The way the main character, Rob, played by John Cusack, addresses the audience directly ("talks to camera") is initially rather disconcerting, but it grows on you, and comes to seem reasonably natural. His sidekicks at the music shop that he runs are very amusing, and the central romantic plot is well worked out. Not being able to remember the book very well, I can't tell exactly how honest the film is in terms of details (it does invent some skateboarding musical talent, perhaps to give Rob's life more potential meaning than the book does), but at the level of tone and general emotion, it does a great job.
The Beethoven took a little while to get going. The woodwind seemed to have a very harsh tone in the first three movements. The oboe soloes in the second movement, and the clarinet and horn in the third movement were all a bit rough I thought. However, the final movement was amazing. Just when you thought it couldn't get any better, some other phrase or moment caught you unawares, and "wow!" The choir (the BBC Symphony Chorus) must have fielded over 100 people, and this made for some amazingly powerful moments. Bernard Haitink conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
There is a review at the Daily Telegraph.
Puccini, La Bohème.
Byng, Rides round Britain. I’m continuing to enjoy this. Perhaps the fact that I’m a diary writer myself predisposes me to like things that are presented in a journal or diary like manner. I read two complete Tours over the weekend; one round Wales, and the other in Sussex. Byng is quite harsh about the standard of the inns in the former. He also complains about towns being ill-paved, the sort of concern that just doesn't enter into our lives these days, when the whole country is covered in a big, maintained road network. Of course, equally, it is now no longer possible to have the sorts of “adventures” that Byng managed within one’s own country.
For example, he has a bit of a moan about the fact that locals
don’t know how to direct him so that he has to rely on other
travellers’ accounts and potentially dodgy maps. Locals are also
typically ignorant about the nature of the interesting
antiquities in their region. One he mentions as having told him
that something was an ancient auld thing
.
From the LRB of 22 June 2000:
The ways of cats are caught well in her [Rebecca West’s] grieving letter over Ginger Pounce, a fine marmalade creature:
He ... was always very careful not to make a fuss of me, but in a cagey way let me know that he knew I was doing pretty well for him and there were no hard feelings. He had a very reserved, reluctant way of licking my hand in a way that suggested he was saying to himself:
I hope to God the woman won't start to think I want to marry her.
I've recently found the home-page of James Gleick, who wrote quite an appealing popular science book about chaos theory and the people behind it. He's good on the experience of being a beta tester for an early version Microsoft Word, but I don't think much of his piece on the Ariane 5 crash, which ends with the feeble line:
Fortunately, he points out, really important software has a reliability of 99.9999999 percent. At least, until it doesn't.
Couperin, Nouveaux concerts. I feel as if I’ve typed this one in quite few times as I’ve been doing this log. I don't think I listen to it that much. I think it must sense when Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings are coming up so that it can leer up in my subconscious and get itself selected for playing at just the right time. Oh yes, semi-sentient CDs.
A neat story, logged by David Chess a few days ago, about a strange PC bug whereby your computer starts to play Für Elise.
So, is Europe going down the gurgler or what? Many (most?) of the countries of Western Europe seem to have been afflicted with wide-ranging protests about the high price of petrol. People have blockaded refineries, and the supply of petrol has been seriously reduced. Yesterday, the radio said that 75% of petrol stations across the UK had no petrol.
Perhaps even more astonishing is that 91% of people seem to be in favour of the protests. We don’t own a car, so maybe this makes us too insensitive to the problem. There are loads of articles at the Guardian. Characteristically, the Daily Telegraph is convinced that high taxes on anything are fundamentally wrong, and says that they're unfair on British hauliers. This is nonsense, as I will attempt to explain next time.
Oscar Peterson's finest hour. My birthday present. I’ve listened to this a number of times since then and I’m coming to like it more and more.
John Byng, Rides round Britain. This is coming along well. I read a long account of a trip to “the North” over the weekend. He goes to a variety of places south of Manchester, in an area that I guess is now known as the Peak District. He is very scathing about Buxton. Later in the same trip he goes to East Anglia and Hertfordshire. He goes to Cambridge and hates it. The inn was expensive, of poor quality, and he couldn’t find anyone to let him into King's College Chapel (easily Cambridge’s most famous landmark).
I would have probably read more over the weekend, but we ended up playing quite a bit of Roller-coaster Tycoon. This is a very appealing game, and quite addictive. I’m not much of a park administrator myself. However, as a “backseat driver”, I really come into my own! :-)
As promised, my argument disputing claims that Britain's high fuel taxes disadvantage Britain’s hauliers (truckers). The claim is that French truckers can out-compete their British counterparts because they can get their fuel more cheaply in France. If however, French trucks are competing on the same routes as British ones, then the British drivers only need to follow the French trucks, and refuel at the same places as the French drivers to incur the same fuel costs as their competitors. If the French drivers are not competing on the same routes, then there is no fair comparison possible.
Elgar's third symphony was recently turned into a performable work in a similar way.
Ever searched for your own name on a search-engine? Apparently, this is called "ego-surfing". According to this article, it's also a prudent thing to do.
Beethoven, piano sonata no. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 Pathétique. I wonder when it was that the word “pathetic” came to have its modern derogatory tone. I’m pretty confident that its use in 19th century English was similar to that in French. Beethoven actually gave this sonata its nickname, something he didn’t often do. (For example, the “Moonlight” and “Appassionata” sonatas both got their nicknames from other people.) I’m not sure who gave Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony the same nickname, but in any case, the use of the word is not meant to imply “feeble, helpless and incapable” in the unsympathetic (ooh, there goes the same word in disguise!) modern sense.
Maybe the modern world is fundamentally less tolerant of helplessness than it used to be.
John Byng, Rides round Britain. No progress with this over the weekend, I’m afraid. I did invade Russia in the Kishinev scenario of Panzer General II. I’ll have to write a game review of PG2 at some stage.
Mahler, symphony no. 7.
Run Lola, run (Lola rennt in the original German). (IMDb page.) We got this out on DVD and were pleasantly surprised to find that we could watch it fine on our computer. (We don’t have a TV.) In fact, we had to first configure it (yes, you can configure DVD movies (!)) so that we got German audio and English subtitles. I thought it was very enjoyable. It keeps the attention held throughout. It’s not very deep, and doesn’t really repay much extended thought, but I still found it very enjoyable.
Of course, it's not just the projection you choose that has potential political significance, it's what you decide to put in the middle of the map. The Peters one puts Africa and Europe in the middle, and cuts through the Pacfic and Bering Strait. Maps I saw when I lived in Canada quite ridiculously put the Americas in the middle of the map, cutting Asia in half at about India. In New Zealand, maps are currently centred on New Zealand, smack bang in the middle of the bottom of the expanses of the Pacific. The cut is then down the Atlantic, at cost perhaps to Iceland and Greenland.