If anything better reflects the state of British culture and the British hatred for intelligence and difficulty, this article in today's Observer must take the cake. Funny how the Americans seem seduced by this shite too.
Against all expectations, the elephant was not in the room. Come Friday evening, at the end of its first full day as an art object, the elephant had probably gone for a lie down, drained by all the attention it had received.
The previous night, at the glamorous opening in the decidedly un-Beverly Hills setting of a disused warehouse at the end of a cul-de-sac nestled close to a downtown freeway interchange, the elephant had upstaged some of Hollywood's finest. Painted red, adorned with gold fleur-de-lis, the elephant merged into the wallpaper behind it. There was nothing that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie could do other than gawp.
The stars, who also included Jude Law and Keanu Reeves, had gathered for the first LA show by the Bristol-born prankster, provocateur, graffiti artist and general meddler, Banksy. Known for his street art and interventions in Britain, his show in LA, 'Barely Legal', was his first large-scale exhibition in the US. Complete with valet parking and a retinue of publicists, it is by far the most high profile of Banksy's foreign jaunts, which have also taken him to Paris, New York and Palestine.
The show includes pieces of British iconography, such as a Guardsman on Horse Guards Parade atop a pantomime horse, in addition to work aimed specifically at the local audience. A police van dominates the entrance to the exhibition, decorated with a picture of Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz carrying a noose. Occupying an entire wall next to it is a painting reinterpreting an American icon, the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. In Banksy's interpretation, the scene is given an urban setting with a group of protesters raising the flag on top of a car.
The world of Brad, Angelina, Jude and Keanu is a long way from Banksy's origins as a 14-year-old schoolboy in Bristol dabbling in graffiti when it was considered an aggressive form of counterculture. The images that followed, daubed illegally on London's walls, paved the way for the trend of appropriating public space by graffiti artists. His chutzpah rose to a higher plane earlier this year when he sprayed nine paintings on the 425-mile barrier that separates Israel from Palestinian territories. A stencil on a Bristol building was allowed to remain in place by the city council after the public voiced overwhelming support.
Yet somehow, despite his mainstream appeal, Banksy has lost none of the respect of his more 'underground' British peers. 'People have been doing graffiti [in the UK] for about 30 years, and it's time it was taken seriously,' said 'Tizer', a south London graffiti artist who works on public murals and on education projects with young offenders. 'When people talk about graffiti they talk about Banksy. Famous people have always come to his exhibitions because his stuff is easy to read.'
A week before the Los Angeles exhibition, Banksy visited Disneyland, somehow managing to place an inflatable figure dressed as a Guantanamo detainee alongside a railroad ride. A short film of the escapade runs inside the LA show. In the same darkened screening room a glass case displays another of his recent interventions: the Paris Hilton CD doctored by Banksy, which he carried out with the help of Los Angeles-based producer Danger Mouse. Enormous cockroaches had been placed inside the display case. Like much of Banksy's work, it is an overt statement. But of what, precisely?
'There's more than one thing going on in every picture,' said Tarik, a chef who had seen Banksy's work in a magazine and decided he had to see it for himself. 'There's a lot of tension in the pictures.'
Tarik gestures at a large painting showing a group of cavemen carrying spears approaching some shopping trolleys. 'European artists are a lot more bold and willing to fight,' he says. 'The concept of opposing your government is full of bullshit here.'
Banksy himself had displayed a fine sense of bullshit in a interview he gave to Roger Gastman published in the LA Weekly. 'Some of the paintings have taken literally days to make,' he confided. 'Essentially, it's about what a horrible place the world is, how unjust and cruel and pointless life is, and ways to avoid thinking about all that. One of the best ways turned out to be sitting in a warehouse making paintings about cruelty, pain and pointlessness.'
Gastman, who edits a magazine called Swindle which features a longer interview with Banksy, thinks that the humour will not be lost on the LA audience. 'His work is fun and witty when you see it in the street,' he said. 'No matter what serious questions I asked, his answers are very reflective of the humour in his work.'
In keeping with his secretive persona - there are no pictures of Banksy and his identity remains in doubt - the artist himself was probably not present at the opening. But that didn't stop people asking. 'Is the artist here,' asked J Mitchell, a singer. 'Are you the artist?'
Josh, a computer programmer and stencil artist was impressed by the scale of the work. 'He doesn't do discreet like other stencil artists,' he said. 'These are supposed to be here, in a gallery. He does it big, which is what graffiti artists have been doing for a long time.'
Josh did, however, take exception to the heavily armed security guards watching over the exhibition. 'They confiscated my Sharpie [indelible marker] on the way in,' he said.
But in a town that takes its animal welfare very seriously, some took exception to the presence of the elephant. On entering, visitors were presented with a flyer reading: 'There's an elephant in the room. There's a problem we never talk about. The fact is that life isn't getting any fairer. 1.7 billion people have no access to clean drinking water. 20 billion people live below the poverty line. Every day hundreds of people are made to physically be sick by morons at art shows telling them how bad the world is but never actually doing something about it. Anybody want a free glass of wine?'
Anarchy Jordan, another artist at the first public view of the show on Friday night, had his doubts. 'I don't know if he's selling out, but it's sad,' he said of the elephant exhibit. 'It must have cost a lot of money.'
Some of the money will have come from the numbered prints on sale for $500 each on the glitzy opening night. The rest will have come from the current market for his work, with Banksy's pictures selling for upwards of £40,000, according to his London agent Steve Lazarides. Anarchy Jordan was impressed by the subversiveness of some of the pieces, including the familiar Paramount films logo bearing the word Paranoid. 'Coming to LA and doing this is subversive," he said. 'After all, LA is the origin of so much nonsense.'
Jay Buim, writing on the yeahyouknow blog, however, was sold on the 'insanely rad installation'. 'Banksy,' wrote Buim, 'Y'all went up and done it. Sho Nuff.'
Sunday, September 17, 2006
Saturday, September 16, 2006
Robert Heger and the music of the Third Reich
Last night I revisited the Six Partitas and Toccata by Robert Heger, based on the chorale Nun jauchzet alle Landen Gott zu ehren, Op.41, based on what the announcer describes as Psalm 66 but sounds for all peoples that on earth do dwell like the Old Hundredth. Maybe it's the slightly opaque 1968 ORF recording (Heger conducting the Bamberg SO) but it's a terrifyingly impressive work, all insistently glassy divisi strings and barking brass, not unlike postwar Hindemith parodying Bruckner. It's made for TV programmes about the Alps or the retreat from Kursk.
Heger was active as an operatic conductor in Nazi musical life, although doesn't figure in Kater's studies of same, so maybe there's hope.
Much Nazi-era music was rubbish - Max Trapp's Second Piano Concerto, despite Walter Gieseking and Willem Mengelberg's best efforts on an Orfeo remaster a few years back, is a clunker, and the likes of Pepping, Grimm and Orff hardly add to the sum of human happiness. But Wilhelm Furtwangler's gigantic First Symphony, composed in 1941, improves with every airing, and Strauss's late music - notably Die Liebe der Danae - is deathless. Heger - whose lengthy but adorable Violin Concerto I also own as a bootleg - is definitely worth re-appraisal. And what of other names? Siegmund von Hausegger (1872-1948) was a Graz-born conductor and composer and holder in perpetuity of the Most Teutonic Name Ever award, and was a frequently played composer. His orchestral works say it all - Wieland der Schmied, Barbarossa, Natursinfonie (over an hour long - who'd a thunk it?). Gottfried Muller (b.1913) was one of the tiny handful of artists that Hitler kept from the front at all costs - Wieland Wagner was another - largely thanks to his enormous Deutsches Heldenrequiem of 1933.
The template is predictable - stolidly tuneful music, as predictable as Biedermeier furniture, lots of Brahms and Reger - but this does not preclude quality of craft. Joseph Haas (1879-1960) wrote much vocal and choral music, including some intriguing-sounding oratorios for soloists, chorus and ork - based largely on religious and folk themes, which sounds like the very stones and mortar of Blut-und-Boden Nazi prescription - until one realises that after the war Haas was not denazified but achieved high academic office in Munich.
More research needs to be done - not least by me - but until then, Heger's Six Partitas and Toccata needs a few more concert halls to lift the roof off. CPO, and the inestimable Werner Andreas Albert should jump at it.
Heger was active as an operatic conductor in Nazi musical life, although doesn't figure in Kater's studies of same, so maybe there's hope.
Much Nazi-era music was rubbish - Max Trapp's Second Piano Concerto, despite Walter Gieseking and Willem Mengelberg's best efforts on an Orfeo remaster a few years back, is a clunker, and the likes of Pepping, Grimm and Orff hardly add to the sum of human happiness. But Wilhelm Furtwangler's gigantic First Symphony, composed in 1941, improves with every airing, and Strauss's late music - notably Die Liebe der Danae - is deathless. Heger - whose lengthy but adorable Violin Concerto I also own as a bootleg - is definitely worth re-appraisal. And what of other names? Siegmund von Hausegger (1872-1948) was a Graz-born conductor and composer and holder in perpetuity of the Most Teutonic Name Ever award, and was a frequently played composer. His orchestral works say it all - Wieland der Schmied, Barbarossa, Natursinfonie (over an hour long - who'd a thunk it?). Gottfried Muller (b.1913) was one of the tiny handful of artists that Hitler kept from the front at all costs - Wieland Wagner was another - largely thanks to his enormous Deutsches Heldenrequiem of 1933.
The template is predictable - stolidly tuneful music, as predictable as Biedermeier furniture, lots of Brahms and Reger - but this does not preclude quality of craft. Joseph Haas (1879-1960) wrote much vocal and choral music, including some intriguing-sounding oratorios for soloists, chorus and ork - based largely on religious and folk themes, which sounds like the very stones and mortar of Blut-und-Boden Nazi prescription - until one realises that after the war Haas was not denazified but achieved high academic office in Munich.
More research needs to be done - not least by me - but until then, Heger's Six Partitas and Toccata needs a few more concert halls to lift the roof off. CPO, and the inestimable Werner Andreas Albert should jump at it.
Friday, September 15, 2006
Snail-Ways - The New Brit Part 1
Snail-Ways
A new popular vision of holidaying - where home is simply displaced to familiar places in the sun - increasingly defines much of what it is to be British. Paul Stump tries to keep up
The 'New Brit', a term used - maybe coined by - Jonathan Meades, is everywhere and is quasi- Procrustean - he/she/it is a form that can be moulded into any shape. Almost. For there are parameters, there's an event horizon, there's a physics in the way.
So let's investigate what is constant about New Brits; let's bother with the outer limits later and concentrate on the centre that holds.
The New Brit, as was calamitously testified by the recent shamefaced sneaking-out of figures suggesting another plunge in the numbers of pupils studying foreign languages, doesn't do Abroad, and is making sure that his offspring do it even less than he does. No - that's unfair, he does Abroad, but only an anglophone Abroad, which of course isn't really Abroad at all. It's home. Even better, it's home as we want home to appear.
Go to any pub in the United Kingdom. Anywhere, from the Bull's Head in Craswall on an old sheep drover's track across the Black Mountains to the Shipwright's Arms, a squat lonely inn on the grey-green estuarial marshes near Faversham, Magwitch country. Go to dosser's pubs in Aberdeen or roadhouses on the Hog's Back (ah, the Sunday grills of Surrey), yob yachtsmen's watering holes in Burnham-on-Crouch, tall sad old piles where the Catford dealers go. You'll hear the same.
Holidays are only discussed - or 99% of the time, save for the poncey old bag who goes on about Puerto Pollenca - when they have been taken in the US or below Capricorn in Tri-Nations territory, amongst Boks, Ockers and Kiwis.
On and on they go. The food - quantity not quality, always. The sun - you can't beat it. The cars, always the cars - they feel like they're in Clarksonia. Nobody ever discusses a train journey, or a walk (unless it involved a fight, or the threat of one) in any of these countries.
Barstool behaviour now revolves so much about how much or how often one or another has seen Fort Lauderdale or New York or Boston or the Gold Coast or Dunedin or "LA" or Bondi or Manly or the Cape that it's become a form of conceptual tone-painting.
It's a desperate sign when someone who describes driving a preserved Edsel from Frisco to Vegas, or an investigation of New Zealand's bizarre Rimutaka Railway, or having one of the sightless golden moles of the Namib desert crawl into a sleeping bag actually seems dazzlingly interesting. And despite the fact that hacks keep reminding us in the jollying tone of a World Cup or Olympic opening ceremony that this is supposed to be the world-unifying era of the supra-modem, it's just that once every six months the description of a cruise down the Rhine-Neckar canal or a beachhouse in Croatia or their last year in Marienbad would be as refreshing to pub life as having the Damned's first LP on the jukebox. But because New Brit disdains speaking foreign, this isn't going to happen any time soon.
British xenophobia and ignorance, ingested at the Imperial tit, are touchy, incendiary subjects, and are contingent here. Barmen in Setubal knowing how to say 'no ice'; Watney's Red Barrel, yes, yes, we know all that, and thank you Eric Idle, it was funny then and still is.
Brits don't like cleverness, and I gladly if unfashionably concede that learning a foreign language is fucking difficult. People have said to me, 'oh, you've got a gift'. No; just sheer hard work and falling pathetically and repeatedly in love, and I am still less than mother-tongue in French and can get by in German and reading Dutch is sort-of feasible. 'Just make an effort and they'll understand' is a sad cliche, and woefully wide of the mark in Flanders, but New Brit seems to care less and less about even doing that now. New money means new mobility, and that means instead of replicating native squalor with mushy peas and Worthington E in the sun you can now choose relative exotica - Bubba's All-You-Can-Eat; Biggest T-Bones South of Mobile? - under a sun just as balmy.
There was a time when pub conversation and smalltalk centred around exotica that actually was exotic. A scene in Esmonde and Larbey's craftily vicious The Good Life (1975) has Margo Leadbetter rhapsodising about her forthcoming holiday's overture; 'sundowners at the Stanley - that's in Mombasa, of course'. The scenario was meant to be striking for its exceptionableness rather than the expense of its acquisition. This was a contrast to Surbiton. New Brit sees in his peripatetic Sun Belt shamblings an analogue of ordinariness, except with a higher ambient temperature and more meat on the plate. 'There was Bud, 10cents a bottle all night,' slurred one Northampton slaphead to me about wintering in one of the US's independent brewing centres. What was frightening about this statement was that you knew he was referring to the Anheuser-Busch beverage rather than Budvar's finest. But who the fack drinks that? It's from the Czech Republic. Or somewhere. And nobody goes there, spesh not New Brit.
Those who once holidayed in Monte Carlo, as it was then charmingly known, went for snob appeal, expense (one and the same) and sophistication. Grace and Rainier, the casino, eating lobster the wrong way. Harold Steptoe spent 10 sitcom years dreaming of cultivated and strange accents, and of course - to paraphrase in the vernacular - topless birds with big knockers. If you were rich enough, all your friends and flunkeys spoke English anyway. But they went for the extraordinary; it matters not a jot to me if a couple from Nuneaton landed in St Tropez just because they'd got enough money to sample this difference (my italics). It is identical in kind to a holiday in Leningrad to watch Conservatory pianists practise Scriabin or Rachmaninov in freezing rehearsal halls with ice on the windows, before falling hopelessly for one of the corps de ballet in the Kirov.
Paul Bowles once compared air travel before and after WW2 with the wistful 'somehow, the world had changed'. In Bowles' heyday, one travelled either for adventure or for novelty with bourgeois comfort. In the 1950s those who saved hard and managed to hop a ride on Le Train Bleu or the fabulous Mistral went to see if it was all real - the gloss on the palm leaves, the naked flesh, the turquoise shallows. Now, New Brit hops a bird to Fort Lauderdale or Melbourne to see if Desperate Housewives or Neighbours is real. Much as his prole 50s homologue, he finds it is, or thinks so. It is everything he has ever wanted; cheap, showy, bourgeois display and consumption ('and it's all so tidy, no crime, well, apart from downtown, but nobody goes there, the jungle, that is'). New Brit's dreams are tacky as tinsel, as pricey as pearls. In the colonies, he finds them, and can't get enough. And the key? The language barrier? Only with those fucking spic servants.
Given that most English now consists of brand names and slang and management-speak shared around the anglophone world, it's hardly surprising that New Brit finds his centre of gravity where there are just as many people as boring as him, as secretly worried about prostate cancer, who wear the same baseball cap and whose sons can talk about the same Playstation 2s without even the shade of syntactic misunderstanding to intervene.
The Costas? Spain? Never mind the Balearics. Why bother when you don't have to holler at waiter or liftboy, why bother when it's as cheap or cheaper to drink across the border in TJ than it is in Torremolinos?
Brits hate languages. New Brit hates them more - and as long as cheap flights to the moistly welcoming outposts of the language remain, he will go on hating them more and more. Which, for those of us who enjoy the Heuvelland or Chartres or Linz or Salamanca, so much the better. But we spend much more time in pubs here, listening to the anglophone supremacists, than we do over there.
Two vicious cycles. Something must be done.
A new popular vision of holidaying - where home is simply displaced to familiar places in the sun - increasingly defines much of what it is to be British. Paul Stump tries to keep up
The 'New Brit', a term used - maybe coined by - Jonathan Meades, is everywhere and is quasi- Procrustean - he/she/it is a form that can be moulded into any shape. Almost. For there are parameters, there's an event horizon, there's a physics in the way.
So let's investigate what is constant about New Brits; let's bother with the outer limits later and concentrate on the centre that holds.
The New Brit, as was calamitously testified by the recent shamefaced sneaking-out of figures suggesting another plunge in the numbers of pupils studying foreign languages, doesn't do Abroad, and is making sure that his offspring do it even less than he does. No - that's unfair, he does Abroad, but only an anglophone Abroad, which of course isn't really Abroad at all. It's home. Even better, it's home as we want home to appear.
Go to any pub in the United Kingdom. Anywhere, from the Bull's Head in Craswall on an old sheep drover's track across the Black Mountains to the Shipwright's Arms, a squat lonely inn on the grey-green estuarial marshes near Faversham, Magwitch country. Go to dosser's pubs in Aberdeen or roadhouses on the Hog's Back (ah, the Sunday grills of Surrey), yob yachtsmen's watering holes in Burnham-on-Crouch, tall sad old piles where the Catford dealers go. You'll hear the same.
Holidays are only discussed - or 99% of the time, save for the poncey old bag who goes on about Puerto Pollenca - when they have been taken in the US or below Capricorn in Tri-Nations territory, amongst Boks, Ockers and Kiwis.
On and on they go. The food - quantity not quality, always. The sun - you can't beat it. The cars, always the cars - they feel like they're in Clarksonia. Nobody ever discusses a train journey, or a walk (unless it involved a fight, or the threat of one) in any of these countries.
Barstool behaviour now revolves so much about how much or how often one or another has seen Fort Lauderdale or New York or Boston or the Gold Coast or Dunedin or "LA" or Bondi or Manly or the Cape that it's become a form of conceptual tone-painting.
It's a desperate sign when someone who describes driving a preserved Edsel from Frisco to Vegas, or an investigation of New Zealand's bizarre Rimutaka Railway, or having one of the sightless golden moles of the Namib desert crawl into a sleeping bag actually seems dazzlingly interesting. And despite the fact that hacks keep reminding us in the jollying tone of a World Cup or Olympic opening ceremony that this is supposed to be the world-unifying era of the supra-modem, it's just that once every six months the description of a cruise down the Rhine-Neckar canal or a beachhouse in Croatia or their last year in Marienbad would be as refreshing to pub life as having the Damned's first LP on the jukebox. But because New Brit disdains speaking foreign, this isn't going to happen any time soon.
British xenophobia and ignorance, ingested at the Imperial tit, are touchy, incendiary subjects, and are contingent here. Barmen in Setubal knowing how to say 'no ice'; Watney's Red Barrel, yes, yes, we know all that, and thank you Eric Idle, it was funny then and still is.
Brits don't like cleverness, and I gladly if unfashionably concede that learning a foreign language is fucking difficult. People have said to me, 'oh, you've got a gift'. No; just sheer hard work and falling pathetically and repeatedly in love, and I am still less than mother-tongue in French and can get by in German and reading Dutch is sort-of feasible. 'Just make an effort and they'll understand' is a sad cliche, and woefully wide of the mark in Flanders, but New Brit seems to care less and less about even doing that now. New money means new mobility, and that means instead of replicating native squalor with mushy peas and Worthington E in the sun you can now choose relative exotica - Bubba's All-You-Can-Eat; Biggest T-Bones South of Mobile? - under a sun just as balmy.
There was a time when pub conversation and smalltalk centred around exotica that actually was exotic. A scene in Esmonde and Larbey's craftily vicious The Good Life (1975) has Margo Leadbetter rhapsodising about her forthcoming holiday's overture; 'sundowners at the Stanley - that's in Mombasa, of course'. The scenario was meant to be striking for its exceptionableness rather than the expense of its acquisition. This was a contrast to Surbiton. New Brit sees in his peripatetic Sun Belt shamblings an analogue of ordinariness, except with a higher ambient temperature and more meat on the plate. 'There was Bud, 10cents a bottle all night,' slurred one Northampton slaphead to me about wintering in one of the US's independent brewing centres. What was frightening about this statement was that you knew he was referring to the Anheuser-Busch beverage rather than Budvar's finest. But who the fack drinks that? It's from the Czech Republic. Or somewhere. And nobody goes there, spesh not New Brit.
Those who once holidayed in Monte Carlo, as it was then charmingly known, went for snob appeal, expense (one and the same) and sophistication. Grace and Rainier, the casino, eating lobster the wrong way. Harold Steptoe spent 10 sitcom years dreaming of cultivated and strange accents, and of course - to paraphrase in the vernacular - topless birds with big knockers. If you were rich enough, all your friends and flunkeys spoke English anyway. But they went for the extraordinary; it matters not a jot to me if a couple from Nuneaton landed in St Tropez just because they'd got enough money to sample this difference (my italics). It is identical in kind to a holiday in Leningrad to watch Conservatory pianists practise Scriabin or Rachmaninov in freezing rehearsal halls with ice on the windows, before falling hopelessly for one of the corps de ballet in the Kirov.
Paul Bowles once compared air travel before and after WW2 with the wistful 'somehow, the world had changed'. In Bowles' heyday, one travelled either for adventure or for novelty with bourgeois comfort. In the 1950s those who saved hard and managed to hop a ride on Le Train Bleu or the fabulous Mistral went to see if it was all real - the gloss on the palm leaves, the naked flesh, the turquoise shallows. Now, New Brit hops a bird to Fort Lauderdale or Melbourne to see if Desperate Housewives or Neighbours is real. Much as his prole 50s homologue, he finds it is, or thinks so. It is everything he has ever wanted; cheap, showy, bourgeois display and consumption ('and it's all so tidy, no crime, well, apart from downtown, but nobody goes there, the jungle, that is'). New Brit's dreams are tacky as tinsel, as pricey as pearls. In the colonies, he finds them, and can't get enough. And the key? The language barrier? Only with those fucking spic servants.
Given that most English now consists of brand names and slang and management-speak shared around the anglophone world, it's hardly surprising that New Brit finds his centre of gravity where there are just as many people as boring as him, as secretly worried about prostate cancer, who wear the same baseball cap and whose sons can talk about the same Playstation 2s without even the shade of syntactic misunderstanding to intervene.
The Costas? Spain? Never mind the Balearics. Why bother when you don't have to holler at waiter or liftboy, why bother when it's as cheap or cheaper to drink across the border in TJ than it is in Torremolinos?
Brits hate languages. New Brit hates them more - and as long as cheap flights to the moistly welcoming outposts of the language remain, he will go on hating them more and more. Which, for those of us who enjoy the Heuvelland or Chartres or Linz or Salamanca, so much the better. But we spend much more time in pubs here, listening to the anglophone supremacists, than we do over there.
Two vicious cycles. Something must be done.
Say it ain't so
Reading Abby Lee's interesting girlwithaonetrackmind blog - which reminds me of the little girl with the little curl, so to speak - she tells a story which I know must be true but don't want to believe that it is. She's just been on TV for the first time to talk about the blog and the (rather less enjoyable) book, and while she was hovering in the wings waiting for the call two nearby technicians could be heard loudly and quite blithely discussing her: 'who's that then?'/'she's the one who's shagged loads of blokes and written about it'.
Now anyone who has read said blog will recognise that the rejoinder is - factually- not wildly inaccurate, but while I am perfectly willing to believe in the veracity of this story, I have never, EVER heard anything quite as boorish said in the presence of a woman. I just haven't. Ever. I know it goes on. It must go on. But like so many things for me - especially in that domain - it remains in the realm of the noise or otherwise of the audially untestamented tree falling in the unattended forest clearing.
I know, I know. I must lead a very sheltered existence. Ladies, please. Send in your Crassest Male Remark to this address.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But if I have to live a vicarious life, I need input. You too, fellas. Come on. And I know my nursery rhyme allusion above doesn't exactly cover me in glory.
Now anyone who has read said blog will recognise that the rejoinder is - factually- not wildly inaccurate, but while I am perfectly willing to believe in the veracity of this story, I have never, EVER heard anything quite as boorish said in the presence of a woman. I just haven't. Ever. I know it goes on. It must go on. But like so many things for me - especially in that domain - it remains in the realm of the noise or otherwise of the audially untestamented tree falling in the unattended forest clearing.
I know, I know. I must lead a very sheltered existence. Ladies, please. Send in your Crassest Male Remark to this address.
I'm not saying it doesn't happen. But if I have to live a vicarious life, I need input. You too, fellas. Come on. And I know my nursery rhyme allusion above doesn't exactly cover me in glory.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Price On Head Of Ant and Dec shock
Patrick Collinson's piece on celebrity insurance in G2 today claims there is a 'two million pound price on the heads of Ant and Dec'. Oh yeah? I'd rub them out for a bottle of '62 Yquem, a quarter of truffles and an afternoon in Melanie Bernier's bedroom. Cheap at 100 times the price.
C.C.'s Clio
Two years ago, 33 months ago, 966 days ago, on a January night in Strasbourg when hoar frost formed on your breath and the bells of the Dom could hardly make it through the freezing fog, my grande passion, still unrequitable, showed me her new car. 'A little silver Clio,' she said apologetically, although she wanted me to be impressed. I was. I couldn't afford a car. Then came an unknown pang; and ever since, when I saw that Renault trademark on the hunched city-scuttlers. Now I know why.
Papa and Nicole. Of course. Of course. This flimsiest of admass francobilia, washing around sedimentarily at the bottom of the early 90s media troposphere, merely updated onions-beret-bike-and-burglar's-jersey. No longer cheroot-chewing Jacques - no, sub that for luscious leggy libertine-in-waiting with rich olivier dad (with that special Pagnol tan - is that in the Dulux catalogue?).
In 11 years of longing I've never realised how that must have influenced me as I wandered stupefied by the prosperity, the charge, the symmetry, the poise, the fragility, the haughtiness, the command, of so many stupendously beautiful women under 21 as I saw within a few hours when I first arrived at the Universite Francois Rabelais in Tours. It was unfeasible, it would not compute, this wasn't fair; this was magic realism at its most macabrely magical.
One in particular, now driving into the future as Nicole drove through those ads.
Papa and Nicole. Of course. Of course. This flimsiest of admass francobilia, washing around sedimentarily at the bottom of the early 90s media troposphere, merely updated onions-beret-bike-and-burglar's-jersey. No longer cheroot-chewing Jacques - no, sub that for luscious leggy libertine-in-waiting with rich olivier dad (with that special Pagnol tan - is that in the Dulux catalogue?).
In 11 years of longing I've never realised how that must have influenced me as I wandered stupefied by the prosperity, the charge, the symmetry, the poise, the fragility, the haughtiness, the command, of so many stupendously beautiful women under 21 as I saw within a few hours when I first arrived at the Universite Francois Rabelais in Tours. It was unfeasible, it would not compute, this wasn't fair; this was magic realism at its most macabrely magical.
One in particular, now driving into the future as Nicole drove through those ads.
Anne Karpf - Read Her!
Generation stressed
Junk food, computer games, relentless marketing and competitive schooling are making British children depressed, according to an influencial group of experts. But why pick on kids when you could say just the same about all of us, says Anne Karpf
Wednesday September 13, 2006
The Guardian
In the past it would have taken the form of a sermon, a lecture, or a monograph, but yesterday's diatribe against modern childhood fittingly made its entrance as a letter to the Daily Telegraph. The paper also ran it as a front-page story, and the subject of a leader ("Lost Childhoods"). Although it targeted the usual suspects - junk food, the electronic media, the curriculum - what made it more than the ritual rail against modernity was the sheer diversity and stature of its signatories. Authors (Philip Pullman, Anne Fine, Jacqueline Wilson) and academics, early-years specialists and educators, economists and psychotherapists: 110 of them got together to express their deep concern that, to quote the title of their letter, "Modern life leads to more depression among young children."
They charge that children's developing brains cannot adjust to the speed of technological and cultural change. That children's needs have not altered, but real food, real play, interaction with adults, and time to be children have given way to junk food, sedentary, screen-based entertainment, and a test-driven curriculum. That children today act and dress like mini-adults and are exposed to "material that would have been considered unsuitable for them even in the very recent past". Society, they argue, is preoccupied with protecting children from physical harm but has lost sight of their emotional and social needs, leading to an escalation in childhood depression, substance abuse, violence and self-harm.
Are they right? If they are, what is the cause - and what can be done about it?
The trouble with the letter is its sweeping scope. Education, media and food, while there are important connections between all of them, have different problems, and though they impact on one another, grouping them together hovers on the rim of reductionism, with the risk of Golden Agery not far behind. The Telegraph leader didn't actually say it was all so much better back in our day - indeed, it argued that children have always gone through stroppy phases - but its elegiac title seems to hark back to the leader writer's lost childhood as much as to the one that has purportedly disappeared today.
The letter-writers acknowledge that "this is a complex sociocultural problem to which there is no simple solution", yet they also say that children need what developing humans have always needed. In fact the lives and practices of human beings have differed vastly through the ages, and differ enormously between cultures today. There's a real danger that, in these admittedly turbulent times, we retreat to an idealised, nostalgic view of childhood - one which, if it existed at all, did so only for a relatively short period of time and only in certain parts of the world. Despite the radical changes now taking place, it is not as if childhood has always been one thing and is now another. Childhood as we know it is a relatively recent invention. It hasn't always been the 1950s.
In many respects, today's children are far more rounded creatures - in the extent of their environmental awareness, for instance, and in their concern for human rights - than they were ever expected or encouraged to be when I was a kid, and their childhoods are richer than ours were, not only materially. Judging by their magazines, just as many of them are pony-mad, ballet-crazy, or football-fanatical. Yes, appearance is now paramount, although if we think it's everything we may have been taken in by appearances. And some aspects of modern technology, like the rise of MySpace, rather than contributing to anomie, have created greater bonds between strangers, even if, admittedly, these are mediated through the screen rather than face to face. What may be irking us adults to distraction is that young people have found technological ways to escape their parents' scrutiny: the mobile allows them to communicate with their friends - all the time, goddammit - without having to pass via their parents first.
And yet. Some of what I've just written is a sop with which to soothe my own anxiety, for, like the letter-writers and most other parents, I'm anxious too. Is there a qualitative difference in what young people today are exposed to? The very quantity, as well as the extraordinary sophistication of the market, make it so. The extent of the penetration of electronic media into every corner of personal as well as social life is unprecedented. Combined with the commercialisation of public space - everything but the air we breathe is sponsored - and globalisation, this means that the market now gets into places it could only have dreamed of before. Seven-year-olds with mobiles is no longer a news story. Our aspirations are shaped by brands and even our imaginations have been colonised.
Food has become such a disaster area that Saint Jamie, he who threw himself into school dinners with such gusto, has been reduced to rubbishing parents rather than the supermarket that pays him and which is no slouch in the junk-peddling department. The rise of video and DVD, which provide so much genuine pleasure, has also made it damn near impossible to control what children watch. And school? Don't get me started. Here we see the impact of a much wider sickness: the managerial revolution. Nothing matters but it can be counted. If you can't grade it, forget it (and many children do).
Unavoidably glimpsing Big Brother this summer, I was truly shocked. Though I thought I didn't have a trace of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells in me, I found it utterly degrading in its blatant cheapening of sexuality, its recruitment of victims willing to collaborate in their own exploitation in a desperate search for hyperreality, aka fame. It seemed an emblem of a morally vacuous culture, a spiritual hole. There, now I've turned into a Daily Telegraph leader too.
On the other hand, to expect morality from the market is a bit like expecting the Pope to speak Yiddish: it's not what it's designed for. Which brings us to the hardest part of this whole issue - the causes and solutions bit. The letter-writers are quite right in claiming that there's a lack of understanding of the realities and subtleties of child development, and call for a public debate. Yet we are dealing here with such gigantic, international forces that the task sometimes seems Sisyphean. At my gloomiest I even fear that a discussion of children's emotional needs will just provide extra research for commercial companies, simply allowing them to market products to kids more successfully.
Of course a start has to be made somewhere, but is childhood the right place? We've invested such hopes and fantasies in it, expecting it to be the opposite in almost all respects to adulthood, that we're almost inevitably going to swing between extremes of libertarianism and repression. In fact, what's wrong with modern childhood is part of what's wrong with modern adulthood. The lack of time for children to be aimless exactly matches that suffered by their parents. The encouragement of a precocious, clothes-and-make-up-driven sexuality mirrors the same experienced at the other end of the ageing spectrum. Rising substance abuse, self-harm and depression among young people? Certainly, but rife among middle-aged and old people too. If you wanted to be really reductionist about it, you could summarise the letter to the Daily Telegraph as "late capitalism is bad for your mental health" - whatever your age.
Yes, of course a debate is necessary - essential - though politicians seem to me the people least equipped to lead it. Of course a society based on need rather than want would look and feel different, and produce different kinds of human beings. But perhaps we should look at things the other way round. Perhaps we should recognise that what's remarkable is how little mental illness there is in economies where we are no longer citizens so much as consumers (even the tube announcements no longer refer to "passengers", but "customers"), and where short-termism is rife, with employees embraced and then dropped with no warning. When people are treated like things, it's hard to avoid turning into them.
In Richard Sennett's book on the new economy, The Corrosion of Character, a young American called Rico suddenly exclaims, "You can't imagine how stupid I feel when I talk to my kids about commitment. It's an abstract virtue to them; they don't see it anywhere." Sennett explores what happens in a society when people feel they don't matter. That's where the debate must begin.
Junk food, computer games, relentless marketing and competitive schooling are making British children depressed, according to an influencial group of experts. But why pick on kids when you could say just the same about all of us, says Anne Karpf
Wednesday September 13, 2006
The Guardian
In the past it would have taken the form of a sermon, a lecture, or a monograph, but yesterday's diatribe against modern childhood fittingly made its entrance as a letter to the Daily Telegraph. The paper also ran it as a front-page story, and the subject of a leader ("Lost Childhoods"). Although it targeted the usual suspects - junk food, the electronic media, the curriculum - what made it more than the ritual rail against modernity was the sheer diversity and stature of its signatories. Authors (Philip Pullman, Anne Fine, Jacqueline Wilson) and academics, early-years specialists and educators, economists and psychotherapists: 110 of them got together to express their deep concern that, to quote the title of their letter, "Modern life leads to more depression among young children."
They charge that children's developing brains cannot adjust to the speed of technological and cultural change. That children's needs have not altered, but real food, real play, interaction with adults, and time to be children have given way to junk food, sedentary, screen-based entertainment, and a test-driven curriculum. That children today act and dress like mini-adults and are exposed to "material that would have been considered unsuitable for them even in the very recent past". Society, they argue, is preoccupied with protecting children from physical harm but has lost sight of their emotional and social needs, leading to an escalation in childhood depression, substance abuse, violence and self-harm.
Are they right? If they are, what is the cause - and what can be done about it?
The trouble with the letter is its sweeping scope. Education, media and food, while there are important connections between all of them, have different problems, and though they impact on one another, grouping them together hovers on the rim of reductionism, with the risk of Golden Agery not far behind. The Telegraph leader didn't actually say it was all so much better back in our day - indeed, it argued that children have always gone through stroppy phases - but its elegiac title seems to hark back to the leader writer's lost childhood as much as to the one that has purportedly disappeared today.
The letter-writers acknowledge that "this is a complex sociocultural problem to which there is no simple solution", yet they also say that children need what developing humans have always needed. In fact the lives and practices of human beings have differed vastly through the ages, and differ enormously between cultures today. There's a real danger that, in these admittedly turbulent times, we retreat to an idealised, nostalgic view of childhood - one which, if it existed at all, did so only for a relatively short period of time and only in certain parts of the world. Despite the radical changes now taking place, it is not as if childhood has always been one thing and is now another. Childhood as we know it is a relatively recent invention. It hasn't always been the 1950s.
In many respects, today's children are far more rounded creatures - in the extent of their environmental awareness, for instance, and in their concern for human rights - than they were ever expected or encouraged to be when I was a kid, and their childhoods are richer than ours were, not only materially. Judging by their magazines, just as many of them are pony-mad, ballet-crazy, or football-fanatical. Yes, appearance is now paramount, although if we think it's everything we may have been taken in by appearances. And some aspects of modern technology, like the rise of MySpace, rather than contributing to anomie, have created greater bonds between strangers, even if, admittedly, these are mediated through the screen rather than face to face. What may be irking us adults to distraction is that young people have found technological ways to escape their parents' scrutiny: the mobile allows them to communicate with their friends - all the time, goddammit - without having to pass via their parents first.
And yet. Some of what I've just written is a sop with which to soothe my own anxiety, for, like the letter-writers and most other parents, I'm anxious too. Is there a qualitative difference in what young people today are exposed to? The very quantity, as well as the extraordinary sophistication of the market, make it so. The extent of the penetration of electronic media into every corner of personal as well as social life is unprecedented. Combined with the commercialisation of public space - everything but the air we breathe is sponsored - and globalisation, this means that the market now gets into places it could only have dreamed of before. Seven-year-olds with mobiles is no longer a news story. Our aspirations are shaped by brands and even our imaginations have been colonised.
Food has become such a disaster area that Saint Jamie, he who threw himself into school dinners with such gusto, has been reduced to rubbishing parents rather than the supermarket that pays him and which is no slouch in the junk-peddling department. The rise of video and DVD, which provide so much genuine pleasure, has also made it damn near impossible to control what children watch. And school? Don't get me started. Here we see the impact of a much wider sickness: the managerial revolution. Nothing matters but it can be counted. If you can't grade it, forget it (and many children do).
Unavoidably glimpsing Big Brother this summer, I was truly shocked. Though I thought I didn't have a trace of Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells in me, I found it utterly degrading in its blatant cheapening of sexuality, its recruitment of victims willing to collaborate in their own exploitation in a desperate search for hyperreality, aka fame. It seemed an emblem of a morally vacuous culture, a spiritual hole. There, now I've turned into a Daily Telegraph leader too.
On the other hand, to expect morality from the market is a bit like expecting the Pope to speak Yiddish: it's not what it's designed for. Which brings us to the hardest part of this whole issue - the causes and solutions bit. The letter-writers are quite right in claiming that there's a lack of understanding of the realities and subtleties of child development, and call for a public debate. Yet we are dealing here with such gigantic, international forces that the task sometimes seems Sisyphean. At my gloomiest I even fear that a discussion of children's emotional needs will just provide extra research for commercial companies, simply allowing them to market products to kids more successfully.
Of course a start has to be made somewhere, but is childhood the right place? We've invested such hopes and fantasies in it, expecting it to be the opposite in almost all respects to adulthood, that we're almost inevitably going to swing between extremes of libertarianism and repression. In fact, what's wrong with modern childhood is part of what's wrong with modern adulthood. The lack of time for children to be aimless exactly matches that suffered by their parents. The encouragement of a precocious, clothes-and-make-up-driven sexuality mirrors the same experienced at the other end of the ageing spectrum. Rising substance abuse, self-harm and depression among young people? Certainly, but rife among middle-aged and old people too. If you wanted to be really reductionist about it, you could summarise the letter to the Daily Telegraph as "late capitalism is bad for your mental health" - whatever your age.
Yes, of course a debate is necessary - essential - though politicians seem to me the people least equipped to lead it. Of course a society based on need rather than want would look and feel different, and produce different kinds of human beings. But perhaps we should look at things the other way round. Perhaps we should recognise that what's remarkable is how little mental illness there is in economies where we are no longer citizens so much as consumers (even the tube announcements no longer refer to "passengers", but "customers"), and where short-termism is rife, with employees embraced and then dropped with no warning. When people are treated like things, it's hard to avoid turning into them.
In Richard Sennett's book on the new economy, The Corrosion of Character, a young American called Rico suddenly exclaims, "You can't imagine how stupid I feel when I talk to my kids about commitment. It's an abstract virtue to them; they don't see it anywhere." Sennett explores what happens in a society when people feel they don't matter. That's where the debate must begin.
Been a long time (to quote Boston)
Crawling out of the abyss four days on, Stumpster finally credits Elder with his speech at the Proms - for all the fucking good it will do.
I daresay the Great Leader and Teacher has his reasons, but who are we to argue? Anyone out there ready to compose an Ode To Tony for mixed chorus, orchestra and organ? Oh, and steel band, and DJ, and gospel choir, and amateur chorus of till girls from Wal Mart, and muezzin. Oh BTW couldn't we get the Arctic Monkeys in as well? No? Oh well.
Good Lord, I'm glad this ban is in place - would hate to think that Toniculture would be threatened in any way by dangerous weapons like Gibson 335s or 1731 Strads.
Who as we all know are now high-ranking terrorist insurgents.
Elder for PM. Indeed almost anyone for PM.
I daresay the Great Leader and Teacher has his reasons, but who are we to argue? Anyone out there ready to compose an Ode To Tony for mixed chorus, orchestra and organ? Oh, and steel band, and DJ, and gospel choir, and amateur chorus of till girls from Wal Mart, and muezzin. Oh BTW couldn't we get the Arctic Monkeys in as well? No? Oh well.
Good Lord, I'm glad this ban is in place - would hate to think that Toniculture would be threatened in any way by dangerous weapons like Gibson 335s or 1731 Strads.
Who as we all know are now high-ranking terrorist insurgents.
Elder for PM. Indeed almost anyone for PM.
LET'S GET LOST: Mons' Monkey Business
Mons' magical monkey business
The Bulletin, 22.4.06
An hour from Brussels, Paul Stump uncovers Mons' singular secrets
Mons hides its lights under bushels. The literature doesn't mention it, but it's a fair bet that no other town in Belgium is immortalised in a prog-rock instrumental. Clocks-The Angel of Mons (1979) by ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, enables one of Hainaut's nicest corners to be quirkily remembered. But three minutes and 21 seconds are, I fear, too little to adequately do justice to such an underrated and understated burgh.
Hackett's song evokes the fabled Angel (s) of Mons of World War One, something else the local tourist office is curiously coy about. The legend arose thanks to a mystical short story in the London Evening News entitled The Bowmen by Arthur Machen that during the bloody debacle of the retreat by the British Expeditionary Force before a German offensive in 1914 a host of heavenly archers interposed themselves in the sky above the ruined town between the two armies. Within a week of the story's publication, it had become so much a part of the war's mythology millions believed it to be true.
Mons must have looked a bit of a mess then, and to the unwary it might still; approaching it by road or taking the wrong street after leaving the railway station (look for Rue de la Houssiere, not Rue Leopold II) and drab, proprietary Wallonian brick and stucco in dreary streets are the rule. But penetrating the rings of mediocrity is to prepare for a treat, a place where the ermine, braid and scarlet tunics of medieval civic pomp still seem to live on in a poetic after-echo. "It's wonderful," wrote one anonymous observer in 1861, "that Mons seems to have escaped the worst of industrialisation."
Situated in the midst of Belgium's nascent Black Country of steel and coal, this was no joke. The scrub-tufted slagheaps of derelict collieries poke like oversize molehills through the greenish fields. Mons (or Montes, or Monts, depending on the period) as its ongoing nomenclatures indicate, is on a hill of its own. Not much of a hill, but a hill nonetheless, handily situated near major trade routes between the Channel Coast and Germany and between France and the Low Countries. It was here in the 7th century that the unassuming divorcee St Waudru set up a little chapel and did sundry good works for the local farmers. Canonised by the population, her collegiate church has become the town's focal point (visually, if not geographically). The current Gothic edifice was begun in the late 1440s, when trade made Mons a prosperous place. Building was slow and piecemeal; at one point the canonesses in St Waudru commissioned a tower 190m tall, never to be completed. Indeed to this day the Montois refer to an unending labour as "like St Waudru's tower'.
Even towerless, the church has a notable reliquary said to contain Waudru's remains, and 16th century sculptures by local artist Jacques Du Broeucq, flush full of new Renaissance influences. The church's treasures are stiff with gold, not least some of Wallonia's finest religious goldsmithery. The Golden Carriage (car d'or) is a 1781 fancy in the style of Louis XVI used to carry St Wauru's relics through the town on Mons' maddest day, Trinity Sunday, when the town turns out for the Battle of the Lumecon. Maybe overshadowed by the Lenten riotousness of neighbouring Binche, the Lumecon is certainly one of the Belgium's most furiously picturesque revels. Ostensibly a magificently-formalised battle between good and evil in the shape of St George (hurrah!) and his lilywhite sidekicks the chinchins and a fire-breathing (for real) dragon, a 9.4 metre wickerwork monster weighing 200kg and his gesticulating, demonic courtiers (boo!), it takes religious-historical processional history into the realm of life-threatening injury. As the 'combat' commences, the surging crowd of bellicose locals around the sandy oval are encouraged - improbably - to grab sheaves of brushwood from the madly careening dragon's tail as it whirls amidst the crazed choreography.
It all takes place in Mons' splendid Grand' Place, dominated by another building whose picturesque greatness as been achieved piecemeal, the celebrated Hotel de Ville. Conceived in Mons' 15th century pomp, it has been continually added to throughout the Renaissance, the Baroque and even into the Industrial Revolution as Mons went through boom and bust and periodic jags of civic pride. The result is hybrid but remarkably homogenous, not least thanks to the neo-Gothic additions of the 19th century which aped so assiduously the style of hitherto - most obviously, the dazzling 15th century facade, which really should be better known than it is. The place's origins are manifold, but nobody, even today, is sure of the source of the famous brass monkey which crouches pensively next to the main entrance. Its little head is silvered by the rubbing of many generations of Montois, who believe it to be a lucky charm (certainly the current writer managed to locate a just-lost bank card after doing the deed).
Curving streets of pavé and upright townhouses radiate steeply off the square; Mons' lively and boisterous student population can be seen pouring down them in colourful cataracts at lunchtime and teatime. This also means a surfeit of decent, cheap shops in among pricier chains. But Mons, even when the locals and the students converge on the centre, never seems crowded. There are always alleyways and impasses to filter off people and traffic, and any walker's progress to the fabulous 17th-century belfry (a joyously OTT array of 49 chiming bells, or "a great big coffee pot with four smaller teapots right underneath", according to Victor Hugo's jocular words) ) or the 11th-century Sainte-Calixte church is usually serene.
Mons' centre is not perfectly concentric, but seems so; a cosy whole, embracing more culture and venerable visual charm than such an outwardly humdrum town ought to enjoy; and I haven't even mentioned the ornamental hauteur of the Francois Duesberg Museum with its exotic late-18th century clocks (whether this or the belfry was an inspiration for Mr Hackett's clangorous mini-epic is unrecorded), the Mons Folklore Museum, the Fine Arts Museum, the fortified redoubt of the Counts of Hainaut... but I'm getting hungry. And there are fewmore auspicious places in Belgium to feel peckish than Mons.
Where to eat. Mons is stuffed with restaurants. Most of them are cheap, cheerful, studenty; many are of high quality, the cuisine often driven by a faithfulness to classic, fill-her-up-garcon Belgian cuisine with beery notes but also to Northern French currents (the border is just 18km to the south). Devotees of the former need look no further than the aptly-named yet inaptly-modest Excelsior. A cavernous, unpretentious bistro with token Art Nouveau scrolling and elderly wood panelling, it's a bustling place that's slightly out-of-date, like a put-upon great-aunt's parlour. It specialises in juicy, hearty staples like steaks, lapin à la biere, hotpots and stoemp at knockdown prices in civilised surroundings and with a refreshingly good beer list at one's elbow - notably rich in Wallonian specialities often overlooked by Bruxellois bars - you can eat and drink your gourmandising fill here for 25 euros, lunchtimes and evenings. More ambitious palates can't miss Devos (7 Rue de la Coupe, 065.35.13.35); run by the Devos-Dandoy Belgian culinary dynasty, it's formal-chichi, all tailcoats and polar-white napery (shame about Norah Jones on the stereo though). Effortlessly luxuriant, beautifully-balanced classic contemporary Belgian-French dishes, to sample cooking this good at just 30 euros for a four-course lunch (my dessert, a chocolate outrage so wonderful as to surely not be of this earth) would have been worth the price alone. Expect 55 euros for dinner, 75 from the carte.
Where to stay? Ticklish. Possibly due to its proximity to Brussels and Lille and proximity to motorways, Mons lacks much in the way of characterful accommodation, more beds situated at the town limits than one might expect. Maybe it's packing everything else into that vibrant heart that does it. That said, behind its stoutly bourgeois facade St James (117 Chaussée du Roi Bauduoin, 065.72.48.24), is unpretentious, and offers more attentiveness to service, food and decor than a grudging award of three stars might indicate.
SNCB trains leave Brussels South Station every hour. Journey time approx 58 mins.
Maison du Tourisme, 22 Grand-Place, Mons, 065.33.55.80.
The Bulletin, 22.4.06
An hour from Brussels, Paul Stump uncovers Mons' singular secrets
Mons hides its lights under bushels. The literature doesn't mention it, but it's a fair bet that no other town in Belgium is immortalised in a prog-rock instrumental. Clocks-The Angel of Mons (1979) by ex-Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett, enables one of Hainaut's nicest corners to be quirkily remembered. But three minutes and 21 seconds are, I fear, too little to adequately do justice to such an underrated and understated burgh.
Hackett's song evokes the fabled Angel (s) of Mons of World War One, something else the local tourist office is curiously coy about. The legend arose thanks to a mystical short story in the London Evening News entitled The Bowmen by Arthur Machen that during the bloody debacle of the retreat by the British Expeditionary Force before a German offensive in 1914 a host of heavenly archers interposed themselves in the sky above the ruined town between the two armies. Within a week of the story's publication, it had become so much a part of the war's mythology millions believed it to be true.
Mons must have looked a bit of a mess then, and to the unwary it might still; approaching it by road or taking the wrong street after leaving the railway station (look for Rue de la Houssiere, not Rue Leopold II) and drab, proprietary Wallonian brick and stucco in dreary streets are the rule. But penetrating the rings of mediocrity is to prepare for a treat, a place where the ermine, braid and scarlet tunics of medieval civic pomp still seem to live on in a poetic after-echo. "It's wonderful," wrote one anonymous observer in 1861, "that Mons seems to have escaped the worst of industrialisation."
Situated in the midst of Belgium's nascent Black Country of steel and coal, this was no joke. The scrub-tufted slagheaps of derelict collieries poke like oversize molehills through the greenish fields. Mons (or Montes, or Monts, depending on the period) as its ongoing nomenclatures indicate, is on a hill of its own. Not much of a hill, but a hill nonetheless, handily situated near major trade routes between the Channel Coast and Germany and between France and the Low Countries. It was here in the 7th century that the unassuming divorcee St Waudru set up a little chapel and did sundry good works for the local farmers. Canonised by the population, her collegiate church has become the town's focal point (visually, if not geographically). The current Gothic edifice was begun in the late 1440s, when trade made Mons a prosperous place. Building was slow and piecemeal; at one point the canonesses in St Waudru commissioned a tower 190m tall, never to be completed. Indeed to this day the Montois refer to an unending labour as "like St Waudru's tower'.
Even towerless, the church has a notable reliquary said to contain Waudru's remains, and 16th century sculptures by local artist Jacques Du Broeucq, flush full of new Renaissance influences. The church's treasures are stiff with gold, not least some of Wallonia's finest religious goldsmithery. The Golden Carriage (car d'or) is a 1781 fancy in the style of Louis XVI used to carry St Wauru's relics through the town on Mons' maddest day, Trinity Sunday, when the town turns out for the Battle of the Lumecon. Maybe overshadowed by the Lenten riotousness of neighbouring Binche, the Lumecon is certainly one of the Belgium's most furiously picturesque revels. Ostensibly a magificently-formalised battle between good and evil in the shape of St George (hurrah!) and his lilywhite sidekicks the chinchins and a fire-breathing (for real) dragon, a 9.4 metre wickerwork monster weighing 200kg and his gesticulating, demonic courtiers (boo!), it takes religious-historical processional history into the realm of life-threatening injury. As the 'combat' commences, the surging crowd of bellicose locals around the sandy oval are encouraged - improbably - to grab sheaves of brushwood from the madly careening dragon's tail as it whirls amidst the crazed choreography.
It all takes place in Mons' splendid Grand' Place, dominated by another building whose picturesque greatness as been achieved piecemeal, the celebrated Hotel de Ville. Conceived in Mons' 15th century pomp, it has been continually added to throughout the Renaissance, the Baroque and even into the Industrial Revolution as Mons went through boom and bust and periodic jags of civic pride. The result is hybrid but remarkably homogenous, not least thanks to the neo-Gothic additions of the 19th century which aped so assiduously the style of hitherto - most obviously, the dazzling 15th century facade, which really should be better known than it is. The place's origins are manifold, but nobody, even today, is sure of the source of the famous brass monkey which crouches pensively next to the main entrance. Its little head is silvered by the rubbing of many generations of Montois, who believe it to be a lucky charm (certainly the current writer managed to locate a just-lost bank card after doing the deed).
Curving streets of pavé and upright townhouses radiate steeply off the square; Mons' lively and boisterous student population can be seen pouring down them in colourful cataracts at lunchtime and teatime. This also means a surfeit of decent, cheap shops in among pricier chains. But Mons, even when the locals and the students converge on the centre, never seems crowded. There are always alleyways and impasses to filter off people and traffic, and any walker's progress to the fabulous 17th-century belfry (a joyously OTT array of 49 chiming bells, or "a great big coffee pot with four smaller teapots right underneath", according to Victor Hugo's jocular words) ) or the 11th-century Sainte-Calixte church is usually serene.
Mons' centre is not perfectly concentric, but seems so; a cosy whole, embracing more culture and venerable visual charm than such an outwardly humdrum town ought to enjoy; and I haven't even mentioned the ornamental hauteur of the Francois Duesberg Museum with its exotic late-18th century clocks (whether this or the belfry was an inspiration for Mr Hackett's clangorous mini-epic is unrecorded), the Mons Folklore Museum, the Fine Arts Museum, the fortified redoubt of the Counts of Hainaut... but I'm getting hungry. And there are fewmore auspicious places in Belgium to feel peckish than Mons.
Where to eat. Mons is stuffed with restaurants. Most of them are cheap, cheerful, studenty; many are of high quality, the cuisine often driven by a faithfulness to classic, fill-her-up-garcon Belgian cuisine with beery notes but also to Northern French currents (the border is just 18km to the south). Devotees of the former need look no further than the aptly-named yet inaptly-modest Excelsior. A cavernous, unpretentious bistro with token Art Nouveau scrolling and elderly wood panelling, it's a bustling place that's slightly out-of-date, like a put-upon great-aunt's parlour. It specialises in juicy, hearty staples like steaks, lapin à la biere, hotpots and stoemp at knockdown prices in civilised surroundings and with a refreshingly good beer list at one's elbow - notably rich in Wallonian specialities often overlooked by Bruxellois bars - you can eat and drink your gourmandising fill here for 25 euros, lunchtimes and evenings. More ambitious palates can't miss Devos (7 Rue de la Coupe, 065.35.13.35); run by the Devos-Dandoy Belgian culinary dynasty, it's formal-chichi, all tailcoats and polar-white napery (shame about Norah Jones on the stereo though). Effortlessly luxuriant, beautifully-balanced classic contemporary Belgian-French dishes, to sample cooking this good at just 30 euros for a four-course lunch (my dessert, a chocolate outrage so wonderful as to surely not be of this earth) would have been worth the price alone. Expect 55 euros for dinner, 75 from the carte.
Where to stay? Ticklish. Possibly due to its proximity to Brussels and Lille and proximity to motorways, Mons lacks much in the way of characterful accommodation, more beds situated at the town limits than one might expect. Maybe it's packing everything else into that vibrant heart that does it. That said, behind its stoutly bourgeois facade St James (117 Chaussée du Roi Bauduoin, 065.72.48.24), is unpretentious, and offers more attentiveness to service, food and decor than a grudging award of three stars might indicate.
SNCB trains leave Brussels South Station every hour. Journey time approx 58 mins.
Maison du Tourisme, 22 Grand-Place, Mons, 065.33.55.80.
LET'S GET LOST: Belgium and Heuvelland
The little bus that could
The Bulletin, 19.5.06
The Heuvelland is a little-known Belgian delight for walkers, cyclists and drinkers - and buses are the best way to enjoy it, says Paul Stump
Just as I start to glance anxiously at my watch, stood like a lemon on the side of a road seemingly in the middle of nowhere near Ypres, it appears. A dinky little minibus in the white, grey and yellow of the Flemish operator De Lijn hoves cheekily into view, looking for all the world like something out of Bob The Builder. And only 30 seconds later than the time we agreed on the phone.
Belbus is not a specifically Belgian concept, but nowhere else so successfully operates dial-a-ride policies. De Lijn has a network of these minor routes throughout Flanders. The principle's easy - you can ring and reserve a seat two hours in advance at any given point on the route, which is in theory almost anywhere. As such beguiling areas like the Heuvelland, ironically termed the Flemish Alps, can be visited without getting the car out of the garage.
Heuvelland ('hilly land'), to the south west of Ypres and forming part of the French frontier, is Flanders' highest point, and although the summit at Kemmelberg is only a puny 159m, size definitely doesn't matter here.
There are nine 'alps' - Kemmelberg, Rodeberg, Zwarteberg, Scherpenberg, Baneberg and Monteberg as well as Mont Cassel, the Mont des Cats and the Mont des Recollets over in France. This was terrain highly prized by the armies of World War One, their panoramas over the surrounding plains and polders of priceless strategic significance. Their heavily wooded slopes got off surprisingly lightly in terms of damage and the woods and hamlets now ooze timelessness. This is also prime cycling country; the hills are fixtures in the Four Days of Dunkerque race every May, and teem with tourist-routiers young and old every Sunday.
It's an extraordinarily self-contained little enclave more French than Flemish in character but strongly Dutch-speaking (Belbus staff, as a rule, speak good English). It's rustic but with an undercurrent of well-earned prosperity. Above all, it is very beautiful, gently rolling and verdant with small square fields of sheep and maize, of morning mists in spring and autumn, little villages snug as bugs in rugs, modest steeples and spires peeping above the bumpy horizon. It demands to be walked in, luxuriated in, appreciated. The locals are proud of this landscape - in the absence of railways, or even much in the way of a population, Belbus is the greenest and most economical way of getting visitors around and not spoiling the place.Once you start walking, it's not easy to stop - there's always a quainter view just around the corner. Or, more to the point, there's always a better pub or restaurant just around the corner.
One of the best is in the village of Kemmel, which sits timidly on the flank of the enormous, beached-whale bulk of the eponymous, malachite-wooded Kemmelberg. Het Labyrint not only serves delightfully-cooked snacks and a very fine range of beers, it boasts its own maze (hence the name) and even its own bizarre museum of archaeology (29 Dries, tel 057.44.65.81, nearest stop ). If you're planning to visit the village's rather good Museum of Rural Life, best go there first. As its name suggests, Het Labyrint won't let you go easily.
The almost impossibly endearing rural gem that is De Kauwackers is so remote that it's a fair step even from the nearest Belbus stop in Nieuwekerke, but worth the effort (1 Kauwackersstraat, tel 057.44.57.94). Named for a rare breed of crow, its ramshackle exterior concedals a lovingly-crafted interior. The only snag is that its once-famous beer list of 160 has been replaced by the perfectly acceptable but far tinier and more homogenous range of the De Bie brewery of Loker, who are in the process of buying up local hostelries. De Tere Plekke in Dranouter is another wonder of rusticity, all tiles, repointed brickwork, ivy and pavé courtyard (21 Koudekotstraat, 057.44.65.67). Dranouter is big on terroir and authenticity, as evidenced by the stout, fresh, farmers' nosh served up in these establishments, and this makes it ideal to host the annual Belgian Folk Festival, when those with a phobia of bagpipes could do well to give the village a miss, although the excellent displays at the Muziekcentrum Folk museum on the site (224 Dikkebusstraat, 057.44.69.33) could fail to intrigue only the terminally unimaginative or those with tin ears. Those craving more genteel refreshments usually beeline to In De Wulf, a fast-rising bistro-cum-estaminet (1 Wulvestraat, tel 057.44.55.57). It's by no means flash, with an estaminet's rawness, but the food is stylish and inventive on basic Flemish themes, and its magret de canard à la kriek and eels cooked in beer have spread ripples as far as Paris. Accommodation is also offered and is of a high standard of cleanliness and service - not to mention value. For those pooped after the paths of the Zwarteberg or Rodeberg - and this is excellent walking country - a night spent here is perfectly apt R'n'R.
Ah yes, those hills. Those strategists weren't wrong- the views (over the hopbines and wheatfields and village spires to Diksmuide, west over the polders to Dunkerque, south to the slagheaps of Arras, east to the towers of Lille) are breathtaking for what, after all, isn't a particularly lofty place. But self-respecting alps have chairlifts, even if they're only little alps. And the Flemish alps has a little chairlift. At 900 metres long, linking Zwarteberg and Rodeberg, it's conceivably the most pointless télépherique in the world, but it's fun - it starts at the Brasserie Cordoba on Rodebergstraat in Westouter - ask your Belbus driver.
We're a casual promenade from In De Wulfhille (29 Rodebergstraat, tel 0496.41.94.08), a little gingerbread house of an estaminet of low timber beams, the oldest building in the village (it's supposed to date back to 1650). Artist Axel Fabry's excellent De Neerplaats, with its oddball staircase, is also worth a detour (32 Poperingestraat, tel 057.44.40.50). This is also the best place to enquire about a tour of the Heuvelland in a horse-drawn carriage, or even on horseback yourself.
A few Belbus stops along, the equestrian theme comes into its own again at De Klijte's pub De Diligence (4 Kasteelmolenstraat, tel 057.44.79.39), where more rides and tours are proposed, and visitors with their own horses are encouraged. The earthier In De Zon (80 Dikkebusstraat, tel 057.21.26.26) is rated by connoisseurs as one of the very finest examples of a preserved estaminet in the region, and its little Art Nouveau flourishes are particularly idiosyncratic and charming.
There's not much glamour about travelling by bus, and there never was. There's never been much glamour about the Heuvelland either. That really ought to change.
Where to stay. In De Wulf is your best bet (see above). De Hollemeersch (4 Lettingstraat, also in Dranouter, tel 057.44.44.06) also has beds and a more than agreeable restaurant to boot.
How to get there. Belbus No.68 serves Poperinge SNCB station and then Westouter, Dranouter, Loker, Nieuwekerke and Kemmel. No.79 serves the same area and departs from Ypres SNCB station. Both are roughly hourly on weekdays and two-hourly on Sunday from late morning. Ring x two hours before every departure to ensure the bus arrives at the agreed stop on time.
Note: some of the bars mentioned have opening hours that are, to say the least, eccentric, and change frequently. Ringing first is advisable.
The Bulletin, 19.5.06
The Heuvelland is a little-known Belgian delight for walkers, cyclists and drinkers - and buses are the best way to enjoy it, says Paul Stump
Just as I start to glance anxiously at my watch, stood like a lemon on the side of a road seemingly in the middle of nowhere near Ypres, it appears. A dinky little minibus in the white, grey and yellow of the Flemish operator De Lijn hoves cheekily into view, looking for all the world like something out of Bob The Builder. And only 30 seconds later than the time we agreed on the phone.
Belbus is not a specifically Belgian concept, but nowhere else so successfully operates dial-a-ride policies. De Lijn has a network of these minor routes throughout Flanders. The principle's easy - you can ring and reserve a seat two hours in advance at any given point on the route, which is in theory almost anywhere. As such beguiling areas like the Heuvelland, ironically termed the Flemish Alps, can be visited without getting the car out of the garage.
Heuvelland ('hilly land'), to the south west of Ypres and forming part of the French frontier, is Flanders' highest point, and although the summit at Kemmelberg is only a puny 159m, size definitely doesn't matter here.
There are nine 'alps' - Kemmelberg, Rodeberg, Zwarteberg, Scherpenberg, Baneberg and Monteberg as well as Mont Cassel, the Mont des Cats and the Mont des Recollets over in France. This was terrain highly prized by the armies of World War One, their panoramas over the surrounding plains and polders of priceless strategic significance. Their heavily wooded slopes got off surprisingly lightly in terms of damage and the woods and hamlets now ooze timelessness. This is also prime cycling country; the hills are fixtures in the Four Days of Dunkerque race every May, and teem with tourist-routiers young and old every Sunday.
It's an extraordinarily self-contained little enclave more French than Flemish in character but strongly Dutch-speaking (Belbus staff, as a rule, speak good English). It's rustic but with an undercurrent of well-earned prosperity. Above all, it is very beautiful, gently rolling and verdant with small square fields of sheep and maize, of morning mists in spring and autumn, little villages snug as bugs in rugs, modest steeples and spires peeping above the bumpy horizon. It demands to be walked in, luxuriated in, appreciated. The locals are proud of this landscape - in the absence of railways, or even much in the way of a population, Belbus is the greenest and most economical way of getting visitors around and not spoiling the place.Once you start walking, it's not easy to stop - there's always a quainter view just around the corner. Or, more to the point, there's always a better pub or restaurant just around the corner.
One of the best is in the village of Kemmel, which sits timidly on the flank of the enormous, beached-whale bulk of the eponymous, malachite-wooded Kemmelberg. Het Labyrint not only serves delightfully-cooked snacks and a very fine range of beers, it boasts its own maze (hence the name) and even its own bizarre museum of archaeology (29 Dries, tel 057.44.65.81, nearest stop ). If you're planning to visit the village's rather good Museum of Rural Life, best go there first. As its name suggests, Het Labyrint won't let you go easily.
The almost impossibly endearing rural gem that is De Kauwackers is so remote that it's a fair step even from the nearest Belbus stop in Nieuwekerke, but worth the effort (1 Kauwackersstraat, tel 057.44.57.94). Named for a rare breed of crow, its ramshackle exterior concedals a lovingly-crafted interior. The only snag is that its once-famous beer list of 160 has been replaced by the perfectly acceptable but far tinier and more homogenous range of the De Bie brewery of Loker, who are in the process of buying up local hostelries. De Tere Plekke in Dranouter is another wonder of rusticity, all tiles, repointed brickwork, ivy and pavé courtyard (21 Koudekotstraat, 057.44.65.67). Dranouter is big on terroir and authenticity, as evidenced by the stout, fresh, farmers' nosh served up in these establishments, and this makes it ideal to host the annual Belgian Folk Festival, when those with a phobia of bagpipes could do well to give the village a miss, although the excellent displays at the Muziekcentrum Folk museum on the site (224 Dikkebusstraat, 057.44.69.33) could fail to intrigue only the terminally unimaginative or those with tin ears. Those craving more genteel refreshments usually beeline to In De Wulf, a fast-rising bistro-cum-estaminet (1 Wulvestraat, tel 057.44.55.57). It's by no means flash, with an estaminet's rawness, but the food is stylish and inventive on basic Flemish themes, and its magret de canard à la kriek and eels cooked in beer have spread ripples as far as Paris. Accommodation is also offered and is of a high standard of cleanliness and service - not to mention value. For those pooped after the paths of the Zwarteberg or Rodeberg - and this is excellent walking country - a night spent here is perfectly apt R'n'R.
Ah yes, those hills. Those strategists weren't wrong- the views (over the hopbines and wheatfields and village spires to Diksmuide, west over the polders to Dunkerque, south to the slagheaps of Arras, east to the towers of Lille) are breathtaking for what, after all, isn't a particularly lofty place. But self-respecting alps have chairlifts, even if they're only little alps. And the Flemish alps has a little chairlift. At 900 metres long, linking Zwarteberg and Rodeberg, it's conceivably the most pointless télépherique in the world, but it's fun - it starts at the Brasserie Cordoba on Rodebergstraat in Westouter - ask your Belbus driver.
We're a casual promenade from In De Wulfhille (29 Rodebergstraat, tel 0496.41.94.08), a little gingerbread house of an estaminet of low timber beams, the oldest building in the village (it's supposed to date back to 1650). Artist Axel Fabry's excellent De Neerplaats, with its oddball staircase, is also worth a detour (32 Poperingestraat, tel 057.44.40.50). This is also the best place to enquire about a tour of the Heuvelland in a horse-drawn carriage, or even on horseback yourself.
A few Belbus stops along, the equestrian theme comes into its own again at De Klijte's pub De Diligence (4 Kasteelmolenstraat, tel 057.44.79.39), where more rides and tours are proposed, and visitors with their own horses are encouraged. The earthier In De Zon (80 Dikkebusstraat, tel 057.21.26.26) is rated by connoisseurs as one of the very finest examples of a preserved estaminet in the region, and its little Art Nouveau flourishes are particularly idiosyncratic and charming.
There's not much glamour about travelling by bus, and there never was. There's never been much glamour about the Heuvelland either. That really ought to change.
Where to stay. In De Wulf is your best bet (see above). De Hollemeersch (4 Lettingstraat, also in Dranouter, tel 057.44.44.06) also has beds and a more than agreeable restaurant to boot.
How to get there. Belbus No.68 serves Poperinge SNCB station and then Westouter, Dranouter, Loker, Nieuwekerke and Kemmel. No.79 serves the same area and departs from Ypres SNCB station. Both are roughly hourly on weekdays and two-hourly on Sunday from late morning. Ring x two hours before every departure to ensure the bus arrives at the agreed stop on time.
Note: some of the bars mentioned have opening hours that are, to say the least, eccentric, and change frequently. Ringing first is advisable.
FACE STUFFIN': Kebab Wars - Best In Europe for Musicians?
Just a quickie.
Having savoured the delicious snackery at Mangal in Arcola Road, Dalston, I'd like to recommend that any other musicianly connoisseurs of the finest late-night takeaway, eat-in-the-street snacks that are kebabs and lahmacuns hotfoot it to almost any Turkish takeaway in Germany. Or Austria.
I've tried 14. In only one did I not find the lamb moist but not overdone, and with a minimum of grease. There is the impression that a sheep may have been involved at some point... there isn't the pretentious slicing and flourishing of abattoir slurry on the hotplate. Note: Brussels isn't quite as bad as London, but it's going that way.
the 'salad', in most countries looking like the victims of germ warfare laid on a slab, usually features at least 12-hour-old lettuce. The shit sauces are remarkably light (OK, OK, this isn't the Connaught, you've had a hard gig, don't demand too much, OK?) and if you ask for just a little paprika, you'll get just a little paprika.
The pittas are industrial but are usually coaxed into some kind of semblance of life on the grill; best of all, they are filled manageably. No retching and lunging and shelving with the hands as the sauces spill out around your greedy lips. Asked for sauce, you can usually be sure that 'a little' won't mean a tanned fist plunged dirtily onto the nozzle; also that 'chilli sauce' means something different than a piglet's anal blood mixed in a boiler the size of a cricket pitch in Dortmund with thickener, flour, 'flavouring' and pectins.
In Brussels or Paris, the presence of semitics in a kebab-house means nothing - the produce will almost always be overpriced shite of the worst order. In Germany - certainly in the south - it is a sign of quality.
Even if you disdain fast food, the Germanic kebab will salve your conscience.
Having savoured the delicious snackery at Mangal in Arcola Road, Dalston, I'd like to recommend that any other musicianly connoisseurs of the finest late-night takeaway, eat-in-the-street snacks that are kebabs and lahmacuns hotfoot it to almost any Turkish takeaway in Germany. Or Austria.
I've tried 14. In only one did I not find the lamb moist but not overdone, and with a minimum of grease. There is the impression that a sheep may have been involved at some point... there isn't the pretentious slicing and flourishing of abattoir slurry on the hotplate. Note: Brussels isn't quite as bad as London, but it's going that way.
the 'salad', in most countries looking like the victims of germ warfare laid on a slab, usually features at least 12-hour-old lettuce. The shit sauces are remarkably light (OK, OK, this isn't the Connaught, you've had a hard gig, don't demand too much, OK?) and if you ask for just a little paprika, you'll get just a little paprika.
The pittas are industrial but are usually coaxed into some kind of semblance of life on the grill; best of all, they are filled manageably. No retching and lunging and shelving with the hands as the sauces spill out around your greedy lips. Asked for sauce, you can usually be sure that 'a little' won't mean a tanned fist plunged dirtily onto the nozzle; also that 'chilli sauce' means something different than a piglet's anal blood mixed in a boiler the size of a cricket pitch in Dortmund with thickener, flour, 'flavouring' and pectins.
In Brussels or Paris, the presence of semitics in a kebab-house means nothing - the produce will almost always be overpriced shite of the worst order. In Germany - certainly in the south - it is a sign of quality.
Even if you disdain fast food, the Germanic kebab will salve your conscience.
Tuesday, September 12, 2006
Lady Lake - Shameless Plug For Dutch Prog Rock Heroes
LADY LAKE
Supercleandreammachine
You've got to be careful when you do retro. Faithfulness to the text is everything; not just the form, but the content. But when the past is dug up it's likely to smell a bit, well, old.
Focus, of course, did the exhumation job effortlessly with Focus 8 - after all, reviving a template they toured around the world for years wasn't so hard. Van Leer's talent as a tunesmith did the rest.
But Lady Lake? They'd be near the bottom of anyone's wishlist of Most Likely To Make A Comeback. Even Europrog specialists have difficulty placing them... they count on the recognition scale along with the plankton, the likes of Itoiz, Akasha and Banzai. Hang on, Lady Lake... small Dutch band, one album, 1977, good effort, God, my son/daughter wasn't even born then etc etc. And then?
Well, and then Supercleandreammachine. Hard though it may be to believe, this apparently unwise comeback after the small matter of, er, 27 years, is actually rather brilliant, a serious statement in Dutch prog history. Nowt radical, natch - this isn't Group 1850 or Willem Breuker territory but you knew that. No, what these guys have done is make a spectacularly old-fashioned sounding collection that succeeds because it does the simple things so well and with such genuine thoughtfulness. Tunes, arrangement, delivery, the lot. It's one of the many pleasures of Supercleandreammachine -named for an old hippy radio show, we learn - that an album which sounds about 30 years out of date is so enjoyable to listen to. And it's not for flimsy nostalgic reasons - although lovers of old keyboards will no doubt get erections at some of the moog-'tron-organ sounds here (are there any female lovers of old keyboards?). Crucially for LL, though, the choice of notes always comes first, not least for stand-out guitarist Fred Rosenkamp; there are lots of ingenious harmonisations on familiar chord cycles and Pohjola-like melodies which playfully elude expectations but never sound forced or self-conscious. Anyone with a working brain and ears twigs that these are guys that understand instinctively how harmony works, and what fun you can have with even its diatonic basics - without offending anyone.
I'm unaware if Rosenkamp ever wanted to be Jan Akkerman, but he makes a fair fist of his wannabe tendencies here; he'll never make it to Akkerman's level, but he's a very fine player, resourceful and tirelessly inventive. It's just that he sounds SO like the Volendam virtuoso - his attack especially- that it points up a little too much the already sizeable harmonic and melodic debt the band owe to Focus. And No One Will Ever Know in particular is spookily similar to Paul Stoppelman's ballad No Hang Ups from Mother Focus. There's also a straight lift in the excellent and knowing Radio Reminiscence (purposely?) of an Akkerman riff from Hamburger Concerto. Leendert Konstanje's big chewy helpings of stylishly-phrased Leslie-powered Hammond are another Focus nod, and the tasteful use of mellotron should do more than merely summon up Cleem Determeijer's work with Finch. But such are the risks of retro.
No. I'm being unfair. This is a band that has reinvented itself and is more than the sum of its influences. That its sound should be fatter, nastier, rawer - louder, ferchrissakes - and that there should be more naked energy on show is a genuine downer. After all, does the world really need a new bunch of part-timer chamber-rocking cheeries like Rousseau? It does not. Lady Lake sometimes risk becoming just that - but they have infinitely more creativity and just need a bit more confidence in themselves to stretch out - not to mention a full-time bassist, preferably with a Rickenbacker and a big ego, both of which would immensely strengthen the sometimes meandering 14-minute opener and turn it into a real showpiece. Then they would take this intelligent music to the stage and become real contenders.
It took them long enough- but here is a late-blossoming flower of a rare hue and beauty. 'Good things come to those who wait' is self-evidently this band's axiom. Fair's fair - but don't leave it 27 years before the next one, boys. After all, you've got yourself at least one new fan and if there's any justice there should be a few more pronto.
8.5/10
Supercleandreammachine
You've got to be careful when you do retro. Faithfulness to the text is everything; not just the form, but the content. But when the past is dug up it's likely to smell a bit, well, old.
Focus, of course, did the exhumation job effortlessly with Focus 8 - after all, reviving a template they toured around the world for years wasn't so hard. Van Leer's talent as a tunesmith did the rest.
But Lady Lake? They'd be near the bottom of anyone's wishlist of Most Likely To Make A Comeback. Even Europrog specialists have difficulty placing them... they count on the recognition scale along with the plankton, the likes of Itoiz, Akasha and Banzai. Hang on, Lady Lake... small Dutch band, one album, 1977, good effort, God, my son/daughter wasn't even born then etc etc. And then?
Well, and then Supercleandreammachine. Hard though it may be to believe, this apparently unwise comeback after the small matter of, er, 27 years, is actually rather brilliant, a serious statement in Dutch prog history. Nowt radical, natch - this isn't Group 1850 or Willem Breuker territory but you knew that. No, what these guys have done is make a spectacularly old-fashioned sounding collection that succeeds because it does the simple things so well and with such genuine thoughtfulness. Tunes, arrangement, delivery, the lot. It's one of the many pleasures of Supercleandreammachine -named for an old hippy radio show, we learn - that an album which sounds about 30 years out of date is so enjoyable to listen to. And it's not for flimsy nostalgic reasons - although lovers of old keyboards will no doubt get erections at some of the moog-'tron-organ sounds here (are there any female lovers of old keyboards?). Crucially for LL, though, the choice of notes always comes first, not least for stand-out guitarist Fred Rosenkamp; there are lots of ingenious harmonisations on familiar chord cycles and Pohjola-like melodies which playfully elude expectations but never sound forced or self-conscious. Anyone with a working brain and ears twigs that these are guys that understand instinctively how harmony works, and what fun you can have with even its diatonic basics - without offending anyone.
I'm unaware if Rosenkamp ever wanted to be Jan Akkerman, but he makes a fair fist of his wannabe tendencies here; he'll never make it to Akkerman's level, but he's a very fine player, resourceful and tirelessly inventive. It's just that he sounds SO like the Volendam virtuoso - his attack especially- that it points up a little too much the already sizeable harmonic and melodic debt the band owe to Focus. And No One Will Ever Know in particular is spookily similar to Paul Stoppelman's ballad No Hang Ups from Mother Focus. There's also a straight lift in the excellent and knowing Radio Reminiscence (purposely?) of an Akkerman riff from Hamburger Concerto. Leendert Konstanje's big chewy helpings of stylishly-phrased Leslie-powered Hammond are another Focus nod, and the tasteful use of mellotron should do more than merely summon up Cleem Determeijer's work with Finch. But such are the risks of retro.
No. I'm being unfair. This is a band that has reinvented itself and is more than the sum of its influences. That its sound should be fatter, nastier, rawer - louder, ferchrissakes - and that there should be more naked energy on show is a genuine downer. After all, does the world really need a new bunch of part-timer chamber-rocking cheeries like Rousseau? It does not. Lady Lake sometimes risk becoming just that - but they have infinitely more creativity and just need a bit more confidence in themselves to stretch out - not to mention a full-time bassist, preferably with a Rickenbacker and a big ego, both of which would immensely strengthen the sometimes meandering 14-minute opener and turn it into a real showpiece. Then they would take this intelligent music to the stage and become real contenders.
It took them long enough- but here is a late-blossoming flower of a rare hue and beauty. 'Good things come to those who wait' is self-evidently this band's axiom. Fair's fair - but don't leave it 27 years before the next one, boys. After all, you've got yourself at least one new fan and if there's any justice there should be a few more pronto.
8.5/10
FACE STUFFIN': First time lucky with Rösti
Swiss cuisine is as oxymoronic as Novaya Zemlya cuisine. Cheese fondues glistening with the sickly sheen of fairground candy, but crucially that bit sweeter; detumescent imitations of Bavarian sausages; beginners' Piedmontese. Switzerland's palate has even forgotten its greatest creation after Gruyere; that is of course absinthe, in the stills in the hills above Romont and Lausanne.
The origins of the one genuinely enjoyable Swiss staple, the roast potato cake Rösti, are obscure. Allegedly a farmer's breakfast dish from the Bernese Oberland, it must have originated from the arable plains around the River Aare and the Swiss capital; tubers don't like mountain slopes. It has suspicious overtones of the Bavarian artery-fattener Bratkartoffeln.
But here the Swiss outdo the Bavarians in restraint. Bratkartoffeln has egg added to its pan of glassy onions, grilled streaky bacon and puffy mound of coarsely-grated spuds. That's too much; that's collaborating more than was necessary.
Here's the schtick; parboil large peeled potatoes - Maris Pipers will do although Bintjes would be an interestingly toothsome contrast to the salt to come. Drain and leave to cool. Quality, as with the bacon and onions, is everything. Slice the bacon into even chunks and finely chop a Spanish onion (this is for 4). Heat butter and oil in a frying pan and gently cook bacon and onions until well done (the onions should be coloured just a little). In the meantime, coarsely grate your cooled spuds and fold the whole lot together in a pan with more butter and oil. The Swiss are animated as to raw or cooked spuds; it's your call. Quickly shape with whatever comes to hand the resultant mess into a coherent cake, not too deep. Season with a little salt and some freshly ground pepper. Above all keep whizzing the cake round the pan to stop sticking or burning; the heat should be low. 15 minutes should do it. Keep checking that the underside doesn't burn - use a flat spoon.
Great for brekkers? Nah. One for coming home, especially if you've prepared the night before. Total time - 15 mins prep, 15 mins cooking.
Basse cuisine, yes. But when you've just got your first Rösti just as crisp and browned as induces a growling Homeric feeding frenzy, then you know you're there.
Herbs, spices, cinnamon, apples, mushrooms - regional specialities, mostly less traditional - consult relevant sources. But if you HAVE to include cheese, make sure it's Gruyere or Appenzeller.
The origins of the one genuinely enjoyable Swiss staple, the roast potato cake Rösti, are obscure. Allegedly a farmer's breakfast dish from the Bernese Oberland, it must have originated from the arable plains around the River Aare and the Swiss capital; tubers don't like mountain slopes. It has suspicious overtones of the Bavarian artery-fattener Bratkartoffeln.
But here the Swiss outdo the Bavarians in restraint. Bratkartoffeln has egg added to its pan of glassy onions, grilled streaky bacon and puffy mound of coarsely-grated spuds. That's too much; that's collaborating more than was necessary.
Here's the schtick; parboil large peeled potatoes - Maris Pipers will do although Bintjes would be an interestingly toothsome contrast to the salt to come. Drain and leave to cool. Quality, as with the bacon and onions, is everything. Slice the bacon into even chunks and finely chop a Spanish onion (this is for 4). Heat butter and oil in a frying pan and gently cook bacon and onions until well done (the onions should be coloured just a little). In the meantime, coarsely grate your cooled spuds and fold the whole lot together in a pan with more butter and oil. The Swiss are animated as to raw or cooked spuds; it's your call. Quickly shape with whatever comes to hand the resultant mess into a coherent cake, not too deep. Season with a little salt and some freshly ground pepper. Above all keep whizzing the cake round the pan to stop sticking or burning; the heat should be low. 15 minutes should do it. Keep checking that the underside doesn't burn - use a flat spoon.
Great for brekkers? Nah. One for coming home, especially if you've prepared the night before. Total time - 15 mins prep, 15 mins cooking.
Basse cuisine, yes. But when you've just got your first Rösti just as crisp and browned as induces a growling Homeric feeding frenzy, then you know you're there.
Herbs, spices, cinnamon, apples, mushrooms - regional specialities, mostly less traditional - consult relevant sources. But if you HAVE to include cheese, make sure it's Gruyere or Appenzeller.
Hurrah for Hurwitz - mostly
The last post on here was a transcription of an excellent piece by www.classicstoday.com's David Hurwitz, who, despite being the only editor to ever have turned my work down, is a paladin among critics and has his head screwed on more firmly than most patsies and publicists.
But while a Corigliano or Dutilleux or Rihm we do not have in the UK, I'd just like to bring attention to two forgotten names of British music, both largely tonal in idiom - Alun Hoddinott (Welsh) and Nicholas Maw, who seems to have been banished into even deeper space than poor old Pluto. Seems only yesterday that Rattle was hymning his 90-minute monster Odyssey at the Proms - and it wasn't bad either - where is he now?
I'm planning a Hoddinott interview for a Welsh magazine, which will appear here if and when it happens.
But while a Corigliano or Dutilleux or Rihm we do not have in the UK, I'd just like to bring attention to two forgotten names of British music, both largely tonal in idiom - Alun Hoddinott (Welsh) and Nicholas Maw, who seems to have been banished into even deeper space than poor old Pluto. Seems only yesterday that Rattle was hymning his 90-minute monster Odyssey at the Proms - and it wasn't bad either - where is he now?
I'm planning a Hoddinott interview for a Welsh magazine, which will appear here if and when it happens.
From www.classicstoday.com, 12.9.06
PLUTO DE-PLANETIZED; HOLST VINDICATED; MATTHEWS DISGRACED
London: August 25, 2006
“When British music plays, the world now listens!” So trumpets the jingoistic cover of this month’s Gramophone magazine. Well, evidently the international astronomical community hasn’t been paying attention. In a triumphant vindication of composer Gustav Holst’s original conception for his popular orchestral work The Planets, the scientific gathering voted to remove Pluto from the list of true solar bodies meriting the designation “planet,” thus sparing music lovers the need ever again to hear English composer Colin Matthews’ excruciatingly wretched appendix to Holst’s masterpiece. Record labels that have already recorded the piece are reportedly hastening to reissue their performances with Pluto happily omitted.
One confidential source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told this correspondent: “We knew it was a bad idea from the start, but we got a lot of subsidy money from the Arts Council for pretending that contemporary English music wasn’t as dead as we all know it to be.” Members of the London orchestras are echoing the same sentiments. “Yes, the music is bad, and there’s something shoddy about have nothing better to do than latch on to an established masterpiece in order to make a name for yourself,” sighed one resigned back-stand violinist. “But don’t tell anyone I said so,” she added hastily, looking over her shoulder in alarm. “You have no idea how close-knit the performing arts community is over here. No one dares express any dissent if one wants to keep one’s job.”
Still, cracks in the institutional foundation seem to be appearing. Representatives of the various national rights societies are meeting in Madagascar next week to debate whether or not Matthews should be forced to return all of his royalties. “He’s never made any money from anything else he’s ever done,” said one enraged delegate, “so why should he profit from what has turned out to be a fraud?” Matthews himself, through his publicist, points out that he had no way of knowing that Pluto would soon be demoted from planetary status, but that argument doesn’t hold much water with record buyers. Shoppers at HMV’s flagship London store seemed rather better informed than the composer. “Pluto’s claim to planethood was always controversial,” says James M., a phlebotomist from Kensington. “Matthews should have thought of that before mutilating a masterpiece!”
As the repercussions continue to ripple through the classical music world, there are rumors that the House of Commons may take up the matter this fall. Tory back-benchers, operating under the mistaken assumption that Gustav Holst was German and not English, have already been heard to characterize the Pluto decision as “anti-British,” and have expressed support for Matthews' latest project, a Proms commission to write a sequel to Eric Coates’ London Again Suite tentatively entitled London Again and Again and Again. Other projects have been hastily cancelled, not all of them originating in the U.K. The Fairbanks Symphony of Alaska is reportedly considering dropping plans to commission Matthews to write Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Arctica.
British conductor Simon Rattle, however, is predictably standing by Matthews, a close personal friend. Rattle's upcoming tour with the Berlin Philharmonic features performances of The Planets with Pluto still intact, and he reportedly sent a personal letter to the deliberating astronomers begging them to at least postpone their announcement until after the tour, "for the sake of international peace and fellowship." And not every third-rate English composer finds the situation distressing. Anthony Payne, busily at work on his conjectural completion of Elgar’s opera based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, barely conceals his glee. “Matthews bungled the job,” Payne contends, summarizing the entire imbroglio in this fashion: “One should never touch a finished piece. In writing trash and fobbing it off as the work of a master, it is essential to select a project in which the original composer did as little as humanly possible. Then no one can criticize your own contribution, however awful.” Just so.
David Hurwitz
London: August 25, 2006
“When British music plays, the world now listens!” So trumpets the jingoistic cover of this month’s Gramophone magazine. Well, evidently the international astronomical community hasn’t been paying attention. In a triumphant vindication of composer Gustav Holst’s original conception for his popular orchestral work The Planets, the scientific gathering voted to remove Pluto from the list of true solar bodies meriting the designation “planet,” thus sparing music lovers the need ever again to hear English composer Colin Matthews’ excruciatingly wretched appendix to Holst’s masterpiece. Record labels that have already recorded the piece are reportedly hastening to reissue their performances with Pluto happily omitted.
One confidential source, speaking on condition of anonymity, told this correspondent: “We knew it was a bad idea from the start, but we got a lot of subsidy money from the Arts Council for pretending that contemporary English music wasn’t as dead as we all know it to be.” Members of the London orchestras are echoing the same sentiments. “Yes, the music is bad, and there’s something shoddy about have nothing better to do than latch on to an established masterpiece in order to make a name for yourself,” sighed one resigned back-stand violinist. “But don’t tell anyone I said so,” she added hastily, looking over her shoulder in alarm. “You have no idea how close-knit the performing arts community is over here. No one dares express any dissent if one wants to keep one’s job.”
Still, cracks in the institutional foundation seem to be appearing. Representatives of the various national rights societies are meeting in Madagascar next week to debate whether or not Matthews should be forced to return all of his royalties. “He’s never made any money from anything else he’s ever done,” said one enraged delegate, “so why should he profit from what has turned out to be a fraud?” Matthews himself, through his publicist, points out that he had no way of knowing that Pluto would soon be demoted from planetary status, but that argument doesn’t hold much water with record buyers. Shoppers at HMV’s flagship London store seemed rather better informed than the composer. “Pluto’s claim to planethood was always controversial,” says James M., a phlebotomist from Kensington. “Matthews should have thought of that before mutilating a masterpiece!”
As the repercussions continue to ripple through the classical music world, there are rumors that the House of Commons may take up the matter this fall. Tory back-benchers, operating under the mistaken assumption that Gustav Holst was German and not English, have already been heard to characterize the Pluto decision as “anti-British,” and have expressed support for Matthews' latest project, a Proms commission to write a sequel to Eric Coates’ London Again Suite tentatively entitled London Again and Again and Again. Other projects have been hastily cancelled, not all of them originating in the U.K. The Fairbanks Symphony of Alaska is reportedly considering dropping plans to commission Matthews to write Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia Arctica.
British conductor Simon Rattle, however, is predictably standing by Matthews, a close personal friend. Rattle's upcoming tour with the Berlin Philharmonic features performances of The Planets with Pluto still intact, and he reportedly sent a personal letter to the deliberating astronomers begging them to at least postpone their announcement until after the tour, "for the sake of international peace and fellowship." And not every third-rate English composer finds the situation distressing. Anthony Payne, busily at work on his conjectural completion of Elgar’s opera based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Madding Crowd, barely conceals his glee. “Matthews bungled the job,” Payne contends, summarizing the entire imbroglio in this fashion: “One should never touch a finished piece. In writing trash and fobbing it off as the work of a master, it is essential to select a project in which the original composer did as little as humanly possible. Then no one can criticize your own contribution, however awful.” Just so.
David Hurwitz
Monday, September 11, 2006
From The Onion, 4/6/03: You Can Be Anything You Want, Says Fictional Character
You Can Be Anything You Want, Says Fictional Character
June 4, 2003 |
NEW YORK—If you work hard, believe in yourself, and never lose sight of your dreams, you can achieve anything you want, the make-believe children's-book character Chipper Chipmunk said Tuesday.
"No matter what, I've got to keep climbing!" Chipper said on page 11 of Chipper Chipmunk Climbs Straight To The Top, released Tuesday by Scholastic Books. "No matter how windy, no matter how lofty, I must never be scared to go high, says I!"
In the book, Chipper faces numerous challenges as he attempts to climb Majestic Mister Maple. The Blustery Westerly Wind blows this way and that, rocking Mr. Maple and slowing Chipper's progress. Scornful Squirrel tries to damage his morale, openly questioning whether Chipper can climb as far or as fast as he thinks he can. And Fearsome Fox utilizes direct, physical methods of obstruction to impede Chipper's ascent.
In the end, however, the fictional woodland creature triumphs over all adversity, including his own self-doubt.
"From down there, Mister Maple seemed tall as the sky, and it scared me so much I almost didn't try," Chipper mused from the tree top. "But now that I'm up at the tippity tip-top of the tree, there's nothing at all that's as high up as me!"
After reaching the top, the pretend rodent issued a challenge to all who witnessed his feat.
"I knew I could do it—it was hard, yes, it's true. But if chipmunks can climb to the sky, so can YOU!" Chipper said, punctuating his message with a thumbs-up sign and a wink.
According to Dr. Roland Gibson of the American Council For Literature & Ethics, Chipper's core message—that people can be or do anything they want—is a fallacy widely perpetuated in children's books.
"Chipper's unshakable faith in success through hard work and persistence isn't something we typically encounter in our daily lives," Gibson said. "This groundless assumption that an individual's capacity for achievement is limitless is a particular failing of children's literature."
Continued Gibson: "Chipper's success took place in the extremely narrow field of tree-climbing, and was achieved free of such real-world factors as class, wealth, religion, or race. To assume that we can apply these lessons to our infinitely knottier, more complicated real-world lives is a wild oversimplification."
Gibson said that, with the exception of certain celebrities and politicians, statements like Chipper's are almost always made by talking animals, superheroes, omniscient narrators, anthropomorphic trains, wandering magicians, friendly dragons, sentient heavenly bodies, Jesus, and other characters subject only to the rules of narrative causality.
In spite of Chipper's good intentions, his positive message has not had much of an impact on the non-imaginary public.
"So, this chipmunk wants us to believe that just because he climbed some stupid tree, anything is possible?" said Dawn Dressler, a Wichita, KS, single mother of three. "Chipper wouldn't be so sure of himself if he had to hold down two jobs, had no dental insurance, and lost half his pension to corporate corruption. Let's see him reach for his goddamn dreams then."
June 4, 2003 |
NEW YORK—If you work hard, believe in yourself, and never lose sight of your dreams, you can achieve anything you want, the make-believe children's-book character Chipper Chipmunk said Tuesday.
"No matter what, I've got to keep climbing!" Chipper said on page 11 of Chipper Chipmunk Climbs Straight To The Top, released Tuesday by Scholastic Books. "No matter how windy, no matter how lofty, I must never be scared to go high, says I!"
In the book, Chipper faces numerous challenges as he attempts to climb Majestic Mister Maple. The Blustery Westerly Wind blows this way and that, rocking Mr. Maple and slowing Chipper's progress. Scornful Squirrel tries to damage his morale, openly questioning whether Chipper can climb as far or as fast as he thinks he can. And Fearsome Fox utilizes direct, physical methods of obstruction to impede Chipper's ascent.
In the end, however, the fictional woodland creature triumphs over all adversity, including his own self-doubt.
"From down there, Mister Maple seemed tall as the sky, and it scared me so much I almost didn't try," Chipper mused from the tree top. "But now that I'm up at the tippity tip-top of the tree, there's nothing at all that's as high up as me!"
After reaching the top, the pretend rodent issued a challenge to all who witnessed his feat.
"I knew I could do it—it was hard, yes, it's true. But if chipmunks can climb to the sky, so can YOU!" Chipper said, punctuating his message with a thumbs-up sign and a wink.
According to Dr. Roland Gibson of the American Council For Literature & Ethics, Chipper's core message—that people can be or do anything they want—is a fallacy widely perpetuated in children's books.
"Chipper's unshakable faith in success through hard work and persistence isn't something we typically encounter in our daily lives," Gibson said. "This groundless assumption that an individual's capacity for achievement is limitless is a particular failing of children's literature."
Continued Gibson: "Chipper's success took place in the extremely narrow field of tree-climbing, and was achieved free of such real-world factors as class, wealth, religion, or race. To assume that we can apply these lessons to our infinitely knottier, more complicated real-world lives is a wild oversimplification."
Gibson said that, with the exception of certain celebrities and politicians, statements like Chipper's are almost always made by talking animals, superheroes, omniscient narrators, anthropomorphic trains, wandering magicians, friendly dragons, sentient heavenly bodies, Jesus, and other characters subject only to the rules of narrative causality.
In spite of Chipper's good intentions, his positive message has not had much of an impact on the non-imaginary public.
"So, this chipmunk wants us to believe that just because he climbed some stupid tree, anything is possible?" said Dawn Dressler, a Wichita, KS, single mother of three. "Chipper wouldn't be so sure of himself if he had to hold down two jobs, had no dental insurance, and lost half his pension to corporate corruption. Let's see him reach for his goddamn dreams then."
buyers and sellers markets
Maybe it's that I can't get arrested with an article, book, programme or website idea, can't even get any subbing work; and can't even get my bum groped by the most haggard old baglady; maybe I've been watching too many old episodes of Lovejoy and Only Fools and Horses on UKTV Gold. But it all reinforces my belief that life is a buyer's market, not a seller's market. You can work as hard as you like, but if nobody wants what you've got, for whatever reason, you're fucked, mate. See following post.
Friday, September 08, 2006
Paul Harris on American Democracy: From The Observer
Thursday September 7, 2006Observer.co.uk
One person, one vote. Count the totals. The one with the most wins. The beauty of democracy is its simplicity and its inherent fairness. It equalises everyone, even as it empowers everyone. What could go wrong? In America, it turns out, quite a lot.
Everyone remembers the debacle in Florida, 2000. The recounts, the law suits and the eventual deciding of a presidential election - not by the voters - but by the Supreme Court. The memory still causes a collective shudder to America's body politic.
Which makes the fact that America's system of voting is now even more suspect, more complicated, and more open to abuse than ever before so utterly shocking. Across the country a bewildering series of scandals or dubious practises are proliferating beyond control. The prospect of a 'second Florida' is now more likely not less. There are many - and not all of them are conspiracy theorists - who believed it may have happened in Ohio in 2004.
This week the venerable New York Times was the latest of many organisations and institutions to declare that America's democratic system is simply starting to fail. Not in terms of its democratic ideals, or some takeover by a Neocon cabal, but by a simple collapse in its ability to count everyone's votes accurately and fairly. The Times is editorialising on a shocking government report into electoral rules in Ohio's biggest county, Cuyahoga, which contains the city of Cleveland. It details a litany of errors and a large discrepancy between the paper record of a ballot and the result recorded by the new Diebold electronic voting machines the county has just installed. It also worried that 31 per cent of black people were asked for identification as they voted compared to 18 per cent of other voters. '[The] report should be a wake-up call to states and counties nationwide,' the paper thundered.
But Ohio is far from isolated. The problem is simply that America has no national standard for tallying the votes in its elections. Apart from a few federal mandates to safeguard broad constitutional rights, it is left up to local officials to sort out the details on the ground. This means in one state a machine might be used. In others a simple paper ballot and a pen. Or it varies from county to county. In one small town a touch screen machine might be on hand, a few miles away other voters might use a punch ballot and in the next county after that you might use a pen. Or pull a lever. Or countless other complex ways to do what should be so, so simple. It also means in one place there is a solid (paper) record of a vote that can be recounted, while in others, it is all down to famously fallible machines and their electronic memories.
In some places you can't vote if you have a prison record. In others, you can. In some states you need identification to vote. In others you don't. In some a drivers' licence will be enough, in others it won't. All this is fundamentally a violation of the basic genius of democracy: it should be simple and uniform. In America that is simply not true.
Then there is another layer of trouble. Because elections are organised locally they are often run and controlled by state office holders or county level election supervisors. Often these officials are nakedly partisan and all too willing to use the power of that office to favour one party over another. Their county or state is, after all, their patch of turf and they seek to protect it for their side.
Then you add a large dose of dirty tricks that are again all too common at a local level in US politics. Forget Ohio or Florida. Just look at Milwaukee where mysterious fliers appeared in 2004 in a black neighbourhood informing residents that all felons and their relatives - even those guilty of traffic violations - could not vote. Or an election in New Hampshire in 2002 where senior state Republicans hired a firm to jam the Democrats phone bank system. Three people are now in jail due to that little escapade. Similar examples of other abuses can be found all over the country.
Now I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe that there is a cunning secret plan, set out in detail beforehand and then masterfully carried out to deliberately steal presidential elections. In fact, you don't actually need a shadowy plot to get much the same effect.
There is little doubt that at a grassroots level America's election is in disarray and being abused. And at a time of narrow election victories where presidential races come down to a single state (Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004) a microscope is instantly cast on that state's electoral practises. And lo, they are found wanting. Or open to fraud. Or being abused. Or local groups (from both sides) are going hell for leather to keep the other side from the polls. This is not because this is being planned out of Washington and targeted into those key states. It is because it is actually happening all over the country. We just notice because it has come down to the wire at that particular state.
You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to be seriously worried about this state of affairs. In many ways, it is more worrying that the system is not being deliberately stolen from on high. It is actually broken from the ground up.
One person, one vote. Count the totals. The one with the most wins. The beauty of democracy is its simplicity and its inherent fairness. It equalises everyone, even as it empowers everyone. What could go wrong? In America, it turns out, quite a lot.
Everyone remembers the debacle in Florida, 2000. The recounts, the law suits and the eventual deciding of a presidential election - not by the voters - but by the Supreme Court. The memory still causes a collective shudder to America's body politic.
Which makes the fact that America's system of voting is now even more suspect, more complicated, and more open to abuse than ever before so utterly shocking. Across the country a bewildering series of scandals or dubious practises are proliferating beyond control. The prospect of a 'second Florida' is now more likely not less. There are many - and not all of them are conspiracy theorists - who believed it may have happened in Ohio in 2004.
This week the venerable New York Times was the latest of many organisations and institutions to declare that America's democratic system is simply starting to fail. Not in terms of its democratic ideals, or some takeover by a Neocon cabal, but by a simple collapse in its ability to count everyone's votes accurately and fairly. The Times is editorialising on a shocking government report into electoral rules in Ohio's biggest county, Cuyahoga, which contains the city of Cleveland. It details a litany of errors and a large discrepancy between the paper record of a ballot and the result recorded by the new Diebold electronic voting machines the county has just installed. It also worried that 31 per cent of black people were asked for identification as they voted compared to 18 per cent of other voters. '[The] report should be a wake-up call to states and counties nationwide,' the paper thundered.
But Ohio is far from isolated. The problem is simply that America has no national standard for tallying the votes in its elections. Apart from a few federal mandates to safeguard broad constitutional rights, it is left up to local officials to sort out the details on the ground. This means in one state a machine might be used. In others a simple paper ballot and a pen. Or it varies from county to county. In one small town a touch screen machine might be on hand, a few miles away other voters might use a punch ballot and in the next county after that you might use a pen. Or pull a lever. Or countless other complex ways to do what should be so, so simple. It also means in one place there is a solid (paper) record of a vote that can be recounted, while in others, it is all down to famously fallible machines and their electronic memories.
In some places you can't vote if you have a prison record. In others, you can. In some states you need identification to vote. In others you don't. In some a drivers' licence will be enough, in others it won't. All this is fundamentally a violation of the basic genius of democracy: it should be simple and uniform. In America that is simply not true.
Then there is another layer of trouble. Because elections are organised locally they are often run and controlled by state office holders or county level election supervisors. Often these officials are nakedly partisan and all too willing to use the power of that office to favour one party over another. Their county or state is, after all, their patch of turf and they seek to protect it for their side.
Then you add a large dose of dirty tricks that are again all too common at a local level in US politics. Forget Ohio or Florida. Just look at Milwaukee where mysterious fliers appeared in 2004 in a black neighbourhood informing residents that all felons and their relatives - even those guilty of traffic violations - could not vote. Or an election in New Hampshire in 2002 where senior state Republicans hired a firm to jam the Democrats phone bank system. Three people are now in jail due to that little escapade. Similar examples of other abuses can be found all over the country.
Now I am not a conspiracy theorist. I don't believe that there is a cunning secret plan, set out in detail beforehand and then masterfully carried out to deliberately steal presidential elections. In fact, you don't actually need a shadowy plot to get much the same effect.
There is little doubt that at a grassroots level America's election is in disarray and being abused. And at a time of narrow election victories where presidential races come down to a single state (Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004) a microscope is instantly cast on that state's electoral practises. And lo, they are found wanting. Or open to fraud. Or being abused. Or local groups (from both sides) are going hell for leather to keep the other side from the polls. This is not because this is being planned out of Washington and targeted into those key states. It is because it is actually happening all over the country. We just notice because it has come down to the wire at that particular state.
You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to be seriously worried about this state of affairs. In many ways, it is more worrying that the system is not being deliberately stolen from on high. It is actually broken from the ground up.
FACE STUFFIN':The Bell at Caerleon
The Bell
Tony and Ceri Willacomb took over The Bell in Ultra Pontem, across the Usk from the historic Roman legionary outpost Caerleon, eighteen months ago - and now just can't stop winning awards. This June The Bell won the prestigious Penderyn Welsh Restaurant of the Month certificate; not to mention - by popular demand - the local Independent Voice magazine Pub restaurant of the Year Award in 2005.
A 17th-century coaching inn, dressed slate (you know the drill) on the tarmac ribbon that was once the old road from Newport to Usk, it's a one-roomer, with bar segueing into restaurant, in unpretentious buttermilk shades with warming Burgundy trim. A hard trick to bring off, but successful, as is the fulfilment of the oft-voiced fiction of 'locally-sourced produce'. Willacomb will give you details of his suppliers, but this foodie quibbling fades with chef John's work with the actual kit. This is provincial cooking of a very high standard, with a Burgundian or Bavarian richness. And faithfully seasonal.
Traditional Welshness, often leaking in from obscurely-sourced recipes (patron has the refs) is riffed on with good taste and imagination. Sautéed wild boar with mushroom risotto has a nicely unexpected tartness thanks to the delicious local Gwynt-y-Draig cider. The startling Welsh blue, Perl Las, adds a splendid bite to tender scallops and more-more-more samphire (remember, Wales has a long coastline). The bafflingly overpowering Black Mountain liqueur - blackberries, honey, whisky - battles it out with the richness of young (too young?) duck. Not for the fainthearted, but one no tastebud is likely to ever forget. This is the cooking of ruggedness, of terroir, that terror of the British menu for years.
Breton seafood galettes are also well-represented; this may be the only authentically Breton food in any pub in Britain. The amniotic nectar that is Kerisac Breton cider is also served in 75cl bottles, albeit slightly pricily at #6.00.
We're not talking iconic like The Stagg at Titley or the hideously-underrated Lough Pool at Sellack, other pearls in the Marches' amazing swathe of great gastropubs, but we are talking you-wish-you'd-been-there-at-the-start. In France, only the likes of Bocuse can turn the master craft of cuisine à la paysanne into art; in Britain's pubs we still deny the paysanne. Why, for example, are there so few Kentish pubs serving the county's specialities- lamb and shellfish - in any way acceptable to a sentient human?
Informed advice re accompaniments from casual bar staff are not British - this is what makes the Bell unusual, not to mention its boldness, and the audacity is not just in its choice of menus. Willacomb is riding an underground wave of enthusiasm for Welsh ciders that are picking up awards from beardie societies but also starting to attract attention from large chainstores. Gwynt y Ddraig (Dragon's Breath) from Llantwit Fardre could and should be the next Weston's or Thatcher's - craft, good taste, modesty and acumen.
Willacomb has struck gold with this truly original establishment. The music, for example, is pitched perfectly, audible for those that want to listen, ignorable for those who want to talk. From Breton harp solos to lounge jazz from Julie London - find that in the capital, and I'll eat my leek.
The Welsh Tourist Board should take a leaf out of Willacomb's book of pushing local class as well as culture. After a superbly-presented platter of local cheeses, we wanted nothing more than to check out local properties and sign in for the Welsh lessons held here every week.
Tony and Ceri Willacomb took over The Bell in Ultra Pontem, across the Usk from the historic Roman legionary outpost Caerleon, eighteen months ago - and now just can't stop winning awards. This June The Bell won the prestigious Penderyn Welsh Restaurant of the Month certificate; not to mention - by popular demand - the local Independent Voice magazine Pub restaurant of the Year Award in 2005.
A 17th-century coaching inn, dressed slate (you know the drill) on the tarmac ribbon that was once the old road from Newport to Usk, it's a one-roomer, with bar segueing into restaurant, in unpretentious buttermilk shades with warming Burgundy trim. A hard trick to bring off, but successful, as is the fulfilment of the oft-voiced fiction of 'locally-sourced produce'. Willacomb will give you details of his suppliers, but this foodie quibbling fades with chef John's work with the actual kit. This is provincial cooking of a very high standard, with a Burgundian or Bavarian richness. And faithfully seasonal.
Traditional Welshness, often leaking in from obscurely-sourced recipes (patron has the refs) is riffed on with good taste and imagination. Sautéed wild boar with mushroom risotto has a nicely unexpected tartness thanks to the delicious local Gwynt-y-Draig cider. The startling Welsh blue, Perl Las, adds a splendid bite to tender scallops and more-more-more samphire (remember, Wales has a long coastline). The bafflingly overpowering Black Mountain liqueur - blackberries, honey, whisky - battles it out with the richness of young (too young?) duck. Not for the fainthearted, but one no tastebud is likely to ever forget. This is the cooking of ruggedness, of terroir, that terror of the British menu for years.
Breton seafood galettes are also well-represented; this may be the only authentically Breton food in any pub in Britain. The amniotic nectar that is Kerisac Breton cider is also served in 75cl bottles, albeit slightly pricily at #6.00.
We're not talking iconic like The Stagg at Titley or the hideously-underrated Lough Pool at Sellack, other pearls in the Marches' amazing swathe of great gastropubs, but we are talking you-wish-you'd-been-there-at-the-start. In France, only the likes of Bocuse can turn the master craft of cuisine à la paysanne into art; in Britain's pubs we still deny the paysanne. Why, for example, are there so few Kentish pubs serving the county's specialities- lamb and shellfish - in any way acceptable to a sentient human?
Informed advice re accompaniments from casual bar staff are not British - this is what makes the Bell unusual, not to mention its boldness, and the audacity is not just in its choice of menus. Willacomb is riding an underground wave of enthusiasm for Welsh ciders that are picking up awards from beardie societies but also starting to attract attention from large chainstores. Gwynt y Ddraig (Dragon's Breath) from Llantwit Fardre could and should be the next Weston's or Thatcher's - craft, good taste, modesty and acumen.
Willacomb has struck gold with this truly original establishment. The music, for example, is pitched perfectly, audible for those that want to listen, ignorable for those who want to talk. From Breton harp solos to lounge jazz from Julie London - find that in the capital, and I'll eat my leek.
The Welsh Tourist Board should take a leaf out of Willacomb's book of pushing local class as well as culture. After a superbly-presented platter of local cheeses, we wanted nothing more than to check out local properties and sign in for the Welsh lessons held here every week.
Preparing for Deafness?
I'm not the most optimistic of people. I realise that there is a chance, no matter how slight, that I will lose my hearing; maybe soon, maybe later, maybe by a blow on the head from a block of frozen faeces plunging from a passing 747. I know Evelyn Glennie can do it, I know Beethoven could do it - is there any way to coach the body into sensory awareness of sounds, especially keys and key changes? Exercises, vast amounts of money paid to unscrupulous Mexican surgeons etc. Whatever. All suggestions welcome. No cranks please. Etc.
Serious request. Honest.
Serious request. Honest.
Fall and JCC!
London's Galtymore is hosting a postpunk delight on Fri 14 and Sat 15 with Mancunian heroes The Fall and John Cooper Clarke sharing a bill. Shame is that it's not as a benefit for RAR, there won't be any SWP papersellers outside, there'll be no badly-kept Ruddles County, Theakston's Old Peculier or Grunhalle lager on, no skins loitering in nearby streets, no Mekons or Linton Kwesi Johnson or Ruts on the undercard. Ah, 1979!
RIP John Drummond
Yes, you were loud. Yes, too much bing-bang-bongery at the Proms. But in mitigation:
Kennedy : Liberace for 90s
Yentob: prat
Bragg: irritating but not significant
Lord Evans: one of those middle=aged men who wears baseball caps the wrong way round because they don't want to grow up.
If there be a hereafter, you deserve the best, for these epithets alone.
Kennedy : Liberace for 90s
Yentob: prat
Bragg: irritating but not significant
Lord Evans: one of those middle=aged men who wears baseball caps the wrong way round because they don't want to grow up.
If there be a hereafter, you deserve the best, for these epithets alone.
Service/Haitink/Mahler
Good to see Tom Service paying tribute to Haitink's excellent Mahler 2 at Proms (Guardian, today). But his charge that Haitink was known as severe and austere in the symphonies is at least 25 years out of date. The Philips cycle in the 60s and 70s was workaday and academic it's true, but my conversion to Mahler came watching Haiters' 1983 Concertgebouw Christmas Day performance of No.3. Tennstedt's 6 at the 83 Proms helped me along the way, but this was mind-blowing stuff. Has anyone a boot of this performance? I have a boot of Haiters' 99 performance with the VPO but it's plagued with high-end tape hum. Haitink's official 7th, with the BPO in 83 was also top-notch - my third-least fave Mahler sym, but the finale just kicks Bohemian ass, like a food-fight in a Ceske Budjejovice bar. He is the greatest living conductor of Mahler - now can someone get a revolver, lock Haitink in a room and get him to do the Cooke reconstruction of the 10th?
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Support Kelner!
For those of you with digital radio, please try and tune into Martin Kelner and Jake Yapp's BBC radio chat show Pleased To Meet You. It's very funny. Hang on, Kelner, you're a tenner short here... oh OK I'll get that CD to you one day
Prom 71 Review
Prom 71 RFH Bell/RPO/Gatti***
Khachaturian, I think, remarked that Shostakovich's Tenth was an 'optimistic tragedy'. In the hands of Daniel Gatti, a tyro in this repertoire, there wasn't much optimism, tragedy, or anything. His RPO did sterling work for him, as ever - the strings are now in the Philadelphia class - but this performance was like an Italian's scrapbook of old Soviet postcards, a series of gestures relentlessly exaggerated to the nth degree, and lovingly maintained, but ultimately formless and which are mute on realities.
Ragged ensemble work in the frantic scherzo, not to mention rambling tempi and rubato didn't help. Underemphasising the woodwind solos in the giant opening Passacaglia was also potentially fatal.
Twenty years back almost to the night, Haitink and the LPO played - or rather exploded - this symphony at a Prom . It was a performance that nobody who heard it will ever forget. Gatti has the speeds and bravura not the architecture which are so crucial to the big climaxes. The construction of the pieces (the cues to the demented dances in the third movement, the accelerandos) are jerrybuilt - but he is learning fast. He knows the drill; 'This is one of the great works of art of the 20th century - handle with care'.
Given that the Prommers had been able to get their juices flowing with a delightfully brisk and bashy romp through Bruch's First Violin Concerto by Joshua Bell, long a venue favourite, they found Gatti just fine. But on the night, Bell was the man - grannies and goths alike whooped and hollered for him as they had done for Haitink on that sensational night long ago.
Khachaturian, I think, remarked that Shostakovich's Tenth was an 'optimistic tragedy'. In the hands of Daniel Gatti, a tyro in this repertoire, there wasn't much optimism, tragedy, or anything. His RPO did sterling work for him, as ever - the strings are now in the Philadelphia class - but this performance was like an Italian's scrapbook of old Soviet postcards, a series of gestures relentlessly exaggerated to the nth degree, and lovingly maintained, but ultimately formless and which are mute on realities.
Ragged ensemble work in the frantic scherzo, not to mention rambling tempi and rubato didn't help. Underemphasising the woodwind solos in the giant opening Passacaglia was also potentially fatal.
Twenty years back almost to the night, Haitink and the LPO played - or rather exploded - this symphony at a Prom . It was a performance that nobody who heard it will ever forget. Gatti has the speeds and bravura not the architecture which are so crucial to the big climaxes. The construction of the pieces (the cues to the demented dances in the third movement, the accelerandos) are jerrybuilt - but he is learning fast. He knows the drill; 'This is one of the great works of art of the 20th century - handle with care'.
Given that the Prommers had been able to get their juices flowing with a delightfully brisk and bashy romp through Bruch's First Violin Concerto by Joshua Bell, long a venue favourite, they found Gatti just fine. But on the night, Bell was the man - grannies and goths alike whooped and hollered for him as they had done for Haitink on that sensational night long ago.
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
Alex Ross: What about Schreker?
From the New Yorker, August 20, 2005, great article by their ace music critic Alex Ross about THE neglected composer of the 20th-c. - Franz Schreker.
All About Schreker
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, August 22, 2005.
A friend once borrowed a history of opera from the library, only to find that every other page had been marked up by one of those hyper-punctuating annotators who stalk the pages of library books around the world. Whether the topic was Monteverdi, Wagner, or Gilbert and Sullivan, the voice in the margins kept returning to one agonized, enigmatic question: “WHAT ABOUT SCHREKER???” My friend, who understandably knew little of the Austrian opera composer Franz Schreker (1878-1934), began to use that graphite cri de coeur as shorthand for the cult of obscure art, which sees repertories and canons as conspiracies against neglected genius. Any gathering of aesthetes will sooner or later have a “What about Schreker?” moment.
It's a good question, though. Schreker was better on his best days than most great composers are on their off days, which is why canons of genius are suspect. A child of fin-de-siècle Vienna, he delighted in the traumas of hypersensitive artist types, capturing them inside a glistening spiderweb of orchestral sound. At the height of his career, around 1920, he was anything but obscure: his operas were staged in all the major German and Austrian houses, and he became the director of the prestigious Hochschule für Musik, in Berlin. There were various reasons for his subsequent decline: he grew less sure of himself as he passed the age of forty; the ever-changing stylistic trends of the Jazz Age left him bewildered; he was of partly Jewish descent, which meant that after the Nazi takeover of 1933 he could no longer earn a living. He tried to learn English, in preparation for possibly emigrating to America. “Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin,” he wrote in his notebook. But he did not get the chance, dying, literally and figuratively, of a broken heart.
An attempt at resuscitation is under way. Schreker's operas are sidling back into the repertories of Central European opera houses. This summer, the Salzburg Festival mounted a beautifully disturbing production of “Die Gezeichneten,” or “The Branded,” which, between 1918 and 1930, played in twenty-two cities, and then went unheard for decades. Nazism consigned Schreker to obscurity; now German-speaking opera lovers seem determined to make amends. Heinz Fischer, the President of Austria, who is trying to quell yet more antiSemitic noises from the country's far right, made a point of attending “Die Gezeichneten” and visiting an exhibition of Schrekeriana which the Jewish Museum of Vienna had put together.
But it's tricky to frame Schreker as a virtuous victim of history. Nikolaus Lehnhoff, who directed “Die Gezeichneten,” rightly perceives that there is something dangerous and strange at the heart of Schreker's music, an unstable, implosive energy, which guarantees that it will have an uneasy future.
Schreker had sharp features, a high forehead, and incisive eyes. He looked a little like Mahler, which may explain why Alma Mahler had an affair with him after her husband's death. His father was a portrait photographer for the European aristocracy; his mother came from an old Austrian Catholic family. He was one of the few young composers of his generation who refused to be overwhelmed by Richard Wagner, paying heed instead to international contemporaries, notably Debussy, Puccini, and Paul Dukas, whose opera “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue” is another hidden gem of the fin de siècle. (New York City Opera will revive it this fall [BLOGGER'S NOTE - 2005].) Schreker's first major opera, “Der Ferne Klang” (“The Distant Sound”), first heard in 1912, stood out from myth-based, swords-and-sorcery operas of the period, because it was set in the present day, in the salons and cafés of the bourgeoisie. An ambitious young composer goes in search of a “distant sound,” turning away from the woman who loves him. She descends into the dregs of society, not unlike Wedekind's Lulu, and only when it is too late does the artist realize his error.
From the start Schreker had an urge to make art about art, to show the exhilarating possibilities and creeping dangers of the creative path. In “The Music Box and the Princess,” a wandering youth summons magic sounds with his flute. In “The Singing Devil,” an organ builder creates a wondrous instrument that is supposed to bring peace, but falls into the hands of an evil fanatic. In “Der Schatzgräber,” a musician uses an enchanted lute to locate buried treasure. In “Irrelohe,” an itinerant fiddler sets fire to the countryside wherever he goes. And in “Christophorus,” the strongest opera of his later years, a wise old composer oversees a quarrelsome posse of students, one of whom is a Schoenberg-like fanatic who “writes linearly.”
Schreker wrote his own librettos, mobilizing naturalistic devices that hadn't been used in German opera before. Freudian dream journals mix with slangy chitchat; one scene melts into another with cinematic ease. There are fascinating effects of distancing: often, a character will sing in elegant phrases about something horrible—in “Ge-zeichneten,” the soprano lingers lovingly on the word Hässlichkeit, or “ugliness”—while attempts at wholesome passion are undercut by dissonance. The music vacillates between melodies of Mediterranean grace and textures of otherworldly complexity. Schreker never abandoned tonality, but he made the triad a nucleus around which extra notes move in flickering orbits. Periodically, his late-Romantic orchestra dematerializes: heavy instruments recede, and chiming tones of harp, xylophone, and celesta (the sound of Tchaikovsky's Sugar Plum Fairy) take over. One minute, you are standing on solid ground; the next, you are dancing on mist.
Anything but a Romantic reactionary, Schreker was nevertheless seen as a throwback in the foxtrotting nineteen-twenties. The fashion was for hard, dry sound; he could not let go of his gossamer textures. A brilliant teacher, he watched sadly as his own students disavowed him. He got a secret revenge in “Christophorus,” which was too far-out and meta-operatic to be performed in the composer's lifetime. (The Kiel Opera has made a good recording for the CPO label.) Master Johann's star students are Christoph, a strutting prodigy beloved of the critics, and Anselm, an ambivalent, watchful youth. Christoph ends up a murderer, a drug addict, a disciple of brute strength. Anselm finds virtue in truth, simplicity, “female weakness”—everything that Germany was preparing to reject.
If “Der Ferne Klang” is Schreker's most inspired work—the Venetian party scene in Act II, with its layering of choruses, Gypsy bands, and singing gondoliers, is worthy of “Don Giovanni”—“Die Gezeichneten” is the one that takes you by the throat. The plot, which Schreker initially concocted for his RomanticImpressionist colleague Alexander Zemlinsky, sets up a love triangle among three habitués of Renaissance Genoa: Alviano, a hunchbacked aesthete, who builds an island utopia called Elysium; Count Tamare, handsome and heartless, who, with fellow-squires, converts Elysium into a hotbed of sexual depravity, taking the daughters of Genoa's merchant class as victims; and Carlotta, a diffident painter, who falls in love with Alviano, or at least the idea of him, only to give in to Tamare's advances.
The Schreker scholar Gösta Neuwirth has found that the scenario contains various cunning portraits of fin-de-siècle personalities. Alviano resembles the industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp, who built a gay pleasure den in a grotto on Capri. Tamare seems to have been based on Tamara von Hervay, an accused bigamist and witch. And Carlotta, who rightly fears that sex would kill her, is probably a stand-in for the perpetually keening Zemlinsky, as well as for the less sentimental Schoenberg, who painted in his spare time. The libretto supplies a description of Carlotta's painting of a glowing hand: it precisely resembles one of Schoenberg's pictures. The transposition of gender roles is typical of Schreker's devious psychology.
The music, too, is full of deceptive surfaces and tricky allusions. It is itself a kind of magic grotto, designed to lure the unsuspecting ear. A splashy, hummable melody linked with Tamare functions like “La donna è mobile,” the ditty that the Duke sings in Verdi's “Rigoletto”; it is the charming face of a vicious man. A complementary melody, wavering between major and minor, represents Carlotta's moody yearning. It collapses in on itself as the opera goes on, until it becomes nothing more than a D-major triad superimposed on D-minor: a clotted, shivering mass. These unearthly sounds appear in conjunction with a finale of shameless melodrama. Some twists are predictable—Alviano kills Tamare in a rage—and some are not. When Carlotta, nearly dead in the wake of a rough night with Tamare, looks up to see Alviano, there is no tearful reconciliation. Instead, she screams, “Away, away! A troll!” Alviano goes mad. Curtain.
Lehnhoff, in his production, takes Schreker's sadistic manipulations a step further. In the first two acts, an austere, ominous landscape unfolds: characters crawl over the surface of a gigantic broken statue, which makes for a dramatic sight amid Salzburg's rock-hewn Felsenreitschule stage. In Act III, we enter Elysium, which here becomes a mechanical sexual ritual, not unlike the boring orgies in Pasolini's “Salò” and Kubrick's “Eyes Wide Shut.” In Lehnhoff's vision, the girls who have been abducted into Elysium are not teen-agers but mere children, and they are not only raped but murdered. It is a grisly tableau out of Egon Schiele or Otto Dix. European opera stages are full of such unspeakable acts nowadays, and they usually have no dramatic point. Lehnhoff, who in other productions has proved anything but a sensationalist, knows what he is doing: he is following to the logical extreme Schreker's cultivated understanding of the worst in human nature.
The musicologist Christopher Hailey, who has long campaigned for a Schreker revival, observes that the operas work best if they are done in the highest possible style. The Salzburg performance, despite a series of awkward cuts, came close to the ideal. Kent Nagano conducted the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester of Berlin, applying the same priestly devotion to Schreker that he brings to Mahler and Messiaen. Robert Brubaker sang the taxing role of Alviano with unflagging intensity, perhaps missing some lyric nuance along the way. Michael Volle was a charismatic and brutal Tamare. Above all, Anne Schwanewilms was transfixing as Carlotta. With her hotly expressive stage presence and coolly beautiful soprano voice, she caught the ambiguities of Carlotta's character and, by extension, all the fire and ice of Schreker's world.
All About Schreker
by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, August 22, 2005.
A friend once borrowed a history of opera from the library, only to find that every other page had been marked up by one of those hyper-punctuating annotators who stalk the pages of library books around the world. Whether the topic was Monteverdi, Wagner, or Gilbert and Sullivan, the voice in the margins kept returning to one agonized, enigmatic question: “WHAT ABOUT SCHREKER???” My friend, who understandably knew little of the Austrian opera composer Franz Schreker (1878-1934), began to use that graphite cri de coeur as shorthand for the cult of obscure art, which sees repertories and canons as conspiracies against neglected genius. Any gathering of aesthetes will sooner or later have a “What about Schreker?” moment.
It's a good question, though. Schreker was better on his best days than most great composers are on their off days, which is why canons of genius are suspect. A child of fin-de-siècle Vienna, he delighted in the traumas of hypersensitive artist types, capturing them inside a glistening spiderweb of orchestral sound. At the height of his career, around 1920, he was anything but obscure: his operas were staged in all the major German and Austrian houses, and he became the director of the prestigious Hochschule für Musik, in Berlin. There were various reasons for his subsequent decline: he grew less sure of himself as he passed the age of forty; the ever-changing stylistic trends of the Jazz Age left him bewildered; he was of partly Jewish descent, which meant that after the Nazi takeover of 1933 he could no longer earn a living. He tried to learn English, in preparation for possibly emigrating to America. “Ladies and gentlemen, let us begin,” he wrote in his notebook. But he did not get the chance, dying, literally and figuratively, of a broken heart.
An attempt at resuscitation is under way. Schreker's operas are sidling back into the repertories of Central European opera houses. This summer, the Salzburg Festival mounted a beautifully disturbing production of “Die Gezeichneten,” or “The Branded,” which, between 1918 and 1930, played in twenty-two cities, and then went unheard for decades. Nazism consigned Schreker to obscurity; now German-speaking opera lovers seem determined to make amends. Heinz Fischer, the President of Austria, who is trying to quell yet more antiSemitic noises from the country's far right, made a point of attending “Die Gezeichneten” and visiting an exhibition of Schrekeriana which the Jewish Museum of Vienna had put together.
But it's tricky to frame Schreker as a virtuous victim of history. Nikolaus Lehnhoff, who directed “Die Gezeichneten,” rightly perceives that there is something dangerous and strange at the heart of Schreker's music, an unstable, implosive energy, which guarantees that it will have an uneasy future.
Schreker had sharp features, a high forehead, and incisive eyes. He looked a little like Mahler, which may explain why Alma Mahler had an affair with him after her husband's death. His father was a portrait photographer for the European aristocracy; his mother came from an old Austrian Catholic family. He was one of the few young composers of his generation who refused to be overwhelmed by Richard Wagner, paying heed instead to international contemporaries, notably Debussy, Puccini, and Paul Dukas, whose opera “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue” is another hidden gem of the fin de siècle. (New York City Opera will revive it this fall [BLOGGER'S NOTE - 2005].) Schreker's first major opera, “Der Ferne Klang” (“The Distant Sound”), first heard in 1912, stood out from myth-based, swords-and-sorcery operas of the period, because it was set in the present day, in the salons and cafés of the bourgeoisie. An ambitious young composer goes in search of a “distant sound,” turning away from the woman who loves him. She descends into the dregs of society, not unlike Wedekind's Lulu, and only when it is too late does the artist realize his error.
From the start Schreker had an urge to make art about art, to show the exhilarating possibilities and creeping dangers of the creative path. In “The Music Box and the Princess,” a wandering youth summons magic sounds with his flute. In “The Singing Devil,” an organ builder creates a wondrous instrument that is supposed to bring peace, but falls into the hands of an evil fanatic. In “Der Schatzgräber,” a musician uses an enchanted lute to locate buried treasure. In “Irrelohe,” an itinerant fiddler sets fire to the countryside wherever he goes. And in “Christophorus,” the strongest opera of his later years, a wise old composer oversees a quarrelsome posse of students, one of whom is a Schoenberg-like fanatic who “writes linearly.”
Schreker wrote his own librettos, mobilizing naturalistic devices that hadn't been used in German opera before. Freudian dream journals mix with slangy chitchat; one scene melts into another with cinematic ease. There are fascinating effects of distancing: often, a character will sing in elegant phrases about something horrible—in “Ge-zeichneten,” the soprano lingers lovingly on the word Hässlichkeit, or “ugliness”—while attempts at wholesome passion are undercut by dissonance. The music vacillates between melodies of Mediterranean grace and textures of otherworldly complexity. Schreker never abandoned tonality, but he made the triad a nucleus around which extra notes move in flickering orbits. Periodically, his late-Romantic orchestra dematerializes: heavy instruments recede, and chiming tones of harp, xylophone, and celesta (the sound of Tchaikovsky's Sugar Plum Fairy) take over. One minute, you are standing on solid ground; the next, you are dancing on mist.
Anything but a Romantic reactionary, Schreker was nevertheless seen as a throwback in the foxtrotting nineteen-twenties. The fashion was for hard, dry sound; he could not let go of his gossamer textures. A brilliant teacher, he watched sadly as his own students disavowed him. He got a secret revenge in “Christophorus,” which was too far-out and meta-operatic to be performed in the composer's lifetime. (The Kiel Opera has made a good recording for the CPO label.) Master Johann's star students are Christoph, a strutting prodigy beloved of the critics, and Anselm, an ambivalent, watchful youth. Christoph ends up a murderer, a drug addict, a disciple of brute strength. Anselm finds virtue in truth, simplicity, “female weakness”—everything that Germany was preparing to reject.
If “Der Ferne Klang” is Schreker's most inspired work—the Venetian party scene in Act II, with its layering of choruses, Gypsy bands, and singing gondoliers, is worthy of “Don Giovanni”—“Die Gezeichneten” is the one that takes you by the throat. The plot, which Schreker initially concocted for his RomanticImpressionist colleague Alexander Zemlinsky, sets up a love triangle among three habitués of Renaissance Genoa: Alviano, a hunchbacked aesthete, who builds an island utopia called Elysium; Count Tamare, handsome and heartless, who, with fellow-squires, converts Elysium into a hotbed of sexual depravity, taking the daughters of Genoa's merchant class as victims; and Carlotta, a diffident painter, who falls in love with Alviano, or at least the idea of him, only to give in to Tamare's advances.
The Schreker scholar Gösta Neuwirth has found that the scenario contains various cunning portraits of fin-de-siècle personalities. Alviano resembles the industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp, who built a gay pleasure den in a grotto on Capri. Tamare seems to have been based on Tamara von Hervay, an accused bigamist and witch. And Carlotta, who rightly fears that sex would kill her, is probably a stand-in for the perpetually keening Zemlinsky, as well as for the less sentimental Schoenberg, who painted in his spare time. The libretto supplies a description of Carlotta's painting of a glowing hand: it precisely resembles one of Schoenberg's pictures. The transposition of gender roles is typical of Schreker's devious psychology.
The music, too, is full of deceptive surfaces and tricky allusions. It is itself a kind of magic grotto, designed to lure the unsuspecting ear. A splashy, hummable melody linked with Tamare functions like “La donna è mobile,” the ditty that the Duke sings in Verdi's “Rigoletto”; it is the charming face of a vicious man. A complementary melody, wavering between major and minor, represents Carlotta's moody yearning. It collapses in on itself as the opera goes on, until it becomes nothing more than a D-major triad superimposed on D-minor: a clotted, shivering mass. These unearthly sounds appear in conjunction with a finale of shameless melodrama. Some twists are predictable—Alviano kills Tamare in a rage—and some are not. When Carlotta, nearly dead in the wake of a rough night with Tamare, looks up to see Alviano, there is no tearful reconciliation. Instead, she screams, “Away, away! A troll!” Alviano goes mad. Curtain.
Lehnhoff, in his production, takes Schreker's sadistic manipulations a step further. In the first two acts, an austere, ominous landscape unfolds: characters crawl over the surface of a gigantic broken statue, which makes for a dramatic sight amid Salzburg's rock-hewn Felsenreitschule stage. In Act III, we enter Elysium, which here becomes a mechanical sexual ritual, not unlike the boring orgies in Pasolini's “Salò” and Kubrick's “Eyes Wide Shut.” In Lehnhoff's vision, the girls who have been abducted into Elysium are not teen-agers but mere children, and they are not only raped but murdered. It is a grisly tableau out of Egon Schiele or Otto Dix. European opera stages are full of such unspeakable acts nowadays, and they usually have no dramatic point. Lehnhoff, who in other productions has proved anything but a sensationalist, knows what he is doing: he is following to the logical extreme Schreker's cultivated understanding of the worst in human nature.
The musicologist Christopher Hailey, who has long campaigned for a Schreker revival, observes that the operas work best if they are done in the highest possible style. The Salzburg performance, despite a series of awkward cuts, came close to the ideal. Kent Nagano conducted the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester of Berlin, applying the same priestly devotion to Schreker that he brings to Mahler and Messiaen. Robert Brubaker sang the taxing role of Alviano with unflagging intensity, perhaps missing some lyric nuance along the way. Michael Volle was a charismatic and brutal Tamare. Above all, Anne Schwanewilms was transfixing as Carlotta. With her hotly expressive stage presence and coolly beautiful soprano voice, she caught the ambiguities of Carlotta's character and, by extension, all the fire and ice of Schreker's world.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
SPORTIN' LIFE: Get Your Kits Off For The Lads
Lovely piece in today's Observer about women in sport. As someone who tends to drift off into a not-entirely-seemly dreamworld if the words 'Martina' and 'Hingis' are mentioned in the same sentence, I declare a completely pointless interest.
Link is www.observer.co.uk. Gist is - women don't get taken seriously in sport unless they're sexy, or marketed thus. Bleeding obvious? Well, yes, but it's nice to be reminded sometimes.
Here is Gail Emms, the splendid badminton player: 'they are always trying to get me into something I couldn't get one boob into, let alone my arse'. The admirable Ellen MacArthur: 'I'm not interested in wearing a dress and sitting on a car' [love that]. Emms could also have brought up the prurient, suits-you-sir nature of the BBC coverage of her endeavours with Nathan Robertson, which omitted only the line 'so come on you two, are you having it off together? How many times a night? Eh? ' (answers; they weren't; none; piss off).
Anna Kessel, the author of this excellent essay, is unafraid to air the valid viewpoint that women's sport does not measure up to men's in terms of visceral excitement. As Bill Bradshaw of the Express says, '...at Wimbledon, until the women play five sets I don't think they should be treated the same as the men.' History tells one why and even then there are exceptions; anyone who has ever seen Lilian Board's heroic overhauling of Colette Besson in the 1969 European 4x400 relay is unlikely ever to forget it. And as Kessel points out, MacArthur competes against, and usually beats, men.
But these are red herrings. They don't excuse overt sexualisation. It happens with men, occasionally - remember Linford's lunchbox?
It's difficult for anyone who hasn't worked in the media to grasp how much looks count in this strange world of objectification. Admirably, my last editor refused to countenance my own (guilty) urgings as a senior staffer to use good-looking young men and women to sell copies. Look and feel is as important as any text. One journalist I spoke to actually said about a girl he fancied; 'but would I put her on the cover?'
Kessel's piece opens with the story of the squash player Vicky Botwright, who was a then-willing, now-regretting participant in what appears to be a particularly cynical marketing ploy on behalf of various parties including the sport's governing body, which used the trim Lancastrian's pneumatism to puff squash. It worked for the short time in which Botwright's website took more hits than Kournikova's. Botwright feels naive now, and can be forgiven. Everybody else behaved very badly indeed.
If she had said to Wispa, the guys who run ladies' squash, surely the only world body named for a crap 1980s chocolate bar; 'Tell you what, I'll gerremoff, and you take photos. Please' things would be different (I know, I know. 2,895,783 other issues about female sexuality and male consumption. I've not enough space). I don't particularly disdain the Sharapovas of this world - but don't force all female athletes to be Mariamorphize. Kelly Sotherton, another athlete featured, is a very fine heptathlete and also - coincidentally - a very attractive woman, but until she decides otherwise she should be in the papers for one thing only - what she does in her sport. Note to sports eds - the 'coincidentally' is the key.
France seems to have a more enlightened attitude - in 2004, the stunning gamine Emilie Le Pennec won the country's first-ever Olympic gold in gymnastics. Did the centrefolds follow? They did not. Mary Pierce is the exception that proves the Gallic rule.
It might also have helped the Observer if they hadn't run a shockingly kitsch cover on their OSM supplement showing Andriy Shevchenko in a clinch with his other half, who was wearing very little, and all of that opaque. Not an athlete, true, but there to sell a sports magazine. On page 28-29 there is a touching story of skier Chemmy Alcott losing her mother. The pic? A full-page job, all pout and soulfulness. She looks remarkably like Patsy Kensit, circa Absolute Beginners. There was, if memory serves, also pieces about the US golfer Paula Creamer and a host of sexpot chess grandmasters in the same magazine - quite recently.
Alcott's been lucky so far - the girl skis well for a Briton, and her personality should be PR gold, but she hasn't, as far as we know, been asked to give the camera a sample of her tan. Shelly Rudman, strikingly and darkly pretty, with a story any journalist would kill for (from rural Wiltshire, dirt-poor, villagers club together to send her to train, wins Olympic luge title - I mean, how weird is that?), also seems to have been left on the media shelf. Even weirder, I'd say. A case of not agreeing to loosen that dress-strap far enough?
One personal dilemma - I'd only been aware of Gail Emms as anyone except someone I'd once seen playing badminton quite well on the telly before reading this, but her stance made me want to go get her phone number. Never mind the pics.
Huh. Men. Only after one thing. Which is why we shouldn't be encouraged.
Link is www.observer.co.uk. Gist is - women don't get taken seriously in sport unless they're sexy, or marketed thus. Bleeding obvious? Well, yes, but it's nice to be reminded sometimes.
Here is Gail Emms, the splendid badminton player: 'they are always trying to get me into something I couldn't get one boob into, let alone my arse'. The admirable Ellen MacArthur: 'I'm not interested in wearing a dress and sitting on a car' [love that]. Emms could also have brought up the prurient, suits-you-sir nature of the BBC coverage of her endeavours with Nathan Robertson, which omitted only the line 'so come on you two, are you having it off together? How many times a night? Eh? ' (answers; they weren't; none; piss off).
Anna Kessel, the author of this excellent essay, is unafraid to air the valid viewpoint that women's sport does not measure up to men's in terms of visceral excitement. As Bill Bradshaw of the Express says, '...at Wimbledon, until the women play five sets I don't think they should be treated the same as the men.' History tells one why and even then there are exceptions; anyone who has ever seen Lilian Board's heroic overhauling of Colette Besson in the 1969 European 4x400 relay is unlikely ever to forget it. And as Kessel points out, MacArthur competes against, and usually beats, men.
But these are red herrings. They don't excuse overt sexualisation. It happens with men, occasionally - remember Linford's lunchbox?
It's difficult for anyone who hasn't worked in the media to grasp how much looks count in this strange world of objectification. Admirably, my last editor refused to countenance my own (guilty) urgings as a senior staffer to use good-looking young men and women to sell copies. Look and feel is as important as any text. One journalist I spoke to actually said about a girl he fancied; 'but would I put her on the cover?'
Kessel's piece opens with the story of the squash player Vicky Botwright, who was a then-willing, now-regretting participant in what appears to be a particularly cynical marketing ploy on behalf of various parties including the sport's governing body, which used the trim Lancastrian's pneumatism to puff squash. It worked for the short time in which Botwright's website took more hits than Kournikova's. Botwright feels naive now, and can be forgiven. Everybody else behaved very badly indeed.
If she had said to Wispa, the guys who run ladies' squash, surely the only world body named for a crap 1980s chocolate bar; 'Tell you what, I'll gerremoff, and you take photos. Please' things would be different (I know, I know. 2,895,783 other issues about female sexuality and male consumption. I've not enough space). I don't particularly disdain the Sharapovas of this world - but don't force all female athletes to be Mariamorphize. Kelly Sotherton, another athlete featured, is a very fine heptathlete and also - coincidentally - a very attractive woman, but until she decides otherwise she should be in the papers for one thing only - what she does in her sport. Note to sports eds - the 'coincidentally' is the key.
France seems to have a more enlightened attitude - in 2004, the stunning gamine Emilie Le Pennec won the country's first-ever Olympic gold in gymnastics. Did the centrefolds follow? They did not. Mary Pierce is the exception that proves the Gallic rule.
It might also have helped the Observer if they hadn't run a shockingly kitsch cover on their OSM supplement showing Andriy Shevchenko in a clinch with his other half, who was wearing very little, and all of that opaque. Not an athlete, true, but there to sell a sports magazine. On page 28-29 there is a touching story of skier Chemmy Alcott losing her mother. The pic? A full-page job, all pout and soulfulness. She looks remarkably like Patsy Kensit, circa Absolute Beginners. There was, if memory serves, also pieces about the US golfer Paula Creamer and a host of sexpot chess grandmasters in the same magazine - quite recently.
Alcott's been lucky so far - the girl skis well for a Briton, and her personality should be PR gold, but she hasn't, as far as we know, been asked to give the camera a sample of her tan. Shelly Rudman, strikingly and darkly pretty, with a story any journalist would kill for (from rural Wiltshire, dirt-poor, villagers club together to send her to train, wins Olympic luge title - I mean, how weird is that?), also seems to have been left on the media shelf. Even weirder, I'd say. A case of not agreeing to loosen that dress-strap far enough?
One personal dilemma - I'd only been aware of Gail Emms as anyone except someone I'd once seen playing badminton quite well on the telly before reading this, but her stance made me want to go get her phone number. Never mind the pics.
Huh. Men. Only after one thing. Which is why we shouldn't be encouraged.
Saturday, September 02, 2006
In Praise of Posy
Robert Hughes makes a very convincing case - unarguable, in this writer's view - for Robert Crumb as the modern Pieter Breughel the Elder. I would like to belatedly add a commiseration-for-the-silver-medal advocation of another candidate for this crown - Posy Simmonds.
Simmonds is currently writing Tamara Drewe, a graphic novel, for The Guardian. After the clever but not-always-engaging serial Gemma Bovary (another Guardian project, from 1999) Simmonds is back on absolutely top form, exploring the mores of Britain's middle classes, their literary and academic pretentions, but also with a social darkside. Smart and sassy but subdued feminism, like an accusing look - plus a concern for social justice, often rendered in strips of sometimes blistering irony, are her trademarks.
She is a consummate draughtswoman with just enough of the naif about her line to ward off accusations of technical display for its own sake; her technique is solid, authoritative, but not overassertive. What makes Simmonds a genius - yes, genius - is her feel for speech patterns. It's almost impossible to reproduce her use of bold, italics and underlining online. Here is an attempt; in one Guardian strip, Turning An Honest Penny, from 1985, Kevin Penwallet, ex-anthropology lecturer turned organic grocer, turns to the tourist trade in his Cornish village to stay alive. Oh God! Oh God! ME! ME of all people...!! Perpetuating the MYTH!! This MYTH which excludes TRUTH... excludes any REALITY at the HARSHNESS of Nature and Country life! Oh God! Oh God! That Penwallet fantasises about selling plates picturing dogs shitting on sandcastles, customs officers taking heroin off trawlers, queues of redundant china-clay workers at the "Olde Village Post Office... characters all!" is comedy gold, but it is Simmonds' flamboyantly brilliant text, nuanced to a tee, which really lingers.
She is also the creator of sensational characters. The British archetype of the liberal 'Guardian Family' was probably shaped by her early work, under the ongoing rubric The Silent Three of St Botolphs, featuring George and Wendy Weber, sociology don and part-time nurse respectively. All are infuriating, all lovable, and the Weber conceit blasts later clumsy imitations, like the Viz strip The Modern Parents, out of the water.
It's not just smugly preening Islingtonian self-referentiality that informs Simmonds' work; Edmund Heep, the bibulous friend of the Webers, is perhaps one of the finest British comedy creations of the 20th century, a whisky salesman, a bumbling teddy bear of a barfly in an impossibly bad suit who uses phrases like 'same again squire? Speak now, or forever hold your codpiece'. In 'Union Jakes' (1986) when the Webers are earnestly chatting to American tourists about the British obsession with 'toilet yumor' and 'class', Heep ambles in and proceeds to reel off a lounge bar lexicography of lavatorial euphemisms. "I don't call it anything... I just go off to shake a tail feather... or to pop a cork! Her Her Her Heh Hehh...or to and change the barrel! Her her Haaa!... pump the bilges... go and kill a hedge... go where the big knobs hang out'. Etc. Reducing the Webers, despite themselves - and us, despite ourselves - to fits of laughter.
Even Claire Brètecher would kill for this sort of stuff. And that's really saying something - and, crucially, that despite Brètecher's surgical social acuity, Simmonds' line and technique give her the edge. She is a national treasure; a BD queen. If we have to have an honours system, at least dignify it by a damehood for Posy.
Simmonds is currently writing Tamara Drewe, a graphic novel, for The Guardian. After the clever but not-always-engaging serial Gemma Bovary (another Guardian project, from 1999) Simmonds is back on absolutely top form, exploring the mores of Britain's middle classes, their literary and academic pretentions, but also with a social darkside. Smart and sassy but subdued feminism, like an accusing look - plus a concern for social justice, often rendered in strips of sometimes blistering irony, are her trademarks.
She is a consummate draughtswoman with just enough of the naif about her line to ward off accusations of technical display for its own sake; her technique is solid, authoritative, but not overassertive. What makes Simmonds a genius - yes, genius - is her feel for speech patterns. It's almost impossible to reproduce her use of bold, italics and underlining online. Here is an attempt; in one Guardian strip, Turning An Honest Penny, from 1985, Kevin Penwallet, ex-anthropology lecturer turned organic grocer, turns to the tourist trade in his Cornish village to stay alive. Oh God! Oh God! ME! ME of all people...!! Perpetuating the MYTH!! This MYTH which excludes TRUTH... excludes any REALITY at the HARSHNESS of Nature and Country life! Oh God! Oh God! That Penwallet fantasises about selling plates picturing dogs shitting on sandcastles, customs officers taking heroin off trawlers, queues of redundant china-clay workers at the "Olde Village Post Office... characters all!" is comedy gold, but it is Simmonds' flamboyantly brilliant text, nuanced to a tee, which really lingers.
She is also the creator of sensational characters. The British archetype of the liberal 'Guardian Family' was probably shaped by her early work, under the ongoing rubric The Silent Three of St Botolphs, featuring George and Wendy Weber, sociology don and part-time nurse respectively. All are infuriating, all lovable, and the Weber conceit blasts later clumsy imitations, like the Viz strip The Modern Parents, out of the water.
It's not just smugly preening Islingtonian self-referentiality that informs Simmonds' work; Edmund Heep, the bibulous friend of the Webers, is perhaps one of the finest British comedy creations of the 20th century, a whisky salesman, a bumbling teddy bear of a barfly in an impossibly bad suit who uses phrases like 'same again squire? Speak now, or forever hold your codpiece'. In 'Union Jakes' (1986) when the Webers are earnestly chatting to American tourists about the British obsession with 'toilet yumor' and 'class', Heep ambles in and proceeds to reel off a lounge bar lexicography of lavatorial euphemisms. "I don't call it anything... I just go off to shake a tail feather... or to pop a cork! Her Her Her Heh Hehh...or to and change the barrel! Her her Haaa!... pump the bilges... go and kill a hedge... go where the big knobs hang out'. Etc. Reducing the Webers, despite themselves - and us, despite ourselves - to fits of laughter.
Even Claire Brètecher would kill for this sort of stuff. And that's really saying something - and, crucially, that despite Brètecher's surgical social acuity, Simmonds' line and technique give her the edge. She is a national treasure; a BD queen. If we have to have an honours system, at least dignify it by a damehood for Posy.
National Anthems
Was it just me, or was Andorra's national anthem as played before the international against England, a belting little tune? It's El Gran Carlemany (The Great Charlemagne), by Bons, was adopted in 1914 and after the opening bar has got the Marsellaise references out of the way, it's great.
Of course, because Andorra is so small one could drive across it in the time it takes to sing the national anthem, they don't get it on TV much. Shame.
National anthems are ipso facto vulgar and crude - they date from the era when modern nationhood and nationalism were invented and therefore reflect the worst and most bull-necked music of the mid-19th century. They are all epaulettes and brass and bluster; you can't ever imagine an anthem composed for an mbira, can you? But like Verdi - himself an Italian nationalist whose chest-out marches overshadow almost every single national anthem there is and certainly most of their arrangements - this in-your-faceness is not always a bad thing. Anthems can, taken as discrete texts, be cool. They rise to the occasion if the tune is good or the whole thing is mad as cheese, as per Inno de Mamelli (Italy) and Brazil's, which, according to the fabulous website http://david.national-anthems.net, doesn't seem to have a title. Both sound like cast-offs from Gilbert and Sullivan but are enjoyable nonetheless. One of this writer's favourites is Denmark's, Der et en yndigt land (There is a lovely land, 1844) by Kroyer with words by the great Danish Romantic Oehlenschlager. Although they also have a 'royal' anthem. Confusing, isn't it?
Eric Blom's Dictionary of Music (1945) is amusingly instructive but sometimes vague about what's official and what isn't. And, as must be with national anthems, entirely reliant on the course of history. It lists the Abyssinian anthem (Etiopia hoy, des yibalish, since you asked); the Fascist and Nazi anthems of Italy and Germany respectively; Indore and Transvaal's anthems crop up; for 'Jewish', the dictionary suggests 'see Palestine'. Uh-oh. Sun Yat-Sen, no less, wrote the words to The Song of Kuomintang, the pre-Mao Chinese anthem. Iraq's was the wordless 'The Royal Salute' by someone called Murray. Zanzibar's ? 'An unidentifiable tune'. Thanks, Eric.
But a good tune - a really good one - is paramount, which is why the UK comes out so far down the list of anthems. Top? A forgotten one from Blom's anthology; The Internationale, originally written in a Lille pub in 1894 by Pierre Degeyter, a socialist from Ghent and with words by Eugène Pottier (Debout, les damnés de la terre), subject of much legal wrangling, nicked by the USSR in 1917 and officially their anthem until 1944 when Gymn Sovietskogo Soiusa, by Alexander Vassilievitch Alexandrov, took over. That was a cute one, too.
Next, IMHO: France (La Marsellaise); Australia (Advance Australia Fair); Spain (Marcia Royal)
Of course, because Andorra is so small one could drive across it in the time it takes to sing the national anthem, they don't get it on TV much. Shame.
National anthems are ipso facto vulgar and crude - they date from the era when modern nationhood and nationalism were invented and therefore reflect the worst and most bull-necked music of the mid-19th century. They are all epaulettes and brass and bluster; you can't ever imagine an anthem composed for an mbira, can you? But like Verdi - himself an Italian nationalist whose chest-out marches overshadow almost every single national anthem there is and certainly most of their arrangements - this in-your-faceness is not always a bad thing. Anthems can, taken as discrete texts, be cool. They rise to the occasion if the tune is good or the whole thing is mad as cheese, as per Inno de Mamelli (Italy) and Brazil's, which, according to the fabulous website http://david.national-anthems.net, doesn't seem to have a title. Both sound like cast-offs from Gilbert and Sullivan but are enjoyable nonetheless. One of this writer's favourites is Denmark's, Der et en yndigt land (There is a lovely land, 1844) by Kroyer with words by the great Danish Romantic Oehlenschlager. Although they also have a 'royal' anthem. Confusing, isn't it?
Eric Blom's Dictionary of Music (1945) is amusingly instructive but sometimes vague about what's official and what isn't. And, as must be with national anthems, entirely reliant on the course of history. It lists the Abyssinian anthem (Etiopia hoy, des yibalish, since you asked); the Fascist and Nazi anthems of Italy and Germany respectively; Indore and Transvaal's anthems crop up; for 'Jewish', the dictionary suggests 'see Palestine'. Uh-oh. Sun Yat-Sen, no less, wrote the words to The Song of Kuomintang, the pre-Mao Chinese anthem. Iraq's was the wordless 'The Royal Salute' by someone called Murray. Zanzibar's ? 'An unidentifiable tune'. Thanks, Eric.
But a good tune - a really good one - is paramount, which is why the UK comes out so far down the list of anthems. Top? A forgotten one from Blom's anthology; The Internationale, originally written in a Lille pub in 1894 by Pierre Degeyter, a socialist from Ghent and with words by Eugène Pottier (Debout, les damnés de la terre), subject of much legal wrangling, nicked by the USSR in 1917 and officially their anthem until 1944 when Gymn Sovietskogo Soiusa, by Alexander Vassilievitch Alexandrov, took over. That was a cute one, too.
Next, IMHO: France (La Marsellaise); Australia (Advance Australia Fair); Spain (Marcia Royal)
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