British press shames U.S.
LONDON--British newspapers are far superior to those in America. American papers are dreadfully dull and getting duller because of harsh elimination of columns and other features.
British papers are livelier and saucier. They are more cultural and intellectual.
British editors know the value of large art. Portrait photographs of grieving women, mourning for their husbands killed in Afghanistan, run three inches wide and five and one-half inches deep on front pages.
The Guardian runs a huge picture daily covering two full pages. Maybe a forest fire. Perhaps a photo of a volcano spewing molten lava. The impact is great.
American newspapers get smaller in size, thinner in girth and scanter in content. My hometown paper, the Reno Gazette-Journal, is disgraceful. It takes less than five minutes to read, three of them on sports.
The Guardian remains large, stout and packed with news, features and opinion. Its layouts are uncluttered as so many U.S. papers are. Some Guardian pages might have just two stories with photos, graphics, quote boxes and tint blocks.
British editorial cartoons are in color and run twice the size of the black-and-white American ones. The Guardian runs the comic strip Doonesbury in color, more than twice the size of the black-and-white strip in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Guardian is the best English language newspaper.
One fault in the British press: the sports pages always refer to the football (soccer) coach of Manchester United as Sir Alex Ferguson. It is as absurd as retaining the monarchy, which has outlived its time by two centuries.
The class system is still deeply embedded in England. Stories are told of writer Evelyn Waugh walking miles from his lower class London home to mail letters from a tonier postal zone.
Courtauld great
The Courtauld Gallery is, to use boxing parlance, pound for pound the best art museum in the world. Its first three rooms have 30 paintings, 10 of them masterpieces. Among them: Monet’s “Antibes,” Renoir’s “Le Loge,” Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” Cezanne’s “The Card Players” and Van Gogh’s self-portrait with a bandaged ear.
The Courtauld pièce de résistance is Manet’s “Bar at the Folies Bergère.” The woman tending bar has a look of incredible sadness.
Another art treasure in London is the National Gallery. It houses such chef-d’oeuvres as Velázquezes’ Rokeby Venus, Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars,” Rubens’ beautiful portrait of Susanna and a Goya beauty, “Doña Isabel de Porcel.”
Impressionism is epitomized at the National Gallery by a Monet painting, “The Thames below Westminster.” Gauzy. Fog shrouding the Houses of Parliament. Barges on the Thames.
The third London art powerhouse is the National Portrait Gallery, although admittedly of more interest to devotees of British literature and politics.
Shakespeare is here wearing a rakish earring but Marlowe, he of the mighty line, is not. Gladstone is here, looking stern and puritanical, next to Disraeli with jutting jaw, goatee and a fierce intellectual look. So too are Addison and Steele, founders of The Spectator and sterling members of Kit-cat Club for London artistic and literary types.
Homage to Shakepeare
One of my favorite walks in London is crossing the Millennium Bridge from St. Paul’s to Southwark to visit the reconstructed Globe Theater. It brings to mind the prologue of “Henry the Fifth”: “Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?”
Supression of women
Streets teem with people today in this old Roman town founded in 43 A.D. Roads are now clogged with cars, buses and lorries.
Among the street crowds are women shrouded in black from head to toe. The only “sinful” flesh showing through the burqua are eyes. Bias flares. Not against Muslims per se but against a religion that shackles 21st century women with garb that denotes submission. Inequality too. Muslim women wear “ovens” and men wear shorts.
SNIPPETS: Trafalgar Square is one of the great plazas in Europe.The towering, rotund Nelson column. Fountains. Huge stone lions. Hordes of people. Square “guarded” on the north by the National Gallery and St. Martin-in-the-Field…The Brits seem to love their dogs even more than their gardens…Only in Britain: the nation has police associations for blacks, for gays, for Muslims--and now pagans!
MORE SNIPPETS: The British Rolls-Royce has long been a symbol of quality. Today it advertises what it calls its “waftability,” “quiet perfection and fast acceleration.” A great Rolls ad created by the American David Ogilvy decades ago: “At 75 miles an hour all you can hear is the clock ticking.”
British papers are livelier and saucier. They are more cultural and intellectual.
British editors know the value of large art. Portrait photographs of grieving women, mourning for their husbands killed in Afghanistan, run three inches wide and five and one-half inches deep on front pages.
The Guardian runs a huge picture daily covering two full pages. Maybe a forest fire. Perhaps a photo of a volcano spewing molten lava. The impact is great.
American newspapers get smaller in size, thinner in girth and scanter in content. My hometown paper, the Reno Gazette-Journal, is disgraceful. It takes less than five minutes to read, three of them on sports.
The Guardian remains large, stout and packed with news, features and opinion. Its layouts are uncluttered as so many U.S. papers are. Some Guardian pages might have just two stories with photos, graphics, quote boxes and tint blocks.
British editorial cartoons are in color and run twice the size of the black-and-white American ones. The Guardian runs the comic strip Doonesbury in color, more than twice the size of the black-and-white strip in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The Guardian is the best English language newspaper.
One fault in the British press: the sports pages always refer to the football (soccer) coach of Manchester United as Sir Alex Ferguson. It is as absurd as retaining the monarchy, which has outlived its time by two centuries.
The class system is still deeply embedded in England. Stories are told of writer Evelyn Waugh walking miles from his lower class London home to mail letters from a tonier postal zone.
Courtauld great
The Courtauld Gallery is, to use boxing parlance, pound for pound the best art museum in the world. Its first three rooms have 30 paintings, 10 of them masterpieces. Among them: Monet’s “Antibes,” Renoir’s “Le Loge,” Manet’s “Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe,” Cezanne’s “The Card Players” and Van Gogh’s self-portrait with a bandaged ear.
The Courtauld pièce de résistance is Manet’s “Bar at the Folies Bergère.” The woman tending bar has a look of incredible sadness.
Another art treasure in London is the National Gallery. It houses such chef-d’oeuvres as Velázquezes’ Rokeby Venus, Botticelli’s “Venus and Mars,” Rubens’ beautiful portrait of Susanna and a Goya beauty, “Doña Isabel de Porcel.”
Impressionism is epitomized at the National Gallery by a Monet painting, “The Thames below Westminster.” Gauzy. Fog shrouding the Houses of Parliament. Barges on the Thames.
The third London art powerhouse is the National Portrait Gallery, although admittedly of more interest to devotees of British literature and politics.
Shakespeare is here wearing a rakish earring but Marlowe, he of the mighty line, is not. Gladstone is here, looking stern and puritanical, next to Disraeli with jutting jaw, goatee and a fierce intellectual look. So too are Addison and Steele, founders of The Spectator and sterling members of Kit-cat Club for London artistic and literary types.
Homage to Shakepeare
One of my favorite walks in London is crossing the Millennium Bridge from St. Paul’s to Southwark to visit the reconstructed Globe Theater. It brings to mind the prologue of “Henry the Fifth”: “Can this cockpit hold / The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram / Within this wooden O the very casques / That did affright the air at Agincourt?”
Supression of women
Streets teem with people today in this old Roman town founded in 43 A.D. Roads are now clogged with cars, buses and lorries.
Among the street crowds are women shrouded in black from head to toe. The only “sinful” flesh showing through the burqua are eyes. Bias flares. Not against Muslims per se but against a religion that shackles 21st century women with garb that denotes submission. Inequality too. Muslim women wear “ovens” and men wear shorts.
SNIPPETS: Trafalgar Square is one of the great plazas in Europe.The towering, rotund Nelson column. Fountains. Huge stone lions. Hordes of people. Square “guarded” on the north by the National Gallery and St. Martin-in-the-Field…The Brits seem to love their dogs even more than their gardens…Only in Britain: the nation has police associations for blacks, for gays, for Muslims--and now pagans!
MORE SNIPPETS: The British Rolls-Royce has long been a symbol of quality. Today it advertises what it calls its “waftability,” “quiet perfection and fast acceleration.” A great Rolls ad created by the American David Ogilvy decades ago: “At 75 miles an hour all you can hear is the clock ticking.”
posted by Jake Highton | 9:26 AM
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