May 2012
6 posts
Growth spurt
The Clock Tower at the north end of the Palace of Westminster is a world famous landmark. Last week I went into the Palace, for the first time ever I’m rather ashamed to say, to attend the launch of a report on unlocking sustianable growth in the UK. The report, which concentrates on science, engineering, manufacturing and desgin innovation, was compiled by PA Consulting and was the result...
April 2012
9 posts
Sparky
This 1933 picutre of Kings Boris III of Bulgaria is very relevant to the plot of Muriel Spark’s 1979 novel Territorial Rights.
Set in Venice it appears to be, in the early chapters, a a fairly straightforward tale of middle-aged heterosexual adultery mixed up with a much younger man (Robert), escaping from his male lover and millionaire “sugar daddy” Curran, by moving to...
Woman Breathing
A truely lovely photograph of the artist Jayne Wilton. Here she is breathing onto a cooled copper plate. The photography, MUA and digital post-production are by the multi-talented photographer Morgana. The concept for this photograph is by Jayne and myself for reasons that may become clear later this year!
WatchThe Cat is back and is very taken with the cartooning that accompanies this video clip. More from the Losers here.
Quilting
A beautiful quilt by Mary Rose Fry which I saw at an exhibition at my local library yesterday. She is a member of London Quilters.
March 2012
8 posts
Yorkie Bar
This is the Ron Cooke Hub, a building on the new East Campus of York University. I’ve been to a conference on student retention there and, as you can see, we’ve had fabulous weather. After the conference finished today I spent a couple of hours wandering around York. I found a bookshop specialising in secondhand music and bought two pieces for flute. There are a considerable range of...
The Blood of the Ox
A tiny street off Basil Street in Knightsbridge contains this building. I know nothing about it and cannot locate the street name either at the moment either on-line or via my AZ*. The tiles are surely those classic “ox blood” ones so beloved of Leslie Green who was responsible for the architecture of many of the iconic London Underground (now TFL) tube station designs. You can see a...
WatchHeavy Metal Cello from Apocalyptica Many thanks to Dawn.
Dancing fashion
Janie Taylor for Chloé on Nowness.com.
Modern music* and dance put to the service of fashion for the spring/summer 2011 collection from Chloé. The dancer is New York City Ballet principal Janie Taylor. My thanks to my flute teacher Katie for alerting me to this clip.
* Philip Glass’s “String Quartet No. 3, ‘Mishima’: IV. 1962: Body Building,”
The summit attained
Yesterday I finally finished Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. An epic story concerning the incarceration of Hans Castorp in a tuburculosis sanatorium in Davos just before the first world war, this is a novel about time and its perception. Initially Castorp is a visitor to his cousin and only intends to stay, as a guest, for a few weeks. However his departure is repeatedly delayed until...
February 2012
4 posts
Aerogel Art
A lovely installation at the Riflemaker gallery by the artist Liliane Lijn. This piece is called Stardust Ruins and is made of silica aerogel and (I think) acrylic. Aerogel, which looks like solid smoke, is an incredibly low density micro-porous material used in scientific applications in particle physics and space science. Poor quality mobile phone picture.
Haunting flute
A couple of weeks ago I attended, as an audience member, the Robert Winn flute masterclass at the RAM. One of the performers chose this piece which was unknown to me. I loved what I heard and so I hope will you.
January 2012
10 posts
World Heritage Site
I was at Durham University last week and spent the early morning of my visit walking around the old part of the city. Durham is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and indeed it has a magnificent Norman cathedral wonderfully located next to the equally old castle on the easily defended peninsula around which the River Wear flows. Surrounded by such massively well known and constantly photographed...
2:54
Colette and Hannah Thurlow of 2:54 (and friends) playing Scarlet
December 2011
10 posts
Still Hungry?
The photographer Rankin most certainly is! My photograph shows, in deliberately grainy fashion, issue number one of Hunger which is a very weighty collection of Rankin’s work over the last 20 years coupled with a significant number of textual essays/comments/conversations related to them. I haven’t really had much time to read it yet, so I’ll not review it here except to say...
Sunset, Moonrise, Earth inbetween
The beautiful sunset this evening and, in the opposite direction, the moon rising over London and coming out of total eclipse, though still fully in the penumbra. Photographs taken from Primrose Hill, London
Woman with musical instrument #1
Following in the footsteps of Harriet Devine, we’ve had a number of Women Reading posts here on Morgana’s Cat. For a change, and with the generous permission of Erica Mulkey (Unwoman), here is the first in a new series of women (and men too I hope) with musical instruments. Erica also provided the caption below.
This is me at age 15, photo by my mom, Kat Mulkey. I had just read a...
November 2011
7 posts
Waves of sound
On Friday I had the rare opportunity to hear the ondes Martenot played live in a concert. This unusual and early electro-acoustic instrument was used in pieces by Messaien and Jolivet following its invention in the late 1920’s. In the concert I attended there were three contemporary pieces for it too. All were with piano accompanyment (one of the modern pieces had a piano prepared with...
The Mountains, Lunar!
A lovely false-colour picture of our very familiar moon colour coded by height. This is an exciting new map resulting from the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. This digital topographic map, from Arizona State University in Tempe, is created from stereo images. These were compared one against another by pattern-matching until the best fit was found between two images with different...