Peter Monro

Magpie 17
June 2010

There’s a wonderful family called Stein,
There’s Gert & there’s Epp and there’s Ein
Gert’s poems are bunk,
Epp’s statues are junk,
And no one understands Ein.  

business
or lack of it: BA continues its grotesque ritual of business suicide. Not content with the normal rules of Russian roulette: one bullet and five empty chambers; it’s staff seem to prefer five bullets and one empty chamber. Jeremy Clarkson gave them an affectionate epitaph – count the insults:

“Of course, they may think their action will bring BA to its knees and that, in the end, the government will step in with a wad of cash to sort things out. That’s what always happened in the Seventies. But that’s not likely to happen now, mainly because European Union rules forbid it. Unless you’re French.

No. If the cabin crew win, the airline will go under and everyone will be out of a job. So, if they lose, they lose, and if they win, they still lose. Only, if they win, we all lose, because a nation with no national airline is like a nation with no national anthem. Even Ethiopia has one.

I like Virgin. And I flew Singapore Airlines recently, which was out of this world. But there is nothing quite so joyous as leaving the hustle and bustle of a superheated Third World hellhole and being greeted on the big BA jumbo by a homosexual with a cold flannel and a refreshing glass of champagne. Take that away from us and we may as well all be Belgian.”  

sport  philosophical
Avoiding a subject with has hammered day & night for the last month, nevertheless John Heilpern has a nice angle in a piece on philosphers and football. 

“Postulates Of the Pitch   Here’s a categorical imperative: Put the ball in the net.”

From the legendary former manager of Liverpool, Bill Shankly. “Some people think football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed in that attitude. I can assure them it is much more serious than that.”

to Albert Camus, the existential novelist who played goalkeeper as a young man in Algeria: “All that I know of morality I learnt from football.”

Taking in the artistic skills of one of the greatest footballers of our time, Cristiano Ronaldo, calling on the aesthetics of Plato and Aristotle to ponder:

“Is Ronaldo a Modern Picasso ?”

To which we might be tempted to respond:

“Maybe so. But could Picasso bend it like Beckham?”

While Jean-Paul Sartre, an avid student of football comes up with a corker from his “Critique of Dialectical Reason,” where he remarks with undeniable wisdom:

 ”In a football match, everything is complicated by the presence of the other team.”

And why stop with the other team, couldn’t one quite reasonably get rid of – the baying crowd, the management, Sky TV, commentators, journalists, FIFA and the rest of the venal shower who infest and feed off it ?

Sartre’s earlier works, “Being and Nothingness” and “Existentialism and Humanism,” dig further, revealing the loneliness of the referee in a new and sympathetic light. The referee’s ordeal is that he alone bears responsibility for his decisions and therefore the mortal fate of the game. Yet the referee who errs badly is within the rules of the game, because the rules of the game allow him to err badly. His irreversible blunders are final.

Ergo, the referee’s rationale:

 “I whistle, therefore I am.”

Game, proven, match.

art
dread word ‘participation’; on the 10^th anniversary of Tate Modern, Waldemar Januszczak writes that its impact on British art has been negligible. Zero. Not one aesthetic development on these shores in the past decade owes a wren’s feather to the antics of Tate Modern.

Except in one thing: yup, ‘audience participation’, turning galleries into amusement parks. Which comes at a great cost, gangs of noisy kids, ‘these days people go to galleries not searching for civilisational milestones or profound aesthetic experience, but hoping, instead, for fun and explosions. Free art galleries have become free amusement parks and crèches.’

In terms of culture and meaning Tate Modern’s influence has probably been a disaster. Not because there is anything wrong with having fun in looking at art – there isn’t – but because the greatest art is only rarely fun to look at.

The Sistine ceiling is not fun. Guernica is not fun. Rembrandt’s Blinding of Samson is not fun. When you begin judging art by its participatory efficacy and its ability to keep kids happy, you are judging it by the standards of the circus.

he describes a sculptor – The fact is she is a bore. Her work is so deeply enmeshed in knots of aesthetic theory that it has lost sight of its own appearance. Joyless, graceless, inelegant, awkward, messy and pretentious – this is the kind of art you can make only when you are cemented so firmly into the art system that you can no longer see beyond it.

the Last Dance: Britain in 1936
Lord Londonderry licked Nazi boots so eagerly he was called the Londonderry Herr.

Salvador Dali gave a lecture about a philosophy student who took six months to eat a wardrobe.

the Ideal Home Exhibition, where the burning question was: ‘If England had a dictator what would women wear ?’

Middle-class women were worse off than their proletarian sisters in only one respect: they could afford a doctor, who was often incompetent, so more of them died in childbirth.

history – Britain in the 30s by Andrew Marr
someone thought it ” the most exciting book of history I can remember reading, not least because it tells a story I feel I know already. The route is familiar, the scenery startlingly novel. Andrew Marr delights in subverting myths. The pre-war decade isn’t about woofter poets and vegetarian intellectuals fighting Franco in sandals. Only 2,000 Britons volunteered for the Spanish civil war.

The 1930s is about the British electorate voting for timid, accident-prone Tory-leaning governments whilst the rest of Europe got high on extremists. The country was saved by an ‘unimaginative, tea-swilling, bovine inability to be easily excited’.

writing
Beowulf might have been writtten 1,400 years ago and be the beginning of English literature.  Many had to grind through ‘this sacred monster’ at university, others might take forty years for the penny to thud home that it is one of the most wondrous pieces of writing every penned.

On the death of the king Scyld:

At the hour shaped for him Scyld departed,
the hero crossed into the keeping of his Lord.

They carried him out to the edge of the sea,
his sworn arms-fellows, as he had himself desired them
while he wielded his words, Warden of the Scyldings,
beloved folk-founder: long had he ruled.

A boat with a ringed neck rode in the haven,
icy, out-eager, the atheling’s vessel,
and there they laid out their lord and master,
dealer of wound gold, in the waist of the ship,
in majesty by the mast. A mound of treasures
from far countries was fetched aboard her,
and it is said that no boat was every more bravely fitted out
with the weapons of a warrior, war accoutrement,
swords and body-armour; on his breast were set
treasures and trappings to travel with him
on his far faring into the flood’s sway.

or this of sailing the seas in their long boats:

Away she went over a wavy ocean,
boat like a bird, breaking seas,
wind-whetted, white-throated,
till the curved prow had ploughed so far
- the sun standing right on the second day -
that they might see land loom on the skyline,
then the shimmer of cliff, sheer fells behind,
reaching capes.

It is language that dances and reverberates with the sound of the ships as they scythe  through those seas of long ago.  
 

survivors
in 1972,  Vesna Vulovic, 22, flight attendant on a Yugoslav airlines flight, fell from 33,000 feet. The DC-10 was blown up by a bomb in a suitcase planted by Croatioan separatists. She was serving food, next she woke up on a snow-covered mountain. Falling at 200 mph, her backbone was broken in several places and she was paralysed for several months.  But ‘after that I was ok.’ !!  She was the only survivor of 28 passengers.

1971 – Juliane Kopcke, 17, flying with her mother to Lima, the plane was hit by lightning. She was in the air strapped to her seat at 10,000 feet, coming-to in the Peruvian jungle, she was still strapped in. Her arms & legs were gashed, collarbone broken and she was the only survivor of 92 people. She walked for 10 days in the jungle to reach help.

teaching
The first headmaster of Stowe school, J F Roxburgh, said his goal was to turn out young men who would be “acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck”.  There again when referring to a shipwreck, he didn’t mean for it to take place within the school as it has in this country over the last forty years.

Magpie 16
June 2010

James Mason made the film Bloodline in Sicily with Audrey Hepburn. She came with her bodyguard, but the whole thing was so dire, she decided after a while that on balance she’d rather be kidnapped by the Mafia than have to complete the picture.

the way we are now
Rod Liddle on how to get on:

Baroness Ashton of Upholland, appointed High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy. A person who has moved ineluctably through agitprop bollocks to quango after quango, from CND to the, Christ help us, Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work and then on to the Employers Forum on Disability, building up the PC brownie points with every new position, never having said anything of interest to anyone, someone perfectly attuned to the requirements of the deathless civil political appointment, someone whose name was writ, badly, in water. Someone like Baroness Ashton, with a face like a bag of spanners.

books etc
Foyle’s bookshop started at 119 Charing Cross Road, built in 1929, in its heyday it had more than 30 miles of shelves.  Christina Foyle, born in 1911 started her monthly Literary Luncheons in 1930 when she was 19, they lasted under her personal guidance for seven decades.

They began as a result of a chance meeting at Foyle’s itself. While she was working behind the counter, a distinguished elderly gentleman asked her for something to read on a train journey. She recommended The Forsyte Saga in glowing terms, having just read it herself. The customer bought a copy and left the shop, returning shortly afterwards to hand her back the book. It was inscribed “For the young lady who liked my book – John Galsworthy.”

One lunch was held for former jailbirds who had written their memoirs. For this Christina borrowed from Madame Tussaud’s a wax figure of Charlie Peace, the murderer, seating it next to the chairman. At the end, one guest tried to shake hands with the dummy, believing it to be the Secretary of State for Scotland.

The worst luncheon she could recall was for Sir Walter Gilbey, the head of the gin-making firm. “He spoke for one and a half hours.  A man in front of my father fell asleep, so he (my father) hit the chap with the toastmaster’s gavel. The man said: `Hit me again, I can still hear him’”.

She met Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a keen spiritualist, in the bookshop, browsing amongst the shelves. She asked him if he had ever been in touch with an author “on the other side”, such as Shakespeare. “Oh yes,” he said. “Only last week I was talking to Oscar Wilde. He told me that being dead was the most boring thing on earth.”

Her systems were antiquated and the staff paid a pittance, many were foreign. One customer, on enquiring where he might find Ulysses, was told that he had gone to lunch.  But this didn’t stop the shop making annual profits of over £15 million.

But of all the many parts and stories of her life none is more truly unbeleivable than her time in hospital when at the age of seven she got tuberculosis. She spent six months in a ward next to shell-shocked and demented soldiers. Her parents, who were running what had become the largest bookshop in the world, were TOO BUSY to visit her EVEN ONCE.

In later life Christina didn’t seem to resent it. And there are some still sentient who will remember the line ‘Children should be seen and not heard.’ whose utterance today would probably get you two years hard labour. But “seven years old, TB, six months in hospital, never visited once, too busy.” 

Even granting that different times have different ways, that is truly shocking.

Obituaries – before you croke
that superb writer, P.J. O’Rourke proposes “Pre-Obituaries“  – official notices that certain people aren’t dead yet accompanied by brief summaries of their lives indicating why we wish they were.

The main advantage of the Pre-obituary over the traditional one is the knowledge of reader and writer alike that the as-good-as-dead people are still around to have their feelings hurt.  There are all sorts of knaves and fools ready to be put to bed with a shovel. Why should they sit at their ease in God’s waiting room reading old issues of the Nation ?

The beauty of obituaries for the still-extant is that they needn’t be limited to those who are about to go home feet first. Preemptive necrology can be practiced on persons who are in the prime of life, especially if they’ve had their little turn in the limelight and will never do anything else of note if they live to be 1,000.

They’ll all receive medical treatment paid for with our Medicare tax dollars when they have the stroke they’ll get after reading their Pre-obits. But, aging though these pests may be, they strike this writer as the kind of people who will live on and on and, before they buy the (organic) farm, may be declared “national treasures” if we don’t do something about it now.

Finally there is the Pre-Obituary of an individual that can be run as a regular feature: “_______ Mysteriously Not Shot by His Wife.”

writers
Ian Fleming, re-visited, to see just how good a story-teller he is. He wrote 14 Bond books which have sold 100 million copies.

Initially, his Bond novels didn’t do well in America, until President Kennedy included ‘From Russia With Love’ on a list of his favourite books and sales shot up.

“Fleming understood the sleight of hand involved in each book – the strange disquisitions on short men or American road signs, women’s clothes, smart cars  or the ghastliness of tea that glide you over the not quite convincing plot twist and on to the next magnificent set piece.

He kept it up almost to the end, until sickness and boredom ground him down. But, as an exercise in sheer style, the Fleming of Casino Royale is hard to beat. It’s not about the plot. Unlike almost any other thriller writer, he can be read over and over and over.” 

Goldfinger is a cracker. At the conference of gangsters convened by Goldfinger to help him empty Fort Knox, Pussy Galore takes exception to her neighbour, Jack Strap’s foul-smelling cigar and even fouler smoking habits:

‘ Know what Jacko ? I could go for a he-man like you. Matter of fact I wrote a song about you the other day. Care to hear it ? It’s called ‘If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it all over you.’

Miss Galore from Harlem runs ‘a gang of outstanding ruthlessness, a Lesbian organization called the Cement Mixers.’ !!  She has ‘the only violet eyes Bond had ever seen’ and ‘pale, Rupert Brooke good looks with high cheek-bones and a beautful jawline.’

Who ever heard of violet eyes or that a jawline is  part of beauty, which it doubtless is ? 

Then there is Auric Goldfinger’s rapturous explanation of the shining ore that is his life:

‘Mr Bond, all my life I have been in love, I have been in love with gold. I love its colour, its brilliance, its divine heaviness. I love the texture of gold, that soft sliminess that I have learnt to gauge so accurately by touch that I can estimate the fineness of a bar to within one carat. And I love the warm tang it exudes when I melt it down into a true golden syrup.

But, above all, Mr Bond, I love the power that gold alone gives to its owner – the magic of controlling energy, exacting labour, fulfilling one’s every wish and whim and, when need be, purchasing bodies, minds, even souls. Yes, Mr Bond, I have worked all my life for gold, and in return,  gold has worked for me and for those enterprises that I have espoused. I ask you,’ Goldfinger gazed earnestly at Bond, ‘is there any other substance on earth that so rewards its owner ?’

Wonderful stuff – both the gold and the writing.

the tops
Dorothy Parker -  a little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.

I wish I could drink like a lady
I can take one or two at the most
Three and I’m under the table
Four and I’m under the host.

Magpie 15
June 2010

people
Cary Grant – denied entry to a Hollywood charity ball because he failed to bring his invitation. He told the severe lady at the door, ‘I’m Cary Grant’. She looked up and said, ‘You don’t look like Cary Grant.’ His reply ‘Nobody does.’

artist
Alexei Sayle remembers his parents, life-long communists, going to the Sheffield Peace conference in 1950. Picasso also went and spoke against war to huge applause. Alas Alexei’s parents didn’t bid for a sketch of a dove which they watched the great man draw; it went to an American for 12 guineas.

Picasso’s visit didn’t start well, immigration put him inside for 12 hours. Thereafter he never came again nor lent any of his pictures to exhibitions here. So that was a productive move by Attlee’s government which had banned the conference and many of those who wanted to attend.

Though on the train back to London Picasso did a drawing on a menu for a dining-car attendant, of a dinosaur. Later at a party in London of other peace people, he stood on a chair and got started on the wall, beginning:

‘with a swish of line that immediately became a real face, but had a devil’s horns, closed eyes and a shut little mouth…..He shook his head, pounced to the wall and turned the horns into a laurel wreath, opened the devil’s eyes and widened his mouth until he looked like an anxious god.

As the master got stuck into a second figure, a guest piped up:

‘What’s that got to do with peace.’ !!!  

So much for the greatest artist of his age.  Instead of crowning the twerp with a large pot of paint, Picasso didn’t complain and added wings to turn the figures into angels.

The mural was saved when the house was demolished, and is his only important work done in Britain.

Sayle goes on to say of the peace movement, his parents and their communist comrades, ‘it was clear to me as a child, that the real purpose of the ‘peace’ movement was not really to ban war. They had no problem with war. They just wanted communist countries to win them.’

Well he was a child, you’d have to be grown-up not to see that.

history
Gibbon’s career exhibited an unusual perfection of both life and work. The years of intellectual maturity had been devoted to the work, and the work had filled the years of maturity. The Decline and Fall was a massive achievement, a triumphant example of a project of the first magnitude identified, defined and completed by the unaided efforts of its historian.

Gibbon did not then go on to fritter away his energies in opuscula. After 1788, he “never contemplated another major work”, as Trevor-Roper often pointed out. Gibbon had brought about “a radical reinterpretation of the process of European history” and with that, having solved “the great historical problem of his time”, he stopped

Well might Trevor-Roper wryly agree that Gibbon had drawn a high prize in the lottery of life. He had been a supremely gifted historian whose powers were at their peak when history, of all the intellectual disciplines, had the most important work to do.
                                                                                                                                                         david womersley  may 2010

 
a cleaner remembers:

‘I once worked for a rich housewife in Hampstead who made me disinfect the fridge three times a week. One day she ran in crying in hysterics that there was a ‘disaster’ in the garden.  It turned out to be a light sprinkling of leaves on the pathway, I told her ‘it was autumn’,  we parted soon after.

Then it was Saudi Arabians in smart houses. A man or men always managed to appear when the house was meant to be empty. They were mostly under the impression that I  was meant not only to make their beds but to lie in them too. So there were endless chasings round gold-trimmed onyx coffee tables all summer long.

hospitals
James Thurber liked crosswords, when in hospital he asked a nurse:

‘What seven-letter word has three “u”s in it ?

She considered and replied:

‘I don’t know but it must be unusual.’

While John Barrymore, the greatest actor of his generation, was also in hospital, in none to fine fettle. A young nurse approached his bed to see if the great man was still breathing, he turned his head slowly toward her, winked and said:

`OK, hop in !’   

sport
Jack Warner, the Trinidadian vice-president of FIFA, the organisation which controls world football.  Warner, a former Port of Spain schoolteacher, is a hugely controversial figure who is believed to have accumulated a £30 million fortune through international football. He has even been reprimanded by his fellow FIFA executive members for the way he and his son handled the sale of tickets for the last World Cup.

travel
package holiday hell – these hotels are for a whole race of people who are decent, hard working and responsible, but are somehow outside the pale of civilisation.

Nothing was sadder or more depressing than to see then them queuing at the buffet for the worst food I’ve seen outside a prison. In they shunted and out they went, like zoo animals, waiting patiently to be fed. There was no contact with any human being, everything was self-service.
                                                                                                                                                                                               steven berkoff

European hoteliers think British tourists are the messiest, most drunken, most complaining of any foreign visitors; “a disgrace and in such an ostentatious, couldn’t-give-a-toss way. The drunkenness and flagrant disregard of decency in the main streets of Mediterranean resorts; fathers bellowing running interdictions at the every move of their inventively named children. ‘Give it back, Heligan ! Not now, Dandelion !”

places
Taki in New York -

One other thing I’ve noticed is the total absence of children. One never sees kids doing what kids used to do in my time. Things like playing marbles, or hopscotch, stickball or even throwing a ball around. TV and computers have moved the kiddies indoors, hence the age-old bonds of childhood have gone the ways of good manners.

There’s no more fighting – as in the time-honoured ritual of wrestling a bully to the ground, or punching him on the nose. Uptown, the black and Hispanic kids still do it, but they settle disputes with either guns or knives. Midtown, affluent white children stay glued to their electronic devices, laughter, teasing and spontaneous play utterly vanished.

 
writing
‘Scoop’ is quite simply perfection; the lethal farce that is Africa, arms dealing, the press, love and every sin under the sun: prescient, sublimely ludicrous from the greatest English comic novelist of the last century.

Just the names of the journalists – Shumble, Whelper and Pigge; Pappenhacker of the Twopence; the Excelsior Movie-Sound News of America; the fabulous Wenlock Jakes, syndicated all over America and on a thousand dollars a week.

And ricochetting between them all, the endlessly clueless William Boot for the Beast; on meeting Corker of the news agency, Universal News, he asks:

 ‘And what please is a news agency ?’

to be told sadly, he has a lot to learn about journalism. Corker then sums it up for the poor sap:

“Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.”

apart from the facts which are usually wrong, all that’s left to write is ‘colour’:

“which is just a lot of bull’s-eyes about nothing, easy to write and easy to read.”

And that’s all you, William or anyone else needs to know about journalism.

Cuisine banquière

In ‘An Englishman Abroad’, Corale Browne is on tour taking Shakespeare to the comrades in Moscow. Guy Burgess, traitor and talker of rare standing comes to her dressing room after a performance; after being sick in her basin and before stealing her soap, he invites her to his flat. She eventually manages to find it, a dump of quite exceptional squalor, his reward for having betrayed his country. Not remotely abashed by the ghastly place, he charms her with his wit and erudition till she eventually tells him:

“Outside Shakespeare, the word treason to me means nothing – only you pissed in our soup, and we drank it.

That probably adds my name to the list of all the other fools you’ve conned. But you’re not conning me, darling. Pipe isn’t fooling pussy.” 

So from actors and spies to banking. 

Today, it doesn’t matter which one it is, though Royal Bank of Scotland wouldn’t be far wide of the mark. Nor that the only reason it still exists is due to £45.5bn of your money.  Forget all that, they have.

So it is comforting to know that RBS which last year paid out £1.3bn in bonuses, is doubling the salaries of thousands of its 16,800 investment bankers and raising the pay of hundreds more. 

Managing directors on about £150,000, will smile their pay up to £275,000-£300,000 a year.

Directors’ salaries will increase just a fraction from £100,000 to £180,000-£200,000.

“Sir Philip Hampton, chairman, conceded that bankers’ salaries were “dramatically high” but repeatedly stressed RBS was constrained by what competitors were prepared to offer.”

And there’s plenty more of the same – ‘to ensure they continue to retain and attract key staff….part-prisoner of the market….compelled by the competition.’ and all the rest of it. 

A few weeks later came:

“RBS awards nine directors £17.8m…”

Of this ‘challenging turnaround plan’, Sir Philip said, among other things  ‘shareholders will benefit substantially if it succeeds.’  There’s something moving in the implication that it is ‘others’ who will do well, not the people who are getting trunk-loads of wonga, not them, but ‘others’.

The last line of the piece is:

‘John Hourican, head of the investment bank, received the smallest award, of £787,730.’

Mull on that word, ‘smallest’, say £787,730 out loud to yourself before you turn out the bedside light. Picture the encounter: 

Sorry John, got some bad news for you.

Really ?

Yes, we can only get you £787,730.

John (aghast) You’re not serious ?

Yes, I’m afraid so. Times are bad and ….etc  etc.

 
Economic crisis; a hundred thousand pound raise here, a million bonus there; it’s all very Greek.

‘Because you are worth it.’ is the line some think was the starting pistol to the spending dementia. ‘Because you are irreplaceable.’  has a similar ring.

In a couple of decades of visiting banks all over the world and meeting a lot of bankers; somehow the word ‘irreplaceable’ never sprang to mind. From Santiago to Almaty, Moscow to Cape Town, Abu Dhabi to Madrid, Oslo to Belgrade to Athens and most of the places in between, not once did a large bubble emerge above the head of the director, chairman, head of international or treasury, saying ‘what an irreplaceable person this is.’

There again, maybe one needs to look harder.

Picture a driving instructor found hog-whimpering drunk in the ditch a year ago, and now back on the job, saying the cost of his lessons have quadrupled.

Bearing in mind, that RBS is a run-of-the-mill highstreet bank, don’t even think what ‘haute banquier cuisine’ as produced by the specialists like Goldman Sachs are concoting in their state-of-the-art kitchen.  Open their cupboard of condiments and read the labels – anthrax, nuclear waste and God knows what else – to give that special flavour. Get out of the restaurant – fast.

To be duped once – shame on them, to be duped twice – shame on you.

So the menu stands. The indispensables micturate away while the rest spoon it down.

As for Pipe fooling pussy ? Well you tell me.

Bon appetit. 

P.S.
For those who object to the metaphor, find it vulgar; to augment any offense caused or perceived, here is that impeccable observer of la condition humaine – the outlaw Josey Wales

Senator:

And Fletcher, there’s an old saying: To the victors belong the spoils.

Fletcher:

There’s another old saying, Senator: Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining.