A Pocketful of Noses: Stories of One Ganelon or Another

A Pocketful of Noses: Stories of One Ganelon or Another

By James Powell

Cover art by Gail Cross

Crippen & Landru, 2009

ISBN: 9781932009378

These twelve tales are ingenious and fantastical, and possess just the right amount of whimsy.

Most mystery writers have just one series character, whereas James Powell has a series.  A quartet, in fact.  Ambrose Ganelon the first founded the family business, a detective agency, around the middle of the nineteenth century.  He used reason and logic alone to solve crimes, but his son and namesake placed his trust in science.  Perhaps you could call him a David Hume to his dad’s Rene Descartes.  Now Ambrose Ganelon the third often found himself moseying down mean streets late at night, where he had to use his fists to get out of trouble, so he abandoned empiricism for pragmatism.  ‘Whatever works’ became his motto.  As for the fourth and final Ambrose Ganelon, he lives hand to mouth since there’s now virtually no crime in Powell’s imagined principality of San Sebastiano.  He has a hard time because his predecessors have done such a good job.

All twelve are solid detective stories, the solutions often hingeing on a new understanding of the original situation, an inconspicuous fact being recognised as crucially significant.  However, it is the entertaining historical background that Powell provides for San Sebastiano which raises these tales above the rest.  And a further layer of enjoyment is added by the invention evident in various imaginary contraptions  and devices, vehicles and weapons especially.  You could well describe these devices as being steampunk in nature, although the term wasn’t in widespread use when the stories were first written.

If you love Conan Doyle and Chesterton, then I’d definitely recommend that you explore Powell’s work.  An exhilarating and entertaining collection.

The publisher’s description of the book can be read here.

Happy as Larry

Happy as Larry

Shaun Parker & Company

The Lowry, 18 October 2011

Ghenoa Gela joyously doing her thing. Photo by Branco Gaica

Happiness is the topic of Shaun Parker’s new dance show.

Apparently based on the enneagram, it asks how people with wholly different approaches to life attain the grail of undiluted joy.

The roller skater who continually falls down, but still gets up again; who, infatuated with speed, goes faster and faster; who continually skirts close to the edge, playing with danger, illustrates one or maybe a range of approaches.  And of course there is little sense in waiting around for happiness to find you.  You need to seek it out: a commitment to creative activities and pursuits, short-term and long-term hedonism, responsible risk taking and experimentation; they are all necessary to get you to where you want to be.

There is also a carefree ballerina in the show, she’s ever looking on the bright side, but you cannot always go through life like that, can you?  How will she respond to life’s misfortunes, the obstacles and frustrations that will be strewn in her path, an unwelcome awareness of her fallibilities and imperfections?  Her problem-solving skills and general resilience will in time be called into question; and when situations are insoluble, acceptance is the key.  Self acceptance, especially.

I enjoyed Happy as Larry, a thought-provoking show full of vibrant incident, vivid colour and fiery explosions of motion.  Ghenoa Gela’s disco dancing was hilarious, the outstanding moment of the show in my book.

In short, seeing this show made me happy.

Happy as Larry is at The Lowry again tonight and then it goes to Newcastle, full tour dates are here.

The Lost World, scored by John Garden

The Lost World

Directed by Harry O. Hoyt

Live musical score from John Garden

USA, 1925

Cornerhouse, 16 October 2011

Adventures abound in Hoyt’s classic movie, ideal Saturday matinee fare even for a Sunday afternoon in Manchester.

The film has been newly scored by John Garden, the Scissor Sisters’ musical director, who played live.

It holds up surprisingly well as a film, being by turns exciting, full of bluster and melodrama, poignant – and with the odd ounce of humour and irony.  Lewis Stone’s performance could hardly be improved upon even now, somehow he knew instinctively how to act to camera.  John Garden’s score invigorates the film, adding dollops of colour, and really comes into its own during the scenes where the dinosaur is on the loose in London town.  One fellow coming out of a pub does a double-take when he sees it, minus its top hat.  Has he really drunk that much tonight?

It is not a completely lost world, of course, since we still have the crocodile, itself a dinosaur or at any rate an archosaurian reptile (same difference). Or consider the birds, what with their shared wishbones and what not.

You can see that The Lost World was a clear influence on many films that were to follow: King Kong, Godzilla, Jurassic Park…

There has been quite a trend in recent times for modern musicians to score silent movies.  Otto Smart has written music for The Lodger and Steven Severin has scored Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet.  John Garden’s music was terrific, right up there with the best of them, and the film will be shown again at the Natural History Museum on Friday, details here.

A forthcoming event at Cornerhouse along the same lines is a screening of John Grierson’s Drifters (1929), which will feature live musical accompaniment by Jason Singh.  Further details of this film can be found here.

Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty

Written and Directed by Julia Leigh

Australia, 2011

Cornerhouse, 15 October 2011

Rather a disturbing film, painting an uncomfortable picture of modern life.

Its subject is oblivion, oblivion as a response to the general dissatisfaction to be found in the human-wrought world.  For Lucy (Emily Browning), this oblivion takes the form of alcohol, drugs and drudgery, the dehumanisation to be found in prostitution.  Marriage is put out there as a possibility (or a joke), but eventually she settles on sleep.  It ticks all the boxes, though there is the problem that you eventually have to wake up.  Suicide might be a better option.

There are some titillating scenes involving scantily-clad young women dressed in fetish clothing, but the true misogyny arises when Lucy is treated as a doll.  It becomes quite unpleasant, so be warned.

At the end of the film, I thought of the young women to be found carved on tombs in various European cemeteries (see David Robinson’s Saving Graces for a slue of such images, or read an interesting discussion of his book here).  That vibe of a beautiful woman mourning the dead, or welcoming them to the underworld – like Anubis bathing a corpse - is present also.

An uncomfortable film to watch at times, but Emily Browning’s performance is astounding.  She is a hunted animal seeking release.

Etherdome

Etherdome

Penny Dreadful

The Lowry, 13 October 2011

 

There is a very beautiful poem by Nick Flynn called ‘Some Ether’, but this play is about another ether entirely.

Not some vaunted fifth element which – as Einstein famously said – cannot be found because it does not exist, rather an anaesthetic, a destroyer of pain, a precious balm.  It is a play about a substance divine and the flawed mortals who bought it into being.

Mostly, the play is an archly acted, neo-Victorian melodrama sprinkled with plenty of slapstick and knockabout humour.  There is a narrative, certainly, but it never threatens to get in the way of a good joke – and nor should it.  Modesty is the watchword of steampunk fashion and here the personae dress in frockcoats and the odd corset.  The set has the appearance of a medicine show, a rabble-rousing soapbox, a demented cabinet.  All very jolly and atmospheric.

If you are looking for a theatrical experience at once wacky, weird and worth it, then Etherdome is warmly recommended.  It is at The Lowry until 15 October and then tours throughout the UK.  Details can be found either here or here.

Strictly Gershwin @ the Palace

Strictly Gershwin

Music and Lyrics by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin

English National Ballet

Palace Theatre, 12 October 2011

Never mind ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, this was a rhapsodic show in celebration of the Gershwin brothers.

We were given wonderful performances of many of their songs, among the highlights being ‘The Man I Love’, a heartfelt rendition by Sarah Fuller, and ‘Someone to Watch over Me’,  tenderly delivered by Hannah Richmond.  The spectacle of the dance also engaged one’s attention and there were many happy moments when one saw the two working together in perfect harmony.  A case in point being the pageant that occurred on stage while the score of ‘An American in Paris’ played.  It was plenty special.

But what caught the eye most was the tango in the second act, this dance accompanying ‘Summertime’, that curiously unsettling song.  Another case of ‘a ballerina stole my soul, broke my heart and torpedoed my weak flesh’, I’m afraid.  Her name was Daria Klimentova.  Saints would be tempted to sin, such a sensual ballerina is she.  They’d happily can their canonisation, let it go all to hell.

You can be assured of a splendid evening’s entertainment when you go to see this show.  And watch out for the song (you know the one) that rhymes Pollyannas with bananas.

Strictly Gershwin is playing at the Palace Theatre until 15 October and then tours the UK.  Details here.

 

Boris Vian’s Letters to Stanley Chapman

Letters to Stanley Chapman

By Boris Vian

Atlas Press & bookartbookshop, 2009

ISBN: 9781900565509

‘The main thing in life is to leap to every possible conclusion on every possible occasion.’

These words, the opening sentence of Boris Vian’s first novel as translated into English by Stanley Chapman, could be taken almost as a ‘Pataphysical Imperative.  That novel, Froth on the Daydream, received its first English publication in 1967, some eight years after Vian’s obscenely early death, but the two men had corresponded much earlier, in the mid-‘50s.  This elegant booklet presents facsimiles of seven of Vian’s letters.

In one, Vian writes that he has ‘had a bad time taking care of a fluttering heart’, a presentiment perhaps of the cardiac attack that would later strike him down.  Anyway, he comes across in the letters as a friendly guy, a giver, his writing full of bawdy wordplay.  There’s mention of ‘a cuntemporary celebrity’ in another letter, an epithet that should be used more often nowadays.  Limericks are discussed at the beginning and they apparently exchange some of their efforts (Vian praises Chapman’s limericks, though none are included here, showing them to a friend, the Scottish comedian Monty Landis) and in later letters the two embark on a project to write songs together.  The plan is to write songs in a rock ’n’ roll style, then a new-fangled thing, with Chapman translating and adapting Vian’s French lyrics.  The correspondence becomes a bit more business-like and matter of fact here.  Some songs, typewritten and with a few annotations, are included in the booklet – they came with the letters.

Why did the correspondence end?  Are Chapman’s own letters extant?  Is this the full haul of Vian’s letters to his English friend?  I confess I don’t know the answers to these questions.  Also, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one small error in presentation: the fourth letter (dated 9 April 1956) was written before the third (3 Sept 1956), otherwise they are presented in chronological order.

For fans and admirers of Boris Vian, a man of myriad talents, this is a welcome publication.  An elegantly produced booklet, consisting of red lettering on a marbled cream cover and art paper between, it is well worthy of its subject.

Some further information about Boris Vian can be read here.

Service

Service

Directed by Brillante Mendoza

Philippines, 2008

Cornerhouse, 8 October 2011

This fecund film teems at the seams, jam-packed with life and incident.

It vibes earthy but could only have been set in a city.  A building houses a porn cinema which doubles as a rendezvous for gay patrons and the young men who service them.  The cinema and the large, extended Phillippine family who own and run it somehow manage to coexist side by side.  Adventures of various kinds are captured by Brillante Mendoza’s ubiquitous camera, a creature hungry to live, eager to register experience.  Most action takes place in and around the building: a jeopardy-strewn island in the city, a perilous oasis.

Service is a very interesting film, similar in style to the work of Robert Altman.  Many and various characters, no single narrative strand.  It is one of several Brillante Mendoza films showing as part of Asia Triennial Manchester 11, the full film programme of which can be seen here.

Tyrannosaur

Tyrannosaur

Directed by Paddy Considine

UK, 2010

Cornerhouse, 8 October 2011

Not cheery fare, but then again who wants that, really, in a film?

Paddy Considine’s debut as director delivers a violent and bleak vision of today’s Britain.  At its centre stands a desperate relationship between a widower who has a tendency to resolve situations with violence and a charity-shop worker suffering abuse – both physical and mental – at home.  Olivia Colman’s performance as Hannah, the charity-shop worker, becomes truly harrowing.  It is very, very uncomfortable to watch.  The truth she brings to the role dazzles.

An excellent film graced by some excellent acting.  But it cannot exactly be called a barrel of laughs.

Two Princesses

Two Princesses

By Vladimir Odoevsky

Translated by Neil Cornwell

Hesperus Press, 2010

ISBN: 9781843911388

This volume tells a tale of two princesses, both unmarried women in 1830s Russia.

It collects together two society tales, one a novella and the other a rather lengthy short story, originally published some five years apart.  Together, they depict an aristocratic world of drawing-room gatherings, salons and masked balls, where the life-goal of women was usually to make a good match.  As for the gentlemen, they had whist and billiards of an evening and duels at dawn.

Princess Mimi (1834) is a novella of seven chapters, the main character being a moral guardian, a tin-pot spinster, a dried-up shell of a human being.  We are given the history of a hypocrite; Odoevsky attempts an analysis of how people become like this, their lives molehill-limited and fuelled by slights real and imagined.  The good Princess Mimi is always hatching petty schemes and jackass intrigues to get her own back, wielding gossip as power just like J.J. Hunsecker, Burt Lancaster’s character in Sweet Smell of Success.  You imagine Mimi as having a smile false and an eye made of glass, as being not really a looker.  Here her malignant lies have fatal consequences.

Our second tale, Princess Zisi (1839), is about a woman on the other side of the fence; Zisi (or Zinaida) is a noble beauty unjustly slandered.  She is a spirited lady, living way before her time, who finds herself crippled by convention and mauled by rumour.  There is a sense in this story of how Russia was changing; and it is clear as well that Odoevsky approved of the change and trusted the younger generation.  What’s noteworthy also, besides a fetchingly emphatic eulogy to wine, is the artistic way in which the story is told: through an assemblage of letters and conversations.  Not entirely an epistolary tale, but close.

A complaint serious enough to merit an authorial incursion in both tales is that too many Russians of noble birth speak and write in French, and a Pidgin French at that.  It’s probably like in the olden days, when the educated in England would write in Latin and not the vulgar language that Shakespeare would have recourse to.

Neil Cornwell’s excellent translation captures the vitality of Odoevsky’s vision.  These vivid tales still live.