Saddened to read of the death of bass giant, Charlie Haden (1937–2014)... but, boy, what a legacy to leave behind! Could post a link to Alice Coltrane's mesmeric Isis and Osiris or his own Song for Che from Liberation Music Orchestra (pictured, Haden far right), but here's the seminal Lonely Woman with Ornette Colman.
Pigbag's Sunny Day is not exactly my favourite track, but it is one of my favourite sleeves; which explains why it's sat fading at the front of the 7" box all these years.
Not far away sits this little string dispenser (though I don't know who made it, when, or from what), these two abstract cousins in blue and red form a vital part of Team Bookcase.
It's bon anniversaire for Jacques Dutronc this weekend as the French cultural icon turns 70. It's not that I've pasted my walls with his portraits or anything, I just remember it's the same date as Edward's. Here's Dutronc with his gorgeous (and more famous) female counterpart, Françoise Hardy. Watch him in action here.
09/04/2013
The death of Mrs Thatcher, that cartoonish super-villain of the 1980s, engenders some peculiar feelings. Compassion, forgiveness and magnanimity may make weak ideological attributes but as emotions they should still be cherished. I always imagined her as Lady Macbeth, trying to expunge the stain of humble beginnings like a phantom spot of blood.
There's an overriding sense of nostalgia in watching the footage rotate this week and thinking about the creative dissent she inspired. Not just alternative/counter-cultural comedy or cinema, but real mainstream stuff too; being seen to extol a message while wholly revelling in the glitz.
I spent half an hour researching contemporaneous lefty-pop for an evocative post: Ghost Town, The Style Council, that Blow Monkey's song with Curtis Mayfield, The Communards… you get the picture. Then I remembered watching the mighty Robert Wyatt's version of Shipbuilding as a bemused 12 year old... it's not something you forget in a hurry.
If a musical genre title needs hyphenating, I was once warned, you should should steer well clear... the same apparently goes for food. I find myself more in the finding-hyphens-quite-useful camp. For instance, the whole life's work of trumpeter Donald Byrd (1932-2013) is no less astonishing for falling either side of one hyphen or another.
This Feb we also bid farewell to Bob Godfrey (1921-2013), whose personality has been so colourfully outlined by this week's obituaries. It's curious to hear Godfrey's long term collaborator and national treasure, Richard Briers (1934-2013), in a less familiar turn, narrating artist Ryan Gander's 2008 video, As it Presents Itself - Somewhere Vague.
I remember the first part of Steven Claydon's bacchanalian after-show party pretty well, though later events became noticeably less distinct in recollection... before receding from memory entirely. Luckily for me the exhibition itself lingers in the mind with crystalline, sober clarity. If you're in London's west end for some Christmas shopping you could do worse than flee the crowds for a five minute culture fix.
The centennial birthday of 20th century giant of no-music (and mycology), John Cage, is a good reason to re-post this picture I've had sitting on my desktop for who-knows-how-long. As unassuming as ever, I'm guessing that carrier bag's just full of fungi.
With the UK seasons seeming to switch daily, we were grateful for a clement couple of hours in a Sussex garden. Great Dixter is pretty much the life's work of the hugely influential horticulturist, Christopher Lloyd, whose riotous and ramshackle ethic is aptly illustrated in mixed herbaceous borders.
Nothing at Dixter is planned on paper but rather intuited annually by Lloyd's successor Fergus Garrett and a team of eager gardeners (with a few languorous cats)... none of whom seemed to mind my ploughing a pram through the place. There's a bit of a doggy theme with a wonderful mosaic of two top-to-toe dachshunds in the walled garden, continuing inside with a collection of sausage dogs; from one-off sculptures to the Slinky tie-in from Toy Story. While the medieval house also holds a fair few ceramics and heap of great rugs, it was the proportions of the vegetable beds outside that truly earned my envy.
Un/fortunately, Great Dixter has an exemplary nursery too, meaning a trip may cost more dearly than entrance fee alone. Binomial Latin usually sounds a bit rude to me, but —for those of you who understand this stuff— here's my shopping list:
Cyperus vegetus
Seslaria nitida
Erigeron karvinskianus
Euphorbia stygiana
Cynara cardunculus (dwarf)
Forniculum vulgare Purpureu Macleaya m. Kelways Coral Plume
N.B. Post title taken from Lloyd's 1970 book, itself a skit on J.S.Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, the preludes and fugues that eccentric pianist, Glenn Gould, so famously interpreted. Even if you hate Baroque music, it's always good to watch him in action... I swear he thought in algebra and algorithms!
Fittingly, the BBC's been playing a glut of Woody Guthrie this weekend as America celebrates the centenary of its C20th folk hero. In mapping the movement of music from Europe (and beyond), something about early Americana puts me in mind of Hobo Nickels, those wonderful examples of Outsider Art. Altered by itinerant workers, railroad drifters, the disenfranchised and dispossessed, Hobo Nickels usurp the totemic symbols of the nascent US, replacing them with a counter-currency of personalised, painstaking, or puerile meaning. I'd love to make my own but modern coins are too tough for tooling!
• Visit Cabinet Magazine for full photo credits and excellent accompanying article
Our crappy studio sprang a leak during the UK's last soggy fortnight. While shifting stuff out of harm's way we rediscovered a nice poster and a naïve etching. Edward spent a sweary day framing them up (don't mention the huge gap at the foot of the black one). The poster's not just gobbledegook (or double-dutch) though, if you've not heard her, Yma Sumac was a loopy sounding Peruvian soprano associated with the exotica movement.
Donna Summer (1948-2012) featured on a handful of popular culture's finest moments, for sure, but that AIDS-as-punishment-from-God controversy was a real stinker and no mistake. Here's the only link I can find to 1979's Our Love, a track not really cited in today's obituaries though I love the Acid touches at the end/drum pattern on the chorus... and so did New Order! The images are Gran Fury's late 80s agitprop for ACT UP, to whom she later apologised.
I know this sight's almost obscene, but I'm 38 weeks pregnant and Edward's wardrobe is really coming into its own; care worn t-shirts for sleeping and oversized shirts in the day. Luckily I've avoided those pleated cap-sleeved jersey numbers (with the curious floaty empire-line) and stuck to sack-like dresses like a penance. The Earth rumbles and cups of liquid ripple when I approach, I'm pretty sure I'll not be sneaking up on anyone anytime soon.
10/05/2012
Saddened by the deaths this week of Adam "MCA" Yauch and the outspoken Maurice Sendack. Sendack's work had seen such a resurgence of interest in these past few years, been made so ubiquitous, that I was temporarily blind to it. An interview with Tom McCarthy highlighted structural similarities with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (c. 1899), recast Max as Kurtz, and made me revisit Where the Wild Things Are (1963); noticing—for the first time—that smart formal game whereby the bordered illustrations progress to fill the page, form wordless double spreads at the carnivalesque climax and fall away once more at the tail end. Proper genius.
• The In Sound from Way Out! Gershon Kingly & Jean Jaques Perrey's 1966 thrift-classic which forms the nominal inspiration for both The Beastie Boys' 1996 LP and Stereolab.
Barcelona based illustrator Kavel Rafferty often makes sketches in series, finding meaning through difference, repetition and the accumulation of objects. While shoes, records, cranes and signage are all charmingly collated and catalogued in her work, it's the images of childhood and nostalgia that are somehow more telling.
Freud would reckon on the collector's indexical drive arising from the need to find order in chaos, abate the passage of time and guard against loss. Or maybe collecting stuff is just good ol' geeky fun. Either way, you can decide for yourself as Kavel spreads her archive fever to East London, curating an exhibition of Risographic prints by collectors, artists, photographers and designers at East London's Mill Co. Project. With all the work up for grabs, they may start collecting your pennies too!
• Images courtesy of another of Kavel's exhaustive side projects, Record Envelope. Collectionistas, 26 Nov, 12 noon-7pm The Mill Co. Project, Lime Wharf Vyner Street, London E2
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