Friday, 6 March 2015
New Normals
Well, it seems yesterday's mini Hannibal Lecter went unremarked, but World Book Day hit the headlines today after an 11-year-old lad marked the occasion by turning up to school dressed as Christian (Fifty Shade of) Grey, duly equipped with cable ties and an eye mask. You may well inquire, wearily, what the world has come to - especially as, it seems, one of the teachers turned up dressed as Dexter, the well-known serial killer. World Book Day appears to have become - at least in our schools - a kind of alternative Halloween, with only tenuous connections to the world of books. Not that it matters - every day is an international day of something or other and no one notices, or has any reason to. What might matter rather more is that the kind of practices - collectively known as BDSM - celebrated in Fifty Shades of Grey (to an accompaniment of Thomas Tallis's Spem in Alium) seems to be becoming 'the new normal'. A 'sex therapist' writing in the current Standpoint is not at all happy about it. Why this rise in masochism? Beats me.
Thursday, 5 March 2015
Arts Clown
I've remarked before on how popular science and stand-up comedy are becoming interchangeable as a small army of science-graduate comics eagerly spread the word for scientism, while the groovier scientists adopt the tropes and tricks of stand-up. It's begun to happen with popular history too, with the likes of Paul Sinha - and now, I fear, a similar process might be under way with stand-up comedy and art history. Last night on Radio 4 I caught a woman called Hannah Gadsby, who is Tasmanian and gay (nothing wrong with either of those) and describes herself as a 'comedian/ art historian' (plenty wrong with that). She delivered a supposed comedy lecture on Manet's Olympia, which managed to convey nothing new or interesting about that much-studied painting, and was most definitely not funny. The 'comedy', such as it was, was infused with that right-on, aren't-we-the-smart ones smugness that characterises Radio 4's science/comedy mash-up The Infinite Monkey Cage, but it was even less funny. Not that that deterred the studio audience, each of whom had apparently been equipped with a face mask and a tank of nitrous oxide. Gales of helpless laughter swept the auditorium punctually every 15 seconds or so. The series is called Hannah Gadsby: Arts Clown, and I do not recommend it.
It's World Book Day...
and here's one little chap who's really getting into the spirit of this dressing-up-as-a-favourite-character thing -
Wednesday, 4 March 2015
Fairy Doors
I feel I should alert my readers to the alarming situation developing in a Somerset woodland, where elfin construction has got out of hand. 'Fairy control is required,' says A Spokesman, 'otherwise we'd be covered in fairy doors... We're trying to keep people to the paths, but the fairy doors are making it a free for all.' No fairies were available for comment, alas.
Tuesday, 3 March 2015
Doc Watson
Born on this day in 1923 was the great (blind) guitarist, singer-songwriter and bluegrass god Arthel Lane 'Doc' Watson. Here is a video of his last performance, recorded in the year of his death at the age of 89, with the Nashville Bluegrass Band. You might find it hard to watch dry-eyed...
Monday, 2 March 2015
Love and Work
Such is the lamentable state of what passes for political discourse these days that it's a rare pleasure to come across something like this - a recent speech by Jon Cruddas that takes its text from William Morris: 'Love and work, these two things only.' It even includes a quotation from Edmund Burke, about 'that state of things in which liberty is secured by equality of restraint' (that highly desirable state of things...). Of course I don't agree with everything Cruddas says here, and of course it is a political speech - with all the limitations that implies - rather than an essay. But at least it engages with real ideas and the realities of life, and at a level stratospherically higher than most of what is uttered by our party politicians.
Cruddas is a rarity in today's political world - a man who genuinely thinks and genuinely cares, rather than going through the motions and hoping enough people are fooled. Like Frank Field - another cherishable rarity - he is a natural conservative and a loyal Labour man. Field, you might recall, was invited by Blair to 'think the unthinkable', only to have all his ideas ignored. Cruddas is Labour's Policy Coordinator, and it's hard to imagine that his ideas will get any further than Field's while his party is under the dead hand of Milliband-Balls.
'Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,' writes Geoffrey Hill in The Triumph of Love,
'it is for me increasingly a terrain
Cruddas is a rarity in today's political world - a man who genuinely thinks and genuinely cares, rather than going through the motions and hoping enough people are fooled. Like Frank Field - another cherishable rarity - he is a natural conservative and a loyal Labour man. Field, you might recall, was invited by Blair to 'think the unthinkable', only to have all his ideas ignored. Cruddas is Labour's Policy Coordinator, and it's hard to imagine that his ideas will get any further than Field's while his party is under the dead hand of Milliband-Balls.
'Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,' writes Geoffrey Hill in The Triumph of Love,
'it is for me increasingly a terrain
seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary,
conglomerate, metamorphic rock-
strata, in which particular grace,
individual love, decency, endurance,
are traceable across the faults.'
conglomerate, metamorphic rock-
strata, in which particular grace,
individual love, decency, endurance,
are traceable across the faults.'
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