C. S. Lewis’s Three Reasons to Do Things

Today I came across this snippet of wisdom by C. S. Lewis, taken from a letter to Sarah, his godchild, dated 3 April 1949:

Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do.  (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing.  I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them.  Things you ought to do are things like doing one’s school work or being nice to people.  Things one has to do are things like dressing and undressing, or household shopping.  Things one likes doing — but of course I don’t know what you like.  Perhaps you’ll write and tell me one day.

The quote was found at The New Jerk Times, an excellent blog.

The Descendants

The Descendants

Directed by Alexander Payne

USA, 2011

Cornerhouse, 28 January 2012

A good film, although it mainly functions as a George Clooney vehicle.

He plays a cuckolded husband whose wife is on a life-support machine.  His two daughters have behavioural issues as well.  And he must make a big decision regarding some land his family owns.  So there’s a lot of emotional ‘meat’ for Clooney the actor to get his teeth into.

To be just to the guy, he does a pretty good job.  There is no fake fire and a fair amount of true black to his performance.  It’s copacetic how he invests his character, who’s a quite ordinary fellow, with a kind of battered nobility.

Still, Robert Forster (who plays Clooney’s character’s father-in-law) is the best actor in the film by far.

Fraulein by Ellen von Unwerth

Fraulein

By Ellen von Unwerth

Foreword by Ingrid Sischy

Taschen, 2011

ISBN: 9783836528085

When Ellen von Unwerth worked as a model, a stint of several years, she apparently greatly disliked holding a pose, being the stationary object of a mainly male gaze.

So her practice as a photographer is interesting and involves encouraging her models to move and be active, as she shoots rapidly from the hip.  It is most likely this process that gives her photos their frequent sense of wild vivacity and open narrative.  There is a before and an after, quite literally, consisting of those photos that in the end were not used.  The photos that do see the light of day capture a moment in time.  They don’t look posed because they are not.

As for the photos contained in Fraulein, they consist in the main of good girls playing at being bad; and when they’re bad they are, of course, better.  Mae West never spoke a truer word.

Most of von Unwerth’s subjects are famous for being supermodels (Naomi, Kate, Nadja and their many sisters), singers (notably Christina Aguilera and Lady Gaga), burlesque artistes (including the delectable Dita Von Teese) and the like.  But now one is best known for being the wife of the French President.

BITCH! Paris 2007. Copyright: Ellen von Unwerth

With several photos there is a clandestine element/demimonde vibe such as can be found in Brassai’s photos of Parisian nightlife or one or two obscure Erich von Stroheim films.  And you might be in a burlesque or a brothel, a circus or a swanky hotel during wartime.  A particular photo, ‘Bathing Beauties’ (1992), suggested somehow a Cecil B. DeMille film.  Yes, there are some domestic scenes but they are hardly genteel.  These young women are more likely to be found dancing on the table rather than setting it.  In one photo (‘Dinner’, 1998) she is what’s for dinner; she’s not making it.

I’d describe each photo as a performance, with cosplay being the predominant aesthetic: having got all dressed up, these ladies now tease and provoke to camera.  And like New Burlesque, you can package it as empowerment if you want.  Personally, I like the unbridled joy and playfulness to be found in a photo like ‘New Shoes’ (1996): a girl all aglow, with her legs in the air, showing off her new shoes.  Besides, there is elsewhere the irony of a seeming innocence, a dallying coyness, which is yet deeply provocative.

TELEPHONE SEX New York 1997. Copyright: Ellen von Unwerth

The humour in ‘Tell Me Yes’ (1993), though present, is altogether blacker: a manacled woman attempts to strangle a man with the chain that binds her.  And in fact quite a few photos feature fetish/BDSM scenes, with loss of control being a prominent theme.  There’s bondage, as you might imagine, but also fairy tale elements: blindfolded girls stepping into a forest.  Loss of control functions as a kind of portable disability.

Ellen von Unwerth’s photography is intriguing, transgressive and erotically charged.  She’s like a real-life Laura Mars, for those who know the Faye Dunaway film.  Only the vital tableaux in Fraulein are too lively and vivacious to make for any crime scene photo.

Her work provides a living link between Pina Bausch and Lady Gaga, whom she has photographed (click here).  Her photo shoot of Christina Aguilera, a young woman who deserves a gold medal for tease, gives an insight into von Unwerth’s practice as a photographer (click here).

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

The Rainbow Connection by Joanne Sherryden

The Rainbow Connection

By Joanne Sherryden

The Lowry, 27 January 2012

This is a pitch-perfect, feel-good comedy.

It is all about a friendship between Joe (Anthony Crank), a gay man fighting depression, and Shelly (Erin Shanagher), a woman stranded in an abusive relationship with a married man.

Brilliantly written and performed, it cannot be recommended highly enough.  It’s chockful of jokes but its heart is big enough to contain them.  You’ll laugh a lot and probably shed the odd tear too when you go to see this effortlessly entertaining play.

It’s on again tonight, details here.

Future Shock by Richard Stockwell

FutureShock

By Richard Stockwell

The Lowry, 27 January 2012

A real interesting science-fiction piece it is, as well.

Like the best sci-fi, it sheds a sometimes piercing light on present day concerns: our darling and very dear financial crisis, those cuts in public spending, the fragility of society and pro-social sentiments generally.  There is maybe too an oblique dig at PFI, all that living on the never-never.

The story focuses on Laura (Alice Brockway), a woman who awakens, or is revived, several centuries into the future.  You can expect fine performances all around – Christine Clare and Phil Minns are the other cast members – in a play replete with ideas.  Clare plays a clone very well – a remark that is intended as a compliment, promise – as a pernickety, anal, jobsworthy type.  It must be difficult to project emotion when your character is a being that’s in some respects emotionless.

An entertaining and thought-provoking play, which is showing again tonight.  Details here.

Amedei White Chocolate filled with Pistachios

Amedei White Chocolate filled with Pistachios

Cocoa about 29%

45g

It is impossible to eat white chocolate without thinking of the Milky Bar Kid.

That freckled, bespectacled boy in a cowboy getup was an unlikely hero, yet somehow he always managed to save the day.  But was he the sheriff or merely a lone vigilante?

Just four cubes of chocolate – yes, that’s all – but what fine chocolate it is!  There’s a luminous covering, a crescent encasing, of subtly creamy white chocolate, like fresh snow upon thatch.  Newly fallen, virginal and pure, untrodden by bird or workman.  Whilst the filling consists of minute grains of cane sugar and nut, golden fragments you might say, resting in a cocoa butter base.   Perhaps it is the hint of vanilla that makes for the unique magic.  Or it could be the variety of nuts that are embedded within: you’ll find almonds, hazelnuts and walnuts as well as the aforementioned pistachios.  Maybe that’s the secret.

Anyway, whatever the reason, this chocolate bar inspires and invigorates as it gives pleasure.  You’ll feel confident about beating the Milky Bar Kid to the draw, no worries at all, after downing as little as an eighth of it!

I enjoyed this excellent ‘latte bianco’ while seeing Justin Moorhouse in Two and Birmingham Royal Ballet’s Beauty and the Beast.  It is available in the UK through King’s Fine Food, further details here.

Beauty and the Beast

Beauty and the Beast

Music by Glenn Buhr

Birmingham Royal Ballet

The Lowry, 24 January 2012

Ballets need ravens.

They always add a dash of dread to the proceedings, darkening even the most pastoral romance.  No doubt about it, they are plenty ominous birds.

This was another top-class production from the Birmingham Royal Ballet.  As the classic fairy-tale unfolded, everything served to enchant the audience.  Dance and music, the sets and the costumes; they all beat the band.  Quite copacetic withal; that’s what it was.

Once the curse was lifted, however, the enchantment abruptly ended.  For at the finish the Beast was transformed into – well, he could have been a Prince, God knows the current crop are bland enough.  But he looked more like a Customer Service Advisor or – Mary, Mother of Jesus forbid – a Digital Marketing Executive type, in truth.  All that palaver, and she ends up with this guy.

So was it all worth it in the end, Belle love?  Wouldn’t you have preferred someone wild and untamed?  We, the audience, got our money’s worth, but will you be happy and content when the curtains close?

Beauty and the Beast is at The Lowry until 28 January.  Details are here.

Two by Jim Cartwright

Two

By Jim Cartwright

Royal Exchange Theatre, 23 January 2012

Photo - Jonathan Keenan

It’s a double header, and that in two senses.

For a start, Justin Moorhouse and Victoria Elliott play all the parts: they’re the landlord and landlady of a pub, and they take on the roles of various customers an’ all.

Now the first part of the play meanders towards the maudlin, the sentimental, the ‘touching’ and the jokey.  In fact, at one point it was in danger of becoming simply a vehicle for Moorhouse’s brand of comedy.  Not necessarily a bad thing, of course, but that’s not the play.

However, the second part, post-interval as it were, was darker and altogether more serious.  An abusive relationship or two was to be found on the demonstration slab, for one thing.  We also got the nitty-gritty – an excoriating revelation, it’s known as in the trade – as regards this couple who run the pub.

When time is called, it is clear that this has been a vital production of a play with much to say still about men and women, the battle between the sexes, gender-related guerrilla skirmishes, and all that.  You get the picture.

If you’re a glass half-empty kind of chap, you might say, ‘Go easy on the jokes and the calls of “Hey, lads…” ‘  But still: a thumbs up, it has to be.

Two is at the Royal Exchange Theatre until 25 February, further details are here.

Coriolanus

Coriolanus

Directed by Ralph Fiennes

UK, 2011

Cornerhouse, 21 January 2012

Ralph Fiennes’ film is fine withal, a triumphant transfer of Shakespeare to the silver screen.

It is fast paced and intensely, virtuosoly (if it’s not a word, it is now) cinematic yet the language, and the imagery of the language, takes centre-stage sometimes too, as well it should.

He is a man forged by war, this Coriolanus, a man who is hard, austere, resolute, proud.  His martial exploits lead him into politics and the silly games of spin-doctors and tribunes, an arena for which he is spectacularly unsuited.  On being rejected by the vulgaris, he is banished from Rome and in time comes to plan his revenge.  What is compelling about Coriolanus as a character is that he is both heroic and pitiful; he can’t compromise or pretend to be something he’s not; his very integrity is his undoing.

The performances are brilliant: Fiennes himself takes the lead, and as Coriolanus he’s  intense and driven; Vanessa Redgrave, quite Fiennes equal as an actor, is a mother who is quite prepared to sacrifice her son to save Rome; Gerard Butler, no slouch in the acting stakes either, plays Aufidius, Coriolanus’s enemy and later comrade.  Aufidius’s jubilation when Coriolanus comes before him (‘But that I see thee here, thou noble thing, more dances my rapt heart than when when I first my wedded mistress saw bestride my threshold.’) is without doubt the best scene in the film.  So Roberto Mancini must have felt when Mario Barotelli signed for him.  And not to forget Brian Cox, always a watchable actor, who here plays a grave Roman.

The music, too, is greatly effective: ominous and forboding, as befits the story.  That leaves the drama itself and Shakespeare’s occult sense of the different kinds of creatures man can be – there’s no human nature, we are too malleable for that – and his compassion for those creatures’ suffering, of course.  In the end, Coriolanus the warrior, like a beloved but dangerous dog, is gently put to sleep by the one who maybe knew him best.

This is a great film adaptation.  John Logan’s screenplay sculptures Shakespeare’s text supremely well, and it will lead you – or should, anyway – to seek out the play itself.

Blackbird by Lucia Cox

Blackbird

By Lucia Cox

House of Orphans

The Lowry, 18 January 2012

In this mesmerising play, which Lucia Cox performs herself, the stage becomes a bare, ruined cage.

It’s the thing that strikes you immediately about this story of a woman kidnapped and held captive: Cox’s adept use of space.  She flutters about the stage, circles it, but there’s no escape.  At one moment she imagines herself in a tree house, while on another occasion she’s on her back, looking upwards.

The monologue, itself a kind of fugue, holds many treasures, including allusions to The Sound of Music and The Night of the Hunter, the classic Robert Mitchum movie.  There’s a disorienting effect overall, the distraught young woman is difficult to pin down.  She seems to be many different characters – each a kind of failed escape.  Her accent changes from American Deep South to, just before the end, Rainy North West.

This was an impressive play from House of Orphans, one of Studio Salford‘s in-house companies.  It’s one of those rare works that must be seen more than once.  The first time for the joy of discovery, the next to soak in - moment to moment - all of the play’s various nuances.

Blackbird is showing again on Friday and Saturday, further details here.

And for details of other plays in the re: play Festival – Sherica is on again tonight – click here.