The View from the Spaghetti Factory (proper redesign coming soon!)

Now that’s what I call good news!

In this household’s occasional ruminations upon whether we could justify paying for a subscription-based cable or satellite TV service, FilmFour represented the main motivation for doing so (along with the Italian football, since its departure from Channel Four). However, the obstacle was always my fundamental opposition to subscription TV… I refuse to pay upwards of £15 per month in order to buy the right to *then* pay additionally for channels I want to watch. If the whole thing was truly “pay per view”, based on single payments for major sporting events (or even single films) or subscriptions for individual channels, I’d be all too willing to sign up, but I’m not paying for a load of “free” channels I’m never going to watch.

(Obviously, I’m already paying a subscription of sorts via the BBC licence fee, but I’m talking specifically about commercial channels here.)

But lo… a golden ray of hope amid the dumbed-down cheapness and corporate sponsorship. The free-to-air relaunch of FilmFour coincides perfectly with the sad end of the weekly “Director’s Chair” feature at my local cinema, a rare alternative to the usual “free overhyped blockbuster with every kilo of junk food purchased”. Watching films on the small screen is never ideal, but it’s better than nowt, and there’s still the good old NFT for the proper cinema experience, as well as the really unusual stuff that they’ll never show on FilmFour.

The cynic in me would probably wonder if all this is just a PR stunt, building viewer loyalty in preparation for some as-yet-unnannounced revolution in subscription TV. For the moment, though, I’m making the most of it and keeping my cynicism at bay!

And on the subject of the previous entry, here’s what I did last weekend.

Nicola’s Mum had always wanted to see Claude Monet’s house and garden at Giverny, so we decided to combine that with a long weekend in nearby Rouen. I’d often wondered what Rouen was like, as it’s twinned with Norwich, where I used to live. It didn’t disappoint… it’s a picturesque city, with friendly people, great Normandy food and drink (cider and calvados being the liquid specialities) and plenty of significant historical and cultural links.

As ever, I invite you to browse the photos… “Rouen, May 2006″ on Flickr

Working through the vast backlog of “ooh, that looks interesting” podcasts I’ve downloaded recently, I found a great little feature on Alf Clausen, composer of all the background and incidental music on “The Simpsons”… basically, everything except for Danny Elfman’s title music. I’ve always been intrigued by the process of creating music around the structure of film, and quite fancy having a go at some point. As a fast-paced cartoon show with multiple layers of cultural references, “The Simpsons” must be pretty challenging to compose for, especially as the music ranges from short bursts of “aural scenery” right up to full-length parody songs.

With the hope that my bandwidth doesn’t get completely SLAMMED, I’ve uploaded the 21-minute chunk here…

Mitt i Musiken: Alf Clausen feature (14.75MB)

It’s from the Swedish radio programme “Mitt i Musiken” (*mumble*… sorry, Sveriges Radio…) but the chunks in Swedish are mostly translating and summarising what Alf says in the interview portions. It’s worth ploughing through for the rehearsal excerpts (now that’s what first-call session players sound like!) and there’s a few interesting nuggets of information. For instance, Matt Groening likes having real orchestral music on the soundtrack, in order to provide smooth continuity and sheen when the animation is a little rough and ready. Also, it turns out that Alf Clausen is hugely influenced by Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, which, on reflection, doesn’t surprise me. I’ll be talking about that piece right here, once the Proms season starts…

Ivor Cutler 1923-2006

The world will be a duller place without him…

With complex, controversial issues such as the Muhammed cartoon affair, there’s a temptation to avoid voicing an opinion at all. Whichever side of the argument you take, you’ll inevitably find yourself in the company of some unsavoury bedfellows. However, that’s life. There is no black or white. Here’s my shade of grey…

Freedom of speech is not absolute. It requires responsibility and sensitivity to the context. You wouldn’t stand up at a friend’s funeral and shout “I’ve been shagging his wife!”, for example. With that in mind, one of my mixed feelings was sympathy for normal, unassuming Muslims whose deeply cherished faith was being ridiculed for the sake of a newspaper trying to prove a point. No religion should be above criticism, satirical or otherwise, but the boundaries between fair criticism and downright offence are different for each social grouping. In this case, we’re dealing with a religion which is sensitive about *any* sort of pictorial representation, so extra care is required. As it turns out, the cartoons aren’t much good. As satire, they’re nothing special, and as symbols of our fine Western civil rights, they’re pretty weak.

While we’re on the subject of the freedom of speech, the same guidelines have to apply to people protesting against perceived abuses of that freedom. If the various Muslim councils had calmly voiced their dissatisfaction with the behaviour of Jyllands-Posten, the whole thing would probably have turned out differently. Instead, we have Danish embassies burning in the Middle East and people killed in Afghanistan and Somalia. Here in London, the protest was smaller than certain newspapers probably wanted to suggest, but was notable for some of the laughably ironic banners held by protesters, such as “freedom of expression go to hell”. Right… so that’d include your freedom to stand in the street holding that banner, then? Many other banners would constitute incitement to violence and were all photographed, according to police on the scene, so look out for dawn raids in a town near you.

But what an over-reaction! The cartoons have now been printed in lots of other newspapers worldwide, but let’s not forget that the original furore erupted after they appeared in *one* newspaper with a circulation of 150,000, written in a minority European language. I’ve been having a browse around the Jyllands-Posten website; here’s an excerpt from a recent editorial (my translation)…

See? There’s something of the Daily Mail about that tone. Well, they probably don’t deserve that particular comparison… either way, the editor was shocked by the response and made an apology at the time. No big deal. If your religion doesn’t have the resilience to shake off little setbacks like that, what hope do you have?

But then, of course, all this worldwide hysteria wasn’t started by the regular Muslims, quietly going about their daily lives. After the cartoons had originally appeared last September (with only localised protests in Copenhagen) a group of ultra-conservative clerics set off for a little PR tour of the Middle East, armed with copies of the offending pictures. Oh, and just in case they couldn’t whip up the desired level of hysterical outrage, they decided to include a few extras in their press pack… some far nastier pictures totally unrelated to the original set, depicting Muhammed as a pig and a paedophile (more details in the Observer). Alhamedi suggests that this, in turn, was an attempt by the Saudi government to deflect attention away from the fact that rather a lot of people had been trampled to death during the Hajj.

Cynical stuff, and if the extremist Islamic factions want to create a worldwide climate of animosity towards Islam, they’re going the right way about it.

Incidentally, the original commission and publication of the offending cartoons was a reaction to the difficulty that author Kåre Bluitgen faced in soliciting artwork for his book “The Koran and the Life of the Prophet Muhammed”. Mindful of the Islamic law against idolatry, many artists were too fearful of the potential backlash to submit work. Anyway, the book is due to go on sale this month, so hang on to your hats…

About a year ago, I wrote a few paragraphs in an attempt to summarise a few things about 2004. I may write one for 2005, we’ll see. However, re-reading that piece just now, the bit that grabbed my attention most was the list of books I’d read during the year. With my usual inability to stick to schedules or resolutions, I haven’t managed to read any of the stuff I intended to read back at the beginning of the year, but that’s not a problem; I’ve had fun regardless. The last book I read in 2004 was “Jane Eyre”, which I figured I ought to be at least aware of before reading “The Eyre Affair”, so appropriately enough, Jasper fforde’s book is first on the list for 2005…

The Eyre Affair - Jasper fforde
The Year 1000 - Robert Lacey & Danny Danziger
Voices of Time - JG Ballard
Vermilion Sands - JG Ballard
Man & Music 1: Antiquity and the Middle Ages - ed. James McKinnon
The Terminal Beach - JG Ballard
The Little Girl who was Too Fond of Matches - GaÈtan Soucy
House of Leaves - Mark Z Danielewski
Music in Medieval Europe - Jeremy Yudkin
Joe Meek: The Telstar Man - John Repsch
The Complete Dorothy Parker
How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World - Francis Wheen
Lost in a Good Book - Jasper fforde
Brief Interviews with Hideous Men - David Foster Wallace
The Girl With Curious Hair - David Foster Wallace
Oblivion: Stories - David Foster Wallace
Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again - David Foster Wallace
Enigma - Robert Harris
A Void (La Disparition) - Georges Perec
The Well of Lost Plots - Jasper fforde

See the patterns? In common with my music listening habits, I’ve decided to approach books (at least some of the time) with more of a completist, less of a random, attitude. I find that if I just read one isolated book by an author (this is also true for music) I’m more likely to forget that author altogether and never return to him/her. However, if I grab as much as possible in one go, the collected work is much more likely to make a deeper impression on me, and it’s fun to see the progressions in an author’s work without interruption.

So… I worked my way through as many early JG Ballard novels and short stories as I could find in the local libraries. For me, Ballard represents a way of appreciating something that might conceivably be called Science Fiction. Lots of speculative ideas about future worlds, but without all the “Star Log Sigma Beta XQZ17, Commander Zirkon Quiklok reporting” stuff. Later, I re-read a couple of David Foster Wallace books and took the opportunity to tackle the mammoth (and utterly brilliant) “Infinite Jest” while hoovering up all the short stories as well. I couldn’t find “Broom of the System” at the time, but was given a copy for my birthday, so that’s a definite for early 2006.

Oh, and the last one on the list… I haven’t finished it yet, so it doesn’t really belong here. I just liked the symmetry :-)

I’m not a consumer of “Reality TV”. I watched the first series of Big Brother, as it seemed like such a great idea for a social experiment. Everything else I’ve seen of the reality genre has made me want to kill people. However, the new Channel 4 series Space Cadets intrigues me.

On the surface, it’s nothing new… a bunch of ambitious, misguidedly self-confident young adults, with the usual personality types. If you’ve seen any reality TV shows since 2001, you’ll know the stereotype we’re dealing with here… student in some pointless media-related subject, likes clubbing and shopping and wants to drive a Formula 1 car and be famous. Yep, we once had beauty pageants for this sort of stuff, but now we have reality shows. Johnny Vaughan fills the Davina MacCall role by being more or less as cringingly irritating as Davina. And as ever, the contestants are aiming to survive all the challenges, overcome all the interpersonal struggles and win the coveted prize… in this case the chance for four people to go into orbit in a Space Shuttle.

Except, of course, it’s all a hoax.

They think they’re training in Moscow, but they’re actually in Suffolk. Apart from one genuine ex-KGB fitness instructor, all of the instructors and “experts” are actors. The Shuttle is a Hollywood prop, as is much of the equipment they’re using for training. This could be the perfect antidote to the whole sorry reality genre. Rather than squirming uncomfortably as stupid triumphs over stupid, we can now delight in the fact that they’re all being well and truly had.

I really cannot emphasise enough just how stupid, blinkered and self-obsessed these people are. Well, maybe not “stupid” as such… several are students and they mostly seem quite wittily articulate. They just seem so smug and self-satisfied in their worldly wisdom, their cat-got-the-cream delight at being in the Space Cadets shortlist. After a few days of very basic training, and with no background in the military or aeronautics, they’ll be going into space, following in the footsteps of a very select bunch of highly trained and specialised people. No, wait… they’re stupid, utterly stupid. Forget the hoax. Fire them into space.