It doesn't seem just a week since I was seeing Ross off on a train once more.
Not because this has been a particularly sensational week you understand. But just because I am here and he is there and I feel the separation.
After I'd been to the Chester Summer Music Festival a couple of weeks ago, I found myself in the strange position of not having any tickets pinned to the notice board in my kitchen. This lasted for just over a week. I now have six tickets for forthcoming Royal Liverpool Philharmonic concerts pinned there.
I should talk with Ross soon about booking tickets for Opera North as well. We've talked about going to see their Bohème and Cunning Little Vixen. The Vixen is a new production and I've just received sponsorship forms from the Company. For £25, I can sponsor a bit of a costume. I think I might just do it.
We are also waiting to hear from English National Opera about tickets for Marriage of Figaro and the Royal Opera about tickets for Rigoletto. I've been listening to both this week and emerging amazed at how wonderful both works are. I'm typing to the second act of Rigoletto now and I can see how that first night audience must have been bowled over by the savage sweep of it.
Here we are, nearly two thirds of the way through the Verdi centenary year, and, mostly, there's been very little of substance written about the man. I'm sitting here just staggered by the sounds in the orchestra. The accepted wisdom seems to be Verdi, great man of the theatre and of tunes; Wagner, great man of the orchestra and of ideas. I've not read any commentary on the psychological and dramatic accuracy of Verdi's orchestral colouring, of his ability to suggest mood, location, state of mind within a few bars of apparently simple and unadorned music, of the almost atonal nature of some of his harmonic progressions.
Ross and I are trying to set up a social Bank Holiday at the end of this month. Hopefully, it's going to include seeing Chris and James and Linda and Ian and Mary and, at long last, Colin.
This weekend has been a chilling time for me. Food shopping. Sleeping. Cooking. Eating. Reading.
I've started reading Chris's book - you'll remember that Ross and I went to the book launch at the end of May. It has been an odd experience on a number of accounts.
Firstly, I've spent the last six months reading only non-fiction so it's odd to return to a world of imagination. Secondly, I've never ever read a published work by someone who I've known before and it's odd seeing the bits of biography jump out of the texture at me. I spent a sunny Sunday afternoon in the back garden with red wine, white butterflies and yellow roses and polished off about half of it. I'm enjoying it.
Saturday evening took me out to Jurassic Park III which was ninety minutes of leaping lizard fun. It could never have had the jaw-dropping novelty of the first film so now we swing from one set piece to another saying "Look, here's another dinosaur".
The pteranodons were probably the best thing.
Alessandro Nivola as Billy Brennan was nice eye candy and was visciously attacked by the pteranodons - see above. I spent the film trying to remember where I'd seen him before and it was in last year's Love's Labour's Lost and the year before's Mansfield Park. Sam Neil reprised his rôle as Dr. Alan Grant, Laura Dern put in a brief cameo, William H Macy was sound as the dad who comes good in the face of fuck off big lizards whilst Trevor Morgan wasn't awful as the child.
I'd give it 6 out of 10.
Better have been films I've been catching up on through the medium of video.
I was prepared not to like Steven Soderbergh's Traffic possibly because
Michael Douglas was in the cast but mainly because it had been hyped earlier
this year around the time of the Oscars. In the event, I was entirely won over.
It is a brilliant achievement.
I particularly liked the used of strong coloured filters to suggest different locations and moods and to give a sort of quasi-documentary to the work. And I liked the way that multiple, interconnecting but geographically isolated stories were held together. It was an amazing feat of script writing. You got to follow...
Eventually, the film is a typical liberal Hollywood film. The Michael Douglas character walks out of his Drug Czar job saying that, if there is a to be a war on drugs then most of the enemy is within our own families and how do you fight you own family. The films gives two answers - spend more time with your children and listen to what they want and put more money into facilities that will give the young other things to do rather than become part of the chain of supply and demand. Dennis Quaid and Albert Finney are in their somewhere in small cameos that tell you something about the casting in depth.
I was also taken by Wonder Boys which also stars Michael Douglas. This
was just a nice and gentle film about folk in an academic environment. It was
also a film about writing and truth and the transformation of personal materials
into readable prose. Tobey Maguire was the up and coming writer. He was last
seen in Cider House Rules which was also good and, most surprisingly, will
take the lead in Spider-Man in 2002.
Robert Downey Jr put in an appearance as a predatory, gay literary agent (where does he get the time to do films and Ali McBeal and all given all the drug rehab). Rip Torn and Richard Thomas were there in the background.
If this was a 7 out of 10, then Traffic has to be a 7.5.
Better than both though is Memento - a clear 8.5/9 out of 10.
It's a truly astonishing film about a man who has no long term memory and has
to construct an elaborate system of devices to help him remember even the
simplest of things - like tatooing messages on his body.
The film has two narrative lines - one which travels backwards and one which travels forwards. At the very end of the film, the two lines intersect and all becomes clear - or at least all that can be made clear is clear. As you travel though the film, you see how, time and time again, your perception of events is changed by adding in that extra bit of preceding information that the main character Leonard Shelby, played by Guy Pearce, has now forgotten.
Carrie-Anne Moss as Natalie and Joe Pantoliano as Teddy complete the main cast. I think the thing that I liked about all three film was that they were ensemble pieces with an interest in the foibles of real people.
You'll be pleased to know that the Sunday People has alerted an anxious nation to the fact that Big Brother's Helen and Paul have now done the biz together. For the record, the act took place some time after 11:15pm on 2 August in a £290 a night room featuring an 8 foot by 7 foot four poster bed draped with cream silk in the exclusive Dorset Square Hotel in West London. It is unknown whether or not Helen screamed "Oh, my God!!" at any point.
We have also been told that Paul earns £80,000 a year as a car designer. Will Helen inspire his designs? Will his next car have big headlamps and a compact rear end with capacious boot? Will it be a long-haul touring model or a quick run around jobbie. What a good thing Paul didn't take up with Brian or he would have been designing a little camper van instead!