Archive for the 'Arts & Books' Category

Following on from the film last week of diva Anna Russell summing up Wagner’s Ring Cycle in 30 minutes, I thought that we could continue our education in posh music with another film that digests All The Great Operas in 10 Minutes:

By the way, this film retells the story of the Ring Cycle in under a minute and even the second time around after last week’s masterclass, I still can’t follow the plot - can you?

I’m traumatised. I feel as if I’ve just discovered that a sweet little old auntie who used to tell me bedtime stories when I was a child had been a crazed children-devouring witch all along, hiding her fiendish cackle behind tales of jolly adventures and lashings of ginger beer.

I adored Enid Blyton as a child, like several million other kids around the world for many generations. It was because of her books that I longed to come to England and have spiffing adventures. It was her books that made me want to become a writer. I loved the spy-like antics of The Secret Seven and the jolly decent gang that was The Famous Five (though, not being an animal lover, I could never figure out why Timmy the dog counted as one of the five…). I think the Five is the series that most people remember fondly, identifying as one or other of the kids. For me it was a toss up between being Julian - oldest and in charge (read bossy) - and George, the tomboy. Dick was a bit nothingy. And never, ever, in a million years, ever girly, frilly, femmy Anne! There was also that series of books that had titles like The Something of Adventure - what’s interesting about my memory of this series is that I don’t really remember the children in it but it was the relationship between the mother and the adult male figure that caught my attention. Hmm, I wonder what that’s all about!

OK, I know, I know. Enid Blyton did not at any time devour children. But the other week, as I was watching the BBC 4 biopic of her life, Enid, I was horrified and traumatised by how casually cruel she was to her own two children - and maliciously vindictive to her first husband Hugh - while appearing in her books and in public as a charming author who was in touch with all little children all over the world.

Helena Bonham Carter plays the author with just the right mixture of childlike fragility and hard hearted coldness. Her cut glass accent sends chills down your spine as she lashes out at her poor Hugh and dismisses her children. At the same time, there is a tragic, lonely aspect to her portrayal, drawn out in close up shots of her haunted eyes.

The theme of the biopic was Enid’s almost pathological need to escape real life - and that it is this escapism that connects with her kiddy readership while at the same time destroying her ability to connect with the real people in her life. And I guess that’s why we all used to read her as kids and now as adults read other kinds of fiction - as escapes into adventure, love, comedy and so on. I know that feeling of escaping into an inner world to create fiction, too - when I was writing my two novels, I would have a sense of drifting between reality and my made-up world in my head. Sometimes, I’d be physically present and doing things and even chatting to my partner or friends but I’d be somewhere else completely. My partner, as you’d expect, didn’t like that at all.

Nor ultimately, did I. It’s disorienting and strange and it struck me that perhaps, this is how one might go mad - if the inner world became too strong or too attractive and you just gave in to it, disappeared inward altogether. All that would be left on the outside would be a body - functioning perfunctorily for awhile and then just sitting or lying and staring into nothing, while inside the dramas, the tears, the joy, the laughter, the thrills and spills would be filling your mind and soul.

So at some level, I think I gave up on writing fiction after my second book. Sure, on the face of it, I tried to keep the writing going, working on several synopses and draft third novels over a few years. But my heart - and my mind - wasn’t in it. I wanted to be here in the real world, living my real life and not a life of fiction in my head.

At the end of Enid Blyton’s life, she slipped into dementia. In the biopic, this was expressed as part of the spectrum of her need to escape and we are left with a poignant image of her sitting on a small kiddy’s chair after a book reading, happily leafing through one of her own books, laughing softly to herself.

Photo: of Helena Bonham Carter as Enid Blyton, thanks to The Life of Wylie

We were having dinner with some friends the other evening and talking about opera when someone mentioned Wagner. The reaction was visceral. None of us liked Wagner, it turns out!

The consensus was that the Ring Cycle is way too long, way too Germanic and well, The Lord of the Rings for Intellectuals. However, one of our party felt that it’s one of those 101 things that you need to do before you die - go to see it at the holy shrine of Wagner, Bayreuth, and to sit through the whole cycle, however long it might take (15 hours, according to Wikipedia; 20 hours according to Anna Russell - see below - taking up 4 or more evenings).

But until then, we can watch it on Youtube, reduced to 30 minutes by fabulous diva Anna Russell:

First 10 minutes:

Second 10 minutes:

Third 10 minutes:

With my background as a lawyer, I always enjoy legal dramas and thrillers. While I’m carried along by the story, there is a part of me that often laughs at the unrealistic portrayal of what it’s really like working in the law. The fictitious lawyers often seem to prepare for a trial in a matter of days and the dramatic hearings are over in the time it takes for counsels to do their summing up. Oh sure, there is often a montage sequence of our dedicated legal hero/heroine at the law books late at night — beautifully-lit shots of them with a furrowed brow surrounded by books and occasionally leaning back to stretch and rub their temples to convey deep thought and hard work. But have you noticed how their files tend to be only a few pages thick?

In reality, lawyers files are stuffed full of papers and go on for volumes. Cases take months, if not years, to come to trial. And the trial itself could last for months or years. While I’ve never been a litigation lawyer, a property project I worked on started while I was practising as a senior lawyer, continued during the five-year break that I took to write my two novels and concluded only a few years after I returned to the firm — in the meantime the trainee who had worked with me qualified as a solicitor, took on the running of the project, had two children and became a partner!

And of course, I never come across any dead bodies, men with guns or murderous conspiracies!

One “lawyer in peril” series that we’re currently addicted to is Damages. The plot is impossible to summarise but suffice it to say that it is full of tension, blood, guilt and cliffhangers. The main reason that we are completely mesmerised is Glenn Close. She plays the senior partner of the firm and is a cross between Cruella DeVille and her younger bunny-boiling persona in Jagged Edge. She is at her most scary when she is being apparently pleasant and kind …

But the best thing about her character is her wardrobe of amazing power suits and crisply cut shirts. They exude power and confidence and stylishness. Even in the most tense and dramatic moment, I am often distracted, shouting out, “Look what she’s wearing! I would love to have that suit!”

In reality, of course, in my days as a lawyer, I often had difficulty maintaining the smart appearance that I started the day off in. The downward spiral would begin with the jacket coming off and going on the back of the chair. Then I would turn up my sleeves. My shirt would get creased. Sometimes, I would get covered in dust if I had to look through ancient property deeds. I’ve even managed to spill coffee all over myself and my desk during a long and difficult time phone negotiation — what a klutz!

In my current job, I’m no longer practising as a solicitor and there is a fairly relaxed dress code so I am often in jeans if we don’t have a business meeting. I feel less severe and more able to be chirpy, cheerful — and more myself — in casual wear. It doesn’t impact on how well I do my work — it just means that the boundary between my work and personal life is less sharply defined.

All of which makes me wonder: if I actually got myself togged up in Glenn Close’s intimidating, power suits, would my personality change? Would I become sinister, manipulative and murderous? And would I suddenly come into the office one morning and find a dead body?

Do I dare put this theory to the test…?

Photo: from Damages official website, with thanks

These days we grumble if our digital camera doesn’t quite fit into our pocket. And that the camera bundled with our mobile phone produces blurry pictures. We take cameras so much for granted and expect so much of the technology.

So it was great to be reminded how far we’ve come since the first cameras were invented in the 1830s at the Points of View exhibition at the British Library (it’s free and on until Sunday 07 March 2010). The history of photography began with the camera obscura, a darkened room with a pinhole allowing light from a scene outside to be projected onto the wall through the hole and the exhibition starts with a box sized one through which you can see a ghostly image of a statue. You’re then led through to the two competing technologies that battled it out in the early days of photography (the VHS and Betamax struggle of its day, I suppose) - the daguerrotype and the calotype. The dageurrotype (named for Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre) could produce only one perfect, crisp and clear printed image and you had to have a camera the size of the print you wanted to create. The calotype, created by Henry Fox Talbot, could reproduce a number of printed images from a negative but the quality was more smudgy. For awhile the daguerrotype was more popular, especially for portraits commissioned by the wealthy, but we all know which technology won out and dominated for most of the next 150 or so years…

The British Library exhibition has a number of those original Victorian cameras on display along with the boxes of chemicals needed to develop and print the images. They are huge wooden contraptions and the whole process of taking a photo and printing copies took an inordinate amount of time. But the challenge was on to make them more portable and to speed up exposure times as well as the whole process - at one time, the fact that they could snap a picture with a 30 second exposure time was a huge achievement!

I was also fascinated by the photos of the far flung corners of the world taken by energetic and driven Victorian photographers, showing places like Cambodia, India and Africa before the influence of the West took hold. They had to lug all that equipment around and often had to develop and print the pictures in the field so they also had to carry tents and tables etc along with them - via camels or other beasts of burden through the wild places of the world.

There are also photos of Victorian celebrities, ordinary people, street scenes and labourers in the English countryside - wonderful evocations of the past. I was particularly struck by the picture of Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square under construction - again, we take that landmark so much for granted: it was strange to see it as it was being put up.

I’m not going to moan so much now that my little digital camera is a little bit too boxy for my jacket pocket. It fits easily into my briefcase and day bag and that’s handy enough for split second snapshots!

(You can also check out the Points of View blog which has some fun past and present views of London.)

Photo: from Points of View exhibition website, with thanks

There’s been a lot of focus on blogging for business recently on this blog, largely due to the research I’ve been doing in the last couple of years for my business book, International Communications Strategy, so it’s nice to be reminded that most of the 170 million blogs out there are by ordinary people writing about their daily lives and personal feelings. It was the We Feel Fine project that was the big reminder - it’s a project led by computer scientist, Jonathan Harris, that explores “human emotion on a global scale” by harvesting emotions expressed on blogs whenever the words “I feel…” are found.

The emotions are gathered and sorted in different ways and shown in six “movements” - madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics and mounds - which are essentially different visualisations of the data. You can see good feelings and bad feelings as well as the geographic location, age and gender of the person expressing those feelings. The project’s website suggests that this living artwork can offer specific answers to questions like: “Do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine’s Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest?”

You need to launch an applet - which can take up to 20 seconds to load - in order to experience this amazing artwork. Click on the image below and it should take you to the We Feel Fine page: to launch the applet from there, click on the last sentence of the first paragraph (”We Feel Fine is divided into six discrete movements, each illuminating a different aspect of the chosen population. These movements are represented in the We Feel Fine applet.”)

I love the way the bubble of feelings cluster round the mouse cursor when you click on the screen in Madness - if you hover it over one of the bubbles, it will show you the location of the feeling and a brief idea of what the feeling is.

Then in Murmurs, you can see each latest feeling expressed somewhere out there in the world appear on the screen and if you click on the phrase, you’ll be taken to the blog. So “i feel so detached from everything i used to stand for” takes me to a blog post You Are My Brand Of Heroin - tonight is the night to let it go by xshadowsoflovex.

So how does this artwork make me feel? I feel more connected with the millions of people out there in the world.

Online bookseller, Amazon, has got the bibliophiles all a-quiver with excitement with its announcement that the Kindle will be sold internationally from mid-October. For those of you who haven’t heard of it yet, the Kindle is a digital book reading device, rather like the clay tablets of ancient times in size and look but electronic and able to store over a thousand books plus mp3s as well as blogs and digital newspapers and magazines. So far, it’s only been available in the US so this next phase is very exciting for book lovers all over the world.

I use the term “book” loosely, of course. Those book lovers who love physical books will not be excited at all by the Kindle on the basis that it lacks all the tactile qualities they love about “real” books - paper, page turning etc. But those who love the content of books and love the idea of being able to carry a thousand books in their pocket, the Kindle is the next big thing.

I fall into the latter group for various reasons:

• I’m lazy and feeble and I like the idea of holding one compact tablet that I can read lying down as well as sitting up.

• I like the idea of being able to carry a range of books around with me but without the weight of the physical books to give me backache and arm ache.

• I like the idea of the text-to-speech facility so that I can load the full text of a book and have it read to me while I sit on the bus. The digital voice might be quite irritating, however - so it will all depend on how life-like it sounds

However, I’m not going to jump in with my credit card immediately as I have some reservations:

• I believe the Kindle ties you to buying all your ebooks from Amazon, in a Kindle-specific format. What happens when my Kindle dies - as inevitably it will, like all electronic devices? I guess I’ll have to shell out for another one - we’ll all start having to think of books like music: but with mp3s or CDS, I can buy my player from any supplier, not just the one company. With the Kindle, am I now stuck forever having to buy it from Amazon?

• I still need to be convinced by the screen quality and how quickly it refreshes when you turn the page - I had a look at the Sony Reader and what put me off is that the screen turns black for a second before it opens onto the next page: ugh.

• It’s a pretty steep price at US$279.

• I remain to be convinced about it’s usefulness outside the US. At the moment, a huge number of e-books from other ebook sites which are available to US buyers are not available to non-US customers due to geographical rights restrictions. Also, if you look at US Audible.com compared to UK Audible.co.uk, the number of audiobooks available in the UK is a lot less than those available in the US - and in particular, major latest releases in the US are glaringly missing from the UK list. I haven’t been able to find anything definitive on the Amazon.com site that gives me any clarity either way about geographical rights restrictions - can anyone help me with this question?

Speaking of geographical rights restrictions, the Kindle will not be available in some countries, including Malaysia - see the list of no-Kindle countries. So my litblogger, book loving friends there are still stuck with the tree-pulp versions of books - although Amazon did reply to blogger Sharon Bakar’s email query to them to say that maybe, perhaps, sometime in the future, the Kindle might become available there…

What about you? Are you going to get a Kindle? Or are you a hard and fast paperbook person?

Photo: thanks to jink (Derek) on Flickr.com (CCL)

I’ve been doing some research on music and social media in preparation for a lecture that I’ll be giving to students on the Music and Media Management course at the London Metropolitan University Business School, along with my co-author Silvia Cambie. There’s a lot of interesting stuff out there and I have quite a stack of case studies and notes on the issues I’d like to discuss during the lecture in October.

And the great thing about the digital world of social media is that you come across a range of wonderfully, wacky items and fascinating people that are as wonderful and fascinating as the real world can ever be. This video is one of those items:

I’ve featured another air guitar video before which starred the winner of the Air Guitar championship in the documentary film Air Guitar Nation. The runner up in that film was Bjorn Turoque, the Bruce Springstein look-alike who stars in the video above. Bjorn - the alter ego of writer and musician Dan Crane - has clearly capitalised on the window of opportunity opened by the film and notwithstanding not winning that championship has gone on to air guitar stardom in his own right.

I received this email via my co-author, Silvia Cambie over at XCulture. Karuna Jumar is researching how UK audiences watch Indian movies and would like your help in building up data for her thesis. Please do take a look at her email below and click on the link to her survey. It takes less than 5 minutes to click through the handful of questions and I’m sure your input will be very useful to Karuna.

~~~

Dear Sir/Madam,

I am presently pursuing a research thesis on ‘Transnationlisation of Indian cinema in the UK’ as a part of my Masters in Media Management at the University of Westminster. For the purpose of my research, I wish to conduct a survey with you to understand the tastes of audiences in the United Kingdom.

Please click on the link below and help me understand the audiences in the UK.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHkyYldoLXA0dXhXTC1td2hMMEZwVEE6MA.

I will be extremely grateful to you, if you could help me in this endeavour of mine.

Warm regards,

Karuna

—
Karuna Kumar

MA Media Management 08-09
Department of Media, Arts and Design
University of Westminster
London

Photo: thanks to Ami from flickr.com (CCL)

I met indie filmmaker Anne O’Connell a few years back through filmmaker David Grey. She told me that she was making a series of documentary films on “Hidden London” and the idea intrigued me immediately. She was on the lookout for interesting and unusual stories for the series and with my legal background, I wondered if I could come up with an idea around a legal theme that might fit in with the series.

Anne picks up the story:

I must confess that when Yang-May suggested making a film about Garden Court Chambers, I knew nothing about the Inns of Court, nor how a set of chambers was run. There was a lot to learn!

However, from the first reading of the company’s website, Colin Cook stood out as the ideal person to be at the centre of the film – someone who had worked at the Chambers for nearly thirty years and who had not only seen the changes taking place in the heart of the British legal system, but as a black senior clerk, he actually embodied some of those changes.

‘A Different World’ is the second film in a series of short films called ‘Hidden London’. The idea behind the series is to find London’s local institutions, places which are often unnoticed by the majority of Londoners, but which have seen all the changes of this constantly shifting city over the decades.

The key to a good documentary, like a good drama, is often to find a character at the centre of the film who comes across to the audience and who can carry the story. Colin turned out to be a charming and willing interviewee, so that aspect of the film happily fell into place.

The rest of the filming was not so easy! One of the key parts of the film is the day when two of the Chambers’ barristers were going to ‘take silk’ and become QC’s. However the two people involved from Garden Court decided at the last moment that they didn’t want to be in the film and I had turned up for the day only to have nothing to shoot!

The ceremony was taking place in Westminster Hall, which is inside the Houses of Commons, and not in Westminster City Hall as I had been told, which is on Victoria Street. In retrospect this made more sense and was far more opulent. But this did mean that I could get nowhere near the entrance – the police were unimpressed by my pleas to be let in!

All in all I had to be very inventive that day finding scenes to film which told the story I wished to tell. I also had to work very hard in the edit as the anticipated script didn’t materialise.

In the end, I think that all the effort to overcome these obstacles proved useful as the film has twice been shortlisted for Best Documentary in short film festivals and this has taken me to such exotic locations as Pentedatillo in the very south of Italy and er… Wood Green in North London!

The ‘Hidden London’ series will one day be for sale on one DVD. The films so far are:

• ‘Blustons’ – life in an old-fashioned ladies-wear shop on the Kentish Town Road
• ‘A Different World’ – change in the heart of the British legal system
• ‘Hampton Pool’ – As London’s outdoor lidos close, one pool is saved by local action.
• The 4th film about Wilton’s Music Hall in East London is in post production.

Photo credits:
Anne, my own album
Colin & barristers, still from Anne’s film