The Wah-Wah Diaries

Seem to be reading a book a day at the moment...it won't last. I need to get on with some other more important things!

Anyway, yesterday while filling in a bit of time at the library, I came across The Wah-Wah Diaries by Richard E Grant. Wah-Wah was a movie written and directed by Grant back in 2004, and the book is a record of the day-to-day trials and tribulations he experienced, less on the shooting of the movie itself than on the pre- and post-production, when his French producer either failed to communicate vital information, or get things done on time, or kept putting various spanners in the works for no good reason - except that she was the producer.

The book starts in 1999, when the idea for the movie was first mooted and the script drafted. From then on it's a constant swing between highs and lows as producers come and go, the script is revised and revised, actors are gained and lost, and the aforesaid producer gets it into her head that everything should be done with French technicians. This book should warn anyone off co-production between England and France forever, though to be fair, there are some very good French technicians involved, the editors in particular.

The actual shoot is a breeze by comparison with everything else that goes on, with near-perfect weather in Swaziland (where it is all filmed, often in places that Grant grew up in and knows like the back of his hand). The amazing thing is that while Grant has some extreme moments of stress and insomnia from all the hitches (and, of course, the French producer), the film gets made, and he survives without going insane. His determination and fortitude prove to be far beyond what he himself thinks he's capable of, especially since this is the first time he's ever directed a movie, and it's an extremely autobiographical one at that.

It's perhaps not the ideal book to read before embarking on getting a musical up and on stage, although the financial aspects of my show won't be nearly as daunting as those Grant faced, nor will we be working with people who don't speak our language - in any sense of the phrase. Nevertheless it shows the value of having a good solid team around you, for support in times of stress and when things all seem to be going down the tube....!

The Graveyard Book

I picked up Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book while in the children's library the other day (all the best fiction is in the children's section, I sometimes think). Interestingly, the recommendation on the front cover is by Diana Wynne Jones, whose children's books I've been reading a good deal of recently. (Finished the fourth the other day, which means I've read all the Howl's Moving Castle series.)

Gaiman's book starts out rather nastily, with the murders of three members of a family, but then takes a twist and has the surviving toddler heading off into the local graveyard, where he's adopted by a couple of ghosts, and gets as his guardian someone who's neither alive nor a ghost...

For the first few chapters the book seems episodic, as though Gaiman was offering us a set of short stories on a theme. Gradually, however, all these episodes coalesce into a superb climax. This isn't a story for fainthearted children (though there seem to be few of those around these days): it's grim in more than one place, and some of the things that happen aren't pleasant. (Don't read it to children who are prone to nightmares.) Gaiman has never been a writer to avoid the unpleasant; it's even apparent in his adult books. (Stardust, perhaps the least grim of his adult stories, still has some exceptionally nasty characters).

Gaiman is a wonderfully imaginative writer, stylish in his use of language (he expects children to keep up, and only in one place explains something for the uninitiated) and is able to create worlds that extend the mind. This is a thoroughly enjoyable read, with splashes of humour to leaven the nasty bits.

Name of the Rose

I've only just caught up with the movie, The Name of the Rose. It's now around twenty-five years old. It's so old, in fact, Christian Slater is a teenager in it; he was 16 or 17 at the time it was made. On the other hand, Sean Connery looks no older or younger than he does in dozens of other movies. He must have something in his contract specifying that he will always look the same (after he'd finished with 007, that is.)

It must also be notable as the movie with the ugliest cast (apart from Connery and Slater, of course). It opens with an emphasis on the particular ugly features of one actor (Elya Baskin) and then presents us with a range of the most ugly faces, as though a requirement for being a monk in the times of the Inquisition was to be not in any shape or form handsome. The hunchback must intentionally be one of the ugliest people to appear in a movie...

The film opens with the peculiar title: A palimpsest of Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose". Of course we all know what a palimpsest is when we see it. Except me. I didn't the last time I came across this word, which was in church a few weeks ago when the preacher used it in relation to something to do with the Scriptures. I had to look it up on my wife's smartphone at that point, and had forgotten what it meant by the time I left the building. In a somewhat curious coincidence, the copy of the movie that I've just watched on DVD belongs to aforesaid preacher.

For those few of you out there who really, really don't know what this words means, here's Wikipedia on the subject: A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin from Greek παλιν + ψαω = (palin "again" + psao "I scrape"), and meant "scraped (clean and used) again."

How that applies to the movie vis a vis the book I've yet to learn, but may in the course of my ongoing research on the matter. The trivia on imdb doesn't give us any hint, though there are some rather suspect pieces of information there - more so than usual, I think.

The movie seems to thrive on an image of these dark ages that is incessantly ugly and brutal. I guess that wasn't an impossibility for the times, but it does rather go over the top (especially when you consider that much of the movie is about the making of books, highly ornamented ones at that). The homosexual monk is straight out of Fellini, (himself no mean searcher-out of peculiar-looking people); left-handed or not, it seems unlikely he would have survived in the way he does in such an environment. The peasants of course are all ugly (though not so much as the monks, perhaps!) and brutish - except the one female character in the story, who's really too good-looking to have come out of this environment. Her sex scene with Slater (or Slater's body double?) leaves nothing to the imagination, and is typical of the way in which European movies seem to think excess is better than subtlety. (The pig disembowelling scene is equally overdone.)

Umberto Eco's book, on which the film is based, is about far more than a murder mystery - it's semiotic (related to the study of signs, language as sign, and so on) in approach, making it a difficult subject to film - though there are still some elements of the semiotic in the movie. This may be how the palimpsest aspect comes in; the film reworks the material in its own way. But don't ask me...I'm just one of the (slightly less ugly) peasants.

Dreams of Rivers and Seas

I've just finished Tim Parks' Dreams of Rivers and Seas, which requires readers to keep their wits about them, and try and pick up and sort through the innumerable clues, themes, metaphors and other links that permeate the book. It's a mystery of sorts, but that's not its prime focus.

It's not been my favourite read of all time, although Parks is an interesting writer; this is probably only the third of his books I've read. (Interestingly enough, he cribs a scene out of his non-fiction book Teach Us to Sit Still, and revamps it for one of the few amusing scenes in this book. It occurs when the American writer visits the Indian husband/wife medical couple.)

It concerns a dysfunctional family: the father, Albert James, is a scientist who's wandered off into some almost completely abstract research that seems to go nowhere (his books are annotated with elliptical sentences that no one can understand, and his lectures aren't much better); the mother, Helen, is a woman doctor seemingly dedicated to helping the poor, but she's also manipulative, remote and regards her deceased husband (he's just died at the beginning of the book) as something of a saint. She is so interwoven with her husband that no one else seems to matter to her. These two live in Delhi, one of the many impoverished places they've settled in over the years.

Their son John, (also a scientist) is in his early twenties, and a bit of a puzzle: naive, immature and desperate to connect with his parents, yet somehow unable to. He has seldom lived with his parents because of their lifestyle, and we discover late in the book that his real father may actually be someone else altogether.

There are two other major characters: the son's girlfriend - also immature, a wannabe-actress, and caught up in her view of herself as something of a rebel - and a forty-something American who wants to write a biography of the father. These five (even though the father is dead his 'ghost' constantly infects and affects the story) intertwine and disconnect and crash into each other in a myriad number of ways, along with a host of other characters. This being Delhi, there are people everywhere.

While the story is about words, and language, and meaning, it's also about family, and what people can do to each other, and how they can destroy each other. It's about selfishness - the father, in spite of being regarded as something of a saint by several of the characters, is perhaps the most selfish of all; the mother exudes it, in spite of her work with the poor. It's also about the fathers (and to a lesser extent, mothers), and the rebellion against them that many people go through, and in some cases, never overcome. The young man begins the story desperate to 'know' his father; by the time the book is finished he has reached a point of hating him (the ending is somewhat ambiguous, so I may be reading this wrongly). Parks brought this theme into Teach Us to Sit Still as well; his anger at his father was possibly one of the reasons why he was continually having what was initially diagnosed as prostate problems - in this newer book, the father has supposedly died of prostate cancer. In fact, the more I think about it, the more links there are between the two books; but that's not uncommon in a writer.

Parks is an excellent writer, and Delhi is portrayed in all its glory and awfulness; the characters are strongly written, and often extremely annoying (!), and in spite of its rather grim atmosphere, it draws you along at a cracking pace.

Chirrup...!

When we were in the UK in 2007 we bought ourselves a Garmin GPS which we named Malvina. I wrote about 'her' at length on that trip; she was invaluable, and only very rarely did she do the equivalent of landing us up in a village where it was impossible to get the car through the narrow street (as some continental lorry drivers experienced around that time) or bring us to a river bank so we could get a ferry across - except that was no ferry, as some other poor GPS user experienced.

These days, if we're going somewhere unfamiliar, we use the Tom Tom app that's on my wife's smartphone; it's pretty good, although suffice to say there are times when we know the city a good deal better than it does. And we certainly know it better than Google maps, which on one occasion wanted guests coming to our house to go around the block in a direction that took them away from the house before setting off towards it...

I've never played geocaching, although I heard about it quite some time ago. It something like a treasure hunt, in which you use the coordinates given via GPS to find the 'treasure' -or, as it's normally called in this game, the 'geocache'. Not being a person greatly enamoured of going off in the wild with nothing but a GPS system, this isn't a game I'm likely to play.

Now, apparently, you can add to the fun when you buy Garmin chirp, which is some sort of homing device, as far as I can make out...but also a lot more. The 'chirp stores hints, multicache coordinates, counts visitors and confirms the cache is nearby' presumably for those searching for it. It sounds a bit like making things too easy, but no doubt for those who take up chirping, it adds to the fun.

Expect, then, next time you're out in the wilds, to hear unfamiliar bird chirps.

Noel Coward

I'm reading The Privilege of His Company by William Marchant at the moment - it was lent to me by a friend. It's a book about Noel Coward and gives quite a different picture of him than I'd ever come across before: he's seen as a gracious and generous man, one who is happy to mentor a young writer and help him to success. Of course the wit and urbanity is there (although Coward frequently lectures Marchant against urbanity in the book), and the theatrical stories...and, most importantly, the understanding of stagecraft which to me is the most interesting part of the book.

I think what is perhaps now forgotten to a great extent is the admiration other actors had for Coward, and this permeates the book. They loved him because of his generous nature and personality; there were few airs about Coward, and no arrogance.

It brings to mind a scene in one of his films - one of several made late in his life, none of which were particularly remarkable in regard to the parts he played. This film was The Italian Job which, on a recent viewing proved to be a pretty unremarkable piece of filmmaking, and worth less than its following (and sequel) warrants. Coward is one of several well-known British actors in it (Irene Handl makes a brief - and rather coarse - appearance, for instance) and his first main scene is in prison, where he's treated with great respect by all the inmates...and the staff (who basically allow him to do what he likes). This was his last film, made only 3 or 4 years before his death, and Coward doesn't look particularly well. He was seventy at the time.

This first (longish) scene has Coward doing nothing more than walking slowly down the stairs of the prison clapped in time by the inmates. He waves his hand in a regal gesture. It has nothing to do with the movie, but perhaps a good deal to do with the veneration he was naturally given by other actors and directors.

Diana Wynne Jones

A few weeks back a friend told me he was reading Howl's Moving Castle to his children, and claimed the book was superior to the Harry Potter series. Well, I'm always willing to take up someone on such a challenge, so I got it out of the library....and had finished it by the next day.

It has only a marginal link to the Japanese animated movie of the same title - same idea initially, but the movie goes off in a different direction.

The book is great, full of unexplained mysteries that keep you guessing until the end, flights of fancy that keep your imagination on its toes, and a bundle of interesting characters who are very much their own selves . It has great language, no sloppy writing (not that Rowling is much given to sloppy writing either, in general), and an expectation that the young readers will keep up with the use of different words and novel ideas.

Incidentally, Howl is a punning synonym on more than one level, as are several of the names in the Moving Castle.

I was so taken with the book that I thought I'd give some of Diana Wynne Jones' other titles a go: I started with Black Maria, and intend to track down more of the books over the next few weeks. Black Maria is an altogether darker book, in which 'management' of other people is the theme - management in the sense of controlling their lives. Consequently all the men in the village have been turned into 'zombies' (they're not dead, just dead boring); the children are 'clones' (only in the sense that they seem to think and behave in the same way) and the women are so naice on the surface, but it's that kind of niceness that makes you want to scream, and it's exceptionally manipulative. And of course there's a good deal of magic going on in the background which we only gradually become party to. The magician, when he finally turns up a long way through the book, is very similar to Howl in the Moving Castle, though he also has some of his own foibles.

It's again a great page-turning read, but I'm not sure that it's outworking is quite as effective as the one in the first book I read. Nevertheless it shares the same imaginative qualities that made the first so successful, and some of the topsy-turviness.

Update: December 2019
Since I wrote this post I've worked my way through quite a few of the Wynne Jones titles - another seven in 2011 alone, and various ones in the years since. Like many prolific authors, Wynne Jones has her off days (The Pinhoe Egg) and her super hilarious days (Arthur's Goon). The Chrestomanci series varies from wonderfully imaginative to peculiar to - dare I say - tedious in places. And just when you think you've read every kind of Wynne Jones book, you discover something altogether different. Furthermore, books that appeal to one reader may be a turn-off for another, and vice versa.  Whatever the case, reading her books is great for the imagination, great for delving into worlds where the problems aren't the same old adult problems that many authors write about, and great for discovering something new around pretty much every corner. 

Uniforms

It often strikes me as an oxymoron that teenagers who claim to be rebelling against everything the older generation stands for will still wear the same gear as each other, effectively turning themselves into uniformed beings. They'll claim that the adults are conformist and lacking in individuality or creativitiy and yet...chunks of the boys will be wearing their trousers hanging down around their butts - almost falling off their butts in fact.

Or the girls will wear jeans that reveal almost everything - especially those awful thong things..

Other non-conformists will wear nothing but black (except perhaps hair that's dyed a peculiar colour). Another group wear hoodies and pants so sloppy that you can't tell whether they actually have legs or not.

Uniforms are part and parcel of everyday life: from the loose-fitting clothes now worn by nurses in hospital (cleaned presumably at discount scrubs) to the smarter uniforms worn by policemen or firemen (and the styled moustaches to go with them). Even businessmen and women wear uniforms - how many suits do you see that aren't black or dark blue these days?

It's quite normal, and you'd think it would be one of the things the youngsters would react against. Nope, they just go straight into whatever is the 'uniform' of the day (those listed above are all heading away from being 'in') and conform themselves into a different group.

Odd.

Heavenly Choirs

Sang with Sunny Side Up again today, at the 'Heavenly Choirs concert' in Knox Church. The concert was a fundraiser for the Hospital Chaplaincy service, and went smoothly and successfully. Hopefully they made a few thousand dollars out of it.

I didn't feel quite so secure in my singing today, even though I knew the pieces. Just one of those days when you're more edgy than other times. Anyway, after we'd had afternoon tea at Knox, a good number of us trooped up to the house of a couple who are in SSU, and had an early tea of soup and buns and anything else people brought with them.

And a singsong. A good old-fashioned singsong.

Also in the concert were the Dunedin Harmony Chorus - we didn't get to hear them, unfortunately, being stuck backstage at that point. They were followed by the Southern Consort of Voices; these people were practicing when we arrived, and were singing some very difficult stuff and singing it well.

In the second half there were three secondary school choirs: Barock (as opposed to baroque), a strong group of boys and girls who sang very well, a girls' choir (their name escapes me because I've lost the programme) of about 25 young ladies who did a great Mumma Mia and a rather more serious piece that showed them off well but wasn't quite so peppy...!

The boys' choir at the end seemed just a little under par - perhaps it was because some of their singers were at the Cleveland Awards this afternoon. The whole group, choirs and audience finished up singing The Hallelujah Chorus. Great stuff.

New Poet Laureate

Ian Wedde is the next New Zealand Poet Laureate.

I used to work with Ian way back in the 70s, when we were both posties (postmen, to the uninitiated). I don't know that we ever had much to do with each other - it was the musicians among the posties who tended to clan together rather than the poets....although I had gotten to know another poet, Brent Southgate, when I was a postie before I went to England - back in the 60s. He's the brother of the well-known conductor, Bill Southgate, who I knew a little earlier on here in Dunedin music circles, and who coincidentally arrived back in NZ on the same day that my wife and I did, when I returned from England. Both of us stood listening to a race commentary on the radio, having forgotten the unique quality of that NZ sound.

There, that'll do for the name-dropping today.

I've read Wedde's poetry in the past and it hasn't greatly appealed, but either he's moved on from the kind of poetry that didn't appeal to me, or I've moved on....his Harry Martens is typically Wedde in its use of language yet more readable than what I remember from the past. Perhaps solid doses of denser Les Murray poems over the years have made me more aware of what Wedde's doing, and maybe it's time to come to him afresh.

Elderly Sibelius

Most of my music writing is done on Sibelius, as I've no doubt mentioned before. While I still compose initially at the piano (normally -there are occasions when I write straight onto the computer), increasingly what's written down there on the manuscript is sketchy and gets transferred to the computer fairly quickly (before I forget what the scribblings mean). In fact, the extra manuscript books I bought to use for writing the musical (Grimhilda!) haven't been used. (Saving them for the next musical!)

Sibelius is a fantastic programme for composers and other musicians - I'm just finishing up transcribing a bundle of some 15 songs for a composer in Alexandra. And I think there are more to come. Her music has all been written by hand in pen or pencil up till now.

All this is a lead up to the photograph below, which I assume shows the very first version of Sibelius (we're now on version 7). I got this off someone who's signs him/herself as jwkay.


The manual that came with my version (that was number 4, and I use number 6 now) is thick and probably the best computer programme manual I've ever used. Excellent!

Two quiet movies

Last night I watched a film we'd recorded a few days earlier: Snow Cake. I actually watched it nearly twice through, as my wife had been doing something else and didn't come in until it was getting close to the end - at which point I said she needed to see it from the beginning, so I watched it again.

I can't tell you about the movie without giving some spoilers, so don't read this if you want to catch up with it.

This Canadian movie concerns a man (played by Alan Rickman) who's recently out of prison (for killing another man). He rather unwillingly picks up a lively young female hitchhiker; a few minutes of screen time later, she is killed outright when a truck crashes into the car. Rickman decides to take the rather oddball gift the daughter had bought for her mother to the mother (played by Sigourney Weaver) and discovers that the mother has some form of autism - a 'very vocal' form, as the mother's neighbour points out. And so things play out, as we gradually learn why Rickman was in prison and more.

It's a story with more than one grieving person in it, but it isn't a miserable story. There's a great deal of humour all round, and Weaver's character, while not played for laughs as such, produces a number of the funnier lines in the film. It's also about the healing needed after losing someone, and how this can take more than a matter of moments.

Rickman does his usual fairly laidback characterization even while baring his soul to different people, but when needed, can produce the goods: watch him in the aftermath of the crash.

Weaver has been criticised by some reviewers for being all performance without a real connection to the character she's playing. But this is a character at a disconnect with herself: she has no social graces: if she's fed up with you she'll tell you to stop talking until she says it's okay to start again, or, if you've come to her house for a wake, she'll ask loudly why you're still there when she wants you to go, or will dump the freshly made sandwiches in the rubbish bin to encourage you to leave. She also enjoys eating snow, jumping on a trampoline, and playing with children's baubles. She's as sharp as a tack...except she isn't quite.

Carrie Ann Moss (of the Matrix series, and the strange film, Memento) plays the neighbour, a woman who doesn't mind having 'gentlemen callers' and who is part of the healing process Rickman needs to go through.

It's a relatively quiet little film, and relies on excellent actors to put its gentle story across.

We watched Taking the Wae Wae Express the other day too. NZ reviewers have generally raved about this movie, the forerunner to the recently exhibited, Hook, Line and Sinker, but we found it lacking in energy and rather shapeless. Both movies have been made using the Mike Leigh approach of improvisation-gradually-forming-itself-into-a-script. The more recent movie worked, using this process - but also had the benefit of some very good NZ actors. Wae Wae uses a mostly inexperienced cast, and for me the lack of a script with crafted lines left them floundering. The young actors were good, but there was a kind of limitedness to their roles: a stronger script in general would have helped them to achieve something more effective. Even Rangimoana Taylor (who has the lead role in Hook, Line and Sinker) suffers from an undeveloped role. There is a curious Malaysian taxidriver in the story, a man given to uttering 'wisdom' to young people, and also a female Scandinavian tourist who turns up out of nowhere and makes herself at home with the other characters - without much evidence as to why she should do so, I thought. Incidentally, this story also evolves out of a car crash....

We were sorry not to like the movie much: it was made by Andrea Bosshard, who used to be one of my piano pupils (her family were neighbours) many years ago..! However, on the basis of Hook, Line and Sinker, I'm sure she's got better stuff still to come.

google + from facebook

Upgrading, or shifting sites, are both things that we tend to react against online. Unless there's a really good reason to upgrade a programme, I won't do it automatically; I've been hit too often by Firefox Mozilla upgrading and causing problems with add-ons and such, to take just one example.

The latest version of Sibelius - version 7 - is now out and I'm hearing less than enthusiastic reports. Seemingly there are a host of new sound samples, but it's also gone over to the 'ribbon' style of menu, and this has been decried by a number of Sibelius users. I'm not sure that that would bother me so much (since I'm used to Windows 7 anyway), but apart from this the improvements seem to be mostly cosmetic. Having not very long ago shifted to version 6 (being forced to, in fact), I'm not desperate to upgrade just for a few tinky-tonk changes.

And a couple of people have enthused about Google +. But I can't see the point. Changing from Facebook (for all its faults) is a major undertaking. Firstly, will the people you're in touch with on Facebook shift with you? (Not very likely.) What will happen to all your collected stuff? Who will care that you've gone to the supposedly 'better' Google +? Not many people, I think.

And you lose access to all those click here buttons that now dot the Net for Facebook and Twitter and so on. Certainly these aren't the greatest loss, and the loss can be overcome, but if Google + is so good, why isn't it available as well as all these other options?

I think Google might have got out of the starting gate far too late on this one; the other horse have won the race a long time ago and the next race is already beginning. (I once swam in a school race in which I was still plugging along when the next race started...)

There are nine 'good' reasons to shift to Google +, according to an article by Mark Sullivan in PC World:
Integration with other Google services (that's sort of a plus for me, but not enough of one)
Better Friend Management (Google's circles and inner circles and so on just don't grab me...it all sounds like too much effort).
Better Mobile App (I don't have a smartphone so this doesn't make me want to move).
Easier to find stuff and share. (A piffle reason, I think.)
You can get your data back. (Well, this might be a plus, but I'm not convinced entirely.)
Better Photo Tagging. (This relates to Facebook's recent upgrading - there's that word again - of the tagging scene and its implications. Hmmm, one reason out of six so far isn't enough.)
Strong group chat features. (I never group chat, so that one's out.)
Safer Content Sharing. (Assigning a privacy level to each piece of content I share sounds like a load of work to me.)
Google is a better steward of your personal data. (This is no different from reason five, I think.)

Sorry, Mark, you just haven't convinced me. And neither has the one person I know who's shifted to Google +. He sent me an email today via Google +, but of course I couldn't reply to it, or comment on it....not being in the Google + system. See what I mean?

Personal Info

I haven't used Internet Explorer for some time, and I probably won't be taking up their offer of an upgrade to IE8, in spite of its claim in this video that IE8 blocks 3 million online threats a day.

In this video (one of several) IE opened two different storefronts, one as a bank, one as a genealogical site, and enticed a number of New Yorkers into giving all sorts of personal information. The idea was that if you trusted someone face-to-face enough to give them personal info, then it's likely you're not being particularly careful online.

Check out what people handed over without any concern....

Debut

Last night, at the RSA Choir concert (that's the Returned Services Association Choir) I made my debut as a singer with the acapella group, Sunny Side Up. I wrote about them back in May after going to a concert in which they were one of several singing groups. At the time I said to my wife, if I was going to join any singing group, it would be them. At a meal with several people a couple of weeks later, three of whom were members of SSU, the subject of me thinking about joining them came up, and a week later I'd started going to their Sunday afternoon rehearsals. And then a couple of weeks later my wife started to come too.

I've always enjoyed singing, and though New Zealand society on the surface seems to imply that it's not a thing for males to do, plenty of them around the country do it. In fact the two soloists at the concert last night were young men, and the 50-plus RSA choir is (still) all male. (There's another all-male choir here in Dunedin too: the Royal Male Choir, and plenty of secondary schools have male choirs.)

I grew up in a Catholic family, so we always sang at church - admittedly it was the same half dozen songs, year in and year out, taken off a cardboard sheet that had been printed before I was born, I suspect; it was still in use when I left my home town in the 60s. And as a young pianist I used to sing my way through complete musical comedy scores. No one ever commented that it didn't sound that hot, but I suspect it didn't always.

And then I was continually involved with singers from my teenage years, as an accompanist - that's continued to this day. After my wife and I came back from overseas we joined a Pentecostal Church, where the singing could go on for half an hour or more before the preacher got up to speak. So singing's 'in the blood' as it were.

The only time I've ever sung solo in a concert, that I can remember, was maybe 15 years ago when a group I was involved in presented a night of George Gershwin songs. The director had found one called 'Blah blah blah blah blah' (yup!) and as a bit of a joke, I sang it and accompanied myself. I think it put that particular director off my singing for good: he's never encouraged me to sing since...

Anyway, as a member of the thirty-plus-strong SSU, my singing blends, (read: doesn't stand out). I wondered once or twice last night if a note I was singing wasn't quite what the rest of the basses were singing, but the notes still seemed to harmonise!

SSU music is often lively, and in the slower songs, full of striking harmonies. My wife and I have heard the group on a number of occasions over the years, and have always been attracted to their particular sound. Last night we sang a couple of African-based songs (easy for the basses: we provide an ongoing rhythmic line underneath), a fabulous arrangement of Total Praise, the powerful Up Above My Head and a joyful spiritual. And we sing again on Sunday, at Knox Church, along with several other choirs. Different songs, mostly, so it's quite a full-on week for the group.

The RSA itself was in good form, though we missed the first part of the first half of the show, being backstage getting ready. I particularly liked Shenadoah and Cwm Rhondda (which was sung in its English version: Guide me, O thou great Jehovah). Some of the faster songs suffer a bit from so many voices trying to get their tongues around lots of words in a way that's tidy, but there seemed to be plenty of energy in the choir, which is great - the oldest singer is ninety (!)

The two soloists were Ben Madden and Alex Wilson, and, from what I heard of them, these are splendid pair of voices, with promising careers ahead of them.

Allie Eagle

Sometimes New Zealand seems to be such a small place that you appear to know every second person who lives here....virtually. Just check out the friends of the friends you have on Facebook, and you'll find that you really are only two degrees away from many well-known people, or from a host of other NZeders.

I'm always getting invitations (though not often via invitationbox.com party invitations) to link up with somebody who seems unfamiliar until I discover they know people I also know - and it's sometimes a surprise to find which of my friends know each other.

And then on another day, you discover someone you've never heard of, someone, that you ought, you think, to have heard of.

TVNZ 7, which focuses strongly on the artistic community in New Zealand, (and which we've only been able to access since we got Freeview included with the new telly) is great for bringing the names of artists in front of you who are quite unfamiliar. (Or, as in a piece yesterday, where they talked about the thriving comicbook community in NZ; thriving in the sense of there being plenty of people working at it, and interested in it, but not in the sense of it being a lucrative area to work in.)

Or in another situation entirely, you meet someone who again ought to be familiar, you'd expect, and isn't. (We had the privilege of having artistic neighbours who ran their own gallery when we were young parents, so we became familiar with a lot of up and coming NZ names and works then.)

I came across the NZ artist, Allie Eagle, (not to be confused with the American artist, Ellen Eagle) who was at a conference I attended yesterday. "Attended" in the sense that I went to the morning sessions, and the first half of the afternoon, and then had had enough of sitting and went home, getting soaked in the rain in the process. Having had enough of a conference before it's half finished is normal with me these days: I can't sit comfortably for that long, and my concentration goes mid-afternoon...

I'd never heard of Allie Eagle at all, that I can remember, but the short introduction to her art - and to herself - yesterday was plenty enough to make me want to know more. [The photo shows her in front of a work she produced for the Waitakere City Council’s chamber building in 2007.] Eagle was strongly (and angrily) involved with the women's movement in the 70s, but has moved some of her thinking around in the last number of years. I warmed to her as a person and an artist. She often works collaboratively these days (using the 'atelier' method of employing other artists to work on different sections of large works - see the article the photo accompanied) and is doing a series of portraits of men, getting to know each individual sitter in a detailed way.

A 54-minute DVD has also been made about her life and art and is available through her website.
I didn't have the money on me yesterday to get a copy, but I think I will.

The price of gold

I noticed on the news the other night that gold is becoming increasingly valuable, and one online article reported that gold is now valued at "$1,619.30 an ounce at 1:48 p.m. on the Comex in New York. Earlier, the price fluctuated between gains and losses. The August contract reached a record $1,624.30 yesterday." (Yesterday in this case was the 26th July.) Phew!

This is good news for those with an IRA (Individual Retirement Account), especially if it's a gold IRA. It's not so good news for those who (a) don't have gold and (b) don't have a retirement plan.

I've written about IRAs on a previous occasion. It was a couple of months before I retired, when I was forced to admit that I didn't have much in the way of a retirement plan, having chopped and changed jobs over my working life, and often been in jobs where there wasn't any retirement plan. If it ain't there, you can't do much about it.

Ways of planning ahead such as the gold 401k approach are fine if you have money to invest, or have stayed in a job for a long period of time. For those of us who don't or haven't, then we just have to take what comes, and count the pennies a bit more carefully than we used to do. This takes some doing, actually, as the tendency, I've found, once you retire, is to keep functioning at the same level as before. Because we had a bit of money still in the bank when I finished up, and have had a bit more come in via things like Trade Me, we're okay. If those dried up, we'd really have to turn off the heat pump and stay in bed all day. (Well, in winter at least.)

I really missed out in my younger days, by not buying gold, either as bars or coins. So shortsighted of me. Seemingly, if I had purchased $25,000 of gold bullion coins in the early 70’s and held on to it during the oil crisis, inflation, devaluation of the U.S. dollar, Savings and Loan scandal, recession, tech and internet bubble, cooked books, 911, and a real estate bubble - after that lot I'd be lucky to holding onto anything - I could sell my gold today for $524,999.00.

And if I had purchased $25,000 of limited mintage investor gold coins over the same time line, I could sell that gold today for $1,377,257.00. Now that probably would have allowed me to keep the heat pump on over the winter at full bore...! Or move to somewhere where it's always warm.

This is always the issue: in order to make money from investments like a gold IRA transfer you have to have something to invest in the first place. If I had managed to put anything aside in the 70s, there would have been no chance of holding onto it during kids' schooling, clothing, eating food, going occasionally to the movies, paying various unexpected bills, replacing the wrecked car with a not-so wrecked one, let alone oil crises, devalutions, recessions, bursting bubbles and anything else you might care to name.

Some of us just have to keep holding in faith to our Father who owns the cattle on a thousand hills, as he reminds us in one of the Psalms. (I think it's more likely he actually owns the cattle on a billion hills, but that's pushing the poetic licence.) In the long run, he's the only one who'll get us through all the crises etc. If you think that's being a bit naive, then you'll just have to believe me that He's done it so far and there's no reason not to think that he won't in future.

Reflective

My nephew and his wife recently uploaded some photos of their UK coast-to-coast bicycle ride; they did the trip about a month ago. And it rained a good deal of the time.

One of photos intrigued us and with a bit of Google flitting hither and yon we finally discovered what the building was. In their original photo, they'd shown the building side on with other buildings reflected in it. The photo below is a more 'official' photo, one that appears on a site called Construction Photography.


The building is in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and is the SAGE Music Centre, a shell-shaped form encompassing three large music chambers with seating for over 2000 spectators.

Spectacular, eh? You can get a different perspective on it at this site, where there's a slide show of various angles. I particularly like number one in the series, with this extremely modern building overlooking a variety of old houses and their upstanding chimney pots.

Goodies and baddies

We watched Air Force One again last night; I’d forgotten how jingoistic it is.

Near the beginning Harrison Ford (playing the President of the USA) gives a speech (in Russia) saying how he won’t stand for little terrorists taking over as presidents of little countries and the US will step in and stop them! And it goes on in like fashion throughout.

We’ve already seen the US SAS-equivalent flying in and capturing one of these little terrorists while shooting everyone else in sight (of course these people don't count; they're just unnamed guards 1 through to 20, and no one cares that they might be real human beings). One never gets to sympathise in any way with the baddies: Gary Oldman is the main baddie and he has some very nasty scenes, which only make us hate him more and more.

Of course it’s very excitingly done, and is full of tension (Wolfgang Petersen at his best). Harrison Ford does his usual steely-eyed stuff at the crucial moments (see picture), and it’s a wonder the baddies don’t turn into butter and melt away. And not only is he the President he’s also a Father and a Husband. Oldman tries to get in a word edgeways about being a 'father' too (with three little kiddies), but you know he doesn’t have a capital F on his version of 'father.'

A couple of quotes from reviews about this movie:

The two hours of this movie felt like such an eternity that I was certain my clothes were going to be out of style by the time it was over. [Charles Taylor in Salon.com]

The movie also resurrects that ancient and dependable standby, the Choosing of the Wires. In countless other movies, the bomb squad hesitates between ``Red . . . or black? Red . . . or black''). This is a big-budget movie and presents us with five wires. It's an emergency, and the president needs to decide which two he should connect. See if you can guess the right two colors. The choices are green, yellow, red, white and blue. [Roger Ebert]

Another go

Trying out this audio clip business again, after having had moderate success earlier today with putting an audio file on this blog...

Suite for Cor Anglais and strings second movement by mike-crowl

Perfectly strange

Short of something I really wanted to watch on DVD the other night, I picked up Perfect Stranger, a film that should have been good because it starred Halle Berry and Bruce Willis. It was thinly disguised porn, to be honest, and I watched only about twenty minutes before deciding I'd had enough of the f word, enough of the sleazy online chat stuff, and enough of the general amoral atmosphere that the film inhabits.

Halle Berry does her best with the role, but her character isn't one you have much sympathy for - she rants and raves when she doesn't get her own way, she supposedly takes up investigating her long-time friend's murder because she's her long-time friend, and then runs round believing that the Willis character is the murderer in spite of nothing more than some circumstantial evidence. Willis does his sleaze-bag look, something he's done better in one or two other movies, and Giovanni Ribisi, he of the shifty eyes, plays "one of those convenient nerdy tech-savant characters who can hack into ultra-secure databases with dizzying speed" as Peter Bradshaw noted in his review.

I seem to remember that I've seen the end of this movie somewhere...maybe on TV. If I recall, Berry kills off Ribisi, who's doing some two-timing of his own. It's all nonsense, and doesn't warrant anyone actually staying in the theatre (or on the couch) to watch this high-class garbage.

Audio on the blog

Out of the blue a person named Mike from Dunedin in Florida emailed and asked if I knew how to put an audio file on a blog. I didn't, but after looking around a bit I'm now trying out a way to play audio through this blog...

Suite for Cor Anglais and Strings third movement by mike-crowl

I've just tested this out and it works. Takes a bit of time to download, but it gets there. I'd remembered that SoundCloud has a 'share' section on each music/audio file you upload to them, and guessed there might be a way of embedding a file. There is. And here it is...

I'll have to do some more...!

The last Harry Potter

Well, the last of the Harry Potter movies is upon us, and my wife and I went to an early morning session (along with about 20 other people) yesterday to catch up on it.

Yes, you still need to know the backstories if you're to make complete sense of things, and some high points from the last book get a little less room than they deserve (no doubt through constraints of time - the twin's death consists almost entirely of Ron in mourning, and the battle between Molly Weasley and Bellatrix is truncated to the point where it's just another fight with wands. Both of these are losses). The backstory about Severus Snape and his deep love for Harry's mother is done in moment after moment and succeeds, in spite of being whipped past your eye at a rate of knots. Again, it helps if you have some understanding of what's being said and shown here. Other things seem to take longer than necessary: the opening scene with John Hurt seems quite slow to me, for instance.

But there are delights as well: Helena Bonham Carter playing Emma Watson playing HBC was one of the highlights. (The three almost unknown actors who played Ministry of Magic workers in the previous episode who were supposed to be the three main actors in disguise were also fun in this regard.) Maggie Smith saying in her inimitable way - after having cast a spell she's never had to use before - 'I've always wanted to say that!' And seeing Neville Longbottom come into his own (after having been unduly neglected by the directors in some of the other episodes) is great.

The CGI is impeccable, and so believable that you no longer give any thought to how it's all done. Many of the huge range of British actors who've appeared throughout the series reappear briefly - some get no more than a single shot - and it's like a coming-together of the cast for a final fling at the thing.

The story has room enough to breathe, although I'm not sure if the audience always has the same amount of breath: I found the film made me fell quite tense, which is probably an intended plus (!) It even seemed more emotionally strong than some of the others, though I can't tell you now which particular bits made me feel that way. The woman sitting next to me seemed to be finding it moving enough to be wiping her eyes a good deal at one stage.

All up this is a strong contendor in the series, and perhaps shows how far the the movies have progressed from the original Chris Columbus episodes. This isn't a movie for small children, however much they may enjoy Harry Potter. I wouldn't take them near it unless you want to contend with nightmares for a week.

And the epilogue, with the characters grown up, actually gave them all a chance to look like they really are. For once Ron actually looked reasonably respectable - the hair had been combed back off his face. And the Potter 'son' is very appealing....

PS: Does the poster above make Harry look like something out of some violent action movie - or is it just my reading of it?

Verbosity

In a review written for the American magazine, The Academy, dated 1 October 1881 of E W White's Cameos from the Silver-land; or the Experiences of a Young Naturalist in the Argentine Republic, a classic work of economic geography and natural history, the reviewer complained, "The author is terribly fond of long words. To him plants become bosquetish, plains are sabulous, cattle are meat-bearing beeves, dead men are cadavers, parrots are psittacs. The Republic is 'a vast cerealic and frugiferous as well as a lanigerous and pelliferous region'."

Noted by Michael Quinion in his latest World Wide Words newsletter.

Notebooks

After reading about Agatha Christie's Secret Notebooks on Agatha Christie.com yesterday I checked our public library and found they had a copy - and a fairly unused one as well.

It's quite a large book, but in fact doesn't take a lot of reading - the print is not small (unlike the print in most of the Christie paperbacks I've got) and the layout is such that there's a lot of white space.

There's also not all that much in it to interest me, unfortunately, and I've given up about halfway through. I thought it might give some background to the way Christie wrote, but it's quite skimpy on this. The author, John Curran, does his best to work out how Christie put her novels together, but he's hampered by having some seventy notebooks that are anything but complete in their info. They're a very haphazard bunch, and though he's done his best with them, they don't actually give much information into how Christie wrote. Or maybe I was just expecting something more.

He does say that she has told us elsewhere (not in the notebooks) that her plotting was done a great deal in her head, and that she didn't write out full outlines for her books. But in contradistinction to that he also says that some of the notebooks have fairly complete outlines of a few of the books: but they come at a stage when all the thinking has been done.

So just how Christie worked out her often intricate stories remains a bit of a mystery. There are plenty of very sketchy one-line notes reproduced in the book, but they're so sketchy that they need Hercule Poirot to unravel them.

The book is useful in the way it cross-references the books themselves, telling us how Christie reused plots and ideas, and that would be interesting if I'd read more of the books recently. But I haven't, and I think rather than read more of Mr Curran's book, I'll move onto reading the novels themselves - or at least the ones I have on my shelves.

Kung Fu Panda 2

Went and saw the second Kung Fu Panda last night (in 2D, by the way, rather than 3D - it seems that the former might be a preferable way to watch it). It doesn't stand still for long (although that didn't stop a young child running up and down behind the seats at the back - where we were sitting from about three-quarters of the way through) and in fact there are times when the action is so fast-paced it's hard for the eye to keep up with it - at least on first viewing. I don't think my eyes have aged in this regard particularly, but movies do move very fast these days (just check out a 2000s action movie with one from the sixties, say) perhaps because those working on them get so used to what's passing before their eyes it seems slow to them. I think seeing the movie again on DVD would help clarify some of the action scenes which were often a blur in my mind.

It has some gung-ho humour and some tender moments (usually undercut by Jack Black's Panda character) and occasionally some wit. The story's not bad, though fairly uncomplicated, and even though it's as predicatable as the average cowboys and indians movie used to be, it's entertaining.

I think its greatest achievement however has little to do with the action or story. This is something that's quite subtle in its own way and something that's actually unnecessary. I'm referring to the design of the film, the look. From the outset this is a beautiful film with backdrops and scenery so finely executed and with such artistry that the movie is worth watching for these alone. Yes, of course, it's quite amazing to see the individual bits of fur on the Panda, for example, wafting in the breeze, but these are a textual feature that's been done well for some time in animated movies. What I found most striking was the sense of realness in much of the texture: the clothing hangs and looks like real material; daft items like the knitting wool that sits on the Ping the goose's head is tangible - even more than the creature it's sitting on. The water dripping in the Shifu the Master's first scene has the look and feel of real water. The roofs on the houses look like real tiles. And there are dozens of other examples.

Again all these things may not be new to modern animation, but they're done with a finesse here that's quite extraordinary. (They were a distinctive feature of another animated feature, one that didn't become a big hit - Fantastic Mr Fox - but I don't remember them being as vivid as these ones are.)

This movie also makes a feature of telling two backstories in different visual styles (as the tale of the three brothers is told in the second-to-last Harry Potter movie). Near the beginning it fills us in on the way in which the Peacock (voiced by Gary Oldman) became a villain; this section has the look of Chinese paper puppetry rather than animation, and is a delight to the eye. The other story tells how Po came to be adopted by the Goose. This is done is a sketchier style, somewhat more akin to the approach used by Japanese animation artists.

I'd be happy to see this movie again, just for the breathtaking look of it all.

Web hosting and such

When I worked for the Presbyterians over the last three years, we several times looked at options relating to having our own website. (I don't mean the Presbyterian Church as a whole, just our little department.) Usually there was an issue: either the web hosting wasn't what it claimed to be - some of them, especially the free ones, were little more than glorified blogs - or it was too expensive for the sort of work we wanted to do, or it was in the States and not suitable for our approach. Or one of a number of other problems.

So even though I no longer work there I'm always interested in checking out places that offer managed hosting just to see what they have available.

One I've just come across offers something called colocation - or co-location if you're not yet up to joining the prefix to the rest of the word. (Apropos of that, I can never decide whether cooperate needs a hyphen or not - cooperate looks to be such an odd word that my mind immediately reads as coop-erate.)

Though I had an inkling of its meaning, I didn't really know what colocation was, so I had to check it up. Apparently (according to Wikipedia) it allows multiple customers to locate network, server, and storage gear—and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers—with a minimum of cost and complexity. Well, there you go. Seemingly, as one company puts it, it's like sending your 'little treasures off to boarding school.' It also presumably relies on fast broadband, which is still a bit of an issue itself here in NZ.

Cost is also an issue with getting someone to host your server: you have to be convinced in your own mind that what you're putting up online is really worth those dollars per month. I'm not sure that we got to that point at our office, and in terms of having a site of my own, I've never been keen to part out cash just to have space available for my vast and opinionated musings - or for anything else I might jot down either. But small businesses, especially those that are highly driven by their computer side, certainly need to consider how their data is looked after. Whether they keep it in-house or send it off to 'boarding school.' If you keep your little treasures at home you have all the hassles of making sure your server is working and not going AWOL when you most need it. If you send the data elsewhere, you have to make sure the company looking after it is secure and concerned for your business to the extent that it at least feels as though they think only of you.

So, it's always a bit of a juggling act.

Light reading

My grandson brought home a book from his school library which turned out to be a bit beyond his reading level. So his mother read it. And I read it.

The title was Rowan and the Keeper of the Crystal by Emily Rodda. Rodda is the penname of an Australian author, Jennifer June Rowe (born in 1948). She writes crime fiction for adults under her own name, but her children's fiction is published under two pseudonyms: Emily Rodda and Mary-Anne Dickinson. She has written several children's fantasy series: Deltora Quest, Rowan of Rin, Fairy Realm and Teen Power Inc., and recently the Rondo trilogy.

The book I read last night comes third in the Rowan of Rin series. It's nicely plotted, stylishly-written and requires the hero and the three young people he encounters to use their wits to overcome several difficult but connected problems. My daughter enjoyed it enough to say she might check out the school library and see if the rest of the series is there!

I'm in agreement: I often find children and young people's books are more imaginative and better written than some of the adult fiction I've encountered.

I started another book yesterday as well. It's a very early (1922) Agatha Christie called The Secret Adversary. It has a joie de vivre that's sometimes missing from her later mysteries, and is full of Bolsheviks and Sinn Fein and the overthrow of the civilised world, and stars a couple of her early characters, Tommy and Tuppence. Yup, that's what they're called. I've come across them before in another one of her books - if I remember rightly it had a very P G Wodehouse style about it. This one lacks that sense of humour (although Christie could be surprisingly witty when she wanted) but it zips along at a cracking pace and even if it's almost entirely unbelievable, it's very entertaining.

Dental

Being retired and living off a pension isn't too bad as long as you don't have any large bills to deal with. Last year, before I retired, both of us had dental bills that chewed up a good deal of the ready money. Since I've retired we haven't had any dental issues, but the car has done its best to bankrupt us!

Going to the dentist in NZ has always been an expensive business, and it's not surprising many people put it off as long as they can. Roll on the day when it becomes a subsidised part of the economy, as medical care is.

In the States you can get a dental plan just as you can get a medical plan. I suppose it's a better option being able to dripfeed your payments to an insurance company rather than having a horrendous bill foisted upon you, but it's still going to cost. I didn't know there were any similar dental insurance plans available in New Zealand, but apparently there are. Seemingly they're not over-popular with the dentists: it requires them to do extra paperwork and, apparently, may bring them in a lesser income. Dear me - that would be awful!

I've had some great dentists over the years, people I've been happy to pay to have work done. I've also had some not-so-great ones: my first dentist was of the old school that thought that taking teeth out was always the best option, even when you were in your teenage years! Crikey. It must have been the trend at that time. I read the sequel to Plumb recently (it's called Meg). In that there's a scene in which the husband goes out (at the suggestion of his mother) and gets all his teeth removed to save himself future dental problems. His young wife is appalled.

Fortunately that awful dentist didn't manage to remove many teeth, but by the time I got to England in the 60s I was having some real problems with my upper set of teeth, and finished up having to go to a friendly Australian dentist who sorted things out. I can't remember if he was the one who removed some of my upper front teeth, but he certainly was the one who put crowns in - at huge expense. I kid you: under the National Health system in England the whole process cost me no more then ten pounds!

Which might explain why the National Health struggles to make ends meet.

The photo of the young man with lolly teeth was taken by Broken Piggy Bank

Snow, and Snowy

One of those strange Dunedin days: mild initially but with a bitingly cold wind. Then a drear sky. Then sunshine, just when you'd turned all the heating on. And then, just as we were going out for lunch with a young friend who's been in England for a year (he's my younger son's best mate) and another older friend, the sky went deep gray and the wind sent snow flakes hurling at you at a rate of knots. By the time I got from the house to the car I was covered in them (snowflakes, not knots).

And then, while we sat inside the pub having our meal, the snow vanished completely (it hadn't settled on the ground at all) and it was sunshine again.

Meanwhile, I've just had a look at the first official trailer for Tintin. He wasn't ever a great favourite of mine, but I must have read some of the books at some point, as the characters presented here all look fairly familiar. But where's the personality behind them? If the trailer's anything to go by, the CGI process presented here is no better than the one in Polar Express in terms of characterization. Where's the real Jamie Bell under all this, or Andy Serkis? There was a great deal more life in the latter's Gollum or even in his King Kong. These characters lack something which I can't quite put my finger on. The various comments on the Guardian article put it down to a deadness in the eyes, which, when you think about it, is odd, because there are real actors involved in the production of what is essentially an animation process. Why should there be any deadness?

The trailer looks very hustle and bustle and not terribly enticing, to be honest. Maybe it just presents all the fast bits and none of the slow...

Let it Bleed

I’ve been finding it quite hard to settle down and read anything book-wise since I retired: reading lots of stuff on the Net. But I skim a lot there too.

The books and magazines I’ve got from the Library Bus (which conveniently stops just around the corner from our house every Monday afternoon) have all been pretty much fizzlers, stuff I can't be bothered getting into.

So I’ll just have to go through my own bookshelves and see what I haven’t read – or haven’t read for a long time. In the light of that, I picked up and read Ian Rankin’s Let it bleed over the last couple of days. That was good. It was one of the bunch of Rankin titles we bought and read in England, back in 2007, I think, and by the time it was its turn to be read I’d had enough of Rankin and Rebus for the time being (having read five or six in a row).

It’s a bit shorter than some of his other books, I think, but it’s very fast-paced, and as always there are a heap of things going on and gradually connecting together. It's less gruesome than some of his other stories, which was also a plus. He’s very good at plotting, as well as providing strong characterisations. And he seems to know so much. Seemingly some of his earlier books had police procedural errors – but who would know, except a policeman. By the time this book was written he had someone on hand to check those details.

I’ve obviously read the series all out of order...just looking at Rankin’s (excellent) website, I can see that Let it Bleed comes in the middle somewhere of about twenty Rebus titles, and I’ve read some of the later ones. Not to worry. They’re all fairly self-contained, and you remember as you go along who's who.

Saboteur

I watched Hitchcock's Saboteur again yesterday. I bought the DVD a while ago, and found the movie was a previously undiscovered treat (as far as I was concerned - it was one I'd never caught up with when it was shown at the movies). Not only are Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane a delight in the main roles (a typical Hitchcock couple along the lines of any of the semi-comedy Hitchcock movies) but they're surrounded by an excellent cast in a variety of smaller roles. Many of these faces were probably familiar around the time the movie was made, but with the advance of years, most of them have become unfamiliar.

Saboteur is, in part, a road movie: Cummings is falsely accused of being a saboteur and goes on the run, picking up Lane on the way. The script is full of speeches about Freedom and Liberty and such (effective in the year the movie was made [1942] no doubt, but a little ironic now) and the baddies, all 'American' citizens, are a nasty undermining group. (One of them is called 'Mr Freeman'). The script is credited to Peter Viertel, Joan Harrison and Dorothy Parker, but it's full of Hitchcock touches. In fact it was Viertel's first script, and, as was often the case with Hitchcock's movies, was written greatly in collaboration with Hitchcock. Parker hones some of the dialogue scenes: the truckdriver going on about his wife, the circus performers arguments and so. Originally she and Hitchcock appeared in the movie as the couple who stop by Cummings and Lane when the two are fighting by the roadside, and Parker delivered the line: They must be very much in love. However, this shot was later replaced with other actors, since it seemed too intrusive to use such well-known faces at that point.

The ending takes place (for no particular real reason, although one of the characters gives it a rather lame explanation) on the Statue of Liberty (the name is thematic, of course, and Lane reads out the stirring words that were written when the statue was gifted to the US by the French). The real saboteur, played by Norman Lloyd (he went on to collaborate with Hitchcock in a variety of other ways), hardly appears in the movie: he's there at the beginning briefly, and then doesn't turn up until the final showdown, plummeting off the Statue in one of Hitchcock's cleverer trick shots.

But it's the characters who are met along the way that make this movie interesting: the garrulous truckdriver, Lane's blind uncle (who can hear and sense things better than the rest of us, of course), the circus troup disturbed in the night (these characters get about ten minutes of the movie, and are strongly delineated both by the writers and the actors), and a bunch of menacing baddies who mouth platitudes about 'real' freedom and so on. Hitchcock has a gift for bringing a character to life in a few moments of screen time.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable Hitchcock piece.

Snow - I can do without it

As I write this, it feels as though it's going to snow, alsthough the sky is relatively clear. My fingers aren't quite sticking to the keyboard with the cold but I've just gone and put some fingerless gloves on, (which makes typing just that much more difficult - though I've found I can play the piano wearing fingerless gloves, which could be an advantage when playing in a cold hall).

My lack of interest in snow has to be balanced against the requirements of ski-fields and such for snow and more snow. Personally, while snow is beautiful, it's something I can do without. (I remember as a child walking for about 45 minutes to school the snow - no 'snow days' then - and arriving so frozen I was in tears; which didn't endear me either to my classmates or the teacher!)

But I realise a lot of people in this country thrive on snow - and a lot of the visitors too - which is no doubt why they like to read things like ski goggle reviews, things that hold no interest for me whatsoever.

Maybe that day of being frozen in the snow has traumatised me forever when it comes to snow....

Photo of Whakapapa by Ben Gertzfield

Not only good looks, but talent!

This isn't our dog, although it's obviously a close relative....

Music and books

Things have been a bit quiet on here for the last few days: I've been trying to get the music for Grimhilda! (the musical) sorted better than it has been. Up till a couple of days ago there was a dichotomy (I've been reading too much theology lately) between the printed copies I had of the vocal score (that's the one with just the piano accompaniment and all the singers' lines) and the versions that existed on Sibelius. In general the printed versions were out of date because I'd made innumerable changes (not least getting rid of the original 'overture' and replacing it with something that up till then had come later in the score) and because they also needed to have all the dialogue that affected where things were played written in.

I thought getting this done would be a piece of cake: I worked at it fairly solidly for two days and only got the first four scenes updated. Phew. Admittedly on Sunday morning I woke up thinking I needed to make yet another alteration to a secton in the second scene that's been bugging me for a while. However, whether the change I've now made is the right one is still not settled....

Actually I wasn't intending to write about the musical here this time, but about the sad news that the wonderful UK online bookshop, Book Depository, has been acquired by Amazon. At present Book Depository is great to shop at because it charges no postage anywhere in the world. (Well, 'anywhere' covers at least a 100 countries.) And still gives discounts on the original prices - not as big as Amazon's, but then Amazon compensates by charging a fearsome US$12 per book, and that usually wipes any discount off the map.

Supposedly, at this time, there won't be any changes to Book Depository's approach. Cynic that I am, I can't believe the good times will last....

Bain: the musical

The NZ Herald is playing a selected film from the archives of the V48 Hours Furious Filmmaking competition every day as they build up to this year's final at Auckland's Civic this Saturday, July 2.

I don't know how long the current movie will be available on the site, but it's a daft piece of work from a Dunedin group (including Dave Gooselink and Matt Landreth) with familiar Dunedin locations. It's a musical based on the story of Trevor Bain (no guesses as to which Bain this really refers to) and it's a non-stop piece of nonsense - almost entirely done to music. It won the prize in 2007.

Unfortunately I can't embed it, so check it out quickly....!