Eurovision 2012 - Baku

Well, 2012 was a vintage Eurovision I thought, and I applaud Sweden’s worthy win with Loreen’s Euphoria (although I was sneakily hoping those Russian grannies would take the prize). I watched most of it but my heavy social schedule on Saturday took it’s toll and I fell asleep during the scoring and awoke to find it was all over.

Memorable moments have to include Albania’s bonkers screeching lady (which nevertheless scored quite well - scary, Europe!):


As well as the above mentioned Russian grannies:



I think the Russian entry marks the moment when an Eastern European country knowingly sends an ironic entry into the competition.

France’s Anggun and her gymnast backing troupe were superb:

And Italy’s Amy Winehouse tribute was also a favourite:

Gaitana from the Ukraine stole the show with a storming performance: But what to say about the UK’s Englebert Humperdink? I am sorry, as his song was quite pleasant and certainly deserved to rank higher than second last (becoming something of a fixture for the UK). I thought his performance on the night however was below his best. A grand old artist needlessly humiliated by the BBC.

We in the UK must try to get over our tendency to be too cool for school about Eurovision, take the piss mercilessly, and then be furious the others don’t vote for us.

Well done Loreen! Next year in Sweden.

Boris's brush with art criticism

Yesterday Boris Johnson wrote such an extraordinarily provoking column in The Telegraph and on his blog that I broke a lifetime’s resolve and left a comment (on the blog). A couple of hours later my comment disappeared, so I thought I may as well vent my reactions more fully on my own blog.
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In his column Boris reacted to two small criticisms made of the AcelorMittal Orbit by the BBC’s arts correspondent Will Gompertz: he felt it was too small and was a pity entry wasn’t free (Anish Kapoor, the Orbit’s sculptor, is on record as being against the entry fee too). Boris’s bile knew no limits and from these minor and entirely reasonable personal comments Boris concluded that the BBC as an organization was biased towards the Labour Party and that the next BBC chief must be a Tory.
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I’m very disappointed in this; I hope his column was flung off two minutes to deadline (apparently a common practice) and doesn’t represent Boris’s considered opinion. I imagine he would have lost a few votes if this had come out before the election.
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The BBC was set up during the last major financial crisis in the 1930s by a political establishment concerned to neutralise extremist views in the UK media. They succeeded brilliantly. However it seems the modern Tory’s attitude to public service broadcasting is far closer to that of Goebbels and Stalin than it is to their own Tory forebears. Today’s Tories are clearly absolutely determined to create a Fox News in the UK – with all the consequent divisive coarsening of public debate that will result. It’s worth noting the BBC had its worst clash ever with the (Labour) Blair Government over Iraq – and despite the Hutton enquiry the public still believed the BBC’s version over Tony Blair’s. To this day the BBC remains the most trusted news source for the British public - vastly more trusted than, say, The Telegraph itself.
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Boris complains the BBC is suspiciously interested in the Leveson enquiry despite the public not being that interested.
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Whether or not the public is interested in the Leveson enquiry, the apparent wholescale corruption of our political classes, the police, and the intimidation of celebrities and members of the public alike are clearly issues which go to the heart of our democracy, as Boris as a senior politician should realise.
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Boris also claims that public funding somehow corrupts the BBC. As Boris’s Mayoral salary is also publicly funded, and he enjoys a generous £250,000 per year from The Telegraph for his journalism, will he abstain from claiming his Mayoral salary? - Mrs Thatcher of course didn’t claim her salary as PM back in the 80s.
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About the Orbit I tend to agree with him that it’s better and more interesting close up – at least as far as I could see from the BBC television pictures. However, you can’t have it both ways – it’s either a monument to the public munificence, advanced aesthetic taste and civic pride of Mr Mittal and Boris Johnson or it’s a commercial fee-paying attraction. As Boris knows, the famous bread and circuses of ancient Rome were free to Roman citizens - that was the entire point. The London Eye was always meant to be a fairground ride – the Orbit is supposed to be public sculpture. And the £15 entry fee is on top of the £10 fee you have to pay to get into the Olympic grounds – so despite what Boris claims it does work out as considerably more expensive than the Eye to go up a not very tall stationery tower. Boris should have insisted on slides!
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Boris’s tiresome diatribe has been dissected brilliantly by Dave Hill in The Guardian, who particularly points out Boris’s dodgy denial of any links to Rupert Murdoch’s News International during his election campaign. Boris’s full-throated diatribe against the BBC will, of course, endear him to the Murdochs père et fils, whose long-term objective is to eliminate their rival media organization in order to maximize their own personal profit and influence.

Pasties in high places

Loving all the Tory pratfalls, keep ‘em coming!

David Cameron’s lazy schoolboy spinning of his purchase of a pasty in Leeds (larded with slightly too much convincing detail) is inspiring satirists everywhere. Damien Thompson in the Telegraph is particularly amusing:

“A PM who finds it easy to scoff
"I love a hot pasty,” declares the Prime Minister, and I believe him. My source in the Downing Street kitchen tells me: “Mr Cameron is the most peckish PM I can remember, bless him. He finds the servings at the No 10 dinners a bit stingy, so we often send up a Greggs pasty or 'steak bake' as a little amuse bouche he can enjoy before joining his guests. Sometimes I’ll drizzle garlic butter on the pastry – that always goes down well!”
Even then, however, Dave finds room for a night-time snack. “Greggs do a lovely Belgian bun, ever so moist, and we send a couple upstairs just as the PM is settling down to catch up on The Killing. Last week I thought he needed an extra treat, so I put a little jug of cream on the tray. He didn’t complain, let’s put it that way.”

Quote London

"But London has cause to feel particularly proud of the thrusting generation of moderates whom the capital shaped in various well-endowed institutions and at soirees held in their honour at the highest level of metropolitan society, before sending them off into the Middle East to work their magic. Think of Saif Gaddafi, Bashar al-Assad and his wife – perhaps Vanity Fair, which last insisted London was swinging in 1997, could return to do a sarcastic "Class of" feature on the capital's most eye-catching governance alumni.

It took root under Thatcher but it was Blairism that presided over the capital's transition into full-blown creep haven – inevitable, given Tony's pathological admiration for the super-rich. The result is that it is now standard to note that there are two Londons: the one where all but a few thousand of the city's millions live, and the one where, when yet another Mayfair restaurant opens selling £70 steaks, the black Range Rovered clientele cannot get a table for weeks on end.

From the outside, the one increasingly eclipses the other. And thus, if I might make a pitch for inclusion in Pseuds' Corner, London is contracting as an idea. Where previously outsiders could get a sense of the richness of the city's culture, it is now increasingly difficult to get a sense of much else than London's richness – while for insiders, the sense of exclusion from that richness becomes more pronounced. The greatest city in the world does not care to accommodate its key workers within a one-hour, overpriced commute of their jobs, but plays enduringly attentive host to some of the most grotesque horrors of the age."

- Marina Hyde in the Guardian

Design Museum Heads West

The Design Museum is in the news because of its annual Design Awards (Designs of the Year 2012 exhibition now on at the Museum) and because the museum itself is on the move across London from Shad Thames to the old Commonwealth Institute in Holland Park - its best frenemy the V&A will be a near neighbour in South Kensington (target date 2014).

While part of me is thrilled that someone is giving this mad 50s folly a new lease of life (Grade II listed, no less, and apparently regarded as second only to the incomparable Royal Festival Hall in post-war British Modernist importance), the bigger part of me is sad the Design Museum will be leaving Shad Thames, which it has graced since the 1980s. I imagine it will be replaced with more expensive flats with river views, impoverishing the cultural life and diversity of this stretch of the Thames immeasurably.

Also worrying is what they intend doing to the old Commonwealth Institute building (Sir Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall and Partners, 1960-2) , an architect’s flight of fancy if ever there was one, a triumph of form over function or even reason:

“Regarded by English Heritage as the second most important modern building in London, after the Royal Festival Hall, the building has a low brickwork plinth clad in blue-grey glazing. Above this swoops the most striking feature of the building, the complex hyperbolic paraboloid copper roof, made with 25 tonnes of copper donated by the Northern Rhodesia Chamber of Mines. The shape of the roof reflects the architects' desire to create a "tent in the park" . . . The interior of the building consists of a dramatic open space, covered in a tent-like concrete shell, with tiered exhibition spaces linked by walkways. “

Those links include swooping stairs down to a floating mezzanine level beneath the immense expanse of that magnificent roof. This grand flourish is extravagantly wasteful of space, which no doubt the Design Museum covets. The proposed remodeled interior designs I have seen sweep away the stairs, walkways, floating mezzanine, etc, and close up that central block of empty space. The original complex and delightful spatial interplay is completely annihilated in favour of a grim heavy concrete platform with a rather mingy oculus allowing a partial view of the roof. My criticisms are purely aesthetic here - no doubt in practical ways the redesign will make the space function far more efficiently as a gallery, as well as generating more usable floor space. It’s just sad that something so intrinsic to the building will apparently vanish in the process. John Pawson has a lot riding on this - a very modish architect, most of his projects so far have been either commercial or private commissions by the super rich; this will be his first major public project. His brand of highly aesthetic minimalism seems a refinement of 60’s Brutalism - the movement which reacted forcefully against the effete and almost rococo modernism represented by the Commonwealth Institute. We shall see whether the styles can harmoniously cohabit.

Happy Valentine's Day

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Building The Big Society

Building The Big Society
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CallmeDave and Boris helping out in the window of Trinity Hospice Shop, Clapham High Street