Month: July 2021

Playing Monopoly as a child, I soon learned that being sent to jail was disadvantageous early in the game, since it prevented me from landing on unowned sites and taking the opportunity to buy them and build up my property empire.  By contrast, spending time in jail was highly advantageous later in the game since it offered me a safe-haven from where I could avoid the risk of landing on property sites – heavily developed with houses or hotels – owned by my competitors.  Being in jail, from time to time, was just part of playing the game, there was no shame involved.

Later in life, I learned about people who had gone to jail for reasons of principle.  Nelson Mandela spent twenty-seven years in prison for his opposition to the Apartheid regime, more than half of which were spent on Robben Island where he was forced to undertake hard labour in a quarry, and where he was allowed one visit – for thirty minutes – per year.  Martin Luther King Jr. wrote an open letter from Birmingham Jail in 1963, which became a key document of the American Civil Rights movement.   Mohandas Gandhi, one of King’s role models, had been a regular guest of British jails in South Africa and India, deliberately breaking unjust laws and accepting imprisonment as the consequence, to draw attention to the iniquities of colonial rule.  In 1846, Henry David Thoreau, from whose writings Gandhi would draw inspiration, spent a night in Concord jail for refusing to pay his taxes, which he feared would help to fund the American war against Mexico, to which he strongly objected.  If we assume that the laws are just and that the courts follow due process, then imprisonment is badge of shame, but there are occasions when the laws are not just and the legal processes are faulty, and in these cases, I came to understand, being sent to jail might be considered a badge of honour. 

Continue reading “Go to jail”

Here in the states, there’s an insurance company called GEICO – the Government Employees Insurance Company – which is owned by Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle). They’re known for their tongue in cheek advertisements, one of which currently involves a motivational speaker who teaches people to “not become their parents” when they become homeowners. The conceit is that once you buy a house, you’ll start wearing Members Only jackets, buy throw pillows with embroidered trite expressions, and stop knowing how to interact with wait staff at restaurants without speaking too loudly and asking embarrassing questions. It works, although how it relates to bundling auto and homeowners insurance does escape me. In any event – I’ve come to realise lately that I’ve descended into post-middle age crankiness: I’m writing on the local newspaper’s comment section.

Continue reading “Monopoly”

Not far from where I live in London there is a small museum dedicated to modern Italian art.  It was founded to display the collection of Erik and Salome Estorick, who lived in England for some years in the late 1940s and early 1950s, from where they travelled regularly to Italy to meet with artists and buy paintings and drawings.  In the museum’s permanent collection there are several works by Giorgio Morandi, the greatest European still-life painter of the twentieth century and, whenever I visit the museum, I like to spend some time in the room where his work is on display.  His etchings achieve a wonderful sense of depth by means of simple variations in the density of the lines, while in his paintings, with their narrow range of creamy blues, greys, and whites, he generates a curious combination of calmness and vitality. 

The English term “still-life” refers to paintings that portray neither the human figure nor the landscape, but everyday household objects: vases, glasses, and pots in Morandi’s work; other painters have included cutlery, bowls, dishes, flowers, fish, vegetables, fruit, musical instruments, pens, ink, manuscripts, and books. Still-life painting draws attention to the technical skill of the artist – the ability to represent light and shadow on a wide variety of shapes and surfaces – while also drawing attention to everyday objects to which we often pay little heed.  One of the best books of art criticism that describes the history and characteristics of the genre, by Norman Bryson, is called Looking at the Overlooked, which nicely captures the sense that these paintings are designed to remind us of what is familiar but routinely neglected.  Sometimes these artworks include hourglasses or clocks, to signal to the viewer the importance of the passage of time, and in other cases they include human skulls, to signal that life is finite.   The French name for the genre, nature morte, translates literally as “dead nature”, which make this point rather more bluntly than its euphemistic English equivalent: inert matter might sometimes be overlooked in its stillness, but organic matter is always in transit from birth to death.

Continue reading “Selfie”