Author Archive: Peter Jakobsen
The Truth About Truth
Not as it seems (photo by CGP Grey)
8 July, 1947: The Army Air Field at Roswell, New Mexico, issued a press statement about salvaging the remnants of a “flying disc” from a nearby ranch and taking it to the air field, where it was quickly spirited to an undisclosed location. It wasn’t till about 30 years later (probably after the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)) that dozens of people started asserting they’d seen aliens, flying saucers, men in black, and so on. It was good business for a long time. But it wouldn’t even pass muster with Stephen Glass. Truth remains an elusive,…
Continue Reading →Better Never Than Late
Joan gets the Call (by Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1879)
July 7, 1456: an ecclesiastic court of appeal acquits Joan of Arc of all and any ‘crimes’. Only hitch: she’d been burned at the stake on May 30, 1431. Some French folks maintain that Jeanne d’Arc was the last thing the English cooked properly. George Bernard Shaw, who wrote Saint Joan (she was canonised in 1920), called her “the most notable Warrior Saint in the Christian calendar, and the queerest fish among the eccentric worthies of the Middle Ages.” In GBS’s play, the final scene has King Charles VII of France encounter Joan in a dream, circa her successful appeal. He tells her:…
Continue Reading →Unconventional
'Where are the cigars?' (George Healy's 'The Peacemakers')
July 6, 1854: The US Republican Party held its first Convention, in Jackson, Michigan, ‘under the oaks’. Six years later, the Grand Old Party had its first President: 162 years after that first Convention, the Republicans have taken a wild gamble with their nominee for President in 2017: Mr Trump, like Howard Beale in Network, is articulating the rage of the American people. It’s Big Casino – he could end up like Barry Goldwater, but if he moderates his approach, given the times, he might get there, like Nixon in 1968. Mind you, the Democrats aren’t exactly running FDR, or JFK. …
Continue Reading →Roberto Devereux
(by Gaetano Donizetti) (Metropolitan Opera, screened July 5, 2016) We’re still not quite sure what to make of this Met rendering of Donizetti’s brilliant little bel canto sweetmeat. It seems to have been given the Heaven’s Gate treatment. But there is much to like – the static set by David McVicar (more Georgian/art nouveau fusion than Elizabethan) provided a sense of stability and economy, serving well as various rooms at Nonsuch Palace (looking a little Hampton Court), The Duke of Nottingham’s digs, the Tower, and as a gallery for the peripheral players. The Errol Flynn, Bette Davis…
Continue Reading →The Raft of “The Medusa”
3 July 1816: the French frigate “The Medusa” founders off Cap Blanc. Two and a bit years later, Theodore Géricault exhibited his classic romanticist work; a grim and sombre depiction of hope turning to despair, as possible rescue, seen in the distance, fades away. The loss of 150 people in this wreck, and abandonment of some, and evidence of cannibalism by survivors, became a national scandal, and Gericault’s melodramatic treatment did nothing to calm the citizens down. “This was a great subject, gory and gasp-making.”* [Sue Roe, The Private Lives of the Impressionists, 2006, p. 9.]
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