November 16-22, 2024
SATURDAY 16 Two events from last week are still swirling in my head, their flavours becoming more and more complex the longer they swirl. First is the film Anora and the imagined life of the title character from the end of the film until this moment now. The second is The Imaginary Institution Of India, the Barbican’s big exhibition, which radically replaces wall text with the options of a book written in English or an audio guide. This is all fine by me because I always prefer to pass over the explanations and just look at the images. And they are superb (even the “dung paintings”), but the subdued lighting in the gallery was not strong enough for those who needed it to read the small-print book, and the image of visitors squinting, heads down, became as distracting as any wall text would have been. The review in Time Out works best for me, and even supplies some text that might have been useful at the start of the exhibition…
In 1975, India declared a state of emergency and suspended democracy; in 1998, it developed nuclear weapons. The 25 years in between were decades of total tumult, which all of the art here tries in some way to address.
…More useful than a lone large-scale painting of two men standing next to a hand cart and a wall of red house bricks, which at least gave the nod to the richness of the colours on display here and the suggestion of barriers being put up and got round.
đź“Ś At the Leadenhall festive craft market Sue spotted a possible new product line for the Golden Lane Stitchers.
đź“Ś On the 58th floor of Horizon 22 all of London looks squashed uncomfortably together, and buildings that look sleek in profile from street level are revealed to be ugly machines. Then you spot a lovely thing embedded in the wreckage.
đź“Ś The lighting in the basement of Pizza Express, Holborn, made it all but impossible to get a decent picture of the fabulously evocative Buena Vista Social Club tribute band.
đź‘€ As seen on the pavement at the Red Lion Street bus stop…
SUNDAY 17 Andy Beckett has spotted a potential thorn in Starmer’s side. His left side. A group of five independent MPs elected in July have formed a Corbynist alliance that has the potential to snowball into an irritant for Starmer as he continues to pull the sharpest teeth from the mouth of the parliamentary Labour party.
đź“Ś It’s fingers crossed again that Greasy Pete gets booted off Strictly Come Dancing.
đź“Ś The bad news is that Greasy Pete once again survived and lives on in Strictly Come Dancing. The good news is that I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here has started and I know already that Tyrone (Alan Halsall) will win, so I don’t have to watch any more of that rubbish.
MONDAY 18 A meeting in the Barbican’s Garden Room with three of the arts centre’s key directors told us nothing new, but at least we were able to complain that Barbican Cinema is not scheduled to show the new Paddington film.
TUESDAY 19 Farmers will descend on Downing Street today to protest the chancellor’s decision to charge them the same rate of inheritance tax as everyone else.
đź‘‚Overheard by Polly Toynbee in Kent…
Housebuilding is the great market failure, where high demand doesn’t produce high supply: it urgently needs government intervention.
đź“Ś I joined the St Luke’s Men’s Shed for an Italian cookery session in the cookery school, plus food, drink and games in celebration of International Men’s Day. Me and Graham came third in the quiz. We got an extra half point for our team name, If Luke’s Could Kill. I was the only one who made time to thank our cookery instructor/chef, Tracy.
WEDNESDAY 19 I just read a great line in the PG Wodehouse yarn The Prince & Betty: “Tears are the Turkish bath of the soul.”
đź“Ś Nelia disapproved of the stitchwork I am doing of Fallopian Jesus, a painting I did for an exhibition in Dundee hosted by a religious charity. Nelia didn’t like it because, “she was a virgin”. I didn’t have the courage to ask whether she believes virgins had vaginas.
THURSDAY 21 RIP John Prescott, 86. An old video of him drinking beer is getting traffic.
đź“Ś Every day Sensemaker offers a terse list of things you need to know about, if you can be bothered. It then goes on to cover one story in detail. I like the attitude.
đź“Ś The story I offered up to the Headway writing group had the title Midwinter Nightmare, though what I wrote stretched it…
It wouldn’t be Christmas if Martin didn’t get a bee in his bonnet, thought Heidi. Every year he concocted some variation of Bah Humbug. They’d been together 7 years and already he’d dusted off the Pagan Roots Of Christmas sermon 3 times, with endless tortured puns on the word Yule.
This year it was Scrooge and the multiple ghosts that crowded his head on that fateful night before the Big Day of reckoning. Martin’s theory was that the ghosts were evidence that Scrooge was a highly complex, misunderstood character and not the grumpy old tightarse as widely depicted.
Heidi agreed that he was indeed complex, but she saw the ghosts as a manifestation of Scrooge’s hidden homosexuality. Why otherwise would anyone leave the name of his “former partner” Jacob Marley on the sign in the shop window? For SEVEN years after he died! Marley and Scrooge were bum boys, no doubt about it.
đź“Ś I was surprised at how unsentimental the new Headway documentary film, The Magic of Chaos, is. It also has Miriam talking about the early days, which was a neat inclusion.
FRIDAY 22 The community group Marge volunteers at were given a bunch of free tickets for Guys & Dolls as performed by the elder pupils of the City of London School For Girls, a very wealthy private fee-paying school in the Barbican. The actor Rory Kinnear was in the queue behind us last night as we waited in a CLSG corridor to go in.
The show being about GUYS and DOLLS meant the guest appearance of some pupils from the City of London Boys School (an equally snooty local institution), but not always. Eg, the character Nicely Nicely (normally a guy) was played by a doll, and a guy (ie, two people, two Nicelys, identically dressed). This gave the show a clever nod to the on-trend gender conversation, plus a historical nod to Shakespeare’s casting of men in the role of women, ++ a popular nod to pantomime, a season that is already upon us.
The show also being about SAINTS and SINNERS meant we got an idea about which pupils their teachers saw as which, and as the daft story unfolded we got to see the guys in the dolls and the saints in the sinners. It was an enjoyable excursion in an sometimes fussy presentation.
The production’s stage-management gave all members of the vast cast a chance to get their moment, and the performances were steely sharp and polished to a terrifying level of self-confidence. These teenagers – many of them with very good singing voices – oozed hard-faced privilege and entitlement even in a school musical! And a comedy at that! Who knows what havoc they will unleash on society later in their lives!
My favourite appeared in the cast list only as “Poppy”, who played a divine Arvide Abernathy (doll/saint, or maybe not, depending on which way you see/feel about things today, yesterday, or whatever).
đź“Ś I narrowly missed finishing yesterday’s Squaredle before the 11.30am cut-off, but I was pleased to have got MAYONNAISE.
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