Tuesday 14 February 2012

A nice poem



I'm not big into Valentine's Day. But I do wish that e e cummings (or anyone, in fact) had written this poem about me. And that I had smaller hands.

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands



'somewhere I have never travelled' by e e cummings
Photograph taken with Instagram

Friday 10 February 2012

Anyone for a tobacco flavoured drink?



To Barts last night to sample their new tobacco flavoured range of cocktails with my friends B, G and V. Barts is a cool, speakeasy-style bar in Chelsea Avenue which is hard to find but lovely once you're there, with cartoons and old clocks on the walls and fishing buckets hanging from the bar and lovely wooden tables and comfortable, squashy chairs. They are known for having some of the most delicious (and brilliantly named) cocktails in London - including a wonderful rhubarb one called The Charleston Crumble - which you can get served in sharing portions in teapots or tophats. All in all, retro heaven.

I must admit, I was somewhat apprehensive about tobacco flavoured drinks. I mean, there are few smells more delicious than a packet of fresh rolling tobacco - but few more revolting than an old ashtray. Where on the scale would these fall?

We were brought a selection of four drinks: a Signiature (tobacco liquer, honey liquer, champange and orange peel); an In Vogue (tobacco liquer, rasberry liquer, fresh rasberries, tequila); a Holy Smoke (tobacco liquer, cognac, rum - above); and a shot of straight tobacco liquer. And they were all absolutely delicious. The In Vogue particularly was fab - crisp and sweet and fruity with an aniseedy aftertaste from the tequila. The straight tobacco liquer wasn't bad either, slightly smoky and sweet (it's flavoured with vanilla, too), a bit like Amaretto or Cointreau. Yum yum yum. Plus, we were given a cigar which we smoked in the car on the way home, feeling very gangsta.

I never really experiment with cocktails; like most people, I know what I like (mojhito or daiquiri) and tend to always order that, rather like a Wagamama's. But wow they can be delicious when you branch out. We also sampled a margherita (heaven) and some more of those rhubarb ones (which taste like a Platonic ideal of rhubarb). If only one could have a cocktail tasting, like a wine tasting. But it'd only be a matter of minutes before one'd be too drunk to be able to taste anything.

Wednesday 8 February 2012

Two reviews: David Shrigley and Lucian Freud


Image from the retrospective at the Hayward Gallery.

David Shrigley is funny. Very, very funny. He has an odd way of taking things that are very ordinary and making them seem absolutely ridiculous - eggs, for example - or vice versa: taking the absurd or ununsual, e.g. sculpture, and rendering it quotidien.

It's not exactly that he has a weird mind, it's more that his mind is exactly in tune with everyone else's, except that he notices things that others don't - or, rather, he thinks that small, unnoticeable things are worth commenting on.

So I was very much looking forward to seeing his show at the Hayward Gallery, which is on at the moment. And guess what? It's funny. He's a conceptual artist, or a childish cartoonist (or both) - but the things that work best, I think, are the least conceptual, the times when he has just had a thought, or perhaps caught a fraction of a sentence, and illustrated that thought or scrap of conversation. As in the picture above: A child cannot be expected to perform the rescue. There are plenty more along these lines, and I thought they were the best thing in the show: funny, irreverent, profound and silly. There's one that says something along the lines of: It's ok to run away from your problems; it's a good idea. Hilarious. And kind of true.

Unfortunately, the very tall man in the green fleece standing next to me didn't feel the same way. He was gazing at each picture - and, yeah, they're art but they're also basically funny drawings (is there a conflict there? I don't see why, particularly) - as though each one has the intricacy of a Hieronymus Bosch. And he didn't look kindly on my giggling.
'Don't you think they're funny?' I said, eventually.
'They're art,' he said, censoriously. 'But I suppose everyone has their own sense of humour.'

Told.

No laughing, then, at this morning's press preview for the enormous and wonderful Lucian Freud show at the National Portrait Gallery.


All images from postcards available to buy at the National Portrait gallery or from www.npg.org.uk

Now this is one helluva show. Boy oh boy is there a lot to see - and wow it's good. What one notices, seeing the pictures up close like this, is how brilliant, beautiful and delicate the hands are - particularly in the earlier work, in the 60s, where you can see the curve of each nail and the close-ups of every cuticle; the roughness of skin on knuckles and the veins, either greenish or bluey, on the backs. And the faces are so expressive, too. Not so much in the pictures of Kitty Garman (his first wife), but by the time he gets to Caroline Blackwood (his second) it seems as though he has unlocked something in himself and they are extremely powerful - first laden with innocent loveliness and then, later, with scorn.

Throughout, the paint itself looks sticky and peaked - like tacky half-dried bodily fluids. The nude portraits are peculiarly, disquieteningly sexy - almost coldly objective, yet one could nearly reach out and touch the warm skin. Somehow, the paintings of two people together are the most powerful and moving in the show. Perhaps this is because they bring the subject out of pure objectivity (as a subject, seen and viewed) and back into their human life with its interactions, quibbles and love and the need for companionship. They move from the stasis and momentary glimpse of life that the single portraits (or at least the less good of the single portraits) are and into movement and dialogue. Which all goes a long way to heighten their pathos.

My brother will kill me when he reads this post. He thinks that any postulating about art is unforgiveably pretentious. Actually, come to think of it, so do I. So ignore all of the above.

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.