Public Address - Random Play (Home)

Sport, art and suffering | Sep 16, 2004 10:44

Now that the Olympic Games are over and completely forgotten -- funny how fame fades away, huh? -- it might be time to consider what our sportspeople may have learned by the experience during their debriefings on remote Fijian resorts. Let's hope one thing is not be interviewed on television.

They have little to say and what they do utter is usually a babble of cliches.

"Yeah, no, it was awesome."

Oh c'mon!

Let all sportspeople know this: "Awesome" is a word reserved for the day you see the Virgin Mary descending on a cloud. That is awesome.

Those who get past "awesome" tend to speak in code. I thought it was great someone did a PB (I asked around and it's a Personal Best, if you didn't know) but was utterly mystified when a very large man said it was good to get the W.

That's a short way of saying "win" said a friend. I got pedantic and pointed out that it isn't: win is a one syllable word and double-you two syllables. Then he said it was a very Kiwi way of avoiding looking too proud. God, we are a complicated people.

Now if we are to believe these people are out there representing our country then why doesn't someone take them aside and give them some media management? Or at least provide them with a word other than "awesome". I had no particular beef against the Olympics and have the greatest admiration for those who test themselves in this most gruelling public arena. But I had little time for television columnists who predictably complain at length about the thing cluttering up their screens. It wasn't like they didn't know it was going to happen, there had been a few years warning. They could have got the videos in, they could turn to any number of other channels.

Television sport (other than big time rugby and anything involving grown men beating each other to a pulp in a boxing ring ) doesn't really divert me much, but Olympic events on television are inevitable and that doesn't seem worth getting all het up for. Coronation Street will return, of that we can be numbingly certain.

I didn't watch much of the Olympics other than what I caught when on random scan but that's not any great personal-political statement, I seldom watch sport anyway so why would I start now? Archery for God's sake?

The sports seen on television are probably great fun -- better if you are winning I guess -- but the previews, interviews and reviews are just appalling. Commentators become cheerleaders or apologists. And I really don't care how hard someone has trained, what sacrifices they have made, how tough it has all been.

That's like theatre people who expect critics to be kind because they've worked hard on their production and the director has mortgaged the house to float the show. It's irrelevant to the final performance, it's special pleading. A lot of people work hard, a lot of people make great sacrifices -- and they don't do it to follow their dream. They do it because it puts food on the table and keeps the creditors at bay, and often little more than that.

We should be very clear about this, these competitors are in it for themselves. Sportspeople who go to the Olympics are not doing it for us, the country, or any greater good.

There is nothing morally superior about sportspeople (or artists or television newsreaders for that matter) and if there was then these people would be saints. And they clearly aren't. Not even this bargain-basement halo-flogging Pope would canonise them.

I liked it when one of the Rowing Twins said she had no idea that four million people were in the boat with them (as some local commentator suggested), they were just heads down and doing it.

We might reflect in their glory or commiserate with them in their failure to meet the challenge they have set themselves, but we should not be mistaken, these athletes are there to pursue their own goals, meet their own challenges. This is their art, and for that they have suffered.

We should expect to suffer for our art. God knows I have for mine -- although standing in the rain outside Madrid's famous art gallery the Prado on a bitterly cold day last year might just have be taking it too far. It was for me. I quit the queue and headed back to my tiny hotel room for a warm shower, then jumped puddles to the nearby bar where I cheerfully wasted both myself and a wet Sunday. That night I staggered back through the downpour to my small hotel room and in the dark slipped on the wet linoleum. I split open my nose on the iron doorhandle of my room. As I was mopping up buckets of blood and feeling relieved I was so self-medicated I wasn't in pain I reflected on this appropriate end to a day which had begun badly anyway.

My intentions when I got up that miserable morning had been excellent -- the room of Goya's late period "black paintings" which I had travelled halfway around the world to see. I woke early that day and when pulling back the curtain the whole thing crashed off its hooks. I got on the bed to hook it back up, the bed wobbled and I was pitched forward, smashing against the window. Only an unsteady hand on the frame prevented me from pitching out and onto the concrete courtyard three storeys below.

I spent an hour trying to explain by gestures and re-enactment what had happened to a dumpy and distressed cleaning woman who reacted as if I had just told her the guys from the Inquisition were popping back after lunch and looked pretty unhappy. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in rapid and incomprehensible Spanish.

I fled and made my way through increasingly heavy showers down to the gallery. Things could only improve.

But I hadn't counted on the Prado also hosting a Monet exhibition and the queues of well-prepared people bussed in at opening time with their protective umbrellas and raincoats.

My leather jacket simply directed the rain to my jeans and boots, so I cut my losses. Goya (whose "black paintings" truly are awesome incidentally) would still be there when the weather improved. I hadn't so much quit as done a Steve Ferguson. I was holding my efforts and energy back for a greater event. This wasn't the first time I have suffered for great art. In fact a fortnight before the Madrid misery I had also almost been foiled by Joan Miro in balmy Barcelona. Miro occupies a central place in the history of contemporary art. But he almost wilfully seemed to have marginalised his magnificent museum in Barcelona. It's a bit off the beaten track and you don't want to try walking there. Take it from one who did. It's a marathon, not a sprint. The handsome Fundacio Joan Miro has a commanding view across the city -- from which you can conclude it is located at a very high point. Very high.

It was a warm afternoon when I headed off to the much vaunted gallery on Montjuic (Jewish Mountain) in the south west of the city with its collection of around 400 of his paintings, many of them compellingly massive.

I took the Metro to nearby Espanya station and figured the museum wasn't too far away after what promised to be an interesting walk. The Montjuic area is stacked with attractions like the archeological museum, theatres and gardens. A little further over is the 1992 Olympic Stadium area and I thought that maybe after giving Miro a day I might wander over that way at dusk and watch the emerald Mediterranean disappear under the falling dark. But of course everything is flat on a map -- especially the cheap kind I was trusting -- and as incline leaned into small hill then became alarmingly steep road I could feel the weight of my small bag increase with every aching step. Up another incline, up three helpfully placed escalators, then some more walking along a road which dipped briefly only to rise even more sharply ...

Clearly, as our sportspeople say, my preparation hadn't been what it should have been. I hadn't done the hard yards and was having to do them now. I pushed through the pain barrier.

Yes, there was quite a view but Miro, not a city snoozing under a haze of heat, was what I was after. Mostly I just wanted to stop suffering for someone else's art. Of course there is a bus right to the door as I learned on arrival -- I found it for the trip back down which was some small consolation -- but the struggle was worth it.

Miro is the greatest Catalan artist of last century. He was born in 1893 and grew up in the old part of the city. His father was a watchmaker and silversmith but early in life Miro was taken by drawing and gravitated to the countryside and coastline. As a young artist he split his time between Paris and the Catalan coast, met Picasso and his circle, and explored collage as well as painting.

He couldn't draw -- then again who can these days? -- but boy, he could paint. His one dimensional works may lack perspective but they create a sense of depth like few others. And they gain power from their enormous scale.

Miro created his own visual language and his curved patterns evoke birds (a favourite subject, along with women) and a timelessness.

Room after room in his enormous museum reveals massive, sometimes minimal, paintings and glowing rainbow-hued tapestries. Yeah, no. Awesome. Realised by the architect Josep Lluis Sert and built in the white Mediterranean style, the museum itself offers a gentle walk through Miro's art starting with breathtakingly large tapestries of bold colour. There are his earliest drawing (and no, he really wasn't that good) and further on some of his sculpture. But in the natural light and airiness of these generous spaces it is his large-scale paintings which are the most forceful.

In one area called the Octogon, which many patrons walk past because it appears there is little to see, are great white canvases with thin, single lines of paint on them. They are late works and designed for contemplation -- or for those who wish to slow down and really see. Seldom has so little said so much and, in this building of his own design, to so many.

At this time of his life Miro wanted his painting not to be an end in itself, but to bring about a certain state of mind, to stimulate the imagination or induce meditation. They possess a zen simplicity and intellectual elegance. Miro wasn't without humour however. On the terrace outside are his whimsical sculptures made from parts of shop mannequins, chairs and found objects. They are vivid reds, blues and yellows, and stand like frozen clowns -- or moments -- amid the whiteness of the museum walls and the pale, misty blue sky above.

And so the hours rolled by effortlessly in Miro's gently provocative company. I took a break for a coffee at the cafe, wandered the terrace once more to enjoy the city stretched out below, browsed in the shop a while, then went back to take in again the tapestries and Alexander Calder's beautiful, liquid metal Mercury Fountain.

It was late afternoon when I finally walked out into the cooler air. I let the idea of the Olympic Stadium go and got on the bus with a gentleman from Denmark. We chatted about Miro, Barcelona, and the various merits and debits of our homeland. Halfway down the hill we passed a couple wheezing their way up, doing the hard yards, suffering for their art.

He looked at me conspiratorially: "A few years ago I was foolish enough to try to walk here. I am pleased to learn I am not the only one."

I smiled, then looked out the window at the houses of Barcelona.

Digg this Scoopit!

Scratching the vinyl | Sep 06, 2004 09:35

A DJ came to my house recently. This isn't the kind of thing I would normally admit to, but bear with me. First, he wasn't a DJ in the old sense -- not one of those guys who sells ads and their own egos between "classic" rock on the radio -- but an actual bona fide, samplin' and scratchin' vinyl junkie. And second, he wasn't one of those more obscure-than-thou DJs who looks for limited edition vinyl issued in December 73 so he can sample the cymbal on some track then gets all huffy and superior when you didn't recognise the source.

Nope, my visitor was just a guy, much like me, who just liked to listen to old records and turn up those rare gems. If they fitted his brief he'd sample them, and if not no matter. When he walked into my office he turned to my wife and said, "Oh, this isn't right" in a voice filled with awe, admiration, envy, and I suspect, a note of pity. But mostly it was as if he'd just walked into King Solomon's vinyl-mine.

I confess to being a hoarder. Nothing embarrassing like bottles, matchboxes, or beer cans. I collect art objects. Well, records actually.

Over the decades I've scrounged through junk shops and school fairs looking for that first Sadistic Mika Band album, things by Sam the Sham and Pharaohs, Japanese psychedelic rock from the early 70s, spoken word albums from the 40s, Gracie Fields' singles ... Just the usual stuff. My walls bulge with the likes of Father Guido Sarducci's "Live at the St Douglas Convent", the Addicts (reformed junkies singing songs of praise, and recently voted worst or weirdest album of all time by Q magazine) and the Alfred E Newman "Mad" album.

Feeding the habit hasn't come cheap - all that shoe leather if nothing else - but some years back I made a great leap backwards and bought a wind-up gramophone ? and locked into something completely different and full of pleasant surprises. It was like a time-tunnel to another, more innocent world. Certainly one more crudely recorded anyway. It's not one of those large, extended-trumpet affairs with a dog peering down it, just a simple wind-it-up and drop-on-the-disc gramophone. I don't even know the year it was made.

My modest machine is a Sonora ("clear as a bell" it extravagantly claims) with an Avonia "Swiss Made" sound box. The sound is scraped out of the grooves by a vicious looking steel needle and travels up into the "sound box" which deflects the noise onto the metal lid. No volume control, no knobs to fiddle ... what's in the grooves is what you get. Plus crackle.

Now some folks get all huffy about sound quality and surface noise but I'm with Iggy Pop who, back when CDs first floated into view and people banged on about the pristine sound, memorably barked: "Life has surface noise!" Current sound equipment is pretty fragile and disposable but my solid Sonora packs up into itself to become a solid metal suitcase that also holds 10 crusty old 78s. Consider it a larger, heavier, more inconvenient and limited-capacity iPod if you will, but it's ideal for picnics. My very own meadow-blaster.

The 78rpm habit is cheap. My "system" only cost about $100 and the records are no great outlay. Most often you don't even have to buy them, any number of people are desperate to unload Ed Ames records on you. Usually if you are in a junk shop - the hospice of the discarded 78 - and the owner spots you crouching over the fragile, musty-smelling pile it's, "Five bucks the lot if you're interested, mate".

Naturally 78s snap easily so you have to be careful, but it depends on how serious you are. I try not to let too many go on me but if it happens, it happens. I was upset to lose "Raunchy" by Bill Justis and His Orchestra (the tune that George Harrison played to Paul and John to secure himself a place in the Beatles), but it was a disposable pleasure anyway. For the philosophical among us their fragility requires the zen quality of non-attachment to them, and tells you something about the transitory nature of art, if not existence.

Most of the records are terrible anyway. But I suspect the ratio of quality to crap is about what it is today. Although there's some real bad stuff out there. Jimmy Durante croaking "The Day I Read A Book" and "I'm a Vulture for Horticulture", the irrepressible Jean McPherson, the Mills Brothers ... And my copy of the Four Aces singing "Mr. Sandman" is only relieved by dirt in the grooves which make it come out something like, "Mr. Sandman, I'm such a lug ... Mr. Sandman, bring me a drink . . ."

But Jesus, they made a lot of novelty records back then: Stan Freeberg blowing bubbles through a straw, and the hilarious "He Holds the Lantern While His Mother Chops the Wood" by the Knaves "with novelty accompaniment".

And the group called Max Hansen with Hans Peder Ase and His Orchestra. Can you imagine what that might have looked like on a picture disc? However the good ones: solo cello by Pablo Casals, the genius of Paul Robeson, Tennessee Ernie Ford singing "Shotgun Boogie", Louis and Ella, Mario Lanza, Fletcher Henderson . . .

Then there was the craze for Hawaiian music in the late 20s and 30s. There was the real thing from Sol Hoopi (almost impossible to find but worth the search), and the unlikely sounding but genuine Ray Kinney and Dick McIntyre with His Harmony Hawaiians.

These are treasures indeed. And all come with the sound of bacon frying. Few 78s have dates on them, the long-gone record companies often obscure, and the songs by second-tier performers who will never make it to Google.

So you just enjoy them in their splendid, cultural isolation.

I don't search out particular discs but would like to hear again Miklos Rosza's theme to the film "Lost Weekend". It was banned in its day becauseit allegedly engendered feelings of deep depression in the emotionally unstable. Like Joy Division, but orchestrated.

Recently a friend came over with his young son while I had the old Sonora out. He'd never seen a vinyl single let alone my archaic machine.

He asked in that genuine, if foolhardy, spirit of inquiry some kids have.

So I told him: long before iPods, downloading, CDs and DVDs, before stereos, before radiograms ... Poor kid, but he hung in there.

"What do you call them?"

"Them? They're 78s."

"Yeah? Grandma's got a whole box of them in her garage."

"Really?" "Yeah."

"A box full of them you say . . ."

So wind me up and let the lo-tech set me free.

"Yaka hula hickey du-laaa," as the old song says.

Digg this Scoopit!