Archives for posts with tag: Michael Munday
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

You Gotta Practice!

January 26, 2012 //
0

If it’s Monday, 3Score Dance Company at the Pavilion Theatre, 10 – 1pm. Jason, dancer, choreographer and our rehearsal director, has enormous patience with us, clarity, and a good sense of humour. An hour’s warm-up and technique, then the more creative part, building on ideas, associations, memories. We’re working with a Maya Angelou poem, ‘Still I Rise’, and each of us has to interpret the words and meaning into movement. I incorporate facial expression, twists, bends… Then we partner another dancer. And we have to teach each other our moves, then partner another couple, and learn their sequences… Surprisingly, at my age, it’s not so much the body that has the problems, as the memory. It’s only too tempting to watch Jason’s fluid moves and copy them each time round, but that’s not how to do it. You have to internalise the moves, get them in your muscles.

Tuesday evening: Brighton Jazz Co-op, upstairs in the Open House. The great Mark Bassey is working us through the classic minor II-V-1 chord progression. Mark is a top jazz trombonist, but he’s passionate about teaching, too. He’s one of the best teachers I’ve come across: clear, patient, sympathetic and encouraging to the strugglers (me). I’m really ashamed to admit my lack of musical knowledge, even of my instrument, but he spends time with me in the break, filling in the blanks, with great good humour, when he could be at the bar with the others. Once again, the trick is to get this theory into your fingers – to access the flat 5th and the tri-tone substitution – without using your mind.

Two great teachers. But, as the joke says, you gotta practice.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Charlie Sings The Blues

January 19, 2012 //
0

Charles Shaar Murray, legendary music journalist, is in full flow, his reading gaining momentum, rattling along, building, unstoppable. But the content comes over loud and clear, too: how the blues is a healing force, a shared experience between performer and listener. He’s reading from his book about John Lee Hooker, Boogie Man. He’s describing the visceral power of Hooker’s grunts and moans over the stomping beat that transcends language, how hearing the bluesman’s despair touches that of the listener, connects, and uplifts, through.. the boogie! The ‘Black Dog’ whipped by a stinging guitar!

Charlie’s reading is really intense, a synthesis of content and form, and you know it’s reaching its climax… But now, an outburst of clapping from the back! One-man clapping, and a voice heckling. This is extraordinary – heckling a reading? and one that’s so gripping? All heads turn and see a smug-looking, carefully-long-haired middle-aged man, and angry voices are turned on him, not least Charlie’s. He sits there, pleased with himself – he’s broken the spell. Somehow, he remains unpunched.

Charlie recovers, finishes, goes out for a fag. When he returns, he straps on his golden National-style guitar, and hits the strings with a heavy brass slide, and you hear that classic blues sound: brass on steel on brass, slur, whine, crunch. Hunched into his leather jacket, he sings the story of cruel Staggerlee, and his love of Beer, Bourbon and Barbecues. And of the Blues.

http://www.michaelmunday.co.uk

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

A Warm Wellcome

January 12, 2012 //
0

In from the biting wind along Euston Road, up steps, bags searched, and into a stylish café at the Wellcome Collection. Apart from the café (‘Please relate your wi-fi usage to your intake of food and drink’ – to paraphrase the notice), here’s a bookshop, library, and permanent and temporary exhibitions. The museum aims to explore ‘ideas about the connections between medicine, life and art… The Wellcome Trust is the world’s largest independent charitable foundation funding research into human and animal health’. Great cakes, too.

Downstairs there are two exhibitions. ‘Charmed Life’ features charms and amulets from the Wellcome Collection, beautifully arranged in flowing shapes by artist Felicity Powell, and juxtaposed with her own wax artworks. From tiny wooden shoes to a nail-studded sheep’s heart, a vertebra carved with a face, animal teeth, lockets, stones, they bear witness to the significance of the object in people’s lives.

And here’s an exhibition of Mexican Miracle Paintings. If you were, say, falling to your death from a roof, or about to be shot, you might pray to the Virgen de Zapopan to save you, or to San Francisco de Asis, for instance. Then, if you survived, you would probably want to commission a small painting or ex-voto to dedicate to the Virgen or San Francisco in thanks. So here are walls full of these miraculous paintings, mostly on tin roof tiles, showing the disaster and the deliverer, and the carefully and often beautifully inscribed story.

Upstairs: the Collection – well, some of it. There are a number of prosthetic limbs, from earlier centuries, some exquisitely engineered, with independently movable joints and fingers. Here’s Disraeli’s death mask, a shrunken head, a whole mummified body from Peru, buried with ritual amulets; shelves of lovely glass flasks for various body functions; a shocking Chinese torture chair made almost entirely of edge-mounted sword blades, and Darwin’s walking canes. And this metal rhombus thing? The caption states simply: ‘Guillotine blade, French, 1792-1796’.

And what looks like a spiky jubilee clip with a small cycle clip inside? It’s a Victorian anti-masturbation device. Your Wellcome.

http://www.wellcomecollection.org

http://www.michaelmunday.co.uk

Tags , , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

What DID the dormouse say?

November 24, 2011 //
1

Black, crumbly, scratchy, smeary… charcoal: I love it. Standing up at a precarious easel, I’m concentrating on the hip of the naked woman in front of me and trying to relate it to the elbow of another, and get it in the right elbow/hip proportion.

Under a black-and-white check canopy with a disembowelled chair hanging over my head, I’m at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party (in New England House, Brighton). That’s the theme of this life class: I expected people dressed in Alice in Wonderland costumes sitting around a table – maybe a stuffed dormouse hanging out of a teapot. I wasn’t really expecting four beautiful young women, wearing, respectively, a top-hat, striped stockings, rabbit ears, and a cigarette-holder, in a surreal grotto of giant playing cards, a huge key, flowers and checks everywhere… it’s years since I went to a life-drawing class, but things have clearly changed! You might say it’s a bit, well, burlesque, but it’s not: it’s a life-class, imaginatively-staged.

The models start with quick poses, five minutes – in fact, they change positions when the song finishes. The songs all relate to the Alice theme, but don’t include the song from the old Disney film (aaah), and do include a disappointing cover of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ (oh well). But that’s not why I’m here. I plunge into a few brush drawings, all bad – I should have been practicing. It takes a while to get your eye back in, but I switch to soft pencil, then lovely charcoal. Everyone’s concentrating hard, and the models are striking really taxing poses, and I’m getting a bit better, and then it’s all over. Time flies in Wonderland.

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

A Perfect Day (almost)

November 24, 2011 //
0

Sun slotting in through venetian blinds: I get up and shower. Aching from a day’s humping of gravel bags, digging, planting, easing Arthur into his hole (see previous post), we’re going to spend this last golden day cycling. At the station we can just get the three bikes between standing passengers in a 2-car train: the woman in a wheelchair could squeeze between us to the toilet, if it was working.

It’s a relief to burst out at Polegate, and finally we find the Cuckoo Trail: an 11-mile cycle and walking path that once was the Polegate to Eridge railway line, torn up in 1968. It’s a lovely ride between the big oaks, still with their leaves on. And it’s not strenuous, I’m glad to find! We come to junctions with other paths and roads, gateways that are really unusual: bullet-nosed bollards with a simple cast iron shape on top, or a big serrated steel arch, imaginatively-wrought – it’s a sculpture path as well. It’s a beautiful day, warm too: we eat our Co-op sandwiches sitting on a bank, looking at the gradated layers of landscape stretching back towards Firle Beacon.

We’re aiming for the 4.02 back to Lewes, but we’re a bit tired now and miss it, so have a pint of Old in the pub (also tired). Cycling the 100 yards to the station, we’re separated by the crossing barriers rattling down between us: I wait obediently till I realise that it’s our train. Pedal furiously towards the footbridge, hoist my bike onto my shoulder, and leap up the steps into the crowd coming down. At which point my perfect day becomes, well, less-than. My ankle turns over and I go sprawling across the steps, bike clattering, and the crowd parts around me, avoiding eye-contact. Battered and wincing, I lurch across the bridge dragging the Ridgeback, but it’s too late – our train pulls out. I curse that pub’s dreary embrace. Apart from that, though…

Tags , , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Song and Dance

October 25, 2011 //
0


Saturday – I have one sodden ball of tissue to staunch the tears rolling down my cheeks and I’m making a spectacle of myself. Well – I would be, if all those around me weren’t riveted by the spectacle in front of me. Mimi, hiding behind a fire-escape, overhears the real reason she has been abandoned by Rodolfo. I’m in the second row at Glyndebourne, watching La Bohème, treated by a friend. I finally get the appeal of opera; I’ve seen a few over the years, but none has had this effect. A grubby, freezing kitchen in a squalid student flat reminds me of life in the early 1970s. But it’s not that memory that moves me: the pathos of the situation, the characterisation, the huge swelling music a few feet away, the exquisite soaring voices  – all combine in a wave of emotion. Heightened, it has to be said, by the wine… sniff, dab.

Monday 9am – I’m signed in by a young blonde woman, her breasts dusted with glitter (9am!) Not a dodgy club – it’s the Pavilion Theatre in Brighton. ‘Aaah’ she says (as in ‘Bless!’) – we’re Over-60s. Actually we’re extras in auditions for a Rehearsal Director for the new Three Score dance project. (Why am I doing this?). The first candidate, Jason, takes us through some sequences: a discus-throwing swing, skips, circling arms; then lift toes, down, lift, down, lift foot, down, bend other leg, straighten other… the 60-year mind/body (well, mine) doesn’t retain this easily. But Ginny’s audition is more personal, quirkier, and somehow I can hold onto these moves: circle the face, cradle the head, rotate the arm, over, back… My body’s waking up. I’m taller somehow. I want to be a dancer now… (Over-60s – bless…).

Tags , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

When I Get Older…

October 25, 2011 //
0


August 1967: I’ve got the latest Beatles LP under my arm! It’s called, strangely, ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, and inside the gatefold cover is a sheet of designs by Peter Blake – designs that you can cut out and keep – and even wear. I can’t wait to play it when I get to this party. Hard guitar on the title track, a bit of whimsical singalong stuff for Ringo (well, OK, but a good chorus), Lucy in the Sky (aaah, yes, psychedelic!), sitars and tabla, Lovely Rita, with orgasmic panting, and Good Morning, with a great biting guitar solo, then the churning Sergeant Pepper reprise, and A Day in the Life – amazing! Trippy!

But on side two, what’s this corny old-time thing? Sort of vaudeville style with a clarinet…’When I get older, losing my hair’..? Perhaps I’ll skip that track at the party. I sort of like it though.. ‘Vera, Chuck, and Dave.’ Funny.

In 1967 it was twenty years ago that Sergeant Pepper apparently taught the band to play, which would make it 1947: a time of rationing, austerity, a bitterly cold winter, and my birth. And I still get the valentine.

Tags , , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized

In Shoreham

October 25, 2011 //
0

My brother-in-law(-in-law) shows me round the house he’s built in Shoreham. It’s not his house, though – he built it for someone else. It’s in classic Modernist style: all clean rectangles, open, light, beautiful wood finishes – I wish it were mine. Inside, an open staircase above a mosaic pool leads up to the open-plan living area. Lovely proportions, exquisite attention to detail. Huge smooth-sliding windows form the whole width of the house; all you can see is beach, sea, horizon, sky.

Two minutes away are the houseboats. Not just boats that are lived in: some of them are evolving art installations, with pieces being added, welded on, changed – the inventiveness is exhilarating. One boat is topped by a coach above heart-shaped windows, another has a car set in the side. A gate is made from a salvaged railway-signal, a letterbox from a microwave on a post. A large bomb, nose-down in the mud, is made from a buoyancy float, ‘PEACE’ exquisitely cut into its side. Everywhere there are bright colours, flowers and vegetables growing, amazing juxtapositions.

The ordered and the random; the cool and the wild; design and art.

Tags , ,
Categories Uncategorized

What A Day This Has Been

October 25, 2011 //
0

A sky of solid blue, blazing sun, and the shushing of waves on the shingle beach – and it’s October.

We’ve carried our picnic down from the car-park to the beach steps but the tide is coming in and soon there will be nothing to sit on; we walk up the path to the top of Seaford Head, clear a space in the rabbit-droppings and spread the ancient blanket. Bacon and parmesan muffins, asparagus, figs and a bottle of Sauvignon in its silver chiller-jacket: this is a classy picnic – we’ve got Sheffield son and girlfriend with us.

We walk down the hill past the much-photographed coastguard cottages and spread our towels, and after limping over the pebbles I have to dive into the sea. It’s colder than it looks, and after a bit of puffing, floating and staring up into the blue I’m crawling painfully back out again.

A beefy-bicepped man in tattoos and shades strolls along the top of the beach with a tiny dachsund straining on a lead; another, leathery dark-tanned, poses in tight split-sided trunks. A thin white youth in flappy football shorts fails to skim stones over the sea.

Just the whoosh of the waves, distant children’s squeals, seagullszzzzzz….

Tags , ,
Categories Uncategorized

Chalk

October 24, 2011 //
0

Under an ominous sky a half-naked man, writhing in his death throes, lurches towards the high coppiced-wood fence surrounding him. His body is like a Grünewald Christ: thin, ribby and pale, his face painted white. All around him, there’s the clashing of cymbals and the sounding of horns. And fire. But the crowd is silent.

About 150 people – men, women, children, dogs – have walked, following the flags, pipes and drum, from Harting Down. A woman blowing a long twisted antelope horn had called this strange figure from the trees on the hill, this very white man, in slow ritual Butoh movements: in his hands, stag’s antlers. Dogs in the crowd growled at the sight – no other sound. The stag worked his way along the valley, stalked and harried by three figures, also in white, hands and bodies angular and aggressive.

Now the stag is driven, wounded, down this long high corral of woven sticks, hounded by the drums, the cymbals, the fire. But as he dies, wrapped in a long white banner, there’s a tiny high sound from the hill behind him. A woman in a long red dress leads a white horse with a strange figure on it. As they come nearer, you can see it’s a woman, a Mongolian woman in high collared national dress, and the sound is a beautiful and eerie song, a traditional Long Song.

She sings us up the valley, to the tolling of deep bells, until we reach a place of flags, and a crescendo of gongs. The stag-man slowly winds his way up the hill trailing the long white banner, and the horse-woman and her escort rides away to the right, stlll singing…

This has been ‘Chalk’ – an installation and performance by Red Earth. Extraordinary, moving, unsettling.

Tags , , , ,
Categories Uncategorized
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »