So long, cool hand..

Dreamsville..

When pictures live in pictures..

This is a photograph that I took, of a print of a photograph that Jody took, of Corinne photographing me with my own camera, which is the one that took this photograph..

… all I need now is to discover, upon zooming in, that the guy in the background is looking at a copy of this picture..

And they called it..

… Currently watching Being John Malkovich, which I stubbornly refused to go and see when it came out, despite, or rather because of, so many of my friends telling me how good it was. I did eventually get it on DVD and one would have to say it’s very accomplished and clever, but I can’t help but find it somehow a little gauche – what Don Simpson used to call ‘High Concept’. Of course that’s an empty phrase, just a way of polishing a turd – if Top Gun is high concept then I think we know where we stand. One big idea – in this case one big head – yeah, quirky I know.. 7and a halfth floor and all that. But the main thing that pisses me off about this movie is that they threw away what I thought was going to be a fabulous story – the puppeteer thing at the beginning, and the connected story of his puppets. I was transfixed for a few moments, and convinced that all my friends had been right – this was staggeringly, heartbreakingly brilliant.. but then.. no, they go and throw it away with the bloody big head thing. The numbskulls…

Anyway – here’s one of the bits I loved. Could only find it in Italian, but I think somehow it works even better that way..

(By the way – I believe the actual puppeteer is a guy called Phillip Huber)

A matter of faith..

Photobooth..

Vladimir Nabokov talking about ‘Lolita’..

..’a mirror of human frailties’, indeed..

So many things to love about this clip..

Nabokov’s opening gambit – “…First, of all, I don’t wish to touch hearts, and i don’t even want to affect minds very much. What i want to produce is, really, that little ’sob’ in the spine of the reader. I leave the field of ideas to Dr Schweitzer, and to Doctor Zhivago…”

The way they all three suddenly rise unannounced from the desk and faux-casually wander over to the sofa. “.. I’d like to ask mr Trilling.. as we move over here..” Brilliant.

They’re drinking tea from tiny china cups, and Lionel Trilling smokes stylishly throughout – oh, and comes out with this little gem – “..We can’t trust a creative writer to say what he has done. He can say what he meant to do, and, even then, we don’t have to believe him..”

But most of all I love Nabokov’s story about the ape who was given charcoal and proceeded to draw the bars of his own cage, and how Humbert is Nabokov’s own baboon, ‘a genius baboon perhaps’, but still a baboon “… drawing and shading and erasing and re-drawing the bars of his cage – the bars between him and what he terms the human herd… It is his passion, the pattern of his passion…”

Truth in advertising..

‘Randy from Dover, Delaware’ tells it like it is on the QVC home shopping channel..

Never allow..

Good morning, heartache..

The creative process – pt2..

Yup, ‘fraid I’ve been at the Borges again.. I’ve, perhaps unforgiveably, picked out a couple of passages from his essay ‘Coleridge’s Dream’ that tickled my fancy. You know the poem he’s talking about – it’s the one that starts like this..

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

a stately pleasure-dome decree,

where Alph, the sacred river, ran

through caverns measureless to man

down to a sunless sea,

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“… A Mongolian emperor, in the thirteenth century, dreams a palace and builds it according to his vision; in the eighteenth century, an English poet, who could not have known that this construction was derived from a dream, dreams a poem about the palace. Compared with this symmetry of souls of sleeping men who span continents and centuries, the levitations, resurrections, and apparitions in the sacred books seem to me quite little, or nothing at all…”
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” …The first dream added a palace to reality; the second, which occurred five centuries later, a poem (or the beginning of a poem) suggested by the palace; the similarity of the dreams hints of a plan; the enormous length of time involved reveals a superhuman execution. To speculate on the intentions of that immortal or long-lived being would be as foolish as it is fruitless, but it is legitimate to suspect that he has not yet achieved his goal In 1691, Father Gerbillon of the Society of Jesus confirmed that ruins were all that was left of Kublai Khan’s palace; of the poem, we know that barely fifty lines were salvaged. Such facts raise the possibility that this series of dreams and works has not yet ended. The first dreamer was given the vision of the palace, and he built it; the second, who did not know of the other’s dream, was given the poem about the palace. If this plan does not fail, someone, on a night centuries removed from us, will dream the same dream, and not suspect that others have dreamed it, and he will give it a form of marble or of music. Perhaps this series of dreams has no end, or perhaps the last one will be the key…”

The creative process – pt1..

A rare fly-on-the-wall opportunity to see Fathers Ted and Dougal at work on the composition of the seminal ‘My Lovely Horse’..

“..just play the f—ing note!…” Been there a few times myself, I’m afraid..

..You’d probably quote me a sonnet..

A little uncanny after I just did exactly that, but I’m watching Good Will Hunting again and this scene just went by which I always liked – a little Hollywood, I know, but moving nonetheless. No way Damon and Affleck wrote that screenplay, by the way..

Sonnet CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

	-- William Shakespeare

The Minefield of Caddishness..

The splendid Harry Enfield, with important advice for all you impressionable young things. Let’s be careful out there..

Hamlet as Facebook news feed..

If you don’t do the Facebook thing I’d imagine that this item would make little sense to you. If you do, then I think you’d have to concur with me that this is a work of no small genius. Click the pic below for the full size version..

Look at us – the last stronghold of gracious living in a world gone mad.. mad!

Been musing, this unfine morning, about trains and rivers, and destinies and obligations and life-stories and desires and tennis and, of course, Terry Thomas.. A quick trawl through Youtube reveals that both my favourite Terry moments are now on there..

Can’t for the life of me imagine how, in all my yaddering on here about music and composers generally, and film soundtrack composers specifically, I’ve signally failed to mention the great Neal Hefti, the unchallenged master of that hyper-elegant Manhattan sound. The Odd Couple is, I suppose, his signature work but this one is my favourite. That moment when Terry bends to pick up the mail at the front door, and those velvet horns come sweeping in.. that’s the sound of a New York I was desperate to experience. Of course it had already disappeared long before I finally managed to get myself there, if it had ever actually existed in the first place..

…and, inevitably, the greatest tennis match in the history of the game. From School for Scoundrels, Terry dispatches Ian Carmichael in fine style. How can so much laughter be generated in me just by one man repeatedly uttering the phrase “Hard Cheese!”? Sublime..