HEAT WAVE

Wiped out by this heatwave, maybe also the air pollution, intensified by the heat. My upstairs studio like a Turkish steambath and creative energy down to zero. However, it gets a little bit cooler in the evening and some kind of nourishment must be taken. Soup is the answer. A bunch of fresh watercress, some broccoli, a few new potatoes, a sauteed onion, a couple of chicken stock cubes. When cooked, liquidise. Voilà! Delicious either hot or cold, with croutons. Don't need anything else these hot days.

 Well, maybe a dessert.

Long ago in a book (by Marguerite Duras I think) I read about clafoutis. Oddly enough I'd never eaten this cherry dish in France, never even seen it. I love the name, the je-m'en-fou implied, and kept a recipe from one of the Sunday supplements. So I thought I'd try it now and defeat the heat apathy. I have the cherries - last of the season - dark and luscious, plus eggs, flour, sugar, milk. The recipe is peculiar:

After stoning the cherries, it tells you to lay out the stones in a row on a tea towel, fold the towel over them, then smash them with a hammer. This is supposed to release the noyau, the kernel inside. Maybe I smashed too hard but there were only some miniscule whitish bits all tangled up in shell fragments. But I obeyed, gathered up the bits and sprinkled them over the stoned cherries, put the lot in a buttered dish. Then the whisking of flour, caster sugar, eggs and milk. The amounts of sugar and milk specified seemed far too much so I ignored the recipe and reduced them, poured the mix over the cherries, added some raisins (my idea) and baked the thing for about 50 minutes. Not bad, but not ecstatically good as I was led to believe. Rather bland and chewy, eggy, a sort of flan. I ate half of it with vanilla ice cream. The other half is for tomorrow.

A PERFECT DAY

Beautiful summer day made entirely perfect by a visit to George Szirtes and Clarissa Upchurch in Wymondham (pronounced Windam) Norfolk.- I'm running out of superlatives, I can't keep saying beautiful etc. but it really was, start to finish. Here's George's Facebook post about it.

 First of all the view out of the train window from Cambridge onwards - the flawless geometry of the Norfolk Fens -  endless flat horizontals broken by shorter verticals and then suddenly these absolutely outlandishly perfect circles equally spaced over the ochre flatness. Rationally I knew they were hay bales, not made by human hands, but it was all really BauHaus. I haven't been to this part of the country before and I was mesmerised, amazed that the wooded clumps of trees here and there on the flat ochre or green carpet were all exactly the same height so that they looked like hedges, carefully trimmed by a hedge-barber. (instead of a hedge-funder, heh heh). And no human beings in that perfect geometrical landscape, no figurative olde worlde peasants tilling the soil. I thought it would be an idea to insert some life-size statues of said peasants in those fields, you know, just to surprise people looking out of train windows.

But never mind all that. The real point of the day was the connection with two exceptional individuals, Clarissa and George, and the inspiring environment in which they live. Unlike George, I'm not good at describing a day's progress with its many significant details so I'm not even going to try. Both of them are multi-talented, multi-faceted, impossible to summarise such richness, visual, verbal, personal. The time flew by, lunch and conversation were delicious, stunning artwork in portfolios and on the walls (the walls too, especially that silky aquamarine one!). Here are a few images. Others remain in my mind and heart. 

EXPERIMENTS TO TEST REALITY

Latest Pableau nearly finished. Hard to photograph because of the reflective surfaces but here are a couple of shots. The back of each flat piece is painted somewhat differently from the front and you can see this in the mirrored background, including the text bubble (written wrong way round on the back so it reads right way round in its reflection).

"Everything puzzled me. I resolved to devise experiments to test reality." The sentence comes from my unfinished-probably-never-to-be finished graphic gnovel. Am taking bits of it to make more Pableaux.

 

ANOTHER BIRTHDAY

It's my umpteenth birthday and this is a lit candle in the photo, proving that I'm still here on the 7th of August 2016.

NOW FOR SOMETHING DIFFERENT

When things get too familiar, too routine, too repetitious, too obsessive, too frustrating, or too whatever, I like to try something that gives me a kick but doesn't necessarily lead anywhere or mean anything except a momentary YES!

Singing is like that for me - not serious singing, not proper singing, just fun. Songs I love, done my way. Best fun of all is concocting a different musical background for a well-known song (I use Garage Band) and singing over it. I recorded a few of these 'covers' and probably uploaded some in past blog posts but I don't remember when or where.

I must thank Roderick whose recent attempts to post a sound recording of his own voice led to my proposing variously convoluted techy options but the problem was finally solved by commenter MikeM who suggested a very straightforward solution. I've now used picosound myself to post two recordings.....

(Click on the titles to hear the clips)

1.  Nat's No Regrets  (Je Ne Regrette Rien)

2.  Nat's Cucuru  (Cucurucucu Paloma)

CARUSO

A musical interlude.

I've always loved the song Caruso for its beautiful minor chords, its melancholy, but until now I never bothered looking up who wrote it or when. I assumed it was old, traditional, perhaps anonymous, and Neapolitan. Having finally consulted Wikipedia (please do likewise if you don't already know the story) I find that it really was about Caruso but even sadder than I thought.

Here it is on YouTube performed as a duet by Lucio Dalla (the song's composer) and Pavarotti in 1992. Listen to it before reading my rough translation.

CARUSO by Lucio Dalla 1986

Here where the sea sparkles
And the wind blows hard
On the old terrace
Facing the Gulf of Sorrento
A man embraces a girl
Who has been crying
He clears his throat
And takes up his song again

Refrain:
I love you very much you know
So very very much you know
We’re locked in a chain by now
It heats the blood in our veins by now

He sees lights flickering on the ocean
He thinks of nights in America
But it’s only the lights
The white froth behind a motorboat
He feels the pain in the music
He rises from the piano but then he sees
The moon emerging from behind a cloud
And even death seems sweet to him
He looks into the girl’s eyes
Her sea-green eyes
Suddenly a tear falls
And he feels he is drowning

(Refrain)

The power of words
When every drama is a farce
A bit of makeup and makebelieve
And you can be someone else
But two eyes gazing into yours
So close, so true
Make you forget the words
Confound your thoughts
You become very small
Even your nights in America
You turn around and see your whole life
Disappearing behind the blades of a propeller
Even if life is ending
He’s not thinking too much about it
He’s even feeling quite happy
He launches into his song again

(Refrain)

TURNING STRANGERS INTO FRIENDS

Late last night, on my way home from a marvellous musical soirée at friends' house, I'm waiting at a bus stop. Two African women next to me are talking with great animation, their voices bubbling, swirling like amplified, orchestrated bird song. I want to speak this language! I turn to the larger, more voluble of the two:

me: where are you from?
she (smiles, gives me a hug, kisses my cheek): Nigeria.
me: which part?
she: Lagos.
me: My friend Teju Cole is from there.
she: Ibo?
me: Yes, Ibo. You?
she: Yoruba.
me: Oh, I think he's Yoruba too.  
(Truth is, I can't remember which of the two Teju is).
The bus arrives. The three of us get on and the large woman sits behind me.
she: How old are you?
me: I'm not going to tell you. Guess.
she: Sixty-two.
me: Thank you, I'm flattered (actually I'm ecstatic) but you're wrong.
she: Seventy-one?
me: (smiling enigmatically) Wrong. How old are you?
she: Guess.
me: Thirty-five?
Her round face, firm and polished as a nectarine, breaks into a gleaming smile.
she: I'm fifty-one.

It goes on like this and by the time I get off at my stop, we have been friends forever. We hug, we wave. I love these women. I love London.

I'M A WINNER

Uplifting news:

I'm one of the 15 winners of a film poster competition to be displayed on the hoardings of a cinema opening at the beginning of September in the old Pizza Express building in Kentish Town. I've just heard from the organisers that I'm on the winners list.

The brief was to design a poster for one's favourite film of all time. So I chose Bicycle Thieves because its brilliance is timeless and because my dear departed brother-in-law Gerardo Guerrieri worked on the memorable script. Below is my poster design and yes, I did borrow from that famous photo. Will post more when all the posters are up on the hoardings.

PABLEAU NO. 1

Done it. Registered to vote in the Labour leadership election. Paid the outrageous £25 fee.

And in other news:

I've just finished the first in my new series of Pableaux (poem-tableaux) - not exactly a poem but kind of poetic?

Title: How could she know. Dimensions: W 31.5 cms X H 31 cms X D 4.5 cms. Media: wood, balsa, canvas, acrylic. It's a box inside which the cut-out shapes are arranged on different levels.

I couldn't get the photo to show its 3-dimensionality or the thin gold edges around the frame.

EXCELLENCE

Parabems Portugal, muito bem! I love Portugal and they deserved to win the World Cup. I love my birthplace too but France lost, that's how it goes.

On Saturday night, more excellence:  I was privileged to be at an extraordinary evening of spellbinding performances from Mikey Kirkpatrick (Bird Radio) and John Bently (Bones and the Aft) - thank you all. I was blown away, gut-wrenched.

Some of Bird Radio and Bones & the Aft gigs are on YouTube but there's absolutely no substitute for seeing and hearing them live, right up close in an intimate setting. Mikey and John have strongly individual musical and poetic styles but both have similar roots and a passionate engagement with place and time, everyday tragedies and wonders. An image comes to mind of medieval troubadours but with very modern, very original sound and fury. See the Facebook page of Bird Radio for news of their CDs. John Bently is also a fellow book-artist (see Liver and Lights website) and his brilliant handmade books are collected world-wide - buy them now while there are still some left!

I took some photos at the gig on Saturday and attach a few below. Lights were dim in the room and I had to fiddle with Photoshop to extract anything at all from the pictures but I'm quite pleased with the somewhat impressionist effect that unexpectedly emerged. Unfortunately my camera's battery died just as Bones and the Aft's set was getting under way so I missed what would have been some memorable shots.