Rain on the Nachos



Listening to Tom’s Diner.

I heard Suzanne Vega sing this at the Empire in Liverpool in 1986 before it was on any album and it was breathtaking. I seem to remember she was attacked by some insect in the middle of it but I might have been dreaming. Wikipedia has just revealed that the actor “who had died while he was drinking” was in fact William Holden who I certainly have heard of. For years I was plagued by a film I saw as a child which starts with a man narrating a tale in flashback while his own body is floating face down in a swimming pool. No one I asked knew of this which shows how clever they were, for it is in fact Sunset Boulevard which is responsible for the line “I’m ready for my close-up”. It is one of those weird dateless films that we know was filmed at a specific time but actually works regardless of its era

The Cloudspotter’s Guide is making little squeaking noises by the side of the bed while I struggle though Foucault’s Pendulum. Actually, FP has suddenly stepped up a gear after trawling through a lot of background about The Knight’s Templar and The Rosicrucians. It seems to starting from a basis of dismissing the wider conspiracy-theory speculations regarding The Templars. The narrator is an expert on The Templars and is quite strong in his denial of all the normal rot about them but I get an inkling that he is about to discover that there is a link between these ideas and other things from the more disreputable ranges of historical research. I wonder if the denouement has all of this discovered truth converting back to being a lot of rot after all. We shall see.

I have been watching a lot of BBC4’s Silent Cinema Season. The show on British Silent film revealed many unknown films one of which – A Cottage on Dartmoor – had a real quality of menace about it. It made me think about a possible revival of Silent Cinema. Silent and Black and White of course. The two versions of Blackmail – one silent and one with sound – are equally valid though the sound one seemed to show that the Director and the Actors were only just getting used to speaking on film. There is a scene where a woman who has killed her potential rapist is asked to cut some bread with a knife while a gossip repeats the word “knife” over and over. In the silent version the visual concentration on the knife is enough to reinforce the idea of the stabbing. The repetition of the word seems too unnatural and forced. Still, what would make a good silent film these days? You could start out with some gentle documentary about someone’s life in a day, something which looks good visually but has no need of narrative. Maybe it could even have natural sound rather than music, just no speech. The BBC occasionally shows programmes from a series about children around the world. These seem to be funded as part of an umbrella that allows these gentle dramas to be made and shown on all the participating stations without any preference or prejudice.

This has been a ramble. I can’t get any enthusiasm to continue.