My favourite redheads

I've just read an obituary about Karen Black, who died last week, where she is described as having a 'tornado of red hair'. I just recently re-watched the 70's version of Great Gatsby, which was a disappointing experience except for her performance as Myrtle, and keep meaning to see 'Five Easy Pieces' again after watching Jack Nicholson's stroppy behaviour in the diner scene  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wtfNE4z6a8 (not because of the strop but because it looks so well filmed) which also includes Ms Black. A favourite of Robert Altman, she starred and had cameo roles in a range of genres, including comedy and horror, but excelled in portraying offbeat complex characters.

One of my  favourite actors, Julianne Moore, another redhead, has a new film out, a modern version of Henry James's What Maisie Knew, the story of a divorce from a child's viewpoint.  In 2007 she also ventured into children's fiction, Freckleface Strawberry, a picture book about a little redhaired girl coming to terms with looking different. I've always enjoyed her performances, having seen her in countless films including the Hours, The End of the Affair, The Shipping News; like Karen Black she often plays trouble women. A youthful fifty year old, she continues to work regularly in main roles.

Amongst the younger generation of redhaired screen stars is Jessica Chastain, who played Brad Pitt's beautiful wife in Terrence Mallick's The Tree of Life. Her character, Mrs O'Brien, remembers a lesson about how people must choose the path of grace or of nature; while she embodies the former, her husband represents the latter. Ms Chastain's latest project is the Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby with James McAvoy, a drama told from his and her perspective.

Meanwhile on the small screen, Christina Hendricks holds out a torch not just for redheads but also the curved figure as Joan Harris in Madmen, though she is naturally blonde (and has been colouring her hair red since she was 10) and attacks journalists for focusing on her shape rather than her talent.

In the world of fashion there's Lily Cole who has recently moved into acting and environmental concerns, launching a range of womenswear for North Circular, whose products are made from rescued sheep.

As for the men, well there's obviously not so many as they don't often dye, but let's start with Damian Lewis, who I first noticed in the excellent 'Warriors', the 1999 tv drama about the Bosnian peacekeeping force (also starring a young unknown Malcolm  Macfadyen). He's in this year's new Romeo and Juliet, playing Capulet, filmed in Italy by director Carlo Carlei, with Douglas Booth as Romeo, lately seen as Boy George and Pip Pirrip on TV.

Then there's Michael Fassbender, currently working in a Terrence Mallick film about two intersecting love triangles in the music scene, also starring Cate Blanchett, who's not adverse to the red dye bottle herself as in Hanna, Shipping News and Bandits. Of Fassbender's role in the 2011 Jane Eyre, the director Fukunaga chose him rather than actors who may have looked more like Rochester because he had the spirit of the character. The thing that strikes me about this quick infantry of my favourite redheads is how often they are in roles which involve looking at the complex layers of relationships.

From shorn to Shauna, a study in crotchetdermy

In a shop in Leicester, 33  Cank Street in the city centre, artist Shauna Richardson is exhibiting her 'crotchetdermy', her own invention, woolly animals crotcheted to imitate Victorian taxidermy. She has created a diorama which can be viewed through the window until 30th October.
Shauna studied fine art at De Montfort University in Lecester. In the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, she created the world's largest single handed crochet sculpture, using 36 miles of wool to create three giant lionesses.The idea  came from the three lion crest of Richard the Lionheart who has close associations with Nottinghamshire. 


As for the city diorama, Shauna wanted to create something with an element of surprise to unsuspecting passers-by - and since Leicester is bidding to become the UK City of Culture in 2017, the residents should be prepared for more unexpected installations and public artworks to come.
 

A good yarn or weave got working together

Yarn bombing is popping up everywhere, we enjoy seeing lots of examples on File Tag Ville on Facebook, and this week on a  visit to Nottingham I saw the remains of a recent display there.
Now I've just read that last March in Leicester it was used in a campaign to cut down fear of crime - the idea is that people feel safer when they pass through public areas adorned with pom poms and the like.
In the article on the Leicester woolly campaign, Sgt Simon Barnes says that people's perception of the level of crime in the areas of Bede Park and Great Central Way is in fact different  to actual reported levels of crime but that activities like this increase community engagement, making people feel that the area belongs to them.
Some members of the public weren't convinced, but that's just their initial reaction, only time will tell.
So what is it, woolly headed liberal optimism that a spot of colour can change things, or a genuine attempt to create a close-knit community?

Gorillas and Partridges

When Mark Steel visited Norwich recently, with his usual formula of finding the quirky oddities of your town, he didn't mention Alan Partridge, perhaps thinking that was too obvious a way to go. And yet the DJ has certainly hit the news in the last couple of months, with the release of his film, Alpha Papa. There was even a campaign to hold its grand opening in Norwich, which came to pass in Magdalen Square, along with an Alan Partridge gorilla, as the city is presently full of multi coloured gorillas, gogogorillas.co.uk/‎ following a previous invasion of elephants, a couple of whom still hang around in the Forum.
But by coincidence, I have been reading Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods (1997), about his travels along the Appalachian Trail, and when he reaches Norwich, he mentions Alden Partridge, born in the American city in 1755,  who Bryson reckons may have been the first person to have walked long distances purely for pleasure. This ancient Partridge set up the American Literary, Scientific and Military Academy (now known as Norwich University), coined the term physical education, walked from Norwich to Williamstown, 110 miles on a typical hike. He travelled up just about every peak in New England before there were maintained pathways.
Norwich itself, Bryson notes, was pronounced Norritch - like the East Anglian pronunciation- until outsiders changed it to Nor-witch in the 1950s. It was most likely the town that inspired the Bob Newhart tv show which ran from 1972 to 1978 , centred in an unnamed Vermont town, where Newhart ran an inn and all the locals were eccentric. Oddly enough, the (Norfolk) Norfolk Playhouse hosted an evening dedicated to Bob Newhart and Tom Lehrer in 2011. Whether the Norwich link was mentioned then, who knows.
So all this leaves me wondering, when  Steve Coogan, Armando Iannucci, and the other writers on BBC4's On the Hour first aired Alan Partridge in 1991, had they heard of the A. Partridge from New England's Norwich, even if perhaps only using his name subconsciously, and had they seen Newhart?  Obviously Alan Partridge is a different kettle of fish, or brace of birds, to Tom Newhart, or Alden Partridge for that matter, and he's been moved on a stage again in the movie, by all accounts. The film topped the UK box office in its opening week.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-23421003

It's a wrap

Earlier this year, Storm Thorgerson died. The name didn't ring a bell, but apparently he is the artist who designed some of the most famous album covers in the last 40 years: he produced work for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel and Muse to name a few. In the seventies, bands turned away from the standard portrait on the sleeve, sometimes not even wanting the name  of the album on the outside. The first to avoid this was Atom Heart Mother by Pink Floyd, released 1970, which I used to have, with the photo of the cow(but no photos of the band) inspired by Warhol's cow wallpaper, and possibly the cover Warhol produced himself in 1967 for the Velvet underground, showing a banana. The later Dark Side of the Moon cover, designed by his company Hipgnosis, is reputed to be one of the best ever album sleeves.Peter Gabriel's first three covers were designed by him, all confusingly with the same eponymous title.

Also born in 1944, but still alive, is another famous album designer from the 70s, Roger Dean, whose work was mainly seen on Yes covers, but also those of Osibisa and Uriah Heep.

Mark the Birdman

More and yet more about birds!
A couple of months ago, Audrey Niffenegger's new dark fairytale was transformed into a ballet by Wayne Macgregor and the Royal Ballet Company,  the book came out, then etchings of the illustrations have been  shown at the Printworks Gallery since June. http://www.roh.org.uk/productions/raven-girl-by-wayne-mcgregor

Bjork and David Attenborough recently joined forces  on Channel 4 to explore the links between nature and music, with Bjork sporting a safari suit and a feathery fascinator. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVAMsJufguk

 Last November I blogged about Mark Cocker's, new book, which he had mentioned in a talk at the Halesworth Cut, well, it seems the book has finally flown onto our bookshelves, 'Birds and People', £40 from Jonathan Cape, not cheap so hopefully lots of libraries will get it! Not that it's not worth the price, being full of stunning photos and the result of ten years work, of collecting stories about the significance of birds around the globe, anecdotes from 650 people in 81 countries. As he stated in his talk, on a worldwide scale chickens provide us with more protein than cattle, sheep, pigs or goats;  plus birds in general give us a whole host of other physical and spiritual things.
He points out that in some ways birds remind us of ourselves: they stand on two legs; have plumages like costumes; they vocalise  and sing to each other. 'Then birds do something people never have and never shall. They fly off.'
In the Peruvian Andes, the Hummingbird has become a symbol of rebirth because in sleep it enters a deep hibernation-like state, so little breath it appears to be dead. All around the world, birds are a symbol of love, of spring, of homecoming. 'In southeast Asia cranes carry the souls of the dead to Heaven.'

Mark Cocker is not sentimental and doesn't overlook the many cruelties towards birds and the dangers they are in.  The RSPB is one of the biggest lobbies in the UK; Mark Cocker is a founder member of New Networks for Nature, which forges links between the art world, scientists and naturalists.The urgent message is that culture and nature are interdependent. Mark and the book's photographer, David Tipling, will be at the Edinburgh International  Book Festival on 20th August

Love and War - Civil Wars

The new Civil Wars album is on its way! The duo ceased touring in November of last year, due to irreconcilable differences, even though their choice of name and songwriting is inspired by such stuff of life, or as Joy puts it ' I was driving around town looking at the Civil War monuments, I thought about all the wars that we each face'. Probably my favourite song from their first album, Barton Hollow, is Poison and Wine, illustrating beautifully the way love is  life's biggest oxymoron. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfzRlcnq_c0

I've been giving this some thought after watching the excellent tv drama about Taylor and Burton, played by Helena Bonham Carter and Dominic West, showing the two archetypal stars who loved each other but couldn't live with each other, as if their personalities were too large to be contained in such a restraining thing as a relationship.
The Civil Wars aren't alone of course in writing about the pains and paradoxes of love, or as Stephen Stills sang,
'there's a rose in the fisted glove, and the eagle flies with the dove, and if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with'.
 There's a theory nowadays that as we live so much longer, it's harder to stay with the one partner, through the many decades of change, but obviously there is all manner of other factors involved. In the  middle ages, though life may have been  'nasty, brutish and short',  at least the ideal of courtly love maintained that you could adore someone from a distance without feeling compelled to act on this passion, other than by jousting or throwing the odd handkerchief. Whereas our modern compulsion to react to whatever our hearts desire may be, gets us into all kinds of tangles. We feel and therefore we act - yet it wasn't always so.
So back to The Civil Wars and rumours that their 'differences' were that after years of saying that they were merely a professional  duo, they had eventually had a short relationship, which has been inspiration for the songs of the latest album. The cynical among us could suspect that this is merely a very canny marketing ploy, but we'll probably love the album anyway. Whatever their romantic status, the fact remains that their voices meld so perfectly together that like the best duos they are greater than the sum of their parts, deserving of the many accolades and awards already bestowed.
http://thecivilwars.com/