Kingsley Amis was very good at picking up phrases people use casually and then using them to mock them. In "Jake's Thing" he has the main character meeting a series of lesser beings and finding that they would say "Cheers" to practically every request he made or to wish him goodbye or to greet him. He'd buy something and the seller, usually young, younger than him anyway, instead of saying "Thank you" would say "Cheers".
It was fairly obvious Amis didn't like this at all which is not surprising since he was a novelist of great literary talent and a wordsmith whose knowledge of the correct use of the English language mattered to him.
I can't say "Cheers" said to me makes me angry though it does slightly irritate me sometimes, especially if it is said in the place of "Thankyou" or "Good to see you" or "Goodbye".
"Have a good day" annoys me a little too, especially when it's late afternoon. "Take care" strikes me as meaningless - he doesn't raelly care what you do.
"I tell you what" also seems needless - except that the best joke in The Edinburgh Festival this year needed the expression I think: "I've just been on a Once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I tell you what - never again." Doesn't work so well without it.
Today a waiter, when I asked for a glass of water said "No problem". "No prob" is another variation of it, only even less likeable.
"Mate" is nuisance of a greeting, especially from a young person to an older one (I have never heard it said the other way round). And "There you go" seems to me meaningless: you are handed a glass of ale and "there you go" the barmaid says when you're not going anywhere except to your seat nearby.
"Squire" is as horrible as "mate", and "Young man" when you are obviously old is insulting.
"I have to go now."
"Well take care, mate."
"Goodbye then."
"Cheers, Squire and have a good day."
"No prob."
Sunday 29 August 2010
Friday 27 August 2010
Women Directors
Of films, that is, not of companies. Recently I have seen two films directed by women. They were both efficiently directed though the second was a trifle flashy in technique. This was called "Beautiful Kate" and was an Australian film based on a novel, adapted for the screen by the director, none other than the once georgeous (she may still be for all I know) Rachel Ward.
I had formed the impression from at least two other films directed by women that they tended to go for stories which made men seem inferior, brutish, unfeeling..... In short I gained the impression that these women directors didn't like men much - or at all possibly. There were "American Psycho" directed by Mary Harron and "Leaving" by Catherine Corsini. The first was an exceedingly nasty portrayal of a well-off New York showoff who may have been a murderer. I enjoyed the film a lot, especially those parts when the guys got together to compare banking cards they had - American Express etc. Who had the best collection? They were silly, nasty, murderous, hated women though took them to bed of course. "Leaving" was not so direct an assault on masculine behaviour; it was a subtle depiction of the mid-life crisis of a woman who takes up with a younger man and leaves her family. The director said she was tired of seeing men leaving women for younger women and thought she'd make a film in which a woman leaves.
So while both films were enjoyable and often exciting I had the impression, again, that these two directors just didn't like men. Now, I thought, going to see "Beautiful Kate", surely it won't be one of those sorts of films because Rachel Ward, surely, liked men, likes men, and would not want to depict them so one-dimensionally as the other two. And I was right. It wasn't about women leaving men, it was about a man coming home to his family where his father is dying and "finding himself"'I suppose. The concentration was on the two men rather than on the women or the girl, the beautiful Kate.
One of my problems is that I'm now hard of hearing and the Australian accents in this film were not good for me (nor for my hearing aids). So I lost a lot of the depth of charactisation and often the storyline at times. I find, now, that foreign films are better for me because they have subtitles.
But why is it that when I see old films of the 40's, 50's and 60's I can inderstand every word yet films made today I find difficult to hear? I watched "Advise and Consent" the other day and heard every word, yet with American series, like CSI, I just don't know what they are saying, especially the women in them.
I had formed the impression from at least two other films directed by women that they tended to go for stories which made men seem inferior, brutish, unfeeling..... In short I gained the impression that these women directors didn't like men much - or at all possibly. There were "American Psycho" directed by Mary Harron and "Leaving" by Catherine Corsini. The first was an exceedingly nasty portrayal of a well-off New York showoff who may have been a murderer. I enjoyed the film a lot, especially those parts when the guys got together to compare banking cards they had - American Express etc. Who had the best collection? They were silly, nasty, murderous, hated women though took them to bed of course. "Leaving" was not so direct an assault on masculine behaviour; it was a subtle depiction of the mid-life crisis of a woman who takes up with a younger man and leaves her family. The director said she was tired of seeing men leaving women for younger women and thought she'd make a film in which a woman leaves.
So while both films were enjoyable and often exciting I had the impression, again, that these two directors just didn't like men. Now, I thought, going to see "Beautiful Kate", surely it won't be one of those sorts of films because Rachel Ward, surely, liked men, likes men, and would not want to depict them so one-dimensionally as the other two. And I was right. It wasn't about women leaving men, it was about a man coming home to his family where his father is dying and "finding himself"'I suppose. The concentration was on the two men rather than on the women or the girl, the beautiful Kate.
One of my problems is that I'm now hard of hearing and the Australian accents in this film were not good for me (nor for my hearing aids). So I lost a lot of the depth of charactisation and often the storyline at times. I find, now, that foreign films are better for me because they have subtitles.
But why is it that when I see old films of the 40's, 50's and 60's I can inderstand every word yet films made today I find difficult to hear? I watched "Advise and Consent" the other day and heard every word, yet with American series, like CSI, I just don't know what they are saying, especially the women in them.
Monday 23 August 2010
Chapter
Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff has had a face lift; more than that, it is absolutely different from the place it once was - same from the outside (an old school building) but transformed inside to a swish, plush, glossy set of rooms one of which is a large restaurant/cafe, another an art gallery, another a theatre and two others which are cinemas. I never much liked Chapter in the past and I'm surprised that it is now so modern and welcoming; it used to be a place where artists and wierdos collected, where the rooms were uncomfortable - purposely so I felt - and where works of art and theatre vied with common sense for attention. In short, it was a poseur's paradise.
The art gallery is still full of a lot of junk (Tracey Emin would be at home there) and the theatrical events are, by their advertisements, avante garde to an excessive degree, too excessive to me. So I go there for the films.
In the cinemas in the city are films which are popular with kids and young people, especially during the holidays: Shrek, Toy Story 3, Avatar and so on; here in Chapter are films you may have read about in reviews when they reached London but don't reach the main distributors. Recently I have seen: "The Last Station" with a fine performance as Tolstoy from Christopher Plummer and another from Helen Mirren as his wife; "I am Love" with another fine performance from Tilda Swinton; "Greenberg" - dreadful; "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", a superb thriller from Sweden; and "Leaving" with a performance from Kristin Scott Thomas the like of which I have not seen many times - if any - before: it is subtle and scarilly OTT at the same time.
Seats are comfy, film quality good, dining before the film good though a bit trendy in its mainly Vegan food. Seats in the restaurant are comfy too, not like the old days when they were hard metal affairs whose flat place for one's bottom was a triangle - not with the point of the triangle at the front but at the back. I never tried one; they looked like the sort of thing the Stasi might have used for interrogation purposes.
I must try their Welsh burger and chips next time - vegetable burger!
The art gallery is still full of a lot of junk (Tracey Emin would be at home there) and the theatrical events are, by their advertisements, avante garde to an excessive degree, too excessive to me. So I go there for the films.
In the cinemas in the city are films which are popular with kids and young people, especially during the holidays: Shrek, Toy Story 3, Avatar and so on; here in Chapter are films you may have read about in reviews when they reached London but don't reach the main distributors. Recently I have seen: "The Last Station" with a fine performance as Tolstoy from Christopher Plummer and another from Helen Mirren as his wife; "I am Love" with another fine performance from Tilda Swinton; "Greenberg" - dreadful; "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo", a superb thriller from Sweden; and "Leaving" with a performance from Kristin Scott Thomas the like of which I have not seen many times - if any - before: it is subtle and scarilly OTT at the same time.
Seats are comfy, film quality good, dining before the film good though a bit trendy in its mainly Vegan food. Seats in the restaurant are comfy too, not like the old days when they were hard metal affairs whose flat place for one's bottom was a triangle - not with the point of the triangle at the front but at the back. I never tried one; they looked like the sort of thing the Stasi might have used for interrogation purposes.
I must try their Welsh burger and chips next time - vegetable burger!
Friday 20 August 2010
Joad
I just got hold of a book writen by C.E.M.Joad: "Guide to Philosphy" written in the fifties. It's a "philosophy made simple" type of work, for the intelligent layman not for other philosophers. Which is probably one of the reasons Joad was, in some academic circles, not much respected. Another reason for the disrespect, no doubt, had to do with his popularity; for he was at that time just after WW2 a member of BBC radio's "Brains Trust", one of four "brains" who sat around discussing topics of the day, philosophical matters .... anything really that had an intellectual content. Joad became famous for his opening remarks on a topic with the words "it depends on what you mean by...." It became a sort of catch-phrase and was known so universally that even comics in variety programmes and music halls would use it. Everybody knew it and everybody knew and loved Professor Joad.
When I was in an extra mural class doing philosophy some years back one of the class said to me: "Do you know what philosophy is? It's a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there."
On the first page of "Guide to Philosophy" Joad quotes the very same "definition" but he calls it a jibe.
I always liked Joad, to listen to and to read (he had a column in a newspaper if memory serves me right); I enjoyed his "Desert Island Discs" programme when he chose only classical music up to Beethoven and said that young people should be forced to listen to such music until they liked it. Good fighting stuff. Good old non-politically correct stuff. Daft but amusing and with a thought that "well, there may be something in what he says".
Poor Joad was caught travelling on a train without a ticket and was prosecuted. He never seemed to recover from the shock. The BBC sacked him, he sank into despair and illness and soon after he died.
When I was in an extra mural class doing philosophy some years back one of the class said to me: "Do you know what philosophy is? It's a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there."
On the first page of "Guide to Philosophy" Joad quotes the very same "definition" but he calls it a jibe.
I always liked Joad, to listen to and to read (he had a column in a newspaper if memory serves me right); I enjoyed his "Desert Island Discs" programme when he chose only classical music up to Beethoven and said that young people should be forced to listen to such music until they liked it. Good fighting stuff. Good old non-politically correct stuff. Daft but amusing and with a thought that "well, there may be something in what he says".
Poor Joad was caught travelling on a train without a ticket and was prosecuted. He never seemed to recover from the shock. The BBC sacked him, he sank into despair and illness and soon after he died.
Wednesday 18 August 2010
Bullfighting 2
Thanks "100falcons" for your comment on my Bullfighting blog. Very interesting since you have come at the topic from a different perspective.
John Julius Norwich wrote a letter to The Times argueing the case for bullfighting: he said that if he were to have the choice of being a fighting bull and one brought up to be slaughtered he'd prefer to be the former. Because they have a wonderful life, they are treated well, live the sort of life that their nature desires and in that 5 year or so life have only ten minutes of maltreatment and that at the very end after they have done what they do best - fight; the others are sometimes intensely farmed and die dreadful deaths after being transported in trucks..... and so on.
Good case.
John Julius Norwich wrote a letter to The Times argueing the case for bullfighting: he said that if he were to have the choice of being a fighting bull and one brought up to be slaughtered he'd prefer to be the former. Because they have a wonderful life, they are treated well, live the sort of life that their nature desires and in that 5 year or so life have only ten minutes of maltreatment and that at the very end after they have done what they do best - fight; the others are sometimes intensely farmed and die dreadful deaths after being transported in trucks..... and so on.
Good case.
Saturday 14 August 2010
Gunga Din
"You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it."
That's him, that's Kipling alright: colourful and rough, earthy and tough..... God! you start rhyming like him after you've read his poem "Gunga Din". And you can see why people have so taken against him for his "British Empire love" when you read stuff about the water carrier, Gunga Din: "You limpin' lump o' brick-dust Gunga Din"; "It was Din! Din! Din! / You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been? / You put some juldee in it / Or I'll marrow you this minute / If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din": "An' for all 'is dirty 'ide / 'E was white, clear white inside".
Etc.
But under this storm of abuse and bad-naming there's a warmth of feeling for the abused, slave-like Indian who carried water for the company of men. At the end I can't stop tears forming at my eyes: "Yes, Din! Din! Din! / You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! / Though I've belted you and flayed you, / By the livin' Gawd that made you, / You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din".
They made a film called "Gunga Din" back in the thirties but it wasn't so much a film based on the famous poem but one based mostly on the story by Kipling of Three Sergeants - played by Cary Grant, Victor McClaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It was an all-action film, the sort you might call "good fun". They were showing it in New York recently and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker talked about the director, George Stenens's "crisp direction". Maybe he was crisp then but he became rather mannered later I thought.
The actor who is most memorable to me was Sam Jaffe who played Gunga Din. In the poem Din saves the narrator from death but is shot himself; in the film he climbs slowly, since he's wounded, to the top of a golden temple so that he can blow a trumpet and save the troupe who are about to be ambushed. Sam Jaffe could play any part except romantic roles. He was a sort of hand-me-down actor who could be called on to play a mathematics professor or a well-dressed gentleman crook who ogled lovely young girls ("The Asphalt Jungle") or a man of about 200 years old in Shangri La or an Indian in a "uniform 'e wore / Was nothin' much before, / An' rather less than 'arf o' the be'ind, / For a piece o' twisty rag / An' a goatskin water-bag / Was all the field equipment 'e could find."
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it."
That's him, that's Kipling alright: colourful and rough, earthy and tough..... God! you start rhyming like him after you've read his poem "Gunga Din". And you can see why people have so taken against him for his "British Empire love" when you read stuff about the water carrier, Gunga Din: "You limpin' lump o' brick-dust Gunga Din"; "It was Din! Din! Din! / You 'eathen, where the mischief 'ave you been? / You put some juldee in it / Or I'll marrow you this minute / If you don't fill up my helmet, Gunga Din": "An' for all 'is dirty 'ide / 'E was white, clear white inside".
Etc.
But under this storm of abuse and bad-naming there's a warmth of feeling for the abused, slave-like Indian who carried water for the company of men. At the end I can't stop tears forming at my eyes: "Yes, Din! Din! Din! / You Lazarushian-leather Gunga Din! / Though I've belted you and flayed you, / By the livin' Gawd that made you, / You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din".
They made a film called "Gunga Din" back in the thirties but it wasn't so much a film based on the famous poem but one based mostly on the story by Kipling of Three Sergeants - played by Cary Grant, Victor McClaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. It was an all-action film, the sort you might call "good fun". They were showing it in New York recently and Anthony Lane of The New Yorker talked about the director, George Stenens's "crisp direction". Maybe he was crisp then but he became rather mannered later I thought.
The actor who is most memorable to me was Sam Jaffe who played Gunga Din. In the poem Din saves the narrator from death but is shot himself; in the film he climbs slowly, since he's wounded, to the top of a golden temple so that he can blow a trumpet and save the troupe who are about to be ambushed. Sam Jaffe could play any part except romantic roles. He was a sort of hand-me-down actor who could be called on to play a mathematics professor or a well-dressed gentleman crook who ogled lovely young girls ("The Asphalt Jungle") or a man of about 200 years old in Shangri La or an Indian in a "uniform 'e wore / Was nothin' much before, / An' rather less than 'arf o' the be'ind, / For a piece o' twisty rag / An' a goatskin water-bag / Was all the field equipment 'e could find."
Tuesday 3 August 2010
Holidays
Mellissa Kite writes in The Spectator this week of her hair-raising Easy Jet flight to Nice: having to queue for hours, the crushes as holiday-makers forced their way ahead to the plane.... etc. you don't have to tell me, I know all about it and it's horrible.
Last week in The Spectator a former editor of a newspaper described how he was arrested at the place where they run the detector over you for wondering vocally if they were looking for a bomb in his shoes. I won't describe everything that happened to him and his wife but again the whole experience was horrible. Apparently if you say the word "bomb" within an airport these days they'll come down on you like a ton of bricks. Not "I have a bomb in my suitcase" but merely "Are you looking for a bomb old boy? Ha, ha, ha."
I suppose it's understandable when you realise how edgy the airport staff have become as a result of our home-made jihadists' attempts to blow as many innocent people as they can to "kingdom come" - not paradise because that's already full of 'em and, anyway, you infidels are not allowed in.
My flying holidays are over. If I do go abroad in the future it will be by Eurostar, the only civilised way to travel. First class of course where you get comfy seats, newspapers to read and a glass of champagne as apperatif to the five course meal - with free wine or beer! You don't notice the journey, smooth and quiet; by the time you've put away the champagne and wine you're out the other side of the tunnel without being aware of having been in it.
Best way to go to Paris that I know - driving is too fraught with dangers and too tiring, coach trips are worse than self-driving I find.
I was sent a small brochure advertising three coach trips one of which was to the Costa Brava: they offered £40 off the £399 cost; also free drink from 11am to 11pm. For all of ten seconds I was tempted. I like the Costa Brava, I like to drink and the £40 off was an atractive offer..... Ten seconds, that's all. Ride right across England to Dover, get sea-sick crossing the pond (yes, I usually am), then the long drive across France to Spain, then the long drive to the Costa Brava.... I'd need more than a couple of their free drinks if I were to do that.
Anyway, I don't have a passport these days so that settles it. Ill get one when I can afford another 1st class Eurostar trip to the continent.
Last week in The Spectator a former editor of a newspaper described how he was arrested at the place where they run the detector over you for wondering vocally if they were looking for a bomb in his shoes. I won't describe everything that happened to him and his wife but again the whole experience was horrible. Apparently if you say the word "bomb" within an airport these days they'll come down on you like a ton of bricks. Not "I have a bomb in my suitcase" but merely "Are you looking for a bomb old boy? Ha, ha, ha."
I suppose it's understandable when you realise how edgy the airport staff have become as a result of our home-made jihadists' attempts to blow as many innocent people as they can to "kingdom come" - not paradise because that's already full of 'em and, anyway, you infidels are not allowed in.
My flying holidays are over. If I do go abroad in the future it will be by Eurostar, the only civilised way to travel. First class of course where you get comfy seats, newspapers to read and a glass of champagne as apperatif to the five course meal - with free wine or beer! You don't notice the journey, smooth and quiet; by the time you've put away the champagne and wine you're out the other side of the tunnel without being aware of having been in it.
Best way to go to Paris that I know - driving is too fraught with dangers and too tiring, coach trips are worse than self-driving I find.
I was sent a small brochure advertising three coach trips one of which was to the Costa Brava: they offered £40 off the £399 cost; also free drink from 11am to 11pm. For all of ten seconds I was tempted. I like the Costa Brava, I like to drink and the £40 off was an atractive offer..... Ten seconds, that's all. Ride right across England to Dover, get sea-sick crossing the pond (yes, I usually am), then the long drive across France to Spain, then the long drive to the Costa Brava.... I'd need more than a couple of their free drinks if I were to do that.
Anyway, I don't have a passport these days so that settles it. Ill get one when I can afford another 1st class Eurostar trip to the continent.
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