Decline of the West
The Course of Empire series - "Desolation" by Thomas Cole
I’ve been dipping into Oswald Spengler’s big bad book, So very high -Teutonic and yet, somehow, worth a look; He gets bogged down, of course, with gonzo hierarchies – And, sending blood to war with money, confuses, as a tease. If we stuck to Kings (theocracy); and types like Kim (autocracy), And what was left ran not on god, here or above (plutocracy), But dough and stuff, you’d have your map of the whole world: Shaped into a cocktail ball, and twirled. But Mr. Spengler did not do that – instead he tabled (Naturally!) eight empires of the past and…
Continue Reading →All Must Fall
I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip…sneer of cold command, …And on the pedestal these words appear: ‘I am Rhodes, diamond king and white supremacist: Look on my works, ye begrudged, and despair!’ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away. [Adapted from Ozymandias with apologies to P.B. Shelley] Shelley’s superb short 1818 poem, slightly cannibalised here, aptly…
Continue Reading →Why Do These Stars’ Stylists Hate Them?
It must be a vicious mixture of misogyny, personal loathing, resentment and superb powers of persuasion. Nothing else can explain how these otherwise attractive women came to appear at the 2016 Golden Globe Awards looking like this.
Continue Reading →Pierre Boulez
(26/3/1925 – 5/1/2016) I hold a box set of records of a Bayreuther Festspiele production of Die Walküre conducted by Pierre Boulez, who died on Tuesday last. Other conductors work hard to give audiences what they want to hear: the famous baton-less Pierre worked the crowd towards liking what he wanted: atonal purity and the trampling of populism. As Michael Tanner, in his Wagner, recounts, the Boulez/Chéreau production of The Ring in Bayreuth “moved from provoking physical violence in 1976 to unqualified triumph in 1981” (at page 57).He recognised the need to dare and to irritate – that failures paved…
Continue Reading →Vale David Bowie
(photo by Adam Bielawski)
David Bowie (8 January 1947 – 10 January 2016) He was a total original, part of the vanguard of the synthesiser revolution, a singer-songwriter of genius, an innovative producer and arranger (e.g. Transformer), a rather odd but always compelling actor (he is appropriately weird in The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hunger), and, in the best sense of the term, a trend-setter. From avant-garde to Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, through Young Americans, the Berlin trilogy of Low, “Heroes” and Lodger, and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps), he mesmerised with his masterful changes of style, change of persona, angelic…
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