Another year, another soundtrack. The first in this site’s regular summings-up of the cultural year from my perspective is music. Spotify’s annual account of your listening statistics informs me that I listened to 3,427 songs lasting 20,271 minutes in total (or fourteen days), representing 1,416 artist performing across sixty-three genres, headed by folk, avant-garde jazzRead More
At the dark end of the street
There is something particularly fascinating, and chilling, about lost cities. Lost civilisations, where hundreds of thousands of people once shared a common culture over many years and have left little or nothing, are too awful a thought to contemplate, but lost cities we can understand. Macchu Picchu, Pompeii, Karakorum, Carthage, Mycenae, Babylon – they tellRead More
The Night Watch
To Amsterdam for a few days, and at last a visit to the Rijksmuseum, one of the world’s leading art galleries, physically or online. For years now I have been familiar with the collection through its digital presences, not just the usual line-up of great works to be found on the standard web sources, butRead More
Melbourne
Let’s go to Australia. We have family in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. We’ll visit the three cities in turn, one week each. We’ll take notes and photographs to document our memories. We’ve been to Sydney and Brisbane, so let’s fly on to Melbourne. You’ll like Melbourne, so said everyone. So we did. There is nothingRead More
Brisbane
Let’s go to Australia. We have family in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. We’ll visit the three cities in turn, one week each. We’ll take notes and photographs to document our memories. Having started with Sydney, let’s fly on to Brisbane. Nothing is more disorienting than to arrive in the middle of an unknown city. EveryoneRead More
Sydney
Let’s go to Australia. We have family in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. We’ll visit the three cities in turn, one week each. We’ll take notes and photographs to document our memories. We’ll go to Sydney first. First sight, a thin line of sunrise-red stretching along the ocean horizon as we land at Botany Bay. OhRead More
Bob covers Bob
Bob Dylan’s latest album, Shadow Kingdom, is an intriguing puzzle. The album is the soundtrack of a 2021 concert film, Shadow Kingdom: The Early Songs of Bob Dylan, directed by Alma Har’el. The film was released as a one-off on the live streaming platform Veeps.com, with little information provided beforehand on its form or contents.Read More
O Pioneers!
I have two definitions of what history is, which I wrote years ago and have repeated several times thereafter – and here they are again: 1. History is what was known once but has been forgotten 2. History is the present’s interpretation of the past It’s worth considering these when contemplating the subject of women’sRead More
Charles Darwin’s daily round
Down House, Charles Darwin’s home for forty years, lies in the village of Downe, south of Orpington in what is technically the London Borough of Bromley, but is a part of Kent really. Darwin purchased the house in 1842 and remained there until his death in 1882. It is a functional rather than a beautifulRead More
The skull beneath the skin
The first X-rated film I saw was The Long Good Friday. It was 1981, I was nineteen, and a little apprehensive about the promised violence that only someone of the age I had now attained was permitted to see. The opening scenes of the film were confusing. Money was being changed hands, clearly illicitly. TheRead More