Thomas Sutcliffe
Sitting in the Lyttelton Theatre the other day, watching the first night of
Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, I was momentarily distracted
from what was happening in front of me by something going on behind me,
namely an audible mutter of rebuke from one theatre-goer at the noisy
bronchial honking of another.
Recently by Thomas Sutcliffe
Friday, 2 May 2008
Walking round the newly refurbished St Martin-in-the-Fields in central London the other day I was startled to hear what seemed a very large claim for the proselytising power of architectural furniture. The church's current vicar, the Reverend Nick Holtham, was talking about Shirazeh Houshiary's striking new design for the East Window, which won a competition to find a replacement for the stop-gap glazing that had filled the window since its Victorian predecessor had been blown out in the Blitz. Holtham praised the new window's design and then said (I'm quoting from memory here so can only vouch for the gist of his remark): "We've had three conversions so far." This seemed to me to suggest an extraordinary track record for an image that had only been in place a matter of weeks and I looked at it again with a new, and slightly wary, interest. Was it really so powerfully inspirational? Then I understood what he was actually saying. These weren't conversions to Christianity, they were conversions to the cause of the window itself. Three people had seen the light and admitted a bit of ecclesiastical modernism into their hearts.
Tuesday, 29 April 2008
One of the great deficiencies of the dead is that they never change their minds. One of their advantages is that there's very little they can do about it when someone changes it for them. Indeed, they can even be enlisted to back up their own overruling.
Friday, 25 April 2008
Here's a thought experiment. Some unspecified disaster has struck the world and evacuation is now the only viable option. Fortunately, we have a congenial planet to repair to, but storage space is limited on the journey and so a selection must be made of which aspects of human culture and history will be taken with us to form the foundation stone for Earth v2. You have to make this choice: should the collected works of Pauline Kael go into the electronic ark or the collected films of Michael Winner? There's only room for one, and the other will be consigned for ever to cosmic oblivion. I take it that my answer to this question will be obvious: I assume that not a few readers would also be wearing "Vote Kael" buttons; and, in my wilder moments, I imagine that even Winner might find himself havering over the answer. Far better to have excellence in one form than mediocrity in another.
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
Am I allowed to call Hillary Clinton a witch? I might as well confess, slightly shamefacedly, that the question is now academic. Because I already have called her a witch, several times, usually just after reading yet another report on her increasingly debased campaign to secure the Democratic nomination.
Friday, 18 April 2008
I encountered an old acquaintance the other day at the British Museum's new exhibition, American Prints: From Hopper to Pollock. But it was one of those slightly embarrassing meetings, where you recognise the face but can't immediately pin down why. I knew we'd met somewhere before, and I knew too that this recognition stirred feelings of affection. But the name and the occasion eluded me.
Tuesday, 15 April 2008
Here's a downturn with a silver lining. According to a retail analyst, sales of bottled water in Britain have fallen for the first time, dropping nine per cent in the year to March. This may be because of general belt-tightening, or it could be that people are getting less comfortable about the ecological costs of bottling and shipping the stuff.
Friday, 11 April 2008
Very hazardous things, rhetorical questions – best avoided in political speeches, as any stump politician will know, because some cocky sod will almost invariably fill in the answer before you can, and it's usually not the one you want. But I don't much care for them in art either, since they provoke that rather curmudgeonly part of me which is always wondering whether I've been sold a pup. Why are you asking me, I think, you're the writer.
Tuesday, 8 April 2008
It wasn't entirely clear, from the weekend's reports on Quentin Davies' proposal that more comprehensive school children should be encouraged to sign up for the cadet corps, exactly what the initiative was meant to achieve. Mr Davies himself seems to think that it is a hearts-and-minds operation, improving attitudes towards the armed forces. A spokesman for the National Association of Headteachers hinted that it might be about supplying a sense of discipline and order to teenagers whose home life is generally as regimented as a bad day in Basra.
Friday, 4 April 2008
You might at first take it for a model of corporate responsibility. Eon, which describes itself as "the world's largest investor-owned power and gas company", recently announced that it had set aside a substantial sum to pay for a "permanent piece of art that Sheffield can be proud of". The company promises to work with local partners to develop ideas for an "exciting and long-lasting art installation".
Tuesday, 1 April 2008
I occasionally fantasise, when the flame of righteous indignation flares up in the British motorist, that one day we might get what we clamour for. Speed cameras will be dismantled in a national fiesta of deregulation, yellow lines will be painted over in villages and towns across the country and the epaulettes will be ceremonially torn from the shoulders of traffic wardens as crowds of delirious drivers celebrate their demobilisation. And then we'll all climb back into our cars and bring the whole country to a fuming standstill, having discovered the hard way that our cherished automotive liberty is actually just incarceration on wheels.