Read
Jane and Prudence – Barbara Pym
(and many others, of course)

Saw
Kristin Hersh, Afterlight (Russell Maliphant), Sylvie Guillem (Mats Ek, William Forsythe and Jirí Kylián), Fela! (Bill T. Jones, Jim Lewis), Drought and Rain (Ea Sola), 9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People.

March 26 March

Lapa - Rio, Brasil

Parilla, Buenos Aires

Woods near The Old Man of Storr, Scotland

Birthday present

Christmas cheeseboard

]]> http://isdinnerready.wordpress.com/2012/01/02/2011-a-review/feed/ 0 Elly March 26 March Lapa - Rio, Brasil Parilla, Buenos Aires Woods near The Old Man of Storr, Scotland Embroidery birthday present Christmas cheeseboard http://isdinnerready.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/books-read-january-2011/ http://isdinnerready.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/books-read-january-2011/#comments Fri, 04 Feb 2011 14:11:03 +0000 Elly http://isdinnerready.wordpress.com/?p=364 Continue reading →]]> This Charming Man – Marian Keyes
One of her exceptional ones – truly an iron mind in a pastel slipcover.

The Driver’s Seat – Muriel Spark
Got 20 pages in and gave up when plot was revealed to involve murder and rape of protagonist

The Thing Around Your Neck – Chimanda Ngozi Adichie
Superbly plotted and observed short stories set in the US as well as Nigeria

Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry – B.S. Johnson
Had planned to read this for a long time – I have half a memory that it’s one of the books read by Matilda in the Roald Dahl story, which considering the references to cancer, sodomy and genocide is quite in line with his sense of humour. A strange, dated, easy read.

Books
Meet David Sedaris - recording for BBC Radio 4
His announcement that his final piece would be ‘Me talk pretty one day’  had to be re-recorded as the audience reacted ‘like a rock concert’, according to the producer. (Actually just multiple gasps of delight, which is not a sound loud enough to be heard at a rock concert, in my experience.)

Exhibitions
Natural History Museum - dinosaurs, birds, creepy crawlies, volcanoes
Lots very bright display boards which dwarfed and distracted from the objects in several of the galleries. I enjoyed the vitrine of humming birds most.

Victoria and Albert Museum – jewellery, theatre, Japan, China, Korea
The fashion and textile galleries are both closed currently.

Courtauld Gallery - permanent collection
I can’t believe I waited this long to look at Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Begere, or as I always think of it (with her ‘I care, but I’m knackered and I don’t want you to hit on me’ posture, her sad eyes and her sceptical pout) the patron saint of bar maids.

Detail from Edouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Begere

Non-Fiction
Paid Servant – ER Braithwaite
The Perfect Scent – Chandler Burr
Good to Great – Jim Collins
A Reader in Promoting Public Health: Challenge and Controversy – J Douglas, S Earle, S Handsley, C Lloyd, S Spurr
Getting to Yes – Roger Fisher, William Ury
Fight the good fight – Catherine Fox
Offbalance: The real world of ballet – Suzanne Gordon
The Thoughtful Dresser – Linda Grant
Julie and Julia – Julie Powell
Fish, flesh and Good Red Herring – Alice Thomas Ellis
Home Life 3 – Alice Thomas Ellis
Perfumes: The A to Z Guide – Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez
The Wordy Shipmates – Sarah Vowell
Selective Memory – Katherine Whitehorn

Books
Bobby Baker’s ‘Diary Drawings’ launch, including talks by Bobby Baker, Dora Whittuck (co-editor), curator of 2009 exhibition (free biscuit pictured above) – Wellcome Collection (April)
Bright Club: Books, featuring Jane Gilbert, Chiara Ambrosio, Myles MacDonald, Sarah Bennetto – Wilmington Arms (July)
Sarah Waters in conversation with John Mullan about The Little Stranger, Guardian Book Club (August)
The Book Stops Here (4 Denmark Street, W1):
Ned Beauman, Natasha Solomons, Adam Thirlwell (August)
Anjali Joseph, Jean Hannah Edelstein, Marie Phillips (September)
Evie Wyld, Sathnam Sanghera, Matthew Crawford (December)

Comedy
Black History Month comedy showcase (BBC radio recording). Compere: Stephen K Amos. Featuring  Annette Fagan, Ava Vidal, Andi Osho, Felix Dexter, Eddie Kadi, Doc Brown, Nathan Caton, Slim, Felix Dexter. Hackney Empire (September)
Be honourable – Josie Long, Soho Theatre (November)
9 Lessons and Carols for Godless People – Compere: Robin Ince. Featuring: Josie Long, Ben Goldacre, Marcus de Sautoy, Baba Brinkman, Mitch Benn,  Bloomsbury Theatre (December)

Dance
Programme 2: Hymn, Annointed, Revelations - Alvin Ailey Dance Theatre, Sadlers Wells (September)
Nearly 90 – Merce Cunningham Company, Barbican Centre (November)

Film
Whip It! – Drew Barrymore (April)
The Runaways – Floria Sigismund (September)
Time Out Live: Another Year by Mike Leigh. Screening of film, followed by discussion between Mike Leigh and Dave Calhoun, Time Out film editor (October)

History
Ministry of Food - Imperial War Museum (March)
The Cradley Heath Centenary - 3 short lectures on women in the British trade union movement, the Cradley Heath strike, the trades union library, 30 minute documentary including interviews with participants (December)

Lectures
The Morality of Charity – Martin Brookes, Anne-Marie Piper, Mark Easton (Chair) RSA, (September)
What is [International] Development For? Elaine Storkey, Matthew Taylor, Roy Trivedy, Paul Vallely, RSA, (October)

Music
A Yiddish Winterreise performed by Mark Glanville, Alexander Knapp – Purcell Room (January)
Little Fish – Brixton Academy (May)
Hole – Brixton Academy (May)
Kristin Hersh – Islington (July)
Pins And Needles (Musical) – Cock Theatre, NW6, (December)
Whitehall Orchestra playing Webern, Strauss, Bernstein, Vaughan-Williams – Pimlico Church, (December)
Dirty Projectors – Koko (December)
Jeff Mills - Lost, SE1 (December)

I consider fashion to be one of the creative industries, rather than an art form.

Art (to me) is a unique or very limited event or object, which is not profit-making (i.e. it’s subsidised by the state or private donors), thus while couture may be limited, as long as it’s sold at a profit to the designer, it can’t be considered art.

The creative industries are those which replicate pieces of intellectual property for profit -  including publishing and graphic design. Architecture is included, although an exception – it’s practised for profit, but results in unique objects (if we’re talking about the work of Zahar Hadid or Richard Rogers or similar).

Further elucidation: Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello  = art. Les Miserables = creative industries.

Of course the two fields feed off each other for ideas and sometimes for directly for content, in the case of artists monographs. Certainly in my experience, people who work in the creative industries sometimes do so because they do not wish to have the life of an artist, although they may have the talent.

This is not to dismiss the craft of fashion or the idea that some clothes are worthy of our attention as cultural artefacts – I just don’t think they are art.

This summer’s Concise Dictionary of Dress was a 45 minute tour* of 11 installations composed of specially commissioned objects and display hardware and articles from the archive of the V&A, accompanied by a series of definitions. I was unthrilled by some of the accompanying text of the first work, Armoured. “3. Inviting attack by being prepared for it, provocative. 4. Heavier. 5. Sustaining belief in the inside and the outside, the invulnerable space and the essentially unprotected body”  reminded me that Freud was a shit-head. A shame, as the installation, in an arch on the edge of a building high enough to see all over London, was one of my favourites.

The exhibition was held in Blythe House (a former post office sorting office and currently the archive of the British Museum, Science Museum and the V&A), reaffirming that Artangel have the surest touch when it comes to choosing venues and that the venue is as often as much a part of the work as the objects it contains.

*Our guide was polite but very firm, reminding me so much of how appallingly middle class people behave in their time off.  They just do it in theatres as opposed to branches of Yates.

I’ll go to any Artangel project I can organise myself (and sometimes another person) into attending, namely:

Stifte’s Dinge – Heiner Goebbels (2008) -I saw this with Alix who managed to review it very decently.

Night Haunts – Sukhdev Sandhu (2006) – The website for this project is excellent, although you should probably look at it at three in the morning, to get the full effect. Alix and I attended the final ‘Nights of London‘ event, ‘Because the Night‘, which took place in the (out of use) Bethnal Green town hall, which included  readings by Sandhu (I have fond memories of the jokes told by sewer workers), works on paper displayed, magic tricks, music by Scanner and a bar, of course.

Kuba – Kutlug Atman (2005) I attended this alone towards the end of the run, the building was grubby and there were almost no other visitors. I think might be the best way to see Artangel works, so you can get completely lost in them. Although you may end up running screaming from the venue having totally lost your sense of self.

The Cremaster Field – Matthew Barney (2002) – This was the first ever screening of all five films, in sequence,  of the Cremaster Cycle, which felt like the work that took over the world in the mid-zeros. Admittedly, anyone with a passing interest in film, opera, architecture, vaseline, murder, musicals, TT racing, broad-shouldered women, legless women, process art, vaseline, men in kilts, men in suits, men in leather aprons, escapology, demolition derby, the Masons, bees, home-made tapshoes and vaseline, will find plenty to enjoy. (Although it took me two years to recover mentally from a pub conversation in which a group of us speculated as to the specifics of his proclivities.)

Many manifestations of femininity are expensive forms of repression and hatred of the female body.  Arguably some of these can be dismissed as ‘temporary’, such as make-up or high heels, and not potentially life-threatening, like cosmetic surgery. (Cosmetic surgery performed on a patient who has e.g.  been in a car accident is a different situation – I’m talking about lip plumping and the like.)

Any modification supports the idea of the female face and body as needing alteration in order to be acceptable, and that  people unwilling or unable to perform these alterations are unacceptable. (Choosing your choice? Please see here.)

Simultaneously however, I reject the status of the masculine as both the ideal and the norm.  Marginalising the feminine and femininity as trivial or inferior is yet another manifestation of misogyny.