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Ode to a Venetian sojourn

A version of this article appeared in Gafencu magazine

In 1963, aged 15, my dad was taken to Venice on a school holiday. It was the first time he had been abroad. For a boy who had grown up in Ayrshire, Scotland – then a place of cows, coal and Calvinism – it was a kind of spiritual awakening: into a world of art and architecture, sunlight and marble, operetta and open-hearted Southern European sorts.

The Venice of today is substantially the same as that of half a century ago – just as the city my dad experienced would have been entirely recognisable to, say, Giacomo Casanova, its most representative 18th Century citizen. Okay, sure, there are probably more American tour groups nowadays, muting the colour scheme with their pastels; and, of course, the African chaps selling you fake Gucci stuff are relatively new. And there aren’t prostitutes everywhere, like in old Gio’s time (I forgot to ask my dad about the ragazze in ’63). But generally speaking (and as you might expect of a World Heritage site), this most visited of cities has been preserved, the patina of its history deferred to and respected. The prospect that blindsides the pilgrim, arriving vaporetto-borne on the Grand Canal – of the Byzantine Basilica di San Marco and Palazzo Ducale, around which cluster several others of the most magnificent Medieval and Renaissance buildings on the planet – is the very same prospect that has been doing so for centuries.

For all that Venice may seem immutable to the outsider, though, immutability is not the story for the 21st Century. See, Venice is in need of saving – for some decades, people who know about these things have been warning that it is done for. The acqua alta (seasonal high tides that account for the huge puddles of seawater often to be found lolling about in St Mark’s Square like fallen Italian footballers hoping for a penalty) has been a feature of Venetian life since time immemorial, but a combination of rising sea levels and the fact that much of the city is slowly sinking into the mud on which it is built, has seen flooding become increasingly frequent and severe. Due to rising waters, the lower floors in some buildings are already uninhabitable; at the crypt of San Zaccaria, where some of the earliest doges (the city’s rulers when it was a republic) are buried, the tombs almost seem to float; belltowers lean; and everywhere the salt water that has got into brickwork is causing it to decay.

A controversial and costly project involving a series of mobile gates that will be able to temporarily isolate the Venetian Lagoon from the Adriatic Sea during high tides may partly save the day and is nearing completion (or at least they’ve reached that stage of things in Italy where the mayor has had to resign after being arrested on charges of taking bribes from the construction company). But the city’s problems don’t end there. Even if Venice survives, Venetians may not: it now has only 70,000 permanent residents, as families have sold up and moved to more affordable places on the “mainland” where they can still find a plumber in the Yellow Pages. Venice ceased being any kind of commercial or political centre about 200 years ago. Now it welcomes some 20 million tourists every year – it has rightly been called an “urban theme park”; history is at its end-point.

What a history, though. Settled by refugees from Roman cities fleeing Attila the Hun, the early Venetians were traders who fished and made salt and worked out that if they drove enormous wooden piles far enough into the mudflats they could then slap a layer of marble on top of the crossbeams and build dry habitations on a lagoon. And so they built – a city-state that would become a hub for the silk, grain, spice and pigment trades, and a staging post for the Crusades. By the end of the 13th Century it was the most prosperous city in all of Europe and it would remain the region’s dominant maritime power into the 16th Century. Its unique system of democracy instilled civic pride and traders plundered the Mediterranean to burnish the imperial city’s might: trophies from east and west speckle Venice indoors and out, perhaps most famously in and around the Basilica di San Marco (the four bronze horses situated above the church’s main doorway, for example, came from Constantinople, while another party relieved the cathedral in Alexandria of the supposed remains of St Mark himself). Building, printing and the arts – painting, sculpture, opera – flourished, and even after the Turks weakened Venice in the late 15th Century, setting it on a path of slow decline, it remained a major cultural capital. In the 18th Century it became a required stop-off on any young European aristocrat’s Grand Tour. And, indeed, his bordello.

FOR A REAL taste of all that historical stuff – and if you’ve bought the idea that Venice might soon disappear and just can’t bear the thought of missing out – you might as well check yourself in at a palazzo. The Hotel Danieli, centred around the 14th Century Palazzo Dandolo on the Grand Canal, should serve the purpose. Rooms start at €750 (HK$7,568 – pollo alimentazione!) a night, but if you feel that’s just not flexing your finances enough, you can stay in the Doge Dandalo Royal Suite, for €12,000 a night.

Built by the Dandalo family, who in fact produced several doges, the original palazzo – around which are annexed a 19th Century palace and a marble-fronted addition put up after World War II – is truly, ornately, stunningly, brazenly beautiful. Its pink facade, marble sills, white turrets and balconies are as a gift box for what’s inside: stuccoes and frescoes from the 16th and 17th Centuries, antique portraits, furniture and Murano mirrors, wooden mosaic floors and Sansovino ceiling beams. The highlight, though, is the four-storeyed courtyard, with its scala d’oro (golden stairs) and its natural light beaming in through Venetian Gothic-style pointed arches.

In imperial times, emperors, kings, princes and ambassadors all lodged at the Dandalo; after it became a hotel, in the mid-19th Century, its guests included Goethe, Wagner, Dickens, Proust and Balzac. Make no mistake: few places in Venice afford a more authentic glimpse of the city of Vivaldi and Byron, Greta Garbo (she has a suite) and, um, James Bond (watch Casino Royal or Moonraker again). Or of the city of John Ruskin, the English art critic and thinker who panegyrized the Gothic in architecture and who stayed here with his wife Effie (and, it’s claimed, encouraged her to have an affair with an Austrian army officer as an excuse to leave her).

The management’s approach seems to involve a combination of conservation (a number of the suites were recently restored by Pierre Yves Rochon and the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice), and light-touch modernisation. The rooftop Restaurant Terrazza Danieli, which offers unparalleled views of the Adriatic, has a contemporary feel and offers a menu inspired by the city’s “historic role as a crossroad between East and West”, which I think means they use a bit of saffron.

A short stroll from the Danieli is the Palazzo Ducale, or Doge’s Palace, which with its intricately carved marble facade, lancet arches and Byzantine and Moorish influences represents the very apogee of Venetian architectural self-confidence. You could spend days on end here taking in its decorative brilliance and the paintings and frescoes that fill its rooms – but you probably won’t, because you’ll fall victim to sensory over-stimulation and end up jumping off the Rialto bridge and embarrassing yourself, or you’ll strain your neck admiring the gilt ceilings, or get thrown out for trying to pat one of the dogs in a Tiepolo canvas.

Worth taking is a tour of the Palazzo’s hidden passages, prison cells and torture chambers. You’ll see the cell Casanova (dandy, philosopher, cabalist, lawyer, clergyman, sexual adventurist, diplomat, inveterate gambler) broke out of on his way to fleeing charges of blasphemy, and get a glimpse of a grimmer Venice quite different to the idealised City of Light that seduces Henry James characters and Americans seized by an Oedipal yearning for a mythical civilised Europe.

Not that it’s all that hard to discover, this “other” Venice – a city of dark secrets, and spies, and the ghosts of medieval plagues. It’s the Venice you get in the Gothic horror of Nicholas Roeg’s 1973 movie Don’t Look Now (itself based on a Daphne du Maurier novella) and Thomas Mann’s funereal Death in Venice, which is all about disappointed idealism, excess and decay. And it’s there in the bocche di leone, the postboxes adorned with scowling lions – into whose mouths citizens were encouraged to dispatch anonymous denunciations of their neighbours – that can still be found dotted around (although Napoleon had most of them smashed to show that French law held sway); and in the crumbling, overgrown necropolis Boney had established on San Michele to keep the odours of death away from more populous islands; and the slightly fetid smell of the canals; and the eerie fog that seems to settle over them at nightfall.

There’s also the Jewish Ghetto, in the Cannaregio district, from which all other ghettoes derive: there was once a foundry here and the word comes from “gettare”, meaning “to cast in metal”. In the 16th Century, all Jews were ordered to live within the area’s boundaries – hardly the model of religious freedom, then, but in reality few states in Europe at the time tolerated Judaism at all.

Needless to say, elsewhere in the city the saints take centre, left and right stage. If you are so inclined, you might hump around Ruskin’s three-volume The Stones of Venice, with its detailed descriptions of over 80 churches, as a guide; alternatively, you could just walk in any direction, or jump on the vaporetto, and discover things for yourself.

Over on the island of Giudecca, Andrea Palladio’s splendid Chiesa del Santissimo Redentore boasts pictures by Tintoretto and Veronese – not a bad strike rate, although in Venice it must be rare to be more than spitting range from something by one of the “big three” (those two plus Titian), or at the very least a Bellini or a Canaletto. Meanwhile, down in Castello, you’ll come across San Lorenzo, the church where Marco Polo (fun fact: he has a type of sheep named after him in Afghanistan) was buried in 1324, only for his bones to get “lost” when they tore it down and rebuilt it in the 16th Century.

Maybe the dead explorer knew what he was about: “lost” is not a bad way to be in Venice. It’s not like you can wander into a bad neighbourhood, and you’ll always find your way eventually. Just don’t bet on finding the same restaurant twice. I did, incidentally, mean to tell you about What I Ate On My Holidays, but I’ve drifted off-course. All you really need to know is that it’s Italy so everything is brilliant; that you’ll get ripped off at some point, so be thankful when you’re not; and that even though Casanova claimed eating fish inflamed his eyes, the seafood is safe. May the Saints be with you.


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Disenfranchised

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post’s Post Magazine

At first I wasn’t all that bothered. When it was decreed back in 2012 that anyone living in Scotland would be allowed to vote in this month’s referendum on independence from the rest of Britain – and that Scots living outside of Scotland would not – the whole business seemed a tad unreal. On a pragmatic level, it gave me an excuse (being in the latter camp) not to have to muster an opinion whenever anyone in Hong Kong picked up on my accent. Don’t ask me, mate; my opinion doesn’t count.

It should count, though. I can’t think of any ballot in my voting lifespan where my vote made a fart of a difference to anything much. But this time it’s different. Not only does it look like being a close-run thing, there’s actually quite a lot at stake – like, you know, possibly disbanding a 307-year-old nation state. It feels a bit like the family are squabbling over whether to sell up the ancestral home, but in the meantime they’ve thrown out all your stuff and sent the dog to live in kennels. Or something.

Ex-pats can vote in normal elections in the UK for 15 years after they leave. Including the 800,000 Scots living in parts of the UK other than Scotland, however, in this instance some 1.15 million people have been wiped off the franchise.

The suspicion among many ex-pats is that the Scottish nationalists have engineered it this way because they think we’d all vote “no”. Well, maybe. But the reality is that Scots have always gone abroad, and will continue to do so even after independence. Many of them go back. Right now, they’re being made to feel a bit less welcome.


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England’s dreaming

This article can be found on Spiked 

It’s not just about counting the bawbees, then. However belatedly, some on the No side in the battle for Scotland have been waking up to the notion that there are votes to be won by making the emotional case for the United Kingdom’s survival. The Nationalists have accused David Cameron at various points of trying to ‘lovebomb’ Scots. But hey, why not?

In a sense, this is less to do with what being part of Britain has given Scotland – or arguing over how the Union prospers Scotland or does not – and somewhat more to do with recognising the contributions of Scotland and Scots to having shaped Britain. In his appeal, in the Telegraph, to a half-dormant sense of Britishness, Ian Duncan Smith last month wrote effusively of the Union as a family and a ‘kinship of free peoples’. The subtext, aimed at Scots and non-Scots alike, ran along the lines of a notion that had hitherto been expressed rather well by the journalist Alex Massie – that ‘Scotland is Britain… for without Scotland there’s a much, much lesser Britain.’

It’s apparent too, though, that for every lovebomber there are others in England who believe she would be better off in a ‘lesser’ Britain and well rid of the Scots, with their statist ways and tendency to inflict men like Gordon Brown on everyone.

Plainly, Gordon Brown himself sees matters somewhat differently and has blown once more into the public square with a weighty-ish new tome: My Scotland, Our Britain. ‘At the heart of [Brown’s] understanding of British values,’ writes the man from the Guardian who was brave enough to read it, ‘there lies an unexpectedly lovely fusion: that Scottish principles of solidarity, civil society and “the democratic intellect” have, through the union, entwined themselves with English values of liberty, tolerance and pragmatism.’

IDS’ list of things Scotland has given Britain, by contrast, includes the Bank of England – or at least William Paterson, its supposed founder. Paterson was a great advocate for the Union, although it must be noted he was also one of the originators of the disastrous Darien Scheme that brought Scotland to its knees, so it’s likely his own interests were at stake. There were, certainly, more notable Scottish architects – conservative and radical, Tory and Whig – of Britain’s nascent identity. Adam Smith elaborated the theoretical framework within which the new nation pioneered capitalism; James Mill’s History of British India had a profound influence on its imperial destiny; and actual architects such as Robert Adam and James Gibbs were responsible for many of the defining buildings of the age in both England and Scotland.

David Hume and James Mackintosh, meanwhile, laid the foundation for modern histories of England – of England, not of Britain, nor of the British Isles. And, well, here’s the thing: post-Union, England influenced Scotland’s sense of Scottishness in incalculable ways; but so too did Scots help to shape England’s sense of itself. Were it not for Scotland, one might suggest, there would be a ‘lesser’ England.

The key historical figure here is probably Sir Walter Scott. The most widely read novelist (in his own lifetime) perhaps of any age, Scott created and romanticised myths about Scotland’s pre-modern nationhood precisely in order to secure Scotland’s status as a full, rather than subordinate, partner in the United Kingdom. With Ivanhoe, however, he focused England’s attentions on its own medieval past, in the process stamping the myth of a country forged out of the conflict between proud Saxon yeoman and Norman oppressor indelibly on its consciousness.

And then, of course, there was Thomas Carlyle, the Scot who rhapsodised about England and Englishness probably more than any other writer before or since, and whose studies of the English character – “frank, simple, rugged and yet courteous” – still have a certain currency. His anti-intellectualism also remains something of an English tradition.

Carlyle’s somewhat Reactionary outlook later in life has not endeared him to the Scottish establishment of today. He also wrote, in a letter to Goethe, that “We English, especially we Scotch, love Burns”. Even Scott, who occasionally refers to Scotland as North Britain, would not have approved. But even so, though today’s go-it-alone Englishman might rejoice at a Yes vote in Scotland come September, he may never quite shake Scotland’s influence on his national culture.

This article can be found on Spiked 


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Hong Kong Rugby Sevens diary

These entries appeared in the South China Morning Post

SATURDAY

Is it ever OK to make light of tragedy? If it is, sometimes, then when? And if not, why not? And who decides?

Perhaps those in the audience at the Hong Kong Sevens attired as airline pilots – channeling, to adopt the fashion industry’s argot, the disappearance of Malaysia flight MH370 with 239 people on board – mulled the moral niceties long and hard before dressing yesterday.

Or perhaps they didn’t. Topicality is king in the domain of fancy dress; it’s like Twitter, only with costumes instead of keystrokes. No point getting done up like Colonel Gaddafi – that’s so 2011.

Funny or not, there’s a gory instant celebrity about pilot garb, as the amiable Kiwi gentlemen I spoke to recognised. They had, they said, ordered their outfits for this weekend’s tournament – for which they have flown to Hong Kong specifically to attend – some time ago. When news of the plane’s disappearance broke three weeks ago, they hesitated, but their qualms were easily mastered. Their next thought was to incorporate a black box recorder into the ensemble, “but it was doubtful that would get past security.”

One imagines the same impulse drives the popularity of the website Sickipedia, where currently a tab advises: “Click here for all the best missing Malaysia MH370 jokes.”

There is a theory that empathy in the wake of a tragic event diminishes the more geographically or culturally remote people feel from it; or, to put it more directly, “westerners” mourn less for disasters in places where there are fewer white people.

Not an easy thing to gauge, I don’t suppose, but on the other hand studies have confirmed that 9/11 jokes originated – in America – the day after the attacks, so it’d be wrong conflate dubious taste and discrimination. Either way, if avoiding the former is a priority, the Hong Kong Sevens may not be your thing.

******

It comes to our attention that the most read “Sevens story” on Friday was about an Australian chap who was, it seems, dispossessed of “almost HK$100,000 in foreign currency” after he met three African ladies in Wan Chai.

Police were keen to warn other tourists in town for the rugby that “butch African women” operating in the area are deliberately targeting drunken expatriates in pubs on Lockhart Road and Jaffe Road. The man in question apparently realised he was being robbed and tried to resist, whereupon he found himself deposited in a rubbish bin, his wallet considerably lighter.

Perhaps understandably the fellow did not come forward with more details of his misadventure and his identity remains a mystery. Instead, the reports stressed the intimidating scale of his assailants, who, we learn, were “powerfully built” and “stood about 1.8 metres tall” – proportions which would not preclude them, you might well think, from engaging in a more legitimate form of scrimmage this weekend.

Scientists announced the other day that they have discovered a new planet. Or at least they think it’s a planet; they’re not quite sure. Their uncertainty will be familiar to followers of rugby. Seeing an actual, fully-formed rugby player can induce a kind of wonder, even terror, similar, it might be supposed, to that engendered by the movement of tectonic plates.

Similarly, the rugby-going populace is little known for its “shrinking violet” tendency, either in appearance or temperament.

What I am driving at is this: could it be that our Australian friend, accustomed to being able to handle himself, magnified the immensity of his muggers out of embarrassment? It is to be hoped so. Visitors to Wan Chai must not succumb to fear. Keep calm and carry on drinking is probably the best advice.

******

With Fiji going for their third hat-trick of wins at the Hong Kong Sevens this weekend, one face in the crowd will be that of former captain Samisoni Rabaka Nasagavesi. The 44-year-old played in the Sevens here four times but hasn’t been back at the event since 2003, his last appearance. When we bumped into him on Friday he told us he was here on a “sort of pilgrimage, with my missus and her mate”, both of whom had gone shopping but would join him at Hong Kong Stadium on Sunday.

Now living in Australia, the former scrum-half won 29 caps for Fiji at XVs but lamented that even now rugby was not as lucrative a career prospect for Fijians as in other nations. “There is more support than there was when I was playing but there’s still not a lot of money or sponsorship,” he said. “Despite the fact that everyone in Fiji plays from the moment they can run.”

Rabaka’s first experience of the Hong Kong Sevens came in 1992, when he played in the Fiji side that beat New Zealand 22-6 in the final, the second time they had won three tournaments in a row here. His main memory of the game is that it was raining.

More discomforting was the Scottish rain he experienced the following April, when he played in the very first World Cup Sevens at a muddy Murrayfield, losing to England in the final.

Rabaka recalled fondly, however, that “in those days you just ran from one end of the pitch to the other, just like playing touch,” adding that Sevens is now more of a structured game. “It’s become more physical, there’s more breakdown, more stoppages. And the players are more muscular.”

Standing 6’2”, Rabaka weighed 14st in his playing days. A skelf of a lad.

 

SUNDAY

Tales abound of amatory trysts of every stamp at the Hong Kong Sevens. Some (including former Scotland captain Andy Nicol) have even met their future spouses during the event.

Love is a many-horned beast, however – and chance encounters often play out less providentially. Or at least so it was for two Canadian men whose eyes met across across the rows at Hong Kong Stadium on Friday. After several glances to and fro, the penny dropped that they knew each other; or rather they knew of each other – from having had the same girlfriend; non-concurrently, I understand.

Of course, for all we know this may be an everyday occurrence in Canada, where the winters are very long. Equally hard to verify was the boast, heard second hand, of a man who claims to have achieved sexual congress one year at the Sevens with seven different women – in one day – and that, furthermore, several of these conquests occurred inside the stadium itself; in the environs of the South Stand, inevitably.

However implausible such figures may seem, it cannot be truthfully said that prudishness holds sway in that area of the stadium. One American expat lady – stressing, in that way that girls do, that she doesn’t normally do these sorts of things – recounts one year taking home a Smurf. Having painted herself red for the occasion – she had dressed as a ketchup bottle – she awoke to find the mingling of colours had left purple smudges all over her apartment.

No doubt you are wondering whether Mr Seven at the Sevens wore a costume. Sadly I have been unable to settle that question; but anyway it strikes me that the age of smartphones and social media may have put the brakes on such activities. One imagines there are downside risks to it, if you will, for people “high up” at Standard Chartered.

Incidentally, our source reports back that “actually, it turns out seven might have been closer to two.”

******

They come from all corners of the globe for the carnival of rugby that is the Hong Kong Sevens – albeit mainly from Anglophone rugby strongholds like New Zealand, Britain and, erm, the United States. The roster of nations able to compete at Sevens suggests, indeed, that it may in fact be more of a genuinely global game than XVs.

On a personal level I have been frustrated in my search for visitors from Germany. It may be simply that they are more reserved than people from countries like Wales and Australia, who tend to festoon themselves in national insignia even for simple endeavours like nipping out to the shops for a loaf of bread. But the Germans’ absence is another missed opportunity to address one of the great sporting mysteries, namely the non-existence of rugby in Teutonic nations.

Also untraceable so far have been spectators from either the Cook Islands (population 19,569) or American Samoa (55,159), both of whom are represented in the qualifying competition this weekend. It would seem counter-productive that these territories compete in both rugby union and rugby league and no doubt they would be well-advised to consolidate operations; but clearly the very fact that they are putting out teams of players capable of not always getting completely trounced (I’d back them against a German select, certainly) is remarkable in itself.

As an aside, I note that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has a significant presence in American Samoa, with 37 congregations. If any of their members have taken the pulse in the South Stand at Hong Kong Stadium this weekend, we would love to hear from them.

******

The phrase, I think, is “well-intentioned”. There exists a branch of the Hong Kong government called “the environment bureau” – perhaps you are dimly aware of it – and it has teamed up this weekend with the HKRFU and (don’t laugh) Sevens co-sponsor Cathay Pacific to mutter about about environmental impacts and the like.

Their big idea, according to our information, is “to minimise the environmental footprint of the event and trial new ideas and best practices that could be applied to other major events in Hong Kong in the future.”

Seemingly this involves sending out the bureau’s new mascot, “Big Waster” – who has a very large, swollen-looking head, presumably from inhaling bus fumes or something – and some student volunteers, to harry people about recycling. There are also a few recycling bins, somewhat indistinguishable from the other bins, dotted around the stadium. And that’s about it. Maybe some shrubs have been consecrated – I don’t know.

By my own admittedly rough estimates, Hong Kong Sevens weekend produces enough plastic waste (from beer cups alone) to litter all of American Samoa, methane (from various sources) equivalent to half the annual emissions of Argentina’s cow population and an asteroid cloud’s worth of other gases from whatever it is planes run on these days; not to mention frazzling Shenzhen’s power grid in the mania for fancy-dress costumes.

In short, minimising the Sevens’ “footprint” will be far from straightforward. It is to be hoped Big Waster understands the magnitude of his responsibilities.

 

MONDAY

My colleague Tim Noonan averred yesterday that the attraction of rugby for many female spectators is in large part to do with watching physically fit men run about. His thesis was supported by comments from one interviewee, a girl called Jessica (not her real name), who referred in glowing to terms to the “specimens” on show.

It is be hoped none of the players read Tim’s column – the objectification of men is a serious issue and can be very damaging to male self-esteem. It got me thinking about the levels of actual rugby fandom at the Hong Kong Sevens, though. My own observations tell me that sections of the audience have little interest in rugby and come primarily to ogle each other.

With this in mind, it seemed to me the best way to further probe these very pressing questions would be via what is referred to as the off-side test: asking women to explain how the off-side rule works. It is widely accepted that off-side in football is quite beyond female comprehension. Would they fare any better with the rugby version?

A selection of the best answers: “When there’s a yellow card”; “Something to do with passing forward when the other team is behind; “If you’re about to score nobody can be in front of you”; “When the ball goes out on the touchline”; “f*** off you sexist ****”.

For the record, none of my colleagues who write regularly about rugby know any of the rules. In fact, such knowledge is generally avoided by sportswriters and those who claim it are viewed with great suspicion.

******

You don’t hear them quite so much nowadays, those jokes that start off with an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman – and sometimes also a Welshman – walking into a bar, and end with each of them confirming some national stereotype or other: thick Paddy, drunken Scot, English toff, that sort of thing. Political correctness – or more likely the exhaustion of the genre – has probably done for them.

I only mention this as of course the whole scenario will have played out in a thousand ways and with a thousand punchlines this weekend in Hong Kong. And as a Scot living abroad, I was curious to know how the forthcoming referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom might play into the social brew, as it were.

My findings were somewhat disappointing. Nary a Scot I encountered wanted to “go there” – so divisive has the question become, I gather, that people are on eggshells in social situations lest they unloosen a hail of brickbats from the other side.

It used to be that Scots exempted themselves from the old rule about no talk of politics or religion in company. What has happened to them? They cannot be accused of drinking any less, certainly.

******

I had hoped to report tales of anti-Russian sentiment at Hong Kong Stadium over the weekend. Foreign correspondents will know the feeling – “tensions” at least furnish you with copy; sadly for the news cycle, however, players representing the world’s newest pariah nation received only the most half-hearted smattering of boos as they took to the field to face Japan yesterday.

Not to worry. I will, instead, convey the major incidents from the match, which the Japanese won 19-14 in extra-time.

Hostilities got underway with the Russians well fired up – they considered that one or two of their opponents looked a bit effeminate; seeing the Japanese engage in conversation with players from European teams before the game had also riled them somewhat.

After racing in front with two tries, they attempted to camp on the Japanese 10 metre line, calling a plebiscite on the question of whether they should remain there (the results are still being counted). The Russians then came unstuck as the Japanese mounted a comeback and ultimately clinched it on sudden death. Vladimir Putin declared his team’s elimination unacceptable, however, adding that all options for settling the score would be considered.


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Hong Kong’s poor need equal opportunities

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post

One hears a lot of about “the grass roots” in Hong Kong. It’s a phrase that seems to carry a more specific meaning here than I have encountered elsewhere, having come out from Scotland some 18 months ago.

Whereas in Britain and the US it intimates more generally the ordinary rank and file, or the population base at large, in Hong Kong “the grass roots” also tends to serve as a rather euphemistic term for the poor. We are told that grass roots people feel neglected, or that they are being effectively papuerised by inflation, or that they do not trust Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying to deliver on his pledges to help them.

There is one problem with the metaphor, however: real grass roots find it easy to break through the sod and grow. If they have the strength to seek their days in the sun, then so it shall be. By comparison, many of Hong Kong’s poor can legitimately be described as being downtrodden.

Much has been made recently of inequality in Hong Kong. As indicated by the city’s Gini co-efficient, a statistical measure of income disparity, we are living in one of the most unequal societies in the world. But it would be a mistake to unhesitatingly conflate, as many do, these two problems: stalled social mobility (the thwarted seedbeds) and a yawning gap between rich and poor.

To seriously confront the latter would require large-scale redistribution of wealth, which seems an unlikely course for any government here to take. There is more than a whiff of crony capitalism in Hong Kong, but it remains one of the world’s freest market economies: increasing the tax burden significantly on wealth creators would be to curtail much of the activity that stems from that.

It is always worth stressing, furthermore, that a more equal society is not necessarily a better one. “Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short” is how Thomas Hobbes described life in mankind’s “natural” state – relative equality tends to prevail in primitive societies as there is little scope for accumulating wealth. There is therefore less economic activity, less innovation and less incentive to create employment – things which benefit everyone.

How to ensure this is so is the challenge faced by governments: even the right accepts the state has a responsibility to help the poor. But where the right may be correct to insist that income disparity is necessary, the solution to ensuring inequality works for the benefit of society as a whole is perhaps the most sensible idea to come from the left.

It was the great liberal 20th Century American political philosopher John Rawls who outlined it best. Arguing for the free market and social inequality, he nevertheless insists in his A Theory of Justice on equality of opportunity: “Those who have the same level of talent and ability and the same willingness to use these gifts should have the same prospects of success regardless of … the class into which they are born and develop until the age of reason.”

To be born poor in Hong Kong is to have one’s prospects of success seriously blunted. Partly this is because the strivers who are given the chance to better themselves in one generation have a tendency the world over to pull up the ladder behind them on subsequent generations. It is also, however, a matter of public policy.

During his election campaign, Leung promised to focus on livelihood issues affecting the poor. Some of these he will no doubt follow up on; others he will not. But in a city whose coffers are directly swelled by booming asset prices – which themselves create new haves and have nots – and which has a grievous track record of billions spent on unnecessary infrastructure projects, the fact that people are forced to live in cage homes is nothing short of scandalous.

No doubt the isolation and immiseration of swathes of what used to be the working classes in rich societies is a global phenomenon and one related to deindustrialisation, which in Hong Kong happened in the space of a generation. Economic circumstances will stall social mobility, but this is when government spending – on housing, on education subsidies, on underwriting small business loans – is at its most useful.

For all the protest and agitation in Hong Kong in recent weeks and months, the conditions for class warfare thankfully do not yet exist. But for the “grass roots”, a bit of Rawlsianism would not go amiss. The city can afford it.


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Roeg’s gallery

This article appeared on the South China Morning Post’s Rewind page

Most scientists agree that aliens probably look something like David Bowie, with his cultivated strangeness and differentially-pigmented eyes (the result, apparently, of being punched in a schoolyard brawl).

Actually, “most” might be an exaggeration: there has been no extensive polling. But what is even less concrete is Bowie’s idea of himself. Whether as Aladdin Sane, Ziggy Stardust or the Thin White Duke, the English singer’s most interesting years saw him shifting otherworldly shapes like nobody’s business. And the quantities of drugs he is known to have consumed in the 1970s make it feasible that he thought himself arrived from outer space.

Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 film The Man Who Fell to Earth casts pop’s original chameleon as a humanoid alien who drops from the sky in a rocket. His objective, sketchily outlined, has something to do with developing the technology to reverse the drought now killing his own planet, and to that end he brings with him high-tech patents that make him a billionaire overnight.

Unfortunately he does not count on human greed or decadence, and, sadly, things do not go well. Mary-Lou, a first-rate mentalist who falls in love with him, introduces him to booze and he becomes addicted to it, and to watching television.

But enough of the spoilers, other than to state that 1970s paranoia – about impending planetary ruin, the brain-sapping properties of TV, political corruption and big business being dreadful – is writ large. Ideas that now seem tired abound. And yet, the movie’s visual boldness, ambition and insistent focus on character over plot put it on a superior plane to most current genre film-making.

Roeg was on a rich vein of form (a run that includes Don’t Look Now – named best British film ever in an industry poll last year – Bad Timing and Walkabout) and by this time Bowie had conquered America. But when the brass at Paramount saw the final cut of The Man Who Fell to Earth, they refused to fund its release and the film struggled to break even.

It’s likely the studio felt it was too, well, alienating. Roeg cuts incessantly between scenes without explanation, only to then linger on things which interest him visually, not least the desert landscapes of New Mexico, where Newton (Bowie) opts to reside. The result is that the film-maker himself seems to approach America – whether New Mexico or New York – from an alien’s point of view. He confronts its strangeness, asks questions of its culture, puzzles at capitalism’s outward manifestations.

Naturally, Bowie is an alien with a British passport. Feeble, androgynous, melancholy, he is the ultimate outsider. And the ultimate tragedy is that like Icarus falling, almost unnoticed, into the sea – as referenced in the film by way of W.H. Auden’s poem about Brueghel’s painting of the scene – humans very soon lose interest in that which they don’t understand.


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A feature on ‘Fine Art Asia’

This article was published in Hong Kong Tatler

If there were any doubt that the art world in the 21st Century is a thoroughly globalised, geographically cross-fertilised business, a thumb through the catalogue for this year’s Fine Art Asia quickly dispels it. Local Hong Kong artist Tsang Chui-mei’s paintings very clearly combine the Chinese literati tradition with elements of Western abstract expressionism; Frenchwoman Fabienne Verdier, who spent a decade in China learning traditional ink painting, likewise channels a distinctly East-West spirit on her canvases; and local gallery FEAST Projects’ Chinese Artists in France features works by contemporary master Zao Wouki, who is said to have counted Joan Miro, Picasso and Matisse among his friends once upon a time.

One could go on – but perhaps it was ever thus. Here, for example, we have Galerie Dayan of Paris offering up a large Louis XV vernis Martin – imitation Chinese lacquerware – among its items of French decorative art from the 17th to the 19th Century.

Art fairs in general have about them something of the 19th Century – for Europe a period of global expansion, when, as the hoarding of artefacts and works of art from around the world became almost a competitive sport, major public galleries sprang up, taking art collecting out of its hitherto exclusively private sphere. And Fine Art Asia 2012, which boasts exhibits from across four millenia and confidently straddles Eastern and Western art, is no exception. Indeed, the flaneurs of Haussmann’s Paris might well feel at home at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai next month – were it not for the fact that modern and contemporary art and design sits jowl-to-jowl with that of older vintage.

“I think it’s a perfect match to combine these different strands together in one venue,” says the fair’s founder and director Andy Hei over lunch some weeks ahead of the eighth major international fair he has staged in the city since his first Art and Antiques Fair in 2006.

Hei (who, like his father before him, deals in classical Ming and Qing-era Chinese furniture) and his co-director Calvin Hui (a gallery owner and collector of Asian contemporary art) are bringing together more than 120 galleries from as far apart as London, New York and Singapore for next month’s event – making it the biggest to date and confirming Fine Art Asia as the region’s most prestigious art gathering.

Says Hei: “I come from an antique or heritage art background; Calvin is from the contemporary art world. We’re a small team and we don’t have a lot of resources, so we are basing everything on the position of Hong Kong and our reputation among dealers and buyers.”

The pair are palpably excited, almost skittishly enthusiastic. Hui talks about fluctuations in the market for contemporary Chinese art with the twinkling eye of one who knows what will count as having artistic, and indeed pecuniary, value, years hence; Hei waxes lyrical about Hong Kong’s advantages for art dealers of being a free port and not charging a sales tax on art (it’s little coincidence that the fair coincides with major autumn art auctions in the city). And as a double act they encapsulate what makes the fair work: theirs may be vastly different artistic backgrounds, but they share a belief in the intrinsic value of good art and a passion for bringing as diverse a representation of it together – under the same roof and in their native city.

“Hong Kong has always been the perfect gateway city,” Hei boasts. “It has always known how to deal between East and West. In the art world, it used to be a case of Western buyers buying Chinese art and taking it back to the West; but now you can see the process has changed direction, whereby both Eastern and Western art is moving east.”
With the art market very much driven by wealthy mainlanders right now, Hui believes the Chinese are first of all “buying back” their own heritage: “There is is a phenomenon in China referred to as the Return of Cultural Relics and this is part of that, whether it’s antique art or 20th Century modern Chinese art.”

But it’s not just about patriotism, he insists – mainlanders are also increasingly outward-looking. “Hong Kong has always been in touch with western culture and western art. In China, people are travelling more and going abroad to be educated and there’s a sense that they are experiencing what Hong Kong experienced further back.”

Much like 19th Century European collectors, he says, the nouveaux riches of China are decorating and furnishing their homes with art and artefacts from different centuries and from around the world. “They may not understand the art historical significance of everything but they will think nothing of combining Italian-design furniture from the 1950s with 5,000 year-old Chinese vases, 19th Century English silverware and Ming Chinese paintings.”

Such eclectic appetites are unlikely to be frustrated by the veritable goulash of treasures on show in Wan Chai. The breadth of exhibits at this year’s fair is truly astonishing: Chinese bronzes from the 13th Century B.C; Chinese and Western classical furniture; Asian and international antique ceramics, paintings, jewellery, watches, sculptures, textiles and decorative art; Dutch and Italian landscape paintings from the 17th to 19th Centuries; masterpieces from Pissaro, Sisley, Monet, Renoir, Guillaumin, Picasso and Miro; sculptures by Rodin, Bugatti and Guyot; works by Chinese “new ink” artists Liu Dan Wei Ligang and Qin Fen; vintage jewellery made for the famous 1920s American socialite Millicent Rogers by “jeweller to the stars” Paul Flato; and much else besides.

For his part, Hui is particularly thrilled to be welcoming the first ever 20th Century Italian Design Furniture Exhibition in Asia – which will run for the duration of September, ahead of the fair, at the K11 Art Mall in TST. Presented by Italy’s Novalis Contemporary Art, it features items by masters of modern design including Etorre Sottsass, Gaetano Pesce, Merret Oppenheim and Studio 65. “For so many of us, Italy really defines design,” Hui says. “It is beautiful and regal while still being accessible in everyday life.”

Hei, meanwhile, identifies an expanded fine art jewellery category – spanning antique pocket watches, 19th Century gem-set brooches and Art Deco Cartier necklaces – as a definite highlight.

“An art fair like this is not just a trading platform,” he adds. “It’s an appreciation of design and art history.”

It should also be said that the fair does its utmost to support local artists by allowing students from the Department of Fine Arts at The Chinese University and Hong Kong Art School to showcase, and sell, their work in the hall. “We want to encourage students to stay in the art business,” Hei says. “Hong Kong needs that. It’s a chance for them to get in touch with the real art market.” In addition, Fine Art Asia supports the Hong Kong Society for the Protection of Children and the Hong Kong Cancer Fund, with the latter receiving the proceeds of a charity auction of works donated by local artists.

“My father taught me that if you gain something from the market, you have to give something back,” says Hei. “We’re not just taking Hong Kong as the venue for an art fair, we’re supporting it every way we can.”


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Blood in the water: My latest feature in HK Tatler

This article was published in Hong Kong Tatler

It would be easy to attribute Ric O’Barry’s slight irascibility to the fact that he’s been campaigning on the same issue for more than 40 years and still finds he’s not being listened to where it matters. Then again, it could be down to his jetlag.

The 73-year-old dolphin-lover and activist has been flown to Hong Kong from his home in Miami for a week at the behest of a student group at Hong Kong Baptist University and – surveying a sparkling Victoria Harbour from a restaurant on the 31st floor of the Regal Hotel – he’s just getting going on the environmental exigencies facing our oceans.

The contamination of fish stocks from industrial pollutants is one thing you might want to think about next time you order a tuna salad, he says taking off his Ray Bans, seemingly to get a better look at me. Over-fishing is another: “We’re stripmining the oceans. My daughter [O’Barry lives in Miami and Denmark with his wife and an adopted Chinese daughter] is seven. In her lifetime there won’t be any fish.”

Crikey. So the message he’ll deliver to the HKBU branch of the international student organisation AIESEC the next day is that conservation is doomed to failure? Well, not exactly. Years of frustration at a lack of global action to protect dolphins have failed to extinguish O’Barry’s idealism. With the sleeve of his smart Explorer’s Club blazer only partially obscuring a multi-coloured agglomeration of charity wristbands, he is a curious mix of old-school swashbuckler and modern activist-warrior. “It’s about people power,” he tells me. “Governments aren’t going to fix these problems. And right now you’re seeing legions of new activists.”

These days O’Barry travels the world trying to stop the traffic in captive dolphins, which he believes is linked to the killing of 23,000 dolphins in Japan every year. But his relationship to the species is more complex than his single-minded – some might say obsessional – dedication to its emancipation might suggest. In the 1960s it was O’Barry who, at the Miami Seaqarium, trained the five dolphins used in the popular US television series Flipper. “For seven years I actually lived with the Flipper dolphins,” he says.

His transition towards opposing dolphin captivity came gradually. “I used to take the television set down to the pool so that Flipper could watch Flipper on television and there was a self-awareness – they could see themselves. It’s really all about consciousness and where dolphins are concerned the porch light is on and somebody is home. When you become aware of that there’s a responsibility that comes with it.”

After leaving Flipper in 1970, O’Barry for a while went around “freeing” as many captive dolphins as he could, eventually landing himself in trouble with the law 13 years ago for releasing two dolphins off the coast of Florida which were ill-equipped to survive in the wild and sustained grievous injuries.

“I was initially motivated by guilt, because it was Flipper that inspired all these dolphinariums,” he says. “I went from training dolphins to trying to untrain them and put them back in the wild. What motivates me now, though, is seeing results – all the dolphinariums in the UK for instance are now closed.”

O’Barry’s major breakthrough in terms of bringing the dolphin’s plight to general notice came, however, with the release of the Academy Award-winning documentary film The Cove in 2009. Suspenseful and gripping, it follows the efforts of a team of divers, technicians and other brave sorts led by O’Barry to record and expose – under the noses of the local police – the annual drive hunting season in which thousands of dolphins are brutally slaughtered at a cove in the remote Japanese village of Taiji.

For all the film’s shock value, three years later the killing continues; but where it has been successful is in recruiting people to the cause. Vriko Séraphina Kwok, vice-president of the AIESEC group at HKBU, says it was seeing The Cove a year ago that inspired her to raise awareness locally by inviting O’Barry over. “The issue of dolphin conservation is one that is relevant to Hong Kong and the rest of Asia and we thought it should be promoted,” she says. “Change can’t happen immediately. Traditional ways of doing things don’t just disappear overnight; but it’s important to educate this generation.”

In common with O’Barry and – judging from a recent US Public Service Announcement a whole battalion of Hollywood celebrities – Kwok is opposed to the keeping of dolphins in captivity for the purposes of entertainment. But not all dolphin-lovers agree. On O’Barry’s visit, HKBU hosted a debate on the issue between him and Dr Allan Zeman, the billionaire chairman of Ocean Park. Zeman, citing a figure of 105 million visitors to Ocean Park since it opened, said such attractions had a role to play in connecting people with nature in ways that would otherwise not be possible. “One thing you can be sure of,” he added, “is that we really care for the animals. We only have captive-born animals and rescued dolphins and we’re a non-profit organisation so we put a lot of money into conservation – US$26m since 2005. We raise a lot of money and we educate children about conservation and we’ll continue to do so.”

A key assertion in The Cove is that dolphinariums around the world are connected to the slaughter of dolphins at Taiji, and it is true that the whalers earn most of their money from the sale of a few live dolphins while the rest are killed and sold for their meat. However, while a thriving market for captured dolphins for entertainment exists in Japan itself, this is not the case in most other countries, where dolphinariums have their own breeding programmes. At the time of The Cove’s release, the Alliance of Marine Mammal Parks and Aquariums, a trade group representing more than 50 such facilities in the US and elsewhere, accused the film-makers of “misinformation”.

When I press him on this, O’Barry responds somewhat tetchily. “The dolphins are captured with the trainers present – and they’re all connected, even to Ocean Park,” he insists. “They’re connected through the World Association of Zoos and Aqariums, through the Marine Animal Trainers’ Association. They’re all colleagues, they all know what goes on.”

Where he’s on surer ground is in his assertion that the International Whaling Commission’s moratorium on commercial whaling has never been extended to smaller cetaceans largely because of Japanese opposition. And as he rightly points out: “The Cove exposed the IWC in a way that’s never been done before.”

Moreover, in his efforts to challenge entrenched habits, he takes encouragement from the recent removal of shark fin soup from menus at some of Hong Kong’s top hotels, and by the fact that – as recorded in Blood Dolphins, a Discovery channel spin-off from The Cove featuring O’Barry and his son Lincoln – dolphin whaling has been stopped in the Solomon Islands. “With money raised from the sale of wristbands worldwide, we were able to help people invest in bee-keeping as an alternative source of income,” he says. “People just want jobs. It’s economics.”

I venture to suggest that it’s that kind of pragmatism that gets results, but he’s already off on a more bullish egression. “We’re winning; we will stop the whalers,” he says. “It’s down to people like the kids who brought me here.”


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All fired up

This article appeared on the South China Morning Post’s Rewind page

Even if you’ve never seen Chariots of Fire, you will have heard its theme: the one that goes “da na na na nah nah” and is usually accompanied on television by footage of people doing things in slow motion. (Come to think of it, the way it has been used as a de facto anthem for British athletics may help to explain why the country’s sprinters no longer win the same quantity of medals as they did, say, at the 1924 Olympic Games, which provide the setting for much of this film.)

Along with The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Chariots of Fire is one of two very fine British films about running and in truth is no more about fire than Slap Her, She’s French. Fire does feature in a number of indirect ways, however.

For one there is a lot of smoking, clearly an aid to sporting achievement in the olden days. Secondly, it features two young men fired up, each in his own way, by zeal or ambition, one of whom, the Scotsman Eric Liddell, has more than a touch of Calvinist fire and brimstone in his makeup. In his unorthodox running style, he also often appears to have a rocket warming his bottom.

Where Liddell is running for God (he even refuses to compete on the Sabbath), Harold Abrahams – the son of a financier who happens to have been a Lithuanian immigrant – is motivated by a desire for acceptance among the echelons of an Establishment, exemplified by the dons at his Cambridge college, that is distinctly sniffy about his Jewishness.

Both are exceptional figures, plucked from real sporting history and held to embody certain virtues – honour, dedication, personal integrity – that infuse the film with a twilit poignance. That theme (composed by Vangelis) and the framing of the flashback narrative with scenes from a 1978 memorial service for Abrahams, add to an overall sense of nostalgia for gifts vanished, lives gone, the flame of camaraderie and love now sputtering or extinguished.

Besides excellent performances from Charleson and Ben Cross (as Abrahams), the supporting credits are chock full with British acting talent, including Sir John Gielgud as one of the dons and a young Nigel Havers in the role of Lord Lindsay, another Cambridge athlete.

There is also much delight to be had from what scholars call the “diegetic” music, i.e that which has a part to play in the narrative itself: plenty of Gilbert and Sullivan (Abrahams’ falls in love with a soprano from The Mikado) and, at the end, a rousing rendition of Jerusalem, the hymn adapted from the William Blake poem which inspires the film’s title with the line “Bring me my chariot of fire”.

The phrase in turn comes from the Old Testament and is taken as a byword for divine energy. Whether or not that idea moves you, Hugh Hudson’s film probably will.