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Index: Notes & Comment

Watching ‘Einstein on the Beach’ through a periscope.

Sunday, 6 May 2012

Anthony Howell: Backwards clocks and crazed compasses dangle before our eyes, and I notice that everyone in the cast is wearing a watch. Time is Wilson’s essential subject. Things happen at different speeds yet ruthlessly conform to the order of brittleness. The stage is steeped in cloud, and a text on a drop curtain depicting a hydrogen bomb explosion reminds us of molecules of dust generating further terrible heat. We are judged by an elderly black man and a white child; by age and by race. As they consult with each other, a black circle covers a white disk. The cast open their paper bags. It’s okay, we’re not doomed. We’re only on our lunch break.

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Marianne Faithfull’s ‘Innocence and Experience’.

Monday, 30 April 2012

A Fortnightly Review of Innocence and Experience. Curated by Marianne Faithfull and John Dunbar Tate Gallery Liverpool. 21 April to 2 September 2012  By Denis Joe. THE MANNER IN which Marianne Faithfull’s exhibition in the DLA Piper Series at the Tate Liverpool is laid out is rather like reading a picture book  and not an [...]

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Joseph de Maistre’s ‘different sort of progress’.

Saturday, 25 February 2012

Anthony O’Hear: There is one respect in which Maistre might himself be too much a figure of his own age: he is as much a believer in progress as his Enlightenment opponents. It is just a different sort of progress.

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Notes on the complexities of Post-Modernism.

Friday, 13 January 2012

Charles Jencks: In architecture, the movement has returned after the Neo-Modernism of the 1990s, in every way but by name. The world is now saturated by the confused labels of Modernism and Post-Modernism, but the streams of concerns to which these labels used to refer are continuing. That is apparent in architecture with the digital ornament (a leading movement), the iconic building (with its many marvellous and woeful examples), and the hybrid “time buildings” (that mix past, present and future architectural codes).

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Postmodernism and history.

Thursday, 5 January 2012

Anthony Howell: Without postmodernism’s new take on history, Alison Marchant’s ‘archival art’ might never have surfaced, including her exhibition celebrating the cross-dressing (and very postmodern) Hannah Cullwick and the fetish photography of her eccentric husband Arthur Munby (who were an 1860’s couple similar in a way to Goude and Jones).

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An ‘Iron Lady’ turns to rust.

Thursday, 22 December 2011

Drew Moore: In Streep’s Thatcher we see a ball-busting leader well equipped with warmongering and anti-socialist rhetoric, as well as a schoolmarm rapidly alienating her cowering Cabinet. Most affecting, we see a feeble woman trying to preserve her dignity surrounded by guardians who have already consigned her to senility. One of the most enjoyable scenes is one in which the utterly lucid patient, with acerbic wit, puts her patronizing doctor in his place.

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A brief guide to Oxford’s ‘Very Short Introductions’.

Thursday, 8 December 2011

Michelene Wandor: The first ‘Very Short Introduction’ appeared in the mid-1990s, and now there are nearly 300 books, which have sold over three million copies, and been translated into over twenty-five languages. The virtue is unadorned: A ‘Very Short Introduction’ contains all you need to know in order to decide if you need to know more. The recipe is a tough call: a ‘Very Short Introduction’ must necessarily historicise, provide an epistemological guide to the subject, analyse its conceptual and ideological issues, and wrap it all up – for now.

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Poetry of ‘a detailed curiosity’.

Saturday, 3 December 2011

Alan Wall: Although radically different books, both Michelene Wandor’s writing and Myra Sklarew’s exhibit a detailed curiosity regarding the minutiae of existence, whether itemising seventeenth-century trade or arachnid encounters. The threads that tie dissimilarities together, whether gossamer or memories of Lithuania, hold the poems together with an alert gracefulness.

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‘Private Eye at 50′, surrounded by elderly gents in greatcoats.

Tuesday, 22 November 2011

Michelene Wandor: This laid-back exhibition of images from its first fifty years, nestles in two interconnecting rooms at the V & A, conveniently on the route to the wonderful café. Lining one high wall are covers, each of which catches a chilling moment in recent political history. There is a young Tony Blair, dark hair waving over his head, visiting an elderly person in hospital. Blair has a huge grin, reassuring the patient that ‘there’ll be a spin-doctor along in a minute’.

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Coleridge as a poet.

Saturday, 29 October 2011

Edward Dowden: Coleridge broke with tradition in the vulgar sense of the word; he broke with tradition in theology, philosophy, politics; yet he did so in a spirit more truly loyal to the past than was the common orthodoxy in theology or philosophy, or the common Toryism in politics.

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Historicism and the great beast.

Monday, 27 June 2011

Anthony O’Hear: We should consider whether the extreme unpredictability of the crowds we are seeing to-day in quite a number of places (including even London, as it happens) is not just an extreme illustration of what is actually always the case. Beneath its apparently smooth surface and underpinning the leaders who appear to shape it, human history is built on shifting sands, on countless inherently unstable actions and decisions of millions of individual people.

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The Wedding: Good, old-fashioned Royal Family (production) values.

Sunday, 1 May 2011

Michelene Wandor: On Friday, April 29, 2011, our couple are friends. They have lived together – as one royal biographer said, without mentioning the word ‘sex’: ‘This is a woman who knows exactly what to do.’ And yet, a guest agony aunt on TV, asked for her advice to the bride said: ‘Have a son quickly, and don’t take any lovers.’ Plus ca change?

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Prince Andrew or President Adams?

Wednesday, 23 March 2011

Anthony O’Hear: Rulers and public figures will always be open to the very real temptations and to the flattery which they bring, whatever political system we have. The remedy is not improved regulation or a new political system, but rather to convince public figures that – contrary to Machiavellian pragmatism and the pleasures of swanning on the boats of oligarchs and consorting with tyrants – they remain subject to the natural law of God and the common decencies of mankind.

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Philosophy and public impact.

Monday, 31 January 2011

Anthony O’Hear: Philosophers, being articulate and argumentative by training, and often having time on their hands as well, will often involve themselves in public affairs. Indeed, despite denials of the fact from some quarters, philosophers as a group punch well above their weight in getting themselves heard in the public square.

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Why doesn’t Britain have a Tea Party?

Wednesday, 7 July 2010

Anthony O’Hear: Do we have reluctantly to conclude that in 2010, for all our personal chippiness, when it comes to what really matters, deference and servility are now uppermost (or is it just laziness)?

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