Wednesday, March 19, 2008
Sunday, March 16, 2008
a classical week
a quieter week, by recent standards, but still time for 3 classical concerts:
at the RFH – Leif Ove Andsnes performing Beethoven , Sibellius, Grieg and Debussy;
at the Wigmore Hall – The Zehetmair Quartet performing Schubert, Holliger and Schumann;
at the Barbican – Piotr Anderszewski and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performing Mozart Haydn and Beethoven.
What can I tell you?
At the Wigmore Hall I was sat in seat C13, just 4 along from the seat made famous in Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’ – as far as I could tell, none of the Zehetmair string quartet looked longingly in my direction.
The Holliger piece was a newly written piece. It was atrocious, buttock baringly bad. Sounded like a dreadful soundtrack to a gormless horror movie, full of atonal tuneless clichés. The rest of the evening was sublime.
The Barbican audience were the friendliest. And the baldest. I’d estimate that 4 in 5 of the blokes had some form of male pattern balding. These are my people.
Best encore was at the Barbican too, performed solo by Piotr Anderszewski, Bach if I’m not mistaken.
I drank too much coffee. This is because I am anxious about falling asleep. It doesn’t stop me nodding off though, but it does make me anxious about being anxious and my mind go whirling. Well the music makes it do this too, but I think the coffee enhances the effect. I should do what the regulars do, have a couple of glasses of red wine and just let it all hang out.
I should tell you what the pieces were but I can’t be bothered. You are not reading this anyway.
Also at the Barbican I checked out their latest exhibition, the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art . The central conceit (I think that’s the right word) is that we are on Mars, looking at a museum the little greenies have put together from their foraging on Earth. But they get things wrong, and make weird connections. So far so – crap, but bearable. The problem is that the whole thing is put together in this weird alien accent – ho ho such funny mistakes the Martians make – but it is a bad accent, totally unconvincing, and one which keeps slipping when the curators feels the need to tell you something about the artist or work. So early impressions were as depressing as the not very funny art and humour shambles at the Heywood. But at least here some of the art is interesting – I liked the totem poles, weird masks, and generally a preponderance of peculiar wooden boxes with strange things in them – fake cabinets of curiosities. And for all the curators’ knowing irony, I wonder if they haven’t unwittingly stumbled upon another truth, that much contemporary art is in fact pants and completely unfathomable, that it might as well come from another planet.
at the RFH – Leif Ove Andsnes performing Beethoven , Sibellius, Grieg and Debussy;
at the Wigmore Hall – The Zehetmair Quartet performing Schubert, Holliger and Schumann;
at the Barbican – Piotr Anderszewski and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra performing Mozart Haydn and Beethoven.
What can I tell you?
At the Wigmore Hall I was sat in seat C13, just 4 along from the seat made famous in Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach’ – as far as I could tell, none of the Zehetmair string quartet looked longingly in my direction.
The Holliger piece was a newly written piece. It was atrocious, buttock baringly bad. Sounded like a dreadful soundtrack to a gormless horror movie, full of atonal tuneless clichés. The rest of the evening was sublime.
The Barbican audience were the friendliest. And the baldest. I’d estimate that 4 in 5 of the blokes had some form of male pattern balding. These are my people.
Best encore was at the Barbican too, performed solo by Piotr Anderszewski, Bach if I’m not mistaken.
I drank too much coffee. This is because I am anxious about falling asleep. It doesn’t stop me nodding off though, but it does make me anxious about being anxious and my mind go whirling. Well the music makes it do this too, but I think the coffee enhances the effect. I should do what the regulars do, have a couple of glasses of red wine and just let it all hang out.
I should tell you what the pieces were but I can’t be bothered. You are not reading this anyway.
Also at the Barbican I checked out their latest exhibition, the Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art . The central conceit (I think that’s the right word) is that we are on Mars, looking at a museum the little greenies have put together from their foraging on Earth. But they get things wrong, and make weird connections. So far so – crap, but bearable. The problem is that the whole thing is put together in this weird alien accent – ho ho such funny mistakes the Martians make – but it is a bad accent, totally unconvincing, and one which keeps slipping when the curators feels the need to tell you something about the artist or work. So early impressions were as depressing as the not very funny art and humour shambles at the Heywood. But at least here some of the art is interesting – I liked the totem poles, weird masks, and generally a preponderance of peculiar wooden boxes with strange things in them – fake cabinets of curiosities. And for all the curators’ knowing irony, I wonder if they haven’t unwittingly stumbled upon another truth, that much contemporary art is in fact pants and completely unfathomable, that it might as well come from another planet.
Friday, March 07, 2008
A Literary Week
yes another busy week...
The highlight of Jewish Book Week for me was Simon McBurney, the main force behind Theatre de Complicite, and what a force. He came across like a hyper-caffeinated cross between Patrick Marber and Boris Johnson, and all the better for that. Ostensibly he was taking part in a discussion about diaspora and Bruno Schultz, but really it was his passion and drive and wonderment for the world of the imagination and of words that shone through, in great contrast to the rest of the rather drab offerings at JBW. Adam Thirlwell, in the same event, came across as a bit plain and somewhat newsnight review-ish. Earllier in the day, Amy Bloom lectured us in how not to write, but seemed to have not heard the the one about not writing historical fiction in the present tense when it came to her own latest offering. And we got a delightful glimpse of Bernard Malamud in an event by his biographer Philip Davis with readings by Janet Suzman, but in an event which drew ties between his writing and his life the absence of anything from the Fidelman stories was a bit of a surprise.
Let us go then, you and I, to the British Library where, as part of a series of events linked to its Breaking the Rules exhibition of European avant-garde book artistry, this month’s Josephine Hart’s Poetry Hour was dedicated to T.S. Eliot. The great and the good were all there. As well as me, I had that Harold Pinter and his lady wife in front of me (I didn’t think it appropriate to ask where he used to get his Pinter Hats from), the Michaels Portillo and Howard were in the cheap seats, and Maurice Saatchi (who it turns out is married to the said Ms Hart) nearly accidentally invited me into the room next door for drinks with the elite. Harriet Walter and Damian Lewis were our readers and a very wonderful job they made too of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and the Wasteland, though sadly nothing from the Four Quartets nor from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. There is something about Eliot, those weird and wonderful phrases which once read are somehow never forgotten, for ever liable to lurch into your conscious mind at unexpected moments. Who is the third who walks always beside you?
I was back at the BL later in the week for a performance by Cindy Oswin entitled “A Salon With Gertrude [Stein] and Alice [B. Toklas]” and really rather marvellous it was too. Ms Oswin began with extracts from “The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas” before reporting how Toklas emerged from under the shadow of her lover/patron with the Alice B Toklas cookbook, whereupon an intermission was declared and waiters emerged bearing trays of nibbles from the said cookbook. They were delicious – stuffed aubergine topped with olives and anchovies, cucumber boats bearing cheesy peas, and little round mushroom sandwiches, and some good wine. All for £7.50 and all these extras completely unadvertised. In the second half Ms Toklas was joined on stage by Gertrude Stein in puppet form (jokes about whose hands were going up where were avoided) and we enjoyed tales of the famous Paris Salon, of Picasso and Hemingway, Matisse and Scott Fitzgerald. It made for a wonderful night.
Whilst at the BL I gave the Breaking the Rules exhibition (Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937 to give it its full title) a second go but still found it frustrating, all those books behind glass unable to yield up their secrets. But something else I noticed, a different narrative, emerged from the way that the exhibition was structured around various cities –– Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius – and so it went on - all names associated with great pre-war Jewish communities - and all leading inevitably to the final “scene” in the exhibition - footage of the Nazis burning ‘degenerate’ books. It seems a shame that nobody picked up on the opportunity to explore the Jewish contribution to the European avant-garde movements when it was lurking so clearly under the surface.
The highlight of Jewish Book Week for me was Simon McBurney, the main force behind Theatre de Complicite, and what a force. He came across like a hyper-caffeinated cross between Patrick Marber and Boris Johnson, and all the better for that. Ostensibly he was taking part in a discussion about diaspora and Bruno Schultz, but really it was his passion and drive and wonderment for the world of the imagination and of words that shone through, in great contrast to the rest of the rather drab offerings at JBW. Adam Thirlwell, in the same event, came across as a bit plain and somewhat newsnight review-ish. Earllier in the day, Amy Bloom lectured us in how not to write, but seemed to have not heard the the one about not writing historical fiction in the present tense when it came to her own latest offering. And we got a delightful glimpse of Bernard Malamud in an event by his biographer Philip Davis with readings by Janet Suzman, but in an event which drew ties between his writing and his life the absence of anything from the Fidelman stories was a bit of a surprise.
Let us go then, you and I, to the British Library where, as part of a series of events linked to its Breaking the Rules exhibition of European avant-garde book artistry, this month’s Josephine Hart’s Poetry Hour was dedicated to T.S. Eliot. The great and the good were all there. As well as me, I had that Harold Pinter and his lady wife in front of me (I didn’t think it appropriate to ask where he used to get his Pinter Hats from), the Michaels Portillo and Howard were in the cheap seats, and Maurice Saatchi (who it turns out is married to the said Ms Hart) nearly accidentally invited me into the room next door for drinks with the elite. Harriet Walter and Damian Lewis were our readers and a very wonderful job they made too of The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Portrait of a Lady and the Wasteland, though sadly nothing from the Four Quartets nor from Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. There is something about Eliot, those weird and wonderful phrases which once read are somehow never forgotten, for ever liable to lurch into your conscious mind at unexpected moments. Who is the third who walks always beside you?
I was back at the BL later in the week for a performance by Cindy Oswin entitled “A Salon With Gertrude [Stein] and Alice [B. Toklas]” and really rather marvellous it was too. Ms Oswin began with extracts from “The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas” before reporting how Toklas emerged from under the shadow of her lover/patron with the Alice B Toklas cookbook, whereupon an intermission was declared and waiters emerged bearing trays of nibbles from the said cookbook. They were delicious – stuffed aubergine topped with olives and anchovies, cucumber boats bearing cheesy peas, and little round mushroom sandwiches, and some good wine. All for £7.50 and all these extras completely unadvertised. In the second half Ms Toklas was joined on stage by Gertrude Stein in puppet form (jokes about whose hands were going up where were avoided) and we enjoyed tales of the famous Paris Salon, of Picasso and Hemingway, Matisse and Scott Fitzgerald. It made for a wonderful night.
Whilst at the BL I gave the Breaking the Rules exhibition (Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde 1900-1937 to give it its full title) a second go but still found it frustrating, all those books behind glass unable to yield up their secrets. But something else I noticed, a different narrative, emerged from the way that the exhibition was structured around various cities –– Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna, Berlin, Warsaw, Krakow, Vilnius – and so it went on - all names associated with great pre-war Jewish communities - and all leading inevitably to the final “scene” in the exhibition - footage of the Nazis burning ‘degenerate’ books. It seems a shame that nobody picked up on the opportunity to explore the Jewish contribution to the European avant-garde movements when it was lurking so clearly under the surface.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
a Long Week
Well it’s been one hell of a week, so much to report.
Jewish Book Week opened on Sunday with barely anything to do with reading, writing or literature in the programme. I think the organisers must have got confused and thought they were programming Limmud, not JBW. Still I had an enjoyable day with sessions on mysticism, Spinoza, and secularity. The highlights as always were the questions from the audience. At the end of the Spinoza lecture, in which we had learnt of his extraordinary achievements in philosophy and his struggles with community and identity, a lady asked if Spinoza had got married and had children. When told he hadn’t, she heckled ‘well he didn’t have much of a life then’. Prof Rachel Elior explained the correlation between different mystical movements and the tragedies that befell the Jewish people – mysticism was the creation of the losers by way of imaginative response to their own tragedy; this hadn’t happened after the Shoah because of the creation of Israel. It was such a shame said an audience member desperately trying to find a question to justify the sound of his own voice that she had POLITICISED the lecture. Err sorry she said she was just stating facts based on her academic research. Anyway we all noticed it was him not her who was trying to politicise things - he faced death by a thousand tuts. Touchy these lefty secular anti-zionists.
Things became even weirder in the evening session with Willow Winston who makes “book art”. I really liked her work and the ideas behind it – kind of variations on pop-ups rich with mathematical and spiritual thinking. For her workshop we were encourage to cut up, mash-up, remix and just generally destroy old books. We were all uncomfortable with the notion, but dealing with our book angst was part of the experiment. I stuck to cutting up my JBW booklet. It was great fun, and a large room of people took to the task with relish and some of the work was really rather impressive.
On Friday I was back at the JBW for more tales of mystical madness from Howard Schwartz, a session which turned into a workshop on storytelling as we all struggled to finish a fragment of story attributed to Reb Nachman of Bratslav. As a writer I was of course fairly hopeless, seeing myself as neither a storyteller (I follow EM Forster on this, oh yes, oh dear, the novel tells a story) nor a performer, but by then I was so far out of my comfort zone not to worry.
It was events at the Arts Depot that brought this odd mental state into being. I would love to know what the thought process is at the Arts Depot. It must be something like – lets put on a festival of physical /visual theatre; we’ll invite some of the most exciting up and coming companies and performers in the land; we’ll get some of the leading theatre companies in London to hold workshops; and we’ll put on some talks as well to give general advice to aspiring performers; and then what we will do is hold the festival midweek, mostly during the day, so that no-one can come, and we won’t bother to actually tell anybody about the festival anyway just to make absolutely sure that the place is all but empty. And with no apparent irony we’ll call the festival “depot untapped”.
So it was that I found myself in a workshop hosted by Sarah Dowling of Punchdrunk; max 15 places, and it was half empty! I had tried to ignore the bit on the programme which said “come prepared to move” but once committed, there was no escape. So it was that I found myself on an intractable projectory leading to myself and a poor lovely lady who had the misfortune to be partnering me preparing and performing a piece of physical theatre in one of the public lifts in the Arts Depot. Thank goodness LaLa Latte Days didn’t walk in that moment. I have to say I just had the best time; the whole experience was really liberating and fun – everyone else in the group was really talented, basically they were other performers taking part in the festival, drama students, or people who go regularly to acting classes, and no-one seemed to mind the fact that I was performing with all the grace of an elephant in the room. I had nothing but admiration for Sarah; not only did she make it such a fun experience, but she had to repeat the workshop again (the second one looked half empty as well) and then get off to Battersea to perform for 3 hours.
That was Wednesday morning. Thursday I found myself in an even emptier workshop hosted by Peter Glanville of the Little Angel Theatre Company, the country’s leading, and probably only regular, venue for puppetry. This wasn’t so much fun somehow, it all seemed a bit too serious, but I learnt a lot about puppetry and was really glad I went.
I caught 3 shows at depot untapped. First was the Levantes Dance Theatre with a piece called Gin & Satsumas, which seemed to be about the terrible boredom of everyday housewife drudgery seen through a prism that verged on the camp / burlesque; there were some lovely images and moments, but overall it was quite a short piece and had the feeling of being the start of something rather than finished product.
Over the two days I grew very fond of the Lost Spectacles, who had been in the Punchdrunk workshop, and their performance, Lost in The Wind, blew me away (no pun intended). This was physical / visual theatre on a large scale, full of imagination and ambition, and was as wonderful as any of the many wonderful things I caught at LIMF last month. A man steps out of his house (always a bad move in these kinds of worlds) into a storm and gets lost, finding himself amongst a very strange ‘family’ who to me felt as though they had been orphaned at an early age in some remote land and had managed the difficult business of not growing up, free from any adult intervention. There was a great sense of play, some wonderful theatrical magic, for example conjuring up a mountain snow storm and an underwater scene from the simplest of materials. And the soundtrack was great. I think this lot could really go places.
Last up and running very late were two puppeteers from Manchester, Mishimou, with a version of The 3 Little Pigs. The puppetry was excellent and again there was just a wonderful vibrancy and sense of imagination. Unfortunately they were plagued by technical difficulties – the lighting kept going wrong, some of the shadow puppetry was out of focus, and ultimately the intercostal animation broke down altogether. My heart really went out to the performers, because, as we told them, what they had done was really good. They managed to limp on to the end of the show, but it was a real shame.
Well if all of this wasn’t enough for one week, I managed to go to a Tea Ceremony at the British Museum held by the London Branch of the Urasenke Foundation, Japan’s leading exponents of Chado, the Way of Tea. I caught a Richard Goode recital at the South Bank - Chopin, with some Bach, Debussy and Mozart. I found it all a bit soporific – I don’t know if that was a good or a bad thing, but it didn’t seem very melodic, all a bit kind of difficult to hold any focus on. I thought I was being plagued by a phantom snorer, but it turned out that the heavy guttural wheezing was actually coming from Richard Goode onstage. I went to Ceramic Art 2008, a fantastic selling exhibition at the Royal College of Art with many of the best ceramic artists from Britain and Europe showing. And I went to the most dreadful exhibition at the Hayward – Laughing in a Foreign Language – supposedly about art and humour but which was not in the slightest bit funny, nor was the art interesting in any way. The artists on show could have learnt something from Lost in the Wind about using humour in art. I just about managed to climb up the stairs at the Hayward to the Alexander Rodchenko exhibition, - what I saw of his graphic art / photography / montage work was really good, but I was too knackered to really appreciate it, and hope to go back again.
I’ve got some random photos from the week to stick up when I get a mo.
Over and out.
Jewish Book Week opened on Sunday with barely anything to do with reading, writing or literature in the programme. I think the organisers must have got confused and thought they were programming Limmud, not JBW. Still I had an enjoyable day with sessions on mysticism, Spinoza, and secularity. The highlights as always were the questions from the audience. At the end of the Spinoza lecture, in which we had learnt of his extraordinary achievements in philosophy and his struggles with community and identity, a lady asked if Spinoza had got married and had children. When told he hadn’t, she heckled ‘well he didn’t have much of a life then’. Prof Rachel Elior explained the correlation between different mystical movements and the tragedies that befell the Jewish people – mysticism was the creation of the losers by way of imaginative response to their own tragedy; this hadn’t happened after the Shoah because of the creation of Israel. It was such a shame said an audience member desperately trying to find a question to justify the sound of his own voice that she had POLITICISED the lecture. Err sorry she said she was just stating facts based on her academic research. Anyway we all noticed it was him not her who was trying to politicise things - he faced death by a thousand tuts. Touchy these lefty secular anti-zionists.
Things became even weirder in the evening session with Willow Winston who makes “book art”. I really liked her work and the ideas behind it – kind of variations on pop-ups rich with mathematical and spiritual thinking. For her workshop we were encourage to cut up, mash-up, remix and just generally destroy old books. We were all uncomfortable with the notion, but dealing with our book angst was part of the experiment. I stuck to cutting up my JBW booklet. It was great fun, and a large room of people took to the task with relish and some of the work was really rather impressive.
On Friday I was back at the JBW for more tales of mystical madness from Howard Schwartz, a session which turned into a workshop on storytelling as we all struggled to finish a fragment of story attributed to Reb Nachman of Bratslav. As a writer I was of course fairly hopeless, seeing myself as neither a storyteller (I follow EM Forster on this, oh yes, oh dear, the novel tells a story) nor a performer, but by then I was so far out of my comfort zone not to worry.
It was events at the Arts Depot that brought this odd mental state into being. I would love to know what the thought process is at the Arts Depot. It must be something like – lets put on a festival of physical /visual theatre; we’ll invite some of the most exciting up and coming companies and performers in the land; we’ll get some of the leading theatre companies in London to hold workshops; and we’ll put on some talks as well to give general advice to aspiring performers; and then what we will do is hold the festival midweek, mostly during the day, so that no-one can come, and we won’t bother to actually tell anybody about the festival anyway just to make absolutely sure that the place is all but empty. And with no apparent irony we’ll call the festival “depot untapped”.
So it was that I found myself in a workshop hosted by Sarah Dowling of Punchdrunk; max 15 places, and it was half empty! I had tried to ignore the bit on the programme which said “come prepared to move” but once committed, there was no escape. So it was that I found myself on an intractable projectory leading to myself and a poor lovely lady who had the misfortune to be partnering me preparing and performing a piece of physical theatre in one of the public lifts in the Arts Depot. Thank goodness LaLa Latte Days didn’t walk in that moment. I have to say I just had the best time; the whole experience was really liberating and fun – everyone else in the group was really talented, basically they were other performers taking part in the festival, drama students, or people who go regularly to acting classes, and no-one seemed to mind the fact that I was performing with all the grace of an elephant in the room. I had nothing but admiration for Sarah; not only did she make it such a fun experience, but she had to repeat the workshop again (the second one looked half empty as well) and then get off to Battersea to perform for 3 hours.
That was Wednesday morning. Thursday I found myself in an even emptier workshop hosted by Peter Glanville of the Little Angel Theatre Company, the country’s leading, and probably only regular, venue for puppetry. This wasn’t so much fun somehow, it all seemed a bit too serious, but I learnt a lot about puppetry and was really glad I went.
I caught 3 shows at depot untapped. First was the Levantes Dance Theatre with a piece called Gin & Satsumas, which seemed to be about the terrible boredom of everyday housewife drudgery seen through a prism that verged on the camp / burlesque; there were some lovely images and moments, but overall it was quite a short piece and had the feeling of being the start of something rather than finished product.
Over the two days I grew very fond of the Lost Spectacles, who had been in the Punchdrunk workshop, and their performance, Lost in The Wind, blew me away (no pun intended). This was physical / visual theatre on a large scale, full of imagination and ambition, and was as wonderful as any of the many wonderful things I caught at LIMF last month. A man steps out of his house (always a bad move in these kinds of worlds) into a storm and gets lost, finding himself amongst a very strange ‘family’ who to me felt as though they had been orphaned at an early age in some remote land and had managed the difficult business of not growing up, free from any adult intervention. There was a great sense of play, some wonderful theatrical magic, for example conjuring up a mountain snow storm and an underwater scene from the simplest of materials. And the soundtrack was great. I think this lot could really go places.
Last up and running very late were two puppeteers from Manchester, Mishimou, with a version of The 3 Little Pigs. The puppetry was excellent and again there was just a wonderful vibrancy and sense of imagination. Unfortunately they were plagued by technical difficulties – the lighting kept going wrong, some of the shadow puppetry was out of focus, and ultimately the intercostal animation broke down altogether. My heart really went out to the performers, because, as we told them, what they had done was really good. They managed to limp on to the end of the show, but it was a real shame.
Well if all of this wasn’t enough for one week, I managed to go to a Tea Ceremony at the British Museum held by the London Branch of the Urasenke Foundation, Japan’s leading exponents of Chado, the Way of Tea. I caught a Richard Goode recital at the South Bank - Chopin, with some Bach, Debussy and Mozart. I found it all a bit soporific – I don’t know if that was a good or a bad thing, but it didn’t seem very melodic, all a bit kind of difficult to hold any focus on. I thought I was being plagued by a phantom snorer, but it turned out that the heavy guttural wheezing was actually coming from Richard Goode onstage. I went to Ceramic Art 2008, a fantastic selling exhibition at the Royal College of Art with many of the best ceramic artists from Britain and Europe showing. And I went to the most dreadful exhibition at the Hayward – Laughing in a Foreign Language – supposedly about art and humour but which was not in the slightest bit funny, nor was the art interesting in any way. The artists on show could have learnt something from Lost in the Wind about using humour in art. I just about managed to climb up the stairs at the Hayward to the Alexander Rodchenko exhibition, - what I saw of his graphic art / photography / montage work was really good, but I was too knackered to really appreciate it, and hope to go back again.
I’ve got some random photos from the week to stick up when I get a mo.
Over and out.
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