Cannons, disguised as flowers
hello,
I’m writing this watching the rain pour down on the second day of Le Tour. I’m properly committing this year. Going to watch as much as possible.
Here are 5 things.
I’ve been playing with TikTok a lot recently. Posting something every day, just as an experiment, as a way of understanding something. It’s become a sort of daily blogging, in a way I like, the form makes it different. Like this bit of Louise Glück I came across:
"So it is true after all, not merelya rule of art:
change your form and you change your nature.
And time does this to us.”
(Also)
The writer Timothy O’Grady was asked if he still played golf:
“Once a year only. I used to play with the poet Matthew Sweeney [who died in 2018] and we’d go to these bohemian parties where everybody hated golf. We used to try to provoke them: they all thought it was bourgeois, but to me it’s the most democratic sport. Wherever the ball goes, you can’t blame anyone else – you put it there.”
I’m not sure that’s really what democratic means but I love that thought - wherever the ball goes, you put it there.
This review of the second day of the first Test at Headingley quotes Schumann describing Chopin’s piano music as “cannons, disguised as flowers”. So good.
This great interview with Jenny Saville has nice little thoughts on some of the incidentals of the artistic life - the way the art lifestyle intersects with the art. She talks about how important she found Cy Twombly:
““I went to a lot of Cy’s shows, and watched the way he was, and the way he lived, and the way he travelled,” she told me. “They showed a very international way of being an artist which was very different from a kitchen-sink, British, gray way of being a painter—like Frank Auerbach taking a sandwich in a bag down to the studio every day. Cy would be taking a boat down the Nile.”
And here’s a good listen, including Lucy Mangan prescribing Jack Reacher as treatment for post-natal depression.
PROMOTIONAL NEWS
I finished my first piece of music for ages. A long slow ambient thing. My Spotify dashboard tells me I’ve had 2 all-times streams and urges me to “Keep the momentum building”. Just think if you click and play you’ll increase my streams by 50%. It’s also on Bandcamp.
And, if you don’t have enough talk about advertising and AI in your life, you can have me and Flora interviewing Michael Lee of VCCP. Podcast. YouTube.
I’ll give you back your day.
russell
(There are 1013 of you. The average atmospheric pressure at sea level is 1013 hPa(mbar).)