COME ON AND …..BOOM! BOOM!

Humping for Britain.

When I think of Englebert Humperdinck, I always think of  the god-awful Release Me, the single which prevented The Beatles Strawberry Fields / Penny Lane from reaching number one in 1967.

Nowadays ‘the hump’ is apparently big in Eastern Europe which may be one the reasons he was selected to perform the UK’s Eurovision song – Love Will Set You Free.

At 76 , he looks in better shape than the Buranovo grannies but it still seems bizarre and wrong-headed to select him as UK’s representative.

The turgid apology for a love song he sang was also completely  out of synch with the brash showbiz image of the contest.

ADULT APP

At 2011′s Future Digital Innovation Awards, the app produced by Touch Press for  The Waste Land won the adult prize.

This doesn’t mean that the London-based digital publishers have sexed up T.S. Elliot’s epic poem but is, instead, a reward for a beautifully presented application that used the possibilities of the iPad  to the full.

I remember the excitement when CD Roms first came out only to find that these mostly proved to be clunky and uninspiring products. They now seem positively archaic by the side of the latest technology.

A TIME OF GIFTS

A Time Of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (1977)

Fermor abandoned formal education at 17 after being expelled following an, by modern standards, innocent flirtation with a girl (it never got beyond the hand holding stage).

The school was probably relieved to find an excuse to get shot of him . One housemaster judged him to be “a dangerous mixture of sophistication and recklessness which makes me anxious about his influence of other boys”. He obviously wasn’t a young man about to be tamed for educational purposes.

Bored by routine and fearful of getting stuck in a rut he resolved “to change scenery; abandon London and England and set out across Europe like a tramp…..travel on foot, sleep in hayricks in summer, shelter in barns when it was raining or snowing and only consort with peasants and tramps”.  This book is the first of two volumes of his memories and adventures, the second volume- Between The Woods And The Water – was published in 1986.

He set off in 1933, and though he wasn’t to know it at the time, Europe was on the brink of war and his journey would take him to countries destined to undergo dramatic and traumatic change.

The route he took mostly on foot, espousing for the most part the soft option of accepting rides, can be gleaned from the chapter titles: The Low Countries – Up The Rhine – Into High Germany – Winterreise – The Danube – Approach To Kaiserstadt – Vienna – The Edge Of The Slav World – Prague Under Snow – Slovakia – The Marches Of Hungary.

Fermor died in 2011, aged 96 and this book was written when he was in his sixties. It is based on notebooks of his “doings” and occasionally vivid, sometimes hazy memories.

SILENCE BEATS SEX AT THE OSCARS

I have now seen all nine films nominated for best picture at this year’s Oscars. You can read individual reviews of each of them on this blog and, ahead of the forthcoming razzmatazz of the awards ceremony, here are my final thoughts on the contenders.

The three best movies are by directors who understand the visual grammar of cinema to the point that images speak louder than words.

In the case of The Artist there is no dialogue at all, unless you count the title cards. Martin Scorsese’s Hugo is so memorable because of the amazing production design that brings the automaton and Parisian station to life. This supports the pseudo-religious view expressed by the young protagonist that we are all part of one enormous mechanism .

Both movies pay affectionate homage to silent movies in recognition of cinema as a painterly and visionary medium.

The other truly great film on the short list is Terrence Malick’s The Tree Of Life,. It too is visually stunning but the lack of linear narrative makes it the type of movie that wins more supporters at artier festivals like Venice, Berlin or Cannes.

I personally expect The Artist to triumph but would like to see Scorsese or Malick win as best director.

BACKTRACKING #36 – RICHARD HARRIS

Part of an irregular series of bite-sized posts about 7″ singles I own – shameless nostalgia from the days of vinyl. (Search ‘Backtracking’ to collect the set!)

RICHARD HARRIS – MacArthur Park b/w The Yard Went On Forever (ABc Records, 1968)

“Like a pizza in the rain – nobody wants to take you home”, sang David Byrne on Rei Momo’s ”Loco de Amor” (Crazy for Love). What is true of pizzas is doubly true of cakes, particularly those with sweet green icing that take a long time to bake.

Jimmy Webb’s bonkers lyrics to MacArthur park had no takers until drinking buddy Richard Harris, in the days before Dumbledore, took a shine to them. The fact that he couldn’t really sing was not seen as a hindrance.