anna_wing

The Five Questions meme. I will ask, if anyone would like questions from me.

From oursin:

1. What would you like your garden to grow that it doesn't, for whatever reason?


Brugmannsias! Utterly the wrong climate: too hot, too wet. I could grow daturas, but they're too close to the ground, my witless cats would nibble them and be very sick if not dead...


2. If you could conjure up a couturier from the past to design a wardrobe for you, who?

Madeleine Vionnet. I'd love Erte or Poiret or Callot Soeurs or in fact any of the great 1920s couturiers, or even Worth post 1910 or thereabouts (and Lucille for my loungewear...), but Vionnet was the mistress of them all. Or of course Issey Miyake, who sadly would now qualify too...

3. Seashore or mountain?

Mountain, absolutely, especially when cool and forested, with onsen at judicious intervals. What with tsunami and cyclones and riptides, and too much sun, I regard the sea with vast suspicion. I suppose the seashore in a temperate climate and not in summer might be all right.

4. A book that has not been written that you wish would be or had been?

Too many, so for 'wish they had been written' I'll go with The Universal Pantograph, and Hope Mirrlees' second novel. For 'wish they would be written'...City of Opal and City of Pearl by Jane Emerson aka Doris Egan.

5. Favourite poet/s?

Rudyard Kipling, with Edna St Vincent Millay and Ogden Nash close behind.

I went to see "Dune" last night, at a suitable social distance. It was rather good, though I remain a fan of the Grand Guignol glory of David Lynch's version. The aesthetics of this version were inventive and beautiful, and the many shots of sand, desert cities, sand, rocks and sand had me clutching my moisturiser protectively (deserts are not my favourite environment, especially hot ones). I should re-watch the Lynch, just to compare and contrast the different choices made from the plethora of possible incidents in the book.

Other thoughts:

1 Oscar Isaac and Rachel Ferguson had, I think, somewhat meatier parts than their predecessors, but lacked the iron charisma of Jurgen Prochnow and Francesca Annis. I did prefer the Lynch version of Dr Yueh to the whole 'Son of Fu Manchu' thing that this version has going on. And Linda Hunt was infinitely more exciting as the Shadout Mapes. On the other hand, Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho was inspired, and Timothee Chalamet is very convincing as a teenager being overcome by an unfortunate destiny, (though one who could really do with a haircut, or at least a hairbrush). This version also appears to be prioritising Rabban over Feyd-Rautha as the junior Harkonnen. It would indeed be difficult to match the lunatic glory that was Sting's interpretation of the role, so, probably a good choice.

2 I don't recall Leto II wanting to be a pilot from the book (though it has been some decades...), and I am sure that there is now fanfic somewhere in which Poe Dameron was the pseudonym of the youthful Leto Atreides, adventuring in a galaxy far, far away from his own...

3 What with all the dim lighting, layers of robes, excessive facial hair, and the dust in the atmosphere, I had some difficulty distinguishing one heavily-bearded man from another, especially since most of the costumes were Variations On The Theme Of Drab.

4 The Bene Gesserit costumes were marginally more sensible than the Lynch crinolines, and the headgear offered a nice sacerdotal touch (though the Bene Gesserit are canonically a secular organisation).

5 All versions of Dune (I saw the 2000 TV miniseries too) suffer from incomprehensibility if you haven't read the book. I did think that having Princess Irulan as the explanatory talking head, while rather a blunt instrument, might have helped.

6 It remains unclear what the giant sandworms eat, though from their dentition or equivalent, they look like filter feeders.

7 The visuals of the starships were truly lovely.

8 Moisturiser, moisturiser, moisturiser...

A rather late response to oursin, who tagged me with Art Nouveau, Gladys Mitchell and jazz

Jazz is easiest, because I am neither a connoisseur nor even a particular aficionado. I just like the sound, the rhythms and the scales that jazz uses, and I like the way it fits in with a lot of other musical traditions that use improvisation. I discovered Klezmer when a family friend took me to a bar mitzvah in New York in the 1980s, and went on from there. Ethiopianjazz is an entire genre on its own, and jazz improvisation suits Myanmar classical music, for instance, which relies heavily on improvisation upon a canon of songs (the Mahagita), and a lot of Thai and Indonesian music as well. Though the attempt to marry a gamelan orchestra and some moody, miserabilist Jan Garbarek-style clarinet failed miserably for the clarinet, which was there merely for visual interest, since a gamelan orchestra at full volume has something like the decibel level of a 747 taking off...

Gladys Mitchell is one of the UK Golden Age Queens of Crime, once spoken of in the same breath and Christie and Sayers. Her sleuth was an older woman, but utterly unlike Miss Marple except in her tendency to come across corpses: Mrs (later Dame Adela) Bradley, three times married (fate of her husbands unknown), distinguished academic psychologist and consultant to the Home Office, possible witch, mother of an equally distinguished barrister in the criminal Bar, crack shot, expert martial artist and billiards player, ruthless, brilliant and terrifying, prone to sinister cackles and able to persuade a suspect to confess merely by smiling at him in a meaningful way. She was played by the late, great Diana Rigg in a TV adaption, "The Mrs Bradley Mysteries", in a fabulous array of 1920s hats, bags, shoes and frocks. The gorgeous Dame Diana did not fit the physical description of Mrs Bradley (who was usually described as "yellow-skinned", "shrivelled" and "saurian"), but caught her mother-velociraptor character perfectly. Mrs Bradley is the kind of older lady that I aspire to eventually live to be.

Art Nouveau - I like its ahistorical quality, and its mixture of Eastern and Western stylistic influence, and the way that different countries produced their own styles, using its principles but influenced by their own local traditions (the Eastern European versions in Russia and Hungary were particularly interesting, as were the Scandinavian "Dragon" styles...). It produced the most beautiful jewellery, furniture and architecture in the world. Many people know of Hector Guimard, but I actually prefer the furniture of Eugene Gaillard, some of which I was able to have copied (for somewhat less than the quarter of a million or so US dollars the originals would have cost...). I also like the way that the art nouveau encouraged the creation of the gesamtkunstwerk, especially in interiors and fashion. When I visit museums, there is usually something there that I would happily take home with me, but the Horta Museum in Brussels is the first where I wanted the whole building and everything in it....