'The History Boys' - A Good Film from a Good Play

The Characters: Lockwood (Andrew Knott), Dakin (Dominic Cooper) and Posner (Samuel Barnett)

It's brave in the current sexual political climate to make a mainstream film about, among other things, sex and the secondary school system - without re-playing the Spanish Inquisition!

'The History Boys' has the creds of being based on the Tony award-winning play by Alan Bennett. And perhaps has been made more 'acceptable' still by casting actors obviously in their twenties as the final year British school students.

It puts the other side of things - that late teenagers have sexual awareness and desire, and that a teacher can become infatuated with his student. Without in any way condoning sex between students or between them and their educators. As Samuel Barnett (the Posner character) has reiterated in interview.

The film also explores the issues around the function and process of education, mainly by counter-pointing safer conventional approaches and propositions with the more risky quirky, slick, off-beat, glibe, often self-consciously controversial ones. A lovely example realizing the latter 'playing the education game' is a progressive teacher's suggestion to make the argument in an Oxbridge entrance essay for Stalin being a great man.

A well-structured piece of drama. A great script. And a really good cast. 

Dominic Cooper is the student Dakin - dark, teasing, cocky, provocative and self-possessed and aware. Idolising his 23 year old teacher, Irvin (Stephen Campbell Moore) - declaring he'd 'never wanted to please anyone more than him ... girls not excepted'. With this essentially straight character wishing at the end of the film to reward his mentor - in an offer to be sucked off. A date is planned but does not eventuate.

The piece is obviously from the theatre and there has been the wise choice of maintaining that style of dialogue delivery - rather big and slightly exaggerated with those pauses between lines that seem somewhat unnatural away from the stage. It would probably disturb the original script too much to be more realistic.

And there has been the fortuitous selection of the lietmotif music of 'Bewitched (Bothered and Bewildered)' - sung originally by Rufus Wainwright and in this clip by the Lockwood character.

If you're interested in momentarily re-visiting this part of your life and all its issues, this piece is very well worth the look. I've looked several times already!!!

Anyone else seen it?

What were your reactions?

The Taking of Snuff and Big Sneezing 

'The Monk of Calais' (1780) by Angelica Kauffmann

Like the dinosaurs, I would have thought snuff taking had been consigned to history - the ancient kind.

But then, when for some reason or other, I was peering in the window of a very old-fashioned tobacco shop in Adelaide and some small square tins of the stuff caught my attention.

Peering turned to enquiring, and low and behold I discovered you could even have your own 'formula' concocted and the recipe carefully recorded in a large old leather-bound volume.

I felt as though I'd entered a lost and long forgotten world!

Of course, I couldn't leave the store without two small purchases ...

... which sit in a drawer of my desk, tempting me ever so often to try them! But I'm such a wimp (well, in some things) that I haven't. Perhaps being a non-smoker all my life.

The gentle art was first described by Father Ramon Pane in 1493. He observed locals in Quebec indulging. And in 1561, Jean Nicot (now what word did this name inspire!), the French ambassador in Lisbon, sent a stach to Catherine de Medici - and a new rage was raging. With a small hiccup in the fun being the threat of ex-communication for users by Pope Urban VIII (1568-1644).

Snuff as everyone knows is powdered tobacco that has been scented (commonly spearmint, cinnamon, rose or camphor), a pinch of which up the nose produces the very most satisfying sneezing. Bet I've had far worse sex!

Now if you happen to be in London and you find your supply is running dangerously low ... http://www.snuffstore.co.uk/

And if you find you have been for some reason cut off from other users, there's a Yahoo group ...  http://groups.yahoo.com/group/snuffboxthenasalsnuffclub/

And if you're unsure about your taking technique, there's this Swedish site that'll put you right - http://www.swedish-snus.com/articles/Swedish%20Snus%20Brands-292/Toque-6731/SHOP-0/

Please, someone out there tell me you 'do' it. 

And share with us!

Souvenirs from Ancient Egypt

In this post I'm going to try to work up something very small and perhaps not significant into something mildly interesting. If I fail, please be kind!

About 15 years ago, Dr Somebody van Macklenberg, a Portuguese archaeologist friend of my father, sent me what he described as a night lamp. 3000 years old. And made of orange pottery.

Something to be put beside a bed.

This for me wonderful object came in a very large cardboard box from a dig in Egypt. After excavating away layers and layers of newspaper, I found the inch-wide lamp at the centre.

More recently, it's been suggested this ancient artifact was in fact a domestic votive dish ... for unguents offered to gods.

Either way, it's been on my desk ever since - and I look at it more than from time to time. It seems to stimulate my imagination. Big time.

And I was reminded of my treasure when I came across a tiny shard in the desert when I was walking from Aswan in Upper Egypt ...


... across the desert ...


... to an early Christian monestry (St Mark's?) ...

I sometimes wonder what my shard was originally part of.

It's slightly concave. Thin. The 'outside' incised with close concentric circles. Each filled with dark colour.

Any ideas guys?

Suggestions will lead to further imaginings - of course!

Two Great Great Aunts Appear

Two unknown great great aunts just stepped out of the mid-C19!

Their tardis was an old photograph, inscribed on the back with their names and family connection. It was found in the old family home, built in the 1850's during the Gold Rush in the state of Victoria.

I know absolutely nothing about these long-lost female relations - so I'm finding myself looking long and hard at the image to try to intuit something - anything - about them. With not a stick of furniture in the room, I realize I'm going to be working hard, very.

Probably home-made dresses - same cheap cotton printed material for each. Were they not well off? Or is this the consequence of a colonial bush context? Each garment is conspicuously too large. So the girls could grown into them and they would last longer?

Is the younger girl holding a purse? Why would she be doing this? To say what about herself? Or is this just happenstance?

Does the older sister have something in each of her hand? Almost held forward and half open to show the viewer.

Dusty boots. Have they traveled in from the countryside for the sitting?

Okay, I'm done!

But I don't think I got any closer to these great great aunts.

Did I miss anything?

Feel free to focus any Sherlock Holmes tendencies you might have on the photograph ... and comment, pleeease!

Film Footage of Giacomo Puccini (1858-1924)

I was initially really interested to see home-movie footage of opera composer Giacomo Puccini - and then to hear him speak, in the USA. On two separate videos.

But the experience was rather different than I expected - the man seemed curiously de-mystified by movement and sound! Ordinary, as most us are.

What's your reaction?

'Berlin: Symphony of a Great City' (1927) - A Silent Film Masterpiece by Walter Ruttmann

I've stayed in Berlin twice - once before the wall went down, and then again in 2003. I'd first become more than casually focussed on the city reading the novels of Christopher Isherwood. And then, during my second visit, by the ubiquitous and all-consuming concern over the lingering 'atmosphere of uncertainty', a collective state of mind which had gripped the metropolis since the Cold War and failed to dissipate after 1989. The largest city in Europe still only has a population of 3.3 million - New York is 20. For me, every day there seemed a Sunday.

So this film naturally caught my attention when it crossed my path.

It has innovative techniques for the period. But more importantly a strong pulsing rhythm which irresistibly carries you along, through the whole of this semi-documentary.

From slow glassy ripplings over water which gradually transmute into passing railway sleepers and carriage windows. And then telegraph poles. And, in a reverse angle from the carriage, out over houses and tenements and factories - as the train enters a still intact early C20 Berlin.

And on and on through this extraordinary film.

It's day break and the capital stirs. Long shots of down dark deserted misty streets. And scenes of workerless factory interiors. Shop window displays of women's lingerie.

The rhythm of the day begins, first signaled by a single piece of paper gently blown along a gutter. A man finally comes into the empty set, walking his dog. A cat skulks by, maybe mouse-bound. A few more people - and the pace imperceptibly quickens. Doors and windows open in cavalcade. In businesses and homes. The sun rises, throwing the first atmospheric shadows of the day.

And the symphony of the great city begins.

Through the rush of the working day.

And into the wilder activity of the evening jazz age clubs and bars.

A great watch!

The Very Startling Dame Edna Everidge

I saw Dame Edna Everidge (aka Barry Humphries) in London a while back.

I went to tick her-him off the list more than anything else - a bit like you do with some famous cities or well-known works of art.

Humphries's reputation is as a social satirist, exposing pretension and prejudice, often by clothing his character in the very traits he's attacking.

I wasn't imagining he'd be that much out of the ordinary - but I was apoplectic with laughter - gasping and hardly able to breathe. To my absolute surprise.

In gentle chat with random members of the audience, he's sweetly and seemingly without calculation have each unconsciously expose themselves.

As much as anything else, it was in a general way the quickness and unexpectedness that gets you in.

These two clips give you a bit of an idea of this aspect of the Humphries theatre persona, if you are not already familiar with it.

He took a while to translate in the States but I believe he's now understood and accepted there?