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Category: Arts

  • Review of Tar: “You have to work with people, and bring them along with you’

    Christopher Jackson

     

    “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” Something about the film Tár, directed by Todd Field, makes me think more of the second half of Schopenhauer’s maxim; it makes me want to toy with the highest accolades.

    When a work of art is truly original, that originality permeates everything and that’s true here. The title, first of all – with the accent on the ‘a’ – snuck into cinemas with a kind of erudite and confident otherness, hints at a sort of must-see strangeness before the lights have even dimmed.

    These impressions continue with the opening credits, which are in fact the closing credits: we see the full list of contributors to the film calmly, patiently described for us and rather than being irritating or tedious, somehow this decision, overturning all the conventions of cinema, projects an intriguing self-confidence.

    Perhaps then, this is another thing about genius: not only that it is aiming somewhere we can’t see, but that it knows that’s what it’s doing, but never in too self-satisfied a way – never, that’s to say, into overconfidence.

    What ensues is a film of rare beauty. We meet the star conductor Lydia Tár, who is seen first looking anxious in the wings of a stage, before entering the essentially surreal environment of an onstage New Yorker interview conducted by Adam Gopnik. We are therefore rightaway in one of those artificial environments of celebration which the media is so skilled at creating where someone is bolstered, made legendary, construed as ‘great’. It is perhaps the implicit goal of our society to somehow become the protagonist of one of these environments, where we are, by dint of our work, ‘celebrated’. And it is the stated goal of cancel culture to pluck people remorselessly from these positions of apparent safety and irreversible acclaim, to bestow humility on people who to whatever degree appear to have succeeded.

    And so we meet Tár, in the spotlit glow of heady achievement. Her achievements seem initially superhuman: she is not just the conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, the most coveted position in classical music, she is also a composer in her own right.

    This opening scene is masterful: we get to know much about Tár, her backstory training under Leonard Bernstein, her attempts to emulate and perhaps surpass him in conducting the cycle of nine Mahler symphonies (reserving the fifth until last), and we get to enjoy her eloquence, her supreme self-confidence, and to guess at the quiddity of her genius, all while feeling it is somehow offkey, that she is being overpraised, overly pandered to, and that the environment is somehow not good for her.

    What follows shows the human being behind the personage which the media is creating and bit by bit we get to know Tár without for a moment doubting that she was deserving of something like the approbation which she has achieved.

    And we wouldn’t get to know Tár at all were it not for Cate Blanchett whose performance is a thing of genius in itself. It is in this which film reveals itself as a collective art – perhaps the greatest expression of community since the cathedrals were built. To refer to this as Field’s film is to disregard all the other contributions.

    Blanchett swims through the refined milieu of classical music, in marvellous baggy suits – dapper and immaculate, but the cuffs free enough to allow her hands the dexterity of swooping down to play a piano. Her character is patiently delineated, and always played with the consciousness of having a huge amount of screen time. But it has a common thread: Tár always prioritises music above people, and what the film shows is that you can’t do this endlessly without ramifications.

    In others words, Blanchett’s performance is both solid in terms of establishing Tár but responsive, in that it shows her development. Her character enters over time into difficulty, and as in Shakespearean tragedy these seem to arrive from without (initially without her sensing their existence, let alone how far advanced they are), while having been caused by flaws perpetrated by the character from within. Most of what will afflict Tár is already in motion before the beginning of the film.

    Tár’s ‘downfall’ is to do with two sins. Firstly, lust. Without wishing to give anything away, she has a tendency to become besotted by female members of her orchestra. She is married to her first violinist, Sharon Goodnow, played by Nina Hoss, but all her human relationships are secondary to her ego – her relationships are, in the words of Goodnow, ‘transactional’.

    It is a terrible indictment, and the penalty is terrible too: it is to discover in the end that all one’s achievements may turn out to be hollow, if we do not set aside the time to nurture human relationships while we carry them out. This mistake is the more easily made because work can be addictive, and once this addiction is ratified by repeated approval, it can become more so.

    The film shows us the classical music world as a workplace with unparalleled intricacy. We glimpse the politics of orchestras – the favouritism which can alter the path of a career, positively or negatively. We also see Tár hiring and firing, always eventually to her detriment.

    What emerges is a highly moral film. Tár fails to realise that her elevated position was never her sole doing, but contingent on others – more so, on people she feels to be her inferiors. There is no plaudit which comes your way in life without others having cooperate with you. Even a solitary profession like that of a poet or writer requires publishers, public relations people, editors, book designers and a whole raft of people to come in behind the idea of your genius. Very occasionally, somebody – like JD Salinger – decides against these structures, and gets noticed for doing that.

    Even more occasionally, someone like Blake gets denied any serious interest during their lifetimes only to be rewarded after their death by a recognition that would have surprised their living selves.

    But in general you have to work with people, and to bring them along with you. Shakespeare, to the extent that we can fathom his personality at this distance of time, seems to have been a humble member of the King’s Men, and we probably wouldn’t quote him at all now if he hadn’t. He would still have been a genius, but a genius in a garret, one without shareholder’s certificates.

    Finally, this is a film which has surprising things to say about cancel culture. In one scene Tár is seen to dismiss a young student who, for reasons of gender identification, is unable to listen to Bach. Her dismissal of him is quite right as to substance, in that she really does understand Bach better than the student. What is wrong is the manner in which she dismisses him. ‘You’re a bitch,’ says the student as he walks out. We have noted throughout the scene that the student’s leg is shaking; he is nervous, unsure of himself. He did have something to learn but needed to be treated more gently.

    Likewise, the finale of the film shows the real end that comes to those who are cancelled. Tár doesn’t do anything too dramatic once her position and her laurels are taken from her. Perhaps she has too much self-regard still for suicide. She also, like Kevin Spacey, has too much money to be seriously destroyed. Instead, she is consigned to a position far beneath her abilities – again like Spacey, her strengths which had once been lauded, now ignored, and the world is the poorer because we can no longer hear Tár’s music, just as we may never know how Spacey, a terrific actor, would have depicted Gore Vidal, a role he was surely born to play.

    In some sense then the film, a true work of communitarian art, can’t quite be an individual tragedy, because that wouldn’t describe our times. We are too materialistic, too wealthy, too connected for individual tragedy. That means that tragedy is always felt jointly. This means too that the genius of the film can’t belong solely to Field or Blanchett or any one person. It’s ours. And this is why we love the cinema when it’s this great; it affirms us.

     

  • Obituary: Martin Amis 1949-2023

    Christopher Jackson remembers the diminutive battler of cliché, and asks what morals his famous style pointed towards

    I have started to dread a random Apple news flash on my iPhone: this sudden beeping sidebar seems to exist partly to alert me to the unexpected death of someone I mind about. If I knew how to turn off these updates I probably would, and take my chances on the websites.

    As it is, the need to own a phone has so far trumped the annoyance of being plugged into a cycle of morbidity and crisis. Last year it was Shane Warne, dead of a heart attack at some absurdly young age, as if the Grim Reaper had no understanding whatsoever of the virtue of a good leg break.

    This weekend it was Martin Amis, who died in Fort Worth, Florida at the age of 73 – the same age as his father Sir Kingsley Amis – of a disease I hadn’t known he had, in a house I wasn’t aware he had owned.

    Why should the death of our heroes be so shocking, being as it is the surest fact about the world? Partly, it is because we’re deprived of the context of decline. Death has its logic lived one moment at a time: Warne’s yo-yo diets and jager bombs, and Amis’ smoking and drinking are explanations we look for amid the fact of coming to terms with it all. We have to play catch up mid-grief – we scrabble for information as we mourn.

    I can still remember Amis sitting to one side of Christopher Hitchens during one of the latter’s last TV interviews, swigging a bottled beer while his friend, bald from chemotherapy, talked so brilliantly in the face of death. Hitchens looked vulnerable, but Amis appeared separate from his friend’s situation. Now we must assimilate that these past years Amis had been silently dealing with the same illness which killed his friend.

    Separated from cause like this, Amis’ departure leaves us with the shock of an unsubstantiated absence. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we have come to expect immortality from our literary greats. It was John Updike who expressed his surprise at Nabokov’s death by saying he had ‘imagined him exempt’.

    I don’t think our regard for Amis ever quite partook of the awe which he – and others – felt for the author of Lolita. It was Amis’ fate to be obviously brilliant, but also to be widely disparaged and belittled.

    There were many reasons for this. One was his physical stature: always, in his own words, ‘a short arse’ he was also characterised by Christopher Hitchens as ‘little Keith’. Given who his father was, it was possible to miss the scale of his achievement by thinking him a smart child. “Daddy does it better,” was a bright friend of mine’s verdict, and one I doubt he would consider revisiting.

    Yet now, in his obituaries, Martin is a ‘literary giant’, amid all the other newspaper banalities: the ‘Mick Jagger of literature’, the ‘enfant terrible’ and so forth. “Why don’t people ever refer to Mick Jagger as the Martin Amis of rock and roll?” he once opined.

    But we now experience the sudden sweeping away of all the nonsense that was written about him. The somewhat overblown controversies recede – things Amis said here and there in interview about Islam, about how he’d have to be brain dead to write children’s books, or silliness surrounding his teeth. All this exaggeration and ad hoc explaining rushes aside to be replaced by the work he did at the desk: Money, London Fields, Experience, The Zone of Interest (a film of which was showing at Cannes in the week of his death), The House of Meetings, Success, to name only a few.

    These are what matter but one wonders if they will matter enough. On the BBC News, Amis’ death came second throughout Saturday to the departure of Phillip Schofield from ITV’s This Morning – a pretty vivid example of the insanity which Amis had spent his life railing against. But as Auden put it: “Poetry makes nothing happen.”

    Writers will look at the death of a fellow writer – especially one so eminent as Amis – and pause in their next day’s work, wondering if it’s necessarily worth it. Amis himself knew this feeling, and articulated it definitively in his 2009 tribute to John Updike: “Several times a day you turn to him, as you will now to his ghost, and say to yourself ‘How would Updike have done it?’ This is a very cold day for literature”. So it goes today.

    But already at his death, Martin Amis was read less than at any time in the last 50 years. There wasn’t a great fanfare around 2020’s Inside Story – presumably his last novel unless something comes to us posthumously. This may have been because in retrospect he was too ill to conduct too many interviews. But undeniably, he had begun to run out of steam. That last book – in many respects a rewrite of 2000’s memoir Experience – felt bloated, the sign of a writer returning to material – his father, his friendships with the American novelist Saul Bellow and Christopher Hitchens – which he’d already satisfactorily dispatched.

    In a sense then, his death comes with this compensation: Martin Amis got himself expressed. Well then, what did he say?

    As numerous obituarists have pointed out, he said first of all that what he was saying was of less importance than how he said it – or more, what he was saying was how he said it. Sometimes, as in his great collection of journalism The War Against Cliché, he pointed this out very precisely – but all along it was the subtext of every sentence he wrote.

    Can this commitment to style be taken too far? Christopher Hitchens recounts how Amis refused to go on past the first page of Orwell’s 1984 because of the early line describing the Stalin figure as ‘ruggedly handsome’. It could be argued that to miss out on 1984 because of this was a step too far: he sometimes acted as though writing was only style. “Style isn’t neutral; it gives moral directions,” he once said.

    So in what direction did Amis – or rather Amis’ style – point morally? One sentence which is rightly celebrated from Experience is this lordly dismissal of a minor critic: “By calling him humourless I mean to impugn his seriousness, categorically: such a man must rig up his probity ex nihilo.” It is worth pointing out firstly that this superb line occurs in a footnote, a reminder in itself that a true work ethic will make sure it prospers even at the margins. To commit to a path in life is tantamount to a blanket refusal to relax.

    But the sentence has far more in it to impart than the mere importance of Amis having written it when he might have got way with something lesser.

    For instance, note the comma before the word ‘categorically’: if a comma is a pause then Amis here takes a moment to tauten his bow before slinging his arrow. But there is also a patience here – a marshalling of care, which might be taken as containing pity for the target of the ensuing barb. It isn’t a sneer, but a tender corrective. It is also worth noting the marvellous switch to Latin with ‘ex nihilo’, which holds – and is held – in marvellous balance by the run of one-syllable words, and especially the Anglo-Saxon sounds of ‘rig up’. The overwhelming impression is of serenity – a calm contentment at his own gifts.

    Was this enough? This equilibrium in the Amis style loops back to his fundamental delight at his choices in life. He loved his job and his work, and never seriously deviated from it, unless one counts his foray into screen-writing with Saturn III, which abortive experience was immediately scooped up in the terrific gift of his masterpiece Money.

    What did writing mean to him as a career? Amis once described writing as “a sort of sedentary, carpet slippers, self-inspecting, nose-picking, arse-scratching kind of job, just you in your study and there is absolutely no way round that. So, anyone who is in it for worldly gains and razzmatazz, I don’t think will get very far at all.”

    In fact, Amis was so famous so young that he could have spent his life at parties. Zachary Leader has recalled that Amis, always kind to his friends, never mastered the art of saying no politely to invitations.

    But if there were hurt feelings, I think we can let those lapse now: the most important word in a writer’s vocabulary is ‘no’ – and had Amis not used it to so much we might not have London Fields. As Amis once said in relation to the emotional response of one of Bellow’s friends who didn’t like the way he’d been depicted in one of the master’s novels: “Well, that’s just tough.”

    What else does the Amis style point towards? There were the piled-up lists of horrified noticing, which are often allied to disgust at modernity: Amis was really a romantic at heart, appalled at this post-lapsarian world. This rhythmic rage was identified by John Updike in his review of Night Train (1997) – the critical mauling which hurt Amis most – as a ‘typical burst of Amis lyricism’. This trope was there from the beginning in this depiction of a street in 1973’s The Rachel Papers, which is seen as containing: “demonically mechanical cars; potent solid living trees; unreal distant-seeming buildings; blotchy extra-terrestrial wayfarers”. This brash listiness repeats throughout the oeuvre and is Amis’ way of showing how the ugliness of the world appears to be piling up exponentially, and can only be mitigated by being named – only when you do that do you begin to bring things back under control.

    This, then, is the Amis disgust, and in his worst novels this emotion could seem synonymous with a dislike of the working classes. There will always be those who think that he was dismissive about people with whom he could claim at best a slender acquaintance. On the other hand, he was creating a fictional universe not writing government policy, and those who read him as if they don’t know the difference will probably never enjoy a comic novel.

    Amis wrote much about the importance of a writer being generous to readers – by which, he appears to have meant being intelligible. For him Ulysses was too difficult, and Finnegan’s Wake an absurdity; even his own beloved Nabokov strayed into error with his late book Ada. My least favourite of Amis’ books for similar reasons is Time’s Arrow, a Holocaust story told backwards, and which gave me a migraine. But it was a brilliant idea even if it could never have been a readable book.

    I’d say that by the midpoint of his career, Time’s Arrow tells you all you need to know about Amis and the future – he didn’t welcome it, and wanted time itself to flow not forwards, but backwards. Again, he had his reasons. Most people who truly love writing know that the future can’t be everything it’s cracked up to be: Shakespeare died 407 years ago.

    Amis gives us a Britain – and then an America – in decline. Some have said that especially in Money, Amis depicts the excesses of late capitalism, which is true in so far as it goes, except that we don’t know how near its death capitalism really is. For all we know, it might be that he is the chronicler of its stodgy middle period.

    At any rate, Amis seems to be sitting too comfortably to one side of societal decay, regarding it. It’s always possible that someone may have some vast private George Michael-esque habit of philanthropy, but I find it hard to imagine Amis rolling his sleeves up to fix a problem; the idea of him ever running for office like Gore Vidal or Norman Mailer is palpably absurd. But perhaps there’s never been anyone better at describing the problems themselves.

    Even so, this sane opting out made politics a difficult subject for Amis. Something about history – though it fascinated him – didn’t sit easily with him creatively. This might be because he was a very sensory writer, and the past is out of reach. Gore Vidal – who Amis wrote brilliantly about – understood the past instinctively, but Amis can’t write about the past without straining after significance. The repetitions which Craig Brown satirised brilliantly in The Mail increase considerably in any book when Amis is grappling with the past. This is Brown pretending to be Amis:

    I am a serious. It is novels that I usually write: what I usually write is novels. And you know why I write? I write to fill the chiliastic lacuna of the aberrant psychotheatre in my headipops. And it all adds up to one thing. I am a serious.

    Hilarious as this is, you can only parody a style which is absolutely recognisable in the first place.

    Nevertheless, something like self-parody increases in frequency in Koba the Dread, The House of Meetings, The Zone of Interest, and The Second Plane – basically any book when Amis is taking on serious subject matter. It is the self-consciousness of taking on big topics which appears to get in the way of what he elsewhere regards as the crucial business of perception, which then leads necessarily, because the world is funny, to comedy. He once said that he continued to write about the Holocaust because he hadn’t come to understand it yet. This need to assimilate the unthinkable is really a sort of refusal of mysticism, and therefore a dead end. There has to be mystery in writing; it is the unseen energy which harnesses the instinct to do it at all. Amis couldn’t leave evil alone as a thing which just is and requires no special or new explanation. There has always been a strand of Judaeo-Christian thinking which regards the devil as essentially boring. Amis wasn’t at all of that tradition. In his best books he floated free of it in the comic mode. But when he sought to take on the Nazis or Stalin, he was rudderless.

    Similarly, he had no particular interest in goodness either. In this, as in much else, he is similar to Dickens, whose villains are vivid, but whose heroines – think Esther Summerson in Bleak House –  simper, as if goodness can’t ever have convincing embodiment. Updike wrote in that same review of Night Train that Amis’ fiction ‘lacks positives’. Though Amis always stopped short of Hitchens-style atheism arguing that it sounded like a ‘proof of something’ there may have been something ultimately a bit watery about his worldview which led to a somewhat unmoored intellectual life. This is what ultimately weakens the work undertaken outside the genre of comedy.

    But how wonderful he was when he was doing what he was best at. I think of the uproarious descriptions of Marmaduke in London Fields; of his description of Updike as a ‘psychotic Santa of volubility’; of the ‘nylon rain’ in Success; of the filmed sex scene in Money (‘You’re a tremendously ugly man, John’); his description of accompanying Blair during the end of his premiership, and finding himself becoming ‘mildly flirtatious’ with the PM; the idea in Experience, of Kingsley Amis’ last fall being a thing of ‘colossal administration’; and his great eulogy to Christopher Hitchens, to my mind the greatest speech by far of the post-War period in an admittedly poor period for orations generally.

    We go to Amis not to meditate on the complexity of the world, but for joyous laughter. And in this serious world there is sufficient dearth of that to make his passing an event very far from neutral: it’s time to go with delight and love back to the books. But as we do so, let’s ask ourself what the style pointed towards.

     

  • Review of Spielberg’s The Fabelmans: ‘a film which tells us our best can be more than enough’

    Photo credit: By Screenshot from the film’s trailer., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71734123

     

    Christopher Jackson

     

    The Fabelmans is plainly the capstone in Steven Spielberg’s remarkable career. It is many things: a cautionary warning about the effects of divorce; a celebration of family; a memoir of what life used to be like in 1950s suburbia. But above all it is a film about vocation and what it means to know what it is you want to do in life from an early age.

    That’s because Sammy Fabelman, who we trace in this film from early adolescence to early maturity is to all intents and purposes Spielberg himself – it is as close to an autobiography as we’ll get from him, to the extent that we don’t need one now.

    The film shows quite clearly that cinema hit Spielberg early on with unusual force – as it must have done almost everyone who encountered this new art form which would so come to alter the world. We first meet Fabelman, played by Gabriel LaBelle, in 1952 about to attend a performance of The Greatest Show on Earth by Cecil B. De Mille. He is nervous about entering the cinema, and then watching in astonishment as the film unfolds. Actually at this time, the film industry was already being impacted negatively by the invention of television: the U.S. Census Bureau, shows that weekly attendance dropped from 80 million in 1940 and 90 million in 1946 to 60 million in 1950 and 40 million in 1960.

    Yet something happens of lasting significance to Spielberg/Fabelman at the performance; the scene with the train accident takes hold of him, and later on, he tries to replicate it at home using his father’s 8mm camera. A film director is born. One of the insights in the film is that the first steps required an interest in the technology: the young Fabelman isn’t shown reading books about story-telling, but fiddling with film, and learning to operate the equipment. It’s a reminder that some form of technical knowledge often precedes true creativity.

    Fabelman is growing up in a talented home. His mother Mitzi, played by Michelle Williams, is a brilliant concert pianist who has failed to pursue her dreams due to the 1950s norm of staying at home to raise a family. Meanwhile, Fabelman’s father Burt is a high-flying electrical engineer in the world of computers, and a genius. It feels as though Spielberg himself is composed of a mixture of his mother’s musical sensibility and his father’s natural aptitude for technology.

    Like so many parents faced with creative children,  Burt views Sammy’s film-making as a hobby, no doubt worried – as a parents usually are with good reason – about Steven Spielberg’s financial future. A brief glance at Spielberg’s current net worth shows he needn’t have worried – but then he couldn’t have known that his son was destined to be the most successful filmmaker of all time.

    But this tees up the best scene in the film when Fabelman’s uncle Boris comes to stay. Sammy’s mother is ultimately too depressed – and caught up in an extramarital affair with Seth Rogen’s Bobby, an employee of her husband – to really have enough mental space to understand what ambitions are burning in Sammy. His father meanwhile doesn’t understand that play is really the ultimate seriousness if it can be made to alter hearts.

    But Boris, fresh from the circus, turns out to have Sammy’s number rightaway. He sees the situation clear. For instance, he observes the similarity between Sammy’s nascent gifts, and Mitzi’s thwarted potential: “He could have been that concert piano player. What’s she got in her heart is what you got.” Marching around the room in a stringy vest looking remarkably elastic and even powerful for an octogenarian, Uncle Boris also speaks the movie’s most memorable lines: “Art will give you crowns in heaven and laurels on Earth, but also, it will tear your heart out and leave you lonely. You’ll be a shanda for your loved ones. An exile in the desert. A gypsy. Art is no game! Art is dangerous as a lion’s mouth. It’ll bite your head off.”

    Art is indeed a game played at high stakes, but work generally is too – it is especially so for Burt whose computing genius cuts him off from humanity just as much as Sammy’s skills as a filmmaker. It’s this which ultimately distances him from his wife: it’s not easy to love geniuses since their thought patterns tend to land everywhere except their marriage.

    Watching the film, you are conscious that Spielberg all along had a great sadness in his life, but for the majority of his career – really until this film – he hasn’t tended to make art of high seriousness. His films, as Terry Gilliam has pointed out, tend towards the schmaltzy and the straightforward: he isn’t an auteur in the line of Stanley Kubrick. He is slicker than that – to the benefit of his bank account but probably to the detriment of art. This film shows that all along there was a serious filmmaker waiting to get out. But he chose to entertain instead, and this has given people much joy. Spielberg is an escapist, and we now see what it was he was escaping from.

    The film culminates in a marvellous scene where the young Spielberg writes to filmmakers looking for a job as a runner. His letter lands with Bernard Fein. Job-seekers will often find that life is changed by the generosity unique to people who actually reply to letters: many a career is begun by the fluke of finding them, and stymied by the lack of them.

    Fein mentions that the greatest living filmmaker is working across the corridor and this turns out to be John Ford. What follows is a marvellously cantankerous mentor-mentee scene, where Fabelman is asked to discuss some pictures on the wall.

    The takeaway is that pictures will be interesting if the horizon is slow, or if it’s high – but never interesting in between. It’s as good a piece of advice as any, but I think is offered with more than a small dose of: “You’re on your own.”

    We all are to some extent, but we take what advice we can and we do the best we can. This is a film which tells us that sometimes our best turns out to be much more than enough – and insodoing makes us optimistic about beginning again.

     

     

     

     

  • Christopher Wren at 300

    Christopher Jackson visits churches by Christopher Wren (1632-1723) in the City of London, and reports on the nature of work both in his day and in our own

     

    I am standing in St Stephen Walbrook with Helen Vigors who is Heritage Project Manager with the Diocese of London, and leading on the educational programme Wren at 300, the series of celebrations which marks the 300th anniversary of Wren’s death.

    I have been to this magnificent church before but today, with Vigors for company, I am looking at it like I’ve never done before. “One of Wren’s theories was that everybody should see the altar,” Vigors says, pointing to its central position. “Clear glass is also a feature of Wren,” she continues. “His quote was: ‘You can’t add beauty to light’. This is a particularly good example of natural light.” Then she gestures at the high windows, which eschew the principle of stained glass. “This whole area is quite compact – you have the Walbrook Club here, and Rothschilds there, and Starbucks and Bloomberg opposite. But the windows are quite high up and so it hasn’t had that theft of light by contemporary London.”

    Theft of light: the phrase has an undeniable resonance and sounds like it wants to be a broader metaphor, as if by being so modern we’ve somehow entered a sort of accidental dark ages when it comes to understanding the past which lies around us.

    Wren’s work is so ubiquitous that we struggle to see him. Wren’s contemporary Nicholas Hawksmoor’s popularity, helped by Peter Ackroyd’s novel Hawksmoor (1985), has increased. But with Hawksmoor, there are only six major churches to consider; quite a different proposition to Wren’s 21 (and at one time there were 51 plus St Paul’s Cathedral). The whole question of Christopher Wren can seem almost too big to make time for. Accordingly, we have built our modern life around him, always respecting him but very often ignoring him.

    Sometimes we’ve done worse than that. In his book-length essay On Beauty, Roger Scruton lists St Paul’s as an example of a building which has been destroyed by the ugliness which surrounds it – the protruding cranes, and the gigantic Norman Foster-ish monstrosities of glass which arguably spoil a once elegant skyline.

    When I ask Dr. Michael Paraskos, a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Centre for Languages, Culture and Communication at Imperial College about this, he is in strong agreement: “Roger Scruton is right. The enclosure of Wren’s Monument brings particular shame on the city. But I think there is a much bigger danger in London than just losing sight of Wren’s achievement. We are in danger of losing the city’s unique identity as a whole, which of course Wren helped establish.”

    When I ask him for examples, he says: “When you read about companies like Marks and Spencer wanting to trash not only their own history but the city’s by demolishing yet another building on Oxford Street, and a few years ago King’s College wanting to do the same with a great swathe of historic buildings in the Strand, you have to wonder what’s wrong with people.”

    As my afternoon with Helen continues, I come into a deeper realisation of how much of a pity this is. We have placed obstacles in the way of understanding one of the undisputed giants of our history – to all our detriment.

    We are, for one thing, too busy for him. Paraskos adds: “It’s worth remembering that barely a century ago, people still pulled down Wren churches without too much thought, and now we think of them as vandals. One day we will look on those who do the equivalent today and think the same. It’s a kind of stupidity.”

    Wren at 300 is a definitive pushback against this ‘stupidity’, and has many aspects to it: it is educational, historical and conservationist. I tell Helen that when we experience these buildings, it’s difficult to know what’s Wren and what’s not since the history of destruction is so layered and complex.

    She agrees: “It’s so difficult to unravel. St Mary Le Bow, for example, is completely rebuilt – but the things which are rebuilt are rebuilt to the Wren design. That church was the highest point in London before St Paul’s and it was really badly bombed.” But we’re not just talking about World War II: “The story of destruction starts with the Great Fire, and then the rebuilding, and then the Church Commissioners in the Victorian era took decisions which led to reduction in numbers. St Magnus the Martyr was moved with the widening of London Bridge. Then there was the Blitz.”

    It is an image of a vulnerable London, where every great achievement is subject to reversal. But perhaps it would be too simplistic to be only despairing about this. It is, after all, as much as to say that these structures exist in the present, and that contemporary skills are still required to keep them going: you can have a career today centred around old buildings.

    After a stroll down Queen Victoria Street, we arrive at St Mary Abchurch, a beautiful building I’ve not been to before, tucked away behind a construction site just off King William Street, and not far from the Monument.

    Looking up at the Grinling Gibbons reredos, Vigors tells me a bit more about the conservation side of Wren at 300: “The conservation project has two parts to it,” she says. “One is working with Cliveden Conservation Workshop and a number of different experts in different fields. We’re aiming it at the incumbents and staff at churches; we’re seeing how we can equip them in basic conversation techniques. Secondly, we’re doing public-facing things: we’re working with City and Guilds Art School and building Crafts College to deliver workshops.”

    So what are the opportunities in the sector which Wren at 300 is seeking to illuminate? “We have demonstrations of pointing, looking at mortars, and stone-cutting, and plastering. What we’re trying to do is to encourage all ages, and explain that this is a sector which needs people to see it as a potential career. It’s not the sort of thing sixth formers know about: the diplomas and qualifications and so on.”

    There’s also a tech emphasis to Wren at 300: “We’re also going to be looking at innovative techniques in conservation. We’re looking at model-making with drone footage and drone surveys and how you can model the future deterioration of a building.”

    The hope is that this focus on sustainability will have a knock-on effect throughout the City churches: “We’re looking at a number of Wren churches and how they can reach carbon net zero,” Vigors continues. “We’re working with a private architectural practice Roger Mears, as well as surveyors and the faculty at Nottingham Trent University. They’ve put sensors in six buildings and they hope to collect data. We want to make an assessment and support incumbents on that process and give them an idea of what’s possible. Heating is another question – whether you heat under person or under pew. We have warm places and cool places schemes. Eventually we’ll give a toolkit to incumbents.”

    We continue our walk, passing the London Mithraeum on our right, arriving in time at another Wren church, St Mary Aldermary, which has a thriving café.

    This church seems to have hardly anything in common with either of the two churches we’ve just visited. It has, for instance, stained glass which Wren was generally opposed to, and a certain charming wonkiness about the East window and the roof. When I ask Vigors about this, she replies: “We think it’s like because of the road system outside. Wren worked around problems. Neil McGregor [former Director of the British Museum] talks about how pragmatic Wren was – even when he did St Paul’s he had two designs. One was turned down for being too Italianate. One, which he thought was ugly, was accepted but he was told he could develop it – and he certainly did.”

    Another obstacle to understanding Wren is that his work is often so redolent of Italian architecture that one sometimes struggles to discern what in his work was borrowed and what was uniquely his. Vigors again stresses his pragmatism: “I think he was certainly influenced by Italian architecture but then he had to deal with the patrons he had here. They weren’t staunchly or puritanically protestant but they had a need for something to be less elaborate which is why you don’t see gold inside. He responded to each parish and each brief he got.”

    So just like architects today, he had to be flexible. What is Vigors’ sense of Wren as a man? “The fact that he was a courtier is probably central. There’s one lovely love letter to his wife; he was fond of his children but wished they’d been more intelligent than they were. The piece he wrote on his tomb: “If you want to see the man look around you” – I think that’s revealing. He also got on with six monarchs – he had to sail a clever path. He must have been a master of diplomacy. He sometimes got cross with builders and he wasn’t always happy with how things went. He was really annoyed when his first St Paul’s was turned down.”

    Wren, then, doesn’t seem to have drawn particular attention to himself. The image is similar in fact to Shakespeare or Leonardo da Vinci – of someone quietly getting things done, and not being in people’s faces too much. Greatness very often isn’t flashy; it’s about hard work.

    We walk next up to St Martin-within-Ludgate and there meet Susan Skedd who is leading on the social history aspect of the project, the findings of which already up onto discoveries about the world of work during Wren’s time. Skedd’s work has already revealed a rich world with a strong flavour of the contemporary. “One of the fascinating things is that we understand how the parish worked as a form of local government,” Skedd begins, her enthusiasm notable as we stand over a 300 year old chair over by the reredos. “They decided who could live there, and who would be kicked out, and these decisions sound contemporary.” It’s a reminder that for some people somewhere, there’s always a ‘cost-of-living’ crisis.

    Susan’s research has led her to look closely at the stories of the craft contractors who worked on Wren’s buildings. She’s asking who they were, where they lived and where they worked. “Masons were more than minor gentry, they were wealthy gentry,” she tells me. “One was William Emmett. He lived in the parish and had his workshop here. That’s our lens – and we’re moving at pace to create those stories.”

    This pushes back a bit at the idea of Wren as the archetypal great man – the unique genius who, one might almost imagine, built the world around us alone, and with his bare hands. Skedd laughs: “My easy way out of that idea is to point out that it was a team – it’s very modern. Neil McGregor calls it the ‘Wren system’. What’s extraordinary is the sense of the office and these amazing records which exist in the London Metropolitan Archives. You can see contractors presenting their bills and getting paid, and they’re witnessing each other’s payments.”

    This question of teamwork is something which also intrigues Paraskos: “I think it’s a really interesting question for anyone looking at Wren to face. How do we cope with the idea he was some kind of unique, one-off, genius? I think the answer is that, although he was undoubtedly very talented, none of what he achieved in architecture, or in science, would have been possible without lots of other talented people around him. We tend to know about the big names, like Robert Hooke and Nicholas Hawksmoor of course, but then there are half-forgotten people like Edward Woodroffe, John Oliver and Edward Pearce, all working in Wren’s office, drawing up plans, designing things and negotiating contracts as part of a team.”

    So the idea of the individual genius doesn’t quite hold water? Paraskos doesn’t think so: “Genius can be thought of as a kind of collective phenomenon, rather than an individual one. I think that was true in Wren’s architectural office, it was true in his scientific work at Oxford, and its true for artists and scientists today. I think it is misleading, but it’s also debilitating for people with real talent, to have to face the myth of genius, instead of the fact of co-operation.”

    Another theme is emerging from Skedd’s research: “Wren’s ecosystem was all about the question of “who you know”. For Wren’s buildings, people worked with people they trusted. You get the same people popping up time and again. And Wren could draw on the very best. People who are building not just in the Royal Palaces but for aristocratic clientele. This morning I was looking at an inventory at the death of a glazier called John Brace. He died mid-work and it listed all the clients who owed him money, and it’s this astonishing list of 20 or 25 people. These buildings aren’t in isolation; the people working on them are also working in Bloomsbury, Greenwich, and Hampton Court.”

    And what about the humbler people who toiled in the profession? “At the lower end of the scale I’ve come across another fascinating detail,” Skedd says. “There were two workmen – we don’t know their names – who were paid for five days to clear one of the sites, which would have included all the rubble and all of the detritus. That helps you understand the pace of work – it was done with real rapidity.”

    Vigors adds: “It’s obviously Office of Wren. In that period of 51 churches plus St Paul’s – you sometimes see ‘approved by Wren’. They’re not all by him. If you’ve got Hooke, and Woodruff and Hawksmoor as your right hand men, you don’t need to be involved in every project.” Skedd adds: “He presided over and inspired and could draw on an amazing array of talent.”

    It reminds me of Thomas Heatherwick or Frank Gehry with their hundreds of unsung employees: the world doesn’t change as much as we think it does. Skedd makes another point: “One of the other details I’ve come across with John Brace. You see in his inventory mathematical instruments – and you’re reminded that this is a time when science and architecture go hand in hand.”

    Of course, this is another area where Wren might be relevant in our own time, when it comes to the arguments over the curriculum and whether STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics

    or STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) subjects should get greater coverage on the curriculum for primary and secondary school pupils.

    Paraskos draws a broad lesson about Wren’s life as both a scientist and artist: “England has always forced people to specialise too soon and go either to science or the arts, and it’s no good for either science or art. When you look at Wren, or any of the great scientists of the past, it’s very rare for them to have no interest in art, or music, or literature. They were more rounded personalities than we seem to recognise. And Wren is the great example of that, using science to solve not only the technical problems of architecture, but as a kind of experimental method to try to understand aesthetic problems.”

    It’s this which, for Paraskos, gives the Wren churches their flavour. “That’s why you get such a lot of variety in Wren’s churches. Each one is a kind of aesthetic experiment. So, he takes the idea of a dome he sees when he visits Paris, he tests it out at St Mary on the Hill in London, then at St Stephen Walbrook, then at St Mary Aldermary, until he’s finally ready to make the most beautiful dome of them all, at St Paul’s Cathedral. That’s interdisciplinarity in action.”

    But for Paraskos it’s unhelpful to try and recruit Wren as a poster boy for the cause of STEAM being added to the curriculum: “This is a loaded question as I can only really give my own view and then try to ascribe it to Wren. I suppose what we can say is that what we see in Wren is someone who believed science is important, and who believed the aesthetics of architecture is important. From that starting point we should perhaps ask ourselves whether the increasing exclusion of the arts and humanities from education also show a belief that both science and aesthetics are important? I would say no. But the whole debate is based on a fallacy that there is a distinction to be made between different aspects of human behaviour. That somehow, when a scientist is engaging in an experiment they are not being creative, or that an artist painting a picture or composing a complex poetic metre is not being methodical. It shows a lack of understanding of what it is to be human not to see that we are integrated personalities, in which we move between different ways of thinking and acting all the time. I would question whether our education system understands that.”

    As we walk out of St-Martin-within-Ludgate, I ask Vigors what will come out of Wren at 300?  “We want there to be not only an appeal but a feasibility study about how the buildings are used,” she says, “and how we can get people in through education, research and community engagement. Obviously the congregations are falling but the buildings are here, and they’re an amazing resource.”

    They are indeed – and because of Wren’s longevity we’ll be doing it all over again in nine years’ time when it comes to the 400th anniversary of his birth. It’s a reminder that Wren isn’t going anywhere, so we need to engage with him now.

     

    To find out more about Wren at 300 go to: wren300.org

     

  • Film roundup: Why it’s a good year for female film directors at Cannes

    Meredith Taylor

     

    Talk to any young person seeking a career in the arts, television or film and the creative industries, the one place that they want to attend is the Cannes Film Festival that takes place each year on France’s Cote d’Azur.

    The 76th Festival, 16th – 27th May, is set for a legendary year with Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Robert De Niro and Leonardo DiCaprio, and an out-of-competition world premiere of Indiana Jones and The Dial of Destiny from James Mangold.

    Some of the best names in cinema will be crowding the Croisette in May – in fact, it’s hard to think which stars won’t be on the famous Red Carpet for this year’s epic celebration announced by General Delegate Thierry Fremaux.

    The 2023 competition line-up includes new films from Wes Anderson, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Todd Haynes, Nanni Moretti and Aki Kaurismäki. The programme also includes the latest from cinema greats Wim Wenders, Takeshi Kitano, Victor Erice and Catherine Breillat. Seven female directors – one making her feature debut – will compete for the coveted main prize: the Palme d’Or.

    Palme d’Or hopefuls include Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda, who won in 2018 with Shoplifters and is now back in Cannes competition with Monster, and Nanni Moretti with Il Sol Dell’Avvenire after winning the main prize with The Son’s Room in 2001. Nuri Bilge Ceylan, won the Palme in 2014 with Winter Sleep, and comes back with About Dry Grasses, a family story set between Istanbul and small town Anatolia, billed as his most ambitious to date and running at over three hours.

    Wes Anderson’s latest Asteroid City promises to be as quirky as ever and stars Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Steve Carell and Tilda Swindon. Todd Haynes’ May December features Natalie Portman, Julianne Moore in another emotional rollercoaster. But humour will undoubtedly come from Finland’s Aki Kaurismäki and Dead Leaves, his first film in six years.

    Veteran Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas) makes a reappearance in Cannes with his Japan-set drama Perfect Days, together with a documentary Anselm, a portrait of German painter Anselm Kiefer, one of two films about artists, the second being Martin Provost’s Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe exploring the love story between the renowned French painters Pierre Bonnard and his wife Marthe. With love in the air, one time partners Benoit Magimel and Juliette Binoche team up again for La Passion de Dodin Bouffant, a 19th century romance between a gourmet and his cook, from Vietnam-born French director Tran Anh Hung.

    Jessica Hausner is one of seven female directors in the main competition this year, with Club Zero. She joins Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher, who directs her sister Alba, Josh O’Connor and Isabella Rossellini in La Chimera. French filmmaker Justine Triet will present her thriller Anatomy of a Fall. Catherine Breillat, another seasoned French director, will be there with Last Summer starring Léa Drucker and Olivier Rabourdin; Catherine Corsini with her latest Le Retour ; Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Man Who Sold His Skin) is coming with Four Daughters. A feature debut for Senegalese-French director Ramata-Toulaye Sy with Banel & Adamawill premiere in competition this year.

    It takes a Brazilian/Algerian director (Karim Ainouz) to make a film about Henry the VIII, but forget Hilary Mantel, Firebrand, billed as a ‘history horror story’, has a British writing team behind it: Henrietta and Jessica Ashworth, best known for the BAFTA-winning series Killing Eve. The stars are Alicia Vikander, Eddie Marsan, Jude Law and Simon Russell Beale.

    One of this year’s most anticipated films vying for the Palme d’Or is from English auteur Jonathan Glazer (Sexy Beast, Under the Skin): The Zone of Interest is an Auschwitz-set love story inspired by a novel of the same name by Martin Amis. British Oscar winner Steve McQueen brings Occupied City, a documentary that looks back at Amsterdam under Nazi-occupation. Also from England comes Molly Manning Walker, a graduate of the NFTS, with her debut feature that goes by the buzzworthy title of How to Have Sex. Let’s just hope that this and all the others live up to expectations.

     

    Meredith Taylor is the film editor at Finito World

     

    Photo caption: Catherine Deneuve, on the set of La Chamade, Cote d’Azur, June 1, 1968. Copyright Jack Garofalo/Paris Match/Scoop

     

  • An Interview with revered clinical psychotherapist Dr. Paul Hokemeyer about Get Back and workplace toxicity

    Finito World interviews Dr. Paul Hokemeyer about the Beatles film ‘Get Back’ as a study in workplace toxicity

     

    Psychologically speaking, how do toxic work situations arise and why is it that we find them so difficult to deal with?

     

    Toxic work situations mirror toxic family of origin situations. In them, we and our colleagues consciously and unconsciously play out unresolved patterns from our primary developmental relationships. In my work, I’ve seen this is particularly true in creative industries where there are fewer organizational boundaries to keep people operating with a modicum of decorum. Toxic work relationships arise because people feel threatened. They feel they are not getting what they need to feel safe and secure in the organization. The best way to look at this is through the lens of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. In this lens, people can only be their highest and best self and produce their best work when their physical and emotional needs are satiated and they operate in a culture of psychological safety.

     

    We struggle to productively deal with toxic work relationships because they affect us on the most primal level of our being. In them, we are constantly feeling the whole of our being is under attack. In this state of being, our limbic system goes on overdrive. It keeps us in a state of hypervigilance and stress. Our central nervous system floods us with stress hormones such as Cortisol and causes our prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain that rules our rational behaviours and enables us to make smart strategic decisions, to go offline. Many times we can see these toxic patterns clearly, but because our neurophysiology is operating through a place of stress and danger, we are paralyzed from making rational decisions and taking reparative actions to change things.

     

    In Get Back, Paul McCartney emerges as a boss figure. He seems in some way a micromanager, particularly of George Harrison. How should we deal with micromanagers and ensure we retain our equilibrium in these situations?

     

    One of the defining features of anxiety disorders is a compulsive need to control what feels out of control. Micromanagers are operating from a place of heightened anxiety. Once we understand the etiology of their behaviours we can create a plan to address them. The best way to do this is to focus first on self and second on the other. Become conscious of what your manager fears most. Look for her triggers. Everyone has hot buttons that send them into states of emotional reactivity. Once you’ve identified these patterns in your manager, consciously strive to go above and beyond in your efforts in these areas. Also, address these issues directly with your manager. Ask her straight out what you can do to improve your service to her and the organization in these areas. The mere fact that you evidence awareness of her triggers and are diligently and intentionally striving to improve in these areas will go far in reducing her anxiety and enable her to put her focus on someone or something else.

     

    To be fair to McCartney he is partly in a position of authority due to a greater talent – his ability to play more instruments than the others for instance means that he invades their space more. How should CEOs and managers deal with extremely gifted individuals to ensure that they don’t alter the balance of a workplace setting?

     

    The construct of psychological safety is every bit as relevant in creative families as it is in traditional organizations. Through it, people feel safe to fail and have a voice that’s outside the norm. Studies show that a culture rich in psychological safety produces exceptionally innovative work and is made up of happy, healthy employees. Managers who are working with extremely gifted employees will be well served to look at the foundations of the construct. At its core, a culture of psychological safety ensures that people will not be humiliated or punished for challenging the cultural norm or speaking up against authority. It requires managers to have healthy egos and to have a mechanism for managing their own issues of narcissism, insecurity and self esteem.

     

    Contrastingly, Ringo Starr in the film seems to carry himself extremely well, and maintain excellent relationships with all people, even in an increasingly toxic situation. How is he able to do this and what might we learn from him?

     

    As in most challenging situations, successful resolution comes not from investing your principal energy in changing the system but rather on focusing on how you can change your reaction to the toxicity that exists in the system in which you are operating. In short, this means coming up with healthy ways to manage the toxicity that surrounds you.  The first step in this process is to accept the reality of the situation. Toxic work environments exist. Yes, you might be able to change them but the probability of changing major systems can be quite low and the return on your risk in trying to change them low.   Instead focus, like Ringo Starr focused, on that in which there is a high probability of success and a high return on investment. As we see in the film, Ringo had the most balanced life. He had a rich and rewarding personal life and invested his human and relational capital through a diverse intrapersonal and interpersonal portfolio. He manifested resilience, which is the capacity to make meaning from setbacks and grit which is the capacity to tolerate short term discomfort for a long term gain.

     

     

  • Christopher Jackson reviews Bob Dylan’s Philosophy of Modern Song: “A great career has its basis ultimately in enthusiasm’

    Christopher Jackson

     

    ‘Curioser and curioser,’ said Alice.” The lines come from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland but might easily have been describing the career of Bob Dylan.

    In Dylan’s world nothing is ever what we might expect, and it’s this quality of oddity which has created the obsessiveness of so-called Dylanologists. And now, just as his recording career has settled down into the possible endpoint of 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, and his art career seems also established in a comfortable retrospective – called Retrospectrum – at the Frost Art Museum, we get something altogether different again. Indefatigability is an underrated character of high achievers: Dylan is stubborn and remorseless, able to find an audience while remaining tied to deliberate mystery.

    His literary career is brief, and occasional – a fact which alone makes it peculiar to consider that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. But his output in books shows in microcosm his essential strangeness. First comes an incomprehensible novel Tarantula, released during the height of 1960s mayhem. Dylan then releases in 2003, a magnificent memoir Chronicles Vol., only to eschew publication of a second. Now we have something altogether different to what we were expecting – except if we had recalibrated our expectations to anticipate the improbable.

    Strangeness will not always amount to genius, but it is impossible when reading this latest offering The Philosophy of Modern Song not to remember Schopenhauer’s remark that talent hits a target no other can hit, and genius a target none can see.

    There’s never been a book like this. The book consists of 65 essays on songs which have influenced Dylan, mainly by men – as numerous reviewers have pointed out – and predominantly emanating out of the 1950s of his youth. Most of them have essays in the second person. Many feel oddly pertinent. This riff, for instance, on Elvis Presley’s ‘Money Honey’ feels relevant to the inflationary status quo:


    This money thing is driving you up the wall, it’s got you dragged out and spooked, it’s a constant concern. The landlord’s at your door and he’s ringing the bell. Lots of space between the rings, and you’re hoping he’ll go away, like there’s nobody home.

    Dylan recently sold his back catalogue to Universal for around $300 million, but there is somehow an authentic note to this – a wisdom which has come his way through songs. It was Eddie Izzard who joked that fame tended to injure comedy as you can’t begin a joke with ‘My butler went to the supermarket.’ Dylan doesn’t always get it right; after this book was published, it emerged that copies of this book masquerading as possessing his unique signature had in fact been signed electronically. It was unacceptable, but in this book, the writer gives the impression of being able to get to the core of things, even when looking at the world through the tinted glass of a limousine.

     

    Sometimes, as in the extended riff on ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ – Dylan writes about the Carl Perkins and not the Presley version – the predominant note is comic:

     

    You get on with most people, and you put up with a lot, and you hardly get caught off guard, but your shoes are something else. Minor things may annoy you but you rise above them. Having your teeth kicked in, being pounded senseless, being dumped on and discredited, but you don’t put any weight on that, none of it’s as real to you as your shoes. They’re priceless and beyond monetary worth. 

    The chapter only grows more absurd until Dylan writes of these shoes: “They neither move nor speak, yet they vibrate with life, and contain the infinite power of the sun.” It’s writing which is a joy in itself but also transforms your listening. Spotify already has several playlists featuring the songs in this book: it is a transformative listen as well as a transformative read.

    Another aspect to this book is the curation of its splendid photographs which makes the book a luxury object and also ups the price to £35 at the same time. The collection is prefaced by a fascinating portrait of a young Elvis browsing in a record store; ‘London Calling’ by the Clash is illustrated by a picture of bobbies breaking up a riot; ‘Cheaper to Keep Her’ by Johnnie Taylor, includes an ad for a divorce law firm.

    That chapter also contains an intriguing invective against the divorce law profession which, having been through several marriages, is a topic close to Dylan’s heart. It’s not the only passage which feels autobiographical. Dylan’s love of London is brought out when discussing The Clash:


    London calling – send food, clothing, airplanes, whatever you could do. But then, calling is immediate, especially to Americans. It wouldn’t be the same as Rome calling or Paris calling or Copenhagen calling or Buenos Aires, or Sydney, or even Moscow. You can pass off all these calls with somebody saying, “Take a message, we’ll call you back.” But not with London calling. 

    Likewise a dissertation on the little known singer Johnny Paycheck delivers this thought from the man who began life as Robert Zimmerman: “And then there are those who change their own names, either on the run from some unseen demon of heading toward something else.”

    It all amounts to a new kind of colloquialised, aestheticized and poeticised music criticism. It’s a homage to all that Dylan has known and loved, and perhaps in that sense has a valedictory feel: but then once you’re 81 everything feels like a goodbye. Yet you’re also reminded that the book is at the same time a hello, and a gift. It reminds you of Dylan’s explanation of his songwriting: “Every song I’ve ever written is saying: ‘Good luck, I hope you make it’.”

    Despite a bit of padding here and there, taken in the round the book has the feeling of necessity: Dylan’s long career appears to have taught him to wait on the vital inspiration. His latest records, now spread further and further apart to the extent that one wonders whether to expect another, have the same quality this book has of things which had to be done, since they could only be done by Dylan – and only done by him at the moment when they were carried out. All great artists are opportunists in that then they end up claiming all the prizes going.

    Greed is an aspect of Dylan’s life – or perhaps hunger. Because alongside this selectiveness of projects is also the other side to him: profusion, growth, energy, and restlessness. These qualities are all encapsulated by the Neverending Tour which has just swung through the UK during the publication of this book.

    There are limits to this book: you can sense that by the last 10 songs or so, the exercise has been largely spent and that some of the tropes have become repetitive. But this sense is more than offset by the enormous impact which the first half has: it feels regenerative, and makes you want to listen again not just to these songs, but to all music.

    A great career has its basis ultimately in enthusiasm. What we glimpse here is the power of that early passion for music which the young Dylan had: it was this which propelled him forwards, changing popular culture along the way, and eventually entering the annals of the true greats. The value of this book is that it needn’t necessarily apply to budding musicians: its lessons are transferable across sectors.

    We also sense that it is just a tiny corner of a voluminous mind. Artists who Dylan knew well – most notably Leonard Cohen and The Beatles – don’t feature at all. So this books suggests other books which will likely remain unwritten – at least unwritten by Dylan.

    This is a book which doesn’t mind who you are or where you are. It only wants to grip you and never let you go until you succeed. In another sense it doesn’t mind what you do, provided you listen to the music.

     

    The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan is published by Simon and Schuster (£35)

     

  • Film review: What does the case of Elvis Presley tell us about work?

    Christopher Jackson

    We sometimes talk as a society as though being successful were somehow the be-all and end-all – as if it were somehow all that mattered in and of itself. Some time in the 21st century, the cry went up that fame was all, and that a particular set of metrics mattered. In the world of music, it would mean that marvellous Holy Grail: the hit, the platinum disc.

    The history of rock and roll seems on the face of it to make it clear in bold italics that this entire thing was always a gigantic folly. Success as a musician, especially in an era of drug-taking and alcoholism made respectable, has with astonishing regularity meant premature death.

    In the light of the 2020s, the life expectancy of the rock star seems sometimes to veer wildly between those who die very young, such as Moon, Hendrix, Brian Jones, Michael Hutchence and so on, to the recent spate of octogenarians, including Bob Dylan, Paul Simon, Paul McCartney, and Brian Wilson. It is as if, if you can somehow manage not to die, then a hedonistic lifestyle can shade by gradations of mellowing into a pampered one, until a kind of creased longevity is achieved.

    Elvis, of course, did die – or rather didn’t manage not to. In fact, his death lacks the Chatterton-esque Romanticism of some of his peers, since he declined physically to such an extent before his eventual demise.

    But the fact that the Elvis legend persists is all to do with the enormity of his impact, and Baz Lurhmann’s excellent film, evokes that like no other biopic about Elvis.

    Listening to Elvis today can be a perplexing, even tame experience. Though we still to some extent inhabit the world of Elvis, we don’t always realise it: for one thing recording technology has come a long way since that time, robbing his sound of its original shock and immediacy. This state of affairs is to some extent exacerbated by the way in which the typical Elvis mix on Spotify or iTunes is a bewildering mix of his early stuff, which really was revolutionary, with the later Vegas work, which seems schmaltzy today.

    What lessons does the film have for a music career? In the first place, we see in the early scenes that great achievement is very often to do with being open to influence and to new information. Elvis’ real legacy was to listen to the great black music of the 1950s, and to open himself up to its influence – and insodoing to further it.

    There is a tremendous scene where the boy Elvis, is peeping through a window, and sees a black rock and roll band, and experiences the thrill and pulse of that music as a thing which he must have in his life – and the only way to do that will be to emulate it. It is often said that when Elvis first came on the radio, people assumed his vocal chords belonged to a black singer.

    In all our careers, there is knowledge which may have a forbidden quality; Elvis is a reminder of the potential benefits of running roughshod over that kind of prohibition, and of imbibing influence wherever it can be found.

    In the film, this idea that Elvis sounded black on the radio is conveyed to us through Tom Hanks’ performance of Colonel Tom Parker. The question of Tom Hanks in this movie is worth a small essay in itself. Hanks, an actor – and to the extent that one can be sure of these things – probably a man to admire is nevertheless the main problem with this movie. Some critics have pointed to his disastrous accent as the principal issue with Hanks’ performance and it is indeed a strange mishmash.

    I think the problem with the performance runs deeper in that Hanks, among major artists of our time, seems to me to be someone with an innate relationship to goodness. In this, he is similar to Paul McCartney, who can never keep optimism out of his songs: his inherent tendency is towards consolation. If you look at his performance in A Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood (2019) you can see him exploring a terrain – in that case, saintliness – which he feels a natural kinship with.

    Here, in Elvis, he is fatally severed from the subject matter of human evil, meaning that he is at an odd distance from the essential topic of the performance. It is like a singer choosing to sing out of range, or a writer with no ability for dialogue switching from novel to the drama.

    The resulting performance doesn’t quite derail the movie, though it comes close. Elvis himself seems to have been born with something opposite: an innate capacity to know what could and couldn’t be done with a song on stage. Luhrmann’s movie shows that this ability was something that he first had to learn to wield: nervousness is something everybody must overcome at some point, and it is interesting to see Austin Butler convey Elvis’ tentative first steps into his gift.

    The greatest question for anyone with a creative bent is how to make money from it. It’s quite rare that an ability with the arts comes hand in hand with a talent for administration; the two aptitudes must occupy different parts of the brain, and where the one is accentuated the other is likely to be in deficit. So it was with Elvis; an outsize performative gift opened him up to exploitation, and he met, in the shape of Parker, a master exploiter.

    The film consistently shows Elvis seeking his authentic self in the teeth of the man committed to falsifying that self – and to commercialising the image he has created. A TV show, which looks like it will be an embarrassment of Christmas cliché perpetrated by the Colonel, is pushed back at by Elvis. Later, we see him inaugurating his big sound in Las Vegas.

    Elvis sometimes appears here as a great artist – a man with an unfailing sense of what audiences want, but able to enact something at some farther point just beyond that vague idea.

    In one sense, Elvis is still with us. We still have our popstars identifiable by one name – Beyoncé, Drake, Jay-Z, and so on. They are, to some extent, his inheritors. But not entirely. In another sense, the world has moved past his obsessions, or begun to wise up to the danger of self-indulgence. Today’s young people are often teetotal, and as likely to wear sneakers and design an app as they are to pick up a guitar and take drugs: they’re the better for it. Some of the 1960s susceptibility to self-indulgence was probably an inheritance of the Second World War: when life has been constricted and dangerous for so long, who could resist that bright day when it came along? It was not a time for the stricture of virtue. It was time to live again.

    This is a film which does more than listening to Elvis’ records can to describe his greatness. It shows how the compulsion of the performer can rise to art, and how if that performance can be captured in sound, a memory lingers on.

    What Luhrmann ultimately does is regenerate Elvis, and remind us what he did. He dragged the past with him into the future, and though he died along the way, he is as much an aspect of our lives today as the atomic bomb, or Winston Churchill, or Martin Luther King, or any of the other seismic things of the 21st century.

    The film ends with footage of a magnificent performance by Presley himself of Unchained Melody. Desperately overweight, and sweating under lights, he nevertheless finds the notes as only the great entertainers do – the more so when the chips are down, and the world is difficult. They find the right notes because they have to, because it’s what they do – and because of decades of practice at doing so.

  • That humorous feeling: how much comedy in the workplace is too much?

    That humorous feeling: how much comedy in the workplace is too much?

    The witty can sometimes prosper in the workplace, but take it too far and you may have a problem, writes Lana Woolf

    Stephen Fry once said of the great Peter Cook that he was never unfunny, never ‘off ’. When Finito World caught up with the legendary comedian – and great friend of Cook – John Cleese earlier in the year, we asked him what he thought of Finito, and he showed us that he, too, never turns off the taps.

    When we told him about our mentoring programs, he was immediate: ‘It’s a very decent thing to do. I’ve heard of a finishing school – and I know Finito is Italian for finished because I eat a lot of Italian food – and I finish it all. But I’ve never heard of a finished school.’

    While we were laughing he was continuing, ‘I have heard of Finnish schools but they’re something quite different.’

     

     

    The Monty Python and A Fish Called Wanda star went on to share some advice as to how to forge a happy career. He quotes American comedian George Burns as saying: ‘If you do something you love, then you don’t have to do a day’s work for the rest of your life.’

    Wise advice, but our encounter with Cleese also had us thinking about an implied lesson that may be as important: what role does humor play in the workplace?

    Well, success in life can sometimes be attributed to ability to get on with people, and that is always to do an appreciation of nuance, which usually goes hand in hand with an ability to navigate intricate situations. The amusing are often, though not always, empathetic.

    Sometimes this proposition can have vivid illustrations. It was Jerry Seinfeld who observed that in US Presidential races it is an unwritten law of politics that the funnier candidate always wins. Obama was always funnier than Romney or John McCain; George Bush Jr. was funnier than Al Gore or John Kerry; Ronald Reagan was funnier than Jimmy Carter or Walter Mondale. Clinching for the theory, Donald Trump Jr. was demonstrably funnier than Hillary Rodham Clinton.

    But does this translate in the same way in the workplace, which is a less performativity space than electoral politics? Part of the force of a personality like, for instance, Sir Martin Sorrell derives from the sense that he might at any moment bark with delighted laughter even at a difficulty.

    Pat Thompson is the founder and managing director of Thompson Dunn, a central London-based psychologists’ firm. For 30 years Thompson has worked with CEOs on organizational culture and creativity in business: ‘I used to deal with delinquent adolescents and then went onto work for Michael Page selecting senior executives. I was once asked: ‘What’s the difference between a delinquent adolescent and a CEO. I replied: “Pinstriped trousers”.’

    The jury is out on how funny this is, but Thompson is arguing that humor is a way of making a ‘a difficult truth say able’. It is a form of smoothing – of moving the dialogue forwards in a way that we might miss if we proceeded solely in an earnest register. When asked about humor’s wider role, Thompson offers a two-word THAT HUMOROUS FEELING answer which dovetails with my own experience of office life: ‘Stress release.’

    A joke, said Nietzsche, is ‘an epigram on a death of a feeling’: the power of comedy is that it discharges feeling which had been accruing by admitting to that feeling and thereby ousting it.

    However, Thompson has a cautionary word about taking things too far, warning against becoming an office prankster à la David Brent in The Office. She also explains that one’s relationship to humor will depend on the tenor of the organization you work for. This can be challenging for women, she explains, recalling how ‘humor in the City was a darker shade of blue in a male-oriented environment. Women are often the butt of a joke and you have to cope with it. In financial services, you have to develop a thicker skin.’

    Moving on up: can a sense of humor lead to swifter promotion?

    Liam Williams is a professional comedian known for Sheep’s and Lad hood and the now the author of a brilliant debut novel Homes and Experiences. So what led him towards his career? ‘In the workplace, I’ve never known where the line is, and I was drawn to being a professional comedian because you are necessitated to go over that line.’

    Did he enjoy: ‘I found that having a laugh with my colleagues was the only thing that got me through the less fulfilling aspects of the job. Obviously, you don’t want to be like David Brent in The Office and you need to find a happy medium between not being too buttoned-up and boring, and not being the idiot with the Homer Simpson tie.’

    He notes that much humor comes from ‘absurd corporate language. This twee idea of ‘We’re all a family” – of language that comes down from on high and doesn’t mean anything to us. There’s so much euphemism.’

    Employers, then, must be careful not to alienate their employees with language that doesn’t match their real experience. A recent podcast produced by Fair Acre Press called ‘Word Bin’ invited participants to choose their preferred word to bin. A huge number of the choices related to corporate culture: normalcy, incentivize, optimized, moving forward, thinking out of the box, reach out/ reaching out, cascading down, time urgent, upgrade, inputting and solutions.

    Nadia Kingsley, the founder of the podcast, told us: ‘I was surprised at how passionately people wanted to bin some corporate speak. Having never worked in an office myself it was a real eye-opener. Some of the binning’s reveal something more than ridiculous management speak – but the old-fashioned hierarchy. For instance, the phrase ‘cascading down’, refers to minions who aren’t good enough to actually go to the conference but are given a version of it by someone above us.’

    Former deputy prime minister David Ludington makes a useful distinction between humor in the public and private spaces. Recalling life as the de facto no.2 in Theresa May’s 10 Downing Street, he explains: ‘Humor is vitally important in private. In a tense meeting, a well-timed and well-phrased quip can defuse tension. In the same way, if you looked at both Betty Boothroyd and Lindsay Hoyle operate as Speaker of the House, a joke or an aside can ensure that those tensions which had been building up would suddenly lapse.’

    Ludington also points to its impact in a speech: ‘Humor changes the register but also helps the audience to concentrate. A successful joke will make the audience listen as they’ll wonder whether there’ll be another joke coming. And humor that’s well received can get people on your side.’

    But he also has a warning against humor used against a political opponent which may also apply to life in a more ordinary workplace. ‘The risk is you get written off as a comic. You need to show you have the comic and the serious. In Shakespeare’s tragedies – even in Hamlet – you have tragedy and serious side by side.’

    Then Ludington laughs, recalling some of the inevitable ups and downs of government. ‘The truth is it sometimes feels more like a black farce. And black humor can keep you going in the inner team.’ This chimes with Thompson’s remarks: ‘Humor is an aspect of positive psychology. If you face difficulty in an organization, then looking on the bright side includes humor.’

    And if all that doesn’t work, and you find yourself caught in a job you dislike at the age of 40? Then John Cleese has some advice: ‘Don’t just take the money. But if you do and you get to 40, you can always kill yourself, I suppose.’ Black humor indeed.

     

  • The English Teacher: A poem about mentorship by Diego Murillo

     

     

    The English Teacher

     

     

    There is always one latent in your life,

    who will shape you to your own advantage.

    Mine was Balkwill. Chaucer-fat. Quotation-rife.

    Flushed with good booze, and dying in a rage.

     

    Rushing to complete his time, he came in

    for the lesson, ranted in despair about his death.

    The next day he swept through, played Beethoven –

    the Ninth – from start to finish. Nodded – left.

     

    In those days, it meant little. How could we see

    past youth to bear witness to him dying in such glory?

    We told ourselves it was how the world was framed:

    to the wise came decay; to the brilliant, shame.

     

    Yet to suspect all this – the passion he held

    in that last summer of his, though dissolving in his palm,

    was to long to join him in whatever he loved,

    and do it ongoingly. This is how we all link arms:

     

    When he died we knew that we’d been chosen.

    In his each and every fantastic literary whim –

    Hardy, Shakespeare, Coleridge, Wilde, Owen –

    he’d lived. We would too – and if we could, live like him.

     

     

    Diego Murillo