beeker ideas

90s hostage

One of the weird things about getting a bit older is you realise your taste - or some of it - is out of date.  Or irrelevant.  But I've decided to embrace it.  Yes, I'm stuck in the 90s.  Which means I can't help but seek this stuff out and then put it up here.  Every now and then. 

It was most likely the same tendency amongst our friends that made this one of the main dancefloor events of our wedding this summer.  I wanted to BE Salt and Pepa for years.  Both of them.  Anyway.  Even if you never felt that way, this has a good chance of cheering your day no end.

bloom news

In a shocking turn of events this week Worsley's been shorn of his hair.  He looks quite majestic in this shot.  And very tall.  With eyes like he's in the dog version of Heroes, or something.  In real life it makes him look a bit chilly, and very charming. We're all trying to adjust.

places

I've just found Flickr's new Places thing and I'm in love with it.  This is the page for one of the best bits of our road trip.

the mend of the world

I missed the launch of John's new book.  But I've got some other green stuff to promote.  I saw my brother the other day, who's got a proper job (editor of the environment agency magazine) and we talked lots about the crossover between what we do.  Or the lack of it, and the potential for it.  Lots to think about.  And then I got this bag from him in the post the other day.  Made of jute, of course.

Which prompted me to go and look at the Mend of the World website and make new resolutions.  I'd not heard of it before, so thought I'd pass it on.  Definitely worth a look. 

sunday afternoon

This afternoon I'm baking Neneh Cherry's Ginger Stout Cake and watching The Gay Divorcee.  It's about as it good as it gets.

I watch this film once every couple of years, but I must have seen it about 100 times.  (I'm not 50, I just used to watch it more often).  Not so long ago I could have recited more or less the entire script.  Whenever I'd visit my grandmother with my mum, they'd argue about Margaret Thatcher in the kitchen and I'd slope off to watch it.  Again and again and again.  That and The Red Shoes.  So I've always loved both.  Now I'm old enough to more or less tell what makes a good film, it turns out The Red Shoes is an acknowledged masterpiece whilst The Gay Divorcee, well, it's standard Astaire Rogers fare really.  But as far as I'm concerned it's very, very special.

It's brilliance lies in working the story around the palpable bile the leads had for one another, and in the title that doesn't really work any more.  And obviously the dancing.  I think this early self-inflicted brainwashing might account for my obsession with Strictly Come Dancing. 

Anyway, a nice way to spend an afternoon.

john martyn

I can't work out why it's taken quite so long for this man to become a part of my life, but thank goodness, now he has.

expanding, seeking, repeating

I read this book recently and a couple of things are sticking in my head.  One is that you can divide people into two categories: Expanders and Seekers.  Expanders make the most of the bird in the hand.  They're generally more content.  Seekers are always looking for something more.  Meaning, people, experiences.  And the two kinds go well together.  Nothing else to say about that, just thought it was interesting.

The second thing was one of characters (a Seeker) saying that to repeat your choices (of curry, books, experiences) was anti life.  I'm not sure about this.  I wonder if habit, and meaning through habit is one of the most pro life (as in not anti life - obviously not in the family planning sense), human things there is. 

Anyway.  It's a good book.

in print

I always dreamt of having my name on a book.  The idea was that I'd have written it, which is far from the case here, but still. Here it is (along with lots of other far more talented souls who were involved).

It’s for the other new Smith book that’s just come out. I’ll stop blowing our trumpet soon. But making a book is a very exciting thing to do.  In fact it's like all design. Ideas that become hyper tangible. So I suppose when it’s a medium you’ve always had a massive thing for (like me with print) it’s extra meaningful.

seagulls in my bedroom

The unthinkable has happened.  I've got seagulls in my bedroom.

My big sister (who knows what she's doing as she recently qualified as an art teacher – surely one of the best jobs in the world) gave us this picture when we got married. We got round to hanging it with much ceremony yesterday. I love it.

The thing about it is, it’s enthralling for all sorts of strange reasons. Not least the ugly-beautiful one. Despite supporting the Brighton & Hove Albion variety of seagulls in a sort of half hearted marital sympathy sense, when it comes to actual seagulls, I've always had a bit of an issue. They seem weirdly selfish. Rat-like sometimes in their scavenging. Disconcertingly, blankly insistent. And they nick your chips.

These photos were taken on a fishing trip in Cornwall a couple of years ago. For the first hour or so three or four seagulls watched us, from a couple of hundred yards away. At the point these photos were taken Matt had asked the captain to show him how to gut the fish, and was completely absorbed in outing innards as (much to my distress) the seagulls quadrupled in number and started to close in. Every now and again he’d even toss an unneeded bit of mackerel to them (another trick picked up from the captain that impressed me not so much) which they’d catch with a snap. Like Rottweilers.

Watching

Waiting

Coming in for the kill

Just as it was all turning a bit too Hitchcock we were done. We turned round and headed back, losing the interest of the gulls to their next meal in a few minutes. That night we had a mackerel barbecue in a cave by the sea. The best meal I’ve ever had.

So when I opened this picture I instantly loved it.  It’s beautiful. Not just the photos and the composition - the seagulls themselves. My sister made something ugly beautiful. Which I think must be my other new thing.

unseduced

I went to see this Barbican exhibition a few weeks ago and wanted to blog something about it but wasn’t quite sure what. That, and worrying about the kind of googling I might attract if I didn't pick my words very carefully has put me off so far. But here goes.

First of all, maybe I’m just too English. Too reserved to look at people’s bits for nearly 2 hours (which is how long it takes if you want to not quite get round everything). I’m perfectly aware that although I don’t think it is, this might just be my issue with the whole thing.

Second of all, although of course responding to any art is about more than just ‘yes’ or ‘no’, part of me has always thought it shouldn’t be. Not in the first instance. I don’t like the intellectualisation of what should be simple emotional responses. Do you love it, hate it, or are you ambivalent? Then, why. Otherwise it all gets a bit poncey.

So with this exhibition I had a problem. What was my response? By the time I left it felt as if my brain matter had been systematically bludgeoned to a pulp, let alone being able to work out some kind of vaguely sensible reaction. Not necessarily in a bad way. Just in a way that left me completely unclear. It forced me to look at my funny rules that I’d become so fond of. And to ask a question I thought I’d cleared up - for myself at least - a long time ago: What should a response involve for us to find it a valuable one?

The scope was incredible: a massive collection from ancient works through the ages to today, the only uniting theme the explicit depiction of body parts and the way they fit together. Everything rubbed off on everything else. As it were. Marble Greek statues with Robert Mapplethorpe. Victorian peep shows with Andy Warhol. The most explicit things overrode the subtler work, seemingly compromising everything. And the longer I spent looking around at this massive, impressive collection, the less capable I was of properly sorting out what I made of it all.

The response that won – the one that always trumps the others – was shock. Not in the moral sense.  Lots of this stuff was familiar to me from years looking at censorship for my degree, after which I thought I was pretty unshockable. So not a moral shock, but a physiological one. The kind that freezes everything, and then deadens the mind.

So perhaps I’ve always been wrong. Perhaps what I’ve always called my immediate response to things has always been a more of a rational process than I’d realised. Because when I spent time with material which is as relentlessly anti-clarity-of-thought as this, I was disappointed in my own reaction.

Which isn’t to say there weren’t plenty of things I liked a lot. Nan Goldin’s photographs shown as a slide show in a darkened room were an oasis of beauty and meaning in what I’d found to be a desert. Not the only example, but the most lastingly powerful one.

Even if you weren’t interested in the subject, and even if I’ve completely put you off (which I hope not), it would still be worth going if only to see how Londoners cope with looking at this stuff together. I’m not convinced we’re really cut out for it. Students barricaded themselves with clipboards and notepads for propriety. Very businesslike men shuffled around in suits, peering over bifocals for theirs. Everyone’s idea of personal space increased automatically to 3 square metres as soon as we’d handed our tickets in.