Two posts in the same month! That is something, at least.
I was looking at this page of amazing designs by Luigi Colani. The kind of page which makes you want to blog it, too. And then thought, shit, my blog has been untouched for too long. Apologies — I transferred jobs and things have been... different lately!
Full service should resume soon. Or what passes for full service here these days.
A family friend was clearing out a drawer and found that her mother (deceased when very old a few years ago) had stored a roll of chamois leather away. It was wrapped in some newspaper — this one.
There are many more pages, and closeups, to look at if you click the photo and then the photostream. There are advertisements for Guinness and Lux Toilet Soap. There are wonderful examples of typeface design and typesetting. There are all the telltale signs of old newspapers — a rubber-stamped masthead logo here, a rubber-stamped news item there, no colour, a hell of a lot more news, and some superb writing.
The date of the paper is October 17, 1943, a time when the Allies were moving up Italy as the Nazis, having rescued the deposed Mussolini, had taken temporary control and then been forced to retreat. There is a driven, enthusiastic tone to the main reporting, and this comes from the now abandoned style whereby fact and open speculation are frankly mixed into a single news story. It also, of course, comes from the need for propaganda.
It’s become chilly in the house today. But I didn’t notice until this DVD had stopped.
It still hasn’t stopped in my head.
After his bout of chronic fatigue syndrome, Jarrett returned to the stage with two solo concerts in Japan, one of which was recorded for CD and published under the title Radiance, the other recorded for this DVD. His style had changed — instead of the familiarly monumental, arching single-movement improvisations, these were a series of shorter, more impressionistic creations.
I said at the time that this new music was pottery very much still on the wheel before the comparative solidity of The Carnegie Hall Concert, and this DVD answers me with as much riveting music as anyone could ask for.
There are times when he abandons note-values altogether; others when he shares his knowledge of Bach and Shostakovich within five minutes of each other and it doesn’t jar in the slightest. Times when, if you’ve heard Radiance or Carnegie Hall, you might wonder why the audience doesn’t applaud at the end of a piece — until you realise with a little excitement that nobody had ever heard him doing this before.
It shows, too — at one point, a person starts clapping late, thinking that the start of a new piece is the final hesitant blush of the last one. His face undergoes a quick crease like wind over water, the music stops for 10 seconds — and never returns, abandoned as he starts again with a completely different idea and carries it for 20 minutes.
Some of you won’t love the relative lack of big, broad tunes and immediately catchy hooks, but you will know everything is alright when you see him give the the audience a little glance of quizzical, playful agreement before each of the three Standards he plays as encores.
The sound is top-quality (5.1 Dolby and DTS if that matters to you), and the picture is just Jarrett and the piano surrounded by darkness, shot wide and closeup from different angles in perfect focus. My advice, as with that of others is, of course, to buy it.
Jonathan sent me this photo he took this morning. It's April, for goodness' sake! And this is central London. Surreal and marvellous.
In the past hour, there has been a rare (for Belfast, that is) storm, with impressive, deep rumbles of thunder, flashes of sheet lightning, and minutes later a torrential downpour of hail.
I stood outside while the hail was coming down, and feared for the flimsy patio roof above my head, in the way you would feel a pleasing terror at a horror movie. When the thunder-flashes came, every few minutes, it was as if you’d blinked when you hadn’t; a tic in the visual field, nothing more. Which was dispelled when the rumbles arrived. Then I read this:
The speed of sound in air is approximately 344 m/s or 1130 feet per second or 762 mph. The speed of light can be assumed to be infinite in this calculation because one must know that there has been a lightning strike before starting counting. Therefore, the lightning is approximately one kilometer distant for every 2.9 seconds (or one mile for every 4.6 seconds). In the same five seconds the light could have circled the globe 37 times.
Ahhh. The world we live in.
Well, I can’t wait until the summer, when I get to go to London again, and perhaps just as importantly, see a retrospective of Cy Twombly’s work in Tate Modern. Don’t worry — you haven’t missed anything because it isn’t there yet.
Truth is, I was trying to write a post in my head about a superb film called The Counterfeiters, which I saw last night. I couldn’t because it’s still too fresh. And then I found I couldn’t fully relax into a substantial post about anything much here, because the new way of blogging on this host makes everything seem rather... ill-fitting. It’s like having a new bed. Or writing with a type of pen you’ve never used before in your life.
Anyway, hopefully this post cracks it.
It's only a little butt. I can vouch for that personally. On the side of a bus, Belfast. This ad is about rubbish and smoking - I wonder if the authorities would accept this excuse for more... flagrant offences?
This, because i can't get it out of my head, is one of the haunting works in Tate Modern's exhibition. If you can, go before it leaves in the near future. Image from the Guardian.
This is a former cinema on Regent Street, London, and is now a Habitat. The cinema Wurlitzer Organ is still there behind the grille on the wall; you can see the console on the shopfloor - and there's a recital once a week. We weren't there for the recital, but for coffee, but the coffeeshop has shut. Shame.
A community centre near Waterloo, opened last year. The colours and overhanging glass are wonderful. It just needed to be a bit sunnier, that's all.
Part of the Juan Munoz retrospective, Tate Modern, London. These were placed on the concourse on level 4, so anyone just walking past the exhibition entrance can get close to them. They started to unsettle me about 20 minutes after I'd seen them and had moved on.
I made this as light as possible so the dark grey sky would overexpose as white. It worked! Bankside, London.
Notice who has nearly finished - and who has barely got a chance to start. Is this equality? Greenwich, London.
A bit of fish in the sink and your hauteur goes right down the drain. Greenwich, London.
The Queen Elizabeth Hall entrance, reflected in freshly-fallen, foul, cold rain, South Bank.
