My sister, who lived in the Philippines for several years, a country which has a large ethnic Chinese community, was remarking about what one of her servants there told her. She said that one of here Filipono maids told her that before applying for a job in my sister’s household, she was due to start work in the household of an ex-pat Englishman but changed her mind when she heard the Englishman was married to a Hong Kong Chinese woman. What difference did that make? my sister asked her.
Well, said her maid, she far preferred working for Europeans - which is why she had applied to work for the businessman in the first place – but all Filipinos hated working for the Chinese. Why? my sister asked her. Well, said her maid, the Europeans treat them well, almost as equals who just happen to be fulfilling a certain role [that of the maid, the driver, the gardener etc]. The Chinese on the other hand generally treated them as though they were sub-human.
That, naturally, is surely something of a generalisation, and there must certainly be some Chinese who behave in a way we enlightened and oh-so liberal Europeans find more acceptable; and I am certainly not making any grand claims on it, but bear with me because it does lead on to a point.
My sister’s anecdote followed on from something else she told me. Staying with us for a week – I am staying with her for two weeks, one more week to go, here in the far north-west of Germany less than a mile from the Dutch border – is one of her grandchildren, and as she was chatting, she was wrapping a couple of small gifts for the lass for his first birthday tomorrow. Then she told me of a huge celebration she had witnessed in the Philippines: a local ethnic Chinese family had hired the ballroom of one of Manila’s biggest and grandest hotel, and had invited several hundred guests to help celebrate their son’s birthday – his first birthday.
I remarked that – which is what I feel – that kind of ostentation has pretty much everything to do with trying to impress one’s friends and neighbours by demonstrating just how rich and wealthy one is, and such boasting and showing off is certainly universal. Nevertheless, many cultural differences are marked, and some cultural traits in an ‘alien’ environment can lead to misunderstanding. But this entry is not intended to be – and I hope it doesn’t become – just another platitudinous commentary on ‘Lord, we are all so different!’, a comment all too often followed among the enlightened and liberal classes in Britain by ‘and isn’t that really, really marvellous?’, a statement with which you disagree in the company of some at great cost.
. . .
I have noted before that as the half-breed child of an English father and a German mother, I have both English and German traits in my personality. And given that I attended German schools — from the the point of view of a child’s development crucial — ages of nine to 13, some German traits are possibly more prominent than some English traits. And one German trait I like is that generally if you ask a German for her or his opinion, you will get it, warts and all. You might care to observe that being, by my own admission, in some ways more German than English, I am bound to appreciate that kind of kind of plain-speaking, but you might also agree that directness of that kind is certainly not a trait which is widely appreciated in Britain – far from it.
In fact, it is generally why the British often describe the Germans as ‘tactless’ and ‘arrogant’, something which naturally bewilders Germans. Their attitude is — and it is one which this semi-German fully understands and agrees with completely— ‘well, you did ask me what I thought, you asked me what my views were, so I told you. Now you are upset by what I said, so what’s going on? If you didn’t want me to answer honestly, why did you ask me in the first place?’ Quite. It is a fair point.
The Brits, though, at least some Brits and especially those who pride themselves on being ‘middle-class’ (and it is that pride which I find so baffling, though it undoubtedly undoubtedly exists) are apt to be what they regard as ‘polite’ and believe any response which falls even a little short of that kind of ‘politeness’ is nothing but outright rudeness; and, if the responder is both direct and German, it is very good evidence – if evidence were even needed for something so self-evidently true – that the Germans are irredeemably ‘tactless’ and ‘arrogant’.
Here is a good example: for over year while I still lived in London 25 years, I shared a flat with three others in Elgin Avenue, Maid Vale. Although I say ‘shared’, the flat was more a collection of bedsits for four folk who shared the same bathroom and kitchen. And although Maida Vale is a in London terms a ‘good address’, the flat itself was nothing special and, being occupied by a succession of renters, rather shabby. (I took it upon myself every so often to clean the kitchen from top to bottom as no one else could be bothered to do their own washing-up and I dislike preparing food in a dirty kitchen. Maybe that’s another of my ‘German’ traits or maybe I am just one of odd bods who doesn’t much enjoy living in squalor.)
If someone left, the protocol was – in theory, but usually not in practice – that all the other ‘flatmates’ would meet and evaluate every whoever applied to take over the free room, and one day, after someone did announce he or she was leaving one flatmate - Kelly – and I met a young German student who wanted to move in. Once he had seen the room and the other facilities, we sat in the kitchen to ‘get to know’ the applicant and what followed was the usual routine of ‘tell us a bit about yourself’.
Eventually Kelly asked the lad what he thought of the room. ‘Well,’ he said in English in his unmistakably German accent, ‘I’ve seen better’, and undoubtedly had – like all the other bedrooms, it too was shabby and had it been a pleasant, airy room, I’m certain he would have said so. But that was his goosed cooked was far as Kelly was concerned.
As soon as he had left she told me: ‘Well, we’re not having him!’ Why not, I asked, he seemed very nice. ‘Did you hear what he said about the room?’ she said. But, I told her, you asked him and he told you. What is wrong with that. But it was no use, he was out: he hadn’t followed standard protocol in such situations by telling us – quite dishonestly, of course, but honesty wasn’t the point – that the room was ‘lovely, really, really lovely’, and just how ‘marvellous’ all the other facilities were and how he would ‘really, really’ love to share the flat with us, and so on.
I told her that I knew Germans quite well and that he was not being rude but simply being honest: she had asked him what he thought of the room and he had told her. What was wrong with that? But she wouldn’t be assuaged and that was that, and the student was not invited to take the room.
. . .
I am reminded of the British obsession with ‘being polite’ and the nation preferring such ‘politeness’ to being honest pretty much every time I switch on BBC Radio 4 (the main talk radio station here in Britain). If, on some discussion programme such as Start The Week, a book one of the contributors has written is mentioned, it is invariably a ‘marvellous’ book, one which the speaker ‘absolutely loved’. If, as happens all too often, the station broadcasts a programme of poetry or short stories or music by either professional writers or artists or amateurs , each poem, story or piece of music is inevitably ‘amazing’, ‘quite amazing’, ‘simply marvellous’ or ‘stupendous’ whether or not it actually is or not. And more often than not it isn’t.
I understand the dilemma faced by presenter: if a poem or a book or a piece of music is mediocre, it can be difficult to say so without sounding overly harsh. But might I suggest that praising it to high heaven as though had been reinvented is not the only alternative. Surely to goodness it is not beyond the wit of most of us to find some way to be polite and acknowledge that at least an effort has been made without resorting to tell outright lies?
A similar and related bafflement for me is much that is said about ‘works of art’ by their creators and commentators, and I was reminded of this yesterday while listening to Afternoon Concert on the BBC’s Radio 3 (one of Radio 4’ sister stations – though I suspect you guessed that – and dedicated to music, mainly ‘classical’ but which has an admirably catholic coverage of pieces). For some reason which eluded me yesterday and still eludes me, yesterday’s concert was given over to piece by Estonian composers and very enjoyable and interesting they were, too.
At this point I have to quote Sir Thomas Beecham who observed (or is said to have observed) that ‘it is quite untrue that British people don't appreciate music. They may not understand it, but they absolutely love the noise it makes’. Well, that sums me up: I don’t just appreciate music, I love it (all kinds of music, I should add, as a rebuff to my stepmother’s aunt who gets very sniffy indeed about jazz and always trots out some dismissive quote by someone or other about jazz), but I can’t even begin to claim I can ‘understand’ it.
Yes, I know – as one can know that one doesn’t know something known by others – that for those with an in-depth knowledge of music different keys can relate to each other, that, for example, a symphony or concerto can have an ‘architecture, but sadly I have no such musical knowledge. That certainly doesn’t detract from my enjoyment and appreciation, but where I do markedly depart from others is when talk turns to matters such as ‘what a piece of music means’. I don’t mean to sound completely daft but as far as I am concerned music is just sound and nothing more. And crucially is has no intrinsic meaning.
Naturally, a composer or performer can give a piece meaning: he or she might hope to try to celebrate his nation’s existence by using echoes of his nation’s folk songs in a piece, but I contend that whatever ‘meaning’ a piece of music has has been superimposed on it later (possibly by the composer him or herself). And let me repeat: as far as I am concerned ‘music’ is absolutely nothing more than pure sound. Yes, the sounds made by the various instruments used to produce it might have been planned to be played in a certain sequence or they it might not: I get equal enjoyment from free jazz as from a Haydn piano sonata. But neither piece has intrinsic meaning.
. . .
I am writing this entry (after what became a typically circuitous introduction) because of two things I have heard on the radio in recent days. The first was a claim (claim? It was delivered more as an absolute instruction than a claim and one which will brook no contradiction, which always rubs me up the wrong way) that ‘art’ need no necessarily be beautiful, but that ‘it must carry a message’. To that my response is an unequivocal ‘bollocks!’
Quite apart from my personal conviction that ‘art’ is in itself nothing special or indeed at all rare and that just as much ‘art’ is produced in a council evening class of enthusiastic amateur painters as in the studios of the – largely self-appointed – great and good, I do get very jacked off with the insistence that ‘art’ should have ‘meaning’ or ‘a message’. Says who? As far as I am concerned nothing in this world whatsoever has intrinsic meaning. Whatever ‘meaning’ we, individually or collectively choose to see in anything is wholly arbitrary. For example, the small, by now very grubby, toy bunny I might have bought for my child when she was a toddler and which she took to bed and to sleep with her every night until she reached puberty might certainly have ‘meaning’ to me on the eve of her wedding 25 years later when I come across it by chance; but it most certainly has no ‘meaning’ to you and I wouldn’t expect it do.
Just by sheer chance as I write this in mid-afternoon listening to Radio 3’s Afternoon Concert, an arrangement by some bod called Fritz Kreisler of the second movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto is being played. Now that piece most definitely has meaning for me – it is a piece I played a lot as in a great deal at one point in my life, getting drunk on cheap and warm white wine feeling very sorry for myself now that another girl had thrown me over and whenever I hear it or any of its other movements, I am taken straight back to those days. But that ‘meaning’ is personal and subjective – if you know and like the piece, it might well have its own ‘meaning’ to you. Does that make my point?
Something similar happens when the latest novels are discussed on radio: to listen to such discussions, you get the distinct impression that if a new novel doesn’t ‘deal with’ a certain, rather limited range of ‘issues’, it can lay no claim – in Britain at least - to being taken seriously. So a hero or heroine might well be an eco warrior battling to halt global warming, a trans man or woman battling to come to terms with his or her identity, a gay man or woman battling to come to terms with his or her sexuality and so on. If, on the other hand, a new novel does no such thing, it is seemingly ruled offside as a piece which cannot be taken seriously.
Something similar goes on with the notion of ‘creativity’, and it, too, like ‘meaning’ is put on a pedestal to be worshipped. Once again I hold to the, no doubt hugely unfashionable, view that not only is ‘creativity’ very common indeed and thus nothing special at all and that it will be found equally in that council-run evening class as in more hi-falutin salons, but essentially the word is quite meaningless. Listening to the introduction of a piece on yesterday’s concert, Prophecy by the Estonian composer Erkki-Sven Tuur, he was quoted as saying that his main aim is to ask ‘existential questions with music’ and one of his goals ‘is to reach the creative energy of the listener’. But what is he talking about? Exactly how do you ask an ‘existential question with music’? And what, exactly is ‘the creative energy of the listener’.
My dilemma is that I might be the patsy, I might be the philistine who is blind to such matters. And being blind I wouldn’t even know I was blind to them. With the best will in the world I cannot even begin to understand what ‘creative energy’ might be. And although I can think of several existential questions which might be asked – such as this one posed by a Palestinian refugee who was born and has lived in a permanently temporary camp for the past 30 years: ‘What the fuck is going on? Am I really going to be living hand to mouth until I die’ – I cannot for the life of me see how such questions can be asked by music.
It does occur to me that perhaps I should throw in the towel and become like folk in Britain for whom everything is ‘amazing’ perhaps that will save me from my incipient philistinism – become part of the gang while I still can.
. . .
I can’t find anyway to lead into this although the artist ‘entity’ Gilbert & George did come to mind while I was writing the above. Sadly, I found I couldn’t trace the immediate connection. However, I think they are a good example of what we philistines regard as bollocks and that how once you are part of the inner circle in art, pretty much anything you do is ‘art’ and ‘amazing’. Well judge for yourselves.
Below is a reproduction of a piece made by Gilbert & George in 1996 called Spunk Blood Piss Shit Spit. To be frank it as an illustration it is perfectly acceptable, though were it produced by a second year art student at college and entitled something innocuous such as Full English Breakfast, I very much doubt it would get any attention at all.
As it is . . . I did seem to remember that Gilbert & George claimed to have used some of their own faeces (the posh word for shit) as part of the materials for their piece, but I can’t find any reference after an in-depth 30-second search, so just accept that as hearsay.
Beneath the piece (lifted from the Tate Gallery’s website about a ‘Major Gilbert & George Exhibition and you can check it out here) is a piece of puffery, by an art critic and by Gilbert & George themselves. Quite how what they write about the genesis of their piece makes that piece any better – or even any more interesting – I couldn’t tell you, but then I am just a philistine who cannot be expected to understand these things. I am, however, not too philistine to realise that if I could get hold of a good agent and a great marketing department, I could make a mint! Here is an excerpt from the accompanying puffery:
At the same time, the pictures [in the Tate exhibition] explore ideas of mortality in its rawest form. ‘It’s like our pictures of cemeteries, all that dead matter. Shit is also the end of a life, a left over’, they explain. The nakedness of the artists is deliberately exposed, an image of humanity reduced to its essentials, without shelter, status or dignity. As the critic David Sylvester commented, while many twentieth-century artists tried to break out of the prettifying conventions of depicting the body as ‘nude’, only Gilbert & George truly succeeded in portraying it as ‘naked’.
Their investigation into the body led Gilbert & George to look in detail at all of its fluids and excretions. They bought a microscope to study samples of piss, and were astonished to discover complex patterns forming and dispersing on the slide. They found they could even pick out recognisable images. ‘Out of these drops of blood come stained-glass windows from fourteenth-century cathedrals, or Islamic writing’ they explained. ‘To see daggers and medieval swords in sweat: that’s our aim. In piss you find pistols, flowers, crucifixes. Spunk amazes us… it really does look like a crown of thorns.
Here is another piece which gives me at least the impression that if you play your cards right, this art game can well be money for old rope.
On the website it is accompanied by this piece of puffery:
We were trying to do something that was absolutely hopeless, dead, grey, lost’, Gilbert & George have said of the Dead Boards pictures. Like the Dusty Cornwers which preceded them, these interior studies of decaying empty rooms and isolated individuals are marked by melancholia. Even when the figures change positions, the same walls and the same boards are repeated, adding to their claustrophobic intensity.
. . .
Later
Just for the craic (or, as I am now told is correct, despite what I thought crack) a photo I took yesterday, reduced to B&W (as is only proper).
