Museum Hours

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 ...

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 ...

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...

"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 ...

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 rev...