News from Nowhere [entries|archive|friends|userinfo]
shewhomust

[ website | The Shadow Gallery ]
[ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ]
[ archive | journal archive ]

Artists at home [Nov. 29th, 2009|11:07 pm]
[Tags|]

It was Open Studios Weekend in the Ouseburn valley, and we went along to have a look. This is the same thing as we did last year, only completely different. Last year was clear, bright, icy cold, and we drifted from gallery to gallery; today was mild dark and wet, and we visited locations with large numbers of studios concentrated in a single building. We also spent more time than we'd intended over lunch: in theory we know that the Cluny is always ridiculously slow, but they weren't busy, and it was late enough that we sat down and ordered drinks, and only then did [info]durham_rambler ascertain that there was a wait of an hour. I was glad of a rest, but maybe not that long.

We started at the new Biscuit Tin Studios (no website of its own, but here's the Google cache of an article in The Journal): a large building, once a print works, near the Biscuit Factory (I'll come to the later) hence the name. Purely as rooms to be in, these were the nicest studios, with full length windows and plenty of natural light - and we felt that overall, this was where we saw the best work, too. Favourites were:
  • Daniel Evans Furniture, beautiful individual pieces, small tables and shelf units made from silky polished wood, ingeniously detailed (drawers whose 'handle' was a vertical rod threaded through a circular hole) and very reasonably priced.

  • Sculptor Allan Scott has some wonderfully mythic dancing figures - also a large plaster horse's head on the windowsill (it reminded me of Valerie Laws' horse's skull, the sheer surprising size of it). He told us cheerfully that a small visitor yesterday had been thrilled with it: "Look! A dragon's head!"

  • Creative Ginger had made ginger beer for the event, and had interesting things for us to look at while we drank it - I liked best his portrait of Terry Pratchett

  • Photographer Doug Hall was generous with postcards of his excellent photos, and not only talked about how he gets some of his effects but gave me a quick demonstration (Photoshop can do some very clever stuff, brightening or darkening sections of an image to bring out the detail). I wwas already going to buy a print anyway. It's the one in his Newcastle / Gateshead gallery which shows Grey's Monument through a window (people who are familiar with my photos will not be surpised at this).

Next stop was The Biscuit Factory. This is a selling craft gallery (in a converted biscuit factory), very smart, though most of what they sell doesn't appeal to me (it's all a bit décor for my taste) and - no doubt as a result - seems very overpriced. The last couple of times we've been there, it's been as the venue for wine tastings, where the art on show provides an agreeable backdrop to the serious business of tasting wine (and the wine helps remove the inhibitions when it comes to art appreciation). Anyway, because we can visit the Biscuit Factory at other times, we tend to give it a miss on Open Studios weekends, so I hadn't realised that below the galleries, stairs lead down to two floors of studios. There are not entirely subterranean - the building clings to the side of a hill - but they weren't as light and open as those at the Biscuit Tin, either.

I don't think that's why we were less impressed with what we saw. Highlight was probably Roy Kirton, and although I like his paintings well enough, the real pleasure was in catching up with his wife, Dot (here she is singing The Seaham Harbour Lifeboat Disaster).

After a diversion to the Cluny, and a quick visit to the bookshop at Seven Stories, we moved on to the Lime Street Studios, but whether because we were running out of steam or because the event was, this was a little dispiriting. We were by now into the last couple of hours of a three day event, and I don't blame anyone who had decided to pack up and go home, but the corridors of closed doors were sad. So were the number of people who were showing exactly the same work as we had seen not only last year, but the year before. There was one glowing exception, showing paintings of boats in bright colours, stylised almost, but not quite, to the point of abstraction, but I've mislaid his name, and even Google does not remedy the loss.

Time to call it a day, then -
linkpost comment

That wandering Bears may come... [Nov. 27th, 2009|09:32 pm]
The Bears (my brother and sister-in-law) came to stay last weekend. They didn't come with buns, but with tiny cheese-stuffed peppers, marmalade and a banjo (they took the banjo home with them, afterwards). The home team provided the buns.

In between the eating and the sitting up late talking, and the doing the crossword, there were entertainments. We went to a Shetland evening in Gateshead, with writer Ann Cleeves and fiddler Chris Stout: a lovely event because, as as Ann tells in in her blog, the two of them bounce so creatively off each other, Ann putting a musician loosely based on Chris into her novel White Nights and Chris thinking that this character is rather cool, and composing a piece of music that he might play... Afterwards we went for a drink at the Sage, somewhere the Bears hadn't previously been - it's not quite the same as taking them to a gig there, but it's a start.

We went out for a walk in Houghall Woods, and another along the coastal path near Seaham; we went to Hexham, and visited the abbey, and explored the town in the rain. ( And we went to TK Maxx. )
linkpost comment

The Olive Oil Greenway [Nov. 26th, 2009|04:11 pm]
[Tags|]

In Saturday's Guardian Travel section, a description of walking routes in Spain, converted from disused railway lines. The route described is the Via Verde del Aceite, in the province of Jaén: I wouldn't want to walk 50 kilometres in two days myself, even on the easy gradients offered by disused railways - but perhaps that bit is negotiable? For reference, then, the Green Ways network has a web site,

For some reason, searching the Guardian's site for Via Verde del Aceite didn't find this article; but it did turn up an article published in the Observer in 2002, which considers the Green Ways as cycling (rather than walking) routes. The two writers also disagree about whether the viaducts are actually by Eiffel himself - now, that's an incentive!
linkpost comment

Happy Birthday! [Nov. 26th, 2009|11:08 am]
It seems that today is Fred Pohl's 90th birthday; so that's what all this thanksgiving is about!
linkpost comment

Daniel Fox: Jade Man's Skin [Nov. 24th, 2009|11:07 pm]
[Tags|]

Disclaimer 1) Daniel Fox ([info]moshui here on LJ) is a friend, or rather, the pseudonym of a friend. He is also one (or two) of my favourite writers.

Disclaimer 2) Jade Man's Skin is the second book of a trilogy: 'Moshui - the Books of Stone and Water'. I've written before about the first volume, but if that didn't persuade you to read Dragon in Chains, don't let this persuade you to start with book two. This is not the kind of trilogy which is three linked novels, it's the kind of trilogy which is a story too long to be contained within a single volume.

So Jade Man's Skin begins precisely where Dragon in Chains left off, which is already impossible to discuss without giving away that spectacular, unexpected, inevitable ending. The situation and the characters are those that were introduced in the first book, yet everything has been transformed: Old Yen still sails his ramshackle boat across the straits, relying on the protection of his goddess, and yet... Han still struggles to maintain some sort of control over the dragon, but...

It was implicit from the first that although this is a heroic fantasy in which the boy emperor - young, brave, romantic - has been ousted from his throne and pursued to the outer rim of his empire, it is not the kind of fantasy in which the reader cheers on the young hero who regains his throne for no better reason than that he is the Rightful Heir. Daniel Fox shows us too much of the price paid, not just by those who fall nobly in battle but by those who have the misfortune to live along the route taken by the armies, those whose cities are plundered, those whose lives are destroyed. As long as the boy emperor is more boy than emperor, compelled by circumstances and adult advisors, falling in love, feeling his way, he is a sympathetic figure; but sooner or later he must grow up, start to make his own decisions, or forfeit that sympathy. What happens when he decides, in this book which bears his name, to become more emperor than boy, to command his army and to demand obedience?

If one of the pleasures of Jade Man's Skin is that it shakes up all the pieces which were already in play in Dragon in Chains, another is that it continues to introduce new elements. Something which had been said from the very beginning turns out to be true, introducing a major new force into the narrative: but it would be a pity to spoil this skillfully arranged surprise. Since the mysterious jade tiger appears on the cover of the book, it's probably not giving anything away to talk about it: unfortunately - or fortunately - it appears and vanishes so enigmatically that I have nothing to say about it but: ooh! jade tiger! tell me more...

"Tell me more!" is pretty much the sum of what I want to say about Jade Man's Skin. It is a book in which things happen, many of them exciting or touching or terrifying, and by the end of it, I really want to know what happens next.
linkpost comment

City of Lights [Nov. 18th, 2009|09:22 pm]
[Tags|, ]

Inside outLast year, Durham was granted Enlightenment; this year we had Lumiere. Another November, another arts event cum festival of electric lighting - except that apparently the two are unconnected, different organisers, different commissioning bodies. Which is odd because I would have said that Lumiere answered a number of my criticisms of Enlightenment: specifically, it engaged more with the city, instead of being imposed upon it, and it proposed only reasonable secure well-lit walking routes. Was it as easy on the eye? I thought so, but don't take my word for it, come for a walk round and see for yourself.

( Many pictures and even more words under the cut )
link9 comments|post comment

You can really have no notion how delightful it will be [Nov. 15th, 2009|01:04 pm]
[Tags|, , ]

[info]durham_rambler has sent me a link to a BBC feature about the puffling rescue system in the Westman Islands. This is old news, but still, pufflings! (The film makes it look very dark in the islands - in August?)

If you'd prefer the audio version, the BL sells a CD of puffin noises (with a 41 second sample, which is probably as much as I need). D., who forwarded on the link, points out that the headline is "Coastal Birds Download on British Library
Coastal Birds Download", but that he was unable to download a puffin - well, it's the wrong time of year, obviously.
linkpost comment

From the roads of Brittany [Nov. 11th, 2009|09:17 pm]
[Tags|]

We had a week in France, we stayed within one region, how much driving could that involve? More than I had anticipated, of course, some of it self-inflicted ("Oh, let's follow the meandering coast road, and explore all these bays and inlets..."), some of it strictly utilitarian, the shortest road from Caen to Quimper...

I don't hate French motorway service stations. In fact I rather like some of them: the one on the Baie de Somme, looking out onto the wetlands and the performing ducks, the one that backs onto the Canal du Midi. The one neat Villedieu-les-Poêles wasn't up to that standard, but it did its best to promote the local brass- and copperware industry with an impressive display of giant ladles.

The roundabout which marked its entrance was decorated with the scaffolding of a belfry, hung with brass bells. This was promising, but it was the last elaborately ornamented roundabout we saaw for several days, and I was beginning to think that that practice was a fashion which had passed. It wasn't until we approached Roscoff that we found ourselves negotiating - during a particularly tricky stretch of navigation - a sequence of themed roundabouts: a white bicycle in a flower bed; an elderly tractor daubed with white paint and towing a bale of straw; two matching scarecrow figures side by side in Breton dress, he standing in a patch of maize, she among - what? was it sunflowers? But I had to pay attention to the road signs. Finally - at the very end of our journey, as we were driving into Saint Malo, there were a couple of classic floral roundabouts, first a globe with the continents picked out in smalll green plants, framed by a giant pair of compasses, next a treasure chest, almost engulfed by a jungle of flowers.

I didn't see any of the black figures which used to mark the sites of roadside accidents. I commented last year that they seemed to be fading away, and losing their power to alarm and warn. This year they had been replaced by outsize renderings of the 'disability' symbol, the stick-figure in a wheelchair on a red background with the caption "La route ne tue pas toujours" - not all road accidents are fatal. Replaced literally, I think, because these were sometimes positioned so oddly that I suspect they, too, marked the sites of accidents.

That's too gruesome a note to end on, so one last roadside moment: picnicking in an aire de repos off the route nationale. We had climbed up, with the picnic we had bought at the market in Quimper, to a table sheltered by chestnut trees, some way above the parking area. As we sat and ate greengages under a hail of chestnuts, a coachload of French soldiers pulled in below us, and were served their rations from a pantechnicon.
link2 comments|post comment

Five things make a weekend [Nov. 9th, 2009|08:07 pm]

  1. ( Shopping! )


  2. ( Whingeing )


  3. ( Dreaming )


  4. ( Chicken and pomegranates )


  5. ( Durham Daily Photo )

link8 comments|post comment

Fifty years of Rosselsongs [Nov. 7th, 2009|08:36 pm]
[Tags|]

Last night at the Sage we celebrated the career of Leon Rosselson with a concert of his songs performed by the composer and Frankie Armstrong, Sandra Kerr, Janet Russell, Martin Carthy and Roy Bailey. Fifty years of songs! But then I first came across Leon Rosselson as a member of the Galliards, who played with Robin Hall and Jimmie Macgregor on some of the first records I owned; in fact, for a long time I thought of Leon Rosselson not as a songwriter but as the guitarist from whose playing I learned the tune of North Country Maid (it was an instrumental, so I didn't learn the words until later). I don't think I had seen him live before last night - although as soon as he sang, his voice and his manner were both so familiar that I began to wonder: that concert that we saw, long ago, with Roy Bailey and Frankie Armstrong and someone else - could Rosselson have been the someone else?

Last night's concert pulled off the same trick of making songs that I hadn't heard in years - decades - not just as fresh and immediate as they were at the time (it's a sad comment on fifty years of political songwriting, that many of these songs have as much to say about the world today as they had about the world of thirty years ago), but as familiar. There were some new songs, too: my favourites from the first half were The Ghost of Georges Brassens (which appears to be on his MySpace page, but I can't persuade it to play) and Conversation on a Mobile (on YouTube).

Of the other performers, I had never seen Sandra Kerr before (I'm not sure why, since she teaches on the Folk degree and - thank you Google! - was the voice of Madeline in Bagpuss) but I was very impressed. She did a fine version of Don't get married, girls, and told a lovely story about touring with Rosselson and Roy Bailey, which she claimed was a perfect demonstration of the difference between the two men: they pulled in to a garage near Dumfries, where a sign read "Clean toilets!". "The dirty ones'll be round the back," said Roy Bailey, but Leon Rosselson just said "It's an order."

I'm not a big fan of Roy Bailey or of Frankie Armstrong; they can be a bit didactic. But there were a couple of things they did with Rosselson last night where the voices worked brilliantly together, and - well, yes, maybe it was didactic, but it worked so well that that wasn't a problem. Martin Carthy is the most self-effacing of superstars, and provided guitar accompaniment throughout - but he also sang a lacerating Palaces of Gold, Rosselson's song about the Aberfan disaster (which I know from Roselson's recording on A laugh, a song and a hand grenade, another wonderful collaboration, this time with Adrian Mitchell, but which Carthy has also recorded).

And eventually - of course - they also sang The World Turned Upside Down. So that was all right.
link3 comments|post comment

And broadside, and broadside, and at it they went [Nov. 6th, 2009|02:59 pm]
[Tags|]

The web site of the National Library of Scotland offers a spotlight feature on broadsides, which they have a collection of nearly 1800. You can search these by keyword or year of publication (from 1650 to 1910), or browse by title or topic. And the topics are:
* Accidents [41]
* Adventure and adventurers [5]
* Apparitions [11]
* Arson [1]
* Ballads [911]
* Body-snatching [40]
* Cholera [1]
* Clothing and dress [16]
* Courtship [233]
* Covenanters [7]
* Crime [88]
* Dueling [9]
* Elegies [59]
* Emigration [44]
* Executions and executioners [147]
* Fairs [8]
* Forgery [12]
* Freemasonry [4]
* Highlanders [14]
* Hiring fairs [5]
* Humour [177]
* Incest [2]
* Ireland and the Irish [40]
* Jacobites [33]
* Last words [88]
* Marriage [63]
* Marvels [7]
* Murder [240]
* Pirates [7]
* Politics [135]
* Prophecies [7]
* Prostitution [11]
* Rape [8]
* Religion [35]
* Riots [19]
* Robbery [59]
* Royalty [27]
* Shoemakers [7]
* Slavery [6]
* Soldiers [53]
* Sport [24]
* Street life [3]
* Suicide [13]
* Temperance [17]
* Transvestites [4]
* Treason [9]
* Trials [76]
* War [26]
* Weavers [2]
Pirates, more popular than transvestites but less popular than temperance? Right...
link6 comments|post comment

Changing seasons [Nov. 4th, 2009|08:48 pm]
This week the first "To let to students" signs have appeared in the street. These used to be a herald of summer, like the first cuckoo. The university briefly enforced a ban on advertising before the Easter break. But times are hard and landlords are desperate; last year this part of the city was bristling with notice boards by very early spring, and this year it's earlier yet. These earliest blooms, like crocuses, are a rich shade of purple ('palatinate purple', a subtle suggestion of alignment with the University...) Ah, don't mind me, I'm just grouchy: I hate this insistence that only students need apply, it leaves me feeling that I, as a permanent resident, am the interloper, the cuckoo in the nest.

The autumn leaves have peaked. There are still plenty of bright golds and russets, but there are more and more bare branches, too. A week or so ago I noticed a couple of trees just down the hill, one all in lemon-yellow and the other all vivid scarlet framed against it. By the time I reached them with a camera, they had lost just enough leaves that the impact was gone - and today they were bare branches.

There were baked goods at the Graphic Novels group last night. This is not unprecedented, but last night's offering was both seasonal and comics-related: to celebrate the publication of Hector Plasm: Totentanz (and All Souls' Day, only a little late) our very own Steven Finch, who lettered and designed the comic, baked us pan de mûk;erto, following the recipe in the comic. How cool is that? Also, the pan de mûk;erto was very good. But since we've eaten it all, here's Hector versus the Danse Macabre.

And the Christmas decorations are up in Newcastle, great swags of white which I suppose represent snow. I'm told that Fenwicks' Christmas window has been installed, too, but I try to avoid that...
link6 comments|post comment

Face recognition [Nov. 1st, 2009|09:21 pm]
I have discovered a new time-sink, and its name is Picasa.

Picasa is a neat little piece of free software which allows you to look at all the pictures on your hard disk. I downloaded it onto my notebook, and have found it very handy for looking through the pictures I take while I'm on holiday.

In fact, I found it so useful that I downloaded it onto my desktop as well. I hoped it would help me to rationalise all the many different folders in which pictures are stashed on my laptop, and maybe get rid of some of the folders I don't actually use. This didn't work out, for two reasons: one, Picasa doesn't actually tell you where it found the image it is showing you; and two - well, there are so very many pictures on my desktop...

But it does have one wonderful feature, labelled 'people'. The software sifts through your pictures and identifies faces, which you then label; thereafter it not only identifies faces, it identifies those faces it has seen before, and files them with the other pictures of the same person. I am not sure which aspect of this amazes me more, the way that it works or the way that it doesn't work.

There's a hypnotic charm in being presented with a screen of thumbnail pictures, and trying to pick out which ones I recognise. Some are clear and sharp, others so pixellated it might have been a deliberate attempt to hide their identity, some so underexposed that all I can see is a faint gleam where the light catches a pair of glasses; some are people I know, some have simply wandered across the background of a tourist location, some are the faces of sculptures, or from a book jacket, and some - very few - are not faces at all (there's a particular configuration of fingers on an accordion keyboard which seems to fool it, though I can't see why). Then, having identified a face as a face, there's the matter of whose face it is. This is genuine living-in-the-future stuff; it's not so long that if we wanted a computer to read numbers from a form they had to be printed in a particular font - now my computer can make a decent stab at identifying individual faces! It slips up, of course, from time to time, as we all do. For a while it was persuaded that [info]durham_rambler and GirlBear were the same person, but it has learned otherwise. And it does seem to learn: the more examples of a given face it knows, the more confidently it recognises further pictures of the same face (confidently is not synonymous with correctly, but there is a comfortable overlap).

Alongside the marvels of the computer's memory. the process illustrates the limitations of mine. Why does it take me so long to recognise people I know perfectly well? Why do I forget the names of people I recognise? Why do I forget which thumbnails I have already double-clicked (to see the full image) and still can't identify? Why don't I know how some of these pictures got onto my hard disk? The full cast of Heartbeat fair enough, that's work related, but where did these two pictures of Terry Pratchett come from?

As I said, hours of fun for all the family...
linkpost comment

Two walks in the woods [Oct. 31st, 2009|08:45 pm]
[Tags|, ]

Last Sunday we went walking around the grounds at Gibside - a National Trust property of landscaped gardens and woodlands.

I remember my first visit to Gibside, which must have been fifty years ago, before my grandmother died: we drove through woodland, with signs on either side of the road saying "Private", and I was very concerned - I was easily worried, as a child. "It says 'Private'!" I said, and my father (who was driving) replied: "We're private," which didn't reassure me at all. More to the point, the only part of the estate then open to the public was the unusual Palladian chapel, and you reached it by a well-defined route through forbidden territory.

Liberty in the eveningNow each time we visit, some new part of the grounds has been opened: first it was the Long Walk, from the chapel to the monument to British Liberty; then you could walk through the woods and admire the view across the octagonal pond to the Banqueting House (itself the property of the Landmark Trust), the stables, the orangery...

This year for the first time we wandered into the Victorian shrubbery which is being re-planted, while a red kite flew overhead. Which was exciting, though possibly not quite as exciting as the free-range chickens at the stables, which rushed up at the sight of picnickers - one leaped up into [info]durham_rambler's lap, and stole the tomato from his sandwich.

The house itself is a ruin: where the family might have been expected to renovate it, or even to build a new house elsewhere on the estate, they seem simply to have moved elsewhere, leaving the house to decay to a shell which feels more like another folly in the grounds than the centre around which the gardens are laid out. And there are none of the formal gardens you associate with stately homes, just parkland in which you can wander without feeling its aristocratic owners breathing down your neck.

A fine day in autumn


The weather forecast suggested that today would be better walking weather than tomorrow, so we walked up from Witton Gilbert, through Sacriston woods (past the furry cattle to Broom House Farm, where we lunched in the café and then walked down the long hill with the views of the cathedral back to the car. The last bit of that walk is usually a bit of a slog along the main road, but today we were escorted by a motorcade of vintage tractors, and didn't feel nearly as long as usual.
link2 comments|post comment

The headless horseman [Oct. 30th, 2009|10:28 am]
[Tags|, ]

Ingrid Silvestre she of the giraffes, has been hanging around the Town Hall this week, as she has an exhibition in the foyer. Which is how she came to be there at dusk as the statue of Lord Londonderry was removed for restoration work (though there is still no certainly about where it will be replaced). Better still, she took some wonderfully atmospheric photographs of the proceedings, which she has posted in her (non-giraffe) blog.
linkpost comment

East Side Story [Oct. 28th, 2009|02:24 pm]
[Tags|]

I justify my insistence on skimming through the piles of (very) old newspapers before I recycle them with the argument that all sorts of treasures lurk within. Today brings an example, a review of East Side Story, which saw and loved, presumably about the time of this review (October 1998). Occasionally I try to tell people that there is a documentary about Eastern bloc musicals, and that not only is it wonderful, some of the featured extracts make you want to see the films they are taken from, too - and they give me that tolerant 'she's delirious again' look.

Now, armed with title, date, and the names of directors Andrew Horn and Dana Ranga, not to mention the wonders of the internet, I can track it down: here's the IMDb listing. There are copies for sale, though not affordably so, on Amazon.UK and Amazon.com. The Guardian review hasn't made it onto the internet (yet?) but but there's a review from the New York Times on open access.

What's more, some of those featured movies are still extant, too: the University of Massachusetts has a copy of Midnight Review, Amazon has Stalin's favourite, Volga, Volga (though only in the US). The Jolly Fellows (Vesyolye rebyata) sounds to be of historical interest only (there aren't many films which can boast the endorsement 'Anyone who dares to make a movie as humourous as this must be a brave man - J. Stalin'), but it can be found on Amazon, albeit in VHS.
link2 comments|post comment

Another week, another book fair [Oct. 25th, 2009|08:56 pm]
[Tags|, ]

Last Saturday (eight days ago) we went to WORDplay, an event in Whitley Bay organised by Culture Quarter. They'd taken over a church hall, and the church as well, Local publishers had their stalls in the main hall, and there were readings in a marquee outside, in the church itself and in a room upstairs. Not only was there something going on all the time, there were several things going on all the time: which was frustrating if you wanted to hear two things which were programmed against each other (and hard on some of the readers who saw their audience reduced accordingly) but it created a real buzz of excitement. Each time an event finished, there was a flow of people into the publishers' room. And at the central point of the building, which you had to pass wherever you were going to or from, there was a hatch into the kitchen, with tea and coffee and cakes and sandwiches on sale. I heard Peter Mortimer read from his diary of two months at Camp Shatila in Beirut, and Joanna Boulter read some of her poetry, missed hearing Valerie Laws read and photographer Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen talking about her new book; I bought a book (Writers on Islands from Iron Press) and a couple of comics/zines from the Paper Jam comics collective) and chatted to a lot of friends and clients and the occasional total stranger. A good day out.

Yesterday a number of the same people were appearing at a book fair in Durham as part of the Book Festival. We have a long and tangled history with the Festival, but the simple version is that I try to go to as many of its events as I can (books! festival! what's not to like?) but there are usually not many events which I am enthusiastic about, and often as not we have other commitments (we might, for example, have gone to the opening event on Friday had we not been at a poetry launch in Newcastle - and a good one, too). So I decided to drop in on the Book Fair, which was in the cavernous depths of the Students' Union. This promised a book swap, a clothes swap and various readings and workshops. Unlike last week's event, it wasn't free, but my life membership of the Students' Union got me the reduced rate, which I thought was a good enough deal.

I'd been in two minds about whether Culture Quarter had adopted the right strategy of forcing you to make choices about who you wanted to hear: so it was interesting to compare the Durham event, where everything except the workshops happened in the same large room. When I arrived, local DJ Tony Horne was talking about a book he had written about an extended holiday he and his family had taken in Australia. He was amplified, and his voice dominated the hall, most of the centre of which was filled with seating - not all of it full. There were stalls around the room, though not as many, and much of the wall space was devoted to the clothes swap - but there were some tables of books, and since it felt a bit rude to go and chat to stallholders, I browsed the books instead. Tony Horne went on for long enough that eventually I went away, found some coffee, came back, found a book I wanted (Georgette Heyer's These Old Shades: LJ tells me it is time I read some Heyer) and - this was harder - found someone who would take my money for it. And eventually he stopped.

Later on I managed to say hello to Vane Women, and to make contact with Durham City Arts. This time I did hear Valerie Laws read, and heard Peter Mortimer again, too - but there wasn't much time to chat before the next reader was on. It's easy to see how an event ought to have been organised after you've seen what didn't work about how it was organised, but if I had to make suggestions, I'd say reduce the amplification and the space allocated to the readings, and put the organisers' table at the foot of the stairs so that it's there to greet people as they arrive, and to sell them books before they leave. Still, I bought a book and had coffee with someone I rarely get to sit down and talk to, so not a total dead loss.

And we had a lovely evening at a birthday party back in Whitley Bay - but that's another story.
linkpost comment

In Quimper, with a camera [Oct. 21st, 2009|09:24 pm]
[Tags|, ]

It was [info]durham_rambler's idea that we should spend a night in Quimper; if there was any particular reason he didn't mention it, but he was keen, and the Brittany Ferries package we were booking offered a hotel there - not the most exciting looking of their hotels, but in the right place and at the right price, so we went for it.

I thought we'd been to Quimper before - I thought we'd explored Brittany pretty thoroughly, and I vaguely remembered a Tourist Office with a display of the faïence for which the place is known... Unless I'm thinking of Nevers? Because I also have vague memories of walking round ramparts washed by the sea, and I'm pretty sure now that was Concarneau - not Quimper, at any rate, which is not on the coast...

Which is how we came to be strolling, in the low light of an autumn evening, around a town that was completely new to us, crossing the Odet, the river which runs down the centre of the main street and whose many footbridges are weighed down by baskets of flowers, and making our way into the old town in search of dinner. And when I say old, I mean it: Brittany is full of towns that look old to someone who lives in Durham, towns like Josselin, where half-timbered houses lean to meet each other across narrow streets.
Jean Moulin
Quimper has its share of old houses, and a taste for painting them in bright shades - or filling their windows top-to-bottom with primary colours. I wanted to photograph everything, and though I did take a fair number of photos of Quimper, both that evening and the morning after, they aren't all fit to be shown to the world. I'm nowhere near mastery of my new camera - only gradually learning what it can do, and what foibles it displays in doing it. I need to learn how much more I am photographing than the viewfinder shows me, and how it is distributed; I need to makes sure I am holding the camera level (this has always been the case, but more so, now). It's wonderful, taking pictures in narrow streets, to have some extra wide-angle capacity - but the resultant fisheye distortion can be spectacular.

And I need to read the manual. There's a lot of it to read, and it's perfectly possible to set the dial to auto and just point and shoot. But what a waste. I'm absurdly pleased with this picture: walking back to the hotel after dinner, following the little river Steir down to its meeting with the Odet (I was amazed, the next morning, to read that this picturesque waterway had actually been built over in the mid-twentieth century, and only opened again in 2003: even if we had been in Quimper before, we could not have seen it... But I digress) we came across a tiny garden arranged around this bust of resistance leader Jean Moulin, the dramatic lighting throwing shadows from the trees (which were waving wildly in the wind) onto the white facade of the Monoprix shop. I set the 'film speed' to as fast as it would go, braced myself against a handy lamp post and went for it - and the result does catch something of what I saw. But reading the manual later, I discovered descriptions of all the 'scene' settings, including a night-time one which I think would have given me a gentle flash and removed the shadow on the face. I don't know if it would have been better, but I'd like to have tried it.

It's a learning curve.
link2 comments|post comment

Another part of the Hundred Acre Wood. Storm still... [Oct. 20th, 2009|10:51 am]
[Tags|]

Jonathan Pryce remembers the glory days of the Liverpool Everyman:
"The programming was uneven, to say the least. We once did a double bill of King Lear and Winnie-the-Pooh on the same set. I struggled as Edgar and Owl, but Tony Sher got good notices doubling as Christopher Robin and the Fool."
link4 comments|post comment

Hannah Berry: Britten & Brülightly [Oct. 19th, 2009|09:05 pm]
[Tags|]

I had hoped that once the Readers of the Lost Art (graphic novels reading group) were meeting in the refurbished and reopened City Library, we would find it easier to get hold of interesting things to read in numbers which made it possible for us all to read them. So far it hasn't worked that way, and our current way of working round the problem is to choose a theme, and all read not the same book but books which relate to the same theme. Which is how I came to read this completely unknown quantity: A. went downstairs to the shelves, and came back with everything he could find which could be labelled crime - including Hannah Berry's debut graphic novel, published by Jonathan Cape.

It's very nearly classic crime: noir with a twist, not so much noir as dark grey. The tough-guy private eye is replaced by a melancholy figure with dark-ringed eyes, a man gradually broken down by a profession which involves telling his clients things that they only thought they wanted to know; the high key blacks and whites of the movie genre give way to the soft tones of watercolour paintings, the glittering cities of Chandler's California to somewhere in England where it is always raining. This transposition adds to the sense of displacement: Hannah Berry, interviewed in the Forbidden Planet blog, explains that her story is set at the time of the Second World War, but that she felt that if she allowed the wr into her story, the problems of her characters would seem trivial in comparison. So this is a wartime England in which there is no war.

The mystery is presented conventionally enough: the detective who is reluctant to involve himself, but cannot resist the entreaties of the beautiful woman in distress - in this case, because she does not believe that the death of her fiancé was really suicide. If the tragic aura of investigator Britten is less usual, this is nothing compared to his sidekick, Stewart Brülightly. Brülightly is a teabag (think about that name), who lives in Britten's waistcoat pocket. This has the immense advantage of providing someone to whom the detective can talk at any time, explaining whatever the reader needs to know, whose presence doesn't need to be explained - but Brülightly holds his own in these conversations, a down-to-earth Sancho Panza to Britten's Don Quixote (a true Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance). It's impossible to write about the book without quoting the exchange in which Britten reproves his partner: ":Don't be lecherous: you're a teabag," and receives the reply: "I'm a teabag with needs, Fern."

This quirkiness, a genuine - if not entirely original or realistic - mystery, and the pervasive melancholy are an odd combination. What brings them together in a harmonious, if unlikely, blend is on the one hand the assurance of the writing and on the other the skilful and gorgeous artwork. (There are some samples in the Forbidden Planet interview, and more on the Macmillan web site - these latter from the US edition, whose cover is different from the UK edition). The muted colours, the use of watercolour, but also the ingenious breakdown of the page into panels, the stunt 'camera angles': page after page is a pleasure to look at. I have some reservations about the lettering; not the script used for captions, which fits well with the style of the book, but the actual speech balloons were a little rough, and this jarred from time to time.

Quite the nicest surprise I've had in a comic since - oh, since Freakangels.
link2 comments|post comment

navigation
[ viewing | most recent entries ]
[ go | earlier ]