Mantel’s piece is about violation. It is about intrusion, spectacle, about a kind of eerie return of the sacrificial monarch who has to die so the land can live (or gossip, ogle, and sneer). It is about the treatment of female royals as clothes-horses, lust objects, virgin queens and perfect mothers, and about how we are encouraged to view them as surface. It is about our perverse relationship with the monarchy in a country which is supposedly a democracy and the emptiness of it. What it patently and emphatically is not is an assault on Kate Middleton – and the cry that it is comes not from Clarence House but from the very media outlets Mantel is chastising.
sketch from today
The emphasis on his royalty meant that [Richard II] cared deeply for ceremony and for spectacle. He enjoyed dressing up. On one occasion he wore a costume of white satin on which were hung cockle-shells and mussel-shells plated in silver; his doublet was adorned with orange trees embroidered in gold thread. He loved to preside at tournaments, but he was not so enthusiastic about true battles. One of his relatives, Thomas of Lancaster, declared at a later date that ‘he is too heavy in the arse, he only asks for drinking and eating, sleeping, dancing and leaping about’. The medieval texts often refer to ‘leaping about’ without explaining what is meant by it.
This month’s A Good Day to Die Hard is the fifth Die Hard movie. The night before it opened, it had a 10 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 98 percent “Want to See” rating from audiences, and that disparity kind of says it all.
Bodoni pop-up book. Beautiful.Bodoni Bedlam Pop-Up Book by Victoria Macey
Very talented illustrator and designer Victoria presents us a very pretty pop-up book. And she’s one of the artists which we can find on tumblr. Follow her here.
Here’s how Shepherd would later describe the difference between Night and Day People—more than a half-century later, you’ll still recognize the types. The Day Person “believes in the world of the office; he really believes in file cabinets. … The time from 8 a.m. to 6 in the evening is the time he’s alive.” Whereas, for the night person, the world began the minute he stepped out off the office. The two types, in Shepherd’s view, were always battling, without even being aware of it. “So you’re sitting in this sales meeting and here is this guy sitting over here and he’s got this light of ecclesiastical fervor; he believes in Operation Dynamo that you’re about to foist on the public.”Shepherd anointed his listeners as Night People, schooled them in what the term meant, and along the way transformed them from outsiders to insiders. The Day People didn’t reject you, Shepherd implied. You rejected them. “I’m talking about people with that wild tossing in the soul that somehow makes them stay up until three o’clock in the morning and brood,” he said. “They might get up at seven the next morning and go to work, but that isn’t what their life is about.”
Objections to Christianity… are phrased in words, but that does not mean they are really a matter of language and analysis and argument. Words are tokens of the will. If something stronger than language were available, then we would use it. But by the same token, words in defence of Christianity miss the mark as well: they are a translation into the dispassionate language of argument of something that resides far deeper, in the caverns of volition, of commitment.
Emmylou Harris
Pitchfork: You’ve been associated with a lot of very inspired but also very hard living guys. How have you managed to move in the same circles as people like Gram Parsons and Steve Earle and survive? EH: Well, Steve Earle wasn’t hard living by the time we started working together! [laughs] I was only around Gram for a very, very brief period of time. I was pretty much the country mouse. When I was around Gram, he really trying to straighten up. We spent most of our time singing, and you can’t get all screwed up and sing. So the time we spent together was a pretty healthy time. I wish I could have spent more time around him. Maybe I could have helped him a little bit. But there’s no point in looking back. Pitchfork: It’s amazing that after 30 years of making music yourself, someone who just recorded a couple of albums is still so often talked about in the same breath as your own name. EH: Well, Gram was a visionary. There are not that many people who come along and come up with something totally different. Of course, being totally honest, people probably spend a little too much time focusing on the dramatic story of his life, including, unfortunately, an early death. A rock and roll casualty. Perhaps people don’t give as much credit to his music and his vision. A lot of times that stuff will supersede someone’s work, and I think that happened a lot with Gram. I think musicians– I’m the poster child for how one person can affect another. With Gram, I don’t think anybody would be interested in talking to me if I hadn’t met Gram and been inspired by him, and continued down the road he set out for me. I don’t think I would have come up with this stuff on my own. Pitchfork: That’s a very modest way to look at it… EG: But I think it’s true. I have a pretty good sense of my life, who I was and what I knew, and how different things were after he came into my life. I think there are people that you have those kind of big bang moments with in your life story, and that certainly was for me. It’s almost like B.C. and A.D.