Things look different up close and far away. Stars, relationships, singing. After my father passed away, lots of accumulated family possessions were lost. Time-based things… holiday super-8s, tape recordings… sad that this stuff so inherent of life and memory were not prized more. Something from this archive was an old vinyl record cut in a carnival record-your-voice booth in the 1930s, of my grandfather singing ‘So Mary Marry Me’ to my grandmother Mary. He was a terrible singer, but the sound was so full of pathos, scratches and fluff, that this powerful evocation of lost time and love was remarkable and self-evident to the teen-age me. It inspired me to make a disc of Catriona telling stories to our son Luke when he was a baby. I wonder if any of the family will be listening to it in 100 years?
We are moved by deja-vus in all media. Music - Charles Ives Central Park in the Dark. Literature - David Mitchell Cloud Atlas (not the movie). Film - William Kentridge thinking about all the other things he has to do that day, and how it affects the work.
I was born in 1958, and am alert to it when I see it written down. The oldest satellite still circling the earth was launched in 1958. This naturally worries me.
Fingers crossed for Vanguard 1 https://www.porty.net/st-kilda/mullach.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_artificial_satellites_and_space_probes
I have a book, published in 1958 ‘A Dictionary of Abstract Painting’. The poor quality printing and thumbnail images make the work look quaint, like a stamp album, which completely loses any sense of importance and vitality the work originally held. I am drawn to the images still.
Francis Bacon never saw the Velasquez popes, he painted his versions from magazines.
Here is an image of the dictionary, opened at the page Hilma af Klint should be. The rather beautiful 10 Kensitas cigarette card bookmark came inside when I bought it in the charity shop. Another deja-vu.
Apologies, I seem to have strayed into oblongs. Easily done.
