Peter Stothard - Times Online - WBLG

Venice Biennale 1: a little light Russian video sex

Next week the world's biggest art party will be open to the public. For holidaying visitors to Venice it will be their first chance to see what  thousands of museum curators, critics and gallery owners are glorying in right now, modest metal tables from Scotland, hardly-moving movies from Holland, massive Japanese breasts, Korean views of condensation and glow-in-the-dark mushrooms (from the USA, I think), everything that makes up the Venice Biennale.

This is my first time here. Even for a veteran of political conventions, literary fairs and other press-fests, the mass of bombast and bullshit in search of beauty takes some serious personal adjustment. Over the next week I may come to make some sense of it.

For the moment, the three-day 'private-view' is almost over.  All the highest-rolling Biennalistas are moving on - to their business home in Basel where they hope to buy and sell to each other rather than to whoop it up at each other's expense. Next week, for the professionals, it will be back to the doom-laden trade of finding the big customers of 2009.  For this Biennale amateur there is merely the task in the next few days of trying to understand something of all this.

So far, I seem to be at loose among free-flowing Bellini-drinkers and feverishly fierce competitors for who gets the most desirable free canvas bag. FYI to next week's visitors: if you find the one that says 'it's so easy to fuck up but I'm too fucking old now to care' you have got the one that most people want.  I have already failed that test for myself, ending up with only a much lesser collection to carry my books through the rest of the summer,  totemic-energy-dragons, lobsters and designer-carrots.

 But there is a lot of other free stuff to be had, some of it exhibits themselves, like a million holiday postcards from different places around the world, all stamped VENEZIA - elephant packs from Venice, ice flows from Venice, Westminsters from Venice. One of the themes this year is that everywhere in the world is more or less the same place.

The private-viewers very much like the free stuff.  Throughout the official and unofficial sites that dot the city there are free iced coffees (from the Illy company that sees its product as essential to fine art), free art books each one of a weight that could kill a man, not to mention again the city's peach-and-prosecco cocktails upon which any art lover can become an instant connoisseur. Of course, if you want to drink a free Bellini on Roman Abramovic's yacht, you may be unlucky. That is an invite of even greater rarity than a 'too fucking old to care bag'. But anyone less fussy is fine.

I have just been to a splendid Russian event. In a brick warehouse in the Arsenale there were tall women in gladiator shoes and killer stilettoes taking canapes and peach drinks from black-suited waiters while watching a giant circular screen on which actors, with only a mildly more malevolent gaze, were doing much the same. It was wonderful, the 'world premiere' of a video installation with the title - unusually comforting for a classicist at the Biennale - of Trimalchio's Feast.

This was nothing too excessive, quite a gentle introduction to the big event. Neither in the audience nor on screen was there anything hard-core, nothing even like the sort of exoticism that excited Petronius, the original Roman author of the Feast in the age of Nero: I neither saw, nor was offered, any hot dinner dish from which live birds flew. There were only eery scenes of seaside decadence, understated sadism with golf clubs and a narrative of what might happen if a tsunami hit the the wrong rich holiday makers at the wrong time.

The audience seemed to like it alot, not just because of the piles of free badges declaring 'Unconditional Love', nor even because the alternative video show was of an interrogator repeatedly banging a young woman's head into a barrel of water. Trimalchio's Feast, with its Gatsby echoes, glossy sex and flying saucers, seems to me an excellent way to have started my Biennale.

The video makers are offering their own free bags here too. A New Zealander who thought (wrongly, I suspect) that this one was the true 'best bag', leant heavily over a table of drinks to see if he could get his prize, bringing upon himself only a hard stare from one of the women in black behind the bar.

'Could I buy one?', he then asked desperately, uttering words more alien here than almost any he could  have chosen.

'Sorry, I don't know', she replied not very sweetly.

'I'm just the artist'.

Exit stout visitor, without gift but still fit to fight another day. 

(More blogging from Venice will follow here later, perhaps something more serious, certainly with pictures when a little technical difficulty of the not very high-end-art kind has been overcome.)

A note from Mick Imlah

There have been many fine tributes to our poetry editor, Mick Imlah, who died last week.

I thought I might say something more here. But saying something about so perfectionist a poet and editor has made me freeze - as though I were trespassing on one of his areas of special interest, Tennyson, cricket or Walter Scott, and he were still looking over my shoulder with a hard pencil in his hand.

So this will be no new obsequy.

The only thing I have for a blog is a note already written, sometime in the early 1980s, and  inserted in one of my three copies (yes, Imlah in unexplained triplicate) of his first book, The Zoologist's Bath and other adventures.

I was a features editor on The Times in those days and the note consists of a set of points which I must have thought I'd ask him about, perhaps for an interview, perhaps because I wanted him to judge some competition, maybe  for some other reason long ago lost.

It reads:

1) no poems which look like rubble

2) eat cheese to stir up dreams

3) the glamour of not travelling

4) in alleys and toilets in places like Norwood

I never did get to ask him about rubble, cheese and the facilities of south east London. I'm not sure we ever did meet until I joined him at the TLS.

Twenty five years ago he did leave a message at the side of my desk, in large clear letters written on the side of a corrugated cardboard box.

All it said was that he'd passed by and I'd missed him.

He had, I did and I do.

A pencil box of bees

In the current edition of The American Scholar my friend, Steven Isenberg, recalls lunches in his enthusiastic youth with Auden, Larkin, Forster and Empson.

It is a rose-tinted piece of recollected pleasure - one which raises more issues than first appear, not least about whether how young admirers could or would have such meetings today.

These were not interviews, promotional opportunities, book-tour signings - just lunches.

Some readers may already know which of the four great men told Isenberg a joke about keeping bees in a pencil box.

Those that don't - and those that do too - can read the memoir for themselves right here.

Sir David Cannadine: master of the Honours list

Congratulations to the great historian and TLS contributor, David Cannadine, on his knighthood in the New Year Honours list.

But it must be a long time since that title - or any title - went to a recipient with so much knowledge of the system's murkier past.

Sir David is a man of many 'special subjects'.

Lloyd George's  abuse of the honours system to finance his politics is famously one of them.

How British aristocrats first gained their coronets is another one.

Sir David has written extensively on the subtle symbolism of the monarchy - and how politicians and palace use one another in good times and bad.

And one of his main contributions to recent public debate has been his insistence that Prime Ministers - whether planning ID cards or Iraqi invasions - should pay a more knowing heed to the lessons of the past.

When the subject is 'cash for honours' or catstrophes in the Middle East, Sir David has a pointed way with precedent.

Gordon Brown has long been an admirer.

It is always good to see due recognition for scholarship - especially a TLS writer's scholarship.

But in this submission for a knighthood, our Prime Minister may be showing a little bit more than mere admiration for a fine scholar and man.

Harold Pinter: exit a master

On one of the stranger nights of this very strange year, Harold Pinter waved a sort of farewell to the London theatre.

He was at the Duke of York's on October 7 - for the triumphant London revival of No Man's Land.

When the show was over, the audience stood first for the cast - and then, looking up at the box beside the dress circle, stayed on their feet for as long as they saw the frail playwright peering down.

Many that night sensed that they would not again see the greatest master of the stage to have shared their lives.

Harold Pinter had a very public cancer.

He wrote about it, talked about it, made it a metaphor - and yesterday, three months later, he died of it.

Reading Tina Brown in Dubai

There can be no better place than the Burj al Arab hotel to read Tina Brown's fizzing declamation against our age in The Daily Beast.

"Something went wrong on or about the dawn of the millennium, that’s for sure", she begins.

"And it keeps on going wrong. Did the 2000 election and 9/11 and Iraq and now maybe Great Depression II—in short, the Bush years—unhinge us into some strange collective suicide spree of self-indulgence, self-delusion, and blind pursuit of money money money till we drowned in it? Or did the planet just spin on its axis when all those nines became zeroes and tip us upside down and shake out all our values?"

Read on. It is the best Philippic Against Folly I've read in years.

The message may, however, take a while to make much visible impact in this sail-shaped skyscraper frozen in full rig against the Dubai shore

Burj al Arab diners still look down serenely over the archipelago of private-island development opportunities that is known here as "The World".

You take 'Australia'. Or let's go for 'Greenland'. Pity that 'Britain' is already gone.

Or the not-so-credit-crunched and sterling-afflicted can eat their caviar beside a basement aquarium of giant tropical fish. Tourist tip: this is the less scenic option.

No unscheduled visitor can simply pop in for a look at the hotel that has uniquely awarded itself a 'Seven Stars" rating.

You need a reservation even to take a glance at these golden pillars and cobalt corridors.

Buffet breakfast is the cheapest way. Only £50.

Fancy celebrating New Years Eve here?

£2000 a head should get you started.

And never fear: 'Children from 4 to 12 years of age dine with us at half price', says the brochure.

'Dine with US'? Delighted.

In the gift-shop there is  the perfect replacement for my broken Times briefcase - with a serious-looking combination lock for these days when no security precaution is  too great.

Only 110,000 dirhams.

£22,000 - and more by every crazy, passing, pound-collapsing day.

To buy in Dubai

Yves-Marie de Malleray is a French painter of Arabian horses, wild camels and the Houbara birds that Arab falconers hunt.

This week he is exhibiting in Dubai, in the Grand Gallery at the Royal Mirage One&Only - brightly realistic about the economic slump (an elegant acrylic-on-canvas  'Stallion after Delacroix' is not immune from recessionary angst), but hopeful that his local admirers, even if their oil money is not what it was, will see his 2008 credit-crunched prices as a buying opportunity.

Hope is still much in evidence in Dubai.

The Gulf state that has set the gold-standard for expenditure on itself in the past decade may not have escaped the global economic gloom.

But this is still a place where others can try to escape.

P for Poppy producers

In the mid nineteen seventies, when Margaret Thatcher was barely more than an idea, the playwright Peter Nichols wrote ten satirical songs that he called Jungle Jamboree.

He later asked his friend, Antonia Fraser, whether Privates on Parade would be a better title.

She said it would - and thereafter the author of A Day in the Death of Joe Egg and The National Health came to prefer titles beginning with a P.

There came Passion Play, Piece of My Mind, Pursued by a Bear and a new musical satire with military and imperialist targets, Poppy, which has been intelligently and spectacularly revived by the young actors of RADA this week.

Ettore's magic peacock

The peahen is more tender than her mate. Between May and July she may be roasted. But in a brisk October by the shores of Lake Como she must be cooked at cooler temperatures more slowly.

Her legs need twenty four hours at 55 degrees though her breast needs rather more heat for rather less a time. When she is done to Ettore Bocchia's satisfaction, she becomes ravioli or ragout and tastes of chestnuts and apricots.

Mr Bocchia is a famed chef who prides himself on kitchen science. He knows the molecular weights of his pastas. His Mistral restaurant at the Hotel Villa Serbelloni is the Fat Duck of Italy - to those who follow such distinctions - and last night he was back in Bellagio after a few days looking after Nobel Prize celebrants and atomic physicists in Geneva.

But to a classicist like your holidaying blogger, a man who has consumed far more food than he has ever understood , Mr Bocchia is much more an ancient magician.

His peahens taste like nuts. His birds become fruit. Of course, they do. When ice cream emerges each night from his bowl of liquid nitrogen, the swirling white gas is like the cloud which conceals the stage-conjurer's art.

Molecular science may make the vanilla smoother. But the formulae of science mean less to the eater than the magic sense that a peahen's egg might at any time appear from the waiter's ear.

No Man's Land

Through the flash-bulb wall outside the Duke of York's theatre last night came top celebrities and financiers side by side.

Before the first, first-night words of Harold Pinter's No Man's Land were spoken, the financial side had headed for the exits.

The mogul next to me at 6.50 pm had taken one look at his champagne glass and another at his Blackberry and braved the paparazzi for the second time.

Because he was merely a money-man in pursuit of crashing banks - and because Russell Brand and other starry friends of the stars remained inside - no one noticed much.

This great play, as Michael Billington reports this morning, 'yields new meanings' in every production, new ways of seeing Hirst, the heavy-drinking writer in his Hampstead house, Foster and Briggs, his sharp-suited criminal minders, and Spooner the mysterious poet-scrounger and saviour from the heath.

This is a magnificent production, an essential night at any time. But it was hard last night not to see the whisky-sodden Hirst as a tottering pin-striped personification of the City, Foster and Briggs as sub-prime spivs and Spooner as a well-meaning politician who might just have an answer but is hard to believe - and is also drunk.

One of the few certainties of Pinter's action is that Hirst is waiting for his 'financial adviser' to arrive for breakfast - and that Foster and Briggs have instructions to make the adviser any of the variable fried food combinations he demands.

But it is Spooner gets to eat the breakfast. There is no financial advice. The finance man never arrives.

The one who should have been sitting next to me has probably not had his breakfast yet.