So, school’s almost out for summer. We’re over half way through the year. And it’s time to take a breather and survey what we’ve sown so far this year. Is 2017 going to be a bumper harvest!? We’ll see.
But, while I mulled that over, I saw, watched, listened to, and wondered about these things ...
“Why don’t you cover a big cork bulletin board in bright pink felt, banded with bamboo, and pin with coloured thumb-tacks all your various enthusiasms as your life varies from week to week?”
A ballet inspired by Virginia Woolf’s words is on TV
ROH Resident (not evil) Choreographer Wayne McGregor says Woolf:
“… loved dance and music. She wanted to write as if she were writing music and choreographing dance.”
Woolf Works is a triptych inspired by three landmark works: Mrs Dalloway, Orlando, The Waves. Interwoven with elements of Woolf’s life and words, via letters, essays, diaries.
We voyage through relationships, then and now, with ghostly gossamer-clad ballerinas - and a nymphette sporting a glittering helmet of Marcel-waved hair.
Through three centuries of leotard-smooth androgyny. Punctuated by Elizabethan gender-bending bodices and bloomers - some in a 24 carat-bright, bold gold.
To the inevitable stream (well ocean) of consciousness where Woolf’s last words and abstract-clad dancers intermingle with the relentless waves.
Hokusai at the British Museum
Speaking of Waves THE The Great Wave was the pivotal piece at a BM exhibition. And it turns out there are three little fishing boats in it - some old chap in the snaking exhibition viewing queue pointed that out.
What’s more it’s actually about Mount Fuji. One of a 30-something series, in fact. While tsunamis may symbolise the awe-inspiring power of nature to the west in Japan Mount Fuji and its almighty immortality was their touchstone.
And, it was Hokusai’s prolific career and quest for artistic longevity explored here. He believed things could only get better: at 100 or 110 who knew what wonders he could produce?!
Which is a rather refreshing way to go about things. I don’t know about you but when I hadn’t published a book by age 9 like Jayne Fisher, author of The Garden Gang series, I thought I was all washed up...
Raining? Footsteps in the Fog might cheer you up...
There is nothing better, in my opinion, than a rainy afternoon with a black & white movie. Especially one like Footsteps in the Fog (1955) starring Stewart Granger - dashing or rakish are usually his epithets - and his wife Jean - the glowering, glowing Estella from David Lean’s Great Expectations - Simmons.
Footsteps is what many online reviewers call a ‘florid Edwardian thriller’ by which they mean - OTT on the drama and frills and fog I guess. He’s a murderous master of the house (is there a term for a black widower?) with marriage to an heiress on his mind.
She’s a maid determined to claw her way up the Edwardian household career ladder by way of a bit of blackmail. And, thus it winds up the best-laid plans of mice and men can be undermined by a maid and a rat...
Kathleen Turner talked femme fatales - huskily
Speaking of wily women Miss Turner - who shot to fame in Body Heat and did a turn as Jessica “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way” Rabbit - talked Femme Fatales on R4.
The archetype of the femme fatale has inhabited the collective imagination since we’ve had an imagination. Lust and ambition incarnate, her story is a neon-lit warning: this is what happens when girls go off society’s prescriptive rails.
And in post-WWII American dreamers wanted to be feeling: upbeat, sunny, hopeful, says one interviewee. The poster girl: Doris Day. The antithesis to 40s film noir and its shadowy, ‘hopelessly pessimistic’ femme fatales.
Of course, this black and white thinking, where women is concerned, is fairytale-esque. It suited the 40s narrative. Now, women’s stories are more complex. Enter: David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. What critic Roger Ebert calls:
“[A] surrealist dreamscape in the form of a Hollywood film noir.”
Starring a perky blonde ingenue (Betty) and a mysterious brunette (Rita) who start the film as clear cut archetypes, but end in confusion:
“Rita (an amnesiac who lifted the name from a “Gilda” poster) wonders if she’s really Diane Selwyn, a name from a waitress’ name tag.”
Femme fatale classics: Double Indemnity, Gilda, The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Twenty One (not that one) opens in Southend
The Forum’s Focal Point Gallery (FPG) opened a “...new cultural venue on Southend’s famous seafront” this month. Twenty One is to be an “alternative venue for healthy food, art and events”.
The launch exhibition 100% Southend features over 110 artworks - 2 from the SEVEN collective - on which FPG says:
“100% Southend is a continuation of FPG’s 2014 project, which explored categorisations of how people engage with culture. The exhibition will use the traditional page format of A4 to bring together a diverse range of 2D works from both established and emerging artists across the SS postcodes to launch Twenty One as a venue for the town’s cultural community.
”
Vogue’s outgoing Fash. Ed got real
“Fashion can chew you up and spit you out,”
Lucinda Chambers told Vestoj (the “platform for critical thinking on fashion”).
Anyone who’s seen Zoolander or Ab Fab or The Devil Wears Prada knows that, right?
Fashion’s built on stories - unlikely adventures featuring toweringly successful (and hanger-thin) people posture in fantasy fashion - spun and proffered like a gloved princess hand, never to be soiled.
And Lucinda - Vogue employee for over thirty years - was ‘mucking’ hers up according to a friend by airing her dirty laundry (i.e. that she was fired).
“You’re not allowed to fail in fashion – especially in this age of social media, when everything is about leading a successful, amazing life. … But why can’t we celebrate failure? After all, it helps us grow and develop...”
she said.
“If you want good results, you have to support people,”
She went on, deploring how today’s business of fashion is making designers work ever faster and in greater quantities. Expecting golden eggs, but winding up, more often than not, with an unappetising scramble.
“But fashion is an alchemy...”
she says of the subtle and unquantifiable nature of imagination made manifest. An alchemy she believes should be both aspirational AND useful. Watch Lucinda’s space.
Finding comfort (and getting curious) in granny shoes
Thinking of form and function I’ve been having trouble with shoes.
I used to wear those ballet slippers favoured by patron saint of effortless elegance Audrey Hepburn. Until I got shin splints. Later I hurt my foot. And finding shoes which didn’t aggravate became my mission impossible.
Turns out even the most apparently benign designs can bite the foot that fills them. Yep, where shoes are concerned it’s got personal.
In the sweltering heat of early summer I desperately eBayed ‘comfort shoes’. And wound up with an orthopaedic pair of sandals. The kind you see in specialist shop windows. You know, the ones with the zip up tartan slippers.
To me they combine retro appeal with wearability. In short: I can do my 10,000 plus steps a day, retain a sense of my personal aesthetic, and my body lives to tell the tale. Why, I have to ask, are so many shoes just NOT made for walking?
