A Marvelous Sky

Last weekend I played once again in a band just for one gig.

And only one song.

It's a real simple basic tune that I took on – The Long Winters' 'Sky Is Open.'

You can hear their original version on YouTube.

No one over here knows this song; it's never been played on the radio here.

What I like about the tune and the way The Long Winters perform it is the clear vocals and the fairly standard English diction of the singer in spite of a touch of Canadian accent in there.

I've more or less lost most of my Ultra-British accent that I grew up with, having lived in Australasia for quite a few years now. I think I'll have to remedy that though, as modern Australian/Australasian is a peculiar, clipped, slack-dictioned, sorry thing... Well I think so.

New PRS Guitar

The guitar part in the song is also extremely easy to play. Now I can manage a pretty difficult range of techniques on this instrument – in fact my Dad called me Paganini all the way up from a small child and I think he thought that like him (that is, my old man, not Paganini!) I might one day take up the violin properly. But I never did. I think though at some point he may have thought I really was Paganini too. Who knows, I may have been in a former life. But I am not now and I don't play publicly anymore although at one time I played in ski resorts all over Austria with fairly big-time professional session and side musos who ski-ed off-tour and played in the nightclubs apres ski.

I'll tell you how good I was – I played joint lead guitar in a jazz band whose drummer, Glenn Walsh, went on to hit the skins on tour for Stevie Wonder in Sydney. There ya go.

Anyhow... 'The Sky Is Open,' is a song currently being considered as the theme for a potential Hollywood big budget flick featuring Marvel's Ms. Marvel. I don't think it'll ever get made though. They've even slated the tremendous New Zealand director Mike Takahori or whatever his name is (he directed the last of the good Bond movies Die Another Day). Ms. Marvel is riddled with complications as far as sexuality and a dark comic book history that won't go away no matter how much spinning goes down the marketing tunnel here.

Me, I'm happy to lust over a new Pernambuco-necked, Maple-topped, PRS guitar, play tunes just for my own self-indulgence, and think about whether it would be fun getting a Sunbeam Alpine or Tiger from somewhere and fully restoring it. This was the first car James Bond ever drove in the movies by the way. But you already know that.

Charlize Theron CANNOT play Ms. M.

Madonna... Could. You mightn't think so but if you go back to her being directed by Traktor Films in the video clip of the song Die Another Day you realize just how amazingly good at action pieces she really is.

Hollywood will likely screw up this job just like it has everything else recently. Even Julia Roberts could do this role. But not, NOT Charlize Theron.

All these people getting too old? No, I don't think so. Hollywood can halt time. Shame it just can't go back to when there were real producers there though.