There is a chill in the air as the first weekend in October begins. It's time to clean out the bookshelves to collect donations for our local library's annual book sale next weekend. Susan brings over Martha Stewart's fat Homekeeping Handbook which I retain in hopes of finding inspiration to do better at homekeeping than I have ever done at old-speak housekeeping. A dream never dies.
Friday afternoon I went around to Burgh House for a talk about the value of Oral History. The current exhibit is based on an oral history Susan has been doing by speaking with people who were instrumental in saving the house 30 years ago and who have been involved in managing programmes over the past 30 years. The speaker was a beautiful young Italian woman who has been involved in various oral history projects in recent years. She played us clips from one of her major projects recording the existence of a "Little Italy" community in the Clerkenwell area of east London from the late 19th to the late 20th centuries. The Italians in London became enemy aliens in 1939, just as the Japanese in the US did after Pearl Harbor. Residents of Clerkenwell's "Little Italy" were interned, some were shipped to Australia, many were lost when a packed ship full of internees was torpedoed and sunk by the Germans. We heard a woman describe a religious procession imported from Italy, celebrated by the whole community every July; a man who remembered his evacuation to the countryside with his younger siblings at the start of the Second World War, and the initial shock of their hosts to find the children were from an enemy-alien community; and a celebration of the camaraderie of Italian waiters who emigrated to London after the war. I wanted to see a Ken Burns style documentary told through their stories.
Her current project involves an art event going on right now in London. Trafalgar Square has an empty plinth in the corner by the National Gallery, so for years artists have been invited to show a sculpture on the plinth for a limited period. When the sculptor Anthony Gormley was commissioned to show his work on the plinth he conceived a scheme to choose people to stand on the plinth and do what ever they wanted for one hour, 24 hours a day for 100 days. A live webshot is available here because the project still has a few weeks to go. Jane's Probably Knitting has a post with photos of a plinth knitter from August that is fun. An oral history of each participant is being recorded, if they wish to be interviewed, before they are hoisted up to the plinth.
Friday evening, we went off to the National Theatre to see David Hare's new play The Power of Yes in which he tries to understand the financial meltdown of the last two/three years. Hare lives in Hampstead, and I see him striding up and down the High Street with or without his big Golden Retriever (okay, I'm not good with dog breeds, but the dog is big, it is a pale gold colour, and looks happy). The curtain opens and a smaller, younger version of David Hare is on stage telling us this is not so much a play, but an investigation. Since we have lived in London, Hare has written two plays that investigate giant clusterfucks by reading transcripts and interviewing sources and then using their words to tell the story. After two fatal train crashes happened soon after we moved here, he wrote The Permanent Way which looked at the sloppy, irresponsible, ideological way in which the last Tory government privatised the rail network. The play had a real political impact and resulted in the present Labour government being forced to ameliorate some of the errors. After The Permanent Way, Hare was a guest at one of our evening programmes at Burgh House, and when the discussion turned political, Hare admitted, as so many people were doing at that time, how his great hopes for a Labour government had turned into the deepest loathing for Tony Blair and his alliance with Bush. Our interviewer asked if he would be writing a dramatic response to the Iraq situation. I like to think that Stuff Happens, Hare's Iraq war play, began there, but for us, ended there since we never saw it when reviewers told us that somehow Hare had turned Colin Powell into the tragic hero of the piece. Bob and I have long despised Colin Powell, for exactly what he is, through learning of his role in covering up the My Lai massacre, and I think I can safely say our opinion of him was confirmed with his reprehensible deliberate prevarication in the UN presentation prior the Iraq invasion. Hare got a lot of stick about his Powell character, and I think I read he did some rewriting before it went to New York.
The Power of Yes is still in previews until later this week, and I did read a snarky comment about it in The Times yesterday, but Bob and I enjoyed it, and Bob thought he got the tone of what happened spot on. The central character is "David Hare" asking the important people exactly what happened to get us to the place where the system very nearly crashed, and ended with a question of why has there been no reckoning. The people responsible are still sitting pretty with their wealth, and everyone else is doing the paying and losing for them, the old whipping boy concept remains useful for those in power. So many villains, and no heroes. The few who are now credited with posting warnings — Nouriel Roubini, Gillian Tett — aren't heroes because they couldn't turn the train around or hold back the flood.
The play was more of a success than the other big weekend event. The Southbank used to have an annual early music weekend in the late summer that was always wonderful. Then a few years ago, the Southbank hired a new artistic director, and the event, along with its director Philip Pickett disappeared. So we were pleasantly surprised when flyers were circulated for what looked like a revived early music weekend. Even if the flyers were a bit suspect -- calling the program Take the Risk — A Weekend of Early Improvisation with lots of big photos and not much information. As it turned out two of the four concerts were complete duds -- Bob went on to call them frauds. We figured out that this event was likely the public-benefit side of an Arts Council grant for lutenist Paula Chateauneuf to put together an all star group to improvise music from incomplete 17th century texts. Good lord were they ever boring. Paula nattered on — American, probably New Jersey, but has been in the UK long enough to put on an irritating proto-English accent — about how risky this all was because the texts were often just sketches of what should be played. She was wearing some sort of ruffly blouse with a neck ruff that kept reminding me of a clown which didn't help. The brief written programme talked with wonder about how these musicians "put their personal stamp on a piece through embellishment. . ." leading both Bob and I to wonder if any of these people had been to a rock concert. Super famous violinist Pavlo Beznosiuk was on stage wearing his undershirt. It was all so bizarre. The English tenor came on stage and explained things to us, with an Italian accent I think. We left at the interval, so I can't say what we missed in the last half. We had been demoralised by a concert earlier in the day by Stevie Wishart who played the hurdy-gurdy — improvised on the cutting-edge of course — for an hour. Okay for half an hour, the two hurdy-gurdy pieces were interspersed with viol pieces, but even a half hour of a solo hurdy-gurdy is painful.
Fortunately the Arts Council grant left some funds to hire the always wonderful Orlando Consort to give us an hour long chronology of the development of plainchant into polyphony. And on Sunday evening to bring us a pick-up group of consummate musicians: lutenist Crawford Young, Patrizia Bovi from Micrologus, Begoña Olivade from Hesperion XXI (and Mudejar). They were great and made some jokes about improvisation and risk. So our risk here was two out four for concerts this weekend.
One other thing we fitted in was a visit to the Guildhall Art Gallery to see an exhibit of the work of John Gay, a photographer who lived in Highgate for 50+ years before he died in 1999. In the 1960s he did a book on Hampstead and Highgate, and donated the original prints to the Hampstead Museum, which did an exhibit of them earlier this year. Those photos were wonderful, so we have been looking forward to seeing this larger show put together by English Heritage. Gay was born in Germany in 1909, emigrated to England in the mid-1930s, and worked as a commercial photographer and as a free-lancer for magazines of English life, country and city. What an eye the man had. The English Heritage Viewfinder website has more than 35,000 Gay photos available. Here is a link to ones he took of Downshire Hill and a nearby cross street in the 1960s. While the photos were wonderful. the papercuts he did as a child and teenager in Germany were astonishing. Some were so amazingly intricate they looked for all the world like woodcuts.
One more contribution to making this a good weekend was the video Megan posted of Bibs feeding Bobs. I have watched it over and over, laughing every time at those adorable children.
Monday morning and the rains came — and the rain hasn't stopped yet.
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