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You know he'll take you down with him
Last night I spent considerably more time on the M4 than intended. When I made it back to West London, the streets were full of tiny witches, miniature ghosts, small Frankensteins, and so on. All clutching bags or boxes of sweets, and being shepherded around by parents. More alarmingly, the otherwise nice pub was also jammed to the gunwhales with little devils, diddy skeletons, and a whole bunch of children who were clearly dressed up but not of any known supernatural genre. Then a zombie schoolgirl brought me a pint.
I'm pretty sure that Hallowe'en didn't used to be such big news. My cub pack always had a Hallowe'en party, and dressing up usually involved being either a sheet-ghost or a binbag-witch. I certainly don't remember the bought costumes that most of last night's micro-horrors were sporting. And we had to make our lanterns out of turnips which - if you've never done it - is bloody hard work. Also, get up several hours before we went to bed, etc. Does anyone bob for apples these days? Or is it all about the trick-or-treating? Round Hallowe'en we used to get people (either in costume, or with lanterns) calling at the door asking for "a penny for Hallowe'en". There was no option of a trick.
Anyway, all this prowling round the streets and sitting in pubs was just a pre-amble to going to church. The church I go to recently got itself a new organ. They also, since Ealing (Ealing! Where the comedy comes from!) currently doesn't have a working cinema, show films in the church hall at weekends. For Hallowe'en, they combined these to extraordinarily good effect by showing the black-and-white, silent Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens with live organ accompaniment.
I wasn't entirely sure how it was going to work; the answer was very well indeed. The church is a large, rectangular building with the organ at the back, in a gallery. The seating is just freestanding chairs, so all had been turned round to face a screen below the organ. The lights were off, with candles in the niches of all the pillars. Lurid spootlights had been placed on the floor, there were generic drippy-water-and-scary-rustlings sound effects playing and the organ pipes were dramatically underlit with UV. Pimp my organ, indeed.
During an ordinary service, your average church organist does quite a lot of improvising. Noodling around bits of hymn tunes to fill gaps, and so on. However, it's still quite a surprise to find St Barnabas' (relatively) new organist is capable of doing a full-on improvised score (82 minutes of continuous playing) for a film. And doing it really, really well.
I presume that up in the organ gallery he had a small screen so that he could keep time with the film - and some of the timing was actually really, really good. I'm so used, these days, to the crashing chords happening at the split-second the action demands it that it was really easy to sit there and forget that someone was making all this up. And playing it for me. In real time.
I had wondered whether a cinema organist would resort to playing "known" pieces whenever they could be bent in to shape, but in this case I only spotted one melody I knew (a fragment of Brahms' Lullaby smuggled in as the clueless Hutter goes off to bed on his journey to Count Orlok's). My knowledge of the pipe organ repertoire isn't extensive, however, so I may just have missed plenty. Certainly it sounded to me very much actually like a film score; recurring themes, but music actually created to suit what was on screen.
These days, of course, Nosferatu with its hammy acting and worn clichés makes audiences laugh. I'd love to know what it felt like to see it in the cinema when the technology was shiny and new. The (rather shoe-horned in) footage of the Venus Flytrap must have been stunning, the effects magical... was it scary, then? I imagine it was. Some scenes do still stand up really well - like the iconic image of Nosferatu's shadow climbing the stairs. Others - like the attempt to show the coach travelling an phenomenal speed - well, not so much.
I still find it a beautiful film, though, and am delighted to have seen it with the organ accompaniment (and a glass of cheap red wine). There was a vague suggestion as we left that they might do more films with live music, and I really hope they do.
I'm pretty sure that Hallowe'en didn't used to be such big news. My cub pack always had a Hallowe'en party, and dressing up usually involved being either a sheet-ghost or a binbag-witch. I certainly don't remember the bought costumes that most of last night's micro-horrors were sporting. And we had to make our lanterns out of turnips which - if you've never done it - is bloody hard work. Also, get up several hours before we went to bed, etc. Does anyone bob for apples these days? Or is it all about the trick-or-treating? Round Hallowe'en we used to get people (either in costume, or with lanterns) calling at the door asking for "a penny for Hallowe'en". There was no option of a trick.
Anyway, all this prowling round the streets and sitting in pubs was just a pre-amble to going to church. The church I go to recently got itself a new organ. They also, since Ealing (Ealing! Where the comedy comes from!) currently doesn't have a working cinema, show films in the church hall at weekends. For Hallowe'en, they combined these to extraordinarily good effect by showing the black-and-white, silent Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens with live organ accompaniment.
I wasn't entirely sure how it was going to work; the answer was very well indeed. The church is a large, rectangular building with the organ at the back, in a gallery. The seating is just freestanding chairs, so all had been turned round to face a screen below the organ. The lights were off, with candles in the niches of all the pillars. Lurid spootlights had been placed on the floor, there were generic drippy-water-and-scary-rustlings sound effects playing and the organ pipes were dramatically underlit with UV. Pimp my organ, indeed.
During an ordinary service, your average church organist does quite a lot of improvising. Noodling around bits of hymn tunes to fill gaps, and so on. However, it's still quite a surprise to find St Barnabas' (relatively) new organist is capable of doing a full-on improvised score (82 minutes of continuous playing) for a film. And doing it really, really well.
I presume that up in the organ gallery he had a small screen so that he could keep time with the film - and some of the timing was actually really, really good. I'm so used, these days, to the crashing chords happening at the split-second the action demands it that it was really easy to sit there and forget that someone was making all this up. And playing it for me. In real time.
I had wondered whether a cinema organist would resort to playing "known" pieces whenever they could be bent in to shape, but in this case I only spotted one melody I knew (a fragment of Brahms' Lullaby smuggled in as the clueless Hutter goes off to bed on his journey to Count Orlok's). My knowledge of the pipe organ repertoire isn't extensive, however, so I may just have missed plenty. Certainly it sounded to me very much actually like a film score; recurring themes, but music actually created to suit what was on screen.
These days, of course, Nosferatu with its hammy acting and worn clichés makes audiences laugh. I'd love to know what it felt like to see it in the cinema when the technology was shiny and new. The (rather shoe-horned in) footage of the Venus Flytrap must have been stunning, the effects magical... was it scary, then? I imagine it was. Some scenes do still stand up really well - like the iconic image of Nosferatu's shadow climbing the stairs. Others - like the attempt to show the coach travelling an phenomenal speed - well, not so much.
I still find it a beautiful film, though, and am delighted to have seen it with the organ accompaniment (and a glass of cheap red wine). There was a vague suggestion as we left that they might do more films with live music, and I really hope they do.
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Kids these days, they don't know they're born. Demanding money with menaces, I ask you!
...also, I miss the smell of candle-roasted turnip...
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I did notice a lot more people out on foot at around 7pm than I normally see at that time on a Wednesday - but no-one came to our door after I got home.
I was well chuffed the year I was at October-Whitby and discovered Safeway was selling pre-carved swedes complete with tea-light ready to use.
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Wow! That is something I have never seen. And I'm not sure whether to be horrified or delighted :)
Do people in northerly parts still carve turnips? Everyone looked at me like I was batshit crazy the first year I suggested it in Oxford... it was all pumpkins round there, even in the 90s.
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Several people with fond (or not so fond) memories of them as kids.
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The upside of turnips compared to pumpkins though is that, once carved (mutilated/scratched/sworn at), they last for months. They shrivel a bit (looking a bit like shrunken heads by the end) but you can use them again and again through the winter months. (I remember a row of them sat on the wall watching the village fireworks) plus, I like raw turnip but can't bear pumpkin in any form.
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We in Oxfordshire carved turnips (swedes) when I was a child - I don't know anyone who had a pumpkin until the late 1990s. We did apple bobbing*, and gruesome games (involving peeled grapes for eyeballs, spaghetti intestines, that kind of thing), and Hallowe'en parties, but not door-to-door visiting.
* At home, not just at Brownies/Cubs. We supplied everyone in the street with apples, and most of the school, courtesy of the Apple Trees Of Doom.
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Frankensteenies?
a sheet-ghost
Now now, no call for that: some credit for at least making the effort I think.
I'm been rather fond of the super-fast carriage. It seems a nicely surreal note, in that there's no very sensible explanation for why on earth they bothered doing it like that. It still works well as a jolt to the senses, albeit of a different kind.
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And another thing - I bet most of the pumpkins sold this week don't end up as food in the average UK household.
I bet most of the pumpkins sold this week don't end up as food in the average UK household.
The Carving ones are the huge things sold for next to nothing
The Edible ones are smaller, about twice the size of a large grapefruit retailing at a bit more than the cost of the huge things.
Of course they are both edible but by implying that one type is specifically for carving is a bit sneaky. Even James Martin seems to be in on it....
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