The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions
After Neruda Facing you I am not jealous. If you arrived with a man on your back, or a hundred men hanging in the rigging of your hair, or a thousand men sleeping on the soft mound of your belly, if you were a river filled with drowned men met by the furious sea foaming at its mouth, by eternal weather — if you arrived with them all where I wait for you, I would not be jealous. We will always be alone. We will always be, you and I, alone on this earth to begin life.
This May, David Goodhart’s latest book, The British Dream: Successes and Failures of Post-war Immigration, earned him the title of ‘too hot for Hay’ when he was ‘shunned’ by the literary festival. The festival director, Peter Florence, went on to describe the book as ‘sensationalist’ and ‘not very good’. But all was not lost. As event chair Andrew Neil put it: ‘What the Hay festival missed, The Spectator brought to you’, with a special panel on immigration last Tuesday, 9 July. Goodhart was joined on the panel by the Mail on Sunday’s Peter Hitchens, former Mayor of London Ken Livingstone, the former chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission Trevor
Deborah Ross reviews two films for us this week. The first is Pacific Rim, a ‘giant monsters v. giant robots’ film, and to be perfectly honest, that’s about all she has to say on the matter. If you do want to find out more, here’s the trailer: Her second film this week is ‘The Moo Man’, which is almost the opposite of Pacific Rim. ‘Instead of being a big, noisy film with nothing to say, it’s a small, quiet film with quite a lot to say’. A documentary following a dairy farmer around his East Sussex farm, it is ‘beautifully and lovingly and discreetly filmed’, it says everything it has
Tapestries once had a place of honour in fine art, but that was during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Oil paintings, for a time, were viewed as the poor man’s tapestry. Now, that equation may be turning round. ‘Tapestries serve a lot of purposes,’ said Donald Farnsworth, president of Magnolia Editions, which has produced tapestries for artists such as Chuck Close, April Gornik, Alex Katz, Ed Moses, Gerhard Richter, Kiki Smith, William Wiley and others. ‘They absorb sound and add warmth to a room.’ But can they also be taken seriously as works of art? They are certainly priced like them. Five large-scale tapestries by Chuck Close were exhibited
Out and about in Surrey on Sunday I happened upon a scene that could have been played out 77 years ago. It was mid-afternoon on that glorious sunshiny day. Lunch just about over. The pub had a large garden with tables neatly shaded by leafy pergolas. A family group had finished their meal but were still huddled round the table, on which in pride of place, amid the empty plates and half-filled glasses, sat a green-and-cream Roberts, aerial aloft. They’d taken the chance (the village pub had no TV) that from words and sound alone they’d not miss a forehand slice or backhand volley. They were confident that the Radio
Last week I was on holiday with my family on the Algarve. The good news was that, thanks to the BBC’s widespread availability in Portugal, we didn’t miss out on Murray at Wimbledon. The bad news was that, for the same reason, we couldn’t escape The Apprentice. But this isn’t an anti-Apprentice column. It’s an anti-BBC column prompted in part by something annoying somebody said to me on Twitter the other day. I’d written, not for the first time, that I considered the BBC ‘a total waste of money’. And the tweeter replied primly, ‘The BBC is a total waste of money or actually you quite like Today, Proms, Glasto,
It’s always a problem with Macbeth: what accents to use? The Globe is applying the traditional remedy. Lord and Lady Macbeth come from Epsom. Everyone else comes from Glasgow. This is a highly entertaining production — one of the best at the Globe in recent years — but it’s not entirely perfect. Joseph Millson has pretty much everything you need to play Macbeth, good looks, physical stature, a soldierly bearing and a dash of melancholy. But he has something you don’t need at all. A gift for laughter. He’s such an instinctive comedian that he sends the audience into fits, without noticing it, by accident almost. And in the oddest
What exactly are the ‘secrets of the royal bedchamber’? That the actual bed was seldom if ever slept in let alone used for romping sex (the latter took place in private bedchambers, often barred off by an ingenious system of locks). But the royal bedchamber was, as the organisers of this exhibition state, ‘the equivalent of the modern-day boardroom’, where government decisions were made and private access to the monarch gained. Those who controlled that access were the most important members of the court. They may have been awarded earldoms, but they vied for jobs that involved serving the monarch at the most intimate (and demeaning) level. The point of
As more time elapses since the regrettable fracas over Kitaj’s 1994 Tate exhibition and his tragic suicide in 2007, he comes more and more into his own as a great but still underrated artist. When I last wrote about him in this column, back in April, I had not yet seen the portion of his Berlin-originated retrospective which was shown at Pallant House in Chichester. Happily I managed to get there before it closed and was once again deeply impressed by the range and painterly intelligence of this extraordinary artist. Now another couple of shows pay justified tribute to his genius, this time as manifested through his printed work. After
Pacific Rim is a giant monsters v. giant robots film and although written and directed by Guillermo del Toro, who made Pan’s Labyrinth, which was sublime, it’s still just a giant monsters v. giant robots film, and now we have dealt with that, we can move on to The Moo Man. The Moo Man is not like Pacific Rim. There are no giant monsters seeking to destroy the world, and no giant robots seeking to protect it. There is no CGI, no 3D, no battle scenes, no violently thumping soundtrack, no action — bar a day trip to Eastbourne — and no token woman who is feisty, as is the
I’m not the first person to remark that Verdi is getting oddly little attention in this his bicentenary year, especially when compared with his contemporary Wagner who, despite the usually much greater demands his works make in almost all respects, is not only receiving plenty of performances, but is also the subject of even more books than usual, not all of them about his alleged faults of character. Yet Verdi shouldn’t be less controversial a figure than Wagner; it’s just that Wagner stimulates people to react in such intense ways, while they placidly accept Verdi as an energising tunesmith and a decent patriot, ardent for the unification of Italy in
Gosh. I wouldn’t mind being Peter Nichols. Eighty-six this month and still enjoying the easy domesticity and professional stimulation he’s benefited from since the 1960s when he was propelled to stardom by his play about raising a disabled daughter, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. He lives in a penthouse flat in north Oxford on the verge of cow-dappled meadows, tufty footpaths and a low grey canal full of quacky coots and ducklings. He’s fit, sharp-witted and fun to be around. (After our interview he and his wife called a cab and went off to Corpus Christi to knock back champagne at a summer party.) He dismisses his
Invisible hand that jangles the lantern over the porch and tells the leaves on the pond to imagine they are clippers and wrenches the shed door , and makes leylandii lurch, unnerving the cat, wobbling the elderly; that viciously clobbers pedestrians at the corner, then snatches up bills and payslips put out for recycling and juggles with them; that gibbers and squeaks through gaps in your sealed units; that laughs as it swipes her portfolio of art, the pantechnicon of his life’s work, in fits when a cone skedaddles like a clown or turning Dalek wipes the smile off its fierceness and swivels a death-ray that hits your moped, your
Those who lament sluggishness in contemporary stagings of Balanchine’s ballets — and those who are responsible for it — should have seen and learnt from Boston Ballet last week. Forget the funereal tempi we, in the old world, are forced to accept because of the killjoy aesthetics favoured by artistically challenged ballet directors and teachers. Boston Ballet’s Serenade had all one would wish for: quick, sparkling tempi, a splendid use of the space, majestic flow and gusto galore. It’s true that precision might have gone astray now and then, but never in a major way; besides, real artistry has always had little to do with precision. What I particularly enjoyed
‘Oh, some of my films have been attacked with absolute vitriol!’ said Nicolas Roeg, 85, and still one of the darkest and most innovative of post-war British directors. We were sitting in his study in Notting Hill; nearby in Powis Square is the house Roeg used for his 1968 debut, Performance, starring Mick Jagger as the rock star who entices a gangster (James Fox) into a drug-induced identity crisis. The film was shelved for a year before Warner Brothers dared to release it. ‘The critics didn’t always get it then — but they do seem to now,’ said Roeg. Roeg was born in 1928 in St John’s Wood into a
just to tell you there is nothing better almost nothing better than getting into bed in the middle of the afternoon when the sun shines down outside and you are perfectly well shedding your clothes one arm under pillow having no sense of ambition beyond this experiment with quiet having learned something from the cat herself curled up under a garden bush
This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau. This is the picture I painted to show That this is the Tiger, so supple and eager. And this is the customs man, suited and meagre, And what do we wonder and what do we know? This is the Tiger and this is Rousseau. I am Rousseau and I painted the Tiger, The Tiger so fierce and the Tiger so free. This is the jungle, the terrible tangle, And these are the teeth that will torture and mangle, And all of it up on the wall as you see. This is the Tiger and this? This is me. This is the man
Belated thanks to readers who wrote in about the BBC’s Question Time last week (still viewable here). It was a slightly odd edition, I thought. The panel – Margaret Hodge, Danny Alexander, Sarah Woollaston, Tony Robinson and me – found ourselves in agreement on more things than is usual on the show. On party-funding we agreed that the parties are all in a mess – albeit in slightly different ways. Likewise we thought that although there may be an argument for it, this isn’t a great moment to raise MPs pay. We all wanted the NHS to remain solvent, though disagreed on the priorities. And everyone was concerned about the coup
I seem to have been steeped in opera lately. First there was Ariadne auf Naxos at Glyndebourne, then Peter Grimes on the beach at Aldeburgh, and now Wagner’s complete Ring cycle at Longborough in Gloucestershire, all within the space of three weeks. As I write, I haven’t quite seen the whole Ring cycle — there is still one more opera, Götterdämmerung, to come — but it is already plain that something astonishing has happened. Martin Graham, who has lived for most of his life in a Cotswold manor house with a tremendous view next to the little village of Longborough near Stow-on-the-Wold, decided 30 years ago with his wife Lizzie
Alan Turing, the man who developed the Enigma code that saved the Allied war effort, was not merely disregarded by his country. A homosexual, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ in 1952 and chemically castrated via forced oestrogen injections. Under unimaginable duress, he committed suicide. That it took until 2009 for the British government to apologise only compounds the scandal. Turing’s story is told in Codebreaker, a docudrama that combines reenactments of conversations between Turing, played by Ed Stoppard (above), and his psychiatrist (the German Jewish refugee Franz Greenbaum), and interviews with experts on his life and work. One after another, they attest to Turing’s brilliance as the man who