Art

I went to see a Beckett play last week at the Bristol Old Vic - not in the main auditorium because it's still being renovated but in a studio theatre which held about a hundred people. The play was Krapp's Last Tape which I remember enjoying when it was broadcast on TV many years ago. I can't say I enjoyed this production though I think the one actor did a good job. Beckett's a bit of a mystery to me. Can't say I like his so-called masterpiece "Waiting for Godot" in which two tramps wait for someone who doesn't turn up. But that may be the point of it, the attraction of it to some people, the sort of people who like to discuss what it was all about after the performance. Waiting for death, maybe. Well, Beckett is very interested in life after death if there is one, or, rather, interested in the nothingness that comes after death. A bit like Schopenhauer possibly.
Libby Purvis in yesterday's Times thought there was just too much talk, too much theorising about art these days. I think she's right. Like those people who like to see hidden depths in abstruse plays a la Beckett, she points a finger at art critics and perpetrators of some of art's monstrosities. She writes: "When did words become so significant that visual artists could assemble any old roadkill, excrement or crude pastiche and critics would force it into fame? Much is said about the commercialisation of the art market. I am more fascinated by the verbal hype".
I believe that there are quite a few so-called artists about who have little talent except to be able to advertise themselves for financial gain. Damien Hirst surely; Tracey Emin is another. That perpetrator of barbie-doll-like plastic works large and glossy and almost sick-making stuff.... his name escapes me - as does his talent. Yet they get talked about in glowing terms by some critics, not all, not Robert Powell for example who saw more art in the man who "caught the f....ing fish" than in that of the man who put it in a cage and who called it, mystifyingly and cryptically, "The Physical Impossibilty in the Mind of Someone Living"? Makes you think, eh? Makes you want to discuss it, eh? Makes me want to puke.

Shakespeare

I'm trying to think when was the last time I enjoyed a play by Shakespeare. It's certainly a long time ago. I have enjoyed some of his plays which have been made into films but not usually (if ever?) those perfomed on stage. Partly this is my fault since in recent years my hearing hasn't been good and so I miss a lot of dialogue; but only from some actors. So, I blame acrors a lot. This week I went to see a Globe Theatre production of Henry V which was on tour and which stopped off at Cardiff's New Theatre for a week. It began, of course, with the Chorus saying "O for a muse of fire...." etc. This I heard perfectly. But from then on I had difficulty hearing what was said and I blame the actors for their poor enunciation. But I know the play well enough to follow what was going on. I left during the interval.
This was a professional production with professional actors in a splendidly suitable set, yet it lacked something. Was it the direction? Was it me? Was it Shakespeare?
I have to say that I have had it "up to here" with Shakespeare's comic characters. They just ain't funny. Were they ever? Well, yes, some have been;:I recall a couple of characters in The Tempest who made me laugh. But the ones in this Henry V weren't amusing at all. I saw a production of "The Comedy of Errors" at Stratford a few years ago - which had had glowing revues - and I was bored.
So I think it must be me. I have outgrown my pleasure in Shakespeare's plays - except Hamlet, Othello and Julius Caeser.
This reminds me of a famous translater of Ibsen's plays who said, in his old age: "I have spent the best years of my life being bored by the great works of literature".
Whatever, it's no more Shakespeare for me on stage. Films maybe.

House of Lords

Reform of the House of Lords. How those words inspire! How they make the adrenilin flow!
If I were to consult some of the habitual denizens of my local pub I think I can guess what their answers would be if asked the question: "Do you think the House of Lords should be reformed?" It would either be "Couldn't care less" or "Yes, they should just get rid of the House of Lords altogether."
The Spectator's editor believes that it works quite well as it is so we should follow the advice given by Viscount Falkland in 1614: "When it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change." Or, as it might be put today: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
Nick Clegg is someone who believes, it seems, with an almost religious conviction, that the Lords should be reformed. According to Simon Heffer, writing in the Daily Mail, "Mr Clegg's desire to reform the House of Lords is gratuitous, narcissistic and ignorant." But, Simon, it's in keeping with everything that Nick Clegg has done over the past year or so: first was his admission that he had slept with 30 women (which, when Nicky got up in parliament to say that in a constituency meeting a young woman had approached him.... had inspired a remark from another MP : "Thirty-one!") which is not, as I suppose he imagined it might have been, something that would prove him to be "at one" with the ordinary guy; then his assuming that the vote on proportional representation would go through; then ..... Too many cack-handed things to list.
Reforming the House of Lords is about as interesting as watching cricket when it's raining or reading articles about the imminent election of a London mayor when the two main candidates are buffoons.
Apparently, according to a recent poll, "only 42% are interested in politics." As much as that!
People are finding it hard to make ends meet and our beloved politicians are pondering over reform of the House of Lords. As the Daily Mail might put it: "you couldn't make it up."

Mina

I went to Trip.com to find out which are the best restaurants in Cardiff and found a Lebanese place called Mina to be top of the list. It had a series of excellent reviews so I was tempted to go there. Recently I had received a certain amount of money from an American cousin who wanted to give me a present - I won't tell you why. She sent me a couple of hundred quid and I told her I'd use it to buy some good meals in Cardiff.
Thus my wife and I went to Mina's. It's an unassuming sort of place from the outside in an area of Cardiff where there are many Asian and Chinese retaurants. Inside,the decor was bright but not off-puttingly stark. We were shown to two seats at the window overlooking the street. The waiter was very charming and pleasant. We ordered a bottle of red house wine and soon had before us a bottle of Lebanese red wine which was delicious and cost about £11. I noticed it said 14% on the label which, to me, is quite hign, almost as much as Sherry.
The meal we ordered was chicken with mushrooms and a few other bits and pieces in a delicious white sauce, not spicey, rather bland perhaps but very tasty, with rice. Very enjoyable.
But I couldn't finish it and when the waiter looked with some apologetic wonder at my not having quaffed the lot I had to explain that now that I was "getting on in years" my stomache capacity was not what it had been when I had been a young man.
It is a little embarrasing I find. It happens whenever I go out to dine. I feel the waiter and chef must feel that the food was not to my liking but this isn't so, it's just that I get "full" after I have eaten about half to two thirds of the quantity on the plate. I wish they would cater for us olduns and serve us smaller portions (at a reduced price of course).
The desert was a lighter affair: youhurt with soft honey covered in pestachio nuts. Angel's food.
9 out of 10 for Mina's. Cost for two? £43. Good.

Mina

French Films

What is it about French films that make me cringe? Often they receive rave reviews but I see only mediocrity. A few years ago I saw a film called, I think, "Hidden" which had rave reviews; I thought it above the average for depth but to me it had a sense of believing it was greater than it actually was. There was so much in it I wanted explained. There was a mystery that, to my mind, was never solved. And that is, I think, a feature of serious French films: they present something to the eye that appears to carry intellectual weight but doesn't; they present problems that they seem not to want to solve because, if they do, the game is given away, the emperor has no clothes.
In "The Kid with the Bike" the young lad who is in a sort of Borstal asks a stranger, a woman who he has clung to in a doctor's surgery to evade capture by the school's staff, if he can stay with her on weekends. Why does she say "yes"? No reason is given. You are not supposed to ask this question. The reason? It doesn't have an answer. But the makers of this film are wiser than me: later on the boy asks her the same question: "why did you take me in?" and she replies "I don't know". She acts mysteriously in a realistic setting. Why? Then there is the boy riding his bike: long sequences with the hand-held camera (in a car, no doubt) on him. Why? Are we supposed to be thinking the boy's thoughts? But we don't know what he is thinking or even if he is thinking.
This is a film that was enjoyable to watch and infinitely irritating to think about thoughout.
But French films are like that; they always have been. Except their thrillers like "Riffifi". Why don't they make more of them instead of trying to arty and intellectual. Trying to be!

The Hunger Games

What a film! I am not a fan of sci-fi films, though I enjoyed "The Thing", the black and white version many years ago, and was not expecting to enjoy "The Hunger Games" but I did. More than just enjoyed it as if it was something nice like ice cream; I felt it had an intellectual element that lifted it above the usual sci-fi films. The action takes place in a future America which is now - then - a totalitarian regime run from a city called Capitol and run with a demonic ferocity and control that is excitingly frightening. There has been in the past an uprising by the poor people in the various outlying parts of the country, an uprising which was put down ruthlessly so that the people now live in terror and severe poverty. For the entertainment of the mass of those in control, a decadent-seeming lot of dandies, perverts and dolls, every year two young people, a boy and a girl, are taken from each of the 12 districts and forced to fight to the death in a large wooded area until only one of them is left alive. It is not only a way the dictator has of maintaining his control over the people but is also shown on TV to entertain, like some ghastly reality programme.
What gave it, to me, an extra element of interest was that, due to the masterly way in which the society was presented in the film, it made me think of the way some societies we know now, like Syria or Iran or The Sudan, function. Not just some which now exist but many of those in history. The Romans, The Pharoahs, The Chinese. It made me feel that I now know something of how it must have felt to a person in, say, China during the Gang of Four's horrific reign of terror.
I wished for some kind of solution or even just a glimpse of a solution to the state which held its people in such dreadful subjection but the film didn't give it: at the end things went on as before. And, in a way, this brought home the horror of it more scarily.