This week Mr Slang is banished to Gobbler’s Knob…

We moved last week. Approximately 50 m. One side of the block to the other. So not far but still we moved and it meant a change of address – possibly harder for the recipient to absorb since all that has altered is the flat number – liquidation of cash reserves, a van and its team of strapping Aussies who will as happily – and efficiently – pack and shift a still smouldering fag as they will a sofa, various purchases that had hitherto seemed quite unnecessary, and all the rest. It was not helped by the previous day’s eye operation, thus rendering me a spectator, and barely that. It is done now even if the slang lexica, once so pluperfectly arranged, are still beyond any logical access.

We could have gone further. Much further. There are places, there are words. The concept of the back of beyond has been recorded since 1816 (Walter Scott) though I’ll bet the use is earlier and the concept undoubtedly must be. (Latin used Ultima Thule – the land of Thule being supposedly six days sail north of Britain and thus the northern limit of navigability– and Smollett Englished it in 1771). The OED defines it as a ‘humorous phrase’ and the image, however contrary might be the reality, remains so.

It helps if one’s own land permits of such projections. Australia and America provide for anglophone coinages. The UK is lacking – John O’Groats and Lands End are too parochial even if the root of ‘Welsh’ means ‘foreigner’ – and must borrow.  The great deserts presumably have their own terminology and the Sahara, of course, boasts Timbuktu, the daddy of them all, first recorded in this sense in 1863. A settlement had existed since the Iron Age: the perception of isolation is purely Occidental.

Timbuktu is real. So is Nar Nar Goon, a small town, pop. 1010 at last count, near Melbourne. The name supposedly means koala. Other Ozzisms are less so. Bullamakanka or Bullabananka has a tenuous link to Fiji bullamacow: bully beef, but it may be coincidence and there is no more such a township than there exists New Zealand’s Waikikamukau which needs to be pronounced slowly, i.e. ‘Why kick a moo-cow’, the physical manifestation of which is limited to a meat-free restaurant in Brighton, Sussex.  Oodnagalahbi  has been twinned with Ooodnadatta: a small town in Western Australia but the important syllable is the galah, both noisy bird and slang for fool. Slang’s many-headed lexis of stupidity also underpins Woop Woop, otherwise found as Upper Woop Woop, Oodnawoopwoop, or Wopwops. The woop is a peasant, with that species’ stereotypes. Both the human and the reduplicated metonym seem to have been born in the 1930s. Australia has also given Hay and Hell and Booligal, anywhere hot and uncomfortable and popularized by ‘Banjo’ Patterson’s eponymous poem. Hell is of the reader’s own definition but Hay and Booligal are actual New South Wales communities. Patterson targeted Booligal: the others get off lightly:

‘No doubt it suits them very well
To say it’s worse than Hay or Hell,
But don’t you heed their talk at all;
Of course there’s heat – no one denies -
And sand and dust and stacks of flies,
And rabbits too, at Booligal.’

Rabbits? Indeed. The First Fleet of 1788 brought rabbits as well as humans and by the 1890s they were serious, crop-ravaging vermin. A dingo fence had been completed in 1885; now the aim was to corral the bunnies. The fence was completed in 1907. The rabbits were undaunted (myxomatosis proved more cruelly efficient) but the equation of the boundary and desolation in the phrase beyond the rabbit-proof fence was in place as soon as were the wire and palings. The contemporary over the fence, playing the abstract role, means beyond the bounds of taste. Synonyms can be found in beyond the black stump, where the stump represents a symbolic marker that divides the ‘civilized’ world from the wastelands beyond; and in back of Bourke, celebrating a town in the extreme west of New South Wales which was the terminus of the railway line from Sydney and thus the start of the real Outback.

Outside Australia one finds the Caribbean behind the bananas and behind god’s back, meaning deep in the countryside and Ireland’s back of God-Speed, a place so very far off that the positive reinforcement of one’s wish of ‘God-Speed’ to a traveller will have faded away before they arrive.

In New Zealand the backwoods are the booai or booay which originates either in the Maori puhoi: dull, slow or Puhoi, a failed mid-19^th century utopian settlement. This gives up the booai: totally confused, absolutely wrong, of plans, ruined and of items wholly non-functional. Spelt Boohai, and here defined as ‘a fictitious river’, the phrase is also used to brush aside questions involving the word ‘where?’: the answerer explains that he is ‘up the Boohai hunting pukeko with a long handled shovel.’

America cuts, as ever, to the grosser aspects of the chase. B.F.E. and B.F.A. – butt fucking Egypt or Africa – stand for somewhere very far way. The place itself, coined by the military, is Bumfuck, Egypt, also known as Bumblefuck, Egypt, Butt Fuck, Egypt (and West Buttfuck), or Beyond Fucking Egypt. Sodomy is not mandatory: there is no suggested reference to either City of the Plain and Egypt seems to exist purely on grounds of assonance; Bumfuck, while when relevant set on foreign soil,  can be found nearer CONUS, in Iowa, or Wyoming. Nor need the distance be that great: the implication is simply of inaccessibility and inconvenience, be it of a parking lot or a restaurant.

America is also responsible for the seemingly obscene Gobbler’s Knob, but like certain Australian towns, the actual place exists, in this case a small town best-known for its hosting of the annual Groundhog Day ceremony. Other images of inaccessibility include Doo-wah-diddy, High Street, China and West Hell, which last is the antonym of the equally forlorn East Jesus. Black America offers its own subset. these include the nonsensical B. Luther Hatchett or Beluthahatchie, Ginny Gall, which refers back to the west African region of Guinea, and Zar, apparently eliding ‘it’s there’. The implication remains that of a place that is far away, unpleasant and culturally alien.

Finally, a hole in the wall, which comes either from the holes in the walls of English debtor’s prisons, through which the inmates could obtain supplies and money to alleviate their situation, or from the small shops and similar establishments found in the broad stone walls of fortified medieval cities. Hole in the wall became a generic, although the West had its Hole in the Wall, an outlaw hideaway that provided a refuge for Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid and the real-life Wild Bunch). Perhaps least savoury was the Hole in the Wall on Water Street, NYC, where c. 1860 its proprietor Gallus Meg (a monstrous Englishwoman) bit the ears off ill-behaved customers and preserved her trophies in a pickle jar displayed behind the bar.

image ©Gabriel Green

You can buy Green’s Dictionary of Slang, as well as Jonathon’s more slimline Chambers Slang Dictionary, plus other entertaining works, at his Amazon page. Jonathon also blogs and Tweets.

Spiritual enlightenment and the wisdom of the Zen masters – yours for only a penny!…

Keen Dabbler readers may recall my fondness for the joke about the man who has an orange instead of a head. In fact it is not a joke at all but a profound Zen parable. And though it is of course perfect and unimprovable in its form and content, if you were forced to add a line to it, the only possible one would be “At these words he became enlightened.”

This is a common punchline in the collection of excellent unjokes that is Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. You may well have a battered Pelican copy of Paul Reps’ compliation of Zen writings laying about your house somewhere, especially if you or perhaps an aged relative have dabbled in Eastern philosophy or violent martial arts. It may be in a box in the attic, or it might be handy on your bedside cabinet for nightly attempts to achieve universal Oneness before sleeptime.  If not, you can purchase a copy online for a penny, which seems a small but somehow apt price to pay for seven hundred years of Oriental wisdom.

First published in 1957,  it is actually four distinct works complied by Paul Reps, “an American deeply interested in bridging the understanding of East and West”, with help from  Nyogen Senzaki, a celebrated proponent of Zen in the US who as a Japanese infant “was left in a field and found by a Buddhist Monk”  (according to the book’s blurb  anyway; Wikipedia disputes) and who later became “a ‘homeless monk’ wandering over Japan and finally settling in California.”

The first section, 101 Zen Stories, is the best, containing such gems as this:

The Moon Cannot Be Stolen

Ryokan, a Zen master, lived the simplest kind of life in a little hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief visited the hut only to discover there was nothing in it to steal.

Ryokan returned and caught him. “You may have come a long way to visit me, ” he told the prowler, “and you should not return empty-handed. Please take my clothes as a gift.”

The thief was bewildered. He took the clothes and slunk away.

Ryokan sat naked, watching the moon. “Poor fellow,” he mused, ” I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.”

Now you may have just become enlightened simply by reading the above, in which case you do not need to purchase the book or read any further. If not, try this one:

Everything is Best

When Banzan was walking through a market he overheard a conversation between a butcher and his customer.

“Give me the best piece of meat you have,” said the customer.

“Everything in my shop is the best,” replied the butcher. “You cannot find here any piece of meat that is not the best.”

At these words Banzan became enlightened.

Still no luck? There are 99 more.

After the 101 Zen Stories comes The Gateless Gate, a series of problems traditionally set by Zen masters for their pupils, along with an explanatory commentary by ‘Mumon’ that frankly poses far more questions than it answers. Then comes Ten Bulls, a series of woodblock illustrations with supposedly meaningful captions.

In the final, very short section, Paul Reps provides two answers to the question “What is Zen?” Both are brilliant and quite astounding in their clarity, insight and brevity. However, I am not going to tell you what they are. You’ll have to buy Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. You won’t regret the purchase, it is a very short, funny book which will only take all the rest of your life to finish.

If you would like to recommend one of the thousands of great books that can be bought online for a penny, email your review to editorial@thedabbler.co.uk

It’s received terrific reviews. But what did Dabblers think of our latest selection? First, we hear from Dabbler Book Club Member and Scotland’s first soupmonger, Elaine Mason, then from Dabbler Editor, Gaw.

Elaine Mason: Some books you pick up as a distraction. Others are relaxing; an unwinding at the end of a long day. I find Kathleen Jamie’s two books of natural history essays* to have an atmosphere all of their own. I savour picking up her books, and relish her distinctive voice unspooling around me.

Her books are quiet. The essays meditate on a multitude of topics in a myriad of surroundings but at the centre of her writing is the skill of the watcher. She likes to look, to mull, to consider, and to look again. Whether her mindful gaze falls on bacteria seen through a microscope, a Bronze Age skeleton carefully unearthed in a thunderstorm, or considers the weirdly lit Whale Hall in Bergen Natural History Museum, her voice demands that you – the reader – slow down and listen. Listen to her. Give her time, and space, to think about the topic under consideration. Let her widen her scope, let her pan back and let the wider landscape be brought into focus. Let her teach you to look:

That’s what the keen-eyed naturalists say. Keep looking. Keep looking, even when there’s nothing much to see. That way your eye learns what’s common, so when the uncommon appears, your eye will tell you.

(Sightlines, p82)

Kathleen Jamie is the perfect essayist. The essays and meditations in Sightings are, I’ve found, the perfect companion on a journey. By the time I reach journey’s end I am ready to look afresh at the world, consider properly what’s in front of me and give it time to tell it’s story.

This is a book of wonders. Pick it up, slow yourself down and learn to look.

* Her other collection of essays is Findings (Ed.)

Gaw: Not the least enjoyment of this collection of essays in nature writing is the style. It’s something that’s been universally praised by reviewers. However, style is something of a will o’ the wisp. Happily there’s a description of the skeleton of a sei whale that sits at the heart of Sightlines that serves as metaphor: it’s “elegant…gracile…slim…feminine”, and yet it briskly supports a brute, even disturbing, power.

Perhaps, sublime is also an apposite word to apply. Certainly a thread of exhilarating terror runs through the book. We partake in the unfathomable – whales, cancerous tumours, the life of abandoned islands, the moon, neolithic tombs, cave paintings, wild coasts, icebergs – exploring the edges of our civilisation and beyond. But we’re never allowed to forget that these edges are at the centre of other worlds, that really we’re all of a piece, with no clear endings in time or place.

This is the main theme of the book. Nature, despite its often staggering sublimity, isn’t something apart from us; it is us and we are it. Inescapably so, death being a final and unarguable reminder.

Outside of a few sentences, Jamie makes her point mostly through relating her encounters, by showing not telling. It’s powerfully done – the essential nature of things is manifested a few times with the force of epiphany.

Her responses are sympathetic without ever being sentimental; the awe-inspiring is never entirely alien. In particular, there’s an unaffected, unforced feeling of being at ease with animals, a fellow-feeling.

Here’s a description of how she felt whilst trying to keep up with a group of killer whales as they patrolled around a remote Scottish headland:

Acid burn at the sternum, taste of blood, tussocky earth and sky flashing, and my heart pounding; suddenly I was reminded mine was an animal body, all muscle and nerve – and so were they, the killer whales, surging animal bodies, in their black and whites, outclassing us utterly.

“[T]aste of blood”: I’d previously had a physical awareness of this sensation – produced by acute exertion and adrenalin – but not a conscious one. In this remarkable book Jamie manages to raise from all sorts of deep places things that should be strange but are revealed to us as profoundly familiar.

Luke Honey writes about food, drink and the finer things in life over at his blog The Greasy Spoon. Today he veers away from victuals and reacquaints himself with a national institution…

We’ve just had a most entertaining half hour or so watching “The Sky at Night”, apparently the longest running television series in history.  Could this be the last bastion of English amateurism?  The BBC films the programme in sunny Selsey, West Sussex-  using the oak panelled dining room of Patrick Moore’s thatched and lattice-windowed cottage as a studio.  It’s terribly chintzy:  like a set from “The Mousetrap”, circa 1952.  Sir Patrick, now a splendid nonagenarian, cuts a dash in his egg-stained Air Force tie, monocle and clipped (albeit, slurred) tones amongst the spotty, bemused professional anoraks of the astronomical world.  His croquet lawn is littered with telescopes and observatories.  The low-budget lighting and shaky direction give the programme a certain je ne sais quoi:  it’s all slightly bonkers.

I like enthusiasts.  Why is that television presenters of this persuasion always seem to live in Sussex or, failing that, amongst the rhododendrons and silver birches of Surrey?  I’m reminded of the equally splendid Robert Alexander Baron Schutzmann von Schutzmansdorff, aka Bob Symes, the avuncular and tweedy presenter of the 1970′s series “Model World”, he with the buttery, exceedingly good voice, Tsarist beard and gauge one model railway running through the laurel bushes of his garden.  I seem to remember that his shed doubled as a signal box.

Several years ago, I was at a memorial service- for my great uncle, I think, and fell into a chat with some nice old buffer, who looked as if he could be a judge, or at least, if he wasn’t, should have been.  “Tell me, my boy”, he said, fixing a look at me over his half-moon glasses, “what are your hobbies?”  I was slightly taken aback, but it was a good question.  Do people have hobbies anymore?  I’m not sure that they do. Bird egg collecting and butterfly hunting are, of course, now taboo, and I suspect that today, any child of ten years old who collected stamps in a serious way, might be looked upon as slightly odd and even risk ostracisation in the playground.

But that’s the charm of “The Sky at Night”.  It’s not slick, it’s not contrived; it’s endearingly amateur-  and eminently watchable; even if those of us, of a non-scientific bent but seduced by the romance of astronomy, can’t understand a word of it.

What a drunken satyr, a grotesquely inflated armadillo and a parachuting nonagenarian have to tell us about not just our death, but everyone’s…

Wisdom is proverbially reticent. The wise need to be eked from their crabby shells; we are, perhaps rightly, suspicious of philosophical or rhetorical fluency.

In a story related in Plutarch’s Letter to Apollonius, Silenus, the improbably wise tutor of Dionysus, is captured by shepherds in the employ of King Midas, and under coercion of one sort or another is made to reveal the singularity, so to speak, at the heart of his wisdom: the greatest blessing available to human beings, he says, is never to have been born; once you have been born, the next greatest blessing is an early death.

This pessimistic line is familiar enough – it appears, for instance, in Oedipus at Colonus – to have become something of a commonplace, but there is a peculiar flavour to it placed in the mouth of Silenus.

Silenus was a species of green man akin to a satyr. In the earliest depictions of him he had cloven hooves, and the legs of a goat or a horse, and while by his classical heyday he was all humanoid, he was invariably accompanied and supported in his teetering drunkenness by satyrs, or balanced precariously on the back of an ass.

His words to Midas are not the dismissive wisdom of an immortal addressing a mortal: they are a confession: this is a superficially carefree being who understands that he himself is destined to extinction. Dionysus and Silenus and the satyrs and their ilk are all gone. And we – mortal hominids – are still very much here.

Extinction and personal death are the pounds and pence of mortality – a common divisible currency which nevertheless occupy distinct mental planes, have different psychic uses. Every individual of every species will die, but some species are more successful than others – more adaptable, more diffused, of greater tenacity or longevity.

All, however, are doomed. We have not only banished the immortals; we have eliminated immortality. We have made a cult of wholesale extinction. We no longer garland sacrificial cows for the honour of the gods, but we erect temples to extinct beings.

In Berlin, for instance, in the Natural History Museum, there is there fossil of a glyptodon, prised from its shell, a Marsyas of philosophical elucidation.

The glyptodon was one of the supersized mammals of the Pleistocene, a grotesquely inflated armadillo, a bumbling conspicuous oddity standing, in the great Venn diagram of the imaginarium, closer to giants, cyclopes, satyrs and gods than to any actual creature. This shambling and pitiful old philosopher was hunted to extinction at the end of the last ice age, by more efficiently evolved and nimble-tooled mammals.

What does the Glyptodon tell us, now that we have captured him, and flayed him, and put him to the test? He tells us that in the grand scale of things we are interesting not for our quiddity but for our generalised qualities; not for our spiritual innerness, but for our material residue. We are interesting as a species, not as individuals. Our survival, insofar as it is likely, will only be in unpredictable fossil form.

What Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy called ‘the terrible wisdom of Silenus’ does not really ring true for us anymore; we could imagine people saying it or thinking it or even believing it, but they would be marginal people, out of the swim – malcontents and misanthropes and cynics. We are currently assured, by contrast, of the possibility of personal fulfilment. You can have a fulfilling life in spite of your always imminent death. Life, it is frequently affirmed, is what you make of it. And thus the highest philosophical embodiment of our essentially comedic age is the parachuting nonagenarian.

But inevitably we have replaced Silenus’s bleak insight with a different, equally bitter one, one that lies, necessarily, in the blind-spot of these near-sighted virtues. Silenus gave himself over to the cultivation of a certain gusto, and the glyptodon and his ilk are interesting; but these serve only to conceal the bald fact that we no longer have even the comfort of a nameable Yorick’s skull awaiting us, but rather, at best, a hazy continuum of papery artist’s impressions.

Atlas of Norbiton is a weekly bulletin from Norbiton: Ideal City of the Failed Life. Unlike its more comprehensive, detailed and discursive mother site, the Anatomy of Norbiton – the Atlas is intended as a pocket guide to the Failed Life for Failed or Failing Individuals on the move.

Nige pays tribute to the greatest dancer…

Fred Astaire – especially when dancing with Ginger Rogers – is (and I admit to a sizeable blind spot in the area marked Dance) almost the only dancer I can watch with that rush of aesthetic pleasure, the tingle at the nape of the neck, the amazed gasp that signify the presence of great art. Why him? I think it’s the sheer effortless elegance; he is the least muscular of dancers. He doesn’t throw himself into a dance – he stroll into it.

This, I think, is because he is always dancing – whether he’s ‘dancing’ or just moving around, walking, running, lighting a cigarette, lifting a glass, patting his hair, anything. Every part of his body is engaged in a kind of continual dance – every part except that extraordinary, outsize, lantern-jawed head that hangs above the action, quite detached – embodying (as I see it) the detachment of the true artist, the cool still centre.

Similarly, I think Astaire was a very great singer – not a very good one in a technical sense (he has little ‘voice’), but he slips into song as easily and beautifully as he slips into dance. Again his style is entirely unforced and unshowy, he does enough and no more, his phrasing is perfect, and as a result he is devastatingly effective at putting a song across – which is why he was so popular with songwriters. Watch him in action with Ginger Rogers here, and marvel…

This sequence never fails to take my breath away – and what an ending! The look on Ginger’s face… Something much more than a dance has happened here.

To mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, we’re serialising The Pickwick Papers…

Thanks to our friends at Naxos Audiobooks, we’re exclusively serialising their abridged version of what is perhaps Dickens’ funniest work, The Pickwick Papers, read by Anton Lesser.

The latest episodes can be heard below. You can catch up on previous chapters here. Tune in next week for more…

Chapter 33: Visitors for Mr Pickwick

Chapter 34: Mrs Bardell goes on an unexpected journey

Naxos Audiobooks – The Complete Dickens

For Charles Dickens’ 200^th birthday, Naxos Audiobooks are completing their unabridged catalogue of all 16 of his major novels, with Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, The Pickwick Papers and The Mystery of Edwin Drood released by May next year. See their website for more information.

Naxos AudioBooks are one of the leading independent audiobook labels, specialising in the classics. You can see the full range at www.naxosaudiobooks.com and follow them on Facebook and Twitter.

You can buy the The Pickwick Papers abridged audiobook – currently being serialised by The Dabbler Book Club – here.

Jon Hotten meets his cricketing hero and finds himself saying exactly the one thing he had been determined not to say…

When he went to the ring, he was often smiling. He knew that when the heavyweight champion of the world defended his title, it was a solemn moment, but he found it hard to forget how strong he was.

Good that, isn’t it… AJ Liebling wrote it about Rocky Marciano, but it might just as well be about Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards walking out to bat. He was usually chewing gum instead of smiling – although the flash of teeth from underneath that Roman nose sometimes gave the impression of one – and his journey to the wicket was inordinately slow for the entrance of a gladiator.

‘Hurry up,’ someone in the Yorkshire crowd once heckled. ‘That’s why,’ Richards said, ‘when you look at records and things, and you see the record of Vivian Richards against Yorkshire, I could be high up where averages and runs are concerned’.

I met him last year. It was on a flat, cold morning at the University of Surrey, and he’d come straight from the airport to a reception to promote the Antiguan Olympic team’s use of the facilities there come 2012. The room was full of journalists and local radio and TV people, and I heard him before I saw him. He was talking to a young and beautiful radio reporter standing somewhere towards the side of the bar. ‘My full name,’ he was telling her slowly, ‘is Isaac Vivian Alexander Richards… It’s a very long name, isn’t it…’ He left an arch pause before breaking into that unmistakable, high laugh.

He was 58 then, almost 59, but aside from the smallest fleck of grey in his goatee, he looked the same as he had when he retired from cricket in 1991, head shaved, face unlined, eyes bright and dark, stomach washboard flat and shoulders and waist still ascribing the perfect ‘V’ of a middleweight boxer. He’d famously never been inside a gym, but those boxing references just kept on coming. Some who knew him well called him ‘Smokey’ after Smokin’ Joe, with whom he’d shared such indomitable spirit. To everyone else though, he remained simply King Viv, destroyer of bowlers, avatar of modern batsmanship. Even the knighthood, which he shrugged off ['Hi man, hi... call me Viv'] didn’t seem quite enough. King Viv it was, and is.

I’d known for a while that I might be able to speak to him, and I knew exactly what I was not going to say: that the first three times I saw him bat, he made 291 at the Oval, 138 not out at Lord’s in the World Cup Final and 118 in a Benson and Hedges final for Somerset a couple of years later – ‘You see, Viv’, I was definitely not going to tell him, ‘you were getting worse every time…’

We sat down at a small table overlooking some plastic hockey pitches. He was drinking orange juice. ‘You know Viv,’ I heard myself saying in a voice that seemed to come from a distant, empty room, ‘the first three times I saw you bat…’ He listened patiently. ‘…So you see,’ went the voice that was apparently mine, ‘you were getting worse every time…’
He looked at me for a second, glanced down at his juice… and then smiled. It felt a bit like like I imagine getting off the mark in your first Test innings feels. We had some common ground – not a sentence you can utter every day – in that we’d both been to Alf Gover’s cricket school in Wandsworth; he reminisced about the eggy smell of the old gas lamps that lit the place and the penetrating winter cold that took until lunchtime to lift, and remembered lovely, Patrician Alf and his famous ‘one to drive…’

What he recalled most about that 291 at the Oval was also something sensory: how hot and brown the pitch was; how un-English. We spoke for about 15 minutes, I suppose, and he said something I’ll never forget, a phrase that serves as an epitaph for his epic career: ‘You see,’ he said, ‘with the bat, I was a soldier…’

That’s good enough for Liebling, good enough for anyone. ‘With the bat, I was a soldier’. He was, and more.

Quintessential Mahlerman this week: four exemplary unions of music and film…

A few weeks ago I took a sideways look at plagiarism in movie scores, going on to name the guilty men and sit them on the naughty-step. But a much easier route has always been available to film producers when they need to trim the budget. Forget John Williams and rent a classic. It will almost certainly be in the public domain, so no fat fees; it will probably bring a bit of ‘class’ to even the most tawdry visuals; and it is available right now, on a laptop near you. One of your kids can edit it.

My own introduction to Sergei Rachmaninov’s music was (yes, you guessed it) the dominating, nay overwhelming influence of his popular second piano concerto in David Lean’s early weepie Brief Encounter. I fell in love with the piece, as well as with Celia Johnson’s mousey housewife. I doubt if I was alone in this musical crush, and the word on the street is that this movie, more than any other, served as an introduction to classical music for thousands who trooped to the local Astoria to soak it up. Was it for them a brief encounter or was it the start of a lifetime of listening? Seeing the film again the other day I realized that Lean over-eggs the pudding by using the music in virtually every set-piece. Perhaps he fell in love with it too. Showing, I hope, a little more restraint than the great director, here are a few examples of music and image fusing together to make something rather wonderful.

Hard to imagine the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa sitting back in his chair and thinking ‘who do I cast as Vincent Van Gogh…..I know, I’ll ring Marty’. But he did, and Martin Scorsese rocked-up complete with New York drawl, donned the ear bandage and hit his marks. The marvellous Dreams, made toward the end of Kurosawa’s long life, is really eight short films linked together and forming the musings of, we imagine, this unique auteur. This chapter ‘Crows’, has the limpid accompaniment of Chopin’s Prelude in D Flat.

Along with perhaps the Busoni concerto, the B flat Piano Concerto of Johannes Brahms is the longest and most taxing (to perform) in the modern repertory. Its length is partly due to the four movement format, almost unheard of in 19th Century concertos, and a gargantuan first movement lasting almost 20 minutes. The heart of the concerto for many is the painfully beautiful third movement Andante which, unusually again, switches the spotlight away from the piano soloist and shines it upon the orchestra’s principal cellist, who introduces the memorable theme, and spends ten minutes playing with it. Ingmar Bergman‘s 1963 film The Silence is one of his bleakest creations, asking more questions than it answers. Is the relationship of the two sisters incestuous? Is the boy a son of one of them? Where are they, and why is it so difficult for them to communicate? Not a natural bedfellow for Brahms, except for the ravishing images by Sven Nykvist which keep us glued to this masterpiece.

Set in medieval Russia and loosely based on the life of the great icon painter, Andrei Rublev seems, to this viewer at least, to be as near to perfection as a film can hope to be. Without concern for profit Andrei Tarkovsky set out to simply tell a story, and created a masterpiece of the cinema. Unwinding slowly (3 hours +), it bursts the bounds of what film is supposed to be, and a sense pervades the film that the existence of an audience was of no concern to this visionary artist still, amazingly, in his early 30′s. The incidental music for the original film was composed by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov; over this montage Boris Grebenshchikov sings the soulful ‘Wolves and Ravens’.

Running for over seven hours, Satantango (‘Satan’s Tango’) by the Hungarian Bela Tarr makes Rublev seem like a short. When I saw it first, a few years ago, it struck me as a pitch-black, misanthropic comedy. A more recent viewing on DVD revealed, as much great art does over time, much deeper layers of truth – truth endorsed by the late Susan Sontag who declared in rather hysterical language that the film was ‘Devastating, enthralling for every minute of its seven hours. I’d be glad to see it every year for the rest of my life’. The music of Arvo Part appears quite regularly on Lazy Sunday and for that I make no apology. Here, the stately beauty of his Salve Regina walks slowly beside the film montage.

Judging by the queues at the Saatchi Gallery, and the liberal sprinkling of orange dots already placed on exhibits, crafty customers were out in force on the first day of the Collect craft fair (which runs until Monday).

Billed as the ‘international art fair for contemporary objects’, the applied art on offer generally encompasses tableware, metalwork, furniture, jewellery, textiles and ceramic sculpture. In keeping with the modern design ethic, the meticulously handcrafted works in this show include trayfuls of unwearable necklaces, deconstructed clothing, useless utensils and chairs you can’t even sit on.

With prices starting at a couple of hundred pounds for items such Katie Bunnell’s computer numerically controlled laser-cut silicon moulded porcelain beakers, the show does offer affordability. But there are also items, probably the more collectable ones – like Michael Eden’s computer generated urns, or Kate Molone’s exotic vegetable inspired pots, where in some cases you won’t get much change from £30,000.

Arty eye candy abounds, with ephemeral glass sculptures and curiosity collections from the likes of Steffen Dam and Geoffrey Mann, exquisite Far Eastern designed enamel and lacquerware from Takuo Nakamura, Tang Mingxiu, Koji Hatakeyama and others – and molten sculptures from Norway like Irene Nordli’s Rosa Venus and Christina Schou Christensen’s Drip. There are some beautifully hand painted, and fairly reasonably priced, Central American inspired pots by a collective of Nicaraguan artists. And a few bizarre mixed media creations, where it looks as though Professor Branestawm got carried away with a Meccano set.

One room in the gallery is dedicated to ‘raw craft’, including Peter Marigold’s roughly constructed Log Chess Set. And, of course, it wouldn’t be a contemporary exhibition without a space for experimental installations. Louise Gardiner’s intricately appliquéd and embroidered canvases deserve a mention here, combining, as they do, detailed workmanship with colour-coordinated saleability (Belgravia-based concept stores take note).

Most extraordinary of all – and great fun too – is Geoff Crook and Peter Jones’ latest collaboration. Following on from their previous showing of ‘useless stuff’, Crook and Jones have created The Rhizome Chair. Its organic form “began as an experiment in translating theory into practice, but has evolved into an ecosystem of ideas and possibilities that redefine form and function.”  Based on Delueze and Guattari’s rhizome theory, the chair is made up of ‘pods’ (or rhizomes), each of which houses a scientific experiment. These range from the production and application of an electric current from fruit and vegetables to the interpretations and response to the unseen world revealed by the scanning electron microscope (SEM). “From its playful use of hyper-real colour to a fresh herb bed, the Rhizome chair is effectively a living form that has the potential to keep evolving. While it reflects some of the proportions and conventions that are normalized within the genre of ‘chairs’, the Rhizome is ultimately the product of a strategy of subversion and extension that encourages us to think before we SIT.”  Like much modern design art, it may not feel very comfortable…but should, at least, stimulate the imagination?