Monday, 27 August 2012

Wilfredo gyrates in his Y-fronts - straight cut

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26 August

* A quick sketch, whose detail can be filled in later *

We couldn't see the said Y-fronts, but could conceive not only, from his style of dress as a class club act gone wrong, that he was wearing them, but also that, as with his shirt, they would be held closed (ouch!) with a safety-pin.

Wilfredo, with his trousers elevated to below his ribs, cut a figure reminiscent, including the teeth, of when down-and-out Reggie Perrin, having faked his suicide, ends up having to take a job mucking out the pigs. And, indeed, Wilfredo is another such creation as Reginald Iolanthe Perrin, whose ways and manners become and let him embody his role.

I do not think the comparison with the great Leonard Rossiter, or, indeed, with the equally great Ronnie Barker, unjust: to make a Rigsby, an Arkwright or a Fletcher - or even a Dame Edna - necessitates having a feel for what that person would do in any situation, and one sensed that in Alfredo and how he lived, moved and breathed.

This had been Wilfredo's last show in his run at the Edinburgh Fringe, downstairs in The Tron (pub), and there was great warmth from those in the audience - and also, amongst the women, probably a fear of either some not exactly passing slight, or of some equally unwelcome favourable attention.

A very convincing embodiment of a Spanish celebrity singer, with more faith in his love-making and his talent than one felt could really be justified (the boasting of Cellini in his autobiography?), and who, with a little more development of material, could go on to greater things.


Post script: Now you can hear Wilfredo, and also here!

Friday, 24 August 2012

Who's dancing with whom ?

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24 August

This is a review of Shadow Dancer (2012)

* Contains some spoilers *

They say that it takes two to tango, but does it?

At any rate, in Shadow Dancer (2012), anti-terrorist agent Mac (Clive Owen, who also has the code-name of Declan) and Collette McVeigh* (Andrea Risebrough, who also seems to get called Cat and C'lette by family and others) seem to have something in common: neither seems quite at home with where they are, Mac within his team (and, as with so many other figures before him, he has his own internal tout or squealer to lean on), and Collette, looking very out of place both at Brendan's funeral and at her mother's house, which is where she lives with her son Mark (we do not know Mark's father or what, if anything, happened to him).

The film is set in 1993, but we have seen the death of Collette's kid brother Sean twenty years before, and there are other deaths or attempted killings in this present - having seen Collette send her brother out to buy fags for their father, because she wants to play with making necklaces, we know something of the background to what happened to her. If it is meant to be a surprise that she is trying to plant a bomb on the Underground, then it is not, but we know very little about what else she has done, except presumably that she blamed her brother's death on a unionist terror-group or the British Army.

She is caught and apparently talked into being an informer, but she seems so awkward at explaining what happened to her in London that it seems unlikely that she would convince Kevin Mulville (David Wilmot), who wants to know (and who does not seem consistently mentally alive as a villain). Maybe being caught and put under pressure is a new situation for Collette, but it seems hard to believe that Mac has not before been in a position where the information that his plant is passing on, if acted on, could implicate or threaten him or her, which, here, he seems to care about, and, which is the way with films, as if anew.

That said, Owen delivers a very polished and unforced performance (but only billed in the closing credits as 'with', for some reason), and seems to be - more or less - in control until the end. Yet what I envisaged would happen does, and we are left wondering how it could not have been foreseen (by him), given the choice that he gave someone close to Collette, when it was highly likely that he or she would do as we see. Besides which, his putting of that choice leads him off the end of the plank with his colleagues, and Mac's position is then untenable.

However, it was regrettable that the little homage, obviously inspired by having Gillian Anderson on the crew (and I did not realize, until afterwards, that it was she) as Mac's boss Kate, to agents standing significantly in a field of a backlit golden crop, X-Files style, is chosen as the medium for making known what happened to the other tout. The agents are even dressed in that fashion: or are we meant to believe that their screen counterparts (the first series began this year) have inspired them to copy?

We are left by this film, as we are at the beginning, by Collette's face**, calmly and carefully photographed as thoughts and feelings pass over it, but we know now that they may be unknown to us: we do, though, know what has just happened.

The implication is that whatever we thought that we might have known about her, we did not, and there are obvious parallels with Jovovich's title character from Salt (2010), except that it is a far inferior film whose plot does not remotely fit together, and this one, by Tom Bradby from his novel, very nearly does (even if, at first sight, there are doubts about it***).

There is one scene between Collette and Mac that, however, defies belief except as an attempt to subvert one's expectations (even if hinted at by Anderson), and which the film / plot is the weaker for. Nothing hangs on it, except that Owen only posed the choice that he did because of it, and could only do so because he delved where he should not have done. Oh, and how likely is it, that, when Mac knows all that he does about all those with whom Collette is involved, this important detail could simply have been kept from him?

The question of who is expendable is, as ever, the name of the game - and, if you can run with it uncritically***, there is plenty of scope for finding people who seek to be the sacrificial victim, not least when Mulville turns his unwelcome attention on Domnhall Gleeson, playing Collette's brother Conor. Fine for him to torture his own, but he seems too sinister, less matter of fact, for my liking, as if a villain trying to get detail from Commander Bond... Maybe there were some such individuals for whom power and giving pain were something that attracted them in the IRA or the like, but there is too much of a feel of the extraordinary, when more solid

As I am suggesting, although Tom Bradby apparently had experience of this period as a correspondent in Ireland, the story ultimately seems too much like a typical agent /double agent / triple agent motif transported to that world, and did not seem to sit happily there. For, yes, betrayals, pacts and sacrifices were, of course, part of that world during what euphemistically got called the troubles, but this is not a film with the finesse of Tinker Tailor, and gets a little too close to a few rather too unusual individuals to tell a really convincing overall story.

Just take the ending, for example: whatever Collette tells Mark, he and she are in the aftermath of an event whose severe consequences they will be hard pressed to escape - even if they are (which they might not be) with greater resources than just their own - and are also clouded by evidence of her past, which has not simply disappeared. Risebrough, too, has made a choice about her son's and her survival, but it is far from clear that it will pay off, or pay off for long.


More now : Collette revisited (thanks to @dannytheleigh)


End-notes

* The poster says Collette - I rather think that IMDb is wrong and has misled me with the spelling 'Colette'.

** It seems that Risebrough is thirty, but she has the type of face that can look very different at different times, and, unfortunately, does, such that she seems too young to have been seven or so in 1973 much of the time, and only occasionally looks old enough: her face also transforms dramatically with a smile, and smiles are rare here.

*** I say that this film would not hang together, from start to finish, if you have seen it and know the ending.


Thursday, 23 August 2012

How do you weigh 16,000 animals? Has AOL® done a Freudian*?

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23 August

It's easy to get a meetkat on to the scales[...]



Meetkat**? So they're not these cute animals with the comedy voices, then? - they're a source of food!

Good, eat the lot of 'em!



End-notes

* Or, as I first typed, Has AOL® 'done a Fruedian'?

** I am not convinced, either, that AOL is spared by the entry in the so-called
urban dictionary
...






Thursday, 16 August 2012

My two-Tweet story...

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16 August

Emperor Kafka, determined to prove that he was not a God, ordered his driver to drive at The Great Wall. One pranged motor, not a scratch.

From then on, his Cnut test having backfired, he believed more fervently than anyone else, his days spent apart, weeping for his people.




Wednesday, 15 August 2012

Nocturnes or Why the hell did I write that? (2)

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16 August

* Contains complete spoiler detail *

This is the low-down on the show-down that is Cringe in the First Person!


Story One:


Crooner


Location : Venice



Narrator : Jan, nicknamed Janeck, the implausible guitarist, haling from 'back in the communist days' behind The Iron Curtain



Others : Tony and Lindy Gardner, Vittorio



Offstage : Janeck's mother, somehow a black-market Tony Gardner fan


Premise : the story told, such as it is, sounds like nonsense, unless under the spell of Gee, I met Mr Gardner in person, and he said and did this! But we cannot be made fans for a singer beloved of the narrator's mother, and it is not even as if she is being told the story of his chance encounter with the crooner:

Tony Gardner had been my mother's favourite. Back home, back in the communist days, it had been really hard to get records like that, but my mother had pretty much his whole collection. [She slept with the boss of the local equivalent of the Stasi??]


Apart from the saps reading the book, who would listen to this story, and what point is there in telling it? - two questions that Ishiguro simply did not engage with, although they are crucial to telling a tale, which is that Tony needs a new wife for his flagging career, so out with Lindy, and they have come away to have a special trip together before they separate.

Janeck's failure to understand these worldly ways is the main intrigue (please see the quotation below), and also the vaguely interesting question whether, in the circumstances, Lindy will want to be serenaded in their hotel room with a few of Mr Gardner's hits (via Vittorio's gondoliering and Janeck's accompaniment).



Tics : Characterized by dialogue littered with excessive deference to his mother's has-been idol, who is always 'Mr Gardner', and by Crooner Tony's equivalent characterization in the form of referring to the younger man as 'friend', from time to time, and overemphasizing his non-capitalist upbringing (of which sod all is conveyed, although we are told that it is now a democracy):

He did another of his sighs. 'How would you understand, my friend, coming from where you do? But you've been kind to me tonight, so I'm gonna try and explain it [sc. splitting up from his wife].'



Tuesday, 14 August 2012

Visiting The Lakes

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15 August

* Contains spoilers *

I have never been to The Lake District (true), but the first episode of Jimmy McGovern's The Lakes provides ample reason to go, and no excuses (not even vertigo, as one does not have to venture into the peaks to see their beauty).

It is a real treat to be back with a four-part story that seemed to be self contained, until a second series (which I felt would ruin things to watch) came along at some point, and it is quite possibly where I started with John Simm (excellent as Danny Kavanagh, and the equally excellent Emma Cunliffe as her namesake Emma Kavanagh [
IMDb does not yield her maiden name in the credits])!

So far, which means that this is a partial report on the four-parter, the sex has been entirely convincing (even with the girls whom Danny and his two mates pick up in a car that they have taken without its owner's consent (TWOC, hence twocking)) and passionate. As there is such a slow build-up to Emma and Danny sleeping with each other, the intensity and variety of their love-making is especially delightful.

I start with sex, because, generally sex, sexual attraction, jealousy and sexual frustration are what pushes many people on or together, although that description makes it seem obvious (when it is not) and cheap (which it also is not). That said, the lusty chef (Charles Dale, just credited as Chef by
IMDb) is brutal, cynical and out for what he can get, but such is life.

With Danny, we see him struggle with strong temptation, and also, rather endearingly, indulge in petty crime to make good money that he loses: Emma and he, established on the coach out of Liverpool when he absconds from home, are an excellent main focus for us at this stage against the back-drop of her parents' (Danny's only visit from Liverpool) and others' lives.


To be continued



Monday, 13 August 2012

Firewalls at Writer's Rest

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14 August


Just a little leisurely winding-down (for me, as I'm not in The States) conversation with Lindsay at
Writer's Rest about what a firewall is and how to picture it.

I'm sure that any other views or images would be very welcome...



Saturday, 11 August 2012

Where it all started with Woody and film

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12 August

As an enthusiast, I cannot help watching What's New, Pussycat? (1965), and wonder what it would have been, if Woody Allen's script from the swinging sixties had been kept intact.

There are traces of what seems his humour in exchanges such as when Victor, played by Allen, is told I can't make love with a person in the closet!, and he retorts to ask how many people, then, does she need in it? If it was his entire screenplay, which I'm sure that I gather that it was not, would that have had a chase with go-karts towards the end, before a muted non-sequitur finale?

As it stands, the plot takes us from A to B just about, but probably the most entertaining aspect of it is from when Ursula Andress literally drops into shot, exuding unashamed sex appeal, albeit as an implausible parachutist with what others like to call 'no back story' - what Thurber called Sex ex machina. Otherwise, that is when the film itself descends into the weakest and most stupid of farces, probably pretty unworthy of the relative sophistication of what went before.

When still in Paris, we see little but interiors, the most 'charming' being Victor's artist's garret, complete with tree-trunk staircase, but the most winning outside shots are of where Dr Fassbender (Peter Sellers) and his Wagnerian wife live, and are having an argument about his relations with patients at the outset. Sellers is terrifically funny, with his immaculate timing and delivery, not least in this scene, where Allen's writing shows.

Allen himself has limited opportunities to shine, though he does, and Romy Schneider excels in a trio with Capucine and Paula Prentiss, all after the body of Michael James (Peter O'Toole). O'Toole's comedic flair, as more of a straight man than Sellers, is also to the fore as this suitably unreal sex-magnet, and they bring this skit on sex and attraction up from two stars to three.



Turing tested

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12 August




Turing tested

For Lucy


Can we can safely say
That, not having
An optical computer,
Alan Turing could have been
On the German side
Without a difference?:

The Allies had, not just him,
But secure code-books,
A machine that Axis hadn't seen
(Without Enigma's flaw),
And the Germans not knowing
Enigma and Lorenz cracked

So the Germans had their pride,
Relying on technology whose
Non-self-encryption
Left them more open,

And, never knowing the truth,
Could only have set Turing
A tougher task: to break
The Allies' code,
Probably not listening
If he challenged their
Self-assurance


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Responding like Shostakovich

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11 August

It was decided to give Dmitri S. a hrad* time, as a delayed response, to Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (which I have not knowingly heard any more than an extract from (long frogotten**), nor do I know where M. is).

Let's say that Stalin took offence at the work. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't (though he could have done: he heard things, and he didn't always like - or condemn - them), but it was the official line.

DS took the official way of reply, saying that he was responding to just criticism, and the work disappeared, I gather, for three decades, with DS having a hard time and having to abandon his formalist ways (in public, anyway, even if he was composing his string quartets on the sly).

All this, it is clear enough, is happening on the surface - publicly and officially, the work (and DS with it) was condemned, so no point defending it, but does it tell us anything?


Yes, maybe a bit, because if you think that this posting is crap, you can add a coment to that effect. If, because it is not the Soviet might against DS, I just call you a troll***, does that mean anything in any objective terms, or is it just a label, like reactionary, liberalism or - that wonder of wonders for a fairly meaningless phrase - political correctness?

Obviously, it means that I disagree violently not with what you have said (but with you!), and want you to go away, a stage on from finding your message in my spam folder and, deciding that it is spam, deleting it. If I were hacking your page and putting anti-Islamic or -Pakistani slogans on there, maybe, and maybe a call to the police, before you get blamed for some sort of incitement, but what about trying to tell you that perhaps you are wrong?

Really a response to just criticism to lash out with You're trolling my blog!, because you can't stand the heat in the kitchen? After all, who lit the flames with his or her blog to begin with - and isn't it there for anyone to read and maybe disagree with? If a reader responds by trying to engage with the arguments and refute them, that isn't wrecking activity in my mind, but, more importantly, the response to that criticism (not accepting it as possibly just, just trolling) may be indicative of insecurity and an inability to accept the hypocrisy of the position argued for, of not practising what one preaches.

And as for political correctness, if we mean using the right words, but then actually 'queer bashing' with the best of 'em, then that's just whited sepulchres, hypocrisy, and a bogus party-line, seeking to get the minority vote...


End-notes

* Sorry, not thinking about Prague - honestly!

** I shall keep that in, too, never having managed to wrap my fingers around that one before.

** I don't know who originated this faintly idiotic description, probably someone who's never read Peer Gynt, but my sister and I (at a lunch-stop by rail between Bergen and Oslo) met a troll in 1973 and were awarded a certificate, so they can't be all bad!


Friday, 10 August 2012

Performance in proposal: Bach's Mass in B Minor

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10 August

I heard much of the re-broadcast Prom in which this work was given at the weekend.

There, they took a break after the Gloria, and resumed with the Credo, but this afternoon proceeded with only a few words from the presenter folowing the applause at the end of what was its first half.

But, as I queried recently in an informal chat with one of the directors of a festival (which had done likewise), it may be the organizers' and the audience's idea, after around one hour of music, to resume after tea, wine, cake or strawberries, but is that best for the work?

I think not: I think that the Mass in B Minor (BWV 232) builds, and that, if people can turn up for a play and find that the performance runs for 90 minutes to 2 hours without an interval, they could and should with this work, rather than interposing the trivial things entailed in an interval.

With the St Matthew Passion (BWV 244) (I have a posting called
Meditations on Matthew), however, I do not think so, because it is in two Parts, and anyway runs to longer than 3 hours - having heard it without a break, I would not wish to do so again, even if that means I am faint hearted: by the standard of Bach's day, I certainly am, where complaining that a sermon was longer than 20 to 25 minutes would have been ludicrous, and the Passion itself would have had worship, too, before, between and after each Part, plus that full-length sermon.


Elsewhere, I complained that Stravinsky's Mass, when - for once - it was broadcast live (or at all), had interpolations from the seventeenth century. For me, having an interval in Bach's masterpiece is alike unnecessary.


Thursday, 9 August 2012

Toilets

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9 August

I've just Tweeted for the first time about toilets, wondering, if a toilet can have a gender, how much it has cost for signage for these male and female toilets - and then you go to go in Café Rouge, and its Messieurs.

My follow-up Tweet asked: how would you like, at a wedding, to be invited as male and female guests to be silent for the male marriage-partner to make his speech?


Catch up with me @TheAgentApsley


Wednesday, 8 August 2012

Dr Emily Gibson pronounces

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8 August

'End The War On Pubic Hair' Doctor Emily Gibson Urges, As She Warns Of Boils, Pustules And Even MRSA

She sounds more like an Old Testament prophet than an MD!


An image of...?

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8 August




Who could it - momentarily - be thought to be (not as a contemporary shot, though)?

Or is that just me, thinking that someone else's look has been assumed?


Who remembers The Tichborne Claimant (1998)

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8 August

I saw the film in its time, because I was fascinated that one of the pieces contained in A Universal History of Infamy, by Jorge Luis Borges, shared its subject-matter (not so, as yet, the tale of Widow Ching, Lady Pirate).

I remember little about it, but see that Stephen Fry was in it, which is plausible. It came to mind, because I was reading promotional material for The Imposter (2012) plus Q&A, and it seemed, as does The Return of Martin Guerre (1982), a better reference-point than The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) - even if Matt Damon is in it - or the other feature that it mentioned.

But maybe not...


A new comic-strip - Bradshaw and French

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9 August

The difference being that there's just the dialogue - the comic bit is so passé!

I say, Bradshaw, what's that thing with its teeth in your trousers?

Dunno, French, but I'll kill it off with a bad review, as usual!



Le motto: Wouldn't know a good film, if...


Tuesday, 7 August 2012

Pap instead of news-reporting

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8 August

From Yahoo!®, 's e-mail sign-on page:

As the search continues for 12-year-old Tia Sharp, members of her local community have pledged to do all they can to help find her


Irrespective of the cause, why the same stale expressions? Those first four words, for example, which pointlessly have to link with something else.

What they mean is that, although the search has gone on for x hours / days, they're not giving up.

But, as for this pledge nonsense - Pledge is a household product, and no one was signing documents to say that they would persist.

Nor were they from her local community - realistically, the middle word does not add anything, nor does 'to do all they can'.


Madonna works tight knee-high boots (according to AOL®)

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8 August

So is it G4S Games absconders who write this stuff?

Is there no sense that, whatever people nowadays might really mean (if they stopped to ask) by some model or starlet working whatever clothing it may be, working something tight (or loose) means something, too?

Or why the hell do I despair at the typical knowledge-base of a human being?


Monday, 6 August 2012

Thursday, 2 August 2012

KST / Bradshaw

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This was meant to be a draft, for me to use to comment on what the great Messrs Bradshaw and French have 'made of' this film, but it seems to have gone live - whatever they have to say...


Philip French:

In Your Hands (aka Contre toi) is a subtle psychological thriller, the second full-length feature by the French writer-director Lola Doillon, but the first to be shown here. A claustrophobic virtual two-hander, it stars Kristin Scott Thomas as confident, childless divorcee Anna Cooper, a surgeon working in the obstetrics and gynaecology department of a prison hospital, and Pio Marmaï as Yann, a wild young man.In Your HandsProduction year: 2012Country: FranceCert (UK): 15Runtime: 81 minsDirectors: Lola DoillonCast: Jean-Philippe Ecoffey, Kristin Scott Thomas, Pio MarmaiMore on this filmAt the beginning Anna appears distraught but carefully controlled, running from a shabby suburban house to her smart Parisian apartment. The movie doesn't leave us long to wonder about her conduct. She goes to the police to report her abduction, and in a tensely developed flashback we learn that she has been held in a cellar by Yann, the vengeful husband of a patient who died during a Caesarean operation carried out by Anna. In this first part there's an emotional ebb and flow, the threat of violence and some physical conflict, as the two discuss the case and its emotional ramifications.In the second part, a delayed instance of the Stockholm syndrome, some mixture of guilt and sympathy seems to draw Anna to seek out Yann. A passionate affair ensues that is in its way as dangerous as the period of incarceration, possibly more so. The end is abrupt and not entirely satisfactory, but it's a convincingly performed and constantly intriguing film


Kristin Scott Thomas gives us another movie in a distinctive genre that she has made her own: modern day, no makeup, speaking French, transgressive sex. It's an intense and claustrophobic two-hander, well acted – especially by her – but frankly a bit of a shaggy-dog story with a faintly unsatisfactory ending. Scott Thomas plays Anna Cooper, a single professional woman living on her own in Paris and a bit of a workaholic. The name signals that, though a fluent and idiomatic French speaker, she is British but otherwise there is no back story. At the beginning of a rare holiday, Anna comes into traumatic contact with an intense figure: Yann, played by Pio Marmaï, and their encounter becomes a terrifying ordeal. The film begins intriguingly and promises much, with an interesting flashback structure which initially conceals as much as it reveals. But in its third act, the movie runs out of ideas and has no more to tell us. Set alongside Philippe Claudel's I've Loved You So Long (2008) and Catherine Corsini's Leaving (2009), In Your Hands showcases of one of this country's most remarkable screen performers, a vividly intelligent presence – but it does not quite work. PB


Big bloody news: King Juan Carlos of Spain trips over (according to AOL®)

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2 August

No doubt there's an awkward piece of footage, showing the royal foot stumbling over something - do we think that it was the right one, or the left?

And did Juan Carlos - just in case we don't know where he is king of (as I am not aware of any other king so named), we have to be told - just trip, or did he actually stumble and end up on the floor, crying Shit!?

And is it better or worse than when the poor blighter sneezed yesterday, maybe three times in succession? And, if so, better or worse than when Beckham (unofficial King of Span) tripped over in 2007...?


Wednesday, 1 August 2012

An ambivalence for Kristin - first thoughts

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2 August

* Contains spoilers - if you can still catch this film, you probably would not wish to know too much *


We see characteristics of Dr Anna Cooper (though her name and profession do not emerge until we hear her listening to her answering-machine), at the outset of this film, that will haunt its progress and eventual ending, did we but know it: I planned to go back to see whether that foreknowledge matters, and, having done so, can say that it does not.

To my taste, Kristin Scott Thomas inhabited the difficult role of Anna to perfection, for she drives and dictates so much of the pace, although, given that she has been kidnapped, one might assume that she is not in control. In this respect, the title in English, In Your Hands, cleverly exploits an ambiguity of the original, Contre Toi, whereas it has to be said that the subtitles are a somewhat ham-fisted affair.

For example, after Anna has been given the response of I sure do when asked whether she likes tea, the utterance Avec plaisir, when she is offered some, is rendered a little more convincingly along the lines of I'd love some. My ability to keep up with spoken French is not brilliant, but I can usually get the gist of dialogue, guided by what I see. Not here, where such a freedom - clearly for the benefit of speakers of US English - had been taken with the tone and style.

It can sometimes be a slow matter of engaging with a film when one is relating to such a familiar face as that of KST, and almost admiring the acting, rather than - if this denotes the separate thing that I intend - following the performance.

For me, an important moment to settle me in was to see her responding to the messages on her answering-machine, following an absence, but also to see how I would relate to her as a doctor, when she arrives and dresses for work at the hospital. (In this film, her name is the closest that we get to an explanation for anyone detecting that she is not French, which I am sure that the noisy pair of couples behind and to the side of me would have made grist to their mill of whispering / talking through the film, since they also laughed at several inappropriate moments.)


Anyone who did not see a poster or other advertising for this film beforehand will not know that they had to envisage, as they were watching what unfolded, how a certain scene would be reached. In fact, I almost came to wonder whether the image had just been - which it is not - a teaser to set the audience off on the wrong scent. Not that this is a thriller, but it is about psychology, about what makes people tick, have the upper hand, in the relations with each other.

And not in a calculating way largely, because there is a lot of instinct at work, and - if we are not busy laughing in a way that suggests we should have left the film to those who wanted to watch it - it will be open to interpretation quite what is happening. No dogma here about even what happens, let alone the rights and wrongs, and in the intelligent domain of films such as Haneke's Hidden (2005) and Code Unknown (2000) (of both of which I was reminded early on), if not equally of The Woman in the Fifth (2011).


More to come...



Tuesday, 31 July 2012

Kosmos revisited

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31 July

* Contains spoilers – do not read, if you want to watch the film for the first time *

Kosmos (2010) has passed my Does it Bear Watching Again? test (DIBWA) (or whatever I call it). If I had had a chance to watch it again at Cambridge Film Festival, it would have been to check on detail that I felt that I had missed first time around.

As it is, ten months later, it had me in tears at the end, after having been weighing in the balance whether knowing what was to happen (although getting the sequence wrong several times, not, I think, because it had been re-edited*) mattered to my appreciation for all but the last few minutes. For I was watching it through the more critical lens of scrutinizing it to see whether it worked, but the cumulative impact still hit me, even if (partly because of reading TAKE ONE’s review) I had been more aware of the way in which the soundtrack, including electronic and natural sounds, played its part.


Some things that I had remembered aright:

* Someone who reviewed the film on IMDb wrongly thought that the woman with the crutch (reminiscent of Lady Archer) kills herself, not the teacher - as if there were any doubt, the former is still around at the end

* That Neptün and Kosmos both counter gravity, and, with the paperwork that litters the place, fly around his lodging

* The role of the falling star / spacecraft in healing the boy who was not speaking

* Kosmos irritating those who think that he should conform to what living a proper life consists in, having a job and doing work


Some things I had not weighed properly:

* How Neptün is jealous of the teacher, because of her relations with Kosmos, and we are twice shown her throwing stones at the other woman's window (and that she had given herself this name, then Kosmos his own in response)

* Just how ambiguous it is whether she has sex with Kosmos at the conclusion of the scene referred to above (and / or an earlier scenes at his lodgings, where they behave like wolves)

* The coherence of the scenes with the cattle and the geese, and of the views of the civic clock

* The way in which popular opinion turns against Kosmos at the end, despite his grief at what happens to the teacher and the boy

* How raids against the cheese-shop, pharmacy and other premises influences residents against campaigning to re-open the border

* The use of CGI in making the snow and effects with the wind happen, as clearly no one could wait for it to be snowing to film a scene - once I became aware of this artificiality, I could not easily shut it out


As to the impression that the film left me with, it is an abiding and powerful one of a film-maker thoughtfully presenting a series of images and not insisting that any one way of looking at them is correct. This is as it should be with the best films, and this one compares very well with Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011).


End-notes

* Although some things that I could have sworn were to come never happened: a follow-up to the brush that Kosmos has with the tip of a lighted cigarette, in showing his immunity to cold, though I forget what, although I thought that it involved the stove.

The usual deal in the trailer for The Hunter

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31 July

If you did believe the trailer, you would expect a fast-paced experience from watching the feature. However, it will not materialize, because the trailer is not remotely representative: almost all the action has been squeezed together in a few minutes, and put with the sort of pounding music that makes me feel very unpleasantly anxious.

Imagine, instead, more and more of the glimpses that you have of Martin David (Willem Dafoe) exploring and setting his traps, cut occasionally with the rightly praised photography of the scenery, and you have a better measure of the ratio of what we call ‘action’ to his everyday hunting activities, because this is really not, unless you excite easily, one that will have you on the edge of your seat.

And I wonder how many of these trailers there are: is this the let's-extract-the-last-iota-of-momentum version? Has it mystifyingly attracted attention away from anyone who might have seen In Your Hands (2012), though a film in French with subtitles is a tricky proposition?


Sunday, 29 July 2012

'Trends' for New Zealand on Pratter

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29 July

Why is it ridiculous that these are items 6 to 10 in that list?


6. Aussies

7. Brazil

8. Australia

9. Sky

10. Kiwis


My 'favourite' browser (3)

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29 July

Following on from where I left off, I spot three new browsers:

* Konqueror (sounds a wee bit aggressive (and martial)),


* CriOS (the dead bones enchanted by The Witch of Endor), and

* Namoroka (some bloody weirdo film-director)


Others that I'd like to see:

* Brendel (makes faces at you when playing music-clips)

* Ashkenazy (the same, but makes less amusing, more pained, faces)

* SuperDry (despite its name, it drenches you with a bucket of water for fun occasionally)

* Texugenbag (just complete crap, but someone would choose the name)

* Brodsky (specially programmed to display weird pairings, yoking Kim Kardashian's image in peach with text about salt-beef and prune salad)

* BJ69XXX (a mind-blowing browsing experience that makes sex seem rather inadequate)

* Sarah/Michael (a way of displaying content that takes something from the different ways of viewing the world of these most famous Palins - also known as S&M)

* Carrot (nothing exciting, unless you like orange immensely, as the colour-bias is that what inclined - perfect for saving celebrities money on tans)


Saturday, 28 July 2012

Explore the natural beauty of Caledonia (according to AOL®)

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28 July

What is this? Bloody cornering the market in a fanciful form of what Fowler dubbed Elegant Variation?

Just so that you can refer to it as Scotland below?

And why not Hibernia, whilst you're at it?!

@TheAgentApsley

A back-hander?

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28 July

Is what follows a strange thing to write, or is it just a clumsy compliment?



I honestly don't know, but the assumption seems to be 'You might be able to write this at Level 1, but could you present it to an audience any better than Level 2 (or 3)?'. I might have bridled myself, so this seems quite a good retort as a put-down:



@TheAgentApsley

Melvyn Tan and Bach

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28 July

As soon as Melvyn Tan sat at the keyboard and was satisfied with the height of the stool, he was ready to play, and began the second of the so-called English Suites (in A Minor, BWV 807) so definitely that I was straight into Bach and knew that he was, too: the fluency and confidence were there right from the first notes of the Prélude, along with tremendous energy and equal restraint and grace.

One knew that this was playing out of conviction, and the deftness with which the trills and other ornaments were executed assured of Tan's mastery of his craft, and the interpretation that he brought that the music is a living thing in and for him. The first three movements in the Suite led up to an audacious tempo in the Sarabande, in which Tan was most persuasive, and so provided a vivid contrast with what followed. Altogether, an interpretation that was evidently as well received generally as it was by me, and of which he could have been left in no doubt.


However, although I am no expert on piano-lids and Steinways, when the audience is not exactly large for a recital in a hall that holds around 400, I don’t know if it needs to be open so much: at any rate, in the rendition of this Suite and a later one, I found a brightness at times in the octaves just above Middle C, which, when there was a rich texture, meant that the chords as a whole wanted for clarity. (It could equally have been something about the acoustic itself (given fewer bodies in the hall), or not pedalling suitably (as there did not seem to be much use of the pedal).)

Otherwise, the only surprise, other than being reminded how joyous Bach is in his depth and invention, his compassion and humanity, was the seemingly hesitant cæsuræ – I can think of nothing else by which to describe them – with which, I suspect, Tan (and not the score) punctuated some movements, seemingly to break up the flow of phrases in some movements.

These little pauses had the effect of catching this listener unawares, but they did not, for all that, initially seem deliberate, more as if the pianist were unsure (Tan played them from memory) what came next - or, maybe, how to speak it in the syntax of its context. In the first Suite played, I came to accept them, whereas they frankly began to jar in the other one (No. 5 in E Minor, BWV 810).

They did so partly because, in between the Suites, I had had to concentrate quite hard to follow eleven different composers’ works in Variations for Judith - I know the Bach Suites from CD (with Glenn), but I found it taxing to listen to this collection of ‘reflections’ on (or of) Bist du bei mir?, the Bach aria from the Anna Magdalena note-book (BWV 508). The title calls them variations, but they were more like versions, since there could be no sense that the variations developed from one contribution to the next (even though Tan chose an order of his own from the score).

Apart from two which Tan, in his introduction, said did not meet the stipulation when the contributors were asked to take part of 'easy' to play, what the pieces broadly seemed to have in common was that they stated the theme, although one deliberately chopped it up, putting interjections from the latter part in the right hand after utterances from the first part in the bass.

Sadly, even if I had had the score, my ability for reading one is so limited that I would not have been able to work out whose contribution was which by following it, so I was left with rather shadowy speculations as to the voice behind each little piece. Perhaps that is the vanity that the writer of the Book of Ecclesiastes complains of, of trying to catch a figure such as Sir Richard Rodney Bennett in his participation - and yet what else is asking all these people to contribute for?

As Tan suggested, the collection is interesting to hear, but it necessarily lacks the coherence of something like the Diabelli Variations or the Goldbergs, as, with every one, it is a reversion to the original, not a progression, not a development. Whereas, if one of these composers had taken the aria for a ride 'properly', who knows!

As I had been taxed in this way, getting back to Bach was not, although I had expected that it would be, a restorative move, but one that simply left me aware that music was being played, but unable to listen to it (although I do also think that, of these six Suites, No. 5 was not the best one to have chosen).


If the recital were to have worked for me, maybe it would have been better like this, ending with the Variations:

1. Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue (BWV 903)

2. English Suite No. 2 in A Minor (BWV 807)

3. Variations for Judith (BWV 508 + 11 others)


My rationale being that the desire to contrast Bach with compositions based on Bach's work would not have wanted a sandwich, or the two Suites, as played, merely to precede the new work(s), but that the Fantasy and Fugue would show a contrasting and more contemplative side to Bach's virtuosic writing in the Suite. Maybe it would'nt work, but this seemed the obvious 'solution' to the problem that I, at least, had faced with the programme.


Friday, 27 July 2012

Nocturnes or Why the hell did I write that? (1)

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26 July

This book is subtitled (or captioned) Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

A question that both the narrator of the middle story*, ‘Malvern Hills’, might usefully have asked about his inconsequential (self-)revelation (if we weren’t supposed to see him as blind to his hypocrisy and selfishness – the biggest act of which must be boring us with his tale!), and his creator, Ishiguro, about cobbling this and four other offerings together to make some sort of five-part whole.

I say some sort […] of whole, because, under the pretext that we have different narrators (who, in their own ways, engage with the title-theme), we are actually being peddled inferior (and probably previously rejected) attempts at short-story writing. One (i.e. ‘Cellists’) cannot even manage to tell a quite lame narrative without giving the game away: if you tell your reader that your friends have already said something about a woman (even if it is part of the story is that you ignored their warning), he or she will not be amazed when that suggestion turns out to be the truth. It doesn’t work, because this is pap, not Henry James.

As for the other stories, amateur critics have been impressed that a minor, if necessary, character** in the first story (‘Crooner’) appears later in ‘Nocturne’ (the fourth), itself a fairly feeble attempt to portray the behaviour of the rich and / or (once) famous through the eyes of a session musician who is about as convincing as John Smith’s is a bitter. The prism for the narration is coming in contact with a celebrity whose claim to fame has not weighed on her fellow inmate at a private health clinic.

Steve, too, is supposed to be an instrumentalist, though I detect no knack on Ishiguro’s part for making him sound (in words, thought or nature) like a sax-playing session musician, with his own studio at home. For someone who supposedly does not think that his appearance need not ‘improved’ to make him more of a success in his career (which his partner urges), he (cringingly) keeps alluding to himself and ‘my loser’s face’.

His ambivalence about why he at the clinic is matched only by that towards the celebrity, who, when she shows him attention, is a nuisance, but then grows on him (though not he on her, because an incident with the cavity of a cooked turkey [sic] does not help). (There is also something about a game of chess, but probably best forgotten.)

The story has what, if generous, one could call a wistfulness about it, but, in truth, it is that does not go – and never was going – anywhere, since the real story-teller (Ishiguro) cannot deliver, through his substitute (the musician Steve), any more than one of those rambling accounts that someone gives to an unwilling listeners in the pub: the strings are seen and heard pulled, and the puppet delivers a monologue, largely devoid of significant content (as it is no more discerning than the pub drunk about what to leave in, what leave out), as well as of style, consistency, conviction.

We know that there is no such thing as the character whom a writer creates, but this one does such a poor job of depicting Steve credibly through his attributed spoken words that we do not care about him, are not interested in the truth or otherwise of what he records, and are left wondering (again) why any of us bothered with it – Steve for consenting to be in it (what union is he in??), and writer and reader for spending any time on it.

This criticism applies alike to all five stories, that they are not really musings on what happened, what might have been, what maybe was, but tiresome excursions into ineptly giving rise to a plausible authorial voice (i.e. one which, at the least, does not repeatedly draw attention to its own inadequacies of tone, syntax and diction). At bottom, do we care that a showbiz couple might separate because his career needs him to have another wife? Do we care how a brother irritates his sister, brother-in-law and, vicariously, someone whom he hates even more?

And then there’s ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, a piece so stupid in its detail that, even more so than any game of chess, one simply cannot imagine that anyone would embark on telling a tale (Ishiguro or the narrator Ray(mond)) that relies on it. Either shut up (as the phrase has it) or put up – put up a better pretence for developing an idea.

As my friend said in her
review on Amazon, much mileage can be had with reading out Tony Gardner’s every utterance with a slur, and ridiculing this entire collection (between guffaws, when one has to suspend reading), but it does not merit its author’s reputation. I do believe that he can write, but he should never have published this:

The links (which, in any case, are pretty tenuous) were obviously invented after the event, because nothing connects the celebrity with the singer in ‘Crooner’, and making people musicians (who actually betray no evidence of ever having played) is a simple editorial task.


Click here for a full exposé of Ishiguro's plots...






End-notes

* He is supposedly a musician (sure some after-thought: please see below in the main piece), whose name I do not believe ever appears, even when his long-suffering sister Maggie is trying to appeal to him.

** With no character, because insufficiently drawn to seem more than someone who, in one of the world’s loveliest cities, is only interested in the least-interesting type of shopping.




Thursday, 26 July 2012

128 page-views to-day!

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26 July

If the so-called Stats told me more, I'd be able to understand what has been looked at - the old piece about Bel Ami (2011?) is a bit of a surprise, at 8 page-views, but they don't (what I'm shown) add up to 128 :


64 x 2

32 x 2 x 2

16 x 2 x 2 x 2

8 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2

4 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2

2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2


And Hello, China!, with to-day's reported audience of 12...



Wednesday, 25 July 2012

Smetana's String Quartet No. 1 (in E Minor) - given The Proms 'treatment'

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26 July

This was played last night, in the Prom's first half, for the first time there.

I have no idea why. (Or why applause was needed after every movement*.)

I am now less resentful of what Mahler did to orchestrate Schubert's String Quartet No. 14, Death and The Maiden, because it still sounded like Schubert:

This orchestration, the work of George Szell, had little identifiable connection with the original, and used brass, amongst its textures. Perhaps the composer's intentions in writing a quartet, which we were repeatedly told contained a motif at the end that represented his blindness (or was it, after all, deafness?), were as dispensable as good employee relations in Ohio.
If you had asked me what I was listening to (without the benefit of whoever's wisdom it was beforehand, or to schedule), I would have had no idea, although I like this string quartet. All grist to the orchestral mill, I s'pose.

End-notes
* Unless it was shocked, grieving applause in embarrassment by those who knew the original.

Horrified tourists watch as man falls from sixth floor of Tate Modern (according to AOL®)

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25 July

So how many things make this reporting imbecilic?


OK, factually it was at Tate Modern, but :

* Was it only tourists who watched (others assumed it to be just a happening, and ignored it)?

* And it was a special sub-set of the tourists, the ones who were alread horrified, who watched?

* Did the choice of floor have some effect on them, or was it just the falling?

* Everyone else (all the other tourists) watched the man fall from a different floor - or, somehow knowing that it had been the sixth, were uncomprehending about the choice of floor


Better stop there...


Here's to you, Dmitri S. !

Here's to you, Dmitri S. !

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25 July

Here's to you, Dmitri S. !


Not even knocking it back in one, but drinking it cold from the freezer with enthusiatic company (and on top of other drink), I know that there is a state of regretting having had so much vodka.

The existence of such enthusiastic company would offer support for the notion Any excuse for a drink ! being a current one, of course, which takes me back to this old old topic of anniversaries :

Is Myaskovsky - or are his works - suddenly more interesting because (as last year) it was 130 years since his birth ?


Or 200 years :

* Since his death

* Since he first vomited after too much vodka

* After he
stubbed his toe on Poulenc in Montmartre (which he may have done), and so experienced an unexpected orgasm (which he may have done*) ?


End-notes

* But Twitter doesn't tell me...


Tuesday, 24 July 2012

What does the word 'stigma' tell anyone ?

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25 July

These are some further thoughts about what meaningful message, if any, is given to the public by talking about the stigma of mental ill-health*.


I suspect little more (and who judges a book by its cover - don't we all?) than titles of texts such as, being quite random, The Tao of Pooh, The Road to Wigan Pier, The Dancing Wu Li Masters or Lady Windermere's Fan.

Yes, they identify something, and not always exclusively: for example, film convention is to write Psycho (1960), not least as it was re-made**.

Do titles / names do any more than identify***? Only, I feel, if they are apt, rather than arbitrary (remember the times when no one knew what counselling was, and everyone had to explain that they weren't seeing a counsellor to get advice?): as my footnote says, the titles that Breton gave to Gorky's paintings seem apt, as does The Canterbury Tales.


Contrast that with The Merchant of Venice, because many people (we have probably all still heard of Shylock) would be pressed to say who the person is to whom the title relates. Do we want that sort of confusion, if we are talking about the very real effects that other people's attitudes (not always conscious) have on almost every detail of the lives of people with an experience of mental ill-health?

For those attitudes get translated into a behaviour with as many points on it as most spectra, from which, maybe:

* funny looks

* crossing the road to avoid

* suddenly halting a lively conversation

* name-calling

* telling stories to councils, the Department for Work and Pensions, social services, TV Licensing, the RSPCA, etc.

* excrement on the car / through the door / over the fence

* damage to property, pets, plants, etc.

* putting burning paper through the door

* personal physical attack

* arson (burning paper through the door that 'works')

* murder (where death is not the result of the arson)


That's for the home-life of that person - home, or feeling that one has one, being much of what is left. Since the chances are that, if he or she had a job, an enforced hospital stay led to another spectrum of behaviours, ending in dismissal or resignation. (Home, that is, if an arsonist - or a violent partner - left any home remaining, other than the streets.)


A grim picture? Not an exaggerated one, though, because all of these things do happen, and one thing can lead to another - after all, who is an expert in responding non-provocatively to that sort of attack on who one is and what one has?

No worse considering it than the fact that the mental-health community shudders every time some violent or fatal crime is associated with the perpetrator's mental ill-health, because a backlash is feared. I come back to that phrase:

Who one is and what one has


That is what we want to protect****:

Who one is can so easily and so subtly be under attack, a stealthy attrition that is upon one before one is aware of it, just as is what one has, mentally or, in physical / emotional terms, the little that one calls a home, family, or friends, all of which have a tendency to slip away, if they did not already at whatever breakdown is (the Peer Support Workers call it psychiatric challenge).

Stopping a world continuing to exist where these things happen and are casually - or callously - taken for granted is what combating stigma should work for:

The verbs to traumatize and to stigmatize (both from Greek, so they have a similar ring) are closer than we realize, and using the word 'stigma' - to me - says not nearly as much.


We are stigmatizing people for things that they did not choose to happen. They are not weak, they do not deserve it - if it meant anything to our society any more to say it, we would know that There (but for the grace of God) go I.

This is the significance of talking about one in four people - not that one gets into a four where there already 'a mad person', so that one is magically safe, but that the former slogan of The National Lottery applies: it's not you yet, but how do you know that it won't be?

We must not traumatize people further for what has already left them traumatized - if we were human beings in any real sense, we would stay with them while they seek to tell their stories, weep with them over what has happened already, and help them to heal, and to feel healed, not judged, criticized, abused, spat out and scapegoated.


And, above all, we would burn that stupid slogan out of our hearts, Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.




End-notes

* Or whatever one's preferred term, as, sadly (in a way), there is no agreement even on that: e.g. mental distress (Mind), mental health difficulty (One in Four magazine), mental illness (NHS), etc., etc.

** Re-made, apparently, unhelpfully faithfully, according to one person who could not see the point of re-enacting the old screenplay.

*** Hesitating to dilate on what is added (or lost) when a visual artist calls every work Untitled, although I will recount how a symbiosis occurred between a painter and a poet:

André Breton, spokesman for the Surrealist movement and a poet and novelist, came to know Arshile Gorky and his works. The two men had a good relationship, such that Breton wrote about and gave rise to titles of many of Gorky's later works

With a good (i.e. apt) title (like The Canterbury Tales), can it be separated from the work, because it is now part of it (and of its meaning)?


**** Even if the dismissive (and damning) ways of some consultant psychiatrists can make the job harder, right at the outset, of that person believing that he or she will not always be like this, always need medication, never get back to work, because it is too stressful.


Jude's Law

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25 July

Jude is pretty obscure - as a book of the Bible, that is, and some might (wrongly) imagine that he fitted in with Ezekiel and Jeremiah, in the prophets.

His law is little known, but it predicted that someone would be named after it, and that this man would do great things in waistcoats (best way to do it, if they don't make you sweat uncontrollably, as well as feeling highly constricted - and to play several frames of snooker wearing one of those, rather than having been shampooed in quick-drying concrete?!).

Myself, I think that Jude had an eye to tipping someone off to taking a share in the business of a gentleman's outfitters, but what do I know!


Sunday, 22 July 2012

Naming no names (not even Wilkie Collins)

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22 July

If I have a falling-out with a pharmaceuticals company, for whom I have been - whatever that means - a spokesman, does not that then introduce an element of what may be 'individual bias', if I wage a very personal campaign against one of that company's products, asserting that it 'kills'?


We all know what the anti-phrase gamekeeper turned poacher is used as a touchstone for, but wouldn't anyone want to know, before heeding this speaker's negative campaign (or, perhaps, even suggesting that someone without those connections is better placed to wage it), what the nature of the connections were in the honeymoon period first, and, more importantly, what exactly went wrong - and why?

On another front altogether, Andy Behrman‏ @electroboyusa took exception when it was claimed that lithium, too, could result in coma and death:

Not true and I'll argue to the end if you're up for it, buddy.

Whether he was 'up for it' remains unclear, as, although Mr Boy suggests that he has taken more than twenty medications, he did not back down or apologize for what might be thought an aggressive attitude. However, maybe he did heed a follower of The Agent, who concurred, pointing out the need for regular blood-tests when taking lithium.




Saturday, 21 July 2012

Russell Brand Jokes About His Sex Life With Ex-Wife Katy Perry (according to AOL®)

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21 July

I looked at the headline, and thought - until I remembered that this was Russell Brand - that I wanted to hear what this really witty guy had to say about his ex-wife.

Sorry, I must have blinked and so missed the joke. (I had been drinking, y'r'onour.) As this was a report of a radio broadcast, it might have been 'nice' - rights issues permitting - to hear what Brand said, rather than reading it described. (That said, the photo of him with a semi-transparent top left me wanting to know less, not more.)

As I try to be Celebrity Deaf, I have no idea what the wheelchair references meant, but I simply found myself thinking which, visually, was more of a catch, Katy for Russell, or vice versa: just look out that one with the top, if you need to, to answer the question. A story about nothing, but I should have guessed...

And as for that 'film' Take Me - I'm a Geek, that really says it all, doesn't it?


Friday, 20 July 2012

Mental health and sport

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21 July

Soon, the time of the Orimpiques will be on us, with their little sequinned costumes, redolent of a prawn - no, I'm thinking of Friday night at the Chinese take-away, and the special fried rice!

There is proof both ways that a beloved sports personality - no, on second thoughts, sportsman or -woman - could be forgiven anything. Someone may remember what Victoria was called before Beckham, but, even so, did his marriage to this one-time Spice Girl* do him any real harm? That said, mistakes on the pitch or in the stadium have been held as grudges for a very long time, and some failed penalty-takers may still receive daily hate-mail years later.

So what is it that makes those who think that they understand the British mentality (in general), and the prejudices that are held about mental ill-health, that mean that it is necessarily and always a good thing to talk about those bad times in one's mental life, and for a whole team to open up?

If it's the Beckham, so what if he married her and she makes him wear her thongs, then one ends up no better off - one just knows more than one wanted about David's underwear. If, though, it's the unforgivable sin, then that team is written off in favour of another that isn't just a load of pathetic pussycats, and no positive benefit accrues to anyone else who may, say, experience depression.

Bob Hoskins used to say in the advertisements It's good to talk, but is it?


End-notes

* And what part did she contribute to the vocal texture?



Never judge a crook by his brother

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20 July

As like as peas in a pod, they say, so maybe it was true in the case of Ronnie and Reggie...


Spice Girls to reform for Olympics (according to AOL®)

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20 July

Some people don't realize that one can distinguish between verbs - with a hyphen.

Or maybe they did mean reform...?


Thursday, 19 July 2012

It must drive the medics mad!

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20 July

By which I mean the well-known, supposedly for comic effect, tendency to call some imaginary medical condition Little Red Riding-Hood Syndrome, or Bust-a-Gut Syndrome. (Not that I am linking the two, although I do see a lupine connection...)

All the medics are tutting, if not tee-heeing, at the misuse of one of their trademark dead languages by people who have never read The Comedy of Errors, been to Ephesus, or known a Greek prefix when they saw one*. (Just like the lawyers, jibbing at the allegedly interesting question of knowingly representing someone who's guilty when, in their mind at least, they don't do criminal law - and all these bond deals for which they are providing the late-night know-how are all perfectly innocent.)

As to what planet the makers of the probably wittily titled Synecdoche, New York (2008) transmitted it from, I didn't stay around to find out**. Thank God it didn't infect the UK, giving us Metonymy in Dagenham!

I gather it's the first of a series of iconic new takes on some damn' thing or another, so I'm watching out for Dïaresis Beijing next.



End-notes

* One hopes that everyone's ability to choose to do those things - or ignore them - can continue unabated.

** Courtesy of explanations such as this, no one is danger of finding out what it meant: A synecdoche is a type of trope, which is a figure of speech. When used in literature, a synecdoche will add to the visual imagery of the passage and enhance the reader’s experience.

Yes, so will having a narrator who knows sod all about nothing!


Sainsbury or Sainsbury's?

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


20 July

Who cares?


But this is supposed to make sense, as it is their advert:

Live well for less this


Forget what the second line is, but who can really believe that the phrase 'this summer' is best broken in half - so that we are faced with this meaningless jumble of for less this? (Even 'Living' would be better than all these monosyllables.)


The whole caption would begin better with what is in the second line:

Summer with Sainsbury's -

Living well for less



And, if they choose to donate a large amount of money to me in thanks, I might not say anything about the image that they used...