Remember Christmas? Sure you do: presents to unwrap, too many roast potatoes and crap on telly. Maybe a glass of wine or two. I only mention it because on official figures 10,000 people have died from Covid-19 in the UK since Christmas Day.
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Overnight, and through today, the orange 45 has been banned from most social media sites. Too little, too late, for sure, but if we’re bandying clichés I could equally say better late than never. In other news, as well as the two pipe bombs that were found, one of the protestors had Molotov cocktails and a rifle in his van. The dispossessed demonstrators included elected representatives, two Seattle police officers (allegedly) and various radicalised members of the professional middle-classes , including one woman who commuted to the revolution in her private jet.
Oh, and some funding for the so-called patriots was donated by the wife of a sitting justice of the Supreme Court.
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I watched season two of A Discovery of Witches today. It’s based on The Shadow of Night, which is the second book of Deborah Harkness’s All Souls Trilogy. It was disappointing. The primary story is set in Elizabethan London, which is one of Professor Harkness’s primary research interests, and I’ve previously enjoyed the book.
I understand that in adapting a book for television or film things change; characters disappear or merge and story elements vanish. In this case so much of the texture of the book has been sacrificed in service to a linear narrative that, for me it fell flat. The pace plodded, and I often thought I was watching tableaux rather than scenes. The one exception to this was the appearance and performance of James Purefoy as Philippe; he was far and away the best thing in it. In the books the writing shifts from the first person (for Diana Bishop’s story) to third person for everything else. One effect of this adaptation is that Diana’s interior perspective, which is rich and nuanced, is discarded and nothing replaces it.
It’s a shame; I was quite looking forward to it.
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Music: Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point was panned on release, especially by American critics who didn’t grasp what the film was getting at. It suffers somewhat by the casting of non-actors in the lead roles, but the film itself, which predates Kent State and the campus protests on the 1970s, is prescient. I wrote about it last year:
The final scene, probably the best known scene in the film, fits my mood just now. The music is by Pink Floyd: Come in Number 51, You’re Time is Up (Change that 51 to 45 and it would be perfect.) And then I remembered Iris DeMent’s great blast of moral outrage, Livin’ In The Wasteland Of The Free which is the second video.
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