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Vaguely down, vaguely untogether, not posting as often as I want to and not getting very much else done either. It is not illness or depression - just a sense that things are not as they should be. Part of the reason is that my father is sick - not very sick, at present - but sick in the way that people are at 88, sick enough that you make phone calls every day, just to check whether you should get on a train, now...Part of it is not getting nearly enough done on various projects and spending far too much time footling, not even watching television, which would at least be work of a sort, or reading, which is professional, but playing patience or Civilization, and deleting them, and then putting them back.
Still, lots of good stuff going on as well. Addie dragged me off to see Le Cercle Rouge which is one of those Melville heist films full of Alain Delon and Yves Montand smoking Disque Bleu at each other in a cool fashion. And you just know when a cigarette girl hands Delon a rose, and her face is in half-shadow, that it is Death symbolism time. Yet it was not a cliche, not in 1970 or whichever year it was. A good enough film that it made me regret going to see 'The Italian Job' in spite of Seth Green in the Benny Hill part - I am coming to the conclusion that it would just be smart never to go and see a movie with Mark Wahlberg in it ever again.
'The Deal' was OK, but slightly spoiled by the fact that I had last seen Michael Sheen playing a werewolf and it affected my sense of his reading of Tony Blair. I wanted much much more of Dexter Fletcher as Charlie Whelan and some sense of why Mandelson jumped the way he did - there was no character development there and you found yourself drawn to the slash reading as much as to the siding with the man who would do anything to get and keep it reading. In the end, Gordon was butcher but Tony was cuter.
I do hope that Karl Rove goes to jail. Greg Palast says Arnie is in bed with the Enron people and the election is a massive scam to screw up compensation lawsuits for the mess Enron made of California's power - this is plausible. And allegedly Rush Limbaugh has drug problems - I should be above gloating, yet somehow I am not.
And Christopher Hitchens is still alleging that Clinton spied on the peace movement in the Sixties, a claim for which he seems to have no evidence save his intuition that Clinton must always have been a Very Bad Man. The thing is, if Clinton had been spying, he would either have been very gung-ho anti-war or very invisible, rather than a very public voice of considered middle-of-the-roadness. I knew Americans I could believe were spooks - older students on post- Army scholarships who sat around quietly in bars and somehow were at most parties. And I can't remember their names because you were not really supposed to notice them. I am pretty certain that this is Hitchens bullshitting on the assumption that ex-Presidents do not ever sue.
Good as 'The Deal' was, I was actually rather more impressed by 'Eroica'; it was a stroke of genius to cast Ian Hart as Beethoven, just because he brings John Lennon to it, while actually looking quite like Beethoven too. Well, more than Gary Oldman did. Odd little film - various actors poncing around being Viennese patrons and either getting the radical newness of Beethoven's Third straight away, or being confused or irritated by it, while a bunch of authentic instrument musicians in period costume play the piece and get to do a fair bit of character acting at the same time - the extra third horn being a coffee-house radical and so on. And it makes Countess Therese's rejection of Beethoven happen on the same day as that first performance - legal impediments to cross-class marriage - she is the woman he wrote 'Fur Elise' to, except it is actually called 'Fur Therese' and the publisher could not read his handwriting.
It should all have been so corny and even more so when Frank Finlay limps in during the scherzo as the ageing Haydn and sits and listens to the variations in pain and then says, more or less, 'This changes everything. This man has put himself into his music. The rules have changed, from today.' And yet because it was Frank Finlay and because the performance was so passionate and because of Ian Hart gurning away in a way that makes him look like the portraits - it made you believe that, yes, this was how it was on a day when things changed. It didn't hurt that we got Jack Davenport doing another of his liberal aristos in the corner.
More later - I have to talk about dinner with
Still, lots of good stuff going on as well. Addie dragged me off to see Le Cercle Rouge which is one of those Melville heist films full of Alain Delon and Yves Montand smoking Disque Bleu at each other in a cool fashion. And you just know when a cigarette girl hands Delon a rose, and her face is in half-shadow, that it is Death symbolism time. Yet it was not a cliche, not in 1970 or whichever year it was. A good enough film that it made me regret going to see 'The Italian Job' in spite of Seth Green in the Benny Hill part - I am coming to the conclusion that it would just be smart never to go and see a movie with Mark Wahlberg in it ever again.
'The Deal' was OK, but slightly spoiled by the fact that I had last seen Michael Sheen playing a werewolf and it affected my sense of his reading of Tony Blair. I wanted much much more of Dexter Fletcher as Charlie Whelan and some sense of why Mandelson jumped the way he did - there was no character development there and you found yourself drawn to the slash reading as much as to the siding with the man who would do anything to get and keep it reading. In the end, Gordon was butcher but Tony was cuter.
I do hope that Karl Rove goes to jail. Greg Palast says Arnie is in bed with the Enron people and the election is a massive scam to screw up compensation lawsuits for the mess Enron made of California's power - this is plausible. And allegedly Rush Limbaugh has drug problems - I should be above gloating, yet somehow I am not.
And Christopher Hitchens is still alleging that Clinton spied on the peace movement in the Sixties, a claim for which he seems to have no evidence save his intuition that Clinton must always have been a Very Bad Man. The thing is, if Clinton had been spying, he would either have been very gung-ho anti-war or very invisible, rather than a very public voice of considered middle-of-the-roadness. I knew Americans I could believe were spooks - older students on post- Army scholarships who sat around quietly in bars and somehow were at most parties. And I can't remember their names because you were not really supposed to notice them. I am pretty certain that this is Hitchens bullshitting on the assumption that ex-Presidents do not ever sue.
Good as 'The Deal' was, I was actually rather more impressed by 'Eroica'; it was a stroke of genius to cast Ian Hart as Beethoven, just because he brings John Lennon to it, while actually looking quite like Beethoven too. Well, more than Gary Oldman did. Odd little film - various actors poncing around being Viennese patrons and either getting the radical newness of Beethoven's Third straight away, or being confused or irritated by it, while a bunch of authentic instrument musicians in period costume play the piece and get to do a fair bit of character acting at the same time - the extra third horn being a coffee-house radical and so on. And it makes Countess Therese's rejection of Beethoven happen on the same day as that first performance - legal impediments to cross-class marriage - she is the woman he wrote 'Fur Elise' to, except it is actually called 'Fur Therese' and the publisher could not read his handwriting.
It should all have been so corny and even more so when Frank Finlay limps in during the scherzo as the ageing Haydn and sits and listens to the variations in pain and then says, more or less, 'This changes everything. This man has put himself into his music. The rules have changed, from today.' And yet because it was Frank Finlay and because the performance was so passionate and because of Ian Hart gurning away in a way that makes him look like the portraits - it made you believe that, yes, this was how it was on a day when things changed. It didn't hurt that we got Jack Davenport doing another of his liberal aristos in the corner.
More later - I have to talk about dinner with
