additions to last posting and those horrid spelling mistakes corected!
Hippy Holidays!



Outrage as ambulance gets parking fine - Paramedic gets parking ticket for picking up medical supplies.
20th anniversary of Clapham rail disaster but are trains any safer today?
Ian Hislop Goes off the Rails delves into the Beeching Report of 1963, which led to the closure of a third of the nation's railway lines and stations.
Beeching's Tracks
Orangutans learn to trade favours
And energy conscious in France are switching off neon lights.

Lana Vandenberghe saw files in her job at the Independent Police Complaints Commission that made her feel that the facts of the Jean Charles de Menezes were being misrepresented to the public. Her decision to take a stand and leak the story to the press would change the course of the investigation and contribute to the pressure on Sir Ian Blair to resign, but it would have huge personal consequences for her.

Ian McKellen's King Lear to ring in the Christmas cheer for Channel 4.
Also available on Metrodome DVD with interview extras.
Sir Laurence Olivier as Lear and much more Shakespeare on More 4: Othello, Macbeth and Richard III.
Casa Verdi in Milan was founded by Giuseppe Verdi as a home for retired singers and musicians from the Italian opera. Although the royalties from Verdi's work ran out some years ago, the home carries on, with Swiss director Daniel Schmid making a great film to seek out on DVD Tosca's Kiss (Il Bacio di Tosca -1984).

And Mandy Patinkin who featured recently in the indie film Choking Man sings from the musicals in January. I remember him many moons ago in Sondheim's Sunday on the Park with George on Broadway. Children Will Listen.
And a repeat of Front Row 's interview with the great Elaine Stritch.

[Saturday December 27, 2008]

Mandy Patinkin is probably best known to the world through his swashbuckling in genre-bending The Princess Bride (1987). The extras on this 2-disc The Special Edition out on Lionsgate DVD (Region 2) date back to MGM’s 2001 re-release (the film only really became a classic hit after its initial VHS release) – separate audio commentaries by director Rob (This is Spinal Tap) Reiner and the book’s author and screenwriter William Goldman, and a rather thin 45 minutes of extras on Disc 2. The uninitiated must buy (or at least rent) this joyous film. Robin Wright Penn (then un Penn’d and 19 years old) says it’s the only film that doesn’t lose her childrens’ interest after 10 minutes. The struggles to make a film (shot almost entirely in England) of the book (1973) are all detailed in the commentaries though Goldman almost looses you as a listener as he becomes totally engrossed in a film he hasn’t seen for 15 years: “I have to watch this, I’m sorry...I never watch what I write [nor] read what I write...Nobody has the least idea of what is going to work [in the movie business]...a total crapshoot.” Every performance is a gem including Brit comics the legend Peter Cook (guess which Rabbi in Chicago on whom Goldman based the reverend’s character?) and Mel Smith. Then there’s Wallace Shawn and the comic genius of Billy Crystal who reminisces on the wrestler Andre the Giant (Andre Roussimoff who dies in 1993 aged 47): “he said to me he loved walking with the animals [in the woods of his farm] because they don’t look twice at you.” The same reason he loved making the film. It was special for Patinkin too as he revenged the films’ 6-fingered villain: “I killed the cancer that killed my father; for a moment he was alive and my fairytale came true.”
Flicker Alley in the States has issued a DVD set Douglas Fairbanks: A Modern Musketeer
Griffith Masterworks 2 out on Kino DVD in the States

Eartha Kitt has just died.
The Independent obit

I saw her perform in very intimate surroundings 8 years ago in New York and I’m sure those lucky and savvy enough to see her performances in London last summer were equally mesmerised by this C20th legend. Remember her rendition of Toujours gai from the musical of Archy and Mehitabel?
And British playwright Harold Pinter also died of cancer at Christmas. Front Row special on Dec 26.

To cheer our post-Christmas blues is The Rutles All You Need is Cash: 30th Anniversary Edition – a 1978 Beatles mockumentary written by Eric (Spamalot) Idle born long before Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap. Fantastic extras as always from Second Sight including an audio commentary from Idle, whose character opines The Rutles musical genius sitting à côté de swimming pool in Los Angeles: “elevated them from essentially Alpha exponents of in essence merely Beta potential harmonic material into the prime cultural exponents of Aeolian cadenza cosmic stanza form.” Also learn from Idle’s commentary why God must have been a Beatles fan! Fun Neil Innes songs (Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band), fun cameos (Paul Simon, Mick Jagger, a very young Bill Murray, John Belushi), fun, fun, fun.
If you liked that film try The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970, DVD) with Peter Cook.
BBC Radio 4’s The Last Word (Dec 19)– folk-blues guitarist Davey Graham obit

Miró, Calder, Giacometti, Braque: Aimé Maeght and His Artists at the Royal Academy will also bring post Christmas joie de vivre if not cheer.
Isabelle Maeght co-runs the Fondation Maeght, the renowned art collection set up in the south of France by her grandfather, Aimé, during the 1960s.

Or if you’re anti-boyband badboy smoke in some of GSK round the back of the Academy. William Burroughs and much much more. Respectable fathers can browse the bookshop and let their hair down into their wallet and the ‘radical’ CD’s of Tom Waits and the likes. Definitely for the Brits that rather not be cheered up. A cultural panoply of Brit democratic musical culture showed in a repeat of BBC 3’s The Most Annoying Pop Songs We Love to Hate (100 of them on Christmas Eve). But the latest Wallace and Gromit – A Matter of Loaf and Death screened BBC2 Christmas evening did get 14 million viewers – more than even the soap EastEnders or Dr. Who. So there’s hope for the world after all I guess.
Creating space for contemporary art (Financial Times)