arts: Picasso at the National Gallery

I am a big Picasso fan, for me he was a wonderful talent: a brave and playful man, who stood up to the establishment and authority, doing his own thing.

My mother does not like Picasso as she believes he was a misogynist who treated his various wives very badly. This is probably broadly true, and while he wasn't a loyal partner, it must have been difficult constantly being surrounded by beautiful and very available women - power corrupts...

Another friend argued she finds his paintings too dark? Well yes some of the paintings are very dark indeed but many others are wonderfully stylish, playful, sexy, moving and vibrant. But for me his art is wonderfully fresh and original, powerfully reflecting our inner lives and feelings.

arts: Favourite Films: Gremlins

This is a great film, I loved it when it first came out a quarter of a century ago!

A curious mythical tale with great and charming special effects for the time.

This extract from fr.wikipedia covers a few of my favourite moments in the film and just how popular and cutting edge this film was at the time:

Billy reçoit Gizmo un peu avant Noël, et est rapidement fasciné par son intelligence, sa faculté d'apprendre et de chantonner. Gizmo se révèle être un compagnon très doux et très affectueux. Malheureusement, un ami de Billy, Pete Fountaine (Corey Feldman), renverse accidentellement de l'eau sur Gizmo. Gizmo est rapidement pris de convulsions visiblement douloureuses, et à la grande surprise de Billy, il se multiplie, donnant naissance à cinq nouveaux Mogwaïs. Ceux-ci semblent beaucoup plus agressifs que Gizmo, et semblent être dirigés par l'un d'entre eux qui a une mèche blanche sur la tête (La Raie) ...

Billy emmène Gizmo à la taverne de Dorry pour retrouver Kate, qui est en service cette nuit là. Les Gremlins ont envahi la taverne, et de façon très vulgaire, forcent Kate à les servir. Elle découvre qu'ils ne supportent pas la lumière lorsqu'elle allume une cigarette pour l'un d'entre eux. Elle parvient à s'échapper en utilisant le flash d'un appareil photo comme arme, et retrouve Billy. Le couple se réfugie dans la banque, alors que les Gremlins sèment la panique dans Kingston Falls. Ils tuent Mme Deagle en la précipitant par une fenêtre, il arrivent presque à tuer le couple Futterman en lançant un chasse neige contre leur porte (en fait, la scène laisse à penser qu'ils sont réellement tués, mais ils apparaissent tous les deux dans Gremlins 2). Quand Billy, Kate et Gizmo émergent, les Gremlins sont partis. Ils se sont tous réfugiés au cinéma de la ville, où ils regardent Blanche Neige et les Sept Nains. Billy et Kate parviennent à les enfermer et à faire sauter le cinéma. Tous les Gremlins brûlent, sauf La Raie (celui qui à la mèche), qui avait quitté les lieux juste avant pour aller manger dans une confiserie car il n'y avait plus de pop-corn...

Mr Wing retrouve la ville qui a été le théâtre des ravages des Gremlins, et donc la famille Peltzer. Il reprend Gizmo pour éviter de nouveaux troubles, prétextant très moralement que la société occidentale n'est pas prête à accueillir un Mogwaï... et que Billy sera prêt, un jour.


Le film représente à l'époque un véritable tour de force au niveau des effets spéciaux (n'oublions pas que nous sommes bien avant l'apparition et l'utilisation du numérique). L'animatronique a été remarquablement utilisée pour ce film et si l'utilisation actuelle des effets numériques permet une perfection largement supérieure, les effets spéciaux live de Gremlins ont pris avec les années un charme certain. Ce charme un peu vintage, allié à la dynamique des scènes de pillage (dans le pub, au cinéma, dans la ville etc.) et au côté très « politiquement incorrect » des bestioles, font que le film fonctionne encore très bien.

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gremlins

arts: Roni Horn - captivating

A couple of weeks ago I saw the Roni Horn exhibition at Tate Modern.

This was a very sensual, dramatic and modern exhibition. It is difficult to say why this is so captivating, at first it seems almost ordinary, but slowly the more you look, the more it draws you.

The guardian art critic described one famous exhibit / room quite brilliantly

You can never fish in the same river twice. In the last room, I am surrounded by 110 portraits of the same young woman. She looks directly at me. Some images are colour, others black and white. Horn photographed her as they travelled between Iceland's hot springs and pools; in each, the woman immersed herself. Her expression changes with Iceland's notoriously fickle weather. The fleeting emotions are constantly in motion: torrid, steamy, frosty, brutal.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/feb/26/roni-horn-tate-modern

There is also a nice gallery of images on the Guardian's website

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/feb/25/roni-horn-tate-modern?picture=343786286

One aspect of her art work and this gallery is the way it is inter-dispersed with quote of poetry from Emily Dickerson:

Faith is Doubt

these words are transformed into a modern sculpture, not abstract but simple and elegantly solid plastic letters embedded in aluminium bars.

arts: Kuniyoshi at the Royal Academy

This is a style of art I love, I was so excited when I saw the flyer (while ordering Onigiri in wasabi!?).

My mother brought me back a "cat pawing at giant carp mouse mat" back from Japan about 10 years ago, it is still on my desk and much admired.

The exhibition was fantastic, this populist art form is quite magical in its simplicity and beauty:

It's a riotous visual feast of Samurai warriors, monstrous octopuses, beautiful women and roiling seas. Everything is bold, surprising, liberating ...

In the later 19th century, the French artists inventing modernism loved Japanese prints. You see them on the wall in portraits by Manet and Van Gogh. Then it really was contemporary: Kuniyoshi, Hokusai, Hiroshige and Kunisada were recent figures when Van Gogh found inspiration in their works.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/mar/30/kuniyoshi-art-review

arts: Royal College of Music Free Lunchtime Concert

At the Royal Academy I caught a real bright young talent, Chris Guild give a dramatic, intense and emotional peformance of Elliott Carter's Piano Sonata (1945/6) a difficult piece of music.

Chris performed this rapid and complex piece for over 35 minutes without sheet music, an amazing achievement to play with such difficult music, large sections of which were extremely rapid and all from memory. The intensity of the playing was overwhelming at times, the discordant and abstract music is not easy on the ear (and there was some frustrated shuffling in the audience who were perhaps hoping something more orthodox).

Chris clearly has a promising career ahead of him:

“An artist of individuality... a charismatic performer” - Royal College of Music, London, June 2008

“His shaping of all the pieces was remarkable… His maturity was also evident in the confident and considerate way in which he ‘handled’ the audience with such charm and authority. He has a great future.” - Review of the Knockando Woolmill Restoration Fund Recital, August 2007.

“As always, his technique was impeccable…” - St Michael’s at SIX, Edinburgh, August 2007

“A consummate musician with a most impressive gift.” - St Mary’s Music School, Edinburgh, May 2005

“One of Scotland’s most promising young musicians” - The Northern Scot, November 2001

“…set for an assured pianistic future” - Hexham Courier, May 2004

http://www.freewebs.com/christopherleeguild/

Chris choose this piece to mark Elliott Carter's 100 burthday:

From 1940 to 1944 Elliott Carter taught courses in physics, mathematics and classical Greek, in addition to music, at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. On July 6, 1939, Carter married Helen Frost-Jones. They had one child, a son, David Chambers Carter. During World War II, Carter worked for the Office of War Information. He later held teaching posts at the Peabody Conservatory (1946 - 1948), Columbia University, Queens College, New York (1955-56), Yale University (1960-62), Cornell University (from 1967) and the Juilliard School (from 1972). In 1967 he was appointed a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Carter has lived in Greenwich Village since 1945.

Carter's earlier works are influenced by Stravinsky, Harris, Copland, and Hindemith, and are mainly neoclassical in aesthetic. He had a strict and thorough training in counterpoint, from medieval polyphony through Stravinsky, and this shows in his earliest music, such as the ballet Pocahontas (1938-9). Some of his music during the Second World War is frankly diatonic, and includes a melodic lyricism reminiscent of Samuel Barber. Interestingly, Carter abandoned neoclassicism around the same time Stravinsky did, saying that he felt he had been evading vital areas of feeling.

His music after 1950 is typically atonal and rhythmically complex, indicated by the invention of the term metric modulation to describe the frequent, precise tempo changes found in his work. While Carter's chromaticism and tonal vocabulary parallels serial composers of the period, Carter does not employ serial techniques in his music. Rather he independently developed and cataloged all possible collections of pitches (i.e. all possible 3 note chords, 5 note chords etc.). Musical theorists like Allen Forte later systematized this data into musical set theory. A series of works in the 1960s and 1970's generates its tonal material by using all possible chords of a particular number of pitches.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Carter

One word of caution, I'm not sure about the choice of music for a casual lunchtime concert, yes it was deeply impressive but most of the audience were hoping for something more accessible?

Why do men driven to push themselves to such extremes of excellence? Sometimes to the point they lose the admiration of the common man / woman?

arts: Defining Constructivism: Rodchenko and Popova at the Tate

Modern art is often hard and inaccessible, and "defining constructivism" has plenty of minimalist modern art, focusing of shape colour and form only... breaking away from traditional aesthetics?

The beautiful setting and expert guiding of Tate Modern make even these abstract ideas exciting and enchanting.

Also this exhibition gave a much more positive perspective on the Russian revolution, sure it all ended disastrously with Stalin, one of the wickedest world leaders of modern times. However before this, yes times were hard but there was a sense of collective ownership, joint responsibility and working for a great cause.

Soviet Russia under Lenin was also the first country to decriminalize homosexuality in 1922. The Russian Communist Party effectively legalized no-fault divorce, abortion and homosexuality, when they abolished all the old Tsarist laws. The initial Soviet criminal code kept these liberal sexual policies in place. But a decade later Stalin reversed this, and homosexuality remained illegal under Article 121 until the Yeltsin era.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin

The curator from the Design Museum waxed lyrical about the work of these communist artists who shaped much of 20th century design over several decades.

arts: Seven Brides For Seven Brothers

While this isn't my favourite movie, there are some classic songs and this production was spot on :)

Unlike the movie, the guy weren't all red haired bruits but seven very handsome and cute guys.

The themes of "The Rape of the Sabine Women" seem a bit incongruous for a "camp as Xmas musical"?

The girls were giggly, very pretty, bouncy ... all-American, pneumatic girls.

The costumes were fantastic, nicely cut, with a touch of Orgeon's 1850 style and fantastic primary colours.

It must be difficult to sing and dance at the same time, especially as for the classic songs we have all heard the studio recording which set a near impossible standard. Still they did very very well, this was a joy to watch.

My favourite couple were not leads Adam and Millie (although they were great and looked perfected in the poster) but Gideon (the runt of the litter / youngest brother) and his sweetheart Alice (with big eyes, rosy cheeks and a huge heart).

general: Alan Cooper - the father of VB and general polymath

I started researching Alan Cooper after reading about his ideas on User Interface design.

I then founded out he worked on the original VB design!

He also has some interesting ideas on food, energy, housing ...