Big Yellow Taxi and Nothing but Flowers

I rather like the contrasts presented in these two songs.

Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchel and Nothing but Flowers by Talking Heads

Beauty

I found this on youtube and had to post it to my blog. Just click here.

Ali Farka Toure & Toumani Diabate

Here is a New Year gift.

A video of Ali Farka Toure and Toumani Diabate - amazing!!

New Year

Photo New Year Fireworks London by Mike Campbell

We watched the fireworks at the London Eye from about ten miles away. We parked the cars outside Richmond Park and walked through the predestrian gates at The Star and Garter on Richmond Hill. Then we walked a little way along the road towards Holly Lodge where during the day there is a great view over central and east London. We stood there looking out with around 100 other people.

The fireworks were amazing even from this distance. We drank Champagne, sang and watched Chinese Lanterns rise and drift east towards Roehampton and Sheen.

Happy New Year!!

winter solstice
all night
from rooftops to drains
the slow thaw
like the ticking of a thousand clocks

dawn
a bloom of bruised light
rises in the east

Some Christmas Carol Links

Here are a couple of links to some beautiful Christmas Carols I've been bumping into recently. I thought you might like them.

Watch this space more may follow.

The Holly and the Ivy performed by Loreena McKennit


The Holly and the Ivy performed by Sedayne


O Come O Come Emmanuel performed by Enya

I walk into thick fog
and bring back a poem

Blue Snow

at twilight
fields of blue snow
glowing


Photo Cold Winter Landscape by D Reichardt

on the glazed grey ice
splashed and dazzled
red tail lights

across the garden
where I've retraced my steps
the snow remembers me

in the hush of a grey dawn
snow is whispering


...


in the hush of a grey dawn
the hiss of snow
slowly falling

frost falling
like the soft paws of a cat
gently spreading

all night
disturbed by frost
softly falling

Sunrise reveals
fields dissolved
with frost

Autumn Leaves

mist stained yellow
with the leaves


Photo by Mike Epp

this night
wrapped up in sleep
and fog pressing at my window

Rememberance Sunday

our fragile silence
framed by cannon fire and
a lonely bugle's call
into mist

dead leaves collect
around the war memorial
the wind's wreaths

autumn twilight
even the gutters sing with
gusting tongues of fire

Photo Clogging up the gutter by Deannster

Waiting for the Frost

tonight I am waiting up for the frost
silently falling -
a white lining in the streets
the bronzed leaves glazed white

remembering frozen breath upon the window pane.


(c) David Loffman

Red Leaves Close Up

a patchwork wreath of rust red leaves

Photo Red Leaves by David Loffman

Art review Paul Gauguin at Tate Modern Maker of Myth

I didn't know much about Paul Gauguin before I went into this exhibition. But what I'd seen of his painting really impressed me. And this helped me feel sympathetic towards him. However coming away from the exhibition I realised I didn't like him at all. And sadly this has affected my thoughts about his work.

However there was much to admire. Firstly Gauguin is a painter of place. His work is embedded in the locations he works in. Whatever he chooses to be a subject, the landscape bursts out, at every opportunity with passion and with vitality. It is a living landscape. And his subjects - generally women, clothed and unclothed are extensions of this landscape. I realise actually that his feelings about landscape are deeply connected to the women he paints. Someone said to me onece that painting is a way of possessing and owning the subject. So the message of these paintings is one of possession and ownership. This was expressed both sexually in Gauguin,s personal life and politically in France's colonial projects in French Polynesia.

His representation of the elements is attractive. His work seems dominated by earth and fire, by vibrant reds and rich shades of green. He has a wide ranging vocabulary of colour, incredibly attractive, it draws the eye. I am captivated by it. I am referring specifcally to the modern abstracted 20th century landscapes rather than the post impressionistic detailed painting of the earlier 19th century work. At times the earth is infused with fire, the earth glows; the earth is a thin transparent skin that covers the earth’s furnace below. The earth feels like a simmering volcano ready to explode and bathe everything with warmth. And yet I am aware of the awe and attraction of violence. I'm attracted to the monochrome oil seed rape fields on May and June. perhaps it's the uniform lines, the blanket, garish colour. And I know it is a form of violence, an expression of power and control of the land. It is the power of the tyrannt. A male power that wants to subdue and control.

I'm also attracted to his depictions of people including women. I don't think it is a sexual thing. For he infuses his figures with a vitality and a life of there own. I don’t know how he does it. Perhaps it is there posture, their body language or the colours or tones he uses. The painting I've posted above I think is exraordinary. There is something quite masculine about these women. The build is solid and broad. But the faces are touched with a individuality, a life force of their own.

Theatre Review Tribes by Nina Raine at The Royal Court

“How can you feel a feeling unless you have the word for it”.

‘Tribes’ is a play about a family coping with deafness. 'Tribes' is a play about love.'Tribes' is a play about what families do to each other. 'Tribes' is a play about communication. It's about being human.

Things are changing in this family. And can they cope with those changes? They are a well educated middle class family – two parents – he’s an academic, she’s writing a novel - and three adult children – they’ve all got degrees – Daniel’s doing a PhD - in the limitations of language, Ruth has ambitions to be an opera singer and Billy... - all in their twenties.

It opens around a kitchen table set probably in the country. We see them finishing a meal but we quickly realise it’s a battle ground where five egos battle it out. Ruth and Daniel have come back to the family home. They are all, highly opinionated, very articulate, offensive, aggressive and funny. Except for Billy, who sits silently throughout the meal and arguments, trying to follow what everyone is talking about. But the arguments are all underpinned by love. Or at least they believe that its love and it seems that way to us too.

But the quick fire competitive banter hides uncomfortable truths. These unspoken truths are focussed on Billy. He is deaf from birth. His mother has spent years teaching him how to speak. He has grown up in a safe and protected family home where his deafness is not seen as a handicap. And he has managed to speak and lip read throughout his life. The family especially Chris – the father is opposed to any kind of discrimination or attempt to see Billy as disabled. He rejects the emerging deaf culture with its aggressive challenges to the hearing community.

Billy brings a girlfriend home. Her parents are deaf and she is slowly becoming deaf through a genetic disorder. And although their experiences are different, at this point in their lives they meet and appear to get on well. But the tensions within that relationship tear it apart. However Sylvia introduces Billy to deaf culture. He discovers sign language and a new empowered awareness of his situation and relationship to the rest of the family.

The first Act of the play feels like an Ayckbourn domestic comedy. But the second Act takes the play onto a different level. Billy refuses to lip read. He will only sign and he expects them to learn to sign. He leaves the family home and moves in with Sylvia. As the breach between the family develops – Daniel begins to stutter again – an old problem they thought was solved - and hears voices in his head. Ruth hears her voice on a tape and hates it, she cannot find a job or a boyfriend. Beth – their mother has writers’ block.

This theme of voice is so beautifully played out through the play. The articulate become inarticulate; and the voiceless Billy asserts his signed voice and challenges them all to really and deeply listen to each other rather than speak. I wonder whether their voices have isolated themselves from the rest of the world. I wonder if the only place they feel safe is around that kitchen table in a sort of verbal sword fight. Billy challenges them – offers them another way to live.

At the end Daniel shrunken with insistent, negative, interior voices and a paralysing stutter manages to sign to Billy ‘Love’. And all of them watch – maybe even Chris will learn.

Tribes is beautifully acted. A script that bristles with intelligence and wit. A performance both thought provoking and entertaining.

river
gold leaf
in the setting sun

I've fallen among leaves
the soft hollow drum of the earth
beneath me

Camargue Fragments IV

IV Bull

In the arena
brute beautiful,
black blooded and bulging
a burning bundle of muscle.
A bursting bulk –
a sun basted, burnished beast.
A brazen bullet
of bull.

Photo Bull by David Loffman

Camargue Fragments V

V Salt Mountain

Flat land.

A sea breached sand bank,
leaving salt pans
stretched tight as a drum -
a thin skin of trapped sea
slowly simmering on the rack
of blind white sun

till a salt crust emerges
out of buckled heat.
Then salt scooped
clamped in metal
heaped onto a glazed and glacial
white salt silt mount
an ice berg among the sand dunes.


Photo Salt Mountain by David Loffman

At Cannes

I’ve not swum in the sea since I was 17. It was always a bit messy and awkward for me – all that bare flesh and wet sand sticking to the skin and too much sun and no shade and the crowds then being ill really put a stop to it completely.

One day this summer we decided to drive to Cannes. The car was full, hot and stuffy. There were four beach desperate children in the back and four adults squashed in the middle and in the front. But there was nowhere to park. We caught glimpses of the sea but the cars were parked nose to tail and the long slow congested line of cars coughed and spluttered there way passed the public beaches, then the private beaches and back to the public beaches.

Then suddenly Alex spotted a disabled parking bay and we made our way to it. It had an automatic bollard in the middle so we could not park. And Alex strode off looking for someone to help. He returned with a guy. I showed him my blue badge. And somewhere in our poor French and his minimal English we understood that the parking bay was reserved for disabled people who wanted to use the beach. And I understood what he meant was disabled people who wanted to get into the water. This was a handiplage.

I looked around at the four despairing children and realised the hopelessness of our situation. It was going to have to be this beach or we were going to have to give up on Cannes. So I made the ultimate sacrifice and told him I wanted to go into the sea. And so we parked.

It was a bit of a hassle working out the practical details but in the end I gave away my car key and wallet to someone. Folded away my glasses and gave them to someone else. Then in a changing room I took of my artificial legs and gave them to a complete stranger to look after. I borrowed Alex’s trunks. Transferred onto a wheelchair and was wheeled down a ramp to the sea. I took off my shirt. I put on a life jacket and holding Iona’s hand I was wheeled out into the sea. Shallow at first, waist, ribs, chest. And then he just tipped me out into the sea.

I lay on my back. I seemed to have let go of everything. So many burdens just lifted and drifted from me. I let the water carry me.

So there I was on the crowded beach at Cannes, where so many beautiful people sunbathed and swam. There I was without legs, white and over weight, swimming and free.

Camargue Fragments

I The Journey South From Arles

Where the fresh waters of the Rhone open
to subsume the land -
where the middle sea spills over lips of sand.

There where a triangle of earth
becomes wafer thin.
We drive passed villages
orchards and vineyards.

Vertical lines shorten.
Farm houses and barns squat
among sunken rice fields
framed by reed beds and bamboo.

And the fertile greens surrender
to brown stalks
and stunted trees.

Horizons flatten under advancing sky.

The road drives us on
relentlessly into heat
passed white salt pans
and mud flats.

Land shrivels to black and white.
In the distance
the scattered black knots of bulls.
And white horses
gather at the edge of fields
like cotton grass
braced against the mistral.

And still further out
beyond where the soft vague boundaries
of mud flats and salt marsh merge.
Sand dunes rise into the salt air -
and the open arms of the river
dissolves into the sea.



© David Loffman

August 2010

Film Review Thin Red Line by Terrence Malick

This year the director Terrence Malick will release his sixth film - 'The Tree of Life'. His first film Badlands was released in 1973 - 37 years ago. He has made some of the most beautiful films I have ever seen and in anticipation of 'The Tree of Life' I'm going to review all five of his previous films over the next couple of months. You can read my review of The New World - here


The Thin Red Line was released in 1998 and marks the return to film making of director/writer Terrence Malick after a 25 year absence.

It is a two and a half hour meditation on war. It is a visual poem. The plot seems secondary to the film. It forms a structure to hang the film on.

A newly arrived division of US infantry struggle to capture a Japanese machine gun emplacement that dominates the whole area. Eventually they destroy the gun emplacement, take the Japanese as prisoners and are rewarded with a week ‘off the line’. After they return to the campaign under new leadership they continue their advance.














The film combines different voices and narratives of the men of C Company who form part of the final stages of the Battle of Guadalcanal fought in the Pacific Solomon Islands in 1942. The film is based on the 1962 autobiographical novel by James Jones. Although this is clearly a war film full of the action and violence we expect from a war film - yet at its heart are the characters, their emotions and the relationships of a small group of soldiers who fight against a challenging natural environment, the Japanese and their own thoughts, doubts and fears.

This is emphasised by the different narrators that conduct us through the film. Unlike Malick’s earlier films – 'Badlands' and 'Days of Heaven', this film combines the internal narratives of a war weary Sergeant, a power hungry Colonel, a Private who has known only desertion and AWOL, and a Company Commander who is struggling with his abilities as a leader. These different narratives offer us very different perspectives on the events of August 1942. And this creates an intimacy with the characters and at the same time enables us to see these events from different points of view. However I feel the film is framed by the first narrative we hear - that of Private Witt. And I think we see the film ultimately from his perspective. His voice carries the soul of the film.

These voices help make it a very warm and human film. Another way in which the film manages to radiate humanity comes as we are made aware from the very beginning that this war has superimposed itself on a landscape and the Solomon islanders that live here. Malick wants us to know that the conflict is just passing through. That the landscape and its people form part of a continuum that co-exists and will continue long after the war has ended. This is brought home early on in the film. As the soldiers move stealthily and carefully through the jungle, an old Solomon islander, half naked and holding a stick, appears from nowhere walking in the opposite direction, glancing curiously at the men, dressed in combats, fully armed and wary, going about his own business. It is a moment of irony that is almost absurd. Such beauty contrasted with such horror.

And this brief encounter offers us a wider perspective and commentary on the events of the film. Not only an American perspective but Malick here offers us a perspective from the Solomon islanders themselves. In another part of the film Witt is speaking to a young mother and trying to make friends with her son. The boy barely talks – but she does. The portrayal of both the old man and the young mother reject any stereotypical images we may have of the indigenous people.














But the film also offers us a Japanese perspective - not in words but in mime and in highly stylised postures . I don’t know very much about Noh Theatre but I wonder if the defeated Japanese are portrayed as traditional Noh characters. Their pained and agonised expressions like Noh masks, their cries of despair like chants, and their economic use of language are all features of Noh Theatre.

Well it seems I could go on and on about this film. But I’ll finish off with these few comments. This film marked the return of Malick to Hollywood after a twenty five year absence from film making. They knew he was good. And everyone wanted a piece of it. The film has John Travolta and George Clooney, Sean Penn, John Cusack, James Caviezel and an amazing performance from Nick Nolte.

John Toll's cinematography was extraordinary. He manages to capture the action and horror of war in one moment and the sublime beauty of the natural world in the next. He seemed to tap into Malick’s poetic vision of the film.















And the music seemed to capture the ethereal quality of the film. Hans Zimmer's score along with Faure’s In Paradism from the Requiem and music by Arvo Part just wove together all the different strands of the film into a poem.

Olive Grove

I

asleep in the olive grove
below us the sea
above - hills

II

awake in the olive grove
church bells, cicadas
shrill children's voices


Photo Old Olive Grove by Greenery

Einschusse

Based on the art work "Einschusse" by Anselm Kiefer

Blasted grey stumps of vineyard and olive grove
buckled over the battleground
a grey matted lining of ash

except where the punctured earth
oozes blood and water
stains the ash with red mucus.

No mangled bodies -
no clawing of scavengers -
no flash of cannon fire -
or the sound of women weeping.

No cries of the dying -
or the sound of distant water
over the cracked toxic land -
just the raw and awed silence of atrocity.


Einschusse by Anselm Kiefer
from The Summer Exhibition 2010

© David Loffman


19 August 2010

Suburban Furniture

Photo Green Pole by David Loffman

An abandoned slowly corroding stump of metal from another century. Half hidden in ivy, tucked in beside a fence on the pavement. A pleated green pillar at its base, bitten off at the top, where the wind whispers over its rusted serrated edges. One jigsaw piece left only.Invisible to pedestrians, its purpose almost forgotten.

Grey Cloud Blue Sky

I am defined by sunlight
dissolved by the
grey swell of cloud


Photo Grey Cloud Blue Sky by roujo

Beyond the Border Wales International Storytelling Festival 2010

What more could you want?

On Saturday morning I sat in the shade, in the Blue Garden. The sun shinning, a mug of freshly made coffee in my hand. And on the stage Bro Ar Men - a world music group playing Oud, Armenian flutes and a Breton harp. This was my introduction to the 2010 Beyond the Border festival at St Donats in South Wales.

We've been here at least 4 times before so we know our way around. The children are older now and are already at the Bradenstoke Hall for the Georgian Singing Workshop. I expect we'll meet up for lunch and maybe hear something together later. But for now I'm happy just to sit and listen as the music drifts over the terraced rose gardens and down to the jousting field. Perhaps they can hear it on the beach or on the fields above the cliffs.

When the set finishes I make my way to the upper lawns. I don't really care about lunch - I'm hungry for stories. At 1.00 I hear Ben Hagarty perform Gilgamesh accompanied by Manya Maratou on various instruments in Bradenstoke Hall - a beautifully restored building that forms part of a medieval castle. When it finishes at 4.00 I have to make my way quickly to the Tythe Barn to hear Hugh Lupton tell stories of the Tylwyth Teg.

These two story tellers are almost singlehandedly responsible for the renaissance in story telling in this country that began in the 60's. Then there is an hour to eat something. Katy buys me a lamb burger.

And then something out of this world happens. In the Pavilion on the upper rose garden Michael Harvey, Lynne Denman and Stacey Blythe perform 'Hunting the Giant's Daughter'. I have never heard Welsh so beautifully spoken or sung before. Suddenly I am in love with this language. The story is spell binding - totally transporting. It twists and turns - at one moment tragic, at another absurd and at the next gruesome, and romantic. They get a standing ovation when it finishes. I've never seen that before here. When it finishes at 9.0 I am bursting with story. I am filled to over flowing. But I make my way back to the Tythe Barn to hear Xanthe Gresham's erotic stories of Aphrodite.

Then I make my slow way back to the tent above the festival to the fields that over look the festival site. I am exhausted. My dreams filled with the distant sound of the sea breaking on beaches below and a strange tapestry of giants and gods, Duduk and drum.

Sunday is slow. There are about 2000 people here spread out over the site. Strangers smile at me, they talk about what they have heard. They tell me how well I manage the stairs. They recommend someone to hear.

I buy coffee at the Arts Centre and then stroll down to the Pavilion to hear Mary-Anne Roberts tell stories of Trinidad. But really I'm just waiting for Hugh Lupton and the English Acoustic Collective at 2.00. It is a mesmerising performance of Hugh Lupton's The Homing Stone with music composed by Chris Wood of the English Acoustic Collective. When it finishes I notice people in tears. We cannot stop clapping. It goes on and on for ages.

Afterwards I go up to Hugh Lupton. I tell him what I think. We chat about Alan Garner and the last time we met. Afterwards I stroll around a bit. I get a coffee, sit it one of the rose gardens. I rest and get ready for the journey home. They will be telling stories here until midnight but I am complete. My cup over flows.

Click here for the Beyond the Border photo gallery

hot dry river bed
scorched Lomandra and Acacia -
the indifferent earth


written with Melanie Bishop

Photo taken from Kate's Photo Diary

you think you've come
to the end of the day
but there is more -
summer nights

arc of blue light
where dawn and dusk
almost touch

house of white roses
heavy headed
tossed on the breeze

spring rain
whispering
a soft tattoo

this morning
bursts with sunlight and bird song
such responsibility

the midnight forest
filled with wood smoke
and the call of a nightingale

Late May
the lonely call of a nightingale
withered bluebells

The Tallis Scholars

I went to hear The Tallis Scholars at the Cadogan Hall on Tuesday.It was a fantastic evening. I wanted to go especially because they sung a Palistrina Mass - Missa Papae Marcelli - I first heard in 1977. It was my first experience of Palistrina and I fell in love with it immediately. I used to play it a lot when I was ill in the 1970's and it was a real comfort to me then. And had not heard it for years. It was great to hear it performed live. But the whole evening was fabulous.

Their voices like flames in a fire ignited with each breath, red embers glowing through the spring twilight, lighting my way home through the darkness. Their voices still warming me as I write this.

escaped sunlight
on the woodland paths
primrose and anemone

cherry blossom
withered dirty pink
pools around the trunk

blue earth below
green sky above
the bluebell wood

Photo Bluebells in Micheldever Wood, Hampshire by Anguskirk

on the priory lawns
hail stones and daisies

fallen petals
in the gutter -
broken promises

Photo by iheartpandas