Work For Idle Hands, My Funny Valentine & Rehab Lab
‘Been really crummy and unable to do all that much. So, I’ve decided to fall in love with two admirable blokes. The chaps in question are Norman Finkelstein and Paul Dirac. Since my passion will be unrequited in either case (as Stormy Normy doesn’t know me from Adam and Paul Dirac is very dead, alas!), the emotional expense is minimal and the risk nil. The pic is for Paul and for me mate Thomas, who will understand & appreciate the joke. Anti-Valentine Update 13/02/09. As it says on the tin: An antidote to crappy, mawkish valentines, really. Love & Bullets 4 All! Update 06/03/09. I’ve decided to rehabilitate crappy movies by doing wreally wrong and wromantic versions of them. Here’s the first one. David Lean, eat your heart out!
… hope it wouldn’t be unconvenient if I say that since my early childwood I severely wanted to have an ornitorinco (duck-billed platypus). By the way, today, for the first time, I come to know the English name … Platypus?!? Now I want it more and more!
PS:
Sorry, the ghost of Monsieur Picabia doesn’t stop conjuring with the one of Monsieur Magritte to haunt me!
My dear, if it was mine to give, you’d have your own duck-billed platypuss by return post. Alas, platypusses are notoriously elusive and non-compromising cretures. But I can draw one for you…eventually.
Tell Mr. Picabia and Mr. Magritte to stop interfering with your connections. The cheek!…
Indeed! An intercours with not much hope of any future! Or… but in fact the look of their eyes directly recalls the title of Noel Coward’s 1935 short one-act stage play Still Life which inspired Lean’s film.
Anyway it is consoling and reassuring that those who appear in the pic will not even come to a conversation like that:
Alec: Good morning.
Laura: Oh, good morning.
Alec: How’s the eye?
Laura: Perfectly all right. How kind it was of you to take so much trouble.
Alec: Nothing at all. It’s clearing up I think.
Laura: Yes, it’s going to be nice.
Alec: Well, I must be getting along to the hospital.
Laura: Now I must be getting along to the grocers.
Alec (wryly): What exciting lives we lead, don’t we?
PS: By the way, which one in the pic could be supposed as Trevor Howard?
Re. future: I should hope NOT!
The point of the whole thing is that I recently watched (or started watching , anyway) Brief Encounter, a film I’d like to see incinerated in public, pour encourager les autres… – and I felt like revenge, innit? And yes, I do remember the dialogue you quote, alas! (& woe).
None of them is supposed to be either Trevor or Celia. I wouldn’t dream of doing anything like that to my babies. They’d divorce me if I did.
Still, now you have a d-b p of your own. Others may follow. It never rains, don’t you know…