Tag: music

Oh, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!

il generalissimo comes to visit again

Siena: 1300-1350, The Rise of Painting 1300-1350

The National Gallery was waaaaay too busy. Pretty stuffy down in the bowels as well. That said it was gilded, splendid, and moving – full of creative energy bursting out of its form, finding previously unknown things to show. Seeing moments when something new is being discovered, a new way of understanding being expressed, new ways of portraying – I always find it powerful. It makes you want to look around you – where are these things today? Should a new set of wonderful artists appear in some part of the world, almost certainly not this one, out of what things around us would they find their art?

Duccio’s Christ plays with the Madonna’s veil and so symbolises the birth of Renaissance humanism – so it seemed to me anyway – finding living behaviour in a formalised Byzantine icon. I almost said ‘breaking free’ but I think that would probably be a disservice to Byzantine art. This Christ is also a child, and children do this.

Watching bodies take shape in three dimensions – Giotto’s great innovation – solidifying out of the symbolic into the more naturalistic, yes, more playful, more observed, suddenly you get the sense that these are people in the world.

I was struck by the idea of Simone’s paintings of Mary and four saints being in the Siena government offices. To be conducting administration of a city dedicated to Mary, underneath those vivid, extraordinary pictures, which must have seemed very new and astonishing at the time, must have created an equally vivid sense of piety.

Was one effect of the portrayal of the newly human saints, looking very much like the men (and women?) with whom you might transact, to make sainthood itself feel more tangible, to create a typology between being a saint and being a political person? The reverse is also true – it made the portrayal of saints and others political.

Textiles from Turkey, Iran, Cordoba, Mongolia, which provide the distinctive tessellations and intricacies of cloth so distinctive of Sienese painting – fragile scraps of cloth that have somehow made their way across seven centuries – were a reminder, always slightly thrilling, of the commerce between diverse cultures, religions and places throughout history, and how important such transactions are for artistic creativity, the ability to make something new and exciting, fresh.

A Surprising Encounter

On the way to the National Gallery bumped into John, a senior manager for a major competitor, who I last saw in Las Vegas, on Regent Street. Doubly wild because he normally lives in the States. He and his colleagues have all been laid off. A strange start to the day. As always you think ‘what if I’d taken my normal route instead of going a different way and then deciding actually you couldn’t be bothered?’ I suppose the negative side of it is all those serendipitous moments you missed out on by not taking a right you were thinking of taking…

Sinners

Was very good. Having a glorious day, where the community is brought together and lives and revels in itself, in a diptych with a night when it is destroyed by evil, produced a really nice balance – warmest feeling vampire film I’ve ever seen anyway. And not one but two grace notes – one an Inglorious Basterds style revenge on the KKK, the other a rapprochement between the old bluesman and the vampires. I think the whole thing only makes sense with that scene at the end, otherwise the view of religion is too confused. I saw a review say that the characters were one note. Yeah, sure, it’s a vampire flick- it gets a lot into its run time.

Couldn’t believe Washington Phillips’ What Are They Doing In Heaven Today? didn’t roll over the end credits though.

The Skin

Curzio Malaparte’s portrait of Naples at the end of la deuxième guerre mondiale. Very powerful, in that cynical Céline sort of way, which makes it seem like a Bosch painting, or at the very least a Breughel picture.

As well as a sort of monde à l’envers satirical force, i like the dark, mystical power this seems to generate in the corners.

All around us was a glint of eyes in the green shadow, a muted laughter, a flashing of teeth, and a silent gesticulation which clove the rays of light that filter into the alleys of Naples at sunset, a light the color of dirty water at sunset, the ghostly light of the aquarium.

and of the effect of the sirocco:

Even voices sound thick and lazy, and words have an unwonted meaning, a mysterious significance, as though they belonged to a forbidden jargon.

Although I’ve got a strong stomach, even a liking for this sort of stuff, by which I mean like Céline etc, his vignette on ‘the languid hosts of homosexuals’ who ‘descended’ on Naples from over Europe is unpleasant. It may be just that I had finished Alan Hollinghurst’s survey of queer life in London, in the 20th century, whose tropes of disgust and pederasty are matched beat for beat in Malaparte’s depiction. Is it worse than his portrayal of blacks? More importantly, is it worse than his portrayal of anyone?

Generally I would say the purpose, the meaning of satire, is to spare nothing and no one (this slightly deviating from a more traditional punish vice and reward virtue – never really actually what it did… or wanted to do.. anway). And generally Malaparte manages the tone to do so, brutally sympathetic, mocking laughter and caustic pity.

He quotes Theseus at the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when, calling on the new moon to rise, he cries, ‘Oh, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!’ It seems like such a great phrase for the breakdown of the politics of the liberal world order through (so Tim Garton-Ash in the FT), amongst other things, the complete breakdown and infection of the information space.

Watching it lose its grip on everything – senescent fingers attempting to hold fast onto something slipping from its grasp – makes you want to sing out with Theseus in anticipation of the new moon.

Music

has been really about Florence Adooni’s wondrous Ghanaian highlife album – fresh, gay, joyous even, cynicism withers  in the face of it, any heavy-hearted dolor evaporates.

also yesterday and today, listening to Melody Maker by Horace Andy, and the Big Youth version, Can You Keep A Secret? Melody Maker is great, but Big Youth transforms anything he’s on. Here, his traditional forceful delivery is also jittery and paranoid – the pieces of paper everwhere seem to evoke dangerous mental disorder or administrative collapse. ‘Can you keep a secret? Can you keep it in your mind?’ In one sense well yes, where else do you keep secrets? But in the sense of this track, it opens up an internal space, your mind as a place to be guarded, hidden from the outside world. All this in front of the haunting wailing of Melody Maker and the eerie  background of Row Fisherman, Row by the Congos.

Like Any Horse Rider

Missed a couple of weeks. It’s like I always say, with blogging it doesn’t matter how frequent it is, you just gotta make sure it’s out consistently.

An incoherent set of four this week. That’s fine. I dreamt I dreamt that someone gave me a big presentation set of Cutty Ranks cd singles.

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Unfinished Letter to a Friend: Las Vegas #1

It’s about this time of year that I leave the soft skies of this damp, north-western archipelago of the European continent, just as spring starts to unfurl, with its gusts and constant showers and wild extravagant clouds and head to Las Vegas, with its diamond hard desert skies, unforgiving landscape, and total artificiality.

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2022 Redux

2022 has been a bit of a dog.

Alright let me pour this little cognac and break it down for you1 I just discovered that this is in fact a 2021 joint, but you remove it from my significant 2022 listening over my dead body

Screenshot 2022 12 20 at 18 27
Screenshot 2022 12 20 at 18 28

My conclusion at the end of the year is that I’ve been suffering from a form of anhedonia and chronic, mild/medium, depression. Drink took up more of a role than it should have, I think to tackle the anhedonia, which led to considerable fatigue and ofc probably made the if-that’s-what-it-is anhedonia worse. My social manner was careless, sometimes borderline deplorable, and discouraging to forming new acquaintance, my already middling intellect very weak2 its natural state is C-, it can reach fairly high on occasion, but this year dragged relentlessly at a skiving, bedridden U. It was something of a relief to realise, 2/3rds of the way through that this seems to be a mode i go into from time to time, much of my teenage years for instance, which the natural intellectual ebullience of teenage years mitigated. but as i get older it feels more existential, more a symptom of decay rather than personality, emotions wan to the point of expiry, still protecting a battered and beleaguered heart by rolling up in a ball, cutting cords that should not be cut. Viva Las Vegas.

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Improving Spanish Tempos

…and the fish i was buying when i bumped into toby jones

tuna with pimenton, garlic and lemon. plus some roasted peppers.

it fell apart when i took it out because a) i cooked it for slightly too long and b) the fish slice has gone completely awol. kin great tho.

reminds me of this lunch i had near trafalgar after the second nicest birthday i’ve ever had:

tuna and chips at a spanish restaurant near trafalgar

after a difficult and stressful morning here (atlas mountains in the background)

an empty golden beach, empty because too cold for the spanish at this time of year lol

and here

a beautiful breakfast veranda in the middle of nowhere (well, you could see the beautiful Vejer de la Frontera on a hilltop across the way), while having orange juice, jamon, cheese and coffee

# Peste 3 – Conditions for Living

A collection of diverse observations from the last week:

The kids are all right

On the last day of school last Friday (lockdown -4), I walked through the park, and there was a large crowd of GCSE-aged schoolchildren – about 120 I made it – all collected there with more arriving. No adult supervision: this was clearly for and instigated by the children, one of those self-organising things – half entirely lark, half entirely serious – that teens can do, and do very well. It was of course in total contravention of recommended behaviour, not that they would possibly care about that – this was ‘it’s the last day, in really unusual circumstances, let’s get together, we may not see each other in person again for a while, let’s do a bit of planning [tho for children that age, the distinction between in person and digital, unless you’re going out, seems a lot less distinct than for pre-internet people like me]. A group of that size would have surely included smaller groups that wouldn’t perceive themselves as part of the main socially/hierarchically central group too. It was all oddly heartwarming.

Vegetable Loves

I was talking to my local greengrocer – this was on the Thursday (lockdown -5), and although he was flat out (‘4 times as busy’ though it ramped up even the next day), the store was full of fresh produce. He said it was a pain: he had to get to the wholesale market much earlier, because the wholesale market was closing much earlier (half three rather than half six), because the hospitality industry simply wasn’t ordering anything. Loads of fresh produce, but no one to buy it. He said he was just loading up the van as full as it would go. He was having to make quite finely adjusted supply and demand calculations and said it was very difficult: 2 weeks’ worth of leeks, gone in a morning, can’t get enough eggs, squashes going out quickly, and potatoes. I panic bought some radishes and an onion.

What was notable, though, was how full of fresh produce his shop was. Although his shop was four times as busy, this is four times as busy on his fairly quiet weekdays. Literally across the road there are two express supermarkets – Tesco and Sainsbury’s – vying for business, and their shelves are empty of fresh produce. People go in, stare uncomprehendingly at the shelves, and buy a forlorn shroomdog. I think there may be an irony here, which is that one pull factor for supermarkets i suspect is some people’s desire to avoid interpersonal communication. You can be cynical about this and say the middle-classes don’t like to be made aware of the fact that they’re being served. But in a multicultural society, uncertainty about language and etiquette, and the formal ecumenical processes of the modern supermarket can make it the easy option if people are lacking in confidence or uncertain, something self-service tills have facilitated further.

This cuts the other way, as the lex pointed out on twitter, multicultural supermarkets are also stacked with good things, but get very few people going into shop outside the community they serve.

Young turks

To take another example, my local corner shop, run by a Turkish family, is absolutely stacked to the rafters with cleaning items, baked beans, milk, bog roll, though they are running desperately short of Ritter Sport, which is extremely distressing, 10% discount for all NHS staff, and in response to Covid they’ve put this sign up in their front window:

Love those crazy turks (and mean crazy – if you’d seen them howling at the moon one New Years’ Eve absolutely off their faces you’d know what I mean. Very friendly though).

Also, the only place I’ve heard any Covid jokes. I mean I’m not getting out as much as I used to admittedly. And although yerman behind the counter found them very funny, ymmv. Still, for the record:

  1. ‘You know there have been no incidents of the corona in Turkey? Do you know why Corona doesn’t go to Turkey? Because of all the germs already there, it would die!’ (30 seconds or so of uncontrollable laughter)
  2. So Turkey said they didn’t have any cases, and then the newspaper reported one, and the government said no, no this is a mistake, there aren’t any cases. Then you know the IMF, they said that if your country had Corona you could apply for aid [i haven’t checked any of this btw], and suddenly the government said ‘We have Corona! Look at this person!’ (prolonged laughter)
  3. You know how you can get the virus on cash, so they say you shouldn’t use cash – that’s the reason they haven’t had any in Turkey because there isn’t any money! (doubles over with mirth)

He was going to carry on, but someone else came in and I made an exit.

Sundries

In other sundry news: supermarket cut flowers die almost immediately (to refer to the Barthes’ cataloguing of the spatial, temporal environments and æsthetics of sequestration), as the florist has now gone. I may just rely on daffs from the grocer.

Our estate agent runs a small set of properties, is extremely considerate to tenants, never charged any fees when I moved in, and is very prompt on repairs. Her husband is in King’s intensive care with Covid, and she is in self-isolation and understandably distressed. Wishing her very well.

Had to call her because our boiler’s packed in due to a power cut and surge last night. Me standing in front of the boiler while the… man who normally does the boiler… guided me through various tasks to find out that it was indeed bust, and that he would try to get a part but it would be tough and may be a couple of weeks because all the suppliers are closed fml.

Conditions for living in a time of Covid.

Keep Your Eyes on the Road Up Ahead – I Don’t Seem to Be Able to Use Mine

I’m going to try (once again) to write a bit more here. It will necessarily largely be stringing beads on the thread of the week, and I’ll need to work harder at writing better than comes naturally, but it is with the intention of plugging recent experiences into the wider set of more permanent feelings and thoughts.

Saturdays have become my day for catching up on bookmarked articles and things of interest held in abeyance during the week, so that’s also the time I’m likeliest to post.

Sometimes a song has a line or moment in it which seems to catch something about a moment now, or of another place, without it being clear why:

Pete Hammill’s Sitting Targets reaches a typical point of anguish, with the lines:

And I’m losing control of my body, and I’m running scared.
Oh, remember the black and white movie,
A positional state of affairs,
Of the fashionable interest in moving,
Just to prove that we’re there.

(In fact it is apparently, ‘We’re left with a black and white movie, a positional state of affairs, An obsessional interest in moving, just to prove that we’re there’ which is clearly right on a re-listen. but the line that’s been in my head has been that ‘of the fashionable interest in moving’.)

This is a propulsive song about escape, from an emotional trauma only defined by the terms of its escape.

If we’d been stuck just a few hours more
I’d have cracked up, I’d say.
No, you never can tell when it’s coming;
It’s so hard getting out of the way;

It is something impending that has brought about the crisis – and with the road and car the means of escape it would be wrong to say something coming down the road. It is more something that looms, something unavoidable, but out of sight, something which makes you feel like a sitting target. Target for what is the question implied by the title. I tend to feel that all art of mid-sixties to early 80s should be assumed in some way to be characterised by anxieties of possible sudden nuclear annihilation, and there is obviously existential fear here, but also there is a sense of the claustrophobia of your home environment, of society and time closing in.

Oh you never can tell how it’s going,
No you never can see how it’s been,
But to stay sitting targets is surely
No better than living a dream.

So that set of lines, which kept on surfacing in my head, work against the rest of the song, and critique the urge for escape – the motion is out of control, it is required for a sense of self and of agency, otherwise unavailable to someone staying in the same place.

That this song plays into a deep-seated set of my own anxieties – staying in one place, continuous building on something being an exclusion of other possibilities, ultimately stemming I think from fears of death – is certainly one part of why this song appeals to me generally.

But its point of specific application right now – the thing that caused it to snag on a hook – is harder to define. I find myself circling around the notion that ‘Of a fashionable interest in moving’ is suggestive of psychosomatic mechanisms at play in society at the moment – the need to express internal stresses in other forms.

A trick that Hammill pulls off quite well across his albums I think is to locate these particular moments of emotional agon into social/historical/scientific spaces, which allows for this sort of application.

It is surely not the motion aspect of the song though – a decade of Tory government now using policy as a way of rhetorically realising an apparently expressed desire for a permafrosted 1945-1948 country means it must be more the threat of stasis implied by the idea of sitting targets.

Perhaps it also links into anxieties I have about the debates taking place on the left – the need and indeed the opportunity to reframe for the future, of the possibilities of the new communities that will form, that are forming, identified in their literary expressions by John Self at the end of his piece on the Brexit novel (a phenomenon to which I am totally indifferent, unless it’s written by a John Lanchester of course). The song seems to warn of the need to avoid the stasis born of fear, and inutile movement for movement’s sake, which is not in itself progressive, but an escape.

As I say, I am fully aware these are, in proper Pete Hammill fashion, personal anxieties mapping onto the social and political space.