HI-DIDDLY-DEE

Overheard at the theatre...

Child (to Father): When I grown-up, can I be an actor?

Father: No, son, you can't be both...

ROYAL RADAR

After the recent BBC / Annie Leibovitz / HM Queen photo-shoot debacle, it's good to see that the relationship between the media (especially photographers) and the Royal Family is back on an even keel...


Of course, just as we didn't know whether the Queen was coming or going in that TV documentary, it isn't easy to know whether Prince Hal was photoshoped before or after he'd stripped down to his boxers...

You can read an excerpt from Radar's article here.

PEARLS: MARK II

MARK'S NEXT FIVE


OF

WISDOM

Guest Pearl-Diver: MARK LEE

1. You should not confuse your career with your life.

2. No matter what happens..... somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

3. When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often that person is crazy.

4. Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

5. A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

SMOKE SCREENS

Years ago, cinemas were full of smoke and smokers - you could to see it shifting and swirling in the beam of light from the projector - and so, too, were the movies we went to see.



At the end of Now Voyager, Paul Henreid lit two cigarettes at once for Bette Davis and himself as they agreed not to ask for the moon when they had the stars; and the smoking of ciggies provided similar emotional punctuation in Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, All About Eve and hundreds of other movies of the 'forties and 'fifties.

Nowadays, of course, smoking is social leprosy and one of Moviedom's leading dream factories has announced that they are giving up and taking the pledge...

Walt Disney Productions (the studio founded by a chain-smoker who died of lung cancer) announced that it had decided to stub out the fag habit:

BURBANK, Calif, July 25, 2007 -- The Walt Disney Company today made a commitment to US Representative Edward J Markey, Chairman of the House Telecommunications and the Internet Subcommittee, that it will discourage depictions of cigarette smoking in its films...

In a letter sent to Representative Markey today, Disney President and CEO Robert A Iger said, “The Walt Disney Company shares your concern regarding deaths due to cigarette smoking. We discourage depictions of cigarette smoking in Disney, Touchstone and Miramax films. In particular, we expect that depictions of cigarette smoking in future Disney branded films will be non-existent. In response to your suggestion, our Company will place an anti-smoking Public Service Announcements on DVD's of any future film that does depict cigarette smoking.”

“Disney’s decision to take a stand against smoking is groundbreaking and I commend CEO Bob Iger for this important commitment. Now it’s time for other media companies to similarly kick the habit and follow Disney’s lead,” said Representative Markey.

Among the 'casualties' of this decision are various characters in Disney's on-going The Chronicles of Narnia franchise based on the books written by the pipe-smoking C S Lewis (right), who will not now be allowed to live in peace with their pipes...

Most significantly - and to the utter outrage of Narnia fans on the net - this will include Puddleglum the Marshwiggle (in the penultimate Chronicle, The Silver Chair) whose pipe was as much a feature of his personality as it was of his creator...

Mind you, it so happens that, for some time now, Disney have been retrospectively - and covertly - de-smoking some of their earlier films as part of a questionable revisionist practice to eliminates awkward and uncomfortable non-pc aspects of films from the past...

For example, Pecos Bill, the animated mythical hero of a tall tale of the West included in the 1948 film Melody Time, appeared throughout the piece (much as many flesh and blood Western actors did) with a cigarette dangling from his lower lip...


But now, thanks to the wonders of digital technology, Pecos Bill has been cured of his pernicious addiction to tobacco - though not his allegiance to the gun lobby...

And who's next for aversion therapy? Well, here's one obvious candidate...


...along with those other Wonderland reprobates: the cigar-chomping Walrus and the pipe-puffing Dodo!

MASS EXODUS

Two Irish women overheard in my local park on Sunday...

1st Woman: I've given up the Mass...

2nd Woman: Yes, I know what you mean... Sometimes, when my grandson goes to confession, I'll go along and light a few candles; but what I say is, you really don't WANT Mass every single week...

FIGURES IN MISTSCAPE

The centrepiece of Antony Gormley’s current exhibition at The Hayward on Southbank is Blind Light.

A prosaic description of the component parts of the work would be: “Fluorescent light, toughened low iron glass, ultrasonic humidifiers, aluminium, water.”

But I would rather describe it as a room filled with clouds...

Entering through the single entrance/exit, you are suddenly blind - plunged not into the unseeing dark normally associated with blindness, but into a blazing blur in which everything further than a few feet from your eyes vanishes into a disorientating fog of snow white brilliance.

Only when you grope your way to one of the walls, do you glimpse the outer world of the gallery and those who are observing your blind entrapment.

As you will see - and not see - in this second photo-essay, those outside the room find themselves gazing at opaque walls behind which shadows occasionally emerge and take on shape and peer out before being swirled back into radiant oblivion.

Antony Gormley’s art is always centred on the human form; here he exchanges the static sentinel figures of so many of his works for the living models of the gallery-goers - tenuously and fleetingly sculpted from vapour-clouds…

Click on images to enlarge

From tomorrow (6th August) until the exhibition ends on 19th August, The Hayward will be extending its opening hours to 10 am - 10 pm daily.

NICELY SPOKEN

Two friends of ours - let's call them Leonard and Virginia - long ago solved the difficulty of commenting to one another on the foibles and oddities of other people present without the risk of being overheard: they make all such observations in French.

On one occasion, while on holiday, Virginia - who has become a tad forgetful of late - made several indiscreet remarks to Leonard about someone in the hotel dining-room in a voice that was far from subdued. She neverthless felt utterly secure in the belief that her observations couldn't possibly give offence, since she was making them in French.

"For God's sake, Virginia, what are you doing?" hissed Leonard in English. "We're in NICE --- where they tend to speak FRENCH!"


[Image: Holiday-makers in Nice © Brian Sibley 2007]

BUT ME NO BUTTS

I have, in rapid succession, received FOUR e-mails from:

Yolanda Q Butts
Yolanda P Butts
Yolanda M Butts
and
Yolanda T Butts

These communications (offering the recipient the opportunity to obtain something called a Mega-Dick, whatever that may be) are, however, all - rather disappointingly - addressed to:

Minnie E Montes
Minnie Z Montes
Minnie F Montes
and
Minnie H Montes

Now, as I thought most people knew, the Montes Quadruplets moved away from here more years ago than I care to remember; so, unfortunately, I am unable to pass on their mail...

Never mind, by the very same e-delivery came two very similar offers: this time for ME and, rather surprisingly, from Jonathan Miller and Jesus!

AS SANE AS A HATTER

Funny how names stick... I was thinking the other day, when writing about Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, how little we really know about this story with which we think we are so familiar.

Start with the title itself - Alice in Wonderland - which is not what the author called it: the correct title is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (just as the sequel isn't Alice Through the Looking-glass, but Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Found There).

Then there's the case of the so-called MAD HATTER... That, of course, is what everybody always calls him, but Lewis Carroll never does: he only ever refers to him as "the Hatter".

Nor, by the way, will you find Mr Carroll talking about "The Mad Hatter's Tea-Party": he titled the chapter in which the Hatter first appears as "A Mad Tea-Party" - which it clearly was! - and since it was held in the garden of the March Hare's house, it really wasn't the Hatter's tea-party anyway!


The Hatter's personal reputation for madness, it turns out, is based solely on the testimony of a CAT --- and a Cheshire Cat at that...

'In that direction,' the Cat said, waving its right paw round, 'lives a Hatter: and in that direction,' waving the other paw, 'lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.'

'But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.

'Oh, you ca'n't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'

'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.

'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

There is, I submit, no reason whatever to condemn the Hatter as being Mad, merely on the say-so of a character who believes himself and everyone else to be mad!

Of course, authorities other than Lewis Carroll, were linking hatters with madness long before Alice tumbled into Wonderland, but that is no proof that this Hatter was any less sane than you or I!

Michael Caineism
("Not a Lot of People Know That")

* Another thing Lewis Carroll never mentioned was the fact that the Hatter wore a hat with a label reading In this Style 10/6...

That detail was contributed by the book's illustrator, Sir John Tenniel. However, so utterly married are the text and the pictures, that the majority of those who have subsequently illustrated the book have kept the label in the hat and often leaving the price unchanged. One exception was Arthur Rackham who daringly reduced the asking price to 8/11!

FIGURES IN SKYSCAPE

Antony Gormley is, in my humble opinion, a national treasure: a contemporary artist whose work manages to be deeply thought provoking and yet remain widely accessible and unashamedly “popular”.

Unlike some modern artists, Gormley isn’t afraid to explain what he was attempting to “say” in a work and yet always leaves space between the words and air between the thoughts for the viewer to join in the dialogue…

He is renowned, of course, for his sculpture Angel of the North (above, photographed by John Howells): that great iron aeronaut, ready to embark on a flight of fancy over Gateshead; Field, a densely packed tribe of 3,500 terracotta beings observing the observer; and Another Place, 100 cast-iron sentinels currently standing on a two-mile long stretch of Crosby Beach, near Liverpool, staring resolutely out to sea unmoved by the rise and fall of the tide…

Gormley is an artist who focuses on the human body both as an object and as a place - or space - in which human thoughts and emotions reside.

His current exhibition, Blind Light (until 19 August), at The Hayward at London’s Southbank Centre contains a stimulating collection of works old and new.

Antony Gormley’s figures sometimes take the form of solid metal sarcophagi, sometimes they are simply a human-shaped void within concrete blocks - resembling both a crowd and building complex - or within highly-strung, wire-webs of suspended geometrical structures.

In the first of two photo-essays, I celebrate one of the new works created by Gormley for this exhibition, Event Horizon: a vista of 31 figures poised like watchmen - or potential suicides - on the tops of buildings and the edges of roofs around the Hayward Gallery, silhouetted against the London skyline, their blind gaze centred on those who look back at them from the gallery terraces…

Click on images to enlarge

[Images © Brian Sibley, 2007]