Couple of movies

Over the weekend I watched a couple of movies, one from New Zealand and one from France. The NZ one was well done, and had some moments of fun, but overall took itself fairly seriously. The French one had no fun and took itself intensely seriously. It was called The Bridesmaid, (La demoiselle d'honneur). [Actually, La demoiselle d'honneur sounds more like our 'matron of honour, ' but apparently it applies to both, according to a French/English dictionary on the Net. ] It was directed by Claude Chabrol, who's been making a couple a movies a year for decades, and certainly knows how to do the stylish French thing. He was 74 when he made this movie.
It's adapted from a Ruth Rendell mystery, which was also called the The Bridesmaid, and which sounds to be pretty similar to the movie in plot. I came into it about half an hour late, though that didn't make a lot of difference. It concerns a youngish, very responsible young man, the oldest in a family of three children, who like his sisters, still lives at home with their mother (the father hasn't been on the scene for a long time). At his older sister's wedding he is spellbound by one of the bridesmaids, and within a very short time, she convinces him that they were destined for each other. And to prove their love, they should each do for things: write a poem, plant a tree, sleep with a member of their own sex, and kill someone. He thinks she's joking, but she's deadly serious - and a psychopath, something that audience is aware of a good deal earlier than the young man.
He eventually takes the opportunity to claim that he's killed someone they both know who just happens to have vanished conveniently. She takes him at his word and goes out and kills someone else they both know. But in neither case are things as they seem, and the ending has two or three twists.
It's a fairly absorbing movie, but it's so bloomin' intense! Were any two lovers ever quite so mad about each other? (Well, he is about her - we never quite know where we are with her about him.) There are echoes of an inverse Flying Dutchman - the girl is called Senta, though she's the one who seduces the young man, and their love is bound to end in death - of some sort.
I missed where the strange carved stone head of the woman came from (it resembles Senta and is in the story before she is), and it was a bit puzzling why the young man seemed as much in love with it as with the girl. Pays to see the whole movie, obviously.

The NZ movie was called Apron Strings. It has two stories running in parallel, though they only just coincide and no more. In one, a control freak of a mother, who owns a cake shop, is still controlling her 40-year-old son to such an extent that he can't get out and make a life of his own. Her daughter has long since flown the coop, but returns during the course of the story, pregnant, and not worried about keeping in touch with the UK father - who turns out to have been a very black man; their child is as black as the family is white.
The other story is about a gay half-Indian, NZ born youth called Michael, who comes across his aunt's Indian restaurant and manages to get himself a part-time job there. His father has long since vanished (as well) and he hasn't ever had contact with his Indian family because his mother, a celebrity cook on TV, had him out of wedlock, and spoilt the aunt's chances of marriage. The two women haven't talked since. This side of the story is the warmer, by far, and the one that's more conventionally done and receives a more conventional 'happy' ending.
The other story almost pulls together the shreds of the family - the daughter and her grandmother are easily reconciled, but it takes the mother a good deal more to overcome her inability to let things loose, and in the end her son winds up in jail, possibly for some time. A wreck of a man, without self-esteem or self-control, he's the victim to a great extent of his mother's fear that he'll go off and kill himself like his father did.
Absent fathers all over the show here.
The NZ film was enjoyable, though the ending seemed a bit truncated for my liking. It didn't go for the intense tone of the French movie, thank goodness, and had that likable quality that's so typical of a NZ film. Very good cast, and well put together.

Photos of Claude Chabrol, and Scott Wills (the weak man in Apron Strings).

Quirky places

There are some quirky places in the middle of Dunedin's CBD which I enjoy just visiting every so often. One of them is a house that most people wouldn't know was there. It's hidden behind the terrace houses in Stuart St. There are two ways to access it: via an alleyway beside the restaurant, A Cow Called Bertha, and the other through the basement of the old library. I wandered into the library this lunchtime, went down the stairs into the basement (where virtually the only public toilet in the library used to be in the old days), stopped and had a look at the great cloth artwork showing the history of the Adult Literacy Movement in Dunedin, (they now have rooms where one of my early ISPs used to be: earthlight.co.nz), and then went out into the courtyard that's in front of the house I was talking about above. It's quite an open area - when my son flatted in the house some years ago, he and I used to sit in the sun in the courtyard sometimes. It's a great suncatcher - when there is any sun! (Today's gloomy, but at least it's not windy like it has been for the last couple of days. The wind was utterly bitter, and suddenly blew itself out about morning tea time this morning.)
My son flatted at one point with a young fellow who was doing a medical degree, and on the side had set up his own ISP: hyper.net.nz. I was persuaded to join this ISP, which I was happy to do as Ihug in those days was having real problems with customer service. I went from almost no customer service to service on tap. I was running the shop in Princes St then, just along from the Octagon, and if I needed help I'd just ring up the young fellow (whose name I've now forgot) and he'd hop around and fix it in a couple of minutes.
The house itself is a very dark place: gets no sun at all in most of the rooms.

The other quirky spot is the old Masonic building in Moray Place where Temple Gallery is now situated. I always feel a bit odd going there. Whether it's the leftover stuff from the Masonic days or what I never know, but it has a bit of a creepy feeling to me.
You go up a steep flight of stone steps in a garden that in the summer is abundant, up a steep path and then have a choice of more path or more steps. The building stands above you as though it was going to topple over while you were climbing.
Inside, the stairs leading up to the main gallery are highly polished, and at least two of them are almost invisible to the naked eye: I've missed them both at different times, either going up or coming down. (The Public Art Gallery has one of these 'invisible' steps as well.)
The main gallery is a large room lit by skylights that don't let much of the outside light through. The paintings are usually lit by a series of soft spotlights, adding to the general air of gloom. Today there's a bunch of large paintings by a female artist whose name has also gone from my mind, though her style is familiar. They consist of ferocious feline-women, many in bridal gowns. There are teeth and claws in evidence everywhere, and in several of the paintings a large horse, sometimes intact, sometimes with his rib-cage showing through his skin. The women are sometimes skeletal as well. Can't say they're my favourite paintings, but they're well put together.

The photo of Temple Gallery comes from this site.
hyper.net.nz was taken over by Orcon at some stage in its existence - which is why Orcon is now my ISP.

An open letter to CT at the Movies

You note in the latest CT at the Movies:
"Christianity Today International has been slammed too. In the last few years, we've lost more than a few key magazines—Ignite Your Faith (formerly Campus Life), Today's Christian Woman, Christian Parenting Today, Marriage Partnership, Christian History, and Today's Christian. And we've lost a lot of good people to layoffs—including 25 percent of our company just a couple of weeks ago."

You say these were key magazines....but the magazine world is full of this kind of thing: niche upon niche until the magazine stands are overflowing with 'something for everyone' and nothing for all. It seems crazy to me, in these days of increasing use of the Internet, that magazine proprietors should be going all out to promote endless magazine reading when this isn't what a huge number of people are reading. Worse, the content between the advertising, even in 'Christian' magazines, is often trivial and banal, mere filler.

I remember an editor I worked with years ago saying that the text was only there to fill up the spaces between the ads, and I think many magazine owners still think this is what magazines are about. But as the internet proves again and again: content is king, not advertising. Content first, advertising a very distant second.

Yet what (to take one example) are newspaper publishers doing? Here in my (relatively small) city, we now have two free papers coming out each week. The content is almost nil in one, and while the other has upped its game, it's still half full of advertising disguised as reporting.

I understand your regret at losing so many colleagues, and I sympathise with you in this. Work relationships are often very precious. But magazines in my country, both national ones and imported ones, have become very expensive to buy week after week, and anyway most of the content turns up on the websites not long after. And while I prefer to read from print, my pocket just doesn't allow me to. And here's the good news: on the Net I don't have to turn over page after page of advertising just to read something worthwhile.

This is a time of huge change in the publishing industry. Print is by no means dead - and I don't think is likely to become dead - but we're all having to get used to a different way of reading stuff that has a degree of the ephemeral about it: newspapers, magazines, bulletins, pamphlets.

Just a few thoughts on a rainy Saturday morning.

Culture

Culture, in the abstract, always and only comes from particular human acts of cultivation and creativity. We don't make Culture, we make omelets. We tell stories. We build hospitals. We pass laws. These specific products of cultivating and creating ... are what eventually, over time, become part of the framework of the world for future generations.

Andy Crouch
Culture Making

Easy Virtue - the play

Last night I mentioned going to see Easy Virtue, the movie. I thought it would be interesting to see what the original play was like, so got it out of the library today. Crikey. The first and most interesting thing is that the movie is far better than the play. The departures from the original are so considerable that only things that are similar to Coward's play are the following:

• A butler called Furber, who is a real person in the movie; in the play he has no existence except buttling.
• A strikingly good-looking woman who's married the heir in a very uptight family. However she isn't American in the play - and she's some years older than John; they go on about it all the time.
• An extremely repressed mother, who doesn't, however, have any concerns about the family property, though she's so uptight about life in general from the moment the curtain rises that she would act as an appetite suppressant to anyone silly enough to try and eat in front of her (actually, that's not dissimilar to the movie!).
• A father who's remote, but who likes his new daughter-in-law. He's not only remote in the play, he's utterly boring, and would probably have been played by an aging matinee idol who had relied in the past on his charms rather than his acting skills to sway the public.
  
• Two daughters, one serious and one scatty. Except in the play the serious one is a bit of a religious nut, and the scatty one is exceptionally catty with it.
  
• John, who's naive and callow. At least in the film he also has some charm.
  
• The neighbouring girl who would have married John if the outsider hadn't come in. She's much the same as in the film: wiser and warmer than the cold-hearted family.
  

The story is roughly similar: callow youth brings home gorgeous, slightly older woman, to the horror of the family. Woman has something in her past, and at the end has to leave for the sake of her sanity, even though she actually does love the boy.

But there the similarities end. Notice that I didn't say anything about the humour in the play; in fact, there's almost none. The funniest lines come in the author's introductions to his characters; their speech is seldom more than a little amusing - there's no laugh-out-loud humour here. Mrs Whittaker (the Kristin Scott Thomas character) is described thus: The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn't so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realises she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.

And what actress would be excited by this description of Marion, the older sister?: She is largely made and pasty, with big lymphatic eyes. Hilda, the younger sister, 'possesses all the vivacity of a deficient sense of humour.'

Which means that most of the humour and wit and nifty one-liners in the film are the film's scriptwriters, not Coward's. In fact, there's almost nothing of Coward in the movie, as far as lines go, at all. Furthermore, Coward doesn't provide us with the hay fever, the Picasso painting, the vicious chihuahua who gets squashed to death by being sat on, the motorcycle amidst the Hunt, the tango at the end with the father (nor the running away with him), the butler who's a bigamist, the can-can at the local cultural evening, the boyfriend with the broken leg, the other girl's wealthy father who's not only buying up the land but also has his eye (goodness knows why) on Mrs Whittaker senior. And the father has never been to war, been sullied by it, nor wandered about France living in brothels.

In other words, most unusually, the film is infinitely superior in almost every way. It would take a cast of considerable skill to make anything of the play as it stands; the movie even manages to remove the sense of datedness.

On top of this, Coward asks the impossible of the average modern producer: he asks for nine characters for the first two acts (plus adding in, during the second act, a young man of no importance who will appear unimportantly in the third, and an elderly bloke who appears for about a minute and is never seen again) and then in the third brings on another eight characters, plus several unnamed extras. These people have come to the ball that's taking place in the next room, and wander in and out randomly during the scene making inane remarks, or, to a degree, building up a bit of tension when the heroine doesn't appear on cue. So that's some dozen actors who do nothing for two acts and then do very little in the third.

I thought When We Are Married was a bit oddly constructed in terms of its usage of some actors: Dyson the reporter appears in the first and second acts for about three minutes apiece and then disappears; Rev Mercer comes on late in the second act for two minutes, is hussled off and then gets another couple of minutes towards the end of the last act; Lottie turns up very late in the second act but at least gets some stage room; the niece gets five minutes early in the first act, another half minute a bit later on, and then a couple more minutes at the beginning of the third act. She's totally forgotten otherwise. Even the young man who sets everything in motion in the first act, where he's a major player, is dumped almost completely after that (he gets a couple of minutes at the beginning of the third act too). My character, Ormonroyd, appears with Dyson early in the first act, and then vanishes for well over an hour before he becomes a major character later in the piece. I suppose in the thirties actors were a lot cheaper, and they could be tossed on and off like this without consideration!

Of course, with the Coward, it makes a big difference, after two acts of constant talk (and very little action - another difference between the play and the film) to have lots of people bobbing in and out, and women and men in pretty dresses and evening wear. It gives the last act some additional lift (and it certainly needs it).

Well, there you go. A relatively straight play turned into a successful comic movie: wonders will never cease.

A little wordplay

Can't resist passing these on. They come from an ezine I get each week called Rumors (that's Rumours to those of us in the world who spell properly), and were supplied to the ezine by someone called John Severson. It may help to know that in the Anglican church, a narthex is the entrance or lobby area, located at the end of the nave, at the far end from the church's main altar. I'd never heard of the word until I went to England with my wife a couple of years ago, and kept coming across Narthexes in the larger Anglican churches we visited.

* Hymnastics: The entertaining body language of your song leader.
* Narthexegesis: Post-sermon commentary by the laity in the lobby after church.
* Pewtrify: To occupy a precise spot in the sanctuary seating for more than 15 years without once showing signs of sentient life.
* Hymnprovisation: The abrupt and unannounced transition from one song to another. It also describes what happens when the words projected on the screens are not singable to the melody the pianist is playing.
* Proliferation: A growing number of anti-abortion activists.

Ralph Milton, who writes Rumors, says it's a free Internet ‘e-zine’ for Christians with a sense of humor."
To Subscribe to it:
* Send an e-mail to: rumors-subscribe@joinhands.com
* Don't put anything else in that e-mail

Easy Virtue

This makes the 1100th post on this blog. Doesn't seem that long since I was looking at a 1000.

Anyway, went to see Easy Virtue tonight, after having had it recommended by one of my work colleagues today. I don't know enough about Noel Coward's original play to work out what belongs to the original script and what doesn't, but certainly there are some wonderful lines. (I'm getting a copy out of the library to have a look.)

The cast are uniformly superb, and Jessica Biel, (someone I don't remember seeing before), is a match for all of them as the Outsider in the family. Colin Frith plays someone who is pretty much dead in his soul, which suits him well, as that seems to be the role he likes to play most of the time, and Kristin Scott Thomas as Biel's mother-in-law pours absolute venom with every line and look. Each and every smaller part is filled with a top-notch character actor, though perhaps Kris Marshall, as Furber the butler steals any thunder that's left over.

Fabulous stately homes play an important part, and the countryside looks terrific, thanks to Martin Kenzie. And then there's the 20s music, flitting in and out of the character's mouths and onto the soundtrack seamlessly.

What more to say about it? The story leaves all sorts of corners open at the end, even though the finale is satisfactory, and you have to wonder what a sequel might possibly bring. Death or life for those of the family who are left? Thoroughly enjoyable.

A different approach to Op-Ed pages

Some interesting comments from Umair Haque, writing in an article for the Havard Business Publishing page, entitled, Newspapers Don't Learn from their Mistakes.

Op-Ed pages are battlefields — and structuring anything, whether markets, networks, or Op-Ed pages as battlefields is as obsolete an idea as the Big Mac. Want to wage peace? Op-Ed pages (and, in fact, every page) should be more like truth and reconciliation commissions — alive with participation, debate, and deliberation, where writers manage the emergence of stories.

That's a radical departure from journalism 1.0. And it tells us: the great mistake newspapers — and most organizations — keep making is simple: they never learn from their mistakes.

Mostly, that's because they refuse to even perceive or acknowledge mistakes in the first place...

Old Stagers

Before When We Are Married began, the ODT published a piece called Old stagers still playing up after 75 years. It discusses the Dunedin Repertory Society in the light of their 75th Anniversary. (The Anniversary was the reason When We Are Married was being staged - again. It's always been a popular and successful play with the company, and proved to be so again.)

The article has a few errors in it: for one thing, as far as I can remember, I've never performed for the Repertory Society before, although the article includes my name amongst a bunch of people who have. And the photograph that accompanies it claims to show a Repertory production, but apparently it isn't. (Don't ask me what the production actually is; there's some debate about it. )

Natalie Ellis, who was interviewed for the article told the cast there were some other miscrepancies, but didn't expand on them further.

Anyway, it took up a full page in the ODT, and that's always good for publicity!

The play ends...

The play is over. I'm sorry, and I'm glad. It's always sad to see the end of such an enterprise: the friends you make, the entity that's a combination of the script and the actors and all the other facets, and the enjoyment of performing (when you burn fat more than you realise!). But it's also a relief to have some space again. (And the last essay for the Varsity course is now done and sent off as well.)

When We Are Married is an interesting play. It's not as famous as some of Priestly's other works, such as An Inspector Calls (at least as far as I'm aware), but it's obviously a popular choice for amateur and professional groups alike. (The St Peter's Church Players' amateur version on You Tube [see below], which shows the last ten minutes or so of the play, seems however rather turgidly done for a comedy.)



The characters in the play are superbly drawn, with lots of detail - especially the three husbands. There's plenty of room for them to swing from total self-importance to virtual defeat and back again. The wives are different again; Clara's sudden descent from aggressive bossiness may be a bit sudden, but it gives the audience huge satisfaction: every single night they clapped with delight at her downfall. Annie is the quiet one, but her long conversation with her husband Albert in the third act is a supreme example of how to undermine pomposity. And there's a wonderful buildup to her response after he asks, How long has been feeling like this, and she says, Twenty-five years, (which just happens to be how long they've been married).

Maria is different again: in this production she was played with considerable authority and warmth. I think you could also play the part differently, as someone who is less confident and finally realises she's going to have to fight for her man. And that's another great facet of the script: each part can be interpreted differently to the way we played the parts (as the St Peter's Players testify!)

A short review

The review for the play was very good, but I don't think it's online. I'll check on the weekend when I've got more time. Meantime, here's a bit of trumpet blowing. A friend of ours in Auckland got an email from a friend of hers who'd been to the play here in Dunedin. The latter wrote [slightly edited]:

Just a few lines from me, [we] went to a comedy drama play last night called "When We Were Married" and Mike Crowl played a "tiddly"photographer. He was hilarious. The play was by J. B. Priestly set about 1908. I'm sure you would have loved this play - it was a really good laugh.

I knew Mike was musical and had produced operas etc., but didn't know he could act. The part suited him to a "T" (not that he's a drunk in real life!!) but he played the part magnificently complete with red nose!

I've never actually produced an opera that I can remember, though I've done some musical direction in that line (not for a complete, full-scale opera, though).

The camera upstages me

Well, the play's had four performances, and is going well over all. A few of the usual slip-ups with lines and things, but in every case someone's pulled us out of a potential hole. Including me, last night, when I got everyone into a hole and then had to haul us out again - which was a bit chaotic for a moment, but, being a character who spends most of the time being drunk, the incoherence of my somewhat made-up speech was reasonably appropriate!
I've been upstaged three times, however, by the antique camera that accompanies me in three of the scenes. It behaved itself on Saturday night, but on Monday one of its legs came loose and I had to try and (drunkenly) fix it. No easy feat when I'm not wearing my glasses to see with (!) and it makes it difficult to keep the lines running smoothly. On the same night, at the end of the play, it managed to get itself stuck on the audience side of the curtain at the end of the play, which terrified us all because it only needed to have been hit by the curtain opening again and it would have toppled into the front row, with breakages, no doubt.
On Tuesday, the flap on the large end flopped down, and do you think I could figure out how to get it up in place again? In the end I decided just to leave it, since drunks can get away with more than undrunk characters can!
The props lady thinks I haven't been nice to it, and it's reacting. So last night I spoke loving words to it at intervals between scenes, and told it how great an actor it was and so on. And it behaved.

Global cooling?

Further to my 'Shuffling Stats' post the other day, here's a quote from Muriel Newman's latest column:

According to the theory of global warming being touted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Al Gore and many others (who have spent an estimated $50 billion trying to show man-made greenhouse gas emissions are causing catastrophic global warming) the earth’s temperatures should be rising in line with a continuing increase in carbon dioxide emissions.[3] The problem is that the planet stopped warming more than a decade ago. In fact, global warming has now been replaced by global cooling and while carbon dioxide levels continue to rise, temperatures continue to fall. This graph demonstrates that the global warming theory based on the computer models of the IPCC and others, is wrong.

The fact that the earth is now in a cooling phase should come as no surprise to New Zealanders, given the unseasonally cold weather we are presently experiencing. Some weather analysts are even predicting that we may miss out on autumn altogether this year!

The play begins

I'm writing this as a way of both getting warmed up for my next (and final) essay for the Research Methods paper I'm doing, and to also note that the play had its first night last night, and went very well. A few missed lines, a few moments when nobody spoke (but somebody should have) - including me - but overall a success. The audience delighted in it. It seems like a very wordy play (I guess that's hardly unusual) but the words have a lot of subtlety and heaps of humour. In fact, I think the cast continues to find it funny, which is always a plus. I certainly do.

There's a 'window' in the set, so that those backstage can actually stand there (without being seen by the audience) and watch at least part of the stage. It's interesting to see how the various actors have developed their characters; no one is just being there saying the lines: there's lots of detail and lots to keep the audiences eyes interested, as well as their ears.

We had an after-show 'do' last night. The South Dunedin Rotary Club had been the bulk of the audience, and were using it as some kind of fundraiser (to do with polio in third world countries). So all the actors trouped upstairs to the socializing area (which is where we did most of our rehearsing, in fact) and met up with the various bodies who make up the Rotarians.

What was interesting is that the two groups barely mixed. Here we have on one hand a bunch of people who can cope with performing on stage in front of a crowd of strangers, and yet when they come face to face with the same people, they mostly become introverts. I thought it was just me, but several of the cast were like that - or else they honed in on somebody they already knew and spent most of their time with them. And on the other hand, we have a bunch of people who are socially adept, and yet who kept their distance from the actors. Surely actors are 'okay' people these days? Or is it that they just didn't know what to say? Intriguing.

On another issue entirely...

There are always new jobs turning up (or maybe old jobs with new titles). I'd never heard of the job that requires medical coding, but apparently it's a job just like any other. The are medical coding training courses available. According to one site: Medical Coding and Billing Specialist are employed by hospitals, clinics, physicians' offices, health maintenance organizations (HMOs), mental health care facilities, insurance companies, consulting firms, health data organizations and information system vendors. As an Insurance Coding & Billing Specialist, you play an integral role in your employer's office. You help make it possible for your employer to collect monetary reimbursements from patient insurance providers. Medical insurance billing/coding and its related occupations are among the fastest growing opportunities in the healthcare industry.
Maybe the reason we don't hear so much about it here in NZ is because we don't, in general, have medical insurance. Or rather, there are medical insurers, but they're not the way the medical system is run, basically. Anyway, if you want to become a medical coding trainee, you can do it online - a kind of distance course, like my Research Methods.

Google not quite killed off yet.

I can't see the much-anticipated 'Google-killer' Wolfram|Alpha search engine taking over the world any time soon. Seemingly the difference between Wolfram|Alpha and a traditional search engine is that the former is able to compute data on the fly, rather than simply returning keyword results from existing pages. Well, I think I know what that means, but presumably it still needs to have some data on hand in order to be able to compute.
For instance, since it seems to like questions, I tried: Where is Mike Crowl in Dunedin? Its response was: Wolfram|Alpha isn't sure what to do with your input.
I thought I'd try something simpler: Mike Crowl in Dunedin. Same response.
Mike Crowl Dunedin. Same response.
Putting just Dunedin in gives some info, but nothing that you wouldn't get anywhere else on any other search engines. But put in my name on its own and it tries to tell me I've spelt my surname wrong. Should be 'crown' according to WA.
It has examples of what it can do over to the right of the page. And of course they work perfectly: but you'd rather expect them to, wouldn't you?
You can watch a video of what it will do, though whether most Google users would want to bother is another thing. When you do watch it, you find that the information WA will give is very specific, very detailed and very good - and formated beautifully, but it's not interested in the world outside its own particular universe. Which means that Google still has the upper hand, as far as I can see.
WA will have its uses, I guess. But since most people using Google aren't looking for school-book, university-textbook information, then I suspect they'll be sticking with the Big G for a while yet.

Shuffling Stats to Suit

You don't have to wonder why people don't take global warming and climate change issues seriously when you read the following sort of stuff:
At his Victoria University of Wellington seminar in March, Bob [White] was armed with some startling facts:
combined searches on Google (through power usage) contribute to global warming as much as all plane travel;
cows contribute 18% of global warming, more than all the world's transport;
43% of New Zealand's greenhouse gases come from cattle and sheep;
the best thing that New Zealanders can do to reduce global warming is eat less meat.
Taking just the first item alone, it seems amazing that someone who claims to be a scientist should come out with such an unthought-through statement. In the (British) Sunday Times there was a similar recent comparison: with the Google search and the boiling of a kettle. Google's response is rather more measured: Others have used much higher estimates, claiming that a typical search uses "half the energy as boiling a kettle of water" and produces 7 grams of CO2. We thought it would be helpful to explain why this number is many times too high. Google is fast — a typical search returns results in less than 0.2 seconds. Queries vary in degree of difficulty, but for the average query, the servers it touches each work on it for just a few thousandths of a second. Together with other work performed before your search even starts (such as building the search index) this amounts to 0.0003 kWh of energy per search, or 1 kJ. For comparison, the average adult needs about 8000 kJ a day of energy from food, so a Google search uses just about the same amount of energy that your body burns in ten seconds.
On that basis we shouldn't we worrying about planes at all, but the people who travel in them!
David Galbraith deals with the issue of Google searches and planes:
“A recent study estimated the global IT sector generated as much greenhouse gas as the world’s airlines put together.”
This is a largely meaningless assertion since without the global IT sector people would have to use planes more. In addition, ‘global IT sector’ includes all of the computers required to design, build and operate aircraft, all of the computers used to search for and book trips, all of the computers used for in flight entertainment systems and all of the computers used by air traffic control.
In terms of moving people around to exchange information, if you wanted to make plane travel several million times more efficient, an Internet enabled computer is a viable alternative.
If you dare to search Google, after White's warning, you'll find all the media took up the cry of the cows (and sheep and other domestic animals) being the cause of more woes than cars. This 'sky is falling' piece of doomsdayism is based on a "400-page report by the Food and Agricultural Organisation, entitled Livestock's Long Shadow, which also surveys the damage done by sheep, chickens, pigs and goats. But in almost every case, the world's 1.5 billion cattle are most to blame. Livestock are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming, more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together."
But when you look at the way in which this theory is worked out, you find that cattle are supposedly responsible for a vast number of negative aspects of the industry, including the transporting of them. Now hang on: shouldn't the transporting go under the vehicle pollution box rather than the cattle box? Just reading the rest of the article (in the link under 400-page report) you start to scratch your head. It takes 990 litres of water to produce one litre of milk? HUH? Certainly the average cow isn't consuming that amount of water, so once again, the stats are being used to load onto the cow, when they're already loaded on elsewhere - or should be.
I'm not going to look at the other two items on White's list. In part they're already covered by point 2, and again, when you start to look at them in any depth, you find inconsistencies in the stats.
If scientists would stick to what they know - geophysics in White's case - they might come up with some better solutions for the real problems.

Banksy

A colleague gave me a book for Christmas (Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything) which unfortunately I already had and had already read. (Hey, that last phrase is rather cute!)
So she swapped it for a $40 gift card which I promptly forgot about until she mentioned it a week or so ago. Today I went off to Whitcoull's just to check what they might have of interest, and came across Banksy's Wall and Piece, which I didn't have and now have.

I already had and had already read;
I didn't have and now have.

Anyway, Banksy's style is fairly familiar, in the sense that it's copied a good deal around the place through people using a similar stencil approach to graffiti - although seldom with Banksy's rather anarchic wit. Check out his website, where there are plenty of examples of his work. He's probably become a bit more respectable in a way, since most of the art on the website has a more permanent look than a lot of what appears in the book. Without photos, many of his art works would have vanished.
The great thing about Banksy is that he's a peace anarchist, and a man with a sense of humour. The book is full not just of his witty paintings, but also his witty texts. And he can certainly paint, something he says all graffiti artists should learn to do....

Banksy remains anonymous (to the general public) and supposedly has written: "I am unable to comment on who may or may not be banksy, but anyone described as being 'good at drawing' doesn't sound like banksy to me."

Swingle Singers

Several years ago the Swingle Singers appeared at one of Dunedin's Festivals of the Arts. My wife and I paid what seemed a very large amount of money to go and hear them, as the SS sound had been something I'd loved as a youth, when I first started collecting records.
I was a bit disappointed with the concert, even though the group (not the original group of course, which had long since gone its way) was utterly professional and polished and superb in their singing. I was disappointed because they didn't sing any of the famous Bach pieces that had made the group famous.
I was reminded of this because my wife bought me for my birthday last week a turntable that connects to the computer. Old records that haven't been heard in years can be put on it, with all their hisses and scratches, and turned into digital files. The turntable on its own is fine, but the advantage of being able to 'preserve' the sounds is a great addition.
A friend of ours has one that she got a few months back, and try as we might we couldn't get it to record onto her computer. To her frustration and ours. However, this time round, with some adjustments for 'this' and sortings out of 'that' we managed to record two tracks without disaster. (So we'll go down to our friend's place when I've finished with the play and see if we can finally get things humming at her end too.)
The Audacity program that we're using is a bit temperamental, but otherwise things are humming along fine.
The J B Priestly play is in its final week of rehearsal, and while most of the lines are in place, we all got a bit knocked by being on stage on Sunday afternoon, and having to contend not only with different furniture to that which we'd been rehearsing with, but also a different - and seemingly smaller - space. We'll get used to it (and the real door which we now have to open and close) but Saturday wasn't one of our great achievements.
Which reminds me of a couple of times back in 2007 when I wrote on this blog about mesothelioma. At the time I had no idea what it was, and had to go investigating. But when the word turned up in front of me again just now in a different context, I had no idea that I'd ever met it before (!) So much for all the learning that the brain enjoys that I talked about in one of those posts. Learning is fine; remembering is a task.
Incidentally, I don't think I've mentioned that one of the actors in this play (he plays Rev Mercer, the character I started out playing) was in a J B Priestly play that I had connections with back when I was probably only about 16. That play was An Inspector Calls and I think this actor played the father. I didn't have much to do with the production of the play; think I was mostly there because my best friend was involved in some way. But it was one of my first tastes of real drama, and I saw every performance. The actor and I were discussing the other day how few of the cast from that play were still alive: at least two of the women died quite young, and the Inspector himself may also be dead. The guy who played the young man has now had a stroke, and isn't well. The changes that 45 or so years bring!

Auckland and Vancouver tie

You may not believe it if you're a Mainlander (that's people from the South Island for those who aren't familiar with the expression) but Auckland comes fourth equal with Vancouver in Mercer 2009 Quality of Living survey, which covered 215 cities and was based on criteria including political, social, economic and environmental factors. Even more amazing - to Australians at least - is that Sydney only came in 10th.

Here are the 10 Best Cities:

1. Vienna (Austria)
2. Zurich (Switzerland)
3. Geneva (Switzerland)
4. Auckland (New Zealand) and Vancouver (Canada)
6. Dusseldorf (Germany)
7. Munich (Germany
8. Frankfurt (Germany)
9. Bern (Switzerland)
10. Sydney (Australia)

And here are the 10 worst, most of which will hardly surprise you:

1. Baghdad (Iraq)
2. Bangui (Central African Republic)
3. Ndjamena (Chad)
4. Brazzaville (Congo)
5. Khartoum (Sudan)
6. Sanaa (Yemen Arab Republic)
7. Pointe Noire (Congo)
8. Nouakchott (Mauritania)
9. Kinshasa (Democratic Republic of the Congo)
10. Port au Prince (Haiti)

On not being perfect

I'm indebted to Jurgen Wolff for the following. He writes:
On Ali Edwards' crafts blog she wrote about working through creative fear. She identified five typical fears. I really liked what she said about this one:

"Thinking this is the one and only chance to tell this story so it simply must be perfect. Oh man, what a way to stop you in your tracks. What does perfect mean to you? And who is the judge? Perfect is so very relative. What is perfect to me in this moment may be entirely imperfect to you. To me, perfect is actually taking time to tell your stories. Risking that bit of yourself to document your experience. Perfect is carving out a bit of time to be creative. Perfect is embracing the imperfection inherent in creating something that comes from your heart, and your head, and your hands. Let it go. Simply begin writing. Tell the story in simple, plain sentences one word at a time. Keep writing until all the words have spilled onto the page and then go back and edit. Perfect is actually telling the story rather than letting fear keep you from sharing the lives and lessons of your family."

This reminds me of the essay I was writing on Saturday: I kept struggling with getting started until I remembered (yet again) that getting it down right the first time is an impossibility. Getting words down is the way to start. Once there are some words - any words - on the page you start to see progress, but not until then. It's that Anne Lamott axiom about 'shitty first drafts' - nothing is right the first time round.

Pressure-Cooker

Well, we began Act 3 of the play this week - short of one rehearsal (on Tuesday) because the carpet-layers were laying new carpet round the theatre. It's a bit scary: we open on the 23rd and at this point we've done Act 3 about four times - and because of the directing style of the director, we don't often go back over a scene once it's done. She relies on our innate and excellent acting skills to get us through - along with a small amount of instruction about where to move if we've bumped into each other.
We've still got Sunday and next week to go as far as rehearsals are concerned, and then we're into the last stretch before the opening. At this point, most of us are still struggling with our lines in this third Act. Crikey. I'm used to long rehearsal periods, where you can 'learn' your way into the part. This is all a bit pressure-cooker (and not just for me; others in the cast are feeling the same pressure). Guess we'll get there, but it's a little nightmarish.
Simultaneously, I'm involved in the first of a series of short dramas that are going to be presented at church over the next couple of months. They'll be using the same group of actors fairly regularly, and....most of the dramas aren't even written yet.
The first of these goes on this Sunday, and isn't too much of a stretch because it consists of four monologues, so we don't have to learn cues or interact with the other three actors. We've all got speeches that last a couple of minutes, but you can take them at the pace that's right for the part, and since I'm playing a somewhat sceptical older person (it's not entirely based upon me!) I can go at an unrushed pace without it being out of character.
When I began to learn the lines for the first act of the Priestly play, I felt as though nothing was sticking. Somehow, since then, the lines are coming much more easily, and it hasn't been too drastic an effort to learn lines for two different plays at the same time (as it were). However, I'll be happier, once the Priestly is out of the way to be able to concentrate on just one play at a time. Think it'll be healthier!
Meanwhile, the essay for Varsity which I'm supposed to have got into tonight has taken a back seat to blogging. Not really good enough....

Treasure and Emma

Just watched National Treasure: Book of Secrets - in other words, the sequel. Worst thing about is Nicholas Cage's dreadful hair style. I presume it's some form of wig or toupee to make him look younger; whatever it is, it's so unsightly, it's a wonder Cage himself didn't have it banned. It has a definite front line, unlike normal hair, and he's lacking even a hint of sideburns, which makes it look as though a cap's been stuck on his head. Unbelievable.
Apart from that the story is so thoroughly far-fetched that you just have to take it as it comes - and with Cage, Helen Mirren, Jon Voight and Ed Harris in the cast, not to mention Diane Kruger and even Harvey Keitel, it's certainly not going to fail on the acting side of things. It sends itself up gently on a number of occasions, and is mostly as good as the first movie.
On a different line altogether, I went and saw Emma last night at the Fortune Theatre. It had had rave reviews, and a number of people had said they were going to it or had been. I can't explain why I was disappointed, because the actors did their utmost, particularly Mel Dodge, who played a shy and awkward Harriet Smith, a tottering and verbose Miss Bates, and a dragon-like Mrs Elton, each with such delineation of detail that she captured the show.
And the direction was energetic and busy, laughed at itself and threw in some marvellous non sequiters. Perhaps it was too busy - and yet the subtle moments came off beautifully.
I think I was just very tired, and the seats were uncomfortable (no arm rests between people, which means you have to sit up straight), and I came away feeling somewhat grumpy that I hadn't enjoyed it.
It had the same approach as Jane Eyre, which I saw at the Fortune last year (but don't appear to have mentioned in this blog): a small cast playing a wide variety of characters, one basic set that was manhandled by the cast, various props picked up and used for different reasons, a sense of reinventing the original while still telling the story. Only here the actors played with the audience as well, giving them knowing looks at certain points, or being very aware of something silly happening to them, and so on. Which can work, but can also be rather twee. It was also a play within a play - five young people perform Emma for themselves, in an attic amongst all the family's no-longer-needed clutter - and at time revert to their non-Jane-Austin roles.
These reinventions are all very well, but the curious thing is that they still work best when the straightforward dramatic elements are allowed to run without any authorial or directorial interference - as in the last scene, where Emma finally realises her foolishness (it's a wonderful scene in the book too - and in the movie), or where Emma insults the nattering Miss Bates and has to be told off by Mr Knightly.

From Panic to Pandemic

A couple of posts ago I wrote about the way people panic these days, as soon as there's the slightest hint of something out of the ordinary. (Another example is the people in the States who are buying up six months worth of food and other necessities to last them through the Recession.)
I mentioned the swine flu 'pandemic' in the post, and was rather cynical about it. Seems that we're now reaching the pandemic level - according to the World Health Organisation. But, as MacDoctor notes: Bear in mind, however, that we essentially get a pandemic of influenza every year. Although this virus is likely to be significantly more dangerous than the standard influenza virus, it is also likely to turn out more like the Hong Kong flu pandemic rather than the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. There will be some tragedies and some disruption to life - but the world will not come to an end.
MacDoctor also lists five myths about swine flu, which make useful reading:
1. You can get Swine Flu from eating pork/ham/bacon
2. If Swine Flu becomes pandemic it will kill 50 million people worldwide like in 1918
3. Swine Flu is just media hype
4. The current flu vaccine offers protection against Swine Flu
5. The antivirals have terrible side effects and will kill more people than the Swine Flu
These are an interesting mix of ideas, and MacDoctor deals sensibly with each one. By the way, MacDoctor is Dr. Jim McVeagh, who is currently working in the New Zealand public hospital system and in Accident and Medical practise. He thinks politics and health make strange, and often uncomfortable, bedfellows and that the law of unintended consequences is particularly bitter in medicine.
One other thing: an article from AAP in the paper today reports that Worldwide, seasonal flu kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people in an average year. That's far more scary than the current panic about swine flu....

A N Wilson 'returns' - albeit slowly

In an honest, first-person article in the New Statesman, A N Wilson, the novelist and biographer, admits that his 'conversion' to atheism was an aberration, which he has spent the last several years leaving behind. I remember reading Wilson's biography of C S Lewis perhaps twenty years ago, and being quite disappointed in his obvious belief that Lewis wasn't really the man everyone thought him to be. Wilson explains why in the article, along with his slow decision to believe in God again, and his realisation that the atheists have got it wrong. A paragraph from the article:

Do materialists really think that language just “evolved”, like finches’ beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where’s the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena – of which love and music are the two strongest – which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

Panic mode

Seth Godin's blog is one of the few I read virtually every day. Though it's primarily focused on marketing and business, he manages to sneak in quite a bit of ordinary everyday commonsense into his posts. Well, 'sneak' might be understating it; often he publishes posts that are plain commonsense.
I don't always agree with his posts, and I found his latest book, Tribes, not that exciting, even though the concept is worth a thought.
But the post for the 28th April (Might as well panic) I agree with entirely. There's a mindset now in the world that if there's a possibility of something going wrong, or even if something does go wrong, we should all rush around like headless chickens. YK2 was the prime example, and the World Trade Centre attack caused so much panic that the US went to war over it - without any real justification. Then we had the bird flu pandemic. Pandemic? How many people actually died in that pandemic? Far fewer than are killed on the roads of many major countries each day.
Along came the RECESSION. Well, that's supposedly what it was. Yes, I know people have lost jobs, and there's a great furore over the behaviour of the banks and CEOs and their billions, but in fact, this is not a crisis like the Great Depression, and may well not get to be. For the most part it's a sorting out of the poor financial management of a number of large companies.
And our latest cause for panic is swine flu. It's dreadful that even a few people have died of this in the world, but again, the actual number of people who have died have been miniscule in terms of the population (or compared to the Great Flu that followed the First World War). I agree with Godin that it seems in the nature of human beings to panic. My suspicion is that this is a fairly recent phenomenon, aided by the media needing something to get excited about.
Godin ends his post by saying: "We have enough caution. We don't need an abundance of caution. That's too much."
Mr Godin, I concur.

Wilbur

A while ago I said I'd let you know when the review for Flashback Forward was available. You can find it on the Otago Daily Times site - just scroll through the various short reviews.

Last night we caught up with the quirky movie, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself. That it was shown at all given the current media tendency to avoid films and TV shows that talk about suicide was something of a miracle. Even more so since the film not only shows Wilbur trying to kill himself at least three or four times (he's already tried several other times), but also has his brother kill himself at the end (he's already dying of cancer, but that's not quite the point).

Apparently it was advertised as a comedy (!) prior to its showing on TV last night. Yes, it certainly has some very funny moments, and the characters have a great tendency to respond to someone else's lines with something seemingly inconsequential, but comedy? Only in the sense that it has a kind of happy ending.

Apart from suicide there was the deceit factor: Wilbur's brother, Harbour, doesn't tell anyone he has cancer - it's left to a hospital worker to blurt it out at a dinner; and Wilbur's wife (their marriage is very short-lived), who loves him dearly, is also passionately in love with Wilbur - and the brother never finds this out. Or perhaps he suspects it, but there's no confrontation scene.

The wife is the catalyst character - along with her ten-year-old daughter. They restore what's well and truly broken in the brothers' family, but it's not quite in the way you'd call straightforwardly moral. I guess the thing the movie has going for it is that it never follows our expectations; and it offers a damaged personality (who has immense charm, it must be admitted) and manages to bring him through a crisis time. How realistic this might be in real life is another issue; although the effect his suicide attempts have on other people is realistic enough.

Taken

The only time I've been disappointed by a Liam Neeson performance was in the dreadful '1st' episode of Star Wars in which he and Ewan McGregor slept-walked their way through what should have been mysterious, action-packed and superb. I'm willing to allow Neeson one error of judgement in his film career, however, because I suspect most of the blame for the problems with that episode of Star Wars has to be laid at the feet of the director.

Which leads into my saying that Neeson manages to invest even more than his usual depth into his role in the extremely violent Luc Besson movie, Taken, and avoids being dull for even a fraction of a second. Not that he gets many seconds to be dull in. He plays an ex-'Preventer' (which apparently means someone who 'stops bad things happening' - whatever that actually means) and when his utterly naive 17-year-old daughter is kidnapped in Paris before she's had a moment to do any Green shopping let alone ordinary shopping, he's on her trail so fast he doesn't have time to pack a spare pair of socks.

Of course, being the world-wise Preventer that he is, he did warn his ex-wife, and his daughter, that it was a big nasty world outside of the good old US of A, but they, being so full of their big plans pay absolutely no attention, and deserve almost everything that happens.

Once he's in Paris, the place piles up with dead and maimed bodies until the cost of employing bodyguards inflates exponentially. Neeson, playing Bryan Mills, is a one-man destroyer of bad guys - and the film gives him umpteen bad guys to destroy. He's not to be messed with. Even Bond wouldn't stand a chance against him.

It's all ridiculous, of course, and it's only the fact that Neeson plays his character with such integrity and emotional depth that you sit and watch the thing. Did I say 'ridiculous?' His gun never runs out of bullets; he dodges machine-gun fire with a flick of his head, he always knows who's on the other side of the door - unfortunately for the aforesaid bad guys; he can drive a car while spending most of the time looking in the rear-view mirror, and/or while driving the wrong way down a one-way motorway. And if he gets injured, well, he'll be all right in the next scene.

Stephanie Zacharek, on Salon.com, says: "Taken" is the latest hyperkinetic chicken to emerge from the semi-cracked egg that is Besson's brain, " and she's right. Besson co-wrote it, and produced it. He's an entertainer, first and foremost, but he's never logical, and he's often extraordinary, as the superb Bruce Willis movie, The Fifth Element, attests.

So don't expect a movie that requires debriefing afterwards; and be warned that there are an awful lot of fairly grim deaths (rather too many broken necks for my liking). On the plus side, it's a thriller that carries you along without missing a beat - and you can tell what's going on in the action sequences, which is more than can be said for Quantum of Solace.

Totally random quote

I just had to copy this passage when I read it, because of the delightful use of words...

After an 'unexpected' mid-life crisis, the author notes: Thus cognitively defocussed and emotionally defused for a number of months by the subsequent bit of deep-deep immersion, I realized I would never last the course of direct experience in the netherworld of love. I also recognized from that bit of dysserindipitous soul-spielunking that I should launch studies of physical attraction, such as studies of beautiful women, the ultimate winners (and losers, it turned out) in the great love selection game.

I'm not sure what 'deep-deep immersion' actually is, but it seems apt for the idea.

From the Preface to Creative Interviewing, by Jack D Douglas, published Sage 1985 (pg 13)

One Off

There's seems to be an excessive amount of advertising on the Net at the moment for weight loss pills. Is someone trying to tell me something?
And, apropos of the above not at all, I've sometimes wondered if actors should only ever make one movie. When you see a movie where the main actor is someone totally unfamiliar to you (as Ryan Gosling was to me in Lars and the Real Girl) you take that person as more real and their acting approach as perfectly right for the character. I saw a movie recently called The Grocer's Son, and because the actor (Nicolas Cazalé) was quite new to me, I took it on trust that this person and the character were the 'same.' Does that make sense?
When we see Julia Roberts and Clive Owen (and a bunch of other familiar faces) strutting their stuff in Duplicity, they bring a pile of baggage from other movies, and get between you and the character.
Of course it's plain uneconomic to have new actors for every new movie - even I realise that - and I can't see that actors will think it's a good idea. But it reminds me of something from my childhood. I saw a movie when I was a kid in which, at the end, there was an underwater fight: two guys with knives attacking each other. One got stabbed, of course, and (as a child) it seemed to me that moviemakers must go through an awful lot of actors if they killed them off so often in the movies...

The artist matters more than the instrument

This week on the Concert Programme, they're giving away a CD called Homage in which James Ehnes (pronounced Ennis) is playing a bunch of well-known short violin pieces. The unique selling point is that each piece is played on a different violin from the Fulton Collection (in Washington) of Stradivarii and other famous instruments. Somehow, playing on instruments that are at least 300 years old is supposed to make the pieces sound more wondrous. So far, to my ear, that doesn't seem to be the case. They could be being played on any decent instrument.

So it was interesting to read the following paragraph from Mike Figgis' book, Digital Filmmaking, page 10.

"I'll make an analogy with music. If you go to a concert and hear a really great violinistplaying a Stradivarius, you'll be witness to a magnificent sound and a great performance. Now that violinist could take a twenty-dollar Chinese violin made for schoolchildren, tune it and play it, and I guarantee a lot of people couldn't tell the difference from the Stradivarius - because of the musician.
Similarly, a great drummer can pick up a wooden packing case and make it sound like an amazing set of drums. A photographer - let's say a Cartier Bresson - could pick up a Kodak Brownie and without a doubt take great photographs.
The point is that it doesn't really matter what the equipment is. It really matters who the artist is, and what their attitude is. So a serious filmmaker will pick up an Arriflex, 16mm or 35mm, or a Panasonic video camera, nad you will see immediately that there is a serious intention in the way they're holding the camera and the way they're recording the image. It will not be ambiguous. It will not be negotiable. It will not be in doubt. They will state their relationship to the caemera, like the musician and the violin, the drummer and the packing case. The way that you pick up a camera and the way that you address the camera is fundamental."

I've always held this contention myself, when other pianists have said to me: that piano's crap or it's too hard too get any decent music out of. Pianists, often having little choice about what instrument they play, have to make the instrument do the best it can. It relies heavily on the musician to bring the music alive on whatever instrument they're faced with.

All too much - almost

I make mention on my other blog of not needing to look for the best diet pills on the market even though I seem to have put on weight as a result of my recent(pre- and post-op) inability to exercise as much as usual, or even to walk at a reasonable pace. Thank goodness I'm now (literally) back on my feet and (generally) walking at my old (near-frenetic) speed. In fact, it was only today that I realised I'm no longer conking out at work from tiredness, or having to come home and have a lie-down from exhaustion. So I am making progress. (Though not with my overexcessive use of brackets.)
We've had time off rehearsals for the play this week; there's another play on at the theatre, so rehearsals are out. But next week we're back into it with a vengeance, and I'm trying my best to have my Act II lines under my belt before we start rehearsing that section. As in Act One, I only have one scene, but this one is a two-hander with one of the other cast members, and goes on for about five pages. I've taken it in sections, so as to get a handle on it, and have been practicing tonight with my son reading the other part. But it's still not all there. And it doesn't help that in this scene the character is somewhat drunk and tends to repeat himself. I learnt the worst bit of repetition first, since I thought it would take longest to get into the brain, and I was right...
Meanwhile, our church is getting back into short dramas - they're to accompany a special series of sermons. I was at the brainstorming session last night, and somehow wound up with a part. Not just a short bit in one short drama; the characters in these dramas will appear fairly regularly throughout several weeks of plays. Of course the first drama will be on within a few weeks, while the rehearsals for the other play are still going, and as well I'll be trying to get my head around the Varsity work (which, thank goodness, finishes the week after the main play).
I tried to get them to cast someone else in the role they were suggesting for me, but it looks as though that may not be a goer. However, there's a suggestion that they'll avoid having me in the drama that goes on the day after we start performances of the main play! I should think so, too. Who do they think I am? Laurence Olivier?
Kind of apropos of what I've just been talking about, it's curious how rehearsing in a particular place seems to embue that place with some kind of residual emotional feeling. Every time we've spent several weeks rehearsing in a particular building, I can't pass the place by without feeling a kind of nostalgia. And when I first appeared in the Narnia series of plays, which were performed in the same auditorium in which we had church at that time, I used to find that whenever I passed the dressing rooms I'd get all emotional. Weird.
Check out some photos from that first production - I'm playing Mr Beaver and appear in the first and third photos.

The lack of style

Check out almost any book on 'how to write' and you'll find absurd advice about not using adjectives and adverbs, avoiding split infinitives, making sure you rarely use the passive voice. For a while I used to think this advice had some value behind it, but I became convinced in the end that most of it was valueless: it lessened the ways in which you could write with style, and was usually at odds with the way real writers actually write.
It seems as though much of the blame may be put at the feet of the venerable Strunk and White book, The Elements of Style. In an article entitled, 50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice, Geoffrey Pullum certainly believes the blame should be. He lists a number of downright errors in the book, and shows how even the two authors inadvertently ignored their own advice - within their own pages.
As Pullum notes, William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919. (White was also the author of Stuart Little.)
Nowadays, if I read a book on writing, I tend to ignore the stuff about passives and so on. A darn good passive in the right place is an apt thing. A split infinitive handled well is beautiful. And as for dislodging adjectives and adverbs, it seems plain that Strunk and White must either have used a simplified version of English in their everyday speech, or else wrote the book as something of a hoax!

Easter trading

Easter, and what's most visible on the news radar? The same 'impoverished' retailers who, every year, fight the law about not being allowed to trade on Easter Sunday or on Good Friday. Yesterday, on the news, we had a bunch of them boasting at how clever they were to do what they were doing. One stood there saying: I didn't ask any of the staff to come into work; I didn't make these customers come out and buy stuff.
And, yes, his shop was full (it was one of the Odering's garden shops) as was the Real Groovy shop (in Auckland, I think) that was shown.
But how essential was it for these places to be open? Not in the least essential. These shops are open because retailers - some retailers - have got to the point where they can't bear to be closed, in case they lose a few hundred dollars. It's plain greed, and has nothing to do with serving the customers, who would quite happily find something else to do if the shop wasn't open. (Probably something healthier.)
People do not die of retail deprivation. In spite of the notion that 'retail therapy' is supposed to be good for you, no demise on the planet has yet been attributed to a category - cause of death: 'could not shop.'
Nehemiah, in the Book of the same name, shut the city gates on the traders who insisted on coming into the city on the Sabbath, and cleared them off the city walls. No doubt there were Jews in the city then who said: but we can't do without shopping on the Sabbath! Nehemiah proved they could. Perhaps it's time for those who deal with recalcitrant retailers to do more than just charge them a nominal fine.

Contrast

I finally made an effort and finished John Cairney's Flashback Forward, which I wrote a little about in an earlier post. Sadly the book doesn't improve. After getting to the point where the big incident happens and the main character is somehow split in two, things ramble on in an interminable fashion for another 200 plus pages (!) Cairney can write well, but he's relied on the big incident at around 100 pages to make his book. It doesn't. There's no plot, no characters that go anywhere or grow in any way. No interaction of people apart from some fairly bland relationships, and even those don't move forward. Very disappointing.
So it's been a relief to get my teeth into (an appropriate phrase to use in the circumstances), Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, which I'd had on reserve at the library for a month or more, and which finally turned up on Friday. It's obviously very popular, and you can see why. Perceptive writing about people who have some reality about them. Clever quiet humour; a neat idea that holds our attention from the beginning (I had some idea of what was coming, but it didn't spoil the reading in any way); and writing that's just as stylish as Cairney's. A lot of American writers are very stylish, but not all of them write well. Meyer certainly does. I'm already 172 pages into the book, and only started it around 1pm. (It's now 4, and I haven't been reading continually through that time.)
It's intriguing to find that this book was Meyer's first; it's accomplished, sure of itself, perhaps a little long (but you don't care), and creates a very real world with characters that come alive quickly. A bunch of high school students could easily get confusing and interchangeable: these ones don't. Furthermore the romantic angle is never slushy or over the top. Bella, the main character, is mostly level-headed and mature (for her years).
I'm looking forward to carrying on reading it before I have to go back to Varsity study and learning lines for the play and so on!

Busy - and Duplicity

It's been a busy week, too busy to do much in the way of blogging. I had a 1500 word assignment to do for my Varsity course, and wanted to get that out of the way before the weekend, when we were celebrating my wife's 60th (her actual birthday was last Thursday, but that was a quieter affair). Plus I had a couple of music transcriptions to do (putting them on Sibelius and then transposing them down), and rehearsals for the play, and....
Well, anyway, it was busy. The birthday 'party' went off well (thanks for asking) and we managed to keep most of it a surprise until the last minute. Which was a major achievement.
My wife and I went to see Duplicity on the Thursday (since we weren't officially celebrating the birthday that night) and it was mostly enjoyable. Clive Owen and Julia Roberts brought off a tricky script in fine form, managing to keep the human side of things to the fore in the midst of all the complications. For some reason Roberts was made to look less attractive than she can be; dark hair, awkward shoes (to walk in), little 'gloss'. A pity, really, because I think people still go to see her because she's got an unusual beauty, and that's worth promoting rather than undercutting.
Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson make the most of their venal roles and the absurdly ridiculous slow-motion fight at the opening of the movie.
The plot was complex and the revelation of the sting at the end a bit unfair on the audience. Plus there were a couple of cheats in the last stages, I think, and the lack of explanation for these slightly undermined what was otherwise a fairly well crafted script.
Stephanie Zacharek (one of my favourite online reviewers) writes in Salon.com
...the structure of "Duplicity" is its own worst enemy. In his efforts to keep us on our toes, Gilroy [the scriptwriter] tosses in so many plot reversals that what he's reversing ceases to matter -- we know it's only a matter of time before he'll turn the tables again, and thus the plot's alleged slipperiness becomes just another kind of predictability. Worst of all, Gilroy saves the biggest twist for the wrap-up at the end, leaving the wrong characters -- and the audience -- stranded and screwed. The overall effect is one of convoluted slickness.

Music as Mnemonic

I get a daily email from a crowd called Catapult Magazine. The emails are usually a quote from one of the short articles that appear in the magazine itself - and every week (I think) they send out a list of the articles. Some of the quotes are worth keeping track of and reflecting on, but I don't often read the articles through lack of time.
However, there was a quote that appeared today that sparked my interest in the article itself. It's by Josh Mosey, and is entitled, Music is mnemonic (as you can see from the title, I think it might be better as music as mnemonic, but that's a matter of opinion).
Like most articles on Catapult, it's fairly short; their articles always seem to me as though they're only just getting into their game when they stop.
Anyway, here's a quote from it:
A friend recently gave me his definitive mix album. It is made up of the songs that best represent his musical tastes. But it is more than that. What my friend gave me was a stained-glass window into his life experiences. This is why we relate well to people who share our musical preferences; we share bits of our soul.
John Mosey supposedly hosts a site called ThoughtCrimeMarketing, but the message after you've clicked on the link says it doesn't exist. Anyway, Josh exists, because this is a photo of him. Supposedly.

UPDATE MAY 2026: This post turned up in the one of the recently most read ones, and I hadn't read it since it came out and several people commented on the fact of Josh's reality and existence. [See below]. Anyway, Josh seems to have got rid of the ThoughtCrimeMarketing idea and now simply names the blog after his name. A sensible choice. 

Couple of McKean quotes

Sometimes a line in a book just strikes you as having a certain melifluousness about it. The following is an example.

God, mammon, and provincialism thus formed the sometimes ugly amalgam that was to be shaped into loyalty to the Synod of Otago & Southland.
pg 9

And another quote from the same book, this time in regard to Thomas Burns, one of the founding fathers of my home city, Dunedin, and a staunch Presbyterian.

There was considerable evidence that while many settlers frequently resorted to ‘cups o’ kindness yet’, Burns was not censorious about drunkenness. He remarked that in New Year celebrations of 1850 ‘some in their first-footing did not exhibit very sure footing.’
Pg 35

Both quotes from: The Church in a Special Colony: a History of the Presbyterian Synod of Otago & Southland 1866-1991, by John McKean.

Rehearsing the play

We're well into rehearsals now - three nights a week at present for those who are in any particular act.
I'd thought I was only in Acts One and Three, which meant I'd have a couple of weeks out in the middle of the rehearsals, and then one of the other cast members, who'd done the play before years ago, said, You're in the Second Act as well. We debated this a bit, because I was sure I'd checked, but of course she was right: I have a whole scene with just one other character in the middle of the Second Act. Which means more learning of lines, something I wasn't anticipating quite!
The trouble with line-learning these days is that the recording system is great still, but the playback isn't so hot.
And it doesn't help when you have (slightly drunken) lines like this:
Ah, yes. Always together...side by side....through all life's sunshine and storms....hand in hand...in good times and bad ones...with always a loving smile. [The other characters says a couple of words.] In sickness and in health....rich and poor....still together...side by side...hand in hand...through all life's sunshine and storms. At which point the other character, not surprisingly, tells him he's repeating himself!
However, it's a fun part, and certainly more enjoyable to do than the part I started out with.

And in a footnote regarding my post headed up Major Biosecurity Alert!!!, I noticed in the letters to the editor in the D Scene last week that someone else had thought using a Botany Department Masters student as a source of un-information was also a bit below the standards required of your average newspaper. The writer said that making a major headline out of a piece of non-news wasn't really doing the freebie paper any good. Hear, hear, I say!