A trip to the gallery for the art-loving Baxter:
Baxter at the Ronald Searle retrospective
varnish
Comments Off
Mar 282010
I'm afraid, even I, really just, don't know.
varnish
Comments Off
Mar 272010
Last night, I went to see ‘Satyagraha’ – the much lauded Philip Glass opera – at the Colosseum.
“A landmark in recent London opera” – Andrew Clements (Guardian).
“Spellbindingly beautiful… this show as a whole is a masterpiece” – Michael Church (Independent).
It’s a big show. We had snacks for the intervals. Three acts, each about 50 or 55 minutes long. About four minutes into Act 1, I’d had enough. About six minutes in and I wanted to shout, scream, vomit, throw my shoes, end the pain. I wanted to die. It was truly, truly, truly, violently, mind-stretchingly, wretchedly awful. I hesitate to call it “shit” because turds are short, pinched-off little things that plop merrily into existence, and can flushed away. Plop, flush, done. This thing just kept coming at me. It wouldn’t stop. It was poorness given power. Weakness stretched to infinity. A clumsy idiotburp flatpuff toestub Niagra of honking nothing, sung quite well. I felt myself teetering on the void. I felt bullied, brutalized by the unrelenting badness of the music. Bad bad bad bad bad. Shut up, shut up, bad bad bad bad.
I felt like this:
The only thing that saved my mind was the knowledge that swept over me, about ten minutes in, that I didn’t have to come back in for the remaining two-thirds of gutless rapemusic. I clung to that knowledge like a dog on an iceflow, 30 miles from shore. It saved me. I left. I lived. God help me, I survived.
PS
“This opera is well named as a deeply felt commitment to passive nonviolence on the part of the audience is required to sit through a full performance” – Henry Heidt
I'm going to miss Bethnal Green
fisticuffs
Comments Off
Mar 232010
Was just involved in an amazing bit of street theatre. Some builders were delivering 2 sofas to our house, when round the corner comes one of those municipal car towing vans, and they can’t get by – “Waitcha turn, you caarnt!” suggests one of the builders. As the tow truck slips by, one of the builders holds up his middle finger and shouts “Cunts!” – the truck stops and out gets a 7ft high, eastern european giant haystacks in a shiny yellow jerkin. “What did you call me?” – “I called you a cunt” says the plucky builder, bumping into him with my sofa. This prompted all kinds of fuck offs and finger jabbing, until everyone realised that no one was *actually* going to start a fight. I played the peacemaker, and pretended to reason with the enormous parking attendant, saying as nicely as I could: “listen, I think you really ought to fuck off now.” The man mountain got back in his truck. The plucky builder was loving it. “He thought I was going to back down, but I wasn’t… I’d have kicked him in the balls, he’d have gone down…” – this met with general agreement. “Yeah, he’d have kicked him in the balls, and done him in the throat… what’s he gonna do? My van’s too big for his truck. Fuck him!”