Music & Film The following is better than the whole of Alanis's last album. Which I haven't been able to listen to more than once. Which is why there hasn't been a review. Yet. Even though it has been out a while. I agree with Patrick. Someone should make My Mother's Red Hat anyway, presumably with Diablo Cody directing.
Cricket in the Park
Well, there is something you don't see every day. A ruddy great video screen in your back garden. It's part of a two day event in Sefton Park with the Ashes being made available free to anyone who wants to come and watch. Couldn't they leave it up for a few more days and show some films?
Spotify Finds: We Chose To Go To The Moon
The Apollo Missions: The actual capcom audio between the astronauts and mission control, its simply existence, the ability to speak from space back to the Earth a stunning achievement in and of itself. The Spotify audience find the Apollo 13 mission of the most interest, probably to see how accurate Tom Hanks's performance was. In case you're wondering, this is the track you're looking for: "Houston, we have a problem..."
Apollo -- Brian Eno: One of the two albums which made up the main soundtrack for the lunar documentary, For All Mankind (the other was Music For Films III which isn't yet on Spotify). The kind of sound which should only be listened to at midnight when you can let it wrap itself around you and consume your being. Perhaps most famous for the track An Ending (Ascent), the transcendatal tone poem which has been used in innumerable other documentaries as well as the films Clean, 28 Days Later and Traffic. You'll know it when you hear it.
geocities rescue
Visionaries
A man stands on the edge of a cliff. Before him is the sea, waves crashing against the rocks. It’s at this moment he makes a decision based upon what he sees. Does he see a mixture of H20 and NaCl teaming with life in its thousands of forms, or the ‘deep blue of God’s tear ebbing and flowing with whispers of the holy spirit’? Whatever that man chooses, science or art, he will always have the capacity for genius.
Looking at the below list, it’s amazing how fine the line between their work and these Visionaries. I was very close to putting Mahir here simply because of the ease with which his site – the net equivalent of Dogme 95 – became so synonymous with people’s idea of what the net is about. So instead I’ve tried to stick with sites that stretch the capabilities of the web without the need for a broadband connection [in 1999].
The Long Now
Sodaplay
16 Colours
DejaVu
Dialectizer
Metafilter
Archive.org
Web Pages That Suck
links for 2009-07-16
- Includes Doctor Who's new tzar Steven Moffat. Says it's all old rubbish etc.
- Imagine an early Richard Linklater film giving a long embrace to John Hughes.
- How Dave became a victim of word of mouth.
links for 2009-07-15
- Or why they don't make them like they used to.
- Esquire sends a man who hardly knows anything about film to interview Gerry. Predictably gets a fabulous interview because he ignores the bullshit questions which usually get asked and they simply chat about his pre-acting CV.
the BBC’s long-running quiz Mastermind
Life If you happen to be watching the Autumn season of the BBC’s long-running quiz Mastermind keep an eye on the famous black chair. And then shift that eye just upwards in the long shots to the audience and at to one end of the back row and if you can see someone who looks like their hair recently lost an argument with a barber, wearing a black jumper that could possibly be a size too small for them, then I completely failed in my attempt to not appear on screen during yesterday afternoon’s taping in Manchester, at the old Granada Studios.
Actually, given how often the studio went dark, that the audience were generally wearing black and the show didn’t seem to be shooting on HD yet, you probably won’t be able to see me. You don’t need to – the presence of a studio audience is just part of the artifice, someone to provide a backdrop to the verbal conflict between John Humphries, the question setter and contestant and to clap admirably in the right places, more like supporting artists than spectators (though we were still that too).
I was keen see if the show looked as impressive in the flesh and MDF as on screen, the interrogatory lights beating down on the computer engineer/quantitative surveyor/estate agent from East Sussex/Derby/Shrewsbury answering questions on The East India Company/Life and Work of DH Lawrence/Clouds as Humphries fired off question upon question. As I expected the chair just looks like an expensive office chair – I think the one I’m sitting as I write this is more intimidating. One or two of the contestants dwarfed it. But it was clear, even before the close of the first taping that it’s not the chair its self that’s important – it’s what it represents.
I’ve always liked Mastermind, though I have to admit to not having watched it much in the past few years. I like that it offers the common man (or woman), some more common than others, the chance to demonstrate that it isn’t simply in academia that one can build up a body of knowledge. There is an element of simply learning a collection of random facts and hoping that they're the right topics and yet I think there’s a real achievement in being able to make connections within this information, being able to distinguish between the various choices that might spring to mind at the close of a question, snapping it out and being able to do that over and over again within two minutes.
As an audience, generally we were hearded – from the street through the lobby – the lobby to the basement café – café to studio – or rather studio built onto a soundstage. This at least offered the chance to see some of the studio which was covered with fading publicity photos for the kinds of drama ITV aren't making any more and not in Manchester and not for the network. Those people who’d ignored the instruction to wear dark colour were separated out into an area behind the cameras. The rest of us were put into the main audience area, ringing the set like theatre in the round. My seat luckily gave good view of question master and question answerer and meant I could still see the sweat on brow, the disappointment of missed questions, the crushing defeat of simply not knowing anything about anything.
The crew, runners and researchers, were young and friendly – all seemed pleased to be there, none betraying signs of what must be quite long and punishing working days in which they have to be nice all of the time. These are probably the future presenters and producers, literally the face of television in about ten years. The floor manager, Sarah, looked to be in her late twenties. I regarded them all with envious eyes wondering what I’d have to be in their shoes – it seemed like so much fun for all the running (these people wear trainers).
The warm-up man was of course Mr. Ted Robbins. In my imagination he’s the warm-up man on all programmes. They probably clone him. For people who don’t know, he had a bloom of televisual fame with his sister Kate on an ITV sketch show in the eighties thaving worked the clubs as a comic for years and now he’s known as the audience entertainer in the business. Here is a younger version of him introducing his own gameshow:
We weren’t his best audience – as he kept reminding us. Sometimes filthy, generally un-PC he filled the uncomfortable silences between recording breaks, joshing with the crew. He could be very funny, though he clearly wasn't sure how to judge the crowd here so just kept going, jokes, audience interaction, general sarcasm. Often his desperation was funnier than the material but he kept slogging onward. He was particularly good when he noticed that two women had spotted each other across the studio, two women who it transpired had gone to school together and hadn't seen each other for twenty years. As he noted it was like something from Surprise Surprise ...
And there were plenty of recording breaks. We watched three episodes being recorded and far from the as-live straight through impression given by the television show, there were lengthy gaps between rounds and pick-ups throughout. Sometimes this entails having the contestant doing their walk up to the chair over and over, even once the main body of the programme had finished – though virtually none of them seem to demoralised by this even having done rather badly. We were all sharing in the artificiality; it has been described as a kind of drama and so the fact that close-ups need to be reshot and parts of the script are repeated only underscores that.
John Humphry’s was as I expected. Someone I’ve admired for years, he’s a genial host – well about as genial as he can be within the strict structure of an episode – yet erasable when it comes to shooting the extras including a new opening in which he has to talk directly into the camera standing alongside the contestants like Anne Robinson at the opening of The Weakest Link, an attempt he said ironically to make the thing more dynamic, sex things up a bit (actually he might not have said the latter but I imagine he did). His best moments were when he'd catch something Ted had said and collapsed with laughter showing that comedy travels (and how odd to see Ted and John, celebrities from totally different worlds, sharing the stage together, one oh so ITV the other very, very BBC).
Another “innovation” is that, from what we could gather, the contestants are going to be introduced in specially filmed bit at the opening of the episode removing the chatter in the middle were John asks them why they chose 'the design of the coke bottle in the 20th century' as a topic or whatever. That might look quite good on screen but it meant that in the studio we didn’t really get to know the contestants, couldn’t choose who to get behind. Some will hate this, though it seems to be a production decision made to increase the speed of the recording process – not that it decreased the length of the session – we began at 1pm and didn’t leave until 5:45.
It would be wrong to say too much about what happened in the actual quizzes, except to say that they were all close run things, and that one contestant had a complete brain collapse during his specialist subject round of the kind which should be mentioned in the papers on the day after transmission. Those subjects ranged from football managers, periods in British history, composers and mountain ranges. One contestant, we were informed, would be answering questions about a Star Trek spin-off and inevitably it was Voyager. I was horrified to discover that I knew more about the programme than she did and I haven’t watched it in ten years and not to the end. That episode will be worth watching just to hear Humphrey’s trying to get his voice around a range of technobabble not having the slightest clue what any of it means.
The trick on Mastermind seems to be to select a relatively narrow subject and learn it inside out. Another contestant selected Bill Hicks and knew his stuff whereas 17th century British history was far too broad, though it has to be said there were inconsistencies. The Voyager questions generally kept themselves within the fiction of the series – in other words made up fictional story details – whereas the man handling Handel had to deal with biographical details as well as the content of the music and dates of composition which doesn’t seem like quite the same thing. Knowing the key that one of the movements in the Water Music is written seems somewhat different to know which actress played Captain Janeway or what seven of nine’s real name is.
We were told often and repeatedly beforehand not to shout out the answers. Not that it didn’t stop me mouthing them, usually with my hand covering my mouth so that the contestant couldn’t see, which was stupid since the last place they were looking was in our direction. I did remarkably well with the general knowledge questions; the problem is speed. Most of the time the contestants knew the answers, but there’s no time to send an expedition to the tip of their tongue to get confirmation, so it’s stupid answer or pass. Usually pass. Not that it didn’t stop me from feeling a bit smug when I got their first.
Then, three and a half hours after it began, it was time to leave. Unlike a theatrical performance there’s no sense of closure; even at the close of the final ‘contest’ there were pick-ups – so the process it a bit anti-climactic. The best way to experience Mastermind must be as a contestant, led out to the stage, the glare of the lights, a couple of hundred eyes watching you, John Humphries’s chisled face, four of the worst minutes of your life and then its all over, unless you’ve won the heat and then you’ll be going through the whole process a few more times. Where do I apply?
links for 2009-07-14
- A fun looking diesalpunk web serial in glorious monocolour made on a shoestring.
- "We of course are influenced heavily by the old serials, but the films with the greatest impact on TMM is the Indiana Jones series. I'm almost certain that we talked about Indiana Jones EVERY single day of production."
- Prepare to be amazed at the original configurarion of London Bridge. No wonder it fell down.
- "The 187 hours of content will air across four of the new-look channels - Watch, GOLD, Dave and Yesterday - giving a major boost to output. Dave, for example, will be able to air high-profile shows such as Star Stories and Smack the Pony alongside Top Gear and QI, while Yesterday will show Peter Kosminky drama The Government Inspector."
romantic handler
Film Truffaut says that Notorious is his favourite of Hitchcock’s black and white films suggesting that it’s quintessential Hitchcock; he doesn’t elaborate on what he thinks that is, but it is another example of a lead character hemmed in by duty and circumstances. Ingrid Bergman is the daughter of a Nazi agent who’s forced to go undercover in Rio de Genero to flush out a nest of Nazi refugees, ultimately marrying one of them. Carry Grant is her romantic handler, Claude Rains her quarry. It’s Rebecca remade as a spy film, with Rains playing a version of the Oskar Homolka from Sabotage.
In a reaction to screen violence, Hitch makes the threat as low key as possible; though Rains is in love with Bergman you’re constantly concerned about what he’d be capable of if he ever found out he’s been betrayed by her, especially with his hectoring mother constantly in the frame. And it’s true that watching Bergman being poisoned slowly always on the edge of salvation is excruciating, a domesticated version of the man on the edge of a cliff, his fingers slowly losing their grip.
As ever there’s an excellent sense of place in the film; set in Rio de Genero, something of an alternative to Hitch’s usual stomping grounds, it’s rather like watching those episodes of Doctor Who in which the film elements have been shot abroad. I’m constantly amazed at how often Hitch gets away with having the actors working in the studio against plates filmed in locale or stock footage. He’s able to connect us to the story and characters so successfully that more often than not we don’t realise the artifice until after he’s moved on.
How Hetero Are You?
Quiz! Based on my twitter feed:
feelinglistless is 83% HeteroYou're as hetero as black coffee. Bitter, unpretentious and doubtless popular. But what's the deal with that burnt aftertaste?
How hetero are you? How hetero is Martha Stewart? Try out any Twitter name and get the real picture. Are we really the words we use? Hope to see you at Stockholm Pride!
feelinglistless is 83% HeteroYou're as hetero as black coffee. Bitter, unpretentious and doubtless popular. But what's the deal with that burnt aftertaste?How hetero are you? How hetero is Martha Stewart? Try out any Twitter name and get the real picture. Are we really the words we use? Hope to see you at Stockholm Pride!
links for 2009-07-13
- I'm coming to the conclusion that people should be forced to study this at school. If they can accept Marienbad, they can accept anything.
- Taking bets on exactly how commercialised, over engineered and poorly designed it's going to be, favouring the record company over the end user.
- Sci-fi with "a fast shoot in Mexico. We'll redo the mechanical alligator's jaws we used from our previous Dinocroc." (we're going to need a MUCH bigger boat)
how dare they kill off Ben Kenobi?
TV Oh for pity's sake.
Over and over and over and over, we've been told by people who like telling us these things that the youff of today (well since the 90s) are far more media literate than ever and can grasp the messages they're receiving far faster and with greater depth than ever before. Steven Johnson wrote a whole book about this. It has charts demonstrating how the average episode of 24 is basically impenetrable to anyone without a young mind capable of cumulative long term memory.
If the finale of Torchwood has proved anything, it's that there is a (hopefully) small minority of people for whom:
(a) None of the above is true
(b) Have no idea about the language of television
(c) Can't tell the difference between a news item and a "review"
(d) Think that sending abuse to one of the writers is a pleasant and clever way to conduct business
(d) Shouldn't be allowed anywhere near proper drama again basically.
Kirsty Walker's article is an attempt to sum up the "fan" reaction to the death of Ianto and how it spilled out into the hate mail directed towards James Moran. It's not a review. It's not about the general public reaction. And yet the comments section spends its time criticising it for not being a review and not mentioning the ratings most horrendously comparing it to The Sun's coverage of the Hillsborough Tragedy.
To stereotypically paraphrase the response in these comments, on Twitter and elsewhere: "How dare you kill Ianto. He was the reason I watch Torchwood and how very dare you make him and Jack into a couple and then kill him off you homophobes and you didn't develop their relationship properly. I'm never watching the programme again. You just keep bringing in these characters and then killing them off after we've started to like them. Why would we want to watch it again. Bastards. Lusers."
Anyone with quarter of a brain can see the flaws in that so I'm not going to bother outlining them too much. It's just fairly shocking that the very people who profess themselves to be fans of the series can't deconstruct it on the most basic of levels. Banging on about the rift being open in Cardiff and the SUV being stolen and then entirely the subtext that ran through the rest of the series about humanity being the real monsters. Remember that tense scene in the board room about how they're going to organise the collection of the children? Boring and too long apparently (according to someone on Twitter).
Also, over and over throughout all three series now, one of the underlying ideas is that if you join Torchwood, it'll kill you. It was the basis for whole episodes and what Jack was talking about in his final speech before being beamed up; so the death of Ianto shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Well it was a surprise because of when it happened (though on-reflection it was forshadowed throughout the episode) and its sudden brutality, but from the first episode on, its been underscored that with the exception of Jack, everybody dies.
How can you and I see that but not MJ who writes: "I don’t care to see a series four that doesn’t have any recognizable characters, or that I can now fear will merely kill off whatever characters are introduced. Why should I warm up to characters who are simply destined to be eliminated pointlessly,or allow myself as a viewer to care about what happens to them?" Well, yes, it's a point, but you've clearly been watching a different programme to me. Plus, you must have a real problem with Star Wars. I mean how dare they kill off Ben Kenobi half way through, I mean what's that about?
I don't remember it being this bad for Wash and Book or Tara ...
Over and over and over and over, we've been told by people who like telling us these things that the youff of today (well since the 90s) are far more media literate than ever and can grasp the messages they're receiving far faster and with greater depth than ever before. Steven Johnson wrote a whole book about this. It has charts demonstrating how the average episode of 24 is basically impenetrable to anyone without a young mind capable of cumulative long term memory.
If the finale of Torchwood has proved anything, it's that there is a (hopefully) small minority of people for whom:
(a) None of the above is true
(b) Have no idea about the language of television
(c) Can't tell the difference between a news item and a "review"
(d) Think that sending abuse to one of the writers is a pleasant and clever way to conduct business
(d) Shouldn't be allowed anywhere near proper drama again basically.
Kirsty Walker's article is an attempt to sum up the "fan" reaction to the death of Ianto and how it spilled out into the hate mail directed towards James Moran. It's not a review. It's not about the general public reaction. And yet the comments section spends its time criticising it for not being a review and not mentioning the ratings most horrendously comparing it to The Sun's coverage of the Hillsborough Tragedy.
To stereotypically paraphrase the response in these comments, on Twitter and elsewhere: "How dare you kill Ianto. He was the reason I watch Torchwood and how very dare you make him and Jack into a couple and then kill him off you homophobes and you didn't develop their relationship properly. I'm never watching the programme again. You just keep bringing in these characters and then killing them off after we've started to like them. Why would we want to watch it again. Bastards. Lusers."
Anyone with quarter of a brain can see the flaws in that so I'm not going to bother outlining them too much. It's just fairly shocking that the very people who profess themselves to be fans of the series can't deconstruct it on the most basic of levels. Banging on about the rift being open in Cardiff and the SUV being stolen and then entirely the subtext that ran through the rest of the series about humanity being the real monsters. Remember that tense scene in the board room about how they're going to organise the collection of the children? Boring and too long apparently (according to someone on Twitter).
Also, over and over throughout all three series now, one of the underlying ideas is that if you join Torchwood, it'll kill you. It was the basis for whole episodes and what Jack was talking about in his final speech before being beamed up; so the death of Ianto shouldn't be too much of a surprise. Well it was a surprise because of when it happened (though on-reflection it was forshadowed throughout the episode) and its sudden brutality, but from the first episode on, its been underscored that with the exception of Jack, everybody dies.
How can you and I see that but not MJ who writes: "I don’t care to see a series four that doesn’t have any recognizable characters, or that I can now fear will merely kill off whatever characters are introduced. Why should I warm up to characters who are simply destined to be eliminated pointlessly,or allow myself as a viewer to care about what happens to them?" Well, yes, it's a point, but you've clearly been watching a different programme to me. Plus, you must have a real problem with Star Wars. I mean how dare they kill off Ben Kenobi half way through, I mean what's that about?
I don't remember it being this bad for Wash and Book or Tara ...
"Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;"
Books Up until recently, it was generally accepted that William Shakespeare’s final play was The Tempest; there was some historic evidence, not least that it was the first play to appear in the Folio that was published just after his death and how best to commemorate a genius than with their latest, perhaps last work. There’s also the romantic notion that Prospero’s final speech isn’t simply concluding the play but the writer’s career, one final humble exclamation to his audience before retirement:
“[..] Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”
Sadly, as Jonathan Bate’s brilliant biography, Soul of the Age, demonstrates, Shakespeare’s retirement was a myth. He continued working right through to his death, his hand potentially seen all over the place, his final work most probably the collaboration with upcoming playwright John Fletcher, Two Noble Kinsmen. After all, the man died at the age of fifty-two. He was wealthy, he didn’t need to work, but like similarly successful artists across the years, the impulse to create overwhelmed the potential for leisure.
Bate’s motive here (just as it was in the RSC complete works completed simultaneously) is mythbusting, though he comes not bury Shakespeare but to praise him. Taking Jacques’s seven ages of man speech from As You Like It as a backbone (“All The World’s A Stage…”), he traces through Shakespeare’s life extrapolating him onto those ages, but rather than offering a straight biography, he instead charts his external world, his historical context, gathering the collective miscellany of experiences he must have had in order to write the plays, poems and sonnets.
For example: many biographies give short shrift to his school days; they aren’t well documented and often there’s a preference to motor on to the juicy gossip, his marriage to Anne Hathaway and thence to London. Instead, Bate, using what evidence is available and applying a curriculum from a similar school, conducts a forensic year on year investigation into how Shakespeare may have been educated listing the books he must have studied and then, and here’s where it gets interesting, demonstrates how that learning blossoms within the plays, notably Plutarch (Anthony & Cleopatra, Coriolanus).
From there he sets about attempting to construct the personal library Shakespeare must have kept, suggesting books he must have read in translation and in their own language providing yet more examples from the texts, even to the point of suggesting which edition of the bible he would have had to hand, the heavily annotated Genova. The point he returns to again and again, is that far from the words and ideas popping into the bard’s mind, he was instead a literary magpie, grabbing snatches of language and ideas and themes and slotting them in to fit his own aims.
In other words, he was a writer. The effect should be to decrease our appreciation of the man and his work because it slowly becomes apparent that his original thought was rather less and the legend suggests. But curiously it simply increases our appreciation because though Shakespeare would often take old plays and texts and rewrite them, hammering in all of these allusions, the taste with which this was accomplished and the psychological, thematic and dramatic depth that shimmers through them is breathtaking.
And so Bate continues, explaining how the court scenes will have been influenced by his own brushes with Stratford law in cases related to land rights and how sexual scandal, which appears to have been rife in town, bubbles under in the likes of Measure for Measure. We’re given a thorough description of his contemporaries, his rivals and friends and so the circumstance in which many of the plays would have been written or revived, forever underscoring that though Shakespeare was the greatest writer of most times, he was also a businessman.
Though the cover suggests that it’s from the popular history genre, Bate never shies away from intellectual rigour; in places it reads like one of Stephen Fry’s deviations on QI, as he enjoys the opportunity to demonstrate the depth of his knowledge and simply lets fact after fact spill out on top of one another. Sometimes that can lead the text into areas that are difficult to pursue without a strong knowledge of the text (most impenetrably in a passage about The Tempest which I read twice and still couldn’t quite follow).
But turn a few pages and there’s something new; a useful discussion of the sonnets which, simply by unfurling the publication history (posthumous, exploitative) untangles the idea that in their present form they tell a biographical story of the artist’s amorous extra-marital entanglements, suggesting that there may have been more than one boy, who the dark lady might be and that in any case that these poems may not have been expressing Shakespeare’s own feelings but those of a fictional construct no more realistic than Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet or Falstaff ...
'Soul of the Age' by Jonathan Bate.
Up until recently, it was generally accepted that William Shakespeare’s final play was The Tempest; there was some historic evidence, not least that it was the first play to appear in the Folio that was published just after his death and how best to commemorate a genius than with their latest, perhaps last work. There’s also the romantic notion that Prospero’s final speech isn’t simply concluding the play but the writer’s career, one final humble exclamation to his audience before retirement:
“[..] Now I want
Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
Let your indulgence set me free.”
Sadly, as Jonathan Bate’s brilliant biography, Soul of the Age, demonstrates, Shakespeare’s retirement was a myth. He continued working right through to his death, his hand potentially seen all over the place, his final work most probably the collaboration with upcoming playwright John Fletcher, Two Noble Kinsmen. After all, the man died at the age of fifty-two. He was wealthy, he didn’t need to work, but like similarly successful artists across the years, the impulse to create overwhelmed the potential for leisure.
Bate’s motive here (just as it was in the RSC complete works completed simultaneously) is mythbusting, though he comes not bury Shakespeare but to praise him. Taking Jacques’s seven ages of man speech from As You Like It as a backbone (“All The World’s A Stage…”), he traces through Shakespeare’s life extrapolating him onto those ages, but rather than offering a straight biography, he instead charts his external world, his historical context, gathering the collective miscellany of experiences he must have had in order to write the plays, poems and sonnets.
For example: many biographies give short shrift to his school days; they aren’t well documented and often there’s a preference to motor on to the juicy gossip, his marriage to Anne Hathaway and thence to London. Instead, Bate, using what evidence is available and applying a curriculum from a similar school, conducts a forensic year on year investigation into how Shakespeare may have been educated listing the books he must have studied and then, and here’s where it gets interesting, demonstrates how that learning blossoms within the plays, notably Plutarch (Anthony & Cleopatra, Coriolanus).
From there he sets about attempting to construct the personal library Shakespeare must have kept, suggesting books he must have read in translation and in their own language providing yet more examples from the texts, even to the point of suggesting which edition of the bible he would have had to hand, the heavily annotated Genova. The point he returns to again and again, is that far from the words and ideas popping into the bard’s mind, he was instead a literary magpie, grabbing snatches of language and ideas and themes and slotting them in to fit his own aims.
In other words, he was a writer. The effect should be to decrease our appreciation of the man and his work because it slowly becomes apparent that his original thought was rather less and the legend suggests. But curiously it simply increases our appreciation because though Shakespeare would often take old plays and texts and rewrite them, hammering in all of these allusions, the taste with which this was accomplished and the psychological, thematic and dramatic depth that shimmers through them is breathtaking.
And so Bate continues, explaining how the court scenes will have been influenced by his own brushes with Stratford law in cases related to land rights and how sexual scandal, which appears to have been rife in town, bubbles under in the likes of Measure for Measure. We’re given a thorough description of his contemporaries, his rivals and friends and so the circumstance in which many of the plays would have been written or revived, forever underscoring that though Shakespeare was the greatest writer of most times, he was also a businessman.
Though the cover suggests that it’s from the popular history genre, Bate never shies away from intellectual rigour; in places it reads like one of Stephen Fry’s deviations on QI, as he enjoys the opportunity to demonstrate the depth of his knowledge and simply lets fact after fact spill out on top of one another. Sometimes that can lead the text into areas that are difficult to pursue without a strong knowledge of the text (most impenetrably in a passage about The Tempest which I read twice and still couldn’t quite follow).
But turn a few pages and there’s something new; a useful discussion of the sonnets which, simply by unfurling the publication history (posthumous, exploitative) untangles the idea that in their present form they tell a biographical story of the artist’s amorous extra-marital entanglements, suggesting that there may have been more than one boy, who the dark lady might be and that in any case that these poems may not have been expressing Shakespeare’s own feelings but those of a fictional construct no more realistic than Romeo, Juliet, Hamlet or Falstaff ...
links for 2009-07-12
- "We all know that advert that is on every fucking dvd..."
- James Moran, Torchwood writer talks about the "fan" reaction. Ianto Jones was a *television* character for goodness sake.
- My (only?) favourite Tory talks about the why.
- Professor David Reynolds reflects on the experience of writing and presenting his 90-part history series.
The Spotify Playlist Obscure Charity Record Special
(or the best of the rest)
The Wishing Well
Having dodged a bullet by not being in Doctor Who when Doctor In Distress was released, Sylvester McCoy offers his vocal talents to aid Great Ormand Street Hospital. The b-side features the 'cast' wishing the listener a Happy Christmas "Hello Rat Fans, I just want to wish you all a very merry Christmas, yeaaaauuuuhhh." That sort of thing.
Ferry Aid
Boy George and Hazel O'Connor again. Shows once again that in terms of charity records, cover versions are the best way to go and if you can rope in Sir Paul, so much the better. The freeze frame which accompanies the YouTube video just shows a sea of people with long hair. It's difficult to tell the boys and girls apart.
Artists Against AIDS Worldwide
Or as it seems to have been called in the US, The Mtv Allstars. This was the period when I bought Rolling Stones regularly and still watched music television on a regular basis and became quite interested in R&B. I'd forgotten how much I liked Alicia Keys, Destiny's Child and the Gwen Stefani record. There were two versions of the video. The one above goes for the usual screaming into a microphone model. The other uses an interesting blindfold motif and is by far the more entertaining:
The Wishing Well
Having dodged a bullet by not being in Doctor Who when Doctor In Distress was released, Sylvester McCoy offers his vocal talents to aid Great Ormand Street Hospital. The b-side features the 'cast' wishing the listener a Happy Christmas "Hello Rat Fans, I just want to wish you all a very merry Christmas, yeaaaauuuuhhh." That sort of thing.
Ferry Aid
Boy George and Hazel O'Connor again. Shows once again that in terms of charity records, cover versions are the best way to go and if you can rope in Sir Paul, so much the better. The freeze frame which accompanies the YouTube video just shows a sea of people with long hair. It's difficult to tell the boys and girls apart.
Artists Against AIDS Worldwide
Or as it seems to have been called in the US, The Mtv Allstars. This was the period when I bought Rolling Stones regularly and still watched music television on a regular basis and became quite interested in R&B. I'd forgotten how much I liked Alicia Keys, Destiny's Child and the Gwen Stefani record. There were two versions of the video. The one above goes for the usual screaming into a microphone model. The other uses an interesting blindfold motif and is by far the more entertaining:
links for 2009-07-11
- That didn't take long ... "Join us, and send a packet of coffee (or three or four, if the mood so takes you!) to this address. We're all doing it; it's fairly cheap and easy to do, and makes our point in a peaceful way. "
- Neil's gutwrenching post about reaching the summit. I'm not sure I'd have the will to do something like that.
- Karie explains why indie bookshops tend to fail. It's no good these days just offering the same as everyone else. Pity it has such a cool name.
- Lovely profile of Metafilter which perfectly captures its spirit.
- Noted. Thanks.
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