A random selection of jottings, observations and general indulgences
There's a lovely East-West juxtaposition on Wikipedia's entry for the year 1947.
At the bottom of the November/December selection, you can learn that at the same time, roughly at the start of the Cold War:
I've been racking my brains trying to recall who said "Would we still remember Casablanca if it had gone ahead with its original casting of Ronald Reagan and Ann Sheridan? Almost certainly, but not for the same reasons", but have given up, so apologies for any inadvertent plagiarism: it seemed as good (and uncontentious) a send-off as any.
The picture is of Reagan at roughly the age he would have been had he ended up in the film - it's worth noting that he was over a decade younger than Humphrey Bogart...
While trawling the web for something to help me brush up what I've already demonstrated to be my pitifully inadequate Czech, I came across this very handy site maintained by the Slavic Languages and Cultures Department of the University of Groningen. Essentially, if you're studying Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Polish, Russian or Serbian, it offers audio recordings (streamed or downloadable) and parallel English/chosen language texts of things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and passages from the Bible, Winnie-the-Pooh and Alice in Wonderland.
Peter Houtzagers put all this together, and all credit to him - not least for revealing that the Czech for 'Edward Bear' (Winnie-the-Pooh's full name) is 'Michal Medvěd', thus making a certain conservative American film critic (for British readers, he's broadly equivalent to the Daily Mail's notorious Christopher Tookey) look even more ridiculous than he's managed off his own bat.
The heading of this post, incidentally, reads ""Aha !" said Pooh. (Rum-tum-tiddle-um-tum.)", thus proving that Czech really isn't as tough as its reputation. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself.
Apologies for the lack of blogging this week: a combination of birthday celebrations, a huge in-tray at work, the start of a big new project and major building works at home have left me with virtually no spare time - but I've been greatly enjoying both the spat between Chris Lightfoot and the English Democrats (and doesn't the fact that they've twice threatened legal action against decidedly hedged and qualified comments on a single individual's blog speak volumes in itself?) and Leo Caesius' contemporary tribute to the classic anthology of doctored Soviet photographs The Kommissar Vanishes...
Assuming I haven't horribly misread this, there's some great news from the Czech Republic for fans of the legendary Surrealist film-maker, animator and all-round multimedia genius Jan Švankmajer:
Dále by se měl letos v létě natáčet nový film Jana Švankmajera Šílení. Bude to hraný snímek s prvky klasické i počítačové animace. Scénář volně vychází ze dvou povídek Edgara Alana Poea. Hlavní postavou je Markýz. Tato postava byla inspirována markýzem de Sade. Barrandov Studio film připravuje s firmou Athanor, s kterou už spolupracovalo při vzniku Švankmajerova snímku Otesánek, oceněného Českým lvem.The gist of this - and that's all my tourist Czech is capable of gleaning - is that his fifth feature Madness, inspired by the works of Edgar Allen Poe and the Marquis de Sade, has finally started shooting at Prague's Barrandov Studios. If anyone wants to attempt a full translation, please be my guest!
At the end of A.O.Scott's New York Times review of global warming disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow, the regular warning-to-parents section contains the following:
Millions of people die, but nobody swears, copulates, undresses or takes drugs.So that's all right then - glad to see they've got their priorities in order.
All this talk of puppet goats (see below) inspired me to dig out the Baby Van Gogh DVD that I purchased last autumn in an impulsive desire to accelerate the development of my son's aesthetic sensibility, showed it to him, but had to retire to lick my wounds after he betrayed not the slightest interest. Six months on, things have improved somewhat - it's certainly no Toy Story 2 (his all-time favourite film by miles), but he did seem reasonably engrossed in it, only occasionally pausing to bash his toy snake against the bars of his playpen.
It's part of the Baby Einstein series of videos that's supposed to turn your child into a Nobel prize-winner by repeatedly exposing him or her to deep and meaningful concepts such as, in this case, lots of shots of a blue puppet goat (named Vincent Van Goat, natch) painting reproductions of his near-namesake's masterpieces, intercut with lots of images of various children, puppets toys, flowers and other assorted objects, all in matching colours. There are six colour sections in all, each introduced by a truly dreadful poem and a synthesised but otherwise surprisingly pleasant rendition of a popular classical piece of music (Musorgsky's 'Pictures at an Exhibition' prominently featured).
Sadly, I was halfway through the last paragraph when he took it upon himself to lie face down on the floor and pretend to be dead for several seconds on end. He's since raised himself, but he's now very firmly sitting with his back to the telly. I can take a hint.
Following a lengthy preparatory discussion last night amongst sundry relatives of my wife, most of whom are planning to descend on a performance of the deservedly legendary 'Sing-a-long-a-Sound of Music' when it hits Worthing in mid-July (I've been once, and am sorely tempted to go again, as it was very comfortably one of the funniest afternoons of my entire life), I thought it might be worth attempting to broaden my son's cultural horizons by playing him part of the film - more specifically, the Lonely Goatherd song, which I (correctly) thought he'd enjoy.
Fortunately, he wasn't privy to the idle web surfing that I was doing while he was watching it, because as worrying coincidence would have it, my brother chose that very moment to ruminate on the subject of goat-related bestiality, his impeccably scholarly research and references somewhat undermined by puppet goats cavorting in the background amid the sound of tuneful yodelling. One trusts that Gerald of Wales never had this problem when writing about the sin of shameful commerce with the Irish goat.
There's a poignant piece in today's Guardian by Judy Rumbold on the utter humiliation that lies in wait for those foolish enough to take up the piano in one's forties and quickly having her dreams of being able to play Erik Satie's Gymnopédies within a month shattered. To her credit, she stuck with it, achieving sufficient skill at the pieces in Piano Time (a book clearly aimed at eight-year-olds) to have a crack at the Grade 1 exams:
It is difficult to isolate the single most excruciating moment from the day last year when I took Grade 1. Was it the fact that I was the only person weeping in a room full of cool-headed eight-year-olds? Was it the rallying pep talk I was treated to, courtesy of a terrifyingly relaxed Grade 5-level teenager? Or was it coming out drenched in sweat and sulking all the way through the celebratory post-exam tea, organised by my tutor for me and her other, more diminutive charges, at McDonald's? I could have enjoyed that chocolate milkshake rather more than I did - I passed - but I am asking myself if it is at all advisable to put myself through the hell of Grade 2.I can't tell you how much I feel for her. Although I'm a long way from a beginner - I took Grade 1 when I was still in single figures and can comfortably play not only the Gymnopédies but most other pieces by Satie (this is not, I hasten to add, much in the way of a boast: Satie may have been best mates with Debussy, but their piano music is poles apart in terms of required virtuosity), but although I've been playing more or less daily since I bought a piano last autumn, I'm acutely conscious that the twelve-year period I spent learning it in the first place is very comfortably outclassed by the eighteen-year period letting what skills I ever managed to muster completely atrophy. I completely identified with Rumbold when she complained that:
adult learners tend not to enjoy the considerable advantage of having parents breathing down their necks, urging them to practise. Too often, I have fallen victim to my pitifully low willpower, slumping in front of House Doctor when I should have been doing my arpeggios. And then there is the drawback of life getting in the way. Juggling piano playing, at the age of six, with a relatively relaxed agenda of pony lessons and sleepovers is not the same as trying to fit it in when job, house and children so often demand priority treatment.My problem isn't so much to do with House Doctor - in fact, the optimum piano-practice time for me is when my wife is watching some equivalent bibble on the telly at the other end of the room - as to do with the fact that while I bought a Yamaha digital piano primarily because I'd be able to practice through headphones at unsociable hours, I discovered that it came with all sorts of other handy effort-saving devices, notably the ability to record individual parts at half (or fractions of) the correct speed, and then play them back as though recorded with absolute fidelity to the score.
Somewhat unexpectedly, I found myself watching the latest film by Night of the Living Dead horror guru George A.Romero - a colleague had bought it on DVD, only to discover that she could only watch it with a vertically-stretched picture, as she didn't own a widescreen TV and the distributors had cocked up the mastering, leaving out a vital piece of data that tells DVD players to reformat the picture to fit tellies like hers. So I offered to watch it on my widescreen telly just to make sure that that was the only problem with it.
Sadly, while that was indeed the only technical problem as far as the DVD was concerned, I also had to contend with a whole host of artistic problems resulting from the fact that Bruiser Wasn't Very Good. In fact, if you factor out bias caused by my instinctive desire to be charitable towards someone who used to be a major film-maker by any standard, it was actually pretty terrible - I can easily see why it went straight to video just about everywhere and received so little publicity that I knew nothing about it in advance of watching it.
The basic concept was that a human doormat called Henry (Jason Flemyng), constantly trampled on by wife, boss, colleagues, accountant and fellow commuters alike, wakes up one day to find that his face has been literally blanked out, replaced by a largely featureless white mask - which has the effect of removing all his inhibitions about standing up to people, whereupon the pendulum swings dramatically in the opposite direction and he starts bumping off those who've wronged him in the past.
There's nothing especially wrong with this premise per se, and the blank-face subplot has at least a spark of originality, but it's fatally damaged by gigantic plot holes, dreadful dialogue (do US cops really refer to "dames" in this day and age?), one of the most embarrassingly OTT performances I've ever seen by an actor (Peter Stormare) that I usually like, and a nightclub climax that goes on forever to little noticeable effect. I stuck with it to the end in the hope that Romero would pull off an inspired twist that would justify everything that had come before... but he didn't.
Warmly fraternal congratulations to The Virtual Stoa, which is three today, thus making it one of the oldest continuously-updated blogs out there - and also the primary inspiration for my own efforts. Interestingly, though Chris and I have never really talked about the rationales behind what we do (accidents of geography mean that we don't actually see each other that much: he's only met his nephew three times), I can't help noticing a huge overlap between his motives and mine:
I don't write many long posts, so most of the posts I post don't take long to prepare and are just scribbled down on the spur of the moment, and that suits a life and a job where I'm often at the computer keyboard for short to medium periods of time at different times of the day, in between the important work of teaching and meetings and eating and drinking. And the subjects of my blogposts dwell on the interstices of my regular life, too: I don't say much here about my teaching life, let alone my research, or about what might laughably be called my personal life, but instead about the bits that fall in between the major pieces of my life: things from books, things found in newspapers, things on other blogs and in other parts of the web, dead socialists, that kind of thing. It's all pretty interstitial, and I like it that way.Dead socialists aside, that's a near-perfect encapsulation of why I do this too.
A recent post on Harry's Place on the subject of cultural matters reflected through the prism of Socialist Worker (where everything has to be slotted into an appropriate ideological pigeonhole, regardless of whether it's a particularly comfortable fit) reminded me of this passage in yesterday's Guardian as part of this piece by Anna Pickard, where she muses on the way that TV listings maintain the same basic neutrality regardless of the political slant of the publication that carries them:
Sometimes I wish that editorial tone would creep in to the listings. But the listings in the Morning Star (Britain's only socialist daily) won't, however much I yearn, read:All of which is rather a shame. I have very fond memories of a militant freesheet in Brighton in the mid-1980s that launched wonderfully aggressive attacks on the local cinema for not showing enough (or, frequently, any) films directed by women. The author clearly put this down to irredeemably sexist programming, instead of the inescapable fact that back then there were hardly any films directed by women in circulation at all (it's actually quite startling to look back and see just how bad the situation was even less than two decades ago) - and that one of the highest-profile titles was Triumph of the Will, not exactly a film calculated to curry favour with Brighton lefties.
19.30 Watchdog: Ineffectual consumer reportage with too little emphasis on commodity fetishism and too much emphasis on value in pension plans for the cake-fed classes. With Comrade Robinson.
20.00 EastEnders. Opiate for the masses.
20.30 Pride and Prejudice: Jane Austen's classic vile propagandist tale of romance, family obligation and bourgeois scum.
It seems that any rightwing paper can get through a basic TV description without mentioning the immigrant heritage of the presenter, and most tabloids can give a brief preview without mentioning the star's colossal breasts.
As ever, the letter's page of today's Metro shows its unerring ability to keep its finger firmly on the pulse of the issues that matter:
Has anyone else noticed that ITV news bulletins are becoming increasingly tabloid in style and content? I reckon it won't be long before Trevor McDonald chooses to present the news in a Page 3 manner - topless and with only a lacy thong to protect his modesty.That's from H.Khan of Telford, just in case you want to know who to blame for putting images like that in your head.
