A Lesser Tati

It is worth  checking out the schedules on Talking Pictures TV. They show old films and old television but there are some considerable goodies hidden among the predictable dross. It was on this channel that I found the utterly brilliant Monsieur Hulot's Holiday. Not quite up to that sublime standard but enjoyable nonetheless is Jaccques Tati's earlier movie, Jour de Fete. You have to put up with annoying subtitles offered in a ridiculous demotic American but at its heart this warm comedy does what comedies ought to do - it makes you laugh. 69/100.  

The Love Of A Good Aphorism

I do like a good aphorism. Recently I seem to recall sharing with you the observation (not mine I should modestly admit) that music is the greatest expression of man's spirituality. Well here is its companion piece, one I picked up from a documentary on Sky Arts: good architecture is like frozen music. For those of you who have the misfortune ever to encounter me in person, be prepared to hear me passing that off as one of my own.  To round off this piece here is a picture of my idea of great frozen music. Unoriginal I know but, hey, there's a reason why these things become cliches.

Making Yourself Read

Marchant's Second Law - 'writers read'. Thus while I have been recovering from my recent back injury (still sore but I'm being a very brave soldier) I have supplemented my diet of telvision documentaries with quite a glut of reading. I surf the web thingy a fair bit - the BBC website is my starting point for news but I am also drawn to American sources because of my morbid taste for American politics. Trump/Biden has all of the dreadful allure of a grisly car crash. All you can do is look on and ask yourself yet again how it comes to this. What has happened to that welcoming and optimistic country that took me into its arms back in 1981? 

Real reading does not though (in the humble opinion of your correspondent) involve a screen - it is a matter of printed paper. And I am currently enjoying three very good books. One has to forgive Jonathan Coe the fact of his schooling at KES. He has a conversational dleivery and is funny about serious things, always the best way to aproach the difficult. I am a good way through The Closed Circle and I look forward to the time of day when I read it. I will review it thoroughly when I have finished.

I have become more like my late father and I have at least three books on the go at any one time. I try to ensure that at least one of these is non-fiction. At the moment that means Tommy, Richard Holmes' heavy tome on the lot of the soldiers of the Great War. It is authoritative and moving. Come to think of it, I think it was Mum and Dad who gave me the book for Christmas back in the good old days when he was alive and his mind still accessible to us.

The third book in my rotation is Evelyn Waugh's Unconditional Surrender, the final part of the Sword of Honour trilogy. On the last day that I saw Dad alive I read aloud to him from these novels. Decades earlier he had gently pointed me in the direction of Waugh, as he did with much literature without ever being prescriptive. Such statements are inherently ludicrous but I nonetheless offer up Waugh as the greatest English writer of the twentieth century. As for Dad, well, it's far easier - he was the greatest influence on my life.      

The Aping Of American Sports Coverage

I like my golf. Well, not my personal golf you realise - that will no doubt (once I have recovered from my bad back - getting there thank you) transpire still to be wayward. No, I like golf and golf courses. I like it done well and sympathise with it done badly. But there's a problem and it is one I have alluded to before. As Sky Sports throw more and more time (and one presumes more of that nice Mr. Murdoch's money) at their coverage, so it becomes less bearable. Overall the standard is dire - a sort of sentimentalised hard-core mediocrity.

Sky's coverage of the European Tour (must we really take the petro-dollars and call it the DP World Tour?) can largely be exempted from my denigration because the broadcaster generally puts the B Team on the commentary job - Richard Boxall et al. Even Rob Lee has become bearable. Problem is of course that the product (the golf itself) has beend devalued by the wrong-headed machinations of the PGA Tour and its European partner, such that the best players are siphoned-off to ply their trade in the States before an ever-diminishing televisual audience. The game has plummeted from meritocracy to a kleptocracy, running scared of that prize gobshite Greg Norman. Much gets more was how my Yorkshire grandmother used to put it. Quite. Unattractive. 

So what's so wrong with Sky's A Team? Ewen Murray is a great broadcaster but he has ceased to be the dominant voice. Instead we get too much of the pathetic Nick Dougherty and the over-promoted Wayne Riley. I can stomach Riley when he is out on the course but that is where he belongs. Dougherty has talent but bloody hell can a man get his tongue any further up Sir Nick Faldo's arse? Even Faldo (not the most unassuming of men) can seem embarrassed. Dame Laure Davies is excellent but gets drowned-out by the tidal wave of Dougherty's schmaltz and the inanity of Paul McGinley - that Blarney Stone has a lot to answer for. And as for Butch Harmon - well, really?

So what I am saying (ironically in a verbose McGinleyesque manner) is that there is too much blather and not enough objectivity. And it is not the OG pocket that drives this rant - I actually won money on the Masters this year but couldn't be arsed to watch the climax, waiting instead to check out the result when I awoke this morning.   

Species Of Noir, The Curse Of Google, And The Dangers Of Taking Stairs Quickly

Last Tuesday morning I was feeling quite optimistic about my golf game. I was due for an early start with the Seniors Section at Royal Pype Hayes and I had it in mind that I had learned the lessons of my humbling at Ynys Mon the previous week. Yes, this was going to be a good round, two in fact because my ambitious plan was to play two games in a day. The Monday night rugby/cricket boys had switched to Tuesday on account of bank holiday. What I had left out of my tactical armoury was a plan for getting downstairs. Long story short, I came a right pearler and fucked my back up (medical terminology) good and proper. A week on and I am still feeling the pain of the splenetic trauma (idiomatic slang) and golf is definitely off the menu. So is any form of exerecise. Silly old bastard.

Whilst I have been laid-up I have been watching a lot of television and old films. Until now it has not even been comfortable to hold a book - I am strangely particular about the right conditions for reading. There has been a lot of the noirish but first the widescreen spectacular. The Robe was the first film exhibited in Cinemascope. I would like to see it in the cinema but a decent print on a largish modern television still gives some idea of the spectacle. Richard Burton allegedly hated his own performance in it (for which he received the first of his multiple failed Oscar nominations) but I thought he was rather good. 70/100.  

Not all of the classic noir tropes are deployed (no narration, no flashbacks for instance) but The Big Sleep is beyond doubt film noir. Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe spits out the crackling dialogue with huge presence and the atmosphere itself crackles when Lauren Bacall joins him on screen. It is not original to call this a great film but it is correct. And I do still love to wheel out the fact that Marlowe's creator was, like that other great writer P.G. Wodehouse, an Old Alleynian. On occasion you have to doff your cap to the English public school system. 90/100.

Many years ago (I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now) I compiled a list of my fifty favourite movies. That list would change a good bit if I undertook it again but I do recall that Orson Welles' Macbeth was on it then and, having revisited it, it would be today. In this I diverge from my learned doctoral supervisor. Yes, it is full of faults, not all of them down to the straitened financial circumstances in which it was produced, but it does manage to convey the visceral darkness that is at the heart of this, Shakespeare's tautest tragedy. Renaissance noir. 83/100. Mind you, if you really want to see Macbeth at its best on screen, take in Kurosawa's Throne of Blood.  

Next some Gotham Noir. I must declare an interest - I think Christian Bale is superb in pretty much anything he does. Thus I came to The Dark Knight Rises pre-disposed to enjoying it. It is perhaps the weakest of Christpher Nolan's Batman trilogy but we are talking about three very good movies here. 71/100. As I allocate that grade, I wonder if I am guilty of watching only good films these days. Old time is on our tracks boys and there may not be time to accommodate the mediocre. On which topic, I heard a voice I respect proposing 2001: A Space Odyssey as a great film. Should I give it yet another chance? The defect is probably mine.

I will finish with a film of the New Noir West, No Country for Old Men. But before I turn to that, a note of sadness. The film is adapted from the novel by Cormac McCarthy. I was introduced to McCarthy's fiction by the poet/academic Anthony Mellors. I googled Anthony to see where he might now be hanging his academic hat and/or practising his poetic art. It transpires that he died last year. We were very diffferent people but I regarded him as a good bloke - a designation he might have found amusing. 

Anyway, No Country for Old Men, a bleak tragedy of America's New West. It is testament to the brilliance of McCarthy and also that of the Coen Brothers who produced the film. Roger Ebert regarded their Fargo as a genuinely great movie and his conclusion that No Country is every bit as good is correct. 91/100.

More Joy

iPlayer and Radio 4 Extra are the two reasons I don't bitch about paying the licence fee. Yesterday I was pointing you in the direction of the Christopher Nupen documentary and today it is my happy duty to direct you towards anything bearing the imprimatur 'A film by Ken Burns'. You most often find these prize pieces of intellectual Americana on PBS America (my most watched channel on the old telebox) but you can watch his Country Music on iPlayer. Brilliant, thorough and captivating.

I've Got The Only Cure For Life, And The Cure For Life Is Joy

Not the first time I've purloined a masterful Clive James lyric (written for the music of Pete Atkin) and it won't be the last. Anyway, it came to mind as I mused my way out of the downer threatened by yesterday's speculations on asymmetric war. The cure for life is joy.

I have just watched (it's on iPlayer - seek it out) Listening Through the Lens : the Films of Christopher Nupen. It is no false modesty to say that I have a tin ear and zero musical talent but, rather as with wine, I have come to know what I like. The documentary about Nupen, himself a documentarist, reminded me that music is quite possibly the highest marker of human spirituality. As long as mankind is possessed of musicality there can be some hope.

Also there is running. My new shoes are working well and this morning I ran up the hill and back down into Benllech with the view out to Red Wharf Bay opening up before me. The cure for life is joy.