Liberty Valance and Trump

 Liberty Valance and Trump 

    

I was watching ‘The man who shot Liberty Valance’ it’s from 1962, directed by John Ford.
It’s a good film with three archetypal male figures. John Wayne plays a strong silent type, good at fighting and shooting, and on the side of behaving well, passionate about a woman and desolate and angry but honourable when he loses her to James Stewart’s complex, educated more peaceful good man, not above helping out in the kitchen, who is brave and wins the love of the good and beautiful woman - Vera Miles. The third sort of man is Lee Marvin’s villainous violent criminal who bullies and ultimately fails.

I must have seen hundreds of westerns as I grew up. The heroes were always riding off into the sunset, uncommitted to any woman, strong, silent and good.
They were not  helpful models for a young woman longing to form a loving equal relationship with a man but they were good looking and wouldn’t hit a woman.
For a boy they endorsed bravery, self containment, honour and violence towards bad men if necessary. However they were definitely respectful of women and believers in justice.

There is a lot of talk now about boys growing up with no good role models, influenced by misogynist thugs, insecure about their gender, unheroic, lacking empathy and unable to make loving relationships.. Trump is the epitome of this cultural phenomenon, strangely admired by a third of American voters - they’d have voted for Liberty Valance and would  have sought to be protected by being his supporters, losing all self respect and honour.

And yet there aren’t any films that promote this bullying attitude are there?
There are online talks that do.  Internet availability provides a private access to the sort of men society as a whole largely fears and dislikes. Covid encouraged isolation from others.
There are few youth clubs in uk since the Tories demolished the youth service, which gave role models with whom young people met and talked, men who could be helpful to a growing teenager, especially those with absent fathers. Also they provided education about the traps and dangers of unknown lying people seeking power, especially online.

Young women via feminism are less subservient, more confident and less available. Men have to be careful about women’s rights and yet they see in some Muslim countries extremist misogyny triumphing. Bad men are recruiting followers.

People say that young people can’t concentrate on a whole film anyway or maybe not on a whole novel.
What’s to be done to promote the values most of us still want?
On tv everything becomes a competition, winners and losers - even bodies are on show for contestants to select, young farmers compete to get tenancy of national trust farms, antiques and houses are bought cheap and sold dear. Only the repair shop does kindly patient acts not for profit but milks our sympathy with endless tear-jerking  stories. Watercolour painting has to be judged with prizes. Cooking is highly competitive whether for bargain ingredients or at the level of master chefs.
At least no one can escape cooking knowledge one would think, and there used to be many programs showing education in childcare to manage bad behaviour in toddlers.
There’s nil political or economic education on tv- no examination in any depth of how different countries are organised, of views like Marxism or modern monetary theory.
A lot of bread and circuses- food and competitions although thankfully not the Roman proliferation of death and cruelty - that’s left for war zones in distant countries.

 Then there’s pornography - people objectified, sex without love. How did we go from a society with little knowledge of sex especially for women before marriage,  to one so desensitised and careless of feelings? Decadence accompanying the end of a civilisation.

And yet swing and roundabout wise we are more careful not to be racist and sexist in language.
You can be gay or change your gender in uk

Do young men, alonside young women,  need to be civilised via a counter culture of decency, equality, non violence and maturity?  Who is going to do it? Could the school curriculum cover it?
Instead of endless fruitless battles over the details of uniform, could we have an emphasis on cooperation and helpfulness?

The personal is political and cruelty is fascist. Workers of the world unite, men and women organising  together. We saw with the popularity of Jeremy Corbyn that there is a thirst for goodness, idealism, we see with protests about Gaza and climate  change -  maybe now even closer to home protests about benefit cuts, it’s not over, it’s not all lost and hope insists on action as the antidote to despair.

Ithell Colquhoun 'Between Worlds' Tate St Ives Feb 1-May 5 2025

 Ithell Colquhoun ‘ Between Worlds’ at Tate St Ives,  Feb 1st - May 5 2025

Ithell Colquhoun - (‘Eye thell Cull hoon’ or ‘Ke’hoon’) was born in India to a white colonial family  in 1908 but came to UK, attending the Slade art school, spending time in Paris and in Greece and eventually living in Cornwall with a studio in Lamorna, whilst having a second home in London.
She died 1988 and it’s since her work, left to the National Trust, was transferred to Tate 2019 that it has excited new interest.

This artist was wealthy enough to pursue her eccentricities in many directions through multiple esoteric occult connections which made her unwelcome to continue in the official British Surrealist movement. She became one of the lesbian contingent in Lamorna alongside Gluck and Marlow Moss.

Her writing has been described as ‘overwrought and opaque ‘ and my own brief attempt to read some of it leads me to think she was rather batty.
She pursued beliefs in a divine presence with hermaphrodite origins and sought a utopian future, whilst apparently mentioning racist ideas and peculiar views on incest which I have only heard hinted at rather than frankly explained by Dr Amy Hale on YouTube.

So what of this extensive show greeted by a huge buzzing crowd at the Private View?
And why are no parallels mentioned with Jung?

 

Judith showing the head of Holofernes, 1929
 

The exhibition  begins with more academic work, then interest in nature, images about same sex attraction, surreal compositions, structures based on cubes, responses to Penwith’s Celtic past and stone circles in the landscape and ending with abstract colourful tarot cards which were intended not for fortune telling but for meditation.

At her best Ithell’s images are vivid and memorable - but in this show  there is some repetitious stuff like the many tiny collages that I doubt she would have chosen to exhibit and some of which are too high on the wall for me to see.
Sometimes her paint is clumsily applied as she seeks to express her ideas no doubt not thinking of anything but how to explore as she feels the need for self- enquiry and esoteric speculation.

It’s miles from the interest in applying paint with lively panache that continues a few yards away at the Penwith gallery to this day in St Ives. There the committee prefers abstract chutzpah and visual celebration to the intense preoccupation of spiritual enquiry we see in Colquhoun’s surreal world.

Both are narrow spheres with little of naturalist observation or political and social relevance although one of Colquhoun’s pictures references a communist liberation group in 1942 in Greece that were fired on by the British forces.

I found myself getting absorbed by it all much more on my second visit when the gallery was quiet. I noticed how very strange were her early paintings and how much vaginal imagery was in the later work, which is actually around the time when Judy Chicago used this in her controversial ‘Dinner Party.’

Local folk may be glad to find an artist exhibited in Tate St Ives who lived in Penwith rather than visiting briefly. This particular one fits well with the idea of our area being one with a lot of flakey practices linked with romantic spiritual or magical myth.

Tate presents the show with no parallel examples from other artists but a separate room of work by Bharti Kher who has some similarities.
If you like an immersion into one woman’s strange ideas you may really enjoy it.

Drawing for 'The Sunset birth, 1942

Ther Sunset Birth, 1942

E.L.A.S. Peoples'Army for National Liberation 1942

 

 Leave uncombed your darling hair 1953

Tarot cards 

from slide show of later works.

'A Retrospective' at St Ives Arts Club, Feb1-12 2025

 St Ives Arts Club Art Exhibition, ‘A Retrospective’ Feb Ist to 12th,  2025

Please check on St Ives Arts Club website or Facebook for opening hours.

Janet Axten is curating this new show and it was a pleasure for me to be present when Chris O’Reilly and Steve Litherland, present and past Presidents, unwrapped the Arts Club collection and we discussed ideas about presenting the selected works to be exhibited in the club’s attractive newly decorated gallery at Wescott’s Quay, which will be free to the public to view.

It’s immediately apparant that these are not contemporary work. Some of the frames are ornate, and the colours are more subtle than those artists choose now, not merely faded by the passage of time. 

My favourite is Moffat Lindner’s (1852-1949) painting of a watery scene with a lovely atmosphere of gentle open air spaciousness. He exhibited in Paris and Barcelona and was a great benefactor to the art scene in St Ives.

Most quirky is the work by John Berryman of 2005 using a piece of burnt wood from the time when the building caught fire when a candle used in a drama rehearsal was left burning. He includes an ace of clubs to refer to us being within an ace of losing the venerable building, with its wooden top storey, used as the Arts Club since 1890. It was saved by someone passing sounding the alarm and John resigned from membership and the Presidency because this happened on his watch. Nowadays any use of open flames or smoking is strictly prohibited.

There are about 25 varied pictures to enjoy.
I would pick out a small gem by Mabel Douglas of her husband, John Christian Douglass, 

 

and Marjorie Mostyn’s vibrant  portrait.

 

 There is also a charming sheet of drawings including  arts club activities from the 60’s which is by an artist so far unknown.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see this collection from the Arts Club’s heritage which is such a valuable historical resource.  The club will welcome any new relevant information from visitors.

For current members who exhibit there it’s a wonderful thing to be part of the ongoing artists’ contribution to the cultural life of St Ives, which draws visitors from far and wide.

Left Bank by Agnes Poirier

 ‘Left Bank’ by Agnes Poirier, publ 2018

This book is about Paris from the Second World War to 1953 as the place where artists and writers were working and meeting, and also drinking, taking drugs and having many sexual liaisons.
Poirier packs in an immense amount of research and detail which can fascinate but in the end the complex array of infidelities becomes wearisome.
Surprisingly the RAF dropped leaflets of a poem by Eluard entitled ‘Liberty’ during the nazi occupation. Somehow Sartre escaped from a German prison with false ID. Picasso managed in a time of scarcity to find enough bronze to cast 150 sculptures. All the paintings from the Louvre were successfully moved to safe locations. Existentialism emerged.
The film ‘Casablanca’ came out in 1942 -  a film I realised only at third viewing shows  political refugees escaping war.
Eventually de Gaulle walked triumphantly up the Champs Elysee with the rejoicing liberated crowds, although fascist snipers killed 300 people. Hundreds of returned  emaciated prisoners were placed in requisitioned hotels and had to be  fed at first small amounts as they recovered.
Jazz thrived.  The communists were very influential and many had been very brave in the resistance. Through the  Marshall Plan the USA helped Europe,  seeing it as an entity, and sending ex GI troops on grants to enjoy studying in Paris. Black people like Miles Davies, enjoying life with Juliet Greco, found racial hatred so much less prevalent than at home.
Sartre started a third way political party, the ‘ Democratic and Revolutionary Alliance’ which eventually petered out. Garry Davis publically gave up his citizenship and called for World Government. Stalin’s death camps were revealed.
Simone de Beauvoir published ‘the second sex’ which many of the men including Camus rejected as it showed how women were in need of their own liberation.
Maurice Chevalier was a collaborator. Koestler violently abused his wife.
There were witch hunts in America against those suspected of communist sympathies- Walt Disney and Ginger Rogers being on the Republican extreme of anti leftwing people.

There is a helpful digest of events and a list of the people who figure in the book with their dates.

I think it gives a vivid flavour of the times and flows well despite some absurd sentences occasionally where the author cobbles her vast researches together, not differentiating between the relative importance of her detailed pieces of information. There are a few photographs of people.

I learnt things and found writers new to me to seek out such as Irwin Shaw.

Some escaped, some collaborated with the Nazis, some fought them and others just voiced educated opinions and indulged their appetites.. Reading about them raises the question of how you would yourself act and how to decide who to trust in such perilous times.

Mary Fletcher

Music of the Mind Yoko Ono

 Yoko Ono ‘Music of the Mind’ 2024

This book accompanied the exhibition at Tate Modern.  Feb to Sept 2024,

‘Music of the Mind’ has contributions by various writers who give their own takes on Yoko Ono’s art and it includes pieces she wrote  and some of her lyrics. There are photographs, many including Yoko as a young artist, and the emphasis is on telling her early life and her most famous works from the sixties and seventies.
Her pages of the words ‘Peace is Power’ in various languages printed on turquoise blue paper form one section.

I attended an extensive exhibition by Yoko Ono  at The Baltic in 2008 which included much of the same work but I could not find it mentioned in this book.

I have also read about her life before but there are new pieces of information here such as her early interest in drama at school , that she was treated in a mental hospital in Japan for a month 1962, and that she and John Lennon performed with jazz musicians in Cambridge 1969.

There is some emphasis on her feminist views with thought provoking quotations such as,
‘If you keep hammering anti-abortion
We’ll tell you no more masturbation for men
Every day you’re killing living sperms , in billions
So how do you feel about that, brother.’

I would have liked more about  her more recent work, which has continued and goes on into her nineties.

What a phenomena she is. She seems to have been able to join the art scene in New York with ease, coming from a wealthy Japanese background but wanting to be anti establishment and fitting in with the exciting times, experimenting with sound and ideas and then being brave in exploiting her increased fame when working with John Lennon.
She found music a great help in coping with grief after her beloved John was murdered and she has kept going with various projects, always trying to involve the audience and take a positive attitude directed to the cause of peace and personal awareness.

If you like Yoko Ono or are intrigued by her you will enjoy this new book.

 

 

The Horned Whale by Jeremy Schanche

The Horned Whale by Jeremy Schanche

The Horned Whale is a collection of two stories, a novel, some poems and a ‘Dream Manifesto’
There are even three drawings.

I began with the poems which being shorter are easier to digest.
I liked the manifesto with its echo of the American constitution.

My favourite was the ‘Ghost-Hulk of a Phantom’ which swept me willingly along a flood of allteration, lists, fantasy, made up and foreign words, rhythmic repetition and  humorous surprises in a pleasurable ride to its hero-rescuing climax which made me laugh out loud in a delighted way.

The other two parts are similarly fanciful. The Kramvil has more plot but even then that  could be summarised in a few sentences- it’s the whirling deluge of language that is striking. Occasionally certain words I found over used such as ‘pullulating’.
Again the hero encounters physical dangers and falls for a beautiful woman with whom he exits the tale in a rosy tinted halo of glory.
There’s not much character development or emotional enquiry.
It’s not the sort of writing I usually go for but it’s remarkable, unusual and flows under its own head of romantic steam.

Jeremy Schanche lives in Penzance and as well as writing is a versatile musician.


 

President Chimp by Jeremy Schanche

 President Chimp is a short work presenting the escape from Detroit zoo of a monkey who takes over the Presidency of America.
Jeremy Schanche satirizes the Chimp story colourfully, showing us a creature bearing grudges from his past treatment, wildly unpredictable  and dangerous, ludicrous and grotesque.
’Chimpy hugged the limelight  and worked the crowd with a deftness of touch that made Ziggy Stardust seem a bumbling amateur dramatist in a village panto.’
Along the way the author manages to bring in serious swipes at the death penalty, the Mexican border wall, built with non Union Labour, the English Prime Minister, Bojo, etc.
 England is ‘a tiny island swarming with a bizarre mixture of effete intellectuals  and turnip munching medieval peasants,’
Elton John comes in for criticism and whistling ability is seen as a sign of humanity. I wasn’t so keen on that as I cannot whistle but I have heard the author is accomplished in that art.
Chimp flies into rages,’his face quivered in simian mania, going from pale orange to deepest  darkest blood red, like a tequila sunrise.’
It’s this inventive turn of phrase that carries the narrative flying along to what I found to be a satisfying conclusion.

There are two more sections in the book which contrast dramatically with the first section.
In ‘More of everything’ the author gives us a fable about wanting  to make one’s senses develop and how the hero comes to a profound conclusion. This fable can go off at any tangents, surprising the reader.

The third section, ‘Into the  thunderbolt  land’  takes us to Tibet, the Chinese invasion, and the quest for Buddhist enlightenment.
What a contrast- kindness and transcendence.

Thus the book gives us three levels of existence, from lurid gross materialism, through surreal sensations to acceptance, ending with spiritual enlightenment.
The journey leaves this reader in no doubt which is preferable.



Jeremy Schanche recently also published a compendium of writings called ‘The Horned Whale’