Some things I wish to praise. (I may add to this through the day.)
The Worst Jobs in History (C4) was an absolute joy. I learned a lot, my children loved it. Watch it and weep, Spivey.
Doctor Who.
My son Jake, who recently passed his Grade 1 Cornet exam with Merit, thus, at a stroke, becoming more highly musically qualified than me.
Me, for mowing the lawn.
Peter, Zoe, Saltation, PB, JB, Vaughan, Gert, Willie, Andre, Hg, Pete n Karen, Gordon and all the others on my sidebar for recently providing excellent and very varied blogtertainment.
M. Roty, maker of fine burgundy.
Buitoni, makers of fine pasta.
Resonance FM 104-and-a-bit for allowing me to rediscover the pleasure of listening to something unmanicured and transgressive.
Carlisle United for making it back into the League at the first attempt.
My wife. Just in general.
Back to the ice pick tomorrow.
Forgive me but I have to speak out about How Art Made The World, BBC2’s answer to Stalinist revision of history.
Are there no editors at work on BBC programmes any more? How can Dr Spivey be allowed to get away with such blatant, unhistorical nonsense? I know television is ruled by brevity but does television also absolve presenters from either providing any proper evidence to support their contentions, or remove the obligation to have at least some basic knowledge of the subject under discussion?
This week we had nothing about art at all but plenty of wishful history. Yesterday evening Dr Spivey seemed to believe that:
- Darius founded the Persian Empire (no, that was Cyrus the Great)
and invented coins (no, Lydians did that two hundred years before)
and that he was a man of peace (oh, let’s forget about punishing the Greeks and the battle of Marathon then)
- Alexander the Great was the first person to have himself depicted for political purposes (wait, wasn’t that just Darius? Oh no. That was a LOGO. This is a PORTRAIT.) Incidentally he neglected to mention that the attribution of that tomb to Philip The Second of Macedon is disputed.
- Rome at the end of the first century BC was ‘divided’ into two ‘parties’. (Not plebeians and patricians.) There was a Republican party (maybe) and a Monarchist party (quoi?!). No mention of Pompey, Mark Anthony, the Julian clan or even Julius Caesar at all, or the problems of a weak centre in an Empire dominated by successful generals. Nope. We were instead informed that Octavian brought peace, winning over the Romans with ‘Art’, and the battle of Actium was thus relegated to a drawing competition. And Wellington doubtless beat Napoleon with a can of spray paint.
I enjoy history and it fascinates me. When I see someone taking on this kind of Broad Sweep My Theory Of Everything approach I cannot stand silently by and see all the rules of logical proof and historical interconnectedness so violated. Did anyone at the BBC check on any of his points? Did anyone challenge him in any way? Hands up who remembers Erik von Daniken.
I saw a documentary about the central European body exhumed at Stonehenge recently. No one on that programme made any claims about how this man had had Stonehenge built. Archaeologists are extremely cautious about making causal links between contemporaneous events. HAMTW feels no need to labour under such fusty restraints.
Spiveyism seemed to suggest that Darius needed images to rule his empire, an empire acquired by conquest. Has the man not heard of aristocracy, or understand what it is for? It is only modern governments, up for election and possessing swarms of bureaucrats and piles of technology, that have dispensed with this method of ruling, which was universal till quite recently. (Some would say it persists.) He seemed to imagine that ancient rulers required some sort of consent from their rulees and that this could be acquired by the power of imagery. This really is art remaking the world at root.
He is peristently putting the cart on top of, underneath and beside the horse. It goes in front, Nigel. There’s a logical order to this. You may be trying to sell a manual explaining how to get one’s horse under one’s cart but it’s really not what we want. Just explain how art made the world, if you can, not how you made history. Please, someone stop him now, before he starts explaining how our stamps make us love our Queen and Saddam Hussein was a clever man because he never had any pictures painted of him gassing anyone.
So what's all this nonsense then? Oasis Number One? Well, it's just not good enough, you've let everyone down and you will all stay in at playtime.
Tsk. Really.
Their best record for ages, yes, but then that's not a claim I would go too far out of my way to make. A return to form, yes, but one more worthy of Mad Frankie Fraser than Red Rum. People used to slag off Stock Aitken Waterman for doing this sort of cut and paste thing, yet Oasis seem to be adored for it. Is the process less noticeable because of the veneer of rockiness surrounding the cheeky Mancs? Surely their pretensions to authenticity should render the criticism more savage, but no. Queues have formed, money has changed hands, the boys are back and there's good rockin' in the barn. Never mind the Great Rock N Roll Swindle, this is The Great Refrain Robbery.
The classic original rock bands usually revolved around an axis of a minimum two strong and original characters. Lennon McCartney, Jagger Richards, Plant Page, Rodgers Fraser. Not all of them. The Who had one writer but four highly distinctive performers. The Police ditto with three. Prejudices dripping off the page with every sentence here.
So what of Oasis? One thief and one cartoon character. No players. Shakes head sadly. In the 80s there was a music shop in Camden that banned customers from playing certain classic riffs while trying out the guitars. There was a big cardboard list with a tarrif of fines. Number 1 was, of course, Stairway To Heaven. Now if you’ve ever been in a guitar shop on a Saturday morning you’ll know why such drastic measures became necessary. The poor staff have to endure a weekly cacophony of familiar bits of beloved tunes, delivered without any overall purpose, addressed to no one in particular, and always slightly out of tune. Noel Gallagher’s genius has been to capture that sound.
There is more substandard guitar playing on Oasis records than the whole punk movement ever cranked out. Awful, whiney note bending. Has Noel listened to the great players? They knew how to bend notes. BB King, Clapton, Blackmore, Kossoff, Beck all had their own ways of doing it. The Gallagher school of bending is a disaster, offering a dreary flatness that even industrial Holland would be ashamed to put before the public.
The only benefit Oasis have so far delivered is the 'Name That Resprayed Tune' game, which I have invented to liven up dull winter evenings. Object: how many nicked ideas can you find in an Oasis song. Up to six players. Method: sit round a table, stick a pin in an Oasis CD track listing and everyone has to nominate one filched idea, lyrical or musical, in the selected song. The first player who can’t think of one has to down everybody else’s drinks, gargle with a bottle of Lemon Hooch, then start a fight. If you want to prolong the game there are special rules for advanced players which include being allowed to quote any couplet of lyrics that makes absolutely no sense at all. (You may think this harsh. Individual lines in the Oasis canon do make sense, and can even be quite beautiful, but the trick with songwriting is to write more than one line. Otherwise it would be called phrasewriting. Or advertising.) Anyway the game’s been a great hit round ours.
OK, I’ll start. Lyla. Tune = Street Fighting Man. First six notes. Riff = Jean Genie (or Blockbuster - bonus point claimed). Instrumentation: guitar part = Getting Better (Beatles, Sgt Pepper). I’m surprised, even shocked that Noel didn’t call it 'Layla', which would have worked just as well and would have been more in line with his usual methods. And can I have an extra bonus point for noticing that the entire song makes no sense at all?
Your turn.
Yesterday was a special day so we went out for lunch. Our choice was a small restaurant catchily titled ‘The Peckham Experiment’. We have been there before and were disappointed, but a couple of months ago I noticed that the street blackboard outside it had adopted French style handwriting. So we thought we’d give it a second chance.
And our liberal sentencing policy was rewarded with an excellent meal at a very reasonable price. There were no feral children scratching at the windows and crack was not on the menu. A little piece of France on our doorstep. Recommended.
I got a present, a large, very heavy book about twentieth century art. My reading habits are limited in time and space. Mel has suggested I invent and market a Loo Lectern.
I’ve now sat through two episodes of a BBC2 series called How Art Made The World, the work of one Dr. Nigel Spivey.
The first episode revolved around the idea that exaggeration is at the centre of man made representations of the human figure. I would like to write a blog entry about how exaggeration is central to the conception of overblown BBC2 art documentaries.
Last week Dr Spivey, an art historian, stomped freely for an hour through the academic cabbage patches of sociology, history, neurology, psychology, anthropology and archaeology. Nothing seemed beyond his scope. Except modesty. Or actually proving his point by any means other than state-of-the-art graphic morphing. The Stones sang tragically about the perils of being addicted to morphing but clearly the young Nige wasn't listening. How the enormously exaggerated sexual features of Neolithic statues could possibly be closely compared to the slightly exaggerated chest musculature and lack of coccyx bone in a Greek bronze statue, a statue possessed of both staggering beauty and an air of deep realism, left my eyebrows exaggeratedly raised.
And this week? Lovely cave paintings, including some crucial examples from South Africa. Any exaggerated features obvious in these primitive depictions of men? Oh, sorry, that was last week's idea. This week's mystery was why humans invented images. What a strange and meaningless question.
Overstated, overvisual. Over not quickly enough. All rather 'Hey Presto' and stuffed with arch lines like: "Then suddenly thousands of miles away..." and clunky rhetorical questions. "Could this be a clue...?" he asked. Well, yes. We think it is a clue because you did too and included it. By the end the Doctor was also taking credit for having discovered the roots of civilisation and agronomy as well as figurative art. The man spreads himself thinner than Marmite.
The verbal pace of the show (very slow) seemed seriously out of step with the visual pace of the show (speedy plus). The breadth and depth of the ideas up for discussion seemed seriously out of proportion to the very few words he used to prove his contentions. Statement = truth, because it's telly. I didn’t think he ended up making his case at all.
Or is it just me?
In line with our current policy we went out to visit an edifying place of historic interest again this weekend. "History alert!" shouted Jake, still fresh from the logical knot of time-based issues raised by Saturday's superb episode of Doctor Who. No monsters for us though. This time we chose Chartwell, the family home bought and redesigned by Sir Winston Churchill.
Zoe was enraptured, Jake was bored. Mel thought we could live there comfortably. I found it a slightly antiseptic experience as it seemed to me to be neither family home nor museum. I declared it a shrine without a numinous presence. Perhaps it was so many bad paintings by The Man that threw me. As a master of the English phrase Winston has few equals. I think he had a deep understanding of military matters and of leadership. He also had a very clear version of Britishness which the Brits were happy to share with him for the duration of the wartime. Words yes. Paintings no.
One of the Roomkeepers told someone next to me that Winston was friends with Monet and had received advice from him about painting. I can find nothing on the web to support this intriguing idea. Winston was born in 1874 and took up painting at age 41. That makes 1915. Monet died in 1926. I’d like to know when and where our host met the great French brushman, and what precisely was the advice. Perhaps it was "Ne quitte pas ta situation quotidienne." That would have been mine.
In their attempts to convince us that he was the greatest living Englishman EVAH we were treated to galleries of his awards, glimpses of his monogrammed slippers, explanations of his writing methods, reminders to admire his bricklaying, and hundreds of examples of his painting ability. Why, I wondered were they all still there, where he painted them? Were there any anywhere else? Monet gave him one of his own foggy, pink paintings of the Thames, according to the Roomkeper. Did the old cigar chomper whip out one of his own efforts at this point and press it on the revered blobbeur? I have been to Giverny twice and I don't recall seeing any Churchills on display there. I suspect they are a strictly local phenomenon, hanging around in festoons in The Weald.
As the tour petered out I began to suspect that the shop would be full of evidence of his prowess as a jam maker. As I tired I also began to dread the possibility that some grateful American had given him a tape recorder in his retirement and we were about to be treated to his attempts as singer songwriter.
However I applaud several aspects of the way the National Trust are running the place. First up they have a sign that reads 'Lavatories', not 'Toilets'. Superbly U piece of detail. You don't get much U-er than Winnie. Secondly there was the politest notice I have ever seen in a public place. On the bed in Lady Churchill’s bedroom there was a sign which read: "Please try not to touch". Charming. I would like to know how effective it is in preserving her Ladyship's counterpane from greasy visiting hands. If it works I think we could do something towards rekindling respect in our society by rephrasing a great many of our other signs and public instructions. Like: "Please try not to enter". Or: "Please try not to drive under this bridge if your vehicle exceeds 3.5 Metres in height".
Or "Please have a shot at drinking up now and furthermore please try to have homes to go to."
On Sunday I mowed the lawn.
Baldly stated that is what I achieved this weekend. The lawn now looks baldly back at me. I detect a resentful air out there, a feeling of wings clipped, of space grossly invaded, of a winter's benign neglect cast violently aside.
I am always reluctant to resort to mowing. It's hard work and it only encourages the thing you're trying to stop. In my dreams we have a sheep and it eats the grass, slowly and methodically tidying its cafeteria while fertilising its future breakfasts. I see no drawbacks to this arrangement except that I'd probably have to shear it once a year, which could well be harder work seeing as you don't have to catch a lawn first before you can crop it, and it doesn’t wriggle. Or bite.
Then again I abhor dishonesty and it would be nice to have a truthful answer when those blokes come ringing on the door offering me horse manure for the garden.
"No thanks, mate." I would answer, flinty-eyed. "Got a sheep. Your call." Dung poker. No bluffing.
I would enjoy that, and for similar reasons it occurs to me sometimes to reinstate the fishpond we inherited here. It could come in handy on those regular occasions when we get offered fish at the door by jolly Geordies.
"Fresh fish?" they always ask. Well, I assume it’s a question, not an insult.
"Not today, thanks," I reply. And always too politely.
Because it’s then that they take half a step forward and follow up with: "Ahh, but would ya like some for the freezah?"
At this familiar point it would be nice to vary the script with: "No, really. But if by ‘fresh’ you mean ‘still alive’ I might be interested."
A nice thought but the moment has passed. We filled in the fish pond when we first arrived and we haven't actually missed it. The only locals who do miss it are about five thousand frogs who still come and sit in our garden in high summer and tell tales to each other of what a wonderful pond it was, how their ancestors went a-courting in it, how things were better before the arrival of the dark satanic shed. A miniature amphibian folk festival it is. They keep well hidden so I don't know how many of them have adopted mediaeval frog personas and are demonstrating traditional frog craft skills. All I can hear are the ancient songs, an oratorio of rebuke.
Well it's all in the cause of a bit of cricket. Jake has just acquired a training ball, half red half white, and wishes to practice on something less hairy than a fur coat. And that's the only spin in this story.
More garden thoughts after the weather warms up enough for our first glass of rosé out there. That, surely, is what gardens are for.
So The Dull Election is finally over. I have not commented much upon it here, having no taste for punditry nor skill in spread betting, but for me it was not just the election itself that lacked savour. Much of normal political life has been suspended for about eight years now. That is what has been so dull, the certainty, the lack of the least whiff of cordite. The circumstances of 1997 were truly extraordinary, and not entirely contrived by the New Labour modernisers either, but that first landslide has recast British politics in a way that is still working itself through
For me there has been only one really interesting thread since 1997, namely the Tory assumption that the Blair landslide was just the result of an aberration of the political pendulum and that power would one day return to its natural home, i.e. themselves. This comforting thought, coupled with their firm belief that the British electorate has a natural right-of-centre-right bias, told them there was no need to re-examine the fundamental assumptions uinderpinning conservative philosophy.
This must still be their current mindset as in last week's election they were led by a Thatcherite selling tax cuts and bogeymen. This strikes me as equivalent to Roy Hattersley leading Labour into the 2005 election on a 'Fair Pay For Miners' anti-nuclear platform.
To make matters worse for the Tories it seems that the lesson Blair has recently learned is that he needs to move to the Right. What else did that little speech outside Number 10 about ‘respect’ mean? Some say he will now be in thrall to his rebel backbenchers. Not by the sound of those “I-We-The Government” quotes he won't.
So here’s the constructive bit - my advice to the new Tory leader, when he/she emerges.
The Tories need to move on from the rhetoric of monetary enrichment. They have never truly answered the question: is the Tory party for those who want to get rich, or merely for those who already are? Too late now, we don't need to know any more.
The Tory trick was always to convince the poor that richness was within their reach, coupled with an insistence that money would not come to the undeserving. Show the Ladder: believe in the Ladder. With the current wealth-friendly Labour leadership having adopted something rather similar this is no longer an identifying feature of Toryism. So what is?
Mrs Thatcher enriched many people she didn't know by selling them their council houses. She enriched many people she did know by selling them our public utilities.
I have had the opportunity of voting Tory all through my life and perhaps I would have been better off if I had. Yet I have never ever done so. What could a new Tory party offer me? New Labour offered me the chance to vote for a socially inclusive agenda without automatically making myself poorer - a powerful come-on for many millions of floaters all over the nation. The fact that we did get taxed more and the social inclusion didn’t arrive just meant that some of the fundamentals of politics were still working as normal and the natural laws of the game had not actually been suspended. In the end Blair and Brown were not better than all their predecessors. On the other hand they were probably no worse. After 1997 presentation moved on and expectations were raised. In striving to make themselves look better while On Sale they have mostly succeeded in making themselves look worse after use.
I have always been interested in Conservative philosophy and Tory politics much more than left of centre doings and thinkings, a guilty pleasure akin to that derived by some from the eating of chocolate biscuits late at night. My excuse is that it’s just a natural side effect of my endless curiosity. I hope to grow out of it and move on to more wholesome reading material. Oddly I was never similarly intrigued by left of centre ideas; I think this is because I never needed to have them explained. It all seemed rather obvious to me from a very young age. It was there from the start in everything I was taught. “Share it. It’s not your turn. Yes, but he’s littler than you. Let him play. You’re not the only pebble on the beach. Don’t show off.” Also: "Are you all right?" and "There, there.”
(This, mind, was in proper Tory-approved institutions like The Family and a C of E Primary School not run by Reds but by an ultra-traditionalist who made us do Scottish dancing and read us awful moralistic tales of the underwater doings of Wee Tammy Troot.)
Even after primary level the barrage continued. We are all equal in the sight of God. We are all equal before the law. Blessed are the poor in spirit. It is easier for a camel yadda yadda rich man yadda yadda heaven. Even "Money can’t buy me love..." What needed explaining to me was how some people could work up a political philosophy centred on the notion that they individually were special by sole distinction of being rich or white or English.
I have had an abiding interest ever since in how a party based on individual achievement and ambition could possibly work out in practice. Once the patriarchal grouse moor Tories were gone and the Thatcher era of clever grammar school types had dawned the Conservative Party has been the best human zoo in town. How a bunch of people almost entirely without principles got elected so many times was fascinating. How the party imploded once the prospect of power was removed has been doubly so. Ambitious types still joined the Labour party all through the Tory hegemony and they learned their lessons well. The Tories show absolutely no signs of doing the same. Yet.
It’s a truism that elections are won from the centre. (It’s also one of democracy’s great ironies, because people who enter politics are not usually driven by visions of centrism, which is not a philosophy but a moving mid point on a spectrum. Never mind, that’s a whole other post.) The systematic centrism of New Labour is proof that it is a truism that the Blairites grasped wholeheartedly and it has worked well for them.
The current Tory leadership, by contrast, obviously do not believe the truth of it. Howard seemed to be wooing not only the blue shires but also the UKIP and BNP constituencies. Is the man serious? Has the New Labour project taught him nothing? The first thing Kinnock did was to dump his lunatic fringe. The first thing Blair did was to dump his historical power base in the industrial heartlands and union movement. They would vote for him anyway, he figured, Clause 4 or no Clause 4. He was right, of course. They did, and in the absence of a credible far left party a lot of them still do. At this election it was not the defection of ex-miners and local government workers that hurt the party, it was the metropolitan vote that Blair had so carefully seduced that deserted him, for the Lib Dems. These are the people Howard needed. And did he reach out even one finger of one hand to beckon them? No, for these are not the people who are so afraid of gypsies that they would elect a government on the promise of moving them on a bit faster. These are the people who like Indian takeaways, who want their children to have gym lessons in French and who don’t like George W and his crusades.
The Tories need a Blair. Someone young, a bit touchy feely, in tune with modern concerns and 21st century conditions, good on telly, not beholden to older power blocks in the party. Oh wait - that was Michael Portillo. Bad luck guys. You wouldn’t have him. You were so keen not to have him that you engineered, with slide-rule precision, the election of Iain Duncan-Smith. And this from the most sophisticated electorate in the world?
I once read a blog post here somewhere proposing that 'a conservative is someone who thinks history is smarter than he is'. Perhaps an original formulation, I don’t know. Certainly admirably Burkeian. The Blue Party needs such modest thinkers, in numbers and right away. But one of the defining essences of conservatism is fear of change, distrust of new ideas, reluctance to rethink first principles which derive their authority from exactly that first position. So, even if they keep the philosophy they should at very least sort out a new name. 'New Labour' sounded good, made sense and went on to do the trick. But 'New Conservatives'? I think not.
They could try 'Better Conservatives', or 'Your Conservatives'. Perhaps. I quite like 'Not Those Conservatives'. It has the kind of definite vagueness that New Labour hinted at. Anyway, they have friends with big advertising agencies and I suggest they get their best men onto it as soon as.
For a while now I have been running this blog on the Thumper Principle, which states that it's best to say nuthin if you got nuthin nice to say. I have extended this to the process of blogging by deciding to say nuthin if I can't work it into sumthin within a day or so. As the very essence of blog is immediacy I have effectively condemned myself to silence, or the more traditional form of blogging known as chatting to friends and family on the telephone.
Last weekend we visited Darwin's House, the very nerve centre of irreligion some might say, which was surprisingly easy to do from a security point of view. Some of the extreme Creationism I have read on the web had led me to expect body searches and wire mesh on the windows. The visitors were all well behaved though and there were no pickets outside, at least not when we were there. Oddly the house betrayed no links with the KGB but then perhaps that was just naivety on my part bcause Darwin's collaboration with Lenin and Satan has, of course, been expertly covered up over the years.
Doctor Who goes from strength to strength and last Saturday's episode included the first footage of a Dalek designed to win our sympathy. The poor little pepperpot was the last survivor of its kind and had ended up as the star exhibit in the alien memorabilia collection of a mad billionaire bent on world domination. What, a mad billionaire bent on world domination? "Surely not," you cry.
Mr Van Stratten's sinister eye-bulging antics put me in mind of one of my all time favourite lines from the Who vaults sometime in the mid 70s when a panic stricken soldier rushed up to Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart and yelled "But... but.. bullets just bounce off it!!!" and the Brig merely rolled his eyes and said "Wouldn't it be nice if just once we encountered an alien monster that bullets didn't just bounce off."
So, anyway, for 45 minutes we were skillfully prompted into sympathising with the lone lorn Dalek and disliking the callous billionaire computer genius. Afterwards we ended up in a long family discussion of the themes raised by the whole episode, including some very interesting dramatic reversals as the Doctor became more ruthless and violent and the Dalek became more human, having been touched by Billie Piper. Privately I wondered whether the same might not happen to Chris Evans, but only time will tell.
In a neat conjunction, a synergistic moment of beauty, we have all been singing 'Mr Lonely' by Akon in Dalek voices for several days now and our amusement shows no signs of diminishing. "I have no body...All on my own..."
Which leaves the election. At this point I am undecided whether to condemn all parties from the moral high ground or to write a long piece about how consumerism and democracy appear to be entering a new, potentially final conflict which will engulf the planet in flames, or at least wrapping paper. For the moment I will merely observe that Blair got elected in 1997 on a massive wave of revulsion for much of what had been wrong in the conduct of our politics for a generation. Oh, and by pinching all the consensus centre-right policies of his predecessors.
Mr Howard has decided to learn this lesson in his own way and is trying to paint himself as Britain's Jimmy Carter to Blair's Nixon. Extraordinary that the wiliest Tory of his generation has artfully reinvented himself as the honest man who can really deliver, slasher of waste (our scroungers are now Civil Servants), straight talker (remember Paxman's thirteen unanswered questions?), deliverer of a new era of accountable government (remember Blair's speech on the doorstep of Number 10?). Generals, it is said, refight the last war but n@ked political opportunists, it seems, refight the election before last.