Ulalume
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 →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 →Inherit the Wind
Proverbs, 11:29 – “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind: and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” ——- I watched this Stanley Kramer bag-of-wind With that pair of plump boiled hams, Tracy and March, In a hot and dusty courtroom, having a fine old time Debating whether a schoolteacher had sinned. Kids bit into the apple when their brains began to parch So he taught them evolution was no crime. Tracy, playing Darrow, fought the case upon the law, In other words he posed as legislator. But the facts were dead against him, so,…
Continue Reading →“The Greats”
Lady Agnew daring John Singer Sargent to get on with it
(Art Gallery of New South Wales, January 2016) As if it is not enough to give the world The Witchery, Edinburgh, in the form of her three great galleries (National, Portrait and Modern) has lent 70-or-so important works that Sydney-siders and visitors can see till 14 February 2016. Eclectic but sumptuous, in this selection we get Botticelli’s Weymyss Madonna, Old Woman cooking eggs by Velásquez (above)… …works by Landseer (above), Reynolds, Titian, Rembrandt, and Watteau (his chocolate-box Venetian scene is below). A modest and immodest brace of Gainsboroughs, a luminous little piece by Corot, and a mighty Lorrain-style landscape by the proto-impressionist…
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