I met Murder on the way

"Rise like Lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number -

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you -

Ye are many - they are few"

                 - Shelley

I have always enjoyed knowing something of the background to how films were made; in some cases these stories are better than the films themselves. I mentioned "Where Eagles Dare" a while ago, and while it's truly terrible, who could not be amused by the idea of Clint Eastwood having to be told that when dressed as a German officer he should refrain from twirling his Luger round on his trigger finger before replacing it in the holster? More recently featured here was the equally bad "Charge of the Light Brigade" where director Tony Richardson's antics included trying to have the Brigade of Guards dressed in blue for their assault at the Battle of the Alma because he thought it would improve the look of the thing. He also delayed and messed about so long on location that the Turkish army detachments intended to provide the extras had to go off on NATO manoeuvres, which explains why some of the climactic battle scenes look as if they had been shot using nothing but half a dozen stuntmen.

It was that last detail that occurred to me when I watched the opening sequence of the infinitely better film 'Peterloo'. It starts with a rendition of the Battle of Waterloo, the budget for which appears to have run to three men and a horse; and before anyone tells me that several horses gallop across screen from left to right, I would point out that they are all the same colour and you never see two of them together. All the money has clearly been spent on the massacre itself, which is very well done. My own experience of facing horses in that sort of situation is limited to a thankfully brief incident at the Battle of Bradford some forty years ago so I don't claim to be an expert, but it all looked very realistic to me. I especially liked the shots as the regular Hussars moved slowly in line abreast pushing back the crowd in a frightening and claustrophobic fashion. It's a very good film, telling an important story and featuring some excellent performances from such as the ubiquitous Rory Kinnear as 'Orator' Hunt. I am, naturally, writing this well after it has finished in cinemas, so it's not a very timely recommendation, but catch it whenever you eventually get a second chance.

Despite the lush cinematography, it's not meant to be taken entirely literally - Mike Leigh is definitely being a bit Brechtian - and contains points that clearly aren't historically accurate, but help convey the lesson which he wants us to learn. So one of the characters has a strange attachment to his coat, but it means we remember how quickly he has moved in society's eyes from hero to villain. Similarly Hunt is shown simply speaking very loudly at the rally, which enables us to follow his argument for democracy and non-violence, but is a tad optimistic when faced with 60,000 people or more. What would have happened is that he would have paused after each sentence so that his words could have been repeated and passed back through the crowd. You know, as shown in that other excellent, non-naturalistic film with a message 'Life of Brian':

"Blessed are the cheesemakers"
"What's so special about cheesemakers?"
"Well obviously it's not meant to be taken literally; it refers to any manufacturers of dairy products."

Hymne à l'amour

Martin Taylor and Martin Simpson played a lovely instrumental version of this and I have been trying to track the original down down ever since. I was handicapped by not knowing what it was called, or indeed being able to remember the tune sufficiently well to hum at strangers. I was also slightly sidetracked by the spurious suggestion that Kathy Kirby did an English version. As far as I know she didn't, but Brenda Lee certainly did. This, of course, is Edith Piaf:

Ecclesiastes Chapter 1 Verse 2

"The vanity of intelligence is that the intelligent man is often more committed to 'one-upping' his opponent than being truthful. When the idea of intelligence, rather than intelligence itself, become the staple, there is no wisdom in it." - Criss Jami

So, not only has the blog gone missing for a while, but even before that the pseudo-intellectual quotient had sadly fallen away. Well today that changes. But I need to warn you that there were some attendees at the two events I am about to describe who were only there with the intention of showing off during the Q&A session; I was shocked , shocked!, to find pretentiousness involved when people met together to discuss Jean-Paul Sartre and Arnold Schoenberg.

The problem with a talk entitled 'The Existentialism of Sartre' is that even if you find yourself disagreeing with it you also partly suspect that you haven't properly understood it. And yet, the more I listened to the speaker talk about 'Being and Nothingness' the more I came to the conclusion that Sartre didn't know a great deal of mathematics. I find it rather difficult to accept that the lack of something (i.e. nothing) is meaningless unless a human consciousness is pondering its absence. Anyone disagree? What I should have done is what most of those making a point did, which is to start by stating that they hadn't read any Sartre since they were students. Call me a cynic ["You're a cynic!"], but you need to be neither a mathematician or a philosopher to realise that doesn't guarantee that they read any while at university either. I haven't read any Sartre since graduating (*) and I certainly didn't read any while I was there, unless possibly he was reviewing albums for the New Musical Express under a pseudonym. The collective brainpower of a room full of people who forty years ago had existentialism sussed, but had all managed to forget it along the way somewhere eventually came up with the question of what J-P would have made of someone's right to change gender (**). The speaker felt that he would have seen it as a case of essence before existence and therefore been against it. Someone in the audience riposted with Simone de Beauvoir's quote "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." and we were left none the wiser.

"It's bad faith to wear my clothes without asking, Jean-Paul."

I learned somewhat more at the Schoenberg, a guided performance of 'Pierrot Lunaire' which was both well planned and executed. The first half was an introduction to the composer, the intellectual milieu of Vienna in 1912, and the original poem by Giraud. There were interviews with the conductor, director and various musicians, although not oddly the singer, who was 'preparing'; who says sopranos are divas? The background to atonality was discussed and there was an interesting, though frankly irrelevant digression into serialism. Questions from the audience were almost subsumed by someone who appeared to be intent on listing every Harrison Birtwistle work he had ever seen (no me neither), but when they came ranged from "Why did sprechstimme disappear after this work was written?" to "What can the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire tell us about the UK leaving the European Union (***)?". The answers were along the lines of: it didn't actually, and quite a lot now you mention it.

Theresa May visits Brussels

The second half contained the performance, which was obviously very good in its own terms, but about which I shall only say that I am glad I went along and experienced it - my mind is duly broadened. The staging was simple and effective with the moon of the title being represented by a lantern in a way that wouldn't have been out of place in "A Midsummer Night's Dream". As to what it was about; I'm afraid that I have no idea. There seemed to be a suggestion that despite the part being specifically written for a woman, that the main character is entirely and definitively male; thereby demonstrating that there is nothing  new under the sun. I'm going to say repressed sexuality was involved - the key figure in Vienna at the time was of course Freud - and death - because she did seem to mention it a lot plus it contains episodes called 'Gallows Song' and 'Beheading' - but beyond that you are on your own. One analysis I read said that Pierrot - who may or may not be Pierrot, or a man, or indeed real - ends with no hope of redemption; which gives you some idea of how cheery it was. Schoenberg himself said that it was a mistake to try to work out what it was about, instead one should go home whistling the tunes; I shall interpret that as the famed Germanic sense of humour at work.

"You know how to whistle, don't you Arnie? You just put your lips together and blow."

*      Actually I have in fact read "The Age of Reason", but to say so rather spoils my line of argument.
**    One of two subjects in the UK at the moment that seem to be obligatory on every agenda of every meeting regardless of what is supposed to be being discussed.
***  And there's the other.

Hot Club de Yorkshire

Hello again compadres. I trust you have all been as hard at it as me. Not that any of Epictetus' activities have involved wargaming as such. Indeed the only remotely exciting thing to happen in the annexe has been that I have solved the long-standing problem of how to get the dehumidifier to work in the low temperatures experienced in this part of the world during the winter. I did this by buying a dehumdifier specifically designed to work in the low temperatures experienced in this part of the world during the winter. As so often, your bloggist can't help thinking that there is some sort of learning point arising, if only one could tease it out.

A chap with a beard

There has been one of those occasional wargaming/real life cross overs when my companion for the evening and I bumped into Peter (and Mrs Peter) at Settle, out in the Dales. We were all at the Victoria Hall, oldest music hall in the world still in use, to see Martin Taylor and Martin Simpson. I have mentioned the latter a number of times (most recently here), but didn't know much about the former beyond his being some sort of jazz guitarist. It transpired that he spent some years in Stephane Grapelli's band in the position once held by Django Reinhardt; so a bit more than just another jazz guitarist then. It was an excellent concert and it was a real pleasure to watch people so absolutely on top of their craft. Simpson has recently lost his father-in-law, the political folk singer Roy Bailey, and sang a couple of emotional songs in tribute including one by Robb Johnson. I knew Robb quite well back in the day (the story of the occasion when I was the cause of him not visiting Palestine hereby officially joins the long list of those for which the world must wait a little longer), a fact which I suppose places me a step closer to various of my musical heroes. Taylor's contribution to the name-dropping involved conversations with Scotty Moore, which with all due respect to Robb, is a bit better than mine.

A lot of name-dropping (and the associated game of how many handshakes one is from the greats) is one of the connections with another gig I went to in the unlikely surroundings of a room above a pub in Ilkley, that by veteran bluesman Kent DuChaine; a man who played with, amongst others, Johnny Shines; who was in turn a man who knew and played with Robert Johnson. Another link was that Duchaine played 'St James Infirmary Blues'  on his National Steel Guitar 'Leadbessie' and Martin Simpson didn't, but usually does (which is sufficient for me). The great Catfish Keith also plays such a guitar and the similarities were often apparent, especially when DuChaine played in a Bukka White stylie (it's something to do with the tuning, but beyond that I can't help you). White was (sort of) the cousin of B.B. King and there was an implausible anecdote about King and a golf cart, along with others about Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters. It's implausibility which gives us the last crossover between the two gigs. DuChaine claimed, with a straight face, that his most recent wife (of five?) was an exotic dancer from Settle. All I can say is that if she ever performed in Yorkshire in November then she did it indoors.

The terrible tyranny of the majority

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world [...] has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby." - H.L. Mencken

I continue to plough through 'Numbers Rule'. Regular readers will not be surprised to learn that my original grasp of the higher mathematics involved has been found wanting. Condorcet's Paradox is indeed apposite, but unsurprisingly there have been further theoretical developments since the late eighteenth century. What we in the UK are living through is actually a worked example of Kenneth Arrow's Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives condition. The really bad news is that this condition appears in a paper proving that it is impossible to design a system of voting which can correctly choose between multiple alternatives. I think we all knew that empirically, but it's good to see a mathematical proof.

Citoyen Condorcet

Arrow won a Nobel Prize, but Condorcet didn't fare so well. He was in many ways a man after your bloggist's own heart - mathematician, accountant, revolutionary, married to a beautiful woman twenty years his junior - and in addition he was a friend of Thomas Jefferson and Adam Smith. On the downside he made the mistake of falling out with Robespierre and, well, that was that. One of the book's conclusions seems to be that the only method of government that does away with manipulations, paradoxes and inconsistencies is a dictatorship; in this case it certainly did away with Condorcet.

Citoyen Arrow

As a by-product of all this I have discovered that in dealing with the common problem of dividing a fixed amount unevenly such that each subset is an integer and they add back to the original number (come on, don't pretend you've never had to do it) that the best way to proceed is by rounding on the geometric mean. All these decades I have been rounding on the arithmetic mean. I feel foolish.

Meantime we shall express our darker purpose

A while ago I saw a broadcast of Sir Ian McKellen's recent 'King Lear'. It was, of course, superb (Sinéad Cusack played a female Kent - I know you like to hear about the cross gender casting), but it was also very long. It started at 7 o'clock and the interval was at ten past nine. A fair number of punters never made it back afterwards. I stuck it out on the basis that if he could do it on stage at his age then I could certainly do it in the audience at mine. The reason for mentioning all this is not to dwell on my numb bum, but because I feel that it behoves me to pass comment on the current omnishambles of a government that we have here in the UK. I find I can do no better than quote Gloucester speaking in that play: "Tis the time's plague, when madmen lead the blind".

It has seemed apparent to me for some time that we are living through is actually a worked example of the Condorcet Paradox. My recent viewing of 'Twelve Angry Men' obviously brought to mind Condorcet's Jury Theorem, and so I sought out a cheap second hand copy of Szpiro's 'Numbers Rule' an interesting book dealing with the mathematics of democracy. I have to confess that I hadn't previously recognised that the balloting system used by the Richard III Society to allocate tickets for the re-internment of a somewhat later lord of Gloucester in Leicester Cathedral - a process which you will recall left me without an invitation - looked suspiciously like one described by Plato in his 'Laws'; yet another reason to dislike the man.

Let's finish with a qualitative rather than quantitative take on democracy: 

"The theory of democratic government is not that the will of the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by bitter experience." - W.E.B. Du Bois

We shall see.

LIFF 2018

As you almost certainly don't know, Leeds has a good claim to be, literally, the first film city in the world. It is therefore no surprise that it has a well established film festival. I have been to three screenings this year, the first, and best, of which was 'Twelve Angry Men'. It's an undisputed classic except perhaps to the astonishing seven and a half thousand people who have awarded it one out of ten on IMDB. One can only suppose that they didn't like its message that the process of justice ought to be taken seriously rather than be the subject of capricious whim, bigotry or indifference, or the telling subtext that it is often the immigrant rather than the native born citizen who adheres more closely to 'American' values. What certainly looks quaint from today's perspective is that the murder was carried out with a knife and there was only one victim.

Second up was 'Cléo de 5 à 7', part of the French New Wave of the sixties, which I found charming and ultimately, and surprisingly, optimistic. It's a hard film to explain - these French eh? - but it works. Someone told me that there were plans to remake it starring Madonna; that wouldn't work, for sure. The choice of these two films to screen was because a theme of this years festival was films that play out in (more or less) real time. It's a bit of a shame that they didn't show 'High Noon'.

Which brings me indirectly on to the third film, 'Tampopo', which is sort of 'Shane' with noodles. It's a funny, colourful paean to the links between food and love, both physical and spiritual, with many references to other films. There is a scene in which a down and out makes an omelette which is fairly transparently inspired by Charlie Chaplin's tramp character. Also in 'Cleo from 5 to 7' there is a short, silent film within a film, one which is definitely as unfunny as Chaplin always seems to be to me. So let's have an even earlier silent film; in fact what might conceivably be the earliest moving pictures ever shot, a few brief frames of Leeds Bridge in 1888:

How and why we remember

In Dorothy L. Sayers' 1928 novel 'The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club', the two minutes silence on November 11th is not only a plot point, but also gives the author, through the hero (of the book and holder of the DSO) Lord Peter Wimsey, the chance to offer a contrarian view as to how the anniversary of the Armistice should be marked. His Lordship observes: "All this remembrance-day business gets on your nerves, don't it? It's my belief that most of us would be only too pleased to chuck these community hysterics if the beastly newspapers didn't run it for all it's worth. But it don't do to say so.".

So, ninety years on and the situation, in the UK at least, is if anything worse, with the poppy police constantly on the look out for deviations from regulated observance. Back in 2013 MPs complained that Google displaying a single poppy on their home page was 'demeaning'; there should apparently have been far more. I cannot be the only one to have been disturbed by the increasing replacement of simple paper poppies by ever larger and more elaborate designs which can serve no other purpose than to signal that the wearer is more virtuous than everyone else. Far better writers than me have been wrestling with all this, so I thought that I would share a few links to their articles; I hope that you find them thought-provoking.


The Conversation on why wearing a poppy is political

Stumbling and Mumbling on not wearing a poppy

Slugger O'Toole asks 'A Great and Just War?'

Ian Jack argues that conceptual art can never convey the tragedy of the Great War



For the record I have not worn a poppy for some years, but I do donate to the Royal British Legion and I shall be observing the silence tomorrow.

Tepid

There hasn't been very much gaming recently, and certainly no wargaming since Ravenna at Fiasco, the result of which escapes me for a moment. Someone has been concerned enough about this state of affairs to ask me when I intend to spend this money supposedly burning a hole in my pocket, and on what. The answers, as you had probably already guessed, are not yet and don't know. Firstly, I haven't actually been paid yet and I stick closely to the accountants' maxim: Cash is Queen. Secondly, well, too much choice. Spending at Fiasco was some Hexon slopes from Kallistra and some trees from the tree man; basically the same as at every other show ever. The boat has been pushed out very slightly since though. I have settled on To the Strongest! as my rules of choice for both Early Roman Empire and for the various 15th century dabblings that I do. Figures for the former are individually based and I acquired movement trays quite a while ago. The latter are all on 40mm square bases and the size of the table, and consequently the squares, mandates three stand units. I have therefore bought some 120mm x 40mm sabot bases to make movement easier, plus a few 160mm wide for units with attached commanders. Painting (green) and varnishing (gloss) is under way.

Boardgaming has more or less stopped completely as I have found both the groups which I used to attend becoming cliquey and off-putting; it seems it is no longer enough to like playing games, one must like playing the games that are, by some mysterious collective decision, determined as being currently fashionable. A cynic - that would be me then - might suggest that having paid a lot of money for a game on Kickstarter is the main criterion for whether a game is so deemed. Which brings me on to about the only game that I have actually played recently. I was invited by a regular five strong gaming group to make up the sixth player in Quartermaster General: Cold War, which one of them at least had funded. I have raved on here often enough about the World War Two game, plus this new game covers a conflict through most of which I lived myself, so I was definitely up for it. The format will be familiar to those who have played/seen the other games in the series (although naturally there are sufficient minor rule differences to catch everyone out) and the first thing to say is that, as with the games for the two World Wars, the card decks do a fantastic job of capturing the essence of the political, military and indeed wider cultural events that we all remember or have read about according to age. In fact I would go so far as to say that it makes a brilliant three player game. Sadly, as mentioned before, we played with six players, which didn't work at all. The mechanism for dividing competing blocs into teams of two players each positively detracts from the gaming experience, not least by making the bloody thing last for ever. So, highly recommended for playing with three players, despite me never having done so.

The once a month Sunday afternoon group to which I used to go is changing venue this weekend and I was wondering whether to give it another try. The likelihood of me doing that increased significantly when I discovered that the new location has a pinball machine. I spent almost as much of my time as an undergraduate playing pinball as I did table football; in other words, a lot. I used to own a pinball machine: a proper, old-fashioned, heavy thing, stuffed full of electro-mechanical relays, with plenty of satisfying heft when you gave the flippers some welly. I bought it from a man I met in the pub. In my experience no story that starts with those words is ever likely to end well; this one certainly didn't.

Unhasty orison

I have mentioned before that I find coincidences interesting, but I am am obviously aware that they don't really signify anything. The brain looks for patterns (especially if one is as analytical by nature as me); if it doesn't find anything it moves on and makes no note; if it does spot something then it says "Aha", or "Would you believe it?" or "Bugger me" according to taste. And given that we are in November 2018 it is also no coincidence that I have seen another play about the Great War, this time a new production of "Barnbow Canaries", which I first wrote about here. It's still funny, still sad and still relevant. I suspect I was the only member of the audience trying to shoehorn the play's message into one of two competing interpretations of the relation between state and capital and I can't pretend it added all that much to my enjoyment. The play is about the sacrifices demanded by total war as viewed through the sufferings and solidarity of women, and to any sensible person that would be enough.

What definitely does count as a coincidence is the close proximity in the St Symphorien Military Cemetery of the graves of Private John Parr, the first British soldier to die during the war, and Private George Ellison, the last such. The juxtaposition comes about because Mons was where the BEF first sought to delay the German advance and was also where the British had themselves reached again by the time of the armistice. The irony of spending four years and millions of deaths to get back to where one started needs no elaboration from me. On Friday the British Prime Minister will lay wreaths on both their graves; we shall have to wait to see what lessons regarding how to conduct relations with other countries that she chooses to draw from her experience.

Private Ellison, who was already in uniform when the war started and had served throughout, was from Leeds and yesterday (understandably a little earlier than the centenary itself because Sunday will be a very busy day for all concerned) was locally honoured with unveiling of a plaque in a short ceremony attended by members of his family and representatives of the successor regiment to that in which he served.

The Parable of the Young Man and the Old

So Abram rose, and clave the wood, and went,
And took the fire with him, and a knife.
And as they sojourned, both of them together,
Isaac the first-born spake, and said, My Father,
Behold the preparations, fire and iron,
But where the lamb for this burnt-offering?
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps,
And builded parapets the trenches there,
And stretched forth the knife to slay his son.
When lo! an angel called him out of heaven,
Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad,
Neither do anything to him. Behold,
A ram, caught in a thicket by its horns;
Offer the Ram of Pride instead of him.
But the old man would not so, but slew his son,
And half the seed of Europe, one by one.

                          - Wilfred Owen 

Art is a hammer

“The worst illiterate is the political illiterate, he doesn’t hear, doesn’t speak, nor participates in the political events. He doesn’t know the cost of life, the price of the bean, of the fish, of the flour, of the rent, of the shoes and of the medicine, all depends on political decisions. The political illiterate is so stupid that he is proud and swells his chest saying that he hates politics. The imbecile doesn’t know that, from his political ignorance is born the prostitute, the abandoned child, and the worst thieves of all, the bad politician, corrupted and flunky of the national and multinational companies.” 

                                                     - Bertolt Brecht

And so to the theatre and indeed to the opera. Much of October's fare had a more or less overt political message. Brecht's 'Mother Courage and Her Children" isn't just anti-war, but also makes the point that anyone who thinks they can profit from war without being affected by it is deluding themselves. The eponymous vivandière, played in this Red Ladder production by Pauline McLynn of 'Father Ted' fame, isn't to be sympathised with for her losses, but rather criticised for not understanding the reality of the situation in which she finds herself. If I were to offer advice to Brecht (and given that I have previously been known to point out where Mozart got it wrong then why wouldn't I?) it is that the character's name does tend to mislead the audience as to how they should view her. Brecht's trademark Verfemdungseffeckt was on this occasion achieved by it being a promenade performance around a deserted warehouse of the type much favoured by villains in the Adam West Batman TV series.

The reason for the location was that Leeds Playhouse, as it has reverted to being called, is having a year long refurbishment, which also meant that I had to trek across to York to see the latest Northern Broadsides production 'They Don't Pay? We Won't Pay!', an adaptation of the Dario Fo farce 'Non Si Paga! Non Si Paga!' by Deborah McAndrew. I've never been sure if Fo, who was certainly influenced by Brecht, was as much of a straight down the line Marxist as his predecessor, but this play leaves one in no doubt that he believed the problems of the working class to be caused by both capitalism itself and by capital's use of the state's (*) powers of coercion in order to suppress opposition and maximise profits. It's also very, very funny, drawing on verbal dexterity, physical comedy and amusingly out of context props; a coffin in the wardrobe anyone? I was also very pleased to see the false moustache given a twenty first century run out with its comedic validity emerging intact.

Coming back to state repression, this is very much the background setting for 'Tosca'. Opera North have a new production, and it's wonderful. Beautifully sung, with the orchestra on top form, if the bleak ending doesn't make you cry then you have no heart. Whilst we are all pleased to see the death of chief bad guy Scarpia (**), played here as a Gestapo/NKVD type boss, we would be advised to bear in mind another quote from Brecht: "Do not rejoice in his defeat, you men. For though the world has stood up and stopped the bastard, the bitch that bore him is in heat again.".

Opera North's 'Merry Widow' is set in a political and diplomatic milieu, but that is presumably merely because it has to be set somewhere. Even I can't pretend that there is anything substantial in it - despite the many jibes against bankers that make the audience laugh, perhaps in recognition of their own powerlessness against the forces represented by what Marx referred to as money capital (***) - but it's great fun. Let me give a special mention to Amy Freston as Valencienne for combining excellent singing with the occasional cartwheel across the stage, just to show off.


* NB 'State' in this context is not identical to 'nation state'. There are (at least) two distinct strands of Marxist analysis regarding the relationship between nation and capital: state as superstructure (e.g. as per Marx and Miliband, father rather than either son) or state as capital (e.g. as per Lenin and Bukharin). I would suggest Brecht leaned to the former in 'Mother Courage', but feel free to disagree.

** Scarpia was of course based on a real person, one who co-operated closely with the British in Naples. We turned a blind eye to his brutality because it suited us politically. Plus ca change.

*** "What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?" - Bertolt Brecht