Van Gone

What is the point of stealing highly recognisable masterpieces, like this Van Gogh that has gone missing in Cairo?

Presumably they can't be sold on the open market. The new 'owners' can't show the paintings off because they could get caught so presumably they just hang them in a private room and look at them on their own which seems utterly joyless.

Oink Oink

Why is that the word "greed" is seldom used to describe subsidy junkie like this? Create your own sentence using the words and phrases "snouts", "troughs", "special pleading", "whining" and "luvvies", this will save me the trouble of writing anything more.

Subsidising British films has led to 100s of crap movies that no one wants to see and serves little purpose but to keep Danny Dyer occupied in shitty gangster flicks.

I've used this quote before but it remains telling:

Stephen Frears recalls meeting him soon after [Gordon Brown] had announced a big increase in money for films. "Do you know what you've done?'' the movie man asked. "Created a rush of absolutely terrible British films?'' the benefactor replied, laughing.

Brilliant!

One of the greatest single issue blogs ever created- Angry people in local newspapers: Celebrating excellence in the field of local newspaper photography.

Sample post, "Didn't-win-the-lottery anger":



Via Clive Davis.

Bad Art & Fanaticism.

Before he became a war criminal, the former Bosnia Serb leader Radovan Karadzic was a poet, in fact he even appeared on the BBC's arts programme Bookmark to discuss his poetry back in 1992 when they didn't do anything so vulgar as probe non-literary activities such as ethnic cleansing that philistines like me would have thought worth mentioning. It kind of puts last week's Question Time into perspective.

I don't speak Serbo-Croat but I'd be willing to guess that his poems were on a level with Saddam's novels and Hitler's paintings, which is to say crap. I don't say this out of simple prejudice or because I've internalised a kind of Halo Effect, in which I assume that someone dreadful couldn't possibly have redeeming qualities, but because of an observation made by Eric Hoffer more than 6 decades ago in The True Believer:

Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini and Hitler are outstanding examples of fanatics arising from the ranks of noncreative men of words. Peter Viereck points out that most of the Nazi bigwigs had artistic and literary ambitions which they could not realize. Hitler tried painting and architecture; Goebbels, drama, the novel and poetry; Rosenberg, architecture and philosophy; von Shirach, poetry; Funk, music; Streicher, painting. "Almost all were failures, not only by the usual vulgar criterion of success but by their own artistic criteria." Their artistic and literary ambitions "were originally far deeper than political ambitions: and were integral parts of their personalities."

The creative man of words is ill at ease in the atmosphere of an active movement. He feels that its whirl and passion sap his creative energies. So long as he is conscious of the creative flow within him, he will not find fulfillment in leading millions and in winning victories.

In other words fanaticism is a refuge for failure. I know some genuinely talented people have fanatical views, in fact extremism is often almost de rigour, but they don't actually take in the movement itself, they write a few words in support or wear a Sandinista tee-shirt they don't become key players in the movements.

Polly For Laureate.

I don't know much about poetry but I know what I like- none of it. Some people might see this as proof of what a heathen I am, but I say that poetry is only really popular in preliterate societies where long stories have to be put into a rhythmic pattern in order to be memorised and retold. Once you've learnt to read you can write things down and refer back to what you have written at any point so lose the need to put the words into poems.

Carol Anne Duffy has been appointed as the new Poet Laureate, but the real purpose of court poets throughout the ages has been as an official sycophant praising powers of the day & Duffy doesn't appear to be willing to do that.

Therefore I propose that either Polly Toynbee* or David Aaronovitch should replace Duffy immediately. They might not technically be poets but as I explained poetry is basically prose for the illiterate**, the real talent is churning out several hundred words of ecstatic approval for whatever New Labour do.

* Polly went off the reservation this week and attacked her Viking, Gordon Brown, but that was probably out of disappointment with being overlooked.

** I could also explain my theory that theatre is television for those without electricity & that painting is an inferior precursor of photography.

Turner Prize Already Settled For 2009.

This is very good:

Rory McInnes, 18, climbed on to the flat roof of his parents' home and daubed the symbol using a tin of white paint, after watching a programme about Google Earth.

Web surfers can view detailed images from satellites using the Google software, enabling them to zoom in on their homes to see them from above.

You've got to admire his initiative.

Mamet Don't Leave Us.

David Mamet's ideological conversion has upset the Guardian's theatre critic Michael Billington:

As a citizen, Mamet is free to do as he likes. What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position.

It's true, we conservatives are all talentless dolts with rigid unyielding positions.

In Glengarry Glen Ross - arguably his finest play - he depicts the way a group of salesmen are demeaned by a cruelly competitive, capitalist ethic. At the same time, Mamet shows a wary admiration for these guys who, unlike the desk-wallahs, have to venture out into the jungle of the hard sell. Given his new-found conservatism, I doubt he could ever write a play riddled with such moral ambiguity.

Which tells me that Billington hasn't actually read the Mamet's self outing, the conservatism of the writers Mamet praises such as Thomas Sowell and Paul Johnson is rooted deeply in an awareness of the human condition. It is because all humans are so riddled with flaws and conflicting motivations that the utopianism of the left falls short.

Only last week I also found myself defending Mamet from the charge, levelled by the wife of an American playwright-friend, that he was a misogynist.

Yes I see the problem, now that you know he is conservative isn't it obvious that he secretly wants to chain women to the kitchen sink?

Already in his last but one play, Romance, seen here in 2005, there were tell-tale signs of his talent going off the boil. And the precedents for a shift to the right on the part of creative artists are not exactly encouraging. Would anyone seriously argue that, in Britain, Kingsley Amis and John Osborne became better writers as they endorsed right-wing views?

Whereas Harold Pinter's later work improved massively as he hardened his left wing ideology as he got older.

This would all be more convincing if Billington didn't give the impression that he was about as open minded as Mullah Omar.