At Keir Starmer's first Prime Minister's Questions, on Wednesday - the first Labour PMQs since Gordon Brown’s last such session on 7 April 2010 - Sir Keir delighted the nation by addressing Rishi Sunak, Leader of the Conservative Party in Opposition, as Prime Minister. And not just once. It caused much chortling and sniggering - the Commons being strongly reminiscent of feeding time at Eton; but Starmer thundered on, obliviously, mentioning the £22 billion Black Hole created of the nation's finances by the Conservatives. And not just once.
Sir Keir, with his ladies.
Fortunately, by the time Laura Kuenssberg interviewed him for her Sunday morning politics show, and pointed out that £9 billion of the Black Hole was created by the Labour Government's settlement of the outstanding public sector pay rises that the Conservatives had somehow omitted to deal with and bequeathed to their successors as a sort of strike legacy, Sir Keir had remembered that he was, in fact, Prime Minister. He said, predictably, that the Conservative government under its successive 5 or so leaders over the last decade and almost a half had broken the nation, the NHS and the economy, but he was going to sort it out, although it wouldn't be popular. He was berated about removing the Winter Fuel payment, but responded that it would be a targeted payment for very poor pensioners. As I said last Sunday, that's fair enough with me, as I have a deep-rooted objection to giving well-off pensioners an un-means-tested benefit that they don't need, out of my taxes. But the really important news was that he bribed his kids with a new kitten to sweeten the move into the Downing Street flat.
A Siberian white kitten with blue eyes, called Prince. Prince joins the existing family cat, Jo-Jo,
and the incumbent Downing Street cat, Larry, who is a Civil Servant and not a Sunak pet.
Just goes to show you that Starmer is a cat person. Rather him than me - sounds like all three cats are boys and Larry already has a street rep for extreme violence.
enough cats, already, mrs ishmael, you sound like a mad old lady in a purple hat with cats. ed.
No, please, just this one last cat:
Right, I'm done with the cats. We'll turn now to the question of what Sir Keir does in his study of an afternoon and who he likes to watch him doing it:
Not her, for sure. He had her portrait removed to a meeting room as he found it unsettling to have her staring down on him while he was getting on with his quiet reading in his private study. I do that increasingly often these days, but call it having a nap.
I went down south to Dundee in June to visit the kimono exhibition at the V&A: Kimono: Kyoto to Catwalk.
The building is a triumph. Kengo Kuma 隈 研吾 is a Japanese architect and emeritus professor in the Department of Architecture (Graduate School of Engineering) at the University of Tokyo. His design for the Dundee V&A was inspired by images of sea cliffs in Orkney, and is a building that hovers between land, sea and sky.
No two walls are the same,
the building is pierced by waterways and walkways,
juts out into the River Tay
and sits in magnificent contrast to the RRS Discovery, the last traditional wooden three-masted ship to be built in the United Kingdom.
Launched in 1901, she was built in Dundee for Antarctic exploration, and eventually returned to Dundee, where she rests in a custom built dock, a visitor attraction in Discovery Point.
Inside the Dundee V&A, the cliff-like faces of the external walls are echoed in moveable tiles of oak,
there is a Grand Staircase and a glass lift
In the midst of this magnificence, I thought the floor slates, which looked as though a careless painter had been at work were a disappointment,
but my son-in-law, who knows about these things, instantly recognised them as slates cut from fossil-embedded rock. Each of those splotches was a cross section of some millenia-old creature.
Dundee's V&A is a museum dedicated to Scottish design, and, as such, has a limited permanent exhibition. The Charles Rennie Mackintosh Oak Room is the most striking feature. Mackintosh designed it in 1907 for Miss Cranston’s Ingram Street tearooms. It was stored in hundreds of numbered pieces for almost 50 years after being salvaged by Glasgow Museums in 1971, and, carefully restored and rebuilt, was installed in the V&A.
Today, the fully restored Oak Room is on permanent display at the heart of V&A Dundee’s Scottish Design Galleries.
I didn't care for the Tweed and Quant foolishness, but I did like this:
The visiting exhibition space has walls that can be moved to accommodate exhibitions of different sizes and a massive freight lift to transport huge pieces to the galleries - this time the Kimono exhibition, which started off in the proper V&A in London then travelled the world until arriving in Dundee, where it will remain until January, so you have lots of opportunity to visit.
I've always been excited by Japanese textiles and surface design. Kimono simply means clothing, or "that which is worn". Both men and women wore the kimono. It looks the way it does because the cloth was woven on narrow looms to create rectangles which were assembled thusly:
The kimonos did not disappoint, nor did their display.
But it was the traditional kimono that gave me pause.
The doll-like courtesans and geishas of Edo's hedonistic 'floating world', dressed, coiffured and caked in thick white make-up presented women as exhibits or products. The rigid social order, from the Tokugawa shogunate to the chōnin lower class, was not mitigated by a religion that required adherence to a moral code or a concept of mercy - to the contrary, Shinto was strongly associated with militarism and imperialism.
This is a kimono for a baby boy. And so is this.
The text reads: " A child's first visit to a Shinto shrine, about 30 days after birth, marked an important rite of passage. Infant boys would be draped in kimono with motifs symbolic of achievement and strength. In the 1930's, as Japan expanded aggressively in Asia, traditional samurai images were replaced by contemporary militaristic ones. Wrapping the child in the image of a battleship symbolised wishes both for his and the nation's future."
And we know what all that led to. mr ishmael recounted this:
"Tom Pendleton was an honorary uncle to mrs ishmael. After surviving some years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp he flew home, weighing just six stones, thirty-eight kilos, in the belly of a bomber; he never spoke of it but you can imagine, can't you. I guess surviving those little yellow bastards' cruelties - or cultural differences as we would now be expected to say - took some balls but I don't think the returning POWs were called heroes."
I said "and we all know what that led to". But, actually, not so much. We do, we ishmaelians of a certain age. But the younger generations, the ones who haven't got grandfathers, fathers and uncles to tell them what the war in the Pacific was like, what the camps were like - they believe that America and Britain were the bad guys, dropping nuclear bombs on defenceless civilian populations just to test them, for the hell of it; not to bring to surrender the filthiest, most cruel, narcissistic, imperialistic, Emperor-worshipping nation under the sun. And the young woke-istas certainly won't learn the truth of history from museum exhibits. Not when museum exhibit boards present this sort of disinformation, presenting Japan as a victim:
I don't get out much, on account of Orkney being a long, long way from the cities of the South. I'd read of this historical revisionism, this Orwellian NewSpeak, but now I've seen it, on museum disinformation boards. How bloody dare they?
There are four splendid anthologies of the writings of stanislav and mr ishmael, compiled by his friend, mr verge, the house filthster. You can buy them from Amazon or Lulu. Here's how:
Honest Not Invent, Vent Stack, Ishmael’s Blues, and the latest, Flush Test (with a nice picture of the late, much lamented, Mr Harris of Lanarkshire taking a piss on a totem pole) are available from Lulu and Amazon. If you buy from Amazon, it would be nice if you could give a review on their website.IIshmaelites wishing to buy a copy from lulu should follow these steps
please register an account first, at lulu.com. This is advisable because otherwise paypal seems to think it's ok to charge in dollars, and they then apply their own conversion rate, which might put the price up slightly for a UK buyer. Once the new account is set up, follow one of the links below (to either paperback or hardback) or type "Ishmael’s Blues" into the Lulu Bookstore search box. Click on the “show explicit content” tab, give the age verification box a date of birth such as 1 January 1960, and proceed.
Link for Hardcover : https://tinyurl.com/je7nddfr
Link for Paperback : https://tinyurl.com/3jurrzux
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With the 15% voucher, PB (including delivery to a UK address) should be £16.84; HB £27.04.
14 comments:
It's a beautiful, modern building. What drove that culture mad, as Auden inquired of their co-lunatics?
I must say, the architecture of the Dundee V&A looks good, very sensual and calming - maybe its all the wood. What a contrast to the South Bank, which needs bombing.
Otherwise, its hard to feel anything good about the japs.
It is ironic that the Museum of Scottish Design in Scotland was designed by a Japanese architect. There was a competition and of the five designs shortlisted, the commission was won by a renowned Japanese architect, who, the commissioners said, produced a design that was way beyond the submissions of the other architects. And it is a wonderful public building, impressive, with a striking exterior and a cathedral-like interior. Built on the unstable banks of the Tay, the footings were excavated to a depth the equivalent of the projected height of the building. And its aesthetic is perfect for Scotland - it occupies the liminal space between air, water and land, its rugged slopes echoing the sea-fretted rocks and cliffs of Scotland's western coasts.
The japs, as mr mike reminds us, evoke truly negative feelings - yet (or maybe because) they are good at things. Efficient, accurate, swift and precise. And as mr bungalow bill references, with his quotation from Auden's September 1, 1939, in that they are very like the Germans - who developed a system for disposing of the untermenschen that was frighteningly damn efficient. Were these two cultures mad? Are they still? What has happened to their very different moral compass, their concept of duty and patriotism that excludes mercy and kindness? I can't believe that defeat in the Second World War has evoked anything other than resentment - it is lurking in their national psyches, this defeat by nations they consider to be inferior.
I was disappointed by the building which I thought had little more charm than a multistorey carpark an impression which partially cladding the interior with timber barely hid. As for all those sinuous curves on the exterior...bolted on concrete slabs, a faux, sham facade.
I think that you are about right, mr anonymous. Yes, planks horizontal and on the inside too. Looks like a ship or a hulk, I'd give it a 3 but not a 10. But then after you had hanged all the lawyers, you could sensibly move on to the architects.
As to the japanese... I don't know. Why are they so different to the Thais and the Vietnamese that we have talked about here before?
Thank you , Mongoose. You're harsh with a three, but i won't qubille the matter. Do you think there are enough beams, sufficiently robust, from which to suspend such and all lawers in gibbett?
Imagine, say a century from now, the awe with which we might look upon a concrete bunker on the banks of the Tay festooned with the bones of such creatures, cages and contained , dangling from the rafters . I speculate it to be as awe inspiring as the ranks of terracotta warriors of Lintong or as salutory as the catacombs and ossiaries of Paris and Rome. Dreadful? yes, but plus ca change? Tis Dundee.
Ah, mr anonymous, I see you are familiar with Dundee. I have no issue with reinforced concrete as a building material when it is as spectacular as in the V&A. What other building material could have achieved such effects?
Just a little hint about the house rules, here - we address fellow commentators by their honorific - so it is mr mongoose, not mongoose.
Oh, that's alright, mrs i. I have been called much worse.
Indeed, the other day I went and looked at the website which has a few other pics. It is not a bad carbuncle as carbuncles go. In fact, it's more than quite skilful. The majesty though is almost always to be found in the engineering bridging of the space. Like in a cathedral, say. They are narrow for a reason. As long as you like but we cannot span distance with stones atop one another. We need to join our stones to get width. The Pantheon is a great 3d concrete dome a couple of thousand years old and, one day I will stand there, the structure shouts the numbers out as you look at it.
Our architects need to remember this. Demonstrate the glory of your skill and your materials. Let the building speak for itself and not for your cleverness.
The arch is the most perfect thing, mr mongoose - I remember making one in a kids' playground at the Birmingham Science Museum. You arrange the stones on a wooden form, slot in the Kingstone and remove the form - and there you go - the thing stands, to my amazement. I was also amazed when I learned that the dome of St Paul's is held together with a big circular rope, to stop the dome walls bulging out and the top dropping in.
And these techniques are ancient.
It's good to see new stuff when it is as impressive as the V&A Dundee, or the Tait at St. Ives. It is not all brutalist concrete high rises.
What drove that culture mad? Belief in authority, just like all humans. When your betters tell you something is the truth, you’ll be prepared to die for that truth, or be punished.
I worked for a Japanese printing press manufacturer with their engineers, they would admit that they, the Japanese, didn’t invent, didn’t design, didn’t try something new. They copied, re-designed, refined and perfected other’s inventions. Perhaps their most famous ‘copies’ are of British motorcycles, from the fifties n sixties. During those times British Small Arms - BSA - manufactured more motorcycles, per annum, than the rest of the world’s motorcycle manufacturers combined, oh how the mighty have fallen. The Japanese took over the market by copying and refining, now all their motorcycles are the same, apart from colours. Of course the feckin chinese are now following the same path. They took all their early technology, art, design, architecture, engineering, music, even martial arts by conquest and slavery, mainly from Korea and China and later by copying the west.
Don’t get me wrong, I quite like the Jappers, I practiced Shotakan Karate for six years, I own two Suzuki motorbikes and their knives are the best.
But I never witnessed what my Dad saw of them, he hated the fuckers with a passion.
The Japanese: copy and refine. Exactly so, mr inmate. It is a terrible shame about the destruction of the motor (and motor-bike) industry but they had it coming. And just as Green lunacy killed the miners, it has now come for the carmakers. The history books will laugh at us.
BTW there was a 1971 750 Bonnie in an auction nearby last month... Very near to disaster - and probably the divorce courts! - but commonsense prevailed in the end.
Should have bid on it, mr mongoose and kept a piece of 1940s engineering alive. Talking of refining, British bike engine crankcases split vertically, front to back, so as the engine cooled, after a run, the different metals cooled at different rates causing the oil leaks, from said crankcases, that British bikes were famous for. Japanese bikes, although looking similar, had crankcases joined horizontally at the crankshaft, with oil levels just below the split, thus never leaking when cooling down.
It is alleged that there where eighty bike manufacturers in the ‘50s in Britain, all that knowledge and jobs gone forever, shame.
Yep all this green nonsense will see off a few old folks this winter, but it’ll be worth it to avoid a run on the pound. Bollox.
Germany and Japan: two of the most sophisticated and aesthetically stupendous countries in human history, so we have widely concluded. Yet they have also grubbed weirdly about in the dark and shitty depths. See Wallace Stevens:
"The mind is the terriblest force in the world, father,
Because, in chief, it, only, can defend
Against itself. At its mercy, we depend
Upon it."
Fuck knows, it's complicated - Eros and Thanatos at play; buildings and their worth are as elusive as everything else we make and then care to think about.
History books, mr mongoose? Only if we're spared...
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