Quotulatiousness

August 13, 2014

“Cloudbusting” by Kate Bush

Filed under: Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:38

Bernadette McNulty:

I first fell under Bush’s spell in the autumn of 1985, the year she released her fifth studio album, Hounds of Love. The record had already gone straight to number one when on an October Saturday, mum took me on one of our cinema trips. The film I think we went to see was Brewster’s Millions but I can recall nothing about it. All that has stayed with me is the vivid memory of the trailer that showed first, a premiere of Kate Bush’s new video for the second single from the album, “Cloudbusting”.

For nearly seven minutes I was mesmerised. There was Bush, dressed like a boy from the Fifties, with a short red Dennis the Menace wig, Fair Isle cardigan and dungarees struggling up a vertiginous hill, behind a giant machine pulled on ropes by her father, played by the Hollywood actor Donald Sutherland. There weren’t many hills that steep in Birmingham and I had never seen such a vast horizon as the Vale of the White Horse in Oxfordshire where the action was set.

Into that seemingly endless blue sky, Bush and Sutherland pivot around the giant silver pipes of their machine. When nothing happens, Bush clutches Sutherland and she looks almost comically tiny, barely reaching his waist. The scene cuts to Sutherland in a laboratory and then back to sinister men in black hats and coats who appear and bundle Sutherland into the back of a car, chased by Bush. From the back window, he gestures her back to the hill where in the finale, she manages to wrestle the machine into producing a giant rain cloud, heavy drops falling down onto the car as it disappears over the horizon.

Belated H/T to Elizabeth for the link.

News reporters as myth makers

Filed under: Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:09

Jack Schafer on the cyclical nature of the news and an explanation for certain story types growing into mythic form:

Has some wise guy flipped a switch and thrown the news into summer reruns?

Everywhere you look in your news feed is a story you’ve seen before. In northern Iraq, conquering jihadists have the Kurds calling on the United States for more help. North Korea is again stating its desire to nuke the White House. A virulent contagion abroad has Americans worrying when it will break out on our shores. And, in a rerun of a rerun, a Gaza war of tunnels, rockets, invasions, ceasefires, withdrawals, broken ceasefires, and shuttle diplomacy is claiming a record harvest of headlines.

[…]

But the periodicity of the news has another cause, as press scholar Jack Lule discovered more than a decade ago in his book Daily News, Eternal Stories. Lule proposed that the news was less a pure journalistic creation than it was the modern expression of ancient myths.

Like many all-encompassing formulas, Lule’s reduction of news into myth suffers by attempting to explain too much. But after reading his book, you can’t help but notice how many front-page stories collapse into the seven master myths he assembles (which will sound familiar to anybody who has brushed up against Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces): the victim, a casualty of randomness or a villain; the scapegoat, who is punished for straying outside the social order; the hero, who smites evil; the good mother, who “offers maternal comfort and protection”; the trickster, the rogue who disturbs the social order; the other world, typically foreign countries; and the flood, or any other disaster.

Few, if any, journalists would confess to consciously calling myths to convey the news, perhaps in part because so few of them are aware of the mythic thrust of their work. Instead, the ancient outlines express themselves spontaneously in copy, as reporters, who are usually voluminous readers, seek to infuse higher meaning to the disparate facts they’ve collected in their notebooks, even if they’re covering something as prosaic as a funeral or a legislative battle.

Few readers would confess to myth-seeking in their media choices, yet Lule makes the undeniable case that audiences prefer news when it is fashioned into something more eternal than pure information. Lule writes:

    Newspaper sales, magazine circulation, television news ratings, and website traffic all surge during dramatic and sensational events: schoolyard killings, royal weddings, hurricanes, assassinations, airline crashes, and inaugurations. What are people seeking? They’re not going to use these stories to vote for a candidate. They want compelling dramas. They want satisfying stories that speak to them of history and fate and the fragility of life. They want myth.

Lauren Bacall

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:57

In the Telegraph, Tim Stanley says we’ve lost one of the last of the true Hollywood stars:

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in the trailer for the film Dark Passage, 1947 (via Wikipedia)

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in the trailer for the film Dark Passage, 1947 (via Wikipedia)

Lauren Bacall the actor has died, a sad thing for sure. But Lauren Bacall the star will live on forever. Because that’s what stars do. They burn bright for millennia.

Born Betty Perske, a Jewish girl from the Bronx, she was spotted by Howard Hawks’ wife on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar and invited to Hollywood to screen test. Bacall thought Hawks was impressive but scary — it didn’t help that his method of breaking the ice was to make anti-Semitic jokes. Hawks thought Bacall attractive but lumbered with a high-pitched voice that was all wrong for the sophisticated quick-fire dialogue he liked to write. So she drove her car up into the Hollywood hills and practiced speaking low and soft by herself. Next she had to improve her demeanour — and for Hawks this meant turning from a shy girl into a sexually confident one. When she couldn’t get a ride home from a party at Hawks’ house, he told her that men went for women who insulted them. She insulted Clark Gable and, right on cue, he offered to drive her home.

[…]

What defined that character? Friedrich calls it “insolence”. Bacall always played the girl who answered back, the one who had the temerity to ask if a man knew how to whistle. That’s Hollywood censor shorthand for if they knew how to make love. Bacall never went out of her way to please no man; men had to please her. Via a series of noir box office hits, Betty Perske ascended into the pantheon and took the slot of the “sophisticated seductress”. For Golden Age Hollywood dealt not in actors or mere parts, but in stars and archetypes. At any one point there had to be a tough guy, a wise guy, a villain, a maverick. Among women there were the betrayed wives, vamps, innocents and party girls. The name of a star on a movie poster told you everything you needed to know about what would happen in that movie — and you went to see it because the last 48 made in that vein were so darn good. This is the nature of star power, the ability to evoke something with just a name in lights.

Pessimism from the Rational Optimist

Filed under: Africa, Health — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Matt Ridley is somewhat uncharacteristically concerned about the major Ebola outbreak in west Africa:

As you may know by now, I am a serial debunker of alarm and it usually serves me in good stead. On the threat posed by diseases, I’ve been resolutely sceptical of exaggerated scares about bird flu and I once won a bet that mad cow disease would never claim more than 100 human lives a year when some “experts” were forecasting tens of thousands (it peaked at 28 in 2000). I’ve drawn attention to the steadily falling mortality from malaria and Aids.

Well, this time, about ebola, I am worried. Not for Britain, Europe or America or any other developed country and not for the human race as a whole. This is not about us in rich countries, and there remains little doubt that this country can achieve the necessary isolation and hygiene to control any cases that get here by air before they infect more than a handful of other people — at the very worst. No, it is the situation in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea that is scary. There it could get much worse before it gets better.

This is the first time ebola has got going in cities. It is the first time it is happening in areas with “fluid population movements over porous borders” in the words of Margaret Chan, the World Health Organisation’s director-general, speaking last Friday. It is the first time it has spread by air travel. It is the first time it has reached the sort of critical mass that makes tracing its victims’ contacts difficult.

One of ebola’s most dangerous features is that kills so many health workers. Because it requires direct contact with the bodily fluids of patients, and because patients are violently ill, nurses and doctors are especially at risk. The current epidemic has already claimed the lives of 60 healthcare workers, including those of two prominent doctors, Samuel Brisbane in Liberia and Sheik Umar Khan in Sierra Leone. The courage of medics in these circumstances, working in stifling protective gear, is humbling.

Ebola outbreak in west Africa

QotD: Abstention

Filed under: Health, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Earlier this year I went off the booze for a few weeks, a purely voluntary move, let it be said. Among other things, I thought might be interesting to look at life from the Other Side. So to speak.

It wasn’t quite what I’d expected. Ex-topers, those warned off by the doc, will tell you emotionally that if they’d known how much better they were going to feel with, out it, they’d have given it up years before they actually had to. This is a pathetic lie, designed to make you look like the one who’s missing out and motivated by their hatred and envy of anybody who’s still on it. In fact, not only is one’s general level of health unaffected by the change, but daily ups and downs persist in the same way.

I discovered early on that you don’t have to drink to build yourself a hangover. There were mornings when I groaned my way to consciousness, wondering dimly whether it was port or malt whisky that had polluted my mouth and dehydrated my eyes, until I remembered that it could only have been too much ginger beer and late-night snooker. Then, the next morning, I would feel fine, or at least all right, with the same mysterious lack of apparent reason.

[…]

As regards other parts of the system, my liver no doubt benefited from its sudden lay-off, but it didn’t send me any cheering messages to say so. My mental powers seemed unaltered, certainly unimproved — I was no less forgetful, short on concentration, likely to lose the thread or generally unsatisfactory than I had been before. But now I had no excuse. That was the only big difference: when I was drinking I had the drink to blame for anything under the sun, but now it was all just me. A thought that must drive a lot of people to drink.

I hope I haven’t discouraged anyone who might be thinking of taking a short or long holiday from grape and grain. The easiest part is the actual total not drinking, much easier than cutting it down or sticking to beer or anything like that. Very nearly the hardest part is putting up with the other fellow when he’s drinking and you’re just watching him. At such times you’re probable not much fun yourself either. Fruit juice and company don’t mix.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

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