Hope. Despair. Vodka.

Although I was born in Hammersmith, I haven't knowingly returned since we left London for the Shire, over 20 years ago. Ascending from the Tube this evening, then, into the generic mall attached to Hammersmith Station, I didn't exactly feel like I've been missing out for all these years.

I probably wouldn't have gone to see Three Sisters at the Lyric Hammersmith at all if I hadn't won free tickets courtesy of Time Out London. Each week, Time Out's "what's on" mailing has at least one competition to win tickets to see a play, theatre or other piece of culcha. As it only takes a couple of clicks, I usually enter every time something even vaguely interesting or otherwise enriching shows up. This week was the first time I won.

I didn't remember the play well, although I did play Irina aeons ago as part of a speech and drama exam; I tend to confuse parts with other Chekhov plays, as well as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, et al., though. I hadn't heard of most of the cast, either, apart from Romola Garai, whom I saw a few months ago at the BFI. Still, I was keen to clear some of the confusion and, anyway, free tickets are free tickets. We had pretty good seats too — we were towards the back of stalls but in the middle of the row so there was a good view.

When we went in, I thought at first that they were doing some sound checks (the play goes on general release the week after next so I assume various preview and press screenings are taking place until then) — there was loud music playing with the occasional even louder sound effect, like a clock ticking, a plate smashing or Chekhov's gun going off. It turned out that this was part of the performance and, indeed, the music continued at the end of each act, during the interval and after the bows.

The music itself was a loop of 30-second samples of a range of songs from The Smiths' Please, Please, Please... to Duffy's Distant Dreamer and Feel Like Making Love by the Bad Touch — quite an eclectic and fun mash-up, I thought.

The use of sound proved to be important throughout the performance. There were mics set up at various points across the stage and sometimes characters would whisper into them so that the whispering was conveyed but the audience could hear. Minstrels stroll onto stage playing electric guitars, providing the background music to one scene, while a piano is placed in the middle of the living room at the Prozorova house, although as it is only ever played off-screen, Chekhov might argue that it is unnecessary. 

The characters' accents vary greatly as well, although no Slavic accents feature — Romola Garai's Masha is terribly RP, while Irina has a wonderful Irish brogue. Geordies and Northerners also make appearances and when Kulygin mocks one of his pupils for the pupil's Latin fail, he adopts a thick Brummie accent.

This theatre company, Filter, is apparently famous for their use of sound in their productions and it was certainly very striking, if a little distracting at times — especially when you're busy trying to remember which character is which (no mean feat when each person is called at least two different names and when you haven't forked out £3 for a programme). Garai was good as Masha but I was most entertained by Irina (Claire Dunne) and the Baron (Jonathan Broadbent), who had un certain air de Bill Nighy about him — maybe it was just the hair and the glasses.

There were still a few empty seats when the play began and a few more people left during the interval (including, thankfully, the woman sitting next to me, who had spent the first half drumming her fingers on her programme, sighing and falling asleep) but those who stayed were rewarded with a more entertaining second half — or perhaps the audience were just more awake. Well worth the trip way out west, in my opinion, anyway.

State of Delay

For several months, I've had three films from my to-watch list ready at home for me to watch them: The Great Escape, The Graduate and A Bout de Souffle. Somehow, though, I've never quite got round to watching any of them and not through lack of time, either, although the lack of subtitles on the latter did put me off somewhat because although I don't need subtitles when watching a French film, I would sometimes prefer to have them, especially when tired and the films in question are part of the Nouvelle Vague.

On the other hand, I've had the DVDs for the TV series State of Play for about two weeks and I've now watched three of the six episodes. In fact, I watched all three this evening. For some reason, my cognitively biased brain finds it easier to watch three one-hour episodes of a TV series than to watch a three-hour film or even, in the case of The Graduate and À Bout de Souffle, a film that clocks in at well under two hours.

Of course, if I start watching a film I like to watch it in one go, without interruptions, whereas TV series are conveniently broken down into easily digestible, one-hour chunks (in the UK, at least), and can legitimately be interrupted or put on hiatus at the end of an episode. I only planned to watch one episode of State of Play tonight but it was so good that I ended up watching three, telling myself at the end of each episode that I'd just watch the intro to the next one — oh, OK, just the first half; oh well, I might as well watch the rest of the episode now. 

I only stopped after three because the other episodes were on the second DVD and the interruption was enough for me to shut down the DVD-watching computer. Even so, it's funny that my brain finds a one-hour time slot an acceptable use of time in a limited evening and will even end up using three hours, but won't commit in advance to the use of 90 minutes to watch a film.

I enjoyed last year's movie version of State of Play, even if it seemed to get hijacked by the bloggers vs journalists debate in places to the detriment of the plot as a whole, in part because I like Rachel McAdams and, against my better judgement, Russell Crowe. Naturally, my earlier prediction came true:

I will, of course, now have to acquire the original TV show so that I can honestly tear the film to bits and say how it has been butchered in its transition from a six-hour TV series into a two-hour film but I do like a good thriller and this was indeed a good thriller.

A Chilly Day in Soho — Polpo Review

Regent's Park was very pretty in the snow – even the London mosque had a white frosting on top — and although the outside temperature was about minus five, after about 15 minutes of running, I began to warm up. we proceeded to Milkbar for a most excellent espresso. After some further wandering, we had a great macchiato and a quick sandwich at the cosy Fernandez and Wells on Beak Street. A successful coffee day, by all accounts!

I've been meaning to go to Polpo since it opened towards the end of last year. It has been touted as a stylish but reasonably priced, tapas-style Italian restaurant with assorted regional specialities. The restaurant was heaving at 8.30 (and even when we left, three hours later) and we had to wait 30 minutes for a table but it was worth it.

I'm no tapas expert and it was hard to know how much food we should order but the waitress assured me we had got it about right. In the past, tapas restaurants would never have worked for me — often, it's hard enough for me to find one thing I like on a menu, let alone several. Polpo had plenty of tasty dishes though. 

We ordered a pizzetta biancha (small and very thin pizza base with mozzarella and onion) and a couple of the chicheti to start (we each tried a potato and parmesan croquette and the prosciutto and buffalo mozzarella on a toasted bread base), and then ordered two meat dishes (a bresaola and rocket salad and pork belly with hazelnuts and radicchio) and two sides (roast potatoes with rosemary and pumpkin risotto). This proved to be just the right amount of food, although I didn't have room for pudding (I could have been tempted by a different selection of puddings). The wine was decent and reasonably priced too and most of the wines come in half-litre carafes.

When you are ordering lots of small dishes, it's easy to lose track of the total cost and so I was pleasantly surprised when the bill, including wine and service, only came to £45 — not bad for a gourmet feast of yummy, small dishes that were rolled out over the course of about 45 minutes, prolonging the dining experience. Even though the restaurant was packed, the service was great too, particularly the maître d' (seen in the door on the left of the photo), who kept coming to update us on the table progress every 10 minutes or so.

A Backstabbing Bridezilla but No 3G in My Apartotel

What do the following have in common: 3G, apartotel, backstabbing, Bridezilla, glocalization and Linux. Well, they were all among the new words added to the Oxford English Dictionary during its last update.

Etymology was what attracted me to linguistics in the first place and it was a disappointment to discover that etymology is to linguistics what natural history is to science--the collection of an assortment of specimens, which, while fascinating on an individual basis, aren't necessarily particularly useful. Chaque mot a son histoire, as Gillieron put it. Nice etymological anecdotes are, however, often the most interesting part of linguistics to non-linguists, even if many of the most fascinating word histories turn out to be apocryphal, disappointingly.

As for the OED's latest release of new words, it interests me to know when what was a buzzword--or even a hapax legomenon (also known as a nonce formation)--is deemed to be enough of a part of the English language to enter the dictionary. For example, while I think of 3G as a thing of the noughties (and a word that only entered my vocabulary in the latter half of the noughties), the OED lists a 1997 quotation as the first, non-abbreviated usage of the word. Linux, on the other hand, feels like it's been around for a long time and it has--it was created in 1991; however, it has taken almost 20 years to make it into the OED. Sorry, geeks; I guess your lingo just takes longer to become accepted.

Apartotel has been around even longer and yet is only just making its dictionary début. I stayed in an apartotel (or apart'hotel, as they spelled it) near Trafalgar Square while doing my work experience in 2000 and the first quotation given in the OED is from a 1965 Observer piece, which refers to "the Apart-Hotel ‘Casa Luxor’." Still, while the concept (a hotel that offers private, apartment-style suites alongside traditional hotel services) is quite widespread these days, the term apartotel is not. As for backstabbing, come on! People have been backstabbing one another for as long as we've been people (and probably before) — indeed, the word (albeit in the hyphenated form, which I prefer) has been around since 1855.

Of the remaining words on the list, I haven't heard of some of them (a-life? Bum rap? Panga?*); others, I have heard of but wish I hadn't and certainly wish they weren't made official: glocalization, Bridezilla, and conspiratorialist, to name but a few--not that I am anywhere near as linguistically fascistic as the Académie française, of course.

And, no SoMaRo, NoMaRo, ToCoRo and all of my other wonderful, FUDGE-y and useful coinings have not yet been granted entry to the dictionary...

* a-life = "artificial life", bum rap = "a false charge or conviction," and panga = the name for various Central/South American boat.

L'enfer, C'est les Autres Candidats

I have been looking forward to watching the film Exam since it was discussed on the Kermode and Mayo Film Reviews podcast last summer, when the film was shown at the Edinburgh Festival. The premise is simple — so simple you wish you'd come up with it yourself and made it into a film — and yet Exam gets top marks for its stylish, intense execution.

Eight people are vying for a job at a mysterious, powerful and at times sinister corporation. They have reached the final stage of the hiring process and they are taken into a small room by Morpheus an invigilator, who sits each down at their desk and explains the (vague and somewhat misleading rules). 

They each have an exam paper on their desk and they have eighty minutes to find the answer; they are spied on by an armed guard and a camera. Of course, when they turn over their question papers, they find out they are blank so they have to find out what the question is (if any) as well as the answer. If they break any of the rules (which include things like spoiling their papers, leaving the room and trying to communicate with the guard or the invigilator).

I attended the Q&A with the writer-director-distributor Stuart Hazeldine, who said the stages through which the candidates progress trying to solve the puzzle move from practical to philosophical to psychological to physical, although he didn't plan it that way. The film turns out to be an interesting hybrid of The Apprentice, Huis Clos, The Running Man and something Kafkaesque. 

In fact, one of the loudest of the characters (who assign one another basic nicknames based on appearance — Black, White, Blonde, and so on), even sounds and acts like the guy who won The Apprentice last year — he even said, "that's wot I'm talkin' about," at one point although he didn't do a reverse Pterodactyl impersonation. Hazeldine doesn't watch reality TV, though, so the similarities weren't intentional (although, he said, he doesn't mind reviewers making the reference if it will broaden the film's appeal and either would be keen or agreed to put Kermode's tagline, "The Apprentice goes to hell," on the posters).

Naturally, game theory comes into it too--should they cooperate or defect? Should they work together in the early stages and then betray one other as they get closer to the end, as per The Apprentice? Some of the candidates also make the vacuous and self-aggrandising statements often seen in Suralan's boardroom. "If you take away the impossible, you're left with the truth," for example, which Suralan would no doubt dismiss as "tut." I was only slightly distracted by the fact that one candidate sounded just like Frances de la Tour and the voice of another had un certain air de Clive.

As for the Sartre connections, I felt a bit miffed when one of the characters brought up Sartre during the film, although they didn't directly reference Huis Clos, a film where three characters who have lived sinful lives and so when they die are forced to spend all eternity with one another in a bland room, decorated with Louis XV furniture. They are, they eventually realise, one another's hell. And here, the candidates are each other's rivals— there can only be one winner. Probably, anyway — who knows what will happen when the countdown ends?

Hazeldine had many other interesting things to say in the Q&A, although it's hard to say much more without giving away the plot. Suffice it to say that I was utterly gripped for the whole 97 minutes (the action plays out almost in "real time" so the exam itself takes 73 minutes (cut down from 80 because it wasn't tight enough)) — apparently some people have said it's just utterly boring and spent the whole time checking their watch, which is silly when you can just look at the countdown clock.

 I was satisfied by the ending, which apparently changed a lot from Hazeldine's original vision. This isn't bad for a film that takes place with eight people in a near-empty room for its entirety; Hazeldine thinks that a future stage play is inevitable. One clever audience member mentioned that there were two filming locations in the credits, which was because the opening sequence had to be shot separately at a later date — it's worth watching this sequence carefully as a number of the details become important later on.

All in all, a stimulating and invigorating cinematic experience!

Nowere Boy

No, there isn't a typo in the title of this post. It's not true that the only reason I went to see Sam Taylor-Wood's new film, Nowhere Boy, a film about John Lennon's formative, teenage years, is because I wanted to improve my ear for the Liverpool accent, but my inner phonetician just couldn't switch off during the film. Luckily, there wasn't anyone in the cinema sitting close enough to me to hear me muttering to myself under my breath, trying out different sample sounds of the accent. I've always been able to do a good job of certain set phrases in Scouse, such as, "f*ckin' great" and "charmin'", the former helped by the fact that I can master the alveolar tap r, which is a bit like a trilled, Spanish r that never really gets going.

After muttering to myself all the way home, I immediately logged on to the Speech Accent Archive, to see if they had any Scousers reading the "please call Stella" transcript. The SAA is great for people who know IPA because as well as the sound clips, you also get an IPA transcription, which is really useful if you want to know which exact phone the speaker is using. Unfortunately, there was a notable absence of Liverpudlians on the SAA so I turned to Wikipedia. 

The entry on Scouse was brief and the section about the phonology of Scouse was briefer skill, although it did offer some insight to the way that while in 21st century Scouse, were and wear are both pronounced wear, in the past, they were both pronounced as were; the entry even mentions that John Lennon and George Harrison would have pronounced nowhere as no-were, hence Nowere Boy. 

Without a copy of Peter Trudgill's classic textbook, The Dialects of English, I thought my search to improve my Liverpool accent was going to come to an abrupt halt. Then, I discovered The International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA), which is another great resource for geeky linguists and actors, set up along the same lines as the SAA: speech samples are arranged by the place of origin of the speaker and various sociological details about them are given. The speaker then reads one of two set texts, which were written in order to elicit samples of the major phonetic points of interest among different accents of interest; the speakers then continue with a few minutes of unscripted speech about their family, upbringing and the local area. 

You can certainly hear the were-wear merging among the Liverpudlian speakers (there are several of them in the north-west section of this page), with nurse, work, square and her, among others, all being produced with the same vowel sound (I'm itching to include some IPA in this post but Blogger tends to mangle it; suffice to say, it is the sound that is represented in IPA by a backwards three). Sadly, IDEA doesn't  yet have IPA transcriptions (just a transcription in English of the freestyle speech) but it's still a very useful site.

Some of the speakers are pretty nervous (nair-vuss) when giving their samples, with the freestyle segments being punctuated with airms; of course, the best way to elicit the most natural samples of people's language is to tell them that you are really studying what it was like to grow up in Liverpool in the 20th century and to ask them to talk about topics that are likely to be emotional and/or very personal. However, in the days of institutional review boards and bureaucracy, even linguists have to worry about the ethical dilemmas of conducting research with human subjects.

As for the film itself, I enjoyed it, even from a non-linguistic perspective. I'm not a huge fan of The Beatles but I quite like biopics and even though Kristin Scott Thomas is becoming the female equivalent of Ralph Fiennes, Nowhere Boy was understated and touching without being too maudlin; it goes without saying that it was beautifully shot and had a great soundtrack.

Cop, Doc and Two Smoking Barrels — Sherlock Holmes Review

So I drift down through the Baker Street valley,
In my steep-sided un-reality.
And when all is said and all is done
I couldn't wish for a better one.
It's a real-life ripe dead certainty
That I'm just a Baker Street Muse.

— Jethro Tull, Baker Street Muse


Having spent a year living in a mews just off Baker Street (and another three months living five minutes' walk from 221B Baker Street), I couldn't not go to see Guy Ritchie's new Sherlock Holmes movie. In fact, I'd been looking forward to it pretty much since it was announced, although, of course, none of the filming was actually done in or near Baker Street or its mewses, as far as I could determine. As the aesthetics of Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law are not unappealing to me, this was a great disappointment.

I was, however, more pleasantly surprised to hear that on its release, the film received a fair number of positive reviews and certainly, it sure ain't like any other Sherlock Holmes film I've seen (although admittedly, the only one I can remember is the Basil Rathbone version of The Hound of the Baskervilles). That's all right, though, because I haven't seen any other Guy Ritchie films either; I have been tempted to see Lock, Stock... to tick another film off the IMDb top 250 but I never quite got round to it.

There are, unsurprisingly, great fight sequences including a stunning finale high in the rafters of an as yet unfinished Tower Bridge with, of course, plenty of breath-taking views of the 19th century London skyline. In some of the earlier scenes, Holmes appears to be being thrashed in a fight only for him to turn it around, with the action being paused or taken into slow mo so that he can narrate to the audience in a very clinical manner the moves he will make to overpower his opponent. 

The mystery and its resolution was suitably satisfying — Jonathan Creek would be very impressed. Rachel McAdams, playing Irene Adler (who could well have been nicknamed the Muse of Baker Street), was very charming as Holmes's one-time lover who is, ironically, a criminal. Thomas Cranmer — I mean, Hans Matheson — was quite an attractive if nominatively deterministic baddie as Lord Coward.

It is Downey Jr and Law as Holmes and Watson, their relationship and their chemistry that carry the film along, though. Holmes spends most of the film sulking because Watson is moving out of their Baker Street flat and moving in with his soon-to-be wife, Mary. As such, Watson doesn't have time to help Holmes anymore and keeps trying to run off to meet his future in-laws instead of solving crying (this would be, I can imagine, a tough call).

But, of course, despite his best efforts Watson won't abandon his old friend when it comes down to it and the two, along with the Muse of Baker Street, team up to avert a deadly plot and tie up loose ends. Downey Jr's comic timing is, as ever, excellent, and his version of the ultra-observant, ingenious, stubborn and OCD detective is very entertaining.

In fact, my main worry is that there will be a sequel, which inevitably won't live up to the expectations set by this first...