Film, TV, and Theatre

The HAL 9000 Scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

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There’s been a lot of talk in the media recently about Artificial Intelligence (AI). Facebook uses it for targeted advertising, photo tagging, and news feeds. Microsoft and Apple use it to power their digital assistants, Cortana and Siri, and Google’s search engine has utilised AI from the beginning. There appears to be something of a chase to create flexible, self-teaching AI that will mirror human learning and apparently transform our lives.

There have been some big-name doom-mongers on this subject, however. Elon Musk thinks AI is probably humanity’s “biggest existential threat”. Stephen Hawking fears that AI may “replace humans altogether”. Bill Gates agrees with both of them. Me, I’m not so sure; surely you can always turn a machine off?…(on the other hand, have you ever tried closing Skype?)

This concept of computers/machines gone bad is a well-worn theme in science fiction, with the Terminator series of films an obvious example, but it was back in 1968, in Stanley Kubrik and Arthur C Clarke’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey, that we were introduced to our first electronic wrong ‘un, HAL 9000. HAL (from Heuristically programmed ALgorithm, apparently, though some have conjectured an easily-decrypted code version of IBM) is a sentient computer controlling the systems of the Discovery One spacecraft on its mission to Jupiter.

HAL is initially regarded as another member of the crew, engaging genially with its human colleagues, playing chess with them and so on. However, he begins to malfunction in subtle ways. As the malfunctioning deteriorates, the crew members discuss the possibility of disconnecting HAL’s cognitive circuits. Unfortunately, HAL can read lips and discerns their plan, and his programmed directives to protect the mission lead him to reason that he must kill the astronauts. In this classic scene, crew member Dave Bowman is outside the main craft in a “pod” and is seeking re-entry, asking HAL to open the pod bay doors. HAL (voiced chillingly by Douglas Rain) isn’t playing ball…

Poetry

W B Yeats’ The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1888)

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Ten years ago, Sal and I had a weekend break in Knock in County Mayo, Ireland, during which we took a pleasant side trip to Sligo and “Yeats country”. In those days I was into “collecting” literary graves and we took the opportunity to visit Yeats’ final resting place, which turned out to be situated in a glorious setting at Drumcliff, under the imposing Benbulbin rock formation. William Butler Yeats was of course one of the foremost twentieth century English language poets, and in Sligo they’re rightly proud of him.

Benbulben

I confess to not having read much Yeats, but there are two of his poems in particular that have resonated with me from old. One is his evocative rendering of the Greek myth, Leda and the Swan, and the other is this, the twelve-line lyric poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

Yeats wrote The Lake Isle of Innisfree in 1888 when he was a young man, living in London and feeling lonely and homesick. The 1880s had seen the rise of Charles Stewart Parnell and the home rule movement in Ireland and developments there had had a profound effect on Yeats’ poetry, informed by his subsequent explorations of Irish identity. The Lake Isle of Innisfree is about a yearning for his childhood home (the isle of Innisfree is a real place, an uninhabited island in Lough Gill, where Yeats spent many of his childhood summers). It is a place of serenity and simplicity, and to we, the reader, that place becomes not Innisfree, but wherever we happen to picture our own rural hideaway; the place to which we pretend we shall one day escape and leave behind our current manic, urban lives (“on the pavement grey”).

The Lake Isle represents an escape, a poet’s vision of a romantic, idyllic, and timeless way of life. I love the way he evokes the tranquil life, in the bosom of nature, in that masterfully simple phrase wherein he says he will “live alone in the bee-loud glade”. How effectively this conjures up a picture of a hot sunny day alive with the hum of insects!

Of course, such an ambition rarely comes to pass and it remains for most of us a fanciful idea. Indeed, Yeats died in France and only returned to Sligo in a coffin. But his poem remains a great favourite with the Irish (it’s quoted in Irish passports) and to romantics everywhere who yearn for tranquillity and “hear it in the deep heart’s core”.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

William Butler Yeats
Music

The Glenn Miller Orchestra plays In The Mood (1939)

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In this blog, I have written about both Elvis Presley and the Beatles, but before them, in an extraordinary four year period between 1938 and 1942, there was a man who scored 23 number-one hits in the US: bandleader and icon of the swing era, Glenn Miller. Miller was perhaps an unlikely star and certainly a reluctant one, as he shied away from the spotlight and hated personal appearances, but he nonetheless had such an ear for melody and such keen arranging skills that most of his output became classics of the age – think Moonlight Serenade, Pennsylvania 6-5000, Tuxedo Junction, Chattanooga Choo Choo, and of course In the Mood, one of the best dance songs to emerge from the period and the one big band song that gave the swing era its defining moment.

Miller had cut his teeth as a freelance trombonist in a variety of bands in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and worked as a composer and arranger for the Dorsey brothers. He had put an orchestra together for British bandleader Ray Noble in 1935, and in 1937 formed his first band, but this proved short-lived after failing to distinguish itself from the plethora of rival bands. Miller knew that he needed a unique sound and in 1938 he put together an arrangement with the clarinet playing a melodic line with a tenor saxophone holding the same note, while three other saxophones harmonised within a single octave. It soon became the basis of the “Miller sound”, the template for what big band music would sound like.

In the Mood is based on an old jazz riff that had been passed around in various incarnations for many a year. It was a fellow named Joe Garland who created a new arrangement for the riff with the title of “In the Mood”, but it was Miller who pared the tune down to its bare essentials. Released in September 1939, the tune went on to top the charts in the US for thirteen straight weeks. With its famous introduction featuring the saxophones in unison, the catchy riff anchoring the tune, the two solos (a “tenor fight” between saxophonists Tex Beneke and Al Klink, and a 16-bar trumpet solo by Clyde Hurley), and the suspense-building ending, it has all the Miller specialities. A true model of suspense and dynamics. Here it is as featured in the 1941 movie Sun Valley Serenade.

 

Glenn Miller
Art

Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Census at Bethlehem (1566)

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Last Sunday, my family and I attended a Christmas carol service at our local church, resplendent, as every year, with candlelight and seasonal goodwill. As well as the age-old carols that we all know and love (or at least tolerate fondly, after the decades of repetition), there were of course several apposite readings, and it is the one below, from Luke 2:1-5, that inspired the subject of today’s blog.

And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be registered… So all went to be registered, everyone to his own city. Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judea, to the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and lineage of David, to be registered with Mary, his betrothed wife, who was with child.

This of course refers to the census at Bethlehem, and the scene was depicted wonderfully well (albeit set anachronistically and anatopistically in 16th century Flanders) in this 1566 oil painting by one of my favourite artists, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. As is usual with works by this Netherlandish Renaissance master, much pleasure is derived from viewing the piece up close and discovering the multitude of details.

We are looking down on a snow-covered village (and indeed this is one of the first examples of snowy landscape in Western art, the previous winter of 1565 having been, not uncoincidentally, one of the harshest on record). People are going about their daily business: clearing the snow, crossing the frozen pond, warming themselves around a fire. The children are throwing snowballs, skating, sledging, spinning tops. In the right hand foreground, we see a man with a large carpenter’s saw, leading an ox and an ass, on which rides a woman wrapped up tightly against the cold. These are of course none other than Joseph and Mary, who have come to Bethlehem to be enrolled in the universal census ordered by Emperor Augustus.

With a few deft brushstrokes Bruegel brilliantly captures village life, whilst subtly depicting the scene just prior to the nativity (since after registering, there was, of course, no room at the inn). I could spend ages glimpsing new details revealed in Bruegel’s works, and indeed have done on several occasions in various galleries of Europe, where I have usually been left to it, meeting my long-suffering family later in the gift shop! Funnily enough, this piece I have yet to actually see (it’s in Brussels’ Musée des Beaux Arts, which is still only “on the list”).

 

Poetry

Wilfrid Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est (1917)

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“Who’s for the game?”

“Who’s for the trench – Are you, my laddie?”

These are words from poems by Jessie Pope, poet and propagandist well-known for her patriotic and motivational poetry that was originally published in the Daily Mail to encourage enlistment at the beginning of the Great War. Another poem renowned for expressing the patriotic ideals that characterised pre-war England was Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier, a sonnet in which Brooke speaks in the guise of an English soldier as he is leaving home to go to the Great War. It portrays death for one’s country as a noble end and England as the noblest country for which to die:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England

Or, as the Roman lyrical poet, Horace, had it in his Odes: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (How sweet and honourable it is to die for one’s country).

Later, however, when the grim realities of the war had set in, Wilfrid Owen chose to express in his poetry a very different kind of sentiment, and when he wrote this poem whilst recovering from shell-shock in a hospital near Edinburgh in 1917, he borrowed from Horace’s phrase for his title: Dulce et decorum est.

No jingoism here, no rose-tinted romanticism nor noble ideals. This poem speaks instead from Owen’s direct experience; a vignette from the trenches, where the gruesome effects of a chlorine gas attack are described in compelling detail. It makes for grim reading. Wilfrid Owen, who dedicated this poem to Jessie Pope herself (I wonder how that went down?), at least provides us with an artistry of words in this description of the horror of the front line. But he reminds us that, were we to experience first-hand the reality of war, we may hesitate to repeat platitudes such as Horace’s “old Lie”.

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

 

Wilfrid Owen
Music

Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21, Elvira Madigan (1785)

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In the course of lunch recently, my good friend and subscriber to this blog, Jason, suggested that I do a piece on one of his favourite pieces of music, Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21, the “Elvira Madigan” concerto. “You’ll know it” he said, when I conceded that I couldn’t bring it to mind from its name. Upon listening to it later, I nodded…of course, yes, I know this alright, and yes, Jase, it certainly does qualify for an “occasional glimpse”!

The concerto is in three movements, but it is the second movement, the Andante in F major, that is the well-known part we’ll highlight here. Mozart wrote the concerto in 1785, in the middle of a prolific creative burst in Vienna in which he wrote no fewer than eleven masterpieces in a 24-month period. It was written for one of his so-called “subscription concerts”; he would hire a venue, engage some musicians, take all the proceeds from the concert and hopefully make a profit.

I was intrigued to learn how the concerto came by its nickname, “Elvira Madigan”. What a story it turned out to be! It is a relatively recent nickname, as it is named after the 1967 film Elvira Madigan made by Swedish director Bo Widerberg in which the andante was prominently featured. The film is based on the true and tragic love story of Danish tightrope walker, Elvira Madigan (the stage name of one Hedwig Jensen) and Swedish nobleman and cavalry officer, Lieutenant Sixten Sparre of the Scanian Dragoon Regiment.

While performing in Sweden with her stepfather’s circus in 1887, Elvira Madigan met Sixten Sparre and the two fell in love. However, since he was a married man and from a different, higher social class, their love was doomed. After two years of exchanging love letters, they absconded and holed up in a hotel in Svendborg in Denmark for a month. From there, 21-year old Elvira and 34-year old Sixten took the ferry to the nearby island of Tåsinge and stayed at a little pension in the fishing village of Troense. When Sixten’s family withheld financial help, the couple’s last hopes faded. They went out to the forest, had a last meal…and then committed suicide with Sixten’s service revolver.

They are buried together on Tåsinge and to this day their graves are still visited by tourists and romantics from all over the world. Mozart’s emotional and dreamlike melody fits their tragic story perfectly. Take a quiet time to experience the music, below, whilst perusing the accompanying images I found of Elvira, Sixten and the places in which they spent their last days. If you remain unmoved, you may want to just check your pulse…

 

Elvira and Sixten
Film, TV, and Theatre

Steve Martin and John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)

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Writer/director John Hughes had had a series of successful movies in the eighties featuring teenage angst and adventures (Weird Science, Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) when he embarked on this, the more grown-up movie, Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It’s a comedy, and it is indeed packed with comic set pieces, but it’s a lot more than that: it has a genuine pathos and poignancy.

Inspired by an actual hellish trip that Hughes had personally experienced, in which various delays and diversions had kept him from getting home for an entire weekend, Hughes apparently wrote the first sixty pages of the script in just six hours. Steve Martin plays Neal Page, a marketing executive desperate to get back home to Chicago to see his wife and kids for Thanksgiving, and who along the way becomes saddled with shower curtain ring salesman Del Griffith (John Candy). Mishaps befall the two throughout their travels, and they endure every indignity that modern travel can inflict on its victims.

The success of the movie is founded on the essential natures of its two principal actors: Steve Martin and John Candy embody themselves, and this is key to why the film is able to reveal so much heart and truth. Neal spends the movie trying to peel off from Del, whilst Del spends the movie having his feelings hurt and then coming through for Neal anyway. It is road trip and buddy movie rolled into one, done to highly comedic effect, and my family returns to it time after time.

The last scenes of the movie deliver the emotional payoff we have been half-expecting all along. Neal undergoes a kind of moral rebirth: we know he has learned a valuable lesson about empathy, and there is true poignancy in the scene where Neal finds Del waiting alone on the L platform. Incidentally, there is a moment just before this scene where Neal, on the train home before he returns to find Del, starts to laugh quietly to himself as he recalls their misadventures. It’s wonderfully natural and it turns out that there was good reason for that: unbeknownst to Steve Martin, Hughes had kept the cameras rolling in between takes on the Chicago train, while Martin was thinking about his next lines, and in so doing captured this unguarded moment. I include it, along with a few of the other great scenes in the two-part montage below.

 

Music

Elvis Presley appears on the Milton Berle Show (1956)

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The cultural impact of Elvis Presley is hard to overstate; when he exploded on the scene, the whole phenomenon of youth entertainment exploded with him. John Lennon said: “before Elvis, there was nothing”. Now, whilst this might be an over-egged point, given that even in the ‘40s Frank Sinatra was inspiring devotion from teenage “Bobby soxers”, nonetheless there’s no doubting the cultural paradigm shift that Elvis launched. His records, his look, his moves, his ducktail quiff, his clothing…these all became embodiments of the new rock ‘n’ roll style, and, with economic prosperity putting more money into American teenagers’ pockets, it spread like wildfire.

This sensation didn’t occur overnight, however. By the end of 1955, Elvis had already recorded two dozen singles, but these were only hits on the Country and Western charts, not the main Billboard charts. That changed with his debut single for his new label, RCA Victor – Heartbreak Hotel. This time, Elvis did shoot to the top of the pop charts and stayed there for seven weeks, turning him into the darling of radio and record stores up and down the country. It was, however, television that truly made him the “King of Rock ‘n’ Roll”, and if any one appearance might be called his coronation, it was this appearance on the Milton Berle Show on 5th June 1956, when he set his guitar aside and put his whole being into a scorching and scandalous performance of Hound Dog.

Previous television appearances had featured Elvis either in close-up, singing a slow ballad, or of his full body but with his movements somewhat restricted by the acoustic guitar he was playing. But here, for the first time, the 21-year-old Elvis Presley was seen from head to toe, gyrating his soon-to-be-famous (or infamous) pelvis.

You can bet that the reaction to Elvis’ performance in the mainstream media was almost uniformly negative. The New York Daily News described Presley’s performance as marked by “the kind of animalism that should be confined to dives and bordellos”. The Journal-American said that Elvis “can’t sing a lick and makes up for vocal shortcomings with the weirdest suggestive animation short of an aborigine’s mating dance”. The Catholic weekly periodical, America, got right to the point, meanwhile, with its headline: “Beware of Elvis Presley”.

The complaints and concerns of these reactionaries, however, was pretty much drowned out by the screams of young girls, and by the end of 1956, when the Wall Street Journal was already commenting that “Elvis Presley is today a business”, they had to accept that the times had changed.

Literature

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869)

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Consisting of over half a million words, spread over 1200 plus pages of small print, and involving around 600 characters (including roughly 160 historical figures), Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace enjoys almost mythical status as the archetypically monumental novel that most people either casually have on their list of books to tackle one day, or who wouldn’t dream of taking on. It is one of the most famous works of literature in history and generally considered to be an absolute masterpiece.

War and Peace is certainly a challenging read and not one to be tackled lightly. I came across it in a pile of second-hand books left by fellow travellers in a hotel in Peru, of all places, and realised that here was my opportunity to take it on (there must have been quite a few people over the years who have read it whilst on a gap year). Anticipating a slog, but not expecting to derive any actual pleasure from it, I dived in. What a pleasant surprise! Despite some admittedly distended and meandering passages on historiography and some lengthy military minutiae, I found it a thrilling read. It is historical novel, family chronicle, and philosophical treatise, all rolled into one, centred around Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and featuring the intertwined lives of the Bezuhov, Bolkonsky, Rostov and Kuragin families.

If you want to understand the big picture, thinks Tolstoy, you have to examine the details – which is exactly what he did. He studied countless manuscripts, letters, and diaries, and visited all the sites where the battles (Schöngrabern, Austerlitz, Borodino) took place, drawing maps of the area and interviewing locals who had lived through the war. The novel is so long and detailed because he believed that that was the only way to tell this story. To do it justice, the canvas had to be broad.

So War and Peace demands patience and focus, but if you are willing to accept those conditions, it is well worth the effort. If you’re in the market for an epic work encompassing love, war, religion, family, class, history, and philosophy, you could do worse than to bump it up that “must read” list of yours.

 

Leo Tolstoy
Art

Antonio Canova’s Sculpture of the Three Graces (1817)

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Back in May, my family and I visited the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and enjoyed, amongst other things, its impressive collection of sculptures, including this beautiful piece from the great Italian neoclassical sculptor, Antonio Canova. The Three Graces were daughters of Zeus and companions to the Muses, and were a celebrated subject in classical literature and art. They are Thalia (youth and beauty), Euphrosyne (mirth), and Aglaia (elegance), and the goddesses are depicted huddled together, nude, hair braided and held atop their heads in a knot, the three slender figures melding into one in their embrace.

The sculpture is carved from a single slab of white marble. Canova’s assistants would have roughly hewn out the marble, leaving Canova to perform the final carving and shaping of the stone to highlight the Graces’ soft flesh. It was commissioned by John Russel, 6th Duke of Bedford, who visited Canova at his studio in Rome in 1814. Bedford was captivated by the group of the Three Graces which Canova had carved for the Empress Josephine, the estranged wife of Napoleon Bonaparte (“I frankly declare”, he is reported to have said, “that I have seen nothing in ancient or modern sculpture that has given me more pleasure than this piece of work”). Josephine had died in May of that year, and the Duke offered to buy the sculpture from Canova, but Josephine’s son claimed it (and that version is now in the Hermitage, St Petersburg) so Bedford commissioned a new one.

The completed statue was installed at the Duke’s home, Woburn Abbey. An 1822 catalogue of the sculpture at Woburn summed up the appeal of the work: “in the constrained flexibility with which their arms are entwined round each other; in the perfect symmetry of their limbs, in the delicacy of detail, and exquisiteness of finish, in the feet and hands; in that look of living softness given to the surface of the marble, which looks as if it would yield to the touch…this great sculptor has shown the utmost delicacy and judgement”.

It is indeed remarkable to get “up close and personal” with a great sculpture like this and marvel at the skill and delicacy required to achieve such an exquisite finish from a block of stone. Canova’s other masterpiece, Cupid and Psyche in the Louvre, elicits the same admiration.

 

 

Antonio Canova

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