Aarrrgh. Having the royal family in the news always makes me feel all irritable and republican. I’m still sticking to my previously stated position that getting rid of the monarchy would be more trouble than it’s worth… but still. Arrgh.
I guess I have to be fair, and admit that the young couple themselves have done nothing to annoy me. But the media coverage… oh god, I can’t bear it.* And we’re going to get months and months of this crap.
Still, despite everything, my overwhelming reaction is to feel sorry for Kate Middleton. Imagine marrying into that family and that situation. After a few years as his girlfriend, she probably thinks she has some idea of what the media attention is going to be like, but I’m not sure you can ever really prepare for stepping into a cage of tigers.
*with the honourable exception of the Caledonian Mercury
5 replies on “Happy sparkly royal bollocks.”
Hallelujah…Maestro please, what’s next score?
Well, it looks like the wedding day is going to be a public holiday, presumably so that all Her Majesty’s loyal subjects can cluster around their television sets and bask in the warm glow of the Holy Couple.
On the one hand, the symbolism is annoying, on the other hand, hey-ho, at least it’s a holiday.
I dunno, Harry. You complain about the coverage and then give it more. And here am I complaining about that. I agree that getting rid of the Firm would be more trouble than it’s worth.
Did you see Sewell’s article in the Standard about Cezanne? I’d be interested in your take.
You think I should be denying them the oxygen of publicity? Maybe you’re right.
On the Cezanne: well, I think Brian Sewell has a few odd blind spots. Personally I like that painting, and the distortions don’t bother me. Someone who was very ingenious with Photoshop could ‘correct’ it by enlarging some parts bigger and shrinking others, tweaking the angles and so on, so that it was closer to reality. I think it would probably make it a blander, less interesting painting. I’d try it myself but I don’t have the skills.
It is interesting, though, the business of artists who can’t draw. I was actually thinking that at the Gauguin the other day: there was no real evidence in that exhibition that Gauguin could have produced a precise, realist drawing of something even if he wanted to. Maybe he could but wasn’t interested in that kind of image; it’s entirely possible that he was a skilled draughtsman at 18 but that after years of not trying his skills would have eroded anyway.
Incidentally, one thing Photoshop Disasters teaches us is that you can actually freakishly distort images of the human body and casual observers will not even notice there’s anything wrong; which is how they end up as magazine covers and fashion ads. And I don’t just mean unhealthily thin: you can have ‘photographs’ of women whose hips don’t line up with their torsos, or whose necks are twice as long as they should be, or whose arms appear to have turned into spaghetti; things which I imagine, if you saw them in real life, would look very disturbing indeed. But most people will see those photos and not notice.
Thanks for this generous reply. Although he can be maddening, I treasure Sewell for his scholarship and wit as much as for his opinions, which are sometimes eccentric. I value those offside opinions too, because they make me think. People are rude about him, but their attitude can be purely tribal.
Didn’t painting change with the advent of photography? (And then film changed poetry and the novel…) You are probably right that Cézanne wasn’t interested in realist drawing – and certainly right that “correcting” that painting with Photoshop would make it blander. Or weird. It would be fun to try.
Thanks, too, for the link to PS Disasters. Brilliant. I’m sure the human brain is programmed to make sense of an image before (if ever) deconstructing it, which is why we see faces in clouds and so on, but don’t notice that the woman in the publicity photo has no arms or hands to play her guitar with.