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Thursday 5 February 2009

Winter Count -- File

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(File Tribe Year 2008)
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Among the Plains tribes of North American Indians there exists a custom of recording the year in a pictogram. These have come to be known as the Winter Count and they represent a significant event that happened in that year.

The Winter Count of one year was usually a single, simple symbol and was often incorporated into a series which carried the history of the tribe in a visual temporal map.

Tribal elders were responsible for remembering the stories that accompanied these Winter Counts and would pass them on verbally to the others in the tribe, who in turn did the same as the elders themselves passed on. This way the generations of each tribe kept a tangible record of their own history, they were usually marked on a single tanned buffalo hide, and also kept alive the custom of oral dissemination of history through stories.

More information can be found here:
http://www.trailtribes.org/greatfalls/since-time-immemorial.htm (scroll down to Reckoning Time)
http://www.telusplanet.net/public/mtoll/winter.htm
http://www.sdhistory.org/mus/ed/ed%20buff18.html
… but it should be noted that the practice of adding dates and/or text is usually recent and many old Winter Counts have been ‘updated’ in this way since their original creation.

Others may want to join me in creating and posting their Winter Count. Ours, chez file, was very easy to decide on as we relocated from Asia to North America but it could represent any significant happening for you or your ‘tribe’ in 2008. Artistic ability is really not important, see mine, only the wish to share with Others your tribal history.


(Blackfeet Year of Smallpox (1864))

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51 comments:

Anonymous said...

File,
Apache, sioux, cheyenne among all the plaines indian tribes you picked offie's and mine.
Blackfeet it's our identity- You may have to start all over again if you don't want us to go on the Warpath.

Zephirine said...

Guitou, don't go on the warpath, give us a pied noir pictogram :)

Zephirine said...

Anyone who has a good Winter Count idea but can't draw it, can describe it here and File might draw it for you if he feels inclined.

mishari said...

If I want to contribute my own cack-handed effort, what's the drill?
Do I e-mail it to you as an attachment, zeph?

Zephirine said...

Yes please, Mishari!

Important: for anyone wanting to send one in, it'll need to be a .jpg, .bmp or .gif, the Blogger system can't deal with artwork in Word.

offsideintahiti said...

No warpath?

Peace pipe, then?

See, Guitou and I are from the Pakalolo clan, an offshoot of the Blackfoot:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF9z25XBfu4&feature=related


We're also quite fond of a little war dance, once in a while:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsZJhXNyrqg

The quality isn't great, so if you don't want to sit through it, it goes something like this:

"When they tear up all the treaties
and break up all the plans

Did you do your duty and kill on command?
Did you know the redman used to roam this land?

Now the souls of lost warriors blow across the sands

Did you know the hunting ground before it became a hell?

So listen to my story of Genocide
How they were hunted and slaughtered till
there was no place left to hide
Did you know the redman used to hold his head with pride?
Till every man, woman and child were destroyed

There are people round here that understand
There are people round here that couldn't give a damn
There are people round here that go slow
There are people round here that
don't take too kindly to the killing
of the buffalo"

And if you haven't read Cormac Mac Carthy's Blood Meridian, may I suggest you drop everything?

mishari said...

I second offsideintahiti's suggestion. Blood Meridian is an astonishing work...its evocation of landscape, its apocalyptic, lyrical narrative, its Old Testament cadences, its cast of frightening grotesques...an unforgetable, frightening, moving and trancendent work. A must-read.

I'd also reccomend McCarthy's other works, Outer Dark, The Orchard Keeper, Sutree and his Border trilogy. A great writer...

Anonymous said...

Thank's Offie, the Blood Meridian suggestion followed by Mishari convincing backup statement are truly a motivator-I'll buy the book regardless that I can't read english! .......Hugh!
btw, Zeph tell me what's a pictogram and I'll be happy to oblige madame :-)

Anonymous said...

I'll be a finding McCarthey's books then, thanks for the tip

G, no offence intended, no war neccessary there is more than one blackfoot as there is (sadly) more than one football

Anonymous said...

filou,
of course my son, if moi blackfeet, toi blackfeet , only tonton offie is blackfoot since his run-in with a reef shark while fishing.
his wood leg is made from an olive tree, the french
refer to as: Olivier-

Anonymous said...

F,

Being, in despite of ethnographic origins, of the tribe of English speakers--and thus perhaps less enamoured of American bestselling mainstream novelists than of the poets who once made this language the remarkably complex and flexible instrument it is--it occurs to me to enquire whether, in your travels, you've encountered the ditty which begins:

There was never ffile half so well filed
To file a file for every smythes intent
As I was made a filing instrument
To frame othre while I was begiled...?

(And do forgive the poet's largesse with his f's in "ffile"--sometimes there can't be too much of a good thing like an "f" in an f-word...)

Anonymous said...

Hi BtP,

curious here (not sure I read you right). Are you saying you consider McCarthy (and a work like Blood Meridian) as "mainstream"?

I thought it was "out there", if you'll pardon the expression.

Anonymous said...

Offie,

Wouldn't wish to get into a bloody argument over McCarthy, any more than I'd wish to immerse myself in any more of his beautiful blood-soaked sentences. (Have done enough of that to last me a short Wild West lifetime.)

But I've been thinking for a while--and for me this came to a head, or shall I say a bloody, blown-off-in-slow-motion Peckinpah-head (for is not McCarthy merely a literary Peckinpah, massively gifted yet so enthralled with violence and carnage as to compromise the art in favour of the blood porn--and without the "period contextualization" excuses critically afforded Peckinpah, or Genghis Khan, say), with last year's typically-bloody-wrong-headed Academy Best Picture award to the Coens' McCarthy-sourced bloodbath "No Country", in fact not only not the best picture of the year (that was "Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days"), but not even the best Western of the year (at best it came in third in that category, after "There Will Be Blood" and "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford").

Now I recognize there are sensitive souls who enjoy nothing better than to curl up in a hot bath, pour in a bit of imaginative red dye, and take in a strong McCarthy. And that "Blood Meridian" is the consensus favourite. With mainstream bathtub-novel-readers, that is. (I preferred "All the Pretty Horses", among this writer's novels--but that's just me--and then too I enjoy cold showers.)

And I realize too that the Imperial Mogul of American Letters, Harold Bloom, has suggested--after admitting he'd twice had to start the book over, having given up on it because the pointless violence turned his stomach--that this work of which we speak elevates McCarthy to the stature of Faulkner (he must be thinking of the corn-cobs), Hemingway and the other Yank Grand Masters. Oh well, the lofty platform of American Letters has always been covered with more or less randomly-spilt blood, vomit and gism--what does a circus audience like better, after all, than a little savagery, as long as it's happening in the pit of the arena from which the luxury boxes are safely enclosed?

But rather than dither on, let me quote here a bit from Caryn James' NY Times review of the book :

'"Blood Meridian'' comes at the reader like a slap in the face, an affront that asks us to endure a vision of the Old West full of charred human skulls, blood-soaked scalps, a tree hung with the bodies of dead infants. But while Cormac McCarthy's fifth novel is hard to get through, it is harder to ignore...

'This latest book is his most important, for it puts in perspective the Faulknerian language and unprovoked violence running through the previous works, which were often viewed as exercises in style or studies of evil. ''Blood Meridian'' makes it clear that all along Mr. McCarthy has asked us to witness evil not in order to understand it but to affirm its inexplicable reality; his elaborate language invents a world hinged between the real and surreal, jolting us out of complacency...

'Grotesque descriptions are alleviated by scenes that might have come off a movie screen... The horrifying details stick in our minds, however, while the surreal elements melt away. That imbalance is a problem, for Mr. McCarthy's emphasis is not on the violent set pieces but on the characters' reactions to them...

'All men are unremittingly bloodthirsty here, poised at a peak of violence, the ''meridian'' from which their civilization will quickly fall. War is a civilized ritual beyond morality... but not for Mr. McCarthy, who positions his readers to evaluate the characters' moral and philosophical stances...

'Mr. McCarthy carefully builds this dialectic only to let us down with a stylistically dazzling but facile conclusion... The judge's enigmatic dance and the long ordeal of the novel's violence demand more than this easy ambiguity. There are, of course, no answers to the life-and-death issues Mr. McCarthy raises, but there are more rigorous, coherent ways to frame the questions.'

Anonymous said...

Far be it from me to lower the literary tone (my job is to lower the tone in Ingrid's parlour), but how no mention when reffing Peckinpah to Bring me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and thereby opening the floodgates to the wonderous hilarity of I'm Sorry I haven't a Clue and the late, hugely missed Humph?

Anonymous said...

In case anyone is not familiar with Clue, here's a taster.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4w7EvDRBERg

Anonymous said...

Mimi,

Ah, Ingrid--now there is the critic we need in the parlour right now!

What do you suppose has become of her? Off on a long weekend in the fjords with Professor G., can it be?

(When last seen, I believe, she was performing with four of her cloned pitch-invaders at the tag end of the Pseuds' Irish wake at the Cock Tavern--??)

Anonymous said...

spot on mimi, bring me the head of Alfredo Garcia probably the best kept secret among Peckinpah's films and still one of the best-No doubt about crazy Sam being Tarantino's source of inspiration.He was the first to show violence in slow motion on a big screen.So much to say about this amazing and bigger than life film maker, his usual cast of characters actors you should write a piece on the ballad of cable hog -not sure of the name-

Anonymous said...

Someone recently, maybe Brooker or maybe my guru Dr Kermode, wrote a brilliant revisiting of Garcia and its influence on Tarentino.

It is of course, an utterly seminal work, but for me it's greatness lies in Clue and the games they played with the name of the film in all its various guises. Far too complicated to detail here, but suffice to say I would never have sought the film out had it not been for the "Bring me the Head" gags that adorned Clue for so many years.

Anonymous said...

"Bring Me the Head"--the dance of sex, death and violence in a slow-mo adagio, the whole business of the impotent bar-musician's pursuit overshadowed by the unappeased spirit of that which he seeks: dead machismo.

"No doubt about crazy Sam being Tarantino's source of inspiration.He was the first to show violence in slow motion on a big screen"

--Yes, but is not this a somewhat dubious historical "achievement"--?

"The Ballad of Cable Hogue": Guitou, could it be this gentlest, most elegiac and moving of Peckinpah's Westerns--seen again a few months back, and it keeps getting better and better--is also in fact his best film? (It is for me, anyway).

Anonymous said...

BTP
Hard to tell because most of his films about the west are a reflection of his Desperado mentality, heroes who didn't give a fuck about dying but still they had to leave with style
It seems that for them the way to die was more important that the way to live.
You right about Cable Hogue aging very gracefully but so does Billy the kid the bar scene with bob Dylan and James Coburn means something special to me-
Mimi, "bring me." isn't the rape scene with. Kristopherson (doing a cameo) ambiguous? Peck had such a tortuous mind, he wanted the audience to enjoy it.

Anonymous said...

BtP,

thanks for your insight. I've only just discovered McCarthy recently, and with no preconceptions whatsoever. I'd heard the name, but I was so unaware of him that I mistook him for the Irish guy who forgot his mother's ashes in a pub.

Blood meridian was indeed a slap in the face for me, and a jab to the guts, and I thought it was an incredible tour de force. I was more than halfway in before I realised there were several layers of meaning and that each character had to be read according to an allegorical (or metaphorical, I'm no good with these) grid.

His landscapes have a cosmic dimension to them, I marvelled at his short sentences with hardly any punctuation, but most of all i thought it brave and clear-sighted to give such an uncompromising take on the birth of the American nation.

Maybe I'm easily impressed.

I gave it to read to Mrs Offside, and it made her angry. She shook me awake one night, demanding to know why. Why I wanted her to read it and why he'd written this absurd book. She said she felt like throwing it against the wall.

We had a long chat, and she did finish it, but I don't think she was entirely convinced. She did put the trilogy in my Christmas stocking, though, so at least I must have sounded sincere.

I thought "The Road" was very powerful too. "No country" a little less so, and I haven't seen the film.

To sum it up, my reaction was of pure delight at having discovered a major author I hadn't heard of. Always happy to hear contrasting views.

Anonymous said...

Did Mrs Offie react in the same way when you introduced her to Verlaine and Rimbaud, or did perhaps she introduce you to them?

And who banged heads when first reading Auden?
Not just in your lives but in general.

I was thwacked mightily after saying I thought WHA was a bit of a tosser. Took that to read him seriously and realise what a very fine poet he was. And not just a wrinkly old man I met in college gardens.

Zephirine said...

I liked McCarthy's Border trilogy, especially 'All the Pretty Horses' but then I found I couldn't get through 'Suttree' and I've rather given up on him since. Very fine writer, wonderful use of language, but I found it increasingly hard to connect with any of his characters.

Guitou, I'm with you there, 'Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid' is one of my favourites, and some of Dylan's best music IMO. nice clip here.

mishari said...

I found All The Pretty Horses the least satisfying of all McCarthy's novels (and I have read them all).

In fact, I found it less satisfying and more conventional than the other two volumes of The Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain and The Crossing.

The Crossing I found too heart-breaking to re-read, unlike all of Mc.'s other works.

In it, a young rancher on the mountainous border with Mexico traps a she-wolf that's been preying on his livestock.

For some reason he himself doesn't really understand and certainly never articulates, on the point of shooting the trapped wolf, he decides instead to take her across the border and release her in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico.

Once in Mexico, he's captured by bandits who sell the she-wolf to a dog-fighting gang. But you have to read it.

It's almost unbearably sad, in great part because McC. eschews sentimental language or any kind of anthropomorphism. He reserves his lyricism, as he so often does, for the landscape. The tragedy of the story is evident without any trickery or manipulation.

Love him or hate him, compared to the tepid, bloodless, self-referential stuff of so much modern soi disant "serious fiction", McCarthy is as bracing as an ice-cold shower.

Anyone here read T.C. Boyle's The Tortilla Curtain? I strongly recommend it.

Anonymous said...

Hey misha, no spoilers please, I haven't even started on the trilogy.

Amusingly, I'm on the third chapter of my first T.C. Boyle, "Budding prospects". It's only a translation, unfortunately, but both funny and impressive so far.

So, what else do we have in common?

Anonymous said...

Now here's a thing, is this rascist?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EotM7FH8uQg

or this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SQVTQgIHHI

Cultural, expressionist?

Anonymous said...

Actually when all is down I recommend the Story of the Blues

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWr0_zWaVzU&feature=related

Anonymous said...

I don't think Billy Bob Thorton adaptation of Cormac Mc Carthy All the pretty horses was good enough (I didn't read the book though) but the material was too good .this is a perfect illustration of a good story supposed to be an epic, turning into a boring film.
Yet, the studios had to cut 1hour of the movie.

Anonymous said...

BTP,
about best of the late westerns: 3.10 to YUMA.not bad at all.
I liked also Tommy Lee Jones,the blasé cop of No County, "Three Burials" another mexican border tale a la Peck.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, all, for the film discussion, I was too traumatised by Straw Dogs to see any of Peckinpah's other films, but I've just decided I need to check out some of his westerns. Will report back.

Not sure how relevant to the discussion this is, but I like it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s48wDOalMLw

Anonymous said...

I hate Obvious Art, and would not trade any of the classic Japanese films now showing over at The Annexe for all the bloody heads and other severed and mutilated body parts in Peckinpah's complete works, the entire pseudo-dangerous oeuvres of Tarantino and the Coen Brothers, or a large crimson-stained burlap sack containing all the McCarthy adaptations in existence or mercilessly yet to come.

offsideintahiti said...

Great clip, munni. I wish figure skating adopted more of these moves. Not totally irrelevant, but Guitou will feel you in better than I can on the meaning of "Apache" in Parisian slang. He's one of them.

Anonymous said...

BtP, if your objection is specifically to graphic and gratuitous violence that's one thing, but I'm willing to bet that, to a Japanese person, those classic Japanese films might contain plenty Obvious - it's just not apparent to us because we're not steeped in the tropes and cliches of the culture that produced them. I'm partly playing devil's advocate, but I thought the first part of your statement was a bit sweeping.

back to the Winter Count: I think I'm trying too hard to find a single happening that sums up the year - 2008 wasn't that remarkable for me. I might already know what my 2009 one will look like.

Anonymous said...

Munni,

I prefer the subtle to the gross, real life to escapist fantasy, beauty to ugliness, and art to trash.

As to your bet, there are more than a few intelligent Japanese people of my acquaintance who would take you up on it in a minute. To them the work of Mizoguchi, Ozu and Naruse remains continually fresh and full of surprise.

The cultural tropes may be familiar, but in the works of these masters the treatment is complex, thoughtful, delicate and anything but cliched.

To explore cliche in cinema the first place to look would be to the effects of the dead hand of Hollywood, over recent decades, as speed, action, graphic violence and instant gratification of the lowest of human instincts have increasingly become the defining features of popular cinema in the West.

Sorry if my statement sounded simplemindedly sweeping, I too dislike generalizations.

I have continued to like a few of Peckinpah's Westerns, in particular Ride the High Country and the Ballad of Cable Hogue, but looking at all his work again about six months ago was not a pleasant experience.

As to Tarantino and the Coens, I'd be hard put to name any advances in their work after the interesting debut features Reservoir Dogs and Blood Simple--and when I look at those two again, the mechanics of the exploitation of violence become more and more apparent as brand formulae.

Don't mean to sound too dyspeptic about the movies, or to suggest that to me recent film history is a tale of nothing but disgust and disappointment. This is far from the case. Over the past twenty years I've discovered many wonders and delights in films from Iran (principally those of Abbas Kiarostami), Taiwan (Hou Hsiao-hsien, Ming-liang Tsai, the late Edward Yang), mainland China (Jia Zhangke), Thailand and Mauritania/Mali (see the two films of which I posted some clips in The Annexe last week), Finland (Aki Kaurismaki), Turkey (Nuri Bilge Ceylan), Romania (two true masterpieces in recent years, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu and Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days), Argentina (Lucrecia Martel, the late Fabian Bielinski), even "old Europe" (Michael Haneke)--these but a few films and names summoned offhand from what I consider a renewed wellspring of genius in world cinema, restoring silence, space, distance and the dignity of the human to this art.

But I realize also there are people who simply won't watch a film if it's slow, reflective, or--yegads!--has subtitles. Like they say, it takes all kinds.

mishari said...

Never mind being put off by subtitles. I overheard a brief conversation in a pub the other day between two 20-somethings, reasonably articulate, almost certainly university educated, that went something like this:

A: Any good films on tonight?

B:(looking through the TV guide), Yeah, this looks interesting...Dr. Strangelove...with Peter Sellers..

A: What's it about?

B: Never mind. It's black and white.

...mishari orders large vodka and tells the barman to leave the bottle.

Anonymous said...

Mishari,

And I'd have ordered a tall glass of tapwater and hung out there with you.

(Coincidentally, Madame B., who at times exhibits a saintly patience with boring movies, and therefore actually sat through the entire recent ExtravaganzInauguration of the united states--of Depression, Despair and Defense, that is-- remarked that when Dick Cheney was rolled out in his wheelchair, her first thought was that he was channeling Doctor Strangelove.)

Zephirine said...

Mishari, that's awful. And I know smart, educated people who won't watch films with subtitles, what is that about? Perhaps they actually can't read very fast and have always concealed the fact.

re: what's known as 'graphic' violence, it comes in and out of fashion. Not so long before Peckinpah et al, Jacobean tragedies of similar goriness were considered grotesque and a bit primitive. It's always a high-risk genre: I remember seeing 'Straw Dogs' in the cinema and the audience hooted with laughter throughout all the shooting off of feet etc, just didn't believe a moment of it.

Anonymous said...

Violence ?
I am not surprise by the criticism evolving aroud Peckinpah, the surprise is by whom it's originated-
I don't intend to praise Violence,I hate violence but It's how he used to deal with the paradoxe of violence that I found interesting-
In the wild bunch, few over the hill old outlaws walking toward death with determination to avenge their mexican friend "why not?," they said , then the bloody massacre following was just an anticipation of WW II, a graphic use of violence to show the absurdity of it-
To caricature him as a "Prince of Violence" it's a superficial evaluation because there is more behind his scenes- By making movies such as cable hogue or junior bonner , gentle mellow, sweet and sad Peck proved tp be and remains one of the greatest American film maker-

Anonymous said...

Cher Guitou,

Re. Peckinpah: Your apparent and slightly confusing (perhaps confused would be the word?) nostalgia for cinematic brutality, misogyny, and the pointless spilling of blood (the "paradox" in that form of porn escapes me, by the way) is indeed rather touching. And if a fondness for those things moves you to continue to highly value The Wild Bunch and its Late-Carboniferous-Period male-mythic romanticism, well, that's brave (if lonely) of you; and then too it's a free cyber-universe (as those GU blog chaingang escapees, licking their bondage-scrapes in the privacy of their lair, are wont to repeatedly declare).

Watching it again a few months ago, though, I felt I was trapped inside a tiresome blood-steeped Time Machine, watching a spectacle of Pure Anachronism unfold before me. Sure, maybe Men and their Things and Ways are Doomed, but why then try to make it all seem so bloody gorgeous? Lucien Ballard is a wonderful cinematographer, his eye for the big picture is to be admired, and Philosophical Nihilism has its place, but must it come drenched with and dripping in such unnecessary and redundant effusions of life's most vital fluids?

Straw Dogs, it appears to be agreed here, was a travesty. So let's leave that one out. And I'll concede you a few points for the affecting rodeo-family honour of Junior Bonner (again pure misty-eyed anachronism and elegiac nostalgia, with a strong foot on the Symbolism Pedal along the way--but Prescott does indeed look swell in wide-angle, almost as good as in real life).

But five nights with eight remastered Pecker Classics last Fall left me with a bad taste in my gizzard, plus, here and there along the blood-spurting trail, a certain disappointment with the occasonal crudity, laziness and cheapness of the film-making--and that latter reaction came as a bit of a surprise. So--one of the greatest? In the same breath with the very much greater American directors who came before him and left their clear marks on his movies, Ford, Hawks, Nick Ray? Or even with those two Euro directors who were also such a strong influences on the impressionable Pecker, Sergio Leone and Carlos Saura (of La Caza)? Sorry, but there I fear we must agree to disagree.

And speaking of good manners: should it be that your charming if somewhat maladroit side-of-the-mouth reference in "surprise is by whom it's originated" is meant by some clever twist of Gallic Wit to designate a provider of the Free Entertainment in this House in which you are (and let's admit it) merely a part of the Nonpaying Audience, keep in mind that those who remain content to sit and ogle as others act out their fantasies for them are sometimes known, across the Channel, as Wankers.

Zephirine said...

Guitou, agree with you that it's over-simplifying Peckinpah just to talk about his use of violence. 'Straw Dogs' didn't work at all for me, but that was because I found the story and the setting totally unconvincing and I remained detached from the film, so the violent elements became either tedious or ludicrous.

Whereas 'Junior Bonner' seemed to me an authentic and beautifully made film and I felt involved with the characters. I don't think I've seen 'Cable Hogue'. As I said, 'Pat Garrett' is my favourite of the ones I've seen and it seems to me the central story suits the director perfectly: the death of the old West, "to be hunted by the man who was your friend"...

Zephirine said...

How did that happen? BTP's comment has snuck in before mine, must be the time-difference or something.

Oi, BTP, you can't go calling Guitou a wanker, totally unwarranted, he only said he was surprised. And don't forget he was keeping this blog going when you were a mere silent and non-contributng lurker, hmm? He likes Peckinpah, you don't, enough already.

Anonymous said...

Zeph,
perfectly right, the death of the west was his obsession,.I'll be in LA next week from there I may be able to send you a compressed version of C.H-
BTP
please stop shooting, you're shooting fast with many inaccuracies.thanks god I am unarmed.
Seriously, I didn't mean to offend you, I am truly sorry if I did-Yes indeed I was refering to you as being an element of surprise based on the other comments and opinions we exchanged in the past,specifically these about freedom of expression- If I am guilty of anything, it's for poorly
phrasing the comments-
I acknowledge your generous and eloquent contribution to this site and your aptiude to cover
different subjects with an unbelievable insight.I wish I had a thoughtful way of making a point like you do, in english. But I also wish you didn't use this advantage to bombard me with this kind of vulgar and out of line insults-For this reason I am going to give up my status of "non paying customers". I rather buy my own ticket and enjoy the company-My Pseuds friends know where to find me if they need me-Until then , the balcony is closed-

Anonymous said...

Gui, please keep your terrace open for all who love to bask in your warmth

PaleFace, well done! You are the proud owner of the first insult on OS, hope it makes you feel good. It does, however, fatally undermine your anti-violence stance when you seemingly can't help but resort to verbal violence to support your position. Boo.

Anonymous said...

Apologies for any fuel I added to the fire. Still planning to watch the films in question though.

Guitou, I hope you'll reconsider and stay, I think you know that most of us value your contributions greatly. Sometime when you're here we should meet for mojitos, but not next week, because I will be in the desert.

Anonymous said...

I think I lost the plot here, off being disturbed about a town I know destroyed by fire, but there's a question I need to ask of film buffs.

Which South London estate was used for Clockwork Orange? I know it's Plumstead way but I just can't bring the name to mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v90KPJ6n4Ew

Anonymous said...

Mimi, wasn't it Thamesmead?

Anonymous said...

And the BAFTA goes to Zeph! I've been puzzling over this for weeks.

Thank you for setting my mind at rest.

offsideintahiti said...

I left a comment yesterday about BtP's spectacular own goal, don't know what happened to it...

I'll be joining Guitou in the taproom, where we'll be buying each other free drinks, chalking them up on that non-paying slate Ingrid keeps for us froggies, and we'll talk movies.

Slàinte!

Anonymous said...

Guitou,

It's been suggested to me by a certain good fairy that I write you even though you are gone.

Gui, I have learned over our half-year of playing together on Zeph's and Ebren's sites that you are a good man, a smart man, a funny man, a man I respect. For the sake of the collective peace of this lovely site of Zeph's and the good people who partake of it I will hereby cede to you the right to say to me or about me anything you may ever wish. If I don't like it, I'll just have a laugh.

And so what, finally. All just words, ghosts in empty space. Happily no real blood on the floor.

offsideintahiti said...

"All just words, ghosts in empty space."

I may be deluded, but I like to think that over the last couple of years, we've forged something that amounts to much more than that.

Anonymous said...

Spot on Offie.

Now, shove over a bar stool and make room for a little one.

Mine's one of Zeph's weird and wonderful cocktails please.