Prognathic, Mitten, Man.

A short trip to Paris just over a month ago was filled with a variety of joys, most notably my engagement to the wonderful Alex - a most magical moment, and we’re both very excited. I always feel a little odd about posting personal things on the internet, and I generally feel it’s something we should all avoid, but I kinda want to shout this from the rooftops, and this is the modern equivalent.

In other news, the relevance of the elephant-gonad photograph here is not a symbol of my impending marriage, but in fact an example of the testicle-penis obsession of Parisian sculptors. There are a number of animal sculptures outside the Musee D’orsay which we got a good look at during our 45 minutes of queueing, and each of them is incredibly well endowed. The elephant drew particular attention, even so as to become photo-worthy, as elephants have internal testicles. This hilights their presence on the sculpture as an unhealthy obsession with pendulous cajones, rather than a slightly more healthy obsession with anatomical accuracy.

Perhaps the sculptor was sculpting from (a sexually-falsified) memory, or, more likely, from a painting of such a beast? Maybe this painting was also emblazoned with massive balls? Where does the buck stop? How many 19th century artists had ever actually seen an elephant, let alone get close enough to discover its apparent eunuch-status. I think the attitude was (and probably still is) almost certainly - “What a gigantic and terrifying beast. It must have huge balls”. Interesting, no?

I think a worldwide search of elephant sculptures is required to find out where the ‘pin the bollocks on the bull’ outlook sprang from.

Mont Blanc, Viewed from Switzerland through binoculars, Summer 2008.

Chatsworth House, Summer 2009

Blackwood suspension bridge, South Wales.

Album of the Week #5 [11/04/10]: Led Zeppelin - Live 1972 - 1979

Now, this isn’t actually an album. It’s a DVD, but I’ve been listening to it this week as if it were an album. I’ve been revising you see, and somehow I can do that while listening to Led Zeppelin, but watching it at the same time would be far too much sensory stimulation to allow me to learn the inner workings of a cat’s pancreas. The thing I really love about live Led Zeppelin, is that they improvise like no one else. Each track is different to the preceeding one especially as they start jumping between albums; having ‘That’s the Way’ and ‘Bron Yr Aur Stomp’ next to each other in the tracklisting is genius. In short, the DVD is great, but try just listening to the music with your eyes shut, and it’s a whole new world of Led Zep.

Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1914) Le Grand Cheval

Harking back to a recent visit to the Tate Modern, I managed to track down an image of one of my favourite sculptures. There’s something really lively about this sculpture; you can almost see the shoulder and hip joints winding up to jump. Alex pointed out to me that in 1914, the world had just started moving over from horse-power to engine-power, and this sculpture really captures that transition. Unfortunately you can only see it from one side here and you lose the whole 3D effect, but there are many images online taken from all angles.

Duchamp-Villon was an expert horseman, serving as an auxiliary doctor in a cavalry regiment during the war. This sculpture developed from his studies of a leaping horse and rider to become an abstract evocation of dynamic energy and power. His work has been compared to that of the Futurists in the way it aims to capture a sense of motion. The tension between the mechanistic and the natural world echoes that between solid bronze and the representation of movement. [From The Tate Modern]

Crow, Richmond Park, Winter 2008

At the Camden Head (in Camden Town) yesterday, Muso’s Guide and Broken Glass Theatre Company put on ‘Beyond the Curve’, an afternoon and evening of poetry, music, theatre and art. Being in the midst of revision, I was a little lame and only made it down there for a few hours, but caught the Poetry and, of course, ‘Scenes From the City’, the piece we’ve all been working so hard on over the last few weeks! 

Poetically, the day seemed to go well. I found that my current pre-occupations and the sweltering heat of the upper-room at the Camden Head (it always seems to hit the high 20s no matter what time of year it is) led my mind on certain wanderings during the set, but the pieces I caught were generally excellent. My particular favourite was a poem by Lizzy Dening called ‘Silverfish’. Sadly it’s not available on her website so I can’t give you the quote directly, but her comparison between the little silver creatures that crawl around bathrooms and hot solder spilling out from a tap really captured my imagination. Becky Varley Winter’s ‘Clouds’, and Benjamin Morris’ ‘Clue’ were two other stand outs.

Broken Glass’s exhibition-come-radioplay, I feel, went very well. Vicky and Ben had affixed Ben’s artwork on the walls, with small excerpts from Vicky’s short stories, and also included a free-standing ‘prop’ which used fishing wire to connect inter-related quotes and images from the stories. Once the chairs were removed from the room, the ten-minute projection of the images in time with the recording were performed, once to a rapt audience, pinned around the edge of the room on the floor, and then a second and third time while people wandered around taking in the images in their full glory with the sound in the background. I think it worked really well; the change in the space from the lecture-theatre-style rows of chairs, to the exhibition gallery really was something. The photographs from Broken Glass’s set are available on the website.

Image from ‘Scenes From the City’, (c) Broken Glass Theatre Company 2010.