Music and lyrics

As part of my ongoing curiosity about web-based information sharing, I am considering signing up to Twitter. So today I thought I'd have a little look at some Twitter feeds. I'd heard Evan Davis mention his on the Today programme. I wasn't compelled to sign up by the tweets themselves (although looking again now, just after the final Leaders' Debate, I can see Twitter working the way it should), but I did like his capsule 'bio' ('Yes, this is the bloke on the Radio 4 Today programme, Dragons' Den and the Bottom Line. These are my views, not those of the BBC.'). I was disappointed that Jay-Z's was run by someone else.

The best one was the tireless Catherine Grant's Film Studies For Free feed. It performed what I take to be one of Twitter's main functions; that is, to provide me with a summary of and link to other things of interest - perfect for a magpie like me. So now I've bookmarked a District 9 article which will help me with the editing of a piece on that movie that I'm working on. And I also couldn't resist 'Jewish band serves up kosher Lady Gaga'! This linked to this page, where you can both hear a Jewish American a capella group recreate chart hits but substitute lyrics that speak to Jewish culture. For example, the chorus to 'Poker Face' becomes 'Can’t eat my/Can’t eat my/No you can’t eat from my/Kosher plate/Hamotzi lechem min ha-aretz' (that last part is a Hebrew blessing over bread, and scans perfectly).

I enjoy the eloquent juxtapositions that arise when something new is added to a song. I love 'One song to the tune of another' on Radio 4, and particularly enjoyed Phil Jupitus singing to lyrics of Aqua's 'Barbie Girl' to the tune of Frank Sinatra's 'Theme from New York, New York'. As Chris Evans recently demonstrated on Radio 2, 'Love Me Tender' to the theme tune of The Archers also works surprisingly well, and might cause one to ponder the clash of cultures that would be represented by The King visiting Ambridge.

Culture clash is also what makes 'Amish Paradise' such a highlight in the output of a man who has devoted his life to rewriting lyrics to humorous effect, Weird Al Yankovic. We have the urban, gangster's milieu of Coolio in our heads, but we hear about the lives of members of a religious community who eschew modern technology.

A similar thing is happening in the more recent Bonnie 'Prince' Billy and Zach Galifianakis 'version' of Kanye West's 'Can't Tell Me Nothing', only in this case, there's no lyrical substitution, but instead of an impeccably groomed and supremely confident black man in the music video, we have two rather shambolic, hairy, out-of-shape white men out in the country, miming along to the lyrics (sometimes letting fly some spit whilst doing so). We ought to remember that the fact that the original video is set in the desert, thus avoiding much of the conspicuous consumption of many a rap/hip-hop video, and that Kanye West's appearance is pretty 'conservative' overall, mean that the Oldham/Galifianakis video is not a straightforward lambasting of the excessive trappings of hip-hop culture. It's a bit gentler and stranger than that. And, of course, the joke appears to be partly on Oldham and Galifianakis, who appear to be bringing attention to rather than downplaying their physical demerits. (This said, one bit of the video that never fails to crease me up is the moment where we see a tractor in profile, and its front and rear lifting mechanisms are demonstrated. Surely we're meant to think of the ludicrous suspension on the bonnets of cars filled with girls?)

All this has provided me with the context (or, if you prefer, an excuse) to share something that I've been sitting on for a while. I was originally going to let it stand alone, in a blog entitled, 'Bone Marrow and Giblet: A Travesty', but I will now put it here, with thanks to Zborowski, Falconer, and Lawton - and apologies to Knopfler:

A love struck Romeo

Brings the streets a marinade
Laying everybody low
With the meat sauce that he's made
Finds a street light
Steps out of the shade
Says something like
'You and meat babe, how about it?'

Juliet says, 'Hey it's Romeo
You should've brought me a lamb kebab'
He's underneath the window, she's singing
'Voila, some pudding black!
You shouldn't come around here, marinading meatballs like that,
Anyway, what you gonna do about it?'

Juliet, the pies were loaded from the start
And I bit into a tasty piece of heart

And I forget, I forget, the movie song
When you gonna realise I make the best beef bourguignon, Juliet?

Came up on different meats
Boths were meats of shame
Both dirty - but lean
Yes and the dreams were just the same
And I dreamed your dream for you, and now your dream is veal
How could you look at meat as if it was just another one of your meals?

Well you can fall for brains and liver
You can fall for brains alone
You can fall for streaky bacon
And the promise of T-bone
You promised me everything
You promised me chicken wing, yeah
Now you just, oh Romeo yeah, you know I used to have a spleen with him

Juliet, when we made duck, you used to fry
Said I'd love you like steak and kidney pud
I'd love you 'til I die
There's a steak for us
You know - the venison
When you gonna realise it was just that the time was wrong, Gi-i-i-blet?

I can't do the pork, like the pork on the TV
And I can't make biltong, like the way it's meant to be
I can't stew everything, but I'll stew anything for you
I can'd do anything 'cept be in love with you
And all I do is miss you, and the way we used to eat
All I do is cut the meat, with blunt cutlery
All I eat is brisket, and the rib that is prime
Julie I miss your calf's liver all the time...

Search engine serendipity

I idly typed 'jobs for bibliophiles' into google yesterday, and it led me to an entry on an interesting website called wisebread.com which I've now started following. Tagline: 'Living large on a small budget'.

I reluctantly consented to and sat through a sales pitch today from a guy trying to sell keywords so that every time someone types certain words into the search engine on their website, our 'product' comes out on top. So much for democracy, or indeed meritocracy.

But then, there are some types of information that can't be controlled, even by political parties with relatively deep pockets. Watching 'Bigotgate' unfold today, beginning with a Sky News microphone that Mr Brown forgot about, and then attracting tweets, blogs, tv and radio coverage, fed by playback-on-demand, I thought again about how the way we share information is changing, and what an exciting thing it is to think about. What is the best way to write about these phenomena? Perhaps the upcoming event 'Where Does History Happen?' will furnish me with some more tools.

Bigotgate may also, entirely fortuitously, provide a boost for an artist whose 'emotionally charged work ranges from the comic to the forlorn', whose only connection to Mr Brown's gaffe is to share a name with the voter he complained about. Google the name 'Gillian Duffy' and you will probably see near the top of your search results a link to gillianduffy.com, the artist's website.

Such is the communications world we live in: a Rochdale pensioner is generating the sort of publicity money can't buy, or in Mr Brown's case, bury.

'Small, Striking Moments'

This is the comment I wanted to leave on Girish's latest blog entry, which has the same title as this one, but there wasn't enough space in the comment box!

I've been working on Hitchcock's Rope for some time now. It's a film full of striking moments (like the moment, already discussed by V F Perkins, where a swing door's movement is synchronised with a character's actions, perhaps suggesting complicity between the director and the murderous protagonist).

There are two great moments that sprang to mind after reading this blog. Perhaps I thought of them because they're arresting moments, moments of thought, for the characters as well as for the viewer.

The first comes after Brandon (John Dall) has decided he'll serve party food not from the dining table, but from the chest where he and his accomplice have stowed the body of David Kentley, a supposed 'inferior' whom they had a right (a duty?) to dispense of - according, at least to their Nietzsche-inspired worldview. The moment I am thinking of is the one where Brandon lays the tablecloth over the chest. He is already pleased with his latest 'artistic touch' of serving food from David's grave (as Brandon's ex-house master and teacher, Rupert/James Stewart, will later put it). As he lays the cloth, though, he slows down - both in thought and speech - and these elements of performance signal to us that an additional layer of significance to his act has just this moment occurred to him, during the execution of the act itself: his laying of a table is also a draping of a coffin.

The second is the moment where Rupert's suspicions are finally confirmed by an object. Mrs Wilson (Edith Evanson), the housekeeper, passes him the wrong hat by mistake - David's hat, as confirmed by the initials embossed inside. This is a key plot moment, but after watching a few times, I realised that of course there's a joke, of sorts, in there too: the hat is too small because, as would befit an 'inferior', David's head is smaller than Rupert's!

Two of the most rewarding parts of studying and teaching film for me are working with film sequences - on the page and in the seminar room. I love discovering new things or refining my understanding/articulation by turning moments over, looking at them in new contexts, or just searching for the right phrase to describe something that is happening in a sequence.

And taking all these great moments and observations about them and turning them into a more sustained overall account is often where the hardest work lies. I would add that, as well as the thinking about individual films in a sustained way often beginning with moments, a key rhetorical device in much writing about film is to do the same. One of the most promising beginnings to a piece of film criticism is 'There is a moment in X where...'!

'I intend to do everything ... I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too ... I shall involve myself wholly ... everything matters'

Susan Sontag wrote the above in her journal, aged 16. What a wonderful sentiment! Here are some interesting things that I've read or heard lately.

On Radio 4's 'Today' Programme this morning (complete with Ennio Morricone music, of course):

1 'Inspired by Hollywood cowboy films, researchers have delved into the science of gun fights.'

A two-person button-pressing experiment showed that 'those who reacted to their opponent were on average 21 milliseconds faster than those who initiated the movement.' (Good to know, but Pete Falconer's research about honour, back-shooting and the Western town at night is more interesting if we actually want to learn something about shootouts in Hollywood Westerns.)

2 US populism

In The Economist this week there's some interesting stuff about 'a resurgence of political populism on both the left and the right', which reminded me of a conversation Pete, James and I were having about US vs European politics, and the prospect of drinking with Howard Hawks and/or Frank Capra. A couple of bumper stickers doing the rounds in America at the moment: 'Save trees: stop printing money'; 'Honk if I'm paying your mortgage'.

Also on this subject: brucespringsteen.net alerted me to a recent expression of US populism. Bruce has contributed to a History Channel documentary 'The People Speak', based on a book, A People's History of the United States.

3 The Zero Rupee Note

There's also a sidebar about a fascinating phenomenon in India. A 'piece of paper the colour of a 50-rupee note with a picture of Gandhi on it and a value of nothing' is "circulating" in India. Why?

Its aim is to shame corrupt officials into not demanding bribes. [...]

One official in Tamil Nadu was so stunned to receive the note that he handed back all the bribes he had solicited for providing electricity to a village. Another stood up, offered tea to the old lady from whom he was trying to extort money and approved a loan so her granddaughter could go to college.

[Their creator] thinks the notes work because corrupt officials so rarely encounter resistance that they get scared when they do. And ordinary people are more willing to protest, since the notes have an organisation behind them and they do not feel on their own.

The THE also had a lot of stuff to make me exalt in the fecundity of the world and the human examination of it (helping to offset the predictable and understandable dose of doom and gloom about 'the sector'). Sometimes even dropped in expressions like 'situated messiness' or a single idea/observation ('people in the same class position tend to support different parties depending on where they live') send me off on pleasurable methodological ruminations. And even the barest book synopses make me hungry to read (Darker than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, by Paul Gilroy. 'Gilroy seeks to awaken a new understanding of W E B Du Bois' intellectual and political legacy by considering the ways that consumerism has diverted African Americans' political and social aspirations').

There are a couple of interestingish pieces (by Alan Ryan and David Greenaway) putting HE's current situation in some kind of historical context (skimming the online versions, I see they've attracted some comment).

4 In praise of index cards

The most pleasurable and beautifully-written piece of all this week is written by Bob Blaisdell, an American professor of English, on how he came to love index cards. I've used them for revision and planning purposes in the past. One of my academic inspirations also uses them. Blaisdell mainly talks about using them for the purposes of learning Russian.

As I was putting them into a [...] rubber-banded packet, I realised that there was another connection to baseball cards: the old cards' edges are less sharp, their surfaces even feel warmer. Through my fingertips, before I look down, I know the word or sentence will be a familiar one.

This reminds me of a poetry and philosophy conference I went to where one of the keynotes, Jorie Graham, was talking about the difference, neurologically, between typing and writing with a pen - the importance of tactility to memory and mental processing. (I also can't resist reproducing this great aside: 'I guess I don't understand the pleasure of playing poker on the computer either. I love the feel of cards - not the idea of them.')

5 New blogs

James brought my attention to 'The Feminist Spectator', because her latest blog entry is on Up in the Air. I enjoyed the piece, left a comment, and added the blog to my 'following' list. I'm still thinking about the idea of blogs and the public sphere. On that subject, yet another article in the THE was about Han Han, a Chinese man whose blog has an audience of 242 million! I just tried to read it, but it's not available in translation. It'd take a lot of index cards before I could read it in the original!

Some sort of promise

Where you went out the back door of that house there was a stone water trough in the weeds by the side of the house. A galvanized pipe come off the roof and the trough stayed pretty much full and I remember stoppin there one time and squattin down and lookin at it and I got to thinkin about it. I dont know how long it had been there. A hundred years. Two hundred. You could see the chisel marks in the stone. It was hewed out of solid rock and it was about six foot long and maybe a foot and a half wide and about that deep. Just chiseled out of the rock. And I got to thinkin about the man that done that. That country had not had a time of peace much of any length at all that I knew of. I've read a little of the history of it since and I aint sure it ever had one. But this man had set down with a hammer and chisel and carved out a stone water trough to last ten thousand years. Why was that? What was it that he had faith in? It wasnt that nothin would change. Which is what you might think, I suppose. He had to know bettern that. I've thought about it a good deal. I thought about it after I left there with that house blown to pieces. I'm goin to say that water trough is there yet. It would of took somethin to move it, I can tell you that. So I think about him settin there with his hammer and his chisel, maybe just a hour or two after supper, I dont know. And I have to say that the only thing I can think is that there was some sort of promise in his heart. And I dont have no intentions of carvin a stone water trough. But I would like to be able to make that kind of promise. I think that's what I would like most of all.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men

Up in the Air

This blog contains spoilers.

Although the protagonist of Up in the Air is a man who flies across America firing people for a living, it is not a movie about losing your job or being unemployed. And although the plot is set in motion by his lifestyle (though probably not his livelihood) being threatened by a new, young recruit who puts forward a case for firing people by videophone, it is not really a movie about new technologies and their alienating effects either. One of the most fascinating things about Up in the Air, in fact, is all of the potential films one can see in it that it refuses to become.

In the movie's first phase, we learn about Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney, through a blend of narration and dramatisation. As the image track cuts between luggage being zipped up and gliding with ease over airport floors, and a series of card swipes and polite but scripted exchanges with service personnel, Ryan tells us, 'Everything you probably hate about travelling are warm reminders that I'm home.'

In the 1950s, Alfred Hitchcock made films about irresponsible males learning to become responsible. In Rear Window, Grace Kelly describes James Stewart as 'a tourist on an endless vacation'. He refuses to see her as a viable partner - until, that is, she crosses over into his fantasy world, and helps him solve a murder. In North by North West, Cary Grant plays Roger O Thornhill, an advertising man with two ex-wives who has to be torn out of his comfortable existence in order to become a hero worthy of our esteem. Cary Grant was fifty-four when he made North by North West. There's a witty scene in an auction where characters are subtly identified with lots; Grant is 'a lovely Aubusson settee, in excellent condition.' Clooney is pushing fifty (and seems to be getting better looking by the year), and a similar thing might be going on when a woman he meets in a bar tells him 'If a car has over twenty thousand miles, I don't drive it.' They exchange opinions about car rental firms, then they each put their cards on the table - that is, to compare their various loyalty scheme memberships. Making a conceit like this work, in terms of both plausibility and sympathy, is a tall order ('We're two people who get turned on by elite status: I think cheap is our starting point.'/'There's nothing cheap about loyalty.'). As with director Jason Reitman's previous movie, Juno, there is a brittle smartness about which one doesn't quite know how the film feels.

I did feel at times that the dialogue would have worked better on the page - or perhaps on a stage - than it did on the screen. But there are some magical moments too. When the movie first decisively breaks its very deliberately established pattern of businesslike exchanges (the first meeting between Clooney and what will turn out to be his love interest being a variation rather than an exception), the audience can share the relief of the new, young recruit who breaks down in the middle of a hotel lobby and wails 'My boyfriend left me!' There follows a very nicely scripted and performed scene between the three principals, where they discuss love and relationships. Natalie's soul-bearing about where she thought she would be now (aged twenty three) when she was sixteen (married, maybe with a kid, and a Grand Cherokee) and how her now-ex boyfriend 'fit the bill' ('white collar, grad school, six foot one, loves dogs, in finance - but outdoorsy - at the weekend...') manages to be incisive without being cruel. Similarly, later, Ryan is sent in to talk his sister's fiancee out of his cold feet, and is faced with an amusing and touching anxious splurge of milestones on the way to death: children, Christmases, Thanksgivings, Easter breaks, graduation, grandchildren, grave.

Visually, the film gets a fair amount of mileage out of the fact that a lot of places in America look the same from the air - and then once you get down on the ground the offices do too. There is also a very nice shot of Natalie surrounded by a roomful of empty office chairs. And the conceits that it builds into its plot are very smart. Ryan's goal is to clock up 10 million air miles - a feat achieved by only six other people. When Natalie is probing him about this, puzzled by the fact that Ryan is not interested in using the air miles, she opines that what a person with that many miles should do is show up at an airport and take their pick from the board. For their wedding, Ryan's sister and her fiancee have requested that their guests take a cardboard cutout of them, and photograph it/them in front of exciting locations, in lieu of a honeymoon they can't afford. As well as being a firer, Ryan is also a motivational speaker. 'What's in your backpack?' is his thing. (This also leads to a nice exchange between Ryan and Alex: 'You know about my backpack?'/'I googled you. It's what us modern girls do when we have a crush.') Ryan asks his listeners to imagine filling up their backpacks with all their possessions, and then all the people they know. He preaches travelling light ('Drink some gingko and let the photos burn.').

As one might expect, all these threads pay off. Ryan hits his 10 million mile target, but on the flight taking him away from Alex, and the moment feels meaningless. After taking Alex to his sister's wedding (and showing her around his school), Ryan flies across the country and steps up to deliver 'What's in your rucksack?' in a prestigious venue, but the words fall hollow, and we then get 'the run' to Chicago, to Alex's doorstep. After the wedding, Ryan calls the airline to get enough of his airmiles transferred to his sister and her husband to send them around the world. And the movie ends with Ryan looking up at the departures board.

But they do not weave together to form the ending one might have predicted. Alex, it turns out, is married. She barely hesitates before closing the door on Ryan when her husband asks who is there, leaving him standing in the snow. Although Ryan calls the airline to transfer the miles to his sister, the conversation is interrupted, and that is all we see or hear of it. Similarly, although he says he will call Natalie (who quits the firm by text message!), we only see her new employer reading the reference that Ryan wrote for her. Ryan has reached out, but has not been invited in. 'Where are you from?' asks the pilot who emerges from the cockpit and sits with Ryan to share a congratulatory drink. 'I'm from here,' he answers. At the end of the film, the only home he has to go to is that to which he laid claim at the beginning.

This is a surprising conclusion to what we would probably categorise as a romantic comedy, but it is true to the (very extreme) logic of Clooney's character, who, in Natalie's words, has created for himself a 'cocoon of self-banishment'. Families and intimacy are kept on the fringes of Up in the Air, spoken of rather than lived through. We only see Natalie's boyfriend from a distance, once, before he ends their relationship (by text message). The wedding of Ryan's sister is treated as a montage of smiles and dancing. Beforehand, Ryan reaches out to his sister, offering to give her away, but she already has someone (someone who has been supportive, and present, all along), and there is no suggestion that from now on the siblings will have a closer relationship.

Clooney's final words are a fitting end to a pretty good, and very interesting, movie:

Tonight most people will be welcomed home by jumping dogs and squealing kids. Their spouses will ask about their day, and tonight they will sleep. The stars will wheel forth from their daytime hiding places. And one of those lights, slightly brighter than the rest, will be my wingtip, passing over.

A collection of quotes

From an article in The Economist:

Universities are feeling the strain in various ways these days. With government funding under pressure, Cambridge is [...] considering tapping the bond market for the first time in its 800-year history, to raise some £300m for building projects. There is a massive debate about the purpose of higher education. At the heart of it all is a widespread perception that young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are being unfairly barred from Britain's most famous universities, and thus must struggle harder than the more privileged to escape a lifetime of mediocre job prospects.

Which reminded me of this exchange in George Pelecanos's The Way Home (a haunting novel which I'm still trying to get my wife to read):

"Don't... don't compare yourself to me. Back in my day, with only a high school degree, you could still make something of yourself. But now there are two distinct societies, Chris, plainly separated. The educated and the uneducated. You don't just go to college to learn. You go to mingle and forge a permanent network with people who all move up the chain together. Don't go to college and there's going to be a ceiling on your earnings. The pool will be limited on who you date and marry. Not only will you probably live in a lower-income neighborhood, but so will your children, and their peers will be lower income, too. Don't you see how it works? There are people who strive to make it to the upper level of society and then there are the other people who stay down below."

"It was you who was always cracking on the lawyers and doctors in our neighbourhood. Saying how they came up from privilege and money, and how they had a leg up. Being all sarcastic about how they never got their hands dirty or broke a sweat. Like how you sweated every day."

The Way Home's epigraph is from Bruce Springsteen's 'My Father's House':

Last night I dreamed that I was a child

out where the pines grow wild and tall

I was trying to make it home through the forest

before the darkness falls

Pelecanos's Hard Revolution also has a Springsteen epigram, this time from 'Adam Raised a Cain' (on Darkness on the Edge of Town) - a song that also features in yet another Pelecanos novel, which my wife is currently reading - but in a part she hasn't read yet (I'm very excited about her getting to it):

Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain

Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame

You inherit the sins, you inherit the flames

The last two lines quoted here definitely form part of the epigraph; I can't check it as HR is one of the GP novels that Pete owns. We have kind of a joint collection. I haven't yet found the movie equivalent of Springsteen, but I'd say Pelecanos is definitely the novel one.

We listened to some Springsteen tonight, but also to the Traveling Wilburys:

Well it's alright, riding around in the breeze

Well it's alright, if you live the life you please

Well it's alright, doing the best you can

Well it's alright, as long as you lend a hand

I'm slowly getting through Gaye Tuchman's Wannabe U: Inside the Corporate University One of its epigraphs, from Robert Birnbaum, is:

An educational philosopher might claim that those things of greatest value are precisely those things that cannot be measured [...] If we cannot measure what is valuable, we will come to value what is measurable.

We watched Lifeboat this evening too. In Hitchcock's Films Revisited, Robin Wood, reviewing his earlier description of the movie, comments:

I would now wish to offer a more political reading, examining the film's very subversive critique of capitalist values: the way in which, by paralleling the Nazi captain and the American self-made millionaire, it suggests that fascism is an extension rather than the opposite of capitalist democracy. This is [...], however, too simple a formula for this extremely complex work, one of the guiding principles of which seems to be that every position, once established, is elsewhere qualified or contradicted.

The movie contains a very moving reading of a psalm that in any case never fails to move me, probably the most famous of all the psalms:

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.