FRIDAY MUSIC: Ryuichi Sakamoto, by JD

You may not know the name Ryuichi Sakamoto but you will almost certainly be familiar with the music in the first video. And I hope you will enjoy the others also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryuichi_Sakamoto

Railing against rail, by JD

In 1829 Robert Stephenson entered his steam locomotive, called the Rocket, in a competition called the Rainhill Trials. It was to be held east of Liverpool and the winner would receive £500. There were 10 other locomotives entered in the contest and Stephenson had to transport his engine and equipment there, by horse and cart, from Newcastle. This is a folk song about this famous competition.



Read all about the event here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainhill_Trials

The thing that caught my attention was the fact that Stephenson and his team took The Rocket by horse and cart to Lancashire. Now that must have been quite an adventure in itself. Remember this was long before there was a network of roads or railways. The first macadamised roads in this country were laid in the 1820s although whether the road between Newcastle and Liverpool was one of them is unclear. To get to the Trials it would have been necessary to disassemble their machine, load it onto the carts, arrange overnight stabling and feed for the horses (and themselves) travel the 150 miles or so to their destination. Then would come the job of reassembly and testing and other preparations for the contest.

Stephenson won and this is what 'state of the art' locomotive engineering looked like in 1829; the video is of a replica of the Rocket (not quite) full steam ahead -



I have the greatest admiration for Robert and his father, George Stephenson, the pioneers of the railway age. Their artistry and engineering skills were outstanding.

Having said that, I am not a fan of rail travel and never have been. In the early 19th century the railways were a wonderful alternative to the stagecoach; more comfortable, faster and much safer. But they declined in the 20th century and not entirely because of Dr. Beeching. They were superseded by the growth of personal transportation in the form of the motor car.

Now, in the 21st century they have long outlived their usefulness and the idea of building more of them in the form of the high speed rail link should be abandoned. They are a very inefficient way to move people around. I live very close to the main east coast line which connects London to Edinburgh. This is a 400 mile transport corridor between two capital cities and it is empty for most of the day. For the majority of the time there are no people being transported along it. Occasionally there is a train and for maybe 10 or 15 seconds once every hour our little stretch of line is doing its job.

Scrap the railways and put the land to better use. The Stephensons would approve, they were forward looking engineers of vision. Modern transport problems will not be solved by 19th century thinking.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Foy Vance, by JD

Foy Vance is a singer songwriter from Belfast. He is not well known to the public at large but he has quietly built up a great reputation for himself both in the UK and in America. One of the videos here features Martha Wainwright and Pete Townshend and you do not share a stage with artists of that calibre unless you are very, very good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foy_Vance

A River in Darkness

If you have a Kindle and £1.00 to spare, Masaji Ishikawa’s A River in Darkness: One Man's Escape from North Korea is well worth reading. It is fairly short but covers an interesting aspect of North Korean history – the repatriation of Koreans from Japan. From Amazon -

Half-Korean, half-Japanese, Masaji Ishikawa has spent his whole life feeling like a man without a country. This feeling only deepened when his family moved from Japan to North Korea when Ishikawa was just thirteen years old, and unwittingly became members of the lowest social caste. His father, himself a Korean national, was lured to the new Communist country by promises of abundant work, education for his children, and a higher station in society. But the reality of their new life was far from utopian.

Mr Ishikawa escaped back to Japan during the nineties famine after Kim Il-sung died. Here are a couple of quotes, the first being a recipe for pine bark cakes.

First, boil the pine bark for as long as possible to get rid of all the toxins. (Many people botched this stage and died in agony as a result.) Next, add some cornstarch and steam the evil brew. Then cool it, form it into cakes, and eat it. This was easier said than done. The pine oil stinks to high heaven and makes it almost impossible to consume it. But if you wanted to live, you choked it down. That’s when the real fun began. Crippling gut pain that brought us to our knees; constipation that you wouldn’t believe. When the pain became unbearable—there’s no delicate way of putting this—you had to shove your finger up your anus and scoop out your concrete shit. I’m sorry. You didn’t need to know that. Except you did. It’s the only thing that shows how desperate we were.

The second quote sounds almost familiar.

People in North Korea spend so much time in study meetings and calculating the number of hours they’ve worked that there’s no time to do the actual work. The result? Raw materials don’t arrive in factories, the electricity doesn’t work, and farms are overrun with weeds.

Mr Ishikawa has a grim story to tell and he tells it well. To my mind he brings out the corruption, the crazy lies and the bureaucratic insanity Kim Il-sung implemented.

FRIDAY: Music for Semana Santa, by JD

An eclectic selection -















Happy Easter, felices pascuas!

The Eyes Of Picasso, by JD

[This piece on Picasso and his vision first appeared on Nourishing Obscurity here.]

The picture shown at left was painted in 1895 when the artist was just fourteen, the same age as the young girl. It is one of the first paintings you see when you visit L’hôtel Salé in Paris.

Standing there and seeing this painting for the first time, I was immediately struck by the eyes. Large, round, black eyes with a compelling gaze out onto the world.

The artist was, of course, Pablo Ruiz Picasso; the man who dominated twentieth century art and those eyes became a recurring theme in his work over the next eighty years.

Whether consciously or unconsciously, Picasso seemed to know what power lay in the eyes.

And the eyes do have an unknown power, as Rupert Sheldrake asserts in his book The Sense Of Being Stared At.

Plato imagined light from a ball of fire emanating from the eye and combining with sunlight to hit the object seen and this is then reflected back to the eye.

Sheldrake and Plato are not the only ones to believe in the extramission theory of the eyes.

The eyes of that young girl are like Picasso’s own eyes with their mirada fuerte,nothing escapes those eyes and that gaze of Picasso’s seems to devour everything it lands upon.

Again and again, the eyes are the main point of interest in his paintings regardless of the style he uses (or invents) We see it here in the two central figures in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of his most celebrated works.

In a completely different style, executed in charcoal (with collage) the eyes are once more the focus in this picture of his then wife Jacqueline Roque.

In this, lesser known, work we can see the wide-eyed excitement of a child taking its first steps. This is a wonderful painting in other ways; the overarching protectiveness of the mother and the delicacy of her touch as she guides the child without grasping too tightly.

And in his final self-portrait we have an old man, shrunken of skull but still those eyes dominate the picture, staring into the undiscovere’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns –

When Picasso died in 1973 it was as if a line had been drawn under the visual arts with the implicit message- follow that!

And we have been unable to do so. Over the subsequent four decades the art world has been floundering, looking for the next big thing and finding nothing of substance.

Painting has more or less disappeared and the visual arts have degenerated into infantilism and ineptitude. Words have now replaced images in that every ‘artist’ must now have an Artist’s Statement (full of meaningless platitudes) or, even worse, a manifesto! and the artworks themselves are often covered in writing. Everything now needs to be explained as if we had lost the ability to see or, more likely, artists can no longer make the invisible visible.

It seems appropriate somehow that history’s greatest painter should be the one to bring an end to the visual arts. And for those who cannot accept such an assertion, I say only – open your eyes/mind and look! Or in the words of J. Winston Lennon –

Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see.

The last word must go to Sir Roland Penrose; from his biography of Picasso:

The virtue common to all great painters is that they teach us to see, but few have had a more compelling way of doing so than Picasso. His power has enchanted those who are susceptible and enraged those who resent being disturbed by his brilliance. Art itself should teach us to free ourselves from the rules of art, and this is precisely what the art of Picasso has done.

There is also reason to be grateful for the violence that he has used, for in our time, when signs of apathy and despair are easy to detect, it is only a resounding and decisive passion that can succeed. As he himself has said: “The essential in this time of moral poverty is to create enthusiasm.” Without the awakening of ardent love, no life and therefore no art has any meaning.

JD adds:

After watching Picasso's last Stand on TV the other night https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09xptbr  I thought the overall message of the programme was a reinforcement of that last line I quoted from Sir Roland Penrose's biography:

" Without the awakening of ardent love, no life and therefore no art has any meaning."  

I have seen a few of the paintings shown in the programme, the ones in the Picasso Museum in Paris and they are indeed 'passionate' paintings, vibrant and 'full of meaning'.

I have seen a lot of his paintings over the years and always there is the sense that they are somehow alive, their 'presence' can be felt in the galleries. (Rembrandt's paintings have that same quality.) Not all of his work has that vitality. I have always thought that Guernica was a flat and lifeless painting; when he does a 'political' painting it is nothing more than a gesture, his heart is not really in it which reflects that quotation above.


As I wrote in the original post "When Picasso died in 1973 it was as if a line had been drawn under the visual arts with the implicit message- follow that!"  ... and we have not and we cannot follow that!

FRIDAY MUSIC: Friday Fusion, by JD

Popular music is currently in a moribund state with a distinct lack of 'music' and too many 'stars' who cannot sing. Well I would say that as I am ancient, a veritable benign old gentleman in fact.

But I can see that young people are also tired of the dreary and dismal offerings and many are looking over their shoulders for inspiration. The results of this old/new fusion are a delight.