I am the black sheep of my flock,
I stand alone at field’s edge.
Out here my waking hours I spend,
Chewing a hole in the hedge.
I am the outcast of this flock.
When you are gathered together,
I spend my days tied up by a rope,
Seeking an end to my tether.
Black sheep, baa baa baa
etc.
I’m reminded of these lines, from Julian Cope’s “Black Sheep Song,” because my blog has been the black sheep of the family around here, sitting around within my site but with a completely different style and lacking a common navigation which might let people know they were actually on the alistairrobinson.co.uk site.
Well now it has returned to the flock: I turned my alistairrobinson.co.uk style into a Wordpress theme, so now … read on »
Archive for the ‘aesthetics’ category…
Artists, Please Expand Your Horizons
Two Horizons is the name of an exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery Of Modern Art that I went to recently, but my topicality is lacking again because I notice it has just ended. No matter: I went so that you don’t have to, and I’m eager to share my thoughts – but that’s probably only because it gives me the chance to have a rant about conceptual art.
Taken from a private collection of fairly new art, it was a mixed bunch. I enjoyed a few of the pieces (but, let’s face it, good reviews are boring, so feel free to skip a few paragraphs.) Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Man Looking out of a Window and Arch together were fascinating. The … read on »
Saxophones and Photographs
I have two reasons for the recent lack of blog action, and I mention them because they’re quite interesting (though I feel that neither will counteract the suspicion that if one takes four months off from work then one has time to write blog posts pretty frequently): I was preparing for my saxophone grade three jazz exam; and I’ve become addicted to Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/alistairrobinson/)
Last time I mentioned the sax exam in these pages, I had just committed to do it. I said at the time that I had opted to play All Blues, Autumn Leaves and Mopti, but I decided not long after to forget about Autumn Leaves and play Lady Be Good instead. It was a good mixture of … read on »
Roger Scruton on Conceptual Art & JAR on Music
Last September, I had a debate with Brian Rowan in the comments of one of my blog posts. The debate was about music: whether you can say, for example, that Stravinsky is better than James Blunt. I said yes, you can, and Brian said no, you can’t. Well, I saw this article in the American Spectator a few days ago, by Roger Scruton, an interesting thinker who has appeared on this blog twice before. It’s mainly about visual art rather than music, but I believe the argument stands for any kind of art. He says it so much better than I do. Here’s an excerpt:
Increasingly, many teachers of the humanities agree with the untutored opinion of their incoming students, that … read on »
Geology, Landscape, Architecture and Art
Wednesday was my day off between contracts and I visited the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow as I made my unhurried way from Hyndland to Leith. I liked the work of Ilana Halperin and Toby Paterson, partly because they’re interested in things that interest me.
Ilana Halperin’s work is about the relationship between geology and civilization, and includes pencil drawings, photographs and narrative. One collection is called Nomadic Landmass, drawings from which are currently displayed quite well at the website of the Edinburgh gallery Doggerfisher. I was particularly interested in the pencil drawings, because I’ve been doing a bit of that lately (see the drawing above.)
Nomadic Landmass is inspired by the short-lived island of Ferdinandea:
“…on the trade route between … read on »
Ben Vane Winter Walk
I was a bit worried about how I’d manage on the mountain yesterday, considering that:
I’d hardly exercised at all since September (our last mountain walk);
I now had not one but two dodgy knees;
I had a cold;
I was feeling pretty run-down from all the commuting and staying up late;
It was February and I had no ice axe or crampons.
But I needn’t have worried: although it was hard-going (it always is) there was no doubt that I’d make it safely to the top, and there was barely any snow around – I was forgetting about how relatively mild it’s been this winter. In fact it was warm enough to strip down to my shirt, and it was only the cold wind at … read on »
Ted Hughes and the 21st Century Zeitgeist
Hawk Roosting by Ted Hughes
I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
The convenience of the high trees!
The air’s buoyancy and the sun’s rayAre of advantage to me;And the earth’s face upward for my inspection.
My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot
Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -
The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of … read on »
The Architecture of Antoni Gaudi
“For the first time since I had been in Barcelona I went to look at the cathedral – a modern cathedral, and one of the most hideous buildings in the world. It has four crenellated spires exactly the shape of hock bottles. Unlike most of the churches in Barcelona, it was not damaged during the Revolution–it was spared because of its ‘Artistic value’, people said. I think the anarchists showed bad taste in not blowing it up when they had the chance….”
That’s George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, writing about El Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Familia (The Expiatory Temple of the Holy Family). It is, contrary to what Orwell says, not a cathedral: it’s a Catholic Christian temple built … read on »
Russell, Proust and Peake
Reading Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy I’m struck by his intellectual generosity and fairness. He goes out of his way to extract the best from all kinds of ideas, including those that are easily rejected in the modern era, in the light of science. The book is a classic but it is widely criticized for its treatment of certain philosophers.
[Russell] treats Nietzsche with supreme cruelty as Nietzsche was a thinker that broke from the Enlightenment tradition and refused to play with numbers.
Russell’s bias and his dismissive treatment of philosophers that he does not agree with.
(Reviews at Amazon.com)
On the one hand it is obtuse not to see the (non-causal) connection between Nietzsche and Hitler, and on the other hand it … read on »
Musical Snobbery?
The other night we interviewed a prospective flatmate with the help of a good friend of Laura’s, the lovely Kris, an Australian nutritional expert. Our interviewee was Australian himself and fresh off the boat, so perhaps Kris’s Oz-related small-talk put him at his ease. So this guy Daniel – despite having an irrational fear of elevators – turned out to be a great guy, into experimental music from the rock and modern orchestral worlds (though not jazz). In particular we talked about Iannis Xenakis’s Persepolis, a stunning, tectonic piece of work that can barely be described as music at all. Daniel was the first (and last?) person I’ve met who knows about it and so I was delighted to be … read on »
©2010 Alistair Robinson