MINUS 11
This is the coldest weather so far. For Hungarians, it's very moderate - many of them are walking round without hats. It's the kind of icy cold that sends draughts seeping through hats anyway, and scarves, and layers, so that you feel your body stiffen and draw back. But there's absolutely no refuge from it. Until you come back indoors to the amazing blast of uncontrolled communist-era centrally heated blocks.
How hellish to be sleeping on the streets tonight, and there are some who do - under shelters of scaffolding, with dirty old quilts and mattresses made from cardboard boxes. Shame on any society that can let its old men shiver and, in some cases, die in pathetic berths like these.
Sunday, January 30, 2005
Thursday, January 27, 2005
DO NOT ACCEPT...
"Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in your books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who... shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the topmost height."
The Buddha, in a Zarathustra-like moment
"Do not accept what you hear by report, do not accept tradition, do not accept a statement because it is found in your books, nor because it is in accord with your belief, nor because it is the saying of your teacher. Be lamps unto yourselves. Those who... shall rely upon themselves only and not look for assistance to anyone besides themselves, it is they who shall reach the topmost height."
The Buddha, in a Zarathustra-like moment
SNOW IN BUDAPEST
At last! It'd been one of those post-global-warming non-event winters here until yesterday. I'd given up reading the online forecast and my thoughts had drifted elsewhere when I opened my curtains and there it was - filling the air. It fell all day without stopping once. There's nothing I can write about snow that hasn't already been written, and yet it seems like a new experience every time, I suppose because the cityscape is so transformed.
The first glimpse of it was in the Buda hills on Sunday. It started falling as we were climbing up to the wooden tower on top of one of the hills. It looked golden with the late afternoon sun illuminating it. The wood became like a scene from Lothlorien. We all had to grab big sticks so that we could edge down without falling, though the Hungarians were able to breeze past in trainers. They had their snow feet while we stumbled and joked about being trapped up there as night fell.
Yesterday it came in earnest, piling up on the branches and car bonnets. The best scene was the Parliament buliding - imagine the Palace of Westminster rebuilt on an impossibly large scale to dwarf all the surroundings, half-glimpsed through netted veils of snow, the chandeliers of imagined long halls - this building surely cannot have mere rooms - visible through its windows. All of this is seen from a bright yellow tram which travels along one bank of the Danube, making a neat arc round Parliament. As it drops us off, people are huddled well into their coats; this is the coldest it has been. Really chilling around your legs and on your face, as cold as I have ever felt. I try to picture the physics of all those almost motionless unheated particles and how their influence is draining off the warmth from my skin.
At last! It'd been one of those post-global-warming non-event winters here until yesterday. I'd given up reading the online forecast and my thoughts had drifted elsewhere when I opened my curtains and there it was - filling the air. It fell all day without stopping once. There's nothing I can write about snow that hasn't already been written, and yet it seems like a new experience every time, I suppose because the cityscape is so transformed.
The first glimpse of it was in the Buda hills on Sunday. It started falling as we were climbing up to the wooden tower on top of one of the hills. It looked golden with the late afternoon sun illuminating it. The wood became like a scene from Lothlorien. We all had to grab big sticks so that we could edge down without falling, though the Hungarians were able to breeze past in trainers. They had their snow feet while we stumbled and joked about being trapped up there as night fell.
Yesterday it came in earnest, piling up on the branches and car bonnets. The best scene was the Parliament buliding - imagine the Palace of Westminster rebuilt on an impossibly large scale to dwarf all the surroundings, half-glimpsed through netted veils of snow, the chandeliers of imagined long halls - this building surely cannot have mere rooms - visible through its windows. All of this is seen from a bright yellow tram which travels along one bank of the Danube, making a neat arc round Parliament. As it drops us off, people are huddled well into their coats; this is the coldest it has been. Really chilling around your legs and on your face, as cold as I have ever felt. I try to picture the physics of all those almost motionless unheated particles and how their influence is draining off the warmth from my skin.
Sunday, January 23, 2005
SOUL RANT
I decided to change the heading on the blog to reflect how I'm feeling these days. I no longer feel like a drone - my job has suddenly become more exciting. Maybe I'm just a more satisfied drone. Anyway, doing just what I want to do makes me feel a little less insignificant. Budapest is an incredible city by day and by night. I'm getting out until the small hours two or three times a week, something I was never able to do in London, living so far from the centre. (Haggling taxi drivers down to £35 for the journey home was too depressing.) I'm meeting new people all the time. I am no longer permanently tired. Thank God (for want of a better expression) I came and kick-started my life!
I chose the line "I don't get what the society wants" as a kind of anti-quotation. I feel as if I'm on permanent holiday from the mainstream. I feel like the character in A Disaffection by James Kelman when he says that everything that the society values means little or nothing to him and everything he thinks is valuable isn't rated by anyone. Or my best friend who recently said in despair that he is tired of a world where money, power and war are valued, and where love and nature are not. I can't put it into words very well:
I couldn't care less about Changing Rooms or I'm a Celebrity or Big Brother
Most of the musicians I love are dead or half-dead
I have never seen an episode of Friends
I don't know who Arson Wenger is (can't even spell his name) and I couldn't give a toss about the football results
I have little respect for any of the political parties. Bush's victory and Blair's upcoming victory are both profoundly depressing events. What happened to the Green movement?
I find it hard to make small talk, about anything
I want to write songs and perform them all day long, then go to a wine-soaked orgy in some ruins in the evening. And tell ghost stories round a fire. Creative expression, wild sex, ancient buildings - aren't these great things?
Buying property is not the be-all and end-all of my life - can't you think of something more interesting to talk about?
Don't ask me what I do - it's my day job. It pays the rent. Ask me about my soul
Ah yes! SOUL. There's not a lot of that to be had, is there? (Hip hop has taken over the world, according to today's Observer)
And, most of all, I'm living on a planet which is being criminally mismanaged by fools, careering towards environmental disaster, and all I hear on the airwaves is... nothing. Everybody's forgotten.
By the way, I know I've written something like this before - it's a kind of chorus. It's come round again. Now all that's off my chest, I'm off for a walk in the Buda hills - it's a beautiful January morning and the whole sky is bright.
I decided to change the heading on the blog to reflect how I'm feeling these days. I no longer feel like a drone - my job has suddenly become more exciting. Maybe I'm just a more satisfied drone. Anyway, doing just what I want to do makes me feel a little less insignificant. Budapest is an incredible city by day and by night. I'm getting out until the small hours two or three times a week, something I was never able to do in London, living so far from the centre. (Haggling taxi drivers down to £35 for the journey home was too depressing.) I'm meeting new people all the time. I am no longer permanently tired. Thank God (for want of a better expression) I came and kick-started my life!
I chose the line "I don't get what the society wants" as a kind of anti-quotation. I feel as if I'm on permanent holiday from the mainstream. I feel like the character in A Disaffection by James Kelman when he says that everything that the society values means little or nothing to him and everything he thinks is valuable isn't rated by anyone. Or my best friend who recently said in despair that he is tired of a world where money, power and war are valued, and where love and nature are not. I can't put it into words very well:
I couldn't care less about Changing Rooms or I'm a Celebrity or Big Brother
Most of the musicians I love are dead or half-dead
I have never seen an episode of Friends
I don't know who Arson Wenger is (can't even spell his name) and I couldn't give a toss about the football results
I have little respect for any of the political parties. Bush's victory and Blair's upcoming victory are both profoundly depressing events. What happened to the Green movement?
I find it hard to make small talk, about anything
I want to write songs and perform them all day long, then go to a wine-soaked orgy in some ruins in the evening. And tell ghost stories round a fire. Creative expression, wild sex, ancient buildings - aren't these great things?
Buying property is not the be-all and end-all of my life - can't you think of something more interesting to talk about?
Don't ask me what I do - it's my day job. It pays the rent. Ask me about my soul
Ah yes! SOUL. There's not a lot of that to be had, is there? (Hip hop has taken over the world, according to today's Observer)
And, most of all, I'm living on a planet which is being criminally mismanaged by fools, careering towards environmental disaster, and all I hear on the airwaves is... nothing. Everybody's forgotten.
By the way, I know I've written something like this before - it's a kind of chorus. It's come round again. Now all that's off my chest, I'm off for a walk in the Buda hills - it's a beautiful January morning and the whole sky is bright.
Saturday, January 22, 2005
DIGITAL MURK
Downloaders of MP3s are being offered a very different history of rock, rewritten by small children who've never seen a copy of MOJO in their lives. By a process of online Chinese whispers, a lot of classic rock songs are cropping up attributed to the wrong artists. No, A Horse With No Name is not by Neil Young. No, Stuck In The Middle With You is not a Dylan song. (In case you don't know, both of these were recorded by people aping their heroes, turning out passable imitations of the "greater" artists - see last post.) Smoke On The Water is definitely NOT in the "Jimmy" Hendrix back catalogue! And there is no song called Everybody Must Get Stoned. There should be a new word for these files. Ideas, anyone?
Added to this, there are fantasy MP3s put together by computer geeks. Hendrix did play Day Tripper in '67, but it wasn't with John Lennon. Would have been a nice gig, though.
It's interesting to see what people come up with. I wonder if in years to come, the music of lesser known musicians will just drift around the wireless networks in complete anonymity, or be swallowed up by the better known names. Maybe there will be authorship disputes, like the theory that Shakespeare's plays were written by Ben Jonson (or was it Marlowe?) Reputations will be tarnished forever; I mean, Stuck in The Middle is a great pop song, but Dylan would have thrown the lyrics out the next morning.
Downloaders of MP3s are being offered a very different history of rock, rewritten by small children who've never seen a copy of MOJO in their lives. By a process of online Chinese whispers, a lot of classic rock songs are cropping up attributed to the wrong artists. No, A Horse With No Name is not by Neil Young. No, Stuck In The Middle With You is not a Dylan song. (In case you don't know, both of these were recorded by people aping their heroes, turning out passable imitations of the "greater" artists - see last post.) Smoke On The Water is definitely NOT in the "Jimmy" Hendrix back catalogue! And there is no song called Everybody Must Get Stoned. There should be a new word for these files. Ideas, anyone?
Added to this, there are fantasy MP3s put together by computer geeks. Hendrix did play Day Tripper in '67, but it wasn't with John Lennon. Would have been a nice gig, though.
It's interesting to see what people come up with. I wonder if in years to come, the music of lesser known musicians will just drift around the wireless networks in complete anonymity, or be swallowed up by the better known names. Maybe there will be authorship disputes, like the theory that Shakespeare's plays were written by Ben Jonson (or was it Marlowe?) Reputations will be tarnished forever; I mean, Stuck in The Middle is a great pop song, but Dylan would have thrown the lyrics out the next morning.
Thursday, January 06, 2005
ART Vs ENTERTAINMENT
The Beatles are better than Busted, and of course neither should be mentioned in the same sentence as Beethoven.
Ulysses is the greatest novel of the 20th Century.
Damien Hirst is just taking the public for a ride.
Can we make objective qualitative judgements about art? Is there a difference between “great” art and “mere” entertainment? Or is it just a matter of taste, like choosing between wines? Worse still, are prejudice and snobbery involved?
Some of us were discussing this in a bar in Buda yesterday. I mentioned a remark by Neb, a commentator on this blog, that entertainment is “just” to make you feel good, and is escapist. My colleague maintained that all art is like this, that the feeling of satisfaction or catharsis or even sadness after reading a good book is really not any more valuable than the fleeting pleasure some people get from hearing the latest manufactured chart-topper. I suggested that the essence of art is not that it can conjure up some feeling, but that it contains some important message about life in the real world. He challenged me about this notion of “importance” and who is to be the final arbiter of this. Might the importance be illusory, and have more to do with the smugness of the educated?
His main point was that people lucky enough to have some hours of leisure have a need for something to occupy their minds. Art and entertainment just two labels for what is in fact the same thing: a distraction. And therefore it's all escapist! (As opposed to, for example, doing voluntary work in your local Oxfam shop.)
We might attempt to define great art by agreeing a checklist of criteria e.g. longevity (that it will be relevant to people a century later); the fact that it manifests a degree of talent or skill, which is some sense measurable; that it requires some thought to execute and to be properly understood. The problem is that none of these criteria alone would suffice. That of longevity, for example, can be challenged on the grounds that we can imagine a piece of “bad” art being valued over time. (Kylie songs on 22nd Century digital media?) It’s unlikely, but not impossible.
Can anyone improve on this checklist, or, better still, give a watertight definition of good art? Or should we just abandon talk of “good” and “bad” in this context as a category mistake, and replace this with the less loaded “I prefer…”? The implication in terms of public policy would be to show up the awarding of Arts Council grants as being entirely arbitrary.
The Beatles are better than Busted, and of course neither should be mentioned in the same sentence as Beethoven.
Ulysses is the greatest novel of the 20th Century.
Damien Hirst is just taking the public for a ride.
Can we make objective qualitative judgements about art? Is there a difference between “great” art and “mere” entertainment? Or is it just a matter of taste, like choosing between wines? Worse still, are prejudice and snobbery involved?
Some of us were discussing this in a bar in Buda yesterday. I mentioned a remark by Neb, a commentator on this blog, that entertainment is “just” to make you feel good, and is escapist. My colleague maintained that all art is like this, that the feeling of satisfaction or catharsis or even sadness after reading a good book is really not any more valuable than the fleeting pleasure some people get from hearing the latest manufactured chart-topper. I suggested that the essence of art is not that it can conjure up some feeling, but that it contains some important message about life in the real world. He challenged me about this notion of “importance” and who is to be the final arbiter of this. Might the importance be illusory, and have more to do with the smugness of the educated?
His main point was that people lucky enough to have some hours of leisure have a need for something to occupy their minds. Art and entertainment just two labels for what is in fact the same thing: a distraction. And therefore it's all escapist! (As opposed to, for example, doing voluntary work in your local Oxfam shop.)
We might attempt to define great art by agreeing a checklist of criteria e.g. longevity (that it will be relevant to people a century later); the fact that it manifests a degree of talent or skill, which is some sense measurable; that it requires some thought to execute and to be properly understood. The problem is that none of these criteria alone would suffice. That of longevity, for example, can be challenged on the grounds that we can imagine a piece of “bad” art being valued over time. (Kylie songs on 22nd Century digital media?) It’s unlikely, but not impossible.
Can anyone improve on this checklist, or, better still, give a watertight definition of good art? Or should we just abandon talk of “good” and “bad” in this context as a category mistake, and replace this with the less loaded “I prefer…”? The implication in terms of public policy would be to show up the awarding of Arts Council grants as being entirely arbitrary.
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