Jackie Kemp

Jackie Kemp

Two Exhibitions: “Doppelhanger” at MOBA and “Frances Stark” at MFA
Arts

Two Exhibitions: “Doppelhanger” at MOBA and “Frances Stark” at MFA

I laughed more in my short visit to the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) – than I can remember doing at an art gallery. But the experience was not only amusing; it helped me to reflect upon the curatorial process at work in all art galleries, and to reach a conclusion about the Frances Stark retrospective which is currently on show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art.

The current MOBA exhibition is entitled “doppelhanger” and features portraits which bear an intended or accidental  resemblance to a famous person. My guide, Louise Reilly, pointed to “Sunday on the Pot with George” (above).

“This is one of my all time favorites. Pointillism is difficult. Why would anyone expend that much energy painting a middle-aged man in his tighty whities sitting on a toilet?” And look” she pointed to where the portrait ends, at the subject’s ankles, where either by accident or design the painter has avoided having to include those challenging feet.

Two Exhiitions: “Doppelhanger” at MOBA and “Frances Stark” at MOFA
Letter from Scotland

Two Exhiitions: “Doppelhanger” at MOBA and “Frances Stark” at MOFA

I laughed more in my short visit to the Museum of Bad Art (MOBA) – than I can remember doing at an art gallery. But the experience was not only amusing; it helped me to reflect upon the curatorial process at work in all art galleries, and to reach a conclusion about the Frances Stark retrospective which is currently on show at Boston’s Museum of Fine Art. The current MOBA exhibition is entitled “doppelhanger” and features portraits which bear an intended or accidental resemblance to a famous person. My guide, Louise Reilly, pointed to “Sunday on the Pot with George” (above). This is one of my all time favorites. Pointillism is difficult. Why would anyone expend that much energy painting a middle-aged man in his tighty whities sitting on a toilet?” And look” she pointed to where the portrait ends, at the subject’s ankles, where either by accident or design the painter has avoided having to include those challenging feet.

Politics

The Real Reason Trump Didn’t Attack Bill Clinton

Hillary Clinton referenced “my husband’ in the first debate the other night – this was unusual, and a critic quoted in the New York Times said it was a remark that “put women back years” but it could be a good move. Although most commentators felt she won the debate hands down; the polling in the swing states is still close. If what people like about Donald Trump is that he’s a real person and they see her as a patronising know-all, then her long marriage to Bill shows Hill in a different light.

The political class have never forgiven Bill. You can see them having flashbacks when his name is mentioned. The crudity of the sex scandal that engulfed the White House during his presidency is all too vivid in their memories. The embarrassment, the humiliation that they felt as the world’s media swarmed into Washington, holding their hands over their mouths to mask their giggles, still surfaces easily.

Politics

US Election: Some Hard Lessons from Brexit for the Democrats.

Brexit continues to lie untouched in the dog’s breakfast bowl, no more appetising in the cold light of day than it was when things started to smell bad on the night of June 23. Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, Brexit over easy on rye, nobody’s quite sure what they ordered. The Scots aren’t planning to shut up and eat what someone else requested on their behalf, that’s clear. Alex Salmond said recently there will be a new independence referendum in 2018.

The US is facing a similar binary choice with one indigestible option on the menu: here are some lessons from a still-suffering Remain supporter.

Politics

Turn out will be high in the US election, predicts senior political journalist Emily Rooney

“Turnout will be huge. It will be what it was the first time Obama was elected,” political journalist Emily Rooney predicted at  a women’s forum in Boston’s Beacon Hill this week. But the former political director at Fox News would not be drawn who will win the increasingly close race.

Fellow media commentator Margery Eagan said she is concerned by the possibility of a Trump win: “I don’t want to be hiding under my desk the way I was when I was five years old, worrying about a nuclear war.”

Clinton, Eagan said “knows everything”. But she “described Trump as a “magnetic’ figure, whose comments constantly “disrupt the news cycle”.

“Honestly, during the primaries if you were in your kitchen and Trump came on and made a speech you might stand there and listen, because he’s magnetic, he’s mesmerising, he says outrageous things and that’s part of what has taken him where he is today.”

She said “People forget that the media is a business and Trump has  been a bonanza for the cable channels”.

Politics

The Boomers versus Generation X

Whether Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump wins the presidential election race in the USA, the next President will be pushing 70 – and a member of the post-war generation known as the “boomers”. It’s a generation that at least here in the US is still very much to the fore. People don’t seem to say here, as I have heard in the UK, that it’s about time they started to make way for the babies of the 60s and 70s, known as Generation X, famous for cynicism, Britpop and apathy.

Perhaps looking at the godawful mess that British politics is has been left in by its Generation X leaders is not much of an advert. For some, that slacker style, like a bad tattoo has stuck with age. Both David Cameron and Boris Johnson frequently gave the impression of having done their homework in the back of the ministerial limo and spent more time on the sardonic quip or a Smiths’ reference than on policy detail.

Is Farming the New Rock and Roll?
Letter from Scotland

Is Farming the New Rock and Roll?


I was prompted to ask this question after meeting some start-up farmers in Massachusetts. They are interesting and unexpected entrants into a profession we are often told has a gloomy future: from a rock promoter to a Harvard educated bio-physicist.

Like other developed countries and the rest of the US, Massachusetts has a large number of farmers over the age of 65 with no identified inheritors. For 30 years, the number of entrants into farming was on the slide. However, over the last decade that has begun to change. It seems, farming is becoming cool again.

Politics

In the USA During the Olympics – Missing the BBC

Note: There is an add at the end about how I am now able to watch the BBC abroad.

So you had to change channel during one of Andy Murray’s matches? Sorry to hear about that. That’s really vegan cheese.

Brits complaining about the BBC coverage of the Olympics should try watching them on NBC. It’s easy in the UK to get involved in the unfolding cavalcade of colour, excitement and drama that unfolds across several channels.

People

A Wartime Escape: Another Arnold Kemp

This is an excerpt from Arnold Kemp’s family memoir: “The Sentimental Tourist”. It is his account of the wartime escape of another Arnold Kemp, his uncle, and the younger son of the minister in Birse who is also mentioned here, Rev Arnold Low Kemp

Uncle Arnold’s escape

A REMARKABLE TALE of the war comes to us from my Uncle Arnold (Addie).   Uncle Addie was also able, if less literary than his older brother (my father Robert Kemp), and an active and adventurous boy.   His informal education was to prove of at least as much value as his studies in the classroom.   Indeed, his childhood ploys on the Dee probably helped to save his life later.  He was dux of Aboyne intermediate school and then followed my father to Robert Gordon’s.  He took a diploma in tropical agriculture at Marischal College (the other wing of the university) and was appointed an assistant manager of a rubber estate in the state of Kedah, North Malaya.   He left in 1937 on the PO steamship Corfu and immediately joined the local volunteer force.   In 1940 he moved to Perak, transferred to the Federated Malay States Volunteer Forces and began extended wartime training.

In December 1941, while he was on long leave in Sydney, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and northern Malaya.   He joined the Australian Imperial Forces but on his urgent recall to Malaya by the volunteer forces was granted an immediate discharge to enable him to return.   He arrived in Singapore in January 1942 in the midst of a severe air raid.   He was sent by train to Kuala Lumpur but it was overrun by the Japanese and he had to withdraw by stages to Singapore.

The Japanese assault forces penetrated the Singapore’s island defences about the 6th or 7th of February.   Their gunfire turned night into day.   Addie was in charge of a section of about 10 men with two machine guns, deployed in pill boxes on the tiny island of Berhala Repin, straight across from Admiralty Steps on the Singapore sea front.   Fires raged throughout the city and the harbour area.  Some members of the company were killed as the Japanese strafed and bombed at will:  they had total control of air space.

On Friday, February 13, two days before the fall, a party of Allied soldiers was spotted on a pier half a mile from Addie’s pill box.   Their company commander, Eric ‘Whisky’ Bruce, ordered him to take a couple of men and guide the party back to company headquarters.   It was a hairy journey as Japanese planes searched for victims.    Addie and his men ducked and dived, cowering in the craters with which the road was pitted.   But when they reached the pier they found that the party had been cut to pieces.   Bodies were spread about everywhere.  They found no survivors but as they were about to leave noticed a man, half buried, who still seemed to be alive.   When they pulled him free, they found that his body had been severed;  ‘he came away with no lower part attached’.   Convulsed with nausea, they covered him as best they could and left.   Later that night their nerves were again shaken when a Japanese bomb fell on a rock near Addie’s pill box.   A jagged boulder crashed through its concrete roof and came to rest on the lid of a full box of hand grenades.

During this week many ships were sunk in the harbour roads.  Early one morning Addie saw an empty lifeboat gliding towards the pill box.   He swam out to it and, grabbing its trailing painter, beached it, and secured it to an overhanging tree.

Adventures in Boston and Portland, Maine
Letter from Scotland

Adventures in Boston and Portland, Maine

Jackie Kemp in Boston: Photo by Rob Bruce

“Large, hot Earl please,” the waitress yelled in a cafe this morning. I smiled, seeing in my mind’s eye a dashing peer of the realm with a twirling moustache, like a character from Blackadder, rushing out of the kitchen. But no, just a tepid tea in a paper cup. Spending time in Boston this week, where my husband is working, I have been reminded of the saying, attributed to George Bernard Shaw, that Britain and America  are “two nations divided by a common language”. At the library when the attendant said:  “check your bag, please,” I opened it thinking she meant she wanted to look inside. But she meant it had to be put in a locker.

Summary of a talk about 1979
Arnold Kemp archive

Summary of a talk about 1979

‘1979: Scotland’s First Constitutional Referendum’
Published on: November 6, 2013 Author: CSCS

On 5 November 2013, the Centre was pleased to welcome journalist and writer, Jackie Kemp, who discussed ‘1979: Scotland’s First Constitutional Referendum’. Below is this listener’s brief summary of the lecture.

Poems

I belong to Europe, by David Kyd

(To the tune of I belong to Glasgow https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJwl9GLaUAU) I dinna belang to the Glaekit! I belong tae Europe Europe’s affa doon Since it got a kick in the Brexit…

Social Affairs

Is the Curriculum for Excellence Dumbing Down Scottish Education?

What do we mean by a good education? It’s not the same as being intelligent of course. An educated young person has skills they can take with them into the world. But should these include reasonable fluency in a modern language, an understanding of the sciences, maths, some knowledge of literature and history? Or, in this age of easy fact-finding on the internet does an educated person mean: a successful learner, a confident individual, a responsible citizen and an effective contributor, as Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence has it? The Scottish government is wrestling with the implementation of this curriculum, which was intended to build on the concept of the “democratic intellect”, a generalist approach favouring interdisciplinary study. But how is it working in practice?

Politics

Leithers Scunnered By Hand-Wringing Over Pitch Invasion

A Wee Piece of Hampden Here in Leith

To paraphrase the famously dull but accurate Times headline, “Small Earthquake in Chile; Not Many Dead”, the reports of the Scottish Cup Final last weekend could have read: “Small Riot at Hampden, Not Many Hurt.”

In fact they didn’t. The Sunday morning newsstands were devoted to 20 point outrage, with the Sunday Mail alone in having a positive headline “Glory, Glory”: although Monday’s Evening News aced it with “They Claimed It.” The TV and radio took the same approach with sports coverage jettisoned in favour of bad news reporting.

Politics

At the Holyrood Election Thursday: First Vote Labour, Second Vote Tory?

Whether Labour or the Conservatives takes second place on Thursday (May 5) is the talking point of the Scottish election. Betting company Paddy Power thinks Labour; Professor John Curtice says it could go either way. Professor Curtice is probably right. He knows when to poll them, and he knows when not to call them – as “The Pollster”, a satirical version of the the Kenny Rogers song “The Gambler” dedicated to the Prof by Vic Rodrick and Annie Gunner Logan has it. (For reasons of copyright etcetera, the pair’s sharp-witted parodies are only ever heard live and if they announce dates for this year’s Fringe, grab a ticket.) Whichever way the cookie crumbles, the opposition vote is likely to be split between Labour and the Tories. So is there scope for them to pool their resources in a new politics? Is it possible for Kezia Dugdale and Ruth Davidson to work together on at least some issues to form a coherent opposition?