The Maroon Diaries

Salma Hayek playing Frida Kahlo in Frida . I think this is the single most erotic scene ever filmed, and nobody even had to take their clothes off.     The Roxanne Tango from Moulin Rouge . I would barely average one trip a year to the cinema, but when Moulin Rouge was screening, I went five times to see it on the big screen. The Cell Block Tango from Chicago . Yes, I've just realised myself. These are all tangos. I must really like the tango. Okay, no more tangos, I promise. Michael Jackson's Thriller has so many layers of cultural references by now that I couldn't even begin to try to unravel them and watch this objectively. But it rocks as hard as it ever did. I have no idea what happened to this man in the end, but when you look back, my god, he was so extraordinarily talented. And there has to be some belly dancing. Something raw and authentic and unpolished, like Gadjo Dilo with Rona Hartner and Romain Duris. I couldn't decide be...

Like most of my generation, I grew up watching an awful lot of television. An awful lot of crappy, often American television with all the brainwashing advertising in between. I certainly developed addictive behaviours toward televsion viewing as a child. Once I was grown up, I decided that that was bad. When I had my own place, I lived without television, and had no doubt that I was better off. When I thought of people who use television to deal with their moods, I had nightmarish visions of overweight women in pink, Tim-Tam-crumb-infested nighties watching Ricki Lake and home shopping infomercials. As long as I didn't have a television set, that could never be me. I sure as hell wasn't giving up the Tim Tams. However, I did go out of my house sometimes. Sometimes I was in other people's houses. So I still got to see plenty of television here and there over the years. And I came to understand that there's a lot of really good stuff on television, too, and to appreciat...

It was a late night for the Maroon Household last night. Yesterday afternoon, Mr. CJ managed to bang his head hard enough to be concerned about a concussion. The thing to do in these situations, of course, is to keep the person awake for a decent amount of time, twelve hours being a pretty good rule of thumb. So we prepared our favourite caffeinated beverages and settled in for a late night. We watched Pirates of the Caribbean , and some Stargate SG-1 . I read my current library book, Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks , which caused me to occasionally open the computer to google things like interictal personality syndrome ,  palinopsia and  the relationship between spirituality and temporal lobe epilepsy . I kept an eye on Mr. CJ to make sure he wasn't falling asleep. He's fine, by the way, and didn't fare any worse than a nasty headache. Amongst all these noctural activities, I somehow had a thought, a memory, come to me quite strongly. I was thinking about a series of ...