Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Friday, March 25, 2011
3BT from Venice, and from Padua
At sunset, from the north wall of the Arsenale, there is a clear and unexpected view of pink and distant snowy mountains.
In the museum of antiquities in Padua, the skeletons of a cavalryman buried with his horse two thousand five hundred years ago, the man’s head fossilized now against what was once perhaps the cushion of the horses neck.
In Giotto’s Scrovegni chapel, also in Padua, a sunbeam slants across the panel depicting the Lamentation and catches their haloes.
… and three more
Just before nine in the morning, two minutes walk to the east of the Piazza San Marco, a well dressed young man’s handsome face suddenly takes on a childish smile and he hopscotches along the flagstones … perhaps the primary school we just passed in the last street is his old one.
Following only ten yards behind him, a much taller man sways like a dancer as he balances two heavy polystyrene cases of fish on his head, stabilised there in their onward trajectory with an inch-thick ring of cloth.
Later, I step through the double-glazed door on to our balcony in my best pyjamas. It is mid afternoon. On the opposite bank of the Fondamenta San Lorenzo, the young waitress standing in the doorway of the Trattoria al Greci glances up, her face a question mark. I bend down in to the shadow behind the balustrade and then hold up for her to see the bottle of prosecco I’d left to cool there last night. She smiles and confirms her understanding with a double thumbs-up.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Saturday, March 12, 2011
3BT from Friday the eleventh of March
Driving the truck with practised precision in brilliant spring sunshine so that it glides up and over that switchback road from Nutley towards Duddleswell across the southern fringe of Ashdown Forest whilst Radio 3 blasts out the Lone Ranger theme ( the trick of in-cab stereo is to shift the balance towards the left speaker ) … not quite the full Valkyrian Apocalypse Now experience but certainly elating … faster than the fastest horse, farther than the swiftest arrow ! Now where did I put my white hat and my black mask, and my silver six guns ?
Glancing up from a four in the morning slump with a most enchanting book at exactly the right moment and glimpsing the blurred façade of The Book Trust at Wandsworth slipping past the rainy windows of the night bus towards Peckham … foreground and background out of focus beyond the twin frames of my reading glasses.
http://www.booktrust.org.uk/Home
http://www.booktrust.org.uk/Home
Admiring other’s minds. For example, my boss, my guvnor. He can’t spell and struggles to write a paragraph but he memorises dialogue and re-enacts film scenes … this afternoon he mimicked Eddie Murphy in Coming To America. I tell him I’m re-visualizing his own scene in my next production … in which Satan brands two words across his forehead in eternally flaming capitals … TOP BASTARD !
Friday, March 11, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Monday, March 7, 2011
Sunday, March 6, 2011
Saturday, March 5, 2011
Friday, March 4, 2011
james turrell is one of the men that i admire
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qUTNx0ghXs0&feature=related
( i wish i could tell you the name of the photographer )
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
lost among the thickly wooded oxbows and levees of what his lordship is pleased to call his mind ...
Irrational Numbers. For the last six years I have been getting up to go to work in the middle of the night. Each time I leave the house, I stand inside the front door in the darkness, checking my pockets for six essential items. Cash, Keys, Cards, Cameras, Glasses, Pens, Phones. Each time, I leave the house feeling anxious that something has been forgotten, and I am compelled to search bag and pockets whilst I walk to the bus stop and wait. Today I decided I really would have to write the list down as a checklist, and only then, for the first time in six years, did I realise there are SEVEN items on the list.
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
3BTs to brighten this dark February
In the evening on Valentine's Day we went to the National Film Theatre to see Truffaut’s delightful Jules et Jim. The large cinema was packed. I had seen the film once before, over thirty years ago on a small black and white television with a square screen but I was too poorly equipped then, too poorly experienced and too poorly educated to enjoy and appreciate it. And for so many reasons: one reason being that it had been gorgeously photographed using an extra wide screen format; another reason being my own lack of personal development, or rather my total maladroitness in the lovelife minefields of jealousy and possessiveness; a third reason being my inadequate understanding of French history and culture, having never visited the country at that time. I feel guilty nowadays because I was so egotistical then and I had repeatedly failed to see the necessary connection between proper fun and proper freedom as a universal human right. Now I think I nearly understand ! Some critics say it isn’t a perfect film but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a great one, and if I were running a film school it would definitely be on the curriculum. At the end of the film the lights “went up” and those luxuriant wide red velvet curtains swished to a satisfying close, their deep folds classically illuminated from beneath, whilst a smart young couple who’d been sitting about three rows in front of us stood and kissed in a long unembarrassed embrace, beautifully top-lit in pale blue from one of the many ceiling spotlights juxtaposed against that blood-red background, a vivid and hyper-cinematic image to memorize with joy, and one that Truffaut himself might have enjoyed.
Dreaming vividly as I often do is still a delight and I enjoy time spent looking for clues about all aspects of real and imaginary life in those dimly recollected experiences. Sometimes the past is re-invented with cinematic felicity in those few seconds before I wake. For instance, just before waking on the morning after Betty’s funeral, I found myself lost and entering the vestibule of a darkened village school room and being asked by two lady teachers if I was “here for the funeral”. I covered my embarrassment somehow and went outside on to the village green, darkened on a mid-summer night just before dawn. It looked like a battlefield of freshly dug graves and through it moved the shadowy figures of countless schoolchildren in nineteen fifties uniforms.
Driving along the north side of Clapham Common this afternoon, my attention to the traffic was briefly distracted by the oncoming progress of an athletic Greek goddess who was jogging towards me wearing a pristine and loose fitting white rugby shirt. I’m not sure which myth she represented, something to do with golden apples perhaps, although it might just have been her perfect rhythm and bounce that fragmented my deviant thoughts. The opportunity for completing a detailed analysis of the phenomena was suddenly curtailed by the passing between us of a large white truck which inadvertently supplied the suitably fruity adjective I might have been searching for, because the name of the transport company was PEACHY.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
on guard ...
... she's trained to sniff out council members who've voted for the cuts in the library service
... the motto over the door at battersea is "not for me, not for you, but for us !"
Saturday, February 19, 2011
a time and a place for everything
gentlemen of the jury
i gave her indoors two perfectly watertight reasons for being reluctant to do the compulsory hoovering
first, it is far too early in the year for spring cleaning
second, we can still see our skirting boards ( some americans call them mop-boards )
i rest my case, m'lud
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
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