THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CAMERON DIAZ, Pt 2 November 14, 2013
Posted by markswill in Media, Navel Gazing, Politics, Schmolitics.3 comments
I ended last week’s excursion to the outer fringes of melancholic resignation by claiming that there had at least been some compensation in the shape of cultural nourishment. That said, we’re not out the woods yet but before return to the forces of darkness, I will honour my promise, kicking off with the fantastic Pop Art Design show at the Barbican – a sprawling, comprehensive exhibition taking in pure art, commercial media and even furniture and household goods. A good 90 minutes if not two hours are required to take it all in. Equally uplifting, partly because I was barely aware of his work, was the Daumier exhibition at the RA and rather more for laughs, Michael Landy’s installations based on the martyred saints at the National, even if they do rather ape what Bruce Lacey was doing 50 years ago.
In fact I’m writing this on the train back from King’s Lynn after a jolly works outing to see the temporarily returned post-renaissance paintings acquired in 1779 from Robert Walpole’s ancestral seat, Houghton Hall, by Catherine the Great. Walpole had Houghton built specifically to accommodate a collection that wasn’t uniformly to my taste – although the Van Dycks, Velazquez and Marattas were of a high order – but its scale and décor, still beautifully preserved, are the perfect setting for an assemblage that’s shortly to return to Russia, never to be seen here again. (Also, the warm fruit scones in the caff were the best I’ve ever had – which is saying something – and we enjoyed one of Griffith’s pork pies, brought all the way from Shropshire, on the train home). Top day on all counts, then.
Only two theatre outings in the last coupla months, but both crackers: Terry Johnson’s clever, archly comic Hysteria at Hampstead with Anthony Sher playing a much put-upon Sigmund Freud (N.B. Naked Old People Alert), and Moira Buffini’s Handbagged at the Tricycle which is a sardonic, brilliantly observed and pitch-perfectly performed imagining of the hostility between M. Thatcher and H.R.H. The Queen. Both still (just) playing so if you live in London, get there quick.
As for films, well obviously I’d advise seeing The Counsellor with Brad Pitt, Javier Bardem, Michael Fassbinder and of course Ms. Diaz all on topping form. And as they haven’t quite yet been released, I’ll repeat my enthusiasm for All Is Lost (R. Redford, brilliant), Nebraska (B. Dern, ditto… indeed his best since The Driver), Labor Day (Kate Winslet, more ditto), August: Osage County (La Streep outstanding as a drug-addled, vile-tongued matriarch) and the best film ever to come out of Romania, Child’s Pose. Which perhaps isn’t saying much. But then neither am I.
Except on the subject of HOUSING, the price of which if you live in the South East, which I don’t, you’ll know is rising at some 8-10% per quarter. It seems extraordinary that the government tacitly if not actively encourage this by allowing, i.e. without any notable tax deterrents, foreign investors to buy ‘off-plan’ properties they will never live in or mansions they might visit occasionally, indirectly pushing up the cost of rental as a consequence. Then on the other hand the banks, several of whom we part-own and who screwed up the economy by over lending to an over-heated housing market, instead of to business as they were supposed to and which we were told would re-build the economy on sounder basis, are again offering 95% mortgages and often with government backing. In the spirit of last week’s blog, I have tried to overcome my cynical doubts about this by listening to the pundits who, like Thatcher, claim that having lots of rich Russians, Arabs and hedgefund hogs investing in bricks and mortar will have a beneficial trickle-down effect for the rest of us. And maybe this time around I am wrong and they are right?
I’m slightly surer of my prejudicial positions on the ENERGY COMPANIES and the NATIONAL HEALTH, both of which obviously concern me in my twilight years. Much to my surprise I agree with John Major that the cartel which supplies light and heat to our overpriced homes are profiteering cynically and enormously, the huge salaries of their bosses and the ‘enhanced shareholder value’ which they trumpet as their prime motive causing both anger and fear amongst those who increasingly have to choose between adequate heating and feeding themselves. And of course a consistent reduction in either leads to ill-health which disproportionately effects the elderly who of course, because of the deliberately repressed interest rates have found their living standards further reduced. A troll round any branch of Aldi or Lidl witnesses growing numbers of harried looking pensioners debating whether they can afford own-brand ketchup or tinned sardines, nutrition being rather lower down their economic agenda than three or four years ago.
I don’t therefore find it coincidental that the NHS is creaking under the strain of all these increasingly ailing crocs, neither am I surprised that closing down walk-in centres, cutting support to GP surgeries and the A&E units that are having to take up the slack, plus wasting squillions on IT systems and senior management that do sod-all for frontline services results only in weasel words from Cameron and Co. The contrarian view, which in my new spirit of impartiality I am bound to espouse, is that like many other developed countries we should jolly well pay for some or all of our healthcare, ergo, the rich and entitled would enjoy better health, live longer and contribute more to, erm, offshore tax regimes.
Oh, and one final cause for unfettered joy: Ed Reardon’s Week is back on R4, and on excellent form – 11.30am Mondays.
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THE WORLD ACCORDING TO CAMERON DIAZ November 8, 2013
Posted by markswill in Cars and Bikes, Media, Navel Gazing.16 comments
In The Counsellor, a violent but not unappealing drug trafficking thriller due out later this month, Cameron Diaz’s deliciously villainous character spouts a lengthy homily about change, its inevitability and the smart person’s decision not to fight it. Obviously I am not a smart person because Canute-like, I constantly resist change. I was also reminded of the foolishness of this when visiting the Paul Klee exhibition at Tate Modern, for although in his day (1879-1940) Klee was a serious thinker and teacher about matters artistic, on the evidence of this rather disappointing show he failed to put his thoughts into action, or rather onto canvas. Which in failing to put most of my own stridently voiced opinions into practice, I am also a craven hypocrite.
And it is of course this untypically honest admission that partly accounts for the hiatus in blogging which I whined about six weeks ago, although then I cited the irrelevance of one man’s views in a world where better brains than I have bigger and better fora to disseminate them and the usually despicable acts of mankind that prompt them. So whilst I still advocate Private Eye, The New Yorker and even Prospect if you really want to know about mankind’s horrors and follies, I was moved by Ms Diaz’s, or rather scriptwriter Cormac McCarthy’s observations to re-consider my position on a few matters that had recently vexed me.
HS2 The current political wrangling over the proposed £42billion north-south trainline is characterised by the opposing sides constantly issuing contradictory reports on its viability, cost and disruptive elements. My view is that it’d be a disaster, especially for the citizens of north London whose properties and lives would be blighted for a decade whilst it was built (I spend a lot of time in north London, see), and as a regular traveler on a creaking east-west train service to and from and my Welsh home, I’d far rather see the money used upgrading existing rail routes. But because so much political capital depends on HS2 going ahead, it almost certainly will. Just as it almost certainly will be beset by cost overruns and delays and do nothing for the economies of northern England that are its supposed beneficiaries.
MEDIA & BOOKS The recent sacking of its arts critics by The Independent and the steady cull of journalists by the Telegraph, Times and Guardian confirm that mass print media is doomed. Ditto the ongoing closure of independent bookshops due to the increase in sales of digital readers with Amazon, the arch-villains of the piece, rubbing salt into the wound with a series of ads showing an ugly man smiling at his Kindle in front of a pile of discarded books. A recent report that children, often encouraged by parents desperate to keep them occupied, just don’t have the attention spans to read anything other than digitized gobbets of information confirms that the printed word is doomed. And with it, probably anyway, the power of the press to challenge authority and commerce to account for their myriad venality. So I’d better get used to that, too. But a bracing if surprising counterpoint came from Murdoch’s News UK paywall-loving boss, Mike Darcey, in the latest In Publishing (print edition, natch): “Papers like The Guardian are eating themselves alive by publishing a newspaper at £1.40 and then giving all the content away for free.” Precisely.
CAR TROUBLE A rare case of contrition now regarding my unfashionable romance with the internal combustion engine. I got it wrong with the Twingo I irrationally bought in August (because I liked its cheeky looks and supposed economy), and am having doubts about both selling my Lancia Gamma and my continuing ownership of the gorgeous technological marvel/nightmare that is my Citroen XM. Since acquiring it, the Twingo has needed a replacement driveshaft and cambelt, both nightmarish to source because it was never an UK import and Renault UK can’t or won’t identify relevant parts numbers. Ergo many frustrating hours spent badgering confused and irritated friends/mechanics/axe-murderers for help. The Citruin has developed a leak from I know not where, probably because I stupidly let a garage who didn’t know XMs service it instead of doing it myself. And winter’s coming and its bum’s getting rusty. Until I bought the XM, I maintained that one’s ‘daily driver’ should cost no more than £1000 and deliver at least two and usually three year’s virtually trouble-free motoring, after which I’d flog it for a few hundred less than it cost and move onto another cheaply insurable old banger, arrogantly assuming that I knew enough to do rudimentary maintenance and avoid buying a dog. Oh, and I’d keep and cherish a classic for high days and showing off. The XM, glorious to drive though it is, proved the exception in every respect, but I thought I’d box clever by replacing the Lancia with it as my object of automotive lust and make the Twingo my daily driver. Wrong, wrong, wrongity wrong. And worse, when I occasionally drive a modern BMW or, gulp, Ford, I kinda hanker after transport that’s quiet, reliable and economical… even if it has no soul.
TALKING OF SOUL All of this unrequited resistance to the march of progress has this month been ameliorated by some determined cultural consumption, but as your attention span has probably already been stretched to its limits, the details of which I’ll peddle around early next week in a unexpectedly prompt second instalment.
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