Arts Archives

Survival tactics

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You couldn’t move across the BBC’s airwaves this week without stumbling on an anniversary programme celebrating 40 years since the launch of Radios One, Two, Three and Four. The Corporation even laid on a self-congratulatory ‘Radio Week’ on BBC4, which seems a bit OTT to me. (Did anyone really choose to watch the ‘earliest episode of The Archers ever recorded’ at 11 p.m. on Thursday?) What surprises me is not so much that radio has survived the onslaught of TV — there’s an aural quality to the experience of listening to a play, a documentary, even a news bulletin that TV can never satisfy — but that it’s survived despite changing so little about itself.

Fay Hart

‘At Casa Verde’

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A poem At Casa Verde, five in the afternoon after Rimbaud I ripped my feet to bits walking the pilgrim trail to Guadalupe as far as Hidalgo. At Casa Verde I ordered a bottle of beer and the special: greasy tortillas, fried cactus, chillies con carne. I cooled my feet on the dirt floor under the table, pictures of movie stars and saints papered the walls, out of the kitchen came a Cuban-heeled boy, able- bodied, slicked-back, skintight jeans and a scowl — He could have me in a heartbeat, that one! — carrying a plate piled with tortillas, bowls of hot sauce and meat, cool beer, and shot glasses for mescal on the house. Everything swimming in heavenly grease, the scent of tequila hangs on the heat.

James Delingpole

Today’s issues

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So the big question this week is: is the Today programme a viper’s nest of evil pinkoes, all of whom should be put in sacks and dropped into a deep well? And the answer is: yes. Shame, though, really, because wrong and bad though it is I do have a soft spot for Today. I like the poshness of the cars they send to pick you up when you’re on it and the producers’ apparently genuine gratitude that you’ve agreed to appear at such a hideously early time. I like the teeny-weeny half-nod of acknowledgement which is all you get from the presenters when you creep to your mic in the studio because they’re busy concentrating and guests are two-a-penny.

Amelia Torode

A final farewell to the dating game in New York

Features

The wedding of the author’s wing-woman The HBO drama Sex and the City arrived on our shores in 1999. Prior to that television show, it would be fair to say, British women (and, for that matter, men) were fairly clueless when it came to matters of grown-up ‘dating’. Sex and the City offered a stylish and contemporary guide to social and sexual mores in the Big Apple, teaching a generation about such concepts as exclusive dating and non-exclusive dating, A-list nights and B-list nights, and the three-day rule (as in the ‘always wait three days after the date to phone him otherwise you come across as too keen’ rule).

4 October 2007

Alex Massie

An American Life and Death

Christopher Hitchens' piece in this month's Vanity Fair is quite something. Mark Daily, a young officer in the Seventh Cavalry, volunteered for the army despite his reservations about the wisdom of the war in part because some of Christopher's articles inspired him to do so. Hitch's latest piece reflects on that heavy burden (shared to one degree or another by all of us who supported the war) and on the life and death of a remarkable young American. If you read one thing today, make it this article. Here's Christopher describing his first meeting with the Daily family: As soon as they arrived, I knew I had been wrong to be so nervous. They looked too good to be true: like a poster for the American way.

Henrietta Bredin

Evil’s inspiration

I'm certainly not suggesting that any of the political parties follow this particular source of inspiration but if you want to see, terrifyingly clearly, exactly where Hitler got a great many of his ideas about military parades, civic display and how to combine an appealing brand of paganism with symbolic Christianity, look no further than the British Film Institute on the Southbank. Last night, and again on Saturday, you could see Fritz Lang's silent film Siegfried - not the Wagner version but based on the original Nibelung saga. It was made in 1924 and is quite astonishing, helped along by a brilliant improvised piano accompaniment. Also on Saturday, and again next Thursday 11 October, you can see the sequel, Kriemhild's Revenge.

Liz Anderson

An award winning life

A huge screen behind the stage at the Dorchester Hotel yesterday showed Montserrat Caballé singing for a hot-dog in a café. Sadly, she wasn’t there in person to collect the Lifetime Achievement award at the Classic FM Gramophone Awards. Neither was Steven Isserlis present, but his friend Barry Humphries — in the wittiest speech of the lunch — collected the Instrumental award on his behalf for his Bach Cello Suites (Hyperion). Other winners included the violinist Julia Fischer (Artist of the Year) and Vasily Petrenko (Young Artist Award), Principal Conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

Liz Anderson

A portrait of the artist

An exhibition of self-portraits by members of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters has opened at the Bulldog Trust, 2 Temple Place, London WC2, and runs until 10 October. The Trust, which was started in 1983, supports selected charities, such as Hampshire Hospices and the Prince’s Trust, and gives advice as well as money. Rolf Harris has a self-portrait in the show, as do some 50 other artists, including Michael Noakes (pictured). The winner of the first Bulldog Bursary worth £5,000 is Joseph Galvin (31), who says he will move from Wales to London for a year.

3 October 2007

Alex Massie

Pulitzer Bait

This post reminded me of a terrific piece Sarah Lyall (one of the NYT's under-appreciated stars) wrote for Slate a couple of years ago. She made the mistake of attending the British Press Awards dinner. The Pulitzers these are not. Most papers crow about their own successes while failing to even report the existence of winners from other titles. Happily, however, there are enough award ceremonies for almost everyone to claim the title "Newspaper of the Year". In their own way, the hacks treat these awards with the proper level of contempt and, since no-one spends all year dreaming of ways to win them we are at least spared the epic, 17-part thumb-sucking series on "Life" or "Death" or "Being a Deaf Quadraplegic" the American papers publish in a bid to win Pulitzers...

1 October 2007

Alex Massie

Is Don Giovanni really the greatest?

Just received an email from Washington National Opera touting their new production of Don Giovanni in which they claim that it's "widely regarded as the greatest opera ever composed". Is this true? I suppose it could be, but as with novels it had never occurred to me that there was a clear or obvious "Number 1 Opera". Still, parlour-game time: if you had to nominate an opera for "Greatest Ever" status, what would you select and, secondly, what opera would you choose to see if it was understood that this would be the last opera you'd ever see? UPDATE: Meanwhile, the Lyric Opera of Chicago calls La Boheme "the world's most popular opera". Make of that what you will.

30 September 2007

Henrietta Bredin

The glory of music

Amidst the coruscating party conference commentary might I just slip in a small musical note akin to that so enjoyed by Matthew Parris in his terrific article in this week's Spec? He was entranced by a single phrase played on the violin, cutting through the artificial flurry and tension before the transmission of a live television broadcast. On Friday night I was similarly transported by the glory that is two people making music together. In the eastern crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, as a dirty night pressed itself up against the windows and the rain sluiced down, two old friends – friends who had been choristers together in the same cathedral - played piano and flute in a programme of music they had devised and in some cases arranged between them.

29 September 2007

Mary Wakefield

Mary suggests…

Music

Have you Herd? If you haven't already done so, buy a copy of Mark Earl's Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour By Harnessing Our True Nature It sounds sinister, but there's not much harnessing in it and lots of exciting ideas about what it is to be human. Mark's thesis is that we're basically group animals, like chimps, and that ideas and fashions spread not as a direct result of some ad campaign, but because of our instinctive desire to mimic each other. This is tremendously cheering. It means all those threatening, cajoling ads -- inside mags, blocking the letterbox, thrust at you in the street -- will come to nothing. However urgent the blurb, it's not going to sway anyone at all. Hooray!

Mary Wakefield

Man with a mission | 29 September 2007

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Mary Wakefield talks to Jonathan Kent about his plans to jump-start the West End Something is rotten in the West End. It’s not just the sour smell of lager, or the Saturday night binge drinkers. It’s more that as I walk up St Martin’s Lane, through what should be the beating heart of theatreland, there’s an unmistakable whiff of artistic decay. It’s been said before and often, with varying degrees of gloom, but it’s difficult to deny: nearly all the shows on offer here are musicals, and most of them adapted from movies or TV: The Lion King (‘Pure delight floods the Lyceum!’) Bad Girls: The Musical (‘If you’re in for a good time, bad girls do it best!

Andrew Lambirth

Topsy turvy

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Born Georg Kern in 1938, Baselitz adopted the name of his birthplace in Saxony, East Germany just after his definitive move to the West in 1958. Brought up in an atmosphere of gloom and social realism, he had been expelled from art school in East Berlin for ‘social-political immaturity’. He fared better in West Berlin and firmly grasped the fashionable nettle of existential angst while struggling with a whole raft of Western influences, from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art. He developed his own brand of uncouth and aggressive figuration, making his trade-mark (from 1969) the upside-down motif.

Robin Holloway

Pleasure at the Proms

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Positively oceanic was the season’s principal novelty. It was not a new commission; rather, the rediscovery 440 years after its composition of the Mass in 40 parts by Alessandro Striggio, whose final Agnus Dei rises to a staggering 60, which ought to leave Tallis’s celebrated Motet (whose inspiration is reckoned to originate here) pale and gasping in comparison. Which is to hint already at disappointment. In the event (17 July) it was Striggio who paled.

Mark Glazebrook

Magnificent six

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Anyone who goes into the Annely Juda Gallery in Dering Street expecting something like those light, airy, weight-denying abstract steel sculptures, painted bright red all over perhaps, like the Tate’s song-evoking ‘Early One Morning’, 1962, is in for a big surprise. All works shown here stand with absolute, resolute, broad-based firmness as if to proclaim that they are what they are. ‘Jupiter’, for example, made in 2005, boasts some nine points of contact with the floor. Caro famously shed the need for a pedestal over 40 years ago and this decision continues to add a certain strength of identity to his sculptures. Self-contained strength is what most of his recent works assert. There is often a delightful individuality but there are sombre elements as well.

Lloyd Evans

Dazzling Dexter

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Too many musicals in London? It depends whether you think the West End should be a temple or a funfair. Room for both, I’d say. But the fact that many musicals are thriving doesn’t mean any musical will. Hit shows succeed because they get virtually everything right. Bad Girls gets three out of five things right. The stylised sets are magnificently gruesome, the acting is terrific and the lyrics are pert and witty. But the tunes are forgettable and the plot is mishandled. The writers style themselves ‘story drivers’ so they should decide which car they’re in. They’ve got half a dozen excellent storylines here and they want to keep them all. Mistake. What’s needed is a single central arc for us to latch on to — a core.

Deborah Ross

Gorgeous George

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Michael Clayton is one of those American films about American lawyers doing American lawyer stuff which isn’t usually my kind of thing. And, anyway, didn’t money-hungry men in neat suits stop being cool or interesting in about 1982? But you know what? This is a pretty decent corporate thriller: tense, exciting, involving, and best of all it stars George Clooney, who is just so hot. I recently read he’d broken a foot in a motorcycle accident and just in case he happens to be a Spectator reader — and why not?; all the best people are — I would like to say this: ‘George, I am willing and ready to nurse you. Further, I know about feet as I have two of them and would have another, if only I knew where to put it.

Kate Chisholm

Guilty pleasure

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Guilty pleasure (Radio 4) Unmasking the English (Radio 4) In 1908 Gerald Mills borrowed £1,000 (worth about £52,000 in today’s money) to set up a publishing company with his friend Charles Boon. Among their first authors were P.G. Wodehouse and Jack London, who would probably be horrified to realise that their books are now associated with a company that promotes titles such as Purchased for Pleasure and Tall, Tanned and Texan. But you can’t be snooty about a publisher who sells 200 million books worldwide every year (that’s one every six seconds according to a proud Mills & Boon editor).

Simon Hoggart

Porn with knickers on

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I once knew a young woman who worked for a large public-interest organisation. She was clever and well educated, but funds were tight, and she feared she was about to lose her job. In which case, she planned to follow a university friend and become a high-class prostitute. It sounded marvellous, she said. The agency vetted the clients, she worked at home, and made hundreds of pounds a day for little work and next to no risk. Her parents thought she was a secretary; when they were in town she simply took the day off. It sounded dreadfully sad to me, and I was delighted when I heard that my acquaintance had survived the sackings. Secret Diary of a Call Girl (ITV2, Thursday) was apparently about the life of such a young woman, based on a weblog which may or may not have been genuine.

28 September 2007

Lucy Vickery

It’s folk music but not as we know it

There's more to folk these days than dodgy beards and cable-knit sweaters and it’s clear why Bellowhead, instigators of an outbreak of frenzied folkish foot-stomping at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on Wednesday, picked up Best Live Act in this year’s BBC Radio Two Folk Awards. Fronted by the charismatic Jon Boden, and underpinned by a riotous brass section, the 11-piece big band’s quirky, contemporary take on ballads, sea shanties, and traditional dance tunes had an ecstatic cross-generational audience singing along and jigging wildly, inhibitions cast asunder.

22 September 2007

Ursula Buchan

Mowl’s quest

James Suggests….

Cinema

The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara: This fictionalised account of the Battle of Gettysburg is one of the best historical novels you’ll ever read. The characterisation is masterful and the plotting so good that you almost forget that you know the battle ended the South’s chances of victory in the Civil War. The individual chapters are so neatly bound that it is also a perfect book to dip into from time to time. The Breach: One of the better films I’ve seen this year, it deals with the relationship between FBI agent turned defector Robert Hanssen, played by Chris Cooper, and the young FBI recruit, Ryan Phillippe, ordered to befriend Hanssen. The twisting nature of their interactions makes for classically gripping cinema.

Lloyd Evans

A Matter for Debate

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Lloyd Evans Zimbabwe – last in the dictionary and too often last on the agenda. The new season of Intelligence Squared debates opened with the motion ‘Britain Has Failed Zimbabwe.’ Moderator Richard Lindley set the scene by taking us back to Salisbury, now Harare, on November 11th, 1965 where, as a young journalist, he reported on Ian Smith’s announcement of UDI. Back then, everyone expected that within weeks British paratroopers would descend from the heavens and sort the country out. They’re still waiting. Peter Godwin, a Zimbabwean journalist, opened in support of the motion with an unsettling quip: ‘If we were in Zimbabwe you wouldn’t be able to go to supper until till you’d voted the right way.

Robin Simon

Masters of the artistic universe

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On The Courtauld’s 75th anniversary, Robin Simon looks back at its colourful and distinguished history The Tate Gallery ...sorry, I’ll start again. ‘Tate’ spent £100,000 a few years back just to lose its ‘the’. Staff are strictly instructed by the gallery’s Oberkommando to refer to it according to the brand name, as in ‘I’m at Tate’. It sounds as if they come from Mars — or Yorkshire. It doesn’t work, and I enjoy the announcement on the Victoria Line at Pimlico which gets it all wrong: ‘Alight here for the Tate Britain.’ The Courtauld Institute of Art turns 75 on 6 October this year and has also undergone a rather expensive ‘brand refreshment’.

Andrew Lambirth

Miller’s colourful tale

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This beautiful exhibition celebrates the 100th anniversary of Lee Miller’s birth in Poughkeepsie, New York State, and it takes place 30 years after her death from cancer. When she died, her only child Antony Penrose had no idea of her achievements as muse and artist, and only learnt about them gradually. As he grew to understand her better, he determined to set about the rehabilitation of her artistic reputation. This he has achieved with exemplary thoroughness, through a series of publications and exhibitions which have made Lee Miller a well-known and much admired figure. The last substantial museum show was at the National Portrait Gallery in 2005 — is it a little soon to be having another?

Roger Kimball

Splendid isolation | 22 September 2007

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It is not surprising that Edward Hopper (1882–1967) is an immensely popular artist. His pleasing deployment of colour and easy-going presentation of the paraphernalia of everyday life give his work an immediate warmth and likeability. His muted palette, careful modulation of hues, and soft-edged precision are a recipe for visual charm. Considered simply as aesthetic objects, Hopper’s pictures make few demands: they are, on the contrary, quietly inveigling, almost seductive in their plain-as-day obviousness. And if we’ve never seen diners or drugstores or city streets exactly like the ones that Hopper paints, we’ve seen ones that remind us of them — or vice versa.

Michael Tanner

A neglected master

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Opera: Iphigénie en Tauride, Royal Opera House; Romeo und Juliet, St John’s Iphigénie en Tauride Royal Opera House Romeo und Juliet St John’s It is astonishing that Gluck achieves such greatness with such limited musical resources. For me he ranks with the top four or five operatic composers, yet he remains a permanently semi-neglected figure.

Lloyd Evans

Treasure hunt

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No idea why, but the hunt is on for lost 20th-century masterpieces. Michael Attenborough is searching for gold at the Almeida and Matthew Dunster has his pan in the stream at the Young Vic. Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding is an adaption of her 1946 bestselling novel. We’re in the Deep South where romantic tomboy Frankie (energetically played by Flora Spencer-Longhurst) wants to run away from home and begin a new life with her elder brother. Frankie’s character, depending on your point of view, is an adorable free spirit or an irksome little whinger who deserves to be clattered over the head with a horseshoe. The play’s structure is clumsy and indigestible and the sluggish plot strays up all kinds of unreasonable side alleys.