Sing like nobody's watching

I saw Casablanca on sale in our local music shop the other day, so I picked it up. I’m so glad that the $10 DVD has finally come to Townsville. It was one thing that we had taken for granted in Melbourne and we really missed it when we first arrived here (what? $29.95 to watch a movie at home?), even though the lack of it probably resulted in us getting out of the house more often. I put the movie on in the background yesterday while I was painting, but this morning I decided to watch it again properly from the start (shut up, I’m on R&R, I can watch a video in the morning if I want to) and I was glad that I did. It really is a very well put together movie, even though the poor old Germans suffer for it. German people in general must be so put out that they’re always being slagged off for what they/Hitler did in the Second World War. They totally must be sick of the English-speaking world going nuts for these old war movies.

Umberto Eco, with whom I usually don’t agree, described the world as “a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth”. I can’t remember where or in what context he said those words, but I choose to believe that he’s referring to our clinging to the notions of right and wrong, of good and evil. Of course I don’t want to mention the war. I’m still even tossing up whether to see that movie that is the reconstruction of the events in the plane on September 11. Half of me wants to go and see if there is anything there to help me make sense of what is going on in the world at the moment. And the other half of me just wants to sing loudly with my fingers in my ears “La-la-la-la-la-la”.

There was a question on our recent census that asked what my address was in August 2001. When I answered the question on the form, I thought that they were just asking me if I had moved house since the last census (answer: yes, many many times). But of course they could also have been asking: where were you before the world changed so much?