Posted in Dance, Literature, Music, Theatre, tagged matthew bourne, dorian gray, hedda, gate theatre, beauty, christopher walken, leo tolstoy on September 29, 2008 | No Comments »
“It is amazing how complete is the delusion”, wondered Count Tolstoy, no doubt blinking in the cruel glare bouncing off a harlot’s milk-white bosom, “that beauty is goodness”. In Leo veritas. Beauty is more reliably bad-ass, and too much of it can kill.
It’s a truism beautifully told in Hedda, Lucy Kirkwood’s updated version of Ibsen’s [...]
Posted in Film, Music, tagged Spain, the sound of silence, the graduate, dustin hoffman on September 22, 2008 | No Comments »
Blame Spain. The Blonde’s shocking recent silence can be attributed to an Iberian version of the below, with equal amounts of solar-powered paralysis and hormonally turgid turpitude, but maybe a little more chest hair.
Never fear. She’s back. And off for a wax.
Posted in Music, tagged Festivals, Mile High music festival, Denver, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Steve Winwood, JJ Grey and Mofro, Michael Franti, Latitude on July 24, 2008 | 4 Comments »
What kind of mofo misanthrope hates festivals? What kind of po-faced, puling fool ain’t full of ribald, tribal rapture at the prospect of a sun-soaked weekend of hemp-based, henna-hued horseplay, carbon neutral creativity and laid-back sonic socialising?
Well.
Whisked off by work to Mile High music festival in Denver last weekend, I paled with despair beneath my [...]
Posted in Fashion, Music, tagged Elaine's, New York, New York fashion, super, VICE party on June 24, 2008 | 1 Comment »
In America, even the subs are super. As a Brit committed to the cause of underestimation, deprecation and bullishly blase back-footedness, I baulk at the insidious infiltration of that asinine adjective into the Queen’s E. Once the preserve of consonant-clipped, gym-slipped gals from Hampshire, super has been adopted by gloss-lipped, French-tipped, semi-illiterate US fashionistas and [...]
Posted in Art, Film, Music, tagged Indiana Jones, film score, film soundtrack, John Williams, Ennio Morricone, Hans Zimmer, shape of song on June 3, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Brief Encounter has a lot to answer for; the appropriation of much-loved music for a film score can feel intrusive and often belittling. There is an irrevolcable loss of innocence when a tender, treasured tune that has companionably quivered and nibbled at your earlobes for years is suddenly gang-raped into a hard little whorish soundbite [...]
Posted in Music, Theatre, tagged Balzac, incest, Lindsay Duncan, Matt Smith, Oedpius, Polly Stenham, Regina Spektor, That Face on May 21, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Is there anything more deliciously dangerous than the engulfing, sticky sweetness of musty, milky motherlove? It’s the unctious umbilical ambrosia that makes us all into trapped, tantrumming tarbabies. But it sure does taste like heaven on a rusk.
The west end’s latest fringe fosterling, That Face, is a spunky little warning about the parallel perils of [...]
Posted in Art, Fashion, Literature, Music, tagged asparagus, bank holiday, blind boys of alabama, C J Sansom, cans festival, Delilo, junipero, thomas hope on May 2, 2008 | 1 Comment »
A Bank Holiday alone: a shimmering, cerulean depot of dreams. Plans are afoot.
Tonight I will spray an HB tag on Lambeth Tunnel at the Cans Festival, Banksy’s international street art gathering; on Saturday I will wander round Thomas Hope: Regency Designer at the V&A, drawing lissom little sketches in my Moleskine, before getting folked with [...]
Posted in Architecture, Literature, Music, tagged Basquiat Strings, church music, jazz, London, Portico Quartet, Union Chapel Islington on February 29, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Good jazz is like musical metaphor: defamiliarising, juxtaposing, playful, so dense it’s simple, so true it hurts, and so tangible you could reach out and touch it. Under the great sandy ribs and tiny tea lights of Union Chapel, Islington last Friday, I copped a creamy handful from two hungry, young, accessible ensembles who cut [...]
Posted in Fashion, Music, TV, tagged Fashion, TV, Books, Music, historical drama, trends on January 9, 2008 | No Comments »
‘Modern?’ the assembled company of consumptive Byronic poets, cynical, rakish fencing-masters, good-hearted, massive-armed shepherds, and secretly aristocratic highwaymen chime as one. ‘What do you mean, modern?’
The Blonde, standing abandoned in the winter rain, s/s 08 Cavalli petticoat slicked to the skin, invisible orchestra keening Michael Nyman-via-Jeff Buckley stylings through the mist, is well aware of [...]
Posted in Architecture, Film, Music, tagged class, Eddy Davis, jazz, Luxembourg, Woody Allen on December 28, 2007 | No Comments »
And so to Luxembourg, the little rich boy on the bourgeois bloc: where the sweet, porcine scent of cloves rises steaming from cups of gluhwein in the gingerbread-hued market square; where the tills of Yves Saint Laurent ping a weary lament to rich multilingual bankers with middle-class spread and lumpen Germanic faces that look like [...]
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