July 02, 2009
Mad Love
Sometime after Watchmen finished, back in the late 1980s, I remember reading an interview with Alan Moore in which he said something to the effect of having ultimately found himself more interested in the little people on the street corner than the big guys in spandex hitting each other to save the world -- and that he was going to concentrate on writing about them instead. The product of this effort was, IIRC, originally to be called The Mandelbrot Set until Benoit Mandelbrot complained that this would contribute to the trivialisation that then attended public mentions of his work (and continues to to this day); it eventually emerged as Big Numbers -- but not for long. Of the planned 12 issues, just two saw the light of day. I'm still not clear what happened -- I remember Dave Sim presenting it as a study in the difficulties of self-publishing, for example, which I'm pretty sure was not the real issue, and there were rumours of illness and madness afflicting the artist Bill Sienkiewicz, also dubious -- but in any case, the wait for issue 3 stretched from months to years and the whole episode was eventually forgotten.
I say we've been married forty years, we've never had call to use language, have we, Edie?
Except, not quite. While most of the series was never put down on paper and now exists only in Moore's own mind, it turns out that #3 was not only written but pretty fully drawn and lettered. By some marvel a photocopy turned up earlier this year and is now available -- with Moore's permission, it seems -- on (of all places) LiveJournal and Flickr:
I'm not sure I can express the impact of this find for a certain, admittedly small, class of people like me. It's like a new Shakespeare play or Beethoven symphony arriving out of nowhere. Except in those cases there would be much quibbling over authenticity, whereas here there is really none. The copy is a tiny bit rough, but the authorship and continuity is unmistakable.
And while in a sense this just makes one yearn even more for the alternate universe where the remaining three-quarters made it to press, it is wonderful to be able to read another piece of the intricate puzzle after all these years. Do it now.
Posted by matt at 11:52 PM | Comments (0)
June 30, 2009
Cryptic
Blame James Muir.
In the unlikely event you actually want to attempt this, you're probably better off clicking for the PDF.
Posted by matt at 09:19 AM | Comments (7)
June 24, 2009
Oddments
Posted by matt at 08:37 AM | Comments (0)
June 13, 2009
Reunion
One of the reasons for my recent lack of blogging -- as opposed to the longer-term lack of blogging, which by now needs no explanation -- was the flying visit by my old friend Bruce, from the Scala days and then Sydney.
Though I saw Bruce several times on our Australian trip last year, he hasn't been in London for 12 years, and it's almost 20 since he lived here. So he was keen to see old haunts and new developments -- especially, since he is a bit of a transport enthusiast, rail-related ones like the new Jubilee Line stations and St Pancras -- and also to get together with some long lost friends. Some of these proved elusive; others materialised by the magic of unbelievable coincidence. But one way and another, several pleasant evenings were had, including this outing to Wahaca:
Ros and Larry last saw Bruce in 1989, Fabio maybe 1992. So there was a fair amount of catching up to do.
Posted by matt at 10:50 AM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2009
City Jitters 12
Posted by matt at 10:12 PM | Comments (1)
May 31, 2009
Circle Limit III
You might have noticed that blogging is not happening with much conviction here. But more likely you haven't, since you've almost certainly not been reading the site anyway. So it evens out. Nevertheless, I feel I should at least make a stab at some kind of posting, if only to give myself something to look back on in future when my already-failing memory of this period has given up the ghost entirely. Think how novel it will all seem then.
So, there was another trip to the Isle of Wight for the bank holiday weekend, and very splendid it was too.
The territory covered was very familiar, but there were some small triumphs. In particular I managed to ascend a couple of steep and moderately technical hills that have hitherto defeated me. I put this down partly to stubbornness, and partly to a sense that I may not be attempting them many times more and it therefore being time I put the fuckers in their place. It also helped that I approached them in the lowest possible gear.
In any case, it was good to once again visit the pretty but largely empty outpost of Freshwater, and to make the now de rigueur pilgrimage to Christine's Enchanted Valley, all in very lovely weather. The former trip was rather long and arduous and left me completely wrung out. Given that, I expected to hate the latter, but actually it was just about right. Sunshine improves these things a lot.
Back in London, Pierre Rigal's Press at the Lilian Baylis helped to exorcise the memories of Rambert's recent travesty. I took Kym, and we both enjoyed a very clever exercise in choreographed claustrophobia, with Rigal ingeniously and athletically filling a small and dimishing space.
Much of the glorious weekend was spent in the park, notably on Saturday when old flame Matthew once again joined me to skate with Alastair and Davide. Nearly everything was beautiful, and those things that weren't don't merit discussion. I wish my balance were a little better.
I've been haunted lately by an experience of Ian's a month or so ago. He found himself on the bus next to a woman who was crying because she hadn't had the courage to hold the hand of another woman, a German tourist, who was dying in the street; she'd been crushed by a van rolling down a hill. I can't even express the suffocating sadness of this event, the victim struck down out of the blue, gasping her last in an alien city, hundreds of miles away from her loved ones and everyone she knew, who in turn might hear nothing of her lonely death for many days; the horror-struck passer-by, shocked and off-guard, unable in the heat of the moment to offer the succour we'd like to imagine we all would, devastated by that failure, guilty and sobbing; even the van driver, carted off for manslaughter after a moment's carelessness on a routine delivery. Above all the awful sudden arbitrariness of it, the lack of warning and purpose and reason, the paper-thin tissue of happenstance that separates us at every moment from a pointless and unexpected end.
It is shocking in this case because it is so relatively rare here, in our rich and orderly city, but that same flimsy boundary is being crossed all the time, all around the world, and so many people even now are gasping their last, looking around dizzy and uncomprehending as the blood rushes out and their mothers and sons and lovers are nowhere to be seen and there is no-one to say goodbye to. No-one to even care.
This has always been the case, and I've always known it. So have you. I don't really know why it has struck me so this time, why it has left me asphyxiated by a sense of fragility and impermanence. But it has.
This could all end so easily, without notice, at any time.
I'm not trying to pretend that this is news.
Posted by matt at 11:43 PM | Comments (1)
May 18, 2009
42
Here we are, then: another year older. Is that a life grown ever richer or just closer to death? Gotta love those false dichotomies.
The day passed very pleasantly, shepherded by damn fine meals -- in somewhat different modes -- in the company of the lovely Alastair and the lovely Ian. Birthday greetings arrived from around the world via various electronic media -- but particularly Facebook, which seems to have become the way this stuff is done in 2009. O brave new world.
Anyway, thanks all. It is an honour to be able to grow old -- gracefully or otherwise -- in such company. And now I'm into yet another year, and here we go again.
Posted by matt at 09:35 PM | Comments (3)
May 17, 2009
Decline
I would have assumed that the current Rambert show is their worst ever, but Ian tells me that Constant Speed, artistic director Mark Baldwin's piece about high energy physics from a year or two back, was even fucking worse. Baldwin should be profoundly ashamed of what he's done to one of the country's great dance companies. I shudder to think what depths his forthcoming Darwin show might plumb.
In the meantime, though, let's consider the material at hand. Baldwin's predecessor Christopher Bruce contributes Hush, an emetically sentimental kiddie ballet for a pretend family of pirouetting Pierrots that could stand as a performative definition of the word "twee". I can't begin to express how much I hated this unmitigated tripe, but it was made even more unbearable by the occasional fleeting reminder of the choreographic excellence of other Bruce pieces like Ghost Dances and the ever-popular Rooster. In the context of Hush those glimpses were positively insulting. It may be the single worst piece of choreography I've seen this century.
Next up was Doug Varone's Scribblings, a dismal catalogue of every last cliche of American contemporary dance set to an unlistenable score by John Adams. I dimly remember seeing Varone's own company in the Dance Umbrella ten-or-so years back. That was merely unremarkable. He has made progress since: this was truly dire. Well before the end of its not especially long running time I was feeling the urge to self-harm. Even then, it was still significantly better than Hush.
The evening was barely redeemed by Itzik Galili's crowd-pleasing romp of a finale, A Linha Curva, a Brazilian-inflected carnival which was still rubbish but at least quite fun to watch. This is the sort of thing that could be crowbarred into any number of West End musicals, chock full of cheesy verve and youthful exuberance, but with absolutely fuck all to say. I was grateful for it, as the only piece of the evening that didn't inspire thoughts of suicide, but really, who cares?
The tragedy is, Rambert is still a company of fantastic dancers, and the poor dears danced their hearts out for this. They deserve much better, and so do we. Mark, you should be composing your fucking resignation letter even now.
Posted by matt at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2009
Weird Science
So, this week's big question from the world of pharmacological neuroscience: what the bloody buggering fuck is this?
Obviously, at one level I know what it is -- it's a composite image of fluorescence artefacts in a cerebellar neuronal culture. I've overlaid two images taken with different absorption/emission spectra, shown here as red and green, which is pretty much what the emissions are. The question is, what are the artefacts? What's causing them to mysteriously appear out of nowhere, overnight? Why do they have this peculiar "wormy" appearance? And why are they so much brighter than the tags we put in deliberately?
If you have any ideas I'd be delighted to hear from you...
Posted by matt at 09:11 PM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2009
Wrong Way
Here, because absolutely everyone has been clamouring for it, is the presentation I gave last week at Cumberland Lodge, or at least a PDF approximation thereof. Click the image to download.
[Update: turns out I inadvertently uploaded a version without words, which makes it rather opaque (and also lacking in picture credits). Oops. This should now be fixed.]
Posted by matt at 06:14 PM | Comments (0)