Greedy, nocturnal and irregular of habit

I'm doing a series of translations at the moment of conversations between an artist who does light installations and various architects, and I have to say, it has been an absolute education. The current interviewee is Peter Zumthor, who, because I am appallingly ignorant about modern architecture, I had never heard of until yesterday, but I had to look up some of his work in order to understand what he was saying, and it is fabulous stuff. Have a look at this:

Vals spa, which is set inside a mountain.

the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, which incorporates the remains of an old church.

The 2011 Serpentine Gallery pavillion, now, alas, pulled down, as the pavillions always are after three months.

the Bruder Klaus Kapelle, in the middle of bloody nowhere. The 20 minute walk across the fields is part of the whole concept.

I went to Cologne once, in around 1980-something. I have never felt the slightest urge to go again until now. Now I want to get on a train and go to the Kolumba museum. (As well as the fantastic architecture and innovative lighting, they have a room devoted to edible drawings by John Cage. I am tempted to go and eat them).

I refuse to translate "an dessen Schulter sie sich zuweilen ausruht" as "on whose manly bosom she occasionally reclines", even though it would serve the author jolly well right.

Maurice Sendak has died :-(

By chance, I read Where the Wild Things Are in a kindergarten English class yesterday. Today I read it on purpose. The moment where the trees start to grow in Max's room is when the magic first hits. You can see the children's faces light up with wonder. From then on, they're hooked. At the end, I could hear them whispering to each other about the story. "He was lying!" "It was a dream!" They knew it couldn't be "true" but they weren't sure what it was instead. They were all agreed, though, that it was "cool". Not bad for a half-century-old book in a foreign langauge.

My daughter's best friend Kathi is desperate for a dog. She's thirteen and has always been the kind of child who likes to romp through forests and climb trees and dive through waves. In the mysterious way of genetics, she has a mother who likes high heels, and shopping for antiques, and whose main aim in life is, as far as I can tell, to be a trophy wife (since this hasn't worked out too well, she's actually a teacher, and a very good one). Kathi has been unfailingly supportive of her mother during a very difficult time, so we were all delighted to hear that her dream has finally come true and her mother has given her a dog to romp and play and bond with.

Except it's a chihuahua. Not just a chihuahua but the fattest chihuahua I've ever seen, or am ever likely to see. It looks like the mutant offspring of a corgi and a giant hamster. It belonged to an old lady who, in the way of these things, couldn't get out for walks and fed it instead to keep it entertained. Kathi takes it for three ten minute walks a day, at the end of which it's too exhausted to jump on the sofa, or even eat, but just lies on the floor gasping.

She is also, against all the odds, a really lovely dog, not yippy or snappy, but genuinely friendly. She's amazingly energetic - when not exhausted by having to lug all that weight around for ten whole minutes - and can bounce around like a furry rubber ball with a dog's head. Her ability to achieve vertical lift-off from all four paws at once astonished Flan (and that was when he'd got over being astonished that this tiny spherical creature was in fact a dog, and before he started being astonished that she could jump from side to side too fast for his eyes to follow). I'm sure that in Kathi's competent hands she'll soon slim down and fitten up and turn into one of the few chihuahuas who actually get to enjoy being a dog rather than treated like a toy.

I'm not dead, I'm in the garden.

A ficlet written for frau_flora for the Easter Egg challenge on MFUWSS, featuring the Spanish Riding School in Vienna and marvellously illustrated by the supremely talented togsos. German version and English version.

Conclusion? It was completely and utterly fantastic.





Not counting the two intervals, it lasted for four hours, and the audience - including me - was riveted the entire time. I don't know any other director who can do that. I've sat through several indulgently overlong productions by directors famous enough to inflict that sort of thing on their audiences, but this is the first time I've hurried back to my seat before the interval was over because I was so eager to see what would happen next.

It helped that it was in a very small space, a former palace just off the Ringstrasse built in the late 19th century in the Renaissance style that serves as a rehearsal room for the Burgtheater (Austria's national theatre) and is also used for their smaller productions. This was the first time I'd seen the room stripped of the usual black cloth and flats, and it made for a brilliant setting. The set was just a series of grey tables put together to make one long table, lined with chairs, and behind it a model of the set. The director, Matthias Hartmann, came on at the beginning and explained with charming understatement that War and Peace was a tough text to adapt for the theatre, but they had thought they would see how far they could get, and since even with all the Burgtheater's resources they couldn't come up with a cast of thousands, they would be filming the little figures inside the model for the crowd scenes. It worked wonderfully.




They filmed other bits of the model, too, and projected them on screens or on the walls - this is the projection of the chandelier:




You can just see the model set underneath it, and one of the video cameras. You can see a bit of the room, too, and how they used the existing doors for entrances and exits, not with the usual black behind them, but with very visible lamps.

The audience was invited to look at the model set during the intervals, and it included not just the equipment for the sound and lights - which was all visible behind the long table on the real set - but also a tiny model of the model set, inside which you could just see an even tinier model model model set. And so, presumably, on ad infinitum.

The tables were occasionally repositioned to indicate Prince Andre's father's country estate, and also served as a way of signifiying battles - the actors drummed on them with their fingers to create the sound of galloping horses, and banged their legs on the ground and threw them around for the battle itself. This is Napoleon walking through the aftermath:



He made a hugely imposing entrance, backlit through smoke, and then coughed as if the dry ice - not the "real" smoke but the theatrical tool of dry ice - was too much for him. The whole thing was done with that same lightness of touch, and a wonderful playfulness. the actors switched between dialogue and chunks of narrative, which they sometimes delivered as narrators and sometimes spoke as if it were dialogue. I don't think I've explained that very well. One example would be when Prince Andre loses patience with his wife and there is a long passage describing his internal emotional state, and the actor advanced on his wife as if he wanted to hit her, while shouting the lines as if these were things he was saying in the heat of a row, even though the actual words weren't doing that at all.

It's hard to describe acting, though, so have one final image instead (no, wait, there is one thing I can describe - how they played Anatol, the beautiful but dim philanderer and wastrel ("Anatol believed he had been created by God for the purpose of spending 40,000 rubles a year"). They chose an actor who was strikingly ugly but also so strikingly charismatic that his delighted smirking at his own beauty was both believable and hilarious. You had no trouble understanding how Natasha fell for him, and yet every time he beamed at his own prettiness you fell about with laughter at the incongruity.)

This is the scene where Andre meets Natasha at a ball. The screen revolved when it was pushed, and the actors danced with the screen between them, turning it rather than each other.



The page numbers were projected onto the top of the back wall, and the whole thing ended when the lights went dwon and the director came back on and said, "This is how far we got. Page number 1394 out of 1600," and then the various characters summarised - extremely entertainingly - what happened to them in the rest of the novel. When Natasha explained how she lost her "witchery" after marrying Pierre, Anatole said, "What a shame!" with such charmingly heartfelt innocence that the audience fell about, and then he got up and told us indignantly how he took it as a personal insult that Tolstoy cared so little about him that his entire death scene happened off-page and that he would NEVER forgive him.

It was magnificent, from beginning to end.

Gacked from sallymn

1. Go to page 7 (or 77) of your current WIP.
2. Go to line 7
3. Copy down the next 7 lines – sentences or paragraphs – and post them as they’re written.

This is from the Wimseyfic, so it's not so much In Progress as In Stasis, though I'm sure I'll get back to it one day...

Bungo, abandoned by his host, took advantage of the interruption to the conversation to visit the bogs, a destination that had been suggesting itself with increasing urgency over the last half hour, but whose siren call had been dampened by his lordship's flow of wit. Wimbles would, thought Bungo, who had sat through altogether too many gatherings of senior civil servants not to be appreciative of genuine wit, have made one hell of an after-dinner speaker.

He stepped out into the corridor, his feet sinking deep into the carpet, past an array of ancestral portraits and a small scribble down by the skirting boards that had presumably been left by one of the Wimsey children. It showed what appeared to be an airborne chicken squirting eggs with the profligacy of a spawning salmon, but which the charitable might take to be an Expressionist rendering of a Heinkel. Bungo shook his head. Good thing that sort of thing had stopped and little boys could go back to the traditional artistic subjects of chaps with swords chopping each other's heads off, or shooting arrows from castle ramparts.

As he straightened up from examining the Wimsey artwork, he heard footsteps, and glancing down the long staircase to the floor below, saw Walton make his halting way along the hall, mystery guest in tow.

Haha! Just as I was wondering what I was going to do with myself this Friday - because there is no Swedish class this week and we have seen all the films at the arts cinema - I discovered that the production of War and Peace that I desperately want to see, and have repeatedly attempted to get tickets for, is on tomorrow (at a time that would have conflicted with Swedish) with three seats left. So now Friday is totally sorted and I am bouncing around with glee. Hours of good theatre (and I know it's good because friends have been) = HAPPINESS!

We saw a terrific film yesterday, Et maintenant on va où?(Where Do We Go Now?") by a Lebanese director, Nadine Labaki. It's a comedy - a genuinely funny comedy - set in a village somewhere in the Middle East where Christians and Muslims lead a life of fragile co-existence, nominally at peace after years of bloodshed, but in practice waiting only for an excuse to explode into violence. At least the men are. The women are different. Sick to death of losing their husbands and sons to sectarian hatred, they will stop at nothing to keep the men from fighting (their solutions owe nothing to Lysistrata - as one of the women says to the mayor's wife, "He hasn't touched you for years. The only thing he uses his wotsit for is to water the garden"). As the situation gets more tense, their schemes get more and more inventive, but with the help of the village Imam and the village priest they do, eventually, manage to preserve peace, even when tragedy strikes and bloodshed seems unavoidable.

Most of the men, it must be said, are terribly poor stuff, volatile and stupid, constantly stirring up trouble and then exploding in outrage when trouble finds them in return. But the women are fantastic. This is a film that passes the Bechdel test in spades and leaves you wondering why there aren't more movies with several overweight middle-aged female protagonists when they're such enormous fun to watch.

Of course it's unrealistic that the Christians and the Muslims finally manage to come together, but the film makes it clear that this is a fairy tale ending, made possible only by the fact that the village is almost entirely cut off from the outside world. The only access is via a ridiculously dangerous bridge over a vast abyss, which two teenagers with a motorscooter (and a bath on wheels for a trailer) regularly traverse to bring in goods from the nearest town. All the political news that filters through from outside is about religious violence. The ending isn't a proposed solution to the problem but an "if only" parable. And, as such, it works. I've also never seen a film where the ending is, in retrospect, so clearly present in the beginning. I will definitely go and see whatever Labaki does next.

Here's the trailer, but be warned, it's VERY spoilery. If you're thinking of seeing the film anyway (please do! It's great!) I wouldn't watch this.