Where's Willy?

At tonight’s meeting of my writers’ workshop fellow member Cleve Moffet came up with a wonderful ‘exercise’. Daniele da Volterra was an artist of considerable renown in his own lifetime, but he is now chiefly remembered for having painted prudish underpants on all the nude figures in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel (earning himself the nickname ‘Il Braghettone’, or ‘the breeches painter’). You can read Cleve’s account below (‘read the rest of this entry’), for he has kindly allowed me to host it on my blog. It is yet another example of truth being stranger than fiction. Cleve sent the following caveats and observations, but they do not detract from his witty account: ‘Let me warn you, though, that while the circumstances of poor Daniele da Volterra’s humiliation are true, I cannot vouch for the veracity of the sequence of popes I mention; they may be off by a decade or so. As for the figure of 117 for the male nudes that is only my approximation after a cursory inspection of the distant ceiling. Vasari was one of D. da V.’s many admirers, closing his Life of him with the words, “Daniello [Daniello Ricciarelli is the name he was born with] was a man of good character, but neglected everything from his devotion to art, and was a melancholy and solitary man.” Which must have made him all the more sensitive to ridicule.’

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An enlarged President

It is the beginning of a plenary session week. In such weeks the Committee follows a familiar rhythm: today, Directors’ meeting early in morning, followed by a ‘pre-session’ meeting of the administration, followed by a meeting of the enlarged Presidency. Tomorrow, preparatory meetings of the Bureau’s members by Group, followed in the afternoon by the Bureau meeting itself, and then on Wednesday and Thursday the plenary session. The plenary will host two VIPs. The first is László Andor, the Commissioner responsible for employment, social affairs and inclusion. The second is the new President of the French Economic, Social and Environmental Council, Jean-Paul Delevoye. The French Council, created in the 1920s, is a sort of ‘uncle’ to the EESC as it is, indeed, to all other such Councils. Monsieur Delevoye is coming with a group of office-holders and colleagues and we are much looking forward to meeting and hosting them. Today’s preparatory meetings passed off well; the well-oiled machine is ticking over nicely.

Thanks to my friend, Kjell (to whom go grateful thanks), I have been reading Sarah Bakewell’s excellent How to Live:  A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. Inventor of the ‘essay’ as we would understand it, Montaigne was an agreeable man who meandered through life with curiosity and constantly reflected about himself and his experiences and the world about him. He wrote these reflections out in a series of around one hundred essays, on such diverse themes as friendship and cannabilism and names and smells and cruelty and experience. As Bakewell informs readers towards the end of her biography, successive generations have found inspiration in Montaigne for different reasons and in different ways but somehow the spirit of his essays and his everyman philosophy of life have remained pertinent. Virginia Woolf described this phenomenon as a ‘chain of minds’: “All share a quality that can be thought of as ‘humanity’: the experience of being a thinking, feeling being who must get on with an ordinary human life… even the most ordinary existence tells us all we need to know: ‘I set forth a humble and inglorious life; that does not matter. You can tie up all moral philosophy with a common and private life just as well as with a life of richer stuff.’ Indeed, that is just what a common and private life is: a life of the richest stuff imaginable.” (pp. 317-318) It’s a fine book about a man described by one journalist as ‘Europe’s first blogger’.

We spent the morning walking up a mountain again.  We didn’t get to a summit, but we climbed from one refuge to another, so it was a modest bit of warming up. It’s a strange period. In the valleys cuckoos are cooing and the azaleas are in magnificent bloom but up in the mountains there are still snow banks and fields prettily full of snowdrops. At the second refuge the emergency winter quarters were open so we sheltered in there from the rain. After brunch (why does simple bread and cheese taste so good under such circumstances?) the clouds cleared and we saw what was looming over us. We’ve got his name, we’ve taken his picture and he’s on the list. To get up him, though, we’ll either have to start very early or start from the refuge… Che bella bestia!

Me having sat at Hanif Kureishi’s knee, as it were, just a few weeks ago, tonight we watched My Beautiful Launderette (1985, directed by Stephen Frears). Kureishi spoke about his screenplay for this film in the context of a discussion about whether writers should consciously write with popularity in mind. He distinguished between hoping and aiming. Clearly, most writers hope for recognition of their art. But to aim for success is to compromise artistic integrity. You should, Kureishi insisted, write what you want to write. Success will come if it wants to. After all, he continued, who would have thought that a screenplay about a homosexual relationship between a skinhead and a young Pakistani entrepreneur trying to make a going concern out of a launderette in Thatcher’s Britain would become a major cult success? By implication, if he had been aiming for success, he would not have written such a screenplay, but it was what he had wanted to write about. The film, inevitably, is a bit dated now, but it remains an entertaining portrait and a touching analysis of what it meant to be an outsider during the transitional 1980s. Kureishi performs a neat balancing act with his script, which is neither judgemental nor plot-based. Even so, the film gets a bit leggy at times and I think Frears could have tightened it up a bit.

In the last edition of Newsweek there was a ‘where and what next for Arnie?’ article and in the middle of it there was the following passage: “Terry Tamminen, who headed California’s Environmental Protection Agency before serving as Schwarzenegger’s cabinet secretary, has told him that he should be president of a newly reconstituted European Union. “In the next few years, the EU will be looking for a much more high-profile president—somebody who can unify Europe,” Tamminen says. “The French won’t want a German, and the Germans won’t want an Italian. How about a European-born person who went off to America and … could return to be the Washington or Jefferson of a new unified Europe?”” Suspiciously close to 1st April though the article may be, it does embody an underlying truth. If one day the EU were to equip itself with a US-style President (and so far it hasn’t) then a Schwarzenegger-type figure would surely be a particularly viable candidate.

Talking to Janos

This morning I learnt the terribly sad news that Janos Toth, a former EESC member (Hungary, Various Interests) and distinguished President of the TEN Section and currently a delegate of the Committee’s Consultative Committee on Industrial Change had passed away in his hotel room here in Brussels. Characteristically, he was here to attend a meeting of the Association of Former Members of the Committee, for Janos was an enthusiastic and passionate member of the Committee and supporter of the concept of participatory democracy and the importance of  civil dialogue. He was young, dynamic and committed and still had so much to give to Hungarian and European civil society. He will be deeply missed and our hearts go out to his family and friends.

Today is, to all intents and purposes, a beautiful spring day in Brussels, but in Belgium you can never really be sure about when spring has truly arrived. The Belgians themselves refer frequently to the Saints des Glaces – roughly mid-May – beyond which better weather is more-or-less assured and certainly no frosts should occur. In my neighbourhood we have two fairly reliable indicators of our own. One is a grand old walnut tree that is always the last tree to leaf and seems to wait until it is really sure that spring is on the way. The other is a curious phenomenon visible in the streets right now. Some sort of insect – a wasp? a fly? – burrows out from between the cobblestones and flies away, leaving a small pile of distinctively sandy soil (picture). I have never seen the creatures that do this (and I’d be interested to find out what they are) but, like the walnut tree, they seem to wait until spring is a certainty and over the past few days they have made their break for freedom.

This evening we watched La graine et le mulet , a French film (2007) directed by Abdellatif Kechiche (thanks to Béatrice O, who loaned us the DVD). Set in Sète, the film documents the life and times of sixty-something divorcee Monsieur Beiji, who loses his shipyard job and is determined to do his own thing by using his unemployment benefit to set up a dockside couscous restaurant on an old converted ship. He is helped to realise his dream by Rym, the daughter of his lover, a hotel owner, but he also needs the couscous-making skills of his former wife and the support of all of his children and in-laws. The actress playing Rym, Hafsia Herzi, turns in a brilliantly sultry performance and the scenes of couscous preparation – a sort of Algerian version of Babette’s Feast – are wonderfully realistic. The film is far too long (two-and-a-half hours) and its ending unsatisfactory, but the portrait of the simultaneous claustrophobia and solidarity of a close-knit immigrant community is compellingly and touchingly authentic.

This evening we strolled in the balmy city, sipped beers in the Grand Place, went to the Actors Studio to watch Dancing Dreams, then ate mussels at Chez Léon. All very Bruxellois, and all very enjoyable. The film, a documentary, was good fun and very touching. In 2008, just a few months before she would die of an unspecified cancer, the great German dancer and choreographer decided to reproduce her Kontakthof only, this time, instead of using a professional dance troupe she used a group of teenage volunteers who had never danced before and who didn’t know each other into the bargain. The film, a documentary, follows their progress through rehearsals to the performance, and hence away from inhibitions to self expression and from individualism to team spirit. There’s a lovely trailer here. When asked to express themselves fully, some of the the young dancers-to-be have much to express themselves about;  there is a Romany boy whose family escaped from the Balkan wars, a girl whose grandfather was burnt alive in those same wars, and another girl whose father died in a gas explosion. The collective adulation of these beautiful young people for the slender and dying Bausch is almost tangible. After such a rich life of creativity and artistic experience, what a wonderful way to live out your last days!