The Public Realm and the Public Good

This is a pair of Supertrees.  They're in Singapore, at a place called Supertree Grove, which is part of the Gardens by the Bay; and they've made me think about one of the ways we do public space in the UK.  But I need to set things up a bit first.

I'd not expected to like Singapore; or, more strongly, I'd expected not to like it.  It's got a reputation for being a bit preppy, a bit too hyper-capitalist, a bit authoritarian, a bit... well, a bit neat.  But I went there for a conference in 2010, and I loved it.  I got a sense that the reputation was accurate to an extent, but only to an extent.  For sure, it's authoritarian, and it does a good show of being very ordered.  But it's also completely bonkers.  Not that I can put my finger on exactly why, of course.  But it is.  If you've been, you'll know what I mean.  If you don't... you should go.  (Forced to elaborate, I'd say something about the juxtaposition of the hyper-modern and sleek with the rather more ramshackle; about the way that finance capital rubs shoulders with food hawker stalls; about the way that Taoist temples in Chinatown and Hindu shrines in Little India are only a few minutes walk from gleaming skyscrapers.  Bonkers, for sure - but also beautiful.)

Anyway: I got the chance to go back there at the beginning of this month, on a work thing.  I made a show of reluctance, but I did want to go back.  And while there, I wanted to go to see Supertree Grove, which wasn't there last time.  These "trees" are a bit hard to describe.  They're big.  They're a funny shape.  They look like something from the cover of a sci-fi paperback.  Part of their function is to be a component of exhaust and aircon system for the biomes.  But they're obviously much more than that; another part of their function is aesthetic.  They're home to thousands of plants, and are artworks in their own right.  They fit perfectly into the bonkers-but-beautiful theme.

As it goes dark, they're illuminated; and twice an evening, there's a 15-minute son et lumière show.  It's cheesy as hell, but there's no shame in giving in to that every now and again.  And this is the bit that made me think about public space in the UK and in Singapore.  Though you have to pay to go into the biomes, the rest of Gardens by the Bay is free - including the son et lumière.  Not only that; there's no branding.  Were it in the UK, I'm pretty sure that there'd be signs all over the place trumpeting that the show was brought to you in conjunction with SuperBank MegaCorp, and there'd be an announcement to that effect as well (as if SuperBank MegaCorp had any relevance at all to the lives of the people watching).  And in hyper-capitalist Singapore?  Nothing like that.  It's just there.  A good thing, provided pro bono publico - which may be what makes the cheesiness of it OK.

Dunkirk, British, and the Germans

OK. So I went to see Dunkirk, because the reviews have been almost universally excellent, and because (a) it was endorsed by Nigel Farage, and (b) everyone pointed out that Farage had missed the point.  Farage missing the point is hardly news; but I wanted to see how he'd missed it.

 

(In what follows, there may be spoilers.  But since what actually happened at Dunkirk is a matter of record, and since there're no twists, I'm not too fussed about that.  I'll say a little about a couple of characters, but nothing that'll mar the film.)

Now, I can see why Brexiteers are getting all excited about the film.  Dunkirk is part of the British national story, and anything that tells a story about plucky British fortitude in the face of a threat from Ze Hun is going automatically to have them wanking themselves square then round again.  In other words, it matters little what the content of the film actually was: it'd've been coopted into the Brexit narrative somehow.  No contortion would have been too wild, because if you've got a fixed idea about that threat and a need for the British to retreat back to the safety of Blighty in the face of a threat from the Continent... well, you get the picture.

And I know I have an idée fixe about Brexit from the other side, too.  But this is my blog, so you'll have to lump it.

Anyway: back to the point I was going to make, which is that those Brexiteers have missed the point entirely.  Dunkirk's an avowedly anti-nationalist film.  And that's apparent from the first minute - from before any character appears on the screen.

The first thing we see is a one-sentence preamble telling us about how the British and French armies have been forced into retreat by "the enemy".  Note that Christopher Nolan doesn't talk about the Allied forces being forced into retreat by "the Germans" or "the German Army" or anything like that.  "The enemy" is in a way more menacing - but it's hard to see how it's anything other than a deliberate move so as not to name the Germans.  One might go a bit further, and infer that Nolan is indicating that Nazism was not German, or at least that there's a clear distinction to be made between what might have been done in the name of Germany and what was done in the name of the Third Reich.  There might be mileage in that - lots of contemporary Germanophiles thought so - but it's not a rabbit I want to chase here.  It's enough to point out that, in the most obvious way, Nolan has deliberately avoided making this a story about Germans and Englishmen.

Thus primed, I would encourage anyone who's not seen the film to count how many times the word "German" or its cognates is used.  I did: I think it's four.  In all cases (which appear over about 3 minutes in total), it's used as an accusation of untrustworthiness.  So far, so standard war-movie.  But it's always from the same character.   And that character is a terrified, paranoid, dangerous idiot, who is looking for someone to blame, and someone to shoot.

That is: the only person who makes a direct reference to Germans is someone with whom you wouldn't want to be in a confined space.  Other British characters are, by turns, doughty, brave, or - in a couple of cases - cowards.  In other words, they're exactly like most people.  They are not made saintly by dint of being British.

Now, there are atrocities committed by the enemy.  A ship that's clearly marked with a red cross is bombed.  I don't know if that happened in reality.  But even there, the bomb is from a machine.  We don't see the face of the pilot.  By and large, the enemy is unseen.  There is a brief moment when we see actual members of the Wehrmacht; but in that moment, when it would be very easy for them to kill a defenceless man, they don't.  They are not made evil by dint of being German.

In other words, the enemy can't be identified with a particular nation.  We know the origin of the enemy, but Nolan doesn't labour the point.  Nation doesn't really matter to the film he's made, which is about people in a situation behaving as people do.  He could have made appreciably the same film about any conflict, real or fictional.  Hell, he didn't even really need a conflict.  Except that, by making a film set in the second world war and not talking about nations or national character, he gives quite a clear message about nations and national character.

Quite clear, but not clear enough for some.  Farage doesn't really do nuance, and he can't really see beyond the nation.  It's little wonder he misunderstood what he saw.

MIFfed

I've got a bit of a dilemma.  It's a nice dilemma to have, and I know which way I'm leaning, but someone may tell me I'm being a fool.  They're wrong, but it's not quite as clear-cut as I thought it would be.

First things first: I love Manchester, and one of the things I love about Manchester is the Manchester International Festival.  It's two weeks of new and interesting art and culture, and even when a show doesn't work, as with Damon Albarn's Wonder.land a couple of years ago, it's still something that makes me proud to be a part of the city.

When tickets for MIF17 went on sale, I immediately went and spent an unholy amount on them.  I've crammed all the things I'm going to go to see into the second week of the Festival, because during the first week, I'll be in France.  This is at the invitation of one of my closest friends and her family; she lives in Australia now, so I only get to see her (and them) every couple of years.  So the final few days of June and the first few days of July are going to be packed, but great.  I'm really, really looking forward to them.

Except...

Do Not Adjust Your Sets

Here's something mildly diverting... although - at risk of sounding like I'm trying to get my excuses in early - whether it makes any real sense might depend on the characteristics of the screen on which you're reading it.

I'm currently in Edinburgh for the IAB, but took the opportunity to pootle off this morning to the SNGMA, where they've a Bridget Riley exhibition.  (It's small, but very good.  Well worth a visit, I'd say, though perhaps not if you've got a hangover.)  One of the paintings on show is this one:

It's called Rattle, and it's a touch over a metre and a half high, by almost four metres long.  It's a series of stripes, each of which is constituted by alternating sequences of diagonals in red bordered with green (which look a bit orange), and red bordered with blue (which look a bit pink).

But here's the thing: the intensity of the colour seems to depend on the direction of the diagonals.  To my eye, the bends sinisters (top right to bottom left, as we look at it) seem to have a much deeper and more vibrant hue than the bends dexters.  I wondered if it was just my eyes, but I asked a couple of other people who were there, and they agreed.  It's just occurred to me that maybe they were just being polite, but I'll take them at their word.

The picture I've just used is one I downloaded; here's a detail from the painting that I photographed myself.  The effect is lost a little in translation from reality to camera to blog, but I think it's just about visible in the two "pink" stripes; the lower one, to my eye, seems to be more intense than the upper one.  Oddly, the bends dexters in the "orange" rows now look to be the more intense to me here, which was not the case when I looked at the painting directly a couple of hours ago.  That in itself is possibly worth noting.

I wondered if the effect would be preserved in black-and-white; and I think it is.

Look at the top three rows in the reproduction on the right here; the top one, the third, and the fifth one down are pink-looing in real life, and the one between them is orange-looking.  But the top row and the third do look to be different even here - darker in the bend sinister than in the bend dexter.  Rows 4 and 5 look to be more similar to each other than rows 3 and 5.  Had I not seen the colour version, I think I'd be inclined to guess that 4 and 5 were the same colour in real life, and 3 different from both.

Or maybe I'm just trying to persuade myself now.  It's a bit hard to tell.

So that's mildly interesting.

I Don't Understand Poetry

This post is meant as a bit of an encomium of Ian McMillan, Bard of Barnsley and potential Patron Saint of Speech Radio - though, on re-reading, I'm a bit worried that it won't sound like it.

The other morning, he posted this on twitter:

I love this poem by Norman Nicholson

The poem in question is called "Five Minutes".  Here it is:

"I'm having five minutes," he said,
Fitting the shelter of the cobble wall
Over his shoulders like a cape. His head
Was wrapped in a cap as green
As the lichened stone he sat on. The winter wind
Whined in the ashes like a saw,
And thorn and briar shook their red
Badges of hip and haw;
The fields were white with smoke of blowing lime;
Rusty iron brackets of sorel stood
In grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.
"Just five minutes," he said;
And the next day I heard that he was dead,
Having five minutes to the end of time.

I've always had a problem with poetry.  I simply don't get it; and this poem is a good example of why.  I don't understand why it can't be rendered as a paragraph, for one thing:

'I'm having five minutes,' he said, fitting the shelter of the cobble wall over his shoulders like a cape.  His head was wrapped in a cap as green as the lichened stone he sat on.  The winter wind whined in the ashes like a saw, and thorn and briar shook their red badges of hip and haw; the fields were white with smoke of blowing lime; rusty iron brackets of sorel stood in grass grey as the whiskers round an old dog's nose.  "Just five minutes," he said; and the next day I heard that he was dead, having five minutes to the end of time.

It'd be - for my money - a slightly over-baked paragraph; writing as such throws into relief what is over-done about it ("red badges of hip and haw"?  Hmmm), but for the life of me I can't see what's missing.  Indeed, it seems to be that the piece is more successful when rendered as prose, because the line breaks are distracting.  Why are they where they are?  (I can't tell that there's a rhythmic need; and the rhyme structure is too tenuous. A-B-A-C-D-E-F-E-G-H-I-F-A-G, if I've counted correctly.  Oooh: wait: 14 lines.  So does that make it a sonnet?  And why does that matter?)  In the prose version, you don't have to worry about that; but you do have the freedom to stress what you will - to pick out the rhythms and rhymes as they present themselves, without the prompt.

Anyway: I replied to McMillan, because... well, because Twitter makes you think that that's OK.  "I have never understood poetry," I wrote.  "Why couldn't this be (overbaked) prose?  Who/ what should I read to see what I'm missing?  I believe I *am* missing something, but what?  I feel like a blind man in a gallery".

Mature Content?

This is a slightly longer version of a post I've just published on the other blog.

There's an aisle at the supermarket that has a sign above it that reads "ADULT CEREALS".  Every time I see it, I snigger inwardly at the thought of sexually explicit cornflakes. (Pornflakes.  You're welcome.) It's not big, and it's not clever: I know that. But all these years living in south Manchester have taught me to grab whatever slivers of humour one can from life. Anyway... A friend's FB feed this morning pointed me in the direction of this: a page on Boredpanda showing some of the best entries to the 2016 Birth Photography competition. (Yeah: I know. I had no idea, either.)

I guess that birth photography is a bit of niche field.  The picture that one "Best in Category: Labour" - which you can see here - is, for my money, a brilliant image.  Some of the compositions are astonishingly good - but then, come to think of it, childbirth isn't exactly a surprise, so I suppose that if you're going to invite someone to photograph it, they're going to have plenty of time to make sure that the lighting is right.

A second thought that the pictures raise is this: no matter how much people bang on about the miracle of birth... well, nope.  Look at the labour picture again. I can't begin to express how glad I am that that's never going to happen to me; and I'm even more convinced than I was that I wouldn't want to play any part in inflicting that on another person.  (I think that there's all kinds of reasons why I have a duty not to reproduce, from overpopulation to the fact that I don't think it'd be desirable for a migrainous thicko like me to beget another generation of migrainous thickos; but not abetting that kind of agony in another human being is also on the list.  Fortunately, since it's unlikely that anyone would want a migrainous thicko to play any part in siring her child in the first place, this is not a problem I'm likely ever to encounter in practice.)

But my overriding response is something in the realm of astonishment that some of the pictures are blanked out as having "mature content".

I mean... really?