Slacker

Well I can safely say I've been slacking off.

I've been catching up on some DVDs - my way of avoiding the screaming hordes of brain-dead tourists and their filthy and dangerous habits - with the likes of Serenity (I so want Joss Whedon to make another series), 7 Seconds (meh), The Bourne Collection (sigh, how can I not watch all three in a row, hmm?), and an old classic, but a favourite, Kiss Me Kate (Howard Keel has a lovely voice and Ann Miller is one of the best dancers I've ever seen).

I remember the re-run on teevee from when I was a kid and I've always remembered Keenan Wynne and James Whitmore Jr. singing "Brush Up Your Shakespeare".

It's curious what movies I remember from Saturday afternoons. They always followed the English Football or the wrestling. Films with Doris Day, Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Stewart Grainger, John Wayne, Steve McQueen, Kathryn Grayson, Richard Burton... the list goes on. I think it may have been some of these movies which inspired me to write; that and all the filled bookcases in the house. We had barely a room without books.

I remember dragging out my mother's old Remington typewriter at the age of eleven or twelve and laboriously searching out keys, punching them to create the words. It took me a whole weekend to write twenty pages of James Bondesque adventure. I'd never read Ian Fleming at that stage, I had read Trixie Beldon and Nancy Drew. I even vague remember what it was about... or at least the ending; the hero and villain died and the world was saved, though in truth, I was pissed at my siblings for nicking off with the pages and handing them around to each other - the work wasn't finished, they had no right, blah, blah, blah. So rather than a happy ending, I wrote death and destruction. Pre-teen angst, you know.

Watching old movies brings that back to me, but with an adult's view. The movies are the same; my appreciation of them is different. Then, I was intrigued by the hows, the whys and the whos, now I have a better understanding of the talents involved.

It all goes to the writing and that watching movies, or reading books is a more subtle form of research.