Hazel O’Connor trending on Twitter. Mainly because of people saying ‘I saw Hazel O’Connor was trending and feared the worst, but it’s fine.’
Looks like someone asked for ’80s songs with the best sax’, and ‘Will You’ fits. Thought Gerry Rafferty should be there, but ‘Baker Street’ was 1978.
Canal Dreams by Iain Banks (Books 2023, 18) 📚
I’ve always considered this the least of Iain Banks’s novels. As, I think, did he. If I remember correctly, this was the one about which he said he wrote it without a plan, and he’d never do that again.
So it’s strange, coming back to The Great Banksie Reread, and reading this for the first time in many years, to find that I liked it far more than I expected to. (Funny to note that my only other reference to it here was saying it was better than I remembered.)
It’s not that bad at all. It doesn’t meander the way you might expect the ’no plan’ thing to imply. What is striking is how apt the title is. A significant proportion of the narrative is taken up with the main character’s dreams. All of which either illuminate her past or tie in to other events in the plot, so they make sense.
But whichever novelist it was that I remember saying, ‘Never have a dream sequence’ — Chris Priest, I think — must hate it.
Tried Siri’s new slightly more conversational mode in iOS 17. Said ‘Siri, pause’ while a podcast was playing out loud, and it did. Said ‘Thank you,’ and it said, ‘You’re welcome,’ which is nice.
Still no Scottish voice, though.
This is a good piece about the different ways we communicate:
Are you a writer or a talker?
That is, when you need to think about something, do you generally reach for something to write with, or look for someone to talk to?
I’m definitely a writer, and I know how it feels to explain something in careful detail, in a document, an email, or just an instant message, and have someone reply with, ‘Maybe a quick call to talk about it?’
This helps me to realise that I shouldn’t get infuriated at them. They just have a different communication style.
A Star Is Born, 1954 - ★★½
The 1954 version of A Star is Born has in it the bones of a great film. It is not, however, the great film it’s reputed to be.
I should start by noting that our enjoyment of this was marred by the fact that the sound was out of sync. We rented it from Apple TV on our Roku box, and it was out from the start. I tried all the suggestions I could find online to fix it, short of a factory reset. Thing is, all of those were about the sound being out of sync on the Roku.
But the Roku was fine, in every other app, and in other things in the Apple TV app (great to have The Morning Show back). No, the problem here was that particular file, it seemed like.
Maybe there was a way we could have forced a redownload of it, and got a different version. If so, it wasn’t to be found.
But you adjust, you put up with things. We were startled half an hour or so in (to a three hour film, I note) when the video stopped and was replaced with a sepia-toned still image. Clearly a production still. The audio, and the story, carried on. The picture changed to another still. Visuals came back, to a long shot. Then another still.
This was strange enough that it deserved duckducking. Turns out we were seeing the result of studio meddling. It seems a producer, believing it was too long, made the decision to cut it. Without the director.
And later the studio, in a BBC-Doctor Who-video-wiping level of stupidity, melted the offcuts down to reclaim the silver.
Thing is, the producer may have been wrong at the time — according to that story, the shortened version was less popular — and he was certainly wrong in what he cut; but he wasn’t wrong about the film being overlong.
That may be unfair. Three-hour films can work perfectly well, after all. No, the edits should have been made at the script stage.
Or maybe at directing.Because this film is incoherent at times. A sudden cut and it’s months or years later with no sense of what went on in between. That can be fine, it can work well. Except here it felt like they had a series of scenes that they wanted to show, and they just bashed them together without a thought for how the story would flow.
There are some great moments. Judy Garland has a fantastic voice, of course, and is a perfectly fine actor, and a very good physical actor, it turns out.
A great voice, rubbish songs, unfortunately. Getting her to sing a song that includes the word ‘somewhere’ does not make it as good as the song she’s most famous for.
Honestly, that and the song-within-a-film-within-the-film (‘Born in a Trunk’, I think it was called) are as much as I remember about the music.
I’m sort of keen to see if the seventies or twenty-tens versions are better. I’ve got to imagine they must be.
Shorter, anyway
Fatal Revenant: The Final Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Book 2 by Stephen Donaldson (Books 2023, 17) 📚
Wordy, as I mentioned before. Long. Unnecessarily repetitive.
But I enjoyed it nonetheless.
I’m quite glad, though, I don’t have the other books yet. I feel it’s best to take a break after a story like this. Let it sink in. Prepare yourself, maybe, for the next one.
Anyway, more of the same: The Land is in danger, Linden Avery’s son is in Lord Foul’s clutches, and she’s prepared to do just about anything to save it, and him. But especially him. I expect we’re going to see a situation where she puts the whole Land — the whole of Earth, indeed — in danger, by trying to save Jeremiah.
Maybe she already has.
Oh: people have far too many different names in this. I mean, names by which various people refer to them. In the very last chapter someone refers to ‘The Timewarden’. I was like, ‘That sounds like The Doctor; what the hell is going on?’ But they just meant Thomas Covenant.
In the Heat of the Night, 1967 - ★★★
A Black cop helps a white police chief investigate a murder in a southern (US) town. After first being arrested on suspicion of the murder, of course.
Compared to how things appear today in the US, this feels very gentle. Even when Sidney Poitier's Mr Tibbs is threatened by racist thugs, there's no real sense of menace.
But it's a good story, sending positive messages, and well worth a watch.
Speaking of ChatGPT, I like Cory Doctorow’s explanation of it and its cousins from his latest piece:
AI chatbots are mirrors of experts, only instead of giving you informed opinions, they plagiarize sentence-fragments into statistically plausible paragraphs.
Dave Winer (I think he’s still @dave on Micro.blog) talks about using ChatGPT to
make calls about a user’s WordPress account. I want to know what sites the user is following in their reader app.
ChatGPT notwithstanding, I’m mildly horrified that a) WordPress makes that info publicly available, and b) Dave wants to use it.
Straight to Hell, 1987 - ★★
Alex Cox made a spaghetti western, with Joe Strummer, the Pogues, Elis Costello, Courtney Love 'acting' in it. Plus some proper actors.
The plot is completely incoherent, but I'm glad it's there.
Still, the best bit is the closing credits. Not because it's over, but because The Pogues' 'Rake at the Gates of Hell' plays over them.