“Today, Blaenavon relaunches itself as Booktown Blaenavon. Nine new bookshops will open simultaneously, specialising in subjects from cookery to psychic healing, six more shops are in the pipeline, and the Castle Inn has put up a shelf of 50p books. The small town in South Wales launches its greatest experiment since 1787, when three businessmen leased seven square miles of rough, heathery land to build an ironworks equipped with dazzlingly modern steam technology.”
Tag: 06.28.03
Chabrier The Hedonist
“Emmanuel Chabrier wanted to write operas so lewd, people would start to ‘make babies in the stalls’.” Where other composers wrote music full of the joy of God, or the joy of great knowledge, Chabrier wrote about the pure, unadulterated fun of being human. “His party piece was to sing the front page of that day’s newspaper, dramatising the events depicted – a street accident, the fall of the Bourse – with appropriate extra-musical effects.” But beyond all the bluster and hedonist revelry was a serious artist whose works attracted the admiration of composers as distinguished as Debussy and Ravel.
True Grit – Audiences Seek Out Documentaries
“It’s an easy fact to overlook; with low budgets, modest publicity and limited distribution, documentaries remain the widely ignored stepchildren of the film business. Yet while Hollywood studio films dominate our multiplex screens, cinemagoers are increasingly seeking out documentaries, on the correct assumption that they offer something more substantial.”
Oh Canada – Knock It Off!
“Normally, the job of any Canadian arts journalist is to provide readers with an endless chorus of hurrahs, to be a booster, a fan, a tireless glee-clubber for all things Canuck.” But really – this relentless pushing of all artists Canadian is at best tiresome, and at worst… Enough with the Diana Krall and Celine Dion soundtracks playing endlessly through all our public spaces…
Old Style Historian
Kenneth Clark would have been 100 this year. “Clark was the incarnation of a deeply outmoded type: the white upper-class worthy. He is best remembered for his 1969 television series, Civilisation, about the history of Western European culture, an inscrutable, perfectly turned-out English gentleman lecturing on high culture and its values to the masses. By the mid-1970s, his brand of art history was already being criticised for being too elitist, an old-fashioned upper-class amateur connoisseurship that was being superseded by ways of looking at art that emphasised society and politics. By the 1980s, when he died, his series had come to seem the epitome of what some now call heritage TV.”
Rap With Andy And Will (Or Not)
Britain’s poet laureate Andrew Motion last weeke wrote some rap for Prince William’s birthday. What a mistake. “The poet laureate going hip-hop is like Mel C going punk – except without quite so many flying bottles. Even so, within hours of the rap being published, an online petition was launched demanding, with a rather sinister turn of phrase, that Motion ‘be removed’. The factor which will prevent MC Motion being sprayed in 20ft letters across the Buck House gates is not that he attempted the rap, but that it is so toe-curlingly off-the-mark, that instead of putting William – and the royal family – in some sort of modern context, it’s more like a trap door beneath William on the gallows of cool, with Motion being forced to yank the lever.”
Let Me Introduce You To Music
This trend of classical musicians speaking to their audiences before performing a piece of music is becoming very popular. But why? Why is it necessary to introduce the music? “Perhaps this thirst for the human voice has been created by television and radio. We are so used to being talked at, bombarded with information, never left in silence for a moment, that it has become unthinkable for a performer to need and use silence. Nobody ever plays on TV without first being talked about, or talked to, or talking themselves. The space between us and the performer always has to be filled.”
Write Canadian (Whatever That Means)
“Of all the elements of Canadian culture, literature may be the most definitive. Canadians are voracious readers of their own writers – from the founding ‘CanLit’ boom featuring Margaret Atwood and Mordecai Richler to, more recently, Barbara Gowdy, Rohinton Mistry and Yann Martel – and Canadian writing tops bestseller lists and wins awards internationally. How is the next generation carrying on this legacy and how is their work affected by such factors as Canada’s racial diversity, media saturation and changing values?”
ALA: A Controversy Over Cuban Colleagues
The American Library Association has become embroiled in a controversy over small independent libraries in Cuba. “Small lending libraries run out of people’s homes, they circulate materials that the librarians say are banned by the government. To some members, the [American Library] association has been ignoring the repression of their colleagues and the cause of intellectual freedom; to others, a small group has been trying to hijack the organization to pursue an anti-Castro agenda.”