Talk To Rex

• Borodin’s “Stranger in Paradise Factory“
• …
• Nah, I’m out

I just received an email from English National Opera inviting me to a concert given by the London Gay Symphony Orchestra. Which is to include Mussorgsky’s Night on Bare Mountain.

Tee hee snigger snigger smirk.

I mean – there are so many smutty puns to be made that they don’t even need pointing out. But I couldn’t help wondering if it might actually have been a deliberate reference to Brokeback Mountain.

Aha! I thought. Night on Brokeback Mountain! A hilarious gay-stroke-classical-music-themed pun. And there must be hundreds of other pieces of classical music that can have their titles similarly twisted for a cheap laugh. An idea like this is surely a goldmine of double entendres that could lead to a list of Finnemoresque proportions.

Except that Night on Brokeback Mountain remains the only gay classical pun I can think of. Possibly the only one there is. Oh, there’s the old joke of calling Vaughan Williams’ Floss Campi – wait for it – “Camp Flossi”… but that joke is as old as the work itself, and apparently it delighted the composer which somehow takes all the fun out of it.

…and, unusually for what is often the dullest day in the whole year, it’s turning out to be one.

Yes. I am very very happy at the moment.

Is it because I had the best fun ever last night? Actually no. Last night I was dragged along to a horrific club by somebody I previously considered a friend. His name is Luke Staiano – I name and shame him here not because I am vindictive, but because he’s constantly complaining that I haven’t named him on this blog. (Also that my Dad didn’t offer him a cake on a previous occasion, but that’s a different story.)

No, the reason I am happy is that today I bought a sonic screwdriver. (Like the one in Doctor Who, if you’re ignorant as to the nature of the tool.)

Both Luke and his housemate Adam (who is a good cook) were scathing about my excitement over a small piece of plastic. What neither of them realised is this: it is simply the best toy in the world.

I have been walking around pretending to unlock doors and explode hidden landmines with it. On the tube I pretended I was making the doors open at each station with it. When the co-op down the road was closed I tried to open the doors with my sonic screwdriver, and when I ended up buying ingredients for dinner at the garage down the road I tried to pay the chip-and-pin machine with it.

(In the last two instances I failed, but I live in hope that one day a fluke of sonic power might make the thing actually work.)

It is impossible to describe, particularly to those unfamiliar with the Doctor’s trusty instrument, just how much pleasure five and a half inches of plastic (six and a half when extended) can give you.

A very happy new year to you all. I’m having one.

I accidentally watched The American President last night, and realised that you can have great fun playing “spot the West Wing bits”.

First, there are the actors (Anna Deavere Smith and Joshua Malina both jumped out at me, and of course Martin Sheen – there’s also Nina Siemaszko, who plays Ellie Bartlet), but then there are the issues (they’re trying to pass gun legislation, as in an early West Wing episode), the minor characters (Senator Stackhouse is referred to, who crops up in an episode of the TV series), the backplot (President Andy Shepherd studied under a Nobel-winning economist), the dialogue (“Someday someone’s going to have to explain to me the virtue of a proportional response”). I could go on.

The difference between the film and the TV series (excepting that the film is a romantic comedy) is that the characters are a little vague in the film, a little loose. Which is entirely understandable – you need more depth to sustain over a hundred hours of television – but is probably also the reason that these days I’d far rather watch some really great TV than camp out in front of a couple of hours of Hollywood, no matter how good the special effects are.

Oh, and the TV series runs about twice as fast. How the hell did Sorkin manage to write so many damn words?

I have been told that breaking up
Is like being bereaved,
One half of you is torn with grief,
The other half relieved.

I’m not sure that this holds much weight,
Bereavement’s far more fair –
Dead bodies don’t live down the road
Pretending you’re not there.

Ronnie, one of the charming people I work with when I’m not pretending to be an actor, just came back from lunch to announce that he’d “given Cilla Black a chip”. It turned out he meant this literally – she was filming in a fish and chip shop he’d gone into and had asked him if she could scab one.

Tragically he didn’t ask her to choose one of the three tasty morsels concealed on the other side of his hand.

I went to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe thinking it was going to be a workmanlike attempt to cash in on Lord of the Rings (but with less cash). So I’m pleased to say that it turned out to be a rather lovely film.

Some of the storytelling is a bit hurried – there’s scarcely any time to draw characters such as Mr and Mrs Beaver or even Aslan, and it’s only the quality of the acting that makes it possible (Ralph Feinnes’ voice is phenomenal). The kids aren’t bad either – Peter and Susan have a slightly odd relationship and appear to have been cast more for their fullsome lips than acting skills, but Edmund has a depth that makes his nastiness and eventual redemption completely believable, and Lucy is adorable.

The script is not inappropriately revisionist as it might have been, but subtley updates some of the clunkier aspects of C. S. Lewis’ dialogue with a gentle humour that is entirely in keeping with the style of the original book (there’s a lovely joke about the prophecy of the end of the White Witch’s Reign not rhyming properly).

But the aspect that most impressed me is the one that I was dreading – the big action sequences. These are never blown out of proportion at the expense of the story, and are directed with a skill that I unpopularly believe Peter Jackson lacks. The climactic final battle achieves an epic sense of scale but still keeps its attention on the characters and plot elements we’re interested in. There are no cheap comedy cutaway shots to lovable dwarves going “ooh my golly me” like we get in those interminable Tolkien films, or reliance on ridiculous spectacle to try and make it look horrific – instead the action has a brutal simplicity that makes it feel much more dangerous. When the two armies first clash it is done without any music – no Howard Shore school of subtlety here. And except for a silly shot of Peter with blurry characters running past him in fast motion, the direction is equally subtle; it’s consistently well-crafted, with some great cuts, but importantly never screams out for attention. For a family blockbuster it’s unusually unpretentious, the antithesis of Peter Jackson’s trilogy which is so far up its own preverbial arse that it doesn’t realise how boring it is.

Yes. It’s a better film than Lord of the Rings. I shall continue to declare this until the day I die, even though most people will disagree with me and call me a fool.

For people still uncertain of which Christmas film to go to, I should point out that it’s also better than Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, for the simple reason that it is a much better story.

Oh, and bollocks to the people who say it’s all Christian propaganda. Most people don’t even notice the Christian parallels until they’re pointed out.

Buses confound me – I understand entirely how you get none for ages and then three at once (it was explained on Notes & Queries once), but I can’t for the life of me figure out how you can get none for ages and then just one come along. Where have the other ones gone? Perhaps buses travel at relativistic speeds, meaning that although the time between them is always fifteen minutes from their point of view, more than half an hour elapses for those of us hanging around in the cold for the next one?

Of course if that were the case then you’d expect to get home really, really quickly – at least as far as your house was concerned. But my house agreed completely with me when I finally got back this evening that the time was: far, far too late.

So I reckon someone’s stealing Cambridge’s buses. If found, please return, etc., there’s a good chap.

Last night it was The Friday Project’s Christmas drinks, and having just about recovered from their last party I went along to throw myself into the yuletide fun. And also to try and persuade them to publish more of my stuff.

Never a good idea. As their launch party proved, although at the height of a party Paul Carr will agree to publish my whole life, the next day he won’t have any recollection of our verbal contract.

This time round I was in the exciting position of having an opera to go to, so I was able to pop in for a few glasses of champagne with various assorted writers, then pop back after three hours of Puccini to view the carnage through relatively sober eyes.

But even watching Madame Butterfly stabbing herself to death hadn’t prepared me for what I beheld. Some people were conscious, few of them standing. Paul Carr stared at me with a glazed expression, then recognised me, threw his arms around me with a cry of “Lark!” and threw my scarf over the bar. The barman was not impressed.

Paul then told me I needed a drink, grabbed from the bar a glass of what looked like vodka and coke (neatly lined up with two others) and thrust it into my hand. I asked him who it belonged to. He said he wasn’t sure, then gestured in the direction of three huge, tough, suited men who were almost certainly in the mafia and said “I think they ordered them”.

I put the drink back.

I decided to escape in the direction of Clare Christian, who I felt was less likely to throw my scarf over a bar because she is, in fairness, less of a pisshead than Paul Carr.

Clare greeted me like Mary Magdalene greeting Jesus – I’m sure she was seconds away from breaking an expensive jar of oil over my head – and continued to cling to me while she struggled to explain to another writer who I was. Having essentially attributed me to every book in their output, she went on to ask me if I would accept £10,000 from a different publisher if they offered to publish a book I’d written.

She seemed genuinely distressed by my predictable response, and somehow I couldn’t make her understand that, like most other people, I’m essentially a mercenary man and wouldn’t even turn down £10,000 from Paul Daniels if he wanted me to appear on his magic show. (Except that he doesn’t have one any more – ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha)

Having achieved all that, I left. A grand evening, all in all.

The opera was nice, too.

Can anybody spot what’s amiss in the Borders music section?