2011 — 2 July: Saturday
Although I'm currently listening to the very well-informed music chap Brian Matthew and his regular "Sounds of the 60s" show, I was (until yesterday) completely unaware that nearly a century earlier an equally well-informed music chap (GB Shaw) had cut his journalistic teeth as a music critic of a vastly different sort...
Roger kindly lent me this first fat volume (of three) — a mere 950 pages or so of coruscating opinions — when I popped round yesterday afternoon for a cuppa and an "Eton mess".1 Since my first-ever exposure to Shaw was hearing (over several nights) a BBC production on what was then 'the Third programme' of the "difficult" play Back to Methuselah in the 1960s I suppose I could be excused my ignorance. I next met the gentleman when forced to "do" Saint Joan as one of the set works for my Eng Lit O-level2 in 1967.
And, while fruitlessly scouring the BBC's vast webness for any hint that this recording might have survived, let alone be scheduled for re-transmission any time before my death, I had the great fortune to stumble on a delightful piece on (you could say) domestic entropy:
As I prepare this script, tapping away at the keyboard as Socrates might have done if he had owned a PC, it seems to me that my brain is at my fingertips, with all its scope and knowledge. But then, after looking up at the screen and noticing that the last two sentences are all in capitals and include various chemical formulae for substances unknown to science, I bounce my forehead off the desk and make the supreme mistake of looking around my room. It is in chaos...
Time for my next cuppa and some breakfast. Accompanied by this oddly engaging 2m 24s of "music" — a slowed-down dial-up sound. (Thanks, Len.)
It seems reasonably sunny out there at the moment.
Although not as...
... shall we say, "enthusiastic", as my chum Brian with the Holmesian canon, I'm happy to try variations on it from time to time. For example, Guy Ritchie's film with Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law was an enjoyable romp that I've watched twice. A few minutes ago Mr (yet another new) Postie dropped off Steven Moffat's 2010 variant, including an unaired pilot (apparently). I saw the three episodes when they were shown on the hi-def channel last year, though I thought #1 was the strongest:
Of course, it doesn't hurt that I was already a huge fan of Moffat's "Coupling" comedy. By the way, I think my current favourite non-Holmes Holmes is Bill Pullman in Jake Kasdan's 1998 film "Zero Effect", which Christa and I first watched in the Harbour Lights cinema. But nobody ever seems to have seen (or heard of) this.
I've just finished listening to the delicious Kermode rant about the latest piece of crappy trash to defile our cinema screens. It was, of course, Mencken who said nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the public. Before that, we heard Tom Hanks telling us that he was the one who insisted "in the tradition of Disney greats like 'Old Yeller'" that Hooch must die. Priceless.
A pleasant afternoon...
... spent (some might say wasted) catching up with a bunch of YouTube clips from earlier Kermodian rants and reviews, leading directly to orders for a DVD of a 2008 film "Helen" and a Blu-ray of "Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives". Fingers again crossed. (The Blu-ray dropped in price by about 50p between the time I put it into my Amazonian wicker basket and the time I 'proceeded to checkout'.)
Better do something about an evening meal, I guess. Somehow it's now 19:02 though I don't have a clue how that happened. I also finished (yesterday) my marathon "House" viewing and catching-up session, so I can now turn my attention to some other material for a change of pace and scene. What shall I choose, I wonder?
Not this. Though it made me smile.