Once and Future Heroine: SARAH LUND

detail, Hammershøi: Young Woman from Behind

She's back. Despite being profaned by the cult of her sweater, Sarah Lund has joined the pantheon of Norse gods and heroines. Indefatigable, fallible, unflinching goddess of retribution and lady of sorrows, she and Forbrydelsen (The Killing) have elevated the TV thriller genre to modern myth. At its best, in the first two series, it achieved the moral authority of classical drama, consistently superior to English-speaking imitators and Scandinavian successors. 
Never mind that the third series does not, and never could, match up, that the supporting characters are less profoundly observed and the interlocking plots more formulaic. With a sense of duty that matches Lund's, Sofie Gråbøl.....CONTINUED

Who's afraid of heroes?

A twilight world of haunted houses on blasted heaths, billowing curtains, priest holes and craggy old retainers, grown men struggling with oedipal longings and alcohol addiction, a slender plot about a list of names and a china English bulldog, an accused Great Actress, superb yet ridiculous, reciting Tennyson's rallying cries to a lost people torn between technologically advanced modernity and their sentimental loyalties to a myth of nationhood - what is this we have, yet another re-working of a Bronte novel, a missing scene from the Olympics opening ceremony, or just more teenage vampires? 

I hear a gunshot on the Scottish moors; a man and a woman get out of their car and stand in the whisky-coloured heather beside a trickling burn. Is it mother and son on holiday in the Highlands, searching for their roots? Maybe it's Richard Hannay from The Thirty Nine Steps on the run from master criminals in 1915?
No, the year is 2012, and the man is Bond, James Bond, as we have never seen him before and should never, ever, have to see again.
In a feat of heroic acting against the odds, Daniel Craig doesn't lose Bond's masculinity or credibility (or put on a funny voice like the Batman, rasping long after everyone's realized he's Bruce Wayne), 007's upper lip still twitches with humour, not emotion, thank god, but he has to fall through the treacly vortex stirred by the director and screenwriters, hooked on the currently pseudo-Freudian, psychobabbling, whinging interpretations of action heroes, like men afraid of their own shadows.

JAMES BOND TAKING HIS MOTHER ON HOLIDAY IN THE HIGHLANDS

Detail of Morning in the Highlands: The Royal Family Ascending Lochnagar, by Carl Haag. Watercolour, 1853, in The Royal Collection

THIS POST IS FEATURED ON FIRST NIGHT DESIGN TIMES ONLINE NEWSPAPER

Special Guest Post: LUCIA BY SARAH

Reblogged from Sarah Vernon's First Night Design, here is an intimate portrait of a long dead woman, one of those ancestresses too well-brought up to divulge any secrets about themselves, who are only deciphered a hundred years later through a mixture of research and intuition. Sarah's post reveals just as much about her own and her mother's imaginative writing talent as it does about her clever, amused, inscrutable-looking great-grandmother Lucia:

My Great-Grandmother Lucia by Sarah Vernon

8 August 2011

My great-grandmother, Lucia, was a gently beautiful woman.  I have late Victorian photographs to show me just how charming she was to look at and last week I created an image with her as the centrepiece.  This particular photograph (below), which admittedly stands on its own, was exquisitely hand-tinted.

Image © Sarah Vernon

Being me, however, I wanted to embellish it!  I used my own textures and backgrounds alongside one from The Graphics Fairy and one from Deviant Art.

Lucia died in 1906 when she was in her 40s. There is some mystery about how she died....
My mother used to imagine that Lucia had had a riding accident since she found the idea so romantic....Read Full Post

If Downton Abbey was McDonalds....

"SO BAD IT'S GOOD" ENOUGH TO EAT - YOUR BRAINS

Poor comfort-eating recessionites, we've got to wait till Christmas for our favourite, luxuriously engineered, salt-fat-sugar fix. The invidious thing about Downton Abbey’s success isn’t its undeniable entertainment value and popularity, or that it has restored UK Entertainment’s balance of trade with America, but that such smugly gilded, spinelessly plotted, lumpily scripted bathos has won awards for excellence in drama and writing. It's another discredit to the honours and prize-giving system which needs abolishing. Preposterous, predictable, derivative, sychophantic, aristophile...

Discovery and Denial

A Mermaid by J.W.Waterhouse (1901). Royal Academy of Arts. Image source: Wikipedia

On January 8th, 1493, during his first New World voyage, Christopher Columbus, wrong again, mistook three sea cows swimming south of the Bahamas for mermaids. This had been a common delusion among sailors for centuries, whenever they saw the large grey creatures raising their amiable, long-nosed, whiskered heads above the ocean surface, and bending their fore-limbs like arms.  

Columbus was not the man to give up a preconception.The next day in his blog - sorry, log - rather than speculate that he had seen a new species, any more than he would ever admit landing on a new continent, he dissed his mermaids for being less beautiful than they were painted (no eran tan hermosas como las pintan) and for having masculine-looking faces (forma de hombre en la cara). From the distance of his ship, he was sure he had seen three butch sirens waving at him. CONTINUED

distemperature

drowning garden

video by Martin Huebscher Photography

...the moon (the governess of floods),
Pale in her anger, washes all the air

...And thorough this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter...

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 1 

AFTER THE STORM (A Story)

More distemperature: SPRING, SUMMER, DENIAL

contrablog:

 

A fine dose of revenge is in every complaint. Nietzsche

WORLD'S END GARDEN

 ...I am re-begot

Of absence, darknesse, death; things which are not.

John Donne, A Nocturnal Upon S. Lucy's Day, Being The Shortest Day

Part One GARDEN
Part Two PUNISHMENT
Part Three RE-BEGOT
Part Four BOUNDARIES
Part Five SWORD
Part Six BESIEGED
Part Seven BREACHED
Part Eight GARDEN
© Pippa Rathborne 2012

 
Like all histories, this is a product of the imagination, based on real events. Every word is true, but, except for the first person singular and plural, the characters are fictional composites and any resemblance to living persons is unintended and purely coincidental.

I think that whenever one has something unpleasant to say, one should always be quite candid.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest