Beth wants to watch Keeping Up with the Kardashians. Mo wants to watch The Marriage of Figaro. A balance is struck and from it The Marriage of Kim K happens; a mashup of opera and reality TV which ends up showing how similar the narrative situations are.

The actual production itself is a feat that deserves great credit, mixing as it does live music, acoustic and electronic, a multi-platformed stage consisting of four separate sets which, along with the backdrop, is all taken apart during the performance, live video streaming of action on and off stage, and a finale that finds the cast dispersed around the whole auditorium. Technically this was very impressive and despite a couple of camera issues and some hesitant transitions it was pulled off to an exceptional standard.

Of course half the production relies on the quality of the music, primarily composed by Clem Faux with a number of other composers to credit. The arrangements of Mozart’s music were accomplished and imaginative. It was a shame that the overture was recorded and not played live, the transition from the sheeny recorded sound to the small live band somewhat jarring. Their placement to the upper right of the audience did cause some balance issues but overall there were no noticeable miscommunications between band and cast. The modernisation of the score, for instance diverging in the case of Kim (Gabriella Noble) and Kris (James Quilligan) with drumkits, synth and a heavy beat worked well, especially when comparing the TV personalities to Mozart’s own Count (Jono Hobbs) and Countess (Ell Potter), who still had the original Mozart accompaniment. However, there were some inconsistencies. The first half neatly merged different styles, but the second didn’t quite reach the same mark, resulting in a finale was essentially straight Mozart.   Figaro’s (Jack Trzcinski) poppy style was refreshing and a very commendable adaptation of well known melodies, and similarly Beth’s (Amelia Gabriel) solo arias allowed for greater character development, her soundworld easily distinguishable from those of the Kardashians and Mozart. Mo (John Paul), on the other hand, didn’t have this opportunity to develop as his song, a reworking of ‘La Vendetta’, sounded hesitant and confused, the music unable to do justice to librettist Leo Mercer’s charming and, ultimately, fun lyrics. In fact, the libretto was probably the most impressive achievement of the whole show – warm and witty, and seamlessly (almost virtuosically) matching the original melodies.

The cast were very strong. Noble and Quilligan in particular maintained a lightness and focused character throughout despite their challenging repertoire. Similarly, Hobbs stood out, his grand-opera pomposity and exaggerated expressions balancing the Kardashians’ contemporary valley-girl flusterdness and Beth and Mo’s more straight realism. However, despite Trzcinski’s very commendable performance as Figaro the character itself was confusing. The sudden sincerity and blunt message-delivery was brought in too late in the performance to feel natural after a first half that took itself refreshingly unseriously. The material was all of a high standard, but the complete tonal modulation and overcrowding of themes (Advertising? Entertainment? Twitter? High-versus-low culture? Commercialism? Capitalism? Love? The internet? Marriage?) left the show feeling disjointed. The song ‘Superficial’ was a particular example of this – after so much satire and fun it was hard to know whether Figaro was a sincere figure or, like the others, an ironic and shallow person, hollowed-out by image-driven, contemporary, online culture (lyric: ‘you’re so avant-garde you know sincerity’s in fashion’).

That being said, it was not enough to damage the performance irrevocably. The Marriage of Kim K is a remarkably imaginative and lovingly constructed piece of theatre. Despite the reservations, it is hard to escape the feeling that something genuinely new has been created here – and that, above all else, is worth serious commendation.

William Carlos Williams died on 4th March 1963. Alongside being a practicing paediatrician and physician, Williams is perhaps best known as the author of a large body of poetry including ‘This Is Just To Say’. Consisting of three short stanzas, it could easily fi t on the back of a postcard. Short and sweet in more than one way, the poem turns the incredibly mundane into a meditation on something, but just what that something is is hard to say. I’ve heard the poem described only semi-jokingly as “The shortest and best poem about death ever written”, and the fi nal stanza (“Forgive me/they were delicious/so sweet/and so cold”) does have something unnervingly morbid about it beyond evoking the taste of chilled plums.

Williams’ poetry is generally considered Imagist, and like many of his other compositions ‘This Is Just To Say’ draws on free verse and haiku. His most anthologised work is eight lines long and about a red wheelbarrow – again, making the everyday into something transcendent and beautiful; something worth consideration. His poems have been compared to the photographs of his contemporaries Alfred Stieglitz and Charles Sheeler, and they have an undeniable close observational quality to them. The lack of punctuation in his poetry further emphasises the ambiguity and objectivity that photography can similarly offer.

Williams goes against the notion that the ‘great’ novel or epic, the lengthy masterpiece of fiction that takes into account humanity’s struggles with itself, with nature and with existence, is the pinnacle of literary expression. Instead, the postcard-length descriptions of small details that would be mere footnotes in a longer book – or even a longer poem – are given a gravity and signifi cance of their own. T.S. Eliot responded to modern life and what he saw as a fracturing Western culture by trying to encompass everything he could allude to in ‘The Waste Land,’ and by scouring it as if with a wire brush. Williams, meanwhile, found the same uncertainty in a coldbox of plums or an old wheelbarrow and embraced it lyrically.

The understatement and brevity of many of his poems (‘This Is Just To Say’ might have been adapted from a note Williams’ wife left on the kitchen table) mean a real consideration of the beauty and profundity of the everyday is forced upon the reader. His poetry is perhaps only rivalled within modernist writing by Hemingway’s apocryphal six-word short story: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to other, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” –Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas proposes a romantic theory as to how reincarnation may procure itself, a theory bound to swell your heart with wonderment. In David Mitchell’s carefully crafted world, everything is connected. In six prima facie distinct but intricately woven stories, the characters of each story are reincarnations of one another, marked by a birthmark in the shape of a comet. Mitchell brings to bear the theme of eternal recurrence – just as fate may be held in the stars, the characters in the stories are destined to meet again and again in their many lifetimes, “crossing and re-crossing [their] old steps like figure skaters.”

The ending is perfect; the film comes a full circle in the eyes of an observant audience: the actors for Hae Joo and Somni 451 have also played Adam and Tilde Ewing, destined to live the same life again, in a diff erent time. Profoundly, “I believe there is another world waiting for us…a better world.”

The characters quest after the same things – love, hope, a sense of justice. These are all parts of the prophesied “natural order” that loops ironically throughout the various storylines. The vice of slavery recurs in the fabricants of neo-soul and so forth. There is something inherently sentimental about the common human struggle and our tendency to repeat the same mistakes, in a never-ending loop.

As the melodies of the Cloud Atlas sextet ring through every arc of the show, “I’ve heard this before, in another lifetime”. “Each solo is interrupted by its successor” – and the struggles of each lifetime ring on forever through the course of time.

There’s a pretty postcard pinned up on the drab beige board in front of my desk. An old friend sent it last month, scribbling on the back of a picture of some perfect gilded Burmese shrine: “Sailing down the Arawatty; not the worst way to welcome in the New Year! Lunch soon?” Getting a postcard is like taking a shot straight from a bottle of Ribena: sugary thrill of happiness, touch of cloying sickliness, something you’re unlikely to do every morning.

They’re cute, of course – but too smug, you think. All sincere-seeming with their physicality but super trite, kind of meaningless. The only thing more discomfort-inducingly clichéd than an ‘Oh I so wish you were here!’ is a tacky pink heart on Valentine’s Day, gently placed in your pidge by the guy you’ve been dating since primary school.

I mean, the closest thing to a Valentine I received this year was the fortune cookie a friend pidged me for Chinese New Year about a week beforehand. Perhaps this is just my various character/facial fl aws at play, or perhaps it’s that the sort of romance achieved in Friday night snogs at Plush isn’t super conducive to flowers and love letters the next morning.

But, to be frank, the only thing that’s worse in turn than Valentine’s Day is the self-deprecatory Valentine’s Day joke. At least that little paper heart and £2.50 Tesco rose I’m defi nitely not jealous of are a vaguely genuine gesture, are actual straightforward, real expressions of emotion. Sincerity seems gross, but that’s our problem.

It’s a cultural disease: terrible, terrible fear of sincerity, and an even greater terror of triteness. We’ve drowned in a postmodern scepticism of meta-narratives and ended up with an aestheticised, simplistic distrust of anything attempting to convey meaning. And irony is so easy: it – or at least an air of it – is the ultimate wall of defence, the absolute fi nest way to protect your self-esteem and ego.

Even lad culture has caught the bug. No more can we have that pile of refreshingly direct cockiness, even if it was really just a façade for all sorts of weird psychological knots. No, no, instead we’ve got this semiironic, not-really-ironic-but-we’re-all-kind-ofsignalling-like-it-is performance of competitive masculinity. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of mannish posturing, but surely it’s a little mad to put it through a fi lter of ‘irony’?

Scepticism of sincerity can be fantastic, of course it can – is there anything more juicy than brutal sarcasm, the waspish gay, Private Eye? The sort of person who doesn’t have a sense of irony will be dry, they’ll take themselves far too seriously and miss various little moments of cheap cheerfulness. But slapped on all over the place like a wannabe Instagrammer’s attempt at a contour it’s a dead end and a cheap trick, about as satisfying as an e-cigarette.

Postcards are the last vestige of sincerity in an ironically ironic world, where self-referentiality is a cliché and even sarcastic clichés are passé. Everything is constructed, performative, hollow, fi ne. But we’ve already done nihilism to death and anti-art has about as much life left in it as the Church of England. Chic Parisians on chic holidays may not be sending oneeuro scraps of printed card back to their Yves Saint Laurent-clad friends or beautiful lovers, but they’re possibly also spending more on cigarettes than food. Is that safe feeling of trendiness really worth it?

There’s a practice in traditional Japanese court poetry: learned poets or lovers would exchange notes in the form of short poems, tanka or similar haiku-like forms, instead of writing love notes or prose letters. Or they’d sit in conversation, like that game where you go round a circle of friends to create a story sentence by sentence, composing a haiku in turn, each of which delicately drew out a theme from the previous person’s.

Postcards are the haiku of the stationery world. They’re direct, pithy, often surprisingly emotionally charged for what they are. Both come across as eff ortless expressions, and something created by completely deliberate action.

It seems like a paradox, but that’s the magic of a postcard: short-form friendliness in something you can hold, that has the literal imprint of someone who’s close to you. Postcards don’t pretend. Letters, phone calls, Skype, Facebook Messenger, all of these things are approximations of real life communication. Postcards don’t even try: they say, ‘We’re apart, but that’s alright – and here’s a bit of my excitement.’ Those lovers swapping notes were doing just the same thing, sending an image and a few words in a physical object. Humans put so much meaning into physical objects; just think of how much we scorn the idea of an ‘e-card’.

And what even is this worry about triteness, about cliché? There’s a poem by the famous Matsuo Basho:

in the capital:

ninety-nine thousand people

blossom viewing

It’s of no importance how many people are seeing the spring flowers, and it’s of no importance for how many years they’ve been looking at them. Lover meets lover and eventually they end up together. You’ve seen that chick fl ick a thousand times, but nothing gets worn out. Every movie is a little diff erent, just as every interaction, every postcard will be diff erent. A formula is just as powerful as something completely ‘new’, if not more powerful – even those ‘Make It New!’ modernists knew that nothing can be really, totally new.

It’s a cliché to ‘stop and smell the flowers’ and people have been looking at them since time immemorial, but no one’s ever truly looked at an apple tree in bloom and dismissed it as ‘trite’. Keep sending postcards, and unapologetically pidge someone a Valentine next year. Sincerity is only as lame as viewing the blossoms in spring.

I would take a postcard over a poster any day. Free from the facile exhibitionism of the poster, postcards are not just a glaring statement which imposes on or entertains a viewer, they are windows onto something or somewhere. The size of this window also determines its power; they represent something bigger, partly because they are, indeed, smaller. A postcard on the wall draws you in, the viewer becomes like Lewis Carrol’s Alice looking into Wonderland: ‘she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”’ Like Alice, we are tantalized, already half-seduced by something so small with the power to encompass so much. The experience is like looking through a window onto an entire culture which we can look through and admire but not step into ourselves. Alice’s desire to “shut up like a telescope” is understandable, the desire to shut off the division, so we are no longer tele, at a distance, from the enticements of the garden beyond.   

George Orwell was fascinated by postcards, and their potential to reveal something of cultural identity. In his essay ‘the Art of Donald McGill’ he discusses the particular genre of saucy seaside postcards.  He is interested in the postcards not particularly for their art or humour, which he characterizes as falling into recurring categories such as sex jokes and drunkenness (‘both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.’) It is rather his belief that they offer an insight into a counter-cultural subversive statement against hegemonic cultural systems of law and virtue which drives his admiration for this particular genre of postcard. He posits that they would function in a similarly subversive role if England’s political and social system was fundamentally changed: “in a society which is still basically Christian they naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed low-ness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever.” Obviously this point is articulated in Orwell’s typically problematic relation to his socialist ideology – that working class culture is something to be celebrated and embraced with class equality, but that he feels it is also essentially ‘low’ and dirty. Yet, his point about the subversive appeal of the postcards is valid – the viewer enjoys the jokes because “A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage.”

Orwell comments that these lewd jokes would never be acceptable on the news, or in other print media, ‘the comic post cards are… the only medium in which really ‘low’ humour is considered to be printable. Only in post cards and on the variety stage can the stuck-out behind, dog and lamp-post, baby’s nappy type of joke be freely exploited.’ The form of the postcard itself seems to lend itself to cultural subversion.  Presumably rude postcards are considered less of an outrage than obscene jokes appearing in national papers because the presumption is that they are for private use, for an individual’s keepsake or to function as a letter to a friend.  Yet, the form of postcards is essentially disruptive of this private/public division. Sending a postcard to an individual is like having a seemingly private phone conversation on a crowded train – there is no envelope and therefore no boundary preventing whoever comes into contact with the dialogue from overhearing, or overseeing as it were. Perhaps this almost cavalier lack of privacy which is bound up in sending a postcard is linked to the text content as well as their front matter. Just as McGill’s mass-produced seaside postcards show trends in the stock figures they reel out and types of jokes they employ, there are also discernible formulaic patterns in what we write on the reverse. Not that every postcard is the same, yet even the most interesting people seem to feel the need to relate anecdotes from their holidays, which often conform to the standard wish-you-were-here banal format. The reverse of the postcard then also reveals norms, culturally sanctioned discourses which seem to lurk in our collective consciousness – windows do not, after all, only offer a one-way view.

On another note, contemporary postcards tend to offer a window onto what our culture aspires to, or obsesses over. Of course, museums do an excellent trade in postcards which capture objects of historical and cultural importance.  These are sold because they are better than the photos museum goers can take themselves (if they are allowed to), but they are also more interesting, and relate to (you guessed it) windows.  In fact, they become a kind of window within a window – the postcard shows the cultural moment that say, the Mona Lisa represents, but also has the marketing of the Louvre – revealing the present culture which wishes to preserve this and continues to assign it value.  Actually postcards in themselves have become an essentially ideological demonstration of which aspects of culture we consider worthy of preservation.  I’m quite a fan of the Penguin books postcards, for instance, or postcards with excerpts from novels (I do English in case you haven’t realised.) I guess we would like to think of these as a window onto the soul, a wish-you-were-here not for a place but for the transportation into the literary world that the book provided.  In looking at these postcards you are drawn into so many windows with their corresponding views that it’s like a figurative glasshouse – the author’s culture, and that of the reader, and also their experience of looking through that window too.  In these more than ever I think we’re trying to squeeze into the tiny doorway, to the wonderland (or indeed window-land) on the other side.              

Sam Peckinpah’s career was filled with great Westerns: we all know of Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). He revitalised the genre, helping forge a fresh perspective on the Western in its twilight phase. However, this overview omits the flawed, fascinating Major Dundee (1965), an underrated, thought-provoking vision of Unionist-Confederate tensions and private wars.

Charlton Heston plays the titular martinet, running a prisoner-of-war camp full of Confederates during the American Civil War. After a family of ranchers are killed by a band of Apaches, Dundee assembles a rag-bag troop of soldiers, prisoners and scouts in an attempt to redeem himself after prior misdemeanours and gain glory. Within this party is a run-down of some of the finest actors of the 1960s: Richard Harris as a proud Southern captain, James Coburn playing a wily scout, Brock Peters, an African-American soldier, along with Jim Hutton, Mario Adorf, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens… The list of great character actors swells the ensemble, creating a vivid patchwork of performances. Combined with the dialogue written by Harry Julian Fink, Oscar Saul and Peckinpah, it comes together to form a salty, tough piece of cinema.

Heston delivers one of his best performances, sparring against Harris, and offering a view not of a paragon of army know-how, but a dictatorial glory-hunter. Peckinpah’s direction is also remarkably assured, juggling the large cast ably and in first half, providing a relentless, thrilling momentum. So why is the film less well know within his filmography?

Sadly, it is due to the film having no second half. The script bogs down in a Mexican village and never recovers coherence; Peckinpah fell out with the studio and the producers leading to the picture being taken away from him, resulting in savage cutting, particularly to the latter half of the film. Even the restored version from 2005 only improves things slightly. The fundamental problem was that Peckinpah, unlike with his next film The Wild Bunch, never figured out how to resolve the character of Dundee himself. Only with the final, climactic confrontation between the colonial French army and Dundee’s men at the U.S.-Mexican border does the movie regain its spirit, but it’s too late to provide a satisfying finale.

It ends on an uncertain note, perhaps appropriately for a film which grapples with the thorny issues of military hubris and intervention, the complex themes contained within the film reflected by the behind the cameras drama. This results in the film being consistently intriguing even if it never congeals into a coherent whole. Peckinpah had a strong, unique vision of the American West, mixing nostalgia with penetrating insights into the U.S. in the nineteenth-century, facing up to the often poisonous brew of tensions within the nation. When combined with an intuitive sense of creating mesmerising cinema, even Peckinpah’s lesser films reward keen attent.