Hot on the heels of making a long list of exhibitions I'd like to see - about half of which I might get to - I took myself to the nearest, at the Estorick Collection in Highbury, a pleasant walk of less than an hour (not quite 10,000 steps).
Giacomo Balla: Designing the Future is on till 25 June. It encompasses figurative painting and drawing, as well as abstraction and applied art and many of Balla’s fashion-related designs. Balla was one of the signatories of the Futurist Manifesto (1910) and did some very dynamic painting, eg cars and motorcycles travelling at speed; he sought to apply art to everyday life ... and came up with some wonderful patterning.
I didn't have time to draw in the exhibition, got there half an hour before it closed, but this one certainly made me want to draw -
Perfectly puzzling for paper piecing!
This small work, which is "among the earliest examples of 20th century abstraction", looked intriguingly shimmering, as if it was painted on layers of glass -
The wall label said -
His designs for clothing were intended to come to life as the wearer moved -
... and this clothes rack is a fitting setting for those clothes when they're having a rest -
And now a grumble - here's an early painting, titled "A Woman Sewing" -
A Woman Sewing (1896)
What is she doing, though?
Those hands, though, are not in a sewing position. Don't you think she's crocheting?
This error a problem of translation from Balla's Italian title? If so - or even if not so - why oh why are writers, curators, even artists perhaps, so careless with (or ignorant of) terms relating to any form of "needlework" ... just another "woman's craft", is it?
About four months ago I decided to refresh my Spanish, and started using an app called Duolingo - "free, fun, and science-based". The initial test told me I knew 29% of Spanish (whatever that means!) - and as I worked through the bite-sized lessons, reaching checkpoints, my score became 25%, 22%, 21%. Turns out it's not because of getting things wrong but because of not practising enough!
My daily goal was to do two of the bite-sized lessons, which isn't a lot - you don't get fluent in a language with just 15 minutes' practice a day, or rather, whenever it suits you. So I decided to "do my Spanish" every evening, in bed - sleep seems to improve language learning - and to do at least three lessons, or as many as I could stay awake for. (The repetition can be soporific...)
The end was in sight - only 10 lessons-groups to go. Some evenings, the screen would be dotted with lots of little lessons that needed revisiting - it's keeping up with these, keeping the skill bars full, that gets you points (sometimes people reach 60%). And if you reach your daily goal every day, you build up a streak.
My streak reached 101 days yesterday - and then I stayed up later than usual and suddenly realised it was nearly midnight - uh oh -
Message received at three minutes past midnight
Reader, what would you do - pay £9.99 to repair, or say "no thanks"? I had no option - the screen is locked. Neither works.
It was good to practise regularly and also to be able to speak, repeat, compare pronunciation. The emphasis on the oral, on having to figure things out - rather than read a list declensions etc, that traditional grammar-based approach - was a big leap forward for me. I feel quite devastated that I've lost it - through inattention, through getting away from useful routine.
Maybe I'll put the app on my phone, and start again (it's all practice, right?) and use the "test out" option on the groups of lessons, which can whizz you through them. Maybe I'll have a break. Maybe I'll start a new language - Dutch, Welsh, Norwegian? Vietnamese? It's a shame they don't do Mandarin.
To hit the buffers is to come to a sudden and unsuccessful end. It implies a massive force moving at speed - like a train with brake failure, about to overshoot the station. Good thing they installed these big ones ... just in case.
More commonly in rail transport, though, "the buffers are projecting, shock-absorbing pads which, when vehicles are coupled, are brought into contact with those on the next vehicle" (wikipedia). Shock absorbers.
As well as it's chemical usage, buffering exists in data ... won't go into that just now ... and "hitting the buffers" has often been used as a catchy phrase in articles about economics.
Buffing - polishing - may require a machine, a buffer -
Which leads me to wonder about the origins of "in the buff" ... won't go into that just now.
Among artists who push their medium is Graham Dean. In the run-up to the London Olympics he spent a couple of years painting athletes, preparing for a solo show.
He regards the preparatory watercolours as finished in themselves, and from some he went on to make paintings that are 6-8 feet high - also in watercolour, intense with deep hues. Brilliant, literally. (Can you buy watercolours by the gallon?)
Read about his process here. He wanted to title the show "Faster, Higher, Stronger" - the Olympic motto - but the Olympic body had secured rights to a long list of olympian words, including gold, silver, bronze (!), so he came up with something similar. In the interview he reports: "some people have said it sounds like a condom advert. This is very ironic if you knew the stories behind condom use at Olympic Games. In Beijing, 400,000 were given out to athletes in the village and each one has ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ printed on them!"
Runner
Footnote
Paintings about sport aren't "my thing" so how did I come across this? It's all due to my pedantry about spelling, especially something that's drummed into copy editors: "names must be spelt correctly!"
The zoneonearts website has such an interesting collection of interviews with artists and craftspeople from many disciplines - you could read it for days - but I found that the silly typos, spelling mistakes that the spellchecker doesn't catch, really distracted me from concentrating on the content; I just wanted to get in there and fix them!
"Library of Burmingham" did it for me ... I simply had to contact the site and ask if they could correct it to Birmingham. Which they graciously did, informing me they had done so in a nice email with the subject line "Birmington".
Oh dear, had it gone from bad to worse? I had forgotten which post this occurred in, so searched the site for Birmington - whew, no result. Further search showed that Birmingham appeared in several artist interviews, including the one I now remembered reading. Instead of simply getting on with something else, I simply had to click on the photo that is now at the top of this post ...
That's the old Tempelhof airport building in the background; hoeflichkeit=politeness
(waste bins in the street are very entertaining)
Clean=happy?
There are also tiny orange streetcleaning vehicles are called Lilliputz (putzen=cleaning)
There's an U-bahn station called Onkel Toms Hutte, named after a housing estate
that was named after Harriet Beecher Stowe's book (pommes=chips/french fries)
If German puns are your thing, have a look here. Let's move on...
Flowery street in the sky...
"Farbe muss gesehen werden", said Walter Benjamin, "colour must be seen"
... would he have enjoyed this "farblosigkeit"?
Some enlightenment for walkers along Am Kupfergraben ... can't find out how or why they are there...
"If anyone can do it, it's not art, and if one can't do it, then it's definitely not art." Karl Valentin also said "Kunst is schoen, aber macht viele Arbeit" - art is lovely, but makes a lot of work
"The eye is the best tool for finding out the questions one must ask" - Peter Hauser (who he?)
"No one in the world gets to hear such rubbish spoken as the pictures in a museum" - Jules de Goncourt
and "One waits and one always arrives late" - Peter Hauser again
First crumb - a link on the Quiltart list to the work of Michael James, which had fallen off my radar. On his site I was struck by the unusual colours in this, and the way the light seems to come through the work -
The Concept of Qi, 2008, cotton and dyes, 50.5"h x 52"w
It being Thursday, I needed to find a poem for the blog, and this would be a great illustration for such a poem ... so I started looking for a poem about "qi" ... which led to the second crumb - the work of Qi Baishi (1863-1957), purveyor of "poems in a brush stroke", for example (what, after much looking, to choose??) -
Third crumb - what is "qi", actually? The ancient Chinese described it as "life force" which permeated everything and linked their surroundings together. Moving into the scientific realm, qi becomes an elemental force: "Fairly early on, some Chinese thinkers began to believe that there were different fractions of qi and that the coarsest and heaviest fractions of qi formed solids, lighter fractions formed liquids, and the most ethereal fractions were the "lifebreath" that animates living beings." But the scientific view is that "Qi is a purely hypothetical concept."
Fourth crumb - the traditional Chinese character for "qi" -
That took me to the Chinese dictionary which still sits centre-front in my field of vision, right next to various thesauruses. (Sidetrack: get camera, take picture, download, tweak, upload ...) -
What looks to us like a short, simple word is manifest in my dictionary in 37 different characters, gathered into four different pronunciations (tones), with a variety of meanings including: a period of time; deceive; seven; wife; strange; ride (eg a bicycle); awaken; get up; abandon; utensil; and, right near the end of the list, "our" qi - whose meanings include air; gas; breath; smell; airs, manner; spirit, morale ... and as a verb: make angry; get angry; bully, insult. Isn't language a wonderful thing?
How many crumbs have we pecked at on this trail? I turn back to go find today's poem - and see that the crumbs that should lead me back have, like Hansel and Gretel's, disappeared.
Found in the paintbrush drawer - an unused waterbrush, hurrah (the water isn't flowing properly in my current one; why?) - and not just one old toothbrush, but one after another after another, saved serially because they were sure to be useful ... but they aren't; I've never made a single mark with any of them, bristles or handle.
Before giving them the toss I had to take a photo of the effect of sun through the clear handles (as you do) and this led to some toothbrush venery ...
SNPs - single neuclotide polymorphisms, pronounced "snips" - are the most common genetic variation. They are very small - replacing a single "letter" in DNA - and quite common, occuring about once every 300 neuclotides, which means there are about 10 million in the human genome. If written language had so many letters out of place, would we be able to understand it?
Most SNPs have no effect on health or development. Many typos in printed language have no effect on comprehension. A SNP in or close to a gene can affect its function; a slip in a word ... well, see for yourself - here are Jane Lackey's examples, printed on the book cover:
Does no-one simply "die" - or rather, do newspaper reports not allow them to simply die? Every time you read a report of a death, the person has "sadly died". Soon there will be a new word in the language: sadlydied, replacing died ... in much the same way that "suggested" has replaced "said" in recent years (but that's another rant altogether).
I suspect a subeditor was at work in this sentence: "At present, about 8,000 people have been confirmed as diagnosed with Ebola, and of those 3,865 have, sadly, died. " Does the Guardian's style book have guidance on sadly died, detailing situations in which it needs to be bracketed by commas?
A search for "sadly died" (in quotes, entire phrase) gets only 549,000 hits ... perhaps there's hope yet. No, wait - "sadly he died" (no quotes) gets 22,600,000 hits, and "sadly she died" gets 5,240,000 ... and "sadly died", no quotes, gets 22,700,000, presumably including a lot of the "he"s and "she"s.
Sadly here can mean "unfortunately" ... but the ludicrous spectre of the person being sad to be dying will keep rearing its head as I read yet another occurrence of the phrase.
Furthermore, a death toll, eg in the current ebola outbreak, isn't just high (48% of those infected), but "tragically high" ... possibly because a nice long word was needed (high is just four letters, after all), and nothing sensible could be thought of.
You're pouring out your morning coffee and a phrase, a line, comes to you ... For me today, it was "cuppa cuppa cuppa cup" - where was that from? A quick search led to this - Java Jive, sung by The Inkspots in 1940.
Lyrics are by Milton Drake (who also wrote the words to Mairzy Doats). The words need to be taken off the page and into a song to make sense ... perhaps this is the very opposite of poetry?
I love coffee, I love tea I love the java jive and it loves me Coffee and tea and the jiving and me A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup! I love java, sweet and hot Whoops! Mr. Moto, I'm a coffee pot Shoot me the pot and I'll pour me a shot A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup! Oh, slip me a slug from the wonderful mug And I cut a rug till I'm snug in a jug A slice of onion and a raw one, draw one.
Waiter, waiter, percolator! I love coffee, I love tea I love the java jive and it loves me Coffee and tea and the jiving and me A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup! Boston bean, soy bean Lima bean, string bean. You know that I'm not keen for a bean Unless it is a cheery coffee bean.
I love coffee, I love tea I love the java jive and it loves me Coffee and tea and the jiving and me A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup! I love java, sweet and hot Whoops! Mr. Moto, I'm a coffee pot Shoot me the pot and I'll pour me a shot A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup! Oh, slip me a slug from the wonderful mug And I cut a rug till I'm snug in a jug Drop me a nickel in my pot, Joe, Taking it slow.
Waiter, waiter, percolator! I love coffee, I love tea I love the java jive and it loves me Coffee and tea and the jiving and me A cup, a cup, a cup, a cup, a cup
The words hide mysteries ... Mr Moto was the fictional Japanese secret agent in eight films starting in 1937, but how is he connected with coffee?* "A slice of onion" - ? - lunch counter slang is one suggestion for that ... or just filling up the lines. "Think prohibition slang" is another suggestion, which leads to the idea that "a raw one" could be a hangover cure - and wasn't coffee itself a remedy for hangover?
"Cut a rug" = to dance, especially in a vigorous manner and in one of the dance styles of the first half of the twentieth century. "Tea" is slang for weed [itself slang for cannabis], "cabbage" and "green" can refer to money. "Drop me a nickel" ... from Louis Armstrong's delightful account of being busted in 1931 we learn that to drop a nickel is to put a nickel (5 cents) into a telephone is to call the cops and stoolpigeon on someone ... but is that relevant here?
Of "cheery coffee bean" Wikipedia says: "The song "Java Jive", a hit song for The Ink Spots in 1940, originally featured the couplet "I'm not keen about a bean / Unless it is a 'cheery beery bean'", as a pun on Ciribiribin, but the Ink Spots' lead singer inadvertently sang it as "cheery cheery bean", and recordings by subsequent artists have generally either followed suit or changed it to "chili chili bean"."
*As with "true" poetry, there are layers under the surface, and varying readings. One interpretation (halfway down this page) suggests the entire song is about personal recreational use of controlled substances:
'Whoops, Mister Moto, I'm a coffee pot' is, on the surface, a reference to pop culture: Peter Lorre films. At that surface level the line is incoherent. Everything falls into place if we interpret it as drug slang:
Whoops, Mr Moto! (Whoops, Mr Marijuana Supplier!) I'm a coffee pot! (I blend pills/beans with my pot!) Shoot me the pot (Give me the marijuana) and I'll pour me a shot (I'll pour in my special ingredients)
As with other cryptic songs, from 'Follow the Drinking Gourd' to 'Proud Mary' and 'Poker Face', the surface meaning of the words is what gets the lyrics past censors and makes the song acceptable to a general audience. The words make a kind of sense on a surface level as long as the listener isn't paying much attention. Attentive listeners find quickly, though, that the literal surface meanings have trouble adding up to anything coherent. The difficulties point to code--slang--as key in understanding the song.
"Moto" is also Mexican Spanish slang for marijuana.
(If that's the case, what might Mairzy Doats (1944) be about...? Nothing, it seems: it's a novelty song based on a nursery rhyme.)
All that speculation aside, I love the unexpectedness and sheer nonsense of "waiter waiter percolator" in the song.
1940s percolator - the colour of coffee splashing up into the glass knob showed how the brewing was coming along
