An American Accent in London

The stage version of the highly-regarded independent movie Sideways opened last week at the St James's Theatre in London, with a script adapted from his original novel by the author Rex Pickett. 

Miles (forty-something, aspiring author, divorcee, borderline alcoholic) and Jack (his old college room-mate and only friend) take a tour of the vineyards of Southern California sampling Pinot Noir, for which Miles has a particular and well-informed enthusiasm. Jack is about to marry an heiress and wants an extended stag week, shagging his way through the local women. They get into scrapes, with intermittently hilarious results. The movie was funny and generous, with terrific performances by Paul Giammatti as Miles and Thomas Haden Church as Jack. Giammatti, with his toothy lopsided grin and melancholy air was wonderful; Church as the fading and chronically priapic actor perfectly cast.

While the film expanded the original novel, adding lightness and wit and depth, this stage production seemed more of a contraction. We lost the bright Californian sunshine, the sweeping Pacific Highway, the verdant vineyards and the golf courses of the Santa Ynez Valley. The road trip, despite ingenious staging, never really seemed to leave the garage.

The female leads were both terrific, the males less so (they were vocally interchangeable, and way too shouty). The misogyny was far more pronounced than in the movie (and sometimes breathtakingly so, as several reviews noted) and the anachronisms accumulated - did waitresses, did anyone, have mobile phones twenty years ago? And even if they did was it theatrically necessary to have quite so much exposition in the form of telephone calls? Would anyone with claims to oenophilia open a very valuable bottle of wine and pour it immediately without letting it breathe? And into used glasses? Does anyone ever swirl and sniff champagne?

My main point of resistance was the actors' voices. British actors are, in my experience, seldom capable of doing even generic American accents convincingly - they never get the stress and pitch and intonation right, and as a result tend to sound like the kind of tiresome English disc jockey who affects  a mid-Adlannic drawl. It's British English with a top dressing of yee-haw. They never seem to come from anywhere particular - from Boston, say, or the Bronx or Seattle or LA. Aren't there speech coaches who work with actors on this? Or failing that, couldn't the actors and directors watch a few movies?

Another thing British actors tend to do is deliver their American lines straight, never introducing irony or sarcasm or any other reading. They never, for instance, work against the line in that odd and attractive sing-song way Americans (and not just actors) do to signify deliberate banality. They never seem to get a grip on high rise terminals or vocal fry or any other characteristics of female American speech (perhaps no bad thing as vocal fry makes my teeth grind). I find it hard to explain but imagine (say) the reunited cast of Friends appearing in a show such as Sideways - or at least four of them. They'd be off to a flying start because (say) David Schwimmer (Ross) had such a whiney adenoidal idiolect that his character was fully expressed whenever he opened his mouth.

There's also a physical aspect - how British and American actors stand and move and breath, how they appear when simply responding to others. How they act when they're not acting. They have very different presences, presumably down to different training. Is Stanislavski behind all this?

Not a great show then, although there were some good moments, clever staging and the press night audience hooted and hollered and stamped and whistled. I'd be quite happy to see a permanent ban on theatrical versions of films (apart from my long-cherished scheme for a theatrical adaptation of Withnail and I with an all-female cast . . .

Silent film music

In the time before sound, cinema orchestras - or their modest flea-pit equivalents - often relied upon Giuseppe Becce's Allgemeines Handbuch der Filmmusik, or its many equivalents. The Italian-born Becce (1877-1973) worked in Germany for most of his career, producing scores for eminent directors such as Lang, Murnau, Pabst, Lubitsch and Berthold Viertel. He based this handbook on an earlier collection of his pieces published between 1919 and 1933 by the Verlag Schlesinger'sche Buchhandlung in Berlin, known as Kinothek. This book of scores supplied a silent movie pianist with a numbered range of appropriate motifs adapted from famous composers and suitable for accompanying the action portrayed on the flickering screen. The titles are wonderfully evocative. Here is a selection:

Kinothek 11 - Situazione Pericolosa (Agitato)

Kinothek 15 - Agony of the Soul (Tragedia dell'Anima)

Kinothek 20 - Patience Under Pain (Resignation)

Kinothek 21 - In a Critical Situation (Allegro Agitato)

Kinothek 27 - Fanatic Dervish Dance

Kinothek 28 - Lynch-Law (Agitato)

Kinothek 33 - Facing Death (Andante, Largo)

Kinothek 46 - Infatuation (Andante Largo)

Kinothek 49 - Emotional Climax

Kinothek 50 - Chariot Race

Silent cinema was, of course, very noisy.Not only musical accompaniment but sound effects (thunderclaps, gunfire) and in some cinemas actors would read the inter titles aloud for the benefit of audiences unable to do so.

Silent films are seldom screened these days (Londoners may recall the Thames Silents , which were rather grand affairs with an orchestra led by Carl Davies) so it's good to ono the annual Pordenone Festival still caters for the faithful. It runs this year between 1st and 8th October. Look it up.

Most searched-for books of 2015

There's a fondly-remembered telly ad for the privatised British Telecom's business directory Yellow Pages. It was made in 1983 and featured the actor  Norman Lumsden as an elderly chap scouring the second-hand bookshops of London (and Cecil Court in particular) in search of a copy of Fly Fishing by J. R. Hartley. A copy cannot be found and the poor chap looks quite downcast. Then his daughter, more clued-up about such things, passes him a copy of 'good old Yellow Pages' and he starts to phone around. She soon finds a cop. The delighted old fellow gives his name: 'My name? Oh yes - it's J. R. Hartley', and he clasps the receiver to his chest, a beatific smile lighting up his old codger face. Heart-warming. You can, I'm sure, find it on YouTube.

Such was the success of the ad that some enterprising publisher actually brought out a copy of the book over his name, ghosted by Michael Russell. This and two sequels (on about golf) were all best-sellers.

Although I visit Cecll Court from time to time (there are still four or five dealers hanging on there) I'm a regular user of the excellent website abe.com, the book dealers' alternative to the predatory Amazon. Here one can rank books by highest of lowest price, by edition, by publisher etc. If you're looking for a fine first edition of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts here's the place to start. 

One of the many features on offer is a list of the most searched-for titles of out-of-print books. The 2015 list, introduced by Richard Davies, can be found here.

What are they, the top twenty searches last year? It's a very odd list, but certain worth sharing as a snapshot of our fellow citizens' cultural priorities.

1. Sex by Madonna

2. Rage by Richard Bachman - Stephen King

3. Unintended Consequences by John Ross

4. Promise Me Tomorrow by Nora Roberts

5. Alla Prima: Everything I Know About Painting by Richard Schmid

6. Finding the Winning Edge by Bill Walsh with Brian Billick & James Peterson 

7. The Vision and Beyond, Prophecies Fulfilled and Still to Come by David Wilkerson

8. Permaculture: A Designers' Manual by Bill Mollison

9. Halloween by Curtis Richards

10. Mastering Atmosphere & Mood in Watercolor by Joseph Zbukvic

11. Fast Times at Ridgemont High by Cameron Crowe 

12. Encyclopedia of Pieced Quilt Patterns by Barbara Brackman 

13. Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh by Toby Harnden

14. Marilyn: A Biography by Norman Mailer

15. Mandingo by Kyle Onstott

16. Murmurs of Earth by Carl Sagan

17. Snake by Ken Stabler

18. A Life Worth Living by Lady Colin Campbell

19. The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler

20. A History of Hand Knitting by Richard Rutt

I;ve got a copy of Mailer's Marilyn Monroe biography (a rotten book, but the pictures are good); I've heard of Madonna (who hasn't?) and her book of soft porn selflies; the rest mean nothing at all to me, apart from one or two names - Stephen King, Carl Sagan ad er . . . that's it. I'm delighted that Richard Rutt's History of Hand Knitting is the 20th most sought-after book of they year, and unsurprised. What would we do without books?

Mirror or window

Does art provide us with a mirror for our lives or a window to the world? Does it reflect our lives back at us, or allow us access to the lives of others?

Both of course, but I prefer windows to mirrors. I'm capable of reflecting on my own life in all its preposterousness and am constantly subject to gloomy introspection and crippling self-doubt, so I want ways out, not ways in. I want to see the world, to experience the world, through the eyes and ears and hearts and minds of other people.

I raise the matter because I came across the word 'relatable' the other day, used as a term of praise for a work of fiction. The user valued the book in question because the content (harsh, volatile, innovative, challenging) was something to which this reader could 'relate' - it spoke to him, to his own experience and therefore (a slightly dodgy 'therefore') had a purchase on his imagination denied to the rest of us, who could only admire the same book from the position of outsiders, the disenfranchised.

This is nonsense, of course. We are free if we choose to 'relate' to fictional characters, to their situations, predicaments, moral choices and actions, from Hamlet to Winnie-the Pooh But that's only a fraction of the range of responses that literature can elicit, and on a level with the commentaries offered by the sinister and illiterate Mr Todd, on listening to a reading of Dickens in Waugh's A Handful of Dust. To judge a novel on the  basis of 'relatability' is a form of arrogance, implying that a narrative must in some way reflect and endorse the reader's own behaviours, rather than offer alternatives.

Buffet froid

Bernarrd Buffet (1928-1999) is the subject of a hefty biography by Nick Foulkes (who was for some years a journalist with the byline 'the Ginger Fop'). Foulkes makes a case for the reappraisal of an artist he thinks is of great importance.

Buffet was an immensely popular painter and a dreadful artist, a one-trick phoney. His paintings of clowns are the kind of thing you'd expect to find on sale in Las Vegas hotel lobbies -  painted on velvet. For the rest it's park railing art - gauche, mannered, coarse-grained and unlovely. His figures are stiff, flat, angular and lifeless, his depopulated urban scenes are chilly and cliched. There's nothing to it at all - he gives trite a bad name.

His stylised signature alone is enough to turn the stomach - spiky and overbearing, often in the middle of a picture rather than (say) in a quiet corner. It changed over the years, becoming bigger and more demented. One gets the impression that his best efforts went into that signature.

Foulkes claims that the near-universal critical disdain directed at Buffet is a form of snobbery but it's nothing of the kind - it's simply good taste. Here's an experiment: use Google images to summon up a huge number of his pictures and ask yourself if you could bear to share a room with any one of them, even for ten minutes. At his very best (say the portrait of a girl in a t-shirt) he resembles Ronald Searle on a bad day, but without a fraction of Searle's subversive wit and intelligence. Buffet was breathtakingly productive, churning out perhaps 10,000 paintings (and prints and lithographs) - proof of his facile virtuosity.

Buffet himself had a clear sense of his own worth: "Abstract Painting is limited and boring, while figurative is unlimited". Yeah, right.

Idea Spotlight User Community

An unexpected and unsolicited email arrives from The British Library, of which I am a member and regular user. It makes the heart sink and the blood boil - a terrible combination. I shall spare the blushes of the manager responsible for perpetrating the communication and preserve his (or her) anonymity.

'Hello' it begins by way of weirdly informal salutation, combining the impersonal and the matey, before inexplicably adopting the royal 'we':

We are contacting you from the British Library to inform you about an initiative to develop our services.  The purpose of the email is not to market or sell any of our services but to give you, as a user, an opportunity to submit ideas about what new services you would like us to offer by inviting you to join The ‘Idea Spotlight User Community’.

The 'Idea Spotlight User Community' - or I-SUC as I like to think of it - immediately puts one on guard, That second sentence, in all its defensive clarification and wayward syntax, is a foretaste of what is to come.

What is it, this Community I have been invited to join? My correspondent wastes no time in clarifying:

The Community is part of a project which aims to make our site at St Pancras in London one of the UK’s most open, creative and innovative public spaces for the 21st century and our initial focus will be services that we offer at our St Pancras site.  

The style is consistent in its repetition, redundancy and opacity. I'd like to know what other public spaces vie for pole position as open, creative and innovative. Heathrow Terminal 4? Trafalgar Square? Birmingham New Street station? How are their relative claims for supremacy evaluated? The presumption is that the site at St Pancras, or the St Pancras site, is currently punching below its weight when it comes to openness, creativity and innovation - but who has made that severe judgement? What line of reason led to such a highly debatable assertion? Where is the evidence?

This is all about further commercial commodification of this airy and noble space. There will be no end of trailblazing initiatives, each one better then the next. Costa coffee outlets? Paninis 'n' wraps? Cupcakes to die for? Late-nite opening for brainy singletons? Radiohead piped into the elevators?.

The once useful and interesting bookshop now sells no end of ghastly BL branded tat, the type of thing flogged in Oxford Street souvenir shops - is there no end to the kind of dreary initiatives aimed at creating vibrant public spaces? It's a library, not a sports bar.

After this opening, the language begins to fail entirely:

The Community is an ‘idea management platform’ which will enable you to submit ideas in response to specific questions and challenges to comment on other people’s ideas.  Ideas will be reviewed by us periodically and a decision taken on whether to take the ideas forward.  The process will be transparent and, [sic] we will give a clear explanation in the case of any ideas that we do not take forward.

The word 'ideas' is repeated six times, in case we're slow to cotton on. This 'platform' is really nothing more or less than what used to be known as a Suggestion Box, a humdrum feature of most companies in the pre-digital age. Nothing new there, apart from the fizz-buzz lexicon. There's more:

The platform will be officially launched in min-June [sic]  2016 but we are inviting some of our users are [sic] to join now and contribute prior to the main launch.  

The first 2 [sic] challenges we are posting are:

·        ‘Making the most of your first visit to the British Library’.  This will invite suggestions on how someone’s first experience of the BL could be enhanced.

·        ‘Meeting people at the British Library’.  This seeks to explore the assumption that people want to meet people that [sic] are researching similar topics by asking them what we can do to facilitate meetings and interactions.

We believe that we will get some great and unexpected ideas and know that we will learn much more about how we can develop services that our customers will find valuable. 

There you go - 'customers' and all that this dread word implies. I am not a customer, at least not in this context, because this vitally important institution is not a shop. I have for years been a regular user of the British Library's services and have benefited hugely from being able to access the vast collections at St Pancras and (until recently) Colindale. The staff at both locations have always been helpful, attentive and good-humoured in my experience (although things seem to have slipped in recent years - fewer librarians for a start, and the closure of Colindale and the relocation of its newspaper archive to a remote and inaccessible part of Yorkshire is terrible).

That the I-SUC platform 'seeks to explore the assumption' that researchers want to meet other researchers' is typical of the lame-brained thinking behind this initiative. Researchers are always ferocious networkers and communicate freely with others in their field, often using the modern internet highway. Meeting one another is less of a priority - that's pretty much what conferences are for. What the BL can do to facilitate meetings and interactions is keep the place operating as a library and not a drop-in centre.

Over the past five years or so the public spaces at the British Library have become increasingly crowded with non-members (i.e. people, mostly school-age, without raiders' passes enabling to access the collections), who use the desks and tables scattered around each floor to hang out. Many of them are doing homework (when not texting and taking Selfies) and, while I don't begrudge them doing so in this great building I can't help feeling that it's counterproductive (and annoying for regular users when it comes to finding a quiet place to make a phone call, or have a cup of coffee or explore the assumption' that researchers want to meet other researchers. 

To my British Library correspondent I say:

- you represent a great and valued institution, so you might at least proof-read your communications before sending them out or get a literate colleague to do so. The content of the I-SUC landing page  is worth careful consideration.

- if you wish to enlist British Library users in your research, and expect them to dedicate their time and goodwill and expertise to your project, you might have the courtesy to address them by name when sending them unsolicited emails. 

- consider just how much people hate the kind of lexicon you employ in your email - 'ensure', 'enhance', 'facilitate' and so on - the stagnant management-speak that ruins everything it describes. It is a betrayal of language.

- be confident. Consult by all means but don't set up something as dubious-sounding as I-SUC in order to tick consultative boxes that will at some later stage be used to justify unpopular or questionable developments.

The British Library is a national and international asset, not part of the Tussauds Group, not 'an ace caff with quite a lot of books attached', not some fuddy-duddy throwback in need of revitalisation. It is a resource used by serious people for serious reasons. It is part of the pulse of our culture.

Shakespeare would never work for Google

There's a commonplace view that runs like this: If [insert name of great artist from the past] were alive to day he or she would be [insert some contemporary occupation]. Thus, to choose the most frequently recycled version of the trope, if Shakespeare were alive today he'd be writing scripts for telly soap operas (and this usefully implies that today's soapwriters could punch their weight against any Elizabethan playwright. As if.). 

A variant on this was the headline to a Guardian essay by the novelist Tom McCarthy in March 2015, which ran thus:

If James Joyce were alive today he'd be working for Google.

McCarthy doesn't actually say this in the article so we can assume this is click-bait added by a lazy sub-editor. What McCarthy actually says is this:

If there is an individual alive in 2015 with the genius and vision of James Joyce, they’re probably working for Google, and if there isn’t, it doesn’t matter since the operations of that genius and vision are being developed and performed collectively by operators on the payroll of that company, or of one like it.

Joyce was virtually unemployable, despite a lengthy stint as an English language teacher in Italy at the Berlitz school (a shadowy profession that's a bolt-hole for the disengaged). He brieflyand unsuccessfully  managed a Dublin cinema and dabbled in various madcap commercial schemes that never got off the ground - exporting tweeds, editing The Irish Bee-keeper and so on. No, if Joyce were alive today he'd be a writer, and a great one, and in all likelihood published by some tiny independent press in Dublin or London or Paris. He'd be admired by a handful of discerning readers and critics. He would be influential, part of the current rebooting of modernism by writers under forty. 

James Joyce would not be working for Google although he colonises a substantial part of their search engine. Here's an experiment you can try at home (or at the office): type in the name 'James Joyce' then add any word you like (nouns are best). You;ll get something every time.