On the game

Can it actually be the case that some governments – from local councils to Parliaments – really believe that it’s ever going to be possible to stop women selling their bodies to men? No country in the history of man- and womankind has ever succeeded in doing this, and none ever will. The question is how you deal with the situation in a civilized manner.

Every solution has its problems and difficulties, the main ones stemming of course from the money which is to be made by organizing the business of prostitution, and which attracts gangsters of every shape and colour. In a way, the individual woman working from home is in the ideal situation, being precisely in the positon of any woman selling a skill of any kind – except that it seems inevitable that unless she is extremely fortunate or careful she is likely to attract the attention of some man who will attempt to extract money from her in one way or another. The ideal situation for individual women might well be a legal licensing system which would regard her as a private businessperson, subject to taxation and the full protection of the law. A problem is of course that a young woman coming into the business cannot always afford to rent a room in a reasonably safe area. Maybe a government small business grant?

It should be the case, and to some extent is the case that a system of legalized brothels works well at least as far as the protection of the sex workers is concerned. But again the large amount of money to be made from prostitution attracts gangsters who force young women ‘on the game’ – often illegal immigrants or young women who have come to a country as refugees. A much more pragmatic and sympathetic approach by law-makers and the police is undoubtedly badly needed, as well as a more careful evaluation of the individual situation in various countries, which at present take very different views of the problem.

Those who oppose the legalization of brothels seem to me to fail to put forward a convincing case; but it’s a case made more understandable by the fact that those who do license brothels go on to take a very odd view of how they should be run and where they should be allowed to function, and situations vary from the huge brothels which have come into being in Europe to some small houses in Australia which are almost a cottage industry.

Local authorities agonize much about the problem of illegal brothels – massage parlours which often look externally perfectly respectable, but where ‘full sex’ is very often on offer from individual young women behind the closed door of the massage room. In a system where heavy fees are paid by legal brothels, a laissez-faire attitude to the massage parlours is questionable, but in some ways not altogether a bad thing, allowing a young woman to work as a perhaps ‘amateur’ prostitute as she would from her own room at home – but under safer conditions. The extent to which the management takes, or doesn’t take a cut of her additional income, and the tax implications is an open question.

Just one more thing to add: the public attitude to the problem, despite a general permissiveness where private sexual behaviour is concerned, is often unhelpful, and there seems no prospect of any improvement – if greater tolerance is considered an improvement, which of course is not always the case where the religious right is concerned. The ‘moral’ objection is easier to understand and deal with than simple foolishness – such for instance as a paroxysm of fury because a brothel is ‘too near a school’. Why anyone should think that infants at school would be affected by the sight of men or women entering or leaving a particular door near their school (unless of course it has a neon sign saying BROTHEL, is a mystery to me. Older boys and girls will presumably, in this day and age, know about prostitution – if they don’t there’s something wrong with the education system - and though they may have a prurient interest in the situation, it won’t be a harmful one. Indeed, inviting a young prostitute to come to a school and give a talk about her life and sex in general might be the very best form of sex education.

Now there’s a thought.

It ain’t, I fear, going to happen.

Give us a tune, Jay Lo

Changing fashions, if one lives to be, what, past sixty or so, become very confusing particularly in music and visual art, I find. I understood and somewhat appreciated the idea that rather than simply copying nature – landscape, conventional portrait, and so on – there is something to be said for an artist creating a vision that is the artist’s own – the artist as god, I suppose. The problem is that very few totally abstract paintings convey anything to me except perhaps some notion of the artist’s personal relationship with colour and form, which becomes pretty boring pretty soon, rather in the way that poésie concrète becomes boring because the shape is usually inimical to the language and really adds nothing to it. In music, the move away from what might be called ‘tunefulness’ seems to me to be deeply depressing – it’s resulted more or less in the death of jazz, which has now become so abstract that the genre has become deeply unfashionable and neglected (certainly in the USA), and in classical music has proved so unprofitable that composers are resignedly turning back to some idea of form and melody. (Though of course the music of a composer who really has something to say – say, Stravinsky – does almost always reveal ‘a tune’ in the sense of a cluster of notes which impress themselves on the memory and follow one around for days like a faithful dog). As for popular music – don’t get me started. Has anyone in the last ten, fifteen years or so written a pop song which can actually be whistled in the street? Well, maybe they have, but if so it’s eluded me; certainly it seems that the really vastly popular pop songs rely now on performance and lyrics rather than anything which could actually be called a tune. I have no objection to watching Jay Lo’s gyrations, or to her remarkable  wardrobe or lack of it – but I can’t be relied on to sing any of her numbers in the shower.

It’s now occurred to me that this is a deeply reactionary blog, in a tone which I recognise to be almost exactly the tone my parents adopted when talking about the Beatles.

Oh, dear.

Cruel music

‘It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness & of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment & never satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature, and everlasting beauty of monotony. And the essentially “pretty” colours of the normal orchestral palate are used to paint this extraordinary picture of loneliness. And there is nothing morbid about it. The same harmonic progressions that Wagner used to colour his essentially morbid love-scenes are used here to paint a serenity literally supernatural. I cannot understand it – it passes oveer me like a tidal wave – and that matters not a jot either, because it goes on for ever, even if it is never performed again – that final chord is printed on the atmosphere.’

- Benjamin Britten (in a letter).

Cancerian women have bigger parts!

Qualities of the Sign Cancer   Is the onely house of the Moon, and is the first Sign of the Watry or Northern Triplicity, is Watry, Cold, Moyst, Flegmatick, Feminine, Nocturnal, Moveable, a Solstice Signe, mute and slow of Voyce, Fruitful, Northerne.

Diseases   It signifies Imperfections all over, or in the Brest, Stomack and Paps, weak Digesnion, cold Stomack, Ptifick, salt Flegms, roten Coughs, dropsicall Humours, Impostumations in the Stomach.

Places Cancer signifieth   The sea, great Rivers, Navigable Waters; but in the Inland Countries it notes places neer Rivers, Brooks Springs, Wels, Cellars in Houses, Wash-houses, Marsh grounds, Ditches with Rushes, Sedges, Sea banks, Trenches, Cisternes.

Shape and Description   Generally a low and smal stature, the upper parts of more bignesse then the lower, a round Visage; sickly, pale, a whitely Complexion, the Haire a sad browne, little Eyes, prone to have many Children, if a Woman.

Kingdoms, Countries and Cities subject to Cancer   Scotland, Zealand, Holland, Prussia, Algier, Constantinople, Venice, Millan, Genoa, Amsterdam, Yorke, Magdeburg, Wittenburg, Saint-Lucas, Cadiz.

-          William Lilly, Christian Astrology (1647)

Poldark, my 'andsomes

I’m now nearing the end of volume nine of the Poldark series – no, not the TV series, but the novels by Winston Graham from which TV has now taken two large bites. The books are (‘of course!’, did I hear someone exclaim?) immeasurably better than the television series, though the first of these was excellent. The novels are examples of great story-telling at its most engrossing. Almost everyone I’ve spoken to about the books has said, ‘You just can’t put them down, can you?” Absolutely true.

I don’t know what readers outside the English Westcountry make of some of the dialogue, however – even maybe some young Westcountry readers. One of my great pleasures has been in being reminded of dialect speech which I’d almost completely forgotten from my childhood: ‘little tacker’ for very small child, ‘teazy’ for irritable and out of sorts, ‘my lover’ for any member of the family – and Graham had a marvelous ear for that, and for local pronunciation and comments: ‘Ais’ for ‘yes’, ‘dunnee’ for ‘don’t you’, ‘See ee drekly’ for ‘see you soon’ – ‘directly’ - and so on. The disappearance of local terms – not just Cornish – is very sad, because so many of them are wonderful. I remember from my grandfather ‘dubbit’ for a short, tubby person; ‘gaddle’, to drink down a beer too quickly; ‘mazed’ for wild, slightly mad; ‘pindy’ describing meat that was ‘off’ – and the wonderful ‘airy-mouse’ for a bat.

Thas all fur now, my lovers.

Who's afraid of Michael Tippett?

Just presented a concert - on FineMusicfm.com - culminating in Michael Tippett's fourth symphony. How many listeners were left to hear the final exhaled breath, I wonder?  Even Lloyd Webber is more tuneful. But it's a facinating work, and I programmed it in the hope that maybe one or even two people might overheard the beginning, or a bit in the middle, and thought 'Ho!" - or something of the soret - and listened until the end, and will maybe even search out more Tippett (seriously undervalued and outpaced by Britten). Maybe all I'm doing is putting listeners off a station which will broadcast such stuff, though? Well, I do from time to time programme a concert consisting entirely of top pops- Beehoven's fifth, Mendelssohn's violin conctero, the Overture to Candide. So horses for courses, and if the goign gets a bit tough occasionally, I'm hopefully counting on one or two people staying the the saddle. But hey, if I'm going to start sing that kind of language, it's time to go.