A kiss is just a kiss...(2)

My last post should not be taken to mean I think Milk has no effect at all on its audience. A number of people I know, and who are not gay and who therefore do not know much about Harvey Milk (something which could be said about a number of gay men and women, too), feel the film has been a revelation to them. It's certainly driven home the enormity of the struggle faced by the LGBT community; and it has introduced them to the groundswell of hate and discrimination that taps away at our shoulders.

Here's B Ruby Rich:

I returned to City Hall [one week later], to vote in the election. For Obama, yes, and against Prop 8. We were sure it would go down to defeat. We were wrong. It was instead a cruel reversal of the scene in Milk in which Harvey and his supporters thought the Briggs Initiative had won when really it was they who had scored a massive victory. On 4 November 2008, San Francisco's celebrations had to be called off. Prop 8 had sailed through with enormous support. Gay and lesbian marriage in the state of California was voted down.

In that moment, Milk was edited by history: it's no longer the same film that premiered in October. It has gathered a new layer of sadness, a renewed sense of loss and betrayal, and a fervid new audience. In San Francisco, weekday shows at 10am have been selling out and, at the Castro, lines stretch down the block and around. People need to see this film.

And here's a little gem to counter my own view about van Sant's failure to meld form with content:

Van Sant's decision to mix documentary footage into his drama facilitates the audience's identification with its story as the stuff of history. [. . .] Look back, remember, don't forget, the footage seems to signal to its audience. Not all of this is over - you aren't home free yet.

I really, really do believe that it is a great film. Perhaps this is why I so wanted it to go, erm, all the way..

Read Ruby Rich's full article here.

A kiss is just a kiss..?

It seems team Milk does not think so. This is what some critics have said. I think I concur. I left the film (at the end, of course) feeling oddly vacant. As a gay man watching the biopic of a gay rights icon, this surely should not have been the case. But it was. Why? I think I have a theory (which others share): there wasn't enough gay lovin' in the film. Now this is truly odd because the reason for the film's political focus was just this issue of gay lovin' - the right to love, irrespective of gender. (I mean, this was the main issue, but Harvey Milk's larger campaign fought for all the other civil rights enjoyed by our straight compadres.)

In an interview here, van Sant and the film's screenwriter make strange remarks about when and how the film's first kiss was going to feature. The decision was made in respect of the straight, potentially homophobic audience who would recoil from this scene, but who wanted to see the film itself. You might as well say that a concession has been made to the very people Harvey Milk fought against. So did van Sant and Lance Black suffer from a loss of nerve? Did the unreconstructed, conservative forces of the Hollywood system strong-arm them into 'toning it down'? If so, they gave in, making what should have been a brave attempt at representation look pale against the film's revolutionary subject. In an interview here, van Sant argues with Newsnight's Kirsty Wark that the lack of sex scenes is due to the film's primary exploration of politics. But as I said, how can you dissociate the two in the case of a figure like Harvey Milk? I was rather disappointed with van Sant's response, even more so because of his laissez-faire, aloof demeanour in the interview. It didn't help.

I'm sorry, no matter what you say, the lack of sex in Milk is a glaring omission - evasion, actually - of what would have been reality for all those portrayed. My emptiness is a result of the film's bizarre representation of otherwise actively sexual - and predatory, at the time - gay men, painted in such paradoxically bachelor hues. It's as if I watched a film about gay abstainers. The odd 'allusion' to a blow job and - in a truly evasive moment - a kiss between Milk and, presumably, his first lover - played by James Franco - in bed, during which one character's lips were unlit, was not enough to suggest what was at stake if the fight for gay civil rights had been lost. Which in America it has been, and at the least certainly in decline since Milk's assassination. Milk is a wasted opportunity to merge form with content in its own revolutionary way.

On the bill at Salle Pleyel

If only I had been there! (Another lost magical moment in the history of performance at which I was absent.)

Ex-communication

The row, however, shows no immediate sign of abating. The Nobel peace prize winner and death camp survivor, Elie Wiesel, said that the pope, by lifting the excommunications, had given credence to "the most vulgar aspect of antisemitism".

In an interview with Reuters, Wiesel said: "What does the pope think we feel when he did that?"

Along with his ultimately anti-gay statements before Christmas; his decision to re-introduce that piece of liturgy that speaks of the conversion of Jews; and the present controversy over the Holocaust denier who is being welcomed back into the fold - well, the Pope's proving quite a peaceful negotiator, isn't he?

John Updike 1932-2009

This one is for me. A great writer vacates his earthly lot and a big gaping black hole of reading opens wide.

Tweet-tweet!

Twitter is not bitter.

Flight or fright?

Flight from the Labour Party at the fright of the recession. Laboured (if you'll pardon the pun), I know, but there you have it: the British electorate is weak at the knees, or just plain weak in their judgement. As if the Tories would have done better had they been in office!! The British electorate: no memory. Having said that, though, this is only a poll by a newspaper, so is it really reflective of the state of people's minds?

The judge was a silly oath

I find all the talk about the fluffing of the oath really irritating. I liked the article to which Normblog links (or which Normblog links to, as you'll find out if you follow it) here, a piece by Steven Pinker on pedants.

In particular, this is good:

Language pedants hew to an oral tradition of shibboleths that have no basis in logic or style, that have been defied by great writers for centuries, and that have been disavowed by every thoughtful usage manual. Nonetheless, they refuse to go away, perpetuated by the Gotcha! Gang and meekly obeyed by insecure writers.

For (clearly not) God's sake!

This is a load of codswallop.

Isn't the fact that Obama was democratically elected confirmation enough that he is, irrefutably, the 44th President of the United States of America? The election is the fact; the oath, the Bible and all the other gubbins are symbols. Now shut up and let him get on with the job (which without question he is doing).

Definitely Blue

What more can you say? Funnily enough, I've just been listening to the Berliner Philharmoniker and Mariss Jansons in the wonderful and mysterious second movement of Shostakovich's First Symphony, recorded in the Berlin Philharmonie. As this report from the New York Times states, Jean Nouvel's new Copenhagen Concert Hall 'is a loving tribute to Hans Scharoun’s 1963 Berlin Philharmonie, whose cascading balconies made it one of the most beloved concert halls of the postwar era'. Nouvel's new building certainly looks impressive; now I await reports about what it sounds like.

[By the way, I originally got the link for this article from Normblog here. And also, the image is by Phillipe Renault, not me. As you'll see, it features on the NY Times article.]

History: for the victors?

In order to reach the Grande Bibliotheque you have to travel through a desolate no-man's land in one of those robot-driven Métro trains steered by a ghostly voice, or alternatively you have to catch a bus in the Place Valhubert and then walk along the windswept river bank towards the hideous, outsize building, the monumental dimensions of which were evidently inspired by the late President's wish to perpetuate his memory whilst, perhaps because it had to serve a purpose, it was so conceived that it is, as I realized on my first visit, said Austerlitz, both in its outer appearance and inner constitution unwelcoming if not inimical to human beings, and runs counter, on principle, one might say, to the requirements of any true reader.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, p. 386

This quotation, along with the larger critique of presidential narcissism and monumentality in which it is embedded, ran through my mind as I read about Sarkozy's similar intentions to erect his own immortality in the form of a French national history museum. How derivative, I thought. How alarming, this phrase, 'national history museum', evoking the relatively politically-free thing implied by the phrase 'natural history museum', but which clearly shares none of its scientific objectivity.

I wondered how a French national history museum might manifest itself. What shape would its narrative have? As the report suggests, it is clear that the museum would not be exclusionary; that it would (it could hardly not) represent the less palatable moments in the 'civilisation of France'. (I refer to Algeria, but also the collaborationist Vichy regime of 1940-1944. In view of the former, though, I quipped to a work colleague that there would have to be four or five floors dedicated to this narrative strand, and that really the most effective curatorial decision would be to have Michael Haneke's Caché on an uninterrupted loop for the rest of time.) Still, it would be naive to think all ground would be covered.

I imagine what Sebald might have thought or written about this. (In a way, he preempted all such institutions in the above passage.) Almost certainly connections would be made between the architectural form of the museum and the array (or disarray) and display of its contents. Given that in Austerlitz experiences with such institutions augur an unassailable melancholy, I imagine that a French national history museum, being as it is a building (or nascent concept) attempting to encompass, as another Sebaldian narrator would put it, the immense panorma of history, would end up inducing an uncontrollable vertigo at both the vanity of presidential projects and their irreversible failures.

The most sensible comment in the report is the following, which requires no further commentary from me:

Alain Decaux, a historian famous for his television programmes, told French radio: "I don't see the use, quite simply, because Paris is one immense museum of the history of France."

[ps. Is it me or does Alain Decaux sound like the character played by Daniel Auteuil in Haneke's film? A lovely coincidence, that.]

Uncanny

I saw Elizabeth Wurtzel's Bitch in a bookstore today. I laughed to myself at the vitriolic title, thinking that the book's contents revealed something deeper and more engaging than my laugh was giving it credit for. I'd heard of Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, of course, but, again of course, had never read it. (It's one of those 'meaning-to-read' books.)

Well, perhaps it's Wurtzel's time in the reading schedule. I hadn't noticed this on Friday, but she has written a comments piece for the Guardian on potentially anti-semitic responses to Israel over the Gaza Crisis. Scrolling down the article, I clocked the words 'Jacques Derrida'. Jacques Derrida! A French philosopher mentioned in a British newspaper! A however-you-like-to-describe-him-but-as-some-would-say deconstructionist, no less.

Wurtzel's piece is well-argued. I can't say any more than that (other than I urge you to read it, along with this, and also this - though I find some of the writer's rhetoric worrying). However, I dread to think what her readers thought of it, since the comments section at the bottom of the article must be so engorged with responses that it failed to upload successfully during the time I read the article itself. Could the sheer volume of comments have anything to do with, in particular, her final paragraph, in which she drives home some level of truth about the attention Israel is given over anything it does; and this, despite the fact that Israel is certainly not the only country in the world to use the kind of force it does against the kind of enemy against which it has established it has no choice but to fight?

I watch the pro-Palestinian rallies that have been staged in capitals across the globe, and I try to tell myself that these people are not against me, or even Israel; that they just are dismayed with all the violence. I tell myself, as Jean Renoir pointed out with such pellucid irony in The Rules of the Game, that everybody has their reasons. But here is what I finally know: with all the troubles in the world, with the terrible things that the Chinese do in Tibet, and do to their own citizens; with the horrors of genocide committed in Darfur by Sudanese Muslims; with all the bad things that Arab governments in the Middle East visit upon their own people – no need for Israel to have a perfectly horrible time – still, the focus is on what the Jews may or may not be doing wrong in Gaza. And it makes people angry and vehement as nothing else does. The vitriol it inspires is downright weird. But that makes sense, because antisemitism itself – creepy, dark, ancient and insidious – is, more than anything else, just plain weird.

Remembering Rosa

Der Spiegel reports here on the ceremonies from last week in Berlin commemorating Rosa Luxemburg's assassination in the city on January 15th 1919.

Karajan

From advising Rostropovich on not playing his cello so harshly, to reminding the chorus and soloists of the word 'freude' in Beethoven's Ninth, Karajan was in a world of his own. In this documentary shown last night on BBC4, you saw him fly his own private jet, steer his own yacht, walk through the snow - presumably in Bavaria or Switzerland - and throw one particular singer all over a bed in a moment of passionate direction in the opera house. Then there were the odd directorial moments in the opera when a voice clearly not his would issue from his mouth. (Karajan pioneered the use of pre-recorded singing during direction to relieve his singers, but most probably so that he could take the position of the singer to demonstrate how it should be done - he, clearly not of fine speaking or singing voice.)

I knew Karajan was mesmerising from when I watched him conduct Debussy's La Mer and Strauss' Eine Alpensinfonie. It's those hands, held downwards, as if he is kneading the sound from the very earth itself. Then the closed eyes, as if in secret rapture. Where did he go in the world of those closed eyes? He was listening to the breathing of the woodwinds and brass, that is where he was. Simon Rattle explained that conducting was about searching for the air pockets; an elusive comment that manages to clearly convey how it is conducting joins the notes together.

Karajan's love of technology made the Berliner Philharmoniker the most connected orchestra in the world, and the orchestra's Digital Concert Hall is his legacy as much as it is Rattle's. (Bernard Haitink is conducting the orchestra in Mahler's Seventh Symphony as I write.)

This post is an incoherent response to the documentary and the Tchaikovsky recordings I'm listening to now. I am in awe of the performance of the Fifth's final movement. Despite the recording's cavernous sound, from Berlin's famous Jesus-Christus-Kirche, the dynamic extremes are startling. One of the golden moments from the Karajan archive is when he exhorts the leader of - I think - the Wiener Philharmoniker to listen to the flute, because the flute sweetens the overall timbre at that point in the score (of Beethoven's startling Fourth Symphony, if memory serves me right). Ostensibly, the ability to listen is key to chamber music performance, and it is this chamber music intimacy for which the Berliner Philharmoniker is renowned.

Dodgiest Phrasing (3)

Coffee roaster Tchibo and gas station chain Esso caused offence with an unfortunately worded ad campaign for coffee. Their slogan "To Each His Own" was used by the Nazis to mark the entrance to the Buchenwald concentration camp.

More here.

For real?!

It wasn't long before the Atheist Bus Campaign was going to be complained about. But get this for a complaint:

Stephen Green, the national director of Christian Voice, is among those who have complained to the Advertising Standards Authority, arguing that the atheist campaign broke the advertising code on the grounds of substantiation and truthfulness. [...] Green said: "It is given as a statement of fact and that means it must be capable of substantiation if it is not to break the rules.

"There is plenty of evidence for God, from people's personal experience, to the complexity, interdependence, beauty and design of the natural world.

Is he for real? How can the modifier of 'probably' in 'There probably is no God' (the Atheist Bus Campaign's statement) count as a statement of fact? I would like to complain about Stephen Green's grasp of his own language.

What he offers as 'substantiation' on his side is nothing more than subjective will: 'people's personal experience' cannot count as evidence. I could arouse a number of people to believe in the tooth fairy, but we would only be expressing a collective belief, not an absolute truth, in that dentist's dream. And as for the 'beauty of the natural world' as evidence of God: scientists might account for the structures in nature as beautiful being as a result of their effective functioning. That it counts for some people as beauty is a matter of opinion, not fact. Not all people believe nature is beautiful in the way that Green asserts. That's, again, a subjective thing. Which is what religion is: pure subjective will.

These complaints do not respect freedom of expression. As this will explain, the bus campaign was not intended to cause offence; in fact, it was inspired to allay terrible fears propounded by fire and brimstone pronouncements in a recent bus campaign. Hence, the method used by the Atheist Bus Campaign. Atheists and humanists are doing good public service. Why should the fire and brimstone religious people be allowed to whip up fear like that, is what the Atheist Bus Campaign is also campaigning for, in addition to their civil right not to believe in God.

So what are these complaints all about? Cultural and institutional dominance, that's what they're about. Religious believers don't like their own views being doubted, whereas they have spent thousands of years pummelling us into believing theirs. Crude as this may be, it's a feeling that never escapes me.

Bottom o'the list

If we believe that culture is the key to successful communities, cities, and economies, then why do the quality newspapers place it at the bottom of their homepages - below 'life and style', or 'lifestyle'? It always bothers me, this. The Guardian is really the only newspaper that gives comprehensive, well organised coverage on their website, as they do in their print editions. The Times makes their arts coverage look like all cultural events are to be experienced with popcorn, like it's all a cheap affair of leisure; the Daily Telegraph just isn't interested (the Gothic script is totally off-putting, and against the progressive spirit of contemporary culture, anyway); and the Independent, the next best thing to the Guardian, hovers between the priorities conveyed by the Times and the former publication. Of course sport totally predominates. (You would never get a cultural news story sitting alongside such events like the Gaza Crisis, as you had with the coverage of the cricket story yesterday. Even Newsnight!)

And then there was this

I wonder whether they'll release a recording, or a cycle. We need more from Riccardo Chailly and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra; their Schumann symphonies recordings are wonderful. They used the Mahler editions for their performances, and it's a cool guessing game judging exactly as to where Mahler's hand is in the reinvigorated writing.

I love this

It's staggeringly super-subtle. I seriously recommend it. The DVDs of the recordings have also recently been released. All of it's my favourite, but the Fourth Symphony is something else: the opening section could've been written in the (perhaps early) twentieth-century as far as I'm concerned. There's something revolutionary about it.

New year's revolutions

2009 could be the year for the environment. I've not explored this before, but the Guardian has a handy portal here for the world's best websites dealing with ecological issues right across the globe. Go and have a look.