Friday 3 February 2012

Cultural stuff




So, I don't want to show off or anything, but look what just landed on my desk...

Ok, I TOTALLY want to show off. It's an invite to the launch drinks for the Turner show at the National Gallery, and is just about the swankiest invite I've ever had in my entire life. I mean, the thing itself is no great shakes - no Smythson swag bag measured in togs like a duvet here - but still: wow. I love Turner. And I love getting to see stuff before other people.

Which is one of the loveliest things about my job (without which I'd have to wait for, y'know, general openings - urgh); that I do sometimes get to see stuff early and feel important and special and dress up a bit and talk to people like David Starkey and Julia Peyton-Jones and David Hockney (name-drop-drop-drop, like rain falling down a windowpane).

So here are the things in no particular order that I'm most excited about, culturally, for 2012. And fingers crossed a press-view invite comes for some of these, too.

Anne Somerset's biography of Queen Anne. I went to the launch party (hem hem) for this last week and it was utterly heavenly and Anne is lovely and a great writer and I just think this will be fantastic.

David Shrigley at the Hayward Gallery. Going to this this weekend, I hope. David Shrigley is so brilliant. In fact, with my first ever pay cheque I bought a print of his which is still on my wall. It says, in his trademark handwriting: NEWS: NOBODY LIKES YOU. And it makes me grin from ear to ear every time I see it (although it may also be the reason I sometimes have low self-esteem; sleeping under that for five years has got to do something).

Lucien Freud at the National Portrait Gallery. Just because.

Hannah Rothschild's 'The Jazz Baroness'. A novel about an aunt of the author's who was a posh English lady in the 1950s who went to New York and heard some jazz and just never came back.

Rupert Goold's productions of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe at Kensington Palace, and of Richard II for the BBC. The man is a god, and everything I've ever seen of his has just been electrifying - from the harrowing, incredibly moving Tempest he did to the Vegas-style Merchant of Venice.

Mark Rylance as Richard III at the Globe. Because it's a wonderful play.

The film of The Great Gatsby. Sort of a grim fascination with this one because a) the book is my best, ever, ultimate favourite and b) the original film - Robert Redford! Mia Farrow! Champagne and parties and dresses, oh my! - is so good.

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