Good Morning

Reflective Moods

Some reflective tunes -

Roger and Brian Eno - Celeste

Brian Eno - Stars

Enjoy.

Desprez

Josquin Desprez - Veni Sancte Spiritus

CD - Josquin Desprez - Motets and Chansons
Producer: Gerd Berg
Lead Vocals: Hilliard Ensemble
Ensemble: Hilliard Ensemble
Lead Vocals: Paul Hillier
Director: Paul Hillier
Composer: Josquin des Prez

Enjoy

Book 26 - Susan Sontag "On Photography"

Susan Sontag "On Photography" (Penguin Books)




Susan Sontag's original essays on the meaning of photography and the photographic image are challenging. She presents a wide range of ideas and discusses the work of some of the great photographers of the past century. Whether you agree with her views about the aggressive nature of photography or the essential "nonintervention" of the act of taking a picture, you can savour the intelligent arguments that she presents.

These essays are six meditations on the nature and implications of photography. Each essay pivots engagingly around a provocative theme: the “aesthetic consumerism” exemplified by taking and collecting photographs, the inherent surrealism of photographs, the incurable defensiveness of those who claim photography an art form, photography’s project of beautifying the world, the West as a “culture based on images”.


I was disappointed that there were no pictorial examples of the multitude of references made by Sontag. The book was nevertheless an excellent and invigorating read.

Book 27 - Michael Jacobs "Everything is Happening: Journey into a Painting"

Michael Jacobs "Everything is Happening: Journey into a Painting" (Granta Books)




The title of the book is as idiosyncratic as Michael Jacobs’ text.

Since the age of seventeen, Jacobs has been fascinated by Spain in general, by art and by Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas in particular. In just a little over a hundred discursive and engaging pages he tells us about all this (not in chronological order!): his schooldays; the impact the painting has always made on him; his time as an art student; the several occasions, from his teenage years onwards, when he had travelled to the Prado to see that painting (pages which involve descriptions of his journeys and the encounters he had on the way); the character of Madrid; a bit on Spanish literature; the researches he had carried out on and off during his life, not only in libraries but also in meetings with specialists and with people who had been involved in taking the painting out of Spain during the Civil War and returning it afterwards; the various spaces in which the painting had been displayed; and the influence it has had on later painters like the French Impressionists and then of course Picasso.

Jacobs had started writing this book around 2012 but died in 2014 before he could finish it. He had discussed it with his close friend Ed Vuillamy, whose contributions to this book are just a few pages shorter than the 106 pages of Jacobs’ own text. Vuillamy must have worked very hard and in a very short time - truly a labour of love. He has provided an introduction of 29 pages of factual information about the life and times of Velasquez, about the painting itself and about some of the interpretations that have been made of this enigmatic work. He also added 61 pages of his own to Jacobs’ text, in which he describes their similarities and differences in interests and we learn a good deal more about Jacobs’ life and personality, of which Vuillamy gives an excellent account. There is, a long passage about Jacobs’ loyalty to his inspirational teacher Anthony Blunt, even after the latter’s activities as a Soviet agent during the war had been exposed. Jacobs’ text had made some references to the philosophical theories of Michel Foucault about figures looking directly out of us, so that we are drawn into the painting. Vuillamy expands on these in relation not only to Las Meninas but to several other paintings. Elsewhere, too he refers to works by other artists, none of which are illustrated. And there are references to some of Jacobs’ somewhat esoteric ideas which he expressed to Vuillamy in conversation but which Jacobs avoided in his own text. Both Jacobs and Vuillamy are learned and highbrow intellectuals, but, in my opinion, Vuillamy shows this off rather more than Jacobs ever did; and, frankly, I cannot always follow him. For example, he praises the multiple vanishing points in the painting, which it would take an expert - or at least a diagram - to understand, let alone to appreciate them as a mark of genius. But Vuillamy concludes with a touching discussion of what the Chamberlain, framed in the brightly-lit doorway at the back of the scene, came to mean for the dying Michael Jacobs.