. 94]
