Some day I’ll write about “How Hollywood Accidentally Saved Western Civilization Despite Itself” based on the restoration of old films.

Here’s my transcript;

At this point I reveal myself in my true colours as a stick in the mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole, I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance. And I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of recent triumphs of science men haven’t changed much the last 2,000 years. And in consequence we must still try to learn from history: history is ourselves.

I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy–the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people’s feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters.

Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals and I value a society that makes their existence possible.

These programs have been filled with great works of genius, in architecture, sculpture and painting, in philosophy, poetry and music, in science and engineering. There they are. You can’t dismiss them. And they’re only a fraction of what Western man has achieved in the last thousand years, often after setbacks and deviations at least as destructive as those of our own time. Western civilisation has been a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence in ourselves. I said at the beginning of the series that it’s lack of confidence more than anything else that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion just as effectively as by bombs. Fifty years ago, W. B. Yeats, who was more like a man of genius than anyone I’ve ever known, wrote a prophetic poem and in it he said;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Well, that was certainly true between the wars and it damn nearly destroyed us. Is it true today? Not quite because good people have convictions, rather too many of them. The trouble is that there is still no centre. The moral and intellectual failure of Marxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism. And that isn’t enough. One may be optimistic, but one can’t exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.”

Actually, this was the real reason I restarted the blog. In the long run, I can see this place getting a little busier with a few more posts, and a re-do of my back pages. But right now it’s just a nice spot for me to goof around adjusting css files and to make the occasional note on this and that, like, for instance; I enjoyed the latest Bond movie Casino Royale (official site here) which I saw the other night. I don’t know if I have anything to say that hasn’t already been said. We were presented with a more serious, less jokey lead character, more like Fleming’s original creation. I hope the franchise continues to pursue this return to roots. Next, let’s hope they get rid of Judy Dench as M–the producers’ cheesy mid-1990s nod to feminism thrown in to balance out the hot young babes. She worries so about James, oh my, oh mother. I’m glad others saw this. Fine, she’s tough, she’s in charge blah tee blah blah. Bond is not all about the hot young babes–that’s great for the movie business I suppose. Make Bond into what he really is, a man with a past, a man with walls, and you don’t need tough, in charge den mother Dench. M can return to being the George Smiley-like puppet master.

I still maintain after having seen this latest Bond adventure–as I have said to several friends though not in public–that some day the entire series will be redone, probably in for television, faithfully following the books, set in their period and accurately portraying the characters. It will be as good as the Sherlock Holmes series with Jeremy Brett as Holmes and David Burke as Watson (Brett is superlative, but it is the writing and portrayal of the Watson character NOT as a bumbling sidekick that really makes that series, along with its wonderful attention to all the small details that are in the stories).

Why will the Bond series be redone? That’s simple. There are just so many problems with a state, any state (a democracy?) giving somebody a licence to kill, there’s a lot to explore there. We saw a bit of that in Casino Royale and the response to the film should encourage more.

“I made all this fudge, like fudge galore! Fudge with… with um… pecans in it, fudge with walnuts, plain fudge, fudge with marshmallow stuff in it. And, and so I wrapped them up and put them in these really nice um… decorative paper bowls and I took them to my neighbours’ house. And I’m knocking on the door–’Hi, I made you some fudge!’–in this hat”.

Then she goes on to describe the B&E and what her neighbours might see if they had a security camera which had me chuckling for hours.

[Note: the video was taken down. I’ve replaced it with this Soul Train appearance. “Right on, Diane Jones.”]

We see how how Atkins took a well-known piece of music and made it more beautiful. If there is one word I would use to describe what I love about Atkins playing, it’s “restraint”; the sense that the song, the music, is larger than he is–that he could do more to dazzle us with virtuosity and technique but doesn’t because that is not what he is all about. He’s about playing the song, and the song is front and centre, not the player and his technique. After listening to this, you don’t say to yourself, “Wow, that was a hot guitar player!”–you say, “I never realized before how beautiful that tune is.”

The use of the harmonics at around moment 1:12 of the video (2:29 if you are using the backwards clock) is simple yet lovely. But it’s the repetition of the phrase right after those harmonics that gets me. Perhaps this will serve as a demonstration of what I mean by restraint. Following the harmonic–this would be in the lyric right after the second verse “Starry starry night”–there is a nice phrase, da-uh daaaa da da. This phrase was introduced right near the beginning of the piece (in the lyric it would be after “Shadows on the hill”). But when it is repeated after the harmonic, the slide is taken just a little bit higher. And then it is repeated after the harmonics again, but this time, instead of taking it even higher, Atkins simply returns to notes he used at the beginning and lengthens the relative time just slightly.

btw, in a quick tour of digg.com I found a reference to this strange video on YouTube, from “The Adventures of Mark Twain” (1985), a claymation special for children. In the clip an angel named Satan appears, a very weird Satan. The animators have done an imaginatively good job of conveying despair, emptiness, and insignificance. The way it all recedes in the iris of the old man is a nice touch.