Thursday, January 19, 2012

Polari as she is spoken...

As I'm to gather my thoughts for our Finnegans Wake blog, I thought I'd post this YouTube link that Paul D. Brazill was kind enough to send me. Polari features a bit, just so you'll have some sense that I tried to stick to some sort of theme.

Paul's blog disappeared suddenly in an ominous seeming way yesterday, so I'm very glad to find out that it was only one of those Google glitches. Which are common enough that someone should invent a word for them. Like, say, "googlitches".

21 comments:

  1. I love Googlitches. Hmm, I hope not Google-itches, though!

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  2. Both good words--both bad experiences, Kathleen.

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  3. Seana

    Ahhh, Kenneth Williams. Such a shame that he's virtually unknown in America.

    Wiki says this:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Williams

    But you have to catch him on radio or the rare good Carry Ons

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  4. No he's not a name I'm familiar with. But when I was a kid in Denver, there was some late night movie channel that used to play all the Carry On movies, which for some reason our family always watched together. I am sure I did not understand half the double entendre, but we were all highly amused by them anyway. I don't remember them well enough now to know what were the good ones and what were the bad ones.

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  5. Seana

    Michael Sheen (he of the Queen and Frost/Nixon etc.) does an uncanny Williams in this BBC film based on his posthumously published diaries:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkF_KqcQD6o

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  6. Thank you. I will definitely watch that.

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  7. Seana

    And here's Williams doing what he did best in many ways, just telling stories...

    These are about his experiences in the army:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_YbbmCit_s&feature=related

    He uses a lot of Polari.

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  8. Watched that army bit and will have to watch more. He is a marvelous storyteller. I'll enjoy the Fabulosa movie more after I have more sense of him.

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  9. I don't know if anyone is still reading down here, but a funny thing happened when I was watching that Kenneth Williams clip. I was looking at the audience shots as they came up and I'd think, hmm that face looks familiar. And then another would and another would. But not any faces I could put names to. I started thinking that maybe now ALL English faces look familiar to me.

    It wasn't till I watched the opening and saw that my beloved--and now long dead--Gordon Jackson was in the audience that this was not exactly what you would call an ordinary audience. More like the type you'd see at the Oscars.

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  10. I liked the Polari better than the English on this.

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  11. I liked the winding through what I think must be London streets as an accompaniment. Made me quite nostalgic for England.

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  12. I thought -- or fancied -- that I recognized a street near the hotel where I stayed the last time I was in London, the dampest room ever offered at a price for human habitation.

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  13. I LIVE in the dampest room ever offered for a price for human habitation. The envelopes seal themselves shut before I can use them. The cough drops melt into pools of colored sugar water.

    It's strange that it was drier when I actually lived at sea level.

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  14. I have never heard cough drops put to such poetic use.

    This hotel was rather Dickensian. I hung up some washing the day arrived. The clothes were no drier when I left four nights later.

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  15. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  16. My v-word on that one, by the way, was appropriate to the comment, or at least its last four letters were. The word was vamemist.

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  17. Jove could feature in to the weather aspect of dampness.

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