More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 March
Not for inventing the dishwasher (as Max Christian Friedrich Bruch didn't, having been born, on the day of Epiphany in 1838, too early to do so), but, from more than 200 compositions, arguably for that Concerto for Violin (in G minor No. 1, Op. 26 (1866))*, or, if not that for you, for one of three other pieces (with very close opus numbers, and even corresponding dates of composition):
* The Scottish Fantasy in E flat major, Op. 46 (1880)
*Kol Nidrei, Op. 47 (1881);
* Symphony No. 3 in E major, Op. 51 (1883)
It is not that his work was not received well by audiences in its time (apparently, his cantata Frithjof, in the early 1860s, was met with great enthusiasm), but it didn't help either that, on account of the second of the works listed above, it was assumed that Bruch had Jewish ancestry and so was not performed in countries under Nazi control, or that music critics since seem to have sidelined him.
And there is, of course, a huge element of chance in what makes it into the repertoire. I have always loved the symphonic music of Vaughan Williams, but it is taking a figure such as Andrew Manze, as conductor, to make out a case for listening to symphonies that I have long valued. I also repeatedly remember how important Mendelssohn was, in a similar way, in making sure that works of Bach such as the B Minor Mass were heard, and also - love or loathe what he did with it - there is the influence of Glenn Gould's first recording of the Goldberg Variations.
With Tchaikovsky, it is rare to hear (least of all live) the Piano Concerto No. 2, and, despite how it was famously received at the time, it is almost always No. 1 that is played. There are also four Concertos for Piano and Orchestra by Rachmaninov, but it is relatively rare for the first or the fourth to be heard.
As to Bruch, although some sources say that he thought that the third concerto was as fine as the first, he seemingly knew where he was in history, and that the reputation of Brahms would overshadow hs own. In an unascribed comment**, he said:
Fifty years from now he [Brahms] will loom up as one of the supremely great composers of all time, while I will be remembered for having written my G minor violin concerto.
In their concerti for the instrument, both men owed a debt to the great Joseph Joachim (violinist, but also composer, as had been Pisendel before him), and - although it is another story - where would either work have been without him?
End-notes
* There are two others, both in D minor.
** Taken from The Rough Guide to Classical Music (London, 2005).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Friday, 9 March 2012
Might I ask what our Sunday trading legislation is for? (2)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 March
Just, for the sheer helluvit, I had planned to revisit this topic (when I started this posting as what Wikipedia® calls 'a stub'), but it happens to have become topical, with plans 'to relax' the legislation for the time of The Olympic Games.
Already The Opposition is questioning whether this is an initial move to do away with some provisions of the Sunday Trading Act 1994 permanently, which might be calculated to put the idea into the relevant noddle, not least when AOL® flashed a hint, last night, that the National Minimum Wage will be under attack in The Budget.
And, of course, we know how businesses suffered impossibly when the minimum wage was brought in - it's just that they chose to do so in a reaction delayed by many years - and that businesses, like banking, are good for the country as a whole, not just for those who receive large rewards for being part of the sector of financial services.
As for the 1994 Act, what would it mean to relax its effect temporarily? Not having any protection from sanctions, such as victimization or dismissal, if one refuses to work on a Sunday? A different regime for opting in or out of Sunday working?
Or is Mr Osborne going to look at that window of six hours for Sunday opening instead - or as well? So the shop can be open from 9.00 till 6.00, maybe, and if you don't want to work those hours, then
Nice XYZ Plc is offering you nine hours' work on Sunday - take it or lose it, as they want the hours worked, and you will be short on your usual working hours, because they are restructuring the shifts, if you refuse them, and these are part of your allotted hours, not additional ones.
And not that they would roster the rest of your hours at unsocial hours either...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
18 March
Just, for the sheer helluvit, I had planned to revisit this topic (when I started this posting as what Wikipedia® calls 'a stub'), but it happens to have become topical, with plans 'to relax' the legislation for the time of The Olympic Games.
Already The Opposition is questioning whether this is an initial move to do away with some provisions of the Sunday Trading Act 1994 permanently, which might be calculated to put the idea into the relevant noddle, not least when AOL® flashed a hint, last night, that the National Minimum Wage will be under attack in The Budget.
And, of course, we know how businesses suffered impossibly when the minimum wage was brought in - it's just that they chose to do so in a reaction delayed by many years - and that businesses, like banking, are good for the country as a whole, not just for those who receive large rewards for being part of the sector of financial services.
As for the 1994 Act, what would it mean to relax its effect temporarily? Not having any protection from sanctions, such as victimization or dismissal, if one refuses to work on a Sunday? A different regime for opting in or out of Sunday working?
Or is Mr Osborne going to look at that window of six hours for Sunday opening instead - or as well? So the shop can be open from 9.00 till 6.00, maybe, and if you don't want to work those hours, then
Nice XYZ Plc is offering you nine hours' work on Sunday - take it or lose it, as they want the hours worked, and you will be short on your usual working hours, because they are restructuring the shifts, if you refuse them, and these are part of your allotted hours, not additional ones.
And not that they would roster the rest of your hours at unsocial hours either...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday, 8 March 2012
Woody and his women (1)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 March
Now, don't get me wrong, because Allen has written some great screen parts for women, but I'm thinking - as I do incessantly, thoughts feverishing racing around my head, trying to catch up with each other and sometimes crashing - about this collection Mere Anarchy yet again.
What does he read (or hear) that he writes such things in these stories for his male characters to write (or say) about women*?:
* The twin dirigibles that stretched her silk blouse to the breaking point
* Hoping to revel in tableaux of raven-tressed sinners looking like they’d come directly from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as they undulated, seminude, in sulphur and chains
* Once she wiggled her award-winning posterior into the lift
Not, by any means, that sex - particularly oral sex - hasn't always been a preoccupation since Allen's earliest films (such as Bananas (1971), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), and Annie Hall (1977)), but maybe, despite the humour (which is maybe a bit too unsubtle), it's that it passes by quickly onscreen as cheeky, rather than as smutty or prurient...
End-notes
* There is another in this collection of around 18 pieces, but I have mislaid it: it must be resting in Father Ted's account, I think. (None is narratated by a woman.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 March
Now, don't get me wrong, because Allen has written some great screen parts for women, but I'm thinking - as I do incessantly, thoughts feverishing racing around my head, trying to catch up with each other and sometimes crashing - about this collection Mere Anarchy yet again.
What does he read (or hear) that he writes such things in these stories for his male characters to write (or say) about women*?:
* The twin dirigibles that stretched her silk blouse to the breaking point
* Hoping to revel in tableaux of raven-tressed sinners looking like they’d come directly from the pages of a Victoria’s Secret catalogue as they undulated, seminude, in sulphur and chains
* Once she wiggled her award-winning posterior into the lift
Not, by any means, that sex - particularly oral sex - hasn't always been a preoccupation since Allen's earliest films (such as Bananas (1971), Sleeper (1973), Love and Death (1975), and Annie Hall (1977)), but maybe, despite the humour (which is maybe a bit too unsubtle), it's that it passes by quickly onscreen as cheeky, rather than as smutty or prurient...
End-notes
* There is another in this collection of around 18 pieces, but I have mislaid it: it must be resting in Father Ted's account, I think. (None is narratated by a woman.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Mystery Worshipper: Mr Ricarno
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 March 2012
Having heard to-night about some mystery drinkers, really from CAMRA, but who had masqueraded as members of a rugby club in the region, I cannot resist posting a link to this item, which I have happened to discover and has a synergy:
http://ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2005/1134.html
If only to tell me that there may be more reasons than the supposedly obvious one why someone attends a service, buys a ticket for a concert, or has a meal...
And, although it does not appear to work for all numbers, if you edit the link to make it 1133, you get another visit to another church (but I haven't - and probably never will - figured out (pun intended!) why 1132 works, but 13 does not)...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 March 2012
Having heard to-night about some mystery drinkers, really from CAMRA, but who had masqueraded as members of a rugby club in the region, I cannot resist posting a link to this item, which I have happened to discover and has a synergy:
http://ship-of-fools.com/mystery/2005/1134.html
If only to tell me that there may be more reasons than the supposedly obvious one why someone attends a service, buys a ticket for a concert, or has a meal...
And, although it does not appear to work for all numbers, if you edit the link to make it 1133, you get another visit to another church (but I haven't - and probably never will - figured out (pun intended!) why 1132 works, but 13 does not)...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
LENT LUNCH - 23 MARCH
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 March
Some people's take on the feeding of the five thousand is that a little boy shared his lunch-box.
Mine on reading the notice that advises me of this meal is to mourn the failure to use the word Lenten, because my understanding of a lent lunch is a sandwich that you somehow expected to get back, and I feel a richness and a beauty in this specific adjective for the church season of Lent - the word aurally has a better ring to it than the monosyallabic Lent: 'we welcome to you our service at this Lenten time'.
Yet it is the church itself that is turning its back on this word, because who else, other than the various denominations and some charities, has Lent lunches?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 March
Some people's take on the feeding of the five thousand is that a little boy shared his lunch-box.
Mine on reading the notice that advises me of this meal is to mourn the failure to use the word Lenten, because my understanding of a lent lunch is a sandwich that you somehow expected to get back, and I feel a richness and a beauty in this specific adjective for the church season of Lent - the word aurally has a better ring to it than the monosyallabic Lent: 'we welcome to you our service at this Lenten time'.
Yet it is the church itself that is turning its back on this word, because who else, other than the various denominations and some charities, has Lent lunches?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Wednesday, 7 March 2012
What was it with Sibelius and the milk pudding?* (2)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 March
And old Jean had a thing not just about gâteaux, but milk puddings, notably tapioca:
Of course, he tried to give the game away, by writing a whole programmatic work in praise of it, but - probably only in a misreading (his handwriting was worse than mine) brought on by incredulity, rather than an attempt to suppress his message - it ended up as being interpreted to depict a forest spirit called Tapio and his realm, hence Tapiola.
No wonder it was his last work, for his publisher asked him for clarification of its themes, and he then had to struggle to write four lines of verse to turn his appreciation of one of his life's delights into some other wretched evocation of Finnish mythology!
End-notes
* Oh, I know that it's a formulation little better than Can I get...?, but it was done with thought, with deliberation, with Love.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
7 March
And old Jean had a thing not just about gâteaux, but milk puddings, notably tapioca:
Of course, he tried to give the game away, by writing a whole programmatic work in praise of it, but - probably only in a misreading (his handwriting was worse than mine) brought on by incredulity, rather than an attempt to suppress his message - it ended up as being interpreted to depict a forest spirit called Tapio and his realm, hence Tapiola.
No wonder it was his last work, for his publisher asked him for clarification of its themes, and he then had to struggle to write four lines of verse to turn his appreciation of one of his life's delights into some other wretched evocation of Finnish mythology!
End-notes
* Oh, I know that it's a formulation little better than Can I get...?, but it was done with thought, with deliberation, with Love.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Sunday, 4 March 2012
What is this fascination with the music of Adès? (2)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 March
An achievement whose performance, I feel, deserves celebration, by contrast, is that of a piece that I happened to hear (and turned out probably only to have missed the beginning of and a little bit twenty minutes on) as part of Music Nation on Radio 3 last night:
It was Surrogate Cities by Heiner Goebbels, called a composition for orchestra, and broadcast live from The Royal Festival Hall.
In default of saying anything more meaningful now, here is a link to the composer's web-site:
http://www.heinergoebbels.com/en/archive/works/complete/view/46
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
4 March
An achievement whose performance, I feel, deserves celebration, by contrast, is that of a piece that I happened to hear (and turned out probably only to have missed the beginning of and a little bit twenty minutes on) as part of Music Nation on Radio 3 last night:
It was Surrogate Cities by Heiner Goebbels, called a composition for orchestra, and broadcast live from The Royal Festival Hall.
In default of saying anything more meaningful now, here is a link to the composer's web-site:
http://www.heinergoebbels.com/en/archive/works/complete/view/46
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Saturday, 3 March 2012
James Bowman pronounces: Most Handel operas have stupid plots
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
I'm not sure (maybe, now, he, too, isn't sure) why he had to share this opinion to introduce a duet from, I think, the last Act of Riccardo Primo, but, he excepted only Giulio Cesare and Ariodante.
Which, I believe, is a little hard on:
Acis and Galatea (about a poster for which he made another joke) - why shouldn't a jealous giant, in love with one, kill the other?
Teseo, because Medea is such a great, wild and torn character, and the things that she does are of legendary status, and what is wrong with the Theseus story?
Likewise Alcestis, for why should not Ruggiero, very much modelled on Odysseus and his wanderings, be unwittingly enslaved by enchantments - a paradigm for love, after all?
And so one could go on - I don't disagree with Bowman that the music is great, but where is the evidence that the libretto / story is so unworthy that Handel must have composed with an eye to the money, not the power of the piece*?
For, if the da capo arias really did have such little merit in terms of a story not worth advancing, I really do find it hard to believe that Handel's audience would, throughout his opera career, have been so often duped. Whereas I honestly believe that word of mouth and personal recommendation, then as now, are so much a part of whether a run closes early that the success that he enjoyed should give us pause in the face of Bowman's dimissal:
Really, when Bowman himself boasted of how many Handel roles he has played, isn't he, not Handel, the cynical one, if he thinks them so much trash...?
End-notes
* Is the opinon, one wonders, based on anything better than having seen the highly unflattering portrait of the composer in Farinelli (il Castrato) (1994)?
(The film gives, by contrast, much evidence of the beauty of the music and of Farinell's (imagined) voice, against the background of hard-nosed competition and ruthless business deals, the depiction (whether or not invention) of the latter of which may easily influence for the worse against our notion of Handel the man.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
I'm not sure (maybe, now, he, too, isn't sure) why he had to share this opinion to introduce a duet from, I think, the last Act of Riccardo Primo, but, he excepted only Giulio Cesare and Ariodante.
Which, I believe, is a little hard on:
Acis and Galatea (about a poster for which he made another joke) - why shouldn't a jealous giant, in love with one, kill the other?
Teseo, because Medea is such a great, wild and torn character, and the things that she does are of legendary status, and what is wrong with the Theseus story?
Likewise Alcestis, for why should not Ruggiero, very much modelled on Odysseus and his wanderings, be unwittingly enslaved by enchantments - a paradigm for love, after all?
And so one could go on - I don't disagree with Bowman that the music is great, but where is the evidence that the libretto / story is so unworthy that Handel must have composed with an eye to the money, not the power of the piece*?
For, if the da capo arias really did have such little merit in terms of a story not worth advancing, I really do find it hard to believe that Handel's audience would, throughout his opera career, have been so often duped. Whereas I honestly believe that word of mouth and personal recommendation, then as now, are so much a part of whether a run closes early that the success that he enjoyed should give us pause in the face of Bowman's dimissal:
Really, when Bowman himself boasted of how many Handel roles he has played, isn't he, not Handel, the cynical one, if he thinks them so much trash...?
End-notes
* Is the opinon, one wonders, based on anything better than having seen the highly unflattering portrait of the composer in Farinelli (il Castrato) (1994)?
(The film gives, by contrast, much evidence of the beauty of the music and of Farinell's (imagined) voice, against the background of hard-nosed competition and ruthless business deals, the depiction (whether or not invention) of the latter of which may easily influence for the worse against our notion of Handel the man.)
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
STOP PRESS: Beat-Crazed Boffins trounced by Daniella (1)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
Alas, that whole Westbrook / East End scene has trashed all the planning for the gig!
In other words, the promoter has got twitchy about 'the substance issue' with which - let's face it - the Boffins had always been inextricably connected.
So he's itchy, because he thinks that the backers will have the rug pulled by the bankers, who, maybe, might be looking to a bonus other than in the form of unsaleable gig tickets, and who, in turn, are in hock to God knows whom who owns X who should honour some favours to Hugh Hefner and / or his estate.
Sorry, BCB following, but that - and, admittedly, this is only the latest - appears to be the terminus, the station where Tolstoy died and the Tolstoyans took over...
That said, the desperate and the downright depraved can now go here in search of news of what Bray King (one-time fight promoter, and now would-be manager of the putative Boffins) has to say about A Tall!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
Alas, that whole Westbrook / East End scene has trashed all the planning for the gig!
In other words, the promoter has got twitchy about 'the substance issue' with which - let's face it - the Boffins had always been inextricably connected.
So he's itchy, because he thinks that the backers will have the rug pulled by the bankers, who, maybe, might be looking to a bonus other than in the form of unsaleable gig tickets, and who, in turn, are in hock to God knows whom who owns X who should honour some favours to Hugh Hefner and / or his estate.
Sorry, BCB following, but that - and, admittedly, this is only the latest - appears to be the terminus, the station where Tolstoy died and the Tolstoyans took over...
That said, the desperate and the downright depraved can now go here in search of news of what Bray King (one-time fight promoter, and now would-be manager of the putative Boffins) has to say about A Tall!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Naomi Campbell performs her Sonata for Piano (according to Samuel VII and YouTube)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
And a cracking performance it is!
Shunning designer wear for a frock borrowed (on the sly) from Katie Derham, Campbell cuts a stunning figure, as she sits silently, contemplating the black interleaved with the white.
Then, in a shot of her actually at the piano, we see her hesitate, before unleashing this piece of compressed energy. For the entire sonata, although in two quite different movements, lasts just 15 seconds, without repeats. (With repeats, which are intermeshed in a complicated way, it could take days, which is longer than can be uploaded to the relevant web-site.)
In a naive act, as if of rage, we are reminded of nothing so much as Bartók's Allegro barbaro, and then, in the contrasting mood, of his well-known nuance for 'night music'. How good, then, that Campbell turned down, in favour of this work, a commission for a Theme and 57 Variations on an Original Melody by Thomas Adès!
Just the first in a strand dubbed 'Supermodels play Sonatas'*.
End-notes
* Although, personally, I'm with Nietzsche still - and waiting for the hypermodel to emerge.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
And a cracking performance it is!
Shunning designer wear for a frock borrowed (on the sly) from Katie Derham, Campbell cuts a stunning figure, as she sits silently, contemplating the black interleaved with the white.
Then, in a shot of her actually at the piano, we see her hesitate, before unleashing this piece of compressed energy. For the entire sonata, although in two quite different movements, lasts just 15 seconds, without repeats. (With repeats, which are intermeshed in a complicated way, it could take days, which is longer than can be uploaded to the relevant web-site.)
In a naive act, as if of rage, we are reminded of nothing so much as Bartók's Allegro barbaro, and then, in the contrasting mood, of his well-known nuance for 'night music'. How good, then, that Campbell turned down, in favour of this work, a commission for a Theme and 57 Variations on an Original Melody by Thomas Adès!
Just the first in a strand dubbed 'Supermodels play Sonatas'*.
End-notes
* Although, personally, I'm with Nietzsche still - and waiting for the hypermodel to emerge.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Complex?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
Complex?
'They've got it all wrong,
About the Don'
(So says he):
'They're the ones who demand -
They want him'
(Such his view)
'They truly stand in need -
They want him'
(Thus he observes)
At the same time,
In a basement in Amsterdam,
He cannot deny:
The desire to inseminate,
To make pregnant,
To give her one!
Priapic, his lust
For intercourse
Defies Leporello's notes,
Numbers, logic,
Save the logic
Of genetic lines
Rutting in the glade,
Seducing another's wife,
All about passing it on,
Passing on the impulse
To pass it on,
And on again
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
Complex?
'They've got it all wrong,
About the Don'
(So says he):
'They're the ones who demand -
They want him'
(Such his view)
'They truly stand in need -
They want him'
(Thus he observes)
At the same time,
In a basement in Amsterdam,
He cannot deny:
The desire to inseminate,
To make pregnant,
To give her one!
Priapic, his lust
For intercourse
Defies Leporello's notes,
Numbers, logic,
Save the logic
Of genetic lines
Rutting in the glade,
Seducing another's wife,
All about passing it on,
Passing on the impulse
To pass it on,
And on again
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Friday, 2 March 2012
Somehow I blinked... (2)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
I quote, rather hurriedly, from http://www.takeonecff.com/about:
The Official Cambridge Film Festival & Arts Picturehouse Review
Take One is an independent film journal run by volunteers. It evolved in 2011 from the original Film Festival Daily as the official source of news, reviews and interviews on all films screened during the Cambridge Film Festival. The first hard copy issue of Take One was distributed around Cambridge on September 8th, and the website is set to run throughout the year. We are in the process of publishing unseen gems from CFF 2011 including interviews with John Hurt, Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine and Nicholas Winding Refn – not to mention friends you maybe haven’t met yet such as Jos Stelling and Simon Rumley.
We will be covering many events in Cambridge including the Silent Film Festival and Cambridge African Film Festival, keeping you abreast of all things Picturehouse and reporting back from events and film festivals around the world.
We pride ourselves in being quotable but un-hip, informative but not smug, and we won’t spoil endings. Stick around, chums.
QED
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
I quote, rather hurriedly, from http://www.takeonecff.com/about:
The Official Cambridge Film Festival & Arts Picturehouse Review
Take One is an independent film journal run by volunteers. It evolved in 2011 from the original Film Festival Daily as the official source of news, reviews and interviews on all films screened during the Cambridge Film Festival. The first hard copy issue of Take One was distributed around Cambridge on September 8th, and the website is set to run throughout the year. We are in the process of publishing unseen gems from CFF 2011 including interviews with John Hurt, Gary Oldman, Paddy Considine and Nicholas Winding Refn – not to mention friends you maybe haven’t met yet such as Jos Stelling and Simon Rumley.
We will be covering many events in Cambridge including the Silent Film Festival and Cambridge African Film Festival, keeping you abreast of all things Picturehouse and reporting back from events and film festivals around the world.
We pride ourselves in being quotable but un-hip, informative but not smug, and we won’t spoil endings. Stick around, chums.
QED
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Never Let Me Glow - Ishiguro's Nocturnes
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
I had more than a hand in critiquing this set of five stories (subtitled 'Five Stories of Music and Nightfall'), which is posted, under my friend's pseudonym, as a review on Amazon®:
One reviewer said that this book is not a `miscellaneous collection of unpublished scraps', but it is - why else mention it?
Another reviewer praised the book this way: `The five brief novellas of Nocturnes are intense and beautiful [read as shallow, boring, banal, shapeless and colourless]; they are packed with detail [read as inconsequential information, senselessly repeated], never waste the readers' attention [read as continuous amazement about oneself for continuing to read on], and are entirely engrossing [read as feeling that doing the dishes would be time better spent]'.
A third reviewer soberly observed: `Had my A level student son written in the same way, I would have made him do a re-write.' The stories are juvenile, and so is the writing.
One other reviewer suggested killing time by reading the stories `in quick succession in one go. Given their pacing, this seems like a manageable task over a long languorous weekend afternoon'.
In fact, there is only one way to experience this book: reading it aloud, doing humorous voices for Ishiguro's feeble characters, and pointing out all his poor style on the way. A hilarious and enjoyable form of entertainment for many an hour!
As a one-star review, it's done well by being read: it has won no stars at all of its own, but it is better than expected for 0 out of 8 people not to have found it helpful (i.e. at least 8 people have looked at it and been bothered enough to want to respond).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
I had more than a hand in critiquing this set of five stories (subtitled 'Five Stories of Music and Nightfall'), which is posted, under my friend's pseudonym, as a review on Amazon®:
One reviewer said that this book is not a `miscellaneous collection of unpublished scraps', but it is - why else mention it?
Another reviewer praised the book this way: `The five brief novellas of Nocturnes are intense and beautiful [read as shallow, boring, banal, shapeless and colourless]; they are packed with detail [read as inconsequential information, senselessly repeated], never waste the readers' attention [read as continuous amazement about oneself for continuing to read on], and are entirely engrossing [read as feeling that doing the dishes would be time better spent]'.
A third reviewer soberly observed: `Had my A level student son written in the same way, I would have made him do a re-write.' The stories are juvenile, and so is the writing.
One other reviewer suggested killing time by reading the stories `in quick succession in one go. Given their pacing, this seems like a manageable task over a long languorous weekend afternoon'.
In fact, there is only one way to experience this book: reading it aloud, doing humorous voices for Ishiguro's feeble characters, and pointing out all his poor style on the way. A hilarious and enjoyable form of entertainment for many an hour!
As a one-star review, it's done well by being read: it has won no stars at all of its own, but it is better than expected for 0 out of 8 people not to have found it helpful (i.e. at least 8 people have looked at it and been bothered enough to want to respond).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
A letter to The Editor
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
Dear Cedric
The letter is probably Z, since it is more versatile on the board than Q or J, and my handkerchiefs are accordingly monogrammed with it. (They wanted to monograph them, but I refused, unless they gave them a free mammagram: which they refused.)
I had a telegram from Tom, but he had telegraphed in vain - 'twas ever in vain with Tom, after dear Viv, and it is now just an Unreal City in which he cannot believe death has undone so many. (Dr ZenZen has charge of his case now, after taking over the left-property concession at Victoria. [He wanted the right-property one, but he had sealed a playing-card in the envelope, rather than his bid].)
Victoria sends her love, and, forgiveably, spends less time with Virginia now after that incident with the water, so the hours hang heavy, unless she goes to the lighthouse, or calls on her kid brother Jacob in his room. At least he has a room of his own!
Ed tells me - a little too candidly even for my club's steward - that he 'wants to get his end away', but maybe he'll sublimate that in another novel. I'd like to believe that there is a visual quality in his prose, as everyone else says, but I'd rather buy ivory from a merchant in the street!
Anyway, that's a round-up of the set. (Moeran had tried to buy the set, saying that, after all, he, too, was known by his initials, but his Egyptian funds fell through.)
Yours dutifully
Bertie
PS I did want to get this to the post to-night, but, at the head of the stairs (or was it the stead of the hares?), I was blunged into parkness, everything became a blur, and I had visions of falling, my head mashed to a pulp on the newel-posts.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
Dear Cedric
The letter is probably Z, since it is more versatile on the board than Q or J, and my handkerchiefs are accordingly monogrammed with it. (They wanted to monograph them, but I refused, unless they gave them a free mammagram: which they refused.)
I had a telegram from Tom, but he had telegraphed in vain - 'twas ever in vain with Tom, after dear Viv, and it is now just an Unreal City in which he cannot believe death has undone so many. (Dr ZenZen has charge of his case now, after taking over the left-property concession at Victoria. [He wanted the right-property one, but he had sealed a playing-card in the envelope, rather than his bid].)
Victoria sends her love, and, forgiveably, spends less time with Virginia now after that incident with the water, so the hours hang heavy, unless she goes to the lighthouse, or calls on her kid brother Jacob in his room. At least he has a room of his own!
Ed tells me - a little too candidly even for my club's steward - that he 'wants to get his end away', but maybe he'll sublimate that in another novel. I'd like to believe that there is a visual quality in his prose, as everyone else says, but I'd rather buy ivory from a merchant in the street!
Anyway, that's a round-up of the set. (Moeran had tried to buy the set, saying that, after all, he, too, was known by his initials, but his Egyptian funds fell through.)
Yours dutifully
Bertie
PS I did want to get this to the post to-night, but, at the head of the stairs (or was it the stead of the hares?), I was blunged into parkness, everything became a blur, and I had visions of falling, my head mashed to a pulp on the newel-posts.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Thursday, 1 March 2012
True Stories (1986)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 March
Not (essentially because, ironically, of the story) much of a film (and I doubt that I would revisit it to be sure*), but it gave rise to what should be admitted is a great album (some people might like to say the same about The Mission (1986), released the same year, but I think that is probably unfair).
My best friend from school, for reasons that were quite hidden to me, had - probably still has - a great liking for Martinu's** music. A few years ago, and a few years on from then, he played me some favoured orchestral composition of his when we were at university, and, admittedly not intending to be complimentary, said that it sounded like film music to me. (He found, I seem to remember, some way of interpreting the comment that questioned whether that was actually a bad thing.)
I vaguely heard the concert in the first part of to-night's Through the Night announced by the very safe voice of Susan Sharpe (on the night shift yet again!), but it was only when what turned out to be Martinu's Symphony No. 1*** was playing that it struck me that it could be accompanying some action that I probably wouldn't want to pay to see at the cinema (not my sort of film), and I went to www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 to be sure that this composer was on the bill of fare.
End-notes
* Even if a whole load of Garrison Keillor (and Bill Bryson's take on small-town America) has flowed under the bridge since then. (And, yes, I do know that this is Texas, not the mid-West!)
That said, I notice (which is the reason for all this) that I missed a film last year about and showing David Byrne in live performance, and have added the DVD to my basket - somewhere - for when I feel like spending a fiver...
** Radio 3 doesn't bother with the accent on his name on its web-page, so I am not troubled to go somewhere else, only to find that I cannot reproduce it anyway (or is that the one on his Christian name?).
*** Elsewhere (work in progress) I shall be asking about how we refer to kings and queens.
In the meantime, this convention of calling works by titles such as 'Concerto No. 3' (which no one respects when talking about them - but, then, we live in a world where Tracy Chevalier made up a name for a painting and got away with it) suddenly seems very odd.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 March
Not (essentially because, ironically, of the story) much of a film (and I doubt that I would revisit it to be sure*), but it gave rise to what should be admitted is a great album (some people might like to say the same about The Mission (1986), released the same year, but I think that is probably unfair).
My best friend from school, for reasons that were quite hidden to me, had - probably still has - a great liking for Martinu's** music. A few years ago, and a few years on from then, he played me some favoured orchestral composition of his when we were at university, and, admittedly not intending to be complimentary, said that it sounded like film music to me. (He found, I seem to remember, some way of interpreting the comment that questioned whether that was actually a bad thing.)
I vaguely heard the concert in the first part of to-night's Through the Night announced by the very safe voice of Susan Sharpe (on the night shift yet again!), but it was only when what turned out to be Martinu's Symphony No. 1*** was playing that it struck me that it could be accompanying some action that I probably wouldn't want to pay to see at the cinema (not my sort of film), and I went to www.bbc.co.uk/radio3 to be sure that this composer was on the bill of fare.
End-notes
* Even if a whole load of Garrison Keillor (and Bill Bryson's take on small-town America) has flowed under the bridge since then. (And, yes, I do know that this is Texas, not the mid-West!)
That said, I notice (which is the reason for all this) that I missed a film last year about and showing David Byrne in live performance, and have added the DVD to my basket - somewhere - for when I feel like spending a fiver...
** Radio 3 doesn't bother with the accent on his name on its web-page, so I am not troubled to go somewhere else, only to find that I cannot reproduce it anyway (or is that the one on his Christian name?).
*** Elsewhere (work in progress) I shall be asking about how we refer to kings and queens.
In the meantime, this convention of calling works by titles such as 'Concerto No. 3' (which no one respects when talking about them - but, then, we live in a world where Tracy Chevalier made up a name for a painting and got away with it) suddenly seems very odd.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Russell's Pate and degenerate languages
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 March
Of course, the apostrophe is slowly, itself, in danger of slipping into oblivion, but it is only there to make the point:
We do not live in very literate times, and much is passed (or, as some would write, past) on by word of mouth* (a strange phrase, if one stops to think about it), so what is envisaged by the argot (call it what you will) in which the novel Riddley Walker's author has a future time and its notion of its past related is a disjunction between some sounds and what saying them has come to mean.
Apart from the immersive feel of impenetrability that the language seems to give until you have a chance to hear even Will Self himself read a section of it - which you may be able to do on one of the web-sites dedicated to the late Russell Hoban (sa4qe.blogspot.co.uk is as good a place as any from which to find some of the others) - and then realize that there is a way through (other than gritting one's teeth) and there is so much more besides to explore.
End-notes
* Even a very good announcer on Radio 3 talked about, very recently, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale: I have said elsewhere that the same unstressed dead vowel in a and the can make them sound indistinguishable (which is because the 'th' sound is the unclear one of the pair, unlike the one in that).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 March
Of course, the apostrophe is slowly, itself, in danger of slipping into oblivion, but it is only there to make the point:
We do not live in very literate times, and much is passed (or, as some would write, past) on by word of mouth* (a strange phrase, if one stops to think about it), so what is envisaged by the argot (call it what you will) in which the novel Riddley Walker's author has a future time and its notion of its past related is a disjunction between some sounds and what saying them has come to mean.
Apart from the immersive feel of impenetrability that the language seems to give until you have a chance to hear even Will Self himself read a section of it - which you may be able to do on one of the web-sites dedicated to the late Russell Hoban (sa4qe.blogspot.co.uk is as good a place as any from which to find some of the others) - and then realize that there is a way through (other than gritting one's teeth) and there is so much more besides to explore.
End-notes
* Even a very good announcer on Radio 3 talked about, very recently, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale: I have said elsewhere that the same unstressed dead vowel in a and the can make them sound indistinguishable (which is because the 'th' sound is the unclear one of the pair, unlike the one in that).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
The Great Composers: the stories that amuse us, but do not edify them or us
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 March
Announcing Beethoven's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3, they almost invariably tell you this story about the premiere:
A pupil of his was asked to turn the pages, but was aghast that there was almost nothing written on them.
Are we ever told who the pupil is? I don't recall it, if so. So from whose account, save the pupil's, would we know that this happened (or is there a claim that Beethoven confirmed the story)? Could the audience itself possibly have known, by looking at the manuscript paper?
More importantly, how does it help us to approach the work and listening to the solo part to know that, if the story is to be believed, Beethoven had allegedly gone before an audience to play it without having written it out? Even if he had, aren't all of Concertos Nos 3 to 5, at least, in the established repertoire?
So does this account, if it tells us anything, inform us more about our own prejudices and pre-suppositions than about whether Beethoven was so behind with things that he had failed to get something down on time? After all, improvised cadenzas were the stuff of Haydn's day, and of Mozart's, and we love that story of how the latter supposedly wrote a trio whilst playing skittles:
How rare - or common - would it have been for Mozart to play a solo part that he had not committed to paper? Can we even have that notion in our mind when this story about Beethoven is trotted before us once more? It almost compels us to feel that he - in the slang idiom - was 'chancing it', was 'winging it', when maybe he was doing nothing of the sort that was unusual.
You could very well look at the prompt cards that experienced and very professional after-dinner speakers use, and maybe the key-words would say nothing to you, but wouldn't you judge the quality of the preparation evidenced in the speech by hearing it, not by looking at cards that are not meant to mean anything except to the person holding them?
So - and I truly think so - this account of the premiere of that concerto just needs dumping. Unless we know how the performance was received by that contemporary audience - and whether its members detected shortcomings that could be laid at the door of poor groundwork - so what, frankly? And, in any case we value Beethoven for the works that he left us, not for his vices or virtues as a soloist whose efforts, in that domain, we will never hear...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 March
Announcing Beethoven's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3, they almost invariably tell you this story about the premiere:
A pupil of his was asked to turn the pages, but was aghast that there was almost nothing written on them.
Are we ever told who the pupil is? I don't recall it, if so. So from whose account, save the pupil's, would we know that this happened (or is there a claim that Beethoven confirmed the story)? Could the audience itself possibly have known, by looking at the manuscript paper?
More importantly, how does it help us to approach the work and listening to the solo part to know that, if the story is to be believed, Beethoven had allegedly gone before an audience to play it without having written it out? Even if he had, aren't all of Concertos Nos 3 to 5, at least, in the established repertoire?
So does this account, if it tells us anything, inform us more about our own prejudices and pre-suppositions than about whether Beethoven was so behind with things that he had failed to get something down on time? After all, improvised cadenzas were the stuff of Haydn's day, and of Mozart's, and we love that story of how the latter supposedly wrote a trio whilst playing skittles:
How rare - or common - would it have been for Mozart to play a solo part that he had not committed to paper? Can we even have that notion in our mind when this story about Beethoven is trotted before us once more? It almost compels us to feel that he - in the slang idiom - was 'chancing it', was 'winging it', when maybe he was doing nothing of the sort that was unusual.
You could very well look at the prompt cards that experienced and very professional after-dinner speakers use, and maybe the key-words would say nothing to you, but wouldn't you judge the quality of the preparation evidenced in the speech by hearing it, not by looking at cards that are not meant to mean anything except to the person holding them?
So - and I truly think so - this account of the premiere of that concerto just needs dumping. Unless we know how the performance was received by that contemporary audience - and whether its members detected shortcomings that could be laid at the door of poor groundwork - so what, frankly? And, in any case we value Beethoven for the works that he left us, not for his vices or virtues as a soloist whose efforts, in that domain, we will never hear...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Beat-Crazed Boffins re-form for a final bash! (according to Samuel VII)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
Actually, they haven't so much re-formed as reformed, so their gig will be of a rather penitential nature, in kind memory of all those monitors (not of the scaly, four-legged variety) that they have hacked to pieces in previous 'on-stage benders' (Daily Scum).
Catch them if you can - the venue for the gig and other relevant details (such as blood-type) are available to all those who can hack into the deeply hidden treasure-chest, just waiting to be found by the lucky few at www.beatcrazedboffins.org.uk/timian...
For the hard of hearing* (you soon will be):
NB Go here for the latest!
End-notes
* Surely no longer a PC phrase (i.e. only compatible with use on a Mac)?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
Actually, they haven't so much re-formed as reformed, so their gig will be of a rather penitential nature, in kind memory of all those monitors (not of the scaly, four-legged variety) that they have hacked to pieces in previous 'on-stage benders' (Daily Scum).
Catch them if you can - the venue for the gig and other relevant details (such as blood-type) are available to all those who can hack into the deeply hidden treasure-chest, just waiting to be found by the lucky few at www.beatcrazedboffins.org.uk/timian...
For the hard of hearing* (you soon will be):
www.beatcrazedboffins.org.uk/timian
NB Go here for the latest!
End-notes
* Surely no longer a PC phrase (i.e. only compatible with use on a Mac)?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
What is this fascination with the music of Adès? (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
Well, I have now witnessed the much-vaunted Thomas Adès (I was sceptical, but The Tempest - almost like The Artist (2011) - seemed to have everyone enthralled, i.e. in slavery), and he does not, at any rate, look like a man who is comfortable with himself: it could be fanciful, but he struck me, in dress and demeanour, as more like a harassed postmaster (or, maybe, an astonished station-master) than the director of an evening's programme of music.
In fact, he did not direct at all: he conducted, arms jutting out to give cues and the like, and he even conducted a very small chamber group, of no more than half-a-dozen players, almost as if, with a string quartet performing one of his works, he would do the same.
As to his music, it may not be pastiche as such, but these were my brief impressions of his concerto Concentric Paths (which, I also believe, was meant to sound more clever than it was - some people want to claim about Chopin that his solo piano works sound very difficult, but are not really that hard to play):
If I had not known that I was listening to the first movement of this concerto for violin, I would have sworn that this was a piece of Ligeti, and that made me feel that Adès does not have his own voice.
(Sally Beamish has just been on Composer of the Week, and, Undertow, a piece by Tansy Davies was played to-night on Radio 3, and neither of those composers sounded so like anyone else.)
In the second movement, it appeared to be a variety of composers' influences (two British) that I was hearing: in writing this, I did forget, for a moment, who all three were, but it was Shostakovich, Maxwell Davies, and Nyman.
In the case of Nyman alone, he continued into the finale: unlike with what sounded like a piece of Ligeti, the music just seemed immensely in the shadow of Nymanesque concerns and approaches (and maybe, as Adès looked, not happy with them).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
Well, I have now witnessed the much-vaunted Thomas Adès (I was sceptical, but The Tempest - almost like The Artist (2011) - seemed to have everyone enthralled, i.e. in slavery), and he does not, at any rate, look like a man who is comfortable with himself: it could be fanciful, but he struck me, in dress and demeanour, as more like a harassed postmaster (or, maybe, an astonished station-master) than the director of an evening's programme of music.
In fact, he did not direct at all: he conducted, arms jutting out to give cues and the like, and he even conducted a very small chamber group, of no more than half-a-dozen players, almost as if, with a string quartet performing one of his works, he would do the same.
As to his music, it may not be pastiche as such, but these were my brief impressions of his concerto Concentric Paths (which, I also believe, was meant to sound more clever than it was - some people want to claim about Chopin that his solo piano works sound very difficult, but are not really that hard to play):
If I had not known that I was listening to the first movement of this concerto for violin, I would have sworn that this was a piece of Ligeti, and that made me feel that Adès does not have his own voice.
(Sally Beamish has just been on Composer of the Week, and, Undertow, a piece by Tansy Davies was played to-night on Radio 3, and neither of those composers sounded so like anyone else.)
In the second movement, it appeared to be a variety of composers' influences (two British) that I was hearing: in writing this, I did forget, for a moment, who all three were, but it was Shostakovich, Maxwell Davies, and Nyman.
In the case of Nyman alone, he continued into the finale: unlike with what sounded like a piece of Ligeti, the music just seemed immensely in the shadow of Nymanesque concerns and approaches (and maybe, as Adès looked, not happy with them).
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Wednesday, 29 February 2012
Daniella Westbrook: 'Drugs Have Ruined My Looks' (courtesy of Huffpost)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
Yes, well, there might be one pose chosen for this story where Daniella resembles an Emma Watson, but - unless I am hopelessly misinformed - she was never awarded the beauty contracts that come the ex-Potter star's way.
Or are we all supposed to be having amnesia and believing that she was some sort of raging beauty in her significant t.v. role in a family of crooks?
To flip the coin, Marilyn was, of course, never comfortable with the attention that came with her looks (and, needless to say, they were enhanced for lenses of all sorts), but it wasn't as if she said that she wished she could be plain once more - why did those Martians have to whisk her away and beautify her one day?
Maybe I'm being mean, but we all knew years back about Daniella and her septum, so why is this news?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
Yes, well, there might be one pose chosen for this story where Daniella resembles an Emma Watson, but - unless I am hopelessly misinformed - she was never awarded the beauty contracts that come the ex-Potter star's way.
Or are we all supposed to be having amnesia and believing that she was some sort of raging beauty in her significant t.v. role in a family of crooks?
To flip the coin, Marilyn was, of course, never comfortable with the attention that came with her looks (and, needless to say, they were enhanced for lenses of all sorts), but it wasn't as if she said that she wished she could be plain once more - why did those Martians have to whisk her away and beautify her one day?
Maybe I'm being mean, but we all knew years back about Daniella and her septum, so why is this news?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Mysteries of Lisbon: The varieties of self-destruction
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
* Contains spoilers *
If I hadn't given the game away in the title, and you told me that you, as I did last night, went into a film for 6.40* and - including a 15-minute interval - did not come out until minutes before 11.30, I'd have asked if you had been watching the full version of Fanny and Alexander (1982).
Actually, not just because of the scale**, I had that film on my mind, and, in the interval between the parts, tried to engage one known from last year's Festival-going with that conceit. (Actually, I should have known better from having said, then, that I had taken my chance, when I could, to see The Seventh Seal on the big screen that it would not be a good thing to air it***.)
As with that earlier conversation, I was met with the notion that Bergman's films are chamber works (and so are just as perfectly seen at home), which The SS, waves pounding on the cliffs and beach, patently isn't. (And nor, for my money, is Fanny and Alexander, despite its domestic roots, but the suggestion was that the proper comparison was with The Forsyte Saga.)
Still, after the (welcome) interval, my belief that a debt is owed to Fanny and Alexander (its being set in a different century notwithstanding, and, really, nothing to do with what I felt that Bergman had demonstrated in that film) did not abate with continued viewing. As to the Galsworthy link, I do not see it myself, any more than I was really reminded of Buddenbrooks (2008) (of which I thought, as of a longer film, but then dismissed), because both are dynastic in a way that Mysteries of Lisbon truly is not.
What I did get put in mind of, momentarily, was The Leopard (1963) in the scenes of nobility in their finery, but, unlike in Visconti's film, I had the feeling that some extras in some scenes just did not move or look as if they belonged in their elaborate clothes, i.e. it seemed that they were not used either to the costumes, or to what those wearing them in that period would have done.
Mention was made, in the film (I forget where), of Ann Radcliffe, and (apart from its usefulness now) I still rue having been required to read her Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - on the slender basis that it would inform Northanger Abbey. Sixty years later, Branco's novel, from which Mysteries of Lisbon derives, clearly took a cue from the title of Radcliffe's book.
However, although the film does yield answers, it casually replaces them with nearly as many mysteries (though some may be created by sheer fatigue in concentrating on a set of interconnecting stories for so long - as against two unrelated films of the same duration - and having to remember who everyone is): by contrast, the Austen text presents us with a world where, despite appearances to the contrary, an utterly rationalistic approach is capable of explaining everything, however spooky or sinister.
Not that Austen (in this and other books) is necessarily always meaning to show us what a nincompoop everyone but her narrator is, but one could be forgiven for thinking so. Father Dinis, for all that he delves into mysteries (as well as creating them), is, in this respect, more like Chesterton's Father Brown, having a healthy respect for others' capacity to set out to mystify him, but at the same time teasing out those things that can be caused to yield to the joint attack of persistence and intellect.
And I would be very interested to know, if I can look into the matter at some point, why I was so put in mind, by this Portuguese film, of the works of the late Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges (as well as struck by the beauty of at least two of the female members of the cast).
End-notes
* And still didn't manage to avoid these over-energized trailers that just leave you in the wrong state of mind to watch the film that you paid to see, let alone that incessant VW Ghostbusters [(1984)] mess about 'seeing films differently', as against seeing the same damn' thing every time!
** IMDb claims that FaA only clocks in at 188 mins, as compared to 266 mins for MoL, but I shall rummage for a better reckoning of its true intended length (even if a version may have been released at that duration of around three hours)...
Yes, according to the running times of the two DVDs on which it was released by Artificial Eye, it is 309 mins (i.e. 5 h, 9 mins).
*** It is almost a commonplace that Bergman is - is supposed to be - a director on the small scale, and thus that his films can conveniently be viewed from a DVD on a smaller screen: to me, that makes as little sense as suggesting that seeing / hearing / feeling string quartets played live adds nothing to one's appreciation, and that one might as well listen to one's favourite recording on CD instead.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March
* Contains spoilers *
If I hadn't given the game away in the title, and you told me that you, as I did last night, went into a film for 6.40* and - including a 15-minute interval - did not come out until minutes before 11.30, I'd have asked if you had been watching the full version of Fanny and Alexander (1982).
Actually, not just because of the scale**, I had that film on my mind, and, in the interval between the parts, tried to engage one known from last year's Festival-going with that conceit. (Actually, I should have known better from having said, then, that I had taken my chance, when I could, to see The Seventh Seal on the big screen that it would not be a good thing to air it***.)
As with that earlier conversation, I was met with the notion that Bergman's films are chamber works (and so are just as perfectly seen at home), which The SS, waves pounding on the cliffs and beach, patently isn't. (And nor, for my money, is Fanny and Alexander, despite its domestic roots, but the suggestion was that the proper comparison was with The Forsyte Saga.)
Still, after the (welcome) interval, my belief that a debt is owed to Fanny and Alexander (its being set in a different century notwithstanding, and, really, nothing to do with what I felt that Bergman had demonstrated in that film) did not abate with continued viewing. As to the Galsworthy link, I do not see it myself, any more than I was really reminded of Buddenbrooks (2008) (of which I thought, as of a longer film, but then dismissed), because both are dynastic in a way that Mysteries of Lisbon truly is not.
What I did get put in mind of, momentarily, was The Leopard (1963) in the scenes of nobility in their finery, but, unlike in Visconti's film, I had the feeling that some extras in some scenes just did not move or look as if they belonged in their elaborate clothes, i.e. it seemed that they were not used either to the costumes, or to what those wearing them in that period would have done.
Mention was made, in the film (I forget where), of Ann Radcliffe, and (apart from its usefulness now) I still rue having been required to read her Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) - on the slender basis that it would inform Northanger Abbey. Sixty years later, Branco's novel, from which Mysteries of Lisbon derives, clearly took a cue from the title of Radcliffe's book.
However, although the film does yield answers, it casually replaces them with nearly as many mysteries (though some may be created by sheer fatigue in concentrating on a set of interconnecting stories for so long - as against two unrelated films of the same duration - and having to remember who everyone is): by contrast, the Austen text presents us with a world where, despite appearances to the contrary, an utterly rationalistic approach is capable of explaining everything, however spooky or sinister.
Not that Austen (in this and other books) is necessarily always meaning to show us what a nincompoop everyone but her narrator is, but one could be forgiven for thinking so. Father Dinis, for all that he delves into mysteries (as well as creating them), is, in this respect, more like Chesterton's Father Brown, having a healthy respect for others' capacity to set out to mystify him, but at the same time teasing out those things that can be caused to yield to the joint attack of persistence and intellect.
And I would be very interested to know, if I can look into the matter at some point, why I was so put in mind, by this Portuguese film, of the works of the late Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges (as well as struck by the beauty of at least two of the female members of the cast).
End-notes
* And still didn't manage to avoid these over-energized trailers that just leave you in the wrong state of mind to watch the film that you paid to see, let alone that incessant VW Ghostbusters [(1984)] mess about 'seeing films differently', as against seeing the same damn' thing every time!
** IMDb claims that FaA only clocks in at 188 mins, as compared to 266 mins for MoL, but I shall rummage for a better reckoning of its true intended length (even if a version may have been released at that duration of around three hours)...
Yes, according to the running times of the two DVDs on which it was released by Artificial Eye, it is 309 mins (i.e. 5 h, 9 mins).
*** It is almost a commonplace that Bergman is - is supposed to be - a director on the small scale, and thus that his films can conveniently be viewed from a DVD on a smaller screen: to me, that makes as little sense as suggesting that seeing / hearing / feeling string quartets played live adds nothing to one's appreciation, and that one might as well listen to one's favourite recording on CD instead.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
What satisfaction does a good - or better - novel give?
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
Of course, start by defining your terms - is On Chesil Beach (which Philip French probably thinks is a palaeontology manual) a novel or a novella? Maybe, just maybe, it depends - in part - on what the author calls it.
That said, I have a lovely red pepper sitting in my kitchen (well, it's on top of a mug), but, if I called it a novel, I doubt that anyone would approach it as one, but rather with a knife and / or some cheese, mushrooms and breadcrumbs.
So, peppers and McEwan (or even McEwan's lager) apart, you are reading this book, and a bit as if it's a lover keep wanting to spend time with it, and its takes you not quite where you wanted, but where you were content to be taken (because of the dialogue, the descriptions, the ideas, the characters...), right to the final word.
Is that better than when, as with Das Schloss (The Castle), that novel of Kafka's allegedly snatched from the fire to which he had mentally consigned it, there is no ending, as he did not finish it (although I think that it is Max Brod, the man who refused to destroy it and other works, who reports that Kafka had something in mind, and says what it is)?
Probably a pig to read it to that point - in whichever of numerous editions / translations comes one's way - not knowing, but would one, say, with Gogol's Dead Souls curse God and Man on finishing what we have and learning that there is no more, because - if we believe the story - the wrong MS, that of the reworked later part, was thrown into the fire?
Do things have to be wrapped up by the author, if he or she can, so that we can put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction, or can we declare, as I do with The Medusa Frequency and Angelica's Grotto, that the books are still great, even if it is clear enough - as debated elsewhere - that the books terminate with what, in musical terms, is a final cadence, but one that, for its formally ending, nonetheless smacks of an ending to be done with it as none other promoted itself in the mind of Russell Hoban.
And then, with that idea of an end to a symphonty* or like, we steer dangerously close - and so pull back, pretending that we touched the leg by mistake - to the labours left unfinished of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and the like (not to mention Fartov and Belcher).
End-notes
* I'm keeping that in, and I shall write to Peter Maxwell Davies, urging him to abandon the symphonic form (he's written at least four, after all), and compose a Symphonty instead!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
11 March
Of course, start by defining your terms - is On Chesil Beach (which Philip French probably thinks is a palaeontology manual) a novel or a novella? Maybe, just maybe, it depends - in part - on what the author calls it.
That said, I have a lovely red pepper sitting in my kitchen (well, it's on top of a mug), but, if I called it a novel, I doubt that anyone would approach it as one, but rather with a knife and / or some cheese, mushrooms and breadcrumbs.
So, peppers and McEwan (or even McEwan's lager) apart, you are reading this book, and a bit as if it's a lover keep wanting to spend time with it, and its takes you not quite where you wanted, but where you were content to be taken (because of the dialogue, the descriptions, the ideas, the characters...), right to the final word.
Is that better than when, as with Das Schloss (The Castle), that novel of Kafka's allegedly snatched from the fire to which he had mentally consigned it, there is no ending, as he did not finish it (although I think that it is Max Brod, the man who refused to destroy it and other works, who reports that Kafka had something in mind, and says what it is)?
Probably a pig to read it to that point - in whichever of numerous editions / translations comes one's way - not knowing, but would one, say, with Gogol's Dead Souls curse God and Man on finishing what we have and learning that there is no more, because - if we believe the story - the wrong MS, that of the reworked later part, was thrown into the fire?
Do things have to be wrapped up by the author, if he or she can, so that we can put the book down with a sigh of satisfaction, or can we declare, as I do with The Medusa Frequency and Angelica's Grotto, that the books are still great, even if it is clear enough - as debated elsewhere - that the books terminate with what, in musical terms, is a final cadence, but one that, for its formally ending, nonetheless smacks of an ending to be done with it as none other promoted itself in the mind of Russell Hoban.
And then, with that idea of an end to a symphonty* or like, we steer dangerously close - and so pull back, pretending that we touched the leg by mistake - to the labours left unfinished of Schubert, Bruckner, Mahler and the like (not to mention Fartov and Belcher).
End-notes
* I'm keeping that in, and I shall write to Peter Maxwell Davies, urging him to abandon the symphonic form (he's written at least four, after all), and compose a Symphonty instead!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Bath-times with a difference (3)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
29 February
Someone who was foolish¹ enough to post a comment on the first of what has become a trio of these postings did so to ask what my advice would be on the matter of croutons. To which my immediate response was:
That is a good question, but not one not to be thought of apart from that of the use of condiments, or, of course, of the edicts as a whole of the court of Louis XIV², I must say (probably in a later posting, on a quite diferent topic)...
For, that epoch³ was, just as we still have the origins there of our code of dining etiquette (e.g. not eating off the knife, how to set out the cutlery, and other impermissible uses of it, etc.), the source of various rulings about food and wine (and how, when and why they are to be consumed - with a very special section on cake).
If I had the energy to invent them, we could spend a merrily long time considering them all, but let us confine ourselves - willing prisoners - to the matter of soup (and avoid, if at all possible, the tangentially connected one of letting cheese melt in it).
Well, of course (miser that he was), Louis invented the crouton. You know how it is: you have some pretty big palace stuck in a field outside Paris, and it's hard to get the catering right. The Royal Baker produces too much for numbers at court that day, and Louis is fretting about this bread that is going uneaten and stale, so he tasks said regal bakery with the task of devising a way of using it.
They are bakers, so they already know about freshening up bread by warming it up again a little, and just take it a little further, rescuing bread that has gone beyond those bounds in this form of what can be added not just to soup, but to any dish with a signifcantly liquid element⁴.
Louis is, of course, delighted, and willingly takes the credit in front of those first to see him sprinkle what he dubs croûtons into his French onion (which, of course, The French assuredly don't - and never have - called it, any more than Danish pastries go by that name in Norway): he was thinking of cru plus tons, by which he meant the top-notch crunching noises that would result.
However, that real origin has been subsumed, in the search for some wholesome derivation, by some piffle about the word 'crust' (when there may be no crust involved on any side of the dice that croutons essentially are - though, but at the risk of burning the apex, they could be tetrahedra, or, without that problem (but the much greater one of making them), icosaehdra or dodecahedra).
However, Louis ends up having to banish croûtons, because his - sometimes not very classy - courtiers end up mucking around with them during meals, and even having games of craps with them later. (They were only emancipated after the Revolution, when Danton much prized them.)
The same sparing qualities can be seen in the well-known account of Marie Antoinette - also, as it happens, addressing what to do if bread is short. (No doubt this was the practice of Louis - if numbers at court exceeded supply, the bakers were asked to find some gâteaux to fill the lack.)
I'll wager that she would have used the subjunctive⁵, which I hazily recall being something of the order of Qu'ils mangèrent des gâteaux!, but I'm certainly not going to check that!
End-notes
¹ The word is used for reasons that may become apparent.
² We - seem to - take for granted that a monarch's name has such trailing capital Roman numerals to denote how many Henrys there have been (strange that we stopped at VIII - did the name fall out of fashion, for some reason (probably related to that king's eating habits)?), but why did we adopt this practice (from the Roman Empire, I think - either that, or from someone's repeated playing of Risk), and what happened at the time to lead to that choice?
³ Until cut short by what happened in (and leading up to) 1789 and afterwards, with the rise to power of Gérard Depardieu (and the coincidental reinstatement of chocolate as a form of currency, still marked to-day, more than two centuries later, by those little string-bags of chocolate money at Christmas).
⁴ If you happen to believe in the merits of Wikipedia®, I suppose that you can be forgiven for crediting it when it launches into an explanation of their purpose with salads first ('notably the Caesar salad')...
⁵ Unless a speaker is really classy (or attempting to impress - as impress one must - an examiner in advanced French), people don't go out of their way to use this mood, so knowledge of it all becomes a little vestigial...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
29 February
Someone who was foolish¹ enough to post a comment on the first of what has become a trio of these postings did so to ask what my advice would be on the matter of croutons. To which my immediate response was:
That is a good question, but not one not to be thought of apart from that of the use of condiments, or, of course, of the edicts as a whole of the court of Louis XIV², I must say (probably in a later posting, on a quite diferent topic)...
For, that epoch³ was, just as we still have the origins there of our code of dining etiquette (e.g. not eating off the knife, how to set out the cutlery, and other impermissible uses of it, etc.), the source of various rulings about food and wine (and how, when and why they are to be consumed - with a very special section on cake).
If I had the energy to invent them, we could spend a merrily long time considering them all, but let us confine ourselves - willing prisoners - to the matter of soup (and avoid, if at all possible, the tangentially connected one of letting cheese melt in it).
Well, of course (miser that he was), Louis invented the crouton. You know how it is: you have some pretty big palace stuck in a field outside Paris, and it's hard to get the catering right. The Royal Baker produces too much for numbers at court that day, and Louis is fretting about this bread that is going uneaten and stale, so he tasks said regal bakery with the task of devising a way of using it.
They are bakers, so they already know about freshening up bread by warming it up again a little, and just take it a little further, rescuing bread that has gone beyond those bounds in this form of what can be added not just to soup, but to any dish with a signifcantly liquid element⁴.
Louis is, of course, delighted, and willingly takes the credit in front of those first to see him sprinkle what he dubs croûtons into his French onion (which, of course, The French assuredly don't - and never have - called it, any more than Danish pastries go by that name in Norway): he was thinking of cru plus tons, by which he meant the top-notch crunching noises that would result.
However, that real origin has been subsumed, in the search for some wholesome derivation, by some piffle about the word 'crust' (when there may be no crust involved on any side of the dice that croutons essentially are - though, but at the risk of burning the apex, they could be tetrahedra, or, without that problem (but the much greater one of making them), icosaehdra or dodecahedra).
However, Louis ends up having to banish croûtons, because his - sometimes not very classy - courtiers end up mucking around with them during meals, and even having games of craps with them later. (They were only emancipated after the Revolution, when Danton much prized them.)
The same sparing qualities can be seen in the well-known account of Marie Antoinette - also, as it happens, addressing what to do if bread is short. (No doubt this was the practice of Louis - if numbers at court exceeded supply, the bakers were asked to find some gâteaux to fill the lack.)
I'll wager that she would have used the subjunctive⁵, which I hazily recall being something of the order of Qu'ils mangèrent des gâteaux!, but I'm certainly not going to check that!
End-notes
¹ The word is used for reasons that may become apparent.
² We - seem to - take for granted that a monarch's name has such trailing capital Roman numerals to denote how many Henrys there have been (strange that we stopped at VIII - did the name fall out of fashion, for some reason (probably related to that king's eating habits)?), but why did we adopt this practice (from the Roman Empire, I think - either that, or from someone's repeated playing of Risk), and what happened at the time to lead to that choice?
³ Until cut short by what happened in (and leading up to) 1789 and afterwards, with the rise to power of Gérard Depardieu (and the coincidental reinstatement of chocolate as a form of currency, still marked to-day, more than two centuries later, by those little string-bags of chocolate money at Christmas).
⁴ If you happen to believe in the merits of Wikipedia®, I suppose that you can be forgiven for crediting it when it launches into an explanation of their purpose with salads first ('notably the Caesar salad')...
⁵ Unless a speaker is really classy (or attempting to impress - as impress one must - an examiner in advanced French), people don't go out of their way to use this mood, so knowledge of it all becomes a little vestigial...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Tuesday, 28 February 2012
Who gets diagnosed - and where are the psychiatrists when this is happening?
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
29 February
It's not just on Composer of the Week, a Radio 3 programme whose content and production I very much esteem, that, centuries after the event, musicians get diagnosed with bi-polar disorder or the like*. It's just that I struggle to think of somewhere else - or somewhere else recently - that I have heard this done.
Let's not take Robert Schumann (and I very much appreciated what Steeven Isserlis wrote in a recent magazine article, seeking to focus attention on the music), but think about Johannes Brahms: we factually know that the Intermezzi are late works, so, when Peter Donohue introduced playing four of them to-night, he had to correct himself when he said that Brahms was writing them in the face of the end of his life, when he was actually doing so, as he then said, when he had retired.
But isn't this all a bit tiresome, reading autumn notes into these works that are not there (I couldn't hear them, at any rate)? If the pieces are any good, they should be played on their own merits, not listened to with an 'Ah, now this is late Brahms' posture, when, as I have said before, we know J. S. Bach's life but sketchily, and also the exact time of composition of some works, so we are freed from these stupid and pointless games.
And I shall scream if I hear any more of this end-of-life nonsense about Scubert's final compositions!
No psychiatric diagnosis with Brahms or Schubert, agreed, but it is not letting the music be free. And, in another sphere, what about William Blake? Blake is always talked about as a visionary, but what that means is that, for all the gubbins written by way of commentary on opaque works such as Milton, no one knows what the hell they are about. Blake writes, engraves, illustrates poetry that may reach few other than himself, but, despite his claims to converse with angels, I have never - to my knowledge - heard him given a posthumous psychiatric diagnosis.
Nor, also, Sir Thomas Browne. No, it's only ever - in the literary world - people who, if they were not ever incarcerated for their mental ill-health, were certainly otherwise known to have been treated for it: John Clare and Virginia Woolf.
And, if I ever hear anyone else described as 'a depressive', I shall bellow!
End-notes
* Where are the case-notes, and who studied them?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
29 February
It's not just on Composer of the Week, a Radio 3 programme whose content and production I very much esteem, that, centuries after the event, musicians get diagnosed with bi-polar disorder or the like*. It's just that I struggle to think of somewhere else - or somewhere else recently - that I have heard this done.
Let's not take Robert Schumann (and I very much appreciated what Steeven Isserlis wrote in a recent magazine article, seeking to focus attention on the music), but think about Johannes Brahms: we factually know that the Intermezzi are late works, so, when Peter Donohue introduced playing four of them to-night, he had to correct himself when he said that Brahms was writing them in the face of the end of his life, when he was actually doing so, as he then said, when he had retired.
But isn't this all a bit tiresome, reading autumn notes into these works that are not there (I couldn't hear them, at any rate)? If the pieces are any good, they should be played on their own merits, not listened to with an 'Ah, now this is late Brahms' posture, when, as I have said before, we know J. S. Bach's life but sketchily, and also the exact time of composition of some works, so we are freed from these stupid and pointless games.
And I shall scream if I hear any more of this end-of-life nonsense about Scubert's final compositions!
No psychiatric diagnosis with Brahms or Schubert, agreed, but it is not letting the music be free. And, in another sphere, what about William Blake? Blake is always talked about as a visionary, but what that means is that, for all the gubbins written by way of commentary on opaque works such as Milton, no one knows what the hell they are about. Blake writes, engraves, illustrates poetry that may reach few other than himself, but, despite his claims to converse with angels, I have never - to my knowledge - heard him given a posthumous psychiatric diagnosis.
Nor, also, Sir Thomas Browne. No, it's only ever - in the literary world - people who, if they were not ever incarcerated for their mental ill-health, were certainly otherwise known to have been treated for it: John Clare and Virginia Woolf.
And, if I ever hear anyone else described as 'a depressive', I shall bellow!
End-notes
* Where are the case-notes, and who studied them?
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Monday, 27 February 2012
Somehow I blinked... (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 February
What appeared to be a Festival thing, TAKE ONE, has become a beast in its own right, under the banner Picturehouse Review:
Whether I should have known about this, and how I have just found it, I do not know, but it is at http://www.takeonecff.com/ for future reference...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 February
What appeared to be a Festival thing, TAKE ONE, has become a beast in its own right, under the banner Picturehouse Review:
Whether I should have known about this, and how I have just found it, I do not know, but it is at http://www.takeonecff.com/ for future reference...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Kristin allures again
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 February
* Contains spoilers *
A friend in the cinema had already warned me of what his friend and he had found not only a surprising, but an inexplicable, ending to The Woman in the Fifth (2011), so I was on the alert.
That said, in the dark and not tempted to look at my watch (or the phone), I nonetheless knew that it was an eighty-four-minuter, but had no sense of how far in I was. Waiting for this surprise actually helped me concentrate wonderfully, and it did not, when it came, seem out of place.
What did keep me waiting was when Kristin Scott Thomas, who was presumably the woman of the title, was going to appear, and I had forgotten about the invitation that Ethan Hawke (as Tom) had been given to a literary evening:
Which, it must be said, seemed as dire as one might imagine, with even the effrontery of being asked for a contribution of twenty euros on arrival. If I didn't know that KST would be much better company than all of these old bores, I still wouldn't have blamed Ethan for, having caught sight of her, wanting to follow her (up to the roof, with the base of Le Tour Eiffel seemingly in touching distance) and leave them behind.
As to the way that everything was told (although, quite in the right way, nothing did get told), what arose from an initial feeling that things were uneasy was one of mysteriousness, especially in relation to KST (playing Margit Kadar, half-French, half-Romanian). The seductiveness that she had shown so tellingly well in her role in Leaving* (2009) was not to the fore as such, although she did greet Tom in a very intimate way when he came to her flat for the first time, but was simmeringly, almost glitteringly, present.
And it was fine that she could see an attractive quality in Tom, because his glasses (I am probably not one to speak) didn't suit him, and his face was much better without them when, in the same scene, she removed them (we possibly hadn't seen him properly like that before, because, talking to his daughter through some railings, we just catch him when he swaps glasses with her).
Tom had an inward quality to him that made it seem as if he had not even noticed that another woman (French-speaking Ania from Poland, played by Joanna Kulig) was taking an interest in him, until she arrives at his door very obviously dressed up and (likewise) takes him up to the roof. One almost thought, in the same way, that his curiosity would not get the better of him when on duty in his mysterious night-job (although his employer must surely have thought that, sooner or later, he would have that impulse), and that he would never go to the 5th arrondissement (the Fifth of the title, or, in the French, La Femme du Vème).
I wanted to see this film again, but I may not have the chance - not at my usual cinema, as it turned out that I had made it to the last screening - and I have ordered the book by Douglas Kennedy on which Pawel Pawlikowski based the screenplay that he has directed.
All in all, this was a film that credited me as a filmgoer to follow connections, to be confused, to work it out, and to construct a reality. I was deeply reminded of Kafka, largely the sort of internal logic of The Castle and (to a lesser extent) The Trial, but that's always fine with me.
Tom, I think, is also creating a reality, and his drifting (e.g. his apparent lack, after the initial concern, of action when he finds that his luggage has been taken from him when he is woken at the bus terminus at Quai de l'Ourcq, and then his inertia when, despite having no real money, he is given a room (no. 7) at Le Bon Coin) is part of that. If I get the chance, I will watch it all over again...
End-notes
* I hadn't thought, when I saw it on DVD, that its title translated Partir, but I think that it does so effectively enough.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
28 February
* Contains spoilers *
A friend in the cinema had already warned me of what his friend and he had found not only a surprising, but an inexplicable, ending to The Woman in the Fifth (2011), so I was on the alert.
That said, in the dark and not tempted to look at my watch (or the phone), I nonetheless knew that it was an eighty-four-minuter, but had no sense of how far in I was. Waiting for this surprise actually helped me concentrate wonderfully, and it did not, when it came, seem out of place.
What did keep me waiting was when Kristin Scott Thomas, who was presumably the woman of the title, was going to appear, and I had forgotten about the invitation that Ethan Hawke (as Tom) had been given to a literary evening:
Which, it must be said, seemed as dire as one might imagine, with even the effrontery of being asked for a contribution of twenty euros on arrival. If I didn't know that KST would be much better company than all of these old bores, I still wouldn't have blamed Ethan for, having caught sight of her, wanting to follow her (up to the roof, with the base of Le Tour Eiffel seemingly in touching distance) and leave them behind.
As to the way that everything was told (although, quite in the right way, nothing did get told), what arose from an initial feeling that things were uneasy was one of mysteriousness, especially in relation to KST (playing Margit Kadar, half-French, half-Romanian). The seductiveness that she had shown so tellingly well in her role in Leaving* (2009) was not to the fore as such, although she did greet Tom in a very intimate way when he came to her flat for the first time, but was simmeringly, almost glitteringly, present.
And it was fine that she could see an attractive quality in Tom, because his glasses (I am probably not one to speak) didn't suit him, and his face was much better without them when, in the same scene, she removed them (we possibly hadn't seen him properly like that before, because, talking to his daughter through some railings, we just catch him when he swaps glasses with her).
Tom had an inward quality to him that made it seem as if he had not even noticed that another woman (French-speaking Ania from Poland, played by Joanna Kulig) was taking an interest in him, until she arrives at his door very obviously dressed up and (likewise) takes him up to the roof. One almost thought, in the same way, that his curiosity would not get the better of him when on duty in his mysterious night-job (although his employer must surely have thought that, sooner or later, he would have that impulse), and that he would never go to the 5th arrondissement (the Fifth of the title, or, in the French, La Femme du Vème).
I wanted to see this film again, but I may not have the chance - not at my usual cinema, as it turned out that I had made it to the last screening - and I have ordered the book by Douglas Kennedy on which Pawel Pawlikowski based the screenplay that he has directed.
All in all, this was a film that credited me as a filmgoer to follow connections, to be confused, to work it out, and to construct a reality. I was deeply reminded of Kafka, largely the sort of internal logic of The Castle and (to a lesser extent) The Trial, but that's always fine with me.
Tom, I think, is also creating a reality, and his drifting (e.g. his apparent lack, after the initial concern, of action when he finds that his luggage has been taken from him when he is woken at the bus terminus at Quai de l'Ourcq, and then his inertia when, despite having no real money, he is given a room (no. 7) at Le Bon Coin) is part of that. If I get the chance, I will watch it all over again...
End-notes
* I hadn't thought, when I saw it on DVD, that its title translated Partir, but I think that it does so effectively enough.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Sunday, 26 February 2012
Thank goodness for Faber & Faber!
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
Simply for this piece of drafting, which I spotted on the imprint page of Alan Bennett's Writing Home (Faber & Faber, London, 1995):
Alan Bennett is hereby identified as author of this work
in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
That may not be sheer joy to you, but look at what is in the front of other books - until such time as I can explain myself...
Which seems to be now.
This is the more usual (if, I think, flawed) form of the notice under the 1988 Act, which in this case protects - thankfully - a rare talent*:
Mark Kermode has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work
The difference being that, according to this latter formulation, something - some prior act - other than the notice itself constitutes the assertion of the right to be identified as the author.
However, when I last attacked the Act in earnest - and probably s. 77 in particular - I could see no antecedent step envisaged by the legislation. So why this past tense of 'has asserted', and why the suggestion that, say, MK bellowed an announcement (which would still be an 'announcement', not an 'assertion') to that effect at daybreak in Parliament Square for seven days running?
Probably just foolish lawyers' caution, from which F&F wisely seems to have broken free - though I'd have to look at a few more of its titles to establish when, if I were that interested...
PS In fact, there is a more intriguing use of the second type of formulation quoted above that I have now found, which is in a Vintage Classics edition of Brave New World:
Aldous Huxley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
Most people, I think, who know when the book was first published will be surprised by that statement (for Huxley, who was born in the tail end of the nineteenth century, died in 1963).
But not, perhaps, if they know the story that relates to Huxley's wife's and his belief in the possibility of extra-corporeal survival, and the story that is recounted about her attempts to make contact with him after he died...
End-notes
* For, and let's be honest, who else would want to lay claim to The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex (or The Boring, The Marginally Less Boring, and The Outright Tiresome), based on said author's tediously pedestrian account, in the first half of the first chapter, of collecting / buying cinema tickets for his daughter and him (which, so far, has taken up fourteen pages of my life)?
The cover of the book is loaded with plaudits: well, if (Empire), 'Film criticism is rarely [this] much fun', then Heaven help film critics; and, if MK (Sunday Times) has 'More opinions than Delia Smith has baking trays', then I not only fail to spot the relevance of the Delia-related comparison (unless she is cook-in-residence to that organ), but also think that I know where MK is best advised to shove such opinions (along with the trays)!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
Simply for this piece of drafting, which I spotted on the imprint page of Alan Bennett's Writing Home (Faber & Faber, London, 1995):
Alan Bennett is hereby identified as author of this work
in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
That may not be sheer joy to you, but look at what is in the front of other books - until such time as I can explain myself...
Which seems to be now.
This is the more usual (if, I think, flawed) form of the notice under the 1988 Act, which in this case protects - thankfully - a rare talent*:
Mark Kermode has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988,
to be identified as the author of this work
The difference being that, according to this latter formulation, something - some prior act - other than the notice itself constitutes the assertion of the right to be identified as the author.
However, when I last attacked the Act in earnest - and probably s. 77 in particular - I could see no antecedent step envisaged by the legislation. So why this past tense of 'has asserted', and why the suggestion that, say, MK bellowed an announcement (which would still be an 'announcement', not an 'assertion') to that effect at daybreak in Parliament Square for seven days running?
Probably just foolish lawyers' caution, from which F&F wisely seems to have broken free - though I'd have to look at a few more of its titles to establish when, if I were that interested...
PS In fact, there is a more intriguing use of the second type of formulation quoted above that I have now found, which is in a Vintage Classics edition of Brave New World:
Aldous Huxley has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
Most people, I think, who know when the book was first published will be surprised by that statement (for Huxley, who was born in the tail end of the nineteenth century, died in 1963).
But not, perhaps, if they know the story that relates to Huxley's wife's and his belief in the possibility of extra-corporeal survival, and the story that is recounted about her attempts to make contact with him after he died...
End-notes
* For, and let's be honest, who else would want to lay claim to The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex (or The Boring, The Marginally Less Boring, and The Outright Tiresome), based on said author's tediously pedestrian account, in the first half of the first chapter, of collecting / buying cinema tickets for his daughter and him (which, so far, has taken up fourteen pages of my life)?
The cover of the book is loaded with plaudits: well, if (Empire), 'Film criticism is rarely [this] much fun', then Heaven help film critics; and, if MK (Sunday Times) has 'More opinions than Delia Smith has baking trays', then I not only fail to spot the relevance of the Delia-related comparison (unless she is cook-in-residence to that organ), but also think that I know where MK is best advised to shove such opinions (along with the trays)!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
In fully working order
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
Now that sounds good, unlike, maybe:
* In working order
* In an order that sometimes works, sometimes not
* In an intermediate and indeterminable working order
* Just plain broken
I've got to go all the way home first
No partial measures, then, such as going five-eighths and pretending that that's enough?
I had to go all the way to London to meet Vanessa
Well, presumably (unless Vanessa budged) going just halfway wouldn't even have given sight of her...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
Now that sounds good, unlike, maybe:
* In working order
* In an order that sometimes works, sometimes not
* In an intermediate and indeterminable working order
* Just plain broken
I've got to go all the way home first
No partial measures, then, such as going five-eighths and pretending that that's enough?
I had to go all the way to London to meet Vanessa
Well, presumably (unless Vanessa budged) going just halfway wouldn't even have given sight of her...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Non-Euclidean logic (2)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
The packet says:
Delicious in* rye bread
or with salads
Does that mean that it is otherwise not 'delicious', and will only become so in these circumstances?
Does it, like some hapless atom with differing electron-states**, flip-flop out of deliciousness, if you try it on its own, then have some with a salad, then try some on its own again?
And please don't confuse it, by having it 'in rye' and with several salads all at once!
End-notes
* An attempt - one that fails, if so - to place distance between this statement and the formulation of ordering 'pastrami on rye'?
** I Know - a hopelessly unfashionable model nowadays...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
The packet says:
Delicious in* rye bread
or with salads
Does that mean that it is otherwise not 'delicious', and will only become so in these circumstances?
Does it, like some hapless atom with differing electron-states**, flip-flop out of deliciousness, if you try it on its own, then have some with a salad, then try some on its own again?
And please don't confuse it, by having it 'in rye' and with several salads all at once!
End-notes
* An attempt - one that fails, if so - to place distance between this statement and the formulation of ordering 'pastrami on rye'?
** I Know - a hopelessly unfashionable model nowadays...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Indecent Tinsel (2011) - the follow-up
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
OK, I confess it: I have been spammed again!
Those guys who ran the screening caught me with a few minutes of what, if I had waited, would have morphed into a docu-style feature with its centre the development, by a flagging family firm that supplies soft-core titillation, of a new range of porno-decorations (including tinsel with a phallic imprint):
The whole thing an excuse for the man running the firm to fall in love with the woman who, taken on to sell its fading products, turns out to be a renowned designer, and also to have fallen in love with him. The only problem being that both are allergic to the products - or some such.
I'd only give it two stars, and I haven't even watched it!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
OK, I confess it: I have been spammed again!
Those guys who ran the screening caught me with a few minutes of what, if I had waited, would have morphed into a docu-style feature with its centre the development, by a flagging family firm that supplies soft-core titillation, of a new range of porno-decorations (including tinsel with a phallic imprint):
The whole thing an excuse for the man running the firm to fall in love with the woman who, taken on to sell its fading products, turns out to be a renowned designer, and also to have fallen in love with him. The only problem being that both are allergic to the products - or some such.
I'd only give it two stars, and I haven't even watched it!
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Saturday, 25 February 2012
My 'favourite' browser (1)
More views of - or after - Cambridge Film Festival 2011
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
Just from the sound of its name, you understand, which is pleasing in the way that the gruff term 'browser' is: GranParadiso.
Although, it has echoes of Cinema Paradiso (1988), and, inevitably, Dante's canti, it reminds me most of a cheese (you know the one!).
And, within less time than it took to pen what appears above, I could know quite a bit more about this browser, thanks to another one, and, probably, even download it and set it as my default:
This software of whose existence I had been unaware until the lifetime statistics revealed that 21 pageviews had been made using it, some of them, perhaps, by you...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
26 February
Just from the sound of its name, you understand, which is pleasing in the way that the gruff term 'browser' is: GranParadiso.
Although, it has echoes of Cinema Paradiso (1988), and, inevitably, Dante's canti, it reminds me most of a cheese (you know the one!).
And, within less time than it took to pen what appears above, I could know quite a bit more about this browser, thanks to another one, and, probably, even download it and set it as my default:
This software of whose existence I had been unaware until the lifetime statistics revealed that 21 pageviews had been made using it, some of them, perhaps, by you...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)