What Are You Watching Now?

[JimC]

The important things about civilisation are the steady rise in abstract mathematics, perfecting the distillation process, and the evolution of the cardigan.

All else is trivial dross...

[Hermit]

The important things about civilisation are the steady rise in abstract mathematics, perfecting the distillation process, and the evolution of the cardigan.

All else is trivial dross...

"Vote 1 JimC. Spoken and authorised by a well and truly lapsed member of the SDS"

[Audley Strange]

Watched Sightseers the other night, low budget British dark comedy about a caravanning serial killer. It was alright. Halfway through vampire flick Byzantium.

I enjoyed that. I thought it best described as "Mike Leigh's: Natural Born Killers."

[Clinton Huxley]

Watched Sightseers the other night, low budget British dark comedy about a caravanning serial killer. It was alright. Halfway through vampire flick Byzantium.

I enjoyed that. I thought it best described as "Mike Leigh's: Natural Born Killers."

the actress in Sightseers was also in Gareth Marenghi's Darkplace, I realised later. She's good.

[Hermit]

More Civilisation.

Episode 4. We're moving into the High Renaissance and this piece is about the head office of Christianity. Clark says it's all good. Employing the most reassuring intonation he can muster he gives us this good news: "In what is commonly referred as the decadence of the Papacy the Popes were unusually capable men who used their international contacts, their great civil service, their increasing wealth in the interests of civilisation." Oh, and did you know that they actually created the likes of Raphael and Michelangelo. Had Pope Julius II not decided to raze one of the biggest churches down, the basilica known as St Peters, in order to build an even bigger one, we would never have heard of any of them.

To continue watching this series is getting to be a bit of a slog, but it does have this huge, redeeming aspect. You get to see art and architecture in exquisite detail and in the best possible lighting. You cannot hope to cover the tremendous scope and range of what is presented in real life. A lot of it would be locked up somewhere, or surrounded by thousands of other tourists or by scaffolding. Even if I had the time, money and knowledge to see everything there is to see and had telescopic eyes, I would probably collapse into a whimpering, miserable heap of nerves due to sensory overload and the stresses of being on the road for months. So I bear with that pompous, relentlessly conservative arse. He does provide a superb armchair tour of European art like no one else has, before or since. But why, oh why could he not share John Berger's attitude as displayed in Ways of Seeing?

[JimC]

Speaking of seeing art on the screen, I must re-watch "Shock of the new" by Robert Hughes, a tour de force of showing and discussing modern art...

[tattuchu]

A Room for Romeo Brass. I laughed and I cried. What more could I ask for?

[SteveB]

Sherlock, the first episode with Cumberbatch, and the Finns kicking Ruskie ass. And Canadian women's curling team kicking poor Eve Muirhead's butt. I hope she gets bronze anyway.

Yes, this was a very Canadian post. Curling and hockey.

I apologize.

[JimC]

Where was the maple syrup!

[SteveB]

I always have thick coat of it on my body. Never know when I have to dive into a giant stack of pancakes.

[JimC]

I always have thick coat of it on my body. Never know when I have to dive into a giant stack of pancakes.

And you could always invite young women with sweet tooths to give you a damn good licking...

[pErvinalia]

Just went and saw Sole Survivor, or whatever it was called. It's war porn, but nothing that special. The most interesting thing about it was that it was based on a true story. Two of the moments in it that allegedly occurred were quite astounding.

[Clinton Huxley]

Lady H is watching something called Zero Hour. It's indescribably awful but she loves it.

[Hermit]

Civilisation, still.

Episode 5: The Reformation. Erasmus resolutely remains sitting on the fence. Albrecht Dürer is a vain hack who cheapened civilisation by mass producing his creations using woodcuts. Protestantism is far too spiritual to be any help to civilisation. Just look at those North Germans. Although England produced that genius, Shakespeare, there is not much evidence of civilisation in that land.

Episode 6: Early Baroque. This is where the series descends into a morass of loftily expressed rubbish. The art and architecture Kenneth Clark purports to discuss becomes a mere backdrop for a wall-to-wall panegyric to the Roman Catholic Church. For example:

Rome and the Church of Rome regained many of the territories it had lost and became once more a great spiritual force. But was it a civilising force? In England we tend to answer "No". We've been conditioned by generations of liberal, protestant historians who tell us that no society based on obedience, oppression and superstition can really be civilised. But no one with an unhistorical feeling of philosophical detachment can be blind to the great ideals , to the passionate belief in sanctivity (sic), to the outpouring of human genius in the service of God which is made triumphantly visible to us every step we take in baroque Rome.

He goes on to claim that this church gave peace to the ordinary people and immediately follows that remark with pointing out the details of the horrors depicted in Michelangelo's Last Judgement that will befall everybody who is not a good Catholic.

After a few minutes of more warbling, this time to the background of footage depicting Roman rituals of the Catholic variety he returns to his point: "The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonising, humanising, civilising (narrator's emphasis) the deepest impulses of ordinary people."

Just before the halfway mark of this episode the urge to take a break became irresistible. I don't know if I'll resume watching it some time later. If I do, I probably won't report on it here any further. Nobody seems to be interested anyway.

[Clinton Huxley]

My mother-in-law passed me the book of the series but after Hermit's description, I think I'll just look at the pictures.