More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
21 July
Shadows and surrealism in Caulfield’s career
For copyright reasons, I have not embedded images, but, when possible, included links to where they can be found and, if the reader wishes, opened in a separate window from the comments that I make here.
Introduction
The five-room survey of Patrick Caufield’s work at Tate Britain is a comfortable one to take in, with 35 canvases that begin with the 1960s, the latest one being from the year of his death, 2005. (Caulfield is twinned, in terms of ticket, with an interesting three-room show for Gary Hume.)
Some of Caulfield’s paintings were known to me over the years from the Tate’s collection, but it was good to put them in a wider historical and thematic context, which begins with pieces that make a virtue of a kind of studied refusal to make the subject-matter stand out from the picture-plane (partly by not using shadow).
The first half of the exhibition
A quality of, and using, ‘flatness’
This ‘flatness’ (or absence of relief, of things in perspective) is typified by The Well (1966), where the bits of rock and masonry (with shadow) that one would seek to interpret as surrounding the well-head look, deliberately, strangely proud, as if they are somehow above it, because, although small, they have mass (where the huge dressed stones arranged to form the well do not). Significantly, too, for what I shall go on to explore, we are shown the least of the well, not even over the lip, let alone whatever water lies ‘below’.
The effect also haunts Concrete Villa, Brunn (1963), where the outline of the named building appears to be imposed on a grid of squares (none of which we can actually see complete) and made from the meeting, at right-angles, of tight pairs of parallel lines (a coded reference to parallel lines projecting to meet at infinity ?). The flattened depiction of the building itself makes it appear to be a polygon, rather in the same way that a perspectival cube drawn with just its edges can look like two triangles joined by a central square.
Mixing styles of representation
In Still life with Dagger (1963), Caulfield is more explicit than in The Well as to the different ways of showing the elements of his composition, and has chosen to mix them. He has a jug as an outline (plus Cubist adjuncts), whereas the weapon of the title is painted full colour in semi-relief, but the beads of the necklace next to it, which loop around the handle of the jug, although they are made to project, light reflecting on the real object would, have the grey hue of the double-delineated flat surface. If we just look at this work without analysing it, it should still give a sense of disjunction, even of disquiet, because the conventions have been muddled.
Another work in this room makes us curious, wanting to know what Bend in the Road (1967) conceals, as the lie of the land and the curve suddenly hide the road ahead (if not at, then very near, the vanishing-point). Although, at one level, we may be conscious that it is Caulfield constructing, or marshalling, this terrain, we may be more caught up in our curiosity – that questioning spirit is part of our reaction to later works, wanting to know what lies beyond that door, window, staircase…
If we forget, however momentarily, that Caulfield determines what to show us (and how), as he does with the limited palette (two main colours here, plus dark outlines), we will have a frisson of being denied in and by this work, and that is its raison d’être, to challenge us and our expectations of painting. Just as the luscious mould on fruit and cheeses in a Dutch still-life might direct us to re-contemplate such everyday objects, Caulfield gives us a blind bend in the road to stop in front of and just wonder : if we will not give ourselves up to that, we will not get it, not get the point.
A response to René Magritte ?
That makes these works sound didactic, but they are not, for they are playful at the same time in the way, say, that Magritte is, even if the curator does not cite him as one of Caulfield’s influences. Portrait of Joan Gris (1963) in this room, quite a well-known one, reminds us of Magritte, with its uniform blue background, relieved only by almost floating irregular geometrical gestures either side of the solid Gris, figuratively rendered (although he could equally seem like a cut-out – please see below). No one could say that Gris or Magritte made jokes in art as such, but they utilized compositional ideas to underlie what they were doing – Caulfield likewise.
The figure of Gris, the easily missed man on the balcony in Villa, and a monochrome waiter in After Lunch (1975), leaning in from a recess, are the only figures whom we see, who do not really occupy these spaces, but are in them : only Gris is fully depicted as if living, because the waiter is bored and absorbed, in terms of colour, into his space, and the man on the balcony is just a tiny reminder that this villa is ‘a machine for living’.
Expectancy in these works
When I say that they do not ‘occupy’ the works in which they appear, there is not the same expectancy, as in other canvases such as Foyer (1973), as to where people are, what is happening, but the waiter has done with his activity at lunchtime and is just quiet, the man on the balcony is dwarfed by the building and its construction even as, reading his paper, he pretends not to feel that he is – and, even if the men have further to say, they do not say it. (Even Office Party (1977) gives us the trappings of the office, e.g. the typewriter, and of the party, bottles and glasses, but no one partying, just the saints on the front of the building opposite.)
It is characteristic, then, of Caulfield that he chooses these largely unpopulated spaces, these moments perhaps between (or under*) the moments, a bit in the way of glimpsing a fully lit room as one passes a house, where one can see what is there and where other lit rooms extend, but no sign of the human life that usually gives rise to all this (and for whom all this would then exist). Each of the pieces in this exhibition has, if not always a very strong one, a personality, an identity separate from those whom we hypothesize could shortly enter it.
That, too, is a cognate feeling in Magritte’s canon, even if it does not mean with Caulfield that a train will rush out of the fireplace, or someone on horseback from the wings : each interior (they are largely interiors, or semi-interiors) appears to have a self-awareness – almost a self-consciousness – that, despite the absence of a human observer, it exists. Put another way, the rooms have a presence that it is not dependent on the motive force of human beings, and this Caulfield paints.
Even if it probably oversimplifies, Cubism is nowadays often purported to be a response to, and demonstration of, Einstein’s theories about relativity, whereas the word ‘surreal’ is blithely, in common parlance, applied to anything a bit strange, without reference to the stated aims of The Surrealist Manifesto (or the practice of those in the movement). At this stage in his career, Caulfield is not moved by his interest in Braque to distort dimensionality quite in the way of a Cubist still-life, and Dagger does not closely resemble the work of that school. However, he does give a dream-like sensibility to these rooms, not unlike the feel of the exteriors of, say, Giorgio de Chirico and Paul Delvaux.
Construction and artifice
In Lunch, as if it is an external view (although it seems to be a painting partly behind a fish-tank, complete with blobby goldfish of a Matissean hue, but not delicacy), there is a wholly naturalistic scene, of a typical Bavarian (or Austrian) castle on a lake, which extends, in photographic detail, into the distance.
Apart from the fish, and a lozenge highlight bottom right (which seems to represent light entering with steps down from the restaurant), this is the most diverse range of colour in a largely blue canvas : two near-parallel slanting lines, as if of shadow in the lower and upper reaches (a slightly different, cooler shade above from below), divide the area left to right, and give way to a lighter colour where the waiter’s head emerges.
Topographically (as will be found with other paintings such as Springtime : face à la Mer 1974), the space is difficult to construe : the fish-tank is supported by a long box on a trestle between whose legs, at the right height, one would be able to look through, just as – if it were not too high – the panelling above and behind the painting gives way to a decorative top-board, beyond which we see the roof-space, columns, probably suspension-wires for overhead lamps. This is where the waiter is standing, leaning over the uppermost of the ranch-style boards that partition off that region.
As already implied, he almost appears to be part of the furniture, inert, though seemingly contemplating whatever is ahead, which is unseen. Is what we see, with a table, chairs, a cooking-pot, the kitchen part, and he would normally be serving dishes that are reached over the partition, and then take them into the restaurant proper (unless it is the dining-room of a wealthy private house) ?
An Escherean perspective ?
Countless viewings, the most recent a thorough one, have not exhausted this painting, with its juxtapositions of shadowed portions, stylized fish, and the confusing verisimilitude of the painting that could be the world outside. Here, and remembering Concrete Villa, one almost wonders whether one is looking at solid enough lines of construction that lead to an absurdity, as in M. C. Escher’s impossible spaces, most notably Waterfall, whose waters turns out to be feeding themselves. That is certainly the feeling with Springtime, trying to be sure where steps lead, and how the world inside the building (though we have a feeling of interiority, I believe it to be false on the evidence) can fit together with this view.
Escher’s etchings have a sense of holding reality at bay that fits with these works seeming to hold enquiry at an expectant arm’s length, more so than with the relative stasis of Braque’s or Léger’s compositions, although they do embody what one might call structural tension (or difficulty). So, with Dining Recess (1972) there is familiarly a circular table with six egg-cup-shaped chairs loosely arranged around it (one can see, but only by considering the circles of the bases of table and chairs, that there is human imperfection, not rigidity, in this set-up).
All but the pale, lemony glow of a lamp that has shape but no depth and an indeterminate blue through a high-up window or skylight** (which could be either a certain type of dullish daytime, or a luminescent night sky without stars) is rendered moderately flatly in a sort of slate grey with a chocolate tinge to it, so that one’s eye is drawn to the ‘hotspots’ of the globe of light and to the sky above. Is the electric light really quite dim that it does not seem to illumine and create shadow, or is the uniform greyness (of a kind that Beckettt maybe described in his rotunda pieces, and in All Strange Away and Company) in this non-directional way somehow its product ?
The light being there draws us and draws out questions, as to whether, say, the space is lit before supper, after the table has been cleared, or just as part of the downstairs lighting of an evening, and the latter sensations are implicit in the painting’s form : we can make the view have meaning, and have a feel for where this recess is from the clues (even if the architecture confuses**), but it resists us, it is non-committal, and will not confirm our notions. Again, a sort of challenge to us about what we believe, what we imagine, but without shouting at us that we make those assumptions all the time.
The second half of the exhibition
Still life reinvested ?
In later work (displayed in Rooms 4 and 5), Caulfield has not so much revisited as reinvested the still life. In Still Life : Mother’s Day (1975) and in Braque Curtain (2005), shadows are silhouettes with a life and lively colours of their own, and one struggles to divine a source and direction of light that would act in this way. Again, that disturbing effect as of Dagger, but this time more strongly, where the puzzle is more explicit, and where the bright blue shadows of Mother’s Day, rather than being cast by light shining on those objects, almost seems to project the objects (there is the same appearance in Curtain).
Faux-collage
All of this made more intense by the faux-collage of what appears to be a cut-out rose applied to the fish-bowl, but in fact is painted – a juxtaposition a little like Magritte’s huge flower in a room, or an apple in front of the head of a suited man. Which is why I relate to using a style that makes a flower resemble a cutting from a magazine as a surrealist impulse, because there is that dislocation again.
In fact, it is a double one, the first being the sharply contrasting technique, the second that some of the simplicities of style, used as a matter of choice, may have blunted one to the scope of the artist’s technical mastery. In other words, since he gives us a bowl by its stylized outline (rather than a bowl that, with effects of shade and reflection, looks like a real one), do we tend not to credit that the painter can paint, and thus assume that he must have used collage, whether it is flowers around a doorway that we cannot see into (Entrance (1975)), or detail in a grand portico ?
Flowers are a key theme of painting-as-collage in this exhibition, whether the striking display in Entrance, or the chopped-off study of tulips. Otherwise, it is paintings (such as in Lunch or Interior with a Picture (1985 – 1986)), or fabrics (a Morris & Co. one in Green Drink (1984)). They are part of what makes interiors feel like a still life, pregnant with what might have happened beforehand, or be about to happen.
Lamp-shades
Another part – which gives rise to the title of this account – is lamps, and Caulfield has made series of the same simple scene at different times of day. Here, I do not know whether there are companion pieces, but Window at Night (1969) uses the device of a pendant light, hanging where it is crossed by the first intersection of a three-wide by five-deep paned window, a red cone with a yellow highlight at the lower aperture.
The room itself, with the outline of a corner top right, is wholly orange : as has been commented before, however, the lamp casts its light uniformly, and maybe we are distracted from this by the window furniture, the open transom, and the silhouettes of items on the window-ledge. Window is not, if we do not allow it to lull us by not thinking with and through what Caulfield has done, a representation except in stylized, Caulfieldian terms.
Heightened expectancy
Again, with the possibility that (the outline of) a person might enter, a degree of tension, then, as with that bend in the road, Gris faced by what seem like mobiles, or these expectant interior views such as Dining / Kitchen / Living (1980). In that latter work, we see, left to right, the three named living-areas. On the table in the centre, a mixed rendition of styles that render the scrapbook-style oval, brown casserole with lid, again making us think that it is cut out, and the food (which looks unreal, in some way, as food in some other canvases does, if not hyper-real and cut out, in other cases, as with some chicken bread-crumbed breasts).
Evidence that someone has been here, as in Goldilocks. Once more, except that we are inside rather than out, the sensation that someone might come in at any moment and surprise us. Except that this is a canvas, and what makes us enter into it ? What draws us into it, as in Window, what keeps us aloof from Foyer, hesitating at whether we are interested, and what shuts us out, if we just look quickly, at it or at Well, and ask what the point is ?
Shadow and the light that cast it
Some later paintings provoke us as to what they might mean in a different way, with lamp-shades that interact by superposition and against the laws of physics with the cone of light that they project. It has already been commented that Braque Curtain’s shadows (which is shadow, though, and which the light ?), unless there really are two table-lamps in the split-level aperture, challenge our understanding if we look at the detail.
Nearly top left, the jaunty outline of the shade of a standard-lamp, but no shadow, no light projected above or below, and in its own little patch of complementary colour. Far left, a large, bold pattern, as if a large oddment of material is hanging, a gesture, in dividing the space, that reminds me again of Magritte’s use of pattern and texture, and a complete foil to the sombre black and light orange of the lamps. If this is the title’s curtain, then it separates off from the world where we do not know what is casting what, or what relates them.
Several works, including Bishops (2004), take this playfulness in a different direction, with what is the lamp, and what is the light that it casts (I could have said earlier that light and darkness co-existing was a Magrittean preoccupation in a series of paintings called The Empire of Lights), and they all seem to formulate a series of ruminations on this question, although it was not, on this visit, one that for me was pressing to follow – or even to try to engage much with.
Shadows, light, and construing spaces
In other works again, such as Hemingway Never Ate Here (1999), fathoming the space is not straightforward : bottom right, there is a black right-angled triangle, indicating that (unless it is trompe-l’œil, as our examination may require is to think) there appears to be a corner, in which case the lower part of the wall below the dado-line (or that part of it) must slope backwards. If it does slope, where the dado turns a corner and stops is where a built-in table (looking for all the world like a hovering tray) is home for a partly drunk beer with lime (which I wrongly took for a fading candle at first, as I had not entered the idiom), an apparently empty cup and saucer and a larger piece of lime (?) on the saucer. (Above the dado, a decorated cow’s head, complete with horns, which inevitably makes of think of the titular Hemingway.)
What lies on the other side of the canvas (the dado takes us roughly halfway across) is initially straightforward, a bracket, though not clearly for what, in relief that resembles a treble-clef. The main feature, though, is a large and bright-yellow emission of light that colours the bits of wall under the bracket and of the short section of wall where the dado ends. One might infer that it emanates from the white full-moon shape seen at the top of this seeming doorway with a curved top, or may be from the white object on the level with the tray, but I am unsure : it could be more likely, given how the shadows look, that the source of the light is invisible, in the space, but hidden behind the arch...
Perhaps, also, since we can make out treads (the first with the leach of the light onto it) on the left of the canvas, stairs go up in the direction of where the bracket is (which would then be – if it were not utterly flat, and in relief – a place to hang a basket). The quadrilateral actually seems to be the actually base of a built-in surface, with a window to the left of it (we catch a hook or bracket’s shadow, which looks wooden, and above it could be a thin curtain-rail), and we see to the right of it the top left-hand corner of what looks like a big piece of furniture (not in style with anything else). This could be the entrance to the building, in fact, as the shadows indicate a floor-level recess.
That exhausts my fathoming this work just now – it is deliberately puzzling, deliberately different from the (apparent) simplicity of others such as Window or Foyer, and, unless one can catch it just right, with a willing and accommodating eye, it will frankly make no sense. None, anyway that is easy enough for a casual stroll around a gallery, although it is really no more complex than Villa, but Caulfield has rendered shape in colour, in perplexing light and shadow.
Touches of Dalí in an interior with Magrittean curtains as radiating light ?
Another puzzling work, with which I shall seek to make a finish, is Reserved Table (2000). Much of the upper left and right part of the surface has been rendered with a crenellated comb, as if it were decorative render for ceiling or walls. (Here, the ceiling is not rendered, or distinguished from the walls, and is of a pashy midnight blue.) To the left of the canvas, arcs of light again, the upper one white and in the shape of a cone with one-quarter of a circle inverted on the top, the lower one slightly creamy, and starting conically, but ending with a claw.
We will have taken in the lobster before then, which this shape echoes. In one sense, it is not out of place somewhere that the title suggest is a restaurant, in another it used more decoratively, oddly just placed there, which implies that it is dead (and reminds me of Dalí’s Telephone (1936)). It is, at any rate, on a narrow ledge in front of what appears to be an almost egg-shaped mirror, showing perhaps the other side of it (although we see more of a reflection than the height and position of the putative mirror suggests :
Maybe it is not a mirror, but a black canvas with a depiction of part of a lobster at the bottom. It could even be a serving hatch, because the lobster on the ledge may not match this one, and the egg-shaped space is set into a rectangle that it delineated as proud by a shadow down the side of it, and it is not impossible that the light seen to the other side represents what comes from the kitchen.
As to the table, apart from a curled, metallic bracket, it appears to float, or, rather, it has a seemingly floating tablecloth, in whose starchy material is impressed the form of a circular top. The curves and billows of the cloth are a distinct contrast to the sheen of the rendered, arched alcove above : it is a contrast, because the cloth, as with the shape that balances it on the left-hand side, is very bright so as to seem hyper-real again, and the shadow under the table / cloth seems vague and indistinct, which is a beautiful touch.
As before, a table that has been reserved, but which is not set – were the diners very careful, or is it infra dig in such an establishment to have the table laid on arrival ? The cloth radiates cleanness, as does the whole space, and it is these highlights and juxtapositions of colour and shade that create yet another sense of something that, presumably, is about to happen…
Brief conclusion
In summary, I believe that the painterly qualities that I have discussed are indicative of influences beyond the recognized ones of Braque, Léger and Gris. In particular, I suggest that Caulfield has used some of the techniques of those who, at some time or other, were admitted by André Breton to the role of the Surrealists, notably shadow for disturbing effect, along with the creation of places that, by their patient emptiness, draw our attention to the immanence of their occupation.
What the papers thought...
The Guardian was favourable (about this and the twinned exhibition), The Independent and The Telegraph were less keen.
Caulfield's friend, David Hare, has some things to say about his work that I find perceptive.
End-notes
* An important collection of Russell Hoban’s stories, essays and other pieces is called The Moment under the Moment.
** If we stop to consider what we see of the inside of the roof, it is not certain that we can construe it : I am unsure whether it is like an Escher, where the lines deceive, or whether it was not intended as it looks, with a sloping roof that disappears into a space where our eye cannot follow.
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Saturday, 20 July 2013
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Wednesday, 10 July 2013
The Ten Glib Compromises of Advocacy
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 July
Following on from Is mental health advocacy better than nothing ?
Never mind The Advocacy Charter – The Ten Glib Compromises of Advocacy
1. Tokenistic proceedings and their prosecution or defence
Just as with letting the client have his or her day in court, the solicitors who – satisfied that he or she has consent – go through the motions, knowing that the nature of their client’s condition means that he or she is automatically at a disadvantage before the judiciary (and almost admit as much to the advocate).
2. Relations with health professionals (1)
The advocate has never met somebody just admitted for the first time, whereas he or she sees the ward staff all the time – can they not make the advocate seem on their side through the pleasantries and formalities of intercourse, subtly undermining the client–advocate axis ?
3. Don’t tell me… ! (1)
One advocacy mantra is maintaining client confidentiality unless the client reveals that he or she intends serious harm to him- or herself or to someone else, which the clients are supposedly told right at the start (when they actually want to jump straight in with their story most of the time). They should then be interrupted with, and because of, it as soon as they appear to be making a disclosure, unless they manage to blurt it out.
And the purpose of this principle ? If you intend to poison your consultant, don’t tell me, because I’ll have to tell him or her – whereas, if I can say that I didn’t know (even if on account of the fact that I stopped you telling me), that’s OK. Really ?
4. Relations with health professionals) (2)
Let alone when it comes to a complaint about a member of staff who supports or facilitates one’s visit to the unit… Does one really put one’s heart into the client’s concern, or, as one should, declare a conflict of interests between duties to one’s service and to the client ?
5. Don’t tell me… !) (2)
Some staff, however much they are reminded that one has to share everything with the client, drop little prejudicial comments or otherwise drip-feed negative messages.
If the client’s issue, say, with which his or her involvement is needed is to do with something off the unit, is there an incentive to say Z looked ‘in a funny way’ when I went to ask about that and mentioned it concerned you ? No possibility of thinking of getting other client work done, meeting targets, or just not wanting to foment avoidable upset ?
6. Giving options, not advising action (1)
Of course, because one has to give the options in some order and may not be able to eliminate emphasis by that and / or other means, does the client get an absolutely free and influenced choice ?
7. Relations with health professionals (3)
If the arrangement with the unit is to visit periodically to be available for a time and then come into the planning / community / ward meeting, does one, even by refusing to laugh with the staff when one or two of those present kick off with frustration or something unintentionally funny, appear to endorse this humiliatory aspect of long-stay ‘care’ ? The staff are not so much laughing with, as at, the rehab patient, and they seek to engage the advocate with their looks, their smiles, their laughs.
8. Giving options, not advising action (2)
Take an unfamiliar part of the benefits system (or challenging it). What makes the advocate competent to say what the options are ? For our service, I pressed for us to have Citizens’ Advice’s information system, which objectively gives those options, but despaired of ever persuading anyone else to use it - some would think it better to interrupt busy colleagues and ask their opinion, even if they were, in fact, on hold on a call that was liable to be resumed before the others could finish answering.
9. Invoking – or failing to invoke – legal principles
Advocacy services that make much of being independent from the NHS cannot very well take an office on hospital premises for a peppercorn rent, as if nothing compromises pursuing any issue for clients on that hospital’s units.
If advocates ever could correctly identify conflicts of interests, this is one – between serving the client and having been done a favour by the hospital. However, advocates usually find / invent such conflicts where none exist, or, with maintaining confidentiality, miss the fact that the person whose confidentiality is being protected can always seek to waive it.
For example, by going to the ward office with the client and getting him or her to say that she wants one to know XYZ.
10. Giving options, not advising action (3)
No one can have failed to read points 1 to 9, above, without noticing that I say that advocates are generally weak at analysing when the principles whose names they bandy about apply : what hope, then, of them knowing how to analyse, and of actually analysing, the problem(s) of which their client is narrating some of the facts, of knowing what facts are missing, and of being able to present the analysed medical, legal or other problem back to the client so that he or she can understand ?
If the client lacks capacity, he or she may feign understanding, just as he or she may claim to be tired or to have glasses to disguise being effectively illiterate. He or she is supposed to weigh up the options and make an informed choice of action for him / her and / or the advocate…
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 July
Following on from Is mental health advocacy better than nothing ?
Never mind The Advocacy Charter – The Ten Glib Compromises of Advocacy
1. Tokenistic proceedings and their prosecution or defence
Just as with letting the client have his or her day in court, the solicitors who – satisfied that he or she has consent – go through the motions, knowing that the nature of their client’s condition means that he or she is automatically at a disadvantage before the judiciary (and almost admit as much to the advocate).
2. Relations with health professionals (1)
The advocate has never met somebody just admitted for the first time, whereas he or she sees the ward staff all the time – can they not make the advocate seem on their side through the pleasantries and formalities of intercourse, subtly undermining the client–advocate axis ?
3. Don’t tell me… ! (1)
One advocacy mantra is maintaining client confidentiality unless the client reveals that he or she intends serious harm to him- or herself or to someone else, which the clients are supposedly told right at the start (when they actually want to jump straight in with their story most of the time). They should then be interrupted with, and because of, it as soon as they appear to be making a disclosure, unless they manage to blurt it out.
And the purpose of this principle ? If you intend to poison your consultant, don’t tell me, because I’ll have to tell him or her – whereas, if I can say that I didn’t know (even if on account of the fact that I stopped you telling me), that’s OK. Really ?
4. Relations with health professionals) (2)
Let alone when it comes to a complaint about a member of staff who supports or facilitates one’s visit to the unit… Does one really put one’s heart into the client’s concern, or, as one should, declare a conflict of interests between duties to one’s service and to the client ?
5. Don’t tell me… !) (2)
Some staff, however much they are reminded that one has to share everything with the client, drop little prejudicial comments or otherwise drip-feed negative messages.
If the client’s issue, say, with which his or her involvement is needed is to do with something off the unit, is there an incentive to say Z looked ‘in a funny way’ when I went to ask about that and mentioned it concerned you ? No possibility of thinking of getting other client work done, meeting targets, or just not wanting to foment avoidable upset ?
6. Giving options, not advising action (1)
Of course, because one has to give the options in some order and may not be able to eliminate emphasis by that and / or other means, does the client get an absolutely free and influenced choice ?
7. Relations with health professionals (3)
If the arrangement with the unit is to visit periodically to be available for a time and then come into the planning / community / ward meeting, does one, even by refusing to laugh with the staff when one or two of those present kick off with frustration or something unintentionally funny, appear to endorse this humiliatory aspect of long-stay ‘care’ ? The staff are not so much laughing with, as at, the rehab patient, and they seek to engage the advocate with their looks, their smiles, their laughs.
8. Giving options, not advising action (2)
Take an unfamiliar part of the benefits system (or challenging it). What makes the advocate competent to say what the options are ? For our service, I pressed for us to have Citizens’ Advice’s information system, which objectively gives those options, but despaired of ever persuading anyone else to use it - some would think it better to interrupt busy colleagues and ask their opinion, even if they were, in fact, on hold on a call that was liable to be resumed before the others could finish answering.
9. Invoking – or failing to invoke – legal principles
Advocacy services that make much of being independent from the NHS cannot very well take an office on hospital premises for a peppercorn rent, as if nothing compromises pursuing any issue for clients on that hospital’s units.
If advocates ever could correctly identify conflicts of interests, this is one – between serving the client and having been done a favour by the hospital. However, advocates usually find / invent such conflicts where none exist, or, with maintaining confidentiality, miss the fact that the person whose confidentiality is being protected can always seek to waive it.
For example, by going to the ward office with the client and getting him or her to say that she wants one to know XYZ.
10. Giving options, not advising action (3)
No one can have failed to read points 1 to 9, above, without noticing that I say that advocates are generally weak at analysing when the principles whose names they bandy about apply : what hope, then, of them knowing how to analyse, and of actually analysing, the problem(s) of which their client is narrating some of the facts, of knowing what facts are missing, and of being able to present the analysed medical, legal or other problem back to the client so that he or she can understand ?
If the client lacks capacity, he or she may feign understanding, just as he or she may claim to be tired or to have glasses to disguise being effectively illiterate. He or she is supposed to weigh up the options and make an informed choice of action for him / her and / or the advocate…
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Tuesday, 9 July 2013
Is mental health advocacy better than nothing ?
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 July
I worked as an advocate for eight years.
When I started, there was no such thing in name as IMHA (Independent Mental Health Advocacy) for people detained under the Mental Health Act 2003 as it then stood (commonly known, for no good reason, as ‘being sectioned’), but our contract, and our arrangement with the mental-health trust, meant that we went onto the wards and could give people just the same help with the Act, but without the powers given to IMHAs, for example, to look at hospital records (I never needed to).
IMHA is a very specific thing. The training to become one, I have to say, is rubbish and factually incorrect or misleading in several places, when, that is, it is not box-ticking and jumping through hoops. That apart, one could and should be very competent in being able to explain a person’s rights to him and her.
Yet that is not because of the training, but because of the limited compass of what one typically needs to know from day to day, whereas the vast numbers who are on supervised community treatment (usually thought of as a Community Treatment Order, or CTO, though it is not an Order as such) indicate either that few people take the chance to have their rights explained, or that (which has to be laid at the IMHA’s door) they do not understand their rights.
Considering supervised community treatment is a triggering event for a person to be advised of his or her rights to see an IMHA, so I should be interested to see figures for how many exercise it. Just a guess, but I imagine few, because it is typically hard, as a patient, to believe that there is a just and fair system and that one has any right that is not compromised.
After all, the person may already have poured his or her heart out to an advocate that he or she should not have been detained under (the civil sections of) the Act, and have been told that, all impressions and intents to the contrary, the psychiatric unit is not a prison or part of the criminal-justice system. Under IMHA, one would be able to know more about the detention, and, safeguarding not telling the person something that would injure his or her health, to pass that reason on.
So that is IMHA, and the typical scope of enquiries that one might have under the Act. Contrast that with, say, a matter of contract or of family law for the same person, whether or not still in hospital. For good or ill, advocates largely ignore the question of capacity, and so will support clients (including seeking to find them, without charge, increasingly unavailable legal representation) to do what they seek. This never happened to me, but he or she may want to give up a tenancy, and, if he or she refuses to have advice on doing so, may be guided through an irreversible process that will later be regretted.
That is one point where I say that advocacy is not better than nothing : with nothing, the person might not get there on his or her own, whereas what, of lasting good, has been achieved in the name of empowering the client ? I had colleagues who had had to help with such folly in the name of empowerment, and who gained some reassurance, by relying on the generalized and self-perpetuating ‘advocacy principles’, that they had, by doing their job, done the right thing. I cannot say or think so – that is the mindset of advocacy, but it is wrong.
Advocacy puffs itself up with the notion that it is a profession. It even uses terms from ‘taking instructions’ to ‘attendance notes’ that are (did one’s colleagues but know it) properly those of solicitors, but with this important difference : The Law Society will not allow a solicitor to proceed, without some independent verification of capacity, if her or she doubts that the client lacks it (in relation to the legal task in hand and the decisions that have, or may have, to be taken). There is no equivalent of The Law Society for so-called generic advocates, but just guidance from bodies such as Action for Advocacy.
Advocacy is not a real profession, although caught by the requirement to provide a service with reasonable care and skill (but advocacy services have scant notion of liability, risk and the scope of a duty of care), and it will sidestep the protection that, as just seen, a solicitor will have to employ to achieve outcomes that can be as damaging, if not more so.
Damaging, if not pointless, for my manager once required me to fly in the face of a direction from a judge in the belief that going to a full hearing would give the client closure* (I had no such belief, and it did not, because he wanted to appeal, and then, when told that he had no grounds for an appeal, wanted a second opinion) : to my mind, if a judge, prior to trial, expresses the view that, without x, a case cannot succeed, one either gets x, or tells the client that one cannot support him to go to trial unless he agrees to get it.
What we did was to go to trial without x, and it was a futile exercise, built on unrealistic ideas that the client would see that the process had been gone through and exhausted, in giving the client the right to ignore a very big judicial piece of advice for no very good reason. Did the client have capacity in relation to these matters ? I rather doubt so, and his ‘instructions’ were of a repetitive, yet not always consistent, kind that was unlikely to find judicial favour in any case. I say all this as a former solicitor (though none of my colleagues had any legal training whatever.)
So on lack of proper safeguards for imprudent decision-making there are concerns, but advocacy is also founded on the shaky basis, touched upon already without calling it such, of giving the person the right to have his or her say. If it’s having a say that rights were infringed, and that hospital staff should not have done what they did, how crushing is it to put all that into a complaint, and then have back from the complaints department that there is ‘no evidence’ that what the client claims happened.
Does one, in hindsight, guard the client’s expectations of the process so that he or she will not be crushed by the outcome, or has the client made his or her own bed ? To make the complaint with the client, it was necessary to come alongside and to empathize with what he or she said, and one is forbidden (despite being permitted to say what is likely to happen from past experience) to express one’s own opinion, because that is a big advocacy no-no except by taking the client, with his or her consent, to someone else such as a solicitor who can express one, and give advice.
If, faced with a client who is upset by what happened and wants to make a complaint, one cannot really say that most complaints procedures are a whitewash and that the client will just be upset more, because that would stray from what is likely to seeking to persuade or advise : the client alone must decide, and one has no opinion to express.
The blind leading the blind ? Sadly, yes, I think so, however well-meaningly grounded in peer support, and little better than kindly do-gooders, unanswerable to anyone much when it all comes unstuck. Add to that people who know things that they do not, such as how one cannot (one cannot ?) be dismissed for being off sick or that, even if the time-limit for bringing an employment claim may turn to be passed, one can simply argue that one could not bring a claim before (and so simply), and the cacophony becomes unbearable.
Either non-IMHA advocates such know more, and be qualified as legal executives, or they should do less. They are not professionals in any meaningful sense, and they should not be allowed to help people without capacity to do objectively undesirable things on some woolly basis of empowering them.
As to IMHA, I reserve judgement, but a five-day training on the Act before IMHA came in was a much better grounding in how it works than the dedicated IMHA module. The advocacy world went soft when the statutory training was announced : there should have been exemptions for existing advocates, more intensive training for new advocates, and none of this vague competency-based accreditation, which does not substitute for solidly understanding the Act and how it applies to different situations.
As if this were not enough, you can now read The Ten Glib Compromises of Advocacy (in retort to The Advocacy Charter)...
End-notes
* It may be explicit enough in what I wrote last night, but I still remember so much of the blinkered vision of advocacy's so-called principles that I was accustomed not to portray that as appalling cynicism - support the client to go to trial, not because we believe that he now, with the stance that he has taken, stands any chance, but just so that we have reason to shut him up !
In the same way, one insulated oneself, in the way that I mentioned earlier on, from questioning whether the principles that had one facilitate someone doing / not doing something just because, at that moment, he or she felt like doing / not doing it were sound or right.
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
10 July
I worked as an advocate for eight years.
When I started, there was no such thing in name as IMHA (Independent Mental Health Advocacy) for people detained under the Mental Health Act 2003 as it then stood (commonly known, for no good reason, as ‘being sectioned’), but our contract, and our arrangement with the mental-health trust, meant that we went onto the wards and could give people just the same help with the Act, but without the powers given to IMHAs, for example, to look at hospital records (I never needed to).
IMHA is a very specific thing. The training to become one, I have to say, is rubbish and factually incorrect or misleading in several places, when, that is, it is not box-ticking and jumping through hoops. That apart, one could and should be very competent in being able to explain a person’s rights to him and her.
Yet that is not because of the training, but because of the limited compass of what one typically needs to know from day to day, whereas the vast numbers who are on supervised community treatment (usually thought of as a Community Treatment Order, or CTO, though it is not an Order as such) indicate either that few people take the chance to have their rights explained, or that (which has to be laid at the IMHA’s door) they do not understand their rights.
Considering supervised community treatment is a triggering event for a person to be advised of his or her rights to see an IMHA, so I should be interested to see figures for how many exercise it. Just a guess, but I imagine few, because it is typically hard, as a patient, to believe that there is a just and fair system and that one has any right that is not compromised.
After all, the person may already have poured his or her heart out to an advocate that he or she should not have been detained under (the civil sections of) the Act, and have been told that, all impressions and intents to the contrary, the psychiatric unit is not a prison or part of the criminal-justice system. Under IMHA, one would be able to know more about the detention, and, safeguarding not telling the person something that would injure his or her health, to pass that reason on.
So that is IMHA, and the typical scope of enquiries that one might have under the Act. Contrast that with, say, a matter of contract or of family law for the same person, whether or not still in hospital. For good or ill, advocates largely ignore the question of capacity, and so will support clients (including seeking to find them, without charge, increasingly unavailable legal representation) to do what they seek. This never happened to me, but he or she may want to give up a tenancy, and, if he or she refuses to have advice on doing so, may be guided through an irreversible process that will later be regretted.
That is one point where I say that advocacy is not better than nothing : with nothing, the person might not get there on his or her own, whereas what, of lasting good, has been achieved in the name of empowering the client ? I had colleagues who had had to help with such folly in the name of empowerment, and who gained some reassurance, by relying on the generalized and self-perpetuating ‘advocacy principles’, that they had, by doing their job, done the right thing. I cannot say or think so – that is the mindset of advocacy, but it is wrong.
Advocacy puffs itself up with the notion that it is a profession. It even uses terms from ‘taking instructions’ to ‘attendance notes’ that are (did one’s colleagues but know it) properly those of solicitors, but with this important difference : The Law Society will not allow a solicitor to proceed, without some independent verification of capacity, if her or she doubts that the client lacks it (in relation to the legal task in hand and the decisions that have, or may have, to be taken). There is no equivalent of The Law Society for so-called generic advocates, but just guidance from bodies such as Action for Advocacy.
Advocacy is not a real profession, although caught by the requirement to provide a service with reasonable care and skill (but advocacy services have scant notion of liability, risk and the scope of a duty of care), and it will sidestep the protection that, as just seen, a solicitor will have to employ to achieve outcomes that can be as damaging, if not more so.
Damaging, if not pointless, for my manager once required me to fly in the face of a direction from a judge in the belief that going to a full hearing would give the client closure* (I had no such belief, and it did not, because he wanted to appeal, and then, when told that he had no grounds for an appeal, wanted a second opinion) : to my mind, if a judge, prior to trial, expresses the view that, without x, a case cannot succeed, one either gets x, or tells the client that one cannot support him to go to trial unless he agrees to get it.
What we did was to go to trial without x, and it was a futile exercise, built on unrealistic ideas that the client would see that the process had been gone through and exhausted, in giving the client the right to ignore a very big judicial piece of advice for no very good reason. Did the client have capacity in relation to these matters ? I rather doubt so, and his ‘instructions’ were of a repetitive, yet not always consistent, kind that was unlikely to find judicial favour in any case. I say all this as a former solicitor (though none of my colleagues had any legal training whatever.)
So on lack of proper safeguards for imprudent decision-making there are concerns, but advocacy is also founded on the shaky basis, touched upon already without calling it such, of giving the person the right to have his or her say. If it’s having a say that rights were infringed, and that hospital staff should not have done what they did, how crushing is it to put all that into a complaint, and then have back from the complaints department that there is ‘no evidence’ that what the client claims happened.
Does one, in hindsight, guard the client’s expectations of the process so that he or she will not be crushed by the outcome, or has the client made his or her own bed ? To make the complaint with the client, it was necessary to come alongside and to empathize with what he or she said, and one is forbidden (despite being permitted to say what is likely to happen from past experience) to express one’s own opinion, because that is a big advocacy no-no except by taking the client, with his or her consent, to someone else such as a solicitor who can express one, and give advice.
If, faced with a client who is upset by what happened and wants to make a complaint, one cannot really say that most complaints procedures are a whitewash and that the client will just be upset more, because that would stray from what is likely to seeking to persuade or advise : the client alone must decide, and one has no opinion to express.
The blind leading the blind ? Sadly, yes, I think so, however well-meaningly grounded in peer support, and little better than kindly do-gooders, unanswerable to anyone much when it all comes unstuck. Add to that people who know things that they do not, such as how one cannot (one cannot ?) be dismissed for being off sick or that, even if the time-limit for bringing an employment claim may turn to be passed, one can simply argue that one could not bring a claim before (and so simply), and the cacophony becomes unbearable.
Either non-IMHA advocates such know more, and be qualified as legal executives, or they should do less. They are not professionals in any meaningful sense, and they should not be allowed to help people without capacity to do objectively undesirable things on some woolly basis of empowering them.
As to IMHA, I reserve judgement, but a five-day training on the Act before IMHA came in was a much better grounding in how it works than the dedicated IMHA module. The advocacy world went soft when the statutory training was announced : there should have been exemptions for existing advocates, more intensive training for new advocates, and none of this vague competency-based accreditation, which does not substitute for solidly understanding the Act and how it applies to different situations.
As if this were not enough, you can now read The Ten Glib Compromises of Advocacy (in retort to The Advocacy Charter)...
End-notes
* It may be explicit enough in what I wrote last night, but I still remember so much of the blinkered vision of advocacy's so-called principles that I was accustomed not to portray that as appalling cynicism - support the client to go to trial, not because we believe that he now, with the stance that he has taken, stands any chance, but just so that we have reason to shut him up !
In the same way, one insulated oneself, in the way that I mentioned earlier on, from questioning whether the principles that had one facilitate someone doing / not doing something just because, at that moment, he or she felt like doing / not doing it were sound or right.
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Monday, 8 July 2013
A field of view
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 July
* Contains spoilers *
People who would find Tarkovsky ‘just boring’ won’t like – or ‘get’ – this film, as I know from glancing at a review on IMDb that churlishly gives it two stars. As if it has broken some sort of naturalistic promise that cinema makes, or one to be exciting (though this film is).
That review claims that being filmed in monochrome makes the English countryside look ordinary. It does nothing of the sort, and is filmed with a real sense of wonder – just look at the short where the four men are first walking down into the space to see why. (Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are at work, claiming that it stole someone else’s idea.)
I don’t care – though I did stop to wonder – whether a mid-seventeenth century field would be as big as that*, but our sense of time and space are only as big as our capacity to believe that the four main actors have been transported out of the English Civil War to join O’Neill – the hedgerow is to the field as the wardrobe is to Narnia. Apart from a knowing Essex joke, Amy Jump gives us little in her able script to dislocate us, and, for all that I care, the men may be from some other age, though they speak a passably historical English.
I think that the mushrooms / toadstools are a red herring as a way o understanding this film. Again, I don’t much care whether such hallucinogenic fare was to be had (as who is not to say that this is an accident of this field), or whether hardened soldiers (or those living more closely to the land) would not be used to what they were eating. When, although Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) does not eat of it, the men adopt a stew that is already being made (presumably by O’Neil), many of the mushrooms that they add are unremarkable, except at the end, when they are of a more wild nature.
If they have any effect, it is to urge them in the effort to pull up a carved stake – but a stake with a life of its own, whereas my reviewer interpreted them as trying to plough the field – whereas hallucinogenics usually lead to heady inertia and contemplation. Of course, the action may not really have been taking place, as the way in which the stake reels them back in is somewhat magical.
Which brings me to the effects. Stunning in their overpowering intensity, they are at the heart of a film where one never know who is alive, who dead, and some lives are cheaper than others. Power, control, and what one will do to prevent evil are the themes on which this film muses, and it gives us no easy answers or ending.
Inevitably, it reminds of other things such as The Pardoner’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it has a literary feel that complements the earthiness of a man noisily trying to excrete or of having his genitals inspected to see what ails him, which is also Chaucerian. That link, too, with C. S Lewis is quite strong, with the notion of whether one could have been away an age but no time has past, and of another place where all is played out.
This is a piece of cinema that has well been worth the wait, and which should repay another viewing – I can only guess at what impact it must have been made with those watching on Film 4, but I would not be surprised if they did not take a second look on a proper screen…
End-notes
* The issue of enclosure would probably not have borne on it as such, but this sort of huge field was brought to our landscape by mechanized agriculture and two hundred further years.
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
8 July
* Contains spoilers *
People who would find Tarkovsky ‘just boring’ won’t like – or ‘get’ – this film, as I know from glancing at a review on IMDb that churlishly gives it two stars. As if it has broken some sort of naturalistic promise that cinema makes, or one to be exciting (though this film is).
That review claims that being filmed in monochrome makes the English countryside look ordinary. It does nothing of the sort, and is filmed with a real sense of wonder – just look at the short where the four men are first walking down into the space to see why. (Meanwhile, the conspiracy theorists are at work, claiming that it stole someone else’s idea.)
I don’t care – though I did stop to wonder – whether a mid-seventeenth century field would be as big as that*, but our sense of time and space are only as big as our capacity to believe that the four main actors have been transported out of the English Civil War to join O’Neill – the hedgerow is to the field as the wardrobe is to Narnia. Apart from a knowing Essex joke, Amy Jump gives us little in her able script to dislocate us, and, for all that I care, the men may be from some other age, though they speak a passably historical English.
I think that the mushrooms / toadstools are a red herring as a way o understanding this film. Again, I don’t much care whether such hallucinogenic fare was to be had (as who is not to say that this is an accident of this field), or whether hardened soldiers (or those living more closely to the land) would not be used to what they were eating. When, although Whitehead (Reece Shearsmith) does not eat of it, the men adopt a stew that is already being made (presumably by O’Neil), many of the mushrooms that they add are unremarkable, except at the end, when they are of a more wild nature.
If they have any effect, it is to urge them in the effort to pull up a carved stake – but a stake with a life of its own, whereas my reviewer interpreted them as trying to plough the field – whereas hallucinogenics usually lead to heady inertia and contemplation. Of course, the action may not really have been taking place, as the way in which the stake reels them back in is somewhat magical.
Which brings me to the effects. Stunning in their overpowering intensity, they are at the heart of a film where one never know who is alive, who dead, and some lives are cheaper than others. Power, control, and what one will do to prevent evil are the themes on which this film muses, and it gives us no easy answers or ending.
Inevitably, it reminds of other things such as The Pardoner’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and it has a literary feel that complements the earthiness of a man noisily trying to excrete or of having his genitals inspected to see what ails him, which is also Chaucerian. That link, too, with C. S Lewis is quite strong, with the notion of whether one could have been away an age but no time has past, and of another place where all is played out.
This is a piece of cinema that has well been worth the wait, and which should repay another viewing – I can only guess at what impact it must have been made with those watching on Film 4, but I would not be surprised if they did not take a second look on a proper screen…
End-notes
* The issue of enclosure would probably not have borne on it as such, but this sort of huge field was brought to our landscape by mechanized agriculture and two hundred further years.
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Saturday, 6 July 2013
That film thing
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 July
People who mention Spring Breakers (2012) in the same breath as The Bling Ring (2013), as if one complements the other, should have to re-take their cinema licence :
It’s almost as if, because both involve the same number of heroes, one could believe in a comparison of the literary merits of the novelization of Ghost Busters and of The Three Musketeers. Not that I believe that the latter’s claims to them are great, but yet not so scant as to justify the exercise in seeking a likeness.
So I shall watch – the trailer for Breakers was bad enough to confirm me in what to expect – the Sofia Coppola film, and trust that I will find it a good piece of cinema…
Post-script (as of 11 July)
OK, I was wrong - Spring Breakers is the more honest film, because it's quite open in its contract with the members of the audience that they want to see, and will see, scantily dressed young women, amply presented...
Review of The Bling Ring here
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 July
People who mention Spring Breakers (2012) in the same breath as The Bling Ring (2013), as if one complements the other, should have to re-take their cinema licence :
It’s almost as if, because both involve the same number of heroes, one could believe in a comparison of the literary merits of the novelization of Ghost Busters and of The Three Musketeers. Not that I believe that the latter’s claims to them are great, but yet not so scant as to justify the exercise in seeking a likeness.
So I shall watch – the trailer for Breakers was bad enough to confirm me in what to expect – the Sofia Coppola film, and trust that I will find it a good piece of cinema…
Post-script (as of 11 July)
OK, I was wrong - Spring Breakers is the more honest film, because it's quite open in its contract with the members of the audience that they want to see, and will see, scantily dressed young women, amply presented...
Review of The Bling Ring here
If you want to Tweet, Tweet away here
Friday, 5 July 2013
Enjoyment made cheap
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
6 July
Language is a funny old business – some effectively say that, for want of a better term for it, laissez-faire applies, and therefore that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty was right :
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
Leave aside what attitude, policy or belief the celebrated writer may have been typifying (or, as some would say, parodying), this utterance does state the liberal position concerning what words signify, that they change with Time, and that woe betide those who do not move with them (or with it).
Except, of course, that the corollary is that, if I read Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer, I cannot very well expect him to mean these words as, untutored, I might construe them :
There nys nat oon kan war by other be
On the other side, there are those kindly and neutrally labelled as the linguistic purists, police or even fascists, who seek to preserve meanings.
Anyway, what about this ?
Check out our range of luxury vodkas*
Enjoy two Bombs for £5**
Since I am ancient, I remember the Bowie song where he is talking about boys checking each other out, a very self-conscious reference to another culture in expressing what men do all the time, whether at the bar or the urinal, because they are so desperately insecure that some of them cannot even urinate, if another man is there.
Now, we are urged all the time to check out the video by Z, and for no other reason than it is the latest Z video, and we are enjoined – almost unceasingly – to ‘enjoy’ every paltry damn’ thing, even a coffee and a Danish pastry for £3. Word gits such as I think that I would probably be more likely to enjoy the so-called combo for £2 – or that, if more wealthy, I would still enjoy it for £5…
Enjoy a glass of perfectly chilled South African bubbly on our exclusive terrace
Oh, I bloody ask you – is everything marketing, packaging, and generally turning that ear into a silk purse ? Are we really so bloody stupid as a species that we cannot sense when we are being manipulated into some bloody posture that says how fine and how much better we are because invited by these pathetic jingles and slogans ?
Does one become tempted (as marketingspeak has it), or think what crap is being dressed up as a snobby treat ?
For me, the turning-point was being told that I should Enjoy ! -not the meal, but some unspecified thing, or just generally ? Formally speaking, the verb was transitive, and I could not just ‘enjoy’ in the same way that I can ‘live’, where I can legitimately say I have lived here all my life, but, equally, I have lived a good life, with a direct object, if I so choose.
Do waiting or serving staff still say that ? I don’t know, but I can happily believe that the tendency / habit / fashion just died off.
My preferences apart, I am just interested by this word ‘enjoy’, which I take to be a misunderstanding of what the verb, and of what ‘enjoyment’, meant to other ages – not a casual and trite encouragement to eat and / or drink something*** :
1. ‘To take delight or pleasure in’ – now, there’s a challenge to mediocrity !
Can I really be delighted by that Danish pastry that they bought in by the dozen to serve with coffee ? – isn’t taking pleasure in something other than simply enjoying everything put before one ?
2. ‘To have the use or benefit of’ – a different sense that leads to
3. ‘To experience’, i.e. ‘to enjoy poor health’, which would seem to connote the opposite of meaning 1, if poor health can be enjoyed.
The verb comes to us from Old French enjoier (‘to give joy to’) or enjoïr (‘to enjoy’), via Middle English, and ultimately from Latin gaudēre - a word on which I have commented elsewhere…
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology**** gives us an obsolete sense, from the fourteenth century, of ‘to be joyful’.
Then, in the fifteenth century, to possess or experience with joy’, and a reflexive meaning of ‘to enjoy oneself’ in the seventeenth century (following se (ré)jouir).
In between, the noun ‘enjoyment’ emerged, in the sixteenth century. We find it in Shakespeare, although sometimes tinged with meaning 2 (above) : quotations to come.
And now, when I am having ordinary meat and drink, am I really meant to enjoy it as such ? Easily save myself, then, £29.95 on a four-course lunch from a good restaurant…
Post-script
The word 'cheap', as in Cheapside, is all to do with buying and selling - the German word kaufen means 'to buy' (and Grimm's Law explains how one becomes the other).
So I say that enjoyment has been sold short...
End-notes
* What about Take a look at ? Doesn’t checking out happen at the supermarket till ?
** What about Get ? How do I know that I will enjoy them ?
*** I quote from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Eighth Edition (1990).
**** Edited by C. T Onions (1966).
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6 July
Enjoy a delicious meal in our elegant new dining area ! Well, thick colds apart, they're virtual synonyms : how *not* enjoy delicious food ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) July 10, 2013
Language is a funny old business – some effectively say that, for want of a better term for it, laissez-faire applies, and therefore that Lewis Carroll’s Humpty-Dumpty was right :
When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.
Leave aside what attitude, policy or belief the celebrated writer may have been typifying (or, as some would say, parodying), this utterance does state the liberal position concerning what words signify, that they change with Time, and that woe betide those who do not move with them (or with it).
Except, of course, that the corollary is that, if I read Troilus and Criseyde of Chaucer, I cannot very well expect him to mean these words as, untutored, I might construe them :
There nys nat oon kan war by other be
On the other side, there are those kindly and neutrally labelled as the linguistic purists, police or even fascists, who seek to preserve meanings.
Anyway, what about this ?
Check out our range of luxury vodkas*
Enjoy two Bombs for £5**
Since I am ancient, I remember the Bowie song where he is talking about boys checking each other out, a very self-conscious reference to another culture in expressing what men do all the time, whether at the bar or the urinal, because they are so desperately insecure that some of them cannot even urinate, if another man is there.
Now, we are urged all the time to check out the video by Z, and for no other reason than it is the latest Z video, and we are enjoined – almost unceasingly – to ‘enjoy’ every paltry damn’ thing, even a coffee and a Danish pastry for £3. Word gits such as I think that I would probably be more likely to enjoy the so-called combo for £2 – or that, if more wealthy, I would still enjoy it for £5…
Enjoy a glass of perfectly chilled South African bubbly on our exclusive terrace
Oh, I bloody ask you – is everything marketing, packaging, and generally turning that ear into a silk purse ? Are we really so bloody stupid as a species that we cannot sense when we are being manipulated into some bloody posture that says how fine and how much better we are because invited by these pathetic jingles and slogans ?
Does one become tempted (as marketingspeak has it), or think what crap is being dressed up as a snobby treat ?
For me, the turning-point was being told that I should Enjoy ! -not the meal, but some unspecified thing, or just generally ? Formally speaking, the verb was transitive, and I could not just ‘enjoy’ in the same way that I can ‘live’, where I can legitimately say I have lived here all my life, but, equally, I have lived a good life, with a direct object, if I so choose.
Do waiting or serving staff still say that ? I don’t know, but I can happily believe that the tendency / habit / fashion just died off.
My preferences apart, I am just interested by this word ‘enjoy’, which I take to be a misunderstanding of what the verb, and of what ‘enjoyment’, meant to other ages – not a casual and trite encouragement to eat and / or drink something*** :
1. ‘To take delight or pleasure in’ – now, there’s a challenge to mediocrity !
Can I really be delighted by that Danish pastry that they bought in by the dozen to serve with coffee ? – isn’t taking pleasure in something other than simply enjoying everything put before one ?
2. ‘To have the use or benefit of’ – a different sense that leads to
3. ‘To experience’, i.e. ‘to enjoy poor health’, which would seem to connote the opposite of meaning 1, if poor health can be enjoyed.
The verb comes to us from Old French enjoier (‘to give joy to’) or enjoïr (‘to enjoy’), via Middle English, and ultimately from Latin gaudēre - a word on which I have commented elsewhere…
The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology**** gives us an obsolete sense, from the fourteenth century, of ‘to be joyful’.
Then, in the fifteenth century, to possess or experience with joy’, and a reflexive meaning of ‘to enjoy oneself’ in the seventeenth century (following se (ré)jouir).
In between, the noun ‘enjoyment’ emerged, in the sixteenth century. We find it in Shakespeare, although sometimes tinged with meaning 2 (above) : quotations to come.
And now, when I am having ordinary meat and drink, am I really meant to enjoy it as such ? Easily save myself, then, £29.95 on a four-course lunch from a good restaurant…
Post-script
The word 'cheap', as in Cheapside, is all to do with buying and selling - the German word kaufen means 'to buy' (and Grimm's Law explains how one becomes the other).
So I say that enjoyment has been sold short...
End-notes
* What about Take a look at ? Doesn’t checking out happen at the supermarket till ?
** What about Get ? How do I know that I will enjoy them ?
*** I quote from The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English, Eighth Edition (1990).
**** Edited by C. T Onions (1966).
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Tuesday, 2 July 2013
Brilliantly together : Tokyo String Quartet at King’s College Chapel, Cambridge
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 July
They were always bound to be a class act, this world-renowned group of instrumentalists with forty-four years to their collective name, but they took nothing for granted, not even the famous King’s acoustic. (I heard their leader, Martin Beaver, make an allusion to a just as famous one of the Carols from King’s in this connection.)
Sadly, a travelling mishap with the quartet’s viola-player, Kasuhide Isomura, meant that they were only rehearsing there for thirty minutes before they had to stop for an audience of what must have been around at least 300 to be let in. (I say ‘had to stop’, but, personally, I might have pleaded artistic reasons and begged the indulgence of the audience to delay the concert for half-an-hour to 7.30 – what did significantly hang, other than getting familiar with the delay of around six seconds, on beginning when advertised, and that would have been all to the good for everyone ?)
Where I felt that the brief interval showed its worth was in allowing the players to reflect on the sound of the first half and re-enter the space for the final work : I cannot believe that they did not exchange words of comment and advice on how to perform in it, because Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15* fitted it like a glove.
Starting there, although out of order in the programme, the quality of the Austrian composer’s writing for cello was evident – sometimes, it is a few percussive beats, often enough to be addictive it is in that singing, upper register where the instrument comes into its beautiful best. The work is on a grand scale (with perhaps necessarily the slight exception of the third-movement Scherzo) as all of these later chamber works are – and Schubert shortly dead at just 31.
Broken or repeated phrases or motifs, sonata form bringing back and again back the melodic elements, these are the concerns of these towering works from the end of Schubert’s life, and, but reverentially and with great beauty and delicacy, the Tokyo players offered it to us. It was gladly received – hardly a cough, almost never during a movement, because the audience was hushed. At the end, most joined in the impulse to give a standing ovation, no doubt because this playing had transported them as it did me, just as does glancing up at the angels signifying, maybe, the finite and the infinite, alpha and omega in their instruments, or in the reflective tranquility of King’s stained glass.
In the first half, we had started with Mozart’s so-called Hoffmeister String Quartet No. 20 in D major, K. 499, and, as an initial impression, one was aware of how sunny this semi-adopted Viennese composer (though did Vienna ever take him to its bosom ?) might seem. Now, I do not place much weight on the idea of a major key equalling happiness, a minor one sorrow or depression, but it was quite clear that the beautifully brought-out lower line of the cello was again of great importance.
Its contribution acted, particularly in the first and third movements, as a sort of counterbalance to the seeming good humour – the interaction of one with the other meant that the entire feel (God forbid, I nearly said ‘message’ !) of the music was somewhere in between, almost as if the composition invited one at one’s peril to hear it as one immediately might. Clive Greensmith’s playing was authoritative, and it was difficult not to be magnetically drawn by the ease and dexterity of his fingerwork, watching which enhanced one’s pleasure at his mastery and expressive qualities.
At the same time – and this may have been adjusting to the acoustic (or its effect on an instrument at that pitch), one was sure that the viola was part of the texture, but it was very hard to hear Isomura in the first half : differentiating parts is, as I have indicated, made easier my being able to see the instrumentalist’s position on the neck of the instrument, but even the lack left the viola part immersed in the rest of the writing.
This was a thoughtful choice, though, of quartet, and my impression is that it may be overlooked between the so-called Prussian Quartets and the preceding set of six that was dedicated to Haydn – no reason for that, really, when one typically has no more than one Mozart quartet, often as an opener, almost as if – perhaps not valuing the works – as a palate-cleanser. As the Tokyo Quartet reminded us, Mozart’s string-writing has real depth, and these works, especially in front of an elaborate rood-screen that dates back to around two hundred and fifty years earlier, are more than we might imagine.
Time, perhaps, for further serious evaluations (I know that King’s Place has done something) of Mozart’s creation for this configuration, when going through Beethoven’s quartet œuvre is maybe too much taken for granted ?
As for the Webern, maybe I have heard this quartet from 1905 before, maybe I haven’t, but my recollection was that, in Deutsche Grammophon’s complete Second Viennese School String Quartets, Webern’s entire output fitted easily onto two sides of an LP (yes, I know…).
I couldn’t wonder whether the work that we were hearing was an elaborate hoax, as it dated to 40 years before the composer’s death (but, then, so did much else), and often sounded like nothing so much as early, lyrical Berg, but with characteristic Webern touches here and there. Perhaps this piece from a Webern of around 22 years has come to light (it pre-dates his first work with an Opus number by three years) since I was last seriously in his sound-world, but its luscious writing, with spiky interjections of partial tone-rows, suited this tribute to Vienna and those associated with it.
The Quartet interpreted it to us unfussily, treating the dissonant passages or nascent tone-rows just as they might an expressive passage in the Mozart or Schubert, and it was a good foil to the Mozart, with no depths hidden – except from one’s ear or interpretation – in its musical purpose.
As I have already said, the Tokyo Quartet received warm thanks for their musicianship, and for this choice of works with the Viennese impulse of dance at its heart – a real joy to see them on this final tour of the UK !
End-notes
* In G major, D. 887, Op. 161 (op. posth., 1851).
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(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
2 July
They were always bound to be a class act, this world-renowned group of instrumentalists with forty-four years to their collective name, but they took nothing for granted, not even the famous King’s acoustic. (I heard their leader, Martin Beaver, make an allusion to a just as famous one of the Carols from King’s in this connection.)
Sadly, a travelling mishap with the quartet’s viola-player, Kasuhide Isomura, meant that they were only rehearsing there for thirty minutes before they had to stop for an audience of what must have been around at least 300 to be let in. (I say ‘had to stop’, but, personally, I might have pleaded artistic reasons and begged the indulgence of the audience to delay the concert for half-an-hour to 7.30 – what did significantly hang, other than getting familiar with the delay of around six seconds, on beginning when advertised, and that would have been all to the good for everyone ?)
Where I felt that the brief interval showed its worth was in allowing the players to reflect on the sound of the first half and re-enter the space for the final work : I cannot believe that they did not exchange words of comment and advice on how to perform in it, because Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15* fitted it like a glove.
Starting there, although out of order in the programme, the quality of the Austrian composer’s writing for cello was evident – sometimes, it is a few percussive beats, often enough to be addictive it is in that singing, upper register where the instrument comes into its beautiful best. The work is on a grand scale (with perhaps necessarily the slight exception of the third-movement Scherzo) as all of these later chamber works are – and Schubert shortly dead at just 31.
Broken or repeated phrases or motifs, sonata form bringing back and again back the melodic elements, these are the concerns of these towering works from the end of Schubert’s life, and, but reverentially and with great beauty and delicacy, the Tokyo players offered it to us. It was gladly received – hardly a cough, almost never during a movement, because the audience was hushed. At the end, most joined in the impulse to give a standing ovation, no doubt because this playing had transported them as it did me, just as does glancing up at the angels signifying, maybe, the finite and the infinite, alpha and omega in their instruments, or in the reflective tranquility of King’s stained glass.
In the first half, we had started with Mozart’s so-called Hoffmeister String Quartet No. 20 in D major, K. 499, and, as an initial impression, one was aware of how sunny this semi-adopted Viennese composer (though did Vienna ever take him to its bosom ?) might seem. Now, I do not place much weight on the idea of a major key equalling happiness, a minor one sorrow or depression, but it was quite clear that the beautifully brought-out lower line of the cello was again of great importance.
Its contribution acted, particularly in the first and third movements, as a sort of counterbalance to the seeming good humour – the interaction of one with the other meant that the entire feel (God forbid, I nearly said ‘message’ !) of the music was somewhere in between, almost as if the composition invited one at one’s peril to hear it as one immediately might. Clive Greensmith’s playing was authoritative, and it was difficult not to be magnetically drawn by the ease and dexterity of his fingerwork, watching which enhanced one’s pleasure at his mastery and expressive qualities.
At the same time – and this may have been adjusting to the acoustic (or its effect on an instrument at that pitch), one was sure that the viola was part of the texture, but it was very hard to hear Isomura in the first half : differentiating parts is, as I have indicated, made easier my being able to see the instrumentalist’s position on the neck of the instrument, but even the lack left the viola part immersed in the rest of the writing.
This was a thoughtful choice, though, of quartet, and my impression is that it may be overlooked between the so-called Prussian Quartets and the preceding set of six that was dedicated to Haydn – no reason for that, really, when one typically has no more than one Mozart quartet, often as an opener, almost as if – perhaps not valuing the works – as a palate-cleanser. As the Tokyo Quartet reminded us, Mozart’s string-writing has real depth, and these works, especially in front of an elaborate rood-screen that dates back to around two hundred and fifty years earlier, are more than we might imagine.
Time, perhaps, for further serious evaluations (I know that King’s Place has done something) of Mozart’s creation for this configuration, when going through Beethoven’s quartet œuvre is maybe too much taken for granted ?
As for the Webern, maybe I have heard this quartet from 1905 before, maybe I haven’t, but my recollection was that, in Deutsche Grammophon’s complete Second Viennese School String Quartets, Webern’s entire output fitted easily onto two sides of an LP (yes, I know…).
I couldn’t wonder whether the work that we were hearing was an elaborate hoax, as it dated to 40 years before the composer’s death (but, then, so did much else), and often sounded like nothing so much as early, lyrical Berg, but with characteristic Webern touches here and there. Perhaps this piece from a Webern of around 22 years has come to light (it pre-dates his first work with an Opus number by three years) since I was last seriously in his sound-world, but its luscious writing, with spiky interjections of partial tone-rows, suited this tribute to Vienna and those associated with it.
The Quartet interpreted it to us unfussily, treating the dissonant passages or nascent tone-rows just as they might an expressive passage in the Mozart or Schubert, and it was a good foil to the Mozart, with no depths hidden – except from one’s ear or interpretation – in its musical purpose.
As I have already said, the Tokyo Quartet received warm thanks for their musicianship, and for this choice of works with the Viennese impulse of dance at its heart – a real joy to see them on this final tour of the UK !
End-notes
* In G major, D. 887, Op. 161 (op. posth., 1851).
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Sunday, 30 June 2013
Thirteen kinds of comment : A review of In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012)
This is a review of In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012)
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)
29 June
This is a review of In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012)
* Contains spoilers *
I had not expected simply to enjoy so much Tomas Leach’s documentary, In No Great Hurry : 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter (2012).
These comments are a snapshot why – if they speak to you at all, I hope that you will see this film:
1. Leiter has a cat – the cat was deliberately incorporated into the film (although not introduced), as if to say something about him, e.g. when comically spread on its back with its paws in the air
2. The stills that we were shown, full screen against black, were very, very effective, very beautiful
3. We were shown Leiter taking photographs, but the temptation was resisted to show us what he took, although he did show us – on the preview screen of his camera – the brilliant shots that he captured of the knees of the girls on the bench
4. We were treated as if this were a feature, and who Soames (Bantry) was, and what she meant to Leiter, was carefully revealed
5. There was a candid provisionality in the shooting as to whether Leiter would approve and allow what we knew that we were watching (and therefore that he must have done)
6. Leiter is an immense trickster, with an unfailing comic timing, which put the largely impeccable Woody Allen in relief
7. We were allowed to watch, but not to forget that we were watching with a licence, with permission – that mattered, and counted
8. The slightly off-putting – because seeming pretentious – sub-title about lessons in life just meant that the film was delicately punctuated by thirteen innocuous captions, often after a moment that had made my companion and me roar aloud
9. This was a better portrait than of Morten Lauridsen, because Leiter’s humour was infectious, his candour and humanity to the forefront
10. At the same time, Leiter’s putting things off, of piling things up, of not throwing things away, was a greater treasure, and he was noble and honest in revealing how such things defeat him, if he starts on a clear-out
11. And all those photographs, those boxes, those contact-sheets – the integrity of keeping on creating, but the immensity of the task of seeking to order it all
12. That inchoate state mirrored Leiter’s willingness to be filmed as incoherent, to start a sentence that he could not finish, or which he interrupted to death
13. Finally, just his photographs again, those aching pictures of his father, his mother, of Soames, with a different intensity from his equally wonderful fashion portraits
Thank you, Tomas and Saul !
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