What look does Coogan have ?

This is a review of The Look of Love (2013)

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28 June (24 March 2015, Tweet added)

This is a review of The Look of Love (2013)

* Contains plenty of spoilers *

I was at a special screening of The Look of Love (2013), with Paul Willetts* present to take part in a question-and-answer session – he is the author of the book now of that name. (It had initially been published, we were told, under the title Members Only.)

One has to take with a pinch of salt whether the older man, looking back over his life in the wake of his daughter’s death, is genuine, or just film schmaltz – engendering a sympathy for Paul Raymond in some realistic mode, whereas significant parts of the rest of the film had Steve Coogan stamped all over them. Coogan, after all (which it took a question from me to elicit, when the Q&A until then had chosen to comment little on the film, how it came into being, or related topics), had approached Michael Winterbottom with the desire to make a film where he played the part.

"My name is Paul Raymond, welcome to my world of erotica." At 11.15pm, Steve Coogan stars in The Look Of Love. pic.twitter.com/HWoUDDCKjn

— Film4.com (@Film4) March 23, 2015

What I take from the film is an attempt to show Raymond as a man whose primary (or initial) interest had been in the burlesque, showman side of things. That aim was significantly undermined by other aspects :

* Showing him destroying his own marriage by first taking sleeping with young hopefuls (with his wife Jean’s acquiescence) and coming home to her to tell her about it, and then starting bringing them to the marital bed, in selfish supposition that such swinging was as good for her as it was for him

* Willing – for money’s sake alone – to enter into partnership with Tony Power (even more sleazily played than Raymond by Chris Addison) to start publishing the trademark magazines (and like products)

* Seeming, in fact, to be unable to relate to anyone except on the level of a transaction**, even his beloved daughter Debbie (Imogen Poots) when talking to his advisers forces him to decide that he cannot keep taking the financial losses of the big show that she is fronting (as a singer) : in this scene, Debbie is clearly hurting at the news, but Raymond has nothing to offer her (no suggestions for alternatives or much comfort), and can only question why she is crying, and keep urging her not to, almost as one of Coogan’s most famous creations might

* This coldness was typified by a stiffly awkward and dutiful reception of Derry, his son from a pre-marital relationship, with just Cooganesque utterances*** to cover thinly the lack of anything to say to him – the closing titles tell us that Raymond, in comparison with the millions left to granddaughters Fawn and India Rose, left Derry nothing


Raymond as presenter of spectaclesis there, but more drawn upon by what Willetts had to say, for the film really tries to show Raymond as driven, but pitifully lost in a world of cocaine, sexy women and alcohol. From the moment when Powers persuades him to have another go at publishing, and Men Only is launched, the spectacles become the different and more specific ones of solo women posing for the camera.

(The film casually interjects Powers telling a model not to spread her legs so much with the words This isn’t Germany, thereby establishing both the standards of the day and Powers’ prowess in showing what could be shown. Raymond is often enough shown there, but looking as if having as much fun as on a wet afternoon in Scarborough.)

Powers, until he falls from favour for apparently not being able to handle his coke (he has a sordid fate listed in the closing titles), is just as much a catalyst for change in Raymond’s life as the lion whose interaction with two bare-breasted women lands him in court. Thus another thing that can be seen about how Matt Greenhalgh (who wrote Nowhere Boy (2009) about the young John Lennon) sought to effect is a serendipitous universe in which Raymond lives and which he – with the major exception of Debbie’s death – creates and controls.

Unfortunately, as with the footage where India Rose is in the back of the car with him and quizzing Raymond as to which Soho properties he owns, it all feels like an over-simplification, and then one asks what the point is. So one comes back to Coogan wanting to do this with Geoffrey Anthony Quinn, born 15 November 1925, and I have no idea whether that pre-dates the death in March 2008 (though it is not as if Willetts appears to have rushed out a biography).

A comment in a review on the film’s IMDb page suggests that Coogan had been turned down in favour of Geoffrey Rush for playing Peter Sellers – however, if so, that film was released in 2004, so it seems unlikely that Coogan harboured the loss, and The Look of Love is ‘compensation’. If he had really wanted to play a funny man like Sellers, why not have selected, as a project, a number of other comics who have died in the last decade or before ?

But there were the out-of-place Partidgeisms – as a rich man, Raymond had no need to make ludicrous and highly self-conscious attempts at witticisms to get women into bed (since, whatever Coogan may think about his own magnetic powers, Raymond had more of a power of preferment that rendered him attractive). It was clearly part of Coogan’s desire to play the part that they should be there, even though they did feel tacked on, and not at the heart of the role :

Willetts, who said that he had been a script consultant, agreed, when answering my question, that the film-makers seemed pleased, even boastful, that they had Cooganized it more and more as it progressed, and one certainly cannot claim, whatever merit the ambition possessed, that they failed.


Yet what it does leave us with is a Raymond who, although wealthy and successful, is alone and probably lacking love at the end, self-obsessedly reliving Debbie’s life and the images surrounding her death – as a purely linear device, it is also, of course, a way of inducing suspense into the story for us, leaving us to wonder, as we work back from an orphaned India Rose, when the moment has come for her to die (and how that will be – we are on edge when Raymond closes the show as to whether it is then with a mixture of heroin, alcohol and a broken heart).

By Debbie’s death in 1992 (although we only heard about this), she had been playing the role that she found for herself of taking over from Powers, and her father had started letting her take over the business. Was he lost, as much as anything, by not being able to leave the pornography and property portfolio in her hands, however much he seemed to show that he did really care for her ?

(There was a slightly strange, because undwelt-on, detail in that, when he split with model Fiona Richmond (whose relationship with Raymond had helped break the marriage), she moved in with Debbie.)

It appears that there is to be another film about Raymond, for which this one made way by taking a different from his nickname, The King of Soho. Will it, as Raymond’s other son is involved, give us a less-romanticized account, where he does not end his days grieving over Debbie and, probably, for his past life, and where he is not played by someone quite so keen to mould the title role to his image ?


Post-script

I think that Antonia Quirke's review (in The Financial Times) is quite fun, and spot on about the Britishness, and there is a good little video linked to in Peter Bradshaw's.

Looking at the publicity material, I have no idea whether Raymond ever said something about what he achieved was not bad for a boy from Liverpool who just had a five-bob note in his pocket : if he said it, one nonetheless felt that Coogan was ficitionalizing his own career's success in and around such detail; if not, that it was in the melting-pot of Coogan creating Raymond in his own image.

Coogan is interviewed on film with Winterbottom, but, in what I saw, all that they touch on is the simple riches-are-empty paradigm.


End-notes

* Perhaps seriously, as I do not recall, IMDb credits Willetts as Lord Longford.

** Echoes of Mark Ravenhill’s Fucking and Shopping ?

*** Including the running joke as to who Raymond claimed had done the interior of his flat, which at one point was George Harrison, another Yoko ?



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Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Gabby Young and Other Animals

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1 June

So, here is my attempt to sum up the experience of The Big Top at Cheltenham Jazz Festival, with Gabby Young and Other Animals...

Compared with other days in that venue, when the acts were not compelling (although, literally, Lianne La Havas did let the position go to her head a little, with everyone on their feet and supposed to do something because she required it), this was warm – and one felt for whether Gabby must have been too hot in her flouncy, cotton-wool skirt. As she said, she had always dreamed of playing at the festival, and she had clearly been inspired with her appearance by the feeling of carnival (and striped awnings and lollipops even feature in one of their videos).

The early numbers were much jazzier than as the set progressed, but at least Ms Young did establish some jazz credentials by swinging along to a few tunes (and even scatting a little), before turning a bit lighter and more folky, unlike others whom I heard in that tent.

That said, some songs were of a distinctly ‘psychological’ flavour, as even the title ‘In Your Head’ suggests, let alone lyrics such as ‘Don’t worry – they won’t get you !’ and ‘The paranoia had taken over’. For a good impression of what that was like, although it is a more free and less straight version, take a look at main man Steve Ellis and her in this Tweet*, which is a link to recordings made for Henry Weston’s Cider :

Some day I might write something about Gabby Young at #cheltjazzfest... In the meantime, here's a backstage session : youtube.com/watch?v=WCKN2i…
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 31, 2013

‘We’re All in This Together’ is a less cheery tale (depending on how it is performed, despite the lyrics ‘And I won’t get alive – and they’ll call you up and tell you I won’t survive’), and there is an uneasy quality to music and words of ‘Ones That Got Away’, whose YouTube studio version is quite lively. However, do not get me wrong that there is not plenty of sassy playing with eight or more Other Animals on stage – it may be simply that Ms Young held back a bit on jazz singing as such during the gig, and her classically trained voice came more to the fore.

If one could wrap up ‘a message’ of the show, it was that things maybe are not as bad as they feel (that paranoia may be manageable, and, even if one has fallen down a tunnel, there may be good things at the bottom), and perhaps best done with another song, ‘Male Version of me’, which ends, a little disbelievingly, with the words ‘Perfect for me’.

In every good sense, Gabby Young is and has the true and unselfish energy of a real entertainer, and her talented Animals and she will surely go on to please others wherever they are heard.


And here is a review of the band at Bristol Harbour Festival...



End-notes

* The one on the official web site, www.gabbyyoungandotheranimals.com has that stripy, Yellow Submarine sort of atmosphere.


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Images pierce our consciousness

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24 June

Piercing Brightness (2013) gives a leading role to Preston, known, amongst other things, as a railway interchange in Lancashire. Another two things that it is apparently known for is the largest population or density of Chinese people in the UK, and, probably unrelatedly, the highest incidence of reported UFOs. (I hesitate to suggest that the link may be that the former group give rise to the high number of sightings, but many an inferred causality has been based on as slender findings.)

Sufficient reason, one may suppose, to set a film concerned with extra-terrestrial life in this city. The resultant photography, around Preston’s buildings and in its natural environment, was strikingly beautiful, both in themselves and as suggestive of connections that were later made more evident. To be honest, too evident, and that mystery and beauty was swept aside in favour of a Doctor-Who-type plot-line and a race to the finish whose inexplicability could only be grounds for suspecting an opening for a sequel.

Though, honestly, they can spare their breath on selling us another one, as even a paper-thin rationale would not have us believe that an exploratory force on Earth would just have contented itself with knowing all about Lancashire, even if it did first arrive there, and then some members of that ‘Glorious 100’ (a bit too much as if something from Blake’s Seven ?) was assimilated in the population by having the facility to choose a human identity (and so, perhaps, become too enmeshed in Earth life (Park Life ?)).

If I wanted value for money from such a force, tasked with some nebulous aim of helping humankind evolve, I don’t think that I’d be content for them to ignore the rest of the planet and seek to achieve it from a former mill-town. Glorious 100, camped out in Preston when there is a world of culture and of forms of life, seems a bit like a rather feeble ill-thought-out given.

For, despite the words and images that we heard at a – forbidden – assembly of some of the hundred, nothing plausible was offered in explanation, when this was supposed to be the participants navel-gazing at what had become of their mission, when the obvious heckle would have been ‘Shouldn’t have started wearing clogs and keeping a whippet’ (with all due apologies for using that regional stereotype !)

When the plot was kept from being real, i.e. not riddled with the ‘Four thousand holes’ that The Beatles located nearby (in ‘A Day in the Life’), the film worked, with, for example, the curious pair in white (Jiang and Shin) rescued from being laughable as they strode across the square by the ever-circling presence of the hooded bikers, or their room, when they are first hosted by Naseer (, being whited out in an unnatural way. Sadly, maintaining intrigue was not part of Shezad Dawood’s purpose.

No, for it was for the gods from Mount Olympus to show their feet of clay by smoking, drinking, and, by smoking indoors, getting slung out. Slung out of a club that, if it had needed as many men on the door, might have had evidence of more than a smattering of fellow clubbers – unless this is deep social commentary on poverty and austerity, but that still doesn’t explain why a club would pay for a disproportionate level of security.

When this film tried too hard, with Chen Ko as Jiang swaggering or downing a large cocktail in one, one just engaged the thinking ‘This isn’t going to go well’, but did not really care, and, even then, not much happened, except his being the worse for wear. Likewise, when Warner (Paul Leonard) is chasing after Naseer with Maggie (Tracy Brabin) in the car, the pursuit is immaterial, because one does not know what he is seeking (or seeking to avoid).

And then, whether it was the aspect ratio of the copy or the projection, there was the issue with seeing the sub-titles, which first of all made it seem as if our duo was uttering the equivalent of figures to each other, and so it did not seem to matter what they were saying, whereas, when the first sub-title spanned two lines, the top line was legible – and earnest, but banal, in the way that seems to typify the communication of alien beings after the original Star Trek series. Jennifer Lim (Shin) did her best to invest her role with the moody character of a Servalan, but the trite nature of the dialogue, when looks were subverted by words, did for that pretence.

As the almost ever-present menace, though, the hooded bikers, because a purely visual element, provided tension and atmosphere, which scenes of Maggie and her colleague stumbling through thickets failed to deliver: ironically, the alien life, which – we were told at one point – had become so adapted to Earth that it had lost its true nature, is more striking when it just seems to be local youth amusing itself, whereas the scenes of supposed sightings lacked impact and any intensity.

At this level, the film did play with the question of whether we would recognize life from another world, if we saw it. However, Dawood and his writer Kirk Lake did so, generally, in a very clunky way, which made it seem to be trying no harder than Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973) in creating a futuristic world with which we are meant to engage:

In fact, take that back, because, in that early film, Allen and his collaborator Marshall Brickman have two outstanding inventive conceits in the orb and the orgasmatron, not to mention the automated operating-theatre, the hilarious spooling scene, the equally hilarious scene with the inflatable suit, and Allen himself masquerading as a domestic robot, and baulking when he finds out what happens at the mender’s...

If Piercing Brightness had had a tenth of that energy in the plot, characterization and dialogue to equal the strong visuals, it could have been immeasurably better and matched its opening promise !



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b

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28 June

Now, a TinyURL for this blog :

http://tinyurl.com/pvnmlbb



Have fub!


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Are you an escapee ?

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18 June 2013

Somehow the recognition of the desire to get away from the tosh that is most training, with its 'issues around' the issues that surround the real issues, is part of the culture, with so-called break-out groups...

Any or all of it is enough to make one wish that one could be an absentee, an escapee, but does either of those words make any sense ?

If I run, I am a runner, not a runnee : I am the one doing the running, not having - if that meant anything - it done to me. There are marshalls who make sure that runners, cyclists or whoever is racing knows where to go, but thankfully - as with steward - no one has coined a word for a person who has been marshalled.

Trust me on this : if not, you must read my whole posting Are you an attendee ?


OK, so why isn't the person who escapes from Stalag Luft IV an escaper, and why, when that person is not on parade for the next body-count, isn't he an absenter ? Someone wlse helped the officer escape, but he doesn't become a person who was escaped, as he did the escaping, and he is the one who is absent, because he is crouching behind a bush in Silesia until nightfall.

Absentee, attendee, escapee... There is no getting away from it, and I, at least, can see no more sense in it than calling an author a writee !


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How Time views After Hours (1985)

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1 June

This story had to be told - one way or another, although it was written for New Empress Magazine's issue (number 10), with the theme of Time in cinema, it resisted inclusion.

Finished, it would have looked at Eraserhead (1977) and seen whether Brazil and After Hours (1985) were both indebted to Lynch, but had gone in different directions with it (a bit like particles flying out from a sub-atomic collision)...


In late 1983, there proved not to be the sustainable will – or, with it, the money – for Martin Scorsese to make The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which he had also insisted had to be shot in Israel (adding to the cost). As he says in Scorsese on Scorsese (Faber & Faber, London, 1996 (updated version)), he sublimated his rage at the studio for thinking Christ ‘not worth the trouble’ (as Barry Diller at Paramount told him, apologizing for not saying before that they were pulling the plug) : he looked around for another film to make.

Not being able to see himself make either, Scorsese turned down Beverly Hills Cop (1984) and Witness (1985), and so ended up, again, in the world of independent film with After Hours and, ultimately, with Fassbinder’s cameraman, Michael Ballhaus. Before then, a few things happened on the way…

In New York, Scorsese got to see a script that he liked. It was owned (i.e. they had the film option) by Griffin Dunne (Dunne played Paul Hackett, the male lead) and Amy Robinson (who had appeared in Mean Streets (1973), and was, with Dunne, a co-producer of After Hours). In his own words, Scorsese started reading it and really liked the first two or three pages. I liked the dialogue […].

This is where things got interesting, because Scorsese had apparently been told that it had been written by Joseph Minion in a class at Columbia University (and been given an A in the Graduate Film Program), whereas that seems not to have been the whole story.

Even I, as a fourteen-year-old, learnt the basic rules of plagiarism : even if others had not also decided to lift material for their essay from the introduction to our edition of Julius Caesar, which made ‘the borrowing’ obvious, one could not simply pass off something as one’s own, and had to cover one’s tracks. (Either that, or acknowledge one’s sources, of course*.)

In this case, as blogger Andrew Hearst reveals (linked from the film’s Wikipedia page), there was a radio monologue called Lies, written, performed and broadcast by one Joe Frank for NPR Playhouse in 1982. On Hearst’s blog, it can be heard in full, and runs to around 11 minutes, providing the broad synopsis for around the first one-third of After Hours.

One might just about be able to listen to it and not be spot the relation to After Hours if one had not seen it recently: were it not, that is, that bagel-and-cream-cheese paperweights made of plaster of Paris are a bit of a give-away (even if a five-dollar bill flying out of the cash-cradle, and through the window, of a taxi and leaving Hackett without cash is not already). Where I cannot agree with Hearst, because what he writes does not take account of how screenplays get written and end up in production, is what he makes of the evidence.

Hearst writes ‘Minion’s IMDb credits are pretty thin after the early 1990s, so his career seems to have been really hurt by this, no surprise’. It is, of course, an easy assumption to make, but do we know that Minion was credited with the screenplay as the (willing ?) fall guy for someone else’s theft of the plot, because there appears to be nothing against which to check the story about the screenplay and the Columbia course ?

The real mystery is that anyone would attempt to pass off Lies in the guise of After Hours without changing some very significant details, some of the more obvious of which have been mentioned. Is it, so we are being encouraged to understand Minion, that we have to imagine him inexperienced and greedy, and so getting himself a bad name by miring the picture in the litigation that Hearst talks about ?

I have not looked for evidence of the court case, not just because it is so long ago (and I would not know where to look), but also since, if there had been an out-of-court settlement, only the fact of the case’s existence, which we probably suppose, would have been apparent. Scorsese, of course, makes no mention of the issue in interview, and even the injured Frank, according to Hearst, was being reticent to name the film that paid him off.

All that we have to hope is that he got a good settlement, because, comparing his performance and the film, it is all there, right down to the characterization of Rosanna Arquette (as Marcy), whom Hearst described as ‘interested and indifferent at the same time’. As for what happened to Minion, there seems to be a bigger elephant in the room than that :

Dunne makes a perfectly good, nervy Hackett, and the film gets good ratings on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes, but, looking at Dunne’s career and judging it from IMDb’s page for him, he seems to have achieved more as director and producer than the rather bitty parts and t.v. work on the other side of the camera.

Yes, things happen - or do not happen - in a career quite unfairly, and maybe After Hours, as the Rotten Tomatoes figures show, had the critical appraisal, but insufficient popular appeal, to allow Dunne to move on from there.

Or maybe there was no moving on from a persecution-complex character such as Hackett, hounded by highly organized vigilantes within hours of visiting the area, giving off signals of being attractive to women, but dangerous, and ending the film dusty and dazed back at the office where he began it.

The all-too-often quoted opening words of ‘Burnt Norton’ from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets – which lose significance out of context – have a place here, in looking at what, if I am not mistaken, is a film directed by Scorsese that made too little impact on its release :

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.


I have not seen Dunne in anything else, but I am grateful to him for wanting to get this film made and being Paul Hackett, and I am sure that others will be for what he has produced or directed since.


End-notes

* Which I do not think that the film credits do with an even bigger theft, that of a story by Franz Kafka that he incorporated into the scene in the Cathedral in his unfinished novel The Trial (Der Prozess), where Josef K. is told a parable about the law, Vor dem Gesetz (Before the Law). The story is lifted straight into the film in the context of the bouncers to the club that Hackett needs to enter, and it feeds into the film's uneasy quality of persecution, witch-hunt and - although Dunne is not Jewish - maybe anti-Semitism.


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Lad goes out / Lad gets laid

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2 June (updated 4 June)

My e-mail accounts will not talk to Varsity.

At any rate, the following comment, which I sought to add to what Hannah Wilkinson has written, has to reside here because of such lack of dialogue :


This piece is almost entirely predicated on the idea that there is, specifically in Britain (at whose universities students come from all over the world) and as if no men of other nationalities might do what is contended for as usual, 'a lad culture' that somehow dictates conformity. This is said numerous times, in different ways, but it is hard to see how this Alfie-like notch-on-the-bedpost 'culture' of conquest is universally true or, even if it were, what the mechanism is for having reached that point.

The supposition, because the article goes on to make a link with rape, is that women do not also go out 'in packs' and do not seek or engage in one-off sexual acts with men who were strangers before the night in question. If women, coupled with drinking large quantities of alcohol, are doing this - as they give every impression of doing - then what makes the 'culture' actually 'a lad culture', when women are looking for and doing the same thing as a way of 'having a good time' ?

The writer thinks that something is being unpicked and described. In fact, the lazy assumptions of the terminology and of how things are however they are means that the piece needs unpicking as to what is mere conformity itself to a way of picturing the world that bears no better relation to reality than 'a one-night stand' to a loving and understanding sexual and emotional relationship.


Post-script

I now see that Nick Badman Brittlebank, who is ranked (somewhere) as a Top Commenter (and appears to be Dogs body at Rohilla B&B), has added the following :


"Not only in the sense that obviously normalising sexually violent language and being slaves to a pack mentality can lead to potentially dangerous situations"

There were some legitimate points made in this article but this wasn't one of them. It's wildly implausible to suggest there's some causal relationship between 'sexually violent language', which could include describing an innocuous sexual act with violent language for effect, and rape.

I find 'lad' culture annoying because it's obnoxious, and I reject it because I think I can express my masculinity without being obnoxious. But I don't think 'lad' culture is dangerous. Writing a moralising article about the dangers of banter paints it as something other than an irritation and is just going to further alienate people who think that feminism is, itself, an irritation. If you don't like 'lads' then don't associate yourself with them, and certainly don't have sex with them. They're not 'imposing a conformity' on anyone- you don't have to speak to anyone you don't want to speak to or conform to any standard you don't like. It honestly is that simple.


I cannot do more than quote Nick here, as Varsity requires me to have the Arsebook account that I vow never to open, and I cannot much diasgree with how he has framed his riposte.


Thoughts, anyone... ?



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The girl on the train

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2 June

England & Wales is a separate legal jurisdiction from Scotland, with its own laws, courts, Acts of Parliament.

It used to be said, in the early 1990s, that it was a principle of the law of England & Wales that, if one saw a child drowning in a puddle of water (i.e. one could intervene and save him or her without hurting oneself), one was under no obligation to prevent it happening.

I have no idea whether that is still so, and, of course, the law assumed the legal fiction of a stranger, whereas a parent would owe different duties. Curious that Lord Denning was at pains to point out the Biblical origins of the law, but this inhumane example showed otherwise, a callous version of the travellers who went by on the other side of the road in the parable of the so-called good Samaritan (the whole point of the parable was to answer the question Who is my neighbour ?, duties to whom some were seeking to avoid).

At any rate, a child standing and playing on the lap of a woman (who turned out to be her grandmother) was taking too much interest in the nearby open window, one of those narrow ones that flaps down at the top of a larger pane. I kept conceiving of her fingers being in the way if the violent wake of an intercity train passing caused the window to snap shut, or, as she seemed to be doing at one point, of pushing it shut it on her own hand with the help of turbulence.

After we stopped at one station and some hesitation, I felt that I couldn't stand back in the face of what might happen, and, if it did happen, would be deeply damaging to a young child and her fingers, so I approached the woman and, prefacing my remark with the wish that I hoped I wasn't interfering, shared my fears. She then shared them with the girl, and urged the reluctant girl to wave to the man (she never did, but she smiled).

If I'd been asked why, or thanked too much, I'd have said that I would hope that anyone would do the same, even in the keep-myself-to-myself days of train travel when we look at each other and pretend that we haven't, etc.

But I do hope that, that anyone else, seeing the risk, might have dared say something, and have thought nothing special of wanting to avoid a harm to the livelihood of a young life.

Later, after a tiring walk in which I was pulling a case on its wheels, I was kindly offered a lift to the village where the driver also lived. I do not see that, as some would, as karma, but the two were clearly related as acts of care for another.


If such kindnesses happened all the time, would we need to think of talking of karma ?


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Censored by The Indy ?

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31 May

I think that it was to The Great Gatsby review: Long, gaudy and flawed, but there is much to admire in Baz Luhrmann’s stonking lack of subtlety that I tried to add a comment.

I added it once or twice more, still 'awaiting moderation', and have now recalled that I still have it, so here it is :


This review is not alone in finding what I interpret as 'a mess' in this film, yet a seemingly 'compelling one' :

It sounds as if the film's 'all-over-the-placeness' should just be an absolute irritation, yet it isn't. (However, are critics indulging in this release a quality in the shower-singer story-line in To Rome with Love (2012) that they too easily dismissed, whereas, for me, Allen gave a potent parody of the type of excesses to which operatic direction and staging - let alone Hollywood films - are prone ?)

I'm going to err on the side that what I have been dubbing 'The Great Fatsby' is irritating, and not bother, because, with any number of reviewers having pointed out different out-of-whack features, not one of those is going to fail to jar - all at once and cumulatively.

I don't recall anyone drawing attention to what length this feature runs to (so probably it in no way drags), but I was even unimpressed the other day by hearing an allegedly 1920s-style number with Bryan Ferry, whose Roxy Music always sounded lively and jazzy anyway - I don't choose to spend time or the premium on a 3D film that possibly might as well be Marvel or Manga as F. Scott, because, although it may be classier than many of its 'blockbuster' peers, what worth does it have in (hypothetical) absolute terms ?

I know how I felt with On the Road (2012), which may have been doing its best to render Kerouac on screen, but left me wondering Why have bothered ?


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The Mysteries of @hullodave...

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1 June

In the same way as we refer to very small things as microscopic, perhaps we should refer to far away things as telescopic.
— Dave Steele (@hullodave) May 31, 2013

"Dougal, these cows are microscopic. Those cows are telescopic." Actually forget the previous tweet.
— Dave Steele (@hullodave) May 31, 2013

Of course, @hullodave means it as a joke, for humorous effect, but he is right, of course, that the words folding umbrella and telescopic umbrella are synonymous, thereby concentrating on the incidental fact that one cylinder (or more) slides within another (or others) to allow the focus to be adjusted, rather than on the actual purpose of making distant things more visible for which the device was invented.

A feature of his nonsense verse, Lewis Carroll used the word portmanteau to describe a word with more than one meaning present, for example the opening line of 'Jabberwocky' :

'Twas brilling and the slithy toves


Two words (I won't say which) entered the English language because of this poem alone. Carroll's mind would have seen perfectly, and condemned in his child friends, how viewing telescopically was being confused with the mechanical properties of the telescope itself : he had an odium for muddled thinking of the kind identified by Dave Steele.

However, if I have a rifle with a telescopic sight, it is clear enough and right that the sight has the properties of a telescope, seeing accurately over a greater distance than would be possible without it.

With 'microscopic', the meaning of the word has been blurred in other ways, meaning no longer literally what is rendered visible (or more clearly) by using a microscope - a scornful patron could well nowadays condemn a microscopic salad, so the connection with the viewing instrument has just been lost in the hyperbole of calling something small.

Though Dave's follow-up Tweet is hard to construe, he must have been gazing on some wee coos during his recent Scottish jaunt to come up with this whimsy. One hopes...


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Report from Beverley Early Music Festival – Chapel and Tavern with Vivien Ellis and The Carnival Band

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30 May

As a fellow festival-goer agreed, we had not seen the attraction of the option of the venue of ‘the tavern’ (Beverley’s The Angel) first – and also that, if matters had ended with just the Chapel (though it had, again, been open to book just that venue’s part of the evening), it would have been a fairly sombre end to things, despite Charles Wesley’s fervent hopes.

For little that was sung was not setting Wesley’s texts, and he was not born until 1707 (and died when he was 80). So the first promised century or more of music from 1616 onwards – the year of Shakespeare’s death – was left to be represented by Thomas Butts’ reworking of Henry Purcell for ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’, and a traditional English tune for Bunyan’s ‘Who would true valour see’, which had apparently been collected by Vaughan Williams. (There was also a text early on of Isaac Watts, ‘Rejoice, ye shining worlds’. Settings of Wesley after his death accounted for extending the scope to the beginning of the Victorian era.)

The thinking may have been that Toll Gavel, as a United Reformed Church, suited this music better than music from the Anglican orthodoxy – and I have no notion whether former Methodist chapels were converted to use by that denomination, although it seems not unlikely.

In any case, though we had been urged to join in, if we knew the words, the hymn-books contained many of these Wesleyan ones, and there might have been greater participation, if this had been pointed out. I suspect that those books would have gone quite outside the chapel tradition, and therefore that the impression of music that we gained was not one that reflected the non-conformist tradition in which we were silently being asked to locate ourselves.

The performers arrived looking a little footweary (they had already done a tavern slot), but donned less brightly coloured garb, including a complete change for Vivien Ellis into a stretchy black number – and, when she re-emerged, the redness of her nose and mouth made me consider the possibility that she had had need to resort to a menthol remedy. (The others all had black jackets, with a stylish double-breasted top-jacket for Jub Davis (on double bass).) However, it may have worked – or I may have been mistaken – for there was no sign that her voice was lacking in power, and, when the men sang as well (in one case, with (I think) ‘Come all ye mourning pilgrims’, on their own), there were some agreeable harmonies.

When those of us watching did sing, as a quiet background to the performance, it added to the experience, but it was rather hard to be sure what that was : we knew that these were not concert-pieces, but also that this was not worship (and, as I have suggested, that this was a deliberate limitation to ‘chapel-type’ music), and, for me, that meant that I did not know where I felt myself to be. That said, there was an enthusiasm, even a fervour, that made this not simply performance.

Interspersed in the proceedings, Vivien Ellis nicely read a Thomas Hardy poem, ‘A Church Romance’, about how his parents allegedly met as the result of a glance exchanged in church, and Steve Banks ‘a sermon’ in the form of admonitions and exhortations of Wesley regarding sacred music, many of which parishioners would well heed : for example, not singingly too slowly, and trying to sing together.

I believe that we showed that his urging had had an effect on us as we joined in Bunyan’s hymn, and so closed ‘the first part’ – since it seemed a good idea, my companion pilgrim and I were out quickly and on foot to the tavern, not so much in the spirit of Till in heaven we take our place, as in the roofed-over beer-garden.


Getting there for a seat under the influence of a patio-heater was a distinct bonus (possible evidence that the troupe had been chilled earlier – along with the fact that, in this half, Vivien Ellis mainly kept a body-warmer on over her dress), as also was being able to join a short queue at the bar.

Here, the sound was amplified, and, in addition to the bag-pipes (played by Andy Watts), we were treated to rounds, some topical, and two from the seventeeth century. Here is my one of them that I liked best :

Beverley ale !
Where, where, where ?
In the blacksmith’s house.
I would I were there.


Also fun was :

A boat, a boat, haste to the ferry !
For we’ll go over to be merry
And laugh and sing and drink old sherry.


We also had a spirited rendition of O that I had but a fine man by Pelham Humfrey, in which Vivien Ellis took delight both in finding in the audience ‘a spicy one’, and showing how If I die, I die, in the true guise of an operatic diva.

Elsewhere, two more sensitive numbers in ‘An thou were my ain thing’ and, in ‘A blacksmith courted me’, one of her oft-performed ones.

We ended with two numbers from the volume Wit and Mirth or Pills to Purge Melancholy, a suitable title for this music, which, concentrating on ‘Old Simon the King’. All in all, a good and lively collection of tunes to round off the evening !


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Report from Cheltenham Jazz Festival - Double bill with Roller Trio and Polar Bear

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23 May

I have tried to write this up before my recollections fade further... they have faded far enough...


Roller Trio comprises tenor sax, electric bass and drums, and they play with an assurance that cannot just come from knowing their material, but also from the unshowy musicality that seems to be the group’s ethos. Not that one will not be impressed by James Mainwaring’s riffs or the funky depths that Luke Wynter conjures up, but it is all of a piece from three guys (the third being drummer Luke Reddin-Williams), whose main aim clearly is to make music, rather than deliver solos.

In a way, we were spoilt to have a fifty-minute set from the trio and then one from quintet Polar Bear, but it did mean that certain things had to be left unexplored, and that neither band, knowing that they had to wind down early, could get into a seventy-five-minute groove.

Not that that came over in the trio's playing, but it probably limited their ambitions for what they could share - which is where I come back to saying that one had to regard this as a good chance to hear both bands. And I know that Roller Trio took the opportunity to do just that with Polar Bear, and then, because they were staying in the same hotel, had a chance to talk later.

It was nice, @rollertrio, to be where the likes of @polarbear_uk and you were spending the night !
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 7, 2013

It was the right way around to have Roller Trio first, as their sassy and less-extended numbers made an interesting contrast with the electro-acoustic sound-world that followed, of drawn-out and flexible sections, and with the thrill of two tenor saxes (Mark Lockheart, Pete Wareham) playing off each other.

Roller Trio seemed @bbcjazzon3, but Polar Bear more like @bbcradio3's Late Junction - perhaps @imaxreinhardt ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2013

Seb Rochford, drummer and the band’s almost self-deletingly frontman, introduced the three pieces that they had time for with a highly tentative wish that the audience ‘might feel something’. In my case, I had the sense of free navigation around structures that allowed saxes, electronics (Leafcutter John), bass (Tom Herbert) and drums to fit into their place and move around in them.


I am left hoping to see the bands again, maybe hear them on the radio before then, and to look into some of their recordings...

Favourite five events (unranked) from #cheltjazzfest : @cmartinjazz, Troyk-estra, Barbacana, Roller Trio / Polar Bear, Ravi Coltrane Quintet
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 6, 2013

Both have web-sites, which are linked to Roller Trio (@RollerTrio) and Polar Bear (@polarbear_uk) for you


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Report from Beverley Early Music Festival - Trevor Pinnock

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25 May

Trevor Pinnock gave a solo harpsichord recital this lunchtime, which he clearly enjoyed immensely, and which led up to Bach's great Partita No. 4 in D Major, BWV 828, and even - unusually for the festival - two encores.

The programme had been constructed around the loose idea of the composers whom Spaniard Antonio de Cabezón would have encountered in his travels with his royal employer, in Britain and on the continent, and his own compositions were represented by the enchanting short variations Differencias sobre el canto del Caballero, with the notes on the pieces speculating that meeting de Cabezón, and learning about his music, may have inspired Tallis and Byrd to use variation form.

Byrd's The Bells, which we know from The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, was masterfully delivered by Pinnock, and the very occasional off note could not take away from the expressiveness and energy of his performance. He played it as a group with pieces by Tallis and John Bull (also from the Fitzwilliam collection) : the text which 'O ye tender babes' sets is not known, but it was very tender, and the third piece combined inventiveness with a variety of moods and impulses, which Pinnock brought out beautifully.

Further connections are these : Bull knew Sweelinck, who was the forerunner in the North German school of organ to its great son Bach, and Bach had the score of Frescobaldi's Fiori musicali in his library, whose Balletti I and II (from another collection) Pinnock played his next. He said that, to general amusement, that although no one knows what a balletto, this is definitely one. He also described the movements as sometimes just being seconds of music (which should have put me in mind of Webern), and they combined melodic variation with very different styles of music, which derive from dance-forms.

Playing from scores, Pinnock nevertheless showed in the subtlety of his interpretation that he knew them very, very well. It was clear that he had an intimate sense of how, musically, the movements belonged together and informed each other, particularly in the Partita, whose Ouverture he not only engaged with at the level of its structure and what was to follow, but also in the detail of phrasing, the interplay of the voices, and of sound quality and texture.

The delicacy of the Aria was heartfelt, because Pinnock grounded his playing in it and its tender emotions, and its feeling nourished the unfolding of the remaining movements, especially the towering Gigue with which the Partita concludes. The audience's applause was unceasing, and kept bringing the harpsichordist back onto the stage.

Closing with a piece by Henry Purcell (a keyboard miniature of an aria from King Arthur ?) and Scarlatti's Sonata in E Major, K. 380, we had, in mircrocosm again, the deft command over the rhythmic and emotional detail that had been the essence of Pinnock's playing. A delightful concert that left many a warm smile behind.


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The mome-rath sings

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17 May

It may be evident to outsiders that I follow Lucy Sixsmith's blog, Mome Raths and Mended Rhymes.

Very modestly, in a recent posting and the present one (Not Being A Poet (Again) : Not NaPoWriMo), Lucy has suggested that she was unsuccessful with the suggestion to write a poem in each of April's thirty days for National Poetry Writing Month.

However, I very much like the (sequence of ?) eight resultant poems, and how they evoke what I understand to have been a time in the last year or so in Moscow, and will read them again at a more leisurely pace - but, as I have commented, they do draw one in !


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Why we should listen to Cloud Atlas (2012)…

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16 May

I begin with some Tweets :

A change in paradigm in MH is a threat to the purveyors of disease research and pill practitioners, how do the powerful react when anxious?
— Steven Coles (@Steven_Coles_) May 16, 2013

@theagentapsley I'm good, but tired. But I'm now somewhat scared by the meat eating piggies!

— Steven Coles (@Steven_Coles_) May 16, 2013

Maybe, @barackobama, but Asimov and others wrote about The Greenhouse Effect DECADES ago - was it just OK on other Planets ?! #Ostriches

— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 16, 2013

Next on the blog : Barack Obama, political timorousness, BSE, Animal Farm, and the messages of Cloud Atlas (2013)
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 16, 2013

Thesis : Any good ‘literature’, something that – in the broadest sense – we can just read, or choose to read deeply in, yields understanding.

It could be Measure for Measure, about which Peter Brook spoke last night (in conversation with @DrMatthewSweet on @bbcNightWaves). Brook’s right about its depths, of course : it’s a play that I haven’t thought about in a long time, but, with its shady Duke, shadier Angelo, dubious Friar, and its Isabella, who wrestles with accepting how the world is to save her brother Claudio, it has heaps to tell us about our own time(s) !


Significant interjection Stuff the people who, intellectually*, reject the term ‘emotional intelligence’ – being truly understanding about the emotional life of ourselves and of this world is a form of intelligence, that some scorn to own, lack, or haven’t learnt to use !

They are the ones who fail to employ the patent wisdom of Pascal’s wager, because they wrongly think it only relevant to belief in God through Jesus Christ : such is not just emotional ignorance, but intellectual suicide through philistinism. At school, geography (and my reading in Asimov and the like) told me all about The Population Explosion and The Greenhouse Effect.

Years later, how can politicians** tell us that this has become a problem, when (for example) US Presidents have quite deliberately ignored the truth for years : the truth being, not whether climate change is or is not a reality, but that – in accordance with the wager – one has to act / believe, because, if one doesn’t, it will be too late by the time that one’s scepticism is proved wrong.

Why didn’t those Presidents act ? Sheer political self-interest in the face of the car lobby, i.e. the manufacturers, drivers, gasoline merchants, petrochemical industries, geologists, and all those who propel the resistant forces against change or invest (financially, emotionally or intellectually) in the status quo. With four-year Presidential terms, who was going to screw their hopes or those of their party ?

You’re gonna miss that train, if you don’t leave now. Who speculates on the possibility of supraluminal travel to get him or her to the station as the train is parting ? Who except abusers, crudely put, fuck their children’s and other generations’ future by selfish inaction to retain power ?

The message of Cloud Atlas, of (at the heart of the film) Sonmi-451, played beautifully and with great inner sensitivity by Doona Bae, opposes such greed, such mean-spiritedness, such lack of human-kindness. We need cultural messages such as this one to overcome our base, venial and mean-minded inclinations and to look to the interests of others – whoever they may be, seen or unseen…


End-notes

* And do so on the level of Intellectual Intelligence, i.e. little better than Mental Masturbation, the game that we can all play with reality : good sex is an escape from how terrifying life can be, in my view, and masturbation (when only bad or no sex presents itself) is, as Woody Allen’s script for Annie Hall (1977) has it, ‘sex with the person I love [most / best].

And, people who knocked To Rome with Love (2012), is the failure and condemnation of the Nazi-styled opera vindication of his lovely parody in the guy who can only sing well in the shower ?!


** Arguably, rooted only in getting re-elected, not frightening the frail and frightenable electorate with awkward truths that might have them do things differently, which they don’t want, of course.



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Me and Theresa May

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15 May

Here is a response to part of what Theresa May is reported as having said (in @guardian) :


THEAGENTAPSLEY

15 May 2013 3:51pm

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I believe all these proposals will make a real difference to police officers on the ground. But ultimately police officers need the assurance that vulnerable people with mental health problems will be dealt with by health and social care services, not the police.

Not for the first time, a Secretary of State not knowing what he or she is talking about :

If a person is 'liable to be detained' (i.e. before formally taken to a psychiatric unit, or having 'absconded'), or someone enters premises under s. 135 Mental Health Act 1983, the police have the specific job of, in some cases, of 'conveying' the person liable to be detained to the unit, but anyway of bringing back absconders and breaking into premises.

In fact, the police are all over the 1983 Act - talking about s. 136 is just the usual knee-jerk, ill-thought-out rash promise of change in the hope of not doing anything (much) before the General Election, and just because of having to in the light of the Adebowale report.


An average of 11 deaths per year just for The Met is shocking. However, does anyone care about the routine level of deaths on in-patient units ? :

It would be helpful to have some figures cited for this rate of mortality, if collated figures exist (Care Quality Commission ?), before assuming that (a) this is simply a problem of the police (with s. 136) having to do what they shouldn't do, or (b) is less mismanaged by 'health and social services', or that those services' practices are any better than those of The Met...


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The efficacy of what are called Community Treatment Orders (CTOs) - The Agent comments

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15 May

I added this comment the other day to this, a report on the @Mental_Elf web-site (by Kathryn Walsh) called Community treatment orders fail to reduce psychiatric readmissions for people with psychosis :


One of the criteria for the trial is said to be ‘capacity to give consent’.

I wonder whether this is ‘a red herring’, if the seeming legal niceties of ‘putting someone’ (as it is often put) on a Community Treatment Order (CTO) are not actually observed.


From professional experience*, I believe that the legal opinion has been expressed that it is possible under Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended), and without a patient ‘applying for’ it, for him or her to be given section 17 leave to, say, a care home or a non-NHS specialist unit. (I am thinking of someone on s. 3.)

In theory, if hospital authorities needed to, ‘reasonable force’ could be used to oblige him or her to go. Forget how ‘untherapeutic’ that is, because the general regime of psychiatric units (e.g. locked wards, compulsion as to ‘treatment’ under the Act – usually an injection, and the dehumanizing environment and attitudes) can hardly be conceived of as therapeutic – or, when it is not that, it is cajoling, coercing, wheedling and blackmailing to seek (a form of) compliance.


Almost certainly, someone whose consideration for a CTO is ‘triggered’ by the Act (e.g. by application or referral to a First-Tier Tribunal, or at the time of contemplating s. 17 leave) will have been plenty depersonalized and demoralized by all of this already, before one even gets in sniffing distance of a formal meeting ‘to consider’ the Order.

Where the Principle of Least Restraint then (not least if no one cannot work out whether it is the CTO regime or that of s. 17, including the example that I gave above, that amounts to least restraint) ?


Patients who have already been brutalized by a place such as I describe (and will typically lack self-confidence and self-esteem), even if formally given the choice to consent to an Order [I understand that they aren't actually 'Orders', and the question of consent is more honoured 'in the breach', I gather], have no obvious reason to say No, when it means that they can go home.

(I believe that anyone would snatch at going home, whatever they are asked to agree to, because he or she (wrongly, I think, because not informed) assumes that it is that, or staying put.)

No reason obvious to the patients, then. If they were properly and independently advised as to (a) being able to say No, and (b) What, if they did say No, would be the Responsible Clinician’s (RC’s) options then, the position might be different :

If the RC cannot secure agreement from the patient to meet the conditions that are sought and / or the Approved Mental Health Professional (AMHP) won’t countermand the Order, there is still a position to fall back onto, i.e. s. 17 leave, or even discharge (since there no longer is supervised discharge).


But how many patients oppose a CTO ? How many think – more relevantly, are told – what happens, if they state openly that they will not comply with the conditions, rendering the notion of putting them on an Order ‘dead in the water’ ?

The RC has beds ‘to unblock’, considering a CTO is forced by certain events, but, if the patient is patently saying No, what will the RC do ?


So an Order is effectively dangled, and capacity to consent is really falsified : the patient is not allowed to weigh up whether to agree to the conditions for a CTO in compliance with the test under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (as amended) simply because he or she is almost certainly not given the full information, which, if he or she had, could be understood and applied.

In truth, I think that the real scenario of a CTO coming about is having huge debts, but being marched down to a bank and told that you need a personal loan from that specific bank.


So not told any safeguards, e.g. that :

(a) the bank can advise only on its own products, and there may be other products

(b) even if the borrower won the Lotto that night and could pay back the loan, interest is charged up front;

(c) there are arrangement fees;

(d) the Bank of Mum and Dad is only too willing to help out, etc., etc.


Such a transaction, if challenged, wouldn’t stand up to the Financial Services Authority (FSA). For me, the way that CTOs are ‘secured’ is no better, but there is no adequate FSA, and patients affected are unlikely to have recourse to one, because they just ‘wanted to go home’.



End-notes

* There is a little more about that experience here in relation to mental health advocacy.


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