Anger

Anais Nin as Astarte: still from Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)


Kenneth Anger in a Cocteauesque fantasy sequence. Still from Fireworks (1947)


At Sprüth Magers until March 27th.

STOP PRESS NEW POET LAUREATE SAME OLD CRAP

The recent appointment of Carol Ann Duffy to the post of Poet Laureate had me gravely concerned. Although she was, I initially thought, a much better poet than her predecessor, Andrew Motion, the latter had added immeasurably to the gaiety of nations. I feared that she would be less talented in this regard. Luckily I was utterly wrong (thanks to Jake for pointing this out).

The Twelve Days of Christmas 2009

A seasonal verse by the new poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, commissioned exclusively for Radio Times.

1
ON THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS,
a buzzard on a branch.

In Afghanistan,
no partridge, pear tree;
but my true love sent to me
a card from home.
I sat alone,
crouched in yellow dust,
and traced the grins of my kids
with my thumb.
Somewhere down the line,
for another father, husband,
brother, son, a bullet
with his name on.

2
TWO TURTLE DOVES,
that Shakespeare loved –
turr turr, turr turr –
endangered now
by herbicide,
the chopping down
of where they hide –
turr turr, turr turr –
hawthorn thickets,
hedgerows, woodland.
Summer's music
fainter, farther…
the spreading drought
of the Sahara.

3
THREE FRENCH HENS –
un, deux, trois –
do not know
that French they are.

Three Welsh lambs –
un, dau, tri –
do not know
that Welsh they baa.

Newborn babies –
one, two, three –
only know
you human be.

Only know
you human be.

4
THE GRENADA DOVE IS CALLING.
The Condor calls from the USA.
The Wood Stork calls from its wetlands.
The Albatross calls from the sea,
on the fourth day of Christmas.

The Yellow-eared Parrot is calling.
The Kakapo calls from NZ.
The Blue-throated Macaw is calling.
The Little Tern calls from Japan, calls
my true love sent to me.

The Corncrake is calling; the Osprey.
The Baikal Teal calls from Korea.
The Cuckoo is calling from England,
four calling birds.

5
THE FIRST GOLD RING WAS GOLD INDEED –
bankers' profits fired in greed.

The second ring outshone the sun,
fuelled by carbon, doused by none.

Ring three was black gold, O for oil –
a serpent swallowing its tail.

The fourth ring was Celebrity;
Fool's Gold, winking on TV.

Ring five, religion's halo, slipped –
a blind for eyes or gag for lips.

With these five gold rings they you wed,
then slip them off when you are dead.

With these five go-o-o-old rings.

6
I BOUGHT A MAGIC GOOSE FROM A JOLLY FARMER.
This goose laid Barack Obama.

I bought a magic goose from a friendly fellow.
This goose laid Fabio Capello.

I bought a magic goose from a maiden (comely).
This goose laid Joanna Lumley.

I bought a magic goose from a busker (poor).
This goose laid Anish Kapoor.

I bought a magic goose from a bargain bin, it
was the goose laid Alan Bennett.

I bought a poisoned goose from a crook (sick, whiffing).
This foul goose laid Nick Griffin.

7
THE SWAN AT COCKERMOUTH –
of a broken heart, one half.

The Mersey Swans, flying
for Hillsborough, wings of justice.

Two, married and mute on the Thames,
watching The Wave.

A Swan for Adrian Mitchell
and a Swan for UA Fanthorpe,
swansongs for poetry.

The Queen's birds, paired
for life, beauty and truth.

8
ONE MILKED MONEY TO MEND HER MOAT.
Two milked voters to float her boat.
Three milked Parliament to flip her flat.
Four milked Government to snip her cat.
Five milked the dead for close-up tears.
Six milked the tax-payer for years and
years and years…
Seven milked the system to Botox
her brow.
Eight milked herself – the selfish cow.

9
BUT THE DEAD SOLDIER'S LADY DOES NOT DANCE.
But the lady in the Detention Centre
does not dance.
But the honour killing lady does not dance.
But the drowned policeman's lady
does not dance.
But the lady in the filthy hospital ward
does not dance.
But the lady in Wootton Bassett does not dance.
But the gangmaster's lady does not dance.
But the lady with the pit bull terrier
does not dance.
But another dead soldier's lady
does not dance.

10
LORDS DON'T LEAP.
They sleep.

11
WE PAID THE BLUDDY PIPER
fir 'Royal Bank;
twa pipers each
fir Fred and Phil,
fir Finlay, Fraser, Frank.
Too big tae fail!
The wee dog laughed!
The dish ran awa' wi' the spoon…
We paid the bluddy pipers,
but we dinnae call the tune.

12
DID THEY HEAR THE DRUMS IN COPENHAGEN,
banging their warning?
On the twelfth day in Copenhagen
was global warming stopped in its tracks
by Brown and Barack and Hu Jintao,
by Meles Zenawi and Al Sabban,
by Yvo de Boer and Hedegaard?
Did they strike a match
or strike a bargain,
the politicos in Copenhagen?
Did they twiddle their thumbs?
Or hear the drums
and hear the drums
and hear the drums?

Photograph of the Decade

Since 2003 we have liberated over 100,000 Iraqi civilians from terrestrial existence.

The Political Economy of 'Hello, Dolly!'

Tightly wrapped in gold lamé, Barbra Streisand descends the grand staircase of the Harmonia Gardens restaurant surrounded by a chorus of indescribably camp chefs and waiters. The latter weave between the tables, dancing and grinning as they serve the diners – one waiter shoots a live duck for the benefit of a customer – thus enacting a nightmare-parodic vision of the joy of labour on the front line of the service industry. But despite manifesting the high-gloss glamour of the culture industry that necessarily obscures the labour of its own production, Hello, Dolly! also argues (anachronistically) for the Keynesian economics of the New Deal.

Made in 1969, Hello, Dolly!, was the most expensive movie musical ever, costing around $20m (well over $100m in current terms). Its obscene excess sounded the death knell for Hollywood mega-musicals. The central character is Dolly Levi (played by Streisand), a matchmaker, widow and Mephistophelean granter of wishes. This character trait is illustrated by the business cards she hands to everyone she encounters, upon which her job description is magically transformed to meet the needs of each recipient (thus echoing the Smithian economics under which supply miraculously meets demands that come from… nowhere). As she sings in the film’s first number: 'If you want your ego bolstered, muscles toned or chair upholstered: Just leave everything to me.'

Levi has been employed as a matchmaker by the miserly 'half-a-millionaire' Horace Vandergelder (Walter Matthau), who owns an animal feed business in the sleepy upstate town of Yonkers. Vandergelder’s ideal woman shares his obsessive concern with the accumulation of capital and will function as a sex object and domestic slave: ‘It takes a woman, all powdered and pink, to joyously clean out the drain and the sink.’ Despite his obvious flaws, Levi soon realizes that she wishes to marry Vandergelder herself – for reasons that do not become clear until the film’s conclusion.


Vandergelder has also tasked Levi with guarding his niece Ermengarde, who hopes to marry the painter Ambrose Kemper – a match that Vandergelder considers unpropitious: “A living, Mr Kemper, is made by selling something that everybody needs at least once a year, and a million is made by producing something everybody needs every day. You artists, you painters, produce nothing that nobody needs, never.” This exchange reveals the film’s ambivalence vis-a-vis the place of art within capitalism. As an embodiment of capitalist spectacle, the film itself prostitutes what could – loosely – be called art to Mammon, but in dialogue such as this the act of artistic prostitution is indirectly criticized, favouring instead the bourgeois ideal of autonomous non-functional art.

Having identified Vandergelder as a potential partner, but finding him in need of some political education, Levi introduces her client to Irene Molloy, a New York milliner who dreams of escaping her life of servile drudgery (‘Either I marry Horace Vandergelder or I'm gonna burn this shop down, break out like a fire engine and find myself some excitement’). But Molloy turns out to be unsuitable when Vandergelder drops in on her shop only to discover two men there: a critical breach of his small-town bourgeois sexual etiquette. Fortunately Vandergelder does not detect the identity of these men, who are in fact his two clerks, Barnaby and Cornelius, whom Levi has induced to take a trip to the metropolis by playing on their suburban ennui. Having successfully discouraged Vandergelder from choosing Molloy, who represents Kracauer’s ‘little shop girl’ – the morally dubious female member of the new middle classes who supplies labour to the pleasure industries of modernity – Levi arranges for Vandergelder to meet another prospective bride – an heiress – at the Harmonia Gardens, an expensive downtown restaurant. The heiress represents the nouveaux riches of late 19th century New York – the Vanderbilts and Rockerfellers – to whose status Vandergelder might be expected to aspire. But Levi has again outpaced Vandergelder: the heiress is an actress friend of hers whom she has instructed to act as obnoxiously as possible (‘Anybody can have oysters in season. I want them out of season… Tell 'em to go out and dig for some’), thus discouraging Vandergelder from choosing a mate from this other, icier pole of the social spectrum. Levi herself arrives at the critical moment in which a disillusioned Vandergelder realizes ‘Any man who goes to a big city deserves what happens to him.’ It is at this point that she makes her entrance, singing of her own return like a self-advertising messiah.


Vandergelder’s evening at the Harmonia Gardens is still further complicated by Levi’s Odyssean cunning: she has arranged for his niece Ermengarde to dance with her artist lover Ambrose at the restaurant’s polka context. Levi suggests that if the painter wins the contest, the prize money will convince Vandergelder that there is a living in art (albeit terpsichorean rather than painterly) after all. The plan is a mixed success: Vandergelder concedes Ambrose’s skill as a dancer, but adds ‘no wonder his pictures are so awful. He must paint with his feet.’ In true farcical style, the restaurant scene is disrupted by the arrival of Vandergelder’s clerks Cornelius and Barnaby, who have brought the milliner and her assistant as their dates. Unable to afford the enormous dinner that they have consumed, they too must join the dancing competition, prostituting themselves in leisure as in work so that they can sup at the table of the culture industry. However, Levi’s complex plan is ruined by Vandergelder’s outraged reaction to these decadent metropolitan shenanigans, and the scene descends into slapstick violence. Naturally, there follows a separation between Vandergelder and Levy – during which Levi symbolically wears Vandergelder’s top hat in order to take on the masculine role and bid him ‘So Long, Dearie’ (‘you can snuggle up to your cash register – it’s a little lumpy, but it rings’), and the clerks Barnaby and Cornelius resign from the store and plan – under Levi’s tutelage – to set up their own rival establishment, thus freeing themselves from salaried bondage in accordance with the all-American myth of the 'self-made-man'.



The restaurant scene is one of several tableaux throughout the film embodying the capitalist phantasmagoria, a term used by Adorno to describe Wagner's opera: ‘the occultation of production by means of the outward appearance of the product’. The phrase's use is particularly apposite in this context because the Hollywood musical represents the true destiny of the Gesamtkunstwerk, revealing that the root of this utopian ideal of a unity of the arts lies in the false wholeness of the commodity. In the Harmonia Gardens scene the role of the artist is filled by Louis Armstrong, who plays the restaurant’s bandleader and duets with Streisand. His tokenistic performance (he is apparently the only black man in New York) reeks of Uncle Tomishness, and yet he still retains a magisterial aloofness from the proceedings. As bandleader/conductor his appearance on screen makes visible the work of the orchestra, usually concealed in musicals and opera (Wagner hid the orchestra pit under the stage at Bayreuth, thus making the illusion of 'music from nowhere' complete before the advent of film). Armstrong is not an actor and his presence marks a breach in the apparently seamless production, demonstrating, like the cracks in Wagner's operas, the impossibility of the Gesamtkunstwerk in an era of capitalist production: 'The disintegration into fragments sheds light on the fragmentariness of the whole.'


The formally necessary wedding that concludes the narrative can only take place after a dramatic reconciliation. Vandergelder, alone once more in his shop, finds himself unable to forget Levi. But Levi must await her dead husband’s approval of the match before she can agree to marriage. When she discovers that Vandergelder has employed a decorator to repaint his shutters, Levi recognizes the omen she has desired: “The paint's still good, but that fellow's just set up a business and needs a good start. You see, Dolly, I've always felt that money, pardon the expression, is like manure: it's not worth a thing unless it's spread around, encouraging young things to grow.” With these words Vandergelder relinquishes his obsession with the accumulation of capital. By repeating the essence of Levi’s Keynesian beliefs their union is secured.

Besides her commitment to the redistribution of wealth Levi promises an inversion of the forces of alienation, offering to convert money back into lived experience:

I have always been a woman who arranges things
For the pleasure and the profit it derives.
I have always been a woman who arranges things
Like furniture, and daffodils – and lives.

She does not deny the attraction of profit, but the fundamental motivation for her actions is the pleasure of ‘arranging things’ – she represents the empowered female bourgeois, whose understanding of the value of human relationships counteracts the atomising force of patriarchy. Patriarchy (Vandegelder) understands only the financial benefit of human relationships: ‘And so she’ll work until infinity: three cheers for femininity.’ Instead Levi proposes to de-alienate capital. Her Jewishness is also of crucial significance in this regard. Her character, standing outside the capitalist system and yet remaining a skilled manipulator of the same, could be read as a crude stereotype. But compare Levi’s role to that of Alberich in Das Rheingold: Wagner’s anti-Semitic caricature of the dwarf who denies love in exchange for gold is reversed in Levi, who offers to sell love back to the capitalist. This is, however, emphatically not an act of prostitution: she is not selling her love, but returning to the capitalist his own love of humanity. Her exclusion from this system, as woman and Jew, provides the Archimedean point from which she can 'arrange things'. Even in the film, however, her arrangements rarely go according to plan. Politically, the hokey Hollywood-liberal idea that love can redeem alienation is equally unlikely to succeed.


In 1938 when Thornton Wilder wrote the Merchant of Yonkers (the book upon which Hello, Dolly! is based), the economic argument underlying his narrative was urgently topical. In 1937 the so-called Conservative Coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans allied themselves against Roosevelt’s New Deal, thus putting an end to liberal reforms. Seen in this light, Levi is pure liberal wish fulfillment: she embodies the American left's hope for a united front, converting the bourgeois (embodied by Vandergelder) to the Keynesian fiscal policy of the New Deal, and reconciling him to the industrial action of his employees, their needs and their humanity. Furthermore, Vandergelder allows the artist to join his New Deal American family – his niece is finally permitted to marry her painter boyfriend.

What relevance, however, did all this have when the film was made in 1969? The Kennedy-Johnson era had come to an ignominious end the previous year in the face of mounting opposition to the war in Vietnam, and Streisand was closely associated with the anti-war movement. But more relevant to the film’s plot was the resurgence in 1966 of the Conservative Coalition that had derailed Roosevelt’s reforms in the '30s. This put an end to Johnson’s ‘Great Society’ programme, a set of social reforms (including the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid) that aimed to eradicate poverty and racial discrimination - policies that had been self-consciously modeled on Roosevelt’s New Deal. Both Streisand and director Gene Kelly were prominent supporters of the Democrats, and Kelly had been a vocal supporter of the unions and an opponent of McCarthyism in the 40s and 50s. The revival of Hello, Dolly! in 1969 was thus politically pertinent, if fatally belated. Worse still, it was compromised medium for a compromised message. On a formal level, its embrace of the spectacular (despite its disingenuous proposal to reclaim the spectacle for the proletariat – “What a knack there is to that acting like a born aristocrat”) replicates the political ambivalence of Keynesianism, and is similarly doomed to failure.

Matt Frei's 'Berlin'

Fittingly, for a city so defined and divided by its buildings, the central episode of Matt Frei's recent BBC three-parter on the history of Berlin focussed on the architecture of the city. The programme was undeniably interesting - we don't see much architecture on TV, and what little there is barely receives anything more than formal analysis and exclamations of wonder (I'm thinking of Andrew Graham Dixon and Waldemar Januszczak). Like the rest of the series, however, the episode attempted a clumsy even-handedness, transparently an act of bad faith since the script didn't depart much from the liberal-democratic doctrine of East Germany as a totalitarian state; compare, for example, Frei's apparently unironic excitement at the power of the American listening post on top of the Teufelsberg, and his condemnation of the Stasi's HQ. However, in other instances he did approach a fairer analysis, for example in his discussion of the demolition of the Berliner Schloß, a debate that formed the core of his narrative.


Above: The Berliner Schloß
Below: Palast der Republik

The Schloß was an 18th Baroque century palace that stood at the centre of Imperial Berlin. Severely damaged by Allied bombing, the ruins were demolished by the GDR government and replaced by a 'People's Palace' of glass and concrete. After reunification this huge complex in the city's historical centre posed a major problem to the local council. Eventually it was demolished in 2006-8, and controversial plans to replace it with an exact replica of the original Baroque palace have recently been ratified by the Bundestag. Frei interviewed residents of the former West and East Berlins, who naturally held divergent opinions of this turn of events. And this is where Frei's programme was most successful - in its focus on the lived experience of Berliners. In one particularly moving sequence a cleaning lady at the Ministry of Finance - formerly the Nazi Air Ministry - described her haunting experiences in the building. With tears in her eyes she added 'you can only clean so much away.'

Why Lisbon is a Good Thing

Three years ago, on being awarded the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the advancement of human rights, Jürgen Habermas delivered an acceptance speech of which the following is an excerpt:

Towards a United States of Europe


Why should we get excited about such a lacklustre topic as the future of Europe? My answer is: if we are not able to hold a Europe-wide referendum before the next European elections in 2009 on the shape Europe should take, the future of the Union will be decided in favour of neo-liberal orthodoxy. Avoiding this touchy issue for the sake of a convenient peace and muddling along the well-trodden path of compromise will give free reign to the dynamic of unbridled market forces. This would force us to watch as the European Union's current political power is dismantled in favour of a diffuse European free-trade zone. For the first time in the process of European unification, we face the danger of regressing to a level of integration below what has already been achieved. What irks me is the paralytic numbness that has set in after the failure of the constitutional referenda in France and the Netherlands. Not taking a decision in this context amounts to a decision with major consequences.

Three pressing problems are bundled together in the single issue of Europe's inability to act:

(1) The international economic situation has changed in the wake of globalisation. Today's conditions deprive the national state of the tax resources it needs to satisfy its population's demands for collective goods and public services, or even to maintain the status quo. Further challenges, such as demographic developments and increased immigration, only aggravate the situation. Here the only defence is offence: winning back political clout on a supra-national level. Without convergent tax rates and medium-term harmonisation of economic and social-policies, we are in effect relinquishing our hold over the European social model.

(2) The return to ruthless hegemonic power politics, the clash of the West and the Islamic world, the decay of state structures in other parts of the world, the long-term social consequences of colonialism and the immediate political consequences of failed de-colonisation – all of this points to a high-risk international situation. Only a European Union capable of acting on the world stage - and taking its place beside the USA, China, India and Japan - can press for an alternative to the ruling Washington consensus in the world's economic institutions. Only such a Europe can advance the long overdue reforms within the UN which are both blocked by and dependent on the USA.

(3) One cause for the rift in the West that has become apparent since the Iraq war is the clash of cultures that now divides America itself into two camps of almost equal size. This clash has also caused a shift in the hitherto valid normative standards of government policy. America's closest allies cannot remain indifferent here. It is precisely in critical cases of joint action that we must break free of our dependence on our superior partner. That is one more reason why the European Union needs its own armed forces. Until now Europeans have been subordinated to the dictates and regulations of the American high command in NATO deployments. The time has come for us to attain a position where even in a joint military deployment we still remain true to our own conceptions of human rights, the ban on torture and wartime criminal law.

For these reasons, I believe Europe must pluck up the courage to introduce reforms which will give it not only effective decision-making procedures, but also its own foreign minister, a directly-elected president and its own financial basis. These could be the subject of a referendum held concurrently with the next European parliamentary elections. The draft would be considered passed if it received the 'double majority' of votes of the states and the electorate. At the same time, the referendum would only bind the member states in which a majority had voted in favour. Europe would then move away from the convoy model where the tempo is set by the slowest member. Even in a Europe made up of core and periphery, countries preferring to remain on the periphery retain the option of rejoining the core at any time.

These ideas dovetail with those of the Belgian prime minister Guy Verhofstadt, who has recently published a manifesto for the "United States of Europe."

*

The full version of this speech originally appeared in German in Der Standard on March 10 and March 11, 2006.

Jürgen Habermas, born in 1929, is one of Germany's foremost intellectual figures. A philosopher and sociologist, he is professor emeritus at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt and the leading representative of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. His works include "Legitimation Crisis", "Knowledge and Human Interests", "Theory of Communicative Action" and "The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity".


from Sign and Sight, translated John Lambert.

The Ashmolean Museum Reopens

Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum, the world's oldest public collection of art and archaeology, will reopen on Saturday 7th November after a closure of 10 months. In the course of the £61m redevelopment the chaotic collection of sheds and lean-tos which had accreted on the back of Cockerell's handsome 1845 building have been demolished to make way for a huge new extension by Rick Mather. The new galleries do not, the Prince of Wales will doubtless be saddened to hear, imitate the fine Greek revival style of Cockerell's building, but instead aim for that blameless Constructivist pastiche so beloved of contemporary architects, with just a hint of hi-tech. There are asymmetrical windows and jutting edifices of Portland stone - the staircase in the atrium (above) would be quite good, if it wasn't for the plate glass (there is an awful lot of glass), which allows the handrails to intrude fussily. In any case none of this is visible from the street, being neatly tucked away behind the old facade.



But the real achievement of the new building is that it has allowed the curators to display the archaeological collection both more comprehensively and more comprehensibly - this is a museum after museum studies, a museum for a post-colonial, ever more closely entwined, world. The official theme is Crossing Cultures, Crossing Times, and while it may feel didactic at times to shoe-horn artifacts from all periods and all locations into one all-encompassing theme, it is surely a vast improvement on the 19th century style of curation that came before, when each period and culture was allotted its own distinct and hermetically sealed pigeon-hole. In contrast, the Ashmolean is planned to give the visitor a sense of the connections between different cultures, established by trade, religions, and tourism, that have shaped the world for millennia.

Critics have already complained that this development represents a 'dumbing down' of the old Ashmolean. The Times's Kathy Brewis was particularly cutting. She insists that the new themed galleries are simply a 'gimmick', and complains:

I don’t want to “discover how civilisations developed as part of an interrelated world culture”. I want to look at something really peculiar with a sense of awe and wonder at its otherness. A trip to a museum should be like a walk in the country — a respite from daily working life, a chance for a different perspective, an opportunity to reflect and ponder. I stare at a screen all day. I move from desktop computer to BlackBerry to laptop, with a bit of television thrown in for extra eye strain. By the weekend I’ve had enough of interacting. I go to a museum for something different.

There are so many things wrong with this kind of griping. A person who doesn't want to discover how cultures interact is a dull dog indeed. Brewis says she wants to wonder at something's 'otherness' instead, but wonder is such a content-less experience. This supplication before the aura of the artwork and the authority of the past is so suspiciously sheeplike, and has been criticized as such for so long, that only the feeble-minded could want to engage with archaeology and art on such a banal level. Finally, she reveals her true awfulness by claiming that her life of staring at screens is such an overwhelmingly 'interactive' experience, that she requires a trip to a museum like a neurotic needs a trip to a sanatorium. If art should be simply a 'respite from daily working life', then Ms Brewis should, I suggest, take a trip to the local branch of Hallmark instead and admire the lovely cards.

People like Ms Brewis want to forget that this is a world in which what we do has an impact, and often a painful one, on the lives of others, whether they are in the next street or the next continent. The attempt to exhibit artifacts in a way that encourages the consciousness of this fact may have occasionally clumsy results, but it is not to be scorned simply because it challenges the cosy assumptions and leisure pursuits of the traditional museum going elite. This is not a 'dumbed-down' but a 'smartened-up' museum: one that, thanks to its association with the University of Oxford, exhibits a critical understanding of the world and the place of the museum within it.