The Battleship Potemkin

“Myth,” the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss wrote, “is language.” Insofar as that language develops exponentially over time, so do components of a story, and can be individualized as ‘mythemes’. But, what Levi-Strauss only hints at, is that at the kernel of myth is – however murkily, and however mediated – a truth. It becomes a primal means of language to describe history and the present and the human condition.


If film is a language, Sergei Eisenstein’s brief, urgent masterpiece uses myth as its logical centre but has also become a myth in itself. And, as Levi-Strauss posits, at the heart of both is truth. The truth of brutal struggle against oppression, and in the film’s afterlife and Eisenstein’s memory, the truth of its furious, bracing genius.

Eisenstein’s reputation is largely unassailable; the only quibbles are about what was his greatest film (Strike (1925)? Potemkin? Alexander Nevsky (1938)?). Briefly setting aside the politics (to totally separate this from Eisenstein’s vision is dissimulation of the worst kind), Battleship Potemkin is a visually stunning essay in the montage techniques pioneered at Mosfilm by Lev Kuleshov in the extraordinarily bizarre ferment of creative energies unleashed by the Bolshevik October Revolution, which gave the world visual artists such as Tatlin and Malevich, composers Shostakovich and Roslavetz and the theatrical innovators Stanislavski and Meyerhold.

The film is a straightforward bellow against oppression, with a rising of matelots on the eponymous ship against their Imperialist bosses in the signature year of 1905, the year of the failed Russian revolution that first Kerensky and then Lenin set out to avenge.

It’s in your face. Of course it is. But it’s an embrace you don’t mind. The grotesquely-treated sailors take control of the ship, the port city of Odessa mobilizes its poor and hungry who are shot down by Tsarist battalions in one of cinema’s iconic moments – and it is here that myth takes hold. Apart from a stream of superbly composed images, devised on the hoof in partnership with conematographer Eduard Tisse - there is the still-stunning Odessa Steps sequence, the tumbling baby carriage, the smashed specs of the screaming babushka, the jump-cutting from this to that agonized figure, hard-pedalling of the dehumanizing banality of evil – even 80 years on, this grips like a vice. The savagery, for 1925, must have reduced cinema audiences to silence, but the harsh contrasts of light on the steps lent film an entirely new language, and thus the visual patois of the last century. The massacre never happened – although Tsarist troops did commit atrocities in the town. The triumphant peroration as the squadron of ships sent to destroy the Potemkin join in its revolutionary fervour is another myth, as naïve as the Socialist-Realism of smiling peasants with huge shiny biceps atop collectivized tractors. And yet, while it is a great big clenched fist, it retains its own individual, inimitable beauty and integrity.

The American cultural critic Garry Wills railed against the ‘fist’ approach of Hollywood blockbusters, telegraphing images and creating its own mythology but Eisenstein – no matter how one views the USSR – did this with good taste and a visual language that simply had not been invented until he did so. Not by Méliès, not by Griffiths. There are period references – the florid gestures of the players, for example – but Eisenstein reinvented the cinematograph in the same way that George Martin reinvented the recording studio.

Watch carefully. Kuleshov and his pals were schooled in revolutionary idealism and their experiments in montage technique were aimed at measuring emotional response in viewers. This is not to diminish the extraordinary pacing of Eisenstein’s cutting from the face of a sailor to a terrified Odessan – the continuity of Hollywoodian visual narrative, still so familiar today, was cut to ribbons, as vital scenes (the slash of a sabre, for example) were reduced to nanoseconds – or the beauty of his sometimes homoerotic dwelling on military hardware. It’s easy to see why Goebbels admired this visual language, as it prefigures his vision of stahlende Romantik – steely Romanticism, as a metaphor for the elemental struggles of the 20th century. But Eisenstein is no totalitarian patsy. Far from it. Indeed its very success – it was an international sensation, not just among communist or even leftist critics and audiences – helped create cinematic myth, in the same way as Citizen Kane (1941), or Triumph of the Will (1935) or Psycho (1960). It used a form of mythology to create its own.

In the last years of his life, Eisenstein stood in ever-increasing isolation, accused of formalism, or the deliberate promotion of style over revolutionary content, and while Nevsky was a masterpiece, Ivan the Terrible (1942) remained a tantalizingly unfinished monument to Stalinist nationalism. Other great Soviet directors followed him through the Party mill – Tarkovsky got into the crap too, and even Elem Klimov, whose 1985 WW2 film Come and See is widely considered to be the most harrowing war movie ever made, never quite made it past the commissars. We should be grateful that Eisenstein’s pre-eminence entered western consciousness before Stalin’s dead hand regimented USSR cultural life. This is not just one of the greatest films ever made, but, along with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony, Joyce’s Ulysses and Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, one of the defining cultural works of the past 100 years. Potemkin is a myth. But as with all myths, there’s truth in the reasons for its fame.

Withnail and I

The best of times, the worst of times


Has a movie ever consigned so many catchphrases to posterity?


‘We’ve gone on holiday by mistake! Are you the farmer? Stop saying that Withnail. Course he’s the fucking farmer!’

This writer distrusts cults and sensations, and even more those loved by students (don’t get me started on The Smiths, for example). But if one memory of my sister’s largesse will abide, it’s when she sat me down to watch this almost sickeningly funny film.

‘Scrubbers! Scrubbers!’

It IS funny – quite apart from the tragic-comical way in which struggling thesps Withnail (Richard E Grant) and Marwood (Paul McGann) scrape what can’t really be called an existence, let alone a living, there’s the strawberry-faced outbursts of scandalously camp Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths), the coffee-house confrontation in Penrith, all of which are time-capsule jobs for British cinematic historians.

‘I mean to have you, boy…even if it must be burglary…’

But Bruce Robinson’s script and direction have another dimension, that of time - remembered, passed and wasted. The verminously scruffy dealer Danny (Ralph Brown) recites his own lament for the end of the 1960s (the setting is the autumn of 1969). Thereafter, in the teeming rain of Regents’ Park, Withnail bids farewell to Marwood - who has finally found work - and thus to a part of his sagging, defeated life. For Robinson, this is also a monument to a past become unthinkable in the Britain of Thatcher and monetarism into which the film was released; a 1960s that was not all Jane Asher, Carnaby Street and mod ensigns.

‘I feel like a pig shat in my head…’

It’s the film’s quality of tackling temporality, often concealed by the belly-laughs, which is what elevates merely a great British comedy into a classic movie, one which – unlike, say, Brassed Off (1996) or The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) – can resonate with audiences from Camden Town to Kuala Lumpur. Even if the bits we remember are the bits everyone remembers.

‘Look at him, Withnail! His mechanism’s gone.’

The signature piece featured on the soundtrack is Hendrix’s All Along the Watchtower as the heroes motor up an empty M1 in a ruined Jaguar D-type. This is a neat analogy – popular culture at its most inventive, dynamic and inspiring.

Le fabuleux et al

Amazing Amélie

Pre-Iraq II, Time magazine ran a cover story rationalizing the ‘freedom fries’ line - WHY FRANCE IS DIFFERENT. Interestingly, the cover star was Audrey Tautou, which was a pic ed’s nice take on softening the editorial frog-bashing. This was indicative of the unarguable fact that nobody could quite rationalize - beyond Tautou’s indescribable beauty - what made Amélie (as it was known in the anglophone territories) such a sensation in spite of its unashamedly atavistic celebration of a dying Frenchness, right down to Amelie’s clogs, the Catholic notion of charity, the Proustian notion of nostalgia.


The premise is simple - a bright but offbeat girl embarks on a mission of charity for the lost and marginalized of Paris, and acts as an avenging angel to the harsh and horrid. But Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s sly trick was to use the swashbucklingly brilliant technique that made Delicatessen (1991) and La Cité des enfants perdus (1995) such breathtaking pictures and place it in the service of a humdrum urban France in a social transition as laboured as a slow panning shot.

Few living directors have a better sense of visual dynamics than this maverick; how could the commander of Alien: Resurrection (1997) make a sweet, oddball love story in Montmartre into an international hit? That he did will perhaps be the ultimate monument to his genius. It should be.

Mathieu Kassovitz had known infamy in France for his role in the classic of racism La Haine (1995) makes his presence as Amelie’s love interest all the more poignant.

Amelie’s France never existed. But Jeunet’s gift is to make a watertight case that it did, in a visual language that combines lingering facial shots with biff-bang pop-video jumpcuts. Stunning, ravishing, you know the drill. It’s a sensation; one of those films you always promise yourself you’ll see. Don’t put it off any longer.

(c) Picturenose

The Apartment

Bad day at the office?

Thank your luckies you’re not CC Baxter, Jack Lemmon’s resentfully downtrodden clerk in an NYC corporation, who has become so cowed by the predations of his boss and the insecurity of his position he allows his superiors use of his flat to have it off with their mistresses. He’s 9 to 5 – they’re cinq-a-sept. Baxter’s immediate overlord, Sheldrake, is a nauseatingly complacent rat played to oleaginous perfection by Fred MacMurray whose attempts to ingratiate himself with Lemmon’s character amount to no more than using the insulting and hated nickname ‘Buddy Boy’ to a man he is doubly exploiting.


Wilder’s offices are striplit hives of paper-pushing drones, reminiscent of King Vidor’s wage-slaves in The City (1927), as regimented as a galley’s navvies. There is a curious, anodyne beauty about the interiors as much as there is of a New York of brownstones and rain, as later essayed by Woody Allen in the likes of Manhattan (1979).

The script – by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond – concentrates on the claustrophobia of interiors and how two people in a room can be continents apart. Not that Baxter wants to be anything but as close as possible to Shirley MacLaine’s lift attendant Fran Kubelik; MacLaine, her unfeasible legs aside, plays Fran as a plain, mousy, downtrodden wench, whose only common ground with Baxter is hatred – of her job, of her corporation, of her life. MacMurray spurns her, she attempts suicide chez Baxter, and the halting, touching empathy – not love – that grows between them is one of cinema’s most affecting romances, culminating in MacLaine’s madcap dash to be with a desolate, broken Lemmon. In this inky-black comedy of cynicism and hopelessness, of alienation and quiet desperation, the glow of human warmth finds a way through, as feeble as an usherette’s torch in a cinema’s gloom – but it’s there. Wilder rarely surpassed this miracle of a film, and few pictures have ever deserved their Best Picture Oscar more.

This is comedy as weepie, and the more the years pass the faster the tears come…

SPORTIN' LIFE: Munich 1958

Much ink and more self-righteousness has been spilled about the possible desecration of the one-minute silence to honour the fallen of Manchester United in Munich. And yet very little has been done to address the causes of why such behaviour might break out.

The mystique of death and loss is its discontinuity and finality; when referred to ourselves, it is akin to the physical removal of a component of the body. Mourning has become a maudlin and morbid part of late-capitalist Britain; as we have less and less control over our lives, we cling to what we see or feel or imagine to be indissoluble from ourselves. One word: Diana.

But the mood surrounding the 50th anniversary of Munich is similarly presumptuous; it assigns to a terrible event an unwonted significance, that elevates a football club into something more than a football club - a presumptuousness that has led to anti-United animus in the first place. An awful lot of piffle has been expended on what-ifs; if Duncan Edwards and Tommy Taylor had survived, England would have been world-beaters, Manchester United would have won eight European Cups on the trot, etc.

Fiction. That Edwards was a very, very good player indeed is not in question. Taylor, also. But consider the fact that with Edwards, England had lost calamitously to Northern Ireland at Wembley the previous autumn; that they were to be tanked 5-0 by Yugoslavia in the spring of 1958, a quite appalling fiasco now almost never mentioned in the media - that this rout and the heavy-legged, unimaginative performances at the World Cup in 1958 would have been transformed by the presence of two or three players simply defies reality. It belittles the greatness of Real Madrid (Kopa, Di Stefano, Gento, Puskas) and Brazil (Pele, Didi, Vava, Garrincha).

All over the footballing world, people will mourn Munich with respect. But only outside of these shores is a sense of proportion and a lack of atavistic sentiment likely to apply. On the 20th anniversary of the crash in 1978 the consensus was that a very good team had been wiped out; now, it is as if it were the downfall of gods.

Harry Gregg, the United keeper who pulled team mates and others from the wreckage, claimed that 'I'm not John Wayne'. He does himself a disservice, but United have for too long been part of a Hollywood narrative that is of their own invention and that of apologists. Grief distorts reality; but grief should be a private thing, not something that transcends a collective history of sport.

Sports Book Reviews from The Bulletin

Sports Book of the Year

Silent Revolutions – Writings on Cricket History
Gideon Haigh

Don’t like cricket? Don’t get it? Don’t go away.

Joey Kramer, the Aerosmith drummer, almost gave up music when he first saw Billy Cobham playing with the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the early 1970s – the Panamanian seemed to inhabit an unreachable realm. Sometimes when I read the young Australian journalist Gideon Haigh I feel the same, that it’s time to chuck in writing and get a proper job (brickie? clown?). Haigh is one of Australia’s great nonfiction authors, a documentarist of peerless stylistic ease whose subject happens to be cricket.

This beautiful book is a collection of his random essays on the history of cricket – like any nonfiction writer of the top rank, he knows his history, and he knows the rules of his idiom – laid down by John Arlott, Neville Cardus and the great West Indian Marxist C.L.R. James – so he feels confident enough to break them.

Few sports have been as well served by a writer. He ranges from the prosaic pathos of his own club knockabouts with a lumpen bunch of larrikins called the Yarras in a Sydney suburb to the professional pinnacle, Test cricket, with the urbane and unforced method of a great batsman compiling a long innings. He rekindles the latent intellectualism of the situations into which cricket often pitches its players – while never brushing away a grimy drop of the game’s sweaty realities, struggles, suicides. Trundling journeymen are as poetically conjured as the game’s greats, Warne, Richards, Grace. I cite ‘poetry’ – but this poetry is spare and tough as that of Banjo Patterson, the laureate of the outback, without ever lapsing into Ocker self-consciousness. He does what has to be done, and with the minimum effort and the maximum effect. His scattering of reminiscent quotes around a quite gorgeous cameo of the Australian all-rounder Keith Miller – a task apparently so easy to execute, but so difficult, as any writer will tell you - is like the distribution of fruit in a tarte au raisin by a master patissier. To use a cruder metaphor, one man’s cut-and-pasting is another man’s tapestry, and this is of the latter variety because Haigh has his own brand of panache. A history of an Australian cricket association should ‘come with matchsticks for the eyelids’, writes Haigh, yet few can summon as much interest for such a dry subject as he. ‘Doesn’t it make you sick?’ said one English friend of mine after reading this, ‘the Australians aren’t just content with beating the hell out of us at cricket - now they’re better at writing about it.’

I went and picked up a bat for the first time in 25 years when I’d finished this. Much of Haigh’s subject matter will be esoteric to the non-cricket fan (they’re a curious bunch, but one has to live with them). If you don’t get this addictively dotty game, get this book. You’ll get it then. If you love fine writing, get it anyway. A certified masterpiece.

Paul Stump

Silent Revolutions is published by Aurum.



Books

Sport


Graham Fife’s two books for Mainstream about the Tour de France belong on the shelf of any wheelman. His own memoir, The Beautiful Machine: A Life In Cycling, From the Tour de France to Cinder Hill (Mainstream) never quite grips, and occasionally wobbles like an unaligned rear wheel. There is fashionable emotional incontinence: neglected childhood, rumbustious compensatory sex in adolescence, mid-life crisis. Yeah, yeah. But when he sticks to the bike and draws amusingly pathetic comparisons between his own riding and the giants of the Tour about whom he is so elegantly and powerfully eloquent, without superfluous superstar namedropping, it’s a superb spin. His take on the riders Ivan Basso and Lance Armstrong climbing one of the Tour’s great passes is simply stunning sportswriting.

Other than that, he knows he will never quite make it, but pushes on gamely. Much the same could be said of his prose, which has altogether too much effort, working well in places but wasting energy in others. One wants to stand on the sidelines yelling ‘allez!’ and ‘courage!’

An uphill ride, but as Fife says, it’s worth it in the end for the view from the top.

Anyone who ever caught the whiff of a distantly decaying moral rat about the Olympic Games should read Guy Mitchell’s Berlin Games:How Hitler Stole the Olympic Dream (John Murray). Mitchell’s description of the 1936 Olympiad is a thrill-a-minute muckraker, but also suggests that the ‘Olympic Dream’ wasn’t stolen by Hitler, but could have been gift-wrapped for him. The craze for perfecting human bodily culture that inspired Baron Pierre de Coubertin’s ‘original’ 1896 Athens Olympiad found its ne plus ultra in Nazism – de Coubertin and the big cheese of contemporary Olympism, Avery Brundage, were both anti-semites, for example. The sporting cameos are marvellous – Jesse Owens acclaimed by 100,000 Berliners in the Olympiastadion, the farcical comedy of an Austria-Peru football match, the moral courage of German long-jumper Luz Long in befriending his vanquisher Owens – written by an author with a feel for physical achievement, its ups, downs, silliness and cynicism. Oswald Mosley is there, sundry Mitfords cluck around, the usual infamous fanfanorade of Hitler-worshippers – but there’s also a lot of fun, whose cosmopolitan zest and élan tries to conjure an ideal Olympics out of what was a pretty sorry affair, and points fingers at those who prevented the ideal from ever happening. Good sport should excite – this is an overdose of excitement.

29-stone darts player Andy Fordham once said: ‘I’m a sportsman – I wear trainers and I’ve been on [BBC TV sports programme} Grandstand’. It matters less to quibble about the definition of what is sport and what are games than to talk of angels and pins. Bellies and Bullseyes: The Outrageous True Story of Darts (Ebury) by Sid Waddell, the motormouth, polymath Geordie who helped the BBC make a pub diversion a national must-see, reminds us that playing darts is as ultimately pointless as playing football, but can embody a sizeable range of human experience, usually working-class, but gentlemanly and proud..‘Sizeable’, of course, is the apt adjective for many of the lagered-up podges (Leighton Rees, Jocky Wilson) who gave this brilliantly simple, fiendishly difficult endeavour of accuracy and hand-eye coordination its profile in the UK, and in the Netherlands, the wildly implausible source of the coming men – and women - in darts. Aside of an affectionate portrait of the great Dutch player (and former postman) Raymond Van Barneveld – not to mention his indefatigable wife, Sylvia - a little more could have been written about the game outside the UK, but this is subsidiary.

Waddell’s comparisons with Alexander of Macedon may be a little exalted when a champion like Eric Bristow, ‘The Crafty Cockney’ stands on the oche to throw the next arrow, but his grasp of the irrationale of playing games, and the joys it can bring, is as sure as the irony the players knowingly embody in their costume-jewellery, tattooed machismo. As the subclause in the title implies, this is populist, silly, lovely. So, anyone fancy a pint?

All titles available from Waterstones, 71 Maxlaan, Brussels.





Books

Paris-Roubaix: A Journey Through Hell

Memo: if you are lucky enough ever to meet the French cycling great Bernard Hinault, do not mention Paris-Roubaix. Not ever. Despite winning the ‘Queen of the Classics’ [one-day races], Hinault regarded L’Enfer du Nord (The Hell of The North), this headlong 250-km
charge along cobbled farm tracks through the gaunt, war-torn flatlands of northern France as a travesty. Pros shouldn’t ride these roads, he grumbled. Because it’s only after 200km (count ‘em) that the real ‘hell’ of the cobbles begins.

This stupendous book proves him right. And wrong.

Paris-Roubaix is about a race that takes place in France, but no Belgian, or Belgium-dwelling cyclist worth his or her salt would dream of missing it. Nobody will ever match photographer Stefan Vanfleteren’s slim portfolio of Flemish and nordiste cycling impressions, Flandrien (, 2005), but this gargantuan homage to pro cycling’s maddest race punches its weight on its own terms. The English translation from original French journalism is top-notch; nutshelling the whole Paris-Roubaix ethos.



L’Enfer du Nord careers from Compiègne to the supremely dreary post-industrial frontier city that is Roubaix early in every April, often in appallingly wet and muddy conditions. A pic of the Belgian sprinter, Eric Vanderaerden, from 1987, is one of the most evocative portraits of the pitiable mess of sport ever taken. Why do they do it? This book tells you, slickly and briskly, and rarely stints on the superhuman efforts of the riders. It is the ultimate test of the cycling skills and stamina of that inextinguishable breed of Flemish and Nordiste racers; it is as significant to them as the spring equinox. Mardi Gras? Yeah, yeah. For anyone with a bike in Comines or Kortrijk, Mons or Menen, summer only starts with Paris-Roubaix. For some Flemings, they would rather see one of their men win the Paris-Roubaix than the Tour of Flanders. Why? Buy the book.

Crucially, although stacked with stats and stories and stars (Van Steenbergen, Coppi, Merckx, Boonen), the book does not confine its appeal to wheelers. Its pages could have been infused with the smells of stoemp, coal dust and bière de garde. One can never turn a page without expecting to see a frituur in the next picture. Repointed brickwork is inescapable. It is indispensable for anyone who lives in Wallonia, for example, for anyone who knows the dank bruised skies that so often hang over the plains of the forsaken borderlands which the historian Richard Holmes memorably termed ‘the fatal avenue’, the feel for the Belgian French that Vanfleteren so exquisitely and unforgivingly catalogued. The magnificent photographs of the absurdly difficult cobbles of the Foret d’Arenberg, the puddles of slime that line the route on wet days, leave an indelible impression of having been out riding in fresh air and drizzle for hours. It has been compiled because it had to be compiled; there is no other race – save the mighty stage races. Tour de France, Giro d’Italia, Vuelta d’Espana - that warrants such loving and meticulous treatment.

Paris-Roubaix is the sensory antipode to the race: it is comforting, easy to read (and always well-written), something to savour over a bottle of Jenlain or Trois Monts beer. It is a treat; its price is something worth putting in extra effort for, like its subject. Ask Bernard Hinault. Actually, don’t.

Paris-Roubaix, A Journey Through Hell is published by Velopress.

If I Could

Pat Metheny's astonishing slowie of that name is not a love song - or not a conventional one. From the 1985 ECM album First Circle, its scarcely-bearable sense of yearning refers not to unrequited love but to unrequited technical desire, that of being able to emulate jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery. Those lacking a musical sweeth tooth may find the piece a little too wistful even by the standards of the tousle-haired Missouri guitarist, but its sense of brokenheartedness is unparalleled in jazz; it evokes Baudelaire's image of the albatross with the damaged wing. The melody is very, very long - underpinned by Steve Rodby's bass, Lyle Mays' synthesizers and Paul Wertico's brushes - and resolves with such perfection it renders the sadness of the piece, of that which is not there, can never be, all the more poignant.

Boonen

Tom's back. So am I. Except he's bigger than I am.

it's back - with new pisspoorness

Yes, folks, I'm back. To the 27.5 peeps in the world that tuned in to TWGMGB then, here's some more web Horlicks for ya. Watch this space.

Families, eh? Mark Lawson, Guardian, 31.8.07

It has been the summer of the public mum and dad. First Gerry and Kate McCann and then Melanie and Stephen Jones, as if not already under intolerable emotional pressure from the loss of their children, have submitted to the stress of lengthy television interviews, trading their privacy for a possible solution to the disappearance of Madeleine and the murder of Rhys. And in a tragedy that is at present less final, the father and father-in-law of Amy Winehouse used a radio phone-in for an ill-tempered family summit on the best way of encouraging the singer to ditch drugs and drink.

Even in a culture in which privacy is a vanishing virtue, a significant shift seems to have occurred. A previous era gave children the injunction that they should be seen but not heard. The rule in the 21st century media appears to be that parents should be seen and heard vociferously. Yet there are already signs that this trend towards parental broadcasting comes at the risk of psychological cost to the families and voyeurism for the audience.
At the Edinburgh Television Festival last weekend, it felt deeply uncomfortable to see Gerry McCann interrupting his unimaginable family nightmare to fly to a media festival to appeal to the media to leave his family alone. A day later, I had to switch off the interview in which the Joneses described the searing horror of their bereavement, feeling that it was like reading secret diaries. Some will argue that these reactions suggest an absence of human feelings; I'd argue they indicate their presence.

Logic tells us that the last thing required by eyes sore from crying is exposure to TV lights, but the McCanns and the Joneses agreed to the ordeal for the same reason. Indeed, it seems reasonable to suspect that the second couple was influenced by the summer-long example of the first. The couples will have imagined a kidnapper or killer - or witness - watching the screen and being shamed into admission.

The tactic, though, was applied differently. Questioned on the outwardly calm demeanour which surprised some viewers, Gerry McCann revealed that he and his wife had been told that self-control might have most effect on a putative kidnapper tuning in. But, if such advice was given, it seems misguided. In a cruel kind of emotional theatre-reviewing of which Queen Elizabeth II was a victim in the week after Diana's death, the malevolent blogosphere gossip about the McCanns began with the observation that they were "not upset enough" when they appeared on TV.

There is no risk of that with Melanie Jones, who looked as demented with grief as we feel we might be in these circumstances, but, as often happens with modern TV, many viewers must have wondered if she should really be putting herself through this. Before it becomes the accepted wisdom for both police and media that participants in tragedies must speak in public, doctors and psychologists should properly study what the consequences might be for those who endure it.

But the couples' decisions to go public might also be practical. While some have argued, since that car crash in Paris 10 years ago today, that Britons have undergone some kind of emotional evolution towards greater self-disclosure, the climate described by the shorthand "Dianarism" has as much to do with technology as psychology.

In an earlier time of intermittent news bulletins, a story that wanted to stay in the headlines required one new development each day. Now new material is needed on the hour. And if it doesn't come it will be spun, demand overriding supply. Participants in a tragedy who choose to close the curtains and weep in private - the old way - know that reporters will, in any case, be standing outside the house speculating about how they are feeling. Already characters in a story being written by thousands of official and unofficial journalists, they might attempt to shape the narrative by providing some pictures and dialogue of their own.

But as the McCanns have discovered, media exposure, for whatever motive it's sought, makes a person famous and celebrity has consequences, of which the biggest is becoming fair game for personal comment, however hurtful or untrue. Accused of murder in Portuguese equivalents of the Daily Sport, which are conveniently reclassified as a "respected national newspaper" when the lurid rumours are recycled in Britain, they now suffer newspaper front pages speculating on alleged "cracks" in their marriage. God help the future tragic parent who has a lover, an unpaid parking ticket or a controversial opinion once committed to print.

More crushingly, as Gerry McCann seemed to acknowledge in Edinburgh, the belief that publicity would help the investigation is now questionable, the parents' appearances instead encouraging false sightings and false suspects. In the Rhys Jones murder, the parental exposure may be more useful, because of the suspicion that the killer was a child, more easily panicked by fear of consequence. But should Mr and Mrs Jones wish to return to private life after the funeral or after a trial, they may find they are assumed to be public property, pestered for regular updates on how they feel.

The easiest of these cases is the Winehouses and the Fielder-Civils. Something like this has happened in a million families: a disagreement over how a crisis involving a child should be handled, exacerbated, as often in England, by a class gap between the partners. It seems pretty straightforward, though, that Mr Winehouse and Mr Fielder-Civil would have been better served talking to each other or to Amy on a couple of mobiles rather than "the nation's conversation".

You can appreciate Mr Fielder-Civil's thinking. His son married a woman who is public property and so questions about what she's up to these days come not, as for most in-laws, in the high street but on the information superhighway. And so, because the public are discussing her, he ends up discussing her in public.

But his plea for fans to stop buying Winehouse records is naive because the music industry is not athletics: the spectators don't care if a performer is artificially assisted. And his intervention, followed by the response from the other side of the family, inflamed the story for another day, giving the paparazzi another excuse to follow around the troubled young woman these men were muddledly trying to help.

In May, the McCanns began the idea that publicity is the best response to family crisis, but recent comments suggest that they are retreating from the technique even as others adopt it. Instinct and history suggests that breakthroughs in the cases of these tragic children are more likely to come from decent policing and that Amy Winehouse's ability to beat addiction will be decided by her personality and treatment, rather than media appearances by her family. Distress is not always better shared and sometimes parents should be neither seen nor heard.

SPORTIN' LIFE: Guardian, July 6 2007

Amongst the swarm of minor pieces of information that slipped out of the press wires on Thursday there was a small snap, around about 4.55 in the afternoon.

"ST JOHN'S, Antigua, July 5 (Reuters) - Former West Indies fast bowler Courtney Walsh believes that Cuba has natural cricketing talent and could become a force in the game. Walsh said on Thursday he had visited the communist country several times and had been amazed by the talent on show."

Cricket in Cuba - a curious idea, that. Curious enough to make your eyebrow flicker up and down when you read it.

It could almost be a joke (the same kind of joke that led Matthew Engel to remark of Chinese cricket, in the 2006 Wisden Almanack, that "if I ever get the chance to report the first China v England Test at Guangzhou, I would be delighted to celebrate with a plateful of sweet-and-sour hat").

It's not. On Wednesday, the Texas-born billionaire Sir Allen Stanford announced that Cuba and Turks & Caicos Islands would be joining his Caribbean-wide Twenty20 competition. Stanford is investing $100m into Caribbean cricket over the next three years, with a genuine conviction that he can create a profit.

It's serious business. And it suggests that in Cuba, unlike the vast majority of the International Cricket Council's 101 members, the game is played by more people than just a few ex-pats in panama hats. As in so many other ways, Cuba is different.

On January 1 1899, the USA took formal control of Havana after the end of the Spanish/American War. Within four years a patsy regime was in place, and a lease was imposed by America on Cuba that allowed them to take possession of Guantanamo Bay. Construction of the naval base soon began, and a long and inflammatory history was sparked.

Cricket, in its first flourishing in Cuba, was one of the minor, and undocumented ripples of change that occurred in consequence. The American presence led to waves of immigrant workers from the Caribbean. At first it was Jamaicans coming to construct the base and its infrastructure, then, in the 1920s it was Bajans coming to work in the sugar mills.

The game came with them, and in Oriente region, to the east of the country, it thrived. Leagues were formed, cup competitions held. In 1955 and 56 the Guantanamo Cricket Club hosted teams from the Bahamas and Jamaica.

And then came the revolution. Cricket clubs were, like everything else, nationalised. The government did not take a great interest and the game dwindled and died. In the records the scorecards run up to one final match in 1974, and afterwards the game all but disappeared. One match a year was played in a town to the south, Baragua, in celebration of Emancipation Day.

For 25 years there was no cricket other than that, and a handful of games organised by various English-speaking diplomats, in Cuba.

The astonishing resuscitation that took place over the decade between then and now was caused by several things. Among them was the receptiveness of Fidel Castro's administration towards alternatives to baseball, even as Bill Clinton was preaching 'diamond diplomacy' and organising friendly matches in Havana between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team; also, the British government grew wise to this new angle of relations, and set up a 'Memoranda of Understanding' between UK Sport and the Cuban Sports Ministry.

More than either of those, though, the transition was, incredibly, brought about by just one woman.

Leona Ford was born in 1943, in Guantanamo. She is a second-generation Cuban; her father Leonard Ford came to the Cuban sugar plantations from Barbados. Leonard was the founder of the Guantanamo Cricket Club.

"The club meetings were held at my home, and when I was little I used to hear about it a lot. There were cricket photographs all over the house," Leona remembers now. After a lifetime spent working as an English professor, she decided to write a history of Cuban cricket in her retirement. The details above are only widely available because of her work. She was increasingly drawn towards the idea of re-establishing the game.

In 1998 she presented a paper on the subject at the annual meeting of the West Indian Welfare Association. In the crowd was a man named Sir Howard Cooke. Cooke was Governor General of Jamaica. What was more, he had captained one of the Jamaican teams that had visited Guantanamo CC in 1955, and remembered playing against Leona's father.

With Cooke's support, not least in the form of getting his old friend Courtney Walsh involved, Lord set about re-establishing the game in Cuba. They started appealing for donations for equipment, and rounded up elderly former players to act as coaches and umpires. Earl Best, a sportswriter with the Trinidad Express, volunteered to run a six-week coaching course, bringing an Argentinian copy of the Laws of cricket with him.

Amazingly, and despite the unique problems Best faced in a baseball-crazy nation ("for a Cuban a bat is held and wielded horizontally," he wrote), the game began to take off. It was designated a 'recreational sport' by the National Sports Institute of Cuba (INDER). That meant it could be taught in schools. With the help of the British Consul, the campaign grew and kit donations flooded in.

In 2002 they were given affiliate membership of the ICC. In 2003 the UK Sport started sending out teams of coaches as part of their new pact with INDER. By then there were eight senior teams, and the game was being played in 37 different schools by over a 1,000 children. The first provincial tournament was held in 2004. From there, the curve continued upwards until two days ago, and Stanford's announcement.

Ford, having spent a long time running the national association out of her house, spending much of her free time watching video copies of Test matches from overseas, was made the ICC's global Volunteer of the Year in 2002. Now 64, she is still the only female head of a national cricket association in the world.

Her's has been an astonishing feat, and one that now looks certain to have a real legacy. The descendants of the Bajans and Jamaicans who first introduced cricket to Cuba now make up 8% of its population. And of course the popularity of baseball ensures a certain affinity with cricket on the rest of the population as well. Possibly the only thing working against the game growing further is the fact that there's not nearly so much satisfaction to be had in whupping the USA at it.

Simon Jenkins: Guardian, 1.6.07

BLOGGER'S NOTE: For connoisseurs of stupidity, visit the responses to this

Celtic nationalists should invest in their heritage instead of flogging it off


A pretence of local pride hides what UK devolutionists are really after - money. And their countryside is suffering

Simon Jenkins
Friday June 1, 2007
The Guardian


Where is the heart of the new "nationalism" sweeping Britain's Celtic fringe? So far it has seemed little more than a bid to spend British subsidies more generously than the English can. The Scots revel in freeing their students and elderly of fees. The Welsh give away prescriptions. Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams refuse to speak to each other until their mouths are stuffed with English gold. This is pocketbook devolution. Read the nationalist manifestos and they are little more than shopping lists. Take away the British exchequer and I sense they would collapse like scarecrows without sticks.

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Meanwhile, almost the first decision taken by the new Scottish Nationalist first minister, Alex Salmond, was to refuse a grant of £5m-10m to save for his nation the most spectacular monument at risk in Scotland, Dumfries House. Tuesday's refusal means that offers of matching money (most of it from England) will fall and the finest mid-Georgian house in Scotland, complete with its original contents, will go under the auctioneer's hammer next month.
Why did Salmond refuse? I suspect it is because his nationalism is rooted not in the character, culture and heritage of Scotland but rather in the bid of a factional politician for English money to buy votes and thus win power. The motivation is ambition, not nationalist vision.

Wales's Labour administration under Rhodri Morgan has been much the same. It is proto-nationalist in all but name, denying affinity to its London parent and buying the Plaid Cymru ticket on everything from broadcasting to bloated public payrolls. It has backed Welsh language and culture, but neither Morgan nor his nationalist rivals have shown concern for such emblems of Welsh nationhood as its landscape and coastline or its historic houses towns and villages, or even its chapels. Instead, if the British want to give Wales money to despoil the Cambrian mountains (like the Highlands and islands in Scotland) with wind turbines, then nationalism means grab the money.

I have no doubt that if Birmingham and Liverpool proposed to flood Welsh valleys for cash today, as they did in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the Welsh assembly would ask simply, how much? Like the Irish when they sighted Brussels gold to subsidise holiday cottages in every bog and headland, the most beautiful parts of the British Isles are being raped by those who should treasure them most: those who live in them. The spectacle offers the English a golden opportunity to jeer that nationalism is not fit even to be custodian of its own heritage.

The Dumfries House decision, unless urgently reversed, is a tragedy for Scotland and indeed for Britain, greater even than the loss of the Rothschild mansions in Piccadilly and Mentmore in the 1960s and 70s. The house, a secondary property of the Marquess of Bute, is an astonishing survival that he understandably no long needs. Dating from 1754, it is the first work of the Adam brothers, Robert and James, after their father's death and is filled with exquisite rococo plasterwork. It also contains, undiminished, the first complete commission by the young Thomas Chippendale, with some 50 pieces to his name. The tapestry room contains Gobelins donated by Louis XIV. The stripping of the house would leave it near valueless and vulnerable to that curse of deserted properties, fire.

The opportunity is undeniably challenging. The house is nowhere near Dumfries but lies close to the former mining town of Cumnock, which gave the world Kier Hardie and Bill Shankly. This part of east Ayrshire is not pretty, but Dumfries and its 2,000-acre estate is its one potential amenity and tourism draw. In terms of today's Olympic billions, the rescue cost is modest: £6.7m for the house and estate and £14m for the contents, of which £4m is the estimate for a single Chippendale rosewood bookcase. Save Britain's Heritage (Save), which has been orchestrating the rescue, puts a total price of £25m on buying the entire estate and preparing it for public access.

An extraordinary outburst of energy has gone into trying to save the house, locally and from English admirers of Scotland's past. The present marquess, Johnny Bute, offered Dumfries to the Scottish National Trust, an organisation of terminal lethargy and lack of enterprise, but negotiations failed. Yet Save has, in just a few weeks, generated offers of £7m from the Art Fund, its biggest ever grant, and the Sainsbury and Garfield Weston foundations: all from south of the border. Further promises, such as from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, are conditional on some show of pride, even of caring, from Scotland. Approached for £5m-10m, Salmond's heritage quango, Historic Scotland, refused to give a penny from its £68m budget on the grounds that the house was "not financially viable". The same might be said for its parliamentary building.

The scheme proposed by Save was commissioned from the developer Kit Martin to convert the less important parts of the house and its outbuildings into flats and devote the 2,000-acre estate as a leisure park for the otherwise deprived population of east Ayrshire. Martin has successfully done four such conversions in Scotland alone, but cannot proceed without start-up funds.

Iam sure that nationalism's attitude to these houses is similar to that of the Irish after independence when they smashed the streets and monuments of Georgian Dublin. One of the loveliest cities in Europe was defaced on the grounds that it was built by the English (even if the craftsmen were Irish). Dumfries, though built by Scottish architects for a Scottish aristocrat, somehow represents English values. The English love history, architecture, mountains and views. A real Scotsman likes money. If he can sell 50 Chippendales and get the idiot English to give him millions for wind farms on Skye, so much the better. His Robbie Burns is not the poetry of the Highlands but of a heavy night in Sauchiehall Street.

Dumfries thus tests the spiritual depth of modern nationalism. It is rivalled by Wales's neglect of its two most outrageously derelict masterpieces: Gwrych Castle near Llandudno, and the gothic mansion of Hafodunos in Clwyd. Both are classic works of Wales's 19th-century heritage that have literally burned while Cardiff fiddled. The loss of Welsh historic houses great and small, both during English rule from London and now under the Welsh executive, has been horrendous.

Ancient buildings should be the emblems of nationalism. The English have been comparatively good about preserving theirs, and I have no doubt that Dumfries, like Gwrych and Hafodunos, would be safe were they across the English border. What now should shame the Scots is that it is the English that are fighting to save what the Scots might one day enjoy.

The past is not a foreign country of which we know little. The essence of Scots, Welsh and Irish nationalism has been precisely the distinctiveness of its separate histories. In an age of increasing leisure but more costly international travel, reminders of those histories are their "family silver", the investment stock of national identity and of future tourist wealth. Those who cannot realise this are not nationalists but money grubbers.

Apologies for Absence

Sorry for lack of posts. This is due to life treating me like a slurry-pit. As Norm Petersen put it, replying to the question 'how's life?' ; 'Like it caught me sleeping with his wife'.

Normal service resumed from today.

Drink Newport beer. Listen to Bill Hicks. Do them both. Now.

TV Review - Jonathan Meades: Abroad Again

JONATHAN MEADES: ABROAD AGAIN
BBC2, 16.5.07

Television is not art. It is craft. Or is it? Sometimes one is tempted otherwise. Jonathan Meades is a tempter.

The present writer has tried to persuade the broadsheets’ arts pages to run a piece on this so-far unimprovable series; one hopes that those who hand out TV gongs display less indifference and ignorance. While not quite the equal of last week’s marvellous autobiographical episode, this again is one of those programmes that seems so good that one questions whether most TV is getting worse or whether a handful of programme-makers (Molly Dineen is another example) are getting better.

In ‘On the Brandwagon’, Meades’ lengthy and many-coloured train of thought gets up steam near Montpellier on a hot night in 1985 - where he had to lie his Englishness away to witness the Heysel disaster on a pub TV – and speeds up to negotiate many curves of logic in order to mow down the ‘regeneration’ industry. First in Liverpool where this strange late 20th-century gibberish first took root in the UK, and then nationwide. This horrid nonsense, he argues, has cheapened modernist architecture and demeaned the perception of the urban environment. At a time when one is ankle-deep in dissembled flummery about Olympic ‘regeneration’ of East London, this onslaught is especially timely.

I speak from experience. Your correspondent lives in Newport, a dreary South Wales town pathetically trying a city-reinvention where people of influence genuinely believe that an undistinguished but very large pedestrian river bridge will ‘rebrand’ the place. Rather like several equally vacuous, meaningless and useless erections before it, as though they also might guarantee everyone a job, a thousand flowers blooming and (I may be exaggerating here) Julia Roberts offering a blow to every male over 18. People of influence believed in those structures, too. It may not surprise the perceptive to learn that none of them has diminished the town centre’s incurable tawdriness, or occasioned a social or economic revolution. Julia’s not turned up either: funny, that.

It is this contagious fallacy, as shallow as it is lucrative (like motivational speaking and management consultancy), that Meades attacks, and also how it has become integral to the thinking of the intellectually idle, overpaid and nepotistic. It is a cancer of urban life, ignored or shrugged off by most, until the rates go up, until the town is defaced; it takes a surgeonly mind to spot it. For which service the eloquent Meades must inevitably face accusations of nay-saying and cynicism – but not from this quarter, and more power to him for it.

‘On The Brandwagon’ is one of Meades’ is more visually aggressive and assertive than usual and lacks a little for it – at one point he briefly assumes three fictional roles, reassuming the actorly profession he trained for at RADA - but this excitable M.O. presumably is an attempt to keep pace with the presenter’s mercilessly accurate autopsy of the discursive fraudulence which supposedly legitimatizes gravy-train urban vandalism, venality and vanity, this absurd late 20th-century phenomenon of civic life. ‘Opportunity pathway’: ‘regeneration community’, are just two jesterly pastiches in a searing PR parody, reminding us that such irredeemable bollocks is cheap and easy but also largely a province of Anglophonic countries. Nonetheless, he reserves especial scorn for the supposedly iconic and ‘regenerative’ but actually very very ugly Guggenheim museum of Frank Gehry that the good burghers of Bilbao in Spain allowed to have plonked on them (nice clip of Athletic Bilbao’s Andoni Goicoechea’s famous 1984 foul on Maradona, by the way).

Meades could have been on thin ice here; ‘look at me!’ is his verbal shorthand for Gehry’s nasty hulk and thousands like it. I have heard some say the same of him, but director Colin Murray has Meades in fewer frames than usual – a subtle and clever touch. Meades’ argument has legs up to its neck, but I must take issue with his calumnisation of the Catalan Sergio Calatrava, whose acceptance of show-off commissions doesn’t stop him proving that he is a very imaginative, modernist architect; in much the same way that Meades makes imaginative, modernist TV programmes.

‘It could have been an abattoir,’ Meades charges, rightly, when discussing the Guggenheim. Its only purpose is to be seen. It could be argued that Meades, canted forward and inscrutable as he strolls in trademark suit and bins, is, like the buildings he damns, a brand that stands only for itself. To which I would contend that if he is a brand, he is one that brings much more stimulation to life than any number of ‘riverside developments’ of ‘overpriced flats and shops selling useless knick-knacks’. He reminds us, constantly, that the ‘regeneration’ industry has brought little of substantial material benefit to the locations upon which it has been visited, usually in direct disproportion to that which said structures were supposed to bestow.

Whereas Meades, if he says ‘look at me’ (at 7pm on BBC 2? Come on), could, by contrast, improve us all.

TV as art? Hmm. I’m tempted.

TV Review: Rick Stein in Du Maurier Country

RICK STEIN IN DU MAURIER COUNTRY

BBC2, 12.5.07

It was Daphne Du Maurier night on BBC2. Hey, here’s a good one. Let’s get a celebrity from Cornwall. So we’ll celebrate an author with a telly chef and a deceased canine mascot. How very very English.

This was unpromising. But… despite her very English-Cornish locations, Du Maurier’s work was interesting because it was singularly not very English at all in its darkly passionate undercurrents and Stein is maybe the most unconventional and interesting of telly chefs because less interested in himself than his product. The result of this strange conjunction – Geoff Boycott on Lawrence, anyone? - was a curious and entertaining 50 minutes of television. It looked good, sounded good and probably didn’t do your mind much good, but it was more than OK.

Rebecca, which made Du Maurier world famous and which bored her when people went on about it (Franz Waxman’s biliously sentimental score in Hitchcock’s 1940 adaptation of the novel, shown earlier on Saturday, may have contributed to her reputation as a writer of ‘women’s’ fiction) took centre stage.

As it should. Rebecca is a book blending psychological depth, a lust-murder and love as a destructive force in a way Plath or Woolf never quite managed with the same panache; it is more Vienna than Bloomsbury, more Schnitzler than Sackville-West. Let us not forget that her writing also inspired the very bleak and sexually-charged likes of The Birds.

To his credit, Stein, while blowing a sizeable wodge of the Cornish tourist office’s budget on a dazzling array of backdrops, all wooded creeks speckled with yachts, and the splendid lifestyle enjoyed by the novelist’s heirs, didn’t shy away from her personal quirks and themes and thought-processes, didn’t over-sensationalise her sex life and highlighted her strained relations with her family. I’d take issue with Stein’s assertion that the first paragraph of Rebecca is the most memorable of any novel’s – any reader of Catch 22 or 1984 would. It’s also quite possible that she would have found as much inspiration in a coast of a county where Rick didn’t have a restaurant; North Devon, say, which inspired Kingsley’s romance Westward Ho! A bit of lateral thinking might have helped make the case secure for the peculiar Romantic draw of Cornwall’s land and sea – the St Ives posse, Hardy’s Beeny Cliff, Bax’s tone poem Tintagel, Ethel Smyth’s opera The Wreckers, and none of these phenomena are too far removed from sexual abandonment remembered, wanted or lived. But the lad Stein did well; words like ‘corrupt’ and ‘decadent’ don’t tend to creep too often into TV chefs’ vocabularies, especially not when used appositely in terms of 20th century fiction.

The sea, the sea - that maritime leitmotif in Rebecca and Frenchman’s Creek among others, was not too overdone here, and slowly persuaded one that fish-mad Stein, whose enthusiasm for whatever task in which he is engaged is too relaxed to be ersatz, is a committed fan of Du Maurier’s sensuously charged writing. In terms of literary criticism, F.R. Leavis this definitely wasn’t, but Stein might actually not have been as unsuitable a choice of presenter as might be imagined.

Stein’s unsinkable geniality can chafe sometimes, and there was unquestioning romanticisation of Cornwall, as in Du Maurier herself, omitting trade diseases among tin miners or the china clay wage slaves of her adopted home near the Helford estuary, for example. But this programme, like Hitchcock’s Rebecca, and its source, attempted and succeeded at popular entertainment of the first order that didn’t assume its audience were morons and that they had a degree of emotional literacy. Stein knows this, and gently makes sure you know he knows; his sense of discovery was palpable but never obtrusive; bank on a few of Daph’s books being loaned out from libraries on Monday.

While the very thought of Jamie Oliver one day ‘discovering’ the London of Iain Sinclair or Colin McInnes is too scary to bear, this likeable oddity made one writer as satisfied as the cash-strapped hoteliers from Saltash to St Agnes for whom a bit of telegenic publicity luring putative tourists, especially when summer holidays are on the agendas of well-heeled north Londoners, can’t come soon enough. Compliments to the chef!

MUSIC: Review, Scriabin 2

Scriabin 2
BBC SO/Sinaisky*

It is dizzying to realise that it is almost 15 years to the day since Radio 3 last broadcast a live (ish) performance of Scriabin’s Symphony No 2, toured by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of Riccardo Muti on the back of an EMI recording that remains probably its definitive essaying. But Scriabin does dizzy like few other composers.

The Second (1901) immediately prefigures Scriabin’s madness, his auto-deomorphism, in which an already luxuriant and virtuosic harmonic and melodic post-Wagnerian vocabulary went chromatically supernova. No.2. is the foundation for Scriabin’s chromatic ‘mystic chord’ which informs all his later pieces. You’d never guess from Vassily Sinaisky’s insensitive stumble through a work of fantastic eroticism that demands the listener savour every last drop of its gorgeousness, to lingeringly savour beauty as does Muti’s stupendous 1990 recording. What we got was less seduction than wham-bam. In Sinaisky’s hands, this sumptuous if flawed symphony – that fourth movement allegro will never work - resembled a rejected sketch by a fourth-rater like Steinberg or Kalinnikov.

Audible lack of belief in the music was ventriloquized by scrappy ensemble work in all departments; rarely does the appeal of the bar sound as vivid as it did in this awful, scurried-through travesty. Sinaisky, who has done irreproachably good things with Scriabin’s temporal and emotional contemporaries like Schreker, never had a handle on the architecture or tempi with which Muti and Eliahu Inbal drew out the full sensual scope of the work.

The slow movement, one of the most voluptuous symphonic statements ever made, never wallowed as it should; the march-like finale was so rushed one could hear Sinaisky’s embarrassment. Scriabin always hated it; but if a conductor programmes this big fat 45-minute pig-out, he should at least try and ignore the composer’s misplaced shame, and make of it what Scriabin thought was impossible; a bloody good symphony. Sinaisky didn’t.

TV Review: Jonathan Meades, Abroad Again

Lord Reith was a Presbyterian Scot, a Wee Free wallah, among whose folks the most timid involvement in sensual pleasures had you hellbound. Strange, then, that perhaps the greatest living embodiment of Reith's dictum "inform, entertain, educate" should be a bohemian epicure from Salisbury who extols indulgence in food and architecture.

Jonathan Meades' new series from BBC Scotland (the irony!) looks very much like further confirming this stature, if the quite startlingly wonderful first-of-five, "Father to the Man", is anything to go by.

Meades, thick-set and ambling in his suit and shades, was warmish property on TV at the turn of the 1990s - Abroad, Further Abroad, Even Further Abroad (you get the picture), he almost got the epithet "inimitable" in the listings - but since then has had to concentrate largely on hard-fought-for one-offs, cult offerings for the faithful. There was Joe Building and Jerry Building, or the iconoclastic mini-series Meades Eats, whose down-to-the-quick criticism of British food was buried in the schedules so as not to bugger with TV's glamorising of our "cuisine".

No bullshit; "Father to the Man" is time-capsule stuff. Magnificent - a good-looking but never glossified autobiography of the development of the author's sense of place and "how mankind intervened" in the world the child Meades saw around him. It is also a dignified tribute to a late and missed father and "a land of lost content and Koola-Fruita". An unsentimental salute to a provincial 1950s world of grocers who would sell that obsolete Maidenhead-manufactured ice-lolly and who would unashamedly sport "majestic comb-overs ... British Racing Green coffee-roasters and maroon bacon slicers".

Ricky Nelson and a pot-pourri of string-heavy British light music bandleaders put in appearances on the soundtrack, natch. The scent of Odense marzipan and eau-de-Cologne 4711 hangs heavy. Mmmm ...

But period picturesqueness apart, "Father to the Man" concisely details the self-education of a "midget auto-didact" in the means by which humans create the world around them into what is now called the "built environment" - from vernacular architecture to water meadows to shack settlements to Fordson tractors. It makes for a spectacle that would be compelling, varied, funny, even if it were not couched in list-heavy, multi-claused language of a richness and complexity worthy of a good Calvados. No, this is one thing Ant and Dec won't be doing to justify their salaries.

To say Meades is clever is to indolently miss the point. It's like saying Zinedine Zidane is a good midfielder, or Boris Yeltsin liked a nightcap. He is also imaginative (further programmes are on garden cities, the evolution of British horticulture on the grand scale, the hypocrisies of the Garden Cities movement, the elision of branding and urban redevelopment). He is also, perforce, very persuasive (how does he get these things made?). The answer to that parenthetical question, by the way, is that he is very, very, very good.

His programmes are opinionated, bracingly prejudicial, but rigorously argued. If your brain blinks for an instant, you'll miss it. The fact Meades and a small team of trusted directors manage to create such ravishing pictures, whose flow and rhythm are less redolent of British TV than Alain Resnais and Jean-Pierre Jeunet and allow the mind to remain engaged with Meades' lecture - is a marvel of television. Not only of this, but any era.

Meades does not assume, as many inverted snobs mistakenly believe, that everyone knows as much as he does - ie. where Totton is, the date of the demolition of Netley Hospital, what leets are, the source of a Flaubert quote, why he refers to Betjeman as "the topographer, not the poet". Thanks to the balance of image and text in his programmes, the sensuality of the visual - glaucous underwaterscapes, a splendid olive-green Morris 1000 estate, rostrum stills of Minibrix and Bayko - inspires a democratic and improving impulse to go and bloody well find out who and where and how and what and why. This programme makes cleverness, a hated bane of British life, seductive.

Reith would have loved it.

One review of a collection of Meades's essays, Peter Knows What Dick Likes (Paladin, 1989) described its author as an enemy of "cultural yobbishness". Meades is rather an enemy of received and obtuse unwisdom; of imagination and intellect stunted by orthodoxy. He is a natural, inoculant against tabloidism, that media creed which seeks to make of the commonplace a dictatorship of the familiar. In the hands of Meades and his cohorts, that which is unfamiliar in the commonplace becomes real and strange and beautiful.

"Your neighbours are the unknown stars," wrote the Tour de France's organiser Jacques Goddet in 1955, of the power of his race to exalt the reality of life for struggling rider and bewitched spectator alike. Here is ample proof - with sufficient application, we can all learn to find that fascination which resides in the apparently mundane.

There aren't enough superlatives, even in Meades' supersized vocab, to hurl at this, the programme of the year so far. If you don't get this, chuck your telly out of the window.

Hagmann on Schreker

Secrets of the grotto
Peter Hagmann raves about Franz Schreker's hot and heavy opera "Die Gezeichneten" in Salzburg.

Is it a man, is it a woman? (S)he sits in rose red silk, with black tights and patent leather boots and puts on fresh make-up. The body ranges between the sexes, the pose extremely lascivious while the lustfully mounting tones of the overture are played slowly, to be savoured.

We're in the Felsenreitschule (the former summer riding school), at the first of three opera premieres on the programme this week at the Salzburg Festival: "Die Gezeichneten" by Franz Schreker. When the piece was first performed in 1918 in Frankfurt, it was a scandal, as was reported by the 14 year old Theodor W. Adorno, who was in the audience. The work appeared "mammothly billowing, excessive" and "something jumpy" happened to him during the "shockingly erotic scenes".
Indeed, there's plenty of those. In the text that Schreker had originally written for Alexander Zemlinsky but ended up putting to music himself, there is a mysterious pleasure garden which contains an even more mysterious pleasure spot. Alviano Salvago, rich in spirit and fantasy but with a crooked frame, built the garden out of a desire for beauty and sensuality. Vitelozzo Tamare, an animal of a man, together with his cronies from Genoa's gentry, uses it as a place to abuse women of high society. The two men end up in a fight over the beautiful painter Carlotta Nardi; the fight drives one to his death, the other to insanity.

Director Nikolaus Lehnhoff was faced with the question of how to tell this story, rooted in fin de siecle Vienna, in such a way that its shock value is felt in a contemporary world of Internet pornography. Together with his stage designer Raimund Bauer and costume designer Andrea Schmidt-Futterer, he found a solution that is as plausible as it is theatrical. In complete contrast to the Stuttgart production of "Die Gezeichneten" in 2002, for which director Martin Kusej made ample use of blood and masculine nudity, Lehnhoff tackles the problem from a psychological angle. Alviano Salvago is no Rigoletto, he's not at all deformed, just a small, thin-legged man with serious psychic trauma. Terrified of being exposed by any form of communication that love, for example, might demand of him, he hides his body and his sexuality in women's clothing. It's seen very intellectually, shown very aesthetically, but the effect is no less dreadful.

Then the climax. After the intermission, there is a lush tableau in the spirit of the Grand Opera. Here, at the opening of the elysium for the people, there is little ostentation on stage. Instead there is good use of the arcades in the Felsenreitschule, bridled but in no way unambiguous choreography (Denni Sayers), and most of all, overflowing musical sensuality created by the exceptionally large and superior vocal ensemble and the Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor. Among all the black robed Renaissance figures and the half-naked ones, a man in a bright white suit stands out. It's Alviano who, perhaps thanks to the scene in the studio, has found himself and is now looking desperately for Carlotta.

He is interrupted by the Duke Adorno (Robert Hale), who launches a suit against him and his friends. The last victim of the band is a child – the second shock effect of the evening. "Die Gezeichneten" and the case of Dutroux (the notorious Belgian child molester and murderer – ed.). Schreker's opera not as a work from a turn of the century long ago, but as a paradigm with very contemporary relevance. That aslo applies to the no less pathological but extremely familiar masculinity obsession embodied by Vitelozzo Tamare. When the secret grotto opens, Alviano is forced to realise that Carlotte has given herself to the handsome muscle package. The "marked one" reaches for his revolver and shoots his rival down in one well-aimed shot; he, in turn falls down with a dreadful sneering laugh like Don Giovanni – the tall, handsome Michael Volle with his robust baritone is absolutely right for the role.

After Frankfurt in 1979, Düsseldorf in 1987 and Stuttgart in 2002, this interpretation is a further milestone in the most recent history of Franz Schreker's opera «Die Gezeichneten». Peter Ruzicka, who has made his contribution to keeping "entartete Musik" alive and well, took a certain risk with this opening premiere in Salzburg. His courage paid off.

Jeremy Eichler on Schreker's genius: Boston Globe

In search of a distant sound
A composer's opera finally makes its arrival in America
By Jeremy Eichler, Boston Globe

April 15, 2007
This afternoon at New York's Lincoln Center, the American Symphony Orchestra will perform an opera by Franz Schreker titled "Der Ferne Klang" or "The Distant Sound." It is, astonishingly, the first professional performance of any complete Schreker opera in North America. And herein lies a strange story, one of the great disappearing acts of modern music history.
Franz Schreker (1878-1934) was an Austrian composer of half-Jewish descent. His popularity in the German-speaking world rose to great heights in the 1920s, for a brief time approaching that of Richard Strauss. Of all the composers whose lives or reputations were eclipsed by World War II, Schreker was perhaps the most accomplished, and his vanishing from history has been the most eerily complete.
In the last two decades, his operas have begun returning to stages across Central Europe, buoyed by the politics of "cultural reparations" that have galvanized interest in music by once-banned composers ranging from Walter Braunfels to Alexander Zemlinsky. In this country, the recording industry has invested considerable resources in "degenerate music" -- a term the Nazis applied loosely to music they disliked, on either racial or aesthetic grounds -- but Schreker's operas have not gotten their due in live performance.
The neglect remains a mystery. Schreker was a voice of startling freshness at a time when music was seeking bold new pathways to its own future. His artistic instincts grew out of the fertile soil of fin-de-siecle Vienna, and his operas grappled with psychological themes of intense Freudian resonance. Like many of his characters, the composer quested for a "distant sound," elusive yet intoxicating, a new way of writing opera that was grounded in history, especially Wagner, but open to the quiver and flux of the emerging modern world. Unlike Schoenberg, he did not call for harmonic revolution but instead renovated an existing musical grammar, conjuring up orchestral sonorities whose tactile richness and subtlety of timbral detail had scarcely been heard before. Most unusual of all, he was an avant-gardist who never gave up on the notion of a progressive music that could spread sensual pleasure beyond a narrow clique of connoisseurs.
Leon Botstein, a conductor who has devoted tireless energy to reviving forgotten 20th-century gems, will lead this afternoon's concert performance. When reached by phone during a week of rehearsals, Botstein's enthusiasm was palpable. "It's mind - bogglingly good," he said. "So fresh, and so direct, and so delightful. It requires not a shred of apology."
"Der Ferne Klang" was Schreker's first work of greatness, and its 1912 Frankfurt premiere made him a young star of modern German opera. The plot centers on a composer's search for a mysterious magical sound that leads him away from his true beloved, only to discover too late that the sound he seeks is a refraction of their own love. The writing in the libretto by Schreker cannot measure up to the symbolist mastery of a poet-librettist like Maeterlinck, but as Botstein points out, neither do the librettos used in "La Boheme" or "Madama Butterfly." And underlying "Der Ferne Klang" is the composer's youthful faith in the strange, nearly mystical powers of the orchestra.
He was a composer of tremendous intellectual richness, but he never disavowed his devotion to music as sound, to music as lived experience," said Christopher Hailey, the leading Schreker scholar, by phone from Princeton, N.J. "He wants to bring us to an understanding of our aural environment, in which the magic of sound is very much part of our experience of the magic of being. I think that comes out most clearly in 'Der Ferne Klang.' He's a young man breaking all the rules, and opening perspectives that weren't pursued with real consequence until after the Second World War."
The near-disappearance of music that offers so much is difficult to grasp. According to Hailey, there was talk of bringing Schreker's operas to the United States in the 1920s, a time when the Weimar blockbuster "Jonny Spielt Auf" (by Ernst Krenek) received its American premiere. But the plans were never realized, possibly due to the giant scale of the works themselves and the prohibitive costs of mounting a production.
When the Nazis rose to power in 1933, Schreker was forced out of his teaching positions and his operas were strictly banned, not only for their progressive musical language but for their frank embrace of sexual themes. In the words of one infamous Nazi poster: " There was no sexual-pathological aberration he would not have set to music."
But the fevered lushness of Schreker's oeuvre seemed to offend not just the zealots of the extreme right, but also the chaste mandarins of the left. Theodor Adorno, the most influential theorist of musical modernism, displayed a marked ambivalence about Schreker, calling him on the one hand "a minstrel in a world without minstrels" and superior to Strauss in "orchestral imagination," but also cruelly denouncing Schreker's work as "music for puberty" or the fruit of a utopia that was too "unsublimated."
To be sure, Schreker's music was a far cry from the austere 12-tone path taken by Schoenberg and his disciples, a model that, after World War II, came to be cast as the only true and legitimate path for modern music. This heavy bias toward Schoenbergian flavors of modernism held strong well into the 1980s and gasped its final breaths only within the last decade. As a result, there are now new paths to sunlight opening up for works long buried in the rubble.
Schreker's operas are among them, but don't expect "Der Ferne Klang" to muscle out "Tosca" anytime soon. This is music with a certain inner volatility, a dearth of easily quotable tunes, and a peculiar undertow toward the dark, unmapped regions of the soul. With the right advocacy, these works might achieve sumptuous rare-bird status in the repertory, but even that is far better than extinction.
After today's performance, the next domestic glimpse of a Schreker opera will probably be given in Los Angeles, where James Conlon and the Los Angeles Opera have plans to stage Schreker's "Die Gezeichneten" ("The Stigmatized") in a future season, as part of its essential multiyear "Recovered Voices" project devoted to music repressed by the Third Reich.
The location of this project in Los Angeles is also fitting, as that city became home to so many émigré composers who were forced to flee Hitler's Europe. Schreker was almost among them. He made contacts in Southern California and considered emigrating.
In preparation for his journey, Schreker began practicing English, and one of his notebooks was on view in an exhibit at the Salzburg Festival in 2005, offering a poignant window into the almost painfully basic preparations for a new life. On one page, the composer wrote simple equations: "Ja = Yes" and "Nein = No."
Schreker's second act did not take place, as he died at 55 after a stroke for which it is speculated that the Nazis' treatment was to blame. More than seven decades later, his music has now made it to this country. Much credit goes to Botstein and the ASO for taking the initiative.
But perhaps the final word here should belong to Schreker himself. At the bottom of one page in the same notebook, the composer scrawled a short and strangely haunting sentence with no surrounding context. He seemed to be practicing his more formal English, perhaps anticipating the demands of a new chapter -- one that is now, finally, taking place.
"Ladies and gentleman," he wrote with open-ended grace, "let us begin."

Deborah Orr: Independent.com

Deborah Orr: A singular horror, a media frenzy and some disturbing facts about missing children
It is shocking that four babies have gone missing in Britain without us even being aware of their names
Published: 09 May 2007
Outpourings of empathy with Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter, Madeleine, went missing from her bedroom at a resort in Portugal last Thursday, have appeared all over the press in the past few days. No doubt they are perfectly sincere. But they are also entirely unnecessary. They are what news organisations want when they have a big story on their hands that is not "moving".

These commentaries add nothing to anyone's understanding of what has happened, or to anyone's sense of what might happen differently in future, because they do not educate, inform or entertain - except, perhaps, the dissociated or the ghoulish among us. They exploit the interest of readers in a way that can only chime with their own worst fears and insecurities, and augment their own distress or panic. This can, and does, lead in the most extreme instances to red-top hysteria and vigilante action. Both of these hinder the debate about paedophilia and what to do about it, rather than help it.

Even without such unfortunate consequences, as is the case with most people simply touched by the suffering of other people, indulging in too many thoughts of "what if..." is a sort of perverse anti-luxury, because despite the almost inconceivable ill-fortune of the McCann family, and despite widespread declarations that one knows just how they are feeling, or more honestly, cannot begin to imagine it, there is next to no likelihood, statistically, of quite such a calamity ever befalling anybody else.

The McCanns will be dealing with the fallout of this singular horror that has been visited upon them for years to come. It may seem right to slide for hours or days into their tragedy, but it is a kind of self-indulgence.

It is usually female writers who are requested to write commentaries about "human interest stories", and it is already apparent, since I'm writing this now, that The Independent and its editors feel in no way divorced from this process. In Britain, certainly, the voracious need of the media for new information has been a huge factor in the manner in which the police "handle" such cases. During the Soham investigation, it was policy to offer some new piece of information to the mass of waiting reporters every day, in order somehow to take advantage of the huge coverage in investigating the possible whereabouts of the girls.

The Portuguese police have not been conducting their investigation into Madeleine McCann's disappearance in this way. During the Soham inquiry, the police maintained pretty much until Ian Huntley's arrest that they had every reason to believe that Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman were still alive.

Chief inspector Oligeario Sousa, who is leading the Portuguese investigation, has no such strategy. Not only has he pointed out bluntly that he is not "a magician" and therefore cannot possibly know whether this child is alive or dead, he has also made no secret of the fact that when a small child has been missing for more than 48 hours it is time to fear the worst. He says Madeleine is likely to have been abducted for "sexual reasons", which is more candid than we are used to.

There is media disgruntlement at the paucity of information from the police, and their failure to issue a description of Madeleine's clothing or to reveal an artist's impression of a possible suspect. There is a lack of clarity about salient facts such as whether the apartment that Madeleine and her siblings were in was locked, or whether the windows were open. There was a failure to act quickly to set up checkpoints at the border with Spain, so that Madeleine could have been removed from the country with ease. British police sources even claim that the forensic integrity of the crime scene was compromised, making it impossible to get fingerprints.

The Portugese investigation certainly seems pretty shambolic, and it is only right that questions be asked. Kate and Gerry McCann, understandably, are reported to be very frustrated by the attitude of the Portuguese police. It was at their insistence that a televised appeal by them to the putative abductor was made, and one can understand why. Such appeals are a staple of UK investigations, even though their practical use is sometimes, very evidently, absolutely zero. Televised appeals are something we have come to expect distraught family members to do, and at times we have even been treated to the tears of actorly murderers. But we continueto believe they are A Good Thing nonetheless.

Most worryingly, the woman who runs Innocence In Danger, an organisation specialising in the protection of abducted and trafficked children first set up under the auspices of Unesco, says she was unable to set up a Portuguese office because "corruption and indifference hampers the country's investigation of paedophiles and child traffickers". Portugal would do well to look closely at such an allegation, because it would certainly not be the first nation to learn that it was being far too cavalier about this matter. In Britain today, some judges appear unable to grasp the profundity of the violation paedophilia entails.

Yet, in some respects, the Portuguese way of dealing with child disappearance does not seem so very different from our own. The Child Rescue Alert system was launched here nationally only last year, and is based on the Amber Alert system that runs in the US. Essentially, the system relies on the media being told at the earliest stage, to encourage the public to act as the "eyes and ears of the police". At a local level, at least, this appears to have been done in Portugal, as people were out searching for Madeleine very quickly. Then there are the statistics. The Council of Europe recommends that its members should run a national missing persons' bureau, and in Portugal, with a population of 10 million, the police list seven people who went missing as children, according to The Daily Telegraph, including one two-year-old who was abducted from home.

In Britain, in the past five years, 44 children have been listed as missing and unaccounted for, with 11 having disappeared when five or younger, and four under 12 months old. Our population is six times that of Portugal, and it is not possible to say whether the figures are collated in ways that make them compatible. But it is still shocking to know that four babies have gone missing in Britain in the past couple of years without us even being aware of their names.

One final word on the unfortunate consequences of media feeding frenzies, which is to call attention to some of the pitfalls of a lack of restraint in emoting and opining on personal loss. Jon Gaunt wrote in The Sun yesterday that the McCanns had brought their troubles on themselves. We should "include children in meals out," he says, "It's called family life." Suddenly all that feminine tit-beating seems very decent indeed.