May 11-17, 2024
SATURDAY 11 It was a joy to turn down the volume on the Israel-Hamas war and its anticipated impact on this year’s Eurovision Song Contest to listen quietly to a 45-minute play on the radio from 2011 called Like An Angel Passing Through My Room, about how a fan’s obsession with Abba’s Anni-Frid Lyngstad turned into “a meditation on the communication between two people and coping with the blows life deals”. I never knew she was actually born in Norway, not Sweden, and is a Princess with the title Serene Highness.
đź“Ś I’m really enjoying mixing the stitch sizes and weights of thread (on silk brocade) in the latest fantasy figure from Sam’s Queen of Wonky workshops at differently various last year.
SUNDAY 12 I’ve started reading The Great Women Artists on Substack. The latest posting has paintings by the artists NathanaĂ«lle Herbelin depicting intimacy. The paintings’ subjects all appear in intimate poses but there’s another intimacy at work, in the huddling of Herbelin’s brush strokes and the infusion of colour (lots) and tone.
đź“Ś And finally… the kidney stone exited. My wife insists we keep it, for scientific study, etc.
đź“Ś We’ve started watching the TV version of A Gentleman In Moscow, starring Ewan McGregor as Count Rostov, and it’s as multi-layered as the book, maybe more so.
MONDAY 13 The term “Woke” means different things to different people. Hardline opinionated people sometimes use it as an insult to those with a softer, more tolerant approach to life. The actor Kathy Burke did a trick on social media not long ago by using the aggression of the anti-woke zealot to defend woke. “I love being woke,” she declared. “It’s much nicer than being an ignorant fucking twat.” Since then the pro-woke movement has gained momentum and the term now seems to have an identity that I think most people can live with.
đź“Ś My wife believes she has spotted a trend towards parsimony in TV quiz-show budgeting. In the past, she says, the contestants eliminated in the first round of a quiz show such as The Finish Line would at least take home a small amount of cash. Not any more. They leave with nothing. And even the contestants who make it to the final of shows such as Tipping Point are presented at the last hurdle with the possibility of losing all the money they’ve won throughout the contest.
đź“Ś I sensed in the tone of his last feature film Killers of the Flower Moon that Martin Scorsese had embarked on some kind of wrapping up. And the documentary Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger, which he narrates, is such a warm celebration of the work of P&P that you almost imagine Scorsese is setting out the template for his own memorial.
TUESDAY 14 In the middle of the night we managed to navigate the online obstacle course and secure a morning telephone consultation with the doctor about my latest mole. I’d already sent a photograph but doctor Tommy said a proper check with a molescope is best. This happened at the surgery an hour later and the mole was deemed to be an innocent “SebK”, which I learned stands for “seborrhoeic keratosis”.
đź“Ś At tonight’s scoring session for the 2024 Imagine Fund applications, some of the younger panelists noticed that one of the applicants had “obviously”used AI to fill in the form. Then one of the older panelists stated that for people with learning difficulties or language problems, using AI is no big crime. I never even noticed the apparent use of AI.
WEDNESDAY 15 At a Zoom meeting to discuss the closing event (party) for the Barbican-Headway community collaboration later this month Jess looked a bit mizz, like her mind was elsewhere. At the end of the meeting she announced her departure from the Barbican after 7 years. From next month she will be pioneering co-production at the Red Cross.
đź“Ś Rishi’s told the courts to stop convicting criminals because we’ve run out of prisons to put them in.
THURSDAY 16 I quickly cut and rewrote the scenario I had ready for today’s writers’ group. I was trying to put some jealousy into Martin and Heidi’s relationship, but failed because I wrote too literally to the prompt/title, which was Far Too Young.
Martin liked to think he was mentally prepared. Heidi’s old school friend Martin (“Other Martin”) had arrived for drinks and was already talking about himself. He’d brought a bottle of budget red; he had in his hand a glass of Chianti Classico. Heidi was flitting from kitchen to lounge, and flirting, as usual. Other Martin was talking like a text book about “Leapfrogging”, his theory that claimed to explain why young people today are just far too young: “As we age, we find comfort in the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade. We are familiar with the songs of our grandparents even though we never danced to them ourselves. The recipes we keep are decades old, and in some cases handwritten by a relative long since dead. All of these things lend material credibility to a belief that the passing of an era will be glacial. But sometimes this process can occur in the blink of an eye and external events can cause a society to leapfrog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might otherwise have continued for decades.” Gaming was the thing that triggered the Last Great Leapfrog, said Other Martin, spawning a generation so absorbed in digital technology that it never bothered to learn how to count or cook or read a map. Heidi and Martin didn’t quite know what to say, but they both knew that they’d quite like Other Martin to go home soon.
đź“Ś I am enjoying my experiments in putting very rough paintings through lots of AI and art apps to see what comes out.
đź“Ś La Chimera is a film about a crazy gang of Italian grave robbers who plunder Italy’s many hidden tombs and trade their contents to fund their dissolute fun-loving lifestyle. There are some hilarious moments (my favourite being one about the impressions one leaves when urinating on sand being a sign of marriage-worthiness), but it’s really a meditative love story and a story of lost love rolled into one.
FRIDAY 17 At a Zoom meeting last night we finalised all the winning applicants for this year’s Imagine Fund awards. The Seed grants were ÂŁ500 and the Project grants ÂŁ2,000. I argued to the very end for a local women’s film club to be awarded a Project grant. Part of their application was written in a way that implied to some panel members that they would be charging a ÂŁ40 entrance fee per film. Then it emerged that the contentious ÂŁ40 was in fact for an entire year’s supply of popcorn.
đź“Ś At the Art Workers’ Guild private view for London Craft Week we had a nice conversation with stitch artist Richard McVetis and boggled at the machine-stitch portraits by Monica Boxley.
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Billy's Scrapbook 