“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Monday, November 28, 2011

Ken Russell RIP


He died today. His rather gauche movies sometimes hit the spot. I kind of hated Gothic for making Shelley be such a nutter. But Tommy was pretty intense. Unbelievably my father was music director for Lisztomania (1975), which meant that he had to teach Roger Daltrey how to mime playing the harp. Predictably Daltrey made a rather desultory comment about reading music (namely his inability to do so), which did not impress him.

2 comments:

medievalkarl said...

"Unbelievably my father was music director for Lisztomania (1975)"

Holy crap. I am so freakin impressed. This is not sarcastic.

Gothic was my love in high school (saw it maybe 8 or 9 times from 1987-88), but The Music Lovers is my new favorite. I can't think of many films that give such a perfect sensation of the loss of self and sense that happens in desire and beauty. Not even going to bother to resist the psychoanalytic temptation to talk about the Real here...

Henry Warwick said...

Q: How do you get a rock guitar player to turn his amp down?

A: put sheet music in front of him.