Kiss me, fool Miki & I celebrated St Valentine's Day at home, watching ‘our movie’. This is how we originally met: in the front row of the Prince Charles Cinema, where we'd each gone to watch this.
Shrek is a great date movie, a romantic fairy tale about that fairy tale, Romance. Its two human protagonists, Lord Farquaad and Princess Fiona, are on course for a romantic marriage motivated entirely by stories. In his case, that he will become king when he marries, in hers that she will marry her True Love after he has rescued her from an imprisoning dragon. Her fantasy begins to unravel when she discovers her rescuer to be an ogre sent by her would-be groom. Mind you, she has a little secret of her own. Courtesy of an enchantment, she is by day an enchanting princess, by night a ogre. The spell, she believes, will be lifted by her True Love's first kiss, which will restore her to her true form.
Matters do not go well for Romance Classic. Fiona and the ogre fall in love, and Farquaad, while dark and arguably handsome, is vertically challenged. Fiona eventually kisses her True Love, and assumes her true form: an ogre. She and Shrek live happily ever after. This is wonderful, a funny, romantic fairy-tale antidote to romantic fairy tales. Post Modernism's finest hour.
IMDB says PoMo's having another go: Shrek 2 is "in production".
Eventually I had to try it. Saw a postcard ad yesterday at the library and today bought for £120 a small used 350 MHz Pentium II box with Linux (Red Hat's Fedora distribution) installed. No time this month, but in March I mean to set this up for software development, and add it to the Lambent network. Have heard great praise for this OS's stability.
So much waiting in my intray for this blog. I’ve started posting the backlog, backdated to their proper dates; will note here entries for anyone who wants to cast back.
Maxx in town this weekend for long-anticipated visits yesterday to Borough Market and Rules. Today, Columbia Rd flower market, digestion permitting.