2015 — 17 December: Thursday
Brandenburg #4 and a cuppa kick off the morning1 and I have a lunch date at "the pie" place. Beats working for a living.
Breakfast first. Well, after an essay on ugliness...
I thought, too, of how many artists had been spoiled for me by the knowledge of their personal behavior or beliefs. I learned of Wagner's anti-Semitism before ever hearing his music, and when I finally did all I could hear in his swoops and little flits into dissonance was something faintly but unmistakably sinister. A similar thing happened to my enjoyment of Woody Allen, whose art seems, in retrospect, to have been preparing me for a clear-eyed, if belated, appraisal of the artist as a man. How else, today, to explain "Manhattan," a film that presents, and almost gleefully fails to condemn, a love affair characterized by unsettling imbalances in age and power?
Amor omnia vincit? I still remember "Manhattan" clearly (I enjoyed it very much) but chiefly for the backache I was suffering in a chilly Slough cinema in early 1980 a month before Peter was born. And about 24 hours before a classic case of shingles erupted around my torso — the primitive NHS 'treatment' at the time being to paint the blisters with potassium permanganate. Not my finest hour!
One can...
... carry a 'marginal' interest (in marginalia, this time) a little too far, I suspect. (Evidence.)
Better inside the tent...
... or outside?
A minister who cannot [accept collective responsibility] must resign although in Whitehall few things are quite that straightforward. The guide continues that this is in fact "a matter of political judgement for the prime minister of the extent to which the credibility of the government has been impaired and the relative advantages of having the individual within the government or on the back benches".
A 200-page Precedent book of guvmint?! Recall Cornford's Microcosmographia Academica. I bought my copy in August 1995 (in Oxford, ironically) when we took Carol there for a day of sight-seeing. Alas, I was already too old to benefit fully (if at all) from its embedded wisdom. Sample:
The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do
right in some future case, which, ex hypothesi, is essentially different, but superficially resembles the present one. Every public action which is not customary, either is wrong, or,
if it is right, is a dangerous precedent.
It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.
My emphasis, after consulting with Sir Humphrey.
I liked...
... this comment on an El Reg piece...
Style Trump(s) substance? :-)
Having failed...
... to find a parking spot in Waitrose, and become quickly very tired of waiting behind people waiting behind people waiting etc. etc. I returned home empty-bagged. But at least I proved that the Mazda's LDWS glitch was temporary. Having re-enabled it, the warning light stayed off and, I assume, I am once again free to stray across lanes and be reminded by a "rumble". Right: time for lunch. TTFN
I've given up...
... on the BBC's Aulis Sallinen opera this afternoon, and am now playing instead the only other piece2 I have of his: the String Quartet #3, performed by the Kronos quartet. Which has now taken me to a lovely piece Kronos performed with Asha Bhosle on one of the BBC Awards for World Music (2006) CDs.
Seven years ago...
... I noted Wikipedia's depressing list of "Lost BBC Episodes". Wikipedia's list has grown since my last visit. Last year, I finally tracked down a bit more detail about a wiped BBC SF radio serial from October 1961 ("Shadow on the Sun") that only I seem to recall, though Jon Ronson's 2004 article and later film of "Kubrick's boxes" revealed that Kubrick had considered this play:
I believe I have stumbled on a lost Kubrick radio play. Perhaps he did this in his spare time. But, if so, why?
"No, no," says Tony. "I know what this is."
Kubrick was always a keen listener to BBC Radio, Tony explains. When he first arrived in the UK, back in the early 1960s, he happened to hear this drama serial, Shadow On The Sun. Three decades later, in the early 1990s, after he had finished Full Metal Jacket, he was
looking for a new project, so he asked Tony to track down the scripts. He spent a few years, on and off, thinking about Shadow On The Sun, reading and annotating the scripts, before he abandoned the idea and eventually — after working on and rejecting AI (which was
filmed by Steven Spielberg after Kubrick's death) — made Eyes Wide Shut instead.
Now that's a film I'd pay to have seen. (I thought "Eyes Wide Shut" was a terrible film.)