the shack and the boosh

Yes folks, a unique experience is offered to you this morning: nowhere else in the blogosphere are these two cultural artifacts linked.

The Shack – wordy and slightly hammy from the literary perspective, risky in terms of its theological presentations, but compelling so far (I’m up to page 89).

The Boosh – wordy and hammy, though not, perhaps, by sitcom standards; alas very hit and miss in terms of quality (‘when she was good she was…’)

The link: funk, of course. God the Father listens to funk in the log cabin while cooking, and Julian Barratt's character, Howard Moon, waxes lyrical about the genre and its relationship to jazz in the two best episodes of the series, 'Electro' and 'Hitcher'. Laugh-out-loud best, playing (ho ho) on everyman’s hesitations about jazz and its afficionados (which I share, despite wanting to get into “the most significant art form of the twentieth century” [Howard Moon]).

a big smile

and another, and another, and then a smirk, and then a chuckle and then some rocking, shaking, shrieking and nearly falling on the floor. And then a desire to share the experience with others.

No, it's not a seventeenth century ecstatic cult, nor is it the Toronto Blessing, it's me laughing.

And the the latest prompts have been:

purgatorio

emergent see posters satirising the emerging church

the journalistic scrapings of Charlie Brooker, TV pundit (and now general columnist) for the Guardian. He is SO cutting and SO witty about the rubbish spewed out by the box that I should keep a copy of his writings nearby for whenever I feel tempted to watch some or feel slightly sad that we don't own one.

more musical echoes

Dvorak, Piano Quartet No. 2 in E flat, Op. 87.

Listen to the opening (main) theme of the first movement. Then watch the credits of Russ Abbott, cheesy BBC sketch show from the late 80s. Don't know who wrote the music to that, but methinks they liked the Bohemian maestro...

Info about The Russ Abbott Show is hard to come by on a cursory glance, though Russ is still hard at work, but I'm sure you remember it if your British and watched any TV during the 80s. Basildon Bond? Bella Emberg? Several other things best consigned to cringeworthy history!?

Episode 11

Ex-President Logan: “I get regular intelligence updates, and I still have my sources” [soft background neighing].

Smart bit of cheeky sound effect.

And of course, regular doses of
We don’t have a choice…
Do everything you can…
How long? Within the hour...

cheeky scriptwriters?

24, season 6: President Wayne Palmer, curiously young and lacking in charisma, commenting on the least plausible development so far (up to episode 5), remarks

It’s a desperate measure, but it’s a measure of our desperation

which is painfully akin to The Sphinx’s manner of speaking in the ingenious and bathetic spoof, Mystery Men, starring William H. Macy, Ben Stiller et al about a group of dysfunctional superheroes. [Why is this film not more popular!?] The Sphinx’s best saw is of course, If you learn to balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack, though it turns out that he can split guns in half with his mind as well.

Yes, we have caved in again and are watching 24 before the Christmas holidays…

The Documents in the Case

A rare thing for me these ancient and decrepit days, I stayed up very late last night (someone else happily slept next to me despite the light) reading Dorothy Sayers' The Documents in the Case, an early whodunnit from the pen of (in my opinion) the best of the golden age crime novelists. It had been on the 'to read' shelf (which is about 5 ft long) for several years but I picked it up yesterday after enjoying an 80s BBC adaptation of another Sayers, Have his Carcase, starring Edward Petherbridge. (If anyone reading this blog is old enough to remember these dramas, you'll know that Petherbridge might have been born to play Lord Peter Wimsey, and the only regret was that the BBC asked him to play the part when he about 20 years too old for it, great lighting notwithstanding!)

This early Sayers (written in conjunction with Robert Eustace, a doctor who assisted various early 20th crime novelists) is surprisingly fun, despite the absence of Lord Peter. Her observations of middle class London life, and the explorations of various popular scientific and philosophical ideas that arise in the course of conversations are neat, winsome, pointed and addictive. The characters are all complex, and even when the murder is solved, the various, often contradictory, narrative perspectives (the novel is a collection of letters) continue to play in the reader's mind.

The explorations of gender mores and the references to endochrine secretions caught my eye, as I'm delving into that at the moment for the Jubilee Centre (and in some ways, there's not much more to say than what Sayers did...). Plenty of religious imagery and ideas to keep the idle mind active. The word 'decoct' (like concoct, only you get what you want by breaking down something else, not by putting it together) was a treat, and took me back to happy undergraduate days at Cambridge making up silly words with Nick and Paul over green tea, in a rather neo-Edwardian fashion. (You can tell I like this stuff, can't you. I sometimes wonder whether I wouldn't have done a bit better as English gent in the 20s, or even a whimsical Lord...)

The engineers in the story came across as slightly repressed characters - bad empathizers, in the language of Simon Baron-Cohen (yes, he is related to Ali G) - and one of them was hopelessly uncultured. I did think that was rather unfair, given that of the engineers I know, one is an international concert pianist, another writes songs, another wears cravats...