Art Nouveau Ho

I got up way too early this morning to get to Oxford's beautiful Sheldonian Theatre for 10AM, carrying the lovely weapons wyte_phantom was kind enough to lend to this week's production of Don Giovanni.

I ended up having to choreograph the fight myself, which I'd more or less expected. Luckily it's short-- only three exchanges and the Commendatore gets stabbed. The music tells you pretty clearly what to do.

What I didn't expect was that the baritone singing Giovanni is a non-English-speaker, so I had to do all the staging in Italian.

Cazzo diavolo.

Hello all. Happy Mardi Gras, Carnevale, Pancake Day, et cetera! To celebrate, here's a link to the best page on the day I could find, with lots of interesting trivia and information.

You all know the drill: today's the day you party hard before Lent starts and no one is allowed to have any fun at all until Easter. I was in Greece once for Easter, and they actually did observe the Lenten fast: no eggs, no meat, no dairy. Certainly makes a cook get creative.

There is some kind of link between self-imposed deprivation and excess. The European Carnival tradition is only one example. I've been told that during the Islamic month of Ramadan, when a fast is observed during daylight hours, food sales actually increase because everyone parties all night. Similarly, during the Jewish Passover (when wheat, oats, barley, maize, spelt and rye are verboten), cooking becomes much more creative and meals become more important.

During all three of these holidays, according to tradition you're also supposed to abstain from sex. This certainly would have given an added piquancy to Carnevale as a literal "farewell to the flesh" and to the fertility-festival aspects of Easter. In medieval Britain, spring arrived a little earlier than it currently does: I'm not sure whether this was due to climate change or the calendar being out of sync, but in any case it meant that the disciplined Lenten season coincided with the thawing, budding, burgeoning season of spring. Here's a medieval lyric that expresses that feeling perfectly: Lenten is come with love to towne. Do enjoy.

(On poems: I'm delighted with the number of requests I got! I look forward to versifying you.)

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of going to the Kew Bridge Steam Museum with monochrome_girl and a crowd of truly excellent people. At intervals we crowded into small, sunlit rooms and craned our necks to watch as the enormous machines which once supplied all of London with water were fired up. If you look that way you see the controls: brass handles, dials, knobs; the sighing exhalation of steam as the pressure is released and the long pistons begin their inexorable slide--
it was not about sex.

Look that way and you see the pump itself: there's a rumble, a groan, as mechanism rises and the giant shaft, 90 inches in diameter, is exposed, glistening with moisture, then the machine sighs as it sinks home--
it was not about sex.

Look up and you see the great balance itself: two stories above your head, long enough to fill a room, two enormous cast-iron brackets are bolted together on a central fulcrum. The pressure of the steam draws one end of the giant device down; when the pressure is released with a hissing sigh, the balance slowly tilts the other way. What you get is this enormous sense of power, of weight, as the balance descends and the lubricated pistons slide and the huge pump--
it was not about sex.

I will confine myself to remarking that among the geishas of Kyoto, the loss-of-virginity rite of passage was known by the term Mizu-age, which translates as "raising water." Kyoto is on a river; they'd have had a lot of experience with pumping...

The other amazing machine I've seen this week was at an exhibition on sleeping and dreaming at the Wellcome Collection with the ever-lovely fracture242. The exhibition itself is a bit scattershot, but in a cabinet full of alarm clocks and waking-up devices I found this: an alarm clock which greets the morning by lighting a candle with a flintlock. Yes, it's a black powder alarm clock. I don't know how many of these were made, or how regularly they were used, but you've got to hand it to those Age of Enlightenment types: only an Enlightenment genius could invent something as monumentally stupid as an alarm clock that can set your bed on fire.

While in York yesterday, velvetdahlia, speedlime and I noticed some amazing colourful projections on the facade of York Minster. Hell, even the test patterns looked cool... but later the entire thing blossomed into a psychedelic glory of moving colours.

So I got chatting to the guys setting it up, and it turns out it's an interactive art installation by Usman Haque. "Interactive??" I said, intrigued. They explained that they have four microphones suspended from nearby trees to pick up sounds from the crowd, and the projected patterns of light will respond to those.

Obviously the next question was "So what happens if I sing?"

The mikes weren't connected yet, but they let me sing into the little Mac laptop they were running it from. I sang a few phrases of plainchant, and watched the falling rainbow-coloured drops of light grow into bright slow-moving rivers. I love stuff like this-- light, art, interactivity-- and the fact that this installation, with its newly written software, was projected on the centuries-old facade of York Minster just made it that much cooler.

The guys from the council invited me back to sing for the opening tonight with TV cameras and such, but the bus and train schedules didn't allow it, so I declined with some regret. Instead I'm blogging it, saying: If you're at all near York, this lovely installation runs from 26 October to 3 November, between 6pm and 11pm every night. Go, look, make sounds and marvel.

Yesterday as I was getting home I saw written in big letters on one of those Evening Standard boards:

DEADLY
SKUNK
FLOODS
LONDON

It took me a while before I thought "Oh! They meant drugs..."

I found a picture in what my friend Flashboy refers to as the Evening Standard Horror Chaos Aaaargh Flickr set.

This has to be one of my favourite Evening Standard koans of all time. Right up there with "THAMES POISON FISH FEAR."

A couple of weeks ago, while my mother was visiting, I had the pleasure of visiting a dealer in antique maps. My mother has developed an interest in old maps, and wanted guidance on what to look for. It happened that in addition to old maps, globes and such, this shop also had a copy of the Nuremberg Chronicle, also known as the Liber Chronicarum, printed in 1493.

So while my mother chatted with the shop's owner, I struck up a conversation with a young guy who was working there, named Tom. We opened the Chronicle and promptly got lost in it: it's an amazing book. Afterwards, I thought: "What a shame that I didn't have a camera with me to blog it!" Luckily, there are plenty of images online for me to share with you.
( Inhale that musty Old Book Smell and step back in time... )

My mother arrived in town today, so I took a cab over to her hotel to have breakfast.

On the way there, the cab driver heard my accent and asked where I was from. He said "I'm going to Las Vegas in a couple of weeks. Me and the lads, we go over there once every two years. Just us, and no women! It's great!"

He went on to tell the following story:
One of his friends had had heart surgery a few years ago. "He's divorced, and been celibate for three years, so me and the lads, we figure it's time to test the old ticker out." The friend shouldn't do anything too strenuous, he said, so they were going to procure him the kind of entertainment that involved him "just sittin' there." They knew a lady, you see, a talented lady who would perform this service. "Then afterwards, he's gonna get a bit of a surprise. See..." the cabbie lowered his voice, "This lady, the one we plan to introduce him to... is not a lady."

"She's not gonna tell 'im till afterwards, you see! Then we'll see how good the old ticker is!"

So he told me, and I told the blogosphere. My work here is done.

I realise a lot of my recent posts have been along the lines of went to see something arty and responded to it on a deep and personal level, look how cultured I am, wooooo so if I'm going to do yet more artblogging today, I should start with a confession: I struggle with classical music that doesn't involve voices.

In particular, I struggle with the symphony. I know they're a benchmark for true greatness in a composer, that they're the major landmarks of Western classical music, etc etc-- but all the same, symphonies often leave me cold. Especially Mahler, who must have been on symphonic Viagra or something: his symphonies are HUGE and last for HOURS. I made a last-minute decision to go hear Mahler 3 at the Proms last night with some friends: you know it's a Mahler symphony when there's so much percussion onstage there's no room for the choir. Seriously: two sets of kettledrums, three sets of cymbals, tubular bells, a gong... I've been doing so much Classical lately I'd forgotten about the late-nineteenth-century tendency to stuff the orchestra with all the weird-ass instruments in the universe. Two harps! A genetically-modified supertuba! Piccolos, for God's sake!

As the lights went down our hurried conversation went like this:

"I've forgotten which one Mahler 3 is!"

"It's the one about death and resurrection!"

"They're ALL about death and resurrection!

"Is it the one with the offstage trumpet?"

"No, it's a posthorn..."

"They've ALL got offstage brass!"

"I think it's got a posthorn... and a mezzo singing extracts from Thus Spake Zarathustra and a boys' choir going 'bing bong'!"

(Lights go on in my brain) "Oh! I think I've sung this..."

(As it turns out, I should just have checked Wikipedia. All kinds of useful information there: orchestral forces, silly movement titles, sung text and the fact that the offstage posthorn solo is usually played on a flugelhorn. A B flat flugelhorn, in case you were wondering.)
( So how was it? )

Today I met my friend Philippa for lunch in the City. She's getting married next month, and as we walked back to her office we had an enjoyable bitch session about people who spend bazillions of pounds on boring wedding dresses (the Vera Wang syndrome.) This concluded with the following exchange:

P: ...I mean, why do something obvious when you can do something interesting?
Me: THIS... THIS IS HOW I KNOW WE ARE FRIENDS FOR LIFE.

And the Bohemian fuckup gave the elegantly office-dressed lawyer a bear hug, right there on the steps of the law firm in which she's a partner.

My local cinema is showing Bergman's The Seventh Seal, and last night I went to see it with the ever lovely fracture242.

Bergman's own recent checkmate by Death saddened me. I loved so many of his films: in addition to Seventh Seal, I adore Smiles of a Summer Night (which Stephen Sondheim adapted for his musical A Little Night Music) and of course The Magic Flute, which to this day is one of the best examples of opera on film.

Seeing The Seventh Seal in all its monochrome glory on the big screen, the overall effect is one of terrifying clarity. On the one hand, the gaps in the production values are more obvious-- yes, they're wearing faked-up knitwear chainmail-- but on the other, moments like Death's appearance in the blinding light on the stony beach have about ten times the impact.

What filmmaker today would dare portray Death without using CGI? Or the dream-visions of the actor Jof? Bergman does it all with acting: the story is told on the faces, in merciless close-ups which are all the more revealing on the big screen.

In the opening scene, Death asks the Knight why he wants more time. The Knight replies "To accomplish one meaningful thing." In the Knight's case, he means seeing his wife again after ten years on crusade-- but in Bergman's, I think, that thing was this film. It's amazing in so many ways.