This year’s UK Eurovision entry was so forgettable that I have — less than 48 hours later — entirely forgotten it. It was sung by someone called Josh — I remember that bit — but I couldn’t tell you what it was called, or anything at all about how it went.
There’s a fun discussion taking place on a friend’s facebook page about which operatic characters remind us of the party leaders in this year’s election.
I’ve gone for Gordon Brown as Wotan [Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen], the powerful, one-eyed brooding figure who’s made the running in the past, but now has a few problems and can’t work out how he can rescue his agenda without screwing everything up (and, as he sees it, at least, risking the end of the world), and who is doomed to fade into nothingness.
Nick Clegg is Don Carlos [Verdi: Don Carlo(s)]. He thinks he’s a romantic hero and a great crusader for political liberty, but he doesn’t really understand the nature of the game he’s playing in, and will ultimately get screwed over by more ruthless participants. (I’ve only a hazy memory of the plot of this one, so apologies if this isn’t getting it quite right.)
And David Cameron? It’s a tricky one, but I reckon he’s Escamillo [Bizet: Carmen]. Superficially attractive, but really a shallow, arrogant, pompous arse — though one with the considerable advantage of being the only major protagonist still alive and not in police custody at the end of the drama.
A new blogmeme’s doing the round, to pick the theme-tune of your blog.
Here at the Virtual Stoa, there can only be one choice — this complex yet sensitive meditation on the dialectics of national identity in a globalising era, as performed at the 2007 Eurovision Song Contest by Scooch:
I’ve just heard the sad (but not unexpected news) that the beat poet Harold Norse has died aged 92. I spent the Summer of 1999 living in an apartment on Albion St in San Francisco’s Mission District, Harold lived around the same building, and we’d run into him from time to time when he was collecting his post.
Over here. (Can’t tell yet whether it’s an improvement.)
Reading this reminds me of the slogan with which Life of Brian was marketed in Sweden: “The Film That Was So Funny, They Banned It In Norway.”
Actually, I think the position of Poet Laureate is a silly one, and I hope Carol Ann Duffy doesn’t start writing dreadful poems about the royal family. (She may not, in fact, given her opinion that “No self-respecting poet should have to” write poems about Edward and Sophie of Wessex.) But her appointment is a permanent rebuke to those who struck Finisterre out of the Shipping Forecast seven years ago, and that’s a very good thing.
… I liked this comment, from Tom Hurka, in a CT comments thread:
At the Edinburgh Festival in 1977 I saw a wonderful play called ‘Ludwig and Bertie.’ It was about Wittenstein and Russell … and Bertie Wooster. You see, Russell and Wittgenstein have agreed to meet, for the first time, in the Trinity College, Cambridge library, which happens to be where Bertie Wooster is going to meet this new man he’s hired, called Jeeves. (He’s going to the library to find an ethics book and read about this ‘categorical aperitif.’) Well, various misidentifications follow, with Russell thinking Bertie is Wittgenstein (and utterly unsuited to philosophy) while Wittgensein thinks Bertie is Russell (and the stupidest man he’s ever met). It all reaches its climax when Russell encounters Jeeves, who’s of course been the Wittgenstein family butler in Vienna and taught Ludwig everything he knows. How, Russell asks him, can the sentence ‘The present king of France is bald’ be meaningful if there’s no present king of France? ‘May I venture to suggest, sir,’ Jeeves replies, ‘that we can analyze this sentence as saying that there is one and only one x such that x is the present king of France and x is bald?’
[via]
From the Ruskin School website:
The film director Stevan Riley will be coming to Oxford at 4.30pm on Friday 27 February to screen his brilliant documentary Blue Blood in the auditorium at Magdalen College.
Blue Blood follows a group of Oxford students in the run-up to the Varsity boxing match and stars ex-Ruskin School undergraduate Charles Ogilvie.
Stevan will introduce the film and he, Charlie and others will contribute to a round-table discussion immediately afterwards.
Variety described it as one of the better sports movies in recent memory, but Blue Blood is also a wonderful story about obsession and the search for personal identity.
Admission free.
It turns out that Slumdog Millionaire is a much more interesting film than I took it to be. Faced with cardboard-cutout characters and an implausible plot, I rather switched off and stopped enjoying myself. My former-teacher-and-current-colleague Bonnie Honig, on the other hand, started thinking instead about what it all had to say about democratic theory — and her splendid essay on Slumdog has just been published on the website of the Indian Express newspaper (albeit under a not-entirely-ideal title). So go over there and read it.
And, given these three, you really don’t have to.
Frost / Nixon is quite fun, and bounces along, but there’s no point making films like this if you’re going to distort what actually happened as much as this one does, and for no terribly good reason, artistic or otherwise. I don’t think I was prepared for a film containing a depiction of a naked John Birt. Perhaps the poster should carry a warning. (“Warning: Contains Scenes Depicting a Naked John Birt”.) I wondered whether it was a problem that it’s impossible to watch Michael Sheen without thinking of Tony Blair, but I don’t think that it is. There is something of Blair in David Frost – the eagerness to suck up to the powerful, in particular – and so it becomes a useful association rather than an irritating distraction.
Slumdog Millionaire is a very bad film. I’m not sure what else to say. It wasn’t dreadful, but when I was trying to think of “films I’d seen in the cinema that were obviously worse”, the two that sprang to mind immediately were Ridicule and Life is Beautiful. Those two were much, much worse than Slumdog, admittedly, but what these have in common is that they are all the kind of foreign films or films about foreigners that get Oscar nominations, and perhaps in future I should make sure I avoid those.
Revolutionary Road isn’t very good, either, which was a bit of a surprise, as I enjoyed American Beauty, and had quite high hopes for this one. There’s very little drama, as what happens once the plot gets going is almost entirely predictable, and the general approach is to pile on every kind of cliché one can think of about suburban life in 1950s America. Michael Shannon’s two short scenes are easily the best thing in the film, but even he’s just recapitulating another stale topos, the madman who talks more sense than anybody else. Part of me thinks that the suffocating layers of cliché and stereotype on all the various levels in this film must be part of its point – but then one just ends up wondering just what that point is supposed to be.
Ronnie Drew died earlier this afternoon, in Dublin (where else?). The BBC, over here.
Lennon-McCartney may have been only the second most significant musical collaboration in the 1960s, after that between Ronnie Drew and Luke Kelly at the heart of The Dubliners.
There was a good piece by the excellent Samuel “On Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations: A Philosophical Companion” Fleischacker in Norm’s Writer’s Choice series last week, not least because most of it is actually about the book Rushdie wrote, which is sometimes hard to recover through the increasingly thick fog of what became “The Rushdie Affair”. He liked it as much as I did, when I read it in the second half of 1989, though with a much richer appreciation of what we might call Rushdie’s engagement with theodicy than I’d have been capable of sustaining back then, years before I started reading Augustine.
It’s nice to be reminded, too, of Martin Scorsese’s film of The Last Temptation of Christ. Fleischacker thinks it had “a far deeper religious sensibility” than that of its critics who charged it with heresy. That might be true, but I just remember it as tortured, laughable nonsense. (“Heaven’s a party, and everyone’s invited!”, says Scorsese’s Christ at one point, or something similar, and I don’t recall it ever getting more profound.) His Gangs of New York was also very, very bad, but there seems to be something about the badness of the religious film that gives it a certain kind of grandeur, of which the badness of the secular film falls short.
I keep thinking I should buy another recording of Carmen to sit on the shelf alongside my old 1978 Abbado / Berganza / Domingo / LSO recording. Any thoughts? Preferences? Anti-recommendations?
