Being creative

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t tend to mention sport on this blog – much. (I’ve only written about basketball and rugby and possibly a few other suchlike.)

So writing about soccer on here is a bit of a surprise to me. Particularly as it isn’t likely to be related to opera or music, for instance, or to the arts in general. But it’s always a challenge to see if there is a connection, and the first connection I found was a bit of a cheat: it related to soccer and opera – but the opera browser, rather than opera with music.

Of course there’s this connection: soccer made Pavarotti a superstar. Yes, I can remember it doing exactly that when his version of Nessun Dorma was played over shots of the FIFA World Cup back in 1990. Honestly, who had heard of Pavarotti before that – except those opera buffs who would obviously know? Pavarotti went from soccer to the Three Tenors and never looked back.

And finally, (out of a surprising number of choices) there’s opera in a different sense again: David Beckham and soccer soap opera.

Don’t ya jus’ luv the Web? It’s so creative-making?!?!

Missing - oh, dear!

I see on the news that someone in Britain has lost two disks containing the details of 25 million persons’ private information, stuff that the Government has on storage. I presume that they’ve ‘only’ lost two disks, rather than having lost all the information, which is rather how the news likes to frame it. One assumes that no one would have such an amount of information solely on two disks.

Seemingly the disks were supposed to go somewhere in an internal post system, and managed to sail off into the wide blue yonder. Huge fears that cyber-hackers will get hold of it all and will start making horrendous use of all the info. More likely the disks will be sitting in the Post Office’s address unknown office (in Ireland, I think) and will be dealt with when all the other bits of lost postal items are dealt with. Or else they’ll be received by some decidedly non-hacking type of person - an old age pensioner, for instance – who will take one look at them, decide they’re junk mail, and toss them in the bin.

What reminded me of this news story was noticing that Martin Worldwide, the list brokers, have over 290 million consumers and 14 million U.S. businesses on their system. And that’s just so other people can send them direct marketing info. By contrast, the 25 million names lost in the post seem rather tame.

Treasure hunt

Having been using a GPS to get ourselves around the UK while we’re here, and having successfully negotiated all manner of routes without getting completely lost, and having gained confidence through having the GPS with us, I’m almost tempted to take up the challenge of doing a bit of geocaching. This is where you use GPS coordinates to find a ‘treasure’. It may not be a treasure in the sense of pirate treasure, or long lost treasure, but it will be something that’s worth chasing. Even if it’s only for the fun of doing it.

I note on the official geocaching site that there’s even a cache in Mosgiel, the smallish town near the city I live in, in New Zealand. They say that the treasure in this case is as follows: This is the original cache type consisting, at a bare minimum, a container and a log book. Normally you'll find a Tupperware container, ammo box, or bucket filled with goodies, or smaller container ("micro cache") too small to contain items except for a log book.

Tupperware and treasure in the same paragraph? (Though apparently the Queen even uses Tupperware at the royal breakfast table…!)

The Pianist

I meant to mention that I watched The Pianist on DVD the other night. What a `grim piece, and how draining it was to watch.
It concerns a Jewish family in Poland who, along with thousands of other Jews are rounded up and sent off to the death camps. The pianist only escapes because he is hauled out of the crowd by a soldier who has become a policeman in order to escape death himself. After that he is on the run, gets caught up in a gang of Jewish prisoners who are made to build for the Germans, escapes again and is helped by an artistic couple, and finally is left to his own devices when his helpers are arrested, or vanish. In his last desperate days he is briefly befriended by a German officer, who, in return for hearing him play (on a grand piano that happens very conveniently to be in the house the pianist has hidden in) brings him some food, and stops him from being discovered by the other officers.
The film is full of brutal moments, sudden and unexpected deaths, dreadful beatings, utter cruelty on behalf of the Germans, corpses and the awfulness of starvation. At times it’s barely watchable. It’s beautifully photographed (by Pawel Edelman), and superbly directed. The cast, a real mix of nationalities, is uniformly good. Adrien Brophy may play on his skinny face a little too much, but he conveys well the despair of an artist, a man who would much sooner get on an play the piano than anything else.
It seems an odd choice for Roman Polanski to direct, though his own background is reflected in some of the events in the movie. I can’t say it’s a movie I’d like to see again: it’s too long, and in that curious way that audiences have of losing empathy with screen characters, we get a little tired of the lengthy stretch of time after Brody is forced to live on his own.
One curious thing about the movie is why an actor, Thomas Kretschmann, who doesn’t appear until something like the last quarter an hour of a 150 minute movie, gets second billing.

Rare coins

One of my brothers-in-law is a collector, even more so now that he’s less mobile. He has DVDs, CDs, miniature clocks, cameras, various other things - and the cutest little dog on the earth. (He acts like a fur collar when he lies on the windowsill behind your head - the dog, I mean, not my brother-in-law.)
Collecting must be a kind of natural facet of our natures: the number of human beings who collect things must be well into the millions, if not billions. I’ve had the collecting bug myself at times, from that old standby, stamp collecting, to the books of various authors (we have all the Dick Francis books, for instance). I find that after a while I get a bit obsessive about collecting, and have to pull back from it before I go crazy - or other members of my family do!
There was a bit of a crazy moment in New Zealand a while ago when it was discovered that a particular coin that might be in the possession of any and every member of the public was actually quite rare. Of course when I looked I didn’t have any of the coins, but I’ve often passed shops that advertise themselves as coin dealers and wondered about what coins are worth collecting and what are not. Like the stamp dealer, a coin dealer has to have a world of information at his fingertips. He can’t just focus on particular areas of coin collecting: he has to be a jack of all trades.
A true coin collector should focus on quality, not quantity. Chasing the elusive rare coin, and being patient until you can acquire it, is better than collecting everything in sight. Having a bit of money up your sleeve in the first place helps too!

Chicago

Chicago the movie disappointed me on a number of counts. Never having seen the musical on stage I don’t have any idea how it’s performed there (though I believe the original version was quite different in approach to the later revival in the 90s) so I can’t tell whether it’s the film’s tone or what that didn’t appeal.

The characters are very hard to warm to. Even the cuckolded husband, living as he does in the middle of a bunch of rogues and self-seekers, doesn’t quite call for our empathy, although he’s the only who might. Renee Zellweger loses our sympathy from round about her third scene, and never regains it; Catherine Zeta-Jones doesn’t fare much better, and Richard Gere’s character never comes close to getting it.

And the story seems something of a mish-mash, at least in this version. I’m told that younger cinemagoers don’t like people suddenly bursting into song. I find this hard to believe. Even if The Sound of Music wasn’t still one of the most popular movies in the world, Grease must still be counted amongst younger people as a movie they love. In both of these people burst into song without so much as a by-your-leave, and no one flees the theatre. And MTV is so popular it has its own channel.

Supposedly Moulin Rouge revived audience’s interest in film musicals. If it did, I’d be surprised: I still find it one of the most annoying movies ever made. The constant cutting from shot to shot as though the editor (or the director) was on speed, becomes so irritating that the film is almost impossible to watch.

Chicago, at least in that respect, is better. The fast cutting is there, but not quite on the same manic level as Moulin Rouge. Here at least you can usually get an idea of what the choreography is about; in Moulin Rouge you had no means of doing so.

But to get back to the story: to me there didn’t seem to be a connection between the songs and the story, except insofar as the songs merely restated what the story had already told us, or only added another dimension. They never carried the thing forward in any way.

Some reviewers suggest that the musical side is seen through Zellweger’s eyes, with her imagining her life as a stage presentation. But if that’s the case, how is it that Zeta-Jones begins the film with All That Jazz, a song that has nothing to do with anything else? Furthermore, at that point, Zeta-Jones is supposed to be in jail for having murdered her sister and husband. Why would she be doing a song in a nightclub?

The opening scenes (apart from All That Jazz itself) have a realistic element to them. But after Zellweger has shot her boyfriend, they go off into this half-story, half-musical hybrid that to me never coalesces. Certainly in movie terms the two intertwine very nicely, but it’s a kind of so what?

Zellweger (apart from her perennial pout) is great in the movie, and does the singing and dancing with great skill. Likewise Zeta-Jones. Gere never seems quite as much at home here as he is in Shall We Dance? where his dancing works. He’s no singer, and sounds thin, and the tapdancing scene is dire. (And again, means nothing.)

The costumes go from skimpy to less-than-skimpy. Maybe that’s meant to distract us from the fact that the rest of it is pretty skimpy too.

Quoting The Times

David Baddiel in The Times, Nov 17, 2007, in an article on Norman Mailer:

Married six times (it never fails to amaze me how many women are happy to shack up with women-hating men) to the ‘low, sloppy beasts’ – his description of the gender to Orson Welles – he stabbed the second, Adeles Morales, at a party, nearly fatally. ‘A little bit of rape is good for a man’s soul,’ he announced in a 1972 speech to the University of California. Like many significant male creative figures of the past century – Picasso, D H Lawrence, Jean-Luc Godard, Eugene O’Neill, Kingsley Amis, John Osborne, etc, etc – his work, and his life, were fuelled by an anger towards (and its usual corollary, fascinated mythologizing of) women. For Mailer, as for a lot of these men, authenticity was about masculinity – to be an artist meant to be a rebel, to be difficult and raging and driven, and that energy, although often directed at class, or convention, or artistic orthodoxy, always, via an association of marriage and monogamy and imprisonment, ended up also directed at women.

Joe Joseph in The Times, Nov 17, 2007, in a review of Coward’s Letters:

[Noel Coward] lived in an age when fame fell like a warm cloak on to the shoulders of those who had dazzled theatre audiences, or readers of fiction, or cinemagoers, or art lovers. It was a time before celebrity had become a commodity that you settle for when you don’t have enough talent for success.

Lapping up luxury

I’m not one for thinking that there’s something great about luxury homes. They always seem to me to require an awful lot of work to keep them looking brand spanking. It’s the same with those houses in Home and Garden type magazines. They never looked lived in. You try and match up the happy couple standing smiling in the photo with the home that’s splashed across the pages, and you think: who does all the work? Who wipes all these glass surfaces and keeps them shiny? Where are the books these people read? Where are the children’s toys, or the grandchildren’s toys? Everything seems hidden away as though any minute someone from Location, Location was going to appear and film the whole thing.

I don’t mind living in a luxury home for a week or so. That’s about as long as I can stand in terms of tripping carefully around the various ornaments that we know are next to priceless, or avoiding soiling the rugs, or sitting too hard on a chair, or scratching the glass tabletop, or knocking one of the valuable pictures off the wall.

I’m sure real people live in luxury homes. And no doubt they have several servants running after them cleaning up. But keeping a luxury home luxurious seems to me to be a task beyond the necessary.

Winning and losing

There’s a television game over here in the UK that’s very popular apparently (one of the many). It’s called Deal or No Deal and involves someone out of a group coming up to the presenter with their numbered box and then trying to guess which of the other boxes holds the big prize. Gradually the boxes are whittled away and often so is the prize money.

There was an elderly guy on it the other night, and his wife was in the audience. She made the mistake at one point of saying, It’s just a game,’ and the presenter picked up on this, and had her on for the rest of the night. The trouble was, she obviously didn’t believe what she said: the worse her husband did, the more her face fell, and when he lost out badly in the end, in spite of repeating her mantra, she was obviously unhappy with his choices.

I’m told that the daughter of a friend of my in-laws has recently been on it too, and when she was offered £20,000 by the Banker (a mysterious personality who never appears, but rings up every so often) she turned it down, hoping for some bigger prize. In the end she wound up with one penny.

Just a smidgen

I’d never thought of the word, smidgen, as being anything but genuine, but another blogger found out only recently that it was in the dictionaries, and even acceptable by spellcheckers. (Incidentally, blogger itself isn’t acceptable according to the program I’m using here, and spellcheckers isn't accepted by Blogger.)

This blogger uses it in the cooking sense: putting in a smidgen of flour, or salt, or whatever. I’ve probably used it more in the expression: Just a smidgen, as when someone asks me how much sugar I want in my tea, or do I want some more hair cut off, or whether something is too long.

Having discussed smidgen, we now discover that there is a word, smidge, as well. Both may derive from the Scots word, smitch, which means a very small amount, or an insignificant person.

Well, next time I’m feeling particularly abashed, I may describe myself as a smitch.

Various holidays

In NZ we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, not because we have nothing to be thankful about, but because it isn’t one of our history.

Quite apart from that the date is too close to Christmas, and because Christmas and the annual summer holidays all tend to run together in NZ, that time of year is already a big one in terms of ‘celebration.’

As it happens we don’t have any public holidays between Labour Day on the 22nd of October and Christmas. So by the time Christmas comes we’re really ready for days off.

I see that the US, however, has Veterans’ Day on the 12^th November, and then Thanksgiving only ten days later. A bit of a clutter in that month.

In Spain they have yet another holiday in that period: 1^st November is All Saints’ Day, 6^th December is Constitution Day and 8^th December is Immaculate Conception Day. Three holidays in December. That’s a bit over the top.

Of course in NZ we have Christmas Day and Boxing Day as statutory holidays, and then a week later New Year’s Day and the Day-After-New-Year’s Day, which apparently doesn’t have a name even though it’s a public holiday. These four make up for our lack of holidays in the previous couple of months, and also ensure that we get over the Christmas rush.

The choice of coffee

For a number of years I would regularly visit the coffee bar next to my shop and have an espresso. And then one day, I went in and asked for one, and the girl (a new girl, who didn’t have any history of the shop and customers behind her) told me that they didn’t do espressos anymore as I was the only person who ever drank them!

I couldn’t believe it, but had no choice but to accept it.

Since then I’ve tended to drink cappuccinos, although I expect there are still espresso machines around – if I wanted to find them.

A friend and I would get together at 11 am every Friday for quite a long time (until my job situation changed) and we always went to a particular café where, he claimed, the best cappuccinos and the best-priced cappuccinos were served. And certainly they were good – though whether it was because we often had one of their baked-on-the-premises cakes or biscuits as well that made a difference, I don’t know.

Anyway, while on my Continental touring, with my wife, I tended to stick to cappuccinos. My taste for espressos is now a thing of the past.

Money In, Money Out

I’m looking forward to getting back to NZ and having some regular income again. Not that we’ve been exactly short of money (although our English bank account is at its all-time low) but you get to the point where you think it’s better to have money coming in rather than having it all going out. I think our holiday over here has cost us rather more than we intended, so I’ll have a couple of bills to pay when I get home. But at least we haven’t had to borrow to keep ourselves afloat – we didn’t even have to do that when I was out of work (though of course we were having to use some of our savings, which was a nuisance).

I see that you can get what they call payday loans now. These are supposed to be loans that tide you over from one payday to the next; they’re intended to be paid back as soon as possible. But the trouble with such loans is that they have a tendency, once they’re in your financial ‘system’ to linger longer than you’d like. I know this from past experience; loans are always a nuisance in the long run, unless you’re a very organised budget person!

Ratatouille

Finally caught up with the movie, Ratatouille, at the cinema. We’d been going to see it in London, but missed the showing. However, it was on in Northampton, when we got there, so along with twenty other people we went to see it.

I think my only criticism of it is that it isn’t particularly funny – certainly not laugh-out-loud funny. It’s entertaining, and the storyline is fine, and there’s quite a bit of subtle humour, but you never kind of get caught up in a great laugh at any time.

That aside, the animation is brilliant, and the story takes a rather strange idea and manages to deal with its problems successfully. A rat who’s a self-taught cook? And who’s ability in the kitchen surpasses most other cooks? Okay. It’s totally improbable, but you manage to suspend belief and let it happen.

Overall, though, the thing that impressed was the technical excellence of the movie. The characters are wonderfully drawn, even those who exist primarily as caricatures. The backgrounds have a depth and warmth not always seen in modern animation, and the cast voicing the characters are top notch too.

I missed seeing most of the actors’ names when the credits were rolling, and didn’t realise Peter O’Toole had played the nasty food critic, Anton Ego. Janeane Garofalo, an actress I enjoy seeing in movies (but haven’t very often) played the only female cook in the kitchen, and someone called Patton Oswalt was the main character, Remy. I don’t know Oswalt’s name but he’s obviously done a lot of voicing for tv. Lou Romano, who plays the boy who pretends he’s a cook, is another actor who’s known more as a vocal artist than one who’s ‘seen.’ The gyrations his character goes through in the movie probably provide the biggest laughs.

I’d like to get a copy of the movie on DVD in due course: it’s one that would repay watching again, I think, to catch up with the details.

In the eye of the beholder

While we were on the Continent, we had the experience of seeing many luxury homes; mostly from the outside. On the bus tour we took in Hamburg, we went around streets where the homes had once had gardens rolling down to the water. In Barcelona we stayed in what was basically a luxury apartment – we were scared to touch anything much in case we broke something.

And in Luxembourg we stayed in what I would class as a luxury home – except that the people living there don’t see it as such.

Up to a point, luxury is in the eye of the beholder. The homes that the National Trust now administer in England are certainly luxurious, but where’s the luxury in having to have dozens of servants to keep the place clean? Even if you do pay them a pittance.

It’s the same with the house in Luxembourg: it’s so large it’s too much for the owners, and they have to get someone in to clean.

It rather takes the edge off the luxury, to my way of thinking, if you have to employ someone to clean up after you. Think I’ll stick with the home I’ve got - which we can manage to keep up by ourselves.

Extend your range by an OCTAVE!

Clicking on one of those little Google ads today – it claimed to be able to add an octave to a singer’s vocal range – I came across Brett Manning’s site, and his ad for helping young singers.

The ad is written in that typical direct marketing style – the same sort of style that once ‘helped’ thousands of men to respond to the ad for becoming a man with muscles, instead of being the bloke who had sand kicked in his face.

You read through the ad and think: there’s no way anyone can ad an octave to their voice, especially not after a couple of lessons. But Manning is talking primarily to singers in the pop world rather than the operatic one. He talks about overcoming the singer’s ‘break’ – that point in the voice when you seem to have to switch from one kind of tone to another – and he says he’s not interested in helping classical singers. That isn’t his kettle of fish. He teaches people how to avoid fatigue with singing, amongst other things.

So you get the feeling that maybe this is all a bit of a have, and that the ad isn’t really going to change anyone’s singing career all that much. That’s if you only read the ad.

If you go to Brett’s site, or check out his name on the Web, you’ll find that there are plenty of people out there claiming he can do exactly what he says, and that he has done, for hundreds of recording artists.

It’ll cost you US$199 to find out whether what he claims is true. (Though he does offer a six-month money back guarantee.) He says he spent thousands learning all the ‘secrets’ from some old guru of a singing teacher. Why are there always ‘secrets’ in these ads? They seldom turn out to be secrets at all. It’s just that ‘secrets’ is a kind of magic word in direct marketing.

Could be interesting to try, nevertheless, when I’ve got a spare $199.

The thing that intrigues me about the site, however, is the picture of Brett Manning. He looks like a 24-year-old, yet he’s supposed to have been teaching for a decade – and was learning for years before that. Maybe the photos haven’t quite been updated?

Exclusive Malls

When we were in London the other night we came across two long malls - of the old-fashioned kind, where there are little shops along both sides of a long covered alleyway. These malls have probably been there since the days when they weren’t covered in and there were hawkers working down both sides. These days, of course, they have nothing but exclusive shops, the sorts of places where only those with plenty of moolah go. There were even commissionaires (black gentlemen, in this instance) dressed up in uniforms with top hats.
The shops sell all sorts of luxury items: expensive ties, waistcoats, cufflinks (starting at £100 a pair), things like a pearl necklace with dozens of pearls, the sort that hangs so long the wearer has to tie it up in a knot. The longer the better, no doubt. There was a shop just focusing on clothes for playing polo (with a marvellous statuette of a horse and rider), there were shops with jewellery that you knew contained several dozen diamonds and probably a variety of other lesser jewels.
I kept expecting to see some famous movie star wandering down there, but was disappointed. Maybe it was the wrong time of day.

Jephtha by Handel

I think I may have spelt the name of this oratorio wrongly in a recent post on my other blog. One of the difficulties of travelling and typing: you don’t always get a chance to check the details.
Anyway, as I mentioned elsewhere it was being rehearsed when we came across it. The group performing it were the Orlando Choir, a group which specialises in baroque music. The only soloist we heard rehearse was a youngish man called Alexander Ashworth, a bass-baritone. He has a fine and fluid voice, and sang in a remarkably relaxed style.
The choir was also dealing with Handel’s constant runs and scales with ease, and also with the fugues that permeate his works. This is another amateur choir - amateur here in London doesn’t mean that the work will be done in a slapdash fashion, or done without professionalism and skill. The Orlando, the BBC, the Philharmonia, the Crouch End and the Trinity boys’ choirs were all remarkable in their professionalism, even though, as far as I can tell, these people don’t actually sing for a living. (Though the boys’ choir has done so many concerts and tours that they might as well - can’t imagine when they get their schoolwork done.)
The conductor - a very relaxed fellow, too - was James Weeks. I don’t know how old he is, but he didn’t seem to be more than in his early thirties. Hang on, he was born in 1978, so that makes only 29. Apparently he has at least thirty hours in the day, because apart from conducting the Orlando, he conducts another choir - the Exaudi Vocal Ensemble; he freelances with other choirs, he plays the organ, he writes on organists and contemporary music - and he composes. Crikey.

John Foulds' A World Requiem

Last night we went to hear A World Requiem, by John Foulds. This hasn’t been performed since 1926 and the revival of it for Remembrance Day was very apt. It was first performed back in 1923, with Foulds himself conducting and his wife leading the orchestra (plus a choir of 1250 people) and it became a feature of Remembrance Day ‘celebrations’ for the next four years. And then it was dropped and vanished from sight. Foulds himself has virtually vanished as a composer, although he was prolific and popular in his day. I suspect his time has come again.
Anyway, the piece was presented at the Albert Hall with the BBC Orchestra and three adult choirs - totalling some 350 people - and a boys’ choir: the BBC Symphony Chorus, the Crouch End Festival Chorus, the Philharmonia Chorus, and the Trinity Boys’Choir. Alongside these there were three groups of trumpeters and drummers playing at the back and sides of the hall at one point, and four soloists (the soprano, Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet, the mezzo Catherine Wyn-Rogers, the tenor, Stuart Skelton and the baritone Gerald Finley).
Unfortunately, from where we were, we couldn’t hear the soloists (especially the tenor and soprano) so well, and they sounded as though they were being swamped by the orchestra. I think it was just our situation in the hall that caused this effect. However we were in the right place to hear the boys’ choir, which started off in the top level of the hall (along with the soprano, a celesta player, two harpists and some strings). They were right opposite our seat. The trumpets and drummers were likewise just on the level above us and visible to us. Many of the people in the hall would have had quite a different experience of their sound.
I don’t think I’ve come across a piece of music that uses a celesta so often - it always accompanies the boys’ choir in the first half of the music, and then, when that choir, along with its accompanying instruments (and the soprano) all come down onto the stage for the second half, it plays in almost every section that follows. The two harps get a fair amount of work as well.
The piece is by degrees slow and funereal, frantic and overwhelming, subtle and sweet. An organ often adds a huge depth to what goes on in the orchestra as well. It’s not easy to pinpoint Foulds’ approach: the program talks about minimalism and the use of quarter-tones. In neither of these areas can he be regarded as anything too way out: there are quarter-tones audible at times, but they’re fairly scattered in a long score. And minimalism comes in the sense that Foulds uses musical phrases almost in an ostinato approach, building up across the orchestra. Equally, some of the singers’ music revolves around short repeated phrases, but there isn’t that sense of ‘I’m trying to drive you mad’ that you get with later minimalists. Foulds might more be said to be being economic with his material. Furthermore, it means that the listener can grasp things reasonably readily, because certain phrases become indented in the listener’s mind through the repetition.
The libretto is a collage of Biblical texts and peace-focused writing (even a bit of Hindu Sanskrit, apparently - Foulds had a great interest in Indian music), and comes across as the work of a believer. Seemingly he was seriously into Theosophy (his wife had introduced him to it) and the ‘occult’. In his case, however, ‘occult’ meant more that he felt there was a true spiritual element to music, and that it could affect people in ways that the other arts couldn’t.
Anyway, it was an experience to be at the presentation of a piece that hasn’t been heard for so long - and even better, it was being recorded for posterity. The CD(s) come out next year.

Making money?

The first piece I ever wrote and had published (and got paid for) was on casinos and the effects they have on a city. At that time our city didn’t have a casino and one was being planned. I wrote, using some information from the Australian experience of casinos, that I didn’t think it was a good idea for the town. While my piece was lauded it made no difference to the casinos, nor to those who gave them their licence. Casinos are a drawcard for tourists, we’re told, and every city should have one.
Well, tourists may well go to casinos, but the people who inhabit them mostly are locals, and a good number of those are people who can ill afford to lose their money day after day. Certainly there are big spenders in town, particularly people from the Asian community, people who have plenty of money and for whom losses at the casinos are no big deal.
One of my daughters worked for the casino for some time. The interesting thing is how much the staff were scrutinised. It wasn’t the customers - some of whom got themselves into considerable strife - but the staff who were made to feel like suspects at all times.
Maybe I’m biased about casinos. Certainly there’s a huge number of people out there who find gambling and gaming a fascinating thing to be involved in. On a typical site that’s primarily for online poker you can also check out some of the best gambling sites in the States, rather than just surfing for whatever turns up. It tells you about the bonuses you can pick up by joining the various sites, what the player ratings are, and it adds a short review of each site to give you an idea of its potential.
Check the site out if you’re into gambling. But you have been warned!

My office(s)

Sometimes readers like to know a bit more about the people who are writing to them, for example, what their office furniture is like.
At present I’m typing this at a kitchen breakfast bar, because I need the laptop to be close to a plug to keep it charging. But otherwise, while I’m in this house in the UK, I tend to work in someone else’s office, where there’s a proper computer desk, a proper swivel chair, and a fridge for the drinks.
Normally, back home in NZ, my office is a little different. The desk the computer sits on is an old office desk whose origins are unknown. Suffice to say it’s scratched and well used, and the drawers have sticky bits on the bottom. The drawers are full of everything that doesn’t fit elsewhere, and is small enough not to make the drawers unopenable.
The chair will be one of two sets of chairs we have around the house; it may depend on how recently we’ve had a load of family in as to whether it’s one of the regular chairs or one of the tall chairs (I prefer the former).
There’s a table for all the accumulated junk: mail, notes, books, bills, statements - you name it. There are at least two bookshelves on the floor, plus another one hanging on the wall. There are plenty of books.
On the desk are the computer, (a PC), two printers (one has been superseded by the other), various wires and cords, bits of paper, dust, and coffee cup stains.
Hanging on the window is one of my wife’s stained-glass decorations.
In the corner is a CD player, and there are two lots of CD shelving. But because I’m lazy, the same three CDs may play indefinitely. Or else I’ll listen to streaming radio, or the concert program.
There, does that suffice?

Australian music?

I thought I’d check up on what Australian music was, as far as BBM.net’s site is concerned. Here’s what they say (I’ve corrected the spelling mistakes, the double use of the word ‘and’ in one place, and use of fullstops instead of commas (!):
Australian Music is more than just the first season of Survivor. It’s more than just a hot blazing sun and kangaroos. Traditional Australian music is excellent for getting serious with your message, conveying a global way of thinking,. and not taking crap from anybody. Nothing says these 3 things better than the Australian Didgeridoo, a long wooden tube where you purse your lip, blow a raspberry and move your lips around like you’re gargling mouthwash. Regrettably, no composer has yet taken up on an attempt to write serious music that conveys a global way of thinking while not taking crap, as this message appears below the previous one: There are no available products under this category.
BBM.net does provide a wide range of other material, though, and you can even get music for your podcasts, for corporate projects, for powerpoint presentations, and that old favourite: on hold music. Under this category you can currently buy a track called: That Tissue Will Cost You. This is in the genre of country/new age; is slow in tempo, dreamy/inspiring/romantic in mood, and is presented by strings, piano, acoustic guitar. The composer is Mike Bielenberg. [That's him in the photo.] Never heard of him? Well, he’s won Telly Awards, New York Festival Awards. He’s out there, man.

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.

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.

Dreams of being a stuntman

When I was a kid, we used to go to Saturday morning movies. These were specially run for kids, and used to show ancient serials, films made on the cheap. They were great fodder for kids who loved to see what would happen next, and who enoyed plenty of knockabout action.

The boy who lived a couple of houses away from me had a big back yard (he lived in a house built onto the corner shop). One of our kids' games was to make up stagecoaches from the boxes lying around the yard, and copy the cowboy stories, or the cops and robber serials. We’d pretend we were stunt men and would fall off these ‘stagecoaches’ and roll around the ground. In fact, one of my dreams in those days was to be a stuntman. Having seen what they have to put up with since, the dream has faded. Plus I don’t enjoy hurting myself!

I once watched a group of filmmakers shooting a scene for a short film. It was the bit where the main character was supposed to fall headlong down a manhole. The street had been built up, so that instead of sloping, it was flat. A pretend manhole had been built into this ‘street’ and the poor old stuntman spent the afternoon being dropped headfirst down this hole.

I was in a play last year, and actually had my own ‘stuntman’ for one short scene. I was supposed to be dropped into a hole, headfirst, and then had to stand on my head while the animals who’d put me there debated as to what I was. We managed to fool most of the audience most of the time. I’d rush off, chased by the animals, and my stuntman would reappear, still chased. He would be caught and dropped in the hole, and then, when they let him out again, he’d rush back off and I’d rush back on.

In spite of the fact that he’s a couple of inches shorter than me, and has a completely different body build, we got away with this trick night after night. People believe what they to believe.

In the short film, when I eventually saw it, the main character ran down some stairs, out the door and fell headlong into the hole. There was no doubt in the viewer’s mind that he’d fallen into the hole and not someone else.

Good old anonymous stuntmen.

Opera holding hands with Rugby Players?

It isn’t often I’d think of the world of rugby at the same time as the world of opera, but in one area there are distinct similarities.

In the past those playing rugby at the top of their careers were still performing at a relatively low level of stress, on their bodies, on their emotional lives, on their ‘real’ jobs and on the families.

Equally, opera singers tended to live at a much slower pace, many of them living out their working lives in one or two theatres and seldom having to travel.

No more. Both rugby players and opera singers are expected to ‘play’ for longer and longer seasons, and there are penalties on both if they don’t show up for work. Opera singers in particular are expected to travel constantly in order to perform all over the world, and often don’t get the rest that’s needed after long flights. (Even as long ago as the 60s I can remember one jet-lagged opera singer arriving for rehearsal and getting into a real tantrum that was mostly the result of tiredness.)

So it’s probably not surprising that both opera singers and rugby players are turning more and more to drugs in order to maintain their high profiles. Expect to see an increasing number of opera stars requiring drug treatment over the next few years; already it’s becoming a cause of concern. I don’t think rugby players aren’t yet known for drug problems, but it can’t be far away.

Perhaps it’ll be a good thing if the world, because of an oil crisis, has to slow down on flying players – of both sorts – hither, thither and yon. Then we might find these talented people being able to work under less pressure, without having to resort to drugs - and alcohol – to keep them at the top.

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape

We watched the film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape again while we were in Valencia, courtesy of our host’s DVD collection. I hadn’t seen it for some time – think I caught up with in on television once – and was keen to see it again, having had fond memories of its quirky approach and intriguing characters.

Furthermore I remembered that Leonardo di Caprio was very impressive in it. He still is. I don’t know that he’s ever done anything better. Di Caprio, who was only 19 at the time the movie was made, plays a mentally handicapped 18-year-old, and conveys the behaviour of such a person with such ease and assurance that the first time around I thought the actor must have been handicapped himself (not having realized it was di Caprio). Before this, he’d hardly been in movies at all; his acting life was in television in such programmes as Parenthood, Santa Barbara, Growing Pains, and even one episode of Roseanne. After Gilbert Grape he barely looked back, and was a super star within half a decade.

Johnny Depp was thirty when he made the movie, but plays someone who’s presumably in his early twenties. Before this he’d made a number of movies, but apart from one they were nothing to write home about, and he’d had appeared for some time in a tv series called 21 Jump St. The one memorable movie prior to Gilbert Grape was the strange Edward Scissorhands, his first collaboration with Tim Burton. A cartoon story performed by real life actors, it’s an extraordinary piece.

Gilbert Grape is full of scenes that stick in the memory: the husband drowning in a foot-deep paddle pool; di Caprio climbing the water tower; the mother climbing the stairs at the end or coming to rescue her ‘baby’. But a scene I’d forgotten was when the husband, an insurance salesman, tries to sell life insurance to Gilbert, who has just been with his wife, with whom he’s been having a rather one-sided affair. On the whole life insurance, for most of us, doesn’t rank highly on our priorities in life, and it’s the same with Gilbert, who actually thinks he’s seeing the man because the latter knows about the affair. It turns out altogether differently for Gilbert and the audience; like so many scenes in the film things aren’t quite what they seem and take different directions to what we expect.

Lasse Hallström as a director doesn’t usually grab me – his version of The Shipping News was a disaster from my point of view – but in this film he has everything in place. I don’t think he’s ever made another film to equal it.

Joe's Palace

Stephen Poliakoff's latest tv film was shown last night. It’s one of two ‘companion’ pieces, the other (which stars Maggie Smith) will show next week.

Thomas Sutcliffe, of The Independent, wrote:
[it had] “a looping, elliptical style of storytelling that can make it very difficult to say, once the final credits start rolling, exactly what the whole thing was about.”

Never was a truer word said without quite being said. I don’t think Mr Sutcliffe intended to disparage Poliakoff’s piece; I think he meant to say it was full of meaning that wasn’t quite graspable. Unfortunately what his words actually say on the surface is exactly what I felt about the film – and so did the other three people watching it with me.

There was so much wrong with it: its sluggish pace, the dreadfully-acted main character Joe (if it was dreadful acting; maybe this boy can’t act) who seemed to be an empty shell; the overdone sex scenes which added nothing to the film – couldn’t we have been left to guess, along with Joe, what was going on upstairs?

Then there was the Michael Gambon character, which Gambon did his utmost to invest with some intelligence. Unfortunately, Poliakoff gave him so little to work on, and such a poor motivation for his long-standing reticence to do anything useful with his life, that in the end you thought: Get on with it, you silly old duffer. He finally did, and not before time.

People kept coming into The House and saying there were strange vibes – all except Joe, who didn’t seem to know a vibe from a vibraphone. He just sat listening to his CDs with his headphones on (including a very silly pair he picked from a host of silly gifts) or writing his notes, and people kept interrupting him. His response was to sound as dull as possible so that hopefully they’d go away and leave him alone. Eventually they pretty much did.

Shooting the present

One of the great revolutions of the late twentieth century must have been the arrival of digital cameras. Everywhere you go now, you see them, and of course they’ve infiltrated the cellphone scene and the palm pilot area as well.

Everyone has one. I don’t think I’ve seen a person toting a ‘real’ camera since we’ve been in England, and the only person I know who still has one that he uses occasionally is a friend of mine back in New Zealand, whose hobby is photography. But even he’s succumbed to the convenience and ease of digital cameras.

I just wish we’d had one when we were in Rome thirty-three years ago. We’d have a lot more photographs, instead of the few we possess, and we’ve have actually been able to take more successful photos of things we only have scruffy photos of.

Of course proper cameras require you to take some care in what you’re photographing. Digitals don’t, and you can get rid of as much as you take if you want. That’s the great bonus of the system.

Our digital camera has long since superseded the proper camera we still have at home, and probably will maintain its dominance. Yet the photography processing shops don’t seem to be suffering. Plenty of people (unlike us, for the most part) want to keep ‘real’ photographs, even if they’re taken off a digital camera. We have hundreds of photos of our holiday over here on computer (and a back up zip drive) but not a one we can actually hand to someone. Strange how we accept such change, isn’t it?

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.

Catching up on HitTail

Because I’ve been on holiday in Europe for a month I haven’t been attending to my HitTail results. Naturally, when I checked them out today I found there was rather a large number of them to sort through. Ce la vie.

I thought I’d take a slightly different approach to them this time. Rather than working through them one by one, I’ve gone back to the section called My HitTail where I can see all the results in a kind of graph. The highest search query gets 48 hits, and of course, being HitTail, there are some two or three hundred one hit queries.

The 48 hits related to people looking for Mike Crowl, something I find rather astonishing – unless it means that unconsciously I’ve been searching for my own name regularly. Obviously it means people have been searching for all the other Mike Crowls in the world. It’s not a common name, but common enough.

Brent Stavig still comes up high on the list; this time at second place. He also appears as Brent Stavig Seattle, Brent Stavig Starbucks and just as Stavig. I suspect Stavig is a less common name than Crowl.

Queries to do with my off-the-cuff jokey post about athlete's fingers, come third. But we also get athlete’s fingers/fingers itch/foot hand, even athletes foot tongue! Crikey. And foot blog - you mean there’s someone writing a blog about athletes’ feet? Well, not entirely. Footcaresales in the UK have a blog on foot problems with only three posts in it. Not sure that that really counts as a blog.

The ever popular shrinking shirts continue to make news, and Chrissy Popadics, whom I’d never heard of until I did a blog on her home town and team of Boise.

These hits are all above the twenty mark. In the teens we get only James Berardinelli, one of my favourite online movie reviewers, and the ubiquitous Michael Crowl.

Anna Leese, the opera singer, and Karl Maugham, the NZ painter come in at 7 each, while Ronnie Rinalde, the whistler, and the book, The Coroner’s Lunch come in at 5. When we get to the number 4, we have several queries vying for attention: Andrew J Hiduke, about whom I still know next to nothing; endowment express; the Dunedin website, godunedin; James Mason in the movie, Odd Man Out; a rock group called Lyrical Whips, and finally, Postie.com, which is part of the PayPerPost site. PayPerPost has for some odd reason now changed its name to IZEA, which sounds like something you ought to have in a NZ firm. (I remember reading some while back in The Listener, how New Zealanders tend to hone in on the letter Z, when reading, because subconsciously they have this thing about Z been primarily related to NZ, or New Zealand. And it’s true. I take notice of the letter Z frequently!)

We’re getting down the list now, and at number 3 we have the following:
Fallacious arguments;
Funky P, in Luxembourg, the band I ‘discovered’ while I was over there;
HitTail itself;
Itchy between fingers;
John Pratt, the man who enjoys making puzzles;
One of my other blogs: Mike Crowl’s Travel Diary;
Rob Roberge, the author of a neo-noir novel;
Shaun Tilby, the basketball player in the Nuggets Team (in Dunedin);
Those Were the Days notes – I presume this relates to some book, but on my site it relates to eating cheese rolls, rolls with cheese too hot to eat and dripping with butter. Nowadays they tend to be soggy, tepid, with a bit of margarine scraped across them.

I’m not going to detail those who made it into number 2, except to mention that to my surprise Kiri te Kanawa is there; Maggie Smith; something to do with design flaws relating to Bill Bryson; Emma Fraser, another singer; Gareth Farr the actor, not the composer (the latter appears under several different queries: Gareth Farr blog/facts/naked/orchestral music of the sea with samples); Kavi Raz, the Indian film actor; Simon O’Neill, another Dunedin opera singer; and Michael Tippett, the composer.

Okay, you say, having read – or skimmed through - all this: What’s the Point? Purely my own satisfaction. I like HitTails’ approach, and I like seeing what people are looking for. That’s it, really. If you want to check out the original posts on any of these topics, you don't need to go to Google.com to do it. Just putting the search query in the search box at the very top of this page will find everything that's been written about any of these subjects.

Online surveys - and an acquisition

Back when I was out of work last year, I started (amongst many other things online) doing more surveys online. Sorry, market research, not surveys.

In spite of what’s said about doing surveys online, it’s not a very lucrative way of earning money, and some of the research places don’t actually offer cash direct, but various other ways of spending the points you earn, which personally I could do without.

I’m one of those people who enjoys doing surveys, although I must admit that some online surveys are very boring in their layout. They don’t fit on the screen well, and they ask the same questions over and over, on screen after screen – until you want to scream.

I’ve always thought face-to-face surveys that just asked the same questions for page after page were badly organised, and it’s the same online. I’ve thrown the towel in with some of them, because they get tedious, and all you can think is: when will this ever end?

On the other hand, some survey companies have made use of the Net’s capabilities rather more, using short videos, and even recreating ads on screen. This is a far better way to go, and shows that some researchers have become more innovative. Let’s hope others follow in their footsteps.

Apropos of all this, I see that yet another NZ company has been taken over, this time Research Solutions, which has been acquired by Synovate. Well, well, NZ will soon be entirely owned by overseas interests and then we won’t have to worry about anything any more!

Las Vegas' other side

Most people will have heard of the Tropicana Las Vegas, but have you heard of Opera Las Vegas? It doesn’t sound like something that goes with the city, does it? Nevertheless, there is an opera company in Las Vegas, and their latest production is Pagliacci. I’m not sure how you can just put Pagliacci on, on its own, but that’s what they’re doing. Normally Pagliacci is done in tandem with Cavalleria Rusticana, but obviously not here. (An old friend of mine used to refer to them rather flippantly as Cav and Pag.)
Opera in Las Vegas is a bit of a struggle, it must be admitted. As they say on their the company’s home page: Opera Las Vegas is raising the city's cultural life to a High Note.
Even apart from the pun (which may or may not be intentional - there’s a typo on one of the links on the home page as well, and ‘language‘ is spelt langurage on the auditions page) this speaks of a group that’s finding the people who live in Las Vegas or who visit the city are in general more likely to be swayed by the delights of the Tropicana than the Rusticana. (Which may account for the latter’s absence from the programme.)
I say, Go for it, Opera Las Vegas. Raise the standards of your community. Your amateur opera company’s productions must be a welcome change to some people at least.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen

Paul Torday’s debut novel makes me intensely jealous. There is no way I could ever get a first novel off the ground with such wit and humour, such intelligence and satire. But then I’m not Torday, and I’m not writing a first novel about a most odd subject.
I just finished this book today. It’s had some mixed reviews around the globe, but I found it perfectly charming. It doesn’t go far in any direction: the aspects of faith aren’t pushed so far that they become unbelievable (although obviously some grumpy secularist reviewers thought they were); the romance aspect is quietly handled, and there’s no shattering of marriages or sudden changes of direction for the characters; the use of various official papers and private notes and letters is hardly a new approach, but Torday handles it pretty well (except when he decided to put some sections out of sequence, something that didn’t strike me as necessary); the characters are more sharply drawn than some reviewers believed (probably the same secularists again); and though we don’t have dramatic scenes in the sense of characters playing off against each other (well, pretty rarely) because everything is told somewhat at one remove, we do have a competent approach to the action that does happen.
And then there’s all the stuff about salmon fishing. I don’t know that this book will convert a whole pile of readers into salmon fishers, but it won’t put them off either. The fishing side of things is interesting, and there’s just enough of it at any time. This avoids making the reader think: this isn’t a novel, it’s a fishing manual.
I found this book in a Valencia bookshop: I was desperate for something to read because my wife was taking so long to finish the fifth Ian Rankin, and Torday’s book was the only thing that looked worth a try. It was worth a try, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, reading it in two days - unfortunately. And my wife still hasn’t finished with Inspector Rebus.

Here are some short extracts from the book:
In the first, the main character, Fred has had a bit of an argument with his so-superior wife, who always expects everything to be on her terms.
“The rest of the evening was a bit of a frost, but when we went to bed, I think Mary must have felt a little guilty about the way she had changed her plans. Suffice to say, my new Marks & Spencer pyjamas were not required for the early part of the night. A relatively rare event in our marriage of late.
Afterwards Mary said, ‘There now, darling, that should keep you going for a bit.’” (Page 30)

Later Fred is having a meal with the Sheikh whose idea it is to enable his people to fish for salmon in the Yemen, and he tells Fred:
“’I regret to see your sadness, Dr Alfred. I would rather see you with an untroubled spirit and with your whole heart and mind bent upon our project. You need to learn to have faith, Dr Alfred. We believe that faith is the cure that heals all troubles. Without faith there is no hope and no love. Faith comes before hope, and before love.”’ (Page 139)

Much later, Fred reflects on this:
“I thought about the sheikh saying, although I could not remember his exact words, ‘Without faith, there is no hope. Without faith, there is no love.’
Then in a moment, in that vast space of rocks and sky and scorching sun, I understood that he had not meant religious faith, not exactly. He was not urging me to become a Muslim or to believe in one interpretation of God rather than another. He knew me for what I was, an old, cold, cautious scientist. That was what I was then. And he was simply pointing out to me the first step to take. The word he had used was faith, but what he meant was belief. The first step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that step. At long last I understood.
I had belief. I did not know, or for the moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the first step away from a world which only recognised what it could count, measure, sell or buy. The people here [in the Yemen] still had that innocent power of belief: not the angry denial of other people’s belief of religious fanatics, but a quiet affirmation. That was what I sensed here, in this land and in this place, which made it so different from home. It was not the clothes, not the language, not the customs, not the sense of being in another century. It was none of these. It was the pervading sense of belief. “ (Page 281)