Culture

"I'm younger than that now": Dylan on ageing

Yo Zushi — Thu, 24 May 2012 16:13:28 +0000

A top-five list of his lyrics on growing old, to celebrate his 71st birthday.

Bob Dylan turns 71 today. On 29 May, the song-and-dance man will receive the Presidential Medal of Honour at the White House alongside the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright and the novelist Toni Morrison. The Bobcat rumour mill, meanwhile, continues to spin, grinding out theories about a new album expected later this year. (A Mexican influence? A song about the sinking of the Titanic?)

Despite his recent(ish) return to form that began with the 1997 album Time Out of Mind – and despite the Oscar and Golden Globe he received for the song "Things Have Changed" in 2001, the acclaim heaped upon the first volume of his memoirs, his painting exhibitions, his radio shows and his 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Being Bob Dylan – he seems far from ready to go gently into the night. Where he once urged his listeners to stay "forever young", however, he now more readily admits: "It's not dark yet, but it's getting there."

In a 2006 interview, Dylan said: "I always wanted to stop when I was on top. I didn't want to fade away. I didn't want to be a has-been, I wanted to be somebody who'd never be forgotten." With fading away out of the question, one major cause for reflection seems to be the ageing process. The mind can remain alive to the world; but what of the physical body?

Below is a top-five list of his Grand Statements on Growing Older, chosen somewhat undemocratically by me. Do use the comments section below if you can think of any better.

5. From "Highlands" (Time Out of Mind, 1997):

I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes

They’re drinking and dancing, wearing bright-colored clothes

All the young men with their young women looking so good

Well, I’d trade places with any of them in a minute, if I could

4. From "My Back Pages" (Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964):

Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now

3. From "Bob Dylan’s Dream" (Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, 1963):

With haunted hearts through the heat and cold

We never thought we could ever get old

We thought we could sit forever in fun

But our chances really was a million to one

2. From "Red River Shore" (Tell Tale Signs, 2008):

Well we're living in the shadows of a fading past

Trapped in the fires of time

I've tried not to ever hurt anybody

And to stay out of the life of crime

And when it's all been said and done

I never did know the score

One more day is another day away

From the girl from the red river shore

1. From "Floater (Too Much to Ask)" ("Love and Theft", 2001):

The old men ’round here, sometimes they get

On bad terms with the younger men

But old, young, age don’t carry weight

It doesn’t matter in the end

Review: Moonrise Kingdom

Ryan Gilbey — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:07:49 +0000

Wes Anderson is out in the open and back on form, writes Ryan Gilbey.

No evolutionary timeline is necessary to illustrate the career of Wes Anderson. His sensibility (bittersweet, archaic) and visual style (fastidious, enamoured with tableaux and cross- sections) are unusual in being intact from his earliest films, Bottle Rocket and Rushmore. His heroes have always been romantic misfits with OCD tendencies and absent or unreliable parents; his outlook steeped in hipster chic. Even Fantastic Mr Fox, a stop-motion animation adapted from the book by Roald Dahl, could not evict the director from his comfort zone, a genre we might call “melanchomedy”.

The only thing more repetitious than the films is the critic who complains about how repetitious they are. Moonrise Kingdom, Anderson’s seventh picture, bears his unmistakable imprint, from the candy-coloured production design to the off-the-beaten-soundtrack (lashings of Britten, a soupçon of Françoise Hardy). But it is literally and figuratively a breath of fresh air, benefiting from the director’s decision to get out of the house (The Royal Tenenbaums), or off the boat (The Life Aquatic) or train (The Darjeeling Limited). The great outdoors doesn’t adhere to storyboards; mist suspended over a field won’t respond to direction.

On an island off the coast of New England in 1965, an orphaned Boy Scout, Sam Shakusksy (Jared Gilman), falls into an amorous fascination with Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward) after stumbling upon her in a church production of Britten’s Noye’s Fludde. They make a pact to run away. Being only 12 years old, there are adults at their heels – Suzy’s weary parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand), a defeated sheriff (Bruce Willis) and a twitchy scout master (Edward Norton). Sam’s flight enables an escape-movie gag too glorious to spoil here, not least because it represents an uncommon burst of outright comedy in a film teetering on the verge of being amusing. Moonrise Kingdom is laugh-inside funny; it’s smile-a-minute stuff.

Among the adult performers, it is Bob Balaban, as the narrator, who is the closest thing to a comic marvel; his skew-whiff posture alone is a visual punchline. But there is a fatigued quality to the adult cast members that goes beyond their characters’ mid-life funk. The children, on the other hand, prove that inexperience can be liberating. As Sam, Gilman offers an endless supply of quizzical reactions and chewy line-readings. His tortoise-like appearance clashes nicely with his hare-like mania: no romantic ever put this much map-making and schedule-writing into the business of eloping. Suzy seems baffled as well as bowled over by him, despite being no less eccentric. (She never goes anywhere without binoculars, showing her emotional estrangement.) Hayward’s face is a picture of poise and wisdom that makes natural her transformation into a temporary Wendy, with Sam and fellow scouts her adoring Lost Boys.

The geek-meets-freak romance is no more convincing than it was in Submarine, 2010’s British cover version of Anderson’s work, but I don’t think it’s meant to be. Moonrise Kingdom is more about imagination than love and how the marginalised find sanctuary there. Repeatedly the film conjures visual representations of its young heroes’ turbulent thoughts. A child somersaults on a trampoline while Sam and Suzy contemplate marriage; the sky is lit by fireworks and shaken by a violent storm; an intricate treehouse wobbles at the top of a pole taller than a redwood; Sam’s mental state after being rejected by his foster parents is mirrored in the close-up of an ocean map where unmoored co-ordinates drift disconsolately in blue space.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Bell Jar, with their nightmare visions of electro-convulsive therapy, were published several years before the action of Moonrise Kingdom takes place, which puts into context the adults’ fears that Sam will have his individuality zapped out of him should he fall into the hands of social services. (There’s a harbinger of this when the lad takes a lightning bolt to the head, though it causes him nothing more severe than a cartoon-style blackened face.) It’s a pleasing coincidence that this director has shaken off some of his own inhibitions to make a film celebrating the boundless imagination. It’s a small but meticulous work; even when Anderson is doodling, he does it with a Montblanc pen.

Mad Men: season 5, episode 10

Alice Gribbin — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:52:00 +0000

Old names and faces, and a masterclass in flirting.

We knew there was friendship there. We also knew – from an aside remark way back in Season One – that he’d never tried it with her. But my goodness, Don and Joan. What sexual tension, what a thrill! “God, you’re irresistible,” she tells him. From the jukebox, sweet Doris Day sings “A Christmas Waltz” (the episode’s title), but the real dance is taking place at the bar. Take note: this is how it looks when Mad Men’s most sexual creatures try and out-flirt each other. “You want to dance?” . . . “You and me, in Midtown? You with that look on your face?” “What look, baby?” Irresistible.

It’s a seductive quality both characters possess in abundance that we haven’t seen for so long. And we reminisce along with them: Burt Peterson and Freddy Rumsen, their standing argument that Joan was a lesbian. We remember those names and faces, those Sterling Cooper days, too. Elsewhere in the episode Paul Kinsey, absent since Season Three, reappears. As does Bobbie Barrett, that alluring old flame of Don’s, in his use of her phrase: “I like being bad and going home and being good.” While the affair was “a disaster,” Joanie knows better, purring at him “You enjoyed every minute of it”.

But it truly was a disaster – his car accident with the comedian’s wife lead, eventually, to the collapse of his marriage with Betty. At the end of the scene Don leaves the bar unsettled and a little upset; Joan has touched a raw nerve. Some men are just promiscuous, she says. Or can’t be satisfied, or recognise what they have. Driving the Jaguar at top speed, shifting gears to accelerate, Don’s inner turmoil has been stoked. Earlier, he tells Joan the car does nothing for him. “It’s because you’re happy; you don’t need it,” she replies. But he is turned on by the car, isn't he?

The Jaguar E-type is of course more than a car. It’s the most beautiful car of all time, an export, glossy red – the perfect symbol of consumerism. If there’s a clear theme to the episode it’s this. Paul Kinsey returns as a Hare Krishna – he “rejects the material world” – but really what he wants is his woman and some money (maybe a farm, though even that requires of him “a little less recruiting and a little more working,” Harry notes). There are others cheating and spending: Lane forges Don’s signature (a double-fake of the Draper identity) for an advance to cover himself against the taxman; Roger offers to pay Kevin (his baby son with Joan) through college, though it’s a “short term” attempt to fix their relationship.

And there’s the play, America Hurrah: “I like to have a can of beer in my hand as I watch the beer ads,” declares the actor. But TV makes him sick - every channel on it. "It’s about the emptiness of consumerism," says Megan. But Don’s job is to encourage people to buy things. He’s selfish, she says, and smashes her plate of spaghetti with as much force as Joan, upon receiving her divorce papers, smashes the model Mohawk.

Nostalgia and materialism – the two themes in play here – weave so cleverly. With three episodes in Season Five remaining, Don may have reached a crossroads where his work and marriage diverge (doesn't Megan seem more and more a catalyst than a character?). “This time last year,” Don tells his colleagues, the company was at crisis point. Now they must sink, or “swim the English channel” to “drown in champagne”. It’s an inspiring speech, one we haven’t heard him deliver in years, and the car, and worldwide recognition, is the prize. At the beginning of the episode, Don tells Pete the Jaguar pitch “sounds like a lot of work”, before going to nap on his office couch. Now he’s taking off his jacket. If Draper's back, is Megan out?

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What the hell is Waterstones doing?

Martha Gill — Mon, 21 May 2012 10:25:25 +0000

Waterstones makes a deal with "the devil".

Why is Waterstones MD James Daunt, who once described Amazon as "a ruthless money-making devil", joining with said devil in a massive deal?

The bookstore is now going to sell Amazon's Kindle, and "launch other Kindle digital services", refurbishing its stores with digital areas where readers can sit and browse.

Waterstones is yet to fully explain the move, simply saying that:

"The best digital readers, the Kindle family, will be married to the singular pleasures of browsing a curated bookshop."

But this shot at the e-book market seems to be aimed directly at Waterstone's own foot. Why invite the e-book into one of the few nooks which paper books still occupy? One of the pleasures of buying physical books is mooching around a bookshop, browsing, as opposed to the more prosaic digital experience. It might also be noted that Waterstones is doing away with the demographic who continue to buy from them simply because they haven't yet stumbled across e-books.

The deal remains wrapped in mystery. The day before it was announced, an interview with Daunt ran in the Guardian, in which he said Waterstones would soon be joining the e-book revolution, but oddly, that this would involve:

...persuading Waterstones customers to choose an e-reader (and ebooks) through a Waterstones-sponsored device. Daunt won't say when this will happen – "it's the bit we have to get right" – but it's imminent. "We'll be different from Amazon," he says, with characteristic ebullience, "and we'll be better."

What's going on?

The deal might have been a panicked one, motivated by Barnes and Noble's recent alliance with Microsoft in a $300m venture last month. This was clearly an excellent move for Barnes and Noble, as they have their own e-book reader and through Microsoft immediately recruited millions of customers. By moving onto Microsoft's turf, Barnes and Noble could only stand to gain.

In contrast, Waterstones, who has no e-book reader of its own, seems to be inviting Amazon to onto their turf. It feels like a bad move.

Better porn with de Botton

Nichi Hodgson — Mon, 21 May 2012 09:19:59 +0000

There is scope to re-think the porn industry.

Not content with ruminating on work, happiness, or airport queues, philosopher Alain de Botton has now turned his restless attentions to the promotion of an ethical porn movement, as reported here on Friday by the New Statesman’s Helen Lewis. De Botton plans to launch the "Better Porn" campaign and website promoting "pornography in which sexual desire would be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values." Sex-positive feminists and ethical sex enthusiasts, particularly within the kink community, have of course been espousing this for a while. Yet even if he is late to the party, de Botton’s campaign is ripe for the championing. Contrary to popular myth, the sex industry is not entirely recession-proof and while commercial porn will never run dry so long as there’s money in circulation, the faltering flow of finance makes it a good time to dump quantity for quality.

As idealistic as de Botton’s project may sound, even in the face of the internet’s daemonic libertarianism, there is nothing inevitable about the ethical paucity of our porn. 30 years ago, before the internet had tempted adult fantasy over to the crass side, Angela Carter encapsulated the sentiment in the opening line to The Sadeian Woman: “Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers”. Replace "women" with "21st century humans" and there is De Botton’s campaign. Right now, we may have the porn we deserve but we can make better. Mass production of anything, food, furniture, fashion, may serve a market but usually at the price of ethics. Porn is no different. Blaming poor porn on atavistic urges is lazy and historically inaccurate. Better porn just requires letting our brains, rather than consideration for our bank balances, lead our late-night Google searches.

Following the murder of Bristol architect Joanna Yeates, in which it was revealed that her murderer Vincent Tabak had a taste for strangulation porn, the reactionary cry from the left and right, feminists and conservatives alike, was that such porn needed banning. I suggested we produce an ethical stamp for porn, something which has always been particularly resonant for the BDSM/kink kind, where social and legal prejudice, and the complications of the pleasure/pain-driven dynamic has heightened the need to prove harmless production. The responsibility of companies like kink.com in stepping up to the ethical mark proves it can be done, and De Botton should look to such models as he builds his Better Porn campaign.

Imagining that De Botton is successful, such is the relationship between need and want, between desire, its permissions and possession, a subculture of unethically produced porn would be bound to persist. But it would be cowardly to reject an ethical model on that basis, and what price the reduction of the populace’s guilt if we knew most porn stars were genuinely and consensually performing?

The most difficult challenge for de Botton won’t be persuading people that his kind of porn is better, but that it’s sexy. As Camille Paglia observed wryly, if somewhat unfairly, about feminism, "leaving sex to the feminists is like letting your dog vacation at the taxidermist’s". The personal is political has rarely made for hot interracial or doctor/nurse tableaux. So while ethical porn will always face the taxidermist test, the last thing we need is an obsession with cleaning up our desirous taboos until what’s an offer is a dry as an Equalities Commission guide to getting it on. De Botton claims to recogise that what makes porn unethical isn’t its fantasies or explicitness, but the means of its production. He could do a lot worse than take an Arts and Crafts-style approach to his project. Avoid elitism, invoke passion, and society will be better off for its production. (Stuffed animals probably need not apply).

Mad Men: season 5, episode 9

Alice Gribbin — Fri, 18 May 2012 16:54:00 +0000

Green-eyed monsters and the downfall of kings.

It's Thanksgiving. "Bring something sweet" to dinner, Megan tells her acting friend. The great irony of "Dark Shadows", we quickly learn, is everyone is sour; nobody is thankful. "The grass is always greener," Howard laughingly tells Pete. "Every man for himself," Roger defensively yells at Peggy. The title of episode nine comes from the 1966 American TV show, a series of gothic tales where the characters are werewolves, witches and vampires. This week, Mad Men is populated by green-eyed monsters.

Betty's jealousy of Megan, and her life with Don, is the most rancorous of all. It's not enough that she surveys the new Draper home - spacious, light and lived in - that contrasts so obviously with her mortician's mansion, but Betty has to catch a lingering sight of Megan (strangely changing clothes at the end of the day), slim and pert in her brassiere. After seeing a sweet note written by Don to his new wife, Betty acts on her jealousy - vindictive, crunching on celery, she tries to use her daughter to plant a bitter seed. But Sally, now dependable for her feistiness, won't be duped. Though her criticisms of Megan are biting - "You're a phony. Guess what? You're not special . . . So why did he marry you?" - Sally has learned there are more artful ways to take control. In the knowing voice of an adult she later lies to her mother, saying Don and Megan "spoke very fondly of [Anna]". Megan can teach Sally how to cry on cue, but her stepdaughter is at least as good an actress.

Beside the Drapers' is another apartment in the city where a poisonous ex-spouse has overstayed their welcome. With toxic smog in the air that morning, Roger leaves Jane's new place that he has "ruined'' by sleeping with her in it. Whether or not we believe his claim to feeling "terrible" about it (and with his dejected exit, aren't we inclined to?), Jane is right: Roger has everything he wants and it's still not enough.

There's some clear and clever parallels, as we often find, between Roger and Don in this episode. Desperate to not be outdone by Pete, Roger commissions Ginsberg to work afterhours on new ideas - because, "when a man hates a man very much . . . " he has to go behind his back and screw him over. But when he says "hate", he's speaking about Bert Cooper - Roger won't "devote the energy to hating people anymore". If Roger is the deceiving, undermining accounts man then Don is his creative equivalent - working on a Sunday, rifling through Michael's notes, and dumping his Sno Ball pitch before selling his own to the clients. Don also claims he doesn't act out of hate; while Ginsberg "feel[s] bad for" Don, the elder doesn't "think about [him] at all". But is the Jew really Ozymandias, the king of kings, looking on his works ("ye mighty") and telling others to despair? Whose vanity - we look too at Roger and Pete - will be their downfall first?

Peggy, for her own reasons, takes satisfaction in Ginsberg's loss. Her New Yorker-style ad was not of interest to Don (perhaps it's the hip, new agency thinking that the New York Times was after?), and we must wonder if her exit from SCDP is imminent. Last week she flipped at Draper over Megan in the Cool Whip kitchen; now, in a moment of elevator drama (a common site for it), she tells Roger he has betrayed her: "You are not loyal. You only think about yourself." Earlier on, looking at the agency's recent output, Don noted that "Peggy really got buried by Heinz". And albeit out of pride and spite, Don is finally wringing some creativity from himself. Will Peggy act on her pact with Ken Cosgrove with move on? Perhaps she should heed the jolly jingle that plays out the episode: "If you want happiness just help yourself to some".

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Life is short... but only if you're boring

Martha Gill — Fri, 18 May 2012 13:22:06 +0000

How living fast does weird things to your perception of time

Three years ago I went skydiving. It’s hard to remember how I convinced myself to do this, but it probably had parallels with how I get up in the mornings, exercise, or start going out with people: blurrily pretending it’s not happening until far too late.

But from the moment major fear kicked in, as I sat on the rattling edge between the inside of a plane and my dangling, sky-surrounded legs, my recall is near perfect.

The plane was dark pink. I was strapped to an instructor, who had the parachute, but there was also a pale green handle attached to my left side, just under my hand.

“Is this the cord that releases the parachute?”

“No, that’s the handle that separates you from me.”

I let go of the handle, the straps and my own sleeves, and spent the fall in the uncomplicated pose of Coyote from Looney Tunes, after he’s already hit the ground. It was extremely cold, I couldn’t really see, and the G-force toyed with me like lint in a Dyson.

After exactly 20 minutes of this, the parachute opened. “Wow, that was amazing,” I said, “really, really amazing.”

“Stop panicking – we’re nearly done.”

We were. The whole thing was over in four minutes - the free-fall bit had been a matter of seconds. But my memory of it plays out as a full 20-minute narrative.

Physicists tell us that time can speed up, warp and shoot off in odd directions, but we never seem to feel these quantum changes. Our inner clock usually records its passing in a manner that is fairly well synced to our wristwatches. In certain situations, though, especially those inspired by fear, our minds seem to be able to stretch time out like a wet jumper.

An experiment conducted by David Eagleman at the Baylor College of Medicine aimed to work out whether this odd illusion was experienced in the moment of fear itself, or after. Do we, like characters in the Matrix, see time passing at a slower rate as we experience it (low pitched bullets droning past, water droplets suspended like jellies) or do we make it all up afterwards?

He persuaded a number of brave participants to SCAD-jump – drop 150 unsupported feet into a big net. This was terrifying enough to bring out the slow-motion effect: afterwards, on average, the subjects overestimated the length of their fall by 36 per cent.

He gave everyone a chronometer, a watch that flashes numbers a little too fast to see. If the fallers experienced time-slowing, he reckoned they just might be able to see the numbers on their way down.

This turned out not to be the case, and he concluded that the time mistake happened in the memory. The slowed effect, he suggested, had been a function of hyper fast brain activity. The amygdala (seat of emotion and memory) had been jolted into recording every last detail of the experience. Rolled out afterwards, the bulked-up memory seemed to stretch far longer than would be accurate.

Live fast, live long

Time for us, then, depends a little on sensation. The days may indeed go faster as we get older and more emotionally stable, but expand again when we do something exciting.

So perhaps my conclusion should be “live fast: live long” – cramming our days with adrenaline highs might be the best way to slow the vertiginous pace of time. Interesting, but also, in some ways, very much whatevs. I’m not skydiving again.

Entirely bare: Sacha Baron Cohen

Alice Gribbin — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:51:25 +0000

The comedian's first-ever British interview as himself.

Cruise-deck sunbathing and babes with machine guns – MailOnline has been all over the stunts for upcoming film The Dictator at Cannes this week. Photos of Admiral General Aladeen cavorting with bikini-clad models, driving a Lamborghini to the red carpet and tossing body bags overboard from a ship have constituted the promotional work of Sacha Baron Cohen's latest creation. The behaviour's no more outlandish than that of his characters Borat, Bruno and Ali G from his TV show and movies.

An out-of-character appearance by the actor and comedian, then, is less audacious but far more intriguing. In his first broadcast interview given in the UK, Baron Cohen has spoken on Radio 4 to the BBC's arts editor Will Gompertz about Jews and comedy, the "hilarious" appeal of Colonel Gaddafi and a rather sinister concession made by the UN. "We asked to shoot inside the United Nations," Baron Cohen says of the making of The Dictator, but "they actually refused":

We said, "Why? This is a pro-democracy movie." They said, "That's the problem. We represent a lot of dictators and they're going to be very angry at this portrayal of them. You can't shoot in here"

Baron Cohen says that in his latest film, he wanted to make clear it was "in no way an attack or comment on Arabs" but rather "an attack and parody of dictators". The only people who would be offended by it are those "dictators and fans of dictatorships". But he admits to "[drawing] a certain amount of pleasure from riling up bigots".

Asked by Gompertz why he hasn't spoken publicly about himself or his work before, the Bafta and Golden Globe winner says it was to "protect the comedy and protect the movie" – that if, during Da Ali G Show days, he was recognisable, "there was a chance that the interviewee would see [me] and withdraw consent for the TV show":

I remember sitting on the tube and people would talk about Ali G while sitting next to me. One time I was dressed as Borat before anyone had seen [the film]. I was standing by an Ali G DVD stand in HMV on Oxford Street, all the Ali G fans were around and no one knew it was me. There was always a certain satisfaction. I enjoyed being anonymous.

Donna Summer dies, age 63

Alice Gribbin — Thu, 17 May 2012 17:01:35 +0000

The "Queen of Disco" has died of cancer.

Donna Summer, the American singer-songwriter who gained fame during the Seventies disco era, has passed away in her Florida home. Summer died at the age of 63 after a long cancer battle.

Born LaDonna Adrian Gaines in 1948, Summer began singing as a child in her local Boston church. She went on to become the first ever artist to have three double albums, all in a row, reach the top of the Billboard charts. She won five Grammy Awards over her 43-year career and released 17 studio albums (ten of which, as of today, have gone Gold or Platinum), and is best remembered for her 1977 track "I Feel Love".

The song was an immediate hit and continued to be played in the dance clubs, emerging as a gay anthem, in the Eighties and Nineties. Here's David Bowie recounting when he first heard it:

One day in Berlin . . . [Brian] Eno came running in and said, "I have heard the sound of the future" . . . he puts on "I Feel Love", by Donna Summer . . . He said, "This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years." Which was more or less right.

The darling buzz of May

Alice Oswald — Wed, 16 May 2012 17:13:19 +0000

Spring, when the earth tilts closer to the sun, runs a strict timetable of flowers. “The first ones out are snowdrops and crocuses, then you move into celandines in March. In April you’ve got dandelions, then all the tree blossom starting. Obviously there’ll be apples but right now it’s blackthorn and plums, then holly and laurel and sycamore . . .” (This is the bee-keeper speaking. All those flowers, with their distinct characters, are sampled by his bees and recorded in honey.)

“Late summer is bramble and clover, which makes a light-coloured, low viscosity honey. But the spring honey is darker and thicker. I prefer it . . .” A spring is the starting place of a river. It’s a quick convulsive movement. It’s a coil that, when stretched, jumps back to its original position. It’s a high tide, a dance on the bagpipes, a waxing moon, a trap, a twig, a joint of pork, a leak, a hawser.

When you step outside in March and think “spring”, all those minor meanings haunt the word, so that everything suffers a shade of something else: the flowers are spirally constructed, like interlocking springs, the leaves leak out like drips trickling off a branch, crops come up like a rising wave. You might be standing at the door describing all these things but if someone put a spoonful of honey in your mouth, you’d stop talking and taste the word exactly.

“But the farmers will keep planting these huge fields of oilseed rape. I’ve just noticed it’s coming into flower the other side of Cornworthy. It’s a good producer of nectar and the bees almost overfly other flowers to taste it. The trouble is the honey it produces is bland and it crystallises too quickly, plus it has an oily texture. The only hope is if the fields flower early enough then the bees will use it for raising their brood and the flavour won’t dominate the honey.”

Do beehive

The bee-keeper, working in his garage in the rain, is the servant of ten queens. By the end of May, each queen could be the mother of about 50,000 children and if the weather’s bad, they’ll need to be drip-fed with sugar solution. Equipment must be washed, new bedrooms built.

There are five hives in his orchard and five in the woodland above. Spring, for him, means hard work. “Starting now in April, I’ll inspect every colony every week. I’ll give them a waft of smoke, then open the hive and have a look at where the bees are. I get right down into the bottom. I take the frames out and make sure the queen’s laying properly and also see if there’s any sign of swarming.

“There’s a sense of however prepared you are, you suddenly find yourself trying to catch up, because things go so quickly in the bee world. Even back in February, the weather might be horrible outside but, inside, the bees are going for it. The queens are starting to lay eggs, ready for when the blossom comes out, because if spring comes and the bees haven’t started expanding, they’re going to miss it . . .”

This particular spring is a rainy one. The nectar is being washed off the flowers and the bees are stuck indoors like bored children. But if he keeps them fed, there’ll come a morning when they’ll set to work again, plugging their equipment into the lime trees, so that it sounds like an engine when you walk under them.

“Yes, I’ve heard that with the sycamore. I’ve been walking up from the orchard to the house and I heard what I thought was an aircraft but it was just the noise of them working in the florets, the whole tree was buzzing . . .”

With particular thanks to Bob Bowles

Review: Tales from the Stave

Antonia Quirke — Wed, 16 May 2012 16:20:06 +0000

Ambient sounds rule in a touching story of a score.

Tales from the Stave

BBC Radio 4

To the music department of the British Library, where a group of historians gathered to examine its most recent acquisition, the 1945 composing score of Benjamin Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra (19 May, 3.30pm).

Although a Boosey and Hawkes version exists at Yale, this wilder document had spent the past 60-odd years in a suitcase with some children’s books at the back of a cupboard belonging to Britten’s one-time assistant Enid, who described the composer as demanding but generous. Britten quietly handed her the papers when she left work to marry, thinking they might be of some sentimental value. It wasn’t until a clear-out last year that the score was discovered, simply marked “A theme on Purcell” (“Hang on, I know what this is,” thought Enid’s euphoric daughter Sonya.) Quickly, to Sotheby’s and £175,000. “It’s such a catchy tune,” sighed one historian, “The xylophone is a classic.” “Rich. D minor. Extrovert,” said another, followed by “Yes, yes, yes!” and “it’s lovely to see it in pencil. I’m fond of pencils.”

The programme was gorgeously confident, allowing the ambient sounds of newly washed hands sweeping softly across pages, and of jackets squeaking and excited breathing, to propel the whole thing. Part-thoughts and half-sentences, far from sounding frustratingly unfinished, had the effect of deeply connecting the ear to an infinite range of life and character. Although a programme about music, it felt crucially more like one about the voices of human beings. “The antiphonal caller responses between instruments – scribing extra lines for himself . . .” “Bass, drum and cymbal, isn’t it? The gong and the whip. Fortissimo. Whack . . .”

Although the manuscript had originally been bought by a foreign collector, apparently the reviewing committee on the export of works of art and objects of cultural interest stepped in and plucked it back for the nation. Curious to learn what other delicacies the committee might be in the process of saving, I called them up, only to be told – doomily – that there is at present a “review of the reviewing committee on the export of works of art and objects of cultural interest”. (Good thing Enid and Sonya did their spring-cleaning early.)

Review: The Baroness - the Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild

Edmund Gordon — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:50:15 +0000

The Baroness: the Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild

Hannah Rothschild

Virago Press, 320pp, £20

Baroness “Nica” de Koenigswarter was born Kathleen Annie Pannonica Rothschild in London in 1913, at the height of that family’s wealth and influence. She married Baron Jules de Koenigswarter, a French diplomat, in 1935 and had five children with him.

In 1951, after hearing a recording of the jazz classic “’Round Midnight” by Thelonious Monk, she abandoned her husband and children and travelled to New York to become the pianist’s patron and companion. She remained extremely close to him – it remains the subject of conjecture whether or not they were lovers – until his death in 1982.

Their unlikely relationship became the stuff of jazz legend. There is an inherent glamour (albeit of a rather novelettish kind) in the story of a rich woman turning her back on a life of wealth and privilege to embrace the demi-monde of New York jazz – and there’s no doubting that the jazz world embraced her back. Charlie Parker died in her apartment at the Stanhope Hotel in Manhattan in 1955 and some 20 songs were written for her, including Gigi Gryce’s “Nica’s Tempo”, Freddie Redd’s “Nica Steps Out”, Kenny Drew’s “Blues for Nica”, Tommy Flanagan’s “Thelonica” and Monk’s “Pannonica”.

Depending on your perspective, Nica was either a brave proto-feminist who crossed cultures and defied convention to devote herself to the music she loved, or a spoiled dilettante who did exactly what she wanted her whole life – and the hell with everybody else. But perhaps these views aren’t mutually exclusive. Nica’s great-niece, Hannah Rothschild, seems able to accommodate both in her new biography: “Perhaps [Nica] was nothing more than an irresponsible gadfly,” she muses. However, she concludes on a note of approbation: “She dared to be different.”

Rothschild extends touching sympathy and respect to her great-aunt but has a habit of patronising her reader. “Contrary to popular belief, schizophrenia does not mean a split personality,” she admonishes at one point. Later, she explains: “Jazz encompasses diverse rhythms, scales, syncopations and styles ranging from early New Orleans Dixie and ragtime waltzes to fusion.”

This tendency to state the basics as if she were dispensing expertise is particularly aggravating when she gets the basics wrong. For instance, she tells us that, in 1935, “William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and F Scott Fitzgerald were topping the critics’ lists”. Perhaps she’s just guilty of a sloppy phrase – but one of the only major US journals to publish a list of the year’s best books in 1935 was the New Republic and neither Steinbeck nor Fitzgerald was mentioned there.

Meanwhile, Barbara Strachey was not “a leading light in the Bloomsbury set”, nor was Tom Wolfe part of the “emerging generation of American novelists” that included Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer. Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf was not “published in 1929” but in two volumes between 1925 and 1926.

In one particularly confused and baffling passage, Rothschild announces that her forebears “were just the latest in a long line of ‘wannabes’ to erect shrines to their own success”, comparing the family’s lavish country houses in the Home Counties to “the fabulous palaces of Blenheim, Houghton, Castle Howard and Wentworth Woodhouse”, all of which “caused shock and consternation” when they were built.

It’s hard to keep track of all the ways that this is wrong. Although the Duke of Marlborough was forced to finish Blenheim Palace at his own expense, it was intended as a gift from the nation, so was hardly a “shrine” he’d conceived to his “own success”; the design of Castle Howard by Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh, meanwhile, did not cause “shock and consternation” but was widely acclaimed and led to Vanbrugh’s commission to design Blenheim soon after.

Even allowing for these slips, it isn’t obvious how the Duke of Marlborough or Robert Walpole (Britain’s first prime minister and the first proprietor of Houghton Hall) or the Marquess of Rockingham (who served two terms as prime minister and commissioned the greater part of Wentworth Woodhouse) can be considered “wannabes”.

These errors occur at the peripheries of Nica’s story and while the perpetual background interference is certainly a distraction, Rothschild does, thank goodness, know what she is talking about when it comes to the Rothschilds. Usually, a subject’s childhood and family background form the most threadbare parts of a biography; here, they take up half of the book.

There are some fascinating sections dealing with the family’s opulent 19th-century heyday, such as the descriptions of Nica’s great-grandfather’s private menagerie, which included “two million specimens of butterflies and moths, 144 giant tortoises . . . and other rare and fabulous specimens, ranging from starfish to giraffes”. These details make poignantly clear just how far Nica travelled in her life.

Rothschild is particularly interested in what drew Thelonious and Nica to one another and offers a variety of factors that may have underwritten their relationship (some more plausible than others): love of jazz, freedom of spirit, even a natural affinity between the descendants of slaves and those of Jews from the Frankfurt ghetto.

Yet she seems resistant to the most obvious explanation: that Thelonious offered Nica a sense of purpose and excitement, while she offered him a taste of the advantages conferred by money and status. To admit this is not to do either of them down. Their love for one another is obvious from this book and no less moving if it speaks of what each of them, before meeting, had lacked.

Edmund Gordon is writing the biography of Angela Carter, which will be published by Chatto & Windus

Review: Defending Politics - Why Democracy Matters in the 21st Century by Matthew Flinders

Chris Mullin — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:38:13 +0000

Defending Politics: Why Democracy Matters in the 21st Century

Matthew Flinders

Oxford University Press, 224pp, £16.99

The late Professor Bernard Crick’s classic work In Defence of Politics was written, he said, “at a time of brittle cynicism about the activities of politicians”. That was in 1962. It has been downhill ever since.

Today, 50 years later, Matthew Flinders, a professor at the University of Sheffield, has attempted an update. He is facing a much greater challenge than Crick did. A flavour of the scepticism he has to confront may be gleaned from the opening clips of an excellent Radio 4 series Flinders produced last autumn (and strangely not referred to in this volume). It opened with a series of vox pops from citizens stopped, apparently at random, and asked what word they most associated with “politician”. The results were stunningly awful: “corrupt”, “rubbish”, “garbage”, “useless”, “liar” and “crook” were just a few of the responses.

Later in the programme, people were asked, “What have politicians ever done for you?” Again, the answers were unremittingly negative. If they are to be believed, most British citizens see no connection between the great social gains of the 20th century – pensions, free secondary education and health care, sick pay, redundancy pay, the minimum wage, protection from unfair dismissal – and the political process that brought them about. Indeed, some appear to believe that we live in the western European equivalent of a banana republic.

The question arises: how, in an age when most people are materially better off than they have ever been and allegedly better educated, have we managed to manufacture such stunning levels of ignorance, stupidity and indifference?

Flinders offers a number of explanations: unrealistic expectations, a fickle electorate, the triumph of the market over collective values and over the public interest in general, rampant consumerism and, above all, a feral and destructive media, made worse by the rise of so-called digital democracy.
Politicians get off fairly lightly – too lightly, in my view. Some disasters are self-inflicted: the great parliamentary expenses meltdown, to name but one. The rise of focus-group politics and, with it, a generation of politicians inclined to follow rather than lead. A reluctance to level with the electorate on difficult issues.

It is generally considered bad form for politicians to blame the electorate for their woes but Flinders, not being dependent on votes for a living, is under no such constraint. He talks of an electorate that is “politically decadent”, possessed of a growing sense of entitlement but
a diminishing sense of responsibilities, and too ready to believe the worst of the political classes without any understanding of the compromises necessary for democracy to function.

But it is for the media that Flinders reserves his worst scorn:

If we really want to understand how the public [is] misled, abused and exploited, how “false wants” and “false fears” are created, and why the ‘expectations gap’ is so difficult to close, then it is to journalists and the media, not just to politics and politicians, that we must turn . . . [A]ll too often they abuse their role and position by adopting a shallow and essentially destructive view of politics.

As Flinders points out, the task confronting the current generation of politicians is all the more difficult, since the evidence suggests that it will be their job to manage decline. Crick was writing in an age of abundance when it was taken for granted that the citizens of western states were entitled to an ever-increasing standard of living. All the signs are that the era of abundance is drawing to a close. It will be the job of politicians in a mature democracy to confront their citizens gently with the consequences of decline. Failure to do so risks eventual meltdown. The big question is whether our political system is capable of giving space to any mainstream politician or political party that tells them what they don’t want to hear. Thus far, the signs are not encouraging.

“I want to provoke a very loud debate about the need to revitalise politics by recruiting politicians with the nerve and confidence to make tough decisions,” writes Flinders. We need, he says, to replace the politics of fear with the politics of optimism. Admirable sentiments – but how realistic in an age of relentless cynicism?

Flinders, like Crick, offers an optimistic view of politics as a “great and civilising human activity”. To be sure, it is sometimes messy and muddled but it is, in essence, an honourable profession that exists to reconcile peacefully competing demands and guarantee the boundaries of civilised life and that, contrary to what is often alleged, has enjoyed a fair measure of success.

This is a brave effort. It is lucid, learned and occasionally repetitive but, unusually for a book by an academic, jargon-free. Above all, Flinders’s message is one that cannot be too often restated.

Chris Mullin’s third and final volume of diaries, “A Walk-On Part”, will be published in paperback by Profile Books on 7 June

Review: Babel

Miriam Gillinson — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:35:50 +0000

Thank God the Brits love queueing in the rain. The preamble to Babel feels a lot like Wimbledon, as an audience of nearly 1,000 waits outside a sodden Caledonian Park in London. Unfortunately, just like poor old Tim Henman and Andy Murray, Babel fails to live up to the hype.

This could have been extraordinary. Created by World Stages London, WildWorks and Battersea Arts Centre and boasting a 300-strong cast of community volunteers, Babel promised theatre on an epic scale. I was expecting spellbinding choirs and eye-popping visuals. But what we got was a kind-hearted but half-baked festival, sorely in need of a headline act.

The show is split into three unconnected segments. The opening section is intriguing, packed with quirky, imaginative visual flourishes. As we wind through the park, white-robed creatures hover around us and makeshift homes pop up in wild, unlikely locations. Ladies iron in trees, lads read in armchairs strewn with leaves and televisions flicker behind bushes.

Distant bells begin to clang and the audience swarms towards the central field. So far, so odd and engaging. But as soon as we hit the centre of the park, the spell is broken. The scant narrative is dropped and the show transforms into a hippy-friendly festival. There’s a knitting stand, a new world made entirely of plasticine, a stream of street performers and, for no apparent reason, a massage parlour. It’s all jolly good fun but it adds little to the show.

When the narrative finally resumes, involving a young family determined to stand their ground, it’s too little too late.

It’s such a slight story for this grand stage and isn’t nearly powerful, or clear, enough to draw the audience in. As the family is evicted, the crowd whispers in dissent but without much conviction. It’s hard to care all that much, when you’re not entirely sure who or what you’re meant
to be supporting.

There are still some wonderful special effects here and the grand, Victorian clock tower looks splendid, lit up in all its glory. But as striking as these visuals are, their impact is slight. The visuals come in short, meaningless bursts and, unlike the tower of Babel, never build up towards something truly majestic.

Some things at City never change

Jonathan Derbyshire — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:29:52 +0000

My friend N–, with whom I’ve been going to watch Manchester City for the past eight years, was worried about the Queens Park Rangers match. He was concerned not just about the outcome – the night before the game, he’d had an anxiety dream in which City’s captain Vincent Kompany was kidnapped – but also that he might not actually get to see to see us win our first league championship in 44 years at all.

N– is an actor and had been in Leeds all week filming a drama for ITV. When he got his shooting schedule, he noticed with horror that he was due to film an important scene at just about the time he’d hoped to be getting on a train to Manchester. But N– is a persuasive fellow and a few days before the match he texted me triumphantly to say they’d moved his big scene. He’d be alongside me at the Etihad Stadium on 13 May to watch what we hoped would be City’s procession to the Premier League title.

Cups for cockups

After 70 minutes of the game, we would rather have been anywhere but in our seats in the South Stand. QPR were 2-1 up, their first goal the result of the kind of defensive howler that used to be City’s stock in trade.

I’d lost count of the number of times Francis Lee’s line about “cups for cock-ups” had been quoted in the papers beforehand, but had rather suavely dismissed all that stuff about “Typical City” (our sublime ability to snatch disaster from the jaws of good fortune) as a crutch that the football writers would have to learn to live without. This team was different, I told myself – too disciplined, too serene, too good. We’d gone to Newcastle the previous week and made them look like a pub team, for God’s sake.

Hubris? It felt like it as City threw themselves ineffectually against an unyielding nine-man Rangers defence not noticeably weakened by the expulsion, after 55 minutes, of that absurd pantomime villain Joey Barton. N– had gone quiet.

I squeezed his arm consolingly and whispered that we could still do it. Twenty minutes to score two goals. Hadn’t we scored lots of goals in the last quarter of games this season?

He didn’t look convinced.

Meanwhile, the man two seats along was raging operatically. “Why do you do it to us, City? It’s always the fucking same.” His companion,
an individual whose face irresistibly suggested the phrase “rat-like cunning”, was sitting (everyone else was standing) with his head bowed, not watching the game. “I need a fag, mate,” he said. You can’t smoke inside the stadium. “I have to do something.” Anything but watch the slow-motion disaster unfolding on the pitch below.

The great escape

A few rows in front of us, our friend J– did his best, Canute-like, to push back the tide of despair that was engulfing the ground.

He rounded on someone who’d moaned at another misplaced pass or unconverted cross. “There’s still five minutes to go,” he yelled when the fourth official raised his board to indicate how much injury time would be played. J–’s father, who’d been almost catatonic with nerves in the pub before the game, sat next to him quietly fearing the worst.

Then it happened. Edin Dzeko, City’s intermittently prolific Bosnian striker, headed an equaliser. And when, in the fourth minute of injury time, the ball broke to Sergio Agüero in the QPR penalty area, N– said something to me. I can’t remember exactly what now, except that it was an improbably lucid appraisal of what was about to occur and that we were going to “do it”. Agüero’s shot hit the net. N– and I tumbled over the back of our seats in a howling embrace. Then the rat-faced man was hugging me. And so was his friend. Someone else was kissing the back of my head.

That morning, I’d read an article by Colin Shindler, who’d said that he admired this new City team, a multinational outfit assembled with the aid of Middle-Eastern petrodollars, but that he didn’t – couldn’t – love them like he’d loved the 1968 title-winning side. Why is it, then, despite
all the grotesqueries of newly acquired wealth, that N–, J–, the rat-faced man and I still care? Another City-supporting writer, Bryan Appleyard, put it very well on Twitter the morning after: “City’s way of winning means, in spite of [the] changes, they are still City. Something in the concept of ‘club’ or ‘team’ is unchanging. And that ‘something’ is what is supported . . .”

He’s right. And it’s quite something.