I spent last night in the company of the Soul of Music. Splendidly naked, he was gazing up in rapture at the Genius of Fire, that ball of eternal flame, whose gilded rays reached over the aquamarine sky to a humble huddle of mortals below. Lo, struggling beneath the thorny thicket of materialism that sunders [...]
Archive for October, 2007
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Posted in Architecture, Art, Music, tagged Bach, simone dinnerstein, sugababes, wigmore hall on October 24, 2007 | No Comments »
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Posted in Art, Fashion, Literature, tagged italo calvino, lee miller, marc jacobs, mrs dalloway, the memory keeper's daughter, toast on October 22, 2007 | 1 Comment »
‘For there she was‘.
The last line of Mrs Dalloway is the ultimate climax: a sweet, sure, substantive stance after the groping gabble of its battle-broken cast. ‘Tis a moment, finally, a moment held, heavy with existence, insubstantial as air. The image of Clarissa is as vivid as a photograph, and a passage in Italo Calvino’s [...]
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Posted in Art, Literature, tagged art of asbestos, dante, david whyte, London, lost on October 19, 2007 | No Comments »
Easily confused little scatterfemale that I am, M’lud, all haberdashery and helplessness, I excel at getting lost. It’s a rare art, to be adrift in the midst of great familiarity, and it results in a life of fear and curiosity, which is not altogether a bad thing. You see, I always know where I am. [...]
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Posted in Dance, Film, Music, tagged seth lakeman, teddy thompson on October 17, 2007 | 1 Comment »
I have found Jesus.
He has the face of an angel and the voice of a prophet, and he plays the fiddle like a devil with a carpenter’s arms. The second coming is an understatement; Robert Powell was a nice looking fella, but it’s a touch of cosmic genius to have made Messiah 2.0 from James [...]
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Posted in Art, Fashion, Film, Theatre, tagged childhood obesity, eley kishimoto, frieze art fair, galliano, national gallery, porridge, proust, Ratatouille, War Horse on October 15, 2007 | No Comments »
Forget the madeleine; porridge is my prepubescent Proustian prompt. Wallpaper paste thick, throat-toastingly hot, with a cowpat crust, a blob of soft brown sugar and your initials applied Pollock-style in glossy golden syrup. Autumn; new term; scratchy tights; porridge. Leaves to leap in, conkers to crack.
‘Fall’ is a child’s season, and whatever the fash rags [...]
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Posted in Film, Music, TV, tagged hbo, rome, the tudors on October 11, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Sam Neill has an extraordinary face. His Wolsey in The Tudors looks like the Machiavellian lovechild of a world-weary pug and an old woman sucking a sherbert lemon. He’s definitely channelling Tim Curry’s Cardinal Richelieu, which makes sense when Henry VIII and his posse (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Henry Cavill, Kris Holden-Reid) seem to think they [...]
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Posted in Architecture, Art, Fashion, Literature, tagged Calke Abbey, English aristocrats, historic houses, National Trust on October 9, 2007 | 1 Comment »
The history of England, as articulated through the annals of its aristocarcy, is an alarming apologue of eccentrcity, obssession and isolation. A class-bound country breeds…well, with itself, leading to a genetically restricted mixture of madness, money and macabre mores.
Calke Abbey is a kind of architectural elegy to the extinction of the rural peer, a giant [...]
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Posted in Film, Literature, tagged epistolary novel, Film, letters, Literature, postal strike on October 4, 2007 | No Comments »
Today’s postal strike comes as something of a relief to a Blonde whose pale paws are lacerated with paper cuts from the snowdrift of wax-sealed, tear-stained, petal-spattered purple prose presented to her on a silver platter every morning by a buckle-kneed butler as she sets about her breakfast kippers.
I love letter-writing because it indulges [...]
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Posted in Film, Music, tagged Art, Film, podcast, Red Violin, Saint-Georges, violin on October 2, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges features highly on my (wipe clean) laminated list of Dead People I Would Do. The mulatto son of a slave was a virtuoso composer, conductor, fencer, horseman and athlete, not to mention a devastating dancer and heroic soldier, campaigning against slavery by using his very body and creativity as an exemplar [...]
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