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Hollywood | Mixtape | Mixtape V, Hollywooding: A Musical McGonagall

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Music As Reading: Mixtape V, Hollywooding: A Musical McGonagall

I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

Musical accompaniment to literature – the soundtracking of poetry and prose – is going to be something that Music As Reading returns to again and again: in it lies, I think, a synthesis that I can already see turning into proper ideas, rather than silly reflections. Poems with Read with… subtitles making musical suggestions, novels coming complete with a tracklisting to – I don’t know, History Boys- or Donnie Darko-style, with their respective 80s pumpers – evoke unambiguous era or mood or context. It’s an attractive thought.

However, rather than launching into the deep-end of serious literary soundtracking, this mixtape takes a rather more gentle hop-skip-anda-jump into a frothy, comic manifestation of the same idea: can a good soundtrack save bad writing, Hollywooding it into something glossy and evocative (for an explanation of the act of Hollywooding, lookee here). Does music change words, or at the very least our ability to judge whether they’re any good or not? Is soundtracking literature therefore a responsible activity? Does the synthesis of literature and music make words less important – as is the case with lyrics, for example? Does this matter? If McGonagall’s writing can be turned, via a concerto, into something seemingly high-brow and ironically profound, then is he really the Bad Poet we all think he is? Perhaps he’s merely a badly read poet…

The Tay Bridge Disaster: McGonagall as Hitchcockian suspense…

String Quartet No.8 in C Minor, Largo - Il Allegro molto – Dmitri Shostakovich
Piano Concerto No. 3 in C, Andante - Allegro – Sergei Prokofiev

The Christmas Goose: McGonagall as arthouse enigma…

Violin Concerto No. 2, Allegro molto – Béla Bartók
Ode to Napoleon – Arnold Schoenberg

An Autumn Reverie: McGonagall as lush panorama

Serenade for Strings in B Minor, Moderato - Tempo di valse – Antonín Leopold Dvo_ák
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis – Ralph Vaughan Williams

The Nithsdale Widow and her Son: McGonagall as human saga

Cello Concerto in E Minor, Allegro - Moderato - Allegro, ma non troppo - Pocco piu lento - Adagio – Edward Elgar
Pictures at an Exhibition: The Old Castle – Modest Mussorgsky

A Tale of the Sea: McGonagall as they-don’t-make-them-like-that-anymore adventure…

Piano Concerto in D Major, ‘For the left hand’ – Maurice Ravel
Symphony No. 5 in D Minor, Allegro non troppo – Dmitri Shostakovich

The Battle of Bannockburn: McGonagall as final chapter of a three-part epic…

Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Andante maestoso - Allegro Vivace – Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Allegro con fuoco – Antonín Leopold Dvo_ák

Hollywood | Chapbook | 'You Could Pass for Lana Turner' by Kyle Hemmings

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Vol XVIII: You Could Pass for Lana Turner

Kyle Hemmings (2.7.10)



Kyle Hemmings returns with a dose of fiction this time around. Fitting in with our Hollywood theme we proudly bring you 'You Could Pass for Lana Turner'. Enjoy.

Good Times/Bad Times

GOOD TIMES

1) I have another wedding dress fitting today...any excuse to put that gorgeous dress on! There had been a big complication with this as I originally asked for the dress to have a lace up, corseted design at the back.  But the company who were making it phoned to say that the style of the dress would fall better if the back was a zip and button design.  So I bowed to their expertise and agree to go with that.  However, the corseted designs are ordered a size smaller as they cinch you in.  Guess what...the shop forgot to change the measurements so I ended up with a dress that was slightly too small for me.  It zipped up to the bottom of my shoulder blades but struggled to get it any further.  SO as you can imagine, I was close to tears at this point.  That was in March so although I didn't want the added pressure of having to slim into a dress, I knew I had to step up my efforts at the gym to reduce the size of my back.  The last fitting I had was 3 weeks ago and the dress zipped up but it was a bit tight and felt a little restrictive.  In the last 3 weeks I have lost 6lbs so I'm confident today that the dress will fit really well.  What's a wedding without some kind of drama!ha ha.

2) I rediscovered the joy of rocking up to a book shop, getting a coffee and sitting around for a couple of hours reading random books.  I used to love doing that but I never seemed to have time.  I love dipping into different types of books in the store, you find yourself getting totally sucked into it and become oblivious to the fact that you're on a bean bag in a book shop.

3) Even though I'm being careful about what I eat, I still allow myself a small treat every day.  We all need a little bit of sweetness in our day!  My current choice is a treat size Crunchie bar, straight from the fridge...you can't beat it!

4) It's my hen night this weekend so I'm excited about that! I have been lucky enough to have two, a weekend in Edinburgh and now a night out in Aberdeen.  I will get a post up about that next week to let you all know how we get on!

5) I was in town with my mum yesterday with the intention of only havng a browse around the sales.  My mum, however, was in a spending mood! I'm very lucky that my mum has great taste in clothes and accessories so often I get to borrow things from her.  She bought an absolutely gorgeous bag from Warehouse yesterday for £28 and said that we could share it! So it's mine for this weekend...yippee! I love everything about this bag, from the rattan effect exterior to the gold coloured details...it almost looks designer! It is big enough to hold all of my crap in the daytime but not too big to carry around on a night out.  It also has a chain that sits inside so you can use it as a clutch or pull the chain out and use it as a shoulder bag.  I am in love with it!

BAD TIMES

1) My dad phoned to tell me yesterday that his best friend, George, had been at his leaving party for work and he was enjoying a couple of drinks in town.  I've known George ever since I was a little kid.  He didn't want to drink too much so he only had a couple then left the bar to get the train home.  Somewhere between the bar and the train station, George fell really badly and hit his head.  Luckily someone saw him fall and called an ambulance.  He fractured his skull and there was bleeding on his brain so they induced a coma with sedatives to keep him calm and as still as possible.  We are still waiting on more news about his condition but we are all thinking of him and praying that he makes a speedy and full recovery.  It's hard to believe that something like that can happen so easily.  It's things like that that make you realise how precious life is and how we all need to live for today and tell the people we love how much we care about them.

Adam G by Jeremy Kost

Hollywood | Music | Musical Hollywooding

J.K. Rowling's Minerva McGonagall - the Harry Potter books are full of po-mo references to other bad writing.

‘I love all films that start with rain,’ begins Rain, the final poem of Don Paterson’s most recent collection, Rain – that’s not a typo by the way, both poem and collection are in fact entitled Rain, and the first line of said poem also includes the word ‘rain’, so those three rains have to be there, I know, I’m as put out as you are… (What is the correct means of dealing with this problem of poems and collections sometimes sharing the same name – and the sometimes-necessity of putting both in the same sentence, thus creating a clunky, clunky sentence? Title-poem?)

‘I love all films that start with rain,’ begins Rain, the title- (and closing-) poem of Don Paterson’s most recent collection. It continues thus:

rain, braiding a windowpane

or darkening a hung-out dress

or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour

right through the empty script and score

before the act, before the blame,

before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone

beside a silent telephone

or the dress lies ruined on the grass

or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source

along their fatal watercourse.

However bad or overlong

such a film can do no wrong,

(For the whole thing, lookee here)

It’s a wonderful piece of writing, playing similar games with technique-expectation, art-about-art and the concept of simplicity as Song For Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze in the same collection, and The Rat and The Reading in Landing Light. And its point – at least, its point until the fabled Paterson italics kick in a couple stanzas down – is, I think, spot on also. Hell, I remember, eight years old, going to lie down and sky-face in my garden in my shorts whenever the summer rain came, because I’d seen somebody in some film I thought was awesome or something doing the same. It’s a bloody lovely feeling, incidentally. Makes you look like a prick though, so I stopped. Pity, really.

Rain: one of the most successful and common Hollywooding techniques there is. Hollywooding: the covering up of any number of individual crippling flaws in a film via evocative, heart-bursting shit – a method popularised, undoubtedly, by Hollwood. So, rain: one of the most successful Hollywooding techniques there is. Another one: music.

Lovely, lovely film-music. What follows is not going to be a lengthy diatribe about the subtleties of good and bad film-scoring slash -soundtracking though because, one, such things have been done far too many times already (yah, the thing about Tarantino is that his approach to track-selection for his soundtracks mirrors exactly the way his films are, in fact, a bricolage of reference and little nods to, y’know, B movies and stuff) and two, because the relationship between Hollywooding and music is about something much more specific than whole soundtracks. It’s about moments, see. (All this said, I’ll be including the Twin Peaks theme on this week’s essay-soundtrack-playlist for reference’s sake, because it’s so completely magnificent. Oh, and if anyone is, in fact, at all interested in what people are still saying about scores etc., you could do worse than read this.)

Moments. Individual moments during which the empty script and score or bad or overlong sequences are, particularly, unambiguously, shamelessly glossed with the music-equivalent of Paterson’s rain. It is these that are the currency of musical Hollywooding, not soundtracks as a whole. Everybody can call to mind one such scene immediately, surely… Here’s mine. Ah yes, we’re all at a funeral but we’re all going walk out halfway through, because that’s totally cool, in order to get our hands on a photocopy of Ryan Pillipay’s journal that we’re all suddenly aware of the significance of and that incrimates Buffy totally (I’M A BITCH! Benedict Bitch!) without any of us actually having the time to read it – to the point that her 70s-pimp-style blow-crucifix gets nabbed, poor love. And then two of us are going to ruefully shake our heads in the most breathtaking display of accidentally-comic condemnation ever filmed. And all of this, all of this is redeemed via ‘mad’ Richard Ashcroft and a set of vaguely convenient lyrics.

‘One of the best endings to any movie I have ever seen,’ gushes Youtube user Worldskye. Worldskye, it sounds to me like you’re a fucking idiot. (What a car though, right?)

Anyway, for the purposes of Music As Reading, I’m interested in whether this technique is capable of glossing bad writing of another sort. Poetry, specifically. Can the right music make awful poetry sound like a specific genre of good poetry because of its own connotations? Can Hollywooding save bad poetry? Don Paterson having been my starting point, I will be utilising that unlikely influence of his, the utterly great William Topaz McGonagall as the focal-point of this experiment. And to celebrate Brief Encounter’s perfect use of Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – no Hollywooding there – I will be relying upon ‘classical’ (whatever that means) work only. The following three ideas will be expanded upon – and accompanied by several others – on this Saturday’s mixtape, A Musical McGonagall.

The Tay Bridge Disaster + Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 = Hitchcockian suspense…?

…It must have been an awful sight,
To witness in the dusky moonlight,
While the Storm Fiend did laugh, and angry did bray,
Along the Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
Oh! ill-fated Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay,
I must now conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,
That your central girders would not have given way,
At least many sensible men do say,
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,
At least many sensible men confesses,
For the stronger we our houses do build,
The less chance we have of being killed.

The Christmas Goose + Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2 = Arthouse enigma…?

…When Smiggs bought the goose
He suspected no harm,
But a naughty boy stole it
From under his arm.

Then Smiggs he cried, “Stop, thief!
Come back with my goose!”
But the naughty boy laugh'd at him,
And gave him much abuse…

An Autumn Reverie + Dvořák’s Serenade for Strings = Lush panorama…?

Alas! Beautiful Summer now hath fled,
And the face of Nature doth seem dead,
And the leaves are withered, and falling off the trees,
By the nipping and chilling autumnal breeze.

The pleasures of the little birds are all fled,
And with the cold many of them will be found dead,
Because the leaves of the trees are scattered in the blast,
And makes the feathered creatures feel downcast…

(To access a Spotify essay-soundtrack-playlist to accompany the above, click here)

Sam Kinchin-Smith

Music Editor

Citizens of a kingdom

The kingdom of God is within you. Luke 17:21 NIV

Jan and Dorothy, nurses, have dual Canadian-American citizenship. Antoinette, from the Azores Islands, is a resident alien in America. Steve, a New Zealander, was adopted by Arizona’s Pima Indian tribe, then moved back Down Under. Cordell is “Jamerican,” a Jamaican-born, naturalized American. Lance, from Australia, recently was sworn into American citizenship. Ana Maria, from Ecuador, is a health educator in a jail system. One of her sons is in pastoral training. Darwin, from Missouri, sat in a Niagara Falls Canadian-side restaurant, looking at the American shore. “Across that river lies freedom,” he declared melodramatically. The server was not amused.

My friends are from all over the world. And the best friends of all don’t even belong to this world! We are aliens. We’re not green and tentacled, but we don’t fit in with most other earthlings. We belong to the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom of Heaven is not a pie-in-the-sky futuristic kingdom that we’ll see shortly after Jesus’ Second Coming. It’s now, and it’s been here since we accepted salvation or “got saved.” We may choke on smog, see cigarette butts and homeless people in the gutter, and hear of oppression everywhere on the globe. But we Christians are, at this moment, living in the Kingdom. It’s both current reality and future promise.

We who live in democratized countries don’t usually understand the distinction between a reign and a realm. The reign is a time and place of government rule. But the realm is the territory or sphere of influence. And because the Kingdom of Heaven is in our hearts, and our Monarch is Jesus, He is our King now as well as after His advent.

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within [among] you.” Luke 17:20-21 NIV

American Independence Day is always a fun holiday. It lacks the pressures of Thanksgiving or Christmas; there’s no need to use the day for chores or a dental appointment. On the plus side, you get the day off work, there are fireworks, picnics, swimming, parades, news stories about heroes, and sales. At church this week, we sing “America the Beautiful,” and “Faith of Our Fathers.” Flags and bunting are everywhere. We dress in national colors.

My favorite Independence Days were ones spent in Washington, DC, with the symphony orchestra playing and the shells bursting over the Washington Monument; and at Lake Powell, Arizona, where we swam and boated, watched a parade, met Navajo code talkers, and saw fireworks from a sandstone mesa. I once spent July 4 at the British Museum in London, where I wore my colors and was wished well by a tour guide!

Patriotism means supporting our government and armed forces, waving the flag, cheering for our country in sports, and having the “correct” political beliefs. Are we true patriots for doing these acts, or are there other ways of expressing love and honor for our country?

What about obeying the laws, including speed limits and zoning ordinances? Do we hire and pay people under the table to avoid taxes? Do we lie on tax forms? Do we study the voter information and the news reports and vote for issues, moral principles, and qualified people, or do we vote a party ticket? (Do we vote at all?) People offered their lives for these liberties we sometimes discount, and for the lifestyle we believe is our right.

But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it—he will be blessed in what he does. James 1:25 NIV

It’s been said that you are your true self when no one is looking. Are you a patriot? Are you a “doer” or just a talker? Wave your flag with pride, but follow it up with a life worthy of a citizen of the Kingdom of God.