SAY SO

It's spooky on the tube, continually looking out for strange people leaving bombs at the doors as they get off.

Stefan & Zeudi never got to Bournemouth. The delay in Montecarlo didn't leave them enough time to get to airport and to get their dance clothes from Bassano. Stefan came to London by himself on Friday night & stayed for the weekend. On Saturday he discovered that the bombs had persuaded Ryan Air to offer change-of-flight without the penalty, so they could have come in fact, on a later plane. On that basis there was an attempt to get Zeudi to London on Saturday morning with the intention of dancing Latin at Bournemouth, but by then she had other arrangements.

On the first day of the British Gym Champs [the overall result based on all 4 pieces] Alice came 11th and on Beam 5th. The big surprise came on the second day, the individual pieces. She qualified for Beam only and came 2nd [the winner was the overall winner Olympian Beth Tweddle]. Alice arrived on Monday - for lunch - with a very big medal in her hand.

I'm leaving London tomorrow, arriving Saturday morning [NZ time] so will probably be internet silent for a few days.

Explosion on Underground -- but I dont have any details, half-heard radio behind me, injuries, deaths, chaos, police sirens. London will be chaotic, buses slow, no trains? Another siren...

Yesterday looking at drawings in dealer galleries -- Robert Bevan's, Derain's -- including one made in Cassis c 1902

I forgot to mention the interesting show of Italian 50s/60s painting at Tate I saw on Tuesday -- a good chance to see a roomful of Albert Burri's, pittura povera?, & one of Piero Manzoni's white canvases with kaolin covered cloth, paper, bread rolls...

Stefan's phone call last night suggests that the Bournemouth trip is in the balance -- problems in Monte Carlo...

Tate Britain was crowded -- mainly for the Frida Kahlo show, which I didn't even try. In the 5th floor cafe space there was a large merchandising space -- a big trolley with over 3,000 Kahlo catalogues -- how long will they last? -- Kahlo jewellery hair grips butterfly brooches large and small necklaces & plenty of printed matter.

The c.70s show 'Open Systems: rethinking Art c.1970' was almost good value at £7 entrance [Donations requested: at the main door £3 and at the Cloakroom £2]. Nice 'cube' works and a whole room with Mel Bochner style measurements, Dan Graham spaces and photos, a Broodthaers museum piece, an anarchitecture room installation...& a good sit down with Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque [1969] -- a slide lecture with a ghostly tape of the voice talking to an unseen audience -- low key anarthistory -- with photos that favoured stacking and seriality uncertainty and heaps, & ghostly slide-changes, none of which went wrong, a rarity.

Weather has turned to rubbish -- grey -- drippy showers -- & cold. Maybe it'll be ok for Bournemouth at the weekend. Weather didnt seriously impede my march up Charing X rd looking for books. Temptation on all sides, most, but not quite all, well resisted.

Somehow I took the wrong path in Regent's Park & ended up in West Euston instead of Harley street -- so walk to Wigmore Hall for Sunday coffee-concert took me 50 mins instead of half-hour -- it turned out to be young piano duo Simon Crawford-Phillips & Philip Moore playing music by Medtner op 58; Rachmaninov Suite no2; Oscar Strasnoy Bloc-Notes D'Ephemera [2001] & Wittold Lutoslawski Var on a theme of Paganini -- this played neatly into my preoccupation with Russian & e European music/dance -- the duo was good, I liked the way they changed painos between pieces, like changing ends at tennis.

Simon C-P seems to be the stolid serious still one and Philip the more demonstrative emotional flamboyant personality. The Medtner was thoroughly Russian in material and staid in harmony and rhythm -- I liked best the Waltz of the Rachamnainov Suite -- the strasnoty was welcome & had a nice conversational modern tone to it -- I'd like to hear more -- the Lutoslawski was brilliant and humorous playing on the familiar old Paganini theme. Then back to mothere's flat for Wimbledon Men's final on TV -- too easy for Federer.

I've read with pleasure 'Prokofiev on Prokofiev' it runs from his birth in 1891 to 1915, graduation from the Peterburg Conservatory. Not only a great intelligence at music / work, but a memoir written in the 1930s based closely on his diaries and family letters, with close critical review of his own early music. This has the advantage of largely excluding the colouring of reminiscence and at the same time comiung close to the text produced at the time -- prior to correction, reflection, and convenient hiding of deficiencies. The family life, the playing of games with other children, the delight in walking on stilts, erudition trained on detailed knowledge of the Russian naval fleet [much of it sunk in 1905 by the Japanese to Prokofiev's serious distress], rurla ligfe. travel on trains -- 3 days to Moscow -- & furhter to St Petersburg, the habitual recoirding of information and delight in cataloguing things -- all there. The regular textbook statement that he was a pupil of Lyadov has survived the evidence of this book that Lyadov was a lazy and unpleasant pedantic teacher of little help to him, while the reality of Gliere's coaching through 2 summers, tho not sufficient was obviously of permanent value. There's a lot about Glazounov and Rimsky-Korsakov as teachers and musicians. Throughout P is a permanent innocent about music, about professional musical life & intrigue, & about sex. Even at the end of his Conservatory days it had to be explained to him that 'Glazounov is away in Riga' meant Glazounov was suffering from another alcoholic binge. P's account of his childhood opera The Giant, with absurd childish plot and libretto, is one of the funniest things I've read. Anyway, I was off on Friday to Chappell's again and bought the 'Visions Fugitives', worked away at sight-reading them on one of the Yamaha electronics there.

The short 'Towards Ballet', 1934, essay by Adrian Stokes is my current reading -- that's, as in all Stokes, straining after an intellectual conspectus of the arts, and comes up with a mass of insights and acute perceptions. I'm going back to Travers and Emery's bookshop & up the ladder to buy the other Stokes book on ballet, that I saw on the top shelf last week.

Apart from usual London summer thundery shower-dodging, I've been at Tate Britain just long enough to walk through the current tourist-orientated show A Painting of Britain -- done in collaboration woith a BBC TV series fronted by the able old broadcaster David Dimbleby who can improvise nicely in front of the camera sometimes. Well, yes, it's a filled to the brim collection of good landscape painting c 1750 to present --but mainly 19th century -- so the occasional sidetrip to Hamish Fulton doesnt annoy the customers too much. Also full to the brim of customers even on a weekday, which makes viewing of smaller items hung close together -- the excellent watercolours -- like walking up Oxford street on Xmas Eve. Sharp elbows required. I caught a glimpse of a very nice Francis Towne waterfall in his best manner -- acquired by the Tate with the Oppe collection. & a great Girtin.

In a show that was designed to be illustrations to a broad history of the industrial revolution & landscape it is necessary to remember that the illustrations [paintings] aren't just handy historical footage for TV -- & to hunt for the pick of the paintings. Of course I got a bit battered trying to stand still to look at Constable's Chain Pier at Brighton, which is pretty good throughout it's complications of foreshore, sea and distant houses, and really takes at least ten minutes maybe quarter of an hour to take it all in.

The Dunedin 'Towne' must be J W Abbott -- I saw one v like it at Sotheby's last week in a v good sale of water-colours -- Edward Lear's v prominent in it, about a dozen of them, prices from £2000 for bl & wh, & as soon as there was a spot of colur £3000 upwards -- the bl & whites were often preferable -- also a rich sunset by Sam Palmer, Venetian William Callow, many v good things...

Next door, almost, at Chappell's, I bought some 1920s 'Fables' by Martinu and played one of their Yamaha electronic pianos for an hour. But not feeling well and not playing well, almost certainly the MSG filled seasoning mother's cook used. She crumbled up the 'chicken stock' cube and sprinkled it on the rice.

The Joshua Reynolds show was superior -- very nice selection of paintings -- all the best -- tho the condition is variable after 200 years -- faded 1760s -- bitumen rivers [I guess that's what it is] in the under painting of several of the later ones. The whole effect was not good -- almopst ruined by the usual glamorous overlighting and its inevitable bad bad shine -- manoeuvring to see paintings was necessary. There were a few I hadnt seen before, an early self-portrait done in Rome and some I hadnt seen for a long time. Enjoyable. The show was arranged by types of sitters -- so it was all about biogrpahies and personalities and their presentation as 'celebrities' -- an interesting idea, Reynolds as early massager of media celebrities in the first age of newspapers. I liked that, but again there was little regard for the way he shaped this out of Van Dyck [nobility origin of bourgeois portrait] and contemporary French [& Italian] portraiture. & then there is the way his military portraits are models for Gros -- In short, the history of art is depleted as long as it forgets it is work in a medium. How tiresome I must sound, saying the same thing every day.

I'm going back for some more today -- before the Wimbledon men's semi-finals.