Very Best of Wales Arts Review Volume 1
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What is a Critic? The Evil of Violence Conversation Gary Raymond explores the nature Cerith Mathias looks at Steph Power talks of arts criticism in a letter the Wales Window of to WNO’s David addressed to the future Birmingham, Alabama Pountney Wales Arts Review The Very Best of Wales Arts Review Volume 1 The Very Best of the Wales Arts Review: Volume 1 1 Wales Arts Contents Review Senior Editor Gary Raymond Managing Editor Phil Morris A Letter Addressed to the Future: Design Editor Up Front 3 What is a Critic? Dean Lewis Gary Raymond Fiction Editor Features 5 The Birth of a Nation: DW Griffith’s Distortion of History and Its Legacy by Phil Morris John Lavin 8 The Poet and the Public Intellectual by Dylan Moore Music Editor 11 Wales, the Artist and Society: The Legacy of Beca by Sara Rhoslyn Moore Steph Power 13 The Deep Sigh: Meditations Upon Haiku by Paul Chambers Web Editor 15 A Tribute to Dannie Abse: Goodbye, Twentieth Century Ben Glover by Adam Somerset 16 Occupy Gezi: The Cultural Impact by James Lloyd Associate Editors 21 Oh, Newport, My Lionheart: 30 years of Music and Nightlife in the Cerith Mathias City of Cider and Steel by Craig Austin Craig Austin 26 Dylan Thomas: The Industry of Tragedy and the Antithetical Mask by Gary Raymond Laura Wainwright 30 The Landscapes of Language by Trey McCain 33 From Olympia to the Valleys: What Riot Grrrl did and didn’t do for me by Rhian E Jones All banners 37 ‘Almost like a world on its own': Wales Arts Review goes to Festival designed by Dean No.6 by John Lavin Lewis, except Dark 40 To the Detriment of Us All: The Untouched Legacy of Arthur Room by Anna Koestler and George Orwell by Gary Raymond Metcalfe, which 43 Against the Evil of Violence – The Wales Window of Alabama by Cerith Mathias was taken from ‘The Brouhers’ by 46 Deeds Not Words by Ben Glover Ric Bower. 49 David Pountney : Schoenberg, Verdi and Issues of ‘Faith’ by Steph Power PDF Designer 54 In Conversation with Gruff Rhys by Sarah King Ben Glover 56 Dark Room by Anna Metcalfe 60 Halloween Special: ‘Like Water Through Fingers’ by Carly Holmes The Very Best of the Wales Arts Review: Volume 1 2 A Letter Addressed to the Future: What is a Critic? by Gary Raymond n the final episode of Julian Barnes’ 1989 book, The said, then we write for similar reasons, and we write criti- History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, titled ‘The cism because it is the next step on from discursiveness; it Dream’, the protagonist finds himself in a Heaven, his is the purest form of debate, crystallised passion. every desire catered for by a dedicated celestial personal Critics are not journalists, (although they are often assistant. Perhaps predictably, the protagonist spends mistaken for journalists by artists, the public, and, often, by some time working his way through the fantasies his time actual journalists). Critics are not outsiders, they are not on earth would not or could not accommodate. He sleeps those who cannot; they are the artists, the thinkers, who with women, those whom he had known and those further trawl through the embers while the firestarters are asleep. beyond his reach. He takes the opportunity to meet his Criticism is a conversation, and the places where criticism heroes, and then to encounter history’s giants. After what is published are the dark oaky pubs, the bohemian coffee must be aeons in this timeless domain, he turns to his houses, the late night wine-singed debates around the assistant and declares that he is bored; he has done dinner tables; they are the places that host the best conver- everything he could ever have wanted to do, and much sations you have ever had, ever wanted to have, or one more besides. He has climbed every mountain and sailed day hope to. every sea. What’s next? His assistant takes him to a ‘Criticism’, that label we give the speech of the engaged heavenly cleric to answer this question. His options are artisan committed to paper, is simply an extension of the two: he can either cease to exist (he isn’t so sure of this purest connection that we, as humans, have with our pathway) or he can read every book ever written. The creative processes. When Jean Genet was locked in his people who read books, he is told, are the ones who tend French prison he began to collect small pieces of brown to last the longest in Heaven. The protagonist asks what scrap paper, on which he wrote, in pencil, the whole of Our happens after that? Well, says the cleric, once you have Lady of the Flowers, one of the greatest novels of the spent the ages reading every book ever written, then you twentieth century. He did so because of the need to do so, get to spend even longer discussing those books with the the need to be part of the eternal conversation. When a others who have lasted that long. You can take forever prison guard found the writings he burned them. Genet arguing about books, he is told. started again, and recreated the novel, knowing it would It is perhaps worth thinking of this parable whenever the never be read, never be published, and would no doubt be question that sits atop this essay makes it into a conversa- burned again. (It was published in 1951 and duly banned). tion. The consumers of literature inherit the Kingdom of What is the need to have this conversation with the page? Heaven, or at least inhabit its pubs and coffee dens. Is it obsessional? Is it insanity? Or is it the thing that keeps If art, if writing literature, is talking to yourself, then us sane? The eternal conversation, whatever, is the thing. criticism is a conversation with whomever you like; your Critics have had a hand in changing things just as the best friend, your greatest enemy, the girl you never got or artists have. Susan Sontag is as important to photography the girl you’re grateful to have ended up with. I’ve never for her 1977 book On Photography as any of the great met a writer I’ve liked whose top-of-the-list conversation photo journalists who preceded it. John Berger’s Ways of topic is their own work. We swirl around books, around Seeing changed not only the way people look at paintings, plays and paintings, in them and out of them, as writers. but altered the way art is taught in universities. Kenneth And we never write anything that impresses us more than Tynan and Harold Hobson, rival theatre critics something somebody else has written. We always want to at The Observer and Sunday Times respectively, found an write the story that another person has nabbed and nailed. unlikely union of outlook when they marked the profound Every writer fell in love with art before they wrote their first genius of Waiting for Godot for a confused and disgruntled sentence, before they decided it was literature for them. public when Beckett’s masterpiece came to London in The great critics of art and culture are almost always 1955. The reviews changed theatre, they made the world practitioners first and foremost, and all the best practition- realise that Beckett was a major figure, and Beckett, as we ers are consumers of the art of others before they are all know, changed everything. drawn to the blank page themselves. In short, we are all Tynan, who rarely wrote about his craft as a critic, did readers, be it of books or images or soundscapes, and it is once write a response to the publication of a collection of never satisfying to keep these experiences to ourselves. If essays by American critic Theodore L Shaw (author of we read to know we are not alone, as CS Lewis famously such companionable titles as War on Critics and The The Very Best of the Wales Arts Review: Volume 1 3 Hypocrisy of Criticism). Tynan, arguably the finest theatre its current health. It is refilling its veins with some potent critic of the twentieth century, wrote, stuff. There is a rumble, the type most commonly associat- ed with the coming of a storm; the filing cabinet rattling What counts is not their [critics’] opinion, but the art moments before the earthquake. The arts in Wales are with which it is expressed. They differ from the about to enter an unprecedented era of creative excel- novelist only in that they take as their subject- lence, a seismic movement that will provide a significant matter life rehearsed, instead of life unrehearsed. platform that is visible way beyond the borders Wales has The subtlest and best-informed of men will still be held on to so dearly for so long. It cannot happen without a bad critic if his style is bad. It is irrelevant whether criticism and criticism of the highest calibre. It cannot his opinion is ‘right or ‘wrong’: I learn more from happen without passion, intellectualism, elitism. It will not George Bernard Shaw when he is wrong than I do happen with star ratings (a fishing line designed specifical- from Clement Strong when he is right. ly to catch the smallest fish), advertorials or soft porn in the margins. Great criticism is as important as the art that And here is the weight behind the blade:- inspires it and the Critic is the writer who cannot give up the conversation.