NOT REPRESENTATIONAL ART IS ALL VERY WELL, BUT ...

Scrubs from a free, small exhibition at the NG.

It does enhance your knowledge of the world around you, Most western art has the effect of ‘making the familiar new or the new familiar’, which Doctor Johnson said was the main purpose of art. I always think, incidentally, that this is the difference between Lennon and McCartney. John was always escaping into new areas making them familiar to us, while Paul relied on close observation of the everyday world and bringing it into new life.

I have been thinking about this having just come back from Istanbul which, being the capital of a Moslem country, does not allow representational art, which is banned in Islamic art. The effect of this is to make buildings like mosques sometimes jaw-droppingly impressive from the outside but rather disappointing inside. The blue mosque in the centre of the city is undoubtedly memorable when seen from the outside but the interior is a but ‘samey’.

 

Before we went to Turkey, I popped into the National Gallery to see a small exhibition of paintings by the artist George Stubbs, who revolutionised the painting of horses by spending about eighteen months locked away with them in a barn. His most famous painting is of Whistlejacket, which is not only on of the gallery’s most viewed works but also the first time a horse without a rider was the main focus of a painting in this (or any other) country.

 

Whistlejacket is still in its original position and the exhibition focuses on another prize-winning horse called Scrubs (above) who Stubbs was commissioned to portray by its owner the wealthy second Earl of Rockingham. Stubbs was not sentimental about horses and was quite prepared to sacrifice them in order to understand their anatomy better, Whistlejacket probably died of natural causes but other horses were not so fortunate.

 

I have long had a preference for representation art over the kind which fills almost every available space with what are essentially pretty patterns on tiles. Likewise, I do not care much for abstract art, although I can see that the works of abstract artists fulfils the making the new familiar part of the art definition while representational works make the familiar new by helping us to look at again at what we thought we already knew.

 

I is probably why I like representational art - ie paintings that show you something you know (or think you know) nut make you look at it afresh. It occurs to me that societies that are religious in nature often prefer non-representational work because they have confidence in a benevolent God and do not need to look at his creations again, while secular and doubting societies that have doubts about God want to examine nature more closely.

 

Of course, this us a broad generalisation, possibly so broad that it has little value. Medieval art in Europe and Britain was both religious and representational – offering views of the annunciation (the announcement to Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus); Christ himself and scenes from his life from his birth and later baptism by John the Baptist to his death at the cross in the crucifixion and to scenes from the lives of his followers.

The Baptism of Christ by Fra Angelico
- another favourite of mine at the NG

What I like about paintings like Fra Angelico’s Baptism of Christ, however, are the faces obviously from life, of the everyday observers of scenes that are holy in nature but in which the artists could not resist putting in literally down to earth details that make the painting come to life. As someone wryly observed in The New Yorker, the problem with paradise is that it might be a bit dull – being stuck in the afterlife forever with nothing much to do.

 

Let us concentrate on what is around us and not worry too much about eternal things. ‘God is good,’ say pious people even after a natural disaster that has claimed dozens of innocent lives. Perhaps but we will never know until it is too late for most of us. Give me the everyday and eternity can look after itself. That is why I orefer art that represents the world around us – and not something more abstract.

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot.com

The National Gallery Stubbs exhibition is open until the 31st May.R

TRUMPISM AND TOURISM

Donald and Melania Trump (from Wikipedia) 

The last time politics affected the tourist industry was back in the days when American tourists were attacked in a random fashion by terrorists while at airports around the world and people from the states stopped flying to Europe on planes because they were afraid they might be subjected to the same treatment. 

 

Never mind that they had more chance of slipping in the bath than being shot at by terrorists, they booked a holiday to feel safe and they were not reassured but frightened by pictures of armed police at airports in Britain where bobbies on the beat rely on truncheons to apprehend villains (or ‘bad guys’ as the Americans call them).

 

Nowadays it is the other way around and an article in the paper on Saturday described how bookings from around the world have gone down since Trump came to office. So keen is he to give almost unchecked powers to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) officers that people are scared of being arrested if set foot in America.

 

We have all heard about the virtual execution of people who do not do exactly as the ICE officers tell them and are quick to lock up anybody – often in horrendous conditions – who have outstayed their visas or have the wrong sort of paperwork. Saturday’s Guardian had a story of an inoffensive grandmother whose husband (and her) were imprisoned like this.

 

We simply feel that we will wait until Trump is replaced (possibly by someone who shares his views) in a few years before taking that trip to the USA. I have been a few times but have no inclination to return, certainly not while he is in power. I usually avoid politics in my tours. People do not want to hear my views and, after all, they are paying me for my services.

  

What concerns me more is that many Americans are feeling unloved when they come here. Trump may not last five minutes in British politics but he likes Britain. The feeling, however, is not mutual. Even if one person in Ireland (where I am writing this) said that it is not Americans we dislike, just one of them. It was a good answer but lacking in one aspect.

 

Because a majority of people in the states voted for him, so they have to take a small amount of responsibility for what he has done, which is virtually to gut the American incoming tourist business and to have knock on effect over here. Bookings are down and I think t is is partly because of Trump’s isolationism.

 

We live in an interconnected world and the tourist business is very much a part of that. If people do not feel safe and welcomed when they travel, they will stay at home for their vacation. It is up to tourist guides and others who work in incoming tourism to fight this by making all our visitors, particularly those from the USA, feel welcome when they come here.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

 

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE TRANSPORT

My much-loved Jaguar, sadly not running now

It all went back to Christmas a couple of years ago. I was driving my much-loved Jaguar to some friends on what proved to be a very wet (not a white) Christmas. I drove into a puddle and, to cut a long and painful story short, found my car being flooded. It was a write off and I never got to drive it again. Incidentally, I was impressed by the fact that someone local gave us a lift back to our cottage and another man turned up to rescue us and did not charge extra for working on Christmas day. Would he have done that in Britain? I doubt it.

Anyway, we became a one-car couple after that. I paid something towards our Toyota which Leena uses mostly. She chose it and is driving it to the stables as I write. Meanwhile, I rely on public transport to get around. It takes about two and a half hours to get to London door to door by train so I do not go early in the morning, but travel the night before and stay in my house in Brixton if I do. It is little too far to commute, although I sometimes go back in the afternoon

if I am doing a half-day tour. I usually enjoy going to London for work on the train.

 

However, sometimes the vagaries of public transport let me down both in and outside the capital. Recently, a points failure meant that the Victoria line was out and I had to take a roundabout journey to get back to Brixton. More seriously, a journey to London involved a roundabout trip via Brighton because of – you guessed it – a points failure. Instead of taking a couple of hours it required a whole morning. Fortunately, at neither time was in a hurry. I am all in favour of train travel but it does require the proper functioning of equipment.

 

I am worried that one day I will have to make an apologetic phone call to an operator saying that I cannot be where I am supposed to be at the appointed time. In fact, now I think about it, I had to do that once a year or so ago. The delay was actually caused by a car breaking down in the tunnel towards Heathrow and, although I had left a couple of hours to get to the airport hotel I was due at, I was running late. Fortunately, so was everyone else and the reason for the delay was accepted by the operator and hardly noticed by the clients.

 

I always leave plenty of time to get to the hotel/airport I am expected at as I factor in possible delays in the public transport system. If they do not occur, I arrive early but I do not mind being early and it is better to be early rather than late, If I have to wait at the lobby of the hotel, there are worse places to read the paper as I do so. Being very early is probably a bit naff, not to say naïve, but I have never quite been able to take a colleague seriously who I felt was cutting her arrival at the hotel too fine – a little close for comfort.

 

In an ideal world we would all take public transpor to get around and people would leave their cars at home. I never take my car into central London these days and rely on buses and the underground system. (Actually two thirds of it is above ground but that is a different story to be told another day.) However, we do not live in an ideal world and, frankly, will never will. It was the attempt to do so that caused communism to fail so dramatically. People preferred the occasional and admitted failures of capitalism to the unadmitted failures of communism in the end.

 

An essential part of building a successful society is learning from your mistakes and that means admitting to them in the first place. One thing I most remember from the film The Death of Stalin is the belief, expressed early in the film, that plane crashes never occur in Russia because socialism has made a perfect society where mistakes never happen. Dream on comrades. We all make mistakes and it is important in learning from them to first of all acknowledge them. Lots of fortunes were made by people who slipped up first.

 

Henry Ford is a name that springs to mind here, He had several false starts before he started he successfully started making cars. Ford, by the way, was a notorious antisemite and a far from admirable man but he had a certain knack. He is reported to have said that you can have any colour you want as long as its black. In fact, he later produced cars in several colours, reasoning that his customers would want more of a choice, but in the early days of mass-production black was both the cheapest and quickest drying type of paint available.

 

The fact is that any free society has to draw a balance between public provision and private choice. You have to wait for public transport but can drive your car whenever you want. However, you have to pay for it, both in parking, which is both difficult and expensive in central London, and because of the congestion charge imposed on car drivers or a combination of the two. The mayor of London might have introduced the congestion charge but he would never have done so without government approval.

 

As a result, as I tell clients, I never take the car into central London. This is partly because  I sometimes end a tour at a different place to where I have begun and it would be a pain to go back to collect the car; partly because it is expensive and difficult to park; and partly because I am now old enough to travel for free on public transport with my freedom pass. Maybe, by the way, we give older people too easy a ride but old people tend to vote and no politician wants to upset them – as good an argument for voting as I have ever heard. 

 

Public transport is socialism in practice, private driving is capitalistic. However, allowing or encouraging everyone to drive cars would not only cause much worse air pollution but clog up the roads more than they are already. Making everyone take public transport may seem fairer but it would always have a hint of ‘we know best’ about it and the chaos caused by the inevitable failure of the system on occasions would never work in a free society where disgruntled people could vote four or five years.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

 

LOOKING BACK ON 2025

First woman Archbishop of Canterbury,
the former nurse Dame Sarah Mullally

I was going to write about the aches and pains that come with old age, but I thought that people would not want to hear about my ailments and have decided to write about the advance of women in our society. I have touched on this topic in diaryofatouristguide,blogspot,com - my other blog on what I do for a living. I publish it every Monday, the first day of the week, while I post this blog on the last day of the month. It is about what I think rather than what I do.

As the photo above shows, the new Archbishop of Canterbury is a woman. So too is the Mayor of the City of London. She is not the first to have taken not his role but the third. However, she is the first to have assumed the title of Lady Mayoress instead of Lady Lord Mayor. It seems like a minor change but it probably reflects the growth of feminism in our society. Although the late Bridget Bardot said that 'feminism is not her thing' it has had an effect on what goes on.

You don't have to describe yourself as a feminist to be affected by the movement and what it stands for. The militant outlook often affect others who do not follow the fmeinist movement. No-one publicly argues in favour of automatically lower pay for women and for restricting their opportunities in order to allow men to 'support their families' or some similar trope. People generally accept the principles of gender equality these days.

Do they also accept the practice? In my business, tourist guiding, the question hardly arises because gender equality is more or less ignored rather than fought over. You work as  a tourist guide and get paid and never has it been said that because you are a woman should you be paid less. IN extended tours, the personal skew more to men, while tourist guiding (in which you work on a daily rather than weekly or two-week basis) the workforce is predominantly female.

While writing this piece, I have been half-listening to a conversation on feminism in which John Hunt was taking part. He was a racing commentator whose wife and two of his three daughters was killed by the former partner of one of these daughters. This is where male dominance of women is still prevalent - in the most old-fashioned way, in simple violence towards the female gender. Men are for the most part simply stronger than women and can inflict violence.

This has led to the growth in misogyny against women. No-one publicly supports misogyny but a few people follow the habits of it in private. Men are conditioned more to violence than women and often take out their fury on the female gender in violent ways, which if they gave themselves time to think about it, they would probably not countenance. Time to think.Men often commit atrocious acts of violence (sexual and physical) without thinking.

They often have a lifetime behind bars to regret their impulsiveness. It may have seemed satisfying to take out your violence by one act but it defines you for the rest of your life and I often wonder how many of these locked up behind bars for life would repeat their actions if they had a chance to reconsider them. Most would not, I am sure but it is too late to think again. Once the act is done, a life is lost or changed forever, and the perpetrator has to live with it.

Although I have no doubt that, If I was born a woman, I would be a feminist, speaking as a man, I have reservations about the movement and I would not wear 'I am a feminist' t-shirt. Why not? I suppose I have to think about my personal life here, I was involved in the break-up of my family some years ago and I was more or less forced out of the family home. Although I remained in touch with my children and my relationship with them is good, I feel that I missed out somehow.

There is still the assumption that the man will move out when a relationship ends, even if there are children from it and it is not his 'fault' that it has ended. I put that world in inverted commas because we now have no-fault divorce and the idea of blaming one person for a break-up has been consigned to history. However, my conscience is clear and I cannot help thinking that if he has been willing we could have made it work.

But she was not willing, so I was made to live apart from the children. I suppose she was a perfectionist and I am far from perfect, so she is on her own and I am in another relationship (and quite happy) while she is by herself (and probably also fairly happy). Things have worked out ok in my life. The kids are ok and I have come to terms with separation and family break-up but I still won't wear the t-shirt. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

    

 

MEN ARE CAR PROUD - WOMEN ARE HOUSE PROUD

My much missed but now defunct Jaguar

There is a reason broadcasts of football matches on Sky are sponsored by car companies. They know that the games are watched by men so they target their advertising at them. Of course, women are not forbidden from turning on the television if a football game is being broadcast, just as men are not obliged to. Some men are not interested in football while some women are. Advertisers aim at broad markets and they assume that it is mostly men who watch games.

As I have always said, there is a difference between a generalisation and an assumption. The title of this post  is a generalisation but it is accurate enough to provide the advertising exec with a fair assumption that the audience for a football game will be mostly male. In the same way, golf games broadcast on tv are where conservative advertising is most often seen. The audience is successful and skews to conservatism, so the advertising follows.

 

Advertisers probably spend a lot of time and research finding out about these audience make-ups and figure that, although it is not against the law for golf lovers to be socialist or otherwise left-wing, it is fairly unlikely so they can concentrate certain types of advertising at them in the hope that they will find a receptive audience. I do not pretend to be an expert on the advertising business but certain things are obvious.

 

In the same way, nothing obliges the male part of the human species to be prouder of their cars than their homes, but they usually are. Men are built for movement, while women are nest-builders. This is a ‘by and large’ observation. I am probably slightly untypical because I am writing this under a ceiling that is going to be prepared (soon I hope) in a house that has frankly been more important to me than any car I have owned.

 

I no longer own one but share a car with my partner, who uses it almost every day when she is not working while I am happy enough using public transport to get around. I still remember when my last car died, however. It was on Christmas day and we were in Ireland where Leena had been doing a bit of nest-building. We had visited friends and I – wrongly, as it turned out – assumed that the puddles we were driving through would not cripple it.

 

To cut a long story short, the racing green Jaguar (of which I was very proud) drove into a deeper puddle than we had previously encountered and I soon had to say, ‘Goodbye, Jag’. I have not owned another car since that Christmas Day and, although I miss the Jaguar, I have managed fine since then. The taxi drivers hate him but our mayor in London is encouraging the use of public transport and bicycles to get around.

 

I have noticed the younger generation is more concerned with getting a mortgage than a car these days and often do not even bother to learn to drive until that is sorted. I have a niece who is learning to drive but is not bothered with learning to do so in a manual car and is quite happy to do so in an automatic, even if it gives her a restricted licence. Her reckoning is that most cars these days are autos so why bother with a licence for a manual change car?

 

In the USA, they do not even have a distinction between licences as most cars are autos and ‘stick shift’ cars are in the minority. Those who want to drive ‘stick’ have to learn how to do so and are not tested on their competence. You hear horror stories about Americans, used to autos at home, who cannot adjust to driving manuals. Personally, I always liked driving a car with a gearstick but drive an auto now without complaint.

 

It gives me an illusion of control, and makes me feel that I am more in charge of the car than it is of me. Women probably do not bother with such considerations and happily drive automatics if they are available. Yet, they are less likely to tolerate a badly maintained house than they are a car. It is a rite of passage to own your own home that usually comes after marriage. 

 

That is another thing. A man is often expected to provide for his wife and this will often mean buying a house which she will turn into a home. In these days of increasing divorce, a man may move out of this home if the marriage ends (as I had to do). He may end up in a flat with a car, the car taking up a large part of his income while the former wife and children stay in the house. The man is still expected to move out, even if he did not desire a break-up.

 

This has always seemed unjust to me. Another thing I say is that there are basically only three things you can give your children. These are time, money and love. Love – we take that for granted. Money – well. That is what the CSA was set up to supervise. What people forget about is time spent with your children. In many ways, this is the most important thing. Like it or not kids judge their parents on how much time they spend with them.

 

All too often a disappearing dad rides off into the sunset and does not see his children again. This admittedly happens less often these days but it still happens too much for comfort. Virtually any child will tell you that, even if they are not together, they would like to have a relationship with both parents. They may also want the couple to bury their differences and stay together - but that is another story.

 

We are getting worse at marriage but better at divorce these days. (We have had plenty of practice.) Yet, the man is still expected to move out and the children to stay with their mother. This may be the result of previous arrangements but it probably reflects a deeper habit in which men tend to move, while women stay still. Even if they have not ended the relationship, men are expected to move on and out when it does so.

 

That does not alter the fundamental truth in our society – houses start increasing in price as soon as you get the keys to the front door. Cars, on the other hand, tend to go down in value once you get your hands on the keys. That, curiously, does not affect how much men love their cars. No matter how smart they are with money, a good car is somehow seen as the mark of a successful man.

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

SPEAKING VERSUS SINGING

Bow ties are usually worn by men at Wexford Opera

As I have previously said, I like to go to see a play and a performance every week. By performance I mean a live event of some kind – a play, an opera, even a football match. This week I have been going to the Wexford opera festival every night so I have been seeing plenty of performances. I have not seen many films, apart from on Netflix, and many of these have been of variable quality.

 

The operas have been of a high standard. As far as I can tell (which is not very far) the singing has been up to scratch and the stagings have been adventurous and original. I was not entirely convinced y how the Spanish civil war roped into Verdi’s Il Trouvere, which is the original Italian version of Il Troubadore and took place long before the war had begun. Verdi rewrote the opera for a French audience and had died before the war in Spain had begun.

 

Yesterday we went to Deidamia, Handel’s take of the start of the Trojan war with Achilles in a Mediterranean island where, disguised as a woman, where he falls in love with the princess there. I was so used to the Achilles-Patroclus story that I found it difficult to adjust to a new trans version, but it gave the legend a new slant at least. He is later uncovered as a man by Odysseus when he chooses some weapons instead of female trinkets.

 

Handel wrote quite a few operas in Italian, having been trained in it before he became a naturalised British citizen in 1717. In those days we welcomed people like Marx and Handel who were unwelcome or could not make a living in their native Germany. (Sadly, no longer.) We think of him as a composer of religious works like his Messiah or Water Music but he had written a lot of operas before he turned his hand to more sacred subjects.

 

Wexford has a tradition of reviving ‘lost’ operas, so we see a lot of works that we would not in otherwise more traditional settings. I admire them for it and, mainly because my partner loves opera, we make a point of going there in late October when the tourist season has ended and they have their annual opera festival. They even encourage (but do not enforce) the wearing of bow ties and dinner jackets for men attending the main theatre.  

 

I have kept my house in London, which is the centre of the British tourist business and, when I am not working, often enjoy the theatre in the capital. London is one of the great cities in the world for theatre and I usually go to see a spoken word production, just occasionally an operatic one. Put simply, I prefer plays to operas, the spoken word to the sung aria. It is not something I am particularly proud of – it is just my preference.

 

Part of this is related to price. Opera tickets are expensive, whereas I manage to get a theatre seat of about £20-30, by using such things as the TodayTix app and restricting myself to the cheaper seats. I even make my decision occasionally based onprice, not going to The Lady from the Sea, but instead to Clarkston, a gay love story of dubious quality simply because the seats were cheper. (I may revise this decision when I get back to London.)

 

I sometimes go simply because I am curious about the theatre. I went to a matinee of Ragdoll, a play inspired by – bit not officially about - the Patty Hearst story, where she became a participant in robbing banks with the Symbionise Liberation Army, who had kidnapped and raped her. I learned that many of the followers of Charles Manson came from privileged backgrounds and been seduced by the certainty to ‘liberators’ like Manson.

 

Both Clarkston and Ragdoll were short plays without intervals, as was Mary Page Marlowe, about a fictitious American woman which was written by the actor Tracey Letts and starred Susan Sarandon and Andrea Risborough as the woman at different stages of her life. I will not deny that it was the star power of the actors and writer that drew me to the play. I am, when all is said and done, as much a star-fucker as anyone else.

 

I could not name many figures in the world of opera – a few singers like Willard White and Maria Callas, who are as much stars as their theatrical counterparts. Many opera goers will be as aware of the abilities of the performers and the intricacies of the plots as their theatre going equivalents, if not more so. Opera is almost made for the anorak tendency of some fans to get to know the ins and outs of the performers.

 

Going to the theatre, however, is probably a more results-based experience than the opera, where the high price of tickets coupled with the sense of occasion it generates, is more likely to result in a better reception for a traditional version than it possibly merits. For all the reputation of opera goers for expressing their disapproval, lots of this must come from the breaking of tradition at the opera, which is probably less tolerated than at the theatre.

 

Reinterpretation of, for example, Shakespeare is almost compulsory these days, leading to some eccentricities on the part of directors keen to reinterpret the bard in their own way. In the conservative world of the opera, you mess with tradition at your peril, as some directors have found out to their cost. Going to the theatre is fundamentally an intellectual exercise, while going to the opera is related to the occasion. This is why I prefer theatre to opera.

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspt.com

TAKING PILLS EVERY DAY

Just some of my daily pills intake

What is the difference between youth and old age? I had been happy enough to consider myself middle-aged until a recent visit to the doctor who had given me a series of pills I had to take very day. These are statins and Metformin, tablets for diabetes, which both my mother and grandmother suffered from and so it is hardly a surprise that I have it too. Every night and morning I have to remember to take my pills.

No longer can I point out the tablets that the average male and female take over the course of a lifetime with that mixture of scorn and dismissal as I now have to take daily pills. I can no longer pty the man I overheard who had to get up every two hours in the night to pee. I have to do the same thing myself these days as my bladder is no longer strong enough to survive a night in bed without a visit to the loo. No wonder people want a private bathroom when they book a hotel room. Walking across the corridor does not seem that like a minor inconvenience when you have to do it in the middle of the night.

 

Add to the daily tablets I have to take the occasional course of antibiotics for a bladder infection and you have quite a few pills that have to be taken every day. This, I have belatedly discovered, is the real difference between youth and old age: your body is slowly but surely declining in its ability to ward off disease.

 

Leonardo di Caprio has recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday, although he has not settled down to start a family yet and is still going out with younger women, these days half his age. He says that he still feels like he is thirty rather than fifty. God luck to him but sooner or later old age will catch up with him and he will have to get up in the night (if he does not do so already) and start taking the tablets to ward off the effects of old age.

What did Mark Twain say? Only two things in life are inevitable – death and taxes. There is no point in trying to avoid either of them, the first because it comes to us all and the second because sooner or later the Inland Revenue (what Americans call the IRS) will catch up with you eventually. Better to pay your share and have a good moan. Almost everyone moans about taxes because we take the result for granted but disparage the means of collection.

 

Still, I am able to work, to walk and to drive – three of the most important things to me. I rarely use the car and am certainly not going to return to driving guiding, which is simply too much hard work and expense for the reward. I often take people around on public transport and hardly ever bring the car into central London, the cost of parking and congestion charge being too high. I also get free public transport so why not take advantage of it?

 

I am blessed in finding my work enjoyable and interesting and have managed to adapt my career gradually to my aging and failing body. My mind, however, remains sharp. Although I forget names of people and words occasionally, they usually come back to me, so I have decided to continue to work until, as I said to a colleague only the other day, “I drop”. Not that I have any plans to do so anytime soon. That is one decision that is out of my hands. 

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com