Thomas Sutcliffe
Thomas Sutcliffe: Agree on a resolution, and change the world
Published: 01 January 2008
Let me suggest a novel problem with resolutions – not the familiar drawback that we all face at this time of year, which is their pitifully short shelf-life, but a problem that only becomes apparent if you think of the resolution-making instinct operating at a different order of magnitude.
Thomas Sutcliffe: My year of treats and torments
Published: 21 December 2007
The problem with end-of-year retrospectives is that they often present the preceding 12 months as a luxury biscuit selection fresh out of the box, when the truth of memory is that what you're usually left with is a bag of broken bits, quite a few of which have bits of fluff adhering to them. So here, with due acknowledgement to Gilbert Adair's Myths & Memories, which did it much better (and which, in turn, acknowledged Georges Perec's Je me souviens), are the crumbs and fragments of my own year in the arts.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Buying sex is not just a business transaction
Published: 18 December 2007
I imagine there are men out there – Independent readers, too – who are contemplating giving themselves an extra little treat for Christmas. They're planning to sidle through the doors of some inconspicuous massage parlour (Peterborough now has no fewer than 48 of them, we're told) and pay one of its employees to have sex with them.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Nothing new in special effects
Published: 14 December 2007
Now here's a handy coincidence. Fresh from a screening of The Golden Compass, a film version of Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, I find myself at the Dulwich Gallery in front of Edmund Dulac's The Ice Maiden – a picture of a bare-footed young woman dressed in white and flanked by two large polar bears. And since a talking polar bear, Iorek Byrnison, is one of the salient attractions of Chris Weitz's film, and Nicole Kidman's glacially slinky Mrs Coulter is another, this image trips a switch and a connection is made.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Africa is dogged by a lack of leadership
Published: 11 December 2007
I found myself in two minds about John Sentamu's pledge not to wear a dog collar until President Mugabe leaves office in Zimbabwe. On the one hand, the rationale for him cutting up his clerical collar on air sounded a little thin to me. He'd obviously decided that it would be an eye-catching thing to do and had then had to work backwards to find some explanation of why this was the form his protest was taking.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Please mind the theatrical gap
Published: 07 December 2007
Coming out of Katie Mitchell's new production of The Women of Troy last week, I found myself giving thanks for the fact that it had no interval. As it happens, I'm always grateful when the interval has been dispensed with, since it rarely strikes me as anything other than a pointless interruption. But in this case, the fact that the audience couldn't confer over its reactions before the whole evening had run its course seemed particularly important.
Thomas Sutcliffe: When the time comes to walk out of your life
Published: 04 December 2007
The BBC News website includes an interesting section, down towards the bottom of the home page, which tells you what the most popular stories on its site are. There are two categories, Most Emailed and Most Read, and usually you can detect a subtle difference between the five stories that top the charts.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The universe in a bowl of water
Published: 30 November 2007
I saw something sublime the other day. This is a common enough boast in newspapers, and arguably too common, given runaway inflation in the language of approbation. But I do have a defence. Because I am – unusually – using the word "sublime" as a verb, not as an adjective. The thing – or things – that were doing the subliming were small chunks of dry ice, which had been dropped on to water and were – as frozen CO2 is wont to do – turning into a gas without an intervening liquid state.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Why the rush? We'll be here for centuries
Published: 27 November 2007
I bought the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace the other day, to be shelved, for the foreseeable future, on the "One Fine Day" section of my bookshelves – a holding pen for volumes bought to shore up my sense of myself as an intellectual in potentia, waiting only for enough free time to convert theory into practice.
Thomas Sutcliffe: A little music goes a long way
Published: 23 November 2007
I attended a school concert this week, one of those parental Days of Obligation that I generally expect to file away under the heading of duty rather than pleasure. As it happened, this one was surprisingly painless. True, some of the performances were best regarded as tests of parental affection, an experience to be endured with grace and a politely non-committal expression, but most of them were delightful.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Why defend families by attacking lesbians?
Published: 20 November 2007
How thrilled prospective lesbian parents must be to have learned this weekend of their extraordinary potency. Not procreative potency, you understand. Despite continuing advances in the science of fertility, they still need a man to be involved in the process somewhere. It's their socio-cultural potency that we're talking about. Because if Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor and a group of MPs from the two main political parties are to be believed, lesbian parents have it in their power to overturn several millennia of engrained and even instinctive social arrangements.
Thomas Sutcliffe: British teens aren't cultural cretins
Published: 16 November 2007
Earlier this week, the British Council revealed the details of a survey into international awareness among the world's schoolchildren, the headline finding being that United Kingdom pupils were the least globally aware of the 10 countries polled. The reaction to this, where there was a reaction at all, was to tut over the insularity of our teenagers and add it to the growing stack of evidence that Government education reforms haven't been a glowing example of value for money.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Why do we want more rape convictions?
Published: 13 November 2007
I don't always find the Today programme a reliable source of news. This isn't because of any editorial deficiencies on its part, just that I hear quite a lot of it when in an amphibious state between sleep and waking, which tends to impair the reception of fine detail. Waking up yesterday, for example, I found myself listening to a report on David Cameron's speech on rape and becoming confused by his call for conviction rates to rise – as if rape convictions were a kind of industrial product, desirable in themselves, and we were lagging behind our European competitors in manufacturing rates.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Licensed bullies we love to hate
Published: 09 November 2007
What is it about army sergeants that so appeals to the liberal point of view? They're not exactly icons of empathetic sensibility, after all. And yet they have an allure that somehow overcomes whatever prejudices you might have about the dehumanising effect of military discipline, or the debasing nature of petty power. Even the most terrifying of them – Gunnery Sergeant Hartman in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket – has the power to stir curdled feelings in us, revulsion and admiration swirling around together and refusing to emulsify.
Thomas Sutcliffe: The smallest steps are often the hardest
Published: 06 November 2007
How refreshing it would be if the Queen's Speech today revealed that the Prime Minister has been busy thinking small. This is not what we're supposed to want as political consumers, of course. We're supposed to be hungry for big ideas and grand gestures, for the epic theatre of social transformation. And the prevailing anxiety surrounding Mr Brown as Prime Minister is that he might not be able to supply it.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Are pictures worth a thousand words?
Published: 02 November 2007
You don't usually expect to encounter confessions of illiteracy when you're chairing a Radio 4 arts review programme, but it has happened two weeks in succession to me, with guests on Saturday Review admitting – without obvious shame – that their reading skills aren't very good. In fact, there was an edge of defiant pride in the way they announced their incapacity – the explanation being that it wasn't printed prose they were admitting to having problems with, but comics, or graphic novels.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Season of mists and melancholic musing
Published: 30 October 2007
Is it only after the age of fifty that autumn begins to get depressing? I certainly can't remember it being like this when I was younger – and smoke in the air and a chilly morning seemed like a fresh kind of arrival rather than an unavoidable departure. It really wasn't hard to go along with the literature back then and treat the shortening of the days and the yellowing of the leaves as a kind of paradoxical refreshment of life, a season that was less brash and bumptious than spring, more philosophically productive than high summer and considerably less uncomfortable than winter.
Thomas Sutcliffe: You have to cut it out to pack 'em in
Published: 26 October 2007
Glancing at the publicity details for David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises I saw one fact that immediately appealed. It was only 100 minutes long. Not edifying, I know, but I'm afraid that weighing up a creative product in this way is one of the occupational hazards of professional arts consumption, like miner's lung or white finger. You want to know what sort of temporal investment is going to be required of you, so you ask "How long is it?" – and the answer, whether it comes as a curtain time or a pagination, invariably starts to colour your responses.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Painters turn their backs on art
Published: 19 October 2007
If you were in a mischievous mood you could describe the Hayward's new show "The Painting of Modern Life" as a major retrospective of backs. I mean people's backs – the portrait's B-side, which we rarely see in an art gallery but which are all over the place here, sometimes centrally placed, as in David Hockney's painting of two friends sitting in the Parc des Sources in Paris or Peter Doig's picture Lapeyrouse Wall, and sometimes incidental, as in Malcolm Morley's picture of a group of passengers on a cruise liner or Johanna Kandl's painting of the Venetian waterfront.
Thomas Sutcliffe: No science of abortion without the ethics
Published: 16 October 2007
"We have confined ourselves to scientific developments", concludes the Christian Medical Fellowship in its formal submission to the select committee considering Britain's abortion laws, "but cannot end without a reminder that abortion is always a procedure with a 50 per cent mortality".
Thomas Sutcliffe: My nightmare at a horror show
Published: 12 October 2007
I've been feeling like the designated driver at a really wild party this week – and not just a good night out at the pub, but one of those once-in-a-decade shindigs that you know people will be talking about for years. Everyone else was intoxicated, reeling and exhilarated. I was stone cold sober and flickering between indulgent bemusement, envy and outright impatience at the delirium all around me.
Thomas Sutcliffe: How can we justify doing this to children?
Published: 09 October 2007
Experimenting on children and babies has, for very good reasons, traditionally been frowned upon. At its worst, the phrase summons the memory of Josef Mengele, and, at its best, raises tricky questions about informed consent.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Bubbles, what on earth did you start?
Published: 05 October 2007
Standing in front of the painting Bubbles at Tate Britain's big Millais show, I found myself thinking of two related questions. Query One was pretty straightforward: is the gallery correct when it claims that this picture was the first serious work of art to be adopted for commercial purposes? Leave aside, for the moment, the satellite question of whether it qualifies as serious at all – but is it really true that no Victorian entrepreneur had previously thought of borrowing a bit of cultural respectability by slapping a bit of fine art on the packet? Query Two was a little more complicated, and involved turning Query One on its head. Never mind the first time that the world of commerce turned to the world of fine art – when was the first time that the world of fine art turned to the world of commerce? Put another way, what's the earliest instance of branded goods appearing in a serious work of art?
Thomas Sutcliffe: Dawkins - what can't he be blamed for?
Published: 02 October 2007
Listening to Start the Week yesterday I was startled to hear the theologian Karen Armstrong blaming Richard Dawkins for Islamic fundamentalism. She didn't put it quite like that, of course, but in the course of a passing remark about literalist interpretations of the Koran she made the point that this was a relatively new tradition in Islam and explicitly connected it with Dawkins' intellectual attacks on religion in general.
Thomas Sutcliffe: Can we all be photographers?
Published: 28 September 2007
Of all the arts, photography is surely the one in which luck plays the largest part. Luck is a funny thing, of course, and has a fixed prejudice in favour of the talented and the dedicated, but even so the point holds. It is not actually inconceivable that an amateur could pick up a camera for the very first time and take a world-class photograph with the first click of the shutter.
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