Museum Hours

So,  The Miniaturist  (warning - spoilers abound).  It looked amazing and all. It really, really did. Those interiors were straight out of a Dutch still life. The framing and perspectives were painterly.  Someone spent a lot  of money on the costumes; the silks looked as though they cost more than the entire budget for many programmes. The casting was pretty fabulous even if Anya Taylor-Joy is more familiar playing a witch/alien/robot  of an evil cast of mind and one rather expected her at some point to transmigrate into a rabid monster doll, crawl unbidden from the depths of the dolls house (on which more below) in the manner of Ringu  and consume half the population of Amsterdam (in 1686) before flooding the dykes and sinking the city beneath the waves. That might actually have made more sense. I may still have been dazed from LFC just buying the most expensive defender in the history of the world. I may not have drunk enough to be in the perfect state of comato

The thesis is simple. Forget the purported four  grand challenges  in the Industrial Strategy.  If the major economic issue of our times is increasing productivity then the single greatest contribution to success would be the development of a widely recognised emoji to express the feelings associated with having ones head in ones hands.   This after all is the position adopted by employees most frequently in workplaces up and down the land. Mountains of written communication, avalanches of emails and texts, are expended as a result. There may even be the odd phone call. If there were instead a single character that could sum up all these feelings which could be sent directly on a one to one or one to many basis it would save so much time and energy. It would cover all those many moments when almost involuntarily one sighs deeply, mouths 'not again' or 'really?', breathes even more deeply, stares at the desk or the ceiling, stretches a lit

Two recent plays  Albion  and  What Shadows  have probed away at the vexed question of contemporary Englishness.  The conclusion that emerges is that Englishness is now: - an almost entirely backward looking exercise in often self destructive nostalgia and reactionary attitudes towards perceived loss; which is accompanied by - an intransigent FU attitude towards the world as a whole. We used to be bigger and more important than you and now we're not so we'll just shout and stamp our feet and the rest of you can lump it. It goes without saying that both are deeply unhelpful to attempts to navigate creatively a place for this country in the 21st century.  Englishness now feels much like a negative exercise in nostalgia because: - the 'positive' ties that used to bind - primarily Empire and religion - are gone; and that - economic insecurity for many makes a sense of a shared, positive future feel like a pipe dream; and that - few polit

I haven't, as they say, read the book but I have read the  article . The book - Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia by Francis O’Gorman - is concerned with what is described as the 'systematic devaluation' of the past since the 19th century. As I understand it the basic points are that: - societies are increasingly obsessed by the future and as such want to relegate where they came from in order to create the new order that will be so much better - big organising ideas like communism found it necessary to sweep away everything that went before - liberal societies are increasingly critical of their pasts and wish to denigrate them for failing to live up to modern ideals.  To say that this left me mildly puzzled is something of an understatement. Listening to our current political discourse one could be forgiven for thinking that the past is in fact the major obsession of many of our politicians constituted as a weird amalgam of Our Is

A brief account of films seen over the last 10 days in what was a bit of a bumper year in terms of quality with only one really loudly squawking turkey. They aren't in a precise order but the ones towards the top are those I most liked. The one at the bottom is running around the room flapping wildly. Zama  by Lucrecia Martel which is a simply wondrous existential fever dream of disappointment and dashed hopes with a stunning walk on llama adding further bathos. Not an easy watch but amply rewards attention with some stunning images and cinematography. Having also just read the book on which the film is based there is a separate blog post about both for those who truly are gluttons for punishment. Columbus  a luxuriantly talky but deeply felt film set amidst the quiet comforts of modernist architecture and dumb phones. Ava  by Lea Mysius which is as zesty as its teen protagonist is spiteful, complex and enterprising. Jeune Femme  with an absolute powerhouse of

"I had done for them what no one had ever tried to do for me. To say, to their hopes: No." That is the  novel - written by the Argentinian author Antonio Di Benedetto in the 1950s but set in a Spanish colony in Paraguay in the 1790s - in a single line. The book and the magnificent film adaptation by the Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel just now being released on the festival circuit are concerned with existential despair; the disappointment in the realisation of hopes being forever deferred, of ambition never being satisfied, of the quotidian as what happens before real life starts. They are also concerned with the identity that we assign to ourselves. As the director said at the screening last night:  "I believe that identity creates an inevitable trajectory so it becomes a trap in itself." That may feel rather hard to unpick but she is saying that once we fasten on to a set of assumptions about who we are and our place in the world w

"Members of the subculture typically do not self-identify as hipsters, and the word hipster is often used as a pejorative to describe someone who is pretentious, overly trendy, and effete, or a stereotypical term, that has been reclaimed and redefined by some as a term of pride and group identity." The French have the great abbreviation BoBo for 'bourgeois bohemians'; people who oh so carefully cultivate the look of the bohemian whilst having a ton of cash and a well appointed pad in the Septieme. Clearly Paris is a particularly great place for this type of lifestyle but London isn't far behind and the spread of the hipster is a well observed phenomenon extending even to sleepy Highbury.  The cafe down the road is now hipster central in N5; hoardes of them hanging out inside or out, crowding the pavements and generally flaunting their hipsterdom.  I admit to finding this both amusing and annoying but it's a phenomenon which says a lot about what

No, not something from an apocalyptic drama in which the final girl/boy/other has to find the final remaining beacon of life as we knew it.  Far worse.  Proverbially, the last refuge of the scoundrel is patriotism. Except that I think the proverb is wrong. The real last refuge is nationalism;  a truly pernicious and harmful doctrine used as a cover all justification for all actions and ideas ('my country, right or wrong').   So what's the difference? It's been probed away at for decades; one of the most famous expositions being  Orwell's   The Lion and The Unicorn. For me the basic distinction is relatively clear but of fundamental importance for the current depressing set of exchanges around the place of the UK in the world and in particular in Europe.  Patriotism is fundamentally about why I like living here including the long standing mongrel nature of the country, far removed from all of the nativist nonsense and white identity

What more could be said about Giacometti ?  The word that comes to mind when considering his classic sculpted figures is etiolated: pallid, drawn, not just devoid of light but devoid of substance. The attempt to give depth just results in further elongation as though multiple dimensions cannot be achieved simultaneously. The sheer effort of will required to study and reflect on the human form is such that it is impossible to see them all. Indeed Giacometti is more likely to emphasise gaps and holes; often jagged and raw in nature. Much of this seems to prefigure death and dissolution and reflects the shattering effect of the Second World War and the horrors it unleashed.  Walking round the exhibition one is reminded of the blasted trees in a Paul Nash painting of the trenches. It is as though humans have been reduced to something between automata with straight backs and legs from which most of the joints have been removed and shambling remnants - or indeed revenants -

There are those rare days when summoning the energy for the latest special delivery film on MUBI - typically a 2 hour plus piece set in a sanatorium where people speak the language backwards, make statues and Marienbad  topiary look athletic, have a fixation with the deep symbolism of a dripping tap and stare silently and endlessly at the middle distance - is just a bit too much. For those occasions there is genre television: crime dramas, comedy dramas and the like.  Rather than the resonant, perfectly formed  madeleine  of the best TV, honed and balanced, these programmes are like a particularly decadent slice of cake. They lure you with the promise of their confection but you rapidly find that the cream was whipped UHT, the ingredients came out of a packet and the fruit is tasteless. This appreciation has been tested during recent experience of watching the British crime dramas Fearless  and In The Dark  and the US dramadies Casual  (on Amazon Prime) and Flake

A new explanation for the delay to my train this afternoon: cows on the line. This did, however, provide some time to reflect on other rather more serious characteristics of modern life than the inconvenience occasioned by the peregrinations of the odd Friesan.  So here are six which seem to me to be particularly pernicious aspects of our current situation.  1.  Libertarianism : otherwise known as letting me do whatever I want and a plague on everyone else. Such a convenient doctrine for the already powerful and utterly malign as a philosophy for the common good with a resolution to remove everything that might be a constraint or require a contribution to the commonweal. This is wholly distinct from liberalism and indeed individualism which are both important and positive. The basic issues that libertarianism always avoid are that a free for all never serves those without agency. The deep structural imbalances in society that fuel inequality have to be collectively addressed

I've had a few glasses of red wine and watched a bit of Glastonbury (and thought, not for the first time, that the ridiculously talented and ethereal Laura Marling is really not of this world and is most likely on furlough from Lothlorien) and almost inexorably I reach for Spotify. And after a short while I am drawn to the Blue Aeroplanes. It's not surprising. They are my favourite band of all time: a mix of experimental Beat poetry semi-intoned over a generally driving beat with that beautiful 1987-92 period of post REM semi-jangle guitar and just a slight inflection of folk whimsy.  There's really nothing quite like it even if almost no-one now remembers them. But for those that do there's this slightly magical aura of being part of a secret club.  And the song that I almost always end up playing at maximum volume is Colour Me  from the 1991 album Beat Songs.  Why? It has the most stunning tune. Mesmerisingly lovely both in terms of the melodic li

It has Jeanne Moreau. It has the most exquisite andante from Brahms String Sextet. It has extended sequences that involve both Jeanne Moreau and the (exquisite) andante from Brahms string sextet. It  is directed by one of the most fabulous French film makers, Louis Malle, and probably ranks alongside Smiles Of A Summer Night as amongst the most swooning meditations on romantic love (albeit on this occasion without Russian roulette). Did I mention, it has Jeanne Moreau. It has a sequence in which a very a la mode Parisienne wakes up with a groomed daschund already in the crook of her arm. It has the most extraordinary sequence of laughter in any film in which the laughter is both such a release and a realisation of how much laughter has simply been missing for so long that it is delirious and painful in equal measure. It is a beautifully observed portrait of Paris and the provinces with all the droll superficiality that implies. But above all it is the utterly