Fantasy

I have seen a couple of strange films recently: "Unmissable" and "Source Code". Both are fantasies. In "Unmissable" a down-and-out writer who can't get on with the novel he's been commissioned to do, is given a tablet by a man he once knew who is working for a chemical company on a secret formula. Which should have told the hero not to take the pill; but he was desperate so he does. Almost instantly he becomes a sort of high-powered, over-intelligent monster: we are told that the average person uses only about 20% of his brain (didn't know that before) but that the pill he has taken will make available to him 100% of his b rain. So he writes his novel which is great - so his agent believes - and it gets published. Then he finds he can wiz-kid things like helping firms to make money. But people are after him, they want the pill of course. It's all rather unbelieveable. But it's fun. "Source Code" is fantasy made so assuredly and seriously that you almost believe it could take place. A man wakes up on a train and, gradually, in eight minutes, finds he not the man he thinks he is. He is dead but certain brain parts of his have been saved and it is these that inhabit the other man. Get it? No, I didn't either. But again, it was fun though even more violent than "Unmissable". While waiting for the film to start I had to put up with reviews of films to come. They were all fantasies. A man becomes a "green man" who can perform great feats of strength and possesses extraordinary powers etc. Another couple of films were also fantasies. They were all spectacularly full of "special effects" which I find rather boring in that, well, you know they are "special effects" don't you?. I prefer a film to be grounded in reality like "Sideways" which had no special effects. Neither did "The King's Speech" which was an excellent film with three, at least, superb performances. Is this fantasy-film-making anything to do with the general public's dispensing with "old forms" of fantasy like religion? Are people now non-believers but still have a secret desire to want to believe something? As G.K.Chesterton put it: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."

Wendy Cope

Charles Moore wrote a good piece on the poet Wendy Cope this week in The Daily Telegraph. He pointed out how her use of easy-to-understand words was deceptive because her poems were greater than the sum of their parts - sort of thing. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said (or wrote): "Wendy Cope is without doubt the wittiest of contemporary English poets and says a lot of extremely serious things. I read something a few weeks ago that she is not very popular with other poets. Moore seems to think this is because (a) people like it and buy it without necessarilly being experts on poetry and that upsets "proper poets". (b) Her name makes her sound like "a suburban spinster poet and that brings out the snob in other writers" - a bit loose that! (c) "She writes lines - indeed whole poems - with no unusual words or syntax" which makes other poets think she's no good. She is good. She's subtle and clever and, though you wouldn't think it on first reading one of her poems, quite erudite. But it's love she writes best about. My favourite is, of course: "Bloody men are like bloody buses - /You wait about a year/ And as soon as one approaches your stop/ Two or three others appear." (First verse). Another is rather clever, again about men - they often are about men! "There are so many kinds of awful men -/ One can't avoid them all. She often said/ She'd never make the same mistake again:/ She always made a new mistake instead." (First verse) Here's a fairly new one called "The Widow": I like this piece. I think youd like it too./ We didn't very often disagree/ Back in the days when I sat here with you/ And knew that you were coming home with me./ This is the future. It arrived so fast,/ When we were young it seemed so far away./ Our years together vanished like a day/ At nightfall, sealed for ever in the past./ I can't give up on music, just discard/ The interest we shared because you died./ And so I come to concerts. But it's hard./ Tonight I'm doing well. I haven't cried./ My head aches. There's a tightness in my throat./ And you will never hear another note."

The Killing

Why is "The Killing", the Danish thriller on TV, better than any of our British TV products? It's a work that analyses in depth the murder itself and also the effect it has on a whole community - well, those in the community who are affected in various ways by the murder, from the girl's immediate family to a councillor who is trying to oust the mayor and take over the job himself. The police investigating the case also become humanely affected by the murder, especially the young woman detective (who wears cardigans that have, due to the series, soared in price) who becomes almost insanely obsessed with the case. Yet don't British TV crime plays do something of the same kind? "Waking the Dead" has investigations of murdered people whose cases are history. Each murder affects certain people within the community and outside it; the innvestigating team use pathology to find this and that out about the victim.... and so on. But there's something special about "The Killing". Its tone is not frivolous or superficial or slightly humorous (Poirot) but deadly serious. You feel, with British crime plays and series that the victim is there to make a good story; he or she is dead so now we'll concentrate on the whys, hows amd wherefores. The victiim is a sort of cypher on which the story hangs (if it does!). In British TV crime works, often, depth of character attempts use idiosyncrasies to make them interesting; there is little depth of character in fact. In "The Killing" the characters were portrayed with depth and understanding: you have the dead girl's immediate family suffering with an agony you could almost feel yourself; then as the investigation spread out to others - a teacher, a boy-friend, a councillor etc - and, not least, the investigating team and slowly the pressure grows on everyone concerned. There was nothing of the "let's make this as exciting as possible" but something of the long, serious , well written novel which delves deep into its characters as well as tell a good story. It was not of the English school well described by Orwell in his essay "Decline of the English Murder": respectable middle class chap who decides to bump off his wife (less disgracefull than leaving her for his secretary apparently - then!) and start out in life anew. It was, it seems, a characteristically Nordic murder mystery for, it seems, the Danish and Swedish writers of crime fiction have become far superior to our home-grown breed.

Elizabeth Taylor

A college friend of mine used to say "I'd like to just sit on the bed beside Elizabeth Taylor, just sit there, you understand? (I didn't nod), just sit there and look at her. I wouldn't do anything, just sit there looking at her." Yeah, I know the feeling and I didn't believe a word of it, knowing him. Probably he didn't believe it either; maybe it was a fantasy of his that made him feel pure since he wasn't pure. He was a ram. A Welsh ram.
But never mind him, let's think of her.
Was she a good actress? Well, she won two oscars didn't she? I never thought her a great actress, good but not great. I always found her a bit lifeless; she posed a lot. She did give a powerful performance in "Who's Afraid of Virgina Wolf?" but I found it forced and ugly - ok, she was supposed to be ugly. The trouble was that she simply wasn't ugly; she tried to be but didn't succeed. Burton was great in it; he relished his lines like only an experienced stage actor can. She blurted her lines, shouting them agressively when she should have been more subtly cruel.
I liked her best when she was young: "National Velvet" and "Lassie Come Home"; she was charming and innocent and loveable. I don't think she was ever as loveable in adult movie life except perhaps when she acted with gay friends like Montgomery Clift and Rock Hudson - then she seemed casually content.
I read a story about her and Burton in a book written by a script-writer. He went to their house on a visit to discuss a script and noticed that in their bedroom they had a trolley full of drinks by the side of their bed. So they were normal after all!
(Another tale he told was of a movie mogul who phoned him up late one night and said: "I want a one page synopsis of "War and Peace" on my desk first thing tomorow morning.")
Back to Elizabeth Taylor. She visited Cardiff with Richard Burton, went to a rugby match and, afterwards, she and Burton went to the bar of the Cardiff Athletics Club. It was packed to the door. "How are we going to get to the bar to get a drink?" she asked Burton. He said: "Just walk." She did and the crowd parted like the Red Sea did for Moses giving her a passage straight to the bar.
An actor told of a visit she made to Port Talbort to visit Burton's sister after he had died. She stayed the night in a bedroom with no toilet facilities except a pot under the bed. The following morning she came down the stairs carrying the pot, stopped halfway down and asked: "what am I supposed to do with this?" Burton's sister said: "we'll bottle it and sell it."

Midsomer

There is no place on this earth like Midsomer where inumerable murders take place - on TV, that is. I am informed that it's not only very popular in this country but the world over; maybe the same as Dickens was popular in Russia some time back because the Russians thought that was how England was then in the 1900's, not, when Dickens was writing, in the 1800's.
Well, the series producer of Midsomer Murders has been naughty and said that he doesn't want black or Asian faces on the show because it would take it away from it its Englishness. He's quite right, it would. That is not to say that its Englishness is like what Englishness is like in reality. The Englishness of Midsomer Murders is the Englishness of a fictional idea of Enghland with its rolling green fields and its Constable skies and its Elgarian tone and its Miss Marpole-like daintiness.
But while the producer was right to point this out he worded the remark in such a way that it seemed racialist: he said that his series was the last bastion of Englishness by which he inferred, if not actually meant, that the England of his programmes was a fine place until the foreiners with black or dark faces came here.
He is, of course, on dangerous grounds because you can't, these days, make any remark that might, just might, hurt the feelings of a "new Englishman".
One is now almost frightened of speaking one's mind lest the politically correct come down on you like a ton of bricks for making a racialist remark when all you've said is something like "I saw a black man peeiing in the street". "Why did you say he was black?" "Because he was." "Would you have said it about a white man doing the same thing? "No, probably not." "Why not? Are white men superior to black men?" "No, I ... er I... didn't mean.... er to say... Please forgive me. Don't take me away to prison. Please." And so on.
Dyke who left the BBC a couple of years ago said that the BBC was too white. Now that is a racialist remark. He is saying that anyone who is black is better than a white person. Isn't he? Would you put a black violinist in a symphony orchestra to have a black face there if he wasn't much good on the violin? Dyke was saying you should.
Sorry to see John Nettles leaving the show since he's the only man I know who can speak without opening his mouth. Could get a new job as a ventriloquist I suppoe.

Language

I used to know a man (in his early eightees then) who set out to obtain an Open University degree (he did get it). One day he showed me some of a lecturer's notes in History, commenting that that lecturer was immensely knowledgeable and a brilliant explicator of his subject. I read a page but could not understand any of it. To my mind it was nonsensical. I could, of course, read the words - they were quite familiar to me - and I could even read some of the sentences; but they meant nothing to me. I had the feeling that I was reading, or trying to read, something that was showing how deep the man was intellectually without his actually presenting any understandable arguments.
It took me back to a physics book that was reccommended to students starting the degree course in physics: the book was unreadable. It is almost as if the authorities wanted to appear wiser than they were and therefore had given the students stuff that they knew would be unfathomable, pretending they themselves were able to fathom it.
In last week's Spectator an art critic (usually a very good one) wrote this about the artist Alan Reynolds: "The new work consists of white reliefs and pencil drawings, which contine Reynolds's exploration of the dynamic relationships between the horizontal and the vertical." I'm pretty sure that Andrew Lambirth undrestands what this means but I certainly don't. However, I'll not go further into this and give him the benefit of the doubt since he knows a lot more about art than I do. But what does it mean?
In The Times today Daniel Finkelstein quotes a professor at the London School of Economics thus: "A political community is properly bounded when congruence and symmetry prevail between the 'governors' and the 'governed and when an imagined community of fate connects its envoys directly to a common political project." Finkelstein says "I haven't got the first clue what the professor is going on about."
Neither have I.

Avante Garde

"Schoernberg envied Berg his success while Berg envied Schoernberg his failures." So wrote a friend of Berg's. He said he had to console Berg over his success - possibly his quite popular violin concerto (which I have not yet fathomed and feel I probably never will).
A lot of composers of the early part of the 20th century seemed to have worried themselves sick over whether they were avant garde enough. "Am I modern enough?" Bartock cried.
Then there was poor Rachmaninoff, concerned that his music was not going along with the trend towards atonality with his success weighing him down: "I cannot cast out the old way of writing and I cannot acquire the new. I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today but it will not come to me."
Thank God it didn't, I say. I have just heard, for the umpteenth time his 2nd symphony and although it gushes with sentimentality and with a style of orchestration that borders on confusion with its overlapping ornamentation, it still strikes me as an emotionally powerful work.
A couple of days ago I heard a song by Korngold. At first, not knowing who the composer was, I thought it might have been Franz Lehar (yes, it was that good). I was most impressed. Yet Korngold, after early triumphs in Germany and Austria, couldn't get his works played, probably his semitic origins had something to do with it. So he shot off to the USA where he became one of the most popular composer of backgound music to films. He was immensely successful with films like Robin Hood and Captain Blood. Yet he yearned for success of a different kind; he yearned to be taken seriously by his avante garde peers. He never was. Yet his violin concerto, written for Jascha Heifetz is rather good.
Well, we can't all be Franz Lehars I suppose, happy to go along doing what you do best and to hell with the rest of the modernisers. But some were like Ligeti: "One simply cannot go back to tonality, it's not the way. We must find a way of neither going back nor continuing the avante garde. I am in a prison: one wall is the avante garde, the other wall is the past, and I want to escape."
His scrap metal thrown into a tin bucket is, I suppose, some kind of escape!