BEAUTIFUL EIGHT

Just watched The Hateful Eight, Tarantino's latest masterpiece (and all three hours of it is).     Kurt Russell is beautiful. He's actually beautiful to look at.  Goldie Hawn is very lucky. Or perhaps he was just very well lit.    Tarantino should get an Oscar.  He won't but he should.   He gives the best lines to Sam L Jackson, Tim Roth (superb superb and strangely very attractive), and the  beautiful Kurt again. Its a cross between Agatha Christie, Carrie and a spaghetti western with snow.   Like an eskimo western.  He chooses actors who have so much character in the face, each line etched like a story in itself.  Jennifer Jason Leigh is horrible but she's meant to be horrible.    Channing Tatum doesn't have lines (on the face) and it shows, but he had a strangely sinister quality which Tarantino sees.   He just needs more lines (on the face that is).   Then he'll be one of Tarantinos beautiful eight for good.  Iconic film which will get better each time you see it.

NEW YEAR

I wrote half the blogs last year I did the year before. This is good.   It doesn't mean I have less to write about but that I'm doing more and have less time to write about it.   I met some very supportive, wonderful and genuine people in 2015. Yes a few odd balls, but less than usual.    Filtering helped.  This is also the last year of the psychology degree, a decision I took three years ago, that and the teacher training for yoga. Both are like a divorce; painful but necessary.  Yoga I love teaching.  Practicing is secondary to teaching it.  My father always said I should be a teacher but only to those who are interested and want to listen.   He was right.  

Studying for the degree has made me realise how linear education is, even on this level and how academia manages to make even the most interesting of subjects into something very dull. Bit like politicians but they do it on purpose so you don't realise how little they know and how little they are able to do.    It is painfully opaque, structured, limiting and dogmatic, a bit like those who pass and construct these blooming exams.    But hold your breathe to pass the test and then you can fly.  As in life.  

Got more books out this year, with the A to Zens and more radio, which I'm enjoying immensely.   I'm always a little nervous these days to admit or write 'I'm happy' so I won't.  

I loved Charlie Brooker's Wipe on 2015, especially the woman reporter's take on feminism or femininism as she put it (which is how I put it as well).  The funniest line was 'do you think a man would be better at being a feminist if he was a woman being a femininist than a woman would be being a woman being a femininist."  Strangely I actually think thats a good question.  

I watch the news less because I'm more aware its a depressing comic of non news. Bankers have once again been left of the hook by Osborne who is no longer going to hold an enquiry into how and why the crash happened and how and why they were able to break the World bank, because we allegedly need the greedy corrupt sociopaths to work for us because we need them to pay tax, which by the way, they are also not paying.     No news about that.  And its raining a lot.    Watch out for anyone building an Ark. I know a few men who have grown a long silver beard and hair long to the shoulders, admittedly looking more like silver haired my little ponies than Noah, perhaps in anticipation they'll convince God they're the chosen ones.   I for one, hope not.