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28 April
If you've been married and not all that happily, you know how it is, so maybe this isn't as immoral as it seems*:
1. Short of rape, which still wouldn't count, it's up to those who have gone
through a marriage ceremony whether they consummate the union
2. The law of England and Wales does not allow divorce** within the first year of marriage (a period that might be inferred to run from the date of consummation)
3. Unless, as it turns out, consummation, or the failure to achieve it, is separate and only relates to annulment, i.e. not to starting 'a divorce clock' running at a later point than the day of the ceremony
4. And applying for annulment of what appears to be a marriage, as with so much of our wretched legal system, is both adversarial and a matter of persuading a judge
5. So one party to the marriage ceremony would need to allege that the other party, wilfully or through incapability, failed to consummate the marriage***, and he or she would have not to contest, probably event assent to the truth of, that assertion****
6. So maybe, three months after the ceremony, a judge might not swallow that the aggrieved party had taken so long to seek annulment (and rumble that the parties were conniving at - what will unfold below as - a contingent marriage)
7. Which leads us to the roulette element: thirty-six men and thirty-six women agree to go into a pool of marriage candidates, from which a pairing (and a number allotted to the pair, between 1 and 36) will be made on some basis or other, but essentially not of the candidates' choice (or not based on knowledge of the other opposite-sex candidates)
8. Cleared payment to the organizer by each candidate of the full costs of a civil ceremony is a prequisite to knowing where and when to attend (advised at short notice, say, by e-mail)
9. If one party fails to attend the ceremony, the one who does attend is reimbursed from the other's payment, and might elect to start again
10. If both fail to attend, maybe they get a refund of one-half each...
11. If they go through with the full legal ceremony, they get what they have paid for - they get what some cult leaders impose, on some basis or other, on the members of their cult
12. With a better knowledge of the facts and law than stated above, they choose how to proceed, whether to consummation, delayed consummation, or none
13. Each couple will have its own outcome that links to its number, whether they never met, met and could not contemplate marriage at first sight, went through the ceremony, etc, etc.
The tracked outcome of each numbered couple (for each of many such pools, in order to achieve a chi-squared level of statistical significance) feeds into a complex betting-system for roulette, reminiscent of the plot of the film Pi (1998)
End-notes
* Though the Surrealists might have approved, as, without formulating it in marriage as such, maybe they did this by default... I gather that, despite the former Soviet regime having marriage, it was neither difficult to begin or end.
** Yet it does allow for the lesser step of judicial separation (as used when Charles and Diana first split up, I believe), which - as far I recall - relieves the parties of what is claimed to be 'the duty to co-habit' (if you can credit such a thing!).
*** Has this topic been in a news-story of late?
**** That said, if John Smith says that Boddingtons slept with someone (who may or may not be named as London Pride), and Boddingtons agrees on the right form and in the correct way that it happened, who is to say otherwise? (Except that it mustn't, of course, have been more than six months ago that John Smith first knew.)
Any better or worse than these company records that say that everyone listed as present had a meeting in Delft, whereas some, say, do not even have a passport - or were doing something quite different on Jamaica?
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Friday, 27 April 2012
Some short comments about Peter Carey's work
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* Bliss (1981) is just that
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27 April
* I wrongly resisted Oscar and Lucinda (1988) for years - just because of that awful original Faber & Faber cover illustration*
* Illywhacker (1985), too, is amazing
* Who would play the role in any film? I suspect Anthony Hopkins (if they did it in time)
* How much does the multi-level pseudo-documentary nature of The True History of the Kelly Gang (2000) owe to forebears, such as, maybe, Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White?
* Wouldn't The Tax Inspector (1991) be brooding - and chilling - as a film?
* Bliss (1981) is just that
* And, yes, I do have some catching up to do - all in good time!
End-notes
* And, to judge from Wikipedia, the original Australian edition.
What's the difference between a t.v. celebrity and a judge? (1)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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Or even:
Well, one, wearing stockings and suspenders, whips you, telling you that you've been a naughty boy (or girl) - and the other is a t.v. celebrity
Not to mention:
One likes silk, one may have taken it, but neither admits to liking magnolia in a silk finish
Let alone:
One gives you a sentence you cannot believe that you'll finish, the other one that you know that he - or she - cannot finish
As to 'not finishing', there is no polish on them, but there's now more of the same
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27 April
Well, first we have to ask what they have in common:
They will both (usually) pretend that they know what they are talking about...
Until - or even after - it becomes blindingly obvious that they don't, or that they should - e.g. the famous query Who is Gazza?
What's the difference between overstepping the line with a judge and with a t.v. celebrity?
The judge will just send you to jail for 30 days, but with the celebrity you are, to put it crudely, fucked - 30 days' worth in one night
As an unnamed person suggested to me by way of a riposte yesterday, how about?
And, of course, one may look good in a wig as you go down - and the other's a judge
Or even:
Well, one, wearing stockings and suspenders, whips you, telling you that you've been a naughty boy (or girl) - and the other is a t.v. celebrity
Not to mention:
One likes silk, one may have taken it, but neither admits to liking magnolia in a silk finish
Let alone:
One gives you a sentence you cannot believe that you'll finish, the other one that you know that he - or she - cannot finish
As to 'not finishing', there is no polish on them, but there's now more of the same
What did the bluebells tell Jesus?
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29 April
Dmitri Shostakovich concurred that Pushkin was right in stating that bluebells are very WYSIWYG*, pretty Zen.
DS demonstrated as much by transliterating the utterance - as only he knew how - to give the theme of the second movement of his Strinq Guartet [sic] No. 10 (sometimes seen as a printer's error, but actually a subtle slight on Stalin).
That apart, bluebells resemble snowdrops (and Märzenbecher) in being close to the ground, largely odourless, and, although not invariant, quite subtle in their varieties**.
As to whether they blabbed about the true nature of the Messiah and that he would suffer, opinions differ:
* Some say that the manna left in the desert areas was responsible
* Others blame Zionist / Marxist mechanisms of Tidal Flux
* It is, in any case, clear that Mendelssohn only accidentally gave the true name of God in one of the modulations of The Hebrides Overture, and paid a levy to the authorities governing Staffa for his mistake (but it was disguised, in the books, as late settlement of unpaid bills left by Boswell and Johnson)
* Botanists, who get shut out of many such a debate, say that bluebells were not in season at the relevant time - but what do they know about the conditions that prevailed two millennia ago?
* Sceptics suggest that, if the bluebells had been in a position to speak, they would not have been audible for the noise of the thyme and lemongrass
From which we can conclude that maybe the teaching of the bluebells, perhaps not as showy, resembled that of the lilies of the field, in being more like a PowerPoint® presentation in technicolor than a dry, formal lecture, given in a crumbling, drafty hall...
End-notes
* Which, actually, stands for What You Saved Is With Yuri Gagarian, the official motto of Moscow State Bank (we could not publish the unofficial one, for tax reasons).
** They are not well known in Galilee, it has to be said, but maybe the success that has built on their debut album might lead to a World Tour that takes in the region...
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29 April
Dmitri Shostakovich concurred that Pushkin was right in stating that bluebells are very WYSIWYG*, pretty Zen.
DS demonstrated as much by transliterating the utterance - as only he knew how - to give the theme of the second movement of his Strinq Guartet [sic] No. 10 (sometimes seen as a printer's error, but actually a subtle slight on Stalin).
That apart, bluebells resemble snowdrops (and Märzenbecher) in being close to the ground, largely odourless, and, although not invariant, quite subtle in their varieties**.
As to whether they blabbed about the true nature of the Messiah and that he would suffer, opinions differ:
* Some say that the manna left in the desert areas was responsible
* Others blame Zionist / Marxist mechanisms of Tidal Flux
* It is, in any case, clear that Mendelssohn only accidentally gave the true name of God in one of the modulations of The Hebrides Overture, and paid a levy to the authorities governing Staffa for his mistake (but it was disguised, in the books, as late settlement of unpaid bills left by Boswell and Johnson)
* Botanists, who get shut out of many such a debate, say that bluebells were not in season at the relevant time - but what do they know about the conditions that prevailed two millennia ago?
* Sceptics suggest that, if the bluebells had been in a position to speak, they would not have been audible for the noise of the thyme and lemongrass
From which we can conclude that maybe the teaching of the bluebells, perhaps not as showy, resembled that of the lilies of the field, in being more like a PowerPoint® presentation in technicolor than a dry, formal lecture, given in a crumbling, drafty hall...
End-notes
* Which, actually, stands for What You Saved Is With Yuri Gagarian, the official motto of Moscow State Bank (we could not publish the unofficial one, for tax reasons).
** They are not well known in Galilee, it has to be said, but maybe the success that has built on their debut album might lead to a World Tour that takes in the region...
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Lunch on the moon?
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27 April
Moon and Sun, as for Francis,
They're in the same breath
For me, for a place to eat,
One is cool - literally -
And has coastal views
Peaked by a crisp crest,
Like a salad's crunch:
If you can catch it
Waiter! Could I have another?
Mine's floated off...
Rating: 4*, but no atmosphere
As to The Other Place
(Maybe Stratford-on-Avon's,
Or 'the one not mentioned' -
As with The Scottish Play),
Steaks 'from the grill'
Come burnt to cinders
Waiter! Could I have - instead -
The chicken Caeasar salad?
Rating: 2*, and stuffy in summer
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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27 April
Lunch where?!
Moon and Sun, as for Francis,
They're in the same breath
For me, for a place to eat,
One is cool - literally -
And has coastal views
Peaked by a crisp crest,
Like a salad's crunch:
If you can catch it
Waiter! Could I have another?
Mine's floated off...
Rating: 4*, but no atmosphere
As to The Other Place
(Maybe Stratford-on-Avon's,
Or 'the one not mentioned' -
As with The Scottish Play),
Steaks 'from the grill'
Come burnt to cinders
Waiter! Could I have - instead -
The chicken Caeasar salad?
Rating: 2*, and stuffy in summer
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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What did Jesus teach about bluebells? (1)
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29 April
It needs saying: he does not, in the surviving written record, mention them at all.
However, we can infer that he was not indifferent to them (and their social aspirations), because he did talk about or engage with:
1. Lilies in all their finery
2. King Solomon in that connection (famous for his mine)
3. Wheat
4. Other crops*
5. Pigs (and a casting-out of devils involved swine)
6. Vines and 'the fruit of the vine'
7. Fig-trees
8. Sheep and lambs
9. Lamb as meat (in German, Osterlamm for the Passover meal)
10. Bread
11. Wine-vinegar
12. Wine
13. Vines
To be continued
End-notes
* Which would have chimed with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Love and Death (1975)
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29 April
It needs saying: he does not, in the surviving written record, mention them at all.
However, we can infer that he was not indifferent to them (and their social aspirations), because he did talk about or engage with:
1. Lilies in all their finery
2. King Solomon in that connection (famous for his mine)
3. Wheat
4. Other crops*
5. Pigs (and a casting-out of devils involved swine)
6. Vines and 'the fruit of the vine'
7. Fig-trees
8. Sheep and lambs
9. Lamb as meat (in German, Osterlamm for the Passover meal)
10. Bread
11. Wine-vinegar
12. Wine
13. Vines
To be continued
End-notes
* Which would have chimed with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Love and Death (1975)
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My fifty-word story (from a few years back)
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27 April
Josef K. had fallen sick again, or so his doctor claimed. Not in person, one must understand, as this opinion was contained in what seemed a hastily penned note, left in the porch.
Josef tutted in a scoffing manner: he sick, and with the lowest blood-pressure in the district!
He looked again at the scrawl, grimaced, and crumpled the offending piece of thin paper in his sweating fingers - grasping for the wall as he collapsed.
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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27 April
Josef K. had fallen sick again, or so his doctor claimed. Not in person, one must understand, as this opinion was contained in what seemed a hastily penned note, left in the porch.
Josef tutted in a scoffing manner: he sick, and with the lowest blood-pressure in the district!
He looked again at the scrawl, grimaced, and crumpled the offending piece of thin paper in his sweating fingers - grasping for the wall as he collapsed.
© Copyright Belston Night Works 2012
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Economists in the Hen-House
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27 April
John Stuart Mill
Was really quite a pill
Pilate said:
What is Truth?
Better that one man---?
© Belston Night Works 2012
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27 April
Economists in the Hen-House
John Stuart Mill
Was really quite a pill
Pilate said:
What is Truth?
Better that one man---?
© Belston Night Works 2012
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Thursday, 26 April 2012
Royal Astonomical Society 'has no back-bone'
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27 April
Such, at least, was - what I deem to be - the clear import of seeing RA55 OFT => RAS SOFT
Or it could be telling me that the owner / driver / registered keeper (maybe all three at once) visits the Saudi town of Rass frequently?
Maybe even a message from or to (if not both) a West Indian person (or persons) about getting angry all the time, as it appears that 'rass' denotes the bum, and, in slang, using the term then means that someone is mad (in the sense of - very - worked up*)
Or, most paranoid of all, maybe it is an allusion to the Royal Archery Society, only there no more is one than such an Armadillo Society, and it is really a front for... you've guessed it, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and all those musical goings-on at Aldeburgh (well, Snape, if one could detect such a village, hamlet, or pair of cottages, though someone must have needed that whacking great maltings!)
End-note
* John is work TUP - meaning that he is a Totally Useless Person.
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27 April
Such, at least, was - what I deem to be - the clear import of seeing RA55 OFT => RAS SOFT
Or it could be telling me that the owner / driver / registered keeper (maybe all three at once) visits the Saudi town of Rass frequently?
Maybe even a message from or to (if not both) a West Indian person (or persons) about getting angry all the time, as it appears that 'rass' denotes the bum, and, in slang, using the term then means that someone is mad (in the sense of - very - worked up*)
Or, most paranoid of all, maybe it is an allusion to the Royal Archery Society, only there no more is one than such an Armadillo Society, and it is really a front for... you've guessed it, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and all those musical goings-on at Aldeburgh (well, Snape, if one could detect such a village, hamlet, or pair of cottages, though someone must have needed that whacking great maltings!)
End-note
* John is work TUP - meaning that he is a Totally Useless Person.
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Wreckers comes home to roost: report on a Q&A at the Arts Picturehouse
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26 April
NB This is a report on the answers given to the more significant questions, and a review of the film (presently in draft) will appear elsewhere. * In consequence, please be aware that there will, almost inevitably, be spoilers *
On Tuesday night, I watched the screening of a first feature by Dictynna Hood, someone to whom I had previously spoken, several years ago, about the documentaries that she was making. (Before she was lionized by Tony Jones and his crew, of whom Trish Sheil was going to introduce Dictynna - who wrote and directed Wreckers (2011) and host the Q&A afterwards, I just had time to ask her whether she had enjoyed making this film, which she largely had.)
As, with a Q&A, I formulate a question mentally and try to hold it during the rest of the film, to ask as soon as the initial questions from the person hosting have died down (so that I do not forget my formulation), I came out with (something like):
You mentioned fairy tales and stories from Fenland – what I found in this film was delight, a sense of possibility, things revealed, things overheard or witnessed, tension, jealousy, menace, fury, and I wonder, Dictynna, how deep you had to dig in yourself – or in ancient sources – to find these impulses?
The latter part of the question, with its humorous implications that she might do or want to do the things that her characters do, made her laugh infectiously. She had already mentioned that she had taken strands from real experiences and the lore of the four Oxfordshire villages, now changed beyond recognition by the overlay of the motorway and its traffic, so she had filmed in and around Isleham - and she mentioned the looks and queries that she had received at another screening in Oxford the day before.
As the questions came (and there was a good turn-out and much interest), Dictynna said more and more, opening up as the film does – opening up vistas – as questioners wondered about the status, as dream, of the start of the film (which, as it stands, someone had wanted her to consider dropping, and for which she had also shot a scene in a chapel, also in or near Isleham, which she said was so beautiful as to be unusable, because it looked as though it belonged in a different film – maybe, someone suggested, still to be made, when she alluded to the footage being on the cutting-room floor*).
Others asked about menace during and at the very end of the film, and it turned out that not only had the ending had been thought of very differently, but that, at one point in the conception, the whole thing could even have been much more of a horrorfest! However, not perhaps as alarming as parts of a wheat-field (whose owner Dictynna was most pleased to see in the audience) - the ones that we did not see, which had been trampled by the crew to get the on-screen shot.
In comments, there was interest in and appreciation of how the countryside had been presented, and I asked a further question about location, because there are many instances of people walking, often enough in twos, both in the village and elsewhere: Hood explained that, in shooting in Isleham (which, although not on a through-route, is apparently busy), she had focused on Dawn with David’s long-lost brother Nick (Shaun Evans) on the pavement and shut out the cars to create a deliberate effect.
The perennial question about when in the making the composer (Andrew Lovett) had been involved came up, and, unusually for films, the answer was that, as one of three with whom Hood had worked before and had been approached when it was at script stage, he self-selected by his desire to engage with the work.
Dictynna also commented that the use of music had been deliberately sparing on his part, and he had made use both of silence, and processing the actors' voices to make sounds that one could not quite distinguish, which people present seemed to agree imparted a dream-like element that they also found pervasively in Wreckers, a blurring between what was dream and what seen.
Towards the end of the session, Dictynna revealed more, including a source of the main story in a Viking text, and also a story about the devil (though Nick, she stressed, has other qualities than mere devilish ones). (As she agreed with me when I said a few words afterwards, there are all sorts of resonances, including Shakespearean ones).
Finally, we were told that two more projects are being worked on, one - of all things - a romantic comedy, so watch this space…
End-notes
* It's always made me think, subconsciously, that hairdressers must be much more house proud, because there the floor is swept clean of cuttings several times per day...
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26 April
NB This is a report on the answers given to the more significant questions, and a review of the film (presently in draft) will appear elsewhere. * In consequence, please be aware that there will, almost inevitably, be spoilers *
On Tuesday night, I watched the screening of a first feature by Dictynna Hood, someone to whom I had previously spoken, several years ago, about the documentaries that she was making. (Before she was lionized by Tony Jones and his crew, of whom Trish Sheil was going to introduce Dictynna - who wrote and directed Wreckers (2011) and host the Q&A afterwards, I just had time to ask her whether she had enjoyed making this film, which she largely had.)
As, with a Q&A, I formulate a question mentally and try to hold it during the rest of the film, to ask as soon as the initial questions from the person hosting have died down (so that I do not forget my formulation), I came out with (something like):
You mentioned fairy tales and stories from Fenland – what I found in this film was delight, a sense of possibility, things revealed, things overheard or witnessed, tension, jealousy, menace, fury, and I wonder, Dictynna, how deep you had to dig in yourself – or in ancient sources – to find these impulses?
The latter part of the question, with its humorous implications that she might do or want to do the things that her characters do, made her laugh infectiously. She had already mentioned that she had taken strands from real experiences and the lore of the four Oxfordshire villages, now changed beyond recognition by the overlay of the motorway and its traffic, so she had filmed in and around Isleham - and she mentioned the looks and queries that she had received at another screening in Oxford the day before.
As the questions came (and there was a good turn-out and much interest), Dictynna said more and more, opening up as the film does – opening up vistas – as questioners wondered about the status, as dream, of the start of the film (which, as it stands, someone had wanted her to consider dropping, and for which she had also shot a scene in a chapel, also in or near Isleham, which she said was so beautiful as to be unusable, because it looked as though it belonged in a different film – maybe, someone suggested, still to be made, when she alluded to the footage being on the cutting-room floor*).
Others asked about menace during and at the very end of the film, and it turned out that not only had the ending had been thought of very differently, but that, at one point in the conception, the whole thing could even have been much more of a horrorfest! However, not perhaps as alarming as parts of a wheat-field (whose owner Dictynna was most pleased to see in the audience) - the ones that we did not see, which had been trampled by the crew to get the on-screen shot.
In comments, there was interest in and appreciation of how the countryside had been presented, and I asked a further question about location, because there are many instances of people walking, often enough in twos, both in the village and elsewhere: Hood explained that, in shooting in Isleham (which, although not on a through-route, is apparently busy), she had focused on Dawn with David’s long-lost brother Nick (Shaun Evans) on the pavement and shut out the cars to create a deliberate effect.
The perennial question about when in the making the composer (Andrew Lovett) had been involved came up, and, unusually for films, the answer was that, as one of three with whom Hood had worked before and had been approached when it was at script stage, he self-selected by his desire to engage with the work.
Dictynna also commented that the use of music had been deliberately sparing on his part, and he had made use both of silence, and processing the actors' voices to make sounds that one could not quite distinguish, which people present seemed to agree imparted a dream-like element that they also found pervasively in Wreckers, a blurring between what was dream and what seen.
Towards the end of the session, Dictynna revealed more, including a source of the main story in a Viking text, and also a story about the devil (though Nick, she stressed, has other qualities than mere devilish ones). (As she agreed with me when I said a few words afterwards, there are all sorts of resonances, including Shakespearean ones).
Finally, we were told that two more projects are being worked on, one - of all things - a romantic comedy, so watch this space…
* It's always made me think, subconsciously, that hairdressers must be much more house proud, because there the floor is swept clean of cuttings several times per day...
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Tuesday, 24 April 2012
If I ran a monthly publications about the Windsors...
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24 April
Yes, if I did so, it would not be the regal equivalent of OK! (although it is that already).
No, but, as Royal Editor-in-Chief, I would definitely have the number-slave BE51 MAG, which I caught to-night, parked on a rainy Cambridge street (in fact, I'm guessing that all Cambridge streets were rainy, except a thickly lined avenue (where the rain comes later), but you know what I mean...).
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24 April
Yes, if I did so, it would not be the regal equivalent of OK! (although it is that already).
No, but, as Royal Editor-in-Chief, I would definitely have the number-slave BE51 MAG, which I caught to-night, parked on a rainy Cambridge street (in fact, I'm guessing that all Cambridge streets were rainy, except a thickly lined avenue (where the rain comes later), but you know what I mean...).
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Monday, 23 April 2012
An inquest into the mysterious death of MI6 spy Gareth Williams opens today (according to Yahoo!)
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23 April
I suspect that fans of the jazz pianist of the same name, who may have been alarmed by the caption, can safely assume that this was a different bearer of the illustrious title.
So Claire Martin will be relieved about the gig in Colchester on Saturday...
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23 April
I suspect that fans of the jazz pianist of the same name, who may have been alarmed by the caption, can safely assume that this was a different bearer of the illustrious title.
So Claire Martin will be relieved about the gig in Colchester on Saturday...
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What Bruno Bettelheim has to tell us about all sorts of stories
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23 April
Some people (no names mentioned!) are quite dogmatic about what BB postulated about fairy tales:
It's a bit like being a strict Freudian* and - as Arthur Koestler expressed it in Bricks to Babel (1980) - filtering out everything that is inconsistent with your adopted (to be pretentious) Weltanschauung, so BB (probably quitely kicking and screaming, from what little I know of him) becomes the new God.
Thus adherents say that He Has Spoken, and henceforth Fairy Stories shall be hallowed, imbued with dark meanings, and with the purpose of helping us manage our difficult inner feelings by projecting them onto a story (no quibbles, no refund).
I think of this from hearing Debussy's familiar (though thankfully off the air for a while) L'Après-Midi d'une Faune (1894), and a decent explanation - for once - of its roots in Mallarmé's poem of 1865. It requires little invention to imagine sexual sublimation (of writer, reader or listener, though, for me, the lattermost remains a stretch, as does finding the text behind other works of Claude's): the faun can safely do - or dream of doing - what we can conveniently enjoy in him, and deny as being our desire.
Which brings us to yesterday's screening, accompanied by Neil Brand and Mark Kermode (why else was everyone there?) in The Dodge Brothers, of The Ghost that Never Returns (1929), the penultimate event in the 15th British Silent Film Festival, which was hosted by the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, this year.
More to come...
End-notes
* Woody Allen's passing quip is my favourite, which goes something like During my time in therapy, my analyst retired - as he was a strict Freudian, it was only six sessions later that I realized.
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23 April
Some people (no names mentioned!) are quite dogmatic about what BB postulated about fairy tales:
It's a bit like being a strict Freudian* and - as Arthur Koestler expressed it in Bricks to Babel (1980) - filtering out everything that is inconsistent with your adopted (to be pretentious) Weltanschauung, so BB (probably quitely kicking and screaming, from what little I know of him) becomes the new God.
Thus adherents say that He Has Spoken, and henceforth Fairy Stories shall be hallowed, imbued with dark meanings, and with the purpose of helping us manage our difficult inner feelings by projecting them onto a story (no quibbles, no refund).
I think of this from hearing Debussy's familiar (though thankfully off the air for a while) L'Après-Midi d'une Faune (1894), and a decent explanation - for once - of its roots in Mallarmé's poem of 1865. It requires little invention to imagine sexual sublimation (of writer, reader or listener, though, for me, the lattermost remains a stretch, as does finding the text behind other works of Claude's): the faun can safely do - or dream of doing - what we can conveniently enjoy in him, and deny as being our desire.
Which brings us to yesterday's screening, accompanied by Neil Brand and Mark Kermode (why else was everyone there?) in The Dodge Brothers, of The Ghost that Never Returns (1929), the penultimate event in the 15th British Silent Film Festival, which was hosted by the Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge, this year.
More to come...
End-notes
* Woody Allen's passing quip is my favourite, which goes something like During my time in therapy, my analyst retired - as he was a strict Freudian, it was only six sessions later that I realized.
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Sunday, 22 April 2012
Why don't I credit sightings of UFOs?
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22 April
Not, primarily, because of the negative influence of the quality of Erich von Daniken's publications, theories and methods (which Nigel, a friend, liked looking into), but simply because I have never seen anything that I could not identify. (Likewise, with ghosts.)
Though it sounds quite dangerous (from my own teenage reading), I'd like to see ball lightning, but nothing else have I seen, flying or hovering, that wasn't an aircraft:
Having had a trial flying lesson, I know that the wing-tip on the right (five letters) has a green light (also five letters), and thus that the left wing-tip has a red one, and I have never been stuck for seeing one ofr other of these lights on something overhead - aliens in UFOs almost certainly don't feel the need to follow our terrestrial aeronautical code, and, if they do, they wouldn't be 'unidentified'.
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22 April
Not, primarily, because of the negative influence of the quality of Erich von Daniken's publications, theories and methods (which Nigel, a friend, liked looking into), but simply because I have never seen anything that I could not identify. (Likewise, with ghosts.)
Though it sounds quite dangerous (from my own teenage reading), I'd like to see ball lightning, but nothing else have I seen, flying or hovering, that wasn't an aircraft:
Having had a trial flying lesson, I know that the wing-tip on the right (five letters) has a green light (also five letters), and thus that the left wing-tip has a red one, and I have never been stuck for seeing one ofr other of these lights on something overhead - aliens in UFOs almost certainly don't feel the need to follow our terrestrial aeronautical code, and, if they do, they wouldn't be 'unidentified'.
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Stars hoping to do well in the 26.2m race include Nell McAndrew (according to AOL®)
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22 April
Not engaging my anyway tired brain, I puzzled over whether a 26.2m race was the metric equivalent of the 100 yds*, until I spotted the word Snickers®, I mean Marathon, in the main headline***.
In any case, do I mistake, or has Nell changed a bit since last seen?
End-notes
* Fortunately, it would be over before it began, so no scope for celebruty** blisters or sprained ankles.
** Sic: one view is that they all Brutes and Beasts, seeking to charm us - with their emperors' and empresses' new clothes - into believing that they are Beauties.
*** Or do I mean headlie****?
**** Or even headlice?
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22 April
Not engaging my anyway tired brain, I puzzled over whether a 26.2m race was the metric equivalent of the 100 yds*, until I spotted the word Snickers®, I mean Marathon, in the main headline***.
In any case, do I mistake, or has Nell changed a bit since last seen?
End-notes
* Fortunately, it would be over before it began, so no scope for celebruty** blisters or sprained ankles.
** Sic: one view is that they all Brutes and Beasts, seeking to charm us - with their emperors' and empresses' new clothes - into believing that they are Beauties.
*** Or do I mean headlie****?
**** Or even headlice?
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Blind singer wows on The Voice (according to AOL®)
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22 April
But why should a blind singer not wow on that programme, since the show's claim to exist is that the judges vote without reference to sight of the singers (pun unintended)? (Not that one could necessarily see blindness, except when it is emblazoned in a caption, any more than hepatitis B or leukaemia.)
You could say that the name of the ensemble The Blind Boys of Alabama was chosen to be catchy (I don't know who chose it), or to draw attention to blindness in the deliberate way that I now criticize.
However, the question is: Who draws attention?
Down's Syndrome girl in a floral print frock and black boots wows on The Voice...
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22 April
But why should a blind singer not wow on that programme, since the show's claim to exist is that the judges vote without reference to sight of the singers (pun unintended)? (Not that one could necessarily see blindness, except when it is emblazoned in a caption, any more than hepatitis B or leukaemia.)
You could say that the name of the ensemble The Blind Boys of Alabama was chosen to be catchy (I don't know who chose it), or to draw attention to blindness in the deliberate way that I now criticize.
However, the question is: Who draws attention?
Down's Syndrome girl in a floral print frock and black boots wows on The Voice...
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Saturday, 21 April 2012
Running down Eraserhead
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12 March
Another special screening tonight - in a series (whose existence didn't quite pass me by, but nearly) about the depiction of monstrosity on screen - of David Lynch's Eraserhead (1977) this time.
We had a bit of an introduction (which threatened to be a bit more of an introduction than I was happy with, but thankfully - as I infer - someone must have waved frantically from the back to cut short what was, as was admitted to us, a speech with the potential to go on all night), and then the film.
Philip Kiszely, who teaches at the University of Leeds (and also runs a publication about punk and post-punk) was our culprit, but he was to be forgiven for the even-handed way in which he conducted the discussion afterwards. His closing words of advice to those who had not seen Eraserhead before was to consider stopping eating the popcorn now, and that he would have wanted to take the seat nearest the door!
It was Screen 3, so the most intimate of the Arts Picturehouse's dark rooms at around 120 seats, but there was still a good attendance, at which Philip was - perhaps for effect - a little surprised, that people who had (he did a straw poll) not seen it before were still turning out to see Eraserhead after 35 years: did they know what they were letting themselves in for?
As a host, Philp was enthusiastic, giving us pointers in references to film noir and in how Lynch had put the film together piecemeal as funds permitted. He also said that Lynch had said very little about what his intentions in making <i>Eraserhead</i> had been, what meaning or message it had had for him, but that he had tantalizingly revealed that he had been reading The Bible at the time, and that one verse - which, of course, he did not specify - had been at the root of it all.
As I have said, he was also indulgent to the pure Freudian interpretation that, with contributions from some, was going later, where everything was a phallus, and Henry Spencer (Jack Nance) in fear of castration. So be it, but strange, as I remarked to Philip at the end, that Freud has so much less credit outside the worlds of film and literary theory, and certainly not in practice...
Friday, 20 April 2012
66 DD brassiere
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21 April
According to Wikipedia®, the word 'brassiere' was not either simply taken from French or used in English until 1893 (and, to judge from the content of the same source, it does not ever seem to have had the grave accent that a related French word, brassière, has).
However, I estimate that it is probably in danger of extinction in that form (i.e. rather than 'bra'), morceau than 'refrigerator' is with 'fridge'*. Similarly, although I cannot quite picture what a 66 DD would be like, I would also imagine that the future of the woman who required such a support might be threatened by health risks associated with being that size.
All of which is a mere excuse for the following, since 66 DD is actually one of a set of UK number-plates** of which I have taken judicial notice (the car that displays it appears to belong to someone two villages distant).
Likewise (taking out the offending spaces, as the owners often do), PEN1S*** and - balancing things up - VA51NAS.
I infer that the following should exist, but I have yet to see them:
* PI55 OFF
* MI55 SEX
* PA55 OUT
* PA55ION
* 4 5KIN
Likewise, PI55 UPS, MI55 SOD, etc., etc. Happy watching, but do keep an eye on the road, too!
End-notes
* I come to that conclusion on the basis, primarily, of which term tends to appear on packaging.
** Which predictive text curiously renders as 'number-slaves', so one can, again, speculate on what the compilers of Nokia®'s knowledge of words thought that the phones' users would be writing about...
*** I believe that PEN 15 must also exist, and (despite remembering otherwise) I may, in fact, have seen that one: I saw this number-slave** twice.
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21 April
According to Wikipedia®, the word 'brassiere' was not either simply taken from French or used in English until 1893 (and, to judge from the content of the same source, it does not ever seem to have had the grave accent that a related French word, brassière, has).
However, I estimate that it is probably in danger of extinction in that form (i.e. rather than 'bra'), morceau than 'refrigerator' is with 'fridge'*. Similarly, although I cannot quite picture what a 66 DD would be like, I would also imagine that the future of the woman who required such a support might be threatened by health risks associated with being that size.
All of which is a mere excuse for the following, since 66 DD is actually one of a set of UK number-plates** of which I have taken judicial notice (the car that displays it appears to belong to someone two villages distant).
Likewise (taking out the offending spaces, as the owners often do), PEN1S*** and - balancing things up - VA51NAS.
I infer that the following should exist, but I have yet to see them:
* PI55 OFF
* MI55 SEX
* PA55 OUT
* PA55ION
* 4 5KIN
Likewise, PI55 UPS, MI55 SOD, etc., etc. Happy watching, but do keep an eye on the road, too!
End-notes
* I come to that conclusion on the basis, primarily, of which term tends to appear on packaging.
** Which predictive text curiously renders as 'number-slaves', so one can, again, speculate on what the compilers of Nokia®'s knowledge of words thought that the phones' users would be writing about...
*** I believe that PEN 15 must also exist, and (despite remembering otherwise) I may, in fact, have seen that one: I saw this number-slave** twice.
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Are you an attendee?
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20 April
Well, HM Queen Elizabeth II is an attendee, because (as is well known) she has those - called attendants, such as ladies-in-waiting - who attend on her.
However, if there is a royal screening or performance, Her Royal Majesty is no more than anyone else there an attendee just for attending it.
Likewise, with a conference: those who attend conferences are (conference) delegates, not attendees.
Picking up, now, where, a week ago, I left off - this sentence has been sponsored by the Royal Society for the Promotion of Commas! - I must turn to that implicit, and vexed (or, rather, misunderstood), question of pairs, as implied above:
I used the words 'attendee' and 'attendant' in the first sentence, and they are a pair, but not a Matching Pair in the way that, say, the legal terms mortgagor and mortgagee or warrantor and warrantee are*.
PROVIDED THAT one knows what one is talking about, one can infer what the pairs will be, which is why I have to go back and say what a mortgage is.
The word comes to us, from French, and literally means a dead glove, maybe even gauntlet: interesting though it would be, for me, to delve into what that origin is, it is just helpful to think in terms of the highly successful board-game Monopoly®, where mortgages are all part of the play.
So, if strapped for cash** (for example, because of landing on Mayfair when it has two hotels on it - and the owner of the hotels noticed before the next player shook the dice), or just because one wants to build said hotels and borrow the money, one can always mortgage the property / properties - to the value stipulated by the values on the game-card for it / them - to the bank to raise it. The property (or properties) is (are) the security for the loan.
Those who have played the game often enough will then know that the game-card(s), each one of which (in the game) is the title-deeds for the property (or properties), has (or have) to be turned the other way up. This act signifies two things:
(1) The player cannot, until the mortgage is redeemed (i.e. discharged), charge other players who land on it rent, etc. (so they get away scot free, as the phrase has it), because the table of what is ordinarily payable is on the other side of the card, which is now face down;
(2) More importantly, that the property (properties) is (are) no longer the player's to do with freely, within the rules (unless, of course, several more of the players in the game are bankers, in which case they make up their own rules!), as he or she wishes - the bank has its security for the money that was lent*** in it (or them), and, unless the player (perhaps as another banker) slily turns it back the other way up, hoping that no one will notice (as if people cheat at cards or in other games, even life), the mortgage needs to be redeemed first.
So what?, you ask, infuriated, bored, tired, or longing for a drink / death / redemption...
Well, the act of mortgaging is carried out by by the player who mortgages the property to the bank, so he (or she) is the mortgagor - and the bank, to whom it was mortgaged, is the mortgagee.
Exactly as with employer and employee, except that, with a mortgage, it may be less immediately obvious who is doing what, complicated by 'applying for a mortgage', the bank (or building society) 'making a mortgage offer', when was it really happening is somebody wanting a mortgage on certain terms, and the lender**** considering it all, and offering a mortgage, on those - or less good - terms.
The act of mortgaging remains what the owner of the property does. Which is obvious with a remortgage, because one knows, although one has a mortgage, who the owner is - it far less intuitively clear when the act of purchase of the property is simultaneous with mortgaging it to secure the loan (needed) to buy it.
Nonetheless, John Stuart Mill takes out the mortgage, mortgaging Black Acre to Z Building Society, and so is the mortgagor, never (in this case*****) the mortgagee.
Finally, though, other words do not pair up with -or and -ee (or, as with employer above, -er), but people (who should know better) try to make them: a bit like making an elephant co-habit with a porcupine in the hope that they will like each other and get married...
So we have, where we started, this crazy fiction that people who are at a conference or meeting are attendees - sometimes people may be 'in attendance', rather than 'present', but they are not attendees. Who, after all, is the attender, if they are? Well, they are themselves, I suppose...
Moving on to lender. Please, please do not be tempted by those who want to say that there is such a thing as a lendee - any more than there is any room for needing this stupid invention of tutee:
Table of Correspondences (non-exhaustive)
1. Borrower / Lender
2. Tutor / Student (or Pupil)
3. Donor of a power of attorney / Donee of the power
4. Buyer / Seller
5. Purchaser / Vendor
In a closing word, I shall say why I gave the last two pairs. There are a good few reasons:
(a) There is no Vendee;
(b) (No more than Buyee);
(c) The pairs don't mix - any more than the elephant and its 'spiky friend' above - and it is not My buyer is having problems with his vendor..., except in the sort of estate agency where your are definitely being charged too much commission;
(d) By inference, there are other real pairs that have not been mentioned, and where the one that lures may not exist - or mean what it seems!
A starter for ten:If someone who gives an assurance is a guarantor, who is the person who receives it? (Go here, if you want a clue...******)
End-notes
* One could go on, with legator and legatee, donor and donee...
** I have no notion where that came to us from, any more than - as mentioned in a conversation with friend Chris the other day - I have no truck with....
*** I quote the Order of Service:
Priest Some unfortunates would say 'loaned'
Congregation Verily, they are to be pitied
All Amen
**** If you hold 'lender', we will return to it later (D.V.).
***** Whereas, if John Stuart Mill's neighbour Virginia Woolf owns Blue Acre and needs some readies, she could mortgage it to him, and he would be a mortgagee.
****** Someone who says that he is someone else's Power of Attorney is actually telling you that he (or she) is a piece of paper!
(He or she is the donee of the power, but could also - as with the merged notion of solicitor / barrister in the States - be viewed as the donor's attorney.)
As if all that weren't enough...
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20 April
Well, HM Queen Elizabeth II is an attendee, because (as is well known) she has those - called attendants, such as ladies-in-waiting - who attend on her.
However, if there is a royal screening or performance, Her Royal Majesty is no more than anyone else there an attendee just for attending it.
Likewise, with a conference: those who attend conferences are (conference) delegates, not attendees.
Picking up, now, where, a week ago, I left off - this sentence has been sponsored by the Royal Society for the Promotion of Commas! - I must turn to that implicit, and vexed (or, rather, misunderstood), question of pairs, as implied above:
I used the words 'attendee' and 'attendant' in the first sentence, and they are a pair, but not a Matching Pair in the way that, say, the legal terms mortgagor and mortgagee or warrantor and warrantee are*.
PROVIDED THAT one knows what one is talking about, one can infer what the pairs will be, which is why I have to go back and say what a mortgage is.
The word comes to us, from French, and literally means a dead glove, maybe even gauntlet: interesting though it would be, for me, to delve into what that origin is, it is just helpful to think in terms of the highly successful board-game Monopoly®, where mortgages are all part of the play.
So, if strapped for cash** (for example, because of landing on Mayfair when it has two hotels on it - and the owner of the hotels noticed before the next player shook the dice), or just because one wants to build said hotels and borrow the money, one can always mortgage the property / properties - to the value stipulated by the values on the game-card for it / them - to the bank to raise it. The property (or properties) is (are) the security for the loan.
Those who have played the game often enough will then know that the game-card(s), each one of which (in the game) is the title-deeds for the property (or properties), has (or have) to be turned the other way up. This act signifies two things:
(1) The player cannot, until the mortgage is redeemed (i.e. discharged), charge other players who land on it rent, etc. (so they get away scot free, as the phrase has it), because the table of what is ordinarily payable is on the other side of the card, which is now face down;
(2) More importantly, that the property (properties) is (are) no longer the player's to do with freely, within the rules (unless, of course, several more of the players in the game are bankers, in which case they make up their own rules!), as he or she wishes - the bank has its security for the money that was lent*** in it (or them), and, unless the player (perhaps as another banker) slily turns it back the other way up, hoping that no one will notice (as if people cheat at cards or in other games, even life), the mortgage needs to be redeemed first.
So what?, you ask, infuriated, bored, tired, or longing for a drink / death / redemption...
Well, the act of mortgaging is carried out by by the player who mortgages the property to the bank, so he (or she) is the mortgagor - and the bank, to whom it was mortgaged, is the mortgagee.
Exactly as with employer and employee, except that, with a mortgage, it may be less immediately obvious who is doing what, complicated by 'applying for a mortgage', the bank (or building society) 'making a mortgage offer', when was it really happening is somebody wanting a mortgage on certain terms, and the lender**** considering it all, and offering a mortgage, on those - or less good - terms.
The act of mortgaging remains what the owner of the property does. Which is obvious with a remortgage, because one knows, although one has a mortgage, who the owner is - it far less intuitively clear when the act of purchase of the property is simultaneous with mortgaging it to secure the loan (needed) to buy it.
Nonetheless, John Stuart Mill takes out the mortgage, mortgaging Black Acre to Z Building Society, and so is the mortgagor, never (in this case*****) the mortgagee.
Finally, though, other words do not pair up with -or and -ee (or, as with employer above, -er), but people (who should know better) try to make them: a bit like making an elephant co-habit with a porcupine in the hope that they will like each other and get married...
So we have, where we started, this crazy fiction that people who are at a conference or meeting are attendees - sometimes people may be 'in attendance', rather than 'present', but they are not attendees. Who, after all, is the attender, if they are? Well, they are themselves, I suppose...
Moving on to lender. Please, please do not be tempted by those who want to say that there is such a thing as a lendee - any more than there is any room for needing this stupid invention of tutee:
Table of Correspondences (non-exhaustive)
1. Borrower / Lender
2. Tutor / Student (or Pupil)
3. Donor of a power of attorney / Donee of the power
4. Buyer / Seller
5. Purchaser / Vendor
In a closing word, I shall say why I gave the last two pairs. There are a good few reasons:
(a) There is no Vendee;
(b) (No more than Buyee);
(c) The pairs don't mix - any more than the elephant and its 'spiky friend' above - and it is not My buyer is having problems with his vendor..., except in the sort of estate agency where your are definitely being charged too much commission;
(d) By inference, there are other real pairs that have not been mentioned, and where the one that lures may not exist - or mean what it seems!
A starter for ten:If someone who gives an assurance is a guarantor, who is the person who receives it? (Go here, if you want a clue...******)
End-notes
* One could go on, with legator and legatee, donor and donee...
** I have no notion where that came to us from, any more than - as mentioned in a conversation with friend Chris the other day - I have no truck with....
*** I quote the Order of Service:
Priest Some unfortunates would say 'loaned'
Congregation Verily, they are to be pitied
All Amen
**** If you hold 'lender', we will return to it later (D.V.).
***** Whereas, if John Stuart Mill's neighbour Virginia Woolf owns Blue Acre and needs some readies, she could mortgage it to him, and he would be a mortgagee.
****** Someone who says that he is someone else's Power of Attorney is actually telling you that he (or she) is a piece of paper!
(He or she is the donee of the power, but could also - as with the merged notion of solicitor / barrister in the States - be viewed as the donor's attorney.)
As if all that weren't enough...
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Friday, 13 April 2012
The Last Staple
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13 April
No, not, o true Tolstoyans, The Last Station, but Staple!
The simple question being: why cannot the stapler, a bit like the oil warning light, tell you when you are using the last of a row of what, gummed together, always looks like a lot of staples when you load it?
If it did, not only would you not go to staple a document - usually that document (and six copies of it) with which you need to rush out of the office - and fail and have to find one that is loaded, in all your frustration and anguish, but nor would your colleagues.
For everyone assumes, which is neither rational nor necessarily fair, that someone else, at a less pressing time, should have filled the stapler up, because he or she knew that he or she had just emptied it, instead of lazily using another.
Whereas, as I should like to suggest (and Dirty Harry would agree), none of us - and this is not meant to have gravitas, unless you choose to read a profound insight into it - knows when it is The Last Staple. (So I say nothing about Wise and Foolish virgins, and trimming wicks and filling with oil.)
End-notes
* Of which Bach treated in Cantata No. 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140.
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13 April
No, not, o true Tolstoyans, The Last Station, but Staple!
The simple question being: why cannot the stapler, a bit like the oil warning light, tell you when you are using the last of a row of what, gummed together, always looks like a lot of staples when you load it?
If it did, not only would you not go to staple a document - usually that document (and six copies of it) with which you need to rush out of the office - and fail and have to find one that is loaded, in all your frustration and anguish, but nor would your colleagues.
For everyone assumes, which is neither rational nor necessarily fair, that someone else, at a less pressing time, should have filled the stapler up, because he or she knew that he or she had just emptied it, instead of lazily using another.
Whereas, as I should like to suggest (and Dirty Harry would agree), none of us - and this is not meant to have gravitas, unless you choose to read a profound insight into it - knows when it is The Last Staple. (So I say nothing about Wise and Foolish virgins, and trimming wicks and filling with oil.)
End-notes
* Of which Bach treated in Cantata No. 140, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, BWV 140.
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Thursday, 12 April 2012
A deserved winner at Cannes (2)
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13 April
Thanks to the offices of Rotten Tomatoes, it is heartening to have found a worthwhile review of this film from Peter Bradshaw.
But he really doesn't look that young, any more than some of the jazzers or classical musicians, who show you how they looked ten years or more ago...
On the poster for the film, this comment* - from the London Film Festival - seemed pertinent:
Hugely impressive... confirms Ceylan's status as a master of cinema...Chekhovian in its piercing insights
End-notes
* In my scrawl, it looks like that of Geoff Archer** - of only the former name was I certain, and it should have been Geoff Andrew!
** Sure some Freudian thing going on!
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13 April
Thanks to the offices of Rotten Tomatoes, it is heartening to have found a worthwhile review of this film from Peter Bradshaw.
But he really doesn't look that young, any more than some of the jazzers or classical musicians, who show you how they looked ten years or more ago...
On the poster for the film, this comment* - from the London Film Festival - seemed pertinent:
Hugely impressive... confirms Ceylan's status as a master of cinema...Chekhovian in its piercing insights
End-notes
* In my scrawl, it looks like that of Geoff Archer** - of only the former name was I certain, and it should have been Geoff Andrew!
** Sure some Freudian thing going on!
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The Cabin in the Woods - with whom?
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12 April
Are young(er) people just supposed to be (more) naive, or why else is it that they people horror films?*
I say this as a response to reading what Darryl Griffiths has written about (or not written about) in an on-line review for New Empress Magazine, because it seems to be taken for granted either that Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Al Pacino and Meryl Streep do not get frightened, or that the cinema-going public does not want to witness it happening when they go away for a relaxing break together in a cosy holiday apartment at Tombstone Mansions.
Which is, in a way, why it is a pity that Guillermo del Toro's Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010), a vehicle for Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce, is such a dud: I determined so in my review at Cambridge Film Festival, and imdb.com confirms it, with a rating of 5.6.
Never mind: I have insider knowledge, in the form of seeing what appeared to be rushes, that Meg and Tom are going full out for gore this year!
End-notes
* And, although that is not my typical choice of viewing, how did we, since - and probably well before - Scream (1996) or The Blair Witch Porject (1999), get where we are from the worlds of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Anthony Perkins?
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12 April
Are young(er) people just supposed to be (more) naive, or why else is it that they people horror films?*
I say this as a response to reading what Darryl Griffiths has written about (or not written about) in an on-line review for New Empress Magazine, because it seems to be taken for granted either that Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Al Pacino and Meryl Streep do not get frightened, or that the cinema-going public does not want to witness it happening when they go away for a relaxing break together in a cosy holiday apartment at Tombstone Mansions.
Which is, in a way, why it is a pity that Guillermo del Toro's Don't be Afraid of the Dark (2010), a vehicle for Katie Holmes and Guy Pearce, is such a dud: I determined so in my review at Cambridge Film Festival, and imdb.com confirms it, with a rating of 5.6.
Never mind: I have insider knowledge, in the form of seeing what appeared to be rushes, that Meg and Tom are going full out for gore this year!
End-notes
* And, although that is not my typical choice of viewing, how did we, since - and probably well before - Scream (1996) or The Blair Witch Porject (1999), get where we are from the worlds of Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Anthony Perkins?
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Wednesday, 11 April 2012
Statistics and the brain (2)
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12 April
And now I have followed on with this:
I'm also, now, wondering about this approach that is promoted to us, even in a context of putting a comment on a web-page as I am now doing, of avatars and profiles - it's almost as if, a bit like Voldemort putting a bit of himself here, a bit there, we are invited to inhabit these computer-generated objects and thereby be there for others to see and know, almost as if that will be there for ever and ever.
I shall side-step critiquing these related so-called social networks (because I'd just want to ask what the sociability really consists in - and I'd no more want to play golf in my living-room, rather than out on the links with club and ball), but just observe that, if I died to-night (and had logged out of my e-mail and Amazon accounts, and my blog), there probably are protocols for my legal representatives to access those things - and to do so before any period of inactivity caused them to be deleted.
However developed the avatar, though, or the profile, they would not be me, would not live on - although things written by or to me might be preserved - in some cyber-existence without the living physical me. Walt Disney reportedly had his brain frozen in such a hope, and, whatever you might think of that as a grasp of what identity is, now as against then, it seems that we are as far from capturing the essence of what would bring Walt back to life, if he died to-day.
For the die-hards of AI, though, what we cannot do is merely not presently technologically possible.
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12 April
And now I have followed on with this:
I'm also, now, wondering about this approach that is promoted to us, even in a context of putting a comment on a web-page as I am now doing, of avatars and profiles - it's almost as if, a bit like Voldemort putting a bit of himself here, a bit there, we are invited to inhabit these computer-generated objects and thereby be there for others to see and know, almost as if that will be there for ever and ever.
I shall side-step critiquing these related so-called social networks (because I'd just want to ask what the sociability really consists in - and I'd no more want to play golf in my living-room, rather than out on the links with club and ball), but just observe that, if I died to-night (and had logged out of my e-mail and Amazon accounts, and my blog), there probably are protocols for my legal representatives to access those things - and to do so before any period of inactivity caused them to be deleted.
However developed the avatar, though, or the profile, they would not be me, would not live on - although things written by or to me might be preserved - in some cyber-existence without the living physical me. Walt Disney reportedly had his brain frozen in such a hope, and, whatever you might think of that as a grasp of what identity is, now as against then, it seems that we are as far from capturing the essence of what would bring Walt back to life, if he died to-day.
For the die-hards of AI, though, what we cannot do is merely not presently technologically possible.
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Who gets diagnosed - and where are the psychiatrists when this is happening? (2)
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12 April
It's Mozart's Rondo in A Minor, K. 511. In a minor key and it sounds sad, so Mozart must have been depressed at the time.
No evidence of which I am aware except the internal temperament of the piece for this proposition: he must have been depressed, because - amongst what we have - it is unusual amongst his works to be in this key / a minor key.
Could someone not, as a patron, have commissioned Mozart to write such a piece? A Duke Orsino, from Twelfth Night, would have desired to hear such a thing, and, when David played to Saul to soothe him, whose mood was he fitting?
For we do not impute to Bach, in those other-wordly passages in the Crucifixus of the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) the state of mind / soul at the time of composition that the music portrays, before the sudden triumph of Et resurrexit, do we?
To be continued
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12 April
It's Mozart's Rondo in A Minor, K. 511. In a minor key and it sounds sad, so Mozart must have been depressed at the time.
No evidence of which I am aware except the internal temperament of the piece for this proposition: he must have been depressed, because - amongst what we have - it is unusual amongst his works to be in this key / a minor key.
Could someone not, as a patron, have commissioned Mozart to write such a piece? A Duke Orsino, from Twelfth Night, would have desired to hear such a thing, and, when David played to Saul to soothe him, whose mood was he fitting?
For we do not impute to Bach, in those other-wordly passages in the Crucifixus of the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) the state of mind / soul at the time of composition that the music portrays, before the sudden triumph of Et resurrexit, do we?
To be continued
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Tuesday, 10 April 2012
Statistics and the brain (1)
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11 April
On Lindsay's blog, another discussion about AI and virtual immortality.
In a side-strand, generated by comment, I have added:
If they do actually mean anything, and are not more inventions (which, however imaginative they may be, just mislead everybody), these statistics about, for example, how much of the brain we use are in the realm of science - but how good is the science, as, if it were crucial to making the right finding to have more of the scientist's brain working than 10%, then the measurements might be ones that defy or defeat the measurer.
An often-quoted one, and one used by those who like wearing hats to justify the preference, is the claim that - and I think that it is usually this sort of figure - 20% of heat lost by the body is through the head. To which I retort:
1. When someone inverted the figure, and made it 80% heat loss, I really had to question whether he ever engaged the brain before speaking;
2. If this is the loss from the head, and one wants to minimize it, a hat is clearly not the answer, where a balaclava is;
3. Maybe that's where the 10% usage of the brain comes from - it's overheating because of people trying to block its cooling system.
See more, if you will, at Writer's Rest...
And now, also, at Statistics and the brain (2)
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11 April
On Lindsay's blog, another discussion about AI and virtual immortality.
In a side-strand, generated by comment, I have added:
If they do actually mean anything, and are not more inventions (which, however imaginative they may be, just mislead everybody), these statistics about, for example, how much of the brain we use are in the realm of science - but how good is the science, as, if it were crucial to making the right finding to have more of the scientist's brain working than 10%, then the measurements might be ones that defy or defeat the measurer.
An often-quoted one, and one used by those who like wearing hats to justify the preference, is the claim that - and I think that it is usually this sort of figure - 20% of heat lost by the body is through the head. To which I retort:
1. When someone inverted the figure, and made it 80% heat loss, I really had to question whether he ever engaged the brain before speaking;
2. If this is the loss from the head, and one wants to minimize it, a hat is clearly not the answer, where a balaclava is;
3. Maybe that's where the 10% usage of the brain comes from - it's overheating because of people trying to block its cooling system.
See more, if you will, at Writer's Rest...
And now, also, at Statistics and the brain (2)
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A cocked ale
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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10 April
Not something that you would want in a cosy village pub, whereas it would be fine in a cellar bar.
For those keen on monastic brews, I have seen some prices, in a special list in a hidden-away pub (the sort that you might struggle to stumble across again), that might knock the holiest of smiles into a frown, and even an offer of a tasting session, again with a price that, except for those really keen on their high-alcohol tipple, might cause a frown.
Cocteau, of course, was someone else, and could irritatingly turn his hand to most things, from film-direction to writing, though he, too, had a weakness, as with Edouard Dermithein Melville's making Les Enfants Terribles (1950), for pushing his favourite players onto another who had to work with them. Without being a composer, he even had a hand in the existence of Les Six.
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10 April
Not something that you would want in a cosy village pub, whereas it would be fine in a cellar bar.
For those keen on monastic brews, I have seen some prices, in a special list in a hidden-away pub (the sort that you might struggle to stumble across again), that might knock the holiest of smiles into a frown, and even an offer of a tasting session, again with a price that, except for those really keen on their high-alcohol tipple, might cause a frown.
Cocteau, of course, was someone else, and could irritatingly turn his hand to most things, from film-direction to writing, though he, too, had a weakness, as with Edouard Dermithein Melville's making Les Enfants Terribles (1950), for pushing his favourite players onto another who had to work with them. Without being a composer, he even had a hand in the existence of Les Six.
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Monday, 9 April 2012
Casual Chess
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Easter Monday
This is what Marcel Duchamp advocated, when he appeared to have withdrawn from making art in the early decades of last century - see, for example, the chess-sex that both Man Ray and he designed.
The heretical idea was that chess only came into existence when two players happened to be somewhere simultaneously and found themselves sitting on opposite sides of a board and playing.
However, it was one that came to be discredited when the Surrealists (which usually means their undisputed spokesman in André Breton) - and those who succeeded them - emphasized the place of Desire (where would Salvador Dalí be without it?).
Thus: I seek a game, so I summon another to me to play against me* - or we have a standing arrangement to play on such-and-such a day of a week at such-and-such o'clock.
Flirting does not enter into it, nor does Arousal**.
QED
End-notes
* And so the expectant, largely deserted cityscapes of Girgio de Chirico. (And yet his Hector and Andromache (1917) is full of so much more passion.)
** Thus we have the bare-breasted, dreamy women on the canvases of Paul Delvaux. (But the Le Galet of his compatriot René Magritte, in a Vache period, is far more erotic.)
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Easter Monday
This is what Marcel Duchamp advocated, when he appeared to have withdrawn from making art in the early decades of last century - see, for example, the chess-sex that both Man Ray and he designed.
The heretical idea was that chess only came into existence when two players happened to be somewhere simultaneously and found themselves sitting on opposite sides of a board and playing.
However, it was one that came to be discredited when the Surrealists (which usually means their undisputed spokesman in André Breton) - and those who succeeded them - emphasized the place of Desire (where would Salvador Dalí be without it?).
Thus: I seek a game, so I summon another to me to play against me* - or we have a standing arrangement to play on such-and-such a day of a week at such-and-such o'clock.
Flirting does not enter into it, nor does Arousal**.
QED
End-notes
* And so the expectant, largely deserted cityscapes of Girgio de Chirico. (And yet his Hector and Andromache (1917) is full of so much more passion.)
** Thus we have the bare-breasted, dreamy women on the canvases of Paul Delvaux. (But the Le Galet of his compatriot René Magritte, in a Vache period, is far more erotic.)
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Sunday, 8 April 2012
A deserved winner at Cannes (1)*
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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Easter Day
* Spoilers ahead - read at your peril, if you have not viewed the film *
It is interesting that the pace of a film can change as much as that of this film did to-night from its first viewing - maybe I was more tired, but, in an unfolding that appeared to have had much time in which I could relish it, much seemed to telescope**, and I found a lot of detail to reabsorb.
Knowing that the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner), the police chief (Yilmaz Erdogan) and the prosecutor (Taner Birsel) were the main ones to watch, I was, for example, much more aware of the first of these sitting behind the second, and how he really only started opening up when talking to the chief's driver for the night, his subordinate called Arab (Arab Ali) - there, as on first sight, the fact that the person who did the subtitles did not follow convention did not help, although I did better, as it is usual to put words in italics when they are spoken by someone not in shot (and there were other pecularities, later on, that meant that I was too busy working out who was speaking to have time to read words before they disappeared).
That said, merely playing detective because one knows the end of the film already (not an inappropriate thing to do when a man (Kenan) has confessed to a killing, maybe murder, as we never really know what he claims happened, and, at a significant moment - when, I think, none of the police are in earshot - his fellow suspect (Ramazan), before silenced by Kenan, calls out that he committed the act) does not usually make the duration of scenes seem shorter, whereas here it turned it into a quite differently paced narrative, although still beautiful.
Where, though, that quicker perception of time was disadvantageous was that the Tarkovksy-like moments, when the wind is moving the crops, or the trees, as if in the guise of a character, seem less naturally poetic, and more overtly arty. In the same way, when Doctor Cemal, who is relieving himself, finds a carved face suddenly revealed by the lightning in the rock level with his own it seemed more contrived, and less convincing, seen for the second time, but these are purely momentary, and did not detract from the whole effect of the piece.
Some have exaggerated the length - or other aspects - of the sequence where we hear dialogue over shots of one apple from those shaken from a tree by Arab, following it as it rolls down a slope and then down a stream, and, although it, too, seemed a little shorter, it still had its power. As did what has been described as an epiphany, when the mukhtar's young daughter Cemile (Cansu Demirci) brings around glasses of tea, lighted by the oil-lamp in the centre of the tray.
On one very obvious level, the film takes us from what turns out to be a view through a window of a living body (Yasar, with the two men who, between them and unseen, kill and inexpertly bury him) to the same one being found and exhumed, and to the indignity of autopsy: where we are left is with the doctor and Yasar's widow Gülnaz, the one watching the other, from the autopsy room, as she walks into the distance with her son, before he turns around, and we are looking for a few seconds at that closing window, then there is a blackout on which the credits come up, but the noise of the school playground (to the left as the widow walks away) and the liquid sounds of the autopsy play over it.
Chief of Police Naci, looking at Prosecutor Nusret in his element as he gives - for dictation onto a laptop - his report from the crime investigation scene, says that a master of revels is the thing to be. Unseen, except by his excellent work, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is such a master, and, in this more intimate screening (screen 3 at the Arts Picturehouse), it was good that the humour came out of moments such as the sergeant being pedantic about distances and jurisdictions, and everyone blaming everyone else for not having a body-bag (and what they then have to resort to), as well as the shock that an autopsy was to be shown, and how affronted Naci is by what Kenan and Ramazan have done to the body.
A little more at A deserved winner at Cannes (2)...
End-notes
* Not that I dare suggest that anything unmeritorious wins!
** Lewis Carroll, in one of the Alice books, brought us this usage.
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Easter Day
* Spoilers ahead - read at your peril, if you have not viewed the film *
It is interesting that the pace of a film can change as much as that of this film did to-night from its first viewing - maybe I was more tired, but, in an unfolding that appeared to have had much time in which I could relish it, much seemed to telescope**, and I found a lot of detail to reabsorb.
Knowing that the doctor (Muhammet Uzuner), the police chief (Yilmaz Erdogan) and the prosecutor (Taner Birsel) were the main ones to watch, I was, for example, much more aware of the first of these sitting behind the second, and how he really only started opening up when talking to the chief's driver for the night, his subordinate called Arab (Arab Ali) - there, as on first sight, the fact that the person who did the subtitles did not follow convention did not help, although I did better, as it is usual to put words in italics when they are spoken by someone not in shot (and there were other pecularities, later on, that meant that I was too busy working out who was speaking to have time to read words before they disappeared).
That said, merely playing detective because one knows the end of the film already (not an inappropriate thing to do when a man (Kenan) has confessed to a killing, maybe murder, as we never really know what he claims happened, and, at a significant moment - when, I think, none of the police are in earshot - his fellow suspect (Ramazan), before silenced by Kenan, calls out that he committed the act) does not usually make the duration of scenes seem shorter, whereas here it turned it into a quite differently paced narrative, although still beautiful.
Where, though, that quicker perception of time was disadvantageous was that the Tarkovksy-like moments, when the wind is moving the crops, or the trees, as if in the guise of a character, seem less naturally poetic, and more overtly arty. In the same way, when Doctor Cemal, who is relieving himself, finds a carved face suddenly revealed by the lightning in the rock level with his own it seemed more contrived, and less convincing, seen for the second time, but these are purely momentary, and did not detract from the whole effect of the piece.
Some have exaggerated the length - or other aspects - of the sequence where we hear dialogue over shots of one apple from those shaken from a tree by Arab, following it as it rolls down a slope and then down a stream, and, although it, too, seemed a little shorter, it still had its power. As did what has been described as an epiphany, when the mukhtar's young daughter Cemile (Cansu Demirci) brings around glasses of tea, lighted by the oil-lamp in the centre of the tray.
On one very obvious level, the film takes us from what turns out to be a view through a window of a living body (Yasar, with the two men who, between them and unseen, kill and inexpertly bury him) to the same one being found and exhumed, and to the indignity of autopsy: where we are left is with the doctor and Yasar's widow Gülnaz, the one watching the other, from the autopsy room, as she walks into the distance with her son, before he turns around, and we are looking for a few seconds at that closing window, then there is a blackout on which the credits come up, but the noise of the school playground (to the left as the widow walks away) and the liquid sounds of the autopsy play over it.
Chief of Police Naci, looking at Prosecutor Nusret in his element as he gives - for dictation onto a laptop - his report from the crime investigation scene, says that a master of revels is the thing to be. Unseen, except by his excellent work, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is such a master, and, in this more intimate screening (screen 3 at the Arts Picturehouse), it was good that the humour came out of moments such as the sergeant being pedantic about distances and jurisdictions, and everyone blaming everyone else for not having a body-bag (and what they then have to resort to), as well as the shock that an autopsy was to be shown, and how affronted Naci is by what Kenan and Ramazan have done to the body.
A little more at A deserved winner at Cannes (2)...
End-notes
* Not that I dare suggest that anything unmeritorious wins!
** Lewis Carroll, in one of the Alice books, brought us this usage.
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Elgar and The Apostles
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8 April
Unless I had heard excerpts when Sir Edward, through the medium of Donald Macleod, was Composer of the Week fairly recently on Radio 3, I certainly had not heard the entirety of his - what I suppose is one - oratorio The Apostles until last night.
Two of those whose views I value thought, with me, that the first part lacked a spark, and I was even - calumny though it is - prepared to blame Stephen Cleobury as conductor for not keeping it moving: we all felt that there were very loud orchestral eruptions that fitted neither with our notion of the subject-matter, nor with the audibility of The Philharmonia Chorus. (I was also not alone in thinking that, whatever the issue was with hearing Susan Bickley, it had been resolved in the second part, whereas Ailish Tynan - despite not even credited as being Mary, Jesus' mother, as well as The Angel Gabriel - was thrilling and energizing throughout.)
Although the work, as shown after the interval, did have greater pretensions to the abiding excellence of The Messiah, and certainly worked better as a narrative once the more cosmic aspects (albeit of Jesus' life, not really that of his apostles), I cannot also help feeling that Elgar, in deriving his own text, would have been better served by a Jennens.
Such a person might also have fitted in, in place of other material in this rather loose and limp first part, some demonstration of apostleship as those who, in two or threes, were sent out by Jesus to do his work. Even so, as Elgar dwells so much not only on the rebel apostle Judas, but also with Mary Magdelene - apart from the perhaps arbitrary identification of her with the woman who anoints Jesus with costly perfume and, in another account of quite possibly a different episode, dries his feet on her hair - beyond the role in finding the tomb empty and meeting the risen Jesus, the title of the piece has already become not fit for purpose.
Certainly, a notion that the text that Elgar has set does justice to the role of the apostles after the resurrection, and then after the ascension, is a doubtful proposition. On this, The Messiah will always be very much superior, because there is absolutely no doubt what it is about, but I do not believe that the embodied theology necessarily puts off agnostic or atheist music-lovers from appreciating the work any more than they do Bach's Matthew Passion.
Having chanced upon this last night from the Proms, and righly guessed that I was hearing it again, I want to blog a bit more, in due course, about the piece, the Radio 3 interval feature about Judas and his historicity and centrality to The Apostles, and Sir Mark Elder's interpretation...
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8 April
Unless I had heard excerpts when Sir Edward, through the medium of Donald Macleod, was Composer of the Week fairly recently on Radio 3, I certainly had not heard the entirety of his - what I suppose is one - oratorio The Apostles until last night.
Two of those whose views I value thought, with me, that the first part lacked a spark, and I was even - calumny though it is - prepared to blame Stephen Cleobury as conductor for not keeping it moving: we all felt that there were very loud orchestral eruptions that fitted neither with our notion of the subject-matter, nor with the audibility of The Philharmonia Chorus. (I was also not alone in thinking that, whatever the issue was with hearing Susan Bickley, it had been resolved in the second part, whereas Ailish Tynan - despite not even credited as being Mary, Jesus' mother, as well as The Angel Gabriel - was thrilling and energizing throughout.)
Although the work, as shown after the interval, did have greater pretensions to the abiding excellence of The Messiah, and certainly worked better as a narrative once the more cosmic aspects (albeit of Jesus' life, not really that of his apostles), I cannot also help feeling that Elgar, in deriving his own text, would have been better served by a Jennens.
Such a person might also have fitted in, in place of other material in this rather loose and limp first part, some demonstration of apostleship as those who, in two or threes, were sent out by Jesus to do his work. Even so, as Elgar dwells so much not only on the rebel apostle Judas, but also with Mary Magdelene - apart from the perhaps arbitrary identification of her with the woman who anoints Jesus with costly perfume and, in another account of quite possibly a different episode, dries his feet on her hair - beyond the role in finding the tomb empty and meeting the risen Jesus, the title of the piece has already become not fit for purpose.
Certainly, a notion that the text that Elgar has set does justice to the role of the apostles after the resurrection, and then after the ascension, is a doubtful proposition. On this, The Messiah will always be very much superior, because there is absolutely no doubt what it is about, but I do not believe that the embodied theology necessarily puts off agnostic or atheist music-lovers from appreciating the work any more than they do Bach's Matthew Passion.
Having chanced upon this last night from the Proms, and righly guessed that I was hearing it again, I want to blog a bit more, in due course, about the piece, the Radio 3 interval feature about Judas and his historicity and centrality to The Apostles, and Sir Mark Elder's interpretation...
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Thursday, 5 April 2012
An evening with David Owen Norris
A pre-concert talk by David Owen Norris about Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen at Easter at King's
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6 April
A pre-concert talk by David Owen Norris about Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen at Easter at King's
No, it's not an offshoot of that rather poor t.v. programme An Audience With..., but David visiting Cambridge to give a pre-concert talk about Messiaen's Visions de l'Amen, a work for two pianos, performed shortly afterwards and nearby in the chapel at King's College, where I sat with him for the performance.
I knew that he was hugely charismatic and entertaining, quite apart from being very informative from his wealth of knowledge, because I had heard him before, talking about and around the theme of Good King Wenceslas in York a few years back as part of its Chrsimas Early Music Festival. David is also well known as a broadcaster, and I dimly remember a regular quirky little slot that he had on Radio 3 on a weekday afternoon back, I think, in the late 80s or early 90s (this link will take you where more information is available), but the opportunity didn't present itself to get the answer directly to what that was and when.
He and I happened to talk, because I was outside the venue (seeing no reason to take a seat yet), and he came out, as I gathered, to take the air. Not wishing to venture a question regarding the Messiaen, if he were, in fact, collecting his thoughts, I sought permission, and, saying that I had first heard it on a recording made by the Labèque sisters, asked about the availability of recordings, saying was it under-represented. David said that there probably around 10, and we agreed that that was probably enough, but also that, as to its appearance in recital halls, the work is not performed very often.
To be continued
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Tuesday, 3 April 2012
A hiatus
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4 April
If there were anyone (other than The Agent) who looked at this blog most days, he or she would have noticed no new postings in a fortnight*.
Well, that has been a surprise to The Agent as well, but that is how things have fallen out - although it is also possible that some items in draft, which (despite not being public) keep their place from when started, were completed since then.
But who can rightly say? Sooner quote Ecclesiastes - which some have heretically identified as a foundation text for The Goons - and go one's way...
End-notes
* That said, there is evidence of The Agent's activities at New Empress Magazine.
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4 April
If there were anyone (other than The Agent) who looked at this blog most days, he or she would have noticed no new postings in a fortnight*.
Well, that has been a surprise to The Agent as well, but that is how things have fallen out - although it is also possible that some items in draft, which (despite not being public) keep their place from when started, were completed since then.
But who can rightly say? Sooner quote Ecclesiastes - which some have heretically identified as a foundation text for The Goons - and go one's way...
End-notes
* That said, there is evidence of The Agent's activities at New Empress Magazine.
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