I agree with the Spectator

A worrying statement. But at least it is not Rod Liddle or James Delingpole striking a chord with me this time. Those moments are more than just worrying. They place a question mark on what remains of a moral compass and focused brain power in my declining years. And they do happen – less and less frequently these days as even I can detect the hypocrisy of right wing columnists displaying, with not a hint of irony, the same self-righteous, tunnel vision certainty of which they have been accusing their woke liberal opponents for years.

But this morning I wake up to a more acceptable embrace of the Spectator line. That of its film critic Deborah Ross who two weeks ago exhorted her readers to enjoy the softer, warmer tones of human foibles portrayed in the Chinese language film The Farewell in preference to the sharper, harsher edges of director Todd Phillips’ clever re-interpretation of the back story to the Joker of Gotham City. These seem to be the two most interesting and innovative films released over the past month of so.

Joker, which I watched last night, is the more ambitious project. It ranges further and wider into cultural references of the past half-century than my limited imagination could grasp. Yet even I could see the scale and brilliance of its visual imagery around both the delights and the dystopia (mostly the latter) of post-modern society. Every shot had been carefully composed to capture the mental torture specific to Joker himself (the struggling wannabe comedian Arthur Phleck played by Joaquim Phoenix) and the brutal social divisions of the digital age which had left him far behind in his mid-forties sharing a dingy apartment in a rundown, dangerous slum area with his declining mother.

Violence, or the threat of it, stalks the film from the first action scene in which Arthur, scrapping for a dime as billboard carrier for a nearby store promotion in his clown outfit, is viciously attacked for no reason by a group of vagrant youths. There is no attempt at nuance or subtlety in the offer shortly afterwards from a fellow struggling comedian of a handgun to protect himself. We know that writer and director Phillips will not ignore Chekhov’s famous advice for the stage. If you introduce a gun in Act One, it cannot fail to go off by the end of the play. From that moment, if it did not know it already, the audience is braced for a shuddering journey through Arthur’s inner agony, strutting comic turns and breakneck switches between tripping the light fantastic and paying back a cruel world with vengeful interest.

The journey of Billi, a 25-year-old fully Americanised child of the 1990s Chinese diaspora, from her New York apartment to the family home of her terminally ill grandmother Nai Nai, is altogether a more gentle, slowly paced affair. Across three generations of a tight but geographically spread family (from mainland China to Tokyo and New York), the film observes the foibles with which humans love, loath, tease and cajole each other to assuage their individual insecurities. Beyond the core theme which triggers the plot, little of substance appears to change through the 90 minutes. And yet almost everything about the family’s inner life changes. And reaches a more redemptive and less violent denouement than the pacier, more challenging Joker.

That core theme is a conceit of intriguing ingenuity if rather strained plausibility. Nai Nai the grandmother has just been diagnosed with an incurable cancer. Her peripatetic children in Tokyo, New York and mainland China (a dull inner province miles from Beijing, Shanghai or any sign of cosmopolitan life) decide to keep her ignorant of the diagnosis. Anticipating her imminent demise, they expedite the marriage of one grandson to his Japanese girlfriend as an excuse to gather all of the family members together back in China for a farewell without letting Nai Nai know the real reason.

This is not the cue for a stream of comedic misunderstandings. There are moments when the “good” lie comes under strain and we come close to playing out the pantomime game of “he’s behind you”. But these are minor touches against the deeper theme of how the insecurities of childhood return to haunt siblings, however far apart they spread geographically, and how no-one ever escapes from the prejudices of their background. Like Joker, this film builds up to a colourful and vibrant climax followed by a brief and quiet reflection on the morning after. That is where the similarity ends. The deepest dystopia drips from every frame in Joker up until the last moment, even as a brilliant white sunlight streams into the final long corridor shot. Loving reflection and a startling reveal bathe the last frame of The Farewell in an almost divine light to soothe the pain of family tension and sadness which has so far suffused the film.

So like Deborah Ross in the Spectator, for those seeking from a “serious” film a balance of sad observation with a light touch and reassuring humanity I would highly recommend The Farewell. But for those willing to endure a bleaker take on mental torture and social division in pursuit of weightier subject matter and a more ambitious canvas, then Joker may turn out to be the most memorable and haunting film of 2019.

So very simple

There is something awesome as well as chilling in the sheer simplicity of the strategy being pursued by (self-advertised) propaganda genius Dominic Cummings. All entirely predictable and (even by armchair Grumpy from Clapham here) predicted from the outset. Although not, it appears, by the majority of the media. The London Evening Standard (aka George Osborne) wrote yesterday that “it was a mistake to reveal your plan too early” and that Cummings had provided valuable strategic intelligence to his Remain opponents. But what new intelligence did yesterday’s text to the Spectator reveal that was not obvious already?

We are heading – as we always have been – for a khaki election of People v All-Comers (Parliament, Establishment, liberal media, Johnny Foreigner) in which Cummings and Johnson bet all on banging out repetitively the simple theme that the only hope for those who want Brexit done and dusted (forget the facts here – e.g. that No Deal means nothing near “done and dusted” – focus on the popular perceptions) lies in voting for the Conservative Party. However high the risks for them in such a strategy (e.g. the loss of the 13 Scottish seats, the loss of various Remain-leaning southern seats), it has clearly been the only feasible strategy for Cummings-Johnson to pursue. They probably will not pull it off (just as Trump will probably not pull off the feat of being re-elected next year on another minority of the popular US vote) but they just might. They stick with their own clear and oh-so-simple message and lure the other side(s) into some muddled messaging. This might activate enough Brexit-inclined floating voters to sneak them up to the magic 35% to 37% of the vote which in turn might just squeeze them into enough Leave-leaning northern and midlands seats to get a parliamentary majority.

So why be surprised when Cummings strides on remorselessly with his populist insults to all those important parties to the negotiation (Irish, French, Germans, Conservative MPs) to whom you are meant in conventional politics to be polite or at least diplomatic? Just as Trump does not give a fig for the response of the military and intelligence experts to his defiance of good strategic sense and long term US interests in northern Syria.

And certainly do not greet each disruption to the government’s deal negotiations as a nail in the Cummings-Johnson coffin. Pages of media coverage piling diatribe upon diatribe against the damage being wreaked by them achieves nothing for the main object, namely to take enough centre ground votes in key marginal seats away from the Conservatives at the election to prevent their achieving a parliamentary majority. I do not have the silver bullet to kill that simple Cummings message. It is always difficult to counter a clear and apparently proactive, positive one-liner: Get Brexit Done, Make America Great Again, Say Yes to Scotland, Take Back Control. But just greeting each setback to their (non) negotiations as a victory over their Brexit madness is certainly not the answer.

There is undoubtedly good hard work being done on the ground by Remain-leaning parties to enable wherever possible a clear run for the anti-Brexit candidate. The Lib Dems’ recent decision to stand aside for Dominic Grieve in Beaconsfield is an excellent example. This may be the election which is won by the detail in key marginals. Just as Trump won the 2016 Presidential election by outperforming the Democrats on the ground by a few thousand votes in five swing states. But it needs a clear message at the national level to support that local action. Does it need to go more precisely personal and dramatic? Identifying Dominic Cummings as the unelected Goebbels of today’s politics, the evil genius behind Boris Johnson’s convenient fool, bullying the 50% of the electorate who do not want No Deal. Just a thought. It certainly needs a message as simple and catchy as Get Brexit Done. What about Save The Future (from this Maniac)? Stay Sane, Vote Lib Dem/Green.

We are a sideshow … again

This subject probably should be a tweet rather than a blog so apologies for using this medium to knock off a rapid reaction rather than compose a considered, researched view. But the double header of this morning’s Supreme Court judgement and this evening’s news from across the Atlantic of impeachment proceedings against President Trump perfectly illustrates how exaggerated is our reaction to issues in our back yard. Events with much greater significance for the futures of our children and grandchildren are taking place across the Atlantic.

Yes, the implications of this morning’s judgement are significant for whether or not we continue with the historic British pride in our unwritten constitution. But the real life fallout will be minimal, or at least confined to the UK, and will be superseded by the ultimate electoral consequences, i.e. can Johnson pull off his khaki election coup or not? By contrast, the real life fallout from the Democrats’ decision to initiate impeachment proceedings could be world changing.

A second term for Trump, whilst ultimately temporal and not irrevocable, would shift so many goalposts worldwide on so many issues – starting with the biggest of all (climate change) and going on to both the global balance of power with the east and the domestic US agenda on healthcare, civil rights, abortion, race relations, income inequality and so so much more. I actually remain optimistic that the electoral numbers should favour his opponent. This is a Presidential election for the Democrats to lose rather than a natural one for Republicans to win.

His base is no more than 40% at best and his reach beyond that is limited. Even at the heights of optimism about the US economy, his approval ratings scarcely moved out of that narrow range. Yet the US electoral college system is absurdly lop-sided and, as we saw in 2016 (and, to a lesser extent, in 2000 and – let us liberal JFK- worshipping progressive not forget – in 1960), it can let in the candidate with the lower electoral reach if just three or four states swing in his direction on a few tens of thousands of votes. So the main object has to be to avoid giving any edge to Trump’s populist message. Which is why Nancy Pelosi and the wise heads in the Democrat leadership have been pushing back on calls from activists for impeachment proceedings.

The parallels with the Clinton experience in the 1990s have been aired widely enough and are ominous. Once the impeachment genie is out of the bottle, there is no telling how effective Trump’s re-election team could be in using it to portray the Democrats as witch-hunting harpies. Prepare for some very nasty, thinly veiled racist attacks on the “squad” and on Democrats in general as an unAmerican group of vengeful socialists. This is the battle which will change the world. Not the Supreme Court’s judgement on the legality of Johnson’s prorogation. And this is the issue for which the world will remember 24th September 2019 long after the ruling of the UK’s Supreme Court has become a footnote in the textbooks of constitutional scholars.

Having said all of that, I still – crossing fingers massively and not wishing to tempt Fate – regard a Democrat victory next year as the more likely outcome. But it has just become horribly more messy and uncontrollable.

The age? or my age?

I have tried so far to construct balanced blogs which add insight into an exhibition or a play or a moral dilemma. The kind of analysis which you would expect from “a very reasonable man”. This much briefer one will be closer to Grumpy from Clapham venting his fury at the radio. Hence the title. Is this really a new age of declining standards in public life and debate? Or is just my septuagenarian discontent with the speed at which the world is rushing away from me?

I am actually much more sympathetic towards political spin and aggressive tactics than most on the so-called liberal, progressive side of the fence. I am not even sure that I regard the government’s recent proroguing decision as such an unprecedented attack upon democratic rights and parliamentary rule. Indeed, many of the actions taken so far by the Johnson-led government strike me as logical and sensible. The loosening of public spending limits likely to be announced today is long overdue. The various trips to Merkel, Macron and the EU made total sense, even if they were largely for presentation and tactics rather than substance. The focus on education, police and health is all good grist to the mill.

So it is not the actions themselves which drive me to declare all-out war on this new Tory regime but rather the bare-faced lying which accompanies them. Spin has always been the pre-eminent skill in politics. Look at Churchill, the master of garlanding the truth to fit his version of events. But the straight delivery of obvious lies to camera and microphone, on a regular and frequent scale, from Cabinet ministers is a new one on me – at least this side of the Atlantic. There is a million to one chance of No Deal. We can and we will achieve a re-negotiation of the backstop. We shall not have an election (although Theresa May lied on that count as well). We are not proroguing parliament to prevent a law against No Deal, we are just doing so to clear the way for our raft of new policy measures. We are still actively seeking a negotiated withdrawal agreement. Removing the whip from all Conservative MPs who vote against us is not hypocritical (given our own past record of such voting) since this is an exceptional and unprecedented case of disloyalty.

A Conservative majority at the General Election would probably enhance my own financial position. And it would indeed remove the famous threat of a socialist government taking us back to the bad old 1960s and 1970s of trade union thuggery and public sector monopolies squeezing our competitive position. But it would establish in initially unopposed power (since such a mandate would deliver massive political authority to Johnson) a team committed to using whatever lies it takes to reverse the Big State. It would be a triumph of deceit over decent standards. I shall vote Lib Dem as usual but if the price of removing Cummings from control is a Corbyn government, then I would reluctantly accept that as worth paying.

The Doctor: a play on medical ethics or a grumpy diatribe?

Let me start with a simple, clear and unequivocal statement. As his swansong at the Almeida, Robert Icke has delivered a first class modern production of a timeless classic with an outstanding lead performance from Juliet Stevenson. Try to see it if you can although lightning fast fingers on the internet button at 1.00 pm every Tuesday is your only chance. All other tickets are sold out for the run to the end of September. Almost all human life and dilemmas are here – almost too many, in fact – as it tackles such intense subjects as dying, caring, grieving, choosing, oppressing, resisting and struggling for recognition in a sometimes heavy bombardment. With large slices of racial prejudice, identity politics, medical ethics, populist witch-hunts, (trans) gender tensions and digital rebellion thrown in. It presses so many buttons around the debate between professional standards and internet-driven public irreverence that metaphorical lights are flashing at every turn.

Arthur Schnitzler’s original 1912 play “Professor Bernhardi” focused prophetically upon the rising anti-semitism in Austria and how it destroyed the career of a brilliant Jewish doctor. This version has freely updated the title, the setting and the script to a gleaming modern clinic whose Jewish founder/director Ruth Wolff operates with “crystal clear” (her mantra) efficiency and professionalism to uphold the highest standards of patient care. In the incident which triggers the whole drama (her denying access for a Catholic priest to administer the last rites to a sensitive teenage patient close to death), there is never any doubt that she reacts with clear, irrefutable logic to protect the interests of her patient and in line with her best knowledge of the patient’s wishes. But the tribal Catholic-Jewish witch-hunt which subsequently goes viral on digital media throws up sufficiently varying interpretations of that moment to surprise us into wondering about her motives, prejudices and human empathy.

The dominant theme remains the original one from a century ago. How moral society crumbles when popular prejudice subverts professional practice and ethics. Scroll on to the digital age and that can take in a near endless range of toxic as well as viral populist campaigns to which our natural reaction (as well as that of those doctors who defend Ruth) is outrage at such trivialisation of medical treatment. This modern production uses sundry riffs around the theme of woke accessibility to create a regular undercurrent of witty one-liners on use of language and erosion of standards. Not all at the expense of the trivialisers – Ruth’s precise but often pedantic corrections of logic and language in conversation expose her lack of perspective at times. But for all these witty jibes at Ruth’s controlling spirit, the balance of sympathy lies with her and her fellow defenders of rigour, standards and identity-blind practice. Which is where the hints of a grumpy diatribe sneak in.

Indeed, they do more than sneak in. A powerful outburst at a clinic board meeting by Ruth’s main supporter which closes the first act could, as Guy put, “have come straight out of a Jordan Peterson lecture”. This impression is reinforced in the second act as a panel of caricature torch bearers for identity groups quiz Ruth about her actions in a television debate. Much of the wit at their expense is straight out of the familiar anti-PC joke book. This is the weakest point in the play where it succumbs to the sort of “straw man” targetting of progressive stereotypes seen more frequently in the Spectator magazine than in the theatrical temple to Islington liberalism. It is a weird point of reversal in the normal way of things – quite fun for that reason but still lowering the quality and originality of the overall performance.

All is forgiven and almost forgotten in the searing half hour of personal revelation which follows that TV grilling and closes the play in a quiet, still but heart-rending series of conversations between Ruth, her partner, her young friend and the priest. The latter could so easily have become just another expose of the age-old debate between science and religion but instead kept us riveted to the emotional depths, dilemma and distress of both.

And somehow in all of that I have omitted to mention the play’s boldest move which may well turn out to have greater impact than all the other themes combined. Robert Icke has broken the barriers of cross-gender and cross-race casting in a way which initially mystifies and then hits harder and harder with every twist and turn of the dialogue at our prejudices on both counts. And I really do mean “breaks the barriers”. It twists and reverses the casting identities with a series of surprises and reveals which keep on giving throughout the second act and are integral to the underlying theme of labels and Dr Wolff’s other mantra – “I am a doctor. That’s all.” I shall never look at theatrical casting with such blinkers ever again.

Medical diagnosis – can anyone do it?

Not sure if the New York Times and Netflix quite intended that to be the message of their recently launched documentary series “Diagnosis” but a less exaggerated version of that question did bother me after watching the first episode last night. Dr Lisa Saunders is a clinician who has been writing a monthly column in the New York Times for the past decade or so. She decided to test out her suspicion that diagnostic failures could often be overcome via improved internet communication around the globe. This documentary series traces a dozen cases which she has featured in her NYT column and how they have led to diagnostic breakthroughs as a result of reaching parts of the medical research world which previous efforts had not. Dr Saunders talks about “crowd-sourcing” contributions to resolving the diagnostic puzzle.

In this first episode, a young athletic woman in Las Vegas facing the permanent prospect of crippling, agonising and seriously life-curtailing muscular pain throughout her body was rescued by a young medical researcher in Turin who read the NYT piece online and recognised symptoms similar to those observed by the research team for which she was working. Cue a conveniently scenic shift from the desert plains of Nevada to the streets of Turin and bunches of blood tests carried out by suspiciously camera-friendly and charming Italian professors and medics, followed by a tense two-month hiatus ending in diagnosis of a rare metabolic disorder for which a drastic diet change provided the route back to normal life, if not actual cure.

Much of the scene-setting came straight out of the documentary film maker’s manual of how to stretch five minutes of hard data into forty-five minutes of compelling drama. Several of the earnest conversations amongst medical staff and the empathetic Skype exchanges between the young woman in Las Vegas and the many fellow sufferers and researchers who had responded to the NYT article carried the unmistakable feel of stage management. And the young woman’s execrable parents had clearly been shoe-horned into a more central role than they merited in the medical context for their contribution to the melodrama. At times, I wondered whether De Niro or Pacino in full Godfather mode had been persuaded to play the father’s part in heavy make-up. It was a tough call whether to feel sorrier for the young woman over her excruciating pain or over her disastrous choice of parents. There was a moment, when the genetic angle raised its head, of pure paternal self-absorption for which Scorsese would have paid a fortune to have portrayed so brilliantly in a fictional drama.

Yet the core message was serious and to the point. The simple act of putting the young woman’s story and symptoms out on the web via the NYT article succeeded in finding a diagnosis and effective treatment where the might of the US medical system had so far failed. But can it really be that simple? And if this route of “crowd-sourcing” diagnoses (Dr Saunders’ words, not mine) takes off, are we heading for the unintended consequence of more populism than professionalism in medical practice?

A TALE OF TWO EXHIBITIONS

Why I don’t get it, probably never did and certainly never will

I decided to visit a couple of exhibitions which were due to close at the end of the bank holiday weekend – the Japanese Manga at the British Museum and the Frank Bowling retrospective at Tate Britain. I arrived promptly at opening time at the BM to avoid the crowds but still found myself stepping carefully around a gaggle of enthusiasts of all ages at every tiniest exhibit. I moved on to Tate Britain at midday and enjoyed an unimpeded stroll through the spacious rooms, sharing each large canvas with one or at most two fellow visitors.

Interest in the Japanese Manga was widely spread across the cultural as well as demographic range. There was a fair smattering of Japanese visitors naturally but if anything the Asian presence was less pronounced within the exhibition itself than throughout the rest of the BM. More continental than Asian voices could be heard in the gentle hum of observations and conversation. This was clearly an exhibition to attract keen followers from all walks of life, thus fulfilling the objective of demystifying our galleries and widening their appeal. The central “library” area of the exhibition inviting visitors to participate via mobile link in viewing a wider range of Manga was a hive of activity.

The visual éclat of the Manga, especially those with sweeping social themes or dynamic action, was clear even to my stilted visual imagination. But I struggled to see much beyond a superior version of Dan Dare Meets Disney in (To A Degree) Asiatic Form. Much was made of the links to 12th and 13th century Japanese art but there was no hiding the historic reality that the earliest precursor to Manga art did not appear until the late nineteenth century as Japan moved at lightning pace to shake off its isolated traditions and embrace internationalism. And Manga in its present form only took off after the Second World War in response to the influence of American cartoon and film culture.

Reading the cartoons from right to left and from bottom to top does lend the Manga a distinctive oriental character. But otherwise their subject matter and narrative lines are identical to popular western story-telling, whilst their cartoon form is indistinguishable from the Beano and the Dandy with a bit of Matt and Private Eye thrown in. There may well have been some subtle hints of Japanese political satire which I missed but most of the Manga cartoons on display revolved around romance and derring-do and fairy tales. I was particularly underwhelmed by a large cartoon commissioned from Japan’s leading sports Manga practitioner for the Rugby World Cup being hosted by Japan in September 2019. It featured a vast black player dominating centre stage as he bears down on a much smaller would-be tackler in the Japanese national team colours. David and Goliath. The theme is pure action man drama as seen in the opening credits to any TV sports programme the world over. With rather less wit and subtlety than is often to be found in that genre. And the No 5 on David’s shirt betrayed a lack of simple research into the codes of the game itself.

No such popular pretensions in the large canvases at Tate Britain displaying sixty years of Frank Bowling’s intense daily engagement with acrylic paint, colour and light. Confession – I had never heard of him before this exhibition. Shame on me. Why is he not talked about alongside Hockney, Auerbach, Freud and Kitaj? Surely one of the great British painters of my life time. And yes, the fact that he is black makes his lack of high public profile all the more mystifying for the obvious reasons. The exhibition was perfectly curated for an ignoramus like myself as it took me chronologically through his development from the early 1960s in London to his New York period in the 1970s and 1980s and then back to London (where he still works in his studio in Pimlico) and a re-connection with the hazy light of his native Guyana.

An admirer of Gainsborough, Turner and Constable and assiduous student of form and paint, Bowling mastered the techniques of using a large canvas to display clear representational images before moving during his New York period towards more conceptual and abstract uses of stunning colours. Even I could see the way in which his technical command of the medium had enabled him to venture into the world of accident and serendipity  through “pouring” paint without ever sacrificing the sense of a supremely skilled creative artist. No mention was made in the exhibition notes of any link to Jackson Pollock’s habit of laying the canvas across the floor to allow the paint to find its place, but surely it was no coincidence that Bowling developed his pouring technique after he went to New York in the late sixties.  

This Bowling retrospective is the real thing. Japanese Manga is just action man (and occasional woman) cartoons with the odd quirkiness and political satire thrown in. Should we celebrate the triumph of cultural accessibility achieved by the British Museum? Or regret the oddly sparse attendance (perhaps it was just a quiet day) at Bowling’s breathtaking display of creative genius and visual imagination? To which I have done scant justice and feel  impertinent to be even trying. I felt as awestruck in front of those great Bowling canvases (especially his mid-life New York period of using faint but clearly structured images behind the subtly changing wall of colour to impart almost subliminal messages about the geography of colonialism) as I recall feeling at the recent Hockney exhibitions and the Matisse/Picasso and Kandinsky exhibitions in Tate Modern a few years back.

25th August 2019