January 13-29, 2024
SATURDAY 13 Jonathan Freedland finally names and shames Benjamin Netanyahu as “leader of the worst, most extreme government in Israel’s history.”
📌 At the Barbican for a second look at the Re/Sisters exhibition before it closes I was again most impressed by the film art, and most particularly the one featuring hot lava flows, which I think we’re meant to be symbolic of something else.
SUNDAY 14 At our allotment group meeting I cheerfully urged Anna to become next year’s Chair, only to be stumped two minutes later by Anna suggesting me as Co-Chair. Now I need to learn all about plants and planting, in which I have very little interest. My role in the group until now has been sweeping, tidying, mending and digging, with occasional input on the destination of the annual group outing. Last year my greatest contribution was to fix the tap on the water butt. Executive jobs I have always managed to avoid. Until now.
📌 At a Zoom meeting to discuss my contribution to the Nomas Projects exhibition Cosmic Madonna in Dundee I got to talk through the process of creating the Fallopian Jesus painting and cheekily use the words “playing with a vagina”.
One of the viewers said she never thought of the vagina as a super colourful place. She said she thought of her vagina as a dark place, which seemed quite psychological to me. Owen, one of the organisers, said my image was “bang on theologically”. It was made in response to the prompt of “Incarnation”, a subject Nomas explores every year around Christmas time. I wasn’t sure exactly what Incarnation meant in terms of Christian doctrine, so I looked it up, and that was where the painting began.
Owen’s remark took me back to one of my primary school reports, age 7, when in a closing note to my parents my teacher wrote, “I am thrilled to see his interest in art and the Bible”.
MONDAY 15 An email tells me that in February the auction house Christie’s in New York will host Goodbye Peachtree Road, selling artefacts from the collection of Elton John. Browsing the catalogue is like a study in modern art, with pieces by some of the 20th Century’s most iconic art-world figures (Herb Ritts, Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, William Klein, Banksy).
📌 In the Zoom discussion yesterday for the Cosmic Madonna exhibition one viewer remarked on the lightness of my Fallopian Jesus image and it did make me wish it could be made into a stained-glass window. Michelle wants me to remake it in stitch.
📌 Took a walk around the Barbican trying to imagine the best place for a dead body to be discovered in a Vera-style TV cop show.
📌 In the New European, Jonty Bloom announces the death of the City of London as a financial powerhouse.
Once famous as a towering force, it is now little more than a quaint, regional has-been with a very dusty trophy cabinet.
TUESDAY 16 Just after the Shipping Forecast early this morning the BBC World Service revealed that Camilla’s nickname is Lorraine. which they said is a play on the French words La Reine.
📌 Even earlier, at 04.32, was a fascinating interview on In the Studio with the film editor Thelma Schoonmaker, wife of Michael Powell and longtime collaborator with Martin Scorsese, who told of her time as an apprentice in which she was tutored in cutting huge chunks from masterpieces by François Truffaut and Bernardo Bertolucci. She also said Scorsese himself is a master editor, which made her job a real treat.
📌 Hooked on a website that scoots around Google Earth showing obscure islands and revealing fun facts about their weirdness. There’s one jointly owned by France and Spain that switches its nationality every six months.
📌 At a screening of Priscilla, the Sofia Coppola biopic of Priscilla Presley, we learned that Elvis posed for their wedding photos with a cigarette in his mouth. That was probably the most interesting thing about this deeply shallow film. The hairstyles tried hard to say something, but not very much.
WEDNESDAY 17 The Guardian only rarely throws up a properly intelligent insight into how we live today. Most of its content is following and not leading a progressive forward march. Today, however, a sociologist has a warning for those who think they know the British voting public.
Broadly speaking, they [British voters] are tolerant and open-minded when it comes to race, gender and sexuality. They also support redistributive economic policies such as public ownership and higher taxes on the rich. The fact these progressive instincts have not, historically, been harnessed by the Labour party says more about the Labour party than the electorate.
📌 Vera’s grandkids put her on TikTok over Christmas proclaiming that “Santa Claus does not f****** exist.” She was an instant hit. All the TikTok people wanted a grandma like Vera.
THURSDAY 18 In David Aaronovitch’s Notes From The Underground substack, he claims to have spotted a key flaw in the TV drama Mr Bates Versus The Post Office. After a fascinating introduction aligning the Bates drama with other classic British dramas in which the little people take on the might of state bureaucracy (Passport To Pimlico, Whisky Galore, The Titfield Thunderbolt), Aaronovitch then asks us to go inside the head not of Mr Bates the hero but of Paula Vennells, the head of the Post Office, who was not responsible for the mess of wrongdoing and injustice but nevertheless chose to sweep it under the carpet. This, he says, is where a true reflection of British society lies.
📌 An email from Chris at Full Fact offers a clue to how hard the fight against fake news is becoming.
📌 At an evaluation workshop with the Barbican for last year’s differently various exhibition and the Headway collaboration with Barbican Communities we were asked what impact the partnership had made on us personally. I said the main one was “celebrity” because my neighbours seem to think differently various was Billy’s exhibition, despite my insistence that dozens of other people made equal contributions.
FRIDAY 19 Not in a long time has a film impressed so much in its totality as Poor Things did last night at the Barbican. Normally you find parts of films you like and other parts you are happy to forget. Emma Stone carries this compelling Alasdair Gray story about brain transplantation from start to finish. Her assistants on this journey, Willem Dafoe and Mark Ruffalo manage to look like naturals to the cause of weird medicine without even trying too much. The film also brought back memories of a 2019 pre-pandemic visit to Glasgow and a night in the Alasdair Gray-muralled brasserie Ubiquitous Chip, where a drunken Scotsman told us he thought we were “theatre types” (says my 2019 scrapbook). And it prompted me to start re-reading Alasdair Gray’s A Life In Pictures, from which I intend to steal some stitchwork patterns.
📌 Our Brighton friend Rupert is a local hero, for rescuing a missing parrot called Susan.
Read all of my scrapbook diaries…
PLEASE MESSAGE WITH ANY CORRECTIONS, BIG OR SMALL.
Billy's Scrapbook 
Your painting, Fallopian Jesus is interesting. Here these days people have become ‘too sensitive’ about religious matters !!!! A politician commented that Lord Rama was a non-vegetarian and there was a hue and cry. It is crazy. Thank you for your interesting post.
LikeLiked by 1 person