2009 — 26 April: Sunday
A cinematic evening, yet another cold night, and definitely time (00:39) for some sleep.
Before that, another picture of Christa, from 1980 in Old Windsor, taken in the room that we were turning into Peter's nursery1 a couple of months ahead of his arrival:
Tonight's films (yes, two — how very self-indulgent) were "Adam & Steve" and "Puccini for beginners". Unlike the "reviewers" on IMDB, I'd say 7/10 and 9/10 respectively. Not too shabby.
G'night.
A "coruscant" morning...
... further brightened by an Antipodean email whose signature tag says "Sent from whichever Mac I happen to be leeching bandwidth on." Neat. It's 09:06 and I have a task or two, but nothing that can't wait. A (delightful) state that reminds me of Glyn Moody's essay2 "Dire Diary":
Outsiders labour under a basic misapprehension about corporate hierarchies. Their image is of poor drudges at the bottom engaged in the mindless repetition of boring, meaningless tasks, with no scope for initiative or independent action. Top executives, so this wisdom goes, are epitomes of freebooting free will, deciding on a whim the fate of thousands as they lounge around in boardrooms of dark leather and darker mahogany, or glide silently and effortlessly in their chauffeur-driven tinted-window limousines. Nothing could be further from reality.
Meanwhile, the top item on BBC Radio 3's news has just been the worrying international spread of Mexican 'flu, followed by the losses enjoyed by Britain's "rich" according to the Sunday Times and its rich list. There's prioritisation for you.
Far better to read about New Yorker writer AJ Liebling (do you recall his total recall?) in a nicely-written piece. I liked the "nobody better could write faster, and nobody faster wrote better" line. Nice epitaph, actually (in my opinion). Source and snippet:
Any restaurant where you see priests eating in a group, or hookers eating with hookers, is likely to be good: "those are two classes of people who like to eat well and get their money's worth." The strange thing is that my grandfather gave me the same advice when I was 13, albeit suitably adjusted for my age and our small town milieu. Priests and cops, those were the tip-offs — priests in a group, spending their own money and not a parishioner's.
Breakfast awaits my attention. And the sun shines on.
Stamps to photography
It's not that long since I read Simon Garfield's well-written memoir of his personal obsession with stamp collecting. Today I find that he's been digging into the details of photographer Bob Carlos-Clarke's life (and death). Sounds pretty interesting (though I note I haven't kept Mr Clarke's work on my shelves, preferring Helmut Newton). Oops — still haven't posted off Big Bro's set of NZ stamps to him!
No Buttercup?
Lunch is (at 14:49) a pleasantly-receding memory. But how horrible to learn on skimming through the "Radio Times" that tonight's South Bank Show (which, I admit, I haven't watched for many moons) manages to do a profile of the work of William Goldman (a hero of mine) without (according to the preview writer who has, I assume, seen a recording) discussing The Princess Bride. I shall watch it in any case, of course.
Don't you hate it when you're listening to a piece of music (in this case, Schubert's Piano Trio in E flat major, D929) and while most of it seems new to you, some of it (mostly the mournful cello theme that keeps recurring) shrieks "Hi! Remember me? I was the background music to the film..." and you cannot remember which film? I do. It's driving me nuts. Wonder if IMDB has thought to add an easy music search capability...
Mrs Google suggests Kubrick's Barry Lyndon which would make sense, though we watched that together about three years ago. I've just snaffled a highly-regarded CD performance of Piano Trios #1 and #2 from Amazon — watch this space.
Later
Good heavens. It's 19:54 and the BBC 6Music "Freak Zone" has just been playing some lovely old Hawkwind that was banned by the BBC back in 1979. Amazing. The inner man has been at least partially attended to, I've exchanged what seems to have become a weekly email with young Val over in (confirmed sunny) Stockholm and also sent Carol a rather overdue one over in (I assume) sunny New York. Right! I think I'll give that new Attenborough film a shot. I have one or two others in, as it were, my back pocket in case it lets me down... (My threshold of boredom is fairly low, I have to admit.)
Later still
It's 23:32 or so. The film Closing the ring was excellent. The SBS interview with William Goldman was fairly3 interesting. But the appallingly poor user interface of the shiny new Humax Hi-Def PVR satellite box is, well, appalling. If you wish to make a manual recording (I did, not least because I observed that ITV's "News at Ten" didn't even kick off until five past ten) rather than a timed one then, when you press "pause" to cut out the obnoxious adverts, the picture freezes, the sound mutes and you thus have no way of knowing when the advert break is over! Contrast that with the Panasonic Freeview PVR where (as you'd expect) pressing pause during a manual recording merely flashes a little on-screen icon to remind you that the recording is paused until you resume. Or my previous Philips DVD recorder: ditto. Or my previous Pioneer DVD Freeview recorder: ditto. Or my previous Tivo: ditto. Or (cruel irony, this) my previous Humax Freeview PVR: ditto.
One might well ask, so why does the new Humax bother to provide a "pause" button? Just to frustrate me, I guess.