143. The Contortionist

If you were asked to name five statues, I bet that one of them would be “The Thinker”, the statue created by Auguste Rodin.

I would like you to try something: 

Sit on a chair that’s low enough for your thighs to be horizontal.  Then, adopt the pose of The Thinker.  

Go on, do it now before you read the rest. 

I expect that you got it wrong on two counts.  Firstly, you will probably have cupped your chin in the palm of your right hand when, in fact, the figure’s chin is resting on the back of his hand and secondly, I expect that you put your right elbow on to your right thigh.  The Thinker has his right elbow on his left thigh.

The BBC’s Arts Correspondent, Will Gompertz, presented a story on the 10 o'clock news last night about an exhibition soon to open at the British Museum involving some of Rodin’s works.  He introduced the story by adopting The Thinker’s pose but he got it wrong, placing his right elbow on his right knee, even although the statue is right behind him

I can’t sit like that and I’m sure that Mr Gompertz would have done it correctly if he were able to do so but he couldn’t. 

In 1906, the photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn and George Bernard Shaw, who was a friend of Rodin, attended an unveiling of The Thinker.  Later, Shaw suggested that Coburn make a nude portrait of him in the same pose as the sculpture.

This is Coburn’s portrait and as you can see, Shaw didn’t, or couldn’t, adopt the correct pose either.

Shaw’s got his left and not his right elbow on his left thigh and the hand position is wrong too.

Actually, I can adopt the right pose but only at the expense of a severe pain in my right shoulder that becomes too much to tolerate after about thirty seconds.  

I have no idea what Rodin had in mind but his model was probably thinking that Rodin was an idiot.   

“No one ever sits like this Monsieur Rodin,” he probably said, with feeling.  “It’s very uncomfortable and completely unnatural.”  

Rodin would have just grunted and lit another Gauloises. 

“And my wrist’s hurting,” the model moaned.  “Why can’t I turn my hand over?  That’s the natural way to sit.”

“Stop whining and don't think conventionally,” Rodin snapped.  “Only another five days.”

The Thinker has been a topic of discussion over the past few days because a curator at The British Museum with too much time on his hands, has suggested that the figure isn’t thinking, he’s mourning.  This assertion is because the back of the hand is supporting the chin and in the statues of ancient Greece, this is how mourning was depicted.  

Rodin called it The Poet originally.  I don’t think it should be called The Poet, The Thinker or The Mourner because he is “The Contortionist”, that’s what he is.

142. The Last Thing ..... I want to do

I was persuaded by Caroline to go to a live music event last night.  I don’t go to live music events very often and my reluctance to go to them is one of the few areas of incompatibility that exists between Caroline and me as she enjoys them very much.  

We moved to Wavendon six years ago and live less than a mile from The Stables, a venue that is consistently voted in the top three live music venues in the UK. This has been the basis or the cause of some conflict between us.    

Over the past few years, The Stables has hosted performers as diverse as Dave Brubeck, Amy Winehouse, Courtney Pine, 10cc and James Galway as well as classical music concerts.

A typical conversation between us goes something like:

“Would you like to come and see Julia Fordham at The Stables?”

“No, never heard of her.”

“I’ll ask someone else to go with me, then.”

“OK.”

The first time I turned down the chance to see a live concert was in 1963 when I was 16 years old.  It was a Wednesday in May and a cricket match had been scheduled between our school and Felixtowe Grammar School.  The game started at 2.30 pm and so would not finish until about 7.00 pm.  

The concert was in Ipswich, 45 miles away and as I couldn’t be in two places at once, obviously, I chose to play cricket.

My friends found someone else to go instead of me and they all left for Ipswich on the train straight after school.  

The next day, they couldn’t stop telling me about what a great evening they’d had watching Gerry and the Pacemakers, Roy Orbison and THE BEATLES!!!  

We lost the cricket match and I was run out for 11.

The first time I actually went to hear live, popular music was seven years ago when I was 63 and I gave in to Caroline’s constant naggings suggestions and agreed to go to the Royal Festival Hall to see and hear KD Lang perform.

It was awful!  Ms Lang had just released a new CD and so all she sang were the songs from that.  They were all new to me and all were instantly forgettable.  Even Caroline found the evening less enjoyable than she had been anticipating.

She did persuade me to go to a Stables concert eventually.  “If you come and see Joan Armatrading, I’ll go and see Gerry and the Pacemakers,” she bargained.   One performance was OK and the other was great.

Last night, we saw Tom Paxton.  I agreed to go because I really like his song “The Last Thing on My Mind”.  For the first 40 minutes of the evening, we endured his accompanying group, a duo called ‘The Don Juans’ - dull, bland, folk music.  

Then, they were joined by Tom Paxton himself and we were treated to another hour of dull, bland, folk music.  Apparently, most of these songs were “favourites that we all remember”.  Not I.

However, the woman sitting next to me on my right remembered them and she sang along to every single one of them.   It was dreadful.  Even though she sang in tune, it was not pleasant listening, especially as I had paid £33 to hear someone else; someone who, despite singing into a microphone, could hardly compete with my loud neighbour.

At ten o’clock, the three performers unstrapped their guitars and walked off.  I was a little puzzled that Paxton hadn’t sung “The Last Thing on My Mind” until I remembered what had happened when Caroline coerced me into going to see The Mavericks two years ago.  They had walked off at ten o’clock only to return for an encore - that lasted for another 70 minutes!

Sure enough, back they came to sing the only Tom Paxton song I knew and the only reason that I was there at all.

As we had arrived at The Stables, Caroline predicted what the audience would be like.  She forecast that she would be one of the youngest; it would be predominantly male and there would be a lot of beards to be seen.  She was accurate on all counts.  

I don’t know what caused it - it couldn’t have been the music - but two of the aged men in the audience of 450 appeared to have heart attacks during the show.  Tom Paxton didn’t stop singing; he is probably used to it and carried on regardless while the paramedics came among us twice to remove those afflicted.  

Our opinions on live music continue to differ as Caroline still maintains that we saw a living legend last night.  

I hate to appear to be unfeeling but I found that watching the paramedics doing their work was more interesting than listening to 3 old men, with a combined age of more than 200, topping up their pension pots.