Saturday, September 22, 2007
Monday, August 27, 2007
Ingredients
...for pancakes, courtesy of a South African genius, my last morning in Greenwich. Well, not ever. Just this summer.
First warm night, barbecue - flame effects 7
Yes, those have been a lot of flame photos. You have to wait for it to burn down to embers before cooking anything.
First warm night, barbecue
It was also my last night in Greenwich, so we decided to stay home and do something special.
Twisty turny Pavilion, Kensington Gardens, 2007
...with a disappointed Jonathan in the foreground. They actually close the pavilion at 6pm daily and we got there at 6.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Monday, August 20, 2007
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Guru Paws
Sissie's brother, who appears to be cunningly imitating a wicker chair. Greenwich, this afternoon.
Homeward bound
Well, tomorrow morning I shall be winging my way to London. There is a fifty per cent chance of photo posts, which may or may not be properly tagged and fleshed out with info. Or perhaps the other fifty per cent chance - not much at all. We will see...
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Ephemera
First of all, many, many apologies to everyone who still reads this blog for the silence. I haven’t died, nor have I become brain-dead, although a distinct sense of slowness in the brain department after coming back from work these days is chiefly to blame. Anyway, on with the post.
I’ll start up again slowly today, with a few interesting links. In the history of both Windows and Mac OSes, one of the most user-customised features has been the background image on the desktop: the wallpaper. And here is a web-based wallpaper search tool which operates via a flickr API to allow you to search for your choice of wallpaper by pixel resolution, image format and keyword. Of course, you’re restricted to the images available on flickr but that’s hardly a disadvantage. I have a marvellous Japanese moss garden to soothe and cheer me when I power up the silicon beast.
I’m going to have a dinner party on the Tube just like this one when I go to London. No, I didn’t say absolutely the next time I go to London, but sometime. And here’s a mimic. And here’s an interesting piece of psychology.
Finally, if you’ve watched the last few clips and wouldn’t mind leaning back to enjoy them again, but this time with a drink in your hand, do learn a little more about an essential cocktail ingredient.
More soon.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Radical beauty
I rarely review organ CDs on the blog — or, indeed, anywhere. There are several good reasons why. Organ music isn’t popular. It is exclusively classical, and classical music isn’t popular among you — by which I mean readers of blogs. Classical music CDs are rarely truly superb enough for me to try to interest classical–sceptic readers in any but the best of them.
These CDs, Messiaen’s complete organ works, played by Olivier Latry in Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris, count among the best. A small but significant number of organ CDs suffer from one of two problems: the playing is not good enough to prevent the sound of the organ being the main attraction, or the playing is excellent and the music is the centre of attention, but there is a problem with the organ, or recording, or both.
Here, the organ is wonderful. Notre-Dame’s instrument has thousands upon thousands of pipes within it, able to produce delicate, silvery tinkling, savage snarls, ethereal whispers, firm harmonies, shudders of the air around you, searing single notes like the primal idea of the note itself, heartbreakingly beautiful and hovering flute solos... the list goes on.
The musician is as expert, musical, restrained, soulful and daring on the organ as Keith Jarrett is on jazz piano, Stephen Hough on classical piano, Steve Vai on electric guitar, Jan Garbarek on saxophone. At no point does he show off. At every point the music comes first. And always there is a sense that he is serenely capable of astounding miracles which would set the world on its ear, but chooses not to employ them because we’d all explode into atomic particles if he did, and he just wants us to enjoy the music instead.
Yes, my tongue was in my cheek in that last sentence, but only a bit. Messiaen’s music is very difficult to get your hands around, and sometimes to get your eyes around on the page. It specifically calls for masses of colour in terms of the sounds available (and since Messiaen suffered from synaesthesia, it has more significance than just a gimmick). It is filled with bizarre rhythms from other countries and other times. It can be soothing or serene or emphatic or happy or frightening. His music demands your attention. From the sleeve notes:
The religious topics he chose to write about all bear on a theme particularly suited to music, that of contact between the everyday and the eternal. Though he was a christian, he was no means writing just for his own church. As Messiaen went on, he drew more and more into his music the songs of birds and the rhythms of medieval India, modern serialism and the sounds of wind or water. The "church" for which he was writing became the world.
Have a listen here to some samples by clicking ‘Track Listing’ on the left. And then go buy for a very reasonable price from some online store or other.
tags: [music] [classical] [organ] [colour] [paris] [notre-dame] [messiaen] [latry]
Sunday, April 29, 2007
She didn't need Money.
“She didn’t need another man. She just needed kicks. What she called The Big Bounce.” Absolutely classic. More here.
An interview with Crown Prince Haakon (such a cool name) of Norway, in Monocle magazine, honouring his country’s fantastic standard of living — because, well, a fantastic standard of living is worth smiling over when you’re being interviewed for a Tyler Brûlé mag.
Having said that, Germany seems to be pretty high up there these days, what with the Waldspirale. Wow.
tags: [books] [pulp] [royalty] [norway] [magazine] [germany]
Monday, April 02, 2007
Miscellany
I haven’t completely lost my desire to blog. Honest. I’ve just had a lot going on in the past few weeks, what with job, a man, a painful back, etc. None of which stop a person from blogging — it just gets easier to slide. So I’m sorry, and here is a selection of interesting links. Mostly so that you can go ‘cool, that’s interesting’ but also so I can know I provided them.
The precise reasons for having a full-size missile mounted on a train escape me. Mostly because a missile can’t really do a very tight u-turn in the air to obliterate the troops that are chasing the retreating train. Hmm.
Carniola doesn’t much like Austrian prisons. Well, that’s unfair — clearly this blogger likes the prisons very much. As do I. It’s just that the concept of giving prisoners quality surroundings in return for their own self-sponsored rehab is lightyears away from the clunky, violent reality of most Western systems.
Now that we’ve had a couple of clear sunny days and clear cold nights, I’ve got interested in what exactly I’m looking at when I crane upwards. Is it a plane? A satellite? A real star? WikiSky will tell you, in a nice star-mapped kind of way.
Be Jackson Pollock - take a splodge for a walk. If you move your mouse quickly, you’ll be amazed and enchanted and generally wonder why this hasn’t been everyone’s favourite pastime since forever. Then, as a suitable jolt into the other side of human endeavour, take a look at a tool for making big holes. Wow, and ugh.
If you have ever had vertigo, or a fear of dark gaping chasms, don’t visit Mirny, Russia. You probably will, anyway, just like a kid can’t stop watching a very scary film, or like I couldn’t stop looking down dark corridors when I was very little.
I assume this is Quartz. Via this site.
Music scores are meant to be played. Occasionally you will listen along with the score in front of you and wonder, in the name of all that’s human, how anyone is able to translate one thing to another. But this score — of the marvellously refined piece Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz, is definitely a feast for the eyes.
Crane and Container Ships. Big ones. I swear, it’s good. And so are these signs. Bon voyage!
tags: [miscellany]
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