22 ★ † FTWeekend 2 November/3 November 2019W
hen Jeff had failed to do
the washing up for
three days running
(our shared student
flat had a strict
housework rota), his punishment was
to spend the whole of a long wet
Sunday speaking only in iambics. It’s
not as hard as you might think. (See?
That was an example.) We’d try to
catch him out: sausage, for instance, is
a trochee; fish fingers is definitely
dactylic. One slip and a further
punishment could be applied: he
couldn’t speak except in quotes from
Bob Dylan. Which made it quite hard
to get anything to eat.
Personally I preferred just to do the
washing up. Anyway, we were young
and poor and obviously had far too
much time on our hands, since Netflix
was yet to be invented. And we’d read
way too much pretentious literature?
No, no, surely not.
What we mainly were was silly.
Light-hearted. Hilarious, often: we
made ourselves laugh a lot, if no one
else. And all those are things that
disappear with age, and sensibleness,
and all the other enemies of promise.
Now, an average morning involves
shouting at the Today programme,
reading the news with a sense of dread.
It’s not that the world has got worse,
necessarily — although weighing evils is
a fruitless business. But everywhere the
mood is much worse — sombre, angry,
combative, dogged — and I only wish
we could look to the arts to help us.
Help us, that is, by providing some of
that... What was it? What to call it?
Fun is too jolly-hockey-sticks. Joy is too
grandiose. Silliness is too negative. It’s
some sort of lightening of the spirit that
makes the world seem bearable.
If the general tenor of the cultural
scene is as sombre as the world around,
that’s absolutely right: the arts don’tand shouldn’t float free of real-life
context. And social engagement is
quite properly at the deep heart of
many artists’ practice; political
commentary is an essential part of the
message of theatre, film and more;
novels take their life from the issues
they wrestle down; young musicians
are writing about their mental health
issues and the crisis in masculinity. As
for comedy and satire — it’s in some
sort of crisis of its own, when every
word must be chosen not to offend and
even Trump isn’t funny any more.
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t see the
arts as a refuge or a distraction, and I
certainly don’t want them to be full of
jokes. The multiple avenues by which
the arts are currently addressing issues
around diversity, or the position of
women, or damaging social histories,are enriching and wonderful. Creative
work is never a laughing matter — and
if some of the things we look for in our
cultural lives are ways of making sense
of the world and our feelings about it,
that is life-or-death serious.
That deep kind of sense-making isn’t
only found in Shakespeare or Mahler.
So-called popular culture does a fine
job, when it does it well. A good HBO
series or a Scorsese mafia movie delve
into great themes of family, love,
loyalty and betrayal, rivalry, jealousy
and revenge, striving and failure, as
much asKing Lear.The Crownhas
hooked a worldwide audience not
just because it’s a real-life soap opera
but because it satisfies a profoundneed for a belief in social order.
The visual arts, now that the
successful contemporary artists have
almost rockstar fame, offer a vibrant
cast of dramatic characters too: the
cynical wide-boys (Koons, Hirst), the
heart-on-sleeve emotional heroine
(Tracey Emin), the court jester
(Banksy), the wicked womaniser
(Freud), the elder statesmen
(Gerhard Richter). So it’s not that we’re
undernourished by any part of our
cultural world, high, low or
middlebrow. Far from it — there’s
never in history been a more calorie-
dense cultural offering, or one that’s
more accessible to millions of people.
So why do I feel there’s something
missing? In the laudable effort to make
explicit social and political engagement
almost mandatory for artists, there can
be a lack of space — space for thinking,
imagining, dreaming. That playful,
soul-lightening effect. I find myself
increasingly drawn to art in any genre
that lets me do the work of reacting as I
want to. That wears its message so
lightly as to be almost imperceptible,
sometimes.
Have I cornered myself into arguing
that there’s a point to pointlessness?
Not quite. It’s never pointless. Even
silly games with iambics aren’t entirely
silly: the great verse forms, because
they are methods of forming words
into patterns that play straight to our
pulses, natural as breath in and breath
out, imprint their message
unforgettably. Shakespeare’s
audiences took home his words as
surely as if they’d been carrying a book.
And while of course I don’t pretend
that a scruffy student kitchen held any
parallels... Oh, on second thoughts,
you’re right. We could have been doing
something useful.Jan Dalley is the FT’s arts editorIn angry times, art can
still find time to play
T
here is suffering for your
art and then there is
leaving 1950s New York
at the age of 25. Of all the
reasons John Updike
gave for his move to Ipswich,
Massachusetts, the most impressive
was anthropological. “You’re exposed
to people who aren’t in your game,” he
said. If he was to write about quotidian
life, to “give the mundane its beautiful
due”, he had to know dentists and bank
clerks, not just publishers. To judge by
Couples, the spouse-swapping novel he
set in a New England town, he got to
know them well enough.
I evangelise for cities more than
most. But their great lie is that one
gets to know all human life there.
It is truer to say that oneencountersit.
Sometimes, one just sees it. Most
meaningful contact takes place
within professional ghettos. It is
an unavoidable design flaw of the
successful metropolis. Cities are
dynamic because they attract people to
whom career success means absolutely
everything. These monomaniacs have
to ignore those in other lines of work as
unaffordable claims on their finite
time and energy. Any contact with
alien realms comes through residual
university friends (a wasting asset as
we age), if at all.
That was me at 30. You should clear
50 before dispensing advice, I know,
but here is mine. What enriches life is
not the number of your friendships. It
is not even the depth of them. It is the
range. Young people starting out in the
big city should beware ghettoisation by
profession. What we are now obligedto call their “networks” should fan out
as wide as possible. And ensuring that
they do is itself a career.
My social circle is more or less
unrecognisable from just five years ago.
Through conscious effort and benign
accident, I consort with fewer politico-
media types born between punk rock
and acid house, residing in London
postcodes E2, E8 and N1. Instead I
now have good friends in all five living
generations: Silent, Boomer, X,
Millennial, Z. Their occupations span
unemployment to job-for-life doctors.
I have reduced the number ofjournalists I see to a small few, and one
of those wants to write film scripts.
There is still a lack of income diversity
— these being, with few exceptions,
comfortable-to-rich types — but give
me time. I am at the start of what I
hope will be a life-long churn.
The result has been a much fuller
life. I no longer crave escapism through
art because I get it from whomever I
am seeing that evening. The subjects of
Brexit and Donald Trump no longer
pollute my private life. I am no longer
in implicit competition with friends.
The benefit is not just to peace of mind
but to professional performance. For
someone who has to come up with
ideas each week, these people aregoldmines without knowing it. Just by
having a different training, a different
way of going at life, they will say things
that they do not realise are interesting.
(The most fruitful are architects —
something to do, I think, with their
grounding in both the quantitative and
the qualitative.)
People do not move to big cities to
meet different kinds of people. They
move there to meet like-minded
people: the ones they could not find in
their ambitionless suburb or waning
town. Even in London, the centre of
every profession in British life, people
slide into work-defined tribes unless
they actively fight against it. The one
place where you can meet almost
anyone becomes the one place where
you probably won’t.
It is not just a shame in and of itself.
It is also a source of what Nassim
Nicholas Taleb would call “fragility”.
If your friends work in the same field,
you are only ever one redundancy,
one demotion, from a much reduced
or at least more awkward social life.
Whether through my embarrassment
or theirs, I have lost touch with several
who failed to keep up in my “game”.
I suppose it could happen with the
Forex dealers I now know or the retired
department-store buyer or the
consultant-turned-gallery-boss, but
I doubt it. People are endearingly
oblivious to fluctuations in the status
of those in other worlds. Extramural
friendships are not just fun, then. They
are a social hedge.[email protected]
More columns t ft.com/janan-ganeshWhat enriches life is not the
number of your friendships.
It is not even the depth ofthem. It is the range
From 1982 to 2001, Mark Steinmetz
travelled from his home in Georgia
to fairs and circuses across the US,
where he photographed a melting
pot of carnival-goers: individuals
from all walks of life “seeking
something to transport them from
the everyday”.
With a humility that is present in
the pictures themselves, Steinmetz
would lose himself in the crowd,
stumbling upon whimsical scenes
and moments of intimacy. His
images, now collected in a new booktitledCarnival, draw in the eye with
their warm tones. Their delicate
blend of artistry and serendipity
echoes the freedombestowed by
a day at the fair.
The photographer’s gift for
capturing the unexpected is reflected
across his black-and-white oeuvre,
containing soft, silvery impressions
of the Deep South, Los Angeles, Paris
and Italy.
Madeleine Pollard‘Carnival’ is published by Stanley/BarkerSNAPSHOT
‘Carnival’ by
Mark Steinmetz
Jan Dalley
Trending
Chess solution 2339 ecause if 1 Rc2+ Kf3! 2 b6 Black replies 2...Qh3+! 3 Kxh3 with a stalemate draw.BCalling all young FT readers!
Join us at the FT NextGen
Festival in London on November
16 for a day of culture, fashion,
tech, business and opinion. Hear
how Monzo CEO Tom Blomfieldbuilt a millennial brand; learn the
secret to plant-based cooking
with Anna Jones; debate the
future of feminism with Laura
Bates, founder of the Everyday
Sexism Project.We’ll also be discussing
fashion’s sustainability problem,
how to turbocharge your career,
and politics in the age of protest.
Find out more and buy tickets at:
ftnextgen.comFT NextGen Festival
How to choose your
friends wisely
anan GaneshJ
Citizen of nowhere
Shakespeare’s audiences
took home his words as
surely as if they’d beencarrying a book
NOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 11/20191/ - 15:14 User:andrew.higton Page Name:WKD20, Part,Page,Edition:WIN, 22, 1