Chicago

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quoting The Times

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

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

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

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

Lapping up luxury

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

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

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

Winning and losing

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

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

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

Just a smidgen

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

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

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

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

Various holidays

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

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

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

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

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

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

The choice of coffee

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

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

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

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

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

Money In, Money Out

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

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

Ratatouille

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the eye of the beholder

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

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

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

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

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

Extend your range by an OCTAVE!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exclusive Malls

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

Jephtha by Handel

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

John Foulds' A World Requiem

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

Making money?

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

My office(s)

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

Australian music?

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

Music for Real Estate

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

Learning Spanish

My brother-in-law has been learning Spanish for some time. He’s been to Spain on several occasions and loves the country. In fact, he and his wife were away in Spain the same time we were there.

I came back from Spain having picked up only a minimal amount of Spanish (hola, mostly), but he’s actually learned quite a bit. He says he doesn’t pick it up quickly because he never learned much about his own language at school, and certainly it helps to have learned other languages if you want to learn a new one.

Amongst the many books he’s got on the subject of Spanish, he has one that takes an approach I think is excellent: it starts off with the words that are the same in both languages – on the page. Then it moves on through a series of lists to show the words that are similar, but have perhaps an E added in Spanish, or some other addition. By the time you’ve gone through several chapters like this, and learned a few additional words that don’t fit into this approach, you’re well on your way to feeling comfortable with the language.

Years ago I had a German course that took the same approach, but unfortunately I lent it to someone and haven’t seen it since. It wasn’t in book form, otherwise I might be able to pick up a secondhand copy. Rather it came to me as a photocopied typescript: I’d read about the author in a newspaper and he sent me a copy himself.

I met up with the person who’d borrowed it a couple of months ago, for the first time in thirty odd years. He says it’s in his garage, but when I was visiting him, his garage was in minor chaos because he was doing some redecorating. Hopefully he’ll find it and let me know, and I might catch up with it again – after all these years.

The Spanish book, by the way, for anyone who’s interested is Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, by Margarita Madrigal. It has drawings by one Andy Warhol, believe it or not, and was first published back in 1951. It’s still in print, however.

Dreams of being a stuntman

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good old anonymous stuntmen.