The Girl in the Mirror

Autumn Moves

2010-11-02T02:02:00.002Z

Autumn with leaves turning, nights closing in, and chilly damp rain, and we're moving house. I've never liked moving house, and I try and do it as little as possible. My father essentially moved house twice in his life: once as a child to the house where he grew up, took home my mother after they married and later me from the hospital, and once again to the apartment where he and my mother now live since I moved out of the house after university. That move was, on the other hand, the first time I moved, and I moved into a tiny one-room studio that contained everything that a young person needed: a bed, a single-burner stove, a refrigerator, a wine rack, and lots and lots of books and music. It was an easy move from that place to a larger apartment where I got a dog, more books and music, and a proper kitchen. I began to earn money and start travelling on my own, which is I think where the problems began. When one has money one tends to buy things, and when one travels one cannot help but bring home a few things; or, in my case, a few crates. I began a period when I became obsessed with collecting things: 'collecting' is a polite way of describing buying more of a thing than one actually needs. I collected antique clocks, Burmese bells, snuff bottles, every issue of Vogue and Vanity Fair, mechanical cameras, art books, and, of course, books and music. My CD collection became so sprawling and disorganised that I took them out of their cases and stacked them on spindles, slotted them into vinyl folders, or simply piled them on top of the stereo, and still they multiplied like rabbits. Things took a turn for the worse when I began collecting records: not vinyl, but shellac 78s, four minutes to a side, which meant that a complete symphony took up a fairly large amount of shelf space. It was only when I ran out of shelf space for the shellacs and the wind-up gramophones that I turned to vinyl. I moved into another apartment but didn't sell the previous one until much later, which meant that I had two apartments' worth of stuff that I tried to fit into every available nook and cranny: in my spare time I envisaged an ingenious method of shelving that would hang from the ceiling, ready to bury me in a torrent of pages and polycarbonate if there ever were an earthquake.

I don't know how people can have clutter-free, immaculately neat homes that look like modern art galleries, with just a few tasteful books on the bookshelf, just enough to make room for a framed photograph and an appropriately ugly souvenir from India or Africa. What happens when they buy a sixth book: does the least favourite of the five on the shelf one get kicked off the island and binned? Where do they keep their music? What do they do with the bank statements, gas bills, tenancy agreements, vehicle registrations, and other paperwork that begs to be tossed but can't be because some officious idiot in the future will want proof of one's continued existence? I think that these people are aliens, or at the very least spies who are living undercover. The thought of living without stuff horrifies me, just as the jumble of my living-room probably horrifies them.

My father continually laments the few items he lost during the move to the apartment. 'I had an Omega pocket adding machine,' he tells me. 'And a Rolex wind-up watch, the first thing that I bought after saving up my first paycheque. A galenium crystal for a radio. All gone now.' Only three things? I can think of about twenty books alone that I can't find after three moves; and that's just the books, and the ones that I can think of. I'm sure I lost much more than I don't even now remember having. I've been in this flat for three years, an eternity by London rental's standards. 'Wow, you've been here a long time,' all the letting agents say. I think forty years, which is how long my father lived in the house where I was born, is a long time. But in London anyone who hasn't bought a house yet is essentially nomadic, setting up camp, making a home, and then packing up and moving on. They do it on a cycle not dissimilar to changing one's mobile after the eighteen month contract is up: and before smartphones and automatic address book downloading, each new phone meant going through one's contact list and winnowing. 'Good God, I can't believe I still have his number. Should I keep it just in case he calls so that I know it's him and don't pick up by accident? Probably not.'

And so it must be with things, especially for a sideways move to a flat of similar proportions. Winnowing, like planting rice, is never fun. Just as one of Christianity's best inventions was Purgatory, where you were neither damned nor saved but held in a holding pattern, there should be one for things: the oubliette where the I may need this someday/I don't want to throw this away/I'll really offend so-and-so if I throw this away stuff can hide in crepuscular eternity. So tomorrow I'm off to Oxfam and hope that the person who gets my windowpane check tweed coat will love it as much as I did when I first bought it, or that the person who picks up my books will will do so with the same gasp of delight as I did when I first found them.

I wouldn't describe myself as a materialistic person: just one who is attached to many, many things. 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' What a wonderful idyll! What if that sentence read: 'In a vast echoey white space with halogen lamps and glass walls there paced a hobbit', would not the Shire seem less the idea of Home? No, no: I want a round door and a cosy curvy space full of comfort and familiarity; and once entrenched I am loath to leave.

Sunday Night with the LSO

2010-06-21T01:46:00.004+01:00

It's taken me a while to warm up to the London Symphony Orchestra. I know that they're supposed to be the top orchestra in Britain at the moment, but I've always preferred the more intimate, family-like atmosphere that the Philharmonia exudes. There was a point when I was at the Royal Festival Hall so often that I started noticing when the flautists changed hairdos, and watched as the one cellist got more and more pregnant by the week and then disappeared. I finally realised what the problem was with the LSO: it's that by the time you get around to commuting to the Barbican from south-west London by tube and walking through the wind tunnel that leads to the Silk Street entrance, I'm in an irretrievably bad mood. Going to the Festival Hall is a few stops down the District Line, with any slack time easily taken up by a stroll along the South Bank, and a quick slurp at Wagamama before the doors open. Outside the Barbican is the City after hours, a post-apocalyptic wasteland where everything is shut and there are no taxis. Inside is the bare concrete madhouse maze from the decade of bad architecture, an overpriced cafe, and fairly rancid toilets.

But I was swayed by Sir Colin Davis's Sibelius 5 last October, when Arabella Steinbacher made her LSO debut; I was initially unimpressed by the idea of yet another lissome violinist making her mark with the predictable choice of the Beethoven violin concerto; but it was an above-average performance. And the Sibelius was nothing short of sublime. This evening I sat through a contemporary piece by a certain Helmut Lachenmann that no human being should be subjected to, those who have paid to be there. The payoff was Maurizio Pollini, who I decided I had better see before he shuffles off or retires in a wave of unobtainable tickets like Alfred Brendel. The sound that the LSO made in that space was at least as good as that of the Vienna Philharmonic I had heard there just a few months ago, and there was an arc of electricity that ran from the rich timbre of the strings to Pollini to Eötvos at the podium. It was a three star concert, and, as the Guide Michelin would say, vaut le detour.

The Mirror Over the Fireplace

2009-10-02T03:13:00.003+01:00

Am I a bit of a voyeur if I like looking in people's windows? There's a row of very posh houses that I pass on my way home from the supermarket, and I peer like the little match girl into the very proper homes of the well-heeled, their Jaguars parked out in front. In the living-rooms the bookcases are stacked high against a pale-hued wall, and I am as amazed by their conspicuous display of good taste as I am by the immaculate neatness of the scene compared to the chaos of my own flat. I always blame it on having too little space, but I know that even if I were to be bequeathed a manor house (by that relative I've never heard of who lives in it, of course) I would probably have fifteen Georgian rooms of mess rather than my current (non-Georgian) one.

The living-rooms follow a common pattern, dictated by the layout of the main space around a central hearth, which, because it is central London, is not used but is focal point of the room, adorned sometimes with the traditional grate and screen. Above it is the mantel, almost never with the usual triumvirate of clock and candelabra, but with something like an rough-hewn sculpture to demonstrate both cosmopolitanism and vaguely leftist liberal leanings. But above the fireplace is traditionally where either a prized work of art is hung, or, more significantly, a mirror, so that as the family was gathered around the hearth, they would simultaneously see a framed portrait of themselves as a family unit.

But more and more these days, it is becoming the most logical place to put a flatscreen television set. It's about the same size as the mirror used to be, you don't have to use up another wall for it, and it allows the living-room to retain its function as the primary living space in the house, since after dinner everyone inevitably ends up watching television, after all. But replacing the reflexive nature and significance of a mirror with something that by its nature requires one to be passive (this is not an indictment of television: I am in love with the medium) gives a primacy to the television set that almost requires it to be on; otherwise there is just a grey lump above the mantel. And interestingly this layout is replicated in new housing that is built without wood-burning fireplaces. I haven't invaded enough living-rooms in tropical countries but my general observation is that they are radial in focus, concentrated around a space defined by a sofa and armchairs, in the centre of which may be a coffee-table or rug.

I am obsessing over this not just because I'm mourning the death of the mirror over the mantelpiece, but because I'm wondering how to insert a 40-inch flatscreen television into the carefully-ordered chaos of my living-room. And because I would die several times over rather than have the sound anything but centred correctly, this means that speakers and cables have to be positioned accordingly. The only place that makes sense is to have it clustered around the fireplace, and that would means that the screen would go where the mirror is now: and the Girl in the Mirror would never let that happen.

Summer sounds

2009-08-06T05:14:00.006+01:00

CD is certainly taking a long time to die. It's just a little older than I am, and the lifespan of a person is a long time to be using one format these days, though it can be argued that many lived and died during the heyday of the phonograph, which, despite the loud cries of protest this statement is no doubt eliciting from the rafters, is over. Not that the vinyl record is dead, but its heyday is over, and it's people like myself who like obsolete technology who are enamoured with it. Unless you're a hi-fi nut with an SME V tonearm and a Kontrapunt moving-coil cartridge and Whest phonostage. Now they, they're just showing off.

I grew up with CD, but there was enough old tape technology lying around the house for me to unravel, literally, by pulling out bunches of magnetic tape from cassettes to see how much of it there was in there. No matter how much Dolby noise reduction you applied to it, cassette tape technology was absolutely beastly, even when you sprung for exotic type IV chemistry. They snapped. They melted in the heat. They hissed like a feral cat. It's cassette tapes in particular that irk me, with their thin ribbons unspooling and knotting themselves; I love my 1/4 inch open reel recorder, and understand the role of studio master tapes in the production process.

The heyday of CD coincided with the time I was at school, coming of age, and being utterly defined by music. The only thing that mattered more than being cool was being unconventional, so no bestselling pop hits from the main floor for me. In Tower Records, which was where one went to get music, I would haunt the top floors and, in those days before listening stations, take a chance on a band with nice cover art for no other reason than that it was the only copy there. High school couplings, or at least flirtations and possibilities, were predicated on music. We didn't have to have to same taste in music, but we had to have the same taste for music. The same lust for music, for it to become utterly the moment, and take charge of your soul, et cetera. I couldn't imagine dating a guy who didn't have that lust; and I remember a summer afternoon with a McIntosh amp, the meters' needles rising and falling and peaking in a wonderfully graphic metaphor. I remember the amp but not much else.

As I write this I've got a download going in the background, and before any sharp intakes of breath let me hasten to reassure you that it's a legal download. This is supposed to be the future of music delivery; but I fail to be convinced. For all my love of vinyl warmth there's no way it can match the resolution of even a mid-priced CD player, in the same way that much as I love the old-fashioned look that photos taken through the Tessar-based design of the screwmount Elmar 2.8 it's thoroughly trounced by any modern Leica equivalent when it comes to basic image reproduction. I would expect the successor to CD to be an order of magnitude easier to use than CD, the way popping a CD into a tray is so much easier than dropping a needle onto vinyl, and for the realism of the sound to be worlds better than what one gets from CD. The equivalent of resolution (the sonic parallel to resolving power and megapixels) are sample rate and bit depth. CD gives us 44.1 kHz (the analogue signal is sampled 44,100 times a second) and 16 bit (2 to the 16th 'layers' of information per sample). I'm downloading an album that gives me 192 kHz at 24 bits, which is pretty impressive, except it sounds remarkably similar to the sound quality of a CD, despite the fact that it's been downloading continuously since dinnertime. I don't have to do this to myself, of course; there's a CD-quality version available, but whither progress?

The album, in case you're interested, is from Linn records and is Artur Pizzarro and Sir Charles Mackerras performing the 3rd, 4th, and 5th piano concertos by Beethoven. I recently bought the recent box set reissue by Richard Goode, which is not just a great performance but sonically as good a recording as one can get on CD. On the other side of the resolution median, I came back from Harold Moore's Records in Great Marlborough Street with, among others, Toscanini's Beethoven 7. It was only after playing it and not hearing much that I did some internet research and discovered that I had managed to fine one of the 'greatest' recordings of the Seventh (whose authority propels these epithets, I often wonder) but one of the poorest recordings. I have no idea how great it might be because I literally can't hear it, even after scrubbing down the record with the usual cleaning fluids. Pristine Audio, an internet site run by a man who presumably possesses a really good record cleaning machine, has issued their 'cleaned-up' version of this recording, just one of the many historic recordings they offer for download or burned onto a Taiyo Yuden CD-R. I decided not to get the sonically enhanced Toscanini but went for a Sibelius instead that was a mono recording with 'XR Stereo' applied to it. It sounds like a mono recording played back in a big room and then recorded with stereo miking, which might seem at first like a deprecatory description, but it actually sounds okay. Through headphones, it relieves one of the mono deadness that makes it seem like the sound is coming from the middle of one's head; through speakers it doesn't convince you that you're listening to stereo, but you do forget after a while that you're listening to mono. This is great news for the huge back catalogue of mono recordings out there, but at €14 per CD, it makes one think twice about how much classic performances are worth, and what would have been a £1 record exchange shop bargain has to compete with good modern recordings on the mainstream labels.

The summer crawls slowly by, and I try to catch the Proms live on Radio 3 while in the kitchen preparing dinner. If one takes an FM radio to the standing gallery at the top of the Royal Albert Hall, will the transmission from the radio arrive before the live sound? These are the thoughts my mind strays to while promming, which may tell you how much I'm engrossed by the music. I go to the Proms out of desperation every summer to while away the break between concert seasons, and every summer am disappointed by the lack of engagement of the arena setting. So most of my listening has been done camped out in front of the stereo, whether the source is mono LP or high-resolution download; but most of the time it's CD.

Linn Records
Pristine Audio
The Proms

A short report on nothing at all

2009-04-27T04:28:00.005+01:00

'O how I hate blogs,' moaned a friend of mine, who does not carry a mobile phone, and who writes for traditional media: newspapers, magazines, and a forthcoming book. His email floated in as I was chatting with friends on my various IM services, receiving Twitter updates, and thinking of a topic for my personal podcast. 'Any weasel with half a brain and half an opinion has a blog. Whatever happened to editorship? Whatever happened to meritocracy of good writing? And journalistic integrity and accountability?'

This, incidentally, is the theme of the recent thriller State of Play, starring the 35-percent-wider Russell Crowe. (Perhaps years from now, his oeuvre will be delineated by the thin vs the fat Russell Crowe, rather like Maria Callas.) It is based on a six hour long BBC series, and the screenwriters have done a magnificent job of adapting it to the big screen, losing very little of the depth of the original, and turning it into an elegy for the print newspaper and its role as the guardian of public accountability. There is a neat little dig at the new technorati in the form of a young female blogger, who is woken in the middle of the night with a distinctly Apple-like ringtone on her iPhone.

A new service has appeared on the iPhone called Audioboo, which is to podcasting what twittering is to blogging. One records short clips of whatever, and they appear on a feed in a Twitter-like manner. At the moment its celebrity user is Stephen Fry, who can make brief declamations about anything sound tremendously important and poetic; others, mumbling about their breakfast or their walks in the park, are not so lucky. I tried it out today and found myself informing my global audience that I was sitting in the kitchen and it was a wonderfully sunny day outside, and that the dog needed to go to the toilet. The truth is that there are now more avenues for self-expression than there is self to express. There is a global dissemination of inanity. Everyone twitters about what they had for lunch because eating is one of the few constants that are potentially of interest in a first-world society, and that you wouldn't be embarrassed for your parents (or your children) to read. 'Just had sex; multiple orgasms but got a bit dry toward the end' does not have its place in the Twittersphere. And now let's not go about rushing off to give a voice to the favorite flogging post of the disenfranchised, the African subcontinent: 'Nothing to eat again today; brother killed in genocide.' I'm not being insensitive, really I'm not. It's just the going off to give other people the chance to be silly is not going to make the inanity of our online lives (and let's face it, 99 percent of it is inanity) any less irrelevant.

It's true that the Chinese whispers of the social messaging sites can deliver news far more quickly than the news outlets, faster than the television stations can rush over an ENG team, and certainly much faster than the dailies can print them. A friend who was at the London demonstrations for the G20 summit noted that there seemed to be more photographers than protesters, and camera crews included a third person trailing the camera and soundman with an editing console. If the complaint is lack of news gathering and facts, rest assured that citizen journalism is alive and well wherever there is anyone with a digital camera.

My most recent acquisition is a tiny spy camera, the Minox B. With the draconian rules and general paranoia about privacy and No Photography signs everywhere, I decided that the best way to take pictures was without asking permission. The Minox was actually made for this task, designed to be as unobtrusive and silent as possible. It does not, for instance, play an artificial shutter noise through a tiny loudspeaker when you trip the tiny guillotine shutter. It hides neatly in a handbag. The time between taking the picture and holding the print in your hand is quite long: it first makes a trip to a handler in Germany, who then forwards it to Minox Laboratories, where it takes a few weeks to process, and then the whole package is sent back by post. So my post for today is quite the archetypal blog post: I went and did something perfectly banal (went to the park), took a picture, and blogged about it and posted the picture.

On the taste of water

2009-03-28T01:30:00.002Z

As age creeps up from behind one becomes more content with simpler things. Water instead of tea or soda, for instance; except that water tastes stronger and more fortifying and more essential. One's morning cup of coffee tastes all the sweeter for being the harbinger of a new day that one is allowed to live and savor the fruits of the earth. The apprehension of the world; the taming of the senses: we learn to cut out what is no longer necessary. Over the years, we learn. We filter music out of noise, and come to love the most beautiful music of all, that which is found in silence. We learn to cut out the chaos of all that our eyes can see and focus on what is meaningful to us, that which we can paint, or frame in the rectangle of the viewfinder. We eat no longer to devour the world but to delight in the flavors and scents that set our heart beating with the language that it speaks, and the tapestry of memories it invokes. We breathe, we remember, and we teach. We pass on the arguments and the answers, the craft and skill that has become embodied in flesh and muscle and movement. And blind ambition and desperation and seeking give way to allowing things to be, and telescoping outwards from the individuality of selfhood to being part of mankind, and being content in the knowledge that if meaning is not found this this generation, perhaps we will come a little closer to it in the next. With this one must be content.

The Last Days of Kodachrome

2009-03-24T03:30:00.004Z

There's some wonderful stuff going on in the world of photography. The unremarkable announcements at the latest photo trade show have begun to hint at the technological development in the realm of digital photography having reached a plateau: Canon and Nikon are so head-to-head that it would be foolish of them to hold back any new R&D in the hope of making customers upgrade, so I believe the cameras we are seeing are the height of the technology as it exists at present. Meanwhile, rumors of the death of film have been greatly exaggerated: if it is a death it is a slow one, and there's plenty of room in my fridge to stockpile enough to keep me going for some time. And more and more photographers who have dropped money on digital are talking, at least on forums, of a return to film. There are no new emulsions emerging (except for color negative, where Kodak is still continuing development for the movie market), and there have been a few lamented deaths, but Ilford, Kodak, Agfa, and the new niche players like Efke and Adox have decided on a stable of favorites to continue. And a few that I thought were dead are surprisngly still going: Kodachrome, which I wished a fond farewell when Kodak closed down the lab at Lausanne, still has some stock going around (most of it expiring in September of this year) and Dwayne's Photo in Kansas is still processing K-14. Kodak has declined petitions to continue making the film, so buying and using it won't change their minds. But out of nostalgia, out of respect, out of sheer obstinacy, and out of sheer love, it behooves us all who used and appreciated this film, which was somehow true to life and exuberant in its interpretation of color (a combination that cannot be approximated by Provia, no matter what anyone says), to shoot the last few rolls and not let them expire be binned to history.

And how much longer will Minox make Minopan and Minocolor in those wonderful little cartridges? I recently discovered that the film is still available, and processing still being done in Germany. I promptly bought a cheap Minox B off eBay and am experimenting with my first roll of 8x11. I was recently on the receiving end of some not very pleasant behavior when took a bit too long find a focus point with the Leica down at Farringdon, but no one is threatened by a Minox. At the worst they think you're rubbing your eyes with a harmonica.

Spring is here and the daffodils are out, and in the sunlight even the most mundane things are gorgeous and textured and contrasty. If this isn't a time for Kodachrome, I don't know when it is. Between now and September I'm planning to shoot as much as I can on this film, and see through the eyes of this film: a world that's both real and larger than life.

Picture: Victory in Europe, June 1945

Mr Wang and I

2009-01-25T03:53:00.004Z

It has occurred to me that this blog, intended to be as much a journal of my consumption of media as a critique and discussion of it, has been somewhat moribund of late, and as a consequence of this negligence, not a result of a dearth of excellence but an abundance, there now exists a potential risk of personal amnesia, and these encounters with the sublime relegated to the status of dates in an abandoned diary, of a scribbled appointment that serves, hardly even, as an aide-memoire to the concert or play in question. To be concise: I am beginning to forget; and with modern media, like films and music, there is still always the possibility of retrieval, whereas with plays and concerts, the intersection between performer and audience is there but for the magical two hours spent in each other's company: and then it is gone.

And there are so many wonderful moments to be cherished. At the Royal Festival Hall I have been indulging in my favorite musical form, the violin concerto; tonight I had a chance to see Anne-Sophie Mutter, the woman who ushered in the procession of young women who form a strange nexus between beauty, musical accomplishment, and adoration: mostly male, tinged with the sexual; a moderately good looking girl with fantastic talent or, at least, fantastic potential, who is transformed by her playing. But while Anne-Sophie Mutter is cold and Germanic, precise in her execution but distant, Julia Fischer, also from Germany, is flawless but radiant. After the intermission she took a seat in the stalls behind me, and would have gone unnoticed had it not been for the men who literally stumbled into the aisles to congratulate her. Perhaps less of a virtuoso, but more vibrant as a performer, was Janine Jansen, who is taller and better looking than her album covers, and was a wonderfully expressive on the Beethoven; oddly enough, the Tchaikowsky, which she just released on Decca, is less brilliant, at least through the stereo.

I've developed a strange attachment to the lower right-hand section of the stalls; it's far less expensive than the coveted middle section, and it goes against the grain of the conventional wisdom that being on the left allows you to see the pianist's hands, or the performer in a concerto who stands to the left of the conductor. I've found that I enjoy being near the double bass players, perhaps a remnant of my party days when I would spent night clutching my drink and leaning against the subwoofer in a club: I like being near the low notes. I like being far back enough for the orchestra to be a coherent sound, but not underneath the dreaded overhang of the balcony, where the reflections begin to throw everything into a muddle. More than once I've noticed a man with thick black glasses sitting in the corner seat of the choir, clutching a programme. He rarely clapped, but merely surveyed the orchestra impassively. I'd noticed that the programme often noted, amidst multinational banking companies and the like, the sponsorship of a donor named Mr Wang. If I were Mr Wang I would probably sit there myself: not in the fifth row centre, but breathing down the necks of the bass section.

Speaking of having one's own orchestra, I had a chance to finally see Tom Stoppard's Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre, with the gollum-like Toby Jones playing the role of Ivanov. Marvellous comic timing, and a moving performance from Joseph Millson as the dissident, but the play creaks along and begins to show its age. There is a brief portion at the beginning which is Stoppard's wordplay dialogue at its best, and reminds us what a comic writer we have lost now that he has become Serious. Following on the heels of August: Osage County, perhaps the London theatre scene is looking up.

Other notables: Sergey Khachatryan making an astounding entrance into the local concert scene; Hélène Grimaud mannish in unflattering all-black like a ninja, but more than making up for it with Beethoven's Piano Concerto 4; and Essa-Pekka Salonen at his best with the Symphonie Fantastique. During the winter months, the music has to cope with a special challenge: my tendency to narcolepsy after a long walk across the footbridge from the Embakment underground station. Music either grips you and leaves you at the edge of the seat, or fails to engage, in which case I curl up and begin to doze in my seat, as many of the people around me do. Unlike theatre or television, music is a language that I am just beginning to understand, but like a play, you are either interested in the story it has to tell or not. Mr Wang, who broke into rare applause after Ashekanzy brought Beethoven's Fifth to a close, would undoubtedly agree.

The Knowledge

2008-09-15T03:31:00.007+01:00

Taxi drivers in London are famous for possessing 'The Knowledge', the product of a two-to-three-year course of intensive study and practice during which they memorize streets, places, restaurants, embassies, and the quickest way to get from Point A to Point B. The information they ingest during this period is supposed to be at least equal to that of a degree course at a university (it depends on the university, one would presume). I've wondered for some time whether or not The Knowledge is becoming increasingly irrelevant in the age of GPS devices, or whether the traditional black London cab is being threatened in any way by the proliferation of 'radio taxis', or licenced minicab services which are booked by telephone and who charge by distance. You can't hail them off the street, which is a great joy of the black London cab; the sight of the lit sign above the windshield is one of the happiest images one can lay eyes on when it's freezing and the rain is coming down and you're dead tired (subliminally recalled in the opening titles of the new Doctor Who; the Tardis, after all, is the little box that will take you anywhere). I still swear by the London black cab, even if they're heavy and environmentally unfriendly, especially the old Fairways; and I still think there's a place for The Knowledge, even as I support the licenced minicabs as a more welcoming entrance route for migrants who don't want to invest in several years and the price of a real London cab.

Over the years, though, 'The Knowledge' has come to be a mystical thing, an idea of knowing every nook and cranny of London; even lifelong Londoners are in awe of it, because even they will admit they know a few neighbourhoods very well, but certainly not all of London. Not even the editor of Time Out, I'm sure, knows everything about London, and keeps the knowledge up to date. There's grungy London, glitzy London, historical London; the city as seen by foot, on bicycle, above ground, the Underground; there's New London, the areas recently colonised by immigrants from a particular region and where others would rather not go. I used to think I knew London well enough until a few friends from out of town dropped in and I was showing them around; I realised that outside of the comfort zone of my own borough, I was reaching for the same tools that every tourist uses: the A-Z, the Tube Map, the Transport for London website, and the latest Time Out or the Sunday Times Culture section. I wonder though if there's anyone who doesn't reach for these at some point. The Knowledge, at least in that sense of mastering the city, will always be just out of reach. As for taxi drivers, they just know how to drive. They do it really well, but they don't know London. Nobody does.

All about the music

2008-08-10T01:36:00.005+01:00

'And so I said to her,' the woman went on, leaning back in her chair and waving her flute of champagne, 'it's absolutely dreadful, you know. How some people have no consideration for their loved ones, no consideration at all.' The voice was low and mannish, the sort you associated with country homes and horses and another gin and tonic, Muriel, if you please; it seemed to float out at us not just from the other side of the tree under which we had spread out picnic, but from another era. She continued: 'I myself think, personally, that the best thing you can do for a loved one is make your own preparations for your funeral. In fact I myself have already picked out all my hymns.'

Glyndebourne is one of the most magical places one can visit during the summer in Britain. It was a wonderful excuse to buy a new dress, something which I am always up for; and Kate Royal was singing the soprano role in Carmen. It's an easy opera in the sense that one knows it well and doesn't really need to watch the surtitles intently and can enjoy the music. And while one cannot fault the standard of artistry at Glyndebourne, the music really does take second priority to finding a good picnic spot and lounging about in its transcendentally beautiful gardens. It was a bit like being back in college: one did have to go to class, which could be enjoyable in its own right, but the real learning that happens at university occurs while lounging about in the quads with friends. Glyndebourne is like Glastonbury for the fat cats of the land, the well-heeled, the men with protuberant tummies who have feasted well on the fruits of the world, the women, coiffed and manicured, who have also feasted well but dieted even better. 'For instance,' she continued, 'I am sixty-seven. My sister was sixty-nine when she died and her affairs were completely in order.'

We tuned out from the conversation and set about unpacking our picnic. We felt we knew something about picnicking from our outings at Oxford, but we were surrounded by professionals, who arrived with coolers, giant hampers clinking with bone china, crystal glasses, salt shakers and pepper mills, and tables that magically erected themselves like Transformers, folding chairs, and I swear I saw one family of picnickers who brought a little houseplant that they ceremoniously installed as the centrepiece of their table. We had ordered a picnic from the in-house provider, and had unwisely declined the offer to rent us folding tables and chairs. The ground-rug they had provided was generously spacious in its tartan splendour, but the dinner in the cooler, when unpacked, was more resplendent than the mat could handle: potted lobster, cold roast beef with horseradish, and a summer pudding the way it should be, puckeringly tart yet sweet and lusciously fruity at the same time. I also learned that there is a subtle art to sprawling in the ground while dressed in formal clothes and eating a picnic while making it all seem casual and summery.

As for Carmen itself, it was not bad. Kate Royal's eagerly anticipated aria at the beginning of the third act was articulate and moving, while the rest of the cast was more than competent. But like the Proms, which we had attended the previous evening (Julia Fischer playing Brahms's violin concerto), there was less of a sense of engagement with the music than at an average evening during the concert season, or, in this case, the opera season. The venue, perhaps? The festival setting? The general atmosphere of summer and of being on holiday? Whatever it is, I'm looking forward to the start of the concert and opera season and my favourite row at the Festival Hall stalls. And I really do wonder if there is any festival that can bridge the gap between Glastonbury and Glyndebourne: I still think there's a lot I can do for my loved ones besides picking out the hymns for my funeral. How terribly inconsiderate of me.

Dinner at the Connaught

2008-07-27T22:40:00.005+01:00

The restaurant at the Connaught, like the hotel itself, used to be a stuffy clubby little place, a bit little like eating dinner in a library, with a heavy air of masculine pulchritude hanging over everything. The food, though, was excellent, under the hotel's in-house chef, a French-British melange of choices printed on a confusing, overstuffed menu. Their signature was the second tablecloth, unrolled ceremoniously just before dessert.

Now all that has changed. I haven't stayed at the Connaught since its renovation, but the rooms are supposedly larger and brighter. The lack of a lobby is made up for by a new gallery that runs along the outside, facing Carlos Place: nothing like the see and be seen drama of Claridge's, its sister hotel, but cosy and intimate. And the restaurant is now Helene Darroze at the Connaught. Was it coincidence that they chose one of the very few female Michelin chefs to take over the most masculine of dining-rooms in London?

The room itself, incidentally, has been lightened a little, with brighter lights, softer furnishings, and less of a sense of enclosure, but the wood-panelling is still there. We went there on the evening after it opened so we expected some faults in the service but attentiveness in the kitchen; and, most of all, the assurance that the chef would be present, as, indeed, she was. She prowled about the restaurant dominated by a long table on which were piled two huge wedding cake-sized mounds of butter, and various cheeses. A bright red ham slicer glided around the restaurant, dispensing paper-thin slices of Bayonne ham.

It seemed a shame not to have anything but the degustation menu, which comes out to about £100 per person, without wine and incidentals. There is a point at which haute cuisine goes beyond a line of competence, and enters a sacred realm of expected excellence where you're not supposed to worry if the scallops are overcooked or the oysters are slightly off. All that is taken for granted: cuisine becomes a language, the meal a kind of poetry, and like poems or paintings or music, something is being said. Helen Darroze, if she were a writer, would be post-modernist masquerading as a classicist, with a wry sense of humour under a facade of po-faced seriousness. Her flavours are bold, but measured; the combinations of textures unexpected and occasionally transcendental. The standout memory of the meal was the tartare of oysters on which was poured an unctuous sauce of pureed haricots blancs: you have the wildness of the sea and the grit of the earth in a single mouthful. Other combinations jarred like a bad couplet: the ballotine of foie gras was encrusted with nutmeg and cloves, which was completely unnecessary and just wrong; it made you feel as though you were having very good food while having your teeth drilled at the dentist. Even the finale of the second dessert, 100 per cent chocolate, went one step too far with a chalky, bitter cacao base, clogging the smoothness of the other perfumes. An impressive tea menu that even good Chinese restaurants in London fail to offer was presented alongside tisanes made from fresh stalks snipped off a few plants in pots that had miraculously appeared at the centre table.

The service, which we expected to be spotty, was absolutely flawless, in that telepathic French way that kicks Mr Ramsay's out of the game. The food was intelligent and thoughtful, but when one pays that much for a meal sometimes you just want it to be damn good, and there was only a single moment (two for my date) when you close your eyes and experience an explosion of pleasure in the mouth; of the sexual kind, almost. I was wondering as we waited for our taxi in the blossom-scented lobby (we had begun at seven and it was now almost midnight) whether we had set the bar too high for Ms Darroze. I believe now that it is she who has set the bar high for herself, and in the ocean of mediocrity that is the French restaurant scene in London, this can only be a good thing.

On Facebook

2008-05-31T02:30:00.003+01:00

How difficult it is, really, to say anything truly original about Facebook. No one really expected it to take over our internet lives the way it has; no one really understand why, out of all the social networking sites, it emerged as dominant; no one can really predict what is going to become of it, whether it will die by the wayside like so many other internet phenomena, or whether it will become an internet-within-the-internet: a safe sandbox in the wild wild west of all the rest of the internet, with its fictitious personae, its masquerading identities, its child molesters, its identity thieves, its hackers with malicious code ready to jump into your computer and turn your life upside down. And, as icing on the cake, it has Scrabulous.

What makes Facebook different is that people are, generally, who they say they are. It's easy to spot a charlatan because he or she will be lacking in friends who vouch for this person's identity; even a group who conspire to create a fictitious persona will eventually run out of numbers. And if the conspiracy grows too large; then, well, it isn't much of a conspiracy, is it? Identity on Facebook has one foot planted in 'real', i.e., non-online life; you meet someone, and then keep in touch via Facebook; you find an old classmate, and then meet up in person. Anthropologists and historians from the future who are researching the current period in wester civilisation will suffer not from paucity, but from plethora, of information. All of everyday life is archived on public and private servers, somewhere, from personal websites to darker side of humanity, in chatrooms where individuals with names such as alz36697_tg trade pictures of children or information on which public urinals are the sites of anonymous sexual activity. Facebook is, literally, the face of the internet, as opposed to its groin. It's a happy, shiny, beaming face, where all acquaintances are friends, messages are polite, and everyone gives cutesy virtual gifts and plays little games and quizzes.

It's also wonderful for studying the dynamics of social networks, as a social networking site is likely to be. Like Google's ranking system, the processing of finding and making friends operates on the basis of eigenvector centrality. It isn't so much how many friends you have, but how important your friends are. So you can be very outgoing, but your five hundred friends who have less than a hundred friends will not matter as much as the few dozen friends you have who are immensely popular. Inbound popularity (people like you and want to be friends with you) counts differently than outbound gregariousness (wanting to be friends with everyone). These people are like the Van der Luydens in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, whose scarcity makes them sought after, and whose friendship becomes a societal badge of approval. Not, of course, that I'm doing anything like counting the number of friends that I have.

The feature that I love most about Facebook is the newsfeed. For someone who has moved around a lot and left groups of friends in various cities, some as near as Oxford, some on the other side of the world, receiving a terse report that so-and-so is getting married, has broken up, has just had sex (isn't that what 'has changed from "single" to "it's complicated"' means?), etc., makes me feel connected and still part of their lives; even as, at the same time, it can drive home the reality that one is very far away.

Chasing Times

2008-05-13T02:54:00.005+01:00

Summer is upon us without it having passed through spring; and though May is only halfway done I'll dare to throw a clout, as well as a jugful of cold water over myself to ease the heat. The foreign students have arrived in London; you can hear the nasal accents of the Americans from the other end of the tube carriage. It is blindingly, stiflingly, insufferably hot. I perched myself above the frozen food section in the supermarket and rolled myself over the open top of the deep freeze as though I were on a spit. But everyone looks good in the afternoon light as they soak in the sun at the outdoor tables of the pubs, the city is bathed in a wonderful glow with dark blacks in the shadows and subtle gradients running up the domes and rooftops, and music is in the air. I suddenly remembered Snow Patrol's hit, 'Chasing Cars', from two summers ago. Record companies who are pushing a song by having it played on the radio incessantly want this sort of association; because the song is everywhere, you don't associate it with a place, but with a time: what you were doing in your life, whom you were dating, how you were feeling. I'm currently listening to A Fine Frenzy on my player, but I opened the window and let Snow Patrol blare out into the street as I was preparing dinner, for old time's sake.

When everything is glowing in the late afternoon light I mourn the passing of Kodachrome, of Technical Pan, and of Polaroid, all of which I would have turned to on a day like this. I miss my home darkroom, also known as the kitchen, where I would have chemicals and developing trays beside the chopping boards and food. It had the advantage of being my own place, where I knew the equipment by heart, and things would be where I left them; but frankly, I'm surprised I'm alive. I'm surprised the dog survived, even after lapping at a dish filled with selenium toner. I've found darkroom space in London, albeit at the other end of the city, and for the first time I have a properly-ventilated space with automatic multigrade heads which switch contrast at the press of a switch, huge developing trays with chemicals mixed and ready for you, and several archival print washers. The main drawback is that now I don't have an excuse for my crappy prints, which look especially bad when I'm working beside professional printers, creating gloriously perfect images with efficiency and precision. I was testing out the darkroom space in the ambition of going on to do some alternative process work, so I wanted to get my head back in the game by making a few prints just to see if I still could; apparently, I can't. So I'll be roaming the city with ordinary HP5+, because that's what I know best, and doing standard 8x10's until I'm up to making interpositives for contact negatives.

As I thumbed through my archive of negatives to try my hand at the enlarger again, I realized that they were arranged more or less chronologically from the time I bought my Leica and started taking photographs, through some of the best and worst years of my life. They weren't many years; they just felt that way. I stopped long before I came to England. The summer of 2006 was a decisive one for me; it was when I started being happy again. I stopped experimenting with exotic emulsions; I ditched the heavy 75mm and learned to shoot wide, and have stayed with the 35/2.0 since then. I shot two rolls in 2006 and then went trigger happy in 2007. This summer, maybe I'll actually make a few images worth keeping.

Turning to Tibet

2008-04-09T04:35:00.007+01:00

It's not often that I find myself compelled to write about political subjects, given that most of the time it's hard to get me to try and wrap my head around political topics and current events; but the latest wave of Tibet-related protests in London in Paris is beginning to verge into the realm of the ridiculous, with people leaping off parapets wielding fire-extinguishers or trying to smother the torch with a blanket or, presumably, just blowing really hard and hoping the flame will go out like a birthday candle. The slogan they are chanting is, for the most part, 'Free Tibet'.

How can one question the moral rectitude of the Free Tibet movement without sounding like an imperialist apologist? It should fit neatly on my ideological shelf as a self-proclaimed left-leaning liberal. In writing this I don't in any way claim to know much beyond the first thing of what the Tibet issue is all about. The problem is, I don't think most of the protesters do, either. 'Free Tibet' is a nice slogan with a nice ring to it, but as a directive it has absolutely no political reality: China is not going to partition off the Tibetan plateau and give them independence. The Chinese belief in a single unified state that must be maintained at all costs, even of violence, is an idea that dates back to the (perhaps mythological) unification in 221 BC. So what are the protesters realistically demanding of Beijing? 'Free Tibet from human right violations' makes more sense. But then why stop at Tibet? China has to reform on all sorts of human rights issues in all areas; and this is a process that will take time. Now is a good time to start; but it's not going to get done in time for the Olympics.

Beijing is giving the Tibetans what they are trying to provide to the whole country: infrastructure in the form of roads, electricity, telecommunications, and transport links to the rest of China; Tibetans don't seem to be as grateful as Beijing thinks they should be. The natural result of better connections is an influx of outsiders, internal migrant of (largely) Han Chinese from other regions. They are the owners of the homes that are being burned and shops that are being looted. The riots are thus a domestic conflict that are (very broadly) analogous to the sort of civil strife that erupted in Northern Cyprus; and the Chinese government did what all governments are supposed to do in situations such as these: try and keep the peace. The Chinese army's methods of keeping the peace are undoubtedly worth questioning, but it is easy to lose sight of the fact that this is their responsibility.

There is a great deal that can be put right in Tibet; the hold of the monasteries over the people and their faith is still strong, and this faith, both in itself and because it gives the exiled Dalai Lama hold over the region's people, make it a threat to unity and government. The problem is that an entire way of life and culture and enmeshed in this faith, and the efforts of the government in Beijing to respect and preserve this culture are clumsy at best, and ruthless at worst. Monasteries lie half-deserted; ancient scrolls are crumbling in the damp. Tibet is the problem child of the Chinese government, and the truth is probably that Beijing has a weak hold on the region, and more importantly, an even weaker understanding of what the Tibetans are unhappy about. They don't know what to do, and they don't know what's going on. Neither do the majority of the protesters.

This photo is of the interior of a temple in Tibet, taken less than two years ago.

Out and About

2008-03-31T02:46:00.002+01:00

A old friend in town is good enough excuse to splash out on dinner and a show, welcome relief from the piousness of staying in, cooking one's own meals, and watching DVD box sets. I have discovered a hitherto dormant aspect of my brain that goes aghast at miniscule discrepancies in expenses, while the other part of the brain tries to console it by going shopping on eBay. I've had an extended attack to trying to be pious of late, partly out of guilt from the excesses of the winter holidays, and was beginning to be mired in the stygian gloom of the Exercise of Moderation.

To add to the drudgery was the prospect of spending the day sitting atop a sightseeing bus or in a capsule of the London Eye, so it was a great relief to find that my friend, whom I hadn't seen for almost seven years, had worked out in advance what she wanted to see and do in London, and we simply met up for an impromptu dinner at Bibendum, chosen on the basis of the fact that she would be coming from Sloane Square. After recent forays to Moro and the Wolseley that had left me profoundly unimpressed, my expectations weren't too high. We managed to get a table, a good one at that, without a reservation, on a Friday night, which I have to compare to the Wolseley, who stuck my date and I the previous week at half past six and ejected us onto the pavement two hours later. The food at Bibendum was excellent: not mind-blowing, but consistent across starters, mains, and dessert, which is more than I can say for the Wolseley.

The play we watched, also organised at the last minute, was Yasmina Reza's God of Carnage, Christopher Hampton's translation of her Le Dieu du Carnage, which is also playing in Paris at the moment. It hadn't opened when I booked it but it was being heavily promoted on Radio Four; I managed to avoid reading any reviews until Saturday. It is thoroughly enjoyable, and almost impossible to believe that it was not written by an Englishman about the English bourgeoisie. It was played as a comedy, which I understand from the reviews is not what Ms Reza would have wanted; but the fact that we laughed did not make the lacerations and the tragedy of the piece any less acute. Do audiences in Paris sit solemnly with furrowed brow through Le Dieu du Carnage? More intelligent people whose job it is to do so have written many reviews and analyses of this play, but I must point out that the telephone, the intrusion of the outside in the dynamics of the two middle-aged couples, defined them as adults and as children: one character's mother constantly calling reduced him to infantile rage; whereas their son, calling at the end of the play, forced them to become grown-ups once again, to adopt the authority of one who knows what one is doing.

After the play was done my friend wanted to go clubbing, which was a perfectly reasonable idea since it was ten o' clock on a Saturday night, and she was leaving the next day. It was with great relief that I was able to indulge in my Exercise of Moderation and go home to my torrents of the last few episodes of House, which should have downloaded by this time.

Playing catchup on television

2008-01-22T03:12:00.000Z

The holidays went by in a catchup blitz of staying current with what's showing on television these days. Most of the year I do try to spend my time outside of work reading, listening to music, and thinking noble thoughts, in addition, of course, to surfing and clicking much too often on the 1-click purchase button on Amazon Prime. But during the holidays my brain goes on vacation as well, and I allow myself to slide into the guilty pleasure of hours with the medium I grew up with and still love the most.

Heroes picked up its pace, finally, though creator Tim Kring should stop apologising to his viewers; it's his show and he can take it in any direction he wants. If we don't like it, we'll stop watching. Season One ended with a bang and the eleven episodes of Season Two that have been aired continue to be the most interesting programming on the small screen. Battlestar Galactica is wisely wrapping up with its main cast largely intact, a graceful and well-timed exit. Grey's Anatomy, on the other hand, should have ended with the third season: it would have been right on so many levels. Meredith gets her man, Christina has an unhappy ending, and they move forward from their internships. The attempt to try and squeeze more storylines from these characters is making a travesty of them, and Ellen Pompeo is looking even more haggard than ever. Brothers and Sisters chugs along gracefully in Mexican soap-opera fashion, with good-looking characters and fuzzy feel-good family scenes: it feels great while you're watching it, but if you blink for a moment then you cease to care.

Of the new series that started this autumn, I found Journeyman incomprehensible; Bionic Woman showed promise but unravelled all to quickly to be Alias's idiot ugly sister; Damages was sharp and tightly-written but seemed to wrap itself up after thirteen episodes. If the second part is at least as good as the first it will be a pleasant surprise. But the future doesn't look bright for any of the shows: the writers' strike means that the hiatus will begun soon; and even if the strike were to end today, the weekly momentum of production will have been lost.

And I still mourn the cancellation of the best series that appeared last year and ended after a one season's worth of great writing: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was to the West Wing what Firefly was to Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a one season coda to a seven-year opus. Studio 60 was intelligent, sexy, and involving, but couldn't get out of the shadow of the Wing. It was with a sinking feeling that I picked up the remote and powered down the television. With great reluctance, I decided that it might actually be time to get a life.

His Dark Immaterials

2007-12-09T03:33:00.001Z

The two hours spent watching the first installment of His Dark Materials, on screen as The Golden Compass, weren't a complete waste of time. The movie was not unpleasant: fluffy bears, snowy scenes, and a world where everyone has pets; and, like every action adventure filmed in the last few years, features Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee. The Sunday Times gave it four stars. The Economist's Intelligent Life placed Pullman in a succession with the Bible and Milton, and wrote that the author expected just a handful of people to 'get' the story, but found it a pleasant surprise when it achieved the cult status that it did.

I think I am one of those few, we unhappy few, we band of heathens, who don't get it. I have to admit to not having read the books, though not for want of trying; if it is as representative of the novels as Disney's The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe was, then perhaps I am doing Pullman a great disservice. I both agree and disagree with Pullman when he says that literature should be a 'theatre of morality'; I think that some literature is, and has great value as such; and then some literature isn't, and that's okay too. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, which he disparages, isn't; but it is firmly rooted in another tradition, that of the epic, with clearly defined forces of good and evil; and there is tremendous popular appeal in this because you don't have to think about what makes them good or bad.

What makes The Golden Compass confusing is its resemblance to Lord of the Rings (not just in casting Ian McKellen and Christopher Lee) but in the trilogy format, and the strange resemblance to a Bond film in having a secret laboratory with white curvy walls in the middle of nowhere. Now in a Bond film this would be inhabited by an arch-villain with clearly evil intentions (e.g., blowing up the world), but here the great revelation is a machine that separates kids from their pets; okay, daimons. Which doesn't really seem like enough provocation for the 'war that is coming'. Without the ramifications of allegory, The Golden Compass, as a film, fails to satisfy.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up on Pullman, though; I just might spend the winter holidays curled up with the trilogy. And there was a brief moment of nostalgia for Oxford, and the airship 'ferry' that took Lyra away to the great city is certainly an improvement on the Oxford Tube or the First Great Western service to London.

Hwet!, For I Shall Disrobe

2007-11-27T03:41:00.000Z

The trailer of 'Beowulf' had already put me in a Freudian state of mind when I headed across London to the BFI Imax theatre to see it in glorious 3D. 'Give me a son,' Angelina Jolie says in a Transylvanian accent, stroking him with the tip of her braided ponytail. 'I will make you strong.' She seemed to be reading off a list of things that guys like to hear when you take them to bed, so I wasn't at all surprised when the crowd at the sold-out showing was largely male. Besides, if there's one person with breasts that seem to be in 3D even on the television, it's her.

'Beowulf' is far from being the first film to be shot and released in 3D, but it's the first complete film in the recent revival of the format, when technology has allowed it to be actually convincing and not leave you in a nauseated state. It's an excellent choice for the attempt, with a strong, driving plot and universal themes, and there's a nice circularity to the first work of the English Literature canon being used as the basis for a new level of reality in; and the epic was, after all, oral in its first inception. Hwet! And look! It's movie experiences like this that keep us going to the cinema.

The film was a romp from beginning to end, a wall-to-wall Freudian playground. Beowulf, the hero, fights Grendel completely naked, with his genitals obscured behind a jug or a screen of smoke; Grendel is, naturally covered in a translucent viscous liquid, and as he advances over the cowering girl, he drips huge gobs of pre-cum like an overenthusiastic teenager off-camera from above. Angelina Jolie as Grendel's mother struts in on sixth-century demonoid stiletto heels, and seduces him while, quite literally, stroking his sword. She takes from him both the male sword and female cup; she keeps the phallus but spits the vagina back at him when she terminates her protection.

The lack of dialogue synchronisation, quite jarring on certain occasions, was reminiscent of budget films made without timecode or pilot tone, and was a reminder of how rudimentary the technology is, and to what degree this new format of storytelling is in its infancy. The most difficult recreations for any visual effects teams are human beings in natural surroundings, so while it's easy to make convincing monsters, getting people to look right and getting the audience to have a sense of where they are in the 3D setting is always challenging. With the opening shot of Robin Wright Penn I mentally groaned to myself and thought that everyone was going to look like cardboard cutouts, but as the film progressed I realised that in general close-ups and far shots were convincing, and it was just that Robin Wright Penn simply has a very flat face.

Each age, I suppose, gets the retelling of Beowulf (the tale, as well as the hero) that it deserves, and both technologically and thematically, this was definitely a 'Beowulf' for our time.

The Summit in the Alleyway

2007-08-29T02:03:00.000+01:00

Every city has its own pact between it and those who live there; each one, individually. Oxford, but for a few, those who stay become part of it, is haughty and peremptory: it opens its gates, its college courtyards, its libraries, to those who give to it their intellect and consent to carry its standard. The place is pompous and full of it but if you believe in the myth you won't fail to be moved, rather like enjoying the company of a likable braggart. As I rode my bicycle into town for some much-needed repairs I sailed down Broad Street (or rather, wobbled; my front wheel had come loose) past the Sheldonian in the late-afternoon sun and wondered how I could desert this place that had been so good to me; it had, quite honestly, offered me little in the way of learning, but much in the way of redemption.

London is another beast altogether. Whether or not you drink the Kool-Aid, Oxford advertises what it's all about quite openly: welcome to the seat of learning; this way up the ivory tower, mind your step and wipe your feet please. I'm sure London can pull up and boast of a Higher Purpose just as quickly; in fact, it can pull up just about anything. Former hub of empire, centre of government, hub of trade and finance; the city is multitudinous, and there are no gates. You enter through an alleyway and emerge into a row of Georgian mews and wait for a definition to present itself to you, the way information packets are handed out to freshers. What is this city about?

At first glance it appears to be centred entirely around money: making it, spending it; it whirls as it is flushed away like the crowd that disappears into the bowels of the underground at half past five. If you walk down King's Road on a Saturday afternoon it's gorgeous and lush, as beautiful as it is inaccessible, like the impeccably dressed woman who looks me up and down with that imperceptible smile on her face: I'm from another world than yours. I imagine it to be a world devoid of those wire-frame racks which lurk like an out-of-season Christmas tree in hundreds of thousands of flats across the country, festooned with knickers and dishtowels. But just as I've found that window-shopping in Chelsea is a perfectly pleasurable pursuit in itself, I think there's a third response to looking at the convertibles whizzing past and the terraced apartments in Kensington, which is neither that of feeling like the little match girl or setting one's jaw with grim determination that all this, too, shall be mine, mine! one day: the simple, quiet realisation of the fact that this is not my world. But I am looking forward to the London that will become mine, by discovery, by creation, in the way that though I will never be a member of All Souls, I do have my favourite seat at the Bodleian.

There is a pleasure in performing something perfectly, like playing a piano piece one knows by heart or executing a well-loved recipe; but there is another pleasure in discovery, in learning, in mastering what one does not know. London was, among other things, the starting-point for geographical expeditions during the age of exploration. There is a certain irony in the fact that perhaps the best way to get to know London is to approach it as would an adventurer, turning the corner into an alleyway that yields unexpected delights, and then to plant a flag, marking it as part of one's own private empire within the city.

Wadham Gardens On a Summer's Day

2007-08-12T21:58:00.000+01:00

'Take with you a ground rug or folding chairs,' we were instructed the day before the performance of Romeo and Juliet in the gardens of Wadham College, which I have to admit (intercollegiate rivalry notwithstanding) is one of the prettiest colleges in Oxford, and its lawn were bright and green and shimmery in the afternoon sun. The performance did not take place in the hallowed space of the centre college quad, of course, but in the garden to the right of the main buildings; against the backdrop of a wall, a 70s Volkswagen van and a tent had been parked, to emphasize the idea of Shakespeare being 'on tour', and which served as the backstage for the square of wooden planks that had been laid down. The idea that the six actors simply piled into the rickety old VW camper and meandered away down the motorway to their next touring gig was somewhat mitigated by a gleaming, comfortable modern bus parked nearby.

It was a small, intimate crowd of theatregoers in a lazy summer mood, and sweet alcoholic drinks were being served; thankfully, they opted for a play everyone knew by heart, it was difficult to imagine mustering the focus to get through, say, Henry VI Part III while semi-drunk on sugary Pimms. As the play moved into the second act the audience, especially those sitting on the ground, were perceptibly more and more horizontal, and the actors glistened in the summer heat. Or perhaps Juliet was really feeling the potion.

Despite the obvious professionalism of the performance, there was something very local (not amateurish; local, more so than if it had been on the stage of a West End theatre) about the fact that Shakespeare was born just a few miles to the north and it was first performed fifty miles to the east; and the garden setting, taking away not just the dimmed, fan-shaped theatre and the proscenium, but the very structure of a theatre in the form of a building, was a wonderful reminder of how 'theatre' is about an agreement between the players and the audience: we say entertain us, and they do; they say, this is Verona, and we believe them. Oh, and the play, of course. For a summer afternoon in Oxford, this play was just the thing.

Out from above the boiler room

2007-07-28T23:45:00.000+01:00

It's easy to romanticize (or sentimentalize) the process of moving house. I'm presently packing up the dormitory room where I've been ensconced for the last two years; I imagined myself lovingly going through the bits and pieces of two years' worth of life as a student at Oxford, doing a triage of thing to keep and things to throw away, and things to gaze at for a while before closing my eyes and dropping it into the dustbin. In the end it was about nothing so much as shoving stuff into boxes as quickly as I could, and noting how unimposing and dusty the things looked as I threw them into storage: flurry, then; and an underlying sadness at leaving a tiny space in which I had been comfortable. The bed where I had read my way to a Master's degree looked uncommonly ugly in the way that only college dormitory beds can look without their covers. Tossing out readings should have been a cathartic process but the main sensation was physical, of paper cuts and grime and sneezing out dustballs. The room, as I look around it, seems unbelievably small: a burnt-out, shrunken shell, papered over in college-issue paisley prints. No, no sentimentality here; just sadness and an eagerness to move on.

Satyagraha ha ha ha

2007-05-03T05:12:00.000+01:00

Seeing 'Satyagraha' performed by the ENO at the London Coliseum has resparked my love for Philip Glass's work, and I have been revisiting old friends. I'll be taking a break from revision to watch Naqoyqatsi, his cinematic masterpiece which is the closest experience to being stoned that doesn't involve being stoned. Fortunately, with a DVD the wonderful thing is that you can wander off while it plays; this you cannot do while watching an opera. Fortunately the staging by the ENO was engaging even as it unfolded, to put it politely, at a stately pace. They made good use of technology as well, including flashing the lyrics (which are in Sanskrit), on monitors mounted on the balcony of the dress circle for the chorus members. Comments overheard as we were walking out ranged from 'brilliant' to 'crushingly boring', which it can be if you were waiting for something to actually happen. But if you allow the hypnotic repetitions of the music to lull you into a trance, then a single moment of Gandhi's life, that of his politicization, is transformed into lush, symbol-laden spectacle, and three acts of beautiful, crystalline music.

Catch it early

2007-02-17T01:30:00.000Z

Timesinks from Amazon arrived this afternoon, bringing CDs of instrumental music (which in theory I should be able to play while studying, so as not to distract me with lyrics), and a few DVDs for the weekend. Of the music, standouts are the soundtrack from Miss Potter, with Renee Zellwegger looking rather rabbity herself on the cover, which is light, airy, and evokes wonderfully the English countryside of imagination (as opposed to the English countryside as seen from the window of a First Great Western train); Pan's Labyrinth is also a beautiful plunge into a fairytale world, the only problem being that the soundtrack was conceived as an extended lullaby, which of course meant that I promptly fell fast asleep.

The DVDs I bought were a lucky choice. I had meant to get another season of 24, but the political bias was beginning to show itself to a distasteful degree, like having a conversation with a man with an increasingly tumescent erection. I decided to take a chance on Criminal Minds, and found it refresingly intelligent. It isn't so tightly written to the point of being fatiguing, like the hour-long BBC dramas; it's predictable enough to be fodder for a Saturday night off. It falls into one of the sub-categories of crime dramas about the different investigation procedures, in this case the profilers. Mandy Patinkin, oddly convincing as a paternal/avuncular veteran of the field, heads a team who, in the episodes I've watched so far, gallop through the various criminal psychoses.

Perhaps I've been wondering since my nightmares of the other night whether I'm of a criminal disposition, but with each profile I found myself nervously examining myself for signs of criminal behaviour. Loner disposition and antisocial qualities? Check. Obsessive compulsive disorder? Yes, until my mid-teens. Interest in Criminology? Yes, I just finished the exams. Paranoid personality? Check. Does paranoia that one is of a criminal disposition count for or against likelihood of criminal behaviour? Okay, now I'm going around in circles. A sign of self-obsession...

Dream Sequence

2007-02-05T19:00:00.000Z

It's only been my second night without downers, but I've spent the last two nights in the throes of a dream which I wish I could say was recurrent, but has been actually rather like a television serial. Perhaps I've been exalting the format of the television novel a little too much, but my dreaming has taken on the likeness of an art-house version of 24. Night 1. Interior. Night. I hang out with some new friends, popping a few pills and smoking up. At the end of it all, I feel a flirtatious camaraderie with one of the boys, R. As the sun comes up, they all stumble out of my house, sobering up in the cold dawn. I'm suddenly conscious of the maid standing shivering in the doorway; she informs me that my terrier, who was pregnant with four puppies, is dead. R had come upon her and for no apparent reason kicked her across the lawn. She had spent last few hours haemorrhaging to death at the vet's. I wake up and attend my Sociology of Ethnicity class.

Second night. I have a presentation to prepare, so I took out my notes, my handouts, and my readings, and soon fall asleep with pencil in hand. Interior. Night. I have found my father's .38 in a desk drawer, and am trying to remember how to use it, and the few shooting lessons we had had together before I grew up and into libertarian politics. My dog's corpse is brought home in a cardboard box, and I thank the maid who had fetched it for me. As soon as the door closed, I found the reason why I had been unable to work the gun. I unlatched the safety, braced my arm, and fired. The recoil was more manageable than it had been for a nine year old, and I managed to leave a nick in the door three feet left of the peephole I had been aiming at. Armed, literally, with this new confidence, I mustered the courage to open the box, and stroked the stone cold body. The next shot went into the wall somewhere. I wiped away the tears and kept firing until the gun was empty.

At this point I had to wake up to go to the bathroom. I knew that if I went back to sleep I would soon head out to see if I could actually find R and pull the trigger. Did I want to find that out? It wasn't even six in the morning yet, but I decided instead to check my email and see if any friends across the globe were awake and logged onto their instant messaging service. Tonight I'm cranky and antisocial, and have decided I'm going to pop a Valium. I also called my maid and was reassured by the sound of barking in the background. I told her to take her to the vet's; she's overdue for her shots anyway.

Notes on a Few Recent Films on Sex

2007-02-02T00:55:00.000Z

After the phenomenal worldwide success of 'The History Boys', you might be led to thinking that the British take a somewhat relaxed moral attitude about things like middle-aged schoolteachers sexually harassing young boys. This is far from the truth. In Venus, about a decrepit actor's relationship with a young girl, and Notes On A Scandal, about a female schoolteacher's relationship with a young boy, and that of an older schoolteacher's sapphic lust for her in turn, yet more permutations of inappropriate desire are explored, sometimes more throughly than one would like to really see.

Of the two new films, Notes On A Scandal is the 'bigger' release, featuring as it does Judi Dench, Cate Blanchett; Patrick Marber (Closer) wrote the screenplay, and Philip Glass (The Hours, among other depressing hits) the music. All the ingredients are in place for a throughly gut-wrenching movie, and anyone with any sense would wait for the DVD and watch it with either a very large tub of ice-cream or a warm body into whose clothing one can sink one's tears. I am not a sensible person, so I watched it at the Phoenix Picturehouse, where I had, incidentally, recently seen The Queen. I only mention this because Notes on a Scandal features two former Queen Elizabeths, and I felt that Helen Mirren should have at least been given a bit role in this movie, if only because she has more Elizabeths under her belt than either of them. The movie was indeed bursting at the seams with emotion and high drama, and Judi Dench and Cate Blanchett turned in excellent performances: full marks. But even while Elizabeth I and Elizabeth I were thrashing it out, there was a part of me that was tapping my foot: 'And then?'

Perhaps it was because I had not quite recovered from the sparse, insidious realism of the previous night's Venus, directed by Roger Michell, of Notting Hill fame, but in a style far removed from the gloss, as well as romanticism, of that film. The lighting in Venus is harsh and unforgiving, especially when the most of the cast is carunculated and tousled. Even Jessie (aka Venus) isn't fantastically pretty; she's young and has the attractiveness of youth, but that's about it. Now when you have a situation in which there is an old (i.e., not merely elderly, or older, but old) man and a teenager (presumably of consensual age), one expects certain cliched storylines to emerge: the intellectualized desire of Nabokov's Lolita, a heartwarming tale of breathing life into a dying man's last days; a tale of sexual frustration, perhaps. Hanef Kureshi, who did the screenplay, and Michell did nothing so prosaic. Or rather, they took all these for granted (the scene in which she insouciantly swabs her twat and offers her finger to Peter O' Toole as a 'reward' is unforgettable) and went far beyond any such conventionalities, ironically by making it a film, quite simply, about a relationship. The film is as insouciant in its portrayal of this unfolding relationship as Jessie is in it, and this lack of deliberate intensity makes it hit all the harder.

I highly recommend watching these films back to back with The History Boys; perhaps they should offer them as a box setof some sort, with a warning that any thoughts of sex after watching all three in a row will, for a while at least, be accompanied by a shudder.

Pirates of the North Sea

2007-01-06T00:13:00.000Z

They say that in an experiment two groups, watching the same movie on a smiliarly-sized screen, but with tinny TV speaker sound on one hand and surround sound on the other, not only experienced the movie more intensely, but actually had the impression that the screen was larger than it was. I don't watch many movies at home (I see them in the theatres), but I do watch a lot of television. I have yet to buy my dream LCD flatscreen, but it might actually be larger than the floor area of my dorm room. Hanging it on the wall with blu-tack is against the regulations.

Back home for the holidays, my television is as outdated as the magazines on the couch; and just as I cringe when I look at the fashion that was the cutting edge before I packed my bags for London, my television is a 4:3 CRT that has never heard of terms such us HD or 1080i. So I've made up for the tiny screen with a plethora of speakers, thanks to an AV receiver with a manual as complex as a statistics textbook, though marginally more interesting. My brother, under the influence of Christmas bonhomie, said he'd set it up for me, a slip of the tongue that he cursed me for remembering after a few hours crouched behind the the entertainment console with a flashlight, draped in cables, while I delivered the scripture according to Yamaha, pacing back and forth.

But it was worth it. Of all the new shows, Heroes shows the most promise; it has a JJ Abrams cliffhanger style, though it isn't as fast-paced as Alias but, unlike Lost, seems to know where it's going. I've only watched up to Episode 11 of the opening season; and my main complaint is the annoying expository voice-over ("Evolution is a complex process...") that frames each episode: you really want to shoot the guy. Another point that may soon be cleared up is the lack of a single, identifiable (in both senes of the word) character through which the viewer enters the world (Josh for the West Wing, Xander for Buffy, George for Grey's Anatomy); at the moment it's a toss up between Hiro and Peter Petrelli. Ali Larter's character seems to have been thrown in as eye-candy for the boys; her superpower appears to be that she can get mad and become violent. I can do that. Of the old shows, Bones and Boston Legal seemed to be chugging along nicely, each episode well made, but easy to snap off. The television equivalent of cocaine is Grey's Anatomy; it leaves you sleepless, your eyes dilated, sniffling into a hanky, yet hungry for more. Season Three promises to be even stronger than the first and second.

Movie studios seem to have taken the hint that people will go to the cinema to watch a movie if they aren't made to wait too long for it, so release dates are now almost simultaneous with the States. Whether they are making more positives from the release internegatives or enough theatres in America have switched to digital, I have no idea, but all I can say is, good for them. Television is another matter. My newlywed friends tell me that their cosy moments at night are spent cuddling together with a laptop, watching TheLatest.s3e5.xvid.lol.avi. Or they might start off the night with two laptops, one watching Prison Break and the other Desperate Housewives, and then watch Grey's Anatomy together. Meanwhile, the 5.1 surround system lies dormant all around them.

There are some things that take priority over shoes, clothes, and Lladro figurines: I have never regretted prioritising spending on books or music; and since I believe that screen narratives are the art form of our time, I'd put DVDs on that list. But one can't buy what isn't being sold, so if I can't get it in the form of a silver disk, then thankfullly there's the Bittorrent underground network. At the moment The Pirate Bay is trying to start its own country off the coast of the UK, and though I am sceptical of their success, I applaud it as an appropriately ridiculous symbolic gesture for the mule-headedness of the distributors.

The Sophomore's Desserts

2006-11-02T03:27:00.000Z

One of the more enjoyable things about being in Oxford for one's second year is the smug satisfaction of watching the new people arriving at Oxford for their first year go through everything that you went through yourself the previous year, comfortably distanced and ensconced in one's own little world. It's amazing the difference that a year can make, and I've no doubt that those who have been here for even longer, especially those who have already achieved their degrees, are watching my second year travails with a similar, and far more acutely defined, sense of superiority.

I would say, however, that the most difficult thing to come to terms with when one first is at Oxford is being in Oxford in the first place. This sounds tautological, I realise, but I rewrote that sentence several times and could find no better way of expressing the sentiment. After the glamour of ancient stone, pretty lawns, and fabled names in whose footsteps you tread all dulls with repetition and familiarity, you're left with what, on its worst days, can seem nothing more than a creaky old university held together with twine from discarded teabags and a drab little town with some very bad fashion, full of people who are intelligent enough to be earnest but not intelligent or unintelligent enough to be amusing.

But it was here, too, that I found myself in the company of cooks and scholars whose obsession with food surpasses mine to the point of unreason at the Oxford Symposium for Food and Cookery; it was almost by chance that I had the privilege of working with the brilliant, eccentric, aristocratic ethnographic filmmaker Michael Yorke, at a documentary filmmaking workshop. The fodder for the intellect that Oxford metes out it does so grudgingly, over time, and sometimes must be chased and pinned down.

Yet I have begun to find that the best moments that Oxford affords one are the ones in which nothing happens: those long winter nights that I spend in the company of my records (a continually growing collection that is threatening to take over my room; but that's another story) and losing oneself in the music of previously unknown composers, dipping into books for work and books for pleasure, with which I am surrounded, along with sheets of paper on which I scribble my notes (my time-honoured way of working, despite my predilection for leather-bound notebooks), photocopied journal articles, and library books (which I sneakily annotate with a UV pen, which I thought was a rather clever idea until I used the black light and found other users' notes on several of the books). And, somewhat to my embarrassment, I have succumbed to the cliche of working fuelled by mugs of milky tea, though the day when you find me using teabags is one that will, one hopes, never come to pass.

The mind goes down its own secret alleyways, personal labyrinths of ideas, or obsessions that take possession of one's imagination and which one worries as a dog does gristle on a bone while sitting out in the cold and waiting for the bus to trundle along. This mental clearing, the space for ideas to 'do their thing' within one's head, is, I find infinitely rewarding and infinitely fragile, and perhaps it is born only of this particular short-lived time in my own Oxford trajectory. But as I cast my eye around at the first year students milling about with their quest to get their Bodleian cards activated or computers connected, clutching their Argos catalogues while forming an orderly queue at the HSBC on Cornmarket, I find this infinite place for the mind to wander an unexpected, probably short-lived, but just reward for my travails a year ago. Except that no one had told me about Argos.

Rolling with the Punches

2006-10-04T01:51:00.000+01:00

"The problem with Tom Stoppard," someone was saying in the foyer before the show started, "is that he demands so much of his audience." I didn't catch the interlocutor's response, but I mentally seconded the opinion. After sitting through his latest play, the three-hour long Rock'N'Roll at the Duke of York Theatre, I'm inclinced to agree even more, especially since the demands include £48.00 for a ticket in the stalls. Apparently, the mere name of Tom Stoppard is enough to warrant a West End opening without an initial subsidised run at the National; and on a Tuesday night the theatre was packed. The names involved in the production were not unknowns, either: Trevor Nunn directed, while Rufus Sewell played the lead.

But while Tom Stoppard has never written plays that are in any way easy, from the play that first made his name, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, to his most accessible and enjoyable play, The Real Thing, the demands he makes on his actors and audience don't go unrewarded. Arcadia, a beautiful and elegant play on every level, has you struggling in your seat, like attending a complicated lecture; but at the end of it comes a moment of intellectual and emotional illumination that makes it all worthwhile. Arcadia is also the play which I would say marked a turning-point to what future critics will probably lump into a different phase of his career as a playwright, one which, as a theatre-goer, I rather wish he would snap out of. The linguistic pyrotechnics are no longer flashes of brilliant wit, but set-pieces, oftentimes with a soapbox slant. The dullness reached its height in his trilogy The Coast of Utopia, a wagnerian three-part cycle of words that I couldn't get through as a reader; I wondered if it had to be seen as theatre, but I'm beginning to doubt if it would have been any less unbearable.

Critics tend to be deferential to Mr Stoppard, and though no one seemed to have the temerity to say anything really bad about The Coast of Utopia, I think they were fairly hard-pressed to try and like it. Rock'N'Roll has been hailed as a return to the old Stoppard, and though I felt it was a fairly gruelling evening, there were a few good laughs; more importantly, there was a strong attempt to engage the audience on more than an intellectual level. The characters were real, even if they did occasionally launch into diatribes; but that's the great danger of a political play. Rock'n'Roll is, despite its name, about communism. I'm not a highly politicised individual, nor did I live through the most important period of the play (the decade or so after 1968); my grasp of modern Czech history is fairly weak; and I'm not even into rock'n'roll. But not being into landscaping didn't stop me from enjoying Arcadia, and the metaphor of the survivial of a rock band as the tribulations of freedom was an inspired one. Walking out of the theatre one doesn't get the immense satisfaction that I got after seeing Jonathan Pryce in The Real Thing; in fact, I wasn't sure whether I actually liked the play or not. It wasn't until a day and a half later (always a bit slow, this girl is) that it all came together. Going two rounds with Stoppard's brain isn't exactly what most would call a rock and rollicking night out at the thee-atre, but I'm up for a rematch.

The 128 kbps Orchestra

2006-09-28T06:01:00.000+01:00

As someone who likes music from most periods after the Baroque (my dislike for that genre is best summed up by a friend's description of it as 'too tinkly'), and has had a long-standing interest in how it has been reproduced since its reproduction became possible in the first place, I have acquired a collection of mechanical and electrical equipment that would not be possible for my other great obsessions. I've always dreamt of having a 35mm projector in my living-room and having occasional screenings of My Fair Lady after dinner parties, but I'll save that for after I get myself a manor house of my own.

While packing up to come to to Oxford I was momentarily torn between my beloved Pathé gramophone and a selection of my favourite records, and my iPod; I eventually settled on the latter. I also left behind towering collections of CDs stacked on spindles (you can treat CDs this way because the reflective surface is either underneath the label or sandwiched somewhere in the middle). I don't have a cassette collection because I don't find the technology particularly interesting, and my musical coming of age occurred just after the tape recorder was the most uncool thing to have, and the age when music matters is usually the age when in matters to be cool.

Vinyl was a format that I came to terms with when I began my explorations into classical music. Square cardboard sleeves with faded pictures and crumpled paper liners were part of the house I left when I moved out. But ever since I got myself a proper turntable and discovered the wealth of good music to be had for a few pence I've never looked back (see earlier post, 'Vibrations in Time'). I regularly come home from Notting Hill or the Dickensian maze of dim, dusty aisles in the basement of Harold Moore Records in Great Marlborough Street heaving a load of records home. And at the risk of stating the obvious, records are eminently physical. They are heavy, they get scratched, they get lost; for no explicable reason, you end up loving one more than the other, like a ratty sweater that you'd rather wear than the latest fashion trend on those days when you feel the world is conspiring against you. So there are some perfectly good recordings that simply sit untouched, while a few records are cleaned more lovingly, wrapped in double layers of plastic sleeves, and played over and over. This is fetishism, at least as it is technically defined: the delightful physicality of a symphony embodied as a beloved object. Spin the record; turn me on.

One of the perks of having residency in the UK is being able to use the iTunes Music Store. It's actually now called the iTunes Store because in America they are now able to purchase and download television shows and movies off of it, but in the UK it's still music and music videos, so I will insist on the old name. Just as the invention of photography happened not with the daguerrotype but the negative and its capacity for infinite reproduction, the real shift between analogue and digital music came with the invention of the CD, which could be reproduced without degradation. The paranoia about piracy associated with MP3s and digital downloads is misplaced on more than one count: first of all, MP3s are just another way of writing down music 'digitally', AIFF being what is used on CDs; second, record labels have always been paranoid, as one will see by the number of LPs with warnings about the dire consequences of home recording printed on the sleeve. It's actually rather amusing to read these, and note that they have been worrying about the same thing for the last thirty years.

But although the labels and the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America, also responsible for the equalisation standard that allowed a greater tonal range to be pressed onto the vinyl grooves) think they're worrying about the same thing, they're mistaken. There is a radical difference between analogue and digital: it's why music piracy should be the least of their concerns; it's also why vinyl sounds better than CDs and infinitely better than anything one downloads off the Internet, even from the iTunes Music Store. Digital is about numbers, expressed in terms of ones and zeroes; to transform music to numbers, one quantizes, or 'samples' the information coming off (usually) a mixing board; the higher the sample rate, the more accurately it conforms to the original. An analogue recording creates something, that can range from a wax cylinder to quarter-inch magnetic tape to a light show, that is analogous (hence the name) to the original. For mass production, an analogue 'master' is then transfered to another medium that will hold a copy that can be mass produced which is in turn analogous to the master. A digital distribution system, on the other hand, will take the 'master', which might be digital tape, a hard drive, or CD-R, and turn it into either CDs or the files you will see on iTunes, 128 kbps AAC files.

Digital will beat analogue most days of the week; but an analogue recording made using the best technology available today played on a very good turntable and cartridge is the best sound reproduction possible at present, because it hasn't been sliced up, turned into a number, and then decoded back to music. Classical music heightens the constrast between the two means of getting music into one's home because of its complexity: great tonal and dynamic range, and the layering of a wealth of information that, on analogue systems, can be problematic for a mediocre stylus (particularly problematic are the cannons on the 1812 Overture, which will always sound wimpier than a CD, and definitely pales in comparison to sitting beside the gunpowder at the Royal Albert Hall). But the 128 kbps file is problematic as well; it does not present a problem for pop music (this not being a disparagement of pop music, which can be occasionally scintillating), but if you think of alll the aural information that is being dispersed at the same time during a symphony, even if you get everything in the 41,000 times it is sampled in a second, all that information cannot be compressed into the file size. Another, equally important, problem with the iTunes Music Store is the amount of DSP occurs before it is finally encoded and put up on the site. There is a reason for this, which is that the sound engineers at iTunes create a sound that, not unsurprisingly, is optimised for use with the iPod, and therefore earpieces. All headphones, even the ones that are worth more than some of the heads that wear them like the legendary AKG 1000, have an inherent problem with spatiality. The sneaky solution to this has always been to introduce a certain amount of crossover from the left and right channels; no doubt Apple's sound engineers have even more complex algorithms these days to minimise the impression of the sound coming from the middle of one's head. Not surprisingly, the best-sounding tracks to download from the iTunes Music Store are those that were recorded exclusively by them. I like the simple acoustic version of Aimee Mann's songs from The Forgotten Arm that she recorded for them, perfect for the intimacy of in-ear listening; the album mix, which is also excellent but has very distinct channel separation, sounds very close to the live gig of her band that I caught at the Shepherd's Bush Empire. Yet another consideration is the dynamic range of classical music: if you put a classical CD on, you might notice that you have to turn up the volume; this is the issue of headroom, and what it allows is the fortissimo that happens later to rattle the window-panes the way it should.

There is even more to be said about the iTunes Music Store and the phenomenon of the iPod if we leave the technical aspects behind and look even cursorily at the social aspects of it, but this might be better left to actual sociologists. There is an incompatibility with listening to classical music at a low bitstream rate on earpieces; a technological solution will present itself in the foreseeable future; in the meantime, one can wait for returns at the Barbican. Classical music, like really good food, doesn't come out of cans.

The Importance of Motion

2006-08-26T04:11:00.000+01:00

It was just one of those days when Oxford felt very far away from London. Almost everyone is resigned to using the services of The Oxford Tube, a coach service that runs 'every 10 minutes' ('at peak times'; sub-caption in microscopic font). The train service is for gamblers: you might get there in half an hour if you're lucky; if you aren't, you might find yourself being shunted to and fro endlessly in a Sartrean hell somewhere between Reading and Didcot Parkway. The Oxford Tube takes longer, but at least even if it's slow, it's predictably slow. Besides, it's less than half the price.

This was one of the days when slow was excruciating: at every stop before leaving Oxford there were fifteen people waiting to get on, all of them with luggage and wanting to pay with fifty pound notes. At a certain point, or, to be more precise, when the clock hit seven o' clock and we had just reached Hillingdon, I gave up on the idea that I would catch the play at all. We pulled in at the Marble Arch stop at twenty past, and I hopped into a taxi. As we passed Big Ben its hands read exactly 7.30. London taxi drivers know where everything is, or are supposed to, so you know they're lost when they say something like 'Um, er, the National is the theatre that's, er...' 'Directly in front of you with a sign projected onto its facade.'

The play that I was impossibly trying to catch was The Life of Galileo, a play about which I knew nothing and had no expectations whatsoever. It was also part of the £10 sponsored season at the National, which was why I was fairly sanguine. If I missed the play completely, a stroll on the South Bank was an acceptable substitute; and I have, after all, lost more than £10 on poorly-judged purchases at a music store. But oh, what a waste it would have been if I had turned around and not walked the few extra steps to where an unexpectedly nice usher took pity on me and said he would sneak me in during a scene change in about three or four minutes. In all I missed about twelve minutes of a play that ran for three hours and ten minutes. And I'm actually considering going back to see all 190 minutes of it all over again, because every second of it was absolutely brilliant.

The costumes and sets were a melange of anachronisms, but the effect of this was to draw attention away from them, rather than toward: a kind of anti-operatic effect, to remove all sense of pageantry and period and focus attention on the text. Galileo's daughter, in flats and capris, could have strolled in off Oxford Street; on the revolve (the play is on the vast, well-equipped Olivier stage) she literally runs up against the cardinals in their medieval red and black. And in the middle of all this is Galileo himself, in a rumpled white linen shirt; he is not straddling these two worlds: he is what at the same time holds them together and yet, because he cannot help but do so, divides them by his words, ideas, and, not incidentally, his character. There are wonderful reviews of the play out there that I will not try to outdo, but I have to say that the two things the average educated person knows about Galileo were delivered brilliantly: the recantation, delivered offstage, with a time-shifted Simon Russell Beale sitting facing the audience, the map of the world on his face; and the coda 'e pur si muove' delivered in the final moments of the play visually, the very familiarity of the image delivering unto us, the audience, the universe as we know it.

It's a phrase that I have come to mutter, more in desperate hope than anything else, when the Oxford Tube is jammed on the ring road heading westward out of London.

Nice hair and no neuroses

2006-08-25T04:02:00.000+01:00

Two of my favourite shows are wrapping up their final seasons (also known as being cancelled, an inhumanely casual sort of euphemism for ending the life of a series): Alias and The West Wing. Neither of them has appeared in DVD box set form yet, at least in the UK, but they are of course widely available on the Bitorrent underground network, and those of my friends who traffic in this sort of activity have given me mixed reviews of how each is brought to a close. I'll decide when the time comes whether I really want to see a pregnant Jennifer Garner (whose outfits have become less and less wearable since Season 3, incidentally) knot up JJ Abrams's promised 'ending with a bang'. The West Wing has been barely watchable for some time, despite a brief resurgence of intelligence in Season 5, but this will be more a valedictory parting of ways than anything else; I'd like to hang out with everyone for a final few hours, no matter how inane the script: one feels as though we have been through much together. But perhaps my lack of initiative to watch the final episodes are part of my inherent dislike of finishing anything: even with books I love, I have a tendency to stop just a few chapters shy of the end. The psychoanalysis involved isn't difficult: I have a natural fear of finishing anything, especially anything of my own; for after completion comes evaluation and, inevitably, judgement.

What I have been doing is starting on new series, and tonight I brought myself up to speed with the latest episodes of Doctor Who that aired while I was out of the country, and then found myself strangely absorbed with a workplace drama (never been my cup of tea) called Grey's Anatomy. It had all the elements of something I'd hate: for starters, an annoyingly pretty main character with great clothes, a tepidly good-looking love interest devoid of personality, with each episode built around a 'theme' about which Meredith Grey, the blonde surgeon whose makeup remains impeccable after a forty-eight hour shift, spouts predictable aphorisms. But it was recommended to me by someone whose taste has never led me wrong thus far, and indeed, I found myself shelving my past traumas of the genre from the likes of Ally McBeal and enjoying a sexy, well put together workplace drama. It's been almost a year since I left the workplace to get my second degree, and I suddenly remembered what a good day at work felt like: the feeling of doing something important and the satisfaction of a day's accomplishment; the pride of knowing that you're good at what you do; the subtle undercurrents of romance that spice up a day at the office.

The other rave I have about the series is the excellent music selection. I've always felt it was cheating, somehow, to get one's musical clues from television, rather than hanging out in smoky clubs to catch the newest band on the block; but life is short, I'm getting old, and I no longer read Vogue from cover to cover, nor do I grab the latest Guide Rouge and Gault-Millau hot off the press the way I used to. It caught my attention because I had been listening to Laura Michelle Kelly's 'Somewhere Only We Know' from her excellent The Storm Inside. It was another artist's version that was used, with excellent emotional timing, in the show, and I began to pay attention to the music; the highlight of Season One has to be Butterfly Boucher's 'Never Leave Your Heart Alone'.

But the final episode and predictable cliffhanger of Season One reminded me of the worst of the genre: an impassioned speech of pushbutton emotionalism, poorly written and badly delivered: it was like something out of Friends. Thank god that magnetic tape is not dead and that I have a friend who knows how to use his VCR (well, it's actually DVCPRO and it's his job), but thanks to him I can get up to date with the latest season of Spooks. I'm looking forward to some suitably depressing BBC fare until the next season of Grey's Anatomy comes out, with, no doubt, echoes of the spring collections in the copies of Marie Claire that I never actually had time to go through.

Sound on wires

2006-07-13T21:38:00.000+01:00

A friend and I had a nice, long Skype conversation the other day. It was also deep, meaningful, and emotional, but that's not germane to this post. The amazing fact of being able to have a phone-like conversation, across multiple time zones (or not: she could have been in the next room but pretending that she was in Kansas; or it could have been a metaphor) is still something that continues to amaze me. My previous experiences with Skype had not been auspicious; trying to use Skype on a laptop without a headset is a recipe for a disastrous conversation. Or three or four disastrous conversations, because you'll hear everything several times over.

This time, though, I was ready. I had a Shure large-diaphragm condenser microphone connected by a phase-inverting cable (aka XLR) to a mixer with a noise-reduction plug-in, in-ear monitors, and port forwarding. The only problem with this is that you're not quite sure whether to have a conversation or wait for the rest of the band to show up. Seriously, it feels very odd not to be clutching a handset. My senior tutor at Oxford has just gotten the hang of not holding the transducer to his ear and shouting into the telephone; he should get the hang of Skype in another thirty years' time. Meanwhile, conversations take on a certain performance aspect by the simple fact that one is one is standing before a microphone and pop-screen, and so, despite the fact that Skype is free, you feel the need to say something of Great Importance. Our next project is to attempt a three-way conversation with one of our male friends, who is generally into three-ways as a matter of course.

The other strange thing I've had to content with recently is paranoia that my phone is spying on me. 3G has many benefits; positive ones include the ability to check Gmail on the fly, but being able to locate you to tell you where the nearest cinema is can be somewhat disconcerting, and I'm sure can equally well be used to locate me for purposes other than to sell me Odeon tickets. It usually ticks away in silent mode (the official reason is that I find the ringing of a mobile phone intrusive, but I suspect it's actually a subconscious fear of unpopularity and I don't like to hear the absence of people calling me). Once in a while, though, it will suddenly flash into life for no discernible reason. Has someone hacked it and taken a picture of me typing away in my knickers? I've taken to wrapping it in swaddling cloth and burying it under the weight of the Complete Works of Byron. For someone who spends so much time with microphones and imaging gadgetry, being at home means being unseen and unheard, and the freedom, should I wish to do such a thing (but not that I would do such a thing, really) to stride naked across the room singing hit songs from the '90s.

Better than a digital dowload

2006-06-17T19:28:00.000+01:00

If there are two factors that can be said to have instigated the renaissance of my love affair with classical music, it is the radio and the phonograph: that is to say, my discovery of radio and the phonograph. One of the first things I did after moving into my dormitory quarters was to invest in a little clock radio; given that I have a problem controlling my irrepressible urge not to do things the normal way, it was inevitable that my little clock radio would be a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) made by Tivoli Audio, known for those little, mono radios designed by the founder of Ruark in his dotage. I learned that you could connect a second speaker, a subwoofer, and even a CD player, and I brought home the little clock radio with one speaker with the vague idea that I would invest in the rest of the system later. I never did, partly because I eventually got a valve amplifier and standmount speakers, but mainly because it sounded so good on its own.

DAB was the next logical evolution for radio after FM. The difference between frequency modulation and amplitude modulation (known in the UK as medium wave), is a fundamental change in the way the signal is encoded: the metaphor usually used is that of a light blinking on a hilltop transmitting information; with MW (and shortwave, and most other forms of radio) the information is sent by the light flickering on and off. With FM, you have different colors of light, and the information is contained in the difference between the colors. DAB is though someone had put up a large neon billboard on the hilltop. Those who understand computers might prefer to think of it as a broadcast form of streaming audio (usually at somewhere between 160 to 192 kbps). It isn't absolutely perfect; there are times when the error rate goes up to the point that the signal deteriorates and I find myself switching over to FM (imagine a foggy night when you can't make out the billboard, but can still see the colored flashes of light). But in general the broadcast quality is impeccable, and you have to hand it to the BBC when it comes to sound engineering (and content).

Even better than BBC 3, though, is the UK's main classical music station, Classic FM. Their hegemony is so strong that they have their own record label, cable television channel, and music magazine as well. The programming, however, is top-notch, especially when you consider that this is a commercial radio station and not a state-sponsored one; classical music radio is not generally an easy sell in the contemporary world. Classic FM does (it would appear from the commercials) have a certain leaning in its listening demographic common to most classical music stations, and so one has to sit through contant ads related to erectile dysfunction, inheritance tax lawyers, and the like. But they are careful to make sure that they get a wide variety of phone-ins and emails, and in fact tend to bias those who aren't rich old men in carpet slippers looking out over their estate, favoring instead children, students, and the working class (either that, or these are the people who bother phoning in). There is a conscious aversion to 'greatest hits' and canonical performers; or you get one and not the other. Every so often they throw in something unexpected, like a movie theme, and on weekend evenings they play chill-out music under the rubric of a show called the Chiller Cabinet.

Even though I can now legally watch television, I only bother to tune in on Saturday evenings for you-know-Who. But the radio is a constant companion; it's so addictive that it has tended to get in the way of revision for examinations. 'Revision' is the British term for what I know as 'reviewing'; both are etymologically parallel in meaning 'to see again', my experience of revision is closer to the way I usually understand the word, as meaning a change or adjustment, i.e., 'so that's that the professor was talking about during the lecture that I hadn't read up for'. Come exam season the call-ins include lots of students asking for some Shostakovich to keep them company while revising. 'Good luck with your examinations, and here is the Fifth Symphony!' I myself am incapable of multitasking: this is a legacy of my age, I think; I grew up when 64MB of RAM was a lot, and I am incapable of having multiple applications running simultaneously, and the same is true of my brain. Kids these days, who can send text messages while surfing the net and having sex all at once, genuinely baffle me. Oh no, wait, that was me just a couple of years ago.

The use of the phonograph in this day and age as a source input seemed to be the domain of fussy old geezers obsessively balancing their tonearms; this is a misconception. It's the domain of fussy old geezers and me. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are some types of music that the phonograph does reproduce better than digital sources, and it's worth getting new pressings of some of this stuff. But for the most part I'm luxuriating in the wealth of cheap material out there, especially for classical music. There's a church down the road where you can pick through records in a bin and then drop a few coins into a collection box. (Oxford seems to be in the process of dumping its vinyl wholesale, and I'm only too happy to cart them back to my room.) Second-hand vinyl shops, meanwhile, need a strong tolerance for dust, a lot of spare time, and the patience to deal with snarky shopkeepers (these shops seem invariably to be manned by someone who will look over your selections with raised eyebrows and a sneer). Then you have to clean them; isopropyl alcohol is what I would normally use, but in Oxford you will find yourself directed down the road to the pub, which sells the only alcohol they are familiar with in these parts. I am debating whether to wipe down my vinyl with Guinness, or resort to something like lighter fluid.

But lo! Attention sneering shopkeepers everywhere, hearken to what I have found at the bins lately: Ashkenazy playing Beethoven's Appassionata; Horowitz performing at the Royal Albert Hall; Dvorak's cello concertos; Rachmaninoff performing his own Third Piano Concerto; and, for some reason, er, Susanne Vega. Oh, sorry, you can't listen to them, because I've got them now and you don't. Played though valves, they sound simply wonderful, and far too good to interrupt for revision.

The best clock radio in the world
Classic FM

Vibrations in Time

2006-05-25T08:30:00.000+01:00

Last night I came home and put on some music. Note that this sentence can mean different things to different people; in my case, it meant something very different last night than it did a week ago. I've been a great fan of the iPod since its inception, to the point that I find myself the curator of a museum of iPods, from the first generation to the latest. This dovetails well with the clutter of my room and my listening habits: when I buy CDs I import them onto my computer, and throw them onto the iPod in uncompressed format. The CDs soon burrow under the cushions of the sofa, and then disappear forerver; computer hard drives and computers come and go with the turnover frequency of relationships (it's been a toss-up the last couple of years); and over the years my music collection is now stored on five iPods (that I really should back up, now that I think about it).

But last night what I did was I turned on my trusty old amp, which was hooked up to the monitor speakers I use for sound editing, and while waiting for the tubes to warm up, sorted through a pile of records and decided to put on Joni Mitchell's Blue. I pulled the record from the dust sleeve, put it on the turntable, and carefully brushed off the dust before clamping it onto the platter. I unclipped the safety latch from the moving coil cartridge and lowered the stylus point onto the edge of the spinning record, and heard a few seconds of what must be one of my favorite sounds in the world (contenders would be that of a cork being pulled from a bottle, or the muffled roar of jet engines roaring into life for take-off). Although the engineering behind it is well-documented, I've never ceased to marvel at how a miniscule stylus being wiggled around can separate into two channels and go on to replicate an illusion of space, one that is populated by a warm, living voice, instruments in the background, or an entire orchestra. I mean, I know how it works, but I don't really understand it, the way you don't understand £60 million: it just ceases to be meaningful as money. (If I ever do come into possession of £60 million one of these days I'll report back and tell you if it becomes any more comprehensible.)

As someone who was in the creative industry just as it was "going digital", I wrestled with the existentialist problems of digital versus analogue in my spare time, but didn't have much time to ponder it in the workplace. This meant that we ended up working with hybrid systems, and at the moment being a purist either way is just either obstinacy or silliness. Film still rules, but not to use non-linear editing would be uniminagable for me now. Between the purist simplicity of my manual turntable and the tube amplifier is a solid-state phono stage to get some gain on the weak signal from the moving coil cartridge. It's a gorgeous frankenstein, I swear.

And the great thing about vinyl is that it's ridiculously cheap. Actually, there's also ridiculously expensive "audiophile" vinyl, and I do admit to owning Sarah McLachlan's Afterglow and Mirrorball on 200g remasters; but audiophiles tend to be nutballs in general. Apparently there are people out there (perhaps with £60 million) who buy these £20,000 speakers or the price of a small apartment for a length of wire. I've complained about the unhelpfulness of computer forums in the past (as opposed to the excellent industry forums for imaging or design), but audio forums seem to be populated by phallus-toting men with more money than sense, who sign off each message with a list of their equipment (yes, really).

I spent a pleasant afternoon in Notting Hill trawling the second-hand record shops, and made a pilgrimage to Harold Moore's classical haven, conveniently opposite Metro Imaging labs. Although I was rushing to catch a show (Noel Coward's Hay Fever, at the Haymarket Theatre Royal, starring Judi Dench doing an impersonation of Norma Desmond), I managed to snatch up some Julie London, a Deutche Grammophon recording of Herbert von Karajan's Dvorak Nine, some EMI recordings of Sir Malcolm Sargent, the Beatles (Parlophone), and Edie Brickell.
Apart from the last, these were from the days when record labels actually meant something; well, they still do today, to recording artists, but in the industry that has consolidated down to the big four, it makes me treasure my Sinatra on Capitol and Piaf on Pathe that much more. (When I was looking for a pair of monitor speakers a year ago I nearly purchased, in a fit of loony nostalgia, a pair of huge floorstanders each as big as a wardrobe from Decca sound labs.) Listening to great vinyl is a bit of a religious experience, and I don't mean that just in the audiophile's sense that the sound was heavenly (it varies, really); I mean it in the sense that it's evocative of an era before DRM and rootkit installers.

As a product of my generation, vinyl will never be the main medium of delivery for my music, though I must admit that I actually haven't bought a CD for ages. Incidentally, of all the vinyl I came home with today, only one of them really makes sense as a purchase, and that's the Beatles: they are, after all, not available for download on the iTunes Music Store.

What you get for £126

2006-05-14T01:19:00.000+01:00

If you want to know what it's like to have a brush with the mafia, just try being living in England for a bit at a residential address. At some point, a letter from an insitution known only as "TV Licensing" will shove a friendly note in your letter-box, informing you of the legalities of watching television in the UK. This will be followed by one that says roughly the same thing but in a less friendly tone, and is printed in red ink. Then comes the one that hints at patrols involving "sophisticated detection equipment", followed by the same wrapped around a dead fish, and so on, until, finally, an envelope arrives on which is written NOTICE HAS BEEN SERVED, and inside which is a picture of a relative holding a copy of yesterday's paper and a note informing you that a hit, I mean, a raid, will be carried out in the next 48 hours. At this point I capitulated and paid up, even though I don't own a television set and don't watch television. But the idea of being woken up by the blunt muzzle of an automatic being pressed against my temple with the rest of the squad rummaging through my lingerie drawer in search of a concealed television set was too much to bear.

The upshot of all this is that now that I've spent so much on my television license, I've decided I should watch television so that my £126 doesn't go to waste. Besides, I've been championing the form for the past few years but bypassing the medium; i.e., I think that some of the best writing, acting, and directing being done today is being done for television, but I've always watched it on DVD. This is partly because I've never had the patience to tune in at a particular time, can't stand commercials, and because I want Dolby 2.0 at the very least. Now that HD is coming to England, I might change my mind, but an HD box is probably the last thing I need now with examinations coming up.

So if ever I watch teleivion now it's on my computer, as a little window on the screen (the resolution of my monitor is higher than broadcast resolution, so resizing it looks horrible). What does one get for £126? Without a decoder box, fairly terrible stuff, the worst of it being reality television involving extremely unattractive people, mixed in with the occasional BBC gem. This is what got me started on BBC programming, which in recent times has moved away from the type of fare it used to produce, which could charitably be described as "soothing" (try watching their adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast). The most noticeable example of this change in BBC style is the new Doctor Who, which now for a change the Americans are trying to download on Bittorrent. I'd previously dismissed it as hardcore sci-fi, which, like opera as a musical genre, the best of which I like but most of which bores me. But the writer of the new series, Russell T. Davies, was quoted as being a Buffy fan and wanting to reclaim the genre. So I watched.

Its lineage from Buffy isn't the female heroine; for that, only Alias does it for me so far (on this point I concur with Anne Billson's book on BtVS, though I disagree with most of it); it's about good writing: shifting in a moment from funny to frightening; operating on a scale both intimate and human, and Saving the World (which both Buffy and the Doctor do on a weekly basis). Unfortunately, Doctor Who is pretty new, so I couldn't go on a seven-season marathon the way I did with Buffy. (Incidentally, American seasons are around twenty-two episodes of forty minutes each; British seasons are ten episodes usually about an hour long, since there are no commercials, which also means that they don't follow the four-act structure of American teleivision.) The second season is now airing, with a new actor playing the Doctor with a new swagger; the new season definitely has an air of confidence about it, as well as a very obvious budget bump.

And since I found myself home on a Saturday night, and with a television license withering away, I decided to fire up my little digital receiver and tune in. When I turned the sound down at the end of the episode, I could hear the same music through the walls and realized that my next-door neighbor was watching it in his flat, as were people in homes and pubs all over Britain. So this is what it's like to watch television. So how much is that HD box again?

bbc.co.uk/doctorwho
How much do you enjoy television?

The Royal Hunt for an Opinion

2006-05-06T05:31:00.000+01:00

It's a terrible thing, I know, but I'm the sort of person who is easily swayed by reviews. In the past, I'd swoop into London for a week or so and take in plays like a junkie on a binge, evenings and matinees all; and the bible by which I swore would be the capsule review I found in that particular week's issue of Time Out. I admit that this has led to some particularly horrifying disasters, such as Jerry Springer: The Opera, to which I dragged my friends, kicking and screaming, on the basis of a positive review (it's even more horrible than the title might suggest). But in general Time Out reviews are reliable, which can actually turn into a problem: because they're usually so trustworthy, there's the danger of falling into lazy complacency and allowing them to form your opnions for you.

These days, now that I have the luxury of watching plays at my leisure, I actually miss out on more plays than when I would parachute sporadically into the country. Even worse, I now have the time to buy the paper every morning (okay, every afternoon), and sift through the contents at length with my breakfast cup of tea. This is what living out in the country does to you. One of these days I might actually take to ironing the paper before reading it. And it is thus that the authority of Time Out has been replaced by that of the Guardian, which I thought highly of but never really warmed to as a website, but is wonderful in its paper form: the nifty size! Those pert little sidebars! That neat modern typeface!

Alas, on more than one occasion I have not been able to stop myself from reading the review of a play before watching it, which was what happened with The Royal Hunt of the Sun. Actually, I can technically claim that I saw it before reading the review, but this was ten years ago and might even have been in translation. I couldn't even remember what the play was about; I do remember though that it was one of the plays that made me fall in love with the medium of theatre. The present production of The Royal Hunt of the Sun at the National Theatre is a resurrection of a 1964 play (yes, I cribbed that date from the Guardian review), with Trevor Nunn directing. Like an adulterer who decides he might as well get in a few extra boinks before telling his wife, I decided that I might as well go for broke, and read all the reviews. Then I went and saw the play.

I'm not going to trot out a statement about the play retaining its relevance and vsince 1964, since I wasn't around to see it in 1964; and relevant to what, anyhow? What I will say is that I probably have changed less than I might have thought in the span of ten years, and that what I loved about the play then is what I loved about it the other night: the almost operatic spectacle and pageantry that is theater in its oldest form, yet none of it gratuitous. I loved how a group of men can climb onto a bare wooden stage and with the aid of two swathes of cloth, hey presto, they are climbing the Andes. Most of all I loved how Peter Schaffer tightened the drama of civilizations and cultures in a complex relationship between two men.

So yes, I'm a weak person, and easily swayed by authoritative reviews, peer pressure, friends with strong opinions, etc. But once in a while I come across a piece that engages me so directly that I like or dislike it in the face of authoritative approval or disapproval. I'm not saying it's a perfect evening: yes, Peter Schaffer can be excessively talky; and I felt Trevor Nunn was gilding the lily with the strobe lighting at the end of the first act ("bet you didn't have this in 1964!"). I'd watched it with a friend that I had hijacked, who had in turn hijacked one of her friends, and because I'd flown back into the UK just the night before neither of them had any idea what we were all watching. Perhaps one of the best compliments that can be paid to Schaffer's writing is that it is the sort that polarizes people, or at least one tends to feel strongly about; one thing you will not leave the theatre wanting for is an opinion. I was watching the play with eyes as fresh as those of my friends sitting beside me, as though I hadn't seen it ten years ago, as though I hadn't gone and cheated and read those reviews.

But as for my little cultural quandary, I have the perfect solution: rather than desisting from my new daily ritual of disassembling the Guardian with my breakfast (I manage to do this despite not having a subscription by buying the newspaper in the evening and reading everything one day late), I'll try and see everything in previews. Then again, I could learn how to have an opinion of my own despite having read the reviews.

V for Very Large

2006-04-20T07:12:00.000+01:00

It was a night to remember, by any standards. On impulse I had decided to take abandon work for the afternoon, nay, the rest of the day; I wandered about the food halls of Selfridges and tried checking movie times for V for Vendetta, which I really wanted to watch in a theatre but which the local Odeon was no longer showing. But this was London; somewhere in the city, there must be some theatre still showing it in an upper attic of a multiplex, Screen 12 or something like that, a little room with a screen the size of a bathtowel. I negotiated the complex menus of WAP on my mobile phone, which spat out a surprising result: "BFI Imax 21.00", with a phone number. I called the number, and a voice mumbled, "Booking." "For V for Vendetta this evening?" "Well, there's really no need to book," sounding only slightly more awake, "you've got the theatre to yourself. Just turn up twenty minutes before nine."

I made my way to the Imax theatre on the South Bank by tube. I've decided that I enjoy the London Underground when I don't really have to get anywhere in a hurry, which was the case. I emerged at Waterloo Station and negotiated the draughty tunnels from which I emerged at the doorstep of the great glass cylinder that is the London Imax Cinema. As promised, I was almost alone in the theatre, which was just about the opposite of the tiny room at which I thought I might be able to catch it. This was almost worth seeing it after everyone else: a DMR (digital re-mastering) of the film on the 70mm Imax format. The picture was crystal clear, and so large that I sometimes had to swivel my head from side to side to take in a scene, but I was enjoying myself too much to want to move. Natalie Portman is someone worth seeing in a closeup shot fifty feet high, and though her acting stuttered on occasion, this was the actress I remembered from The Diary of Anne Frank (on Broadway), not the ham of the Star Wars epics. The final scene, the destruction of the Houses of Parliament to the soundtrack of the 1812 Overture, was delivered in appropriately thunderous surround sound.

But perhaps the eeriest thing about the movie was emerging from the theatre and deciding to take a stroll across the river to catch a bus rather than brave the tube past midnight on a Friday; and, lo, the Houses of Parliament appeared before me, respondent, symbolic. It was an odd experience to watch this film in London because, despite being a Hollywood production, they got so many things right about British culture, down to the sans serif typefaces of the signages to the irony that the tube station they filmed at was the abandoned Aldwych Station, right by the offices of the BBC. As I boarded the bus I was more aware than usual of the CCTV systems that would cover every step of my journey home.

Social web browsing and other inquisitions

2006-02-25T01:40:00.000Z

An amusing way to while away a wet and rainy afternoon is to cycle through blogs by clicking on the interests that you have listed for yourself and going through the blogs of those who share similar interests. Similarly, if you keep bookmarks on sites like del.icio.us as I do (though I got into the habit of doing it for practical reasons rather than sociability) then it becomes quite interesting to see who else has bookmarked a rather obscure site that you thought would be of interest to only to yourself. I look through their blogs or examine their profiles out of curiosity and the desire to discover other sites of interest, using these people as intermediaries, so to speak; just another way in which our society can be understood in terms of being a network of gargantuan proprotions. So in this manner I come across new sites of interest, a new web service to play with, new authors, new television shows. I will never contact these people and tell them that we share common bookmarks, why don't we be friends: nonetheless, for people with hermit-like tendencies such as myself, this is yet another reason to stay in my room and let the twenty-inch screen of the computer become my window to the world, and engage less in actual social interaction.

Because this, after all, is what friends do: they share music, books, experiences, ideas; and this comes before, and with the best of relationships, remains constant even as they become shoulders to cry on when a boyfriend leaves or take you home when you've embarrassed yourself at a party or take you to task when you've done three tabs of acid four nights in a row. And much as I value that, and think of my friends as family when my own is scattered across the globe and far away, I value the other aspect every bit as much: the quotidian exchange of information that no algorithm of recommendations will be able to replicate. The quirks and mannerisms, the eccentricities of personality, the unqiue way of speaking, the stories they tell over and over: these are, after all, what endears them to us, why we love them, the reason we say we know them. I have always felt that if I were to meet someone exactly like myself I would detest her immensely: the girl in the mirror is myself; but if she were to take on a life of her own and climb out from behind the looking-glass she would be someone I would want to throttle. There is a belief in popular mythology that if you wake up in the middle of the night and see someone who looks like yourself standing in the distance that it is an omen of death; perhaps there is a psychological underpinning to this bit of folklore.

We like our friends because they are different than us, but we love our friends for the extent to which they are of like minds to ourselves. Perhaps the decisive moment comes when in the course of time together and going through experiences together, that despite all you have in common that you hold a same or different morality. And the revelation of this morality, I have come to find as I grow older (but necessarily any more mature and certainly not nobler of thought or virtue) can be as much in the course of cataclysmic events as in quotidian companionship: in laughter; in its absence. When one moves beyond the family one is born into to "family" as defined by the people you surround yourself with, that one makes and chooses, the stakes become just a little bit higher. And this, I am firmly convinced, is a good thing.

Honour Undriven

2006-02-11T05:30:00.000Z

The Wyndhams Theatre used to be my favorite theatre in London, with its location right by the Leicester Square tube station, its intimate size, and the fact that several of my favorite plays, include "Copenhagen" and "Democracy" had successful runs there. Of late I've seen two duds in succession; well, one must qualify the the disparagement by pointing out that expectations were high: after all, if you have John Hurt and two other luminaries of the British stage in a play translated by Tom Stoppard ("Heroes"). Similarly, if you have Dama Diana Rigg and Natasha McElhone (pictured) and lots of exclamatory blurbs on tube posters, you gladly hand over £45 and rub your hands in gleeful anticipation.

"Honour" isn't rotten; like I said, it's a dud: it thumps to the ground like something unripened and inedible. It a terrible waste of a great premise, a good cast, and occasional patches of brilliant dialogue. But none of it comes together: the scenes are too short, and the transition between them awkward; the episodic quality is probably meant to make it fast-paced, but the net result is that scenes deliver the punch-line prematurely and ineffectually; without sufficient buildup, what could have been emotional body-blows glance off and hang limply in the darkness while the actors re-arrange themselves on the stage.

The play is about an intellectual couple, married for thirty-two years, whose marriage crumbles when Natasha McElhone's character (I usually buy a programme during the interval if I like the play; this one didn't have an interval, so I can't remember the names of the dramatis personae) invades their cosy intellectual domestic space in the guise of an interviewer having come to do a profile of the husband, flirting outrageously ("I know men want to fuck me"); the scenes of the interview alternate with scenes between him and his wife, during which they exchange smooth ironic repartee, evidently intended to portray a marriage between intellectual equals that has had all its corners and edges worn smooth with time. A logical addition which provides us an extra dimension from which to view the breakup is the a daughter who is roughly the same age as Natasha's character but not quite as clever or worldly, but from whom we learn nothing.

What ultimately lets the play down is its pacing. I can only suppose that, having managed to contract Dame Diana Rigg for the lead role (the man's wife, named Honor), they decided to squeeze as much emotion out of her as possible, so very early on in the play the smooth repartee turns into high-strung single-note emotionalism that simply could not be sustained for the rest of the uninterrupted hour or so after he decides to leave his wife for the willowy young interviewer. I was sitting in the stalls very close to the stage, where I usually like to sit, and despite the raw emotion gushing in floodwaves across the proverbial footlights, I found myself tuning out and thinking of where would be a good place to grab a bite afterwards. The ending, when it came, didn't so much leave me wanting more as made me leave wanting a play that did more. Watching this play is the opposite of seeing a masterpiece in a student production: it was an amateurish piece that a brilliant cast tried their best with. Though I have a sneaking suspicion that even Diana Rigg, while doing her scenes, was wondering if there was anything good on television later tonight.

This Woolf Wrings

2006-01-22T04:50:00.000Z

This evening I joined an old friend from Oxford and her sister for a preview performance of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, recently transferred to London at the Apollo from its run on the other side of the Atlantic. By the grace of a patchy education, I had somehow managed to avoid having had to read the Albee playtext in high school or college and interpret it for literary symbolism; what did surprise me was that my friend and her sister, neither of whom are exactly intellectual slouches, had also escaped similar fates; as well as the equal or worse one, that of having had to watch an amateur performance of it.

Since the play is more or less established as canon, I don't expect to see any of the reviews in the weekend papers to have any comments on Albee's work as a piece of theatre (it was written and first produced in 1962). They'll probably focus on Kathleen Turner's (of Jewel of the Nile fame, as well as the somewhat more thematically related War of the Roses) and Bill Irwin's performances, and manage perhaps to cram in a few snippy remarks about how London theatre is being overrun by America (which I'd agree with, though not being British this fact is of interest but not frustration for me).

But the upshot of this mysterious gap in our literary education was that we entered the Apollo with no expectations; it could have been the latest Patrick Marber. And since Kathleen Turner was unrecognizable in her new blimp-like incarnation, we didn't feel we were watching a film star doing a career-saving stage turn. We went in fresh; and it was a fresh play that was delivered to us.

The fact that the claustrophobic one-room set, that doesn't change over the course of three acts that take place in "real-time" (it supposedly begins around two in the morning, and ends as dawn breaks), was contemporary to the original time setting of the play (phonograph records instead of CDs), was for the most part incidental and quickly forgotten. (I am glad though that no attempt was made to change the setting to the look of the present-day; that would just have been tiresome.) Quick summary of the performances: flawless, empassioned; absolutely intense. But because we did not know how the play would turn out or what it was thematically "about", we were watching it as theatre, without the emotional detachment of, say, the umpteenth staging of Hamlet. The violence of the language, as well as the physical violence, were perhaps not as shocking to us as it would have been to an audience in the early sixties, but the emotional impact of the George's smashing a bottle and his attempt to throttle his wife were unmitigated and unexpected. And as the play built itself up to its inevitable climax, we were squirming in our seats; the final fifteen minutes left N in tears (okay, and I as well); and the last few lines of the play had our skin crawling.

We wandered around the West End in a shell-shocked state for some time, feeling as though we had been put through an emotional wringer. I can't imagine how the actors go through this every night; perhaps they're such pros that after the curtain goes down they all traipse off to the pub nonplussed, but we felt we were in dire need of a medicinal amount of alcohol, and quickly downed a bottle of Argentinian red. (Yes, despite my recent mishap; but that was a particularly malevolent Gewurztraminer and was before dinner...don't trust the German winemakers, my grandfather used to say during the war...)

I did some rather belated homework about the play and its supposed intentions, and received more than a mild surprise. This is definitely a production that benefits from one's *not* having read the lecture notes. If you have the blessing of ignorance, as we did, get yourself to Shaftesbury Avenue and watch it as a piece of theatre. The emotional beating is a sadomasochistic treat, and the intellectual rewards are an incidental counterpoint.

Notes from Oxford

2005-11-15T03:38:00.000Z

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

2005-10-23T16:47:00.000+01:00

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)

2005-10-08T11:51:00.000+01:00

"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

2005-10-03T18:57:00.000+01:00

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

2005-08-04T19:48:00.000+01:00

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

2005-07-09T01:48:00.000+01:00

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

2005-07-04T01:43:00.000+01:00

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

2005-06-22T23:23:00.000+01:00

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

2005-06-18T21:40:00.000+01:00

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

2005-06-14T14:48:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-21T18:02:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-18T16:03:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-14T22:33:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-12T21:49:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-10T22:39:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-10T07:22:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-09T22:31:00.000+01:00

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

2005-05-09T22:23:00.000+01:00

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.