William Eggleston in the Real World

Michael Glover, art critic, The Independent: 'You seem to have both loved and loathed the American landscape. How much pain has the holding of such contradictory impulses caused you?'
William Eggleston: 'I don't remember loathing any of it.'

WIlliam Eggleston bought his first camera , a Canon Rangefinder, in 1957, when he was inspired by Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He began experimenting in colour in 1965, by the late 1960's it was his dominant medium. His exhibition of colour photography in 1976 at the MoMA marked the acceptance of the medium, and it's argued that the likes of Martin Parr, using the same high colour saturation as Eggleston, followed in his footsteps, was allowed the use of colour photography as an art form. In 1976 Eggleton's photos were criticised as banal, boring: there was no message, barely any subject. It took some decades for his influence to be absorbed and understood, but this year he was awarded the Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award at the Sony World Photography Awards. The Tate Modern has opened a permanent exhibition of his work (he was represented in their 'Cruel and Tender' photography exhibition which I saw 2003).

 These last two from Martin Parr's  Last Parking Space series would surely have been unthinkable without Eggleston.

 

S. O. S. continued - Steel on Shops

Have recently been to see Mark Steel for the second time. I heard him on the radio when he went to Bungay (where I grew up) which was funny although doctored for radio. Stories of the Chicken Roundabout (it's on wikipedia, but now defunct, the roundabout is still there but the chickens have mysteriously disappeared after years of local fame and quite a few months of national fame followed the foul-pest scare), of Harry Potter manuscripts and the Bungay printing works.

Then I went to see him in Halesworth while I was living there. More local stories, and especially his curiosity as to how Halesworth had managed to avert Tescos, one of his main pet hates.Possibly his main pet hate. He tours the country with his 'stand up' with a local slant, searching out the quirks and oddities of the places he is visiting, and is a belligerent advocate for the individual quality and characteristic of each community. Having laughed til it hurt in Halesworth, I bought his book, named after his tour, Mark Steel's in Town, which I also enjoyed.(I really appreciate his column in the Indy).

Now I'm in the Norwich area, and I spotted he was coming to the Playhouse here, so despite a sellout of two performances (he usually only does one night in each place ) and an extra night's booking the following week, by turning up on the night I managed to get an unclaimed complimentary ticket. Some people obviously look gift horses in the mouth. Or not. Though obviously I had to pay for it, not being a member of the right set, whatever that was.

Alan Partridge didn't get a look in, perhaps too obvious, but Kett got a long mention, in addition to other revolutionary characters, plus the Puppet Man, who everyone but me seemed to have heard of. In my time, in a previous life in Norwich, it was Marigold, but he didn't crop up either. Anyway, a good time was had by all, Steel reckons that Norfolk people are very welcoming nowadays, now that the revolutionary spirit seems to have dwindled.

From his website:
'On the way to a show in Skipton, in North Yorkshire, I noticed a road sign to a town called Keighley. So later, during the show, I mentioned this, asking the audience, 'Is that your rival town?' And the room went chillingly quiet, until one woman called out with understated menace, 'Keighley is a sink of evil.'
Based on his award-winning BBC Radio 4 series, Mark Steel's In Town, is a celebration of the quirks of small-town life in a country of increasingly homogenised high streets. Steel's bespoke observations on the small, sometimes forgotten, towns of Britain go right to the heart of British culture today, championing the very people who shape the places we live in now.

http://www.marksteelinfo.com/Commentator and stand-up comedian Mark Steel has presented several radio and television programmes, and appeared on Have I Got News for You and Never Mind the Buzzcocks. In 2006 he published 'Vive La Revolution: A Stand-up History of the French Revolution', and in 2000 stood as a candidate in the London Assembly elections.

Five years time; it's five years later

Having read a couple of articles about Noah and the Whale and Laura Marling recently, I've only just realised the connection between them, that Laura was not only on the Whale's first album, 'Peaceful, the world lays me down' (with the single Five Years' Time,  plus 2 Bodies 1 Heart and Shape of My heart),but was in a relationship with Charlie Fink, and that 'The First Days of Spring' which I have and love is all about their break-up.

Charlie Fink says that their latest album, 'The Heart of Nowhere' , released 6th May, was inspired by  a close friend getting engaged recently, and his realisation that it's a landmark moment when your first friend gets married. Hardly surprising coming from a young 26 year old, whose band is named after their collective favourite film 'The Squid and the Whale' (the story of a divorce seen from the perspective of two young boys) and its director Noah Baumbach.

The album includes a track 'Silver and Gold', which begins 'I was looking for Harvest but I found Silver and Gold', all about discovering Neil Young, who himself wrote 'Only love can break your heart' and 'Heart of Gold' - on the album 'Harvest'. Neil Young was an influence on the band and on Laura Marling.
Marling's first album, 'Alas I cannot Swim' released in 2008 when she was just 18, and nominated for a Mercury Music prize, was produced by Fink. After her relationship with him, she was linked with Marcus  Mumford of Mumford and Sons (he plays on some of her recordings) but they separated in 2010, the year she was again nominated for the Mercury prize, for her second album, 'I speak because I can'.

Now with the release of 'Once I was an eagle' she is quiet about any possible relationship, but has moved to Los Angeles where she says she has to do 'a lot less explaining about herself'; she claims to find Americans more poetic, London life hemmed her in. In 2012  she toured the West Coast  in the manner of Joni Mitchell in her early days, who she is often compared to, without a band or roadies, just herself and a hire car, calling it the Working Holiday tour. In America it's easier to be alone without being lonely, she maintains. (It was in Los Angeles in the 60's that Neil Young met Stephen Stills; in California  Stills and Graham Nash met David Crosby, who also introduced them to Joni Mitchell, and CSN and Y were formed).

So 2008 saw the release of Marling's debut album, Alas I cannot swim' and the re-release of 'Five Years' Time'. Here we are five years later, it took me a while to discover both acts, and I'm at last putting the pieces together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8YCSJpF4g4

Birds, Birds, Birds....

Tippi Hedren

So having seen the Voice Project's Ideas of Flight last weekend, it keeps striking me how birds are very much in the public consciousness at the moment, the Zeitgeist or what!? There's Peter Cowdrey's compositions and works where he takes birdsong, slows it down, records humans imitating it, then plays the recordings back to birds who recognise and respond! http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/30/claxton-norfolk-beautiful-music-birdsong


Waveney and Blyth Valley Arts are focusing on 'The Famous Five' for their project this year, taking groups of people into local schools to introduce young people to five of the region's most interesting feathered inhabitants.http://www.waveneyandblytharts.com/

Among young songsmiths there's Beth Orton who professes a personal link with birds and uses their song in her latest cd Sugaring Season and its accompanying videos, the single 'Magpie was released last autumn; Laura Marlings latest album due out 27th May is entitled 'Once I was an eagle', and includes the tracks I was an eagle, Master hunter and Little Bird.http://www.lauramarling.com/

Even Hitchcock's film The Birds and bird-beaten actor Tippi Hedren seem to have been featured in the media ad infinitum recently, in tv's The Girl, etc.

This year's cold winter has driven more unusual birds into our gardens in desperation for food, but that doesn't mean there are increasing numbers, though perhaps we are more aware of them.And in the words of an earlier singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, 'Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you got til it's gone...'

http://bethorton.wordpress.com/page/2/

Ideas of flight

Last weekend as part of the Norwich Arts Festival I saw the Voice Project's Ideas of Flight, Sian Croose's most ambitious venture yet, which combined  100 voices, plus soloists, Andy Sheppard on saxophone (I've seen him perform with the Voice Project a couple of years back), the Trio Zephyr string quartet, together with the  beautiful visual treat of the nave of the Cathedral covered in the projected shadows of bird flight. Devised by Sian and Jonathan Baker, with poetry by among others Andrew Motion and Maura Dooley, put to music by Jonathan plus Karen Wimhurst, Barbara Thompson and Orlando Gough, the evening was rich with soothing music interspersed by the singers' impersonations of birdsong.
'Here are the sky-nails they asked you for
So long ago
and this their purpose,
in fixing our eyes to the heavens a moment
the heart lifts'   Maura Dooley
 http://www.voiceproject.co.uk/   http://voiceproject2.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/19th-february-ideas-of-flight-voice-project-choir-taster-session/
Afterwards we followed the magical stiltwalkers of the Companie des Quidams, swathed like Arabs in volumnious white fabric, out of the Cathedral where they draped themselves against the Cathedral entrance as if they were part of its stone decoration, then around Cathedral Close, where their fabric tranformed into giant lanterns.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76ln3BycITo http://www.quidams.com/Reve-d-Herbert.html?lang=en 

The festival continues until 26th March   http://www.nnfestival.org.uk/ http://www.edp24.co.uk/mobile/news/norfolk_concert_series_is_inspired_by_the_songs_of_birds_1_2188477