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Arts

Edwardians In Colour review: 2 stars out of 5

Last night – during a lull in domestic proceedings that coincided with my early evening gin & tonic and a dearth of anything remotely watchable on the box, I managed to negotiate my cable television complexities and thereby play for myself the first episode of a Channel 5 documentary series [...]

March 5, 2019 // 0 Comments

Das Boot

I watched the final 4 episodes of Das Boot. One critic observed that a few years ago you would call it unmissable but such is the improvement in European productions that he down graded this to hugely enjoyable. I would not have gone as far at that. There were 2 parallel stories, one on the U-boat [...]

March 2, 2019 // 0 Comments

A busy press day

Some days there seems to be nothing happening in the world – and the next the internet just keeps giving. Here are links to some pieces that appear today upon the websites of UK national newspapers: POLITICS From a world which some Rusters feel may be over-represented on the pages of this [...]

March 2, 2019 // 0 Comments

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Watching the biopic of Donald Sutherland on Sky Arts inspired me to rent one of the more neglected films in his canon of considerable work – Six Degrees of Separation. Sutherland is in every sense a towering actor able to fulfil many roles, the concerned father in Ordinary People, the cop in [...]

February 23, 2019 // 0 Comments

Thoughts upon the word of news – and vaginas

One aspect of the universality of social media and the internet is that it has not just broken the mould of what used to be the traditional (and for ages presumed unchangeable) means of news dissemination but actually blow the whole world of news information and human interaction wide-open. For [...]

February 20, 2019 // 0 Comments

The Makioka Sisters /Junichiro Tanizaki

Junichoro Tanizaki is one of the Japanese literary giants of the twentieth century. I was invited to a book club where the book under review was his The Makioka Sisters. This is the story of 4 sisters, the daughters of an Osakan merchant, whose family wealth and status is dwindling in the 1930s. I [...]

February 16, 2019 // 0 Comments

Das Boot and Sky Arts “Discovering”

I watched the next two episodes of Das Boot on catch up. Both engrossed me sufficiently to intend to watch the rest of the series. One of the attractions of modern television is the importing of the European production. These begun with The Killing and followed with other Scanda Noir like The [...]

February 15, 2019 // 0 Comments

Wagner and somnabulance

Yesterday in our opera class my neighbour fell asleep as we listened to Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. I immediately thought of the judge censured for falling asleep at court. Of course there is a world of difference between sleeping on duty and sleeping in a class. In both cases though it [...]

February 14, 2019 // 0 Comments

Art and the counterculture of the fifties and sixties

Yesterday in our art course we studied the gay British artists Francis Bacon, Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde and Keith Vaughan. Our teacher is proficient in putting art in context, she will often prepare a time line of dates of key events and is knowledgeable on philosophy too. So we began with [...]

February 13, 2019 // 0 Comments

Fings don’t always seem what they are, or used ter be …

Having briefly worked in television I’m broadly aware of the ‘tricks of the trade’ – real or imagined – because, of course, in broadcasting (as in every aspect of life) very little is actually what it seems. Or perhaps that should read ‘necessarily what it seems’. Whether it’s a [...]

February 11, 2019 // 0 Comments

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