Time Flies, Doesn't It?
Yesterday evening's education was first a film Looking for the Light, about the photography of Jane Bown. What a wonderful, gentle, yet determined lady, who served the Observer for such a long long time, and delivered some of the best, well-captured portraits of our time. Beckett was my favourite, and I do believe it became an iconic image. Well done to the film-makers Luke Dodd and Michael Whyte, you can find it on Amazon Prime.
Also from that same source, found by pressing the related button, it was Michaelangelo: Self Poetry, his life story told in his own words. A portrayal by Robert Snyder, who may or may not be related to Gary Snyder of Poets of the Peaks fame, please let me know if you have any back story.
The evening followed a bright afternoon, thanks to our lively The Arts session, one highlight of which was seeing the progress of Malcolm Tait's latest painting, via six photographs, one taken at each stage of a substantially changing piece of work.
Next up on the stereo is the playlist Walk on the Wild Side by Lou Reed which apparently was recorded in 1972 when I was a youthful twenty years old.
The lyrics remind me, that at Manchester's Apollo we saw AC-DC. It was the first night for the new singer Brian Johnson, after the tragic death of Bon Scott. But oh how time plays tricks with the memory, for this must have been in the early nineteen-eighties, when I would be approaching thirty, eight years then gone, in the flick of an eye.
Back to Poets of the Peaks, here is a poem of mine, written in 2005 whilst studying at Buxton, the capital of the UK's High Peak region:
Only taken down for dusting
I could paint your picture
In the richness and the ruby
I could throw you pearls
Like dukes and earls
I could dress you
In all your fairest finery
And build some rooms
With gold from looms
Of the Caribbean’s finest leaf
Paste words on walls
From old Egyptian scrolls
Stolen by the kindest thief
Plums and preens and old VisQueens
Imaginary dreams, streams of themes
Of a world of Wagner
The chandelier and leaf veneer
In mysticism and marble
Chaise lounge for laid back languor
Wrapped in silk
And bathed in milk
Chardonnay for dessert
The harp would play in solo
Plucked by Marco Polo
And Caesar in his toga
Why these schemes I fold
To reach a time unsold
To reach a you much further
Now placed back on the pedestal
You were only taken down for dusting
Dust off the cobwebs in my parlour
Ardour may have followed better
But that would get too close
For now it is from a distance
The thoughts I trawl; to try escape her
A past, a present, a future, all now
transferred to parchment paper
