Frankenstein…

… frank-en-tastic!

Updates

• Venue has been saved. Going monthly sounds good to me. Much as I love having all Bristol happenings between two handy covers, there are some parts of the magazine I could happily wave goodbye to. However, I have a suspicion this might just be a prolongation of the agony. Can Venue really survive as a freebie, and shackled to Folio magazine?

• Igor Stravinsky has fallen behind the fireplace in my new house. He can't be extracted. I've tried. And I'm not going to try the bent coathanger tactic, as last time I did that the radiator fell off the wall. Besides, I quite like the idea that he's hiding away there, along with Mozart.

• The globe has been turned the right way up. Curiouser and curiouser… I'm now wondering if my current downstairs neighbour reads this blog? Hello if you do.

In praise of books

'The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.'

Roald Dahl (Matilda)

La bibliotheque

Stravinsky and Mozart

By mistake, I seem to have started a collection of quirky black and white photos of great modernists (don't stop reading). Here's Stravinsky for music, and a while ago I had Picasso to cover art. Both are on my kitchen wall. I need a writer to go with them.

It's a topsy-turvy world…

My downstairs neighbour has put a globe outside his front door. I wonder why it's upside down? It makes it quite hard to read the names of the countries. The occupant of the flat doesn't have an Australian accent, as far as I could detect, so it's probably not out of a patriotic desire to have his home country on top of the world. Perhaps he likes to confound expectations - it's actually a statement of his, erm, quirky, subversive personality. Maybe it broke and he glued it back together, only to discover, after all his efforts, it was the wrong way up? Thoughts on a postcard please.

Ash Wednesday

Pancakes were a must yesterday for Shrove Tuesday. (Why don't we eat them more often? Everyone else does.) Although I'll admit operating a double standard as I haven't given up anything for Lent. Nevertheless I thought I'd mark Ash Wednesday with some lines from one of my favourite poets, TS Eliot. Here's the third part of his Ash Wednesday, published in 1930 and dealing with his recent conversion to Anglicanism.

III
At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitul face of hope and of despair.

At the second turning of the second stair
I left them twisting, turning below;
There were no more faces and the stair was dark,
Damp, jaggèd, like an old man's mouth drivelling, beyond
repair,
Or the toothed gullet of an agèd shark.

At the first turning of the third stair
Was a slotted window bellied like the figs's fruit
And beyond the hawthorn blossom and a pasture scene
The broadbacked figure drest in blue and green
Enchanted the maytime with an antique flute.
Blown hair is sweet, brown hair over the mouth blown,
Lilac and brown hair;
Distraction, music of the flute, stops and steps of the mind
over the third stair,
Fading, fading; strength beyond hope and despair
Climbing the third stair.

Lord, I am not worthy
Lord, I am not worthy
but speak the word only.

TS Eliot

Flying high

Spotted: the first hot air balloon of the year. Lazily drifting over a hazy sky early(ish) this morning. Spring must be near.

Decisions, decisions…

Iphigénie en Tauride

A little late blogging about this one, but last week I popped down to the Cinema de Lux in Bristol. That's a pretty rare event in itself: give me the smaller screens, and, admittedly hit and miss, 'arty' films of the Watershed over the popcorn-fuelled audiences and Hollywood blockbusters of Cabot Circus any day. Apart from, I've discovered, a handful of Saturdays this spring when the cavernous spaces and football-pitch sized screens are transformed into surrogate opera houses, in which case, count me in.

The Met Opera House from New York has been broadcasting its productions live to cinemas around the UK for a good while now, but I've been a bit slow on the uptake. Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, starring Plácido Domingo and Susan Graham as the seemingly doomed brother and sister, was my first taste of it. I'll be going back for more.

'Short of fainting I could not have been more moved than when I saw a performance of Gluck’s masterpiece Iphigénie en Tauride,' wrote Berlioz. Fainting wasn't on my agenda, but Gluck's piece, written for the Paris Opera, is a gripping tale, which from the outset seems for a tragic ending.

To give you an idea, Iphigénie is obliged to sacrifice any strangers landing on the island of Tauride. Her brother Oreste, who she hasn't seen for 15 years and doesn't recognise, pitches up with a friend after being shipwrecked. You see where this is going… Oh, and the backstory is that their father was murdered by their mother, so Oreste killed their mother in order to avenge his father's death. It's not a cheery tale. Although, without wanting to give the ending away, I will say I wouldn't bother with the deluxe box of kleenex…