On the Beat

A few weeks ago, I read that "people living in Scotland may be happier than those living in the rest of the UK". (I thought I had posted about it but I can't find it - and I don't think this is the article I read, either, nor this one, but you get the drift.)

But then this morning I heard that Edinburgh [is] apparently the most miserable place in Britain.

So am I meant to be happy or miserable?

...You know me - me, I'm all smiles...

I have been listening to a couple of radio programmes on BBC’s iPlayer this afternoon.

The radio iPlayer is a little different to the tv version.

For one thing, it was designed by Spinal Tap.

The volume control goes up to 11 – that little bit louder.

The V&A has a large retrospective of the model and photographer Lee Miller, marking the centenary of her birth and thirty years since her death. I was familiar with her pictures – I went to a show of her work several years ago (in Amsterdam, I think), and found them captivating.

She had an interesting – and disturbing - life: she grew up being photographed by her father, and became a model; she moved to Paris where she sought out the surrealist photographer Man Ray and became his associate and lover. With Ray she helped develop some startling images, and discovered solarisation, producing startling, burnt-out images.

She moved back to the States, setting up her own studio in New York, before moving back to Europe, marrying (for a while) and travelling around Europe and the Middle East, all the while taking stunning images – seeing the surreal in the every day. Her eye for detail – caught in the exhibition in a series of pictures that only remain as contact images (the same size as the negative)– was immaculate.

Portrait of Space - from the Daily Telegraph website.

Her most powerful images were taken in the second world war: the world gone mad, all she had to do was point the camera to catch her glimpses of the unreal. The horrors of her pictures from Buchenwald – piles of shoes; piles of bodies – are still resonant. There is a famous image of her bathing in Hitler’s bath after the fall of Berlin.

After the war, she remarried the art collector Roland Penrose (whose collection forms the basis for the Dean Gallery’s rich archive of surrealist pictures) and in the 1950s she stopped taking pictures; I read somewhere that her son Anthony Penrose was unaware of her body of work until her was sorting out her affairs following her death.

This was a brilliant show, capturing Miller’s influential vision: it was full of beautiful, compelling images, spanning fashion, portraiture, architecture – and war.

I have only one quibble: one of Miller’s most stunning, startling images wasn’t on show. Picturing bricks pouring through the door of a bombed out church, this photograph has a strong pull on my imagination.

Non-Conformist Chapel - from the Columbia University alumni magazine website.

The Lee Miller Archive contains many of the images from the exhibition, including the pictures I have linked to here.

On Thursday, the tube I was on stopped at Oxford Circus, and I noticed that the walls of the tunnel were being stripped of layers of posters and cleaned.

Yesterday I went back and got off the tube to have a better look. It felt like I was an archaeologist, looking down through the layers to different ages.

It also looked like abstract paintings – particularly those by Clyfford Still: jagged lightning cutting across the walls.

I took a lot of pictures; here are some of them.

(Also, when I got back from Oxford Circus and was sitting comfortably at my laptop, looking through my friends page, I saw this post by the rather wonderful tubewhore, who had exactly the same idea, although she was at Leicester Square; perhaps they are scraping the posters away throughout the West End.)

( more pictures beneath the cut )

Surreal moment of the week

Last night I was sitting watching TV; strangely I found myself watching Gardener's World. I don't have a garden, and while I am passionate about some plants, gardening has really never been my thing. But I rather like watching gardening shows on TV.

Last night's programme was mostly about protecting plants from drying out during the heat of the summer.

And after hearing about floods throughout central England, three motorways (the M4 M5 and M50) closed because of rain, trains unable to run in case the tracks were washed - well, the idea that there were gardeners around Britain thinking how they could stop their garden plants drying out seemed quite quite bizarre.

They are probably thinking how to stop them drowning.

Seagulls in Aberdeen

The story, from the BBC Scotland website

Video of the BBC footage, on YouTube

Dramatic U-turn of the week

I was standing in Sainsbury's, waiting to pay. And they had a pile of the new Harry Potter book, at half price. So I bought one. Largely because I couldn't think of a reason not to - I know I am going to buy it at some point (though I was intending to wait for the paperback), and at half price it just seemed to make sense.