Make Something of Something

I’ve been following the energetic creativity and general joie de vivre of Claire the illustrator for a good while. Sometimes young people give you hope – there’s a spark there: a passion, a purpose, a spirit. If you’re looking for an example of resourcefulness, seek her out. I thought she was a real individual who happened to be handy with a pencil, but it turns out she’s also handy with saw and set-square. She wanted for something, and went and made the damn thing. Now that is a kind of problem-solving psychology that is all too rare these days. And there’s a fair example of fatherhood here too. Go look.

Image lifted from http://illustratorclaire.wordpress.com/. Pretty sure she'll be alright with that.

The example set me thinking. Time was that there were three kinds of people: people who made stuff or dug it out of the ground; people who sold the stuff that was made, or else filled in ledgers to record how much was sold; and people who did bugger all. Each had a value set. The first put value in skill; the second put value in money; the third put value in blood, or else in tradition. It seems to me that there is something very honourable in setting store by skill, something noble about blood, and something essential about tradition. And that makes me lament all the more that practically everyone these days is of the second category. Everyone is a salesman or an administrator, and our lives are reducible to an overwhelming concern with the bottom line. I find very little by way of humanity in the mere chasing of green.

Alas, the artisan and the patron are not likely to be resuscitated any time soon. I therefore exhort you to do as our young exemplar does, and make something of something. Find some value in life that does not reduce to dollars and cents. If you have a frivolous hobby, pursue it seriously. Play an instrument? Dedicate yourself to mastering it. If you’re a gardener, don’t satisfy yourself with pulling weeds, but work to enchant it. Write stories? Get published! There is humanity in these things, for the human creature is artful and skilful. Therein lies one source of our cachet.

Straight Talking

According to Stephen Evans, my peer of some renown in Berlin, the Germans don’t do small talk. There’s not even a word for it. How much of your day is spent congenially warming the air with idle nothings? For many people, at work, at school, or with friends, that’s all there is. Imagine taking it away from them for a day. How would it feel for them to be left with the emptiness of their heads?

It takes some time to realise that there’s a good reason why your German interlocutor is knitting his brow over your insistence that it’s fairer weather today than yesterday, and looks to be changeable tomorrow. He wonders why you think he can comment on meteorological matters, or why you are particularly preoccupied by them. The conversation doesn’t go anywhere because he doesn’t understand ‘ice breakers’. There is no ice in Germany, so why not sail straight to the point? The Anglophone’s tendency to prevaricate comes from his own self-consciousness, rather than any interpersonal hurdles in reality. The trouble is, a  German’s tendency towards plain sailing only thickens the ice for the Anglo. And the thicker the ice, the more our German friend will think us strange and disingenuous. Of course, all this disappears once you’ve managed to get to know one another, but the route to friendship in this case bears a resemblance to a Victorian wedding night. With no prior knowledge about how things work, it takes a deal of fumbling and apologising before a beautiful union can be made.

In truth, both these cultures represent a thing lost. Conversation used to be an art. Small talk was a failure in artistry. The true conversationalist would engage seriously, but without emotional investment, with sensitivity to political and social taboos. A conversation would flow naturally from topic to topic, without passion, but with subtle betrayals of character that would allow for the slow appreciation of personality. The essential ingredient in this engagement of the courtois was French, and that is the missing link in Anglo-German relations at present. The lingua franca is now English, but no two peoples speak English in the same way, or are united by a common purpose. We are lost in incommensurate idioms. The monarchies and the courts of the eighteenth century were, if not directly related, then at least of a political piece. French was the order of the day from St. Petersburg to London, and it bound the courts in common.

 Click to enlarge

Last time I looked, France still lay between England and Germany. There aren’t any courts any more, but we’re constantly told that we, the common people, are all of a piece these days. Maybe we should meet in the middle?

Winning Ways: Observations on Football Management

Times have changed, but the route to the top is the same as it has ever been. Hard work, determination, indefatigability, and self-belief. Repeat 10,000 times.

I’ve been looking over the managerial record of Sir Matt Busby, legendary manager of Manchester United. What a man he was. His single-mindedness was already evident before the Munich disaster, but his resoluteness in creating a team from the ruins of his Babes is still one of the most extraordinary turnarounds in the history of sport. I saw Busby once, just before he died. Children who had heard his name breathed with reverence by fathers and grandfathers lined up to hang onto his coat and beg him for his signature. Sometimes, greatness just is, and everyone implicitly understands it. But Busby was no conjurer. He simply had a vision, put into effect through hard work and discipline, repeated over 25 years.

Busby’s mantel is now worn by another. I’ve never been much of an admirer of Sir Alex Ferguson’s public persona, but Alex Ferguson the manager has my infinite respect. There is only one level at which a player plays for Alex Ferguson. Anything less than 100% will surely result in packed bags and a summer transfer. No player’s reputation is bigger than the club, and no media event is more important than what happens on the pitch. These are principles carried, no doubt, by just about every manager in the league. So it must be something about the man that allows them to be put into effect. He must be a man of immense character to pull it off.

There are several other things that endear me to the nature of his successes. He has consistently believed in youth, in nurturing talent as well as buying it. He absolutely understands that there are traditions and rituals to do with Manchester United that are far more important than his tenure with the team. Indeed, his tenure has been about preserving those things. He is unfailingly loyal – a self-styled servant of the club. In these things he represents what has otherwise been lost from the modern game.

What Busby and Ferguson also have in common, beyond their winning ways, is the faith shown in them by their employers. These days, football seems to be all about winning, or else the manager loses his job. There’s no faith shown in a manager’s ability; no adherence to the development of players, systems, strategies; no long-term planning. Ancelotti won the double at Chelsea, but nothing this year, and now he’s on his bike. What nonsense. Ferguson was appointed in 1986, first winning the league in 1992-3. Busby was appointed in 1945, not winning the league until 1952. Winning did not come by the touch of a magic wand, but through perseverance, experience and practice. It is bewildering to me that, regardless of the continuing presence and example of the finest ever football manager, in the shape of Alex Ferguson, the rest of Football Inc. attempts to emulate his success by following a diametrically opposite strategy. The way to win, despite the times we live in, is the same as it has ever been. 

Confirmed: A Drop of the Black Stuff Is Good for You

But America knew that already, right?

Bang A Drum!

Last night was Yutaka Sado’s debut at the Berliner Philharmoniker. If the stories are to be believed, it was his stated dream when he was in sixth grade one day to conduct this orchestra . His dream surely came true last night, as he tried, with a little help from Shostakovich’s 5^th Symphony, to blow the roof off the Philharmonie. This was prefaced by an extraordinary performance of Tōru Takemitsu’s From me flows what you call time, for five percussionists.

It's rare to find an image quite so fitting, but this juxtaposition, of Time and Shostakovich, really sums up last night's performce.

Men like to bash things in anger at times, and we occasionally thrill to the sound of the blood pumping in our heads. But regular readers will know that I resist modern Western culture’s demand always and instantly to be gratified. It was fitting, therefore, to wait for the thumping Soviet march of Shostakovich; to be led there by a supreme exercise in control. Percussion, in a way perhaps more accessible to the watcher, to the listener, than with other musical instruments, is force controlled. It is striking, literally, on various levels of delicacy, intimacy even, in order to give emphasis to what we may happily and not inappropriately think of as the Big Bang.

The performance of Takemitsu’s piece made the best imaginable use of the entire sound space of the chamber, defining the score in terms of location as well as in pitch, volume, and tempo. Truly, it was a four-dimensional performance, with the five percussionists answering each other across the orchestra. There was a cosmic eeriness to the score, assisted ably by the dressing of each of the percussionists as, apparently, psychedelic dentists. The audience was brought to the edge of its seat, but whether to listen the more carefully, or in preparation to run, I am not sure.

The harnessing of so much power is like the coiling of a spring. Let it go, and the energy flies everywhere. Sado conducted Shostakovich like a man physically emptying the music onto his players. He breathed every note. The percussionists, restored to white tie and tails, took up the cudgels and batted back the volleys from his baton with the sound of artillery fire. Not for the faint of heart, this. The audience was roused and genuinely, for once justifiably, impressed. Sado had conducted the essence of the masculine, in all its reason and studied control, and also in its violence.