Take your shoes off and throw them in the lake

Other things to write about which I have thought about while typing this entry but which need to be taken offline :-

"The Rudiments of Wisdom" by Tim Hunkin in the Observer.
The Shipping Forecast

Jan Morris, the travel writer is my cousin several times removed etc. I stumbled over this article by her about the first ascent of Mount Everest. She was on Desert Island Discs the other day and I have to say she was the most interesting guest for a long time. I read her autobiography - Conundrum - first I think, when it was serialised in the Sunday Times. (I was about eight and can still remember the shock of us actually getting The Sunday Times rather than The Observer - It must have been my Mother who decided on buying The Observer but I think my Dad still got it for years after she died). I was obviously far too young to understand all the psychological stuff in the book but I like to think it made me aware of how difficult life for some people is. Her fictional Travel book Last Letters from Hav is also very good. If you were not told beforehand, you would not know that the place does not exist. I suspect there is some reality in it just like in Passengers the album of ostensibly ficticious sound tracks by U2 and Brian Eno. I ( and I am sure you) know that at least one of the films mentioned - Ghost in the Shell - exists. The track - . Corpse (These Chains Are Way Too Long) [From Gibigiane] has a wonderful write up in the sleeve notes - vis

From the Original Soundtracks 1 sleeve...

Gianniccolo's last film "Gibigiane" is also his most tautly argued. At just over ninety minutes long it is certainly not the huge canvas he used so devastatingly in 'Mirages' (1984, 4 hrs, 20 mins) or 'Il Vento' (1987, 5 hrs, 9 mins), but is in its comparatively modest way just as satisfying. Its title is the word used in Venicefor the quixotic shards of light reflected onto walls from canals, and features only those images in a series of 10 minute sequences which are leaved over one another by means of slow dissolves. The film opens at real speed, but each sequence is about 15% slower than the one preceding it, so that the last ten minute section is less than one eighth real speed. The original film was silent, but a lengthy section from it with this music was used as the title sequence to an Italian TV detective series ('Il Pendolo') set in Venice.

I took this from this site which has a list of all the tracks with the sleeve notes and whether or not the reviewer believes or knows the film to be real. Anyway I loved the images that the sleeve notes for Gibigiane put in my head. A sort of cool Italian version of Bergerac crossed with the detective work from Hannibal. Sublime. We are Travelling now at nine times the speed of sound.

"Traders" is a short film about the bizarre goings on in a large but very anonymous Merchant Bank in London. It goes beyond the cliche of the braces and striped shirts to expose a dangerous and compelling side to the world of international futures trading. If you have ever wondered how the world manages to survive based on the ludicrous premises of spending money on things which you will never actually see or even understand, then this film is for you. It is directed by Anthony Dryden and is his first film after leaving the up-coming Rissington film group. The soundtrack is by John Tudor and incorporates elements of his best selling album - The Burning World.

From Cuspixo films - Autumn 2002.

As goes The Rudiments of Wisdom - I need to do nothing other than point you to the website which, as you can see, I have already done. The Rudiments of Wisdom was a cartoon encyclopaedia in The Observer and was my favourite bit. I was reminded of it by seeing a poster by Tim Hunkin. It is nice to see it continuing on the Web as I thought he had stopped doing it years ago. A large part of my childhood has just flashed before me. Isn't the net wonderful? (The world needs a new punctuation symbol - the hypothetical question mark and it is of course down to me to design it).