"How to Shake Hands"

David Rees on how to make a how-to show:

Here’s the thing: making a TV show is a great excuse to do things you always wanted to do and never have for whatever time or logistical reasons. We did an episode on how to climb a tree because basically, when I was growing up in North Carolina, there was a huge magnolia tree in the front yard and my parents wouldn’t let me climb it and I always wanted to climb it. I thought, “If I have to climb it as part of a TV show, my parents will have to support that.” Not only did I get to climb that tree, but I also got to go to the Redwood Forest in California, and I had always wanted to go and see these 3,000 year-old Redwoods, which was incredible. Or for “How To Shake Hands,” we got access to cadaver specimens of arms and hands. That was actually really profound because they had cut open the arm and tied strings to all the ligaments so when you pulled the string, you could watch the finger bend over and flex into the palm of the hand. That was obviously very heavy for a lot of reasons.

In it

Did I ever link to this at the time? Anyway, some thoughts on immersion - in novels, in games, in water - following the publication of The Magic Circle.

Wiggish

Good article at the FT about cinematic hair (site registration required):

Warn was also a hair designer on The Great Gatsby, a follicular showcase featuring 300 extras – only 100 of whom sported their own hair. “Director Baz Luhrmann is very pro-hair, he loves it and wanted the styling to be extreme,” says Warn. “But, because he was shooting in 3D and HD, we had to be really careful about stray hairs, so it was a like a military procedure to keep each hair in place.”

Wax off

The ten best personal trainers in film and television.

Saturday update

I was grumpy this morning when my exercise plans were thwarted, but have just had a very productive hour and a half session of brainstorming (it is a ridiculous word, but descriptive) and writing bits of new draft at the library.  A lot of work to be done between now and Thursday, but I think it will work.

Miscellaneous light reading: Christa Faust's highly enjoyable Supernatural tie-in novel, Coyote's Kiss.  I wonder how much this sort of work pays?  Really I have no room for it in my life, but I would love to write a Fringe tie-in.  I guess that is why people write fanfic, for free...

In other television-related news, I continue to spend an inordinate number of hours watching House (currently near end of Season 7).  I am not sure why it's so addictive, but I'm reminded of how when I first read Master and Commander, I then couldn't rest until I had read all of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Aubrey and Maturin (I would walk in to Cross-Campus Library in New Haven and check out another four or five and race home to devour and return - I think I read all twenty over the course of about five days, which is slightly grotesque).  The Aubrey-Maturin friendship is built on the same sort of chassis as the House-Wilson relationship, even if the latter is more obviously Holmesian.

Period television

Jenny Diski has a great rant at the LRB against Downton Abbey and its ilk. 

(Ed. Previous link went only to Columbia gate: this one should work for all.)

Took the plunge

and ordered tickets for Cycle 3 of the Ring Cycle at the Met - found a good friend who would do it with me, that was the clincher.  Who knows when I will have the chance again?  In a best-case scenario, it is a truly magical and transporting experience; in the worst-case scenario, parts of it are somewhat boring and it adds an onerous number of hours to a busy week, but I think there is no huge downside, it will be worthwhile whether or not I absolutely love it.

(Have uncharacteristically watched some hours of television this weekend - usually I only watch seasons of television on DVD with B. in Cayman, but we were very near the end of the third season of Fringe when we parted ways at the end of the Thanksgiving odyssey, it is a program which is very perfectly suited to my tastes, and my new laptop makes it very easy to watch videos from Amazon anywhere in my apartment - I watched the last three episodes of season 3 and then, regrettably, the first seven of season 4, which is as far as it now goes - am in horrible desiring limbo now of wanting all the rest of the season in one fell swoop, when really it will only be doled out WEEK BY UNREASONABLE WEEK over the rest of this year.  Anybody who has secret early access, tell me and get me in on it too!  Though I do observe, as always with this series, that they play overly fast and loose with the alternate universes: I feel that though high-quality television does a good job creating investment in characters over a season and its successors, the provision of too many alternates in this sort of a plot erodes general belief in and concern with the characters, to a sometimes problematic degree.)

APPROVED

John Jeremiah Sullivan on what it's like to live in a house where a TV show is filmed.

Hello goodbye

At the LRB, Peter Pomerantsev on other things that happened at Moscow Domededovo Airport.

Moby Ovary

Phil Nugent's Screengrab obituary for Patrick McGoohan, 1928-2009.

Also, via Torie Atkinson, a song that I know well because of a great mix tape made for me in the late 80s or early 90s by my dear friend Paul: "I Helped Patrick McGoohan Escape"!

Light reading round-up

I feel that I have hardly read anything recently, but whenever I say that, someone objects that this is not really the case!

I had a good Caymanian interlude in June which featured a certain amount of work but also a number of frivolous pleasures, including more movies and TV episodes than I usually seem to consume in regular life: The Incredible Hulk (enjoyable at the time, but largely unmemorable--Liv Tyler is very beautiful, though, and I wish that I too could get an accurate heart-rate monitor that operated without a chest strap!); Wall-E (very charming); Season 3 of The Wire (exactly to my taste); miscellaneous Disney Channel shows (hmmm, not sure what to say about these; mildly culturally illuminating?!?).

It is an essential part of holidaying that one should be able to pluck books from the shelf that are not quite what one would read in regular life, either, but next-universe-over sort-of-exactly-what-I-like-to-read-but-not: Tyler Cowen's Discover Your Inner Economist (perfect for reading during meals--at home I have the New Yorker for this, but when I'm on the road I need a highly engaging non-fiction book, novels are not good because it is not appealing to put them down when I'm done eating, I am more likely to greedily finish them all at once!); Raymond Khoury's The Last Templar (very good opening scene involving Knights Templar on horseback invading a gala affair at the Met and chopping someone's head off, but there is a reason I do not read books of this ilk more often); Carl Hiaasen's Strip Tease.

This last was very good indeed, I thought; Hiaasen has a gift I associate especially with Terry Pratchett, of writing extremely funny satire in which the characters are also quite engaging. I do not know why I had the impression that I did not like Hiaasen's books, I think that in point of fact I had not read any of them--I am not a great Elmore Leonard fan, perhaps I had mixed the two up?

And since I've been home, amidst the continued stream of work-related books touching upon cycling, reindeer and nuclear physics, some rather delightful volumes I have been looking forward to for some time: the altogether brilliant Naomi Novik's latest installment in the Temeraire series, Victory of Eagles (possibly my favorite of all since the first volume, but you cannot do better than to order the box set of the first three volumes and start at the beginning if you have not read these books already: Naomi really is a genius of light reading!); and Kathrine Switzer's Marathon Woman: Running the Race to Revolutionize Women's Sports (very gripping in every respect, and indispensable in its account of the rise of women's amateur and professional sports in the United States and worldwide).

But the real highlight, light-reading-wise, of these past weeks was a brief but to me rather meaningful encounter with one of my great literary heroes! I am not a great one for book-signings, but when I saw the announcement in the very good bookstore in Grand Cayman for a signing that would take place the following Saturday evening, I knew I had to go! Because it was Dick Francis signing his latest novel Dead Heat (co-authored with son Felix)...

Here's a link to the absurdly copious collection of Dick-Francis-related posts I've written here over the years; if you click through to this one and scroll down onto item #6 on the list, you will have a hint of the special nature of the place this writer holds in my affections, but it is really beyond rational explanation why I love his books so much! My beloved English grandmother was very fond of 'em too, she and my mother and I have all read them about fifty million times! (And in fact I had already read this one, though I was very happy to read it again; and when I finished with the advance review copy which a friend kindly gave me, I passed it onto my mother, because aside from the fact that I knew she would be able to while away a few hours with it quite happily, I was laughing to myself at the fact that she and the book's chief love interest are both English viola players named Caroline! Though I am thinking my mother would not be likely to utter any of the sentiments about music expressed by the love interest!)