Bright ideas can lose their way in the dark
It is easy for those of us blessed with sight to romanticise blindness. Amadou & Mariam, two of Africa’s most celebrated performers, performed an entire concert in a pitch-black hall at the Manchester International Festival last week. The idea was to share with the audience the world as the two blind musicians encounter it. If you cannot see, your sense of sound becomes richer, Amadou, the Malian guitarist, wrote in the programme.
It was an interesting experiment. You were led to your seat in the darkness by an usher wearing infra-red goggles, having being given a white card to raise if you became disorientated to the point of being distressed. The night vision glasses also monitored the hall throughout the concert “for your safety”, the blurb announced, in case anyone got up to any funny business.
The dark was filled with the sounds of a Bamako dawn – cockerels, dogs, a pump splashing water, maize being pounded – which faded as a picked guitar melody kicked in. There was a peculiar intensity about the first few numbers as the guitar, kora, flute and some kind of mandolin overlaid one another. Rolling blues riffs gave way to more modal patterns. The local language Bambara shifted to French. Metallic licks alternated with crude boy-next-door strumming.
But then the problems set in. After a while the darkness brought home the fact that blindness is a sensory deprivation. I wanted to see the band and synchronise the sounds with the sight of what was making them. Was that phrase from a harp or mandolin, or maybe even a balafon – whatever that might be; the programme said there was one, but I wasn’t sure what it was, though if I’d seen it I might have recognised it from my travels in Africa over the years.
FollowThe Madness of an Extraordinary Plan, Gerard McBurney
Wagner for beginners seemed to be the idea behind the free preview of a new play about the grandiloquent composer, with illustrations from the Hallé
Orchestra under Sir Mark Elder. Tickets were allocated by ballot to draw in a new audiences. The Bridgewater Hall wasn’t exactly full of people wearing City shirts but the audience was a good deal younger than if they had been paying £50 a head.
Those who knew little about Wagner might have struggled with Gerard McBurney’s drama which cleverly stitched together a catholic collection of quotes by and about the composer. It lacked much narrative thrust, focusing instead on Wagner’s artistic philosophy.
What bound the piece together were the Hallé’s themes from the four Ring operas, from a solo haunting horn to a rhythm of the Rheingold anvils so clamorous they could have been a recording from Manchester’s industrial past.
McBurney pulled no punches. Wagner is a high priest of human feeling in its purest form. But he is also a self-aggrandising, sickly, super-sensitive, self-indulged neurotic. For all his heightened artistic sensibility he believed the ultimate ambition of a passionate wife should be to lose her identity in self-sacrifice to her husband. Post-Hitler it is hard to see all his romantic mythology as anything much more than preposterously pantomimic posturing.
Roger Allam was commanding as Wagner but Deborah Findlay and Sara Kestleman, as the two female chorus figures, had a trickier task switching between quotes from unannounced sources as disparate as Bakunin, Baedeker, Darwin, Dickens, Grimm, Liszt, Nietzsche, Scohepnhauer, Tchaikovsy and Wagner’s wives, Minna and Cosima. They didn’t so much lose the plot as have no plot to lose.
But the music was another thing. After the play the Hallé launched into Act III of Die Walküre with a group of Valkyries you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. They had tremendous immediacy and urgency. You could see Wotan coming in their eyes, and hear him in voices of such power that you felt afterwards that you’d been run over by a train.
One of the most striking images of an image-packed week came from the BBC’s political editor, Nick Robinson, when he described Gordon Brown’s House of Commons denunciation of the Murdoch empire as “more a roar of pain and anger” than a speech. It resonated because of the vivid picture it conjured of a mighty beast in torment. But there was also something rather odd about it.
Certainly Robinson did not go on to deploy the same powerful linguistic skills in reporting what he described as the “fair points” the former prime minister had made. Indeed he minimised them. And there was something rather mocking about the way he said that Brown had “tried very, very hard to make friends” with Murdoch’s newspapers. “My point is not to condemn Gordon Brown,” he continued, expansively, “he only did what Tony Blair had done and what David Cameron went on to do”.
Gordon Brown is a complex man, who combines much light and not a little darkness, but there was little doubting the titanic scale of his rage and his pain at the way his young son’s illness had been turned into circulation fodder for The Sun. Yet Robinson’s tone was flip, as if Brown was merely a schoolboy settling a few playground scores.
Perhaps I was over-reacting, I thought, until I saw the same sentiment expressed repeatedly on Twitter. Robinson was making light of a major scandal, it was said. He was taking a “side-swipe” at Brown’s wife Sarah in a “thinly-veiled diversion tactic for No 10”. And he’d suggested the Browns were feigning their upset which was “really sick, Tory boy,” one tweeter said. The Labour MP Tom Watson, who made much of the running on the phone-hacking scandal, even said in an interview: “Frankly I think the BBC should probably take a look at itself. I don’t think their political journalists took this story seriously when the investigation was taking place in parliament. I think Nick Robinson, the most powerful political editor in the land, missed the story of his life.”
The accusation that Nick Robinson has a bias towards the Conservative party is hardly new. When he was appointed BBC political editor in 2005 much was made of the fact that at Oxford he was president of the university Conservative Association and later was national chairman of the Young Conservatives in the Thatcher era. When the general election came in 2010 there was internet moaning that his Tory partiality was now showing.
This always seemed to me to be over-stated, as did the protests that he showed his political colours when he tore up an anti-war/anti-cuts placard that a protestor was holding up behind him during one outside broadcast. That was professional frustration, or irritation at having been made to look foolish live on air, not political prejudice. On Friday he joined the strike alongside other BBC journalists protesting against compulsory redundancies, which is hardly the act of a hardline Conservative.
There were a couple of noisy walk-outs in the second half of this new Johnny Vegas offering. They could just have been clumsy people anxious not to miss their last bus. Or they might have been from a tv shopping channel, or Leeds, two of the objects of Vegas’s gratuitous insults.
He had vowed not to send up tv shopping channels in the show which mixes theatre and live tv, broadcasting part of the action live on Ideal World every night. Instead, he promised a play about how people function under pressure when their personal lives are coming apart at the seams. But the target of vapid consumerism was too enticing.
There are some fine comic performances. Kevin Eldon, who also directs, is the much put-upon but almost all-seeing floor manager. In the studio warm-up he is so quickfire it’s difficult to spot where he breathes.
Emma Fryer steals the show as Vegas’s wide-eyed ditzy brunette co-presenter, Lindsay, who is just about to overtake the blokeish star presenter, Bryan, by getting a solo spot selling figure-flattering ladies underwear. But her perfect make-up and deadpan manner hide an engaging vulnerability. She prides herself on “a touch of self-deprecation but not enough to suggest low self-esteem” but is a deeply weird agrophobic who lives in her dressing room.
The live tv link-up is more than a gimmick. It adds hugely to the adrenalin as the two presenters row furiously as the floor manager counts down to cameras going live and the short-delay tv monitors flicker on. It gives real edge to the will-he/won’t-he after Bryan announces he will propose to Lindsay on air. But once the link-up is over the show soars into surreal sketch stratosphere where wild rhapsodic humour allows the audience to wilfully suspend its disbelief at the barmy ending. This is the fertile imagination of a comic who understands that fecund is not a four letter word.
The piece does not have the depth and intimacy of Interiors, his 2007 show here, in which Vegas again played a mad sad thin man struggling to get out of a jovial bursting frame, inviting an audience of just 30 into a suburban semi as he tried to sell the house to them. But it is very funny and the best non-kids show of the festival so far.
It is the thinking of the 1950s, Labour’s Andy Burnham said yesterday in a philippic against pupils being able to choose Latin as part of the new English baccalaureate. He prefers engineering, business studies and ICT to create “a route into work” for Britain’s young people. But it is a modern myth that Latin is outdated. Latin is the maths of the humanities – a training in analytical thought for which no previous knowledge is required. It fires the imagination of the young with its goddesses, gladiators and mythological flying horses. It offers a great foundation for later language learning. Its students do better in reading, comprehension, vocabulary and conceptual thinking. Ipsa scientia potestas est.
Pirates, Rickie Lee Jones, Manchester International Festival.
There has always been something defiant about Rickie Lee Jones. When her debut album, with its jazz-toned hit single ‘Chuck E’s in Love’, won a Grammy in 1979 she rejected suggestions that she emphasise the more commercial aspects of her songwriting. Indeed her second album, Pirates, which chronicled the break-up of her relationship with Tom Waits, proved a howl of anguish. Now, crossing the chasm of cocaine-fuelled psychosis which divided then from now, she is back, defying the years.
A retrospective might seem to go against the grain for the Manchester International Festival which specialises in new work. But this live performance of Pirates, which has been listed as one of the 25 Most Underrated Albums of All Time, was more than an exercise in nostalgia for a cultural moment now long passed.
She performed the songs, along with those from her eponymous first album, in the order she wrote them, beginning somewhat diffidently with ‘Easy Money’ and ‘Weasel and the White Boy’. But with growing confidence she recreated the Runyonesque carnival that was her Seventies finger-snapping bepop, jazz and R&B flavoured Coolsville. She was allusive, impressionistic, cinematic and – as she navigated the darker side of it all – bleak. These are songs Edward Hopper might have written. Her cast of characters are “all dead now or in prison” but for one golden evening they were back with her, in their prime.
Her voice was light in the years when the cigarillos, drink and drugs were a bohemian indulgence and had not yet taken their toll. Thirty years on it retains that brittle fragility, diamond-hard and yet desperately vulnerable. But if her elfin quality has not been entirely lost with the thickening of her waist she has acquired a vocal depth and knowingness. She still sings like she is half-cut but that belies a control as complete as that of her impressive band of economic synth, precise bass, faultless guitar, cool trumpet and plangent tenor sax.
This is not growing old disgracefully. It is a voice from a dream, elusive yet familiar, transcendent, a messenger from another place. All that junkie whining about the departure of Waits has become a lament for human mortality and the passing of the years. Stunning. And she did it all without breaking her cool.
It’s no good expecting universities to make good the failings in the culture of our schools
This is not the story of one boy, but of many boys and girls. But let’s begin with one. A seven year-old is sitting at the dining table copying from an exercise book onto a sheet of paper. It is an essay he has written on the Great Fire of London. His teacher told him it was good work and has asked him to read it out to the class the next day.
“If there are any words that are difficult to read aloud you can change them,” she has told him. But he is not just changing the odd word. He is rewriting the piece entirely. “I can’t use a word like that, or that, or that,” he says, pointing, “because the other boys will laugh at me.” Next he cuts out a line he has imagined about what the Dean of St Paul’s said to the King after the conflagration. “They’ll laugh if I mention the Dean of St Paul’s,” he explains. The boy is dumbing down his work for fear of the disapproval of his peers. “Learning is for losers Dad,” he says to his father, though he knows it’s not true.
Just five top British schools take a huge number of the places at Oxford and Cambridge universities, a report by the Sutton Trust said the other day. Four independent schools – Eton, Westminster, St Paul’s Boys and St Paul’s Girls – and one state school sent 946 pupils to Oxford and Cambridge between 2007 and 2009. That was more than the 2,000 schools at the bottom of the Trust’s list combined. Together they sent only 927 to the two elite universities.
But we are not just talking about a contrast between the top and bottom of the Sutton table, which covered 750,000 students and 2,343 secondary schools. What it reveals, when you look lower down the table, is that an elite of just 5 per cent of schools account for almost a third of Oxbridge admissions. And if you look beyond these ancient institutions you find the same imbalance extends to all Britain’s top 30 universities.
Some of the reasons for this are self-evident. Selective schools generally get better results than comprehensives which, by definition, contain a wider-range of abilities. Private schools, on average, do better because they pay more for better teachers and pupils are taught in smaller classes. Combine fee-paying and selection and you get the situation where almost half of the girls who got to university from St Paul’s School in London went to Oxbridge.
The difference turns on different A level results. But there are other interesting factors producing what the Sutton Trust’s chairman Sir Peter Lampl calls these “stark inequalities”. Two grammar schools with almost identical A-level results are highlighted in the report; one gets 65 per cent of its pupils into the Top 30, the other just 28 per cent. At the other end of the scale two comprehensives with equally low scores displayed an even bigger disparity; one got 70 per cent of its 18-year-olds to apply for higher education, the other just 33 per cent.
Why such huge gaps? read more…
Suddenly there is talk of famine in Africa again. Ten million people are at risk of starvation in the worst drought conditions in 60 years in Ethiopia, Somalia and northern Kenya. Tens of thousands of people have left their homes in search of water and food. Hundreds of thousands of farm animals have died.
Every day some 1,200 Somalis are crossing the border into Kenya where, near the once little town of Dadaab, the world’s biggest refugee camp, 50 kilometres square, has developed. Many of the children arriving there, after month-long treks across the unyielding desert, are so weak that they are dying despite receiving emergency care. Millions more are hungry and have begun the slow journey to wasting from malnutrition.
Oxfam has just launched its biggest appeal ever for the continent. The head of the United Nations’ humanitarian affairs department, Baroness Amos, yesterday appealed for donor nations to “dig deep” to help.
Except, of course, there is nothing sudden about all of this. It is a creeping disaster and an utterly preventable one. In April aid agencies warned that 8m people were facing severe food shortages. Nothing was done. Three months later that figure has risen to 10m. Predictions by the international Famine Early Warning Systems Network make clear what will happen by September if the world turns its back. Its food insecurity monitoring has recorded slippage from Stage 2 Chronic to Stage 3 Acute and, for many areas, Stage 4 Emergency. Stage 5 Catastrophe/Famine is next.
The classic first signals have been there for months. Livestock prices have plummeted and cereal prices soared, as they always do ahead of famine. Two-thirds of the population make their living by raising goats, sheep, cattle and camels. Animals are how families accumulate wealth and store savings. When drought comes both water and grazing for animals vanish and they sell for downward spiralling prices.
Coming over here, stealing our jobs…
If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here. The destination is the reform of the welfare system to make work pay. That is undoubtedly a good idea. It is something the last Labour government tried to do, and something the Work and Pensions secretary Iain Duncan Smith is determined finally to bring about. There are, classically, two ways of going about it: cutting benefits and/or raising wages, though the tricky bit is tapering the impact of one on the other to avoid creating poverty traps and disincentives to work. But three days ago the Coalition’s most zealous reformer added something else to the mix.
The change cannot be brought about, he said, without curbing immigration – to stop ‘them’ from stealing ‘our’ jobs. Oh dear. We are back to Gordon Brown’s “British jobs for British workers”. It didn’t work for him, and it won’t work for Duncan Smith either.
You can see why they want to try it. The logic is superficially impeccable. The number of British-born workers without a job has increased by 223,000 over the last ten years. In the same period some 1.7 million foreign-born workers have migrated here from eastern Europe while a further million immigrants have arrived from non-EU countries.
Do the maths. Get rid of 223,000 foreigners and their jobs will be made available for those jobless Brits. The red-meat tabloids have done the calculation. So has no less a statistician than Roger Daltrey, lead-singer with those archetypal Sixties rebels, The Who. Gordon Brown’s government “left the British working man screwed like he’d never been screwed before by cheap labour coming in from Europe,” opined Daltrey, 67, the man who once sang that he hoped he’d die before he got old.
In the end the protest accusing Bono of not paying enough tax turned out to be a bit of a rain-soaked squib. In the original tradition of Glastonbury protest, in the days before it became a corporate bunfest, activists inflated a 20ft balloon with the message “U Pay Your Tax 2” as the world’s biggest rock band took to the stage. But the organisers deflated the sign after a couple of songs saying it was stopping the people behind from seeing Bono & Co.
In 2006 U2, the band which was so prominent in the 2005 Make Poverty History campaign, moved its multi-million-pound song catalogue to the Netherlands for tax reasons after Ireland capped the tax-free income artists could earn. Bono was thus, protestors said, demanding that his government gave more in overseas aid whilst simultaneously reducing the income from which it could pay that. Bono was “a socialist-minded do-gooder who talks the talk but refuses to walk the walk”.
It’s worth unpacking this argument. It starts by asserting that Bono is promulgating social justice while living like a dedicated capitalist. That is unpersuasive; better to be a capitalist dedicated to social justice than one who isn’t. But how do we disentangle private and public moralities?
Aristotle holds that good behaviour grows out of a good character. Modern society disagrees; it takes a more utilitarian view, insisting, for example, that it is possible to be both a bad husband and a good prime minister. So if a footballer is unfaithful that is a problem for his wife but not for the fans, unless he is seducing other players’ girlfriends, which might damaging a team’s morale and performance. By this score U2’s fine performance at Glastonbury should satisfy all except those critics who were wanting them to fail.
But virtue ethics suggests this is not enough. So what about proportion? It is possible to be a tax dodger and do good in the world – and for the worth of the latter to outweigh the former. Glastonbury’s founder, Michael Eavis, a Methodist, suggested that the band’s massive donations to charity outweighed the harm of their tax-efficient accountancy. Certainly only a small proportion of the tax U2 is avoiding would have gone on overseas aid.
Has the Nobel Peace Prize backfired for China’s dissidents?
The empty chair spoke eloquently at the ceremony to award last year’s Nobel Peace Prize to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo for “his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China”. He could not be there to receive it because he was in prison, where he had been incarcerated since 2009, merely for demanding political reform and an end to one-party rule in his homeland.
It seemed a good decision at the time. But a year on – amidst the tightest clampdown on dissent in China for two decades – the Nobel committee might be forgiven for wondering whether their strategy has backfired. read more…
I was in Ireland on Sunday when I opened The Observer and read that the man whose obituaries last year called him England’s best-known parish priest turns out to have been a predatory paedophile.
How many more shocks can the system take, I wondered aloud to my Irish friends. They looked surprised. Like so many of their countrymen and women they have lost the capacity to be shocked by the activities of Catholic priests and the response of the institutional church to them. They shrugged their shoulders as, one said, “many Catholics and post-Catholics would”.
Post-Catholics? Apparently so many people have left the church that a new sociological term has been coined in Ireland for those who have abandoned their religious practice but cling to a cultural identity in a country where, notwithstanding all the progress of the peace process, there remains a significant consciousness of denomination as a tribal badge.
So much so that the country’s leading Catholic cleric, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, suggested some time ago that although 90 per cent of Dublin’s primary schools are under his control the percentage of the population who want a Catholic education for their children might be as low as 50 per cent.
This week a national school forum has been discussing a proposal by the country’s Minister of Education, Ruairi Quinn, that half the primary schools under the control of the church should be transferred to the jurisdiction of other bodies. Representatives of the Catholic bishops have been taking a tougher line than their archbishop. But a counter-proposal by the Catholic School Partnership that only 10 per cent of schools should switch from church control nonetheless appeared to concede the principle that change was needed.
Catholics in England and Wales are nowhere near so far down the path of disillusion. Even so, each new disclosure is a blow to the confidence and morale of many Catholics I know. “Every time a little bit of you dies inside,” one said. Each revelation may be the final straw for someone. One acquaintance of mine recently left the church to became an Anglican.
