By the Skin of Our Teeth

I've been meaning to start old-fashioned link-based blogging for two or three months now, for posts that get too long for Twitter. I thought I'd wait until I got layout sorted, and maybe a new site, with the tabs I want for books, films, misc and so forth, but fuck that. It can be dealt with later.

Do other people also experience earworms of favourite lines from films and TV shows playing in their heads?

This morning, I had this, from the first episode of Kenneth Clark's Civilisation:

The decontextualisation of hearing it just at that moment, 2 mins 53-54 into the video, is important, and allows it to become riff-like - without all the preamble about Western Civilisation that now sounds so chauvinistic and, if you're charitable, embarrassing, in the modern multicultural intersectional ferment of internet, academia and migration.

One of my old university tutors later went on to teach a course about this series, so it has an extra layer of resonance for me that it might not for the average history buff of my age (too young to have seen it on telly as a kid).

For I don't know how long: 12 years, maybe longer, I've been accumulating bits and pieces I'd use in mixes, if I made mixes, and this is one of them, to be underlaid with a snippet of the introductory organ music from the very start of the episode.

For many years, I felt like that, simple as: that I was getting through life by the skin of my teeth. In a way I can now put it in the past tense, because I'm better, and I discovered that my health was not quite as precarious as I'd assumed for my whole adult life previously. So it would feel more right than ever to put this line in a mix.

It resonates with me like The Streets' 'Turn the Page', but with, pleasingly, less ego in its few words*.

But I know this will be a hard decade and a hard future, and I woke up from my Rip van Winkle slumber into a dystopia, so it also continues to feel as if we are getting through by the skin of our teeth, in present-continuous.

I am still not sure when I'll manage to learn to create mixes, and put a few of these things together. There's a world of activities and travel and social life to catch up on, and things I didn't seem to be able to do before, which I now can. And there are only so many hours in a day, and even if I am a lot better, I don't have the energy levels of those baffling people who apparently manage to do everything. So for the moment, however long that is, the ideas remain in words and snippets.

*On the ironies of ego and non-achievement which have marked the last twenty or so years of my life, one of my favourite ever things, other than The Royal Tenenbaums (which, okay, is more about not fulfilling early promise) is this quote from A Dance to the Music of Time:

Trapnel wanted, among other things, to be a writer, a dandy, a lover, a comrade, an eccentric, a sage, a virtuoso, a good chap, a man of honour, a hard case, a spendthrift, an opportunist, a raisonneur; to be very rich, to be very poor, to possess a thousand mistresses, to win the heart of one love to whom he was ever faithful, to be on the best of terms with all men, to avenge savagely the lightest affront, to live to a hundred full of years and honour, to die young and unknown but recognized the following day as the most neglected genius of the age. Each of these ambitions had something to recommend it from one angle or another, with the possible exception of being poor - the only aim Trapnel achieved with unqualified mastery - and even being poor, as Trapnel himself asserted, gave the right to speak categorically when poverty was discussed by people like Evadne Clapham.