Any Other Business: Part LIX

As the title suggests, so forth.

A Blacklist Darkly

Well, that was … unexpected. The unintentional season 7 finale of The Black List aired on Sky One last week. And it was half-live action, half-animated. Not at all the expensive rotoscoping over live action of A Scanner Darkly, but clearly that was at the back of someone’s mind as they tried to figure out how to finish the story with the remaining dialogue being phoned in by the actors, and a limited budget to render them and their environments accurately. Leading to such wonderful innovations as little title cards telling us the narrative and emotional import of the facial expressions of the animated characters when there was no time or money to actually make the avatars tell the story that way. One hopes that this approach is not going to catch on…

Golfgate, moral hysteria, and No Deal Brexit

Imagine a world where nobody in the media was allowed to use Twitter or report on Twitter. Imagine a world where government did not respond clumsily and frantically to frenzies whipped up by the tiny fraction of very loud people who use Twitter. In this world the Cork Examiner might still have taken out Dara Calleary, a target that remains highly suspicious, but not Phil Hogan. Instead the Twitter-led moral hysteria brigade have excelled themselves, and Phil Hogan is gone. Now nobody should cry over the end of Phil Hogan’s political career. The man was a boor of long standing and his disastrous quango Irish Water will outlive him. But to go now. For attending a dinner that was perfectly legal. As the Atlantic reported yesterday the rich in America are saving oodles of money because they have nowhere to go right now. If functions which separate people into groups of less than 50 and give them different exits, entrances, and toilets, are to be verboten because somebody might go mental on Twitter – who benefits? The hotels that cease to host such functions and shut down? The staff who cease to work such functions and go home? This is the self-defeating performance of austerity in another guise: where a billionaire decides not to buy a new yacht for fear of it being seen in a poor light, and a number of yacht-builders go on the dole because of the optics. So… less than 6 weeks to go until a deal needs to be ready to present to a top level EU gathering to approve Brexit with an actual trade deal. And the EU has no Trade Commissioner. And whoever comes in, with less than 6 weeks to appoint someone, will be totally clueless as to their brief as opposed to being on top of it from being there all thru the Brexit farrago. Good Job Everyone!!! A satisfying bout of righteous crucifixion during the silly season, and, well, come January, when we will be battling the flu season, the seasonal spike in patients on trolleys in hospitals, a surge in coronavirus as we all stay indoors without any preparation for proper ventilation, and probably another total lockdown we look forward to the final kibosh: 3 weeks of empty shelves, and an eternity of higher prices thereafter, as No Deal Brexit arrives like a tonne of bricks and all our imports from England become hugely expensive, and all our supplies perforce must come thru France at greater uncertainty and therefore a new model of supply chain management involving the resurrection of warehouses which don’t come for free, we can all content ourselves with the knowledge that the Bad Man Was Made Quit and that makes it all okay.

You really mean that this Spotify list is so highly classified you damn people would kill to keep it a government secret?!

Spotify these 60 songs for a 70s mood

Edwin Starr – War // Talking Heads – Life During Wartime // Blue Oyster Cult – Don’t Fear the Reaper // David Bowie – Station to Station // David Shire – The Taking of Pelham 123 theme // Led Zeppelin – Kashmir // Lou Reed – Sweet Jane live // Boston – More Than a Feeling // Iggy Pop – The Passenger // Bob Dylan – One More Cup of Coffee Before I Go // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Who’ll Stop the Rain // The Beatles – Across the Universe // Simon & Garfunkel – Bridge Over Troubled Water // Arvo Part – Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten // The Doors – Hyacinth House // Bob Dylan – Tangled Up in Blue // Blondie – One Way or Another // Roxy Music – Love is the Drug // Talking Heads – Psycho Killer // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Up Around the Bend // The Doors – LA Woman // Lynyrd Skynyrd – Freebird // ABBA – Voulez-Vous // David Bowie – Starman // T-Rex – Children of the Revolution // Kansas – Carry On My Wayward Son // Alice Cooper – School’s Out // Blondie – Heart of Glass // Stevie Wonder – Superstition // The Rolling Stones –Brown Sugar // The Clash – London Calling // Pink Floyd – Us and Them // Led Zeppelin – The Rain Song // Creedence Clearwater Revival – Have You Ever Seen the Rain // Bob Dylan – Shelter from the Storm // John Lennon – Imagine // Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody // The Doors – Love Her Madly // ABBA – S.O.S. // Blondie – Call Me // The Kinks – Lola // The Buzzcocks – Ever Fallen in Love // The Who – Won’t Get Fooled Again // John Williams – Jaws theme // David Bowie – Life on Mars // Van Morrison – Moondance // The Band – The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down // Lou Reed – Satellite of Love // John Williams – Superman march // David Bowie – D.J. // Gil Scott-Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised // Lou Reed – Walk on the Wild Side // Talking Heads – Memories Can’t Wait // David Shire – All the President’s Men finale // Glen Campbell – Rhinestone Cowboy // ELO – Mr Blue Sky // John Williams – Star Wars march // Led Zeppelin – Stairway to Heaven // The Knack – My Sharona // The Sex Pistols – Pretty Vacant // ABBA – Waterloo

Austerity and the Arts

The Journal has compiled a handy guide to various political pledges on arts funding. But take all with the caveat of Pat Rabbitte’s infamous slip on farcically utopian bait-and-switches, “Sure isn’t that what you tend to do during an election?”

Brian Eno’s John Peel lecture at the British Library last year excoriated politicians, especially the Tories, for wanting to bask in the reflected glamour of cultural icons, and boast about the money such activity makes for Britain, both in its own right and in attracting tourists via a sheen of national creativity, without ever wanting to invest in it. According to him these people believed artists magically appear, and start providing a return without requiring any initial capital outlay; an impressive economic conjuring trick to be sure. Whereas, he pointed out, Roxy Music would not have come about without a previous generation establishing a whole gamut of public investment in the future: the NHS, Arts Schools, libraries, galleries, museums, and the dole. According to the Social Democrats there has been a 55% cut in arts funding since 2008 in Ireland. Such cuts dramatically change the cultural current. Take Annabelle Comyn.

Annabelle Comyn was the founding artistic director of Hatch Theatre Company in 2004. She directed a number of contemporary British plays (by Martin Crimp, Dennis Kelly, David Greig, and Zinnie Harris) with regular collaborators including set designer Paul O’Mahony, sound designer Philip Stewart, and actor Peter Gaynor. Then in 2009 Hatch Theatre Company saw its grant slashed from €90,000 to €20,000. After that there was no funding for any projects submitted, and Comyn, who had also directed Joe Penhall’s Blue/Orange and Caryl Churchill’s A Number for the Peacock in 2006 and 2007, took the hint. As she told the Irish Times in a 2014 interview “I remember thinking that the work I had done with Hatch – predominantly contemporary British plays – wouldn’t get funding.” So began two years in which one of Ireland’s best theatre directors didn’t work as a director.

And then Abbey artistic director Fiach Mac Conghail offered her the chance to direct Pygmalion at the Abbey’s main stage in 2011. So began a new phase of Comyn’s career. Her version of Shaw’s comedy emphasised that Henry Higgins really is stripping Eliza Doolittle not just of her accent, but her station in life; and even personality; and irresponsibly remaking her to his own whims. The coldness of Charlie Murphy’s Eliza to Higgins in their final scenes captured the accompanying intellectual transformation he had not counted on, and was an unexpected touch. 2012 saw her back on the Abbey main stage reviving Tom Murphy’s 2000 Abbey commission The House. This Chekhovian tale of social climbing and the frustrations of returned emigrants in the 1950s saw Comyn add new strings to her bow as she blocked 13 people for a chaotic drunken speech and fight. Comyn’s interpretation of Murphy’s melancholic character study with barbed commentary on societal failure saw her win Best Director at the Irish Times Theatre Awards. And yet…

A director who specialised in premiering contemporary British plays is now (with the exception of 2012’s The Talk of the Town) exclusively reviving classic texts. A cultural current in Irish theatre has been diverted, and you can be sure that nobody returned to Dail Eireann after tomorrow will have as a priority allowing it to resume its original course. Does it matter? Well, John McGahern, the Irish novelist par excellence, would not have become the writer he was had he not been exposed to the works of Flaubert, Camus, and Hemingway. It matters if our theatrical landscape suddenly has a Berlin wall of austerity erected cutting off consistent interaction with new British writing. In the grand scheme of things cutting a €90,000 grant has had a larger effect than the latter-day Gladstone who made that retrenchment could ever have imagined.

To quote the two voices at the end of GK Chesterton’s The Napoleon of Notting Hill:

“What could have happened to the world if Notting Hill had never been?”

The other voice replied—

“The same that would have happened to the world and all the starry systems if an apple-tree grew six apples instead of seven; something would have been eternally lost.”