Politics When BBC Radio 4's Today programme took the, as presenter John Humphries says, "unusual step" of promising an MP anonymity if he would write about the atmosphere in Westminster and then hide their identity by having their words spoken by an actor, I wonder if they (the MP or Today) were expecting this performance.
Extraordinary, isn't it. Usually when such things are read out, the actor drops into their audiobook voice, not quite monotone, but certainly with a degree of neutrality. Here, whoever the actor is (he sounds a bit like the late Alistair Cooke) gives it a level of emotional intensity that borders on the ludicrous, as though he's appearing at the National, Olivier Award on standby.
If this wasn't on a news programme I would have been impressed; he is very effective. As he says "I'm not corrupt. I didn't come into this for the money", the expression is so convincing you can almost see him, an old political warhorse, sitting in his office at Westminster, revolver resting on a typed suicide note, glass of ancient whiskey in his left hand confessing his sins to Harry Pearce from Spooks, who's hawk-like glare is almost willing his right hand towards the gun.
But this was on a news programme and eventually I corpsed at the sheer ludicrousness of what I was hearing, and was still laughing when the actor reached what he (and the MP) hoped was the apotheosis ("That's what makes it such a nightmare, and a nightmare that may never end.") and Humphries breathed in audibly before introducing his guests.
Update... Just watched the extended version of Have I Got News For You (because what's the point of the Friday version?) and noticed that Paul Merton, I think, make a comment about someone with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and gun in the other in relation to the expenses scandal. "Great" minds, etc.
not awful
TV Here are some clips from a pilot that wasn't picked up by the CW network in the US. It's fairly entertaining, but also strangely familiar:
It took me a couple of seconds, then I realised: it has to be the work of someone who's watched This Life and Party Animals and decided to do that, except set it in Washington. It's not awful, just familiar.
It took me a couple of seconds, then I realised: it has to be the work of someone who's watched This Life and Party Animals and decided to do that, except set it in Washington. It's not awful, just familiar.
geocities rescue
Ma Histoire de Film
At the risk of sounding like a character from ‘The Fast Show’ some hobbies are with you a short time and others are with you your whole life – something like a first love. It all started one day I was sitting in The Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds watching ‘Ba wang bie je’ (Farewell My Concubine) in a sold out screening getting excited by the machinations of Chinese opera. Where else could a subject like this create such an emotion but in the cinema? The following week, when someone shushed me during ‘Como agua para chocolate’ (Like Water For Chocolate) because I was getting into the story, I knew what my first hobby/love/interest was.
My first film (at the cinema I think) was ‘Pete’s Dragon’ of all things. From there I couldn’t say. My first conscious 18 film was ‘Robocop’ which I saw on video when I was 13 or 14. I saw ‘Empire Strikes Back’ before ‘Star Wars’ (and wondered why Luke was trying to kill his Dad); my first film star crush was Virginia Madsen in ‘Electric Dreams’ or possibly Elizabeth Shue in ‘Adventures in Babysitting’; The first film I recorded from the TV was ‘Starcrossed’ the early James Spader classic; My first DVD was ‘The Opposite of Sex’. The second was ‘Pleasantville’. The first film I walked out of was ‘Batman and Robin’, which is probably the worst film I’ve ever seen (or at least it was -- the older version of me).
Extract from Madeline Peyroux's "Bag of Bones"
In the title track of her sublime new album Bare Bones, Madeline Peyroux writing the lyrics herself for the first time, uses Hamlet to talk about the recent death of her father. She sings:
"Old Hamlet's done now, dead and gone
And there's no ghost who walks
Poor Yorrick tells you everything he knows
With no tongue to talk"
As she told The Telegraph: "I looked for ideas in literature [...] I checked out a few writers that I hadn't been able to grasp: Lorca, Neruda. I even tried Dante's Inferno because I wanted to look at the Christian idea of salvation in another poetic light outside the Bible."
That's in interesting way of looking at the play: to an extent perhaps the errant Hamlet, which is somewhat how he's portrayed at the outset is seeking salvation from his ways by seeking his dead father's revenge. Peyroux herself has had a chequered history -- is she implying that she too is trying to become a respectable person?
"Old Hamlet's done now, dead and gone
And there's no ghost who walks
Poor Yorrick tells you everything he knows
With no tongue to talk"
As she told The Telegraph: "I looked for ideas in literature [...] I checked out a few writers that I hadn't been able to grasp: Lorca, Neruda. I even tried Dante's Inferno because I wanted to look at the Christian idea of salvation in another poetic light outside the Bible."
That's in interesting way of looking at the play: to an extent perhaps the errant Hamlet, which is somewhat how he's portrayed at the outset is seeking salvation from his ways by seeking his dead father's revenge. Peyroux herself has had a chequered history -- is she implying that she too is trying to become a respectable person?
an entertaining experiment
Film Hitch’s one and only romantic comedy, Mr & Mrs Smith is a bit of a misfire though it’s still an entertaining experiment. It’s a comedy of remarriage in which the couple discover that their original certificate was invalid and Mr Smith has to prove to his wife why they should continue to be together. The kind of story Billy Wilder or George Cukor would have treated with a light touch, under Hitchcock the material becomes rather leaden so that though the jokes are in there, Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery are sexy performances (Lombard in her next to last performance before her untimely death) and the viewer knows what’s supposed to be funny, you find yourself watching stony faced not entirely sure why it’s not working.
In their book on the master, Rhomer and Chabrol suggest that it’s because unlike other romantic comedies which are shot in an objective style, Hitch decided to shoot everything subjectively, we’re forced to identify with the characters which undercuts the laughter: “Generally speaking American comedy gets it effects from the assumption of objective observation: it is a report on madness. Here, we are accomplices of the characters. The laughter, when if does arise, abruptly shrivels up: the “gag” is not funny to the person at whose expense it is carried out.” In other words, because we’re identifying with both characters at the same time, we’re too sympathetic to the concerns of the both of them to laugh when there’s a gag at the expense of either of them.
I’d argue that it’s inherent in all romantic comedies that we have to identify with both parties, it’s just that in most cases it’s turned on and off depending on the needs of the story and more often than not we’re asked to identify with one character more than the other. Up until this point, all of Hitch’s romances have been from the male perspective. In Mr & Mrs Smith, Hitch attempts to balance our sympathies across the couple and because we can see why she thinks he’s a slop and why he thinks she’s being unreasonable we don’t really know where to look. You can’t blame the director for trying something new and it is still more entertaining watching his failure, clearly the work of someone who loves the medium, than sitting through yet another cynical exercise in high concept unhilarity directed by Andy Tennant and starring Sarah Jessica Parker.
Hitch doesn't have much to say about the film when talking to Truffaut. He says he was 'tricked' into it because he wanted to work with Lombard and just followed the script as it appeared on the page clearly unhappy himself with the results. Years before, annoyed with the attitude of some people in the profession, the director had described actors as being little more than cattle. This was Carole's chance at revenge for that. When he appeared on the stage the first day, Hitch found that she's had some corrals erected and inside three cows, each with name tags around their necks, one for her, one for Robert and one for Hitchcock!
in his medieval phase
Music I'm trusting you Mr Spotify.
In the ongoing battle with the stuff virus that threatens to consume my whole room and me with it, I've sorted through and had a clear out of my cassettes. I was quite late in buying a cd player, so well into the nineties spool-to-spool was still my primary source of music, but eventually shiny-disc took over and most of them were consigned to a crate under the bed where they've sat unloved for too long.
Time to send them to the charity shop. What surprised me was how easy it was to sort through. I'd expected sentimentality and memories but I felt nothing as I put some of these slightly worn sacred objects into the carrier bag. If the sixteen year old version of me had known that I'd be getting rid of that copy of Debbie Gibson's Anything Is Possible, he would have made two copies and put the original in a bank vault.
Now I have the cd (!). Rule one. If I have the cd, it's gone. Rule two: if it's on Spotify, it's gone. I know this means I'm trusting third parties to have this music available to listen to when I'd like, but I've not listened to most of it from tape in years anyway so if its not there, I'm not sure it's too much of a loss. If anything it's made me want to go and listen to it again. I'd forgotten about Voice of the Beehive, Coldcut, The Lilys.
In Spotify related news, they've added a label search. It looks like this:
label:"virgin"
or whoever.
It's as bog-standard as the genre search in that it spews out an unedifying, horrifyingly random list of tracks, but this is another useful way of discovering music if you have the patience to load the whole updated list into view and go random. I'm listen to Virgin at the moment and it's an odd mix or Roxy Music, classical music and Kelis. The most popular track is The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. Do we know where that royalty money is going to these days?
I've also discovered that despite what the record company itself says (and I have emailed and asked) Deutsche Grammophon do have a presence on Spotify to the tune of just under a thousand tracks, mostly Bach, Bryn Terfel, Elvis Costello and Sting in his Medieval phase. Still, it's a start.
In the ongoing battle with the stuff virus that threatens to consume my whole room and me with it, I've sorted through and had a clear out of my cassettes. I was quite late in buying a cd player, so well into the nineties spool-to-spool was still my primary source of music, but eventually shiny-disc took over and most of them were consigned to a crate under the bed where they've sat unloved for too long.
Time to send them to the charity shop. What surprised me was how easy it was to sort through. I'd expected sentimentality and memories but I felt nothing as I put some of these slightly worn sacred objects into the carrier bag. If the sixteen year old version of me had known that I'd be getting rid of that copy of Debbie Gibson's Anything Is Possible, he would have made two copies and put the original in a bank vault.
Now I have the cd (!). Rule one. If I have the cd, it's gone. Rule two: if it's on Spotify, it's gone. I know this means I'm trusting third parties to have this music available to listen to when I'd like, but I've not listened to most of it from tape in years anyway so if its not there, I'm not sure it's too much of a loss. If anything it's made me want to go and listen to it again. I'd forgotten about Voice of the Beehive, Coldcut, The Lilys.
In Spotify related news, they've added a label search. It looks like this:
label:"virgin"
or whoever.
It's as bog-standard as the genre search in that it spews out an unedifying, horrifyingly random list of tracks, but this is another useful way of discovering music if you have the patience to load the whole updated list into view and go random. I'm listen to Virgin at the moment and it's an odd mix or Roxy Music, classical music and Kelis. The most popular track is The Verve's Bittersweet Symphony. Do we know where that royalty money is going to these days?
I've also discovered that despite what the record company itself says (and I have emailed and asked) Deutsche Grammophon do have a presence on Spotify to the tune of just under a thousand tracks, mostly Bach, Bryn Terfel, Elvis Costello and Sting in his Medieval phase. Still, it's a start.
is wonderful
Radio This week on the BBC Radio 4 blog, the network's announcers are being given the opportunity to talk about their job. It's also a chance to show us the personality which tends to be submerged when reading out the Shipping Forecast. Here's Cathy Clugston. She's funny:
Kathy's also on Twitter. Her biog is wonderful: "Amazonian anosmic newsreading ukuleleist."
"3.30AM The alarm goes off, but it doesn't bother me. That's because I'm already staring at it. In fact, I've been staring at it on-and-off since about two o'clock, when I jolted awake after a horrible dream in which I overslept until half past seven, raced in to find Radio 4 on a loop of Sailing By and got told off by James Naughtie, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon and my old primary school teacher Miss Carruth. Still, it could have been worse. I could have been naked."Much the same thing happens to me now. I've been waking up at seven o'clock every day for months now, and I too can anticipate the alarm. I also can't even attempt to have a lie in because I wake up anyway. At least it's not 2am. That is early.
Kathy's also on Twitter. Her biog is wonderful: "Amazonian anosmic newsreading ukuleleist."
great piece of advertising
Film I hate, hate, hate the films of Guy Ritchie. They're hateful, laddish things, filled with horrifying stereotypes doing nasty things to one another, self-consciously arty to the point of artlessness. Unless they're about his ex-wife on a beach. Then I saw the trailer for his new Sherlock Holmes film:
Wow, that's a -- great piece of advertising. Some things to think about:
(1) Holmes was filmed rather a lot in Liverpool and if you know the sit well enough, you can spend much of it's duration saying: "That's ... that's ... that's ..."
(2) Mr Downey Jr seems to be continuing his renaissance. That's a unique and interesting interpretation of Mr Holmes.
(3) Rachel McAdams. In a corset. Just saying.
(4) Seems to be a spoofier production in the vein of Without A Clue.
(5) Linguistically it sounds just right.
Wow, that's a -- great piece of advertising. Some things to think about:
(1) Holmes was filmed rather a lot in Liverpool and if you know the sit well enough, you can spend much of it's duration saying: "That's ... that's ... that's ..."
(2) Mr Downey Jr seems to be continuing his renaissance. That's a unique and interesting interpretation of Mr Holmes.
(3) Rachel McAdams. In a corset. Just saying.
(4) Seems to be a spoofier production in the vein of Without A Clue.
(5) Linguistically it sounds just right.
satisfyingly parochial
TV Understated entertainer John Barrowman's countrywide bearhug staggers into the Liverpool Phil tonight. Here he is grinning out from the What's On page in the Echo:
And here's the actual listing, which I think is about the most satisfyingly parochial thing I've ever seen:
Which proves that when you think about it, Liverpool's just a massive version of Stars Hollow or some other small town. Isn't St. George's Hall just our posh community centre?
And here's the actual listing, which I think is about the most satisfyingly parochial thing I've ever seen:
Which proves that when you think about it, Liverpool's just a massive version of Stars Hollow or some other small town. Isn't St. George's Hall just our posh community centre?
My ears!
Game The music of this pixelgame, Underworld, sounds like it was recorded by Malcolm Clarke. It's quite the most imitating aural experience my headphones have had [via]. My ears! My ears!
a few possible libels along the way
Politics The reaction to UK speaker Michael Martin's statement was one of the most exciting pieces of parliamentary coverage in many a year. BBC News Channel played it well by holding back the commentary and simply letting the drama unfold as MPs stood and actually asked the man to his face when he'd be resigned, why the resolution to get rid of him wasn't being debated and offering a few possible libels along the way.
Not that any of this stopped the whole thing from turning into this scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. In case you're wondering, in this scenario, Reg is Michael Martin, the PFJ are the Labour Party and Judith is Douglas Carswell, the Conservative backbencher who is putting forward the motion of no confidence:
Not that any of this stopped the whole thing from turning into this scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. In case you're wondering, in this scenario, Reg is Michael Martin, the PFJ are the Labour Party and Judith is Douglas Carswell, the Conservative backbencher who is putting forward the motion of no confidence:
AT THE POPULAR FRONT OF JUDEA's HEADQUARTERS:Hopefully the actual vote of no confidence will not be like The Phantom Menace.
REG Right, now, eh. Item four: attainment of world supremacy within the next
five years. Eh, Francis, you've been doing some work on this.
FRANCIS Yeah, thank you, Reg. Well, quite frankly, siblings, I think five years is
optimistic, unless we can smash the Roman empire within the next twelve
months.
REG Twelve months?
FRANCIS Yeah. Twelve months. And let's face it... as empires go, this is the big
one, so we've got to get up of our arses, and stop just talking about it.
PFJ Hear hear!
LORETTA I agree. It's action that counts, not words, and we need action now.
PFJ Hear hear!
REG You're right. We could sit around here all day talking, passing resolutions,
making clever speeches, it's not going to shift one Roman soldier.
FRANCIS So let's just stop gabbing on about it, it's completely pointless, and it's
getting us nowhere.
PFJ Right.
LORETTA I agree. This is a complete waste of time.
--[Judith runs in, panicked.]
JUDITH They've arrested Brian!!
PFJ What?
JUDITH They've dragged him off. They're going to crucify him.
REG Right. This calls for immediate discussion!
JUDITH What?!?
REGULAR Immediate.
DIET Right.
LORETTA New motion?
REG Completely new motion. Eh, That, ah. That there be, ah, immediate action...
FRANCIS ... ah, once the vote has been taken.
REG Well, obviously once the vote has been taken, you can't act on a resolution'till you've voted on it!
JUDITH Reg, for God's sake, let's go now, please!
REG Yeah, yeah. Right, right. In the, in the light of fresh information from,
ah, sibling Judith.
LORETTA [taking notes] Ah, not so fast, Reg.
JUDITH Reg, for God's sake. It's perfectly simple. All you've got to do is to go out of that door now, and try to stop the Romans nailing him up. It's happening, Reg! Something's actually HAPPENING, Reg! Can't you understand? Yaaargh! [She rushes out in a rage.]
FRANCIS Oh. Oh dear.
REG Hello... and a little ego-trip for the feminists.
LORETTA What?
REG Ah, oh, sorry, Loretta. Ah, read that back, would you?
shades of grey
TV I've been mulling over whether to buy the Region One release of Dollhouse but this piece which compares the series to Shakespeare's Measure for Measure might just convince me:
"Like “Measure for Measure,” “Dollhouse” is a calculated venture into “dark comedy” – if we mean very, very dark comedy indeed, like Dante’s “Comedy” in the deepest reaches of Hell, where the betrayers of trust are situated. Or it’s Whedon’s venture into “problem comedy” or “tragicomedy.” All of these are labels applied so uneasily to “Measure For Measure,” of course, because in it Shakespeare chooses to give us a noble brother in prison, facing execution for a sexual misdemeanor, who begs his devout little sister to leave her convent and give her body to the magistrate (a man obsessed with her virginity) in exchange for his own life. To put it in the modern vernacular, “you only have to do it once and then you can forget it ever happened/act like it never happened.” This is the dollhouse protocol too, only it’s for a five-year contract and you do it over and over…."Having not seen the series yet, I'll admit to only having glanced through much of the post so as not to spoil anything, but the reaction to the series has been much the same to the general opinion of Measure which is rarely produced and hasn't seen a proper film version. People don't tend to know what they think of it because though it asks a great many questions about the human condition it's also extremely bawdy in places and all of the characters have shades of grey. Other than Hamlet it's my favourite of his plays. So will that mean Dollhouse will be my favourite of the Whedons?
Stand by for action!
Music The best set design from Eurovision on Saturday night was this dystopian nightmare, ironically accompanying the Russian entry:
How ever did the authorities let that slip through? Let's see which passage from its clear inspiration, George Orwell's 1984, most appropriately sums up the process of watching the contest....
"I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. "
Perhaps:
"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
Though in truth it's probably:
"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science."
Or if you're that way inclined:
"This is an emergency! Control must be believed and obeyed! No-one in the colony believes in Macra! There is no such thing as Macra! Macra do not exist! There are no Macra! [...] Stand by for action!"
How ever did the authorities let that slip through? Let's see which passage from its clear inspiration, George Orwell's 1984, most appropriately sums up the process of watching the contest....
"I tell you Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the party, which is collective and immortal. Whatever the party holds to be truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. "
Perhaps:
"Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."
Though in truth it's probably:
"We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science."
Or if you're that way inclined:
"This is an emergency! Control must be believed and obeyed! No-one in the colony believes in Macra! There is no such thing as Macra! Macra do not exist! There are no Macra! [...] Stand by for action!"
The Spotify Playlist
Phonetics
When I was working at the Royal Bank of Scotland, part of the training ritual was to learn this phonetic alphabet so that we'd have a standard, professional way of reading letters back to customers, instead of 'P for Peter, H for Harry, O for Orange' etc. I used to know it backwards, but it seems my brain has since decided it was important to replace portions of that information to make way for the lyrics to Lily Allen's The Fear (here it is sung by The Siberian Chipmunks). Or like whatever. Anyway, in an attempt to relearn what I have learned I've put together this playlist.
a personal vision is self-indulgent
Film At about 3:15 this afternoon, I finally pulled the coat that had been sitting in my lap for two hours over my head as the room swelled with jingly-jangly music and I sat in my own personal darkness trying to gather my thought processes back into a state which would allow me to stand up, put on said coat, pick up my back pack and make my way out of the cinema. The credits were rolling on Charlie Kaufman’s new(ish) film Synecdoche, New York and I simply didn’t know what to do with myself. I was elated, pleased, excited and knew two things. That I couldn’t wait to see it again and again and also that I was looking forward to reading the inevitable film theory spin-offs.
Reviewers have been desperate to label the film a ‘masterpiece’ but none of writing I’ve seen has noted the film’s debt to the great auteurs, giants like Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Resnais, Fellini and Tati, directors who treated their audience with intelligence and respect with work in which ideas took precedence over explaining the plot and offered a visual contract that asked us to use our own imagination and personal experience to explain the order of events and character motivations. Like Kaufman, they’ve also been accused of self-indulgence which isn’t necessarily incorrect; but everyone with a personal vision is self-indulgent and more often than not the really interesting, surprising work comes when that vision hasn’t been compromised.
Many of the films of those directors have moments in which the viewer finds their understanding being stretched, which probably require a pause to check some director’s notes. Synecdoche is replete with such incidents, though like those films too, the ideas and themes coalesce afterwards as they did for me on the train home. That if we’re not all careful we can all find ourselves in a state of recursion trying to recreate the times when we truly comfortable rather than creating something new, a constant state of discontentedness that leads us to miss the moments when we actually should be contented. I'm growing my hair longer again because I remember being happier when I had longer hair. That sort of thing. Or we become afraid of taking risks in case that contentedness is wrecked, leading to a kind of emotional paralysis.
Nothing appears at Google Scholar yet. There’s the fittingly titled, “Debating Inclusion in Synecdoche, New York: A Response to Gresham and MacMillan” which is about “the comparative development of socialization skills in children with disabilities placed in inclusive or non-inclusive educational programs” but these things take time, critical mass must build, the film is too new. In interviews, Kaufman has said that he only wants to create films which lead to at least one conversation afterwards and he must have succeeded; for years to come I suspect, people will be debating the meaning of the work, from its structure to themes to meaning and not just in film classes, but psychonalysis courses. And mathematics labs too.
Reviewers have been desperate to label the film a ‘masterpiece’ but none of writing I’ve seen has noted the film’s debt to the great auteurs, giants like Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Resnais, Fellini and Tati, directors who treated their audience with intelligence and respect with work in which ideas took precedence over explaining the plot and offered a visual contract that asked us to use our own imagination and personal experience to explain the order of events and character motivations. Like Kaufman, they’ve also been accused of self-indulgence which isn’t necessarily incorrect; but everyone with a personal vision is self-indulgent and more often than not the really interesting, surprising work comes when that vision hasn’t been compromised.
Many of the films of those directors have moments in which the viewer finds their understanding being stretched, which probably require a pause to check some director’s notes. Synecdoche is replete with such incidents, though like those films too, the ideas and themes coalesce afterwards as they did for me on the train home. That if we’re not all careful we can all find ourselves in a state of recursion trying to recreate the times when we truly comfortable rather than creating something new, a constant state of discontentedness that leads us to miss the moments when we actually should be contented. I'm growing my hair longer again because I remember being happier when I had longer hair. That sort of thing. Or we become afraid of taking risks in case that contentedness is wrecked, leading to a kind of emotional paralysis.
Nothing appears at Google Scholar yet. There’s the fittingly titled, “Debating Inclusion in Synecdoche, New York: A Response to Gresham and MacMillan” which is about “the comparative development of socialization skills in children with disabilities placed in inclusive or non-inclusive educational programs” but these things take time, critical mass must build, the film is too new. In interviews, Kaufman has said that he only wants to create films which lead to at least one conversation afterwards and he must have succeeded; for years to come I suspect, people will be debating the meaning of the work, from its structure to themes to meaning and not just in film classes, but psychonalysis courses. And mathematics labs too.
geocities rescue
Female Vocalism
A couple of years ago I was filtering through my CD collection working out what I would end up selling at Vinyl Exchange. I realised that other than film soundtracks and compilations, all I seemed to have was the work of female vocalists and particularly, obscure female vocalists. The list reads like a ‘who’s who’ of ‘who the hell’ . . . odd thing is how many actually have official web sites.
The only the conclusion I can come to as to why I’ve less Travis and more Tori Amos is reality. Other than this new wave of bands, your Semisonics and Stereophonics, male writers tend to write about the fantasy of a situation whereas your average angry grrrl will offer the reality.
It’s the on-going contrast between the shutdown emotions of the male and the open feelings of the female. Looking at the male members of my music collection I begin to see a trend. Bob Dylan, REM, Hootie and the Blowfish and The Devlins tend to write about their feelings, certainly more than the Bryan (I was twelve in 1969) Adams’ of this worlds.
Plus there is definitely a lot more expression in the voice of the average Lisa Loeb. In a female vocal track, there is more likely to be that heartbreaking note which scares the bejesus out of you.
Discuss . . .
Joseph Goebbels was, well not a fan exactly
Film One of the best elements of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca was the serpent-like performance of supporting actor George Sanders as an old friend of the old Mrs De Winter and he was back again for Hitch’s other film of 1940, Foreign Correspondent, this time as an altogether more charming British newspaperman who helps the lead character, Joel McCrea the foreign correspondent, to his story about the assassination of a foreign diplomat at the edge of the second world war. Their banter is definitely one of the highlights, and it’s a shame that Hitch wasn’t interested in franchises since a whole series could have spun off about these two men travelling the world chasing down exclusives as war crashes about around them with Laraine Day constantly on their tale ready to pull them back from the edge.
In his book on film genre, Film/Genre, theorist Rick Altman talks about how films, in an effort to appeal to as wide a market as possible can no longer be pigeon-holed in the old Hollywood tradition -- western, gangster, screwball, woman's film and in an attempt to appeal to as wide an audience as possible blend them together. Hitch was ahead of the game here as well, since Foreign Correspondent was already doing much the same thing forty years early. Within its two hours, Hitch manages to drop in elements of newspaper films, spy dramas, romantic comedy, war films, noir, travelogue, political thriller and even a disaster movie and so cunningly that it doesn’t draw attention to itself in the same way as, for example, From Dusk Till Dawn which very specifically wanted its audience to know it was incoherently slipping into a different genre mid-stream (and arguably becoming a better film in the process).
He even managed to attract the very enemy he was working against. Joseph Goebbels was, well not a fan exactly but enamoured enough to call it a masterpiece of the form, “a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries.” What Goebbels might have been picking up on is that Hitch is careful not to portray the enemy within the film in completely black and white terms -- in at least one case we're clearly supposed to have a sympathetic reaction because the man is defending his country just as McCrea and Sanders are defending theres. They commit despicable crimes yet we find ourselves readily identifying ourselves with them and Hitch is demonstrating that there's nothing scarier than an enemy hiding in plain sight who we probably quite like.
misdealings
Politics David Bartlett from the Liverpool Daily Post has an excellent piece about the expenses scandal:
"Being an MP should be a privilege, it is not a right. Yet some of these MPs have behaved like they had a divine right not only to hold office but to also pretty much fleece the taxpayer with complete impunity. They have spent months trying to keep these claims secret, secret from the very people that put them into their positions of privilege and pay the taxes that pay their wages and their expenses. Do I think all MPs are bent or on the make? No, but enough of them have abused the system to taint them all and our parliament."I just feel sorry for the few MPs that genuinely did nothing wrong, have worked hard for their constituents and are now being tarred with the same brush. And the people who work for the MPs that have done something wrong and are having to cope with the public reaction to their manager's misdealings. At this point it's difficult to see how we can trust the people who represent us again.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)