It's Always More Complicated

I.e. keeping wealthy capitalists in this country (but for how long, we wonder, hmmmm, because there are not even cheap garrets going anymore): UK super-rich would be ‘bored to death’ in tax havens – survey: Interviews with top earners reveal many are too attached to UK’s cultural institutions:

“I wouldn’t go to a tax haven. Can you imagine anything worse than going to a tax haven?” one of the respondents, Leanne, who works in consulting, told the researchers. “Some tiny little place with just people with yachts and servants. So no, I wouldn’t leave for that kind of reason … I want to live in a vibrant economic climate where there’s room for innovation and, you know, people are inventing, and I think London is like that.”

Another respondent, Luke, who works in law, said: “I have a nice life here [in London]. My clients who moved to the Bahamas were bored to death. Sun, sea and sand. OK, it’s great for a couple of weeks to charge the batteries, but after a while you think, ‘Well, I’d quite like to go and watch an opera.’ Well, you can forget that – there’s not a theatre in the Bahamas.”

Bea and Peter, a couple who both work in finance, said that if they “move to the Middle East, [you] are in gated communities and stuff like that. I never found that attractive in any way.”

Marianne, who works in culture, said the suggestion that there would be a “big brain drain” if the government introduced higher taxes on the wealthy was “complete nonsense. And I will give you the answer why in two words, and that is National Gallery or National Theatre … that’s why people aren’t going to leave London.”

And another totally unrelated London thing (and it's not actually physically in London anymore): Wooden sauna from 1948 London Olympics gets Grade II listing.

Dept of, Miff once more at the British Library: okay, I finally got to see the manuscript I ordered the other week (after being 'processing' it was 'returned to store', I ordered it again and lo and behold, it was in due course 'ready for collection' in the Manuscripts Reading Room.). Alas, it contained nothing of relevance to my research. However, Had I But Known, there was this exhibition Friendship Before Facebook: Social Networks in a Pre-Digital Age on friendship albums, like what Lady B- was ever being solicited to write choice passages from The Swan of Avon in. But alas, I found out today, and it comes off at the weekend.

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Dept of, Hmmm, Not So Sure About that: the ultimate goal of all self-improvement is to reach the point where you no longer feel the need to improve yourself, because, on the one hand one takes his point that people take it to ridiculous lengths, but on another, the more one learns about something the more one's ignorance is revealed. And on a foot, back in the dear old 70s growth movement, I had the distinct impression there were people for whom it had become their social life, a thought which made me think of that book about the blokes in the 'seduction' community and how that provided them with masculine companionship and friendship. That people get secondary gains from doing things even if they don't get whatever the primary intent is.

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Dept of, I Wish This Had Stuck To Its First Message: It's Okay to Be Good and Not Great, because it then goes waffling off into that rather insistent theme of modern distraction and anomie and the need for Human Connection, because, honestly, I think the early message is quite good.

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Dept of, I Thought Everyone Knew That, But I Was Probably Making Unwarranted Assumptions: The Equivocal Legacy of Charlotte Perkins Gilman - meaning, eugenic feminism, mostly.

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Dept of, May Be Of Some Interest: the chamber opera Dear Marie Stopes is having 2 performances at Kings Place in September.

As a result of a train of thought which need not detain us further (especially as I am unable to reconstruct it in any kind of detail, but riffing off from seeing The Marriage of Figaro at the weekend*) I came up with the band name The Amorous Butterflies (?Cherubino and the -? or just The).

But find it hard to imagine what kind of band it would be and how one would classify the music it made.

On reflection, wonder if the name would be better for a performance group combining dance, acrobatics, and trapeze work.

Brought to you by a combination of whimsy and unidea'dness.

*OperaUpClose at the King's Head in Islington. Tres intime.

I'm sure I have hymned before the necessity, if not the actual pleasures, of boredom, but whatever, I think it bears repeating.

Article in today's Guardian G2 as to whether large swathes of great works of music, literature are too long, full of makeweight, and really, really, deserve to be ruthlessly cut.

Quite early on there seems to me to be a dodgy segue from 'this opera/symphony has its duller bits' to 'too much already!', in the comment about Der Rosenkavalier:

Der Rosenkavalier being one. It just feels too long, and I find myself wondering why all this inventive music is going on. It's like being fed too much cream and dessert. It rapidly becomes indigestible.

The other day I walked through Euston Square Tube station, and the current bit of classical music they were playing was 4th movement, Beethoven's 9th. Which was lovely, and unexpected, and a lift to the day, but there is something about its coming after the previous movements when one hears it at a concert which is an even more amazing experience.

You need those less spectacular and dramatic moments for the spectacular and dramatic moments to BE spectacular and dramatic rather than More of the Same.

Jude Kelly gets it about right:

But there is also a sense that the best art is like life. Some of it is a bit dull, but you need the boring parts to appreciate the climaxes. Reaching the end of a Wagner opera is like climbing a mountain: part of the achievement is in the struggle to get there.

Think David Hare misses the point: great artists don't necessarily have boring bits because this is the reverse side of Their Greatness. Surely it is more that they are not actually scared of being thought boring, if that is what they need to do to get the effects they ultimately aim for.

Also read something somewhere recently to which I went mentally 'How True' that life and relationships can't and in fact pretty much shouldn't be a constant stream of intense peak experiences. Because then you don't in fact appreciate the peak bits when they happen.

From crossedwires

1. COMMENT WITH A MYSTERIOUS COMMENT OF YOUR CHOICE.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Post the names of five fictional characters and your thoughts on each.

First up, Brush the Wandering Hedgehog from the Little Grey Rabbit books by Alison Uttley, about whom I have expatiated heretofore and whose likeness (by Margaret Tempest) features in my current default icon.

I couldn't choose between these two, because, really, they go together like going-together things: Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing, which is a (possibly pernicious) example of the 'they hate each other so really they're in lurrrve' trope that actually works. And how is awesome Beatrice in any way not awesome?

I did wonder about Dorothea Brooke from Middlemarch, but since she changed her name once within the novel and is in prospect of changing it again (in both cases to names that Victorianists can spend many hours debating the correct pronunciation of), I decided to go with her uncle, Mr Brooke, who is a wonderful character study though, do admit, one would hate to live with him and he was hardly the man to provide adequate guardianship to his orphaned nieces. Brilliantly done by Robert Hardy in the TV version.

The entire Beetle family in Cold Comfort Farm: the patriarch Agony Beetle, his sensible and forthright wife (''Tes flying in the face of nature!' - 'All the same, it might be worth tryin'.') who is not from darkest Sussex, their daughter Merriam the hired girl at the farm, with her fatal habit of succumbing to seduction when the sukebind blooms, and her four offspring, who are being brought up to be a jazz-band in one o' they West End nightclubs.

And the very uncanonical Belinda in Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (though Purcell clearly has a casual attitude to canonicity generally, with the witches in Dido and Aeneas and the numerous interpolations into A Midsummer Night's Dream, and let's just not go there with what he did with King Arthur). I was wondering: what happens to Belinda after Dido dies of grief following Aeneas's abandonment? She seems a sensible type (if perhaps failing to see what a bad idea Aeneas was as a lover for Dido), so I don't see her doing an Charmain-and-Iras act. Maybe she takes up the reigns of state in her competent hands? Maybe that was the plan? - Dido generally moping around was perhaps not the best thing for Carthage. I think there's a story there.

Search fails at finding the piece in The Observer Review anent this: Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People, which is happening at the Bloomsbury Theatre (which is, of course, within the Student Union building of the godless institution in Gower St). This aroused in me the question of whether there would be any George Eliot, in particular 'O May I Join The Choir Invisible' and whether there are musical settings of same (there is at least one, by someone who also composed an -?unproduced - opera version of Silas Marner).

Haven't I seen Tim Adams going WOEZ about evil computerz and teh intanetz and their malign effects on creativity, sociability, etc, before? Someone who spends most of their time hanging out in Comment is Free is bound to get a v distorted picture of what is going on.

I am perhaps a little more persuaded by Rachel Cooke in Jeremiah mood about public libraries. Which does seem to imply that yet again the debate is shooting right past the actual core constituency (or what would be, if so much wasn't wrong with them).

A lengthy piece on 'mash-up' novels, e.g. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies - and are there any of these which are not based on something by J Austen (and we haven't, have we? yet seen Emma and the Evil Undead?). In which case, is it not simply about brand recognition but the contrast element? (The Brontes already having teh gothique up the wazoo.) Without ever having read any of them, the whole idea does strike me, as it does the author of this article, that the joke quickly grows old - and would perhaps be better as shorter jeux d'esprit than whole novels.

Biography of the apparently somewhat elusive Dorothea Lange (which after all is plausible for someone whose stance appears to have been 'I am a camera').

Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph is also... one of America's most famous photographs. It is her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker who, like countless others, had journeyed west from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. For a long time, it was known simply as Migrant Mother and, like many of Lange's images from the 1930s, it is stark and beautiful. It is also problematic, because of its contested context and the issues it raises about the morality of documentary photography.
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In 1958, Thompson made herself, and her frustration with Lange, known though a powerfully inarticulate letter to a photography magazine in which she demanded that her portrait no longer be used without her permission. By then, of course, it was too late. The photograph had long since floated free of its subject, and of its creator, becoming a symbol of something greater than either of them could have imagined.
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Gordon rebuts Thompson's claim that Lange had told her the image would not be published. Her case for the defence is a strong one: FSA photographers knew that their images would be widely disseminated for the common good so it is unlikely that Lange would have said otherwise. Likewise, Thompson's long anonymity was decided not by Lange but by the project's guidelines that instructed photographers contracted to the FSA not to record the names of their subjects.

Nevertheless, one's sympathies lie with Florence Owens Thompson who, it transpires, was not a white American but a Cherokee. She had lived on the margins of American society while Lange's portrait of her was reproduced around the globe, becoming an icon of American suffering and stoicism. "Its reputation grew," writes Gordon, "because it symbolised white motherhood and white dustbowl refugees… Would the photograph have had such popularity if viewers had known its subject was a woman of colour?" The ironies that attend this single image, then, echo the contradictions that attend America's collective – and revisionist – notion of nationhood.

Why readers crave the risk factor. From Hemingway to war heroes, there's a romance in writers who put themselves in their own story. And there's a danger in it too. While I am entirely there with Mr McCrum's suggestion that 'It does no favours to the powers of the imagination to perpetuate the romantic myth of authorship, however much unconsciously we subscribe to it', I feel he undercuts his own argument when he writes dismissively that 'The worst of the literary scene today is that so many of its protagonists, far from waving a standard for the darker side of human experience, resemble nothing so much as dentists, accountants and public-relations executives'. Given that Alaa el-Aswany, author of the internationally critically-acclaimed The Yacoubian Building was, and maybe still is, a dentist, and that it is conceivable that even a public-relations executive might write a good novel, this seems the kind of banal assumption he intends to subvert.

Euan Ferguson, WHUT??, Kingsley Amis was a 'splendidly humane old chuffpot' and women were one of the areas of life 'to which he brought grand amateur enthusiasm'. I find it hard to read those as simply coded ways of expressing 'curmudgeonly and misogynistic misanthrope alcoholic'.

To its supporters, the beaver is a keystone species. To others, it's a rodent with a huge appetite for deforestation. As these "charismatic beasties" are released into their new Scottish home, many are predicting trouble in the Highlands.

Does anyone else want to codslap Jamie Hewlett for this?

Hewlett and Damon Albarn have been engaged on a project 'Monkey: Journey to the West':

The first salvo was the opera, Monkey: Journey to the West, a visually extravagant affair designed and animated by Hewlett ('what you see is me, what you hear is Damon'). It premiered in Manchester last year and comes to London's Royal Opera House this week, complete with acrobats, silk dancers, contortionists, puppets and projections.

And, okay, you can mutter 'cultural appropriation' or you can give him points for expanding beyond traditional Western themes and stories.

But how come it is okay for Hewlett and Albarn to venture beyond the perimeters of their own culture (perhaps because their simplicity, it is already irretrievably corrupted?) but to go all woez woez over the complication of Unspoilt Noble Savagery as follows:

'Damon and I spent three years immersing ourselves in Chinese culture when we were preparing the opera,' says Hewlett. 'We'd been to China many times and had the real privilege of travelling round the rural areas, staying with tribes, which no one gets to do. Once you get outside of the cities, what you find is a culture that is still intact - that hasn't been spoiled by Western influences.'

Ironically, the production of Monkey itself threatened to sully the very cultural purity with which Hewlett was so enamoured. Originally co-produced by the prestigious Théâtre du Chatelet in France, the show is directed by Chinese-born New Yorker Chen Shi-Zheng ('we call him "Susan"') with a young Chinese cast who found themselves rehearsing on the outskirts of Paris.

'Many of them had never left China,' says Hewlett, 'and most of them didn't speak English. But they learned pretty bloody quick! So here they were in Paris, one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, and they got days off and spending money. The girls were fascinated by Disney stuff, and bought loads of Disney merchandise, while the boys were buying Nikes and Levis - all the stuff they couldn't get in China. And then they discovered McDonald's! And Damon and I were thinking, "OK, this is very exciting for them, and we can't be cultural stalwarts about it all." But when they started sitting round the piano and singing songs from Chicago, that was it! Damon called them all together, and with Shi-Zheng translating into Chinese he went into this great big rant. "Don't fucking sing that shit! I don't wanna hear any of this cabaret crap! You're not gonna eat this food. And don't be spoiled ... please!" Because they were such a great bunch of kids, so wonderful, and we'd brought them here and suddenly we were faced with this guilty spectre of them being ruined by western culture.'

Woah! Clasp that padlock on their minds, why don't you? Or possibly keep them in some kind of zoo habitat?

Raise that good old double standard, raise it high, raise it high!

Review of Bacchus, a restaurant recently opened in Hackney, which contains the following, deserving, I think, of this week's Oscar Wilde memorial award:

The idea of transforming a nice old Victorian pub in a resolutely poor part of Hackney into a temple of molecular gastronomy is so eccentric, it warms the heart. But then so does the story of the Charge of the Light Brigade.

For those of you who are fond of wool, a place you may like to visit, even if it is allegedly 'Britain's least popular attraction': the Welsh National Wool Museum, in the picturesque village of Dre-fach Felindre in the Teifi Valley (which does not appear to have its own website yet - no, it's cunningly concealed under National Museum of Wales)

Alas, I can't find a link in the online version of the Guardian to the report of the flightless bird (rhea, not ostrich) called Eric which is terrorising the populace of Lostwithiel, Cornwall.

Not a book to cheer the hearts of those of us whose banner bears the strange device 'It's Always More Complicated'.

Another review of that book Why Do People Get Ill?, though I am rather with the reviewer cited in the 'Critical Eye' column who felt that although one would like one's doctor to be cultured, one would also like them to know their physiology and biochemistry.

Re recent furores about Madama Butterfly, James Fenton points out that Pinkerton in the original libretto is presented as a nasty piece of work, and also shows the evolution of the story via various authors.