Another grumble ...

Typically, I have the opportunity to go and hear Ian Bostridge singing in Brussels during the week but can't get my act together, dither & then discover the concert's come and gone.

Then, this lunchtime, I sit listening to him present a programme on Radio 3 based around Benjamin Britten's compositions for tenor voice. I'd no idea about Britten's deep dislike of Vickers' interpretation of Peter Grimes nor really appreciated just what made Pears' voice so particularly suited to the works as a whole. In short, it was a fascinating and illuminating programme. Ian's commentary was predictably intelligent, articulate and considered, the contributors equally well-informed. Excerpts illustrated and further clarified the points being made. Good job all round.

This is radio as it should be: you finish the 45 minutes feeling better informed, revitalised, your appetite whetted to listen to more Britten and to listen more attentively. Your world has grown - a little but appreciably.

How rare it is to hear broadcasting that seems so stoically indifferent to marketing imperatives or self-imposed audience appeal.

And I wonder how many such programmes you can fund for one edition of Top Gear, Strictly Come Dancing, ...

See if you can access it via Listen Again/iPlayer in the UK (I doubt we can out here in Belgium).

Just finished Geoff Dyer's The Colour of Memory which arrived on Monday & I've been swigging since. It's good in that first novelish way (it is his first, I think). So obviously worked up from journalings of wasted months - a point he makes in the Note to the Revised Edition. I like his aesthetic of the "inch from life - but all the art is in that inch". How true.

Compared to - say - Iain Sinclair, the writing is easy going, in places pretty functional. Dyer apologises for there being no plot as such but it's a ruse. He knows that at the core of the book is a pervasive aimlessness of that period in one's life when time expands to fill the void. Jobs are picked up & dropped, people come & go, there's not even a rumour of mortgages, babies, & other stuff that hold you down to place & responsibility. Why then even think of a plot?

And yet, he's clever in not filling in the gaps. The held glance between Steranko & his sister Fran is left in the air at the close of chapter 007 but it's clear that things have changed by 005 & his kiss with Foomie. Or the way he closes the novel entering Freddie's apartment & discovering the journal (which is/isn't) the manuscript we're reading. What of corduroy jacket Freddie? We're not told explicitly - moved abroad, died? - & are better off left guessing.

So much of the later GD is already here: frequent little riffs off jazz records that are on a turntable or bought in the market; worked up passages on photographs or - like Monica's bedroom seen through a window - life that is becoming photogenic; the allergy to regular employment; the cultivated delinquency. And there's even the hint of Tarkovsky - a Brixton Nostalgia? - at those points when the writing stalls & time seems to stop & an epiphany is hinted at yet never quite arrives ...

The annual system failure. Shut down. Bed. Reboot.

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collage 23/1/13

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collage 23/1/13

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Why do you make a book? Because my Hands can extend a few score Inches from my body; because my poverty keeps those Hands empty when my Heart aches to empty them ...

(Coleridge, Notebooks, entry Spring-summer 1811)

turning this statement over all day ... & the stranger & more suggestive it gets ...

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collage 22/1/13

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Among the obits for Michael Winner this caught my eye:

"In 1957 he directed his first travelogue — This is Belgium — shot largely on location in East Grinstead."

Imagine had he continued in this vein ...

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collage 21/1/13

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collage 20/1/13

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E. is just back from her class trip down in the snowy Ardennes and deeply puzzled at the news that some parts of the UK are on red alert with blizzard warnings.

"But they like hot places .... so why will they be coming?"

That's blizzards not lizards ...

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Next to the stuff coming out on John Zorn's Tzadik label, this has to be among the most beautiful calligraphic CD covers I've seen in quite a while. The music's damn good, too.

Given editions such as this designed by the wonderfully named oficina tresminutos who would want to buy music off iTunes? 

(Check out their page at: 

http://www.oficinatresminutos.com/html_pages/04_packaging/packaging_gls_00.html)