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.

Jean-Léon Gérôme

 

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.