Ah, the Bridge...

 

Phew!

Picasso and Kaufmann

But perhaps don't rush to fill a seat at the new Charlie Kaufman film Synecdoche. Meaning 'simultaneous understanding', the film hinges around a search for - er, well I'm not entirely sure. The meaning of life? Escape from loneliness? I'm not even sure what questions were being asked. We're all actors in our own lives? What's true and what's false? Everyone is the same as everyone else? We can see everything at once? After 2 hours and 4 minutes I was left confused. I prefer Picasso's take on simultaneous understanding: cubism. Ok so it's not always easy to see what you're looking at, but I think the idea of looking at everything at once works better on a canvas than on screen.

Picasso's Variations

Down the stairs in the National Gallery's Sainsbury Wing, in the rectangular middle room, hangs this painting. There's probably someone sitting on the low wooden bench in the centre of the room looking at it right this second, mesmerised by the wonderful organised muddle of colours and angles. Make sure at some point before the exhibition closes on 7 June that that person is you.

Sublime Schumann

Just heard the Takacs Quartet and Marc-Andre Hamelin perform Schumann's Piano Quintet at Bristol, St George's. One of those performances written on the memory in indelible ink. From the striding opening chords to the sorrowful sighs and hypnotic triplets of the second movement, from the outpouring of scales in the third to the final flourishes of the finale - not a foot, finger or pizzicato wrong.

Fantastic Mr Fox

Last November I wrote about Bristol's urban foxes. Now here's the photo evidence.

Animal Farm

Just watching Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra. Saint-Saens's The Swan from Carnival of the Animals on cow bells. The man's a genius!

Run Bristol

Tomorrow is 10k day. Suddenly this sounds like a Very Long Way. Yes, the two friends who I'm running with and I have run the full distance before but that was when no one was watching. When we didn't have 'Champion Chips' clamped to our trainers to time to the second, nay the millisecond, how long the torture lasts, rather than estimating - generously - from an unreliable clock. When we didn't have to be ready and raring to go at 8.30am (OK - I'm stretching the truth here. The race doesn't start until 9.30, but runners are meant to be hanging round doing impossible stretches from this ungodly hour) and when we weren't branded with race numbers, like cattle going to slaughter. 10k. 10k? 10k! 10k... However you say it, from the start that finish line looks far away.

Down in the woods...

Uncle Bulgaria

At St George's, Bristol, last night. Included hats with red flowers, clapping, stamping and dancing in the aisles.