Streep and Adams

I watched two movies over the last two nights which both starred Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. The first was Julie and Julia, the second, Doubt. The first might be a chick flick, by description, the secondly is a serious adaptation of a seriously successful stage play.
I'd heard some reports about J&J which made me think I didn't want to see it; in fact it turned out to be a delight - well, at least the Meryl Streep part of it did. Amy Adams played a thirtyish woman, rather self-centred, not terribly sure of herself, who is persuaded by her husband to blog about cooking her way through Julia Child's cookbook, in a year.
Streep plays Child about fifty years earlier, at a time when she was trying to find out what she wanted to do with her life. And did find out, most successfully, as it turned out.
There were quite a few connections between the two characters, (both have 'saints' for husbands) who never actually meet in the movie (though there was a hint towards the end that it might happen), and the thing flits back and forth between the two periods with considerable ease.
The revelation of the film, however, is Streep's performance. It could be described as a striking imitation of Child - and everything is there: the awkwardness because of her height, the delicious laugh, the nonsequiters, the mutterings and mumblings, the surprised little noises. But it's much more than an actress playing the part of a person most of us will have seen on TV at some point. Streep thoroughly inhabits the role, so that you seldom think about her 'performing'; she just scoops Child up holus bolus and presents her as she would have been if she herself had made a movie at the time.
Streep has always had an uncanny knack of getting the voice right in a movie - I can still 'hear' her in the Australian film she made about Lindy Chamberlain. She had that accent down pat, and managed to make herself Australian, if that's the word I'm looking for. And she's done it in other movies too. But her Julia Child is a marvel. And the scene with her sister, with both of them full of delight at seeing each other again, and full of fun and full of suggestions that there might be a 'tall' man for the sister to marry (she opts for a small bloke, as it happens) is one of the best scenes in the movie.
Amy Adams has a slightly thankless role; she's never going to get the sympathy Streep gains, and there are scenes where she's required to turn the audience off her. And does.
Her role in Doubt is similar: another slightly self-centred character who's either more naive than she looks, or just a little conniving. I wasn't sure what to think about her. Still, she's a good deal more sympathetic than the Streep character, who is the devil incarnate when she gets going. Sure, she has a couple of sympathy scenes with an elderly nun who's losing her sight, but these are utterly overwhelmed by her sheer awfulness in every other scene. The priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman in an ambiguous role that never quite clarifies where he's at) calls her the Dragon in an early scene. She's far more than that. She's prepared to lose her soul to prove her point, and possibly does.
The story, set in 1964, centres around a large Catholic school run by nuns, with a priest theoretically in charge, but pushed to one side by Sister Aloysius. She doesn't like anything he does, doesn't like his sermons (which are short and punchy), doesn't like his use of a ballpoint pen, his need to have three lumps of sugar in his tea, his longish fingernails, but most of all, his concern for the one black boy in the school. Sister A takes it into her head that the priest is homosexual, and perhaps he is - neither the movie nor Hoffman ever allow it to be definite - and that he's intent on corrupting the boy. She determinedly brings him down - at least as far as her limited realm is concerned (he's given a 'promotion' at another parish, and school) - and makes sure that her control-freak nature is satisfied to the max. But at the end....doubts.
The film has some marvellous sustained scenes lifted directly from the play, I guess, but otherwise is opened out naturally, without any sense that scenes are broken up just for the sake of it. I've seen some of it twice now, and it remained as powerful on a second viewing as on the first.
Incidentally, the Julie character in J&J is described in the credits as being 'now a writer.' Julie Powell's second book, Cleaving: a Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession, which details affairs she had after the first book's publication, as well as her experiences learning the butcher trade, was published November 30, 2009.
So much for her husband the saint....
Photo is of Julie Powell

Reality, truth, morals, values et al

Reading more of Fabric of Faithfulness, and noted this quote from Steve Turner's poem, Creed on the World.

We believe that each man must find the truth that

is right for him.

Reality will adapt accordingly.

The universe will readjust.

History will alter.

We believe that there is no absolute truth

excepting the truth

that there is no absolute truth. [quoted page 104]

and the statement of a graduate student :

They tell us that it is heresy to suggest the superiority of some value, fantasy to believe in moral argument, slavery to submit to a judgemtn sounder than your own. The freedom of our day is the freedom to devote ourselves to any value we please, on the mere condition that we do not believe them to be true. [page 107]

Quotes from Fabric of Faithfulness

Finally reading The Fabric of Faithfulness a few days before it's due to go back to the library, and came across some quotes I want to keep track of.

Milan Kundera: The devil laughs because God's world seems senseless to him, ; the angel laughs with joy because everything in God's world has its meaning.

Kundera again: Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God?

Those two quotes are from page 88 of the book. On page 90 we have one from Neil Postman:

In consideration of the disintegrative power of Technopoly, perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to give them a sense of ocherence in their sutdies, a sense of purpose, meaning and interconnectedness in what they learn. Modern secular education is failing not because it doesn't teach who Ginger Rogers, Norman Mailer and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social or intellectual centre. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a 'course of study' at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses 'skills.' In other words, a technocrat's ideal - a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills.

How that rings true with our own educational system, and may well be the reason - or at least part of it - as to why so many students at University behave like such fools.

Artists: failure and success

I like this quote, which was sent via Twitter from art shark's net:

An artist cannot fail; it is a success to be one. ~Charles Horton Cooley.


Charles Horton Cooley (born Aug. 17, 1864, Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S. died May 8, 1929, Ann Arbor) was an nAmerican sociologist ad the son of Thomas M. Cooley. He studied and went on to teach economics and sociology at the University of Michigan, and he was a founding member and the eighth president of the American Sociological Association.

He is perhaps most well known for his concept of the looking glass self, which is the concept that a person's self grows out of society's interpersonal interactions and the perceptions of others.

Bits about Boston

After starting life as something of a flop, Thornton Wilder's play, Our Town, won a Pulitzer Prize. How often does that happen, I wonder: something that's different (and it's certainly different to some of Wilder's other plays) fails to make the grade initially, yet ultimately outsmarts all its critics and indifferent audiences, and becomes a classic.

It's estimated that Our Town is playing somewhere in the world every night of the year, including Boston - the place where it was first a flop. (So if you're an actor looking for work in the Boston job search site, it's probably not a good idea to apply for a performance of this particular play. Just kidding!)

I've got the script of the play here at home, included in a book with a couple of other Wilder plays (The Matchmaker is one) but I've only ever seen the play performed once - back in the early sixties, when it was done here in Dunedin. (Obviously Dunedin is another place where it's not regarded highly enough to be performed regularly). It's a play, as I recall, that manages to be both universal and local, of its time and timeless.

Talking of scripts, I find it somewhat curious that what one director and his actors will do with a script can be entirely different to what another director and his cast will do with it. Yet broach such an idea to the musical world and they'll throw up their hands in horror. The composer's intentions must be honoured to the last staccato dot.

Yet a piece of music is really no different to a play script. Both are scripts, in fact, and orchestra A will actually play the thing differently to orchestra B, though the difference may not be entirely discernable to most people's ears. Interpreting the composer's intentions is a major work of art in itself, and while most decent musicians will do their best, they will produce something different to other musicians, and will even produce a different performance of the piece themselves from night to night.

Take myself as an example of both a composer and a musician 'interpreting' my own work. I never play any of my pieces the same way twice. In fact, I probably can't. So to be horrified that this musician or that isn't fulfilling the composer's intentions is, I think, on a par with insisting that an opera must be performed in the original language when sung before an audience who, for the most part, doesn't understand the language.

Yes, there's a certain beauty in the original sounds and the way they fit the music, but there's a certain dulling of the experience for people who don't understand what's being sung. I heard a radio broadcast of The Daughter of the Regiment on the weekend. Though the composer, Donizetti, was Italian, this piece was written in Paris, and has a French libretto.

The audience at the Met - that most snobbish of opera houses - listened politely to the rantings and ravings of the spoken dialogue with barely a titter. The cast (which included Kiri te Kanawa in a small non-singing role) did their utmost to give life to the French dialogue, but it was all wasted on the audience, who only laughed when there was some visual comedy. (Which was lost on us listeners!)

How much more successful would the piece have been if it had been sung and spoken in English, especially since French isn't the most attractive language to sing anyway. The photo to the left, (by Silver Jade Deutch) by the way, is from a production by the Boston Lyric Opera - and was performed in English. Good old Boston - you get some things right!

Smoking

When I was a child, at least three people smoked in the house I grew up in. One of them may have rolled his own, but the other two mostly smoked tailor-mades.

When my own children were small I worked for the local City Council at a time when smoking was allowed not only in the tea breaks but while people worked as well. Thus we had the boss sitting in his cubbyhole smoking; we had the young feller chain smoking; we had the two women smoking, one of them with some vile roll-yer-own stuff that threatened your health just with the smell of it. We had the old bloke smoking - he rolled his own too, and the smell of his ones vied strongly with those of the woman.

And then there were the two blokes in the next office, which was only partially disconnected from ours. They smoked. Fortunately it wasn't an entirely enclosed space, but I guess I came home reeking of smoke every day. Although at that time, because so many people still smoked, we probably didn't even notice it.

So far I haven't died from secondhand smoke.

Nowadays, people have to stand out in the cold smoking. Or in doorways. I noticed in the Guardian the other day that the English are thinking of even banning people smoking in doorways. No more lighting fixtures in the vestibules for the Poms!

When we were in England in 2007, the smoking ban had just come in (an MP got caught smoking with his head out of the train, claiming he was smoking outside!) We went into a riverside pub on one occasion, and the place so reeked of smoke we couldn't stay there. Decades of cigarette abuse had rendered the place almost impossible to make smell clean again. Of course NZ had been smoke-free for some time by then, so our nostrils had forgotten just how rancid old smoke is.

And talking of abuse, one of the Brits calls smoking in cars when children are travelling with the adult, 'child abuse'. Might that be just a little bit over the top? As is the idea that all cigarettes might be wrapped in plain brown paper packages to rid them of their distinctive advertising and visual appeal. Brown paper wrappers. Crikey.

For a brief period Hollywood succumbed to the disapproval of smoking, but not for long. Movie after movie these days has people smoking, and cigarette smoke floating through the air still makes a shot look particularly good. In fact, my suspicion is that proportionately more people smoke in movies than smoke in real life. Just as more people per head of cinematic population hop into bed at the drop of a hat (or anything else, if it comes to that) that would in real life. I think.

Photo by Hamed Masoumi

A 'real' picture of Google?

I'm not sure who put the following video together, but it's an extremely well-done graphical approach to information.



And whoops, at the end it has a sting in the tail!

Getting emotional

Being a person who finds tears arising in all manner of situations, I was naturally drawn to this piece by Frederick Buechner, which I found on Tim Keel's blog (unfortunately he doesn't tell us where it comes from.)

"You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you've never seen before. A pair of somebody's old shoes can do it...You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next."

Substitute the Pacific Ocean for the Atlantic or a photograph of my now deceased mother holding one of my sleeping grandchildren as a tiny baby for the old shoes, or a sloppy movie (in fact, not it doesn't even have to be sloppy) for the piece of music (not that I never get emotional about music), and you have a picture of what might cause me to be emotional any place any time.

Chasing the wrong prize

I wonder if real art comes when you build the thing that they don't have a prize for yet.

Seth Godin

Keaton and Chaplin and all

Someone has put a Buster Keaton montage up on You Tube. It's been set to the music of the Can Can. Whoever put it together had a good sense of the rhythm both of the movie clips and the music, and the thing works very well. There are moments from Keaton movies I've never even heard of, and an endless series of falls, spills, tumbles and slides. Was the man made of rubber? Or else he was a medley of broken bones.



A longer clip, from Charlie Chaplin's Limelight, is also on You Tube, and contrasts the two artists to the benefit of neither. Limelight was produced in 1952, by which time Chaplin was 63 (almost as old as I am now) and Keaton only a little younger at 57. Chaplin drags out a not-particularly funny scene, with him as a violinist and Keaton as his accompanist on the piano, to an almost enormous inordinate length. Everything is overdone and repeated, until you want to scream for help. Chaplin had always dragged things out - it was only in his big setpieces that he really became funny. Keaton built his sequences over dozens of scenes, in which he spent his life struggling against the forces of gravity and the cussedness of machines, houses, and all manner of other paraphenalia. The grand climax was a climax of dozens of little moments, all of them hilarious, and all related to the story overall. (Jacques Tati also built over a long stretch, but required his audience to wait with him until the sudden climax of things - which sometimes was over almost before you knew it - before giving us the sudden belly laugh.)

Keaton is much more generous, and his movies remain more watchable as a result. In the Limelight, he plays second fiddle (as it were) to Chaplain's main role; this means he gets to do the same thing several times as the camera cuts back to him, to do the obvious (standing on Chaplin's violin when it's left on the floor) or looking perplexed when the piano reacts against them both. He has one spectacular moment - wiggling around on the piano stool leads to it flinging him off - but Chaplin tops that by falling into the orchestra pit - landing out of sight, whereas Keaton does his fall in full view.

Chaplin can be redeemed, however, by watching a piece of silent movie nonsense in which he, Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Larry Semon, Fatty Arbuckle and Dizzy Daniels all appear. There's no story to it; just a bunch of inept players causing havoc out on a pretty scruffy golf course. Here Chaplin is only seen in short scenes in which his timing with a bunch of golf balls is impeccable.

The Playmaker

There's no doubt about it, when it comes to the world of books, not all of them are certified diamonds. I finally gave up on Can You Forgive Her? by Anthony Trollope. Its meandering pace, its lack of focus in the characters, who seemed to all be doing their own thing without relation to one another, and in particular, the dreary heroine whom we were supposed to forgive, I assume, all conspired to make me put the book down and not be in a hurry to pick it up again.

On the other hand, I picked a book off my shelves recently that I'd had for a while, and have read it fairly speedily. This was The Playmaker, by Thomas Kenneally, the Australian author. His books can be quite uneven, (I read, but loathed, The People's Train - one reviewer said it combines a fluency of narrative with woodenness of thought, and enjoyed a much less well-known book called A Victim of the Aurora). He's best known for Schindler's Ark, and tends to write books that include real historical people.

In spite of its readability, The Playmaker is odd. It's situated in Sydney when the place was still nothing more than a site for deported criminals and the Marines who guarded them. The Playmaker is one of the officers and has been 'commanded' to put on a play in celebration of the King's birthday (whether the King is actually still alive is something they have no knowledge of). He - Ralph - chooses Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer, and casts a bunch of the felons (or 'lags' and 'she-lags' as they're know throughout the book) to play the parts. The book works its way backwards and forwards in time, starting later rather than earlier, and we see the play progressing, and the lives of the various 'immigrants' interacting with each other, and with the ab origines (as Kenneally insists on writing it, no doubt to give some authentic flavour to the look of the words.)

Ralph and his cast were all real people, and at the end of the book Kenneally tells what happened to each one...as far as he's able to. Some of them led extraordinary lives after we leave them.

Kenneally is a brilliant researcher (or has brilliant researchers working for him). He's able to weave together historical reality and fictional episodes with a good deal of skill, and to be imaginative when it comes to filling in the gaps, or recreating the period, or adding to what little is known. However, I'm not sure that he's a great storyteller, at least in terms of structuring his books. As I've posted on more than a few occasions, storytelling structure and I are not the best of bedfellows. Nevertheless I can still see when a book hasn't hit the mark in terms of structure, even though I'm not always able to put my finger on what would have worked better.

The Playmaker's climax is weak, for instance. After a long haul through the book, the two intersecting events that mark the end of it don't gel. They're just annoying in the way they're put together. The climax should be the fact that the play has got off the ground and has hit the mark with its audience. But Kenneally chooses to add in the capture of one of the lags who has been on the run, and has been stealing food from the community. He's brought into the barracks where the play is being presented and his presence interrupts the whole mood, not only of the play, but of the book. As does the unexpected death of one of the other characters.

Equally, the shifting back and forth in time doesn't really seem to contribute greatly to the impetus of the book, although it's less of a flaw than the seemingly-botched climax. (The People's Train is infinitely worse - it has no climax whatsoever.)

Presumably it was intentional that the book should be brutal in its descriptions: not only of the various hangings and beatings that take place (not just of lags, but of criminal Marines as well), but also of the sexual encounters most of the characters have at some point. Sex pervades the book; I thought of putting it aside more than once, because of the way everything is coloured by sex. There are occasional oddities: for example, when a supply ship finally arrives, Kenneally tells us that a sudden storm strikes it as it enters the harbour. This is done in about one sentence, and then things carry on as though this had really made little difference to the crew or the people waiting for the supplies.

In spite of all the above, there are some great passages of writing in the book. The expedition to find the aborigines in order to get a cure for one of their number who has fallen sick is strikingly done, and the way in which Ralph experiences his increasing sense of creating something that comes alive through his criminal cast is also good.

Many years ago I read Kenneally's Three Cheers for the Paraclete, a book that's a lot less turgid than some of his later work (Wikipedia describes it as a comic novel), and which was generally a lot more enjoyable. His later books, however, seem to thrive on frequent obscurities that leave the reader struggling. Maybe it's a result of winning the Man Booker prize once too often.

Driving economically

Getting a decent car insurance quote can be a bit of a nightmare. You think you've got it all sussed, and suddenly some better deal comes up....or does it? Trying to go into all the details and figure out whether A will give you this or B will take it away, or C will do it in a different way or D will just decide the whole thing's a waste of time and charge you even more can be a minefield.

It's a bit like life in general: you decide to go for something and all these other possibilities arise. It's a 'Life of Possibilities' as some group whose name I think is Dismemberment Plan sings. Now there's a name to conjure with.

Alice in Wonderland

Before I went to see Alice in Wonderland, yesterday, a friend told me that Johnny Depp had modelled his 'look' on Elijah Wood, particuarly the eyes (in the movie, Depp seems to have these permanently wide open). If he hadn't mentioned it, I never would have given it a thought. To me, Depp just plays yet another of his eccentric characters, and whether he's based it on someone else's persona or not hardly seems to matter.

We had the pleasure of watching the movie in 3D, which certainly gave it an extra touch of extravagance. Without that, I'm not sure what I would have thought of the movie. It's overstated in a typically Tim Burton way: everything is extreme, and it's full of extraneous detail that even with 3D you don't have time to catch up with. And the characters, which start out as eccentric anyway, are heightened in this regard by all the possibility of modern CGI.

Thus Helena Bonham Carter (the Red Queen) is not only smaller than normal, but also has a larger head. Crispin Glover (who was, of course, the inept father in the Back to the Future series) here plays a full-blooded villain, whose size is just a little out of sync with the Red Queen's. Anne Hathaway is painfully beautiful, almost a mockery of herself, and yet still plays against her usual naive, sweet screen personality. Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter really is mad; but in this world that's hardly noticeable.

The film opens with Alice as a six-year-old, being assured by her father (played by New Zealander Marton Csokas, who suddenly has a bunch of movies in the pipeline after seeming to be invisible for two or three years) that she isn't mad having nightmares - the whole world is mad. Eleven years later and Alice is due to be engaged to a nauseous Lord, and is surrounded by poncy English nobility. She breaks free of this unpleasant crowd, falls down a hole and into Wonderland, where there's some dispute as to whether she really is Alice, since she doesn't seem to remember anything about the place. (Shades of Hook.)

All the old characters are there, and possibly some new ones. I'm not au fait enough with the Lewis Carroll stories to be sure whether everyone who appears here is in the books. The Jabberwocky turns up as the Red Queen's 'champion' for a major fight with Alice at the end, something that isn't strictly Carollian (an unnamed boy despatches the beast in the second Alice book), and various other liberties are taken. Of course, it is eleven years later, so no doubt things will have changed. However, looking at synopses of the original stories, it appears that Burton and his scriptwriter have pulled in characters from both the books without regard to their original places in the stories.

Mia Wasikowska doesn't make the most exciting Alice. She's a bit pale and wan, and lacking in energy somehow. Even her fight with the Jabberwocky at the end is rather tame, and it's more than a little surprising that she manages to overcome him. And when she returns to real life, much more sure about herself, she still seems as though she's missing something in the way of strength. I found her the least believable part of the movie altogether, which is rather ironic.

And CGI has come so far that we almost fail to be impressed with what happens in movies now. Avatar (which I saw in 2D) managed to impress because it viewed the world in an original way. Alice doesn't quite do that. The story is fairly tame (and there are some odd holes in it), and while the CGI really is superb, it's mostly things that we've seen before....except that it was in 3D, which made it rather more exciting. (The sense of being able to reach out and touch the butterfly that hovers in front of you right towards the end is extraordinary.)

We're becoming blase about what can be done in the movies, regrettably. I saw Fantastic Mr Fox not long ago, and it was wonderful....yet.... How can we capture that sense of freshness when we come to the movies now? We've been spoiled silly by what's possible.

Sixty Six

The other night I discovered that we had a DVD on our shelves called Sixty Six, a movie I hadn't even heard of. My wife had bought it at some point unbeknowns to me.

It turned out to be oddball, funny and quite original. And it had Helena Bonham Carter in one of her 'mother' roles (as in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), which was a bonus. She has considerably more to do in this than in 'Charlie' and is a somewhat tougher mother (and Jewish). Eddie Marsen was the Jewish father - he's an actor you seldom know about in spite of his strange face - he was Inspector Lestrade in the recent Sherlock Holmes, and has appeared in plenty of movies, but is usually one of the lesser characters.

In this movie he plays the downtrodden of two brothers who run a grocer's shop that, early in the piece, is wiped out by a supermarket opening just up the road (all their customers abandon them in spite of years of hard work). His brother is full of jokes, full of beans, full of life. A go-getter within his own small sphere. Eddie's character is the opposite in every way, and a little eccentric, to boot.

The main character - and the narrator - is a boy just coming up to his Barmitzvah. He's planning on having the most amazing Barmitzvah ever, with plenty of presents, and lots of people. Unfortunately, it coincides with the final of the Football World Cup. England shouldn't even get in the final...but it does, and young Bernie's Barmitzvah is pretty much down the tubes.

Bernie (played by Gregg Sulkin) has everything going against him, just like his father. He has a snazzy older brother (though he's not actually very bright, unlike Bernie), he gets asthma when he's stressed, he's hopeless at sports, and so on. But he's a clued-up kid, and doesn't intend to let disappointment get him down. The crisis, of course, brings out the best in all the family members.

The story is supposedly based on director Paul Weiland's own family circumstances, but it's very likely the family has been a little eccentricated for the movie. Weiland seems to have spent most of his career working with Mr Bean - which will explain some of the humour in this movie, though by no means all - and overall he has a sure hand on the direction.

Small scale, not particularly action-packed, this is a gem of a movie. I'm surprised I've never come across it before...!

Weight loss and ghost writers

I've never tried weight loss drinks, though a couple of members of my family have, and found them effective. As with all diet approaches, it's a matter of keeping the weight off once you've lost it! Certainly the drinks helped. But motivation to lose weight helps even more.

On another tack entirely, I came across this intriguing paragraph yesterday:

The film’s plot is also controversial, based on a disputed literary theory that [Alexandre] Dumas’s anonymous white collaborator, Auguste Maquet, should get much of the credit for the plots and drafts of Dumas’ most famous works. "Possibly for commercial reasons, they are white-washing Dumas in order to blacken him further," said the Council of Black Associations. Ironically, the term in French for a ghostwriter is a “nègre littéraire (a literary Negro),” and ghostwriting is called “negritude.”

The paragraph comes from an article about a new film on the life of Dumas, in which white actor, Gerard Depardieu, plays the writer. However, as Dumas once responded to a critic: “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, sir, my family starts where yours ends.”

I don't know that I've ever been aware that Dumas was a 'figure of colour' as the French apparently put it. He's not high on the list of authors I've read, although I found The Count of Monte Cristo surprisingly absorbing. All 900 small-print pages of it!

However, there's been a bit of a hue and cry over Depardieu playing him in a film, and the question has been asked: aren't there any actors of colour in France who can play him, and, will black actors be allowed to play white roles? I'm sure there are, and possibly they could be, but Depardieu is one of France's great drawcards when it comes to promoting films....for better or worse.

However, all the controversy aside, I think the most intriguing thing I found about this article was the language used for the ghost-writer: nègre littéraire (a literary Negro),” and ghostwriting: “negritude.

Isn't language the oddest thing? I never ceased to be amazed at the way we use words.

Back to my first thought: perhaps Dumas could have profited a little by those famous weight loss drinks - if they'd been around in his day. Or perhaps, like so many other people of weight in the 19th century, he didn't consider it a big issue.

The loss of storytelling

On the Insatiable Moon blog there's this comment from filmmakers Tom Burstyn and Barbara Sumner

At the Berlin festival one thing became obvious – we’re a little old to be embarking on what is a new career for us both. Young people should be making low-budget documentaries. Passion and obsession should be the preserve of those with energy to spare. We’re grandparents and we like to sleep, while we really don’t do well in the two-star accommodation kindly provided by the festival.

And yet we found ourselves repeatedly in conversations about our increasingly technical world – which is clearly the preserve of the young – and the loss of storytelling. At dinner one producer wondered if in fact we were in the grip of a cultural autism. As she saw it, the more technology (and thus budget) a film requires the more it appeals to and tunes the left-brain. And that’s perhaps what I hated most about Avatar – all that film wizardry in service of itself, instead of story.

The trick of course is to harness the fantastic benefits of the digital world to the needs of the heart to make intense, emotionally connected films. That’s certainly our goal. And one of the benefits of going to Berlin with This Way of Life was the solidifying of that purpose. Vive l’obsession!

The documentary, This Way of Life features Peter Karena, his wife Colleen, their six children and many horses who live almost wild in the stunning beauty of New Zealand's rugged Ruahine Mountains. Until, that is, Peter's escalating battle with his own father has profound consequences for the whole clan.

PS - If you want to win a piece of film history, go to the Trade Me auction featuring a vehicle used both for transport of crew and stars in the movie, The Insatiable Moon. (Pictured at left)

Finding our way back to ethics

...we have lost a way of thinking and talking about some very important things. The preoccupation with market ­efficiency and economic growth has loomed so large that other activities, and other ­values, have been subordinated to its disciplines. "You can't buck the market," said Margaret Thatcher, and no government has disagreed since. It was the adage that was used to justify soaring pay for the highest earners and stagnant earnings for the low-paid. The ­market ruled, and questions of injustice, honour or integrity were all secondary or irrelevant.

A poll for the World Economic Forum last month found in 10 G20 countries that two-thirds of respondents attributed the credit crunch and its ensuing economic recession to a crisis of ethics and values. Sir Thomas Legg declared in his final report on MPs' expenses that there had been a failure of ethics. There's a widespread perception that social norms have subtly and gradually shifted towards the centrality of ­personal self-interest. As long as it's legal, it's legitimate; no further ­individual judgment is necessary.

Madeleine Bunting in an article entitled To tackle the last decades' myths, we must dust off the big moral questions, published in The Guardian, 21st Feb, 2010.

Bright Star

Jane Campion has annoyed me as a movie-maker for many years. I thought The Piano was highly overrated - well-made, but all rather silly. The only good thing it did was introduce me to Holly Hunter, who later made such an incredible job of Mrs Incredible in The Incredibles.

Campion's earlier movie, An Angel at My Table had come off better, because she held to the New Zealand focus of the book, and Janet Frame really was a character who suffered (but also triumphed). The film that annoyed me most of all was Campion's version of The Portrait of a Lady, in which she not only turned the self-assured Isabel Archer into a total wimp (Nicole Kidman at her most pathetic), but made all the male characters venomous and domineering. And allowed John Malkovich to do his most extreme version of his own persona. He was totally out of control in this movie.

Henry James' book had been one I really enjoyed; to have it turned into a suffering-woman piece of nonsense, was insulting to James - and to the viewers. (And don't talk to me about the opening in which a random bunch of females sit in trees staring at us. Absolute piffle.)

I haven't watched any of her movies since, but I was nevertheless interested to read what people had to say about her latest, Bright Star, in which the story of John Keats becomes somewhat eclipsed by the story of Fanny Brawne.

The reviewer who most interested me on the subject was Stephanie Zacharek, a writer I read as much for her wit as for her view of a movie. I don't always find Zacharek and I see eye to eye, so I found what she had to say about Campion and her movies intriguing (and affirming of my own opinion, of course!):

I feared I was in for a treatise on the drudgery and heartache of the lives of women, a theme Campion has visited and revisited too many times for my taste. In fact, "Bright Star" is the first Jane Campion I've ever liked, and that includes "Sweetie" and the oft-praised "The Piano." I've always found her movies pretentious and heavily annotated, like the work of a theory-bound academic who fills pages and pages with copious, scribbled footnotes. For me, Campion's filmmaking has always groaned under the weight of her recurring "Oh, how we women suffer!" message.
But "Bright Star" has no obvious agenda. It appears that Campion was simply struck by the tenderness, and the tragedy, of the story, and that has freed something in her storytelling style.

Well, there you go. "Pretentious and heavily-annotated." Yup, that pretty much sums up a good deal of Campion. So it looks as though Bright Star might be worth a visit. Maybe. I still haven't quite got over what she did to Isabel Archer.

Incidentally, Ben Whishaw, who plays Keats, was familiar to me when I saw his face in the promo photos. I realised he'd played a wet young man who was sent to a harsh British prison for a murder he either did or didn't do (I never actually got to see the end of the thing) in a series called Criminal Justice. I first saw this mini-series being advertised in Britain when I was there in late 2007 - I think. Anyway, it turned up in New Zealand last year, but I missed bits of it - the beginning, and the end (!), and found Whishaw's soppy performance a real turn off.

Talk about suffering women - Whishaw would have done as good a job as Kidman in Campion's Portrait. Sorry, Ben.

Orwell and Arthritis

Over the last few months, I've often wondered if I was getting arthritis in my right forefinger, particularly, and sometimes in the left. The pain could be most noticeable when I used a computer mouse for any length of time (hence I swap from right to left from work to home), and especially when I did any hard practice on the piano.

But most curiously, the pain seems to have gone the way of many other unidentified pains. It just isn't there any more. Let's hope it stays that way and I don't have to natural arthritis relief (or even any unnatural.)

Pain is a curious thing: I fell over three weekends ago and badly hurt my upper ribcage area - may even have fractured a rib. Coped with it for a week as it calmed down, and then suddenly it was back with a vengeance. Doctor gave me some strong anti-inflammatory tablets, and voila! the pain was gone to a degree that I could once more lie on that side at night.

When I went to the doctor the pain had extended down underneath the original sore area, and around to my back. (Which is why I was getting a little concerned.) After a few days of anti-inflammatories there was nothing except the slightest tension if I squashed my chest area in any way.

And then last Friday, the extra pain came back to the degree that I spent a good deal of the day feeling queasy - even the anti-inflammatory didn't help. Couldn't get comfortable. And yet, yesterday, I woke up feeling fine again and did a day's work in the garden with my wife.

Ain't pain a strange thing?

On another painful front, I've just read in our local paper an article that's been reprinted from the Philadelphia Inquirer, where it's called (rather oddly) The towering George Orwell, 60 years after his death. In our paper it was called, Sixty years on, Orwell's legacy endures, which to my ear has a better ring. The article is by John Rossi, professor emeritus of history (not English) at La Salle University. Regrettably Professor Rossi includes in his article 'six rules of good writing' that Orwell had proposed in an article entitled, Politics and the English Language.

I say regrettably, because I don't for a moment expect that Orwell thought he'd still be being quoted on these 'rules' umpteen years later. And worse, they fit in comfortably to that school of thought which is particularly prevalent in the US of A that thinks these six rules actually tell you something about how to write.

Here they are. They're commonsensical, as Rossi suggests, but they're also limiting. And they smack of Ernest Hemingway, whose own writing followed these kind of rules to such a degree that he cut out anything that might have made his writing interesting.

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech that you are used to seeing in print.

Never use a long word when a short word will do.

If it is possible to cut out a word, always cut it out.

Use the active rather than passive voice.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

Rule number six is typical of Orwell: "Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous."

I want to scream every time I hear some writer proclaiming: never use the passive voice, when what they should be saying is: there is a time and place for everything under heaven, the passive voice included. Some of the greatest writers in the language use it without blinking an eyelid.

Equally, cutting out words is the job of an editor in a newspaper, not a writer. Yes, there is a time within your writing when you should go through and chop out extraneous words, but what counts as extraneous is a matter of style - and your style may require that so-called extraneous word.

There's a certain value in being creative with new metaphors, figures of speech. But spending your entire time trying to find new ways of saying things that have been said in every possible way already is time-wasting in terms of getting on with your writing. That 'rule' is a real handicap to a person trying to get a novel off the ground.

Never use a long word when a short one will do. Okay, that's fine if your style is totally circumlocutional. If it's not, a good mix of short and long brings variety, and allows your reader to discover new words.

'Rule' number five is nonsense: jargon is essential in some circumstances; the proper scientific word may be the only one that exactly describes what you're writing about. Foreign languages do have some good words. And considering that a large percentage of our language consists of foreign words we've borrowed over some of the last two thousand years or longer, why fuss about it now? You're going to swap a perfectly good 'foreign' word for an English one? Better make sure the latter really is English, then.

Pooh to Prof Rossi, and pooh to George. Too many rules (even six) makes Jack a dull boy.

Prof Rossi quotes another of Orwell's lines: "Good prose is like a windowpane. It hides nothing." Piffle. Good prose tells you exactly what it wants to tell you. Which may not be everything. And Prof Rossi claims in his article that 'In many ways, Orwell's essays had the greatest impact on modern prose. He almost single-handedly invented a new cultural artifact - the serious essay about a seemingly unimportant topic.'

Obviously Mr Rossi has never read G K Chesterton, who could make an argument out of a straw hat and still wear it home.

The HitTail List - first count for 2010

It's very annoying when you have an idea for a great post in your head and somewhere during the course of the day it vanishes. Of course, I know I should have written it down before I forgot it, but this time I didn't. Some master post gone for good.

Meanwhile, it's that time again: the checking-up-on-of-the-HitTail-Top-Ten.

Of course there are plenty of old favourites here (sorry, acne treatment reviews hasn't made it yet, for all those who think it should have). In order, they are:

1. athletes hand - sans apostrophe, as you might expect.
2. mike crowl - surprise, surprise - and sans capitals.
3. the great divorce notes - a perennial. One of these days I'm going to put some real notes about the Great Divorce on here.
4. googleads.g.doubleclick.net - a total newcomer, which meant nothing to me. I checked it out on the Net, and it brings up the I'm Feeling Lucky page on Google. Hmm. Can I really have been the end result of so many lucky searches?
5. nintendo jewellery - with jewellery spelt correctly, you'll notice.
6. brent stavig - our old friend whose main claim to fame now seems to be the fact that he turns up on my blog!
7. james berardinelli - considering that I haven't mentioned James' name for some time on here, it's interesting that he still gets on this list.
8. karl maugham - only because I misspelt his name so often.
9. shrinking shirts - a constant problem for people, obviously.
10. athletes fingers - just in case you missed number one on the list.

Those who only made it into the top twenty are a real mixed bunch:

mikecrowlsscribblepad.blogspot.com - why would anyone actually search on that?
athlete hand
postile
lesley martin euthanasia
the great divorce chapter summaries
henry lewis gates
here lies eric ambler
religious jeans
crowl
john gray philosopher

I know I've written about all these, but surely other people have too? I'm not going to go further down the list, but Chrissy Popadics only made it to 21st place this time, and how do you pronounce Boise, 22 - and 26 and 28 and at least once in each of the next decades as well. The people of Boise must wonder why the name of their town is such a problem for the rest of the world. Maybe it's time to change it.

Cliches

Just found this delightful compilation of cliches in one of the reviews of The Dictionary of Cliches. What's most interesting is how old many of these well-worn phrases are.

'Tom, Dick, and Harry' (1604) were 'fit as a fiddle' (1616), though Wally was 'dead as a doornail' (1350). No one thought about Wally 'in the heat of the battle' (1588) because it was 'do or die' (1809) since they all knew they 'bit off more than they could chew' (1878). Wally was as 'hard as nails' (1837), and had the 'bird's eye view' (18th century) perched, as he was, 'out on a limb' (1897). They agreed that Wally should have seen 'that snake in the grass' (13th century) or 'smelled a rat' (1550) when Sam 'cast the first stone' (Bible reference) toward him. However, Wally always expected a 'square deal' (1633) because 'a friend in need is a friend indeed' (1275), and he had known Sam since 'time immemorial' (1189). Of course, 'money is the root of all evil' (Timothy 6:10) and Sam was 'rotten to the core' (1718), so it should not be a surprise that he was also 'a cold hearted' (1606) 'eager beaver' (18th century) who 'shot {Wally} to hell' (1706) 'in cold blood' (1608). Tom, Dick, and Harry could 'go along for the ride' (1960) or 'explore every avenue' (1890) so they could 'divide the spoils' (Isaiah 12:25). They were, after all, living in 'a den of thieves (Matthew 21:13), and Wally was up there 'on cloud nine' (1950).

The paragraph was put together by Victoria Tarrani

Orson Welles - Citizen Kane

Let's mention this early in the piece before I get carried away on my main topic. The best eye cream for dark circles is a subject I know nothing about, but that doesn't stop me writing a little. I'd be a bit surprised if cream could remove dark circles, but someone obviously thinks it can, and says so. So there.

I've been reading a book by a couple of Frenchmen called Orson Wells at Work. (It's a Phaidon publication, so there are heaps of photographs, and the weight of the book is such that you can't read it except by lying it on a table.)

I've read a Welles biography in the past and it struck me that he was both talented to the max - and chaotic to the same degree. Whether it was that he just took on far too much continually, with expectations that he'd finish everything (he rarely did), he left behind him not just a legacy of some superb movies but a sense of actors, technicians and others who both loved and hated him because he was so unreliable. He was reliable unto himself, but that isn't quite the way the world works for the rest of us.

The consequence of his chaos was that some great movies were never finished (Don Quixote is the best known example, but there were several others), some movies that would have been greater were undercut by producers who couldn't stand the strain of waiting for him to finish his work (or were running out of money, something Welles himself did constantly), and Welles was also forced to act in a number of second-rate movies (especially in Europe, where he lived in a kind of self-imposed exile for many years) instead of in movies in which he could have been brilliant.

The book goes into detail about the production not only of the better known movies, but of all the others that didn't quite survive Welles' approach to work. As he grew older he filmed in a more and more haphazard way - haphazard to the rest of us; Welles knew exactly what he was doing at all times, and film he might shoot in three different countries is put together (as in Othello, for example) as though it was all shot in one location. Often the actors would never do the reverse shot of a scene - Welles would use a double in a different country (often with a different crew) and finish the scene that way. He would dub all sorts of actors, famous and not famous - often with his own voice! When the producers complained that the audience would never understand the Scottish accents he'd got his cast to use in Macbeth, he dubbed practically the entire film again, using not only his own voice, but in some cases the voice of one cast member for another. He treated the film and the sound tracks and the music score as items to be set against each other, rather then necessarily fitted together as they were originally intended. Thus a composer might find that his carefully crafted score, timed to the second, would be chopped and cut and splattered across the film in bits. It worked, but it wasn't quite what the composer thought would happen.

Anyway, as a result of reading this book, I had another look at Citizen Kane, which I've had on DVD for a while but not got around to seeing again. It remains extraordinary. Okay, 'Rosebud,' the thing everyone is trying to discover throughout the movie, is a bit of a McGuffin in that in the end it barely matters what it was - it's only a hook to hang the story on. And it may not help to know the 'secret' of Rosebud. Knowing that takes away a bit of the suspense. But there's so much else to admire, that this is a small matter.

The fact that this movie was achieved by a young man of 24, who'd had little experience of making movies (the one he began with RKO before this was never completed) is astonishing. Even today, after nearly seventy years, it stands up strong and solid, with little sense about it that it's a product of its time. In fact, it isn't a product of its time. It was so far ahead of its time that it took other movies years to catch up.

I'd forgotten the extent of the production values in it: this is no cheap wet-behind-the-ears production. It gets the full Hollywood treatment, with massive sets and crowds of people, and heaps of 'stuff' throughout (all part of Kane's extravagance). And then there's Welles' performance in the middle of it (matched by several others of the Mercury Players who were brought into movies for the first time). Even in the 'newsreel' at the beginning of the film, we see him age back and forth from youngish to mature to old, and he does it without a sense that he's performing as a young man, trying to be old. He just does it. The make-up is there, but it's the movement that's right. In the scene late in the movie when he smashes up his departed wife's boudoir, it isn't a young man going hammer and tongs at destruction: it's an old man. He struggles to lift certain things, gets caught up in a power cord, has to have more than one attempt at pulling things off the wall, has to exert effort in order to achieve what he wants. A young man would sail around the room with ease. This man can't.

In this film Welles hasn't got into his later approach of general chaos: here the script is well-organised, the dialogue is actually spoken by the actors and things work as they would in a 'normal' movie. Except that all the time Welles is trying out stuff: when the reporter goes to read Thackford's diary about Kane in the former's monumental library, everything is overwhelming: the space, the thick walls, the huge doors, and so on.

The scene when Kane's second wife is debuting at the opera is justly famous for the apparent slide of the camera up away from the stage into the flies and finally up to where a couple of stagehands are standing (telling each other that the singer stinks). Welles is like Hitchcock, always experimenting to see what he can get away with, what he can try that will be out there, beyond what everyone else has done. We've become so used to so many of the things that were innovations in Citizen Kane that when we see the film afresh we don't recognise them as innovations. But they were. And the Phaidon book brings them to the fore in considerable detail.

Praise the Lord!

When I worked in the bookshop I used to get a regular ezine from Bob Burroughs on music for church worship - and quite a bit more. We corresponded occasionally, and at one point he sent me a copy of each of the CDs he'd produced with the Florida Baptist Singing Men and Women. I used to play them often in the shop. The choir(s) are rich in sound, and have a superb ability to be strong or soft when needed. (That might sound obvious, but not every choir can do it - and this choir is all the more extraordinary in that it consists of volunteers from cities all over Florida.).

Backing the choir is a great band, with excellent brass in particular. The CD I've been listening to again recently is simply called Praise the Lord!

I like a lot of the tracks, but there's one that always amazes me. In it, for a few brief phrases a tenor called Rhon Carter sings. He comes sweeping in across the choir starting way up high, and climbs still higher. Not only that he's singing a phrase with the words, 'Whom shall I send?' and the word 'send' is at the end of the phrase and higher than the rest. Yet he soars up there without seeming effort, and sings what is an awful word to sing up high with consummate ease. Just wonderful.

It's only when I look on Google for this choir that I find that 'singing men/women' is a common title for choirs in the States.

On a less positive note, the Dell computer I ordered on the 19th of January has gone AWOL. The printer arrived a couple of weeks ago, but nothing else has come in. I've been in touch with a woman by email who's supposed to be handling the problem personally, but I haven't heard a peep out of her today, even though she promised some information. It's becoming hard to digest it as time continues to pass by. It was only when I started to make a fuss that anyone did anything. Prior to that the order had got to the point of vanishing off the horizon altogether. Scary, when you've parted out cash in advance.

To give them credit, the last time we ordered a computer from them (the laptop) it arrived safe and sound on time and has worked perfectly since. So will this one, no doubt, once it gets here....finally!

The meaning of Winnie-the-Pooh

Is this at last, then, the 'meaning of Winnie-the-Pooh: the falseness of every overtly proffered ideal? If you suppose so, I want you to listen carefully from here on. A strong misreading is still a reading, with all its loose ends tucked nearly out of sight. Since meaning, as one of "Milne's" [Milne in quotes because it's already been proved he didn't exist] poems proclaims, '"isn't really anywhere!/It's somewhere else instead," the meaning of nonmeaning must itself be deconstructed if we are to keep pace with the text's self-dissolution.

Jonathan Culler once memorably defined this task for us. A critic's role, he wrote, is that of "sawing off the branch on which one is sitting":

One can and may continue to sit on a branch while sawing it. There is no physical or moral obstacle if one is willing to risk the consequences. The question then becomes whether one will succeed in sawing it clear through, and where and how one might land. A difficult question: to answer one would need a comprehensive understanding of the entire situation - the resilience of the support, the efficacy of one's tools, the shape of the terrain - and an ability to predict accurately the consequences of one's work.

The last quote comes from the [real] book by Culler: On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
The pseud stuff before it comes from page 11 of the satirical book, Postmodern Pooh, by Frederick Crews, (pictured above) writing at this point in the book under the name of Felicia Marronnez.

Facing the Fear

An extract from an interview with Seth Godin.
The interviewer was Gretchen Rubin on The Happiness Project - a blog with the subtitle: A chronicle of my attempts to test-drive every tip, principle and scientific study that promotes happiness. (Hmmm - happiness is scientific?)

Back to Seth:

"There are two secrets to creativity:

1. Understand that there's no gene for it. No cultural or family history required. Creativity isn't a gift from above, it's something that everyone is capable of.


2. The only thing that prevents your creativity from showing up is fear. Fear of being laughed at, fear of being wrong, fear of seeming uninformed. So many creative exercises and habits revolve around overcoming that fear.

For me, the single best thing you can do to become more creative is to be wrong more often. Creative people are wrong all the time (look at Apple's long string of failures). The goal is to create a safe place to be wrong, a way to be wrong without destroying yourself. The more wrong I am, the more often, the better I seem to get at being creative."

I can certainly agree with Seth about the fear aspect: it's very easy to think 'no one will like this - I'm going to make a fool of myself [especially when it comes to acting, or performing my own music] - this stuff isn't as good as so-and-so's' - and more. It's something you have to keep stepping up on top of and ignoring.

Global Warming going down the tubes?

In the light of the ongoing debacle over the global warming scandals, a long quote from an article by Muriel Newman of the NZ Centre for Political Research.

The Christchurch Press reported that the 32-strong delegation of New Zealand politicians and officials who attended the Copenhagen climate fiasco has cost taxpayers at least $600,000.[5] Under the Official Information Act I have been trying to find out from government agencies the cost to taxpayers of funding officials to fly all around the world for the last five years endlessly talking about ways to reduce carbon emissions and negotiate a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. While all of the information has not yet been received, it looks likely to be at least $2 million. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of taxpayer funded costs that have resulted from the government’s blind faith in the IPCC reports. Instead of seriously questioning the scientific findings that underpin those reports, to see whether they were robust enough to base complex and expensive public policy on (especially as there has been no lack of local independent criticism of the whole IPCC process) the government has exposed the New Zealand public to gross exploitation by climate alarmists.

All of this leads to questions over the integrity of our own National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA). NIWA scientists featured in the Climategate emails and in early January NIWA came out with the astonishing claim that the last decade was the warmest on record. This finding, based on measurements of fractions of a degree, helped support the cause of catastrophic global warming. However it has now been revealed that even though their raw data shows no warming, NIWA has been adjusting their temperature records to produce results that show a warming trend. When asked for the details of how they make their adjustments they have astonishingly had to admit that they don’t have it![6] The fact that their data has been massaged might also explain why NIWA has found warming down here in New Zealand, while Professor Phil Jones, the Director of the Climatic Research Unit and the scientists at the centre of the Climategate scandal, has just confirmed in an interview with the BBC that there has been no significant global warming for the last 15 years![7]

See the rest of the article - Climate Change in Tatters

Buechner on Marriage

I've been reading Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark again, after a break of several years. It’s an alphabetised collection of thoughts on various topics. Though I might add some of them here (and maybe on my other ‘quote’ blog, The Daily Writer).

Here’s the one on marriage:

They say they will love, comfort, honour each other to the end of their days. They say they will cherish each other and be faithful to each other always. They say they will do these things not just when they feel like it but even – for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health – when they don’t feel like it at all. In other words, the vows they make at a marriage could hardly be more extravagant. They give away their freedom. They take on themselves each other’s burdens. They bind their lives together in ways that are even more painful to unbind emotionally, humanly, than they are to unbind legally. The question is: what do they get in return?

They get each other in return. Assuming they have any success at all in keeping their rash, quixotic promises, they never have to face the world quite alone again. There will always be the other to talk to, to listen to. If they’re lucky, even after the first passion passes, they still have a kindness and patience to depend on, a chance to be patient and kind. There is still someone to get through the night with, to wake into the new day beside. If they have children, they can give them, as well as each other, roots and wings. If they don’t have children, they each become each other’s child.

They both still have their lives apart as well as a life together. They both still have their separate ways to find. But a marriage made in Heaven is one where a man and a woman become more richly themselves together than the chances are either of them could ever have managed to become alone. When Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, perhaps it was a way of saying more or less the same thing.

Twitter effectively

Tamara Erickson is a regular writer on the Harvard Business website. In a recent piece called Are You Fun to Follow on Twitter (it's interesting to note that the Yanks don't appear to have heard about the move towards not capitalizing the first letter of each word in a headline) she notes that Twitter can be used effectively if you think about why you're using it. And she's not just talking about businesses - her ideas apply to the personal use of Twitter too.

Here's how she concludes her article:

1. Don't report banal details. Unless you're observing a true breaking news event (and note: this term does not include what you or your child ate for lunch), skip it.
2. Do interpret your experiences. How do they make you feel? What do they mean to you?
3. Do share the oddities you observe. Look for things that seem unusual, out-of-place, surprising.
4. Do share things you love - quotes, phrases, descriptions of events that brought joy to your day.

Slow down, enjoy. Listen to the world's music. Share the best of your experiences, but remember, 140 characters is a unique format — more like poetry or Haiku than news reporting. Using it well requires our thoughtful attention.

[My italics in point number 2]

And here's a curmudgeon on the same topic, from the same site.

Buechner on Art

Some lines from Frederick Buechner's Whistling in the Dark: a doubter's dictionary - from the section, 'Art.'

Literature, painting, music - the most basic lesson that all art teaches us is to stop, look and listen to life on this planet, including our own lives, as a vastly richer, deeper, more mysterious business than most of the time it ever occurs to us to suspect as we bumble along from day to day on automatic pilot. In a world that for the most part steers clear of the whole idea of holiness, art is one of the few places left where we can speak to each other of holy things.

6 pixels

I came across Mitch Joel and his 'Six Pixels of Separation' yesterday. Haven't looked at the book yet, as such, but was most intrigued by one of the promotional videos related to it. It has almost nothing in it except words and a voice (Joel's) on the soundtrack. But the words are used in a wonderfully inventive way - there's only one point where a paragraph is actually visible on screen as it would be in a book, but even then, as Joel reads, each word or two is highlighted, keeping up with his considerable pace of speaking. Otherwise words speed across the screen, enlarge, form boxes...in general, play. It's worth watching more than once just for the inventiveness of it all.



On his blog Joel also notes the fact that it's baby boomers (grandparent-type people, in other words) who are using Facebook primarily now. I'd heard this last year, but it's good to see it confirmed again. He quotes the Boomers and Social Media report which notes: "Creating and renewing personal connections online is the biggest draw for boomers... Their contacts include family, friends and co-workers of all ages."

So in other words, boomers - people of my age - are using Facebook as a way of keeping up contact not just with their peers, but with everyone amongst their family and friends.

Seth Godin on dealing with ideas

One blogger I read every day (mainly because he sends me a copy of his posts via email - much the best way to get read!) is Seth Godin. I may have mentioned him once or twice before in this blog(!)

Today he has three posts on the go, but the one that really appealed (mainly to my artist-struggling-to-market-his-product-type-person) was the one that starts in this way.

If you've got an idea worth spreading, I hope you'll consider this random assortment of rules. Like all rules, some are made to be broken, but still...

I won't include all the rules here, but here are some of my favourites.

• Waiting for inspiration is another way of saying that you're stalling. You don't wait for inspiration, you command it to appear.
• Don't poll your friends. It's your art, not an election.
• The hard part is finishing, so enjoy the starting part.
• Figure out how long your idea will take to spread, and multiply by 4.
• Think big. Bigger than that.
• Try not to confuse confidence with delusion.
• Surround yourself with encouraging voices and incisive critics. It's okay if they're not the same people. Ignore both camps on occasion.
• Be grateful.