Category: The Arts & Design

The true face of Leonardo?

Well, maybe.  Here’s something I picked up off the IHR circular, and thought might be worth posting if the advertising content on the original could be pruned.  It could.

So here is a four-minute presentation by Siegfried Woldhek, a newspaper illustrator with a sideline as a Third World techno do-gooder, on his research into “the true face” of Leonardo de Vinci.

Film review - This is England (2006)

They don’t make big budget films about the far right in Britain.  In fact, it’s rare for any film to be made about it.  But one was made last year based on the personal experiences of its director, Shane Meadows.  These are my impressions of it.

IT’S 1983, the first day of the school summer holidays.  We open with a couple of minutes of genuine archive footage.  Mrs Thatcher appears, tearful crowds see the Falklands fleet out of harbour, then follow shots from some inane TV show – not really a contrast, as all these scenes are part of the same “spectacle”.  Next come some disturbing shots of dead and wounded soldiers being hurriedly ferried away from a Falklands battlefield, and it’s these last that implicitly form a backdrop for the film itself.

Shaun, played by Thomas Turgoose, is a severely undersized 13-year-old North-country boy (the scene-setting is reminiscent of that in Ken Loach’s Kes).  He has lost his father in the Falklands War.  His mum (Jo Hartley) just doesn’t possess the inner resources to help him get over it, and he’s scoffed at and bullied at school.

One day he’s befriended by a gang of older kids - rather patronisingly, perhaps they want him as a mascot.  They are punk/skinhead types, not political, indeed on the verge of criminality.  Membership of the gang (which has one black member, a friendly and gentle boy called “Milky") takes Shaun out of himself.  The boys play fantasy/hunting games in derelict buildings: - a waste of time perhaps, but now Shaun feels that he’s needed and has a purpose.

But then an older member named Combo (Stephen Graham), whom we haven’t met before, rejoins the gang.  He’s been in prison, manfully taking the rap, it seems, for one of the other members.  He quickly re-establishes himself as the feared leader, and preaches a programme of white supremacy.  A pivotal moment in the film has been reached, and the mood of the action changes.

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From a second Promethean Sunic …

Oh, tell me the pale Moon

Where has the joyous beat of the heart gone?

In the veinless, bloodless, joyless machine,

Illusion of our time.

Like a sunless gothic cathedral among the skyscrapers,

Without its chime - lost in the yawning heights of time.

Divine heart, you have slept too long in your primeval grave,

Waiting for the thunder to wake you up in your deep sleep!

But all that clamour couldn’t move you

You were falling deeper in your dream.

Until in the darkest darkness of my human heart,

I dreamt of the mysterious sun-ray that has come to wake you up,

Before the delightful dawn of time –from the coldest depths of

Unknown Life; from forgotten timeless spheres,

As soft as the white flower petals in warm summer nights

Comes the unknown delight!

The lost feeling - the old Eros; reborn out of time immemorial,

Deeper and warmer than all those passionate fires of cold modernity.

by Xenia Sunic, wife of Tom and a Croatian poet dedicated to the Promethean spirit.  She lives and works in Zagreb.

There Lie Forgotten Men

The poem I reproduce below was penned by a schoolgirl, Rebecca Sullivan as a (probably rather tiresome) homework assignment.  Her subject matter was Remembrance Day: the 11th of the 11th.  To continue with the BBC News report:-

Her teacher was so moved by the poem - which describes a world in which war dead are all but forgotten - she sent it to the Royal British Legion.

Officials decided to include it in a service at Trafalgar Square after deciding that it stood out from the hundreds of poems the Legion receives each year.

Rebecca wrote her piece after being moved by the poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon which she read as part of a school project.

Here then, with apologies for any excessive lugubriousness, is the poem - which I found myself forced to read from a slightly different but no less poignant perspective.

There Lie Forgotten Men

They lie there in their thousands
The last rays of sunlight
Catching the white of the gravestones
Lending a poignancy to the moment
Numbering in their thousands they lay
Deserving remembrance
And yet the scarred green fields are empty
Nothing remains here
The processions of people vanished with the years
Their sacrifice all but forgotten

She stands there alone
At the edge of the silent place
And she is shocked
New wars brew and these forgotten men
Will play no part in them
The dead silence warn no ears but hers
In great halls in moments of great decision
What they fought for is forsaken
And by days end new gravestones
Appear on the blood red ground

She finds what she seeks
‘Sgt John Malley Age 27’
His life brutally ended
And she stands by his grave
But he can give no answers
And she weeps for him
For the empty hole he left behind
And for the new emptiness
Soon to join the black chasm
And her tears join the flood

Portrait of an artist

Yesterday evening I took my daughter to Brighton College to see the inimitable and wholly entertaining Joanna MacGregor in concert.  The experience, both visceral and cerebral, left me pondering – and that, in turn, left me searching all today for a quiet moment in which to fix some of those thoughts.

A Joanna MacGregor concert is, within the small, refined world of classical piano performance, an event.  She brings to the platform so many conflicting qualities – thorough-going unconventionality, inner simplicity and warmth, a distinct impression of personal frailty, a quite awesome power when called upon, a high cerebral capacity, utterly eclectic tastes – one can only call her, in contemplation of the fusion of these things, an artist.  Quite probably, she is a unique artist.  Certainly, she is a unique individual.

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Ezra Pound Recitation: Rolling The R’s

Listen Here

Canto LXXXI

“Master thyself, then others shall thee beare”
Pull down thy vanity
Thou art a beaten dog beneath the hail,
A swollen magpie in a fitful sun,
Half black half white
Nor knowst’ou wing from tail
Pull down thy vanity
How mean thy hates
Fostered in falsity,
Pull down thy vanity,
Rathe to destroy, niggard in charity,
Pull down thy vanity,
I say pull down.

But to have done instead of not doing
This is not vanity
To have, with decency, knocked
That a Blunt should open
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame
this is not vanity.
Here error is all in the not done,
all in the diffidence that faltered . . .

Traditional art now despised in the British art world

But elephant dung is great!

The Tate was accused yesterday of snubbing one of Britain’s foremost collections after it rejected a gift of 160 paintings that had been given pride of place at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.  Its director, Sir Nicholas Serota, said that the works did not deserve to be in a national collection, even though their five-month exhibition last autumn drew thousands of people to the Walker, one of the outstanding collections of fine art in Europe and part of National Museums Liverpool.

The works were painted by the Stuckists, an international group of artists founded in 1999 to promote traditional artistry, looking to the Old Masters for inspiration. Experts said that the artists had “inaugurated the rebirth of spirituality and meaning in art, culture and society”, with their works worth œ500,000, but the Tate was less than impressed.

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Horace, for Phil

Many know that Phil, an MR contributor is on vacation. Earlier I recieved a note telling of his wonderment of Rome. Well, Horace is closest I’ll be getting to Italy, Phil!  What a lucky guy.

Odes

The Message Still Applies

The message conveyed by this WWI propaganda poster still rings true: while a few struggle with the foe most smugly ignore the threat, choosing indulgence. In this war, the Real War, the foe isn’t across the ocean, the English Channel, or even in Fallujah, instead he occupies our very soil.

I found the British archive this morning, while looking at Soviet propaganda.

The Art of Don Troiani

I am not a great connoisseur of Art but I do have a keen interest. The paintings and art work of Don Troiani paint a vivid picture of the immortal battles of a bygone era. 

Art, cultural vandalism and the public purse

The art world is one of the most corrupted components of British society.  It is filled with talentless professional eccentrics, poseurs and intellectual frauds and lightweights who daub with faeces and trade in pure shock value or boorish mundanity.

What might have been excusable were it no more than the surviving rump of 20th century modernism, refining perhaps the irony of Duchamps and Dali but not their outrageousness, has completely taken over the asylum.  As Prince Charles famously said of architecture, the avant garde has become the establishment.  It seems that there is no way back, for the structure of patronage and schooling which produced the great art of our European past cannot be replicated.  Democracy, capitalism and the state have killed it off absolutely and forever.

The consequence, quite apart from the flight from beauty and the total failure of draughtsmanship, is that the general public has become hopelessly innured to badness.  It traipses along to the galleries to be baffled, amused, entertained by the shock of the bad - in the process, naturally enough, creating a demand for more and yet more and worse badness.  We know it’s all crudely unintellectual schlock of the lowest order, a sublime joke in which some Highfallutin Johnny Expert informs us with a perfectly straight face as to that before which we must genuflect.  But still, it seems, we genuflect.

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