The Big Air Package
(by Christo) (2013) We all went to the gasometer near Duisberg to check out Christo’s installation, ‘Big Air Package’. We were sceptical about this Bulgarian wrapper but it was wonderful, a 90m high white balloon that cast an eerie, snow-like glow inside. Afterwards, we had German super-hospitality at dinner and beyond, salted with pessimism about Ms Merkel and the future of the Euro.
Continue Reading →The Best and the Brightest
(by David Halberstam) Definitive parable of hubris leading to apocalypse. Whiz kids from the ivy-league encounter a Big Texas Democrat as their new boss; tragedy ensues in a companion piece to his earlier The Making of a Quagmire but which is wider in scope. Larded with mean detail, such as when LBJ enthuses to Sam Rayburn how brilliant all the new kids are, to which the paterfamilias of Congress replies that Lyndon might be right “but I’d feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for sheriff once.”
Continue Reading →The Apes of God
(by Wyndham Lewis) The best (and bitchiest) book of the art demi monde ever written. As T. S. Eliot said of this masterpiece, “It is so immense I have no words for it.”
Continue Reading →Animal Farm
Drawing of Squealer by Pett and Freeman
(by George Orwell) The best political allegory since Swift. Venerable pig, Old Major (‘Willingdon Beauty’ as his show name), a Karl Marx figure, outlines an animal world of milk and honey and soft straw. The animals rise up, kick out the nasty farmer, see off the counter revolution, and settle down to run the enterprise themselves, in a workers’ paradise of co-operation, truth and mutual respect. But some animals are more equal than others… Who would have thought Napoleon the Pig, circa 1940, would look so much like Vladimir Putin? Sorry, I mean Josef Stalin. Don’t I? Our mild suggestion…
Continue Reading →Anna Karenina
(by Leo Tolstoy) That part of this huge novel taken up with Anna, Karenin and Vronsky is a work of art, startling in its modernity. The bucolic pages concerning Constantine Levin, on the other hand, are the highest schlock. O for an editor with the spine to suggest to a nobleman the wielding of shears and a blue pencil! Anna is a great flesh-and-blood character, in a situation not dissimilar to Madame Bovary or Hedda Gabler. But being Tolstoy, the rich inner drama is cast on an epic scale.
Continue Reading →