Skip to main content

Posts

Walking to England's oldest Oak tree: Majesty.

Gus Dapperton & BENEE: Don't Let Me Down

Paul Nash (1889-1946): Wood on the Downs, (1929)

Bleak life

Halway through reading Bleak House and feeling somewhat awash with the unending stream of odd-bod characters writ large that Dickens so enjoys creating. Comic, strange, tragic, curious all. Some a doodle and others a bombardment. How very peculiar, preposterous that he would invent them and on such a scale. And then on the way to Tesco after work last night, cycling along an unlit path in the gloom, I discerned ahead of me an odd assemblage of a person pushing a shopping trolley towards the store, shuffling along in a bobbling, pausing manner.  Getting closer, even from the barest glimmer of lights t'was a small, impossibly elderly, unwell woman and an emaciated young boy walking on tip toes, who were seemingly attached by their clothes being stitched together they were so close. In the store I saw them again, in their own oblivous to all, attached to one another condition, pondering things very precisely but not really buying anything much. The boy, with ill fitting overly-large b

David Emitt Adams: Facing West Seven Hours Before Sundown, 2014

Nowomowa - Tribute to Joy Division

Having watched one Youtube video on Joy Division recently the algorithm has kept offering up more.  Each one is good. One of the unexpected side-effects of absorbing information which was out of reach at the time as it was before information was available in any meaningful way, is to appreciate as if for the first, or near first time, the original power  and mystery of their songs.  To wonder how producer Martin Hannett took four wannabe punks who had all fell out of education at 16 and through them invented a new type of music. Listening to these songs again and cover versions and being stone cold aware that if one makes something it needs to aim to be as good as this. It sets a bar. This evening, Youtube offers a bloody brilliant 2020 tribute set from a Polish band.

one of the picture elements

Jennifer Guidi: Dear Light Illuminating and Activating Our Inner and Outer Worlds, (2023)

Gagosian website here

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis: Forest, (1907)

Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, (1875-1911, Lithuania): Funeral Symphony (IV), (1903)

The non-narrated documentary film ' Burial ', (2022), consists largely of visuals of the decommissioning of a nuclear power station in Lithuania accompanied by an ominous, wavering soundscape. It doesn't sound that promising but the effect is extraordinary.  Unexpected also was the inclusion of a 1903 series of paintings, the 'Funeral Symphony', by Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis,  an artist I'd never heard of, who died at 35 of pneumonia.  I'm still attempting to process something of their deep, wonderful mysteriousness. Pastel on Paper.