@RealSteveHolmes – – 40 years of exploring ideas and now for 20 more

The main reason I want to move to the seaside is that when I stand there on the beach in the bright sunshine I always feel good no matter what. The first time I ever test drove an Audi it just felt right compared with the car I thought I wanted, a Merc, which felt awful when I rented one for a week to check it out. For twenty years, since before Windows existed when DOS was a big deal, I’ve been struggling with the “wrong” feel of Microsoft blockware, which is the main reason I want to try Apple.

Some things feel right; they relax you, but with energy in hand. Some things feel wrong; they make you nervy and drain your spirit away. Like dealing with call centres and writing to the tax man. Like queuing in the rain at Hammersmith to get into a Ricky Lee Jones concert where she only sang for 45 minutes. Like making a date with the wrong girl at school but feeling you have to go through with it not to hurt her. Like being five years into the wrong career before finally understanding you have to scrap it all and start again.

In my wardrobe I have clothes  I so much love to wear that I save them for a special time and never wear them, choosing instead things that I don’t like so much because it doesn’t matter if they wear out. How stupid is that?

I mean, I know it’s supposed to be the path to wisdom to control your desires but I like my desires, very much. I like clean cotton sheets. I like machines that work first time and do exciting things. I always end up glad I had sex even when I thought I didn’t feel like it. I love my food but I don’t want that much of it these days and there’s a range of tastes that feel good to me, such as asparagus and haddock but no longer beef, which feels harsh. So why do I still eat stuff I don’t like, because of a “balanced diet”?

I think I shall put more emphasis on how things feel from now on and less on what might be the sensible thing to do. Sensible hasn’t been such a great success. It doesn’t make your skin tingle and your heart leap.

In the last few days I’ve had contacts with people whose lives are falling apart, contact with people whose lives are always challenging, contact with people who are facing the spectre of death. In the past I usually would have had something glib to say but increasingly I find myself speechless, only able to listen rather than suggest anything, overwhelmed sometimes by the sheer weight and complexity of what others are going through and in the final end simply impressed by the courage shown by so many in different ways, also the resourcefulness, persistence and humanity.

I long to tell these people that I respect and admire how they are in facing their lives – far more than I would if they were blustering through with phony optimism. But it seems that there is a kind of guilt in the air, that people feel slightly ashamed for not being at their best, that they would rather not be showing their “negative” feelings, that they long for it all to be over and soon… Which is reasonable.

Only when it isn’t over soon, believe me, I really really don’t mind anyone going over their honest feelings time and time again. It doesn’t bug me in the slightest that someone is or feels they are less than perfect. In fact I feel honoured that they would trust me by telling the truth. It’s like a spark of humanity in a world full of lies…

I did tell someone today that admired his courage and he replied: “I haven’t got any other choice, have I?” Completely without self pity. How magnificent.

It’s called “In the Cut” starring Meg Ryan and half penned by cult writer Jane Campion and it made me sick with its relentless, menacing, sordid, anti male propaganda.

Plenty of atmosphere, all of it nasty. Plenty of sharp dialogue without one single moment of human decency ever poking through the total gloom. Nice pointless plot in which all men are suspected of everything and not to be trusted. Possibly the most utterly objectionable film I have ever seen after Silence of the Lambs.

You must see it, as an education in pure, unadulterated prejudice masquerading as interesting psychological complexity. And Meg Ryan really got into it, as you can see from the Parkinson interview on YouTube, and Nicole Kidman co-produced it, so these babes think it really says something about sex, love and men – which is simply terrifying.

Because no mysoginist, no matter how bleak his world, no matter how many women had cruelly rejected him, could ever turn out an image of woman as utterly hating and completely negative as the men portrayed in this film.

What it tells us, that a bunch of rich, attractive, powerful and intelligent women in the most cosseted country on earth could make such a movie, what it tells us is that something is terrible wrong…

It’s called Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is a title so bad it hurts; the plot is a tapas bar of clichés about romance; the “characters” are at best half a dimension and in most cases considerably less; the acting is school of Johansson, who dominates throughout, except for one brilliant protagonist who holds the entire thing together: the voiceover, which is simply stunning, on a par with the gentle irony of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe.

This voiceover enables Woody to illuminate the easy lives of a bunch of stupid American clichés, to mould them this way and that around a bunch of stupid romantic and life clichés, to foil them with a bunch of stupid cliché Spanish stuff - and yet to extract a dry laugh from a jaded and hostile viewer (me) at every single turn.

I have never liked the guy, never liked his arrogance, never liked his antics, never liked his strange family relationships and never liked the adulation he used to get from dunderheads starved of anything more meaningful. But if he had learned to step back sooner, as he does here, if he had broadened his field of vision like he does here, my God, he could have been almost half a contender.

For American humour, this film is brilliant, almost European in its almost sophistication. A very enjoyable romp, though the sex could have been more explicit and the Cruz identity almost spoils it by overacting to put  Scarlett in her place when actually the third woman, the incidental, woman, the Spanish artist and the voiceover are the real stars, especially the voiceover.