Liverpool One's Christmas At Night

Liverpool One's Christmas At Night, originally uploaded by feelinglistless.

The Noughties: Doctor Who's Decade. Part One.

Some of the best Doctor Who adventures this decade have torched the usual format in an attempt to do something different, something other than the TARDIS materialises, the Doctor overthrows an oppressive regime/repels alien invasion/causes some history to happen, the TARDIS de-materialises. There have been musicals, reality tv parodies, stories set in single rooms, that happen backwards or repeat themselves or take place solely in the form of emails. Here are three of my favourites:

Blink

So why was Blink voted the second best story of all time by Doctor Who Magazine readers? It’s certainly as atypical as some of the other adventures on this list, in that the Doctor has precious little screen time and we don’t see the climax to his side of the story. You could point to Steven Moffat’s writing, the willingness to text the audience’s ability to comprehend the complex narrative pinioned around a pre-destination paradox and the poetry of the dialogue (“I have til the rain stops.”), the strength of characterisation particularly in Sally Sparrow who within her forty-five minutes is just as interesting and strong a figure as the Doctor or any of his companions. There are the performances, far more naturalistic than we’re used to in the revival with Carey Mulligan’s understated deadpan a refreshing change from the heightened emotions seen elsewhere. The imagination fuelling story happening on the fringes, of the Doctor and Martha trapped in the 60s recreating Star Trek’s City of the Edge of Forever. The subtle photography presenting an overcast and more scuzzy image of the Whoniverse than usual. If we're looking for indications of what new nu-Who under Moffat’s guiding hand will be like, let’s hope it will be like this.

The Earth Arc

Or what happened after the first time Gallifrey was destroyed. In similar circumstance to the revival, the Eighth Doctor of the novels is forced to destroy his home planet to save the universe from an intractable enemy. But rather than leave him with the guilt, his then companion, Compassion, a living TARDIS (with me so far?) exiles a now mysteriously amnesia-gripped Doctor to the late nineteenth century his only direction to meet a friend in a café in 2001. The following six novels describe his journey through the twentieth century, focusing on his interactions with the world wars, the cold war and the space race as he attempted to reconstruct his identity and wondering what the enigmatic blue box, his only possession really is. Often very poignant, we watch as this figure so familiar yet so alien bluffs his way across the years instinctively knowing that he can’t be too special but desperate to help if the need arises. The best entry is Lance Parkin’s nostalgic 80s set Father Time, in which the Doctor gains a daughter and repels an alien invasion with a realistic interpretation of Thatcher’s Britain as a backdrop.

Unbound: Exile

Big Finish’s What If? series from 2003 threw up a peculiar group of scenarios in dramas of varying quality but for my money the most unusual and enjoyable is this adventure in which to hide himself from the timelords at the close of 60s adventure The War Games, he commits suicide and returns as a female in the form of Arabella Weir and takes a mundane life on Earth, supermarket worker by day, alcoholic by night. Written and directed by voice of the Daleks and later Big Finish exec Nick Briggs, it’s rather like Human Nature played for laughs, the incongruity of the timelord (or lady) preferring to get pissed than deal with the world’s ills. In other words, Bridget Jones hiding in the working classes. Not hugely popular at the time of release, in retrospect, it has the intelligence and humour of some of the best Radio Four drama. Features somebody called David Tennant in minor roles playing one of the Doctor’s timelord pursuers and a barman (he was formerly Weir's lodger and is godfather to one of her children).

will also be entertainment on the night

Plug! Right then, Cancer Research UK have been in touch about an event in Manchester next year and since it's for charity and since I know at least some of you will be in the area I promised to post something here:

• Shine is the charity’s first night-time walking marathon in Manchester on Friday 17 April 2010 and is open to anyone over 16 and entrants can choose to walk either a 13 or 26-mile route.

• Here is the route map: http://shine.cancerresearchuk.org/on-the-night/route-map

• The city will be illuminated for an inspirational procession of light. There will also be entertainment on the night to make the atmosphere at Shine even more unique.

• Shine is unique in that you can choose to fundraise for one of 12 different cancers, or you can walk to raise general funds for Cancer Research UK's life-saving work.

• The £30 entry fee will help fund vital research into a disease which affects one in three Brits at some stage in their lives.

• If you want to see who is talking about Shine or help raise awareness on Twitter then check out #shine2010

• You can also add a Twibbon to your Twitter page in support.

If people would like any more details they can also contact Cally at cally@yourshine.org.

Cally also asked me to post the following question:

‘Would you take part in this race, if not, how would you support the event in your own way?’

Good luck.

Review 2009: Subjectively Speaking

The News

The following short exchange happened on Twitter ...

@feelinglistless Right then, let's begin. What would you like to talk about?

@ThatNeilGuy Well, I thought we could talk about my decision early this year to tune out the news as much as possible.

@feelinglistless A bold move. What brought you to that decision?

@ThatNeilGuy I got sick of hearing partisan bickering all the time. Everything is so implausibly black & white in political discourse.

@feelinglistless Just for some context, where do you live?

@ThatNeilGuy I am in the US of A. In South Carolina.

@feelinglistless Was there a particularly story or report that turned you off in particular?

@ThatNeilGuy So political discourse in general made me angry. Why is compromise such a bad word in politics? Isn't life about synthesis

@feelinglistless -- but surely the news is simply reporting what it sees. I know that's slightly different in the US with network bias but ...

@ThatNeilGuy Everything seemed to come thru a lens of "bush is infallible and all democrats are antiamerican."

@feelinglistless Would it not be possible to simply just tune out politics?

@ThatNeilGuy Hard to not hear all news reports as "this politician says the other side is evil."
@ThatNeilGuy So I've stopped listening to top of the hour news reports. But I still get info from other sources.

@feelinglistless So it would be truer to say that you've stopped with broadcast sources?

@ThatNeilGuy Yes! If I had Comedy Central I'd probably watch Daily Show and get news slanted thru that lens, yet still be informed...
@ThatNeilGuy So I get most topical news from Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, a radio comedy quiz show...
@ThatNeilGuy Via podcast. And also learned about financial crisis stuff thru This American Life podcast...
@ThatNeilGuy And science news thru podcasts of Skeptics Guide to the Universe and This Week in Science.

@feelinglistless I should add though that the Today programme on Radio 4 tends be criticised for bias against whoever isn't in power at the time
@feelinglistless But isn't it true that it's impossible to present the news without some kind of bias or agenda political or otherwise?

@ThatNeilGuy Yes. And I am hypocritical, I know, for wanting the agenda to be more akin to my own. Like viewed as comedy.

The Noughties: Girly-Pop and other experiments.

Vinyl Exchange, originally uploaded by photocat7.

At the turn of the decade I wasn’t entirely sure what kind of music I liked, forever standing in Vinyl Exchange in Manchester looking at the racks full of inlay cards, not have a clue what to buy, pocketed hands desperate to flick through the racks but paralysed by indecision. The stock answer was that I’d listen to anything but in truth the pregnant pauses of life accompanied by Alanis Morissette or Sheryl Crow albums with the odd film soundtrack on heavy repeat. Slowly it became apparent that in fact my approach to music was similar to most people’s approach to art, I knew what I liked, but I couldn’t simply acknowledge that. I was embarrassed by it. The whole of music history has passed me by. All I knew was that I hated country music and dance (without much of an inclining about either of them).

Across the decade, I’d like to think that has changed. Firstly there were the world music courses, reading Rolling Stone Magazine, the trips through the local libraries listening to everything from folk to R&B indiscriminately, then ploughing through all of the Proms in 2007, forced myself to experiment across the genres, slowly educated myself with cds and latterly Spotify as my Henry Higgins. Eventually I realised that I didn’t hate country music and dance, that there wasn’t much music worth detesting, prejudice and ignorance blown apart. The month of music writing contributed to this blog in 2008 is symbolic of that change, of embracing the eclectic. Now I’m the kind of person who can genuinely say they like Britney Spears’s early releases, Haydn’s Mass In Temore Belli and Miles Davis’s A Kind of Blue, which doesn’t make me deep, I know, just more receptive than I was.

Despite all of that I’ve also spent much of the decade listening to girly-pop, which I hadn't properly noticed until I was working my way through the 411 album the other day noting the influences and imitations. Honestly. For all my snootiness about the Simon Cowell axis of shit, I’ve somehow managed to amass a surprising knowledge of a genre which I’m only about fifty-percent appreciative of. I know all of the words to Avril Lavigne’s Let Go album. The Promise by Girls Aloud grew on me. Which means I have had to listen to it enough times for it to grow on me. And let’s not get started on the Sugababes saga which has threaded through this blog like poison ivy. I was one of the three people who thought Jewel’s only proper pop album 0304 was a good idea. I’ve heard of Gretchen Parlato. No one’s heard of Gretchen Parlato.

I’m not embarrassed by this. While strong musical tone of the nineties was indie music and Brit pop, the noughties saw a proliferation of purer pop music, most specifically by female artists. There’s been the odd boy band and revived boy (now man) band, and the three guitars and a drum kit model still ploughs on ahead, but its female voices have been the prevailing sound. For once, the zeitgeist caught up with me (or the other way around). The quality threshold hasn’t been brilliant. It’s the singers on the fringes of the genre that seem to work best in album terms, the Norah Joneses and Regina Spectors. Those in the epicentre tend to be sustained by their singles, a reaction to the increase in downloading probably. The aforementioned 411 album genuinely only has one and 1/8 good tracks, the one everyone’s heard of On My Knees and the unison singing that greets the opening of Chance.

It’s plaudits then for Norah Jones’s politically tinged Bush-era Wake Me Up with the opening refrain “Wake me up when it’s over, wake me up when it’s done, when he’s gone away…”. To Natalie Imbruglia’s White Lillies Island and its opening track That Day which comforted me through the rubbish commutes earlier in the decade. To Little Boots, A Fine Frenzy, Kate Nash, Joss Stone, Lilly Allen, Lady Gaga, Paloma Faith, Girl Aloud, Bananarama, Christina Aguilera, Jewel, Madelaine Peyroux and everyone I've missed for producing at least one good singable single each. To the Sugababes for being so consistently entertaining even if their music always hasn’t been. And to All Saints for setting aside their differences and trying again, even if the resulting album lacked the power of some of their solo efforts (particularly Appleton’s Fantasy). C’mon Siobhan, if Shazney can do it …

But my favourite singer of the decade, and the most consistently brilliant is Shakira. Oh yes. Most Europeans probably first encountered the Columbian hip-wiggling prodigy as be burst from the sea in the Whenever, Wherever unaware of her already lengthy career in her home country, but the depth of her subsequent English-crossover album, Laundry Service demonstrated that she wasn’t some thrown together new blonde sensation but an artist of real substance. Subsequent listens demonstrates that the key to her success is the fusion of the Latin American sound with more standard rock tropes laced with hints of dance music. It simultaneously sounds like nothing else but entirely familiar and if anyone sought out her earlier nineties material they’d find that the only thing that had changed was the shift in language.

But threading through her work is the undercurrent of intoxicating oddness, of the music and of her image. Hoots of derision greet her lyrics. A standard interview or profile piece will mention some of the linguistic hoops she spins through but the truth is that a large proportion of her words are poetry. Don’t Bother from her next album Oral Fixation Vol. 2 (whose title is easily explained by the previous overlooked in this country Spanish language Fijación Oral Vol. 1) is almost Dickensian in its subtle setting out of a character, the popular rival for a boy in her school. Unlike those purveyors of girly-pop whose albums are structured around singles and whatever else can be bunged on a cd, Shakira’s album are consistently interesting and refreshing right the way through.

And like the fusion of world music sounds within mainstream pop, Shakira constantly seeks to be different to the pack yet remain popular. So while she’ll collaborate with Beyonce she’ll also appear on album covers mimicking the Virgin Mary or Eve in Eden accompanied by a snake or on her latest a ferocious image of feminity. The other interview cliché is to mention how clever she is, and she is. When Evan Davis interviewed her at the close of the decade for the Today programme about her charity work, it was car crash radio simply because he’d expected a pop princess using poverty as a vehicle to sell records. It didn’t take the listener long to realise that there was far more to her than that.

our living room

Travel Adam from Invisible Paris seeks out the scene of Claude Monet's painting Les Coquelicots à Argenteuil which we also have on the wall of our living room:

"Walking through Argenteuil today, there is an immediate sensation that something is not quite right. It is an ancient site, which has been inhabited for thousands of years. The river Seine still flows powerfully past the town, but it is cut away from the centre by a very busy four lane road. It has become literally impossible to walk down to and alongside the river. Running adjacent to the river are the historical arteries of the town, ancient roads with low stacked buildings and houses, many still fulfilling a commercial role that has been theirs for generations."

Of course the architectural features that Adam describes as banal are still somewhat more interesting that what you find in the average British town.

wonderfully named

Elsewhere I've reviewed 'The Mystery of Hamlet: A Solution' by the wonderfully named Myron Stagman: "I’m probably not the best audience for Stagman’s book which spends its time seeking connections between symbols and words and treats the play as a puzzle book that Shakespeare has offered up to be solved like Kit Williams’s Masquerade."

Brian Cox's Hamlet masterclass with Theo. A two year old.

'The Mystery of Hamlet: A Solution' by Myron Stagman.

In Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, a race of hyper-intelligent, pan dimensional beings create Deep Thought, a city-sized super computer, to find the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything. After seven and a half million years, the massive computant presents the irrelevant answer “forty-two” on the basis that for all their hyper-intelligence, the pan dimensional beings didn’t really define what the question was going to be. Which is rather my approach to the question Myron Stagman considers in The Mystery of Hamlet: A Solution – why does Hamlet take up to four hours stage time and up to six months narrative duration to kill Claudius? Stagman suggests it’s the “single most famous and controversial issue in Literature”. I'm not so sure.

My prejudice against this line of literary criticism is that if you set aside the play’s literary merit and whatever secret codes Shakespeare (or "playful beguiler" as the cover has it) may have layered into the text and simply treat it as a piece of drama dealing with human emotion, there is no question. Hamlet, an aristocratic prince and scholar (and depending upon which text you're reading a teenager), has been tasked by the ghost of his father to murder his uncle, and though his immediate reaction might be to speak of revenge, a very human reaction, of course he dithers when faced with the reality of process. Instead he fains madness and does everything he can to get Claudius to expose himself and it’s only after, in a fit of oppressed anger, he kills Polonius, that he finds that he has that murderous ability within him.

In which case I’m probably not the best audience for Stagman’s book which spends its time seeking connections between symbols and words and treats the play as a puzzle book that Shakespeare has offered up to be solved like Kit Williams’s Masquerade. There’s no argument that Shakespeare uses metaphor and analogy, but just I’m not sure that the dramatist has deliberately obscured the meaning of his story as Stagman seems to be suggesting, that, for example, ”the time is out of joint” was his way of indicating Hamlet’s reluctance to ram a sword into Claudius’s heart. It would be wrong to spoil the solution. To paraphrase Stagman's analogy when considering the approach of other critics to his problem, it would be like giving away who the killer is in the review of an Agatha Christie mystery. Except to say that if it’s not exactly “forty-two”, I can't completely agree with him.

The book is also oddly structured, opening with forty pages of quotes from other plays to demonstrate the various aspects of “the greatness of Shakespeare” then continues with three shortened versions of the play in varying degrees of detail. Someone picking up this book should already have this material to hand and though Stagman’s enthusiasm infectious as he points out his favourite speeches and lines there’s an element of the Derren Brown magical tv event about the way he’s effectively teasing us with other treats before revealing the final illusion. The summary of his argument appears first in over eight pages then fifty, some of the text repeated with quotes and evidence. Just one quarter of the book really deals with Stagman’s analysis and then feels rushed as though he’s as desperate for us to come to the solution as quickly as he does.

Part of the author's solution is determined by his assumption that “the story takes place in Denmark during the Viking period, 8th to 11th century AD” in approximately 1000 because in the text England is paying tribute to Denmark and he spends most of the book describing him as a “Viking prince”. Shakespeare doesn’t specifically give a period in the work, and though the source legend is from that period, and I’m more persuaded by Steve Roth’s argument that Shakespeare meant for his audience to see the play as happening in contemporary Europe. The text is laced with such assumptions even when the textual evidence seems shaky or open to dramatic choice, such as the exact relationship between Claudius and Gertrude. It’s difficult to concur with a argument when you disagree with the interpretation of the individual data.

The Mystery of Hamlet: A Solution by Myron Stagman is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. £34.99 . ISBN: 978-1443814409.

A sample of the book is available here.

The Noughties: Pessimism

Bank of America, Bank of China, AIG, Ritz, Cheong Kong, Hong Kong Club, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Jardine House, Intl Finance Centre, Four Seasons, The Center, Cosco, Hongkong, originally uploaded by hanneorla.

If there’s something I’ve been reminded of in this decade, it’s that financial systems are all connected and that a person in a posh shirt or blouse abstractly shifting small numbers across a screen in the hopes that they become bigger numbers has the capacity to effect the everyday lives of dozens even hundreds of their fellow humans at the click of a mouse, the tap of a key. I can’t imagine what it’s like to have that power, but equally I can’t imagine having that power and not making sure I was aware of the results of my actions, of being shut out from the process. Over and over I’ve heard early digital gold-rushers, usually those who’ve lost their job too and have some distance, note that they simply didn’t know, or even if they did know that they shut that out of the equation simply so that they could do their job.

But when I hear these stories, I don’t shrink away in horror, I want to offer sympathy. Because in the end they, and we, are just part of the system. When I was working in the credit card centre, and call centres in general in fact, I was very conscious of being part of the machine. I’d say it to myself whenever I had a bad call as a way of remembering that whatever the person on the other end of the line said wasn’t personal and that indeed they were as much part of the machine as I was, that other pressures, professional or personal, will have led them to having that attitude. It’s all wheels within wheels, and even those of use who think we’ve dropped out of society, are working against the system, are probably part of the system ourselves, a kind of fail safe in case the mechanism slips out of control.

Oh, Fonzie ...

[via]

The Noughties: Film. Part Two.

Manic Pixie Dream Girls

An apparent film construct, and originally so named by Nathan Rabin in this seminal AV Club article, I’ve known a fair view manic pixie dream girls real life and if I’m being really honest, been in love with most of them. Which is why it’s entirely gratifying that the noughties has seen the exponential increase in their appearance on film. You know the type, the mysterious, funny, beautiful girls next door who turn up in some geek’s stolid existence and give them the experience which turns their life around. In old Hollywood, typecasting led to some actors playing cops, lawyers, doctors and politicians their entire lives. Some actors (female and oddly male) spent the noughties playing manic pixie dream girls (or boys) over and over and over again.



The holy trinity are arguably Zooey Deschanel, Natalie Portman and Kirsten Dunst though as Rabin notes, Elisha Cuthbert could be added, and not just for My Sassy Girl – what about Love Actually and The Girl Next Door? But there have been some one hit wonders. Rie Rasmussen in Angel-A (assuming her height doesn’t disqualify her). Norah Jones in My Blueberry Nights. Kat Dennings in Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist. Amy Adams in Enchanted. Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation. Even Maggie Gyllenhal has a sinister twist on the type to her name with her unruly gold digger from Don Roos’s Happy Endings. Though we have to be careful with definitions. Do these stop being Manic Pixie Dream Girls if the films shows us too much about them?

Film Journalism

In the Noughties, everyone became a critic. I should know. At the risk of repeating a hundred op-ed columns on the subject with the advent of blogging and later twitter it’s possible to read thousands upon thousands of voices giving their opinions on new films. If the latest studio financial experiment is indeed rubbish, you’ll know about it weeks or months before you get to see it, even something like Avatar which is about as locked down as films can be. When Ang Lee’s underrated Hulk opened, it flopped overnight because of people texting their friends to tell them not to go. Since Twitter went mainstream, that is not a rare occurrence. Film writing as a discipline has eroded and paradoxically, despite the increased availability of material, an understanding of basic concepts is simply missing from this kind of discourse. Too often I’ll read reviews from people who’ve missed what the director was trying to do or will dismiss a work as boring or pretentious simply because it’s not treating the audience with contempt and with some intelligence (like Ang Lee’s Hulk).



Which I still find myself returning to those professional critics, and especially those critics or groups of critics with years of experience, with a track record. Mark Kermode (even though he’s wrong about Synecdoche, New York and a great many other things). Sight and Sound for independent, international and historical releases. Empire Magazine out of habit and for blockbusters. Time Out for the second opinion and because they’ll often review a film based on whether it’s a good example of its type. Beyond all of that and if I’m in a hurry or I just want a spoiler free percentage of star rating (it happens), it’s the aggregated but still informed opinions at Rotten Tomatoes Top Critics or Metacritics. The instant opinion of peers has its place, but there’s nothing quite like the informed opinion of someone who’s seen more films than you and can see where Sandra Bullocks’s new opus fits within film history. The importance and regard for that has reduced during the noughties and when it’s something very precious that should be preserved.

Cinema

This was the decade when I stopped going into cinemas. During the nineties, this was a weekly pursuit, often greeting three films in a day. But somewhere in and around 2003 I got out of the habit and it’s very rare that I’ll see the inside of an auditorium now. Initially this wasn’t a conscious decision, but a string of poor experiences over time have led me to consider the proper release of films to be on dvd and to look forward to Lovefilm sending me a copy. Often I don’t even know when something is being released at the cinema unless I hear Mark Kermode reviewing it. Which is quite a change from someone who actually kept a diary, diligently copying them over from Empire Magazine each month.



The cost of tickets has skyrocketed; there’s really no justification for charging eight pounds to see a film, especially if it will then be available at roughly the same price or cheaper two or three months later (factoring in travel expenses). Attending the cinema is a different experience of course, but at home there’s less chance that you’ll have to deal with total strangers talking all of the way through the film, running around the auditorium and laughing inappropriately during tense moments (all of which happened during my first viewing of The Dark Knight). I’m not sure if cinema audiences have got considerably worse behaved over the time or if my tolerance level has reduced, but I really can’t understand why someone would pay those prices and then not bother to watch the film.

Getting It Wrong.

Both of which lead to my most surprising discovery of this decade – that all too often studios, some critics and even other humans don’t seem to know anything about film. Time and again, over and over, there have been films this decade which I’ve been beguiled by, which I’ve thought were impressive, interesting, even classic additions to the canon, which others have dismissed out of hand, marked as artistic failures or which haven’t managed to find an audience for one reason or another. I mentioned some of them in my old Forgotten films project. Arrogantly I assume it’s because I have an innate ability to see what the director or writer were trying to achieve which others don’t, but it’s more likely that I’m just different. 'Twas forever thus.



Just for the record, here are some of the films this decade which I’ve loved against the tide of popular and critical opinion and this is just what I can see on my dvd shelf from where I’m sitting: My Blueberry Nights, Hollywoodland, Heaven (Twyker), Tristan & Isolde, Easy Virtue, AI, Intolerable Cruelty, Charlie Wilson’s War, The Family Stone, Planet Terror, Across The Universe, Rent, The Fountain, The Beach, Angel-A, Paris J’Taime, Kate & Leopold, Music & Lyrics, Sunshine, Stranger Than Fiction, Superman Returns, Jersey Girl, King Arthur, 13 Conversations about one thing, Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen, Bubble, Elizabethtown, Full Frontal, The Island and The Italian Job (remake). I’d include The Happening too but I’m still not sure what “Night” was trying to do. Why would anyone do that on purpose?

just the right amount of Lewis Carroll

Liverpool Life Artist Ed Purver recently visited Liverpool and saw the empty streets of Anfield. He was inspired to suggest this rather mind blowing site specific art project which has just the right amount of Lewis Carroll about it to impress me:

Ed Purver - On the Street sketches from Liverpool Biennial on Vimeo.

He talks about his inspiration on the Liverpool Biennial blog:

"So it’s a strange thing to experience this in Liverpool, of all places, which is home to some of the warmest, most expressive people in the whole country. It is a city that is overflowing with personality, and so it is even more of a disturbing experience to visit these places where personality has been removed.

"In Anfield, around the ‘V streets’, I sometimes felt like I was walking through a micro ghost town. It made me think again about ghosts, phantoms and phantom limbs, about who were both here and not here. Who used to be here? Who would still be living here in these houses if they hadn’t been slated for demolition? What would it look like to ‘repopulate’ these houses with these ‘ghosts’?"

Parts of the Smithdown Road area are similar. Some of these aren't the best houses every thrown up, but we always must question the demolishing of one set of houses simply top build new ones. Seems like an awful lot of effort.

neither by the looks of things had Jane Lapataire

Elsewhere I've reviewed John Barton's book Playing Shakespeare:

"In the session on speeches, Barton explains quite correctly that the great soliloquys are about the actor communicating their mood to the audience, something too often forgotten when Hamlet strolls onto the stage then looks at the ceiling. As Barton notes on the dvd (and I hadn’t realised this and neither by the looks of things had Jane Lapataire who's sitting next to him), “To Be Or Not To Be” is not only a series of questions but also the only soliloquy in the whole of Shakespeare without a personal pronoun, immediately externalising the choice that Hamlet has to make."

'Playing Shakespeare' by John Barton.

Co-founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, John Barton was, with Trevor Nunn and Peter Hall, one of the legendary theatre directors whose work and acting collaborations in the mid twentieth century would effect the course of Shakespeare on stage in successive decades. His biography includes a range of landmark production through the sixties and seventies (including the 1969 Twelfth Night with Judi Dench as Viola, and the 1970 A Midsummer Night's Dream with Patrick Stewart as Oberon), and with his abilities in helping actors through workshops, his presence and influence are felt even further.

In 1984, Channel 4 commissioned Playing Shakespeare, a television series based on such workshops and during twelve sessions, Barton and range of actors including Peggy Ashcroft, Sinead Cusack, Judi Dench, Sheila Hancock, Ben Kingsley, Jane Lapotaire, Ian McKellan, Roger Rees, Donald Sinden, Patrick Stewart, David Suchet, Michael Williams and range of other (most still yet to feel the breeze of international fame) worked speeches and scenes and sonnets within a rehearsal situation before a studio audience. Unseen for years, the series has been available on dvd.

The book of the series, Playing Shakespeare, recently reprinted, is a transcript of the sessions, augmented by Barton to clarify material that might not be quite so apparent in the transfer from video to page, and augmented with extra material which had to be cut from the television series for time (and commercials). First published in 1984, Barton still stands behind the material and so rather than updating the text, has been tucked in the back featuring new interviews with Stewart, McKellan, Dench and Lapotaire considering what has changed in Shakespearean theatre between now and then.

Barton's wisdom begins with Hamlet’s “speak the speech” dialogue from Act III in which he reminds the players to project the words naturally and with some truth and not to simply “mouth it as many of our players do” otherwise he might as well get the town crier to do the work. The director’s thesis is that though the characters and themes of the plays are important, it’s vital that the text should be communicated with the utmost accuracy otherwise the audience will not be able to make sense of the story and even the language can seem overwhelming, Shakespeare gives clues throughout as so how it should be spoken.

To this end, throughout these sessions, Barton purposefully ignores what the plays are about and gives minimal direction in terms of the characters. Instead he pulls apart the syntax of the words, the stress patterns, noting when antithesis is being employed and monosyllables demonstrating that though there is poetry in Shakespeare, the playwright is just as interested in pointing the actor towards the emotion he is conveying, which unavoidable, through a handy bit of circular logic, leads the actor to understand to internalise the character they are playing.

In the session on speeches, Barton explains quite correctly that the great soliloquys are about the actor communicating their mood to the audience, something too often forgotten when Hamlet strolls onto the stage then looks at the ceiling. As Barton notes on the dvd (and I hadn’t realised this and neither by the looks of things had Jane Lapataire who's sitting next to him), “To Be Or Not To Be” is not only a series of questions, but also the only soliloquy in the whole of Shakespeare without a personal pronoun immediately externalising the choice that Hamlet has to make.

A set text amongst actors, Playing Shakespeare best serves the layman in its general discussions of acting and Shakespeare’s use of language. The sessions considering what Barton calls the “two traditions” of Elizabethan and modern acting, the use of sonnets as rehearsal pieces, the discussion of different approaches to playing Shylock with Stewart and Suchet and an extended interview with McKellan about the challenges of producing contemporary Shakespeare (well contemporary in 1984) can't help but illuminate our viewing experience.

These probably work best because they’re far more discussional rather than going about the business of working the text. But the book can sometimes be a frustrating experience because though Barton’s intelligence is undimmed, as he acknowledges himself, a few of the sessions hinge on the audience hearing the modifications an actor is making to a speech, and obviously that is lost on the page. Yet it's worth persevering because every now and then you're bound to find a new way of thinking about a character. The section on irony and Richard II has led me to rethink my reaction to the play.

Though the chat with Ian McKellen on the dvd largely reiterates what was said in the text and Judi Dench offers some funny anecdotes about the recording of Playing Shakespeare, Hamlet casts a shadow over the retrospective interviews. Barton has Lapataire workshop “To Be Or Not To Be”, which in isolation she turns from the insecure musings of a teenager into the morbid fears of an older woman and the interview and Patrick Stewart, recorded in the midst of his run as Claudius in the RSC Hamlet, demonstrates, through each their opening lines, the differences between Hamlet’s uncle, the ghost and Macbeth helping to confirm the logic of Barton’s thinking that all you need to know about a character is in the sound of their words.

Playing Shakespeare by John Barton is published by Methuen Drama. £18.99. ISBN: 978-0713687736.

Japanese title cards

Film Having watched the whole of Max Mon Amour this afternoon I can tell you that everything you need to know about it is in this trailer. Despite the Japanese title cards, it's fairly clear what is being implied, and you'd be right. The director, Nagisa Ôshima, who previously released Ai no corrida and Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, did not work for another thirteen years:



Some answers to your questions.

(a) Yes.
(b) Yes, indeed.
(c) 18 certificate.
(d) No. Though the husband hires a prostitute to see if it's even possible.
(e) Laughed all of the way through. Mostly because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Sometimes it looks like a comedy, but everything is being played very, very straight.
(f) A Disney film. Or Bunuel.
(g) Yes, despite all of that, I still feel like I've seen everything now.
(h) £7.98.

Moo minicards

Life I always thought it would be quite ostentatious to have business cards with my email address, twitter details and the URL of this blog on them. Then I saw the small Moo minicards being handed out here and there and after weeks and weeks of mental itching I decided to order a box full. Each of the cards has one of the hundred things about me printed on the reverse side (with a few contemporary modifications) so they're all unique, and I dare say, conversation pieces.

Why not the BBC?

BBC Much as a love the BBC's podcast directory and all of its wares the one black spot is in the area of RSS feeds. On the iPlayer, it's possible to subscribe to a whole channel's output, or by genre, or both. For some reason, this isn't possible with the podcast range, you can't subscribe to a feed of everything from Radio Four, or Three or Five. No genre support either. Which means if you're interested in interview or documentaries you have to scoot through the whole site and subscribe to them all individually.

Since there doesn't seem to be an easy way of contacted the BBC, nothing in the way of a simple electronic suggestion box, I thought I'd pop it on here instead in the hopes that someone from the BBC internet team might find it through a referral. I know this wouldn't be very user friendly for iTuners, but we users of RSS readers would be able to pick and choose from the range from programmes when something interests us and there's less chance of us missing a new podcast when it begins. The Guardian has a single feed for all of its podcasts. Why not the BBC?

probably even Coldplay

Spotify Alicia Keys's album is ok, but it's not the kind of thing you could stand to listen to more than once. One of the problems is that all of the songs remind me of something else, probably even Coldplay (a bit). All of them. Some examples, with links to the Keys track on Spotify, for those of you who have Premium:

The Bible
Gabriella Cilmi's "Awkward Game"
Beyonce's "If I Were A Boy"
Pussycat Dolls's "Stickwityou"
The Kids From Fame
Richard Marx "I Will Be Right Here Waiting For You"
Derrivative R&B. Take your pick.
Bonnie Tyler
Early Destiny's Child
Featuring Beyonce. Also a bit Salt N Pepa.
Hill Street Blues

Ultimately, then, a major step down from the genius Songs In A Minor which still sounds fresh and new.

The Noughties: Film

As studios run scared from ploughing too much money into experimental choices and with mainstream cinemas essentially offering what used to be called summer blockbusters all year round, I've generally retreated to dvd and a tv screen. The mainstream media is already putting together plenty of worthwhile review lists, so rather than copy them, I thought I'd simply talk about my own obsessions:

William Shakespeare

There haven’t been any truly great Shakespeare films over the past decade. Plenty of noble attempts in the slipstream of the late 90s teen cycle with Michael Almereyda’s city set Hamlet with Ethan Hawke in the lead and Michael Radford lucid Merchant of Venice that had Al Paccino’s Shylock striding about real locations both noble experiments. After the triumph of Hamlet in the late 90s, Ken Branagh went back into acting with his Macbeth project left unmade. Love’s Labour’s Lost was a fun musical with some lovely performances, but As You Like It was a strange disappointment, never quite gelling until the epilogue with Bryce Dallas Howard taking us on a tour of the production trucks (but it could have been that it just didn’t measure up to the remarkable Globe production I’d recently seen).



In the main the bard’s own language has taken a back seat in adaptation, either within a teen setting (O, She’s The Man) or international locations (Omkara, Ye Yan) sometimes illuminating the original story but often obscuring it. Otherwise the best works has been about the history of Shakespeare in production. Stage Beauty cleverly pulled the Stanislavsky technique backwards in time a couple of centuries to demonstrate the change in the acting process brought about by the introduction of women into the profession. At the other end of the decade Me and Orson Welles and me, coincidentally also starring Claire Danes is receiving great notices. I can’t wait.

Hyperlink films

Or the subject of my dissertation. Multi-stranded narratives were nothing new. Shakespeare, Dickens and Tolstoy all wrote in that style, and examples appeared throughout the first century of cinema from DW Griffith, MGM and Robert Altman. But during the noughties they became the key approach to covering a social issue, with drugs (Traffic), globalisation (Syriana), fast food (Fast Food Nation), karaoke (Duets), border politics (Happy Endings), race (Crash) and love actually being all around (Love Actually) covered.



They lost traction later in the decade because although having dozens of characters allows for dozens of star names and famous faces on posters, the sheer process of editing these behemoths has led to directors and studios shying away – plus despite cache they only ever tend to be moderate box office successes. With the exception of Altman, few come back and make one again. The original cut of Love Actually was three and half hours and was absolute torture for Richard Curtis to deal with. You can tell at the climax because Martin Freeman seems to drop Joanna Page off at the end of a date and then we’re expected to believe he picked her up again and they went to a nativity. On Christmas Eve. Um, no.

Harry Potter

The decade began with the Lord of the Rings spread over three Christmases and I could write volumes about that, crying over the sight of an Olyphant again as I go, but to an extent the Harry Potter films are the more interesting choice because of their longevity; the chance to see these child actors slowly develop their craft (under the tutelage of some legendary British stage and screen presences) and age into talented teenagers across the series, which isn’t something you can otherwise see outside of soap opera or long running sitcoms.



Most Hollywood franchise things also become very bothered with the business of making sure the main character has a goal which is set up at the beginning and is dealt with at the climax. The Potter films inadvertently appropriate the alternative narrative style of the art house, in which a collection of incidents cumulatively lead to a story, with only the broadest of linking tissue between the scenes. Not everything is clear, sometimes we don’t really know why something is happening. It’s as a result of adapting huge books into two and half hours and having to chop whole swathes of J K Rowling’s text and relying on the fact that a large percentage of the audience will have read the story already and will know this information. But if you’re simply keeping with the films they can at times be as entertainingly scatter-shot and obscure as an Andrei Tarkovsky film and all the better for it.

DVD rental by post

One my key responses to most film related questions over the past decade as been “it’s on my list” meaning, no, because of the fragmentation of production and the fact my interests tend to run counter to whatever happens to be in the cinema at a given moment I haven’t seen that Neil Gaiman inspired animation/documentary about a faded rock band/Moon but I will do when Lovefilm decide to send it to me because I’ve asked them to. For film fans, dvd rental by post is a liberation.



Instead of having to wait for television to have one of its rate fits of taste and show some world cinema/old Hollywood noir/John Sayles drama all we do now is add it to our online list and still wait, but in the knowledge that it will come rather than not even knowing which channel has the rights to it. I began the decade working through the BFI’s century of cinema list, continued with film noir and everything Truffaut and Godard directed, worked my way around the voluminous viewing lists for my film course then off into even more obscure areas before pulling back now to try and catch up with whatever I’ve missed at the cinema. For the record, here is everything I watched in 2004.

Woody Allen

Still being a fan, I have a brighter impression of Woody’s decade than most. There’s no denying he got off to a disastrous start with The Curse of the Jade Scorpion and Hollywood Ending which looked cheap and rushed and in which his own on screen comic timing was very clearly faltering. He worked much better as the supporting role in Anything Else, the charms of which really depended upon whether you enjoyed watching Jason Biggs and Christina Ricci rerunning a less intimate version of Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park (I did). Melinda and Melinda was arguably his best film of the decade, telling the same story through comic and tragic filters with a complex performance from Radha Mitchell in both (along with Stranger Than Fiction it’s still about the only Will Ferrell film I can stand to watch all of the way through).



The British films were generally kiboshed by his unsteady hand with writing for English actors, the speech patterns and cultural references basically Dick Van Dyke’s Mary Poppins accent writ large. Cassandra’s Dream is unwatchable – poorly written, unfocused and roughly acted. But Match Point and Scoop are two of Scarlett Johansson’s best films, the little seen latter also has Ian McShane as a ghostly conman. Vicky Christina Barcelona was a proper return to form, and Whatever Works, his first New York film in ages is apparently very good (but yet to have a UK release date. Hello Amazon.fr).

[click here for part two]