Grimhilda! the ebook

Well, it's taken a lot longer than I intended, but the ebook of Grimhilda! is almost ready for publication. Just a few aspects still to be dealt with and then it'll be off to Amazon Kindle for them to do their bits of sorting out, and the book will make its way out into the wider world.

I had intended that the book would be ready last year, not long after the musical was presented, but it turned out that adapting a stage script and turning it into a novel was a bit more of a task than I'd imagined. The first draft was very close to the stage script in many ways, and I had to rethink things, expand my view and get away from what I'd been watching night after night on stage.

Then procrastinations set in, and delays caused by 'more important things' and so poor old Grimhilda! mark two went on the back-burner again. It's been her major failing in life.  She first turned up in the world over thirty years ago, and had a struggle to come to full term, as it were. Anyway, after many fits and starts she's just about there.

I just clicked on the #Grimhilda on Twitter, and was surprised to find that someone had sent this tweet back in November:
υиα єтєяиι∂α∂ ‏@emarina14 24 Nov

Con ganas de que sea maňana para volver al escenario ! ; #theater #grimhilda #teatroGuimera #shoutout… http://instagram.com/p/hENsI1JgMH/

Unfortunately the instagram link no longer works, and the Spanish (I think it's Spanish) translates as something along these lines - according to one translation site:

Wanting to make the morning to return to the stage!

With the desire to be wholegrain to return to the scene !

With desire of which it is maňana to return to the stage!

 

I like the middle one best. Of course, it could be that I'm getting a Spanish site to translate Portuguese or some other variation of the tongue. 

 

@emarina14 supplied a photo - of herself, presumably - as Grimhilda (I guess!). I hope she won't mind me copying it here.  This is a more conventional witch than the one who appeared in our show - or is imagined in the book.

 

I don't think there's any connection with our musical/book, though it's intriguing to come across this all the same.  Here's a picture of our Grimhilda [Helen Wilson], as she appeared in the Dunedin production: 

I've just looked up that other hashtag #TeatroGuimera. Apparently this theatre is located in Santa Cruz de Tenerife in the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands (Spain) is the oldest theater in the Canary Islands. So at least I was right about the language. Here's the theatre's own page.

 

Anyway, back to the book.  It'll be available - at least initially - for Amazon's Kindle, so you'll be able to read it on any of their devices, or on the iPad, or on most smartphones.  That should cover a few bases! 

 

Elsa & Fred

We watched a charming Argentinian movie last night called Elsa & Fred (Elsa y Fred in the original language).  Some of the US critics didn't think that much of it, calling it too predictable.  Of course it is, but the lovely detailed performances of the two principals makes it worth seeing, and anyway, the American studios must have thought it worth something as they've remade it in English, with Christopher Plummer and Shirley MacLaine.  It will be a vastly different movie, and the subtle and delightful playing of the Argentinian actress, China Zorilla, will probably be replaced by MacLaine's particular brand of brashness.  Time will tell. 

Anyway, the story is simple enough: an old man, recently widowed (seven months before), moves into an apartment opposite an old woman who has been widowed twenty-seven years before (or perhaps it's twenty-three - or perhaps, as we discover, she wasn't widowed at all).  Elsa is a vibrant woman with a mind of her own (she is perfectly capable of handling her control freak of a son) and she quickly decides she has time for a last fling before she dies.  Fred, played by Manuel Alexandre, isn't so sure.  His married life has been very 'tidy', and everything he tells Elsa about himself she pronounces to have been more like death than life.  But the relationship does develop, in spite of Fred's qualms, and in spite of their various children's disbelief.   If Elsa's older son is controlling (her other son, an artist, is a bit of a sponger), Fred's daughter is a nightmare.  The opening scene has her installing Fred in his new apartment, and everything is put in place according to her plans, not his.  She is venomous, and not a lady easily crossed; her husband has a perpetual downtrodden look about him. 

We delight to see Fred coming alive, but he's not the only we see differently as time goes on.  It turns out there is some good reason behind the concerns of both Elsa's son and Fred's daughter.  I was surprised by the turn of events about three-quarters of the way through the movie, anyway.  I said to my wife, I hope this doesn't all end in tears (too many good films seem to; I must be up for happy endings these days).  This film manages to avoid the tears, even though people are forced to face things more honestly than before.  Furthermore, there's an ongoing genuineness about the love between the couple that overcomes the difficulties.  

The film made us laugh out loud in several places - unusual in a comedy watched at home on a DVD.  Most of the laughs were the result of lines delivered by Zorilla, and her subtle changes of expression.  A hugely experienced actress (she was 83 at the time the movie was made) with more than fifty plays behind her and well as roles in thirty movies and various television productions.   Alexandre was 88 when he made the movie.  Unlike Zorilla, he is a Spaniard, born in Madrid and has performed in nearly a hundred movies.  This film is set in Madrid in fact, where it seems that being an Argentinian makes you something of a peasant.  Fred's daughter refers to Elsa two or three times as 'that Argentinian woman' as though it was something despised. 

A genuine surprise of a movie.  

Not so sharpe, these soldiers

Dark circles under eyes is an odd way of saying something - the lack of 'the' before the 'eyes' gives it a kind of person speaking English as a second language feel. So I'm not sure why a company would advertise themselves with such a link. Mine not to reason why, mine but to do or die, to paraphrase Charge of Light Brigade. (This removal of the the definite article is catching.)

Talking of soldiers charging into battle, I've been spasmodically watching the Sean Bean series, Sharpe, on Prime television over the last few weeks - it's on Friday night, so it tends to come at that time of the week when making an effort to do anything else is wearying. I'm not up with the story enough to keep track of who's who, and quite honestly, only Sharpe and one other character, an Irishman - played by Daragh O'Malley), seem to consistently appear (although I'm no doubt wrong about this).

In last night's episode, as far as I could make out, they were trying to conquer some walled city (in Spain?) by first creating a breech with cannon fire, and then sending in men to scale the broken wall. How anyone was ever supposed to survive these absurd break-ins is beyond me, especially when they had no protection from the gunfire coming from the city walls above them. This type of warfare was still in play in the First World War, when sending thousands of men into battle with no armour was the norm. Even the Romans, way back in the year dot, were far more canny. They used shields against the arrows and spears and other weapons, and had some armour. These guys in Sharpe just run straight into the gunfire, and fall over like ninepins in a bowling alley. Absurd.

Of course Sharpe and his core cast of characters survive everything going - which is just as silly as the way in which the warfare is conducted in the first place. (As was the survival of Pete Postlethwaite in this episode: he played a Sergeant with several screws loose, and managed to get away with nothing more than a leg wound - and that was given to him by that arch sharp(e)-shooter, the Irishman who'd such a marksman normally he should have been able to pinpoint a spot on his head and actually hit it. No doubt Postlethwaite lives to chew the scenery another day and eventually come off worst.

Bean was in the Jodie Foster movie, Flightplan, which we caught up with the other night. It proved to be better than expected, though hung on a fairly thin premise. Nevertheless it made the most of its surroundings, with lots of sinister Hitchcock-like moments, and a bunch of people who seemed perversely inattentive to the problem at hand. The two baddies were suspicious from early on; we just couldn't see why they were suspicious.

Incidentally, the imdb.com has had a facelift. There are plusses and minuses: it looks better, but you have to dig a bit further to find stuff that came up much quicker previously.

Another old movie

Just a mention of another old movie we watched the other night. It’s called Hunted, but also has an American title, The Stranger in Between, which isn’t as appropriate as the original.
Dirk Bogarde stars in it, along with a wonderful child actor, Jon Whiteley. Bogarde is a bit too suave and romantic to really play the hunted murderer well, but he’s always a great presence on the screen, and he carries it off. Whiteley, who’d never made a film before, and who was only seven when this film was made (as I was), is just wonderful. There are one or two moments when his concentration isn’t quite there, but in general he brings everything to the screen. He went on to star in four more movies (including The Spanish Gardener, again with Bogarde), an episode of the tv series, Robin Hood, and then gave it all up at the age of twelve. He spent his adult life as an art historian at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.
The film is in black and white, and makes great use of the visual contrasts available in that medium. Unfortunately, it runs out of steam some way towards the end: there’s no real climax, only a crisis of conscience on the part of Bogarde’s character, and it’s not enough to satisfy a modern audience any more, I feel. Nevertheless, while it runs, it has some great moments, is visually good to look at, and has a number of well-played minor roles.

Driving in hot and cold

One of the areas of the world that hasn’t ever really appealed to me for some reason is Scandinavia. Maybe I always have the impression of cold and that puts me off. Maybe I’m just not interested in wending my way up there in order to stay at one of the Sweden Hotels or the Norway Hotels.
I remember reading one of Bill Bryson’s books in which he was particularly rude about the bus trip he made at the beginning at it rather put me off reading the rest. However it was about a trip he made to somewhere in Scandinavia, and certainly cold was the impression you were left with.
On the other hand, my most recent experience of anything Scandinavian wasn’t to do with Stockholm Hotels, or Oslo Hotels, or any hotels at all, in fact. We were in Spain, (not the coldest place on earth), travelling from Barcelona to Valencia. Normally we would have travelled all the way by train, but there were major works going on at the railway station and we had to be transported the first part of the journey by bus.
Now it was autumn in Spain, and for the Spanish it probably felt chilly. We felt warm, as we did through our entire time in Spain. Anyway, the heating was on in the bus. On full bore. We’d hardly got out of Barcelona before we began to feel as though we were going to melt, but the Spaniards on board were no doubt quite comfortable.
Across the aisle from us were two women from Denmark. Like us, being used to cooler climes, they felt the heat as oppressive. The problem was, we had no idea how far we would be going in the bus. Our first understanding was that it was merely taking us to another station within Barcelona, but the bus kept on and on and left the outskirts of Barcelona well behind.
Then one of the other passengers claimed that we were travelling all the way to Valencia in the bus. This would have meant that the bus would arrive in that lovely city with at least four melted passengers, if not more. (And one who would be desperate to go to the loo!)
However, we breathed a huge sigh of relief when the bus finally pulled into a station in another city, and dropped us off into the wonderfully cooling autumn air. The Spaniards’ armpits were no doubt thoroughly dry. Ours were dripping!
I've never driven in Scandinavia, unlike Bryson, though I was recently sent an email which had a longish description of the sort of things you need to watch out for when driving there. They're mostly pretty similar to driving anywhere else in Europe, except that dipped headlights are required at all times, and there are heavy fines for anyone driving under the influence of euphoriants - a word I can't say I'm familiar with.
Another interesting thing is that you can get something called an Autopass. There are some 45 road tolls in Norway, and the autopass allows you to drive in a special lane straight through the tolls. You've paid in advance, in other words. (You'd want to make sure you did enough driving there to get your full value out of the pass!)
The only other thing to watch in these four countries is the state of the roads. The winter weather closes some of them completely. Not nice to get stuck in the mountains in the middle of winter, I'd say. It would be the equivalent of being stuck on a steaming hot bus in Spain!

The photo in the upper right corner is of the Öresund Bridge. It was taken by Jonas B. The other photo is by Geek2Nurse, and shows the Great Belt Bridge. Both are massive sea bridges, as you may be able to tell.

Learning Spanish

My brother-in-law has been learning Spanish for some time. He’s been to Spain on several occasions and loves the country. In fact, he and his wife were away in Spain the same time we were there.

I came back from Spain having picked up only a minimal amount of Spanish (hola, mostly), but he’s actually learned quite a bit. He says he doesn’t pick it up quickly because he never learned much about his own language at school, and certainly it helps to have learned other languages if you want to learn a new one.

Amongst the many books he’s got on the subject of Spanish, he has one that takes an approach I think is excellent: it starts off with the words that are the same in both languages – on the page. Then it moves on through a series of lists to show the words that are similar, but have perhaps an E added in Spanish, or some other addition. By the time you’ve gone through several chapters like this, and learned a few additional words that don’t fit into this approach, you’re well on your way to feeling comfortable with the language.

Years ago I had a German course that took the same approach, but unfortunately I lent it to someone and haven’t seen it since. It wasn’t in book form, otherwise I might be able to pick up a secondhand copy. Rather it came to me as a photocopied typescript: I’d read about the author in a newspaper and he sent me a copy himself.

I met up with the person who’d borrowed it a couple of months ago, for the first time in thirty odd years. He says it’s in his garage, but when I was visiting him, his garage was in minor chaos because he was doing some redecorating. Hopefully he’ll find it and let me know, and I might catch up with it again – after all these years.

The Spanish book, by the way, for anyone who’s interested is Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, by Margarita Madrigal. It has drawings by one Andy Warhol, believe it or not, and was first published back in 1951. It’s still in print, however.

Horse show in a bull ring

Being in Valencia we happened upon the show, Passionata Andaluza, which features Andalusian riders and horses, as well as flamenco dancers and the popular pianist/composer, Manolo Carrasco. Carrasco is utterly energetic, wild, frenetic - and a big show off. He’s just what the show needs, yet how he copes with the heavy duty playing he does each night is beyond me. As a pianist myself, I know what he’s doing to his hands. Nevertheless, he plays with all the fury required - and occasionally some tenderness. I think he prefers fury to tenderness, but that may just be my opinion.
Apparently he’s composed all the music for this show - some of it well-known Spanish tunes adapted and arranged - and along with a top band, he plays continually throughout. There’s a superb sax player (who doubles on flute at one point), guitarists, a drummer, and three singers, who occasionally do solos in that typical wailing Spanish way.
The horses are wonderful, of course; they trot in time to the music, and do their movements with great serenity. And of course they stand on their hind legs and everyone claps. And one of them manages to lift himself completely off the ground and kick his back legs out. They’re a delight, really.
And then there are the dancers. I can’t find their names listed on the site, but they’re superb too. Five women and a couple of blokes, and their timing and passion is spot on throughout. I enjoyed them more than the horses for the most part.
The show was held in what must be a former bullring, right next to the main railway station in Valencia: the Plaza de Toros is what it’s called. It’s very large, and must hold two or three thousand people at least, though it was only about two thirds full tonight. The seating is concrete, so they provided some padded portable seats at a euro a throw. They were definitely necessary! And of course, being in the open air, people smoked all around - and drank from those Spanish skin bottles in the usual Spanish way: holding it about a foot away and letting it arc into the mouth.

Leather

While we were in Barcelona, my wife came across a hobby shop in the next street to where we were staying (a street that also had two rival Internet shops, incidentally, both of them run by Indians - Indians from India, that is) which sold leather for use in decoration. Like so many shops in the area it had a tiny frontage, and inside the counter stretched from just by the door to near the back. All along the right wall were little shelves and lockers, and along the left wall were reels and reels of leather in various grades of width and texture.
It immediately became my wife's favourite shop in Barcelona, and she went in there at least three times in the three days we stayed in the city. The place was constantly busy all day - and by all day I mean from the time it opened in the morning (around nine) to the time it shut in the evening (around nine). Some Spanish shops have a siesta; this one didn’t as far as we could tell.
Even though we are already loaded up fairly heavily in terms of what we have to carry around Europe, she bought some leather to use for knots, and perhaps later, to hang the enamel pendants we intend making on.
The Barcelona people obviously use the leather for all sorts of decorations: on purses, and clothing and whatever. You might wonder how such a shop could survive, but it’s obviously been there for decades - maybe more than a century.

Nothing's simple

I wonder who it was that decided the phrase notebook computer was more apt than laptop computer. Both of them are synonymous, as far as I can tell, so why have two names? The world is full of doublings-up. Here in Spain, where we’re sojourning, there seem to be two languages running along concurrently, as there are signs in both in most places. One of the languages is concise, the other uses more words to say the same thing. I don’t know which is ‘actual’ Spanish and which is something else (such as Catalan, which seems the most likely candidate, or Galician or Basque), but perhaps I’ll find out before we leave the country.
When you come to Europe you think everything is simple and that the people who live in Spain speak Spanish, the people who live in Switzerland speak Swiss (they don’t) and the people who live in Germany speak German (they mostly do). But nothing is simple, perhaps because human beings aren’t simple, and variety is the spice of life in every department.