We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Staying with the Middle Europe theme, it looks like a great deal of partying went on in Hungary when Brian Linse of Ain’t no bad dude blog fame went there to make his movie Den of Lions, with Steven Dorff, Bob Hoskins and Laura Fraser… I wonder if they remembered to actually shoot the movie?
As I have heard rumours they are still clearing up and rebuilding in Budapest post-Brian, when the dreaded Bad Dude of the Blogosphere arrives in London to do the movie’s post production work, I wonder what havoc will be wrought here? My liver hurts just thinking about it.
The classical end of the music recording business has been enduring a slow crisis caused by the fact that the classical repertoire is (a) stagnant and (b) now all recorded. Classical freaks like me now have all we need. We have multiple versions of everything good, and although the newly composed stuff is occasionally worth hearing, most of it is a load of old Boulez. The only serious unfinished task is the recording of the entire operatic repertoire on DVD instead of just on CD.
The usual answer to the plight of high culture is that low culture should subsidise it, but these are also bad times for the economically serious end of the recorded music business. The free internet downloading of pop music is playing havoc with record company profits.
Which means that classical music, just when it is least able to, must now pay its own way. Big classical names are now having their hitherto automatically renewed contracts terminated by the dozen. And as these former titans slide into penury, their cultural centrality disappears. Big star classical performers in 1960 were really something, because the very first stereo recording of a major item of the repertoire was a big event. No matter how good it may be, a recording now (the thirtieth) of the same piece cannot possibly matter so much. Herbert von Karajan was a more central figure in European culture than Karajan’s newly appointed successor at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Sir Simon Rattle, can ever be, no matter how much “better” the critics may tell us Rattle is.
The politicians are not helping nearly as much as the likes of Rattle think they should. Suddenly the cabinets of the western world consist not of old-time culture-lovers but of ageing Beatles fans. They still dole out arts subsidies but they are cutting back on supporting “elitists”. Instead they are “democratising” arts spending. Instead of giving huge gobs of money to high-culture high-talent parasites, they now prefer to give lots of little gobs of money to lots of no-hoper parasites. Such trends take time to work their way through (hence the continuing significance of who gets to boss the BPO), but you can feel the oil tanker turning, slowly but surely.
Classical music itself will last for ever. This is the great historic achievement of the classical music recording business. But historic achievements don’t pay wages now. What is to be done?
One answer is to cut prices and to cut costs. Wrench the price of new classical CDs (not just of regurgitated old recordings) from the best part of twenty quid down to a fiver, slash the fees paid to the performers and generally cut out the crap. This is what Naxos has done, with great success.
There’s much talk of new “business models” for the recording and “delivery” of classical music, with the copyright and long-term royalty streams remaining with the artists but with any first time round income going to the recording companies. In other words the recording companies no longer place bets on artists. The artists place their own bets, and the recording companies are now bookies. To me this sounds like a thinly disguised pay cut. Or, even more cruelly: vanity recording. (Bloggers won’t need to have this trend explained to them.)
So, when all else fails, go with babe appeal. I give you Hilary Hahn. Now I do not yet get all the subtleties of Samizdata‘s editorial policy, but when it comes to babe photography it is my clear understanding that we are all for it. So here are some Hahn likenesses, taken from her website.
Hilary Hahn is not just a pretty face. She can definitely play. Her recording of three of the six Bach unaccompanied violin pieces is one of my all time favourite CDs, and all her four recordings so far are decently done. But from a business point of view it is clear what is happening here. In the sleevenotes accompanying her latest recording, of the Brahms and Stravinsky violin concertos, released just before Christmas, I counted no less than fifty six photographs of her, together with three of her conductor Sir Neville Marriner, and three of the two of them together. Total number of photos of Johannes Brahms: zero. Total number of photos of Igor Stravinsky: zero.
This is not a long-term answer, either for the classical music recording business in general or for the likes of Hilary Hahn in particular. (That Brahms/Stravinsky disc is already being heavily discounted in London’s HMV stores.) But while it lasts it’s fun to look at.
Like many a Londoner living in the middle of the city, it is all too easy to take the cultural riches of this place for granted, such as its many art galleries. And of course my interest can be all too easily blunted by the mind-erasing trash that goes under the banner of “Modern Art”. So it was great to have seen the American Sublime show at the Tate Britain gallery last weekend.
The exhibition features work from landscape painters such as Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Francis Cropsey and Thomas Moran. Some of the pictures were small, some of them were vast canvasses showing the sheer grandeur of the landscape in the early days of Jefferson’s Republic from the early to the middle of the 19th Century.
What these works all had in common was stunning mastery of paint, a razor-sharp eye for detail and an awareness of how to ram home the vastness of the Rockies, the huge waterfall of Niagara or the rough weather found off the coast of Maine. The virtuosity is staggering, and all achieved without the aids of modern technology. Some of the paintings had a melancholy feel, some overtly religious, some were designed merely to revel in the mastery of paint. All left me moved in some way to feel my admission fee was money well spent.
The show also reminded me that all too many of our current so-called artists haven’t the skill to pull off the kind of visual achievement of their 19th century forbears. They cannot be bothered to put in the painstaking effort, and mask their incompetence behind such nonsense as sheep preserved in liquid or bits of dung chucked onto the side of a wall.
The American Sublime exhibition is a demonstration of how great art can be but also that can be no substitutes for effort and practice. If the purpose of art, as the novelist Anthony Burgess once said, is to enhance life, then these painters achieved that goal brilliantly. Or, to take the definition given by Ayn Rand, art is the selective re-creation of reality in the light of certain values. For these painters, they picked out the great, the awe-inspiring, the sheer scale, of what they saw as America was opened up in the rapidly industrialising world of the 19th Century. These were things that mattered to them, and it shows.
I cannot recommend this exhibition highly enough. It continues until May 19. Fellow Londoners have no excuses. Go see it.
I spent an hour this evening having my blood slowly boiled by another of ‘The West Wing’, (Yes, they do show it over in the UK on Channel 4)
When the series first appeared, last year, I thought it was rather promising. Yes, I realise that the premise was a Democrat President but, nonetheless, it was blessed with a good cast, a sharp script and the kind of slick production values we have come to expect from these high-profile American TV dramas. Of course, I had to put up with left bias but it was, for the most part, tut-worthy rather than infuriating. But it is rapidly becoming infuriating. Tonight it almost jumped off the scale.
The whole series seems to be nothing more now than a barely-disguised vehicle for left-wing propoganda and American ‘liberal’ neurosis. The threadbare plotlines are nothing more than emotive appeals on behalf of some chic left-wing canard such as gun-control, the environment, affirmative action and ‘hate’ groups. The President is, apparently, obsessed with these subjects and little else. The rarely-seen (and never heard) Republicans are always portrayed as knuckle-dragging racists who only want to get into power so that they hang homosexuals from lamposts.
The once-sparkling dialogue has debauched into a painfully contrived polemic and the attempt to disguise it as a dialogue makes it all the more embarrassing:
“C.J. we should be going after these hate groups now”
“No, Josh, its an election year. Our priority has to be to save the Alaskan Spotted Beaver”
It really does get that bad. The characters do everything short of making a direct appeal to the camera and, in some ways, it would actually better if they did. The whole thing smacks of an increasingly ham-fisted exercise in getting messages across rather than entertain. If anyone has not seen ‘The West Wing’ yet then I recommend you do so, if only to learn how not to do TV drama.
Still there is one good thing: the actress who plays the character of ‘C.J.’ – Hubba hubba
Famed smoker of Communist cigars and cunning blogger Brian Linse of Ain’t no bad dude fame has finally ‘got with the programme’ and posted some pictures of the delectable British Actress Laura Fraser at the Den of Lions blog.
In case you do not know, Brian Linse moonlights as a film producer when he is not blogging and is currently in the midst of shooting an action thriller in Budapest called Den of Lions, staring Stephen Dorff, Bob Hoskins, Laura Fraser, Ian Hart, Laura Fraser, David O’Hara, Laura Fraser.
Laura Fraser prepares for a scene in the movie Den of Lions Did I mention that Laura Fraser was in the movie?
Check out Brian’s Den of Lions film blog. It is yet another fascinating way in which blogs can be used, providing interesting information and insights as the project develops on-site in Hungary, with updates to follow when the film enters its post-production phase.
As I once mentioned before in an earlier blog article, I am not one of those people who thinks the term ‘modern art’ is an oxymoron. That said, I am somewhat in sympathy with the Stuckists and regard much (or even most) ‘installation art’ as not so much bad art as not art at all.
This picture of the late Queen Mother, whilst clearly a piece of classical portraiture, is also quite modern in its lightness and style. It does not attempt either soulless photographic hyper-realism or remote abstraction but instead captures the rather charming essence of the subject’s mixture of formality and accessibility.
It is a reminder that we do not have to look very far back to avoid “British art disappearing up its own arse” as Ivan Massow put it. I do not think art should just be formal portraits but I do think it must have meaning that rational observers can actually divine.
In an age when we all too often confuse celebrity with achievement, let us mourn the passing of a true achiever, Billy Wilder
From Sunset Boulevard to Double Indemnity to The Apartment to Some Like It Hot, everything he touched turned to gold. Thankyou for your gifts, Mr.Wilder
“I don’t want to see lust and rape and incest and sodomy in the theatre. I can get all that at home.”
–Dudley Moore, entertainer, jazz and classical pianist.
All round gentleman-about-town, raconteur, degenerate smoker of communist cigars and worthy blogger Brian Linse also moonlights as a film producer when he is not doing his proper job of blogging.
The production of his very interesting looking film called Den of Lions is well underway, shooting on location in Budapest, Hungary.
Progress reports and numerous pictures can be found at the film’s own blog site! Check it out. 
The blogging phenomenon is such that I am making new American friends by the hour, friends I’ve never met but who are getting to know me fast. It’s the same for David, Tom, Adriana and the rest of us. And maybe some of these new American friends can confirm or deny a feeling I’ve had ever since September 11th of last year. I get the feeling that black America has finally united with white America. The Oscars awarded last night for Best Actor to Denzel Washington, for Best Actress to Halle Berry, and for being Sidney Poitier to Sidney Poitier, nudged me into writing this, but the thought has been with me for some time.
There’s nothing like a common enemy and a common ordeal to bring people together. September 11 supplied this. The differences and gaps between black and white Americans are still big, still a problem. But these differences and gaps shrivel down into very little indeed when set beside those between both and their common Islamic fundamentalist enemy.
Not so long ago, black Americans were queuing up to change their names to something Islamic, to piss off whitey presumably. I’m guessing that there’s a lot less of this going on now, and that maybe some of these name-changes are even being reversed.
This is short posting because it’s a simple question about something rather than a complicated answer to something. Simply: Is all or any of this true? Or am I indulging in speculative sentimentality, or more plainly, in wishful thinking?
Although my guitar is gathering dust while I do “the survival thing”, I still keep my ties to the music industry current and am still a member in good standing of the Irish Music Rights Association (IMRO), so I’m not just a plain punter when I talk about music. That’s why I found this article in the New York Times very interesting. Some people are starting to cop on to the fact a revolution is well along and not even Jack Valenti, starring as King Canute, can turn back the tide.
I guess I particularly like the article because I said pretty much the same in an earlier article about Music in the post copyright age* and a Q&A as my answer to self-asked question twelve, which was:
12. Which industries/businesses should feel most threatened by the increasing popularity of the Internet and its associated activities?
*= I based this article on ideas I expressed to music industry panelists during and after a Q&A session at a 1998 CMJ panel on band web marketing at the Millenium Hotel in Manhattan.
In his debut film released later this week the deliciously un-PC Ali G gets elected as MP (Member of Parliament) for Staines and becomes involved in a plot to overthrow the Prime Minister. He presents his manifesto for a more ‘wikid’ Britain in Da State We Iz In published in the last Sunday Telegraph. In a rousing finale of this articulate document he answers the question of “Why should u change de world?” in a practical manner whilst keeping his eyes on the ultimate dream:
U should do it 4 your childrens benefit and for your unemployment benefit, your housing benefit and your disability benefit: try to increas dem as much as posible. I know it’s a dream but together lets try and make de place where we bring up our kidz to be as good as South Central LA…
Anyone fancy joining him?… I thought not, but it is a wikid larf. 
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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