OH MY AMERICA...

John Donne in his Elegy XIX, “On his Mistress Going to Bed”, written in 1633, compares the excitement of the New-found-land of America with seducing his naked mistress: “licence these roving hands”  he says.

On Friday we went to the Chineke! Orchestra playing a programme of American music as part of the Brighton Festival. (Chineke! is a not-for-profit foundation providing opportunities in classical music for Black and Minority Ethnic musicians.)

It was wonderful. We’d never heard a more impassioned or dramatic version of Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ or a funnier Copland’s ‘I bought me a Cat’. In addition to these composers we had Montgomery, Weill and Ibert.  We realised, as we listened there was this unmistakable American sound full of optimism, grandeur and wit. It was like listening to the best Hollywood film scores distilled into an expensive, sweet perfume.

For sure, we have our own local difficulties right now and the recent EU elections may well show an unwelcome rise of right wing parties but something even graver is happening across the Atlantic.

America gave me more frissons of excitement than anywhere else I’d been. To land at Kennedy and see the New York skyline sent shivers down my back.  To watch Aaron Sorkin’s ‘West Wing’ and somehow (how naive!) believe it was a true to life insight to American politics; to see Jeff Daniels’ (Sorkin again): 'America is not the greatest country in the world anymore', The Newsroom - 2012 – and to know no other writer in any other country would dare to write such a critical piece or for it to be delivered with such brio; to remember the iconic westerns that shaped my sense of right and wrong and, as with Elmer Bernstein’s music for ‘The Magnificent Seven’, to find myself humming it as I walked into a difficult meeting. This was my America.

And these were reasons why I had believed that America really was the greatest country in the world, thrilling, brave, fair and always innovative. The dreadful Monroe Doctrine had long gone.

But America has gone sour. I can no longer recognise it as the place that  brought us Gershwin’s music, Elvis, MoTown, Tom Wolfe,  Mohammed Ali, Michael Johnson and Sorkin or James Stewart. America has been stolen and I want it back.  Because it belongs to the whole world, not just Americans, it belongs to all our memories of progress and adventure. I feel a sense of sacrilege that the vast canvas boldly painted in bright and exotic colour has been painted over.

Perhaps it’s characteristic of our times that electorates sit passively as the past is written out and its culture is traduced and replaced by  shrill and discordant voices. Politicians everywhere are now becoming the sort of people with whom you would not wish to converse, let alone break bread.

In 1976 on my  first visit to America I felt like Donne:

“How blest am I in this discovering thee!”

Not anymore, I’m afraid. Not anymore.

A GRAND TOUR - 21st CENTURY VERSION

Rich Victorians loved to tour Europe on a protracted culture fest. Today it’s over rather faster but there are strange moments of similarity to my recent experience.

It was a four night trip to Assisi birthplace of St. Francis and Clare and with Assisi itself an undisturbed medieval town.

It was the 20 hours of getting there and back that surprised my medieval  body. Whilst the journey was seamless and punctual - just a 1000 miles - in Chaucer’s time half a century after Francis, pilgrimages were undertaken with more freedom of spirit than we jetsetters experience today.

We hit the Calendimaggio in Assisi, a festival recreating medieval Assisi with constant contests between the two parts of the town – the Basilica of St Francis on the lower west side and The Cathedral of San Rufino on the higher eastern part of the town - singing, verbal sparring, drama and drumming.

Nearly everyone is dressed in elaborate medieval costumes and vast pantomimes of activity occur involving huge stage sets on wheels. You can’t move for knights, Saracens, virgins , nobles. It’s like being backstage at a grandiose performance of an ambitious Hollywood film.

After the last night the performers’ celebrations continued until after 4pm with raucous singing and increasingly drunken and erratic drumming throughout the streets. The next day Assisi was quiet with lots of pale faces, dark glasses and “postumi della sbornia” (hangovers).

These exuberant celebrations apart what did Assisi really provide?

First of all the eyes – a terraced hill town with gorgeous pink and white stonework overlooking a verdant plain below. It’s very old and feels it. Even modern commercialism has failed to spoil it.

Second the stomach – wonderful low-cost, inventive Italian food and wine.

Third the weather – pretty much non-stop drizzle, occasional heavy rain and mist.

Fourth, and tellingly, the spirit – it was impossible not to blown away by the sacred specialness of the place where the most extraordinary story of self-deprivation and focused holiness was being enacted in the early 13th century – think Robin Hood and you’ve got the timing about right. The parts of Assisi that took my breath away were San Damiano where Clare and her entourage of poor nuns were based – her own church with its extraordinary crypt Chiesa di Santa Chiara, the Hermitage where Francis and friends went on retreat – it’s quite extraordinarily mystic, over 1500 feet up high over a densely forested gorge  and the town’s cathedral San Rufino with its crypt which has Roman remains making even 1200 seem very modern.  The upper and lower Basilica and Francis’ tomb are the knockout landmarks but they moved me less as crowds of singing pilgrims and noisy schoolchildren marched down the hill towards them.

Peace, devotion, authenticity and quiet surprises were what I savoured most in Assisi.

It was worth the 20 hours travel to feel so liberated from the present. I didn’t even check the news or e-mails. Who cared about them when there was this?

"WE DISCARD CAUTION IN SEARCH OF PLEASURE" (Duke of Mantua)

To Covent Garden to see Verdi’s ‘Rigoletto’ - classic opera or contemporary exposé? When the shagfest of a first act started I realised ‘Rigoletto’ is a story of now, not of 1850 when Verdi wrote it.

It’s story of rape, female subjugation and lads’ banter.

Imagine the Duke of Mantua (aka Harvey Weinstein) in his court (“This production contains some nudity and scenes of a sexual nature” warns the programme, yep, writhing bodies and lots of pelvic thrusting). This is Hollywood, baby.

The Duke has just seduced/ravished (one of many such conquests) the daughter of a Count who’s rightly pissed off by this. The court jester, a crippled, misanthropic hunchback, Rigoletto, (think of Olivier’s Richard III without the poetry) derides this count who places a curse on him to Rigoletto’s great discomfiture.

Cut to his home to which he hurries to the beautiful, innocent Gilda his daughter. En route he meets the sinister Sparafucile, imagine a Check-a-Trade assassin openly plying his skills. Rigoletto says “not right now, son.” He lectures his sweeter than sweet Gilda on staying indoors, apart from her Sunday trips to church, to avoid men. He checks with Giovanna her nurse that she safely confined. (What sort of life is this? The girl is a prisoner.) But nursey being corrupt lets in a young man whom Gilda’s seen at church where she was hit by a thunderbolt when their eyes had met. But it’s really the Duke in disguise stalking a likely conquest…what a scallywag! When he gets in the house there are lots of surreptitious embraces and arias until they are interrupted.

Cut to the court. Someone has seen Gilda in Rigoletto’s house and assumes it is his mistress “let’s kidnap her” they chortle - bit of amusing female abduction - what fun! When Rigioletto interrupts them in flagrante they pretend it’s someone else’s wife they’re taking. “Put on this mask” they laugh so he can’t see what’s going on. And when he realises the truth it’s too late.

Back to court where the gang of rapists and criminals are congratulating themselves “nice one Cyril!” The Duke hurries off to the room where Gilda is (not just for a chat we can surmise). A miserable Rigoletto arrives and is ridiculed as his daughter is deflowered inside with Mantuan thoroughness. The curse is working!

Rigoletto plans revenge. He’ll get Sparafucile to kill the Duke. But it goes horribly wrong because Gilda, still in love with the ghastly Harvey Weinstein of Mantua, overhearing the plot to kill the Duke decides she’ll intercede so it is she, in the dark, not the Duke, who is stabbed. RIP. She dies. Rigoletto is destroyed with grief.

Thrillingly sung and performed, we men in the audience should have slunk out shamefaced. (If that’s pleasure son you can keep it.) Verdi does Sodom and Gomorrah brilliantly and timelessly. My ears joyed at the music, my brain fizzed with thoughts of male madness.

A PERSPECTIVE FROM HOLLYWOOD AND BOLLYWOOD ON 2010

We’ll shortly be bombarded in the media by the “anguishings” of economists and gurus about 2010. So I thought I’d start by going instead to the world of film, with which I grew better acquainted over Christmas, for some pointers.

“This is my show” (Anil Kapoor as Prem Kapur the gameshow host from Slumdog Millionaire.)

As he felt his own control oozing away, Prem got more and more frustrated. Yet we’d all better stop trying to run things and start trying to steer them. However much we huff and puff the age of the Fat Controller is over. Events of 2010 proved just how out of control the bullies are.

“Doubt is not a luxury we can afford any more” (Elastigirl from the Incredibles.)

It was Lord Denning who said “people pay us for our certainties not our doubts” and Shakespeare more tersely “our doubts are traitors”. Whilst we have never lived in more complex times with information overload and unprecedented events happening at random we need to have a sense of clarity and an unfailing determination to be decisive if we are to survive. Better to be wrong than die in a sea of vaccilation.

“Your book is going to change the world.” Stanley Tucci (as Paul Child) from Julie and Julia.

As a writer I always believe this secretly although I doubt if it’s true. Yet the optimist that visualises the best result is the one more determined to go for it. Who’d ever start a film like Titanic, Avatar or Lord of the Rings without such an indomitable belief? There’s never been a better time to go for it.

 “Impossible. Impossible. Nothing is impossible. Dig little mouse. Dig.” Matthew Broderick (as Philippe Gaston) from Ladyhawke.

This irrepressible positivism allied to nothing any longer being inviolate, from the corporate reputations of BP and Toyota to the hero to zero slide of various politicians in 2010 (in Nick Clegg’s case from zero to hero to Nero), underpins the new world order. Since nothing is impossible just do it. And remember Rutger Hauer (star of Ladyhawke) in those bizarre Guinness commercials. He said “just keep an open mind”.

Time I’d suggest to watch more films and read fewer Harvard Business Reviews. When truth is stranger than fiction it’s time to go to fiction for inspiration.

This is the first of a series of blogs to mark the New Year – enjoy them.