Second Time Round
15 June
Not everything is better the second time around.
I think Ross and I were very lucky with
our return visit to Llandudno.
I've felt less lucky with Artemis Fowl. I loved the first
book. The latest, The Arctic Incident, really doesn't follow through
with the same sense of an achieved alternative myth.
Big Brother might as well be re-named Big Yawn this year. The
alterations to the format and the choice of rebarbative people have been a big
turn off.
Nor have I been following the Corinthianism with any sense of urgency. Our lads
won against Denmark and little Michael Owen scored so huzzah for that but I
really can't be bothered to get up at an early hour and be glued to my television
along with five pints.
24 though still remaining watchable and watched is increasingly a victim
of its own format. What started as a startlingly original idea is now as formulaic
as the next thriller. Imagine living a life where you aren't allowed to sleep,
eat or go the toilet and neither is anyone else around you. And then, on the hour,
every hour, a major, heart-stopping incident happens. I think not.
I recently polished off Somerset Maugham's The Razor's Edge and was much
impressed by it. Like Cakes and Ale which I read
earlier in the year, it is eloquent, elegant and
poised. There's a comment on one of the flyleaves to the effect that Maugham
is a master of delaying the delivery of information. The whole book is a big tease
really. I followed it up with Waugh's The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold which
did not achieve the same sense of stylistic consistency.
Andrew Graham-Dixon's History of British Art is just as good in book form
as it was on the television. There is more in the
book on his thesis of the tension between a lost Catholic history and a Puritan
strain of Protestant iconoclasm. Try this.
The National Portrait Gallery's proximity, in London's Trafalgar Square, to the
National Gallery is a nice piece of unintended comedy. The National Gallery is an
emblem of the nation's reluctance or inability to renounce altogether the past and
its spiritual, sensuous, glorious visions: a museum thronged with the bright ghosts
of Catholic European religious art. The National Portrait Gallery by contrast is the
most Protestant of British art institutions: a museum consecrated to grey spectres
of emulable probity. Between them, the two Victorian art institutions amount to the
museological symbol of a large divide in the national psyche.
I like challenging statements like that.
Ross and I are both having ongoing problems with bureaucracies - he with the Disability
Living Allowance people and me with Telewest and the solicitors handling
David's will, which after seven years is
still not settled. It feels like there is always someone to be battled with.
The must see movie of the moment is Spiderman. Others like
Johnny Depp's From Hell and Soul Survivor with Wes Bentley (from
American Beauty) are best forgotten about.
Ross declared that he thought it was very good within five minutes of leaving the
cinema. This is most unusual for him. I usually have to beat any sort of comment out
of him with a barge pole. I don't disagree. I just don't want to be as madly enthusiastic.
The mayhem is as well choreographed as Computer Generated Images will allow. But the
script is also literate and the playing above average for this sort of tosh.
Tobey Maguire was our hero. He was very good in Cider House Rules and
Wonder Boys and does a good line in charming
self-deprication. He used it well in the character of Peter Parker and looks not entirely
unpleasant in skin tight lycra. He's a nicely not Hollywood pin-up. Thank goodness James
Cameron never did get around to making his version with Leonardo Di Caprio (BTW what
has happened to Mr Cameron?).
