Columnists
Pete Clark stands on a soapbox about summer festivals; Bill Knott flies the flag for handwritten letters; and Paula Ridley, chairman of the V&A, is this month’s guest columnist
SPEAKERS’ CORNER
PETE CLARK HAS LIVED IT UP WITH THE BEST OF THEM BUT AS THE MUDDY DAYS OF FESTIVALS BEGIN TO DAWN AGAIN, HE BELIEVES THE GOLDEN AGE HAS PASSED
IT all started to go horribly wrong with Woodstock. This 1969 benchmark of the counter culture was the mother and father of all pop music festivals, and its mutant offspring have been a public nuisance ever since. Given that only 450,000 people attended the event, and the vast majority of them were stoned and American, Woodstock lives on in the airy realms of myth and legend without the tedious underpinning of fact.
Memories of those four days unspool in much the same way as the sanitised movie that commemorated the hippie jamboree: free love inspired by dodgy drugs played out to a soundtrack of Jimi Hendrix and Ten Years After. If you look very closely at thefilm, there are glimpses of the reality: a desperate tribe of new barbarians, famished, dehydrated and covered from thatch to piggies in mud, perpetually in search of somewhere vaguely private to perform basic bodily functions.
In the intervening years, nothing much has changed. The Woodstock experience is now regularly available at Glastonbury – although not this year, as the stars were regarded as being in an unfavourable conjunction. The former event took place on the farm of Max Yasgur, the latter is presided over by farmer Michael Eavis. In normal life, farms are places where animals live, and they are equipped accordingly. Unfortunately, human beings, for all their clever ways, have not mastered the essential skill of grazing. Chewing the cud is not an option unless you have three stomachs. This means that festival-goers have to rely on the vagaries of on-site catering, the smell of which could drop a buffalo mid-charge. Even with a peg painfully attached to the nose, the queues for such alleged victuals as are available, stretch for days rather than yards.
Then there is the business of the tent. If God had intended us to live in tents, he would not have ushered mankind from his original caves straight into terraced houses. No one who really loves music has the inclination or ability to put up a tent. The tented acres at Glastonbury are a slap in the face to any notion of civilised progress. The cries of the lost, hopeless and plain befuddled bring to mind some medieval staging post on the road to eternal damnation, an impression confirmed by the omnipresence of New Age hawkers of herbs, potions and crystals. Sufficiently demoralised, the modern pilgrim is every bit as gullible as his ancestors.
I know how bad it can get. In the early ‘70s when just a teenager, I went with my then girlfriend to the Reading festival. We had a single sleeping bag, no tent, and a severely circumscribed kitty. Rod Stewart and the Faces were the main attraction for her, Status Quo for me. After an entirely sleepless night punctuated by sharp bursts of rain, the Sunday dawned sunny. For an hour, we had terrific fun as John Peel, our compere, made mock of bands with names like String Driven Thing. Then I fell asleep for the rest of the day, awaking with severe sunburn. There was no water and no shelter. I had to take the following two days off work because my skin could not bear the touch of clothes.
Since then, the pop festival has always represented the peak of masochism. It did not stop me attending further events: Bickershaw; the Isle of Wight; Knebworth; Castle Donington – all have experienced my wary footfall. But not any more.
This year’s festival highlight will feature the exquisite schadenfreude of Julien Temple’s Glastonbury movie indoors, efficiently catered and sanitary. It’s only rock ‘n’ roll, but I like it with comfy seats.
FLYING THE FLAG
BRING BACK THE HANDWRITTEN WORD! SAYS BILL KNOTT
EVER since man last brushed traces of primordial soup from his tigerskin dinner suit, our ability to communicate thoughtfully has distinguished us from other species.
Take the letter, for example. We are told that dolphins are extremely clever, but the ability to sit down at a mahogany writing desk and thank their hostess of the previous evening for a wonderfulfish supper still eludes them.
And yet… one wonders whether the art has been lost forever. Of the mounds of mail most people receive every year, I doubt whether more than a very few missives are actually hand-written. It is rare now even tofind a hastily-scrawled card buried among the bills and pizza menus on the doormat.
On the other hand, it is not unusual tofind a message on one’s mobile phone, usually of the “thnk u 4 prty lst nite” variety. Or, an email expressing similar sentiments but using the occasional whole word. Schoolchildren are no longer taught the difference between ‘yours sincerely’ and ‘yours faithfully’, instead, they learn a form of English unintelligible to anybody over the age of 30.
The perfume-dabbed love letter, the childishly-inscribed but heartfelt ‘thankyou’ letter, the crinkly, featherweight airmail letter… all have gone the way of the fountain pen and the ink blotter.
Even the letters pages of our newspapers are now full of emails – a form of communication often written in haste and repented at leisure. In our fast-moving age, the circumspection of a hand-written letter should be a welcome check on the text-now-think-later school of communication.
Many years ago, blue tits used to be adept at pecking the silver foil from milk bottles to drink the cream at the top. With the demise of the milk float, and the trend towards skimmed milk, they lost that skill within a generation or two. I fear the same has happened to correspondence – I sincerely hope not, or should that be “faithfully”?
THE PRICE OF HISTORY
PAULA RIDLEY, CHAIRMAN OF THE V&A, DOES THE MATHS
LONDON is having a Modernist-fest at the moment. There’s not only our own exhibition at the V&A, but Moholy-Nagy and Albers at Tate Modern, and the Royal Institution of British Architects’ spring exhibition of photographs of Czech architecture in the 1930s.
Britain came later to Modernist architecture with the arrival of refugee architects like Serge Chermayeff who built the De La Warr pavilion on the south coast, now splendidly restored, and Berthold Lubetkin, whose Penguin Pool at the London Zoo delights contemporary architects.
Modernism has struck a chord with today’s generation, which prefers clean white loft space, minimalist decoration and a few key pieces of furniture. Thefirstfitted kitchen, designed in the 1920s by Margarete Schutte Lihotzky for Frankfurt apartments and on display at the V&A, was the ancestor of the majority of contemporary kitchens (and possibly responsible for all those queues at Ikea).The modernists of the 1930s were just as keen on healthy living, too, and on getting the sunlight into their white geometric homes. Everyone recognises the Barcelona chair, designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1928 and present today in smart studio apartments and commercial foyers.
As well as furniture and architecture, Modernism embraced painting, photography, fashion, and graphic design, much of which is on display in this show together with a number of cleverly-edited shortfilms, an early X-ray machine and the rare Czech Tatra car (pictured right).
What a pity, then, that the modernist icons of our time are becoming impossible to acquire for today’s British museums and galleries, whose funds for such acquisitions are now only £6.6m, down from around nearly £50m (taking account of inflation), in the 1980s. So enjoy it while you can – Modernism is at the V&A in London until the end of July, and then travels to Hanover and Washington DC, so you might catch it there. It will feel familiar, even though nearly 80 years separates us from these objects – it is only a short step from Bauhaus to our house, as Tom Wolfe put it.
