A musical interlude

 

Actually it was a whole concert: but it made an inspiring and enjoyable interlude in our busy lives. A friend had invited us to accompany her, or maybe we wouldn't have spent the money. Wow, it wasn't half good! Worth every one of Alice's pennies. The main item was Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff (that is his name) - an unusual piece of choral music, some bits loud and angry thumping cacophonies (what a lovely noun that is) some parts soft, flowing and mellow. I didn't understand a word, because it was either in Latin or German, but there was a translation in the program. It's based on poems by some renegade and lascivious (a gorgeous adjective too) medieval monks, and is all about boozing and love and sex. Really. One part, O Fortuna, about the Wheel of Fortune which takes you down as well as up, has been used a lot in films and even ads.

Daniel Taylor

There were three soloists, as well as a huge orchestra and choir. The guy with the really deep voice and the soprano lady were both excellent. I felt rather sorry, though, for the man with the pure sweet voice, who only sang for a few minutes out of an hour. Apparently he was portraying a swan being roasted. He actually acted it, with gestures and all. He's Daniel Taylor, fantastically good, and is called a Countertenor. Alice told me about that later on. Back in the 16th century, when the Pope forbade women to sing in church or on stage, boys used to be castrated (shudder) to keep their voices high. Nowadays they don't practice such horrors, and some men can sing these notes with training. But deary me, those popes had a lot to answer for - and still do.

There was a super film about one of the famous nineteenth century "castrati", Farinelli, and Anne Rice (who's mostly known for her vampire books) wrote a beautiful and serious novel on the subject, Cry to Heaven. Apparently these men were as celebrated as today's pop stars, and supposedly were much in demand as lovers, too. Did you ever?

It was freezing cold when it came time to go home again. I was grateful to Alice for so kindly knitting me a scarf like hers to help combat the weather. She did it mostly while watching TV.

But not Homeland! Far too exciting to miss a second...

P.S. Six-year-old Angelina (remember her from August 2012?) who is learning to knit herself, declared it "awesome"!

Recent Films: our top three
NOTE: don't forget to click on the pictures...

Our Favourite
Absolutely the very best of the all the films we've seen recently is the beautiful Beasts of the Southern Wild. It tells the tale of a poor south-of-the levee community in Louisiana, seen through the eyes of a young child. Quvenzhané Wallis was only five when she was cast in the part (all of seven when filming finished) and she's absolutely brilliant! Maybe even a youngest-ever Oscar contender? This first feature from Benh Zeitlin was very much a group effort, and deservedly won accolades at both Sundance and Cannes.

It's about environmental issues, class, poverty, race - as well as being the powerful story of a troubled daughter-father relationship.

The eyes and imagination (both!) of Hushpuppy, as she's called, command the point of view. The eponymous (what a pompous word, but Alice insists) beasts are the aurochs she's been told are prehistoric monsters buried under the ice-caps.

Since she's also learned these are now melting, when a Katrina force storm arrives, she "sees" the aurochs unleashed. They were wonderfully magnificent - and scarey! Alice says this is called Magical Realism. Sounds like an outright contradiction to me...

Alice thinks it's OK to enter another reality through a portal, like Cocteau's Mirror or C S Lewis's Wardrobe: in fact she loved all the Narnia stories as a child. And the Alice books, of course, were an early favourite. But she finds it somewhat disturbing to have it just happen without any transition.

There's a fascinating Making of Beasts of the Southern Wild video here. Yes, we do understand that some people don't like to know anything about a film before they've seen it. However, I like knowing all the ins and outs - it adds to my appreciation, in fact.  

Hear, hear, says Alice.
Hear? I'll never get used to these bizarre human expressions. Seems this one is historical...

Our Second Choice
From indie to block buster! But our tastes are quite eclectic. We actually went along to our second favourite art-house cinema to see this new Bond movie. Why? Because I hate iMax (it gives me a crick in my neck); they have lovely, comfortable, red seats in their Screen One, and it was cheaper there, too.

Skyfall was certainly over-hyped, but only in the sense of there being so very much of it: Moviejuice, Review Show, Mark Kermode on Film 24, even dear old Graham Norton had all three stars on his couch. Despite the hype, which can sometimes put Alice off, we really wanted to see it, and in the event it was well worth it.

It had all the expected running, jumping, chasing and shooting one expects; plus a more interesting plot than the last two, so that was good enough for me to thoroughly enjoy myself.

Alice is a bit more precise in her critical approach. She reckoned Daniel Craig has proved himself as probably the best Bond ever; Judi Dench did full justice to a more complex part for M, and Havier (oops!) Javier Bardem was a chillingly nasty villain, fully matching his role in No Country for Old Men. We also had a new Q in Ben Whishaw, who (handing Bond a tiny lighter-sized radio transmitter) uttered the priceless line, "Were you expecting an exploding pen? We don’t really go in for that any more." I suspect Alice rather took to him.

Moreover, it looked absolutely super, especially the unique title sequence (now on YouTube.) Alice, now, is pretty pernickety when it comes to cinematography, and this got her full approval. So, it's five stars from us both.

And our third recommendation

Ginger And Rosa, directed by Sally Potter (of Orlando fame) is about two best friends, born on the same day. Their growing up together is skillfully established in a series of quick and emotive scenarios. As teenagers in the "swinging" London of the 1960s they come face to face with the Cold War nuclear threat, as well as encountering sex, love and some complex family and friendship relationship problems. The parents and other adults exhibit all shades of sixties' opinions and bohemian craziness. The script and direction are excellent. The acting is first class all round.
See this review, and this one too.

Alice herself is of the same generation as the girls, and remembers well the terror she felt during the Cuban Missile Crisis - the fear of total human annihilation, just like Rosa. But even if you didn't live through it, the film is worth seeing just to get a feel of what it was like. It's also a very good film indeed.

Going to the Cinema

This photo is irrelevant really, but the gate (of the Central Public Library) is rather splendid, so I wanted to include it. This means Alice has to be allowed a little rant about how wonderful the library sytem is. Oh, all right. She says you can go online, search for a book, and if it's in any of the city's 30 branches, you can reserve it and when it's free they'll send it to your local one to collect! And no charge. Pretty smooth - OK?

Actually we were going across the road to the (not so inspiring) entrance of the Scottish National Library, to see an exhibition about Scotland at the cinema. They had Scottified (so what else can I call it?) some famous film quotes to publicise it.

There was lots of stuff: old posters; movie mags; an antique cine camera (a bit like this one); lantern slides of ads; and screens showing clips from old silent films and early talkies.

There's a good video about it all by Summerhall, and an interesting review at beautybombshells with details and pictures. Exactly why the word "bombshells" in this contex? You may indeed ask. Alice Googled and Googled away, eventually found a picture here, which can't be right, and a more suggestively helpful definition at an online Dictionary.

You humans do love to make a word work hard. I hope you pay them more, like Humpty Dumpty.

NEXT TIME we'll tell you about films we've been seeing - plus some we're really looking forward to.

Dustin Disses Directors

Alice, of course, objects to my title: she says diss "isn't a proper English verb." Oh dear - comes of having been an English teacher a very long time ago, you know. I say, if they can use it on TV, it's OK by me. Anyway, I'm not giving up the alliteration.

We were in Screen 3 of our favourite art-house cinema, watching the ads and trailers before seeing Room 237 (which was entertaining, but not worth a whole entry here) when there appeared a Red Carpet News interview with Dustin Hoffman. An actor known in his youth for the role of the naive student in The Graduate, he has made his directorial debut at the age of 75.

His new film, Quartet, is about a bunch of elderly opera singers in a retirement home, starring venerable veterans like Maggie Smith and Michael Gambon - shades of Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, methinks.

But that's beside the point.

In the interview, he had the nerve to utter the following words: The truth is, the easiest thing in the world is to be a film director, if you have first-rate crew (whose various functions he then listed). I was fortunate to get really first-rate people. And, and if you do, your, your ten-year old kid could direct.
[Underlining by a still horrified typist.]

At this, there arose a spontaneous collective gasp-groan-laugh of disbelief and derision from those of us watching. (Alice was one of the loudest.) We were aficionados, after all. What an insult to the many great directors in the history of cinema! I won't try to name them here - you know who you think they are.

Hard to believe he actually said it in public, isn't it? But just see this video of the offending interview.

Doing Art 2: Picasso et al

Across the road from the Munch, at the TTISH NAL F DERN ART (look at the previous post here, and you'll see what I mean by pretentious) the Picasso et al exhibition was showing. Alice says I should give it its proper title. Yes... but as long as she avoids lengthy digressions like last time. OK, we're agreed. It's Picasso & Modern British Art, and was first shown at Tate Britain, to much acclaim.
 
It seems that this particular Poster Girl, Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, caused a lot of problems when the publicity department of the galleries got her put up in Edinburgh Airport. Some lady passengers (and I do mean ladies as opposed to post-feminist women) complained about the nudity. Goodness me, it's Art! Moreover, it's Internationally Famous Art!!

They even put a "white vinyl cover" over her (or just her breasts?) but finally relented and restored her to the eyes of the public.

In the grounds of the SGMA

If the view from the steps of the gallery looks familiar, it's because it was designed by Charles Jencks, who did the Life Mounds at Jupiter Artland.

My personal tastes aren't as wide ranging as Alice's (Damien Hirst, for the love of god!) so I was expecting lots of weird modern stuff from Picasso, like his ghastly Weeping Woman. But I have to admit, some of it I actually liked.

His Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle was decidedly less garish and the tones quite pleasing. Unlike Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Makes me shudder. Click for a bigger view, if you must...

When his cubist paintings were first seen in Britain in 1910, G K Chesterton described one of them as "a piece of paper on which Mr Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots". A snidey way of trying to seem clever.

A recent review is more favourable! "English critical opinion struggled to make sense of Picasso, to normalise him. They never could. The superman is above all norms". What do you think?

Our absolute favourite of all (both of us) was Henry Moore's Reclining Figure in elmwood. Made you want to reach out and stroke it - like most of his figures.

The painting though, called Source, is a Picasso!
So there was a surprise.

Moore's bronze Reclining Figure outside the front of the gallery has a sister round the back, which used to live in the Botanic Gardens, and Alice said her sons loved to climb in and over and under that one when they were little.

Same impulse.
Art appreciation starts early.

When Alice was at boarding school (No, no, please don't wander into another digression!) she used to have a postcard of Picasso's The Old Guitarist pinned up in her cubicle. She particularly liked this quotation from The Man with the Blue Guitar, by Wallace Stevens:

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

The above was a rather narrow escape from a lengthy losing (by Alice) of my intended plot. Phew...

GMA One has a really good cafe , less expensive than GMA two, too (enjoy the pun) with a nice garden area. I think we must have been there on the last warm day of the year...

Then we had a final stroll round the Life Mounds after closing time.

But that wasn't the end of it! With her Friends' membership, we were able to go back for a more leisurely browse a while later on - but as you can see, the season had definitely turned, so the tea and cake had to be indoors. If you look carefully at my reflection in the teapot, you can see I'm still smiling.

Doing Art 

(plus a Technical Digression)

"We went to school in the sea"

NOTE: Don't forget that you can click on the images to see them larger, or open in another tab to get full size. And the Links appear in pale green. They're what makes it a Web.

Oh dear. Alice objects to my title, Doing Art. She thinks people will assume we've taken up modernistic collages, water colours, or even Fainting in Coils. She would prefer something like Visiting Art Galleries and Exhibitions. She can be so pedantic sometimes. We finally compromised by agreeing to add to the title, as appropriate in each case. So, start again.

Doing Art 1: Munch Prints

Here I am, at the gates of the pretentiously named SCO NATIO GALLERY O MO. Alice has just become a Friend of the Galleries. She says its a good deal: for a one-off annual subscription, she gets free entry to all the paying exhibitions at the four different National Galleries in the city. So we'll be Doing Art a lot for the next twelve months.

Watch this space, folks.

Next we're in front of the imposing pillars of the august building. And I do mean august with small 'a' and accent on second syllable, as opposed to capital A, accented first syllable: apparently totally unrelated. It was September anyway. English is such a confusing language. Reflects the idiosyncractic structure of human thought.

Alice has now looked it up, and the first use comes from the Latin augere - to increase or honour, and the latter is summer's (if you're lucky enough to get one of those) final month, named after the Emperor Augustus. Since he was so called as an  honour, it seems there is a connection after all. Did you ever!

Technical Digression - by Alice

Amazing how that apparently simple word "august" just popped out of Monkey's head and into my fingers on the keyboard. As you can see from his Profile, he is digitally disadvantaged, so relies on my secretarial skills to promulgate his wit and wisdom to the world. 

One of Google's Data Centers

But do you realise exactly what is required after the relatively simple act of typing to achieve this transmission? My computer's processor turns these keystrokes into a series of noughts and ones in its memory circuits, and transfers them to the hard disk when I click on Save. Later, when I copy or upload the blog, these bits of "machine code" pass down my phone line, then via the solid or ethereal staging posts and gates to my ISP's UK server. It is NOT really a Series of tubes! Then they are shunted in packets (that is what they're called) to another server, on a rack, in a container, in a storage unit, at one of Google's vast data centres (centers in techno-type) possibly the one in Finland, since Blogger is powered by them - a huge multinational corporation giant - and I'm in Europe.

Data Racks in one of Google's centers

Then, in order to get to your computer monitor (or tablet or smart-phone screen) when you click on a BookMark or Favourite (you have made one for this blog, I hope) or just type in the http address (that means hypertext transfer protocol, by the way) these bits and bytes are translated and transferred along a similar reverse trajectory. Just think! There are billions of little electrons, or else pulses of light, running a relay race along thousands of miles of wires, cables, optical fibres, routers, amplifiers and connections (masses and masses of them in undersea pipelines, but only a few via satellite) to reach you - who actually may be only a relatively few miles away from the physical me!

Cooling pipes - carefully colour coded

And did you see these amazing pictures Google recently released? They are absolutely stunning! There's a neat YouTube video too (less recent) where you must listen hard to spot the quaintly named "Google-provided Personal Transportation Device." Techies have their own brand of humour.

If this enthralls you as much as it does me (Monkey is getting very impatient and bored up in his dictation post) there are some interesting books on the whole thing. I can recommend Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon.

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet looks promising too, not just the great cover design, so I've requested it from the library. (Aren't Libraries simply wonderful!) If you follow the last link, do scroll down and watch the fascinating lecture by Andrew Blum, or see it on its own at TED. There's an excerpt from Tubes on Gizmodo; also a review and interview with the author at npr books.

OK. Digression over. 

Back to Monkey - and Munch

Yes, Alice that's all very interesting, I'm sure. You're quite the Granny Geek. I agree human ingenuity, creativity and technology are indeed awe-inspiring and their potential for changing the world maybe for a little bit better, or, scarily for a great deal worse - is mind-boggling. But all I really care about is that it works when I need it to. Sorry.

Not smiling, but screaming

Where were we?  Munch.

Munch is famous for that horrifying painting, aptly entitled The Scream. A print version of it was on the poster. Nothing beautiful or uplifting about that. Alice would say Art can be meaningful and significant without necessarily appealing to our aesthetic sensibilities. Maybe it's a matter of opinion. Still, I know what I like and what I don't. And it's not this. So there.

The only way I could respond to this harrowing piece was to turn my "smile" upside-down.

 The exhibition didn't have any of his paintings, but a number of prints - made from woodcuts, or etchings. That's a fascinating process, as we learnt later (wait til we get to Piranesi.) You can't photograph inside any of the exhibitions, though some images can be found on the bountiful world-wide web if you use your ingenuity.

Munch certainly created some lovely flowing lines, and made interesting variations in different colours, but even this sexy Madonna (No, not that one!) has a sinister little figure in the corner, a bit like a dead foetus, I thought.

In fact, I found most of this show was very depressing indeed, though Alice said she could appreciate the artistry.

But how about this self-portrait with a skeleton arm laid in front? Gloomy, don't you think? Munch himself was clearly suffering from depression, which is a terribly debilitating illness, very underestimated by people who've no direct experience of its horrors.

My favourite part of the visit was the ladies' loo!

A great piece of art in itself.

Here's what I was gazing at...

Does this mean I took the Blue pill, after all?

P.S. to words.. words... 

Edmund Kean as Shylock

Alice is mightily pre-occupied again, and way behind with writing up our recent cultural visits. She's about to be Shylock for her Shakespeare reading group. She loves taking on these villains. In the eighteenth century, Edmund Kean played the moneylender as a frenzied and embittered monster of evil armed with a butcher knife. His performance created a sensation. This picture shows a super out and out villain. Hurrah! But Alice is saying I should point out that he's not one hundred percent a villain, but actually the victim of antisemitic prejudice, who is reflecting back the hatred heaped upon him by the Venetians. So what! That hardly seems to justify refusing to indulge in the Quality of Mercy, and insisting on cutting A Pound of Flesh from the bosom of his debtor, does it?

Merchant of Venice 2004

For all the prepration Alice is going through, you'd thing she'd been invited to perform at the Globe! She's watched two different DVDs of the Bard's Merchant of Venice - a BBC one from 1980 with Bergerac [see NOTE below] in doublet and hose as Bassanio and a heavily accented Shylock; plus a more lavish film version with Al Pacino doing a splendid turn as "the Jew". She found a weird book called Shylock Is Shakespeare in the Library and read that too, searching for hints on interpretation, and now she's looking up all the archaic words...

John Nettles as Hamlet

 NOTE: One of Alice's claims to fame (which she just loves to tell people) is that she was at University with John Nettles; went to the same Philosphy classes as him, and shared a stage with him when he was Hamlet in 1964.

She was only the boy who played the Player Queen, however.
Not Ophelia or anything romantic like that. ["Spoilsport!" - Alice]

I'll be glad when this reading is over and we can get back to jolly photos of me in interesting places. Sigh.