-
read the comments as well.
-
Amusing bit of Japanese art. via VVORK
Categories
Categories
Island Boy by Tom Davis
…or to give him his full title: Sir Tom Davis, Pa Tuterangi Ariki, KBE. The ‘Pa Tuterangi Ariki’ bit was a title he got by marriage; the knighthood was all his own. Davis was the Prime Minister of the Cook Islands from 1978-87, and Island Boy is his autobiography. He was undoubtedly an impressive individual — he studied medicine in New Zealand, then took the job of Medical Officer of the Cook Islands, where he modernised a decrepit colonial medical service; then he sailed his young family in a small yacht from the Cook Islands to Boston to study public health; did some medical work in Alaska; then he took various research jobs in the US, including research on physiological adaptions to extreme conditions for the army and the nascent space program; raced sports cars; then returned to the Cook Islands to enter politics as a free market ideologue, eventually becoming Prime Minister.
So there’s lots of good material. However, although Davis wrote perfectly well, he was not a dazzling prose stylist, or a man with a gift for anecdote, and he clearly had no intention of sharing anything very personal; he mentions two marriages, a divorce and several children during the book but gives absolutely no details at all. So what you get is a straightforward, by the numbers autobiography which is often interesting but also often a bit of a chore. I don’t think he was terribly introspective, to be honest. His obituary, which I found while trying to learn more about his title, says (among more flattering stuff):
A driven and ambitious man, he was sometimes seen by his peers as arrogant and conceited.
And that does ring true. He is certainly really quite dismissive of most of his political colleagues and opponents.
I ordered Island Boy as my book from the Cook Islands for the Read The World challenge, before realising that the Cook Islands wasn’t actually on my list of countries, which is based on UN membership. But the list isn’t that rigid, and having bought it I may as well count it.
» The picture, Avarua Market, is © Daniele Sartori and used under a CC by-nc licence.
Categories
Links
-
Stunning pic from APOD. via @Glinner on Twitter
-
Seriously impressive.
Categories
Links
-
Astronomy-themed quilts.
Categories
Speaking as a dumbed-down chav…
I am endlessly fascinated by the people who are, by their own account, in a constant state of simmering rage at having to overhear other people’s uncouth language. This comment was in response to an article in the Sunday Times:*
Dave Russell wrote:
Couldn’t agree more abouyt the dumbing down of the nation. Just listen to a conversation between a group of people under the age of 25. It seems to be cool to speak like a complete thicko these days, no longer something to be ashamed of. The one thing that really grates on my nerves is to hear people using the child-like term ‘train station’ instead of ‘railway station’- the mark of the true dumbed-down chav. The other thing is how some apparently intelligent people think its cool to continually use swear words in public-in bars, buses and trains etc-even at the ‘Train Station!’ Most of the this dumbed down class wouldn’t understabnd a single Monty Python sketch-they simple don’t have the educational background.
OK, this is the usual stuff: the suffering of psychic violence when exposed to casual speech, the fear of the demotic. But the idea that the mark of a ‘true dumbed-down chav’ is that they say ‘train station’? That’s genius.
*admittedly, it’s a Jeremy Clarkson article, but even so.
Two superficially very different exhibitions at Tate Modern at the moment. One is Pop Life: Art in a Material World; to quote the blurb:
Andy Warhol claimed “Good business is the best art.” Tate Modern brings together artists from the 1980s onwards who have embraced commerce and the mass media to build their own ‘brands’. Pop Life includes Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and more.
Which is flashy, exhibitionist, loud — several rooms have music playing — and vulgar. I don’t mean to be snobby; much of it is intentionally vulgar. Not least Jeff Koons’ kitschy hardcore porn imagery.
The other is John Baldessari: Pure Beauty [which doesn’t have much of a website just yet… they may just be running a bit late]. The tone of which is much more Serious and Arty. Not that it’s humourless, there’s plenty of dry wit on show; but it’s all very restrained and low-key. Series of small photographs, made with an eye on content rather than beauty. Stills from black and white films with sections blanked out. Rather formally-constructed photocollages. The later work gets larger in scale, more complex and I think more human, in the sense that his collages refer more directly to emotions and issues and almost form proto-narratives; but it’s still very tightly controlled and visually restrained.
So stylistically, they’re quite different. It’s a distinctly different experience going round them: the Baldessari is much less likely to give you a headache, for a start. To some extent, though, I think it’s as much a difference of personality as of kind. Not everyone enjoys celebrity and celebrities, and money and noise and going to Studio 54 with Grace Jones — or whatever the equivalent was for Damien Hirst in the 90s. But if you were an art critic from Mars, or a few hundred years in the future, the similarities might seem more significant than the differences.
Though having said that, the artists brought together in the Pop Life show are themselves a slightly mixed bunch, so perhaps I should resist making any more sweeping generalisations anyway. I mean, Tracey Emin, Keith Haring and Jeff Koons don’t necessarily have a great deal in common beyond a talent for self-promotion. Perhaps the Tate thought it would be a bit blunt to just call the show ‘Masters of Hype’.
Incidentally, having been at school at the time when Keith Haring merch — bags, pencil cases, whatever — was all the rage, it seems odd to find him in the Tate. It’s like finding a room dedicated to seriously analysing the artistic importance of Hello Kitty. Or Thundercats.