Category: images

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Have I mentioned Lou Reed’s arms?

oh those arms and sinews

Strange, it never occurred to me that anyone else in the audience might be fixated on these two parts of his anatomy but it turns out this predilection is shared by H, whose idea it was to go to see him perform his concept album Berlin in its entirety. And in fact, judging from the larger picture from which the above was cropped, performers as well as audience members shared the interest.

neck

This was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to, possibly the best (although to be honest I go to so few there isn’t much competition, but don’t let that get in the way of how fabulous this was).

Quite apart from the stunning quality of the musicianship it was the physicality of the thing that so enraptured… Lou Reed moving like an ancient and arthritic monkey yet taut as catgut stretched across a violin bridge, face contorted in intense concentration; the swaying of the angelically-gauze-robed New London Children’s Choir; Katie Krykant in her stunning scarlet dress seated quietly while silent then stretched tight, pulling the music out on threads between her hands.

backing singer

The guitarist, Steve Hunter, played on the original album and has been described as “one of the best guitarists on the planet”. I’m not going to argue with that. An extraordinary presence, tall, inexplicably wearing what looked like a black wooly hat, he sometimes bounded around, at others reclined on a stool with one long leg extended out across the stage.

The intensity and rapport between all the musicians on stage (about 30 including the brass and string section from the London Metropolitan Orchestra was incredible. That’s drummer Tony “Thunder” Smith having some kind of out of body epiphany during Satellite of Love (played as one of three encores).

satellite of love

The only cavils I have are minor. The set by Julian Schnabel didn’t quite work for me. It wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t really very inspiring. And the presence of what appeared to be an old green sofa hanging against the backdrop was annoying. The back-projected film by Schnabel’s daughter Lola Schnabel featuring Emmanuelle Seigner as the album’s central character, Caroline, was a mimsy spun-sugar confection completely emotionally disengaged from the intensity of the music and narrative it was supposed to complement.

And what a narrative. Emotionally and physically abusive relationships, infidelity, jealousy, a mother having her children taken away, suicide by the blade. Quite apart from my own general history in the 36 hours before the concert I learnt of the suicide of a former colleague and discovered a friend had grown up in a series of foster homes after being removed from their mother’s care because of her repeated suicide attempts. Yes, life is indeed a bitch. However at the end of the performance I was left feeling profoundly uplifted. I’m not sure why this should be so, but guess that it’s partly sheer gratitude for what hasn’t happened and partly an ability now to look at pain without the fear that the mere act of looking will allow it to infect, overcome and destroy.

As for the pictures, I am so happy with them! I’ve long admired Caroline‘s spectacular concert photography but grabbed the long lens pretty much as an afterthought just before leaving the house. I think that given how far away from the stage we were it handled the challenge really well. I shoved the ISO up to 800, cleaned up the Olympus trademark noise afterwards; the tiny size and weight of the lens and camera means less shake, and, perhaps the most significant factor, Mr Reed kept quite still most of the time 🙂

I still really really want the new E-510 though. Can you imagine what my tiny light lens could produce on a body with built-in image stabilisation? and with (at last) an effort by Olympus to tackle the appallingly bad noise their cameras usually have at high speeds? It’s only a few millimeters larger and 85g heavier the the E-400… with the weak dollar I could get it for £400 when I go to NY in September… that’s £150 less than over here… nonononononono… no spending money. Tell me to stop. STOP! DON’T DO IT! NOOOOOOOOO!!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh

PS Did you know Lou Reed meditates? He studies with Mingyur Rinpoche who’s a teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu lineage. Maybe it’s Rinpoche who’s taught Reed to smile. Yes, there is visual evidence. Lou Reed can smile. Well, after a fashion. Looks like he still needs practice. And he’s released an album, Hudson River Wind Meditations. User reviews are positive. The one music critic I read was, um, savage.

Posted on

Have I mentioned Lou Reed's arms?

oh those arms and sinews

Strange, it never occurred to me that anyone else in the audience might be fixated on these two parts of his anatomy but it turns out this predilection is shared by H, whose idea it was to go to see him perform his concept album Berlin in its entirety. And in fact, judging from the larger picture from which the above was cropped, performers as well as audience members shared the interest.

neck

This was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to, possibly the best (although to be honest I go to so few there isn’t much competition, but don’t let that get in the way of how fabulous this was).

Quite apart from the stunning quality of the musicianship it was the physicality of the thing that so enraptured… Lou Reed moving like an ancient and arthritic monkey yet taut as catgut stretched across a violin bridge, face contorted in intense concentration; the swaying of the angelically-gauze-robed New London Children’s Choir; Katie Krykant in her stunning scarlet dress seated quietly while silent then stretched tight, pulling the music out on threads between her hands.

backing singer

The guitarist, Steve Hunter, played on the original album and has been described as “one of the best guitarists on the planet”. I’m not going to argue with that. An extraordinary presence, tall, inexplicably wearing what looked like a black wooly hat, he sometimes bounded around, at others reclined on a stool with one long leg extended out across the stage.

The intensity and rapport between all the musicians on stage (about 30 including the brass and string section from the London Metropolitan Orchestra was incredible. That’s drummer Tony “Thunder” Smith having some kind of out of body epiphany during Satellite of Love (played as one of three encores).

satellite of love

The only cavils I have are minor. The set by Julian Schnabel didn’t quite work for me. It wasn’t terrible, it just wasn’t really very inspiring. And the presence of what appeared to be an old green sofa hanging against the backdrop was annoying. The back-projected film by Schnabel’s daughter Lola Schnabel featuring Emmanuelle Seigner as the album’s central character, Caroline, was a mimsy spun-sugar confection completely emotionally disengaged from the intensity of the music and narrative it was supposed to complement.

And what a narrative. Emotionally and physically abusive relationships, infidelity, jealousy, a mother having her children taken away, suicide by the blade. Quite apart from my own general history in the 36 hours before the concert I learnt of the suicide of a former colleague and discovered a friend had grown up in a series of foster homes after being removed from their mother’s care because of her repeated suicide attempts. Yes, life is indeed a bitch. However at the end of the performance I was left feeling profoundly uplifted. I’m not sure why this should be so, but guess that it’s partly sheer gratitude for what hasn’t happened and partly an ability now to look at pain without the fear that the mere act of looking will allow it to infect, overcome and destroy.

As for the pictures, I am so happy with them! I’ve long admired Caroline‘s spectacular concert photography but grabbed the long lens pretty much as an afterthought just before leaving the house. I think that given how far away from the stage we were it handled the challenge really well. I shoved the ISO up to 800, cleaned up the Olympus trademark noise afterwards; the tiny size and weight of the lens and camera means less shake, and, perhaps the most significant factor, Mr Reed kept quite still most of the time 🙂

I still really really want the new E-510 though. Can you imagine what my tiny light lens could produce on a body with built-in image stabilisation? and with (at last) an effort by Olympus to tackle the appallingly bad noise their cameras usually have at high speeds? It’s only a few millimeters larger and 85g heavier the the E-400… with the weak dollar I could get it for £400 when I go to NY in September… that’s £150 less than over here… nonononononono… no spending money. Tell me to stop. STOP! DON’T DO IT! NOOOOOOOOO!!

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh

PS Did you know Lou Reed meditates? He studies with Mingyur Rinpoche who’s a teacher in the Tibetan Buddhist Kagyu lineage. Maybe it’s Rinpoche who’s taught Reed to smile. Yes, there is visual evidence. Lou Reed can smile. Well, after a fashion. Looks like he still needs practice. And he’s released an album, Hudson River Wind Meditations. User reviews are positive. The one music critic I read was, um, savage.

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More Rimbaud, words, images, thoughts

Wouldn’t it just be super cool to make images based on The Drunken Boat? (see the other day). Such colours! such images! such exclamation marks! I assumed this was so much a no-brainer that there would already be a group on flickr devoted to exactly this, along the lines of that for The Waste Land. There isn’t.

There are two interesting pictures – here and here – based on lines from A Season in Hell but no groups.

Words and images, images and words. At the exhibition on Tuesday I particularly liked the work by Victor Burgin who mixes image and text in his series UK76 and US77. (I didn’t really respond to another image-word juxtaposition in the work of Stephen Willats which I found too didactic and simplistic. Both photographers, both politically engaged, both heavily into theory but one I found sterile, the other exciting. Diffrnt strokes for diffrnt folks I guess.)

Hg and I talked about the personal power of words in framing a narrative of self, of the measurable physical effect on the brain of naming self-experience. He told me (again) to read Ursula K Le Guin‘s Earthsea Quartet. (I shall, I shall!)

The same day I went to the exhibition F and I talked about artists who feel the need to issue an instruction booklet with their work. How the words attempt to strait-jacket the art not allowing the possibility of the infinity of dialogues between object and viewers.

I am reminded of meeting with Ivy in the British Museum Great Court. We talked about the images of poetry and the poetry of images. She could have concentrated on the non-poetic image but chose words first. Wow! I’m really honoured to have been labelled a Thinking Blogger by Ivy. I now have to tag five more.

Firstly because of the punk connection there’s Jeff. Not that he doesn’t make me think all the time – he does. So much that my brain frequently hurts. However at the moment he’s remembering his friend Slim in a series of extraordinary posts, words and images. Slim the Drifter, moving between punk and country and a whole load of labels in between, defying them all.
Then there’s the hostess of the Thinkery. I mean with a blog name like that it’s a natural isn’t it. Krista makes me think and laugh and all sorts of other things. And she takes great pictures too.  And loves socks. And takes pictures of them.

Koranteng makes me think about such a wide range of stuff it makes my head spin. Most recently there’s been the issue of plagiarism to start the neurones firing. But look at the way he writes. And the music. Thanks to him and a one-hit wonder recommendation I’m now ploughing through the 14 or so albums I had to acquire in order to get that single song.

My friend and former World Service colleague Lara covers Hackney, Luanda and pretty much everything in between. And she is, completely brilliantly, growing and growing and growing. Thanks for taking us along too 🙂

I missed Oso‘s birthday. He’s had remarkably few of them and this won’t be apparent from his blog where he grapples and tussles with everything from beer to cats. Oh, and some other stuff too.  Amongst his many other talents and activities he’s the multi-stomached rambo-ruminant digester of Global Voices, the must-read synopsis of what the world is talking about.

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A day

Superb exhibition – Panic Attack! – Art in the Punk Years. It was full of reflecting surfaces and I just couldn’t resist. Here is co-viewer Mr Hg in a picture I called “bigfoot”

bigfoot

but he feels would be better named “bigfoot, small tits”.

Quite why I felt the necessity to place myself in various of the photographs on display I don’t know. Homage? Yes, let’s call it homage.

Here I am with a man who took pictures of himself in an Arthur Rimbaud mask.

shot

In fact that, in common with this and this, is merely a jeu d’esprit. The homage comes here:

in nan's hair

Yup, pretty opaque I know. But it’s actually this self-portrait, Nan One Month after Being Battered by Nan Goldin. I love this picture. The blood and lipstick, the bruises and the curls. Defiance. Acceptance. Pain. Pride.

After rushing back and picking up the 2ndspawn from school we go round to friends for tea… F (a painter) and I talk of art, painting, photography, poetry. The tea gives way to wine. She has roses on her kitchen table.

kitchen table

She is painting a Rimbaud poem on the wall of her studio. All of it.

As I descended Rivers undisturbed
I sensed the haulers no longer steered me:
Howling Redskins took them captive, nailing
Them naked like targets to painted poles.

I was carefree of all or any crew,
Freighting Flemish wheat or English cotton.
When that racket with my haulers had done,
The Rivers led me wherever I wished.

Through the rippling fury of tides,
Last winter, emptier than childhood’s mind,
I ran! And Peninsulas let slip
Have not brought down more triumphant hubbub.

The tempest has blessed my sea-borne wakings.
Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves,
Those rolling beds of the eternal dead,
Ten nights, no thought for dull-eyed harbor lights!

Sweeter then, I’ve been bathing in the milky
Way, in star-steeped Poem of the Sea,
Ravenous green azures; where sometimes a drowned
Man drifting by, rapt, pale and pensive, goes down.

Where, tinting all at once the blue, the slow
Delirious rhythms of the day’s rosy glow,
Stronger than alcohol, vaster than poetry,
Ferment the freckled red bitterness of love!

I know the heavens cracked by lightning, surfs,
Waterspouts and currents: I know the night,
And the Dawn exalted like doves in flight;
I’ve seen sometimes what men thought they saw!

I’ve seen the low sun, smeared with mystic awe,
Lit with violet congealing fingers,
The rolling waves, like actors in old plays,
Their shuttered shivering so far away!

I’ve dreamt the night green to the dazzling snows,
Kissing to the sea’s eyes climbing and slow,
Unheard-of juices’ flow, blue and yellow
The waking of singing phosphorescence!

For months I’ve followed hysterical herds
Of surf surging and crashing on the reefs,
Without dreaming Mary’s luminous feet
Could force back the panting Ocean’s muzzle!

I’ve jostled incredible Floridas,
You know, mingling flowers with the panther’s eyes
On the skins of men! Rainbows stretched like reins
To the seas’ limits, gleaming doves of grey!

I’ve seen enormous bogs fermenting, snares
Where in the reeds a Leviathan rots!
Waterfalls crashing in the midst of calms,
And horizons tumbling into chaos!

Glaciers, silver suns, pearly waves, fiery skies!
Hideous wrecks in the depths of dark harbors
Where giant serpents devoured by insects
Drop with black perfumes out of twisted trees!

I’d shown these Eldorados to children,
Blue seas, these golden fish, those fish who sing.
– Flowering foams have cradled my driftings;
Ineffable winds gave me timely wings.

Sometimes the sea, wearied martyr of poles
And zones, whose sobs had me gently rolling,
Raised her yellow cupped shady blooms to me
And I rested, like a woman kneeling…

All but an island, I sideswiped quarrels
And the turds of clamoring blond-eyed birds,
And I sailed, while through my fragile rigging
The drowned fell back, descending into sleep!

Now I, in the ringlets of back bays lost,
A boat in the birdless air, storm-tossed,
The Monitors and the schooners of Hanse
Wouldn’t salvage my water-sloshed carcass;

Free and fuming, decked with violet fogs,
I who pierced the blushing sky like a wall,
Bearing solar fungus and azure snot,
The exquisite jam of all good poets,

Who ran, spattered with electric lunettes,
Planking warped, black seahorses in escort,
While the hammering heat of these Julys
Beat fiery funnels out of sea-blue skies;

I, who trembled fifty leagues off, hearing
Behemoths in rut, gross Maelstroms moaning,
Eternal spinner of motionless blues,
I miss the Europe of ancient ramparts!

I’ve seen atolls full of stars! and islands
Whose fevered skies are open to drifters:
– Exiled in these deepless nights do you sleep,
Countless golden birds, O future Vigors? –

Too true, too many tears! Dawns of heartbreak.
Each moon is cruel, and every sun bitter:
I’m swollen with harsh love’s drunken torpor.
O let my keel burst! Let me go to the sea!

If there’s water in Europe for me
It’s the cool, dark pond at balmy twilight
Where a child squats full of sadness, launching
A frail boat like a butterfly in May.

Bathed in your languors, O waves, no longer
Can I clear the wake of cotton freighters,
Nor pass through blazoned flags and banners’ pride
Nor pull beneath prison hulks’ dismal eyes.

I want to make things.

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When I was one

I had just begun

bubbles!

Bernard has just begun, as of today. It was very exciting, and had bubbles. As well as real live frogs.

“This is the best party-bag I’ve ever had” said secondborn on the train on the way home. And also “those weren’t the really scary sort of babies, you know.” Firstborn merely announced that his alien was better than the smiley, which is basically as good as it gets with a nearly teenager.

Neither of them has stayed six for ever and ever. Nor, I suspect, will Bernard.

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Crazy day

Up at sparrow’s fart to drive down to Whitstable with Nina, Arun, Neha and Maizy. Nina drove, I subdued Maizy in the passenger seat and Neha in the back rose heroically to the initially alarming instruction to give Arun his bottle when he got hungry.

love

He’s a beautiful smiling-gurgling-laughing boy. Which is just what you need if you’re a single parent (speaking from experience).

neha

Neha is already instructing him on the finer points of philosophy.

fish bones

Maizy managed to contain her jealousy (didn’t grab his head in her jaws and drag him around the ground as she does with the cat… which was a relief.) She confined herself to locate the smelliest fish carcasses and offal and rolling in them in order to perfume the car on the return journey. We had a superb meal in the restaurant above the fish market from where we could see a fisherman mending his net

netting

and the gravel processing plant which obscured any further the view of the sea.

gravel works

Unfortunately we then had to belt back to London like shit off a shovel because of my rather urgent and complicated domestic arrangements involving three children, seven adults and four different suppers.

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A way of looking at thirteen blackbirds

stamps

A package arrived today from Hong Kong bearing these wonderful stamps, but on first glance I was rather disappointed. Common magpie? little egret? scops owl? pshaw. Why send them all the way over from China when they’re available for viewing right here. The white-bellied sea-eagle is the only species not seen in the UK.

Closer inspection revealed that the owl wasn’t a European scops owl but a collared scops owl (there are, it seems, more than fifty members of the Otus family alone).

This then brought back to mind a really disturbing thought I had after admiring this picture from Mikey (and can you spot the joyfully serendipitous reason why I’m using a screenshot rather than a link?)

one of 13 ways

Wallace Stevens was not writing about my sort of blackbird. Turdus merula is not found in the States. In the new world it’s not a Turdus, it’s an Agelaius. A family with no less than 11 members. Ok, it’s not quite 13 but very nearly. Call it poetic license.

“Does it matter?” asked the friend who happened to phone up as I reached exactly this point in my musings.

Well, yes and no. Yes it matters because on an utterly visceral level I have spent decades fleshing out that highly visual poem with very clear images just like Mikey’s above. Visceral because when I realised it was the “wrong” bird inhabiting those scenes I felt a wrenching in the guts. A disillusionment almost as painful as the discovery that “unique” is not pronounced “uni-kway”.

And no, obviously it doesn’t matter. Neither a jot nor a tittle. It’s the deluded worry of an over-literal intermittently keen birdwatcher. But I confess I was relieved to find these illustrations by a fellow-countryman of the poet which show not a hint of yellow head or red shoulder interrupting the general blackness of the bird.

Poetry is the subject of the poem,
From this the poem issues and

To this returns. Between the two,
Between issue and return, there is

An absence in reality,
Things as they are. Or so we say.

But are these separate? Is it
An absence for the poem, which acquires

Its true appearances there, sun’s green,
Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks?

From these it takes. Perhaps it gives,
In the universal intercourse.

Birds remade in all their blackness each time words fly from page to brain. A million million forms flocking the sky between issue and return.

(And here are some more blackbirds which flew into my inbox overnight, by Edward Picot who also curates The Hyperliterature Exchange.)