CAN SOMEONE DIRECT ME TO THE ART, PLEASE?
So much of the PBC's arts programming
has been hi-jacked recently, vehicularised, by posturing, bullying arseholes talking
down to us - Alan Yentob, interviewing, like a slavering groupy, his
teenage pop idols,
His breath'll lift the varnish from that Strat,
His breath'll lift the varnish from that Strat,
if he's not careful;
you can smell it from here.
one almost expected, in a recent outing, that he would ask Mark Knopfler for a plastercast of his dick, just for his personal collection, y'understand.
Brothers in arms.
Yentob is one of the more gross, nauseating, overpaid luvvies whom, via our taxes, we keep in indolent, self-fellating luxury, sharing with us, betimes, his journey into this or that aspect of pop trivia; they're never just making a fucking programme, these Yentobs, they're all on a fucking mission of discovery, good of them, really, to babble at us, shouting urgent cultural instructions, from their luxury liners.
And, of course, I'm an artist myself, so I know how you suffer.
I suffer myself.
A portrait of the artist as a young potatoman.
Mark PotatoMan is another, nose-talking flat-out, racing against himself in the Most Well-Researched Interviewer Ever Steeplechase, one would be surprised to learn that he ever paused for a split-second to enjoy a work of art or entertainment, too busy deconstructing it, making notes, for a future tellyarts gabfest in which he sits, bloated, ashen, reeking of grease'n'garlic, and oozing his superior knowledge of everything, ever; repulsive fucking mutant, he should go for a run, the fucking gabshite. And he should wear a tie or a tee-shirt, one or the other. He clearly knows nothing of the art of dishevelment.
I would love to hear, just once before I die, one of these fuckers saying, for instance, Dickens, nah, never read a word of it. Shakespeare? Nah, not for me; read Hamlet, that's enough, innit? Japanese cinema? you must be outa your fucking mind. But no, the PBC is carpeted, wall-to-wall, with cultural polyglots, a Babel of effete narcissism, the sort of people whom mr jgm2 says should be charged double or treble for their arts degrees. I used to be among that arts degree crowd, myself, Gilgameshing, Chaucering and Joyceing my way to a wordy, arty future, so it hurts to find myself courtesy of the PBC, coming over all Hermann Goering - ven I hear ze vord kultur I reach vor mein pistol.
That the PBC is run for and by crooks, ponces, pimps, slags, degenerates and child molesters is now axiomatic; that we continue to shovel our money into the scabby, snarling mouths of the likes of Chris Patten - just because this failed Tory spiv says we should - is almost unbelieveable. In a decent society Patten, Dyke, Thompson, the whole shameless, shabby crew would be breaking rocks on Dartmoor. For ever. If a foreign, national institution was proven to be a hotbed of larceny, degeneracy and decades-long, institutionalised noncing the PBC would be wetting itself in indignation. Mrs woman on a raft describes herself as being moored just off the coast of reality. Until heads roll at the PBC, actually into the basket and not into wealthy retirement, we, the United Kingdom, will remain a sewer-island, off the coast of civilisation.
They're not all as bad as that, though, the culture jocks, not as bad as foul, as yentob. Some of them have a sense of humour and Waldemar Jabberwocky always has interesting things to say about paintings,
Jabberwock does Baroque.
and he even manages to make some of it seem spontaneous, although spontaneity and the managerialised, child-abusing PBC are antipathetic. It really isn't good enough that the public broadcaster's coverage of arts generally is in the unlaboured hands of a bunch of cunts. I know critics, at least paid ones, are a considerably lesser form of life than the rest of us but even so, Kirsty Wark and her slew of screeching, parasitic, late-night cocksuckeurs culturelle;
Paul Morley, Diane Wei Liang, Kirsty Wark,
Miranda Sawyer, Andrew Motion.
I'd throw them all out of the lifeboat,
in fact, I wouldn't even let them in.
Yentob and PotatoHead, Andy Graham-Dixon, Mark Kermode, Sue Perkins, Clemency Burton-Hill, Jesus, I could go on for a month. And most of this lot, as usual, are Oxbridge, some of them,
Look, I'm an artist, too.
I'm not just some PBC talking head tart.
like the gorgeous, pouting Burton-Hill are both Oxbridge and the pampered spawn of some superannuated BBC grandee del noncios.
But aside from daddies and dons, the main thing which this gang has in common is that each really makes a dreadful, self-absorbed fist of what we pay them to do, what the nation needs them to do, now, more than ever. There is a better way and that is to take ordinary people and say, OK, whaddayamake of this, then? But that's never going to happen. Only in places like here.
I used to take groups of official criminals - as opposed to bankers and politicians - to see Shakespeare or to an art gallery or a music festival, alongside, I hasten to add, directing them towards work, training and common-or-garden Decency. Never knew that was for me, most'd say, and clutched in the sharp, grimy paws of Kirsty Wark and the rest, it never will be. X-Factor, that's the thing for you, singing, 'swhat you understand.
In the grown-up world, writers review each others' books - and how many fucking books can there be, there's already millions upon millions of them, why don't people learn a different language instead of reading the latest, indispensable, Sebastian Faulks tripe? As bankers review each others' bungs, PBC execs review each others' larceny, cops review each others' crimes and doctors review each others' greedy malpractices so the critics, acting as our own cultural coppers, review for us the evidence relating to their brighter, more successful chums' efforts and tell us what we think. But actually, if you look at Tracey Emin's Great Bed of Shit, for instance, you will see that art is whatever you can get away with.
Even so, wading about in shit, the role of ordinary people is to be told, by the charmed crcle of clever people, what they think about art or music or politics. Or anything. You'll like the things we tell you to, or you won't like at all.
It was a rare pleasure, then, to see, last night, an arts show seemingly completely controlled by its subject and - barring an introductory simper from Clemency - completely devoid of the critical, faux-interrogative, flattering voice. Although he will be best remembered for selling dodgy insurance to the elderly, the tellymonster, Parkinson, wrote the book on pandering to the scum of showbiz and the arts. And do tell us, Mr Niven, some of the many other ways in which you are wonderful.
I don't do dancing. Maybe it's my early presbyterian upbringing, I dunno, I just don't and I rarely watch it - save for Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson, on a good day - I don't think I've ever looked at dancing. There was a guy used to be on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, when I was a young child. Antonio, I think his name was,
a Spanish flamenco dancer, hand-clapping, boot heel-stomping, shouting Ole, every once in a while, he was mesmerising. But that's about it with me and dancing so it was just a mild curiosity which drew me, last night, to PBC2's Sylvie Guillem - Force of Nature
Now a breathtakingly fit 48, Guillem trained initially as a gymnast and only a student exchange period with the Paris Opera Ballet saw her talent recognised by then Director, Rudolf Nureyev,
who, against all precedent, propelled her into the position of etoile, principal ballerina, whilst she was still virtually a child. Rudi's preferment cast the die for her future personal and artistic behaviour. She would only ever do what she wanted to do.
The film is short, about a half an hour and concentrates as much on Guillem's monologues on Life, Art and the Environment as it does on her dancing and although these are compelling a longer show would have enabled us to be the more amazed, I suspect, by her dancing. There are short clips of her in classical roles and lengthier segments of her modern works; all of them, for me, at any rate, clarified the difference between sheer, ferociously uncompromising artistry and the countless little daily performances which we all give, over and over again for the benefit of family, friends, workmates and strangers alike; all the world is a stage, of course, Guillem's stage, though, occupies a different space, rarified, fantastically dramatic and, perhaps most significantly, utterly wordless.
.
I was left breathless, open mouthed by the sheer physicality of her performances, her partners all marvel at the things she can force her body to do, even now, approaching fifty.
She can stretch and bend and fold and free from partner support she can spin two or three times in mid-air.
As I said, I know nothing of balletstrokedance, leaves me cold as a rule but with some of Guillem's modern pieces my ignorance, my unfamiliarity didn't seem to matter. None of them were large, ensemble, company pieces, just two dancers or in the final piece just Guillem, herself, sketching the stages of woman's life, the movements in space of this one body matched to a few notes, expressing achey truths denied to words.
In her to-camera pieces she was equally compelling.
It's odd, isn't it, how, maybe because we listen a wee bit harder, the words of those to whom English is not native, seem so much more, well, so much more right, unhabituated, more seeking and feeling and testing than declamatory. She spoke of how, early on, she had realised that she had but one life and to allow others - seniors - to dictate it was the same as giving it to them freely, for their own use. And when she transferred from Paris to London's Royal Ballet she quickly became known as Mademoiselle Non for her frequent flat refusals to play suggested roles. London - and global - directors and audiences feel that her ungovernability is a price well worth paying for seeing her on their stages.
Contempating the end of her career, Guillem laughs that the inevitable decline in her powers will only propel her upwards, slingshotting her into something else, something which is manifesting itself in her antsy support for SeaShepherds,
a radical environmentalist group which sidesteps the customary Bono-bleatings of showbiz in favour of direct action, ramming illegal whaling ships, for instance.
I am sure she will be a loss to dance lovers but most of her stuff will be digitised for posterity and there may well be another Sylvie along in a minute or two, there usually is.
But if you get a chance to see her, in this film, dancing and talking - both of them forms of thinking out loud - then, as we usually say, it is well worth the time spent.
She's got everything she needs,
she's an artist, she don't look back.
you can smell it from here.
one almost expected, in a recent outing, that he would ask Mark Knopfler for a plastercast of his dick, just for his personal collection, y'understand.
Brothers in arms.
Yentob is one of the more gross, nauseating, overpaid luvvies whom, via our taxes, we keep in indolent, self-fellating luxury, sharing with us, betimes, his journey into this or that aspect of pop trivia; they're never just making a fucking programme, these Yentobs, they're all on a fucking mission of discovery, good of them, really, to babble at us, shouting urgent cultural instructions, from their luxury liners.
And, of course, I'm an artist myself, so I know how you suffer.
I suffer myself.
A portrait of the artist as a young potatoman.
Mark PotatoMan is another, nose-talking flat-out, racing against himself in the Most Well-Researched Interviewer Ever Steeplechase, one would be surprised to learn that he ever paused for a split-second to enjoy a work of art or entertainment, too busy deconstructing it, making notes, for a future tellyarts gabfest in which he sits, bloated, ashen, reeking of grease'n'garlic, and oozing his superior knowledge of everything, ever; repulsive fucking mutant, he should go for a run, the fucking gabshite. And he should wear a tie or a tee-shirt, one or the other. He clearly knows nothing of the art of dishevelment.
I would love to hear, just once before I die, one of these fuckers saying, for instance, Dickens, nah, never read a word of it. Shakespeare? Nah, not for me; read Hamlet, that's enough, innit? Japanese cinema? you must be outa your fucking mind. But no, the PBC is carpeted, wall-to-wall, with cultural polyglots, a Babel of effete narcissism, the sort of people whom mr jgm2 says should be charged double or treble for their arts degrees. I used to be among that arts degree crowd, myself, Gilgameshing, Chaucering and Joyceing my way to a wordy, arty future, so it hurts to find myself courtesy of the PBC, coming over all Hermann Goering - ven I hear ze vord kultur I reach vor mein pistol.
That the PBC is run for and by crooks, ponces, pimps, slags, degenerates and child molesters is now axiomatic; that we continue to shovel our money into the scabby, snarling mouths of the likes of Chris Patten - just because this failed Tory spiv says we should - is almost unbelieveable. In a decent society Patten, Dyke, Thompson, the whole shameless, shabby crew would be breaking rocks on Dartmoor. For ever. If a foreign, national institution was proven to be a hotbed of larceny, degeneracy and decades-long, institutionalised noncing the PBC would be wetting itself in indignation. Mrs woman on a raft describes herself as being moored just off the coast of reality. Until heads roll at the PBC, actually into the basket and not into wealthy retirement, we, the United Kingdom, will remain a sewer-island, off the coast of civilisation.
They're not all as bad as that, though, the culture jocks, not as bad as foul, as yentob. Some of them have a sense of humour and Waldemar Jabberwocky always has interesting things to say about paintings,
Jabberwock does Baroque.
and he even manages to make some of it seem spontaneous, although spontaneity and the managerialised, child-abusing PBC are antipathetic. It really isn't good enough that the public broadcaster's coverage of arts generally is in the unlaboured hands of a bunch of cunts. I know critics, at least paid ones, are a considerably lesser form of life than the rest of us but even so, Kirsty Wark and her slew of screeching, parasitic, late-night cocksuckeurs culturelle;
Paul Morley, Diane Wei Liang, Kirsty Wark,
Miranda Sawyer, Andrew Motion.
I'd throw them all out of the lifeboat,
in fact, I wouldn't even let them in.
Yentob and PotatoHead, Andy Graham-Dixon, Mark Kermode, Sue Perkins, Clemency Burton-Hill, Jesus, I could go on for a month. And most of this lot, as usual, are Oxbridge, some of them,
Look, I'm an artist, too.
I'm not just some PBC talking head tart.
like the gorgeous, pouting Burton-Hill are both Oxbridge and the pampered spawn of some superannuated BBC grandee del noncios.
But aside from daddies and dons, the main thing which this gang has in common is that each really makes a dreadful, self-absorbed fist of what we pay them to do, what the nation needs them to do, now, more than ever. There is a better way and that is to take ordinary people and say, OK, whaddayamake of this, then? But that's never going to happen. Only in places like here.
I used to take groups of official criminals - as opposed to bankers and politicians - to see Shakespeare or to an art gallery or a music festival, alongside, I hasten to add, directing them towards work, training and common-or-garden Decency. Never knew that was for me, most'd say, and clutched in the sharp, grimy paws of Kirsty Wark and the rest, it never will be. X-Factor, that's the thing for you, singing, 'swhat you understand.
In the grown-up world, writers review each others' books - and how many fucking books can there be, there's already millions upon millions of them, why don't people learn a different language instead of reading the latest, indispensable, Sebastian Faulks tripe? As bankers review each others' bungs, PBC execs review each others' larceny, cops review each others' crimes and doctors review each others' greedy malpractices so the critics, acting as our own cultural coppers, review for us the evidence relating to their brighter, more successful chums' efforts and tell us what we think. But actually, if you look at Tracey Emin's Great Bed of Shit, for instance, you will see that art is whatever you can get away with.
Even so, wading about in shit, the role of ordinary people is to be told, by the charmed crcle of clever people, what they think about art or music or politics. Or anything. You'll like the things we tell you to, or you won't like at all.
It was a rare pleasure, then, to see, last night, an arts show seemingly completely controlled by its subject and - barring an introductory simper from Clemency - completely devoid of the critical, faux-interrogative, flattering voice. Although he will be best remembered for selling dodgy insurance to the elderly, the tellymonster, Parkinson, wrote the book on pandering to the scum of showbiz and the arts. And do tell us, Mr Niven, some of the many other ways in which you are wonderful.
I don't do dancing. Maybe it's my early presbyterian upbringing, I dunno, I just don't and I rarely watch it - save for Ginger Rodgers and Fred Astaire and Michael Jackson, on a good day - I don't think I've ever looked at dancing. There was a guy used to be on Sunday Night at the London Palladium, when I was a young child. Antonio, I think his name was,
a Spanish flamenco dancer, hand-clapping, boot heel-stomping, shouting Ole, every once in a while, he was mesmerising. But that's about it with me and dancing so it was just a mild curiosity which drew me, last night, to PBC2's Sylvie Guillem - Force of Nature
Now a breathtakingly fit 48, Guillem trained initially as a gymnast and only a student exchange period with the Paris Opera Ballet saw her talent recognised by then Director, Rudolf Nureyev,
who, against all precedent, propelled her into the position of etoile, principal ballerina, whilst she was still virtually a child. Rudi's preferment cast the die for her future personal and artistic behaviour. She would only ever do what she wanted to do.
The film is short, about a half an hour and concentrates as much on Guillem's monologues on Life, Art and the Environment as it does on her dancing and although these are compelling a longer show would have enabled us to be the more amazed, I suspect, by her dancing. There are short clips of her in classical roles and lengthier segments of her modern works; all of them, for me, at any rate, clarified the difference between sheer, ferociously uncompromising artistry and the countless little daily performances which we all give, over and over again for the benefit of family, friends, workmates and strangers alike; all the world is a stage, of course, Guillem's stage, though, occupies a different space, rarified, fantastically dramatic and, perhaps most significantly, utterly wordless.
. I was left breathless, open mouthed by the sheer physicality of her performances, her partners all marvel at the things she can force her body to do, even now, approaching fifty.
She can stretch and bend and fold and free from partner support she can spin two or three times in mid-air.
As I said, I know nothing of balletstrokedance, leaves me cold as a rule but with some of Guillem's modern pieces my ignorance, my unfamiliarity didn't seem to matter. None of them were large, ensemble, company pieces, just two dancers or in the final piece just Guillem, herself, sketching the stages of woman's life, the movements in space of this one body matched to a few notes, expressing achey truths denied to words.
In her to-camera pieces she was equally compelling.
It's odd, isn't it, how, maybe because we listen a wee bit harder, the words of those to whom English is not native, seem so much more, well, so much more right, unhabituated, more seeking and feeling and testing than declamatory. She spoke of how, early on, she had realised that she had but one life and to allow others - seniors - to dictate it was the same as giving it to them freely, for their own use. And when she transferred from Paris to London's Royal Ballet she quickly became known as Mademoiselle Non for her frequent flat refusals to play suggested roles. London - and global - directors and audiences feel that her ungovernability is a price well worth paying for seeing her on their stages.
Contempating the end of her career, Guillem laughs that the inevitable decline in her powers will only propel her upwards, slingshotting her into something else, something which is manifesting itself in her antsy support for SeaShepherds,
a radical environmentalist group which sidesteps the customary Bono-bleatings of showbiz in favour of direct action, ramming illegal whaling ships, for instance.
I am sure she will be a loss to dance lovers but most of her stuff will be digitised for posterity and there may well be another Sylvie along in a minute or two, there usually is.
But if you get a chance to see her, in this film, dancing and talking - both of them forms of thinking out loud - then, as we usually say, it is well worth the time spent.
She's got everything she needs,
she's an artist, she don't look back.
25 comments:
Inform, educate and entertain have become talk down patronising bollocks and line your pockets. What was the move to Salford all about ? How fucking much did they piss against the wall doing that, never mind the blatant racket these stinking chair polishers run, lining each others pockets.
It`s not as if you can learn anything. A week or two ago there was something on about Machiavelli, oh good, interesting period, Florence, Medici, Leonardo, Savonarolla, the Borgias, how did Machiavelli fit into all this but no, it had to Relate To The World We Know, that`s why they interviewed Alastair Campbell and I know all about that cunt.
I used to watch James Burke, he was interesting. Will watch the dancer.
Couldn't be a more stark juxataposition as between Yentob & Sylvie.
I've seen Sylvie perform and she is outstanding. But not on the same level as the Russians - I'm a bit of a balletomane, and IMHO its the combination of pure technique and apparent fragility (like clear porcelaine) that sets them apart.
Having said that, the most outstanding thing I ever saw was the Bolshoi in the late 80's at Covent Garden. The Spartacus was hair-on-end stuff - thats was from the male lead (sorry can't recall his name). Amazing athleticism. And I'm 100% hetro.
I'm afraid I'm a philistine when it comes to arty dancing. The Saturday night stuff is ok, if you like that sort of thing, but I have never understood all this deeper meaning bollox. I tend to associate ballet with queers and middle class twats who understand it even less than me but pretend to know all there is to be known about it, who attend mostly to be able to tell other middle class tossers that they attended.
Side note: the Japanese whaling fleet is not illegal; they catch only the species' permitted under international law, in the number permitted. Paul Watson, the so called Captain of Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin, who has never achieved a rank higher than deck hand in a real Navy, is a cunt. Wanted by Interpol. A pirate and a bail skipper. Worshipped by a bunch of scruffy, smelly, hippy enviro-loons who value marine life more highly than human life and who are funded by freak-shows like Bridgette Bardot.
Vincent.
When they made the latest film version of The Great Gatsby I heard Mark Lawson saying that he had read the book 100 times - I mean, SERIOUSLY!
No book, even Ulysses, can warrant reading 100 times.
I don't know that one can be a selective philistine, mr vincent, I think it's akin to pregnancy, you is or you ain't and I am sure that there is as much in dance as there is in music, that I don't understand what it is is neither here nor there.
As for whaling I don't give a flying fuck whether its legal or not, slavery used to be legal, anyone who disrupts whaling is OK in my book, rank or no rank and the occasion featured in the Guillem film was stated to be what would be, even in your terms, illegal, as these outrages go.
And I don't know quite what Bardot ever did, short of being exploited by men, - and then, of course, growing old - which has so excited you. Absolutely nothing wrong in people being concerned with animal welfare. Is there? Or do we hide behind the red in tooth and claw mantra of the savage?
Middle class twat is not an appellation I would readily apply to mr mike, down there in Oz, nor, indeed, to a small handful of other ballet afficianados whom I have known over the years for to do so would be to invite upon my own love of Beethoven and Mozart the same sort of vindictive and unfounded scorn. That the arts lobby is repulsive does not diminish the art.
You are as entitled to dismiss ballet as I am to dismiss the fucking bagpipes or the relentless, fourteen-verse ballads of English hangings, sung, interminably, up here, by generations of smirking wee Fionas but I have had some correspondence not only with those who share my assessment of this awful, melancholy doggerel but with those to whom it is bread and meat.
My arguement about it all is to do with levels of - or indeed any - public funding for arty stuff whilst old ladies are cold and not to do with snobbery actuelle or inverse..
As I said in the middle of the post, I have never understood ballet; the Sylvie Guillem film made me wish I had; c'est la vie, say the old folks, goes to show you never can tell.
It must be hyperbole, mustn't it, mr mark?
There are, in my life, books of comfort, the Horatio Hornblower stories comfort my child within and take me back to a place less fraught with paranoid possibilities, a place of reliability; the Ragged Trouserd Philanthropists never fails to stir a blazing outrage at our conspiring in our own enslavement; A shropshire Lad; Of Human Bondage..... I, any of us could go on for hours about the Head-In-A-Book days which shut-shit-out, which soothe and revive, not with literary merit but with familiarity but a hundred readings of The Great Gatsby? No, the man's a prat if it's true and he's a prat if it's not.
As for Big Al Campbell, well, mr yardarm, the pre-eminenc of this creature - then or now - is a mystery beyond my comprehension; we must view him as the ancients must have viewed the Plague.
i'm sure that whales are being cruelly hunted out of existence, but does ms g have time for the civilian families being bombed and droned out of existence in afghanistan and pakistan? or the victims of other cia organized western invasions and interventions which cause so many deaths amongst child and civilian populations in africa and the middle east - somalia, libya, central africa, and congo, for instance? (why is france backing one side in national disputes against another?) or the victims of slaughter promoted indirectly through russian support of the syrian government, which is still allegedly bombing civilians over there?
bardot supports fascist politics, n'est-ce-pas?
There is no difference between killing a whale and killing a pig or a cow.
The 'used to be legal' argument is as weak as the 'used to be illegal' argument.
Bardot values animals above humans. She is a mad old bat, as her regular court appearances serve to prove.
I meant no offence to Mr Mike, nor anyone else in particular. I readily admit that I know next to nothing about dancing, except that the arty stuff looks like a load of old shit to me, Emperor's new clothes stuff. I have had the misfortune to know a few middle class twats in my time and believe me, they know about as much as me on the matter of ballet, but to hear them drone on and insufferably on about hopping and skipping about in a cod piece and lycra leggings, you'd think they had written Swan Lake. Same sort of nobs that think they know that the vineyard was South facing and that don't use tea bags, they have 'infusions'.
Vincent.
Mr Vincent: no offence taken. I'll accept "twat" (been called a lot worse) but not "middle-class". We are as close to classless, down here, as is possible.
You should try the ballet; its no more expensive than a ticket to a premier league match. And the performers are a lot more pleasing on the eye.
BTW I'm totally against the "arts" being subsidised, at least from public funds, for all sorts of reasons not least the distortion of what is "art".
"There is no difference between killing a whale and killing a pig or a cow."
Maybe not, to you, mr vincent, but there is to me.
And there is no weakness in my correcting your assumption that the whalers tackled by SeaShepherd were acting legally, unless we now vilify versimillitude.
The CIA and all the other spookmonsters have received plenty of stick, here and elsewhere and your, mr wotsit's, endless, snide, attempted redirection of these commentaries towards your own I-Know-Bestisms grows turgid and pitiful. I knew all this stuff which you claim to reveal long before you were born, you fucking idiot. JUst who the fuck do you think it is that you're talking to? You should fuck off and write at Fawkes's place, they're all fucking stupid there, you will be amongst kin.
It is an attempt to similarise, broaden our, Idunnowhat, our understanding of our humanity that spurs these pages into existence. Do you rerally think I have nothing better to do than pander to your juvenilia? Ha-ha, mr ishmael, you forgot Uncle Sam. No, cunt, I didn't. But I'll happily forget about you. Don't waste your time posting here again.
I don't, either, mr vincent, resent Bardot valuing animals more than people; I'd swap the entire house of commons if it'd spare my little mr harris
I didn't think you were supporting taxpayer arts funding, mr mike. I got in trouble here, some years back, by publicly ridculing the Scots' - or some of the Scots' - demands for money to support the smirking wee Fionas, the pipers, the fiddlers the dancers and the Godawful fucking language, in fact, any activity which would support in luxury a superstructure of grandees and administrators and save them having to work for a living, the MacCultrurata. It is not that I am against this stuff, I mean, certainly I don't like most of it, it doesn't hold a candle to English or Irish traditional music but it doesn't matter whether I like it or not. My point was that, like the Delta Blues or Morris Dancing, it will, if it has any merit, survive without subsidy.
I am not entirely sure if that's true across the board, if there is no cultural activity whatsoever which deserves subsidy - it's just that so many of the beneficiaries of such arty largesse wind-up with touring scheedules and recording contracts.
Mr Mark mentioned Mark PotatoHead reading The Great Gatsby a hundred times and just by way of a sort of showbusiness tangent I recalled the insufferable Billy Bragg remarking that he had "started (his) career as a professional folksinger twenty-five years ago." The contradiction of this statement escaped Bragg but then he is a fuckwit; that there is even a debate about the public funding of perfectly able-bodied people who would rather sing than work does prod my inner Duncan- Smith.
Much great, early music has, of course, been sponsored by the Church so is beholden, perhaps, to the public purse in that sense; much, too, has resulted from private patronage, although the Archdukes and Princes were probably spending money they had stolen from us in the first place, so it can go around and around, the argument about arts sponsorship, reeling and a-rocking, rollin' til the break of dawn. This day and age, though, I'm agin it, fuck 'em,let 'em work, if they really love their traditions they'll do it in their own time, at their own expense. Y'know, like those people who rescued so much of the steam railway heritage. That's the way you do it.
Mr I: I accept your point that in the "good-old-days" the traditional sponsors of the arts had probably stolen the money from us plebs anyway, and so it was de facto public sponsorship.
Its just that today (and its very much the case down here - don't get me started on Aboriginal art and culture, FFS) that the whole industry has become a 5 star lifestyle for so many arseholes with no merit (I've re-read your Belbin Bragg piece to confirm that), and the crap (literally in the case of Emin) that results is an insult to any sane person, and to genuine artists. So I'm totally against it.
Are you telling me to fuck off?
Vincent.
Not you. If I was telling you to fuck off, mr vincent, you'd be able to see it, at a glance, wouldn't you? I'm just disagreeing with you, is all. I disagree with mr jgm2, for instance, about most things, mr tdg politely eviscerates me. If no-one here disagreed with me or I with them, there would be no point to this.
Phew, wasn't sure.
Dunno about verisimiltude Mr Ishmael. What is true is that the Sea Shepherd vessels have been involved in numerous acts of vandalism, eco-terrorism, basic wankerism more like, which have endangered human life. These events have been reported to the International Maritime Agency and on every occasion the SS were found to be at fault. The Jap whaling fleet are not wanted by Interpol or the German Police, but Watson is. His crusade is far, far more about himself and his massive ego, than it is about whales. The man is a self-aggrandizing cunt, a fat hypocrite, his competance as Captain inversely proportional to his arrogance as self proclaimef resistance leader. A legend in his own living room. You might be getting the faintest whiff of my dislike for this twat. It is only a matter of time before he turns one of his dopey acolytes into a martyr, you can't fuck about at sea like he does and get away with it forever. When he succeeds in killing a crew member, Discovery will be there, gushing sentimental bollox about self sacrifice. Poor kid might even get a SS boat named after him.
The species hunted are not endangered, except by over population. Since a de facto ban on ALMOST all whaling numerous species of fish are now approaching dangerously low numbers due to the whales' voracious appetites.
I really think that churning literally millions of cattle through the grinder, every year, and flogging the sterilised slop at McDonalds as burgers is far worse than catching a couple of hundred whales a year.
It is, to me, a sign of ruin that nations think they can dictate what other nations fish out of the sea, that human life is dragged down in importance to the level of a sea creature and, just like Bono and his various bullshit charities, faded celebs like Bardot facillitate this nonsense.
BTW, getting paid millions for getting your milkers out is not exploitation.
Vincent.
I once worked in Selly Oak Library, mr mike and one of my tasks was doing the Housebounds -taking books to those who couldn't make it to the library and suggesting further, different reading. Doubtful at first, I found it immensely rewarding, it was nice, of course, and cautionary, to be the instrument of social contact among those confined but beyond that it was a weekly half-hour or so of fairly serious focus on reading and on books, for both the visited and for me, the visitor. It was, I suppose, a local authority-funded community arts programme of a sort. It was great.
As I mentioned, I also hustled funds from various Cadbury charitable trusts - the Frys, the Cadburys and the Rowntrees, all Quakers, being very strong on penal reform - in order to take those disadvantaged by their lives or their choices to the theatre, the concert or the museum. Thirty years on, I believe this was a project of unqualified good, one which would meet even Mrs May's privatised rehabilitation goals; preaching work and work alone to people who have nothing is simply not enough, it wasn't then and it won't be now, skilling-up the workforce involves more than skilling them up to work, gotta skill the fuckers up to live, too.
I am, therefore, all for funds being available to people like me, arty eniough to hunt them down, smart enough not to expect them as of right, on the fucking rates.
All I know of Oz is the Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, Oh, and a clutch of unattractive emigrees, too, Clive James, Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Rolf Harris, Jesus, what a crew. Seems to me, also, that Oz is just like SA or Uncle Sam, writ a bit smaller; native populations brutalised, cleansed, imprisoned, betrayed and made helpless and hopeless by inebriation.
Hell of a place, though. A daughter went walkabout for a year or two a while back and the country looks fantastic, as though people couldn't touch it, not so's you'd notice, anyway.
Write something, if you feel like it, a guest post, I am sure it would be interesting. callmeishmael@live.co.uk
Mr I: By the cut of your gib, I think you would make a good Aussie. Why not visit?
If you think where you live is wild, then you ain't seen nothing. Everything is bigger/wilder/more colourful/more dangerous. We even eat our national emblems (the kangaroo and the emu).
I have a sad feeling this may have changed (not sure) but in the Northern Territory there are no speed limits on roads - you could indulge a passion.
RE my earlier point on classlessness - I play golf with tradesmen and lawyers - the only difference is the tradies are better golfers.
I might take you up on your gracious offer.
Sometimes, mr vincent, for me, the gesture outweighs the rationale. Interpol and the German Police, well, I don't know who they work for but it isn't you and I. As for eco-martyrdom, well, it's like nuns getting raped, isn't it, that's almost what it is supposed to be about, suffering and dying as they testify to their holy husband, never bothered the Christians in the Coliseum. If it wasn't for Hitler there would be no Israel, blah blah blah, if it wasn't for tweny-eight years chokey Nelson Mandela'd be nobody, he can't have it both ways; we can go on and on about the fraudulent martyr. Greenpeace, is it Greenpeace, banged up back in the USSR, well, that is what they sign up for, what do they expect, have they never looked at Putin? Do they really think that they can fuck him about without penalty? And the same goes for the Sea Shepherds, my faint delight in them is that they are a ragbag and that they don't give a fuck because - and you don't need me to tell you this - GlobaCorp doesn't give a flying fuck about anybody, any creature any resource on land sea or in the air, these people commit Earthcrime every second of the day, they will kill us all, we should kill them first and anyone even taking a step in that direction, standing up to them, is good news to me. Fuck Interpol, when are they going to arrest a banker or two?
As for why the whales and not the cows well I can't give you a satisfactory answer, it's just my feelings, it doesn't feel right. It's like the seal culling, with the baseball bats, that doesn't feel right, either. Bullfighting, that doesn't feel right.
The tiniest migratory bird, fetching up in my trees, having flown thousands of dead-reckoned miles, he is every bit as much a miracle as is the big whale, it's just that his song is not so plaintive, his presence not so dramatic, his death and dismemberment not so bloody and awful.
It is right, not the slightest sparrow falls but your Heavenly Father knows of it, every single scrap of Creation, every leaf, every grain of sand is as much miracle as every other, it is all miraculous enough to make one dally with the idea of a guiding intelligence, the cows nuzzling my hedges are due the same awe and respect as the Blue Whale. But you gotta start somewhere and there is a consensus of sorts around the whale. It won't stand rational examination, but this isn't about reason, this is about survival.
We must inevitably do lots of things which are now untinkable, we must curb population growth, we must abandon meat eating, not for ethical reasons but because it is just not sustainable. I'd do it tomorrow, if only I could, my spirit is willing, it's just my appetites that are wrong. I'll maybe try in the New Year. Trouble is, I have to be on a very high protein diet. But that's another story.
I have mentioned a hundred times that I do not believe that my enemy's enemy is my friend and I don't, therefore care too much about the SeaShepherd gang but at the same time I am glad that somebody is having a go at the status quo.
I don't know about overfishing or oeanic populations, I suspect that nobody does, really, it's a big, deep, dark ocean. All I know is that up here they are coming round to not dumping overfished fish back in the drink. Mind you, entrusting the sea to fishermen is idiocy.
As for Brigitte, my contention is that she was nonced, publicly, by an older man, Vadim, and for a while was made the go-to harlot-tramp for people educated by the likes of the filthy old nonce, Hugh Hefner. More sinned against than sinning BB. I think, also, that whatever she is doing with her remaining years is more worthwhile than, say, the lowlife skullduggery of Brenda Windsor and her army of whores, pimps, slags, ponces, thieves, blackmailers and filthy little gossiping fairies, y'know, just for one.
We differ on this point Mr Ishmael. If I thought that SS would call it a day if they managed to save the poxy whales, then I might go for it. But they won't, they really won't.
What will happen when a couple of hundred people get to dictate a nation's (not even their own nation) fishing quotas via piracy is that they will be emboldened and arrogant enough to think that they should also be allowed to dictate every fucking thing else. The poor octopi, the jellyfish, think of the suffering of the mackerel. Consider the plight of the race horse, pets are prisoners, meat is murder. Stop eating this, start eating that, scrap cars and planes, except ours, obviously. Peace and love, man. Please give generously. Wankers.
Watson is such a cock that he was thrown out of Greenpeace. That's going some. Putin has the right idea; lock the fat bastard up in a gulag for an ''attitude adjustment'. He didn't get that fat eating tofu I'll wager.
Don't worry about over population, globa-corp usually fixes that every 50 years or so. We're due a culling. That's what I'm interested in Mr Ishmael, saving people, not frigging whales.
We all get fucked over, somewhere in life, don't we? Some more than others, and some more willing participants than victims, but most don't get to be millionaires out of their degradations. Bardot did OK.
Ironic that I can call you Ishmael and you don't like whaling.
Vincent.
Whatever else withers and shrivels irony flowers ever anew.
It's the grass that withers, Mr Ishmael, and the flowers that fade, but...
Well, I guess you know the rest, as your posts are littered with scripture.
Catholics... What can you do?
Vincent.
Wark needs a good knobbing :-p
Lee.
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