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...
WatchThe amazing Bellatrix, World Champion Beatboxer with the Boxettes. For good flute playing, for which I strive, expert control and lack of the “wrong” type of lip tension is critical and I find getting this correct one of my greatest challenges. Just watch Bellatrix’ lips when she makes her “lip bass” sound - incredible!
The Boxettes are appearing at the Kings Place,...
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...
The Mountains, Magical!
In an earlier post I mentioned that some of the characters in Tintin in the New World were inspired by Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I have now borrowed The Magic Mountain (Lowe-Porter translation) and have read about 10% of it. I’m clearly not going to comment on the book until I have finished it but I was interested by the opening description of Hans Castorp’s journey...
Autumn Colour, this time with added colour!
Two people who viewed my recent picture of autumn leaves which was in black and white commented that it would have been also good to see it in colour. So, Lady A and Sir R, here it is!
October 2011
14 posts
Stripey! →
In the spirit of the previous photograph here’s something that caught the cat’s eye today.
Tintin grows up
I have just finished Frederic Tuten’s novel Tintin in the new World which has a lovely cover picture of Tintin and Milou (Snowy in English) by Roy Lichtenstein. In this clever book, which borrows characters from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, we find Tintin discovering sex, love, jealousy, hate, remorse and finally death. Written very much in the style of Hegre’s graphical...
Plane to see
Platanus × acerifolia, London. Photographed with Tokina 100mm F/2.8 Macro AT-X lens on a Nikon D70
Here's the church and here's the steeple
The view from the top of Primrose Hill, London this morning. One old and distinguished landmark, St. Paul’s Cathedral, is here balanced by the very distinctive shape of the nearly completed “Shard”.
Zoon Tune
On Sunday I attended a recital by the Dutch flautist Jacques Zoon at the Royal Academy of Music in London. Zoon played the Bach Sonata in A major, a modern Sonatina by Jaap Geraedts and an arrangement of the famous Brahms Violin Sonata #2. In all three pieces he was most ably accompanied by the pianist Cameron Roberts. Zoon plays, unusually these days, on a wooden flute with wooden headjoint,...
11 tags
WatchTreat your ears right. Listen to this album. Then give generously! Morgana’s Cat has.
Unwoman says things: Making a documentary. Please... →
unw0man:
I am working on an email blast to send everyone but it’s being waylaid by (gladly) stamping lots of 1” buttons for Occupy SF tonight. In the meantime, here is a link to my kickstarter for this documentary. It will be shot on my trip up to Seattle for SteamCon, with stops to play in Portland,…
Please give generously! I have.
September 2011
11 posts
Steaming Hot
Fan of the Cat commented that my recent post of Morgana was “steaming hot”. Well here’s something else that is both hot and steamy. A closeup of the valve gear on the Vale of Rheidol railway’s 2-6-2T #8. Even if you have no interest in steam trains at all this is a lovely narrow gauge line which travels up through a beautiful tree-lined valley. The railway starts from the...
1 tag
When in Venice
“But swear, you have to swear, that when you see him for the first time in his cot, you’re not going to say that he resembles Van Eyck’s baby Jesus in the Louvre Museum.”
I knew that baby Jesus. She had placed him as background (that was her word) on her computer. He appeared as soon as she turned it on. He was the cutest, the cheekiest, the funniest of all the baby...
