Uh?

This evening my friend and I bought The Baader Meinhof Complex on DVD. It was a bargain, not least because it was 'specially packaged' for HMV (a piece of card slipped over the normal plastic case, in other words) but even more tantalisingly, a set of limited edition postcards. But get this for a contradiction. First, read the blurb from the back of the case:

The radicalised children of the Nazi generation lead by Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin are fighting a violent war against what they perceive as the new face of fascism: American imperialism supported by the German establishment. Their aim is to create a more humane society but by employing inhuman means they not only spread terror and bloodshed, they also lose their own inhumanity.

Not bad for a blurb, really. You get the picture (before you watch it). Is it possible to write a value-free blurb; one that allows for the viewer's own conclusions after having watched the film themselves? The woeful contradictions of these 'freedom fighters' teaches us all a lesson in what it means to fight for freedom. Lose the direct action; employ peaceful, more articulate means. Engage with direct action like they did; become like and possibly worse than the perceived 'enemy'. Etc. Und so weiter.

What lessons the DVD company wish to put across are, however, erased when you venture into your packaging to look at the enclosed postcards. Each one of these postcards contains an image of each of the protagonists holding a large gun at a human being. The one postcard that doesn't (they run out of protagonists) reproduces a still from the film in which one of the characters has their back to the viewer facing a blazing fire, arms outspread, as if embracing the Dionysian violence they've whipped up. So why include images of terror in the postcard pack when the blurb is so intent on drumming home the moral message? This is the usual tale of cinema as a sheer capitalist art form, one that foregrounds visceral appeal at the expense of whatever message they, in bad faith (Baader-Meinhof faith), wish to convey to society to make it a better place. Except it all goes wrong. Just like the Baader-Meinhof complex.

Now I must watch the film..

Malcolm Lowry (1909-1957)

July 28th is Malcolm Lowry's birthday. High modernist novelist hailing from the Wirral, Lowry is as notorious for the events of his life as the events he wrote for his demanding, intense fictions. (Fictions, it must be said, that are inextricably tied up with his life.)

There is no sign from any British newspaper of even a token commemoration of this fact. Lowry lovers need only wait until the autumn for proper acknowledgement of this Lowry centenary, when Liverpool's Bluecoat will have an exhibition and a whole host of other events, including the publication of a special book by Liverpool University Press.

Staring into we know not what!

Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony chills to the core. The dramatic contrasts in the first movement are shocking: where does this come from? This music is not simply a genius exercise in the melding of form and (indissolubly to) content; it betokens something much, much deeper. And who can tell what, given the multiple mysteries surrounding the man himself?

As you can guess from the previous post, I'm exploring the random archive of Berlin Philharmonic performances available on YouTube. Seiji Ozawa's performance of the Sixth Symphony with the orchestra is stunning. Truly, truly stunning. A DVD is available of their Vienna Musikverein performance in honour of a recent Karajan anniversary. Based on samples of their performances together of this work, I couldn't recommend it enough!

Rattle on Brahms

Simon Rattle's new recording of the Brahms Symphonies with his orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic, is sure to be a landmark document in both his history and that of his orchestra's. As Rattle himself explains in the video above, Brahms is very much entwined with the very idea of the Berlin Philharmonic itself. The parallels to be drawn in these new recordings are between Rattle and two of his predecessors: Karajan and Furtwängler are the ghosts lurking behind these readings. Though unfairly snubbed by some German critics, Rattle's contribution to the orchestra's sound has been to admit light without sacrificing tonal depth. It's about balance, something essential to music-making itself. Some might disagree with this assessment, and probably those aforementioned critics will; but watching and listening to even a few bars of Rattle's Brahms on YouTube can be illuminating in terms of his approach to rubato and the capricious ends to which this is put in what you could call a kind of 'terracing' of the music's through-line. The dust of years gone by is thus wiped away.

After nature

As readers of the four fragments on Corsica published in Sebald's Campo Santo will know, this sad story on the ruination of nature is bound to have a certain resonance.

Bookstruck

Lovely piece by Blake Morrison in yesterday's G2 for the André Kertész exhibition, On Reading, at The Photographers' Gallery. Reading is democratic. The non-existent but powerful world it constructs for the reader, I mean, as in this particular image, about which Morrison says the following:

One memorable image features a boy sitting in a New York doorway in 1944, amid a heap of newspapers left there to alleviate the wartime shortage ("Paper is needed now! Bring it at any time," reads the poster behind him). Times are hard yet the boy looks perfectly happy: amid the detritus, he has found a page of comic strips.

This boy seeks out his own refuge and privacy from the chaotic world around him, which the image itself shows in the pile of newspapers the boy also uses as seating. The exhibition runs until 4th October.

Sebald on Flikr

Sebald's Melancholy Web. Contribute images or begin a discussion.

Slow-drone news and democratic life

Working-class students should get a bunk-up to university with lowered entrance grades.

Changing educational opportunities for working-class students must start a very long time before university entrance if it is to have any real impact. Educational privilege and elitism is built into the structure of society. The issue here is not just about the impact of private schooling either. A child who has newspapers and books at home, and hears conversation about politics over the kitchen table, is already privileged, irrespective of where he or she goes to school. Indeed, according to a report in the Guardian last year, the children of parents living in inner cities who sent their children to local comprehensives for "ideological" reasons, turned out to be over-represented in terms of Oxford and Cambridge places.

For me, this gets to the heart of the matter. I've felt such disadvantages myself. I don't know why or how, but I managed to defend myself as a teenager against an anti-intellectual upbringing by reading broadsheet newspapers. But this damaged my self-image, of course, because it singled me out for ridicule when handling those unwieldy publications in the pre-Berliner, pre-tabliodification-of-proper-media days. But I don't now care about what I looked like, and the shudders of embarrassment I feel even now when I think about myself 'getting beyond myself' by reading these newspapers and books and listening to classical music, are deflected by my comfortable position as an educated adult who reads things. Sadly, it is a truth that many people are unwilling to acknowledge that the working-class still - even now in the twenty-first century - fails to support learning and education. It's not a case of parents ensuring their children complete their homework; it's a case of there being a reading culture in the home; it's making sure people communicate freely and uninhibitedly with each other, respecting each other's opinions and resisting the urge to blurt out hot air instead of reasoned argument; it's a case of thinking beyond materialism and unedifying entertainment and sport and reading, discussing, creating, learning.

There are many problems to defuse. The working-class culture of masculinity is a massive stopgap to intellectual life (you can forget 'culture', dance, music, or art). The over-bearing, normative culture of sport detracts from other types of time-filling, labour-intensive activity.

There are many psychological impediments to reverse. Generations and generations of insufficient literacy and education as a whole have had an enormous impact on intellectual confidence in working-class life. Working-class people cannot and should not be blamed for this. It is truly, deeply upsetting to see such a person struggle to articulate themselves in the company of those whom they believe to be more educated and more eloquent than themselves. Never underestimate the immense detrimental effects of the failures of postwar education on the working classes. If you swipe aside the issues enlisted in this paragraph, you are dehumanising the problem. Working-class people are not anthropological subjects; they are living and breathing people with terrible insecurities, the like of which are simply not present in the same form in the clerical, middle classes and 'onwards and upwards'.

How to reverse all of this? A very good start would be to make small changes in the spirit of larger outcomes. Angela Phillips is right to focus on the daily ritual of reading newspapers. Introducing schoolchildren early on to the media and the social responsibility of absorbing the news and commentary on it would open the need for a daily engagement of critical thinking, something essential to democratic life. But when you consider the fact that the working-classes in their millions read only the cynical, intellectually-ignorant, genuinely socially divisive, tabloid newspapers, you are confronted with a potentially irreversible problem: the fecklessness, the incredulity, the surrendering to ignorance involved in buying and reading these papers have taken root and actively subverted the social function of critical thinking. The mock-seriousness with which they go about obtaining these depressing excuses for newspapers reveals the extent to which working-class life turns its back on the examined life. If this is not the case, then why do they not question the quality and responsibility of the tabloid newspapers they buy, cast them aside, and embrace their new-found intellectual freedom? Lying behind this question is another problem: inveterate laziness of the mind.

A massive amount of work is to be done. If it is to be successful, each party - the government, primary and secondary schools, universities, but most of all working class families - must acknowledge the collaborate process that is democratic life, and rather than thinking stuff will get done by other people, accept active responsibility for it.

Real rag and bone

Yesterday the digital rag and bone merchant heard a real scrap metal, possibly rag and bone on the side, version, out there in the harsh world where the announcements through a speaker perhaps indicate that the recession has finally hit. Or maybe I slipped down time.

More good news!

It's coming thick and fast. Cadbury's slowly switches to Fairtrade in a big way! The new packaging is interesting, not to mention beautiful: it exudes vintage, old-fashioned values through its typeface, but the Fairtrade symbol nestled below it betrays its modernity. (No pun or irony intended in here, but there you go!)

Good news!

Hard to believe that there is any of this these days. It's not all doom and gloom in the publishing industry. And we're not talking of any old publisher here, but a devotedly left-wing one; devoted also, amongst other things, to ideas, the intellectual life, social justice, theory, beauty of design as well as thought. Buy their books from here, here, or here.

On Friday evening

Martha Kearney was at Latitude drinking Pimm's. Are festivals counter-cultural anymore? What's wrong with nice things, said one of Martha's guests. I agree. Latitude delivers many cultural fruits, from indie headliners to poetry and, naturally, organic and Fairtrade food and drink. The counter-cultural, thankfully, has become the norm, which is why it no longer appears to be counter-cultural. But what, I ask, was the point of the counter-cultural in the first place if not to infiltrate the norm, if not to dominate it? Hasn't it achieved some level of success? If years ago counter-cultural meant buying organic and going vegan, then now, in no small part, it has become the done thing. I wonder where the counter-cultural lies nowadays?

Britain is in full festival fever: the Manchester International Festival has just ended after weeks of new, innovative art across all genres and borders; Latitude, as Martha Kearney will tell you, is bouncing along as we speak; the first night of the Proms was tonight and Edinburgh is to come; so what is the point of reminding the British public of all the joy to be had in life when you can terrify them witless with sensationalist reporting of swine flu?

The Proms started tonight. It all began a bit stilted, what with Clive Anderson's continuity and charisma problems and the banal, literal visual accompaniment to Stravinsky's Fireworks being..yes, pictures of fireworks! Beautifully sung and performed it may have been, the Chabrier was boring. Tchaikovsky's unfinished Third Piano Concerto performed by the polymathic Stephen Hough was formidable, both soloist and orchestra set alight by Tchakovsky's histrionics - histrionics on the right side of uncontrollable melodrama. Katia and Marielle Labèque's immortal rendering of Poulenc's Double Piano Concerto was beyond belief in terms of technique, energy, theatricality, verve, joy, melancholy.. Poulenc's concerto is a masterpiece, though: concise in terms of style, form, and expression, it glides by manically like the madcap silent movie it would perfectly accompany. Paris is the centre of the world in this work, and all the sonorities of the 1920s can be heard in its shape-shifting contours. Mozart and Balinese gamelan are evoked as timeless echoes, jilting the sense that this is a concerto of the twentieth-century city. It's as if the audience watches silently through a veil of smoke in a wild bistro after too much (or too little) absinthe. Such was her fanatical control and energy at one point, I thought one of the Labèques would catapult herself into the piano. Performer, instrument, and work were definitely one.

How obsessed the commentary was with psychobiography! The third piano concerto provides evidence that Tchaikovsky did not commit suicide. How could he? The music is so joyful, it simply couldn't have spilt from the soul of a condemned man along with his last pot of ink!! I'm sorry to pull the Freudian rug from under the tidy idea, but it is simply an underestimation of human psychology to suggest that from happy art follows happy person. (Tchaik might've done it to dupe us all! Bugger the choleric water of St Petersburg, or wherever it was he was last seen alive!) It was odd how suicide was being brushed under the Freudian rug in this way. Perhaps suicide is not middle class enough (though I'm not one of those naive idiots who thinks that classical music equals anti-proletariat). At least disposing of the suicide theory precluded mention of his being GAY. (Too strong, this, for the Proms?)

Time was when the Proms commissioned real composers. Step aside young composer fresh out of full training and years of hard slog at music academies for...Goldie!! I'm sure this experiment will yield startling results, but what a naive-genius-tempstuousRomanticartist-reinvention-of-the-reality-TV-genre all rolled into one big, fat marketing icon this commission was! I think we'll be hearing the Royal Albert Hall's first visitation of techno. How POMO it all is. (You've got to give it to them, though: did anyone see the pure product placement - on Stephen Hough's music stand! - of Roger Scruton's book on beauty? What diversity: from Scruton to Goldie. I'd rather have Goldie than a gnarly, crusty, and old hateful, assiduous promoter of the hunt and all things calcifyingly status quo, to be honest. Funny that.)

Cafédirect from the horse's mouth

willoway
I recently I bought two bags of Cafe Direct coffee beans at a drastically reduced price in a bargain shop. This is a shop that buys in ultra-bulk, but also stuff that is nearing its sell-by date. How is the Fairtrade status affected by buying your products in shops like these? Is the price passed on to the grower even when the product is picked up in less formal arrangements like bargain shops?

lamtheurbanspaceman
@willowway - yes - the fairtrade status is not affected by the shop or the price you pay at a retail outlet because it is all already sorted out further back down the supply chain.

ovethewall
Willowway

Reading it back - my previous posting may have been a bit harsh on Fairtrade, but this stems from frustration of what was once a development/ campaigning label into an apparent marketing opportunity for bandwaggoners.

One of the many benefits of Ft is that the same Ft price and Ft premiums get to the farmers regardless of retail price. So you can grab Ft bargains at discounters that will deliver the same Ft benefits but again you can also pay significantly over the odds as some supermarkets (Tesco - obviously - and surprisingly Sainsbury the worst as far as I have seen) who inflate prices and profiteer with farmers geting none of the additional money you are investing (into the PLC quaffers)

Play safe and stick to pioneer brands - either at local shops or at the co-op who do a pretty fine job on Ft with own brands too ( and are a mutual not shareholder owned)

Cafedirect
Great question and answers! As discussed, the fairtrade price (including the social premium) will always reach the farmers because any buyer is required to pay this price.

The complicated part is that the final retail price depends on the outlet that sells the product, as that store, be it an Oxfam shop or Sainsburys, will set the selling price (and thus the margin they make on selling the product). Choosing what to buy is one decision, and choosing where you go to buy it can be another.

If you buy our products through Traidcraft and Equal Exchange, the profits made on those products will go to the work of those organizations vs. to the shareholders of a company. Yet the retail price is often higher (less economies of scale than a supermarket) or it could be more inconvenient than heading to your local Tesco. Always tradeoffs!

However, to add another perspective, supermarkets do make our products available to a mainstream audience and we really want to encourage more distribution, not less! Through supermarkets, Cafédirect products can reach many more consumers, meaning we can purchase more from growers and have a much bigger impact as a result. Yet we have no control over the prices they set. Slashing prices of a fairly traded product (particularly own brand) can send a confusing message to consumers about fair prices. Conversely, higher prices also dont guarantee any more profit back to farmers.

Companies join up to Fairtrade for different reasons and choose to certify anywhere from 1 product in their range to 100% of their products, etc. A company who has a sells a Fairtrade product can simply buy certified coffee anonymously and then market themselves as committed to trading fairly.

Ultimately, we couldnt agree more with Iamtheurbanspacemans comments on pioneer brands!

In the case of Cafédirect, having 100% of or products Fairtrade certified is just the start. We have direct, long term relationships with smallholder growers, there are 2 growers on the Board of Directors, cooperatives own shares in the company and we are constantly working to push value up the supply chain and back to origin. Fairtrade is where weve started, but were continuing to pioneer. While we welcome how Fairtrade products have become more and more mainstream, hopefully our comments here explain some of the difference between all those ‘Fairtrade products on the shelf!

Cafédirect answers questions from the public on the Guardian's Ethical living blog.

Of their range, I can wholeheartedly recommend this.

Picasso

His doves became symbols recognised across the world of the peace movement, after one was chosen as the emblem of the first international peace congress in Paris in 1949 - the same month he named his daughter Paloma, the Spanish for dove. He produced new versions of the design for posters for each of the later peace congresses including the Sheffield gathering, planned at the height of the Korean war, when Picasso himself was held by immigration for several hours, and which was abandoned after the Labour government of the day refused entry to hundreds of delegates including the American singer Paul Robeson, and the writers Pablo Neruda, and Louis Aragon.

Labour governments barring entry to artists is nothing new then. Tate Liverpool's forthcoming Picasso show will highlight Picasso's political life, something which is apparently overshadowed by his reputation as a womaniser. I say apparently because I've always thought Picasso's concern for history and politics were never in doubt: first there is Guernica, then there is the anecdote about the German officer who discovered the latter painting in the painter's studio on the quai des Grands Augustins and asked: 'Did you do this?', to which Picasso curtly replied 'You did'.

Knows your rights (and wrongs)

The Guardian focuses on more of the former in this special website.

Rights and wrongs

Phil Woolas, Immigration Minister, responds to Henry Porter's post. I'm still not convinced. It's an indisputable fact that the government has to seek stricter and more efficient procedures at our borders in the interest of our safety and security, but what good is the system that sends visiting international pianists, artists, and writers back home for not scoring enough on their assessment? While it's true that the system must treat everyone the same and fairly, I can't see what good it is to claim that the points-based system is flexible when such refusals have been made. Isn't this all in the game of rule-making? When the system shows evidence of its inflexibility, it becomes abstract: the rules must be maintained at all times, no matter what the circumstances might be in a given case. The host organisation for an artist applying for a temporary visa may argue that their attendance is beneficial, is definitely only temporary, will not endanger the audience or the locale; but if they haven't scored enough points..

Daily maltreatment

There could no more depressing example of the way in which this government's populist obsession with immigration damages artistic life.

Henry Porter on recent and frankly idiotic cases of immigration control for international artists visiting our shores. What is going on? What will happen to international arts festivals or even the everyday life of our major galleries, theatres, opera companies and orchestras, who invite esteemed artists from around the globe to enrich our lives?

This is what every reasonable and sensible person is thinking right this minute in light of the misguided, 'hyperregulated' procedures of the UK Borders Agency. At the foot of Porter's blog post is this link to Manifesto Club, which is currently campaigning against these measures. Go there and pledge your support.

Daily misreading

Taking my daily antihistamine, I thought I read 'allegory relief' on the packet. This was before my first sip of coffee. Having read Benjamin's Origin and Eagleton's Walter Benjamin over the past week, is it any wonder?!

Fear at first sight?

Extracts from Philip Hoare's Leviathan can be found here. His recent BBC2 programme on whales will be repeated later this month.

For the love of reason

Martha Nussbaum at Dissent applies her characteristically direct, rigorous, and ultra-lucid style to the question of gay marriage and constitutional law. As all three of the replies to the article acknowledge, it would be very hard indeed to muster an argument against in like-minded character. What gets me is the real bar to any argument for and against, and certainly the thing which motivates those who assiduously campaign against gay marriage: the homophobic animus. Again, as one of Nussbaum's repliers maintains, there is little by way of rational, reasonable argument to be found in the kind of minds besieged by this homophobic animus. Mounting a challenge to this is like waging a psychic war against an implacable, hateful id that for time immemorial has received institutional and constitutional assent for various manifestations of hatred, violence, and power.

But this reinforces Nussbaum's rigorous support for constitutional change!

Commodity Fetishism

Berlin's squat scene, which I suppose goes without saying.

Something I stumbled on just this minute.

Not exactly a new edition (a misleading term, this, sometimes) but a beautiful reprint with an elegant and actually quite ingenious new cover. Same old astonishing content.

Liberals need our brotherly help

We shouldn't settle for a capitalism with a human face (which has many faces).

New forms of colonisation via purchasing of arable land in developing countries.

Fascism fills in for a failed revolution.

Slavoj Žižek's latest performance from Marxism 2009:

Launch of Corridor 8

With doom-laden reports of newspapers folding (excuse the pun), surrendering to the growing primacy of new media, it is truly heartening, exciting, and generally restorative for the soul to discover that a new magazine is being launched. And in the middle of this so-called recession!

The first issue of Manchester-based Corridor 8 will be released this month at the city's Urbis. The ambition and artistic reach of this annual arts magazine are indicated by a new commission from Iain Sinclair, whose first ever psychogeographic foray into the north west of England (no surprises that the location had to be Manchester) promises to be a groundbreaking contribution. (Again, excuse the pun. None of these are intentional, by the way!) I anticipate that Sinclair will acknowledge some level of debt to Sebald's The Emigrants, a work of prose fiction not explicitly psychogeographic but which stands as one of the first major accounts of its kind for the palimpsest landscape of Manchester. The magazine's website offers the following quotation to tantalise us:

Wandering Deansgate was like finding yourself in the middle of some dark fantasy for which you had no instructions. Cliffs of unreason. Deansgate as a river of human traffic, the Irwell its liquid margin.

Curiously enough, Sinclair's piece is accompanied by images from Chris Petit, another writer whose work crosses Sebaldian paths (Petit got there first, though, in a way) and whose current project, like Will Self's forthcoming book, is informed by Sebaldian methodologies and subject matter.

The depth and range of this first edition is impressive: from psychogeography to Alan Dunn's reflections on how the internet can abolish vast geographical boundaries in the name of international social inclusion and cohesion, Corridor 8 promises to be a distinguished publication indeed.

Philip Hoare talks

..here to the Guardian, about winning the Samuel Johnson Prize, whaling, and fear of water.

Refulgent rainbow?

It's London Pride tomorrow.

The Times was in rainbow colours last weekend.

Peter Tatchell isn't impressed with Gordon Brown's status as a gay-hugging PM. There's also more work to be done to continue the radicalism of the Stonewall Riots.

Meanwhile, over the water, there are also contradictions afoot in the White House.

Still, there are certainly reasons to be positive and celebratory.

Two things to buy: a re-released Stonewall Riots doc; and what sounds like a fun, fascinating, but certainly not frivolous film from Cuba: Strawberry and Chocolate.

Behind the beat

An ignorant, lopsided critique of Terence Davies' Of Time and the City can be found here on Mute's website. This article is a shame, since some of the issues it discusses - about regeneration, class disenfranchisement, useless property development - ring true in the daily life of Liverpool, which was last year's European Capital of Culture and is the subject of Davies' film.

But Davies' film is used unfairly as a battering ram for the negligence of things way beyond the director's reach. True, Peter Carty credits Davies' past work, but somehow finds Of Time and the City as an unwitting reflection of burgeoning elitism and class alienation in quite possibly one of the most world-historical working class cities in the world. My problem with Carty's article is its bitter tone. He targets Davies' 'plummy' accent, saying that the director's 'dulcet tones of privilege are a betrayal, though he cannot bear all the blame for this'. The slight forgiveness granted in that last clause leads on to some unfair abuse of middle class Liverpudlians such as George Melly, John Peel (who was Wirral-bound anyway, and so is ripe for ethnic alienation from Liverpool), and of course Beryl Bainbridge, though I do agree with this particular example: Bainbridge is a complete snob whose declarations about Scousers requiring elocution lessons stands as unreconstructed class hatred, full of the kind of prejudice that Merseysiders face even to this day. But lobbing Davies in with Bainbridge? Terence Davies fans will know from his films and from interviews how there is not one prejudiced bone in his body. He has expressed in interview how his accent and passion for the kind of language socio-historically alien to that spoken by his populous family are themselves an expression of his outsider status as a gay Catholic yearning for Bruckner and glamorous Hollywood actresses on Lime Street cinema screens. In light of such facts, Carty's inverted snobbery is grossly unfair and in some cases unforgivably insensitive.

I am almost dizzy at the extent to which I think Carty is just plain wrong on most of what he says. His critique is old-fashioned and not progressive but actually regressive in its suggestion that it is only to popular culture that the working classes flock. He claims that the film's music is incongruous with its images of working class life, but I know from having met working class audience members of Davies' film during its extended run at FACT that there was an interest in things beyond the pub song. One gentleman asked me about the music that accompanies the transfiguring closing sequence, which was Mahler's Second Symphony, known as 'The Resurrection'. I then went on to recommend recordings. Yes, working class people can fall in love with Mahler, you know! But the debates about culture and class are so closed-minded as to suggest that really, no, it's not for them; it's elitist and beyond their ken. Carty commits the unforgivable error of attributing Mahler's posthumous reputation to dubious appropriations by an audience that is passionate about the work but fails to understand it in any real sense beyond its surface melodrama and retro-gilded sensibilities. This is the 'Wouldn't You Just Die Without Mahler' clique, or, as Carty claims, those who adore 'a composer who perennially signifies bohemianism* for the irredeemably bourgeois'. What is beyond this writer is the fact that Mahler suffered terribly as a Jew in viscious anti-Semitic Vienna and so was himself as alienated as the working classes themselves. Listen with open minds and ears to Mahler's klezmer- and brass band-inflected voicing and you will realise that the old dinstinctions between High and Low are irrelevant. In any case, it makes little sense to be ingornant of forms of oppression when marshalling an argument against oppression itself.

The terms of Carty's debate are perennial: the working classes are instinctively and genetically non-responsive to High Art. The language of Eliot and Joyce is not their language, by which is meant that because it doesn't speak in their terms, it is not open to their minds. Pace Of Time and the City. Quite apart from the fact that another documentary of working class life with images of dockers and young peacocks in hair-rollers overlaid with Buddy Holly and the Beatles would have made for yet another cliched attempt at representation, it would have also made for a much less powerful paean to an iconic city. There is something about the rarefied language and unfamiliar music that deepens the viewer's connection with the images panning slowly before the eyes in that inimitable Terence Davies fashion. A socialist critic might call it alienation; not the form adumbrated by Marx and lived in by the working classes, but the strategy adopted by artists by which they seek to deepen the viewer's awareness by distancing her/him from everyday, quotidian reality. Of Time and the City transfigures its subject by dignifying its well-worn images and life with words and music the people consider are not for them, can't be about them. But they are; they really are.

[*It is unfortunate for Carty that a massive irony lies behind his unwitting use of this word. It even increases his overall ignorance, for Mahler actually was Bohemian, born in 1860 in Kaliště, Bohemia, in what is now the Czech Republic!]

Hot issues

For once, an allegory it is not.

Values in ruins

In the first five days, some 55,000 people rushed to snap up tickets that until the end of 2009 will sell at €1 a piece. Internet interest has also been unexpectedly high, helping to boost the sense that with this new showcase, Athens is on to a winner to retrieve the Parthenon sculptures from the British Museum. "Altogether, 90,822 tickets have been sold," said the Greek culture minister Antonis Samaras. "From America to Mongolia, Australia to Nepal, internet users have logged into the [museum's] site. I, personally, have received letters of thanks from ordinary people in China. The interest has been phenomenal."

The nearest I've been to the ancient magnificence of something like the Parthenon is Berlin's Pergamon Museum. The monumentality of the Pergamon is somehow enhanced by the fact that not all of it is actually there. The dynamism of movement is emphasised mid-gesture by an incomplete, ruined figure. Much can be extrapolated from ruins such as they are installed in magnificent museums like Berlin's. But there's no space for melancholy where it is possible for an installation to benefit from increased wholeness by the reacquisition of looted sections. This is the story behind the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, whose reopening has revived the question of the Elgin Marbles. For me, there is no debate: they should be returned to Athens as soon as possible. Over 90% of people who voted in the Guardian poll asking just this question agreed. What place is there for equivocation when an institution representing a former imperial power is proposing to retain objects looted and in some cases severely damaged by a man acting in his own interests?

Leviathan wins Samuel Johnson Prize

Philip Hoare's Leviathan, or The Whale has won the Samuel Johnson Prize. Sebald fans will undoubtedly find familiar some of the qualities of Hoare's work, in particular his use of uncaptioned photographs and a stylistic hybridity that marks both writers out from the crowd. It is said that just before his death, Sebald had approached Hoare with a view to forewarning him on some instances of literary theft he was keen on doing from his work.

The announcement on the Samuel Johnson Prize website actually features a plaudit from Sebald: "Philip Hoare’s writing is quite untrammelled by convention and opens up astonishing views at every turn."