More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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23 January
Fascinated by Martin Clunes taking the lead in remaking Reggie Perrin (i.e. The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin), I have conceived a project where he would re-create the role of Edmund in Blackadder the Second. (It may, for the sake of completeness, be released in the boxed set, but who gives a hang about The Black Adder? – after that, it’s a miracle that we ever got the BBC fund any other series!)
The supporting cast is as follows:
Percy – Neil Morrissey*
Baldrick – Bob Mortimer
Melchett – Paul Merton
Nursie – Jo Brand
Flashheart – Vic Reeves
Yes, you have spotted an important omission – I just cannot cast anyone better to play Queenie than the original Miranda Richardson (and don't even try suggesting that other Miranda!).
And so the whole plan may fail (unless I persuade Bill Bailey that he does look good in a frock)…
* My first instinct had been - for some reason - Dylan Moran, but Clunes' old on-screen flatmate seemed a better proposition: not that I'm typecasting.
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Sunday, 22 January 2012
Saturday, 21 January 2012
Woody, the alleged Augustan
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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21 January
His first new humour collection in over 25 years
So says the front of the dust-jacket of Mere Anarchy, but it might have done better to say:His first new prose collection in over 25 years
This eulogy (taken from the inside of the jacket) by The Daily Telegraph is pretty far fetched:
If Allen had lived in Augustan England[,] scholars would now be considering him alongside Dyden, Pope and Swift.
If Allen had lived in Augustan England[,] scholars would now be considering him alongside Dyden, Pope and Swift.
So, John Dyden (1631 - 1700) was a poet (but also a dramatist, critic, and translator of Virgil), Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744) was another poet, and also made and published translations of the classics (as well as making an edition of Shakespeare's works), and Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745), although he was a poet, is best remembered for his prose satires, his political pamphleteering, and his essays (e.g. A Modest Proposal).
Am I alone in missing where Allen would obviously have fitted in, when all three are poets (whereas I have never, to my knowledge, seen any poem of Allen's), and Dyden was even Poet Laureate, with Pope (when in fashion) celebrated in society for his verse?
This Augustan period, even if scholars did agree about its duration (Pope had no opportunity to know Dryden, because of their dates), strikes me as a time not obviously suited to Allen's humour and insights - and they certainly do not, by and large, come out in the eighteen allegedly 'witty, wild and intelligent pieces' that the dust-jacket claims describes the contents of Mere Anarchy.
And why, when he is such a successful film director, who has given the world wonders enough, does such an assertion need making about Allen?
The quality of that directorial work far exceeds that of the best of these pieces!
Trailer for Resident Evil: Retribution
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 January
* Contains spoilers *
Oh no, what should have been the response to the first film, the audience retribution of avoiding any more of it, has become a self-fulfilling title for film no. 5!
After I had caught up with the original film, I took the trouble to hear these people (Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, and their co-stars, plus the writer, producers, set and costume designer, Marilyn Manson and his collaborator on the score, etc.) talk up what didn't need it, as I'd already got the DVD by then, and had seen the fruit of their labour**.
(But it's not a Digital Versatile Disc for nothing - why do we have to have its versatility (it makes a great frisbee, too?) hidden in the acronym DVD, when most people reasonably imagine it to stand for 'Video' anyway?: or is the the videodisc still a patented, if aged, format?)
The only truth in any of it was - although (for someone with no knowledge of the pre-existing videogame) it was fascinating to hear how they had tried to replicate its cult world in order not to disappoint the potential fan-base - when Jovovich, as some might say, cut to the chase and said how great it was, because you could watch her half-naked in a mini-dress, much of the time soaking wet, too.
She went on to stress how important it was to be able to see her legs in the action scenes, and, true enough, we did see her break the neck of one of the living dead between her naked thighs. Probably all of this and the origin in the game explain her costume, as little suitable as Lara Croft's is as a tomb-raider, but I still do not know what it was meant to be:
Boots, for sure; then the mini-dress, with a hem on the slant; and then what covers Jovovich's modesty - at least for the majority of the film - in the form of some sort of pair of shorts. But why does the shorts' purple colour have to be so at variance, such a clash, with the bright red of the dress (don't ask me about scarlet or crimson - I haven't a clue)?
What woman, after all, seeing that outfit laid out on a bed and not knowing who she is or how she got there (just that she appears to have been showering and taken a fall), would think 'Oh, perfect - I'll wear that!', rather than 'By all means revealing, but why reveal these purple shorts?'?
Still, the video-game designers, probably 11-year-olds, covertly working on the first version at home after school, and being paid peanuts for their piecework, may not have had much visual sense, or have been under the direction of somebody with some form of colour-blindness, unable to tell that the shorts and dress, which were intended to be co-ordinated, were not in the work supplied to him / her...
* The beloved term 'theatrical trailer', as if we might be mistaking it for where Jovovich has been hanging out between takes! Fatally, she is married to the director, so she might be playing this role for the rest of her natural (as Anderson is also the writer, and, having been seen enthusing at length about his creation, convinces that he could easily generate another 23 screenplays!)...
** Perhaps they believe that there is still a rental market, for those not patient enough to wait for the item to stabilize to buy at a decent price - or perhaps they honestly believe that anyone watches the extras first, which (apart from the trailer*, which they didn't watch on the DVD) nobody does - or, more likely to be near the truth still, they make these featurettes to boost morale so the crew don't instead think 'Oh, God - another day of this mindless script!'.
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22 January
* Contains spoilers *
Oh no, what should have been the response to the first film, the audience retribution of avoiding any more of it, has become a self-fulfilling title for film no. 5!
After I had caught up with the original film, I took the trouble to hear these people (Milla Jovovich, Michelle Rodriguez, and their co-stars, plus the writer, producers, set and costume designer, Marilyn Manson and his collaborator on the score, etc.) talk up what didn't need it, as I'd already got the DVD by then, and had seen the fruit of their labour**.
(But it's not a Digital Versatile Disc for nothing - why do we have to have its versatility (it makes a great frisbee, too?) hidden in the acronym DVD, when most people reasonably imagine it to stand for 'Video' anyway?: or is the the videodisc still a patented, if aged, format?)
The only truth in any of it was - although (for someone with no knowledge of the pre-existing videogame) it was fascinating to hear how they had tried to replicate its cult world in order not to disappoint the potential fan-base - when Jovovich, as some might say, cut to the chase and said how great it was, because you could watch her half-naked in a mini-dress, much of the time soaking wet, too.
She went on to stress how important it was to be able to see her legs in the action scenes, and, true enough, we did see her break the neck of one of the living dead between her naked thighs. Probably all of this and the origin in the game explain her costume, as little suitable as Lara Croft's is as a tomb-raider, but I still do not know what it was meant to be:
Boots, for sure; then the mini-dress, with a hem on the slant; and then what covers Jovovich's modesty - at least for the majority of the film - in the form of some sort of pair of shorts. But why does the shorts' purple colour have to be so at variance, such a clash, with the bright red of the dress (don't ask me about scarlet or crimson - I haven't a clue)?
What woman, after all, seeing that outfit laid out on a bed and not knowing who she is or how she got there (just that she appears to have been showering and taken a fall), would think 'Oh, perfect - I'll wear that!', rather than 'By all means revealing, but why reveal these purple shorts?'?
Still, the video-game designers, probably 11-year-olds, covertly working on the first version at home after school, and being paid peanuts for their piecework, may not have had much visual sense, or have been under the direction of somebody with some form of colour-blindness, unable to tell that the shorts and dress, which were intended to be co-ordinated, were not in the work supplied to him / her...
* The beloved term 'theatrical trailer', as if we might be mistaking it for where Jovovich has been hanging out between takes! Fatally, she is married to the director, so she might be playing this role for the rest of her natural (as Anderson is also the writer, and, having been seen enthusing at length about his creation, convinces that he could easily generate another 23 screenplays!)...
** Perhaps they believe that there is still a rental market, for those not patient enough to wait for the item to stabilize to buy at a decent price - or perhaps they honestly believe that anyone watches the extras first, which (apart from the trailer*, which they didn't watch on the DVD) nobody does - or, more likely to be near the truth still, they make these featurettes to boost morale so the crew don't instead think 'Oh, God - another day of this mindless script!'.
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Supposedly, Holden makes 'brainless' dig at Brook
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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22 January
Nothing nicer than a link so entitled under a picture of the two ladies, smiling nicely enough together - shark-fins, the phantom menace beneath the unruffled surface...
I blogged yesterday (Allegedly, Katy Perry unfollows Russell) tangentially to a so-called story about so-called celebrities. What now has to be asked is:
If Amanda Holden actually had to make some public pronouncement that damns Kelly Brook (rather than, more easily, just allowing it to be put about that she did), who actually believes that said Kelly did not license her to do so, because it is part of some agreed way of trying to boost what they are now calling BGT (and / or their own presence* and careers)?
It would, at the very least, invite AOL users, about to sign in to get e-mail (which is where I saw it, and actually, for a change, knew who both people were), to take a look at what it's all about, and so show Huffington Post attracting readers into the bargain...
And 'BGT'? Doesn't that sound like a reworking of Roald Dahl and his BFG - or a beverage made out of three men who sang (probably still do) with high-pitched voices?
Or maybe the modern attention-span is so short that, just as British Oxygen Corporation thought plain BOC more sexy back in the 1980s (and, after all, they did capture and, under pressure, liquidize many other gases - still do), Britain's Got Talent had too many potential viewers glazing over.
Personally, I don't think it's that at all: all along, the programme has been open to misinterpretation between couples shouting out its name to each other as to what's on, but only now has research revealed the crucial and damaging mishearing, leading to the hostile response:
Oh, I know well enough this country's got that bastard - that's why I'd emigrate, if I could, to get away from his bloody millionaire suspense!'
* Why is it always 'media presence', when doesn't 'presence' say it all, when it is self evident that these people are present - or invisible - to the public?
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22 January
Nothing nicer than a link so entitled under a picture of the two ladies, smiling nicely enough together - shark-fins, the phantom menace beneath the unruffled surface...
I blogged yesterday (Allegedly, Katy Perry unfollows Russell) tangentially to a so-called story about so-called celebrities. What now has to be asked is:
If Amanda Holden actually had to make some public pronouncement that damns Kelly Brook (rather than, more easily, just allowing it to be put about that she did), who actually believes that said Kelly did not license her to do so, because it is part of some agreed way of trying to boost what they are now calling BGT (and / or their own presence* and careers)?
It would, at the very least, invite AOL users, about to sign in to get e-mail (which is where I saw it, and actually, for a change, knew who both people were), to take a look at what it's all about, and so show Huffington Post attracting readers into the bargain...
And 'BGT'? Doesn't that sound like a reworking of Roald Dahl and his BFG - or a beverage made out of three men who sang (probably still do) with high-pitched voices?
Or maybe the modern attention-span is so short that, just as British Oxygen Corporation thought plain BOC more sexy back in the 1980s (and, after all, they did capture and, under pressure, liquidize many other gases - still do), Britain's Got Talent had too many potential viewers glazing over.
Personally, I don't think it's that at all: all along, the programme has been open to misinterpretation between couples shouting out its name to each other as to what's on, but only now has research revealed the crucial and damaging mishearing, leading to the hostile response:
Oh, I know well enough this country's got that bastard - that's why I'd emigrate, if I could, to get away from his bloody millionaire suspense!'
* Why is it always 'media presence', when doesn't 'presence' say it all, when it is self evident that these people are present - or invisible - to the public?
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Merry birthday ! (2)
More views of – or after – Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 January
I have looked out Sir Gawain, and, after it opens vividly with lines describing the sacked Troy¹, it goes on to some schoolboy history about how one of the heroes' descendants, after they had dispersed with Troy in ruins and cinders, went on to found Britain² (named after him, Brutus, grandson of Æneas) – the key words being underlined in the text (which is in Middle English):
And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On many bonkkes full brode Bretayn he settles with wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysses and blunder
Ful skete has skyfted synne.
(lines 13–19)
(All terribly hard to learn (and forgotten now), but, for my degree and in alleged proof that we could translate from Middle English, I had to be able to render in modern English any passage from Gawain's first Book, and from a specified Book from each of Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde – no one knows who wrote Gawain, but it was then believed that it was the same poet who wrote Patience and Pearl (not to mention the snappily named Cleanness³, with all of which it appears in my edition.)
So, after the noble lineage of Britain's founder has been established, we go on, before the introduction of Arthur and his court at the end of the introduction, with a rather worrying couplet (lines 21–22) – unless you are a football thug – that, and I spare presenting a chunk of the original just now, tell how bold men were bred there (fair enough so far), but who loved fighting (baret that lofden) and made mischief (tene that wroghten) in many a troubled time. (It's just a guess, as it's a long time ago that I looked at this, but I doubt that 'mischief' has quite the right ring for that phrase.)
We have men who brawl and cause trouble, and then we have Arthur, in all the nobility of his person and of his court (lines 23–29). It is a time of marvels, and of stories long told with lel letteres loken (line 35), linked with true letters, as are the unmistakeable 'l' sounds of that phrase in this alliterative verse.
And then the story proper opens with these lines (in which I have highlighted the words that we can still easily recognize to-day, even if a line like the fifth might leave us cold – apart from spotting that the knights are doing something 'full many times'):
This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledes of the best,
Rekenly of the Rounde Table alle tho rich brether,
With rych revel oryght and rechles merthes.
They tournayed tulkes by tymes ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé thise gentyle knightes,
Sythen kayred to the court, caroles to make.
For ther the fest was ilyche ful fiften dayes,
With alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse[...]
(lines 37–45)
If you have ever seen the Douglas Fairbanks' take on Robin Hood, as I did at the Film Festival in September (in the magnficent setting of The Great Hall of Trinity College – and with Neil Brand's and his percussionist colleague's performance of his score for it for a solid two hours), then you may have a sense of the sort of tradition from which he got that notion of what the court of Richard I might have been like, with jousting and merry-making.
Which brings us on to this word 'mirth', which is there twice (once in a variant form) in this Christmas scene, with Christmas itself, it is to be noticed, not lasting twelve days, but fifteen. All that memorizing means that I had remembered something right, and the way that the word is used (certainly the second time) does suggest a richer meaning for the word than we have for it.
C. T. Onions, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology that he edited (my copy is from 1966), tells us that the word is from Old English, and gives a meaning, for the 13th century, of 'joy, happiness OE; rejoicing, gaiety'. The word has, then, already started to divide between what the Sussex Carol means by it (the first meaning), and a usage in the 14th century, 'gaiety of mind; diversion, sport'.
I should check when Gawain is generally dated to, but have gone on longer than I intended – that, and Onions referring me to what he says about the word 'merry', must wait for a later time. (Suffice to say that he gives an Old English sense (noted as obsolete) of 'pleasing, agreeable', and says that, in the phrase 'merry England', it was 'later apprehended as "joyous"'.)
End-notes
¹ The opening lines of Gawain:
Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes
(lines 1–2)
I seem to remember being told that it is thought that the choice of alliteration with the word 'brittened' is deliberately meant to anticipate, in sound, where the narrative is going next.
² A sop to the historians and others who claim that Britain was a political invention of the Acts of Union, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that willy nilly brought the Scots and then the Irish under the uneasy yoke of the English Parliament ?
³ Cleanliness is always said to be next to Godliness, but only in the [possessive adjective of the nationality to be spited] dictionary.
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21 January
Continued from Merry birthday ! (1)
I have looked out Sir Gawain, and, after it opens vividly with lines describing the sacked Troy¹, it goes on to some schoolboy history about how one of the heroes' descendants, after they had dispersed with Troy in ruins and cinders, went on to found Britain² (named after him, Brutus, grandson of Æneas) – the key words being underlined in the text (which is in Middle English):
And fer over the French flod Felix Brutus
On many bonkkes full brode Bretayn he settles with wynne,
Where werre and wrake and wonder
Bi sythes has wont therinne,
And oft bothe blysses and blunder
Ful skete has skyfted synne.
(lines 13–19)
(All terribly hard to learn (and forgotten now), but, for my degree and in alleged proof that we could translate from Middle English, I had to be able to render in modern English any passage from Gawain's first Book, and from a specified Book from each of Langland's Piers Plowman and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde – no one knows who wrote Gawain, but it was then believed that it was the same poet who wrote Patience and Pearl (not to mention the snappily named Cleanness³, with all of which it appears in my edition.)
So, after the noble lineage of Britain's founder has been established, we go on, before the introduction of Arthur and his court at the end of the introduction, with a rather worrying couplet (lines 21–22) – unless you are a football thug – that, and I spare presenting a chunk of the original just now, tell how bold men were bred there (fair enough so far), but who loved fighting (baret that lofden) and made mischief (tene that wroghten) in many a troubled time. (It's just a guess, as it's a long time ago that I looked at this, but I doubt that 'mischief' has quite the right ring for that phrase.)
We have men who brawl and cause trouble, and then we have Arthur, in all the nobility of his person and of his court (lines 23–29). It is a time of marvels, and of stories long told with lel letteres loken (line 35), linked with true letters, as are the unmistakeable 'l' sounds of that phrase in this alliterative verse.
And then the story proper opens with these lines (in which I have highlighted the words that we can still easily recognize to-day, even if a line like the fifth might leave us cold – apart from spotting that the knights are doing something 'full many times'):
This kyng lay at Camylot upon Krystmasse
With mony luflych lorde, ledes of the best,
Rekenly of the Rounde Table alle tho rich brether,
With rych revel oryght and rechles merthes.
They tournayed tulkes by tymes ful mony,
Justed ful jolilé thise gentyle knightes,
Sythen kayred to the court, caroles to make.
For ther the fest was ilyche ful fiften dayes,
With alle the mete and the mirthe that men couthe avyse[...]
(lines 37–45)
If you have ever seen the Douglas Fairbanks' take on Robin Hood, as I did at the Film Festival in September (in the magnficent setting of The Great Hall of Trinity College – and with Neil Brand's and his percussionist colleague's performance of his score for it for a solid two hours), then you may have a sense of the sort of tradition from which he got that notion of what the court of Richard I might have been like, with jousting and merry-making.
Which brings us on to this word 'mirth', which is there twice (once in a variant form) in this Christmas scene, with Christmas itself, it is to be noticed, not lasting twelve days, but fifteen. All that memorizing means that I had remembered something right, and the way that the word is used (certainly the second time) does suggest a richer meaning for the word than we have for it.
C. T. Onions, in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology that he edited (my copy is from 1966), tells us that the word is from Old English, and gives a meaning, for the 13th century, of 'joy, happiness OE; rejoicing, gaiety'. The word has, then, already started to divide between what the Sussex Carol means by it (the first meaning), and a usage in the 14th century, 'gaiety of mind; diversion, sport'.
I should check when Gawain is generally dated to, but have gone on longer than I intended – that, and Onions referring me to what he says about the word 'merry', must wait for a later time. (Suffice to say that he gives an Old English sense (noted as obsolete) of 'pleasing, agreeable', and says that, in the phrase 'merry England', it was 'later apprehended as "joyous"'.)
End-notes
¹ The opening lines of Gawain:
Sithen the sege and the assaut was sesed at Troye,
The borgh brittened and brent to brondes and askes
(lines 1–2)
I seem to remember being told that it is thought that the choice of alliteration with the word 'brittened' is deliberately meant to anticipate, in sound, where the narrative is going next.
² A sop to the historians and others who claim that Britain was a political invention of the Acts of Union, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that willy nilly brought the Scots and then the Irish under the uneasy yoke of the English Parliament ?
³ Cleanliness is always said to be next to Godliness, but only in the [possessive adjective of the nationality to be spited] dictionary.
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Allegedly, Katy Perry unfollows Russell
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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21 January
And I doubt that it's Grant of that name (or Hoban), I like the verb (even if it relates asuredly to disengaging from someone presence on Arsebook, that even more potent waste of time than blogging), and here the woman is again miraculously, just days after (supposedly) being 'slammed' by Dim Sum, I mean David Cameron.
Whatever next in the autonomous world of my AOL sign-on page (where I never know whether it will be the angry bearded man or the girl with the copper hair and appealing green eyes, both trying to interest me in its product System Mechanic)...?
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21 January
And I doubt that it's Grant of that name (or Hoban), I like the verb (even if it relates asuredly to disengaging from someone presence on Arsebook, that even more potent waste of time than blogging), and here the woman is again miraculously, just days after (supposedly) being 'slammed' by Dim Sum, I mean David Cameron.
Whatever next in the autonomous world of my AOL sign-on page (where I never know whether it will be the angry bearded man or the girl with the copper hair and appealing green eyes, both trying to interest me in its product System Mechanic)...?
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Friday, 20 January 2012
Tired old nag of a film (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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21 January
Anyone who may already haunt the web presence of New Empress Magazine will know that I have already been scathing about the premise, amongst other things, of Spielberg's latest, War Horse. (I think that I admitted there that I did not ever see Private Ryan, but truly never felt the need to do so.)
Well, I saw the trailer again in full and thought the same, but another NEM posting has softened my attitude to the origins of the piece, if not to the film itself, or to making a film of it, for two reasons: it still does not render it of any greater worth, to my mind, than the Disney true-life adventures that rather irritatingly punctuated my childhood, when I had most wanted from the week's Disney spot that evening was the adventures of Donald Duck or the like, but the esteemed British children's writer Michael Morpurgo had originally written it, and he had adapted it, in a highly successful way, for the stage.
So those, for me, are the parameters of the work, and, as for Spielberg's daughter - or somebody - loving horses and the play, that is really neither here nor there, except that you can be sure that (and no sour grapes, honestly), if I shared my liking for a very good pork-and-stilton pâté that I buy from my local farm shop, Steven wouldn't dreamwork up a treatment about the people who make it. The basis is a children's story, and so fits with much of what he directs, with its corny, schmalzy emphasis that somehow diminishes the big picture for the small story of some indviduals.
Oh, life is about individuals, and, in this and in Ryan, the idea of looking out for your mates in the theatre of conflict (why ever do we call it that?) is part of it, as in Band of Brothers (whose executive producers include, of course, the selfsame Spielberg and Ryan's own leader of a smaller such band, Tom Hanks), but not everything: militarily, sacrifices do need to be made, and deploying even eight men (at the risk of their lives) to save one man - for whatever reason - would have to be seen as one to be made an objective.
After all, the film of The Cruel Sea, as Simon Heffer has recently argued on Radio 3's late-night slot The Essay, tellingly depicts men in the water who think that they are to be rescued. However, the wider perspective is that it appears from sonar that a U-boat is underneath them, and dropping depth-charges, rather than saving them, has, hard though it is, to be the decision to make.
So, much as Matt Damon has become my mascot on these pages, he'd have to go. If children want to see a story about a horse, that's fine, but don't bother me with your take on it, Steven!
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21 January
Anyone who may already haunt the web presence of New Empress Magazine will know that I have already been scathing about the premise, amongst other things, of Spielberg's latest, War Horse. (I think that I admitted there that I did not ever see Private Ryan, but truly never felt the need to do so.)
Well, I saw the trailer again in full and thought the same, but another NEM posting has softened my attitude to the origins of the piece, if not to the film itself, or to making a film of it, for two reasons: it still does not render it of any greater worth, to my mind, than the Disney true-life adventures that rather irritatingly punctuated my childhood, when I had most wanted from the week's Disney spot that evening was the adventures of Donald Duck or the like, but the esteemed British children's writer Michael Morpurgo had originally written it, and he had adapted it, in a highly successful way, for the stage.
So those, for me, are the parameters of the work, and, as for Spielberg's daughter - or somebody - loving horses and the play, that is really neither here nor there, except that you can be sure that (and no sour grapes, honestly), if I shared my liking for a very good pork-and-stilton pâté that I buy from my local farm shop, Steven wouldn't dreamwork up a treatment about the people who make it. The basis is a children's story, and so fits with much of what he directs, with its corny, schmalzy emphasis that somehow diminishes the big picture for the small story of some indviduals.
Oh, life is about individuals, and, in this and in Ryan, the idea of looking out for your mates in the theatre of conflict (why ever do we call it that?) is part of it, as in Band of Brothers (whose executive producers include, of course, the selfsame Spielberg and Ryan's own leader of a smaller such band, Tom Hanks), but not everything: militarily, sacrifices do need to be made, and deploying even eight men (at the risk of their lives) to save one man - for whatever reason - would have to be seen as one to be made an objective.
After all, the film of The Cruel Sea, as Simon Heffer has recently argued on Radio 3's late-night slot The Essay, tellingly depicts men in the water who think that they are to be rescued. However, the wider perspective is that it appears from sonar that a U-boat is underneath them, and dropping depth-charges, rather than saving them, has, hard though it is, to be the decision to make.
So, much as Matt Damon has become my mascot on these pages, he'd have to go. If children want to see a story about a horse, that's fine, but don't bother me with your take on it, Steven!
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Great books that bored me (and I didn't finish)
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20 January
So, maybe, they weren't so great...
At any rate, whilst looking for Sir Gawain, to see what the so-called Pearl poet said about the word 'mirth' - as I seem to recall a feast (probably Christmas) when the Green Knight makes his dramatic entrance, on horseback, and challenge - to shed light on the posting Merry birthday!, I spotted the Penguin volumes of Goethe's Faust, and suddenly found a strange linguistic connection with something else that I gave up on:
Faust
Proust
When, in the 1980s, Penguin (again) brought out its three-volume new translation of Proust's Temps Perdu (even the title's too long!), I cautiously bought just the first volume, and wisely so, as I didn't get beyond around p. 153 and all that flannel about Swann (excuse the repeated double 'n'), which left me not caring to know any more about any of it (let alone some prized lines about the power of a cake to spark off memories, which, without reading, I struggle to see as any great insight, if maybe an example of synaesthesia)*.
So what, other than the letter-combinations (above) those works have in common is their length (and falling into parts as a result) - I had read Part I of Faust, but withdrew from Part 2, because I simply wasn't interested in what betrayals and debaucheries Faust could, under devilish encouragement, commit - and whether I could stay the course. Trying to be dutiful, when I found the task distasteful, I did plough through the whole (i.e. both parts) of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, another catalogue of cruelty and depravity, during the first week of my degree course, but took next to nothing - save a greater dislike for Marlowe - from doing it.
And I have too further confessions, one of which I will excuse on the basis that (as with the Marlowe, though who knows when that - or a substantially unabridged version of it - was last performed**) it is meant to be seen performed, not read as a text, and the other that endless stories where a jealous husband (usually unreasonably and sustainedly jealous, so as to make Leontes seem the model of trust) repeatedly tests a wife by putting temptation in her way were (a) just padding to the long-stalled plot and, to me, (b) not of interest anyway.
For those who haven't already guessed, I refer to the following works, and am guided by a carefully placed slip of paper in each, which indicates where I stopped:
Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth Parts One to Three - another attempt to be dutiful, I stalled partway through Act Three, Scene Two, of Part Two, and should have taken the opportunity, when the RSC did marathon sessions of it, to encompass it;
Cervantes' Don Quixote - I didn't even make it to The Second Part (giving out at the end of Chapter XXXV in The First Part).
In conclusion, I have two copies in tranlsation - don't ask why! - of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which, it should be known, is a three-volume work, so some may know how to place their stake, if offered the chance of odds on whether I'll ever read it all...
* The great, and perhaps a little overlooked, Paul Jennings wrote very humorously about his similar aspirations to be an educated man and, amongst other things, have read Temps Perdu - I didn't just find my copy of the jokily called attempt at anthologizing his Oddly collections, which (my recollection is) were themselves anthologies of (the best of) what he had published in something like The Observer, The Jenguin Pennings (yet another Penguin!), but, if it doesn't contain this piece about Swann, where the fictive narrator, at least, too foundered, it is still a very good introduction. Copies don't seem cheap though, according to Amazon®.
** More often than I could imagine, according to the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_%28play%29#Performance_history.
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20 January
So, maybe, they weren't so great...
At any rate, whilst looking for Sir Gawain, to see what the so-called Pearl poet said about the word 'mirth' - as I seem to recall a feast (probably Christmas) when the Green Knight makes his dramatic entrance, on horseback, and challenge - to shed light on the posting Merry birthday!, I spotted the Penguin volumes of Goethe's Faust, and suddenly found a strange linguistic connection with something else that I gave up on:
Faust
Proust
When, in the 1980s, Penguin (again) brought out its three-volume new translation of Proust's Temps Perdu (even the title's too long!), I cautiously bought just the first volume, and wisely so, as I didn't get beyond around p. 153 and all that flannel about Swann (excuse the repeated double 'n'), which left me not caring to know any more about any of it (let alone some prized lines about the power of a cake to spark off memories, which, without reading, I struggle to see as any great insight, if maybe an example of synaesthesia)*.
So what, other than the letter-combinations (above) those works have in common is their length (and falling into parts as a result) - I had read Part I of Faust, but withdrew from Part 2, because I simply wasn't interested in what betrayals and debaucheries Faust could, under devilish encouragement, commit - and whether I could stay the course. Trying to be dutiful, when I found the task distasteful, I did plough through the whole (i.e. both parts) of Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the Great, another catalogue of cruelty and depravity, during the first week of my degree course, but took next to nothing - save a greater dislike for Marlowe - from doing it.
And I have too further confessions, one of which I will excuse on the basis that (as with the Marlowe, though who knows when that - or a substantially unabridged version of it - was last performed**) it is meant to be seen performed, not read as a text, and the other that endless stories where a jealous husband (usually unreasonably and sustainedly jealous, so as to make Leontes seem the model of trust) repeatedly tests a wife by putting temptation in her way were (a) just padding to the long-stalled plot and, to me, (b) not of interest anyway.
For those who haven't already guessed, I refer to the following works, and am guided by a carefully placed slip of paper in each, which indicates where I stopped:
Shakespeare's Henry the Sixth Parts One to Three - another attempt to be dutiful, I stalled partway through Act Three, Scene Two, of Part Two, and should have taken the opportunity, when the RSC did marathon sessions of it, to encompass it;
Cervantes' Don Quixote - I didn't even make it to The Second Part (giving out at the end of Chapter XXXV in The First Part).
In conclusion, I have two copies in tranlsation - don't ask why! - of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which, it should be known, is a three-volume work, so some may know how to place their stake, if offered the chance of odds on whether I'll ever read it all...
* The great, and perhaps a little overlooked, Paul Jennings wrote very humorously about his similar aspirations to be an educated man and, amongst other things, have read Temps Perdu - I didn't just find my copy of the jokily called attempt at anthologizing his Oddly collections, which (my recollection is) were themselves anthologies of (the best of) what he had published in something like The Observer, The Jenguin Pennings (yet another Penguin!), but, if it doesn't contain this piece about Swann, where the fictive narrator, at least, too foundered, it is still a very good introduction. Copies don't seem cheap though, according to Amazon®.
** More often than I could imagine, according to the entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamburlaine_%28play%29#Performance_history.
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Thursday, 19 January 2012
Every Veran helps! (1)
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20 January
Anyone who has ever used so-called predictive text (that terminology probably calls for a whole posting of its own) on a Nokia® phone will know that the software is programmed to know the name 'Nokia', but not the name that comes out as 'Veran', which, if you will ever be writing a text-message to say that you have called in to one of its shops and is anything needed, you will have to spell and save - but nothing will alter the fact that the first option always comes up as Veran*.
Well, my local Veran, in a sign prominently stuck on the self-service machine such that it impeded the scanner, proudly announced to-night that, between midnight and 6.00 a.m., I could use the machine - and, if I didn't want to, they would open a till! (I can see that being a really popular request - from the point of view of how it would be received, that is...)
The point was that not a single till was then operating, it was well before midnight, and so I was disenfranchised from this marvellous offer of having a human being serve me. The slogan 'Every little helps' may well have disappeared (it only ever was a little, and it helped damn all), so perhaps the new one is 'Lump it or leave'.
Plus whatever happened to their much-vaunted 'Value' range, whose products I realize, all of a sudden, that I don't recall seeing for a long time - were they so choked with toxic ingredients that you could buy a kilo of Value peanuts for something of the order of sixty-nine pence, but, within a week of finishing them, you'd have ingested such a high dose that planning a funeral would be in order?
* And I know well enough why that is - some geek's supposition, in setting it up, that, just as I am more likely to be writing 'Dear Nun' than greeting my own mother, I want to write about the verandah to the recipient of my message, not concerning a well-known chain of supermarkets.
(I've not tried the key-combination, but, as a message to Anna always comes up as 'Dear Bomb', for all that I know the phone is programmed with supposedly useful things like 'dacha', 'veldt', 'lebensraum', 'samovar', etc., etc.)
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20 January
Anyone who has ever used so-called predictive text (that terminology probably calls for a whole posting of its own) on a Nokia® phone will know that the software is programmed to know the name 'Nokia', but not the name that comes out as 'Veran', which, if you will ever be writing a text-message to say that you have called in to one of its shops and is anything needed, you will have to spell and save - but nothing will alter the fact that the first option always comes up as Veran*.
Well, my local Veran, in a sign prominently stuck on the self-service machine such that it impeded the scanner, proudly announced to-night that, between midnight and 6.00 a.m., I could use the machine - and, if I didn't want to, they would open a till! (I can see that being a really popular request - from the point of view of how it would be received, that is...)
The point was that not a single till was then operating, it was well before midnight, and so I was disenfranchised from this marvellous offer of having a human being serve me. The slogan 'Every little helps' may well have disappeared (it only ever was a little, and it helped damn all), so perhaps the new one is 'Lump it or leave'.
Plus whatever happened to their much-vaunted 'Value' range, whose products I realize, all of a sudden, that I don't recall seeing for a long time - were they so choked with toxic ingredients that you could buy a kilo of Value peanuts for something of the order of sixty-nine pence, but, within a week of finishing them, you'd have ingested such a high dose that planning a funeral would be in order?
* And I know well enough why that is - some geek's supposition, in setting it up, that, just as I am more likely to be writing 'Dear Nun' than greeting my own mother, I want to write about the verandah to the recipient of my message, not concerning a well-known chain of supermarkets.
(I've not tried the key-combination, but, as a message to Anna always comes up as 'Dear Bomb', for all that I know the phone is programmed with supposedly useful things like 'dacha', 'veldt', 'lebensraum', 'samovar', etc., etc.)
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More on AI: Boxie
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20 January
Another item that I find of interest at Writer's Rest, where I have posted:
Well, I have to ask: would an investigator from the IRS using such an interface remain as cute in many people's eyes for very long...?
And my AOL sign-on page bombards me with images of people getting hostile and rough with their no less cute PC in an effort to get me to sign on for their System Mechanic (another piece of sotware probably likely to make worse a situation of functionality that is tolerable).
The point being that for someone who sees beyond the 'face' and sees it in a reductionist way as housing just cameras, not real eyes, and the means of controlling the traction and 'the voice', there is nothing to like, and there is nothing capable of feeling any dislike.
It's not, after all, like shouting at the cat when she asks for food and then, if she persists, locking her out!
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20 January
Another item that I find of interest at Writer's Rest, where I have posted:
Well, I have to ask: would an investigator from the IRS using such an interface remain as cute in many people's eyes for very long...?
And my AOL sign-on page bombards me with images of people getting hostile and rough with their no less cute PC in an effort to get me to sign on for their System Mechanic (another piece of sotware probably likely to make worse a situation of functionality that is tolerable).
The point being that for someone who sees beyond the 'face' and sees it in a reductionist way as housing just cameras, not real eyes, and the means of controlling the traction and 'the voice', there is nothing to like, and there is nothing capable of feeling any dislike.
It's not, after all, like shouting at the cat when she asks for food and then, if she persists, locking her out!
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Teatime Tasties Ltd
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20 January
Either you will understand (and share) this compulsion, or you will not - I saw, just once, an HGV bearing this name and was so heartened by its old-fashioned ring that I had to record it. Now is its moment of flying more freely!
For another that puns on the name of a famous painter, this oft-seen one takes some beating:
Vincent Van Hire
I do hate to think what they ask for as a deposit...
A more curious one (again, seen but once) is not for what it obviously relates to - as there is a time of year when it and related matter is fluttering in the currents on our roads - as the choice of name:
R. F. Straw Services
'Would you have need of some straw services?', the pitch might go, I guess. (Beats that stupidly misused word 'logistics', when it means little more than 'haulage', even if the load is refrigerated.)
Finally, a friend has the initials RPC, so I am always tickled by:
RPC Containers Limited
PS And how could I have forgotten - except that I did forget:
Central Crushing Ltd
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20 January
Either you will understand (and share) this compulsion, or you will not - I saw, just once, an HGV bearing this name and was so heartened by its old-fashioned ring that I had to record it. Now is its moment of flying more freely!
For another that puns on the name of a famous painter, this oft-seen one takes some beating:
Vincent Van Hire
I do hate to think what they ask for as a deposit...
A more curious one (again, seen but once) is not for what it obviously relates to - as there is a time of year when it and related matter is fluttering in the currents on our roads - as the choice of name:
R. F. Straw Services
'Would you have need of some straw services?', the pitch might go, I guess. (Beats that stupidly misused word 'logistics', when it means little more than 'haulage', even if the load is refrigerated.)
Finally, a friend has the initials RPC, so I am always tickled by:
RPC Containers Limited
PS And how could I have forgotten - except that I did forget:
Central Crushing Ltd
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Merry birthday ! (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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19 January
If anyone can explain what has been raised by adapting some Christmas labels to identify whose is which of two presents being sent together, I'd be glad to know:
We say Happy Christmas and Merry Christmas interchangeably, but we only say Happy birthday*...
End-notes
* The same is true of Easter, actually - does Christmas especially embody merriment (a word used twice by friends this season, when it has no common place in our vocabulary)? Plus there is the word 'mirth', rhymed with 'birth' in the Sussex Carol in a line (or part-line) that goes something like 'news of great mirth': the birth of Jesus is not what we would nowadays think of as a subject for mirth. (I must check, but I think both that the words 'merriment / merry' and 'mirth' are cognates, and that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may shed light on an older meaning of the latter... - it does, so see, if you will, Merry birthday ! (2))
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19 January
If anyone can explain what has been raised by adapting some Christmas labels to identify whose is which of two presents being sent together, I'd be glad to know:
We say Happy Christmas and Merry Christmas interchangeably, but we only say Happy birthday*...
End-notes
* The same is true of Easter, actually - does Christmas especially embody merriment (a word used twice by friends this season, when it has no common place in our vocabulary)? Plus there is the word 'mirth', rhymed with 'birth' in the Sussex Carol in a line (or part-line) that goes something like 'news of great mirth': the birth of Jesus is not what we would nowadays think of as a subject for mirth. (I must check, but I think both that the words 'merriment / merry' and 'mirth' are cognates, and that Sir Gawain and the Green Knight may shed light on an older meaning of the latter... - it does, so see, if you will, Merry birthday ! (2))
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Woody on Amazon®
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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19 January
No, not Allen's opinion of Amazon®, although he probably has one and it may be a strong one (heaven help him, if he ever made a joke about Amazon® - the Keaton biographer would infer deep insecurity regarding Internet shopping!), but something that I have just read in a review of Stardust Memories, a series of eight mini-reviews of a boxed set (contrary to popular usage, they are not 'box sets').
If you want to see what K. Gordon rightly wrote, follow this link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woody-Allen-Gift-Region-NTSC/dp/0792846052/ref=sr_1_52?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1326966006&sr=1-52
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19 January
No, not Allen's opinion of Amazon®, although he probably has one and it may be a strong one (heaven help him, if he ever made a joke about Amazon® - the Keaton biographer would infer deep insecurity regarding Internet shopping!), but something that I have just read in a review of Stardust Memories, a series of eight mini-reviews of a boxed set (contrary to popular usage, they are not 'box sets').
If you want to see what K. Gordon rightly wrote, follow this link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Woody-Allen-Gift-Region-NTSC/dp/0792846052/ref=sr_1_52?s=dvd&ie=UTF8&qid=1326966006&sr=1-52
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Tuesday, 17 January 2012
Let me dress you like a Hero!
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18 January
Having sensed, not strongly, but sufficiently, that things punk are coming back in fashion, what with all that post-Potter Bonham Carter look, I have prepared and am about to announce my new Kleinzeit range of bondage gear.
Even lords and ladies will feel terribly out of place if they don't have one of my Hypotenuse corsets, to be worn over a suit, dress or separates, and, with every one purchased, there is a free five minutes' worth of ripping, slashing and general tugging at the seams of two garments.
Then with the Zonk hat, a ball-bearing the size of Sweden has to be carried around, so it needs to be screwed to the head in five places - get your co-ordination wrong, and the spring that houses the bearing might just behave unpredictably and smash you one in the face.
Those who like to keep things simple will adore the Plain Deal restrainers, lengths of pure Norwegian heartwood that are bolted from the back to halfway down the calf, rendering movement much more painful, if achievable at all - a whole new dimension on popping down to the shops, and cutting out all of that unnecessary sitting behind a steering-wheel.
The Glockenspiel manacles offer all the restriction, plus, of course, chafing that you would expect from a quality accessory, plus they give you a significant discount (we dare not say how much, as initial supply is likely to be outstripped by demand, as one would want with such bijou purchases) on the Nurse charging-unit .
On a rolled-steel harness, which is again guaranteed to dig and rub, and in a pure titanium housing, the unit is capable of delivering shocks of up to 100V at currents as high as 10A (thrilling, eh!), depending on where you are from A to B. Trigged by a special Swiss sensor, it detects any, even the smallest, deviation from Kantian moral principles and shocks you - and anyone nearby - into obedience. Strict doesn't come close to it!
And those are just a few of the most exciting articles in this extensive range, which personally excite me greatly and have given me pleasure to design.
(As I say, initial supply will be limited - just that little business of being sued about the Philosophical Investigations underwear, which I swear had nothing to do purchasers starting to issue instructions to others to pick up and move blocks of masonry...)
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18 January
Having sensed, not strongly, but sufficiently, that things punk are coming back in fashion, what with all that post-Potter Bonham Carter look, I have prepared and am about to announce my new Kleinzeit range of bondage gear.
Even lords and ladies will feel terribly out of place if they don't have one of my Hypotenuse corsets, to be worn over a suit, dress or separates, and, with every one purchased, there is a free five minutes' worth of ripping, slashing and general tugging at the seams of two garments.
Then with the Zonk hat, a ball-bearing the size of Sweden has to be carried around, so it needs to be screwed to the head in five places - get your co-ordination wrong, and the spring that houses the bearing might just behave unpredictably and smash you one in the face.
Those who like to keep things simple will adore the Plain Deal restrainers, lengths of pure Norwegian heartwood that are bolted from the back to halfway down the calf, rendering movement much more painful, if achievable at all - a whole new dimension on popping down to the shops, and cutting out all of that unnecessary sitting behind a steering-wheel.
The Glockenspiel manacles offer all the restriction, plus, of course, chafing that you would expect from a quality accessory, plus they give you a significant discount (we dare not say how much, as initial supply is likely to be outstripped by demand, as one would want with such bijou purchases) on the Nurse charging-unit .
On a rolled-steel harness, which is again guaranteed to dig and rub, and in a pure titanium housing, the unit is capable of delivering shocks of up to 100V at currents as high as 10A (thrilling, eh!), depending on where you are from A to B. Trigged by a special Swiss sensor, it detects any, even the smallest, deviation from Kantian moral principles and shocks you - and anyone nearby - into obedience. Strict doesn't come close to it!
And those are just a few of the most exciting articles in this extensive range, which personally excite me greatly and have given me pleasure to design.
(As I say, initial supply will be limited - just that little business of being sued about the Philosophical Investigations underwear, which I swear had nothing to do purchasers starting to issue instructions to others to pick up and move blocks of masonry...)
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When a joke is an autobiography
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18 January
Take this:
For most of his childhood he was a loner, undoubtedly suffering from an inferiority complex. Consistently depressed and fearful of death, Allen learned to overcome his neuroses with comedy. His perception of his childhood and his inadequacies is now central to his humor. "I was in analysis for years because of a traumatic childhood. I was breast fed through falsies," is just one example.
And this:
Nettie and Martin Konigsberg naturally didn't understand the prodigy they had brought forth [elsewhere described as 'semi-literate'], and were very hurt by his college performance. "My mother was a sensitive woman. When I was thrown out of college she locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles."
And this in a biography of not Allen, but Diane Keaton!
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18 January
Take this:
For most of his childhood he was a loner, undoubtedly suffering from an inferiority complex. Consistently depressed and fearful of death, Allen learned to overcome his neuroses with comedy. His perception of his childhood and his inadequacies is now central to his humor. "I was in analysis for years because of a traumatic childhood. I was breast fed through falsies," is just one example.
And this:
Nettie and Martin Konigsberg naturally didn't understand the prodigy they had brought forth [elsewhere described as 'semi-literate'], and were very hurt by his college performance. "My mother was a sensitive woman. When I was thrown out of college she locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of Mah-Jongg tiles."
And this in a biography of not Allen, but Diane Keaton!
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Monday, 16 January 2012
The Man Who Mistook his Novel for a Cookery-Book
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17 January
More interesting, though, is the one who made the opposite mistake, and wondered why it was so violent (all that dicing and slicing), intent on carrying out on its citizens all sorts of ritual passages through fire and heat, and always emphasizing that they must have qualities of rawness and freshness.
Better things were hoped for from the closing chapters, but still chopping was going on, accompanied by fairly regular beatings, and the whole sorry business seemed intent on leaving nothing unchanged apart from the occasional victor in the form of 'garnish'.
He'd heard about garnishee proceedings - perhaps a nice, juicy law thriller would be better with these people who seemed more content with being what they were...
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17 January
More interesting, though, is the one who made the opposite mistake, and wondered why it was so violent (all that dicing and slicing), intent on carrying out on its citizens all sorts of ritual passages through fire and heat, and always emphasizing that they must have qualities of rawness and freshness.
Better things were hoped for from the closing chapters, but still chopping was going on, accompanied by fairly regular beatings, and the whole sorry business seemed intent on leaving nothing unchanged apart from the occasional victor in the form of 'garnish'.
He'd heard about garnishee proceedings - perhaps a nice, juicy law thriller would be better with these people who seemed more content with being what they were...
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Russell Hoban topped up my anti-freeze last night
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17 February
Other people will tell you things like this, which, I agree, you may find unlikely:
Samuel Beckettt cleaned and polished my windscreen two days ago
However, what I have gathered through a mate of mine in the trade (he owns GY Motors) is that those who, on our view of things, appear to have died during their literary career (such as Russ Hoban last year) have instead really just no longer found themselves drawn as they always were to everything about writing.
Yes, they may still be found, over coffee, reading a column or two in The London Review of Books, but what energizes them now is no longer producing and spreading their writing. We have misinterpreted as their death the greater pleasure that they take in doing, as a favour for someone else, that little thing that keeps being forgotten about:
The one that niggles every time the driver is about to get into the car, and, again, there isn't time to do it and be in Northampton on time
That recurrence of need is what these working on our cars seek to remedy - that needless feeling of being screwed up that the wiper-blades still haven't been cleaned, or the washer-bottle filled.
My contact tells me that he can't be any more specific than that, but that this pattern is what he has gathered from Tweets that he has seen.
He doesn't know whether it's just novelists (and, as he says, Stevie Smith wrote a novel, so who is a novelist?), but he says that it's clearly just minimal maintenance jobs, so don't expect Thomas Hardy to do your 12,000-mile service, or you'll have a long wait!
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17 February
Other people will tell you things like this, which, I agree, you may find unlikely:
Samuel Beckettt cleaned and polished my windscreen two days ago
However, what I have gathered through a mate of mine in the trade (he owns GY Motors) is that those who, on our view of things, appear to have died during their literary career (such as Russ Hoban last year) have instead really just no longer found themselves drawn as they always were to everything about writing.
Yes, they may still be found, over coffee, reading a column or two in The London Review of Books, but what energizes them now is no longer producing and spreading their writing. We have misinterpreted as their death the greater pleasure that they take in doing, as a favour for someone else, that little thing that keeps being forgotten about:
The one that niggles every time the driver is about to get into the car, and, again, there isn't time to do it and be in Northampton on time
That recurrence of need is what these working on our cars seek to remedy - that needless feeling of being screwed up that the wiper-blades still haven't been cleaned, or the washer-bottle filled.
My contact tells me that he can't be any more specific than that, but that this pattern is what he has gathered from Tweets that he has seen.
He doesn't know whether it's just novelists (and, as he says, Stevie Smith wrote a novel, so who is a novelist?), but he says that it's clearly just minimal maintenance jobs, so don't expect Thomas Hardy to do your 12,000-mile service, or you'll have a long wait!
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Tuesday, 10 January 2012
Amazonspeak
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10 January
If I query things with Amazon® by e-mail, the reply that I receive is often in quite obscure English, because many of its staff are from (maybe on) the continent.
It has now spread to routine error messages, where I am now trying to understand the astrological significance of the following, and how I am buying and selling in the same breath:
A card provider will often decline an attempt to charge a payment card if the
name, expiry date, or postcode you entered at buy-sell-leo does not exactly
match their information.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 January
If I query things with Amazon® by e-mail, the reply that I receive is often in quite obscure English, because many of its staff are from (maybe on) the continent.
It has now spread to routine error messages, where I am now trying to understand the astrological significance of the following, and how I am buying and selling in the same breath:
A card provider will often decline an attempt to charge a payment card if the
name, expiry date, or postcode you entered at buy-sell-leo does not exactly
match their information.
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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...
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(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...
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Antony Worrall Thompson masterminded attacks on my bird-feeder by marauding squirrels
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
The arrangement was that they’d split the proceeds 50:50, but you can never trust a squirrel to honour a deal when it’s influenced by nuts as trophies.
Seriously, I have no (operational – i.e. stocked and suitably hanging) bird-feeder, and I cannot claim that I have ever seen even one squirrel in my garden (apart, probably, from a plastic one, which my ex-wife thought pleasantly decorative: its fate is unknown to me, but not a source of sorrow).
Back to the story, what a back-handed compliment for the brand of shop (which I sha’n’t name – they don’t need the publicity) from which the items were taken: the endorsement that a top chef (at least, I take it that he is one) thinks their (if it was) cheese and wine worth running that risk for*!
Could this just be the beginning of the concept of celebrity approval by theft? Will tagged packets of condoms next be taken by your favourite man (or woman), and the name D---- or M---- just happens to get mentioned in the report?:
I always steal T----- condoms – why wait to pay when I can get it on and use them?
Of course, the whole idea might then backfire, if the public dared to copy its prize stars, and those rather ineffectual bleepers at the entrance to shops would be getting worn out. How would the line of defence go? Maybe, I only did it because she’s worth it.
* Or should this apology, reported on the Channel 4 News web-site, actually be read as showing that AWT admitted an error of judgement in his choice of products?:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson apologises for repeatedly shoplifting cheese and wine from a branch of T[----], and says he will "seek treatment".
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
The arrangement was that they’d split the proceeds 50:50, but you can never trust a squirrel to honour a deal when it’s influenced by nuts as trophies.
Seriously, I have no (operational – i.e. stocked and suitably hanging) bird-feeder, and I cannot claim that I have ever seen even one squirrel in my garden (apart, probably, from a plastic one, which my ex-wife thought pleasantly decorative: its fate is unknown to me, but not a source of sorrow).
Back to the story, what a back-handed compliment for the brand of shop (which I sha’n’t name – they don’t need the publicity) from which the items were taken: the endorsement that a top chef (at least, I take it that he is one) thinks their (if it was) cheese and wine worth running that risk for*!
Could this just be the beginning of the concept of celebrity approval by theft? Will tagged packets of condoms next be taken by your favourite man (or woman), and the name D---- or M---- just happens to get mentioned in the report?:
I always steal T----- condoms – why wait to pay when I can get it on and use them?
Of course, the whole idea might then backfire, if the public dared to copy its prize stars, and those rather ineffectual bleepers at the entrance to shops would be getting worn out. How would the line of defence go? Maybe, I only did it because she’s worth it.
* Or should this apology, reported on the Channel 4 News web-site, actually be read as showing that AWT admitted an error of judgement in his choice of products?:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson apologises for repeatedly shoplifting cheese and wine from a branch of T[----], and says he will "seek treatment".
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50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre
50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
50 years since Poulenc stubbed his toe in Montmartre
9 January
Do not misunderstand me - I have loved, even if I can never remember how to pronounce his surname, Poulenc's chamber works for a long time.
But to-day, a matter of weeks since it was played before on Radio 3, I have just heard again his Sextet for Piano and Wind, so some dubious anniversary must be afoot:
However, why not hear his glorious music more often just as a matter of course, as with that of Prokofiev (a proposition with which Susan Milan, who had just played his sonata for flute and piano at a recital, fully agreed and with the notion that he is underplayed in the repertoire)?
We really don't need these lame excuses such as its being 100 years since Groves pronounced somebody's music 'an abomination' to revisit them.
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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
Treatment for Worrall Thompson
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
I have just heard reported, on Radio 3 news, the item that has been besieging me on various sign-in pages. It was then being reported as an allegation that Antony Worrall Thompson had been caught shoplifting, perhaps cheese and wine.
According to the news bulletin, he has now received a caution, and has described his behaviour as 'irresponsible'*, saying 'I need treatment' for it.
I wonder what treatment he has in mind... For sure, forgoing that illicit cheese-and-wine party, but perhaps having to eat Quorn® twice per week.
In any case, Worrall Thompson's reported way of referring to himself and what he had done might make one wonder if he was meaning to suggest that this had happened before, if there is a behaviour that needs treatment**.
Doubtless, more will unfold on yet another celebrity story - a rather different penalty, in terms of both criminal sanction and disapproval, from when Winona Ryder was caught, it has to be said.
* There was another adjective, but somehow it didn't stick.
** Well, according to the Channel 4 News web-site:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson apologises for repeatedly shoplifting cheese and wine from a branch of T[----], and says he will "seek treatment".
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
I have just heard reported, on Radio 3 news, the item that has been besieging me on various sign-in pages. It was then being reported as an allegation that Antony Worrall Thompson had been caught shoplifting, perhaps cheese and wine.
According to the news bulletin, he has now received a caution, and has described his behaviour as 'irresponsible'*, saying 'I need treatment' for it.
I wonder what treatment he has in mind... For sure, forgoing that illicit cheese-and-wine party, but perhaps having to eat Quorn® twice per week.
In any case, Worrall Thompson's reported way of referring to himself and what he had done might make one wonder if he was meaning to suggest that this had happened before, if there is a behaviour that needs treatment**.
Doubtless, more will unfold on yet another celebrity story - a rather different penalty, in terms of both criminal sanction and disapproval, from when Winona Ryder was caught, it has to be said.
* There was another adjective, but somehow it didn't stick.
** Well, according to the Channel 4 News web-site:
The celebrity chef Antony Worrall Thompson apologises for repeatedly shoplifting cheese and wine from a branch of T[----], and says he will "seek treatment".
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Sunday, 8 January 2012
Anxious thoughts made apparent
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January
There is some quotation from Paradise Lost that would do better than that tag-line, but it doesn't come to me*.
It would not be right to say that I like Erin Hogan's descriptions in her book Spiral Jetta, but only because I do not think that one should relish another's pain.
For what she does is to capture the type of content of anxious thoughts, fears that cannot be reasoned with and so will not be subdued by argument or otherwise abate:
I pulled off into what seemed the largest gap between two scrub bushes and parked the car. There were a lot of little bushes underfoot, and I wondered whether the undercarriage of the car, which had been running all day, might be hot enough to start a fire. I wasn't sure if this could actually happen, but the thought alone made me get back in the car and move it to the barest ground I could find.
Likewise (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):
Still worrying, I checked the landscape and realized that, should I see a faint plume of smoke from wherever I happened to be, I would not have time to halt the nascent inferno, and my burned-out Jetta would forever be marked as the car--and I as the dumbass driver--that destroyed Mormon Mesa. My poor car would share the fate of the rusted-out amphibious vehicle and old Dodge truck near Spiral Jetty.
Further (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):
The thought was too much to bear, so I moved the car again, took a liter bottle of water and poured it over the ground, then put the car back over the wet spot. What more could I do?
Beautifully written, and - so rare nowadays - perfectly punctuated, what Erin Hogan has written just does justice to the intrusive thoughts, with their very strong force, that can beset an experience and undermine one's (potential) joy in it.
Another quotation (from a page or so on):
Now I faced a new dilemma. Clearly there was someone else out there. But would they be friend or foe? I pictured a bunch of sixteen-year-old guys sitting on their tailgate, listening to ZZ Top, shooting their rifles at empty beer cans scattered atop the mesa. I magined what I would look like sauntering up to them out of nowhere. "Hey guys, how's it going?"
[...] I imagined my broken, violated body baking there on the top of the mesa. Snippets of Deliverance alternated with The Accused in my head. I debated going back to the car. Was that cowardly or prudent? Where, once again, was the line between legitimate concern and paranoia?
Maybe the above, if not an interest in US land art, will encourage finding this book. I should leave the final word to Erin:
Maybe it's the salt that keeps Spiral Jetty honest. The work is now almost entirely white. Salt has latched onto every available surface, blanketing it, making it a croûte en sel. It comes across as pink in all the recent pictures I had seen, and perhaps in a certain light it is. [...] But the color one feels overwhelmingly is white: bone white, bleached white, blinding white.
* On reflection, I think that it is 'darkness visible' (from Book 3 or 4).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January
There is some quotation from Paradise Lost that would do better than that tag-line, but it doesn't come to me*.
It would not be right to say that I like Erin Hogan's descriptions in her book Spiral Jetta, but only because I do not think that one should relish another's pain.
For what she does is to capture the type of content of anxious thoughts, fears that cannot be reasoned with and so will not be subdued by argument or otherwise abate:
I pulled off into what seemed the largest gap between two scrub bushes and parked the car. There were a lot of little bushes underfoot, and I wondered whether the undercarriage of the car, which had been running all day, might be hot enough to start a fire. I wasn't sure if this could actually happen, but the thought alone made me get back in the car and move it to the barest ground I could find.
Likewise (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):
Still worrying, I checked the landscape and realized that, should I see a faint plume of smoke from wherever I happened to be, I would not have time to halt the nascent inferno, and my burned-out Jetta would forever be marked as the car--and I as the dumbass driver--that destroyed Mormon Mesa. My poor car would share the fate of the rusted-out amphibious vehicle and old Dodge truck near Spiral Jetty.
Further (a continuation of the previous passage, but just giving a pause):
The thought was too much to bear, so I moved the car again, took a liter bottle of water and poured it over the ground, then put the car back over the wet spot. What more could I do?
Beautifully written, and - so rare nowadays - perfectly punctuated, what Erin Hogan has written just does justice to the intrusive thoughts, with their very strong force, that can beset an experience and undermine one's (potential) joy in it.
Another quotation (from a page or so on):
Now I faced a new dilemma. Clearly there was someone else out there. But would they be friend or foe? I pictured a bunch of sixteen-year-old guys sitting on their tailgate, listening to ZZ Top, shooting their rifles at empty beer cans scattered atop the mesa. I magined what I would look like sauntering up to them out of nowhere. "Hey guys, how's it going?"
[...] I imagined my broken, violated body baking there on the top of the mesa. Snippets of Deliverance alternated with The Accused in my head. I debated going back to the car. Was that cowardly or prudent? Where, once again, was the line between legitimate concern and paranoia?
Maybe the above, if not an interest in US land art, will encourage finding this book. I should leave the final word to Erin:
Maybe it's the salt that keeps Spiral Jetty honest. The work is now almost entirely white. Salt has latched onto every available surface, blanketing it, making it a croûte en sel. It comes across as pink in all the recent pictures I had seen, and perhaps in a certain light it is. [...] But the color one feels overwhelmingly is white: bone white, bleached white, blinding white.
* On reflection, I think that it is 'darkness visible' (from Book 3 or 4).
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Saturday, 7 January 2012
Tirza: an epilogue
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
At the time of the Festival, I established that the book from which this book was made, with the participation of its author, into a film was available only in the original Dutch and in a German translation (which, at a pinch, I could have read, but at great cost).
I now see that there is a French translation, which would not put me at any greater advantage, but none in English that I can find, and I wonder what the fate of the film is - if it is not going to get distributed here or in the States, the possibility of an English translation probably depends on it.
Well, I still think that it is a tremendous film, and maybe I shall look for evidence of reviews...*
I have found this, with which I would take issue (and will, given a chance):
http://jasperaalbers.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/the-best-and-the-worst-of-dutch-cinema-%E2%80%93-the-tirza-review/
But, maybe, I'd prefer you to look at (or what preceded it):
http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2011/10/attempting-to-address-tirza.html
* Contains spoilers *
In the meantime, my knowledge of German allowed me, belatedly and when it had to be returned to the library, to look at the Dutch original, and it may not surprise to know that the ending in the novel appears to differ:
If I didn't miss something, and it isn't a dream, Jörgen does not try to leave, but ends up going back to, Kaisa's dwelling, but makes it to the airport, and, despite her cries of Want company, sir?, boards a flight and labours his way home.
As I say, I was reading the text as someone who speaks German, so I could work out much of what was being said, but I may have missed something in the preceding pages that could indicate that it is Jörgen's fantasy that he makes this journey...
Since then (at the end of February, in fact), Penny, a friend who speaks Dutch, took a look at the closing pages, and found nothing to suggest that there is the intervention of a dream between getting back from Big Mama and leaving Namibia.
End-notes
* Well, I see that it has no reviews at all on the so-called Rotten Tomatoes web-site, and the first one that I found was from one of the Festival's own Take One crew - I obviously didn't submit something myself, or, as others didn't, it didn't appear.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 January
At the time of the Festival, I established that the book from which this book was made, with the participation of its author, into a film was available only in the original Dutch and in a German translation (which, at a pinch, I could have read, but at great cost).
I now see that there is a French translation, which would not put me at any greater advantage, but none in English that I can find, and I wonder what the fate of the film is - if it is not going to get distributed here or in the States, the possibility of an English translation probably depends on it.
Well, I still think that it is a tremendous film, and maybe I shall look for evidence of reviews...*
I have found this, with which I would take issue (and will, given a chance):
http://jasperaalbers.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/the-best-and-the-worst-of-dutch-cinema-%E2%80%93-the-tirza-review/
But, maybe, I'd prefer you to look at (or what preceded it):
http://unofficialcambridgefilmfestival.blogspot.com/2011/10/attempting-to-address-tirza.html
* Contains spoilers *
In the meantime, my knowledge of German allowed me, belatedly and when it had to be returned to the library, to look at the Dutch original, and it may not surprise to know that the ending in the novel appears to differ:
If I didn't miss something, and it isn't a dream, Jörgen does not try to leave, but ends up going back to, Kaisa's dwelling, but makes it to the airport, and, despite her cries of Want company, sir?, boards a flight and labours his way home.
As I say, I was reading the text as someone who speaks German, so I could work out much of what was being said, but I may have missed something in the preceding pages that could indicate that it is Jörgen's fantasy that he makes this journey...
Since then (at the end of February, in fact), Penny, a friend who speaks Dutch, took a look at the closing pages, and found nothing to suggest that there is the intervention of a dream between getting back from Big Mama and leaving Namibia.
End-notes
* Well, I see that it has no reviews at all on the so-called Rotten Tomatoes web-site, and the first one that I found was from one of the Festival's own Take One crew - I obviously didn't submit something myself, or, as others didn't, it didn't appear.
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Might I ask what our Sunday trading legislation is for? (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January 2012
Does anyone have any idea now what the UK law on Sunday trading protects - and how?
We have a regime, recently changed to allow shops to reopen on the chime of midnight as Sunday ends, where the larger shops (as defined by square footage, principally*) can only open for six hours continuously, starting no earlier than 10.00 a.m. and ending no later than 6.00 p.m.
(I am not aware of any obligation to open for the full six hours, so, if I am right, it would be possibly to be open just from 12.00 till 3.00.**)
Does that protect the workers, if they presumably can be in later than on other days for a start no earlier than 10.00, and give them the possibility of some lie-in? Is that at the heart of the legislation's thrust, though it doesn't protect workers in smaller, local shops (we know that names and brands), who still might have to start at 8.00, if not 6.00 (let alone the 24-hour petrol-stations)?
Or is it to protect the poor consumer / shopper from shopping him- or herself silly every day of the week...?
In any event, the premable of the enabling Act of Parliament (there are bound to be Regulations made under it), the Sunday Trading Act 1994, says (with great economy) relatively little:
An Act to reform the law of England and Wales relating to Sunday trading; to make provision as to the rights of shop workers under the law of England and Wales in relation to Sunday working; and for connected purposes.
Oh, I forgot, there is the protection for workers of being able to opt out (and not be penalized) of working on a Sunday - notices to be served, etc., and changing one's mind***. Which, of course, for someone who wants to devote him- or herself to the family and / or religious observance, is fine and good, but where do those other limitations on opening hours come from and fit in, not least 17 years on from 1994?
End-notes
* Thus: “large shop” means a shop which has a relevant floor area exceeding 280 square metres.
** Actually, that doesn't appear to have been envisaged, and is, at any rate, not possible (and might mean that someone failing to open for the full six hours could be taken to task, bizarre though that seems, for all that I know):
A person who is, or proposes to become, the occupier of a large shop may give notice to the local authority for the area in which the shop is situated—
(a) stating that he proposes to open the shop on Sunday for the serving of retail customers, and
(b) specifying a continuous period of six hours, beginning no earlier than 10 a.m. and ending no later than 6 p.m., as the permitted Sunday opening hours in relation to the shop.
*** Section 4 of the Act is, to say the least of it, terse: 'Schedule 4 to this Act shall have effect'.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January 2012
Does anyone have any idea now what the UK law on Sunday trading protects - and how?
We have a regime, recently changed to allow shops to reopen on the chime of midnight as Sunday ends, where the larger shops (as defined by square footage, principally*) can only open for six hours continuously, starting no earlier than 10.00 a.m. and ending no later than 6.00 p.m.
(I am not aware of any obligation to open for the full six hours, so, if I am right, it would be possibly to be open just from 12.00 till 3.00.**)
Does that protect the workers, if they presumably can be in later than on other days for a start no earlier than 10.00, and give them the possibility of some lie-in? Is that at the heart of the legislation's thrust, though it doesn't protect workers in smaller, local shops (we know that names and brands), who still might have to start at 8.00, if not 6.00 (let alone the 24-hour petrol-stations)?
Or is it to protect the poor consumer / shopper from shopping him- or herself silly every day of the week...?
In any event, the premable of the enabling Act of Parliament (there are bound to be Regulations made under it), the Sunday Trading Act 1994, says (with great economy) relatively little:
An Act to reform the law of England and Wales relating to Sunday trading; to make provision as to the rights of shop workers under the law of England and Wales in relation to Sunday working; and for connected purposes.
Oh, I forgot, there is the protection for workers of being able to opt out (and not be penalized) of working on a Sunday - notices to be served, etc., and changing one's mind***. Which, of course, for someone who wants to devote him- or herself to the family and / or religious observance, is fine and good, but where do those other limitations on opening hours come from and fit in, not least 17 years on from 1994?
End-notes
* Thus: “large shop” means a shop which has a relevant floor area exceeding 280 square metres.
** Actually, that doesn't appear to have been envisaged, and is, at any rate, not possible (and might mean that someone failing to open for the full six hours could be taken to task, bizarre though that seems, for all that I know):
A person who is, or proposes to become, the occupier of a large shop may give notice to the local authority for the area in which the shop is situated—
(a) stating that he proposes to open the shop on Sunday for the serving of retail customers, and
(b) specifying a continuous period of six hours, beginning no earlier than 10 a.m. and ending no later than 6 p.m., as the permitted Sunday opening hours in relation to the shop.
*** Section 4 of the Act is, to say the least of it, terse: 'Schedule 4 to this Act shall have effect'.
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There is another Earth – and, wow, up there with Solaris! (terminal posting)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 January
* Contains spoilers *
I must have been quite dim when I saw Another Earth. (We say 'He is bright', 'She's so dim', as if the intensity of a light is all that matters, when, of course - as any photographer or cinematographer will tell you - it has other qualities.) It's just that I was musing to myself why, when Rhoda was wandering around, largely at night, the other Earth that was being talked about on the night that she, by trying to look at it out of the window whilst driving, killed the wife and child of John Burroughs seems so improbably huge - if it appeared that big, it would either have to be enormous (and so not a mirror Earth) or very close, many times nearer than the moon (with which, maybe for technical reasons, it seemed to appear).
The less-dim may have realized the symbolic nature of its size, reflecting - almost in an expressionistic way - the depth of Rhoda's guilt. As I have said, the probable cannot be pressed too far with this film, or it would not have taken scientists four years (the term of Rhoda's prison sentence) to try communicating with the other planet. And, as John Burroughs asks, when he is arguing against not escaping from Plato's cave and knowing the truth, would its inhabitants be calling it Earth 2, as those on his were.
His initially unselfish response to learning that Rhoda has won the prize of a trip to Earth 2 is not what we expect, and, when he comes to appreciate that he doesn't want her to go, we have not expected her to tell him the truth about why she came there. (We know that she is a bright girl, who had a place to go to MIT before her foolish act (and which of us has not done foolish things in a car and got away with it?), and her quick-wittedness came out in thinking of the explanation that she had called to offer a free trial of a cleaning service, faced by the awfulness of telling John the truth - and then in claiming to come from Maid in Haven, which, of course, sounds almost like something else, the thing that maybe John comes to believe her to be.)
The final unselfish act - again, a complete surprise to me - was giving John her flight-ticket, and again I was being slow. (I've talked about Rhoda's quick-wittedness - what makes us turn extremes of a spectrum into pejorative terms?) I knew that she had given him a family photograph, and that she had told him that the latest theory was that Earth 2 became visible when its synchronicity with this planet broke, but I did not know then that the flight-ticket was also being given, or why John, with the views expressed before (which may have been an intellectual cover, of course, for his real feelings), would have wanted it.
I came to understand, as I meditated on the apparent hugeness of Earth 2, that, if the theory were right, then it might be that, on that otherwise hitherto identical planet, the accident hadn't happened, and John could see his family again (whatever the other John Burroughs might think).
Whether others 'got all of that' as the film played out, I don't know, but it has in no way spoilt it for me to have been reflecting on what I could not follow...
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8 January
* Contains spoilers *
I must have been quite dim when I saw Another Earth. (We say 'He is bright', 'She's so dim', as if the intensity of a light is all that matters, when, of course - as any photographer or cinematographer will tell you - it has other qualities.) It's just that I was musing to myself why, when Rhoda was wandering around, largely at night, the other Earth that was being talked about on the night that she, by trying to look at it out of the window whilst driving, killed the wife and child of John Burroughs seems so improbably huge - if it appeared that big, it would either have to be enormous (and so not a mirror Earth) or very close, many times nearer than the moon (with which, maybe for technical reasons, it seemed to appear).
The less-dim may have realized the symbolic nature of its size, reflecting - almost in an expressionistic way - the depth of Rhoda's guilt. As I have said, the probable cannot be pressed too far with this film, or it would not have taken scientists four years (the term of Rhoda's prison sentence) to try communicating with the other planet. And, as John Burroughs asks, when he is arguing against not escaping from Plato's cave and knowing the truth, would its inhabitants be calling it Earth 2, as those on his were.
His initially unselfish response to learning that Rhoda has won the prize of a trip to Earth 2 is not what we expect, and, when he comes to appreciate that he doesn't want her to go, we have not expected her to tell him the truth about why she came there. (We know that she is a bright girl, who had a place to go to MIT before her foolish act (and which of us has not done foolish things in a car and got away with it?), and her quick-wittedness came out in thinking of the explanation that she had called to offer a free trial of a cleaning service, faced by the awfulness of telling John the truth - and then in claiming to come from Maid in Haven, which, of course, sounds almost like something else, the thing that maybe John comes to believe her to be.)
The final unselfish act - again, a complete surprise to me - was giving John her flight-ticket, and again I was being slow. (I've talked about Rhoda's quick-wittedness - what makes us turn extremes of a spectrum into pejorative terms?) I knew that she had given him a family photograph, and that she had told him that the latest theory was that Earth 2 became visible when its synchronicity with this planet broke, but I did not know then that the flight-ticket was also being given, or why John, with the views expressed before (which may have been an intellectual cover, of course, for his real feelings), would have wanted it.
I came to understand, as I meditated on the apparent hugeness of Earth 2, that, if the theory were right, then it might be that, on that otherwise hitherto identical planet, the accident hadn't happened, and John could see his family again (whatever the other John Burroughs might think).
Whether others 'got all of that' as the film played out, I don't know, but it has in no way spoilt it for me to have been reflecting on what I could not follow...
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Page layout and baking
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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7 January
No, not a view of the night sky, with supernovae, galaxies and complete with meteors, but an arrangement of twelve prawn bites, creatures that sacrificed their lives to be put in the oven for my delight (as it turned out, this purchase of discounted party food was inspired) - I was interested enough in the challenges presented in setting them out, if one didn't adopt the mundane approach of rows of each one, to record the result.
And then we have this, to-night's effort with the same task (no, the previous ones did get cooked and eaten, not just put back in the fridge to be humiliated again by more facile designs made using them):
From which one takes what? Well, someone might like to compare them, and perhaps even psychoanalyse me on the basis of the significance of the similarities (or differences) in carrying out the same exercise more than once.
For me, I take the grandiose line, and return to the night sky, with an analogy to mandalas, those Buddhist sand-paintings that first so intrigued me when I read about then...
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7 January
No, not a view of the night sky, with supernovae, galaxies and complete with meteors, but an arrangement of twelve prawn bites, creatures that sacrificed their lives to be put in the oven for my delight (as it turned out, this purchase of discounted party food was inspired) - I was interested enough in the challenges presented in setting them out, if one didn't adopt the mundane approach of rows of each one, to record the result.
And then we have this, to-night's effort with the same task (no, the previous ones did get cooked and eaten, not just put back in the fridge to be humiliated again by more facile designs made using them):
From which one takes what? Well, someone might like to compare them, and perhaps even psychoanalyse me on the basis of the significance of the similarities (or differences) in carrying out the same exercise more than once.
For me, I take the grandiose line, and return to the night sky, with an analogy to mandalas, those Buddhist sand-paintings that first so intrigued me when I read about then...
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Friday, 6 January 2012
Crypt in Canterbury
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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6 January
I quote from the Hoban 2005 web-site. Can anyone else spot the relational error?:
After viewing the painting, a service began in the main part of the cathedral, so the group was led downstairs to the crypt, where no photography is allowed.
A clue. It resembles the one in these lines from a song by Chris de Burgh:
Rolling through the countryside,
Tears were in my eyes.
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6 January
I quote from the Hoban 2005 web-site. Can anyone else spot the relational error?:
After viewing the painting, a service began in the main part of the cathedral, so the group was led downstairs to the crypt, where no photography is allowed.
A clue. It resembles the one in these lines from a song by Chris de Burgh:
Rolling through the countryside,
Tears were in my eyes.
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Vented ill-feeling and the Vento case
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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6 January
Whilst looking for related case-law to that of Vento v. Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police [2002] EWCA Civ 1871*, I came across another that, though not relevant to what I wanted to know, is nonetheless intriguing, probably in a salacious way, for the allegations made in it.
I wasn't there, so I only know what the judge said (and judges tend to be a little staid, even if they do not sit in the High Court or higher courts), but here is an indication of what looking at the case, Mitton and others v. Benefield and another [2011] EWHC 2098 (QB), reveals (amongst other things - see for yourself):
* I consider it clear that he [Mr Wilding-Mitton] has become or allowed himself to become obsessed with his neighbours and prepared to identify as sinister the most ordinary of suburban activities.
* Mr Wilding-Mitton maintained in his evidence that he has consulted experts on both sides of the Atlantic to enable him to tell me that from the outset of their relationship Mr and Mrs Benefield, who should be classified as psychopaths, had a planned campaign to destroy Mr Wilding-Mitton and his family. He said that he thought the matter, which he described as the hounding of an innocent person, to be of national importance. He said that they, by which I understood him to mean his family, were trying to defend themselves in an impossible situation.
* He said that Mr Benefield was a platinum smirker who had a moronic stare. A consequence was, according to Mr Wilding-Mitton, that his daughter, who in the witness box appeared an amiable teenager, had been subject to psychological rape or molestation. Nothing she said in her evidence came remotely close to that kind of categorisation. He maintained that Mr Benefield was a psychopathic narcissist and that Mrs Benefield had a psychotic disorder.
Read on, if you dare, at www.bailii.org ...
* A general Internet search, based on the name 'Vento' and trying to find a synopsis of what it established concerning awards for injury to feelings in discrimination cases, proved null, so I consulted a specialist legal database, www.bailii.org, not to be mistaken for what superficially pretends to be it at www.bailii.org.uk.
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6 January
Whilst looking for related case-law to that of Vento v. Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police [2002] EWCA Civ 1871*, I came across another that, though not relevant to what I wanted to know, is nonetheless intriguing, probably in a salacious way, for the allegations made in it.
I wasn't there, so I only know what the judge said (and judges tend to be a little staid, even if they do not sit in the High Court or higher courts), but here is an indication of what looking at the case, Mitton and others v. Benefield and another [2011] EWHC 2098 (QB), reveals (amongst other things - see for yourself):
* I consider it clear that he [Mr Wilding-Mitton] has become or allowed himself to become obsessed with his neighbours and prepared to identify as sinister the most ordinary of suburban activities.
* Mr Wilding-Mitton maintained in his evidence that he has consulted experts on both sides of the Atlantic to enable him to tell me that from the outset of their relationship Mr and Mrs Benefield, who should be classified as psychopaths, had a planned campaign to destroy Mr Wilding-Mitton and his family. He said that he thought the matter, which he described as the hounding of an innocent person, to be of national importance. He said that they, by which I understood him to mean his family, were trying to defend themselves in an impossible situation.
* He said that Mr Benefield was a platinum smirker who had a moronic stare. A consequence was, according to Mr Wilding-Mitton, that his daughter, who in the witness box appeared an amiable teenager, had been subject to psychological rape or molestation. Nothing she said in her evidence came remotely close to that kind of categorisation. He maintained that Mr Benefield was a psychopathic narcissist and that Mrs Benefield had a psychotic disorder.
Read on, if you dare, at www.bailii.org ...
* A general Internet search, based on the name 'Vento' and trying to find a synopsis of what it established concerning awards for injury to feelings in discrimination cases, proved null, so I consulted a specialist legal database, www.bailii.org, not to be mistaken for what superficially pretends to be it at www.bailii.org.uk.
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Thursday, 5 January 2012
The real Diva
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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6 January
In the film Diva (1980), it may be possible to argue that there is more than one diva, and that Paris itself is the other.
Leaving that aside, we have Cynthia Hawkins, a black American soprano (played by Wilhemenia [sometimes with a Wiggins] Fernandez), who seems to be living in Paris, but - although full marks for effort - whose French must have been a strain on the ears of the first audience: if that isn't just put on, why this choice of character, not necessarily actress, for the role?
Well, she does have a childlike trust and belief, and that quality is both important to the film and comes across very clearly, and it is probably quite relevant that she is the glamorous star from another country, albeit doing her best with her French. (It's said that Jessye Norman was in mind when the part was created (not to play it), although I do not know in what way.)
Her feeling about herself, about not wanting to be recorded or held to ransom because of a recording, is the thing that comes to the fore: with Jules, she is amazingly open and also forgiving, since he not only takes her dress, but the recording that helps create the film's kerfuffle, and he is not always the most direct about what he is doing.
So that, that quality, is what I guess makes Cynthia singing from La Wally, which she does splendidly, the diva in Diva: her naive belief, and following her instincts.
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6 January
In the film Diva (1980), it may be possible to argue that there is more than one diva, and that Paris itself is the other.
Leaving that aside, we have Cynthia Hawkins, a black American soprano (played by Wilhemenia [sometimes with a Wiggins] Fernandez), who seems to be living in Paris, but - although full marks for effort - whose French must have been a strain on the ears of the first audience: if that isn't just put on, why this choice of character, not necessarily actress, for the role?
Well, she does have a childlike trust and belief, and that quality is both important to the film and comes across very clearly, and it is probably quite relevant that she is the glamorous star from another country, albeit doing her best with her French. (It's said that Jessye Norman was in mind when the part was created (not to play it), although I do not know in what way.)
Her feeling about herself, about not wanting to be recorded or held to ransom because of a recording, is the thing that comes to the fore: with Jules, she is amazingly open and also forgiving, since he not only takes her dress, but the recording that helps create the film's kerfuffle, and he is not always the most direct about what he is doing.
So that, that quality, is what I guess makes Cynthia singing from La Wally, which she does splendidly, the diva in Diva: her naive belief, and following her instincts.
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Early Woody and Mere Anarchy (3)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
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6 January
I am beginning to realize that the theme of Fool's Gold seems to link almost everything in this collection:
* A man offered levitation and special powers by crooks
* An actor who doesn't know his own status, duped into taking a poor part in a film
* The 2.6-pound white truffle that everyone wants is a fake
* The director who so believes his yes-men that he tries to film the LA phone-book
* The unwise purchaser of a property and hirer of the men to work on it
* The songwriter in analysis who is supposed to be the next Irving Berlin and pays his therapist with songs
* What to the witless might sound like a brilliant idea for working up the interrelated lives of Gustav and Alma Mahler into a musical drama
Those are just the ones whose themes I can recall, and only the one about the father whose son goes to 'film camp' and has the proprietor of the camp and him raging back and forth in correspondence breaks the pattern - even there, though, the $16m distribution rights seem fine until someone else is interested in a share...
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6 January
I am beginning to realize that the theme of Fool's Gold seems to link almost everything in this collection:
* A man offered levitation and special powers by crooks
* An actor who doesn't know his own status, duped into taking a poor part in a film
* The 2.6-pound white truffle that everyone wants is a fake
* The director who so believes his yes-men that he tries to film the LA phone-book
* The unwise purchaser of a property and hirer of the men to work on it
* The songwriter in analysis who is supposed to be the next Irving Berlin and pays his therapist with songs
* What to the witless might sound like a brilliant idea for working up the interrelated lives of Gustav and Alma Mahler into a musical drama
Those are just the ones whose themes I can recall, and only the one about the father whose son goes to 'film camp' and has the proprietor of the camp and him raging back and forth in correspondence breaks the pattern - even there, though, the $16m distribution rights seem fine until someone else is interested in a share...
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Early Woody and Mere Anarchy (2)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
5 January
I had wrongly thought that something appearing in The New Yorker might be a mark of quality.
However, the credits tell me which have previously been published there, and they are not the best: one is just demonstrating how to set out a screenplay (which Allen, of course, can do), but with few laughs; another, a ludicrous idea for a show, which, if the narrator had employed the little sense that he had, he would never have bought an expensive lunch to hear about; a third, a tiring story, loosely tied in with Dante's Inferno, about a very ill-advised choice of building and builder.
Doesn't exactly inspire one to read on (although, for completeness and despite what often seems to me to be lazy writing, I will), and the quality of the presentation of the text leaves a lot to be desires - I know that people no longer know what orphans and widows are, so cannot care about them, but for the last line of a page to end like this shocks me:
; fi-
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5 January
I had wrongly thought that something appearing in The New Yorker might be a mark of quality.
However, the credits tell me which have previously been published there, and they are not the best: one is just demonstrating how to set out a screenplay (which Allen, of course, can do), but with few laughs; another, a ludicrous idea for a show, which, if the narrator had employed the little sense that he had, he would never have bought an expensive lunch to hear about; a third, a tiring story, loosely tied in with Dante's Inferno, about a very ill-advised choice of building and builder.
Doesn't exactly inspire one to read on (although, for completeness and despite what often seems to me to be lazy writing, I will), and the quality of the presentation of the text leaves a lot to be desires - I know that people no longer know what orphans and widows are, so cannot care about them, but for the last line of a page to end like this shocks me:
; fi-
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