The Virtual Stoa

I keep thinking I should buy another recording of Carmen to sit on the shelf alongside my old 1978 Abbado / Berganza / Domingo / LSO recording. Any thoughts? Preferences? Anti-recommendations?

Today, tehgraun’s arts critics are writing about sporting events, so we have theatre critic Michael Billington on darts and rock critic Caroline Sullivan on the Second Test Match.

Tomorrow we’re promised “chief football writer Kevin McCarra on Finnish contemporary dance” and “golf correspondent Lawrence Donegan on the San Francisco Symphony’s Brahms cycle”.

I like this kind of thing.

According to the website, the Latvian pirate song “is a story about the historical endeavours of our ancestors, and tells of their backbreaking lives, rebellious spirit, freedom, masculinity and tenderness while showing their patriotism and love for the planet earth, and an unquenchable thirst for adventure.”

We have the first ever Eurovision entries from San Marino and Azerbaijan this time round.

Here’s San Marino, with “Complice” by Miodio:

Here’s Azerbaijan, with “Day after day” by Elnur Hüseynov:

Be aware that it’s possible that neither of these songs will get beyond this week’s semi-final stage.

I asked my friend Dan, who is an expert on (i) political philosophy concerning the rectification of historic injustice and (ii) pop music, and he reckons that Cliff Richard is the victim of historic injustice, having been cheated by Spanish fascists out of the 1968 Eurovision title that was rightfully his. I’m still not altogether clear who owes what, if anything, to whom. I was rather hoping we might blame Ruth Kelly, owing to her Opus Dei connections, but some people around me seem to think that’s a bit too tangential, all things considered.

My brother Michael, over here.

Norm points out that Willie Nelson has recently turned 75…

Over at the new-look Harry’s Place (where they have decided that the increasing problems with the site were those of form rather than content, style rather than substance), David T suggests that Ken Livingstone is a sort of Coriolanus figure, whereupon “mastershake” in the comments replies that “You have clearly never read, nor seen, Coriolanus.”

The disagreement raises a good question — just why is Coriolanus a tragic figure? If it’s just that he’s a great man brought down by his tragic flaw, which is his pride, as David T basically suggests, then we’d have to conclude that Coriolanus isn’t a terribly tragic tragedy, as his kind of pride is just odious, getting in the way of generating anything like the kind of affective sympathy for Martius which might make his predicament a compelling one. And it can’t just be that he’s a great man who just isn’t appreciated by an ungrateful mob or by two politicking tribunes, either. That would give us a dull right-wing interpretation of the play — which isn’t to say that it isn’t an interpretation that’s been offered many times in the past, and encoded into several well-known productions, including those staged in Nazi Germany.

But Coriolanus is a great play, and one of my very favourites (along with The Winter’s Tale and Measure for Measure). And the clue to the tragedy, it seems to me, comes in Cominius’s remark in Act Two Scene Two that “It is held / That valour is the chiefest virtue, and / Most dignifies the haver: if it be, / The man I speak of cannot in the world / Be singly counterpoised.” “If it be…” — note the conditional. Martius’s tragedy is that valour is no longer the chiefest virtue in public life. He’s been brought up by his mum to be a typical Roman hero, but that kind of Roman hero is now an anachronism, for Rome is entering the phase of her existence in which the elite must master the skills of peacetime as well as the arts of war—which in practice means learning how to manage the domestic class struggle, just as it does for politicians today—and this is what Coriolanus is particularly badly-equipped to do.

Tony Blair — who is, happily, now one of yesterday’s politicians — used to like to talk about “traditional values in a modern setting”, though that was just by way of providing rhetorical cover for his left flank as he wrestled the Labour Party ever further to the Right. Coriolanus is the tragedy of what happens when you really are living out of your time, and the modern setting is a lot less hospitable to the traditional values than you’d really prefer it to be. And this general approach to reading the play is reinforced by Aufidius’s remark right at the end of Act Four, “So our virtues / Lie in the interpretation of the time”. (And it’s true; they do.)

So it’s hard to read the mayoral election through the lens of Coriolanus — if we did, we’d have to argue that Ken Livingstone is crucially an anachronistic figure, but that Boris of the Bullingdon is not. But it’s easy to see why the Decents might be attracted to this erroneous interpretation. The political confrontation at the heart of the play, after all, is that between Coriolanus and the tribunes of the plebs, who have some influence over public opinion, and who do everything they can to bring him down. And since Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford, and David Cameron’s Conservative Party) can’t possibly be cast as a tribune, these are the parts to be filled by the scribes of Decency — Nick Cohen, Martin Bright, and their friends on the blogs — with their relentless campaigns against Citizen Ken.

Nick Cohen might have made a plausible T of the P back in his Cruel Britannia days; but it’s weirdly implausible to see him occupying that role today, with his campaigns for the return of the grammar schools and for the Labour government to be doing more for people on £100K p.a.. (See also today’s column, which, since we’re being Shakespearian, is something rich and strange.) But within the discourse of Decency, which is what matters here, Cohen remains firmly a Man of the Left, and casting him and his ilk as Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus gives the guys at Harry’s what they need — a perspective on the election that puts the vitriolic, personalised anti-Livingstone polemic centre-stage, and shoves the ultimate victor, Boris Johnson, firmly into the wings.

UPDATE [5.5.2008]: David T replies.

Another opera in lego has been posted on YouTube. This time it’s Philip Glass’s La belle et la bête, written to accompany Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film.

Preview.

Act One.

Act Two.

Act Three.

[from, thanks NB]

From my Balliol colleague Adam Roberts’ valedictory lecture, on retiring from the Montague Burton chair in International Relations at Oxford (and reproduced in this week’s Oxford Magazine):

Montague Burton (1885-1952), the great pioneer of mass production tailoring and the benefactor of the chair, was an incurable believer in modernity. In his extensive travels, his notes on which he published privately in two volumes entitled Global Girdling, he demonstrated a love of the modern and, with only a few exceptions, a dislike of antiquity. Visiting the Middle East in the 1930s, he hated the Pyramids and the Wailing Wall. By contrast he loved the railway on which one could glide from Cairo to Tel Aviv and thence to Jerusalem - a symbol of modernity to him that now seems to us to belong to an era long gone. He praise the Jerusalem Electricity Works - and he had no higher terms of praise than this - as ‘reminiscent of Bourneville and Port Sunlight. He was a passionate believer in the League of Nations: 6,000 of the employees at his Leeds factory belonged to the Montague Burton Branch of the League of Nations Union. His progressivism itself looks charmingly antique - as does his belief that if you put all men in suits you would deliver a body blow to the class system. Indeed, he developed ingenious schemes whereby customers could buy not just the suit but all that goes with it - the shirt, the tie, even socks and shows. This is almost certainly the origin of the phrase ‘The Full Monty’. I was tempted to entitle this lecture ‘The Full Monty’, but I don’t believe in encouraging false expectations, especially as by a perverse irony, thanks to Peter Cattaneo’s memorable 1997 film, The Full Monty now means the exact opposite of what it did originally.

Over at some website or other called DVD Outsider by some chap called Slarek:

But my choice for DVD release of the year is…

Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films – region 2, BFI

This was an easy decision. The most comprehensive DVD set of the year has been assembled with passion and care in every department, from the remastered transfers to the extensive and sometimes rare extra features to form a Svankmajer completist’s dream package. If you’re at all interested in animation or surrealism or art then you should own this set. Knowing that it was a real labour of love for Michael Brooke, the driving force behind this excellent package, inevitably adds you your appreciation of the work that has gone into it. Fabulous.

Alan Connor, over here.

The splendid David Howell (”big man, big books”, as a friend once described him to me) writes about Lady Chatterley’s Lover over at Normblog.

In order to pretend to myself that it isn’t really admissions season, I’ve been going to the cinema.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford is quite good. It’s not very good, but it is quite good, and it manages not to be dull, even though hardly anything happens, it all moves along very slowly, and you know exactly what’s going to happen towards the end. Beautifully filmed, and the acting’s not bad at all. It doesn’t, however, make me want to go off and live in Missouri. In the dispute between Norm and Adele and Sarah Churchwell on gender in the film, I think Sarah Churchwell edges it on points, with her shrewd remarks on the (d)evolution of the Western since Clint Eastwood showed up. (Do note the fine correction at the end of Churchwell’s piece.)

The Darjeeling Limited is quite funny when it’s being a silly film, but about halfway through it tries to become Meaningful, whereupon it becomes moderately tiresome, except for a couple of jokes towards the end and a brief appearance by a tiger. Ros K has more over here.

The trailer to The Golden Compass makes it look cracking, esp. the polar bear. But is it clear whether I should have a look at a Pullman novel or two ahead of time, or just wander along to see the film?

Oh, and, call me puerile (”you’re puerile”), but I did enjoy this advert.

From the Guardian:

If you are considering dyeing a sheep, first ensure that it is your own sheep and never use household paint or a chemical-based fabric dye such as Dylon. “The dye would need to be a non-toxic vegetable dye,” says the RSPCA, “and applied with a sponge or silent spray.” On one website, a seasoned sheep-dyer recommends food colouring (NB, you’ll need a lot of bottles) and advises that you dye only long-wool breeds, “as they tend to dry faster and not mat up like the finer wools”.

In other sheep-related news, I saw a copy of Henry Moore’s sheep sketchbook in the window of Waterstone’s this morning, which I last spotted at the Moore exhibit in Rotterdam about this time last year. I really should buy a copy. It’s very good.

Tosca also exists in a Lego version.

Act One, part one:

Act One, part two:

Act Two:

Act Three [a particularly fine firing squad]:

One of the best things about living in Oxford is that the Welsh National Opera pass through twice a year. Their productions are usually great fun, and Friday’s performance of Il Trovatore was no exception. For those who missed the show, however, here’s Verdi’s masterpiece abridged and performed in Lego:

Act One:

Act Two:

Act Three:

Act Four:

There’s this piece on the weird Canadian film-maker Guy Maddin on the website of the London Film Festival. And he [Mike, not Guy] tells me that the interview he did with everyone’s favourite Czech animator Jan Švankmajer for Vertigo (whatever that is) earlier in the year is now freely available here.

I don’t think I’ve publicised this properly before, so here goes. Some Stoa-readers may remember my brother’s old blog, Mischievous Constructions, which doesn’t exist any more. Then he went off and wrote at Closely Observed DVDs for a bit about Czech cinema. And now he’s writing again at a new-ish blog, Kinoblog (”a survey of Central and East European Cinema”), and it’s turning out very nicely. So add it to your bookmarks. And, if you haven’t already, get yourself a copy of his Jan Švankmajer box set while you’re at it.

I’ve known about the pop song “Now I Want A Man Like Putin” for a while, but hadn’t heard it until yesterday. Here it is:

A pop-up Graceland at Christmas:

Over here.

Sample: “I must admit translating Elvis into Sumerian was not easy.”

[From the man who brought us Elvis in Latin]

“Although I argue vehemently against modern pop music, on grounds of its musical incompetence, verbal impoverishment and general morbidity, narcissism and salaciousness; although I fiercely object to disco dancing as a sacrilege against the human form and a collective rejection of civilised courtship; although I defend reels, minuets, galliards, sarabands and (as limiting cases) waltzes and polkas as the only ways in which ordinary humanity should dare to put its sexual nature on festive display, and although I regard the 12-bar blues and the flattened subdominant seventh as the lowest forms of vulgarity in music, I find rock’n'roll in general, and Elvis in particular, irresistible, and would happily dance away the night to it. I cannot explain the thrill of delight with which I hear the first bars of Jailhouse Rock or the eagerness with which I at once search the vicinity for a partner: but there it is, appalling proof that, despite all my efforts, I am human.”

[tehgraun]

Elvis Presley, died thirty years ago today, 16 August 1977.

Five excellent Elvis tracks (no particular order):

Please list your favourite tracks / records / films (!!) / etc. in the comments.