Category: Culture

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Culture

Gilbert and George at Tate Modern

I went yesterday to see the big Gilbert and George retrospective at Tate Modern. The Tate have done their usual thorough job of putting the exhibition online, so that link will give you a fair idea of what the exhibition’s like.

I enjoyed it more than I expected. Not that I expected to hate it, but it wasn’t a show that I was especially excited to see. My usual gripe about contemporary art is that it often seems a bit half-baked; good moments that never seem to be worked through and developed fully. Gilbert and George did at least seem fully-baked. There’s a sense of a lot of stuff in the show – lots of ideas and images and variation. At the crudest level, a lot of work. Not that work ethic is the most sophisticated metric for artistic worth, but it at least predisposes me to be little more sympathetic.

I preferred the works with a more geometrical composition and a more austere colour scheme; there was a period in the eighties when their work became a bit too much like the packaging for a particularly odd range of children’s breakfast cereals (click on any of the images to see an enlarged version):

Generally, the obvious visual parallel with their work is stained glass windows, but actually some of the more geometrical ones remind me of quilts. Whether that’s a good thing or not.. don’t know, really. I’ve always quite liked simple, traditional geometrical quilt designs; when they work, they seem to be doing so much with so little. I don’t know whether that sense of formal restraint really applies to a work like Jesus Said:

In the past few years, they’ve started using computers to do the design work, and I’m not entirely sure that it’s an improvement: they seem overfond of some of the heavier-handed tools in Photoshop. Still, I like some of them.

So overall, I don’t know that I’d like to have many of these pieces actually in my house—and yes, I know that’s another rather simplistic metric for artistic worth, but it’s one way of communicating a gut reaction—but I’m glad I went to the exhibition.

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Culture Nature Other

Darwin’s prose

I recently found Charles Darwin’s Beagle Diary, being posted ‘live’ on the internet with a mere 175 year time-lag (see also Pepys, Thoreau).

He’s only just reached Brazil, so there’s plenty of time to join the fun. This is from today’s entry:

The houses are white and lofty and from the windows being narrow and long have a very light and elegant appearance. Convents, Porticos and public buildings vary the uniformity of the houses: the bay is scattered over with large ships; in short the view is one of the finest in the Brazils. But their beauties are as nothing compared to the Vegetation; I believe from what I have seen Humboldts glorious descriptions are and will for ever be unparalleled: but even he with his dark blue skies and the rare union of poetry with science which he so strongly displays when writing on tropical scenery, with all this falls far short of the truth. The delight one experiences in such times bewilders the mind, if the eye attempts to follow the flight of a gaudy butter-fly, it is arrested by some strange tree or fruit; if watching an insect one forgets it in the stranger flower it is crawling over, if turning to admire the splendour of the scenery, the individual character of the foreground fixes the attention. The mind is a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future and more quiet pleasure will arise. I am at present fit only to read Humboldt; he like another Sun illumines everything I behold.

A little on the flowery Victorian side, but still a fine bit of prose. What’s interesting is that you’d never know he could do it on the basis of The Origin of Species, a book which is well written but rarely sparkling. But in the diaries, notebooks and letters he can be a lively, engaging writer. One of my favourite quotes from the notebooks: ‘He who understands baboon would do more towards metaphysics than Locke’.

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Culture

My toy camera: the Cardcam

My post a few days ago about ‘toy cameras’ made me dig out my own toy camera. It’s not a film camera, though, like a Lomo or a Holga; instead, it’s a crappy digital camera from a few years ago. It’s somewhat in that spirit, though, as it’s a primitive point-and-shoot camera with no controls of any kind at all (and no screen – just a viewfinder).

It’s called the Oregon Scientific Cardcam and its selling point was that it’s only the size of a credit card. Which is true — at least, it’s probably about four credit cards thick, but it’s still very cool.

Unfortunately the pictures are awful. They’re 640×480 pixels, which is limiting but not the end of the world, and because of the primitive state of flash memory technology when it was made it can only hold 26 pictures. More problematic, though, is that it doesn’t work very well with subjects which are too bright, too dark, too high contrast, too close, or too far away; the focus is rarely very sharp, even given the limitations of the resolution; the colours are erratic; and there’s a distinct distortion at the corners of the pictures. I took it skiiing a couple of times as a fun camera I could take out on the slopes with me, but even on that basis the pictures were so bad it was hardly worth it. I assume, btw, that the market for this kind of camera was pretty much wiped out by the production of cameraphones.

So does my new-found appreciation for the aesthetic qualities of photographs taken with cheap cameras extend to my cardcam? Well, here’s a selection of the more attractive ones out of two ‘rolls’ of shots I took:

Bearing in mind these are the very best ones (lots are just unusable); I don’t absolutely and unswervingly hate them, but I don’t think they’re about to start a hot new trend. In terms of an embracing-the-flaws philosophy, the distortion around the edges of the pictures is probably the most interesting thing.

It was quite entertaining playing around with it, but I think it can probably go back in the drawer again now.

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Culture Me Other

New improved photo page

With the help of a neat little application called PictoBrowser, I’ve tarted up the page with my Flickr photos. PictoBrowser should work even if you prefer reading the site with one of the old themes, but to get the full effect of my redecorating, you need to be using the ‘scallop‘ theme.

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Culture

last.fm, again

I’ve joined last.fm, again, under a different name. The intention, again, is to post a ‘recently listened music’ widget somewhere on the site, but I’m still thinking about how best to rearrange various things. In the meantime, I was slightly startled by this. The ten most listened to artists for this week are:

  1. Red Hot Chili Peppers
  2. The Beatles
  3. Radiohead
  4. Coldplay
  5. Muse
  6. The Killers
  7. Nirvana
  8. Metallica
  9. Bloc Party
  10. Death Cab For Cutie

I’m not going to type out any more, but the trend continues.

I’m not generally comfortable using the term ‘white’ as a term of mild derision, because I’m not given to self-loathing (about my race, at least), and I’m well aware that, on so many levels beyond mere skin tone, I tick all the boxes. This isn’t a misguided bid for some kind of urban cred, but: that is just the whitest list I’ve ever seen in my life.

Really, of course, ‘white’ has nothing to do with it; I just don’t get guitar rock. It always seems like the basic principle is that ‘if we make enough messy noise, people won’t notice that we’ve got rubbish voices and no rhythm’.

Having exposed my own musical prejudices, it’s only fair to point out that you can see what I’ve been listening to recently on my last.fm profile page. Feel free to mock accordingly.

Categories
Culture

The Tribes of Britain by David Miles

This is the blurb:

“Who are the English, the Irish, the Scots and the Welsh? – a ragbag of migrants, reflecting thousands of years of continuity and change. Now scientific techniques can explore this complex genetic jigsaw: ancient Britons and Saxons, Celts and Romans, Vikings and Normans, and the more recent migrations which have created these multicultural islands.

Drawing on the most recent discoveries, this book both challenges traditional views of history and provides new insight into who we are today.”

The book lacks pretty much everything that blurb might lead me to hope for: extensive analysis of the genetic make-up of the British, a surprising new perspective on British history, new insight into how it makes modern Britain what it is.

It’s a readable and up-to-date history of Britain focussing on population movements and demographics, with lots of quotable and surprising snippets. Who knew, for example, that the ‘fitz’ in names like ‘Fitzroy’ was from the French ‘fils de’? Or that among the black population of the UK, Africans now outnumber people from the West Indies? But if you have a broad understanding of the history of these islands, it’s not going to force you to re-evaluate it. And while I enjoyed many bits of it, this kind of large-scale history doesn’t lend itself to a clear narrative thread, and it was definitely putdownable.