The Zuyder Zee Sized Hole At The Heart Of The Miniaturist

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 comatose acquiescence lying prone on the couch.

I have no problem whatsoever with the ending of a journey of self-discovery and development, personal growth and taking responsibility for dealing with circumstance. None.

What I do have a problem with is that the central plot device - a weird dolls house which is gradually populated by articles which seems to presage events - whilst clearly not a complete macguffin, made no sense whatsoever in terms of the central dynamic. 

In particular:

(a) why does the husband decide that a dolls house is just what his new wife needs to distract her from the fact that he is not going to be the husband that she thought she was marrying? 

(b) he gives no sense of actually knowing or having any connection with the elfin character actually making and delivering the miniatures - so ....

(c) there is no explanation of why said elfin character other than clearly being several degrees brighter than most of the population of Amsterdam (in 1686) would pay particular attention to observing in minute detail the goings on in this particular house

(d) how said elfin character is able to capture parakeets - which when last seen seemed destined for a long and doubtless ultimately fruitless flight back towards the Tropics - when it looks as though reaching up to close the shutters might prove fatal to her. 

I may be doing this production and possibly the book (which I haven't read) a disservice but this looked like a classic case of, so to speak, a (dolls) house which the author thought was in need of a home. 

Then it's a case of don't think too hard about the detail because, well, this is a pretty amazing idea with just the right combination of spookiness and mystery so people will just kinda switch off and go with the flow and be pretty fascinated by all that period detail. 

And wondering how to capture an escaped parakeet.

And whether the main character will turn into a rabid monster doll.

And whether LFC have bought the best defender in the world or just been duped by a feint from a competitor. Rather like this production.

Meeting the Productivity Challenge: A 'Head In Hands' Emoji

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 little and then succumbs to a modest bout of chronic rather than acute despair at the world in general.  

It would meet the need when HR send out, yet again, a contract that has the wrong job title, an incorrect salary and the wrong number of hours to be worked (but is, of course, in all other respects absolutely fine).

When you explain something for the fourth meeting in succession and it's still palpably obvious that 'don't get it' remains the dominant reaction. Moreover, many of the attendees have actually forgotten that there even were three previous discussions.

When someone actually reads out in public the phrase 'not for disclosure' and continues to make the associated disclosure whilst maintaining the sense of beatific calm bestowed on those for whom the connection between eyes, brain and mouth is at best fleeting.

The selection of available emojis simply doesn't quite cut it. For example:

🤨   Raised Eyebrow - good for denoting scepticism, disbelief, or disapproval but is rather too simply quizzical rather than capturing the full ennui associated with dealing with repeated nonsense 

🙄   Rolling Eyes - splendid for disdain but the boredom is too straightforwardly contemptuous rather than having more of a sense of despair 

😣   Persevering Face - does provide some of the 'how many times' emphasis and can also suggest being on the verge of tears but also suggests some hope of actual agency to make things different

😕   Confused face - very good for puzzlement but often there's really no puzzle just incompetence and a failure to think things through. 

I think we are coming closer with something like this: 

🤦   Facepalming - to display frustration or embarrassment at the ineptitude of a person or situation, but that has more of a sense of one off immediacy rather than connoting in the fully Nietzschean sense eternal recurrence. 

So the search goes on. The emoji would convey a sense of frustration coupled with a degree of genuine puzzlement; it would add in a touch of disbelief but in a resigned rather than indignant mode; there would be an element of despair and a bit of desperation. Above all there would be a sense that this is just how the world is and always has been and that expecting anything better is tantamount to a fool's errand. So there is an underlying fatalism. 

It would indeed be the perfect symbol for our confusing and troubled times when so little seems to be achieved by so many and indeed most effort is directed at something that is actually counter our best interests. And even then we cock it up.  

Maybe it has an element of this:

This one is probably going a bit far but could work if suffering also from a migraine:

This one would be good for rather more eirenic states of resignation:

So come on all those great minds, the untapped potential about to be unleashed across the UK in response to committing wilful economic suicide by severing ourselves from our main trading partners, lets put together a national competition to design the emoji that best meets the needs of the time. 

Let's work really hard on putting our heads in our hands.

Let's show that you really couldn't make it up. 

Loss and Nostalgia: Two Plays

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 political leaders have invested energy in talking about a future that places less emphasis on the nation and more on reciprocal ties and responsibilities that, in an interconnected world, are the bed rock of protecting and promoting liberal democracy and a managed and mixed economy which are still by far the best means of securing a better life for all citizens.

In short there is far too much about the past and far too little about the future.

Both of these plays are deeply concerned with these issues. 

Albion - which revolves around an obsessive attempt by a largely self made entrepreneur to recreate a garden from the 1920s attached to her old family home but which has been allowed to fall into decay - precisely targets several important aspects of the phenomenon.

The beautifully observed ironies of this ultimately deluded enterprise are manifold:

- the project is a response to loss - in this case of a son - to try to assuage some of the pain and the sense of dislocation

- as work on recreating the lost idyll develops it becomes apparent that the original visionary who built it had no real interest in most of the people he lived among - whom he largely wanted kept out - just in people like him. Cultural nostalgia is for the likeminded. The lives of others - even relatives and close friends - who hold different opinions are of no interest and little appreciation

- a by product of this obsession is to disregard the lives of the young and make decisions which have terrible consequences for them. In one case, persuading her son to join the army in which he is put in the line of danger and dies and in the other by moving her daughter away from her home, her friends and her prospective career 

- for the wealthy and well heeled cultural nostalgia is seen as wholly compatible with economic hard headedness and making money even when that is to the detriment of others. When the garden project fails the decision is quickly made that the only approach that works in terms of the money is to sell the property to a developer who will convert the house into flats and the grounds into little plot of land to go with each one 

- class and wealth affect how insulated one is from the consequences of taking the country backwards. A middle class Cambridge graduate who wants to be a writer and works in publishing has connections that will provide opportunities even when she has a major set back; a working class writer who works on the garden project ends ends up not going to university and instead makes coffee in the local Costa and feels completely without agency

- an entrepreneurial Polish cleaner has a clear plan to manage others, to work hard and to save money in order to buy a stake in society. Her hard headed realism is focused wholly on relative economic security. She is perfectly happy to observe that 'some' parts of her homeland ‘look beautiful’ but that is of no consequence if the economic realities go south. 

As she says with complete equanimity: 'it's not who you are, it's what you want to do'. Nostalgia is a luxury for which she has no time whatsoever.

What Shadows examines the context for the infamous 'rivers of blood' speech given by Enoch Powell. The consequences are still felt today.  

This play magnificently probes away at the notion that personal identity seems solid and constant but is actually fluid and can be evanescent (illness in particular affects our perception of who we are); that we all wear multiple hats simultaneously; that change is constant throughout history and we identify the changes that we like - or don't - and give them emphasis.

That notion of choosing the change with which you are comfortable and rejecting the change with which you are not seems close to the heart of the matter. There is a magisterial passage in which Powell discusses the effects of the iconoclasm unleashed by the Protestant Reformation in the 1550s (the play actually has a reference to the Act of Uniformity of 1552 which gave me a history geek quiver of pure pleasure). He accurately describes just how huge a shift this was for most people in England at the time: imposed from above and undertaken with considerable violence towards buildings that we now hold - in their post Reformation state - as part of the quintessential nature of an English town or village.  

At the same time he observes that belonging is created by the relations between people who occupy the same space. The point of course is whether you consider those other people to have a legitimate basis for being in that space in the first place.

At root Powell is also shown to be driven by a huge sense of loss. This comes from his specific sense of belonging (his home county of Shropshire in particular) which he feels is not recognised by new arrivals, coming on top of the war which he sees as fought to preserve places such as Shropshire and that his own personal ambitions in politics are looking less and less likely to be realised.

So he has a very specific cultural identify which he feels isn't shared. In a section towards the end of the play he describes how the speech took possession of him. Whilst he felt powerful in the immediate aftermath he also increasingly felt very alone in facing the consequences.

Ultimately I think that much of the speech is explained by Britain's move from being a top dog to a second rate power. Powell is much more indulgent  of difference when feeling in control (so tellingly he is liberal on sexual orientation and on different cultures in India). What he cannot accept is the feeling of being 'done to' in Britain in the 1960s. 

In Albion the final scene is so loaded with symbolism it is surprising that the stage doesn't collapse. 

The main character is left scrabbling around in what is once again a largely derelict garden trying to plant a surviving offshoot of a single red rose that survived the war. This is accompanied by desperate efforts to call off the sale of the property so that yet another attempt can be made to save and restore the garden. 

In practice even were this to be successful the consequence would be to ruin the family financially because of the fines that would be paid for breach of contract. 

Increasingly desperate attempts to go backwards that will ruin the future.

Does that sound at all familiar? 

Do We Really Want To Forget?

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 Island Story, The Second World War and Britain as viewed (by many of those very politicians) through sepia tints from parts of the world that had in the not too distant past been British colonies. 

Indeed, it seems that our future is increasingly affected by deliberately distorted notions of the past which people across the globe are eager to use to justify all kinds of disastrous policies. That nice Mr Putin is very much the Imperialist and a latter day Peter the Great. The tragic state of the USA arises from completely separate narratives about the past and the foundation myths of the country and a systematic failure to reach any kind of common ground on the history of slavery and discrimination. The horrific events in the Middle East reflect an active ambition to go back to an imagined medieval past and to destroy all other cultures in the process. 

The point about all of this is the not forgetting but the complete exclusivity of the views being propounded. 

The past is not being used to draw some carefully calibrated lessons about what can happen and to aid understanding and reflection. 

It is being used for malign purposes. It seems to me that we do not have a problem with amnesia. Far from it. We have a problem with spending far too much time on partisan commemoration but far too little time on reflection. 

The commemorating focus is on 'heritage' (which is now often coupled with the word 'industry'). And one of the things about heritage is that it is deeply cultural and is associated with an expectation that it be viewed positively. It is in short reinforcing some of the story that we tell ourselves. It is about identity.

This commemoration obsession can seem mildly quaint or more than a touch ridiculous when seen in the obsessions of many British people with a past that is characterised by big houses, latter day indentured retainers and a class ridden stratified society represented in frankly repulsive programmes like Downton Abbey. This is indeed the Our Island Story version of history and it is more than just quaint or ridiculous when it becomes part of a wider narrative about our Imperial past as somehow a good thing rather than a disastrous exercise in expropriation and domination. 

I spend more time than I should wandering around houses that were built by people who I would have found completely abhorrent. The past is fascinating but it needs to be viewed in a clear sighted manner. I want to understand but I have no interest in celebrating aristos and swaggering roaring boys.

So whenever I hear some nonsense about The War and how we were a top nation and how much better it would be if we were to let the lion roar again, my immediate reaction is to suggest that people should take a deep breath, have a cup of tea and spend some time reading the magisterial book The Uses And Abuses Of History by Margaret Macmillan. As she says:

'History is not a dead subject. It does not lie there safely in the past for us to look at when the mood takes us. History can be helpful; it can also be very dangerous. It is wiser to think of history not a a pile of dead leaves or a collection of dusty artefacts but as a pool, sometimes benign, sometimes sulphurous, that lies under the present, silently shaping our institutions, our ways of thought, our likes and dislikes.'

Using history as a basis for identity is a manifestation of history at its most sulphurous. Much of our history is not one of which we should be particularly proud. It is, however, what made us what we are today for good and ill. We should remember it but we should not commemorate; we should reflect and understand and be clear eyed in doing so. Above all we should see history and the study of the past as one of the great liberal disciplines and a bed rock of pluralism. 

The danger it seems to me is from obsessives who choose a narrative grounded in the past to posit a purportedly better future. That these are frequently extreme nationalists or religious fanatics should come as no surprise.

At this Clio, the muse of history (you can see her at the top of this blog), would weep copiously (and that's not just from the sulphur). 

Yet we know that there are still exercises in enforced amnesia which continue and in these cases remembering what others have tried to eradicate is a wholly laudable enterprise. And when that is done with the kind of grace and intelligence that is on offer in this film Spell Reel about remembering the recent past in Guinea-Bissau one can see the power in doing so. 

Remembering what others want forgotten is after all fundamentally about pluralism. 

London Film Festival

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 a performance by Laetitia Dosch cast adrift in the Paris precariat and nostalgic for things she never had.

Manifesto by Julian Rosefeldt: a laudable, droll, sophisticated, inventive reaction to populism with an extraordinary set of performances by Cate Blanchett.

Loveless by Andrey Zvyagintsev: classy extreme Russian miserabilism about serious family dysfunction seen at 11 am on a Sunday. On the upside it's less grim than his previous film.

Bright Sunshine In by Claire Denis. A quite luminous Juliette Binoche in a droll but also deeply poignant assessment of the effects of wanting to be wanted. This is, naturally, in French and really could only be made in France (and I say that as an entirely good thing).

Mademoiselle Paradis by Barbara Albert which magnificently captures in high Rococo relief the 18th century's fascination with prodigy.

Promised Land by Eugene Jarecki in which "America is the fat Elvis'. A resonant metaphor for the current tragic situation of a country that has lost its way.

Western by Valeska Griesebach about East German 'cowboys' (aka construction workers) in Bulgaria; a meditation on belonging, empathy and being strong which magnificently undercut conventions.

Thelma by Joachim Trier which checked in with a veritable flock of 70s horror flicks, threatened to really take off but didn't quite, so to speak, ignite.

The Meyerowitz Stories by Noah Baumbach which can now be found on your very own Netflix service and has humour, pathos and some scenes close enough to home that they require viewing through latticed fingers.

Ingrid Goes West which is a pretty good satire of deranged Instagram culture.

Downsizing by Alexander Payne. As a fan of many of his other films this was a deeply disappointing Charlie Kaufman-lite flop. Baggy, unengaging and at times close to embarrassing.

Zama: Life Is Not That Hard And Then You Still Don't Die

"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 we struggle ever to escape them. In the case of Zama this is as a white,  Spanish corregidor who has a wife back in Spain and ambitions to continue to rise in Royal service but is living in a colonial backwater surrounded by people, most of whom are indigenous, who he considers beneath him. 

As he gradually sinks in terms of his career and his prospects, however, he is increasingly desperate for approval (particularly from children who he sees as being his own younger self) and interprets that approval as a reflection of his own merit:

"Zama had been and could not modify what he once was. Should I believe I was predestined by that past for a better future? This boy, Indalecio’s son, demanded that of me with all the force of his admiration."

He lives both in the past in terms of how his expectations have been shaped but also crucially in the future in terms of those ambitions being satisfied. In the restrictive nature of the times he can only hope to move on thorough Royal favour and to secure that he must attract attention, most obviously by being recommended by a superior for promotion.

Zama's whole existence is therefore founded on waiting. He waits for messages from his family. He waits for the governor to write letters of recommendation to Spain. He waits for his merit to be properly appreciated by the few people in his local society whose good regard he values. He waits to have relationships with the few Spanish of equal standing having already fathered a child with a local indigenous woman.

It is with these attempts and failures at relationships that much of the novel is concerned. Zama is haughty. He should be appreciated. He is self centred but he is also blind to the reality of what is happening because it is all refracted through his own sense of merit and being the focus for whatever occurs.

In practice, he is being exploited but his self obsessed, narcissistic temperament, almost solipsistic in its resolute focus on securing his own future fails to appreciate what is happening until it is too late. In one moment he is considering how to respond to one of the objects of his desire and weighs up the choice between feeling that he can almost punish her on the one hand and on the other that he may need to exploit her in the future:

"I hesitated between a lengthy epistle of postponement designed to stoke her longings on the chance that I might one day find myself in need of her help, or a few laconically expressive lines, like those she had sent me, to dash all her hopes."

Gradually, Zama becomes feverish both in terms of being ill and in terms of hallucinating figments of what he wishes to see; the things that are not there but were they to be realised would satisfy his hopes and dreams.

Nature also seems to take a delight in undercutting him with its insistent concern only with the present. There is a glorious sequence in the film when a stray llama wanders backwards and forwards behind Zama coming into view over his shoulder but wholly unconcerned with his inner crisis as it chews on some grass suffusing the whole scene in the most delicious bathos.

His hopes of preferment both by the governor and by these women gradually fading, Zama determines to join an expedition in search of a notorious local bandit who has been terrorising the area and disrupting trade. His calculation is that success in this venture will lead to his immediate elevation back in Spain.

Zama and his colleagues travel through extraordinary scenery, as they ride and then wade their way through the flooded swamp land in search of the bandit. They are sinking and with their bodies and their animals their hopes of success also gradually fade until they are the ones being pursued and finally captured by warriors from a local tribe.

There are final delicious disappointments and realisations for Zama. Towards the very end as he drifts between conscious and unconscious states and between life and death he is yet again visited by a child: 

"He was me, myself from before; I hadn’t been born anew. I understood that when I recovered my own voice and was able to speak. Smiling like a father, I said, “You haven’t grown. . . .” With irreducible sadness he replied, “Neither have you.”

Hipsters: A Pathology

"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 is happening in society and in London in recent years. 

The great Grayson Perry perfectly captured the two classic traits of the middle classes. One type wants to know exactly what is considered tasteful and then be obsessive about securing it. The other wants to flaunt their individual taste obtained though individual development, travel etc. 

In either case they are all about emphasising difference, particularly from below.

These signifiers help you to identify people who are your in group. So the coteries of hipsters clustering around the cafe down my road emblazon the signifiers to secure and consolidate acceptance in the desired group and exclude those who are not desired. This is all about reinforcing difference and the ties that bind are now increasingly found in small differences.

Recent manifestations of the hipster, particularly the male variety had extensive facial hair (although peak beard has now clearly passed some time ago); flannel shirts, brogues (preferably sans socks); some tweed accoutrements; flat caps or hats and the occasional waist coat.

The overall effect was to look like a slightly trying too hard Victorian handyman who hasn't actually had to get his hands dirty and certainly wouldn't recognise one end of a wrench from the other. But at least there is a fit with the period of the local housing so it's not all bad.

There's a major emphasis on authenticity which informs the whole look. This may be an understandable if somewhat overstated reaction to mass marketing and consumer manipulation which seems widely shared amongst millenials. On the other hand the peculiarities of the DIY maker mentality assembling new things from old were accurately and hilariously mocked in the film While We're Young in which obsessions with mechanisms and mechanical objects are a central feature. One can see it in the obsessions about everything from the perfect cup of coffee to craft beer; from vinyl records to reusing outdated electronics. 

So the hipster really is a highly developed form of Grayson's second type of middle class person: rigorously flaunting their individuality and their own creativity and style. 

There's also a wonk version of the hipster; bit intense; slightly fey; cycle close by ready to ride to the nearest think tank and think great thoughts after spending time with, you know, actual people in the local social housing, (prisoners or addicts even better if you can manage it), before writing great thoughts for the next seminar at which they can talk to each other on the basis that they have all spoken to real people. It's a bit of a badge or a rite of passage because the  wonk version of the hipster desperately needs the real world bit on the CV. So a couple of years teaching in the local community school goes down an absolute treat. 

The basic point here is that they mostly come from rarified, privileged backgrounds and have gone through the same school and university routes and then into the hard end of wonkery. In other words it's still all about the in group.

Other aspects of lifestyle hipsterdom most certainly include yoga. As has been pointed out to me this is a classic piece of “stuff white people like” because it gives us a taste of exoticism which might otherwise be absent from our lives. Don't get me wrong. Yoga is not a bad thing! But here it is a major cultural signifier. A perfect one because it originates in a different culture but also reflects middle class obsessions about well being and health. Which are of course also signifiers. So what better than to turn up at the cafe with your yoga gear ready to drink your carefully prepared coffee after an hour of striking an impressive asana.

There is an infuriating sense of privilege about the whole enterprise. The BoBo concept captures this so well because the whole thing is so carefully - and often expensively - cultivated. Indeed curated. 

And that's the central irony: something that flaunts authenticity comes across as screamingly, transcendentally inauthentic. 

What, however, is even worse than the solo hipster is the hipster couple. Then not only does one have the preening self obsession, one has shared self regard. If, heaven forfend, there is also a child full solipsism ensues. Exaggerated parenting places said child as the simply assumed centre of attention. The parents almost as a matter of pride fail to observe their effect on anyone else because they are only really concerned with being observed themselves. This can even extend to treading on you and then rather expecting that you apologise. 

After all what could be a greater expression of curating then a child.  

The Last Refuge

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 politics which increasingly taints discourse about these issues.  

In contrast, nationalism is about being better than anywhere else, exclusivist, chauvinistic, inward looking and increasingly xenophobic.  

One of the most outrageous statements by our egregious Prime Minister was the infamous: '“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere".

Where to begin with this arrant and dangerous nonsense. You can certainly take the piss out of it as this rather wonderful article does. 

However, it is also critical to challenge the notion that there is some kind of absolute dichotomy as she suggests. Many people feel absolutely no difficulty in describing themselves as having manifold identities. They see huge value in solidarity at the global level as well as at a local level. They are concerned about both exclusivist chauvinism and the kind of indifferent globalism that neoliberalism has inflicted where the gains accrue to tiny elites at the expense of the many (and which is indeed close to the heart of the resentment fuelling the politics of grievance being experienced in many countries).

We all benefit from wearing multiple hats; from seeing solidarity with others arising in various forms. A civic patriotism which is focused on the bonds between us is wholly different to a chauvinistic nationalism which emphasises difference and which for English people can never fully escape the connotations of empire, religion, war and class. 

As an unashamed left wing liberal who believes that political discourse should be led by values and principles and founded on equal respect for all human beings, the essentially arbitrary groupings of people on parcels of land that have arisen over the centuries are, for me, of much less importance. I know I'm an extreme example of this view but bear with me. 

It seems absolutely self evident that co-operation, inter dependence and facing outwards are the only way to make headway on the most important challenges facing humanity - economic, environmental and on security. Backward looking reactionary attachments to a little island at the expense of all else is wholly perverse. 

Yet the reason that it is so pervasive is largely down to the collective failure to come to terms with our history - particularly Empire and war - and in particular to stop mythologising some kind of inherent virtue of 'standing alone' on the basis of what was in retrospect a lucky escape in the second world war in which we were bailed out by our allies. 

The right lesson to learn is that we stood up to the most vile genocidal regime imaginable and made a huge contribution to defeating it. The wrong lesson is that we are somehow still a top dog. The British Empire was primarily a mechanism for exploitation and expropriation. Many in the 18th and 19th centuries would have been quite happy to accept that description because they felt that Britain had indeed come as close to perfection as it was possible to be. Our so called constitution and the mother of parliaments was as good as it got. Heap on some pretty nasty eugenics and the 'white man's burden' and you have a delicious brew of self justification. 

The Empire was nothing of which to be proud but it retains a hold over may of the posh white men and women that still wield disproportionate influence. Many of those who led the Leave campaign were actually brought up in what would have been described as the 'colonies' and harbour some ridiculous notions about the sceptred isle as a result. 

So when we translate some of this baggage into the current highly charged and polarised climate there are some very clear dangers. Polarisation has been massively exacerbated by the obscenity of the referendum on the European Union. There is now a real danger that beliefs come to be seen as cultural issues associated with identity and are manifest most obviously in antagonism towards people who are not from this 'nation' - obviously immigrants but indeed increasingly anyone from anywhere other than England.

In other words, language about change, about class and about identity, particularly white identity, has now become heavily imbued with a sense that it must be accompanied by a stridently nationalistic outlook ('take back control' anybody?) and that anyone questioning it is somehow a traitor. 

This is, however, a development that has been led by the very same posh white men and women who harbour extreme views about class and nation, well captured in this article which ends by saying : 

Xenophobia and racism are real, but not congenital. They can be overcome by treating working-class communities as places of worth and value, investing in them over the long term rather than through a constant churn of here-today-gone-tomorrow interventions.

The complex reality of the working class is that it’s white and brown, Muslim and Christian, builds cars and works at McDonald’s. Only by having a broad, nuanced understanding of this, and rejecting simplistic just-so stories, can we find solutions that will improve material conditions for everyone.

The War is again instructive. It led to the formation of close bonds in communities facing an external threat on an unimaginable scale. Listening to people from my parents generation who lived through it was also illuminating. The men who were in the army but had what might be described as an 'if it moves salute it, if it doesn't paint it white' experience of boring mundane life largely removed from the main theatres of war talked endlessly about their common experiences usually accompanied by raucous laughter.  The men who had seen serious action never spoke of it at all.  

All of them after the war were clear about the need for international co-operation to stop more of the same happening again. My parents and their friends were members of the international friendship league which pretty much did what it said on the tin. 

These were the very people who had just been through the war and survived it. Unlike the latter day maniacs from Leave who never had these experiences but feel somehow able to pontificate as if they have a ghostly direct line to Winston. 

Being patriotic means wanting a good way of life here with an economy and a society that do as well they can for as many people as possible. 

On that basis alone leaving the European Union out of some crazy and hazy notion that we can be top dog again is utterly absurd. 

Indeed it is the example par excellence of where petty nationalism flies in the face of true patriotism. 

Shape Shifting With Solids

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 - on the wall after a nuclear explosion. 

Yet the exhibition does show us more of the Giacometti that is much less well known and which should be celebrated. Not so much his painting which for me adds little but his earlier sculpture and his commercial design work from the period before the War.

These are more playful; in some cases Surreal and in some cases clearly influenced by other cultures that were important for many artists in the period notably African art but in the case of Giacometti, particularly Egyptian art and also, for me at least, the Moai of Easter Island.

The most profound insight though is the similarity of some of the sculpture to the wonders of Brancusi with a common emphasis on minimum interventions to allow the nature of the material to speak whether that is stone or metal or wood. The beauty of these sculptures is a reflection of the justly famous and profound Brancusi aphorism that 'simplicity is resolved complexity'. In other words the sculptor has gone through the mill to do as little as possible whilst conveying as much as possible in the relatively small number of interventions that are made. 

Two things come across most strongly from all of this work and form common threads across his whole output: first, an obsessive observation of detail and worrying away at the heart of the matter and secondly, a fascination with perspective. 

At one stage that emphasis on perspective was particularly concerned with distance. His tiny heads and figures are a reflection of seeing images and people from afar; glimpsed and evanescent. When conveyed through the medium of plaster the sheer roughness of the surface reflects the lack of certainty about the actual form but also the degree to which there are certain basic facts about any individual which are observable immediately from any distance. And that is surely the genius here: to capture something of the essence in the way that we as humans do when we see others without necessarily needing or indeed expecting to see all of the detail.  

These tiny heads are also endlessly protean. I particularly loved one of the French writer Simone de Beauvoir. A photograph cannot possibly do justice to the extraordinarily tactile and mercurial effects that Giacometti produces. Looking at this tiny piece from different angles gives wholly different perspectives: it's like shape shifting with solids with a different personality and indeed age of life revealed depending on your vantage point.

There is also a glorious drawing made by Giacometti (not in the exhibition) in preparation for the sculpture which is a classic pose but from which the sculpted version takes flight into completely different dimensions. 

Finally, here is the great man in classic pose in the mid 1960s; tousled hair, cigarette, slightly down at heel. The picture seems to perfectly capture his weight of experience to the extent that the strangely elongated hand suggests that even he is in need of a disembodied arm to support his head.

We for our part can be grateful that - with or without the arm - he produced such astonishing work, often dark and despairing in tone but reflecting a truly humanist ambition to reflect as much as he genuinely could of his fellow human beings; and nothing more. 

Trauma In A Car Park: Dalliances With Crap TV

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 Flaked (on Netflix). 

The British programmes are at some pains to suggest that their cake is sourced wholly from organic ingredients and will provide roughage. So we have top quality lead actors; intriguing personal back stories; local rootedness and a deliberate sense of grit.

Ultimately, however, they always seem to suffer chronically from: 

- trauma in a car park. Deep personal crises are revealed, often at some volume because they have been bottled up for so long but particularly because they have been bottled up on a car journey, in a public place so that it is then possible for someone to look suitably windswept and desolate to emphasise that this has been a personal crisis. This is frequently associated with .... 

- having to be somewhere else. Personal trauma has an amazing ability to unlock flashes of penetrating insight and to alert all colleagues that they urgently need to phone or text the person undergoing the major crisis. The inexorable consequence is that the crisis ridden individual then has to run, ride, hitch, harness or otherwise transport themselves at high speed towards ... 

- the place that they should have known was important from a much earlier point in proceedings. These seem to come in two main types. One is typically damp. There is something about water and dripping pipes, plentiful moss and ubiquitous dilapidation that has set designers going absolutely gaga. The other is posh, polished and pristine and can be guaranteed to sport a magnificent and huge kitchen full of implements that one never knew could look so threatening. In one or other of these places ...

- the top quality lead actor will do something clever having previously arranged a load of stuff which there wasn't really time to explain to anyone else let alone the viewer. That car with the bomb under it. Don't stress we've sorted that. The chap you've just worked out is the killer, immediately decides to run off in a high profile way because he has a telepathic understanding of your moment of insight all those miles away in the car park (see above). Of course he runs directly to the damp place or the pristine place (see above) but sufficiently slowly that the top quality lead actor is able to follow him. After the clever thing has happened there has to be a few moments for ...

- the universe, having been out of kilter for the previous five episodes, to resolve the world order so that everything is back on it's axis and a thousand previously impossible things happen in moments. Shady types who were almost omnipotent in their malign elusiveness are suddenly dropping to their knees when merely approached by your common or garden Dixon of Dock Green bobby; previously wildly over acting Masters of Oxbridge colleges are found slumped with the equivalent of the pearl handled revolver or the glass of whisky having decided that suddenly it is all too much. After which we may have ...

- deep personal trauma in a car park redux because whilst professional clever things have to happen there has to be another scene in a public place (who knew car parks could be so full of drama) in which wind-sweptness can return albeit with a touch more sun this time because the talking cure has worked a degree of magic and the trauma is not quite as bad as it had been. 

The lesson that we might draw from this is that given the crap weather in the UK the emotional state of the main protagonist can be deduced with considerable confidence just from the amount of natural light in any given car park and the length of the preceding car journey. 

Whilst these are useful insights to fully appreciating not very good British crime dramas when it comes to US dramadies life is more straightforward:

- this is California so the weather is never less than magnificent which means that inner emotional states cannot be signposted by the weather and being hipster types people ride bikes in scenic locations so that they don't have the chance to engage in emotional dramas in car parks. But ...

- none of this matters because the only things that happen are some some very, very tired tropes about good looking flawed guys having an endless supply of attractive women with whom to have mixed up relationships; quirky friends who are just mixed up enough to provide a plausible foil but who are by most standards very good looking; all against the backdrop of magnificent houses or Venice Beach; and that ...

- since everyone is in therapy or recovery they can talk in detail about their deep personal crises without needing to do it in the car park.

There are worse things than cows on the line

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. Atlas didn't shrug at the effort involved in doing that.

2. Anti-intellectualism. Often now seen in the derision poured on experts. Again a characteristic of the charlatan, the demagogue and the populist to avoid scrutiny from people who might actually know what they're taking about. Without expertise we end up simply with opinion which rapidly shades over into prejudice. Having freed ourselves largely from the shackles of religion and recognised that logic and evidence and indeed facts are a rather better basis for making decisions we move away valuing intellectual and expert contributions at our enormous peril. Just look at the con man sitting in the Oval Office. A vulgar buffoon with the attention span of a newt and an ego the size of a (small) planet.

3. Anti-Enlightenment(arianism). The critical values of the Enlightenment are scepticism, rationality, tolerance and the recognition of the value of the individual. They established the public square for debate and discussion. All are inimical to populist, authoritarian, regressive and nativist prejudice. These are the core values of civilisation. They need all our support and rigorous defence including unbending intolerance of the intolerant. 

4. Self-improvement. A malign obsession linked to the dreaded 'positive thinking'; one of the most ridiculous and pernicious of doctrines, the stuff of snake oil salesmen the world over. Imagine it and you can be it! Maximum happiness guaranteed. So much the better if we would instead focus on self-reflection - a genuinely helpful approach to understanding our place in the world and our relationships with others. All the better again if this is accompanied by the willingness to embrace failure, pessimism and uncertainty all of which are the natural state of we flawed creatures. We'd all be a great deal happier as a result.

5. Transformation. A much abused term but reflecting a desire to makeover, to fundamentally change ourselves and particularly to look for magic cures for unhappiness, illness or obesity. The truth is that small, moderate, balanced improvements are almost always the right course to follow and have much the better chance of being effective and sustainable. Magical thinking is always just that: the stuff of fairies at the bottom of the garden. Leave it there with the compost.

6. Majoritarianism. Obscenities such as referendums are consistent with democracy only when seen solely as majoritarianism and an unhealthy desire to divide and direct fire at on out group in order to justify all kinds of malign activity such as dismantling the rule of law. In effect a form of popular dictatorship. That's why they are the plaything of the demagogue and the populist. A liberal democracy starts from the perspective that the main characteristics of any system are to be plural, to embrace nuance and to recognise that the world is a mess: its manifold not binary and anyone who tells you the contrary is doubtless up to no good.  

Ditch 'em all!

Six Minutes of Aural Beauty and some Burnt Sienna

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 line and the arrangement; a beat that just invites participation and the most fabulous guitar solo at about 3 minutes 40" after a wonderful pause following which the whole band crash in again. 

And then there's the lyrics. 

They are as usual very clever.

"I'm talking to you in bar code' so you're going to have to do some work to decipher what I mean and to do so you need the right scanner. The artists mentioned in the song all had tragic ends and as it says might well have been channeled by Tom Waits as a troubadour of gloom.

But there's more. 

"You can make me

seem like you

OK I like you

you can me me like you

OK I'm like you"

So do I like you or seem like you? Well it's both - isn't it? The tragic artists asking for their later readers and listeners to keep them alive, colouring them in the rich but sombre yellow brown, the kind of colour one might find on a Roman fresco or a Renaissance house in a Tuscan hill town. It's an earth colour, one for which we have an instinctive feel, it's ancient but protean; it feels as though it has been with us forever and is endlessly rediscovered by generation after generation.

You have to draw your own painting from 'someone else's well head' but there are so many from which to choose. A rich history of poetry and talent whether its Elvis or Marlowe or Piaf. All were young once and indeed as Elvis sings Return to Sender we are all momentarily younger; it's evanescent but that doesn't matter. Whilst it happens it's real. 

And that surely is the beauty. The tragedy is part of it. When you seal it with a kiss you are keeping the spirit alive; you are both them and like them because you want to be and you want to be because they are describing emotions and states that are common to us all as human beings. Just doing so from the vantage point of prodigious powers of artistic interpretation. 

I love this song so much. It plays to your brain and your heart in equal measure; you can make a ribolitta whilst dancing round the kitchen drinking wine and shouting about politics and love. 

A glorious uplifting anthem to tragic poets and eternal human emotions. 

Pourquoi J'Aime 'Les Amants'

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 rhapsodic and all encompassing sequence when the lovers wander at night from the well tended parterre into the wild garden (in a way that Andrew Marvell would have recognised and applauded) that elevates this beyond being a simply fine film into something quite extraordinary.

In her white nightdress and flowing hair, Jeanne is back to a wildness rather than the primped and pristine figure of the first hour of the film.

The lovers free fish trapped in a cage by Jeanne's husband as they cross a stream before gliding without oars on a boat across the lake because 'there's no resisting happiness'.

And it's that sense of complete mutual submission and lack of constraint that is captured so perfectly by Malle and which goes into complete overdrive with the extraordinarily well matched Brahms which in itself can create a knee tremor at fifty paces.

The tropes of folk tales involving lovers meeting at night are then completed by the cockerel crowing in the dawn. At this point the lover should either vanish or, if you're particularly unlucky, turn out to have been dead all along.

In this case neither. Instead there is a wonderfully observed sequence in which love and doubt intermingle as the mundane and the quotidian intervene to ever greater extent.

And the beauty of it is that Malle is sufficiently brave to end the film by showing both. Akin to The Dolls House, Jeanne may go, and she may well go alone, but that delirious night is the experience - for which she has absolutely no regret - that allows her to do so.

Some audiences at the time (1958) were scandalised. Now all we see is the most delirious account of two people meeting and saying to each other: 'I've known you forever'.