One of the commonest searches on my site is for Tooting swimming times: when DCL at last published them online, I did a page about it, but the link is dead, and the brochures available either are out of date, or they don’t include the pool times. So here you are, fellow Tooting swimmers, I’ve scanned the sheet and posted it here. Don’t blame me if it’s wrong, but it’s better than not publishing it at all.
Click here to get the latest Tooting-swimming times
A wonderful 1994 interview with Moira Shearer who played Vicky Page in the Red Shoes. If you ever for a moment thought that the real-life dancer (or the dance) had anything in common with the film, think again.
The Red Shoes is one of the best places to find evidence of all the things the books tell you about the social construction of composers as male geniuses, and women as brainless bodies, so helpless in the presence of music that they dance themselves to death while the men carry on enjoying a taste of immortality without actually having to die just yet. There is an insidious misogynist violence about the film, insidious because the misogyny is carried out with the excuse that it’s all in the name of art, and art transcends life, so that’s all right then.
At one point, Lermontov silences Vicky with a swipe of the hand that looks like he’s slapping her, and then raises his index finger as if to put them on her lips to shut her up: “I will do the talking. YOU will do the dancing!”
Well it’s nice to know that Vicky/Moira Shearer finally does get to do the talking, and what she’s got to say is far more interesting.
Now dance it, darling.
So much for the ineffability of music: from Arthur Philips at The Believer, Dancing about architecture, a wonderful article about music and writing.
It pushes all my buttons at once, since I seem to be headed in the same direction with my dissertation: it’s all very well to say ‘talking about music is like dancing about architecture’, but the more you consider it, the less attractive it seems: as Nicholas Cook says in Analysing musical multimedia “there’s nothing like the ineffable to provoke talk” (p.267). In a perversely backhanded way, the quip is itself a verbal musing on the ineffability of music: it’s all right to talk about music as long as you say it’s ineffable. It sounds hip, but it’s very 19th century.
Talking about music has its advantages, its necessities even, and Philips’ article is a very good advert for its delights.
OK, I have found it, possibly the coolest thing ever to hit my corner of the internet. The Backdoor Broadcasting Company go around recording your event, and broadcasting it on the web when it happens, with an archive to listen to if you missed it.
It came my way via an ad for a forthcoming lecture by Andrew Bowie on philosophy and improvisation. He’s given the lecture elsewhere before, so if you can’t go, you can listen to the broadcast (Here it is: called Background Capabilities and Prereflexive Awareness).
There’s an elegant and beautifully reasonsed apologia for the audio medium on the impact page with which I wholeheartedly agree. Youtube has its moments, but moments are what they are. This kind of guerrilla radio captures the big thinking from the margins and distributes it from another centre. Not for everyone I know, but for me, this is what the web and digital techology are for.
If you use Firefox and do internet shopping, Invisible Hand is a great add-on. It sits there quietly and unnoticed in your add-ons in Firefox, until you start looking at a product on the web that it has found cheaper somewhere else. Up comes a discreet yellow bar at the top of your screen telling you where to go to get it, and any other price offers, as in the screenshot below, where it turns out Asda have a better price on an academic text book than Amazon.
Heron in Tooting
This wonderful heron visits our end of Tooting now and again. It’s a wonderful sight. The only one I’d ever seen before moving here was a concrete one in the back garden of our house in Dorset. Funnily enough, I’m going to Heron Quays just now…
…is a priceless line from a conversation between the composer of the music for Gone with the Wind, Max Steiner and film producer David Selznick. Describing the scene where Melanie has the baby, Steiner recalls:
I had ninety men – the whole stage at United Artists was full of musicians – and Selznick comes in at 3.00 a.m. and called me over and said “What are trying to do? Ruin me?” I said, “Why?” He said, “A big scene like that and you have only twelve cellists? Melanie has labor pains, I want twenty cellists!”
They had to come back the next day with 20 cellists to re-record, because even Hollywood couldn’t muster 10 extra cellists at 3.00 am. Steiner’s point is actually that in many cases, his original idea won out, despite all the efforts and money thrown at ‘improvement’.
An interesting aside in this article is the extreme working practices: Steiner would work from 8pm til 6am the next morning at the studios, and then write during the day, after a few hours sleep. I was on the point of wondering how he kept this up, when he adds that a doctor came round every day at noon with an injection of Benzedrine to keep him going. I must talk to HR about this, I’m being short-changed.
From ‘On Gone with the Wind, Selznick and the art of “Mickey Mousing”: An interview with Max Steiner. Journal of Film and Video 56.1 / Spring 2004
