The politics of museum displays

Paris is great, even in December, but being back from Paris can be a bit of a sharp comedown.
While wending my way around the galleries of the Louvre which house ancient archaeological pieces from an area roughly described as the Levant - Palestine, Lebanon, Southern Syria, Jordan, Israel - the disparity between the different bits of the museum struck me.
In the big, exciting, fashionable, child-friendly Egypt galleries, for instance, and other areas like the Assyrian and Mesopotamian galleries, noneof which are associated with major current political issues, the spaces are clean and bright and newly-furnished-looking, and the display cabinets are new and expensive-looking, and there are attractive places to sit, and plenty of these have been sponsored by one big international corporation or another, as evidenced by the plaques with their names on.
But in the complicated and controversial and unfashionable area that is 'the Levant,' the vibe is very different, with slightly grubby walls and floors, tatty cases, little seating and older, sparser labelling of many of the objects. Granted, most of the stuff here is less sexy - no vast reconstructions of Assyrian palaces, or stunning wall-sized sculptures. But the 3-foot-high Jordanian plaster figure, older than any pottery and with blank inhuman eyes but a bizarrely realistic child's nose was pretty amazing to me. But could it be that those big corporate donors don't want to get mixed up with this stuff, that even those donors from the Arab world who are happy to claim more resplendant, less currently complex civilisations for themselves, are chary of association with this untidy, emotionally and politically loaded corner of the Middle East?

Train torture

At this time of year it's hard to feel like one of the biggest impediments to sustainable transport in the UK is the British train industry. Having spent the last few weeks making regular visits to the trainline.com website to see if they've deigned to start listing affordable tickets for Christmas, I am now convinced that the modern version of Mr Scrooge is a bunch of rail industry prices executives laughing to themselves while anyone who doesn't fancy shelling out (for example) £65 a pop to get home for Christmas has to waste their time watching train ticket websites like a hawk. And then when they finally release all three reasonably priced tickets, they will sell in ten seconds flat and half the desperate buyers will be faced with that horrible patronising screen that some scumbag copywriter at trainline.com has invented to tell you lies about where the ticket you just tried to buy has disappeared to in cyberspace.
This country really badly needs decent public transport, and the grasping corporations ijn place aren't providing it. We need to tax the tits off the aviation industry and instead of building another insanely polluting runway at Heathrow, put the money into an improved, not-for-profit rail system.
And then we need to hang Richard Branson up by his heels from the front of one of his Pendelinos and tug on his cheeky little goatee till his eyes pop out.

Meeja horing

Well, rather bizarrely OA and I seem to have degenerated into poster children for not having kids for environmental reasons - OA's vasectomy has now managed to make its way into Ethical Consumer magazine, the Metro, BBC2's Heaven & Earth, the Observer and now the Femail section of the Daily Mail.
The Observer, done by their environment & transport editor Juliette Jowit, was generally a fairly positive experience. Juliette was a genuinely interesting person to talk to, wrote an excellent article and was obviously very interested in properly exploring the issue of population and the environment. After the horror of the Observer Woman section and its general pathetic vacuousness, being involved in this article kind of restored a small amount of my faith in this publication (though I still want one of those Observer Woman Makes Me Spit t-shirts). The pic of me was a bit of a horror, but at least Albert's beans on the allotment looked good!
Daily Mail writer Morag Turner wasn't as horrible as I was expecting from this fascist rag (Overgrown Antipodean and I will be donating half our fee for the piece to the National Coalition of Anti-Deportation Campaigns), although she obviously had a fairly shallow understanding of and interest in the subject. You kind of got the impression that she was a bit bored of writing the usual tripe that goes in Femail and had aspirations (not matched by the quality of her article, unfortunately), to write 'proper' stuff. The quotes from OA and I that made it into the article bore a slightly bizarre and vague relation to what we actually said, but that's tabloids for you. The most traumatic bit of this whole experience was getting photographed - I knew we were going to have a photographer round, but was utterly unprepared for the appearance of the makeup artist, who proceeded to plaster me in more slap than I've worn in about the last 15 years and certainly more than I have ever worn at one time in my entire life. I looked like a raddled old slapper and my hair kept sticking to me. The photographer was a kind of old-style gent, but the makeup artist was weird - we started off thinking that she was rather standoffish, but rapidly realised that actually is was just that breahing occupied all synapses, and she certainly couldn't walk and speak at the same time. And the result was infinitely more horrible than anything the no-makeup, bit-of-a-weird expression Observer guy inflicted on what miniscule public reputation I may have!
Well, Daily Mail woman is now talking about pimping us to Grazia or something similar. Will have to see what the fee would be... and maybe donate half of that one to something radical feminist. Unless of course they see this blog...
Observer article:
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,,2206650,00.html
Daily Mail article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=495495&in_page_id=1879

Is this a ham I see before me?

Well, it's a bit off-topic but I suppose it fits into corporate ethics on the grounds of gouging bastard London theatres, and into art on the grounds of being a Shakespeare play. But generally I just need another opportunity to vent some spleen, whilst possibly getting a warning out there to anyone still planning to cough up serious cash for the West End production of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart.
Overgrown Antipodean (see http://theethicalwedding.blogspot.com for who this is) reckons that the reason this production had theatre critics creaming themselves en masse is that they're all middle aged men whose egos have been stroked by the idea that a bald 60-something can play a part better suited to a man in his 30s or 40s, with its implications of military and physical prowess. It's as good an explanation as any.
I was really excited about seeing this play. Macbeth has always been one of my favourites and I've never seen it done on stage. I have been known to 'fess up to a liking for Mr Stewart too, although I did go off him slightly after reading somewhere that he'd left his wide for a bit of stuff, which is just tediouslt stereotypical of aging actors whose careers are doing well, and really not in Jean-Luc's class. So prior to actually seeing it, this play had a lot going for it. And it's not often I shell out nearly £40 each for theatre tickets.
Oh dear. Was I ever wrong. I mean, it wasn't really, really diabolical or anything (well, one or two bits were). But it certainly wasn't up to the hype, and some bits were really quite ropey. Patrick Stewart was the hammiest thing alive. There's one scene in which he makes a ham sandwich and you just want to yell, Mary Whitehouse Experience style, 'that's you that is!' at him. What are directors for but to tell people they're hamming themselves into seriously unhalal territory and looking very, very silly in the process. OA nearly laughed a couple of times, and he is damn sure that if he had, plenty of the audience may well have succumbed too and then where would have Mr S been?
Next up is the big 3 witches 'double, double toil and trouble' speech. Now, this bit needs to be done well because the coherence of the plot of much of the rest of the play rests on understanding what they're saying. So doing it as some dodgy semi-rap with a lot of feedback hissing is really, really unhelpful. And when you do it in a style which is blatantly a rip-off of the 1990s video to Shakepeare's Sister's 'stay,' the one with Marcella Detroit and Siobhan Fahey fighting over some prine bloke in a hospital bed, then it just gets really daft. I mean, director blokey, did you think no-one would notice? Dear oh dear.
And then there's the generic authoritarianism motif which seems to be de rigeur for any play in London which is vaguely about power, kingship, corruption, authority etc etc etc. I'm sure once, about twenty years ago, this was a fresh and interesting take, but now it's just a bit sloppy and vaguely offensive to use shots from Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in such an imprecise and slapdash way.
There were some good things. Banquo's ghost standing bloodied on the dining table; the slithery bloodspots projected on the background; Lady Macbeth looking very fine in a rather nice bias-cut evening frock. But, to be honest, I'd quite like my 40 quid back. And my main lesson from this? Well, never trust a critic, but that goes without staying. But for my Shakespeare, I'm definitely sticking to the regions and hoping for some more quality like the wonderful, brilliant production of the Tempest this summer at Manchester's Royal Exchange, with Pete Postlethwaite.

Sands of Sorrow

Profoundly moving film made in 1950 or so showing the experiences of Palestinian refugees forced from their homes during the establishment of the State of Israel. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8047351706461342401&q=uranium&pl=true