Madeleine and Norah's Infinite Playlist.

Music As a consequence of becoming ensconced with the Olympics and also cancelling my old BT email account, I've unaccountably failed to notice that two of my favourite musicians, Norah Jones and Madeleine Peyroux have new albums coming in the next couple of months, only noticing after Amazon pushed some recommendations to me. Algorithm 1, Serendipity 0.

Of course, a new Norah Jones album isn't that much of a rarity. Although it's only her sixth solo release since 2001 and the first in four years, she's filled the time between with side projects, supergroups and soundtracks and the like. Her spruced up website explains:
"Coming October 7th, Day Breaks is Norah's sixth solo album and a kindred spirit to her breakout debut Come Away With Me. It finds her returning to the piano and her roots.The album features Blue Note luminaries including saxophonist Wayne Shorter, organist Dr. Lonnie Smith, and drummer Brian Blade on a 12-song set that presents 9 new originals alongside covers of songs by Horace Silver, Duke Ellington and Neil Young."
Here's the promo for the single, Carry On:



Text book, and as advertised a return to the simpler sound of the earlier album. Here's the pre-order page at Amazon.

Madeleine Peyroux's disc is Secular Hymns. From her website:
"The story starts with a concert in the countryside of England where I received a most gracious compliment, that our show had filled the hall with spiritual humanism. This is the result of subsequent recordings in that same little church, and it is because of that the album is titled Secular Hymns."
Promo:



Dance me to the end of love ... also the usual run of play.

If only Borders still existed so I could take my customary trip to Speke retail park to think about buying them for half an hour before convincing myself it's ok.  Here's the Amazon pe-order for the Peyroux instead, sniff.

Soup Safari #68: Pea and Mint at the Egg Cafe.







Dinner. £2.75. The Egg Cafe, Top Floor, 16-18 Newington, Liverpool L1 4ED. Phone: 0151 707 2755. Website.

"Set a goal. Work. Achieve."

Sport Kathryn Bertine is the cyclist who has led the campaign for an official women's Tour de France, a fight which is still ongoing.

  Her life has seen many obstacles and complications as this excellent piece from Bicycling magazine explains:
"She’s the powerhouse behind the women’s race at the Tour de France, the athlete who wrote three books, made a documentary, and clawed her way into the professional ranks of three sports. But walking away from a goal might have been her strongest move yet."
See also this Guardian piece about the forgotten story of ... Marianne Martin and the Tour de France Féminin, the first attempt at creating a women's race.

Clea Duvall on the Invisible Girl.

Film Here's a rare thing. In this week's Random Roles at The AV Club, Clea Duvall talks about her guest appearance on Buffy: The Vampire Slayer:
"It was pretty early in my career. I’m almost positive we shot it before it had aired. Or maybe I just didn’t know they were doing that show, and when my agent told me I had an audition for it, I was like, “They’re making a TV show of Buffy The Vampire Slayer? That’s insane.” Then I went on to also become obsessed with the show, because it’s so good. But I was pretty new, and I was really young. I think I was maybe 18 or 19 when we shot it. I was nervous and very shy, but really related to that character so much because I am a shy person. I am an introvert. I was so taken with the sensitivity and the emotion in that role. When I first heard the idea they were making a show about Buffy The Vampire Slayer, I thought it was insane and then read that script and was impressed, and it’s something I’m happy I was a part of."
The whole of the first season of Buffy was indeed filmed before it aired, the studio and channel were that confident about its success. The full story is in the utterly brilliant in place (illegibly wonkish in others) Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB and UPN which I reviewed here [via].

“Go. Now. Go.”

TV The Art of the Title finally reaches the credit sequence for My So-Called Life, of the best uses of montage in titles and theme song. They interview director Scott Winant and title designer Kathie Broyles and reveal a titbit about what Claire Danes was like as an actress at this point:
There is also a good deal of movement, lots of swirling of cameras and characters. Was that to represent her metamorphosis?

Scott: When Claire was cast, she wasn’t an experienced actress, so she didn’t know how to hit her mark or stand still while we were shooting. They wanted me to stop her from doing that and I said, “No, I actually want to embrace this.” So we worked around Claire.

If you look at that image of her silhouetted in the street with Brian Krakow, under the trees, I waited to get to that moment because I knew Claire would spin on her toes and spin her purse behind her and it would make a great silhouette. Television allows us to adapt not only to the story but the actors themselves.
After watching the credit sequence again, I want to watch the whole series again. Oh to have the time to have a time.

Soup Safari #67: Fennel and Courgette at the British Library.







Lunch. £3.60. The British Library Restaurant and Terrace, 96 Euston Rd, London NW1 2DB. Phone: 0330 333 1144. Website.

Reversal of the Muse.

Music In the middle of everything else, the astonishing musician Laura Marling has begun a podcast in which she interviews women working in the music industry. Here's the first episode:
"In our first Reversal of the Muse podcast, Laura speaks to female sound engineer Vanessa Parr. Vanessa was the in-house engineer at the renowned Village Studios in LA, and has worked with some of the greats: Elton John, B.B. King, Coldplay and John Mayer amongst others.

"In her chat with Laura, Vanessa recalls how she broke into a male dominated field, where female engineers are few and far between. Together, they share their insights on both the benefits and challenges faced through being the only women in the studio."
Worth noting that Marling is more professional and engaging than half the people who work in professional radio. Oh wow, just noticed the second installment is with Haim.

My Favourite Film of 1932.



Film As anyone who's read my Love Actually evisceration will know, my dissertation, completed nearly ten years ago this month, was about hyperlink cinema, films with lots of characters, storylines and locales so called because of their similarity to how the web is structured. The question I asked myself was whether this constituted a genre or narrative form.  I concluded then that I didn't know.  Now I'm sure it's both. The second chapter which considered their narrative properties began by summarising their antecedents, the key influences and it's in this area as I was writing somewhere in mid-July that I realised that I'd made the error of selecting a PHd topic for my MA dissertation and that there was clearly thousands of words which could be written about this. So I wrote thousands of words, many of which then had to be trimmed before the handing in date leaving that second chapter as a summary of what I would have written, lots of phrases like "space does not allow for the presentation of a detailed analysis of literary history" that sort of thing. Since my favourite film of 1932, Grand Hotel, would also spark the cycle of that sort of film and was arguably the key influence on what went later, I thought I'd offer a mild rewrite of that portion of my dissertation.

After some preamble explaining the point, I went straight into literature and the shop floor with Shakespeare, who, despite having been influenced by earlier sources, was arguably the key ancestor of the cross cutting storyline structure (not counting the Bible). Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure for Measure, for example, share similarities particularly in relation to the depiction of different classes and geographic locations and with storylines that are only connected during the main body of each play by a single character – Puck in the former, Lucio in the latter with all of the characters and some of the stories dovetailing together in Act Five (Shakespeare, 1964; Shakespeare, 1979). Tolstoy’s War & Peace (1865-9) relates the stories of a variety of families over an eight year period reacting to the Napoleonic invasion of Russia, introduced together in the reception given by Anna Pavlovna Scherer at the opening of the novel (Various, 2006). The novels of Charles Dickens are famous for their digressive narratives, with Bleak House (1852-3) in particular featuring storylines that are only connect through chance (despite the utilisation in places of the orphan, Esther as a first person narrator) (Allan, 2004: 101). In Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) too, the storylines of Boffin and Wrayburn are only connected through the waterside murders (Hayward, 1997: 41).

Some works also feature a map of the location to help orientate the reader, in the following cases a township and train carriages. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919) is a novelistic anthology with a narrative that flits back and forth amongst townspeople each with their own stories connected through George Willard the author’s autobiographical presence within the town. As Malcom Cowley indicates the author ‘would have liked to tell the stories of all the faces he had ever seen’ (Anderson, 1967: 5) and all of these short tales contributes narrative details to the others (Anderson, 1967: 13). Geoff Ryman’s 253: The Print Remix (1998), covers a seven and a half minute commuter journey between two London underground tube stations which ends with a crash, the reader being presented with descriptions of travellers and how their actions, however small, effect one another. Ryman’s book, which began as a website, is somewhat interactive in that the reader can ‘visit’ each of the characters in any order – however if read from cover to cover in the traditional way, like Anderson’s book, the effect is cumulative, some details only becoming illuminated as the reader’s knowledge of events increases (Ryman, 1998: 2).

Intolerance appears to be the first film that consciously exploits a multi-strand narrative structure, intercutting between four very distinct storylines (the fall of Babylon, the crucifixion, the Edict of Toleration which led to the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and a contemporary story about a young Irish Catholic boy), although as David Bordwell notes the film eschews ‘causal connections’ (Bordwell, 2006: 93), with instead the thematic link of social injustice. The process of watching the film is still very similar to that of hyperlink cinema since it requires the spectator to absorb a group of parallel storylines refocusing their attention with each shift in timeframe. The next film that visibly demonstrates the structure of ‘a cross-section of life, taking it and leaving it where you found it – a story without a beginning and with no ending’ (Anonymous, 1982: 156) was Grand Hotel (1932) which also contained four or five distinct stories none of which have primacy and the inferred main protagonist, The Baron certainly does not receive narrative closure; the critic of Grand Hotel quoted above hints at a weakness of the format that will be considered later: ‘a more careful scrutiny might reveal that the interwoven plots seem to fall somewhat short of building suspensefully to clearly defined climaxes’ (Ibid., 1982: 156).

The film would spark a production cycle of works that featured a large cast of stars in cross-connected storylines, although the majority would be far less experimental in their plotting; with the exception of Dinner At Eight (1933) all deferred to a ‘one locale’ setting -- ‘Columbia’s American Madness (1932), which is set in a bank, Warner’s Employee’s Entrance (1933), which is set in a department store, and Paramount’s The Big Broadcast (1932), which is set in a radio station’ (Balio, 1995: 101). The reticence towards using a spread of locations, with the need for a more complicated shooting and editing style may have been a production decision, but it could also be proposed that more locales would lead to even greater amount of the exposition that was presumed needed at the time to keep the narratives coherent. It could also be inferred that these films would notionally influence the development of television soap operas, which also have surface similarities to hyperlink cinema. As Nick Lacey suggests, these ‘do not centre their narratives on one, or two, main characters; instead they follow the lives of several characters in a particular setting with a multi-stranded narrative structure’ (Lacey, 2000: 38). It could also be argued that soap operas as well as television drama series such as The West Wing (1999-2006), Desperate Housewives (2004-) and The Sopranos (1999-) are even more complex because they require the viewer to follow these causal narratives from week to week over many years, with the expectation that the audience will retain enough character information to sustain the resonance of the drama.

The Grand Hotel cycle might equally be considered the first in a group of what are described as ‘ensemble films’, which according to Linda Cowgill are ‘essentially subplots which have to be connected without the benefit of a main plot to hold them together’ (Cowgill, 2005). Understandably hyperlink cinema is usually assumed to be part of this group and indeed when a survey of recommendations was published in the Summer 2006 issue of DVD Review magazine, Magnolia (1999) and Short Cuts (1993) featured alongside The Big Chill (1983) and Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) (Bainbridge, 2006: 34). Cowgill suggests films as diverse as The Great Escape (1963), Independence Day (1996), Twenty Bucks (1993), The Right Stuff (1983) and Diner (1982) (Cowgill, 2005). Many ensemble films link their characters together by having them meeting periodically – in Late Night Shopping (2001), four twentysomethings share insights on their own stories at an all-night café during their break from work. Mallrats (1995) continues the MGM tradition by setting its stories largely inside a giant shopping centre. Others utilise what Cowgill describes as a ‘story frame’ – a main narrative that either sparks or binds all of the storylines together (Cowgill, 2005). In A Bridge Too Far (1977), although there are many separate plotlines featuring both officers and civilians, they are all a reaction to the war and in particular Operation Market Garden the failed Allied attempt to bring a decisive victory against Germany in World War II. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) despite having qualities similar to hyperlink cinema, a story frame is created by the war of Middle Earth, the ring quest and the two films that book end this central film of a trilogy. But a story frame can be much simpler than that – stories detailing the final night of a school year (American Graffiti (1973), Dazed and Confused (1993)) or a wedding (Diner (1982), A Wedding (1978)).

Bibliography

Allen, Janice. 2004. A Routledge Literary Sourcebook on Charles Dickens' Bleak House. Routledge, London.

Anderson, Sherwood. 1967. Winseberg, Ohio. Introduction by Malcolm Cowley. Jonathan Cape, London.

Anonymous. 1982. Grand Hotel. In. From Quasimodo to Scarlett O’Hara: A National Board of Review Anthology: 1920-1940. Edited by Stanley Hockman. Frederick Unger Publishing Co., New York.

Aronson, Linda. 2000. Screenwriting Updated: New (and Conventional) Ways of Writing for the Screen. Silman-James Press, Los Angeles.

Balio, Tino. 1995. History of the American Cinema: 5: Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise: 1930-1939. University of California Press, Berkley.

Bainbridge, Gavin. 2006. Shelf Space: Ensemble Films. In. DVD Review. 92.

Bordwell, David. 1985. Narration in the Fiction Film. Methuen & Co. Ltd., London.

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Shakespeare, William. 1964. Measure for Measure. Edited by S. Nagarajan. Signet Classic, New York.

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