"In September we will begin the full-scale project of digitising over 80 years' worth of broadcast records. That's approximately 400,000 pages of Radio Times, 3 million programmes and 300 million words to recognise through OCR.
The process for which is described. Not too long ago this would have required an infinite number of temps many decades to carry out. Also:
"Although the BBC only has about 20-25% of the programmes in its physical archive"
Of course there is. For decades television and radio was broadcast live and there wasn't a cheap recording format. I just haven't thought of the implications of that before. In the long run, 20-25% is a lot, even if 10% is probably due to junking (goodbye Marco Polo). What will be really clever is if once this is completed, the database then links internally to relevant pages within the BBC website.
Decorating This has made me chuckle for a good couple of minutes. Claire Danes helps launch paint. It's not so much the endorsement, but the all or nothing gusto with which she's thrown herself in. There's the many photos:
And the quotes you can't imagine a real human being saying out loud:
“United States Artists (U.S.A.) is a fantastic artist-advocacy organization. I’m pleased to be working with Valspar and U.S.A. to bring Stephen Burks’ beautiful installation to Grand Central. I appreciate how color can transform a space and I’m excited to use Valspar’s new, richly colorful Hi-DEF Advanced Color System paints.”
I've also found another appearances of the thousand bells or at least the accompanying parable. It was included by the priest Anthony de Mello S. J. in his book The Song of the Bird, which is linked here, and begins at the bottom of page seven.
The version in Belem's piece is longer and more poetic and from what I remember has a happier ending but it seems to be one of the classic parables used in sermons when talking about faith and belief and glimpsing God, which just confirms that it's in the right setting.
"The Staircase cannot be constructed in three dimensional reality due to its property that the steps forever carry the traveler upward in a loop. The same steps are traversed, but, impossibly, after the first time around (or second, or third…) one ends up back at the beginning, and the whole journey starts again. One can turn around on the stairs and descend, as well, with the same effect—continually treading the same ground, over and over."
About the only disappointment I have with Inception is that no one uses the words "recursive occlusion". That would have been special.
LifeThere are now some excellent photos of the Laura Belem installation at the Liverpool Echo website and one of me that must have been taken during paragraph three of my review (second line, first one along). Hopefully that won't be the one they choose to put in the paper. The picture of the artist looking upwards is far nicer and makes much better sense. If you're intending to visit, I hope the photographer won't mind me saying that you should ignore them all anyway until you've seen the installation for yourself. The surprise is everything.
Art This morning I attended the press preview for artist Laura Belem’s The Temple of a Thousand Bells, the one of the first glimpses of what this year’s Liverpool Biennial will have to offer. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect, so I was quite sheepish as I stepped up towards the venue, probably eyeballing the people outside not sure who was a journalist and who an organiser, desperate to give my name so that it could be ticked off a list. I was also a bit tired, so tired in fact that I forgot to take my camera.
But a slight mix of discombobulation and somnambulation is probably the best way to greet this installation, in which from the ceiling, Belem has suspended a thousand specially blown glass bells (produced at the Glass Blobbery in Corwen, North Wales, one of the few surviving traditional workshops). Like Matej Andraž Vogrinčič’s upturned rowing boats which populated the floor of St Luke’s in 2006, the artist has transformed a familiar piece of old Liverpool architecture into a kind of alternate reality version through the introduction of these incongruous objects and my drowsiness only helped the suspension of disbelief.
I’d recommend you spend some of your time in the space simply looking upwards, allowing your eyes to swirl about the many circles created by the bells, abstractly interfering with one another like Venn diagrams, and listening to the accompanying soundtrack piped in from five very present speakers. Since the bells are static, lacking clackers, Belem has provided the sound they could be making and the polyphonic technology is a good enough mimic that if you empty your mind you can imagine the chimes are coming from up above.
An accompanying male voiceover, which also narrates the mythic tale of the discover of the original temple of a thousand bells describes it as “a symphony which cannot be described in words” and to a degree I’d perhaps much rather hear more of that than his story. But the bells themselves are an extraordinary enough vision on their own and I’m actually pleased I wasn’t taking pictures since it meant I could simply concentrate upon them. In the statement on her official website, Belem says that central to her work is “transcience, memory and displacement” and she’s certainly achieved that.
The Temple of a Thousand Bells can be visited Thursday - Sunday from 10am - 6pm.
"Doncaster's libraries have provided extremely limited services for years: the number of qualified librarians has dropped from 26 to two; there is no head of libraries; and the "customer service managers" who run libraries do not appreciate the need for professional staff to run a service that offers far more than just books."
Their website lists twenty-eight libraries in the service which means that effectively, the qualifieds must to some degree be carrying out the same duties as the head of libraries on a much lower rate of pay and a far higher stress levels since they're no doubt doing staff training too (because otherwise I can't imagine how such things as purchasing and cataloguing would otherwise be carried out).
Update! 19/08/2010 I contacted Lauren Smith, who wrote the article and is a co-ordinator of the save Doncaster libraries campaign, seeking clarification on how the two qualified librarians fit within the organisational structure. She sent the following which she's agreed to let me reproduce. It's actually worse than I thought:
Hi Stuart,
That's not quite the situation. I'll try to explain and hope it makes sense!
There are only two qualified librarians working in Doncaster libraries, both of whom work in bibliographic services, which is the department that deals with stock acquisition, rotation, etc. There used to be librarians who worked with children, vulnerable groups, did outreach, publicised libraries – 5 years ago there were about 26. There were cuts and more cuts and librarians were made redundant.
There's no head of libraries and there hasn't been for over 5 years. The libraries are managed alongside customer services by people who don't know much about libraries and what they're there for.
There's nothing by way of staff training. The two librarians who know how to buy books and stuff do that for all the libraries in a central unit. The staff working in libraries are either unqualified library assistants or reserve staff. There is no training at all, which means customer service can be very hit and miss and can put people off forever.
Hope that helps.
Lauren
In a follow-up message Lauren added: "Basically, they deskilled the service a long time ago. Now they're trying to get rid of the service completely."
“It was good to have something alongside the album writing that had a deadline because it made me slightly more disciplined. It was sort of like exercise that kept my energy up for the task of writing the album,” she says. “When I did the performances for Hamlet over two months last year, in between the time I was on stage, I would sit at the backstage piano and write my album songs.”
As I say in the review I can't detect any direct influences in the lyrics of the album, no scraps of Shakespearean verse, but since the play is steeped in a vast spectrum of human emotion, some crossover is probably inevitable.
Music And so we return to Sarah Blasko, whose interpretation of "Seems Like Old Times" from Annie Hall I posted last week. In his email, her publicist suggests that “she's adorable and quirky and evokes references to Regina Spektor and PJ Harvey” and since that’s a description which just about fits any of the manic pixie dream girls who’ve been releasing albums over the years I was intrigued enough to cheekily ask if he would send over a review copy of “As Day Follow’s Night” so that I could hear what was really different about Blasko in comparison to the Nash, the Allen, the Golightly, Spektor or any of the other anti-folkists. Which he has. I’ll know to be cheeky more often.
I should have an affinity for the album, since, according to her online biography Blasko wrote it whilst also working on the score to the Bell Shakespeare Company’s 2008 production of Hamlet (even appearing on stage). She says: “It was good to have something alongside the album writing that had a deadline because it made me slightly more disciplined. It was sort of like exercise that kept my energy up for the task of writing the album,” she says. “When I did the performances for Hamlet over two months last year, in between the time I was on stage, I would sit at the backstage piano and write my album songs.” I can't detect any direct influences (without entering an extrapolation fantasy), this isn't a concept album but tonally (as her bio suggests), the main key is melancholic.
This is Blasko’s third album, having begun recording in 2002, the first two huge award winning hits in Australia, so against appearances, unlike the late noughties genrists this isn’t a debut album, it’s the tricky third. What that means in terms of the sound I can’t tell, having not heard the whole of the first two (#spotifyfail) the extent to which her direction has changed. Her bio suggests this is a development, but "incremental" which is intriguing, since it does at least suggest she's willing to try something different, though from the couple of early tracks it doesn't seem to be in the order of trying some entirely new sound (available at her videography). What I can say is that this is a singles album with at least four or five good tunes that could stand alone with a B and a Tin Tin Out remix.
The bouncy Hold On My Heart which has a good repetitive dance hook would work well alone and the She & Him alike Over & Over in which the trill in her voice (think Melanie) is put to good effect. It’s unfair, of course, to simply drop comparisons, but in this crowded genre, everything sounds like everything else to some degree, so it’s impossible not to. There is the suggested Spektor and Harvey influence in these eleven tracks, the willingness to mess about with unusual instruments, Blasko’s trademark it seems the musical saw, slightly mangled piano and multi-track vocals. And strings. Lots of strings. That gives it a nostalgic element, but without joining Duffy on the rap sheet and stealing Dusty Springfield’s coat.
The other point of division is lyrically; these are not narrative songs replete with pop culture references and if they’re autobiographical they trade in generalisations, only now and then, as when she asks “Is My Baby Yours?” that we wonder if there’s some tale being suggested between the lines (assuming that isn't a huge hidden Hamlet reference). There are few moments to leave you grinning at the linguistic acrobatics required to fit a rhyme around CSI or macaroni. Mono-syllables abound. Which also makes it much easier to listen to oddly which is probably why I’ve had “As Day Follow’s Night” on repeat these past couple of days.
Yet in places, she’s deeply effective. “I Never Knew” seems initially to be a standard break up song, but there’s a sense that the source of her pain isn’t even aware of her existence and that she’s actually letting go of an unrequited love after realising that she has little chance, which is something I’ve had to deal with, oh, lots of times, usually with manic pixie dream girls and assuming I haven’t misinterpreted that’s the first time I’ve heard that sentiment or something similar voiced in music since Airhead’s “Funny How” (unless I haven't been paying attention). Many of the songs, which on the surface sound fairly straightforward, contain this inner ambiguity which suggests that what’s important to Sarah Blasko is below the surface.
"The problem is, I went on a food and wine tour of Italy. And it was so much more fun and so much more interesting. And I was like, who is this person? If you're gonna do Italy, you know, you plan ahead! You have fun! She spent the whole time in Rome, and then she went to Naples. That's not… to be in Italy, and to undoubtedly have a wee bit of money, she didn't plan it well. She didn't go to Sicily, or Assisi, or Venice, or Florence, or Milan. How boring can you be? It's like, hey, you're in Italy. She wasn't making the best of it. When I went on my trip, of eating Italy, we went to people's houses, we were interacting, it was fun! That Thanksgiving dinner… You don't want to know the truth. It was sort of ridiculous. I was like, did I pay money to see this? And I only paid $6, because I went before noon. It was so contrived.
As we seek a new film criticism paradigm, this is clearly the way forward.
Theatre Blistering and detailed article that the author wrote for Ralph Fiennes for the production of his new film. Why Coriolanus Matters:
"the world abounds with leaders and military personnel within whom it is possible to recognize aspects of Coriolanus’ character. The arrogance and intransigence of Bush and Blair make them obvious contenders; Mugabe’s (one of many tyrants) flouting of democracy and abdication of rational political responsibility make him another; with their military backgrounds strongmen such as Pervez Musharraf (who in a final rebuke to his enemies before stepping down as president argued he had ‘shed blood for his country in two wars’) and the late General Pinochet are other leaders who incite comparison. Recently, John McCain gained significant political capital from his air force background and a distinct emphasis on aggressive foreign policy combined with a fervent support for the US military at home."
For all that, my favourite aspect of Coriolanus is that he's the Roman General who's ultimately felled, not during battle or his own vanity (though they have a part in it) but by his mother's disapproval. Mum knows best.
It seems overly cynical to reduce Anne Fortier’s Juliet into a single line pitch, but since it's already been optioned for a film, chick lit meets historical fiction meets Dan Brown meets Shakespeare is presumably how her agent sold the book to Hollywood so it’ll do here. The set up is good enough to drag the reader through the first two hundred or so pages. On the death of her Auntie, American student Julie Jacobs discovers that her heritage began in Siena and stretches back as far as the real Juliet or Guilietta, who’s story was relocated and mangled until it eventually became Shakespeare’s classic about star-crossed lovers.
The novel is then split between first person reportage of Julie's adventures in Siena and a third person historical recreation of the events surround her ancestors life, meeting Romeo, falling in love and becoming separated by familial rivalry, the former impacted by the discoveries of the latter, pieced together by Julie as discovers her legacy. The vital bit of conflict is from forces that are intent on either obscuring the information or using her research project for their own nefarious purposes, as she finds herself caught between the very same families that caused misery to the original Romeo and Juliet.
There are plenty of plusses to Fortier’s book. Her characterisation is excellent. Julie is good company as she navigates Sienese society with very witty asides about her potential suitor Alessandro and the social graces she’s supposed to adopt and appreciates the irony of being connected to such a famous story. Her sister Janet, who we're told ironically played Juliet in a school production is an excellent foil, Fortier employing her mix of attractiveness and cheekiness to move to keep the story moving. The historical characters are also just the right side of cod-Shakespearean camp and the author has some fun demonstrating the differences with the play.
Siena is also recreated in prose remarkably effectively, the geography of the city lucidly drawn. This is still a tourist view of the place; as Joanna Hogg’s British film Unrelated was keen to demonstrate, Siena has been as effected by industrialisation as anywhere, dull motels and motorways just outside of the centre. There’s none of that in this book, though you can understand Fortier wanting to conjure the romantic side of Siena since it’s entirely possible that Julie would keep to relating that herself. Fortier has still clearly researched not just the history but the modern version and is keen to fit as much of that flavour into the book, albeit augmented for her own aims.
Which is rather the problem in the end. The book is five hundred pages long and I would guess over half of that is description or insight, Fortier intent on telling us about everything she has learned. I’m a slow reader at the best of times, and I'm sure there will be some readers who'll enjoy being submerged in the details of the world, but Juliet took longer for me to plough through than some literary criticism. Too often the plot halts in order to allow for this accentuation to the point that you just wish she would get on with it. We know, for example, almost every meal the Julie eats across her stay, none of which really illuminates her character, other than that she likes to try something different abroad. Don’t we all?
It doesn’t help that with the exception of the necessary relocation to Italy, Julie isn’t a particularly goal orientated, most of her “discoveries” documents passed to her, or tales told by new acquaintances, like one of those episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? which have evidently been shot on a tight schedule (cf, David Tennant). It’s left to characters like her sister to do the leg work and then report back and all too frequently when she does piece the facts together, her revelation has already been revealed in an adjacent flashback. As a modern girl, should Julie be as impotent to her own destiny as Giuletta?
In few other places have I seen the appalling position that a girl like Giulietta would have been in, a commodity to bringing union between families from birth. However interesting the contemporary scenes are, they’re rarely as entertaining or exciting as the shorter passages set in 1340 as Romeo attempts to save his Juliet from tyranny, aided by her faithful Friar Lorenzo. On more than one occasion it’s a disappointment when the contemporary passages return and we’re dragged away from this fascinating world, even if, as Fortier admits in her notes at the back, she augmented the reality of some of the characters because of the needs of the drama.
Perhaps Fortier would have been happier turning out a purer piece of histortical fiction telling the story of the original Romeo and Juliet but the publisher has suggested it required the contemporary scenes in an attempt to attract two audiences which are habitually quite distinct or make all of that accessible. Sadly it's impossible to just read the historical fiction and skim the rest; the two are inextricably linked as necessary exposition is included in the modern period and the period story lacks a satisfactory conclusion on its own terms.
Which is then mirrored in the main story. Just as the book looks like its about to become really interesting, and make the kind of genre twist that might also drag in Twilight fans too, Fortier pulls back and delivers a thuddingly conventional climax that largely undoes much of the goodwill which has developed in the meantime and delivers few proper surprises. The back of my my preview copy offers an alternate sales pitch "Shakespeare in Love meets Labyrinth". If only the latter had been referencing Frank Oz rather than Kate Mosse.
Juliet by Anne Fortier is published by Harper Collins. RRP: £7.99. ISBN: 978-0007321865
It seems overly cynical to reduce Anne Fortier’s Juliet into a single line pitch, but since it's already been optioned for a film, chick lit meets historical fiction meets Dan Brown meets Shakespeare is presumably how her agent sold the book to Hollywood so it’ll do here. The set up is good enough to drag the reader through the first two hundred or so pages. On the death of her Auntie, American student Julie Jacobs discovers that her heritage began in Siena and stretches back as far as the real Juliet or Guilietta, who’s story was relocated and mangled until it eventually became Shakespeare’s classic about star-crossed lovers.
The novel is then split between first person reportage of Julie's adventures in Siena and a third person historical recreation of the events surround her ancestors life, meeting Romeo, falling in love and becoming separated by familial rivalry, the former impacted by the discoveries of the latter, pieced together by Julie as discovers her legacy. The vital bit of conflict is from forces that are intent on either obscuring the information or using her research project for their own nefarious purposes, as she finds herself caught between the very same families that caused misery to the original Romeo and Juliet.
There are plenty of plusses to Fortier’s book. Her characterisation is excellent. Julie is good company as she navigates Sienese society with very witty asides about her potential suitor Alessandro and the social graces she’s supposed to adopt and appreciates the irony of being connected to such a famous story. Her sister Janet, who we're told ironically played Juliet in a school production is an excellent foil, Fortier employing her mix of attractiveness and cheekiness to move to keep the story moving. The historical characters are also just the right side of cod-Shakespearean camp and the author has some fun demonstrating the differences with the play.
Siena is also recreated in prose remarkably effectively, the geography of the city lucidly drawn. This is still a tourist view of the place; as Joanna Hogg’s British film Unrelated was keen to demonstrate, Siena has been as effected by industrialisation as anywhere, dull motels and motorways just outside of the centre. There’s none of that in this book, though you can understand Fortier wanting to conjure the romantic side of Siena since it’s entirely possible that Julie would keep to relating that herself. Fortier has still clearly researched not just the history but the modern version and is keen to fit as much of that flavour into the book, albeit augmented for her own aims.
Which is rather the problem in the end. The book is five hundred pages long and I would guess over half of that is description or insight, Fortier intent on telling us about everything she has learned. I’m a slow reader at the best of times, and I'm sure there will be some readers who'll enjoy being submerged in the details of the world, but Juliet took longer for me to plough through than some literary criticism. Too often the plot halts in order to allow for this accentuation to the point that you just wish she would get on with it. We know, for example, almost every meal the Julie eats across her stay, none of which really illuminates her character, other than that she likes to try something different abroad. Don’t we all?
It doesn’t help that with the exception of the necessary relocation to Italy, Julie isn’t a particularly goal orientated, most of her “discoveries” documents passed to her, or tales told by new acquaintances, like one of those episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? which have evidently been shot on a tight schedule (cf, David Tennant). It’s left to characters like her sister to do the leg work and then report back and all too frequently when she does piece the facts together, her revelation has already been revealed in an adjacent flashback. As a modern girl, should Julie be as impotent to her own destiny as Giuletta?
In few other places have I seen the appalling position that a girl like Giulietta would have been in, a commodity to bringing union between families from birth. However interesting the contemporary scenes are, they’re rarely as entertaining or exciting as the shorter passages set in 1340 as Romeo attempts to save his Juliet from tyranny, aided by her faithful Friar Lorenzo. On more than one occasion it’s a disappointment when the contemporary passages return and we’re dragged away from this fascinating world, even if, as Fortier admits in her notes at the back, she augmented the reality of some of the characters because of the needs of the drama.
Perhaps Fortier would have been happier turning out a purer piece of histortical fiction telling the story of the original Romeo and Juliet but the publisher has suggested it required the contemporary scenes in an attempt to attract two audiences which are habitually quite distinct or make all of that accessible. Sadly it's impossible to just read the historical fiction and skim the rest; the two are inextricably linked as necessary exposition is included in the modern period and the period story lacks a satisfactory conclusion on its own terms.
Which is then mirrored in the main story. Just as the book looks like its about to become really interesting, and make the kind of genre twist that might also drag in Twilight fans too, Fortier pulls back and delivers a thuddingly conventional climax that largely undoes much of the goodwill which has developed in the meantime and delivers few proper surprises. The back of my my preview copy offers an alternate sales pitch "Shakespeare in Love meets Labyrinth". If only the latter had been referencing Frank Oz rather than Kate Mosse.
Juliet by Anne Fortier is published by Harper Collins. RRP: £7.99. ISBN: 978-0007321865. Review copy supplied.
"One of the weirdest things about Yahoo when I went to work there was the way they insisted on calling themselves a "media company." If you walked around their offices, it seemed like a software company. The cubicles were full of programmers writing code, product managers thinking about feature lists and ship dates, support people (yes, there were actually support people) telling users to restart their browsers, and so on, just like a software company. So why did they call themselves a media company?"
No one else seems to remember this (the collective web memory being a strange and spotty thing) but when I was studying search engines at university in the 90s, Yahoo was licensing Google's technology.
That's why I used it, pulling great search results (even then) and material from Yahoo's own portal. Eventually when Google became a serious company, Yahoo began using their own version which didn't seem to work quite as well.
"Who's best qualified to assess the merits of a new production of Hamlet: a practising theatre critic, or a Danish prince? The former brings a certain amount of theatrical experience to the task: he or she has probably seen the play before, and so is at least well placed to judge the originality and competence of the staging under review. But the latter, even if a theatrical virgin, will have valuable insights of a different order to offer, especially if he's of an introspective disposition and has had a father expire in suspicious circumstances. In short, the Danish prince will know how it feels, and can therefore judge whether Shakespeare has got it right."
Purdey is reacting to some of the reviews his new play Subs has received both from critics and the sub-editors it illustrates.
It seems to me the ideal person to judge a new production of Hamlet would be a Danish Prince who is also a theatre critic.
