Sadly, my initial viewing of this video was undermined by the irony of YouTube's advertising:
My ringtone of Tom Lehrer's The Elements has just become even more out of date ...
Sadly, my initial viewing of this video was undermined by the irony of YouTube's advertising:
The Spotify Playlist
Voices That Care
I've always had a soft spot for charity records; most of them are awful, but there's a definite joy to picking over the list of people who turned up, if not always in the same studio at least on the same slab of plastic or collection of ones and zeros. But this is an atrocity. It's not so much that all of the middle of the road, not even your parents like them, musical artists are collected together up front. Or a young Will Smith turning up in the middle to add some 'urban'-edge (in much the same way as Dizzee Rascal for Band Aid 20). It's that so many otherwise well respected actors have also been roped in. On first watching I literally shouted out "Not you too Pfieffer! Streep? Not you too Streep."
http://open.spotify.com/user/feelinglistless/playlist/0IP8KRKSr0bz7VYZ1Uidnb
the YourSpace competition
Liverpool Life I've received news of the following in the electronic post:
Mydeco.com, the UK’s leading interior design and homewares website, who are offering one lucky community a design makeover by British design icons Sir Terence Conran and Tara Bernerd.
Over the past month, the YourSpace competition has received nearly 200 nominations, ranging from Scout huts to park pavilions, hospital waiting rooms and even the odd police station. At the same time, the public has been voting for the most deserving space. The Pavilion in Victoria Park in Liverpool has been shortlisted:
To vote for your favourite from the shortlist, visit www.mydeco.com/yourspace by June 19. The winning nomination will be announced next month.
Mydeco.com, the UK’s leading interior design and homewares website, who are offering one lucky community a design makeover by British design icons Sir Terence Conran and Tara Bernerd.
Over the past month, the YourSpace competition has received nearly 200 nominations, ranging from Scout huts to park pavilions, hospital waiting rooms and even the odd police station. At the same time, the public has been voting for the most deserving space. The Pavilion in Victoria Park in Liverpool has been shortlisted:
To vote for your favourite from the shortlist, visit www.mydeco.com/yourspace by June 19. The winning nomination will be announced next month.
geocities rescue
Relationshippy Things
I once knew a guy at school (hey Ben) whose entire chat-up line ouvre consisted of ‘Let’s have a dance, I’ll buy you a drink and we’ll get off with each other.’ This worked to a worrying degree and he broke the hearts of many of his school friends. Some of us aren’t quite so professional and need all the help we can get.
What must be amazing is how much of this stuff there is out there. Cynics might suggest that it’s hardly surprising, since computer users by reputation don’t get out there much. Which is probably easy. The thing is that because most of the work in the millennium is carried out by the computer - our main interaction is with the nearly flat piece of glass you’re reading this from now.
So it’s hardly surprising that these people are trying to fill in the advice we should all be getting from our friends who are right now having a great time in the pub, bar or coffee house wondering why we haven’t come out again. ‘Spose the best advice any of these sites could offer is to turn off the computer and experience the thing for ourselves. But they wouldn’t would they?
GetRomantic.com
Kvetch.com
Way Too Personal
Virtual Kisses
The Love Calender
Ask-a-chick
links for 2009-06-12
- Genius way of getting at the unmentionables by taking advantage of the indefensible.
- "These three trials were so vast in scope, and so significant in their impact, that Darrow's work remains inspirational. Starting with Leopold and Loeb and going on to the Scopes 'monkey' trial, with its backdrop of evolution, and then defending a black doctor, Ossian Sweet, charged with murder, Darrow swept through a triangle of defining cases in quick succession. In each one he showed a fascinating mix as a man of reason who used such emotion in court."
- "If you’re sitting next to someone on a plane who irritates you, try doing this..."
- Preview photographs of the refresh of my back garden/local municipal park.
- This old fashioned DMOZ style project might seem redundant, but their New This Week feature always seems to uncover interesting websites that no one else seems to be talking about on a range of topics. Examples to follow:
- A visual obituary service for deleted YouTube videos.
- Collaborative effort to create searchable databases from obscure archive material which could prove useful to someone someday. Some of the documents seems like a lot of effort -- there are a couple of dictionaries in progress whose scans could just as usefully be computer read, the job being to copy and paste that data into the database.
the fragile edges of a tiny vessel
Film As I greet each Hitchcock film, my admiration for his work increases. Everyone talks about the various motifs of the director (here’s a big long list of them ) but for me, it all boils down simply to a willingness to work outside of the norm, to flout expectations, and above all to experiment. Having tackled the lead up to conflict in The Lady Vanishes and Foreign Correspondent, Hitch could have tried his hand at a stereotypical war film, a genre-rich re-enactment of a fight against the odds. Instead, in Lifeboat, he plays out the war within the fragile edges of a tiny vessel, of civilians buffeted by events beyond their control.
A pleasure cruise is torpedoed and the survivors gather together on a lifeboat, drifting in a seemingly endless ocean awaiting rescue. A propaganda element is injected when a survivor from the U-boat (which was destroyed in the skirmish) is pulled on to the life-raft and we watch the rag tag group first reject then accept his presence, before, predictably he repays their ‘misplaced’ trust. It’s the stuff of the later indie movement, a bunch of strangers collected in a room (or in this case a boat), and on reflection the Cube trilogy is a near remake. They live, they die, they fall in love, they argue and all within a confined space.
For my sins, I’ve not encountered Tallulah Bankhead who plays the temporary matriarch Constance "Connie" Porter before; it’s fairly understandable since she was mostly known as a stage actress and mired by controversy about her private life for much of her career which mitigated against film roles. It’s said that Bette Davies took some inspiration from her, but for my money she’s more like a younger, aristocratic Susan Sarandon, that ability to be earthy yet still rise above. The rest of the cast are a mix of Hitch’s repertory and as ever they’re impeccably chosen, especially Walter Slezak whose generally placid, good natured demeanour, counters expectations and continues Hitch’s theme that the enemy is just like us.
What stops the film from becoming stagey – a risk since the whole piece has been filmed on a sound stage – is Hitch’s use of close-ups and editing which at times reveals information to us and only some crew members, suspense created then in their ability to communicate the discovery to the rest of the crew. We’re also never given an establishing shot of the whole boat; we’re constantly on-board the vessel, never given respite from the intoxicating grimness that pervades the scene. Which isn’t to say there are lighter moments, but this is the blackest of comedies.
links for 2009-06-11
- God send.
- Starts next Tuesday. Blurb reads: "Off-beat, fast-paced, funny, sexy and candid depiction of office life, following the fortunes of four personal assistants in the City of London." Looks like The Devil Wears Prada crossed with that rubbish corporate law drama Trust written in the style of Attachments. Created by former PA Gabbie Asher, previously script editor on Eastenders, Grange Hill, Casualty, Crossroads, Funland, Twisted Tales and oddly, Kevin Smith's film Dogma (according to the imdb...)
- Practically the whole of Rodney Street is listed and large parts of Nelson Street. Thanks Laura.
- Oh, make up your mind ...
- Good luck Neil!
links for 2009-06-10
- Listen to the audience -- they're not sure what to do -- assuming any of them are old enough to remember Saved By The Bell. Would the UK equivalent of this be Todd Carthy turning up for Graham Norton pretending to be Tucker?
- Contains the rather wonderful theme tunes.
- "Sarah Brown, incidentally, is lovely, and much prettier than she looks in photos. In fact she was so nice that my estimation of Gordon went up several notches (the "reverse Cherie Blair" effect)."
'Shakespeare Made Fit' by Sandra Clarke.
Much as I love Shakespeare, I do get impatient with him sometimes. Well, not him exactly but the way that he’s being presented in repertory, or more precisely that of the thirty-eight (or so) plays in the canon, only about fifteen are regularly production. Rarely do the likes of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, All’s Well That Ends Well, King John, Cymbeline or particularly since it’s my favourite, Measure for Measure, see the inside of the playhouse. Critically they’re all perceived to have faults, or are generally unknown to audiences, so the playhouses tend to stick to the core repertory because that’s what the people want. Which is fine to a point, but those of us with adventurous tastes, it’s a bit disappointing when the only choice is yet another production of King Lear or Romeo & Juliet. What we need is to find a way of presenting the most popular plays which would attract the more seasoned/fatigued/picky theatre goer.
Sandra Clark’s book Shakespeare Made Fit offers another choice. In the restoration period, just after the theatres reopened in 1660 after the Civil War, to fill the gap in product, theatres were given license to produce Shakespeare. The catch was that by law, the versions put on could in general only be revisions and rewrites. So Troilus and Cressida became a tragedy, Romeo and Juliet lived, Measure for Measure and Much Ado were conflated and as Clark describes in her introduction: “Macbeth was done as a semi-opera with witches in flying machines”. Dozens and dozens of works by famous and infamous writers of the time and audiences flocked to them as texts which by then, to them, had become somewhat archaic were given a new lease of life.
Clark selects five examples providing commentary and a reproduction of the text: John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot, a contemporary retelling of The Taming of the Shrew giving the writer/actor a central role commenting on the action; The Tempest by John Drden and William Davenant prefiguring the text to become a comedy of manners; Dryden’s All For Love retelling the final hours in the lives of Anthony and Cleopatra; Nahum Tate’s notorious Lear in which the King lived to see his daughter married and Colley Cibber’s Richard III which drew from Shakespeare’s other histories to try and put the King’s machinations into some kind of historical context (an idea later borrowed by Olivier in making his film version of Shakespeare’s original).
These adaptations have had their fair share of criticism over the years with respected critics like Dover Wilson using words like “dismemberment” and “vandalism” when referring to them. In the commentary, Clark herself painstakingly notes the imperfections, especially in Lear which keeps large chunks of Shakespeare’s text whilst dropping in the material which changes the tone of the story, noting that in places it reads like two different plays mashed together. The deletion of “Now is the winter of our discontent …” from Richard III is hard to take, especially since the replacement, “Now are out Brows bound with Victorious wreaths …” is so pedestrian.
But, as Clark also points out, what these critics failed to notice, is that these adaptation do not destroy the original, they’re merely variations on a theme, just like the numerous films which have been turned out, and in many cases aren't half bad. True, some of these adaptations, especially Tate’s Lear, were the only versions in production for quite some time, but eventually they were superseded again, the Bard’s poetry fighting back and rediscovered. Many of them can stand separate from their sources, in much the same way that Shakespeare’s rarely criticised for rewriting and modifying some earlier version of Hamlet. I think by now you can work out what I’m about to say in the closing paragraph.
Why not put these adaptations back into production? On the page, it’s impossible to get the flavour of what these plays must have been like in the theatre, but there must have been something pretty entertaining about them if they stayed in theatres for so long. I’d love see how the happy conclusion to Lear worked in theatre and it would provide audiences who are less familiar with the originals an opportunity to see why Shakespeare’s work worked so well, his moral ambiguity and imaginative leaps set against the more linear line of thought here. If a theatre wanted to be really creative and the production team were up to it, original and adaptation could run simultaneously for that purpose. Seems a shame to let this part of our theatrical history sit and gather dust.
In the restoration period
Theatre Much as I love Shakespeare, I do get impatient with him sometimes. Well, not him exactly but the way that he’s being presented in repertory, or more precisely that of the thirty-eight (or so) plays in the canon, only about fifteen are regularly production. Rarely do the likes of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, All’s Well That Ends Well, King John, Cymbeline or particularly since it’s my favourite, Measure for Measure, see the inside of the playhouse. Critically they’re all perceived to have faults, or are generally unknown to audiences, so the playhouses tend to stick to the core repertory because that’s what the people want. Which is fine to a point, but those of us with adventurous tastes, it’s a bit disappointing when the only choice is yet another production of King Lear or Romeo & Juliet. What we need is to find a way of presenting the most popular plays which would attract the more seasoned/fatigued/picky theatre goer.
Sandra Clark’s book Shakespeare Made Fit offers another choice. In the restoration period, just after the theatres reopened in 1660 after the Civil War, to fill the gap in product, theatres were given license to produce Shakespeare. The catch was that by law, the versions put on could in general only be revisions and rewrites. So Troilus and Cressida became a tragedy, Romeo and Juliet lived, Measure for Measure and Much Ado were conflated and as Clark describes in her introduction: “Macbeth was done as a semi-opera with witches in flying machines”. Dozens and dozens of works by famous and infamous writers of the time and audiences flocked to them as texts which by then, to them, had become somewhat archaic were given a new lease of life.
Clark selects five examples providing commentary and a reproduction of the text: John Lacy’s Sauny the Scot, a contemporary retelling of The Taming of the Shrew giving the writer/actor a central role commenting on the action; The Tempest by John Drden and William Davenant prefiguring the text to become a comedy of manners; Dryden’s All For Love retelling the final hours in the lives of Anthony and Cleopatra; Nahum Tate’s notorious Lear in which the King lived to see his daughter married and Colley Cibber’s Richard III which drew from Shakespeare’s other histories to try and put the King’s machinations into some kind of historical context (an idea later borrowed by Olivier in making his film version of Shakespeare’s original).
These adaptations have had their fair share of criticism over the years with respected critics like Dover Wilson using words like “dismemberment” and “vandalism” when referring to them. In the commentary, Clark herself painstakingly notes the imperfections, especially in Lear which keeps large chunks of Shakespeare’s text whilst dropping in the material which changes the tone of the story, noting that in places it reads like two different plays mashed together. The deletion of “Now is the winter of our discontent …” from Richard III is hard to take, especially since the replacement, “Now are out Brows bound with Victorious wreaths …” is so pedestrian.
But, as Clark also points out, what these critics failed to notice, is that these adaptation do not destroy the original, they’re merely variations on a theme, just like the numerous films which have been turned out, and in many cases aren't half bad. True, some of these adaptations, especially Tate’s Lear, were the only versions in production for quite some time, but eventually they were superseded again, the Bard’s poetry fighting back and rediscovered. Many of them can stand separate from their sources, in much the same way that Shakespeare’s rarely criticised for rewriting and modifying some earlier version of Hamlet. I think by now you can work out what I’m about to say in the closing paragraph.
Why not put these adaptations back into production? On the page, it’s impossible to get the flavour of what these plays must have been like in the theatre, but there must have been something pretty entertaining about them if they stayed in theatres for so long. I’d love see how the happy conclusion to Lear worked in theatre and it would provide audiences who are less familiar with the originals an opportunity to see why Shakespeare’s work worked so well, his moral ambiguity and imaginative leaps set against the more linear line of thought here. If a theatre wanted to be really creative and the production team were up to it, original and adaptation could run simultaneously for that purpose. Seems a shame to let this part of our theatrical history sit and gather dust.
links for 2009-06-09
- See, someone else is asking the same question.
- Damn, I have the first issue somewhere. The cover story highlights a kit machine with less that 1k memory.
- Directs users to Spotify playlists so that they can listen to the music under consideration. It's started ...
- David Bartlett sums up what it was like in Manchester Town Hall on Sunday night: "When Griffin took to the lectern to give his acceptance speech all the mainstream party MEPs and their supporters marched out of the room in protest."
- The BBC have one of these every five years and they're always good. Hopefully BBC Four will rerun some of the previous documentaries -- my VHS copies are getting a bit moth-eaten.
This is a disaster
Politics I went to bed at 2:30 last night after an evening of building anger and indignation and an overflowing sense that humanity, or our local version of it, have once again fulfilled the low expectations we have for it. Reading the live blog from David Bartlett, political correspondent of the Liverpool Echo, who was at the count in Manchester offered a much clearer idea of what was happening than the BBC's tv coverage which after covering the protests outside the count, didn't return until the announcement. For much of the night the Greens and the unmentionables were neck and neck, then ultimately the flavour of proportional representation we follow meant that there wasn't much that could be done.
Last night's events were of the kind that commentary simply can't encompass. We could talk about low voter turnout, about how poorly some parties communicated their message and how well others misrepresented theirs, but what's the point? This is a disaster, idiocy has replaced intelligence in relation to politics and what had seemed like a relatively stable system is in danger of spinning off into the kind which just a couple of years ago, if it had been happening abroad, we would have glanced across nervously at and thanked whoever or whatever we believe in wasn't happening here, and we only have ourselves to blame.
Last night's events were of the kind that commentary simply can't encompass. We could talk about low voter turnout, about how poorly some parties communicated their message and how well others misrepresented theirs, but what's the point? This is a disaster, idiocy has replaced intelligence in relation to politics and what had seemed like a relatively stable system is in danger of spinning off into the kind which just a couple of years ago, if it had been happening abroad, we would have glanced across nervously at and thanked whoever or whatever we believe in wasn't happening here, and we only have ourselves to blame.
links for 2009-06-08
- My first webpage.
- Does that include Pob, Naked Yoga, Network 7 and Chips Comic?
- Felicia rounds up her own Twitter hashtag. Yes, she *is* amazing.
- "Amanda Holden (Cheryl Cole) is lured to the opening of a new beauty salon (actually an abandoned warehouse). As Holden sits under a hair dryer, Lombard and Mariella stand around thinking of a suitably fitting demise for her. After twenty minutes they agree that she doesn’t really have any interesting or unique character traits, so they let her go."
- Haskell Wexler is her uncle!?!
- Search engine for academic journals that points directly to the RSS feeds.
-
Bloody football.
- "Because the camera is so close to the character(s) being followed, we feel that we're physically attached to those characters, as if by an invisible guide wire, being towed through their world, sometimes keeping pace, other times losing them as they weave through hallways, down staircases or through smoke or fog."
- Handy (if retro) portal listing about 800 different news related media. Somehow, I'd forgotten about Ananova ...
- A lucid perspective on this weekend in UK politics from the Nigerian Guardian. We think we have problems: "In Nigeria, it does not matter how badly a leader performs. As long as he is in power, everyone kow-tows to him. People are re-elected to positions in Nigeria not because the people still want them but because they must complete an assigned ethnic quota. Nigerians are forever confronted by their leaders with election results which bear no reflection of reality. Nigerian leaders are rewarded with undeserved victories."
- So that's what I was listening to...
- She certainly is. In case you're wondering how far my tin-hatted conspiracy theory about Caroline Flint has come, this looks to me like the kind of article someone writes if they want the top job. She only needs seventy names. According to the Labour website there are 96 female Labour MPs (including herself). I wish they'd just get on with it frankly.