Showing posts with label addiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label addiction. Show all posts

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Playing a hand with the Lord

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


26 June

You know that your mind is not in quite the right place to listen to a petit motet, even if you've never heard one live before, when you start thinking certain things on seeing the line

speravit anima mea in Domino


Yes, maybe pizza, but equally that game with the spotted rectangular pieces! (Still a pub classic, in some areas, with the regulars having grudge matches, I believe.) Do we really get the name of dominoes from here?


If
Wikipedia® is to be believed, though, favela has nothing to do with this other line, in the Dies irae, as set by Lully for the funreal (?) of Marie-Thérèse, wife of Louis XIV, meaning 'will deserve the world in ashes':

solvet saeculum in favilla


Odd, as a slum area would seem to have quite a lot in common with a world dissolved in ashes. Be that as it may, the real revelation comes towards the end of this text that he composed for:

flammis acribus addictis


This, translated as 'doomed to flames of woe', seems to shed some light on the nature of real addiction, of being doomed to do something: when the word 'addiction' came to mean what it does, was someone making a judgement, whether or not moral, on the power of the person to escape it?

Sounds like a fairly condemnatory appraisal to me, which does not allow for hope - or change. Its life-history is in line for being gtracked down...


Monday, 9 January 2012

A special screening of Trainspotting (1996)

More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)


9 January

Well, Ewan McGregor amply demonstrates that he was lacking in something back then, and Robert Carlyle's performance was given largely by his ludicrous moustache. Yet, apart from the fact that the film dragged and went around in circles, it was fine.

The science talk about the biochemistry and physiology of addiction was a bit too much for one who had not long taken pain-killers, but the after-film discussion with the speaker was fun, and everyone had the chance to have their say.

Their next one in the series is MS and Hilary and Jackie, which seems a bit tenuous, when that is not only not remotely what the film is about, but does not even feature except as the background to the drama between the sisters, but still...