Another video from my London trip
There are eight Royal Parks in London and on this walk I went through (or past) four of them. Another – Greenwich Park – is near the destination of my river trip (see the previous video).
cafe reviews, wanderings, disconnected thoughts
There are eight Royal Parks in London and on this walk I went through (or past) four of them. Another – Greenwich Park – is near the destination of my river trip (see the previous video).
This week I’ve been in London. I was born in the suburbs of South London and spent all my life in various areas of the capital (apart from a couple of years travelling abroad and then four years in Birmingham) until last year when I moved away. It was a strange feeling to be back – partly that it’s home but partly that I couldn’t live there anymore as it’s too fast and crowded. Especially walking around the area I lived in for 20+ years felt odd as I still dream about it.
I’ve footage for three or four videos and have already made the first of them. This was a river boat trip along the Thames from Westminster Pier to Greenwich.
My latest video is of the town of Evesham, in Worcestershire, on a bend of the River Avon. It originated with its 8th century Abbey (since demolished) and has many historic sites as well as a thriving community on both sides of the river.
There’s a Robert Venturi quote I heard recently that goes:
But an architecture of complexity and contradiction has a special obligation toward the whole: its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion. More is not less.
“The easy unity of exclusion” put me in mind of the ‘diversity’ initiatives prevalent in public service and probably in private companies. They trumpet diversity but what they really seem to be after is this:
that everyone, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, religion, ability, age, etc., must want the same things and aspire to live the same way. When someone comes along who is really diverse (usually non-neurotypical), see them close ranks right away.
(Venturi quoted in “Architect”, https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/learning-from-robert-venturi_o )
So the last destination on the 801 bus route from Cheltenham now has its video. That’s Bourton-on-the-Water, Stow-on-the-Wold and Moreton-in-Marsh. I’d rate Moreton as more interesting than Stow and less than Bourton. There is a fourth destination – nearer Cheltenham – that is Andoversford, but while it may have been interesting decades ago as a railway junction, entrepot for quarried stone and having a few nice old buildings, it has since lost the railway and become overflow housing for the nearby town.
As I was heading for the bus a young man engaged me in conversation about the various destinations – he was on his way to Bourton and wondered how much there was to see there vis-a-vis Stow or Moreton. Somehow he’d asked someone who had done precisely those destinations! I was pleased to be of help.
It was a windy day and the wind sounds get into the video sometimes but apart from that – with music via Epidemic Sound – is my Moreton-in-Marsh video.
A fragment of “Rain Shadows” which I wrote years ago, I’m not sure when but it was some time before 2005 to go by the address on the manuscript.
‘‘His attention was caught by the green readout of the hi-fi and he went over to see what had been playing. It was a recent John Kluge CD, No Eclairs; a weird piece only tangentially related to music, full of bangs, bells and whistles and tape-loops of manic laughter. One of Fiona’s. He pressed the button again and electronic sound whispered into the room. Alarm clocks went off to left and to right. Impossibly fast violin playing – imagine Paganini looking at the score and going “No, man, no way!” – broke out for a second or two and then faded away again.’’
as I seem to be emulating the (non-existent) music of Kluge, I can only say,
you’re on.
(translation of a piece written for a French course)
Serge Poliakoff was born in Moscow on January 8, 1900, the thirteenth child of a family of Kyrgyz origin. His father was a horse breeder and his mother was very involved in religion.
The young Serge is interested in art and sculpture, and enrolls in the School of Arts in Moscow. Come the Revolution of 1917 he fled Russia to go to Turkey, and after adventures through Europe he finally settled in Paris in 1923. He was also a guitarist and played cabarets, which remained his professional job for several years of his painting career.
Once established in Paris, he enrolled at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Académie Forchot to progress his painting studies.
It was in 1935 that he met Marcelle Perreur Lloyd, a descendant of Sir Thomas More of Irish and French origin, who became his wife. It was at her insistence that he continued his studies in England, at the Slade School of Art. During a visit to the British Museum he is struck by the colors of the Egyptian sarcophagi. From then on, his art became less figurative and rather dominated by blocks of color. He gained a reputation for abstraction and pure color.
On returning to Paris he met the painters of the time, such as Sonia and Robert Delaunay and Wassily Kandinsky, and the sculptor Otto Freundlich. In 1937, his first personal exhibition took place, at the Galerie Zak, in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The Zak also gave the first exhibition to Kandinsky, who is a supporter of Serge: “For the future I bet on Poliakoff,” he says. During the war, his works became darker and more abstract. After the war, he had an exhibition of his abstract compositions at the Galerie de l'Esquisse, which put him in the spotlight and he received good reviews in the press. Two decades followed where Serge's reputation grew, and he met several of the big names in art and cinema. A room reserved for his paintings at the Venice Biennale in 1962, in which year he became a French citizen. Retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, and an exhibition at the Galerie Ex-Libris in Brussels, and at Circle and Square in New York, and so on. Yves Saint Laurent designs a ‘Poliakoff’ dress. It was about the Whitechapel retrospective that Pierre Rouve (diplomat and communicator) said, “His art, flourishing in a perpetual present, is also an art of boundless presence”.
What characterizes a work by Poliakoff are blocks of color, a strong intensity as if the color were all that remained of a scene. He was influenced by the icons of the Orthodox Church, which are not exactly portraits but objects of meditation. The Russian Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) was of the same opinion; his art simplified to a black square. Poliakoff did not know Malevich's work until the 1950s, so he had to walk the same path separately.
It is also possible to make comparisons with the art of the Catalan Joan Miró (1893-1983) with its somewhat marine forms, reducing living beings to stains of color. All other consideration flees and you find yourself faced with pure light, the “boundless presence” as Rouve says. It is considered 'tachiste', a movement that includes such as Hans Hartung and Antoni Tàpies, and can be seen as the European equivalent of American abstract expressionism.
Following a heart attack in 1965, his health weakened, and Serge Poliakoff died on October 12, 1969, aged 69. The following year the Museum of Modern Art in Paris devoted an exhibition to him, and more recently others took place in Bergamo (1970), Oslo (1976), Milan (1983), Paris (2013), New York (2016 and 2021). In the 13th arrondissement of Paris there is the “Place Serge-Poliakoff.”
The progressive art journal Hyperallergic characterized Poliakoff’s current reputation as ‘for France, like a respected old uncle who is sometimes visited; but for the United States, a forgotten name' and suggests that it is because in the 1950s when Serge was approaching the peak of his career, Paris was losing its crown as 'art capital' to New York. Even so, Poliakoff's importance as the innovator of a color sense above all else, the 'unequaled colorist' as Van Gogh foresaw, has already begun to be rediscovered.
Before the Stow video I just linked to I did do two others.
Bourton-on-the-Water:
and Chipping Campden:
The Chipping Campden one is twenty-four minutes long, my longest video so far, mainly because there are two buses a day so I was there for six and a half hours so had a comprehensive walk around town!
Bourton-on-the-Water gave me the opportunity to visit the model village and Birdland, which are both worth seeing.
These were made using VideoPad but for now (as of the latest video) I’ve gone back to Animotica. VideoPad is probably too much for this computer to handle and it glitches a lot. Animotica can be clunky to use but with perseverance it is fine and it is reliable.
On Thursday I went to Stow-on-the-Wold. The highest village in the Cotswolds at 250 metres asl, and a very old settlement, though what we see now is largely 18th century and later – it thrived on the wool trade and one of the most visible results of that is the narrow passages into the market place, which were used to drive sheep down – as they had to go single file they could be counted as they came out. I wonder if ‘counting sheep’ is based on that? But now it’s just cars that get driven in Stow – the town council seems to have no desire to keep the private car out of the town centre, which is a shame. As a result it feels crowded and the amount of background noise in the video was considerable.
I put two of my own musical compositions to the video – although later modified one of them (the second one) as I wasn’t happy with part of it.
Anyway, welcome to the Sheep Streets (that’s a pun on the Wonder Stuff’s 1991 record “Welcome to the Cheap Seats” if you don’t recognise it).
I don’t feel that well though I don’t think it’s CoVid, but whatever it’s going to be no vid from me this week. I had the timetable for the bus to get to my next destination, and a list of things to see, and the possibility that now is the best time to go there because it’s a very touristy town and why not go in the off season? It’s a shame because not only am I emotionally invested in making short films and putting them on YT I have also just bought myself a copy of VideoPad to replace Animotica as my editor of choice.
Animotica has served me well for months but it has limitations, not least being vague and it’s hard to keep track of items in a longer project or more accurately one with a larger number of clips (you could have one hour-long take, that would be easy. 50 clips making up a 20-minute film, less so). I went for the pro version of VideoPad not least because it allows three audio tracks, which may sound like a lot but when you consider the first track is the video clips’ audio, and the second will be background music, what happens when you want to drop in, say, a sound effect of a train going past or of birdsong? If you’re limited to two audio tracks then you can’t. To look at the reviews VideoPad is level pegging with Animotica but it has a more traditional desktop (Animotica more resembles Windows’ Video Editor). We shall see.
So given other things I have to do, it looks like – health permitting – it’s filming next Wednesday. And as even ‘tomorrow, go into town with the camera’ is a filming schedule, then I have a schedule.