Tag: dvd

MEDITATION 76

As I sit beside my candle to begin this meditation, I am looking in the corner opposite across my lounge. This is where my cd’s are housed on shelves that are virtually full now, almost from ceiling to floor. This is my prized classical music library and there are also several shelves of film music and musicals as well. I must also mention some more cd’s neatly stacked on or below my coffee table. Beside me to my left are more shelves of DVD’s and Blu-ray’s. Behind me are my bookshelves which are also full. I appear to be quite a collector. I hasten to add that there is still space to get to the front door in case of fire! I haven’t completely submerged myself in culture yet.

However I take comfort in the fact that they have been collected over a long period of time. I have been collecting my cd’s, for example, over the last three decades, and before that I collected LP’s since being a teenager. I replaced my favourite LP’s with the cd versions in the early 90’s. Some, as with my books and movies, were gifts or bought at reduced price in a sale. Some of my music was a given to me by my old friend Brian, who passed away ten years ago. Some I purchased on my many trips to Budapest, where cd’s were cheaper than here. When I was running the Drama tours, after a week of organising and directing, I would always visit my favourite classical music stores in a moment of spare time and treat myself to an album – or two. I would do the same when I was there on holiday of course. One of the stores even gave me a discount card.

I also take comfort from a remark by my Hungarian friend, Mariann, when she visited my house quite a while ago. She looked at my bookshelves and said, ‘Books make a home.’

You may be thinking that all these books and music and movies must have been a solace to me during the pandemic or at least helped to get me through it. The answer is yes and no. My retirement finally began as the pandemic started and part of my retirement plan was to absorb myself in my reading and music and movies, now that I would have time to do so. But, as with all of us, the lockdowns left me too unsettled at times to enjoy them. I did purchase more cd’s though, some of which I still haven’t played. Then I discovered that I now had three versions of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, as a result! I forgot to check I already had two – or did I? I think it was comfort-buying more than anything. A buffer again the storm. I am sure I will play them eventually.

Recently I have been led to reflect on why we collect things. Yes we may have a particular interest or hobby but what drives us on to collect more. Is it the innate need to possess within us or the primitive hunter/gatherer syndrome? Is it curiosity – I must hear that or see that? Is it the novelty of the new – a new artist on the block – I must hear or see him or her? Is it compulsion or obsession? The bottom line is: do we ever ask ourselves: Do I really need that?

Perhaps creating a collection is a relaxation from a stressful professional job, like my purchasing the odd cd or two in Budapest on my Drama tours. My Hungarian friend Adam is a high powered lawyer in Budapest and has a large collection of Star Wars figures and memorabilia going back to his childhood for instance. He also collects figures from TV series from his childhood. Perhaps he is harking back to his childhood when his life was less stressful, when he wasn’t so high profile. I must ask him. He also collects 1990s Honda sports cars – not models but the real thing! He currently has four, I believe, or

it it five? He scours the Internet for spare parts. I remember bringing a pair of head lamps in my luggage for him on a visit a few year ago! He has driven me around Hungary in one of them. Sitting in it, I imagined I was in some 1990’s American cop show. Although the cars are quite low to the ground and I am no longer agile enough (if ever!) to quickly get out and shout ‘Freeze!’

Another example of this is from many years ago when I was a student in Oxford. A high powered professor of Medicine at my college would occasionally invite small groups of his students for dinner and to see his elaborate train set which he kept set up in the loft. Digital collecting is so very easy isn’t it? Just a click then it is on its way. But not as satisfying or relaxing as spending time browsing in a shop. My dear friend Alan tells me he likes to listen to music while doing the family ironing. Currently he has collected 2,500 songs on Spotify and has 76 albums saved digitally too. He must have a lot of ironing to do! I should not jest as I have four complete Wagner Ring cycles and four complete versions of the nine Beethoven symphonies on disc! And all the rest. As I look at my music collection I realise that some discs reflect earlier enthusiasms which I no longer have. So perhaps I need to decide which I really want to keep and give away the rest as my dear late friend Brian did.

But where is the enjoyment – purely in possession? Sometimes I look around my shelves and think when will I have the time to absorb all this, to really enjoy it. I think back to my childhood and youth, when I would use my birthday or pocket money to buy a book and go home and immediately curl up in a chair and begin to read it. Or I would buy a record and take it home and play it over and over again and really absorb and enjoy the music. I had so few books or albums then I suppose. The ones I had were special. The connection between purchase and enjoyment was immediate then. I also used the local library to borrow books and music too, even when I moved to London and my little bedsit in Brixton. Borrowing rather than buying? Dear me! But I lived with more modest means then.

As I look around the lounge again I realise that, when you include my TV and the cable box, this little room is quite an entertainment centre. I am now a man of riches and treasures too: well, treasures to me. It appears I am wealthy man. It is good to look around our rooms with fresh eyes and take in our possessions. To realise just how wealthy we are compared with many others – and some of those others may live not very far from us. So we should be grateful for what we have and share our treasures with others if possible. And perhaps try to pay no attention to that little insidious voice encouraging us to purchase more and take that itching finger away from our phone or laptop where Amazon and other sites pedal their wares.

Some of these books and cd’s and movies are like old friends to me. Some are barely new acquaintances as I have hardly played them or read them, if at all. Some too, like true friends, have helped see me through difficult times.

But they are not really friends. Real friends cannot be bought, let alone possessed. Generally we only acquire real friends by accident, not by intention, where we find ourselves at different times on life’s journey. We shouldn’t pick them up and put them down again either like a cd or a book, let alone leave them to gather dust on the shelf. Friendships have to be kept in good repair. They are our true treasures, our true wealth.

Marcus advises us: ‘Whenever you want to cheer yourself up, think of the qualities of your fellows’, for which we could read ‘friends.’ So, instead of playing or streaming that movie or music or interminable Netflix series, or clicking on Amazon to buy something new, we could cheer ourselves up by reflecting on our friends and be thankful for them. And then give them a call.

Ave atque Vale – until the next blog.

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Neilus Aurelius

As I sit here writing beside my candle, winter is upon us at last. Blizzards and snow have slowed down the country or so it appears from the news on the television. Here, where I write, in the South West London area, what snow there was has turned to miserable freezing rain. In these wintery times, candlelight is cheering and comforting as is, of course, a blazing fire in the hearth. Something we miss with central heating!

It must have been a comfort to Marcus as the wind howled over the Danube plain outside his tent. A comfort and an inspiration: as fire-gazing can lead to internal reflection and even deeper, to meditation. The fire must have been a fixed point to help him focus on the centre of his consciousness in the whirlwind of his thoughts. I am probably wrong: I am imagining that Marcus’ mind was similar to my own! From his writings, I have a sense that there was a great stillness in Marcus. I doubt he got as frazzled as I do! But then as he was a Roman emperor with absolute power it was easy for him to radiate stillness. Or is that the image he presents to us in his ‘Meditations’? Is it what he wants us to imagine he is like? And his ‘Meditations’ are, after all, the compositions of a mind in repose.

When I was a child in the North East, I used to love gazing at the fire in my nan’s back kitchen. There was a huge black cast iron fire guard in front of it, usually festooned with her stockings, hung out to dry. An Alan Bennett scene! I paid no attention to her hosiery hanging there, but concentrated on the heart of the fire, watching the wood burning to grey ashes in the bed of white and orange flames and listening to the crackling and sputtering in the grate. Looking at the flames would lead me to my first stirrings of inner reflection. I would think of ideas for little plays I might write or poems.

I did a lot of writing then. I would coerce my school mates and friends in the street to be in my little plays. We’d act them out in the road. There were very few cars then, you see. One of my friends in the street – Michael – took a play of mine and passed it off as his own at his own school.

I remember I would arduously write out the parts by hand, like a little monk. And now, what seems like thousands of years later, in my retirement I am writing again and I am still a little monk. But in between, I have been writing plays for my school too, and coercing my students to take part instead. Except they haven’t needed much coercing because they enjoy it and because it might involve a week on tour in Budapest.

I’ve been thinking about my childhood in the last few weeks a lot. I have just seen the new film ‘Stan and Ollie’ about Laurel and Hardy, the great movie comics. They were part of my childhood. Their short comedy films were on BBC TV every Saturday teatime after the football results and before ‘Doctor Who’. I was ten or eleven years old when the first one was shown. It was ‘The Music Box’: Stan and Ollie trying to get that upright piano in a wooden crate up all those flights of steps. I vividly remember watching it in my nan’s back kitchen, which was where she had the television. I was leaning over the kitchen table with an iced bun in my hand entranced by their comic antics while the fire cackled in the background.The films were in black and white but what did that matter? Television was in black and white then too!

Of course those little comic gems have been repeated on TV so many times since – but not so much now, which is a great shame. And now they are on blue ray and DVD and I am

sure you can stream them. Through these little films (which were originally fillers on a cinema programme) and a handful of feature films, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy very quickly became international movie stars and held in great affection by a worldwide audience to the extent that they are now cinema icons. It is amazing to think that their films are 80 years old in the main (and the silent ones 90 years old) yet there is still such a strong interest in them and affection for them that recently a movie about their lives has been made.

In the film, Steve Coogan (Stan) and John C. Reilly (Ollie) are very adept at adapting the duo’s movie mannerisms to situations off camera and off stage in real life. The story deals with their final UK tour in the 50’s which was initially not as big a success as their tour a decade earlier. Their working relationship is under strain not least because Ollie’s health is in decline and because the offers are no longer coming. But the working relationship survives – because they are great friends. The friendship endures. And that is what shines through the slapstick mayhem in their films – there is an affectionate bond between them.

Their humour is gentle and warm. Yes humour has changed a great deal since they were in front on the cameras – it is more cynical, sarcastic, sexual and foul mouthed – even in family movies – and slapstick is not so funny to general audiences now. I’ve played some of their movies to my pupils -the younger ones love it, but the older ones don’t find it so funny. But when Stan and Ollie were working in the 20’s and 30’s,there were caustic, cynical and sexy sophisticated comedies too.

I think part of their enduring appeal is their screen personas, which was so very different from their off-camera personalities. Though Ollie was the dominant personality of the two

in the movies, in real life it was Stan who wrote the gags, directed and produced (in this he was like his contemporary Charlie Chaplin). He had already appeared in silent movies as a solo star. Ollie was a jobbing actor who generally went along with whatever Stan had devised.

Stan had that rare quality of being able to portray pure innocence on screen and not make it sentimental or something to be jeered at. It was a childlike innocence – Chaplin was more artful (in some ways like the Artful Dodger from his favourite book ‘Oliver Twist’). Stan may be slow-witted (and gets them both into high water as a result) but it is part of his charm. We don’t deride him for it, but laugh with him.

Ollie is all politeness, Southern gentility and charm. He is always eager to help others in the films. Despite his large frame, there is a grace about his movement at times, as there in Stan’s movement too, evident in their famous dance in ‘Way Out West’. He is a Southern gentleman (making use of his roots in Georgia) or tries to be in the most ridiculous of situations.

At the root of the duo’s appeal is there inherent goodness. They are good people to be with – as a German comedian commented in a TV documentary I recently saw.

Of course it was television in the main that prolonged their longevity with the public. Though their popularity was on the wain in the mid-1950’s, when their movies appeared on TV (first in the U.S.A and later in our own and other countries) they were given a new lease of life. And years later, after endless repeats the movies were issued on video and DVD and colourised and digitally restored. Modern technology has resurrected them. Yes it’s a kind of resurrection.

Of course, without the modern technology of the time, the development of the moving picture, Stan and Ollie would never have got together at all. I ask myself what would have happened to them instead. Before becoming besotted with the movies and working in cinemas around 1913, Hardy was a singer and had a cabaret and vaudeville act. Without the movies, he may have graduated to being a actor in plays and musicals around the U.S. I guess and maybe he would have got to Broadway. Laurel was a music hall comedian, in Fred Karno’s comic troupe (along with Charlie Chaplin). That may have been how he would have carried on, along with Charlie, playing the music hall and later variety circuits. If he survived World War One.

But for technology, they would never have got together and we would never have known them decades later.

Ave atque Vale until the next blog.

If you are enjoying my blog, and have not already done so, please sign up below to receive notification of each new blog by e mail. Just add your e mail to ‘Follow’.

And please do pass on the blog address to others who may be interested. I would also value any feedback on nzolad53@gmail.com or my Facebook page or Twitter.

Many thanks

Neilus Aurelius

 

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