Mike Crowl's Blog, page 23

Shakespeare the survivor

I went and saw the movie version of Twelfth Night a couple of weeks ago - it's a recording of the 2017 production at the National Theatre in London. The movie version is bit of an oddity: there's a 20-minute interval around the two-hour mark, when nothing appears on the screen except a counting down clock; we can still hear the sound of the audience in the real theatre. The last time I saw a similar production - it was the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Love's Labour's Lost - they...

The flexibility of music notation

I've been reading and playing music since I was seven or eight, and over the years it's struck me more than a few times just how flexible a system music notation is. Here are a couple of examples:

Pitch

Firstly, there's more than one way to write the pitch of a note: it depends on what key you're in, whether it's a sharp or flat key. You can even change how you write a note within a piece, regardless of the key (this is called using the enharmonic equivalent). Modern music increasingly does thi...

Dough - and The 100-Foot Journey

We caught up with a 2015 movie last night called (simply)  Dough . As in cash, of course, and in actual dough for baking.

It's a story about an elderly Jewish baker in London whose business is losing customers and money. The shops on either side are either owned or being bought out by an unscrupulous former 'barrow boy.' Through various circumstances a young African Muslim boy becomes the Jew's apprentice baker and things begin to turn around. Of course there are difficulties and troubles a...

Dough

We caught up with a 2015 movie last night called (simply)  Dough . As in cash, of course, and in actual dough for baking. 
It's a story about an elderly Jewish baker in London whose business is losing customers and money. The shops on either side are either owned or being bought out by an unscrupulous former 'barrow boy.' Through various circumstances a young African Muslim boy becomes the Jew's apprentice baker and things begin to turn around. Of course there are difficulties and trou...

On Sharia Law in the US

Shireen QudosiI don't normally include material relating to Islam and ISIS on here, but this series of sixteen tweets from Shireen Qudosi, a tweeter I follow, needs to be more accessible. (It's difficult following sixteen tweets in a row on Twitter: other tweets interrupt the flow!).

The series started as a result of this tweet from  Isaac Cohen @IHWCo on the activist, Linda Sarsour.Ms.@lsarsour claims having anti-Sharia bills or laws that forbid it from being made as US laws, prevent...

The pain of being a violinist

I spent some time talking with a friend the other day about just how hard it is to play the violin. Not so much because learning to put your finger in the right place and produce the right pitch is a major problem - children gradually learn how to do this, and learn what the correct sound is and what isn't.

Nor is it a matter of the bowing, which is like learning to juggle by adding more and more items to what you're throwing around. Anyone can do it...!

No, what we were talking about is the sh...

Collaborative writing

While reading The Making of Some Like it Hot, by Tony Curtis, (with Mark A Vieira) a couple of days ago, the following piece on co-writing struck me as interesting in terms of the different ways collaborators work together. 
'Billy' is Billy Wilder, the writer and director, and 'Izzy' is I.A.L. Diamond, his second major co-writer. (Wilder had previously worked on several films with Charles Brackett.)
The work wasn’t glamorous. Billy compared himself and Izzy to bank tellers, coming in at n...

Anne with an Eeek.

We've watched the first three episodes of Anne with an E on Netflix over the last couple of nights. Increasingly it's become apparent that this is a reconstructed Anne of Green Gables , as if the writers/directors wanted to change as much as possible within the overall framework of the story, and to add in stuff that made it more 'up to date,' if that's the phrase I want.

Sadly it isn't working. Not for us, anyway. Anne, in this version, is at odds with everyone, whereas in the origin...

Cant is my wont

This piece of nonsense first appeared in Column 8, a column that featured in the Dunedin Midweeker, and for which I wrote for five and half years in the 1990s. In spite of this piece's age, the problem of the apostrophe hasn't yet gone away.


In the latter days of the last World War, Lancelot Hogben published a series of books, Primers for the Age of Plenty: a fairly optimistic title considering that rationing still had a ways to go. Hogben and his writers looked towards a new wo...

Giving Column 8 a new lease of life

Back in the 90s I wrote five and a half years of weekly columns (apart from the holiday period each year) about all manner of subjects under the title Column 8. (You can find a few of the columns reprinted online, here, and one, Nobody Birds, on this blog. ) It was great having a free hand like that - the sort of benefit few writers probably have just to let their hair down and go for it. Sometimes having such a wide range is inhibiting, strangely, but in general something got writt...