Hold my pint: Mentioning the 'B' word

It has been strictly avoided. A bit like the plague. Or COVID-19 (fingers crossed, until now at least, on a personal level). But there comes a time when the word must be spoken, when the reality must be faced. And that word is ... Brexit.

That’s right, people. Brexit. BREXIT. The absolute bloody clusterfuck that is Brexit.

 

‘Why now?’ you ask – perhaps warily, if you yourself are familiar with the shambles, and are aware that I have avoided it on this blog, choosing indeed to tread lightly because of the divisiveness of the issue.

I made no mention of it at the beginning of this year. I have not said a word here about the UK government having screwed UK fishing communities – and now preparing to screw UK farming communities (and the irony that both these are traditional parts of the constituency of the Conservative Party).

 

That avoidance has been five years in the making – not least because I have also spent a lot of that time trying to understand it through the prism of my Brexit-voting parents (who then died in 2017 and 2018, without hanging around to see the godawful mess that their votes had helped to create) and finding that my attempts to understand them (and myself) is still, even now, largely bound up in trying to understand Brexit and English exceptionalism.

 

So why now ... why today?

 

Because Tim ‘Not-Very-Nice-But-Definitely-Very-Dim’ Martin has decided that, in spite of having been one of businesses’ few high priests for the cult that is Brexit, he now needs EU economic migrants to pull the pints in Wetherspoons, the chain of pubs that he founded, and wants regulations ‘liberalised’ in order to allow that.

 

To be fair, he has a BA in law from the University of Nottingham and qualified as a barrister in 1979 (though has never practiced) so is clearly a Brain of Britain candidate.

 

Not.

 

In 2018, on Brexit, he said that his pubs would stop selling EU-sourced products ... because, well ... The EU! Nose, spite, fucking face.

 

But honestly, this is from an individual who was reported in The Guardian on 30 March this year as having recommitted to a massive, 10-year expansion of ’Spoons, including 75 projects, made up of 18 new pubs and 57 major extensions to existing venues, creating 20,000 jobs.

Oops ... what if you can't fill those jobs, Mr Martin?

 

So it’s hardly difficult to see why he’s suddenly had a change of heart about immigration – okay, less a “change of heart” and more an ‘OMG! My personal pocket!’ religious conversion.

 

And this, girls and boys, is just part of why Brexit is a clusterfuck – because it has been guided by imbeciles and private profiteers who aren’t even intelligent and/or self-aware enough to recognise the impact on their own businesses and profits. Never mind on anyone else. They can't even managed enlightened self interest!.

This is not written from a position ofsnobbery. ’Spoons often do really good cooked breakfasts at a really great price (I’ve enjoyed them before a match in Manchester more than once and in Cardiff during Millennium Magic). And the beer they sell isn’t just dross, such as that 'brewed' by Interbrew.

 

But Martin’s comments illustrate that, while Wetherspoons is essentially a (socially) working class brand, he doesn’t give a toss about that group of people (however you would categorise the working class) and only about his own pocket.

As is clear, given that this is an employer who refuses to pay his own staff extra for working on bank holidays or allow them to have a soft drink while working on really hot days (like today).

 

Brexit in a fucking nutshell.

Sign a petition too get Wetherspoons to pay its workforce for bank holidays

 

Back to the gallery – but Rodin is no blockbuster

As our frenzy of COVID-19 lockdown-easing culture blitz continues, The Other Half and I nipped over to Tate Modern for The Making of Robin exhibition.

A little note: it might feel like a “frenzy”, but while getting out and about a bit, we’re also avoiding the centre of London and venues that would entail using the Tube or crossing central London. Let's all be sensible.

 

Living in east London, Tate Modern is easy for us as it’s a single bus ride and a walk away. I’d deliberately booked for late on the Sunday morning of a bank holiday weekend as that was almost certainly going to be quite quiet. It was. And we also walked most of the way home – but that’s a different story.

 

Now, this is billed as a major exhibition, but while it is interesting, it’s no blockbuster for the uninitiated. That said, we are living through exceptional times, so leeway has to be given as arts organisations try to get back up and running in the face of a deeply anti-arts government in Westminster.

 

The exhibition concentrates on the processes that Auguste Rodin used in creating his iconic sculptures. This means looking primarily at how he created, used and re-used the plaster works that were rarely intended as being finished items.

 

So, for instance, there is an entire display cabinet full of hands that were initially created when he was working on The Gates of Hell. These are really interesting ... but particularly if you’ve seen a finished version of The Gates of Hell. The OH and I are fortunate enough to have visited the Musée Rodin in Paris twice, spending time with castings of many of the works we see represented here in their development phases. Including The Gates of Hell.

 

Personally, I love Rodin’s monumental Balzac ... but can you fully appreciate all the maquettes (both very large and very small – and there are many of them) if you can’t see or haven’t seem one of the final castings?

 

Equally with The Burghers of Calais – although at least visitors to this exhibition can go and view the casting that stands in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament without too much difficulty.

 

For me, the most interesting works shown here in their own right are those representing the Japanese actor and dancer Ohta Hisa, known as Hanako (left). They include works in bronze and glass and are fascinating.

They were unlike any Rodin works we'd seen previously.

It was also good to see a couple of works by Camile Claudel – Rodin's lover and co-worker – yet I find myself wonder whether, by forcing this tiny representation in, the exhibition doesn't do her a disservice rather than a service.

 

Indeed, the OH and I have a long history of finding some curators’ notes impossibly pompous or priggish. Here, this becomes the gallery’s attempt to be ‘woke’ (and I hate myself having to describe it as that).

Further, it actually risks misrepresenting Claudel's life – reducing her problems to her connection with Rodin, rather than noting, for instance, the massive damage done to her by her mother.

 

And seriously, who really needs to be pointed, via QR code, to a chat between two women saying that there was a “gender imbalance” in art in the 19^th century? Not least for an essentially art geeky exhibition ... is Tate really assuming that visitors won’t know that the 19th century was deeply unbalanced in gender terms in general?

 

Equally, do we need a mini lecture on ‘cultural appropriation’? I mean – the examples of Rodin's personal collection of objects from the far east, then turned quite casually into new works are genuinely interesting. But would the gallery also, in such context, mention Ai Weiwei, or is smashing centuries-old Chinese vases and claiming that doing so is a ‘work of art’ okay if you’re Chinese and the centuries-old vases you smash in the name of art are themselves Chinese?

 

Look ... it was great to get back into a gallery. In terms if Tate Modern, the social distancing etc all works well and allows you to feel comfortable, for which I am genuinely grateful, but this exhibition is, in essence, for Rodin geeks. If you haven't seen finished versions of these plaster works, then it's probably not worth visiting.

 

And such things can be done better. See Matisse in the Studio in 2017 at the Royal Academy showed how – my thoughts here.

 

And as for Rodin – some thoughts from the last time the OH and I visited the Paris museum.

Cruella: Flawed, yet arch but subtle fun

Cruella

For those of us of a certain age, Cruella de Vil is one of Disney’s most memorable – and least likeable – villains. Having had the pleasure of playing a classic villain on stage in a Christmas show – and being able to relish the response of the children in the audience (including one who spotted me without make-up while in a shop a short while later) – I enjoy a good villain at least as much as the rest and possibly more.

 

But while, as an adult filmgoer I almost had the hots for Antony Hopkins as Hannibal Lector, killing and skinning dogs to make a coat is simply beyond the pale. Though to add from a personal perspective, it always helps for me if a villain is a little bit arch; I give you 2003’s Underworld, and Bill Nighy as Victor, and Alan Rickman’s Sheriff of Nottingham as further examples.

 

Perhaps it was the trailer that made me want to see this – or partly the lure of being able to, once again, actually be in a cinema – or a bit of both, but after a first post-lockdown cinema visit last week made me feel comfortable in the environment (it was Peter Rabbit 2, in case you’re curious), this was too tempting to miss.

 

An origin story for de Vil, it is set primarily in the 1960s and ’70s, allowing for a ridiculously good soundtrack and some wonderful costumes, and it tells the story of how Estella becomes Cruella and, along the way, invents punk.

 

It looks wonderful, but it’s also a cracking story of being different – of being an outsider who is expected to conform and the soul-shredding struggle of trying to do that.

 

That soundtrack? It includes the Stones, Bowie, Nina Simone, The Clash, Queen, Judy Garland, Nancy Sinatra, Blondie and Ken Dodd, plus a new song from Florence + the Machine, and is a major force for why the film works (by and large).

 

The performances are delightful. Emma Stone as the eponymous Cruella is wonderful: arch – yet far, far more subtle than that might suggest (hint: arch can also be subtle). Emma Thompson as the Baroness, her nemesis, is a wonderful sparring partner, visually channelling Holly Golightly in places, and. ore than visually channelling Meryl Streep as Miranda Priestly/definitely-not Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada in others.

 

Mark Strong is excellent – and also very subtle – as the Baroness’s butler, while Joel Fry and Paul Walter Hauser provide the perfect – and not obviously simplistic – level of support as the Dickensian child crooks who ‘adopt’ Cruella’, only to end up being led by her.

 

Oh ... and the dogs are great too.

 

There is a criticism, though – and that is that is too long by around 15 minutes. Director Craig Gillespie should have knocked 15 minutes off the 134-minute run time – without losing any scenes. There is no bad scene, but it should all have done with just that bit more pace.

 

However, back to the pluses: it looks utterly fabulous and has a pleasing darkness, but with some laughs too. This is Disney channelling DC’s predilection for the dark, but also understanding Marvel’s use of humour – and thereby arguably handing DC a lesson (though trailers for July’s The Suicide Squad suggests that DC might have finally latched on to why Marvel is streets ahead of them in such stakes).

 

It’s dark in a good way – arguably a Joker for a younger audience. And I cannot give it greater praise than that, even with that quite serious pacing fault

Back to the concert hall – at last!

On Wednesday evening, after an all-too-long absence, The Other Half and I finally made it back to the concert hall for a socially-distanced programme at the Barbican.

It had been a long time coming: our last live concert was on 6 December 2019, also at the Barbican, for a recital by Russian pianist Arcadi Volodos, who performed a programme of works by Liszt and Robert Schumann.

 

By the end of that year, we’d been to five concerts/recitals (plus four operas together – one further one for me – and one play). Hopefully, this doesn’t make me sound like a dilletante in the culture vulture stakes.

 

Yet I had realised by late last autumn that while concerts were hardly an everyday experience for us, they were the form of entertainment outside the home that I missed most deeply. Perhaps there’s a sort of spiritual basis for that? Whatever.

 

On Friday 11 December last (my birthday, as it happens) I’d optimistically booked tickets for the Barbican on 10 January, for a recital by the wonderful young British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor. That went the way of all flesh only shortly thereafter, as London was plunged into tier three – and then the whole country into lockdown three.

 

As I said, the return has been a long time coming – and not least for all the musicians and backstage and front of house staff. The UK government, as with all bombastic, flag-shagging, populist regimes, seems determined to play down and denigrate the arts in general, irrespective of what they give to the country as a whole – even in terms of being a major attraction for tourism and, therefore, a big earner for the economy.

 

But hey ... if we had a half-way decent government in Westminster, it’s possible that we wouldn’t be where we are now.

 

Anyway, Wednesday was one of three socially distanced concerts at the Barbican being given by the London Symphony Orchestra, under conductor laureate Michael Tilson Thomas, and featuring Yuja Wang on piano.

 

The programme opened with the five very pleasant minutes of The Last Spring by Grieg, from his Two Elegiac Melodies, opus 34.

 

Then came Ms Wang to the stage for Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto – the Brief Encounter one.

 

After 35 minutes of that, we were served up Beethoven’s fifth symphony – synchronicity allowing that it takes the same time to perform.

 

It was a relatively short concert with no interval, but superbly chosen. Both of the main works are iconic – or at least, have iconic musical moments and phrases that possibly do the full works a disservice.

 

Personally, Rachmaninov’s first piano concerto is my favourite and I have rather dismissed the second because of the over-familiarity of its theme.

 

But here, it became new, the musical quotes back in context and not dominating the whole. Wang’s playing can be both muscular and exquisitely delicate. It was a glorious performance.

 

I teared up so often, but I remain slightly unsure as to whether that was the music itself, the performance and/or simply Being Back. Probably a full house. It had the feeling of a religious experience (and I do actually know what those are like!).

 

The Beethoven was a revelation for similar reasons to the Rachmaninov. Freed from being reduced to that brief, opening quote, the symphony becomes so much more. Not least, it can be viewed as a sort of struggle between the Classical and Romantic eras of western music that Beethoven bridged – and indeed, created the bridge between.

 

The first movement has a sense of the revolutionary – a hint of sturm und drang. The second then seems to leap back to a more courtly approach.

 

Only a week or so before, the OH and I had listened to a classic von Karajan recording of the sixth symphony, The Pastoral, on 180g vinyl. There, it is so easy to comprehend Beethoven, in effect, painting pictures in music. Here, you feel the struggle to reach that – and that is fascinating.

 

This week’s concert also made me consider my relationship with Mozart and why I don’t want to spend much time with his music. It’s as though Beethoven brought the emotion – and Mozart avoided it.

 

That’s a slightly simplistic view, of course – but not that much. My favourite piece of Mozart – and it’s one of my favourite pieces of music per se – is the requiem. But I think that’s because it has real emotional heft rather than simply being a bonbon for a not-very-intelligent emperor. 

 

The playing throughout was wonderful. Ms Wang is a superb pianist – I have ordered several of her recordings on the basis of what we saw and heard.

 

I’ve been shielding for much of that last year – and fortunate enough to have been able to work from home throughout. It’s not all been bad, but it’s not all been great either.

 

And getting back to hear music like this, played like this, was special almost beyond belief.

As lockdown ends, there's another pandemic

Another pandemic

Piled pyramidally on top of the bin

Precarious crates and paper plates

Lord it over the overflow ...

A plastic salad tub or two

And paper masks

Crumpled blue

With broken strings.

There’s no pub near the lone pint pot

That leans rakishly against a birch,

Nursing the afternoon’s dregs and

Staying stock still so as not to lurch.

Bottle tops trodden into London clay

Sprout between tussocks of weary grass,

While a barber-pole straw dallies with daffs

And a pizza box spreads like porn-style ass.

Percussive rain on a discarded can

Refreshes the parts with a pinging tune,

And a neon spoon floats across the pond

As though water has borrowed the moon.

Bedraggled plastic caught in branches,

Remains of bunting tied to trunks

Shiny metal stars, bombed into the air to greet a birthday

Fallen now like blossom

Sparkle on the ground

And vie for space beside the wall

With shreds of a dog-torn rubber ball

And a plastic five that speared the cake.

Lockdown is easing as spring is sprung.

Let’s surge to freedom and

Show nature what it’s missed.

April 2021

Taking flight into a magical world

Wing

Matthew Francis

 

Faber & Faber

 

 

What better way to spend a chilly Saturday in early March, than curled up in a chair with a slender volume of poetry? In Matthew Francis’s Wing, I found the perfect companion for the afternoon, as wan sunshine tried to best the high clouds outside.

 

It was copy bought in Aldeburgh last September, on our brief escape from London before further measures to combat the pandemic were introduced. Neither The Other Half nor I are big on ‘shopping’, but after we’d booked the break, we discovered that the small town included a serious independent bookshop. And we knew instantly that we would pay at least one visit.

 

In the event, during a stay of nine nights, I strayed inside three times. Masks were worn, hands sanitised and then encased inside white cotton gloves that were left in a basket to be laundered on leaving. It is not a vast space, but oh, the bliss of being among shelves of books; of plucking unexpected titles off shelves, knowing that this was a well-deserved holiday-from-the-plague treat.

 

In a selection that was hugely influenced by the nature of the trip, Wing – published earlier in the year – was one of the books that went into my bag.

 

It is a joy.

 

With an overarching theme of examining microscopic life – and particularly the insect form – it also brings other wings into its embrace.

 

After opening the first section, Freefall, with a poem that starts with houseflies buzzing around where Francis is sitting to write, he concludes with a work of the same name – written “in memory of a friend killed in a parachute accident”.

 

Neither mawkish nor sentimental, this stunning verse blends the human with the natural world – even though the very fact of being in a plane and of parachuting is far from ‘natural’. But as the opening stanza has it:

 

Out of the metal shell of the plane, he hatched

Into raucous air,

 

and stretched out, breathless, as he’d done so often,

on the cushion of wind,

 

to crawl, crablike, across the irregularities

of the buffeting element.

 

Tissues of cloud below swathed the greens and yellows

of a chequered world.

 

The subject might seem out of place in a book of nature poetry, but it brings to mind Icarus and, in a collection titled Wing, is a counter – and poignant one at that – to the apparent effortlessness of flight in the non-human world; a reminder too, of the fragility of life.

 

The middle section of this collection is named Micrographia, after the “scientific treatise by Robert Hooke (1665)”, an English scientist who, with a microscope, was the first to visualise a micro-organism.

 

It is a remarkable melding of science and nature, as the microscope increases both understanding and also mystery.

 

The final section, Canticles, is more playful.

 

In Collective, for instance, Francis reinvents collective nouns: instead of a ‘clattering’ or a ‘train’, he posits a delightful “funambulism of jackdaws”. Forget ‘gaggle’, here we have a “chevron of geese” – how much more picturesque and accurate? – and a “double-take of blackbirds”.

 

And the poem finishes with a “shifting mandelbrot of starlings” – a glorious description of a murmuration, bringing science/maths into the impossibility of such miraculous formations.

 

In Sea Canticle, one cand almost hear the haunting tones of Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie (Sunken Cathedral), as the varied inhabitants of the seafloor float liquidly over and around the remains of a sunken sailing ship.

 

Wing is a glorious collection that, overall, has a quality of meditative awe at the complexity of life, even at its tiniest.

 

Wondrous.

 

New poem: Cold etchings

 

Cold etchings

 

The house faced east across the valley,

Stoic against the Pennine winters of childhood

When bitter winds would blast across the space

to bite at fingers blue and

Clog the arteries between towns

with snow that

Drifted and swirled and blotted out the view.

 

A plug-in Dimplex made bearable

the move from day to night,

Wan warmth radiated out to battle goosebumps

Until safety was reached

under flannelette and honeycomb and eiderdown,

With a piping bottle for frozen feet.

 

By morning, the large bow window would be frosted fast.

Frayed old towels folded on the sill below

Set to mop up when it thawed at last.

But before then

I’d dare to etch my initials on the glass.

 

This year, the cold snapped late.

But it was sharp enough when it arrived

To save some bees from neonics intended to beat a beet pest.

 

Locked down locked in I only saw

the rime through slatted blinds.

No early morning walks to the bus stop

Diverting slightly to surreptitiously

            etch messages on frosted cars

Under cover of decaying dark

As a fox barks in the nearby park.

 

 

8 March 2021