Genius on stage

This evening, in a perfect antidote to a busy day, I took N° 1 sprog to see a living legend at the Ancienne Belgique; Jeff Beck. He did not disappoint. A basically modest man and a notorious perfectionist, Beck lets his guitar do the talking, and how! A generous set saw him perform a number of his rock-and-roll classics from the past decade, together with more lyrical numbers from recent albums (his encore was Nessun Dorma). He had an excellent backing team on stage with him. We particularly enjoyed bass player Rhonda Smith’s performance (see also here) – she is clearly destined for greater things – but drummer Narada Michael Walden and keyboard player Jason Rebello were also excellent. Among trade mark numbers, we got A Day in the Life, and Somewhere Over the Rainbow. My only regret is that he didn’t play my all time favourite – Nadia. Eric Clapton once explained that Beck’s genius is, more than many guitarists’, in his fingers; he long ago abandoned plectrums and picking and you can indeed see him caressing the strings with his thumb and fingers, toying with the harmonics and wooing distinctive sounds out of the instrument. Nadia is all slide and vibrato bar but the man also has fingers of steel in his left hand. Beck can sign off this post, with his haunting Corpus Christi from his latest album, Emotion and Commotion.

Presenting the team

Today was a very big day for the Committee and for its administration. As I have described in previous posts, next week will see the constitutive plenary session of the 2010-2015 mandate, and no less than 102 of the Committee’s full complement of 344 members – almost one third – will be brand new. Today and tomorrow we are welcoming these new members to what we have dubbed ‘information days’, designed variously to: enable them to get all of the bureaucratic formalities out of the way (insurance, security passes, lockers, etc) in a ‘one stop shop’; to help them to understand how the Committee functions and to explain about their rights and prerogatives; to explain a series of practical matters, from the layout of our buildings to how the voting machines work; to meet sitting members; and to meet the administration. This afternoon I chaired two information sessions (two so that we could cover all of the different languages in interpretation) and presented the future President, Staffan Nilsson, and then the members of the Committee’s management board. Everything went swimmingly and there was a positive buzz about the whole day. As I never cease repeating, you never get a second chance to make a first impression, and I was proud of my colleagues for I think we amply demonstrated a simple truth; we are very much looking forward to working with our new members, just as we are much looking forward to getting our ‘old’ members back next week!

Just over seven years ago my good friend, mentor, colleague, political buddy and academic sparring partner, John Fitzmaurice, passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. A memorial lecture was established in his memory and this year I received the great honour and privilege of being invited to deliver the lecture. It was supposed to take place this coming Wednesday. I wanted to have something to say, rather than having to say something, and I wanted it to be relevant to John’s memory as well as being relevant to the audience in front of me (which would in any case have had many of John’s former friends and colleagues among it). In other words, I did not want to wing it on the basis of a few ideas, but rather to develop a sustained argument and to deliver it with some passion. So I have not only been working hard but I have been feeling increasingly strongly about the things I wanted to say. Put another way, I have been building up to the big moment. But yesterday afternoon, quite suddenly, the big moment had to be postponed; the venue is no longer available. It is a novel and strange experience. In part, it feels like a postponed exam or interview (I always approach such events with what I like to believe is a healthy degree of trepidation), in part, there is a sense of frustration. But  now there is all this passion in me and there is nowhere for it to go in the near future (the lecture will probably not now take place until January).  I suppose it will just have to leak away slowly. It’s a strange feeling.

Today was the 8th World Day against capital punishment. In two-thirds of the world’s countries the practice has either been abolished or abandoned. Among European countries, only Belarus still has the death penalty. Of the 58 countries that continue to authorise the death penalty, 18 are known to have carried out executions in 2009. Sadly, those countries include the United States. On this issue, I believe, Europe can, and does, set an example for the rest of the world, whether ‘Europe’ means the European Union or the broader grouping of the Council of Europe. All too often the existence of the death penalty is accompanied by an asbence of procedural guarantees. As the EU High Representative, Cathy Ashton, put it, ‘There is no room for complacency – every execution is one too many.’

At my writers’ workshop last Monday I read out a piece (cut-and-pasted below) about a David Bowie cover version of the song Wild is the Wind. As Clive James wrote in North Face of Soho (see this post: http://www.martinwestlake.eu/north-face-of-soho/), ‘The dizzy speed with which the echo of a sense memory kills time continues to astound me.’  My piece was about how, if I closed my eyes, Bowie’s 1976 recording of the song still immediately transported me back into a South Harrow living room. But I realised in retrospect that it was also about the metamorphosis of a song (written by Dimitri Tiomkin and Ned Washington) through three incarnations, from the 1957 original (performed by Johnny Mathis), to Nina Simone’s sultry 1968 version, to David Bowie’s sublime (to my mind) 1976 rendition. All three versions are good in their own way. There have been other covers (including some notably crappy ones) but, as I wrote to a friend, for me Simone’s and Bowie’s transformations of the sunny fifties ballad into something so much more lyrical and, well, wild are good examples of their genius (if that’s not too strong a word). In any case, I have decided to post my exercise below and you can listen to the three versions to which I refer on You Tube:

Today has been a spectacularly beautiful day. This afternoon I drove down to Furfooz, on the Lesse river, to join a group of Michel Claes’s friends and family (see this post). As an instructor, Michel and his colleagues brought their charges, young people from troubled backgrounds, to a gite here, where they would holiday with walks, canoeing and rock climbing. As a top notch rock climber and mountaineer, Michel would wind down by scaling the nearby cliffs, overlooking a large oxbow loop in the Lesse. So we walked through the woods to the Aiguilles de Chaloux, shuffled out to the rocky promontory you can see in the picture, and talked about Michel and his life. It was almost as though he was working his way up from below and we were waiting for him to appear over the cliff edge…

This evening we watched The Swimmer (starring Burt Lancaster). It’s one of those off-the-beaten-track cinematic gems, like The Hustler (starring Paul Newman), Jeremiah Johnson (starring Robert Redford) or Little Big Man (starring Dustin Hoffman) that attract a quiet cult following and really ought to be better known. Based on a short story by John Cheever – but much better than it, the plot’s basic conceit is the metaphorical swim by an apparently popular and successful advertising agent, Ned Merrill (Lancaster), across an affluent corner of Connecticut, from swimming pool to swimming pool. It is an allegorical tale, replete with metaphors. As the middle-ageing Ned swims on he encounters existential insights, experiences growing doubts and faces increasing hostility from former friends and girlfriends. We realise all is not well… Lancaster gives a fine performance, the slickness of his advertising man’s charm contrasting with his balding pate and slacking muscles.

The dog took me for a walk in the arboretum again yesterday morning. It was lovely weather; a blue sky, cool and crisp air. We walked through a series of pine plantations and then I realised that we were in the midst of a plantation of monkey puzzle trees. My picture, taken with my GSM, doesn’t really do the scene justice. Anyway, a sort of cod revelation came to me. In my childhood the monkey puzzle tree was an occasional ‘novelty’ ornamental tree, to be found rarely in suburban gardens and always pointed out by parents because of its rarity and strangeness. But of course, where monkey puzzle trees come from they are not at all strange. On the contrary, they are normal and there are forests of them in Chile and Argentina. There is a metaphor in there somewhere.

Two miracle workers and a Secretary General

When I joined the European Economic and Social Committee in late 2003 as Head of Communication, I went on a communication course alongside some of my new colleagues. The course was about internal communications and the trainer was a great enthusiastist for internal newsletters as a way of fostering fellow feeling and providing a means for dispersed staff to learn about one another. In the coffee break I learnt that the Committee had once upon a time had such an internal newsletter (‘Echosoc‘), but that, relying purely on volunteers, it had slowly petered out and then disappeared. Ever since then I have dreamt of re-creating such a newsletter and once I became Secretary General I realised that, if I pushed hard enough, I could realise my dream. Two weeks ago, thanks to the good offices of the Communication Department, the Human Resources Directorate and the Staff Committee, a new internal newsletter, EESCoop, came into being, and at lunchtime today all of those involved in the creation of the first new number had a little celebratory moment together. I said a few words, as Secretaries General are expected to do, but from now on I want to have very little to do with EESCoop because, if it flourishes (as I fervently hope it will do so), it should be written by staff, for staff, about staff. Long may it prosper!

This is a forgotten post; one that I mostly wrote at the end of August, and then forgot to publish. So here it is. Basically, North Face of Soho was the last ‘holiday book’ I managed to read. NFoS is the fourth and, to date, last volume of Clive James’s Unreliable Memoirs. It is an altogether darker book than its predecessors. James grows up, properly. He becomes addicted (to marijuana). He encounters failure and, just as challengingly, he encounters success. He becomes a father and a family man… All of his memoirs are written with the considerable wisdom of hindsight and – freely acknowledged – bags of poetic lience. His witty aphorisms are still much to the fore but now his forensic intelligence is devoted less to humouristic accounts about growing up and much more to the twin processes of learning and writing together with choosing where to go in life – and why. At times it reads like a manual for the budding author: a writer ‘learns by falling short, and finding out why… Anyone who can write can write better … the most common and destructive mistake is to neglect the simple for the sake of the spectacular.’ What makes the book compelling is that, wit much to the fore, James does not flinch from honesty about his own failings. As he puts it, ‘…a book about growing wiser would be dangerously untrue if it suggested that there is always something charming about the attainment of self knowledge. Sometimes it is exactly like meeting the wrong stranger in a dark alley.’