Lighten-up, Dave...

# 26

We celebrate the rain soaked end of summer with a light-fingered peek behind the scenes at The Bus Lane…

Our Mission Statement [1^st Draft]

“Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing or to come.”

W.B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium 1926/8

Our Mission Statement [2nd Draft]

“On time, on-line and on Crack…”

Tom Perdue, Gimme Strength, 2011.

Inside the Blog Factory:

Meet Our Research Department:

From a secure and highly secret location on the roof of Streatham Bus Garage, our three stalwart researchers – Artificer Higgs, Bo’sun Particle and Ron (‘Hard Ron’) Collider - constantly monitor all available media, trawling through the furthermost backwaters of the Internet and out into the dark matter beyond. Their budget is unfathomable, their metaphors mixed, their puns intentional. Their mission: to locate, stun and haul on board any and all material and ideas that might be suitable for plagiarism. So far, only the God Particle has evaded them. Rest assured; anything intelligent, creative, sensitive or even mildly amusing out there and these lads will be on it like a ton of bricks.

FAQs:

1. Is there some plan behind all this or do we just keep buying lottery tickets?

(Mr P. Floyd, Nuneaton)

Answer: Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun…

2. I was driving across the burning desert, when I spotted six jet planes. Is there any point to my journey?

(Ms J. Mitchell, Up The Joshua Tree)

Answer: The point of the journey, Joni, is the journey, Joni – okay?

3. I need to get from Strawberry Fields to Abbey Road via Penny Lane on a Sunday. How should I travel?

(Mr P. Coleoptera, Wirral)

Answer: Hopefully, Paul – as always.

4. I ride on a mail train baby, can’t buy no thrill. Does being in a hurry get me to the top of the hill any faster?

(Mr R. Zimmerperson, Coney Island)

Answer: No, Bob, – but it will seem to take longer and longer.

5. Sittin’ thinkin’ sinkin’ drinkin’. Are seats still available on the Party Bus?

(Sir C. Richard, Windsor Castle, Berks)

Answer: Get a grip, Keith. (Are you sure?)

6. If we can’t have everything we always wanted, and it’s beginning to seem as if we can’t; at what point do we settle for what we’ve got?

(Suzanne T. Andoranges, Hastings.)

Answer: When they nail the lid on the box.

7. What would you do if I sang out of tune?

(Sgt. P. Epper, Chelsea Barracks)

Answer: Stand up and walk out on you.

8. Is there really a crack, a crack in everything?

(Brother Starkey, Nepal)

Answer: Yes, Wistan, that’s how the light gets in.

Social & Life-skills Department:

Drink Aware!

The priest raises the glass of red wine and says, “Drink until you see Jesus”

- Italian Chefs, BBC TV 25 May 2011.

A recent episode of the Swedish Policier ‘Wallander’ on BBC4 included the following exchange when yer man asked a young policewoman to return to duty:

Policewoman: “I can’t. I’ve been drinking.”

Wallander: “Who hasn’t?”

[‘The Courier’ (Kuriren) BBC4 9pm 04 June 2011.]

“The trick is to get very, very drunk and then dance until you are sick.”

- The Hour, BBC Television, 23 August 2011.

James Joyce: “Ah, Trieste, Trieste ate my liver!”

Finnegans Wake, 1920 something.

Sports Desk

Yes, it’s a Sporting Life in the Bus Lane, even if we only wrap our chips in it.

Horse racing:

The wheels jolly nearly came off the ruddy desk (Sponsored by Bet-Fried Chicken – either way, it’s a gamble!) yesterday evening when news finally arrived (via semaphore flags and the occasional codger bearing a cleft stick when there is no unobstructed line-of-sight between bedroom windows) that the 2.30 at York had been won by Sepp Blatter on Capello, followed home by Jack Warner on Bung Ho and with Her Majesty riding the favourite, Rupert’s Lad in third place. Mark Hughes on Mohamed Al-Fayed’s gelding Cottage Pie again failed to finish. Controversially, the Appeal Court had earlier barred Kiera Knightley from riding Ethical Dilemma in the FIFA Pantomime Stakes.

Footie:

All other things being equal (which they seldom are) Henry Kissinger remains our hot tip to take over as manager of Arsenal before the end of the month. As regards Ryan G*ggs the transfer plughole remains open.

Olympics:

Lord Coe of Barking Creek has confirmed that zimmer-frame users playing chicken with the 159 in the Bus Lane will not be admitted as an Olympic Sport in time for London 2012.

Formula 1:

Efforts to re-locate the Bahrain Grand Prix to the streets of Beirut have failed. Although many Lebanese welcomed the proposal it was turned down by the Beirut Taxi Drivers’ Association. They felt that the slow-moving Formula 1 cars would hinder and delay their Mercs.

Food Safety:

Are cucumbers now safe to eat?

“Cucumbers? I didn’t know we were meant to eat them!” (Anon)

Desert Island News:

Calling All Pseuds!

Kirsty Young, announces that Elgar’s Cello Concerto “Speed dials the soul”.

Radio 4, 11.06.11.

Canvey Island Discs – your suggestions please for The Bus Lane's very own budget version of Desert Island Discs - a programme devised by Woy Plomley, late of Plomstead.

Here’s our current selection – as voted by followers of The Bus Lane - for eight 45rpm discs to go to the top of the playlist at that café round the back of the caravan park. (You know the one I mean, there’s burned-out Mondeo on the pavement opposite – been there since last Guy Fawkes’ night…)

1. Dixie Chicken – Little Feat
2. Tommy Roe : Sheila
3. Elvis : Jailhouse Rock
4. Eddie Cochran : Summertime blues
5. Bob Dylan : Subterranean Homesick Blues
6. Pulp : Common People
7. Johnny Cash : I Walk the Line
8. Plastic Bertrand : Ca Plane Pour Moi
9. Buddy Holly : Peggy Sue
10. Willin’ : Little Feat
11. Bruce Springsteen : The River

(That’s eleven you idiot – there are only meant to be eight!)

More Suggestions please!

In addition to a cricket-box and antibiotics, what other luxuries would you take if you were to be cast-away on Canvey Island?

And your choice of book? – apart from the Argos Catalogue, Nutz and Hello! magazines which are – of course - already there.

And your suggestions for one frivolous distraction of no practical use – and you can’t pick Boris Johnson because London already did.

Bizarre facts:

Sarah Palin and the “failing upward syndrome”. Sarah is now one of those ‘celebrities’ whose profile and general acclaim perversely seem to increase every time they screw-up in public.

Is this the new ‘American way’ to success?

Last Word:

Famous last words:

“Get my swan costume ready.”

Anna Pavlova, ballerina. Died 1931

Eyes without a face....

# 25

….the eyes of the rioters and looters are all over the newspapers and television. Their faces are unseen, their eyes are unseeing – and I don’t mean blind. I mean lacking in understanding, lacking in empathy. Poverty is mentioned as an issue underlying the riots but ahead of material poverty there is another sort of poverty. The looting of the corner sweetshop and the hairdresser’s salon, the torching of a block of High Street shops with twenty-eight dwellings above – these are examples of poverty of imagination. The much-reproduced photo of a woman jumping from a blazing building wrenched me instantly back to the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre. I’m not comparing the looters to those terrorist hijackers but I’ve just had to read again an article written by the novelist Ian McEwan which was published in The Guardian of 15^th. September, 2001.

McEwan wrote:

“This is the nature of empathy, to think oneself into the minds of others……

…If the hijackers had been able to imagine themselves into the thoughts and feelings of the passengers, they would have been unable to proceed. It is hard to be cruel once you permit yourself to enter the mind of your victim. Imagining what it is like to be someone other than yourself is at the core of our humanity. It is the essence of compassion, and it is the beginning of morality.”

Knowing the difference between right and wrong is not something we learn by rote. My parents did not tell me it was wrong to break the windows of shops along the High Street and steal their goods. Neither did I explicitly teach that to my children. I expected them to know not to do this because they grew up aware of empathy and were encouraged to be imaginative. Colloquially, we talk about ‘walking a mile in someone else’s shoes’, but I don’t suppose the empathetic traits of the looters would have been enhanced by running a mile in a pair trainers swiped from the stock at JD Sports. No, they would simply find themselves a mile away and untroubled to be wearing stolen shoes.

As you might expect, we in The Bus Lane draw the line at torching our London buses. These inoffensive pieces of machinery may lack the iconic status of the old Routemasters but that’s no reason to destroy them. Socially, these are transports of delight; they belong to us all. Beyond trashing buses and thieving fashion accessories, the selfishness of the average rioter extended only as far as looting a Blackberry, some booze and maybe a flat-screen telly. Such pitiful greed pales into insignificance when set against the avarice of politicians and bankers; the fiddlers of expenses, the manipulators of financial markets, the speculators and arbitragers, the hedge-fund gurus and the traders in derivatives. These people have had their fingers in our collective cash register for years. Only the truly hopeless and powerless have to smash windows and doors to do the same.

The sense of history repeating itself with a giddy, unstoppable, predictability is overwhelming. Read again (or discover) W.H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939. It’s the one that begins:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-second street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September night.

Okay, Auden was writing from a gay bar in New York on the eve of the war against Hitler, but does anyone doubt that we are experiencing yet another ‘low dishonest decade’? There have been so many. His second verse ends with;

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn,

Those to whom evil is done

Do evil in return.

The parallels are manifold and just too depressing to contemplate for long. In the newspapers and on television the best brains in the land proffer their analyses and explanations. Very few do not mention despair and the need for a transparent investigation. There is indeed much unmasking to do – and not just of the creatures caught on CCTV. If we peel away the masks that conceal the identities of the puppeteers manipulating our economic system we find only other masks; layer upon layer of them. No one is finally in charge – not even the dreaded Murdoch! Everyone is ultimately obedient to the inhuman corporate automata running global capitalism.

Successive masks have been torn aside for two centuries now and all we have done is to reveal further masks. Behind the latest veil there is never a human face. If we survive to continue peeling long enough we might eventually confront the existential felony that lies at the heart of Capitalism. But then we’ve known about that since 1848 and where has it got us?

“All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his Kind…”

I’m not telling you where that comes from. You either know already or, if you don’t, it may be best not to ask. Some of you might do your bits if I fail to break it to you gently… Let’s just say it has form. Know what I mean, bro?

To Arcadia…by bus

#24

   The artist Lucian Freud died on 20^th July at the age of 88. Cy Twombly had pre-deceased him by a couple of weeks, dying on 5^th July at the age of 83. Coincidentally, we followed the Bus Lane around the South Circular last week to visit the Twombly – Poussin Exhibition[1] at Dulwich[2]. Seated on the upper deck of the 201, I read Catherine Lampert’s fulsome obituary of Lucian Freud in The Guardian. She mentions that “The rather sensational Benefits Supervisor Sleeping (1995) achieved a record auction price for a living artist in May 2008, £17m, ….”[3]

I flap the broadsheet pages, fold them once more and begin to read a Death Notice at the bottom right-hand corner, just above ‘In Memoriam’. It records the passing of Audrey Nottman (Besterman) who died peacefully in Liskeard at the age of 90 with her son at her side. A wartime ambulance driver, a versatile and widely published medical artist and scientific illustrator, Audrey has bequeathed her body to science. There will be a tree-planting celebration in September and, in lieu of flowers, donations are invited to Médecins sans Frontières[4]. Audrey has died as she seems to have lived, with more than just a passing thought for the welfare of others.

An image of Lucian Freud – a 1985 self-portrait – dominates the obituary page. As a portrait painter he could pursue his subjects – including himself - to their absolute core and reveal what he found in tectonic forms made manifest at the surface of the skin. Audrey, working to an illustrator’s brief, would have made anatomically accurate drawings, not expressive works comparable with Lucian’s. But if only there were a God, and an after-life, and Audrey Nottman taking the role of the eternal, unsleeping, Benefits Supervisor…Surely her art of living would be worth every penny of some penitent’s seventeen million sobs?

At Dulwich, I find Twombly a much more difficult artist to appreciate than Freud. Even in a newspaper reproduction there’s no escaping Freud’s profundity - yet here I was strolling past some of Twombly’s canvasses desperate to get to the explanatory text on the adjacent wall. Should a good painting remain inscrutable and mute without learned exposition? I think not.

Twombly has some great work in the Dulwich show; the two versions of the ‘untitled’ Bassano in Teverina, 1985, Hero & Leandro (To Christopher Marlowe), also from1985, Bacchanalia: Fall (5 days in November) and the large canvasses of the Quatro Stagioni sequence. Other pieces I just didn’t get at all, even with the benefit of the curator’s text. To me they seemed either slight or wilfully obscure. If you can explain what I am missing in Venus & Adonis 1978, The Second Part of the Return From Parnassus, 1961, or Apollo, 1975, do please help me out.

Among the parallels shared by Twombly and Poussin was an extensive knowledge of classical mythology and an intention to convey some of its dramas in their work. From Virgil they received the notion of a fabled land called ‘Arcadia’ where innocent shepherds dwell in a blissful state. Their contentment might be complete and therefore without drama were it not for the brooding reminder - ‘Et in Arcadia Ego.[5]’ Even in that idyllic state, death is ultimately always present.

So there we were, that day in Dulwich, with our dead artists, Nicolas and Cy and Lucian. Serendipity had added Audrey to their number and I began to wonder if Dulwich Picture Gallery is not also a representation of Arcadia. With proportions that stand like frozen music and Sir John Soane’s masterly neo-classical details, the building was England’s first purpose-built picture gallery designed to be open to the public. It is also a mausoleum. The money to pay for it came (in 1811) from the estates of London art-dealer Sir Peter Bourgeois[6] and his friends Noël and Margaret Desenfans. They did their sponsorship differently in those days. Nowadays, the likes of Coca Cola Corporation and Barclays Bank seek favour, popularity, prestige and commercial advantage by attaching themselves to spectacular sporting occasions and to the Arts. By contrast, the Dulwich trio sought only a nominal immortality.

Soane’s floor plan places the three tombs on the west side of the building, directly opposite the entrance. The mausoleum is a central component of the whole design; unobtrusively linked to the flow of circulation around the adjoining galleries and, like them, lit from above. The Arcadian idyll whispered in the galleries separates the entrance from the mausoleum, thus quietly confirming that death is the only other way out. Et in Arcadia Ego, indeed. Depart in peace Nicolas and Cy and Lucian and Audrey.

---

[1] ‘twombly and poussin: arcadian painters’. Cy Twombly (1928-2011) and Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665). Exhibition Dates: 29 June – 25 Sept 2011.

[2] Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 7AD.

[3] Catherine Lampert, The Guardian, Saturday 23 July 2011, page 49.

[4] www.msf.org.uk/support_donate.aspx

[5] Et in Arcadia Ego : I take this to mean that “I” (death) am even to be found in Arcadia.

[6] Sir Peter Francis Bourgeois, RA. 1756-1811