Genuine Inspiration

Saw most of Invictus, the film about the Springboks winning the Rugby World Cup in 1995, this evening, but still haven't watched the whole thing. On two earlier occasions I'd watched and enjoyed the last hour or so, almost despite myself. I'm not a great one for manipulatively inspirational movies and that's what Clint Eastwood as director went all out to provide. But I could live with this one since Mandela clearly, unashamedly went out to manipulate his nation and the world through the tournament and succeeded magnificently for the best of reasons. (By the way, Morgan Freeman is just astonishing as Mandela. He becomes the great man such that when a final photograph of the real president comes up in the credits you almost assume it's another shot of Freeman.)

Seeing more of the earlier part of the film added enormously to its power and quality since this is much darker than the later segments and makes no bones at all about the faultlines in South African society and how close to impossible it was going to be to ever create bridges across them. But Mandela did it.

I'm thinking now of three moments in my life when what Mandela stood for (and stands for) loomed large. One was the final itself and seeing him in that green and gold shirt with some small understanding, now enhanced by the movie, of what that meant. Secondly listening to Elvis Costello sing Free Nelson Mandel with The Specials back in the dark ages, and realising that his freedom was a real possibility and people's voices together might just be able to change the unalterable. And thirdly, watching him walk out of his prison on a live tv broadcast and knowing, just knowing, that something huge was possible.

The weight on those shoulders. The size of the man!

Gripped

We've now completed the third episode (from fourteen) from the BBC's Little Dorrit adaptation. Noi is well and truly hooked, and I'm just a fanboy anyway so my allegiance was secure from the opening frames. Great pace to the series. The opener was an hour long but after that we're dealing with thirty minute episodes and they just shoot along. Unlike the film the adaptation stays true to the secondary characters - so far, at least - so we get all the melodramatic rigmarole of Rigaud and Miss Wade and Tattycoram, and very fine it is, especially in this medium.

Was a bit disconcerted by the relative youth of Arthur at the beginning, probably influenced by the definitive Derek Jacobi performance in the film, but I reckon I'll come to terms with it. It certainly makes the idea of some kind of attraction on the part of Amy more believably normative, but perhaps I sort of prefer the odd unnaturalness that the film achieved. I think there should be something a little uncomfortable about it all.

London is splendid, teeming with life, resplendent with jarring contrasts. The huge canvas a reminder not just of Dickens's extraordinary ambition, but also of a compelling moral vision that sought to bring these things together in some sort of coherence.

There's always a churning, powerful sense of outrage simmering beneath the swiftly-shifting surfaces. But this is a kind of generous, controlled outrage - the kind that somehow gets things done.

Sobering News

An easy way to get depressed this week has been to pay attention to the news. Mind you, I suppose that's true of any week you care to mention.

I was startled this afternoon to hear some figures about the incidence of rape and assaults of a sexual nature on women, these being discussed in a decently sober, sensible manner on Sky News. (Why the Murdoch-owned British Sky News is vastly superior to his dreadful Fox News is one of life's more refreshing mysteries.) I assume the figures related to women in the UK and they made for some very discomforting reflections. One in ten women said they'd been raped and almost a third of all women sexually assaulted.

Now the figures came with plenty of controversy attached, and it struck me that I'd certainly like to hear or read more debate as to their veracity, but even so. If they come reasonably close to reflecting reality then that reality is even more depressing than I had begun to imagine.

It strikes me that this would make a good topic for a TOK presentation, assuming the presenter were genuinely interested in establishing some degree of precision regarding the generating and handling of the data and not merely in attitudinising.

All Smiles

We went down town this afternoon, to Orchard Road no less, where I felt utterly out of place, quite enjoying my rampant sense of alienation if truth be told. I think it's encountering buildings that light up like demented Christmas trees that does it - it being to make me feel like someone who's just walked in from a simpler rather backward world to a place that's a bit too forward for its own good. Fortunately most of the inhabitants looked as ill-at-ease as I felt; distinctly, uncomfortably, human amidst all the glitter.

The brightest smiles I saw were plastered on the faces of three young people featured on the side of a bus in an advertisement for one of the local universities. They were gathered around an avuncular old chap, also looking rather cheerful, as a result, so the ad seemed to claim, of carrying out some sort of successful research. This struck me as odd. The encounter with new-found knowledge is far more likely to lead to a sense of despair, I reckon. Maybe they were faking it, after all?

Making It Up

Spent some time today - it wasn't that much time actually, but it felt like a lot - viewing some of the talking heads on Fox News manufacturing remarkable amounts of outrage about almost everything they could think of to be outraged over, which was plenty. Oddly it included little, if anything at all, of the sort of stuff you'd think would make a sentient being get hot under the collar.

I've known for quite some time, being particularly prone to it, what a dangerous emotion righteous indignation is. But watching it in action on this scale scale struck me as providing the perfect cure. The problem is though that some folk obviously find this stuff deeply inspirational. In fact, I reckon some of the talking heads themselves are so in love with their own rhetoric that they end up almost fooling themselves.

It is, by the way, of some interest to consider the fact that if they aren't fooling themselves they qualify as genuinely wicked.

Plots

Enjoyed the plotting of the first Wallander novel. Surprised by Mankell's deliberately protracted ending, but pleasantly so. The loose end also was unexpected, but a reminder that life is full of them. There are no neat plots in reality, but a good story needs a sense of forward momentum which is often achieved by deliberate simplifications, or, rather, powerfully synthesising insights that make sense of complexity and render it tractable, graspable, readable.

Heard some other fascinating stories today, tied to broad sweeps of narrative - one of which concerned the history of this island. A reminder that wherever you are is always more interesting than your limited understanding can ever grasp. Lots of necessary loose ends, and what looks like a reasonably happy ending for one of the narratives, insofar as any story ever really ends, insofar as any story can ever engender anything close to happiness.

A Useful Comparison

Here's one thing that might usefully cheer anybody up: no matter how bad your day has been, Kurt Wallander's has been one heck of a lot worse.

(Actually my day has been a rather jolly one, things all told. Just saying.)

Pastures New

I'm finding myself really bothered by the painful lack of progress, or substance, or whatever, in my reading over the last couple of months. I had intended to mention that I was still moving steadily through the wonderful Collected Causley the other day, when it occurred to me that I embarked on my read-through over a year ago, so that wasn't much of a defence.

Having put down the Diamond I picked up my American Library Thoreau, the one with Walden in it, and that was going to be my reading for the month ahead. Again, rather embarrassingly I made a false start on Walden not so long ago, further evidence of my lack of application in the one area I'm supposed to maintain as evidence of a life of the mind.

So I took advantage of a visit to Holland Village in the late afternoon with Noi to pop into the second hand bookshop there in search of something trashy but good, if you see what I mean. I reckon this is the roughage that's been missing from my reading diet for quite a while, ever since I got quite puritanical about buying books and ensuring I finished everything actually already on my shelves. I came away with the first of Henning Mankell's Wallander novels and a dirt cheap biography of Tolstoy - the one by Aylmer Maude - which I'd been thinking of getting and reading ahead of teaching Anna Karenina this year, just for the fun of it really since it's well out of date.

The odd thing was that with a couple of cheap paperbacks in my bag I suddenly felt a whole lot better, and even more so when I read the opening of Faceless Killers, the Wallander novel, and found myself at the mercy of the narrative.

Conclusions

Grateful for a space of time in which I can breathe over the weekend I've been finishing things off, and most enjoyably so. I surprised myself by completing the most sustained act of viewing of the small screen in my recent history by watching the last three episodes (out of seven) of Tinker, Tailor... yesterday. I immediately informed the Missus, who'd passed on the experience this time, that I'd be happy to watch it again along with her if she so desired. She's thinking about it.

And then it was on to completion of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, a tome, I'm embarrassed to tell you, I actually got started on as long ago as January. Completely bought into the main argument, but got a wee bit lost in some of the detail. There's a note in the back from the good prof in which he comments on his own dispassionate account of how peoples conquered and slaughtered other peoples and he recommends something with the passion he distances himself from as a corrective. But I thought his distanced persepective itself conveyed an extraordinary moral power and sense of outrage: there is no excuse for what we do to harm others, even if we seek one in the mess of history. It was, it is, all about domination.

In between all this we watched the first half of my newly acquired As You Like It DVD, the one filmed at the new Globe. Noi got hooked by Act 1, Scene 2. Who said the story doesn't count?

Great Guitar Solos 3

I suppose if I ever have to name my top ten albums of all time Stevie Wonder's Talking Book is going to be in there, though it's going to be difficult to leave out Innervisions and I'm not sure I can make room for two albums, even from the mighty Little Stevie, as he once used to be. I think Talking Book edges it though on the strength of the last two tracks on side 2, and it's on one of these that Jeff Beck provides a solo that defines good taste, charm and a whole raft of other qualities usually disregarded when one considers the guitar solo as a sort of genre in itself.

Actually there are two lead guitars credited on the track in question, from Jeff Beck and Buzzy Feton, but it's the solo following the initial chorus of I'm lookin' for another pure love in my life, from which the song takes its title, that wins my heart, and I assume it features Jeff as you can hear Stevie saying, Take it away Jeff after the initial few notes. You also hear him chuckling, as if delighted at the perfection of the playing in terms of the mood of the track, quite early in the solo and towards the end. In fact, all the guitar work on the song featuring both players is quite lovely, embroidering thin almost ethereal lines in and around the gorgeous melody, and equally gorgeous sound world of synthesisers, vocals and percussion that bodies forth the piece. (I know that sounds odd, but it's the only way I can describe what Stevie and his producers seem to be doing here, and on the other albums of this period. It's as if they are inventing a new vocabulary for popular song following the excitement of realising what might be done with the technology of the period. On many tracks you really have to work hard to figure out what exactly is being played even though it sounds absolutely right - especially in the lower depths. The Moog bass, if that's what it is, is just from another place.)

But back to the solo. I'm guessing that with the exception of the falling line that comes towards the end it isn't terribly difficult to play. There are no pyrotechnics here, and this from a player who is capable of unleashing the ultimate in fretboard fireworks. But that sense of restraint is at the heart of what makes it work musically, as if the top notes are striving to go somewhere that no one can reach. Ultimately the player is saying, Don't look at me, but listen to this beautiful thing that I'm just a part of. Very good advice in this case.