Magpie 3
January 2010
acting and all that
John Hurt looking back recently, said that a film could not be made today without the bean counters knowing “what the audience was.” He always thought the audience was: ‘anyone who wants to see it and so buys a ticket.’ (complex ?)
women
the Economist cover had a feisty, tanned lady, sleeves rolled up, head in a bandana, and look on her face that echoed the caption ‘We can do it.’
Rosie the Riveter of the flexed muscles, comes from the Second World War when American men were at the front and women were needed to work.
Today she is there as women for the first time in history become the majority of the American workforce.
They already make up most graduates in OECD countries, the majority of professional workers in several rich countries, including the US and run many of the world’s greatest companies. In the European Union they have filled 6m of the 8m new jobs created since 2000.
mobiles
Long yearned to grab one from some terminally yacking cretin and hurl it out the train window, preferably followed by the owner; but maybe there is a pitiful glimmer of hope:
“the mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newscom wants the widely differing levels of radiation given off by different handsets to be displayed as prominently as the price. While the state of Maine is thinking of putting cancer warnings on mobile phones.
Evidence grows that using mobiles for more than 10 years increases the risk of brain cancer. While a study this week (Jan 2010) thinks that radiation might alleviate Alzheimer’s. Swedish research thinks it may cause it. “
(So that’s clear then.)
places
los Angeles:
I stepped off the 747 and took a deep lungful of the smog-baked yellow gas that has long since replaced the stuff we were designed to breathe. When Bob Hope came to Ireland he said, ‘It makes me nervous to breathe air I can’t see.’
On the San Diego freeway, the black taxi driver told me he was a minister in a sect that speaks in tongues, English wasn’t one of them. As he rambled on, my mind drifted off: all the while I’ve been absent from LA, these eight lanes of traffic have been running non-stop, twenty-four hours a day, at fifty-five miles an hour (80 mph now- Ed) and will until the world ends. John Boorman
writers
Gore Vidal remembers the saner city of his youth and his grandfather, the blind senator for Oklahoma.
“Washington was a small town where everyone knew everyone else. When school was out in June, boys took off their shoes and did not put them on again – at least outside the house – until September. The summer heat was – and is – Egyptian. In June, before Congress adjourned, I used to be sent with car and driver to pick up my grandfather at the Captial and bring him home. In those casual days, there were few guards at the Captial – and, again, everyone knew everyone else.
I would wander on to the floor of the Senate, sit on my grandfather’s desk if he wasn’t ready to go, experiment with the snuff that was ritually allotted each senator, then I would lead him off the floor. On one occasion, I came down the aisle of the Senate wearing nothing but a bathing suit. This caused a good deal of amusement, to the blind man’s bewilderment. Finally, The Vice-President, Mr Garner – teeth like tiny black pearls and breath that was all whisky – came down from the chair and said, ‘Senator, this boy is nekkid.’ Afterwards I always wore a shirt on the Senate floor – but never shoes.”
education
The great mumbo-jumbo of the age. Malcolm Muggeridge had a recurring dream that he was on ‘Any Questions ?’ in a studio deep underground while up on the surface the last vestiges of western civilisation are coming to an end, the mushroom cloud was rising.
“We are discussing the increase in juvenile delinquency, and a peeress in her own right gets up and says,
‘What we need is more and better education.’
That is when I wake up screaming.”
That was written some 40 years ago, and we’ve been screaming ever since.
books
‘Seasonal Suicide Letters’ by Roger Lewis.
Along with the lunatic jokes and napalm-coated insults, it is also a savage but cogent howl against contemporary culture. Glossy ads of unreal, beautiful, successful people, he penetratingly observes, are not “aspirational – they are a ferocious rebuke”. Meanwhile, highly intelligent publishers, editors and media mandarins, having themselves enjoyed the finest education that money can buy, preside over a landscape “where discussion of centuries-old literature and culture has disappeared”, replaced by stuff on DIY, gardening and shagging kitchen nightmares.
people
Patrick Mavros - met long ago in his home country of Zimbabwe. A craftsman, jeweller, artist, silversmith with the skill of Daedalus; master of African wildlife, raconteur sans pareil, most ‘gentil parfit knight’, force of nature, that ever came out of the bush.
His shop in Fulham Road is the most exquisite in London – or anywhere else. There are to be found those two near-extinct most delicate of antelope – elegance and taste.
To go in and walk around or sit surrounded by his silver pieces, carvings, sculpture, pictures, photographs and books is a delight rarely encountered.
His staff are intelligent, polite and will show you a third quality that has all but vanished – courtesy.
