So, a month ago I set myself to read six Booker Prize-shortlisted books from six different years. Having completed this task, I find that they fell into three distinct groups: good short books that won, overlong books with ships in, and rubbish from before the dawn of time.
We will deal with these in reverse. First, the rubbish: David Lodge. Oh my. Was this really what they had instead of good books in 1984? The winner that year was Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner, which is a good short book; also shortlisted was Flaubert's Parrot by Julian Barnes, which I've read and I remember liking although I can hardly remember a thing about it. But evidently it was pretty thin once you got far below them, because Small World is just a rubbishy book, an unfunny comedy, the sort of book no literate person can read without thinking that they could have written it themselves if they'd thought it necessary.
Overlong books with ships in: Sea of Poppies, English Passengers, Parrot and Olivier in America. The first two of these are set mostly on ships and I do feel that I learned quite a lot about ships and who is on them and what they all do and what a schooner is; the trouble is that I feel that I was supposed to be learning that. All three of these books are dragging huge weights of research around with them, research which is unnecessary for two quite distinct reasons: first because putting in makes the book worse, and second because you could just make the stuff up if you needed it, it's a novel after all, not a documentary. I liked the Carey most, possibly because I read it first before long-ship-novel-unease had had time to set in. Carey is obviously a terrific technician but I do wonder whether he might write a better novel if he didn't seem to be looking for ones that you have to a be a terrific technician to write. Sure, two voices alternating, different versions of same events, rounded picture, great, well done, but is he concentrating more on the achievement than on the novel?
Amitav Ghosh is a terrific researcher, I guess, almost to the exclusion of other considerations. I'm willing to believe everything he tells me about life on the Ganges when the opium trade was at its height, but where's the novel? He approaches the multiple-narrator thing more softly, using a bunch of different third-person perspectives, but it is still somewhat naggingly obvious that he is doing a series of turns. The comedy, when it arrives, is all stock characters and stock situations, comedy by numbers - it never feels like something he actually finds funny, just something he thinks other people might. I actually enjoyed the book more than you think, but when I think about it now it's the negatives that spring to mind.
Matthew Kneale's English Passengers is my least favourite of the ship-books. His multiple narrators are a whole bunch of different first-person ones, some consciously written, like one character's journal and excerpts from another's book, some presented as if orally narrated after all the events had taken place, some of the smaller ones not really very well decided as to what they are. The whole thing doesn't move forward linearly in time, which along with it jumping about in place makes it rather difficult to follow in places because you don't quite know whether one character is about to meet another on this island or was there twenty years ago. Again there is a quantity of research being dragged like a dead horse around every corner in sight, this time Manx dialect, the early history of Tasmania, and fad racist theories of the mid-nineteenth century. All fine but WHY?
The two I liked most were the short ones. John Banville's The Sea was the winner in 2005 and I'm right down with that. It is a concentrated careful novel, containing no unnecessary ingredients, with only one main character. It mixes his mistily-remembered childhood holiday in a coastal town in Ireland with his return there many years later after his wife's death when he is trying once more to get a grip on life by looking back at where he first found he was getting that grip. The supporting cast are not overdone as they would have been in some books; the ones from the past are remembered with a mixture of clarity of impressions with fuzziness of details and composition, just as the memories of childhood are for most of us, and the ones from the present are not probed but hinted, seen from the viewpoint of an observer who is not interested in going far beneath the surface. If you like modern literary fiction and haven't read this book, then you should.
Last and shortest, Ian McEwan's Amsterdam. I've been unsure about McEwan - I didn't really feel I was getting Enduring Love or even quite Atonement, and On Chesil Beach seemed compact to the point of being slight, an extended short story. But this is definitely a short novel and I thought it was completely successful as such. Two main characters, two third-person perspectives, one movement; the book is unified like a play, and structured like a play, in five acts. It takes three hours to read and if you start it with three hours to spare then you can read it right through, like you'd watch a play. If you're going to dislike it then possibly you're going to do so because both of the characters are unsympathetic, not very nice people, which is true, but they are real enough and our time with them is short enough that it doesn't bother me like it sometimes would. Of course McEwan is sometimes an awkward writer, not bothering to cut out infelicities, leaving Tom Swifties in when they occur to him, generally not giving a damn about the actual writing, but then again that's a method that's worked for a lot of people, Iris Murdoch for example, John Irving, and we must acknowledge that it is a method he has chosen on purpose.
My winner is definitely The Sea. I anticipate having a chance fairly shortly to get hold of the 2010 shortlist in its entirety; come back then, and we'll do the whole thing again.
Sunday, 24 October 2010
Saturday, 23 October 2010
The bad, the good, and the Disney
So, we're half-way through the autumn's musicals, more or less, give or take. What have we learnt?
Erewash Musical Society had a shot at Gypsy. Mercifully I have blanked out quite a lot of the detail but really this sums up everything that is wrong with mediocre-to-bad amateur musicals. The choreographer was sitting at the front corner of the auditorium, changing a notice-board that announced the locations, and enjoying it! Enjoying it! The real problem is that the people running this sort of thing have low standards. You couldn't have put on a great Gypsy with the resources available to Erewash Musical Society, but you could have put on a decent one. If you just did it the way it was written, that would be better. Gypsy is designed for two actresses playing June at different ages and two corresponding actresses playing Louise at different ages: what we ended up with here was three Junes and four Louises. Yes, four. No, they didn't look like different-aged versions of the same person. Yes, it was a mess. The stripping scene didn't work - why do directors cut the dialogue? The whole POINT is that Gypsy's "gimmick" ends up being her talking during her act, the pseudo-intellectual chatter - "zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night", as Lorenz Hart parodied it. It falls flat if it's just a 30-something woman pretending to be a 19-year old taking her clothes off. Meanwhile we had a very one-paced performance from Mama Rose. I realise it's tempting to come out with all guns blazing and blast your way through the evening if you're playing Mama Rose, but the job of the director is to point out that this is a stupid thing to do, because you've got nowhere to go and when you get to Rose's Turn the audience is sitting there thinking that they've just been watching this all night. Actually, quite a lot of them seemed to be quite enjoying it, but they were old and don't get out much.
The theatre itself, the new Duchess, was absolutely horrible. It was nowhere near finished. I'm not even convinced it'll be any good when it is. The box office is immediately inside the door so if there's any queue at all some of you are waiting outside, and the seats are too close together, and there's visible wiring just clipped in place along the walls, and you can't get a black coffee, and they won't let you take your ice-cream back to your seat. What's to like?
That was the bad. The good was (of course) Derby Gilbert and Sullivan Company, doing HMS Pinafore and Fiddler on the Roof. Pinafore was a beautiful example of why Andrew Nicklin's productions are so highly regarded: superbly played and sung, and constantly inventive on stage without ever seeming to be working against the material. I'm not sure about the general idea of setting things in different periods - it seems to be the convention for Shakespeare and opera, that a director can say "I am setting this in 1960s London" or whatever and have sets and costumes to reflect that without changing a word or a note, bringing in an air of constant disconnection. But for this production we were clearly in the 1920s and it didn't worry me, partly I suppose because very little about Pinafore is specific to the exact date. There are one or two things - pocket boroughs, for example, were abolished by the Reform Act of 1867 - but I'm not going to quibble. A 1920s setting does enable the wonderful and priceless Charlotte Clement to use her real hair, that very nice bob which would look wrong anywhere except the 20s or now. But really, the details are insignificant, this was just an all-round really enjoyable production.
Then in the second half of the week they had the very different challenge of Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler in some ways takes a lot more staging than Pinafore, because it is a Broadway-style musical with a lot of shortish scenes happening in different places rather than an operetta with a big static setting for each act. And it places much greater demands on your performing depth - of course, the chorus singing isn't as challenging as G&S, but you do need to fill a lot more small speaking roles. This was one of the two significant problems with the production, that several people in small roles were noticeably out of their depth. The other was the really noisy and pointless smoke machine. I know that Alan Jackson just loves things like smoke machines, but still, you don't actually need smoke ANYWHERE, let alone during "Far From The Home I Love", and if you can't release it silently you should just do without it instead of making a distracting noise behind a singer. I'm surprised Andrew Nicklin let this one past - he should have gone round the back after the dress rehearsal and just told them not to use it.
Also as ALWAYS the bottles in the bottle dance looked stupid because they clearly weren't glass, and one of the shirts that Golde put out on her washing-line had a modern-looking label in it. And at one point I thought Simon Theobald stumbled over a line and had to say something slightly different from what he was intending.
I think that's all the negative things I can think of to say. Apart from those, this was as close to a perfect Fiddler as I ever expect to see, and I do expect to see a lot. It really is a beautifully put-together musical, huge but with hardly any surplus parts, funny and serious, various but unified, a wonderful thing that shows what you can do with a musical that you can't do any other way, and this was a production to match its scope. Part of the secret, I think, of a good Fiddler is that nobody, not even Tevye, must be trying to big it up - if you all do it just the size it's written, it comes out right. Tevye is a funny guy but he's not a clown and his monologues aren't stand-up routines. If you just act then it doesn't slow it down and you don't have the discomfort of a jerk into seriousness when you need it. Similarly, it's too common to see a Yente who is underqualified for playing a lead and is determined to make the most of the biggest part she'll ever get, or will ever get again at any rate. But Joan Self pitched it beautifully. I've never seen that troublesome early scene with Golde and Yente ("nothing can kill a show like too much exposition") go so well. The production was filled with little things that turned out to have perfectly good reasons, like why was Jessica Nicklin wearing those glasses? So she can take them off when Fyedka comes on. I thought that was a great touch because Fyedka and Chava are pretty skimpily realised - there just isn't room for a lot of interaction between them, and if you're not careful it comes across as being all him making the running. Does she in fact care about him one way or the other? In the script itself we don't really see any evidence until we suddenly discover at quarter to ten that she's run off with him, so having those glasses there to give us a little extra insight into Chava is really nice. Again, why is one of the little girls carrying that doll around everywhere? I wondered about that all evening until the last 30 seconds of the show when she put it down on the front of the stage and I started crying.
The lovely orchestrations are never going to sound better than that either. There was a synth in the pit but as far as I could tell (I've only got one pair of ears and there was a lot else going on) all it was doing was providing the accordion and harp, both things which in smallish doses sound OK on a synth. What really kills you is when you start using it instead of strings, a depth to which I don't expect Andrew Nicklin ever to sink. All the strings were there and all the percussion and all the reeds - when Don Walker asks for a cor anglais you have to give him one, like in "You'll Never Walk Alone".
Incidentally, all three creators of Fiddler are still alive 46 years on, with a combined age of 265.
So, then the Disney. Good Companions and Beauty and the Beast. There is really hardly anything to say about this. It's not any flavour, is it? It's Disney. The baddies are more fun than the goodies, and the show seemed most alive when Gaston and LeFou were on, followed by the castle servants. The vapid goodies in cheap costumes just slowed it down. The whole thing felt a bit under-directed - when the actors weren't bringing it, there wasn't any it there. You wonder how interested Phil Simcox actually was. And where has all the money gone? They said, I think, that they had spend £45,000 on this production, but you'd never have known it. Many costumes (including Belle's blue and white in which she spends the whole of the first act) just didn't look like they fitted properly, and Keith Scott-Savage's shirt was just ridiculously inappropriate, rather like his performance. And as for the Beast's mask... it looked like something you would pick up for £3.99 in Tesco, and I suspect that's exactly what they did. The transformation can only have taken so long because he got his elastic stuck on his ears.
Also there were mistakes in the lighting. For 17 quid a ticket. Come on.
Still, if you just like Beauty and the Beast as a thing, and you wanted to see it on stage, here it was, slower and less sparkly than the film but all there and sung audibly and in tune. It will probably be better at Nottingham Operatic (although I'm a bit worried that they refuse to tell me who's in it - have they got some problem there?) and it will certainly be better at Christchurch Theatre Club, but I think that most of those around me were satisfied.
Going back to my question at the top, what we've learnt is what we already knew: directors matter. Choose your director carefully, kids, and be a bit cautious about one who never says no.
Erewash Musical Society had a shot at Gypsy. Mercifully I have blanked out quite a lot of the detail but really this sums up everything that is wrong with mediocre-to-bad amateur musicals. The choreographer was sitting at the front corner of the auditorium, changing a notice-board that announced the locations, and enjoying it! Enjoying it! The real problem is that the people running this sort of thing have low standards. You couldn't have put on a great Gypsy with the resources available to Erewash Musical Society, but you could have put on a decent one. If you just did it the way it was written, that would be better. Gypsy is designed for two actresses playing June at different ages and two corresponding actresses playing Louise at different ages: what we ended up with here was three Junes and four Louises. Yes, four. No, they didn't look like different-aged versions of the same person. Yes, it was a mess. The stripping scene didn't work - why do directors cut the dialogue? The whole POINT is that Gypsy's "gimmick" ends up being her talking during her act, the pseudo-intellectual chatter - "zip! I was reading Schopenhauer last night", as Lorenz Hart parodied it. It falls flat if it's just a 30-something woman pretending to be a 19-year old taking her clothes off. Meanwhile we had a very one-paced performance from Mama Rose. I realise it's tempting to come out with all guns blazing and blast your way through the evening if you're playing Mama Rose, but the job of the director is to point out that this is a stupid thing to do, because you've got nowhere to go and when you get to Rose's Turn the audience is sitting there thinking that they've just been watching this all night. Actually, quite a lot of them seemed to be quite enjoying it, but they were old and don't get out much.
The theatre itself, the new Duchess, was absolutely horrible. It was nowhere near finished. I'm not even convinced it'll be any good when it is. The box office is immediately inside the door so if there's any queue at all some of you are waiting outside, and the seats are too close together, and there's visible wiring just clipped in place along the walls, and you can't get a black coffee, and they won't let you take your ice-cream back to your seat. What's to like?
That was the bad. The good was (of course) Derby Gilbert and Sullivan Company, doing HMS Pinafore and Fiddler on the Roof. Pinafore was a beautiful example of why Andrew Nicklin's productions are so highly regarded: superbly played and sung, and constantly inventive on stage without ever seeming to be working against the material. I'm not sure about the general idea of setting things in different periods - it seems to be the convention for Shakespeare and opera, that a director can say "I am setting this in 1960s London" or whatever and have sets and costumes to reflect that without changing a word or a note, bringing in an air of constant disconnection. But for this production we were clearly in the 1920s and it didn't worry me, partly I suppose because very little about Pinafore is specific to the exact date. There are one or two things - pocket boroughs, for example, were abolished by the Reform Act of 1867 - but I'm not going to quibble. A 1920s setting does enable the wonderful and priceless Charlotte Clement to use her real hair, that very nice bob which would look wrong anywhere except the 20s or now. But really, the details are insignificant, this was just an all-round really enjoyable production.
Then in the second half of the week they had the very different challenge of Fiddler on the Roof. Fiddler in some ways takes a lot more staging than Pinafore, because it is a Broadway-style musical with a lot of shortish scenes happening in different places rather than an operetta with a big static setting for each act. And it places much greater demands on your performing depth - of course, the chorus singing isn't as challenging as G&S, but you do need to fill a lot more small speaking roles. This was one of the two significant problems with the production, that several people in small roles were noticeably out of their depth. The other was the really noisy and pointless smoke machine. I know that Alan Jackson just loves things like smoke machines, but still, you don't actually need smoke ANYWHERE, let alone during "Far From The Home I Love", and if you can't release it silently you should just do without it instead of making a distracting noise behind a singer. I'm surprised Andrew Nicklin let this one past - he should have gone round the back after the dress rehearsal and just told them not to use it.
Also as ALWAYS the bottles in the bottle dance looked stupid because they clearly weren't glass, and one of the shirts that Golde put out on her washing-line had a modern-looking label in it. And at one point I thought Simon Theobald stumbled over a line and had to say something slightly different from what he was intending.
I think that's all the negative things I can think of to say. Apart from those, this was as close to a perfect Fiddler as I ever expect to see, and I do expect to see a lot. It really is a beautifully put-together musical, huge but with hardly any surplus parts, funny and serious, various but unified, a wonderful thing that shows what you can do with a musical that you can't do any other way, and this was a production to match its scope. Part of the secret, I think, of a good Fiddler is that nobody, not even Tevye, must be trying to big it up - if you all do it just the size it's written, it comes out right. Tevye is a funny guy but he's not a clown and his monologues aren't stand-up routines. If you just act then it doesn't slow it down and you don't have the discomfort of a jerk into seriousness when you need it. Similarly, it's too common to see a Yente who is underqualified for playing a lead and is determined to make the most of the biggest part she'll ever get, or will ever get again at any rate. But Joan Self pitched it beautifully. I've never seen that troublesome early scene with Golde and Yente ("nothing can kill a show like too much exposition") go so well. The production was filled with little things that turned out to have perfectly good reasons, like why was Jessica Nicklin wearing those glasses? So she can take them off when Fyedka comes on. I thought that was a great touch because Fyedka and Chava are pretty skimpily realised - there just isn't room for a lot of interaction between them, and if you're not careful it comes across as being all him making the running. Does she in fact care about him one way or the other? In the script itself we don't really see any evidence until we suddenly discover at quarter to ten that she's run off with him, so having those glasses there to give us a little extra insight into Chava is really nice. Again, why is one of the little girls carrying that doll around everywhere? I wondered about that all evening until the last 30 seconds of the show when she put it down on the front of the stage and I started crying.
The lovely orchestrations are never going to sound better than that either. There was a synth in the pit but as far as I could tell (I've only got one pair of ears and there was a lot else going on) all it was doing was providing the accordion and harp, both things which in smallish doses sound OK on a synth. What really kills you is when you start using it instead of strings, a depth to which I don't expect Andrew Nicklin ever to sink. All the strings were there and all the percussion and all the reeds - when Don Walker asks for a cor anglais you have to give him one, like in "You'll Never Walk Alone".
Incidentally, all three creators of Fiddler are still alive 46 years on, with a combined age of 265.
So, then the Disney. Good Companions and Beauty and the Beast. There is really hardly anything to say about this. It's not any flavour, is it? It's Disney. The baddies are more fun than the goodies, and the show seemed most alive when Gaston and LeFou were on, followed by the castle servants. The vapid goodies in cheap costumes just slowed it down. The whole thing felt a bit under-directed - when the actors weren't bringing it, there wasn't any it there. You wonder how interested Phil Simcox actually was. And where has all the money gone? They said, I think, that they had spend £45,000 on this production, but you'd never have known it. Many costumes (including Belle's blue and white in which she spends the whole of the first act) just didn't look like they fitted properly, and Keith Scott-Savage's shirt was just ridiculously inappropriate, rather like his performance. And as for the Beast's mask... it looked like something you would pick up for £3.99 in Tesco, and I suspect that's exactly what they did. The transformation can only have taken so long because he got his elastic stuck on his ears.
Also there were mistakes in the lighting. For 17 quid a ticket. Come on.
Still, if you just like Beauty and the Beast as a thing, and you wanted to see it on stage, here it was, slower and less sparkly than the film but all there and sung audibly and in tune. It will probably be better at Nottingham Operatic (although I'm a bit worried that they refuse to tell me who's in it - have they got some problem there?) and it will certainly be better at Christchurch Theatre Club, but I think that most of those around me were satisfied.
Going back to my question at the top, what we've learnt is what we already knew: directors matter. Choose your director carefully, kids, and be a bit cautious about one who never says no.
Sunday, 19 September 2010
new reading list
So it looks like there isn't a cheap way to buy this year's Booker Prize shortlist; even the almighty buying power of Book People hasn't been able to get the books down below fifteen quid each for the most expensive ones, which is too much.
This is a pity, because I was all geared up for a burst of modern-fiction-reading. So here's what I'm doing instead: I've found on my shelves six novels which have at some point in the past been shortlisted for the Booker, and I'm going to read them instead.
They are, in chronological order:
My chosen pseudo-random reading order is alphabetical by surname: Banville, Carey, Ghosh, Kneale, Lodge, McEwan. This puts the two which we already know won at either end of the list, pleasingly.
This is a pity, because I was all geared up for a burst of modern-fiction-reading. So here's what I'm doing instead: I've found on my shelves six novels which have at some point in the past been shortlisted for the Booker, and I'm going to read them instead.
They are, in chronological order:
- Small World by David Lodge (1984)
- Amsterdam by Ian McEwan (1998)
- English Passengers by Matthew Kneale (2000)
- The Sea by John Banville (2005)
- Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh (2008)
- Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey (2010)
My chosen pseudo-random reading order is alphabetical by surname: Banville, Carey, Ghosh, Kneale, Lodge, McEwan. This puts the two which we already know won at either end of the list, pleasingly.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
musicals for the autumn
The autumn season starts this evening with Gypsy in Long Eaton. Here are five musicals happening between now and the end of the year that I find particularly interesting.
Gypsy, Erewash Musical Society, September 13th - 18th
You don't see very many Gypsies around: it has no work at all for an adult chorus, except some dancers who should really be very young, and I suspect that it's a hard sell in spite of its moderate cult status among theatrical people. It is more than seven years since the last one I saw. I've found it a hard show to love but the real excitement here is that we're at the Duchess Theatre in Long Eaton, back in use for the first time since it burnt down in 2003. A new small theatre right on my doorstep is a terrifically exciting idea. Let us hope that with improved facilities EMS and LEOS will lift their standards - they are two companies who have persistently seemed to play to amdram cliches, static staging, old young women, choruses looking out into the auditorium to see Auntie Joan at idle moments. Perhaps we will see some life breathed into them now.
Fiddler on the Roof, Derby Gilbert and Sullivan Company, October 8th - 9th
Like last year, Derby G & S are doing two shows at the Derby Theatre, the old Playhouse, in the same week. They'd run out of easily sellable Savoy operas pretty quickly if they did two of them every year, so this year they're doing HMS Pinafore for three performances, taking a day off, and then doing Fiddler on the Roof for three performances. This'll be the first time I've seen them doing non-G & S and all I really know is that they're taking it pretty seriously, because I saw Peter Bostock last night and he's grown a beard for it. We know that it will be well sung, of course, but there are potential pitfalls here. In G & S it is a matter of convention that you often cast people who are wildly the wrong age for the part, as you do in opera (apparently), and you can stretch especially the heroines (who are all supposed to be very young) quite a long way before anything breaks. Fiddler falls apart sooner if one or more of Tevye's five unmarried daughters is quite obviously getting on for 40 or if their suitors are middle-aged. And whereas Andrew Nicklin's direction of G & S is always wonderful, I've not been so impressed with his American musicals for Derby Opera and Rolls-Royce. So we'll see.
Beauty and the Beast, Good Companions, October 12th - 16th
We're going to be having Beauty and the Beast for breakfast, lunch, and tea, and probably in church on Sundays too, in the next couple of years, just as we had Thoroughly Modern Millie and before that Jekyll and Hyde, but even more so. Fortunately we have a couple of what should be good productions to get us going, this one and Nottingham Operatic's a few weeks later, so we can get an idea of it and then not need to sit through whatever Mansfield and Ashbeians and LEOS make of it. (If we like it enough after twice then we can go and see what John Lewin makes of it with Christchurch in January.) I am slightly too old to have seen the film when young so I am uncertain about what to expect. It was a big effects show on Broadway and I guess this production will be trying to make a splash - Good Companions are back at the Derby Theatre for the first time since I think 2002 and I don't think they'll be skimping.
Parade, Greasepaint Productions, October 26th - 30th
Everyone must come to see this! If you don't come to see a production of Parade when one's available, then you will have only yourself to blame when all there is in the world is people doing Mamma Mia and Full Monty and Disney. Parade is one of the hardest and darkest musicals out there and it is typical of Greasepaint that they should be willing to give it a go, having taken on similar challenges in recent years with Sweeney Todd and Ragtime. I have never seen it performed and really I have no idea how it plays. But I am really looking forward to finding out.
Titanic, Little Theatre Company, November 15th - 20th
The mind boggles. It really does. Burton Brewhouse is a horrid place to put on a show of any scale, a narrow awkward stage with nowhere to move scenery to and nowhere to put a band and the stage on floor level at the front with a million short rows of seats rising steeply into the sky away from you. Little Theatre Company are (or used to be) laughably bad at doing musicals; I haven't been back there since they rolled out an absolutely dreadful King and I four years ago. And Titanic is enormous in its scale and ambition and amount of skill required. What is going to happen here? But as I said just now, if you don't come and see this sort of thing then everybody's just going to do Disco Inferno and "Back to the 80s", whatever that may be, for ever. So come and see it! What's the worst that could happen? (Apart from it hits an iceberg and everyone drowns.)
I don't think these are necessarily going to be the best five musicals of the autumn (in fact if they are I'll eat my head) but they're five interesting ones that I am certainly going to be at. I'll keep you posted.
Gypsy, Erewash Musical Society, September 13th - 18th
You don't see very many Gypsies around: it has no work at all for an adult chorus, except some dancers who should really be very young, and I suspect that it's a hard sell in spite of its moderate cult status among theatrical people. It is more than seven years since the last one I saw. I've found it a hard show to love but the real excitement here is that we're at the Duchess Theatre in Long Eaton, back in use for the first time since it burnt down in 2003. A new small theatre right on my doorstep is a terrifically exciting idea. Let us hope that with improved facilities EMS and LEOS will lift their standards - they are two companies who have persistently seemed to play to amdram cliches, static staging, old young women, choruses looking out into the auditorium to see Auntie Joan at idle moments. Perhaps we will see some life breathed into them now.
Fiddler on the Roof, Derby Gilbert and Sullivan Company, October 8th - 9th
Like last year, Derby G & S are doing two shows at the Derby Theatre, the old Playhouse, in the same week. They'd run out of easily sellable Savoy operas pretty quickly if they did two of them every year, so this year they're doing HMS Pinafore for three performances, taking a day off, and then doing Fiddler on the Roof for three performances. This'll be the first time I've seen them doing non-G & S and all I really know is that they're taking it pretty seriously, because I saw Peter Bostock last night and he's grown a beard for it. We know that it will be well sung, of course, but there are potential pitfalls here. In G & S it is a matter of convention that you often cast people who are wildly the wrong age for the part, as you do in opera (apparently), and you can stretch especially the heroines (who are all supposed to be very young) quite a long way before anything breaks. Fiddler falls apart sooner if one or more of Tevye's five unmarried daughters is quite obviously getting on for 40 or if their suitors are middle-aged. And whereas Andrew Nicklin's direction of G & S is always wonderful, I've not been so impressed with his American musicals for Derby Opera and Rolls-Royce. So we'll see.
Beauty and the Beast, Good Companions, October 12th - 16th
We're going to be having Beauty and the Beast for breakfast, lunch, and tea, and probably in church on Sundays too, in the next couple of years, just as we had Thoroughly Modern Millie and before that Jekyll and Hyde, but even more so. Fortunately we have a couple of what should be good productions to get us going, this one and Nottingham Operatic's a few weeks later, so we can get an idea of it and then not need to sit through whatever Mansfield and Ashbeians and LEOS make of it. (If we like it enough after twice then we can go and see what John Lewin makes of it with Christchurch in January.) I am slightly too old to have seen the film when young so I am uncertain about what to expect. It was a big effects show on Broadway and I guess this production will be trying to make a splash - Good Companions are back at the Derby Theatre for the first time since I think 2002 and I don't think they'll be skimping.
Parade, Greasepaint Productions, October 26th - 30th
Everyone must come to see this! If you don't come to see a production of Parade when one's available, then you will have only yourself to blame when all there is in the world is people doing Mamma Mia and Full Monty and Disney. Parade is one of the hardest and darkest musicals out there and it is typical of Greasepaint that they should be willing to give it a go, having taken on similar challenges in recent years with Sweeney Todd and Ragtime. I have never seen it performed and really I have no idea how it plays. But I am really looking forward to finding out.
Titanic, Little Theatre Company, November 15th - 20th
The mind boggles. It really does. Burton Brewhouse is a horrid place to put on a show of any scale, a narrow awkward stage with nowhere to move scenery to and nowhere to put a band and the stage on floor level at the front with a million short rows of seats rising steeply into the sky away from you. Little Theatre Company are (or used to be) laughably bad at doing musicals; I haven't been back there since they rolled out an absolutely dreadful King and I four years ago. And Titanic is enormous in its scale and ambition and amount of skill required. What is going to happen here? But as I said just now, if you don't come and see this sort of thing then everybody's just going to do Disco Inferno and "Back to the 80s", whatever that may be, for ever. So come and see it! What's the worst that could happen? (Apart from it hits an iceberg and everyone drowns.)
I don't think these are necessarily going to be the best five musicals of the autumn (in fact if they are I'll eat my head) but they're five interesting ones that I am certainly going to be at. I'll keep you posted.
Sunday, 5 September 2010
how to think about RemoteViews
The RemoteViews mechanism in android is used in two crucial places which anyone writing apps is going to have deal with sooner or later: home screen widgets and status-bar notifications. But the documentation for it lacks a high-level overview and so it is quite hard to understand. Here is that high-level overview.
First, a RemoteViews object is not, whatever you might think from its name, a View. It is similar but don't fall into the trap of thinking it is a subclass; it is more like an alternative.
The RemoteViews mechanism is a way of letting one process pass a chunk of screen to another process to be displayed as part of the second process's layout. You create a RemoteViews object by specifying the layout xml file you're going to use for your chunk of screen and then calling a series of methods to populate the various bits of the layout.
These methods are exactly analogous to the ones you could call on a View object if you'd just used that layout xml in your own process, but there's no underlying View for them to be called on so what's really happening is they're getting stored up to be called later at display-time. When you've finished setting things up how you want them you pass the RemoteViews object to the other process, the one that's going to be doing the displaying.
In the common case you don't do this directly: when your RemoteViews is going into a notification you set it as a field of the Notification object and then when you pass that Notification to the NotificationManager it does the IPC for you, and when your RemoteViews is going into a home screen widget you pass it to AppWidgetManager.updateAppWidget and that does the IPC. When the second process receives your RemoteViews object, with it having been appropriately serialized and deserialized in a way you don't have to worry about, it calls the apply() method on it and then it gets displayed: at this point there actually is a View object and all the things that you did earlier get applied to it.
You can never yourself get to this View object: it's in someone else's process, after all. If at some point you need to change what's in the View you have to fiddle the RemoteViews object and then pass it again to the process doing the displaying, and it has to go through the applying process again.
A note on calling the setFoo methods: these methods don't map one-to-one onto the familiar methods you would use to set attributes of a View. So for example if your layout xml file contains a TextView element which you've given an id using the android:id attribute in your xml - say android:id="@+id/title" - then you don't have a TextView to call setText on but rather you must call setCharSequence on your RemoteViews object, specifying as your first argument the id of the TextView element (in this case R.id.title) and as your second the name of the method you really want to call, in this case "setText". The third argument will then be the actual text you want to put into the TextView. This means that you can only get to methods of the eventual View which take a single argument, and only if that argument is of one of the types which RemoteViews supports. It also means that in effect your method type checking is put off until run time: if it turns out that there is no method setText(CharSequence) on a TextView, you get an exception when the other process tries to show your view and that's the first you know about it. So you have to be careful. Observe also that you have to be more precise with thinking about types: there is no method setText(String) on a TextView but normally you can act as if there is because a String is a CharSequence so you will just get setText(CharSequence) instead. But if you try to do the same thing with RemoteViews, by calling setString instead of setCharSequence, then it won't work and you won't find out until you get the exception at run time.
First, a RemoteViews object is not, whatever you might think from its name, a View. It is similar but don't fall into the trap of thinking it is a subclass; it is more like an alternative.
The RemoteViews mechanism is a way of letting one process pass a chunk of screen to another process to be displayed as part of the second process's layout. You create a RemoteViews object by specifying the layout xml file you're going to use for your chunk of screen and then calling a series of methods to populate the various bits of the layout.
These methods are exactly analogous to the ones you could call on a View object if you'd just used that layout xml in your own process, but there's no underlying View for them to be called on so what's really happening is they're getting stored up to be called later at display-time. When you've finished setting things up how you want them you pass the RemoteViews object to the other process, the one that's going to be doing the displaying.
In the common case you don't do this directly: when your RemoteViews is going into a notification you set it as a field of the Notification object and then when you pass that Notification to the NotificationManager it does the IPC for you, and when your RemoteViews is going into a home screen widget you pass it to AppWidgetManager.updateAppWidget and that does the IPC. When the second process receives your RemoteViews object, with it having been appropriately serialized and deserialized in a way you don't have to worry about, it calls the apply() method on it and then it gets displayed: at this point there actually is a View object and all the things that you did earlier get applied to it.
You can never yourself get to this View object: it's in someone else's process, after all. If at some point you need to change what's in the View you have to fiddle the RemoteViews object and then pass it again to the process doing the displaying, and it has to go through the applying process again.
A note on calling the setFoo methods: these methods don't map one-to-one onto the familiar methods you would use to set attributes of a View. So for example if your layout xml file contains a TextView element which you've given an id using the android:id attribute in your xml - say android:id="@+id/title" - then you don't have a TextView to call setText on but rather you must call setCharSequence on your RemoteViews object, specifying as your first argument the id of the TextView element (in this case R.id.title) and as your second the name of the method you really want to call, in this case "setText". The third argument will then be the actual text you want to put into the TextView. This means that you can only get to methods of the eventual View which take a single argument, and only if that argument is of one of the types which RemoteViews supports. It also means that in effect your method type checking is put off until run time: if it turns out that there is no method setText(CharSequence) on a TextView, you get an exception when the other process tries to show your view and that's the first you know about it. So you have to be careful. Observe also that you have to be more precise with thinking about types: there is no method setText(String) on a TextView but normally you can act as if there is because a String is a CharSequence so you will just get setText(CharSequence) instead. But if you try to do the same thing with RemoteViews, by calling setString instead of setCharSequence, then it won't work and you won't find out until you get the exception at run time.
Tuesday, 17 August 2010
The Last 5 Years
What do we expect out of a musical? We want imaginative, creative direction but we don't want direction for the sake of it; sometimes you can be imaginative and creative and come up with something that isn't any good. It is easy to confuse imagination and creativity with originality; just because something has come to you from nowhere in a spark of sudden inspiration doesn't mean that it hasn't previously come to a hundred other people or wouldn't come to them if they were in your situation. And even an original idea does not always turn out to be a good one.
What is or should be a director's object in a musical? I don't want always to see everything done in the way I would have thought of, but I do expect a director to have done his or her job with me in mind, in other words to have directed a musical for people who are willing to pay close attention and who want to have that attention rewarded. What annoys me is when a director seems to have thought "that would be good" in the abstract; there is no good apart from what is good for the audience. Inaudibility, for example, is an absolute fault: if I can't hear the words then the director has failed to do the job, no matter what his or her artistic motivation. Showing off is a fault: I may often criticise a director for being incoherent, but I don't think I've ever criticised one for being too self-effacing. A musical that's worth doing at all is worth doing the way that it's written (even if it is also worth doing in other ways).
How much slack should we cut a young, relatively inexperienced director? Some, of course. I'm sure that John Lewin himself looks back on some of his early work and thinks that he could have done it better. I often see musicals directed by established directors who seem to keep getting asked back only because committees are reluctant to give someone new a shot; when you do see a new director it is often someone whose main qualification seems to be that they are an established performer. Sometimes this works well (Phil Simcox, for example), and sometimes it doesn't. So seeing someone direct because they have themselves apparently decided to take the bull by the horns is unquestionably a good thing, and if it happened more often the world would be a better place.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that of course I'm glad that Oliver Metcalfe did Last 5 Years, and I wish him every success, but I still sat there annoyed at his not having done it very well. The two singers were very confident, knew the piece well, and were not apparently reliant on being able to see the musical director (who was playing a hard piano part and not conducting in any case) - so why did the band need to be down the front? If you put them at the back of the stage and moved the whole production six to eight feet towards the audience you transform the show. This is a beautiful and personal and intimate piece; it is built entirely around the characters and the audience's personal connection with them. The closer they are to us the better. The ideal production would be in a small room with no raised stage, just six musicians behind the actors and lightly raked seats. Chad's Octagon would be absolutely ideal for it. If you are going to lift it away from the audience you need to keep that intimacy. Catherine Orton's production at that benighted leisure centre two years ago was an absolute model. It occurs to me to wonder whether they intended until they got to the dress rehearsal to use the pit under the stage; that would explain why neither of the performers set foot on the board which covers it all evening. Even if they did, the correct solution should have been obvious when they got into the theatre.
Of course, if you'd done that then you wouldn't have been able to bring the tabs across to change the set slightly in the middle and then change it back again. But why did you want to do that? What does it add? It just distracts. It isn't even textually defensible; the middle set (for the wedding) has a cross at the back but Jamie wouldn't get married in a church; as we establish at the beginning, he's Jewish and seems to be if not observant at the very least still actively immersed in Jewish culture (all those Shabbas dinners in Washington Heights). The whole thing is designed to work on one set that never moves or changes; trust that and your other problems go away.
So, the performers. Oliver Metcalfe is certainly talented but on this evidence is not multi-dimensional; we got a whole evening of the bow-wow style, popular on Broadway (or at least on Broadway cast recordings) but not yielding the sort of subtlety that I would have enjoyed, and were left with the impression that he was playing no-one but himself. It seemed of a piece with the performance that he had made no visible costume effort at all; it isn't very hard to dress plausibly like a 20-something New Yorker in the late 1990s or early 2000s but he didn't do it (they didn't wear their jeans down below the hips like 18-year-olds do nowadays). And he didn't go to any lengths to look Jewish either; it can't be impossible to dye your hair dark for a week (although I admit that it might be difficult, especially if you want the original colour back at the end of the week). I know I'm carping but I have high standards! What he could have done with was a director; anyone directing themselves in leading role is always going to end up being self-indulgent. Perhaps it works best when you are playing a character who is designed to work when self-centred (I'm thinking of Shane Perry's Sweeney and his Mack Sennett), but the difficulty of playing Jamie is that he seems like such a horrible person - a self-directed performer is only likely to slip further in this direction, it seems to me.
Jessica Nicklin. Aaaaaaah Jessica Nicklin.
Jessica Nicklin was absolutely splendid. We expect no less, of course. I love agile communicative performers. Cathy walks a fine line between appealingly vulnerable and shakeworthy doormat and we had just about the right balance.
Her costumes also looked pretty hastily assembled but she looked the part (she can only be 18 but didn't have any trouble coming across a few years older) and her accent was stable; this has been a problem in the past, wandering around the South and everywhere else in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas last year, but she seemed to have it pretty well nailed for Wizard of Oz and it was fine again here.
I like nothing more than unashamedly serious character-driven musicals and I'm in favour of young people and of trying something; so why am I half-hearted about having enjoyed this production? Is it because I find actively bad direction, identifiable mistakes, more annoying than passively bad direction? Because I don't like Jamie? Because it just turned up at the wrong time for me to get the most out of it? I don't know. I find myself in the odd position of seemingly having more to criticise than to praise but also of thinking that whatever we might have had differently, we unquestionably in a broad sense need more of this sort of thing.
What is or should be a director's object in a musical? I don't want always to see everything done in the way I would have thought of, but I do expect a director to have done his or her job with me in mind, in other words to have directed a musical for people who are willing to pay close attention and who want to have that attention rewarded. What annoys me is when a director seems to have thought "that would be good" in the abstract; there is no good apart from what is good for the audience. Inaudibility, for example, is an absolute fault: if I can't hear the words then the director has failed to do the job, no matter what his or her artistic motivation. Showing off is a fault: I may often criticise a director for being incoherent, but I don't think I've ever criticised one for being too self-effacing. A musical that's worth doing at all is worth doing the way that it's written (even if it is also worth doing in other ways).
How much slack should we cut a young, relatively inexperienced director? Some, of course. I'm sure that John Lewin himself looks back on some of his early work and thinks that he could have done it better. I often see musicals directed by established directors who seem to keep getting asked back only because committees are reluctant to give someone new a shot; when you do see a new director it is often someone whose main qualification seems to be that they are an established performer. Sometimes this works well (Phil Simcox, for example), and sometimes it doesn't. So seeing someone direct because they have themselves apparently decided to take the bull by the horns is unquestionably a good thing, and if it happened more often the world would be a better place.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that of course I'm glad that Oliver Metcalfe did Last 5 Years, and I wish him every success, but I still sat there annoyed at his not having done it very well. The two singers were very confident, knew the piece well, and were not apparently reliant on being able to see the musical director (who was playing a hard piano part and not conducting in any case) - so why did the band need to be down the front? If you put them at the back of the stage and moved the whole production six to eight feet towards the audience you transform the show. This is a beautiful and personal and intimate piece; it is built entirely around the characters and the audience's personal connection with them. The closer they are to us the better. The ideal production would be in a small room with no raised stage, just six musicians behind the actors and lightly raked seats. Chad's Octagon would be absolutely ideal for it. If you are going to lift it away from the audience you need to keep that intimacy. Catherine Orton's production at that benighted leisure centre two years ago was an absolute model. It occurs to me to wonder whether they intended until they got to the dress rehearsal to use the pit under the stage; that would explain why neither of the performers set foot on the board which covers it all evening. Even if they did, the correct solution should have been obvious when they got into the theatre.
Of course, if you'd done that then you wouldn't have been able to bring the tabs across to change the set slightly in the middle and then change it back again. But why did you want to do that? What does it add? It just distracts. It isn't even textually defensible; the middle set (for the wedding) has a cross at the back but Jamie wouldn't get married in a church; as we establish at the beginning, he's Jewish and seems to be if not observant at the very least still actively immersed in Jewish culture (all those Shabbas dinners in Washington Heights). The whole thing is designed to work on one set that never moves or changes; trust that and your other problems go away.
So, the performers. Oliver Metcalfe is certainly talented but on this evidence is not multi-dimensional; we got a whole evening of the bow-wow style, popular on Broadway (or at least on Broadway cast recordings) but not yielding the sort of subtlety that I would have enjoyed, and were left with the impression that he was playing no-one but himself. It seemed of a piece with the performance that he had made no visible costume effort at all; it isn't very hard to dress plausibly like a 20-something New Yorker in the late 1990s or early 2000s but he didn't do it (they didn't wear their jeans down below the hips like 18-year-olds do nowadays). And he didn't go to any lengths to look Jewish either; it can't be impossible to dye your hair dark for a week (although I admit that it might be difficult, especially if you want the original colour back at the end of the week). I know I'm carping but I have high standards! What he could have done with was a director; anyone directing themselves in leading role is always going to end up being self-indulgent. Perhaps it works best when you are playing a character who is designed to work when self-centred (I'm thinking of Shane Perry's Sweeney and his Mack Sennett), but the difficulty of playing Jamie is that he seems like such a horrible person - a self-directed performer is only likely to slip further in this direction, it seems to me.
Jessica Nicklin. Aaaaaaah Jessica Nicklin.
Jessica Nicklin was absolutely splendid. We expect no less, of course. I love agile communicative performers. Cathy walks a fine line between appealingly vulnerable and shakeworthy doormat and we had just about the right balance.
Her costumes also looked pretty hastily assembled but she looked the part (she can only be 18 but didn't have any trouble coming across a few years older) and her accent was stable; this has been a problem in the past, wandering around the South and everywhere else in Best Little Whorehouse in Texas last year, but she seemed to have it pretty well nailed for Wizard of Oz and it was fine again here.
I like nothing more than unashamedly serious character-driven musicals and I'm in favour of young people and of trying something; so why am I half-hearted about having enjoyed this production? Is it because I find actively bad direction, identifiable mistakes, more annoying than passively bad direction? Because I don't like Jamie? Because it just turned up at the wrong time for me to get the most out of it? I don't know. I find myself in the odd position of seemingly having more to criticise than to praise but also of thinking that whatever we might have had differently, we unquestionably in a broad sense need more of this sort of thing.
Friday, 13 August 2010
awesome on Fedora 13
Not only is the awesome window manager not shipped with Fedora 13, it doesn't even compile. Here's why, and how to fix it.
awesome communicates with the X server not through the xlib library like most people do, but through the newer xcb library. Under the hood both of these libraries talk the same X wire protocol to the server, which is why the server never needs to care which you're using. The principal relevant advantage of xcb here seems to be what the xcb people call "latency hiding" and Julien Danjou, the rather enthusiastic awesome lead developer, calls being "asynchronous" as opposed to "synchronous". As awesome uses the cairo library to do some of its drawing, it needs to have an xcb-enabled version of cairo available; the version of cairo shipped with Fedora 13 is not so enabled.
Fortunately, it is easy to build your own cairo:
You can now build awesome in the usual way: download and untar the source then run "make", and as root "make install".
Now you've read that, here's the easy way: go to http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/thm/awesome/ , where Thomas Moschny has made available a modified cairo rpm and an awesome rpm to go with it. You can add one file, which he gives you, to your /etc/yum.repos.d and then just "yum install awesome". But aren't you glad you know what's happening and why you had to do that?
To make awesome your default window manager within the default Fedora GNOME setup, run:
gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager awesome --type=string
If you're going to run awesome, you probably won't want the GNOME panel so you can disable it:
gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/panel true --type string
GNOME needs to think you have a panel configured but this command just sets /bin/true to be your panel so you don't get anything displayed.
Configuring and using awesome is outside of the scope of this document. But stick with it and soon you will find that all other ways of using a computer feel terribly clumsy.
awesome communicates with the X server not through the xlib library like most people do, but through the newer xcb library. Under the hood both of these libraries talk the same X wire protocol to the server, which is why the server never needs to care which you're using. The principal relevant advantage of xcb here seems to be what the xcb people call "latency hiding" and Julien Danjou, the rather enthusiastic awesome lead developer, calls being "asynchronous" as opposed to "synchronous". As awesome uses the cairo library to do some of its drawing, it needs to have an xcb-enabled version of cairo available; the version of cairo shipped with Fedora 13 is not so enabled.
Fortunately, it is easy to build your own cairo:
- install the xcb-devel and xcb-util-devel rpms from Fedora (this should be just "yum install xcb-devel xcb-util-devel" if you're set up properly).
- grab the cairo source rpm from a Fedora mirror: source rpms are in releases/13/Fedora/source/SRPMS/ and the Fedora mirror list is at http://mirrors.fedoraproject.org/publiclist/Fedora/13/ .
- install the cairo source rpm - this will give you a bunch of files in /root/rpmbuild , assuming you haven't changed your setup to make it do something else.
- edit the cairo specfile (/root/rpmbuild/SPECS/cairo.spec) to build with xcb. All this needs is adding an extra argument, "--enable-xcb" to the configure invocation at line 58 of the file. You should also increment the release number (line 8 of the file) so that rpm will be able to see the package you're building is newer than the currently installed one. For bonus points, you can add an entry to the top of the changelog, but if you're not going to be distributing your new rpm nobody except me and Santa will ever know whether you do this or not.
- build a new cairo rpm: "rpmbuild -ba cairo.spec". This will leave you with newly built cairo and cairo-devel rpms in /root/rpmbuild/RPMS .
- install these rpms directly with the rpm command.
You can now build awesome in the usual way: download and untar the source then run "make", and as root "make install".
Now you've read that, here's the easy way: go to http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/thm/awesome/ , where Thomas Moschny has made available a modified cairo rpm and an awesome rpm to go with it. You can add one file, which he gives you, to your /etc/yum.repos.d and then just "yum install awesome". But aren't you glad you know what's happening and why you had to do that?
To make awesome your default window manager within the default Fedora GNOME setup, run:
gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager awesome --type=string
If you're going to run awesome, you probably won't want the GNOME panel so you can disable it:
gconftool-2 --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/panel true --type string
GNOME needs to think you have a panel configured but this command just sets /bin/true to be your panel so you don't get anything displayed.
Configuring and using awesome is outside of the scope of this document. But stick with it and soon you will find that all other ways of using a computer feel terribly clumsy.
Monday, 22 March 2010
Jake Thackray playlists
All of Jake Thackray's recorded music, more or less, is available on Spotify, but not in a way that makes it very easy to get at. EMI's 4-CD box set contains all four of his studio albums, plus an entire acoustic alternative of one of them, plus a load of extras, but as far as Spotify is concerned it's just 4 CDs. So I've put together some playlists to make it easier to pick one of the albums and listen to it, and here are the links. His first album was Last Will and Testament; its orchestrations don't at all reflect his live performance style so you may prefer to listen to the acoustic version, although the track listing is not exactly the same. His second album was Jake's Progress and his third Bantam Cock, with decreasing amounts of accompaniment, and in his last album, On Again On Again, he finally got down to the sound of a man and a guitar, much the most natural way to hear him. There's also a live album, released as Live Performance, containing 29 songs. I've collected the miscellaneous songs from the box set into another playlist for completeness - these seem to be a mixture of demos, singles, alternate takes, and songs that were rejected for the released albums.
There are two collections also on Spotify, Lah Di Dah and The Very Best Of Jake Thackray. These each contain assorted tracks from the individual albums.
The links in this post are all to the http URLs that Spotify generates for you, not to their "spotify:" pseudo-URLs. I don't know whether that's better for you or not. Please let me know if you have a preference.
There are two collections also on Spotify, Lah Di Dah and The Very Best Of Jake Thackray. These each contain assorted tracks from the individual albums.
The links in this post are all to the http URLs that Spotify generates for you, not to their "spotify:" pseudo-URLs. I don't know whether that's better for you or not. Please let me know if you have a preference.
Saturday, 2 January 2010
this year things
"I will not call anyone nellie or butch, unless that is his name."
This isn't a resolution thing - as any fule kno, serious resolutions are for Valentine's not for the new year - but a statement of intentions thing. So this year you can shout at me if I fail to do the following:
- learn Japanese. Japanese is challenging because it's completely unlike English - not just different writing systems, but completely unrelated vocabulary and syntax and everything. But it's not as challenging as some languages would be; the pronunciation is not exceptionally hard for an English speaker (not as hard as Chinese, for example) and of course there's lots of it around to practise on on the web. I'm starting off by fiddling around with whatever learn-yourself-Japanese stuff I can find on the web and by learning the hiragana, one of the three writing systems. I don't really know how I'm going to get the rest of the way. I'll have a look in Waterstone's tomorrow.
- get out of my job. I don't know that I want another one that's just the same sort of thing with possibly more money and fewer asshole colleagues (if you work with me you know who I mean); at some point you've got to do something you actually want to do. If only I had a better-defined idea of what that is.
- draw more. I've not been doing very well at learning to draw, partly because it is rather disheartening to be doing it badly. But you never improve if you don't practise.
- finish decorating my billiard room. I've got some sort of idea of how it's going to look and as I'm not hugely inconvenienced by not having the room available to use, I can take my time and do it properly. So no deadline, but it's only a small room and so some evening and weekend time should get some progress made.
-blog. I'll be blogging progress on all of the above and attempting to write something about the musicals I see - I seem to have a lot of strong opinions that nobody hears except my mother in the car on the way home from the theatre or Jarrod at work the next day. Now everyone who wants is going to be able to hear them! So possibly just my mother.
- be clearer. Now I have written this list one thing that is clear is that I am unclear - I don't seem to know how I'm going to do the things I want to do or really why. We'll have to see how that goes.
This isn't a resolution thing - as any fule kno, serious resolutions are for Valentine's not for the new year - but a statement of intentions thing. So this year you can shout at me if I fail to do the following:
- learn Japanese. Japanese is challenging because it's completely unlike English - not just different writing systems, but completely unrelated vocabulary and syntax and everything. But it's not as challenging as some languages would be; the pronunciation is not exceptionally hard for an English speaker (not as hard as Chinese, for example) and of course there's lots of it around to practise on on the web. I'm starting off by fiddling around with whatever learn-yourself-Japanese stuff I can find on the web and by learning the hiragana, one of the three writing systems. I don't really know how I'm going to get the rest of the way. I'll have a look in Waterstone's tomorrow.
- get out of my job. I don't know that I want another one that's just the same sort of thing with possibly more money and fewer asshole colleagues (if you work with me you know who I mean); at some point you've got to do something you actually want to do. If only I had a better-defined idea of what that is.
- draw more. I've not been doing very well at learning to draw, partly because it is rather disheartening to be doing it badly. But you never improve if you don't practise.
- finish decorating my billiard room. I've got some sort of idea of how it's going to look and as I'm not hugely inconvenienced by not having the room available to use, I can take my time and do it properly. So no deadline, but it's only a small room and so some evening and weekend time should get some progress made.
-blog. I'll be blogging progress on all of the above and attempting to write something about the musicals I see - I seem to have a lot of strong opinions that nobody hears except my mother in the car on the way home from the theatre or Jarrod at work the next day. Now everyone who wants is going to be able to hear them! So possibly just my mother.
- be clearer. Now I have written this list one thing that is clear is that I am unclear - I don't seem to know how I'm going to do the things I want to do or really why. We'll have to see how that goes.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)