La Belle et La Bete British Film Institute revival my first horror film

La Belle et La Bete Jean Cocteau 1946

I saw this film for the first time in about 1948 on a very early 12 inch black and white television. Lord Reith saw to it that the limited BBC broadcasts were of top quality.

I was four/five and this film scared me stiff and fascinated me at the same time. I was very precocious and even then I knew I was watching something truly remarkable. The hands holding the candelabras, the falling petals, the blowing curtains. I was so terrified I did not watch it the end and it is only recently that I completed the film on YouTube which is no longer possible as it has been taken down. I had not missed much and it was just as I remembered.

I am so pleased the the British Film Institute has shown the film. It seems it has been made into an opera  by Philip Glass but the original sound track is the one for me. That was scary too. 

Delight of Painting in Oils in Photoshop

Joy in the Winter Garden

In 2014 I have decided to author an iBook with all the whistles and bells but to do this I have to master the new Photoshop, dread horror, gasp. The old Photoshop was daunting but the new is even scarier as it now includes Photoshop Raw. Ahhhhhhhh.......

There was nothing for it but to upgrade to Mavarik on my Mac so I can preview the ibook and learn how to use the new Adobe iCloud suite. When I started in this world in 2007 everything was new and one could get away with a lot but today everyone is so good.

I started in September with Premier Pro and that was not too difficult, then I began on Photoshop CC, masks. I need to use masks. Photoshop is tricky as it is not intuitive. You cannot play your way out of a problem. Once the error sign arrives there is little you can do but start to research and that can take hours.

Photoshop Raw was not too difficult to grasp as it is really just a iPhoto but a bit better. Snag comes as now one can add this non destructive edit as a filter in PS. To the uneducated this can be a nightmare and as yet I have not got to the bottom of it so I rarely use it.

Masks took 6 weeks. They are really hard as there are so many of them. It seems there are infinite ways of adding a mask with channels, paths, layer mask, clipping masks, alpha channels and on and on and on and I have just about managed it...... I think.

So for Xmas as I need to draw I bought the new Wacum tablet. The one you can draw on like paper and on New Years Eve when I knew that Applecare and the shop would be open I had a go. I needed both as the tablet does not come with a tiny connection that is absolutely vital and I had to upgrade my Mac  which if anyone has done this takes 5 hours and both are not intuitive.

This is a mashup of all the Art History Brushes

On New Year's Day I started on brushes. These are complex too but the results have been worth the effort. Magic.  I can turn any photo into an oil painting better than I could ever realise in real life. The process actually teaches you how it is done but quickly and without the mess. It is not easy to do although there are apps that will do this for you but actually getting in and messing up the pixels is so liberating. Love it.

Also the camera is so good at composition. It gets it right most of the time. I am good at drawing but not that good. It is frustrating because it takes time to work out how the brushes work and there is a History Brush that doesn't work most of the time unless you know the trick. It is snapshot, by the way, it the history brush refuses to work take a snapshot in History and it will.  Photoshop Help, Google and Yahoo do not tell you this. Took a morning's research.

I just enjoy doing this so much I think I could become addicted. Here's a Paris Scene which is half way through the process and I cannot wait to start on Venice!

2014 is off to a good start and hopefully this year I shall not be so grumbly.

Welcome 2014 Janette Miller in Auckland

2013 has been an exceptional year for me! Quite unexpected and in some ways unbelievable. At the ripe old age of 70 when one's life is supposed to be over and there is nothing left to which to look forward a year pops up and delivers some of the goals that you thought you had missed arrives by magic without you doing a thing.

I have two blogs, one for my family Janette Miller's Strange Life, where I can reminisce  about the past without boring my family stiff, I get very few views but it is good social history and one day a great grandchild might, just might be interested.

This blog is where I get things out of my system so I can be a bit grumbly on occasions, a bit like the character Victor Meldrum who finds life in his mature years unbelievable! This year I shall try to be more positive if I can so I shall take this opportunity of saying just why 2013 has been so strange and yes exceptional and none of it was of my making.

Putting aside that access to enough B12 healed my compromised nervous system and why UK doctors fail to give patients enough injections of a vitamin necessary to do this I shall never understand. The fact that my garden has been ravishing thanks in part to a glorious summer here in Auckland and I watered it, my year has been exceptional because of the patronage and friendship of one man who 56 years ago saw in a tiny 14 year old, mousy, formally uneducated child something that made her special to him.
Although none of us knew it in 1958 this man who at 44 was famous but not a superstar has gone on to icon status and taken all of us who he favoured along with him. 2013 was the centenary of Lord Benjamin Britten's birth and as one of the few left standing who worked with him and knew him I became part of these festivities without lifting a finger.

Nothing could be stranger than finding oneself part of such an illustrious scene 56 years on. If I had been told then that a tiny part in a children's opera would lead to my place in posterity I should never have believed it or that I should have to wait all that time for recognition that what I was asked to do by Britten was quite extraordinary. It still is.

Again this recognition is reinforced because at the time of the actual broadcast of  Britten's masterpiece Peter Morley's 1959 The Turn of the Screw for Associated Rediffusion which was even then an artistic triumph in public was for me a personal family disaster.

Far from my family being proud that their 16 year old relative had the honour of being in this prestigious production my family who gathered expectantly to watch their relative at 11 pm on Xmas Eve  1959 on UK TV hated it. They hated it. They watched in total silence and I could feel the atmosphere going from bad to worse. At the end of Act 1 a stunned family audience were speechless. No applause, no we are so proud of you, just silence. My aunt who was there with a male cousin from Argentina who I only met twice in my life, was shocked. Her grim face said it all.

Nobody said anything. It was after midnight and the TV and tape recorder that had been my Xmas present were turned off. I dared to ask if my family enjoyed it and my aunt speaking for all of them said NO! It was like a funeral. What should have been a joyous occasion was like a funeral. Although my mother had prepared a delicious after viewing meal nobody stayed to eat it. Coats were brought and they all went home. My mother and father too were very subdued about the performance. No praise of any sort was given and we went to bed.  They all returned for a repeat performance for  Act 2 with a similar reaction! Three months later my father wiped the tape as he needed it for his amateur radio.

And yet Britten knew what I had done for him was exceptional. Flora for that was my part, is the hardest role to cast in the opera. It is hard to grasp that casting a girl singer for this role in the 1950's could be so difficult but Britten found it impossible. He had had no idea of how to write for a girl child. Boys yes, he did it all the time but a girl? There were just no little girls who sang in the 1950's. Britten had searched for a child since 1954 and never found one. Henry James' had described Flora as An old, old woman, consequently Britten who was working with an adult Flora made no concessions  and Flora's aria is one of the most difficult to sing in the entire opera as it is high, uses intervals singers hate and orchestrally exposed.  It is terrifying. Britten was brilliant at casting and he knew that for The Screw to succeed theatrically it had to have a child not an adult pretending to be a child. He was so determined to do this that after the original Venice production he would not allow The Screw to be performed again until he found a Flora. He had already auditioned 40 little girls and gave up hope. The Screw remained on the shelf. And then as if by magic I turned up.

Britten knew I was special. He went out of his way to get to know me and help me. He watched me grow up.  I think I may have been the only girl of 19 he ever got to know. Unknown to me I became a favourite. He was so kind. I was given seats for opera's. Invitations to swim, rides alone in the car. He was interested in what I was doing and talked freely as one does to a colleague. I was privileged to be mentored by such a man. I was around Aldeburgh for 5 years and as I grew our friendship deepened.  I knew first he was fond of me as Jennifer Vyvyan told me "Ben is so fond of you Flora", they called me Flora.

My family ensured that I really never enjoyed the success of The Screw.

So it has been somewhat gratifying to discover that the British Film Institute has remastered the iconic recording and shown it  in London to great acclaim in 2013. I am told the print looks magnificent and I am in it. The TV cameramen made me look so beautiful.

Today my family would have been flabbergasted. They were so wrong and so unkind that night 56 years ago. When the BBC asked me recently what my family reaction was the interviewer was shocked. That bit got cut out of the interview. But I do find it incredible that that performance that was just at the start of my career should give me my posterity. I am there in Britten's first TV production for all time for this will always be preserved as it really is his masterpiece. I have been so fortunate. 2013 will be hard to replicate and in fact I don't need to.

BBC Death Comes to Pemberley or how to ruin a good Novel by PD James

Enjoyed BBC's Death Comes to Pemberley so I decided to read the PD James's book and compare I first did this exercise when I was ten when I compared Olivier's film of Richard III with the Bard's. I was very precocious. Both adaptations were miles from the originals and I wonder just what PD James thought when she visited the BBC set. Was she aware of the hatchet job? 

For an Xmas murder mystery I suppose the BBC felt they needed the hanging and the arrival of the King's messenger  in the form of Elizabeth Bennett as Miss Marple and indeed the series did prompt me to read the original book which I loved but I cannot see the justification to reduce a well known author's work to such a major and unfortunate re-write. The confidence of the BBC Drama Department to be able to do this and get away with it amazes me. No on second thoughts it doesn't. The BBC have always been arrogant.

Ms James has penned a delightful tongue in cheek parody of Ms Austen and the book is cleverly braided to amuse lovers of the original. Mary, the plain daughter gets married leaving the more attractive Kitty on the shelf, Mrs Bennett is left at home and just when the novel is ending Ms James offers another touch of genius. The solution in the book as to who is to look after the unwanted child which in the TV series Mr Darcy accepts to meet today's politically correct standards, is  given to a Miss Harriet Smith of Highbury and comes highly recommended by a Mrs Knightly. No happy ending for the child!

The court case in the book is tried in London at the Old Bailey. Louisa, the mother of the child does not recognise Wickham at the inquest. Colonel Fitzwilliam is not the bastard he is made out to be,  quite the opposite and if I were him I should sue and Mrs Darcy knows her place and plays no part in the denouement. The adaptation is a travesty. Why the BBC did not stick to the original novel I shall never know as PD James is much better than hack screenwriters. It is lucky I did not read the book before seeing the BBC's version as I should be so furious my Xmas would have been ruined.

 So congratulations PD James, pity your publishers and agents did not get script control. I hope many more are now encouraged to read your book. At US$6.50  on Kindle it is a great read.

Pandora Bracelets an Unhappy Pandora Experience

Last week I tried to buy a Pandora Bracelet!  This is a worldwide company and they pride themselves on offering the Pandora Experience but like the Pandora of Greek Legend opening the Pandora box can lead to a nightmare.

The Pandora advertising is lush and inviting, the web experience is all that can be asked for. The new products for Xmas are gorgeous and are displayed enticingly so after a evenings deliberation all that is needed is one's credit card and a visit to the local Pandora agent.

Simple? Well no! For me trying to buy one of these bracelets was very difficult indeed.

And this is where the experience turns to custard, for me anyway for Essence the product that is heavily marketed on the web site is not so easy to buy unless you live near certain Pandora stockists. In the strange world of Pandora marketing certain stockists come first, the rest second and the poor customer who actually wants to buy that which is extensively marketed last.

I do not live near a favoured store, the store has to pay Pandora for the privilege and I found that my local stockist although they do all the donkey work of showing me the initial range cannot sell me the advertised items. Initially I found this unbelievable. To buy these precious  mass produced objects I have to travel many kilometers through traffic to parts of the town I usually do not visit or wait until well after Xmas when Pandora may let my local stockist sell them or may not.

When I complained to the Marketing Division in Australia I was given plausible explanations of why it was impossible for Pandora to help me like sending the wanted articles to my local stockist.

It seems it is all my fault. I did not read the small print at the end of the scroll down saying that this major collection could only be bought at selected stores. Silly me as I though as they had advertised it so widely they wanted to sell it to me. It seems that the only place these bracelets can be bought is in a few stores in Australia and New Zealand as it is an experiment so poor old New Yorkers who are featured cannot buy these either.

It is my fault I do not live near a franchise and there is nothing that the customer services can do to help! This was a first for me. Never before have I met a marketing PR  department who turned away business. Usually customer services  fall over backwards to help. Not at Pandora.

It seems although Pandora rules the waves when it comes to who can sell what but when it comes to special offers that it supports, the stockist is responsible. I missed on one by three days as when I bought my bracelet the assistant who knew of the offer did not tell me until after I had purchased and when I asked Pandora later could my purchase be considered for a gift  was firmly put in my place. Not their responsibility. Pandora has nothing to do with stockists except  to arrange special offers and have the power to not let them stock what the customer wants.

After a week of trying I came to the conclusion that Pandora does not want customers that actually buy what the customer wants. It is all for the retailers. My local stockist only has outdated goods.

It is no surprise that Pandora's many imitators have such an easy ride as in desperation one turns to them. Once one makes the change to another brand one is unlikely to change as the idea is to make a collection.

So that was my Pandora Experience for what it is worth. I write this in the scant hope that the Pandora bosses will take on board that all is not well in their world. Customer satisfaction used to be number one priority not with Pandora.

Now every time I look at the bracelet I  managed to buy I remember what grief it has caused me. I am even writing about it now! But this is the last as I am cured and no doubt my bank balance will be much improved by the experience.

Big warning if Google asks you to 'delink' don't. I lost my DIYTVMovies YouTube Channel!

Big warning if Google asks you to 'delink' don't.

When Google instructs you to delink when trying to link to a Google+ page that won't work don't do it because if you do you will lose your legacy YouTube Channel.  Delink ought to read DELETE. Once you have delinked  your YouTube Channel is in limbo. It is enough to make one cry and I did. Eight years of work gone in a puff.

Last night was perhaps one of the most most challenging of my life. My YouTube Channel DIYTVMovies which I started in 2008 and had over 70 original videos and I think 54,000 views has all my precious Book Binding videos, and my DIYTV Movies was removed permanently on one click which Google told me to do and it looks as if it is gone forever.  Google+ is a pain. I had to move to it and Google promised I would lose nothing and my videos were safe.

Google are trying to retrieve it. I had a comforting email from Stephanie with a load of click here instructions which I did to the letter. I got the temp page back but not DIYTVMovies which confidently tells me that this Channel has been removed permanently. And I really have not done anything to deserve this.

I keep my personal videos separate from my work as I don't want to bore my friends stiff. I did cry! It was like coming home and finding your house burnt down. I have some up on my personal channel but now many are missing. The ones on my garden have two versions one which I show to you and one short director's commentary showing how I did It. Those have gone.

So has my CV!! Never bore my friends with that so it was never up on my personal channel and now it never will be. It was the first video I ever made for a major job I could not take and it took hours of compiling. You going to get these too if I can find them.

I felt like death but I am a careful 'little thing' and I did back up! Today I spent hours trolling through old tapes, I still have a tape machine bought at huge expense when tape went out of fashion but today has been worth every penny. Then I have been able to download from the net and I shall backup everything. Take weeks but hey.......

It is a nightmare but every cloud has a silver lining and I found some nice shots of my late husband  Miles playing The Organ Grinder which I can use. So fingers crossed that Google can get it head around this.

Big warning if Google asks you to 'delink' don't. I am not alone a glance at the forum and there are hundreds in the same boat. 

Kiri Te Kanawa at 70 on This Week TVNZ One

Kiri Te Kanawa New Zealand's opera diva gave a very frank interview on NZTV on the approach of her 70th birthday. In my 20's Te Kanawa was one of my peers that I truly admired. She attained a standard of excellence and position that I strived to achieve. True I had London at my feet and my own dressing room at the Palace Theatre Shaftesbury Ave but it was a  comedy lead in a musical and not at Covent Garden!

All my life I had envied Te Kanawa. She seemed to have that silver spoon of door opening that was not given to the rest of us. For her first performance of the Countess in Figaro at Covent Garden  which  I was lucky enough to attended she was given a year and a young conductor, James Robertson, to prepare. I was given two days to learn my part and no dress rehearsal!

Her career went from strength to strength while the rest of us had to struggle although it must be admitted that my career has been exceptional and not without its rewards. Modestly I shall admit that in 1982 Auckland made me Women the Year for services to Opera and Ballet. I had stood up to the Council in a manner that would have made Joan of Arc proud!

So it was with some trepidation that a friend thought I should be introduced to the Diva. I have suffered at the hands of divas before as my introduction to Margot Fonteyn had proved a warning to meeting one's idols. She was horrible to a little 13 year old and later regretted it and apologised. I knew Kiri had repaid James Robertson by getting him sacked.

This took place on the night that Te Kanawa was made a Doctor of Music at Auckland University. The occasion was not one of the most memorable of my life. Like Madame Du Barry at the hands of  petulant Marie Antoinette my introduction to Te Kanawa proved to be an embarrassment for all concerned except the Diva.

I was introduced as the woman who had done so much for opera in Auckland.  Madam Te Kanawa was not impressed. The Diva turned, looked me in the eyes and turned away and continued talking as though I had never existed. Not a word was said. I was cut, dismissed, put in my place. I was definitely not getting my name on her Christmas Card list. Consequently I gave Madam Te Kanawa a wide birth.

Sadly this sort of behaviour has not been a one off. It is written about in some detail in Kiri - The Unofficial Biography. It appears after forcing the City Council to build her an opera house her behaviour was so outrageous when asked to sing in it that she was banned from singing there again and has had her statue removed. The place is now empty for most of the year. A white elephant to a diva.

Even news reporters were intimidated by her until last night when a very chastened yet still feisty Kiri gave what could be her last major interview on NZ TV. But Kiri has soldiered on in spite of her reputation.

She looked tired and sad in spite of some classy dresses. She gave the impression of well was it worth it? She appeared to be trying to justify her lack of self control and her rudeness to a country that gave her everything. Kiri had everything, money, fame, publicity, help when other singers equally good like our Dame Malvina Major had to struggle for any recognition and funding at all. She complained that she had had it hard! We know she didn't. Kiri has been treated all her life like a princess.

Kiri and I are of a similar age but at this moment I do not envy her. In fact I felt sorry for her. Maybe I did not hit the heights but I certainly did not leave a trail of rudeness behind me.

But she soldiers on. Her rudeness was still visible as she bullied young singers in a recording studio which is not the way to get the best out of young inexperienced singers. She does not know the secret of when to stop. We all have to stop one day.

Divas whether balletic or operatic can be extremely unpleasant to deal with. Katherine Battle a delicious coloratura soprano had the reputation of Battle by name and Battle by nature till at last no opera house would take the chance and employ her. I had a run in with a current USA Diva in Wellington when this said madonna refused to go on one night and had the president of the opera down begging on his knees before she would condescend to sing.

Unwisely this terrifying woman was still employed by the company in opera I was directing and turned up singing a different translation which with copyright being so litigious these days was a breach of contract and then when given the direction to stand still as she was jiggling about poured out a stream of bad language the like of which I have never heard before or since.

It was a case of she goes or I went and she went. I hope that she has changed. I doubt it.

So take care to be very nice on the way up and down. It is advisable  to leave an attractive legacy. These days with the growth of the internet your sins will find you out. One or two are bouts of bad behaviour  are allowable, none of us is perfect but years of rudeness will reap a grim reward.