Sarah Grace - and a bit about my music

Via my old 'friend' Jurgen Wolff (in the mostly Internet sense - though I have actually met him), I came across a blog written by Sarah Grace.

Sarah writes longish posts (although I guess I should check out the length of some of mine) and talks a lot about the joys and woes of being a writer. She's also a Christian, and discusses that in some of her posts too.

The post that Jurgen pointed me to was 10 lessons I've learned from both running and writing. A neat post, full of good comparisons.

I began writing another piano piece during the Easter break. I'd begun two other pieces, one of which was going well and then fizzed; the second seemed a great idea when I improvised round the piano with the main idea in it, but somehow there seemed to be too many options when I came to write it, and at the moment it's just sitting going nowhere, with only a page of music.

The one that's nearly finished, however, took off from the start. I'd had this idea of naming the pieces with some reference to a famous composer: the first is called Someone's Knocking - is it Beethoven? The title only arrived after the piece was part way done. The second started out with Bach in mind from the beginning, and is called, Bach does the Housework.

The most recent one, however, missed out on having a composer in the title. I was working through it, going fairly well, and suddenly had a kind of moment when I thought, this has something to do with a cornet/trumpet player. Opted in the end for the cornet player, and so it's called, The Cornet Player goes on Holiday. Having that in mind gave me a real impetus to keep moving on it. I wanted to write something that was lighter in tone rather than heavy, and the holiday element kept me focused.

I'm not a composer who's good on structure, as I think I've mentioned before, and I'm better composing a piece that's four to six pages long than a symphony. (Much better, in fact - there ain't no Crowl symphonies.) With music I find that I just have to sit down and start and see what happens. The structure usually sorts itself out in the end, but composing is a bit of a journey for me. (Like writing, really, though I tend to see the overall structure of written things better than composed ones.) If the journey goes well, I'll finish a piece easily. If it doesn't seem to get out of the gates of the town, then it may stay there for a very long time.

A matter of probabilities

If shrinking shirts is one of the most commonly-searched key phrases on this site – don’t ask me why – then drug rehab must be one of the least. I’ve just checked out HitTail, looking for a trace of this phrase, and there’s not one to be found. ‘Charity shop bolivia nc’, yes; ‘celia cromer wedding’, yes; ‘bugs flies compost pile’, yes; ‘all sort of home kitchen crowl insect’ – surely that must be ‘crawl’ – yes.

But nothing about drug rehab. Yet drugs and drug rehab is something I’ve written about a number of times, for various reasons.

The infinite puzzles of the Internet, eh? Who can fathom the mind of the Google Spider, or deduce her ways?

Plainly then, there’s more real concern about shrinking shirts in this world than about drug rehabilitation. Maybe it’s just that more people wear shirts than take drugs? I guess in terms of probabilities, that would be the case. Or maybe HitTail has a problem with drugs?

The other rather curious thing about key word phrases and my blog is that Henry Lewis Gates is fairly high on the list. Off the top of my head I couldn't recall who he was; nor did I remember writing about him. I had to go back through the blog itself to check him out and find he’s mentioned rather ironically as having misquoted Burns by saying it was Shakespeare who talked about his love being like a red, red rose.

He's rather more important than that -which might account for so many people looking for him.

Catching up on writing

Over this Easter weekend I've managed to get on and do some more writing for the Triond site, where articles can be left indefinitely, and can keep on getting viewed, and making money. (Peanuts, but it is money.)

I sat down a week or so ago and tried to chart out my writing/composing priorities. Doing an article a week for Triond was one of them. I kind of caught up by writing four articles, a couple of which were rehashes of pieces I'd done before.

So for those with an interest in other things I do, here are the links:

Blowing My Own Trumpet. This is a piece about trying to promote yourself on the Net. Self-referential is the term, I think!

Friends for Life. This one looks at some of the books on my shelves and concludes that some of them make better friends than the real people I know. Hmmm. This was a piece I started some time ago and never did anything more with.

The Delightful Lives at 44 Scotland St. Another 'rehash' - in the best sense. I've taken the four book reviews I've done of the four episodes in Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland St series and woven them together into a long overview. It's called recycling.

Support Your Local Circus. This was written new and fresh yesterday after I went to see Weber Brothers' Circus in Mosgiel, one of the outer suburbs of Dunedin. It's a lovely little circus, full of energy and life, with clowns that are genuinely funny, and some wonderful Asian acrobats. And three absolutely crazy motorcyclists racing around and around inside what seems a very tiny metal globe.

Photo by Atelier Teee

Shrinking Shirts

It never ceases to amaze me (though it's not hard to amaze me at the best of times) that there are so many searches on the Net for Shrinking Shirts. It's a phrase that comes up time and again on my keywords on HitTail, but it also appears daily in a Google alert I have for the topic.

You can even find video clips on You Tube on the subject. Here's a very earnest gent telling you how to stop your shirts from shrinking (and what to do about grime on your collars and cuffs).



One of the more delightful alerts I received in the last couple of days relates to a guy on Yahoo Answers asking about the problem. He asks:

I just bought a few cheap flannel shirts that fit me perfictly, but when i washed one of them it shrunk so much i could not where it anymore. I have wear them more as a light jacket, so they doen't get very dirty. Could i just throw them in the drier and skip the washing machine to semi-clean them? This would not shrink the shirt would it?

I've left his spelling as it was in the post, by the way. Fortunately he gets some very sensible answers - more so than the last person I came across on the Net who was asking something similar.

So what has all this to do with my creative work? Hmm, nothing really. It's just one of those things that interests me. And Artists Should Always Be On the Lookout for Interesting Things.

Tune in the head

I don’t know how it is with other composers, but I find when I’m working on something (as I have been on the third of the brass band pieces I’m currently writing) a tune from that piece will get itself in my head and hammer away at every opportunity. I know composers aren’t supposed to write tunes anymore (sez who?) but I write tunes still; that’s the way I am. At least two of the three ‘movements’ of this brass band collection have big tunes, ones where the tune is built up gradually from a small number of players to the whole band. Listening to it on Sibelius is quite exciting as you hear more and more instruments joining in.
But having the tune go round and round in your head for days on end is as annoying as seeing one of those funny t-shirts where you catch the words on the front but don’t have time to see what’s on the back. Or vice versa.
Or it’s as annoying as reading a review by James Berardinelli and finding that he likes a movie you hated. Or vice versa.


Photo courtesy of Steve 9091, on Flickr.com

Granados

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

What's in a Name? Quite a bit, actually

When we were in England we went to the deadening town of Milton Keynes, a place that was purpose-built for the overflow from London (I think). It struck me as an unpleasant place to live when I went there more than thirty years ago. It hasn’t improved, in spite of having one of the longest malls I’ve ever been in.
But I only mention Milton Keynes because there was a stall in the middle of the mall (always the poet!) where they were selling Dead Sea Salts. Apparently these are very effective for all manner of illnesses, including psoriasis treatment – which is rather odd, since you’d think that the dead helping the dead wouldn’t really work. Seems it does.
What struck me more though was the name itself. It must have taken some grit to insist that they stick with the word ‘dead’ in giving a name to various facial creams and lotions. Still, the Dead Sea Salts have been regarded fairly highly for many decades, so I suppose they thought they could risk it.
Must be one out of the bag, though.

Solaris

The other movie I got was Solaris, which deserves a post to itself, rather than being stuck in with Unfortunate Events. Although there are some Unfortunate Events in Solaris too: a couple of murders, a couple of suicides, some hasty and painless dispatching of people who aren’t really people, madness, an abortion, and lives lived without God.
Which makes it all sound very grim. In fact it’s not. The love story at its heart preserves it from being a minor version of Alien, and quite honestly, whatever Solaris is doing to the people on the space ship, it doesn’t seem particularly malicious.
It’s a very slow movie – though nowhere near as slow as its Russian forebear, which takes twice as long to tell the same story. But the slowness isn’t a negative feature, and I found it absorbing. (Not so my wife, who switched off very early on, even though she managed to tell me quite a bit about it later.)
George Clooney revels in having a role that’s got some depth – the role of Ocean is more like a paddling pool by contrast. Natascha McElhone (how did she ever get into movies with a name like that? It would never have been allowed in the good old days!) is an English actress I didn’t recognise, but she was in The Truman Show, and has turned up in a variety of other things, including tv episodes. Her lovely wan smile is used to great advantage, as is her puzzled air. She seems exactly right for the part.
There are virtually only two other actors in the piece: Jeremy Davies, who’s currently incarcerated in Lost, and Viola Davis, who’s one of those actresses who’s in everything but never seems to become familiar. Davis plays a maddening character who turns out not to be who he is, and Davis is a grim reaper of a woman, determined to beat the planet Solaris at its own game. When she figures out what it is.
This isn’t a film I’ll watch with my wife again in a hurry – she said you can watch it on your own sometime – but I’d like to figure it out a bit more. The central mystery becomes obvious enough, but what’s the ending all about? Is it just there to confuse us a little further?

A Series of Unfortunate Events

A couple of weekends ago, the Regent Theatre Trust held its first non-book sale. It focused on DVDs (which all went within minutes of opening), videos, sheet music, paintings and jigsaws. And of course, vinyl recordings by the mile.
I’ve already mentioned that I picked up some music at the sale, but I probably didn’t say I got two DVDs – the only two I could get my hands on in the crush. One was the film version of a book I read in late 2006 when I worked in a very boring job where I had next to nothing to do all day except sit and wait for the phone to ring. Which it didn’t very often. This was Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.
I enjoyed the books - there were three in the volume I got, all of which come into the movie. So-called children’s books often have a style and charm that’s lacking in many novels for adults. Of course the movie thins down the storyline considerably, as you’d expect, but it manages to maintain the conversational style of writing by having Snicket as a character in the film (played by Jude Law). What it does even better is cast Jim Carrey as Uncle Olaf, and he gives it everything he’s got. His highly stylised characterisation is wonderful, never missing a beat. He’s surrounded by artwork that is also absolutely spot on. It makes the movie worth watching several times, I’d think.
Some of the other actors aren’t quite as stylish as Carrey, which is a pity. The three children are fine: Liam Aiken, with eyes that convey amazing amounts; Emily Browning, beautiful and resourceful, and the Hoffman twins, who seem to have no qualms about being hung from a table edge with their teeth sunk deep into it. And Timothy Spall is his usual superb self. I’ve never seen him put a foot wrong.
But Billy Connolly, playing the gentle, snake-loving uncle is rather flat and seems to wonder what he’s doing there, and Meryl Streep misses the boat (not literally, as she spends quite a bit of time in one) somehow, something she seldom does.
In the end it’s the children, Carrey and the mise-en-scene that makes this a memorable movie. And of course, Mr Snicket’s humour.

There are times when I could do with a pair of Bose headphones. Even though our tv has surround sound and you can improve the bass, it comes across as very variable. I'm sure the sound would be better heard through headphones, just as it is with my Sibelius music program on the computer.

Hi Ho Silver!

I can remember the phrase, Hi Ho Silver!, but I’m lucky if I can remember the name of the actors who were in the films. Though I seem to remember that there was another horse called Tonto. Or was that the Indian’s name? Oh, dear.

Once I could quote you the details of umpteen films, naming the actors, directors and probably several other facts you didn’t need to know. Now I’m lucky if I recognise half the stars I see on screen.

And talking about silver, I can remember the fact that stocks of silver bullion are becoming hard to get, because I’ve had this fact hammered home to me on a number of occasions in relation to one of the writing companies I work for. But don’t ask me some other ‘facts’ I should know. I probably won’t be able to tell you.

I discovered that all this is perfectly normal. I suspected that it was, but I found a new book at the library the other day called Where did I leave my glasses? : the what, when, and why of normal memory loss. It’s by a woman who must now be getting on for seventy (she was a child in the forties) and who’s obviously been a top article writer for generations. Her name is Martha Weinman Lear, (of course I had to check it out on the book’s cover, because I’d forgotten), and she writes with great good humour and plenty of sense. She dispels the myth that most of us are heading for Alzheimer’s, and she includes plenty of sound scientific stuff in a very readable way.

She writes non-fiction the way I’d like to do it: plenty of information, but made so palatable that you just keep on reading. Years of experience probably helps, but for me it’s the sort of thing that’s quite hard. Maybe it is for her too. I don’t suppose she gets up in the morning and composes twenty pages on the trot without recourse to a few moments of thought.

I have written some good pieces in this sort of vein in the past – mainly for the NZ Listener – but I don’t seem to have the opportunities so much now. And many magazines have got deadly serious, so that humorous articles don’t get picked up readily. Just have to keep blogging then, to pay the bills.

Of course I should have checked earlier, but Tonto was the Indian. His horse was called Scout. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about the name of his horse: The origin of Tonto's horse, Scout, is less clear. For a long time, Tonto rode a white horse called White Feller. In the episode titled "Four Day Ride," which aired on August 5th, 1938. Tonto is given a paint horse by his friend, Chief Thundercloud, who then takes and cares for White Feller. Tonto rides this horse, and simply refers to him as "Paint Horse," for several episodes. The horse is finally named Scout in the episode "Border Dope Smuggling," which was broadcast on September the 2nd, 1938. In another episode, the lingering question of Tonto's mode of transport was resolved when the pair found a secluded valley and the Lone Ranger, in an urge of conscience, released Silver back to the wild. The episode ends with Silver returning to the Ranger bringing along a companion who becomes Tonto's horse, Scout.

Point of View

I finished reading Christopher Priest’s The Prestige a couple of days ago. I came across it because my son and I were having a discussion about a particular video of a quick-change-costume act that appeared on tv recently. In spite of watching several times and taking my son’s advice to not look at the two principals, but to watch away from them, I still missed seeing whatever trickery they were up to. Whatever it is they do to achieve their extraordinary quick changes, it’s superbly done.
Anyway, Ben mentioned Priest’s book because it talked about illusion and distraction in magician’s acts. But it turned out to be a lot more than that: a marvellous tale of deception and feuding between two rival magicians with some strange electricity thrown in, and quite a bit of distracting of the reader away from what the author doesn’t want you to see; well, at least not until he’s ready.
In the end the story is just a little over the top, leaning towards fantasy - and yet there are no cheap flights of fancy; it’s all told in a seemingly pragmatic way. That the events in the story are often much less than pragmatic is another thing altogether.
Priest manages four different storytellers very successfully (or is that six?), conveying the contemporary laidback attitude of the first narrator, the slightly bumptious and curiously doubled storytelling of the first magician, the background to the events told by another modern character, a woman this time, and the last long section told by the other magician – who has more than a few tricks up his sleeve, and isn’t anything like the character the other magician makes him out to be.
We get the same story more than once, and yet each re-telling peels back more layers of strangeness, showing that Priest, while not exactly leading us the garden path, is certainly not giving us all the information all the time.
Telling a story from four points of view is an achievement in itself. I know how difficult I’ve found it to successfully switch back and forth between two characters in the most recent novel I’ve been writing. (It has the working title of My Twin is Dying, but isn’t likely to finish up with that.) Priest has the advantage over me of retelling his story; I’m trying to tell a chronological story but varying who’s doing the telling as it moves along.
A friend of mine – she calls herself Sanchona on the book cover – discussed point of view at length with me (and other writers apparently) while she was writing her book A Family of Strangers. It’s one of those subtle things in writing that most new authors don’t quite see the need to deal with; great writers seem to do it without thinking.
Sometimes I think writers in discussion groups on the Net go overboard on how point of view should be achieved, and are too restrictive. Take any decent classic novel and check out how they’ve done it. I can guarantee there are as many ways of doing pov as there are of telling stories. The thing is to know what you’re doing in the first place.

Simon Barnes....again

For the past six weeks or so I've been reading Simon Barnes' book, How to be Wild. The following quote comes from section 63.

Science cannot replace religion, still less. God. That is not the job of science, despite all the fuss made by Dawkins, the proselytising atheist. But science can at least address the God Questions; and give us a deeper and more vivid understanding of life. And as I read about life, and as I walk along my own entagnled bank, I can feel very deeply that there is grandeur in the deep, puzzling, buzzling, complex nature of life that these great books have shown me.

The reason I'm taking so long to read the book is that it's very much one that you pick up in an odd moment and put down again after a couple of its short chapters, unlike The Prestige, which I devoured in a few days. (More on that book in a later post.) So I've just got Barnes' book out of the library for the third time, and hopefully will finish it on this round.

And speaking of Dawkins, I came across this quote about him and other atheistic popularizers in a blog I read most days, The Website of Unknowing. Carl McColman's referring to a book by Becky Garrison, called: The New Atheist Crusaders and their Unholy Grail: The Misguided Quest to Destroy Your Faith.

He writes:
Basically mimicking the fetish for intolerance that has come to characterize religious conservatives in our day, the new atheists have made it fashionable to dismiss religion as not only “untrue,” but unworthy of even the right to exist.

How do you say No?

In years past I used to accompany soloists from the Saints, one of the local brass bands. That came to a sudden end due to economic reasons, I think, and since then I’ve only spasmodically had anything to do with them. However, one of the trombonists is a buddy of mine from church, I see a 'retired' member of the band waiting at the same bus stop most nights, and their principal cornet player, John Lewis, seems to like my accompanying and has asked me to play for him on several occasions, so I’m still in infrequent contact with them.
It's slightly surprising that he still asks me to play, as on one of the more important occasions when I last played for him, I played the introduction with a sharp or flat extra. Not a good start, but we recovered, as old pros do.
John has just rung me tonight, and asked if I’d be interested in playing for him and a few others in the Invercargill Regional Comps, to be held in April. It’s a chance to do some playing for something particular, rather than just sitting at home practicing my scales (!), but I’ll also be rehearsing for the play by that time, which means I’ll have a bit on my plate.
I don’t want to join the wine club (sorry, whine club) but I have to think about how much time commitment is involved.
The play isn’t too involved, as far as I’m concerned – and I do need to keep my fingers in motion, so…
So I’m sitting debating whether I should be saying No, or whether I just do what I do in other years and go for it. Hmmm.

Scoring for the orchestra

People who’ve been reading this blog for a while may have noticed that I have a bit of an anti-thing about Douglas Lilburn, who’s currently classed as a Great New Zealand Deceased Composer. In fact, he may even be The GNZDC.
As I’ve said on a number of occasions I find most of his music lacking in something. Not all of it – his earlier pieces have some energy about them, but as he got older things seemed to get less and less lively (I hesitate to call them lifeless), and then, of course, he went down the dead end of electronic music.
Anyway, all this is by way of mentioning that at the Regent Non-Book Sale last Saturday, I actually found a Lilburn score. A full score, in fact. I would have picked up more full scores (mostly in miniature form) if the woman in front of me hadn’t been hunting desperately for them. So desperately that she was tossing anything that wasn’t a miniature score to one side in a heap. I can never understand why people do that to books or music in a sale. It damages what are often already fragile items, and shows a complete lack of concern for other buyers.
However, I managed to snaffle the Lilburn. It’s a conductor’s score, rather than a miniature, and getting it for $3 was quite a bargain, I guess. Even though it was Lilburn (!). I did pick up one miniature score as well, Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
I was interested in getting the scores, because it’s good to see what composers actually write when they’re producing full orchestral scores. Often the details are quite different to what you hear, and often you wonder why is there so much detail. Is it just to give the musicians something to do? Or to fill in the gaps? Or to add volume? It’s hard to know.
My one and only recent foray into the orchestral world – in terms of playing in the orchestra rather than composing for them – was when I played the piano part in Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Antarctica. The piano does quite a bit of work at times in this symphony, but to be honest, 60 to 70% of it goes unheard in terms of detail. It’s filler stuff, added to give depth to the orchestral sound. This was just as well, as not being the world’s best orchestral player, I often found it hard to keep to the conductor’s beat, and consequently was playing to a rather different drummer than the rest of the orchestra on more than one occasion.
There’s an advantage in being hidden under dozens of other orchestral sounds, of course. You note it most particularly when you’re suddenly not hidden. That’s really scary.
After that I was determined to stick to solo playing, or accompanying. That I know how to do.

I've got a little list

In line with what I said in the last post here’s a quick overview of the creative factor in the Crowl world as at this date:
Lined up for a small part in a play called And Then They Came for Me: remembering the world of Anne Frank. It’s written by James Still.
Writing some brass band music in the hope that one of the A Grade local bands might consider playing it.
Writing some piano music with tongue-in-cheek titles.
Considering writing some songs again, including a song for the dramatisation of C S Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which our church is producing later this year.
Writing four blogs mainly, and posting occasionally to a couple of others.
Considering a way in which a novel I’ve virtually finished might be published on the Net, bit by bit.

That’ll do for the moment. Meantime, I’d like to alert you to a poem I wrote which gets advertised at times in a widget along the side of these posts. It doesn’t get many views from people, so I’d like you to have a look and either leave a comment here or on the site of the poem itself.

A change of direction

I’m changing the focus of this blog.
What focus, you ask? You mean there’s been a focus?
All right, I’ll admit sometimes the focus might have been a bit obscure; that’s the nature of a blog entitled Random Notes, as you might expect. It isn’t surprising to find posts about wrinkle cream reviews and travelling in Asia and all manner of other things in a blog that’s random. However, even though a few of these random element might remain – indeed will remain – I want to do something about the music/arts/movies focus.
This has been all over the place, and there’s been nothing to distinguish the blog from thousands of others (except perhaps, its superior writing!)
From now on there’ll be an increased focus on my own creative side: the articles, reviews and even the blogs I write; the composing I do; the piano-playing I do; the music I play and the movies I watch. Sound egocentric? It isn’t intended to be.
The intention isn’t to plaster the reader with Mike Crowlishness, but to give you a genuine picture of the creative side of my life – a side that’s reasonably extensive, even though I’m by no means a full-time creative person. Like many others in blogworld, I have to work for a living.
Crowlfulness is a niche market: the other Crowls I come across on the Net aren’t focused on creative stuff – usually the Crowls I read about are into football (American version of) or other less arty affairs.
And because no one else has quite the knowledge about the Crowlicity that I do, I can claim to be more informative on this subject than anyone else.
So that’s how it’s going to be – at least until I have another brainstorm and decide to take a different tack. Here goes!

Making some changes

I'm intending to make some changes in the focus of this blog over the next weeks, which those of you who are regular readers (all 2 of you) will no doubt notice.
Meantime, I've also revamped another blog I have - it goes under the name of Mike of All Trades. It focuses now on the books and other items I'm selling on various online sites, and gives some background and anecdotal material relating to the books sold.
I think it'll be very interesting!

Brent Stavig

I just need to make mention that in a Google Alert that arrived today, there's a link to a profile on Brent Stavig. Brent has made a number of appearances in these pages, as a result of my searching for a poet by the name of Stavig, some time ago.
He probably finds it odd that some obscure blog keeps mentioning him, but, what the heck - this is the nature of the Internet world.

Travelling in Asia - for those who do

Last week, my boss and I spent a good couple of hours trying to book hotels online. These were in Sydney and Brisbane, and though we found the ideal place in Sydney, we couldn’t for the life of us get it to go right through to completion stage. It kept telling us we were spending more than forty minutes on the site, and that was too long. We must be some kind of bug/virus/bot or whathaveyou.
I was reminded of this just now, because of looking at sites advertising Cheap Hotels in Singapore, Cheap Hotels in Bangkok and Cheap Hotels in Kuala Lumpur. Bear with me if I seem to be repeating myself here! It’s the leftover result of struggling to book Cheap Hotels in Brisbane or Cheap Hotels in Sydney.
Booking hotels online has its ups and downs. When we were in Europe we had to book hotels and hostels as we went. The result was that we got a very mixed bag of accommodation, as I’ve said in my Travel blog. In Barcelona we had to climb five flights of stairs to get to our room, even though there was a lift in the building. The lift, however, was reserved for permanent residents. Good grief.
In Rome we paid a fortune for a very ordinary hotel. Not only that, but it was a long bus ride from any of the tourist spots.
In Hamburg, the shower wasn’t just en suite, it was literally built into the room! In Heidelberg there was absolutely nothing in the room except the bed and a hatstand.
On the other hand, in Valencia, where we stand for a week, we had two wonderful apartments; in Florence we were within spitting distance of all the tourist places and could walk comfortably to them; in Cologne we paid about half the price of the Rome room for exactly the same kind of accommodation. The luck of the draw, obviously.
It would be interesting to have a go at doing the same thing for Asia - if I ever get a chance to go there!

The various photos of come from Flickr.com, and were taken by
MsAnthea: Bangkok
Storm Crypt: KL (Note that this is the building Sean Connery and Catherine Zeta-Jones hung between in the film, Entrapment.
Christopher Chan: Singapore

How to Write

In the end, if you really want to write, you just have to do it. Reading a book about it may help – but it may also be a bit like sitting disconsolately on the edge of the pool with a book called How to Swim.

Jeremy Treglown writing in the Financial Times, and reviewing several books on helping people to learn to write well.

One of the books he mentions is Jurgen Wolff''s Your Writing Coach
It's a book I keep thinking about getting, but as Treglown says, it's a matter of sitting down and doing the nitty gritty of writing, if you want to do it. There's no easy way to write, any more than there's an easy way to build a house.

HSM2

Okay, what’s all the rave?
Sorry, I mean, if you have a pre-teen daughter, what’s all the rave?
High School Musical 2.
We’d just got over the sensation of version one when version two was announced. And even while that was in the works (it came out just before we went to England last year) HSM1 was turning itself into an onstage show, an onstage ice show and who knows what else. And was doing the world tour. (We came across it in Italy, for example.)
The marketers have gone mad, of course, and everything and its brother is covered with HSM guff, from bedding to cellphones, from shoes to schoolbags, from rubbish to more rubbish. As it always goes, since Walt Disney found that he could make more money out of his Mouse out of the movies than in.
Now don’t get me wrong: I actually enjoy the two musicals. Let me qualify that. I think the songs are twee and fluffy, some of the acting isn’t above the level of the script, but the dancing is topnotch. HSM1 and 2 (and Hairspray, as I mentioned the other day) have restored dancing to the big screen. Good on them!

Stephen de Pledge Pieces

Stephen de Pledge premiered a NZ piano ‘work’ at his concert in the 2008 New Zealand International Arts Festival. The work consists of 12 piano pieces by New Zealand composers, including Ross Harris, Michael Norris, Samuel Holloway, Jenny McLeod, Dylan Lardelli, Eve de Castro Robinson, John Psathas, Jack Body and Gareth Farr. Half of the pieces had been played before in other circumstances; for the rest it was a true premiere. For the work as a whole it was a world premiere.
Each piece is in response to ‘landscape’ and of course the responses vary enormously. They sound like the sorts of pieces I’d like to get my fingers on (literally) but I know that they’ll have virtuoso difficulties which I don’t think I’ve got the energy any more to tackle.
There’s a good and detailed review of the concert by Robbie Ellis on scoop, though we could probably have done without the rather snide comments at the end about someone unwrapping a lozenge at a snail’s pace during the concert. That sort of addition to a review does nothing for the reviewer; rather it makes him sound pompous.
Robbie is least satisfied with Jack Body’s piece, which, with its accompanying track of Body himself chauntering on, seemed out of place with the rest of the purely piano items. Robbie allows Body his humour – “an utterly charming and piquant jaunt of whimsy” – but you get the impression he didn’t feel it worked as well as the other pices.
On the SOUNZ site they say about Body’s piece: ‘Jack Body's The Street Where I Live, was sublimely humorous. A fellow composer was heard to affectionately remark afterwards that he thought "Jack had out-Satied Satie!"”
I doubt that, but then I’m not a Body fan. (He’s in the same category, as far as I’m concerned, as my old nemesis, Lilburn: the much over-rated category.) ‘Sublimely humorous?’ Sublimely overstated.

Homeless Family blog

Here’s the link to the blog about the ladder rack and the missing father. You may make more sense of it than I did!
I’ve just checked the last post on the blog – last as in finished. The blog was written for a certain time and is now done with. It ended in January this year.
The homeless family aspect wasn’t a joke; the blogger writes in his last post:

My name is John,
2004 homeless with family
2005 diagnosed Bipolar and began treatment, still in shelter
2006 got out of shelter
2007 continued stability. Started professional blogging. Kept advocating through some hard harassment locally by the 'Downtown Vigilante' and his 'posse'.
2008 elected to the Board of Directors of the Lead Agency in Jacksonville that spreads the money to the homeless service providers.

It goes to show you can write about anything – and it can be of value – in the great wide world of Blog. Furthermore, there are a heap more comments on this blog than I ever get on any of mine!

Ladder racks and chess

It’s not every day you’d find a blog that claims the lack of a ladder rack was what lost the writer his father.
It’s a bit of a confusing post, but somehow in it there’s something deep – as its sole commentator notes. Apparently the blogger had tracked down his long-lost father after some time only to discover that he carried all his work gear in the back of his red pickemup (an interesting word I haven’t come across before, although when you break it down into its component parts – pick em up – it makes perfect sense) and this caused scratching and damage to the truck bed.
Quite how he got from there to losing his father again, I’m not clear. But it seems it all hinges on the ladder rack.
My loss of my father hinged on the game called chess. (Bit of a far cry from ladder racks, but there you go; each to his own.) If chess hadn’t been his master, instead of him being its master, he and I might have had a number of good years together. But some obsessions take hold of you, and chess came before family, in my father’s case. I haven’t seen him for sixty years – admittedly he died back in the early sixties, so I wouldn’t have seen him for all those years anyway, but that’s not the point.
Ladder racks and chess. Life is always made up of little choices.

The troubles of life

Since shrinking shirts (as opposed to shrinking violets) keeps coming up on my HitTail search results all the time, I thought I’d have another look at what’s out there on the topic.
Google picked up a site called Threadless Nude No More (Google seems to have a bit of a thing about nudity and nakedness) and coincidentally, when I checked out what a threadless t-shirt was, I came across one that had been sold recently on Trade Me, a site I’d spent a good deal of the afternoon on (between sorting out the house still). They sell t-shirts too, and advertise them thus: Don't trade naked, buy a Trade Me t-shirt!
See what I mean about nakedness? You can't get away from it.
The Trade Me seller wrote: This is one of the collection of threadless t shirts. Threadless is an organisation where artists submit their artwork to be printed on t shirts. Each t shirt has its own name and an idea behind it. this one is called "in the event of a playground" and is printed on a blue t shirt. T shirts made in USA
Anyway, the original TNMM site is also a social site, where people discuss things (mostly related to their threadless tees, I think). Under the heading, Shrinking Shirt, Alex Tong, whose user name is secondfate, asked: “I want a Threadless shirt, but they only have it in Men's Large.
If I put it through the wash @ warm, and dry it, would it be feasible for it to shrink to a Mens Small?
Advisable? no? yes?”
Not surprisingly, Alex got some very odd responses, but the general consensus seemed to be that it would better for him to tone up his body for three months and then he’d fit the shirt. Seems a rather drastic approach, and Alex was of the same opinion. Firstly, being Asian he was naturally small, and secondly, if he did build up his body in order to fit this particular Threadless, he’d then be too big for his billion other shirts.
Ah, the troubles of life.

That's Alex in the photo - he actually seems to be a bit of a shrinking violet, if the picture is anything to go by.

Vantage Point

There’s something really annoying about downloading a YouTube video, at least as far as doing it on my computer is concerned. The initial download stops and starts, the sound is often just behind the action, and in general you have to go off and make a cup of tea while it gets its act together.
It’s taken me three attempts to download it, and I get about half a second at a time. So I’m writing this while I’m waiting for it to finish the job. Then maybe I’ll be able to watch it as it ought to be watched. Instead of in bits.
Anyway, the trailer I’m trying to get at is for Vantage Point, a film that’s been mentioned twice today in emails that arrived in my inbox, and which is obviously one of those action-packed pieces that barely stops long enough for you to get your breath.
James Berardinelli (whom I regard, in general, as being an astute critic) said the film ‘fails the “reality test”, but maintains a certain intensity for its entire running length.” Someone else compares it to watching the tv show 24. (That’s always a bit of an endurance test, especially if you’ve missed an episode!)
Anyway, I’ve now picked up the full trailer and it goes like a bat out of hell. Dennis Quaid, an actor I like to see in movies (he always comes across with integrity) is in the lead, by the look of things, and the premise is pretty basic: eight people see eight different aspects of the assassination of the President, and the pieces have to be joined together. Looks fast and furious, with car chases, crashes and lots of explosions. Bet it’s noisy too!
Forest Whitaker is also in it, and the lead actor from that very strange series, Lost (the one in which the scriptwriters appear to be the most lost people of all). Bruce McGill, who used to be MacGyver’s occasional offsider many moons ago, turns up again in a McGill-type role (they’re thick on the ground), and William Hurt plays William Hurt with his usual elegance.

Update on Gareth Farr

Some updates on Gareth Farr (whom I’m listening to at present on my CD player).

1. He’s currently the resident composer of the Auckland Philharmonia, which is kind of being like the Poet Laureate of a country, but on a smaller scale. As a result of being RC for the AP, he wrote a fanfare for their annual al fresco concert, the Mazda Summer Matinee. (Not sure how the Mazda people got in there, but no doubt they have a good reason.) The orchestra’s chief executive, Barbara Glaser, said the fanfare is ‘”so bright and vibrant. Gareth understands just what the spirit of a fanfare is. It has all the excitement and rhythmic touches that we love about him.”
Sounds like Gareth all right. Excitement and rhythm are second nature to him.

2. As well as writing a fanfare, Farr arranged a couple of songs written by the NZ pop group, Evermore. Evermore performed these with full orchestral backing. Gareth was quoted as saying, “Orchestras are such dramatically wonderful ensembles.” He should know; that’s certainly how he writes for them. The orchestra was also playing some of its more regular repertoire: Mozart, Bach, Beethoven. Wonder how those three would feel being alongside Evermore? And I wonder which of the four will be heard evermore?

3. In a report from gaynz.com, someone wrote about the Te Papa Museum’s 10th birthday: “Other highlights throughout the day include the reprisal [sic] of Gareth Farr's composition Te Papa performed by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.”
Now some listeners might think Gareth’s music is a reprisal for their view that he’s too modern, or too loud, or too everything, but I suspect that the writer actually meant ‘reprise,’ which means that the piece is being played again, in this instance in the same place where it was first performed, and by the same orchestra that played on that occasion.

Rudyard Kipling

C S Lewis discussing Rudyard Kipling and his writing, makes this observation:

If all men stood talking of their rights before they went up a mast or down a sewer or stoked a furnace or joined an army, we should all perish; nor while they talked of their rights would they learn to do these things. And I think we must agree with Kipling that the man preoccupied with his own rights is not only a disastrous, but a very unlovely object; indeed, one of the worst mischiefs we do by treating a man unjustly is that we force him to be thus preoccupied.
But if so, then it is all the more important that men should in fact be treated with justice. If we all need ‘licking into shape’ and if, while undergoing the process, we must not guard our rights, then it is all the more important that someone else should guard them for us.

From They Asked for a Paper, a collection of various papers produced by Lewis over the years. This address was given to the English Association.

As always, Lewis discusses the subject with intensity and ease, with insight and detail, and, as always, he manages to produce some clear statements of his own that stand outside the subject.

Revival!

In a rather oddly titled article from the Telegraph online, Opera loosens its Corsets, (the article's a couple of years old), I was intrigued to discover that the Carl Rosa company was back in existence. Carl Rosa would have been delighted, I’m sure.
I have tenuous links with the Carl Rosa company – second or third-hand, some might say. When I was at the London Opera Centre, the director was James Robertson, and he’d had real links with the company; he’d conducted for them for some time. It had obviously been an enjoyable time of his life, and he would mention Carl Rosa (by which he meant the company rather than the person) with warmth and enthusiasm.
The revived Carl Rosa is the brainchild (lovechild, you might almost say) of Peter Molloy, who delights in operetta, and has offered excellent and fresh productions of some of the G & S repertoire (they’re just about to take The Mikado off to the States) as well as other light opera pieces.
The company, in its original form, was the first to produce England or in the English tongue the following list of top operatic works: Lohengrin, Aida, Carmen, La Boheme, Cavalleria Rusticana, Hansel and Gretel, Mignon, Manon, Tannhauser, Rienzi, Andrea Chenier, Othello and The Flying Dutchman. Quite an achievement.

Hail the Conquering Hero

I remember reading one of Preston Sturges’ scripts when I was in my teens. Even though in those days films were much more talky than they are now, I was struck by the long dialogue scenes that pervaded the script.
This was just one of the features of Sturges’ movies. There was never anything much in the way of camera trickery – the camera caught what it needed to and that was that. There was little innovation in cinematic terms. There was often little ‘action’, by which I mean people driving around in cars or on riding horses.
But there was always plenty of dialogue, witty, smart dialogue that was often an inch or two ahead of your ear, and that you only caught up on as the next witticism was arriving. It was always played in an off-hand manner, as though to be witty and articulate was the norm for everyone. And then there were the characters: Sturges never provided a basic few characters. He wrote his screenplays for dozens of sharply edged individuals, from the leads to the tiniest bit-players. No one in his films can be said to be uninteresting; there are so many interesting people that you have a job keeping up with them all, and you almost wonder why some of them are made interesting!
Take the homecoming scene in Hail the Conquering Hero, a film I’ve just caught up with some sixty years after it was made. We have a ‘hero’ who’s far less handsome than his rival; a self-centred mayor whose wife isn’t in the least put down by his rudeness, and his laconic campaign manager; we have someone who’s only role seems to be to organise things – and they invariably get way beyond his capabilities; we have an opera singer wanting to sing in seven flats, a key the band can’t play in; we have at least three adult bandleaders and a confident youthful one (and four bands); we have a little girl who presents the flowers; we have the mayors’ rivals, each one an individual; we have six Marines, from the bombastic sergeant to the mother-loving Bugsy, and the four between. Each person is drawn full of life, even though some only appear in a single scene.
In the opening sequence, four waiters sing behind a woman in a bar; each one of them is a person, one of them forever being just a bit hidden, and another, the smallest one, having to catch up with the others every time they move. And then there’s the maitre d’, who has a short sequence of lines with the sergeant. He’s as funny as anything in the movie, but this is the only time he appears. Three characters who appear in the last part of the movie – the ticket lady, the train conductor and the telegraph man – maybe have a minute of screen time between them, yet they’re just as memorable as the rest of the cast.
It’s partly to do with the actors Sturges cast in his movies, and with his ability to rouse them to life in a fraction of screen time. The actors plainly enjoy their roles and their dialogue; it’s the sort of dialogue most actors would die for these days.
As for the film itself, well, it’s apparently not top of the list in terms of Sturges’ small output (he only directed twelve movies), but there’s plenty to enjoy about the script and story. Yes, it has two or three patriotic moments, but it was made during the war, and real people were out there dying. I don’t think the patriotic moments are badly handled anyway, and Eddie Bracken’s (he of the mishapen face) final speech is both dramatic and patriotic at the same time – and moving.
Perhaps the weakest link – if there is one – is Ella Raines. She acts in the style of the heroine of that time, and that’s okay. But I don’t think she has much more than surface to give anyway. And she doesn’t exactly light up the screen.
Dear Miss Raines apart, this is a great movie, a wonderful palliative to the often vapid movies made these days.

Hairspray

We watched Hairspray last night as a change from moving the furniture around the house in preparation for the carpet-layers - who came today.
I’d heard that Hairspray wasn’t up to much and that people didn’t like Travolta in drag. I’m not sure that I was overstruck by his performance in this movie, but he carries it off pretty well, and gets some enjoyment out of sending himself up in the role.
The rest of the cast have an equally enjoyable time in what is a very upbeat movie. And there’s dancing, dancing of the calibre you don’t often see in a Hollywood musical these days. Actually you don’t see too many Hollywood musicals anymore, if it comes to that.
I miss musicals. They were the mainstay of my cinema-going in my childhood. It was the peak of the film musical period, and I’ve been saddened by the fact that so few musicals have been produced since the 70s. Why this should be, I have no idea. Someone in the marketing department got the idea that young people wouldn’t go to musicals, and that was that. Out they went.
Anyway, back to Hairspray, which apparently has been filmed before. Can’t say it passed my way, but in 1988 I may not have been going to too many movies, having a bunch of kids at home.
The film has a bunch of stars at its centre, from Michelle Pfeiffer and Christopher Walken to Queen Latifah and Zac Efron (better known as Mr High School Musical. But it’s Nikki Blonsky, who comes way down the cast list on IMDB, who carries the film. There can’t be many roles for short and solid girls, especially leads in a musical. But here she is, and she gives it everything she’s got. The rest of the cast orbit round her, but just when you think one of them is going to take over, up pops Nikki again. She’s a delight.
Zac Efron plays a bit of a wimpy role, which is a pity, because he’s got talent coming out of his ears, and needs a role with a bit more bite. It can’t be said that either of his High School Musical parts have given him much to do – apart from the singing and dancing.
The cast apart, the film is full of visual delights: not an opportunity is lost to play up the fun of crazy hairstyles and clothes, garish colours and skinny women. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie, and can see me sitting with my granddaughter watching it over and over.

Lilburn and Delius

Landfall in Unknown Seas, by Douglas Lilburn, has just been played on the radio yet again – this time with Sir Edmund Hillary doing the reciting of the poem (and not very well either, it must be admitted).
In spite of its ‘popularity’ this is an unexciting piece of music. The format doesn’t help much, with a person reading the poetry of Allen Curnow interspersed with string ‘interpretations’ of what’s just been read. Somehow it never takes off. The poetry is fine enough, but Lilburn’s music never rises to the occasion. In fact, it tends to flatten things out. As always, Lilburn fails to come up with anything except his usual chordal movement stuff, and after a while that gets tedious. It reminds me of Delius’ music, whose wandering compositions wax and wane in popularity. They never seem to have any purpose; they’re reflective, which is fine in music, but that’s all. Delius seems to have no other mood.
Lilburn has occasional moments in his compositions, moments when he finally seems to break out of the mode of the mind and into emotion. But he seems to hold back far more often than he lets loose, and in a composer that’s not a good trait, I don’t feel. Without some sense of passion, even if it’s only below the surface, music becomes a mere mood, and in Lilburn’s case it’s not a very interesting mood.

Rain

My attitude to rain has changed since I moved to Suffolk. Certainly, I used to understand rain as a good thing. I didn’t have the townees’ hatred of rain: a thing expressed time and again by the great Shane MacGowan of The Pogues, for whom rain is final proof of the indifference of God to his own suffering. MacGowan has written of Rain Street, that it’s just another bloody rainy day, and that it was raining worse than anything that he had ever seen.
But me, I used to see the rain and say, well, I accept that it is a Good Thing. A pity it’s doing it now, but I accept it. But I left all that behind when I reached Suffolk. My water is pumped up from a well; I have a bit of river on my few acres; I have pasture. I need the grass, I need the rain, or my horses will suffer. And so when it rains, I respond not with my mind but my guts: rain, how truly fabulous. It is an extraordinary adjustment, a new way of seeing the world. Water doesn’t come from a tap: it comes from the sky. My water is wild.

From chapter 42 of How to be Wild, by Simon Barnes.

I'm reading this book at the moment, on and off. It's the sort of book that keeps coming back to the same refrain, and there's no 'plot' so picking it up when you feel like it isn't going to lose you anything. But it is a wondrous refrain to the wonder of the wild world around us - not the wilds of Africa (although that's here too) but the wilds of Suffolk or your back yard.

The Artist's Room

I’ve just found that The Artist’s Room, the gallery on the corner of Dowling St, in Dunedin, has its own website. Of course, that’s just as you’d expect these days, but it hadn’t occurred to me to check it out before. The only thing I don’t like about the site is that a lot of the background is black with white print. Hard on the eyes, I say.
However, the quality of the art displayed on the Artists’ page (one artist in the title, plenty of artists on the page) is superb. I went in there the other day and found that the owner, Michelle (don’t know her other name) was beginning to set up the next exhibition. It’s works by Neil Driver, whose realism is a delight to the eye. I happened to say to Michelle that his work reminded me of Steve Harris, who’d long ago gone to Australia to make his fortune (and has). She enthusiastically agreed – enthusiastically, because she happened to be emailing him there and then! Very serendipitical.
Steve Harris’ work has a dark quality to it, whereas Driver’s seems more full of light. You always feel with Harris as though something odd is just out of sight.
His work is great. I got to know it when he used to bring his young daughter to the daycare centre I was running, back in the late seventies. Harris had an unassuming quality about him, but is an artist of terrific strength.
No doubt his daughter is now getting on for thirty, which seems strange, since I last saw her when she was just a nipper.
Michelle has sold some of Harris’ work from The Artist’s Room, even though most of his painting gets snapped up in Oz. She has some more of it coming for a realismo exhibition that’s happening in late March. I’ll definitely be going down to see it.

I almost forgot to mention: the bookshop I used to run was formerly situated beside the gallery’s premises. In fact, I used to climb the stairs that now lead to the gallery to go to the loo (!) [Sometime I must write about that building. It had character.] The door you can just see in the photo with the round window above it was where the shop was. It now has a restaurant in it.

Goin' Dancin'

Another article I’ve published recently on the Net relates to my dancing experiences – when I say ‘my’ dancing experiences, I mean dancing with my wife. We went to a course in what we thought was ballroom dancing several years ago and discovered that they not only taught ballroom dancing but square dancing. And both forms of dancing were the ‘called’ type, where someone calls out the next move as you go. It’s very common in fact, but we’d never come across it before. We actually enjoyed it a lot, until it just became too time-consuming. It was great exercise, and both of us got quite fit doing it. We even travelled to a few other centres to join in square dancing conventions with other people.
However, those who were really into it would travel to Australia and the States and Canada and all sorts of places to join others who danced. And people would come to us too. That sort of thing was rather beyond our pocket and our amount of annual leave.
It’s time we got back into something along those lines again, as we’re both feeling distinctly unfit (in spite of all the work we’ve done on the house recently in terms of getting ready for carpet laying) and need something that gets us up and running.

Nope, that's not us in the photo: though we occasionally came close to such finesse. The photo's by catface3.

Flying Boats

I’ve just posted an article on trifter.com about flying boats. To be honest, it’s an article I’ve had on my files for a long time. Several years ago I did a lot of research on the subject and was keen to get the thing published, but could never quite find the right home for it. Anyway, this version of it now has a home and that’s satisfying enough for the moment.
My mother had a lot of interest in flying boats. If my memory serves me right, she flew to Australia in one, around 1939. One of her old scrapbooks has pictures from the local newspaper showing flying boats landing here in Dunedin harbour, something that’s rather hard to imagine now.
I always liked the idea of those great ships of the air and their luxurious, roomy cabins; the fact that you could sleep onboard if you wanted to, in proper beds, and that you’d be waited on by proper stewards, and fed at real tables.
Having been in a few planes over the last six months or more, most of which were unutterably cramped and unpleasant, it’s nice to dream of what it would be like in a classy flying boat.
I see that you can get a DVD of British RAF seaplanes and flying boats on one of the NZ sites. I’m almost tempted to check it out further!

Back to HitTail

It’s rather a while since I last checked out HitTail, and that means that there’s a swag of searches listed which have connected up to this blog in some way or other. A few of them are downright strange, for example:

Crowls Land Investment (wasn’t aware we had any land to invest)
Money order not it [sic] my name
Coffin maker carpenter twentieth century Russian Chinese
Loss of little toe evolution
Eat cheese itch on fingers (urrgh)
Slouching towards serfdom
Don’t use Triond cause it is an Israeli company (scary - who finds that a problem?)
Country line dance water man Crowl (obscure)
How the Indians use to right in leather (use to what?)
I was in an Oxycise infomercial

A number of keywords turn up in some form over and over:

Smidgen
Couples San Souci
Men’s engagement rings
Insects in compost
Brother of the More Famous Jack (in one instance, the Less Famous)
Distressed oatmeal
John Foulds’ World Requiem
Alfred Hitchcock
The Marriage quote from Shall We Dance
Singing in the Rain
The movie, Bandidas, (particularly the horses)

Which all rather seems to indicate that I must be writing about some things that other people find interesting!

Double Hitchcock

Amongst all our house renovations, I’ve managed to watch two elderly Hitchcocks, after finding them on DVD in The Warehouse. The first was definitely the better of the two, though it had its hammy moments; the second (which even Hitchcock didn’t regard highly) is so hammy and badly acted that you wonder why he let them get away with it.
Sabotage, the first of the two, is full of wonderful detail and energy, marvellous London characters, and an effective performance from Oskar Homolka. Sylvia Sydney is good in the early part, when she’s lively and bright, but she doesn’t seem to do well in the latter half of the movie, when she’s required to be much more emotional. John Loder was second choice for the male lead, and is adequate, but doesn’t exhibit much charm. Desmond Tester plays the young boy as a person full of beans and liveliness. He was actually 17 at the time the movie was made, but you’re never aware of his being much older than his character. (I don’t know what happened to him as an actor. He made a bunch of movies up until 1940, one more in 1947 and then nothing more until 1874. Seems he might have moved to Australia - he died in Sydney in 2002 at the ripe old age of 83 – because he appears in more than one Aussie movie after that time.)
[Should have checked Wikipedia first: there's a reasonably full bio of Tester there.]
The other movie, Number 17, is low on the list of Hitchcock favourites, perhaps with good reason. It’s either a complete spoof or a ham-fisted piece of rubbish, and since Hitchcock wasn’t much into ham-fisted work, even when he wasn’t enjoying making a particular film, we can only conclude that he plays his producers for suckers and produces a piece of nonsense.
It’s full of shadows playing around on walls, and strange empty rooms and enigmatic characters. Though based on a hugely popular play, Hitchcock has done such a re-treatment of it that little of the original survives. The main actor, Leon Lion, who was completely associated with the role of Ben on stage, reappears here, and it’s well known that Hitchcock detested his constant mugging and overacting. Between him and John Stuart, in the opening scenes, the acting is taken at a snail’s pace, with every gesture and reaction overdone. You have to wonder what Hitchcock thought he was doing.
Things heat up a bit with the addition of more characters, and there is some humour in it, but it’s hard to believe Mr and Mrs Hitchcock and Rodney Ackland really spent several months on the script. It makes no sense, and is full of stuff that couldn’t have been got away with on stage. By the time we get to the end, with its crazy train ride, a bus trailing it all the way, and the enormous crash onto the waiting ferry, things have reached the theatre of the absurd. Admittedly, Hitchcock intercuts models and real action and other special effects in a marvellous way; it’s just a pity it’s all for so little dramatic effect.