Confessions On A Dance Floor

Madonna's new album, Confessions On A Dance Floor, improves every time I listen to it. The music is fantastic, especially Let It Will Be, Forbidden Love, and Push; the lyrics are extremely catchy, especially Hung Up, Get Together, Jump, and Like It Or Not.

There are a few dud songs, mostly because they endlessly repeat the same meaningless lines (Sorry: "I've heard it all before...", inexplicably, the second single; Future Lovers: "In the evidence of its brilliance..."). Isaac would benefit enormously by cutting Yitzhak Sinwani's Kabbalah lines. The rhyme scheme in I Love New York ("New York"/"dork", "mad"/"sad"/"glad") is fairly simple, but it's also perhaps the catchiest song on the album.

The new album has been compared in the press to Ray Of Light and even Like A Prayer. I don't think it's as incredible as those two, though it's certainly as good as Music. There seems to be a general consensus that the previous album, American Life, was awful, and that Confessions On A Dance Floor is a return to form, but actually I really liked American Life.

The album's complete track-listing is: Hung Up, Get Together, Sorry, Future Lovers, I Love New York, Let It Will Be, Forbidden Love, Jump, How High, Isaac, Push, and Like It Or Not.

Ken Adam

Christopher Frayling has written an excellent new book about Ken Adam, who worked as a designer for Kubrick on Dr Strangelove and Barry Lyndon.

The book really is fantastic. There are photos of Kubrick taken by Adam, and photos of Adam taken by Kubrick. Amazingly, Adam says that "a few years ago" he was taken to the British Film Institure archive in London where he watched the custard-pie-fight epilogue from Dr Strangelove! This sequence, which Kubrick removed from the film at the last minute, has always been considered lost or destroyed, though Frayling's book appears to confirm for the first time ever that the scene still exists on film.

Incidentally, the title of this book is not completely clear. The front cover and spine call it Ken Adam: The Art Of Production Design, but inside it's titled Ken Adam & The Art Of Production Design.

Full Metal Jacket Diary

Matthew Modine, star of Full Metal Jacket, has published a journal about the making of the film, Full Metal Diary. There are several previously-unseen Kubrick photos, and transcripts of conversations between Modine and Kubrick. It's limited to 20,000 copies, and has groovy metal covers (a 'full metal jacket', geddit?).

The best parts of the book (i.e. the Kubrick parts) were actually available a while ago from stanleykubrick.de as a PDF download (titled Full Metal Dairy!).

Malaysia

I've been on a brief holiday to Penang in Malaysia with Dech. We stayed at a hotel towards the northern part of the island, though Penang is a small place so it only took a short bus ride to reach the main town, Georgetown.

Kubrick exhibition

The German Kubrick exhibition has now arrived at Melbourne, Australia. It will open at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image on 24th November, closing on 29th January 2006.

Weekendavisen Mohammed cartoons

Danish newspaper Weekendavisen published a collection of Mohammed caricatures today, following those printed in Jyllands-Posten. The Weekendavisen cartoons feature Mohammed as a Pre-Raphaelite woman, a chair, Father Christmas, a Wassily Kandinsky abstraction, a hyper-real leg sculpture, a Georges Braque Cubist painting, a Danish man, and Leonardo DaVinci's Mona Lisa. Mohammed is also shown with his mother in a childish drawing, and an anatomical drawing depicts his internal organs.