Doldrums – Lesser Evil, and Live at De Nieuwe Anita, Amsterdam

Subbacultcha! is, in its own words, an ‘independent, multidisciplinary cultural platform’ based in Amsterdam. It produces an extensive monthly magazine focusing on experimental and emerging independent musical artists; and arranges a diverse and regular programme of music concerts, film showings and art exhibitions throughout the Netherlands and Belgium. Hosting concerts in a variety of venues across Amsterdam, including Trouw, OT301, and Sugar Factory, De Nieuwe Anita – a small venue to the west of the centre beyond the Jordaan, along the Frederik Hendrikstraat, with a bar out front and a dance floor with a balcony – remains Subbacultcha!’s home in the city.

Doldrums – an electronic dance musician originally from Toronto, now based in Montreal; whose debut album, Lesser Evil, came out in Europe and the US earlier this week, and has begun obtaining highly positive reviews (falling, alas, but a handful of decimal points from securing a ‘Best New Music’ tag at Pitchfork today) – performed at De Nieuwe Anita under the auspices of Subbacultcha! last Saturday.

The evening’s support act was Cosmo V, apparently the name of a sole woman, whose latest EP and official debut, No Name Street, is scheduled for release in the next month. Live, Cosmo V took the form of a five-piece band, with the female singer accompanied by a drummer, a couple of guitarists, one of whom occasionally played sustaining synth sounds via a MicroKorg, and a final individual on synthesiser and digital percussion. The band were suitably energetic given the performance that was to come, playing a heavy art-rock with charismatic vocals, particularly effective when accompanied by droning synths in the earlier songs of the set.

Doldrums, the name taken by the twenty-three year old Airick Woodhead, plays a boisterous dance music with layered and distorted samples, rich bass and a varied, shifting percussion. Often conceived as part of a Montreal scene, including his friends and the fellow artists Grimes, Blood Diamonds and Purity Ring (the latter two who have, incidentally, played at De Nieuwe Anita and Trouw respectively in the last several months), Doldrums’ music is similarly experimental but denser and more earthy, and seems to draw from a different palette of sounds.

I’ve listed to Lesser Evil on record a few times since the concert, and it is already a really engaging and enjoyable album, which seems likely to unfold upon further hearings. The percussion sometimes features bold or strident hip-hop influenced drum breaks, at other times oriental bells and chimes, and there are also glitches which combine with melodies on the closing songs to produce a music which feels quite plaintive, whilst at the same time retaining the warmth and the optimism which surges throughout the album. In fact, Lesser Evil flows between movements, the first closing with the song ‘Sunrise’; followed by a strong and worldly middle sequence, beginning with the single ‘Egypt’ and progressing to the title song; and concluding with three final songs of a piece in their darker and calmer tones. A suggestive summation would be that the sound here is something akin to a particularly heavy conflux of Animal Collective and Múm. Woodhead’s voice is often pitched very high, and breaks through with a lot of spirit and clarity above or carrying through the thick rhythms of the music.

On Saturday, Doldrums was accompanied by a fellow musician who provided vocal accompaniment and a visceral yet steady and consistent percussive flair. Maracas were tossed upon the ground. A man at the forefront of the audience, who I presume knew the musicians and was a deliberate part of the proceedings, wearing a sort of waistcoat and shirt, engaged in a range of instigatory dances, most frequently returning to a form of the Running Man. The show was fresh and full of energy without being frantic. In this live setting, the vocals sounded deeper, and amidst a whirl of genres – from techno to hip-hop to psychedelia to folk – there seemed the distinct presence of jungle in the pieces performed from Lesser Evil. The final few songs were from Doldrums’ earlier work, the closer the buoyant electro-pop of ‘Jump Up’.

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Doldrums has uploaded Lesser Evil in full over on his SoundCloud page, at: https://soundcloud.com/doldrumss/sets/lesser-evil

amsterdamarm: A Blog and a Guide to the City

amsterdamarm

Over the past couple of days, or really since the weekend, I’ve been working on a sort of hybrid, a cross between a blog which will consider daily life in Amsterdam, with an emphasis on art and culture, and a cultural guide to the city. The site is ready to ‘go live’, I think; and this post serves to recognise and declare the fact. The site’s address is:

http://www.amsterdamarm.com/

and it will be linked from this moment on at the top of the page, via the lowercase ‘amsterdam’.

The site is supposed to complement this one, and its related tumblr. pages, culturedarm and visualarm. Lengthy reviews of musical events, art exhibitions, and restaurants will remain here and be linked via amsterdamarm. Obviously all extensive discussion, hypotheses and analyses and explorations regarding pieces of art will remain here. The site will, in its first endeavour, essentially be a place where I can blog about some of the more immediate goings on in the city, providing briefer, more throwaway, but nevertheless engaging comments, depictions, reviews, highlights, and so on and so forth. I’ll post pictures of the city on a regular basis too.

The second part of the site consists of a series of guides to the city. At the moment, I have produced fairly extensive guides to the city’s musical venues – popular, classical and jazz – and cinemas, featuring pictures, descriptions, directions, and links. Another guide currently details what may be found upon visiting the city’s four most prominent art museums: the Van Gogh, Stedelijk, Hermitage Amsterdam and Rijksmuseum. These guides, the latter in particular, will be updated in the coming days and weeks, and continually thereafter. A fourth link will, provisionally at least, simply collate all those postings on the front page which relate to food, to restaurants, bars, and cafés. I roughly intend to produce a guide to the best shops and markets in the city for music, for art, for literature, for food. The site may also develop and extend in unintended ways.

Arsène Wenger’s Upset: Arsenal in Review

During a press conference last Monday, Arsène Wenger bemoaned the severity of the criticism leveled at his side after their weekend FA Cup home defeat to lower-league Blackburn; and argued he had been shown a lack of respect by the morning’s report in The Sun, which he described as without foundation, which stated that he was set to be offered a two-year extension to a contract currently set to run until the summer of 2014. Wenger, perceptively enough given the timing of the report and the nature of the publication involved, clearly interpreted it as an incendiary piece, its point, in essence, ‘Arsenal don’t look like a winning anything for another year – and Wenger’s going to be given a reward!’.

Wenger’s comments – which, while forceful, appear from the available footage of the press conference to have been made relatively calmly and coherently; though a Guardian report suggests he showed an increased anger after the recorded portion of the press conference was over – were depicted by The Mirror as constituting a ‘meltdown’; as ‘furious’ by The Guardian; and Yahoo! Eurosport claimed they indicated a man ‘cracking up’. The BBC were a little more restrained, suggesting Wenger appeared ‘riled’; but they did feature on their football page a tirade by Stewart Robson, a former Arsenal player and frequent critic of the club, claiming Wenger was solely at fault for Arsenal’s problems this season and should have been sacked five years ago. The Daily Mail, for their part, led after the Blackburn match with ‘Wenger hits rock bottom’; and published a piece in the lead-up to Tuesday’s Champions League encounter with Bayern Munich headed, ‘Taxi for Wenger? No, he’s more like crazed cabbie Travis Bickle’.

Thus the focus of the football media – who, after all, do not like being shouted at, unless it simply cannot be helped – was already squarely on Wenger before Arsenal suffered a fairly comprehensive 1-3 defeat in their home-leg against Bayern. Their tone since then has remained either explicitly or insidiously derogatory. The Sun ran a piece titled ‘Wen will this end?’; The Mirror made a fortuitous discovery, ‘Out on his Arsene? Wenger lookalike spotted outside Job Centre as Mourinho installed as favourite to replace him’, and followed up with ‘Is it time for Arsene Wenger to go?’ and ‘Wen will he realise? Arsene caved on Tuesday and he’s lost his touch’; in a similar vein The Independent asked, ‘Should Arsène Wenger stay or should he go now?’; and the Evening Standard wrote ‘Wenger rages and a great club gets left behind’. In the aftermath to the Champions League match, the BBC ran a misleading headline, ‘Don’t sack Wenger says Vermaelen’; and a piece by their chief football writer questioned Wenger’s future. In this way the media collectively forced an interpretation, and demanded an answer to a question not really being asked within Arsenal football club: whatever the discontent among some of the fans, Wenger has never indicated the slightest inclination towards leaving before the expiration of his contract, and the Arsenal board have always steadfastly supported their manager.

The British media have never wholeheartedly warmed to a man who is neither British nor shares a British attitude towards the game. The representative of this attitude is not Sam Allardyce nor Tony Pulis – two managers noted for their teams’ direct and physical play, with whom Wenger has at different times come into conflict – but Alex Ferguson. Alex Ferguson has devoted his life to football and, now 71 years old, shows no signs of slowing down or calming down. He continues to pursue success ruthlessly, aggressively, and contemptuous of any criticism that comes his way – to the point that journalists who report on his club in a way he deems unsatisfactory will find themselves debarred from interviews and press meets. Throughout his career, he has routinely questioned the integrity of players and officials alike, attempting to exert pressure upon them for his own ends; and his Manchester United sides established in the Premier League the practice of haranguing officials. Despite it contradicting this behaviour, however, there is still about Ferguson and entrenched in British football the idea that football remains, on some level, only a game, and not to be taken too much to heart. The practical manifestations of this idea include such niceties as managers shaking hands and meeting one another for bottles of wine after games. Those who are deemed to disregard or flout the idea in some way – among them Kevin Keegan, Rafa Benítez and Wenger himself – are open to chastisement or ridicule.

The message pushed by the British media has found its way across waters: The New York Times ran a report titled, ‘Arsenal Is a Mess, and Wenger Takes the Blame’. Yet how much of a mess are Arsenal actually in? Splitting the matter very broadly into two sides, there are some who would argue Wenger has been shown undue leniency owing to his past achievements and a unique set of circumstances at Arsenal. The opposing view is that Wenger’s supposed failures over the last number of seasons are relative failures at most, and that the club remains well off with him in charge.

My view is that the distress suffered by Arsenal on the pitch has been very much overplayed; and that Wenger remains crucially important to the Premier League precisely because he is individual within it, and manages Arsenal according to a perhaps deeply imperfect set of principles, but still to a set of principles deeply rooted and profoundly different.

Arsenal provide the strongest evidence that a club’s expenditure on wages, rather than their expenditure on transfer fees, determines their Premier League results: Arsenal’s consistent presence in the top four of the league, over the past ten or so years, equates to their consistent presence amongst the league’s top four or five spenders on wages. What distinguishes Arsenal in this realm is their wage cap. Steadfastly maintained, it means that there is a relatively narrow spread between the wages given to the club’s top players and their fringe and youth squad. This certainly means that some younger players, and some experienced and thoroughly mediocre players, are being paid too much. More, it arguably means that they struggle to attract and maintain the very top players. Still, the approach bears the quality of novelty, and my inclination is that it is less inflationary, and less detrimental to the sport overall, than the habit of other big clubs to cave to the increasingly exorbitant demands of their top players.

When it comes to transfers, Arsenal have faced criticism for selling their star players and refusing to spend on proven replacements. The notion that they routinely sell their best players is exaggerated. Both Patrick Vieira and Thierry Henry were approaching their thirtieth birthdays when they left the club for big fees, and both were past their respective footballing bests; though there was perhaps a case for retaining at least one of the two owing to their stature and experience. Cesc Fàbregas was undoubtedly sold most reluctantly, eager to return to Spain to play for the club he supports; and Robin van Persie left for Manchester United last summer at his peak as a football player, in a move which Arsenal were terribly lax in allowing to develop, yet which hardly cast Van Persie in an admirable light, given that he moved to one of the club’s biggest rivals having only fulfilled his potential over the previous season or two. Emmanuel Adebayor and Alex Song were not fundamental to Arsenal’s side and were sold for hefty sums; Gaël Clichy had stagnated and was no longer performing for the club; and Samir Nasri was as inessential for Arsenal as he remains for Manchester City.

Wenger’s failure here has been in the replacements he has signed. He has undoubtedly been limited for a number of years by the £390 million Arsenal spent financing the Emirates Stadium: completing the stadium in 2006, the debt the club accrued currently stands at £253 million, and won’t be paid off in its entirety until 2031. As a consequence, to help balance their debts, Arsenal have actually made money in the transfer market over the past ten years: since 2003, they have made a £15 million net profit, where Chelsea have spent over £500 million net, Manchester City over £400 million, Liverpool about £170 million and Manchester United £120 million. There are suggestions that – with their debts stable and a strong cash balance, owing partly to the money which has come in from developing Highbury into a luxury apartment complex, and also to a renewed five-year sponsorship deal with Fly Emirates – Arsenal will be able to spend heavily this summer. Still, spending £10 million a piece on Per Mertesacker, Laurent Koscielny and Thomas Vermaelen in past seasons has not provided a consistent, complementary central-defence pairing; Arsenal lack some strength in their midfield; and there remain questions about their goalkeeper and the best way to structure their attack.

Nevertheless, on the pitch, there is a tendency to overstate the extent of Arsenal’s decline over the past number of years. It is true that Arsenal last won a trophy in 2005, at the end of which season they lifted the FA Cup. Prior to 2005, Wenger’s trophy haul was exemplary: after becoming Arsenal manager early in the 1996/97 season, he led the club to three Premier League titles and four FA Cups, plus four Community Shields. Since 2005, Arsenal have reached three finals – of the Champions League in 2005/06; and the League Cup in 2006/07 and 2010/11 – but have come away on each occasion without a result. The closest they’ve been to recapturing the Premier League title was in 2007/08, when they finished in third place, four points behind Manchester United, the title winners. Arsenal’s side now is significantly inferior to the side they possessed just a couple of seasons ago. While they lack the same fluidity, they remain capable of some of the best football in the Premier League, with talented players including Santi Cazorla and Jack Wilshere, and exciting and direct attackers in Lukas Podolski and Theo Walcott.

Wenger inherited in 1996 a club that had finished fourth once in the Premier League era, also finishing in 10th, 12th and 5th; under his charge, Arsenal have never finished outside of the top four. They currently sit fifth in the Premier League table, four points behind Tottenham, with a superior goal difference; five points behind Chelsea in third; and two points ahead of Everton in sixth. Liverpool are five points back and have played a game more. They have been in poorer positions in recent seasons and have recovered the ground; though there may be the feeling that, this year, the group of challengers is especially wide and relatively strong.

It remains that a top four finish and Champions League football every season is underachieving at a very high level. Trophies in football are not the only benchmarks of success, and sometimes appear more the objects of an instant and a miserly gratification, overemphasised because Manchester United have been so successful for so long in winning them within England. Only four clubs have beaten Manchester United to Premier League titles; Blackburn and Manchester City once, and Arsenal and Chelsea three times apiece. Wenger’s three title wins make him the second most successful manager in the history of the league. With so much weight placed upon trophies, few are the sides who frequently obtain them. Any questioning regarding Wenger’s future should, at least, be put less in the context of a supposedly drastic and desultory decline; and instead it must consider whether, in the circumstances, Wenger is not continuing to perform solidly and well; and whether there exist candidates who, facing some of the same challenges, will at once bring Arsenal the trophies their fans desire and which the club is presumed to need and deserve. A distinctive, positive and enjoyable style of football, consistency towards the very top end of a challenging league, and the sense of identity that comes through coherency and persistence of character – all these things should be cherished, whilst a change of manager is no guarantee of increased entertainment, much less of any immediate triumph.

Alexander Blok – ‘Night, street, street-light, drugstore,…’ (1912)

Alexander Blok (Александр Блок) (1880-1921) was the foremost of the Russian Symbolists, who changed the face of Russian letters from the late 1890s through until the Russian Revolution, leading Russian literature into a ‘Silver Age’ after the great works of the previous century.

Chekhov died in 1904, and Tolstoy, over thirty years his senior, not until 1910. Tolstoy published his final novel, Resurrection, in 1899; worked on Hadji Murat – which wasn’t published until after his death – until about 1904; and wrote and published one of his great short stories, ‘Alyosha the Pot’, in 1905. Chekhov’s stature as a playwright owes to his later years: The Seagull premiered in 1896, Uncle Vanya in 1899, Three Sisters in 1901, and The Cherry Orchard in 1904. Some of his best short stories were written during the same period, including ‘The Bishop’ as late as 1902, but especially ‘Lady With the Toy Dog’ (1899) (otherwise known as ‘Lady With the Little Dog’, or ‘Small Dog’, or ‘Pet Dog’, or simply ‘Dog’) and ‘In the Ravine’ (1900). Indeed, Chekhov’s career as a serious writer was only established in the latter half of the 1890s, when the Symbolist movement in Russia was itself emerging under Merezhkovsky, Balmont and Bryusov.

Still, the work of Chekhov and the later works of Tolstoy sit happily alongside the writings of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky and Turgenev, as well as Tolstoy’s earlier pieces. All of these writers extended, in various manners and through various disciplines, into the twentieth century and beyond; but they seem, certainly in retrospect, together as one tradition, which is that of the 1800s. This perhaps owes something to their lack of immediate and gifted successors in the novel and the short story. The Symbolists had the effect of reestablishing poetry as the primary form in Russian literature. Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, Marina Tsvetaeva and Vladimir Mayakovsky would follow them in differing ways. The Symbolists held their forebears in the highest regard. Andrei Bely wrote penetrating essays on Russian prosody, and on Gogol in particular, rescuing his work from the socially conscious realm delimited by Vissarion Belinsky. Yet in their metaphysics, and in their formal innovations, they took Russian literature into a distinctly new and decidedly modern era.

Blok wrote from a young age and was publishing his poetry to acclaim by 1903. He soon found himself at the head of the second wave of Russian Symbolism. This Symbolist movement in Russia was something quite distinct from the Symbolist movement in France. Edmund Wilson, in Axel’s Castle, characterises the movement in France as the ‘second swing of the pendulum away from a mechanistic view of nature and from a social conception of man’ – which is to say that it took its lead from Romanticism, and its related but sometimes unclear (especially outside of Germany) sense of philosophical Idealism, and sought the individual against the Naturalism associated with Émile Zola. While the social realist model of literature had continued to thrive in Russia after Belinsky, and whilst there were contemporary realist writers to respond and react against, in Russia there were other important influences: in the writings of prominent religious thinkers and mystics; and also in a nascent attention being paid towards folk art. Consequently Symbolism in Russia was itself more mystical, and more explicitly and thoroughly philosophical. This was so at least in the early years of its writers, who moved on significantly throughout their careers in both form and thought.

D.S. Mirsky calls the lyrics Blok wrote between 1908 and 1916, which together comprise the third volume of his collected poems in Russian, ‘certainly the greatest body of poetry written by a Russian poet since the middle of last century’, the time of Pushkin, Tyutchev and Lermontov. Mirsky also calls much of this poetry untranslatable, as it ‘depends to such an extent on the ‘imponderables’ of diction, sound and association’. Yet some of the musical, stridently rhythmic qualities of Blok’s verse do, I believe, show through in translations of his work.

One of my favourite poems by Blok is also one of his most well-known and reproduced. It bears no title, but is dated 10 October, 1912. Below I will give the poem in Russian; in my own admittedly rough transliteration, which I think still gives a strong sense of the flow of sounds; and then in three different translations into English.

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Russian Text

________________

Ночь, улица, фонарь, аптека,

Бессмысленный и тусклый свет.

Живи ещё хоть четверть века –

Всё будет так. Исхода нет.

–

Умрёшь — начнёшь опять сначала,

И повторится всё, как встарь:

Ночь, ледяная рябь канала,

Аптека, улица, фонарь.

–

10 октября 1912

________________

English Transliteration

________________

Notch, oolitsah, fonar, aptyekah,

Byessmuyslennuyi ee tooskluyi svet.

Zheevee yeshe hhot chetvyerrt vyeka –

Vsyeh boodyeht tak. Eeshhuhda nyet.

–

Oomryesh – natchnesh opyaht snatchahlah,

Ee puhvtoreetsyah vsyeh, kak vstahr:

Notch, lyedyahnayah rryahb kanahla,

Aptyekah, oolitsah, fonar.

–

10 Oktyabryah 1912

___

Transliterated by me, Christopher Laws

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English Translation 1

________________

The night. The street. Street-lamp. Drugstore.

A meaningless dull light about.

You may live twenty-five years more;

All will still be there. No way out.

–

You die. You start again and all

Will be repeated as before:

The cold rippling of a canal.

The night. The street. Street-lamp. Drugstore.

–

10 October 1912

___

Translated by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks

________________

English Translation 2

________________

Night, street and streetlight, drugstore,

The purposeless, half-dim, drab light.

For all the use live on a quarter century – 

Nothing will change.  There’s no way out.

–

You’ll die – and start all over, live twice,

Everything repeats itself, just as it was:

Night, the canal’s rippled icy surface,

The drugstore, the street, and streetlight.

–

10 October 1912

___

Translated by Alex Cigale at albany.edu

________________

English Translation 3

________________

A night, a street, a lamp, a drugstore

A meaningless and dismal light

A quarter century outpours –

It’s all the same. No chance to flight.

–

You’d die and rise anew, begotten.

All would repeat as ever might:

The street, the icy rippled water,

The store, the lamp, the lonely night.

–

October 10th, 1912

___

Translated by Dina Belyayeva at silveragepoetry.com

________________

Markov, V. and Sparks, M. Modern Russian Poetry (MacGibbon & Kee, 1966)

Mirsky, D.S. A History of Russian Literature (London; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968)

Wilson, E. Axel’s Castle (Glasgow; Fontana, 1976)

Watercolours for a Children’s Story

A number of years ago, with my partner and I living in Umeå in the north of Sweden, my partner was afforded the opportunity to study for six months in Istanbul. So we went and we lived in Istanbul for about six months, from the beginning of a September until the latter days of the subsequent February.

My partner was able to study a variety of courses in Istanbul, some only tenuously related to her degree; and one of these courses saw her tasked with writing a children’s story. I provided the illustrations, twelve small watercolour paintings.

I wanted to use the fox for a cutout animation I intend to play around with, so we found the book, or booklet; and I thought I’d post images of the paintings here.

Serena Williams, Oldest Ever Number One? What Trouble in Israel? A Women’s Tennis Roundup

Serena Williams today returned to the position of number one female tennis player in the world, according to WTA rankings. Whilst many news outlets across the globe have proclaimed her thereby the oldest women’s tennis number one in the history of the sport, the truth is a little more complex.

The Women’s Tennis Association was formed in June 1973, founded by Billie Jean King. It began computerising its rankings on November 3, 1975; and when women’s tennis rankings are discussed, they tend to refer back to this date. However, the WTA did release year-end rankings in 1973 and 1974; and in 1973, the number one ranked player was Margaret Court, who had won Australian Open, French Open and US Open titles in both singles and women’s doubles during that year, and who at the year’s end was precisely 31 years and 168 days old.

Serena has become world number one – for the first time in over two years, since October 2010 – at the age of 31 years and 145 days old. So she is officially, and perhaps somewhat pedantically (but of course, we are obliged not to forget the legacy of Margaret Court), the oldest women’s number one since computerised rankings began. In this context she surpasses a record held by Chris Evert, who was a month short of her 31st birthday when she was last world number one in November 1985.

The WTA releases its rankings weekly, each Monday, with players awarded ranking points for their results over the preceding fifty-two weeks. Serena’s number one ranking therefore rewards her for a year’s worth of good results: most notably, she took Wimbledon and US Open Grand Slam singles titles in 2012, added the WTA Tour Championships (generally regarded as the most important and prestigious after the four slams) in October, and also won Olympic gold in London in the summer. Having first reached number one more than ten years ago, this will be her 124th week in total at the top of the rankings. Here she is behind only Monica Seles (with 178 total weeks at number one), Martina Hingis (209), Chris Evert (260), Martina Navratilova (332), and Steffi Graf, top of the list with 377 weeks at number one, 186 of which were consecutive, which is another record.

It is mildly but in no way troublesomely ironic that Serena – who has been critical of the rankings system in the past; in 2009, when world number two behind Dinara Safina, remarking, ‘I don’t know what to do to be number one. I don’t even care anymore. I’m just happy to be here’ -begins this week having been defeated yesterday by the person she has replaced as number one. Victoria Azarenka beat Serena in three sets in the final of the Qatar Total Open in Doha, 7-6 (8-6), 2-6, 6-3. Azarenka was forced to save a set point in the first set tie-break; and her victory over Serena is only her second across the pair’s twelve encounters. Serena beat Azarenka five times last year alone; and Azarenka was on a nine-match losing streak against her opponent. Serena and Azarenka dispatched of Agnieszka Radwańska and Maria Sharapova respectively in their semi-finals. The focus of the women’s tour now moves to Dubai, with Serena, Azarenka and Radwańska the top three seeds in a tournament whose opening round takes place today. Angelique Kerber, Sara Errani, Petra Kvitová, Sam Stosur and Caroline Wozniacki comprise the other seeded players.

Radwańska was still facing questions last week in Doha regarding the Fed Cup Group 1, Pool C match between Israel and Poland, which took place on February 8. Agnieszka and her sister Urszula gave Poland a 2-1 victory over Shahar Peer and Julia Glushko in Eilat, Israel; but Agnieszka appeared clearly unhappy with some of the Israeli crowd in a forcibly brief press conference after the match:

Asked in Doha, Radwanska was more expansive but still noncommittal, saying, ‘To be honest, I was really disappointed. I didn’t really expect something like this to happen on the tour, especially when a lot of teams were there and a lot of top players, and, yeah, a couple of things happened. It’s always sad and always unfair, as well. I think it’s not a responsible way to behave’.

The Polish Fed Cup captain, Tomasz Wiktorowski, has apparently written to the International Tennis Federation with his take on events. Online speculation has centred round the possible use of some unsavoury religious insults; but there is no evidence for these either in comments made by the players, coaches and spectators involved, or in the very brief footage of the game available online. Still, it is not the first time a Fed Cup crowd in Israel have aggravated opposition players. In 2008, in a World Group game which Russia won 4-1, both Maria Sharapova and Anna Chakvetadze faced a partisan crowd inclined to cheer their mistakes and put them off their strokes. Chakvetadze’s response was particularly emboldened:

Sound and Meaning in A Serious Man

The Coen brothers, throughout an increasingly acclaimed career, have nevertheless faced frequently the criticism that much of their work is elusive; creative and visually strong, atmospheric, and humorous whether that humour is considered broad, black or satirical, but lacking coherent and sustained themes, convincing character development, and narrative resolution. A Serious Man – with its oblique opening set in a richly atmospheric but historically and geographically indistinct Polish-Yiddish past; and its sudden ending, where earlier reconciliations are thrown to one side as plot elements are introduced and left implying an uncertain and unwelcoming future – has faced each of these related criticisms. In fact it is a film strong in purpose, its central theme precisely that life is elusive, and that the questions we inevitably ask of it will return to us haughtily unanswered or hastily postponed; as though we ask a question down a line expecting a neat response and receive, instead, only a garbled, and therefore disembodied, reproduction of our own voice, our hope persisting only in that something else seems responsible for the garbling.

The opening act of the film establishes this broad theme. A Jewish man named Velvel marvels at the world as he walks home with his horse in the snow, somewhere in what is today South-Eastern Poland – he mentions the Lublin Road and Lvov, now across the border in Western Ukraine. The marvel lies in the beauty of nature; but foremost for this man in the fact that, his cart having upturned on the way home, he was stumbled upon and aided by an elderly gentleman known to him and his wife. This seems to him an occurrence of remarkable serendipity; but his excitement is cut short when his wife, Dora, proclaims the gentleman, Traitle Groshkover, a ‘dybbuk’ – which in Jewish mythology refers to a type of the transmigration of souls (O, rocks!), where a malevolent soul inhabits the body of a person recently deceased. Dora declares that Traitle Groshkover is already dead and mourned.

So Velvel’s framework for understanding is thrown into confusion, violently contested by the opposed framework of his wife. Both frameworks reside in the mysterious and the unknown: the one in a type of coincidence which, in its positive aspects, seems product of something more than chance; the other in the possibility of souls somehow persisting and taking possession of bodies to fulfill evil deeds. The existence of meaningful coincidence is more easily accepted than the existence of dybbuks not only because it is more positive, but because it can be reasoned through in other ways; Velvel suggests that he as a ‘rational man’ should not believe in dybbuks; yet he is palpably frightened at the prospect. When Traitle Groshkover arrives at the couple’s home, having been invited on the road for some soup, the debate ends with Dora plunging a pick into his chest. A circle of blood gradually emerges upon Groshkover’s shirt, and he departs into the dark snowy night. Velvel suggests his body will be found in the morning, and they will be ruined; but Dora is content she has seen off a dybbuk.

Various subservient themes explore the general theme of life’s complex uncertainty and apparent indifference. One of the most prominent revolves around language and sound. The films considers how language often proves insufficient as a tool for communication and understanding; and how words misunderstood or out of their most welcoming contexts are often reducible to mere sounds.

Religion is a significant aspect in the lives of the family A Serious Man contemplates, yet it is a source of confusion more often than clarity. In the early stages of the film, the protagonist Larry Gopnik’s wife, Judith, tells him that she has become close to a family acquaintance named Sy Ableman, and wants a divorce. Taking these two statements, Larry naturally puts them together; but Judith refutes the apparent logic of her own speech by denying any relationship between Sy and her desire for divorce. She explains she wants a ‘get’, without which she will be an ‘agunah’. This is to say that she wants a Jewish ritual divorce, without which she will be considered ‘chained’ to her marriage and won’t be able to remarry within the faith. However, the religious terminology is lost on Larry, who responds with an incredulous ‘What?’ in each instance.

He does not comprehend her, but is still prompted by her when he seeks answers in the shape of three rabbis; only visiting the first two because he is unable to arrange an appointment with the elderly, reclusive, but supposedly eminently wise senior rabbi, Rabbi Marshak. From the two rabbis he does get to see Larry receives worldly advice (from a man much his junior) and suggestive anecdote, but nothing in the way of definitive spiritual guidance.

Concurrently, Larry’s son, Danny, is studying for his bar mitzvah. This involves chanting a passage in Hebrew, which he must learn by heart by the time of the ceremony. Music is a passion shared by father and son, but it doesn’t bring them together: ‘Dem Milners Trern’ by the Yiddish singer Sidor Belarsky provides Larry with some solace and content; whereas Danny listens to contemporary popular music, notably Jefferson Airplane’s ‘Somebody to Love’. Danny succeeds in grasping the passage, but he learns it by rote, as a passage of noises rather than as a meaningful piece of writing. Unlike his father, he does get to meet with Rabbi Marshak, after his bar mitzvah. The words the Rabbi proffers bear secular rather than religious meaning: he paraphrases a lyric from the Airplane song, ‘When the truth is found to be lies / And all the hope within you dies…Then what?’; recites the names of the band; returns the boy’s radio, taken by a schoolteacher earlier in the film; and advises, ‘Be a good boy’. In this the rabbi shows a human rather than a spiritual understanding; a strength of empathy which Larry may share for others, but which he finds hard to express.

The figure who he seems to share the closest bond with is his brother, Arthur; but this is an emotional understanding enabled precisely because mental and verbal communication is precluded: Arthur primarily resides in and communicates through a string incomprehensible mathematical symbols, which he sets down in a notebook he calls ‘The Mentaculus’. When Arthur’s physical activities are revealed – he gambles, and is later accused of sodomy – they are further removed from Larry’s world, and he seeks legal aid and is acutely sympathetic in part because Arthur’s life is an embodiment of his own related difficulties communicating with other people.

In his work life, Larry reinforces the film’s central theme in lecturing on the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger’s cat. Travelling to work one day, he is involved in a car accident, which, as he later realises, occurs at precisely the same moment Sy Ableman is killed in a car crash elsewhere in town. A Korean student taking his class, named Clive, is struggling with his course; Larry having failed him on his midterm, Clive fears he will lose his scholarship, and so (we presume) surreptitiously leaves an envelope containing money to encourage Larry to alter his grade. When Larry later calls Clive to his office to discuss this, Clive’s verbal manoeuvrings repeatedly imply the impossibility of knowing another person’s motivations conclusively. Aside from refuting Berkeley by accepting that the letter does in fact exist, Clive denies knowing anything about it; when Larry presses him, the resulting conversation is one of the most telling in the film:

Larry: Actions have consequences.

Clive: Yes. Often.

Larry: No, always! Actions always have consequences! In this office, actions have consequences!

Clive: Yes, sir.

Larry: Not just physics – morally. And we both know about your actions.

Clive: No, sir. I know about my actions.

Larry: I can interpret, Clive. I know what you meant me to understand.

Faced with the obstinacy of his student, Larry at once withdraws his assertion that actions always have consequences; substituting instead the offer that, at least in his office, where he feels he can maintain a degree of control, this chain of cause and effect, action and consequence, will be and remain. When Larry suggests he can interpret Clive’s actions, Clive responds with an apparently gibberish phrase which Larry hears as ‘Meer sir, My sir’. Speaking more slowly, Clive clarifies – he actually said ‘Mere surmise, sir’; and emphasises his point with a ‘Very uncertain’ whilst shaking his head. What was, upon first hearing, an unintelligible sound pattern in fact tersely summarises Clive’s point, and Larry’s difficulty. Larry’s eyes turn away thoughtfully.

After Sy Ableman’s funeral, Danny’s bar mitzvah, Larry winning tenure, and a decision on Clive’s money together provide a sense of things being reconciled, the film ends with two scenes which throw everything into a deeper and darker disarray. Larry, who we see at his doctor’s office early in the film, receives a call from this same doctor who asks him to come to the surgery immediately to discuss his x-ray results. Seemingly serving as a visual metaphor for impending bad news, the final scene of the film shows a tornado making its way towards Danny’s school. A sub-plot in the film has seen Danny owe money to a large boy named Fagle. Fagle chases Danny home on several occasions, too cumbersome and short of breath to catch him up. While the pupils stand outside their school building, in the process of being relocated to the basement of a synagogue, Danny – who now has the cash – calls out Fagle’s name, ready to reimburse him. Fagle, however, is focused on the tornado in the distance, and turns his head to look at Danny with neither comprehension nor interest. Here even the familiarity of our everyday cares, and more, even the familiarity of our own names are disrupted, losing their ability to connect and relate us. Fagle’s name is taken by the wind – a mere passing sound.

Zola’s House at Médan (or Le Château de Médan), by Cézanne

In a piece on Cézanne’s Banks of the Marne, published on this site several weeks ago, I mentioned and briefly considered, by way of comparison, the painting Zola’s House at Médan. The painting is just as often referred to as Le Château de Médan; it was painted between 1879 and 1881; and is now part of the Burrell Collection in Glasgow.

Over the last week I have been reading through a book on Cézanne by Hajo Düchting, published by Taschen, entitled on the front cover simply Cézanne; with the title page expanding upon this via the provision of a subtitle, 1839-1906, Nature into Art. The book makes particular mention of Zola’s House at Médan; and includes a lengthy quotation by Gauguin which I thought was worth republishing here.

Gauguin is recorded as the painting’s first owner, purchasing it from the Parisian art supplier and art dealer Julien François Tanguy. Over the course of years, Tanguy established in his shop quite a collection of Impressionist paintings, owing to the fact that, where money was lacking, he accepted paintings in exchange for paints. He was called Père by his artists, and sold, or attempted to sell, works by Monet, Sisley, Seurat and Van Gogh alongside Cézanne and Gauguin. Van Gogh painted him three times, the latter two paintings increasingly experimental, Japanese-inspired portraits.

Gauguin’s remarks provide us with his own sense of the interplay of colours in Cézanne’s painting. They continue with a second-hand account of an occurrence which took place with Cézanne mid-paint. This account is humorous in its evocation of the professorial passer-by, it provides a nice depiction of Cézanne’s character, and it is also a suggestive shot of a perhaps not atypical contemporary response to Cézanne’s work. Here is Gauguin:

Cézanne is painting a shimmering landscape against an ultramarine background, with intense shades of green and ochre gleaming like silk. The trees are stood in a row like tin soldiers, and through the tangle of branches you can make out his friend Zola’s house. Thanks to the yellow reflections on the whitewashed walls, the vermilion window shutters take on an orange tone. A crisp Veronese green convey the sumptuous leafage in the garden, and the sobre, contrasting shade of bluish nettles in the foreground renders the simple poem even more sonorous.

A presumptuous passer-by takes a shocked glance at what seems, in his eyes, to be a dilettante’s wretched daubing, and asks Cézanne in a professorial voice, with a smile,

‘Trying your hand at painting?’

‘Yes – but I’m no expert!’

‘I can see that. Look here, I was once a pupil of Corot. If you don’t mind, I’ll just add a few well-placed strokes and set the whole thing right. What count are the valeurs, and the valeurs alone.’

And sure enough, the vandal adds a few strokes of paint to the shimmering picture, utterly unabashed. The oriental silk of this symphony of colour is smothered in dirty greys. Cézanne exclaims: ‘Monsieur, you have an enviable talent. No doubt when you plant a portrait you put shiny highlights on the tip of the nose just as you would on the bars of a chair.’

Cézanne picks up his palette once more and scratches off the mess he has made. Silence reigns for a moment. Then Cézanne lets fly a tremendous fart, and, gazing evenly at the man, declares: ‘That’s better.’

NeL, Amstelveld 12, Amsterdam – Restaurant Review

According to tripadvisor, Amsterdam is host to 1,793 restaurants. Since my partner and I moved here at the beginning of November, we have visited some but not all of these; NeL, being the only one thus far that we have visited twice, will therefore be the subject of this first Amsterdam restaurant review.

NeL possesses and promulgates – it is the first thing that appears, as a splash page, when you open the restaurant’s website – a brief descriptive motto, saying, ‘Ik wil geen kapsones hebben, maar volgens mij hebben we het mooiste terras van Amsterdam’. This means that, without wanting to be boastful or full of airs in any way,  thinks that they have the most beautiful terrace in all of Amsterdam. This may in fact be so. NeL is situated on the Amstelveld, a picturesque square within the canal belt, between Reguliersgracht and Utrechtsestraat, Kerkstraat and Prinsengracht, near to much yet just outside some of Amsterdam’s main tourist areas. The square boasts a boules terrain (that is, a sand pit in which boules may be played); a five-a-side football pitch; a children’s play area; and the restaurant itself is housed adjoining a beautiful 17th Century wooden church, the Amstelkerk. There are trees by the restaurant and along the canals; some of the city’s more curvaceous bridges; and NeL’s terrace sits amidst all of this, within a white wooden fence, with wooden tables and benches, heated, and open all year round.

My partner and I ate at the restaurant first in early October of last year, a month or so before moving to Amsterdam, when visiting the city prior to our move. We hadn’t been to Amsterdam before and were wandering about in the evening, not especially sure where we were or how our location related to the location of our hotel, a little hungry, but nevertheless wandering and quite aimlessly. We came across the square and it looked thoroughly pleasant, and liked NeL’s menu, and it was dry, and so we ate outside on the terrace.

The menu at NeL is international and fairly concise. It seems to change regularly, monthly or bi-monthly, given that I know since early October it has passed through at least three formulations. The dinner menu tends to boast six starters, including a soup and a couple of salads; main courses comprising two fish and two meat options, a vegetarian option, a daily speciality, and always the NeL Burger and NeL Vegaburger (better that than a VegaNeL Burger, which appears cluttered in writing among other flaws); and a standard range of desserts, with crème brûlées and chocolate fondants. The menu is relatively simple, but with some nice combinations and subtle touches, and in my experience very capably cooked. Sandwiches, or ‘broodjes’, along with several salads and pastas, are served until 4pm; there is a bar menu with a charcuterie, and nachos and Indonesian spring rolls alongside typical Dutch snacks like bitterballen and vlammetjes; a kid’s menu; an extensive drink menu; and a smoking menu on top. The prices are reasonable, quite typical for Amsterdam at around €15-20 per main.

The first time we ate there I had orzo pasta with chicken, chorizo and tomatoes, and my partner had a half lobster. My dish was light but entirely satisfying; with the right amount of chorizo so that it was visible in the bowl, present on regular occasions within my mouth, but not domineering; and the orzo pasta, lying as it does between a risotto rice and a larger pasta, was novel, keeping the dish fresh without absorbing all of the other flavours. For dessert, we had a chocolate torte.

Last Saturday evening, we ate at NeL a second time. We had been to the Foam photography museum – whose new exhibitions, following an extensive Diane Arbus retrospective, are mixed; with some interesting and evocative Russian photographs from the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, and an engaging room built around the models of Dutch photographer Jan Hoek; but on the other hand a couple of exhibitions very loosely conceptualised and visually mundane – and were heading later to see The Master at the Tuschinski theatre. NeL lies usefully near both.

This time we ate inside. The atmosphere is relaxed, the décor simple and muted even in its plush reds and greys, there are often families about, but the tables aren’t packed together and it is, all in all, a very comfortable place to sit and to be. Accordingly, the service is casual, perhaps not quick, but well paced and genuinely friendly. Music is performed frequently in one section of the restaurant; on Saturday, they were apparently preparing for an Argentinian band, and were playing old Argentinian music, which was occasionally a little loud but otherwise wonderful. The black bread we were served soon after ordering, along with olive oil and a garlic yoghurt, was excellent. I ate steak with a pea purée, mushrooms, courgettes and amandine potatoes in a blueberry sauce; and my partner ate a deer stew with mashed potatoes and pear. Having tasted both, I can recommend both. The mushrooms in particular were delicious, some of the best mushrooms I have eaten, complemented especially well by the blueberry.

Pope Benedict XVI Announces His Impending Resignation; What and Who Next?

Pope Benedict XVI, born 1927 as Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, has this morning announced his impending resignation from the position, citing poor physical health.

In contrast to his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, who once remarked, ‘There is no such thing as a pope on retirement’, Pope Benedict had in the past suggested that a pope may need to retire, and may indeed have a duty to do so, should his health delimit his carrying out of the role. There are suggestions that his brother, Georg Ratzinger – a priest who served as the musical director of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Regensburg, therefore leading the famous Cathedral Choir, the Regensburger Domsplatzen, from 1964 to 1994 – may have known for several months about Pope Benedict’s plans.

Nevertheless, his decision – announced this morning during a consistory, a formal meeting of the College of Cardinals – has been met with widespread shock and surprise; even the Pope’s aides said, in a statement by a Vatican spokesperson, to be ‘incredulous’. He is the first pope to resign since Pope Gregory XII in 1415. In a nice phrase, the BBC reports that Ezio Mauro – editor-in-chief of La Repubblica, the daily Italian newspaper with the widest circulation – says this news represents an “irruption of modernity” into the Vatican.

This is the Pope’s full statement, translated from the Latin, taken from radiovaticana.va:

Dear Brothers,

I have convoked you to this Consistory, not only for the three canonizations, but also to communicate to you a decision of great importance for the life of the Church. After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the certainty that my strengths, due to an advanced age, are no longer suited to an adequate exercise of the Petrine ministry.

I am well aware that this ministry, due to its essential spiritual nature, must be carried out not only with words and deeds, but no less with prayer and suffering. However, in today’s world, subject to so many rapid changes and shaken by questions of deep relevance for the life of faith, in order to govern the bark of Saint Peter and proclaim the Gospel, both strength of mind and body are necessary, strength which in the last few months, has deteriorated in me to the extent that I have had to recognize my incapacity to adequately fulfill the ministry entrusted to me.

For this reason, and well aware of the seriousness of this act, with full freedom I declare that I renounce the ministry of Bishop of Rome, Successor of Saint Peter, entrusted to me by the Cardinals on 19 April 2005, in such a way, that as from 28 February 2013, at 20:00 hours, the See of Rome, the See of Saint Peter, will be vacant and a Conclave to elect the new Supreme Pontiff will have to be convoked by those whose competence it is.

Dear Brothers, I thank you most sincerely for all the love and work with which you have supported me in my ministry and I ask pardon for all my defects. And now, let us entrust the Holy Church to the care of Our Supreme Pastor, Our Lord Jesus Christ, and implore his holy Mother Mary, so that she may assist the Cardinal Fathers with her maternal solicitude, in electing a new Supreme Pontiff. With regard to myself, I wish to also devotedly serve the Holy Church of God in the future through a life dedicated to prayer. 

So Pope Benedict will vacate the papacy on February 28. Statements from the Vatican suggest that the Church hopes to install a new pope relatively quickly, sometime during March, before Easter.

The College of Cardinals – which is all of the cardinals of the Catholic Church – led by its Dean, the Italian 85 year-old Angelo Sodano, will set a date for the convening of a papal conclave. At this conclave, the cardinals will come together, after a mass, in the Sistine Chapel in Rome; listen to two sermons which preface their affairs, attempting to define the present state of the Church; take an oath of duty and secrecy; then set about determining who will be the new pope. Voting may begin as early as the first afternoon of the conclave. Balloting will continue every morning and afternoon thereafter, in theory until there is a two-thirds majority decision. There will be breaks every several days if no result is reached; and there is precedent for the new pope to require only a simple majority, should a two-thirds majority prove especially difficult.

The Catholic Church currently has 209 cardinals. All but two of these were appointed by the last two popes, with 123 appointed by Pope John Paul II, and 84 appointed by Pope Benedict XVI. In 1970, Pope Paul VI decreed that cardinals aged eighty or more before the beginning of a conclave would be ineligible to vote; and he also set a theoretical limit of 120 cardinal electors. Of the Church’s 209 cardinals, there are currently 118 of voting age. These are the men who will determine the next pope. 67 of these 118 were appointed by Pope Benedict, and in this way the outgoing Pope will help shape the direction taken by the conclave. When it comes to electing popes, there is the saying, ‘After a fat pope, a lean pope’, summarising the tendency to elect a pope with different qualities than and often of a different background to his predecessor; but this inclination may be less prominent given Pope Benedict’s sudden yet unenforced departure.

The 209 total cardinals come from 67 different countries. A majority of cardinals are from Europe, 115 of the 209. 24 European countries are represented; with 49 cardinals from Italy alone, 29 of these being cardinal electors. America has 52 cardinals (19 from the US, 9 from Brazil); Asia 20; Africa 18; and Oceania 4.

Contenders for the papacy include:

• Cardinal Peter Turkson, a Ghanaian cardinal aged 64, the president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace after being appointed to the role by Pope Benedict in October 2009;
• Cardinal Angelo Scola, the 71 year-old Archbishop of Milan;
• Cardinal Marc Ouellet, a Canadian of 68, both prefect of the Congregation for Bishops and president of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America, a candidate considered emblematic of the Church’s increasingly global focus;
• Cardinal Francis Arinze, 80, from Nigeria, a close adviser to Pope John Paul II, and currently Cardinal of Velletri-Segni close to Rome, where Pope Benedict served before his election;
• Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the 78 year-old Cardinal Secretary of State, whose involvement in the Vatican leaks scandal may have diminished his chances;
• Cardinal Angelo Bagnasco, 70, Archbishop of Genoa and president of the Italian Episcopal Conference, considered conservative but popular within Italy;
• and the Honduran Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga, also 70, president of the Caritas Internationalis relief and development confederation.

________

The BBC, The Guardian and others are running live feeds commenting on Pope Benedict XVI’s announcement.

This is a hugely informative and up-to-date catalogue of the Church’s cardinals: http://www2.fiu.edu/~mirandas/catalogs.htm 

Here is a link to the Pope’s statement on radiovaticana.va: http://en.radiovaticana.va/articolo.asp?c=663815