Fighting Back in the Culture War

By David Hamilton

High Culture is attacked as upper-class entertainment or a way the ruling elites achieve hegemony over the masses. The elitist argument is ideological rather than factual because working-class people are not barred from attending concerts. Politeness and good manners are essential but if they pay the fee they are entitled to watch a concert.

The definitions is also inaccurate. What is wrongly described as popular culture is manufactured culture crteated by Corporations to make money from the masses. It is also a means of social control- bread and circuses. It is not really culture but fashion and dissociates young people from their general culture and communities while guiding them to manufactured identities.

Even talented musicians are controlled by record companies by contracts. They are
legally obliged to perform in publicity videos chosen by the Corporation to market them to a particular section of the public. Hollywood action films are aimed at adolescents.

The distinction between traditional and real popular culture is not stark. Schubert and Beethoven used folk songs as motifs and popular culture has used classical influences for melodies and structure. Vaughan Williams is a fine example of the use of traditional folk music in classical works. Contemporary composer Peter Maxwell Davies has written pieces which incorporate or are inspired by folksong or folk melody such as An Orkney Wedding.

Traditional culture has depth: you can penetrate as far as you have the personal depth to do so. It also has a long continuity; Manufactured culture is exemplified by boy and girl bands who are created and marketed to appeal to young people as a commercial arrangement. These fads are engendered by the new Establishment.

When Bill Haley and his Comets first toured Britain in 1957 they were sponsored by the Daily Mirror; David Bowie's first tour in 1973 was also sponsored by a national newspaper.

The Hippy Fashion developed amongst bohemian sects in Haight Ashbury, California, and after a major hit record: “If your Going to San Francisco” by Scott MacKenzie national Chain stores across the west began selling kaftan coats and beads to young people. The phenomenon of “weekend Hippies” or “Ravers” grew up as professional people ceased shaving on a Thursday so they could look like Hippies for the weekend.

The Punk boom which was engineered by Malcolm MacLaren and Vivienne Westwood, from their clothing shop Sex. McLaren promoted a rock band of sneering youths-the Sex Pistols. Elvis Presley had an outstanding singing voice and natural presence but was controlled by his manager Tom Parker.

There is a proliferation of David Beckham clones wondering around in the sort of gear he advertises. I saw a young man in a Rock Bar recently with a Mohican haircut a 1970s fad but Beckham recently had one. These are sometimes described as “sub-cultures” by academics but are deculturation by Corporations and replaced when another money-spinning style appears.

National identity is being broken down into ethnic and sexual identities: not whether one is English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh but whether you are ethnic or gay.

Popular culture is distinct from the manufactured culture which is now called “popular culture”.

The ballads of Robin Hood or Medieval Mystery and Miracle plays with their pageants are examples. These grew out of the churches Corpus Christi Day ceremonies. These were very much produced by the guilds of tradesmen but were communal and not completely top down affairs like manufactured culture. The Music Hall was a popular entertainment but well to do people also attended. The performers were very talented and in complete control of their songs and the audiences.

There is little of Marie Lloyd left but there is of Libby Morris and Wilson, Keppel and Betty are one of the most original acts I have seen. They were not manufactured by Corporations. (1)

The great works of Europe grew from spiritual aspiration which is part of religious observance. Bach and my personal favourites Byrd and Tallis were church organists and imbued Christian spirituality and transformed it into profoundly uplifting music.

Throughout the 60s there were dishonest clergy who took their pay from the Church but tried to undermine it from within. Believing in “The Death of God” and promoting Marxism from the pulpit. John Robinson, The Bishop of Woolwich, dismissed the traditional idea of a “God up there” or “out there” and said God is love. What is love in the abstract?

The Closing of the Church to the public

Those responsible for traditional culture in the churches have retreated into little worlds when they should be welcoming a wider public, not capitulating to our deculturation. Churches and cathedrals' are constantly appealing for money from the public but seem not to encourage people to attend.

Sunday evening services in the Church of England are communion services which deter new worshippers as they cater for communicants. Take the popular service at St. Lawrences Ludlow, which use The Book of Common Prayer. They attract about 70 but held at 8 a.m; the less popular modern service with its average attendance of 17, is at the more social 9a.m. (2)

The clergy, the Synod are not interested in the views of people outside the Church and do little to attract them. They have closed their minds and see everything through the dogma of progressive services. I once remarked to a vicar that I gave up church when they destroyed the service by dropping the King James Bible. He was amazed! They are ideologically convinced that holding services in a vulgar, modern English means people can understand the services. You can not understand communication with God in a simple rational way but achieve a spiritual awareness through sublime language.

I tried to get information on concerts of The Linnaeus Ensemble who were playing at two churches but neither church replied to me despite leaving several messages. I mentioned this to one of the musicians and she explained: “Churches are like that!” Do these people enjoy hosting concerts for empty rooms? My helpers and I have had this difficulty with cathedrals too so we wrote to several and other venues to make a comparison.

Traditional culture is in retreat while manufactured culture is assiduously promoted. We never received a reply from Great St. Mary, Cambridge, Norwich Cathedral, or Gloucester Cathedral.

I attended a concert at Birmingham Conservatoire and was probably the only one in the audience not connected to the College or friend of the performers. Young musicians would gain experience and confidence by playing to a wider selection of the public. I wrote to the head of the Conservatoire but never received a reply. I thoroughly enjoyed the concert which was conducted by Margaret Faultless as a wider audience would have.

Zoe Poyser of Birmingham Conservatoire explained : “ We have a varied output of both public and educational activities that range from those involving students of the Conservatoire as well as external hirers such as Birmingham Philharmonic Orchestra, Birmingham Music Service, Central England Ensemble, Schubert Ensemble, and Birmingham University Symphony Orchestra and so on. Our priority as an educational institution is to provide performance spaces and opportunities for our students, but this sits alongside and in harmony with our existence as a performance facility for hire.”

Art Galleries make great effort to welcome the wider public and offer many opportunities for education. The fabulous National Gallery in Trafalgar square has greeters who will answer any questions put to them by the public and many interesting books on sale as do Galleries of Contemporary Art such as The Tate in London and the The Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead. Sarah Wilkinson of the Baltic was very informative: I often recommend that visitors spend some time talking to the Crew (gallery assistants), who have a thorough knowledge of the works on display. They are there to clearly provide an insight into the views and ideas of the artists themselves as well as listen to and discuss the ideas and thoughts of our visitors as well as their own. Many of them are artists themselves which lends an extra dimension to discussions on artistic practice and we know from our comments and audience research that visitors who have used this resource have a richer experience as a result.

The insularity of Church officials

The Director of Music at Gloucester Cathedral said he would look at my email when he had some spare time: I heard no more. This is a great shame because Gloucester is a magnificent Cathedral with most beautiful cloisters and would also benefit from donations from the public. I asked for some information on the continuity of the choir: “I know its on the net but personal views are always more interesting and more engaging. I would quote you and mention the choir.” This was my intention throughout.

Those responsible for publicity do respond to explain how they try to attract audiences as Helen Simms at Gloucester Cathedral did. It is the clergy and directors of music who are insular.

Traditional Culture grows from religion. It is part of our continuity and is inherited from our ancestors, not specially created for our entertainment as a commercial operation. It is an historic continuity and though there are different periods and reactions one against another they occur within a continuous tradition.

Norwich Cathedral choir has impressive continuity. It was founded in 1096 and continues the tradition of choral worship today. It makes broadcasts and recordings and their repertoire is masterpieces of the Renaissance to contemporary by such as John Tavener and James Macmillan.

Yet when we contacted the Cathedral for information on their choir and its history we were ignored despite twice being told the Vice Dean would contact us.

The Reverend of Gonville and Caius, Cambridge replied to my assistant: "I am in no position to generalise about the issues you raise because I have not done any research or studied any academic surveys on the subject. I can only say that most people who come to Caius Chapel find it an intimate, warm and friendly place where people are given support if they look for it, and left in peace to say their prayers if that is what they prefer." That was not my assistant's experience which is a pity because it has a fine chapel and should have a wider audience.

A good example

The Dean of Kings College, Cambridge, was very polite and courteous and explained that he had introduced a welcoming system whereby he and the Chaplain stand at the door to welcome people as they arrive for the service, and to wish them well as they leave. “This didn't happen until relatively recently, and so I'd like to think we'd actually made progress in being warmer. Certainly quite a lot of people have said as much. On the other hand, it also has to be said that the very large congregations we generally get at King's, composed as they are mostly of one-off visitors, do mean that the actual personal contact is pretty limited. It's perhaps also important to remember that the Chapel is a private chapel which serves the community of King's College first and foremost, and so much of the personal contact for which we are primarily responsible happens outside the Chapel itself, in other parts of the College.”

The difference in secular venues

The Three Choirs Festival is not a Cathedral-led event, but organised by a separate independent charitable trust, the Three Choirs Festival Association. It is international rather than English music. Debbie Liggins was very helpful: “We hire the space (along with up to 15 other venues in each City) but with the benefit of 300 years of tradition i.e. the Cathedrals have us in their calendar in perpetuity, though we have to negotiate the terms every year.

The Three Choirs Festival takes place for a 10 day period only and rotates annually between the 3 cities of Hereford, Gloucester & Worcester. Yes, our main concert venue is the Cathedral in each city, but we are more interested in promoting the excellence of the festival with its international reputation than the various venues utilised. Thus we focus on our international soloists, resident symphony orchestra (the Philharmonia Orchestra) and the quality of the artistic programme. We advertise and place editorial in niche choral and classical publications and online event listing sites.” They use promotional material, e-newsletters, press releases.

They cherish the different character that each city gives to the festival, and thus undertake extensive publicity within each city every 3 years while putting on 'fringe' events for the local community.  (3)

Ludlow's excellent, world famous festival makes every effort to reach a wide public. They send-out 40, 000 brochures, have 13, 000 friends on their list and use a professional firm to to distribute them and they have many visitors from abroad.

They stage a Shakespeare play which is very atmospheric as it is put on in Ludlow Castle and, as the sky is darkening, Bats take to the wing and create a eerie atmosphere. This year it is much Ado About Nothing which, regrettably, has been set in WW2 Britain on VE Day.  Changing periods always ruins the play because it changes the associations of the time period.

In response to my The Neglect of English Classical Music Raymond Walker, Chairman Victorian Opera NW wrote: (4)

“May I say how strongly we at Victorian Opera endorse what you are saying. I agree with all you say about the composers mentioned. How could it be that the Cheltenham Festival did not give the premiere of Holst's Cotswold Symphony and that a Danish CD label Classico provided the first hearing of this symphony. And how dare a director Michael Berkeley promote his own work when he should be acting as an impartial director of the Festival. 2008 saw Balfe's bi-centenary yet nothing was given by R3. When last September RTE broadcasted a rare performance of Balfe's Falstaff 1838 the BBC wouldn't relay it even though it would have cost them nothing in royalties. We have just recorded W V Wallace's 'Lurline' 1860, a superb work, in readiness for his bi-centenary in 2012. Will Wexford or Buxton pick up a Wallace opera to perform? I doubt it without a deliberate shake up. I am disheartened by the fact that licence payers cannot get R3 to promote a wider coverage of classical music instead of pushing atonal and serial music that very few enjoy listening to.”

It is important to save English Music that is stuck in attics and garages and record it. The Daily Telegraph of 26 April 2004 had a feature on John Foulds when Birmingham Symphony Orchestra released their recording of "Dynamic Tryptich." Malcolm MacDonald, editor of music magazine Tempo: "There's no question he was a genius and one of the most significant English composers of the last century. MacDonald, found some scores in the British Library: "I got out a dozen pieces, and the first thing I opened was the Dynamic Triptych. I was blown away by it. This was music unlike any British composer of the time. I was amazed it was lying around, and no one was playing it.

"Foulds's daughter " took me to the garage, where there were two coffin-sized boxes full of sketches and manuscripts she's been left by her mother." Unfortunately, many of the manuscripts were damaged by rats and ants. In his book "Music Today" Foulds's, explained how, by strict diet and meditation, he had developed his clairvoyant and clairaudiant abilities. Much of his music, he claimed, was dictated to him by spirits."

Some of the greatest modern English music has been popular. Elgar, Tippett and Britten were very well received.

One who is keen to promote traditional music is Em Marshall founder of The English Music Festival and EM Records. I asked her why so many guardians of classical music looked inwards rather than outwards to a wider audience: She told me: “I suppose that maybe they feel it is "safer" keeping their concerts amongst a dedicated audience whom they know approve of the music, rather than opening it up to the general public, where they might experience more criticism? I don't really know - that's only a possible thought! Clearly if traditional music is going to survive it HAS to be opened up to as many people as possible - and it is unfair and narrow-minded to keep it from anyone who might want to listen. We are now publishing scores to make this music accessible to artists as well as making our own DVDs.” (5)

The common trait is that religious venues have become insular and cater only for themselves yet they are as a spine running through our national history and vital to the nation as a whole. When I was researching in St. Lawrence's, Ludlow, an orchestra was practicing for a concert. There was a stall for refreshments but “Brian” refused me a cup of tea! Perhaps I was not one of the club!

We have churches and cathedrals from those of accepted beauty and majesty to the eccentric as in Chesterfields twisted spire and these are repositories of our history as well as culture and should again be the centre of our communities.

It is my view that they should open up to the general public by advertising and putting on refreshments to perpetuate our culture not allow the forces of decadence to go unchallenged. Colleges of Education have a responsibility to do so because they are funded by taxpayers money. This could be done without cheapening the music by lowering standards, people must lift themselves up. Religion is the fount of culture and the clergy and directors of music have a duty to perpetuate that. Churches and cathedrals are spines of continuity through our national existence.

(1) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq7DGvfnr3U&feature=related

(2) http://www.rvwsociety.com/biography.html

(3) Peter Hitchins.The Abolition of Britain.1999. PP 105-135

(4) www.3choirs.org

(5) http://www.newenglishreview.org/custpage.cfm/frm/44183/sec_id/44183

(6) The next English Music festival is (1-5 June 2012) http://www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk/

The Definition of Art

By David Hamilton

There is confusion about what art is. The qualities that make something art are intrinsic, not external. It is the artifice, the organising of elements, perspective, choice of colour etc, that make it art. The result is obtained by transforming reality and thus nature through human imagination and emotion and is realised by skill and technique.

The word Beauty (or beautiful) is descriptive if used as an adjective to express the response of the beholder to an object, or if used within a clear context; if used as an abstract noun it is universal, and therefore meaningless.

A significant difference between contemporary art and traditional art is the split between form and meaning. This Cartesian duality is the split between mind and body, subject and form. The split is in all the various forms and styles and substance and meaning, of the respective art forms. In architecture contemporary buildings look like objects they are not which is why they are given comic nicknames - The Gerkhin, The Cheese Grater, or Liverpool's Catholic Cathedral, The Mersey Funnel. The form is not related to function - the interior of a modern cathedral could be anywhere.

Traditional art develops within traditional forms and it develops the forms. In his Christian paintings of the fifties Dali adapted forms to his individual vision but they are recognisably traditional forms. Dali was a genius - contemporary artists are not. They need to shock to get recognition. Real Art grows out of tradition and provides sustenance, spiritual or worldly, for people rather than negative emotions like shock or offence that are harmful.

To Marcel Duchamp it was enough for an artist to deem something "art" and put it in an art venue. But it does not matter where you stick a urinal it is always a urinal with a specific non-artistic purpose. To say something becomes art because you put it in a gallery is very muddled thinking. I had an experience in the Ikon gallery in Birmingham where the only objects with artistic qualities are the water closets and washroom taps which had pleasing curves and smooth surfaces. But they are not art: they are objects for specific non artistic purposes.

It is not the context of underpasses that makes or unmakes street artist Banksy's work art or otherwise: it does not have artistic subject matter and is just technique. Artistic subject matter is realised through qualities of artifice and held together by purpose which concentrates the artifice and technique to the goal of producing art.

George Dickie and Arthur Danto held that works of art are objects connected to various social practices. This depends on beauty as some objects like the taps or a motor car can be beautiful but because they have non-artistic functions are not art whereas a painting is. To Dickie art is about being self-assigned but you can put a car anywhere, it is always a car and its function is different from a work of art even if it is beautifully designed. When Artists begin to create they have a purpose and an artistic end in mind and to bring this into being they use appropriate technique. They do not take into account aerodynamics, say, or how fast water pours out or precisely where its trajectory will take it as these are not part of the artistic purpose. They are to engineers and designers of those objects.

This is the institutional theory of art which is a theory about the nature of art that holds that an object can only be art in the context of "the artworld". Whatever an artworld is.
Danto wrote in:The Artworld: "To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry-an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world." That has nothing to do with the work itself but where it is. Art is practice not theory.

Nothing can make Duchamps "readymades" art because they were made for a specific non-artistic purpose. Theory does not change a pile of Brillo cartons in a supermarket into art, yet Danto thought if it was put in a gallery a substantive transformation took place. Andy Warhol's pretentious Brillo Boxes (a pile of Brillo carton, replicas actually, so they are doubly pretentious) are a pile of Brillo boxes wherever they are put.

Dickie's institutional theory can be assessed from the definition in Aesthetics: An Introduction: "A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation." On the contrary, what makes something art is the intention of producing art through artifice and technique successfully realised.

Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst have declared works to be art because they say so. They were promoted and financed by Saatchi who first declared their works art but he is not an artist. It is critics and elite art buyers who decide what is art and usually because of its commercial value but that is external to the work, not intrinsic. They are right about the commercial value of objects but not about its classification as art because designating something as art because it has commercial value is to apply external or non intrinsic criteria as the standard of judgement. Some people are supposed to think they are Napoleon or royalty but does that make them so?

This takes us back to Duchamps folly. This argument is that because he placed it in a gallery it became art. To say something like Damian Hirst's pickled shark is important is pretentious. It is supposed to make us think but by taking the shark out of context (the sea) it is rendered meaningless because it is deprived of its being which is its life, and its function to swim and hunt. It habitat and how it lives in are essential not extraneous. A graffito by Banksy is not it is added to the environment not part of it.

Picasso: "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs." Well, he has dismissed proportion but that is only one part of the whole.

Splodgeness Abounds

Commercial galleries need to appeal to a buying public and be more popular than avante garde painters yet they follow the fad of impressionistic landscapes that lose their meaning by technique over imaginative vision: the scene is obscured by splodges of paint! This obtrudes between the scene depicted and the viewer and causes a disjuncture in the meaning. This is technique over intuition; skill over the knack. By contrast the camera can elevate the knack over technique as one makes an artistic judgement on what to photograph. It gives a clear reproduction of the scene not splodgy brush strokes that could be anything from a cloud or wave or a sunbeam to just a slip of the brush. These smears festoon every commercial art gallery in the country. This effect is demonstrated by comparing these with photographs of the same scenes.

Public Art

Fills our ordinary lives with meaning and provides different feelings as they have different purposes.

Trying to shock people is petty and there are many more responses. To shock is a means to the end of making themselves rich because the elites reward these attacks on our Art. It is as though they have a brief to undermine our artistic traditions. They have minor imaginations which cause only one response whereas a work by a major artist like Dali prompts several emotional responses.

A Liverpool pub, The Jacaranda, has a mural in the downstairs bar which John Lennon had a hand in painting when he was an art student, and this creates fascination and joy at the thought of someone so famous being part of it. The painting is well executed but not devoted to a high purpose, but conveys feelings because we know who was involved.

The Peter Kavanagh, also in Liverpool, has a delightful mural based on Dickens characters in the snug-bar. The story is that an artist who was a regular customer in the 1930s could not afford to pay for drinks on account, so he painted the mural. It produces delight and merriment, adds to the pubs character and raises it above the ordinary. ]

Statues are stylised and used to convey various human qualities. Military heroes say, were shown in proud and honourable poses that suggested authority, fortitude, steadfastness such as Lord Nelson's famous column in Trafalgar Square. They were cast in forms that conveyed meaning but contemporary public art fails in that elementary intention as the meaning is disjunctured.

I spent a few days in Shrewsbury recently. It has honoured its famous local Charles Darwin by "public art". But does it succeed in its purpose? One known as Quantum Leap is dissociated meaning as the form is not directly linked to the subject so there is no representation. The title Quantum Leap actually refers to something in physics not evolutionary biology which was Darwin's study. It is probably the contemporary informal term for making a major leap forward but applied to something celebrating Darwin confuses rather than elucidates. These contemporary artefacts arouse no curiosity and one does not feel inclined to enquire about them. They cannot be taken seriously as there is no spirit of genius behind them; rather, a commercial motive which are part of contemporary popular fashion and do not gain gravity from tradition. Quantum Leap looks like an armadillo crossed with a pack of cards and seems to be influenced by popular film Jurrasic Park rather than Darwin.

The Darwin Gate is three separate structures which unite to create an apparently solid structure. What does it mean? How does the form convey the meaning? The sculpture apparently combines the form of a Saxon helmet with a Norman window inspired by features of St Mary's Church which Darwin attended as a boy. They claim that as darkness descends defused light shines through the columns suggesting stained glass windows with the tops of the posts resemble ecclesiastical arches. When it unites it resembles the shape of a church window. However, there is no connection with Darwin and the transmission of meaning to the public is split. It is called The Eggbeater.

 

Even ordinary works can, if in surprising places, prompt a myriad of responses. The Nags Head in Shrewsbury, has an unusual and painting with an obscure origin. It has an unusual context in being on the inside door of a cupboard in a room above the pub. There is a strange atmosphere up there, where the temperature can plummet in seconds. Some think the painting depicts Neptune, others, the Devil. It is thought to be by a prisoner of war during World War II but staff at the local Rowley's House Museum purvey only a mystic tale but no accurate record. One told me it is of a woman who committed suicide by jumping from an upstairs window. In this legend it is said that the female figure will return if painted over. The painting is not of a woman but there is an ambiguity as the figure has feminine legs which are disproportionately long and thick, and a short body. This painting prompts wonder, amusement, mystification, delight.

Rowley's House museum holds the excellent Morning View of Coalbrookdale by William Williamse. (3) An important function of both painting and photography is to reflection a way of life or, as in this case, a defining historical era. There is too little representation of ways of life in contemporary art and fiction and people need this affirmation of themselves. These engaging paintings convey a powerful impression of the impact of early industrialisation on a still natural landscape. There are many forms of art which convey something important to people and prompt a variety of responses. Shock is just one: it is negative and it is unimportant.

Saint Alkmunds church in Shrewsbury, has a beautiful and moving stained glass in the east window. This is The Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Francis Egington. In this the Virgin Mary at the end of her journey through life and about to ascend to heaven. She is standing on the firm ground of the cross; with the Bible as the word of god for guidance and the sacraments represented by the chalice. The struggles of life are symbolised by thistles on the path. She is looking up in faith at the symbolic crown with her arms outstretched and open to heavenly influence as if she were asking and waiting to be uplifted back to her home in heaven. These were developments by Egington the artist who based the work on The Assumption of Saint Mary by Guido Remi of 1638 which is a more conventional Assumption painting and has Mary being lifted by Cherubim.

As you enter the church you are transfixed and walk towards it in awe looking up. It immediately begins to form an emotional response and the feeling of awe grows as you advance. This is not an intellectual proposition but a deep feeling of transcendent emotions.

 

This acts like great art, on a deep, unconscious level like an archetype. It opens the imagination transmitting holy or noble feelings in contrast to the degenerate contemporary art which spreads negative and evil thoughts. Old works have a quiet authority and the viewer pauses to contemplate it with respect, as when looking at old gravestones, to recreate the departed. It is a development of traditional form and links us with our roots.

The contemporary age is one of excess of technique. Jeff Robb, who has a permanent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, uses a method of lenticular sheets which are only sold by one firm which is in Switzerland. This is very clever and often fascinating but the subject matter is ordinary - nudes. His art is the cleverness of what he does with the subject but he does not transform the actual subject. Jeff needs specific equipment and ink cartridges to produce his results. Technique is important but should be guided by the vision not for its own sake or it is empty form.

The qualities that qualify a work as art are intrinsic to art in general but Art with a capital "A" has an elevated, sublime, purpose and is only realised by a high quality of conception and execution. A visual object or experience created through an expression of skill or imagination. The term art covers various media: painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation. The various visual arts exist within a continuum that ranges from prompting deep feeling or transcendent emotion and great skill to reproducing figures or landscape which have a mood and also prompt thought or feelings.

Kimbolton School has murals by Pellegrini. They give a sense of grandeur and seriousness and create a suitable frame of mind for study.

 

 The modern understanding of art derived from Abbe Batteux in the 1740s who regarded the essence as an "imitation of nature" and, principally, that it caused pleasure. They cause various mental states in the beholder. He defined these mental states as pleasure and the experience of beauty. Prior to this, individual modes of art were attached to various sciences like Music to Mathmatics but this is the skill not the purpose. Kant promoted a universal criteria to decide if something was Art. He used a geometric idea of patterns of shapes and lines. In The Critique of Judgement he developed the notion of beauty as the cause of the the mental state. The problem is beauty is so abstract as to mean something different to everyone, though it is a word that describes the individual appreciation of something very pleasing.

English philosopher Michael Oakeshott described two sorts of knowledge:

"The first sort of knowledge I will call technical knowledge or knowledge of technique. In every art and science, and in every practical activity, a technique is involved. In many activities this practical knowledge is formulated into rules which are, or may be, deliberately learned, remembered, and, as we say, put into practice; but whether or not it is, or has been, precisely formulated, its chief characteristic is that it is susceptible of precise formulation, although special skill and insight.

The second sort of knowledge I will call practical, because it exists only in use, is not reflective and (unlike technique) can not be formulated in rules... "
In art, this equates to the distinction between natural talent or genius and the skill and technique which realises the vision and meaning. Soccer players show a high degree of skill and to great players it is natural but developed by coaching and practice, but there is no high purpose involved.

Technique or genius; skill or a knack

There is a phenomenon in English art: a seven year-old Kieron Williamson. He has an indefinable knack that is called genius. This is artistic judgement in the practice of painting when one knows instinctively what to put and where. He has natural qualities: perspective, choice of colours. He has them automatically but perspective is a technique for realising the vision and choice of colours is part of the expression of the vision.

This knack is the artistic judgement. It is a non rational process - it is intuition or instinct and it is this that technique realises. In Kieron's case it was triggered by the Devon and Cornwall landscape and "sprung full-born into life" like Athena from Zeus's head. It was instantly realised, not slowly educed. (2)

To clarify the working of the two functions of form and content, technique and vision we have a fine example from music. Music was suffering the same culture war as painting and was dominated by atonal styles and was saved from an unexpected quarter. It was a paradox:

What we know as the culture wars and political correctness could not have made progress if it had not been adopted by the popular musicians of the 1960s. The words to The Beatles hit Get Back were developed from a spoof of Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech. Paul McCartney later turned into a more conventional rock song.

McCartney and John Lennon wrote melodies and through harmony revived tonal music. Atonalists were destroying traditional classical music as composers Schoenburg and Stockhausen did with water gurgling down a drain noises. The Beatles natural musical genius was realised through the technique of producer George Martin: The Beatles were raw talent, Martin supplied the form.

McCartney and Lennon upported the New Left and McCartney had a single banned by the BBC for apparently supporting the IRA ; Lennon was figurehead of the New Left-Politically Correct movement and his records like the album "Sometime in New York City" promoted it. He donated to The Black Panthers and The IRA.

Atonal composers disdained their audiences as Bourgoise but Lennon and McCartney brought them together. Martin's skill at realising their meaning added to the whole and triumphed over the split between form and meaning in contemporary music.

Martin wrote the orchestral arrangements and instrumentation in collaboration with them. It was Martin's idea to put a string quartet on "Yesterday". To demonstrate his point he played it in the style of Bach to show what "voicings" could be used. To realise "Penny Lane" McCartney hummed the melody, and Martin wrote it in music notation and David Mason, the classically trained trumpeter played it in a piccolo trumpet solo. Eleanor Rigby was heightened by Martin's strings-only accompaniment inspired by Bernard Hermann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho.

For "Strawberry Fields Forever", Martin combined two different takes into one. For I Am the Walrus he provided an original arrangement for brass, violins, cellos, and vocal ensemble. He worked closely with McCartney to develop the orchestral 'climax' in A Day In the Life.

The Artistic Subject

When he became a Christian, Salvador Dali found an artistic subject and the inherent spirtuality of the subject gave him a fuller, more elevated vision and he painted the masterpieces of the twentieth century. He was a skilled draftsman who developed his skills of realisation by studying Renaissance masters. Much criticism of Dali was because he supported General Franco rather than the Marxism of the orthodox Surrealists and art critics. They were ideologues and like all ideologues expected their members to conform to the manifesto or have their thinking corrected. Breton banned Dali from The Surrealist movement in 1941 and tried to ban his "Sistine Madonna" from the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York in 1960. It is said that Breton a Trotskyist, called Dalí in for questioning on his politics as his political allegiances had changed. After World War II, Dalí became close to General Franc's movement and issued statements of support. He congratulated Franco for his actions aimed "at clearing Spain of destructive forces" met him personally and painted a portrait of his granddaughter.

His fascination with the hypercube a four-dimensional cube and unfolding of a hypercube is featured in "Corpus Hypercubus" which changes the traditional form but it is still recognisable and we know what it represents. His "Last Supper" and "The Christ of St. John of the Cross" are the masterpieces of the twentieth century. This brings us to the essence of great Art: genius and inspiration.

Contemporary painters and makers of installations show contempt for the audience and do not work for the public good. They seek a response but it is a negative response. They are not geniuses and have to shock to get noticed. In fact they are not really artists - but purveyors of clever tricks without deep meaning. Art is communication but contemporary art fails to communicate because of a disjuncture between subject and beholder, form and purpose.

The indefinable knack is intuitive practice called genius. This is artistic judgement in the practice of painting when one just knows instinctively what to put or where. This knack is the artistic eye, artistic judgement and it is a non rational process - it is intuition or instinct and it is this that trained and developed technique realises."
John Dryden captures it :"But genius must be born, and never can be taught." It is the technique that is taught not the genius, which is inborn, as the qualities that make a work art are intrinsic to the work, not external nor contingent on where the work is put.

The difference between nature and art is this. When I point my camera at something that pleases me I first use artistic judgement but I record natural phenomena. If I take a sunset it is reproducing nature and is not art but nature. However, if I then use the zoom function, it has the effect of condensing the distance and thereby magnifying the gold or red which is moving from nature to art because it is introducing a technique to change the reproduction of the natural phenomena and make an artistic end. I recently took several photos of a sunrise in Penzance Bay in Cornwall and sunset at Brighton. There is little technique involved and as long as you point the camera at the right thing you are away. The camera is recording natural phenomena but a meaning is conveyed from photographer to viewer as the scene automatically conveys certain emotions to the viewer. In the above examples it is natural beauty. When you look at a photograph of a landscape a chain of thought is triggered which moves from the inherent emotional state conveyed to personal and often unconscious thoughts and feelings.

A similar process occurs in art as the idea or a scene is transformed through human imagination and emotion till it becomes a work of art: transformed reality.

(1) http://dilettantescholar.blogspot.co.uk/2008/05/michael-oakeshott-rationalism-in.html

(2) http://www.kieronwilliamson.com/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1203226/Pictured-Incredible-watercolour-paintings-boy-aged-just-SIX.html

http://www.magnoliabox.com/art/96482/Morning_view_of_Coalbrookdale_1777

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The Corrosion of Modern Drama

By David Hamilton

First posted at the Traditional Britain Group

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In 2009 Ben Stephenson, the controller of BBC drama commissioning, said that the corporation should encourage "peculiarity, idiosyncrasy, stubborn-mindedness, left-of-centre thinking."

Yet, according to its own royal charter, the BBC must "be independent in all matters concerning the content of its output". To show how we got to this undemocratic, totalitarian state I give a survey of the war on our culture and history carried on against us in our theatres for over thirty years.

They were a major phalange in the destruction of our drama in The Culture War through nihilist and then subversive drama. Their technical abilities are excellent and their facility for embodying nihilism and ideology into dramatic form exemplary. An aspiring young playwright would do well to study their use of styles and genres to explicate their message. Their works were frequently televised, films were made of them and they were performed in many countries especially on Broadway.

The Labour Government that came to power after 1945 did not bring The New Jerusalem as expected; the universities had been opened-up to grammar school pupils, not just public school products. These were the followers of the New Left and the new culture of the time. It was the era of CND opposition to Nuclear Bombs.

Disintegrating Worlds

Look Back in Anger is “Kitchen Sink” drama and and in 1956 provided a focus for disillusionment and frustration, for the rebelliousness of a generation that felt lost and betrayed after the certainties of the past. The emotional tirades of Jimmy Porter, the central character, against the drabness and smugness of the class system woke people up like a breaking window. The audiences were used to genteel, quaint, drawing-room dramas and the deeper but quiet dramas of Terrence Rattigan.

In Jimmy's tirade near the end the nostalgia, resentment and aimlessness are expressed:

“I suppose people of our generation aren't able to die for good causes any longer. We had all that done for us in the 30s and 40s, when we were still kids. There aren't any any brave good causes left. If the big-bang does come, and we all get killed off , it won't be in aid of the good old fashioned grand design, it will just be for the brave new nothing-very much- thank you, about as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus.”

Osborne's dissatisfaction is an individualist reaction against the consumer society and nostalgia for a lost past rather than political. Many of his later plays were studies of individuals or groups not comfortable in the world they were in because of a sense of betrayal of moral and aesthetic standards in a culture being over run by the mass produced and the second-rate.

Inadmissible Evidence (1964) offers a powerful depiction of one going through a crisis of confidence which stands for the crisis of the country as a whole as it sinks into a pit of mediocrity and hopelessness. Bill Maitland, the central character is a solicitor. We have moved out of the squalid attics and bedsits of his early characters. He now set his plays around "Cocktail Cabinets”. In Hotel Amsterdam and “West of Suez” he dealt with affluent but spiritually empty characters like writers, journalists, politicians, actors, media types, no longer the disaffected.

Harold Pinter(1930) arrived in the 1950s with his “ Drama of Menace”. He had been associated with Samuel Beckett and The Theatre of the Absurd and his method resembles theirs. He did many studies of human disintegration. Before the plays he had written a novel The Dwarves which was later published and his 1963 play of the same name is derived from it. It follows Len through a mental breakdown and retreat into madness. Pinter has used this theme of the mind's retreat into its own kingdom as an escape from the unbearable demands of the world several times. There are “Beth” in Landscape(1967) and Kate in Old Times(1970). Women who insulate themselves from reality in a sort of dream scape.

Pinter's characters usually give unreliable versions of their pasts from Stanely's account of the concert he gave at Lower Edmonton in The Birthday Party(1958) to Ruth's memories of her career as a photographic model in The Homecoming(1965). Whether they are fantasies or deliberate ploy to disconcert an opponent in a psychological game is never certain, but they are not believable recollections of the past.

In No Man's Land(1974) Hurst admits under pressure from the intruder Spooner that for him life has ceased: No Man's land does not move or change, or grow old, remains forever silent.” He is trapped in a frozen world. No Man's land is in some respects a re-working of The Caretaker. In both one occupies a space then comes an intruder to ingratiate himself, move into the space but finally gets rejected. The outsider is Spooner who tries to insinuate himself into a permanent place as secretary in the household of Hurst, the writer. Whereas in he earlier play, Aston, the mental defective, Davies, the tramp , are barely articulate, Hurst and Spooner are educated men. One is a writer and Spooner claims to be a poet only without Hurst's financial success.

In one scene Spooner tries to destroy Hurst's grasp of the past: by querying if he did have the wife he has been boasting of. In the following Scene Hurst produces a photograph album which he seems to offer as evidence against Spooner's attempt to deny him the past of his reminiscences or conceiving. Is he getting back at Spooner or reassuring himself?

“My true friends look out at me from my album.”

But he is unsure of the reality of the past. Pinter's characters often look back in that way, not in anger but in disillusionment. In a sense of being dislocated from a past where they once felt comfortable.
The typical Pinter battle between occupant and intruder is played on a higher level and is largely a claim to an authoritative version of the past: if you control the past you control the future, as Orwell put it.

In Betrayal(1978) Pinter succeeded in using the flashback technique, which he had begun to experiment with in “Old Times”, to scrutinise the mind's conscious and unconscious betrayals of reality. The play deals with the developing relationship between three people: Robert and Jerry have been close friends since their schooldays and Emma, wife of Robert and former mistress of Jerry. Pinter tells the story in a series of scenes moving backwards in time: there are nine scenes beginning in 1977 with meetings between Emma and Jerry and Jerry and Robert – two years after the adultery ended. We are taken back to a moment in the married couples bedroom in 1968, when the affair began. We are shown key episodes enacted after we have heard them discussed. With this technique for the first time in his work Pinter verifies the past. But does it accord with memories and conversations we see the characters have. We learn that there is a lot of deliberate deception which makes a dramatic event that is entwined with tricks of memory that the mind has no control over. They deliberately miss-remember and also involuntarily get the past wrong.

Many plays of the era expressed the retreat from the world tackled frequently by Osborne and Pinter; the individuals failure to cope with everyday life.

David Storey(1933) wrote of the futility of life. Storey was a painter and novelist as well as a playwright and wrote the screenplay for the British Social Realist film version of his play This Sporting Life(1960).

His first play: The Restoration of Arnold Middleton (1966) was on the breakdown of a schoolteacher Home(1970)is set in a mental hospital but the location is only revealed gradually as the story proceeds. There are five characters including apparently benign Harry, opinionated Jack, cynical Marjorie, and flirtatious Kathleen. As we are shown their interactions we realise their delusions and pretensions are similar to those of people living in normal life. This is a poignant evocation of the passing of a way of life - the subtext of most of these plays . In several of his works but more so here, Storey achieves an elegaic quality that has been compared to the mood of Chekov’s last plays. Home has little plot; it is the carrying through of a process of a dramatic image of growth and decay, rise and fall, advance and retreat. Two well-spoken, gentlemen, approaching old-age meet coarse working-class women and try to establish a relationship with them but fail. At the end they are alone again, back on the deserted terrace where we found them, weeping quietly together.

After uncertainty in the opening sequence the audience have realised that their talk of the weather and items from their newspapers is not the small talk of casual acquaintances, but the careful avoidance of subjects too painful to face by two inmates of another institution, a mental hospital, the Home of the title.

In Lifeclass.”(1974) exhibits the disintegration of a man “Allat”, an instructor at an evening class who lost of belief in the value of what he is imparting:

Phillips: Don't give up. That's the message that comes down to us from Rembrandt, Cezanne. From all that countless host that sank their existences in art.”

Allat: “ Don't you get the feeling at times that it is a substitute for living?”

The deeper levels of his despair are revealed when he compares the artefacts left in stone, bronze etc down the ages from the first painters on walls of caves, with the futility of human life “whirring in the void of the meaningless universe.” Storey was not an absurdist in technique like Beckett, Ionesco or early Pinter, but through a naturalistic style he describes a universe without meaning, an absurdity. Allat delivers a powerful evocation of a collapsing character: “

“ Whereas we elements of a work ourselves, partake of existence, simply by being what we are. Expressions of a certain time and place and class, defying hope, defying anguish, defying even definition. More substantial than reality, stranger than a dream, figures in a landscape. Scratching, scrapping, rubbing. All around us our rocky ball hurtling through time singing, to no one's tune at all.”

Early Days(1980) is about the slide into cunning senility of a politician whose life fell apart when he missed his chance to become PM. - the remainder of his life was spent in bitter reminiscing.

Peter Shaffer's (1926) Equus(1973), is about the vile crime of a boy blinding six horses by stabbing . The boy is sent to a child psychologist, Dr. Dysart, by his social worker.(6) Technically, the play is constructed like a detective story with a narrator who has his hat over his eyes and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth a la Humphrey Bogart. He is a professional psychologist but narrates how he goes about the mean streets. It uses the detective genre for the purpose.

Dysart slowly uncovers what made him like that. There was a tension between his fathers atheism and harsh application of discipline and his mother's religious fanaticism and over indulgence. There was an early erotic experience riding a horse on a beach on holiday as a boy; a sexual entanglement with a girl who worked at the local riding school. Dysart discovers that the boy lives in a secret world developed his own private religion and worships a god called Equus. He goes out secretly and holds rituals riding the horse and flagellating himself at night and having an orgasmic frenzy. The primitive psychic energy of this invented god fascinates the psychologist – the figment of a disturbed adolescent imagination.

Dysart's relationship with his wife has died, he has no belief in anything and this god comes to represent the vitality he lacks. Shaffer called this a study in “professional menopause.” Some regard this as an important play, others see the psychology as popular but it is a powerful experience when acted on stage. The film version failed because they used real horses but on stage they were played by actors in brown costumes, wire masks and standing on a couple of hooves which made it unreal and lessened the brutality.

The presence of these unreal horses by mime on stage gives. For example, there is a scene on stage where the girl is grooming them by mime. However, the intellectual content is more objectionable and corruptive than the theatrical content.

Alan Bennett’s(1934) Forty Years On(1968) is set in an English Public School, symbolically named Albion House. Bennett counterpoints the reminiscences of a retiring headmaster with an end of term play which his successor is putting on. It is a play that offers a view of 1960s England which is at odds with the old-fashioned values of the retiring headmaster. The final two speeches make explicit the allegory of a nation that has lost a world-wide Empire is looking for a role for itself. Guess where? in Europe! This was in 1968 when we joined the Common Market. These last two speeches give a funny and satiric but also sad and nostalgic flavour of a society going through change. The headmaster’s speech:

“Once we had a romantic and old-fashioned conception of honour, patriotism, chivalry and duty. But it was a duty which didn’t have much to do with justice, with social justice anyway, and in default of that justice, and in pursuit of it, that was how the great words came to be cancelled out. The crowd has found the door into the secret garden, now they will tear up the flowers by the roots, strip the borders and strew them with paper and broken bottles.”

The schoolboy at the lectern is reading the final bit of the school play:

“To Let. A valuable site at the crossroads of the world. At present on offer to European clients, outlying portions of the estate already disposed of to sitting tenants. Of some historical and period interest. Some alterations and improvements necessary.

Peter Nicholls(1927) took a critical look at the state of the country by the routine in another British institution - a ward in a National Health hospital. The National Health(1969) is a fantasy-Farce.

Among the cross section of contemporary society were Foster, whose standard of living has been greatly improved by the Welfare State, a man who looks back over the preceding 20 years with great gratitude; against one Mackie, a former colonial administrator who speaks for the class that is in retreat before what he calls the armies of democracy: “A nation doesn’t grow great on material greed without a sense of duty, Churchill knew this and he got the best from us, inspired us with purpose. National service turned boys into men. The world’s finest youth club, but now the Chatterley set are destroying our moral fibre with liberalism, fornication, pederasty, drug-taking condoned by the church, remember the fall of the Roman Empire.”

The trick is to present him as objectionable because of his political views,yet, because he is dying of stomach cancer, arouse sympathy for him as a man. Another irony is this black comedy with tragic overtones deals conditions in an under-funded national health hospital contrasted comically with a hospital soap, like the popular Emergency Ward Ten of the time, being shown on the wards.

Tom Stoppard(1937) wrote serious entertainments. Rozencratz and Gilderstern are Dead(1966), showed his affinities with Samuel Beckett and the Absurdists. The play develops these two minor figures from Hamlet - “little men, unheroic, little men astray”. They are backstage, in the wings and are never sure what Hamlet is about. Occasionally, they are bundled onto the stage and take part in a little scene only to be bundled back behind the curtain, uncomprehending, puzzled about what is happening. It is a striking image of dislocated man: off-stage, minor characters in a play they can not understand.

In two of his later most brilliant plays Jumpers and Travesties from the 70s, he succeeds in his aim of contriving what he once described as: “The perfect marriage between the play of ideas and Farce and, or even high-comedy. While presenting dazzling displays of verbal wit and spectacle, he demonstrates by theatrical means, the difficulty of arriving at value judgements in a world where absolutes no longer have universal or even widespread support; where moral, social, religious,political even aesthetic points of view are subject to the laws of relativity.

Jumpers centres on the plight of a professor of moral philosophy who is trying to uphold the existence of God in an atheistic university and society. His wife is a former singer who has lost the will to sing romantic songs about the Moon, since men walked on it and destroyed its mystery. The story is a simple whodunnit and the murder of one of the professor's colleagues takes place against a literal background of the moon as there is an enormous TV screen at the back of the set transmitting newsreel footage of the first British expedition to the moon and a general election; or was it a coup d' tat that has just carried the neo-Fascist, radical liberal, Jumper party to power. The British have got to the moon but one of the rockets motors failed and there is only power to bring one of them back. The astronauts are named Scott and Oats after Britain's failed South Pole explorers.

Agitprop and Dramatised Ideology

There are overtly Socialist writers and here we move from well-written nihilism and negativity to cultural warfare, violence and advocacy of revolution.

What is known as Cultural Maexism replaced liberalism in the 1960s after a series of demonstrations and sit-ins in Western universities, notably Berkely and the LSE; and the streets of France. It began by calling itself New Liberalism but replaced the Liberal idea of individual rights with that of “group rights” which means ethnic minorities arfe victims and have claims upon Whites who are portrayed as “oppressors”. It also uses identity politics which is inverse Nazism. There is the action and behaviour of New Liberals shows little concept of political democracy or individual freedom under the rule of law. The democratic political system was viewed as an enemy to be captured, manipulated and subdued until it gives way to a spoils system whereby power is distributed between interest groups favoured by race, sex and gender.

John Arden(1930) emerged in the late 50s and moved from a balanced, pacifist and intellectual position to a Marxist one. He was involved with Marxist politics in the UK and Ireland. In 1961 he was a founder member of the anti-nuclear and he also chaired the pacifist weekly, Peace News. In Ireland, he was for a while a member of Sinn Féin. He is also a well-known supporter of civil liberties and is critical of government anti-terror legislation which he dramatised in his radio play The Scam (2007).

The Waters of Babylon(1957), and The Workhouse Donkey(1963) concern corruption in local politics and the interference of local bureaucrats in deviant groups like nomadic Gypsy's in Live Like Pigs(1958) and the morality of empire and war in Sergeant Musgrave's Dance(1959).

Arden became disillusioned with parliamentary democracy under the pragmatic Socialism of Prime Minister Harold Wilson and like the younger writers he was disillusioned with established theatres seen as promoting bourgoise cultural values. He had many acrimonious disputes with the managements in the late 60s and early 70s. He and his Irish wife were proponents of Agitprop. He wrote a three-part play The non-stop Comedy for the Liberty Hall in Dublin which was the HQ of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in 1975.

He favoured techniques derived from Medieval Morality Plays and Brechtian Epic Theatre as well as popular entertainments like music, songs, stand-up comic, rather than methods of Naturalism and Social Realism used in Kitchen Sink drama. He developed these techniques to the fullest in The Non Stop Connolly Show to present an account of Irish Revolutionary James Connelly, who was shot by the British after the failed Easter Uprising of 1916. The Play is in six-parts and was performed non-stop over the Easter weekend of 1975. The audience could come and go. It is presented in the form of a review interspersing dramatised events from history with songs and popular spectacle. For example, there is an election staged as a tag-wrestling match.

They frequently re-worked classic plays from our cannon to undermine our cultural traditions and were redolent of brutality and violence.

Edmund Bond(1934) is Marxist celebrated for Saved(1964) which caused the public debate on censorship that led to the office of The Lord Chamberlaine, being abolished. Under The Theatres Act 1843 scripts had to be submitted for approval by the Lord Chamberlains's Office. The Lord Chamberlain sought to censor Saved but Bond refused to alter it, saying removing the pivotal stoning scene would alter the meaning of the play. He was backed by the play's director William Gaskill and the Royal Court. They used a legal loophole which allowed plays that had been banned to be performed under 'club' by forming a theatre club. However, the English Stage Society were still prosecuted, found guilty and given a Conditional Discharge.

It is a characteristically violent play in which a gang of working-class youths abuse and stone a baby in a pram to death in a frenzied crescendo of violence. It apparently, explored the lives of South London working class youths suppressed according to Bond, by a brutal economic system and unable to give their lives meaning, who drift into barbarous violence. One character, Len, tries to maintain links between people violently tearing each other to pieces. The play shows the Marxist view of the social causes of violence and opposes them with individual freedom. This was Bond's major theme.

Bond and the Royal Court in 1967 produced a new play, the surreal Early Morning which portrayed Queen Victoria in a lesbian relationship with Florence Nightingale, the royal Princes as Siamese Twins, Disraeli and Prince Albert plotting a coup and the whole dramatis personae damned to a cannibalistic Heaven after falling off Beachy Head. The Royal Court produced the play despite the imposition of a total ban and within a year the law was finally repealed. In 1969, the Royal Court it put on and toured the three plays in Europe. They had international success with more than thirty different productions around the world between 1966 and 1969.

Bond's work has three distinct phases. He dramatised violence and eradicating its causes by re-shaping society. His earliest plays like The Pope's Wedding(1962), Saved, The Narrow Road to The Deep North(1968) and Lear(1971)have characters who gradually become aware of a need for an alternative to the way their societies are structured. They react to the awareness differently. Some react positively, some negatively.

Lear, is a re-working of Shakespeare's through Marx's explanation of the historical process. It has the customary excessive violence which is horrific torture of Lear who is left blind after his eyeballs are extracted by a machine (Bond was a a materialist), to make a symbolic gesture of starting to take the great wall that he had built as king between his people and their neighbours which dominated the play. His sufferings by the middle act of he play lead him to an awareness of man as a trapped and degraded creature imprisoned in the reality formed by the ideology and institutions of the society over which he was once king:

“Who shut that animal in that cage? Let it out. Have you seen its face behind the bars? There's a poor animal with blood on its head and tears running down its face. Who did that to it?” Is it a bird or a horse? Its lying in the dust and its wings are broken. Who broke its wings? Who cut off its hands so that it can't shake the bars? Its pressing its snout in the glass. Who shut that animal in a glass cage? Oh, God! There's no pity in this world.”

He is unable to face his insights into what society has done to human nature; reducing it to the subhuman: “I can't live with that suffering in the world.”

But he does live, unlike Kiero of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, who committed suicide when he reached that level of insight.” Lear lives on and learns to believe in the possibility of changing the world. He is eventually shot when he tries to put his new knowledge into practice and starts dismantling the wall that symbolises the barriers that he was once responsible for. That is the first group of plays with people reaching consciousness and either giving up in despair or trying to do something.

The second group of plays, Bingo(1973), The Fool(1974), and The Woman,(1977) he took the lives of William Shakespeare in Bingo, John Clare in The Fool and the classical story of the Trojan War in The Woman. These very different periods and stories he uses as the focus for his view of the way we are deformed and limited by the ideology enshrined in our culture . He uses different periods of history to explicate different stages of development. He saw his task as re-assessing and adjusting the conceptions that modern man has of the past.

The third phase began with The Bundle(1978). He claimed that he tried to develop from plays burdened with problems to those that dramatise the strength of people to find answers. The answers his characters find are hard decisions and to be ruthless in trying to change the world. Like The Bundle which is a Brechtian Parable play. A guerilla leader called Wong throws an abandoned infant into a river because his conventionally good deed of caring for the child would prevent him bring about a successful revolution against the corrupt order of society that causes babies to be abandoned by their parents.

Bond developed again in the 80s and wrote a trilogy of war plays: Red, Black and Ignorant(1983); The Tin Can People(1984) and Great Place(1985). He depicts a grim world after a nuclear war. He imagines the moral challenges to humanity of the survivors and the repressive regime that might have to be inaugurated to husband scarce resources. He takes us into the future. He has an extraordinary range from working-class dialogue in Saved, Restoration, a grim but witty, parody of Restoration Comedies. The first part is in the style of Restoration Comedy, but the second is in The Industrial Revolution and this is cast as a parody of 19c Melodrama.

1968 brings the rise of The New Left who replaced Liberalism. There were race riots in the States, the French Government was nearly brought down by student riots and Russian tanks suppressed the Prague rising. The war in Vietnam had a major impact because it was seen as not in the American national interest but a Capitalist invasion. These events helped to form the outlook of a new generation of young dramatists.

I only have space for three: Howard Brenton, David Edgar and David Hare.

Howard Brenton(1942) began his career with fringe theatre groups The Brighton Combination and and Portable Theatre. Like others by the mid 1970s Brenton was disillusioned with the once radical fringe theatre which had become arty and run by intellectuals. He said he abandoned The Fringe when he heard people discussing what aesthetic methods they had used.

He wrote the first play to be staged at the National Theatre. He claimed that there was a tension which could not be reconciled between a radical dramatist and the bourgoise institution of the large theatre. He implied that the transfer of his work from the Fringe to to established theatre was an act of infiltration by which means the Marxist writer could subvert citadels of the class system from within. 

On the challenge offered by his play for the NT:” I know I am in an exposed position but someone's got to go in first and start doing something. If its the national its got to be about England today and that means new writing.”

Brenton saw England as founded on violence: “ There is nothing to choose morally between the mass-murderer and the policeman who arrests him.”

In the early Portable Theatre play Christie in Love(1969) based on the story of John Christie, the serial killer, "and the roles society forces on people." In Revenge(1969) the sinister master criminal, Hepple, is pursued by the equally sadistic policeman MacLeish. A model is Jacobean Revenge plays.

Magnificence(1973) the central character, Jed, is a terrorist and closes the play with a futile gesture of despair and blows up himself and the cabinet minister he is holding hostage.

Characters like Jed are modelled the Malcontent characters from Jacobean Revenge plays. He vents his anger about the world: “Bomb em, again and again and again, right through their silver screen. Disrupt the spectacle, the obscene parade. Bring it to a halt. Scatter the dolly girls, let advertisements bleed. Bomb em, again and again. Murderous display, an entertainment for the oppressed...”

As with Jacobean drama we are not sure what to make such a character- feel disgusted or sympathetic. Brenton's plays are a series of metaphoric bombs hurled at his audience- attempts to disrupt the spectacle of life, to make them face the uncomfortable truths about the corrupt and repressive system that underlies their comfortable lives.

Romans in Britain(1980) was prosecuted by Mary Whitehouse. Sitting through this state-financed attack on us was described as like someone spitting in your face! This was the aim of these Bourgoise-Marxists – Epater les bourgoise- to spit in the face of the bourgoise. These writers had no moral base as most of them had been to British public schools and had plummy middle-class accents and they were financed by taxpayers money..

Once again we have great technique as a vehicle for a vicious attack on our culture and history. Brenton juxtaposes scenes from 54BC when Julius Ceasar raided Britain as a prelude to the later Imperial conquest; then scenes from when the Romans left leaving the British-Romano aristocracies way of life crumbling before the invading Saxons. He then uses scenes from Ulster in 1980, where a British secret serviceman is caught and executed by members of the IRA.

The juxtaposes are supposed to raise important questions about the nature of Imperialism and what it does to both the oppressed and the oppressors.

As they moved from Fringe to established theatres, to drawing up what David Hare called in one of his plays “Maps of the World,” many of the Marxist writers abandoned single-issue plays, the staple of Agitprop, like David Edgar's Wreckers(1977), which is about the effects of a particular Industrial Relations Act in 1971.

David Edgar's(1948) Maydays(1983) spans 1956 to 1973 and surveys the historical developments that have produced the social and political aspects of contemporary Britain.

Howard Brenton and David Hare's Brassneck, begins in 1945 and ends in 1973, and Hare's Plenty moves from 1943 to the 1960s; from a prologue after the War to an epilogue in Mrs. Thatcher's Britain of the 1980s. These Marxist dramatists tried to create an alternative history of contemporary Britain.

David Hare(1947) is one of Britain's most internationally performed playwrights. He was long associated with The National Theatre, which produced eleven of his plays successively between 1978 and 1997. A trilogy about the church, the law and the Labour Party - Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War - was presented in repertory at the Olivier Theatre in 1993. Nine of his best-known plays, including Plenty, The Secret Rapture, Skylight, The Blue Room, Amy's View, The Judas Kiss and Via Dolorosa have been staged on Broadway.

But if you do not conform you are exiled. Ian Curteis submitted a play about The Falklands War to the BBC, which was sympathetic to Margaret Thatcher. It was rejected. If he had attacked Mrs. Thatcher as a warmonger or an Imperialist it would have been accepted.

These people with the BBC and The Arts Council became the new Establishment and promoted The Culture War from within. If a young playwright wrote about the destructive psychological effects which abortion can have on women Mr Stephenson would reject it. (1)

Its interesting to look over this because they are now the Establishment and oppressing those with a dissident voice. The rehabilitation of Sir Terrence Rattigan brings a a cool breeze sweetening the stables once again, as the dark clouds of Nihilism and Ideological drama recede. Rattigan's plays are once more being staged. (2)

The nihilists and the ideologues are passing into history while contemporary playwrights merely write Politically Correct platitudes leaving a vacuum crying to be filled by a contemporary explanation of our world expressed by new Traditionalist or Conservative playwrights. As they would be refused money by the Arts Council and refused a stage by the theatres they would need places to develop plays, practice and perform.

There are lots of pubs in Britain that need custom since the smoking ban ruined the business for so many and Conservative writers and actors could book rooms above these pubs to develop a drama for our time. The task of these phalanx's would be to re-link to certain traditions and convey a message of our history and continuity.

(1)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/mediatechnologyandteleco...

(2)

http://www.westendextra.com/news/2011/jan/campaign-honour-sir-terence-ra...

A Vindication of Natural Society

A Vindication of Natural Society

By David Hamilton

First published at the New English Review

We are not merely natural but we are natural in the sense that our lives are held together by emotional relationships rather than ideologies and the numinous things in life like art and religion and a need for countryside as well as beautiful landscapes. We are natural in the sense that we form emotional relationships, families and communities and need our countryside as solace or relief. A varied and open countryside is beneficial to the physical and mental health of the population. We have a duty to pass on the environment we have inherited to our children, as they, in turn, will have a duty to pass it on to their children.

The essence of Conservatism and Conservation is to conserve which derives from the Latin conservo, conservare, conservavi, conservatum. They are closely related and from the same root. The English Conserve derives from that and this opens up the idea that to a Conservative Conserving the environment should be part of the practice not the Liberal pursuit of continuous economic growth.

There is a growing sense of unease, a sense of dread that we have taken the wrong direction, that things are not eternally progressing but coming apart. To the popular prejudice conservatism stands for one-sided market forces, aggressive commerce and self-interested individualism. But conservatism as an outlook has a deeper more varied lineage. Conservatives like Edmund Burke and David Hume believed in a market economy but restrained by a network of civic associations and local institutions - the “little platoons” as Burke described them. The “little platoons" are voluntary groups who take the initiative and act in the interests of the community rather than let the socialist state take people's responsibilities of them. They hold society together and make it meaningful.

There are many aspects to conserving our environment and I have written in New English Review previously about the loss of our social environments by demolishing traditional buildings and ruining local ambience by new buildings that jar with their surroundings, but we are also responsible for our natural environment and the animals and flora that inhabit it.

This is not an abstract discussion in a university common room but a practical need to conserve what we have inherited. On my travels I constantly find scenes of beauty and history. This view of the pack horse bridge in Bakewell shows a beautiful bridge which has waterfowl around it. It was built in about 1300 and has five Gothic arches and triangular corner stones over the buttresses. We have responsibility to see it is passed on to our children to enjoy. Little platoons of fisherman help conserve the waterways to facilitate the practice of their sport.

 

The problem is human nature.

The problem is human nature; or, those aspects known as selfishness and self-interest. There is a need for politicians to be independent or not wedded to particular industries because when, as now, government and corporations become too close we have many abuses. A famous example which caused much increase in pollution was the scrapping of large parts of the British Railway network by Dr. Beeching and his associate Ernest Marples who inaugurated the motorway system. (1)

Dr. Beeching (later Lord) was appointed by the Minister of Transport, Ernest Marples, as Chairman of British Railways Board in May 1961. The Beeching report, “Re-shaping of BR,”was published in March 1963 and recommended the closure of many rail lines throughout the country.

With the idea of progress life was sped up by rapid technological expansion. Economists, technocrats and scientists put their faith in science and technology and tried to create an artificial way of life as efficacious as nature. But artificial in such as processed foods, with harmful chemicals and poisons like hydrogenated fats. There are big increases in diseases such as diabetes and heart disease caused by the unhealthy amounts of sugar and fats the food manufacturers use. The industry is bent on short-term profits, not the long-term impact on flora and fauna-the natural environment.

The hydrogenated fat or hydrogenated vegetable oil in processed foods contain trans fats which are as harmful to the heart as is saturated fat. In the manufacture liquid oils have hydrogen bubbled through them in a process called hydrogenation to improve their texture, flavour and longevity. This produces a more solid fat, hydrogenated fat or hydrogenated vegetable oil, which is used in many processed foods.

The blind faith placed in DDT illustrates why we should scrutinise the claims of companies when they advertise efficacious wonders for their products. It was yet another utopian panacea for all pesticide problems. (2) There are countless examples of tragedies caused by the wishful thinking of scientists. The fish in the seas are developing the sex organs of the opposite sex yet “the pill” was also claimed to be a triumph over an imperfect nature in the minds of utopian scientists. The great scene of realisation is Robert Oppenheimer watching in horror the detonation of the atom bomb he had had so much to do with bringing into being and exclaiming: “I am become death.” (3)

The latest in a long line of wonder drugs, “statins”, is so invested with irrational optimism that many medical practitioners have enthusiastically called for them to be prescribed to everyone regardless of health problems. They suppress the body's production of cholestrol and are expected to save us all from heart problems and strokes. In practice they are causing memory loss and forgetfulness. Statins may well help people at serious risk of heart attacks and strokes but the irrational enthusiasm with which they are prescribed is worrying - medical people will not listen to their patients who complain of severe side-effects such as muscle weakness, memory loss and bouts of confusion. They imagine that we are on the way to another little utopia – a world without heart problems!

But what is reality? Thalidomide has been forgotten but we still see the victims trying to function the best they can.

Convenience is found in the cities where we become dependant on cash points, all-night supermarkets and 24-hour pubs and bars which inculcates dependence and reduces self-discipline; while in the country people plan ahead as they need to stock up with food. Country people are comparatively more in tune with the times of day and the seasons and do not have to resort to Hesiod's Works and Days and Virgil's Georgics to return to natures' rhythms.

As I write the British Coalition Government, led by “Conservatives”, wants to “loosen” planning controls, for the Green Belt. This cancels the great idea of the 1948 Town and Planning Act of setting up Green Belt areas and is a very anti-Conservative move. It is to make it cheaper and easier for the Conservative Party's supporters like wealthy developers to build where they like. The Green Belt has restricted urban sprawl and conserved some beautiful countryside that all can visit. There are several similarly destructive schemes planned and I hope that The Countryside Alliance and The Campaign to Protect Rural England fight to conserve our environment against unnecessary destruction.(4)

There are some 600,000 empty properties and many brown field sites in urban areas that should be developed first, but the Coalition Government aims to let developers destroy our meadows, ancient woodlands and downlands, which, once concreted over, are gone forever. Green Belts are cheaper to build on than brown field sites, but what short sightedness! We have a duty to conserve the environment for future generations. This is an era in Western nations where little people have got to the top, minor figures, who put their short term interests above the long term national interest. Local planning authorities must be encouraged to, after being given the power to, require developments on already developed land before destroying Green Belt land in the communities' interests.

They need to think through the environmental, social and economic implications of each development and ensure the conservation of the environment and a better quality of life rather than constantly plumping for economic growth regardless of the practical consequences. Millions of people visit the countryside for outdoor activities - climbing, rambling canoeing. There are many activity centres which offer young people a healthy life instead of clubbing and drugs.

The development of GM foods is carried out through the parameters of the progressive mindset of unlimited progress to a utopia. The utopia is variously, a perfect food, a means of feeding the world or crops that do not need pesticides. They lack a practical grasp of reality and are too optimistic and only too late will they realise the awful consequences of their actions.

They get a glimpse of the blueprint of nature -- the genetic code – but do they understand it? It is a fine and delicate part of nature scientists are attempting to manipulate but do not understand the ramifications. It has always operated within the whole and developed system of nature but tinkering with it could cause irreversible damage. We are part of nature and not standing outside looking on. (5)

There are groups voluntarily forming their own “little platoons” in the face of local bureaucrats, who do not think of themselves as Conservative or Traditionalists, but who value the environment and a more natural life. They are setting examples for others.

Ashley Vale, in St.Werburghs, Bristol, is a community of 26 eco-houses that were designed and built by local residents in reaction to a developer attempting to take over a brownfield site in the St Werburgh's district of Bristol. They are built of wood instead brick, because it is recyclable. They have timer frames and most use Fermacell boards, which are made with gypsum and cellulose from recycled paper, instead of plaster board. The cavity walls are filled with Warmcel which is made from newspaper. Many of the double-glazed windows came from Rationel, a Dutch firm that uses only sustainable timber.

 

The eco houses have bedrooms on the ground floor with the living rooms above to benefit from the rising warm air from the sitting and kitchen areas which also keeps the bedrooms cool. There are “Upside down houses” in Salford which have the bedrooms on the ground floor with the living rooms upstairs. This scheme was designed not to conserve heat, but to utilise the existing buildings in a contemporary way and with contemporary standards whereas most Ashley Grove houses have underfloor heating and only one does not have solar panels. They are well insulated and given enough sun - a problem in England - residents can sell solar electricity to the National Grid.

The houses are built around a community green and recycling centre. The building design was considerate and the south side of the rooves have short solar panels which do not block the neighbours' light; the north sides are long and without windows to allow privacy for the neighbour on the other side.

The project started in 2000 in reaction to a developer's plan to build a housing estate on a former scaffolding yard. A group formed the Ashley Vale Action Group and proposed a vision of their own and won a case to build a sustainable, community on the yard and bought the land. They formed a co-operative and met thrice-weekly for over a year to design the houses. Each designed their own homes and most had little or no building experience. The problem of human nature was channelled into good ends because although they wanted to live in large houses they made them recyclable and generate much of their own electricity by the solar panels.

Some of the houses are attractively coloured but others have faded timber; the houses are individually conceived and built and look a picture of chaos; but this was a step in the right direction and the idea can be developed. Future eco- houses should be built with something like traditional Tudor wood facades-in white with black beams.

Nearby, is St.Werburgs City Farm which opened in 1980 when a group of local residents got the support of Bristol City Council and established it. The community idea was to involve local people in the running of a working livestock farm and they sell the produce and offer recreational and educational activities. The Farm has constantly grown ever since with more land being leased, buildings built and new services added.

In 1987 they leased land from British Rail to use it for public use and preserve it from developers. They created an eight acre site called “Narroways” with a community garden. In 1996 they formed the Narroways Action Group to involve local people in its management and to use it as a nature reserve. British Rail had planned to sell the land but they raised funds to conserve it for the use of the community. With the backing of hundreds of local people and a grant of £30,000 to re-fence the site, Bristol City Council were convinced to buy the land.

The Action Group became a registered charity – the Narroways Millennium Green Trust – and has a 999 year lease. Their registered office is at the Farm and the Farm has a sub-lease from the NMGT for 999 years at a peppercorn rent for the Community Garden. These developments attract wildlife such as pipistrelle bats, grass snakes, badgers, buzzards, sparrow hawks, kestrels, green woodpeckers, dark bush crickets for example.

There is a city farm in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, likewise started in 1980 with a few chickens so inner city families could see animals they would otherwise not see. It encourages youngsters to value the natural environment. It has sheep, goats, rabbits, ducks, geese, turkeys and cats. (6)

In The Spectator of December 17th 2005 philosopher Roger Scruton urged rural residents to save their countryside by clubbing together and buying it. Rural communities should “take power into their own hands” as they had shown that the Hunting Act cannot be enforced we must now rescue our countryside from outsiders who are favoured by the Government. Neighbours (we) should club together to buy small parcels of land from desperate farmers then rent it back at a peppercorn rent.”

Animals – A benevolent dominion

In the prosodic English of the great King James Bible Genesis tells us: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth."

Animals are part of our environments and our pets are part of the family. They perform valuable services: dogs warn of trespassers and cats keep rats and mice from our homes, young children love caring for and riding ponies and they in turn depend upon us for care and food. This is a reciprocal relationship and suggests that our dominion over them must be a benevolent one.

One constantly sees posters stuck on lamp posts, bus stops and placed in shop windows for pets that have gone missing and many of these are taken. Children and elderly people in particular become very attached to their pets and form emotional bonds with them. They become part of the family and need stronger protection in law; not because of some abstract rights but because of an emotional connection - an emotional bonding between animals and their owners.

There are television programmes about, say, a veterinary practice, where maltreated animals are brought in for treatment and countless photographs of mistreated animals are posted on social networking sites. People become genuinely upset but feel helpless. The law needs strengthening and much more severe sentences given for cruelty to animals to to give a more accurate reflection of our relationship with them.

This dog was tied to the back of a car and dragged along the road. I don't know its circumstances but if he belonged to someone they would have been devastated.

Plastic bags and bottles, like diamonds, are forever

The number of single-use carrier bags issued in 2010 rose by 333 million – a 5 per cent increase from the previous year. The bags which are often used for only 20 minutes on average, to carry the shopping home, take up to 1,000 years to degrade.

As well as causing serious harm to marine animals and birds, they blight the coastline, with 70 bags littering every mile. There is a similar problem with the plastic bottles drinks are sold in.

It is appalling the way irresponsible supermarkets hand these bags out. Like black bin bags they can be seen everywhere - clogging up streams and brooks, stuck in the branches of trees and in fields threatening to choke farm animals. The only answer is to ban the manufacture of these bags outright.

In the meantime we should give schoolchildren or unemployed people some purpose in life and help them value their environments by forming little platoons, to go out in supervised groups clearing the environment of these invidious items and disposing of them safely. They cause serious harm to marine animals and birds and desecrate our coastline – it is estimated that 70 plastic bags litter every mile. I refused a plastic bag and the shop assistant gave me a paper bag but warned that the bottoms are not very strong. I'm sure the manufactures could correct that minor fault.

There has been a Keep Britain Tidy campaign since 1955 but this treats the average person as responsible when those responsible are the inventors, makers and distributors of the plastic bags. With so many plastic bags being handed out even the most responsible people must lose some now and again and they go into the environment.

There are many people who do not litter, waste water, drive big cars, or shop compulsively; but some are given to being wasteful because they are self-centred, sociopathic or bitter against the world.

 

It is retailers who must take responsibility for their actions. There is environmental damage and expense caused by the billions of plastic bags given away by supermarkets. This is a problem they have created because before supermarkets took over shoppers used to take their own bags to the shop with them and carry their shopping home in them putting the bag away until the next shop.

There is hardly anywhere in British seas where marine wildlife is safe. There is a need to create marine protected areas where wildlife can recover and flourish. The amount of litter on beaches has doubled in a decade. Little platoons of volunteers could work to clear our seas of the strangling rubbish that is dangerous to sea life and sea birds.

The EU has exacerbated some problems and about 88% of Europe’s fish stocks are overfished or depleted. The sea’s rich wildlife can be restored, fish stocks be made more plentiful, our beaches and seawater made cleaner but it would require government action which needs prompting by protests. It is appalling that many of our beaches are hazards to peoples' health because they have human sewage floating around them. (7)

There is a difference between a Traditional way of thinking and a Progressive way of thinking. Progressivism encompasses Liberalism through to Marxism - the “isms” that grew out of the French Enlightenment. Progressives erect a set of idealisations – what we are becoming, what we should think and how we should behave, but human nature is fixed and how we act it out or think is given form by our cultures and communities. We are part of it and it is what makes us social beings.

We are not evolving to a pre-ordained end, but a wholesome culture improves people and thus the community. The decline in oil reserves or a worsening of the economic slump which Progressives view as merely a potential hiccup in ineluctable progress calls fore a serious re-think and the solution will be the Conservative approach to community and nature that I am outlining.

Progressives try to dismiss the conservative or traditionalists as relics from the past as if we have just awoken from a slumber that began in the 17th Century and are trying to change things back to what we left. The Traditional Britain Group has many well-educated young people amongst its members and they are not trying to bring the past back but conserve what is best.

The idea of Conservatism should be the conservation of what is natural in our culture, heritage, and natural environment. Conservatives must defend the environment we inherit and recognise our responsibility to our descendants. We respect the culture and our natural environment passed on to us and have a responsibility to hand what we inherit to our descendants in a decent state.

Notes:
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_Axe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Marples
http://mikesowden.org/feveredmutterings/doctor-beeching
(2) http://greenliving.about.com/od/healthyliving/a/DDT.htm
(3)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7gGxeQe8BM
(4) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_belt
The Daily Telegraph is campaigning to save the GreenBelts
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/hands-off-our-land/8752127/Hands-Off-Our-Land-latest.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2083825/HS2-David-Cameron-faces-high-speed-rail-rebellion-ahead-500m-tunnel.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-16606212
(5) http://www.care2.com/greenliving/germany-decides-genetically-modified-foods-are-not-welcome.html

(6) http://hackneycityfarm.co.uk/
http://www.justfood.org/farmer-outreach/grow-nyc/city-farms-markets
http://communitygarden.org.au/
There is a European Federation of City Farms (EFCF)
http://www.cityfarms.org/
Further reading
Rachel Carson. 1951 The Sea Around Us.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson
Professor Ezra Mishan was an early proponent of a Conservative economics as opposed to constant economic growth.
Ezra Mishan. The Costs of Economic Growth, Staples Press, 1967.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Costs-Economic-Growth-J-Mishan/dp/028661619X
Economic Myths and the Mythology of Economics, Prentice Hall / Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1986.http://www.amazon.com/Economic-Myths-Mythology-Economics-Mishan/dp/0745000657
Thirteen Persistent Economic Fallacies, Praeger, 2009.http://www.amazon.com/Thirteen-Persistent-Economic-Fallacies-Mishan/dp/0313366055