Icarus @ 59 # 18

Luna Park, Sydney and I am thinking about the time I took a ferry out of Sydney Harbour to Cockatoo Island for the Sydney Bienniale. It was just one of the most fantastic experiences of my life. The whole island was taken over as a huge art installation site and you have no choice but to embrace it, and I have loads of pictures of my visit. But as I look through the pictures, this image (above left) I snapped on the way out  of Sydney harbour catches my eye, just for the sheer fun of it. The idea that you can open these theme parks all over the world dedicated to amusement and a laugh appeals to me. We should have universities dedicated to amusement and fun, that sounds like an idea, I think I might propose that next semester when I return (which gets sooner every year). But if the Luna Park face is the full smile  of a mischief maker you have to be ready for the rest. The picture on the right was taken at the high point of my year and its hard to believe it was only a couple of weeks ago, when ,e, my Dad and Alex Sharpe drove over to Falkirk to see the Kelpies. Another artistic endeavour, they have been called 'a monument to Scottish industry,' and there is something about that too. I have often said that 'work is what we do but art is who we are', these, surely, are evidence of the two coming together and that is what I try to teach, the combination of creative and critical thought and action coming together with hard work to create a better world, what more can we wish for? I stole this next image (below) but I am sure no one will mind, isn't it great:

I am getting ready for 2014 when there will be lots of changes but there is no point in being alive for the crescent, c'mon, bring on the whole of the moon - happy hogmanay.

Icarus @ 59 # 17

Las Ramblas in Barcelona is the exciting place everyone says it is but as we strolled through and around, taking in the evening air, Dan and I stumbled across this Catalonian dancing taking place outside the cathedral. Both the music and the dancing itself were a throwback to a history and a time which we tend to ignore. The city itself is full of curios, the ultra modern MACBA stands not far from this site and the arch modernist, Antoni Gaudí is revered everywhere you go - alongside the famous Barca and the Nou Camp.  And then you come to realise, this is what makes the city unusual. It is a city dedicated to Catalonian culture. You don't get that in London, for example. Boots of Spanish Leather, methinks - I really like her band and wish I could stumble across them in Brighton's Lanes, our own Las Rambles:

Icarus @ 59 # 16

Ok, I am still in Central Park mode, but there is a lot to see and think about. Still on the subject of carrousel horses there is this wonderful park marker - don't know what else to call it. This winter I plan to take some Brighton park pictures because I find most parks are full of little things that are a constant reminder of a time past. Brighton's parks are full of Victorian clocks and water fountains and all kinds of oddities. And perhaps the best way to investigate these is to run or even cycle every park in Brighton. That might be a New Year's resolution, do every park in Brighton, with a camera, first Blakers, then Preston, Queens Park is a good one… goodness, I have a quest and now I need a map. And you need a map for this song, one of the longest songs I have heard in a long time but 'I dream a highway back to you…' is such a great refrain. You have to be in the mood for it, but I like it a lot, especially the understated playing from David Rawlings and languid vocals which are Gillian Welch's secret weapon. I could take a seat in Central Park and time out to listen to this on my iPod, as the fast lane of NY life zips by.

Icarus @ 59 # 15

Objet d'art: Carrousel horses, there is something a bit eerie about these, grotesque even. I think its the expression on their faces. This one is in Central Park, NY but could easily be the one in Hyde Park, London or on the seafront in Brighton. Mark Gertler's Merry Go Round in the Tate Gallery in London catches a version of this grotesqueness and he took the idea forward as a caricature of the First World War. I can't post the picture here because the Tate owns the licence but it can be seen at: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gertler-merry-go-ro Perhaps though it has more to do with the way we perceive the grotesque. Like clowns dressing up can look creepier than they look funny, for example. Indeed the word grotesque comes from the same Latin root for grotto, which is a hidden place and then we begin to piece the meaning together into the uncanny. I have a grotto at the bottom of my garden. See above right, this picture was taken after last year's snow. There is no telling what lurks down there and in there, might be hiding a carrousel horse (of course)! Actually, last night we watched the Hobbit and, well, you never know… and here is some great music to go with it. I love the Tiny Desk Concerts because they are like little musical grottos, i reach in and get to find loads of stuff that I would hitherto miss out on, like the fantastic Rodrigo y Gabriela, enjoy:

Icarus @ 59 # 14

In his Winter Journal, Paul Auster writes, 'Some memories are so strange to you, so unlikely, so outside the realm of the plausible, that you find it difficult to reconcile them with the fact that you are the person who experienced the events you are remembering.' I thought it was just me. This year I have such a succession of experiences that they barely got a chance to become memories before they were squeezed out as another pushed its way in. I'm not saying I live this hugely exciting life but not a month seems to go by without something happening. And travel, despite having a full time job (where I have had nary a sick day in twenty years) and writing and publishing as part of this job, I seem to have squeezed a lot of places in. Edinburgh, London, New York, Austen, Oklahoma, Barcelona, Majorca, Kefalonia, Oxford, Glasgow, Winchester and Cape Town - and in these places I keep working because I have written or co-written around thirty-thousand words for publication this year too (and today I am working on another project, which I am very excited about). Then again, maybe that is just me and my life and this blog is a way of reminding myself of the memories. Perhaps I should be keeping hard copy of this as an aide memoir of sixtieth year. I have friends who don't forget anything and they remind me of memories I was involved in but can't even remember taking place. I wonder why that is, why some people remember everything and some of us remember hardly anything at all? And now I can't remember why I asked that question. I wonder if I am really a goldfish.. I wonder if I am really a goldfish.. I wonder if I am really a goldfish.. I wonder if I am really a goldfish… did I ask that before? It has been a long year… sometimes like traveling down a nowhere road.

Icarus @ 59 # 13

Objet d'art: Juxtaposition, cities do this for me, on one hand you have a hand built installation like this (above right) and then you have the glass structured architecture (above left) that takes over our city skies. These are in London, where I spent many enjoyable years and I miss it from time to time. But this is Boxing Day, juxtaposed with Christmas Day and calling my sister Margaret, who couldn't talk for laughing at a story my Dad was telling her, reminded me that it doesn't really matter where we live, living at peace with ourselves, so that we can pass that onto others is what really matters. This morning we are all off for a run in the park. I might listen to this as I go, peace like a river ran through the city, speaking of hope:

Icarus @ 59 # 12

There is an empty chair at our table, 

this favourite time of her year, 

but her laughter lingers,

clinging to the crisp December air; 

and she is with us still. 

Happy Christmas

Icarus @ 59 # 11

Objet d'art: the ghost of the West Pier, Brighton. I have always loved living by the sea and I love it down on the beach when its stormy and lets be honest, this is the stormiest Christmas eve I have ever experienced. The day started dark and only graduated to grey before plunging us back into darkness. Its been a day for pulling up the drawbridge, getting the fire going and then settling down with a good book. I have just opened, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri. Not sure what I think yet, it was a birthday present and I don't know much about it, except it was shortlisted for the Booker. I will let you know. But as Clive James said only today, in a discussion with Andrew Marr on Radio 4, a critic's job is not to tell his readers things but to open the door and ask them to take a look for themselves - and I rather like that. Clive James sounded very frail, I gather he has been unwell and that is a pity, for all his popularism, he is a very erudite man - and a fantastic poet. His Dante translation is fantastic, although I find his most recent poetry a bit too, 'sorry I have been a naughty boyish'  but I can understand why. But Alan Turing has been given a royal pardon - about bloody time too, hard to believe that around the time I was born you could still be castrated for being gay, what a disgraceful idea for a civilised society. This is desk dancing music to bring some sunshine to a dreich day, I am dancing as I type, oh yay:

Icarus @ 59 # 10

Objet d'art: the temporality of a living fire; yesterday was the shortest day and thank goodness its gone because it was dreich and wet. So after I came back from the gym I lit the fire and pulled up a guitar. In these moments its easy to slip into nostalgia, this song (below) and the images in the clip are supposed to promote that too - but I don't feel a clashing nostalgia for any of it. I found myself thinking about Nelson Mandela, 46664, and this cell where he was held on Robben Island, and the trip I took there earlier in the year. And from this I remind myself that while its easy to reflect on a kind of mythical past, like the Scotland of this clip (below), and Mandela's great legacy. Going forward, onto the next experience is the only way forward. There is no point in dwelling on what is past, we have to keep going forward. Bob Dylan once said that nostalgia is death - he is right. It suffocates us and Nelson Mandela would have agreed. Personally, I am already looking forward to 2020, but this doesn't mean we can't play the 'here's tae us, wha's like us,' without some affection for a great singer:

Icarus @ 59 # 9

Objet d'art: my desk, I love this desk and the corner I write in where I can keep books to hand and music on constant. And it's not just a workstation but a bolthole and a place of refuge. I am not precious about it, the kids are on the screensaver and the screen itself sits on top of two books, the bottom one is a collection of Romantic poetry and the one above is Sigmund Freud's On Dreams. And let's not be pretentious, those books were chosen because they are the right size. Yesterday, I  finished my first draft of my Essay, 'The Lyrical Future of Nostalgia,'  for Axon, only to remember a quote I wanted to include but forgot to do so - isn't it just the case. No matter I can clip it in today - not like the old typewriter days! And here it is, 

She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awakening from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

Michael Ondatje, The English Patient

Isn't it great.The English Patient is one of my all time favourite books for this very reason. And I might be listening to this at the same time, I love this clip, and it reminds me of reading Ondatje's book, 

Icarus @ 59 # 8

Asleep in the study...

Ozark Resonator

Objet d'art: I work in this study (left) it sits between the living room and the kitchen in a Victorian house in Brighton and there are many distractions. Books and music, guitars and dreams, lots of dreams - and like the dreams each guitar is different. It looks a lot, I guess, and its not all of them, but I have been collecting them a long time. I sill have my very first guitar upstairs, which my Mum bought for me when I was 10 and it still plays really well. My favourite, desert island guitar would be the one to the left of the banjo. It is a Norman, handmade in Canada, the wood is wild cherry with a spruce top and it is the one I would grab, well alongside the 1960 Stratocaster, second from the left, if there was a fire. But my current fave and the one sitting in my kitchen as I cook dinner (where I play every night - as a way of winding down a working day) is this one (above right). I use it to play blues and slide guitar. Its a work of art in its own right. It is an Ozark Resonator; that title has something to do with the construction and sound holes. The 'biscuit resonator' which lies under the chrome metal plate relies on a single cone and the 'biscuit' - which is mounted to the base of that inverted cone - translates the energy of picking and strumming and the sound of the slide from the bridge to the biscuit to the cone - easy huh? But it has a very distinct sound, especially when playing slide. I am ok, I get by but would really like to be better - indeed am looking to see if I can get some lessons to speed up my understanding. This guy needs no lessons. I don't play mine on my lap like he does but i would if i could learn to play like this:

Icarus @ 59 # 7

Objet d'art: this helicopter hangs, suspended in the MOMA in New York. It is a paradoxical installation,  since helicopters are a weapon and a life saver in equal measure. It reminds me of Baudrillard's idea of knowing that the secret of philosophy is not to know oneself, or know where where one is going, but rather to go where the other is going. We chase each other's dreams. Wasn't it Pierre Bourdieu who said, if I speak only of myself who will follow me? Perhaps we need to understand both sides of all debates - and not just the newspaper/tabloid/political (always biased)  idea of what the debates are? Andy Warhol said he wanted to be a machine (hence the helicopter image here) and he reduced/alleviated art to the process of reproduction until the image was saturated into strangeness, 'closer and closer to the nothingness of the object…' which is open to the idea that if we take the image, the identity, the celebrity and reproduce it over and over we take away the mystique, and so we can question the ideas behind it/him/her as art and performance. Hmm, I am not so sure. This has always seemed simple but remember those Marylyn Monroe pictures and Che Guevara, such an idea denies the process of seduction and desire and even Freud's uncanny, which is much more complex. Time for music, methinks. See the lonely boy, out on the weekend,  trying to make it pay, was a great sentiment when I was 16, but I am thinking of the other - and this song does that - same era, I was still 16 and now I am growing into myself, though I hesitate to call myself 'old man' - btw, don't you just love this Martin guitar:

Icarus @ 59 # 6

I am posting this a day early because my old friend Rocky sent me details of an article on ''unfinished paintings''. The idea of the unfinished is something i have been preoccupied with for a while and have just written an academic article on it, which has some of this... 'The narrative future of nostalgia,’ is a phrase Milan Kundera (2009: 106-107) coined in an essay entitled, ‘The Untouchable Solitude of a Foreigner (Oscar Milosz)’ and as I reflect, both the phrase and the title of the essay are relevant to my current thinking. Kundera writes, 

[in Milosz’s] November Symphony… I was entranced not by a myth but by a beauty acting on its own, alone, naked, with no outside support… [which] lay in the discovery of something I had never encountered anywhere else: I discovered the archetype of a form of nostalgia that is expressed, grammatically, not by the past but by the future: the grammatical future of nostalgia. The grammatical form that projects a lamented past into a distant future, that transforms the melancholy evocation of a thing that no longer exists into the heartbreaking sorrow of a promise that can never be realised.

You will be all pale in violet, beautiful; grief

And the flowers on your hat will be sad and small

I was reading this at a time when I wondered what a songwriter should or could write about after nearly fifty years of writing songs. Love songs seem a little gauche at my age, a reflective past, loss, heartbreak and the like are a little too morose, and besides I had done them, seen them recorded, they sit on albums now. And so I decided to write a new song based on the forty year old fragment (above, which i found in a box in my attic) because it brought back nostalgic memories with an imagined future; and I decided to finish it and then back the song up with a new academic paper. I have written both and a scratch version of the song can be seen here (recorded while I was sitting at my desk so don't expect much) but since this is a countdown year in which I am writing and recording songs, this seems to be a good place to start. A better version and video will follow in time:

Icarus @ 59 # 5

Objet-d'art: I took this picture of the ice rink in Central Park last February. It presents itself like a Brueghel painting, full of a life that goes on as other life goes on elsewhere. Amidst the metropolis of New York and a world of banks and deals taking place high in the air, this little oasis in the park allows us to glide across frozen water. Don't you just love the juxtaposition: the fact that you can walk from here to the Metropolitan and Guggenheim, down Broadway, onto the NASDAQ in Lower Manhattan and then across the Brooklyn Bridge in less time than it takes to pull your ice skates on. This is the city I would most like to live in in the whole world. But its getting to the festive time of year and if we are talking about coming on Christmas and cutting down tree and skating over rivers, there is only one song (for me). I like to play this on guitar but also on mandolin on dark nights in front of the fire, when the house is asleep:

Icarus @ 59 # 4

Candy Apple Red: Objet-d'art, this is my new guitar. I got it for my birthday and is there anything more representative of serviceable art than a guitar? I am so excited, its my first ever bass. I have played them before, of course, but never actually owned one until now and I like it a great deal. And its also telling me I have no excuses for now delaying recording - except time, of course. But today is also a privilege because Dan has also just given me a copy of his first novel to read for him, and it has a red cover. So this is a red day and that's just fine by me, because that is all it needs to be. Not a blue day, not a day for the blues, not a day to choose to be blue, but a red day for 'killing the blues'…

Icarus @ 59 # 3

I walked past this sculptured gate last night and its all lit up - note to self, always have an iPhone handy. But its such a lovely piece, it just sits outside a little stairwell at the side of the Methodist Church in Fiveways, where I live, here in Brighton. And every so often I will post pictures of objet-d'art I stumble across in this year. At least that is the plan, that and snippets of song lines and the like, that appeal. Today I am working on a song with a verse that starts… Maria said, 'Jesus your cross…' and I quite like the ambiguity of the line. Its a monostich of sorts and its a start. My favourite monostich of my own is one I wrote and sent to Australia and I confess it just rolled onto the page without thought - poetry by osmosis on an Icarian theme… Odysseus, did he see  us? And that is where I will leave this post because writing 365 of the blighters isn't going to be easy. This musician and this tune blows me away - east meets west with Jeff Beck and Nadia, oh yay:

Icarus @ 59 # 2

In this second posting of my sixtieth year I am reminded how much I love playing stringed instruments and this year is about to be a big year for them - I am determined to record that elusive album at long last. A song every couple of weeks can't be such a chore, can it? Indeed I am not sure why I haven't done it already. In the meantime I am writing a journal article called 'The Lyrical Future of Nostalgia' which will be a theme and I guess your sixtieth year is a good time for that. But I don't have  huge amount of time this morning because my other resolve to stay fit is also on the cards as I prepare to hit the gym - ola world. Isn't this a fantastic song though:

Icarus @ 59 # 1

It is 5am in the morning and this is my first post of my 60th year. The year just past has been marred by too much sadness but I have come through it healthy, so I am holding this one to hostage because it promises better. I am inclined to write more or better for this first post but Winchester calls for the last time this year, its a day of first and lasts, a bit like this song which I have an inordinate fondness for - and it is my birthday after all, so I am treating myself to an early morning version. Happy Friday, happy my birthday, I have a vision of my 60th year being just grand.

Icarus in the clouds # 3

One of the things I have never understood about celebrities is how they crave the common life and go into newspapers as Mrs B or Mr J and say I am just an ordinary joe (as if they aren't there because they are, hmm, celebrities). So we have celeb X who says I am really just Mrs J down the supermarket. Except they are not are they. I have never craved celebrity, that's not a confession but a statement of fact, although in certain circumstances it is thrust upon you (and its nice when you have a brief glimmer). I have friends who are poets (very few celebs there) but they do enjoy their moment in the sun, shade, spotlight and I guess that's not so hard to understand. Getting published is that kind of a deal and yet even that becomes just ok. I have never known a book yet (34 and counting) that didn't feel over as soon as it was published. But hey ho, maybe I have had it lucky. Right now I am writing lots but I am keeping it to myself. Celebs take heed, you can do it just for yourself if you weren't so addicted to yourselves… umm, that sounds a bit rude but we can all be up our own arse sometimes. Hey ho, hey ho, hup, hup, ho… Me and my Abbi love to play this very loud in the car - and car dancing is one of the great joys of life!