Better late than never

This post, which first appeared on Jason Goroncy's blog, should have been copied here at the time...for some reason it got lost in transit, and has only surfaced four years later. Better late than never... 

Some moons ago, I posted an interview with the Dunedin author, composer, and musician, Mike Crowl, in relation to his book, Diary of a Prostate Wimp. Mike is a good friend who has, besides his literary foray on his surgical experiences, published two fantasy books this year for children. One of these was based on a really delightful musical he wrote and produced in 2012, called Grimhilda! (I posted about it here). This month, Mike released a ‘sort of sequel’ to Grimhilda! called The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret.

The Mumbersons is a ‘sort of sequel’ because here new characters take the lead, and only a very few of the people from the first book appear. It’s an approach not unlike that which C. S. Lewis adopts in his Narnia series. The Horse and the Boy, for example, has distinct connections to the earlier book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but the characters driving the tale are quite new.

Mike’s fantasy world, like Lewis’s, isn’t explicitly ‘Christian’, although much of the strange new world of the Bible underpins the stories. In Grimhilda!, for example, the parents of a young boy called Toby are kidnapped by a witch, who later explains that she’s entitled to do this because they haven’t loved their son; they’ve been too busy with their own lives. After some initial reluctance, Toby sets out with some companions to rescue his parents. In the background to the story we learn of another young boy who tried to do the same thing many years before, and failed, dying in the process. This past sacrifice makes possible Toby’s new life of loving service.

And then there’s the blood. Indeed, a main thrust of the new story is about the secret of Billy’s blood, and whether it can be used for good or evil.

Both stories are adventures, with the heroes having to overcome a number of difficulties, sometimes by their own strengths, sometimes aided by the unlikeliest of gifts. In each story, the boy is accompanied by a female companion: in Grimhilda! she’s a bossy doll who’s come to life; in The Mumbersons, she’s a risk-taking girl with a rather strange family background.

Like the other two books, The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret has been published as an e-book [and also a paperback] on Amazon, and is also available at the Dunedin Public Library. Again, Mike has worked closely with Cherianne Parks, his co-author, whose ideas ‘permeate the story’, as he notes in the Acknowledgements. You can read more about Mike here.

It isn’t necessary to have read Grimhilda! to understand the new book. Although, of course, knowing the background of the earlier story will add to the enjoyment of the sequel.

Chesterton's brother and Kindle formatting

By chance I recently came across a book about G K Chesterton, the famous early 20th century writer. I have some 36 of his titles on my shelves, in paperback and hardcover, and a few more on Kindle.

The book was written by Chesterton's brother, Cecil, although when it was first published his name didn't appear on the cover. It's entitled, G K Chesterton: a Criticism, and looks at the early period of GKC's writing life, when he was still establishing himself, and then suddenly becoming well-known everywhere.

I began to read it a few days ago, and it's good, but the Kindle edition has more errors in it than all the other hundreds of ebooks I've read put together. It's been scanned from an old library copy - the library details have been scanned into the book, in fact, along with the due dates! But no one has bothered to check it whether the scan was accurate. Apart from typos, there are innumerable formatting problems.

Normally when you find a typo or formatting issue, or some other error in a Kindle edition, you have the option to inform the publisher. You can see how to do that here, if you're not sure. I began to do it as I was reading this book, but because of the sheer number of problems, I gave up.

Here are some of the errors I found:

1. Letters that were in a different font at the beginning of a chapter, or section, in the original edition, not only appear as garbage in the Kindle version, but the original capitalized letter may turn up several Kindle pages further on. (It took me a while to cotton onto this.)

2. Whenever poetry is quoted, there are additional lines between the original lines, and in one case towards the end, the rest of the ordinary text has turned itself into 'verse.'

3. Quotation marks are random, sometimes appearing, sometimes not. Sometimes they're replaced by asterisks, or some other punctuation sign.

4. There are large chunks of white space where you'd just expect the next line in the paragraph. In one case there's almost a whole blank Kindle page between sentences.

5. Sometimes after a break in the lines, the next section becomes incomprehensible, as though there were actually some words missing from the text.

That may not be everything. As I said, it became impossible to keep on informing the publisher - Amazon Digital Services LLC, apparently - about each and every mistake. There would be at least one per page, if not several.

The only surprise is that I managed to read the book completely, in spite of all the errors! The Kindle version isn't expensive to buy at $3.30 US, but since I'm expected, as an Indie Author on Kindle, to provide a quality typo-free, well-formatted copy for Amazon to work with, it seems only fair that Amazon themselves should provide something much better than this.

Catch up on some movies

We've watched three movies on DVD over the last week or so that have been worth noting.

Let me put in a plug for our local library while I'm at it: they provide DVDs at $2.00 a pop for a week, and $2.00 a pop for TV series, which you can have for a fortnight. I wanted to catch up on the first series of Broadchurch the other day, because I'd missed some episodes. In the end we got it from a video store, and it cost $10.00. I found it in the library yesterday as one of the 'top of the picks' at $4.00, and I could have had it longer...  It's a great service, and we've made some really interesting discoveries as a result, even watching two entire series of DVDs in Italian: Inspector Montalbano was one of them. And then we went on to learn Italian as well...but that's another story.

First up on the movie front was Last Passenger. It's about a small group of people who get left on a train that's refusing to stop - the driver turns out to be someone, they think, who wants to commit suicide in a spectacular way. Dougray Scott and Kara Tointon star, and do a good job. The whole film takes place on the train and for the most part maintains its sense of tension. There are a few spots where things could have moved along a bit, and the plot probably doesn't want to be investigated too strongly, but overall this was a nicely tense ride. There's an affecting performance from the seven-year-old boy, Joshua Kaynama, a little boy caught up in a situation he doesn't understand and who's asked to do the impossible at one point.

The second movie was much more sure of its pacing: the tension barely let up for a moment, even when there were conversations between various baddies. This was 7 Boxes, a film made in Paraguay, which apparently isn't well-known for top quality movies; in fact several of the cast seem to have started their film careers in this movie (!)

It's about a young man whose job is wheelbarrowing purchases for customers in a market. (The wheelbarrow isn't your garden model but a long flat thing that obviously takes muscle to handle.) These wheelbarrow boys have to compete with each other to get the work, and it's tough. When the boy, Victor (Celso Franco) gets an opportunity to take seven boxes 'around the block' for some devious characters, he jumps at it, because it's going to be very well paid. The boxes of course contain something much worse than he imagines, a nasty fellow-barrow boy has been shunted out of the job by accident and wants to get it back, and those sending the boxes on their way have got things considerably tangled, much to their horror. The piece is well plotted, and all the elements keep crossing and intercrossing until there's a violent climax in which Victor almost dies.

In spite of the tension and violence there's quite a bit of humour, lots of fun with cellphones changing hands, a nice bickering relationship between Victor and Liz (Lali Gonzalez) his know-all friend who obviously thinks girls can do anything, and all manner of other enjoyable details. This movie also takes place in a fairly confined area: small in South American terms, anyway. Everything happens in a huge (and I mean huge) market area, a market that seems to go on in a maze for miles in every direction.

The last movie was Saving Mr Banks. Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks star, Hanks playing a generous second fiddle to Thompson's wonderfully arrogant performance. Thompson is P L Travers, the creator of the Mary Poppins stories. Her books are sacrosanct and the idea that Walt Disney (Hanks) should make one of his awful animated movies out of them appals her. She's been holding out for twenty years, but now she's starting to need the money, and is finally persuaded to go to Los Angeles and meet Disney, and see if she can agree to anything. There's almost nothing she wants to agree to, which makes it difficult for the Hollywood people, but in the end...well, you can imagine the end because you know Mary Poppins got made and was one of Disney's most successful films ever.

Interwoven with the modern story (set in 1961) is Travers' childhood. She had an imaginative father of Irish stock, in Australia, but he was an alcoholic, and for all his intentions to keep his promises, seldom could. In spite of this Travers, as a child, adored him, and shared his wonderful fairytale view of the world. Her childhood is a tragedy, in fact, and this has affected her adulthood, so that in spite of writing a wonderful set of stories she has become a bitter old woman. Perhaps she wasn't quite as difficult as the filmmakers make her out to be, but she was certainly opinionated, and the 'family' (the Banks family in the book, and Poppins herself) were extremely precious to her.

It's a classic Hollywood movie in the old style, with a cast of great actors (Colin Farrell plays the relatively small part of the father, and Rachel Griffiths makes a brief appearance as an aunt who obviously was in part a model for Mary Poppins). Very enjoyable, and emotional.

Diary of a Prostate Wimp

The book I've been writing on my experiences of how the medical world dealt with my prostate is now almost ready. It only lacks a cover, an ISBN and a CIP (the National Library of New Zealand's Cataloguing-in-Publication Data - each country has their own version of these). All these are all in the pipeline in various ways. So I may make my deadline of the end of April after all. 

I've had a brilliant editor who went through my 'final' draft with such a fine toothcomb that he found things I hadn't thought were even there. Though I must add that I also found a couple of tiny things he missed - but then he was working, as usual, on about six other things at the same time. Nevertheless the final text is correct in ways I wouldn't have achieved on my own. 

I've sometimes had some qualms about whether the information in the book is too personal, too in-your-face (especially if you're not a bloke), too intense, and too-a-variety-of-other-things. Time will tell. The book is partly based on a series of blog posts I wrote back at the time the events were happening, and at that time I began to read - but never finished - a book called Please Leave the Seat Up by Brian Turner. Brian was an Englishman who'd gone to the US with his wife to take over a branch of his company. It was going to be a highly successful time, and he would have done very well. Within weeks he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and all his plans fell apart. While I was putting my own book together over the last few months I actually read Brian's book. If I had qualms about anything in my book being too much in your face, then Brian's book showed me that when it comes to talking about health, almost anything is permissible! Not only is it permissible, it's essential to tell the readers the details, because the medical profession doesn't. 

This was one of the big things I learned about having something seriously wrong: the medical profession knows a lot of what can go wrong, but prefers to wait until it goes wrong before they tell you that it's not abnormal, and that thousands of other people have been in the same boat. The only thing is that few of those thousand people have written about their experiences and passed on what they've learned. 

Still, I often got more help and information from friends and colleagues who'd either had the same experience, or something similar. The doctors and nurses would be helpful if you asked (generally) but they tended not to provide information if you didn't ask. And how would you know to ask until you found something strange was happening? I'm not blaming the medical people - some of them were extraordinarily helpful and I thank God for them - but it sometimes feels they think that less information is better than more, even when that little bit more information might have allayed a lot of your concerns. 

I was fortunate to get through the experience; many, as I show in the book, have much worse times than I did. Prostate issues, and prostate cancer, are amongst the most common problems men can have in later life. Hopefully this book will help some men before they find themselves involved in such difficulties. 

By the way, it's called Diary of a Prostate Wimp. You'll have to read it to find out why!

Grimhilda! goes live

Been a busy week in which I've not only learned how to do the final processes required for getting my e-book, Grimhilda!, up onto Kindle, but also how to turn the original Word document into an .epub or .mobi file. I realised yesterday I had to have a copy in either one of these formats in order to fulfil my requirements with the National Library of NZ, which holds a copy of every e-book published in the country that's had an ISBN given to it by that library. The library acts as a kind of clearing house for ISBN numbers in NZ; it requires two copies of every printed book. Of course, it's difficult for a library to 'hold' a copy of an electronic book, soGrimhilda! has done her first 90 days on Kindle's promotional level, I'll need the book to be in those formats for sending it off to other devices, such as Kobo.
they have to have it in a format that's usable to them. .Epub and .mobi are the same formats public libraries use for their electronic books.  And, once

If you're still with me, that's great. Don't get too fussed, it's all a learning curve, for you and for me.

Anyway, Kindle says that the normal turnaround time for getting a book online with them is between 12 and 24 hours. I uploaded the final version of the book at 4.27 on Monday (I noted the time exactly!) and, when my wife came home told her she wouldn't be able to see it till the next morning. Nothing daunted, she checked anyway, and there, at 6.15, the book was up and running online. So of course she had to be the first to buy a copy, which rather puts our profits out of kilter, but at least it meant someone bought it. Later on, we were unexpectedly called over to my son's house to babysit, because my daughter-in-law had cut herself rather badly and was down at A&E. So Grimhilda! got its first 'reading to a grandchild' - or at least two or three chapters did. This same grandson, who'd seen the musical version back in 2012, and declared it 'awesome' at the time (so generous!), two years later struggled to remember it. Such is the price of fame. However, I gave him a few details to remind him, and he did remember actually going to it. I'm not sure that he realised the book was telling the same story. Well, that's the advantage of being able to take the same material and re-do it...

You can find Grimhilda! here.  Currently it's available for Kindle readers of all sorts, as well as Kindle apps on PCs and Macs, and on iPads and iPhones. And the Kindle apps on android phones too.

Click here

I remember being told some years ago now that to write click here in a blog post was really old hat, and rather amateurish, and that you should make the need for clicking more informative, more inviting, and less obvious.  Curiously enough, in spite of that advice, and its apparent authority, writers of blog posts and articles on the Net still use click here ubiquitously.  (Ubiquitously is one of my all-time favourite words, but it's not as popular on the Net as click here. Actually ubiquitous is far more popular than ubiquitously - but I digress, though before I do, how this for a sentence: When looked for with proper binding, the previously ubiquitous pentaquarks disappeared.)

Back to click here, as in (Click here to read the full decision) which will take you to the most recent decision in the Author's Guild's case against Google's library book scanning project. 

This click here will take you to the full transcript of Joss Weldon's Equality Now speech. I'll let you discover now what equality he's discussing.  

This one is self-explanatory, as some click heres are: (Click here to read the profile on Smashwords in Forbes Magazine).  This heads in the direction that the original 'authority' expected - the one I mentioned in the first paragraph.

You can Click here 2013-07-07 to listen to Nadia Bolz Weber's sermon on What a lousy idea it is for other people to be the source of our peace. Weber always has something edgy to say in her sermons.

And finally, here's a long introduction to a piece by Karl du Fresne, which ends with a definite click HERE:

Karl believes that the Australian ownership of most of our newspapers has significantly contributed to the decline, but he also blames the ‘feminisation’ of media content. “Before the feminist lynch mobs assemble, I should explain … it’s not female journalists I’m concerned about – far from it – but the creeping feminisation of newspaper content. By this I mean the increasing proportion of newspaper space devoted to ‘soft’ topics – fluffy human interest stories, gossipy items and lifestyle-oriented content better suited to women’s magazines. Some call it latté journalism. In metropolitan papers especially, café reviews and profiles of celebrity chefs, fashion designers, baristas and TV personalities have displaced investigative reporting and traditional ‘hard’ news about events and issues of importance.” To read Karl’s excellent analysis, click HERE.

Just a little overview

While commenting on Facebook this morning, I thought that it would be interesting to list the number of different skills that have been employed since I began to work on the musical, Grimhilda!   It hasn't been quite a matter of everything and the kitchen sink, (as in Sienna Sinks stainless steel sinks) but it's felt close to that at times.


Of course, the first skill was writing the thing, in collaboration with my friend, Cherianne Parks (she contributed many of the crazier ideas, and is very strong on structure and plotting).

Then the was the writing of the music, first in a piano/vocal score, and then gradually this was orchestrated.   None of these skills, so far, were new to me.

Next, and these aren't in any particular order, I had to discover how to apply for funding and how to fill in applications forms to funders.  I was greatly helped in this by Sally-Anne Howes, who's done it before and made editorial comments and did the budgetting side of it.  As a result we got some $6000 of funding!

Then there was my involvement in the auditions.  I didn't make the final decisions on casting, but was involved in the process with the director and music director.   When we didn't have a complete cast as a result, in collaboration with the D and MD, I began the search through every means I could think of to find the additional actors we needed.  So you might say I acquired some casting skills...

Then there was advertising.  Initially I was doing this in a kind of ad hoc way, and then somehow it became my job altogether.   It's been interesting, and I've met some great and friendly and helpful people.   And been overwhelmed, as always, by the willingness of people to get involved.

I also recorded two selections of music and put these on SoundCloud, along with some of the instrumental music - courtesy of the Sibelius program.   And last weekend, I went through and checked (and corrected) the instrumental parts, and printed them out, and, with my wife's assistance, taped all the individual pages together into a concertina format, so the musicians don't have pages flying everywhere during the performances.  That was a much bigger job than I anticipated.   And then we'd no sooner done that than we had to add in a number of bars because the Director wanted a bit of dancing in one place.  Such is his prerogative, but it's surprising how much extra work that was.  It's much easier to cut stuff than add stuff!

And then there's what you might call my 'producing' role: finding things, and people to do stuff, and making decisions that something is far too expensive to go with and trying to find a better and more economic option.   Surprisingly the economic options are often because other groups in town, or people, are willing to be generous to a degree that continues to amaze me.  This week has shown me just how generous people can be - we were even offered a keyboard for the celesta part in the score after I advertised on Twitter.  Someone retweeted the original tweet, and within five minutes, I was on the phone to a resident saying he not only had a keyboard he was willing to lend (to a complete stranger!) but was willing to drop it off to the theatre.   Wow!

I've just been having coffee and liaising with the MD and the man who's going to look after the mics for us.  He's even willing to go chasing up additional items we need to get this part of the show to work properly.  Again, Wow!   (And he's been willing to come to rehearsals and see how things run and what needs to be done.)

My list of helpful people is growing - and I'll keep it for future reference!

Meanwhile, Cherianne has also played multiple roles: props person (collecting them and organising for them to be built where necessary); overseeing the making of the costumes and liaising with the scenic designer; ongoing script consultant and much more which she could tell you about better than I can.  And of course, she'll be Stage Manager during the show's run.

I'm sure there are other jobs I've been involved with (such as putting together the promo at the Library yesterday) but they're all beginning to merge...maybe I'll update this as the other jobs come to mind!

Grimhilda! gets a poster

Here's the poster for Grimhilda!  The overall design is what I had in mind, but of course the details are a little different.  Thanks to Andy Cook who did the artwork.  Those mountains of Grimhilderness look ominous and very difficult to get through.

We're moving forward on the advertising side of things, with the radio ads scripted and getting ready to go at the beginning of the new month.  We're also going to do a promo at the Dunedin Public Library on the 18th April, at 12.30.   Quite which bits of the show we'll present at that point is still up for grabs and depends on which members of the cast are available; we've already heard from some of them that they're keen to be there.

And tickets will go on sale next week, all things being equal.  The Regent Theatre website will soon have advertising on it for the show.  The Dunedin City Council "What's On" section already has the advertising up.

Let it Bleed

I’ve been finding it quite hard to settle down and read anything book-wise since I retired: reading lots of stuff on the Net. But I skim a lot there too.

The books and magazines I’ve got from the Library Bus (which conveniently stops just around the corner from our house every Monday afternoon) have all been pretty much fizzlers, stuff I can't be bothered getting into.

So I’ll just have to go through my own bookshelves and see what I haven’t read – or haven’t read for a long time. In the light of that, I picked up and read Ian Rankin’s Let it bleed over the last couple of days. That was good. It was one of the bunch of Rankin titles we bought and read in England, back in 2007, I think, and by the time it was its turn to be read I’d had enough of Rankin and Rebus for the time being (having read five or six in a row).

It’s a bit shorter than some of his other books, I think, but it’s very fast-paced, and as always there are a heap of things going on and gradually connecting together. It's less gruesome than some of his other stories, which was also a plus. He’s very good at plotting, as well as providing strong characterisations. And he seems to know so much. Seemingly some of his earlier books had police procedural errors – but who would know, except a policeman. By the time this book was written he had someone on hand to check those details.

I’ve obviously read the series all out of order...just looking at Rankin’s (excellent) website, I can see that Let it Bleed comes in the middle somewhere of about twenty Rebus titles, and I’ve read some of the later ones. Not to worry. They’re all fairly self-contained, and you remember as you go along who's who.

Library

A quote I'm personally very much in tune with...!

A library is a good place to go when you feel unhappy, for there, in a book, you may find encouragement and comfort. A library is a good place to go when you feel bewildered or undecided, for there, in a book, you may have your question answered. Books are good company, in sad times and happy times, for books are people -- people who have managed to stay alive by hiding between the covers of a book.

E.B. White in "A library is many things" in Letters of Note

Of course, it doesn't need to be a public library - your own books on your own shelves are like having a host of friends sitting around waiting for a chat...

Paul Tankard and C S Lewis interview

In the light of the soon-to-be-presented production of Shadowlands (mid-May at the Playhouse) the following may be of interest:

Library Talk Sheds New Light on C.S. Lewis

Fantasy film and literature buffs – especially those with fond memories of The Chronicles of Narnia – are in for a treat on Friday 29 April from 5.30pm, as a talk at the Dunedin Public Library reveals an undiscovered side to children’s author, religious writer and literary scholar, C.S. Lewis.

Dr Paul Tankard, senior lecturer at the University of Otago, has been on a ten-year search for a missing interview with the much-loved creator of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which was made for a British television programme two years before Lewis’ death in 1963.

The interview was never aired due to the racy subject matter – the erotic in literature – and has been long since lost, but with much help, Tankard searched the globe until a transcript of the interview was in his hands. The words provide a fascinating insight into a highly original writer who rarely gave interviews.

The discovery has caught the attention of the international media, and Dr Tankard’s essay on his discovery recently appeared in the prestigious Times Literary Supplement in the United Kingdom

Perhaps even more interesting to a general audience is the story behind the discovery.

For those of us who checked the back of their wardrobe as children – or now have children doing so - this is a rare opportunity to discover more about the brilliant mind behind that fantasy, and to hear something of his views about the real world in which we live.

It is also an opportunity to celebrate the tenacity and success of Dr Paul Tankard, a very dedicated member of our own community.

• Eros: A New Discovery about C.S. Lewis
• Friday 29 April 5.30pm, 4th Floor, City Library
• Free but bookings are essential.

Juggling

Being a distance student, I don't often go into the University Library here in Dunedin (and this time I've found all the books I need for my essay in the public library, as it happens) but when I do, it always amazes me how many of the students leave their laptops lying around while they go off and chat, or go to the loo, or get something to eat or drink.   I guess if Mummy or Daddy have bought the laptop then the students don't have any sense of having had to work to pay for the thing, or maybe they think that there's a special student laptop insurance that applies in their case - and of course Mummy and Daddy will be dealing with that anyway. 

I've only used my laptop in the library a couple of times, and I don't think either time had anything to do with studying.   It just happened to be a pleasant place to do some writing.   If I remember rightly, one of the occasions was when I was working on the script for the musical.   It was early in the piece, when I was trying to get an overall structure to the thing, before my collaborator came in on the scene and gave the whole venture the real kickstart it needed.

The script is sitting on the computer at the moment, feeling a bit neglected.   Work on the university paper I'm doing has tended to take up most of my brain time, though I'm getting a little frustrated at not getting on with the composing side of things for the musical, and I can see me pushing that into the mix even though I should be giving time to the paper. 

It's the problem of having two interesting things to juggle at the same time.   I've never been terribly good at the actual physical art of juggling, though I did spend quite a few weeks practicing at one point.   Just couldn't seem to get past that stage where you're worrying over what's happening next and into the point where you start to relax.   It's something I'd like to be able to do, because it's quite a healthy thing: not just the physical arm movements, but picking up the balls continually is physically demanding.   Well the balls are still sitting in my wardrobe waiting.....

Photo of Tom James, the unicycle juggler, by Les Chatfield

Quirky places

There are some quirky places in the middle of Dunedin's CBD which I enjoy just visiting every so often. One of them is a house that most people wouldn't know was there. It's hidden behind the terrace houses in Stuart St. There are two ways to access it: via an alleyway beside the restaurant, A Cow Called Bertha, and the other through the basement of the old library. I wandered into the library this lunchtime, went down the stairs into the basement (where virtually the only public toilet in the library used to be in the old days), stopped and had a look at the great cloth artwork showing the history of the Adult Literacy Movement in Dunedin, (they now have rooms where one of my early ISPs used to be: earthlight.co.nz), and then went out into the courtyard that's in front of the house I was talking about above. It's quite an open area - when my son flatted in the house some years ago, he and I used to sit in the sun in the courtyard sometimes. It's a great suncatcher - when there is any sun! (Today's gloomy, but at least it's not windy like it has been for the last couple of days. The wind was utterly bitter, and suddenly blew itself out about morning tea time this morning.)
My son flatted at one point with a young fellow who was doing a medical degree, and on the side had set up his own ISP: hyper.net.nz. I was persuaded to join this ISP, which I was happy to do as Ihug in those days was having real problems with customer service. I went from almost no customer service to service on tap. I was running the shop in Princes St then, just along from the Octagon, and if I needed help I'd just ring up the young fellow (whose name I've now forgot) and he'd hop around and fix it in a couple of minutes.
The house itself is a very dark place: gets no sun at all in most of the rooms.

The other quirky spot is the old Masonic building in Moray Place where Temple Gallery is now situated. I always feel a bit odd going there. Whether it's the leftover stuff from the Masonic days or what I never know, but it has a bit of a creepy feeling to me.
You go up a steep flight of stone steps in a garden that in the summer is abundant, up a steep path and then have a choice of more path or more steps. The building stands above you as though it was going to topple over while you were climbing.
Inside, the stairs leading up to the main gallery are highly polished, and at least two of them are almost invisible to the naked eye: I've missed them both at different times, either going up or coming down. (The Public Art Gallery has one of these 'invisible' steps as well.)
The main gallery is a large room lit by skylights that don't let much of the outside light through. The paintings are usually lit by a series of soft spotlights, adding to the general air of gloom. Today there's a bunch of large paintings by a female artist whose name has also gone from my mind, though her style is familiar. They consist of ferocious feline-women, many in bridal gowns. There are teeth and claws in evidence everywhere, and in several of the paintings a large horse, sometimes intact, sometimes with his rib-cage showing through his skin. The women are sometimes skeletal as well. Can't say they're my favourite paintings, but they're well put together.

The photo of Temple Gallery comes from this site.
hyper.net.nz was taken over by Orcon at some stage in its existence - which is why Orcon is now my ISP.

Music for Real Estate

The rather curiously-titled Music for Real Estate is part of BBM.net’s site. It’s a business that provides what might be called musak, though I suspect they’d put themselves at a level above that.
Apropos of that, the worst piece of musak I’ve heard recently was in the Valencia Aquarium grounds in Spain. Actually, the three worst pieces of musak. One was a dreary Celtic style tune played by a wailing violin over piano and guitar, another wandered around in a way that made you wonder if the composer had left his music program to do the work, and the third was so awful I can’t now remember any details. All were maddening.
HSBC Bank also has a piece of piano and orchestra musak it plays if you happen to get stuck waiting on their line. It apparently has only one piece of musak, in fact. We heard it several times through when we rang them from New Zealand before we came to the UK and again the other day when I was inquiring about something.
Anyway, back to Music for Real Estate. I’m not sure how they come by the odd title, but the meaning of it, I think, is to convey that they can provide music suitable to any location you care to name.
This kind of music is also known as needle-drop, stock music or library music. (A friend of mine has composed a couple of CDs of such tracks, and some of them were used in the production of The Magician‘s Nephew that I acted in.) The advantage of this kind of music is that you can literally purchase it, a track at a time, to use in whatever situation you want. Once you’ve paid the fee there are no further ongoing royalties to deal with. Presumably it’s possible you’ll come across ’your’ piece of music elsewhere sometime, but I wouldn’t have thought that was a major issue. The prices seem a bit steep - anything from $29.99 to $59.99 per track - but I guess if you’ve got permanent access to it, that’s not so bad. And if you feel it’s the right piece for your ’real estate’ you can’t really complain.
They have thousands of tracks available, and include one category called Australian. Whatever kind of music can that be? LOL.

Shooting the Past

We watched the first two episodes of Shooting the Past on tv last night. BBC (I think) was repeating them. They first came out in 1999.

Timothy Spall plays one of the lead roles, in his pre-Harry Potter period. As always he’s a joy to watch: confronting, wheedling, keeping other people on the back foot. He’s not necessarily the lead character, but he certainly takes up much of the viewer’s attention.

The story is that an American business company wants to take over a building that houses a library of ten million mostly black and white photographs. The Americans would quite happily ditch the lot. The five somewhat eccentric workers in the place attempt to dissuade them from such drastic action, in part by presenting stories through the photographs. The program is worth watching for the photographs alone: they’re by turns poignant, humorous, startling, outstanding, and even seemingly ordinary. They capture the tone and times of the 20^th century in a wide variety of ways.

I’m not sure when the next episode is on, but because we never seem to be in one place for long it’s quite possible we’ll miss it. I’ll have to make an effort to catch up with it.