More Changes
6 July

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Things are moving on.

Though out of chronological sequence, I shall say now that I have gained an interview for the job of Web Content Editor at the Liverpool Museum. And I'm thrilled to bits. I put a lot of effort into that application and I would have been really upset had I not got as far as the interview stage.

Within that, I also recognise that this is a world class organisation and has probably attracted applications from around the country. So, I've done well.

Readers! Send out the positive vibes for this coming Thursday afternoon, 10 July.

At work, having officiated over a networking assignment at the beginning of the week, I used my job application as a way of leading the troops through a series of exercises about them applying for jobs. This culminated in a series of mock interviews. It all went well.

There is a good sense of esprit de corps among the troops at the moment. This culminated in a recent photo opportunity by the Superlambanana which has appeared near the entrance to my workplace.

Featured here are Lee, Sarah, James, Dave, Clinton, Stu, Colin, Peter and, in the second photograph, me. The missing ones are plenty, as there are a couple of dozen on the project at present. However, it would have been nice to show you Billy but he's gone AWOL. And it would have been nice to show you Ryan who is charm and good looks on a stick and for whom I would certainly be tempted to break my professional vows on non-interference.

On Saturday night, Ross's brother Sam came over for a meal with his friend Lottie. Among other things which we had to eat, we concocted a fruit salad which featured strawberries from our garden. They are both about to move into new rented accommodation together - that's as flatmates I hasten to add.

Apparently, Sam has a best friend. His name is Matty, he is 19 and he is a ju-jitsu instructor - so he's probably well fit then. One wonders if he is yet to toss Sam over his shoulder? There again, if he were a boxer instead of a ju-jitsu person, Sam might be in line for taking a pounding in the ring.

More interesting and spooky facts...

Sam's friend Matty and Ross's partner (me) share the same birthday (thought 35 years apart). Matty's boss and my son share the same name. Sam's Facebook Profile says that he is in a relationship; Matty's says he is single. Lottie says that they are both drama queens.

And then it was down to London for another of my occasional getting away from it all trips to the capital.

Before I go into detail about that, I need to record how the trains in both directions had plenty of empty spaces on them, how the tube trains in the afternoon were not full, how the hotel I stay at had rooms available in August, how both galleries I visited were practically empty. Suddenly, the downturn in the economy seemed palpable.

The trip was built around attending a performance of Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at Covent Garden. My particular reason for attending this performance was the fact that Charles Mackerras was conducting.

I've waited about thirty years to hear this man conduct this work. He conducted a celebrated series of performances when he was the Music Director of English National Opera in the early 1970s just before I hit London as a student and really became an opera aficionado. For the first time in this country in the twentieth century, he encouraged singers to embellish and improvise around what was written down by Mozart, just as Mozart would have expected his singers to do back in the eighteenth century.

Expectations were high as the critics had all raved. That's usually a recipe for disappointment but I was well satisfied. I don't think I've heard the score bubble with so much energy and infectious good humour for a long time. There was a constant commentary from the woodwind and occasional brass. Everything supported the singers.

I attended performances of this work at Covent Garden in December 1977 which were conducted by Karl Böhm. They have become legendary. I suspect that these current performances will also enter the pantheon. In contrast, his conducting was much slower and more blended. It was beautiful even if there wasn't a lot of fun to be had. The one great plus in his interpretation was the moment of forgiveness at the end which was sublime. Mackerras missed that element. And thank goodness. I would hate to have witnessed perfection.

I liked Ildebrando D'Arcangelo's Figaro and Aleksandra Kurzak's Susanna was exceptional particularly as I not rated her at all in L'elisir d'amore last November. Sophie Koch was sensational as Cherubino. I didn't enjoy Peter Mattei's Count Almaviva as much as some of the audience and felt that Countess Almaviva was not best served by the tinny sound that Barbara Frittoli produced.

It was luxury casting in depth to have Robert Lloyd playing Bartolo (I saw him for the first time playing Masetto in Don Giovanni at Covent Garden in December 1973), Ann Murray playing Marcellina, Robin Leggate as Don Basilio and Donald Maxwell in the bit part of Antonio the gardener. With some caveats, an excellent show.

If that was the main purpose of the visit, then I amply justified the rest of the time spent in London with visits to two gallery exhibitions.

Ross and I are Tate members and so I got into the exhibition at Tate Britain for free: The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting. It was an interesting but not very exciting show. High Victorian in tone, mostly it was the painterly equivalent of television travel documentaries today. As with Arthur Melville's An Arab Interior, the paintings showed the people back home what life was like in the land of the infidel.

Clearly there was an awful lot of misinterpretation and wishful thinking going on. Victorian men completely misunderstood the nature of the harem. Frank Dicksee's Leila is more of a Parisian courtesan than an Islamic woman.

What I found most interesting was where the draughtsmanship was heading. Take the painting below, John Frederick Lewis's A Frank Encampment in the Desert of Mount Sinai.

This is a painting of an English lord at play in the desert. He is rich enough to have brought with him all of the trappings of his life back home. Around him, the locals pretty much bow in obedience. But forget all of that for the moment. Just look at the design and layout. It could be a storybook still from an Indiana Jones film. In fact, the more I looked around the exhibition, the more I was reminded of Hollywood and the Alma-Tadema exhibition which I saw at the Walker Art Gallery back in 1997.

And then works like this, William James Müller's The Carpet Bazaar, looked to me not very unlike drawings of nineteenth century opera designs which I have seen. I could see this being very readily adapted for the last act of Verdi's Rigoletto.

So, three stars for good.

Which allows me plenty of room to up the stakes and rave about the other exhibition I saw - Radical Light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910 at the National Gallery.

Let's be quite clear here. I was totally blown away by this exhibition and want to go back to London just to walk round those six rooms again. I kept asking myself just why these artists and these works are not better known?

And I guess that the answer is that they are Italian and not French - they are Divisionists and not Impressionists, Post-Impressionists or Pointilists.

And because of those different traditions you get fascinatingly different results with not too dissimilar a starting point.

For example, in Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo's The Living Torrent, you can see that there is more of a social conscience running through the movement. And the rounded top edge to the painting somehow also links back to the Catholic alterpieces which the artist would have grown up with.

Then you have something like Giacomo Balla's Lampada which celebrates the introduction of electric street lighting and clicks right into Vorticism and some of the later Soviet schools. And it's pure energy and colour.

And more social concern with Angelo Morbelli's Giorno di Festa al Pio Albergo Trivulzio which is about destitute old men shivering with the cold in a church led institution on a religious holiday. And here you can begin to see how the use of colour as practised by Balla has been turned to produce real life effects.

But the name that rang clear and loud with me was that of Umberto Boccioni. Why have I never heard of this man before? Take this landscape, Campagna Lombarda. It's easily as complex and luminescent as anything produced in France at that time.

And how about this from the same man? La Citta Che Sale - The City Rises. It shows a building site with horses and men toiling at work. It is Colour as Energy honouring Labour.

I haven't been this excited about a gallery show in an age. It was superb.

The catalogue and the audio tour for the exhibition were both quite insistent that the painters on display all followed the most modern of current colour theories.

I was bowled over by the combinations of lilacs, greens and deep, sullen reds which go to make up Emilio Longoni's Glacier, for example. Of course, you can't see any of that detail at the scale of the image I'm reproducing here. The colours merge and the result is almost photographic.

And that got me thinking about our digital age on the the train journey home.

And then when I got home I saw this in a digital image I was looking at.

Look closely.

What colours can you see?

I can see greens, yellows, lilacs, blues, purples, pinks, etc.

But at that scale, you wouldn't know what you were actually looking at.

It's all raw information.

In actual fact, it's a portion of the left hip from the photograph below.

And what I thought about our digital age was this.

That the Divisionists in Italy and the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and Pointilists in France broke down the effects of light into pure colour. They understood that the data about the colour which was contained in the light was interpreted by the brain. They saw that, by placing tiny amounts of violently contrasting colours together, they could create through light an impression of mass and solidity.

And without that insight, it would have been more difficult for us to make the conceptual approach to our current notions of digital images where each point/pixel is comprised of information about the amount of red, green and blue light to be projected within a cathode ray tube.

Again, if you looked at the raw digital information within a jpeg file, you'd never know what you were looking at until a computer interpreted it for you.

By the way, the naked body in the photograph above belongs to a young man by the name of Andy.

I tried to meet up with Andy whilst I was in London but there was a clash of timetables with mine being bounded by the departure of trains from Euston and his being bounded by the arrival of a cleaner to er do for him.

Anyhow, Andy is, by looks, right up my er street. He stands in a long line of beautiful attraction which includes Keith, Andy and, some would say, Sam.

At the moment, I feel up for some uncomplicated, enthusiastic, inventive, energetic, physical congress - just sport nookie, that's all. And there's another change. I've not used that term here in this Journal since 1997, 1998 and 1999.

Ever since my recent dark depression at the beginning of 2004, I have felt uncertain and nervous about intimacy. I've broached this subject on a number of occasions with Ross but we've not really made very much progress. I'm at a loss to know what else to suggest to him.

I've mentioned outside help but he vetoed the idea. So, until something changes, our sex life is a barren wasteland.

Until recently, that didn't bother me very much but now, as I feel that some renewed energies are beginning to flow again in my life, I'm unwilling to give up on the idea of every having full-blooded bodily contact with another human being ever again. Life's too short to be content with streaming images over the Internet.

I'm also in the market for finding out about Viagra/Cialis/Levitra. I've talked about this with my doctor and, since I do not have erectile dysfunction, I can't get those drugs on prescription. However, I feel that something which would take away one more uncertainty and potential worry would help me with my self-esteem and confidence. So, if anyone knows of a legitimate and reputable source, don't hold back, get in contact with me.

As a Quaker I abhor violence and am committed to the ideal of finding peaceful solutions to problems at all levels. So, rating Wanted with three and a half stars is something of a guilty secret which I've now shared with a world-wide electronic community.

I don't care if the plot had more holes than a fishing net (bathing in warm wax cures gunshot wounds, Russian trains can travel from the plains to the mountains by going through a short tunnel, etc, etc). I don't care if the dialogue and characterisation are simplistic. The film is a blast.

It encompasses high camp and audacious design and composition in a refreshingly European take on the comic book genre.

I don't normally like volent action films at all. But this film made me laugh out loud and gasp in equal measure. Great popcorn movie.