Every properly cultured person admires jazz, not necessarily in its rumbustious, earthy form, but certainly in its great moderns. The Duke himself, but above all Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie and their zillion followers. You have to, don't you, really? Well, sorry. I like early classical music and late classical music. I like opera, even Wagner these days. I like rock, pop, folk and (very much) the blues.
And then there's jazz. I don't mean the great singers, but the infuriatingly snazzy, oopla-poopla, jingly, endlessly self-referential up and down and roundabout stuff that takes itself sooo seriously and requires you to wear a martyred frown and a horrible striped jacket — and quite possibly unfortunate facial hair — to appreciate it.
What's it really about except showing off? Too many notes, as the Austrian emperor is supposed to have complained about Mozart. It doesn't make me excited, sad, wobbly, calm or indeed anything much. Jazz just goes up-down, back-forward, wurble, wurble — pointless. Friends have tried to open my ears. They're big enough, yes, but they aren't big enough for that stuff.
Stephen Hough, pianist, on Bach I'm quite embarrassed about this, but I don't like Bach. I admire him enormously, of course — who couldn't? Every bar he wrote is extraordinary. I hear people talking about the "universality" of it, and the "deep spirituality of it" and the expression and the romanticism, but it just doesn't reach through to me. I feel like a priest who's lost his faith. I really am meant to believe this, but somehow I don't.Occasionally I put the B Minor Mass on in the car thinking: "This is the greatest Mass ever written, get on with it," but within a couple of minutes my mind starts to wander.
I played Bach when I was learning, of course, but I always found the Romantic pieces more fun. That's something I thought I would grow out of, like someone who at first prefers a very sweet cream sherry rather than a drier one, but as we get older those things often change. Maybe I'm still a kid, but as yet I've not got to that stage. There's clearly some important screw missing in my musical mechanism.
Emily Maitlis, Newsnight presenter, on Romeo and Juliet
I think Romeo and Juliet is a terrible play and should be ditched in favour of West Side Story whenever possible. The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is, mainly, that it isn't a tragedy at all. It's just a postal mishap. Relevant to our times, perhaps, but hardly high drama. Basically, they fall in love (and we'll leave aside the paedophilic connotations of sex with a 13-year-old girl), run away and then come a cropper when a (fairly key) message fails to reach Romeo and it's suicide all round. Tragedy has to be about fatal flaws, about personal growth, about emotional annihilation — not a dicky delivery service and a hot-headed youth. These lovers had their wires crossed not their stars.
It's like hearing that someone died from tripping over a biscuit. It's odd and it's quite sad but more than anything it's just bloody ridiculous.
Nicky Haslam, interior designer, on Monty Python
It leaves me absolutely cold. Cleese and those other guys are completely up their own arses. It is humour made for dolts. I never made it through a complete episode of Flying Circus because it was so bad. I hate sacrilege too — so Life of Brian was an unfunny idea, too easy to sustain a whole film. It was the same with the Goons and Charlie Chaplin, who I could never stand — that kind of dopey, physically silly, male, oh-look-at-us humour. I prefer girls in backless dresses saying witty things in 1940s films, the kinds of movies that have a dry, crisp wit to them, and screwball comedies too. Python and its like rely on easy laughs — the parrot sketch is just ghastly — I prefer the kind of humour that creeps up on you, the kind that builds up so that, out of nowhere, you find yourself in hysterics. Humour should be subtle.
Jude Kelly, theatre director, on Rubens
I don't like Rubens. He's undoubtedly masterful technically. But I think there is a sentimentality to him and a sort of voluptuousness with regards to flesh — a combination of coyness and sexuality that I find very cloying and slightly disturbing. It's not that they are large; it's something about the way Rubens paints the texture of the flesh that is so clammy. I have always had the feeling that it's on the verge of titillation.
His cherubs seem far too knowing and they always seem to me to have a slightly sexual, devilish air. They always look as though they have eaten enormous amounts of chocolate. They seem to be the antithesis of spirituality, the way they prop themselves up with their head on their hands, sort of languorous. Where's their work ethic, that's what I want to know.
Edward Watson, principal dancer, Royal Ballet on The Nutcracker
I first danced in The Nutcracker when I was 17 and a pupil at the Royal Ballet Upper School. I joined the Royal Ballet the following year and then seemed to be in it almost every year for the next ten years. It feels as if I've danced practically every role in it — the Father, the Spanish dance, the Waltz of the Flowers, even the Sleigh Driver. I know every part inside out, so the whole thing drags along in a kind of Groundhog Day blur.
I danced the Nutcracker Prince in Tokyo a couple of years ago. I stood in the wings during the performance in a really uncomfortable outfit, feeling completely miserable. I promised myself there and then that that I wouldn't put myself through another one.
Matthew Parris, Times columnist, on the Beatles
I remember well enough the early Beatles in the 1960s. I was 14, a colonial boy in Africa, and listening to Jim Reeves, Ricky Nelson and Pat Boone — then along came these four lads from Liverpool, and everyone went crazy.
Exuberant, they said; a blast of fresh air. She loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. Darling, it's so marvellously simple! Youthful passion, careless energy, innocent art. The sound that finally broke the spell of the Second World War. The Mersey beat (er, where is Mersey?) putting Liverpool on the map.
Well, it left me cold. I just thought it was crass. All that banging about, boring, babyish tunes and noisy choruses. I slightly fancied George Harrison, but that was all.
Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, on Gilbert and Sullivan
I don't really like Gilbert and Sullivan, and that's partly because when I was a child in Birkenhead, my great uncle used to sing in amateur operatic society versions of The Mikado and a variety of other Gilbert and Sullivans, and I just don't like it. It brings back memories of sitting through — even though I should be very proud of my great uncle's voice — some fairly ghastly productions, and I just find it all rather twee.
Chris Addison, comedian, on Charles Dickens
To be fair to Dickens, he never really stood a chance with me because, like many middle-class children brought up in the 1970s and 1980s, my first real exposure to him was in the form of turgid, cardboardy BBC adaptations. These were pre-Andrew Davies times, remember, but even now for me Dickens is inextricably associated with the depressing back-to-school miasma of a dark Sunday evening. I've tried to get past this but I merely have to pick up a copy of one of his books and I can smell the Vosene of hair-washing night and the fear of knowing that I hadn't finished my homework. Not to mention the resentment of the fact that I was missing Buck Rogers on the other side.
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/specials/article6964184.ece
He fought the Nazis. He braved the Pacific. And he hated being called a hero. Jonathan Brown looks at the extraordinary career of Knut Haugland, the last Kon-Tiki survivor
A heavily decorated commando who escaped three times from the clutches of the Nazis, his bravery and endurance gave rise to one of the most enduring legends of the Second World War – one retold in spectacular style in a Hollywood movie.
Yesterday Haugland's successor as director of the Kon-Tiki Museum in Oslo, where thousands flock each year to relive the optimism and excitement of that intrepid voyage, announced that the former radio operator had succumbed to natural causes in a city hospital, closing the final chapter on an extraordinary life.
Haugland's death, following that of Heyerdahl himself in 2002, marks the passing of the last of the six-man crew that set sail from Callao in Peru in April 1947, bound several thousand nautical miles for the far-flung islands of Polynesia based on little more than an anthropological hunch. That journey set a new benchmark for modern adventurers, spawning an international best-selling book published in 66 languages and an Oscar-winning film in which Haugland played himself. It also helped popularise Heyerdahl's passionately held belief that the great oceans had been highways and not barriers for the movement of ancient seafaring civilisations.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/news/knut-haugland-a-reallife-adventure-story-1851472.html
Books by Chris Hedges, Thom Hartmann and Cass Sunstein suggest that we've nearly lost our sense of self-government. None show the way to get it back.
By Kirk Nielsen
I read the three books in less than two weeks; friends ask how that was possible. The trick is to avoid not only Facebook and Twitter but also: celebrity news, cable news, Oprah, Jerry Springer, American Idol, The Swan, other reality-TV shows, professional wrestling, violent pornography, positive psychology and right-wing Christian fundamentalism.
The latter list includes some of the spectacularly mind-numbing American pursuits that Chris Hedges examines in Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. Hedges submits that while they mesmerized large portions of the American citizenry, CEOs being paid millions of dollars a year to run companies that feed on taxpayer money usurped our government — with the help of elected officials bought by campaign contributions and tens of thousands of corporate lobbyists who now write many of the nation's laws.
"Those captivated by the cult of celebrity do not examine voting records or compare verbal claims with written and published facts and reports," Hedges writes. "The reality of their world is whatever the latest cable news show, political leader, advertiser, or loan officer says is reality. The illiterate, semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present. They do not understand the predatory loan deals that drive them into foreclosure and bankruptcy. They cannot decipher the fine print on credit card agreements that plunge them into unmanageable debt. They repeat thought-terminating clichés and slogans. They seek refuge in familiar brands and labels. ... Life is a state of permanent amnesia, a world in search of new forms of escapism and quick, sensual gratification."
The wider public might view investment bankers as 'vampire squid', as one commentator put it, but the newspaper of the business world has made him its 'person of the year'
Lloyd Blankfein, chairman and chief executive of Goldman Sachs, recently claimed that bankers were doing 'God's work'. Photograph: Chip East/Reuters
Hats off to the Financial Times for refusing to pander to lily-livered liberals. The pink paper has opined that its "person of the year" for 2009 is none other than Lloyd Blankfein, chief executive of the widely reviled Wall Street bank Goldman Sachs.
In the parallel universe inhabited by the FT, Blankfein is a hero - a "master of risk". The FT accepts that Blankfein has struggled to find an effective rebuttal of a deluge of public criticism unleashed on his bank.
But it says the former gold trader from the Bronx has "steered Goldman adeptly through the crisis, betting correctly that the global investment banks would survive the turmoil (with government help) and not be dismantled by regulators".
The FT's John Gapper continues: "The bank has stuck to its strengths, unashamedly taking advantage of the low interest rates and diminished competition resulting from the crisis to make big trading profits."
How charitable.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/andrew-clark-on-america/2009/dec/28/goldmansachs-financialtimes
Remember, as far as most of the Republican establishment is concerned, disgraced former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) is the ultimate "ideas man," if not a bona fide "visionary." National Journal recently asked Republican insiders to name "the most creative thinker" in the GOP. Gingrich was easily the biggest vote getter.
If ol' Newt is the intellectual Republican powerhouse, the GOP has cause for concern.
Newt Gingrich became the latest to play the ridiculous "it's snowing so global warming must be a hoax" card. Gingrich took to Twitter -- where he's been schooled before -- on Saturday morning to share a few thoughts about the storm:
newtgingrich As callista and i watched what dc weather says will be 12 to 22 inches of snow i wondered if God was sending a message about copenhagen
Got that? A snowstorm along the East coast in December was, according to the former Speaker, a divine signal about international efforts to combat climate change. Seriously.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2009_12/021560.php
I dare YOU to watch a full hour of Glenn Beck on Fox News. I DARE YOU! I did not long ago and realized that no matter his father reported him or not, he is a mentally unstable radical who should be put on every NO FLY list in the world. 
