Anchors Aweigh

Because there was absolutely nothing on TV last night, and I'd run out of steam to just sit and do more work (I'm adding an accompaniment to some pre World War I songs at the request of a customer) we watched Anchors Aweigh again.  Not what my wife would prefer to watch, but she acquiesed on this occasion!

It's a bit of a muddle as far as the songs go: some of them plainly belong to the storyline, others have been thrown in, and of course, there's Jose Iturbi playing anything that looks spectacular on the piano, and taking up screen-time.  He was a brilliant musician, though he plays the piano with an almost claw-like hand position, which seems odd.  He also conducts in the movie, several times, and, as part of the storyline, frequently hops onto his motorbike and scoots off to his next appointment.  Apparently that was the case in real life too.  (At one point he and thirty other youthful pianists play a version of Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody.  That must have taken some recording!)

There's a reasonably conhesive story, for once: Gene Kelly (Joe) and Frank Sinatra (Clarence Doolittle!) are buddies on a naval ship (the film was released in 1945, so it has overtones of the war, but not many); on shore leave, Kelly is the 'sea-wolf', a whiz with the girls, supposedly, and Sinatra is the ex-choirboy who gets tongue-tied in front of a girl. Kelly is supposed to be meeting up with a hot date, but keeps getting forestalled by other matters. The police pick them up in order to deal with a boy (Dean Stockwell, absolutely delightful) who's been found wandering the streets late at night, wanting to join the Navy, and order Kelly and Sinatra to deal with him and get him back home. They do, and meet up with Aunt Susie (Kathryn Grayson), who's the boy's guardian, his parents both being dead. Sinatra falls for Susie, but so does Kelly, gradually, and then there's a bit of untangling to do, especially as later in the movie Pamela Britton turns up as a waitress and falls for Sinatra. She's from Brooklyn, and that's all the name she's known by in the movie (the credits list her as 'Girl from Brooklyn'), though her accent is about as genuine as ours were in The Sunshine Boys.  In fact ours might have been more credible. 

Grayson wants to get an audition with Iturbi, but is stymied at every turn.  Kelly and Sinatra aim to fix one up for her, but that gets stymied too.  It all works out in the end, of course. 

Sinatra and Kelly are at their best - Sinatra, around thirty when the movie was made, plays naivety very well, and gets some lovely moments to croon (courtesy of Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne). Kelly gets some superb dancing in: the famous dance with Jerry, from Tom and Jerry cartoons (Tom has about 15 seconds of screen time; Mickey Mouse was to be have been the star, but Disney refused to let his animators work for MGM); the stunt-filled Spanish style dance when he plays a bandito serenading his lady, and the wonderful, joyful dance with the serious little Spanish girl (Sharon McManus, who was around seven at the time, and is credited only as the 'little girl beggar').  Kathryn Grayson sings a couple of up-in-the-top-register soprano songs, and performs well enough as Aunt Susie, but she's no real match for the guys.  Her energy levels are considerably lower than theirs, and when she's singing, she obviously doesn't like moving too much; nor does she convey much in her singing: there's a kind of 'I'm concentrating on the vocals' look about her.  It perhaps doesn't help that the plot shifts her feelings from Sinatra to Kelly three-quarters of the way through, without too much explanation. 

There's a crazy parody rendition of If you knew Susie by the two guys when they're trying to ward off a possible suitor (Grady Sutton, playing a stuffy well-heeled opera-lover), though it's hardly complementary to the character of Aunt Susie in the movie.  And something that shows how times have changed: Aunt Susie leaves the nine-year-old Stockwell with a babysitter (whom we never see - presumably she's someone who lives close by).  The reason Stockwell is found on the streets in the first place is because the babysitter's gone home after leaving him asleep in bed.  He's climbed out the upstairs window, apparently.  On a second occasion, the same 'babysitter' is employed to look after him, and again she leaves him alone once he's asleep. It's hard to credit this even in the 40s, though of course it suits the plot!

Upskilling

Having a (newish) daughter-in-law who's in the medical line of business (she's a Physician's Assistant) I'm a little more aware of the wider world of medicine than I was when I was purely a patient.  Not that I've been a patient very often - at least as far as being in hospital is concerned.  I've only ever stayed in hospital twice in my life, once when I was 21 and once in 2009, by which time I was 64.  

And my daughter-in-law now has some very funny stories to tell about medical experiences - although when she tells them they seem much funnier than when I try to repeat them.  We were on Skype to her and my son yesterday (they're in the States) and she was telling us about how she was treating a Spanish patient in the ED where she works.  He spoke no English, so there was a translator involved as well.   My daughter-in-law had hiccups while she was examining and questioning the man, and suddenly he said something in Spanish and then went BOH! at her.   She was a little puzzled, especially when he did the same thing again.  Finally it was explained: he was doing to her what he would do to a child who had hiccups: giving her a fright.

This isn't the sort of thing you're likely to learn in medical school, and it's probably not something you'd use very often.   And I'm not sure if my daughter-in-law wants to go learning anything more at the moment: she's been studying for what seems like forever, and has some student debt to catch up on.  

However, for those who feel the need to catch up on some extra credits, or to upskill, there are a variety of courses available, courses that once upon a time wouldn't have been dreamed of: it was assumed that when a doctor was trained, that was it.  But these days there's a sense that a doctor's training needs to keep going, and not just in catching up with the latest developments in medicine.  Consequently there are all sorts of courses available, such as a medical teaching course or a medical management course.  These are especially useful for those who already do some training of other staff themselves, and who need to make sure they have the requisite skills.  It's a bit like the assessments students do of their lecturers; if the latter don't come up to scratch, then some updating of their teaching skills may be necessary.  Not every University- trained person automatically makes a good teacher.   In the medical field you can even attend a teach the teacher course (I sometimes think some school teachers and lecturers could do with something similar!)  And if you're in the administrative department of a hospital you might even attend a consultant interview course.

Of course, you might not want to keep attending courses!  Fitting these into an already busy medical life may be something you'd want to put off.  However, from my experience as a patient, I can assure you that the more informed the medical staff are the better.  For some doctors a 'treating the patient as a human being' course would be a good option.  I note that this kind of thing is now being included in the six-year course that doctors go through.  Thank goodness!

Apropos of nothing at all

I found this picture amongst a bunch of photos on the work computer. Don't know where it comes from, so hopefully it's not something with copyright issues, but it's just a wonderful shot.

How'dya like to be the guy in the middle?

The photo has a title: Manifestacion, Corea. Corea is presumably another word for Korea, and I guess manifestacion means 'demonstration'. Sounds like the photo is Spanish in origin, but looking up a bunch of photos under that title on Google gives me hundreds of others, but not this one.

Blogging NOT in English

Every so often out of curiosity I click the link ‘Next Blog’ on the top of my blog. In the past this would bring up a host of blogs in English, with the occasional one in a foreign language.

Whether the random nature of this has decided tonight to link to everything but English I’m not sure, but I’ve struck in succession:
Rosas do Cotidiano (in Spanish, with lots of photos);
Blog do Guillermo (also in Spanish, with lots of toddler photos);
Digital Nature (a stockbroker’s blog which appears only just to have started - it has one entry on Azizi Ali, a millionaire writer on personal finance in Malaysia);
Jannice Lindell, who comes from Uppsala in Sweden, and is therefore writing in Swedish;
A blog in Chinese (I think) on which I can read nothing;
Reflexos, another Spanish blog, by the looks of it, with a nice graphic at the top;
Brookeb’s little photo diary (lots of lovely garden photos)
Another Chinese blog, focusing on motorbikes;
An Egyptian blog (?) with only one entry from a few days ago;
And my favourite out of these, another Asian blog, called My Lego, with some great Lego constructions.

I read yesterday in a book called Naked Conversations (which is about blogging, for those who might think otherwise) that English is no longer top of the languages when it comes to blogging: Farsi is well above it, and Asian languages are also high on the list. My quick survey seems to indicate that Spanish might be heading up too.

Granados

One of the other books of music I got when I went to the recent Regent non-book sale was Granados Masterpieces: 12 Spanish Dances.
Having been playing the piano now for around 55 years, you get to the point where you think there won’t be any more music coming along that can really make you sit up and do some real work. I’ve become very stale about a lot of music, particularly the piano music I’ve got, (which is perhaps why I’ve had to write some more of my own!), and it’s great to find something that triggers of the musical responses again.
At first I thought the pieces were sight-readable. They are, up to a degree, but they’re also full of little tricks that you don’t expect, and consequently sight-reading them doesn’t really cut the mustard.
The most well known of the dozen is Andaluza, but it’s by no means the only one worth playing in the set. I suspect I’ll get my teeth/fingers into all of them in due course; meanwhile it’s great to have something to play that requires a bit of work, but not so much that you want to give up frequently.
The other thing about them is that most of them have very little in the way of melody or development. Granados takes a phrase or two and works away at it like someone chewing their cud (but rather more artistically). Things don’t actually go anywhere, which is part of his charm and his style, I guess. Curiously enough it reminds me of John Adams, or Reich or some of these other minimalists. I wouldn’t have thought of Granados as a minimalist, but perhaps he’s the forerunner of some of them?

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.