The Invisible Province

Sport, depression and the death of Robert Enke

2012-01-24T14:26:00.012Z

There is a strong fascist bias in our relationship to professional athletes. We expect them to be paradigms of physical and psychological strength. These are the men and women who have actively trained away the weaknesses of mind and body that most of us passively accept. They have achieved a state of perfection that sets them apart as superhuman. It is this we admire in them. It is this that fills stadiums, sells tickets and clinches sponsorship deals. We want them to wear a carapace of invincibility.

But should they show signs of frailty or weakness then, public adulation can quickly turn to disappointment. And, worse still, should this become a sustained weakness then the athlete will be exposed to an intense scrutiny under an exacting audience that usually results in them being expelled from the divine sporting pantheon. They fall to earth as figures of public pity or ridicule. Chad Harbach’s critically acclaimed novel, The Art of Fielding, nails this tension through the rise and fall of his baseball protagonist, Henry Skrimshander. He writes:

We all have our doubts and fragilities, but poor Henry had to face his in public at appointed times, with half the crowd anxiously counting on him and the other half cheering for him to fail.

This year’s William Hill Sports book of the year, A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng is a disturbing account of how public and professional expectations can place terrible pressures on sportspeople. While the rewards for those who excel in a particular sport may be enormous (both in terms of public acclaim and wealth), this can turn into a Faustian pact, with men and women trading their souls and, in some cases, losing their lives for the promise of success.

On 10 November 2009, Robert Enke, threw himself in front of a passing train. He was a goalkeeper for the German football team and would probably have represented his country at the 2010 World Cup. From an early age he was recognised as being an outstanding talent: physically strong, intelligent, with an instinctive sense of space, excellent reactions and a radar like sensitivity to the position of players and the ball. He was admired by both peers and fans as a formidable goalkeeping presence. But Robert Enke was also a man who suffered from severe bouts of clinical depression which he hid for fear of looking weak. After his first game for Fenerbahce in Turkey went disastrously wrong, Enke wrote in his diary:

11.08.2003. I’m finished. We lost the game 0-3. Didn’t look good from the first goal. After that I was very nervous in the second half. Was mocked by some of the fans...Would like to get away from Istanbul, do a proper course of therapy at last. At any rate, it can’t go on. Understood yesterday that I’m simply not up to the demands...Terri (his wife) just rang and had to put the phone down again to cry. I feel helpless and anxious. I don’t leave the hotel room, I’m afraid of people’s eyes. I’d just like to live without anxiety and nerves.

The emotional honesty of Enke’s diary entries provide valuable insights into the nature of depression itself – the feelings of isolation, anxiety and inertia. Reng gives us a clinical glimpse inside Enke’s head. But we also see how his position as an international goalkeeper compounds his anguish. The goalkeeper is the last line of defence. Everything is literally in his hands. Enke’s Barcelona team-mate, Victor Valdes talks of the goalie’s “special sort of suffering”. The goalkeeper is at once part of a team and a figure who stands alone. Tactical and defence errors may result in a goal but it is the goalkeeper who lets the goal in. He must live with this failure.

One psychiatrist who cared for Enke told him that his problem was that he had never learnt to live with his mistakes. He reminded the goalkeeper that “a mistake wasn’t the whole game, a game was never the whole season, a season wasn’t a career. A career isn’t a life.” Enke could accept the principle intellectually but he was incapable of integrating it into his personality. “If you could have my head for half an hour,” he told his wife, “you’d know why I go mad.”

Like so many sportspeople, Enke found it impossible to admit to his psychological and emotional difficulties. He kept burying them for fear of being outed as weak. This contributed to his unhappiness and mental dissolution. But recently some professional athletes have been willing to talk about how the pressures of their particular sport has played into their feelings of depression. Respected figures such as Marcus Trescothick, Jonny Wilkinson and Stan Collymore have spoken openly about the crushing self-doubt and emotional turmoil that they have battled with. They have brought this hidden subject out into the open. While we may fantasise that our sporting heroes are invincible, such brave testimonies remind us that sportsmen and women are not immune from the fragility of the human condition.

A Life Too Short: The Tragedy of Robert Enke by Ronald Reng, Yellow Jersey Press, London, 2011

Steve McQueen's Shame

2012-01-17T16:48:00.014Z

Too much discussion has revolved around the raw images of loveless sex in Steve McQueen’s remarkable film, Shame. It is true that this is not a film for the prude. Yet, Shame is no arthouse exercise in soft porn, a vulgar excuse for adolescent prurience or a sexual addiction “issue” film. It is a serious film with a moral core - film making of the highest order and executed with an uncompromisingly adult attitude.

The images that really matter in Shame, that penetrate the imagination, are those lyrical ones that mark this film out as an ambitious tone poem about the shame that shapes the human condition. In theological terms, the shame of Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise becomes in McQueen’s film, the shame of brother and sister who cannot connect with themselves or others.

The film opens with an image of devastating beauty. The handsome, thirty something, Brandon (Michael Fassbender), lies sprawled naked from the waist up on a bed. The deathly paleness of his flesh contrasts with the rich aquamarine of the sheets. Framing the image at a disorientating angle, McQueen signals that one of the interests of his film will be the nature of perspective and how shifting views of people undermine our superficial judgements. We may want Brandon to play to the caricature of the “sex maniac,” but he doesn’t. We may want to dismiss him as a sleazy pervert or admire him as an internet age Lothario, but neither of these crude perspectives do justice to the complex character on the screen.

McQueen’s opening cinematic image employs all the artistic attention of a Renaissance painting and clearly references Christ in the tomb images. But like the greatest Renaissance art, this highly accomplished image contains depths of meaning that elicit from the viewer responses beyond mere technical admiration. Brandon is entombed by his addiction. He is, in Norman Mailer’s famous phrase, “a prisoner of sex”. Brandon’s misery and self-loathing are communicated in his uncomprehending, dead-eye stare. There is darkness in his eyes. The bed where this man exercises his priapic lust is also the place where he finds himself most alone and alienated. What should be a place of sleep becomes a metaphor for a tormenting, existential insomnia that deprives Brandon of life’s most essential element: love.

In a pivotal scene, Brandon goes to see his sister, Sissy (Carey Mulligan), sing in a snazzy club with a breathtaking panorama of the city. McQueen uses his signature film device of holding the camera on a scene and letting the action play out in real time, with the minimum of editing or tricksy camera work. Using a static close-up of her head, McQueen films Sissy singing New York, New York. But this is not the big band, razzmatazz anthem to the Big Apple that we are familiar with. Sissy’s rendition is mournful, brittle, extracting from the lyrics and musical arrangement an emotional dissonance that mirrors what is going on in her and Brandon’s respective lives. If I could make it there, I’d make it anywhere...The scene tests the endurance of the viewer. McQueen does not flinch. Can we bear to watch such naked suffering or will we turn away? As his sister sings, Brandon tears up and, for the first time, the pain within the man bleeds to the surface.

The third main character in Shame is the city. McQueen’s New York is cast in dark hues. Nightclubs are bathed in a palate of sweaty reds. The modernist sheen of offices and apartments are drained of any human warmth. Subway platforms are purgatorial antechambers. Trains ferry morose souls across the Styx of the urban sprawl to unknown destinations. It is a godless place. Having been betrayed by the promises of instant happiness and gratification, people are seen trying to rescue something of recognisable value from the rubble of their lives.

Against the backdrop of the city, Brandon goes jogging. In one continuous, uninterrupted scene McQueen’s camera tracks Brandon as he pounds the streets. Here is the loneliness of the long distance runner - Brandon running from all his internal hurt and trying to sweat his onanistic passions into submission. The image hums with a poetic density, whose meaning evades easy description and complacent thinking. A man jogging at night in a city suddenly acquires a universal resonance and significance. We recognise something of our own fragility in this action. The jogging scene is exquisite and heartbreaking like so much in this great film.

The ferocious, emotionally naked acting of Fassbender and Mulligan has been widely praised. I hope they continue to win awards for their coruscating performances. But, for me, Shame is all about the visual image and a reminder of how cinema can approach the mystery of who we are with startling, profound perspectives.

Mission Impossible vs The Artist: Sound and fury vs silence

2012-01-11T14:48:00.021Z

Two recent films – Mission Impossible and The Artist – provide contradictory cinematic experiences and ask the audience to engage with the medium of film in different ways. Both films are interesting because they are box office draws and have received favourable critical reviews. The Artist (though, in my view, hugely overrrated) is hotly tipped to win Oscars this year. But The Invisible Province is interested in the question of our engagement with a film –not so much the fact that we do engage with a film, but what that engagement looks like.

Is there a place for a cinema that requires our attention and concentration? Or will the dominant tendency in film be to cater for the diminishing attention span of audiences who simply want the relentless activity (with a car chase thrown in) and white noise (but turned up to full volume) that mirrors so much of contemporary urban life? Is some kind of synthesis possible that bridges these differing expressions of engagement? Mission Impossible and The Artist provide some clues to possible answers.

The latest episode of the Tom Cruise Mission Impossible franchise is filmmaking for the Play station generation. Ghost Protocol jettisons narrative in favour of action set pieces that comprise different levels of difficulty for Ethan Hunt and his crack team. The film is littered with props and gadgets: adhesive gloves, a scanning contact lens, masks and guns. This is paraphernalia lifted from the virtual worlds of the computer game, the equipment that a contestant wins as he hits scores and climbs levels. But the computer game influence is also evident in the film’s pace, editing and aesthetic of Heraclitean flux. There is no opportunity to look at anything, to savour or reflect on an image, because everything passes as a Formula 1 blur.

Faced with such lobotomised filmmaking, all an audience is required to do is to be directed from one frenetic set piece to the next while shutting down any critical mental faculties en route. With one’s synapses besieged by the film’s sound and fury, the characters on screen are no longer required to resemble anything remotely human. There are buff bod's, hot chicks and IT geeks in this caricature paradise. All they have to do is kick ass and perform gymnastic tricks in exotic locations. The only method acting in this movie is performed by Tom Cruise’s hair. The violence comes from the Road Runner/Coyote stable (the director, Brad Bird, previously directed the Pixar animation hit, The Incredibles) and it exists outside any recognisable moral universe, except the most infantile one of goodies and baddies.

The argument in favour of movies like Mission Impossible is that it is popular entertainment with pretensions to nothing higher than a big box office return. It gives the popcorn audience what it wants is the usual defense. That may be true and the huge numbers going to see this film suggest that it is delivering the goods. Although giving people what they think they want is not the same as giving them something of value – something that allows them to reflect on themselves and others in a less predictable, clichéd manner.

But the failure of a film like Mission Impossible is not that it provides mere entertainment (being entertained is an important thing) but that it debases the language of tension, suspense, and ambiguity by impersonating a foreign medium, the computer game. It is the unique cinematic syntax associated with the thriller/action movie that makes an Alfred Hitchcock film so compelling or the Waterloo chase sequence that opens The Bourne Ultimatum so edge-of-seat exciting. Without this common, fully developed language, an audience is turned into passive, disengaged viewers. They are fed thin cinematic gruel that leaves them cinematically malnourished. Up until this point in time, cinema’s main interests existed independently of the attitudes and aesthetic of the Wii or the Play station. This is changing and with this change the engagement with a film becomes less focussed and more distracted.

The Artist takes us back to the early days of cinema – the silent movie. It reminds us of how audiences engaged with a film, less as a piece of entertainment and more as an event. Some of the most poignant moments in this novelty film are images of a cinema full of people watching a silent movie and having an emotional experience – visibly expressing emotions of happiness, sadness or fear. In that age of cinema, the viewer had to engage with the story. They had the job of interpreting the visual mood of a piece or the emotions the actors on screen were attempting to communicate.

The silent movie demanded directorial storytelling skill and expressiveness. Viable narrative arcs existed which allowed the viewer not only to follow the story with ease but to contribute to the plot development in an active manner. What was left unspoken on screen, found a voice in the imagination of the viewer. In this way, the viewer began to form their own cinematic lexicon with which to engage with the images on the screen.

Two very different films. Two very different ways for an audience to engage with a film. The popularity of The Artist suggests that there may still be an appetite for films that make an audience work. Yet, it is Ghost Protocol that will father a litter of poor imitations who will, in turn, fill our multiplex screens and leave audiences, if not speechless, then, probably dumb.

The Invisible Province's Favourite Films of 2011

2011-12-23T19:50:00.027Z

A number of people have asked The Invisible Province to come clean about his favourite films of 2011. So, here are The Invisible Province’s top 6 (I couldn't decide) memorable movies – in no particular order.

1. A Separation directed by Asghar Farhadi

2. Tyrannosaur directed by Paddy Considine

3. We Need To Talk About Kevin directed by Lynne Ramsay

4. Senna directed by Asif Kapadia

5. Weekend directed by Andrew Haigh. The only film that The Invisible Province did not write about. So what is there to say? A small budget movie that is beautifully written, performed and realised. It has a remarkable honesty and candour and is not for the prudish. Its focus is on contemporary gay relationships but the central question about what makes for authentic or inauthentic love applies to all human relationships.

6. Blue Valentine directed by Derek Cianfrance

and the reissue of the year: Apocalypse Now by Francis Ford Coppola

and the disappointment of the year: Terence Malick's The Tree of Life...but still worth seeing even though it is a cinematic folly on an operatic scale.

...oh, and almost forget this....

2011-12-21T09:04:00.006Z

The Invisible Province's Top 5 Albums of the Year

2011-12-20T17:03:00.057Z

Here are some of the albums that The Invisible Province has been listening and grooving to in the past year. A top five, but in no particular order:

1. Raphael Saadiq's Stone Rollin'

Stone Rollin channels the sass of Motown, the funk of Paisley Park and the surf rock of California. But Saadiq achieves this without resorting to retro-soul mush - this is not just another poor imitation of the 1960's but a remaking of all that is glorious and urgent about the soul music of that vintage era. You know you've been here before but Saadiq makes you hear these riffs and melodies with a contemporary ear. Stone Rollin' is an ambitious reinvention of the past that makes you want to celebrate the present.

2. PJ Harvey's Let England Shake

I had the privilege of hearing PJ Harvey perform Let England Shake live at the Royal Albert Hall in November. It felt like I was present at a state of the nation address. It was a remarkable night. An album about war might have referenced Sassoon, Owen & co but Let England Shake is actually in the tradition of Byron, Shelley and Keats at their lyrical and angry best. If you want to hear English songwriting at its best then listen to this exceptional record.

3. James Blake's James Blake

This is an album of inventive sea-saw beats, electronic tics and dissonant auto-tuned vocals. It has a unique sensibility and is unlike anything you are likely to hear in the pop universe. Think Karl Stockhausen jamming with Massive Attack and you're close, but not very close, to the sound.James Blake is wildly beautiful and leaves you in a state of spellbound confusion. This is a truly modern piece of music making - no musical genuflections to the past, but a contemporaneity that is both complex, difficult and riveting. An album very much of the moment.

4. Radiohead's The King of Limbs

Radiohead have never been interested in commercial success and yet, they are one of the world's biggest and most critically acclaimed bands. How to explain this? The King of Limbs goes some way to providing an answer. Radiohead are famous for their unsettling soundscapes - disjointed rhythms, musical interference and Thom Yorke's siren voice. Abstract lyrics allow the listener to fill in the ambiguous gaps. All this is well known. Yet, what is not always recognised is that Radiohead can craft a beautiful melody (see Codex), tease out a bright guitar figure and turn a great pop song....they can also come up with a damn good video.

5. Bon Iver's Bon Iver

Bon Iver's Justin Vernon made a guest appearance on Kanye West's baroque hip hop opus, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and something of the expansive production values there inform his latest work. This is Bon Iver pimped. For fans of the compelling, For Emma, Forever Ago (2008), the news that Bon Iver have left behind that wintry, bruised feel for a more satuarated sound might be a cause for anxiety. Yet, Vernon's mournful, soulful falsetto remains. The intricately rendered love songs remain. The heartbreaking beauty remains.

and, might as well throw in, The Invisible Province's single of the year...a big, lush slice of romantic pop.

...oh, and almost forgot SHAME

2011-12-15T21:56:00.003Z

Shame, directed by Steve McQueen eta January 2012

What films will The Invisible Province be watching in 2012

2011-12-11T17:06:00.051Z

It looks like 2012 could be a good year for film. Some serious directors (Guillermo del Toro, Terence Malick, Ridley Scott, Baz Luhrman, etc) are releasing films in the coming twelve months. So, here are some of the cinematic treats that The Invisible Province is looking forward to in the coming year:

1. Prometheus
Director: Ridley Scott, ETA: June 1 2012

There is a lot of speculation on the internet ether about what this film is about. One theory is that Prometheus is a prequel to the Alien series(Ridley Scott directed the classic Alien film that spawned the franchise). Another blog theory, is that it is an autonomous Sci-fi adventure in which the aliens may or may not make an appearance. All we know is that (according to the actor, Michael Fassbender) it is "a journey to the darkest corners of the universe". Westfield, Stratford, then? In Westfield no one can hear you scream. Thirty years after Blade-Runner, the prospect of Ridley Scott returning to the sci-fi genre is reason to be intrigued and just a little bit over-excited.

2.The Dark Knight Rises
Director: Christopher Nolan, ETA: July 20 2012

Only the recent Batman films have come close to translating the action of the comic strip into something that feels like true cinema. Under Nolan's direction this has been achieved by emphasising the heart of darkness of his Gotham City superhero. This is the comic strip re-written by Albert Camus (actually it's his brother, Jonathan Nolan). What do we know about the latest movie? Anne Hathaway is Catwoman (which is a worry but it could have been worse, it could have been Halle Berry), Marion Cotillard is the new love interest and Tom Hardy has been down the gym again and plays a musclebound psychopath called Bane. Nolan has declared that this is the last Batman film he will be involved with which suggests that it could also be the grimmest and most explosive yet.

3. The Great Gatsby
ETA: autumn 2012, Director: Baz Luhrmann

Australia was a turkey, so it will be interesting to see if Baz Luhrmann gets back into the groove with his $125 million version of F Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, The Great Gatsby. The worry is that it will become another camp meringue, albeit where characters wear white suits and flapper dresses. Can Luhrmann tame his flamboyant directorial style or will the soul of the novel be lost in Luhrmann's jazz age kinetic editing? We wait and see. I suspect this will be a film that will divide critics and audiences. Leonardo DiCaprio and Carey Mulligan star and...did I mention, it's shot in 3D! I want this film to succeed (and if it does it might be brilliant) but there is a little sick feeling forming in the pit of my stomach.

4.Love
Director: Michael Haneke, ETA: autumn 2012

A new film by Michael Haneke is always an event. Plot details are sketchy but Love seems to be about an elderly French couple, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva (both of them in their eighties), whose relationship is severely strained when one of them suffers a stroke. Haneke has said that he is interested in exploring the process of ageing and the indignities of old age. Where Abercrombie youth is exalted, Haneke (ever the subversive) swims against the cinematic tide.

5. The Master
Director: PT Anderson, ETA: early 2013

Paul Thomas Anderson's films(There will be Blood, Magnolia, Boogie Nights) have always referenced religious fervour in an oblique manner, but The Master appears to be an explicit investigation of the varieties of religious experience. From what I can tell, the film centres around a
World War II veteran in the 1950s who decides to invent his own religion. The film has had terrible trouble finding financial backing which suggests that it is serious film making and not multiplex pulp. Philip Seymour Hoffman, Amy Adams, Joaquin Phoenix and Laura Dern are in the cast. I can't wait. Can't find any trailers or leaked clips so here is a reminder of PT Anderson's greatness:

And the best of the rest....

The Hobbit, directed by Peter Jackson...it's about small guys with hairy feet, you know.
Cosmopolis, directed by David Cronenberg...it will be interesting to see if a great director can bring the literary giant, Don deLillo, to the screen.
Seven Days, directed by Michael Winterbottom...the greatest living British auteur?
The Burial, directed by Terence Malick ...because even when he's bad (The Tree of Life), he is good and when he is good, he is mind blowing.
Django Unchained, directed by Quentin Tarantino...because we all want to say "that was as great as Pulp Fiction"...we know he's got it in him.

Chavs: the demonization of the working class

2011-10-29T19:43:00.015+01:00

Why did the chav cross the road?
To start on the chicken for no apparent reason

What does a chav get for Christmas?
Your bike

What day of the year does a chav find most confusing?
Fathers day

Admit it, did you smile?

After reading Owen Jones’s book, Chavs: the demonization of the working class, I think I might be a Chav. Chav – a word that can be used as an acronym for “Council Housed and Violent”. Well, I was raised on a council estate and for most of my life raised by a single parent mother who worked as a domestic cleaner. I went to a comprehensive school. I presently earn less than the national median wage of £21,000. By all accounts, I’m ticking a good number of those chav, underclass boxes. Yet, I’ve never been tempted to wear a baseball cap (and certainly not one with Burberry tartan) or a hoodie. I’m not violent. I have no police record. I went to university and, even got a degree. I’m more likely to be watching some arty-farty stuff on BBC 4, than Jeremy Kyle and his baiting of dysfunctional families. I’m a Catholic priest and, therefore, might be described as part of “the establishment”. Confusing. Maybe, I’m not a chav after all.

Whether I am a chav or not, we all know they are out there – that “feral underclass” of people who are portrayed as “Thick. Violent. Criminal.” There are websites such as “ChavScum” which show these people to be feckless, sponging and immoral proles with no aspirations to better themselves and become middle class. But you don’t need to go on the internet to find them, we can laugh at them from our sofas as we watch Little Britain, Wife Swap, Shameless or slip in the DVD of the horror film Eden Lake, where an affluent couple are tortured to death by some local, dog-owning teenagers. Richard Hilton, the chief executive of Gym Box, provides an articulate, contemptuous description of the chav:

They tend to live in England but would probably pronounce it “Engerland”. They have trouble articulating themselves and have little ability to spell or write. They love their pit bull dogs as well as their blades. And would happily “shank” you if you accidently brush past them or look at them in the wrong way. They tend to breed by the age of fifteen and spend most of their days trying to score “super-skunk” or whatever “gear” they can get their sweaty teenage hands on. If they are not institutionalized by twenty-one they are considered pillars of strength in the community or get “much respect” for being lucky.

Owen Jones’s indignant and persuasively argued book, Chavs, challenges these caricatures of the working class and exposes them as barely disguised forms of class prejudice. He believes the historic roots of this are found in the Thatcherism of the 1980’s:

In only a decade or so, Thatcherism had completely changed how class was seen. The wealthy were adulated. All were now encouraged to scramble up the social ladder, and be defined by how much they owned. Those who were poor or unemployed had no one to blame but themselves. The traditional pillars of working-class Britain had been smashed to the ground. To be working class was no longer something to be proud of , never mind celebrate. Old working-class values, like solidarity, were replaced with dog-eat-dog individualism.

The role of the Labour Party under the leadership of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown also comes under scrutiny and criticism:

In New Labour’s eyes, being aspirational working class meant embracing individualism and selfishness. It meant fighting to be part of Brown’s “bigger middle class than ever.”...New Labour politicians frequently diagnose a “poverty of aspiration” in working-class kids to explain things like poor school results or why poverty is transmitted from generation to generation. For example, former New Labour education secretary Alan Johnson once railed against a “corrosive poverty of aspiration which is becoming particularly prevalent amongst today’s generation of working-class boys.” It is not the lack of jobs and apprenticeships following the collapse of industry that is to blame, but rather the attitudes of working-class children.

Chav-hate, he believes, distracts us from the real issues of widespread inequality within society. Focusing on the “moral attitude” of the working class distorts the debate and diverts attention away from structural issues, such as, employment, housing and just wages. Considering the town of Ashington, seventeen miles north of Newcastle, Jones interviews the local Catholic Parish priest, Fr Ian Jackson, who observes:

For a lot of the younger people, you feel that most of them want to move on and move out, to get out of town really, because there’s nothing for them here! The main industry, I would probably say – you’re looking at the big Asda that’s just been built, and the hospital...I think the young people would say: “What is there for me apart from working in a shop?”

Chavs is a thought-provoking, challenging read. Jones cogently argues that there has been a tendency to view social issues through the prisms of race, gender and human rights. But this ignores the question of class. It is this issue that Owen Jones wants to put back into the heart of the political and cultural debate. Chavs is his provocative attempt to do so.

Chavs: the demonization of the working class, Owen Jones, Verso, 2011

And the winner is...Kevin

2011-10-27T15:53:00.013+01:00

The London Film Festival has given the best film award to We Need to Talk About Kevin. It is a bold - if flawed - piece of film-making, that lingers in the memory long after you have seen it. The image of a desolate Tilda Swinton vainly trying to drown out her baby's screams by standing in front of workmen with pneumatic drills still has the power to chill the blood. After you see this film, you will never romanticise parenthood again.

Below, Lynne Ramsay and the radiantly beautiful (and just a little bit androgynous), Tilda Swinton, talking about the film:

We Need To Talk About Kevin

2011-10-22T16:12:00.010+01:00

We Need to Talk About Kevin opens with a scene that is visually beautiful and visceral -an aerial shot of a huge, semi-naked crowd covered in thick, menstrual sludge. A young woman, Eva (Tilda Swinton), fixed in a cruciform position, is passed above the heads of the crowd. And, then, as you are trying to make sense of the image you, suddenly, find its context: a Spanish Tomato festival. It’s a brilliant prologue, a perfectly crafted visual image used to maximum impact but without any whiff of sensationalism. In this image, all the major themes of We Need to Talk About Kevin are contained: the relationship between the crowd and Eva, the crucifixion of that woman due to the unspeakable crime of her teenage son and the effects of that bloodbath.

Based on Lionel Shriver’s popular and acclaimed novel, We Need to Talk about Kevin is the account of a mother’s disintegrating relationship with her sociopathic son. When Kevin goes on a killing spree in his High School, his mother is blamed for his behaviour and becomes one of the most reviled figures in America.

Each scene in Lynne Ramsay’s film has a jagged edged ferocity. Using a fragmented narrative that time travels between Kevin as a baby, a child and a teenager, Ramsay makes the audience work hard at piecing together the images so that they form a cohesive narrative. A lesser director would build scene upon scene in a conventional narrative manner, leading us to the final carnage in the school gymnasium. Ramsay takes a sledgehammer to this approach and, instead, drip feeds our minds with images and scenes throughout the film so that our imaginations automatically create the final horror without any aid. This is brave and bravura filmmaking.

The performances are also exceptional. Tilda Swinton is all fearful, brittle emotion and dead-eyed despair for her son and, in the end, for her own tragic fate. One scene has her prepare an omelette made from the eggs a neighbour has vindictively smashed. In an act of self-punishment for her son’s crime, she mechanically spits out the shards of eggshell from every mouthful. Jasper Newell as the young Kevin shows how children can use their affections and intelligence to manipulate and pit one parent against another. Ezra Millar, as the teenage Kevin, is both charismatic and terrifying, all teenage cool but with something toxic and hateful beneath the surface. This is a young man who has lost all sense of what might be described as “personhood”.

We Need to Talk About Kevin is chilling – visually and psychologically. If you are looking for a popcorn, Saturday night gore-fest then this is not it. We Need to Talk About Kevin requires that you fill in the gaps, make connections, question assumptions. I don’t think that this is a film that you could love but it is a film so clinically rendered that it is impossible to ignore. It reminded me of Andy Warhol’s car crash paintings (and there is a blatant visual reference to Warhol in the film) – horrible, but mesmerising and desperately sad. As much as you may not want to, you just can’t look away.

And the winner...

2011-10-18T21:06:00.010+01:00

...of the Man Booker Prize is The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. A worthy winner. It's a tremendous read. A short novel but with subtle and profound insights into the human condition. I read it in a day and have blogged about it already - click on the link above.

John McEnroe, Catholicism and God

2011-10-14T16:05:00.008+01:00

Just finished reading John McEnroe’s autobiography, Serious...

p.214: My parents were churchgoing Catholics. My brothers and I had all been baptized and confirmed, and I had gone to Mass every week until I was eighteen. Even though I had decided for myself that organized religion was a sham, and that God, if He exists, must be deaf, dumb and blind – Catholic guilt doesn’t go away easily.

p.309 (on being inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame, 1999): I even mentioned God. “If you believe in someone up above,” I said, “that person, for whatever reason, wanted me to play tennis...Believe it or not, I think God had an enjoyable time watching my tantrums...I think my emotions were on my sleeve. I think that my drive and intensity were on display. But ultimately, I don’t think people would have given a hill of beans if I hadn’t been able to play.”

Muddled theological thinking? The post-modern response to God and religion? The intuition that we need something that transcends corporeal reality and gives our lives meaning?

Serious, John McEnrow with James Kaplan, Sphere, 2002

Tyrannosaur

2011-10-12T18:58:00.009+01:00

Tyrannosaur is the actor, Paddy Considine’s first film as a director. As a novice, he handles his raw, confrontational material with considerable visual assurance and sensitivity. For example, Considine shows considerable editorial confidence when moving the action from manicured housing closes with expensive cars guarding each door to the decay of the estate, where staffys strain and snarl at the lead. Each location is highly realised and successfully mirrors the psychological territory of the characters. “It’s not social realism, whatever that means,” Considine has admitted in a recent interview, “but I think it dares to be quite truthful in its own version of what truth is, if that makes sense.”

Joseph (Peter Mullan) is an aggressive, violent alcoholic from a decaying Leeds council estate who seeks refuge in a charity shop run by a married, Christian woman called Hannah (Olivia Colman). A relationship is established based on their unspoken understanding of each other’s woundedness. This understanding will lead to tragic consequences.

Using the familiar narrative device of the chance meeting of two people from opposing social classes releases questions of surprising depth and rigour: are the glib assumptions that we make about others an attempt to shore up our own prejudices? Should the sadist be forgiven and, if so, what would that forgiveness look like? Why do anger and violence lurk in the hinterlands of masculinity? In a demoralised environment, does prayer still retain some resonance? Are there people who by their actions place themselves beyond redemption? Why is man’s desire for affection and love so resilient? How do you explain the mystery of goodness in a world so prone to evil?

Considine is more interested in the questions than the answers. But there are answers and these are channelled through the two central performances that capture the change of an emotional key with the slightest shift of an expression. Peter Mullan’s performance embodies all the impotent rage peculiar to some men than can erupt in acts of gratuitous violence. But, beneath the machismo, baseball bat wielding posturing , Mullan’s rounded interpretation reveals Joseph to be a man who is looking for some sort of gentleness and acceptance in a world where doors are continually slammed in his face. This gentleness he encounters in Hannah played with intense, raw power by Olivia Colman. But her facade of sing-song cheerfulness masks the fact that she is on the receiving end of male violence. She is looking for a sanctuary where her own wounds may heal. I predict Colman will win awards for this brave, unflinchingly honest performance.

Tyrannosaur is not without flaws, but these are imperfections in what is, otherwise, a little gem of rare authenticity. On this auspicious form, I can’t wait to see what Considine produces in the future.

Erotic Capital and the Male Sex Deficit

2011-10-02T09:44:00.021+01:00

The central idea of Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital appears uncontroversial. Catherine Hakim, a Senior Research Fellow of Sociology at the London School of Economics, claims that beautiful people get noticed, get on and, above all, they get paid. Beauty is an asset and gives someone “Erotic Capital”, a lifetime of benefits in the private and public arenas of life which the plain and ugly are less likely to achieve. She writes:

Attractive people draw others to them, as friends, lovers, colleagues, customers, clients, fans, followers and supporters and sponsors. This works for men as well as women. Indeed, the “beauty premium” seems to be larger for men than for women in public life, most notably in the workforce, where it can add 20 per cent to earnings.

Beauty, she argues, should not be dismissed as some shallow vanity in comparison to intelligence, education and moral integrity but that it has a power of its own. This is an interesting idea and Hakim uncovers dozens of examples to support her case. But then her argument takes a different direction. The way for women to improve their standing in society is to get out the makeup, show their curves and use their sexuality. This is the true feminist response and it works because of what she labels “the universal male sexual deficit.” She writes:

Men generally want a lot more sex than they get, at all ages. So men spend much of their lives being sexually frustrated to some degree...Male sexual desire declines only slowly with age, if at all. Women’s desire often falls rapidly after the age of thirty, typically due to motherhood. The male sex deficit grows steadily over the life cycle...The laws of supply and demand determine the value of everything, in sexuality as in other areas. Male sexuality is worthless, because of excess supply at zeros cost.

Attractiveness then is a bargaining commodity, women using men’s sexual appetites for their own purposes and financial gain. Men are there to be exploited and this is to be achieved by women using their sexual appeal, rather than erasing it. Hakim wants women to act as objects of sexual desire because in this way they can control the market place of private relationships and public commerce. “The male sex deficit allows women to leverage the exchange value of women’s erotic capital to a higher level,” writes Hakim. In other words, Angelina Jolie would not be paid as much as she does if she was plain looking.

Western radical feminism, she believes, has restricted women’s potential to use their erotic capital and in doing so plays into the hands of patriarchy. In Hakim’s thinking the stripper, the lap-dancer and the prostitute are simply using their erotic capital to gain appropriate financial rewards. Women in every sphere of life should do the same in order to gain financial and personal benefits that are presently denied them.

This has happened because, in order to maintain their patriarchal dominance, men have chosen to portray beautiful women as “bimbos” and beauty as only "skin deep.” Hakim reiterates the cliched criticism of Christianity as reinforcing “the Madonna/whore dichotomy of the two Marys – the virginal mother of Christ and Mary Magdalene, the beautiful courtesan and repentant sinner. Pleasure, beauty and sensuality were presented as invitations to sin, transgression, iniquity.”

This is one of the most depressing books I have read for a long time. Life devalued to a series of financial transactions or power games. Men are little more than slaves to their genitals and passions. Women forced to recreate themselves as pornographic fantasies in order to capitalise on the base longings of men. Relationships between men and women, such as marriage, are just bargaining enterprises, where a woman can withhold sexual favours in order to get what she wants. Lipgloss is to be preferred to learning - the fake sun tan to the dignity of womanhood. The idea of love is relegated to some romantic ideal with no currency in the contemporary market place. We cannot rise above our sexual and economic impulses. Money and sex make us who we are.

The problem with this sexonomics vision of men and women is that it does not correspond with reality where the desire for authentic, self-giving and life-giving love motivates us. This reality is concerned with that which lies beyond surface appearances and is the place where the loving heart of who we are is revealed. Here, beauty and truth are related. To live this reality is, I am convinced, what truly liberates men and women.

Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital, by Catherine Hakim, Allen Lane, 2011

One Man, Two Guvnors

2011-09-20T18:19:00.009+01:00

One Man, Two Guvnors is a retelling by Richard Bean of Carlo Goldoni’s classic comedy, The Servant of Two Masters. The action has been moved from Italy of 1746 to Brighton of 1962. While retaining the farce structure of the original, Bean gives the play a very British comedy makeover. This is less Commedia dell’arte and more Up Pompeii and Carry on. One Man, Two Guvnors is two and a half hours of unapologetic silliness and fun. Never have I seen a National Theatre audience enjoy themselves so much and laugh so loudly.

This production (directed by Nicholas Hytner) combines physical and verbal comedy with such wit and imagination that the audience can relax in the knowledge that it is going to be entertained. The scenes with an octogenarian waiter serving soup still has the power to make me smile twenty four hours later. James Corden (of Gavin and Stacey fame) almost steals the show, with his insatiable appetite for food and buxom women – it is a very funny performance – but this is an ensemble piece, with every actor milking their caricatures for all they are worth. The actors appear to be enjoying themselves as much as the audience.

One Man, Two Guvnors has no big message, no existential angst. It is just great fun. Panto for adults and an antidote to Puritanism. One Man, Two Guvnors tranfers to the West End in November. Treat yourself. Fun is good.

P.J. Harvey wins

2011-09-12T11:45:00.008+01:00

I wrote an earlier post on P.J.Harvey's fantastic album, Let England Shake...and I'm delighted to hear that it has just won this year's Mercury Music Prize.

On Canaan's side

2011-09-07T15:35:00.008+01:00

If The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes is concerned with the unreliability of memory, then another Booker-shortlisted novel is about the necessity of memory for anchoring our identity. Lily Bere, the eighty-nine year old narrator of On Canaan’s Side by Sebastian Barry, sifts the memories of her long and tragic life. “What is the sound of an eighty-nine year old heart breaking?” she asks. Her “confession” provides the answer, where “a measure of tragedy is stitched into everything, if you follow the thread long enough.” Raking through the ancient store of her memories, Lily substantiates this assertion.

After the First World War, the young Lily is betrothed to Tadg Bere. He has enlisted for the Black and Tans, the Army regiment recruited to suppress any revolutionary impulses within Ireland. As a Catholic, he becomes a hunted man when a death sentence is placed on his head by the IRA. Lily and Tadg flee Sligo and cross the Atlantic to the security of America.

For Lily, America is the promised land. She is an archetype of the grateful immigrant, “a voyager in love with the place of her voyage.” But there is no escape from the enmities of the past and in New York, Tadg is murdered. Lily goes on the run. On Canaan’s Side interweaves the domestic details of Lily’s life in America with the broader sweep of history – the Second World War, the civil rights movement, Vietnam, the nuclear age and the Gulf War.

Employing a heightened lyricism, Barry describes the interplay between the memory of historic events and those quotidian experiences and people that coalesce in the memory to illuminate an ordinary life. For Lily, the memory of a golden afternoon on a rollercoaster with her husband has as much significance as hearing the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination. Both events make an impression on her, but only the joy of the fairground ride penetrates her being and is formative. “We may be immune to typhoid, tetanus, chickenpox, diphtheria, but never memory. There is no inoculation against that,” Lily points out.

Barry writes with all the concentrated attention of a poet. His prose is attuned to the pulse of life in all its sorrows and solaces– those stirrings and quickenings that reveal themselves to us in recollection and amplify the whispered cadences of the soul. As Lily puts it:

To remember sometimes is a great sorrow, but when the remembering has been done, there comes afterwards a very curious peacefulness. Because you have planted your flag on the summit of sorrow. You have climbed it.

And I notice again in the writing of this confession that there is nothing called long-ago after all. When things are summoned up, it is all present time, pure and simple. So that, much to my surprise, people I have loved are allowed to live again. What it is that allows them I don’t know. I have been happy now and then in the last two weeks, the special happiness that is offered from the hand of sorrow.

On Canaan’s Side, Sebastian Barry, Faber, 2011

Life Together

2011-09-02T14:47:00.009+01:00

This summer’s riots in England acted as a catalyst for intense public and private debate about difficult, state of the nation questions. Much of the discussion revolved around the ubiquitous notion of “Broken Britain”, an umbrella term for the sense that this once “green and pleasant land” is experiencing widespread moral, spiritual, economic and social degeneration. “Broken Britain” conjures up images of menacing, dead-eyed youths in hoodies, lawless council estates through which huddles of pale-faced girls push baby buggies. Broken Britain is shorthand for the erosion of anything that might be described as “community”.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s 2010 book, The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone summarises this position: by 2009, they claim, Britons had become “anxiety-ridden, prone to depression, worried about how others see us, unsure of our friendships, driven to consume and with little or no community life.” This is a summary of Britain as a more individualistic society, one where the civil cement that holds people together is crumbling and the idea of “community” is under threat.

However, there exist dissident voices that challenge this terminal diagnosis. They claim that such views simply play to our prejudices, romanticise the past and over simplify the present situation. One such voice is Henry Hemming. In his provocative book, Together: How Small Groups Achieve Big Things, Hemming argues that the current proliferation of small groups and associations – everything from the local book club to the knitting club to the five-a-side kick about to the prayer group – is evidence of a trend moving in the opposite direction to the grim predictions of communitarian demise. This surge of small associations has been largely missed or ignored by commentators who prefer to peddle a pessimistic agenda.

These associations (and there are estimated to be some 1.5 million of them in Britain) are evidence that the ideal of “community” is very much alive and that Britain may not be as “broken” as we imagine. Hemming writes:

…a growing number of Britons now experience community not just in their neighbourhoods, or the ethnic and religious groups into which they are born, but the associations they belong to. In these small groups we forge meaningful and lasting connections to one another: we communicate, make decisions as one, we work together towards shared ends.

Hemming contends that these new associations are gradually replacing static understandings of community (e.g. those based on geography or religious affiliation) with communities that have a more fluid and flexible character. He argues that this has come about, in part, because of the declining influence of Christianity:

A Mori poll conducted in 2003 found that 45 per cent of Britons could not name a single Christian gospel. Only 18 per cent knew the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Although our morality and cultural references retain elements of this shared Christian heritage, you will find far fewer Christian narratives, idioms or references in twenty-first century novels, plays, films and obituaries than you would have done half a century earlier.

This loss of Faith, Hemming believes, inevitably involves the loss of a social sense of belonging. Large numbers of people are no longer bound together in community by the life of the sacraments, liturgy or religious festivals. The parish church can no longer claim to be the hub of community life. “And who or what shall fill his place?” asked Thomas Hardy in his poem, God’s Funeral, “Whither will wanderers turn distracted eyes/ for some fixed star to stimulate their pace?”

But this new breed of wanderers are not just trying to fill the “God-shaped hole” in their hearts, they are also aware of a gaping church-shaped hole in their social lives that requires attention. And this has led many people to exchange the parish-based community for new, secular models of community that can respond to their social needs. These communities are “creative minorities”, small groups, less fixed and more mobile, communities that people voluntarily join instead of being born into.

What weakens Hemming’s argument is his uncritical regard for the small group, seeing it as the answer to the increased spatial mobility and technological advances (particularly, the advent of the internet) which have undermined conventional expressions of community. For example, he presents all “new” associations in a positive light without giving any consideration to the value of the “things” that have brought the people together. But is there a difference between joining my local BNP group and joining the local Pilates group? What part does the object around which we associate play or is every act of coming together in a small group socially valuable?

On the other hand, Hemming has a low opinion of “traditional” ways of being community, considering them to be calcified. The parish church or the local community can no longer “inspire the same level of commitment, fellowship or identity that you might find within, say, a thriving book group, a five-a-side football team, a residents’ association or a band of historical re-enactors.” This contentious claim is open to question. One might ask, for example, how Hemming measures levels of commitment, fellowship or identity in order to make such a damning comparison.

In his enthusiasm for the idea of community, has Hemming not proposed too rigid a model? Must our understanding of “community” fall within one or other of Hemming’s binary descriptions? Can people not move between different expressions of togetherness – large or small, ancient or modern? Is it the case that new ways of relating necessarily involves the rejection of historically proven ways of relating? Can they not co-exist? Must we polarise our understanding of reality?

Where Hemming is more persuasive is in his evangelical advocacy of the importance of communion for human beings. “What life have you if you have not life together?” wonders the chorus in T.S.Eliot’s The Rock.

Hemming is convinced that community is as important and valuable today as it was fifty, a hundred or a thousand years ago. The heart of the good life is where the personal and communal are held in proper relationship. Associations have the potential to foster fellowship, stability and offer a shared sense of identity that is often expressed (even in its secular form) through traditions, rituals and objects. They make for human well being and can provide respite from the “weariness, fever and fret” of everyday life. They are the places where we explore and learn and play. Choosing to be part of a group can be a positive, radical choice that stops us being swept along by the tide of consumerist options presented to us. In this sense, community has the potential to earth us and gives us what we were made for - a more complete life together.

Together: How Small Groups Achieve Big Things, Henry Hemming, John Murray Publishers, 2011

Arsenal, Nihilsm and the Meaning of Life

2011-08-30T10:42:00.007+01:00

Simon Barnes, the sports journalist, muses (The Times 26/8/11) on the Champions League play off between Arsenal and Udinese. Prior to the match, the majority of pundits predicted that Arsenal would lose. The pundits were proved wrong. Arsenal won. But what caught my attention was a philosophical aside in the article. Barnes writes:

We humans understand what happens in the world by making a story out of it. Narrative is the way we think, the way we see the world. Sport keeps us enthralled not only because of the beauty of its action but also because of the unending narratives it presents us with. And what is a story without a moral? A story that has no meaning is no story at all, it’s just a recording of the chaos of life. We make narratives to make sense of the chaos, to make the chaos bearable.

This appears to be a thinly disguised form of nihilism: life viewed as nothing more than a series of contingent, chaotic events. But human beings, not having the strength to sustain this view in their everyday lives, impose fabricated narratives (in some cases, religious meta-narratives) on this chaos to deceive themselves into thinking that life does have meaning. Sport, Barnes suggests, is one of those narratives that appears “to make the chaos bearable”. But the meaning is an illusion. Life is absurd.

Part of my holiday reading was a collection of essays, Seeking Meaning and Making Sense, by John Haldane, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. As the title of the book suggests, Haldane opposes the subversive position that “searching for meaning in life is like hunting for unicorns – both are pointless activities based on empty myths.”

The nihilist argues that we cannot trust the cultural order to provide us with clues as to who we are and how we ought to live. The social, moral, aesthetic and spiritual spheres are so fragmented that the tools to construct a human philosophy – a way for living wisely – are no longer available to us. As a consequence, we have been set adrift in an indifferent universe. Our lives are meaningless. The way we understand ourselves and the world around is desiccated. This is “the postmodern condition”.

In response, Haldane believes that it is possible to show that the various areas of human life – society, art, science, nature, politics, morals, religion – do contain objective value and that these values can be known by human reason. Demonstrating this will refute the nihilist’s impoverished view of man and society.

Contrary to the critics, most human beings continue to believe that there are values and goods in life worth pursuing. Such values and goods integrate and stabilise the way we act and think. They make us free and stop us being slaves to whim, desire and fashion. Part of the recognisable human form of life is to look for meaning - that which ennobles and unifies the way we experience and live life. Haldane writes:

I believe we need a re-articulation of older conceptions of human nature, human values and public culture. In the first instance this may be a task for philosophers, but the various intellectual disciplines and the elements of deep culture such as the arts have an essential role to play if a sense of value and meaning is to become prevalent once more. Certainly one cannot operate as if “modernity” had not been, nor should one simply ignore the points made by postmodern critics. Reform and renewal are recurrent necessities in any living tradition: naïve pre-modernism is not an option; and the idea of a Golden Age untroubled by scepticism is a fantasy of the ignorant. But before we try to finesse older ways of thinking we need first to show that they are not bankrupt.

Essay by essay, Seeking Meaning and Making Sense considers those areas of life familiar to humans and uncovers that which is valuable within them. As the quotation above indicates, this is not an exercise in nostalgia nor an attempt to pastiche the past (attitudes that are becoming increasingly fashionable in a number of religious and cultural arenas). Instead, Haldane is attempting something more demanding and subtle – to retrieve those ways of thinking that can now creatively contribute to an animating philosophy of what it means to be human at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He makes no secret of the fact that underpinning this retrieval is his conviction that human beings “can make sense of things by having discovered real truths about human life and its fulfilment”.

In this slim volume, Haldane casts a forensic eye over a wide ranging cultural landscape, from embryonic stem cell research to The Exorcist to the artist, Richard Long. All that is missing is an essay that references Arsenal. If there was one, I am confident that Haldane would make a strong case for homo ludens finding real meaning in his sport and play.

Seeking Meaning and Making Sense, John Haldane, Imprint Academic, 2008

Leadership and a sacred heart

2011-08-25T10:54:00.013+01:00

Earlier in the summer, The Times newspaper carried a photo of the Labour Party leader, Ed Miliband, carrying a pile of books. His holiday reading. One of the books was Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading by two Harvard leadership experts, Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky. It’s an ambitious and inspirational book, with a wealth of practical advice and vivid stories that successfully illustrate its serious academic intent.

I’ve been thinking about what makes for good leadership - the kind of leadership that carries people through change (sometimes, difficult change where people may be asked to give up values, habits and the things they hold dear in exchange for an uncertain future). A leadership that inspires/ challenges people with new ways of acting and thinking and has the determination to make sure a “vision” doesn’t just remain an admirable idea but becomes a concrete reality that can actually be lived. I thought Leadership on the Line might help knock my undisciplined thoughts into some shape. It did.

Leading is a perilous activity – leading a team, a family, a parish, a company, etc –and is rarely achieved without some personal cost. It can mean making others face uncomfortable truths about themselves and particular situations. Asking people to question the status quo, to consider alternative models of reality and have them accept change is never easy. In fact, it can be very painful for all concerned. People may try to derail, marginalise or sabotage your ideas. Challenging an institution, corporation or society, can unleash personal criticism. You might be ridiculed, ostracised or persecuted. There is a chance that you will be branded a “troublemaker” or, worse, a “traitor”. As Mahatma Gandhi pointed out, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they get angry, then you win.” Although, experience suggests Gandhi’s upbeat conclusion is not always the case.

There are not only the dangers inherent in presenting your ideas to others, but the challenge of making sure those ideas are taken seriously and acted upon. Finding ways to ensure that a proposed change becomes an historic reality takes time, perseverance and grit. It is rarely achieved single-handedly or overnight.

Given all this, it’s easy to see why we many of us shy away from leadership roles in preference for the quiet life, the one that does not rock the boat and keeps us popular. I’ve heard myself use the phrase, “Let’s leave well alone”, when, in truth, I knew that all was far from “well” but that I wasn’t prepared to take a lead in trying to improve it.

Heifetz and Linsky remind us that although leadership is a risky business, used wisely, it can also have incredible value. Leadership makes a difference. It can bring about positive change and help others to live more complete, stable lives. Leadership gives our lives a potent meaning - one that is, ultimately, rooted in love and service:

…the answer to the question “Why lead?” is both simple and profound. The sources of meaning most essential in the human experience draw from our yearning for connection with other people. The exercise of leadership can give life meaning beyond the usual day-to-day stakes – approval of friends and peers, material gain, or the immediate gratification of success – because, as a practical art, leadership allows us to connect with others in a significant way. The word we use for that kind of connection is love.

To find the word “love” in a textbook on leadership is surprising. But Heifetz and Linsky’s aim is to reveal the fundamental philosophy that lies behind all forms of leadership, the “thing” that will make all the stresses, strains and setbacks of leadership meaningful. Their radical thesis is that love makes for good leadership. Only this orientation gives someone the courage to raise difficult questions and search for creative answers to them. This search can unleash all sorts of tensions and conflict. Yet, you often need some conflict in order for an issue to really surface and be considered honestly, otherwise, the issue lies dormant and nothing changes. But, it is not helpful if tensions boil over and the temperature cannot be controlled. The challenge is to find ways for people to absorb change and to make sure that new adaptations are deep rooted and not just superficial exercises with no long term dimension. Depending on circumstances, this might be achieved in a bold, radical way or by small baby steps.

At the same time, the leader must be aware of his own “hungers”, those human frailties that can so easily distort the very meaning of leadership and turn it into a vehicle of exploitation and abuse. Heifetz and Linsky name some of those hungers: an excessive desire for power and control, the desperate need for affirmation and a sense of your own importance, the use of your position to transgress sexual boundaries in a reckless search for intimacy. Heifetz and Linsky caution:

History is replete with charismatic authorities who, with their self-importance and air of certainty, galvanized people looking for certainty.

Most people who preach or teach know something of this appeal. There is a strong temptation to believe it when people say, “You’re the One.” Of course, you may indeed have valuable wisdom, but the need to be of special importance creates a dangerous condition, where leading can become misleading

What purifies the “hungers” of a leader and keeps them under control is love. We need to develop, what Heifetz and Linsky call, a “sacred heart”. They explain: “A sacred heart means you may feel tortured and betrayed, powerless and hopeless, and yet stay open…you remain connected to people and to the sources of your most profound purposes.” In other words, love is leadership’s internal dynamic:

Any form of service to others is an expression, essentially, of love. And because the opportunities for service are always present, there are few, if any, reasons that anyone should lack for rich and deep experiences of meaning in life.

Exercising leadership is a way of giving meaning to your life by contributing to the lives of others. At its best, leadership is a labor of love. Opportunities for these labors cross your path every day, though we appreciate through the scar tissue of our own experiences that seizing these opportunities takes heart.

Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading, Ronald A. Heifetz and Marty Linsky, Harvard Business Review Press, 2002

Project Nim: Chimps and the language of love

2011-08-16T19:53:00.019+01:00

In November 1973, the psychology department of Columbia University headed by Herbert Terrace began a potentially groundbreaking experiment. An infant male chimpanzee was taken from his mother a few days after birth and placed in the care of a “surrogate” human family living in Manhattan. The aim of the experiment was to examine whether the chimpanzee could acquire enough sign language to communicate with human beings. The chimpanzee was christened Nim Chimpsky a play on the name of the celebrated linguistics professor, Noam Chomsky, who contends that human beings alone are hard wired for language.

James Marsh (the director of the acclaimed Man on Wire) has taken this experiment as the subject matter for his latest film-documentary, Project Nim. “I wondered whether it was actually going to be possible to devote a whole film to the life story of an individual animal – and one who is no longer with us,” Marsh explains, “Nim’s life was lived entirely in view of humans and was very well documented in photographs and on film.”

Utilising these sources, Marsh adds contemporary testimonies from those involved in the experiment. These provide fascinating insights into the tendency to anthropomorphism and the very nature of language itself. Project Nim is far more than a film about hubristic scientists or animal cruelty. Without sacrificing cinematic pace or tension (the film’s editing by Jinx Godfrey is a thing to behold), Marsh exposes the dubious philosophical principles that underpinned this experiment and presents this as evidence of the larger moral contradictions that existed in the 1970’s.

For example, Project Nim provides a cultural snapshot of sexual mores in the 1970's. Promiscuity appears to have been the norm in this particular academic jungle. Here, the myth of sexual liberation was played out but without any of the ideological sexual theorising of the 1960’s and, before, the spread of AIDS had cast its shadow. Research assistants were invariably young, beautiful women, handpicked by Terrace, to satisfy his sexual, as well as, intellectual requirements. “I don’t think my feelings about [research assistant] Laura [Pettito] got in the way of science,” he feebly explains at one point. The evidence suggests otherwise. Nick Roddick considering such sexual behaviour writes:

“They may tell us nothing about Nim, but they do tell us a lot about the 1970’s. The notion of emotional responsibility – to partners, children, and, indeed, other human beings – is absent, as is any idea of treating Nim himself as a sentient being with his own agenda, rather than the subject of an experiment. As a result, Nim learns more about the people than most of the people learn about Nim.”

This final speculative assertion is open to debate, but what Marsh’s film does prove was that Nim did learn some basic sign language. His favourite signs were “play”, “banana” and when he got bored in the research lab, “potty”, which meant that he would be taken out to the toilet. Nim could make himself understood to human beings. However, the scientists had hoped that by using a language human beings could interpret, the veil separating species would be lifted and we would be given a chimpanzee’s view of the world (a bit like in James Lever’s satirical autobiography of Tarzan’s chimp companion, Me Cheeta). This never happened.

Nim only used language to communicate his immediate needs and wants. His motives (if we can speak of motives) were purely selfish. His language was, thus, limited. When he wanted affection or attention, he would sign “play”. When he wanted food, he would sign “banana”. He had no interest in acquiring language that could express other conditions, possibly because those other conditions (even if they existed within his mental ambit) were of little or no interest to a chimpanzee.

Human beings use language to express needs. But language is also a sublime tool to communicate ideas that transcend such base, self-aggrandizing impulses and passions. On the one hand, language shapes and orders our lives. It helps us describe the world around us and helps us navigate our way through that world in practical and poetic ways. But, language can, also, be used creatively to speak, for example, of the sacred or of the human being as a mystery. There is a language that arises as much from wonder as from knowing. A language that is not interested in explaining life, but is interested in capturing it in all its heartbreaking glory. Such language allows us to utter words of healing benevolence and offer blessings. It feeds the hunger of the soul and makes the invisible appear. Language articulates our disgust at death and acts as a repository for grief.

Above all, human beings use language in a way that points beyond themselves to realities that exist outside themselves. Language bridges these realities, reconciling them without erasing their differences or contradictions. Used in this miraculous way, language becomes a defining characteristic that sets human beings apart from all other animals. Unlike any other species, human beings can speak (often, in a faltering, inarticulate manner) a language of love. We can sound love for each other. Nim couldn’t. The language of love is unique to human beings. It makes us who we are. It makes us more than animals.

The Sense of an Ending

2011-08-12T15:42:00.021+01:00

Memory shapes who we are or, more accurately, it provides points of reference by which we can claim some understanding of ourselves. Individual memories accumulate like geological strata and have a formative function in accounting for a person. Memories place us within history, assure us that we are not isolated monads. Early memories (our first friendships, our first love affair and so on) have a particular potency. Yet, our memories are rarely reliable accounts of a particular event, let alone accurate descriptions of the person we are. The process of remembering is a slippery affair. It can be partial, prejudiced, tainted with historical imperfections and the desire to reinvent ourselves in the best possible light. As Julian Barnes writes in his latest book, The Sense of an Ending:

How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.

Tony Webster, the narrator in The Sense of the Ending, is a man in his late sixties who has led an unremarkable life, someone “who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him”. “What did I know of life?” he wonders at the end of the novel. It is a question familiar to many of us.

A mysterious letter makes him revisit his schoolboy friendships with a gang of three boys who were joined by a fourth, Adrian Finn, who possessed a laser-sharp mind. In a history lesson, Finn challenges the teacher about the causes of the First World War: “That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”

With the passage of time, the bonds of boyhood friendship unravel and the friends lose contact. Webster marries and divorces and works in arts administration. But, he cannot shake off the memory of his first girlfriend, Veronica, whose family he spent an awkward weekend with. In the end, Veronica dumped him for Finn. Yet, when Webster learns that Finn committed suicide and left him his diary, the past returns with a renewed vibrancy. Finn, Veronica and that weekend begin to acquire new, unsettling meanings. The novel becomes an investigation into the way memory can betray us and can have the property of psychological quicksand. In Webster's case, it is the surfacing of new facts that makes him revise long-held versions of the past that he held to be “true”.

The question Barnes is interested in is how does one interpret the past and one’s involvement in it. Can we rely on memory alone? Is the way we remember figures from our past accurate or is it riddled with the woodworm of falsity? Webster reflecting on Adrian’s early death muses:

When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you are in life, and might become. Later...later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It’s a bit like the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it’s obvious why you did; if you don’t, then the log of your journey is much less clear.

The Sense of an Ending has all the tension of a psychological thriller and the final denouement makes the reader question everything he has read in the previous 150 pages. It is a page turner (an intelligent read for any summer holiday), but one filled with unsettling ideas and insights. A lucid and provocative novel that will stay in my memory for a long time.

The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape, 2011

Lance Armstrong: cancer, a yellow jersey and life

2011-08-02T20:13:00.021+01:00

I recently accused someone of being too competitive. I’m not competitive, he countered, I’m interested in competition. It’s a subtle distinction that you could not imagine the cyclist, Lance Armstrong, making. He is fiercely competitive, swaggeringly self-confident and driven. Putting on his socks in the morning could easily become a time trial for someone like him. But, I suspect, he is not very different to many top class sportsmen and women. Yet, it is the young Armstrong’s braggadocio and intolerance of any form of weakness that make him so difficult to like. He’s an invincible superman on a bike, playing to all the worst American stereotypes: brash, loud, in your face. He doesn’t seem to be one of us or, at any rate, he doesn’t want to be one of those who are known as the mortals.

The compelling quality about Armstrong’s autobiography (ghost written by Sally Jenkins), It’s not About the Bike, is that he exposes these personal defects and makes no attempt to rationalise them away. But this courageous self-knowledge was only achieved after he was diagnosed with advanced, stage 4 testicular cancer in 1996. This gut-winding news made Armstrong realise that he was, in fact, a mortal, one of us:

My illness was humbly and starkly revealing, and it forced me to survey my life with an unforgiving eye. There are some shameful episodes in it: instances of meanness, unfinished tasks, weakness, and regrets. I had to ask myself, “If I live who is it that I intend to be?” I found that I had a lot of growing to do as a man.

I won’t kid you. There are two Lance Armstrong, pre-cancer , and post. Everybody’s favourite question is “How did cancer change you?” The real question is how didn’t change me? I left my house on October 2, 1996, as one person and came back home another. I was a world-class athlete with a mansion on a riverbank, keys to a Porsche, and a self-made fortune in the bank...I returned a different person, literally. In a way, the old me did die, and I was given a second life.

However, there are no purple passages in this book where Armstrong romanticises his cancer or makes it a cheap vehicle for self-improvement tips. Any moments of self-understanding are weighed against the terror of seeing one’s mortality up close and personal, the debilitating horrors of chemotherapy, the sick-in-the-pit-of-your-stomach as you wait for the next scan result, the sadness in the eyes of family and close friends. Illumination is not easily achieved. It is not a superficial process. For Armstrong, the dying to one’s old self in order to rise to a new life, was as gruelling, dangerous and lonely an experience as any Tour de France uphill climb. Yet, it also proved an opportunity to escape from the factory of alibis that maintained the personal inauthenticity he had grown accustomed to. It was a chance to win back his life. He writes:

There is an unthinking simplicity in something so hard [as cycling], which is why there ‘s probably some truth to the idea that all world-class athletes are actually running away from something. Once, someone asked me what pleasure I took in riding for so long. “Pleasure” I said. “I don’t understand the question.” I didn’t do it for pleasure. I did it for pain.

Before the cancer, I had never examined the psychology of jumping on a bicycle and riding for six hours. The reasons weren’t especially tangible to me; a lot of what we do doesn’t make sense to us while we’re doing it. I didn’t want to dissect it, because that might let the genie out of the bottle.

But now I knew exactly why I was riding: if I could continue to pedal a bike, somehow I wouldn’t be so sick.

It’s Not About the Bike may focus on Armstrong’s cancer, but it also provides a fascinating glimpse behind the coloured blur of the peloton. I know nothing about cycling. But, after reading Armstrong’s book, I have gained some appreciation of how finely calibrated this sport is, where every fraction of acceleration is analysed and measured. It is a sport of personal rivalry and bodies pushed to the very extremes of what they are physically capable of. And along with the endless manoeuvring for best position on the road, there is the chasing of agents, sponsors and the best support team. This is a game of chess played out on feather light bicycles and at high-speed. The chapters describing Armstrong’s training for the punishing 2,500 km Tour de France in 1999 and his eventual victory are as exciting as any piece of sports writing I have come across. It is a riveting read.

Slipping on the maillot jeune, the yellow jersey worn by the winner of each stage of the Tour de France, took on a symbolic significance for Armstrong. He recognised that he could not be defined by his achievements – however, impressive they were – but that his significance was to be found elsewhere. It was who he was that mattered. “Sometimes I think the biggest thing cancer did was knock down a wall in me. Before cancer I defined myself in terms of winner or loser, but I don’t have that kind of rigid vanity anymore.”

In the final analysis, this autobiography is what it says on the cover. It is not a book about the bike. It is a book about Lance Armstrong and some of those tangible and intangible things that make us want to both embrace and reach beyond our mortality. A book, then, about life.

It's Not About the Bike: My Journey Back to Life, Lance Armstrong with Sally Jenkins, Yellow Jersey Press, 2001

Tracey Emin and abortion

2011-07-26T15:19:00.027+01:00

In 1990, Tracy Emin underwent a “botched” abortion of twins. It is this traumatic event that provides the centre of artistic gravity at the current Hayward Gallery retrospective of her work. She approaches the subject of this abortion with a range of different media: video, sculpture, letters, scratchy monoprints, appliqued blankets, watercolours and scraps of ephemera. These different expressions conjure up acute and oblique associations with the termination. Together, they provide an artistic time capsule cementing her memory of the abortion to the physical and psychological cost of having it.

There are objects of great tenderness and emotional power: an unfinished baby shawl, The first time I was pregnant I started to crochet the baby a shawl (1998-2004), and vitrines with neat displays of baby clothes and tiny shoes lovingly created for the human life she terminated. Such objects are vehicles through which Emin can grieve her action, capturing not only the loss of innocent life but, also, the loss of the experience of motherhood.

Emin is not emotionally neutral to the abortion, far from it. There is no sense that she views abortion as just one medical procedure among others or that she is promoting an ideological stance. Emin openly recognises the reality of her actions - that she has ended a human life – and the devastating consequences of doing so. One consequence was that Emin destroyed all her work and did nothing creative for over two years. The abortion creatively paralysed her. In this sense, Emin’s experience is not uncommon to that of many women who have undergone abortions. The raw details in Emin’s work eloquently express how her intentional destruction of an unborn human life inflicted deep psychic wounds on her soul.

And it is this notion of “the soul” that Emin returns to again and again. In Emin’s artistic vocabulary, “the soul” becomes a recurring leitmotif. The 2001 neon sculpture, You forgot to kiss my soul, speaks of desires that go beyond mere eroticism. Her 1994 journey across the United States, from San Francisco to New York, was famously punctuated with readings from her book “Explorations of the Soul”. Of course, it is impossible to establish what “the soul” means for Emin. Severed from any specific religious meaning, the idea drifts and collects secular accretions. Yet, it is clear that for Emin “the soul” is not a completely meaningless concept. It is an attempt, an albeit clumsy attempt, to articulate an interior reality that is unique to Man. An invisible core and unity within us that gives our lives a distinctive dimension.

In the well-known soap opera of Tracy Emin’s life (from Margate "slag" to establishment figure of the contemporary art scene), it is the work around the 1990 abortion that truly resonates. It is a sobering reminder that most women do not have abortions lightly. They do understand the destructive meaning of this action and they often struggle to deal with the consequences of it for many years to come.

Yet, what is absent from Emin’s work (as with much of the “popular” discussion surrounding abortion) is any attempt to provide a moral context. In her twenty minute video, How It Feels, Emin candidly describes her abortion but this is done as an almost entirely subjective, feeling based description. Valuable though that perspective may be, the idea that abortion may also be considered rationally from an ethical standpoint is ignored. Instead, Emin takes the default position: “Abortion has been sanctioned. It is a given” and this is enough to give it some form of moral credibility. There is no discussion of whether this act is morally wrong. Thus Emin concludes, “I would have been so much happier had I not had the abortions, but I truly believe that I would have been so much unhappier if I had had the children." And there the moral debate appears to end in her mind. Yet this hedonistic utilitarian response means she is forced to live with an uneasy tension. And such a tension inevitably leads to a perverse rationalisation of her actions:

When I first started becoming successful, I believed I was in a Faustian pact, and in return for my children's souls, I had been given my success. I am not a Catholic, but I have a profound belief in the soul. It's only now, now that I know that it will never bas filled with strange guilt and misunderstanding of myself. I felt that my abortions had somehow been possible for me to have children, that the guilt has finally lifted. I give a lot out into the world, and I care and love for all that I create. It's a really big endeavour that extends much further than just the ego of myself.

Such muddled, relativising thinking is not uncommon. Emin uses the prevalent consequentialist language of our age where “the ends justify the means”. And yet such language looks suspect before the stark challenge of tiny shoes carefully arranged in a simple, single line.

Body Fascism vs. Lucian Freud

2011-07-24T16:40:00.020+01:00

The images that surround us of the human body are largely manufactured, photo-shopped assemblages. They cannot be trusted. They are counterfeit representations of what it means to be an enfleshed being.

The body fascists - those who wish to alter the body's meaning - have made it their mission to uncover every dissident blemish, stretch mark or fleshy ridge and airbrush them out of existence. Women’s bodies have become pornographic constructions. Part Lara Croft and part Barbie Doll. They bear no resemblance to anything that could be described as natural. And that’s the point, the natural is a thing repellent to modern sensibilities where the artificial has captured the imagination of a Nip/Tuck generation. Men’s bodies are also under the same reconstruction. It is the homoerotic body of the gym bunny on the cover of Men's Health magazine that men are to aspire to. A pumped, ripped, shredded physique that has little to do with masculinity and everything to do with a pathological narcissism, a flexing and posing in the mirror of our physical insecurities. In contemporary culture, the idea that we are flesh has become unacceptable. The human body has become a taboo.

Lucian Freud loved the human body. Not the fictions created by advertising agencies and pornographic websites, but the human body in all its fleshiness and rawness. Like all great artists, he wanted to destroy the taboos surrounding the human body. He wanted to represent our fleshy reality with all its fierce imperfections, astonishing proportions and weight, seductive originality. His paintings are works that reverence every natural expression of the flesh and that is why so many people (blinded by the cataracts of body fascism) find his work so disturbing and subversive. Freud’s paintings challenge every manufactured image around us. They bypass false images of the human body and show, in the most candid manner, the glory of human nakedness.

In Freud’s work, every brushstoke, colour combination and assertive line defines the contours and crevices of the human body. There is nothing tight and toned about Freud’s nudes. He is not afraid to show us the way human skin stretches and slips, in fact, he relishes the fact. He loves the sagging midriff, the flabby breast or moob, the slack backside. Training his clinical eye on the human body, he finds its infinite variations a source of aesthetic fascination.

The art critic, Michael Kimmelman has observed that Freud’s paintings and etchings are more than highly-achieved figurative representations but that they remind us of a profound truth, that we are “all vulnerable and sublime in our ordinariness”. The Aryan body physique represents a power and control that aims to rival nature and reinvent creation. It despises the human body in all its weakness and fragile beauty. Freud’s oeuvre places nature in all its ambiguity and strangeness at the very heart of his artistic enterprise. Nature is to be respected. The human form, nature’s most complete and original expression, is a thing which can only make us pause in silent wonder. Freud’s masterpieces remind us of this fact and will continue to do so for many generations to come.

A Separation

2011-07-05T16:54:00.019+01:00

The Iranian film director, Asghar Farhadi’s film, A Separation, won the Golden Bear at Berlin this year. It is easy to see why. A messy, acrimonious divorce leads to a complex web of social, moral and religious dilemmas. The film is so morally nuanced that every finely calibrated glance or hesitation alters the audience’s perspective on the characters and what we understood about a particular situation. Moral ambiguities ratchet up the tension in the film. Farhadi is interested in the very nature of morality. He asks: "How do we measure morality, and on what basis can we say whether an action or decision is just or not? When I'm asked why I don't divide my characters into good and bad people, my answer is to ask what measurement I should use to divide them?"

The audience, far from being passive popcorn spectators, is cast as a jury who must acquire the wisdom of Solomon and try to determine some form of moral resolution. It is clear from the opening scene – a hearing between the warring husband and wife – that Farhadi is not going to patronise his audience with easy answers but make them work hard.

The marriage of a middle class couple, Nader and Simin, is falling apart. Simin wants to leave Iran with her husband and daughter, Termeh, but he refuses to do so. Nader’s main argument for staying is that they must look after his elderly father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. When Simin moves out, Nader is forced to make provision for his father’s care and he hires a working class woman, Razeih, to look after him while he is at work. In the opening half hour of the film, Farhadi sets up this complex web of combustible relationships. When he lights the touch paper, he ignites questions concerned with the nature of truth and lies, faith and reason, modernizing attitudes and those that wish to preserve the status quo, moral responses that are influenced by secular influences and those where a sense of sin prevails. In an interview, Farhadi says:

Yes, and there are even more divisions – between father and daughter, for instance. But the main separation – the most important in Iranian society – is that between the different classes. A lot of people in Iran today lean towards a modern way of life, yet there are those who are more traditionalist, who want to go back to a mythical olden day. For the middles classes it’s more to do with individual freedoms. Class is where the real struggle lies. It’s turning into a hidden war.

Such divisions in society and religion are familiar in the West. But A Separation never deteriorates into inert ideological positions. Farhadi refuses to take sides. Instead, he uses domestic, human trials to provide a window into the broader legal, theocratic and class structures of Iranian society. Farhadi is determined not to caricature Iranian society, to turn it into a cartoon Muslim state. For example, he makes clear that there is no homogeneous, simple response to Islam. The educated, Nader and Simin, are not devout. The carer, Razeih, is religious. When Nader’s father wets himself, her first response is to phone an imam for the correct religious response. Can she as a woman help clean the old man? What would the Koran permit in such a situation? How far can you go? And it is the Koran in the final scenes of the film that seals the fate of Nader, who is accused of murdering an unborn child.

A Separation is not an Iranian film, but a film about a marriage in meltdown and that is something that transcends cultures. Beautifully acted, A Separation has all the tension of an Alfred Hitchcock film and will leave you with sweaty palms. But it also has a penetrating intelligence that continually shifts moral expectations and makes you think deeply. Not many films do that these days. A Separation honours the audience by treating it as an intelligent community. That is what the very best cinema should and can do. A Separation does.

London Road

2011-07-03T19:41:00.011+01:00

The serial killing of five prostitutes in Ipswich in 2006 and the impact on the local community doesn’t sound the most promising material for a musical, but London Road at the National Theatre is one of the most original pieces of musical theatre you are ever likely to see. London Road is proof that a musical can be more than superficial entertainment, that it can deal with weighty, nuanced subject matter, such as, the meaning of community and the possibility of reconciliation.

In the programme note Alecky Blythe how she interviewed all those who had been affected by the murder of the prostitutes and used these verbatim interviews – with their every “um” and “hmmm” – as the basis of the work:

My first interviews from Ipswich were collected on 15 December 2006: five bodies had been found and no arrests had been made. The town was at the height of its fear. I had been gripped and appalled by the spiralling tragedies that were unravelling in Ipswich during that dark time...It was not what was mainly being reported in the media about the victims or the possible suspects that drew me to Ipswich, but the ripples it created in the wider community in the lives of those on the periphery.

However it was not until six months later on returning to Ipswich to gauge the temperature of the town post arrests but pre-trial, that I stumbled upon what was to me the most interesting development so far. A Neighbourhood Watch that had been set up at the time of the murders had organised a London Road in Bloom competition and the street could not have looked more different from when it had been under siege by the media scrum the winter before. ..Such was the impact of the terrible happenings in that area that the community had come together and set up a series of events, from gardening competitions to quiz nights, in order to try to heal itself.

In Rufus Norris’s brilliant production, this transformation occurs before your eyes as a tea urn produces a hanging basket and the stage blossoms with begonias, petunias, fuchsias and creates an oasis of suburban hope for the community. The composer, Adam Cork, has taken the verbatim testimonies and set them to music, retaining the conversational tics and hesitations that are found in the original recordings. What might have been a journalistic exercise – a conventional piece of docudrama – is taken by the music in a completely unexpected direction.

Simple phrases such as “Yeah, s’quite an umpleasant feeling, everyone is very, very nervous...erm...and very unsure of everything really”, or, “You automatically think it could be him” become the basis for choral singing and complex rounds that take on a hypnotic quality. The natural rhythms of conversation are given a new musical intensity that mirrors the intensity of feeling and emotion experienced by the community.

It is hard to describe the imaginative brilliance of this piece without it sounding like some sort of dodgy experimental theatre. It is experimental and it is theatre but it is very far from dodgy. London Road has one of the most talented and accomplished casts you are likely to see on the London stage at the present moment. This is a production with real imaginative flare and conviction. The subject matter and music gives voice to individuals as they explore the healing properties of living in community and a way of finding meaning and stability in the midst of chaos and violence.

Betrayal and Kristin Scott Thomas

2011-06-22T08:00:00.002+01:00

I read Harold Pinter’s Betrayal in forty five minutes as prep for the new production at London’s Comedy Theatre. On the page, the dialogue looks like mental scratchings. Language pared down to the bare essentials, operating at the outskirts of anything we might commonly recognise as human discourse. Pinter’s tics and pauses carrying the terrifying freight of unspoken meaning. It is in all that is left unsaid or suggested that we complete the picture of ourselves. As Wittgenstein famously put it, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

In Betrayal, communication has been eroded by the failure of human beings to act personally and love faithfully. Infidelity, lies and unspoken knowledge have damaged the channels of human relationships, leaving the participants of this ménage a trois tongue tied by their actions:

Jerry
You’re looking very pretty.
Emma
Really? Thank you. I’m glad to see you.
Jerry
So am I. I mean to see you.
Emma
You think of me sometimes?
Jerry
I think of you sometimes.
Pause
I saw Charlotte the other day.
Emma
No? Where? She didn’t mention it.
Jerry
She didn’t see me. In the street.
Emma
But you haven’t seen her for years.
Jerry
I recognised her.

Betrayal is the perfect play for an actress such as Kristin Scott Thomas. It shows the full range of her remarkable acting ability. She can act below the surface of the words, every subterranean emotion visible in the tiniest vocal inflection or hesitation. Every facial detail or physical gesture signifiers of some pathos at the heart of what it is to be human.

This is not method acting where an actor attempts to psychologically inhabit a character. Instead, this is acting that feels more like a form of possession. Here it is the character that appears to inhabit the soul of the actress. Such acting, bypasses the familiar ways of understanding performance, that is, the action of people pretending to be other people in order to tell a story. The pretence element appears to have almost entirely dissolved, leaving a performance with a crystalline transparency and honesty. Kristin Scott Thomas is a very special actress and acting at the very height of her abilities.

Part of what makes us human is that we are creatures who must communicate. It is not an optional exercise. Discussing the nature of communication, Adam Philips in Monogomy writes, “you cannot be for it or against. You can only do it more or less well – by your own standards or by other people’s – but you can’t not do it.”

In Betrayal, Kristin Scott Thomas’s finely calibrated performance shows how words can mask what we really want or need to say. We are given a real sense that the lies, spoken and unspoken, that surround marital infidelity exist as a cover for our destructive actions. Yet, what we cannot escape, whether it comes to light or not, is the truth about ourselves and our actions.

Senna

2011-06-12T20:14:00.010+01:00

The verdict that so-and-so is “a legend” is passed too frequently and glibly these days. Once probed, there is often scant evidence to prove the case. But, after watching Asif Kapadia’s engrossing (if ten minutes too long) documentary, Senna, it is clear that there is an abundance of evidence to justify Ayrton Senna’s place in the pantheon of sporting legends.

Kapadia presents a chronological biography of Senna using dramatic footage not only of Senna racing, but of the politics and arguments behind the Formula 1 scenes. As the film unfolds, the Tamburello corner that took his life comes into view. With little commentary or talking heads to colour one’s opinion of the man, the footage is allowed to speak for itself and the audience (especially people like myself who know little about F1) are allowed to come to their own conclusions about Ayrton Senna. There is something uncomplicated and refreshing about this approach.

There is all the drama of Senna’s rivalry with the taciturn Frenchman, Alain Prost. There is remarkable footage of Senna racing and when racing in the rain, doing so with an inspiring fearlessness. There is Senna speaking his mind and standing up for what he believes in. There’s Senna the playboy and symbol of hope for the people of Brazil. But, as Simon Barnes, points out:

Senna’s response to the separation imposed on him by his gifts was humility. It was not he who was great, it was God. His talent was both burden and gift. His great rival, Alain Prost, openly scoffed that Senna’s problem was that he believed he was immortal, but that was not the case.

Senna never saw himself in messianic terms. He saw himself as a vehicle, a strange thing for a driver, but he was a vehicle for God’s power on earth. After one particularly brilliant drive, he said in wonder: “I saw God.” For him, there was far more to sport than victory. Such things are just stations on the way to a greater revelation. Sport reveals truths – about humans and their relationship with the world, about God too, if you will – that are far greater than two-nil or three sets to love.

It is clear that Senna was no mystic in a yellow racing helmet. The film makes clear he enjoyed too much the sensual pleasures of life. However, Senna does appear to have had a sense that he was set apart, that his remarkable talent was pure gift from something that transcended his own abilities and finiteness. For him, that something was God.

His was a talent that pushed him beyond ordinary human limits, to levels unimaginable and previously unseen. He could see the gap that no one else could see and take the risks (often with his own life and sometimes with others lives) that no one else would. It wasn’t just his expertise in a car, pushing it to the outer edge of its limits, that people admired but his mental stamina in achieving this. Senna manages to capture this – the flair of an incredible sportsman and the inner world, with its own chiaroscuro, that can turn a man into a legend.

Apocalypse Now - a flawed masterpiece?

2011-06-04T21:31:00.011+01:00

The making of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now has passed into cinema history. A catalogue of disasters threatened to railroad the film. These have been documented in his wife, Eleanor Coppola’s 1991 film, Hearts of Darkness: a filmmaker’s apocalypse. Shot on location in the Philippines (a scheduled 17 week shoot ended up being 34 weeks and the budget spiraled from $12-13 million to $31), a rain drenching typhoon destroyed huge sets and stopped the production. The star, Martin Sheen (who had replaced Harvey Keitel), suffered a near-fatal heart attack. Marlon Brando (then being paid the enormous fee of $3.5 million for a month’s location work) turned up so overweight that he could not perform his scenes in the script and his performance was reduced to the famous talking head in shadow. There were extra marital affairs on set, drug taking and Coppola became suicidal as he shot hundreds of hours of material in the face of adversity. When he finally presented a cut to the studio it ran for over six hours and he was sent back to the editing suite.

He returned to the studio bosses with a 153 minute version of the film and it is this that has just been re-released in this country. It is a remarkable cinematic experience. Without the aid of CGI engineering, there are scenes that are so technically complex, emotionally evocative and visually dense that it is a small miracle that they ever made it from one man’s imagination on to celluloid. These supercharged moments, choreographed with fearless audacity, take your breath away. Mixing symbolic, Bunuel-like sequences with straight war-genre action, Coppola scrambles our expectations and creates a disorientating space where the confusion, violence and madness of war and human hubris can be viewed from multiple perspectives. A film of such scale and artistic ambition, a film that defies facile categorization, cries out to be seen on the big screen. Don’t watch it on DVD.

The general orthodoxy is that Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece but a flawed one. That in the final analysis, Coppola was not in control of his material and that the last twenty minutes of the film (those where Marlon Brando appears as the demented Kurtz) lack cohesion and sap the film of its explosive energy. I disagree. Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece and all the kinetic expansiveness of the earlier parts of the film find a proper resting place in the dreamy, meditative quality found in those final eerie scenes in Kurtz’s lair. Coppola’s brave decision not to conclude the film with another bravura set piece, but to steer the audience towards quotations from T.S.Eliot’s Hollow Men and Joseph Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness is correct. Coppola understood that he wasn’t making an action movie, but a literary movie that could move an audience to deeper consideration of human failure and moral contradiction.

Apocalypse Now is a masterpiece. Go and make your own mind up, but go.

Apocalypse Now: why we love violence and war

2011-05-31T16:52:00.016+01:00

A new print of the 1979 version of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is in selected cinemas now. It is a masterpiece. In a future post, I’ll challenge the common consensus that argues it is a “flawed masterpiece” and the flaw is Marlon Brando. Until then, have a look at my fellow blogger, Fr Stephen Wang’s great piece on the film on his blog, Bridges and Tangents. Apocalypse Now visualises many of the ideas that Barbara Ehrenreich considers in her fascinating book, Blood Rites: The Origins and History of the Passions of the War.

Why is it that human beings are so keen to wage war? Is war primarily a male pursuit? Fully aware of the horrors of war, why do we continue to inflict suffering and death on other human beings? Why are we so attracted to violence? Why do we think aggression is an acceptable way to resolve our problems and disputes? What turned Cain against Abel and initiated the tragic cycle of internecine violence? Ehrenreich quotes Tolstoy on the question of what “causes” war or any particular war:

The deeper we delve in search of these causes the more we discover, and each single cause or series of causes appears to be equally valid in itself, and equally false by its insignificance compared to the magnitude of the event.

Blood Rites is an attempt to untangle these causes and isolate those fundamental causes that stimulate the pathological desire for war. One fundamental cause, Ehrenreich proposes, is man’s primitive need for sacrifice, where the sacrifice (human or animal) restores order and promotes some form of reconciliation. She points out that these sacrifices were often enacted in ritual form – involving hymns, uniform gestures, sacred sites, costumes and a priestly caste. Such ritual form, she argues, has passed over to military activity where warfare is sacralised. This idea reminds me very much of the thought of René Girard as found in his influential book, Violence and the Sacred. I am a huge fan of Girard and admire his speculative energy.

Girard claims that war and sacrifice were, from the earliest times, integrally related to each other and had a common goal. They reigned in the aggressive forces within a community that had the potential to tear it apart and, instead, channelled those forces towards an enemy (in the case of war) or a sacrificial victim (in the case of religion). So, Girard argues:

Religion in its broadest sense...must be another term for that obscurity that surrounds man’s efforts to defend himself by curative or preventative means from his own violence.

The god to whom the sacrifice is offered is only of secondary interest, according to Girard. What matters is that the victim must be seen as a scapegoat and endure a violent and public death. Girard points to the ancient Greek ritual in which a pauper who had been cared for at public expense becomes the cure (the pharmakos) for the community’s evils, actual or potential. He would be driven outside the city’s walls and possibly be killed. In time, an animal would serve as the designated victim, the scapegoat, upon whom the sins of the people would be heaped. The slaughtering of the scapegoat had the symbolic force of taking away their sins and restoring social cohesion.

War, according to Girard, is “merely another form of sacrificial violence”. Apocalypse Now ends with both a ritual act of sacrifice and the sacrifice of a military hero. In the film, these sacrifices lead to the laying down of arms. A Girardian would read these scenes as the preservation of communal identity by transferring internal conflict outward and onto a scapegoat. As Girard himself writes:

We see here the principle behind all “foreign” wars: aggressive tendencies that are potentially fatal to the cohesion of the group are redirected from within the community to outside it.

Blood Rites: The Origins and History of the Passions of War, Barbara Ehrenreich, Granta, 2011

Violence and the Sacred, René Girard, Continuum, 2005

And the winner of the Cannes Film Festival Best Picture is ....

2011-05-22T21:22:00.007+01:00

Since writing my blog post this morning it has been announced that Terence Malick's The Tree of Life has, in fact, won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival 2011.

The greatest film director of all time?

2011-05-22T15:10:00.015+01:00

A new Terence Malick film is a cinematic event. And they are events that don't happen very often - Malick's last film, The New World, was released six years ago. But, in the past week, The Tree of Life previewed at the Cannes film festival. For those who love movies the excitement around this film - a family drama spanning multiple time periods including the creation of the universe - is palpable. The critic, Chris Wisniewski, sums up why Malick is such a significant director:

Those rambling philosophical voice overs; the placid images of nature, offering quiet contrast to the evil deeds of men; the stunning cinematography, often achieved with natural light; the striking use of music - here is a filmmaker with a clear sensibility and aesthetic who makes narrative films that are neither literary nor theatrical, in the sense of foregrounding dialogue, event, or character, but are instead principally cinematic, movies that suggest narrative, emotion and idea through image and sound.

One thing Wisniewski overlooks is Malick's intelligence. There are not many directors that studied for a doctorate in philosophy at Oxford. Malick's thesis, under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, was on the concept of world in Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Wittgenstein. These philosophical interests underpin his cinematic work. So, for example, The Thin Red Line, uses the visual medium of cinema to discuss the nature of original sin. In this way, Malick takes cinema to an intellectual level that is rarely explored by other directors.

Peter Bradshaw awarding The Tree of Life five stars in The Guardian, writes that "This is visionary cinema on an unashamedly huge scale: cinema that's thinking big. Malick makes an awful lot of other film-makers look timid and negligible by comparison."

Time Out's Dave Calhoun said: "The Tree of Life offers breathtaking imagery and even manages to survive an epic detour to the dawn of time, featuring the Big Bang, dinosaurs, meteors and all.

"It's so ambitious and full of inquiring ideas and questions about our place in the world that, perhaps inevitably, it feels like a grand folly - albeit a heartfelt and stimulating one."

What Sport Tells Us About Life

2011-05-22T10:02:00.016+01:00

I have just read What Sport Tells Us About Life by the cricketer, Ed Smith. It is not only stylishly written, but also keeps in the air all sorts of eclectic ideas that provide much intellectual enjoyment and stimulation. I was particularly struck by the chapter on amateurism and the way Ed Smith draws convincing parallels between sporting and artistic creativity.

In sport (and elsewhere), amateurism is a derogatory term. As the literary critic D.J.Taylor put it, “The amateur, formerly the symbol of fair play and a stout heart, became the watchword for terminal second-rateness and lower-rung incompetence.”

Ed Smith is concerned that the relentless pursuit of “professionalism” has discouraged “an instinctiveness and individuality that is well suited to producing success in sport”. The thing that most of us enjoy about sport and art are those moments of creativity and inspiration, when an individual or team are not playing safe, but transgress regulations, planning and over organization to produce something innovative and beautiful.

In his autobiography, Chronicles, Bob Dylan writes, “Creativity is not like a freight train going down the tracks. It’s something that has to be caressed and treated with a great deal of respect. If your mind is intellectually in the way, it will stop you. You’ve got to programme your brain not to think too much.”

In other words, creativity – whether in the arts or sport or elsewhere – lies beyond easy analysis. Indeed, over analysis impedes the creative spirit, makes it tense and sclerotic. In this regard, the sports writer, Simon Barnes, comments:

If you look at your own talent too searchingly, it might cease to be what it is. If you bring these highly trained but deeply instinctual matters to the level of conscious thought, the magic stuff might never happen again...Ian Botham would only describe his outbursts of brilliance with the phrase “it sort of clicks”.

The literary critic, Christopher Ricks, sees the link between artistic and sporting creativity in these terms:

An artist is someone more than usually blessed with a cooperative subconscious, more than usually able to effect things with the help of instincts and intuitions of which he or she is not necessarily conscious. Like the great athlete, the great artist is at once highly trained and deeply instinctual.

Great artists and sportsmen have a freedom and instinctiveness about what they do. A sort of childlike joy infuses the hours of practice and training and stops sport and art becoming a matter of mere professional concern. “Playing with joy,” writes Ed Smith, “without concern about the money you might earn or the criticism you may provoke, often makes sportsmen play better. An unburdened sportsman is more likely to play at his best.”

If all that is true of sport and art, then might living with joy, being unburdened and having a lightness of being, also help us to live in a more complete, creative and inspiring manner?

What Sport Tells Us About Life, Ed Smith, Penguin Books, 2008

Corpus Christi

2011-05-04T09:22:00.022+01:00

Today, I received an e-mail claiming that Terence McNally's 1998 play, Corpus Christi, has been turned into a film and is about to be released. The e-mail was a rallying cry to stop the film being shown because of the perceived blasphemies contained in it.

There is, in fact, no film version of this play, let alone one about to be released. Internet rumours, such as this, stir up all sorts of hysterical emotions and attitudes of antagonism (usually directed at an individual or a particular group of people). The willingness to uncritically accept such rumours as truth, casts doubt over the motives and other beliefs such people hold to be true.

Such scurrilous internet activity does as much damage to the gospel of truth than any out-for-cheap-shocks play or film might.

That wedding frock

2011-04-29T20:21:00.015+01:00

That frock. Just two words: Alexander McQueen. McQueen's protegee and successor, Sarah Burton, designed this wedding dress but it looked as if McQueen had cut the fabric himself. The attention to detail. The precise tailoring. The understated romance. 'Alexander McQueen's designs are all about bringing contrasts together to create startling and beautiful clothes and I hope that by marrying traditional fabrics and lacework, with a modern structure and design we have created a beautiful dress for Catherine on her wedding day.Catherine looked absolutely stunning today, and the team at Alexander McQueen are very proud of what we have created,' said Burton.

Who would have thought that it would be the label of the enfant terrible bovver-boy that would parade in front of the English establishment and leave them open mouthed?

Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost

2011-04-29T19:37:00.027+01:00

The first time I heard the jagged, fractured rhythms of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert. The following day I bought a tape (that shows how long ago it was) of the modernist ballet score and it still remains with me (although I did upgrade to a c.d. at some point). Wim Wenders opens his film documentary, Pina, with an arresting excerpt from the German choreographer Pina Bausch’s version of The Rite of Spring.

Bausch interprets Stravinsky’s music with the confidence of a master. Dancers move in synchronised unison or singly. Men are stripped to the waist – their torsos muscular and hard. Women wear gossamer shifts that give them an added fragility and softness. Together they stomp their terrors, longings and violence into brown earth as the sacrificial ritual of the music unfolds through the primitive blockbeats. The physical tics and visual silhouettes that are so much part of Bausch’s dance language are all contained in this opening sequence.

Pina is also in 3D. Let me immediately confess that I am unconvinced by 3D films. It seems to me that the technology does not meet the expectations of the audience. There are always images that remain blurred at the periphery of one’s vision, items on screen that float when they are not meant to and are disconnected from the canvas of the screen. With Avatar the technology did take a quantum leap forward, but not enough to make one believe that films in 2D were on the way out.

The use of 3D in Pina is the most successful that I have seen. In part, this is because the 3D is not there to heighten a visual CGI effect. It is not a piece of cinematic cabaret. 3D in Pina aims to place the dancers in space. It has a specific and refined function. The physicality of their movement is given a proper depth. Here, 3D is not used as a cinematic gimmick but as a vital expression of how we encounter dancers in motion. It accentuates, rather than detracts, from the beauty of the performance.

Five days after being diagnosed with cancer, Pina Bausch died on 30 June 2009. This film is a tribute to her work. She, in fact, appears in brief documentary footage only a couple of times in the whole film. We are to approach her and her unique sensibility, through her sublime and, at times, disturbing choreography. Wim Wenders has decided that the work is the thing and not the personality or biography. In the 1970's Bausch’s work began to make an impact on a wide audience and was critically applauded. The Rite of Spring and Café Müller became her signature pieces and they provide the main substance of Wim Wender’s film.

Though we live in increasingly hypersexualised societies, our bodies are becoming more alien to us. We view them as additions to who we are, appendages rather than as integral to the reality of our being. We risk seeing ourselves and others through a pronographic lens. The work of an artist such as Pina Bausch challenges this view more eloquently and persuasively than any lecture or learned article. She shows that our bodies and what we do with them speak of the mysterious depths within us. They differentiate gender and in turn, exhibit different characteristics that are both complementary and together create a convincing integrity.

But this is no mere biological reductivism or simple gender stereotyping, because what Bausch is concerned with is the human body in motion and flight. She captures those moments - the scratch of a nose, the awkward tilt of a head, the collapse of a physical position - when the male or female body hints at that within us which normally remains hidden. “Pina made us feel more than human,” says one of the dancers in the film.

What would feeling more than human look like? This remarkable film offers some tentative answers to that question. Don’t let the idea of a film about contemporary dance put you off. Don’t let the prospect of wearing 3D specs put you off. Go and experience a film that will shift your understanding of what it means to be an embodied person...and, maybe, even make you want to dance.

Source Code

2011-04-25T17:40:00.011+01:00

The director is Duncan Jones. That is not his real name. His real name is Zowie Bowie. Who? He is the son of David Bowie but Duncan Jones doesn’t want you to know that he is the son of rock 'n' roll royalty. He wants you to think something else, to have you relocate his identity elsewhere or as far away as possible from his famous father. By the way, David Bowie (aka Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, etc) once starred as an alien in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 sci-fi classic, The Man who Fell to Earth.

And if you are beginning to think this introduction is unnecessarily head-scrambling, then that’s nothing compared to Duncan Jones’s time-warp, sci-fi thriller, Source Code.

An American soldier, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaall), wakes up on a commuter Chicago train. Sitting opposite him is Christina (Michelle Monaghan) who relates to him as if she is his wife or girlfriend. He, however, has no idea who she is. Eight minutes later, the train explodes. Gyllenhaall wakes up in an isolation booth where through some impenetrable quantum-physics babble he is sent back to the train using “time reassignment” technology. Each time, he is given a task (find the bomb, find the terrorist) by his handler. He must complete the task within eight minutes before the train blows up again. So far, so confused? Imagine Speed and Groundhog Day as if written by Professor Stephen Hawking....and that probably won't help.

Unfortunately, for Duncan Jones, his film has none of the popcorn thrills of Speed nor the wit of Groundhog Day. The riffing on a familiar scene does have a hypnotic quality as new details are revealed to the audience but this is at the expense of real race-against-the-clock white-knuckle tension. Source Code exists in two parallel cinematic universes. On the one hand, it wants to be a mainstream audience pleasing thriller and on the other, it wants to be an intelligent character study of a man who comes to knowledge of himself through endless repetition. Familiarity breeds self-knowledge might be the film’s existential premise.

In fact, the film does not exist in two, but three universes. It also wants to be a brief encounter romance and to tease a romantic lead performance from Gyllenhaall. With each eight minute trip to the train he becomes more attracted to the mysterious woman opposite him. However, while the train has no trouble igniting, their relationship fails to produce a believable spark. Gyllenhaall is condemned to running up and down the train aisle in a wild-eyed fashion until he snatches a final kiss from his true love and the audience are left with some Chinese cookie philosophy to choke on.

Source Code is slick and stylish. It is also very silly and not as clever as it would like us to believe it is. Unfortunately, it was just eight minutes too long for me.

Let England Shake

2011-04-02T20:40:00.017+01:00

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The singer-songwriter, P J Harvey, has reinvented herself as a contemporary Wilfred Owen on her eighth album, Let England Shake. After eighteen months of research, Harvey has crafted a suite of ambivalent, beautiful songs about war and imperialism. In a bold statement of intent, Harvey chose to premiere her new album not, as you might expect, on Later with Jools Holland, but on The Andrew Marr Show, where she sang in front of an unimpressed, Gordon Brown.

Such promotional antics could have become another rock star’s desperate attempt to be taken seriously as a political animal. Yet, there is no political posturing in these songs. There is never a moment when Harvey sounds like a would-be soap box preacher rather than a singer at the very top of her creative game. Using a mesmerising range of vocal registers, she inhabits her descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man with a shocking lyricism.

With creative audacity, Harvey can, for example, combine English folk music and nursery rhyme to devastating effect. Hummable tunes are skewed by shrapnel rhythms and unpredictable stresses that leave one disorientated as if caught in the mist of a musical gas attack. At the same time, the lyrics oscillate between an opaqueness (I live and die through England./It leaves sadness) and a gut-punching directness (What is the glorious fruit of our land?/Its fruit is orphan children).

Songs do reference particular conflicts, especially the Gallipoli campaign or a survivor’s account from the First World War (Walker’s in the wire/limbs pointing upwards./There are no birds singing/ “The White Cliffs of Dover”). Yet, there is a universal quality to these songs. They could be about any historical battle zone from Thermopylae to the Somme to Basra. This remarkable collection of songs and lamentations sound as if they are echoing down through the centuries of violence. All this is achieved with a voice so contemporary and unique that Let England Shake is evidence of P J Harvey's claim to be a national musical treasure, but one that has the power to make us collectively uncomfortable.

On Grief

2011-03-28T20:35:00.012+01:00

In a recent blog post, I wrote about grief and quoted from Christopher Reid’s collection of poems, A Scattering. A number of people contacted me to tell me how moved they were by the poetry. A Scattering comprises four poetic sequences that chart the illness and death of Reid’s wife, Lucinda Gane, and his resulting grief.

Poetry is especially suited to the blankness, aching emptiness of bereavement. “I didn’t know what to say,” “What can you say?” are common expressions of impotency in the face of someone’s grief. The language of everyday discourse is not supple or honest enough to articulate a profound sense of loss. However, the best poetry combines both an expressive elasticity and fierce lucidity that can drive language into those hurting places that would, otherwise, remain shut to us. Poetry translates those emotional states that appear to have effaced language into something that is recognisably human.

The smallest associations with his deceased wife – a bottle of perfume, the garden, favourite songs – allow the poet to exercise that creative voice with which to sound his anguish. The internal howl of pain finds a metre and rhyme, a disciplining principle that makes some tentative engagement with loss a possibility.

The fact that a person once loved is no longer physically present sets in motion a nuclear series of transformations and adjustments. Life has changed not ended for Reid. Faithless, life for his wife, he believes, has ended. Walking past the hospital to which he has donated her body, he consoles himself with the thought that she is “doing practical work...educating young doctors/or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her.”

Yet, for all Reid’s practical atheism, one senses in this poetry a yearning to break free from the gravitational pull of scientific fact. This collection begins with the word “Blessed” and ends with the word “blessing”. Deeply embed in his verse is a kind of secular benediction. A blessing on all those who have died and on all those who grieve. Here is some acceptance that the language of clinical pathology will never suffice, that the human instinct is to find a religious vernacular. This is poetry that brings his wife back to life. While the innumerable air kisses/we exchanged in passing/remain suspended to this day,/each one an efficacious blessing.

Flowers in Wrong Weather

Snowdrops, crocuses and hellebore,
which last year must have done their shy, brave thing
unobserved by me, are out again this year.

I was in the garden bagging
tree-trash the gales had flung down the week before.
No gardener, even I could tell the job needed doing.

Now it was a too-mild February morning.
The flowers looked misplaced, without some ice in the air
or bullying wind to give them their full meaning.

Or was it just that there was nobody to share
the annual miracle with? Crocuses piercing
the soil with a palpable pang: the dear

droop of snowdrops; hellebore
stoically averted: all missing the welcome and blessing
of the one who had planted them there.

A Scattering, Christopher Reid, Areté Books, 2009

Last of the Country Gentlemen

2011-03-20T15:32:00.013Z

After Sunday Mass, I was given Last of the Country Gentlemen by a visitor who works for Mute Records. I had never heard of it or Josh T. Pearson. His photo – half cowboy, half Old Testament prophet – didn’t make me want to run to the c.d. player. But, a couple of days later, I did slip the disc into the machine and sat back with minimal expectations. The slow realisation flushed over me like some sort of ecstasy that I was listening to music with an absolutely unique aesthetic. By the time, I had finished listening to the seven love songs my eyes were moist, my heart was racing. These are songs that take an x-ray of all the fissures, shadows and splits in the fragile heart as it attempts to love. I am certain Last of the Country Gentlemen is one of the all time great albums about love.

There are two states that require a heightened artistic response. The language of the quotidian – the language of cleaning the cooker, going to the office – won’t do. The music of the shopping mall and pop charts won’t suffice. Love and death need a language and music that rises to the occasion, that speaks in a biblical fashion. Josh T. Pearson has found both the language and music to diagnose the cause of his love sickness.

The immediate cause was a failed relationship with a girl in Berlin - although it could be almost any failed relationship. Pearson captures the distinctive way that men grieve a lost love: masculine emotion tightened to a thick knot. This grief is spare, picked clean to the white of its bones. Loss is expressed with no taint of hysteria but with just a few guitar parts and the occasional addition of mournful strings. The language is measured, weighed in the scales of sadness. I ain’t your saviour or your Christ or your goddam sacrifice/And when I said I’d give my life, I weren’t talking suicide/ And I’m so tired of trying to make it right, for a girl who just won’t come to the light/night after night after night after Christ haunted night.

Josh T. Pearson’s voice could make desert stones cry. It’s as if he is placing his finger in the maggot infested decay of this relationship. He crawls with a sense of his own complicity in its death. Woman when I’ve raised hell, heaven knows you’re gonna know it/ Don’t make me rule this home with the back of my hand. At the same time his autopsy, eats him up from the inside out. He’s brought to his knees as he performs his own improvised funeral rites over the relationship’s carcass. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Last of the Country Gentlemen is a little work of art.

Clybourne Park is a winner

2011-03-14T07:30:00.006Z

I wrote recently about the play, Clybourne Park, now on at the Wyndhams Theatre, London. A number of people have contacted me about this blog post and it seems to have captured people's imagination. Well, last night Clybourne Park won a prestigious Olivier Award for Best New Play...and it is.

Sir Alex Ferguson and the sound of silence

2011-03-11T14:41:00.024Z

The headline is Ferguson’s silence was music to the ears. Simon Barnes (referencing Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness as only this sports writer can) explains, “Sir Alex Ferguson (the manager of Manchester United) is giving a press conference today...After Manchester United’s defeat by Liverpool, Ferguson had spread a blanket of silence over his team. But now, alas, to the dismay of us all, he is talking to the world again. The horror! The horror!”

Ferguson’s monastic silence meant that there were “none of the usual claims about referees and how their incompetence cost his side the game...No rants against the media...No exclusion of journos who dare to suggest that United’s players and coaching staff are not all living saints...no pointed little sulks and vendettas against the BBC and others who had inspired his wrath...”

Silence, Barnes argues, would allow us to concentrate on what was really important – the football. “We’d have to talk about the players on the pitch instead of the personalities of the managers. We’d have to discuss the manager’s tactical abilities rather than his skills at verbal sniping. We’d have to deal with sport rather than soap opera.”

The whitenoise of meaningless, trivial, superficial words – the chattering of the commentating classes - makes us deaf to what is essential. Whether it is the person in front of the television or down the pub or in the office – we have convinced ourselves that we all have something of importance to say. There are those who do have something to say and then there is the majority, those legions of wagging tongues, who create a cacophony of discordant opinion.

Only silence provides us with an eloquence worth listening to. As the poet, R.S.Thomas puts it, "the silence holds with its gloved hand the wild hawk of the mind." Silence alone can hew that which is sublime and truthful from language. As in the prophet Isaiah, the seraph must touch our unclean lips with a glowing coal in order to purify them of all the inane banter, bigotry and innuendo. Perhaps, it is not a press conference that Sir Alex needs but a seraph's touch?

Simon Barnes also sees this silence as leading to “the eloquence of perfect action.” He ends with this riff and a delightful nod to John Keats:

I’m talking about the eloquence of perfect action: Dirk Kuyt’s goals against Manchester United, Tiger Woods at his best, Barcelona in full song, Jessica Ennis in full flight, Rebecca Adlington’s finish, Graeme Swann’s off break, Chris Ashton’s support play, Jonny Wilkinson’s tackling, Usain Bolt’s speed.

In sport, truth is action and action is truth. Perhaps in life as well. The rest is silence.

Racism, Frankie Boyle and Clybourne Park

2011-03-05T16:33:00.039Z

Clybourne Park is a play of ideas but don’t let that put you off. This play is laugh out loud, scurrilously funny. But it is much more than a sophisticated sitcom or stand up routine. In the audience’s laughter our own positions and prejudices are revealed and reflected back to us. This is theatre that is highly entertaining and provocative.

The acting in Dominic Cooke's production is of the highest quality capturing the subtlest inflections of human nature, the camouflaged cruelties incubating in our relationships. The actors (and all of them contribute to the success of this production) flesh from Bruce Norris’s text, characters that are at once, theatrical (and so provide an audience with a critical distance with which to scrutinise their behaviour), and, at the same time, immediately recognisable as one of us (thus, shrinking any distance and mirroring all that we flinch from in ourselves). All the lazy dualisms of goodies and baddies, the virtuous and vicious evaporate and all the ambivalent, moral and psychological chiaroscuro in which the human person is shaped becomes solid.

This two act play runs like a perfectly calibrated Swiss watch. Set in two separate historical periods inhabited by different characters, the acts reference each other and show how the fears and anxieties of one age remain stubbornly alive in another. The buying and selling of property becomes the locus for the unspoken grievances, political and personal, that cross historical and cultural time zones. Yet, this is no crude piece of political agitprop. Instead, ideological positions are rooted in the shifting silt of human tragedy and loss that lies within us. Nevertheless, Clybourne Park is a play of fascinating ideas.

In a liberal, permissive society what, the play asks, can be classed as offensive? John Galliano’s anti-Semitic rants in a Parisian bar or the comedian, Frankie Boyle’s jokes at the expense of the disabled? Are certain things inherently offensive or is offense in the eye of the beholder? Bruce Norris uses the nature of humour to explore this. If you prefix every potentially offensive comment with a knowing wink and “it’s a joke” does that make it acceptable? Or does the degree of offense depend on how something is said, the context and by whom? Clybourne Park makes the point that the language that some black people may use among themselves would be considered unacceptable if used by white people.

Or, perhaps, there is some correlation between the gravity of the offense and the sensitivities of the listener? This struck me forcibly during the past week. I felt offended and insulted when someone made a comment about my height (or lack of it) and physical stature. Most of the time such comments never appear to land a blow (in fact, some of them are very funny and, if I may say so, they are usually the ones I make self-deprecatingly about myself), but at that particular moment the comment hurt. Hyper-sensitivity on my part or a real, verbal offense? Maybe the question is did the person who used the comment intend to belittle (excuse the pun) me and, if so, is that where the offense lies?

Clybourne Park considers all those things that make people outsiders. There are the obvious ones of race, gender, class, sexual orientation and religion that are constantly (and properly) brought to our attention. The current debate in the United Kingdom about multiculturalism highlights this. But Norris asks the more profound question: what are these “outsiders” placed outside of? Well, it may be that certain people or groups are placed outside the many rights (for example, to personal security) and freedoms (for example, to religious expression) that most people naturally benefit from. Such discrimination is unacceptable. But, it may also be that in this mortal life we all exist as outsiders, living outside the city walls, and the idea that there are insiders is just a powerful myth. Being an outsider is our commonality.

Grief, for example, makes us all outsiders, Norris suggests. In the first act, a couple grieve the death of their son and in turn, they become emotional pariahs in the community in which they live. The grieving, as the poet Christopher Reid writes, carry “an emptiness so heavy,/ I am inclined to call it my new born soul,/ though its state may be less an achieved pregnancy than a pregnancy/ lodged oddly, for lack of a womb, in a tight gap/ behind the sternum, mid-thorax, not far from my heart.” They bear the wound of loss that others cannot accept or recognise as being part of the human condition.

For all its ideas, Clybourne Park never forgets that we are made to live lives of praise and lamentation (either suppressed or in tears) and that it is in such expressions that we find our human identity and the possibility of reaching out to each other in tenderness. Apart from all the other things that there is to enjoy in this play, I think this sad-stirring element makes Clybourne Park a must-see.

The Rite

2011-02-24T18:42:00.017Z

I have a film review of the new exorcism horror film, The Rite, in this week's edition of The Tablet. Below is a taster of the review. For the full review go to The Tablet.

The Rite is a horror film that wants to be taken seriously. Opening with a quotation from Pope John Paul II signals this ambition: “The battle against the Devil, which is the principal task of Saint Michael the Archangel, is still being fought today, because the Devil is still alive and active in the world.”

Inspired by Matt Baglio’s non-fiction book The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist, the screenwriter, Michael Petroni, claims to anchor his fictional narrative in these documented accounts of demonic possession. Petroni treats the existence of the supernatural realm without any hint of irony. From the outset, The Rite promises real theological intelligence and to be more than a sub genre remake of William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, The Exorcist.

The film’s opening sequence introduces Michael Novak (Colin O’Donoghue), a mortician’s son, who decides to enter seminary instead of becoming a partner in the family firm. As a deacon, Michael comes to believe that his vocation was an escape from his morose father and the fact that he could not afford a college education. He also begins to doubt his own faith and decides to leave. However, the seminary Rector witnesses Michael ministering to a woman fatally wounded in a car accident and impressed by this, persuades him to join a course in Rome that is training a crack team of exorcists.

Here Michael is introduced to a curmudgeonly Welsh Jesuit, Father Lucas Trevant played by Anthony Hopkins. This veteran exorcist may use unconventional methods but his record of success is almost unblemished and his fame has spread across the city. Lucas invites the sceptical deacon to attend the exorcism of a young pregnant woman. As she tears at her scalp and her eyes roll back, Lucas’s mobile phone rings. “I can’t talk now. I’m in the middle of something,” the Jesuit whispers. And when the session comes to an anticlimactic conclusion, Lucas asks Michael, “What did you expect? Spinning heads? Pea soup?” At this point, Michael’s conviction that these phenomena have a psychological explanation remains intact. “Choosing not to believe in the Devil won’t protect you from him,” Lucas warns his novice.

Neither O’Donoghue or Hopkins are able to find convincing priestly identities for their characters. There is never any sense that these priests have an interior spiritual life. The doubts they articulate feel like manufactured add-ons with none of the ambivalence associated with true spiritual struggle. No number of prayers mumbled in Latin can convince us that these men are anything more than clerical caricatures.

Cloning and Never Let Me Go

2011-02-17T15:23:00.020Z

Spoiler Alert

Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 Booker prize nominated novel, Never Let Me Go, has just been made into a film. The book is a subtle meditation on what it means to be a person. The film adaptation, while not able to match the philosophical nuances of the book, approaches the complex subject matter with visual and narrative restraint. The book is a classic. The film is worth catching.

Never Let Me Go is the story of a love-triangle between Kathy, Tommy and Ruth (played in the film by Carey Mulligan, Andrew Garfield and Kiera Knightley) which goes back to their school days at Hailsham. On the surface, the students of Hailsham are well groomed, well behaved and appear to have a charmed public school life. Yet, there are tell-tale signs that this institution has more disturbing intentions. There is a neurotic emphasis on the health of the children. Smoking behind the bike sheds is a mortal sin. There are apocryphal tales of the violent things that have happened to students who escaped beyond the school boundaries. The natural, unaffected joy that children bring to a school is absent here and replaced with an atmosphere of impending despair. Play is manufactured. Creativity is a social experiment. Hailsham is an educational limbo.

It transpires that the children at Hailsham are clones and are waiting to be used as adult organ donors. This is their sole purpose in life. The functional purpose that society has decided for them. They have been created to act as nothing more than biological spare part machines. Yet, of course, these clones are not robots, they have souls and they can love. These are the distinguishing features of a person. We are present to ourselves in self-conscious autonomy, yet we only possess ourselves fully when we give ourselves to the dynamism of love. This is not a passing pleasure or emotion, but the very meaning of our being alive, an awakening of our sense of being. All love is self-surrender and self-fulfillment.

Kathy, Tommy and Ruth have heard a rumour that love can defer their fate. Couples who can prove they are in love will be given some extra years before they must start donating their organs. But the threesome also realise themselves as persons when they fall in and out of love with each other. This is the primal and first of all impulses in the heart of being. Love is the intuitive sense that we are not to be instrumentalised but that each person has an obscure, living depth that must not be manipulated or destroyed.

Never Let Me Go never succumbs to sci-fi sensationalism. Both the novel and film are beautifully understated and this adds to the moral chill factor and sense of tragedy. It is the passive acceptance of cloning – both by those cloned and those involved in the process – and the lack of ethical debate that gives Never Let Me Go an authentic tone. The medical police state is unquestioningly accepted(except by one brave teacher who is quickly removed from Hailsham and branded a “subversive”). There is a passive resignation that this is how it is meant to be and that the proposed medical benefits outweigh the invasive manipulation and destruction of human life.

All this feels real and possible because we recognise (consciously or unconsciously) that the abuse of the person is happening in our own time. In 2000, Pope John Paul II addressed the 18th International Congress of the Transplantation Society where he highlighted the dangers of creating human life as though it were a medical product:

...methods that fail to respect the dignity and value of the person must always be avoided. I am thinking in particular of attempts at human cloning with a view to obtaining organs for transplants: these techniques, insofar as they involve the manipluation and destruction of human embryos, are not morally acceptable, even when the proposed end is good in itself.

Since that warning, the destruction of persons who are intrinsically valuable in themselves has become a routine part of contemporary culture. This has happened without us barely noticing. Not science fiction but reality. Now that is really frightening.

On Friendship II.

2011-02-09T16:31:00.014Z

My previous blog was about friendship and it seems that I’m not the only one thinking about this at present. In a recent article (The Times February 7), Cosmo Landesman reflects on the fragility of friendship. Is this due to our friendships becoming more and more “virtual” due to social networking sites and less “real”? Is it the pressures and pace of contemporary living that make giving time to friends increasingly difficult? Landesman writes:

The sad truth is that my friends and I are seeing less of each other than ever before. I wonder: do my friends notice this change? Do they care? Do I?

Much has been written about the shallow and ephemeral nature of online friendships found through social network sites such as Facebook. But back in the real, offline world friendships – at least mine – are changing for the worse. Once, there was a clear division between on and offline friendships. Not now.

The great paradox of our time is that today we’ve never had so much technology – the Internet, e-mails, tweets, texts – to bring us closer to our friends. And yet we have been so distant from them. We can all stay in touch all the time – but we never seem to have the time to actually see each other.

...I believe that friendship has an etiquette of its own, and it has cost me dearly. I once had a beautiful, super-smart, sexy girlfriend – but she would never return my phone calls. It drove me nuts and so I had to end our relationship.

Friends like to tell you: I’ll be there for you. But I don’t want them to be there for me, I want them to return my phone calls and respond to invites to dinner! In other words, I want to feel that our friendship is important, and that it is shown in small acts of thoughtfulness.

I sometimes wonder, if I didn’t make the effort to see certain friends, would they make the effort to see me? So I called one of my oldest and dearest friends to ask him that question for this piece. He hasn’t returned my call – that was two days ago – so I don’t know the answer.

Friends! Who needs them?

Unfortunately, I do.

Is all this just the whimpering cry of some middle-aged neurotic? Or, the rose tinted longing for some golden age of friendship that may or may not have existed? Is friendship possible in our crooked times?

Landesman’s anxieties have been shared by everyone who takes friendship seriously. Friendships are fragile and complex ways of relating. This is, in part, because the desire “to become one instead of two” in friendship is not the same as the unity that lovers seek. Whereas lovers strive to obliterate the distance that separates them by fusing themselves one to another, friendship cherishes the distance that exists between two individuals. What unifies friends is the discipline and effort of maintaining their mutual distance in love. If that distance is threatened by desire, domination or possessiveness then the friendship will begin to corrode and disintegrate.

“The simple fact of having pleasure in thinking in the same way as the beloved being, or in any case the fact of desiring such an agreement of opinion, “ writes the French thinker, Simone Weill, “attacks the purity of friendship at the same time as its intellectual integrity. It is very frequent. But at the same time pure friendship is rare.”

Friendship delights in the fact that there are two distinct persons involved in a loving relationship. The two friends consent to remain two and to celebrate not only the things they share in common, but above all their differences. Friendships are possibly the only relationships where individuals do not have to disguise or compromise their differences. They have the rare liberty of being themselves. It is the difference and space that exists between them that gives them the freedom to hide nothing and fear nothing. Friendship is, in the words of St Augustine, "sweet beyond all the sweetness of life that I had experienced." That is why they are important, precious and very rare.

On Friendship

2011-01-29T14:54:00.025Z

I have just had an article published in The Irish Post on Friendship. It is a reworked version of an earlier blog post inspired by the film, The King’s Speech, but now with a Christian emphasis and consideration of how the dominance of erotic love has “done dirt on friendship”. I have even included a Toy Story video as an act of reparation! I think it is an improved piece of work.

With five star reviews and predictions of Oscars, The King’s Speech is the film of the moment. Interestingly, it has been described by some critics as the first “bromance” of 2011. “Bromance” is street patois for the friendship between two men. In cultural terms this is a recognition of the value and importance of men having male friends. These friendships give men the permission to reveal or articulate things about themselves in a way that is different to how they would do so with their wife, girlfriend, work colleagues or gang of mates down the pub. Unfortunately, the term “bromance” brings with it associations of juvenile puerility. Yet, the central relationship between Bertie, the future King George VI and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, has no trace of such associations. Their friendship was a not trivial affair and part of the film’s success, is that it is treated in a sincere and profound manner.

Friendships can be based on interests, experiences and personality traits shared in common. However, The King’s Speech is a reminder that deep friendships can occur between seemingly mismatched characters. In this case, royalty and a commoner, an English monarch and an Australian speech therapist, a man straight-jacketed by convention and a man who explodes conventional practices, one trapped by the wounds of the past and one uncertain about the possibilities of the future. Yet, these combinations work because each man sees in the other healing and life-affirming qualities. Through their friendship both men discover a masculine idiom with which to communicate their fears and longings.

The Greek philosopher, Aristotle devoted two chapters of his Ethics to friendship and all future reflections on friendship have, to a greater or lesser extent, been influenced by his thought. Aristotle believed that friendship

is almost necessary for living. Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things. Indeed those who hold wealth and office and power are thought to stand in special need of friends; for what is the use of prosperity to them if they are denied the opportunity for beneficence. In poverty too and all the other misfortunes of life people regard their friends as their only refuge. We praise those who love their friends, and the possession of many friends is held to be one of the fine things of life. What is more, people think that good men and friends are the same.

So, for Aristotle, friendship is a kind of virtue, not only because it can potentially bind together the divisions of class, age and social rank, but because deep within the noblest friendships incubates the germ of goodness. “It is those who desire the good of their friends for their friends’ sake that are most truly friends,” wrote Aristotle, “because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.”

Christian thinkers took such ideas and married them to the fact that human beings are created in the image of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. A God of relationships of love. They believed it was possible to glimpse (albeit through a glass darkly) in the highest forms of human experience something of the mystery of the Blessed Trinity.

It was in the twelfth century Cistercian Abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire that Abbot Aelred synthesised these ideas and wrote On Spiritual Friendship. Aelred saw in friendship the possibility of human beings concretising their faith. The Christian life could not just be an abstract assent to the love of God but rather love of others, for example, through friendship, made real in some manner God’s love for us.

For Aelred, friendship is a vehicle by which we can approach the Divine and, at the same time, a conduit through which Divine love can pass. Friendship, according to Aelred, should never be a convenient alliance of interests. For him there was a clear separation between superficial, fair-weather friends and a profoundly spiritual friendship. He writes: “Is it not a foretaste of blessedness thus to love and thus to be loved; thus to help and be helped; and in this way from the sweetness of fraternal charity to wing one’s flight aloft to that more sublime splendour of divine love..?”

In recent times, the idea of friendship has been vandalised by the ubiquitous belief that all relationships are, at base, erotic and sexual. This insidious notion has done dirt on friendship and, sadly, deep friendships between people of the same sex are often viewed with suspicion. The King’s Speech refutes this modern idea and unashamedly places friendship centre stage. Friendship, it suggests, give people the space to breathe, to be themselves, to not be narrowly defined in a sexual way. Good, healthy friendships provide us with intimacy as well as the security and freedom of distance. They are to be celebrated.

Aristotle believed that without friendship our lives would be incomplete and we would remain partially lost to ourselves. Tempering his natural idealism he candidly admits that “such friendships are rare...because men of this kind are few...The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not” or as the poet, Elizabeth Jennings puts it, “they (friendships) are not claimed but courted, honoured, considered.”

The friendship between Bertie and Lionel Logue appears to have possessed these qualities. After a slow, stammering gestation period, their lifelong friendship was courted, honoured, considered. They were able to penetrate their character differences, idiosyncrasies and failings and see within each other the treasure of goodness. “Easy at first,” writes W.H.Auden, “the language of friendship/Is, as we soon discover,/Very difficult to speak well...” In The King’s Speech we meet two men who found their respective voices and did learn to speak that essential language very well.

Blue Valentine

2011-01-21T18:51:00.022Z

Dean: I feel like men are more romantic than women. When we get married we marry, like, one girl, 'cause we're resistant the whole way until we meet one girl and we think I'd be an idiot if I didn't marry this girl she's so great. But it seems like girls get to a place where they just kinda pick the best option... 'Oh he's got a good job.' I mean they spend their whole life looking for Prince Charming and then they marry the guy who's got a good job and is gonna stick around.

Marriage break-up films traditionally revolve around some infidelity or tragic event that shakes the foundations of a previously secure marriage. Blue Valentine avoids these obvious dramatic episodes and enters the more interesting territory of what happens when hairline cracks and fissures appear in a marriage and the centre cannot hold. The film dissects the cliché that people “fall out of love” with a poetic intelligence that reveals the blessing and the pain of love as something elemental to our human experience.

From the outset we sense some bleeding toxicity in Dean and Cindy’s marriage and yet, we cannot locate where the bleed is coming from. They communicate in staccato, accusatory outbursts or silences, thick with loathing and blame. While they live in close proximity to each other, they are emotionally strangers. Husband and wife relate to each other as tenants who cannot remember what brought them together in the first place. They look like two people worn down and defeated by their increasingly futile attempts to keep the fragility of love from shattering in their hands.

Yet, the director, Derek Cianfrance, intercuts historical flashbacks to remind the audience of the times in Dean and Cindy’s relationship when love seemed possible. Dean wooing Cindy by singing you always hurt the one you love in a “goofy voice” as she tap dances in front of a wedding outfitters. The choice of a doo-wop, soul classic that becomes “their song”, the musical glue of their affections. The hushed intimacies, the physical tenderness, the belief that in each other they have found something protecting and ennobling. These glimpses into Dean and Cindy’s past are not just romantic excursions but evidence that, in the words of the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, “love means to learn to look at yourself/The way one looks at distant things/For you are only one thing among many./And whoever sees that way heals his heart...”

Ryan Gosling’s Dean is all bloke-ish charm but with a sense of the real responsibilities that come with trying to be a husband that loves. He is not the stereotypical man who abandons the girl when things get tough. He is not the commitment phobe but is determined to stand by his woman. It is Dean who tries to claw back the relationship from the precipice of destruction and is not frightened to say “I love you” repeatedly in order to do so. Gosling’s blistering performance has a physical rawness that manages to combine coiled-up ferocity and masculine tenderness.

Michelle Williams played one of the wives in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain. In that film, the slow realisation that her husband was living a double life and the grief that came with this knowledge was handled with a pitch-perfect sensitivity and honesty. I doubted that I would see another performance of this quality from Michelle Williams. I was wrong. In Blue Valentine, she manages to convey the sunny passion of love and the desperate hurt when that superficial love begins to burn away leaving the cinders of a failed marriage. Her every look is an autopsy on a dying relationship.

In narrative terms, Cianfrance’s film looks slight but its ability to consider the death of love from within the lives of the characters themselves is powerful and convincing. Who or what is to blame for the failure of this marriage remains a mystery and it this mystery that makes Blue Valentine so believable. This remarkable film lays bare the secret movements of love and shows how falling out of love can, for many of us, be as heart-achingly bewildering as falling in love.

Bromance, friendship and The King's Speech

2011-01-12T18:20:00.020Z

Some critics have described The King’s Speech as the first “bromance” of 2011. They are right and they are wrong in equal measures. The hybrid term “bromance” indicates the friendship between two men. In cultural terms it is a street recognition of the value and importance of men having male friends. This is the secure environment where a man can reveal or articulate things about himself in a way that is different to the way he would do so to his wife, girlfriend, work colleagues or gang of mates down the pub. Unfortunately, the term “bromance” brings with it associations of juvenile puerility. The central relationship in The King’s Speech between Bertie, the future King George VI, and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, has no trace of such associations and thus makes for a more profound and moving depiction of their friendship.

Friendships can be based on interests, experiences and personality traits shared in common. However, The King’s Speech is a reminder that deep friendships can occur between seemingly mismatched characters. In this case, royalty and a commoner, an English monarch and an Australian speech therapist, a man straight-jacketed by convention and a man who explodes conventional practices, one trapped by the wounds of the past and one uncertain about the possibilities of the future. Yet, these combinations work because each man sees in the other something that has a healing quality and is life-affirming. In this friendship both men discover a masculine idiom with which to communicate their fears and longings.

Aristotle devoted two chapters of his Ethics to friendship and all future reflections on friendship have, to a greater or lesser extent, been influenced by his thought. Aristotle believed that friendship

is almost necessary for living. Nobody would choose to live without friends even if he had all the other good things. Indeed those who hold wealth and office and power are thought to stand in special need of friends; for what is the use of prosperity to them if they are denied the opportunity for beneficence. In poverty too and all the other misfortunes of life people regard their friends as their only refuge. We praise those who love their friends, and the possession of many friends is held to be one of the fine things of life. What is more, people think that good men and friends are the same.

So, for Aristotle, friendship is a kind of virtue, not only because it can potentially bind together the divisions of class, age and social rank, but because deep within it incubates the germ of goodness. The highest form of friendship will involve the reciprocal recognition of goodness, its nurture and unhindered growth.
Aristotle hewed three broad categories of friendship. The first two he considered inferior to the third; nonetheless all had some claim to be properly described as “friendship”. The categories were:

(i) Friendship based on utility. This would include the friends we intermittently call upon to fill vacant evenings and help keep at bay the bruised clouds of loneliness – friends who will amuse us, flatter us and distract us from ourselves.

(ii) Friendship based on pleasure. This type of friendship often comes as a powerful twister of looks, feelings and passion which eventually blows itself out, leaving varying degrees of emotional destruction. Once the feelings have been stripped bare and the passion exhausted, so this friendship lacking real foundations, subsides and eventually collapses.

(iii) Friendship based on goodness. These friendships are stable, possess athletic stamina and can weather the fickleness of human emotions and motives because they are based on goodness. Aristotle writes that

Only the friendship of those who are good, and similar in their goodness, is perfect. For these people each alike wish good for the other qua good, and they are good in themselves. And it is those who desire the good of their friends for their friends’ sake that are most truly friends, because each loves the other for what he is, and not for any incidental quality.

Aristotle suggests that without this pure form of friendship our lives would be incomplete and we would remain partially lost to ourselves. Tempering his natural idealism he candidly admits that “such friendships are rare...because men of this kind are few...The wish for friendship develops rapidly, but friendship does not” or as the poet, Elizabeth Jennings puts it, “they (friendships) are not claimed but courted, honoured, considered.”

The friendship between Bertie and Lionel Logue appears to have possessed these qualities. After a slow, stammering gestation period, their lifelong friendship was courted, honoured, considered. They were able to penetrate their character differences, idiosyncrasies and failings and see within each other the treasure of goodness. “Easy at first,” writes W.H.Auden, “the language of friendship/Is, as we soon discover,/Very difficult to speak well...” In The King’s Speech we meet two men who found their voices and learnt to speak the language of friendship well.

Football, Religion and the Sacking of Football Managers

2011-01-10T09:27:00.019Z

Followers of The Invisible Province will know that I greatly admire The Times newspaper’s chief sports journalist, Simon Barnes. The oceanic breadth of his sporting knowledge is married to incisive, intelligent analysis and expressed with prose of crystalline clarity. Today, Simon Barnes, considers the sacrifice of the Liverpool manager, Roy Hodgson, and the resurrection of Kenny Dalglish (although a weekend loss to Manchester United makes this resurrection look precarious). There are not many sports writers who can reference The Golden Bough (a text that is more often associated with T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land) with such ease and lack of pretentiousness. Simon Barnes can:

Football is always making comparisons between itself and religion, with messiahs coming to save football clubs – I have just read that Kenny Dalglish is regarded as a “saint” on Merseyside – and every ground, especially Anfield, is a cathedral. But football is not to be compared with the organised religions of the present day.

No. Football goes straight to the atavistic roots of religion. To understand the cult of the football manager, don’t linger by the sports shelves, go across to anthropology and read The Golden Bough, the great work by Sir James George Frazer.

Frazer told us all about the temporary king, the person who has total command, along with everything – and everyone – he could possibly want. But his real function is not to rule. His function is to die. When the crops fail, the king must be killed and a new king found. Only that way can a new start be made, only that way will the future glitter and flow with promise, only that way will the followers have their faith reignited.

This ancient cycle of despair and hope is repeated in football clubs across the country and the world: appointment, success, decline, failure and then the immolation of the leader. So bring in the new leader and everything will be all right, the cycle can continue. It is an absurd way to run a football club...but running a football club is not the real purpose of this ritual.

The real purpose is to satisfy our souls, to reconcile us to life’s unfairness, an unfairness brutally exaggerated in the distorting mirror of football. Long live the new king. Enjoy it while it lasts.

The 2011 Census

2011-01-09T15:04:00.020Z

I was at Westminster Cathedral today and browsing through their newsletter (no, not during the homily!) I spotted a notice for volunteers to help with the forthcoming national census that will take place on March 27th. This reminded me of an article I’d read in The Economist just before Christmas by its British editor, Andrew Miller, predicting the findings of this census and what it might tell us about how we are presently living in Britain:

The census will reveal a sharp rise in the number of adults in their 20s who still live with their parents, tethered to the family nest by a combination of limited economic opportunities and still-high property prices. Yet it will also suggest that, among affluent young people, more are opting to live alone (because they are settling down with partners later, and eschewing the option of sharing with friends in favour of getting a foot on the property ladder). And it isn’t only yuppies who will be shown to be living by themselves. So will several other kinds of Britons.

Britain’s divorce rate has stabilised. But that trend disguises a rise in the overall separation rate. The number of couples who choose to cohabit rather to marry has risen; and their relationships tend to be more fragile than modern marriages. So the overall separation rate is higher than the (marriage-only) divorce rate. As the census will enumerate, this means a steadily rising number of people who are living by themselves. More, too, will be found to be living alone at the end of their lives, after a partner dies. (The ageing population will be another of the census’s headline themes. It will record that there are almost 1.5m people in Britain aged 85 and over – and that the country is home to more pensioners than children.)

People will be found to be working alone – at home – more than ever. In the sphere of work, Britain will emerge as a radically bifurcating country: increasingly divided between the workaholic and the work-shy. There will be a large number of households in which both the resident adults work worryingly long hours – and, even more worryingly, a large number in which no one works at all.

If Miller’s predictions are correct, then the Britain of 2011 is one in which people of every age are living more atomised, disconnected lives. The traditional bonds that held relationships, families and communities together are being rejected in favour of looser, less stable bonds. This is a worrying trend if we are to maintain some recognisable form of social cohesion and individuals are to hope for something more than a life alone.

Our relationships, particularly with people whom we love – husband or wife, parents, children, dearest friend – embody something of our meaning and who we are. If such relationships start to deteriorate, then we risk being degraded as well. At the same time, this picture is also an opportunity for existing communities (the family, religious and social groups of all colours and persuasions) to show what has been possible in the past and present robust and attractive models of community living for the future.

127 Hours

2011-01-06T18:05:00.028Z

Danny Boyle’s latest film, 127 Hours, reimmagines the true story of a swaggering adrenalin junkie, Aron Ralston, who heads out into the lunar landscape of Moab, Utah on his mountain bike. Canyoneering (a mixture of cycling, hiking and climbing) provides him with his endorphin release of highs that makes him feel invincible. But, when his arm is trapped by a boulder in a deep ravine, this sports badass is soon reduced to a scared little boy. The film captures Ralston’s increasingly desperate attempts to roll the stone away and the tormenting realisation, captured on his Blair-witch style video diary, that he could be crushed by a trillion year old landscape.

It has been widely reported that Ralston escapes by hacking off his arm. Boyle’s depiction becomes one of those moments when a cinema audience both squirms with empathetic dread and relishes the butchery. At this point, there is a real nerve-shredding connection between audience, character and visuals. But such connections are hard to come by in the rest of the film.

Boyle becomes so committed to trying to capture Ralston’s reckless energy and will-to-live that the film loses any real emotional connection with the central character. In a film so closely focussed on one character this is a failure. Ralston's experience is lost in a whirlwind of showy cinematic tricks and techniques: split screen images, kinetic editing, flashbacks and an obtrusive soundtrack (Dido, Sigur Ros, A.R.Rahman, Bill Withers). This one-man agony opera is played with conviction by James Franco but the performance is overwhelmed by what begins to feel like an end-of-year film school project. Boyle's penchant for technical exhibitionism reduces this Romantic battle between man and nature into a comic hero caper.

The single man trapped in a claustrophobic space (see Ryan Reynolds in 2010's Buried) is a challenging ask for any director. One suspects that Boyle was attracted to such subject matter, in part, as a reaction to the narrative expansiveness of Slumdog Millionaire. But rather than trusting in the finely observed details of this human story, the acting and an audience’s ability to engage with both, Boyle bottles it and resorts to a cinematic box of tricks. Flashbacks to friends, lovers, family and two female hikers Ralston met before the accident have no emotional weight and feel like idle intrusions into the editing suite.

127 Hours is a disappointment and only saved from being an indulgence by the breathtaking landscapes conjured by cinematographers Antony Dod Mantle and Enrique Chediak. In these images the audience are given a glimpse of the real vistas, physical and psychological, this film might have explored if it had dared to channel some of Aron Ralston's spirit of adventure.

Open: the autobiography of Andre Agassi

2011-01-01T17:20:00.036Z

Andre Agassi was castigated for taking part in an ad campaign with the tag line, Image is Everything. In his autobiography (ghost written by the Pulitzer prize winning, J.R. Moehringer), Open, Agassi goes behind his own image and that of tennis to provide a candid account of his life on the circuit. This is a confessional account that gives as much space to his lost childhood and his bullying, unloving father as it does to cataloguing the victories and losses of the tennis matches he played.

All this is recounted with an emotional honesty that at times is almost too painful to read. This is partly because tennis has such a “clean” image and the reality for this tennis player, at any rate, was less then clean. In this book it is as if Agassi is unpicking the scabs of old psychic wounds. He reveals with remarkable candour and humour all that was retarded and dishonest in himself as he struggles to establish an authentic identity that is more than just a public or sponsorship image. Such self-analysis is not uncommon in the modern biography, but for a major sportsman to do this makes for a landmark sporting text.

The leitmotif that runs throughout this book is I hate tennis. Agassi is not bluffing. He means it. He hated tennis but like an abusive lover, he kept going back to it and could not give it up. The hatred began at an early age. As a child, he was forced to spend hours every day hitting balls being fired from a customised machine, the dragon, while his father barked, harder, harder. Mike Agassi is the destructive influence that disfigures his son’s whole life. This father turned a little boy with talent into someone so psychologically damaged that Agassi would spend the majority of his life loathing himself or making failed attempts to piece together, like one of his mother's jigsaw puzzles, some sense of who he was. At a turning point in his failing professional career, Agassi reflects with a raw honesty:

I hate tennis more than ever – but I hate myself more. I tell myself, so what if you hate tennis? Who cares? All those people out there, all those millions who hate what they do for a living, they do it anyway. Maybe doing what you hate, doing it well and cheerfully, is the point. So you hate tennis. Hate it all you want. You still need to respect it – and yourself.

This search for some sort of self respect could have turned this autobiography into another Oprah book of the week. In a famous 1994 article written by Martin Amis for the New Yorker, Amis derides the idea of the need for “personalities” in tennis, such as Nastase and Connors. He acerbically comments that “personality” is “an exact synonym of a seven letter duosyllable starting with “a”, ending with “e” (and also featuring, in order of appearance, an “ss”, an “h”, an “o” and “l”)”. But it is the anguish and hard-won self understanding that makes Agassi’s search for selfhood so compelling. His peers may have considered Agassi an “asshole”, but Agassi was simply a damaged mutant trying to find a true reflection of himself in a world he didn't understand. At the heart of this search is Agassi’s primitive instinct that love is a central element in the composition of any being. Love is the illuminating feature that distinguishes someone from being a self-preoccupied egomaniac and being a person.

She (the actress, Brooke Shields) laughs. You don’t actually hate tennis.
Yes.
But you don’t hate hate it.
I do. I hate it.
We talk about our travels, our favourite foods, music, movies. We bond over one recent movie, Shadowlands, the story of the British writer C.S.Lewis. I tell Brooke that the movie struck a chord with me. There was Lewis’s close relationship with his brother. There was his sheltered life, walled off from the world. There was his fear of risk and the pain of love. But then one singularly brave woman makes him see that pain is the price of being human, and well worth it. In the end Lewis tells his students: Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. He tells them: We are like blocks of stone...The blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what makes us perfect.

The war of attrition that the ATP tour became for Agassi was also the place where he played some great, physically bruising tennis. Open captures these matches with an economical vividness and shows how a match could turn on a point or be lost due to poor split-second decision-making. We feel the sweaty rivalry between Agassi and his nemesis, “pistol” Pete Sampras – a rivalry that also had a deep seam of mutual respect. However, Agassi’s deepest, bitterest rivalry was with Boris Becker, who in Agassi’s view “tries to come off as an intellectual, when he’s just an overgrown farmboy.” There is a brilliant recreation of the 1995 grudge match at the US Open semi where Becker starts blowing kisses to Brooke Shields in Agassi’s box. But Agassi has spotted Becker’s tell-tale serving weakness: “Just before he tosses the ball, Becker sticks out his tongue and it points like a tiny red arrow to where he’s aiming.” Insider details such as these provide the reader with enormous pleasure and provide Agassi’s account of his career with a unique, multi-layered texture.

Much has been made about the lurid drug revelations in Open, but the real revelation is that a sportsman like Agassi admits to being profoundly messed-up by his past and by the sport that continually threatened to destroy him. Neither his past or his tennis did destroy Agassi and the man who emerges victorious from this book is much more than just an image.

What I am looking forward to in 2011

2010-12-27T15:04:00.074Z

The Invisible Province has already got its beady eye on a number of cultural events in 2011. I am sure there will be many others that will come along and grab its attention, but I thought I might share these with Invisible Province readers:

1.

Slowly I learnt the ways of humans: how to ruin, how to hate, how to debase, how to humiliate. And at the feet of my master I learnt the highest of human skills, the skill no other creature owns: I finally learnt how to lie.

Frankenstein at the National Theatre. I've already booked simply because I consider Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to be one of the great novels of the nineteenth century. This production (written by the playwright, Nick Dear, who I am hoping will not neglect the epic sense of sadness that is so much part of the novel) is being directed by the film director, Danny Boyle. I must confess that after Trainspotting, Danny Boyle films have left me stirred but never shaken. Slumdog Millionaire may have pulled at the commercial heartstrings, but it was artistically overrated. Yet he's a home grown talent and one cannot deny that his films have a popular appeal (he's also got the gig to stage the opening of the 2012 Olympics). But can he transfer his cinematic skills to the stage of the Olivier Theatre? The production also includes two good British actors, Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller who will alternate the roles of Dr Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. This may not be the theatre event of 2011 but it is bound to be interesting.

2. I missed Clybourne Park when it was at the Royal Court and have been kicking myself ever since. But now that it is transferring to the West End I have been given another chance. This is a play that explores the limits of political correctness and how, on its own, it cannot keep a lid on racial tensions...the play is also meant to be very funny.

In 1959 Russ and Bev are selling their desirable two-bed at a knock-down price. This enables the first Black family to move into the neighbourhood, creating ripples of discontent amongst the cosy white urbanites of Clybourne Park. In 2009, the same property is being bought by Lindsey and Steve whose plans to raze the house and start again is met with a similar response. Are the issues festering beneath the floorboards actually the same fifty years on?

3. A new Terence Malick film is an event for anyone who claims to love cinema. His films are, in the words of the poet, Louis MacNeice, alive with "the drunkenness of things being various". I have always come away from a Malick film deeply affected and having felt I've witnessed something of our transient existence through a clearer, purer lens. I can hardly contain my excitement about The Tree of Life. The only worry is that Brad Pitt is in it...

4. Has Steven Speilberg made a decent film since Schindler's List? Well, this year he offers us two films: The Adventures of Tintin and Warhorse. Not so interested in Tintin (I was always an Asterix the Gaul boy) but I am fascinated to see what he does with Michael Morpurgo's Warhorse. The acclaimed National Theatre production is currently on in London's West End. Speilberg now brings it to the screen and if anyone can make a success of doing so then it must be him. I'm willing this film to be a great Speilberg movie. Can he do for the First World War trenches what he did for the extermination camps? We'll see.

5. Two big sculpture exhibitions this year. Modern British Sculpture at the Royal Academy and The Shape of Things to Come: New Sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery on the Kings Road. Although, when the blurb for the Royal Academy exhibition says:

The exhibition will take a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions that will challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions.

I want to run to the hills. Still, if I can mentally shield myself from the curator's radical juxtapositions, then I hope to still be able to enjoy work by Alfred Gilbert, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Anthony Caro and co.

6. New REM album, Collapse into Now. New Elbow album. New Plan B, The Ballad of Belmarsh. New Mumford and Sons. So lots of interesting pop sounds in 2011.

My top SIX albums of the year

2010-12-15T19:49:00.066Z

2010 was a superb year for music. The synthesiser made a comeback which for a child of the eighties like myself was electronica to my ears. Just as the New Romantics were a reaction against punk, so this was a reaction against that which is deemed street and "real" in favour of something more synthetic, glamorous and playful. At the same time, there were some great dance records. And at the further reaches of music, my ears pricked up (thanks to Radio 1's Zane Lowe) to a whole host of innovative sounds that have not made it into my top SIX (I just couldn't leave out Plan B) this year but could well do so in 2011...we will see. In the meantime here are my favourites of 2010.

Janelle Monae's debut album, The Archandroid, is breathtakingly inventive and exciting. It is a concept album (remember those?) with a narrative arc but achieved with such a lightness of touch and musical playfulness that it never becomes an exercise in musical onanism. Like some diligent art student, Monae pilfers from the musical canon only those sounds and riffs that will give her sound its unique musical texture. This snatch 'n' grab approach is audacious, daring and it works. She bounces from genre to genre (rap, r'n'b, folk, disco, cabaret, film scores, etc) with effortless dexterity and sure footedness. In less gifted hands this could have ended up as a pretentious mess. Here, however, every song is crafted to perfection and performed with a soulful confidence. This is Aretha meets Stevie meets Prince. There's not a weak moment in this album. Above, Cold War - not just a great song but also a video moment to rival Sinead O'Connor's famous tears in Nothing Compares to You. My album of the year just because it reminded me that pop music still has a revelatory power.

Let's get her age out of the way. Laura Marling is twenty years old. If I and everybody who writes about Marling hadn't mentioned this fact then you would think I speak because I can exhibits the emotional maturity and musical range of someone twice that age. Setting poetic language to music is a devilishly difficult business but Marling places her finely tuned lyrics on a musical framework of contrasting dynamics that both support and expose her ideas. Rambling Man is an example of this. These lyrics are polished with the finest emery board of creative intelligence. They exhibit a gemstone translucence and honesty. I Speak because I can are miniature hymns of the highest order to love, loss and beauty.

Cee Lo Green's Forget You was one of the big hits of the last year. It is a cleaned up version of Green's potty mouthed assault on an ex-lover given to a cheerful Motown beat. In The Ladykiller, Green successfully channels Motown polish, Stax sassiness and Philly soul for the twenty first century. This is barrelhouse soul, big lunged and finger lickin' good. Stadium sized melodies, horns and strings combine to make one of the great pop albums of the last year...some say, the decade?

This is music that seems designed for the eyeliner brigade and those with complexions so pale that they blister should daylight touch them. But the eerie, multi-layered soundscapes in Stridulum have a sinuous power. They have escaped from the suburban bedrooms of teenage goths and have infected a wider public with their crooked beats and wall of sound synths. Zola Jesus's lead singer, Nika Roza Danilov, has a Siouxsie Sioux vocal range that mesmerises and chills. She is a siren calling us to the darker undercurrents of contemporary living. Stridulum has an independence of vision that lifts the black veil on all the shadows that inhabit our imaginations. This is music for the twilight hours when all seems strange and feverish. It draws you in and once in, you just can't stop listening.

If Stridulum is the dark side of synth pop, then Happiness by Hurts is the New Romantic pop side. So perfect is the mimicry in every musical detail that I can imagine having heard this music in La Beat Route or the Blitz club in the 1980's. With its glacial rhythms and edgy lines - part Ultravox, part ABC - this is a homage to the icy dance music of an era but made accessible to a new audience. For those of you who have been waiting for a duo with sharp suits, slick haircuts and a monumental sound, this is it. If you haven't been waiting for this, what's wrong with you?

Plan B's The Defamation of Strickland Banks is stylish soul music for a new generation of absolute beginners. Ben Drew's conceptual Motown conjures up a world of smoky East End night clubs (owned by The Krays) where if you weren't on your guard, someone would nick your new tie pin at knifepoint. Stonking tunes - all horn hooks, blues guitars and full orchestra sounds - only just mask the air of threat and menace. It is this edginess that stops this album from becoming just another indolent foray into retro-Amy- Winehouse-soul.

My Favourite Films of 2010

2010-12-12T15:50:00.065Z

It’s that time of year when newspapers and magazines start to list their cultural highlights of the year. So not wanting to feel left out, here are The Invisible Province’s top five movies of 2010.

1.

Of Gods and Men (Xavier Beauvois). Film making doesn’t get much more luminous than this. This is based on the real life story of seven monks in a North African monastery who are threatened by Islamic fundamentalists. The narrative exhibited a complete lack of pretension, irony or religious cliché. This is a sublime study of religious vocation and sacrificial love. I am not ashamed to say that this deeply moving film brought me to tears. If this doesn’t win the Oscar for best foreign film I’ll eat my biretta.

2.
I am Love (Io sono l'amore) (Luca Guadagnino). This was a flawed film, but these were flaws in a diamond. The story of a frigid bourgeois Milanese family coming apart at the haute couture seams was told with ravishing imagery and an opulence that made love to the senses. Tilda Swinton’s central performance – part ice-maiden, part Lady Chatterley, all pent up sexual repression – was a master class in melodrama. Oh, and then there was that bowl of soup...

3.
Another Year (Mike Leigh). It was the tenderness and humanity of Mike Leigh's latest film that impressed me. Yet, it is a film that has split audiences. I side with the view that the shifting, moral complexity of the characters does not undermine the central thesis that human beings are made for goodness. A film that reveals the sadness and serenity found in the human condition and why we would not have it any other way.

4.
The Killer Inside Me (Michael Winterbottom). The only film that made me flinch and turn away from the images of brutality on the screen. Yet, this was as far from the current trend in torture porn as you can imagine. A serious analysis of sadism and masochism that months after seeing it has left questions in my mind about what makes us moral beings and what degrades us. Not an easy watch but one that is thought provoking which is more than can be said for most films.

5.
Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik). For me the performance of the year goes to Jennifer Lawrence who seemed to inhabit her 17 year old character in a way that appeared to make acting redundant. This was a film that could have played to all the “white trailer trash” stereotypes but stubbornly refused to do so. Instead, we were given an austere portrait of the damage eking a poverty-stricken life from a harsh environment can do to human beings.

Of Gods and Men

2010-12-04T18:15:00.024Z

Save us, Lord, whilst we watch!
Keep us, Lord, whilst we sleep!
And we shall watch with Christ
And we shall rest in peace…

It’s hard to believe that a film about seven Cistercian monks living in a remote monastery in Algeria, five of whom were murdered by Islamic extremists in 1995 ever made it past the financiers to the screen. Of Gods and Men did and then went on to win the Grand Prix at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival and became an overnight sensation in that most secular of countries, France. If nothing else, this catalogue of unexpected success is a small miracle.

The screenwriter, Etienne Comar, has taken the historical facts about this monastic community and with, Xavier Beauvois, the director, transformed them through the alchemy of art into something that explores “the dignity of difference” and how God “takes the weak and makes them strong in bearing witness to Him.” Neither Comar or Beauvois would describe themselves as “believers” in any conventional sense, but with an utter lack of irony, they have dared to combine secular interests and spiritual truths in such a way that an audience is given creative permission to glimpse a reality that lies beyond empirical measure or psychological explanation. Few films have managed to achieve this – Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St Matthew, Alain Cavalier’s Therese – but Of Gods and Men does partly because it approaches its subject matter with a reverence and sense that our lives are imbued with a meaning, a Braille that can only be deciphered with the most sensitive, finely tuned spiritual touch. Quoted in The Times newspaper, Beauvois comments:

“I never wanted it to be a Catholic film. It comes from left and right; it is about men more than about gods. But it is true that something in this story resonates with people. The culture of crashing banks, conspicuous consumption, and others working hard for less and less, all those problems mean people want breathing space for a few hours, an escape. They have a need for growth, spirituality, silence...Nowadays it’s rare to die for what you believe in, to have conviction and passion...”

The film opens with a question that echoes for the remaining 121 minutes running time. The monastery’s elderly monk medic, Brother Luc (played with a rugged earthiness and generosity by Michael Lonsdale) is asked by a young woman if he has ever been in love. “Many times,” he replies ruefully, “but then I found a greater love.” It is the question of what makes for a vocation, a love that one is prepared to sacrifice all other loves for that becomes the main centre of interest for Beauvois. The film eschews pious melodrama or political rhetoric. Instead, it is the life of faith both at the communal and individual level that provides the film with its existential drive. The film's soundtrack, used to sublime effect, are the hymns and chants of the Divine Office that mark human time with resonances of the eternal.

We are privy to each brother’s response to the question of whether collectively they should stay (with the inevitability that they will be murdered) or leave and save themselves. On the one hand, Brother Luc says, “I’m not scared of terrorists, even less the army. I’m not scared of death. I am a free man.” At the same time, the much younger Brother Christophe (Olivier Rabourdin) is tormented by the decision he is being forced to make. “Help me. Help me,” he cries to God in the dead of night, as his fellow brothers listen from their cells. Community life exists to support the brothers in friendship and sustain them by the rhythms of prayer, but ultimately the life of faith remains an individual response to a terrifying gift.

Nowhere is this struggle explored more poignantly than in the monastery’s Abbot, Christian (Lambert Wilson). The final decision weighs heavy on him. He understands that if the community stays that this will inevitably lead to the deaths of the men he loves. In a scene of fatherly tenderness, he says to Brother Christophe that by entering the order, “you've already given your life”. In accepting to follow Christ, Christian recognises that he and his brothers have already laid down their lives and that they can no longer be defeated by any earthly power. “To leave is to die”, as one other brother remarks. But their commitment is not to the place but to their vocation. This commitment is total because it is not to acquiesce to an idea or philosophy, but to surrender to a person that can be known and loved - Jesus. In a final voice over, Abbot Christian says, “This country and Islam for me..are a body and soul...God willing, I will merge my gaze in the Father’s and contemplate with Him His children of Islam, as He sees them.”

Too much cinema today operates at the emotive level, as a desperate form of distraction. Of Gods and Men possesses a quiet intensity and passion, combined with a directness of storytelling, that has engaged audiences at an interior level and brought them to tears. It releases a depth charge into the very soul of man and stirs from the silt of our beings something that is irresistible and hard to ignore, no matter how hard we may try. You don’t have to be a believer to appreciate what a tremendous piece of film making this is, you just have to be human.

The Exorcist, Let the Right One In and the horror film genre

2010-11-26T13:44:00.045Z

I‘ve just read the film critic, Mark Kermode’s, autobiography, It’s Only a Movie. This is a wry summary of a life spent in darkened rooms and his futile assaults on artistically impoverished summer blockbusters. In the film world, the critic’s pen is not mightier than the Hollywood studio publicity machine. Kermode is not only famous for his quiff but also for his knowledge of the horror film genre."I am now a very happy horror-film fan," he writes, "who has derived hours of harmless pleasure from watching people pretend to disembowl each other with chainsaws."

Kermode's favourite film of all time is William Friedkin’s 1973 classic, The Exorcist, which he has “seen about two hundred times (I stopped counting after the first hundred)”. He has written definitive and peer group acclaimed academic studies of this film. Here is Kermode firing on all evangelical cylinders but, along the way, making interesting points about the positive aspects of the horror genre:

The first viewing (of The Exorcist) passed in an almost orgasmic whirl of fear, and remains one of the most genuinely transcendent experiences of my life. Rarely have I been more aware of being alive and in the moment than in the two hours that it took the movie to run through the projector that night. People talk endlessly about the damaging effects of horror movies but too little is heard about the life-affirming power of being sacred out of your mind – and, in those very rare cases, out of your body. You ask me if I think there is more to this world than the grim “realities” of ageing, disease and death, of mourning and loss, and I will refer you to that first viewing of The Exorcist during which my imagination took flight, my soul did somersaults, and the physical world melted away into nothingness around me. I don’t think that there is a spiritual element to human life, I know it because I have experienced it first-hand, and I have horror movies to thank for that blessing.

The Exorcist is clearly an accomplished film on all sorts of levels (I’m, not surprisingly, particularly interested in its perspective on the Catholic priest) but I’m not sure it would make it into my top ten films. I also admit to knowing next to nothing about the horror genre which exists at the periphery of my cinematic vision and knowledge. The Exorcist, along with Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby and Kubrick’s The Shining are all films of exceptional artistic quality and yet the horror genre as a whole is too camp and predictable for my tastes.

In 2008, I began to read the rave reviews of an indie Swedish vampire movie called Let the Right One In. Curiousity got the better of me and one afternoon, I took myself off to a matinee performance. Let the Right One In became one of my favourite film of that year.

The film circles around the relationship of two outsiders. Twelve year old, Oskar, is bullied at school and without proper parental support, he must fend for himself emotionally and practically at home. New neighbours move in next door and Oskar meets the mysterious Eli. An adolescent romance begins to develop between them which is handled by the director, Tomas Alfredson, with real tenderness and humour. They are “a pair of star cross’d lovers” and in Eli’s case she can only appear when there are stars because she is a teenage vampire.

Let the Right One In directs the horror genre to a new territory where the fragility of all our loves and relationships are examined. The sense of being misunderstood that is so common in adolescence (and such a staple ingredient in films about adolescence) acquires an added depth when the individual that is misunderstood is a vampire. Let the Right One In is no gore fest but a more melancholy meditation on those insurmountable barriers that make love impossible. This is Catcher in the Rye with fangs.

Let the Right One In has just experienced an American makeover as Let Me In. This new version (which stays reasonably faithful in terms of narrative structure to the original), directed by Matt Reeves (Cloverfield), is worth seeing in its own right. The action has been transposed to the United States of the 1980’s, but the essential elements remain the same. The most significant change is that this feels much more like a conventional horror film. There are more shocks, more breaking of necks with attendant Dolby sound effects and more CGI. Given this directorial slant it is inevitable that the horror displaces the ambiguous romance and makes it a less disturbing film than the Swedish original.

These films may not have convinced me of the importance of the horror genre. They have, however, made me question my prejudices and that can never be a bad thing.

Another Year

2010-11-17T19:38:00.047Z

At the heart of Mike Leigh’s Another Year is the happy marriage of Tom (Jim Broadbent) and his wife, Gerri (Ruth Sheen). He is an industrial geologist and she an NHS therapist, both approaching retirement in an unremarkable suburbia. Leigh captures the gentleness, unspoken tenderness and friendship of a long marriage without ever allowing this picture to slip into sentimental sludge. With an acute eye and ear, all the minutiae of a contented marriage are examined: the bedtime hug, the shared mug of tea on the allotment as the seasons pass by, the humour and eloquent silences that weave through kitchen table conversations. Their years together have given an emotional earthiness to their marriage that finds expression in their kindness and hospitality to others.

All the characters in the film are linked in some proximate or remote way to this marriage. Tom and Gerri’s way of living becomes a kind of measure of happiness or illuminates the corrosive effects of solitude, the failure that some people have in finding a sustaining love in their lives.

The film opens with a menacing prologue that alerts the viewer to the themes that will be examined in the film. Janet is sent to Gerri for help with her insomnia and depression. In a tense cameo performace from Imelda Staunton, Janet's pinched features seem to be in a vice-like grip of self-loathing and terror. “On a scale of one to ten, how happy would you say you are?” probes Gerri. “One”, snaps Staunton as she bullies Gerri for medication to sedate her from the grim reality of an unhappy homelife. Even for those who are married, Leigh suggests, the consolations that Tom and Gerri experience are for others cruelly unattainable.

This is particularly true for Mary who works as a secretary in the same hospital as Gerri. Mary (an intelligent, brittle performance by Lesley Manville) has a manic, chatterbox personality that covers the “quiet desperation” of her private life. A failed marriage and a car-crash relationship with a married man has led her to invent an illusory love life, where almost every man she meets is encouraged to “take her out for a drink” and none ever do. Mary is a fantasist, trying to escape the ageing process and the prospect of a future spent alone. Her loneliness has turned into a bitter pool of remorse and resentment and only glass after glass of white wine dilutes the pain. When Gerri says, “Life’s not always kind, is it?” In Mary, we see the answer.

Tom and Gerri invite Mary to share in their life, to come in from the cold and find some warmth in their relationship. But, as the seasons that mark the course of the film turn, so Mary tests the patience of her hosts. Her behaviour chills the atmosphere in their home and their response to her becomes less accepting, more distanced. In this, Leigh explores the limits of kindness. Is there not some tough kernel of self-interest, desire for recognition in all our acts of kindness? Is a truly selfless kindness ever possible? Must there be limits and boundaries to our kindness? If so, how do we determine what those are?

Tom’s old university friend, Ken (Peter Wright) is also weighed down by loneliness. He is not the happy-go-lucky Northern bachelor boy but an overweight, chain-smoking, beer-swilling image of sadness. At a barbecue in Tom and Gerri’s back garden, Ken wears a t-shirt with the slogan “Less thinking, more drinking”. The irony, of course, is that the more he drinks, the more he thinks about his situation.

Another Year is a subtle meditation on the necessity of love in human lives and how "without it we remain incomprehensible to ourselves". But it is also a meditation that is full of Mike Leigh’s observational humour and generosity of spirit. Our human lives are complex, fragile, ridiculous, Leigh observes, but if our lives – even in their disillusionment, loneliness and mortality – are to be embraced then there must be something that we can hope for. Tom and Gerri symbolise that hope.

There are so many reasons to see this compassionate film but the main reason is Lesley Manville’s performance as Mary. It is heart-breaking without ever becoming mawkish, immediately recognisable without any lazy traces of caricature.

On Oscar night, when Sandra Bullock (or some other Hollywood starlet) stands up in her Armani Privée frock and says And the winner of the Best Female Performance goes to...the answer has got to be Lesley Manville.

some favourite film quotations

2010-11-14T08:13:00.049Z

My new curate suggested we watch David Fincher's Se7en the other night over a pizza. By the end of the film, he was being violently sick. Nothing to do with the film. Nothing to do with me (I think?) and everything to do with gastric flu.

I'm a fan of Fincher. He is one of those few directors who bridge the gap between popular cinema and more thoughtful subject matter. Last week I saw the first ten minutes of his latest film, The Social Network, before there was a power cut and the cinema was emptied. So that is still to be seen at some point.

I saw Se7en when it first came out in 1995 and wondered if it would stand a second viewing(it does on many levels even though Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow's acting are flat affairs). However, the thing I remember most about Se7en is a speech given by Kevin Spacey near the end of the film. Watching it again, the speech does not disappoint - a memorable piece of the kind of economical, flick-knife sharp writing that is especially suited to the cinema.

So, I thought I'd offer some of my favourite quotations from popular films. I was going to track down the relevant film clips, but I think I'll let the words do the talking and let you conjure in your mind's eye and ear the scene from each particular film.

1. Innocent? Is that supposed to be funny? An obese man, a disgusting man who could barely stand up; a man who if you saw him on the street, you'd point him out to your friends so that they could join you in mocking him; a man who, if you saw him while you were eating, you wouldn't be able to finish your meal...After him, I picked the lawyer and I know you both must be thanking me for that one. This is a man who dedicated himself to making money by lying with every breath that he could muster to keeping murderers and rapists on the streets. A woman...so ugly on the inside she couldn't bear to go on living if she couldn't be beautiful on the outside. A drug dealer, a drug dealing pederast, actually. And let's not forget the disease-spreading whore. Only in a world this shitty could you even try to say that these were innocent people and keep a straight face. But that's the point. We see a deadly sin on every street corner, in every home, and we tolerate it. We tolerate it because it's common, it's trivial. We tolerate it morning, noon and night. Well, not anymore. I'm setting the example. What I've done is going to be puzzled over and studied and followed...forever.
Kevin Spacey, Se7en

2. I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house. And that he's rather I shoot at tin cans in the backyard, but he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted, if I could hit 'em, but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird. Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don't do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat people's garden, don't nest in their corncrib, they don't do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.
Gregory Peck, To Kill a Mockingbird

3. You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Who do you think you are talkin' to? Oh yeah? Huh? Okay.
Robert De Niro, Taxi Driver

4. This list...is an absolute good. This list is life.
Ben Kingsley, Schindler's List

5. I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!
John Hurt, The Elephant Man

6. I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find it extremely comforting that we're so close. I also find it like Chinese water torture that we're so close because you have to find the right six people to make the right connection. I am bound, you are bound, to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people.
Stockard Channing, Six Degrees of Separation

7. Why did you go to the police? Why didn't you come to me first? What have I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectfully? If you'd come to me in friendship, then this scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day. And if, by chance, an honest man like yourself should make enemies...then they would be my enemies. And then they would fear you.
Marlon Brando, The Godfather

8. You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your mommy, your daddy. You love your pyjamas. You love everything, don't you? Yeah. But you know what, buddy? As you get older, some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-the-box. Maybe you'll just realise it's just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And then you forget the few things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe its only one or two things. With me, I think it's one.
Jeremy Renner, The Hurt Locker

9. Extraordinary! On the page it looked nothing. The beginning simple, almost comic. Just a pulse - bassoons and basset horns, like a rusty squeezebox. Then suddenly, high above it, an oboe, a single note, hanging there unwavering, till a clarinet took over and sweetened it into a phrase of such delight. This was no composition by a performing monkey! This was a music I'd never heard. Filled with such longing, such unfulfillable longing, it had me trembling. It seemed to me that I was hearing the voice of God.
F.Murray Abraham, Amadeus

10. The final passage is the famous Ezekiel 25:17 from Pulp Fiction. Too long to write out so I have tracked down the clip. I should warn people that it does contain some rather colourful language, but not, I think, gratuitously so. It is Quentin Tarantino at his best and Samuel L. Jackson at his coolest. Enjoy

Indifference and its consequences

2010-11-09T09:38:00.033Z

In the morning, the Campo dei Fiori in Rome is blush with the colour and smells of fruit and vegetable stalls. In the afternoon, emptied of the stalls and washed cleaned, locals and tourists sit outside the restaurants people watching. And in the evening, young people congregate around the bars, flirting and laughing with each other. Overlooking this daily cycle of work and play is a monumental statue to the Dominican cosmologist and philosopher, Giordano Bruno. Found guilty of heresy, Bruno was handed over to the civil authorities. On February 17, 1600 he was burned at the stake. In his poem, Campo dei Fiori, the Polish poet, Czelow Milosz, meditates on the indifference of the bystanders who blithely watched as Bruno was consumed by flames:

Someone will read as moral
That the people of Rome or Warsaw
Haggle, laugh, make love
As they pass by martyrs’ pyres.
Someone else will read
Of the passing of things human,
Of the oblivion
Born before the flames have died.

In The Other Schindlers, Agnes Grunwald-Spier recounts the stories of those men and women who helped their Jewish neighbours during the Holocaust. Sometimes this was inspired by religious belief as in the case of the nun, Soeur St Cybard (1885-1968), who saved a young five year old girl, Josie Martin, by taking her into a Catholic school and concealing her identity. Later Josie would write:

I can only surmise that Soeur St Cybard was a pious and sincere human being who practised her religious beliefs well beyond the dictates of her immediate superiors...I also wonder if I could have been a rescuer. When I think of that, I’m always struck by how heroic that nun was – not just for the obvious reason of risking her life by taking in the enemy or the perceived enemy. I also think of the upheaval it must have caused for this woman to take in a child!

Other rescuers had humanitarian motives such as Jaap van Proosdij (1921 -) who was only twenty one when he rescued 250 Dutch Jews. Reflecting on his actions, he said:

Why did I do it? Because it was the only normal thing to do. One can’t sit and watch when people are in mortal danger even when you do not know them...It is an important thing in my life to feel that I was useful somewhere...that I did not live just to enjoy myself. Nothing else I ever did was as important. A friend of mine said to me that the war was the time he really lived. For me, it was the time I lived the most intensely.

These histories of bravery and selfless concern for others are deeply moving. But, as Agnes Grunwald-Spier reminds us, these were largely isolated events before the general sea of indifference to the sufferings of the Jewish people.

What moves one person to compassion and action when others remain largely indifferent to the suffering around them? What makes one person a bystander and another a Good Samaritan? Has it something to do with categorising people as “them” and not “us”? Does the primitive tendency to stereotype the “other” feed into this indifference? Do some people possess a religious or moral integrity that goes beyond doctrinal formulations and deepens them? Are there some people who have an acute awareness of their interconnectedness with humanity, that, in the words of John Donne, “no man is an island, Intire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent. A part of the Maine…Any man’s death diminishes me, Because I am involved in Mankinde; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. (Devotions XVII) Where within us does the darkness of indifference give way, if at all, to the breaking dawn of active compassion?

In 2001, Professor Richard D. Heffner interviewed the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner, Elie Weisel. Heffner asked: “You’ve spoken about those who put people in the death camps and brought about their deaths directly. You also speak about others who stood around indifferently. Do you feel that this is increasingly a theme in our times?” Elie Wiesel responded:

Oh, more and more. I have the feeling that everything I do is a variation on the same theme. I’m simply trying to pull the alarm and say, “Don’t be indifferent”. Simply because I feel that indifference now is equal to evil. Evil, we know more or less what it is. But indifference to disease, indifference to famine, indifference to dictators, somehow it is here and we accept it. And I have always felt that the opposite of culture is not ignorance; it is indifference. And the opposite of faith is not atheism; again, it is indifference. And the opposite of morality is not immorality; it’s again indifference. And we don’t realise how indifferent we are simply because we cannot not be a little bit indifferent

.
J.D.Salinger, author of Catcher in the Rye, helped liberate Dachau concentration camp. He would later observe that “anyone could turn out to be a Nazi –your neighbour, your babysitter, the man at the post office – anyone. And anyone could be a hero; you never knew until it happened who would be a hero and who would be a coward or traitor.”

And that is the rub. We remain largely hidden from ourselves. Only our actions or acts of omission reveal us in any concrete sense. None of us can predict the existential maturity of our moral natures until we act or fail to act. Above all, it is in the moment of tragedy or trauma that either our moral grandeur or failure is revealed to us. We see ourselves as we really are. Until we are faced with the suffering and fragility of another human being, those who are hunted and crucified outside the city walls, we do not know whether we will reach out to them or whether covering our own backs, protecting our reputations, parroting given ideological positions will be our main preoccupation.

Would I have been another Schindler, Soeur St Cybard, Jaap van Proosdij or just another indifferent bystander, rationalising my cowardice and ignoring those who were “other”?

The Other Schindlers: why some people chose to save Jews in the Holocaust, Agnes Grunwald-Spier, The History Press, 2010

Racism, football and the collective.

2010-10-31T16:00:00.040Z

One of the reasons I read The Times newspaper (although it frequently infuriates me and I constantly think about having an affair with some other paper) is the writing of the journalist, Simon Barnes. He is the Chief Sports writer for the newspaper, but also writes on his love of bird watching and a variety of other subjects, including his son who has Downs Syndrome.

Simon Barnes is what people now refer snootily to as a “prose stylist”. His words have a cleansing, Alpine purity and yet he is not afraid to exercise language and metaphor in order to create vivid sporting images. He has the ability to take foreign subjects and through the written word, make the reader believe that the alien sport he is surveying is also within their mental apprehension. Not only that, through his incisive analysis, the reader believes that sport has a meaning and value beyond mere distraction. This, in the sociologist, Peter Berger's famous phrase, is sport as "a signal of transcendence"

It is because Simon Barnes considers sport to be a human virtue, that he also recognises its vices. His latest article, No masking football’s ability to up the anti (29 October 2010), considers the relationship between racist, neo-Nazi organisations (in this case, the English Defence League, EDL) and football. He writes:

It’s always football. Whenever you follow the more grotesque forms of politics, you end up on the road that leads back to football. As I read the disquieting interview with Stephen Lennon, founder of the English Defence League in The Times this week, so I waited for the moment when we came up against football.

It happened in the sixth paragraph, with the information that Lennon is banned from going to matches at Luton Town as part of his bail conditions, after being charged with affray and assault after two separate incidents. The EDL, I learnt, began with Luton supporters handing out leaflets that read “Ban the Luton Taleban”.

Barnes thinks there are a number of reasons why football attracts such degenerate, disordered social views. “The politics of violent intolerance traditionally does best among working-class youth,” he observes, “particularly when they can be separated from older people and from women”.

The first part of this statement seems uncontroversial to me. The pale faced youths on the crumbling terraces of the 1970’s and '80's were the obvious recruits for the National Front. They were susceptible to the rhetoric of the far right. “Some people say we’re racists. We’re not racists. We’re realists,” says the character Lenny in Shane Meadows 2006 film, This is England, “Some people call us Nazis. We're not Nazis. No, what we are, we are nationalists and there's a reason people try to pigeonhole us like this. And that is because of one word, gentlemen - Fear.”

It is Barnes’s contention that when men (especially, young, impressionable men) are separated from the elderly and from women, their ideas become more easily manipulated. When ageing (with all its frailties, experiences and sense of approaching death) and the feminine are marginalised, men become more vulnerable to a distorting machismo that often finds expression in a brutal herd mentality.

“In a footballing context, jocose bigotry is socially and morally acceptable”, writes Barnes, “In football, it is perfectly acceptable to be illogical and absurd in the name of loyalty...When you turn to football, you are entitled to let your sense of fairness and common sense – almost your humanity – take a holiday. Tottenham Hotspur can hate arsenal and Arsenal can hate Tottenham and Everton can hate Liverpool and everybody can hate United....When the precariously maintained joke of rivalry and hatred becomes something people actually believe in, the madness begins.”

If this is true of football, then, perhaps, it is true of other collectives where men and testosterone predominate? I don’t know what the social theorists would say about this and I'm not entirely convinced by this suspicion. Nevertheless, as I looked out at my congregation this Sunday morning, the sight of young men alongside women and the elderly felt kind of healthy and reassuring.

Hamlet and the Search for Identity

2010-10-24T08:00:00.001+01:00

To thine own self be true,/ And it must follow as the night, the day,/ Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Over the years, I have seen a number of Hamlets (Anton Lesser, Ian Charleson, Kenneth Branagh, Jude Law, Ben Whishaw, Simon Russell Beale and I even, as a guilty pleasure, enjoyed Mel Gibson’s portrayal in Zeffirelli’s 1990 film of the play) and all have – to a greater or lesser degree – shed new light on the complex soul of the Prince of Denmark. Last week, I went to see the latest production of Hamlet at the National Theatre where Rory Kinnear (the son of the late, Roy Kinnear) takes on the role with a renewed freshness. His performance and the inventiveness of this production makes you feel as if you are watching the play for the first time.

One of the challenges that any actor faces when they approach Hamlet is to what extent they travel the fault lines between sanity and insanity in the character. Kinnear’s Hamlet is very sane and his “antic disposition” is a psychological mechanism to protect himself from the pain of grief and injustice. This Hamlet circles the epithet “to thine own self be true” and considers if that is possible when "the time is out of joint” and you are under surveillance from family, peers, institutions and society.

In such an environment, must we repress truths about ourselves in order to survive, achieve preferment or engender some form of acceptance from others? Are we ever willing to let down our guard and be entirely honest with ourselves or with another? Or is there always an element of self-deception when we look at ourselves and subterfuge when we present ourselves to others? Do we prefer to manufacture and live with the illusion rather than wrestle with our reality? Kinnear's Hamlet asks if it is possible to live a more authentic appropriation of who we are? If so, what might that look like? The director, Nicholas Hytner, in a programme note remarks:

One of them (the play’s chief concerns) is human authenticity. It’s one of Hamlet’s obsessions: the apparent impossibility of being authentically oneself, or of knowing others authentically. The first line of the play is famously resonant: “Who’s there?” The second line seems even more telling to me: “Nay answer me: stand and unfold yourself!” Is it possible to completely unfold yourself? To anyone else, or even to yourself?

Rory Kinnear commenting on the famous soliloquies that are so central to the play observes:

Hamlet is someone who’s constantly searching for the truth in humanity and in himself, and, through the continual betrayal of those he once loved or was close to, adopts more and more walls to protect himself or to obscure his motives. In those five or six soliloquies you’re able to be open, to enlist the audience to your situation and to work things through with them...He’s trying to be honest with himself.

This might seem like simply a psychological process of introspection - the caricature that many people have of Hamlet is of a melancholy youth, a sort of Danish Morrissey, endlessly soul mining or indulgently navel gazing depending on your prejudices. But Kinnear suggests that Hamlet’s self actualisation cannot be reduced to mere psychology or sociology but is something that also happens outside his immediate understanding of himself:

Madness seems to be a label for behaving outside the norms of society. Hamlet, in seeing the ghost of his father, seems to be taken – as well as to rage at the murder and adultery, which he might have already suspected – to a state of wonderment at this other-worldliness, a new sphere of life. But at the same time he’s wondering how he’s going to be able to deal with this knowledge. He instantly decides that the way to deal with it is to behave as “other” as possible. If he tries to sit on his new knowledge it will out somehow, so actually to let rip from the start.

I find these questions of identity, of what makes us who we are, fascinating and, perhaps, that is why I so enjoyed this production. Are we, as Descartes describes it “in the strictest sense only a thing that thinks: that is, I am a mind, or intelligence, or intellect, or reason...a thinking thing”? Is such an atomistic description of the human person adequate or is our authentic identity to be realised in something beyond the self, for example, in love for an Ophelia or a mother or God? Does the ek-stasis of being, the movement towards communion with others lead to a transcendence of the boundaries of the self and thus to true authenticity? Is the philosopher, Charles Davis, correct when he writes in Body as Spirit:

Man’s true subjectivity is not the self-sufficient independence of an isolated monad, but a self-possessed openness to the plenitude of being. As an embodied subjectivity, the self participates in the plenitude of being only in and through the world with which it is a bodily one.

Too many big questions here to think and write about in a brief blog post. But the fact that a production of Hamlet still has the power to stir such universal concerns makes it a profound, unsettling and moving experience.

Nothing is Self-Evident

2010-10-18T15:24:00.047+01:00

One of the pleasures of writing The Invisible Province is that I often receive ideas and suggestions from people(and even if they don't make it into a blog post, they are always interesting - so do keep sending them to me). The following blog post is thanks to the chaplain of the University of Essex, Fr Paul Keane.

In 1988, the American writer, Raymond Carver reflected on the following words from St Teresa of Avila: "Words lead to deeds...They prepare the soul, make it ready, and move it to tenderness." Carver was receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Hartford and in his acceptance speech before a packed auditorium of university students and lecturers, he said:

Long after what I've said has passed from your minds, whether it be weeks or months, and all that remains is the sensation of having attended a large public occasion...try then, as you work out your individual destines, to remember that words, the right and true words, can have the power of deeds.

Václav Havel, the renowned dramatist, essayist and the first President of the Czech Republic, would agree with Carver. Words lead to deeds and that is why words are such volatile, powerful and important things. They are vessels of sacredness and should be handled with a sacramental reverence. One cruel word can, in the words of George Steiner, "do dirt on hope". On the other hand, words that are blessings, revelations of understanding can illuminate the darkest abyss and build communion. Contrasting the words of Salman Rushdie with those of Ayatollah Khomeini, Václav Havel famously wrote: "Words that electrify society with their freedom and truthfulness are matched by words that mesmerise, deceive, inflame, madden, beguile, words that are harmful - lethal even. The word as arrow."

For Havel, the question of our time is whether words can be expressions of truth that man can live by or have our words become so semantically corrupted by the virus of relativism (e.g. those schools of postmodern literary theory that advocate the deconstruction of meaning and the annihilation of all syntactical or lexical descriptions) that truth is beyond expression. Where words have been emptied of their truth and are reduced to the level of a euphemism, the value and power of language is called into question. In this environment, the meaning of words become so elastic that the linguistic bonds that unite human beings begin to fray and break. The idea that words are to be used responsibly is viewed with suspicion and disdain. Words become instruments of power and violence. Havel writes:

We should all fight together against arrogant words and keep a weather eye out for any insidious germs of arrogance in words that are seemingly humble. Obviously this is not just a linguistic task. Responsibility for words and towards words is a task which is intrinsically ethical. as such, however, it is situated beyond the horizon of the visible world, in that realm wherein dwells the Word that was in the beginning and is not the words of Man.

Václav Havel has just given a remarkable speech at the opening ceremony of Forum 2000. This is language used with all the fervour and energy of an Old Testament prophet. But, above all, this is language that has the power to make synaptic connections between different viewpoints. Havel links the destruction of our landscapes by a philistine consumerism with "a civilisation that has lost its connection with the infinite and eternity." In Havel's mind, the economic recession is of a piece with a mystical intuition that "strangeness, unnaturalness, mystery, inconceivability have been shifted out of the world of serious thought into the dubious closets of suspicious people. Until they are released and allowed to return to our minds things will not go well." Havel really does believe that words can lead to deeds.

XX

2010-10-13T17:28:00.029+01:00

The sad fate of the album XX is that it will end up being blogged about by middle aged men (worse still, blogged about by priests, which must be the kiss of death to anything cool and stylish). Unfortunately, XX is going to go the same way as every Portishead and Massive Attack album - the way of the middle class, hip dinner party and the television advertisement. This is a shame because around the addictive dubstep melodies and riffs the XX have crafted a musical landscape that echoes with dystopian menace and the heartbreak you find whimpering in council estate stair wells on a Saturday night.

The XX are four youths from South London dressed in black and looking as if they haven’t had a hearty meal for some time. A boy/girl duo – Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sims – are the lead singers and their vocal interplay, all hushed intensity and jagged intimacy, veneer their lovesongs with an urban vulnerability. Supported by Baria Qureshi (keyboards/guitar) and Jamie Smith (programming/samples), the XX have created a critically acclaimed debut album that has just recently won the prestigious Mercury Music Prize.

As the musical interlude, Intro, fades, the listener is drawn into the seductive, languid spaces of XX - a bedsit, youth squat land for damaged hearts. Synth beats and smoky soundscapes give more than a respectful nod to the 80’s band the Cocteau Twins but this aural expansiveness is hooked to lyrics that dissect at the nuclear level the autistic anxieties and tics of contemporary relationships. Big sounds and emotional longing are what make XX an interesting listen. These are songs that, in the words of the track VCR, “live half in the daytime/live half in the night”, that no man’s land where authentic love is hard to come by.

One of the standout tracks is Crystalised. Its helter-skelter, unpredictable riffs conjure up a bruised psychological state of self-mutiliating uncertainty. “You’ve applied the pressure/to have me crystalised./And you’ve got the faith/that I could bring paradise ./ I’ll forgive and forget/before I’m paralysed./ Do I have to keep up the pace/To keep you satisfied.” Reading the unspoken contradictions of a relationship takes on a forensic struggle. The pressure and pace inherent in a youthful relationship is also recognised to be destructive and paralysing. This song, like so many on the album, has an unsettling sensuality, the closeness of breath and the grinding of teeth.

Some critics have complained that by the end of the album, the songs have melted into one luxurious, indistinguishable blend. There is some truth in this but with an album that provides so many unexpected pleasures, this criticism feels petty and mean. XX is a perfect soundtrack to all the consolations and terrors that swirl around our search for love. Let's hope it does not end up at too many dinner parties or on too many grandad blogs.

XX, The XX (Young Turks, Rough Trade Records, 2009)

Is the internet weakening our ability to read?

2010-10-06T16:00:00.004+01:00

There’s a striking passage in the Confessions, where St Augustine describes his surprise when he stumbles across Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, reading. Augustine observes that “when he read, his eyes scanned the page and his heart explored the meaning, but his voice was silent and his tongue was still. Often, when we came to see him, we found him reading like this in silence, for he never read aloud.” Augustine was witnessing what, we may term, a paradigm shift from a largely oral idiom to a written idiom, where the thinking subject internalises the word and becomes not just one who reads but a reader.

But this shift, Nicholas Carr believes, also marks a significant cognitive development with brain function being stimulated and exercised in new ways. For centuries, the commonly held neurological view was that, after the malleability of childhood and youth, our brains became structurally fixed. In this mechanistic understanding, the brain was like a combustion engine, its many parts having a specific character and function. If any deviance from these functions occurred the circuits of the brain, like those of the engine, would begin to break down. Such an understanding of the brain has recently been called into question and it appears that our brains are more “plastic” than previously thought. With repetitive thought and action, the neural circuits of the brain appear to develop and strengthen.

Augustine witnessed the shift from an oral to a literate culture but now there appears to be a further shift to an electronic vernacular, which, again, will provide challenges at the neural and cultural level. We are witnessing the digitilisation of text. It is conceivable that all the libraries of the world will be stored on a computer and accessed via the i-book in your hand. At the forefront of this revolution is Google that aims to scan every book ever printed and make them “discoverable and searchable online.”

In comparative terms, is this anything more than the change from vinyl to c.d that many of us experienced in the twentieth century? Does it matter if our texts are printed or digitalised, isn't this just a technological development which only the Luddite would see as threatening? Well, though there may have been benefits from the move from vinyl to c.d and more recently, to download, there have also been losses. No one listens to an album sequentially from track one to track twelve these days. The idea of artistic coherence, at least in the mind of the majority of listeners, has been lost. Instead the listener flits from track to track until they land upon something aurally attractive and then, when they are satisfied or their attention is tested, they move on. Our ability to listen to music - pop, jazz or classical - in a concentrated, uninterrupted fashion is challenged. It is not just that the music or the methods by which we listen to music have changed, what is changing is the very act of listening itself. Listening for the "still, sad music of humanity" has become an activity associated with a bygone age.

Similarly, having a digitalised text may have many benefits, such as easy access to a particular book but there are also likely to be losses. For example, what happens to the cohesion of a text? What happens to the intellectual discipline of following an argument? What happens when we stop exercising our more reflective faculties, when a text becomes just hyperlinked data, something to scroll rather than an integrated body of learning to be thought through? What happens to the architecture of our brains when we start thinking like this? Nicholas Carr writes ominously:

For Google, with its faith in efficiency as the ultimate good and its attendant desire "to get users in and out really quickly," the unbinding of the book entails no loss, only gain. Google Book Search manager Adam Mathes grants that "books often live a vibrant life offline," but he says that they'll be able "to live an even more exciting life online." What does it mean for a book to lead a more exciting life? Searchability is only the beginning. Google wants us, it says, to be able to "slice and dice" the contents of the digitized books we discover, to do all the "linking, sharing, and aggregating" that are routine with Web content but that "you can't easily do with physical books...The great library that Google is rushing to create shouldn't be confused with the libraries we've known up until now. It's not a library of books. It's a library of snippets.

Film Quiz

2010-10-04T17:55:00.008+01:00

I have been exposed by my fellow priestly blogger, Stephen Wang, for what I really am: a nerdy cineaphile. It's true. There's no escaping my reality. His last film quiz provided me so much pleasure, especially his really difficult, cryptic clues. Now the fascinating Bridges and Tangents blog has stumbled upon a great film quiz from The Guardian newspaper...I'm doing okay at the moment, although a few of the film references have escaped me. Nerdy cineaphile, me?!

Beauty is truth, truth beauty

2010-09-30T11:48:00.010+01:00

My review of Roger Scruton's book, Beauty, has just been published in the online art periodical, Artfractures Quarterly: Summer 2010. There's lots of other stimulating essays and reviews in there as well. Do have a browse.

Winter's Bone

2010-09-21T17:55:00.057+01:00

Sometimes a film come along, like Winter’s Bone, that just reminds you how important cinema is. Unlike any other medium, the cinematic experience gives the viewer the psychic space to imaginatively explore the lives of those that they would never encounter in normal circumstances. But, this is more than an education in neo-realism. There is a certain moral position informing such film making that aims to exercise those faculties of empathy within us. Watching films that are more than entertaining distractions but have a serious intent enables us to imagine in a vivid way something of the invisible darkness in others.

Set in the Ozark mountains of rural Missouri, Winter's Bone follows 17 year old Ree as she searches for her father who has disappeared on bail after having put up their family home as a bond. If she does not find him within the space of a week, she, her catatonic mother and her two younger siblings will be evicted. The film is a chase, race-against-the-clock movie but elevated to something more profound by the rawness of impoverished lives drawn with a visual acuity and poignancy.

These American backwaters are not unfamiliar to film goers. John Boorman's 1972 film, Deliverance, starring Jon Voigt and Burt Reynolds, presented the inhabitants of these peripheral sub-cultures as backward hillbillies, emotionally ruined by lines of familial consanguinity and intent on making city-dwellers squeal like a pig. The Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men suggested that the contemporary cowboy landscape had lost its John Wayne values and become an amoral wilderness. Again, Ang Lee mapped this territory in Brokeback Mountain but, in that film, the landscape became a metaphysical backdrop to suppressed passion and eventual violence. In Winter’s Bone, director Debra Granik avoids any consoling lyricism or horror film clichés in order to consider the grinding effects of poverty on a community. These are people who have aged before their time, the lines in their faces etched by the toil of eking a living from a barren land or surviving their loneliness by snorting lines or firing rounds into each other.

Winter's Bone possesses all the menace of any good thriller but the film’s real achievement is to place these thriller motifs within a domestic context. In between playing Nancy Drew, we witness Ree's effort to look after her family. Where ends cannot meet, she survives on the food handouts from neighbours or the hunting of squirrels for a stew. Played by Jennifer Lawrence with impressive emotional commitment, Ree combines gritty resilience with the awkward vulnerability of any teenager. Her world is one of trailers, cabins and anorexic dogs tethered to long chains. Yet, she accepts this stark, unforgiving existence for the sake of keeping her family together. When her brother and sister ask her if she is going to abandon them, Ree replies “I’d be lost without the weight of you two on my back.”

Yet for all the emotional and visual austerity, this film does not succumb to fashionable nihilism. Winter’s Bone is a more nuanced project and seeks a kind of ambiguous redemption. Even in an hermetically sealed environment where the laws of barbarism and vengeance shape social attitudes, the possibility that individuals will choose generosity and goodness breathes hope across this tortured landscape. This hope may look grimy and weather beaten but it is still something recognisable as worth living for.

Lady Gaga and death

2010-09-15T17:37:00.034+01:00

The Lady Gaga phenomenon seeps incontinently into every crevice of popular culture. She is, in the words of Madonna’s song, Vogue, on the cover of a magazine or, more correctly, every magazine. She has become a “living sculpture” that claims to fuse raunch, mortality and violence into an art form with its own pop soundtrack. At first glance, she and her arresting visuals look like performance art but, on closer inspection, they are too self-conscious, premeditated to be anything more than an exercise in crepuscular camp. With her Marge Simpson wigs and “look at me, look at me” shock tactics, the Lady Gaga brand has become as ubiquitous as Nike trainers and McDonalds. You can sneer at her, but it is hard to ignore her. She has become the Damien Hirst of the music industry, a headline junkie.

“Death subtends life, or underlies life,” the pathologist F. Gonzales-Crussi explains, “and the action of time consists in peeling away successive layers so as to render death ever more visible.” Lady Gaga’s striptease creates an aesthetic of the funeral parlour. Her walk-in freezer complexion and cat suits that give her an anorexic silhouette locate her inspiration in the mortuary. The Jacobean revenge narratives of her videos (that involve male models being burnt and poisoned) are meant to reveal “the skull beneath the skin”. Recently she has captured the headlines by wearing a dress made of proscuito crudo. Remember man that thou art meat. The more twisted and macabre, the better in this weird carnival of death. The cultural commentator, Camille Paglia writes in a recent article for The Sunday Times Supplement:

At last year’s MTV awards show, Gaga staged a barbaric spectacle where she was seemingly crushed to death by a falling chandelier, after which her bloodied body was hoisted up to dangle limply above her piano. On her current tour, she appears to be killed by a psychotic stalker, who gnaws her throat as the blood pours down her chest. Monster claws and other horror-movie regalia are a Gaga staple...All the frantic, flailing arm moves imposed on her by professional choreographers can’t disguise her essential depressiveness and spiritual paralysis...

It's not clear what Paglia means by “spiritual paralysis” but she captures the idea that something innate to the human person is damaged by such nihilistic preoccupations. This is the soul of man dragged through the sewers of the imagination or what the American art critic, Adam Gopnik, describes as the High Morbid Manner:

A detached, distanced, oddly smiling presentation of violence – a pageantry of violence – is, as every evening’s television and every summer’s big movie demonstrates, as much the popular fashion as the avant-garde one...The shock of the new, which for most of the century could reside as much in a black square as in a slit eyeball, isn’t available any longer. It’s not possible to shock any more by being new. The only way to shock is by being shocking.

Lady Gaga may dress as if she is the high priestess of the avant garde but she is simply appropriating the ambient culture around her – the torture porn of horror films and the drive-by fantasies of Grand Theft Auto. Her music sells because she can write a hook. She sells because she has tapped into the maggot infested corners of the contemporary imagination. "I want your ugly/ I want your disease," she sings. Disease and ugliness is what we get. The pursuit of Beauty is forsaken.

Without any eschatological hope or reference point, the secular mind ekes out a little comfort from futile distraction. With annihilation offered as our ultimate meaning one endures this living death by downloading Bad Romance and dancing like zombie.

Is the internet playing with our minds?

2010-09-08T15:19:00.026+01:00

“Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene towards the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”
The Shallows, Nicholas Carr

Did you get to the end of the above quotation without pressing a link or playing the video? Reading anything on the internet is full of distractions, pop-ups, siren voices inviting us to click, link, search and surf. Unless I make the effort to print an article from the internet, I invariably don’t read it from beginning to end. Online I’ll skim read it and if it doesn’t hold my attention or I find it too difficult, I’m back to the Google search engine. Even when I am reading, I catch myself taking sneaky glances at my e-mails, Statcounter, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, etc. I am snacking or grazing on information, images and ideas. I have the suspicion that when I log into the internet, I am logging out of my usual ways of thinking. Reading a book and reading a blog or an article on a website feel like two cognitively different experiences. But, are they? And if they are, does it really matter?

Of course, the fact that all this immense store of data on the internet is just a click away is widely accepted as having radically benefited mankind. This is hard to dispute and only the Luddite would argue that we would be better off without the internet. When Tim Berners-Lee composed the code for the world wide web, the way human beings collected and transmitted information and ideas changed for ever. Now, with a quick Google search, I can find out within seconds that, for example, A Space Odyssey was released in 1968. No more traipsing to the library and wandering the stacks. For cherry picking information (the way I mostly use the net) I find the internet invaluable, but there are moments when I wonder how helpful it is if we want to think a bit deeper about things and ideas? How is the internet affecting our cognitive faculties and our ability to think more seriously?

One of the criticisms of this blog is that it is not bloggish enough. It’s not punchy, pithy or journalistic. It’s not angry, opinionated or flashy. The paragraphs are too long, the language too literary and rhetorical, the ideas too culturally arcane. These criticisms are spot on. But that’s the kind of blog I chose to create. Yes, there are links and videos, but I wanted to see if it was possible to put ideas and their expression at the centre of this medium in a way that was less feverish and less about convenience. I wondered if the effort and patience that have been essential requirements when reading a book could still be part of reading a blog? I’m not sure. And I become positively pessimistic when I read the pathologist Bruce Friedman, who also blogs about the use of computers in medicine, admit, “I can’t read War and Peace anymore, I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.” I am beginning to suspect that this experience is not uncommon.

I think something is happening to our minds (or, at least, to my mind). We appear to be moving from a linear, narrative processing of information (largely influenced by the book) to something more staccato and disjointed (largely influenced by the Internet). A more contemplative, focused reading of material is being replaced by a hurried, superficial reading that fillets essays and articles for the “essential” facts and discards the rest as superfluous waste. We are becoming, in the words of one commentator, “skilled hunters,” butchering the involved, challenging argument for the gobbet, soundbite, snazzy snippet.

It appears I’m not the only one that has these concerns. In his book, The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Nicholas Carr examines similar anxieties but places them in a broader technological context. He argues that there is growing scientific evidence which shows the internet is changing the way our brains function and that for all the benefits of the internet, there may also be real losses. Like the computer, HAL, Carr suggests that our minds may be going and being replaced with a radically new synaptic organization:

For the last five centuries, ever since Gutenburg’s printing press made book reading a popular pursuit, the linear, literary mind has been at the centre of art, science and society. As supple as it is subtle, it’s been the imaginative mind of the Renaissance, the rational mind of the Enlightenment, the inventive mind of the Industrial Revolution, even the subversive mind of Modernism. It may soon be yesterday’s mind.

The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember, Nicholas Carr, Atlantic Books, London, 2010

No Way Down: Life and Death on K2

2010-08-30T16:46:00.036+01:00

For the serious mountaineer, there is only one mountain. K2. After Everest, K2 is the second highest mountain peak in the world, standing some 28,251 feet. But whereas Everest has been “overrun by a circus of commercial expeditions” and thousands have had their picture snapped at its top, K2 retains its deadly attraction. Only 278 people have ever stood on its summit. Of those 278, only 254 have made it down to base camp alive.

On Friday August 1 2008 a series of international expeditions (Norwegian, Dutch, Italian, Serbian, American, South Korean and French) began an attempt on the K2 summit. By Monday August 4, eleven mountaineers and high-altitude porters (HAPs) were dead. Many of those who made it down alive were suffering from severe frostbite or were emotionally bruised by the knowledge that friends and loved ones had been killed. This became one of the worst disasters in modern mountaineering history. K2 with its natural arsenal of ice, snow, avalanche and altitude sickness had defeated almost all those who had tried to scale its fearsome heights. The Sherpas were wary of “waking the fury of the mountain gods” that they believed lived in the glaciers, seracs and crevices of this cold mountain. That fateful weekend the mountain gods roared.

Graham Bowley’s No Way Down provides a meticulous account of the central events that culminated in this tragedy. But, above all, he tells with wonderful economy the human drama of courage, hubris, self-sacrifice and ultimately, loss and grief. It is a fascinating exploration of the existential pull that mountains exert on the lives of some people.

For these mountaineers, climbing is more than a physical challenge but it bears a metaphorical weight as they attempt to articulate through the climb what it means to be mortal. Every groan of the mountain, every careless footstep, the ice screw and line badly anchored makes the cold breath of death visible. These tough men and women remind us that when we are exposed to our human fragility in such a stark, uncompromising fashion, we are also provided with a simultaneous awareness of what we are capable of and of what we cannot achieve by our own powers. It is not mountains that are conquered, it is fear. In a Himalayan light, the illusions and armoury fall away and we find ourselves clinging to a new clarity about ourselves. For some, this is a touching of the void. For others, a touching of the transcendent. In both cases, the climbing of mountains like K2 are death-defying and self-defining experiences for those involved. Bowley observes:

They (the mountaineers) had broken out of comfortable lives to venture to a place few of us dare go in our lives. They had confronted their mortality, immediately and up close. Some had even come back to K2 after serious injury in earlier years, attracted like flies to the light, to some deeper meaning about themselves, human experience, and human achievement.

In return, K2 had required from them heroism and selflessness and responsibility. It had also laid bare fatal flaws and staggering errors.

Gerard McDonnell was one of those who came back to K2 after he had been caught in a rockfall in 2006 and had to be airlifted to hospital. Back to fitness, this time he successfully climbed K2, making him the first Irishman to do so. There is a photo of him triumphantly holding an Irish flag at the summit. Bowley explains that Gerard’s reasons for climbing were, in part, due to his personal history. His father, Denis, had died when he was just twenty. In 2003, when he climbed Everest, he took with him his father’s rosary beads and told his mother, “I felt close to my dad up there.” For those who knew Gerard this was a statement stamped with real conviction rather than sentiment.

Sadly, Gerard McDonnell never made it down alive from K2, probably succumbing to the devastating effects of altitude sickness. Yet, during his descent, he is believed to have selflessly tried to help three Korean climbers who had fallen and got trapped in their ropes. He did so in the knowledge that this would put his own life in grave danger. At his memorial service back in his home town of Kilcornan, County Limerick, the priest said, “We know we are here to honour Gerard, to praise him, and welcome Gerard to his heavenly home. Gerard, who died on the K2. That is his burial place and in a sense where he wished to die…It was on a mountain that Moses communicated with God. It was on a mountain that Jesus was transfigured. It was on a mountain that Gerard achieved one of his life’s ambitions. It was such a spiritual experience that he even referred to it as being an honour to die on a mountain.”

No Way Down could have been reduced to a boys own adventure yarn. Instead, Graham Bowley chooses a more complex, rigorous route through his material. He does not allow the bravery of the mountaineers to camouflage their flaws and vanities. He shows how the different memories of those forty eight hours reveal as much about those who are recalling the events as those who they are recalling. And at the centre of his story rises K2. With prose that is as spare and precise as anything in Hemmingway, Bowley provides a vivid sense of how this mountain inspires both jubilation and fear.

The photographer, Anselm Adams, famously said that “No matter how sophisticated you may be, a large granite mountain cannot be denied - it speaks in silence to the very core of your being” No Way Down does not hesitate to explore these ontological intuitions and thus turns a tragic event into something with universal application. No Way Down is my favourite read of 2010...so far.

No Way Down: Life and Death on K2, Graham Bowley, Viking 2010

Fundamentalism

2010-08-24T10:46:00.043+01:00

In On Balance, Adam Phillips suggests that you can determine when a thing is fundamental if it turns up in dinner party conversation or after a few pints down the pub and the tolerant façade people present begins to slip. The debate becomes agitated and sometimes violent. To protect us from such ugly displays, some polite forms of society have created the convention that we are never to discuss politics or religion…or, in other words, never to discuss anything that really matters, that pertains to Truth.

But, outside the etiquette of polite society, this is very hard to do. There are few human beings who live lives of obscene indifference. Most human beings consider something or someone as fundamental. Without this fundamental idea, without recognizing something as definitive, our lives are trivialised. The fundamental may be your children or the State of Israel or the Bible or your socialism. Whatever it is, it is fundamental to how you understand yourself, your place in the world and, for some, your eschatological purpose. In this loose sense, we are all fundamentalists.

It follows that we will want to protect these fundamental things from views that seek to harm them. “There is no such thing as free speech,” Stanley Fish writes in No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing Too, “because from the very start your sense of just how free speech should be is shadowed by your identification of, and obligation to, the good in whose name acts of speech are to be justified.” For example, the democrat will try and hold in some sort of harmonious tension the multiple views within society. However, if it is perceived that the fundamental idea of democracy is itself being threatened by a particular view then this dissenting view may considered inadmissible. Adam Phillips observes that “For the fundamentalist, as for the democrat, people can say what they like; but when they start saying things that aim to destroy the foundational preconditions of their given political culture there have to be penalties.”

But how do you manage fundamental beliefs in a pluralistic, liberal society? One possibility is that there can be what the political philosopher, Chantal Mouffe, calls "productive conflict", lively debate that invigorates democracy. Another possibility is that some consensual ground is mapped where we accept that there are fundamental things that we disagree on but other fundamental things (e.g., our common humanity, our desire for peace, our search for unity) that we can choose, at times, to recognise. Or society responds to these tensions by elevating the idea of tolerance with the result that vigorous “truths” are turned into flaccid “opinions” and bled of some of their power.

Increasingly these methods are being questioned. Productive conflict may be useful in a democracy, but who decides what is productive and for whom? Or what happens when discussions and negotiations keep breaking down and we are no longer able “to agree to differ”? I noted that in a recent article, an activist wrote, “it is not tolerance that we want, it is acceptance” signalling a philosophical shift to a position that is more sharply defined and, for the advocates of tolerance, threatening. Adam Phillips suggests the following modus vivendi:

We are talking about the moment in which people begin to believe, in despair or with relief, that co-existence rather than consensus is our best option; or alternatively believe that the unbelievers – those who are not of the same mind – must be eradicated. Coexistence, in other words, is the modern liberal’s last hope; the only remaining political ideal left, and one that will survive only if that is itself agreed upon.

Today the word “fundamentalism” is most often associated with religion. Islamic fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism is a complex phenomenon (too complex for a blog post) but it appears to arise, in part, as a reactive response to a contemporary world view, for example, to secularism or Western materialism. In this reaction, the balance between faith and reason tips towards more aggressive expressions. "The quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous," writes Pope Benedict in Salt of the Earth, "when it leads to fanaticism and narrow mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith becomes falsified." The fundamentalist becomes less concerned with honouring the fundamental and more concerned with strategies of conflict. When what is considered fundamental is defined as in-opposition-to rather than as a truth to be valued in itself, then the distorting effects of this process proliferate with grave consequences. When fundamental beliefs are imposed rather than proposed, human freedom and dignity is treated contemptuously.

“There is no goodness without belief,” wrote John Updike, “There is nothing but busy-ness. And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved to take into the next.” Most people accept that believing in something fundamental is essential if our lives are to have some moral coherence and purpose. Yet this can only be achieved if these fundamental beliefs are protected from the corrosive effects of fundamentalist designs. Adam Phillips advises that for the religious believer to achieve this involves keeping the vital relationship between faith and reason in play at all times. Without this relationship those things that believers consider fundamental risk spinning dangerously out of control. This is not a new idea, but it is one that Adam Phillips expresses eloquently in On Balance. For those, who believe in something they consider fundamental, this is a salutary warning.

On balance, excess and religious fanaticism

2010-08-19T14:58:00.047+01:00

I am temperamentally suspicious of extreme positions in religion, politics, culture and people. These are commonly described in terms of binary sectarianism: liberal/conservative, progressive/reactionary, utopian/revolutionary. I find these tags intellectually lazy and adolescent. My psychological anxieties about such divisions are that (a) they are too crude to be useful in thinking deeply about ideas. By generalizing, they inevitably degrade the vital nucleus of an idea and (b) nuance, paradox, intellectual humility and the slipperiness of human thought become vices rather than virtues of intelligence. By making an aristocracy of the final word, the possibility that there may be something more to say about a matter or fresh ways of speaking about it are closed off.

It follows that the idea of mature, respectful “dialogue” with contrary perspectives becomes a sign of weakness. The possibility that other views may shed light on a given view is held as anathema. Such sectarianism must turn the person who holds a contrary view into an enemy. They are to be defeated either by battering them into submission with an argument or by battering them physically, verbally or emotionally until they no longer exist. The umbrella term for these attitudes and strategies is fundamentalism.

I am looking for something more balanced, especially in a world where there exist competing and opposing views. A balanced economy. A balanced body politic. A balanced Church. A balanced person. More balance in my life, my ideas and in myself. I believe that because balance is attractive and difficult to achieve that it has an inherent value. But, has it? For example, what makes me think that the “balanced argument” or the “balanced presentation” of a particular argument is of more value than the polemic or the rant? Could, in fact, the polemic or the rant be nearer to the truth of the matter than the meticulous weighing of ideas and expressions on some finely tuned scales? And, how does one determine what is the balance, what is the extreme? I clearly have some idea in my mind of what are excessive positions, but based on what? Maybe I should be more suspicious of balance?

I’ve been thinking about these mental balancing acts because I’ve been reading Adam Phillip’s infuriating and fascinating (you see, I’m trying to strike a balance and ending up with a critical imbalance!) meditation, On Balance. He writes:

When the dramatist Mark Ravenhill writes that “Art that isn’t driven by this basic impulse to create an unbalanced view of the world is probably bad or weak,” we are not shocked by this, partly because after Romanticism we take it for granted that this is the province of art; elsewhere it is balance that is required. Art, ideally, is where the unbalanced views should be kept, as far away from religion and politics as possible. If we want art to be an isolation ward it is because we know just how contagious these so-called unbalanced views of the world can be (fascism, racism and sexism in modern liberal societies are unbalanced views, but liberal democratic values are not).

I’m not sure this view bears close examination. I’m not aware that, for example, in the contemporary art world “unbalanced views” are proliferating and that dangerous germ cultures like fascism, racism or sexism are being grown. The really “unbalanced” views (and they are, at present, minority views) in this environment are that beauty, harmony and truth are more than bourgeois, cultural constructs. Yet, there may exist some art forms, such as in the theatre, and entertainment forms, such as comedy, where playwrights or comedians dare to tip the balance or knock it over.

The reason that Adam Phillips is convinced that “unbalanced views should be kept, as far away from religion and politics as possible” is because the memory of 9/11 casts a dark shadow over his thinking. On Balance is as much a book about this event as it is about balance or psychoanalysis. For Adam Phillips, 9/11 is the example of modern excess that colours all his views of other, lesser examples of excess:

The anorexic and the suicide bomber, the attention-seeking child and the compulsive gambler, the person who has more money than he needs and the person committed to celibacy are all involved, in their different ways, in extravagant violations of law, decency or morality; even though, of course, they may not see it this way. And this, too, is important when we are thinking about excess: what is excessive to one person may be to another person just an ordinary way of life. The devoutly religious are not, in their own view, overdoing it; terrorists are not, in their own view, overreacting to the injustices they feel they have suffered. Indeed, one of the many ways of describing many of our personal and political and religious conflicts is that someone is trying to persuade someone else that they are being excessive: excessively cruel, excessively disrespectful, excessively unjust.

Perhaps, we need to take a more balanced approach to our discussion of excess. Instead of lumping together all forms of excessive behaviour – “the person who has more money than he needs and the person committed to celibacy” – as if they were identical, we need to recognise that different excesses belong to different categories of behaviour. For example, is the excessive behaviour of grief the same as the excessive behaviour of sexual promiscuity? Can you ever have too much grief? If so, what is the right amount of grief? Can you ever have too many sexual partners? If so, what is it about having multiple sexual partners that could be damaging? Different excesses. Different categories.

Adam Phillips concludes his discussion of excess by considering religious excess or fanaticism. This, of course, interested me because I, according to Phillips, am supposedly living an excessive life as a religious celibate and for somebody who prizes balance that is unsettling. But, more importantly, this discussion (post 9/11) has widespread cultural implications. Phillips suggests that there are three ways to account for religious fanaticism:

i. …Excessive belief is called up to stifle excessive doubt, as if the fanatic is saying to himself: “If I don’t continually prove my belief in this extreme way, what will be revealed is extreme faithlessness, or despair, or confusion, or even emptiness.”

ii. ….Excessive acts of belief are required to persuade other people, as if the fanatic is saying to himself: “What matters most in the world to me will not be listened to, or considered, or thought about or even noticed unless a dramatic statement is made.”

I think there is something in these descriptions of extreme religious behaviour, but it is Adam Phillips third description that I found really thought provoking. I will conclude this post with it.

iii. …the religious fanatic is someone for whom something about themselves and their lives is too much; and because not knowing what that is is so disturbing they need to locate it as soon as possible…Because the state of frustration cannot be borne – because, perhaps, it is literally unbearable, as long-term personal and political injustices always are – it requires an extreme solution, which is usually a fast one…Fanatics are people who have had to wait too long for something that may not exist. Wherever there is excessive frustration there is a false solution; this would be an excessive way of putting it. Our excesses are the best clues we have to our own poverty; and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.

On Balance, Adam Phillips, Hamish Hamilton, 2010

Michael Clark at Tate Modern

2010-08-18T15:26:00.043+01:00

I have blogged elsewhere about the Michael Clark dance company. Therefore, it was an unexpected pleasure to stumble across them in Tate Modern as they and selected members of the public rehearse for a performance next year in the Turbine Hall.

Leaning over a concrete balcony you get a birds eye view of the dancers sculpting potential moves in what must be the world's biggest rehearsal room. They are dwarfed by the industrial architecture, a space not designed for human beings but for machinery. It is a challenging environment with no respect for the scale of human dimensions. This fascism threatens to overpower the Lilliputian proportions of the dancers as they imagine fresh marks and gestures with their bodies. Yet, before the creative project, the ugliness of fascism is exposed. Beauty defeats the imbecilic. The dancer warming up with splits and stretches shrinks the uncompromising features of the building and we respond to something recognisably vulnerable and helpless, those features that make us human and loveable. "A victory for the person," I overheard a woman comment to her partner. I agree.