"You Must Take Up Your Well-shaped Oar And Go On A Journey Until You Come Where There Are Men Living

The Virgin and the Eagle.

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Too good to be true?

The Riace Bronzes

A recent episode of the Bettany Hughes series, The Ancient World, entitled ‘Athens: The Truth About Democracy’, covered the history and development of that unprecedented experiment in direct, representational democracy in 5th-century Athens. As expected, the show covered the astonishing achievements the Greeks made in art, drama and philosophy. Interestingly, Hughes pointed out that these achievements actually coincided with the period in which pure democracy was beginning to decline, eroded by the dominance of Pericles and the dragged-out nightmare of the Peloponnesian War.

Among the most notable achievements was the abrupt evolution of Greek sculpture from the stiff, Egyptian-like figures of the kouroi to the astonishing dynamism and realism of the Discobolus and the Riace Bronzes. The suddenness of this evolution and the perfection of the resulting art seems to be in keeping with the rest of the ‘Greek Achievement’, but an English sculptor has a different theory. Nigel Konstam, interviewed by Hughes in the programme, thinks that the lifelikeness of these sculptures is just that – namely that they were made using plaster casts of live models. He demonstrated how this could be done in his workshop, where a number of sculptors smeared plaster over a carefully positioned, suitably muscled male model.

Konstam didn’t stop there, though. His ultimate piece of evidence was the soles of some of the Riace sculpture’s feet. The underside of the sculpted toes and soles are flattened at exactly the same point a live standing model’s would be – a detail unnecessary for verisimilitude, since the soles are invisible. It’s a persuasive argument, though it could just as easily be argued that Greek sculptors paid the same attention to detail on the invisible as the visible in their work. A more convincing proof for the argument came to me as I looked at the images of various statues, something that has often occurred to me while looking at Greek sculpture – namely, that the heads and bodies often seem notably different to each other., Even when the proportions are perfect, as they usually are, the bodies are so life-like as to seem to be breathing, while the faces are oddly generic – both male and female faces have the same long noses, pursed lips and round cheeks (incidentally the young Elvis had a perfectly ‘Greek’ face). It’s less conclusive than the soles-of-the-feet evidence, but this disparity strongly indicates, from an aesthetic point of view at least, that models with perfect bodies were used as moulds for both male and female Greek sculptures, while the faces were created from imagination. It’s not implausible that such ripped torsos would be plentiful among Athenian citizens – soldiers in the triremes spent up to 8 hours a day solidly rowing.

If true, this theory rather takes away from the idea that the Greeks were innovators in sculpture, but the thought doesn’t bother me. Their myriad achievements in just about every other field more than make up for it.

"He looks around, around

He sees angels in the architecture

Spinning in infinity"

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I need you all to stop what you’re doing and look at these pictures of George and Ringo

Chapter 1: Dead in the morning

Chapter 2: This cross is your heart, this line is your path

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.

The dash of Beatles magic comes as they reach the end of the verse and bounce together on the strung-out “pleeeeeeease . . .” answered by Paul’s solo “ . . . love me do.” The spirit in the harmony and the expectant silence that follows heightens the sense of anticipation...

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In the drawn-out “plee-ee-ease” of “Love Me Do” the lilting harmonies yearn politely—in “Please Please Me” it’s dirty and polite all at the same time. John and Paul’s verse duet gains on the Everly formula: Paul stays on the initial high note as John pulls away beneath him (“Last night I said these words to my girl”), putting the Everlys’ “Cathy’s Clown” lilt to a brighter beat. The rasp in Lennon’s voice on the repeated “come on”s is far from innocent—he wants this woman to do more than just hold his hand. As they hit the second “please,” Paul and John leap away from the pleasantry of the first, soaring up to convey a real adolescent sexual frustration. Even the sound of the band has more rough edges than the thunking bass of “Love Me Do.” Where the first single is genuinely coy, the second makes a “polite” demand on the female, and Lennon deliberately tries to stir up a reaction.

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Although John and Paul can be worlds apart (as this album [“Please Please Me”] demonstrates), when they harmonize the common brilliance they achieve is breathtaking. The two share a space of musical effervescence that only they know how to reach for, and they hit it with uncommon grace.

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The first and last songs on the album, “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist and Shout,” are its bookends: both revolve around the idea of falling in love on the dance floor. But where Paul gets the dance floor jumping, Lennon makes the earth move. It’s as raunchy as anything the Beatles ever recorded, and it stands up beautifully to records with raunchier reputations (like the Stones’ “Satisfaction”). Where the opening tune suggests an adolescent sexuality, “Twist and Shout” conveys a loss of innocence; where Paul’s singing is charged but charming, Lennon’s delivery is nothing short of lustful.

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Throughout rock, and throughout the history of music—from Bach’s French Suites to Ravel’s La Valse—the image of the dance in music has been linked to the act of sex.

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After two verses [“Twist and Shout”], the singers—John with Paul and George in support— back off to play their guitars for a verse, as if resting for the final round. When the voices come back in, the personalities we’ve heard throughout the record stack up one by one for the rave-up, building the chord with mounting excitement. At the top of the ladder, they spill over the edge with hysterical screams, the musical dam breaks, and before we know it they’re into the last verse. It’s the musical equivalent of an orgasm, and it counts among the most exciting moments in all their music.

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It’s not that they’re telling teenagers to dance or have sex: they’re simply enjoying life so much that they can’t contain themselves—they want the beat to seduce the whole world into having fun.

(Tell Me Why by Tim Riley, 1998/2002)

"hey guys, let's all wear dark shirts and not tell paul"

In December 1964, Dusty Springfield toured to South Africa. She was horrified by apartheid, so her contract specified that she would only play to non-segregated audiences (the same tactic the Beatles had used in the American South earlier that year). It didn’t go well: South African officials came to her hotel pressuring her to sign a declaration that she would only play to segregated audiences, making veiled threats that it would be dangerous for her to go outside.

After several performances, she was deported. The South African government announced: “Miss Springfield was on two occasions warned, through her manager, to observe our South African way of life in regard to entertainment, and was informed that if she failed to do so she would have to leave the country. She chose to defy the Government and was accordingly allowed to remain in the country for a limited time only.”

The Beatles’ Ringo Starr was one of many to rush to her defence, saying “Good for Dusty. I would have done the same thing. It’s stupid to have segregated audiences, especially as the music came from the Negroes in the first place.”

“Negro” sounds dated now, but in 1964 it would be the most respectful term to use (it was Martin Luther King’s preferred wording). Beatle biographers tend to leave Ringo out of political discussion, so it’s interesting to see him weighing in - particularly the way he takes the opportunity to emphasise who created rock’n’roll.

Sharon Davis, Dusty: An intimate portrait of Dusty Springfield, 2008

Bull’s-eye view

The camera lens as a ruthless eye – it’s a well-worn cliche, but one that keeps demanding to be used. Photographs, even the most carefully shot, can reveal elements utterly unplanned by the photographer and the subject, from an previously unnoticed tower in a landscape to the lines in the face of a movie star clinging to youth. Since its invention the camera’s capacity to invade privacy has been readily exploited, leading to excitement and anxiety in equal measure.

Another common, but apposite cliche, is the idea that the photographer somehow violates their subject – even if the latter is willing to be photographed – by capturing their raw, unmediated image. As Henri Cartier-Bresson put it: ‘The creative act lasts but a brief moment, a lightning instant of give-and-take, just long enough for you to level the camera and to trap the fleeting prey in your little box.’ Referring to the subject as ‘prey’ sounds slightly terrifying, but is probably a sentiment familiar to many photographers. Even inanimate objects and views become a kind of prey in the avaricious aperture of a camera.

It’s the camera’s invasion of human privacy that is the focus of an exhibition beginning at the end of the month in Tate Modern, entitled Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. Grouped under various themes that range from the obvious (sexually explicit or graphically violent shots) to more subtle examples of voyeurism like government surveillance and street photography, the sample of images available online indicates an exploration of humanity’s secret moments. Some are shocking, like the terrified face of a young South African man clinging to the side of a building while a jeering crowd urges him to jump, some are unsettlingly banal, like the couple kissing at the New York Tortilla Factory, but all share that strange intimacy that comes when a photography ‘steals’ a moment that a subject would never intend to be recorded.

One photograph from the exhibition that captures a thing rather than a person is a powerful image of a British army watchtower at the Crossmaglen security force base in South Armagh. On an otherwise normal-looking street the watchtower looks utterly unnatural, bristling with wire fencing and multiple aerials. Obviously this photo was illicitly taken, and yet the tower looks somewhat ridiculous, rather than threatening. Its incongruity highlights the unnatural political situation that gave rise to its creation.

Ideas of reality and artificiality are thrown into relief in Walker Evans’ 1927 Street Scene (above), where the hatted man viewed from above, bathed in intense shadow, look like figures from the set of a film noir. The fetishisation of the past in film and art often means that genuinely contemporary images end up looking like pastiches.

The value of this exhibition is not just the interesting images that will be on show, but the questions it raises about the function and power of photography, which are even more relevant now than in the past, considering we are under more surveillance now than ever before.