Conjunctions

I sorted out my Dvd collection a couple of evenings ago.

When I moved, I simply unpacked them straight onto the shelf and left them anyhows.  Now they are tidy, and I can find what I want.  I still have to face the cds, and of course the contents of the bookcase.  Neither of them is in any sort of order either, though to a certain degree the cds are arranging themselves over time, as the things I am listening to a lot at the moment are working their way to the top.  Six months down the line I'll probably be spitting because all my Schubert has got shoved to the back and all I can find is west African steel-string guitar and kora groups and mid-eighties rock...

Sorting out the dvds was rather fun, to my surprise.  I had wondered about categorising them, but wasn't sure where some of the boundaries should go (for example, what do you label "Rashomon"? Art House?  Classic? Foreign?).  In the end I gave up on the urge to adapt the Plessy system, and went for a completely straightforward alphabetical order by title.  This puts opera, ballet, obscure art house stuff and delicious popcorn all on one level.   The shelf begins with "Aeon Flux" and ends with "Die Zauberflöte", and you could say that's what I'm all about - the full spectrum, from Charlize Theron with a ray gun to Mozart. 

Seriously, if I had set out to buy dvds with no greater aim than demonstrating my much-boasted eclectic taste, I don't think I could have chosen better.  Picking one letter of the alphabet, the Ms are: "The Mahabharata", "The Marriage of Figaro", "A Matter of Life and Death", "Mayerling", and "Mission Impossible". 

I also discovered that at some point I have lent someone "The Princess Bride" and not got it back; and  didn't record who had it.  I am a numpty. 

The bookcase is similarly jumbled at the moment; "Olive Oil - the Key to Long Life and Health", "Lieutenant Hornblower", "Strolling through Istanbul", the libretto of "Pelléas et Mélisande", "Let the Right One in"...  But emptying and re-arranging a whole bookcase is rather a mammoth job.  I may continue to be a chicken for a while longer where that is concerned.

Meanwhile back to the writing.  Thorn has just received an alarming telepathic message from a former student and is rather worried.  I left him worried last night and now I want to restore his peace of mind, but I don't think the plot is going that way. He's going to get a lot more worried before this day is out...

Notebooks, rock and ballet, "Jesse James" and scones...

This has been a busy week.  I went to work, and to a meeting at Hampton Court Palace.  I gave out leaflets in the rain at Kew The Music (and am due to do the same on Sunday).  I went to the latest Royal Ballet triple bill.  I watched a beautifully-made and acted, but terribly depressing, movie.  I featured in a photo shoot as one of a pair of "ladies enjoying afternoon tea at Kew".  And, of course, I wrote.

I've finished the first notebook and started a second.  I've discovered that hard-boarded A5 spiral bound notebooks are the perfect thing for me to write in at the moment.  They are portable, and somehow less intimidating, than A4 foolscap notepaper, which is what the whole of "Gabriel Yeats" and "Ramundi's Sisters" were both written on.  A4 paper is good if you have space, and are very relaxed; e.g. flopping on a lawn with a large cold drink to hand.  But writing in snatches on the tube or on a bench at work, as I am doing this time, somehow a smaller notebook feels more comfortable.  This size takes about 16,000 words to fill, so I even know roughly how much I've written. 

It's going so fast that I know it's going to be a bit rough-and ready, and probably full of inconsistencies.  There will be time enough to revise, later.  A few pages back, one of the characters surprised me by announcing very firmly "We don't use that word", of a term I had myself been using blithely up till then.  It is a very odd sensation, when the characters in a fiction begin to have minds of their own.  But it's a strong sign.  Anna and Thorn and Carlton are coming clearer all the time; one of the cruxes of the story, which was fuzzy until last night, has clicked; and I have a title at last.

I am writing with rock, interestingly.  "GY" was written with Brahms and Mozart.  This story is coming with the sounds of The Icicle Works, Bill Nelson, The Waterboys, Vieux Farka Touré and U2.  It has drive, and they drive me.

The ballet was a mixed bag.  The bill opened with "Birthday offering", which is a sparkling piece of solid frou-frou, in costumes that look like off-cuts from the Quangle-Wangle's Hat.  It's a steady stream of show-off turns, for seven ballerinas and their cavaliers, and it was very nice, but to be frank a bit empty.  Tamara Rojo was stunning as usual, though I hope she has something more worthy of her dramatic powers to do in the programme of new work that ends the season.  I should be sorry if this lovely, frilly bit of bling were the last time I ever saw her dance. 

The last piece in the bill was "Les Noces", which I know I ought to admire; modernist masterpiece, unique historical artifact, etc etc.  But, I'm sorry, I don't really like it that much.  Call me weak-minded, but I wasn't grabbed.

The middle piece on the bill, though, was another of Ashton's mini-masterpieces; "A Month in the Country".  Worth everything for this.  WOW.  Zenaida Yanowsky, Favourite Baritone's Ballerina Missus, was stunningly good as Natalia Petrovna.  She is a luxurious dancer whose height makes her grace yet more gorgeous; there is a sense of effortless scale to her every movement; and she is a powerful actress.  At the very end, as she loses her lover, and faces the realisation of what her future will be, the simplicity and truth of her gradually shrinking movements, her stillness after that brief, brief hour of rapture, were simply heartbreaking.  Needless to say I cried.

What more?  The movie: "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford".  Looks fabulous, is very well-acted, desperately sad and very, VERY slow.

On the plus side, it's the first time I have ever begun to understand why Brad Pitt became a star; in a role seemingly meant to be semi-sleepwalked through, he is actually rather good.  Casey Affleck, who I knew of only by name, does extraordinarily well at the difficult task of playing someone who is stupid and pathetically lacking in self-awareness, without turning the role into a caricature.

The rest of the cast are also excellent.  My current hero does what I guess may be his regular thing of quietly burning a hole on the edge of the screen while others are busy delivering their dialogue, centre stage.  It's a pity that his character gets killed halfway through, though; especially as he plays the only person with something like a shred of a moral compass left (if you'll excuse the mixed metaphor).  I like to be able to sympathise with someone in a film..  Pretty hard when the only sympathetic character is lying butt-naked and dead in a snow-filled ditch.  I do hope it wasn't real snow, incidentally.  There are some sacrifices no-one should have to make for their art.

This afternoon I found myself modelling again, for the first time in over seven years.  Not for a life class, but for a photo shoot.  If all goes well I am now going to appear enjoying my afternoon tea in a piece of Kew literature.  It took ages and I discovered just how unappetising cold, milky Earl Grey smells, having to wave a cup of it in front of my nose for over an hour.  I prefer my tea hot and without milk, and I loathe Earl Grey.  But I did get to eat two very fresh scones with raspberry jam and Cornish clotted cream.  Any Friday that ends with a belly full of fresh scones can't be all bad!  And the pictures have come out well.

Weekend time, now.  Writing time.  And washing machine time, and grocery-shopping time, and all the rest.  But writing time, I think, first and foremost.  It has me by the ears and will not let go.

Busy bee with 14,000 words (& counting)

I’m not complaining, honest I’m not. 

I know I sometimes write these rather coy-sounding messages about the Muse having visited me, and maybe the metaphor reads as pretty damned pretentious (or, as someone in an interview I read recently put it “this is going to make me sound like a dick”).  

I can only apologise.  That is how it feels to me; and I’m about to not just extend that metaphor but take it out for a long stroll as well.  The Muse came to visit in mid-June, and she has stuck around ever since, running me ragged.  I’m ecstatic, having her around all the time like this, but I am also getting really tired.

I’ve written about 14,000 words so far, and it’s still coming.  On my ten minute walk into work in the morning, I think about the story.  I run through dialogue, mouthing the characters’ words, to the amusement of passing bus drivers.  In my lunch break I think about the story, and on my way home, and while I cook supper.  I eat in the persona of one or the other of the protagonists, feeling the ghost of their muscles overlaying my own.  The story is inhabiting me; I am possessed by it.  And yet at the same time it is also constantly running ahead of me, teasing, springing out of reach when I hold out my hands to embrace it.  I want to thump it.  I want to grab it and pin it down.  I want to yell at it; “Get yourself under control, godammit!” 

Sometimes I want to tell this elusive mayfly of a Muse that I am getting too old for this kind of shenanigans.  But I don’t; I never will.  I’ll work all night, I’ll turn to drink, I’ll put down anything she gives me and I’ll be grateful. 

When she goes away, sometimes it is for just long enough to give me a real notion of what life without her would be.  Never again to know her blessed, blinding, mercurial presence; the thought is intolerable.  So I toil on in her wake, following as fast as my weak human flesh will let me. 

This latest visit, most nights sometime between midnight and one a.m. we have a conversation that goes something like this:

Me >yawn<

The Muse: (sharpish) You tired?

Me: >mumble< sorry >mumble< really sleepy.

The Muse: Holy sh*te, am I going to have to keep stopping for you like this?  But we were right in the swing of things!  C’mon, just a few pages more.

Me: >mumb...le...<

The Muse.  Well buggeration.  Okay, okay, go to sleep then...

I swear, it’s like being tormented by someone you love past all reason.  And the gods only know what all this gives away about me, psychologically! 

Whenever the Muse comes back after an absence, it is always with a new face.  The sense of energy I feel when she arrives is exhilarating.  It’s like being in love.  All I want is to make something that is worthy of her and worthy of the face she has chosen.  I’m not complaining; honest I’m not.  I love this better than anything I’ve ever known.  It is what I was made to do.  But I wish I had more energy, and I wish there were more hours in the day.

Out of nowhere, they appear...

It is extraordinary, how a thing can simply not exist – never have existed – and then suddenly be there. 

I know the imagination is fed by many springs, and its outflow prompted by the oddest conjunctions of events.  A myriad tiny elements come together, and suddenly a story springs from the ground and runs away downhill, with characters and scenarios bubbling forth, alive and vivid in the sun.  In the absence of any one of those elements, perhaps the story would never well up at all; perhaps it would stay buried in one’s mind, deep in the underground water table of thought. 

But as it is, the elements do conjoin, and there it is; and it feels as though this one thing has come into being from nothing.  All other matter comes from previous states of matter.  Only the imagination seems to come out of nowhere and no-thing, the goddess Athena springing fully armed and extremely lively from the forehead of Zeus. 

I have been writing steadily for the last ten days.  Eleven days ago, Anna Maple, Thorn Reynolds and Carlton Truro did not exist, and nor did Jasper Jarvis, who is what I believe is referred-to as the principal antagonist.  They had no past and no future, their fears and hopes did not exist, nor their courage, nor their frustrations and losses; and Anna had never tucked her amulet inside her collar, and Thorn had never hated Vegas, or had two of his ribs cracked by a scrupulously thuggish lab technician... 

In a way it’s rather irritating.  I was halfway through two stories that had been going well, when the Muse took a vacation.  She didn’t like the stressed-out Imogen who was house-share-hunting and trying to move in a hurry.  She left me painfully aware that if I went on with those two stories I would be forcing things that just weren’t ready to grow any more at the moment. 

Then out of nowhere the Muse comes back, finds me sitting on a number 237 bus, and presents me with this.  She’s like a big kid (I hope she won’t be offended with me for saying so!); she’s more interested in the new story, so that’s the one I have to write.  She teases me with the idea that if I give this some attention, she’ll help me along with “Midnight in the Café Tana” as well - in a while, once this new story is in good shape.  But “in good shape” may mean “first draft completed”.

Oh well, we’ll see.  In the meantime, I can see that I’m going to get fond of bottled-up, impulsive Anna and bloody-minded Thorn.  But I feel already as if I have known them for years, yet they have existed for less than a fortnight.   It’s just so weird.

Not by bread alone...

It’s a long time since I wrote.  I had a lovely fortnight off; chilled out at my mum’s, then swam and sketched for a week in Kefalonia.  I came back to work tanned and refreshed, straight into a cloudburst at Gatwick.  That was just two weeks ago.  Work has been steadily busy ever since, which is good (I hate being bored).   

My cultural life since then has consisted of three mixed evenings out.  The first was to a concert that was a bit of a curate’s egg – a beautiful, lump-in-the-throat producing performance of The Enigma Variations, followed by Brahms’ Violin Concerto played by a Very Famous Soloist who I rapidly began to want to slap.  I’m sorry, but being a “character” does not entitle you to add extra percussion (sometimes off the beat, to add insult to injury) by jumping heavily up and down in fake exuberance as you play.  I love the Brahms concerto dearly, and the last person I heard playing it was Christian Tetzlaff, who is a musical demi-god in my book; I don’t want to see it turned into a self-indulgent party turn.

The second was last Friday, to a Hollywood blockbuster of the “lets trash New York with CGI” variety, and the last was last night, to “The Prince of the Pagodas” at Covent Garden.  “Prince of the Pagodas” was interesting stuff.  I gather the plot has been tweaked a bit, the intention being to make it a scrap more comprehensible; not very successful, I’m sorry to say.  Britten’s score veers between very beautiful and very weird, and so does the choreography.  But the orchestra and the excellent cast were putting their all into things, and I cannot fault the performance.  I’m just not sure it was worth reviving in the first place.  Marianela Nuñez was a radiant Princess Belle-Rose, Nehemiah Kish a handsome, gentle, gentlemanly Prince and Tamara Rojo a splendidly contemptuous Princess Belle-Épine, flashing her magnificent eyes and slashing high kicks at everyone.  The four evil kings who team up with Belle-Épine were terrific, the daft but saintly Fool bounced like the requisite rubber ball, and all the numerous bit parts were well done too.

But I’m afraid the blockbuster movie was a lot more fun. 

There are times when you want perfectly-cooked fresh food and top class wine, followed by superbly-played Mozart, and there are times when you want popcorn and a large chocolate milkshake, and lots of hunky men slinging each other about the place, and explosions.  “The Avengers Assemble” has the hunks and the explosions, a plot that is surprisingly easy to follow given its complexity, a script that is well-constructed, intelligent and genuinely witty, and a very good cast.  It was a perfect Friday-night movie, and I shall probably buy the dvd when it comes out, to add to my collection of things like “Aeon Flux”, “V for Vendetta” and the “Star Trek” reboot, for those “popcorn-needed” evenings.  Come to think of it, of course, although those are all popcorn movies they are, like “Avengers Assemble”, blessed with better than average scripts and good actors (okay, and eye candy). 

I’ll grant you that some of the Avengers are, to be polite, more limited as actors than others.  Captain America and Thor are big manly lunks of muscle, and they do “decent” and “honourable” and “heroic” to a tee, but I’m not sure either of them would do “Hamlet”.  Tom Hiddleston, enjoying himself playing the villain, would be a dream Hamlet, on the other hand (& is my dream Gabriel Yeats).  Robert Downey Jnr., Scarlett Johansson, Mark Ruffalo and Samuel L Jackson are all eminently watchable, in pretty much everything they appear in, whether they are paying their mortgages doing junk or acting their socks off in something intelligent.  They can all carry a movie on their own, and any of them would be worth seeing this for.   Yes, that’s right, I’m not being silly; this really is a superhero movie worth seeing for the acting. 

That brings me to Hawkeye, Jeremy Renner, who was new to me, and steals every scene he is in.  Even when he isn’t doing anything, one’s eyes stray to him; he’s so hot he burns.  I haven’t been able to muster myself to see “The Hurt Locker” (I have a vivid imagination, and don’t want to see the subject matter made any more real than my imagination already can); so I had no idea what this chap was capable of, or even what he looked like.  Indeed, I admit that I was vaguely expecting a handsome, high-cheekboned scenery-chewer, trying wildly to capitalise on having been flavour-of-the-month a couple of years ago.  Mr Renner however is the exact opposite; a middle-sized guy with nice eyes, who looks as if he might be part hobbit, and does bottled-in intensity so well he could almost be British.  He’s terrific. 

So, not for the first time, I have the great Joss Whedon (who wrote and directed this) to thank for a good evening’s entertainment.  Thank you, Mr Whedon; more, please!

I came home from this so fired up that the Muse popped in and has been hanging out with me ever since.  A new story!  I’m about 25 pages in, and it’s feeling good.

Hectic times, but a little ballet fun, and a rest is at hand...

It’s just over a week since I moved, and I am almost completely unpacked and stowed.  I have very nearly reached the stage where the last few items will fit in the bottom of the wardrobe (& can then be forgotten about for a while).  I just need to rationalise two last boxes into one, and find a home for my Tupperware. 

I celebrated on Wednesday by going out with the Dipterist to one of those Royal ballet cinema relays, preceded by a meal out at Nando's.  Peri-peri chicken is one of the dishes that makes me wonder if I am really a natural vegetarian, as I remember it always being simply delicious, but I was good and had a halloumi and mushroom burger and stewed black beans.   Yum yum yum.  Then “La Fille Mal Gardée”, which is also yum yum yum.  Particularly yum, as the Dip remarked, with Steven McRae in tight yellow trousers.

It’s hard to describe the unique charm of “La Fille Mal Gardée” without making it sound simply very, very silly.  I suppose to a modern, tired, cynical mind the idea of a pastoral world where true love always wins the day and the harvest is gathered by smiling people in matching blue smocks is so obviously silly it doesn’t need saying.  Well, it may be so; but this is joyfully, entrancedly, defiantly silly; silly and happy, and as dreamlike as any memory of the Best Ever Summer of your childhood.  Like that childhood memory, too, it has an undertone of pathos, a sense of anticipated, even accepted, loss.  Was it ever real, your Perfect Summer?  Is the ideal of perfect love ever real? – yet we still remember the perfect summer, and we still believe in the perfect love.  Lise and Colas play, kiss, flirt, tie each other up in pink ribbons, and then suddenly stop, looking into one another's eyes with quiet amazement, rapt away in love.  I was about to say it is possibly Ashton's masterpiece; but then I thought of "The Dream", and "Marguerite and Armand", and "A Month in the Country", and "Cinderella"...  Did he make anything that isn't masterly, I wonder?

I think part of why we believe in their love story is because they are so credibly human; this is no grand passion à la Romeo and Juliet, and there are no grand gestures.  The lovers are plainly potty about one another, but they are quite capable both of squabbling, and of being patient with one another.  Lise’s vision of the future includes a beautiful wedding in a lovely dress, but also pregnancy and dealing with naughty children.  I’ve burbled before about the onstage chemistry between McRae and his regular partner Roberta Marquez, and here they are entirely believable as they fool about and then embrace tenderly.

The pathos comes in the touching character of Alain, the half-witted eligible would-be bridegroom who Lise and Colas outwit, and also in little nuances all the way through; in flickers of expression, the curl of a hand, the energy of a jump, the electricity of a shared glance or a smile.   Marquez’ expression at the climax of the longest “pink ribbons” dance (the “Fanny Elssler pas de deux”) when she is lifted up and drops the handful of ribbons she is holding, is exquisite.  One moment she is the astonishing turning centre of a human maypole, the next it’s gone, and her face says “Oh, that was so pretty! – and it’s over...”; delight and regret battle for a moment as the ribbons flutter away.  There is another lovely little moment as Farmer Thomas loses his temper at the end, and the Widow Simone, who seconds before was stamping her feet in hissy frustration at her daughter’s disobedience, leaps to Lise’s defence like a small round lioness – “Don’t you dare speak to my girl like that!” 

In Ludovic Ondiviela they’ve got an excellent interpreter for the tricky part of Alain; he managed to convey the boy’s hopeless naivety and mental deficiency, but also his innate sweetness of nature.  I don’t suppose anyone trying to make this story into a ballet today would get away with the character Ashton made of Alain.  It’s obvious that he has what we now call special educational needs – I expect in 1960 it was still perfectly acceptable to call him a simpleton – and sometimes he can seem a cringe-making grotesque.  Ondiviela has both the technical skill to carry off the extraordinarily tricky unballetic choreography and the acting chops to make Alain a sympathetic figure rather than an embarrassing one.

Marquez is delightful, her elfin beauty and sparkling footwork a perfect fit for the mischievous Lise.  People with more ballet know-how than me tell me she is one of the company’s weaker principals technically; perhaps so, but she has character and charm in buckets.  As her Colas, McRae is in his element; he can pull off all the technical demands with an air of absolute insouciance that makes you (almost) forget what incredibly difficult stuff this must be.  Having seen Acosta (on Dvd) I really don’t want to see a Colas who looks remotely unsteady or uncertain! – but that’s unlikely ever to be a problem for Mr McRae, and his characterisation of a good-hearted, cocky, full of himself but deeply romantic boy is spot-on as well.

It made for a lovely, lovely, happy evening out. 

Now I’m off and away for two weeks’ annual leave.  Usually I go to Greece at this time of year.  Nothing is booked as yet, but I will probably still try to make a trip, since I’m not planning on going to Athens and I gather that everywhere else is still very peaceful and normal.  To begin with, though, I have a long weekend with my mother; peace and quiet down in Kent...

Moved. Thank God.

It's been a while since I posted anything, as I've been completely focussed on looking for a new house-share/flatshare and then, when I found one, on moving.  But I am now moved. 

On Thursday I was whizzed from my old home to my new - a room in a flatshare near work - by two guys from the startlingly efficient "London Man+Van" company.  They loaded and unloaded everything and got me moved in under two hours (including a break for tea and biscuits).  They even kept smiling throughout, which was more than I was doing, tense and exhausted as I was.  I've just been back to the old place (funny how quickly it becomes "the old place", and the new place becomes "home") to clean my room, and am now about to hand back the keys.  I'm not completely unpacked yet, but I've broken the back of it. 

What a relief.