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6 April
If – God forbid ! – I were to wish to express the notion that the Prime Minister is a bad man, motivated by self-interest, how might I say it to Cameron’s face ?
I can’t emphatically say the natural You’re evil !, because the first syllable, with its diphthong, is hard to control at any volume when making sure that the message is abrupt and clear, so I might resort to three sharp, distinct jabs, You are evil !, and then add to it, You are selfish and evil ! (or vice versa).
But how cowed by this will he feel, because he can just brush off the adjectives, knowing that he is a pure and noble breed¹ ?
Think of when you are in the car, or cycling, or on the pavement, and someone else using the road does something stupid. You might serenely and calmly turn your countenance to the fact that you have had – as the case might be – to brake suddenly, softly murmur How stupid…, and resume your assumed walk through life with the Buddha.
More likely, I suggest, is that you will react differently, and not resort to our earlier formulation, You are stupid !, at all, but to the You stupid x !, where – probably depending on the level of your non-Buddha-restrained frustration, indignation or even anger – x might be man, woman, etc.², sod, bastard, twat, prick, and so on³.
At this point, it is worth noticing that many adjectives that, according to this pattern, occupy the place of our own ‘stupid’ are bi-syllabic, such as ruddy, bleeding, bloody, sodding, fucking, useless, hopeless, etc., and can therefore be rattled through and over : they have their weight, but as a qualification to our chosen engine of conveying, e.g. You priceless fucker / shite / wanker. (One can, of course, say (probably if relevant) You bald git !, and there is, in great, fat, dumb, proud, crass, etc., a whole battery of monosyllables, but the stronger qualifying words seem to be polysyllabic.)
OK, so what is this exercise – even if some may find it fascinating – of considering condemning Cameron all about ? Well, I want to look at the words of insult that some of the bloggers on mental-health regard as taboo because they stigmatize those with mental-health issues. For example the terms lunatic, psycho, mad, crazy, loopy, demented, and psychotic.
If someone gets called a fucking psycho, that is one extreme, and it may constitute any number of things from a drunken mate approving a reckless act of violence to, say, the critical characterization of a risky piece of driving. (We use words in context, and, in the first example, this may be part of the mythology of the mates’ behaviour, and so not be understood anything other than positively.)
There is a stage further, though, such as in the arena of taunting or threatening – or even administering – violence to a person who is known (or believed⁴) to have a mental-health condition. That reinforces a message that (beautified) goes along the lines We don’t like you or want you around because of who you are, what you do, and what it means for you to be here where you are not welcome.
However, I believe that some words have been denuded of any real malice, unless they are deliberately used offensively : I would suggest that, with enough energy, being called a pretty table-leg could, if anyone wanted to say it, be invested with and convey disregard, disdain, and disgust.
Or take this, from Soda Pictures’ booklet for New British Cinema Quarterly (where Eryl Phillips talks about making – planning to make – Gospel of Us, a three-day theatrical event to tell Christ’s Passion in and around Port Talbot) :
The ambition of the piece was bordering on madness – to attempt a film of it all was either a mid-life crisis or just lunatic
At least two of the words or phrases ‘mid-life crisis’, ‘madness’ and ‘lunatic’ explicitly suggest poor judgement through mental ill-health, but does that, in itself, make it insulting as such to those with that experience ? I’d draw the line in favour of those things being OK, whereas to have written this would be different, I think:
The ambition of the piece was bordering on demented – to attempt a film of it all was either a psychotic episode or sectionable
The insult, there, is to belittle psychosis (by likening it to the feelings of alienation from one’s life that usually fall short of needing even medication), to draw the vague word ‘demented’ (usually meant to signify dangerous violence, and attributed in the popular imagination and vocabulary to mental-health conditions) into the mêlée of meaning, and to cheapen the real and highly threatening and frightening matter of being sectioned by mentioning it in the context of a film that would be hard to make.
What I am hoping is not so much to have demonstrated that when Jon Snow, in writing about the Philpott case, called Philpott 'a lunatic', it was not stigmatizing the whole mental-health community, but to have started a debate about whether that word (and others, some of which I have mentioned, or even given in examples) can ever be used, or must always be pounced upon...
End-notes
¹ In what turn out not to be Paul Weller’s words, but those of Ray Davies (David Watts).
² Or, as my father was wont to say, ‘individual’.
³ Enterprising individuals** might learn a whole string of them, or play a sort of melody, on a scale of them, in increasing and receding severity, such as :
man shit jerk sod cunt drip bum twat .
⁴ A sort of guilt by association or mistake, as in Max Frisch’s Andorra.
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Saturday, 6 April 2013
What would you do with an extra £600 (which you won't get) ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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6 April
Not quite sure how democratic the Diberal Lemocrats are, so here is my comment on Lynne Featherstone's disingenuous question :
Well, if people in a job all got their salary up front on 6 April (rather than every week, fortnight or month throughout the year), or equally those on welfare benefits, they would be in a completely different position to make prudent capital outlays, such as not having to pay interest on paying insurance by instalment.
No one, though, will get £600 in a lump sum, so it's a rather stupid question to ask what anyone would do - let alone whether, overall, other changes leave them worse off !
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6 April
Not quite sure how democratic the Diberal Lemocrats are, so here is my comment on Lynne Featherstone's disingenuous question :
Well, if people in a job all got their salary up front on 6 April (rather than every week, fortnight or month throughout the year), or equally those on welfare benefits, they would be in a completely different position to make prudent capital outlays, such as not having to pay interest on paying insurance by instalment.
No one, though, will get £600 in a lump sum, so it's a rather stupid question to ask what anyone would do - let alone whether, overall, other changes leave them worse off !
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Wednesday, 3 April 2013
Epiphany : Questions in a comment
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3 April
I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II
I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers
(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?
(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?
I can't say that it did.
After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.
I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.
I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.
(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?
(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?
I take it that these belong together.
I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how CHOIR related to the other two parts of the film the second time.
In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an iconostasis (although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).
I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).
As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.
They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 April
I am taking this space to start respond to various questions posed in a comment on Epiphany : my visit to Tate Britain II
I have now watched Turner Prize Video artist Elizabeth Price wins and BALTIC Bites - Elizabeth Price, and they should inform my answers
(1) I am unfamiliar with Beckett. If I were to listen to Words and Music, or watch Quad, what influences would be mirrored by Price?
(2) Did it not feel odd to spend so much time on the recreation with the burning furniture?
I can't say that it did.
After all, how do you convey the notion, the terror, of a fire without showing it, and the whole work is only around 20 minutes.
I don't even think that it could be mistaken for a re-creation. At that time, I believe less had been appreciated about how different substances in furniture burn, and how a source of fire might ignite other items.
I took the footage used by Price to be from filmed combustion tests, where the nature and spread of fire was being analysed. I have already commented on the use of two panes : for me, Price located, in this material, the bewitching, hypnotic quality of fire, as against, elsewhere, the destructive one.
(3) With Choir and with the information on the church architecture interspersed, did the fire seem like a sacrament?
(4) The description of the parcloses reinforced an absent focus on the parishioners. How did the film make you feel?
I take it that these belong together.
I watched the film twice through in succession, and therefore knew how CHOIR related to the other two parts of the film the second time.
In my vocabulary, a parclose is merely what I would call a rood-screen or, in other church traditions, an iconostasis (although, in that case, not serving to separate the choir from the rest of the church, but designating, by opaque panelling decorated by holy images, a place limited to the priest).
I am not sure how describing any of the church architecture stressed an absence of parishioners, since there was no one in this part of the film (unlike the distorted moving dancers / singers of the second part, into which the clicks, beats and handclaps drew us).
As I realized that the second section was moving towards giving detail of a fire in which people had been trapped and died, I felt uneasy. We did not see them. We saw the aftermath, and heard from those who had been outside. They were traceless, numberless dead.
They could have been trapped in the choir of a church, and, with no way out (except, perhaps, smashing the windows and climbing out), burnt to death.
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DJ Kristin is spinning discs
This is a review of In the House (Dans la maison) (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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3 April
* Contains spoilers *
This is a review of In the House (Dans la maison) (2012)
Another posting is a detailed attempt to understand what is happening in this film, but it is not a review – this is.
The story presents itself as an unfolding, a relationship between a teacher and a sixteen-year-old ‘learner’ (as the staff now have to call the pupils), in his class Sophomore C* at the Lycée Gustave Flaubert** : Germain (Fabrice Luchini), the teacher, first learns that he has this class (we know nothing about what else he does – whether, even, he teaches any other class) from Anouk, the school secretary (with whom, if not now, he has almost certainly had an affair).
Less interested in his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) than in marking homework (does the affair with Anouk subsist, a diversion of Germain’s care and attention ?), he is excited by an account (marked à suivre, to be continued) of his weekend by a Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer) fully as much as if Claude had spied upon Germain’s thought, actions and life and written it up, gives it a B+, and shares it with Jeanne – she has to suspend her uncertainty about what will happen in the wake (pun intended !) of the death of Bruno, the owner of the gallery that she runs, whose funeral service Germain, kindly, declined to accompany her to.
Everything stems from these facts, Claude’s attitude(s), Germain’s obsessive fascination, and his continued sharing with Jeanne : it is almost as if, on one level, Claude is writing to Jeanne by the epistolary mediation of Germain, because, when Jeanne says that she is reminded of the fondness for gossip of her cousin in Yorkshire (which, I believe, explains why her accent in French is less tight than usual, because we are not meant to see her as native to this country), Germain opens his critique of the latest instalment from Claude by saying that he writes like ‘a provincial cousin’.
It is patent that Germain is forgetting who he is, what he is doing, and almost fictionalizing his own work as a teacher by devoting himself to a creative effort and a creator who, although good, do not objectively merit it, a risky projection, most likely, of the ambitions that he could not fulfil for himself as a writer.
Who is teacher, who is being taught lessons, and what of this family with which Claude involves Germain (and Jeanne, through him : at least twice, Claude asks Germain if he is showing the episodes to anyone else, who straightaway denies it, although he keeps trying to moderate by invoking the spectre What if someone else read this ?) ?
These are the essential questions that this film poses in three very good performances by the named characters, and also by the family whose house, lives and thoughts Claude effortlessly seems to infiltrate (reminiscent of the manipulation in Funny Games (1997) and, more recently, The Imposter (2012)) – they will not directly lead to the answers that I have found in this film, and, without them, the ending will only partly work.
Yet it is as striking as Ali Smith’s close to her stunning novel The Accidental, and, if a viewer is anything like me, he or she will want to watch a second time*** to track how its course as affected by knowing where it is going.
End-notes
* The French education system may have taken this from that of the States, or vice versa.
** There seems to be such an establishment in Rouen (where Flaubert was born, and died).
*** This film is, with its cinematic credentials in place, all about the watching that audiences do.
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What does the bread line mean ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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3 April
Living on the bread line.
What exactly is that, when one stops to ask ?
It means, as in Soviet Russia*, queuing for your bread, for hand-outs (and this administration sees no need for food banks : everyone, we are told, actually has more than he or she needs).
Somehow, however bad Rickshaw-Ditch wants to make it out to have been (why did his wife have no income, we wonder... ?), I don't think that he was waiting for hours, as people passing watched, for a loaf of bread !
And this charitable giving to the poor : just go, for example, to the Collegiate Church of St Mary in Warwick and see how the boards preserved there record provision in people's wills for giving to the poor and how people were considered then, centuries ago, not as lazy, scrounging scum, but worthy of care and consideration.
Think, too, of the long tradition of the Poor Laws, on which Wikipedia is far more knowledgeable than I can be, and look at what is happening in the name of Fairness in twenty-first century post-industrial Britain...
End-notes
* Which this Coalition is copying, by making accommodation fit the number of occupants and screw what happens to those already there, in what they fondly think of - whatever it may be - as 'home'.
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3 April
Living on the bread line.
What exactly is that, when one stops to ask ?
It means, as in Soviet Russia*, queuing for your bread, for hand-outs (and this administration sees no need for food banks : everyone, we are told, actually has more than he or she needs).
Somehow, however bad Rickshaw-Ditch wants to make it out to have been (why did his wife have no income, we wonder... ?), I don't think that he was waiting for hours, as people passing watched, for a loaf of bread !
And this charitable giving to the poor : just go, for example, to the Collegiate Church of St Mary in Warwick and see how the boards preserved there record provision in people's wills for giving to the poor and how people were considered then, centuries ago, not as lazy, scrounging scum, but worthy of care and consideration.
Think, too, of the long tradition of the Poor Laws, on which Wikipedia is far more knowledgeable than I can be, and look at what is happening in the name of Fairness in twenty-first century post-industrial Britain...
End-notes
* Which this Coalition is copying, by making accommodation fit the number of occupants and screw what happens to those already there, in what they fondly think of - whatever it may be - as 'home'.
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Tuesday, 2 April 2013
KST with a Yorkshire cousin
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3 April
* NB Spoiler City : What follows is not a review as such, and takes as read that the film has been watched and its plot is no surprise *
The closing shot of the film, before a screen comes across from left and right to meet at the point where a double shooting has taken place, shows a two-storey building with eight (or ten ?) sets of French doors onto balconies. Dusk has somehow fallen, and the lit-up windows are mini-screens or stages on which we witness dancing, sex, etc., and, in one case, first a man and then a woman being shot (top, second from left). Other stories for Scheherazade to tell...
The opening shots were of a boy of around sixteen dressing, first his muscular torso with no head, and he will turn out to be Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), but, by the time of the closing shot, we may even have forgotten how the film started, such has been our journey, circumscribed and maybe claustrophobic as its locations have been :
* In and around the Lycée Gustave Flaubert
* The flat of Germain (Fabrice Luchini) and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas)
* In and around the house of what comes to be called that of 'the Raphas' (Denis Ménocet (Rapha Artole père), Emmanuelle Seigner (Esther), and Bastien Ughetto (fils))
* In and around the gallery that Jeanne runs (and thinks of as hers), Labyrinthe du Minotaur (with all its echoes of Theseus and Ariadne, Minos, Pasiphaë, and Dædalus)
* Approaching and inside the complex that contains the basketball court
* Queuing outside and in the cinema
* Finally, just outside the Germains' flat (after we have been shown Garcia's house and him on a bus to the former)
That is the entire compass, I believe, of In the House (Dans la Maison) (2012), but one may not have realized as much in watching. Our cast, too, is quite narrow beyond those mentioned, being Anouk (the school's secretary), the headmaster, the twins Rosalie et Eugénie (both played by Yolande Moreau), and Bernard, the maths teacher whose test Germain 'steals'.
I hypothesize that :
* French forms of greeting apart, Germain and Anouk are (or have been) more intimate than just colleagues
* Even before the events unfold, nobody atthe school much liked Germain, who may have been reactionary (or otherwise caused conflict with authority)
* Jeanne has probably thrown herself into the gallery both because childless, and because of Germain's relative lack of interest in her and what she does (and maybe she, in her turn, was intimate with the former gallery owner Bruno, whose funeral Germain early does not attend, calling it 'a mass')
* Maybe some (or all) of this does not exist outside Germain's head in the present of the film, for the following reasons :
(1) As with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Germain is fascinated by Garcia because of the latter's writing, and is a Germain Germain, seeking, as Humbert does, to be untruthful to himself about what the fascination is
(2) If Garcia = Germain, Germain projecting his desire and drive for good writing onto another part of himself that concocts an enticing supply (after all, although what he takes to be the inventiveness (if it is not autobiographical) of Garcia's writing keeps him interested, the writing itself (at best) shows promise, not great genius), he can distance himself psychologically, by entering a psychotic experience, from any or all guilt for attacking his wife, humiliating 'a learner', and stealing the maths test
(3) For all that we know, the return to school (and the announcement of the reintroduction of school uniform, complete with the prurience of seeing Garcia dressing) onwards is imagined, because Germain has already been suspended (and maybe is already at the Institut de la Verrière, the psychiatric provision where his other, younger, more promising self (Garcia) visits him) - the scene, shown to us and which Garcia tells him that he watched, with learners in everyday clothes strikes a strange note, which might suggest the unreality of the uniformed scenes
(4) If so, then he tells himself a story of his own being drawn in (perhaps as to the centre of a labyrinth, Ariadne's (Garcia's) string taking him to face the Minotaur monster at the heart of him / his life) to excuse the three culpable acts listed in (2), above, and to provide his internal rationale for being led on and on, as if like Macbeth or Othello, to his destruction
(5) Esther Artole tells Claude Germain that his thinking that he loves her is 'in his head' and irréelle, and he is only in proximity to her by having, in part, helped her son Rapha with unreal numbers (such as the square-root of -2) : if Germain is - as Beckettt says about his prime character in Company - devising it all for company, then his neglect of Jeanne becomes Claude's interest in getting close to and seeking to seduce Esther (with all her Old Testament echoes in a book of her own)
On quite another level, the film seems to present itself to us much like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, trying to piece together the puzzle of what is happening in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and there is often its playful feeling to the unfolding of each instalment from Garcia and its reception by the Germains. On another, Garcia is not unlike the son in Benny's Video (1992), or another schemer in the rather dire Bel Ami (2012) (not to mention The Imposter (2012)).
If, though, Germain had his admission, prior to (on a 'straight' reading) or during which (on a reading where, as Germain showed on the blackboard, the conflict is within) Garcia is the internal enemy (= the younger writer who Germain once was, back to haunt him, but at the same time intrigue him), the film has a different character that fits the ending.
Perhaps consumed by his failure as a writer and being but a teacher (just as Jeanne's biological 'failure' may have caused her to seek a career), we may see Germain spurred to fond imaginings that turn toxic and bring / have brought his downfall, a little in the same way that a noise that we hear in sleep incorporates itself into a dream and then, at what seems a remove of time, appears to wake us.
Interestingly, I have now seen a variant of the landscape poster that is in @CamPicturehouse on Neil White's (@everyfilmteled's) web-site, which shows Garcia next to Germain on a bench, with the Rapha house foregrounded (and even with a Narnia-style lamp-post, which, rather, reminds me of Magritte and his anarchic Empire of Light paintings)...
We cannot see Garcia's face, but just look at the expression on Germain's, regarding him !
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3 April
* NB Spoiler City : What follows is not a review as such, and takes as read that the film has been watched and its plot is no surprise *
The closing shot of the film, before a screen comes across from left and right to meet at the point where a double shooting has taken place, shows a two-storey building with eight (or ten ?) sets of French doors onto balconies. Dusk has somehow fallen, and the lit-up windows are mini-screens or stages on which we witness dancing, sex, etc., and, in one case, first a man and then a woman being shot (top, second from left). Other stories for Scheherazade to tell...
The opening shots were of a boy of around sixteen dressing, first his muscular torso with no head, and he will turn out to be Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), but, by the time of the closing shot, we may even have forgotten how the film started, such has been our journey, circumscribed and maybe claustrophobic as its locations have been :
* In and around the Lycée Gustave Flaubert
* The flat of Germain (Fabrice Luchini) and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas)
* In and around the house of what comes to be called that of 'the Raphas' (Denis Ménocet (Rapha Artole père), Emmanuelle Seigner (Esther), and Bastien Ughetto (fils))
* In and around the gallery that Jeanne runs (and thinks of as hers), Labyrinthe du Minotaur (with all its echoes of Theseus and Ariadne, Minos, Pasiphaë, and Dædalus)
* Approaching and inside the complex that contains the basketball court
* Queuing outside and in the cinema
* Finally, just outside the Germains' flat (after we have been shown Garcia's house and him on a bus to the former)
That is the entire compass, I believe, of In the House (Dans la Maison) (2012), but one may not have realized as much in watching. Our cast, too, is quite narrow beyond those mentioned, being Anouk (the school's secretary), the headmaster, the twins Rosalie et Eugénie (both played by Yolande Moreau), and Bernard, the maths teacher whose test Germain 'steals'.
I hypothesize that :
* French forms of greeting apart, Germain and Anouk are (or have been) more intimate than just colleagues
* Even before the events unfold, nobody atthe school much liked Germain, who may have been reactionary (or otherwise caused conflict with authority)
* Jeanne has probably thrown herself into the gallery both because childless, and because of Germain's relative lack of interest in her and what she does (and maybe she, in her turn, was intimate with the former gallery owner Bruno, whose funeral Germain early does not attend, calling it 'a mass')
* Maybe some (or all) of this does not exist outside Germain's head in the present of the film, for the following reasons :
(1) As with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Germain is fascinated by Garcia because of the latter's writing, and is a Germain Germain, seeking, as Humbert does, to be untruthful to himself about what the fascination is
(2) If Garcia = Germain, Germain projecting his desire and drive for good writing onto another part of himself that concocts an enticing supply (after all, although what he takes to be the inventiveness (if it is not autobiographical) of Garcia's writing keeps him interested, the writing itself (at best) shows promise, not great genius), he can distance himself psychologically, by entering a psychotic experience, from any or all guilt for attacking his wife, humiliating 'a learner', and stealing the maths test
(3) For all that we know, the return to school (and the announcement of the reintroduction of school uniform, complete with the prurience of seeing Garcia dressing) onwards is imagined, because Germain has already been suspended (and maybe is already at the Institut de la Verrière, the psychiatric provision where his other, younger, more promising self (Garcia) visits him) - the scene, shown to us and which Garcia tells him that he watched, with learners in everyday clothes strikes a strange note, which might suggest the unreality of the uniformed scenes
(4) If so, then he tells himself a story of his own being drawn in (perhaps as to the centre of a labyrinth, Ariadne's (Garcia's) string taking him to face the Minotaur monster at the heart of him / his life) to excuse the three culpable acts listed in (2), above, and to provide his internal rationale for being led on and on, as if like Macbeth or Othello, to his destruction
(5) Esther Artole tells Claude Germain that his thinking that he loves her is 'in his head' and irréelle, and he is only in proximity to her by having, in part, helped her son Rapha with unreal numbers (such as the square-root of -2) : if Germain is - as Beckettt says about his prime character in Company - devising it all for company, then his neglect of Jeanne becomes Claude's interest in getting close to and seeking to seduce Esther (with all her Old Testament echoes in a book of her own)
On quite another level, the film seems to present itself to us much like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, trying to piece together the puzzle of what is happening in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and there is often its playful feeling to the unfolding of each instalment from Garcia and its reception by the Germains. On another, Garcia is not unlike the son in Benny's Video (1992), or another schemer in the rather dire Bel Ami (2012) (not to mention The Imposter (2012)).
If, though, Germain had his admission, prior to (on a 'straight' reading) or during which (on a reading where, as Germain showed on the blackboard, the conflict is within) Garcia is the internal enemy (= the younger writer who Germain once was, back to haunt him, but at the same time intrigue him), the film has a different character that fits the ending.
Perhaps consumed by his failure as a writer and being but a teacher (just as Jeanne's biological 'failure' may have caused her to seek a career), we may see Germain spurred to fond imaginings that turn toxic and bring / have brought his downfall, a little in the same way that a noise that we hear in sleep incorporates itself into a dream and then, at what seems a remove of time, appears to wake us.
Interestingly, I have now seen a variant of the landscape poster that is in @CamPicturehouse on Neil White's (@everyfilmteled's) web-site, which shows Garcia next to Germain on a bench, with the Rapha house foregrounded (and even with a Narnia-style lamp-post, which, rather, reminds me of Magritte and his anarchic Empire of Light paintings)...
We cannot see Garcia's face, but just look at the expression on Germain's, regarding him !
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Sunday, 31 March 2013
A cloudy prospect
This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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31 March
This is a review of Cloud Atlas (2012)
dear Cloud Atlas the movie, I'm going 2 c u today. please boggle my mind. it's a sunny day and 3 hrs is a long time. nae pressure.
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013
In his review of Cloud Atlas (2012), Philip French – not at all showing off – seems to give every example that he can think of in films where actors play more than one role. (Thankfully, he did not trouble us with Alec Guinness’ eightfold cameos as members of the d’Ascoyne family.) To French, that historical view may be important, but I agree with the person (was it he ?) who said that one might be too bothered working out which actor / actress is on screen to pay attention to other things.
For me, trying to think of Hugo Weaving’s name (by reminding myself of The Matrix (1999) and its Agent Smith) was not too much for my poor little brain (not, that is, in the way that some of the intense stretches of action were, acting as some sort of overload). Having thought of some counter-examples, I cannot think that the following Tweet is correct in alleging a significance, other than damn’ good fun on the part of cast and crew (Weaving as a nurse to put Ratched in the shade ! ), in these multiple roles (which is properly the stuff of The Hours (2002)) :
As far as I am concerned, the territory that the futuristic parts of the film occupies is that before the time of the trilogy that began with The Matrix, and whose antecedents were ‘filled’ in by the collection of short works that make up The Animatrix (2003). It may be that, with his novel Cloud Atlas (published in 2004), David Mitchell was aware of this material, and has an interest in the ethics, possibilities and implications of AI (Artificial Intelligence) – I almost cannot believe otherwise, rather than that it is a layering on the book from the Wachowskis, who co-wrote and co-directed the film with Tom Tykwer (who was also one of its three composers).
We are shown an agent from Union (Hae-Joo Chang, played by Jim Sturgess) who is seeking to recruit Sonmi-451 (Doona Bae), very much in the same way that Trinity recruits Neo in The Matrix and introduces him to Morpheus : the aim in both cases is to tell the truth about the situation that fellow ‘fabricants’ and humans, respectively, are in, when they are deluded as to the reality of their existence and purpose.
Neo, before he is ‘awoken’, is in one small pod of a huge human power-source for the machine world, but, believing otherwise because of the stimuli provided to his inert, supine body (which generate the matrix in which he seems to be alive), has to be shown the truth, which shocks him. Even more shocking, in a way, is for him to be told that he is the chosen one, just as Sonmi-451 is. In her case, the lies that fabricants such as she have been told, when unmasked, cause her to engage with Union’s cause and to seek to broadcast the truth. (One is almost reminded of the closing scene of The Matrix, where Neo is making the sort of ‘wake-up call’ that was made to him by Trinity at the other end of the film.)
In another era, that of the continuing slave trade in the States, Doona Bae is Adam Ewing’s (Sturgess’) wife Tilda, to whom he returns from the colonies a changed man because of having his life saved by Autua (David Gyasi), a black slave who had stowed away : we do not learn more of it, but Adam and Tilda intend to head eastwards to campaign for the abolition of slavery. Is the multiple-character aspect significant here ? Well, yes, Bae plays both Tilda and Sonmi-451, but, in the former role and in those times, she would probably have been no more visible as a force for change than as Adam’s supporter.
There is thus a link between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twenty-first century in terms of seeking freedom and helping others in that search. Dr Henry Goose (Tom Hanks) would have prevented the latter, but, as Zachry, he helps, rather than hinders, escaping a stricken place, so it would appear that any pattern is not one of direct correspondence, and, if not dictated by logistics, may be little more than fortuitous.
i saw Cloud Atlas...Now I shout it from the highest hills, even told the golden daffodils- it's a glorious multiverse of jodorovsky+Griffith
— mark cousins (@markcousinsfilm) March 21, 2013
Continued as In the clouds
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Sunday, 24 March 2013
A working document : Silver Linings Playbook and its pros and cons with mental-health issues
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
25 March
First thoughts after just seeing the film, to be added to, revised, etc., as time and reading other comments permit
* NB Contains spoilers *
Preamble : I do not know about US mental-health or criminal law, but I do know about sections 37 and 41 of the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended), where it used to be that, before the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office would receive psychiatric reports and decide whether someone could fully or conditionally be discharged from section. Such people had been found to have committed a criminal offence, but, because of their mental-health condition, were being held in hospital, not in prison.
What we are shown seems similar, though it is implausible that Pat’s mother could just turn up, sign a document, and take him home there and then (or, equally, that it would not be known beforehand that police officer Keogh had been allocated to supervise Pat (Bradley Cooper) in the community) : in the UK, the 1983 Act would only allow Pat’s mother to take him off even a non-criminal section by giving 72 hours in which the consultant could object to it on the basis that he would be a danger to himself or others.
As I suggest, a far cry - even if perhaps necessary to a plot where Pat's father does not even know that it is happening - from seemingly just 'bowling up' and getting Pat signed over...
Pros :
1. Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal (as Tiffany Maxwell) of someone with mental-health issues as straightforward and open, genuine, and not excusing what, in Pat, did not have to be that way.
2. That Pat (Bradley Cooper) responds to her, albeit just initially just by talking about medication at her sister's dinner table, because they share something.
3. That Tiffany is shown throwing back in Pat's face his hierarchy of craziness, where she is ‘worse than’ he, because she ended up being highly promiscuous for a while (after her husband has been killed when helping another driver), and where, as she tells him, he throws back in her face what she has trusted him with in friendship.
Cons :
1. Bradley Cooper’s portrayal (as Pat) of someone with mental-health issues who cannot control himself, and lacks compassion, tact and understanding, because he is the one with the history of undiagnosed bi-polar disorder, and the implication might be that those traits or behaviours are part and parcel of the diagnosis.
2. The notion that regular therapy would not only be available, but provided, in a medical culture so rooted to medication. (The therapy gets conveniently forgotten, once Pat encounters Dr Patel at a football game, as do the charges and consequences of what happens there, because the film presents him as doing nothing other than rehearsing with Tiffany and collapsing.)
3. The suggestion from Pat that he can recognize OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder*) in his father Patrizio just because he likes the remote-controllers in a certain arrangement, which is a regression even on Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as it Gets. Pat has been in a psychiatric unit for eight months, and so should know better, because (as suggested at point 5) he has got close enough to people to understand how they tick and feel.
4. The whole film, of course, has a bit of a feel that, just as Jack Nicholson in that other film 'just needed the love of a good woman to take him out of himself' (i.e. Helen Hunt), so Pat just needs to accept that he loves Tiffany and wants to care for her.
5. Danny (Chris Tucker) is shown as engaging, but with recurrent fixed thought-patterns that prevent his engagement with others. Nonetheless, Pat and he have a friendship, which must mean that Pat is capable of getting beyond his self-centredness(contrary to what point 1 in this list suggests. Danny has a pretty understandable desire to escape from the unit at Baltimore, but, when he is legitimately out (prior to which Pat, somehow, has been finding time to write to him), he is suddenly transformed into a with-it guy, making Pat jealous by demonstrating dance-moves with Tiffany - the transformation would have been interesting to know more of.
6. Putting points 4 and 5 in this list together, the message appears to be that mental ill-health arises from self-obsession, and that learning to focus one's attention on the needs and feelings of another is all that is needed as a cure. Which is about as true to the world of such conditions as bi-polar disorder as films like Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) are to psychiatric practice or Marnie (1964) is to breaking through a neurosis by finding 'the key'.
Watch this space !
End-notes
* Some people seriously believe, as someone with the condition once told me, that it stood for Obsessive Cleaning Disorder.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
25 March
First thoughts after just seeing the film, to be added to, revised, etc., as time and reading other comments permit
* NB Contains spoilers *
Preamble : I do not know about US mental-health or criminal law, but I do know about sections 37 and 41 of the Mental Health Act 1983 (as amended), where it used to be that, before the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office would receive psychiatric reports and decide whether someone could fully or conditionally be discharged from section. Such people had been found to have committed a criminal offence, but, because of their mental-health condition, were being held in hospital, not in prison.
What we are shown seems similar, though it is implausible that Pat’s mother could just turn up, sign a document, and take him home there and then (or, equally, that it would not be known beforehand that police officer Keogh had been allocated to supervise Pat (Bradley Cooper) in the community) : in the UK, the 1983 Act would only allow Pat’s mother to take him off even a non-criminal section by giving 72 hours in which the consultant could object to it on the basis that he would be a danger to himself or others.
As I suggest, a far cry - even if perhaps necessary to a plot where Pat's father does not even know that it is happening - from seemingly just 'bowling up' and getting Pat signed over...
Pros :
1. Jennifer Lawrence’s portrayal (as Tiffany Maxwell) of someone with mental-health issues as straightforward and open, genuine, and not excusing what, in Pat, did not have to be that way.
2. That Pat (Bradley Cooper) responds to her, albeit just initially just by talking about medication at her sister's dinner table, because they share something.
3. That Tiffany is shown throwing back in Pat's face his hierarchy of craziness, where she is ‘worse than’ he, because she ended up being highly promiscuous for a while (after her husband has been killed when helping another driver), and where, as she tells him, he throws back in her face what she has trusted him with in friendship.
Cons :
1. Bradley Cooper’s portrayal (as Pat) of someone with mental-health issues who cannot control himself, and lacks compassion, tact and understanding, because he is the one with the history of undiagnosed bi-polar disorder, and the implication might be that those traits or behaviours are part and parcel of the diagnosis.
2. The notion that regular therapy would not only be available, but provided, in a medical culture so rooted to medication. (The therapy gets conveniently forgotten, once Pat encounters Dr Patel at a football game, as do the charges and consequences of what happens there, because the film presents him as doing nothing other than rehearsing with Tiffany and collapsing.)
3. The suggestion from Pat that he can recognize OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder*) in his father Patrizio just because he likes the remote-controllers in a certain arrangement, which is a regression even on Jack Nicholson's character in As Good as it Gets. Pat has been in a psychiatric unit for eight months, and so should know better, because (as suggested at point 5) he has got close enough to people to understand how they tick and feel.
4. The whole film, of course, has a bit of a feel that, just as Jack Nicholson in that other film 'just needed the love of a good woman to take him out of himself' (i.e. Helen Hunt), so Pat just needs to accept that he loves Tiffany and wants to care for her.
5. Danny (Chris Tucker) is shown as engaging, but with recurrent fixed thought-patterns that prevent his engagement with others. Nonetheless, Pat and he have a friendship, which must mean that Pat is capable of getting beyond his self-centredness(contrary to what point 1 in this list suggests. Danny has a pretty understandable desire to escape from the unit at Baltimore, but, when he is legitimately out (prior to which Pat, somehow, has been finding time to write to him), he is suddenly transformed into a with-it guy, making Pat jealous by demonstrating dance-moves with Tiffany - the transformation would have been interesting to know more of.
6. Putting points 4 and 5 in this list together, the message appears to be that mental ill-health arises from self-obsession, and that learning to focus one's attention on the needs and feelings of another is all that is needed as a cure. Which is about as true to the world of such conditions as bi-polar disorder as films like Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) are to psychiatric practice or Marnie (1964) is to breaking through a neurosis by finding 'the key'.
Watch this space !
End-notes
* Some people seriously believe, as someone with the condition once told me, that it stood for Obsessive Cleaning Disorder.
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Saturday, 23 March 2013
Kristin at the Harold Pinter Theatre I
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
24 March
I admit that I went to see Old Times, not because of Rufus Sewell, or because of Lia Williams, but Kristin Scott Thomas, who played Emma so beautifully in the same director’s, Ian Rickson’s, production a few years ago (since when The Comedy has become The Harold Pinter Theatre). (Quite apart, even if IMDb ratings disagree, from her striking roles in In Your Hands (2010), Leaving (2009), In Your Hands (2010), The Woman in the Fifth (2011), and I’ve Loved You So Long (2008)*.)
I have seen this play before, and the role of Kate has its difficulties. Moreover, Williams and she have their work cut out by a schedule that has them alternating who will play it, and who her friend Anna, from one performance to another – even, when there is a matinee, within one day, and, on a few days, ‘the actresses playing the roles of Kate and Anna will be decided on the night of the performance with a coin toss’ ! I’m not sure whether it’s gimmickry, but it will have me seeking a time to see KST as Anna.
Anna is the part that Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant**, played – I knew that she had appeared in it, her last of his, but had assumed / misremembered her being Kate – and, to my eye, there are facial similarities between her and KST. (Likewise, I found a still of Pinter appearing in the play as Deeley, and his Kate was Nicola Pagett.) Getting back to the actresses swapping the roles, they obviously aren’t a pair, being mistaken one for the other, in the way of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but it is an interesting thing for the freshness, the dynamics, of the staging to do it.
Talking, before the performance, to some people sitting near me, I explained about how Old Times confuses or blends memory, imagination and reality, and how alliances are tacitly proposed by one to another against the third. However, they shift, so that the characters also employ challenges to each other’s recollection, status, even the words that they use, and sometimes outright intimidate. These skeletal remembrances of my last encounter with the play were to hand, but not, even if it had been wanted, the detail of the unfolding.
Afterwards, waiting at the stage door, I talked to a couple who had not known the play before, but read good reviews, knew some of the films, and wanted to see KST. As we chatted about it, there was a convenient centre-ground that what really happened is down to interpretation***, resulting from my clarifying that the silent tableau acted out at the end is what Anna told us about earlier, with the unknown man in Kate's and her shared room, and his head in Kate's lap, etc.****.
As our discussion progressed, the intriguing suggestion arose that Kate and Anna are perhaps the same person : what if they were, with the visit of Anna as some sort of psychological way of interpreting the things in Kate that Deeley could relate to better, if she took the form of Anna ? The play was first put on in 1971, and Pinter had had that affair with Bakewell in the decade before, so maybe he knew all about, as the case might be, splitting up his affections between two women, or having a publicly visible wife and another with whom he had an unacknowledged intimacy.
If so, I cannot see the situation with Merchant, Pinter and Bakewell, although credited as the origins of the later play Betrayal, being any more than the germ of it or (of Old Times) : this is not Pinter working out his angst and anguish, and actually puts me more in mind of Beckettt’s aptly titled Play, another two women and a man, seemingly being tortured or interrogated about their past. Play was from 1963, and Beckettt and Pinter not only knew each other, but were friends (with a shared love of cricket, too).
The text supports this notion, because, at the close of a long speech towards the end of Act Two, Deeley says (talking to Kate about Anna) :
She thought she was you, said little, so little. Maybe she was you. Maybe it was you, having coffee with me, saying little, so little.
He wants both women, now as then (if there really ever was a then), so much is clear, and there he resembles Man in Play. Beckettt achieves a distillation of the essence of an affair by having the three voices speak parts of each of their story, one at a time and seemingly unaware of the others, literally disembodied (they are in urns), and, in the way that they are presented to us as spirits, compelled for eternity to tell their wrongs, they remind of the Inferno of Dante (beloved of Beckettt). In Pinter’s play, he muses on the uncertainties of memory, of identity, of remembering – or thinking to remember – another person and / or an event, and this production does justice to that aim.
I have already mentioned that Kate is on stage often enough with nothing to do. Scott Thomas did this perfectly, embodying this Kate who gets talked about, and who seems, if not other worldly, sometimes a bit emotionally distant – so much more dramatically stirring the flare-up, when she talks, in several chunks of text separated by silences and pauses, about Anna (who has no further words in the script), seems to gel with this notion that Anna is no more than she, killed off by having Deeley come to her room.
But perhaps Deeley, too, is Anna / Deeley, because Kate first describes Anna :
Your face was dirty. You lay dead, your face scrawled with dirt, all kinds of earnest inscriptions, but unblotted, so that they had run, all over your face, down to your throat.
Then, after a pause marked, in the same speech, she continues addressing Anna, but talks about Deeley :
I dug about in the windowbox, where you had planted our pretty pansies, scooped, filled the bowl, and plastered his face with dirt. He was bemused, aghast, resisted, resisted with force. He would not let me dirty his face, or smudge it, he wouldn’t let me.
The unclean face, the repetition of ‘dirty’ (albeit as a verb), and the vivid reminder of the description of Anna’s in ‘smudge’, they all suggest some link. Anna is said to be ‘lying dead’, with its finality, and Deeley’s response in the immediately succeeding words, proposes a solution to Anna and being in London (the explanation of the apparent opening present day) :
He suggested a wedding instead, and a change of environment.
Slight pause
Neither mattered.
The succeeding, closing words of the play, still from Kate, amount to a denial of Anna’s ever having existed :
He asked me once, about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.
There has been a fair amount of barbed comment from Deeley to her, such as this exchange (about Anna’s possibly fanciful claims regarding her home and husband) :
Anna : He’s not a vegetarian. In fact he’s something of a gourmet. We live in a rather fine villa and have done so for many years. It’s very high up, on the cliffs.
Deeley : You eat well up there, eh ?
Anna : I would say so, yes.
Kate related (if Anna weren’t the side of Kate that she killed to become Deeley’s wife) Anna being dead, then, in almost magically-sounding way abouttaking Deeley to where she lived, ‘When I brought him into the room your body of course had gone’, then putting on his face, and his proposal : Deeley has substituted for / become Anna.
Seen from his perspective, the closing tableau of a sobbing Deeley, seeking attention or comfort from the women in turn, then, as Kate sits on her bed and Anna lies on hers, sitting in the armchair embodies a possible, but difficult, choice between the quiet Kate, who likes to go for walks, and the Anna who says (again, not convincingly) that she likes parties, the Tate and concerts.
As if as a provocation to Deeley, who claims to have been watching a film in an empty cinema in when he first saw Kate and spoke to her outside, Anna asserts that Kate hustled her out to ‘some totally unfamiliar district and, almost alone, saw a wonderful film called Odd Man Out’(the same film). After these words, a silence is marked, and then Deeley abruptly says ‘Yes, I do quite a bit of travelling in my job’, which Sewell reinforced by an angry look at Anna and tone.
We will never know what is going on amongst this apparent three any more than they, if they are three, do themselves, or what Deeley’s job and travelling are really about. As with all good art, what matters is how this play makes us think about what we see, remembering what Anna said :
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.
Three slight hesitations with the performance. First, when Deeley takes a second brandy, what Sewell is (meant to be) doing with his gyrations across the sofa on which Anna is sitting from behind it was beyond me. Later, I felt that he allowed the pace to go a little too slack in, I think, the long speech where he confuses the women, or in a sustained exchange with one of the others, when he is centre stage. And, finally, there is supposed to be a long silence, after lying across Kate’s lap, and before very slowly sitting up (the sitting up was not slow either), but that may be Rickson’s direction.
Now on the blog : when KST played Anna instead
End-notes
* I throw a veil over Bel Ami (2012), not because KST isn’t good, but because she had been miscast as an older woman, who, through childlike desire and infatuation, gains a glow of someone more the real age of the actress.
** Curiously, to judge from the write-up of Pinter in the back pages of the programme, you’d have thought that he lived with Antonia Fraser for a while before marrying her, not that he’d already been married and a father, let alone had an affair with Joan Bakewell…
*** Perhaps one of the starting-points for Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, precisely about interpretation, with (in the production that I saw) another three characters, Nils Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg, circling each other - and their relationships - like particles in an atom.
**** That speech, in context, shows what I first thought about the play when I read it, because there are pages of script leading up this point when just Deeley and Anna are talking (usually about Kate), and some stage business is needed for the listening Kate. (Between them, Rickson and Scott Thomas (and, no doubt, Williams) did this immensely well.) As she remarks, it’s almost as if she is dead or cannot hear them, an intensified form of what happens – as here – when some long-lost friend of one partner is being asked by the other what he or she was like then.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
24 March
I admit that I went to see Old Times, not because of Rufus Sewell, or because of Lia Williams, but Kristin Scott Thomas, who played Emma so beautifully in the same director’s, Ian Rickson’s, production a few years ago (since when The Comedy has become The Harold Pinter Theatre). (Quite apart, even if IMDb ratings disagree, from her striking roles in In Your Hands (2010), Leaving (2009), In Your Hands (2010), The Woman in the Fifth (2011), and I’ve Loved You So Long (2008)*.)
I have seen this play before, and the role of Kate has its difficulties. Moreover, Williams and she have their work cut out by a schedule that has them alternating who will play it, and who her friend Anna, from one performance to another – even, when there is a matinee, within one day, and, on a few days, ‘the actresses playing the roles of Kate and Anna will be decided on the night of the performance with a coin toss’ ! I’m not sure whether it’s gimmickry, but it will have me seeking a time to see KST as Anna.
Anna is the part that Pinter’s first wife, Vivien Merchant**, played – I knew that she had appeared in it, her last of his, but had assumed / misremembered her being Kate – and, to my eye, there are facial similarities between her and KST. (Likewise, I found a still of Pinter appearing in the play as Deeley, and his Kate was Nicola Pagett.) Getting back to the actresses swapping the roles, they obviously aren’t a pair, being mistaken one for the other, in the way of Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, but it is an interesting thing for the freshness, the dynamics, of the staging to do it.
Talking, before the performance, to some people sitting near me, I explained about how Old Times confuses or blends memory, imagination and reality, and how alliances are tacitly proposed by one to another against the third. However, they shift, so that the characters also employ challenges to each other’s recollection, status, even the words that they use, and sometimes outright intimidate. These skeletal remembrances of my last encounter with the play were to hand, but not, even if it had been wanted, the detail of the unfolding.
Afterwards, waiting at the stage door, I talked to a couple who had not known the play before, but read good reviews, knew some of the films, and wanted to see KST. As we chatted about it, there was a convenient centre-ground that what really happened is down to interpretation***, resulting from my clarifying that the silent tableau acted out at the end is what Anna told us about earlier, with the unknown man in Kate's and her shared room, and his head in Kate's lap, etc.****.
As our discussion progressed, the intriguing suggestion arose that Kate and Anna are perhaps the same person : what if they were, with the visit of Anna as some sort of psychological way of interpreting the things in Kate that Deeley could relate to better, if she took the form of Anna ? The play was first put on in 1971, and Pinter had had that affair with Bakewell in the decade before, so maybe he knew all about, as the case might be, splitting up his affections between two women, or having a publicly visible wife and another with whom he had an unacknowledged intimacy.
If so, I cannot see the situation with Merchant, Pinter and Bakewell, although credited as the origins of the later play Betrayal, being any more than the germ of it or (of Old Times) : this is not Pinter working out his angst and anguish, and actually puts me more in mind of Beckettt’s aptly titled Play, another two women and a man, seemingly being tortured or interrogated about their past. Play was from 1963, and Beckettt and Pinter not only knew each other, but were friends (with a shared love of cricket, too).
The text supports this notion, because, at the close of a long speech towards the end of Act Two, Deeley says (talking to Kate about Anna) :
She thought she was you, said little, so little. Maybe she was you. Maybe it was you, having coffee with me, saying little, so little.
He wants both women, now as then (if there really ever was a then), so much is clear, and there he resembles Man in Play. Beckettt achieves a distillation of the essence of an affair by having the three voices speak parts of each of their story, one at a time and seemingly unaware of the others, literally disembodied (they are in urns), and, in the way that they are presented to us as spirits, compelled for eternity to tell their wrongs, they remind of the Inferno of Dante (beloved of Beckettt). In Pinter’s play, he muses on the uncertainties of memory, of identity, of remembering – or thinking to remember – another person and / or an event, and this production does justice to that aim.
I have already mentioned that Kate is on stage often enough with nothing to do. Scott Thomas did this perfectly, embodying this Kate who gets talked about, and who seems, if not other worldly, sometimes a bit emotionally distant – so much more dramatically stirring the flare-up, when she talks, in several chunks of text separated by silences and pauses, about Anna (who has no further words in the script), seems to gel with this notion that Anna is no more than she, killed off by having Deeley come to her room.
But perhaps Deeley, too, is Anna / Deeley, because Kate first describes Anna :
Your face was dirty. You lay dead, your face scrawled with dirt, all kinds of earnest inscriptions, but unblotted, so that they had run, all over your face, down to your throat.
Then, after a pause marked, in the same speech, she continues addressing Anna, but talks about Deeley :
I dug about in the windowbox, where you had planted our pretty pansies, scooped, filled the bowl, and plastered his face with dirt. He was bemused, aghast, resisted, resisted with force. He would not let me dirty his face, or smudge it, he wouldn’t let me.
The unclean face, the repetition of ‘dirty’ (albeit as a verb), and the vivid reminder of the description of Anna’s in ‘smudge’, they all suggest some link. Anna is said to be ‘lying dead’, with its finality, and Deeley’s response in the immediately succeeding words, proposes a solution to Anna and being in London (the explanation of the apparent opening present day) :
He suggested a wedding instead, and a change of environment.
Slight pause
Neither mattered.
The succeeding, closing words of the play, still from Kate, amount to a denial of Anna’s ever having existed :
He asked me once, about that time, who had slept in that bed before him. I told him no one. No one at all.
There has been a fair amount of barbed comment from Deeley to her, such as this exchange (about Anna’s possibly fanciful claims regarding her home and husband) :
Anna : He’s not a vegetarian. In fact he’s something of a gourmet. We live in a rather fine villa and have done so for many years. It’s very high up, on the cliffs.
Deeley : You eat well up there, eh ?
Anna : I would say so, yes.
Kate related (if Anna weren’t the side of Kate that she killed to become Deeley’s wife) Anna being dead, then, in almost magically-sounding way abouttaking Deeley to where she lived, ‘When I brought him into the room your body of course had gone’, then putting on his face, and his proposal : Deeley has substituted for / become Anna.
Seen from his perspective, the closing tableau of a sobbing Deeley, seeking attention or comfort from the women in turn, then, as Kate sits on her bed and Anna lies on hers, sitting in the armchair embodies a possible, but difficult, choice between the quiet Kate, who likes to go for walks, and the Anna who says (again, not convincingly) that she likes parties, the Tate and concerts.
As if as a provocation to Deeley, who claims to have been watching a film in an empty cinema in when he first saw Kate and spoke to her outside, Anna asserts that Kate hustled her out to ‘some totally unfamiliar district and, almost alone, saw a wonderful film called Odd Man Out’(the same film). After these words, a silence is marked, and then Deeley abruptly says ‘Yes, I do quite a bit of travelling in my job’, which Sewell reinforced by an angry look at Anna and tone.
We will never know what is going on amongst this apparent three any more than they, if they are three, do themselves, or what Deeley’s job and travelling are really about. As with all good art, what matters is how this play makes us think about what we see, remembering what Anna said :
There are some things one remembers even though they may never have happened. There are things I remember which may never have happened but as I recall them so they take place.
Three slight hesitations with the performance. First, when Deeley takes a second brandy, what Sewell is (meant to be) doing with his gyrations across the sofa on which Anna is sitting from behind it was beyond me. Later, I felt that he allowed the pace to go a little too slack in, I think, the long speech where he confuses the women, or in a sustained exchange with one of the others, when he is centre stage. And, finally, there is supposed to be a long silence, after lying across Kate’s lap, and before very slowly sitting up (the sitting up was not slow either), but that may be Rickson’s direction.
Now on the blog : when KST played Anna instead
End-notes
* I throw a veil over Bel Ami (2012), not because KST isn’t good, but because she had been miscast as an older woman, who, through childlike desire and infatuation, gains a glow of someone more the real age of the actress.
** Curiously, to judge from the write-up of Pinter in the back pages of the programme, you’d have thought that he lived with Antonia Fraser for a while before marrying her, not that he’d already been married and a father, let alone had an affair with Joan Bakewell…
*** Perhaps one of the starting-points for Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen, precisely about interpretation, with (in the production that I saw) another three characters, Nils Bohr, his wife, and Werner Heisenberg, circling each other - and their relationships - like particles in an atom.
**** That speech, in context, shows what I first thought about the play when I read it, because there are pages of script leading up this point when just Deeley and Anna are talking (usually about Kate), and some stage business is needed for the listening Kate. (Between them, Rickson and Scott Thomas (and, no doubt, Williams) did this immensely well.) As she remarks, it’s almost as if she is dead or cannot hear them, an intensified form of what happens – as here – when some long-lost friend of one partner is being asked by the other what he or she was like then.
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Friday, 22 March 2013
Woody took me with him, money or no
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
22 March
Starting out, and even with Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen collaborated with Mickey Rose, as he did on the screenplay of Take the Money and Run (1969) (though not the direction). He has talked about working with Rose and also Marshall Brickman, and said that he liked the variety doing so gave him (Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is a later piece of co-authorship with Brickman).
Stardust Memories (1980), coming after the ill-received sombre drama that was Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979) (co-written with Brickman), almost mercilessly mocks these ‘early funny films’, but here we can see how well elements work, such as faultless delivery of the punch-line and of the joke built on leading up to incongruity. The recent film documentary of Allen drew the attention of those who did not know to how he began, as a gag-writer, and Rose and he know how to construct them : after 15 minutes, Virgil Starkwell (Allen in a voice-over) was in love with Louise; after 30 minutes, he had decided not to steal her handbag.
But there are many other things in play, with references both to cinema literacy, and even James Joyce (with 16 June, the Bloomsday featured in Ulysses, the date of a big bank robbery cum fake film, complete with a sort of, if possible, even more crazy Erich von Stroheim) : Allen effortlessly makes films that come afterwards, such as Stir Crazy (1980) or O Brother, Where Art Thou ? (2000), seem just lumbering, keeping in one groove, whereas Rose and Allen have leapt on to a new theme and feel for that part of the film.
In this his, if you include the strange film that is What’s Up, Tiger Lily ? (1966), second feature, his camera angles are already inventive, he as his own leading man and Janet Margolin as Louise parody their own domesticity as gangster and moll (Louise saying ‘You know, he never made the ten most-wanted list. It’s very unfair voting – it’s who you know’), and a quick moment when the side-effect of a drug-trial has Virgil turn into a rabbi for a few hours, with clever cutting between the onlookers and the subject, is – along with the mock-documentary story-telling (Virgil’s parents being interviewed about him, both disguised with Groucho glasses that sport bushy eyebrows and moustache, plus a patently plastic beak-like nose) – where he comes back to, in 1983, with Zelig.
The film is funny and fresh, and it was a delight to catch up with Allen and his cynical take on romance, where the love is in the early days of fascination and attraction, and irritating habits and silly misunderstandings make it wear thin. We simply do not ask whether Louise, an unlikely laundress, would seek out Virgil, who turns out not to be a cellist with the Philharmonic (but a failed bank-robber), because we are having too much fun !
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22 March
Starting out, and even with Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen collaborated with Mickey Rose, as he did on the screenplay of Take the Money and Run (1969) (though not the direction). He has talked about working with Rose and also Marshall Brickman, and said that he liked the variety doing so gave him (Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993) is a later piece of co-authorship with Brickman).
Stardust Memories (1980), coming after the ill-received sombre drama that was Interiors (1978) and Manhattan (1979) (co-written with Brickman), almost mercilessly mocks these ‘early funny films’, but here we can see how well elements work, such as faultless delivery of the punch-line and of the joke built on leading up to incongruity. The recent film documentary of Allen drew the attention of those who did not know to how he began, as a gag-writer, and Rose and he know how to construct them : after 15 minutes, Virgil Starkwell (Allen in a voice-over) was in love with Louise; after 30 minutes, he had decided not to steal her handbag.
But there are many other things in play, with references both to cinema literacy, and even James Joyce (with 16 June, the Bloomsday featured in Ulysses, the date of a big bank robbery cum fake film, complete with a sort of, if possible, even more crazy Erich von Stroheim) : Allen effortlessly makes films that come afterwards, such as Stir Crazy (1980) or O Brother, Where Art Thou ? (2000), seem just lumbering, keeping in one groove, whereas Rose and Allen have leapt on to a new theme and feel for that part of the film.
In this his, if you include the strange film that is What’s Up, Tiger Lily ? (1966), second feature, his camera angles are already inventive, he as his own leading man and Janet Margolin as Louise parody their own domesticity as gangster and moll (Louise saying ‘You know, he never made the ten most-wanted list. It’s very unfair voting – it’s who you know’), and a quick moment when the side-effect of a drug-trial has Virgil turn into a rabbi for a few hours, with clever cutting between the onlookers and the subject, is – along with the mock-documentary story-telling (Virgil’s parents being interviewed about him, both disguised with Groucho glasses that sport bushy eyebrows and moustache, plus a patently plastic beak-like nose) – where he comes back to, in 1983, with Zelig.
The film is funny and fresh, and it was a delight to catch up with Allen and his cynical take on romance, where the love is in the early days of fascination and attraction, and irritating habits and silly misunderstandings make it wear thin. We simply do not ask whether Louise, an unlikely laundress, would seek out Virgil, who turns out not to be a cellist with the Philharmonic (but a failed bank-robber), because we are having too much fun !
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Saturday, 9 March 2013
Bonding ? Schmonding !
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
9 March
Time for a rant - a rantlet, for lack of time...
Yes, I am happy to originate a term, but I will not adopt one that makes no connection with - no sense to - me, such as male bonding:
1. 'Bonding' was what superglue was supposed to do, when one bought an expensive, fiddly little tube of stuff that did precious little for one's sanity, when it went everywhere but the target, made one fear for sticking one's fingers together for eternity, and ultimately stuck nothing to nothing.
2. Moreover, there is no such thing - as far as I am aware - as female bonding, so the implication is that men are just useless at opening up to each other on any real or emotional level, and need special sessions.
3. There's the Pratter hashtag (God knows why they are called that !) #EverydaySexism - is referring to 'male bonding' that ? Yes, just like man flu, it is.
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9 March
Time for a rant - a rantlet, for lack of time...
Yes, I am happy to originate a term, but I will not adopt one that makes no connection with - no sense to - me, such as male bonding:
1. 'Bonding' was what superglue was supposed to do, when one bought an expensive, fiddly little tube of stuff that did precious little for one's sanity, when it went everywhere but the target, made one fear for sticking one's fingers together for eternity, and ultimately stuck nothing to nothing.
2. Moreover, there is no such thing - as far as I am aware - as female bonding, so the implication is that men are just useless at opening up to each other on any real or emotional level, and need special sessions.
3. There's the Pratter hashtag (God knows why they are called that !) #EverydaySexism - is referring to 'male bonding' that ? Yes, just like man flu, it is.
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Sunday, 3 March 2013
Morten and Eric
This piece is about Shining Night : A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
3 March
This piece is about Shining Night : A Portrait of Composer Morten Lauridsen (2012)
Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen are huge names in the sacred choral music tradition in America.
To-day, on a Sunday afternoon, the latter is in Cambridge, conducting a rehearsal just now before a screening of Shining Night (2012), a new film about him at 4.00, complete with a Q&A with the director and him. (Later, the concert for which the rehearsal.)
There may be more relevant and compelling things to ask in the wake of the film, but my question, as presently envisaged, is:
If you agree that certain composers have a distinctive voice or sound, is it fair to characterize that as their harmonic language, and, if so, what are the elements in your harmonic language are of which you are aware, and, if not, how would you describe what makes your compositions yours ?
Michael Stillwater's film gave an affectionate appreciation of Lauridsen the man, the composer, and the participant in rehearsals where his work is being performed, as well as of Waldron Island in Washington, where he lives part of each year, looking across to Canada. Certain messages, apart from the power and cohesiveness of the work, came across very clearly :
* Lauridsen is almost a poet in his approach to composition, as well as a sociological and historical scholar in putting the texts that he sets in context
* Indeed, as he revealed in the Q&A, he reads poetry every day, and begins every class at university with a poem (and the opportunity for others to share poetry)
* He is quite aware of musical language, and so, in setting O magnum mysterium, says that he did not want anything to interpose itself between the text and the hearer
* He alluded to a wealth of notes 'discarded' to get 'the right ones'
* The natural world and the silence of where he chooses to live are supremely important to him
* The sense, as he later confirmed, of being a private person, but one who feels deeply for history, for those who will hear his compositions, and for those who sing them, having deliberately made Lux Aeterna within the capability of choirs of competent singers, rather than just highly skilled ensembles
* Having to pawn one of his two instruments or his typewriter to get by, he had not had things easy in early days
Initially, Lauridsen answered questions from two members of the music society at Queens' (his hosts that day).
When I got to ask a question, I asked whether being front of the camera and talking about himself had felt intrusive - in a very long answer, he was quick to say (and quite defensive in saying so) that he is used to talking in public as a university teacher. However, the fact remains that there was at least one moment that Michael Stillwater had caught on camera in his documentary where Lauridsen looked choked by what he was remembering or talking about.
What I had wanted to know was whether Stillwater had had to do anything to make the experience easier for Lauridsen, especially at those moments, but he wanted to suggest that he was not even aware of the camera.
He said that, when he had responded to Stillwater's approach to make a film, he had freely invited Stillwater to film him in rehearsals and performances, first in California, then in Scotland, but it sounded as though he hoped that he would not have to be filmed on his retreat in Washington, in an unquestionably beautiful location that Stillwater's cinematography showed to good effect (despite the limitations of the digital capture of certain qualities and characters of light).
Stillwater was equally clear that he had felt - rightly - that, in effect, the heart of the film would have been missing without Waldron. Good for overcoming both Lauridsen's reluctance, and for making the presence of the crew a happy one for other residents !
As for whether one is with those such as Giles Swayne who do not regard Lauridsen as 'a real composer', I believe that how one views his work is a matter of opinion, but that his conviction and integrity when it comes to what he views as important in life and in his work (inseparable as they may be) come across and deserve not to be denied.
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Friday, 1 March 2013
Am I celebrating Royal Assent for the Mental Health (Discrimination) Act 2013 ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March (updated with Tweets, 2017)
Well, no...
Despite the mental-health charities waving flags, I do not think that it has changed very much - or in the right way - for most people, and this is why :
1. How many people will ever be a company director, and is just removing bars relating to mental health, without regard to safeguarding shareholders and those with whom the company may do business or interact, the right approach ? Limitations on being fit to act as a director that do not stereotype mental ill-health, but reflect the fact that it and many other criteria might make staying a director inappropriate, should have been considered.
2. Some can now serve on a jury, itself not an everyday calling (many enough are never asked), but - across the board - not someone on a Community Treatment Order. That is still wildly discriminatory.
3. Of the groundbreaking areas, being an MP is the thing anyone is least likely to do. Rather than just doing away with the previous law, the law should have been revised, so that an MP is as capable of carrying out parliamentary and constituency duties over time as a company director.
Three roles that affect almost no one in ordinary life, and this is a triumph ? No, it is just repealing legislation, rather than considering what should have been passed in its place ! It paves the way for no new and better legislation to deal with the real issue of discrimination in mental health in the slightest.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
1 March (updated with Tweets, 2017)
Well, no...
Crediting @TimetoChange, an Act in 2013 won significant victory for the rights of those subject to #mh diagnoses :https://t.co/iR5pFbNqGo
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017
Mental Health (Discrimination) Act 2013 may not be the shortest Act of Parliament, but...
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017
It comprises 4 sectionshttps://t.co/ff80eqlbVs
By comparison Mental Health Act 2007 amended Mental Health Act 1983 :https://t.co/yxiVPjWeUg
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) January 6, 2017
2007 Act : 59 sections, 11 Schedules
QED ? https://t.co/LPgU2pM1di
Despite the mental-health charities waving flags, I do not think that it has changed very much - or in the right way - for most people, and this is why :
1. How many people will ever be a company director, and is just removing bars relating to mental health, without regard to safeguarding shareholders and those with whom the company may do business or interact, the right approach ? Limitations on being fit to act as a director that do not stereotype mental ill-health, but reflect the fact that it and many other criteria might make staying a director inappropriate, should have been considered.
2. Some can now serve on a jury, itself not an everyday calling (many enough are never asked), but - across the board - not someone on a Community Treatment Order. That is still wildly discriminatory.
3. Of the groundbreaking areas, being an MP is the thing anyone is least likely to do. Rather than just doing away with the previous law, the law should have been revised, so that an MP is as capable of carrying out parliamentary and constituency duties over time as a company director.
Three roles that affect almost no one in ordinary life, and this is a triumph ? No, it is just repealing legislation, rather than considering what should have been passed in its place ! It paves the way for no new and better legislation to deal with the real issue of discrimination in mental health in the slightest.
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Wednesday, 27 February 2013
The road to wherever
This is a review of Lore (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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28 February
This is a review of Lore (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
Lore (2012) is a film that, along the way of the journeys that we see made, shares beliefs current at the time of the fall of The Third Reich. In the case of Lore's family, neither parent is an ordinary German citizen, because he is a high-ranking SS officer and she appears implicated in unethical medical experimentation, and Lore is in the Hitlerjugend: occasional near-religious fervency for Hitler, and a disbelief in the American reports and evidence of atrocity, are the stuff of utterance in these times, when the idea that Holocaust denial could be legislated against seems impossible.
The film is not those beliefs or utterances, but they are an integral part of the travel that is encompassed from the Schwarzwald, in the far south-west, to the Baltic north of Hamburg to an island akin to, but not, Föhr, where we leave Lore. (Not before, as elsewhere, a tactile quality in the rich mud has been experienced, and the otherness of crossing by causeway to this island has vividly been shown.)
Lore, as the eldest of five, has been put in charge of getting her brothers and sisters up to the North because her mother, having denounced her husband to him as a Feigling (coward) proudly strides off to deliver herself to the forces of occupation - one of the first striking moments for Lore is when, having raced after her mother and caught her up, she finds her mother already so resigned to what she is doing that she appears to have nothing to spare for Lore and the family after those parting instructions.
What follows is the journey, the confrontation with death, brutality and violence, and it is almost all the time just the passage of the five siblings, plus Thomas when he joins their number and (and as long as) makes himself useful. Director / co-screenwriter Cate Shortland and Saskia Rosendahl as Lore brilliantly show her teetering at the edge of whether she should associate with Thomas, as an assumed Jew, or feel sexually excited by him and his touch, just as, in her fascination for the various corpses, she challenges upbringing that she should not have curiosity, and should not harm others or steal.
This fractured sense of belonging in and relating to a world that is no longer the same Germany, but even split into three zones that they have to negotiate, is there in the cinematography of the characters, with part of a face here, maybe not in focus, a focus that varies through the shot to lead to a disjunction, or a conflict between the scene and the figure in it. By contrast, the sensual, even visceral, quality of nature is fed into every frame in which it alone features, in panorama and in close detail, touches reminiscent of great masters such as Tarkovsky, but with more of a sense of urgency, though none less of integration into the narrative.
The film shows a quest, and we have to decide - as does Lore - why, for what, and what matters, because all that she knew before and trusted now seems unreliable. What does happen next matters less than that Lore has made this journey and unlearnt much in the process. Getting to where we must leave her, having been allowed to be part of that transformation (although we always knew that we stood outside it), we leave her as herself, as Lore
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Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Confusions and confabulations
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
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27 February 2013
Are you up Ship Creek without a handle, or otherwise struck with the word-blindness of such as Dogberry and Mrs Malaprop ?
After I had bothered to buy myself a nice copy, Joyce put me off reading Finnegans Wake (famously lacking an apostrophe) by the appalling pun egg and beacon, and I resolved to read no more and sold it again. However, in common with those as distant in time as Laurence Sterne and John Lennon (his Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write), I have an interest in how words are power, words can urge and rouse (the famous example in Julius Caesar, but also give the game away that some who profess things are little better than parrots, in the vein of Harry Enfield's series of sketches about what the bloke down the pub said.
Some writers (the likes of Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, with his Russian argot) have imagined the language of a future age, and, with a public heading to lower levels of literacy, it is quite conceivable that an aural understanding of language will lead people more astray, as with the example that I gave previously on these pages of I can't be asked. But can we predict them... ?
Can we set computers to work out what will sound so like something else that people will, at least, be uncertain, as with It was off my own back / bat (where the latter is more likely to be right)? Or, with a tone-deaf sense that says that Adele's Skyfall song (and its execution - it's well and truly dead, but, sadly, a zombie), will it be somewhat contrary, so that people think that x is the right course of action in the last risotto ?
Whatever happens, whilst there is life in me, I will fight that panino is the singular, and that adding a second plural ending - I would have had us do as we do with cappuccino, and treat it as an ordinary anglicized word that I order more than one of by adding the ending -es, so I would want And two ham-and-cheese paninoes, toasted, rather than the smart dick who confused everyone with the unnecessary introduction of panini. I wait, a hope as yet unsatisfied, for coffe-houses to be offering me tramezzini...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
27 February 2013
Are you up Ship Creek without a handle, or otherwise struck with the word-blindness of such as Dogberry and Mrs Malaprop ?
After I had bothered to buy myself a nice copy, Joyce put me off reading Finnegans Wake (famously lacking an apostrophe) by the appalling pun egg and beacon, and I resolved to read no more and sold it again. However, in common with those as distant in time as Laurence Sterne and John Lennon (his Spaniard in the Works and In His Own Write), I have an interest in how words are power, words can urge and rouse (the famous example in Julius Caesar, but also give the game away that some who profess things are little better than parrots, in the vein of Harry Enfield's series of sketches about what the bloke down the pub said.
Some writers (the likes of Russell Hoban in Riddley Walker and Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange, with his Russian argot) have imagined the language of a future age, and, with a public heading to lower levels of literacy, it is quite conceivable that an aural understanding of language will lead people more astray, as with the example that I gave previously on these pages of I can't be asked. But can we predict them... ?
Can we set computers to work out what will sound so like something else that people will, at least, be uncertain, as with It was off my own back / bat (where the latter is more likely to be right)? Or, with a tone-deaf sense that says that Adele's Skyfall song (and its execution - it's well and truly dead, but, sadly, a zombie), will it be somewhat contrary, so that people think that x is the right course of action in the last risotto ?
Whatever happens, whilst there is life in me, I will fight that panino is the singular, and that adding a second plural ending - I would have had us do as we do with cappuccino, and treat it as an ordinary anglicized word that I order more than one of by adding the ending -es, so I would want And two ham-and-cheese paninoes, toasted, rather than the smart dick who confused everyone with the unnecessary introduction of panini. I wait, a hope as yet unsatisfied, for coffe-houses to be offering me tramezzini...
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
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