It was virtually impossible to find a hotel room in London last week, much less a brutalist closet in a designer boutique. Black turtlenecks, WAGs, Russians and BMW courtesy cars were scaring the wildlife in Regent’s Park, temporary home to the fifth Frieze Art fair. Over 70,000 ordinary people paid £18 to struggle though the turnstiles of this multi-ringed circus. Inside, more than 150 galleries hawked good, bad and ordinary contemporary art at extraordinary prices.
Continue reading ‘Prospect at the Frieze’
Author Archive for John Kelly
Dimitri Klein sold his Paris-based advertising agency on the crest of the wave that preceded the bursting of the dotcom bubble. He spent five years at Auroville—the utopian spiritual community near Pondicherry, Tamil Nadu, founded by Sri Aurobindo and “Mother” Mirra Alfassa—thinking about the big picture and formulating his plan for an “experimental” hotel. The Dune eco-resort was due to launch on 6 January 2005. The Tsunami washed it away on New Year’s Day. Nobody was killed, but the local economy was devastated and the Coramandel coast was blighted as a tourist destination.
Dimitri’s time in Auroville clearly lent him paranormal resources. The Tsunami wrecked both the Dune and the adjacent fishing villages. As a French citizen, he did not qualify for aid from the Indian government while, as an expat, he got no help from France. He raised the cash to rebuild from friends and fellow spiritual travellers—and out of this misfortune has arisen a truly revolutionary Dune Mark 2.
The Dune is a collection of 35 stylised beach huts: Keralan palm houses with surreal garden portals, lighting columns made of recycled plastic water bottles, brutalist concrete structures designed by a German architect and even a suite atop a water tower—voted India’s most exotic honeymoon location—surrounding a palm-fronded restaurant and glass-sided conference centre. An ancient Brahmin travellers’ hostel is in the process of re-assembly, stone by stone, on the complex. A blue swimming tank with overlapping sides near a deserted beach accessed by metal doors and an ayurvedic spa and yoga centre, in traditional Keralan style, supervised by an authentic Yogi (Dr “Bobby”) and staffed by Keralans, complete the eclectic picture. Food is grown on the Dune’s organic farm, irrigated by recycled waste water, heated when necessary for showers by solar energy. The beachfront tree line, swept away by the Tsunami, has been replanted. A fair number of villagers work for the Dune, which recycles profits to fund a school for fishermen and a residential academy in Chennai where kids are taught textile and fashion skills then placed in gainful employment.
Continue reading ‘Out of the Tsunami came the Dune’
I was gifted with glorious weather yesterday on my first visit to Glyndebourne—and to opera of any sort, actually. On the downside, I was obliged to suffer Tristan and Isolde, not one of Wagner’s cheeriest musicals, performed ably but in expressionist style on a static set reminiscent of the swirly vortex of the 1960s TV series The Time Tunnel. The hypnotist’s disc effect of the backdrop combined with the impenetrable German warbling (though Glyndebourne has a karaoke translation screen above the stage to tell you that they’re singing “we are doomed to perpetual night” for the umpteenth time) sent me into a deep sleep almost immediately.
Act One ended with Tristan and Isolde sharing a potion which both believed to be poison, but to their horror (and mine) transpired to be a love potion, condemning us to Act Two, during which they whinge about the miserability of still being alive and enraptured. Tristan falls on his betraying friend’s sword at the end of the second act, but this still leaves an hour for Islode to tell us at length how fed up she is before she expires of a broken heart.
Wagner was apparently one of Freud’s earliest patients and was in a particularly fragile state when he wrote this opera. I was in a state of shock at the price of the ticket and mused that, while our August cover story on “Pop Economics” took the live music business to task for premium pricing, at least you generally got some kerrang for your cash. Had my opera cherry been popped by something less demanding with a tad more movement, perhaps I’d feel better about paying £185 to sit in the dark for six hours in a monkey suit on a glorious afternoon, but as things stand, I’m fairly sure that I’m too thick for opera.
That much said, Glyndebourne is a wonderful anthropological experience and something which anyone but me deserves to do at least once. Nobody does privilege better than the English Rich—men bedecked as penguins, ladies in Mitford, languid and fragrant on the lawns of an English stately home. Perfectly white fluffy sheep gazed and grazed, separated by a ha-ha from the picnic tables, some attended by butlers, where dinner-jacketed toffs and pretenders such as I ate and drank and emphasised the growing gap between have and have-less in New Labour’s cultural utopia. Not so much “never had it so good” as “never before in the field of human endeavour has so much been owned by so few for doing so little” was my view, perhaps somewhat tainted by the overflowing chalice of Cornish/Irish melancholy done to a turn in German which awaited in the gloaming within.
But the difference between the average GLC sponsored pop festival at Finsbury Park, apart from the absence of the obligatory Shane McGowan, Indian drumming and a random 1960s Ska band introduced by Ken Livingstone (pace Tristan, opera has suddenly seemed like a good idea) is that the posh folk take their rubbish home. Yes, the rich are different. Nary a Waitrose carrier bag, Pol Roger bottle or Kettle’s hand cut crisp packet to be seen on the camomile lawn as the culture-sated revellers departed in their 4×4s and helicopters. And most of us didn’t have butlers.
UPDATE: For an alternative view on on Tristan and Isolde by folks who like Wagner, see these Guardian and Telegraph reviews.
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