Logistics.

Art At some point I know I will have to complete my North West art collection visits and to that end I've spent much of the afternoon on logistics. Here's what I've discovered.

The cheapest approach seems to be to buy a Freedom of the North West 4 in 8 Day Rover ticket and attempt four of those visits on four of those days. The previous idea was to stay in Windermere but looking at the costs of things, I really can't afford the mix of train fare and hotel room for three nights.

This rover costs £70.

My assumption is that I'll do the collections in Carlisle, Knutsford, Coniston and Grasmere with the last two, in rail terms equaling Windermere twice.  Here's the alternative price.

Return to Carlisle: £47.90 (roughly £30 with advanced singles)
Return to Knutsford:  £16.80 (which is cheaper than advanced singles)
Return to Windermere: £21.30 (about the same with advanced tickets)
Return to Windermere: £21.30 (about the same with advanced tickets)

Which adds up to £107.00.

Rover ticket it is then.  With advanced bookings and whatnot I can get roughly the same price as the rover, but why would I other than the whole, killing myself to get places for a week thing.  But if its four in eight, I'll get the odd day off.

Now, the travel.

Carlisle and Knutsford are "easy".  It's train there and back and both are within walking distance of the station.

Grasmere is pretty easy too.  Bus from Windermere Station and dropped off outside The Wordsworth Museum.

Coniston on the other hand is laughable, because it's not Coniston.  No one should try and do this in a day.  When I told the lady at the Coniston tourist information that I was attempting, there was a lengthy pause and then the tell tale "Right... so..." and a tone in her voice which indicated she was just on the edge of trying to talk me out of it.

Because I'm not travelling to Coniston only.  I'm visiting Brantwood, Ruskin's former home.

Getting to Coniston is relatively easy:

09:28 train from Liverpool Lime Street gets us (or rather to be fair me) into Windermere for 11:39.

I can then get a 505 bus to Coniston at 12:10 arriving at 1:00pm.

Here's where it gets tricky.

The last bus back to Windermere is at 17:05.

Which gives me four hours to get to Brantwood, look around Brantwood.  Get back to Coniston.  Then find The Ruskin Museum and pay my respects.

Brantwood is a half hour picturesque walk from Coniston.  Forty-five minutes by boat.  There's a lake involved and the river cruise only visits Brantwood at the end of the rover cruise.  Which leaves at the quarter hour.  Nope.

Yes, indeed.  My best option is a taxi I guess.  Which I'll have to book ahead, of course, and hope for the best.

If everything falls right, I'll get to Coniston for 1pm, get to Brantwood for 1:20 ish.  Spend an hour there, taxi back, walk to the Ruskin Museum for 3:30pm, spend an hour there then get the last bus back to Windermere.

Shrugs.  When has anything ever gone to plan ever?

The other option is to do Carlisle and Windermere for three days, with Coniston on two of them, Brantwood one afternoon, The Ruskin Museum on another, then do Tatton Park on another day completely.  Yes, thinking on, I could essentially commute to Windermere for three days.  Plus Carlisle.

Oh God.  What have I done?

Africa Oye from above.

Music Here is the Africa Oye Festival in Sefton Park over the past few years. Not sure why I missed 2010. They missed 2012.

2014



2013



2011



2009

The Films I've Watched This Year #22

Film  After spending the last hermitage week reading books, this week I surrendered myself to new media and spent most of it in front of my iPad mini visiting art galleries in far flung cities via the medium of free audio guides. Search the otherwise awful to navigate iTunes app stores for terms like "exhibition" and "museum" and of course "audio guide" or for various institutions by name and you can find a wealth of these tours primarily designed to enhance a visit to a building or show but which, in the best cases, feel like an entertaining and educational experience in and of themselves.  Here's the list:

The Guggenheim (New York)
Maitland Regional Art Gallery (Australia
Tate Britain
Paris 1900 (at the Petite Palace in Paris)
Made in the USA: American Masters From The Phillips Collection (Washington)
MOMA Abstract Expressionism (New York)
Degenerate Art (Neue Gallery in New York)

With a few more that I didn't finish because it became apparent pretty quickly that you really did need to be in the space for the tour to make sense either because there weren't any pictures built in, required you to actually be in the space for the content to appear thanks to location mapping or simply not enough content to make the process worthwhile.  They're also mostly, for obvious reasons, designed for the iPhone but tend to be mostly iPad compatible even if turning to landscape mode (or turning the iPad on its side) doesn't lead to the picture or video filling the larger screen.  I've seen a lot of content this week which must be tiny and barely legible on a screen the size of a cassette box.

Unlike standard bespoke audio guides, the ones with calculator digits and buttons, most of these, as well as offering the option to put in a number, also provide a list or index of the talks on offer which are usually in the order which the curators expect people to walk around the exhibition which means its possible to follow the narrative, with introductions to sections and the key examples included.  Essentially without the exhibition itself it's a glorified slide lecture and voices vary in degrees of naturality from curators obviously reading from a preprepared text to actors and professional voiceover artists repeating their words.  I think I heard Suzi Klein on the Paris 1900.

There are two here which are pretty outstanding.  The Guggenheim app is designed to update with new content as each new exhibition opens, but the tour of the Frank Lloyd Wright designed New York building is well worth spending an hour with as it explains the architect's philosophy, the controversial history of the building which wasn't initially well received by artists and the issues surrounding its many restorations.  As well as photos of the various areas, it includes reproductions of blueprints and related documents as well as short videos panning across the interior and poking into the areas referred to in the narration and interviewing artists about the challenges of creating installation art there.

The app on this list which seems to genuinely embrace the potential of these audio guides is the one which accompanies MOMA's Abstract Expressionists.  Seemingly including all of the objects in the exhibitions, its possible to arrange them in hard chronological order so that you can experience the history of the movement from its birth onwards and see the moments when each of its exponents found their voices.  But the key element is again the videos which don't just explain what the paintings are about but also how they're painted, from the choices of medium to the sheer effort involved, with demonstrations of how the artist would have applied their work to the canvas.  Sublime.

Apart from the Soderbergh's the only other filmic experience I really had this week was with the National Film Board of Canada's interactive docudrama app Circa 1948 (available here) which takes the format of the first person shooter, mixes it with the old point and click adventure and turns the user into a ghostly presence in post-war Vancouver exploring a bankrupt hotel and the skid row area, listening to a series of snatched conversations between characters straight from noir films but transposed to a Canada deep within the post-war depression.  For all the Hollywood trappings, the sense of place is annunciated by the multi-accented cast and paintings of George VI on the domestic walls.

There are forty-four conversations to find, snatches of theatre in which we're offered hints of wider narratives but few resolutions to the stories of corrupt cops, marriages on the slide and primarily the fate of war veterans who the state is unable to support and who will be made homeless once the hotel closes.  The characters appear as ghostly wisps within a fantastically detailed environment, conversations triggered after clicking highlighted objects.  But it is resource intensive, the app crashing on numerous occasions on what I've come to realise is one of the earlier iPads and now and then a glitch causes the user to fall off the set, which drifts into the sky like a scene from Inception or The Matrix.

Che: Part II
The Girlfriend Experience: Director's Cut.

As expected, Che II did explain some of the structural issues I had with the first film or the first half of the film called Che though it's also still fair to say I was pretty bored in that way that you sometimes are with films in which you understand what the director is trying to do,  in this case staying away from the conventions of biography and anything related to Guevara's interior life or iconography (confirmed by the accompanying interviews), can see the effort which has gone into directing the piece what with all the time spent in the jungle and the artistry of the getting a Red One camera to do that but unable to really engage with anything beyond that.

All of my chronological watching challenges have had these kinds of moment though I don't think it's the equivalent of Hitchcock's Topaz or Allen's Hollywood Ending.  It's not a complete disaster, there are sill moments like the Matt Damon cameo, Che's asthma and anything with Franka Potente which are pure Soderbergh.  There are just too many moments when stuff happens, then more stuff happens and some more stuff happens and nothing quite connects together even though unlike some films, you know that it's supposed to.  But like I said last week, I will be watching both films again back to back, just to see.

The Girlfriend Experience: Director's Cut, on the other hand, is straight into my top five Soderbergh films.  I wasn't greatly enamoured with the theatrical cut of TGE, which is cold and strangely uninvolving and loses focus whenever it strays away from Sasha Grey's escort into the somewhat random incidents featuring her boyfriend.  All of that's been rectified in this version prepared specially for the BD, which cuts out the improv session amongst the blokes on the plane, substitutes a few of the conversations with material from different takes and either through happenstance or focused Eisensteinian choices gives Grey's character much more warmth and nuance.

Having not see the original for a few years I was able to watch the redux with somewhat fresher eyes.  It's not until rewatching the other version with the commentary that I noticed that Soderbergh removed all the scenes touring the weekend hotel, so that the first time we see Chelsea is outside while she's receiving the bad news which makes the whole thing even more emotionally draining, especially when she says she's cold.  The director also injects a greater sense of how the treatment of the reviewing monster effects her, making her seem a touch more vulnerable but still emotionally strong.  I'm certain that if Soderbergh had made the same choices on the cinema cut, the film would have been much better received.

The commentary's excellent too.  It's a two hander between Soderbergh and Grey that only rarely matches the pictures but manages to cover the breadth of the production, the research he and Grey did in speaking to escorts about their work and adding that material to the script, Grey acting process and how Soderbergh accommodated her lack of experience despite the tight schedule (at one stage filming an ordinary, but flirty conversation between her and another actor while pretending to prepare to shoot the scene resulting in some of the best scenes in the film), how all of this differs from her usual work in the adult film industry and her ambitions to produce and direct herself.

The Feeling Listless Soundtrack 1.0: Under The Bridge.

Written by Flea, John Frusciante, Anthony Kiedis & Chad Smith
[from: 'Under The Bridge', 2001]

Music  I’ve a feeling The Red Hot Chilli Peppers never had this in mind. Which is a great thing about bizarre cover versions, they’ll stretch the originals to breaking point. Unlike the All Saints equally sublime version, they make no attempt to replicate the opening guitar solo vocally and everything is subservient to the vocal. It should sound as wrong as Oasis clashing through Bobby Mcferrin’s ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy’ but doesn’t. There are of course really bad cover versions. There are the bland karaoke copies (anything by Atomic Kitten, Blue, Westlife and that crowd), and pointless dance versions like Madhouse (somewhere there is a dance version of All About Eve’s ‘Martha’s Harbour’). But midway between there will always be joy like this. And Donald Duck’s version on ‘Yesterday’. [Originally written over twelve years ago.]

[Commentary:  Sadly there isn't an Oasis cover of Don't Worry Be Happy, I think that was my idea of a joke.  The song's probably in the soundtrack for the same reason as Travis's rendition of Britney Spears, incongruity.  My other memory of this song is watching a special cinema presentation of the All Saints version along with Lady Marmalade in front of the original release of Tarantino's Jackie Brown.  Of all things.]

Marina Abramović's Video Diary.

Art Marina Abramović's latest show is a 512 hour long performance piece at the Serpentine Galleries in London, where across the opening hours of seventy-two days, she's inviting a maximum of a hundred and sixty people into an almost completely empty gallery space (the whole gallery space is empty in fact) and asking them to share that space with her and now and then following her whispered orders to stand in various places including facing a wall. The Guardian's reviews of the piece are pretty vivid and speak of near religious experiences.

As well as a tumblr posting visitor's experiences, Abramović is also posting a nightly video diary, the latest of which from yesterday is embedded below, in which she describes the notable events of the day and what artistic discoveries she's made as a way to give an audience who can't make it to the gallery some sense of what it must be like to be in her presence.  The result has all the nerviness of a hostage appeal coupled with the openness of a haul video, but instead of telling us about the latest Rimmel lipstick she's bought at Boots, the artist is offering us her emotional turmoil.

New videos will be posted at the Arts Council's thepace.org which is back up and running in a form which is focused so far in aligning itself with museums and art galleries and at The Serpantine's own website where they're piled up one on top of the other so that you can see even more clearly how the artist changes across the length of the project. The latest is pretty raw actually as she describes something happening for the first time and actually taking the whole thing pretty well.  Some artists would be furious ...

Newman.

Film Arthur Newman, the "lost" Emily Blunt film (lost as in not released in the UK) finally has a release date over here but with a title change. Presumably because we could care less what his surname is, even though the synopsis somewhat suggests he's the protagonist and he's played by Colin Firth, it's now called Arthur and Mike, which instead suggests its about two blokes, even though Mike is Blunt's character. Lord knows why it's taken two years to be released here.  The IMDb says Momentum Pictures had the rights in 2012 but didn't do anything with them.  My only guess is because of the story's similarity to this case (it's also about a man who fakes his own death) and there being legal issues. Or the film not doing particularly well in the States. Either way, finally and well done to Arrow Films for having a go with it instead.

NT 50th app. Thingy.

Elsewhere I've reviewed the National Theatre's 50th Anniversary app thingy for the iPad on The Hamlet Weblog.

National Theatre 50th Anniversary Timeline App.

Having recently availed myself of an ipad I've had a chance to experience the National Theatre's new archive app highlighting fifty productions from across their half century in existence. Probably rightly, it's not all Shakespeare, but some of the most important productions are there, Olivier's Othello from 1964, Dench and Hopkins in Antony and Cleopatra in 1987, the Lear/Richard III tandem productions from 1990 which ultimate led to the film version of the latter with Ian McKellan, Fiona Shaw in Richard III from 1995 and Ian Holm's Lear in 1997.

Hamlet is represented by the 2000 production with Simon Russell Beale in the title role. The app is image rather than textually rich. There's little in the way of anecdote or analysis of the productions beyond a short introduction by the playwright Nicholas Wright (also a board member at the NT). A more elaborate approach would have included audio or video of the productions and more extensive text, perhaps at least relevant contemporary interviews with the cast and crew. But to be fair, this is free and such material is available elsewhere.

None of which is to devalue what is here, which includes black and white photos from the rehearsal process, Russell Beale wearing a baggy sweatshirt from an NT Othello production, fabric samples from his real costume, and annotated excerpts from the script showing the actor's movements and stage management cues (revealing Osric filled the role usually assigned to a second gravedigger and that the length introduction to Yorick featured in all its glory). The colour shots of the actual production suggest the production was lit in a style which evoked the Jacobian indoor theatre, faces against the darkness.

Overall I suspect the app will be of most interest the theatre scholars and audience members with long associations with the National. Those of us outside of London without access will feel inevitably frustrated. At some point, probably elsewhere, someone (!) should compile an accessibility guide to all this. Many of these productions have been filmed to some extent and even Russell Beale reprised his role for ArkAngel (my second review on here) (I wonder how I'd approach it differently).  But for all that, this is still well worth a download, should you be able to.

The download gateway is here.

"For this, you see, is Panini HQ."

Football The Guardian's received a disappointing, if unsurprising given that men tend to be envy factories, criticism for sending Hadley Freeman, someone who's professed to knowing nothing about the World Cup to cover the World Cup. Actually it's been inspired as she writes about the tournament for the rest of us. Today's dispatch is especially good as she visits the factory which prints Panini stickers:

"In an unprepossessing industrial suburb, about a 45-minute drive out of São Paulo, is where football fans will find Willy Wonka’s factory. Like many buildings in the main city, it does not look like much from the outside – in fact, it looks disarmingly small – but this may well be a ruse to put off the less myopically devoted because inside is a veritable mecca for football (and sticker) fans. For this, you see, is Panini HQ.

"Shelves of Panini-published comic books line the reception (including a rather charming series based on the adventures of Neymar, and the Brazilian footballer’s hair does make a lot more sense in comic-book form). But let’s be honest, most people are here for the stickers, and the peeks into boxes going in and out of the warehouse, stuffed with sheathes of team photos, are nigh on torture for the dedicated collector who is still missing those final dozen elusive stickers and the World Cup has already started. And shinies! There’s a whole box of shiny stickers just by that machine and …"

I was always a bit half hearted about collecting football stickers at school. The whole process seemed entirely stacked against people like me with less friends and it was always the bullies who seemed to have the disposable income to amass the number of stickers necessary to create swaps enough to fill the books.

Richard Eyre on directing Daniel Day-Lewis at the National.

The Films I've Watched This Year #21

Film  Here's the usual mitigating circumstances as to why this seems like and in fact is a very short list.  On Sunday night I watched the latest BBC Arts escapade, the prosaically titled, The Summer Exhibition: BBC Arts at the Royal Academy, which despite essentially being essentially The Culture Show meets The Review Show, was a spry, often funny, enjoyably intelligent and far more watchable hour than the piece angles; whereas the Hay piece to some extent expected us to understand already the point of the book festival and why we should care about these authors, this piece did the leg work of explaining what the Summer Exhibition is, why it's important within the context of the art world and most importantly captured loads of the atmosphere of the show both from the point of view of the submitters and the visitors.

Of course, all of this already has an in-built relevancy for me, but there was an admirable sense of unity to the piece, drawing the different sections together.  The discussion between Tim Marlowe (new director of artistic director at the academy) Miriam Elia (artist) and Kate Bryant (director of the Fine Art Society) about the significance of the academy in contemporary art culture in which they agreed that it was pretty old school flew in the face of the evidence of what had already been seen in which a man who could clearly paint but was a traditional landscape artist found himself rejected for the fiftieth time, whereas someone whose work pastiched 80s garishness (and happened to work in the Academy's shop) found two of hers waved through.  Not so sure about the random musical number at the end, but The War Doctor seemed to be enjoying himself at least:



Che: Part One
Hard Boiled
The Five-Year Engagement
Center Stage

Still playing Soderbergh catch-up though for once it's one of his I hadn't seen.  On our genre tally, Che would be his old school roadshow EPIC, though I'm watching it in the release format of two separate films, though I don't think I'll be waiting a whole month before the next one.  I didn't not enjoy it, which is damning with faint praise, but despite the obvious care which has gone into the piece, not least the train crash which was shot practically without any CGI, it lacks something, perhaps has a certain Soderbergh-by-rote element in which he's almost providing what's expected of him rather than producing something especially fresh.  In the accompany interview, he says that he didn't have any knowledge of Che before the project was brought to him and that might explain why it feels so inert in places, paradoxically given that the fight scenes are effectively presented and Benicio Del Toro's central performance is mighty.

But I'm willing to be wrong.  Once I've seen the second part and finished the rest of his films I do plan to return to the Che dyptic and work through them in a single sitting.  The lack of inertia, the preponderance of low key moments, of repetition, of didacticism, may well be features rather than bugs and there may be moments in the first part which only really make sense when watched in conjunction with the second.  When Soderbergh sets out to make his version of the EPIC, as with all his projects he's presumably looked at and attempted to understand the tropes so he can put his twist on them and one of the tropes of EPICs is that character moments from before the intermission always return afterwards, even in the strangely involving technicolour horror of something like Cleopatra, where the geopolitical interactions (for want of a better description) between "Egypt" and "Rome" are contrasted pointedly across the hours.

The Five-Year Engagement is utter rubbish or as I said on Twitter, while it was on, "what a pedestrianly directed, miscast thing it is. The script is utter horse dip." Now I was slightly distracted during this, having had to pause the thing in the middle, as most of us did during the Tweetdeck javascript outrage, but it's quite some time since I've seen a film so aching disappointing.  As I again said on social media at the end, there's probably a decent 90 minute film hidden in there, but at two hours it feels like the we're experiencing whole five years.  The central performances are undoubtedly engaging even if Emily Blunt is miscast in a role clearly written for Zooey Deschanel, and Alison Brie's a trooper given the pretty thankless best friend role she's been dumped into.  There are also some good lines (Rhys Ifans as a college professor reflecting on the student body and why he doesn't bother to learn their names: "Everyone here is either called Zac or Ashley...").

But oh the litany of faults.  Director Nicholas Stoller seems to have attempted to produce a film in which no one has any agency.  As I noticed recently, I've been wrong in haranguing When Harry Met Sally for making the ending about Harry all these years because structurally the opening flashback half hour is from Sally's POV, the middle finely balances the two of them and then Harry takes over for the last half hour.  It's actually perfect.  In The Five-Year Engagement, none of the scenes are offered from a particular point of view which means that the audience is denied a point of identification and therefore empathy.  Stuff just sort of happens between the characters, but there are precious few reaction shots telling us how we're supposed to feel about things that are happening, they just sort of do.  Even the cretinous About Time manages to give us a clear protagonist, even if he's an arsehole.

Plus the structure's up the wall.  Ideally it needed a hook to keep the audience orientated to the calendar - there's a good piece in this month's Sight and Sound about how actual calendars can be used for this purpose - but for much of the film the audience is unaware of where they are in those five years.  We keep being told - oh this will be for another year, or another two years, but for those years to make sense, to have weight, we need to be aware of their passage and not just through weird beards and the addition of ill-advised bangs to Emily Brunt's fringe.  Pieces to camera and voiceovers are old hat which isn't to say neither would have worked.  But the really annoying thing is that it ends really well.  Despite these problems the last ten minutes are stonkingly good, mostly because Stoller throws out everything else he was doing and essentially does a Muppet set-piece with humans.

Which brings us to last night and Center Stage which I watched by mistake because I thought I'd added a Chinese film with the same title to my Lovefilm list and was sent instead this Nicholas Hytner-directed ballet film starring Zoe Saldana, Peter Gallagher and a bunch of near complete unknowns who can all dance and also act a little.  The Time Out review covers most of the bases.  It's a FAME retread but focusing on the single discipline of ballet, with Saldana in the Leroy slot but featuring some amazingly terrible rock music, which includes, for pity's sake, playing the Thunderbugs's Friends Forever under scene in which the students go out into the world together.  The gender politics is up the wall too, with the female ballet dancers constantly seeking the approval of their male counterparts, some of whom take some amazing liberties without much in the way of a comeuppance.

Yet there's no denying once all that gives way to the dancing, as is often the case with dance films, the results are jaw dropping.  Against the prevailing tide, Hytner often allows the ballet to play out in masters across the 1:2.35 letterbox which has to be the ideal aspect ratio for ballet, and must have looked spectacular in cinemas within an auditorium setting.  Plus, having watched the BBC's ballet season recently, I can see that Hytner et al have researched the incidentals of being a ballet performer, of the treatment the dancers must wrought on their shoes through, banging, scraping and soaking in order to make them wearable.  About the only omission I noticed was the apparent lack of anyone producing notations of the choreography, though the rehearsals scenes are generally kept to a minimum anyway so as not to spoil the surprises in the final performances, which are definitely worth sitting through the previous ninety-minutes for.

Yan Preston's Mother River at the Open Eye Gallery.

Photography While the eyes of the world are on Brazil, as the few of you who bothered to read my weekly film review posts will know my interest has been with China and this week I’ve had the pleasure of investigating two massive artistic projects which have happened in the country and which have involved a lot of walking. On Monday, at Southport’s The Atkinson gallery’s group show about walking, I enjoyed the six images that are almost, bar some film, the only record of Marina Abramović’s The Great Wall Walk in which she and her partner set off at either end of The Great Wall of China with the plan that they’d meet in the middle and marry. They met in the middle and decided to do nothing of the sort, presumably having had a chance to think, not that it didn’t stop a repeat performance twenty years later.

Then last night, at the Open Eye Gallery I attended a slide presentation by photographer Yan Preston whose Mother River project involves visiting the Yangtze River and taking pictures every hundred and fifty kilometres in an attempt to understand and to an extent discover the extent to which this waterway which stretches across and unifies much of China lives up to its mythic reputation. After coming to terms with the initial shock of just how immense an undertaking this really would be and attempting some other performance projects involving stones and swimming, Preston returned to her original idea, dug in, and set to work. Over the following months she collected the photographs and the results are as stunning as you might expect, even more so because having decided to work on film, not everything went to plan. See below.

I loved everything about this. I have a real affinity for these kinds of, as I tend to describe my own, mad fool missions, viewing projects, wanting to photograph genetically surreal objects and visiting all of those fine art collections. Throughout I noticed how Preston had experienced many of the familiar frustrations, of spending half the time dealing with logistics and geology and technological failures, which in her case manifested itself in films being ruined and having to return to landscapes in order to replicate photographs again. Her set-backs were rather more epic than mine though. Where I’d turn up at Carr Lane to find a superlambanana missing, she was bitten by wild dogs or arrested by authorities who simply couldn’t understand why someone would be searching for a spot on a map so they could photograph it.

One of the tensions Preston’s had to deal with is between artistry and reportage. Initially it seemed as though the artist was about to abandon the fixed point part of the project because the resulting photographs wouldn’t reflect the romantic vision of the river. But thankfully she realised that she was capable of finding beauty or at the very least human interest at each of the points and that there is real value in recording the status of the river at this moment in China’s history when, as she also described, it's in a state of industrialisation. Amongst the photographs and video record, we saw landscapes in which nature had given way to concrete, areas in which Le Corbusier’s uniform urban ideas were flourishing, but soullessly, Leonardo Di Caprio’s character’s limbo from the film Inception made real.

The final result is a book, a specimen of which was available for viewing tonight. I decided not to look yet. Partly because we’d already seen a version briefly as a pdf but mostly because the project continues, as these things often do, due to setbacks related to health and budgets, and I want to see the whole thing together. The ideal approach would have been to begin at one end of the river and continue through to the other side, but no one has an infinite budget or the time to complete that immense undertaking in one go. Even Michael Palin, once he’d been round the world in eighty(ish) days, broke up subsequent televisual challenges into recording blocks. Preston clearly has the tenacity to see this through to the end and it seems only fair to wait until that end before enjoying the results. I hope she us visits again to report back.

Portrait Mode.

The Feeling Listless Soundtrack 1.0: Please Can I Go Now?

Written by Guy Sigsworth
[from: 'GMT: Music from the film', Island, 1999]

Music I never say goodbye to people. Even when they’re disappearing to another continent or I’m leaving a place never to return, I’ll only turn to people I’ve become close to and tell them to take care, and often that I’ll see them next time. I never used to be like that. When I was twelve, I stood on a station platform crying my eyes out because a school mate was going to Australia. The problem was that I always did see them. And usually in the strangest of places. And having said all of the things you need to say when you aren’t going to see someone again, there was the disappointment because even after five years there wasn’t much to add.

I stopped saying goodbye to people when I saw the Channel 4 adaptation of the Anthony Powell novels ‘A Dance to the Music of Time’. This told the story of a group of school friends as they grew up during the last century into old age. The dance being the weaving in out of their lives, spinning off into the ballroom floor of time, returning to each other’s company the way people do as the music hits specific beats and rhythms. Some of them have two left feet and fall to the side; some aren’t invited up and don’t waltz at all. As I watched I noticed the same movements in my own life. The best television informs us all.

Years later I did meet my school friend, back from Oz for only a few moments – he happened to be in the UK for a few days for a conference. Sure enough, because of our big pronouncements we just looked at each other and asked what we’d been up to. No spark in the old friendship. Post ‘Dance’, I saw someone I’d once worked with but also knew through a mutual friend; we’d been close enough to whisper secrets but had lost touch when I’d left the job. I’d just waved when I left, with a shouted 'See you!'. When we saw each other this time we just kept grinning insanely, and talked for hours (well for as long as our train journey). At the end, my friend had remembered what I’d said before and offered, “I’ll see you next time…”, and I know she will. [Originally written twelve years ago.]

[Commentary:  Still one of my favourite pieces of my own writing if you're allowed to say that sort of thing, though the sentiments are even more fluid in the social networking era when no one is entirely out of reach any more.  My one regret is that after all these years I can't remember who the second subject in the third paragraph is or if we did see each other again, in the real world at least though I have an odd feeling that she might be reading this in which case assume my embarrassment and apologies.  The song is from a British film I don't think anyone else has seen.  But I did have the album on repeat for over a month thanks to vocals like these, which seemed to admirably capture the time and place.]

Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

TV The BBC's website is full of clips of old shows. Most of them are only a couple of minutes. But sometimes they're many hours of content. Here's an example. It's the Simon Bolivar Orchestra playing Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra. All fifteen minutes of it in a the usual enormous embed:



The actual programme its from or rather was cut from since this is a "web exclusive" is long gone. Yet here this still is. With its very present crowd.  I let you know if I see anything else.

Joss Whedon on Speed.

Film Joss hasn't talked about Speed much across the years. Here's probably about as definitive an interview as we'll get in the Huff Post. As you might expect, some of the best things about the film came from him:

What were some of the biggest changes you saw in reworking those other drafts that weren't great?

The biggest change for me came for me came from Keanu. The whole "Pop quiz, hot shot," was not me. There was this idea of Jack as this cop on the edge, who plays by his own rules, you know, "He's a maverick! He's out of control!" Apart from “Die Hard,” which really made room for a thoughtful action hero, everybody had been that sort of thing. So, when we sat down with Keanu, Walter Parkes, Laurie MacDonald and Jan, I think, they said, “Keanu, these guys are not mavericks. They’re whole thing is diffusing the situation, and they’re unfailingly polite, and they always say sir or ma’am.” And I was like, “I know exactly what to do! That’s it, that’s the whole meeting, we’re there.”

Note on release dates. It might be 20 years old in the US, but it didn't turn up in the UK until October of that year. I know because it was the film I saw at the Lounge Cinema in Leeds on my 20th birthday [via].

The leftovers of Doctor Who.

Television It's the new Flash Forward everyone. But it's on HBO so it might be good. On the downside, it's from one of the co-creators of Lost. On the upside, Liv Tyler, (the new Doc ... potential Doctor ...) Patterson Joseph (who must really like these apocalyptic stories) and Christopher Eccleston (who'll apparently turn up for any genre show now so long as it isn't Doctor Who).  Plus I love the title.  It has moxy.

"HBO and Showtime don’t care how many people are watching any given show"

TV Indiewire has a brief but excellent analysis of the US television networks and how the construction of their shows do differ markedly even if it all seems like a jumble from this side of the Atlantic:

"The reason premium cable changed television was because they were dependent upon subscribers, not advertisers. The implications of this are profound: unlike all the other networks, HBO and Showtime don’t care how many people are watching any given show. And they don’t care if, after "Game of Thrones," you watch "Silicon Valley." The moment you subscribed, they made their money. They are after an aggregated audience, not the largest audience in any time slot.

"HBO doesn’t care if I watch "Girls"; it was designed to get young women to subscribe. My viewing is a bonus. And they don’t care if the "Girls" audience watches "Looking." That show is designed to get the gay male audience to subscribe. Falloff from one show to the other doesn’t really matter."

The section about Netflix is interesting because the experience of Orange Is The New Black differs markedly from mine. Unlike House of Cards, I'm finding it very difficult to get through the first season of OISTNB. I've stuck at episode six I think. Each episode feels like enough in the same way the author suggests Breaking Bad is. It's not something I have been able to binge.  With the launch of the new series I am feeling a tug to get on with it, but I wonder if it's simply that we don't see eye-to-eye, if I'm just not enjoying the thing.  What could that mean?

No More Weeping.

Theatre Watching the twitterbituaries for Rik in which everyone seemed to have met him at some stage, I flippantly tweeted that I hadn't met him.

 Then a few hours later realised that if I hadn't actually met him, I had seem him and Ade in Waiting for Godot during my A-Levels, when our English group minibused down to London from Liverpool for their production.

 Sat near the back of the theatre it was difficult to see much of their performance, but I always remembered the set (which I now realise was designed by Derek Jarman!) and how they reacted off script to one audience member and his very power laugh.

 Imagine my surprise to find now that Channel 4 Daily's rather sober Box Office slot covered the production and filmed the double act in character.

 Find above this astonishing piece of archive and as a bonus, below, a publicity interview from Tonight With Jonathan Ross:

That Time Again.

Sport Grant and Hurley reunited, sort of, in the name of football:

"Celebrities and football fans have taken part in the BBC World News's England team 2014 World Cup poem, written and filmed by poet Henry Birtles.

"The poem, called That Time Again, makes reference to the first and only time England won the tournament, 48 years ago, in 1966.

"The 2014 Fifa World Cup kicks off in Sao Paulo on Thursday when the hosts Brazil play Croatia."

It's the Perfect Day of poetry. I'm glad I spent it with Hugh.