Downbeat Mamet

A few days ago I wrote about the possibility of listing the movies I watch. I'm not sure that my enthusiasm at that point has continued. I may just carry on writing up movies in my journal and on here, in the blog. At least then those that hit the spot in either a negative or positive fashion will get remembered a bit better.

I watched House of Games last night. It turned up on Maori TV, which was a bit odd, although they do have a reputation for showing offbeat movies - more often foreign than English. My feeling about House of Games, which dates back to 1987 and was written and directed by David Mamet, is that this is a movie best-forgotten. Roger Ebert, who can be relied upon in general to come up with good commonsense and taste in regard to movies praises it highly. In fact there are two reviews of it by him online. He revisited it in 1999, and saw it as one of the great movies.

Um. I have to say, Mr Ebert, that in this case I'm puzzled. It's a typical Mamet movie; amoral characters, lots of nifty dialogue and a storyline that has potential. However, Mamet's direction is very stagey, the actors are often placed is quite unrealistic poses, and the star of the piece, Lindsay Crouse, exhibits almost no expression from beginning to end. Well, not quite. She smiles once, in one of the last scenes, because she's got away with murder, literally, and now also has the idea that stealing from other people is some kind of triumph. She's supposed to be a psychiatrist, but doesn't appear to have much idea what that job is actually about. And apart from the last-minute smile, Crouse goes through the role as though she's dead behind the eyes. Perhaps this was intentional. Maybe Mamet asked her to be like that.

The men in the cast are all good, particularly Joe Mantegna, and play their confidence trickster roles with ease and subtlety. Which makes it all the more odd that Crouse is so deadpan. If the story is meant to be about a woman who's really venal underneath but has been hiding it, then it makes little sense in terms of the role she plays early in the piece. If she thinks that being a confidence trickster is an acceptable job, even though she's reminded on a number of occasions that it's a criminal's job, she pays not attention. In the end you don't have much idea what goes on in her head. With the result that the scene where she murders the main male character makes little sense. Yes, she's been conned by him, but she knew who these guys were, and allowed herself to be taken in. She's no dupe, after all, and stands up to people without difficulty, most of the time, including a young patient threatening to kill himself with a gun, in her office.

Mamet seems to delight in unpleasant characters, ones we find it hard to sympathise with. (I had to switch off Glengarry Glen Ross because the Alec Baldwin character was so foul-mouthed and bullying, and because the world the salesmen inhabited was so utterly bleak.) It's as if his view of the world is focused so much on the dark side of things that he can't see the light. Incidentally, in spite of the black and white, film noir look of the poster, the film is in colour, though many scenes take place at night, with gloomy interiors. Crouse wears some of the most awful 80s costumes I've seen in a while, and her hairstyle is more masculine, somehow, than feminine. Maybe this also was intentional.

Google side alleys and back corners

Years ago I wrote a piece about the way in which many people spell the word crawl (as in a baby learning to crawl) as crowl, which of course is my surname - it was while I was searching Google that I discovered this fairly common error. For a long time  I couldn't find that article, then it turned up on my Evernote files, and I transferred a tidier copy of it to this blog. 

My search that resulted in discovering the connections between crowl and crawl started because I was looking up my own name on Google. Self-indulgent, you might say, but I'm the sort of person who quite often sits down to check what's turns up on Google when I put my name in. I also like to check out the results when I look up my books. I'm sure there are other things to do in life, but sometimes this turns up some interesting stuff, the sorts of things you'd never otherwise discover.

For instance, I put the words Disenchanted Wizard in the search box today, because that's the name of my latest book, and I wanted to see where it was appearing on the Net. One of the things I discovered is that Kobo has a list of books with the word disenchanted in their titles, and my book is among them. Thanks, Kobo! (I've only just noticed that another book, Reviving Old Scratch, which I read last year, and which I lent to a friend just yesterday, is also on this list, because its subtitle is Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted.)

I also discovered that a writer named Keith Timson, who, coincidentally was born in the same year as me - 1945 - had written a short story called The Disenchanted Wizard that appeared in a magazine called Dark Horizons, in 1991. Nice that he chose to give my book some advertising over 25 years before it was written!

And of course I found that The Disenchanted Wizard turns up on some rather suspect sites, where they're trying to give my book away for free when they don't have any right to do so. When I clocked on on of those sites, the response was 'refusing to answer Google's inquiry.'  LOL

There's also a list of all my books on a site called Medical Books. Okay. Not sure of the connection there, although admittedly the non-fiction title, Diary of a Prostate Wimp, is somewhat medical. Each of the books, which all appear twice in this list, have blio beside them. Presumably blio.com is one of the distributors of the books. But that still doesn't explain the Medical Books aspect of things. Still it's nice to be turning up in all sorts of places!

One of Kobo's Asian sites is advertising TDW. Wow! I'm world famous!!

But perhaps the oddest search result came up as 'PDF Read [Southern Book] - Diary of a Prostate Wimp - Kitchens R Us. When I clicked on the link it said that the page wasn't found but it brought up the Kitchens R Us page anyway, on which there is nothing about either Prostate Wimp or Disenchanted Wizard, rather to my disappointment. I'd love to know how the two were connected, and why my latest book brought them together.

Obsessed by lists?

Long before I started posting on Goodreads I was keeping track of the books I read each year. Unfortunately the earlier lists are a bit thin on some information, but gradually I improved this so that at least I can go back and check out both the title and the author. With the advent of my increasing immersement in the Goodreads world, things improved even further and I now have reviews of all the books I read these days, as well as notes about some of those I read further back. (Isn't 'read' a confusing word on the printed page? It's easy to misunderstand last sentence in print, though if it was spoken it would be perfectly sensible.)

It takes a bit of doing at times, but overall it's useful to me.

On another tack, I've been thinking for the last few weeks that it would be good to keep a better track of the movies and TV series I've watched. It's very easy to forget them - and maybe that doesn't matter - but every so often you think: I wish I could remember what that movie was that made such an impression on me. Thankfully, most of them can be found with a bit of effort on IMDB; occasionally some can't.

IMDB is a wonderful resource. I can remember when it was in its early stages, and a lot of information was missing about individual movies, and a lot of movies were missing completely. Now, of course, as anyone who uses it knows, practically everything ever filmed seems to be on there. Which is an extraordinary achievement. There must be an army of data inputters working on the thing day and night.

If I was to set up a record of the movies and series I've watched, at the end of the year I'd remember that I'd seen Broadchurch mark 3, and I could make a note that I found it more dour than the other two series (I think), that there seemed to be a great deal of emphasis on pornography, and that some of the scenes were brilliantly written, including the one where Miller and Beth Latimer chuckle about the naughty things they used to say as kids, or Beth's impassioned speech to the Vicar in regard to husband having nearly committed suicide. The acting was brilliant throughout, especially Julie Hesmondhalgh as the initial rape victim, an ambiguous character who received a great deal of sympathy, but also had some odd goings-on in her life.

I'd remember that we'd begun to watch 13 Reasons Why, and decided it wasn't for us. And then an Icelandic series called Case which again had an emphasis of pornography that we felt we couldn't cope with any more of it.

I'd quickly be able to find the name of another series we watched in which a young girl was murdered at the beginning and then proved still to be very visible and very real to half a dozen people she knew. It was a series from Belgium. It was Hotel Beau Sejour - thanks, Google. This was a marvellously engrossing series which, even though it didn't explain how the premise could have come about, kept us on tenterhooks for a number of episodes. As did Fauda (Chaos), an Israeli series we watched and which was intense. I did write about this one.

Most of these have been watched on Netflix, which - in New Zealand at least - is a mixed bag: some very good shows, a few very good films, and lots of stuff that is trying to get a second life by being included in the Netflix catalogue. When Netflix first arrived here a year or two ago, you could watch anything from the US catalogue, which was vast. Then, for some reason, Netflix NZ was whittled down to some top quality shows and films and a lot of debris. Sometimes it's hard to decide which is which, though it has to be admitted there are some very good TV series being produced these days, almost none of which (Broadchurch is an exception) appear here on free to air TV.

But you can see how easy it is to forget what you've seen, how many hours you've spent watching True Story, and the other I don't feel at home in this world anymore. The first starred James Franco and Jonah Hill, and was a curious piece based on a (yup!) true story about a man who'd murdered his wife and children and then tried to claim he hadn't. And a reporter who seemed to get sucked in by the murderer's supposed protestations of innocence.
gripping stories. And how easy it is to forget titles, such as the two we watched over the last few days, both movies. One was

The second starred New Zealander Melanie Lynskey, and someone with a considerable connection to NZ, Elijah Wood - although he was so well-disguised, somehow, that it wasn't until near the end that I realised who he was. This was a very quirky, sometimes funny, movie, that became increasingly violent as it went on. There was blood everywhere. Not sure that it was all necessary. But it held together, even though it was quite slow in places, and the ending was satisfying.

So. Plainly I need to make a list, and quickly. Otherwise all these movies are going to drift out of the consciousness. Does anyone besides me care? Maybe...

Nate Wilson

I've only just started reading Nate Wilson's fantasy novels for children (he also writes books for adults), so it was sad to hear - via a tweet from his father, Douglas Wilson (an even more prolific writer of all manner of things) - that, as this page describes it:  'Nate is preparing to undergo extensive brain surgery to remove a “farm egg” sized tumor near his brain stem.'  

Nate and his family, and his father's family, are all Christians, so the perspective on this relatively sudden sideswipe to his life is being handled in a manner that might be different to those without a faith. I say 'might' because no doubt there are people without faith who can face such a trial with humour, bravery, integrity and the like. As Nate seems to be doing. 

Still, if I was in his shoes, even though I'm a Christian too, I'd be struggling with this situation. I don't regard myself as a brave person, and anyone who's read my book Diary of a Prostate Wimp will know that I found even that relatively minor interruption to my otherwise healthy life quite a challenge. (This wasn't intended to be a opportunity to mention my book, by the way. It just came to mind...!)

So those of you out there who are praying people, pray for this fellow-writer, that the operation required will be successful and he will come through it safely. 

Hemmed in by geography

I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment called Prisoners of Geography: ten maps that tell you everything you need to know about global politics, by Tim Marshall. I think the subtitle is slightly overstated. 'Everything' isn't true, because some countries aren't included: Australia gets three brief mentions, and New Zealand one. Plainly our politics aren't global enough.

But what the book does tell you is fascinating. It brings a whole new light to so much world news, and some breadth to just who holds power in the world. And who doesn't.

For instance, Russia, which is a vast nation in terms of real estate, is in reality only a relatively small country, because so much of the area it covers isn't much good for human beings to live in (as anyone sent to Siberia will tell you). The Russia we mostly think of is a smallish area to the West.

Furthermore, there are considerable problems with Russia's location: it's far more landlocked than it would like to be. And that's what Marshall is discussing: countries are bound far more strongly by where they're physically placed on the earth than by many other considerations. If there's no real access to waterways, then that can be extremely inhibiting. A number of countries are completely landlocked. If there are mountain ranges on your borders, then this may be helpful in terms of stopping invaders, but it's also a nuisance when it comes to trying to get over the mountains yourself.

And it helps to have good neighbours. Many countries don't, and spend a great deal of time fighting those next door.

Marshall also points out how the 'countries' we know in the world at present are, in some cases, relatively new on the world map. They didn't exist in this form a couple of hundred years ago. The British are to blame for some of these changes (along with the French and other empire-building nations). For example, the Brits, once they'd done with their Empires, tended to make hasty decisions about who would live where after the Brits themselves had gone. India and Pakistan's problems stem in part from this. Pakistan is one of the youngest 'nations' in the world, because basically it didn't exist less than a hundred years ago. Bangladesh is ever younger.

The Brits also drew lines across vast swathes of the Arab world, causing some of the problems we know today - though not all of them. The Arab tribes have been at war with each other for centuries, in one way or another. But a somewhat laissez-faire approach to map-making has had some huge consequences for those living in the region. You wouldn't expect maps to change the way nations see themselves; maps, after all, are only pieces of paper. (Unless of course they're magic, as the map in my latest children's fantasy is.)

Marshall manages to get to the nub of different countries' problems in succinct ways, and leaves you with a clearer understanding of what's going on around you. While his thesis is that geography itself is partly to blame for much of the world's infighting, he also shows how the movement of peoples around that geography can have beneficial or disastrous effects on other people, ones who were there first, as it were.

Marshall's point about geography, of course, affects us all even at a micro level. I live on a hill, which affects how I get to the city retail areas which are mostly on the flat. But it does mean I have great views of the Harbour and sea. I'm unlikely to be flooded, because water runs off our property easily, unlike some of my fellow citizens in areas that have been reclaimed.

New Zealanders, for the most part, live on two relatively equally-sized islands (imaginatively-named by our forebears as North and South). The gap between these two islands is a nuisance for travellers. Either we have to fly from the South to the North or vice versa, or we have to spend a considerable time going over the Cook Strait, a choppy bit of water that isn't always kind to travellers.

The North Island is warmer, as you'd expect, and has more population in its bigger cities. But in spite of what North Islanders think, the South isn't that cold: Scotland is much colder in the winter; many cities in the USA have snow for months at a time. We here in Dunedin, for instance, are lucky to get it once a year.

So geography and weather make a difference, as Napoleon found to his cost when he lost thousands of his French soldiers to the Russian weather - as Hitler also did with his German troops. For all our sense that we live in a world of vast choice, the reality is that we're hemmed in considerably by geography...

Marshall's book is fairly up to date, but the world keeps changing. He extends his book's range on his website The What and the Why.

Football on the rise for both sexes in NZ

The national game in New Zealand, as you probably know, is rugby. And it's a blokes' game. Or rather it used to be. In fact there are plenty of women throughout the country playing rugby just as fiercely and energetically as their male counterparts.

A couple of weeks ago I went to a Saturday morning game one of my grandsons was playing in. His position is hooker, that guy who dangles between two props in the scrum. And this fellow really does dangle because he's small for his age. Some of my friends won't believe this, but I actually played hooker myself way back when I actually played rugby. But unlike my grandson, who's in there boots and all, I wasn't cut out for the game. Half the time the players from the opposite team would wind up covered in blood when we went down in a scrum: my blood, because my nose would bleed at the drop of a hat. Even if my nose hadn't bled, I still preferred indoor sports, with the less physical contact the better.

It was interesting that the visiting team in this particular game had one girl player in it. And she was very good: she had speed, and she was excellent at kicking goals. She could have been easily hurt by some of the bigger boys in either team, but she seemed to manage to keep out of their way - or perhaps they avoided her, because I think even in boys of that age there's an inbuilt sense that girls won't take the impacts a boy might.

Courtesy NZ Football

I said at the beginning that rugby is our national game, but soccer, it appears, is rapidly catching up. And of course there are girls in soccer too, and plenty of them. (The National women's team is called the Football Ferns; the men's is the All Whites, in contrast to the internationally-known men's rugby team, the All Blacks.)

One of my other grandsons used to play in a team when he was younger that had girls as well as boys in it. Now that the boys are bigger I think the sexes are separated off into their own teams. But girls' teams are catching on fast. There was a photo in the sports pages of the newspaper a couple of days ago promoting girls' soccer, in fact.

Which was part of the reason that I decided that the main character in my latest children's fantasy, The Disenchanted Wizard, would be a girl who plays soccer - with a passion. And also idolises Xanadu Whitworth, the top player in the city. At the beginning of the story, Della, the soccer player, is putting up an enormous poster of Xanadu in her bedroom. Her younger cousin Harold thinks Xanadu's smile is probably photoshopped. Della scoffs at the idea, and it turns out, in due course, that she's right to scoff. But she's wrong about some of the other things Harold has to say...

Making your books more discoverable

I've been reading another article on marketing my books, something I do with enthusiasm about every two or three days, and this one basically suggests looking at your books and working out what niche markets different areas of the book(s) might appeal to. I haven't got my teeth into my earlier three books as yet, although I did do something similar with Diary of a Prostate Wimp, a couple of years ago, putting myself on various Facebook and Twitter pages in relation to prostate cancer and such. But to focus on my latest book, The Disenchanted Wizard, the first focus is that the main character is a girl who plays soccer. Okay...there a thousands of girls who play soccer, some in teams with boys, some in all girls teams. The secondary main character is a boy who's intensely nterested in maps. Off the top of my head I can't think of a marketing area that consists of boys who are interested in maps, but no doubt there is one. For instance, I just discovered a whole page of images on Pinterest that looks at ways you can decorate your boy's room with map themes. (Even if the marketing research doesn't open up the doors you're interested in, the things you turn up on the Net in the process are themselves interesting!) It seems to me that a problem with marketing children's books is that it's difficult to market directly to children. Even with print publications, the marketing is almost always via the parents, or the grandparents - or uncles, aunts and sundry cousins. But these adults aren't the first readers of children's books (although many adults, including me, do read children's books - I've just read two books by Nate Wilson, for instance.). It's the children we want to encourage to read the things, but it's finding ways to do that that's not so obvious. It's a whole different ballgame with adult books: it's adults who are online at all the obvious social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and Pinterest and so on. (Carmen Amato, the author of the article I mentioned at the beginning of this post, writes mysteries, for adults.) On the other hand, I always find it curious that TV ads for some children's products play at night, when the children they're aimed at are in bed. The ads in general are cringe-making, and yet there they are, in the middle of some program about some specifically adult interest. Are they actually aimed at the parents? I guess they must be, otherwise they wouldn't be on at such an hour. Yet if that's the case why are the ads so kiddiefied, with goo-goo kids all raving about some new product that looks for all the world like something no adult in their right mind would take to. (And the kids often seem to be too old for the product they're endorsing.) So maybe, to advertise to kids, you do have to advertise to their parents. (Yes, I know there are kids ads during kids programs as well - that's another issue.) The question becomes: How to get the parents' attention about something that doesn't focus on them? Some further thinking required...

High hats

I've quite often written about music and instruments in this blog, but it only struck me today that there's hardly any mention of music in any of the four books I've written. Odd, since I'm a musician as much as a writer. (And so, it turns out, was Robert Louis Stevenson: he wrote over a 100 pieces of music, as well as playing the piano and flageolet - a kind of recorder.)

Anyway, here I am writing about music yet again in this blog. 

High hats, (or hi-hats, or even hihats) are the common names for a couple of cymbals set in opposition to each other on a stand, with a pedal operated by the drummer's foot. Why they're called high hats I haven't been able to find out so far, but no doubt if I left the question open someone would be able to tell me. 

They haven't always been called high hats. Wikipedia explains: Initial versions of the hi-hat were called clangers, which were small cymbals mounted onto a bass drum rim and struck with an arm on the bass drum pedal. Then came shoes, which were two hinged boards with cymbals on the ends that were clashed together. Next was the low-sock, low-boy or low-hat, pedal-activated cymbals employing an ankle-high apparatus similar to a modern hi-hat stand. A standard size was 10", some with heavy bells up to 5" wide.

It doesn't look as though they were ever on the ground, in spite of their being called shoes or low-sock, low-boy, or low-hat. Plainly the drummer wanted to keep them at a reasonable eye-level. But these earlier names are as delightful as high hat (which is another name for a snobbish person, based, presumably on the idea of the snob wearing a top hat). My favourite is low-sock. There's something evocative about this: did drummers wear short, short socks at some point, as a part of their uniform? Perhaps not. Maybe their socks slid down with all the effort of using nearly every limb to play their varied instruments? Who knows. 

The interesting thing is the way the names rise up the scale, as it were, from shoes to low-sock to low-boy (the mind boggles) to low-hat to high-hat. As though these double cymbals were gradually going from being some lower-class symbol (ho, ho) to joining the upper cut. 

Whatever the source of the name you can find more than one high hat at guitarcenter.com.

Catching up on Classics

Just finished reading Treasure Island, for the first time ever. I knew the outline of the story, so I may have seen the Disney movie way back in the fifties (but don't really remember it) and I may have read a Classics Illustrated comic version of it when I was a child, but as for the book, I've never opened it before. The only reason I've read it now is that someone wrote about it in an article I read - an article I can't put my finger on again now - and it struck me that Treasure Island would do nicely as something to read, even more so as there was a free version of it on Kindle.

The book is surprisingly grim and violent. Deaths abound from beginning to end as the various pirates associated with the treasure are disposed of one by one by other pirates intent on being the last man standing, so it seems. It's much worse than one of those TV series in which a bunch of seemingly random people are killed off in order to make it more difficult for the detective to figure out whodunnit.

And even Jim Hawkins, the young hero (Stevenson isn't particular about his age, though he's often called a 'boy') kills at least one of the pirates. Hawkins tells most of the story, and this aspect of the book is very well done...until Stevenson, out of the blue, interrupts his narration with one by Doctor Livesey. Naughty Stevenson, I can hear all those contemporary writing gurus saying. It does come as a bit of a shock, and only lasts for a few chapters before Hawkins takes up the tale again. Was it necessary? I suppose so, since Livesey gives us information Jim can't possibly know.

Stevenson's writing is superbly stylish. There's a great deal of atmosphere, the discussions of ships' tackle is convincing, and the Island is vividly drawn. The characters are nicely delineated, especially the more well-to-do ones such as Squire Trelawney and the Doctor, and Captain Smollett. Long John Silver is of course a character who's larger than the book, almost, and some of the other pirates have their peculiarities both of mannerism and speech.

And the names are great: apart from those mentioned above, the names stick in the mind. In fact, as each one appeared, I thought, Yes, I remember this one. Remember it from what? Classics Illustrated? Blind Pew and Israel Hands and Ben Gun and the like.

Well, this year so far I've managed to catch up on The Three Musketeers as well as Treasure Island. I'm onto Peter Pan next, another one I've never read. Must be a year for classics...not necessarily illustrated.

Slow writers

A longer review of The Disenchanted Wizard - from Lorraine Orman - is now on KidsBooksNZ. She finishes the review by noting: Non-stop action and a strong focus on the child protagonists are combined to create a satisfying fantasy for readers (probably girls) of about 9 to 12. I was pleased to tell her that I know of two very enthusiastic boys who've also read the book, so we can take 'probably girls' with a grain of salt. It didn't seem to bother either of the boys that the main protagonist is a girl; anyway there are plenty of males in the book as well!

I've begun writing a fourth book, but it's in the extremely early stages so far, finding its way with some difficulty. And if the last book is anything to go by, what I've written so far is just as likely to be ditched by the time the book reaches its final form. 

I was pleased to read a long blog post by Anne Allen today called Slow Writers: Are they Doomed to Failure in the Digital Age? Having taken some two years to complete The Disenchanted Wizard, which by any standards is a relatively short book, I think I would call myself a slow writer. And yet two other books that appeared in 2014: Diary of a Prostate Wimp and The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret were each written in a few months. So maybe it depends on the book as to whether slowness is an element or not. 

Still, a book of 30,000 words should, you'd think, take a good deal less time than some of the books running to 600 pages or more that I've been asked to review in the last two or three years. But when a book requires constant rewriting and revision and rethinking, then any book of any length will take time. And a dose of procrastination doesn't go amiss either, when it comes to dragging out the time involved. 

I'm currently reading through an old journal I kept. At the moment I'm in the section written during 1990, when I was really finding my feet as a writer. Again and again I write of the struggles of trying to write with so many other calls on my time (I was working full-time and had five children), but also dealing with procrastination and with the difficulties of revising. So nothing much has changed it seems!



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Typos and puns and fans

Over the last week or so I've been reading a kids' fantasy, The Midnight Glass, by D T Vaughn. It has a great climax, and a couple of neat surprises towards the end. Other people might have seen what was coming, but I didn't, so they were very pleasing when they arrived.

Unfortunately there are some typos and missing words in the book. It seems as if other people who've read it weren't perturbed by this, but having a kind of proofreader's eye, those sorts of things stick out like a sore thumb. They don't take away from the story, but just catch you up as you're reading along.

The irony is that my wife said to me last night while reading my book, The Disenchanted Wizard: 'there's a word missing here.' It was an of, but she picked it up, in spite of the fact that I've been through the book with a (plainly not effective enough) fine tooth comb, and so has my co-author. And to cap it all, my son informed me today that when his son enthusiastically read the book in the last couple of weeks he commented afterwards, 'There was an and missing at one point.' Oh, dear...

Anyway, on a more positive note, a friend of mine was here tonight and said she'd bought all three of the books in the series, after at first having had some trouble finding the most recent one on iTunes. Whatever the problem was, she'd obviously overcome it, and her son - a voracious reader - had already finished Grimhilda! and loved it, especially the humour; was into The Mumbersons, and keenly anticipating reading The Disenchanted Wizard. He even pointed out to his mother how 'clever' the title of this last one was...did she get it, did she see how it was a play on words, etc?  I think he's my greatest fan....!

He's talking about using the three titles for a book report for school, which has to be about a New Zealand author. Wow, I'm really into the big time now...!

But something else he said really made me laugh. Those who know the book, Grimhilda!, will know what a sticky end that lady comes to. This young fellow's comment to his mother was 'She should have been taken into custardy.' If you don't get that, my advice is to go and buy a copy and read it. You'll see how delightfully in tune with the book his comment was.

Music in my books...Not

I was just thinking how curious it is that there's hardly any mention of music in my four published books: the two most recent ones: The Disenchanted Wizard and The Blood Secret don't even mention the subject; there's one brief mention of it in Grimhilda!, and three passing ones in Diary of a Prostate Wimp. This is surprising to me, now, because music is as much a part of my life as writing. I've played piano for more than sixty years, and been involved in a lot of amateur shows as well as accompanying soloists in competitions and concerts. I was even a professional musician for a couple of years.

The old journal from the 90s that I'm typing onto the computer, however, has lots of references to the music work I was doing at the time, sometimes quite long sections, as when I was describing a trip to Wellington with the St Kilda Brass Band, where I not only accompanied some of the soloists in the solo competitions, but also played a percussion instrument in the full band's competitions.

Plainly, in the next book I write - if there is one - I'll have to be include music a good deal more, to make up for the lack of it elsewhere in my writing.

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

I'm more of a old-school pianist, and play classics and popular music from the earlier part of the 20th century in preference to more recent stuff. (So I don't have much interest in bass guitars at musiciansfriend.com.) But one of the teachers I play for about once a month has introduced me to more recent popular music, from shows I'd never heard of until I came to play a piece from them (such as Matilda). My education is sadly lacking in knowing what shows are current on the big stages these days, or what movies appeal to kids so much that they have to sing the songs from them. (Moana and Frozen, for example.)

Anyway, it's good to learn new things, and to contend with the trickier rhythms in these 21st century songs. Talking of new things, I'm working hard to learn how to play the vocal score of a new opera that's going to be performed here in Dunedin, in July. It's called War Hero, with music composed by John Drummond, who's written a number of short and full-length operas, several of which have been performed here, and even had their premieres here. This will be the premiere of War Hero as well.

It has an all male cast, which is probably not surprising, since it's set in the First World War, and it deals with the well-known pacifist, Archibald Baxter, and the virtual torture he went through because of his beliefs. I think it'll be a powerful piece on stage. The music isn't too difficult, now that I'm getting the harmonic world into my head. But it doesn't take concentration!

2nd review of Disenchanted Wizard

In yesterday's post, I mentioned a riot in Castle St, in 1990. I should have also mentioned, being a writer, that I used this fact in a novel I wrote but never finished. In the novel the narrator and his son found themselves trapped in Dunedin's main street, with students smashing windows of shops and generally vandalising. The narrator and his son go into a nearby jeweller's shop. The jeweller locks the door behind them, afraid of the vandals. He lets them out the back door, where coincidentally they met the narrator's wife, from whom he was now separated, and who, for some reason I can no longer recall, didn't recognise them. I'll have to go back and see why!

That's what happens to novels when you aren't working on them. You forget the details. I've just had a review of The Disenchanted Wizard sent to me by a friend and in it she quotes a line from the book. I looked at it and thought, I don't remember writing that! But of course I had, though in the context of the book it's possibly a little less wise than it seems in the review!

Anyway, for those who don't want to go to the trouble of checking out the review on Amazon, here it is:
Here's a great quote from this book: "Libraries are always safe. Unless you read the books." And - having just read this exciting and action-packed fantasy - I can add, "And unless you end up trapped inside a magic map!" Della and her cousin Harold see strange things on the antique map, but when they show Della's father he turns white and rushes out of the house. Della and Harold follow him and become involved in a nightmarish plot to take over the minds of the city's residents. A succession of dangerous pursuits and escapes ends with an awesome finale at the local football stadium. A suspenseful read for fantasy fans aged about 9 to 12. 

The review was written by Lorraine Orman. She's the author of a number of books herself, mostly in the young adult range - some of which I read a number of years ago. I can't remember how we came to know each other, but we had quite a bit of contact at one point by mail and later email. We met up once, in Auckland, over on the North Shore, and we've loosely stayed in touch since then. She's a member of a writers' group on Facebook that I belong to as well. 

Bob Jones and a riot in Castle St

I'm currently putting onto computer the typed journal I wrote back in the early 90s. It's fascinating stuff, covering the complications of family relationships, the beginning of our journey with our current church, now called Dunedin City Baptist, discovering people who would become long-term friends; my successes and failures with writing - a number of small-scale articles getting published, and the work I was doing on a young adult's novel; and the highs and lows of running a Christian bookshop.

Every so often there's also a bit of news beyond these circles. For example, on the 16th April, 1990, I wrote:

The students are well and truly in the news today: a drunken riot in the Castle St area, with 1500 involved in some form or other; a garage collapsing under the weight of about twenty student spectators; furniture being dragged out into the street to be set alight; and further through the paper, we have Bob Jones in his column berating some engineering student in Auckland for writing [that] the study of the humanities was a waste of time because it was non-productive. Jones gives him a real going-over, saying that it's the humanity students who learn to think, compared to the engineering, legal, commerce and so on students who shouldn't even be at University at all, but in separate tertiary institutions, since they are only learning how to use facts. Quite an interesting piece of writing from his lordship, who usually manages to come up with some commonsense dressed as nonsense! Often what he has to say would be fine if he wasn't so bumptious with it. For once, his subject is allowed to speak and Mr Jones is kept in the background. 

A little explanation is required for those who don't live in Dunedin. Our University campus is relatively self-contained over several large blocks, and many students live within those blocks or on their borders. Castle St, over the last few decades, has become one of the more notorious areas for such events as I'm describing here. Couch-burning, which has always seemed to me to be a pretty clueless occupation given the toxic fumes many couches give off, is still done, though it's been

After the balcony collapse - courtesy of Radio NZ

frowned upon severely by police and Proctor alike. Riots are less common, I think, though not large gatherings of students. And in the last couple of years a balcony outside a flat collapsed (harming those underneath more than those on it) when too many students stood on it at once. 

But the other interesting thing about this is that the University itself is tightening up on the Humanities Departments by cutting back on staff, and reducing them in size. Naturally there's been a considerable outcry, but to little avail. Obviously whoever is in charge of such actions thinks along the lines of the Auckland student mentioned: the humanities don't 'contribute' therefore they should be demolished. 

Bob Jones seldom made friends because of his bumptious attitude to a great number of things, and people - in fact I'd already mentioned him in the journal because of this. But here, for once, he makes a solid point, at least as far as the humanities are concerned. These are the areas where people learn to think. That's not to say there are no thinkers in the other departments (the lawyers might be most offended at his statement) but in general these other departments take known facts and work with them, developing from there. The Humanities go beyond this, study what's been written before, what's been thought about before, learn how to think about these things, and then can apply their thinking to other situations. That's a very rough view of what they do. But their value, though not always obvious in profit and loss terms, is of value in looking at how society thinks and trying to get it to think clearly and honestly and wisely. 

Luthier

I'd never heard of the word, luthier, until I went looking for something about Greg Bennett and acoustic guitars. Apparently Greg Bennett is a luthier, which means he designs and makes stringed instruments - in his case, generally guitars. 

The word luthier is obviously related to the word lute, and lutanist and so on, but it has a kind of lisp sound about it, as though someone was trying to say the name Lucia. 

Okay, that was totally irrelevant, and I shouldn't make fun of anyone who has a lisp. However, the word lisp has a long history, going back before the year 1100 at least, and connects the Middle English words, whlispen or lispen, to the Old English word āwlyspian, and is like the Dutch word, lisp and the German word lispeln. There you go, didn't know you were going to get a lesson on the origin of words. 

You can find out more about Greg Bennett guitars here: 

http://www.guitarcenter.com/Greg-Bennett-Design-Samick/Acoustic-Guitars.gc

I assume the man in the picture is Greg Bennett, and not just some model smiling and holding a Greg Bennett guitar...

Typing up the past

Photo courtesy of Pixabay

Back in 1989 I began to keep a journal on my computer. It wasn't the first journal or diary I'd kept, by any means - another (handwritten) one was produced alongside it most days, but that was more focused on my spiritual life, and how it was going.

But this 1989 journal was different in the sense that not only was it being written on the computer, I was printing it out as I went. Which was just as well, as the computer I was using, an Amiga 500, didn't keep much information itself; you had to back-up everything onto disks. A tedious process, but essential; a story I wrote, and thought had potential, got lost when it wasn't backed-up. (In every other respect, the Amiga was great.)

The back-up disks survived long after the Amiga had been sold on when we got a new computer, but of course they were no good without the Amiga system. Fortunately, as I said, I'd printed the journal out, regularly, and by the time it came to an end (I went onto a different system on a computer that backed up stuff of its own accord) there were seven volumes of it, the first alone amounting to 120 pages printed out on an old dot-matrix printer, with about 700 words per page.

Feeling some concern at only having one printed copy of the journal, I spent some of my hard-earned cash one day and got the whole thing copied by a local printer I knew through my work. Now I had two copies, but what to do with the second one? Where to store it for safety? I considered a safebox of some sort, but didn't have the finances at that point to keep on paying for the storage. I asked our friendly family lawyer, but that didn't work out either; it wasn't the sort of thing they did. (At least not without payment.) In the end I gave the second copy to my son, so that at least both copies weren't in the same house.

Now, having recently finished the book I've been writing over the last couple of years - The Disenchanted Wizard - I decided it was time to do something I've been intending to do for some time: type up the printed copy of the journal onto my current computer, where it'll automatically be backed-up onto the Cloud. And that's what I've been doing for the last two or three weeks: I'm currently up to page 70 of the first volume, making pretty good progress, and discovering all sorts of stories and events within the family that I'd forgotten about.

There's a lot about writing in there, too. In 1988 I began a writing course by correspondence, and when the journal opened I was coming towards the end of the course and making some progress with the writing: getting articles published, a short story read on the radio, and another short story for kids printed by the School Journal. 

I had a thought a couple of nights ago that I could use the writing sections of the journal in another book, and started some preparatory work towards that. Time will tell whether that eventuates. After all, who needs another book on writing?

50 Books All Kids Probably Won't Read Before 12.

There's no doubt, that without lists, many magazines and even newspapers would struggle to keep their readers interested. Yes, people read the news, and articles, but put the 'Ten Best' or '50 something you should do before you something else' at the top of a piece, and it will almost guarantee that it'll get read.
But I have a feeling that what turns up on these lists makes the items self-perpetuating. Let me give you an example of what I mean. I've just come across a list 50 Books All Kids Should Read Before They're Twelve. To begin with, there are some 'magic' words in this title: 'all,' 'should,' 'before'. All relatively innocuous words, common words. But look at the effect they have here. Our attention is immediately grabbed by them. If all kids need to do this, then my kids need to do it. And they need to do it before they're twelve! Wow!
But look at the list. You'll find a great many of the titles on other lists of children's books. Not only are these books already well-known, but every time they get on a list like this they become more well-known. We have to remember this is one person's opinion, and they probably put the list together one day off the top of their head.
Remembering that this is a list for children not yet aged twelve, so look at some of the titles. The Hobbit sits next to Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing (by the wonderful Judy Blume). I am Matala and Revolution is Not a Dinner Party are only a few books apart. Both pretty earnest sounding titles, and seemingly there to broaden the child's social consciousness. I don't think I even had one of these until I was in my mid-twenties.
The Diary of Anne Frank is also there, a book that I'd think was a bit too adult in many ways for even a 12-year-old - unless it's an abridged version. And then The Fellowship of the Ring. Man, I've read this twice, and the second time I found it harder going than the first. This title is followed by The Hunger Games. Crikey, that's a very strange book, with its strong focus on killing innocent people, and its concerns seem a bit beyond even mature 12-year-olds. At the end of the list, To Kill a Mockingbird, which, while it's a great story, is also very longwinded. It certainly has children as the central characters, but it's not truly a kids' book, even though thousands of American schoolchildren have found it on their reading lists.
I've just had a look at another list, 50 New Zealand Books Every Kid Should Read by Age 12. This is quite a mixed bag, and even though I've grown up in NZ, and so have my children, many of these books are unfamiliar to me. The compilers don't claim any authority on this list, which is good, and as it should be. At the end of the day, children are all different and their reading levels will vary enormously, as will their emotional experiences in terms of reading particular books.
I think, personally, that we should follow the Alan Jacobs' approach and read on whim. That's certainly what I did as a child, and continue to do as a nearly-seventy-two-year-old. Claiming that there's any definitive list is probably more of a media approach than a real one.

By the way, you can find some discussion - from a NZ online newspaper - on the first list I've mentioned above, including some reservations about some of the choices.

And a second BTW: I don't see any of my books on these lists. That surely must be an oversight...

First review of The Disenchanted Wizard

Beatrice Hale has sent me a review of my most recent ebook, The Disenchanted Wizard. She's really enthusiastic about it. This is an abridged version of the review. 

This is a beauty of a story! It’s a hugely intriguing adventure story of discovery where people are ‘folded’ and put in The Map, and have all sorts of adventures trying to get out of the map. It’s a story of the goodies and the baddies, and of course the goodies win, eventually.

What did I like? The fantasy, obviously, of The Map and the wizardry which came with it. The pace was lively, dialogue was great, characters good and clear, and what got me most was the detail in the descriptions of the events:  the Antiquarian Bookshop, the ‘folding’ experience, the books coming off the shelves, the wolves scrabbling and howling, scrambling and scrabbling up the chimney with ‘shapes’ hurtling round, the wolf biting into a box, and the final chapters of the soccer match with the pin-up hero Xanadu Whitworth (what a name!) being revealed as a good wizard and on the right side, as pin-ups ought to be.

Favourite bits?  I loved the words: ‘Vertical and horizontal dimensions/to both of these you pay attention.’ Fun! And think of ‘Fold In, Spiral Out’ -  a picturesque view of movement.

The story for me was on different levels. Beneath the fantasy origami stuff of being folded up into small paper shapes and ‘put into the map,’ imprisonment, baddies and goodies, is a story of children learning to think their way through a situation, to look for solutions, to try things out, and to keep on trying.

Just suspend your reality, move into the next world – and ENJOY!

The book is on sale at various ebook outlets. Here are some of them: 

KINDLE:  http://tinyurl.com/jnrt9cx 

SMASHWORDS: http://tinyurl.com/zbl8n9t  

ITUNES: http://tinyurl.com/zx4gmfc 

KOBO: http://tinyurl.com/hazqcy3

B&N: http://tinyurl.com/jd4h7wr

Fauda

We've been watching a series called Fauda (Chaos) on Netflix over the last week or so. Very intense and often extremely suspenseful.
It concerns the ongoing war between the Israelis and the Palestinians. In this case the focus is mostly on a crack group of soldiers set up to infiltrate the Palestinians and undermine their terrorist attacks. All the soldiers in this group speak Arabic like natives and can pass for Arabs. Their main target is a terrorist who was supposed to be dead - in fact the main character of the series had understood that he'd killed him a couple of years before. But the terrorist is alive and well, and is almost killed (again) early in the piece, only just escaping once again. In the process, however, a wedding is disrupted (the terrorist's younger brother is the groom) by the soldiers (in disguise as the waiters providing the sweetmeats) and tragedy occurs. From then on it's a question of who will win: the soldiers, who want to rid the country of the terrorist, or the terrorist, who is planning a massive attack on the Israelis.
Because the series is made by Israelis, we're rooting for them even though they don't necessarily come across as full of integrity at every point. They're not out for revenge, they just want to keep their country free of a terrorist who they thought they'd already finished off. The Palestinian side is well-presented even though it's hard to empathise fully with them because their cause isn't just revenge, it's outright slaughter. But they come across as human beings, caught up in a seemingly timeless war between two peoples, in which they are basically carrying on a fight that has gone on for centuries in one form or another.
There are a host of characters, several of whom don't survive the crossfires for various reasons. There are some wonderful big set-pieces, and scenes of considerable anguish (from both parties to the war). The Palestinians (many of them played by Israelis - though the terrorist himself is actually a Palestinian actor) tend to present a kind of thinking that is so imbued with hatred that it's hard to empathise fully with them. On the other hand, the behaviour of the Israelis isn't always the best, and there is some laxity in the sexual department between some of the main characters. This didn't seem necessary to the plot, for me, but since a second series is being made, perhaps these elements affect what is yet to come.

Third book in my fantasy series for children

The Disenchanted Wizard - number three in the Grimhilderness series - is now available in ebook format. You can order it from Kindle and a variety of other outlets online: see the list at the end of this post.

The Disenchanted Wizard has had a long, long gestation. Check out innumerable posts on my blog in which I go from joy to despair to frustration to tearing-out-hair, and so on. Some of the delay has been due to other work getting in the way; some of it to procrastination (though not much); some of it to disagreements about the book with my editor-cum-co-writer; some of it has been the fact that large chunks of it have been rewritten. And in some cases rewritten again. As my co-whatever-she-is has said regularly, You can do better.

I won't go again into the considerable changes that have occurred during the course of this book. Suffice to say that only the main characters survived the gruelling process: Della, the 12-year-old at the heart of the story, and her father, Archie; Harold, her younger and sometimes smarter cousin; the curious Mr Crinch - who spent much of the process being an ambivalent character, one we weren't quite sure about: was he was on Della's side or not? You'll have to read the book to find out.

And then there was the wizard himself, originally known only as the Dog (at one time, The Moorish Dog, in fact), but later more often known by his real name, Evan Hoyle. In the very early stages he was Grimhilda's rogue brother. That idea went west. The other character who managed to survive the purges was Xanadu Whitworth, a name that popped into my head before the first draft was written, and which appealed to me so much it stuck. His name sounded so much like that of a footballer's, to me, that that's what he became.*

Anyway, here's the synopsis as it appears online, just to give you an idea of the story:

Della's enthusiasm for soccer, and for the famous player, Xanadu Whitworth, is knocked sideways when her younger cousin, Harold, brings his latest map to show her. The map has strange drawings on it, and within minutes she and her cousin are shocked at what happens with one of them. Worse, when Della's father sees the map, he plainly recognises it from his past, and goes into a panic. Shortly afterwards he rushes out of the house to find someone who can help. But who is this person who can help, and what exactly can they do?

Before the evening is out, Della and Harold˗˗accompanied by the puzzling Mr Crinch˗˗will be thrust not only into a different world, but into a series of terrifying situations. They will have to face the wizard, Evan Hoyle, once known by the nickname, The Dog, and must stop him not only from attacking Xanadu's soccer team, but from taking over the city.

KINDLE:  http://tinyurl.com/jnrt9cx 

SMASHWORDS: http://tinyurl.com/zbl8n9t  

ITUNES: http://tinyurl.com/zx4gmfc 

KOBO: http://tinyurl.com/hazqcy3

B&N: http://tinyurl.com/jd4h7wr

*To see what might have happened to some of the characters who didn't make the cut, check out this the flash fiction story I wrote on the subject, back in 2015. You'll find it on this page: just search by my name, Crowl. 

Amp me up, baby

I've written about amps before, usually with tongue considerably in cheek. My relationship with amps has usually been through our church, where for a while the size of the amplifiers seemed to increase every few weeks. Which just made things louder rather than more subtle.

When we did the New Zealand opera, A Christmas Carol, about three months ago, the four keyboard players and the conductor, tore their combined hair out on a number of occasions during the later stage of the rehearsals in the theatre, because it seemed no one was actually in charge of sound (a surprising omission) and yet we had sound to deal with. Keyboards don't sound good without amplifiers, as you'll know.

Thankfully, our assistant stage manager used her wide-ranging brain to bring the amplifier that we did have in-house under control. Initially it seemed as if all the sound from the keyboards was blasting its way around the orchestral pit. But gradually we worked out how to get some control, some subtlety and the audience heard a great sound, and those on stage heard more than enough to be able to sing along with.

All of which to introduce Bugera Amps, a kind of amp I'm not familiar with, but which are apparently available in all shapes and sizes, to suit all sorts of musical ears. (And probably a few unmusical ones.) The little stay-at-home-put-my-grand-composition-on-the-computer type to the I'm-playing-the-biggest-gig-I've-ever-played-so-this-amp-better-do-the-job type. Good old Bugera!

Art movies

 I dipped into Pauline Kael's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang again recently, and came across the following quote in her review of Ingmar Bergman's film, Persona: 

It may be that an open puzzle movie like this one, which affects some people very profoundly, permits them to project into it so much of themselves that what they think the movie is about has very little to do with what happens on the screen. This kind of projection ˗ which we used to think of as the precritical responsiveness of the mass audience ˗ is now common in the educated audience. People can be heard saying that they ‘didn’t worry about whether it was good or bad,’ they ‘just let it happen to them.’ And if the educated audience is now coming around to the larger audience’s way of seeing movies, I would suggest that they are also being sold in the same way as the larger audience, that advertising and the appearance of critical consensus it gives to certain movies are what lead people to ‘let’ certain prestigious movies ‘happen to them,’ just as the larger audience lets an oversized musical spoof like Thoroughly Modern Millie happen to them. The idea is that ‘art’ should be experienced, not criticised. There seems to be little sense that critical faculties are involved in experience, and that if they are not involved, advertising determines what is accepted as art.

If what I understand Kael to be saying is correct, it means that much of what is claimed to be 'art' in movies, as in 'art house movies', is merely movies that are 'sold' that way. These movies can be obscure, strange, full of peculiar and unrelated incidents, sometimes badly filmed, and often have next to nothing in the way of a story. There was a great trend for these sorts of movies back in the sixties: Bergman brought the Swedish approach, Fellini and Antonioni the Italian one, and there were a bunch of awful French movies that made virtually no sense at all, such as those by Jean-Luc Godard. They were the 'new wave.' 

Some of these directors were masters of cinema-making, but not of story, and they brought oddball movies to the screen that were more about mood and emotion and possibility - or the lack of it. Great actors appeared in them, and sometimes must have wondered what on earth they were supposed to be acting. Certainly audiences must have often wondered what they were watching, but in the mood of the times it was considered trendy to make a great noise about these films often more because of who they were made by than for any other good reason. Viewing Bergman today, you can still get the impression of a great mind at work, though increasingly the films seem to be distant from us. Unlike many films that have endured, they lack the means to affect us emotionally. Watching Fellini's 'masterpiece', La Dolce Vita, we get to the point where we wonder if it's ever going to end, even though a lot of what goes on is very watchable. But there doesn't seem to be anything to really grasp in it, and this became increasingly the case with his movies. Antonioni's films always seemed to be saying something you couldn't hear. Godard's movies were strange radical things in their day, full of unexpected violence, yet even then they seemed to have no heart (Fellini at least had a heart), and Bergman's films can come across as cold (though in some of his earlier movies we can empathise with the characters more readily). 

Were these films great or were they sold to us as great? I think the moviemakers themselves were great artists, but they tackled things from a strange mental viewpoint. 

Simple names

Remember the days when a musical instrument had a single name (or at most two, like the spuriously-named, French Horn)? Yes, some of the names might be odd, like a Serpent or the Theremin, or the Aquaggaswack (yup - see the picture on the right), but they were easily remembered. (Well, maybe Aquaggaswack isn't easy to remember, or spell.)

But now we have instruments and add-ons to instruments that come with names like the Eventide h9 Harmonizer Guitar multi-effects pedal. Looking at that name I'm not even sure where to start in terms of deciding which is the most important element. Sure, 'Eventide' is obviously some kind of brand name, so - with all due respects to the makers - you could cut that out. The 'h9' is presumably some kind of class of pedal, and I guess that's kind of important. Relatively. What the 'Harmonizer' aspect is I'm not sure; I suppose it's the electronic part that makes sure everything else works together. Or not.

The 'Guitar' - well that's easy, except that most likely it's an electric guitar of some kind, so it's not quite as straightforward as the Aquaggaswack. 'Multi-effects' makes me quake. We have a young feller at church who uses a few 'effects' on his guitar. One of them sounds mostly like static. Not so pleasant when you're trying to sing over it, though I guess it has its place. Somewhere. Maybe on a rock band stage, in performance, when you can wear earplugs.

And finally 'pedal.' Well, we all know what that is: it's a word that covers a multitude of appliances, mostly worked with the foot. Three of them in some cars, two in others. One on grandma's sewing machine, two on a harmonium (and jolly hard work they are, too).

Which brings me back to my point. It's taken three paragraphs to explain a single instrument, or a single instrument's add-on. I guess we could just call it an 'h9' and be done with it, but it's not quite as interesting as a 'bikelophone' or a Didjibodhrán.

La La Land

Probably a few spoilers here, so don't read this if you haven't seen the movie.

I see La La Land has won a bunch of awards in the Golden Globes: Best Actor and Actress, Best Musical (not hard, since there are barely any others around), Best Director, Best Original Score (interesting category to win, I'd have thought), and finally, Best Screenplay. O...kay. Plainly La La Land pleased the people who nominate and vote for the Golden Globes, and it's pleased a lot of other people too, but...

It starts off brilliantly with a one take (or at least, so it seems) dance sequence set on the freeway, the drivers of cars marooned in a traffic jam taking part in a hugely exciting dance amongst the cars (and on top of them and over them). It’s so extraordinarily well choreographed and timed that you feel set up for a really good musical. Curiously it has very little to do with the rest of the story.

Not long after that a quartet of women who share the same flat, including the heroine, Mia, (Emma Stone), have an equally well filmed song and dance around their apartment, the camera following through the doors and openings without a hitch. And then there was also an exuberant party dance in which guys threw themselves into a swimming pool - filmed partly from under the water. 

But after that, and as soon as Ryan Gosling appears, things begin to get gloomy. Even though Gosling plays the piano superbly in the film, and actually dances pretty well and sort of manages to sing, he lacks the charisma that made the great movie song and dance men come alive on screen. The story requires him to be a fairly cheerless fellow, and Gosling is admirably suited for this. His dream hasn’t taken off and so he’s got a snitch at the world ˗ until he falls in love with Mia, who’s also got a dream of making it big-time as an actress. In spite of dance duo sequences and an incredibly beautiful vision of Los Angeles, the film gradually becomes more and more downbeat, until it turns out that the dreams each one has will destroy their relationship. Five years later, he’s got the jazz club he always wanted and she’s a big movie star, and has married someone else. And has a child. What? The hero and heroine don’t end up with each other ˗ in a musical? Nooe, not in this one. 

As if to fulfil our expectations in part, at the end, while Mia is watching Gosling (whose character's name barely gets mentioned enough during the film to be memorable) playing the little haunting tune in his club that is kind of a theme song (although in spite of all his fuss about jazz, it’s not a jazz piece), she imagines what would have happened if he’d done one thing differently on the night they met in the restaurant where he was hating playing the setlist of songs. 

As a kind of audience tease, in the trailer this imagined scene is the one we see, where instead of rudely pushing past her because he’s angry that he’s just been fired, he stops and kisses her. If the audience has seen the trailer, their expectation (as mine was) is to see him stop and kiss her when this first happens; instead we get the scene in which he ignores her. 

They have met a couple of times before this, if I remember rightly: once at the very end of the opening dance, when again he’s rude. And this is part of the problem: he’s not actually that likeable a character, even though he does set her on the road to stardom in the end. In doing so, of course, he loses her.

It’s a bit of an oddball story: starting with such high expectations of joy, and becoming more downbeat ever after. Once the romantic stuff starts, everything slows down, and the film seemed to me to be too long for its own good. Plainly I’m alone in this because all the reviews I’ve read think it’s fabulous from whoa to go, and have no criticisms, virtually.

I know that musicals haven’t always been upbeat with happy endings, on both stage and screen, but here the mood changes so considerably that it just doesn’t quite come off. It’s a bit like Carousal, where there’s such joy in the first half and such sorrow in the second. But there the thing is at least balanced better. And it ends in hope. 

There's no hope in La La Land. Once the characters have set themselves on the path they've chosen, their relationship falls by the wayside - in spite of them saying they'll never forget each other. 

Emma Stone is terrific throughout. In fact she holds the movie together. She gets to sing a few times, dances a few times, and has a soliloquy type piece near the end, which is another kind of dream sequence. She does this very well, for someone who plainly isn't a trained singer. Gosling shows that he's worked exceptionally hard to make it look as though he's a superb pianist. When he's playing jazz and such, in the movie, he comes across very well. Unfortunately there are two scenes where he's supposed to be hating what he's doing - it's beneath his talent. The boredom and sourness undercut the value of the scenes somehow, and it becomes a bit of a mystery as to why Mia would fall for the guy. He has a big chip on his shoulder (a scene in which his sister appears and berates him, early in the piece, reinforces this), and wants the world only on his terms. In the end, is he actually happy? He's got the club he always wanted, he's got great musos around him. Obviously it's still not enough. 

I'd had high expectations of the movie. And felt really enthusiastic about it while watching the first half hour. But gradually something goes awry. In spite of all its awards and accolades, I think it's not quite the movie people are seeing. Maybe it's more the movie people want to see, because musicals and movies are so much a part of each other. Let's hope the director/writer, Damien Chazelle, makes another musical, one that really does send you out of the theatre dancing (as someone claimed, rather improbably, that this one does!)

Detectives and their superiors

We watched the first episode (of two) in the new Maigret series last night. Suffice to say that Rowan Atkinson proved yet again that his long-standing relationship with Mr Bean, or Blackadder doesn't mean that he can't play someone completely different and in a totally different key. He was just wonderful.

But that's not what I wanted to write about. What I would love to see is a police thriller in which the main detective isn't constantly berated by his superior for not being quick enough in solving the crime, and/or spending too much of the department's money and therefore likely to find his funding cut off at a moment's notice - because up above the superior is another superior fussing about something similar.

Not only does it bring a cliche effect to each police thriller you see, it gets harder and harder for the actor blessed with the role of the superior to make anything fresh of it. I'm not sure who the well-known actor in Maigret was who was landed with this particular role; he chose to take the repressed, struggling, man-in-the-middle approach to the part, unlike another recent British series Paranoid in which the three main detectives are continually berated by an almost frenetic superior, played by Neil Stuke, who plainly felt that the lines he was given were so pointless and minimal that he'd go all out.

It would be interesting - if not so dramatic - to see an encouraging superior just once in a while, or one who didn't turn out to be more corrupt than the criminals, or one who didn't close down the investigation before it started, and so on.

Suppose, for a change, the detective in charge of the case worried about the resources and the funding and the fact that it was taking a long time to get a result - while the superior sat upstairs eating biscuits and drinking coffee and saying to the detective: Don't worry, old boy, it'll all come out in the wash. Just wait for the last episode!