I once wrote a ponderous blog post about Wikipedia’s flaws. Now I learn that there is a famous Onion article that makes my points in a much more amusing way. Enjoy.
Arts & Letters
Review of Perfume:The Story of a Murderer
It was about twenty years ago that I first realized that not everyone had a sense of smell that was as keen as my own.
A young lady I was sweet on was strolling with me through a mall, and she wanted to go in to one of those stores that sell fripperies for your bed-and-bath. I had always avoided those places because I dislike strong smells, but this time around there was a girl urging me on. Which one of my male readers hasn’t done something against their natures when a woman is involved?
The interior of the store was just as you would expect. There were sachets, jars of potpourri, perfumed soap, body oils, body washes, shampoos, and various bath oils. The odors had all percolated, mixed together, and produced an overpowering miasma that filled every corner of the store. If there is a hell where bad flowers go when they die, then that store was a portal to that particular perdition.
But I noticed something curious while I was in there. I kept running into people! I would turn or take a step back, absolutely sure that there was no one to trip me up, and I would end up stepping on some poor sap’s foot. What the hell was going on?
“Cry ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!'”
London’s National Film Theatre, one of the most useful institutions in this city (when it does not fill its entire programme with gay and lesbian films from Outer Mongolia) is running a Lawrence Olivier season in August and September. Naturally, the four Shakesperian films are shown and “Henry V” has been given pride of place with a certain number of disclaimers by critics who, over the years, have had to acknowledge with pursed lips that, despite its heroism and emphasis on patriotism, the film is superb. Some of us might think that contrariwise, the heroism and patriotism add to the quality of the film but that is probably why we are not film critics.
Made during the war, with Olivier taking time out from his service with Fleet Air Arm, it does emphasise patriotic ideals, in particular ideals of England. As it happens, none of that was invented by the film-makers the lines, the images, the concepts are there in Shakespeare’s play, which is what makes them so interesting.
Cinematically the film is mesmerizing, beginning and ending with a panorama shot of Elizabethan London, carefully recreated from contemporary prints. Famously, Olivier accepted and incorporated into the film the sheer theatricality of the play. We start with a raucous performance of “The Chronicle History of King Henry the Fift with His Battell Fought at Agincourt in France”, during which the Chorus, played by Leslie Banks, urges us to expand the play in our imagination to take in England and France, and opens out first into the Boar’s Head Inn, where Falstaff is dying, then the two courts, the armies and the battles themselves. William Walton’s music spreads through the film.
The opened up scenes are not particularly realistic though the battle and the sight of the dead afterwards affect one with melancholy about the horrors of war, no matter what modern critics might say. But it is all artificial, with scenery, costumes, group shots based quite clearly and enchantingly on late mediaeval miniatures. The film was shot in Technicolour, another thing the programme notes see fit to apologize for (it did seem amazing to those unsophisticated audiences in the forties, honest) and the artificial look of it adds to the splendour of the film and makes it a more consistent work of art than Kenneth Branagh’s “gritty and realistic” version made forty-odd years later. Of the two, it was Olivier who served in Fleet Air Arm, having returned to Britain in 1941 from Hollywood, and there have even been stories of him having been recruited into the Special Operations Executive (SOE) to build up support for Britain in the United States while it was still a neutral country.
The Awakening
Still I’m here
And still confused
But I can finally see how much I stand to lose
from “All These Years” by Mac McAnally;
performed by Sawyer Brown
9/11 woke us up as attacks do. But I think it also made us rethink the assumptions that had little to do with Islamic terrorism or even the fragility of our society. We stopped and took an accounting. And, like the woman in bed with her lover, we began to realize how much we had to lose. We’d liked some adventure the frisson we feel as we near the abyss, a daring easier when our lives are secure. “Yes, isn’t that interesting,” we’d say, tempted by the pyrotechnics of the post-modernists, by the fun of contradictory abstractions. But here the similarity with the song disappears, because the adventure was in our minds we’d left history, human nature, our bodies behind.
The Edinburgh Festival – and how!
The Edinbugh Festival begins in Scotland’s capital city tomorrow and despite the fireworks of creativity that it always delivers, I think this year is going to be hostage to “Jihad! The Musical!” – “A madcap romp through the wacky world of international terrorism”.
It was written by an Old Etonian and a 25 year old female compatriot.
The Edinburgh Festival opens on tomorrow (Monday), and I await the reviews with interest. In the meantime, here is one of the songs, “I Wanna Be Like Osama” for your evening viewing pleasure.
The chap who plays Osmana is stardom bound, that’s for sure. I’ll let you know when the reviews come out.