Monthly Archives: March 2019

Art

Jean-Léon Gérôme’s The Carpet Merchant (1887)

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In July of 1798, Napoleon marched into Egypt and defeat­ed the Turks at the Bat­tle of the Pyra­mids, weak­en­ing past break­ing point the wan­ing Ottoman Empire. He was dri­ven out a year lat­er by the British, but in that small amount of time he had already changed every­thing: because fol­low­ing him came first a trick­le and then a tor­rent of west­ern­ers into the Near and Mid­dle East. They came and they jour­neyed through Turkey, Iraq, Per­sia, Egypt, Lebanon, Pales­tine, Ara­bia and North Africa. Many of them wrote about their expe­ri­ences, spark­ing a deep fas­ci­na­tion with these exot­ic, mys­te­ri­ous lands.

The artists came too, and they paint­ed what they saw: bazaars and souks; robed and mous­ta­chioed Arabs smok­ing hookah pipes; mosques and minarets; Turk­ish baths and harems. With time this became an art move­ment and today we call it Ori­en­tal­ist art. I love it for the way it con­jures up the exot­ic, and although it is clear that some artists let their imag­i­na­tions get the bet­ter of them (I’m think­ing of the harems, which no artist can have actu­al­ly seen), their depic­tions of these lands must have inspired many a beat­ing heart to vis­it.

One such Ori­en­tal­ist was French painter, Jean-Léon Gérôme. In 1856, he vis­it­ed Egypt for the first time and fol­lowed the clas­sic grand tour of a typ­i­cal occi­den­tal vis­i­tor to the Ori­ent: up the Nile to Cairo, then to Abu Sim­bel, across the Sinai Penin­su­la and through the Wadi el-Ara­ba to the Holy Land, Jerusalem and final­ly to Dam­as­cus. He gath­ered themes, arte­facts and cos­tumes for his ori­en­tal scenes, and then set to work, soon estab­lish­ing a rep­u­ta­tion back home which saw him become hon­orary Pres­i­dent of the French Soci­ety of Ori­en­tal­ist Painters.

There’s a gallery, below, of sev­er­al of his Ori­en­tal­ist works, giv­ing a good flavour of what he was about, and below that my favourite piece of the lot, The Car­pet Mer­chant. I have trav­elled quite exten­sive­ly myself in these lands, from Istan­bul, Beirut and Dam­as­cus to Mar­rakesh, Petra and Cairo; and noth­ing quite beats the sim­ple plea­sure of wan­der­ing the snaking alley­ways and souks of an old quar­ter, and tak­ing in the sights, sounds and smells of life there. The Car­pet Mer­chant cap­tures that feel­ing per­fect­ly.

The Carpet Merchant
The Car­pet Mer­chant

 

Music

The Rolling Stones’ (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction (1965)

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In April 1965, the Rolling Stones embarked on their first head­lin­ing tour of the Unit­ed States. They had already had two US top ten hits (Time Is On My Side and The Last Time) but in terms of the British inva­sion they were still a notch or two below bands such as Herman’s Her­mits and the Dave Clark Five. One song, writ­ten dur­ing this tour, would soon change that.

The sto­ry behind that song is enshrined in rock folk­lore. Mid­way through the tour, in a motel in Clear­wa­ter, Flori­da, Kei­th Richards woke up in the mid­dle of the night with a tune in his head. Fum­bling in the dark for his cas­sette recorder, he hit the record but­ton and played the eight-note gui­tar riff. He also mum­bled a lyric — “I can’t get no sat­is­fac­tion” – and then fell asleep. In Richards’ own words: “On the tape you can hear me drop the pick. The rest is me snor­ing”.

Richards didn’t think his riff would turn into any­thing com­mer­cial; nonethe­less, Mick Jag­ger was inspired to flesh out the lyrics and when the band’s tour took them to Chica­go just three days after Richards’ noc­tur­nal ram­blings, they dropped into Chess Stu­dios (home to their heroes Chuck Berry, Bo Did­dley and Mud­dy Waters) and laid down the song.

This first attempt was actu­al­ly an acoustic, folksy ver­sion of the song, sound­ing noth­ing like the swag­ger­ing stomp it would turn into. It didn’t take long for that trans­for­ma­tion to occur, how­ev­er: just two days lat­er the band re-record­ed the song, this time in RCA Stu­dios on Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard. Richards had just acquired a Mae­stro FZ‑1 Fuzz-Tone ped­al, Char­lie Watts put down a dif­fer­ent tem­po, and the band gave the song a far more aggres­sive feel.The song was released as a sin­gle in the Unit­ed States in June 1965. It was a smash hit, giv­ing the Stones their first US num­ber one and set­ting the band on their tra­jec­to­ry to become the “Great­est Rock and Roll Band in the World”. Here’s a suit­ably elec­tri­fy­ing per­for­mance deliv­ered by the band and filmed dur­ing a quick tour of Ire­land a few weeks after the song hit num­ber one.

Literature

Joyce Lankester Brisley’s Milly-Molly-Mandy Stories (1925)

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One of life’s great plea­sures is read­ing to your chil­dren at bed­time, and your blog­ger, accord­ing­ly, has read many a children’s sto­ry to his own girls (and pro­vid­ed, inci­den­tal­ly, many an amus­ing voice to bring char­ac­ters to life and make the sto­ry more inter­est­ing – I didn’t live through years of Jack­anory for noth­ing, you know!). Some of the books we read were con­tem­po­rary, and some were hardy peren­ni­als from bygone eras enjoyed by pre­ced­ing gen­er­a­tions. One of the lat­ter, from near­ly a hun­dred years ago now, and which stands out as a paragon of charm is Joyce Lankester Bris­ley’s 1920s col­lec­tions of sto­ries about Mil­ly-Mol­ly-Mandy, the lit­tle girl in the nice white cot­tage with the thatched roof.

To this day, from time to time in our house, we return to Mil­ly-Mol­ly-Mandy and read one of her sto­ries, each one a minia­ture mas­ter­piece and the lit­er­ary equiv­a­lent of com­fort food. Now, it is pret­ty obvi­ous that these sto­ries are not “rel­e­vant” to today, and they are vul­ner­a­ble to claims of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty and a rose-tint­ed depic­tion of a sim­ple and long-gone world. But such objec­tions don’t mat­ter a jot to a child to whom the sto­ry is being read; nor to me, the nar­ra­tor, frankly. Chil­dren don’t need “rel­e­vance”; they need to be transported…and Joyce Lankester Brisley’s world cer­tain­ly does that.

We are invit­ed into a world of rur­al charm, in an unnamed vil­lage with a school, a blacksmith’s, a grocer’s, and a baker’s, along with copi­ous fields used as short­cuts by Mil­ly-Mol­ly-Mandy, Lit­tle Friend Susan, Bil­ly Blunt, and Toby the dog, as they walk to and from school or run errands for Moth­er. Each sto­ry begins with “Once upon a time”, and is fol­lowed by reas­sur­ing­ly unspec­tac­u­lar goings-on in Milly-Molly-Mandy’s life, be it run­ning to the shops with a six­pence for a skein of wool for Grand­ma, feed­ing milk to a baby hedge­hog, or hav­ing a pic­nic in a hol­lowed-out tree trunk with her friends.

The mag­ic lies in the way Joyce Lankester Bris­ley weaves her sim­ple sto­ries, the words and phras­es she uses, and the charm­ing illus­tra­tions, drawn by the author her­self, that accom­pa­ny the nar­ra­tive. Such sim­ple child­hood pas­times as “mend­ing” a pud­dle by adding peb­bles and stones into it, or get­ting wet and flap­ping and quack­ing like ducks: who does­n’t relate to that?

So to those to whom Milly-Molly-Mandy’s world is still cul­tur­al­ly com­pre­hen­si­ble, be warned: these sto­ries can give you a lump in your throat, as you mourn a dis­ap­peared world trod­den under­foot by the piti­less forces of mod­ernism and glob­al­ism! Nev­er­the­less, the sto­ries are an absolute delight and solid­ly deserve their place in the pan­theon of child­hood lit­er­a­ture.