Notes from Oxford

Music was the theme of the weeks past; it's getting hard to keep track of time in terms of calendar dates, as everything is now secondary to the timeline of the Michaelmas Term. I'm writing this at the start of Week Six, which I'm told is a good thing: not writing so much as being alive (the act of doing the former generally a sign of the latter); it is Week Five which is the killer. And somehow, like most Oxford cliches, it turned out to be true. By the end of the week I was a nervous wreck, with bloodshot eyes and barely paying any attention to personal appearances except to vaguely color-coordinate the sort of voluminous fluffy sweater that the British specialize in, under which you could have layers of thermal underwear, an explosive and detonator, or be completely naked and just rather tubby.

One advantage to Oxford's concert scene is its intimacy, which translates not just to being able to sneeze at the back of the conductor's head, but to the fact that everything is cheaper, and it's somehow less of a giant commitment to go and attend whatever's playing at the Holywell Music Room or evensong at Christ Church. The main problem actually is keeping track of all these; unlike London, there's no Time Out to consolidate all the information as to what's going on where and give a snippy little review for recurring productions. Quite logically, a good place to look for notices is the Blackwell Music Shop on Broad Street; one of my favorite things to do is actually to stock up on propaganda material (flyers, brochures, notices, lecture lists, etc.) and then settle in at a cafe and go through them at leisure. I can do this more than once a week if I'm bored, which is probably not good for the environment because I leave them all in a heap on the cafe table; but it no doubt gives the organizers of the Oxford Philharmonic and the like a feeling of gratification to see all of their flyers gone and in need of replenishing.

The other week I caught Stephen Hough, whose recording of Rachmaninoff won an Editor's Choice award from Gramophone Magazine, in a recital at the Jacqueline du Pré building at St Hilda's College. The venue was the sort of very small and well-lit space where if you cough everyone within a five meter radius turns around and gives you a long, expressionless stare; if you attempt to alleviate the cough by fishing for and unwrapping a lozenge wrapped in cellophane deep in a bag with a zipper and velcro pockets, even people from the upper gallery will glare at you. I'm usually less concerned about who's playing as opposed to what's being played, and I was a little disappointed to find that the programme was mostly Mozart: but Stephen Hough was indeed amazing. The Guardian, I believe, said that his was the "most perfect piano playing imaginable", or something to that effect; and while I would hesitate to say that (if only because I am less certain about the actual extent of my imagination) it really was brilliant, passionate, and apparently effortless. He didn't hitch up his pants and wiggle his shoulders and take a deep breath before hitting the first note the way most pianists do; he'd simply leap up onto the stage, sit down, and begin playing without a moment's hesitation, as though the music had been burning inside him and simply leapt into flame and up and out through his fingertips and into life and motion and sound and the most wonderful music that held the little roomful of people enthralled.

A slightly more elaborate affair was the Oxford City Orchestra at the Sheldonian; the concert, last Friday evening, had as its highlights Dvorak's Symphony No 8 and Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 2. Rach 2 is one of my favorite pieces of music (as it is for many people), and I was at the same time eager to hear to hear it live and anxious not to be disappointed by limp piano playing or one of those conductors who pace it at a tempo as though he had forgotten to top up the parking meter. The twenty-four year old pianist who took centre-stage that night seemed a very happy chap, in both senses of the world; one of my companions theorized that it was this gay disposition that might have accounted for the somewhat florid interpretation. We agreed, though, that florid was better than austere; and my other friend, who had always shied away from Rachmaninoff having held the impression that his music was somewhat "dark" (which it can be), was pleasantly surprised. What did come as a pleasant surprise to me, from a technical standpoint, was that the acoustics were excellent, for which credit is due to the fact that the Sheldonian's roof is about to collapse. The vaunted (though not vaulted) ceiling of the theatre has been providing an added element of excitement to the university's functions by threatening to come crashing down, and is now swathed in swaddling-cloth; or perhaps Christopher Wren in 1664 got right what the modern engineers of the Opera Bastille couldn't do in terms of acoustics. Of course, there's no heating; the wooden benches are uncomfortable; and sitting in the upper galleries you feel that if you stand up too suddenly you might find yourself catapulting straight into the middle of the strings section of the orchestra. It was, in fact, so cold that the moment the applause died down we stampeded out as though there were a fire drill and took refuge in the warm confines of the Café Rouge.

www.stephenhough.com

Of Latin Rites and Times New Roman

It's been over a week since our matriculation at the Sheldonian Theatre in the center of Oxford. Historically, the center of Oxford has been at Carfax, and this is still what would seem to be the central crossroads of the contemporary city; the university, however, has its noumenal center in the cluster of buildings that include the Radcliffe Camera, the Sheldonian Theatre (where degrees are conferred as well), and of course the Bodleian Library. The last-named is probably the closest one can get to a symbolic "heart" of the university (it's certainly not the fortress-like buildings of the University Offices in Wellington Square); the library card for the Bodleian also doubles as one's university ID. The Bodleian is an uplifting sight with yellow light pouring from behind the large window panes at dusk under the spires, and it's also a cosy idea to know that every book published in the United Kingdom is sitting somewhere there. This cosiness of the idea doesn't necessarily translate into practical terms, though: the Bodleian is far from being one of those libraries where you can spend countless hours wandering amidst shelves of books (it's not Barnes and Noble, after all): upon entering what you find are rows of computers running the arcane Telnet program, which the library still uses to search for books; this has neither the charm of a card catalog or the convenience of modern computer interfaces. The book, when you do find it, is likely to be "withdrawn", which is the Bod's equivalent of a museum's piece being in storage rather than on display. You fill out a request for the book, and make an appointment to read it in one of the reading-rooms. The reading-rooms are admittedly quite nice (I'm partial to the Upper Camera), but I'm an impatient person; I'll make an appointment to see my dentist, say, but to schedule to consult a book is somewhat laborious. Nor is the status of the Bodleian as a "deposit library" (by law, every book, journal, newspaper, magazine, etc., published must send them a copy) quite as watertight as they would like one to believe: these days, "publishing" can take many forms and its definition is becoming quite fluid, so people from across the disciplines have been commenting on how the Bodleian has been missing out on many key documents, even those which are in print. Let's see how they deal with the new publishing industry being created by the likes of lulu.com. Despite these criticisms I can never cross Radcliffe Square without thinking of the miles of books lying in the subterranean tunnels, ready to be conveyed the great sprawl of the Bodleian through the network of pneumatic pipes.

The University of Oxford does seem to be highly modernised, with every lecture I've attended so far being accompanied by a Power Point presentation as de rigueur; but one would think that a university of this calibre would also have cutting-edge IT technology. What I've seen so far seems to be the hegemony of Microsoft and its tell-tale harbinger and fingerprint, the ominprescence of Times New Roman. I am still reeling from the amount of Times New Roman I am subjected to on a daily basis; does anyone not think of varying the typeface at some point? I've never been a great fan of sans serif typefaces but coming home to my beloved Mac I am tempted to obliterate all the Times-related font sets from my computer's Font Book to salve my battered sensibilities. I suppose 800 years of history might be dragging the University down a bit, but if it pedalled a little harder, perhaps it could get beyond Windows 2000.

So, then. The verb "to matriculate" comes from the Latin "matricula", which means "stand around freezing your ass off in ridiculous costume on a drizzly Saturday morning". Oxford is one of the last universities to actually keep the tradition of the ceremony, which is to physically present oneself before the (in our case, Vice-Chancellor as representative of the) university, who was supposed to take down one's name in a notebook of sorts and thus recognize one as a member of the university. So in full battle gear (black gowns flapping in the wind, tassels a-twirling) we all filled the Sheldonian to the rafters for the ceremony, which lasted all of about seven minutes (including the pipe organ fanfare). The Sheldonian isn't a very large theatre, and there are thirty-six colleges, so everyone is hustled away quickly for the next batch to enter. But the real induction into Oxford, in my opinion, is the moment when you learn how to ride your bicycle while carrying a stack of books and balancing an umbrella in the rain.

The Bodleian Library
www.lulu.com

Serenity, or Firefly writ larg(ish)

"Serenity" opened in the UK this weekend. Despite the good press the movie has been receiving all around, especially among British critics, I wasn't quite sure what to expect when I walked into the Odeon screening room in Oxford (where the screen is about the size of a large television set). I've always had great admiration for Joss Whedon (as evidenced by my unabashed admiration for the Buffy series, supra) but even on Buffy and especially on Angel he has always been uneven as well as unpredictable, and I was imagining the myriad ways in which he could fail to deliver.

But I needn't have worried: "Serenity", whether you've seen the "Firefly" episodes on DVD or at a newcomer to that universe, does not fail to deliver; not only is it coherent as a movie, but it manages to pick up roughly where the series left off, which means that for a fan it doesn't too much time on what we already know yet manages to introduce the premises of the futuristic setting and the characters in a few deft strokes. What is missing, of course, is the cosy familiarity one develops with the characters which is perhaps the biggest advantage of television over feature films: one comes to think of the "Friends" cast as one's friends; the detectives on "CSI" as one's collleagues at the workplace; "The West Wing" is at once a workplace drama and a family drama, with the president as a father figure presiding over a house. And (returning to "Serenity") anyone with any familiarity with Joss Whedon at all will know that he never has "clean" victories but that there always is a price, so I wouldn't count it as a spoiler to say that I knew even as the movie began that not all of them would make it; but I nevertheless lurched in my seat when it happened.

The other reviews I've been reading have focused a lot on the transition to "the big screen", but because of the venue where I happened to see it, four feet away from a small screen, UK projection dimensions (there's a difference in aspect ratio, i.e., a strip lopped off the top and bottom) in a theatre without DTS nor Dolby decoding (rather like the Mac, which uses its own mixdown even if you play a Dolby disc on it), it felt like a good, long episode: a season-ender, say. So is it the new Star Trek or even the new Star Wars? No, no. But I think it's fair to say that it might be the new Joss Whedon, which also does less disservice to all concerned.

Let England be England

England again! In London, where I stayed for a few nights seeing friends and squandering away a fortune (it's a wonderful city in which to pretend to be a millionaire; a friend and I met for lunch at the cafeteria-like but scrumptious Nobu for the £50 set lunch) I put myself up at the Lanesborough, having been put off by horror stories about the now-shabby rooms and deteriorating service at good old Claridge's. The Lanesborough is now my favorite hotel in London: even if you know that its old country-house feeling is complete artifice, since it doesn't have the pedigree of, say, the Connaught, which is far too masculine and lacks the femininity that used to be Claridge's edge [that was supposed to be a genitive; note to self: find out possessive form for such names]. Summer is thankfully over and even in Chelsea only those who truly spent a fortune on their slimming and tanning are making last-ditch attempts to expose skin in the increasingly chilly weather.

A few tears, well-shed, for my Sloane Avenue flat; but upwards and onwards! To Oxford this time, and the full-fledged adventure of full-fledged university life! Actually, it has already caught me up in such a swirl that I haven't had time to blog since I arrived. And there's so much to tell...but bedtime calls if I'm to be sentient for the lecture at 10 am tomorrow morning.

Staring myself down

There's another blog I keep, a self-indulgent blog, that I try to keep as far away as possible from this one. I journal here when I feel I've mastered something; or at least learned something; and I log it down both for my own sake and because I hope my synthesis of some new idea or trend or observation will be useful. I started off by explaining that the girl writing this blog is the girl in the mirror; or, more precisely, the girl that I want osee in the mirror: someone old enough to know things but tender enough to be open to new ideas and new worlds. She's confident, knows a great deal about a great many things, and is hungry to learn more about just about everything; she enjoys sharing what has has verified in hre research and her opinions.

Is that me? That's me on a good day, when I just run my fingers through my hair and without further ado get on the 19 bus in defiance of the Knightsbridge dress code; I feel as though I can hear the thoughts of everyone on the bus; I overhear conversations and entire life histories flash before me.

On days like thig one I write pages of self-analysing drivel in my othe blogs: the kind that only a bored, neurotic intellectual could possibly produce; or have the time to produce, or think it worth the time to type in. On days like these the Girl in the Mirror taunts me, makes me bury my head in my hands.

Oh what a day it has been

I’m writing this at the end of one of the longest days [originally supposed to have posted yesterday] in recent British history, when terrorists detonated three bombs on the Underground and one on a double-decker bus. No one is quite certain what the transport situation in the morning will be like; announcements have been made that every effort is being made to bring operations to normal, but no one knows quite what to make of this.
The reason for this, perhaps, is that no one had been quite certain of the situation throughout the day; at least, no one who wasn’t Tony Blair or worked in Whitehall or MI5. When the Underground was shut down, the reason given was that there had been a power surge. I had in fact checked the Transport for London website before I left home because a friend had advised me on my mobile that there were “problems on the tube”; I assumed it was one of the usual “signalling problems” that reguarly causes delays (now that I think about it, I’m not quite sure what that means, either). My morning commute takes me down the Piccadilly Line to Holborn, two stops down from King’s Cross.
I’m certain that the newspapers and magazines will be filled with editorials and analyses comparing and contrasting the incidents of the day with those of 9/11, and Mayor Giuliani has already appeared on British television to give his views on the matter, or to fill dead airtime (to take a certain view). These analyses will no doubt be far more clever or piercing than anything I could write, but here’s an offbeat take on it: London’s transport system is one of the few really impressive things about the city for me; it is impressive the way that the skyscrapers of Manhattan are impressive.
London isn’t compact and well-planned the way that Paris is; its streets don’t snap to a grid the way that they do in New York. Yet every taxi driver, in the days before GPS, knew every single back alley and every obscure hotel or monument tucked away behind, say, Victoria Lane, which might or might not be a wider thoroughfare than Victoria Street, Victoria Crescent, Victoria Mews, Victoria Road, Victoria Square, etc.. London is vast, unruly, and its streets are paved-over cart-tracks from a medieval city. Since taxis are prohibitively expensive and cars becoming even more so, most people rely on either the double-deck buses that lurch their way through the narrow streets, or the underground railway system, the oldest in the world (the first carriages were pulled by horses). As a work of engineering in itself, the tube is inspiring: at Holborn, the Piccadilly Line is 15 storeys below street level. (As a means of daily conveyance, it is one of the least pleasant aspects of living in London; even the buskers are off-key.)
An attack on the tube and the bus system is a shaft to the heart of what makes London pulse; and so even if it isn’t as grandiose a gesture as flying an aircraft through a skyscraper, it was a body blow to the city. The city simply ground to a halt as surely as though someone had switched off the electricity to the mains. There is no doubt that the scale of the attack is diminutive compared to that of 9/11, which is not t disparage the “dreadfulness” (to use the Queen’s term) of it. But where it differed most was in the way it was handled by the authorities and the media.
Throughout the morning, the public had very little idea what was going on, beyond the fact that there had been explosions. After finding the tube closed, I boarded a bus, which was then stopped and everyone told to get off. We were politely informed that there were security problems, and told to “go home, or go to a park; stay away from Central London”. I tried to make my way to Central London, and found myself stopped by a policeman, who was also very polite; I had the feeling that if he had found me in the act of murdering someone, he would have asked me to kindly please stop bludgeoning the poor gentleman in the same good-natured tone.
It was not until afternoon that the first photographs of the blown-up bus were released; it was not till evening that the number of explosions and their exact location were confirmed, and the facts released that the army had been called in to secure Charing Cross Station. The radio had been quite surreal all day: after Tony Blair’s statement, most stations simply went on playing music as though it had been a routine announcement about the economy. Contrast this to the constantly “Breaking News” style of CNN, which breaks news with the same insistence and doggedness of someone with poor digestion breaking wind.
I’m ambivalent about this “stiff upper lip” approach to a national crisis; some might even call it deliberate misinformation; certainly, calling explosions on the tube “power surges” is something other than mere downplaying. But to put the question of the responsibility for public awareness of the national situation aside, I can attest that, very simply, it worked. The majority of Londoners simply stayed at work or stayed at home (as they were consistently told to do), a few even probably did go to the park. And since cable is a luxury in Britain, the world was most likely more alarmed than the people who were in their homes or strolling down Sloane Street for a cup of tea.
Tony Blair said in his public address that he would not allow the terrorists to change the British way of life, which I imagine includes everything from clotted cream pudding to insane banking regulations to foreign policy. Some of these things could stand some change; but America promised itself the same thing but failed. The American way of life has changed; you only have to try checking in for a flight to know that it has. In a few hours, we’ll find out how Britain will respond.

And the show goes on

Movies open later in Paris than they do in London; over the weekend I saw posters for La Guerre des Mondes, which opened here last week but which I have yet to see. But they stock DVDs faster: I finally found what I had been waiting for for some time, Season 5 of The West Wing. Yes, I know I should get a television connection, or even cable; but I'd probably never leave the house. I also know that I can download the whole season through Bittorrent, but that's an entirely different topic. So I buy the DVD box sets and watch half a season in a day along with housekeeping and personal grooming. I am now wholly moisturized and up to Episode 12 of the Aaron Sorkin-less series.

It isn't quite as bad as everyone said it would be; I suppose because I'd expected worse. If it were a new series I'm sure it would be amazing. Actually, it would be amazing in more ways than one: there's some pretty awful dialogue, and the storylines are simplistic, but the naivete is not unamusing. What is amazing is to see actors who know their characters inside out sputtering out stilted language and stumbling through meandering storylines; they seem to understand their roles better than the writers. The look hasn't changed, of course; the directors by default have to follow the style that Thomas Schlamme set out, but they're less stylized about the long takes and marking scene changes with focus pulls. Some readers of this blog have assured me that by Season 6 the writing gets better and they're now having to deal with series fatigue more than anything.

While updating my software I found a new version of iTunes delivered to my desktop, with Podcasting built in. I never did get my head around the concept, which I shall now have to explore. (Then again, I came late to blogging as well; now I can't stop.) I did notice though that they had a lot of KCRW stuff on the menu; well, there goes what I thought was a well-kept secret. KCRW is great; I can't get enough of one of their shows which I feel is definitive for my type of music; it's a show called Morning Becomes Eclectic (yes, bad pun on poor Eugene O' Neill, but a great show). It's definitive the way MTV Unplugged used to be in the days when MTV was music telvision and not Jackass. They recently featured one of the artists that I was just beginning to love (they're uncanny that way), Keren Ann. Just go to the drop-down menu for that show and do a search for her if she's no longer on the "recent" list. I'm listening to Nolita as I type.

www.kcrw.org

Star Wars : A New Hope, Not

I'm not sure why I decided to accept a casual invitation to go along with some friends who wanted to see Star Wars Episode III, some of whom had seen it before. I don't think my attitude towards George Lucas and the prequels is too different from that of everyone else who loved the first three; we trudge to the cinema with a feeling of deep disappointment but with a sense of stalwart loyalty. Or perhaps it was because I wanted to see how someone who could do so little with so much. Like every struggling filmmaker who counts the ticking of rental on the rented HMI's and dreams of million-dollar budgets, I would like to scratch at the coattails of the man who own Industrial Light and Magic but cannot seem to afford the affront to his vanity of hiring a script writer, or even a script doctor at the very least.

On the technical side of things, I've been curious (though not enough to pay the price of the Odeon Leicester Square box office ticket to really find out) what a film shot entirely digitally looks like on a movie screen. HD looks wonderful on a computer screen because that's where it was created, to stretch things a little bit. But HD progressive ("writing" the screen twice in opposite directions) is just the latest attempt to surmount the fundamental problem of video, which is that it looks false.

This is where it gets complicated. Video, whether by means of 3CCD or HD or in post, has a guilty secret aspiration: it wants to look like film. Digital cinema from George Lucas is about the height of the technology at the moment, so it's a good assessment of what is possible and what isn't; it is patently obvious that achieving the "film look" is still in a galaxy far, far away. Film looks the way it does because it works a certain way; it has a certain advantage in its ability to compress highlights and shadows, but mainly we like the look of film because we're used to it; we also believe more in an image that looks like it was shot on film. Even most kids today still grew up with directors who will ultimately rely on film, no matter how much CGI is done; it's all transferred back to film.

I personally don't think digital cinema should look like film; but, unfortunately, it has to look other than the way it looks now, because it looks like a videogame. The fact that it's sci-fi is a double-edged light-sabre: it gives it a certain excuse to look like that; but then it doesn't help that the script and production design are simply ghastly. The future of the image is digital, that much is certain; and the transition will have its growing pains; must we unneccessarily add bad writing and directing to these pubescent difficulties? I've seen the current state of digital cinema, and seen it clearly; I wish I hadn't.

Still, there's something about watching the credits roll and not seeing "Filmed in Panavision" at the end; I like the idea of the possibilities of digital cinema. Come it will; but take this direction it must not.

Waterloo to Paris-Nord : There and Back Again

London today, in insolent defiance of the official weather forecast, is blanketed in a heat wave; people are going around naked in the park (mildly acceptable) and in the crush between Piccadilly and Leicester Square. One of these shirtless men doggedly tried to pick me up with the tenacity of an Italian; whatever happened to the stereotypical well-dressed Englishman and the British reserve?

It was probably the same temperature on the centigrade scale at the Place d'Horloge in Avignon; but oh, it was glorious last weekend. I draped myself on the stone steps facing the Palais des Papes and luxuriated in the sunshine and the breeze, idly remembering and then dismissing the vague thought that we were well past the allotted time for our rented car on the parking meter. The rest of the the weekend was a Peter Mayle idyll; we based ourselves at the Hotel les Frenes outside Avignon and made the usual rounds of Aix-en-Provence, Marseille, Les Baux (excellent unfiltered olive oil); we went to the morning market at Nimes and went sat down for a round of Perrier-menthes. (Sadly, though, gone are the days when you could race around the French countryside at top speed; they've taken to enforcing speed limits and some very unfriendly people will be waiting for you at the tollbooths.)

Waterloo Station is ironically and aptly named; it is here that the unified European rail system disintegrates into the chaos of the former British Rail, now subdivided and privatised into a system of utter confusion. They've cut the journey time down now by making some improvements on the British side, but essentially the TGV chugs along at the speed of a railway carriage from era when there were compartments on the train instead of airplane-like seats. After the descent into the tunnel and the re-emergence on the other side, time leaps forward an hour; the train leaps forward into the high-speed mode it was made for, and one leaps into the glory of continental civilisation.

Pierre Gagnaire was unavailable to feed us, as was Guy Savoy, but a table for five was available at the restaurant Alain Ducasse; it was my decision not to book our usual room at the Crillon and stay at the Plaza-Athenée instead, where the restaurant (formerly Joël Robuchon's Jamin) has now relocated. Ducasse suffered from his usual problem of a leitmotif becoming repetitious rather than resonant (it was asparagus and caviar this time); but it was an excellent meal all around. And the Plaza-Athenée is beautiful, so beautiful: its winding staircase with the unending red carpet winding upwards; the attention to detail down to the selection of pillows; the exuberant red of the canopies that unfurl every morning. If it weren't for the prohibitive price of the aller-retour (£500 for a first-class return) I'd be back there this weekend.

The Greater Parisian Co-Prosperity Sphere (as we called our reunion in Paris) has dissolved itself; the boys are off to Prague, my cousin to Milan, and my brother back home. The last time I drove on the left was when I was in South Africa, but for the moment Chelsea is charmless and the prospect of a weekend alone at Sloane seems a condemnation. Perhaps if I can make my way out of central London I shall do the Lake District this weekend. I'm sure London will be interesting again; but can these boys please put their shirts back on?

Her Majesty and the iPod

It seems almost impossible to believe that I have a broadband connection in London; or at least I think so, as the modem is a tricky one it is, and the signal myseriously comes and goes. But for the moment it seems to be here for the moment. And I've missed blogging, oddly enough. I've missed it among other things that come with broadband internet access, which had become so reliable that it was jarring to turn on the computer and have all the widgets come out blank, my mail offline, my iDisk files unreachable.

Britain seems so wired (not in the sense of having had a great deal of caffeine, although there are coffee shops every two steps; whatever happened to a the English cuppa?): every company comes with an Internet address; you can pay the congestion fee over the internet. The congestion fee is apparently a toll that motorists have to pay when they drive their cars around in Central London; I've seen this in Singapore as well, but there it all seems (like the rest of the country) ruthlessly efficient: you drive your car under a bar wired with an ray-beam (or something) and it deducts money electronically. Drivers in London have to rush to a convenience store or get online to pay the toll; if they don't, there is a £50 fine. Which is fine by the Mayor of London, who runs the whole scheme and wants more people not be able to pay in time; the website is often down. Probably not deliberately, but an inefficiency that works to his advantage.

London would be a pleasant compromise city to live in if one had the means, and these are not lean means; one must be a very, very rich person to actually live well in London. It has the best theatre, bookstores, and basically can't be beat for as the cultural capital of the Anglophone world. But the shopping is better in New York, and the food is better in Paris. You can get about seventy per cent of what you'd find on these other great cities it is wedged between (and it meanders in the middle of the Atlantic if one ignores geography); but all at twice the price. You can eat well in London; but you can't eat well for little money in London; you can in Paris. Or New York for that matter. Which leaves the bookstores, which I haven't checked out yet; but in terms of theatre, there is something ironic about the fact that the best show on in the West End is The Producers.

But the British do have style; and when they put up an Apple store here they went to town. It is located in no less than Regent Street and flies a flag above the entrance; it's more like the lobby of an Ian Schrager hotel than a computer depot. One would wouldn't be surprised to see a royal warrant above the entrance, e.g., "Purveyors of digital musical equipment to HRH The Prince of Wales". Or even the Queen; who needs an iPod more than she does? Wouldn't an audiobook be just the thing to pass the time while sitting through the Trooping of the Colours?

Le Seigneur des Anneaux

They've been threatening to show The Two Towers on HBO again; for some reason, my friends and I follow the HBO schedules in our own way. Collectively, we own all the collector's sets of the Lord of the Rings trilogy; so we decided to make an evening of epic cinema in the living room of one of my friends, where his family has built, I swear, a small theater. We created a bag of Original Butter Flavor that turneby pressing a buttoon that turned a flat pouch into a bag of steaming buttery munchies (one of the few instances when the microwave produces better results than traditional cookery), and settled down to watch the trilogy in THX, Dolby, 7.1 sound.

One of the interesting problems that arise when you have an international collection of friends who have each lived all over the world is that there is PAL and NTSC; there are regions 1 to 7; and there are DVD players that refuse to play discs from the same country of original: this is what can only be called technological xenophobia. My friend actually had three DVD players, one of which, he promised was a 'DVD-slut' that would accept anything thrust into it. As it turned out, the collector's version of Fellowship of the Ring was unplayable, so we settled for the abridged version; my Le Retour du Roi would only play in French.

Interesting experience it was, to watch the culmination of the story (and the best of the films, if you want to take them individually) in French. First of all, one doesn't at first realize how vital the dialogue is to what most would classify as an action movie. For those like myself who could remember the English and understand the French, it served to keep my attention from following the story to staying at the level of the surface; specifically, the text of the dialogue (pace Derrida et al., si vous voulez). One admires the poetry of the dialogue, both in English and in the French; and I have to confess to a feeling of vindication/retribution for years of trying to read French novels or watch subtitled French films: ha, the tables were turned for once.

I have a friend who is a translation scholar; he pointed out that when the committee in Sweden gave Gabriel Garcia Marquez the Nobel prize for literature, were they giving it to his novels, or the translations. And as for Milan Kundera, I can't stand his early works, but everything from La Lenteur onwards I adore: this was the point when he started writing in French rather than in his native Czech.

One of the impetus for writing The Lord of the Rings for JRR Tolkien was actually his interest in languages, especially his make-believe ones that stemmed from his interest in early forms of English; Middle-Earth was born from its tongues, so to speak. I think they should, like Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (filmed in Aramaic) or Philip Glass's Akhnaten (libretto in Ancient Egyptian) have filmed Le Seigneur des Anneaux (I remember trying to buy a ticket, in halting French, for the Lord of the Lambs) in the original tongues: V.O. for the world; subtitled variously, and, for heaven's sake, playable on all machines. The standards of video are so multifarious as it is; adding artificial restrictions is just downright silly.

The karaoke experience (PDF download)

Buffy in the West Wing, by Proust

A nice chap wrote in the other day about my blog and mentioned The West Wing, the American television series about the White House senior staff. Now, I feel fairly confident talking about The West Wing, even if it sounds pretentious for someone who also likes Buffy the Vampire Slayer; I hesitated and finally didn't put The Economist among my favorite reading material, because to be completely honest there's an element of trying to overreach a bit intellectually in subscribing to that magaazine (sorry, newspaper). Indeed, most weeks I rarely get past the obituary (I'm a back-flipper); so my week begins by finding out who died. If I'm really industrious by Wednesday or Thursday I can get past Books and Arts; on blue moon Sundays I actually get to News and find out what happened in the world two weeks ago.

But The West Wing I do love; and I'll say this just once, I love it the way I love Buffy. The thing is, I'm not really into vampires and goth, and rarely even watch horror movies; in the same way, I'm only marginally interested in American executive politics. But Buffy the Vampire Slayer was simply great television, hitting its high notes in Seasons Four and Five. The problem of initiating someone who wouldn't normally watch this sort of thing is that you have to fill in the cumulative mythology from Seasons One to Three, which are good television but not outstanding. What you get in Season Four is the sense of a creator who suddenly realized the possibilities of television. Continuing storylines aren't a new thing; the 80s had Dynasty and Falcon Crest. What suddenly seemed to happen with late Buffy, and eventually with The West Wing and especially with Alias, is that a new form of tightly-written, well-directed, visionary storytelling was attempted.

No single element taken alone is actually new, of course. Well-written doesn't get better than Joss Whedon's "Hush" (Buffy 4); for well-directed just about any of Thomas Schlamme's ten-scenes-in-one-take (including impossibly difficult steadicam shots and lots of backlighting) stuff; for demanding a lot of the audience, Alias 3 is mind-boggling if you didn't see the first two seasons. But the strange thing about anything written for television is that it is not end-oriented: in other words; the basic rule of writing a story, which is to have a beginning and work towards and end, doesn't apply here. The point of television is to have as many seasons as the networks will give you. At the same time, how do you get an audience involved in the story if there isn't a story? This sounds like making too much of a couple of good TV series. Appreciate, yes; but claim that there's something new going on there? Yes, I do.

If you really want to appreciate it, invest in the DVDs. Not for the commentary, but so that you can watch it sequentially rather than as a weekly snippet. I watched The West Wing's first four seasons in one week. Aside from the fact that you can see the sets evolve so that they're not obviously walking through a door into a different time of day, you get a sense of the broad canvas, the larger story. I suddenly remembered the last time I burned night into day by being so engrossed; it was JRR Tolkien (and, to a lesser extent, the Harry Potter novels).

I wrote about small being the new big and big the new small? Forget the size or shape of the screen. The new format is video come of age. Imagine that for years everyone had written novels and short stories; some novelists ran long: Dickens, Dostoyevsky (which Alias has been compared to, by the way); but Proust is long not just quantitatively. It's a long novel in a different way; and there's something "unending" about it as well; and I'm not talking about the experience of reading it. Okay, it's a stretch; but there's something new happening in the format of motion pictures, and it's not happening on the big screen; it's already taking shape in 4:3; in your living room.

And now back to intellectual pretense

Please read with both hands on the table

On the Dashboard of my Macintosh, the widget for the Encyclopaedia Britannica shares space with that for the Wikipedia, which, as a reference source, I find somewhat patchy, but I have a soft spot for that project. Actually, more often than not it triumphs over the Britannica as a reference source: when I need a comprehensive overview of the Battle of Stalingrad I'll use the Britannica; but if I need a quick reference to what XML is all about the Wikipedia's a lot more succinct. By its very nature it'll never actually be "finished"; but at a certain point I think it'll actually reach a watershed point as a reference tool in its own right.

I'm just a little bemused that the Encyclopaedia Britannica is trying to keep itself from obsolescence by putting itself online, and just a little bit sad that they've given up their lordly position on the shelves of every middle-class home; there was something comforting about the authoritativeness of the dark maroon spines with gilded lettering; when you looked up it was as though the full weight of the British Empire was staring back down at you, and the unspoken message wa: "Here is all the knowledge that is worth knowing"; and if you listened carefully, the grand pronouncement was followed by a sotto voce "...you little upstart..." So in the middle of a sentence I would would hesitate, unable to resist the authority of those rows of gilded spines with their arms akimbo behind me, and double-check what I was about to dash off. Strangely enough, now that the Britannica can be called by pressing F12 on the keyboard, I rarely bother.

Credit must be given, thus, to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has resisted the temptation to give up the fight and lurk in cyberspace. Which is a ironic, considering that you need a certain amount of time to get through a Britannica article; whereas you'd think that with the OED you just want to look up a word. (To be honest, what I used to do was take the appropriate volume of the Britannica to the loo with me; its laxative powers are vastly underrated.) But perhaps the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary know that the people who really use the OED for what it is aren't just looking up the meaning of a word, just as Jane Grigson's cookbooks aren't to be used to look up a recipe. No, the Oxford English Dictionary was written by madmen for madmen, and is meant to be read like a novel. (Yes, really: there's a book about the making of it called The Professor and the Madman, by Simon Winchester.) This is why it runs twenty volumes long and has entries 60,000 words long on a single word. Now that's what I'd like to have behind me while I'm at my desk; though if I went to the loo to check out the proper usage of "go" I might never come back.

I'm somewhat ambivalent about all these resources being moved online. I'm an impatient person, and more often than not my more esoteric desires aren't to be found at the local bookstore or music shop. Music is less of a problem; there's always Limewire; but the books I want are always the ones that take a couple of weeks to arrive, so that by the time I get them I tend to open the package with faint surprise. I wanted this? Badly enough to order it? Instant gratification is to be had by downloading e-books; but that means keeping the household up all night with the printer chugging away. Audiobooks I like, but I have a special designation for them; they're for the books that I know I should read (and actually want to read) but I can't bring myself to, like keeping up to date with the latest mathematics and media theory stuff. Based on my own reading habits, I don't think the printed word is going out of date anytime soon, but that's a whole different issue from that of reference.

But while we're hovering around the topic, I'd like to put in a word about libraries. Most people have given up on future survivial of libraries; and I agree, if it's community libraries we're talking about, the kind with little old ladies shushing you and taking twenty minutes to look for a book which turns out to have been lost during the war. But the big libraries will always have their place in the world, and for the same reason that the OED exists in printed form: reference. Every single book published in Britain is required, by law, to send a copy to five libraries: the British Library, the Bodleian in Oxford, the University Library at Cambridge, and two others I can't remember (in Scotland and Wales). Just wandering around the Bodleian is an enthralling experience; it's the same feeling has having the Britannica staring down at you, but a thousand times over.

The University Library at Cambridge is less imposing, both inside and out; in fact, from a distance, there's something remotely phallic about its architecture. There's an urban myth (that might be true; who knows) that the library houses its private collection of pornography (after all, *every* book in Britain is sent there) at the very tip of the phallic protuberance; they purportedly have pornographic material dating from the time of Galileo. Although the University Library (unlike the Bodleian) is a lending library, the ponographic material must be read in that special room at the foreskin; there is a large window through which the curators can check on you and a sign that exhorts you to "Please Read With Both Hands On The Table".

Of course, there are also Newton's papers, some portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls that scholars are working on; and the Bodleiand and the Library of Congress have their own treasures. Not to mention the papers from the trial of Galileo at the Vatican. But if I had free access to all the libraries in the world; that's where I would head first. After all, that's what libraries are for. And that's what you won't find on the Internet.

This way to the phallus
The unfinished project

The Glory of Failure

If you must fail, then do so with aplomb. It's a time of renewed interest in Douglas Adams and his work again, now that Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the movie, is being released around the world; the reviews have been mixed (I haven't seen it myself). The producers should have been more careful: it's a text almost as sacred as JRR Tolkien's; and boy, that was playing with fire. But the fact that Tolkien's fans are more than merely zealous but were trained inthe same desert camps as fundamentalist terrorists ia outweighed by the fact that Douglas Adams passed away much more recently. I have a soft spot in my heart for him, incidentally; he was one of the few persons I know of (okay, the only one, come to think of it) who died of writer's block. (Yes, really; check out his biographies.) Another trait that endears him to me is that he, too, understood how dear the Mac Powerbook is to a creative individual. At the time of his death they were able to excavate basically an entire book's worth of unfinished stuff from his hard drive. There aren't many people who are able to produce something by not producing, if you know what I mean.

The ultimate triumh of creating something by not being able to create is Terry Gilliam's attempt to make a film of Don Quixote, starring Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis. It was Gilliam's dream project, but just about everything went wrong from day one; but he pushed on; and let's not stretch the Quixotic metaphor of his doing so too far. He finally gave up, but there was supposed to be a "Making of..." featurette (the kind they stick in the DVD version) which went on to become a kind of cult hit. It's by Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe; and, honestly, reading between the lines and gleaning the sort of film that Gilliam was going to make, it seems only fitting that Lost in La Mancha came out and the film didn't, and I dare say the documentary is a lot funnier than what the film would have been. Productivity, I think, is overrated; as long as you're a genius, as Terry Gilliam and Douglas Adams are and were, you can produce even when you didn't.


But I'm going to dig up my copy of HHGG (as Hitchhiker's... is affectionately known) and listen to his original radio serialization before the film comes out. As someone who is in both industries I have a personal rule of never comparing the film to the book; I mean, I do, but never on the basis of faithfulness; one of the reasons I say this is because someone once made a god-awful film from one of my works without my permission; I decided not to sue: but it brought me to the rumination that if the film had been a runaway success I might have decided to. Then again, copyright law is is a bit murky here: an idea can be copyrighted; the expression of an idea can't. Anyway, my research in that area finally led me to the conclusion that anyone is welcome to make a film, kabuki opera, a monologue for five voices, or an installation piece, or whatever, from any of my works; just please have the courtesy to invite me to the opening, eh?

The collaboration that could've been but didn't happen was the Hitchhiker's Guide to La Mancha, and that work, which was was never produced, but in its own way was, is a work that definitely eases a lot of the pressure of everyone's back. Posterity, after all, occasionally is kind enough to judge you on what you didn't manage to do. So I'm going to open a chilled ginger ale and catch up on The West Wing, which is a lot more fun than sitting in front of my editing console.

www.douglasadams.com
The first inception of HHGG was on audio

Small Is The New Big; Big The New Small

While browsing for Aimee Mann on the QuickTime site, I noticed that they now have technology that can let you play videos on on your mobile telephone. And mobiles have become so small these days that I keep opening my compact and holding it up to my hear after scrambling through my bag to answer an incoming call. I should either get a phone that doesn't have to flip open, or pressed powder that comes in a brick. As I tell everyone, I'm an old soul, and when I was at school I enjoyed all the parts that have nothing to do with my job in the media now, like taking movies on Super 8 and threading it through a projector. The videophones began their popularity in Japan, apparently, because they have long commutes to work on crowded subway compartments, and what better way to annoy your fellow travellers than to play an action movie on a little screen held up to their face while the person beside you is trying to compose a haiku? The space needed to set up a projector and play a flickering seven-minute reel would take up as much space as the entire compartment. I personally went through the transition from the whole plane of passengers on a transcontinental flight all craning their heads to watch the same movie and listening to the sound through stethoscopes, to everyone peering intently at the back of the seat in front of them surfing through various channels and having the film paused at a crucial point in the plot by an annoucement for turbulence.

On the same site, I downloaded the trailer for Kingdom of Heaven. Have you noticed that the more important the release is, the more elongated it gets? Really high-budget films seem to be shot in a strange format that requires you to swivel your head from one side to another if you're sitting in the cheap seats up front. Panavision now makes an 80mm format, which is ten times the width of the Kodachrome that I used in my father's Bolex. (I really should dig that up and shoot an epic-like script on it using sock puppets.)

Nothing is medium-sized anymore. Although, actually, they still are. We still are most accustomed to 4:3, the television format: count the number of hours you spend watching TV to watching extremely elongated movies about war and death in a theatre. Or staring at a computer monitor, for that matter. And when they shoot movies in various degrees of elongatedness, they still make sure that everything important happens in the middle, because at some point it's going to be on HBO. One theory is that a wide format is what we're more naturally inclined to, because our eyes are in roughly that proportion. Another theory is that we the wider the screen, the more we're in "surround" mode, and hence it's more real. Myself, I'd rather that it not be too wide so that I can use my peripheral vision to look out for pickpockets, stalkers, and shady would-be rapists lurking by the "Exit" signs.

The irony of it all was that when I finally managed to download the trailer and watch it (and I'm too impatient to click on the full-screen version to buffer), I had a gloriously large, wide-screen HD editing monitor in front of me, and it was completely black except for a a few dead pixels and a rectangle the size of a matchbox in the middle, on which was playing (with black bars above and below), the preview to the epic. I think that at some point in history, these were called peep-hole theatres.

What Filmed in Panavision Means

Morning for the Living

Every night, going to bed is an ordeal for me. Not that I don't want to day to end, but I'm usually afraid it never will and I'll toss and turn, making a terrible a day into an even longer one. So I take pills, sometimes as many as a dozen at a time, combinations of various over-the-counter remedies and "hacks" of medications for other things, like blood pressure suppressors. In continental Europe the pharmacies will cheerfully sell you, over the counter, ten packs of twenties of knockout pills, as long as you look reasonably cheerful while purchasing them, I suppose.

I never know how I'm going to wake up in the morning; what sort of mood I'll be in: cheerful or melancholy; energetic or lethargic; irritable or sated with an irresistible urge to contribute enormous sums of cash to Amensty International. That's why I'm convinced that while sleeping I'm actual up and about in another world living a parallel life, and stuff happens to me there.

But there are some mornings that are just special, and sometimes you just wake up to them like unexpected presents laid at the bedside. Possibilites are infinite, the world is huge and wonderful and worth exploring, and there are all sorts of exciting things to do and nothing that has to get done or else. Physically, you're starting to think about breakfast. This is especially true when travelling; after all, when I'm at home, I don't really think about breakfast so much as have it, as I usually know what I'm going to have for breakfast; but in a foreign hotel bedroom the room service menu suddenly doesn't look quite as exorbitant as it did the night before.

One of the essentials of a good hotel is a CD player in the room (these days, sometimes an iPod dock in the room). There's a limited amont of time to get dressed (sleeping in the buff is a pleasant habit from my years of promiscuity), and these mornings absolutely call for music. I used to play it on my Walkman, then iPod, now on the reasonably good speakers of my Powerbook. But a few hotels have particularly good sound systems: the Peninsula in Honkong; Claridge's in London; at the Ritz in Paris the acoustic aren't outstanding but they managed to hide a car stereo console within a gilded Louis XVI table. In the past I used to burn a disc on the spot, but now I travel with a couple of compilations. One day I decided to "master" a defintive collection to commemorate what I caled a "Morning for the Living" (a pun on mourning for the dead, but no one gets it...yes, this is the point when you say Aaah!...)

The picture I used for the album cover really was taken very early on a very beautiful morning with a Powershot S1, a vastly underrated camera which is the Leica M6 of our time.

1. Because the Night, from the 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged album. Nothing like rock and roll to get the blood pumping.

2. No Ordinary Morning, by Chicane from his Behind the Sun album. Because.

3. I'm a Traveler, by Clem. Much effort was spent on my part to track down any more information about this artist. I found the song on an album called Correspondances, released by the RATP, the company that runs the Paris Metro. Apparently you can't just go and busk in the tunnels of the underground there; you have to audition for each line's Musical Director. At some point they released an album of the best of the music from the buskers, and this American girl was among them. Short of hoping to chance upon her in the Chatelet-Les Halles interchange, I've given up the search. The company's site makes no mention of the CD, and they aren't selling in stores.

4. Morning, by Karen Matheson, from the album Time to Fall. A morning song if there ever was one, although the title is misleading. Look under Celtic or Folk

5. The Rainbow Connection, performed by Sarah McLachlan from the album For the Kids.

6. Morning, also called Smile, from the film Modern Times by Charles Chaplin. He wrote it himself. It sounds melancholy at first, but if you have a mental reference to the moment in the film (when they decide to go on down the road together, and the film ends with them walking off intoa fade; cross-refernce, by the way, to the final episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

7. There She Goes, a cover by Sixpence None the Richer, when they apparently didn't know that the song was about heroin.

8. Nessun Dorma, from Turandot by Puccini, by Pavarotti of course. Who could sleep anyway if someone was singing at you like that? And who would want to sleep? There's a fresh new morning, washed and pressed, waiting for you to put it on.

Where you might find some real underground music

Going Through the Motions

That being the title of one of Aimee Mann's songs on her album that is posted, in its entirety, on her website. It also happens to be one of the funniest songs from the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV show's musical episode, written by the series' creator Joss Whedon and performed by the cast. It's brilliant. The Aimee Mann song has nothing to do with it; it's from her new album The Forgotten Arm; I stumbled across it when trying to figure out what QuickTime is all about.

Aimee Mann has always been one of my favorite artists since the days when music was to be found on CDs and opened eagerly (and with great endeavour to tear through the peoiple-proof packaging that it is shrink-wrapped in), in those prehistoric days just after records were invented as an afterthought to the wheel. I loved her voice and the poetry of her lyrics; her collaboration with the makers of the movie Magnolia; and also discovered she was tall and pretty to boot. She seems to be quite at ease with music in the digital age. Her website is one of those full of flash animations and complicated stuff that slide up and down; she has released an exclusive iTunes album; one of her videos was filmed in HD and is downloadable from the Quicktime 7 site; and finally there's The Forgotten Arm, the entire album, in a Quicktime stream on her site. A nifty window opens and presents rotating graphics along with the lyrics to every song as it streams. And I must say that this isn't Internet radio the way it used to be. You can skip through the songs, which just the slightest pause, look at the lyrics or do something else while it plays. And it's all for free.

Well, sort of. There are various ways to define "free" on the Internet these days, and here we run into the famous cultural distinction between the concepts of the public and the private and what is owned or not. Let's digress to the real world and compare American suburbia to a European city: the latter was conceived with a sense of public ownership; people live in cramped, not very comfortable or attractive flats; but outside they move about in well-designed public transportation; most museums are free; art is in the architecture, the spaces, the gardens, is free: as opposed to the American desire to capture, to own, to take home; they have a compulsive need to take snapshots or videotape experiences; they like to accumulate, to gather, to store; and isn't that what consumerism is about?

The thing about the Aimee Mann album as a Quicktime stream is that there is no way of capturing and storing it directly. As far as my brother is concerned, it can't be done; and I tend to trust him as the final arbiter of what the average netizen can or can't do. You can go to the website and click on it as many times as you wish, but you can't use one of the fiendish methods of capture to grab it. The only way would be to physically get another device and record the sound as it plays, which is like the old method of pirating movies (to hold a videocamera at the screen in a moviehouse for the entire film; this was before DVD cloning was the rage); it's like not being able to stop at admiring the painting in a free public museum and having a compulsive need to buy a postcard of it in the souvenir shop. True, nothing's permanent on the Internet, but chances are I'll enjoy listening to it enough before it gets taken down; and if it does and I really like it, I will go and buy a CD (which, incidentally, doesn't take up much space and is still an excellent medium for archiving, along with 78s. Incidentally, shopping at the online iTunes music store is rather like buying 78s, which was *the* standard for music distribution for a long span of time; each record held one song on each side (and some people even theorize that the technological limits of the 78 rpm shellac disc gave us the average length of the song as we know it today, about four minutes). At any flea market or attic you can buy these for just about a dollar; there was probably a time in its day when it cost about a dollar as well, though a dollar then isn't worth what it is today. I'd say that for a dollar a song we now get stereo sound processed by sound technicians and without a scratchy sound, so it's hard to say which dollar was really worth more.

So will I be going through the motions of trying to capture Aimee Mann's album to add to an already cluttered private space in the form of (god forbid! a tape)? For the sheer perversity of outwitting the system, perhaps; just as a sign saying "Do Not Tap On The Glass" makes you want to do just that. But in the long run, as long as she's not going hungry (and she doesn't look like she is), I'll stroll down the Internet the way one strolls along the streets of Paris, and enjoy the beauty that might or might not be there tomorrow (it's the city of light, after all, not the Eternal City). Here's to a beautiful woman who has just made the Internet landscape more beautiful by making her art public. Perhaps some regions of the Internet will look more like Milan or Prague and less like Deadtown suburbia.

www.aimeemann.com
Aimee Mann Video

The Girl in the Mirror

Girl

My reflection, the girl staring back at me, is changes from one day to another; this pretty girl is who I'd like to be or who I think I am on my best days.

It's an image I found on the Internet, of course, but I chose it because the girl seemed to be about the same age as I am. Of course she's probably in her teens and in makeup; but I'm led to believe that if I moisturize enough I can look that good.

She's dressed in baby blue, a color I would never wear; I've spent my life trying to look older by wearing black. But now that I look older not because of makeup but because of, er, time, there's something striking about the soft baby pastel and the sophistication in her face.

What she's wearing is deliberately androgynous, with the pert cap at an angle, like Eponine in Les Miserables. I might as well put forward that I'm understood to be like both genders, sometimes at the same time; I never came out with it but didn't attempt to hide it either.

If anyone stumbles across this weblog and thinks they recognize someone, that might have been me walking down the street with the same sparkle in my eyes. Our it might just have been my reflection.