Mick Hartley

A vision of America

From US photographer Louis Stettner, who died in 2016 - early pictures of New York:

Brooklyn Promenade, Brooklyn, 1954

Coming to America, 1951

Concentric Circles, Construction Site, New York, 1952

Subway, New York, 1946

Subway, New York

Lake, New York State, 1952

And a later picture of Detroit:

Cityscape #8, Detroit, 1985
[Photos © Estate of Louis Stettner]

Tintarella di luna

Italian Rock'n'Roll, with Mina:

From the 1959 film ''Jukebox - Urli d'amore''.

Mina - Anna Maria Mazzini - was a huge star in Italy:

She was a staple of television variety shows and a dominant figure in Italian pop music from the 1960s to the mid-1970s, known for her three-octave vocal range, the agility of her soprano voice, and her image as an emancipated woman.

In performance, Mina combined several modern styles with traditional Italian melodies and swing music, which made her the most versatile pop singer in Italian music. Mina dominated the country's charts for fifteen years and reached an unsurpassed level of popularity, with 150 million records sold. She has scored 79 albums and 71 singles on the Italian charts.

Mina's TV appearances in 1959 were the first for a female rock and roll singer in Italy. Her loud syncopated singing earned her the nickname Queen of Screamers. The public also labeled her the Tiger of Cremona for her wild gestures and body shakes.

She never seems to have made much of an impression over here, though. Which is perhaps not too surprising, as she quickly reverted to Italian type with her first hit in the Sixties, the ballad Il cielo in una stanza.

Then Città vuota, a cover of Gene McDaniels' It's a Lonely Town. Here it is accompanying a very Italian 2012 Dolce & Gabbana commercial - all lingerie, pouting, and fast cars.

Also, Se Telefonando, from 1966.

Southbank

The National Theatre from Waterloo Bridge:

And Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror, Blue, on the roof of the Hayward Gallery:

 

Camdonian revisited

Here's Barry Flanagan's sheet metal sculpture, "Camdonian", in the north east corner of Lincoln's Inn Fields, photographed this morning: 

I called it a monstrosity back in 2015, and that was before its latest, um, embellishment. 

Here's what I wrote then:

Flanagan is best known for his hares. They are indeed very fine. I've absolutely nothing against his hares. This, though, is not a hare, and it is not fine. It is a slab of steel: discoloured, ugly, depressing. Installed in 1980, it very possibly provided the impetus for the 1980s influx of the homeless and destitute who used to congregate in the Square for the night. I've seen sleeping bags and cardboard boxes under the sculpture in the past. Even without sleeping bags, it's the sort of shape that attracts litter. It fits right in with that kind of urban desolation vibe. Scrap metal junk. Perhaps Flanagan - who may well, to judge from his hares, have had a sly sense of humour - was having a laugh. Taking the piss. It may not smell of piss, Camdonian, but it looks like it should. Surely some passing drunks, late at night, will have been unable to resist. Certainly graffiti have been scrawled on it from time to time. It almost asks for it.

Lincoln's Inn Fields is London's largest public square. It's an oasis hidden away behind High Holborn, Kingsway, and Chancery Lane, with the Strand off down to the south past the Royal Courts of Justice. There's no traffic to speak of. It boasts quirky delights like Sir John Soane's Museum and the Hunterian - plus, of course, Lincoln's Inn itself on the east side. On sunny days the centre is full of office workers taking their lunch on the grass. It's a lovely hidden delight; a London treasure; a civilised urban space.

Just get rid of this horror....please.

Carolina night

Jack Delano. May 1940. "Corner store at 11 p.m. Durham, North Carolina."

[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Farm Security Administration]

Oranges and lemons

More autumn colours, at The Hill:

A direct causal consequence of the philosophy driving the communist system

The Times has printed an edited extract today from Jordan Peterson's foreword to the new edition of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, published by Vintage Classics. Here's my extract from their extract:

It was Solzhenitsyn who made the case that the terrible excesses of communism could not be conveniently blamed on the corruption of the Soviet leadership, the “cult of personality” surrounding Stalin, or the failure to put the otherwise-stellar-and-admirable utopian principles of Marxism into proper practice. It was Solzhenitsyn who demonstrated that the death of millions were, instead, a direct causal consequence of the philosophy driving the communist system. The doctrines of Karl Marx contained hidden within them sufficient hatred, resentment, envy and denial of individual responsibility to produce nothing but poison and death when manifested in the world.

For Marx, man was a member of a class, an economic class, a group — that, and little more. His admirers regarded Marx’s doctrine as one of compassion. But hate may well be a stronger motivator than love. It took no time, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, for the apparently laudable demand for universal equality to manifest its unarticulated and ever-darkening shadow. First came the brutal indictment of the “class enemy”. Then came the ever-expanding definition of that enemy, until every single person found him or herself at risk of strangulation within that insatiable and devouring net.

Let us note: this outcome was not the result of the initially pristine Marxist doctrine becoming corrupt over time, but something apparent at the very beginning of the Soviet state itself. Solzhenitsyn cites one Martin Latsis, writing for the newspaper Red Terror, November 1, 1918: “We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and essence of red terror.” The writer believed that it would be better to execute ten thousand innocent individuals than to allow one poisonous member of the oppressor class to remain free.  [...]

Twenty-five million dead through internal repression in the Soviet Union (according to The Black Book of Communism). Sixty million dead in Mao’s China (and an all-too-likely return to autocratic oppression in that country in the near future). The horrors of Cambodia’s killing fields, with their two million corpses. The barely animate body politic of Cuba, where people struggle even now to feed themselves. Venezuela, where it has now been made illegal to attribute a child’s death in hospital to starvation. No political experiment has ever been tried so widely, in so many different countries and failed so absolutely and so catastrophically. [...]

If there was any excuse to be a Marxist in 1917 there is absolutely and finally no excuse now. And we know that mostly because of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and The Gulag Archipelago. Thank Heaven for that great author’s outrage, courage and unquenchable thirst for justice and truth. It was Solzhenitsyn who warned us that the catastrophes of the Soviet state were inextricably and causally linked to the deceitful blandishments of the Marxist utopian vision. It was Solzhenitsyn who documented the price paid in suffering for the dreadful communist experiment, and who distilled from that suffering the wisdom we must all heed so that such catastrophe does not visit us again.

A propaganda word

Oh dear. Roger Scruton's appointment as chairman of the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful commission is being - um - scrutinised. From the Times (£) - Housing tsar Sir Roger Scruton ‘Islamophobic’:

Theresa May’s new housing adviser faces calls to quit after his contentious views about Islamophobia and homosexuality were unearthed.

Sir Roger Scruton, a philosopher of aesthetics, was appointed last week as chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful commission. The opposition has highlighted his past comments as evidence of his unsuitability.

In his 2017 book Conservatism: Ideas in Profile, Sir Roger, 74, wrote that Islamophobia was a “propaganda-word”.

As one commenter asks, "Is it now officially Islamophobic to suggest that Islamophobia is a propaganda word?"

A couple of links from my copious archives - here and here - explain why I agree with Scruton. "Islamophobia" is indeed a propaganda word. But it's Islamophobic to say so.

Street tree

Stoke Newington:

You don't need to go to an arboretum nowadays to see spectacular autumn colours. And it's not just the parks I'm talking about. London street trees used to be just planes - the famous London plane - with the odd horsechestnut, but in recent years councils seem to have gone all out for the exotic and vibrant, from cherries, crab apples, rowans - here on Clissold Crescent - to the Caucasian Wingnut, Indian Bean, and Gingko.

London's Street Trees is a useful guide. One fact I've learned from it is what those maple-like trees are that suddenly seem so widespread. Here's one at Kenwood:

It's an American Sweetgum. They tend to go red from the top down in autumn. They can grow big - up to 40 metres or so - and, unlike the smaller ornamental trees, they can live for hundreds of years. They only arrived on London streets in the last fifteen years, and already they're everywhere. So we better get used to them.

The Greatest Slovak

Slovakia's public broadcasting corporation, the RTVS, have launched a show to find the "Greatest Slovak". One of the contenders: Josef Tiso.

Who? Well, he was the leader of the Slovak Republic from 1939 to 1945, when it was a Nazi client state, and was responsible for the deportation of thousands of Slovak Jews to the death camps. He was executed in 1947 for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Dalibor Rohac:

A Catholic priest-turned nationalist politician, Tiso advocated Slovakia’s secession from Czechoslovakia just as Adolf Hitler was turning up the heat in the Sudetenland. When Nazis annexed the Czech part of the country and turned it into a ‘protectorate’, Tiso became the president of a one-party client state of the German Reich, which then acted as its reliable ally throughout the duration of the war.

Most significantly, Tiso was responsible for the deportations of Slovak Jews to German-occupied Poland, which started in 1942. Out of the 58 thousand people deported in the first wave (mostly young, unmarried women), only 282 returned. Overall, at least 70 thousand Slovak Jews perished in the Holocaust, out of an initial population of around 89 thousand.

At a time when some in Central Europe are seeking to minimize the involvement of local populations in the Holocaust, it bears stressing that the deportations from Slovakia were not a German imposition but resulted from the initiative of Slovakia’s government – and were, in fact, stopped in 1943 after considerable international pressure, including from the Holy See. The Slovak government also reimbursed Berlin 500 Reichsmark for each deported person (around $200, expressed in 1940 US dollars). President Tiso, who was arrested after the war and sentenced to death in 1947 for treason, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, was not timid about his motives:

“I am asking: Is it Christian that the Slovak nation is seeking to get rid of its eternal enemy, the Jew? Is it Christian? The love of self is God’s imperative. That love urges me to purify myself of everything that harms me and threatens my life. And I believe nobody needs convincing that the Jewish element has threatened Slovak life.”

Following public outrage, RTVS decided to exclude Tiso from the poll and to withdraw the promotional materials about him. The show is now also being investigated by the country’s National Criminal Agency for instigating extremism. Yet, the initial inclusion of the wartime politician and the prominence given to Tiso by the show’s producers, are not a fluke but part of larger and worrying project of Slovakia’s nationalists....