the best thing

So I've been listening to an album by Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends fairly solidly for the last week -- I'm still not tired of it. I love sea shanties. I really love them.

I understand that they might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I think they're bloomin marvellous. Wikipedia defines a sea shanty as follows:

A shanty (also spelled "chantey," "chanty") is a type of work song that was once commonly sung to accompany labour on board large merchant sailing vessels

Basically, they were songs sung by men who spent months at a time on the sea in huge old ships -- crashing through the waves, hauling the anchor and climbing the rigging. Tempting as it is to romanticise the kind of life they might have led, in reality it must have been an exhilarating, gut-wrenching, back-breaking, rollicking, superstition-ridden, stinking and intensely communal way of life.

Yet despite all this, the songs they sang -- passed down over hundreds of years through oral tradition and memory -- speak so candidly of love, loneliness, brotherhood, insobriety, women, work, and hope. I love their simplicity and honesty, and there's something about a group of male voices (often with little or no instrumental accompaniment) that I find irresistible.

As well as all that, I have some very very fond memories of sea shanty weekends in Whitby with my Granny. These weekends were held annually (I'm not sure if they happen still -- I hope they do) and drew dozens of sea shanty groups into the various pubs and taverns of the town for many many performances over the weekend -- some less formal than others.

My Granny and I went together for several years (starting, I think, when I was about 6) and they were very formative experiences for me. I remember the delicious sense of naughtiness as she would take me into a pub full of beer, smoke and old grey-bearded sea dogs to listen to the sea shanties. I'd sit there, utterly enthralled at the bare brazen singing, raw and somehow deeply important.

Whitby, North Yorkshire

The audience sat around me on rickety wooden stools and threadbare armchairs would be roused and join in the exuberant music. Surrounded by the tapping of feet, banging of tables and clapping of hands, I was desperate to learn the words so that I could join in. It's amazing how quickly you can pick them up. Other songs would be more melancholy -- singing of longing after months on the sea -- and the singing would become a general hum hanging over the room, acapella and tipping over some invisible boundary into the profoundly spiritual. I would hold my breath as I saw grown men cry and the atmosphere became electric.

After nights of shanties fit to burst, my Granny and I would wind our way in the dark back to the cottage we were staying in, stopping off at a fish and chip shop for a cone of chips on the way back. Even now, listening to shanties brings a distinct taste of hot vinegary chips to my tongue.

revue de l'artiste

The Artist - 2012, dir. Michel Hazanavicius

I wasn't sure what to expect from this film -- I vaguely knew that it might be a silent film, I'd seen an intriguing trailer for it, but basically thought that any film released in 2012 in black and white and possibly silent must be worth a watch, if only to see if they could pull it off.

Put simply, they did.

It's set in the late 1920s, and the main character is an old-school melodrama film star called George Valentin, who is basking in the heyday of his fame and success. Not giving anything away, time passes and the film industry progresses to the stage of pioneering the first 'talkie' films -- something Valentin thinks will never catch on.

The film as a whole -- while having plenty of genuinely funny moments -- is actually a lot more melancholy than I imagined. It's directed and shot beautifully, and I was surprised at just how little I missed any speech (there were some dialogue subtitles, but mainly you were left to work it out for yourself). It's to the credit of the actors that you just didn't really feel that you needed any dialogue.

I suppose it was out of such necessity that melodrama was born, but for The Artist to be able to distinguish between the over-acting of the movie-within-the-movie and the film itself is impressive. The film itself is subject to the same constraints as the silent films of the twenties, but I wasn't left with the feeling that any of it was unnecessarily over-acted.

I enjoyed the elements of the film that mirror characteristics of the original silents (like the characterisation of the little jack russell side-kick), and in a sense I think those sometimes blurred boundaries were reflected in George Valentin's life -- he expected the same reaction from people in real-life as those in his movies, and was eventually left behind in a world that made him increasingly irrelevant.

Overall, I was left with the urge to watch some of the old originals (my knowledge of them is lacking to say the least), after being given a new appreciation of their artistry.

And that, I suppose, was the point.