Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
The Horse’s Mouth
Gulley Jimson could paint this at Glenelg Football Club (Home of the Tigers), under strict supervision of course.
(Dir. Ronald Neame) (1958) Alec Guinness plays Gully Jimson, struggling artist, in this off-beat and very amusing film (adapted virtually beyond recognition) from Joyce Cary’s novel. Jimson lacks recognition and cash but he is supremely assured of his genius (or John Bratby’s genius – he did the ugly but oddly impressive works) and willing to exploit anyone and everyone in the service of his art. To that end, he flouts convention and disregards personal discomfort. He’s even willing to lie to rich amateurs. But as he suggests, “Don’t look at the picture, feel it with your eyes.” …
Continue Reading →Killer Quotes from “Withnail & I”
This delightful film has abundant gems within its script: Withnail to the farmer: “We’ve gone on holiday by mistake…are you the farmer?” Withnail drank a lot in the car, and now: “I feel like a pig shat in my head.” And earlier: “I feel unusual.” From the car, earlier: “Throw yourself into the road darling! You haven’t got a chance!” Withnail in the tea rooms to Miss Blennerhasset: “Balls. We want the finest wines available to humanity, and we want them here and we want them now.” Withnail: “We’re out of wine, what do…
Continue Reading →The Flight of the Intellectuals
There ain't no Muslim Sisterhood...Tariq Ramadan at Oxford, 2009 (photo by Kaihsu Tai)
(by Paul Berman) This hasty, readable, tendentious book bills itself as an attack on liberal intellectuals, and in particular, their inability to confront the paradox of a modern Islamism that hearkens back to its glory days of stony fundamentalism. But really, it is an assault on one man. Via that attack, the book ends up saying important things about the impulse of humans (even and perhaps especially those of ‘superior intellect’) to choose sides, deny opposing points of view, and draw near to attractive extremes. Berman, from the outset, leaps straight at his target, Swiss-born Tariq Ramadan, the controversial Islamic philosopher, alleged here to be an apologist for Islamic…
Continue Reading →The Pearl Fishers
Image from Antonio Bonamore from Zuccarelli's 1886 set design
(by Georges Bizet) (Met, March 2016) Time to fess up: I love The Pearl Fishers – unlike that other Brahmin-inspired piece, Lakmé, it does not cloy; it is not kitsch. It is a lovely piece, with pretty music, a good tight love-triangle plot and whilst there are not many polyphonic moments (apart from the famous piece, Au fond du temple saint, where the two fishermen declare their totally, okay – not totally – counterfeit affection), there are great declamatory solos and tremendous choral parts. I’ve loved it ever since I snapped up a cheap box of records of the production by Theatre National de…
Continue Reading →Rampage at Port Arthur
28 April 1996 TVC has friends who were honeymooning in Tasmania on the above date. That morning, they had a lovers’ tiff: she wanted to go to Port Arthur, the pretty but desolate and spine-tingling remnants of early convict settlement, vividly recounted in Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (although that is set elsewhere in Tasmania). Her beau, however, thought they should take advantage of the mild weather to climb picturesque Cradle Mountain, and his argument prevailed. It’s the kind of argument where you can never say ‘I told you so.’ For that day, a young (28 year old), well-to-do,…
Continue Reading →