Hello and welcome to the first Eyecatching Words podcast of 2024. This is your weekly aural (with an A) magazine with news, features and music from deep in the heart of the UK, as seen by a white privileged 65 year old Brit who tries not to be typical of his demographic.
As usual I will be taking a look at my personal week, dipping an anxious toe into the ice cold water that is the news of the world, and selectively looking through the batshit that modern life produces in abundance. But this week is a short episode as I get into the retired man’s new groove, so no features, just a lot of rant and rave.
So that was Christmas. Regardless of whether your festive season was good or bad and did or did not align with your beliefs, it is over now for another twelve months.I took a taxi ride this week which was instructive as I had a muslim driver who did not drink alcohol, and he had a number of stories to tell about drunken passengers he had had the misfortune to carry over the Christmas and new year period. His most graphic concerned a woman who had asked him to stop the car so that she could take a piss on a grass verge, only to then pass out in a pool of her own urine.
There was nothing self righteous or judgemental about his description but he was genuinely baffled as to why anyone would want to do that to themselves. In his view alcohol was one of the world’s greatest evils, far worse than drugs and petty crime. But there are signs of a backlash with the steady rise of low- and no-alcohol drinks and new technologies which mean that for both wine and beer it is increasingly possible to have something which is enjoyable in its own right and not just a poor imitation of the real thing. Personally I confess to at least three episodes of over-indulgence during the holiday period but my body is showing signs of rejecting this particular lifestyle choice, and I find myself increasingly turning to the Dry Drinker website, which is my go-to place for decent alternatives to alcoholic beer.
I am not a great fan of Dry January. Or sober October. It should be an all year round balanced approach, unless someone wants to come up with a tagline for every month. In fact I’ll do it for you, omitting the two months that are already labeled.
Don’t get larey in February
March means parched when it comes to booze
April, April, no drinks on the table
May the fourth alcohol free beer be with you
June is the time for a booze free tune
July brings alcohol free beer in the sky
August. Just avoid alcohol. Nothing rhymes with August.
September means summer is finally over, so just stay sober
Remember, remember it’s a no booze November
And finally:
December’s for celebrating, not inebriating
I think we can safely say that the poet laureate has nothing to fear from me, but you get my point. Just drink in moderation or not at all. And as the old hypocrites of the parenting world used to put it: do as I say, not as I do.
Looking back –
The news at the end of the year continued grim. Compassion fatigue is definitely a thing as The Ukraine and Gaza started to slip down the front page. We are habituated to the bad stuff being there. The world is like one of those town centres with a reputation for dogshit; you just start dodging the turds rather than getting angry about them. But there was a lot of talk about a UK general election being called for May, which I still don’t know whether is true or not. Personally I think Sunak is such a Machiavellian figure that he is deliberately rumourmongering to play games with the labour opposition. I think autumn is more likely. Either way there are two enemies for democracy to overcome in the year ahead. The first is lies, damned lies and social media. And the second is good old apathy, the belief that voting changes nothing. Well I can tell you now that it does. The thirteen years of labour government between 1997 and 2010 were not perfect but there was an attempt to invest in public services, create a sense of social cohesion, and do levelling up in a genuine rather than a tokenistic way. By contrast the last thirteen years of Tory government have seen an astonishing decline in standards in public life, the rich getting richer, the poor getting poorer, a disastrous decline in our relationship with our key trading partners, and a devastated infrastructure. But don’t take my word for it. This is from the latest edition of Prospect magazine :
Everywhere you look there is a crisis: the NHS, the entire criminal justice system, housing, social care, higher education and on and on. Almost all NHS trusts are in deficit. Several councils have already fallen into effective bankruptcy—including the biggest, Birmingham—and 26 others are at risk, with some of the larger Tory shires on the list. There is a recruitment crisis across most of the public sector, as lower pay and the sheer emotional exhaustion, exacerbated by huge demand and a crushing sense of failure, have made it harder to persuade people to sign up. It is worst in social care, where there are over 150,000 vacancies, more than the total number of doctors in the NHS. All these problems feed off each other. The initial focusing of austerity on the poorest increased pressure on public services, helping to trigger crises. These crises have their own knock-on effects. For instance the inability to get adequate healthcare has pushed up the numbers out of work for health reasons, and the numbers on disability benefits. Which in turn has created a tight labour market, even in a stagnant economy, which has made growth even harder to achieve and public sector recruitment more difficult too. That lack of growth reduces the scope to invest in public services. It looks horribly like a spiral that we will struggle to break out of. And the risk is that if conventional politics is seen to have failed completely, voters become willing to try out extremists—a pattern that is not confined to the UK. The Conservatives will, no doubt, keep searching for someone else to blame. But, during one of the more challenging periods in our history, we have been saddled with our worst-ever government. You wonder if they will ever be forgiven.
Don’t be cynical and don’t be apathetic. Get out there this year and educate yourself and go to the ballot box with a sense of purpose. The phrase “voting changes nothing” was invented by people who want to keep us all under the thumb.
So I had a good Christmas and New Year and I hope you did too. The winter solstice is out of the way. I’m over my cold and I’ve managed to get up to London a couple of times, so here are a couple of cultural highlights.
First off was Hamnet at the Garrick Theatre in the Charing Cross Road. I read the book by Maggie O’Farrell a couple of years ago and it has been adapted for the stage by the actress and writer Lolita Chakrabati who did the stage adaptation for Life of Pi. It tells of how Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway met and married and then went on to lead separate lives as she immersed herself in bringing up their children and he went to London to seek fame and fortune. In many ways she was the wise and passionate earth to his feverish intellectual lightning. She was immersed in folklore and healing and had a bear of a brother who bought stability to both families. He was a firestorm of ideas and words with a drunken loutish father and a an appointment with history. Of their three children, Hamnet was the one to die of the plague at the age of eleven, with devastating consequences for those that lived. But by the end of the story there is a reconciliation of sorts and the beginnings of a new story that we have all since come to share in. In short, Hamnet (like Shakespeare’s Hamlet) is a space where the intellectual and the metaphysical violently collide and then become one. Not resolved but reconciled. I loved it. Excellently and compactly staged, it moved at pace but bought you into the story in thought provoking ways.
My other foray to London was to catch the Marina Abramovic retrospective at the Royal Academy before it finished on the 1st January. I am so glad I made time for this. I knew nothing of her work, but it is stark and impactful and contains many shocks to the senses. She is now in her seventies but has over the decades explored so many themes through actual self harm and on one occasion nearly killing herself with one of her own pyrotechnic installations. Here is an account of one piece, Rhythm 0, which she performed in 1974.
To test the limits of the relationship between performer and audience, Abramović developed one of her most challenging and best-known performances. She assigned a passive role to herself, with the public being the force that would act on her. Abramović placed on a table 72 objects that people were allowed to use in any way that they chose; a sign informed them that they held no responsibility for any of their actions. Some of the objects could give pleasure, while others could be wielded to inflict pain, or to harm her. Among them were a rose, a feather, honey, a whip, olive oil, scissors, a scalpel, a gun and a single bullet. For six hours the artist allowed audience members to manipulate her body and actions without consequences. This tested how vulnerable and aggressive human subjects could be when actions have no social consequences. At first the audience did not do much and was extremely passive. However, as the realization began to set in that there was no limit to their actions, the piece became brutal. By the end of the performance, her body was stripped, attacked, and devalued into an image that Abramović described as the “Madonna, mother, and whore.: As Abramović described it later: “What I learned was that … if you leave it up to the audience, they can kill you. … I felt really violated: they cut up my clothes, stuck rose thorns in my stomach, one person aimed the gun at my head, and another took it away. It created an aggressive atmosphere. After exactly 6 hours, as planned, I stood up and started walking toward the audience. Everyone ran away, to escape an actual confrontation.
Strong stuff. Some of her performances survive only as photographs and written accounts, others could be seen on video. A naked man and woman stood in a doorway and to get past them you had to squeeze between the two. Another naked man lay on a slab with a skeleton on top of him. Some pieces, made of stone and marble, could be interacted with. There were even some almost traditional canvasses which showed she was capable of art that you felt comfortable as well as uncomfortable with.
I like to make links between the things I have seen and done. Abramovic likes to confront and disrupt, and in a way that is what Shakespeare did in a very different way with some of his plays over four hundred years ago. If art does not confront or disrupt us it becomes entertainment. I left feeling suitably dazed and scared at the thought of what human beings are capable of. But I was also struck by the thought that artists can be brave in ways that most of us never know. If nothing else you have to admire her for her sheer courage in allowing her life, her pain, her indignity to become a work of art in itself.
My other piece of news was that I bought myself a retirement present: a high end camera which has astonishing low light capabilities. I was once a serious amateur photographer and did a lot of work with theatre groups and dance companies so now that I have time on my hands I intend to rediscover my love of photography. Checkout the eyecatchingwords.blog website for my progress and updates.
Lastly the batshit news. Last year, mathematicians discovered the “einstein,” a unique shape that can tile a flat surface in a pattern that does not repeat. According to the New York Times
Last November, after a decade of failed attempts, David Smith, a self-described shape hobbyist of Bridlington in East Yorkshire, England, suspected that he might have finally solved an open problem in the mathematics of tiling: That is, he thought he might have discovered an “einstein.”
In less poetic terms, an einstein is an “aperiodic monotile,” a shape that tiles a plane, or an infinite two-dimensional flat surface, but only in a nonrepeating pattern. (The term “einstein” comes from the German “ein stein,” or “one stone” — more loosely, “one tile” or “one shape.”) Your typical wallpaper or tiled floor is part of an infinite pattern that repeats periodically; when shifted, or “translated,” the pattern can be exactly superimposed on itself. An aperiodic tiling displays no such “translational symmetry,” and mathematicians have long sought a single shape that could tile the plane in such a fashion. This is known as the einstein problem.
“I’m always messing about and experimenting with shapes,” said Mr. Smith, 64, who worked as a printing technician, among other jobs, and retired early. Although he enjoyed math in high school, he didn’t excel at it, he said. But he has long been “obsessively intrigued” by the einstein problem.
And now a new paper — by Mr. Smith and three co-authors with mathematical and computational expertise — proves Mr. Smith’s discovery true. The researchers called their einstein “the hat,” as it resembles a fedora.
Not only is this batshit in itself but what has happened since is how people have grabbed the einstein fedora and used it in so many ways. It has been turned into a pasta shape. Reimagined for a new game of Tetris. Folded into origami shapes made from dollar bills. Used as the shape for a kite. And even used as the basis for a hat or rather, fascinator. The human race seems to still have a sense of fun about it, and this is one bit of batshit that gives me hope for the future.
That is all for this week. I want to finish by recommending Maestro on Netflix which is the story of Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montenegra, their friends, their family and his many male lovers. Bradley Cooper and Carey Mulligan give excellent performances and for me this was up there with Oppenheimer as one of the best films of the year. So this week’s playout is America from West Side Story, a great piece of music from a show that in its day also made people feel uncomfortable and went way beyond the boundaries of mere entertainment. Welcome to 2024, and see you next time.
Eyecatching 