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 →Freya (Anthony Quinn)
The best thing about this, Anthony Quinn’s fifth novel is its unsympathetic protagonist. Freya Wyley, (twenty at the commencement of the novel and the end of World War 2, forty or so at the end of the story), is bold, rude, devious, suspicious and smug. She lacks insight and never learns. After repeatedly wrecking lunches, parties and work meetings with outbursts of vituperative personal abuse and being called to account time and time again, “her habitual response to criticism was one of airy indifference, since it usually came from people not qualified to give it”. The characters are the best part of the book – Freya’s closest…
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…
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