Homespun Conservatism

Posted on October 11, 2015 by leslie

Homespun Conservatism

 Allan Pond assesses a thought provoking thesis

Peter King, Keeping Things Close: Essays on the Conservative Disposition (Arktos, 2015; ISBN 978-1-910524-42-8; pp.95 )

The author of this slim volume of essays is described on the back cover as an ‘anti-radical’ and he is certainly a member of that rare species, the conservative social theorist in higher education. (He is reader in Social Thought at De Montfort University, Leicester). A couple of years ago he wrote a book called Reaction: Against the Modern World which put in a good word for reactionaries. But feeling perhaps that that was too strident he has now produced a work that advocates an altogether more homespun conservatism, to use his own expression, which he takes to mean not one that is unsophisticated, crude, mundane or lacking in polish so much as one that starts and finishes close to home. To express the obligatory declaration of interest in reviewing, Peter King and I are ‘friends’ on Facebook although we have never met in person and we both have posted on the wall of the ‘Traditionalist Conservative’ Facebook discussion group from time to time. I find his ‘take’ on conservatism hugely congenial and any criticisms I make here of this book are merely ones of emphasis rather than fundamental dissent.

In these discrete essays, albeit linked by a strong common theme throughout, he channels the thoughts of two leading conservative thinkers, Michael Oakeshott and Roger Scruton. From Oakeshott he adopts the idea that conservatism is a disposition, a relaxed and tolerant yet also sceptical approach to life, rather than a check-list of ideological principles or detailed policy prescriptions. He takes from Scruton the idea that conservatism is about love of home and being comfortable with the everyday and the familiar. This book advocates a small c conservatism that completely eschews doctrinal argument. Indeed not only does he argue that his form of conservatism is not, properly speaking, particularly political at all (p.viii) he actually lambastes the current Conservative Party for celebrating aspiration and change for changes sake thus falling in with the contemporary zeitgeist. (p.83)

King adopts what might at first glance seem to be a rather risky strategy which is to accept those epithets thrown at conservatives by their opponents, that they are complacent, unadventurous, stick in the muds and so forth as a valid description of the nature of the conservative disposition. His argument is that most of us live quiet and ordinary lives not of desperation but of contentment and that is what makes us conservative. We are creatures of regular habits and known routines and above all we need to protect that feeling that we belong somewhere and know our place.

This is of course often the picture that radicals will have in their heads about conservatives, whether small or big c, that they are insanely wedded to hierarchy and immobility. But King provides a considerably richer picture of this sense of ‘knowing’ ones’ place, where knowing is actually a feeling of contentment rather than frustration and satisfaction not striving. Being in, or knowing, one’s place is to be located, bounded, contained within a network of significant others, both people and particular places, shared memories and common loyalties. Knowing our place is to feel comfortable. The author contrasts this sense of being ‘in place’ with what we feel when we are ‘out of place’. Of course we are always in some place but when we feel out of place we feel embarrassed or insecure, perhaps threatened, certainly not at ease. Above all it is where we are not accepted and therefore it is not home. For those genuinely homeless, who cannot find acceptance anywhere, they are never secure because never properly located and rooted.

Our sense of place is not inevitably fixed to a single spot. King uses the example of rambling where the purpose is not necessarily to get to a particular place at the end of the walk, though undoubtedly we will baring unforeseen events, but to enjoy the activity of walking and taking in the scenery itself. He describes how he likes to take his camera with him on walks and take pictures often of the same places but at different times and seasons. So in a sense the same place can also become different places, as different aspects, perspectives, are highlighted; “I do this because I continue to see new things; or rather, I see the same things in new ways”. (p.6) What matters about a place is not merely its location but more its meaning for us, or what he calls (following the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor) its atmosphere. That is how we ‘lock on’ to a place, by recalling the associations it has for us and the feelings it evokes in us when we remember it or recall it when looking at a picture of it. Through those evocations we both locate ourselves and others we share those memories of atmosphere with. Snatches of music can have of course a similar effect, and as Proust memorably noted, smells. King notes that Zumthor describes this pull of atmosphere attractively as a ‘seduction’; it pulls us into and back in time to the place or person, and like sexual attraction this is not a rational so much as an intuitive or visceral feeling. It need not depend on any one physical attribute. A place does not have to be particularly beautiful or noteworthy to have this effect on us. What is far more important is the sense of familiarity, its continuity even in difference that the place has for us. This is what makes a place, or a person or activity, ‘feel right’. It is unique, irreplaceable. Another place might look ‘just the same’ but it does not ‘feel right’. It is this distinctive feeling that makes it ‘home’ for us, a place we can always return to and know it from the inside.

Another way of saying that we feel at home is to say that we have put down roots. This is often however regarded as something of a limitation, a restriction of movement and therefore of personal freedom. It’s something we do when we have done roaming. But again King flips over this clichéd trope and argues that in fact freedom is fixity, anchorage in a secure foundation. He contrasts the conservative idea of the root with the once fashionable post-structuralist idea of the rhizome, popularised by the radical anti-psychiatrists Deleuze and Guattari in their two books Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Unlike the root which was about fixity and therefore represented authority and hierarchy, they counter posed the notion of the rhizome (which actually also means a root but never mind) which represents fluidity, lack of a structure, no central authority, an automatically self-generating and spontaneous order rather than a pattern imposed from a centre. This idea appealed to the playful, post-modernist mood of the 1980s when it first appeared and was appropriated by a number of different political as well as academic viewpoints ranging from anarchism to cultural geography.

But as King rightly notes, the idea that a tree or its root represents some kind of hierarchy and lack of difference is nonsense. Every tree is distinct with its own particular set of roots that fit it to the soil in which it is rooted. To be rooted is not to be the same, not to be undifferentiated or under the sway of a ‘central automaton’ whatever that is, but is to be a distinct and particular individual. No two trees are exactly the same.

But this discussion of roots leads onto the no less interesting notion of ‘ruts’. He concedes that conservatives will be happy to be stuck in a rut. But again he employs this idea in a much more fecund way. After all a road began as a rut; a track gradually worn bare and widened over time by long usage by many travellers. We can follow a rut without having to clear our own fresh path, and it helps avoid the bogs on either side. Leaving the direct physical metaphor aside, King argues that the idea of a rut, the familiarity of a settled and repeated routine, enables all of us to concentrate on more important things without thinking of where we are putting our feet. To follow a well-trodden route, a rut, gets us there considerably quicker because we do not have to forge a fresh track, i.e. adopt an entirely new and unfamiliar way of doing things. It also gives us a useful way of resisting unnecessary change.

Farmers of course know the value of the rutted track and while writing this I was reminded of a passage in Adrian Bell’s The Budding Morrow, his account of a year farming in Suffolk during the second world war. “Well, why stick to the ruts ? For two good reasons. One is that last autumn I carefully ploughed the field we pass through to reach the kale, and I could not bring myself to mar those crested winter furrows…Two, that nothing would have been spared but my personal mud-bath, for that fresh earth would have clogged up the wheels, whereas the water in the ruts keeps them clean. In farming with horse and cart the motto is not ‘get out of the rut’ but ‘get into a rut and stay in it’”. (The Budding Morrow, Bodley Head, 1946, p.13)

King argues that what most of us actually wish for is not variety and endless change but blandness and banality, but again he gives to these seemingly negative words a positive connotation. To be banal is less to be trite or shallow than to be merely ordinary and unexceptional; indeed to be in a common place. Actually, to be banal is a highly appropriate conservative expression since it was originally a feudal term meaning that the use of the lord’s mill was compulsory for all his tenants (banal mill) from whence we derive the expression common to all. To be banal therefore is to share in a common inheritance. And to be bland is less to be boring than to be balanced and not over excited or carried away by passing fads or fashions or idees fixe. He adopts the expression and the wider argument from Francoise Jullien’s 2004 book In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics in which Jullien argues that blandness derives from the Chinese concept of shi which he translates as detachment. To be bland is to be able to hold a variety of different emotions or attitudes in balance; to be essentially a harmonious or rounded person. To be bland is, he argues, to be like a sponge, soaking up influences from our environment and assimilating them through the strength and regularity of our habits.

Indeed so keen is the author to insist on this aspect that he italicises what he describes as the most important fact of how we live; “we live in the banality of the ordinary”. (p.37) This is a salutary thing to insist on since so many seem to regard the world as a puzzle that needs to be deciphered and these people are quite often not only deluded but positively dangerous. The obvious example is the follower of Marx who uses dialectics as a sort of magical incantation. But the allure of superior gnostic insight appeals across the political spectrum, where a cabal or a cell are identified as the manipulators of the scene, the hidden hands that make the world go round. Indeed the idea that there is some hidden reality beneath the appearances, that some secret fingers must be pulling our strings, is merely the dystopian version of that utopian dream that wants to remake the world as perfect.

To be ordinary is inevitably to be limited but as Peter King observes, we are constantly preached at to be always striving for more, to be high achievers, to aspire to be better. We seek a limitless and ever expanding cornucopia or as he puts it and the key idea that animates our contemporary culture appears to be ‘boundlessness’.  (p.75) Instead he advocates the Greek idea of ataraxia which means being happy with what we have got, knowing our limits and the limits of a good life, being content with enough. This is the old Stoic teaching which is at the core of any small c conservatism worth the name.

The penultimate essay, appropriately titled ‘Enough’, is to me the most appealing in the book and one that not only small c conservatives, but adherents of all political doctrines across the spectrum should inwardly digest. The argument is not exactly new. In some ways those who see themselves as ‘greens’ are temperamentally closest to taking seriously this viewpoint but green politics in its radicalism denies its caution. But somewhere we have to find an alternative to the politics of limitless desire, not least because as Burke reminded us, men of intemperate minds cannot be free. King’s own solution is to suggest that we are best focusing on our own backyards rather than trying to change the whole world.

Is he right? This is clearly a herbivore’s conservatism rather than a carnivore’s. It is gentle and ruminative and is a refreshing change from a lot of other conservative writings. For where is the paean to free markets? Where is the denunciation of cultural Marxists and other assorted pests undermining the fabric of our civilization? Where is the longing for moral certainty and the condemnation of those who are deviant? Where is the patriotic banging of drums and cymbals, the waving of flags, the insistence on national loyalty above all else, a nation one and indivisible? Where is the crude anti Americanism?

In my view there is far too much of this excitable lumpen conservatism around and King’s refusal to indulge in it is refreshing. Nevertheless I do have a few reservations about his case. First I wonder if it true that conservatism appeals only to those who live comfortable and uneventful lives, or the complacent as he himself puts it. Does this not imply that conservatism is fine if you are comfortable but definitely not for those whose lives are characterised by threat or upheaval? Maybe it is the latter who need conservatism more. None of us relish chaos, but those of us with resources can weather it better than those without. And indeed I wonder whether it is correct, as he claims, that “life for most of us most of the time is not a struggle…Most of us find that we can just get on and do much of what we want…Life is not always, or even often, difficult.” (p37) We are indeed fortunate to live in a country where this is certainly true for most if us. But even here not all of us can be quite as equanimous as he seems to be and this is certainly not true for many in other parts of the world. I think conservatism must be about more than appealing to the comfortable. On occasions it might also have to afflict the comfortable.

My other reservation concerns his whole notion of conservatism as disposition. This has an impeccable pedigree I know and in one sense it is obviously true in so far as we can quite properly talk of people having ‘conservative’ tastes in, say, clothes or music or art and architecture. But I feel uncomfortable with the idea that conservatism is somehow a general view of the world, a whole way of life, rather than merely a view about the public realm; just as I feel uncomfortable, because it is a related confusion, when he supports the argument made by Pierre Hadot that philosophy is a way of life rather than an academic pursuit. I believe that conservatism is not metaphysical, a view of the world in general, but political, a view about what arrangements work best in politics. So conservatism is a public doctrine rather than a private passion. Small c conservatism is less about possessing certain habits or tastes (hating rap, preferring plainchant) than about having certain views about politics and its limits.

The danger of seeing conservatism or indeed any other doctrine concerning res publica as a way of life is that it moves quickly on to saying that the personal is political and the political is personal thus denying any notion of a limited politics and in this regard conservatives and liberals can unite and make common cause. What in fact is distinctive about small c conservatism is not that it is a total view of life but rather that it is a limited view of politics. Conservatism appeals, I would suggest, precisely because of the limited nature of its ambitions to remake the world. Nevertheless it is a political doctrine not merely a preference for comfortable shoes or home fires. But these are mere caveats and overall I regard this as an important and engaging statement of the conservative position.

Solid Blue

Solid Blue

Allan Pond if a former member of the Green Party and writes from Northumberland

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Goons not Guns the Problem

Posted on October 10, 2015 by leslie

Jheronimus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross

Goons not Guns the Problem

Ilana Mercer on the evil that men do 

The public personas who pass as conservatives are NOT system builders. We know them as conservatives not by their well thought-out, philosophically consistent thinking; but because they’ve staked out certain positions on The Issues, over time.

“Gun violence” is the term used by conservatives with this messy habit of mind. A careful thinker would refer to “goon violence.”

“For guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of manufactured illness in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is integral to the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. It is here to stay.”

In cahoots with their left-liberal partners in crime, conservative jurists, journalists, politicians and pundits now routinely debase this moral vocabulary. “Gun violence,” they all jabber, is caused by mental illness.

Their cure for goon violence: bring in the big therapeutic guns to do the diagnosing. With state imprimatur, the witch doctors will lay the “scientific” cornerstone for walling-in society’s oddballs.

Democrats concur: if someone does something awfully wicked, he must have an illness as real as cancer or Alzheimer’s.

Still, progressives are pioneers in abolishing the fact of evil and replacing it with a diagnosis amenable to state intervention. Did not Joseph Stalin replace the wisdom of the ages with a scientific system that deployed the therapeutic idiom to murder and imprison dissenters?

But while they dare not cop to it openly, a secondary goal exclusive to progressives is to destroy the very idea of a self-reliant citizenry.

Left-liberals would dearly love to disarm all citizens (bar their own security details), to better resemble the “enlightened” Eurocracy. In today’s backward Britain, home of the Magna Carta, the police now instruct their subjects that “the only fully legal self-defense product … is a rape alarm.”

Both factions of our opposing position holders are generally unoffended by prior restraint initiatives. Easily would they condone the initiation of aggression ad absurdum against the individual, on the off-chance that he himself may initiate violence against others.

There once-upon-a-time was, in our town, a darling, loopy young man who stood on the curb, holding up commercial signposts, face beaming, yelling his love for The Lord. He’s gone! Replaced with a more sedate, swarthy gentleman. Perhaps the exuberant youngster was rounded up and hospitalized. Just to be on the safe side.

Likewise are conservatives perfectly comfortable with the fortification of the therapeutic state and the deconstruction of conventional morality.

What is meant here by deconstructing morality?

Take Dr. Keith Ablow, a conservative regular on Fox News. Ablow first diagnosed the goon du jour, Chris Harper Mercer, with a mental illness. The good doctor arrived at the diagnosis thus: Harper Mercer shot up a college, in Roseburg, Oregon, killing 10 people and wounding seven. Ergo, he must be ill.

As Dr. Ablow surmised, Harper Mercer must have lived a life “of terrible desperation and suffering in the shadowy basements of suburban homes, lost in delusions and wandering the streets.” (Ablow’s writing is worse than his brain infarcts.)

This awfully evil act, Ablow and the other TV knaves take as irrefutable proof of disease. This disease, for which there is no scientific evidence, causes killing just as Parkinson’s causes shaking.

Ablow was up against a smart and moral man of the cloth, also a regular on FNC. Much to Father Jonathan Morris’s horror, etched on his young face, Ablow went on to insist that evil is a disease.

Morris scrambled to correct this awfully destructive statement, made on national TV, but there was no stopping evil Ablow and his anchor enabler.

Evil is a disease, asserted Ablow, because human beings are defined by their humanity.

When human beings lose that humanity, it can only be because they’ve been afflicted by a sickness.

With that, Ablow struck a blow to the moral foundation of our already tattered civilization: the idea that man is in fact not very good and that a meaningful life is defined by a struggle to be better.

With his evil-as-disease illogical, ahistorical folderol, Ablow and his co-conspirators flout all The West’s great secular and sacred texts.

If we accept the intellectually, logically and morally wicked idea that evil is a condition of the flesh and not the spirit—We The People don’t have a prayer.

The ancients taught that “every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood” (Genesis 8:21). Look around you. The truly good and noble are as rare as philosophical system-builders on national TV and radio.

However, if good is the default position of humanity, as Ablow has it—then the rest, hundreds of millions of bad people, are all ill.

In truth, our frailties define us. Human beings are not universally good. On the contrary; the struggle to live a righteous life is not that common among mankind.

The many deadly sins—gluttony, greed, sloth, pride, envy, and so on—are what define humanity. Few are the people who actually struggle to vanquish vices and work at being virtuous. (Gluttony is this writer’s vice. In the course of writing this text, six slabs of chocolate were devoured! This is no illness; it’s gluttony. Another is being late to file copy, to the detriment of a long-suffering editor. This vice shall be conquered!)

But according to TV’s philosopher kings, this writer’s resolve is futile, for vice is a physical illness, and not a moral affliction amenable to self-correction.

Ultimately, if evil is accepted as an unnatural condition, a disease—then wicked individuals cannot be held accountable for their misdeeds.

If you’ve bought into the evil-as-disease balderdash, work to vanquish this most diabolical of vices.

Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S.  She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com.  She blogs at  www.barelyablog.com   Follow her on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer “Friend” her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ilanamercer.libertarian

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Wines to take Summer into Autumn

Posted on October 8, 2015 by leslie

Wines to take Summer into Autumn

A fine selection of wine and other drinks

Colchuaga Valley

Colchuaga Valley

Among a crop of very fine whites and reds each at a respectable mid-range price, I have here a number of rosés which belie the reputation that they have acquired over recent years of being simple and sweet, lacking in subtlety and complexity. There are also four gins, from perfectly serviceable ones for everyday use (should one so wish!) through to a couple of really outstanding ones for special occasions. In the purchase of any of the drinks listed below, one can be confident in the enjoying of beverages of excellent quality, good value and sophisticated character.

Reds first, and taking these in order of price range, we can start with a superb wine which is fabulous value for its price tag of £7.99 (from Morrison’s). Root 1 Carménère Vina Ventisquero 2013 comes from the Colchagua Valley, situated between the Andes and the low coastal mountains of the Pacific Ocean. The grapes are 85% Carménère and 15% Syrah, and are grown on original ungrafted roots, which the winemakers believe give better purity of flavour and expression of terroir. I was immediately struck by the very classy, striking and sophisticated bottle design, which, rather than sporting a label, is embossed with a bold image of a vine with long roots breaking into information about Chilean wine and this wine in particular. Root 1 Carménère is a dark opaque purple, with a nose of forests: liquorice and dark berries. The taste is overwhelmingly dark and fruity – again redolent of woodlands, log cabins and open fires. The black bitterness of blackcurrants are tempered by the sweeter tones of liquorice and ripe blackberries, plums and cherries, and there is a little ash on the finish. A superb wine for hearty stews and red meats.

Root 1 Carmenere

Clefs du Pontif 2014 is blend of 50% Grenache and 50% Syrah from the chalky soil of the Pays d’Oc in Southern France (available at £9.99 from Avery’s of Bristol). It is a deep, thick ruby colour with a nose of woodlands – dark berry fruits and oak trees with a hint of liquorice. The taste is rich, smooth and dark; it is a pleasantly full-bodied wine. There are lots of blackcurrants and blackberries, with the taste splitting discernibly into the higher, sharper tones of the blackcurrants and redcurrants, and a lower rumbling tone of tar, leather, ash and spices below. A complex, intriguing and satisfying wine.

Gerard Bertrand Terroir Minervois 2013 combines Syrah and Carignan Noir grapes, which have been hand-picked from the stony, limestone slopes of the Montagne Noir. If outer appearances, and the trouble taken with them, are anything to go by, then just a glance at the bottle with its elegant and sophisticated whilst also bold logo bodes well; and the wine – from renowned winemaker Gerard Bertrand – doesn’t disappoint. The colour is a deep purple and the nose is full of dark berry fruits whilst at the same time offering some tantalising wood smoke. On the palate we have a complex array of flavours that roll out like waves on the tongue – first is some dry ash, followed almost immediately by fruits – plums and blackberries. Then come the wood – oak, followed by some smoke – warming bonfires, and finally a lingering finish of dark forest and some tar. Impressive and very sophisticated, this is a wine for a really decent meal, despite its RRP of only £9-11.

The Abbotts & Delaunay Réserve 2013, Côtes du Roussillon (from Avery’s at £11.99), uses Syrah, Grenache Noir, Carignan Noir and Mourvedre grapes from three of Roussillon’s famed terroirs – Montner, Tautavel and Caramany. It is a deep, opaque purple with a nose of liquorice, spice and brambles. On the palate, this full-bodied wine is as dark, black and rich as the nose indicates. The fruit elements are blackberries, with some plums – but lots of woody tones, too – oak and ash, and these are combined with a hint of tar and lots of spice and black pepper. There is some sweeter liquorice at the start and a long and black finish of ash at the end, making a robust yet nevertheless sophisticated wine for red meats.

Our whites start with the Domaine Paul Mas Viognier 2014, from the Paul Mas Estate in the chalky, fossil-filled soil of the rolling hills of the Herault Valley in the Languedoc. I liked the touch of the label featuring Vinus the heron – who was allegedly often seen in the Paul Mas vineyard, preferring the ripe grapes to the fish in the river. The nose is gloriously floral and rich and the colour is a good light gold. The taste is dry, with lime, lemon and grapefruit but also a slightly mellower and sweeter peach flavour. It is slightly chalky, like the soil in which it is grown, but with fresh blossom – lime and apple blossom. An extraordinarily aromatic wine. (RRP £9-11.)

Domaines Paul Mas

Domaines Paul Mas

The Josmeyer Pinot Blanc Mise de Printemps 2014 lives up to its name with a burst of spring in each glass. The hand-picked, biodynamic grapes come from the 25-hectare Josmeyer Estate, which dates from 1854, in Alsace. Quite yellow in colour; the wine has an extremely floral nose, full of apple blossom and lime tree blossom. On the palate we have a first a sharp burst of lemon and lime followed by a hint of floral sweetness in a long aftertaste that tingles on the tongue with a lingering fizz. It is quite a dry wine, however, with some mineral elements, especially chalk, contributing to that dryness. Very elegant and pure in taste – an extremely drinkable wine. (£11.50 from The Wine Society.)

Established in 1921, Mount Pleasant is one of the founding fathers of winemaking in the warm, humid and wet conditions of the Hunter Valley in Australia. I tried their Elizabeth Semillon 2013, and their cellar-aged Elizabeth Semillon 2007 (the Elizabeth range was inspired by the visit of Queen Elizabeth to Australia in 1954 – the first reigning monarch to visit the continent), and found myself impressed by both. The 2013 Semillon has a very pale straw colour and a gloriously floral nose – oodles of citrus blossom, apple blossom and lime. The taste is much drier than the nose indicates and has plenty of citrus fruits – predominantly lemon and grapefruit, with a hint of pineapple combined with all those floral notes and some mineral elements on the aftertaste. Overall, it is an extremely elegant, crisp wine, perfect for fish and seafood dishes. (RRP £13.99-£15.99 from Harper Wells and slurp.co.uk.)

2007 Cellar Aged Elizabeth Semillon

The cellar-aged 2007 Semillon has won an impressive number of medals, and rightly so – the nose of this golden-coloured wine at once impresses with its intensive mineral odours mixed with a large amount of hay and mustiness than hints at a refined age. The taste beautifully combines an initial sweetness as of ripe raisins, delivered along with a slight effervescence that adds a refreshing element to the wine, followed by a long finish of those mineral elements so prevalent on the nose: lower, darker tones not dissimilar from the dark tar notes and tannin bite of an excellent full-bodied red. There is hay there, some toast and nuts and some crumbling chalk, yet also the bite of white pepper; and the wine seems almost to dissolve at the end, leaving just a tantalising taste, like the grin of a Cheshire cat. (RRP £14.95-17.80, from slurp.co.uk, Wine Library, Hedonism and BBR.com.)

The Vignobles des 3 Châteaux AOC Languedoc Pic Saint Loup 2014 is made from 60% Syrah and 40% Grenache Noir grapes from the chalk and stone soil at the foot of the Pic Saint Loup. The bottle shows an excessively wild mountain landscape with a wolf, muzzle elevated, and bears the legend “truly irresistible”, and the wine is suggested as an aperitif or as an accompaniment to pizza, salads or charcuterie. It is a pretty pastel pink in colour, with a very subtle nose – a distant note of strawberry and a hint of cherries. More depth is apparent on the palate, and the taste moves from the strawberries and cherries evident on the nose through raspberries to a slight hint of gooseberry, and concludes with a warmingly dry finish. Altogether, this is a wine to celebrate and remember summer; but also one to acknowledge with joy the approaching autumn. (Available from Ocado priced £9.99.)

For the last of the summer’s wines, two Mirabeau rosés: Mirabeau en Provence 2014 and Mirabeau Cotes de Provence 2014. The former has a nose that is dry and fruity with mainly strawberries; the colour is a pretty salmon pink. On the palate it is dry and refreshing – full of summer fruits including tart redcurrants as well as softer, sweeter berry fruits. A very dry, light wine with an almost effervescent aftertaste, which leaves the wine tingling delightfully in the mouth. Mirabeau Cotes de Provence 2014 won a Medaille d’Or Paris 2015 and, again, is a pastel pink. The nose is very sweet and fruity – strawberries and cream. On the palate we first have a sweet burst of those ripe berry fruits, but this is followed by a long dry aftertaste with plenty of citrus flavours along with redcurrants. There is a bite of white pepper and a hint of dry hay at the finish. A pleasingly complex and extremely elegant wine. (RRP £8.99 from Waitrose.)

From complexity to purity: Wenlock Spring water has newly developed lightweight glass, leading to 18% lighter bottles – they’ve produced a lovely little shot glass representing the combined weight loss from the still and sparkling 330ml bottles. The water bottles do indeed feel surprisingly light for glass bottles full of water. The water comes from Wenlock Edge in Shropshire, as immortalised by Housman and numerous composers. It has a high calcium content, and all mineral content / scientific information is given on the bottles. The taste is exceptionally pure and refreshing, slightly sweet and immensely “clean” tasting. A delicious and delightful water.

For those who prefer things a little stronger and are keen on trying unusual drinks I could recommend the new Sheppy cider blackberry and elderflower blend. This is a rich, pinkish-red colour, and lightly effervescent. It is very slightly citrus-y on the nose, with hints of raspberry and elderflower – but all very subtle and delicate. The taste is redolent of early autumn rather than high summer: not surprisingly, given its contents, although I must admit that I found the blackberry rather retiring in the landscape of flowers. The elderflower comes immediately to the fore, fading towards the back of the palate and making way for the raspberry notes that were hinted at on the nose and the rather more elusive blackberry. I’m not convinced that the light sparkle adds very much – the flavours here are subtle yet fresh and they might well command greater attention if they were not competing with the distraction of effervescence. However, this is an unusual view of a drink that can all too often be perceived as hackneyed; it is a refreshing yet slightly wistful; taste borne of ‘the year’s last, loveliest smile’. (RRP £3.50.)

Finally, a selection of four different gins for different occasions. Greenall’s Original London Dry Gin has a delicately sweet nose with the hint of a minty undertone. The spirituous taste is immediately evident but there is a longer drawn-out depth to the flavour that rewards perseverance: a slight dark fruitiness comes to the fore. The finish lingers for a while with a warming glow. Altogether, this is a typical gin – nothing especially startling, but nevertheless a pleasant and uncomplicated drink to enjoy on a pre-prandial basis. (£15 for a 70cl bottle from Tesco’s.)

Rather more special is the Berkeley Square London Dry Gin. This gin is created, according to the description on the bottle, ‘using a hand-picked blend of botanicals, including basil, lavender and kaffir lime leaves’. The latter make their presence felt immediately upon the nose, their sweet muskiness heralding a drink of remarkable sophistication. The flavours of lavender and kaffir lime are dominant, with an underpinning of basil to lend warmth and substance; and the aftertaste is substantial, resonant and memorable. The bottle states ‘best enjoyed on the rocks or in a martini’; but my feeling is that to serve it in the latter would be a waste: this is an immensely satisfying gin with multi-layered flavours that requires only the addition of simple tonic water to allow its subtleties to be fully appreciated. (Available from Waitrose, price £36 for 70cl.)

Berkeley_Square

Bloom Premium London Dry Gin has a very subtle nose, with honeysuckle very much to the fore, and with a rather sweet undercurrent. The taste lingers long on the palate, the chamomile informing the initial impression, later crossfading into the delicate sweetness of the honeysuckle. Again, this gin is more rewarding the more it is savoured – a quick swallow reveals few of its secrets. With patience, this drink is more warming and has a greater depth than the description on the bottle might imply – do not expect to appreciate this subtle gin without due concentration and the focus it expects. (Available from Ocado, priced £25, 70cl.)

Opihr Oriental Spiced London Dry Gin, on the other hand, has a heavily spicy – almost curried – nose that bears out the spirit’s name, after which it is something of a surprise to find that the initial impression upon tasting is of a very mild, undemanding drink. The spiciness does not recur until the liquid is far back on the tongue, and even then it is not as powerful as it is on the nose. Nevertheless, it has a potently warming effect and adds an extra and interesting dimension to a drink that is too often taken for granted. My guess is that to serve this gin with ice, according to cliché, would kill the flavour entirely – and one would be well-advised not to gulp unthinkingly at it, but to enjoy the pungency of its aroma. Not a gin, therefore, for the drink-swilling county set, but for a special occasion or for enjoying in peace and tranquillity with a superb book or some Mozart playing, in a calm and magical atmosphere by an open fire on a fine autumn evening. (Available from Waitrose at a very reasonable £19 for 70cl.)

Opihr Oriental Spiced Gin

Opihr Oriental Spiced Gin

Em Marshall-Luck is our food and wine critic

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ENDNOTES October 5th 2015

Posted on October 5, 2015 by leslie
Atlantic Wall, gun emplacement

Atlantic Wall, gun emplacement

ENDNOTES October 5th 2015

Atlantic Wall, from modernist, Wim Henderickx * Cordelia Williams enchants us with Schumann * The music of Tudor England * ‘Under the Admiral’s Flag’ – the RSNO marches past with the music of a Bohemian bandmaster

Autumn begins and the Proms now seem a distant memory. Our busy schedule this summer at the Royal Albert Hall led to a build-up of CDs – with many awaiting review, so this edition of Endnotes brings you a taste of some of the backlog. We begin with an austere tone-poem – or rather, an atonal discourse which depicts the atmosphere of a place, by the Antwerp-based, Darmstadt-inspired modernist, Wim Henderickx.

Atlantic Wall, composed in 2012, brings the composer’s own Hermes Ensemble centre-stage in a recording of great quality and complexity; taking the listener to the Western European coastline, to the remnant of World War ll concrete fortifications, which in centuries to come will undoubtedly represent to the Europeans of the future what the mysterious Neolithic circles and barrows mean to us. A detailed and extensive programme booklet, issued with the CD, explains Henderickx’s projection of place:

“… The scores of bunkers no longer serve any purpose – they have been abandoned and no one bothers to demolish them. They are simply ignored. They remind us of prehistoric dolmens and megalithic constructions… Atlantic Wall is the waves and the sea, is water…the rhythmical, incessant battering of the swirling water on the coast… Atlantic Wall is fire. The inner fire of the observer who braves the elements for years to watch the horizon.”

It is somewhat unusual to find such overtly programmatic music from a general movement of composers, known for their abstractions – their processing of sounds which deliberately seek to break the conventional moods, ideas and tonality of music. For those who find even Mahler or Schoenberg dangerously fragmented, Atlantic Wall is a work which would probably be beyond any understanding. But if you are prepared to unlock the door into this world where a new language exists; to abandon your preconceptions, you are sure to find a strange power in Henderickx’s gloomy sea-cliffs of decaying concrete*.

In complete contrast, Cordelia Williams (BBC Young Musician piano winner from nine years ago) takes us to calmer waters, in a Schumann programme which leaves you in no doubt about the pianist’s quality – and ability to bring the mid-19th-century timbre of this German romantic to life. The two books of Davidsbundlertanze (Op. 6) are performed with all their magical, ennobling properties – these ‘Dances of the League of David’ derived from a musical movement created by Schumann and inspired by the symbolism of King David in opposition to the Philistines. The Op. 17 Fantasie in C also appears in Cordelia’s enchanting collection (on the Somm label), as does one of the composer’s last works, the six-part (but each, very short) Geistervariationen – inspired by a visitation from angels. What greater testament could there be to the romantic imagination and lyrical beauty of Robert Schumann, than the homage paid by his 21st-century interpreter and soul-mate, Cordelia Williams.

It is thought that the English composer John Taverner was born in 1490 – Taverner becoming one of the Tudor era’s finest composers of church music. Gimell Records brings us the Tallis Scholars, recorded in ethereal form – possibly one of our finest, if not the finest of our specialist choirs, absorbed as they have been for the last 40 years in early music, and in the works of the Tudor and Elizabethan era. Their conductor, or director, is Peter Phillips, who steers his scholars through a monumental piece: the Missa Corona Spinea – the Mass of the Crown of Thorns – a work that was probably first performed in front of Henry Vlll and Wolsey.

For Mr. Phillips, there is an undoubted additional sacred resonance to this early landmark of English music – the conductor describing the piece with reference to Shakespeare’s idea of ‘Music of the Spheres’. We often think of Tallis’s Spem in Alium (which dates from about 1570) as the summit of our musical achievement at that time, but listening to the Gloria and Credo from Taverner’s vision of a crown very different from that warn by King Henry, reminds us of a master-architect of the great arches and spaces of church music.

Finally, from Chandos, we move to Prague, to the Gulf of Trieste – to the world of Austria-Hungary and the marches and landmarks of an empire, destined to disappear in the Great War. Julius Fucik, who died at the age of 44 – two years into World War One – was a Bohemian composer of marches and light tone-poems, and bandmaster of the 86th Infantry Regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, based at Sarajevo.

A recently-issued collection, performed with verve and an appetite for colour and a good tune by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Neeme Jarvi, brings the almost forgotten figure of Fucik back to life. His most famous piece (although hardly anyone seems to know of its composer) is the March of the Gladiators, a boisterous prelude to traditional circus entertainment. However, a more poetic side to Fucik is presented in the Wintersturme, Op. 184 of 1906, and the melodious Danube Legends. The glories and grace of the old European empires are evoked in the 1912 Overture, Miramare, a depiction of the palace, close to Trieste, built for the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian. An American march, The Mississippi River, dating from 1902 confirms the feeling that Fucik was Europe’s answer to Sousa; as does his 1901 march Under the Admiral’s Flag, which was played at the launch of a battleship – a ceremony presided over by the ill-fated Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Another full-bodied Chandos recording, with the RSNO in sparkling form – and a fitting memorial to a composer whose untimely early death, and neglect, is one of the sadder stories of late-19th, early-20th-century music.

*The Wim Henderickx collection, entitled Triptych, is available on the Hermes Ensemble’s own label

The new Tallis Scholars CD of Taverner’s music will be available from the 30th October

Stuart Millson is the Classical Music Editor of The Quarterly Review

 

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The Global Village Idiot

Posted on October 4, 2015 by leslie
The Pope at the UN

The Pope at the UN

The Global Village Idiot

Ilana Mercer sends the Pope packing

In the wake of America’s week-long, Pope Francis bacchanalia, a few column titles suggest themselves:

“Benedict, What Have You Wrought?”

“The Global Village Idiot.”

“Lady Di of the Papacy.”

The last hints at the trendy, pop-philosophies that animate Pope Francis’ Lady Di-like belief system. The intellectual equivalent of these papal shopworn shibboleths you’ll find in a Chinese, fortune-cookie wrapper.

Ultimately, the editor will decide which of these unflattering headings best describes the man whom one devout Catholic—libertarian jurist Andrew Napolitano—called a false prophet for overturning Catholic canon law without consulting his Bishops. Yet another reason Pope Francis is drawn to an authoritarian president who rules by presidential veto.

Intellectually, Pope Francis is no match for his predecessors.

With his 1998 encyclical, the Polish pope—how the Polish people suffered under the communists whose creed Pope Francis is inadvertently dignifying—sounded a lone voice for both “Faith and Reason” in the postmodern religious wilderness.

Who other than Pope John Paul spoke with such unhectoring clarity about the errors of relativism in modern thought? Certainly not Jorge Bergolio, who is too simple to consider such abstractions.

The anti-intellectualism evinced in the Holy See’s 2015 environmental encyclical made this pope’s “close advisers,” in all their “ill-tempered diction,” the butt of ridicule over the pages of the Catholic Crisis magazine:

“From the empirical side, to prevent the disdain of more informed scientists generations from now, papal teaching must be safeguarded from attempts to exploit it as an endorsement of one hypothesis over another concerning anthropogenic causes of climate change. It is not incumbent upon a Catholic to believe, like Rex Mottram in “Brideshead Revisited,” that a pope can perfectly predict the weather. …”

In the same badly written potboiler, the pope took a swipe at the richest nations, blaming them for despoiling the earth. In truth, however, the developed world has advanced the technologies (and attendant ethics) that are helping to clean up the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans and many a landmass. It is the developing and underdeveloped nations—China and India, for one—that despoil the earth and devastate its creatures. So polluted are the waterways in former communist countries that rivers are known to catch fire. Watch.

Not in the US, Canada or Germany does the earth look like an “immense pile of filth,” to use his Holiness’s hyperbole. Although this is indeed the case on land tracts upon which angry, entitled migrants tread. Familiarize yourself with “The Impact of Immigration Policy on Wild Life and on the Arizona Borderlands,” Mr. Pope.

Indeed, why not advocate the Golden Rule imperative where it’s most needed?

“Let us remember the Golden Rule,” preached the pope: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Mt 7:12).”

The young, aggressive, Arab males currently flooding many of Europe’s bucolic communities do not appear to apply Pope Francis’ Golden Rule to their benevolent hosts. Look at these images from the Hungarian-Austrian front deluged by the people the pontiff has deified.

Conspicuously missing from Pope Francis’ sermon to the joint session of Congress was the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ. Instead, the pope elected to tout war president Abraham Lincoln. Remarked Lincoln scholar Thomas DiLorenzo: “Honest” Abe “waged total war for four years on his own countrymen, causing as many as 850,000 deaths.” Yet to Pope Francis, Lincoln was “the guardian of liberty.”

Pope Benedict XVI was—still is—a great intellect. The Times Literary Supplement wrote this about Joseph Ratzinger’s “unflagging [intellectual] energy.”

“For a man in his eighties to write a serious multi-volume work on Jesus (he promises a third installment on the infancy narrative) is remarkable enough. When the author happens to be the chief pastor of over a billion Catholics, it is truly extraordinary.”

Befitting a scholar, Pope Emeritus Benedict had closely examined the possibility of Islamic reformation. After decades of primary source exegesis, Benedict concluded the following:

“In Christian and Jewish texts, “God has worked through His creatures.” Consequently, these texts are not just the word of God, but the words of men inspired by Him. Isaiah, Mark and others of the “divinely appointed” are fully authorized and adequately inspired to interpret and revise the scriptures.”

Not so in Islam. According to Father Fessio’s rendition of Benedict’s scholarly, spiritual inquiry, “The problem with Islam is far more fundamental. As the Islamic tradition has it, the Koran is not Mohammed’s words; it is God’s eternal word, seen as sent from Heaven, never to be adapted or altered.”

For warning the West that Islam may be “a closed and irrational system,” impervious to reform, Benedict was forced to apologize, in 2006, because Muslims threatened their version of the Golden Rule: riots.

With his brilliant mind and beatific smile, Pope Benedict XVI was the whole holy package. Now his successor, Pope Bumping, is dismissing Benedict’s finding about the theological imprimatur behind Muslim violence, and telling the faithful that “no religion is immune from forms of individual delusion or ideological extremism.”

In a word, be on the lookout for radical Christians and Jews.

As did the simpleton pope preach about the necessity to “harness the spirit of enterprise” for “the creation and distribution of wealth,” through legislators, whom the pope likened, mindlessly, to Moses, in their direct access to God:

“You are the face of its people, their representatives. You are called to defend and preserve the dignity of your fellow citizens in the tireless and demanding pursuit of the common good, for this is the chief aim of all politics.…”

Allow a Jew (albeit a bit of a closet Catholic) to quote from the encyclical written by Corinne and Robert Sauer (chosen people both, in my book) of the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies:

The Hebrew word for charity—Tzedakah—comes from the word justice: Tzedek. To comply with both, a Jew must give ten percent of his income to help the poor. Charity, however, “is a moral principle, not a legal one.” There is nothing in this injunction that implies “a need for a public policy of involuntary taxation and … monetary handouts for the unemployed.” Voluntary charity, moreover, “should not be confused with income redistribution. Income redistribution aims at reducing income inequalities because income disparities are seen as unfair or immoral. … This is not the Jewish view. … The poor have no legal right to the rich’s property—distribution, and eradication of income disparities is impossible and not the goal in Judaism.”

More egregious, the pontiff (much like America’s representatives) knows nothing about the American constitutional scheme. America’s elected representatives are sworn not to “satisfy common needs,” as this pig-ignorant pope put it, but to uphold a limited set of negative, individual rights—those to life, liberty and property.

Even President Barack Obama, a socialist leveler if ever there was one, has recognized that “the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.” Obama once confessed, in frustration, that the obstacles the Constitution poses to “redistributive justice” have compelled community organizers like him to pursue extra-constitutional change.

Clearly, this pope has confused Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s general will with the American Founders’ philosophy of individualism, republicanism and dispersed, limited authority.

Rousseau’s work was recited by Robespierre, leader of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, as he beheaded innocents—17,000 of them—in the name of the nebulous common good the Jacobin pope is touting.

The Idea of America was not to centrally control man’s work and his fellow-feeling.

The statism preached by the scold from the Vatican is anathema to the philosophy of our Founders, who rejected a state-directed common good.

“By pursuing his own interest,” wrote moral philosopher Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations” imbibed by the framers—”[man] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it. I have never known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good.”

Take that back to Rome, Pope Francis.

Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S.  She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com.  She blogs at  www.barelyablog.com   Follow her on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer “Friend” her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ilanamercer.libertarian

 

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The Dilemma of Hypermodernity, part one

Posted on October 3, 2015 by leslie

Umberto Boccioni, States of Mind, The Farewell

The Dilemma of Hypermodernity, part one

 Mark Wegierski espies an escape route for humanity

An earlier, academic version of this essay has appeared in “This World: Religion and Public Life” (Culture and Consumption) no. 31 (2000) (New Brunswick, USA and London, UK: Transaction Publishers), pp. 29-45. This is the 15th anniversary of the appearance of the academic version of the essay – which had also appeared in various, different, non-academic iterations in the 1990s, including in Polish translation.

One of the most significant, yet often cursorily examined phenomena of modern society is the increasing pace of technological change. The amount of theoretical scientific knowledge (that is, in the “hard” sciences) is growing exponentially, as is the number of devices etc that are being produced, as a result of the growth and practical application of such scientific theory. Ultimately, these technological processes are fuelled by the market-economies of (primarily) North America, Western Europe, and now, the Pacific Rim countries. Yet amongst all this frenzied growth and creative entrepreneurship, to what ultimate end is all this unbridled expansion is taking us?

Social theorists such as George Parkin Grant, David Ehrenfeld, Christopher Lasch, and Jacques Ellul — inspired by figures like Simone Weil and Martin Heidegger — have described an emergent “vicious cycle”, where all the problems caused by modern technology can only be solved by the application of further technologies — which engender newer, greater problems, for which new technological solutions have to be found — and so on. It seems impossible to think that this process can go on forever — at some point, the crises engendered by technology (a total saturation of the environment with pollutants of various sorts, for example), will confront humanity. And the suggestion that recombinant DNA technology could be used to “adjust” humans to live in heavily polluted or radiated environments is simply nightmarish. Our world is one in which genes of mice are spliced with those of carrots, mice with genetically human blood coursing through their bodies. Biotechnology companies develop new, unique life forms, such as the aforementioned mice, over which they then exercise exclusive proprietary control. Recently, there was the story that scientists in Britain had developed transgenic pigs, whose organs are to be used in humans. There were also reports in the media that a research laboratory in Basel, Switzerland, had produced genetically altered flies with fly eye structures in 14 different places in their bodies, where they never naturally occur. These various tendencies evidently represent only the beginning of the infinite manipulation of human and physical nature through technology, against which — along with other thinkers — Aldous Huxley warned, in his finely crafted dystopia Brave New World.

Apart from the so-called purely physical effects, e.g., toxic waste dumps, poisoned air, skin cancer from ozone depletion, shrinking forests and green spaces, as well as dwindling or extinct natural species — which are bad enough in themselves and now obvious to almost everyone — there are also the enormous social effects and costs of total technologization, for example, massive overpopulation, especially in often overburdened urban areas — which are enfolding more quickly than the ultimate dangers of pollution and biological manipulation.

The trend through all of history has certainly been towards increasing urbanization and technologization in urban areas, but in premodern societies, there were definite natural checks on such growth. The contemporary problem of excessive urban growth affects all parts of the Earth — the Western world, the ex-Eastern bloc, East Asia, and the vast South of the planet. What, for example, can be done today to prevent BosNYWash (Boston – New York – Washington) from swallowing up the entire North-Eastern seaboard of the United States? What is to prevent Mexico City from having a population of 30 million in ten years or so? The traditional society — like all societies of the South of the planet — continues to be dislocated by overpopulation arising from cheap, band-aid infusions of Western technology — resulting in greater misery, disease, starvation, political corruption, and environmental degradation for virtually everyone afterwards. The faster the growth rates of the American and world-economies, the more enticing the images Western advertising firms offer the desperate poor in the South and ex-Eastern Bloc, and the greater the needs of the transnational corporations (TNC’s) for cheap labour pools, the faster such behemoth-cities will grow, in every part of the world. (Only East Asia shows some evidence of being able to cope with burgeoning urban populations — as typified by the authoritarian but very environment-conscious Singapore.) In terms of human social existence, the contemporary urban environment virtually always turns out to be one where, as in New York, the social bonds and ties of “small-town” family, community, and country are largely lost, to be replaced by the “razor’s-edge” excitement of the big city.

In their hey-day from around the 1880’s to the late 1960’s, America’s big cities — New York, Chicago, Boston, Detroit, etc., had evolved a unique, fairly liveable, many cornered community structure that somehow dealt, however imperfectly, with the problems of living in these urban agglomerations. This system was partially described in Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Prominent in these structures were civic politicians and “ward-heelers”; the big factory-owners; leading small businessmen; the municipal police; the Catholic Church, which represented large numbers of non-Protestant white ethnics; the virile, heavy-industry, blue-collar labour unions; the editors and reporters of the big independent papers of the city; as well as traditionally-situated organized-crime groups and youth-gangs, both exceedingly mild in their social consequences by today’s standards. This kind of urban milieu can be seen in any number of movies (especially older movies) set in this period.

However, in the following decades, as the commodity, advertising, and “instant gratification” culture increased its grip on society, there came an explosion and expansion of various vicious groups, for example, greedy developers, ruthless advertisers, the parvenu rich, drug-pushers, etc., that refused to play within the rules of the big-city, resulting in the near-complete breakdown of the urban social consensus, and the turning of large sections of downtown American cities into hell-zones. Although the city vs. country distinction has existed throughout much of history, nowhere has it been thrown into such sharp relief as in America.

There are in fact two, distinct America’s: the big cities — dynamic, pulsating, heterogenous, and cosmopolitan; and the heartland — simple, quiet, and home-spun. There is, however, a serious imbalance of power, ideology, and resource-consumption between the urban centres and the rural periphery, which parallels, it could be argued, the relations between the Western world and the South of the planet, as described in node-periphery theory. The big cities siphon off the people and resources of the heartland to create an environment which, while certainly exciting, is brazen in its artificiality — gleaming corporate skyscrapers, condo-towers, and ugly housing complexes rising out of the detritus created by the death of old neighbourhoods and old town-centres — possibly the last places of civilized life in the modern city (from the Latin civis, suggesting the public-spirited “citizen”) — which had continued to exist in the context of the older big-city structure.

And then there are the suburbs, neither city nor country — the developers’ creation, “Ye Olde Victorian Homes” — thrown together at impossible densities, produced with all the care and craftsmanship of an assembly-line, and centred on those vital modern institutions — the shopping-mall and the public high school — though one sometimes wonders which of these performs the greater “educative” function. In the suburbs, one finds neither the “cutting-edge” excitement of the inner-city, nor any real sense of community and country values. Indeed, the suburbs continually devour the real countryside, forming a sterile “inter-zone” between the various urban conglomerations.

And what now increasingly emerges is the West Edmonton Mall scenario — which is today the world’s largest mall — human beings living in huge, totally manipulated environments, cut off from earth and sky and sea and wind. Life in such an environment would eventually come to resemble the existence portrayed in such movies as Logan’s Run or Outland — meaningless, monotonous work relieved only by perverse, polymorphous ecstasy. In fact, as the efficiency of control techniques increased, one could reward workers with less and less, until they literally became happily mindless drudges, as Jacques Ellul warns.

Through the instrumentalities of the technological media, and a co-opted heterogenous lumpenproletariat — which is always ready to be deployed against the legitimate claims of the heartland — an extraordinarily narrow, socially liberal, economically capitalist, hyper-urban elite dominates North American society. The social liberalism of this elite is nothing more than a justification for ever greater hypertrophic consumption for the entire population; as well as for bringing into existence innumerable pseudo-countercultural “tribes” based almost exclusively on expensive commodity fetishes (as described by Guillaume Faye in La Nouvelle Société de Consommation).

The webs of urban-and-technology-based domination, control, and influence by media reach deep into the heartland — creating through various technological means and simulacra, a whole “other” dimension, an electronic environment, which has never hitherto existed in humanity’s history. Along with the commodity-structure they support, the media constitute the major part of the interlocking grid of what French social theorist Jean Baudrillard terms North American “hyperreality”.

The media, far from being liberating, hyper-centralize power — for those who have access to them — hence the absurd income-figures of persons who, in earlier societies, might well have been petty street-hawkers or street-singers. The electronic and other media dominate the sociophysical environment to an extent never before achievable or imaginable. As Aldous Huxley wrote, “one thousand repetitions make one truth”. And one picture (i.e., riveting visual image) is worth a thousand words!

The media do not use “inefficient” coercive methods but rather all-pervasive normative control of virtually all societal vocabularies and imageries. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell had asserted that “Newspeak is Ingsoc, and Ingsoc is Newspeak”, i.e., that the key to capturing people’s minds was to monopolize the various “languages” current in society. The apparatus of torture and repression drawn in the book was ultimately secondary. Aldous Huxley’s society — to which our own world seems somewhat closer than to Orwell’s vision — can therefore be seen as a “refined” version of Orwell’s police state.

Understanding the nature of semantic and symbolic control allows one to see North American society as both generally non-coercive and normatively totalitarian. The mass media and its complementary mass marketing, mass education, and state therapeutic systems construct the sociophysical environment in which we all live, and the societal norms most of us accept.

What does the promised land of hyperurban North America really amount to? At the upper-most levels of Manhattan, or in its cavernous underground play-pens, corporate controllers, cynical media figures, “successful businessmen” (i.e. drug pushers), highly placed government apparatchiks, and decadent pseudo dissidents, pseudo artists, and pseudo intellectuals commingle freely, indulging in their variegated pleasures — bought at the expense of exploiting and corrupting the heartland, and the decencies of the human heart. The scene is similar in L.A. and its environs, Chicago, San Francisco, Washington D.C., Atlanta, Miami, Detroit…with minor local variations and colour.

All in all, this is reminiscent of the world portrayed in such ambiguous or culturally challenging films as Paddy Chayefsky’s Network (where the desperate prophet-figure, after a brave fight, concludes, “we’re all androids now”); Wall Street (“greed is good!!”); Tim Burton’s new Batman epics; Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner; Verhoeven’s RoboCop; Terry Gilliam’s Brazil; Robert Longo’s Johnny Mnemonic (based on William Gibson’s short story); Judge Dredd; or the Max Headroom TV series — most of which depict the so-called “air-conditioned nightmare” of the “near-future”. (Max Headroom was set “twenty minutes into the future”.) This “gritty future” — distinct in some ways from the supersanitized Brave New World environment — is also explored in Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (filmed by Stanley Kubrick), and in the entire “cyberpunk” subgenre of science-fiction. There already exists — among other phenomena — a rock music movement often called by that name; as well as other such extremal movements (which amount to being entire styles-of-life), like thrash-metal and gangsta-rap, promoting hyperviolence and hyperdecadence.

These various contemporary artefacts (as well as the burgeoning genre of “the lonely, wounded hero”, best typified by Andrew Lloyd Webber’s operatic interpretation of The Phantom of the Opera, as well as the Beauty and the Beast TV series) suggest that meaningful resistance to the current system — whether in strong words or deeds — must initially come from embattled lonely men and women of heroic stature, championing and joining together with all others who are brutally marginalized by the current power-realities. Many of the truly intelligent and decent people in North America wander about half-dazed and half-broken, not even conscious of what is plaguing them and the society as a whole.

And, if generational rebellion truly is inevitable, let it flow in a natural and socially-meaningful direction: towards a rejection of the whole system of media-oligarchy with all its sterility and machine like conditioning processes.

Although rock-music is undeniably one of the primary means for the socialization of youth into contemporary society, it maintains in places strong Romantic and idealistic themes, however distorted they might be. To properly evoke these themes, through careful lyrical and melodic analysis, in a socially meaningful way, would be a quick point of entry into the very centre of current media-generated “youth-culture”. Another possibly hopeful music genre is the rising “New Country”.

Yet, ultimately, the only worthwhile attitude to contemporary North American culture, which “air-conditions hell and kills the soul” — for anyone claiming the barest shred of thought, reflection, or decency — must be cutting, biting, searing, consistent criticism. Surely, there can be no cause more heroic and idealistic than to fight against a corrupt and socially destructive oligarchy; to discover real meaning and worth in one’s own life; and to strive to recreate and then participate fully in a real social, communal, and spiritual life, “heart speaking to heart”. This deeply felt, determined, serious minded criticism might even be seen as the only genuine art or poetry — in the highest meaning of those terms — possible in our age. Arguably, everything else is mannerism, kitsch, commodity, or genre piece, meaningful only in so far as it echoes the serious critique of “the contemporary order of things”.

In the face of a completely manipulated environment, it appears that most of us are left with, as our final defence and ultimate touchstone, only our subterranean underground impulses, our primeval unconscious, which remains virtually inviolate — if we can even believe in something like it in this day and age. This disjunction between something that can be felt as our primeval eros, which is virtually the same as when we emerged from the caves, and our radically altered technological world, probably explains why there are so many people today who superficially accept contemporary norms, yet are genuinely unhappy. Ever deepening unhappiness in the midst of sybaritic luxury, or rather, more often than not, engendered by that purposeless luxury, will remain a part of the human condition in contemporary society until the real genetic manipulation, à la Brave New World, begins.

And there is much to criticize today. The “last men” now in charge (so well described by Nietzsche), who preside over this imploding kingdom, are a feckless oligarchy — they rail against vigilantism, but are unable to maintain safe streets; they claim they are opposed to violence, but supersaturate society with slasher-flicks, shock-horror movies, thrash-metal, and so forth, particularly aimed at the young.

These oligarchs are clearly incapable of giving genuine leadership and direction to the society they are parasitical upon. They cannot even use the justification of being a successful elite, of assuring unity and cohesion for their society — or even a minimum of safety for their citizens. They can evangelize the East to their way of thinking; exploit the South of the planet economically (and invade it militarily, too); dislocate and destroy traditional societies; and rape the environment with relish, at home and abroad, but they lack the creative political energy to form something lasting and worthwhile, which can be passed on to the common history of humanity. It must be understood that the big cities of North America today — completely divorced from the countryside — are really the centres or “capitals” of an emerging, transnational global culture which some term “PlanetTeen” — a borderless, planet wide, socioeconomic system, dominated by North American pop-culture, consumerism, and all pervasive technological saturation.

Mark Wegierski is a Toronto-based writer and historical researcher. He was born in Toronto of Polish immigrant parents

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Rudding Park Hotel, Spa & Golf

Posted on October 2, 2015 by leslie
Rudding Park Hotel

Rudding Park Hotel

Rudding Park Hotel, Spa and Golf

The original building which now houses Rudding Park Hotel, Spa & Golf dates from 1805 – an elegant, large, beautifully symmetrical Georgian house with huge landscaped gardens which offer occluded views of the house. The estate was purchased by Sir Joseph Radcliffe in 1824, and remained in the family until 1972, when bankruptcy resulted in the sale of all the furniture and objets d’art that the Radcliffes had collected over several generations, most of it acquired during successive Grand Tours; the only remaining legacy of the collection is a set of rather fine bookcases. During Rudding Park’s time as hotel, the buildings have been expanded in a series of developments that have joined up the main house and the clocktower, and then added further wings. The complex also boasts a splendid Victorian Gothic church still in use for carol services and blessings, as well as occasional concerts, and I would strongly urge the visitor not to miss this. The original house is used now as the conference and events centre, with spacious and extremely versatile rooms that can be adapted to suit all occasions, such as extending into marquees in the garden or converting into car showrooms. My favourite room here was the library, with its glorious bookcases (yes, those original ones), intriguingly full of old books. The newest wing houses a downstairs spa and small gym and some much larger rooms and suites (including Presidential suites with all appropriate security features). The paintings throughout the buildings reflect country pursuits in their various forms – George Stubbs reproductions and suchlike – which add to the country house atmosphere; whilst there is also a small ‘gallery of fame’ with photographs of the more famous visitors to the hotel.

Rudding Park Hotel is an ever-evolving project; the next plans are for a spacious spa wing to revive the reputation of Harrogate as a top spa destination, with a large number of treatment rooms and pools of different temperatures, as well as a rooftop infinity pool and hydrotherapy pools. We were taken on an entertaining guided tour of the house and the various stages in its development by manager Peter Banks, who has been here 18 years and thus overseen and directed the success of this impressive hotel, and whose physical stature and general oozing of tremendous confidence and charm in a manner both genial and confiding perfectly suits his role.

Hotel Library

Hotel Library

We were staying in a junior suite – decorated in bold green and darker neutral colours, modern-looking but luxurious, with a vast and extremely comfortable bed, balcony, sitting area with long sofas and a beautiful large sumptuous bathroom with rainfall shower and free-standing bath. The suite is designed to be imposing, with hints of regal gold in the colour scheme. We were immensely impressed by the thoughtful touches – we had young master Tristan with us, and a bottle of Johnson’s baby shampoo was provided, along with a biscuit baked with Tristan’s name on it. Bowls of fruit were in evidence as well (much to Young Master’s approval), and the Molton Brown toiletries in the bathroom were likewise a more thoughtful selection than one usually finds.

We took a seat in the bar before dinner, a colder and more modern space, and were here slightly disappointed by the fruit juices on offer, as they appeared to be from concentrate rather than freshly squeezed or local juices (and the appetisers likewise were rather on the pedestrian side). However, our faith was restored as soon as moved through into the restaurant for dinner.

The Clocktower Restaurant is broken up into various very different spaces – some more modern and spacious; others in darker colours and cosier, with lots of banquettes. We were seated in the conservatory, where large circular stone tables and wicker chairs (as one would expect in a conservatory) satellite the sprouting trunk of a very old tree. The walls are a light stone, with traditional arched French windows (rather redolent of Victorian architecture) on three sides of the room and a bright, light atmosphere even in the evening. We sat looking out over the fine gardens, finding it a pleasant and relaxing space.

The Clocktower Restaurant

The Clocktower Restaurant

On entering the hotel we had at once been struck by the positive attitude of the staff, who were extremely friendly and polite, professional and appropriately dressed; some of them struck a great rapport with Tristan (even, entertainingly, playing hide and seek with him in the lobby) – and this high level of service was maintained in the restaurant. A high chair was brought and a kit of colouring-in to keep him occupied, while we were offered water along with the menus and were provided with bread shortly afterwards – fresh brown rolls and white ciabatta rolls, crunchy on top and soft and springy inside.

The menus offered a good range – the menu of the day offered nearly as many choices as the à la carte, with some interesting vegetarian options as well as tempting meat and fish dishes. I commenced with the garden salad – extremely (please, dear reader, excuse the vulgar phrase) ‘on trend’, with a variety of edible flower and leaves, griddled baby vegetables and slightly tart and creamy goats’ cheese wrapped up in coils of crunchy cucumber. Mr Marshall-Luck opted for the duck with rhubarb, which dish worked extremely well, especially as the rhubarb was just verging on the right side of sweetness to complement the slight saltiness of the duck. He found it surprisingly filling, too; a satisfying quantity which nevertheless left plenty of room for the following main course!

Here, I chose the fillet of pork with apple purée, crispy sage leaves, black pudding and wild boar tortelloni. The latter was the best part of the plate, having the most incredible flavour, very gamey and dark: delicious. The nuggets of pork fillet were wrapped in bacon to lend a saltier note and were beautifully tender. Altogether, it was a dish that pleased immensely – all elements sang in harmony and the portions were well-considered, manageable without overwhelming or leaving one feeling too full for dessert.

The steak – a Mr Marshall-Luck weakness – was also superb. Very flavoursome and just fatty enough, the meat was complemented beautifully by a deliciously rich béarnaise sauce and ‘skinny chips’, while the portion was, like that of the pork fillet, judged to perfection.

I gave into the lure of the selection of Yorkshire cheeses, rather than having a dessert – just choosing two goats’ cheeses. I was provided with two very unusual and interesting cheeses – one a generously-portioned wedge of hard and full-flavoured cheese, the other a runny and sharp tasting goat’s cheese presented in a glass with a sprinkling of black truffle on top. These were served with more of the Clocktower Restaurant’s lovely warm bread and various accompaniments.

Mr Marshall-Luck chose the cheesecake with rhubarb, which he deemed very good, although the biscuit base could, perhaps, have been slightly crunchier; the flavours, however, were fresh and open, and the cheesecake itself was deliciously creamy and just rich enough without being overpowering. Young Master Tristan by special request was presented with a small portion of a chocolate cheesecake-y dessert, which he attacked with gusto. It was rich and powerfully – concentratedly – flavoured; and it had a biscuit-y base which texturally complemented the smoothness of the topping very well. The following tea and coffee were both excellent; while the whole meal had been accompanied by the 2008 Rioja Reserve – which was a full-bodied and flavoured wine, albeit nothing wildly spectacular.

For breakfast we were back in the conservatory again and were impressed by the fact that service ran smoothly, despite it being extremely busy; with all the staff working efficiently. Again Tristan was taken good care of and was brought milk to drink. There was a buffet on offer of juices, breads and pastries, although we would have welcomed a greater range in the form of cold meats and cheeses. However, that which was provided was of very good quality, with ‘rolling’ toasters provided for patrons’ use, if desired. The juices, too, were nicely chilled and freshly squeezed. Hot dishes were, of course, also offered, and I went for the scrambled eggs and smoked salmon on muffin – a very thin muffin, crunchy and, pleasingly, buttered. Flakes of smoked salmon were mixed up with the well-done scrambled eggs – thankfully nothing sloppy here – and this was hugely enjoyed by Tristan also.

On the whole, we were greatly impressed by Rudding Park Hotel and much enjoyed our stay, departing with regret that we could not stay longer to wander the extensive gardens and grounds, or to enjoy more of the superb and friendly service, or of the Clocktower Restaurant’s fine food.

However, the immediate area had one last pleasure in store for us. Rudding Park is very close to the town of Knaresborough, which looks a little dull as one drives through it but features the remains of a castle – including dungeon and mediaeval garderobe – and a Museum. Of the latter, the focal point is an original Tudor courtroom (the only one left in the country), complete with trapdoor through which the prisoner would emerge, blinking, into the light and immediately under the stern gaze of the judge, raised high up above him and separated by a vast wooden table for the jury. We found this transfixingly fascinating – a real window into history. There are also various other artefacts of interest in the Museum, and this is highly recommended for any visitor to Rudding Park for an unique insight into a side of life rarely seen.

Knaresborough Viaduct

Knaresborough Viaduct

Em Marshall-Luck is QR’s Restaurant and Wine Critic

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Donald, don’t let FNC shaft America

Posted on September 29, 2015 by leslie

Faux News

Donald, don’t let FNC shaft America

Trump, Mercer, eviscerate Fox

Bless Donald Trump. Inadvertently, by just being Donald, Mr. Trump has delivered more good news to liberty lovers.

In his bid for the presidency, Mr. Trump is not only threatening the Republican establishment, but is forcing a war with the cable news channel that does the Republican regimists’ bidding.

The Fox News Channel backed Genghis Bush’s wars. The Powers That Be at FNC now wish to roger (Ailes) America, again, by delivering the country to neoconservative tool Marco Rubio, or to fool John Kasich (governor from Ohio), or to Ms. Fiorina, whom tacky media types call “Carly.” However, this little lady’s honeyed words conceal a burning desire to commit the country to an arms race with China and Russia.

Not for naught did Scott Walker go from 2 percent in the polls, to zero, to sayonara. Walker, that live wire, picked up his marbles and went home, blaming Trump for making him sad. But like the rest of the establishment’s candidates, Walker had served up the same sub-intelligent, hackneyed lies about the root-causes of the migration problem plaguing Europe.

Syrian, Iraqi and Libyan populations are on the move, the neoconservative posse preaches, because of a failure to remove Bashar Hafez al-Assad, a man who was the source of stability in Syria, much like Saddam Hussein was in Iraq.

Have we learned nothing about the perils of toppling law-and-order dictators, only to see the rise of barbarians worse than their predecessors? Evidently not.

Bar Rand Paul and, to a degree, Donald Trump, all the Republican candidates insist that American exceptionalism lies in leading the world not in technological innovation, comity, commerce and as exemplars of individual rights—but by projecting military power the world over. The US government’s bankruptcy, the candidates see as having no bearing on their own unanimous plans for an arms race with the other super powers and a renewed military offensive in the Middle East.

Since the second primary season Republican debate, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, in California, FNC’s Sean Hannity has been promoting Rubio’s rabid ideation with zeal. Rubio regularly trashes Vladimir Putin for trying to prop Assad up, so that the Islamic State does not capture Damascus.

Regrettably, other than to sensibly say that he’d get along with Putin, Trump made absolutely no attempt to demonstrate a familiarity with the issues, at Simi Valley. He might want to rethink his relaxed approach, for it belies the candidate’s claim to have surrounded himself with the best people possible, or to have good judgement.

Trump’s good judgment has since surfaced in a conversation with Greta Van Susteren: “If Putin goes into Syria and is “able to knock out ISIS,” that’s not the worst thing he’s ever heard, Trump told the host.

That excellent instinct—allow Putin to degrade and destroy ISIS if he wants to—comes from a very different perspective than Rubio’s lamentations about Russia “replacing us as the single most important power broker in the Middle East.”

You see, Trump’s instinct is to conduct foreign policy that benefits Americans. He doesn’t want Americans dying for nothing. Rubio’s prime objective is to conduct foreign policy that aggrandises Washington. Like other neoconservatives, he dreads being a politician in a country that is no longer the world’s military hegemon.

For if America busies itself not with elective wars, but with commerce, the shift in power and prestige will be away from politicians who prosecute wars, and back to The People who produce prosperity.

“I’m owned by the people!” affirmed Trump, who wants what the people want.

Having spent a total of two years of his working life outside government, Rubio—reflexively, not consciously—wants what’ll glorify The State, the thing by which he survives and thrives.

And what does the battered GOP base want?

The base, I hope, has wizened up to the neoconservatives.

The base, I hope, will realize that neoconservatives are still in the business of creating their own parallel reality and forcing ordinary Americans, Europeans and Middle-Easterners to inhabit the ruins.

As I read it, the GOP base wants government to reverse the things it has done; to repeal laws, wars and do no more harm.

Unless in defense of the realm, Americans are uninterested in more of the same foreign-policy folly. Let us keep our military mitts to ourselves and defend our own borders. That, it would appear, is the prevailing sentiment among Republican voters, although not among the regimists who congregated at the Reagan Library.

Therefore, it is to Rand Paul’s prescriptions during the debate that Trump should look, and not to the War Tourette’s of the rest:

  • Refrain from a rash foreign policy.
  • Engage with Russia and China.
  • Talk to the Mullahs before you “bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” (a jingle popularized by jingoist John McCain).
  • Leave dope policy to the states (not ideal, for consumption is to be left to the individual, but better than most).
  • Do not sign on to bomb Assad out of existence. You’ll miss him when he’s gone.
  • Remind Hillary Clinton who broke Libya.

Donald Trump has done another fine thing since Simi Valley, about which the media is audibly silent.

In the honorable tradition Benjamin Franklin wished to establish, Trump said he’d forfeit a salary as president. Many of our Founding Fathers believed America’s representatives ought not to be paid at all.

As a man among metrosexuals, Trump’s demeanor, naturally, is unlike that of his fork-tongued adversaries.

Nevertheless, Trump was genial, even gracious, at Simi Valley. He showed contrition over his unkind cuts about Carly Fiorina’s face. Fiorina could have cracked a smile, but didn’t. (Or, perhaps she couldn’t, considering the likely nips-and-cuts suffered by The Face).

And Trump refused to grovel.

Good. Groveling about impolitic statements is the first sign of a housebroken GOPer.

So here’s why Trump is good for liberty:

By waging internecine warfare against the political masters and their mouthpiece (FNC), Trump is undermining the bastions of neoconservatism in America; he is dealing a structural blow to the edifice of Beltway Republicanism.

In response, the Beltway boys are rising on their little hind legs.

As Megyn Kelly riffed about Trump’s sexism, Fox News commentator Rich Lowry blurted out this on Kelly’s File: “Carly Fiorina cut Trump’s balls off with the precision of a surgeon.” (Kelly, who is turning out to be rather vacuous, detected no sexism there.)

Another slick Republican strategist, Rick Wilson, a regular on CNN, recently asked Trump supporter Ann Coulter on Twitter if Trump paid her “more for anal.”
Trump, for his part, fired first on the political flank. Now, in a pincer movement, Trump opened up a new front and is gunning for the establishment’s media megaphone.

This is why Trump’s war with Fox News is part of a just, liberating war.

Fox diversity

Ilana Mercer is a paleolibertarian writer, based in the U.S.  She pens WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, “Return to Reason.” She is a fellow at the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies. Her latest book is “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Her website is www.IlanaMercer.com.  She blogs at  www.barelyablog.com   Follow her on Twitter:  https://twitter.com/IlanaMercer “Friend” her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ilanamercer.libertarian

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Running on Empty

Posted on September 25, 2015 by leslie

Free running 2

Running on Empty

Robert Henderson enjoys Derek Turner’s Displacement

In his last work Sea Changes Derek Turner presented a large canvas on which he painted both the predicament of the illegal immigrant and a Britain afflicted with a paralysing political correctness which traps both the British elite and the ignored and secretly despised white working-class. With the novella Displacement, we have a more intimate work which examines a dismal, deracinated England which has left the English with no sense of having a land that they could call their own. They have even been robbed of any sense that their predicament is in some way wrong.

Displacement is set in South London. Martin Hacklett is a member of the white working class, an endangered species in his London. Like the rest of his class Martin is not only materially deprived. He has also been robbed of his national identity. He has a job as a courier on a bike and, because he knows no better, thinks him self lucky to have a job because England has got to such a state that such jobs normally go to graduates.

The world Martin inhabits is unreservedly tawdry. Everything that once gave the white working class a sense of belonging, worth and respect has been removed by post war immigration. A creeping colonisation of Britain has occurred. His is one of the few white English faces left in the road in which he lives. His white English neighbours are not working class but the advance guard of a future gentrification. Martin wistfully thinks of a life in the suburbs. He used to dream of somehow finding the money to move there when he had a girlfriend, Kate, but that dream died after they broke up.

Martin lives with his father and elder brother Mike. His dad is a vessel adrift from its anchor. He worked on ships as a deckhand until the company which employed him went bust. Since then he has been unemployed. But it is not just his work which has gone. A natural Labour voter he no longer has a meaningful Labour Party to vote for or a union to which he can belong. Mike is a drug addict and minor criminal.

Martin’s release from the dreariness of a London in which the native English have been reduced to just one ethnic group is twofold. The first means of escape is free running. This frees him from the clutching mediocrity of his social and physical world, giving him not just a physical release but a sense that he is temporarily above the dreariness in which he lives. His second release is through poetry which he both reads and writes. Martin is not academically inclined and never got much out of school, but he has a desire to express himself and free verse can be, like free running, something which is not constricting, something he can bend to his will rather than he being bent by circumstances.

Against all the odds Martin becomes a sort of celebrity. Whilst free running Martin is seen by people in the buildings he scales. This causes alarm amongst some, because he runs in a white hoody which with his blondness gives him a ghost-like appearance. Martin is also seen on a building housing a senior politician, something that attracts the notice of the police who fear that he is a security risk. The media take up the story without knowing who the person involved is. Martin’s ex-girlfriend guesses that he is responsible. She is excited by Martin’s sudden if so far anonymous celebrity, reconnects with him and arranges for a public school educated journalist by the name of Seb to interview Martin about his free running.

The journalist visits Martin and his family in the spirit of an anthropologist visiting a tribe of hunter gatherers. Except for Kate, whom he tries unsuccessfully to seduce, Seb does not have any real interest in Martin and his family and friends; they are merely props for an article which will validate his idea of the white working-class as an out of date, redundant species, with Martin cast as the ugly duckling who is changed into a swan by his free running exploits, something Seb attempts to capture in prose of excruciating pretension such as “From his concrete eyrie he can discern the essential unity of humanity”.

The article is deeply offensive but Seb diffuses the anger of Martin and his friends and family by introducing Martin to a publisher of poetry who gives him hope that some of his poems will be published. What Martin does not appreciate is that this is itself a patronising act, a re-enactment of the patronage of working-class authors in the quarter century after the Second World War. It is a continuation of the offensive, patronising tone of Seb’s newspaper article with Martin in the role of a performing savage.

The real tragedy is not the mean circumstances in which Martin finds himself, but the fact that he accepts his lot without questioning it: he does not ask why he cannot set up a decent home because housing is beyond expensive; or why he cannot get the sort of job his father’s generation could get, manual most probably but paying well enough for a man to raise a family; or why his father has been reduced to idleness through no fault of his own. Most importantly he does not question how it is that where he lives is almost entirely dominated by people who are not like him when only a few decades before the place he lived in had been solidly white working class.

Martin should be filled with rage but he is a man resigned to being a victim because he does not realise he is a victim. He sees the unappetising mediocrity of the world he lives in but accepts it as how things are. He does not even have what Winston Smith in 1984 had, vague memories of what preceded the dismal world in which he lived. Winston, however ineptly, had an urge to challenge the status quo; Martin has no urge to change things, only to find a way to escape the grind of his daily existence with poetry and free running, which both gives him a focus on something untainted by the rest of his life and literally lifts him above it. Yet even these consolations will be fleeting enough because free running is for the young. It will not be long before Martin is too old to find his freedom there.

ROBERT HENDERSON is QR’s film critic. He blogs at http://www.living in a madhouse.wordpress.co.om/

http://www.englandcalling.wordpress.com/

http://www.ukcmri.wordpress.com/

DEREK TURNER is the former editor of QR. Displacement is published by Endeavour and is available as a Kindle Edition via Amazon Whispernet, price £1.99. Derek’s personal website is at http://www.derek-turner.com/

 

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Inside Out

Posted on September 22, 2015 by leslie
Peter Docter

Peter Docter

Inside Out

Film Review by Robert Henderson 

Main Voice cast:
Amy Poehler as Joy
Phyllis Smith as Sadness
Bill Hader as Fear
Lewis Black as Anger
Mindy Kaling as Disgust
Richard Kind as Bing Bong, Riley’s long forgotten imaginary friend
Kaitlyn Dias as Riley Andersen
Diane Lane as Riley’s mother
Kyle MacLachlan as Riley’s father
Director: Pete Docter

This is a film with high ambition. It is an attempt at explaining the workings of the human brain whilst tugging the heart strings of adults and children by telling the story of an unhappy and insecure child.

At the centre of the film is an 11-year-old girl named Riley. Her parents have just moved from Minnesota to San Francisco. As a consequence Riley feels isolated and lonely because she has left all her friends behind and everything else which was familiar.

Most of the action takes place inside Riley’s mind, although there are occasional forays into the interior consciousness of her parents. Headquarters is Riley’s conscious mind which contains five emotional personifications: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust, and Anger. Memories are represented as orbs which can be changed by contact with the five personifications. There are core memories housed in a hub in Headquarters which power five “islands”, each of which reflects a different aspect of Riley’s personality: Family Island, Honesty Island, Hockey Island, Friendship Island and Goofball Island. The Islands sit over a memory dump where unimportant or unwanted memories are placed. Aside from all this is an area storing long term memories.

Joy is the dominant personification and acts as the organiser of Riley’s personality and emotional balance. Sadness is the other important personification. A theme running through the film is the fact that sadness is not just an unwonted quality producing misery but sometimes a creative force which shifts the momentum of the mind by making memories which are sad to be flavoured with poignancy of melancholy so that they become more than just sadness.

There is an oddity with the personifications. Riley’s personifications are divided between entities which are clearly male or female. Joy, Sadness and Disgust are female and Anger and Fear male. On the occasions when the personifications of the parents are see the mother’s are all female and the father’s all male. Was this just slapdash or a conscious decision? I rather suspect slapdash, but either way as the difference goes unexplained it undermines the film’s pretensions to be more than just a cartoon about a child’s negotiating of a difficult period of her life.

Joy and Sadness get accidentally swept into the maze of long-term memory along with the core values. The rest of the film is devoted to Joy and Sadness struggling to make it back to Headquarters, which they eventually do, while Fear, Disgust and Anger are trying incompetently to keep Riley’s mind normal, their attempts resulting in the personality islands collapsing into the memory dump leaving Riley without the psychological structure to keep her on the straight and narrow and temporarily depriving her of the better angel of her personality.

Joy (voice of Amy Poehler) and Sadness (voice of Phyllis Smith) catch a ride on the Train of Thought in Disney?Pixar's "Inside Out." Directed by Pete Docter (?Monsters, Inc.,? ?Up?), "Inside Out" opens in theaters nationwide June 19, 2015. ?2014 Disney?Pixar. All Rights Reserved.

Joy (voice of Amy Poehler) and Sadness (voice of Phyllis Smith) catch a ride on the Train of Thought in “Inside Out.”

Treated as an Odyssey that is simple enough and potentially attractive as a storyline. But there is an insuperable obstacle to the film being enjoyable and developing into a well loved Pixar classic. Inside Out is very didactic. To understand what the film is about it is necessary for the audience to take on board the animation’s instruction on how the mind works or at least the film’s version of how it operates. That raises a very awkward question, namely, what is the natural audience for the film? Will children of Riley’s age honestly follow what is happening? Will adults for that matter? Or will a somewhat baffled boredom be the result?

Of course there is a second element to the film, the emotional journey of Riley. Will it appeal to pre-pubescent girls around Riley’s age? Perhaps but the portrayal of the girl is what girls of that age would probably see as parents being patronisingly superior and “just not understanding them”. That could either alienate them or be something which enlists their empathy. But I doubt whether it will have any attraction to boys in the Riley age group because they would be at best uninterested in what girls think and at worst actively hostile.

It is also difficult to believe that either girls or boys of Riley’s age would have found the storyline exciting. There is a bit of routine improbably physical cartoon action with Bing Bong, Riley’s imaginary friend from long ago, helping Joy and Sadness to return to Headquarters, but there is little of that and not terribly thrilling at that. The film is so intent on showing how clever it is – gee, whiz, we’re showing everyone how the brain works – that those producing it have lost sight of the fact that they are in the entertainment business and their clients are first and foremost children.

That leaves adults. In many modern animations there are a host of knowing jokes for adults but here there are next to none. In fact, make that there are precious few jokes for children or adults. That leaves emotional engagement. Critics and various mediafolk have made great play about tears flowing as they watched Inside Out, but the sentimentality is too contrived to be entirely convincing.

As a serious exposition of how the brain works Inside Out is a non-starter. To be a serious exposition it is necessary to properly understand concepts like short and long term memory. Most people will simply think that one lasts longer than the other, when short term memory is very short indeed (a few seconds) and the relationship between short and long term memory is still much debated in academic circles. The film gives an impression of certainty where there is no certainty.

There is also a problem with the personified emotions, joy, anger, sadness, fear and disgust. These are presumably meant to be the primary emotions which can combine to produce secondary emotions in the same way that red, blue and yellow are primary colours which can be mixed to produce other colours. But is it true that the five personified emotions are really the only primary emotions? For example, how would jealousy be created out of two or more of them? Anger, Disgust and Fear might be components of jealousy, but there is far more to jealousy than those emotions, for example, greed and desire.

The animation has met with widespread, indeed fulsome, praise from critics who see the film as a penetrating and intelligent drama daringly dealing with the difficult and nebulous subjects of brain function and consciousness as well as depicting an 11-year-old girl’s interior world. This judgement I find utterly misplaced. Why has critical opinion been so adulatory? I suspect that it is a film which the chattering classes feel obliged to praise because of its self-consciously serious intent.

Technically the film is first rate as one would expect from Pixar. It looks superb and the actors providing the voices do their best to imbue the characters with distinct personality.   But truth be told the film is curiously bloodless, and whisper it quietly, distinctly dull. In fact, Inside Out has the tone of the kind of book Victorian children had vainly thrust upon them to instruct the child in moral improvement. There was a large component of children of the Riley age group in the audience when I saw Inside Out. They were remarkably silent. Was that because they were entranced or because they were unengaged? I rather suspect it was the latter.

ROBERT HENDERSON is QR’s film critic. He blogs at http://www.living in a madhouse.wordpress.com/
http://www.englandcalling.wordpress.com/
http://www.ukcmri.wordpress.com/

 

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