Martin Scorsese, Classical Music, Police, Guns , Robert Parker

An Interview With Martin Scorsese

Rand Richards Cooper | Commonweal | 15th December 2016

How films get made. In this case, Scorsese’s long-awaited Silence, based on Shusaku Endo’s novel about the persecution of Christians in 17C Japan. Scorsese first read the book while flying to Japan for a cameo in a Kurosawa film. Then a fan jogged his elbow. “I was in France for Aviator. Chirac wanted to meet us and say hello. He was the president at the time. And his wife was something of a Chinese and Japanese scholar. Actually, a lot of Japanese literature I read came through her giving me books” (8,800 words)

The Music Of The Future

Roger Scruton | Future Symphony | 14th December 2016

Until Schoenberg, modernism in classical music was a matter of degree. Wagner inflected and advanced tradition but did not break with it; likewise Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky. But from Schoenberg on — and perhaps for this we should blame Adorno — tradition was abandoned, despised. “There is no guarantee that a new work of music will be recognized as such by the educated musical ear, or that it will be possible to hear it as an addition to the great tradition of symphonic sound” (5,640 words)

Police Memoirs

Duncan Campbell | Guardian | 16th December 2016

As a youth you liked taking drugs, you designed your own knuckledusters, you threatened to knife your dad, you overturned a car in a gang fight. What do you choose as a career, if not crime? You choose the Police, of course. The cv is that of Graham Satchwell, a highly distinguished police officer and now author of An Inspector Recalls, one of “a batch of increasingly frank police memoirs” offering “an invaluable prism through which we can see how and by whom our laws are enforced” (2,300 words)

Guns And Hollywood: Locked And Loaded

Gary Baum & Scott Johnson | Hollywood Reporter | 19th December 2016

The best way to sell a weapon is to place it in a Hollywood blockbuster, gun makers say. The clash of values between gun makers and Hollywood liberals leads to a “sometimes uneasy partnership”; but the two camps, ostensibly “mortal enemies”, still manage a “lucrative, symbiotic relationship”. For proof, look at the “scores of movie stars”, including “prominent gun-control advocates such as Matt Damon and Liam Neeson”, who have “made fortunes wielding guns onscreen” (5,300 words)

Hedonistic Fruit Bombs

Steven Shapin | London Review Of Books | 3rd February 2005

On Robert Parker, claret, and wine connoisseurship. “Compared to the language pertaining to vision, we do not possess a rich vocabulary for describing tastes and smells. If we insist that wine descriptions be strictly and unambiguously referential, we won’t be able to say much at all. Parker evidently thinks there has been too much bullshit in wine writing. On the whole he avoids the poetry, along with much of the bullshit, and strives for as much descriptive reference as the language allows” (4,600 words)

Video of the day: Studio Ghibli In Real Life

What to expect:

Elements from Hayao Miyazaki’s animation studio beautifully incorporated into Japanese landscape (3’17”)

Thought for the day

My capacity for having a good time exists. It surfaces, however, on odd occasions
Renata Adler