What Is Dave Doing?!? Part 4

With Vancouver Fan Expo and then VANCAF, I fell behind on my little activities journal here on the website. Of course I was still reading and listening to music. I just didn’t seem to have time to write about it! When I did write about it, the long gap between installments meant even more to write about, further adding to the time. I actually edited down two of the entries to make them shorter, believe it or not.

Also I’d been voraciously watching the…Wait! This is the perfect opportunity to ask:

WHAT IS DAVE DOING?!?

WATCHING: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries

Well, my oldest daughter recommended that I watch this web series, but it took me a couple of months to get around to it. And now I’m mad at myself that I didn’t start sooner. I’m recommending it to you and I hope you’re more proactive than I am and watch it right away. (Here’s a link!)

Boy, I really enjoyed this web series. It was funny and also very moving; and it used the framework of Pride and Prejudice well – although modernizing the story meant the characters lost some of their “prim and properness”. (Some people might say that’s a good thing, but I admire the restraint and politeness of the Regency era – even if I can’t imitate it!)

The Diaries use the genre of web blog as a framework to hang the story of Pride and Prejudice. Lizzie Bennet becomes a 24-year old college student, making a year-long web blog as a thesis project. In Austen’s original draft of Pride and Prejudice – then called First Impressions – the story is told in a series of letters between Elizabeth and Jane. Austen changed this when she did a major re-write of Pride and Prejudice before it was finally published, but the book is chockfull of letters. The Diaries  essentially follows this epistolary format by making the video diaries a sort of letter between Lizzie and us. Although Lizzie’s sisters and other characters make appearances, many pivotal moments in the story take place off camera – just as many pivotal sequences in Pride and Prejudice are told through letters.

I don’t think it was intended, but the installment format of the video diary actually serves to deepen the story. (It was originally broadcast twice a week.) Just as in monthly pamphlet comics, the gap between episodes means that we think about and live in the story in a deep and personal way. When affecting things happen, they can touch us deeply. (I’ll admit I cried a few times – notably when Jane is jilted and during the Lydia sequence near the end.)

I really can’t recommend this show enough and hope fans of Sneaky Dragon will give it a try. (Maybe it’s not for everyone!) If you do start watching it, let me know what you think in the Comments below. Maybe I’ll start watching it again and we can have a little discussion group. I’d love the excuse to give it another watch.

LISTENING: Emmitt Rhodes, Mirror

One of those sad, inexplicable misses in the history of pop music, Emmitt Rhodes was a talented singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist who, in a studio constructed in his parent’s garage, produced three fine albums in the early 70s. Mirror, his second album for ABC-Dunhill, is full of great songs built around the piano/guitar interplay so popular at that time (see Elton John, Carol King, Todd Rundgren et al.) with a McCartneyesque touch to the vocal sound. Frankly, any album that features a song as great as “Love Will Stone You” is going to rank pretty high with me, but the overall excellence of the record makes his commercial failure rather mystifying. His career – from member of the band The Merry-Go-Round to solo artist recording with producers and session musicians to solo artist recording in his parent’s garage – indicates to me an incredibly shy and sensitive musician unable to handle the business side of the music business.

Here is “Love Will Stone You”:

And here’s a promo film for “I Really Wanted You” from the same album:

READING: Anthony Trollope La Vendée, The Warden, Barchester Towers

Despite obsessing over web series, Operation Anthony Trollope marches ever onward – I’ve finished La Vendée (Trollope’s dip of the toe into historical fiction). Although it got better as it went on, it never quite came together for me. Most of the characters read as Brits speaking oddly and the ending comes so abruptly that your head almost snaps off your neck, but worst of all, the characters can’t come alive and Trollope wasn’t able to create an exciting, suspenseful atmosphere for the characters to inhabit – as sympathetic as most of the characters are (royalist or republican).

Next up: The Warden – published in 1855, this was Trollope’s first success. After the misfire of La Vendée, Trollope returned to the formula of The Kellys and the O’Kellys – a love story with humour, finely observed characters and acute social observations – but placed the story in England. It’s a simple story of a shy, retiring warden of a charitable hospital for destitute labourers, who finds himself in the middle of a battle between social reformers and the church hierarchy. What makes the story so great is the social commentary and the great characters that seem to just flow from Trollope’s pen. Most important – and this is something that La Vendée did not have – is the feeling that the characters are real and alive on the page. There is even a moment where the titular warden makes a decision that even Trollope didn’t seem to anticipate – upending much of his careful plotting!

The success of The Warden meant it was soon followed by Barchester Towers – one of Trollope’s masterpieces. The wonderful creation of the cathedral city of Barchester – based on Salisbury, where Trollope was then working for the post office – and its cast of ambitious, gossipy precentors, prebendaries, minor canons, archdeacons, sub-deans, etc. somehow touched a nerve with the British public – then concerned with church reform as the established Church of England began to be disestablished. Several characters return from The Warden, including the wonderful Mr. Grantly, the bombastic archdeacon, and they are joined by two of the greatest villains in English literature: Mrs. Proudie, the bishop’s termagant wife, and the unctuous hypocrite Rev. Obadiah Slope. The romantic sub-plot is rather routine, but the fantastic characters and the devious plots and counter-plots make the novel the fun read it is. It’s been more than twenty-years since I read these books so it’s been a real joy to enter the gates of Barchester one more time.

READING: Susannah Fullerton, Celebrating Pride and Prejudice: 200 Years of Jane Austen’s Masterpiece

Here’s a fun read for fans of Pride and Prejudice, which I think we’ve established I am. Susannah Fullerton, who is some sort of muckety-muck with the Australian Jane Austen Society, has written a guide to Pride and Prejudice, recounting not only the history of its writing, but its reception as a novel, its contemporary fans, studies of the various characters, the sequels, pastiches and travesties that have come in its wake, the various theatrical, TV and movie adaptations and more. Ms. Fullerton has read a lot of crappy books so I don’t have to and I thank her for that. She enjoyed the 2005 movie version of the book much less than I did, but I think we see eye to eye on the weaknesses of the 1995 version and both of us agree that Elizabeth Garvie from the 1980s version was the best Elizabeth Bennett.

LISTENING: Stereolab, ABC Music

A collection of radio sessions recorded for various BBC shows including John Peel. Interestingly, my favourite stuff by the band doesn’t fare very well in the lay-‘em-down-quick world of radio sessions. Their early VU-inspired drone rock and their later quirky pop seem to suit the stripped down nature of the sessions better than their purple period avant-jazz/pop/retro/funk music. “Metronomic Underground”, a long, repetitive funk drone from Emperor Tomato Ketchup, for example, needs some meat on the bare bones of its radio version. It’s missing the Moog squelches and other atmospherics that bring to life what is essentially a repetitive chant with funky bass and drums. Usually I’m a big fan of BBC radio session collections. I have many of The Peel Session records and used them as a cheap way to hear unknown (to me) bands (Hello, Twa Toots!) I’m a big fan of The Fall collection and think some of the songs are better in the radio session version than on the record (“New Face in Hell”, for instance). I think Stereolab relies on a particularly produced sound more than other groups and miss such things as Sean O’Hagan’s string arrangements or instrumental colourings from producer/collaborators like John McEntire or Jim O’Rourke. Anyway, I’ll stick to the original albums and then we’ll all be happy.

All right, folks, let’s call this a wrap!