July 9, 2012

Brooklyn and Bengal

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I have been reading Colm Tóibín’s novel Brooklyn. It is set in the mid nineteen fifties in southern Ireland and in Brooklyn. The story is the story of Irish emigration, at a time when the economy is stagnant and jobs difficult to find. Eilis Lacey’s brothers are in Birmingham in England. Her sister, Rose, does have a good job, but Eilis can only find a Sunday job in a local shop.

Her emigration to Brooklyn, where opportunities are better, is mediated though her sister Rose and the brief return of an Irish priest from Brooklyn. Father Flood organises her employment with Bartocci’s in Brooklyn which enables her to get immigration papers. Her sister has one of the few good jobs around, but by sending her sister away, she is condemning herself to remaining close to their mother and giving up chances to marry.

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July 7, 2012

La Règle du Jeu: A Film about War in the Guise of a Comedy of Romantic Intrigue

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We recently watched La Règle du Jeu at the local film club. Francois Truffaut, who like other nouvelle vague directors was  inspired and influenced by Renoir, called La Règle du Jeu ‘le credo des cinéphiles, le film des films’. I interpret this to mean something like the ‘manifesto’ of film making. But if it is, it is a difficult manifesto to interpret and it is difficult to be sure of Renoir’s intentions when he made the film.

Filming on La Règle du Jeu started in mid-February 1939, and was completed by the end of March. The film opened in Paris on July 8th 1939, originally in a 94 minute version. Although some critics recognised its importance, it was not well received by the public and was a commercial failure. Renoir re-edited it down to 81 minutes, but it was banned by the French government and subsequently by the Nazis. The original negatives were destroyed in an allied bombing raid in 1942, and the film had to be re-assembled after the war. The reconstruction, completed with Renoir’s help in 1958 by Jean Gaborit and Jacques Durand, was shown in 1959 at the Venice Film Festival. At 106 minutes it is longer than the version which opened in 1939. This is the version we have today.

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June 25, 2012

Northern Italy: Venice and Florence

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We made the first of our two motoring tours of Italy in 2001. We took the shuttle train through the channel tunnel on a Friday evening late in September, stayed the night in Calais, then drove down through France to Italy, arriving at dusk in Milan.

On Sunday we drove on to Verona, taking a detour along the shores of Lake Garda on the way. In the afternoon we visited the art museum in the Castelvecchio. The castle was completed in 1376 and is a superb setting for a museum. The fortified bridge that crosses the river here is a restoration; the original was destroyed at the end of the Second World War. In the evening we joined the passeggiatta, taking a stroll through the streets to the arena, before heading back to our hotel for supper.

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June 15, 2012

French Film Season

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At the weekend our local cinema ran a short season of French films as part of the annual French Arts and Film Festival. We managed to get to a few of them.

Les Emotifs Anonyme is an amusing comedy directed by Jean-Pierre Améris.  Angélique belongs to a mutual aid group for people who are very awkward in personnel relationships. She is also an anonymous master chocalatier, selling her chocolates through the shop of M. Mercier. After his death she joins, as sales-women, a failing chocolate factory run by Jan René van der Hugde, who is equally awkward, and is being helped in private sessions by a psychologist. The course the film takes is unsurprising. The secret chocolatier returns to save the business and the couple muster the composure to get married.

The lead roles are played by Isabelle Carré and Benoît Poelvoorde. We saw Poelvoorde a couple of years ago in Anne Fontaine’s film Coco avant Chanel, playing Etienne Balsan.

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May 17, 2012

Travels through a Dry Land

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Outside the air-conditioned car, it’s 100 degrees. The Mojave Desert stretches away on either side of the highway. We have been maintaining a steady 60 on the clock for quite a while. But we are, nevertheless, in a queue. The same vehicles have been in front and behind since our last stop at Baker and will still be with us when we get to Las Vegas. It’s Sunday afternoon, and the traffic is solid in both lanes on our side of the highway. And it’s the same on the other side for traffic heading back to Los Angeles.

This is the first stretch of the most ambitious of our motoring trips. The idea is to drive inland from Los Angeles through Nevada, a corner of Utah and a corner of Colorado to Santa Fe in New Mexico, and then return by a southerly route through Albuquerque, Flagstaff and Phoenix. We arrived in Los Angeles late on Friday night, and did very little on our first full day, except relax by the hotel pool and book the hire car, a compact Ford SUV.

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April 29, 2012

Shearing Layers: How Buildings Learn

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Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn is one of my favourite books, maybe one of the half dozen non-fiction works I would take to a desert island. It’s a book about buildings, and specifically how buildings are modified and adapted over time, but the theoretical ideas on which it’s grounded can be applied to any type of system.

The argument is illustrated by sequences of photographs, and these are the greatest asset of the book. Brand has trawled the archives for sequences of photographs of the same building or street scene taken at different times. The cover features two Greek Revival townhouses on St. Charles Street in New Orleans; identical in a auctioneers drawing made in 1857, quite different in a 1993 photograph after various modifications to add storeys, extensions, balconies, windows and entrances.

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April 25, 2012

A Question of Upbringing

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Amy Chua’s memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother attracted plenty of critical response when it was published last year. The excerpts in the Wall Street Journal suggested it was a guide to parenting which praised the superiority of the ‘Chinese’ method. But this is misleading. Chua tells us she started to write the book in summer of 2009 when the family returned from Moscow, where, during a break in a café in Red Square, she finally admitted defeat over her parenting methods, at least in the case of her younger daughter Lulu, and allowed her to make her own choices about where to focus her efforts and her own choices about how much dedication and intensity to invest. The presentation of herself as an extreme ‘Chinese’ mother is delivered dead-pan, which makes it very funny.

The Wall Street Journal knew what it was doing when it printed extracts from the earlier chapters, because there can be fewer more contentious activities than bringing up the next generation. The polarities of ‘Chinese’ parenting and ‘Western’ parenting can stand in for most of the conflicts between strict and liberal and traditional and modern. I think there are at least four objectives involved in bringing up children: transmitting culture; preparing for life, developing an individual and protecting the experience of childhood.

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March 16, 2012

Central Java

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It’s convenient that Borobudur and Prambanan, the two principal UNESCO world heritage sites in Indonesia, are located close together, Borobudur a few miles to the north west of Yogyakarta and Prambanan out in the eastern suburbs just beyond the airport. They were probably built at around the same time in the 8th and 9th centuries CE, but they couldn’t be more different in character.

Borobudur is an artificial mound, a set of ascending platforms and stairways leading up to a single bell-shaped stupa. There are terraces of smaller stupas at each level of the climb. In many cases they are broken, revealing inside stone-carved Buddhas gazing out over the plain to the mountains. It’s not known why is was abandoned, but because of its proximity to Mount Merapi, it was buried under ash for centuries before being rediscovered by Stamford Raffles, briefly governor during a period of British rule, in 1815. It is now set in well maintained parkland and we were fortunate in our guide Anit, one of the large number of guides accredited at the site.

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January 26, 2012

Along the Mekong

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Luang Prabang is the former capital of Laos. It sits on a promontory where the Nam Khan flows into the Mekong. We stayed at the Apsara Rive Droite (*), which is on the far bank of the Nam Khan. You get to the main town by the hotel’s small motor boat. A local ordinance insists that the presence of the hotel should be disguised, so to look like part of the village the garden is surrounded by banana groves and bamboo fencing. Out of season in June, we had the place entirely to ourselves.

The town itself is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and still largely undeveloped. The national museum was formerly the royal place until the kings were deposed by the Pathet Lao in 1975. The museum collection is made up largely gifts to the king, including, from the United States, the Lao flag carried to the moon on Apollo 11 and a small piece of moon rock. Round the back in the garage is the collection of royal motor cars: a couple of Lincoln Continentals, a Ford Edsel, a beaten up Citroen DS, a Toyota jeep and a speedboat, used to visit the orchards across the river. The museum has information on the lives of the royal family up until 1975 but nothing later. The last king in fact died a few years afterwards in a re-education camp. The museum also houses the Pra Bang, the small statue of the Buddha that gives the town its name. It was made in Sri Lanka in the 1st century and was a present from the Khmer empire in the 14th century.

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January 23, 2012

Chinese New Year in George Town

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Today is the first day of the lunar year in the Chinese calendar. The nomenclature of the years is based on a sixty year cycle of five elements and twelve creatures. This will be the year of the water dragon. This is the third festival in a run, following Diwali in October and Christmas in December.

Like the Indian, but unlike the Gregorian calendar which is solar and the Islamic calendar which is lunar, the Chinese calendar is lunisolar. The solar New Year falls at December 21st, the winter solstice. The twelve months of the lunar calendar are anchored to the solar calendar because the winter solstice always falls in the 11th month of the lunar year. The 1st month of the lunar calendar will therefore start sometime between January 21st and February 21st, depending on which date in the 11th month the winter solstice occurs.

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