Getting Artful

I spent a fair amount of June thinking about art. I had my reasons. 1) It's a fruitful area of consideration. 2) I've been asked to do a TOK lecture for our Year 5's on Art as an Area of Knowledge (or something like that) and I thought I'd better sound as if I had a bit of a clue about what I will be talking about. Mind you, the lecture is probably going to take place next year (when the Year 5's are Year 6's) but I thought I'd get my retaliation in early, as it were.

The thinking involved, as it usually does, a lot of me imagining myself standing there delivering wise words and testing whether the words I had in mind sounded like they were possessed of any kind of wisdom at all. As usual I found myself pleasantly surprised at finding I seemed to have a few useful ideas and unpleasantly perturbed at how few these ideas actually were. It's a very illuminating way of discovering how much one doesn't actually know - very much in the spirit of Theory of Knowledge, I think. I also did a bit of reading, well generally re-reading, in fact. Aided and abetted by John Carey's What Good Are The Arts?, Alain de Botton's The Art of Travel, Raymond Williams's Culture and Society and most of the essays in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics I am now armed to convince some unfortunate young people that it's all a lot more complicated than it looks - and it looks pretty complicated anyway.

There is one fairly simple point that abides with me, though. The whole business of the democratisation of the arts is extremely healthy. There are those who'd call it dumbing down, I suppose, but the more people who do art, in whatever form, the better. It's a lot more intrinsically rewarding than doing drugs and renders the world, or the way we see it, more artful, which goes a step better than being no bad thing, attaining the giddy heights of being distinctly that rare beast: a good thing of itself.

Old Dog, Old Tricks

This from my diary for Sunday 2 July, 2006:

Well it was a late and disappointing night last night. I shall have bad dreams about Steven Gerrard's penalty miss for years to come.

Nothing really changes, eh?

Dark But Hardly Comfortless

It was a game of three thirds - as opposed to the archetypal two halves. The outer panels of the triptych were dominated by a superb Germany: skilful, mobile, fluid, intelligent, in contrast to England who simply weren't. It was just about at the fifteen minute mark that I consciously thought: we are going to get hammered. And after the Podolski goal I seriously thought five or six were on the cards. Then came the central panel, a curious exercise in premiership blood & thunderation. But even if the Lampard not-a-goal had been-a-goal I don't see how anyone seriously might have thought that Germany were going to lose. Even at the beginning of the second half when England still had much of the play, Germany looked the more likely to score more than once - as, of course, they did. Both of Mueller's goals on the break I saw coming as soon as I glanced across at England's lack of cover, as did most of the world, I guess.

On the build-up to Mueller's second, Barry's startling lack of pace against the cannily effective Oezil brought back memories of myself lumbering around in park football as an overage thirty-something being skinned by whippet-ike youngsters around nineteen, attempting vainly to clip their heels as they motored around me into the distance. But I was never paid as much as Barry, of course. In fact, I was, rightly, never paid at all. Nor were any of our back four who still rarely (actually, I think never) conceded dumb route one goals like Germany's first.

Anyway, I'm trying to take the defeat well and haven't done so badly today, though I lost a fair amount of sleep last night. I'm reminding myself of just how good the Germans were (wasn't Shweinsteiger brilliant even though not many of the reports have been mentioning him?!) and what a pleasure it was to witness such great football. I remember adopting the same outlook after Gunter Netzer's Germany thumped England at Wembley in the early seventies, though it didn't work for me then. But now I'm older and a lot more tired and have put up with these situations for many more years. And the teams who've made it into the quarter finals so far have oodles to offer (though I'm sorry that the USA didn't make it, always being good for the unexpected.)

Can Germany go all the way? It would be nice to think so - a triumph for the beautiful game. But that defence is oddly brittle for a German team - hence the atypical central thirty minutes last night. And I can't see Argentina allowing anyone to pull them around at the back as the puppet-show otherwise known as Johnson, Upson, Terry and Cole did.

A Shift In Perspective

I'm still working on clearing the backlog of reading of the books for children I've got in KL. These are titles I bought in the late 1980's in the UK but didn't read and left behind when I came over to Singapore. I finally shipped them out, with a number of other old books, some five or six years back and have been chipping away at them, in an on and largely off manner, since.

Having said that I'm not sure the one I found time for this trip can properly be classified as being written for children, though it's generally marketed as such. The title in question was Jan Needle's Wild Wood (the edition in question being wonderfully illustrated with cartoons by Willie Rushton). It's a cunningly wrought, splendidly subversive take on the world of Wind In The Willows, being a re-telling of the events in the lives of Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad from the perspective of the Wild-Wooders. The villainous weasels, stoats and ferrets of the original become the valiant, exploited underclass of Wild Wood, struggling to survive a bleak English winter and we find out how Toad really came to escape from the dungeon, amongst other revelations concerning the plot of the original. Even Ratty's being tempted to seek for adventures on the open sea is given an unexpected twist.

The idea of recasting a beloved classic in what I suppose is a broadly class-conscious politically-correct light sounds quite dreadful - but here it works completely because Needle obviously loves the original and its characters and, against the odds, manages to stay true to them. The only thing that didn’t work for me was the highly contrived frame story which sets up the central narrative of Baxter, an amiable weasel (or ferret, can't recall now) who was witness many years previously to the take-over of Brotherhood Hall. This frame seemed quite unnecessary, just getting in the way of getting the story going. I can't imagine even quite a sophisticated child having the patience to sit through it. Which leads me back to the question of whether this is a children's book at all. (Mind you, the same is true of its (almost) inimitable original.)

(It's Not Just) A Matter Of Tactics

Duncan Hamilton's Provided You Don't Kiss Me wasn't the only soccer-themed tome I found time for back in KL last week. I also enjoyed Jonathan Wilson's Inverting The Pyramid, an account of the development of tactics in the beautiful game. The range of the book makes up for its somewhat detached approach, serving as a reminder that the game has been around for a long time and current fashions and concerns have never really been too far away. What also emerged, for me at least, was an understanding of the degree to which the most dramatic tactical developments have been linked to particular individuals on the pitch.

You don't get total football without Cruyff.

There's also a remarkable picture taken at the Celtic vs Inter Milan European Cup Final 1967. What's so remarkable is the meagre size of the crowd in the background of the shot. You used to see that number at Hyde United games when I was a kid. But I remember watching the game on tv and being impressed at the foreign glamour of it all, though not with Inter's eleven-man defence - a strategy nicely accounted for by Mr Wilson. I must have had a very short attention span in those days because I stopped watching in disgust, thinking Inter were bound to win and, although delighted to learn of Celtic's eventual victory, felt disappointed in myself for not actually watching the whole thing live. By the by, the Celtic team that day were all born within 30 miles of their ground, Parkhead. We're never going to see that again, more's the pity.

Floral Dance

It's been a week but my heart is still dancing with the highland flowers (and the fruit and other good stuff like that), at least when I'm in vacant or pensive mood. Not that events in South Africa have left much time for being pensive.

A Step Forward

I found myself a good deal more involved in the last twenty minutes or so of last night's England game than I'd expected myself to be. At that point it had become important for me that they should win because they deserved to and we were getting glimpses of qualities they could bring to games at the knock-out stages that had the potential to result in great games. I'm thinking here of the kind of blood and thunder, all or nothing, end to end stuff that, on its day, makes the Premiership the most watchable of all leagues.

We might just get that against Germany - the perfect opponents for the last sixteen. There's no point in playing a team you're going to be regarded as favourites to beat. You get the best football when it's all or nothing, as long as you've shed the shackles by then. And I get the feeling, from a distance and I may be wrong, but I do feel that Capello is the man who could unshackle the squad. His handling of the silliness following the Algeria game was exemplary - the contrast with the hapless Domenech is eerie and salutary.

And on a tangential but related point: why do Jamie Milner's step-overs look like they're being performed in slow motion? Is this intended to confuse the defender?

Heart In The Highlands

Above: just a few, heartening reminders of what we did on our holidays, a whole week ago.

The Beautiful Game

It occurs to me that anyone reading some of the recent posts to this Far Place might assume I was chiefly, if not solely, interested in the progress of England's national team in the World Cup. This is by no means the case. I won't be terribly upset if they get eliminated at the group stage; in fact, I won't be at all upset, assuming they don't deserve to go through which, at present, they don't. (By the way, I still have not abandoned hope that they'll do something against Slovenia and am probably the only supporter they've got who thinks Capello makes perfect sense in his comments on how they played against Algeria and what they need to do now.)

My real interest in the tournament lies in wanting real football to be played - on the ground, to feet, plenty of movement off the ball, and wanting to keep scoring to the end because that's where the enjoyment lies. A bit like Portugal last night. Any team that can do that will get my support - as did Brazil in 1970 (their 1 - 0 victory over a fine England team being one of the great games of any World Cup) and Holland in 1974.

I reminded myself of the fundamental truths of the game back in Kuala Lumpur by reading Duncan Hamilton's Provided You Don't Kiss Me, a sort of account of Brian Clough's years of success (and failure) at Nottingham Forest. The writer was, at that time, a sportswriter for a Nottingham newspaper and had good access to Cloughie and he provides us with a persuasively raw and vivid portrait of the man. The book is organised around broad themes rather than proceeding sequentially - for example, one late chapter focuses on Clough's drinking and its deleterious effects upon him and casts about both early and late in his career to explain the mystery - and I suppose would be a bit of a puzzle for anyone unaware of the broad outline of the great manager's career. But it worked for me, helped by the fact I read the whole thing in less than a day (as a sort of holiday after ploughing through the Naipaul I had just wearily completed.)

What I liked most about the book was the obvious respect Hamilton maintained for Clough all the way through its 'warts and all' aspects, and the way it didn't lose sight of the bedrock truths of what football should be about. Yes, the man wanted to win, but he wanted to win with style and knew how to set players free, mentally and physically, to do so. The humour he embodied was at the heart of it all and sort of fed the passion.

It's a pity he didn't get the England job. He would have released the players from their chains. But, as Hamilton convincingly shows us, the media would never have allowed someone with a real personality to have sustained that position, no matter how right he was for it.

In the meantime, I'm salivating over the prospects of Portugal against Brazil. Let's hope they both turn up to play.

Unable To Quit

In early June I decided to abandon V.S. Naipaul's The Loss Of El Dorado on the not unreasonable grounds that I was getting absolutely nowhere with it. It turns out that I wasn't quite as determined as I may have sounded. I kept going and my aged blotted paperback copy now resides on a bookshelf in Maison KL whence I made it to the final page.

Was I right to keep going? I suppose so, yes, on the grounds you should always finish what you start. (Curiously I typed that initially as 'start what you finish', which sounded better somehow.) But the problem is that looking back I don't feel there was any profit in the enterprise. Naipaul convinces you that history is a messy business, especially for those on its periphery, which is just about everyone in his account, and that people are generally foolish or cruel or foolish and cruel. No one emerges with any credit - in fact, what makes The Loss Of El Dorado so difficult to read is that no one emerges at all in anything close to a fully-rounded sense.

Case in point: much of the central part of the narrative revolves around the rivalry between a chap called Picton (who eventually got himself killed heroically at Waterloo) and another chap whose name I've forgotten and don't care to remember. The rivalry seems to come out of nowhere for no good reason, except to make desolate the lives of those caught up in it. But that seems good enough for Naipaul, who, when you think of it, seems drawn in so much of his work to the shabby, sordid and second-rate. Of course, normally he can make this stuff first-rate even in its bleakness - but not this time, at least not for me.