Holders of various sorts

There's something wonderful about the way in which words are invented for different crafts, jobs, and technical areas. The music world has a number of them, some of which I've talked about in other posts, but here's my latest discovery: a gooseneck holder.

Rather than try and describe this, I've added a photo of one form of this rather cute device:

It reminds me of something from an animated movie, though I can't put my finger on it at the moment.

A related musical item, in a very loose sense (the main connection being that it holds something) is the folding music stand. I don't mean those solid stands that are guaranteed to hold the music upright even in an earthquake or tornado, but the ones you unfold bit by bit, trying to work out why it looks as though it's going to blow apart on you as you do so. An example is in the picture below:

The choir I conduct, The Choristers, went out to sing at a rest home today. I'd left the good music stand that they've provided for their conductor back at our rehearsal room (its only quirk is that it has a tendency for the separate parts to...separate). So I grabbed a music stand from home that I was given recently by a friend who'd got it from another friend who's since died. (Are you keeping up?) I'd been grateful to get that new one, because the one we've had in our house since my daughter was at intermediate school (it has her name and the school's name on it) is a little monster than hates to have to stand up and hold anything. It says that after nearly thirty years of being in my house it probably needs a rest. (I've given it a rest: out on the pile that's going to the junk yard.)

The one I was given recently is a more well-behaved character. I thought. As soon as I went to stand it up at the rest home, it claimed that I was opening it incorrectly, and promptly threatened to burst apart. I folded it again, tried again. It still looked as though the actual part that holds the music would throw any music placed on it onto the floor, So I folded it up and tried a third time, finally managing to figure out its intricacies. Even then it demanded not to stand in the position I wanted, but at an angle it claimed was more suitable. (It wasn't.)

Not a good way to start a performance....

The Luddite reminisces about watches

My wife has always been very keen on wristwatches that do pretty much everything, so she tends to go for those that not only show your heart rate, the speed you're walking, the speed you should be walking, how far under water you can go, whether there's enough air to breathe and so on, but also - when they have the time to do it - tell the time.

These watches are great, but all I want to know when I look at my watch is what time it is. Yup, I know, really old-fashioned, but that's the way things are. I've had watches that would wake me up in the morning, or act as stop-watches, or tell me the time in another part of the world, but in the end I still only use them to tell me the time here where my body actually is. That's really all I need. An alarm clock is better for me that a watch that starts going pip pip pip in the morning, and when have I ever needed to time someone who's racing?  Never, that I can remember.

The first watch I had, which I was given for my 21st birthday, just rolled around second by second, day after day, and told me the time. It lasted until my daughter was 12 (around twenty years, in other words) and I only stopped using it because my wife kindly brought me home a new watch she'd purchased on her trip to England. I imagine, if I could find my first watch, that it would still be going happily.

That second watch was equally long-lived. I only stopped using it when I was back in England with my wife, in 2007, by which time it had long since got gunk in the works, and no one could fix it properly, or else the parts had long since ceased to be made. It still ran, but you couldn't adjust anything very easily. Since it was getting frustrating not being able to tell the time correctly (and I've never got used to checking my cellphone for the time) we bought a cheap watch at a stall in Norwich market. It's the one I'm still wearing, even though it's a pain at daylight saving time - the one where you have to put the clocks back - as it takes forever to shift back eleven hours (if that's what it is we do).  It's never had the happy relationship with me that my first two watches had, and perhaps it feels a little unloved. Anyway, it goes, and that's what watches are made for.

More on the adaptation process

I wrote a few days ago about adapting my musical, Grimhilda! into a book, and how I was feeling quite disenchanted with the process, as it was proving a great deal more difficult than I'd expected.  I don't know if getting that off my chest helped or not, but I've now done more work on the first three chapters and have handed them out to some other people to read and comment. The responses have been pretty positive all round. So perhaps it was just a matter of getting up and running again.

Last year, when I started the adaptation process, the big pull initially was to keep everything that was in the musical's libretto.  Not a good idea.  I got gradually more adventurous and added in detail which clarified the story further, and broadened its parameters and allowed things to breathe.  On stage everything happens within a short period of time (about an hour and half in this case) and it's all in real time even if you're covering a day or a month or several years.  In a book, time is far more flexible, and I began to allow for that as well.  But I still got to the end of the first draft feeling increasingly unsatisfied.  And by the time I'd gone through three or four more drafts (I think the first chapter was on its sixth), I was beginning to get thoroughly fed up with it all. 

But that was back in August last year.  Coming back to the book has been a pleasure.  Things are working, and I can better see which details are needed and which are not - and where other things can do with expanding a little. 

I was further encouraged when my daughter told me the other day about a friend of hers.  This woman had come to see the show (back in April/May last year) with her eight-year-old daughter (I think that's her age) and the daughter was very enthusiastic, wanting to know when the sequel was coming up!  Crikey.  I'd met this little girl briefly at one of the performances and she was star-struck at meeting the author.  This will probably be the only time in my life when someone is star-struck, so I'm making the most of it. 

Brave

We went to see Brave today with three of our grandchildren, one daughter and one daughter-in-law.  What a wonderful film, though not entirely for children, who might find it quite scary in places.  The five-year-old grandson assured me he was okay while at the same time telling me it was a bit scary.  And it was: the scene in which the ferocious bear appears, and especially the big battle between the male and female bear at the end, are very frightening.  If you're five.

But frightening bits apart, this is a delight.  The characters have originality about them, the story isn't as straightforward as it might first appear, and the detail in every scene insists that we come back for a second or third look at the movie.

The wonderful thing about animated movies in particular is the artwork that's involved. It's in a league of its own, but more importantly it invariably celebrates the beauty of the world.  Brave is no exception (and the short Pixar movie that accompanied it, in which three generations of starkeepers deal with the latest influx of stars, is just a wonder from beginning to end).   The Scottish wilds are wonderfully portrayed, and the animals in the film (in particular the heroine's horse, and her father's dogs) have their own personalities, but are also animated wonderfully as animals.

Brave's big plus, in terms of animated movies, is that it concerns a young girl who knows her own mind, and who's finally allowed to follow it.  While females have often been the subject of cartoons, from Snow White onwards, they've seldom been as adventurous or forthright as Merida, the heroine of this movie.  Merida has to battle with her mother at all points, but she manages to win through at the end still on the same side.  Both characters have matured by the time we're finished.

The vocal work is delightful too - the script includes a number of less commonly used words that fit well with the Scottish accents.  Kelly MacDonald plays Merida, Emma Thompson her mother, and Billy Connelly her father.  I wasn't sure that Connelly was going to work at first, even though he seems an obvious choice for the role: he's larger than life and the character he plays is larger than life both personality-wise and physically.  But Connelly has a way of reading his lines in movies that doesn't always ring true.  Fortunately for Brave this style is soon left behind, partly because he gets fewer and fewer lines to say as the movie goes on.

Julie Walters appears as the wood-carving witch, and is quite unrecognisable.  There are a number of other reasonably well-known actors in the smaller roles including an actor named Patrick Doyle. This is the same Patrick Doyle who composed the score, and his score is a delight from beginning to end; even the bagpipes come across effectively.   Doyle the actor has appeared in other movies he's composed the score for, including two of the Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare adaptations.

At the opposite end of movie-making, as it were, we watched the second in the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo trilogy; The Girl Who Played with Fire.  Like its predecessor, it's violent in the extreme, though there are thankfully no sexually abusive scenes.  (There is one what-seemed-to-me-to-be unnecessary lesbian sex scene, however.)  Unlike its predecessor, it relies on a lot of coincidence, and there's much less actual mystery to it. The heroine manages to find out things fairly easily, and Blomqvist finds her even more easily at the end, by which time she's been beaten, shot and buried alive.  She's one tough cookie.  The story is left hanging (unlike the first film) and it's presumably necessary to see the last movie to get some of the unfinished business dealt with.  The revelation about her father in this one seems a bit far-fetched, especially as the first time we saw him he was drastically on fire to the extent that you wouldn't have thought he'd have survived.  Seemingly he's as tough as his daughter.  (And let's not mention his even tougher son, who's very unpleasant.)

A footnote - or should that be an above note?

The picture in the previous post originally appeared on the Alberta Shaken Baby Syndrome Prevention site. Last weekend we had two of my grandchildren staying with us – and their mother. Boy, is she patient with them! The older of the two, who’s around 15 months, got diarrhoea while he was here, and cried loudly every time he was changed – which was often. And then his baby sister would join in. My wife and I can get small children to stop crying by a variety of (positive) methods – all of them learned through handling our own children over the years - but even we were struggling to keep them calm for long. Their mother, bless her heart, never got angry, never got mad, even though she was very tired. Good on yer, daughter!