4 more characters from On The Road

…and because I enjoyed the movie so much this evening at The Phoenix on the high road in East Finchley, here are four of the supporting characters (one of whom lives in Blighty now, in Bracknell of all unhip places)

Carolyn Cassady – Camille

William Burroughs – Old Bull Lee

Joan Vollmer – Jane

Al Hinkle – Ed Dunkel

 

On The Road triptych

D & N as Neal & Jack – City Lights, San Francisco, July 2004

On The Shelf of Honour (Big Sur is just out of frame)

I licked my lips for the luscious blonde – The On The Road scroll,
British Library, London, October 2012

 

 

The Book Group 10th anniversary list

The best so far?

Ten years in the life of a London book group…

Atonement – Ian McEwan (Nov 2001) *

Oxygen – Andrew Miller (Dec 01)

The Corrections – Jonathan Franzen (Jan 02) ***

Stupid White Men – Michael Moore (Mar 02)

Rings of Saturn – WG Sebald (Apr 02)

The Year of the Goat – Mario Vargas Llosa (Jun 02)

Twelve Bar Blues – Patrick Neate (Sep 02)

Swann’s Way – Marcel Proust ??? (Oct 02)

Life of Pi – Yann Martel (Jan 03) *

A Fine Balance – Rohan Mistry (Mar 03)

Light of Day – Graham Swift (May 03)

After the Quake – Haruki Murakami (June 03)

Code of the Woosters- PG Wodehouse (July 03) **

Voyage au bout de la Nuit – Celine (Sept 03)

Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates (Oct 03)

Tomorrow’s People – Susan Greenfield  (Dec 03)

Touching the Void (Jan O4)

Vernon God Little (March 04) **

Elizabeth Costello (April 04)

The Comedians (June 04)

The Line of Beauty (Sept 04)

Clear (Nov 04)

Havoc in its Third Year (Dec 04)

The Plot against America (Jan 05)

A Heart so White (March 05)

A Tale of Love and Darkness (April 05) **

Saturday  (June 05)

The Radetzky March (July 05)

Identity (Sept 05)

Oryx and Crake (Nov 05) **

We need to talk about Kevin (Dec 05)

The Kite Runner (Jan 06)

Cloud Atlas (March 06) ***

Prague (May 06)

Things Fall Apart (July 06)

Kalooki Nights (Sept 06) **

People’s Act of Love (Nov 06)

The Woman in White (Jan 07) **

The Secret River (Mar 07)

Homo Faber (May 07)

My Name is Red (Sep 07)

Run Rabbit Run (Nov 07)

In Cold Blood (Jan 08)

Blindness (Feb 08)

What Sport Tells Us About Life – Ed Smith (May 08)

The Enchantress of Florence (Jul 08)

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Sep 08) **

Engleby – Sebastian Faulks (Nov 08)

Homecoming (Jan 09)

Audacity of Hope (Feb 09)

Oscar Wao – Juan Diaz (Apr 09) *

Humboldt’s Gift (Jun 09)

Scoop – Evelyn Waugh ** (Nov 09)

Pnin (Jan 10)

Therese Raquin – Emile Zola (Mar 10)

The Razor’s Edge – Somerset Maugham (May 10)

The Death of Ivan Ilyich / Kreuzer Sonata (Jul 10)

Alone in Berlin (Aug 10)

Freedom (Sep 10) *

Byzantium Endures (Jan 11)

The Bottle Factory Outing – Beryl Bainbridge (Mar 11)

The Heather Blazing – Colm Toibin (Apr 11)

The Tunnel (Jun 11)

Manhattan Transfer (Aug 11)

The Sisters Brothers (Oct 11)

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Nov 2011)

On the Shelf of Honour

Gabba Gabba Hay

a laid back event

Had a good role in the Hay this week, doing a speaking session chaired by Sky News’ Political Editor Adam Boulton with the likes of Dr Who director Euros Lyn and ITV Wales news and sports presenter Frances Donovan.

As I was driving towards the Hay Festival from Hereford train station in my chaffeur-driven Jag (could easily get used to that) I leafed through the programme. I kept seeing the name Peter Florence which seemed very familiar for reasons I couldn’t figure. It turned out Peter, the founder of the Festival, was at university with me and a fellow linguist. We had a nice chat when I arrived at the Festival site and I recognised him easily enough after all these years, an affable fella. It’s quite an event he’s built up over the years (with his dad originally I think) and well worth his MBE.

I nabbed a delightful hour trolling around the second-hand bookshop in the former cinema – I came away with a perfect crop: a novel about Manet, a Pierre et Gilles picture book, a Phillip Kerr thriller and a signed Martin Gilbert history book.

My one evening there I spent delightfully with an author friend of mine met thanks to Wikipedia (but that’s another story).

I got the chance to take in a couple of events (on the look out for arts presenting talent) – a session on the forthcoming British Art Show 7 featuring three of the selected artists and the two curators. BAS 4 in 1995 (it’s a 5-yearly review show) was the one that showcased the YBAs. 2009 Turner Prize nominee Roger Hiorns, famed for his copper sulphate council flat (Seizure) and pulverised jet engine, cut an intriguing Hockneyesque boyish figure. I also caught a lecture on Henry Moore by the curator of the current Tate Britain show, Chris Stephens, which was fascinating, prompting us to refresh how we see Moore and to appreciate his radical edge and dark side more. The comparisons he made by juxtaposing Moore sculptures with Robert Capa photographs was convincingly illuminating.

I spent a good part of the afternoon hanging out in the Green Room, tapping away beside Adam Hart-Davis in dubious shorts/boots/socks combo. Highlights of the passing faces ranged from Ian McEwan (I’m a big fan of Atonement) to Andrew Marr (I mainly catch him on Start the Week). I also enjoyed chatting with Adam Boulton’s wife, Anji Hunter, formerly Tony Blair’s aide. Likewise it was great to get an insight from Adam on his recent, already legendary clash with Alastair Campbell. It didn’t feel like the time&place to raise the issue of that sneaky non-viewer question to Nick Clegg during the Sky leaders debate.

Headed home in the company of the Derek Browne, former British triple jumper and investment banker, now focused on encouraging entrepreneurial initiative in the country’s young people through his outfit Entrepreneurs in Action.

Bookishness is what I’ve always loved about Cambridge (where I first met Peter Florence) and Hay has the same vibe in its own way – a particular kind of tranquility and a top Simple Pleasure. It’s a real battery-charger to immerse yourself for 48 hours in art and books.

Coming soon on Simple Pleasures 4: My latest project about to enter private beta – a literary one.

a laid back look (in a nervy kinda way)

Silver Lining

hi ho silver lining

Here’s a rather salutary assessment of the economy from our Chairman here at Channel 4, Luke Johnson, in the FT. I have to say, it resonates for me – I’m pretty much a “a house is for living in” kinda guy.

For too long it has been more profitable in the west
to finance consumption rather than production.
That cannot continue. I am afraid that the west’s credibility
– and luck – has run out.

In the early days of Simple Pleasures 4 I began reflecting on what people really need, a stream of consciousness prompted by a Demos gathering which reminded me of a book which had really gotten me thinking – Coasting by Jonathan Raban.

Been meaning to get back to that post, Reflections on the Fundamentals of Life, for ages – nothing like a bit of financial meltdown to encourage thinking about the principles of economics.

So what did Coasting prompt? Looking back I seem to have re-invented Maslow’s Heirarchy of Needs. Still, no harm working out stuff for yourself.

What struck me last week, the week of the US presidential inauguration, was that Britain is in desperate need of a bit of self-confidence. With the City fucked by its own petard and North Sea oil drying up we’re really going to have to work out where we add value to the world.

So we arrive on earth like the Terminator, naked and balled up as a package with the basic needs outlined in that earlier post. The economics of our existence start from the need to cover those basic needs by doing the equivalent amount of work or value adding. But those needs simply meet our bestial basics. As King Lear argues, we need something over and above that to make life worth living.

“O reason not the need! Our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous.
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man’s life is cheap as beast’s.”

Watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona the other week, what constitutes that ‘something over’ has got really out of whack. The New York life-style portrayed in the movie (through Vicky’s impending marriage) was truly repellent.

The shift of emphasis from consumption to production and adding value could be the silver lining of these dark clouds. Is this the moment when we reflect and recognise what is true value and what matters? These are themes that have been on my mind over the last couple of years such as in this post prompted by  a Buffalo Springfield classic.

The schadenfreude around the collapse of the banks, or more so, the bankers stems from the fact most of them don’t produce anything or add value – they guess and they gamble, they speculate and they risk, they continue to short-sell bank shares the moment the ban is lifted to profit as usual at other people’s expense.

Talking of profiting at other people’s expense, Luke’s article reminds me of a bafflement I had as a teenager about just how did the economies of the West and the rest fit together. How come American’s have those huge fridges and South-East Asians live in huts, scraping together a bit of meat to go with their bowl of rice? How come we get paid hundreds of pounds a day when for equal effort and more they get pence? How come poverty here comes with a 32″ telly? A good friend of mine lent me when we were teens a copy of a JK Galbraith book, The Nature of Mass Poverty I think it was, which I struggled with but didn’t ultimately come to grips with – I’d probably get on much better with it now as the interest is truly there.

Luke raises similar questions: So why should industrious Asians earn a tiny fraction of what citizens in the west earn? Especially when they have so much of the cash and productive resources, while we have deficits, high costs and poor demographics.

Now what I know about economics you can fit on the back of an ATM slip – hence this second stream of consciousness thinking out loud.

Around the JKG time I was also baffled by how can this constant growth add up? How can countries expect to grow year on year with finite resources? How can we expect pay rises as a given year on year? Doesn’t there come a point where no matter how clever you are about squeezing the most out of existing resources and in creating technology to increase productivity those two graph lines eventually run into each other and cross?

My gut feeling about this moment is that we must use it as a time to readjust our values, to refocus on what is really important. We must use it to refocus as a country and as individuals on what value we can add. Having said that, it was a bit depressing to see the reactions to falling oil prices – after a few weeks of people really thinking about the car journeys they were making, the headlines swiftly reverted to ‘Supermarket forecourt price wars!’

The next three commissions on my plan are Landshare, where people who want to grow their own food are linked to people who have bits of land which can be grown on; the Secret Millionaire online where the online community get to give a million pounds to community groups and small charities which quietly add value, largely unseen; and a project on Adoption that tries to highlight the value of each and every child and enable it to be realised fully. I feel they are the product of a particular positive, back-to-basics  vibe. Despite the grimness of the IMF report which ranks Britain’s economy as the most adversely impacted this year of any major economy and the Lords scandal which ranks Britain’s high ranks as smelling as rank as it comes, I can’t help but feel there’s opportunity here…

Rocky Road

High in his mountain lair, overlooking the snow-topped peaks of the Canadian Rockies, protected by the sheer stone walls of the looming castle, the cross-platform commissioner and his white cat reflect on the events of the past few days. The Banff Spring hotel, one of the barmy baronial piles built by the Canadian Pacific railway (I’ve seen two others, at Lake Louise and in downtown Toronto, all astounding in their scale), is home to the annual Banff TV Festival which follows hard on the heels of NextMedia, its toddler brother of about four which focuses on interactive media. It’s interesting to see this year that the two are beginning to overlap substantially, reflecting (a little late) the changes in TV over the last two years in particular.

The highlights for me of ‘the place great TV is born’…

My main speaking session this afternoon with Kate Harwood from BBC Drama (Cranford, Oliver Twist, etc.), chaired by Ed Waller, Editorial Director of C21 Media – really enjoyed rabbiting on about Picture This, Embarrassing Bodies and Big Art Mob to illustrate my approach to factual cross-platform (BTW “rabbiting” is one of various English words I found out this trip Canadians don’t understand). Sesh seemed to go down well. Mentioned the forthcoming 4mations and 4IP. It’s always fun demoing Embarrassing Bodies because you never know what gruesome video will be featured on the homescreen – my very own Russian roulette of public speaking (not sure what exactly we were looking at yesterday but the thumbnail featured what seemed to be a fifteen-day old mini cheese pizza growing on someone’s head) .

Kate showed a couple of interesting clips from forthcoming shows – House of Saddam looked fascinating as did Criminal Justice (in which Pete Postlethwaite and some other thesp heavyweights cropped up).

Looking up at the reception before the Rockies Awards to see Bill Murray of Where the Buffalo Roams and Ghostbusters fame. Stripes featured big in my teen viewing – especially the parade ground manoeuvres to the tune of Manfred Mann’s Doo Wah Diddy. He looked rather white and old. Buffalo I first saw at the Arts Cinema when I was at college so I guess he is getting on. (I’ve just finished reading Fear & Loathing for the first time – goddarn that book has great pictures!)

I’m carrying on writing this on Canada’s third greatest invention – after maple syrup and Neil Young – the Blackberry. We’ve just driven past the Banff Centre where Kim Cattrall trained. I had the pleasure of picking up 4 Rockies Awards on behalf of the Channel in front of said Sex in the City star to her 1 shiny little metal mountain range. Whilst she looked like a million dollars, I was more like a bad penny, coming back to the podium four times, which did however have the benefit of driving home how much above its weight Channel 4 punches.

Going to the hot springs after work yesterday with Jane Mote of UKTV, in their rather charming 1932 split-level building. 39 degrees in the outdoor water with views in all directions of snow-capped peaks. Steam coming off the surface, fat bellied men in old-style trunks, a row of French maidens posing in 1930s bathing costumes, it felt for a moment like we were in some Russian resort, missing only the wodka.

Running this morning, after doing a breakfast meeting with four Canadian writers and producers (including Jill Golick of scriptwriting blog Story2OH), along the Bow river past the falls. The epitome of Canadian Rockies scenery.

Having a proper chat at breakfast with Nick Fraser of Storyville (who has just execed a film about the aforereferredto Hunter Thompson) (and Mette Hoffman Meyer of DTV, Denmark representing the award-winning documentary Iron Ladies of Liberia) – last saw Nick when we were both speaking at Discovery Campus in Brussels but didn’t really get to talk – so a proper chat about photography (prompted by his commission What Remains: Life & Work of Sally Mann which also picked up a Rocky), new digital forms for documentary, sealing wax, cabbages and things.

Last year it was Mark Thompson I met at breakfast in that same dining room. We were discussing the fall-out of Celeb Big Bro and his verdict was “shit happens”. And the Richard & Judy phone vote balls-up – “Sometimes shit happens in a row”. Which in retrospect was ironic given the kind of year he had following that convo with one bit of shit (Blue Peter fix) after another (queen trail scandal) after another (BBC cuts).

Hooking up with Tom Perlmutter, President of the National Film Board of Canada, to explore possibilities about combining forces on 4mations. Canada has a great reputation in animation which seems in kindred spirit to what comes out of Channel 4 on the animation front.

Meeting an honest to goodness Mountie.

Being on the judging panel for iPitch from the Bell New Media fund, like last year. Not quite as exciting entries as last time but a worthy winner (a cross-platform teen court).

As I come down from the mountains, I come away with the impression that convergence is now more than the C word in TV – it’s the done deed.

Human Bonds

So I’m on the underground yesterday, reading the new hardback I’d bought the day before. Then this burn-out walks on and I have that feeling – I know he’s going to sit next to me. He’s very tall, lanky, drug thin. His fingernails are dirty. The driver has to warn passengers to stay clear of the closing doors. The burn-out calls them “fucking idiots” in the expected loud cockney voice. I shift rightwards in my seat, hope he isn’t going to smell too bad (which he doesn’t as far as my hopeless sense of smell can tell), carry on reading.

“Is that the new Bond novel?” he asks me gently, having glanced down at the page I was on. The book only came out the day before. The open page had few clues as to what it was.

“Yes, it is.”

“Do you think the film they’re making of it will be good?”

“I think it’s based on a different story.”

“So is that written by Fleming?”

What do I take from the unexpected exchange? You can’t judge the book by the cover I guess is the obvious one we (certainly I) can’t be reminded of often enough. You can tell the price (but not the value). What I most took away was the Simple Pleasure that I had enjoyed the conversation and contact and there was real warmth in those human bonds.

The new Bond book is entitled ‘Devil May Care’ and has been written by Sebastian Faulks (of ‘Birdsong’ fame) in the style of Fleming. I’ve only ever read a couple of Bond books, but remember really enjoying ‘Casino Royale’ (the first Bond novel) for the surprising brutality of the man I had only encountered through the movies. The publication of a new Bond book felt like a bit of an event (I was one when Fleming died) so I bought a copy of this in advance on-line through Hatchards website and picked it up on the day of publication on the way to a meeting at BAFTA with Rob Bevan of XPT- we were working on the forthcoming website for 4IP, the new Channel 4-led fund for public service interactive media, announced at Next on 4 back in March and coming on-stream over the summer. Hatchards in Piccadilly – a book shop dating back to 1797 as it says on its rich green bags the colour of Bond’s customised Bentley with its Arnott supercharger – is one of London’s great treasures. It makes me feel guilty every time I buy from Amazon and I try to make amends by pulling by whenever I’m at the Academy at 195 Piccadilly and picking up a signed volume.

After having a satisfying creative session with Rob, my old collaborator from MindGym, I hooked up with Ivo Gormley of ThinkPublic to talk about his forthcoming documentary about the internet and democracy. We walked back Channel4wards through St James’s and St James’s’ Park where I had the pleasure of demoing Big Art Mob in its mobile incarnation [WAP site] to him in a small alley where we found a superb bas relief of Anthony and Cleopatra, which looks like it may once have adorned a theatre in the area but is now built into a wall opposite an old public house, and on a remixed sculpture which seems to have once lost its head in the park. Ivo’s dad, Antony, who he closely resembles, is one of the most popular artists on Big Art Mob, third only to Henry Moore and Banksy. I wonder what the ‘burn-out’ thinks about public art? what his favourites around the city are? Something to talk about next time…

Meme Myself and I

Never done one of these meme things before but who am I to deny the luverly, busy & lively LJB. So here’s the deal: You list 8 facts/habits/things people may not know about you. At the end of the post, you tag 8 people and let them know via their blog comments (LJB cheated and only did half her tagging duties but then that’s where I peter out too so we’ll let that go). Seems like a cheap trick to drive traffic to your blog or turn you into a sheep (note to self: tag Herd) or am I just being silly&grumpy and it’s all just a big harmless game, talking of which it reminds me of a cafe game I used to play with my good friend and best-man Stuart called Secret & Obvious – (1) go to a cafe (2) find a table with a good view of the pavement, preferably outdoors (3) for each passer-by say something Obvious about them (4) then something Secret (5) alternate turns with your fellow player – that’s it, hours of good clean giggly fantastical fun.

So here we go…

(1) My first published photos were in An Phoblacht, the journal of Sinn Fein (they were of Gerry Adams and Ken Livingstone – who coincidently I saw in Strutton Ground at lunchtime today being accosted by a voter, occupational hazard I guess but it must be a pain if you’re trying to get somewhere on time) – so that’s the Ken & Gerry show in Conway Hall, how do I get myself into those weird situations?

(2) My cat is called Tommy Boy after the New York record label – the CD was behind his head when we were trying to come up with a suitable name

(3) I collect pictures of Lost Gloves – God knows why but it’s a bit addictive – if you think I’m weird, other people try to pair up my One Lost Gloves with matching partners!

(4) My grandfather worked for Picture Post (I have a lovely photo of him at work just across the room now taken by Thurston Hopkins) – he was a VSP (Very Special Person – just made that up but you can’t have too many Three Letter Acronyms)

(5) I’m a pantheist

(6) I have a lot of books and in my bookcase I have two Shelves of Honour – these include Tom Jones, The Complete Plays of Joe Orton, Clockers, The Riddle of the Sands, Black Box, Northanger Abbey, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and a special section devoted to old copies of Ulysses

(7) I have put a sign above the front door, one of the old style Irish road signs, saying Donegal / Dun na nGall 1 which means one mile but I read as one day – whenever things get tough, it’s only 1 day to get to Donegal – I love North-West Ireland and my wedding reached Ramelton (The Bridge Bar) on Day 3

(8) I have 8 watches – one for every day of the week plus one for good measure – the best one is a 1920s mechanical digital one, but it stopped working properly on my wedding day, which is odd as it’s not electronic

So who do I tag? maybe that’s what the blogroll is for. I reckon it’s going to have to be Mark Earls of Herd fame (for reasons mentioned above); Alfie (likes playing and what else is he going to do in his sick bed); Jule (usually game for a laugh): Russell (has plenty of idle time in caffs on his hands); Oli B (somebody might as well work out how to make money out of it). That will do, enough already.

[Picture courtesy of Thurston Hopkins/Getty Images]

Too Long in Exile

I’m sitting here in the James Joyce Foundation in Zurich with in front of me a copy of ‘Thom’s Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for the year 1904′ published in Dublin by Thom & Co. (Limited) of Middle Abbey-Street. 1904 is the year in which Joyce’s Ulysses is set. This big red volume is the reference book Joyce used to recreate the detail of Dublin from exile here in Zurich. Joyce came to the city on leaving Dublin in 1904 (hence the choice of date for the novel – it is Dublin as fixed at the point of exile) accompanied by his other half, Nora Barnacle. They moved on to Italy/Trieste, back to Zurich, and on to Paris. Much of Ulysses (1922) was written here in Zurich. Joyce left occupied France in 1940 for Zurich where he died in 1941 (aged 59) and is buried.

So I’m flying in this morning with my iPod Shuffle on and up pops Van the Man singing ‘Too Long in Exile‘ with the line “just like James Joyce, baby / Too long in exile” – one of those meant to be moments.

And on the subject of Abbey Street and occupied France, in my hands is a copy of a classy thriller ‘The 6th Lamentation‘ by William Brodrick whose two central characters are a monk and a victim of the occupation of Paris. Another key character is a refugee to Switzerland. So I’m psyched for the Stiftung James Joyce.

I’m welcolmed by a friendly American academic and by the Director and prime mover of the Foundation, Fritz Senn, a Joyce specialist and as near as a Swiss man can be to being Irish.

In the back of Thom’s is an advert for Uska-Slan – Water of Health – in the form of Cantrell & Cochrane’s Table Waters. Just the kind of ad Leopold Bloom would have dealt in. I’m fresh from a lunchtime conversation which included the benefits of Badoit and the insanity of bottled still water. There’s a wonderful passage in Ulysses about water I heard declaimed atop the martello tower in Sandycove, South Dublin on the centenary Bloom’s Day on 16th June 2004.

I can, for example, look up my sister-in-law’s street in Ballybough (PoorTown) and see exactly who lived there in 1904. Mrs Grace at No. 24. A draper at No. 1, a jeweller at No. 14 and Mr John Killen of the GPO at No. 16. It tells you where the pillar boxes were (“Pillar Letter Box adjoining Raglan-road”). I’ve just spotted my father-in-law’s namesake (Murphy, James, esq.) at No. 26 Clyde-road which was valued at 70 pounds – and a certain William McGee at Cobourg-place (next door to Jasper Monahan the spirit grocer, which I assume is a far more colourful name for an off-licence).

My wife has now lived in London – many miles away from the cemetry at Kilbroney, Co. Louth where James Murphy after James Murphy is buried – for more years than she’s lived in Ireland – she went past the mid-point a couple of years ago, very significant really.

When I was in Ireland for the summer holidays last year, staying at said sister-in-law in Ballybough, I picked up a copy (at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Kilmainham) of ‘That Neutral Island‘ by Clair Wills about the Irish home front in the Second World War. I often wonder what similarities and differences there are between the Irish neutrality and the Swiss. Joyce spent most of the First World War (July 1915 to October 1919) in Zurich, as well as getting the permit for entry from occupied France in late 1940.

A few weeks ago there was a big art robbery just outside Zurich from another Foundation – the Emil Buhrle Foundation. Buhrle was a Zurich-based, German born industrialist who sold arms to the Third Reich. After the war 13 paintings in the collection, which was raided in February by armed masked men, appeared on a list of art looted by Nazis from Jews and eventually he handed them over, getting some compensation from the Swiss government. The provenance of other works in the collection remains shady. Much like the Russian collection currently on show in the Royal Academy, London (in the From Russia exhibition), where the British government had to provide an official ‘safe passage’ document to insulate the dubious pieces from any chance of investigation and return to their rightful owners – Russia’s art galleries are peppered with works ‘nationalised’ after the Revolution or looted in the Second World War, many ultimately from murdered Jews. So one has limited sympathy for the Emil Buhrle Foundation as whose work the masked raiders with the Slavic accents actually stole is a moot point.

I recently came across this quotation by the writer and Nobel Peace Prize winner (and man behind another foundation, this one a Foundation for Humanity, which bears his name) Elie Wiesel (through A.Word.A.Day – a daily email with an interesting new word – might have been Joyce’s cup of tea [my philisophical Zurchner taxi driver earlier today was tickled pink by this British idiom]):

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

And this popular one attributed to Edmund Burke also comes to mind from the Last Message SMS competition on Lost Generation:

“It is necessary only for the good man to do nothing for evil to triumph.”

Reckon I’ll give the last word to Van the Man (not to be confused with White Van Man – the Buhrle robbery was carried out in a white panel van) and his collaborator on ‘Song of Being a Child‘, Peter Handke (not Swiss but Austrian like Adolf Hitler and Simon Wiesenthal, born in 1942, also a collaborator with Wim Wenders [Wings of Desire], a writer who has lived in self-imposed exile in Berlin, the US and for the last two decades Paris):

When the child was a child
It was the time of the following questions
Why am I me and why not you
Why am I here and why not there
Why did time begin and where does space end
Isn’t what I see and hear and smell
Just the appearance of the world in front of the world
Isn’t life under the sun just a dream
Does evil actually exist in people
Who really are evil
Why can’t it be that I who am
Wasn’t before I was
And that sometime I, the I, I am
No longer will be the I, I am

A little more magic from the Hiberno-Germanic melting pot.

Warum bin ich ich und warum nicht du?
Warum bin ich hier und warum nicht dort?

Find Our World in Yours

On Monday the artist Mark Titchner pulled by Channel 4 HQ to give some background to his new work, unveiled that day in front of the building, Find Our World in Yours. It is the latest incarnation of the Big 4, a 40 foot high figure 4 marking the 25th anniversary of the Channel and the advent of the Big Art Project, a bold cross-platform (TV, web, mobile, real-life) initiative focused on Pubic Art. Each quarter the Big 4 is reskinned by a different artist and this quarter it’s Mark‘s turn.

His approach involves punctuating the metal skeleton of the 4 with slogans in a style derived from trade union banners. Into the upstroke of the 4 is built a video booth, with echoes of the Right to Reply one at 60 Charlotte Street back in the day. Passers-by, staff or anyone who wants to can pop in and leave a message with their thoughts about Television. A selection of these is played out each week on the TV screens that pepper the framework. The main slogan reads: Find Our World in Yours, Find Your World in Ours.

What was most inspiring about hearing Mark talk was the eclecticism of his inspirations. In art history these ranged from Renaissance depictions of religious ecstasy to Duchamp op-art, from 60s psychedelia to contemporary advertising. And then beyond the art world he used everything from record labels to the aforementioned trade union banners, from the Black Panther movement to corporate mission statements from which to springboard ideas.

I’m a great lover of such eclecticism. At school I remember being given a book by velvet-jacketed Mr Fitch RIP (think Rob Newman’s Jarvis meets the Cyril from That’s Life) – it was a copy of Paradise Lost edited by someone called Broadbent (or similar) which had the most fantastically eclectic footnotes, from the biblical to the scientific, from the geographic to the historical, and all points between. Apart from turning me on to literature (I ended up studying English, French and German literature), it made me realise how interconnected all these disciplines are and how essential those connections are to creativity.

Which brings me to a peak of creativity, my favourite book, James Joyce’s Ulysses. One of the things I most love about the book is the fabulous ecelecticism of the novel – whether you want to know about the water supply of Dublin or the dynamics of grief, the family life of Shakespeare or the history of Irish Republicanism, it’s all in there. And, of course, the art of advertising (Leopold Bloom is in the business) which brings us full circle back to Find Our World in Yours which, like Channel 4, has advertising in its life-blood.