First Drafts
The Prospect magazine blog
Michael Coveney
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23rd February 2010
Sweet Nothings: a pungent blast of misdirected sensuality
The great Swiss director Luc Bondy—who has just produced a controversial Tosca at the New York Met—returns to the Young Vic where, in 2004, he directed a compelling update of Sophocles by Martin Crimp, Cruel and Tender. This time, it’s a new version of Arthur Schnitzler’s Viennese tragedy Liebelei, reworked by the talented Scottish playwright David Harrower. A young man has an affair with a married woman. At a party, he flirts with a girl who falls headlong in love with him. Meanwhile, the married woman’s husband looms.
Tom Stoppard translated the play as Dalliance for the National Theatre in 1986, mixing secessionist fin de siècle charm with a trademark biting wit. But Bondy and Harrower are updating it to the contemporary metropolitan scene, as Sam Mendes and David Hare did with Schnitzler’s La Ronde—seen as The Blue Room with Nicole Kidman at the Donmar Warehouse in 1998.
A pungent blast of misdirected sensuality seems on the cards with a cast of hot names including Natalie Dormer (Anne Boleyn in The Tudors on television) and Tom Hughes (from the new Ian Dury biopic Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll). The event also marks an interesting collaboration between the Young Vic and Bondy’s Vienna Festival, as well as the co-commissioning Warwick Arts Centre.
This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Prospect
Nick Crowe
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23rd February 2010
Have One on Me
by Joanna Newsom (Drag City)
Folk music is enjoying interesting times. Unlike classical music, whose endless centenaries and revivals root it firmly in the historical, folk is employing its own traditions to create original and relevant work. Young American acts like Grizzly Bear, Devendra Banhart, Sufjan Stevens and, arguably, Animal Collective, are writing the kind of innovative music which, though reminiscent of the late 1960s and early 1970s electric scene, is just as comfortable in the hip bars of New York and London as a beer tent in Dorset.
Since her classic 2004 debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, Joanna Newsom has proved herself just as inventive, not least for the nuanced phrases and rhythms which she plucks from her instrument, the pedal harp. But it is her voice which is truly striking. Persistent, liberated, at times even feral, its girlish, petulant pitch cuts right into the poetry of her lyric writing. And combined with the quirky arrangements that sometimes accompany her songs (Beach Boys collaborator Van Dyke Parks orchestrated her last album) the effect is to transport you along undiscovered paths of the Appalachian Mountains, even when stuck in a traffic jam on the A4. Have One On Me, her third album, is an ambitious triple CD set, but may prove to be the broadest and most beautiful landscape yet.
This article originally appeared in the March 2010 edition of Prospect
Tom Streithorst
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19th February 2010
Spend, spend, spend: in this climate, you can't have too much of a good thing
Britain, along with much of the western world, has (barely) managed to crawl its way out of recession. That it has done so is mostly thanks to unprecedented and, I dare say heroic, government easing. For two years, monetary policy has been spectacularly loose, with interest rates close to zero, and fiscal policy has been hugely expansive, with deficits more than doubling. Finance ministers haven’t had much choice. With the private sector deleveraging, households and businesses saving instead of spending, the government has had to step in order to maintain demand. Imagine what a mess we would be in today with interest rates at normal levels and without massive deficit spending. Unemployment would be through the roof. But all this government expenditure, combined with lower tax revenues, has pushed deficits to almost wartime levels. The question is: will bond markets continue to shrug off what some see as unsustainable budget deficits?
Economists are fighting a civil war over what is more frightening: government deficits or their eradication. We should all pay attention, because the consequences of either side winning could be brutal.
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Tomas Hirst
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17th February 2010
The Kremlin has decided to take a strong stance against Iran’s enrichment programme
China’s unwillingness to support sanctions against Iran may preoccupy the international community, but the discussion ignores a key development: the lack of a Russian obstacle.
To put the situation in perspective, Russia has the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, estimated to be in the region of 16,000 (although the Start II Treaty limits the number of operational warheads to 4250). It also has a traditional hostility towards America’s aggressive foreign policy and a vested interest in keeping US/Iranian relations frosty in order to knock out a major competitor in oil production.
Along with China, it has forced a watering down of three previous attempts at sanctions against Ahmadinejad’s regime. Their combined resistance to tough international measures has left many feeling that, to date, sanctions have been largely toothless.
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Tom Chatfield
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16th February 2010
Can you keep a secret? Image by Girius
Yesterday, a friend told me the story of last year’s summer internship competition at Saatchi & Saatchi. Eager young beavers had to start a Facebook group, and the one whose group got the most members won the coveted internship. Only problem: within two weeks, Bristol university graduate Tiffany Philippou’s brainchild, Secret London—devoted to sharing members’ inside knowledge of London’s more elusive delights—had won 182,010 members and promptly morphed into a startup.
Marvellous, the power of the web. What interests me, though, is why Secret London worked so well. For starters, it’s a self-evidently good idea. People love sharing inside information about bars, gigs, bands and locations on social networking platforms. That’s why yoof spends so much time online, up to its armpits in Tweets and tinyurls. But why do they love it quite so much—and what larger social purposes is it serving?
Think of yourself for a moment as a node: your web presence a pinprick connected to millions of others via everything you’ve said and done online. What is it that gives your particular online presence value—and status? It’s not your unerring ability to regurgitate received opinions, or type ”lol” a dozen times. It’s the content you generate that’s unique to you: what you actually think, where you’ve actually been, the things that only you know. Largely, in fact, it’s real stuff that gives your virtual presence value: your take on real places, real actions, real people. Read more »
William Davies
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15th February 2010
Bold moves: but can the Tories deliver
The news that the Conservative Party intend to facilitate greater employee ownership in public services is one of the boldest policy announcements of David Cameron’s leadership. Labour has already thrown scorn on what appears to be political cross-dressing, and the left-leaning twitterati have pored over the proposal for inconsistency and policy naivete. But what evidence is there out there on the viability of such schemes, and how likely is it that the Tories could deliver this successfully?
I authored a Demos pamphlet on alternative ownership models last year, and while I’m more concerned with ownership pathologies in the private sector, the report looks at the potential and precedents for employee ownership in the public sector too. Here are three sets of questions thrown up by this morning’s announcement:
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David Killen
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15th February 2010
By NAF, Prospect’s cartoonist of the month.
James Crabtree
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15th February 2010
Comrade Dave gives power to the workers
Oops, he did it again. Having spent years giving the impression of being all “grand narrative and no radical policy,” David Cameron is on a roll. He recently announced plans to publish every government contract, a genuinely radical change. And now he has announced something even more daring: giving all public sector workers the right to take over the body in which they work (reaction from Conservative Home is here, and Phillip Blond’s original idea proposing something very similar to this is here. ) Three thoughts:
The media are on a Tory crisis trip, which looks increasingly odd. The Guardian, unless I’m missing it, haven’t written this up. (George Osborne was on the Today programme talking about it.) Very odd, especially given how yesterday Toby Helm wrote in the Observer that Cameron was beset by a “growing sense of crisis.”
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A S H Smyth
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11th February 2010
Ian Rankin: one of the many authors speaking at Galle this year
Trying to get to Kaveri Lalchand’s “Pulp Fiction” talk when Wendy Cope calls. She wants to meet me at her hotel tomorrow morning. Be still, my beating heart.
Lalchand is a garment manufacturer who went into business with an editor of maths textbooks, in order to publish Indian pulp fiction for the English-language market. She chats from the stage like a stand-up comic, showing video clips, reading “naughty” stories, and dishing out copies for the audience to look at. Blaft, the publishing house, is giving away bookmarks that proclaim: “Reading is sexy.” Her purpose is to reconnect with the trishaw-driver readership: to achieve this she has been begging 5000-copy translation deals from million-selling Hindi authors. All very refreshing and non-literary: “I don’t know what transgressive fiction is… but we published it anyway.” For once, I find myself wishing the event could be longer.
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James Crabtree
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11th February 2010
- from Webcameron to TEDcameron
Last night Prospect’s arts and books editor Tom Chatfield and I were lucky enough to be part of the 200 or so people packed into Bafta’s auditorium for the widely trailed “secret” Cameron TED talk. Three reflections.
1. People are missing the radicalism in his open contracts announcement. Cameron last night committed to publish the details of all government contracts. Not just IT contracts, which no one noticed they pledged to do in their IT paper before Christmas. ALL contracts. Every contract any contractor signs with a government department. Cleaners. Train operators. McKinsey being paid to write most of the Dhazi review. McKinsey running large chunks of Northern Rock. All of it. Here is the pledge:
A conservative government will publish all government contracts worth over £25,000 for goods and services in full, including all performance indicators, break clauses and penalty measures. This will enable the public to root out wasteful spending and poorly negotiated contracts, and open up the procurement system to more small businesses.
It’s a bit confusing, because this looks like their existing announcement (to publish all government spending lines over £25,000). But it isn’t. It’s new. I can only imagine what the CBI think about this. (UPDATE: see end of post for more on CBI reaction.) It is, if delivered in this spirit, a genuinely radical transparency measure. Imagine the fuss this is going to cause when everyone who didn’t get the contract pores over each detail, and asks difficult questions? Imagine how much easier it is going to be for outside bodies to track public money—think PFI projects—to see if they are on track, and also to use FOI to track progress? Interesting stuff.
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