more esoteric leanings

Music In the recent BBC Trust report, it was suggested that they "do not believe BBC Four’s current remit is sufficiently clear, particularly in relation to BBC Two" and that it has to increase its distinctiveness. If that means the smaller channel will shift back to its more esoteric leanings that can only be a good thing. In 2004, they televised John Cage's "4'33" ...



... a masterful piece of television in which the director still uses the same grammar that would be employed if the orchestra were hammering out a symphony, and Tom Service is on hand at the conclusion to offer a reaction just as he might at a Proms concert. More of that please.

For those interested in hearing the piece again with a retro sound, here it is rendered in Mario Paint:

complete the data entry

Music The BBC have published an online archive of the Proms from their launch in 1895. Their methodology reminds me of the work I did at the Walker in the late 90s, where I helped to merged and complete the data entry on three or four different collection databases:

"The database is in fact an amalgamation of three existing databases. The largest of these was on a system called 'Cardbox' and was only available to a handful of users within the BBC network. Once the three old databases had been combined, one of the biggest challenges for the researchers was combing multiple versions of the same entry. For example, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (left) cropped up 27 times, with 746 works; he's now been reduced to a single composer entry with 185 works."

Until someone decides to spend the next three years creating a database of Spotify playlists, as a treat, here is Mozart's musical biography instead.

on stage,

Music Bad concert perhaps, but great review. Welcome to the Courtney Love experience:

"She took the stage nearly an hour past the advertised 9:30 start time, smoking a cigarette, rambling for a minute about how she was late because she had just been hanging out with a senator friend. (Leave your best guesses in the comments.) She also introduced an assistant, Lisa, who was on stage for the entire show filming Love on an iPhone. Not on the side of the stage. Not filming a few songs. The entire show, on stage, often directly in front of Love. Love, naturally, played to the camera more than her fans. She preened, she constantly sang in its direction, she looked like she was trying to seduce it. Love and Lisa huddled before, during and after songs, conferring about what angles to shoot, like they were Bogdanovich and Kovacs."

[via]

Still in its dust jacket.

Film Yesterday I went charity shop diving in Waterloo and Formby and found a first edition paperback of Much Ado About Nothing from 1938 in the original Penguin Shakespeare series edited by GB Harrison. Still in its dust jacket. It's something I didn't think I'd ever hold in my hand. So I understand the relish with which documentarian Adam Curtis must have written these words:

"I have just got my hands on something wonderful and precious. It is five computer drives containing the unedited rushes of everything shot by the BBC in Afghanistan over the last thirty years.

It fills 18 terabytes of space.

It has been put together by Phil Goodwin who has worked for 14 years as a cameraman for the BBC in Afghanistan.

What Phil Goodwin has done is incredibly important. I cannot praise him or thank him enough. He has rescued moments of experience - both grand and intimate, sometimes intense or odd, or sometimes where nothing happens at all.

He's posted some examples. Some are very graphic in places, especially the footage of the attempted assassination of Hamid Karzai in 2002. Given the amount of film to be worked through, I don't know if we can expect another Power of Nightmare any time soon ...

just let events play themselves out.

Web At the end of June, Everything Is Terrible appeared on Chicago's local television breakfast show and judging by their clips, it's an example of the web literally going viral and infecting mainstream broadcasting, especially in relation to the Jerry Maguire tapes. See if you can spot the moment when the anchors stop trying to understand and just let events play themselves out.

If our local equivalent, North West Tonight, was like this every night, I'd be more likely to make an appointment. As it stands, 6:30 each evening the potential audience stands witness to half an hour which seems designed to prove Werner Herzog's theory (in Grizzly Man) that "the common character of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder."

Last night the whole programme was broadcast from the edge of a reservoir because of the water shortage, which largely consisted of shots of Ranvir Singh and Diane Oxberry precariously looking like they could fall into the blue at any moment. At no point would that not have been improved if an expert had been on hand dressed as an alien.

Just because.

Life For over fifty years, a couple who live next to a key suicide spot in Sydney has been dashing out to try and talk the desperate from the edge of the cliff. Just because. Having saved over a hundred and sixty souls, what struck me about the story is that these guardian angels, who are now in their eighties, say they haven't suffering any psychological ill effects themselves:

"Despite all he has seen, he says he is not haunted by the ones who were lost. He cannot remember the first suicide he witnessed, and none have plagued his nightmares. He says he does his best with each person, and if he loses one, he accepts that there was nothing more he could have done.

Nor have he and Moya ever felt burdened by the location of their home.

"I think, 'Isn't it wonderful that we live here and we can help people?'" Moya says, her husband nodding in agreement."

History Fiancée of half the internet, Felicia Day, revisits her online past for Get Mortified. I've always loved this pronunciation of niche.

Elsewhere I've reviewed the RSC edition of Hamlet at the place with the thing. Meanwhile, I painted the bathroom today. It's now blue. I feel like I'm working harder whilst on holiday than before. This needs to be rectified, and quickly.

Hamlet (RSC Macmillan) Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen.

Who's There?

Despite my praise for the RSC’s complete works project which led me to embarrassing editor Jonathan Bate at a lecture/booksigning when I told him about being “something of a fan”, I was initially a bit reticent about purchasing an individual edition of Hamlet on the assumption that it would simply reprint the material already available in the larger volume. But since I’m a completest and I very much liked the cover with its spade variation on the usual Yorrick’s skull or Ghost, Amazon were soon making a debit to my credit card.

Publication Data

Published 2008 which makes it, I think, the freshest edition of the text available, what with rivals reprinting older material with new covers. The third revised edition of the Arden third series was in 2005.

Introduction

As expected, and perhaps understandably, there is a sense of déjà vu. Much of the introduction replicates text from the complete works, as does the key facts, the text itself obviously and the Shakespeare biography at the back is an abbreviated rewrite of the general introduction. Yet, even if you already have those complete works (and if not, why not exactly, Asda now have copies of the paperback for just over twelve pounds) I would certainly recommend this individual volume, if you’re looking for a thoughtfully edited, brand new "player" rendition of the play.

Bate’s introduction is relatively short but plain speaking, interested in illuminating the doubling of Hamlet with other characters, Laertes, Fortinbras and Claudius who it’s suggested had comparable schooling. There’s a dichotomy at the heart of Hamlet’s character, Bate suggests, in that he’s capable of some horrible violence, but is unable to react when called upon to do so with pre-meditation because of his intellect, which is I suppose the opposite of Claudius who is capable but doesn’t want to be too bloody and wants to be surreptitious so relies on poison to do his work.

Unusually, the introduction then turns to the stage craft of the fight and that unlike the simple fencing epee of modern productions – notably the RSC with Tennant and Branagh’s film, productions would originally have featured a rapier and dagger which means that the fudge that usually occurs with Hamlet accidentally grabbing Laertes’s weapon should be more purposeful demonstrating a shift in personality. In order to be a worthy successor to his father, he would have to show the same ability to make big decisions like Hamlet Snr’s land grab and this would demonstrate that possibility.

The introduction then expands from the complete works original for a textual discussion related to hammering the play into shape for a coherent production and then a dip into the critical history which cunningly ignores all of the usual names for something rather more oddball. So instead of Bradley, there’s a smattering of Dr Johnson, Goethe, Schlegel, Showalter, Kierkegaard, Freud, Joyce and well, there’s a surprise at the end. What this selection from outside of the critical mainstream demonstrate is that like football, everyone who’s interested as an opinion on Hamlet’s mental state but no one is really sure.

About The Text

Does a good job of explaining the vision for this version of the text. This is, like the Oxford (which I'll be talking about in coming days or weeks) the First Folio in its purest form, with the Q2 additions at the back, “Now all occasions do offend me" and all (note nothing from Q1 which increases the Arden supplement’s value) the assumption being that the post-mortality edition of the play was the most up to date copy and as Shakespeare finally intended. Oddly, Q2 has still been used as guide for “corrections” however and some of the readings from the earlier printing have been transposed, not least sexton for sixteene in the gravedigger scene, which is still problematic despite theatrical tradition.

Hamlet in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

After a new scene-by-scene analysis some might say synopsis, we find a thorough stage history with some focus on the RSC. The main theme is continuity and the line which can be drawn from Burbage to Garrick to Macready, Irving, Barrymore, Gielgud, Olivier and take your pick from many of the faces I’ve looked at on this blog, though I like to think it shifts to Jacobi then Branagh then Tennant, which is unfair since it’s rather orthodox and leaves out the wilder excesses of Burton, Warner and Williamson.

What marks out the RSC’s contribution is its willingness to experiment and that’s demonstrated in the edition’s true innovation, a round table discussion between three practitioners who have produced the play for stage. Ron Daniels’s contribution is based on his so-called pyjama Hamlet with Mark Rylance in 1984; John Caird directed Simon Russell Beale for the National in 2000; Michael Boyd the artistic director of the RSC tackled the play in 2004 with Toby Stephens in 2004.

These few pages cover a lot of ground and you might have noticed me already quoting from it in my show reviews and are a demonstration that there’s no better people to talk about the play than those tasked with turning it into a piece of drama although there is some disagreement between the three as to how, for example, brutally the closet scene should be played, how abusive Hamlet should be to his mother, the extent to which he is suspicious of his motives.

How is it, my lord?

A thumping good edition all round then, striking the right note between helping the beginner and offering something new for the fan/scholar. Having taken over from the Penguin as the RSC’s text of choice, it is still very much a player’s edition. The notes at the bottom of each page are brief but pointed and the text is well spaced out and readable. I’d refer you to the complete works first if you’re looking for something with the same scholarly aims but with greater depth.

Hamlet (RSC Macmillan) Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen. £6.99 paperback. ISBN: 9780230217874.

Two Houses.

Comics Alison's post about producing short comic strips to add interesting content reminded me that this blog ran a weekly six episode strip back in 2003. It was not well liked at the time, but since my planned blog post for the evening was cancelled for reason best explained over a drink some time should we meet (say Son of the Pink Panther to me) I thought I'd introduce you to ...

Two Houses.



These episodes are best read in order.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Elsewhere A picture of the ten years old version of me has been posted at "How I Met Your Motherboard".

and for free.

Journalism Sometimes it's possible to be ready to blog about something then find someone else has done the job for you, ironically on this occasion since Sian is writing about someone else who is trying to get someone to else to do a job for them, and for free.

The whys and wherefores are captured here but what it boils down to is a freelancer who writes for "womens" magazines wanting an intern to essentially find stories and do the grunt work on stories to save her the bother, unpaid.

As Sian notes it's been knocking around in Twitter all day but there's been no word from the journalist who has generally been kicked around by social networking's core user base for her presumptuousness.

Internships have been something of a transparent dangling carrot for me.  I know that they would be valuable experience and good fun, but I feel so old now that the imperative to also have money to walk around, eat and pay the rent also weighs heavy.

Unless anyone, as ever, has any ideas ...

It reminds me of an article I read many moons ago about an intern who hired an intern (the source of which I can't remember so again, ironically, I've asked someone else).  Expect an update should it turn up.

Updated:  06/07/2010

It was an article I heard.  Many thanks to Apricot at AskMe for identifying that (somewhat inevitably) it was a piece on This American Life in episode #385, Pro Se:

Act Four. Underling Gets An Underling.

Stef Willen tells Ira about a time that she took matters into her own hands, even though she was only a lowly production assistant on a reality show. (7 minutes)

Volpone (Stage on Screen production from the Greenwich Theatre)

In the dying moments of his Volpone, Ben Jonson risks ridicule by requesting that the audience only applaud if they have enjoyed what they have just witnessed. Luckily for the cast and crew in the Greenwich Theatre for this recording of the play for Stage on Screen (who were good enough to send me a copy for review) they’re met by an appreciative audience. I’m a bit more cautious which shouldn’t reflect on the Greenwich, rather that Jonson’s satire on greed left me disenfranchised and disappointed and even more appreciative of the complexity of his King's Men colleague Shakespeare’s writing.

Jonson’s story of a repulsive aristocratic conman destabilising the lives of his equally despicable peers portrays the dark heart of humanity; from Volpone to his Iago-like dissembling servant Mosco to the Venetian gentlemen who crave his inheritance, this is a society that covets wealth above human feelings. One “VIP” is even willing to prostitute his wife Celia to Volpone in order to secure his fortune. When the central nobleman is initially brought to court, the judges are easily persuaded of his innocence by those of reputation rather than the truth, which admittedly has a certain contemporary resonance.

But I wasn’t involved. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, which I know is a probably a reductive view of the play since they’re not supposed to be, but in general my taste is for drama in which the protagonists have dimensions and don’t quite so nakedly exist as signifiers for whatever themes the playwright is hoping to expose. Even a delicious bastard like Richard III has complex (if misguided) reasons for his reign of terror, whereas Volpone is simply a hedonistic empty vessel I was unable to connect to because Jonson refuses to allow us below the surface.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t laugh with this production, especially at the Steptoe-like chemistry between Richard Bremmer and Mark Hadfield (who played the Gravedigger in the recent RSC Hamlet), the latter bringing to the fore Mosca’s patient wait to get one over on his master. There’s also some hilarious antics of the clowns led by Conrad Westmaas, who add some bravado during the play’s darker moments. Aislin McGuckin is also worth mentioning for giving bite to the otherwise submissive Celia, making her treatment by Volpone all the more shocking.

Director Elizabeth Freestone’s blocking of the courtroom scenes is remarkable; the cast address us, with the law high at the back of the stage to offer the judgement we cannot. There are also occasion when she transports in "filmic" elements, the actors creating moments in which the action rewinds or enters slow motion. These are accentuated by OB director Chris Cowey who places cameras on the lip of the stage putting the viewer right on the front row of the audience when the various characters step into the spotlight. Cowey was formerly the producer of Top of the Pops and is very good at putting the camera in position to catch the best of the action.

I’m willing to admit that my overall reaction to the play itself might simply be because my experience of the drama in this period is skewed towards its most famous son, which is a result of a general tendency to focus on Shakespeare at the expense of his contemporaries. If the likes of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher are increasingly being ignored in theatres, they’re even less present in the home market, which means that unless you have access to theatreland, it’s impossible to get a proper sense of their work, especially as it appears on stage. If nothing else, this Stage on Screen release is vital in demonstrating that Jacobean drama was as any other era and allowing us to decide whether we appreciate it. Or not.

Volpone is available on dvd from Stage & Screen.

I’m a bit more cautious.

Theatre In the dying moments of his Volpone, Ben Jonson risks ridicule by requesting that the audience only applaud if they have enjoyed what they have just witnessed. Luckily for the cast and crew in the Greenwich Theatre for this recording of the play for Stage on Screen (who were good enough to send me a copy for review) they’re met by an appreciative audience. I’m a bit more cautious which shouldn’t reflect on the Greenwich, rather that Jonson’s satire on greed left me disenfranchised and disappointed and even more appreciative of the complexity of his King's Men colleague Shakespeare’s writing.

Jonson’s story of a repulsive aristocratic conman destabilising the lives of his equally despicable peers portrays the dark heart of humanity; from Volpone to his Iago-like dissembling servant Mosco to the Venetian gentlemen who crave his inheritance, this is a society that covets wealth above human feelings. One “VIP” is even willing to prostitute his wife Celia to Volpone in order to secure his fortune. When the central nobleman is initially brought to court, the judges are easily persuaded of his innocence by those of reputation rather than the truth, which admittedly has a certain contemporary resonance.

But I wasn’t involved. None of the characters are particularly sympathetic, which I know is a probably a reductive view of the play since they’re not supposed to be, but in general my taste is for drama in which the protagonists have dimensions and don’t quite so nakedly exist as signifiers for whatever themes the playwright is hoping to expose. Even a delicious bastard like Richard III has complex (if misguided) reasons for his reign of terror, whereas Volpone is simply a hedonistic empty vessel I was unable to connect to because Jonson refuses to allow us below the surface.

Which isn’t to say I didn’t laugh with this production, especially at the Steptoe-like chemistry between Richard Bremmer and Mark Hadfield (who played the Gravedigger in the recent RSC Hamlet), the latter bringing to the fore Mosca’s patient wait to get one over on his master. There’s also some hilarious antics of the clowns led by Conrad Westmaas, who add some bravado during the play’s darker moments. Aislin McGuckin is also worth mentioning for giving bite to the otherwise submissive Celia, making her treatment by Volpone all the more shocking.

Director Elizabeth Freestone’s blocking of the courtroom scenes is remarkable; the cast address us, with the law high at the back of the stage to offer the judgement we cannot. There are also occasion when she transports in "filmic" elements, the actors creating moments in which the action rewinds or enters slow motion. These are accentuated by OB director Chris Cowey who places cameras on the lip of the stage putting the viewer right on the front row of the audience when the various characters step into the spotlight. Cowey was formerly the producer of Top of the Pops and is very good at putting the camera in position to catch the best of the action.

I’m willing to admit that my overall reaction to the play itself might simply be because my experience of the drama in this period is skewed towards its most famous son, which is a result of a general tendency to focus on Shakespeare at the expense of his contemporaries. If the likes of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher are increasingly being ignored in theatres, they’re even less present in the home market, which means that unless you have access to theatreland, it’s impossible to get a proper sense of their work, especially as it appears on stage. If nothing else, this Stage on Screen release is vital in demonstrating that Jacobean drama was as any other era and allowing us to decide whether we appreciate it. Or not.

Volpone is available on dvd from Stage & Screen.

The dross.

Games This online ZX Spectrum emulator features the classic games you'd expect (5% of all releases) and the dross (the other 95%).

I was a Commodore 64 owner, can you tell?.

Includes a rare appearance from Doctor Who: Dalek Attack, the 1992 game featuring the Seventh Doctor which is worth seeing for the pitiful attempt at recreating the television title sequence and Sylvester McCoy's face which is fine until the wrong logo appears.

Oh and the game itself which is unplayable.

Like most games on the ZX Spectrum.

Sorry.

"Things are starting to pick up again work-wise."

TV Eve "Gwen Cooper" Myles has given an interview to WalesOnline on the subject of the upcoming US Torchwood series in which she confirms that the production will be based over there (either LA or Canada). When asked about other projects she says:

"Things are starting to pick up again work-wise. I’m about to sign for a BBC Wales TV remake of The Fabulous Baker Boys and I’ve got another film in Bulgaria and then we start shooting the new Torchwood in January."

Really, Eve? In the Michelle Pfeiffer role? Please?



The casting on the Baker boys starts here. I'd like a couple of the McGanns or Laurence Fox and Tom Hollander. It'll probably be Horne & Corden.

Igloos.

Liverpool Life Further to my post the other day about the cleanliness of Sefton Park's visitors, the council have delivered about ten yellow wheelie bins which are now dotted about the field ...

... and are generally being used as goal posts. We passed one earlier which has been upturned even though it is full of rubbish.

Meanwhile, on a brighter note, In The Night Garden Live have arrived and erected the staging igloos which we can just about see hidden behind some trees on the far side. Here is a time lapse video of the installation:



Lovely.

an untapped hotbed for anthropological study.

Life Our regular fish and chip and Chinese meal emporium is closed for what looks like a holiday so we had to walk further afield for supper this evening. As ever, there’s a slight apprehension about entering an alien takeaway but little did I realise that we’d be stumbling into what turned out to be an untapped hotbed for anthropological study, particularly in the realm of human adaptation.

Here is the potential area of study:

Our order included a chicken curry. We were told that there would be a fifty minute wait for a meal because of the backlog. Not wanting to wait that long, we asked for the time limit on fish and chips. Ten minutes. We ordered three sets and sat down.

As we watched, the take away only seemed to have two different types of customers:

Type A entered, made a meal order, asked the time it would take to materialise and left. None of them were surprised about the wait. This lengthy waiting time is a regular occurrence. It’s expected.

Type B entered and to a person ordered sausage and chips. Sometimes they would vary the order. More than one sausage. Larger sausages. An extra savoury cake. Tub of gravy, tub of peas. They were all served straight away and all before us.

No one ordered fish and chips.

From the vantage point of the waiting chair, I began to draw a couple of conclusions.

Either that the sausage chips are so gorgeous and the fish so inferior that there was no choice. Good for them, not good for us.

Or that through a process of trial and error, the Type B customers, visitors to what is the only fish and chip and Chinese meal emporium in the very local area have realised that the only way to be served straight away in busy periods, to walk away quickly with a meal, is to ignore the couple of hundred menu choices and order the pig meat and potato.

Which they do, in their droves, the additional extras their way of creating some variety to a meal which could become boring very quickly (assuming they don’t order the same variations each time as well).

There may be other external factors which separate those who patiently wait for a “meal” and those who impatiently want their food straight away. Is there a demographic divide or does it depend on the day’s activities? The “I can’t be bothered waiting, just get us a sausage will you” factor?

As it turned out, there were so many Type B's that a queue developed anyway and our fish and chips took even longer because of the number of sausage dinners being dished out.

As ever it wasn’t as nice as the usual place. I expect you could do an anthropological study about the implications of that too.

"I gave Mr. Sulu a first name."

TV With Doctor Who's relatively open door policy in regards to mythology, it's easy for us fans of the best franchise to forget how restrictive it is in other areas. At some point in the late eighties, Gene Roddenbury decided that only the live action Star Trek material was considered "canon" (and the flashback sequences about Spock's childhood in the Animated episode Yesteryear) which rather left the authors of the spin-off fiction rather rudderless.

But it wasn't always so. Star Trek was a franchise fiction pioneer and one of the first examples produced by licensee Pocket Books was The Entropy Effect by Nebula and Hugo award winning author Vonda M McIntyre. At this earlier stage, in general, anything went and when for story reasons, McIntyre needed to give Sulu a christian name (which hadn't already been established in the tv series). So she did:

"... I couldn't figure out how to write a love scene where the protagonists called each other by their surnames. So I gave Mr. Sulu a first name, "Hikaru," which is from The Tale of Genji. I was blissfully unaware of the glitch till long after the fact; someone at Paramount objected to the idea of the character's having a given name, for reasons unclear to me. David had the good idea of asking Gene Roddenberry and George Takei their opinion, and both of them said "Go for it" or words to that effect. And so Mr. Sulu has a first name."

McIntyre would go on to give Saavik and David Marcus a health sex life in the Star Trek movie adaptations. Where did I leave my copy of Star Trek IV?