So hard to say good-bye - in England, at any rate

A happy day for many, as George W. Bush and his First Lady said a definitive good-bye to the political scene

One of the things I've noticed on my return to England is the way that the simple word "good-bye" seems to be moving into obsolescence.  For some years now, a lot of people have started to say "See you later" - though there is often not the slightest likelihood of their seeing one again the same day.  What does "later" mean, then?  some vague time in the future?  is this perhaps plumber-speak - like "I'll come round later", meaning in three months' time?

I used to know where I was with polite formulae.  "Thank you" didn't need a reply.  Now, as often as not, it is followed by the thankee saying "No problem".  What problem did they think there was?  Do they mean "Don't mention it" - i.e. the matter was such a trifle I needn't bother to thank?  Or has thanking itself become a problem?  

You can see the existential dilemmas I've been facing in daily social dealings.  But the good-bye thing is a little more fraught.  Even when someone succeeds in saying good-bye it's accompanied by other formulae.  "Drive safely" is an injunction I find slightly offensive, since it implies that I wouldn't drive safely if not told.  (Actually that might be right so I won't go on about it.)  "Take care" is often uttered with a sort of oozing unctuousness that is pretty repellent.  It implies that my life is so fraught with danger that I need to tread warily.  Are there perils that, after over sixty years, I am still unaware of?  I prefer the more blatantly selfish "Look after yourself", though why anyone needs to say that as we part company I don't really know.

I started thinking about all of this after walking the dogs today.  During our promenade along the seafront there were the regular words used by doting parents to their toddling offspring - "Look - a doggie".  I have now developed a total loathing of the word "doggie", and have to restrain myself from a Victor Meldrew-type rant in which I address the proud father and ask whether his child sits in a chairie to eat his mealie.  Becoming a little concerned about my decline into grumpy-old-man-ness I started to think of other phrases I disliked, which led to the good-bye thing.  Not that there's much danger of a rant if someone says "Drive safely", "Take care" or "See you later" - it's just that all of them encourage some further conversation - such as asking whether they know of perils I'm unaware of, or when "later" is referring to.  Much easier really to keep to a simple good-bye, perhaps with a regal wave like George W.

Antony Mair   

Coastal Currents - art, art and more art

Outside 10 The Lawn, St Leonards-on-Sea

 Coastal Currents Arts Festival is now in its fourteenth year.  It's a two-week celebration of visual arts and performance, open studios, exhibitions and events.  And believe me, it's quite difficult to cover everything, even if you live here.

I decided to opt for some of the open studios - partly because of an enjoyable time I'd had last year, partly because we'd been invited to a couple and it seemed a good idea to sample more.  Our neighbours Bob and Claire Humm had asked us round to their house to have a look at what they had been up to.

Outside the Humms' house - no, the figure with his head in the stone is not real

Bob had constructed a diminutive cinema in the form of a compartment comprising six doors, with two cinema seats, one behind the other.  A little claustrophobic, but fun.  A screen showed a film of Claire in one of her Jack in the Green costumes, inspired by folklore.

I followed this up this weekend with a trundle round most of the 22 locations in Saint Leonard's where artists had opened their studios to the public.

Studio at 7 The Lawn, St. Leonard's

 At 10 The Lawn - a slightly dilapidated but beautiful Decimus Burton house - various works had been brought together in the back garden, and I interrupted the various artists over a late lunch.  A few doors away at No. 7 the studios of Nick Snelling and Adrienne Hunter were also in the back garden.  I then found myself in basements, industrial units, and rooms at the top of concrete staircases that might once have been offices.  Artists' resourcefulness never ceases to amaze. Between studios I stumbled on an exhibition entitled "Garden in the Garage", where a group of artists had taken over a large and empty space perfect for exhibiting their conceptual pieces with the theme of the garden.  It was great.

Garden  in the Garage

With some of the studios I was aware immediately that the work wasn't for me.  No criticism there - it's a question of taste.  You're then faced with the awkward question of how to leave without appearing boorish.  I came to the conclusion that a polite "thank you" without further ado was the only way to keep going without being caught up in insincere chitchat.  But if anyone has any better suggestions I'd be interested to hear.  It was a little sad on some occasions, when the artist had obviously been waiting, bored, for an hour or so without anyone crossing the threshold.  But with so much to see, I'm afraid that niceties were sacrificed.

No such scruples were necessary at Studio VII in Shepherd Street, where I spent a very happy time looking at the work of the seven artists exhibiting.  Lynne Bingham does mixed media pieces, a number of which were perspex cases in which old books had been placed with sections cut out and small objects inserted.  I'm not sure what that was about, but I liked them a lot.  Suzie Watts is another mixed media artist, working mainly in bronze and iron, whose small pieces packed quite a punch.  Another member of the group had done some rather fine ceramic bulls.  I'm sorry there isn't another day to go and see them again.

Antony Mair

Lynne Bingham's "Moral Essays"

Afrikàba - Festival of African and Caribbean Art

Sona Jobarteh  - photo courtesy of her website

Afrikàba - the Festival of African and Caribbean Art - is now in its fourth year in Hastings. It overlaps with the higher-profile Coastal Currents festival, which is devoted to the visual arts, so tends to get overlooked. 

I have mixed feelings about anything that combines the words "African" and "Caribbean".  "African" on its own is broad brush enough - what really links the Berbers in Morocco with the Kikuyu in Kenya? but linked with the Caribbean as well?  surely in the latter case only a distant past - yet we continue to lump them together.  It's rather as if a group of people in Nigeria set up an Anglo-Australian festival.  

But that's a side-issue.  We should probably be grateful for anything we can get that tells us more about the peoples and cultures of African states, and last night's opening event at Hastings Museum certainly did that.  Poetry was contributed by Akila Richards, picture right, originally from Liberia but now living in Brighton.  A performance poet, she recited her pieces with studied and beautiful gestures that were close to dance.  The words were almost shaped by her hands.  A beautiful poem called "Dancing with Grandmothers" went the whole way, with Akila dancing to a recording of her voice against a musical backing. 

Good though Akila was, the real star of the evening was Sona Jobarteh, described on the Afrikàba leaflet as a "Kora virtuosa".  In case that has you puzzled: the kora is a twenty-one stringed West African harp that dates back to the thirteenth century, when Mali was one of three West African empires that controlled trans-Saharan trade.  Sona Jobarteh comes from a Mali family of griots - storytellers and musicians, who act as a repository of oral tradition and advise royal personages.  She explained that only five families traditionally have the right to play the kora, and she is the first woman to do so.  

Accompanied by a drummer and three guitarists, she played several numbers to rapt attention.  One of them was in honour of a nomadic tribe that roams across the northern territory of a number of West African states - a noble and hospitable people, she said.  Looking round at the scattered audience of Guardian-readers in Hastings Museum, I could hardly think of a culture more alien.  But by this stage we were all on our feet at Sona's behest, for her showstopping final number that had us all dancing and clapping with enthusiasm.  

Antony Mair   

Art on the Stade

"Sunbathers" by Jeffery Camp RA

The trouble with things being on your doorstep is that you don't give them the attention they deserve.  This has certainly been true of the Jerwood Gallery's current exhibition of paintings by Jeffery Camp RA, entitled "The Road to Beachy Head".  Nothing in the publicity had particularly tempted me, so my visit to the exhibition was a particular pleasure.

Not that Camp's loose freedom with line and shallow layers of paint are normally my thing.  But after the initial jolt I began to look more closely.  In this group of paintings Camp, who formerly lived in Hastings, concentrates on the landscape of and near Beachy Head, just down the road.  But what makes the paintings unusual is his combination of elemental landscape with human figures or heads.  The impression is of human beings caught in an elemental environment beyond their control - or, as in "Sunbathers" above, rapturously united with nature.  It's not fashionable art, but it has a particular resonance that is usually the key to something important happening.

An incidental pleasure of nipping into the Jerwood Gallery is that they have rehung the permanent part of the collection, removing some and introducing others.  There are some terrific new appearances.  I particularly liked David Bomberg's "Portrait of Eunice Levi", but could happily have pocketed half a dozen or so others for the walls of the Shoebox.

Across the open space of the Stade is the Stade Hall - a featureless large room that is sometimes used for art exhibitions, sometimes for meetings.  At the moment there's an exhibition of paintings by Oliver Crowther called "Guardians of the Stade", with powerful portraits of local fisherfolk.  There's no sentimentality about them, and they're a good complement to the Jerwood's curated show.

Antony Mair

Dealing with death

Skull and crossbones flag flying in the boatyard of Hastings Sailing and Motorboat Club, Rock-a-Nore

I'm about to go to my fourth funeral in a little over three months.  The previous three have been intensely emotional occasions, since the deceased has in each case been in their fifties, only.  Two - Paul's brother and sister-in-law - had died of cancer, the third - Jo Grigg, the leader of the Stanza poetry group I've attended in Brighton for a little over a year - of an inoperable brain tumour discovered only a month before her death.

Tomorrow's funeral promises to be less traumatic, since the lady concerned was over 90, had been unwell for some time and had already expressed the wish for the "Grim Reaper" to come along and take her away.  The Irish funerals of Paul's brother and sister-in-law were a different matter, and I've written of the first of them in a separate post.  There could scarcely have been a greater contrast between the Northern Irish Catholic way of dealing with a funeral and that of Jo last week.  

We had been told to wear bright clothes in celebration of her life.  Both Jo and her husband had been regular attenders at the Bishop Hannington Memorial Church on the edge of Hove.  The service began with a short film projected onto walls on either side of the chancel, showing Jo reading one of her own poems.  It was a close-up, and looked as if it had been done by Jo herself at the computer.  The eulogy, prepared by Jo's husband Peter but read out by the vicar, was a moving tribute but succeeded in being upbeat even in the midst of grief.  

The religious side was present in the optimism of believers in the Resurrection and the next life.  But at the same time there was an absence of the theological paraphernalia I'm used to from my RC background.  The result was moving but at the same time affirmative.

Each of these three deaths has been shocking in its way: in each case a life has been cut off before it has run its course.  When I was speaking about this to my sister-in-law she quoted a friend of hers, who had said that this was the wrong way to look at things: a person dies when it's their time to die.  This may be at any age.

I've been thinking about this but find it unhelpful.  The sadness I've experienced at each of these funerals has of course been partly induced by the heightened sense of my own mortality.  But, even more than this, the sadness has been caused by a death before the normal course is run.  Jo's funeral was all the more striking because, although the family were clearly grieving their loss and in shock at its suddenness, they faced the fact of her death with a firm faith that gave them courage and optimism.  You can mutter about happy-clappy churches and poems being read instead of, or in addition to, Scriptural readings; about the favourite songs of the deceased being played over loudspeakers instead of organ music, and about the appropriateness of photos being projected onto church walls - but in the end it's this courage and optimism that impresses, whatever form the service takes.

Antony Mair   

Wired Aerial Theatre on the Stade

Little did I think that the show put on in Hastings tonight would be my introduction to bungee-assisted dance.  Imagine five people dangling from wires on the face of a large screen on which images are projected, and you get an idea of the Wired Aerial Theatre's production of "As the World Tipped".  A crowd of a thousand or so of us stood in the gloom and slight drizzle on the open space of the Stade, by the seafront, as the show began, with some deafening music and a speeded-up simulation of the 2005 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference, with voiceovers of delegates and five people onstage whizzing about with files.  When the talks collapsed, the fun started, with the stage first tilting then upending completely, before being raised in the air by a giant crane.  Clever effects followed, with the dancers/acrobats interacting with footage from Yann Arthus-Bertrand's film Home about climate change, and from Gideon Mendel's films about floods in Pakistan and Australia.  As continents fell apart, the actors fell with them; they ran vertically through a grassy meadow and fell off the sides of buildings that were themselves constructs of endless television screens with newscasters broadcasting climate change news.

Do you get a whiff of propaganda?  well yes, this was a work with a message - underscored at the end with the words "Demand Change" projected in capitals on the screen.  My problem with it as a work of art was that the message was over-explicit and over-simple.  Women in saris and small children standing in mud and staring soulfully at the camera have become a cliché for the West's indifference to the problems of underdeveloped countries.  A little more showing and a little less telling would have made a big difference.

As would a slight reduction in the volume of the sound.  With admirable political correctness, a screen had been placed at one side with text for the hard of hearing.  This displayed not only words that were spoken but also the nature of accompanying sound effects - "winds howl", "woman screams".  However, the noise level was such that anyone deaf would probably have got much of the point from the vibrations in the ground beneath our feet.  When the message came up with "Soft piano music" as we were being deafened by some less than tinkling ivories I thought they could do with replacing the sound engineer.

But if you looked at the show just as a spectacle there were some superb moments.  I particularly liked the sequence where a dancer posed in the centre of the screen as Lena Horne singing Stormy Weather.  The running up the screen was also good.  It was a fine way to celebrate the start of the Coastal Currents Festival, about which more later.

Antony Mair

More poetry

The picture above may look a little bit like a primary school, but that's how the world of poetry is: everything pared down and minimalist - usually because there's no cash for anything grander.  The Poetry Café is tucked down Betterton Street, in a virtually unknown hinterland of Covent Garden, and is the ground floor of a building occupied by the Poetry Society.

The Stanza group I've been attending in Brighton for a little over a year now is an offshoot of the Poetry Society.  Earlier this year I'd taken part in a "Stanza Bonanza" in the windowless basement of the Poetry Café, where two Stanza groups fielded six members apiece to read their poems in slots of just under ten minutes.  Then it was Brighton and Walthamstow.  This week it was Brighton and Barnes.  I'd originally volunteered to compère the event, having read before, but then one of the participants dropped out at the last minute and I found myself reading again.

Reading your poems to an audience of unknown people gets easier the more you do it.  This was my fourth time, and I can now see the way it needs to be done - though I'm a long way off doing it right.  The last thing an audience wants to hear is someone droning on in a monotone, not engaging with the listeners. This creates a whole new level of boredom.  Also, I used to think that poems could stand on their own two feet and didn't need an introduction.  But in a reading they do: it's nice to hear the context - what led to them being written, for example, and where you were at the time.  A sense of humour helps as well.  Contrary to what a lot of poets seem to think, people have come along for a good time, not just an earnest bout of severe mental concentration.

Last night three members of our Brighton team recited their poems off by heart.  Two of them - Tommy Sissons and Sue Evans - were admittedly "performance poets", which means that their work is intended to be performed rather than read.  The third, Andie Davidson, just felt that her poems were more effective when delivered that way.  And they were.

Yours truly wasn't sure he could trust his memory sufficiently to equal this.  I adopted the solution of reading three poems, of which two were not too serious.  It's great when you get a laugh from an audience.  You feel somehow that you've not only got their attention but they're on your side.  That's the moment when you give them a poem that's a bit tougher - but not one that's too long, because you'll lose them.

The other pleasure of these events is hearing others read whom you don't know - it's a thrill to hear a poem that's fresh and original.  There were several of these from the Barnes representatives, which I could happily mull over on the long train ride back to Hastings.

Antony Mair