The Garden in June

At the beginning of June, the main border was at it's best. By now the blue Delphinium Pacific Giant and the Astrantias are over.

But the white Lychnis in the middle of the border above are now much better.

As are are both Penstemon Roma.

The roses are always at their best in June.

The hot bed at the far end of the garden is also good this year.

The bedding Dwarf Antirrhinums are struggling to fill the border.

But the bed around the conservatory has been more successful with using both Lobelia and Alyssum. 

The Acanthus has flowered well but the leaves have suffered from the blight.

One day I will move the purple Penstemon as it struggles in the wildflower border.

The lawn had become very dry and patchy with no rain in May. Fortunately some heavy showers recently has improved the grass immensely.

Goodbye Holly

It was time. What I thought was a nice Holly bush turned out to be a huge tree. It overpowered the paved area at the side of the house and had to come down.

As I had hoped, this has opened up this whole corner and I can begin to decide what can go here.

A Fantastic Woman (Una mujer fantástica)

A Fantastic Woman was the entry from Chile for the The Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards of 2018. It deserved to win. I'm not sure how I came to miss it at the cinema, but it may have had a limited release.

The story of a transgender woman called Marina stars Daniela Vega who, herself, is transgender. She is quite brilliant as a troubled soul whose much older partner (played by Francisco Reyes) dies at the beginning of the movie. The marvellous original screenplay is by director Sebastian Lelio and Gonzalo Maza. 

This is an emotional drama following a quiet person caught up in the aftermath of a tragedy that involves police and family. It is only at the very end of the film that we glimpse what makes her happy. No wonder so many critics gave the film five stars, as they did the team's previous movie Gloria (99% on Rotten Tomatoes). 

The song with the end credits is also great: "Time" by the Alan Parsons Project.

Great Film Composers:Music of the Movies on Sky Arts - The 2000's

Of the first six from this episode of Great Film Composers, I had only heard of one. This decade was described as giving us "some of the most exciting and innovative" music and was so much a "fusion of styles".

Alexandre Desplat  came from a musical family and composed the music fro a huge number of films in France. But it was 2003's Girl with a Pearl Earring that brought him to the attention of Hollywood. The music was described as a "wonderful, exquisite, perfect score, full of restraint and mood". Syrianna in 2005 was a much more exciting score for this political thriller but still "delicate and haunting". For his Oscar nominated music to The Queen in 2006, Desplat blended trumpets with something more lyrical and romantic. (His work in the next decade is even more amazing).

Argentinian Gustavo Santaolalla is a champion of his home country's folk music and formed a band mixing that with rock. He moved to the USA as a solo musician and was chosen to score 21 Grams (2003) and The Motorcycle Diaries (2004) where he used a guitar to clash with percussion. However he is best known for his "sensual score" for Brokeback Mountain in 2005 for which he won the Academy Award. Again this was guitar focused, The following year he won another Oscar for his score for Babel. The programme described how Santaolalla accompanied director Aledranjo Inarritu to locations all over the world. Using a guitar yet again, he conjured up a sound that sounds "almost improvised".

At last a composer I had heard of. A R Rahman. He was a prolific composer in Indian TV and film before Danny Boyle chose him to score 2008's Slumdog Millionaire, an inspired choice. The pulsating soundtrack combined Indian music with a western feel and won the Academy Award for best score and best song. Jai Ho backed one of the best song and dance sequences I have ever seen.

Cliff Martinez made his early career as drummer for the Red Hot Chilli Peppers and captain Beefheart, But it was his work with computers and new technology that led him to be chosen by Steven Soderbergh to compose the score for his first 1989 feature Sex, Lies and Videotape. Martinez went on the score ten of the director's movies. These included the critically acclaimed Traffic in 2000, and Solaris in 2002. Here he used a baritone steel drum that gave an effect that was described as "cosmological". (Again the next decade proved equally fruitful for this composer.)

Marco Beltrami is another talented musician who, amongst many other films, is noted for composing the "music"  for The Hurt Locker in 2008. A percussion driven score full of industrial noises that was said to be "a highlight of the decade".

Dany Elfman (the last of this series of composers who I did not know) also had a rock band background and has composed the music for seventeen of Tim Burton's moves. These included Batman in 1989 and Spiderman in 2002. We were given an extract from the latter's great music for the end credits.

Hans Zimmer had already been applauded in an earlier episode, but here the contributors concentrated on 2000's Gladiator for which he was nominated for an Oscar. The opening dream sequence was described and Ian Nathan was impressed as Zimmer "finds his moment".

Of the many movies scored by the English composer John Powell, the programme chose 2002's The Bourne Identity. That particular pulsating beat came from a limited budget after the score form the original composer was rejected.Powell went on to score the sequels and many other films in that decade.

Howard Shore (who also appears in the previous episode) brought a classical orchestral score for the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I was amazed to hear that he composed different themes for each character, plot and location.

Towards the end of the decade, new mainstream popular musicians turned to composing for feature films. Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead was acclaimed for his core for There Will Be Blood in 2007. This was described as an interesting mix of his own work and classical music from the past. It proved that musicians from all different backgrounds could be successful in writing film scores.

The Light of Day, My House in Umbria and A Game of Hide and Seek

Although "The Light of Day" takes place "over the course of a single day" (as suggested by the back cover of my paperback), it is in fact actually about another day that is told in hindsight. In fact the many glimpses of the past are expertly and satisfyingly written. The prose is easy to read and flows from the page. Sometimes obtuse, it is always engaging. I love those short sentences starting on the first page:
"She's here before me, of course. When isn't she? She doesn't sleep these days, she says. "These days" have lasted years. Always awake at dawn, so why not? Always something to be done. And I pitch up after her. Boss's privilege".

Two separate passages describe the following of a car - Lillie Road, Fulham Palace Road take me back to my childhood, and the Hammersmith roundabout to my first ever driving lesson. What a place to start! I was waiting for a big reveal at the end, but it is so delicately written, I almost missed it.      

     

A short novel from one of my favourite authors, but at the same time delicate and devastating. Written by William Trevor nearly thirty years ago, Mrs Delahunty is haunted both by her traumatic past and even more traumatic recent event. In middle age she tells us about the repercussions of the latter but only dips into her early life which would make an even better story.
It is her house in Umbria that takes in a small number of tourists before the outrage and survivors afterwards. We have huge sympathy for her, but as the story progresses, we find her attitude harder to accept. Trevor pulls no punches in his beautiful prose. It is the writing that saves a tragic tale.         

 I didn't enjoy this book as much as I had some others from Elizabeth Taylor. I still loved her dialogue, and she can get right to the heart of her characters. However some of her writing, whilst not entirely obscure, is sometimes too elaborate, even though this is her style. Early on when Harriet and Vesey are still young:

"His personality had long influenced hers, as the moon influences the sea, with an unremitting, inescapable control. Her mother had seen that influence and thought it not always for good." And later together:
"She wished that they might never stop; believed that they might not; for time, with it's dwindling, filching ways, seemed triumphed-over. They were suspended in some magic which caught up also, meaninglessly, gilt baskets of azaleas, some paper streamers and a great chandelier like a shower of grubby acid-drops. Remotely, the figures of other people drifted at the perimeter of their enchanted space of floor. They dictated their own music."

It was worth sticking with the slow parts of the book as threequarters through Vesey and Harriet meet again after many years and for one brilliant chapter they remember moments from their youth. It was just that some judicial editing might have made this book exceptional.          

David Bowie: Finding Fame on BBC2

David Bowie: Finding Fame is the third part of Francis Whately's trilogy that was shown on BBC2. Although it describes how David Robert Jones became David Bowie, what I wanted to hear was the period when formed the band David Bowie and The Buzz. Why? Because I saw them perform at Sussex University on 22nd October 1966. The programme confirmed what Richie Unterberger says on the All Music website that Bowie left a band called The Lower Third and recruited a new band called David Bowie and The Buzz in February 1966.

David was nineteen at the time, so younger than many of his more successful contemporary's. I was two years older at twenty one. At that time I had no knowledge whatsoever about Bowie and as I said on my previous post, I have no memory of him playing that night in October 1966. It is only having the ticket that I know I must have seen him play. Only two months later he disbanded the band wanting to go alone, although in 1967 he joined an existing band called The Riot Squad.

This is what I said on the 27th February 2010:

For some reason I still have the ticket, which might now be worth a few bob on eBay. The date was the 22nd October 1966, and I have absolutely no memory of the gig whatsoever. which is a shame, given the success Mr Bowie had in later years. And not many people will know the name of his band at the time: David Bowie and The Buzz. 

TYRANT - Shakespeare on Power by Stephen Greenblatt

Tyranny has long been a focus of many of Shakespeare's plays. Stephen Greenblatt has cleverly taken this as a theme for this scholarly but revealing study of those villainous creations that we thought we knew so well. The author's study of the text of these plays reminds us there is always plenty to learn  about these individuals. This is essential reading for teachers and students of the Bard.

From the overthrow of Richard II the book follows the trilogy of Henry VI and picks out Jack Cade as a Trump like populist leader. The rise of Richard, Duke of Gloucester is punctuated by those who enabled his grab for the throne. Greenblatt tells us "By multiple acts (of murderess collaboration) taken by respectable people eager to be "guiltless from the meaning", tyranny is enabled". And later "Within the play, Richard's rise is made possible by various degrees of complicity from those around him. But in the theatre it is we, the audience, watching it all happening, who are lured into a peculiar form of collaboration".

In Macbeth, it may be that Lady Macbeth is the real tyrant, urging her husband to kill Duncan, telling him he has "the milk of human kindness". Then her great line: "a little water clears us of this deed". How wrong can you be. King Lear is an obvious target for this book, as is Leontes in A Winter's Tale.

For me, the penultimate chapter is the highlight of the book, as the author looks at some of those who are in peril from the tyrant but escape the net of his killing sweep, only to come back to destroy them. The quote from the last line in King Lear has never been so clear:

"The weight of this sad time we must obey;
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
The oldest hath borne most; we that are young
Shall never see so much, nor live so long".

The second half of the chapter dwells on the complications that is the plot of Julius Caesar and his destruction. A few pages was probably not enough to reveal it properly. However the final paragraph is brilliant and includes the sentence "What the tragedy offers instead is an unprecedented representation of political uncertainty, confusion and blindness".

The final chapter deals with Coriolanus but it was the first paragraph that resonated with me. "Communities are usually alert to the danger posed by certain people in their midst and contrive to isolate or expel them". Never has this been more true than this country's dismissal of Corbynism and Momentum. But it is Volumnia, the mother of Coriolanus that is again the real tyrant. Her goading of her son to stand for Consul is his undoing.

So whenever I see one of these plays again, I will definitely read again the relevant section from this
book. And enjoy the play even more.

Film Night - Part 3

My word, it's been a long time since I saw Four Weddings. Funnier than I remember. The cast (especially Hugh Grant) looked so young. Well it was twenty five years ago.

Somehow I missed the remake of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. at the cinema. It would not have stood a repeat viewing, but it certainly was a Saturday night movie.

It's been even longer since I saw Some Like It Hot. Although it did show it's age (1959 so that's sixty years old) there was plenty to enjoy. I was amazed that there was so much shooting and killing by the gangsters.

William Trevor

William Trevor has become one of my favourite authors. He was born in County Cork in Ireland in 1928 but moved to England in his twenties and remained there until his death in 2016 at the age of 88. He was nominated five times for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Prize (far superior to the Booker in my opinion, and now the Costa Prize) three times.

His first success came in 1964 with The Old Boys (on my to read list) and he moved to Devon where he resided for the rest of his life. Felicia's Journey (a 1994 Whitbread winner) is one of my favourite books and I also enjoyed the award winning The Children of Dynemouth, Fools of Fortune and the nominated The Story of Lucy Gault. 

Trevor is hugely admired for his short stories and there are a number of collections. I'm not a huge lover of this format and his News from Ireland collection my only book so far. I also enjoyed My House in Umbria, the first of the two novellas that make up Two Lives and shall pick up the other, Reading Turgenev sometime soon.

In 1977 Trevor was awarded an honorary CBE and in 2002 came an honorary KBE. In his obituary in The Guardian, Peter Porter ended with:
Ireland remained close to his heart, but I am convinced that he reserved his best writing for his adopted land, England. One of the great creators of fiction of recent decades, he was not modern, but neither was he reactionary. Every sentence he wrote was perfectly crafted, yet he had a natural love of storytelling: his first loyalty was always to the reader’s desire to find out what was going to happen next. It is hard to conceive of an English-speaking literary landscape without him.

Great Film Composers: Music of the Movies on Sky Arts; The 1990's

The 1990's saw the rise of independent cinema as well as the big studio blockbusters, and this led to a great variety of film music.

How can I have never heard of James Newton Howard? He wrote the scores for over a hundred films and garnered eight Academy Award nominations. He came from a musical family but I guess he got bored with his traditional music education and went into rock and roll, notably orchestrating Elton John's Don't Go Breaking my Heart. He was composing for films in the 1980's but made his breakthrough when chosen to score what was thought to be a small film, but 1990's Pretty Woman became a classic. The programme ignored his first Oscar nomination for the score to 1991's Prince of Tides and jumped Joel Shumacher's 1993's Falling Down. Howard's music suited the chaos of the movie. The same year he worked on The Fugitive, a "big and bold score" and another Oscar nomination. A huge number of films later, the programme described his music for 1999's The Sixth Sense as being such a subtle score telling two separate stories, one horror and the other an emotional drama with "the ability to bring them all together".

Dave Grusin had a background in jazz music and was composing music for films from the late 1960's. I wasn't sure why this series ignored his early work, especially as by the time he won the Academy Award for best score for 1988's The Milagro Beanfield War, he had already been nominated four times. Instead his score for The Firm in 1993 was classed as a superb piano composition, almost sounding improvised, winning yet another Oscar nomination.

Carter Burwell has scored most of the films of the Coen Brothers. From 1984's Blood Simple, to 1987's Raising Arizona and Miller's Crossing in 1990. The first two scores came from his background working with rock bands, but the last saw him work with an orchestra for the first time, making a "romantic score" against all the bloodshed. After scoring more films, then came one of my favourite movies of all time, the 1996 Coen Brothers' Fargo. The bleakness of the film was set against a melodramatic score" for what is a black comedy thriller. The music had a "beautiful haunting melody". I hope that The Big Lebowski gets a mention in the future.

Thomas Newman has been nominated for fifteen Academy Awards without ever winning. He came from a very musical family, but the episode skipped many of his scores to concentrate on 1994's The Shawshank Redemption. Called a doom laden classic, it won Newman his first Academy Award nomination. (As did his score for Little Women in the same year, ignored by the programme).

Another composer whose work for the cinema started in the 1980's was the American James Horner. He studied in England at the Royal College of Music before teaching at UCLA. Horner was the man for the big score. He started composing for films in the 1980's and made his breakthrough with the score for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Amongst many, many other  movies in this decade were Cocoon 1985) and Aliens (1986) which won Horner his first Oscar Nomination. He was equally busy in the 1990's but it was 1995's Braveheart that the programme picked out. Yet another Oscar nomination, his medieval music was modernised to a "huge sweeping score". In 1997 came one of Horner's best known scores for the movie Titanic. Not only did it win the Oscar for original score, but also that for the song.

Many established composers who started writing music for films in previous decades continued their success. Among other films that he scored in the 1990's,  Hans Zimmer composed the music for Tony Scott's Crimson Tide in 1995 that won a Grammy award for the main theme. The score was said to be a big sound full of "throbs and rumbles".

Gabriel Yared (yes, another name I didn't know) was a Lebanese-French composer whose big success was the music for The English Patient. It won both the Academy Award and a Grammy. Among other Oscar nominations came his score for 1999's The Talented Mr Ripley that the programme ignored.

Howard Shore had a big musical education and was the composer and musical director for Saturday Night Live. It was David Cronenberg who engaged him to compose the music for The Brood in 1979. Through the 1980's he continued to score many movies and the programme picked Dead Ringers from 1988. Then in 1991 came The Silence of the Lambs and his score was said to emphasise the battles between dark and light/. "A most seductive piece of dark music" was the conclusion. Shore was then the obvious choice for David Fincher's serial killer movie Seven in 1995. The programme dipped into the next decade to remind us that Howard Shore composed the music for 1991's Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (the first of the trilogy) that won the Oscar for best original score.

John Williams continued his association with Steven Spielberg with 1993's Schindler's List. It was called one of "his simplest scores" with one amazing heartbreaking theme. Very different from his scores for the many blockbusters for which he was so well known. An Oscar for the score was well deserved.

This House - National Theatre Live at Home

This House was by far and away the best theatrical production I have seen at home. James Graham's hilarious take on the Labour Government's struggle to keep in power between 1974-1979 gives us a wonderful view of the working of the House of Commons. The play focuses on the whips of the two main parties, alternating nicely between their offices. Deals come and go, members are (literally) wheeled in to vote.

The cast is excellent. Phil Daniels is at his best as Bob Mellish and Jeremy Herrin's direction invokes the hostile atmosphere of parliament. The set was extremely clever, the music sympathetically daft. My only criticism was that the play went on too long at over two and a half hours. Cutting half an hour would have done no damage.

Rose "Blue for You"

In early May, the rose "Blue for You" was not yet in bloom in it's position just under the window.

But by the end of the month it was showing why it is called a blue rose, although more lilac to my eyes.

Now in June, there are so many flower heads, not bad considering the soil is so very poor next to the side patio.

Delphinium "Pacific Giant"

The best flower (well my favourite) in the garden at the moment is Delphinium "Pacific Giant". It is almost two meters tall and has multiple flower heads from just the one plant. I only used a short stake to tie it in the early spring, but it seems to be the Hibiscus shrub behind that is giving it the best support.

In the photo below, you might be able to see a bee inside the flower.

Two Philadelphus

The two Philadelphus that I planted a few years ago have never flowered as well as this year. This one is Philadelphus "Dainty Lady".

The one that borders the side patio is Philadelphus "Belle Etiole"

Great Film Composers: Music of the Movies on Sky Arts: 1980's Part 2

The second half of the 1980's saw big budget releases mix classical and popular music. Alan Silvestri grew up to be a talented musician and arranger., playing jazz guitar, and as a drummer with The Herd. In his twenties, from 1977 to 1983, he composed music for the TV series CHiPs. This brought him to the attention of Robert Zemeckis and they began a long term relationship over a number of movies. The first was Romancing the Stone in 1984. Bonnie Greer called it a "grand Hollywood score". Ian Nathan thought that the music was very modern with a loud bass and a big beat.

Again with Zemeckis, Silvestri composed the score for Back to the Future which was called his masterpiece. It was "brassy and bombastic" and had that fifties feel when Marty goes back to that decade. This was followed by two sequels where Silvestri adapted the original theme. In 1987 he scored Predator and then he was back with Zemeckis for Who Framed Roger Rabbit. That modern jazz score is instantly recognisable that was mixed with cartoon and film noir themes. In 1989 Silvestri worked with James Cameron on The Abyss, composing some inventive music for those jaw dropping moments.

Michael Kaymen was born in New York City and rose to prominence in film composition in the 1980's. Another graduate of Julliard School, he formed a classical/rock band called New York Rock & Roll Ensemble who released five albums in the period to 1973. He became a successful arranger for some of the biggest bands in popular music including Pink Floyd and Queen.

Kaymen scored his first big Hollywood movie in 1983 with David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone. He composed a horror film score with all sorts of sounds. This was followed by his music for Brazil  in 1985 and Highlander in 1986, merging traditional ancient instruments with the music of Queen. That same year he scored Mona Lisa. In 1987 and 1988 he scored two huge thrillers in Lethal Weapon and Die Hard. mixing popular songs with classical themes.  

Hans Zimmer was one of the most successful composers in cinema history. He moved from his home in Germany to work in London, first as keyboards and synthesizer player with the band The Buggles, and then working with the prolific film composer  Stanley Myers on many British films often mixing orchestral sounds withe electronic music. Zimmer's first work in Hollywood was 1988's Rainman for which he received an Oscar nomination. In 1989 he worked with Ridley Scott on Black Rain and the same year he composed the music for Driving Miss Daisy. He was still composing scores for big blockbusters in the 1990's and 2000's.

John Williams had already been discussed in previous episodes and he continued his success in the late 1980's with Steven Spielberg's 1987 film Empire of the Sun. The music was nominated for an Oscar. For some reason this episode omitted William's scores for 1988's The Accidental Tourist and 1989's Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade and Born on the Fourth of July, all being nominated again for an Academy Awards.

Maurice Jarre was also mentioned in a previous episode and in 1987 he worked with samplers for the first time on 1987's No Way Out. Also that year he made that aggressive score for Fatal Attraction that harped back to old time thrillers.

John Barry also continued his successful career with 1985's Jagged Edge. That gloomy piano helps to keep us guessing what is going on. And then the same year he composed my favourite all time film music with Out of Africa which won the Academy Award for best score.

Finally, Ennio Morricone won another Oscar nomination  for his music for 1987's The Mission and 1988's The Untouchables. But it was his music for 1988's  Cinema Paradiso that the contributors thought was a sweet sweeping score.