Songs, smiles, singers, and a snout

This is going to be one of those compendium posts, where I do a quick squiz over the HitTail results from the last week or so, or at least the ones that seem interesting to me. Douglas Lilburn’s Sing Harry turns up again. It’s good to know that this song cycle by Lilburn continues to arouse interest, especially since it’s one of the few things he wrote that I think does! (Oh, dear, the old anti-Lilburn bias coming out again.)
Another NZ composer is also on the list - at least so it seemed when I first saw the reference. But I couldn’t quite figure out what why anyone would be looking for Snout Gareth Farr. Turns out that there’s an actor in the Royal Shakespeare Company with the same name, and he was played Snout in a production back in 2002. So NZ’s Gareth Farr gets a look-in rather fraudulently.
The king of whistlers, Ronnie Rinalde, is still going strong. Except that his name is Ronnie Ronalde, and I’ve managed to misspell it in one of my posts - as the searcher did.
The Indian actor, Kavi Raz, whom I mentioned the other day in relation to the movie, The Golden Bracelet, is on the list, as is the Jazz/Funk group from Luxembourg, Funky P. More about them another time, as Roosevelt Isaac (their lead singer) has emailed me a few times recently to give me some further gen on their doings.
A couple of non-NZ composers make the list: John Adams, whom I’m going to check up on more when I get back home, and Michael Tippett, who’s been a regular visitor to the HitTail search results.
An interesting search for Jobs for Opera Singers didn’t seem to take the searcher very far, but it did turn up for me a site where most opera singers are listed, but not, rather to my surprise, Elizabeth Connell, who is certainly no minor artist. It’s an interesting site, nevertheless, with info about books, opera houses, and resources for singers.
And finally, my comments about the travelling exhibition of pictures of the smiling Christ comes up. But the results Google turns up (apart from the one on this blog) are from those places that turn Jesus into all manner of beings: smiling, sad, black, yellow, you name it. The one from picturesofJesus4you.com is very American, somewhat hippy and a jolly good chap. Okay, he’s a pleasant Christ, and certainly he’s smiling, but he lacks a bit of the awe I’d expect Christ to have along with his smiles. The artist is Frances Hook, by the way.

The Gold Bracelet

You have to wonder how many movies virtually vanish into obscurity. Once even the worst films could do the rounds of small cinemas as B movies shown in tandem with an A movie. Now, sadly, these sorts of movies go barely noticed in cinemas - if they get there at all - and wind up as more fodder for the video stores.
I was doing a search on gold bracelets, as it happened, and came across a movie called The Gold Bracelet. It’s an Indian story about the aftermath of 9/11, and how a family’s fortunes spiral when prejudice against them begins in the wake of the disaster. Rather curiously, given its serious theme, it still manages to fit a couple of Bollywood musical numbers into the script - these are possibly okay for the earlier part of the film, where the tone is more lighthearted and romantic; they seem odd for a film that veers off towards the dramatic in its second half.
Still, Indian filmmakers seem to get away with all sorts of things in their movies. One of my favourite films is Monsoon Wedding, which has comedy and drama in fairly equal amounts, but balances them out superbly. It also includes some musical sequences - not quite in the full-blown Bollywood style, but still energetic and full of fun. Maybe we Westerners just have to get used to the fact that this is part and parcel of Indian moviemaking.
The photo is of Kavi Raz, an Indian actor who wrote and directed The Gold Bracelet, and also acted in it.