The movie ‘The Swimmer’ was released in 1968, its one of my favourite movies: beautifully strange, with an undercurrent of darkness (excuse the pun) and bleak existential profundity.
The film opens with ‘Ned’ (Burt Lancaster) jogging in swimming trunks through a sparkling autumnal woodland in the bright early morning sunshine.
Ned looks tanned, healthy and happy as he drops into a friend’s backyard pool and announces to the folks sitting there that he’s about to embark on a little personal odyssey: he’s going to swim across the county in a wild loop using the pools of old friends and acquaintances and return back home again.
As the day wears on, Ned is confronted with the various aspects of his past and present as an affluent Connecticut Advertising executive, living in the picturesque suburbs with his perfect family and the party set clique.
In one meeting he attempts to seduce a former babysitter of his daughters when she confesses she had a crush on him when younger. But this ends in embarrassment and rejection for Ned, as does confrontations with ex-lovers and former close friends.
Something is wrong.
Ned’s glittering smile, gushing bonhomie and boastful remarks about his beautiful wife and daughters, are increasingly met with cool indifference, sarcasm, and finally, outright anger.
At a public pool Ned is confronted by angry shopkeepers and various creditors he owes money to for unpaid grocery bills and so on.
The summery, smiling façade begins to crack at this point, ‘the swimmer’ is not welcome and his attempts at joviality are interpreted as waffle and evasiveness.
In the final scene, Ned arrives home at last after his strange Homeric journey.
His ‘home’ is of course locked and empty, a storm is brewing as darkness begins to fall.
The swimmer breaks down sobbing on the porch.
The movie (originally adapted from a John Cheever short story) creates a fantastic contrast between the affluent, comfortable, suburban culture of cocktails and swimming pools, and the silent but ever present neurosis that accompanies it; the silent scream of boredom, insecurity, shallowness and existential confusion and loss.
Lancaster’s character is a ghost, he’s already dead to most of his so called ‘friends’. Ned has committed the ultimate sin…he can’t keep up appearances anymore, he’s fallen on hard times. A corpse that remains unburied, ugly and rotting under a cloudless azure sky.
The old life has gone, and Ned’s personal odyssey is like a final haunting, a brief funereal passage of the old self.
The movie is literally ‘swimming’ with symbolism and metaphor.
It’s ‘day-in-the-life’ narrative can be compared to Joyce’s Ulysses - Ned is Leopold Bloom of course.
Ned is always waving not drowning, desperate to stay afloat, to keep up appearances, to convince himself and others that its all okay, everything is beautiful and perfect in the blazing sunshine and glittering waters of his (and their) little world.
Its almost like he’s trying to purify himself too, he feels ‘unclean’ of low caste: he’s attempting to wash away the stains and stigmata of his shame in front of his friends, pool by baptismal pool.
The Swimmer is everyman and every woman, a superb allegory for a single human life.
We’re all just trying to stay afloat against the tides and hidden currents of life…and grinning like idiots while we’re doing it.
Apologies for cheesy voice-over on this trailer!)
Saturday 19 June 2010
Thursday 17 June 2010
Billy Childish
As I've written about before, I'm a bit of a Charles Bukowski fan. I love Buks blue-collar rage against the machine in all its elemental no-frills authenticity.
The British 'art terrorist' Billy Childish has adopted the classic Bukowski motifs in his poetry, novels, music and paintings. Indeed he has been labeled the 'British Bukowski', and unashamedly acknowledges the debt owed to his dead white American hero.
Childish's biographical account of his childhood 'My Fault' reads like an Alf Garnett version of Buk's 'Ham on Rye'. Its got the childhood Dyslexia, dermatological eruptions, alienation, loneliness and silent rage.
And of course, overshadowing and shaping all this, is the monstrous but absurd Father character, ranting and raving in Basil fawlty style impotence and alcoholic incomprehension at poor little Billy - the runt of the family.
The shear amount of cold, hard, undiluted vitriol that Childish heaps on his father throughout his biography makes for very uncomfortable reading. His mother and older brother get their fair share too, as does any woman who crosses his path: he describes his notorious 'relationship' with Tracy Emin in minute detail - anal sex, her 'obvious' stupidity and taking the piss out of her cleft palette seemed to be the most memorable highlights.
Childish almost tries to 'out-Bukowski' Bukowski in the depths of loathing and self-pity he's prepared to to sink to in making his point. The point being - he's an heroic victim in a cynical world. He's a victim’s victim...if that makes sense. I guess the clue was in the title of his autobiography: 'My Fault'.
Childish is an interesting character, a notorious art world outsider (which makes him very much an insider in a strange way) and his various projects, paintings, music and writings are always worth a look.
I suppose the peculiar English eccentricity mixed with the monochrome 50’s working class grittiness is the ‘Billy Childish’ brand, and something he is very obviously aware of in the way he ‘markets’ himself.
But I always like to take inspiration from lots of different sources, and you don’t have to buy into the whole caboodle at the end of the day.
I’m a bit post-modern like that, I take a bit of what I fancy and patch it together. If it works it works, if not just try again.
Saturday 12 June 2010
The Studio
As you can see from the pics, my little artistic environment is rather compact, cluttered, and very good for focusing concentration on the job/painting in hand.
Indeed, it is almost impossible to swing an undernourished gerbil around in - never mind a big lumbering moggy.
But then again, why anyone would make that specific exercise a universal criteria for habitability has always baffled me: why not a Yorkshire terrier or an aardvark? Lets have a bit of imagination please!
I fashioned the ‘easel’ out of an old chest of bedroom draws and a section of hardboard I cut out of the back of an ancient wardrobe many moons ago. The shelving was also ‘carpentered’ by Moi with the aid of the great God Black and Decker (I’m particularly proud of the Baroque curves).
I can tell you’re speechless with admiration…
Its Ad hoc, but hey it works and is in the make-do and mend spirit that I try to adhere to as much as possible (not always that successfully).
This little art space has been a veritable hothouse of creativity over the years…and a veritable greenhouse in high summer. Indeed, all I required was clump of birch twigs, a towel and a couple of stones and I could have rented the place out as bloody sauna.
Yay, on many a long enchanted summer evening did I toil in my underpants, my nostrils assailed by the pungent incense of linseed oil and white spirit; like Picasso conjuring sex and death in the Med I was manifesting something similar in the West Midlands - something often more disturbing and terrifying to the neighbours…if they caught a glimpse of me half-naked, sweaty and paint splattered in the Wagnerian twilight.
Lord of the Flies springs to mind at this point.
In the winter of course, its like Christmas in Vladivostock. Well, more like an igloo in Alaska really. This is the time in my annual creative cycle when I dress like an Inuit and paint like an idiot.
The central heating doesn’t extend to my little bunker so I have to wrap-up in about 4 layers of clothes.
This of course ‘retards’ my physical mobility and sometimes my mental agility too.
I escape to the warmth and safety of the living room every twenty minutes or so for a ciggy and a brew, and then with a sigh and a sad heart, I stagger back into that separate weather system like Edmund Hilary going for a Jimmy Riddle outside his tent.
Yeah, like I’m a serious artist, I mean I suffer man!
“That which does not kill me makes me stronger”.
Right on Freddy N, I’m beyond good and evil on nights like those…freezing cold, delirious and insensible: a prisoner of the artistic Will, dragging me through the ragged mountains of my human, all too human talent.
Never mind, to be spellbound and ravaged by the muse isn’t all-bad, it keeps me sane more often than not regardless of what I produce.
Anyway, I have a dream that my studio and its contents will, after my demise (a long, long time in the future), be removed wholesale and reconstructed exactly as they appear in the pic, in the MOMA in New York, or maybe Tate Modern would be okay really I suppose…at a push.
Excuse me, I’m delirious again and its not even January yet.
Heat exhaustion? Okay I’ll stop now.
Tuesday 8 June 2010
Mythologies: A rose by any other name...
I’m currently re-reading Umberto Eco’s ‘Name of the Rose,’ famous for its Gothic overtones: the found manuscript, crumbling medieval Castle/monastery, endless punning and metaphor and a labyrinthine plot. The book was written in the early 80’s and is now something of a classic of ‘postmodern literature’. It was made into a successful Hollywood film - which doesn’t even come close to the intricacies of the book for obvious reasons.
Eco was using the classic ‘Gothic’ literary device in The Name of the Rose as an armature to hang all his little investigations into the nature of language, meaning, symbology, truth and error upon.
He’s a Semiotician – he studies the cultural history and nature of language and image as signs in two parts, e.g. ‘Margaret Thatcher’ – Denotative meaning: Long serving British female Prime Minister, Connotative meaning, depending on time and culture: Evil, selfish, destructive cow. (Okay, that was a bit of a generalization and a sly dig, but you hopefully get what I mean).
Connotation is the real engine of communication in each era or epoch - it even has its own subcultures in technical terminology and slang too of course. I know this is old news to a degree, but after reading Eco and others, I suddenly became aware of how slippery and strange our everyday communication is on every level – often outside of conscious awareness too.
For semioticians, words, images and everyday objects are never fixed and merely denotative, but are always traitorous, fickle and elusive, reassigned generalized symbolic roles by chance, accident and association.
The French writer Roland Barthes did a wonderful book of essays on the minutiae of signs called ‘Mythologies’ back in the late 50’s.
The title was making a statement about the construction of modern myths that occur within the arts, media and culture in general at particular moments of history, and how they then become embedded (at least for a while) as real and somehow unassailable transcendent truth. But all they really are of course, is time and culture dependent myths.
Barthes ‘deconstructed’ everything, from the way Roman’s had their haircut in movies, toys, the imperialism of plastic, detergent powder packaging, compared ’The New Citroen’ to a Gothic cathedral, and digressed on the real significance of Steak and Chips.
He used the example of professional wrestling to illustrate a general point as to how the suspension of disbelief (the wrestlers are REALLY trying to hurt each other)can be applied to a deeper level of fabrication and artifice on the everyday level of human discourse.
For Barthes, there is nothing 'essential' or natural about human nature, we are all just storytellers at the end of the day.
Eco prefers bigger themes, broader canvasses. He was trained as a medieval scholar and has that hermetic/alchemical Renaissance man approach to his narratives and varied subject matter. The macrocosm within the microcosm – everything is linked in a chain of associations, allusions, symbols and metaphor.
Language and history for Eco like the labyrinth of the great library in his novel, is full of trap doors, sliding panels and distorting mirrors, nothing is what it appears to be. The busy rows of copyists in the great hall of the monastery, transcribing the sacred texts – our fragile link to the past – are subject to the same psychological caprices, hidden agenda’s, cultural restraints, bad days and Friday afternoon feelings as we are today.
It is the job of William of Baskerville (a nod to Sherlock Holmes) to find a platform for reason to grip onto – at least for a while, until that little ‘truth regime’, and he himself become just another text to be deciphered by later scholars.
In a later work ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, Eco does a more sophisticate imagining of a Da Vinci code style tale (pre Dan Brown). An Italian publishing house is looking to cash in on the boom in medieval/Knights Templar/New age/Hermetic literature, so researchers are sent out to begin weaving together fact and fiction from a vast plethora of diverse sources.
Soon, various esoteric and encyclopaedic myths and facts are constructed into something like a terrifyingly real story – The Illuminati strike again!
If any story is reinforced by enough relatively self-consistent facts and is well written and enough people believe it – then it becomes truth. So people begin to die in the ‘real’ world of Eco’s tale. The gothic fairytale/conspiracy theory becomes real.
But isn’t all our knowledge a conspiracy theory? Culture, time, context dependent?
A form of narrative literary persuasion that appears to hold together for short periods of history? (Psychoanalysis is a good example).
We now have so much knowledge available to us via the internet we can weave the most outrageous stories that are ‘literally’ imaginable – just look at You-Tube and the Blogosphere.
There are so many competing stories, so many possible interpretations, so many facts, that we often haven’t the time or the inclination to find genuine truths (unless its something directly pertaining to our safety or livelihood).
It’s just whatever seems to work at the moment. All the authors have ‘died’ and we are just left swimming in myths and facts.
How will some blogs and homemade You-Tube clips be interpreted in decades to come? Maybe they will be embedded into some Illuminati conspiracy that will initiate Armageddon, or will be studied and copied by some future scribe/psychologist as an early example of 21’st century digital hallucinatory syndrome.
I know, I’m getting into Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Hype-Real’ territory here: ‘Did the Gulf War really happen?’ kinda thing.
The more literate we become, the more ‘stuff’ we know, the more we risk believing anything.
Maybe the Taoist’s and even Samuel Beckett have the best answer – less is more.
Eco was using the classic ‘Gothic’ literary device in The Name of the Rose as an armature to hang all his little investigations into the nature of language, meaning, symbology, truth and error upon.
He’s a Semiotician – he studies the cultural history and nature of language and image as signs in two parts, e.g. ‘Margaret Thatcher’ – Denotative meaning: Long serving British female Prime Minister, Connotative meaning, depending on time and culture: Evil, selfish, destructive cow. (Okay, that was a bit of a generalization and a sly dig, but you hopefully get what I mean).
Connotation is the real engine of communication in each era or epoch - it even has its own subcultures in technical terminology and slang too of course. I know this is old news to a degree, but after reading Eco and others, I suddenly became aware of how slippery and strange our everyday communication is on every level – often outside of conscious awareness too.
For semioticians, words, images and everyday objects are never fixed and merely denotative, but are always traitorous, fickle and elusive, reassigned generalized symbolic roles by chance, accident and association.
The French writer Roland Barthes did a wonderful book of essays on the minutiae of signs called ‘Mythologies’ back in the late 50’s.
The title was making a statement about the construction of modern myths that occur within the arts, media and culture in general at particular moments of history, and how they then become embedded (at least for a while) as real and somehow unassailable transcendent truth. But all they really are of course, is time and culture dependent myths.
Barthes ‘deconstructed’ everything, from the way Roman’s had their haircut in movies, toys, the imperialism of plastic, detergent powder packaging, compared ’The New Citroen’ to a Gothic cathedral, and digressed on the real significance of Steak and Chips.
He used the example of professional wrestling to illustrate a general point as to how the suspension of disbelief (the wrestlers are REALLY trying to hurt each other)can be applied to a deeper level of fabrication and artifice on the everyday level of human discourse.
For Barthes, there is nothing 'essential' or natural about human nature, we are all just storytellers at the end of the day.
Eco prefers bigger themes, broader canvasses. He was trained as a medieval scholar and has that hermetic/alchemical Renaissance man approach to his narratives and varied subject matter. The macrocosm within the microcosm – everything is linked in a chain of associations, allusions, symbols and metaphor.
Language and history for Eco like the labyrinth of the great library in his novel, is full of trap doors, sliding panels and distorting mirrors, nothing is what it appears to be. The busy rows of copyists in the great hall of the monastery, transcribing the sacred texts – our fragile link to the past – are subject to the same psychological caprices, hidden agenda’s, cultural restraints, bad days and Friday afternoon feelings as we are today.
It is the job of William of Baskerville (a nod to Sherlock Holmes) to find a platform for reason to grip onto – at least for a while, until that little ‘truth regime’, and he himself become just another text to be deciphered by later scholars.
In a later work ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’, Eco does a more sophisticate imagining of a Da Vinci code style tale (pre Dan Brown). An Italian publishing house is looking to cash in on the boom in medieval/Knights Templar/New age/Hermetic literature, so researchers are sent out to begin weaving together fact and fiction from a vast plethora of diverse sources.
Soon, various esoteric and encyclopaedic myths and facts are constructed into something like a terrifyingly real story – The Illuminati strike again!
If any story is reinforced by enough relatively self-consistent facts and is well written and enough people believe it – then it becomes truth. So people begin to die in the ‘real’ world of Eco’s tale. The gothic fairytale/conspiracy theory becomes real.
But isn’t all our knowledge a conspiracy theory? Culture, time, context dependent?
A form of narrative literary persuasion that appears to hold together for short periods of history? (Psychoanalysis is a good example).
We now have so much knowledge available to us via the internet we can weave the most outrageous stories that are ‘literally’ imaginable – just look at You-Tube and the Blogosphere.
There are so many competing stories, so many possible interpretations, so many facts, that we often haven’t the time or the inclination to find genuine truths (unless its something directly pertaining to our safety or livelihood).
It’s just whatever seems to work at the moment. All the authors have ‘died’ and we are just left swimming in myths and facts.
How will some blogs and homemade You-Tube clips be interpreted in decades to come? Maybe they will be embedded into some Illuminati conspiracy that will initiate Armageddon, or will be studied and copied by some future scribe/psychologist as an early example of 21’st century digital hallucinatory syndrome.
I know, I’m getting into Jean Baudrillard’s ‘Hype-Real’ territory here: ‘Did the Gulf War really happen?’ kinda thing.
The more literate we become, the more ‘stuff’ we know, the more we risk believing anything.
Maybe the Taoist’s and even Samuel Beckett have the best answer – less is more.
Saturday 5 June 2010
Toasted whippets of the world unite!
Well, here it is again eh (almost).
Doesn’t seem like two minutes since that great carnival of colour, sweat and masochism was fondling the senses of all true sports lovers everywhere.
The salivating crowds, the pride and the passion, the demon’s and the saints, the tales of bravery and cowardice, the mythologies passed down from father to son in hushed whispers.
And those names, yes the names…Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Lemond, Indurain, and of course, Lance Armstrong.
Tour De France champions one and all.
Of course I wasn’t talking about the Soccer World Cup, that’s a multi-media mass circle jerk for pussies.
Give me a Tour cyclist, a boxer or even a rugby player as a role model every time over some, thick, soft, bimbo-shagging narcissistic dullard who collapses in agony at the sound of a 5-year old unscrewing his Vimto at 50 yards.
I mean football is like tennis with a shed-load more jingoism and a bigger ball.
(Plus the charisma bypasses are not nearly as evident.)
Yeah baby, give me the dance of the two-wheeled ‘toasted whippets’ through the mountains and molehills of the Gallic countryside in July, above the static banal nationalism of that slowly dying feverish pitch any day.
I first became infected by the Tour bug back in the ‘70’s, when as a mere unsuspecting waif, I was exposed to wobbly colour highlights of the occasional stage on ITV’s World of Sport programme.
Like a benevolent but slightly dodgy ex-spitfire pilot-mad uncle, Dickie Davis’ grinning face would be the precursor to the multi-coloured man/organism of the peloton, as it snaked and whipped through the very quaint villages and towns of France.
(I found out many years later that my sister had a crush on Dickie – what a sick perv!)
The mountain stages were the best though, and still are of course.
The race was decelerated by altitude and incline, the riders strung out like refugees from a fire-stormed city or characters from a Beckett play: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.
As they wound up the endless switchbacks on the volcanic steppes of Mount Ventoux, or were buzzed by marshals and photographers on motorbikes on Alpe D’Huez, it was an opportunity for us in our armchairs to witness the gaunt faced suffering and surreal loneliness and isolation of the Tour cyclist in all its cinematic gore and glory.
Never has the phrase ‘you can be lonely in a crowd’ been so well illustrated as in those images (both moving and still) of the sun baked agony of climbing a mountain on a bicycle while thousands of people scream in your face, exhaust fumes sting your throat, and everywhere you look there’s a camera lens ready to capture your always imminent, physical and psychological breakdown.
That’s stress.
These people really are gladiators.
But of course, the sight of sweaty cyclists hammering through Birmingham on a wet Tuesday afternoon, or even a sunny Lake District doesn’t have the same kudos and romance as the Romanesque meets medieval sights and settlements of France.
The signposts and shop fronts, the advertising slogans and riders names, all written in this alien but seductive language.
Another world - familiar, but slightly off kilter, angular…interesting.
The Tour de France is a moveable feast of course, that’s its attraction for so many people I think. Yes there are other tours – the Italian Giro, the Spanish Vuelta etc – but the original gallic flavoured banquet, with its incredibly diverse sauces and seasonings, landscapes and architectural features from all those regions and departments, make it endlessly fascinating and dynamic – both for spectator and rider.
(Although I doubt if most riders have time to appreciate the scenery during the race.)
The Tour has something of the medieval carnival about it, the gypsy caravan, the mystery play and the renaissance masque all rolled into one.
It’s a drama with real life and death scenes on a constantly moving stage, packed with tall tales and surreal moments.
It is as much about the spectators and places as it is about the race itself: the two form a beautiful hybrid, a celebration of the human condition in both its tragic and comic aspects.
I was something of a keen cyclist myself in my twenties, and even joined a club for about 5 years and spent seemingly endless Tuesday and Thursday evenings battling up dual carriageways in a headwind.
I was a Time trial rider: ten or twenty five miles against the clock.
The French call it ’The Race of Truth’, and unlike road racing where you can hide behind someone’s wheel or get encouragement from a team mate (tactics), the race against the clock is lonely and very, very hard: biggest gear, head down and push!
These experiences made me appreciate (in my small way) what it must be like for the guy struggling up a mountain pass on his own, being chased down by the hounds of the peloton when on a lone break, or having the embarrassment of failure: finishing poorly or last - ‘The Lantern Rouge’ as they call the last rider to finish in the Tour.
Now I cycle more for pleasure than the hope of getting a wild card entry to the great Velo Odyssey.
I’ve actually gone full circle, I’m the armchair enthusiast once again, lost in boyish admiration for the heroic exploits of people with foreign names in a foreign land.
But no silver streaked Dickie Davis this time, just media slickness through and through. But hey, the coverage is loads better, you can spend weeks lost in a timeless…okay, better not go there eh.
I’ll tell of my personal competitive cycling adventures at another time – I’m still experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder from that last ‘25’ in ‘97 I think.
Anyway, sod the World Cup, get on your bike!
Doesn’t seem like two minutes since that great carnival of colour, sweat and masochism was fondling the senses of all true sports lovers everywhere.
The salivating crowds, the pride and the passion, the demon’s and the saints, the tales of bravery and cowardice, the mythologies passed down from father to son in hushed whispers.
And those names, yes the names…Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Lemond, Indurain, and of course, Lance Armstrong.
Tour De France champions one and all.
Of course I wasn’t talking about the Soccer World Cup, that’s a multi-media mass circle jerk for pussies.
Give me a Tour cyclist, a boxer or even a rugby player as a role model every time over some, thick, soft, bimbo-shagging narcissistic dullard who collapses in agony at the sound of a 5-year old unscrewing his Vimto at 50 yards.
I mean football is like tennis with a shed-load more jingoism and a bigger ball.
(Plus the charisma bypasses are not nearly as evident.)
Yeah baby, give me the dance of the two-wheeled ‘toasted whippets’ through the mountains and molehills of the Gallic countryside in July, above the static banal nationalism of that slowly dying feverish pitch any day.
I first became infected by the Tour bug back in the ‘70’s, when as a mere unsuspecting waif, I was exposed to wobbly colour highlights of the occasional stage on ITV’s World of Sport programme.
Like a benevolent but slightly dodgy ex-spitfire pilot-mad uncle, Dickie Davis’ grinning face would be the precursor to the multi-coloured man/organism of the peloton, as it snaked and whipped through the very quaint villages and towns of France.
(I found out many years later that my sister had a crush on Dickie – what a sick perv!)
The mountain stages were the best though, and still are of course.
The race was decelerated by altitude and incline, the riders strung out like refugees from a fire-stormed city or characters from a Beckett play: ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’.
As they wound up the endless switchbacks on the volcanic steppes of Mount Ventoux, or were buzzed by marshals and photographers on motorbikes on Alpe D’Huez, it was an opportunity for us in our armchairs to witness the gaunt faced suffering and surreal loneliness and isolation of the Tour cyclist in all its cinematic gore and glory.
Never has the phrase ‘you can be lonely in a crowd’ been so well illustrated as in those images (both moving and still) of the sun baked agony of climbing a mountain on a bicycle while thousands of people scream in your face, exhaust fumes sting your throat, and everywhere you look there’s a camera lens ready to capture your always imminent, physical and psychological breakdown.
That’s stress.
These people really are gladiators.
But of course, the sight of sweaty cyclists hammering through Birmingham on a wet Tuesday afternoon, or even a sunny Lake District doesn’t have the same kudos and romance as the Romanesque meets medieval sights and settlements of France.
The signposts and shop fronts, the advertising slogans and riders names, all written in this alien but seductive language.
Another world - familiar, but slightly off kilter, angular…interesting.
The Tour de France is a moveable feast of course, that’s its attraction for so many people I think. Yes there are other tours – the Italian Giro, the Spanish Vuelta etc – but the original gallic flavoured banquet, with its incredibly diverse sauces and seasonings, landscapes and architectural features from all those regions and departments, make it endlessly fascinating and dynamic – both for spectator and rider.
(Although I doubt if most riders have time to appreciate the scenery during the race.)
The Tour has something of the medieval carnival about it, the gypsy caravan, the mystery play and the renaissance masque all rolled into one.
It’s a drama with real life and death scenes on a constantly moving stage, packed with tall tales and surreal moments.
It is as much about the spectators and places as it is about the race itself: the two form a beautiful hybrid, a celebration of the human condition in both its tragic and comic aspects.
I was something of a keen cyclist myself in my twenties, and even joined a club for about 5 years and spent seemingly endless Tuesday and Thursday evenings battling up dual carriageways in a headwind.
I was a Time trial rider: ten or twenty five miles against the clock.
The French call it ’The Race of Truth’, and unlike road racing where you can hide behind someone’s wheel or get encouragement from a team mate (tactics), the race against the clock is lonely and very, very hard: biggest gear, head down and push!
These experiences made me appreciate (in my small way) what it must be like for the guy struggling up a mountain pass on his own, being chased down by the hounds of the peloton when on a lone break, or having the embarrassment of failure: finishing poorly or last - ‘The Lantern Rouge’ as they call the last rider to finish in the Tour.
Now I cycle more for pleasure than the hope of getting a wild card entry to the great Velo Odyssey.
I’ve actually gone full circle, I’m the armchair enthusiast once again, lost in boyish admiration for the heroic exploits of people with foreign names in a foreign land.
But no silver streaked Dickie Davis this time, just media slickness through and through. But hey, the coverage is loads better, you can spend weeks lost in a timeless…okay, better not go there eh.
I’ll tell of my personal competitive cycling adventures at another time – I’m still experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder from that last ‘25’ in ‘97 I think.
Anyway, sod the World Cup, get on your bike!
Friday 4 June 2010
Random quotes #1 Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera once observed (in his inimitable way) that we live in the age of ‘Totalitarian kitsch’:
“When I say ‘totalitarian’, what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree ‘be fruitful and multiply’”.
Kundera was applying this in a general sense, he was critiquing the Soviet oppression of his Hungarian homeland and the communist ideal, but also the romanticizing of human ‘nature’ and social relationships – cultural and personal.
He provides a slice of everyday kitsch by using the example of being moved by seeing children play on the grass:
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch.”
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 1984.
“When I say ‘totalitarian’, what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree ‘be fruitful and multiply’”.
Kundera was applying this in a general sense, he was critiquing the Soviet oppression of his Hungarian homeland and the communist ideal, but also the romanticizing of human ‘nature’ and social relationships – cultural and personal.
He provides a slice of everyday kitsch by using the example of being moved by seeing children play on the grass:
“Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!
The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!
It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.
The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only on a basis of kitsch.”
From The Unbearable Lightness of Being. 1984.
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