I vow to thee my pasty

Well, the Olympics has got all some of us feeling terribly British and flaggity-wavery all of a sudden, but one or two people apparently want to widdle on the flame. I’m not just talking about Alex Salmond and his Scolympians (which sounds to me like a species of alien mollusc), but also the head of the tourist body Visit Cornwall, who wants to avoid references to England in any promotional material for the county. Sorry, make that duchy – the word “county” is also verboten. Cornwall is just Cornwall, and that’s where people should go. The fact that they’ll have to go through Devon to get there is but a minor inconvenience.

This does help to remind us that the entity we define as the United Kingdom is a fairly recent invention, and in a political sense only really goes back to 1707, with the Act of Union between England and Scotland. Since then, Ireland has joined the party and then (mostly) left it again, so the current map of the United Kingdom is less than 100 years old; when UKIP’s tosspot-in-chief Nigel Farage dismissed Belgium as “an artificial construction” I wondered why he thinks that couldn’t be applied to the entity he so zealously seeks to release from the bonds of Euroserfdom. Even if we cleave to the notion that England – as distinct from the UK – is a valid concept, we have to accept that for plenty of people a regional or civic loyalty trumps any fealty to nation or country. This is true in Cornwall, Liverpool and also Yorkshire, where they’ve been calculating how many medals they’d have taken if the county had entered the Olympics as a separate entity. I now find that when I’m outside the UK and someone asks where I come from, my immediate response is usually “London”.

I’d guess that every country – barring a few small, relatively homogeneous island or city states – has areas that attract this sort of local loyalty, whether or not they’re actively yearning for independence. National citizenship is simply an administrative necessity, rather than an expression of an emotional bond. I’ve been to New York and Barcelona, for example, but I know damn well that doesn’t mean that I’ve been to the USA or Spain. Are there any real Italians, or are they at heart Venetians and Sicilians and so on? Home is not necessarily where your passport says it is.

NYT Travel: Makepeace Island, Australia

New York Times Travel: Destination Makepeace Island
By Julie Earle-Levine

August 8, 2012

Makepeace Island, Richard Branson’s island in Australia, is a 10-minute ride on a private launch from Noosa, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. The name is reason enough for any couple (quibbling or not, let’s make peace!) to visit, plus the island is heart shaped — though not quite as much as it appears to be on its namesake Web site — a forgivably cheeky exaggeration.

Zipping to the island by luxury speedboat, our driver advises us to look in the trees for koalas and indulges us with tales of kangaroos swimming over from the mainland. It’s very Australian: sweet-smelling eucalyptus trees, bouncing marsupials and laughing kookaburras. Branson bought the island in 2003, and the friendly locals, fishing in dinghies, often shout “Hi, Richard!” as they pass by the chic island launch.

The property is exquisite, with private two-bedroom villas and a four-bedroom house (the hideaway can accommodation up to 22 guests), an outdoor cinema and a lush lagoon pool that is lit at night by a roaring fire pit. Villas are furnished with authentic antique Balinese furniture.

The general manager Nick Jones does double duty as a chef, preparing delicious, mostly locally sourced meat and seafood. His tamarind-glazed crispy pork belly with a green mango, Asian herb and rice vermicelli salad is delightful. At night, there is a private theater for films, billiards and even bongos and a didgeridoo to play. If kayaking around the island has wiped you out, just relax in Branson’s huge black volcanic rock bath before retiring to his four-poster, with racy bedside reading in the form of “Position of the Day.”

Total seclusion has a price: you need to book the entire island, which is not a small commitment. It’s far pricier than couples therapy at $2,800 a night for exclusive use of Makepeace, plus $575 per adult per night (for 7 to 22 guests), or $890 per adult per night for 1 to 6 guests. But hey, if you’ve got the dough, give peace a chance.

Nice Body Painting Part 1

Nice Body Painting Part 1

Plop art

The Oriel of the Blue Horses, an installation by Martin Gostner, has gone on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. It’s horse shit. No, make that fake horse shit. Now, I’m always ready to defend the wild-eyed imaginings of the conceptual art posse against the sneers of Call-That-Art?-A-Child-Of-Three-Could-Do-That, Inc, but it does look as if this time Gostner has just stapled a sign saying “KICK ME” to his own arse. Or maybe that’s his next piece.

I wonder what the late Robert Hughes would have made of it all.

#London2012: regarding the keirin

 

I’ve just realised that in the midst of the most spectacular sporting event to grace my native land since they cancelled We Are The Champions, I’ve written three blog posts about the opening ceremony and precisely none about the actually running and jumping and throwing and all that malarkey. You see, when healthy lads of my age were glued to Grandstand and World of Sport, or out in the park trying to emulate Kevin Keegan or Brendan Foster, I’d be stuck in my bedroom using the continuous paper my dad brought back from work to recreate in prose form the dystopic sci-fi that dominated my imagination and TV viewing.

So while I have the deepest respect and admiration for plucky Victoria Pendleton and her success in the keirin yesterday, I have to admit that to me, this is not so much a sport, more a combination of 

and

and

Vertigo vs Citizen Kane: battle of the fat blokes

The results of the 2012 Sight & Sound Poll are out and the collective wisdom of hundreds of critics and directors asserts that Vertigo is, notwithstanding what everyone has said for the past 50 years, better than Citizen Kane; one white, male, overweight raconteur and curmudgeon nudging another off the pinnacle. I don’t agree: I don’t think it’s even Hitchcock’s best movie, and it’s not my favourite either (which is a different thing, but more on that later).

Every time one of these polls is staged, the same quibbles arise. What’s the bloody point of it all? Well, the first point is to shift copies of Sight & Sound (or Film Comment or Empire or whatever) and then, on a more altruistic note, to raise awareness of the richness of cinema as an art form, to encourage people to see some movies again or for the first time and to provoke debate and discussion and dialectic. Obviously nobody is arguing that Citizen Kane was, in some empirical and absolute sense, the best film ever until 2002, but that this has now ceased to be the case, as if helium has usurped hydrogen as the lightest element.

The other gripe concerns the selection of those who vote in the poll, and with it the whole nature of elitism in the creation of a canon. “But my favourite film is Star Wars [or The Godfather or The Shawshank Redemption or Dirty Dancing] so why should I care what Mark Kermode or Quentin Tarantino thinks?” The answer of course is that Kermode and Tarantino have almost certainly seen Star Wars, whereas I’m not sure how many diehard devotees of Star Wars have seen Vertigo or Kane or Tokyo Story (number three on the list and top of the directors’ picks). And when you’ve seen Star Wars and Vertigo and several thousand other movies of all genres and periods and countries, you start to realise that there’s a difference between your own favourite film and the film you consider to be the best. (Back to Hitchcock: I suspect Rear Window or Psycho are among his best, but my favourite is Spellbound, even though I’m well aware of its glaring faults. And as for Welles, I’d pick The Stranger or Chimes at Midnight over Kane.) So ultimately there’s nothing wrong with having Star Wars as your favourite film, but without any critical context, why do you expect us to care?

That said, a well organised poll does tend to say something about the sampled group. I always think of the time customers at the David Lean Cinema in Croydon were asked to pick the best film of all time; confronted with the glories of Hitchcock and Welles, Ozu and Kurosawa, Bergman and Ford and Wilder and Ed Wood, they picked that epic of love and loss and duty and windy bonnets, Mrs Brown. If only Hitchcock had replaced Kim Novak with that nice Judi Dench, there would surely be no arguments.

PS: In the New Statesman, Ryan Gilbey – one of the voters – queries the dearth of recent movies in the list.