Sunday 12 December 2010

snow on the water, palermo and blooming briggs


(i)
in less than three days -- the temperature went from a surreal 22 degrees to a rather sudden 2 degrees...saturday morning a little magic surprised everyone. the mountains on the other side of the gulf were all dusted with snow. to see the clear emerald sea, under a slight hint of wintery white was a real sight...just beautiful. then last night a storm broke at sea -- with a very strong, blizzardy wind sounding like an old train with broken brakes...

(ii)
despite having read plenty of negative reviews - i finally got a chance of watching "palermo shooting" by wim wenders. a friend reccomended it and bought it for me. i must say i liked it - even if some undertones and metaphores are kind of over the top and overdramatised. yet, visually, musically - it is a thunder of a movie: lyrical, surreal, unconventional, dreamy and using colours and light in the most sophisticated way. must add that the main actor chose by wenders, german singer campino, is charming to say the least - in a rather scruffily manly way. pity about the too many tattooes...but cannot complain about the rather intense rest.

yesterday also watched "the end of the affair" - the second cinematic rendition of graham greene's homonymous book. i was let down by the movie just about as much as i loved greene's original work. the story remains gripping -- but there is something too distant in the acting. or perhaps greene's wry, merciless pace is quite impossible to translate into a film.

(iii)
over the weekend, in between classes... walked around the two or three streets in town that host the most "in" shops and stores... inside, scattered glimpses of christmas trees and yuletide-ness...the more global names (gap, marks and spencers, zara, mango, sephora) displaying, reassuringly, random slogans - in english - about "giving" and "what i really want for christmas..." -- right...
yeah, what do i really want for christmas??
oddly - for the past couple of days i have had just rather consummeristic hopes for the festive season and i keep on daydreaming about eccentric presents showing up around 25th: red coats, furry vests, ushankas with pon pons, beanie caps, boleros with feathers, exotic perfumes, dandy boots, retro knits with apres-ski motifs, shearling boots, angora and mohair cardigans, bobble hats, leopard-print ponyskin court shoes, lurex blazers...
but i guess father christmas is far more sensible than that... and i will need to kind of reset my daydreaming...

(iv)
A lovely thing about Christmas is that it's compulsory, like a thunderstorm, and we all go through it together.
-- Garrison Keillor "Exiles," Leaving Home (1987)--

(v)
come to think of it -- not all father christmases are sensible, reassuring specimens. one father christmas i absolutely adore is the very grumpy and super british one created by raymond briggs, a fantastic author. his 1973's "father christmas" is a total classic and portrays santa claus as a tired and unhappy old man who dreams of exotic holidays, fancy french food ("with ketchup!") and whinges peevishly about his job, the weather and...anything really.
"Blooming chimneys!!
Blooming soot!! Blooming cats!!!!
Blooming cookers!!! Grrr! Getting a blooming cold now..!"

in a "guardian" interview - the very same author writes about his 1973's character...
Father Christmas has a terrible job. Can there be anything worse? Coal mining, perhaps? But even that is a dry, warm and matey job. Whereas Father Christmas works all alone, outdoors, at night, and in the depths of winter. Half the time he is flying through the freezing air, enduring rain, snow, sleet and fog. The other half, he is slithering down soot-encrusted chimneys, breathing in clouds of coal dust.

The work is a cross between that of a sweep and a milkman, filthy dirty, cold and lonely.

What do we know about him? He has a white beard, so he must be old, well past retirement age. Also, he has been doing this job for years, so he must be fed up with it. He is bound to be grumpy.

We also know that he is fat, so he probably enjoys his food and drink.

It is a working-man's job, so he lives in a working-man's house. He has probably lived in it for most of his life, so it is very old-fashioned with few modern comforts. There is no central heating and there is still an outside lavatory.

A few peculiar people complained about seeing Father Christmas on the lavatory. One American vicar's wife wrote that she was "upset to see one of the pictures portraying Santa performing an act of personal hygiene. Also the notations indicating that he cursed. The entire story is negative and very depressing." But that was more than 30 years ago, and besides she was religious. Children love the lavatory picture. It is always their favourite bit.

My Dad appears as the milkman in the book, saying to Father Christmas: "Still at it, mate?" The milkman's van has the number plate ERB 1900, which are my Dad's initials and the year of his birth.

As Father Christmas hates the cold so much, he is bound to love warmth and the sun. His house is decorated with posters for sunny places: Majorca, Malta and Capri. This started the idea for a book about his summer holiday. After the death of my wife, Jean, kind friends asked me to their house in France. Another friend asked me to her father's house in Scotland, on the shores of Loch Fyne. This is where we regularly watched a seal swimming past the kitchen window. We also had a fright, while swimming in the loch, at seeing the fin of a shark cleaving its way towards us. Luckily, it turned out to be a harmless basking shark. So these two incidents went into the book.

Then my American publisher asked me to New York and to a conference in Las Vegas. So these three places - France, Scotland and Las Vegas - were where Father Christmas went for his summer holiday. When he arrives home, he cries: "Hooray! Home again!"

After the lunacy of Las Vegas, I felt exactly the same.


(vi)
blooming xmas shopping! blooming loud fashion (dream) buys! -- i feel like a cartoon from briggs' lovely (and real) world...

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