Rain dance by Steve Wright

What a thrill to be out and about in the rain

without socks or shoes or even a mac.

It’s probably unsafe but we can catch our

death of cold together. Look how the drops

dance on puddles like the skin of a drum,

like a pudding left too long in the air.

I went out in a storm when I was six

and lathered my hair with apple and pear.

You should have seen the neighbours stare,

and my mum behind the curtains in creases.

So slap the puddles with your feet,

give the rain something to dance for.

Note:

With the frequent February showers Oxford has been experiencing over the past week, Steve Wright finds joy in english weather through poetry. Also contained is a useful life hack for those struggling to make the time to wash in the lead up to fifth week.

A study in urban botany

17/1/16

On the bridge behind the Tescos

Sprouting out from the cracks of the pavement

There’s a small, delicate blue plaque

Pinned tastefully to the railings. It reads:

‘Geranium Robertianum flowered here

From June to October 2014’.

The railings have been lovingly repainted

And the pavement has been recently swept-

There isn’t a weed in sight.

In the doorway of a McDonalds

Two homeless men crouch on plastic bags

Discussing where best to spend the night.

Author’s note:

This experience with the plaque did genuinely happen to me whilst out running in Oxford one evening last week- it struck me as such an absurd moment that I had to write it down. After writing it I felt it needed something else – whilst walking to a tutorial the next day I saw the homeless on Cornmarket Street, and I realised how the poem had to end. I like the fact that the comparison gives the poem a whole new level of meaning- looking at what really proliferates on our streets, plants or people.

The Arctic Tern’s Prayer

tell the air to hold me in the rushing heart of it

and keep its paths straight

away from home let there be a land that

flows with fish and flies

and let it taste like it tasted at home

home take this salty scent of home from my head

cut away the memory of its last ultraviolet

flash beautiful beneath me

don’t turn me to a twist of salt to fall to

sea’s saltiness if I look back at my home

let me look back just once let me

look back

Note:

This poem is published in Flight, an anthology in response to the refugee crisis, which launched on the 1st of February. Artic terns spend summer in the UK and winter in the Antartic. Annual round trips extend up to an estimated 90,000 km.

It is not controversial to assert that Andy Warhol is the most instantly recognisable artist for the latter half of the 20th century. This makes the task of putting on an exhibition of his work rather problematic – presenting Warhol in a fresh light is challenging when the man has had so much exposure. An unimaginative exhibition of his work would no doubt still draw crowds, so it is particularly exciting when an exhibition attempts to put together something genuinely fresh, to carve a new-fangled lens through which to view him. Last year, the Barbican did so by displaying (a portion of) his private collection in their delightful exhibition Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector. This year the Ashmolean Museum presents, in public for the first time, over a hundred works from the collection of Andrew and Christine Hall. The collection is predominantly formed of various portraits – of celebrities, naturally, but also of politicians and other artists. It also includes other work, such as some of his Oxidation paintings and an attempt at replicating a Rorschach test, as well as a number of films loaned from the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Curated by veteran Sir Norman Rosenthal, the exhibition is brightly lit. Each piece has a number of lights from a variety of angles pointed at it, creating a criss-crossing overlap of shadows. Jonathan Jones suggests that there are shadows everywhere in Warhol’s work and Rosenthal’s careful curation reflects this notion in the exhibition space itself.

Contextual information is usefully, but not excessively, provided, in each of the rooms, and is sometimes even quirky. A highlight is the backstory of a series of portraits of Ethel Scull (1963), which explain how Warhol, armed with a hundred dollars’ worth of change, took her to a photo-booth and shot image after image after image, before picking the best 36 to use in the commissioned work. The result is a series of images of Scull in a variety of positions and a variety of colourways, which, when placed next to each other, produce a notable sense of movement – as if we are seeing her facial reactions throughout an average day.

A similar effect is enacted by the films included in the exhibition. Two Screen Tests, where people were asked by Warhol to sit and ‘do nothing’ in front of a rolling fi lm camera, are displayed on screens side by side. The focused gazes, combined with the participants’ minute twitches, make for a strangely transfixing (and utterly disarming) experience. A 50-minute excerpt from Empire State, Warhol’s eight hour film of the changing daylight on the eponymous New York skyscraper, is shown on a screen on the perpendicular wall. The juxtaposition leads one to draw parallels between the building and the faces, both standing still in front of the camera but also minutely changing.

Warhol seems fascinated with the motion created through repetition, with his portraits of Watson Powell (American Man) providing an early illustration of this. Later on, we get a small selection of the hundreds of society portraits produced by the Warhol Factory, displayed in a large grid on a colossal wall. The portraits are often repeated with minor changes in colourways. In the same room hangs Twenty Fuchsia Maos (1979), which takes the official image of the leader disseminated throughout China in The Little Red Book and repeats it again and again in a gaudy colourway. Rosenthal’s note to the piece likens the image to the widely disseminated Coca Cola logo, and highlights Warhol’s transformation of a necessarily static image – a logo, or official portrait – into something changing and mutable.

The final room of the exhibition is, in this respect, unexpected, and more than a little jarring. Devoted to his late work, it is filled with black and white pieces which often focus on religious subjects. Subtle changes and the resultant movement they create give way to a preoccupation with dichotomies: between black and white, or ‘Heaven’ and ‘Hell.’ Repetition only occurs in the form of positive and negative versions of the same work, further emphasising a focus on the opposition of these extremes (or lack) of colour.

Postulating about the purpose or meaning behind Warhol’s work will always present a problem, particularly given the man himself continually refused to share his system of beliefs. Such an ambiguity can, perhaps, be seen as a reflection of Warhol’s diffidence in regards to his own image – he wore a wig from his 20s, narrowed his nose, and had repeated collagen injections in his later years. The self-portraits included in the exhibition are thus remarkable insights into a man of mystery, in that they articulate a desire for control over self-image. None are repeated like his other portraits, but rather each exists as a singular expression of himself. Yet that is not to say that these expressions are lucid or unaffected – rather, they are personas. As such, the resounding feeling upon leaving this exhibition is that we may never quite know what made the man under the wig tick.

Although it has been a decade since James Shapiro’s prize-winning 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, it seems the author himself has been content to move at a slower pace. His latest book takes us seven years forward, to the creation of the three plays of 1606: King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

Dates remain at the centre of 1606: William Shakespeare and the Year of Lear. Shapiro finds this is not only as a remarkably productive year for Shakespeare but also marks his transformation into a Jacobean author. We usually consider Shakespeare to be an Elizabethan, but, as Shapiro reminds us, “the last decade of his life was spent as a King’s Man under James.” The great success of this book is to demonstrate again and again the importance of these unstable contexts to Shakespeare’s output. In his characteristically lively style, Shapiro deftly navigates the reader through the pivotal moments of the nation’s transition to Stuart rule and their infl uence on the plays of the period.

The seismic event of the time was the November 1605 with Guy Fawkes’ discovery in the basements below Parliament. Even though the plot had been foiled, the ensuing trials and executions continued to pour salt into the national sore. For Shapiro, the “shrewdest of them must… have realised that even if nothing had been physically destroyed, something had inescapably changed in their world.” Shakespeare was such an observer; the plays which follow the Gunpowder Plot, notably Macbeth, probe the questions surrounding the plot more deeply. Is evil on such a scale the result of demonic possession? Or the product of more human forces, ‘Another Hell above the Ground’?

There are times when Shapiro seems a little too keen to suggest an all-seeing, all-knowing playwright. At one point, as military preparations are being made to put down the furtive uprising in late-1605, we are told that, “Few in England would have known the roads, towns and terrain” of the Midlands as well as Shakespeare. Whilst I am willing to concede that “as a strolling player and a native of Warwickshire” he knew the Midlands well, to suggest that he might be privileged in this knowledge seems a little farfetched. Shakespeare was not alone in having to tramp the roads in search of work; many young women regularly moved to take up places in houses before marrying. A similar argument could be made for tradesmen, MPs or country gentry.

This is a minor criticism but one that reveals Shapiro’s vision of Shakespeare as a “reader of his culture.” The genius of Shakespeare in 1606 lies in his ability to sense the shifts and concerns of his time. To my mind, such an argument brings about the best chapter in the book, when Shapiro discusses the ways in which Shakespeare rewrote a newly published play, ‘King Leir’.

Just as Shakespeare reworked old plays, so Shapiro has deftly revived the idea behind 1599. We can only hope that he might next turn his attention to a new year, possibly 1610-1, the year which gave birth to The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and Cymberline. Then we might safely say of the bard, as Edgar in King Lear: ‘Thy life’s a miracle’

The X Factor is a phenomenon of massive proportions. Thousands of people queue across the country for thousands of hours to have the opportunity to sing in front of the master of music himself, Simon Cowell. In the beginning, in those heady early noughties when viewing fi gures were at their peak, The X Factor was the only topic of conversation. It was the cornerstone to which we bound our hesitant small talk with hairdressers. It was the bedrock of every discussion at the beginning of every year eight science class. It bridged the generational gap between grandparent and adolescent grandchild during every slow Sunday lunch. Who was going to win? Does Wagner share a similar level of talent to his namesake? Is Simon Cowell’s hair for real?

The glorious noughties however have faded to a distant teenage memory, much like the nauseatingly sugary smell of Britney Spears perfume and the youthful innocence of Justin Bieber. And yet, in some slightly dusty corner of ITV, The X Factor carnival continues. Producers, judges, and auditionees cling to the continuation of this televisual juggernaut as sailors to a sinking ship with Simon Cowell at the helm. Indeed, Captain Cowell returned to his vessel after a brief absence in 2014. It was hoped that his renewed captaincy would rekindle the viewing fi gures and so bring back the millions who had turned their attentions to alternatives. Instead, since his return in 2014, ratings have continued to dwindle.

The show is an artistic expression of a specifi c aspect of the human experience; hope. Thousands of people hope that their patchy rendition of the Titanic theme will tug at Cowell’s cold heart. Contestants hope that their performance will be the stuff of musical legend. Guest judges hope that their appearance as a guiding light will reignite their own faltering musical careers. People across Britain continue to phone in on their BT landlines and other networks that may be charged in the hope that their democratic contribution will infl uence the future of music. Cowell himself hoped that his return to the captain’s seat would steer his ship back to the glory of 2010.

It’s an expression of hope in an environment of continuing hopelessness. It is, in this way, a representation of the own delusional optimism of humanity. To this very day, The X Factor continues its descent along the arc of success. Its descent continues to be a poignant artistic expression of hope. In this way, it is very much a part of the modern artistic landscape