THE BRITISH MUSEUM HAD LOST ITS CHARM - (Line from song “A Foggy Day in London Town”)

It was the spring, or perhaps the summer of 1966. I was thirty-one years old, my career was belatedly getting into gear and Goodyear Tyres had scheduled me on a course in London, the accommodation and course venue being in the University of London Commonwealth Halls in Russell Square. I had the whole day off to travel (trains were slower forty years ago) and the course didn't start until the evening. I passed through London and Euston during my army service in 1953, but had seen nothing of the metropolis. This was my chance - I could take the night sleeper from Glasgow Central, arrive in London in the early morning, and have the whole day to wander its streets. I headed for Central Station carrying only a light overnight bag, feeling a bit like a mature Dick Whittington - I briefly considered carrying the bag on a stick over my shoulder.

American companies were notoriously parsimonious when it came to travel expenses, so I had a second-class ticket, which meant I had to share the sleeper berth with an unknown other. It is hard for a young professional today to realise how limited and parochial the horizons of a thirty-something could be in the 1960s. The swinging decade had touched the teens and the early twenties, but the values of someone ten and more years older were essentially bounded by the expectancies of our parents - the wartime generation. We were, in the main, cautious and unadventurous, at least in the grim North. Provincial cities and provincial manners were peculiar to their region, although my horizons had been somewhat broadened by National Service in the Army in England.

I boarded the train and was shown to my compartment by the sleeping car attendant, who explained that my reservation was for the bottom berth. I could hardly believe that two people were expected to wash and sleep in this tiny space, but I was relieved that I was on the ground floor, so to speak. I can't remember now exactly what time it was - probably nine or ten o'clock in the evening. It was too early to go to bed, but there was nothing else to do, and I was rather anxious to be in my pyjamas, washed in my lower berth before the top bunk man arrived. It did cross my mind that it might be a woman, not a man, but I dismissed this ludicrous idea swiftly - British Rail had not embraced the values of the flower children. While I was brushing my teeth, the attendant returned, in an ingratiating mode, and asked if I required any refreshments, holding in his hands several miniature whiskies. My miniscule expenses allowance did not run to such profligacy, and I tentatively inquired after a coffee, a request that clearly disappointed the attendant, and which was greeted with faint contempt. He returned after a time with a cup of coffee, named the price, and I over-tipped him in my embarrassment at having fallen at the first hurdle.

I was sitting on the edge of my bunk drinking it when there was something of a commotion in the corridor outside, raised voices, then the door opened and a red-faced man of indeterminate age, reeking of alcohol, thrust himself into the tiny space, shoving a large bag in front of him. I stood up, banged my head on the bunk above, spilt my coffee on my pyjamas and muttered an incoherent greeting. He ignored me completely, turned to the attendant behind him in the corridor and demanded 'three wee Bell's', which, to a native of Glasgow was not a request for a carillon but for three whisky miniatures. Prudence and the lack of communication prompted me to lay my coffee cup on the floor and slide back into my bunk. My travelling companion climbed up the ladder to the top bunk without undressing, farting spectacularly on the way up. A fart in a sleeper compartment has much the same effect as a fart in a spacesuit, to paraphrase Billy Connolly's remark to Michael Parkinson, which so convulsed Angie Dickinson with mirth.

After a time, the attendant returned, and, entering the compartment, reached up to the upper berth with the three miniatures. The price was named, money changed hands, the attendant left, and there were more farts and grunts of satisfaction from above as the man aloft consumed his whisky. I thought about saying goodnight but decided against it. I lay back then discovered to my horror that I needed a pee. Unaware of the protocols of sleeper travel, which permitted wandering along the corridor in one’s pyjamas, and recognised the inevitability of travellers peeing in the tiny sink - even, horror of horrors, while the train was standing in the station - I lay in misery until necessity forced me to get up after the train had moved off, partially dress again and venture along the corridor to the toilet. I returned and entered the compartment to find my companion peeing in the sink, and the smell of alcohol-permeated urine was added to earlier aromas. At that point, I had an epiphany, and vowed that I would never travel second class on a sleeper again, only first class. I went back to bed again and watched the trousered legs of my travelling companion ascend to his lair above me, taking some comfort in the fact that he was fully dressed.

I then fell asleep, only to waken in terror, facing the back wall of the berth in total darkness, and experienced an Edgar Allan Poe moment until I turned and saw a glimmer of light through the window blind and heard the rhythmic rattle of the train on the rails. I was awake when we pulled into Euston, got dressed hastily and left, inhaling the relatively clean air of the great rail terminus. I was in London and the day beckoned. I had a London street map, and had decided to locate the course venue before I explored London. The danger for the Glasgow man of those days abroad in another city was to assume that all the streets ran either north and south or east and west. Glasgow city centre is laid out in a grid system, like many American cities, and all the main arterial roads conformed to this directional pattern.

I headed more or less south, looking for Bloomsbury and Montague Street, with vague thoughts of the Bloomsbury Set and Virginia Woolf in mind. I turned into Montague Street and found myself faced with the British Museum. The old Sinatra classic, A Foggy Day in London Town immediately came to mind. It was before eight in the morning, and visitors already seemed to be streaming into the museum, most of them carrying briefcases – probably popping in before going to work, I thought. My overnight bag was essentially a large briefcase, and I was wearing my best three-piece suit, so I joined the visitors as they entered. To my delight, the little old uniformed attendants greeted me with a polite “Good morning, Sir.”

Once inside, the other visitors mysteriously disappeared, and I was left to explore alone. I found myself in antiquities section, but to my disappointment, the huge sculptures were covered by dustsheets. Looking around and finding no one to help, I began pulling them off, but was suddenly seized from behind and my arms expertly pinioned at my sides. My captors were two little elderly uniformed men, one of whom politely asked me if I was a member of staff. When I said no, he told me that the museum didn’t open until nine o’clock. In a moment of acute embarrassment, I realised that the other ‘visitors’ were all members of staff. I was escorted firmly to the door as I blurted out my apologies, feeling like a yokel from the country in the big city for the first time. All I needed was a straw sticking out of my ear to complete the picture. Back in the street, I could hear Sinatra declaiming that “The British Museum – had lost its charm ---“

I got my fix on the venue in Russell Square then headed down Southampton Row, taking me in to Holborn. I found a café, and had something to eat, with some language confusion when I requested beans on toast, and was asked “One round or two, dearie?” - a formulation I was unfamiliar with. I wandered about Holborn for another hour or so, fascinated at how different London was from Glasgow. I came upon Gamages, the huge department store, and spent some time in it. The street names were so evocative – Aldwych, the Strand, Fleet Street, Chancery Lane – stirring confused memories of the Monopoly board, of old detective stories, and of the terrible quota-quickies - the British-made black and white B-feature films that cinemas were obliged to show as the condition of screening the American main features.

I decided to head west, to the infinite imagined glamour of Shaftesbury Avenue, Piccadilly and Oxford Street. At no point did I consider travelling other than on foot: I couldn’t afford taxis and I was scared of the Tube, which I imagined as a giant and intimidating version of the tiny, friendly Glasgow subway, a perception that was confirmed the following evening. Anyway, the pleasure lay in the perambulation – this is always the way to see a city, if you have the stamina for it.

London was no disappointment to me – it fulfilled every expectation of glamour and more. The Swinging London concept had been sweeping the media for sometime now – my new American boss back in Glasgow, Don Wolfe, was kitted out with a Beatles-type suit, to everyone’s amazement – and here I was at the heart of it. The mini-skirt, still being tentatively embraced back home in Scotland, was everywhere, and it was that delightful interregnum when stockings and suspenders had not entirely been abandoned for tights. I was also struck by the sheer affluence of everything around me, here, in what had in my lifetime, been the heart of one of the greatest empires the world has ever seen. Now, even the residual pale shadow of that empire, the Commonwealth, seemed to be fading fast, albeit giving its name to my course venue of that evening. But London was now the hub of a new world, the world of fashion and popular music, and there was a dawning recognition of this not entirely welcome fact by New York and Paris, a recognition that would be crystallised by a film I would see that very day.

In the course of the morning, I found Buckingham Palace, walked up into Mayfair (another Monopoly board reminder) then into Soho. The discovery made by a London hairdresser, one Mr. Raymond, that a private members’ club was exempt from the prohibition on moving nudes, had brought an end to the static tableaux of the Windmill Theatre, and strip clubs abounded, many of them also clip joints. They would derive no revenue from me, however, since the era of the credit card had not reached my class of society, I dealt on a cash-only basis, and was effectively unclippable. In fact, I had only had a current account for a couple of years, forced on me when my company moved to credit transfer for the payment of salaries and wages. I knew I had to conserve what little cash I had for an evening out with the course participants, and I planned to spend part of the afternoon in a cinema after I had lunch. The film I wanted to see was one that had caused quite a stir in the newspapers – Antonioni’s Blow-Up, currently on at the Odeon, Leicester Square.

I found my way to Leicester Square, and there it was, billed in giant letters – Blow-Up. Another greasy spoon meal, and I was ready to relax in a darkened cinema. I left the sunny streets of swinging London, paid my money at the box office, and entered the auditorium, which was fully lit. The other big event in London that year, was the Noh Drama, the classical Japanese theatre, and I seemed to be surrounded by knowledgeable art and theatre buffs all discussing the Noh in very learned terms. I felt that somehow this rubbed off on me, and although not part of their conversation, nodded gravely in silent agreement at their assessments, and felt very cosmopolitan.

The main feature started, on a large screen, projected in superb sharp focus, and suddenly in front of me was the London I just left a moment ago, as a young and beautiful David Hemmings returned from his undercover shoot as a down-and-out to his mews flat to develop his film. The plot of the film, a fundamental dislocation of perception and reality, mirrored my own feelings, an effect compounded by fatigue after my night on the sleeper and all my walking in the streets of London. My reality had shifted, and I experienced some of the disorientation of the photographer hero. At the scene in the club, where the Yardbirds perform and smash their equipment, I felt a strange anomie stealing over me. When I left the cinema, the sun was still brilliant, London still swung, and somehow I felt I was locked in a new and disturbing reality. I walked for the rest of the afternoon, then made my way back to Russell Square, exhausted, feet hurting quite badly.

I checked in to the course, had a meal in the cafeteria, then handed in a pre-prepared written assignment I had brought with me for the workshop. I was assigned to a syndicate, and told to meet with them at 7.30 p.m. The syndicated leader, a tall, attractive brunette from Mars (the confectionery bars, not the planet!) introduced herself as May Stavert, handed us back our assignments, and began the process of each participant reading out their contribution for evaluation by the group. The other members were all Londoners – I was the only provincial. When my turn came, I read out my piece and commentary with what I thought was great clarity.

There was a stunned silence, then one man said “What’s ‘e saying?” The lovely Miss Stavert shook her head and said “Search me!” Another man smiled sympathetically at me, and turned back to the group. “I think he’s a Jock – or maybe a Paddy?” he said by way of explanation.

Swinging London collapsed about my ears, and I said simple, unprintable things forcefully to my new colleagues that they understood only too clearly, remarks that took several rounds of drinks to repair later that evening. I became the hero of the course (which was about effective communication) for the next two days, lionised for my brutal Celtic frankness. All in all, it had been a worthwhile trip.

© Copyright Peter Curran 2010

Does the Law undervalue Christian beliefs? - BBC1

I came to this Sunday morning programme – The Big Question - belatedly, because I had dismissed it as being a God Slot item for Sunday mornings. I was very wrong – it is a well-structured, well-moderated (by Nicky Campbell) series of discussion on highly relevant political, social and religious topics.

One of the three items today addressed the question Does the law undervalue Christian belief?

The tabloids have been covering this topic for some time now in their usual hysterical fashion under the question - implied or explicit  -  Are Christians being persecuted in Britain?

The persecutions being visited on them include not being allowed to wear a silver cross with an airline uniform and not being allowed to deny accommodation to same sex couples in their bed and breakfast operations. As one journalists has already observed, as persecutions go, this is hardly being nailed to a cross or burnt at the stake, but Christians argue that it is the thin edge of the wedge, and since persecution for a Christian is a traditional route to virtue if not martyrdom – not to mention tabloid celebrity – it is worth a shot to complain about it.

The accusation is that the law is being enforced in a partial manner, Muslims over Christians, with Muslims being allowed to get away with anything – if you believe the tabloids – because of either fear or political expediency.  But I must stop being flippant, because there is a more serious economic aspect to this – some Christians have either lost their livelihoods, or been threatened with losing them over non-compliance with the law on discrimination.

Sunday’s audience was a well-balanced one in terms of spread of opinions, although some members of it were anything but balanced in their approach to rational debate. They had already shown their colours to some degree in the earlier two topics, especially on the question of an English Parliament, since certain opinions, not to say prejudices tend to group themselves predictably across a range of issues.

The basis of the discussion centred around our rights at law in Europe not to be discriminated against on grounds of our gender, race, colour or sexuality and the right of freedom to worship – religious freedom and the perception by some that English judges in recent cases had placed the rights of homosexuals and non-believers above those of Christians.

Nicky Campbell opened with a former counsellor for Relate, Gary McFarlane, who had worked in the area of relationship counselling, including sexual relationship, and who had been dismissed for stating, under questioning by his employer  during a training process, that he would refuse to  offer same sex couples on sexual therapy, e.g. assist and improve their sexual technique and their sex life. He was dismissed for gross misconduct.

This term perhaps suggests something different to a lay audience than to a human resources (Personnel) professional like myself. It means a single act, or series of actions that implies a total rejection of the contract of employment, warranting summary termination of the contract without notice. This is not, as some believe, instant dismissal (there is no such concept at law) since proper disciplinary procedures and rights of appeal are required by law, and the decision can be contested at law.

Gary, a pleasant, mild-mannered man, freely acknowledged that he had stated that he would not offer sexual therapy as defined to same sex couples, based on his religious convictions. This was, as Nicky Campbell put it, a theoretical problem, since Gary had not yet actually been presented with the situation where he would have had to refuse. Gary’s view was that such a situation would conflict with his Christian beliefs, and if it arose, he would “want to take it to his supervisor and work it through …”

Campbell asked Gary if he would offer sexual therapy to unmarried couples, and he answered yes. Campbell then observed that he was therefore discriminating against gay couples. Gary, a former solicitor, then went into a long justification of his position, saying that “there were no absolutes …”, when clearly there were some absolutes for him. He had a “personal dilemma” in assisting in the sexual relationships of a same sex couple.

Gary’s case set the core agenda for the ensuing debate. Did the right at law to religious freedom mean that if a central belief of the Christian religion (or any religion) conflicted with the rights of another mean that a Christian had the right to refuse to obey one law by invoking their rights under another, e.g. did they have the right to discriminate, in breach of the discrimination laws, without suffering any consequences?

The examples all included commercial and financial implications, under either a contract of employment or in running a business. Various recent cases have highlighted the employment contract examples, notably the airline employee wearing a cross, and an unscripted observation on the rights of a bed and breakfast operator refusing to accommodate a gay couple may yet cost the Shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling his job. (His comments were recorded and leaked to the Press.)

Gary was convinced that “a level playing field” did not exist at law between Christian rights and Muslim rights, and that no action would have been taken against a Muslim in similar circumstances because “it would have been too hot a potato for Relate to have touched …”.

Dinah Rose QC was asked if it was true that the law was favouring Muslims. She replied that the law gave equal protection to anybody for their religious beliefs. Nicky Campbell cited to right granted to Muslims in the Health Service to cover their arms. Dinah Rose replied that he was talking about individual cases, but whether you were talking about Muslims, Christians, atheists or Jews, that law said the same thing – you have the right not to be discriminated against on grounds of your religious beliefs, and when you were talking about treatment by an employer that placed people with individual religious beliefs at a disadvantage, then the employer has to justify that particular policy.

She added that she would not comment on Gary McFarlane’s case because she did not know the full facts, but that the test would be the same – whether the employer’s policy is justifiable.

My perception of this was that if a Muslim employee of Relate took exactly the same position as Gary, would they too have lost their job? Relate can assert that they would, but if they have not yet had such a case, we won’t know if, in Gary’s accusation - “it would have been too hot a potato for Relate to have touched …”, and they would have reached an inconsistent decision.

The other aspect of course is the reasonableness of the employer’s position. Would it have been more reasonable to allow Gary to continue in post, accepting his caveat on sexual therapy to same sex couples? I can only offer what my answer would have been as a human resources director, an emphatic no – there is a specification of the duties required for a particular post and employees cannot opt out for reasons of personal belief or capacity. They are either willing to do the job as specified, and capable of doing it or not.

In my career, I have on many occasions accepted that discretion could be exercised where an employee had temporarily or even permanently lost the physical capacity to carry out the full range of duties in a job, perhaps because of injury or disability, and that such a restriction of performance could be accepted temporarily or permanently. But such an exercise of discretion would have set a benchmark for future cases where the circumstances were identical. Relate therefore, in my view, would have been free to allow Gary to continue in post providing they allowed, for example, a Muslim or Jew to continue in identical circumstances.

Gary was unhappy, but the QC  reminded him that his barrister could put his arguments to the Court of Appeal. She was again unequivocal that the law did not place Christians at a disadvantage.

This exchange should have said it all, but it was only the prelude to the heated, often emotional and sometime irrational debate that followed. That is, of course, what made the programme worth watching, depressing though it was on occasion. Watching and listening to Dinah Ross QC made the gulf between her disciplined legal mind and that of the passionate contributors who then entered the fray seem almost unbridgeable.

The debate then moved to the case of John and Michael, a gay couple who had been denied a room with a double bed at a guest house because of the landlady’s Christian beliefs. She had been upfront about these, saying that her convictions did not allow them to stay in the house. John and Michael felt the injustice, not just as a gay couple, but as discrimination equivalent to racial or religious discrimination, or to unmarrieds – in Nicky Campbell’s words. They were preparing to take a civil action out against this discrimination.

Campbell then put the question to panel member Alison Ruoff, lay member of the General Synod of the Church of England – if she owned a bed and breakfast, would she have let the room to them, and got an unequivocal no. When pressed, she said this was because it was her own home – a B&B, not a business, as John and Michael asserted.

Rabbi Yitzchak Schochet said they would be welcome at his B&B if he had one, even though their sexual orientation was in conflict with his faith, because that was the law of the land. He also said to Gary that his case was different, but still illegal – his religious beliefs were infringing the rights of gay couples because he had voluntarily taken on that role and profession. In contrast, John and Michael were not infringing anyone’s legal rights by sharing a bed in a B&B room.

Nicky Campbell asked if it was appropriate to subvert the law because of a few things  that had been said in the Old Testament. Ruoff replied that it was not just the Old Testament, it was the whole Bible. “Sorry – I stand where I stand – I would not have any homosexual relationships happening in my bed and breakfast. It’s my own home – they can go to a hotel.”

A DIGRESSION – LOT, HIS WIFE AND DAUGHTERS

I suddenly had a thought about Lot and his wife, (I was shaking salt on my egg as I watched the programme) and not having a bible handy, went to Google. One of the first sites I came across had the title What the Bible Says about Queers, which one would hope was not the first port of call for lay members of the General Synod, so I hastily exited and went to the Authorised Version – the King James.  (To anyone who thinks I got this from Richard Dawkins – I was born six years earlier than the eminent scientist, and had been reading my bible daily at school for five years before he went to school, and the story of Lot always fascinated  and puzzled me.)

I could, of course, have gone to the Vulgate, to Tyndale’s Version, Cranmer’s Bible, Coverdale’s version, to the Jewish texts, to the Douay Bible, and any one of the innumerable versions, but  I was not in search of a passage in Ecclesiasticus, or the Book of the Maccabees, nor of Tobias, none of them present in the King James because Protestants regard them as apocrypha, but present in some other Christian bibles. Maccabees, for instance, is in the Catholic version of the bible. The Qur'an has a very different view of Lot from the Christian Bible, and venerates him as a prophet, which Christians do not. They reject the aspects of the Christian version of the Lot story that show Lot in rather a bad light. There is, as far as I know, only one version of the Qur’an.

Now Lot was an important man, according to Genesis. Abraham was his uncle, (Haran was his father) and you couldn’t get closer to the Creator than that until Moses, Christ and Mohammed came along, as Christians, Jews and Muslims would probably agree. (For three world religions with the same roots, there is precious little else they agree upon, and that is the great tragedy of our modern world.)

According to the Christian versions of the Bible, angels came to stay at Lot’s house in Sodom. The men of the town demanded to have homosexual sex with the angels, but Lot refused and offered his virginal daughters instead. However, God is angry at Sodom, and is about to destroy the city – and four other cities of the plain - with fire and brimstone. The angels force Lot, his wife and their daughters to leave the doomed city and head for Zoar, one of the five cities that the Lord has decided to spare, and warn them not to look back as the destruction begins. Lot’s wife doesn’t take this good advice, looks back and is turned into a pillar of salt.

Lot then heads for a cave in the mountains, where his virginal daughters get him drunk and seduce him, for the purpose of preserving the family line. This incestuous union produces two sons, Moab and Ammon, who go on to become patriarchs of the nations named after them, Moab and Ammon.

Lot and his Daughters - Hendrik Goltzius 1616

This is a fascinating story, whatever your views of its authenticity. It seems clear to me that Lot refused to let the men of Sodom have their way with the angels because they were guests in his house and they were angels. His position on the rights and wrongs of homosexuality are less clear. What is abundantly clear – if you accept the Christian version -  is that Lot was prepared allow his daughters to be gang-raped, and later committed incest with each of his daughters while drunk. Both of these acts would be crimes under 21st century British law and presumably the General Synod of the Church of England – and Alison Rouoff - would vigorously condemn them.

But the Lord did not seem to take a view on this, and the modern church skates over it. It was Lot’s wife who was turned into a pillar of salt, not Lot or his daughters. Jesus later enjoined his followers to remember the fate of Lot’s wife (Luke 17:32), clearly approving of the Lord’s decision, but he did not appear to have a bad word for Lot.

It seems to me that on this, as on innumerable other biblical facts, that Christians have always been highly selective on what they choose as their benchmark events, quotations and moral imperatives. Would bed & breakfast operators welcome Lot and his daughters to spend the night? Would they offer up their daughters to gay couples to deter homosexual activity? One would hope not …

Back again to the Big Question …

Dinah Rose QC asked Alison Rouaff – rhetorically - if she would agree with the old South African law that refused to admit a mixed race couple to accommodation, then answered it herself  - no, of course not …  She again emphasised that the law was the law, and the B&B owner’s personal views did not come into the question.

Alison Rouaf then fell back on the rather feeble argument that the law had changed on recognising homosexuality (yes it has, Alison – once John and Michael would have been imprisoned for the act, or perhaps, like the tragic scientist Alan Turing, have been offered chemical castration as an alternative to prison. Society has moved on, even if some members of the Church of England Synod have not …) and perhaps our unfortunate B&B owners had set up their operation before then. She also made the quite unsupported assertion that if the owners of this B&B were Muslims, “… there is no way we would be having this conversation …”.

The debate then moved on to a black couple, Eunice and Owen Johns, who had been fostering for a long time, but were now not allowed to continue.  Derby City Council, in response to their request to foster children between the ages of five and eight years of age, asked them what they would do if a child came to them and said they thought they were homosexual, what would they do and say? Eunice and Owen replied that, as Christians, they would love them and care for them - “We would just be there for them, whatever the situation …”.

Nicky Campbell pressed the point more specifically, as Derby City Council patently did – and as I would have …

“But what would you have said to the child if the child had asked “Is it wrong to be gay?” Eunice was still evading the question, saying that she was not sure that a child of that age would ask such a question. She and Owen would not put the child down – they would have to “work it out – work it out …”

But eventually she said that she would not tell the child that it was alright to be homosexual. And there was the nub of it – for Derby City Council, and for me. Vulnerable children would be put into the care of a caring couple, a nice couple, a loving couple – but a couple with a deep conviction, one that they would express to the child at a time of maximum distress and innocent vulnerability, that the law of the land was wrong – that Eunice and Owen’s version of religion and the revealed word of their God trumped the law, and that the child’s sexual instincts were wrong. As they both said “We are Bible-believing Christians …” and for them, that ended any questions, any debate, and over-rode the law of the land.

I would not want to see a child placed in the hands of such a couple, anymore than I would want to see them placed in the hands of a couple who believed that heterosexuality was wrong and their belief was that their God and their holy book condemned it, insisting on homosexuality as the natural way.

But then I had to act as my own devil’s advocate. What if I were fostering children in Nazi Germany when the race laws were in operation? Would I obey the law and surrender a child that I discovered to be Jewish to the Gestapo? Would I tell that child that they were unworthy, that they belonged to an inferior race because the law said so? Would I act on my own deeply held beliefs just as Alison Rouoff, Gary McFarlane and Eunice and Owen Johns did, and if so, where does the difference lie between us?

This is a very complex question, one to which I have no easy answers. But it would lie somewhere in the fact that, in Nazi Germany, I was living in a repressive, murderous dictatorship, not a democracy, one where every civilised value was being progressively abandoned, one where human rights counted for nothing. And my belief in what was right would not come from an ancient, highly contested set of writings of primitive peoples that claimed to be the word of God, interpreted in violently disputatious ways even by those who broadly accept them, but from the great thrust of civilisation’s painful and gradual process from ignorance, obscurantism, persecution, slavery and injustice to something approaching my ideals of freedom and justice for all mankind.

And, most of all, from the belief that I would only accept the rule of law in a democracy in which I could exercise my democratic rights to elect representatives with the power to express my views and make laws that represented them - a democracy in which the rights of minorities were also respected.

This viewpoint was eventually at least partially expressed by Liz Kershaw, panel member on the programme.

If, within such a democracy, every religious group followed their religious conviction when it was in conflict with law, there would be chaos, anarchy and violence instead of democracy, and we would have violently competing theocracies. The United States of America has always been close to this situation, never more so than now, with religious extremist groups prepared to use violence, bombing, intimidation and murder to advance their causes. (For Christian examples, look at the pro-life extremists.)

Enter the atheist – there may have been more but they kept a low profile.  She rather spoilt her sound arguments by exploding into the debate, almost incandescent with righteous indignation, and very soon managed to wind up an initially mild-mannered Christian gentleman, (Mark Mullins, a Christian barrister) who said that “We (Christians in Britain) believe that it is the word of God and that it has been good for our country for the last two millennia.”

Our atheist lady challenged this on the support for slavery issue – not the ideal example, in my view. She could have quoted persecutions, hangings, burnings, torture and general intolerance, not to mention the evil performed in the name of the British Empire. The Christian barrister then offered the examples  of the law letting  Sikhs wear bangles, Muslim’s wear headscarfs, making accommodations for homosexuals, but when it came to the Christian faith, promoting a politically correct dogma claiming equal treatment for all but  “funking it” it when it came to challenging Muslims. His view was that if someone refused to do something under their contract of employment that contravened their religious belief, quoting the example of a registrar refusing to handle a same sex marriage, then “if you’ve got other people who will take that, you’re not discriminating against anybody …”

This seems to me to be an extraordinary view for a barrister to take, but perhaps the clue lies in his earlier use of the phrase “politically correct”, much loved by Christians and those who wish to continue to use certain kinds of terminology and exercise discriminatory practices, to try to ridicule the progress of our society towards more civilised and equitable ways of dealing with minorities and our fellow human beings in general.

I am sure that Mark Mullins is not racist or homophobic, for example, (he will doubtless take the Christian position of “hate the sin, not the sinner”) but he must be aware that the term politically correct is used pejoratively by racists and bigots of various types who wish to exercise their perceived right continue to refer to blacks as niggers, darkies and coons, and to homosexuals as poofs, perverts, queers and worse, and to the disabled as cripples and lunatics. Political correctness, in my view, has made for a more civilised public discourse and made us a better, more tolerant society, allowing for the odd risible application of the principle, much beloved of The Daily Mail, etc.

Liz Kershaw made perhaps the most telling comment, that religion was perhaps “the politics of its day” with the powerful telling the ignorant and uneducated how to conduct their lives, how to see the universe, etc.

Christians in Britain once had that power – they were the establishment, and, leaving aside endless squabbling over doctrine amongst themselves, were unchallenged in the public arena. They had the power – now they don’t, and the ordinary people feel free to call out derisively when the emperor has no clothes, and to elect secular powers and representatives who will ensure a measure of equity in their society, however imperfectly.

If Christianity had that kind of power again, we would slide towards a theocracy, and, in the old Scots phrase, our civil liberties would melt away “like snaw aff a dyke” (snow from a wall).

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.

© Copyright Peter Curran

But is it Art?

BBC4 ran the first of two programmes this week about Goldsmith’s College, or rather, Goldsmith’s University of London as it styles itself.  The title almost put me off – Goldsmith’s: But is it Art?

BBC iPlayer - Goldsmith's: But is it Art?

This was enough to make the heart sink – anyone with any interest in the arts will recognise that recurring situation, a sort of Groundhog Day moment, when one is cornered by someone who, with wide-eyed innocence, says “But don’t you think all art is just a matter of opinion – of personal taste? And what about modern art? Do you really think …?”

And you know that you are headed for an utterly sterile discussion, one in which the innocent will gradually reveal himself to be deeply hostile to the idea of art, and will unburden himself (it usually is a ‘him’) of opinions formed from Daily Mail headlines, a primitive world view that effortlessly encompasses homophobia, racism, sexism, paranoia about young people, crime,  a desire for the restoration of capital punishment and a denial of man’s contribution to global warming, or perhaps even a denial of global warming itself.

But inexorably I get drawn in, in the almost invariably mistaken belief that this person may just be a truth seeker, wanting to understand …

My knowledge of the arts may best be described as limited and partially informed. Certain art forms are virtually a closed book to me – ballet, some musical forms and some aspects of literature. I do appreciate literature and music, but my experience and preferences tend towards what is sometimes called popular culture – cinema, popular music and jazz – but with a limited knowledge and appreciation of orchestral and chamber music and literature.

I do also have a very definite bias towards form and structure in the arts, and a respect and admiration for technique in art. I must also declare a family interest – my son, Michael Curran, is a full-time artist - an alumnus of Duncan of Jordanstone school of art and a first class honours graduate of Goldsmith’s.

The first of the two BBC4 Goldsmith’s programmes started, depressingly, in a manner entirely consistent with the sub-text – but is it Art? – with a young Irish student whose chosen art form consisted of stealing objects, ingesting them and then excreting them. She seemed calculated to arouse every prejudice imaginable against art, and doubtless when The Sun and the Daily Mail get around to it, she will be mercilessly pilloried.

But equally, it is entirely clear, to use her own favourite word, that she won’t give a fuck, indeed she will turn such attacks, if they materialise, to her own pecuniary advantage. This is an artist who managed to persuade another artist (Simon Starling) to invite her to Spain to view his art work involving plants, then uprooted and stole one of the plants and brought it back to Goldsmith’s. (So far she has not proposed to ingest the plant and “shit it out” - that would be something to see!)

The Yiddish word chutzpah might have been invented for her – a quality once defined as the ability to murder your parents then plead for clemency in court on the grounds that you are an orphan.

I would wish her well in her career – which she describes as “what I can get away with” - but she clearly does not need my good wishes - or anyone else’s – and she will make her own way in a blistering hail of ‘fucks’ to success. Nobody that single-minded can fail. I think she herself is the art work, one that I can only marvel at …

WHAT IS ART?

This question is like asking What is Jazz? – one that prompts an Ellingtonian response along the lines of “That kind of talk stinks up the room …” But the question will continue to be posed, because art is a multi-billion dollar business and art is always political, not least in the area of arts funding and education.

I would venture to to say that most artists, like most jazz musicians, never ask themselves this question – they are driven by an imperative to create, not by definitions and labels. But once they want money, want to sell their art, or want a job in the arts, the question will arise in one way or another.

Walter Pater’s dictum that all art aspires towards the condition of music may be a useful point to start, although it is one of the most over-worked clichés about art, trotted out by every arts critic and blogger at every opportunity.

A musical anecdote -

In the mid-1970s I took up a new appointment in the Newcastle Breweries in the Personnel Department. A colleague, Derek English was a passionate lover of classical music, and quickly assessing my limited knowledge in this area, set out to educate me by generously offering to loan me items from his treasured LP collection.

“I’ll start with Beethoven,” said Derek. I then crassly replied that I didn’t like Beethoven. I got a long speculative look, then the observation that was a kind of Damascean moment for me.

“It’s OK not to like Beethoven, Peter, so long as you realise that the problem lies with you, not with Beethoven …”

So - what is Art?

I reach for my New Oxford dictionary, realising that I have never read a dictionary definition of art, and the content surprises me.

art noun 1 (mass noun) The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power … works produced by such skill and imagination – creative activity resulting in the production of paintings, drawings or sculpture.

No mention of music, literature,  or drama  - they come under the arts.

This takes me full circle, because this is what I understood as art as a child and as a young man, and it is perhaps what most people understand as art – painting, drawing and sculpture. The arts, a concept I came to later, embraces music, and drama. And of course, Goldsmith’s offers much more than painting, drawing and sculpture – it teaches music, literature, drama, design and more besides. The art college is simply part of the Visual Arts department. Much art - including my son’s art - includes text, music and dramatic elements as well as painting, drawing and sculpture.

So I must offer my thoughts on the question What is Art? in the wider definition of the arts.

Let me start with jazz, now generally accepted as an art form.

Immediately, we run into the definitions problem – what is jazz? – and the firm assertion of many ‘jazz’ musicians that they play music, not jazz, and are not prepared to be restricted in their creativity by a label.

What is jazz? Well, I know it when I hear it, but my judgement perhaps  reflects my age and my generation, although I believe that I could establish a consensus with most jazz musicians and committed listeners on what is and what is not jazz.

Most Edinburgh  aficionados of ‘jazz’ over about sixty five years of age would,  in my experience define it as so-called traditional jazz to mainstream jazz. as performed by a legion of small groups of musicians and vocalists of a similar age and era. I suspect that most Glaswegians would define it as mainstream or bebop, and most younger people would recognise  it as bebop - or later dialects of the bebop language - or as smooth jazz, although they might not recognise the terms – hard bop, fusion, etc. Some in both camps would reject utterly one or other of the forms as being jazz, echoing the narrow-minded divisions of the 1940s triggered by the emergence of bebop. Asked to define the music, they would tend to fall back on concepts of improvised or not improvised and instrumentation, none of which define jazz, and few would think of it in terms of art.

Yet jazz, almost uniquely, has the capacity to crystallise in a moment - for me at any rate – the answer to the question What is Art?

An anecdote -

When I completed my national service in 1955, I already played the clarinet, but my plans to earn some part time income from music were limited by the fact that a clarinet player could only find work in a traditional jazz band, and had to have a reasonable  ear, some improvisational skill and the ability to ‘busk’, i.e. play without written music. I had none of these skills – I was a fair reader and a reasonable technician and could play in tune, but that was about it. In jazz parlance, I was a slave to the dots (I still am!) and needed written music to perform.

That meant I had to get a saxophone if I wanted to enter the world of the semi-pro and become a gig musician. (gig in those days meant an engagement for a musician, and only musicians ‘went to the gig’. Today, the young person defines a gig as a concert or performance and the audience goes to the gig.) The saxophone god in 1955 was Paul Desmond, alto player with the Dave Brubeck quartet, darling of the American college circuit, and the man associated for ever with Take Five, that radical – for jazz – excursion into 5/4 time, and a jazz best seller, then and now.

Paul Desmond had a light, ethereal tone and a deceptively simple improvisational style, and he seemed to epitomise jazz – and accessible jazz at that. I would have killed to play like Paul Desmond, but I was rooted in older styles, and had more in common with Earl Bostic and Benny Carter than Desmond.

I had acquired an alto saxophone, was taking lessons from the best Glasgow sax teacher, Derek Hawkins, and was gigging within six weeks of buying the alto. I was also reasonably well regarded in the big band rehearsal groups that proliferated in those days because of my relative technical and reading abilities.

I was becoming complacent and reconciled to not playing like Paul Desmond when, to  my intense annoyance, a musical colleague, Alan Watson, a tenor sax player of my generation, told me of another Glasgow musician, younger than me, who “played alto like Paul Desmond”. I moved swiftly into denial mode, and said that although he might sound a bit like Desmond, he couldn’t possibly play jazz like him.

And then a seminal moment – I saw a  young, shy musician, acutely short-sighted, with beer bottle bottom spectacles, pick up his alto sax and play a few bars of music – maybe 20 or 30 seconds of music. What I heard was the essence of jazz and was undoubtedly art, and I knew in an instant that if I played and practised for a hundred years I would never be able to do what Pete Hilforty did so effortlessly that day.

That moment has been repeated a thousand time since then, often with musicians simply warming up before a performance, but always with that instant recognition of the art of jazz – not a matter of technique or study, but an innate artistic and musical sensibility and something called at its lowest level talent and at its highest, genius.

But here I must make a fundamental distinction. It is possible to play so-called traditional jazz (a very British term) with very basic instrumental technique and little or no theoretical knowledge but huge emotional intensity, but without a relatively high level of technical skill, and a sound understanding of harmony allied to a good ear, you won’t play bebop, or as it used to be called, modern jazz, a term now inappropriate for a musical form that is about seventy years old.

Another question therefore presents itself – Is art enhanced or inhibited by technique – by technical proficiency?

THE NATURAL ARTIST – TALENT versus TECHNIQUE

The Goldsmith’s programme made the point that the college has never emphasised technique, concentrating instead on helping the artist to define his or her objectives and artistic concept, and it can certainly point to a glittering record of success of its alumni, a record of both prestigious art prizes and commercial success. The names are a kind of litany of British art – Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, Lucian Freud, Mary Quant, to name but a few – and many Turner prize winners are in this number.

Goldsmith’s, for better or worse, is also associated with the art collector Charles Saatchi … So the tutorial regime and policy seem to work, insofar as one accepts the art world’s definitions of success.

Does technical facility in itself deliver artistic validity? Does a well-made painting, drawing or sculpture equate to art?

The New Oxford definition again - the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power … works produced by such skill and imagination – creative activity resulting in the production of paintings, drawings or sculpture.

Not a word about technique, unless you regard it as being implied in creative skill – and note that “beauty or emotional power” which seems to imply that a work of art can have emotional power without necessarily having beauty. If that was the intention, the converse could not have been intended, since (I would argue) a work of art cannot have beauty without also having the power to stir the emotions. There also nothing about the intellect or intellectual power, but then the mathematician would argue that a fundamental mathematical proposition can have intellectual and emotional power and beauty …

Let’s take for the purposes of analysis technically skilled ‘artists’ who produce work for corporate clients, ‘artworks’ that will be placed in public places, in the foyers of public buildings, that will stand or hang in boardrooms. I place the words artist and artworks in parentheses so as not to beg the question.

(As an aside, the phrase begging the question, currently widely misused as meaning requesting or demanding that the question be asked, in fact means presenting a proposition that demands proof without actually presenting proof. In other words it means avoiding a necessary justification.)

There can be little doubt that much of this kind of ‘art’, however technically impressive, requiring considerable technical skill, is not art in any real sense of the word. If a work of art results from this process, it is either serendipitous, or the patron has found a true artist, not just a skilled technician. For example, the music, painting, sculpture, drama and film produced during the Third Reich was in the main competent and well-executed, but was not usually art. But the propaganda documentary film of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg, Triumph of the Will, was high art and an enduring masterpiece of cinema, because the Nazis chose a highly gifted artist to make it.

(The film incidentally showed many examples of execrable Nazi art, something that Riefenstahl must have been aware of, whatever her personal allegiances.)

Of course another position may be taken on artworks – that they are all art, but some are bad and some are good. The only criterion is – did the artist intend them to be art? But then we are back to the question – can a work of art be produced inadvertently by someone who had no such intention? A photograph that was  perhaps simply intended to be an accurate record of a scene or events, may turn out to be art, and utilitarian objects and buildings may likewise be judged by an experienced and expert eye to be art.

Other perennial questions arise, among them -

Can art result from unintentional or random effort?

Are beautiful patterns in the sand on a beach or ice crystals on a window art? They may certainly be beautiful – beauty does not necessarily require intent or creativity, unless one invokes a Creator – a Supreme Being – or a Gaia principle, but they are not art. From the Lascaux Palaeolithic cave paintings through to Damien Hirst, art requires a human creator and an artistic intent – a vision.

Must an artist also have a motivation to communicate with an audience?

Most certainly do, but I have known artists who, for all or part of their creative lives, seemed to wish to communicate only with themselves. Some indeed appeared to be satisfied with the process of producing the artwork, and destroyed it after completion. And historically there have been artists who wished only to communicate with their God.

My son reminds me that Samuel Pepys had no apparent intention to communicate with anyone during or after his lifetime, yet undoubtedly produced a great literary work of art. That other great essayist, Michel de Montanus – Montaigne – initially had no thought of producing art or literature, but he achieved both, and did publish in his lifetime, but with no intention of achieving a wide circulation. Since I cannot conceive of life without either of of them, I can only be grateful that their intentions were frustrated by posterity.

Must a work of art communicate with and be appreciated and enjoyed by a large number of people before it can be considered as art?

I would answer a pretty definite no to the question, indeed some artist only achieved success posthumously, but the works were clearly art even before the judgement of posterity. And some great works of art have only ever been appreciated by a comparatively small number of people, but a small group that could tell shit from Shinola – people who have devoted their lives and their energies to art, and who know what they are talking about.  An elitist argument I know, but although as a citizen I am a democrat and believe in the voice of the majority of the people, in matters of taste I am unashamedly elitist.

To the argument that it’s all a matter of taste, I reply, yes – good taste and bad taste. The problem lies with you, mate, not with Beethoven, or Van Gogh  or Leonardo Da Vinci or Goethe.

SOME TENTATIVE STATEMENTS ON ART

The production of a work of art demands -

An artistic concept, idea or vision

A wish to realise that concept tangibly and to communicate it to an audience, however small, and perhaps consisting only of the artist

Sufficient technical capacity to realise the concept or vision, however imperfectly

The verdict on the artwork by art experts, leaving aside entirely commercial judgements will usually include seeing the work in the context of its intentions, its impact on the observer, the artist’s other work (few artists achieve a reputation solely on the basis of one work, although its does happen) and to some degree its technical competence.

When a work of art has been consistently highly regarded by experienced art critics and collectors over an extended period of time – decades, perhaps centuries – then it may well be styled a masterpiece. Some art is very much of its time; it is in vogue then it becomes part of art history, but perhaps no more than that.

Bear in mind that all of the above represent the thoughts of someone who is not an artist, has a rather narrow range of artistic understanding, but to whom art has always been a vital part of life. In that sense, I perhaps understand the ordinary man’s perception of art better than the art expert, and I may have an insight into the thinking of the art Philistines, whilst rejecting their negativism.

And so back to Goldsmith’s – But is it Art? Part One.

Many of the undergraduates featured in the programme were   consumed with self-doubt and apprehensions  (with the notable exception of the young Irish artist, stealing, ingesting and excreting and not giving a fuck) about the validity of their art and where their futures lay.

Among the things that concerned them were recognition of the labour involved in some forms of art, e.g. painting and sculpture, and – a key issue – control of their own work. Most were also spending money to make work and receiving nothing in return.

The student who had been a designer of armour (body armour for police and security services, etc.) was grappling with the change in mindset required in coming from a highly structured profession engaged with hard realities and tangible things into the Goldsmith’s philosophy of the artistic idea and intent behind the work. He also struggled with his tutors’ idea that if an art work could be ‘read’ quickly, it was not good art.

Preparing for the exhibition of their art, many were clearly uneasy that all their work and study rested on the success of this show, and they found the preparation and lead-up to the show highly stressful. Not the least of their worries was which of their existing artworks and projects they selected to showcase their work. Each artist was allocated a space for their personal show, and when they saw their space for the first time, some were unnerved by the need to consider how their artwork would be presented in a three-dimensional space that would include those viewing the art.

Art exists in the mind, in the eye, in the ear,  in the senses (tactile, taste, smell) and in space and in time.

For the painters, with one or more two-dimensional objects to display, dealing with the challenges that this presented seemed threatening. One must assume that, as artists, they regularly viewed art in museums, galleries and public places, but the idea of their own art in a space seemed to come on them as a bolt from the blue.

(For my son, whose art is mainly installation art, utilising images, text, music and live performance,  the concept of placement in space and time is fundamental, as it is to all such artists.)

The choice of work and spatial positioning dilemmas were most in evidence in the artist who featured Olympic mascots from Beijing in his work. He seemed to lack confidence in his own work (to my eye, it was the best in the show) and launched uncomfortably into a typical piece of artspeak, going on woodenly about it being a critique of the Beijing regime.

The tutors liked his art but disagreed with his choices for the show, and for his placement of the paintings.

The idea came up of an artwork being an argument – a proposal to the world. There is no doubt that many art movements and some notable artworks have been just that. But the idea that was absent in the programme, if not in the Goldsmith’s philosophy, was one that is central to my concept of art – the expression or capture of a unique view of the world and its hidden meanings, the ones that lurk tantalisingly just below the surface of things. Photography, when it is art, captures this innate strangeness and mystery in what are often seemingly banal scenes of ordinary life.

Then we had the paintball gun. Well, it’s not Jackson Pollock, but I suppose it has some sort of validity. An artist needs many technical gifts, but I had never thought of his ability to aim a weapon being one of them. One tutor drily observed that since he could do all that with a brush, the gun had to be on display to help the visually and imaginatively challenged to get the point. Our artist, having striven to adapt to the Goldsmith’s view and abandon his own literal-mindedness, felt that this was a bit literal, and was confused, because as he said “I’m trying to play by their rules …”

There were some reminiscences about a former student who had shit noisily in a glass bottle then painted it green. This had scandalised the students who had watched the artist straining at stool, but it had met the criterion of provoking a response. This brought the Punk movement to my mind, but the less I say about punk as a musical form or an art form the better.

The last word goes to Roisin, our feisty Irish artist. In response to the suggestion that she should be ready to sell herself to those viewing the show by getting cards printed, she responded “I'd rather spend the money on a few fuckin’ drinks …” Brendan Behan would have loved her.

© Copyright Peter Curran 2010

© Copyright Peter Curran

Jazz in Moridura

(first published in American Chronicle – March 2007)

Jazz - the music of Moridura

The Ancient Order of Moridura reflects the three enthusiasms of its hero, Alistair Mackinnon. I say hero - he is certainly a central character, but a number of the male characters could lay claim to being heroes, so perhaps I should call him one of my heroes. (Of my heroines, I may not speak …)

Alistair loves classic jazz, cinema and literature, and he has communicated these enthusiasms to his young friend, Paul Corr, and to others, in an unlikely context. Music features at a number of points in the narrative, and musical analogies are used at times of high tension and emotion.

How do I define classic jazz?

A legion of jazz enthusiasts will doubtless be roused to a fury of indignation by my definition, which is jazz created in the half century from 1917 to 1967. I do not for a moment suggest that the music created after that period is not of enormous artistic value, simply that only time will give it the status of classic jazz. The jazz of the legendary pre-history of the music, what might be called the Buddy Bolden era, would undoubtedly deserve this status, but we have little record of it.

Two of the big Scot's idols are trumpet players - Louis Armstrong and Bix Beiderbecke, one a poor black boy from the red-light district of New Orleans – Storyville - and the other a middle-class white boy, of German-American extraction, from Davenport, Indiana. They were born within two years of each other, in the ragtime era, and we can be sure that no one could have forecast how their futures would converge in the music that was becoming jazz. They influenced two very different schools of jazz trumpet playing, the hot and the cool respectively, but Louis' towering genius went beyond the trumpet, influencing every jazz instrumentalist, creating jazz singing almost single-handed, with major inputs from Bing Crosby and Connie Boswell, and ultimately influencing the whole of popular music, an influence of which most of our young rock and pop musicians are blissfully unaware.

Alistair’s other idol is Charlie Parker, an alto saxophone player, of a later generation, born in 1920. Parker, together with the trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, totally transformed jazz into the new form, bebop, virtually inventing a new musical language in the process. The transformation was a painful one for many of the older generation of musicians, many of whom could not, or did not wish to adapt their styles to the complex musical and technical demands of the new form. The great war between the boppers and the 'mouldy figs' has left its legacy to this day, with some doctrinaire - and cloth-eared - adherents of either form totally rejecting the other. Alistair was an impressionable youth when the war was at its height, but never took sides, recognizing the merits of both musical forms. However, he would readily acknowledge that he has not really adapted to many of the forms of jazz created since then, while not denying their validity.

The first jazz piece we are introduced to is Bix's At the Jazzband Ball, played at the party in Alistair's home on the banks of Loch Lomond in Scotland, and designed to lure the shy Paul down from his bedroom to the main reception.



At the Jazzband Ball was the record that Alistair had used to convert the sceptical Paul to jazz many years before, by insisting that he play it twenty times, on a wager that he would then voluntarily play for the twenty first time, and be hooked! It reappears later in the unlikely setting of the monastery of Moridura.

Alistair had also used Parker's Mood, a formidable extended 12-bar blues improvisation by Bird (Charlie Parker), to move Paul's appreciation on to the bebop form, a much more difficult task. Parker's Mood reappears later in the monastery setting.

The third piece of music, It's Tight Like That, belongs to Louis Armstrong, and surprisingly, is not a piece highly regarded by many jazz critics, as opposed to Louis' great masterpieces such as West End Blues and Potato Head Blues.



This melancholy little piece, a popular tune of the time in a minor key, with its odd verbal exchanges, almost certainly sexual in nature, has a simple harmonic structure. However, a least one critic has described Louis' majestic solo as being suffused with a feeling of tragedy, and it is admired by Alistair, who dismisses the critics with an airy "What do they know?" Significantly, the solo fascinates the young monk Mateo, who entertains the sacrilegious notion that Louis might have been an earthly incarnation of the Angel Gabriel. Mateo also finds something profoundly Spanish in the solo, a view ridiculed by Manuel Ortega.

There are other musical references in the book, to Ko-Ko, Charlie Parker's revolutionary improvisation on the chords of Cherokee by Ray Noble, utilizing the upper particles of the harmonic structure in a completely new way, and From Monday On, an old Paul Whiteman tune, with Bing Crosby on vocal and Bix on cornet. Manuel once played tenor guitar - a four-string guitar - and the visiting American industrialist, Pick Carter, takes his nickname from his guitar playing college days.





Perhaps this outline will encourage those of my readers unfamiliar with jazz to expand their knowledge of the music, may illuminate the narrative of my book, and will perhaps prompt them to go further in exploring this wonderful music.

© Copyright Peter Curran 2007/2010

© Copyright Peter Curran

Elements of a classic movie from a book

(First published in American Chronicle 2007)

Will the latest blockbuster book make a good movie?

Anyone who knows the answer will get rich quick. The fact that a book is highly readable, unputdownable, a best seller - none of these qualities will guarantee its success as a movie. Some great books have made lousy films, and conversely, some lousy books have made great films. How can this be? What are the factors that make for a great screenplay and a box office success?

Let's look at an undisputed classic - The Maltese Falcon.

Dashiel Hammett's crackling dialogue and rapier-like wisecracking can clearly be lifted from the page and translated into the screenplay, but only a casting director with an expert eye and ear could put the unforgettable lines into the mouths of a Sydney Greenstreet, a Humphrey Bogart and the ineffable Elisha Cook  Junior.

The combined talents of the cameraman, the lighting director and the director vibrantly brought to life the wonderful scenes of the plot, and the musical director added that essential atmosphere that can only be implied in prose, however descriptive. But the potential was all there to start with.

Much the same could be said of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, and nothing that has not already been said can be added on that wonder of the cinema, Gone With the Wind, a triumphant translation of Margaret Mitchell's best seller into a cinematic masterpiece, a glorious Technicolor realisation of the author's fertile imagination.

So we see the beginnings of what might constitute the essential elements of a book that will metamorphose into a screen triumph, the building blocks that will translate one art form into another.

There must be a strong central theme - the great skeletal underpinning of the book - one that moves from a dramatic statement of purpose, perhaps an initially hidden purpose, that drives the principal characters towards a final dramatic resolution. And what of these characters? We must identify with them, understand their hopes, share their fears, forgive their weaknesses, tremble with them in their moments of trial. Our villains - must we hate them? We must fear them, perhaps on occasion despise them, but nonetheless, feel that they are after all, fallible human beings, subject to loves and hates, hopes and fears.

Of course, a single, central theme will not be enough to sustain interest and momentum - there must be secondary plots, sub-texts, that mirror the complexity of real life, and add the vital realism and suspension of disbelief as we follow the story.

There must be great set-piece scenes, envisaged and described in time and space, ones that evoke strong emotional responses - ecstasy, wonderment, claustrophobia, fear, anticipation.

And perhaps most of all, the dialogue must be vitally real, and come from the fully rounded personalities that the book presents us with, reflecting their whole personalities and inner life - what they have been, what they are and what they may become. Even in the most nightmarish situations, there must be humour - black humour on occasion, perhaps. Above all, there must be love and hate, laughter and tears, a sense of things lost and a sense of new beginnings - and there must be hope!

The descriptive passages on the history and motivation of the characters must be dumped. Faced with the three-dimensional characters (figuratively speaking - cinema is still two dimensional, but not for much longer) on screen, the public need only a few hints to get the picture

But the dialogue must be there - the iron dictum is that a good script can save a bad movie, but good production values and special effects can't save a poor script.

©Copyright Peter Curran 2007/2010

Cinema, music, television and radio

This blog will be a highly personal view of cinema, music, television and radio, with a bias to classic cinema, jazz and the music of the great popular songwriters of the twentieth century. I wil re-cycle a few pieces originally posted elsewhere to get me going, and then target at least one new piece per week.