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Never See the End of the Road

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And so on the last day of my NaBloPoMoing, some sad news. Jørn Utzon, the Danish architect who designed the Sydney Opera House, has died. The Opera House is arguably one of the most iconic 20th century building and yet Utzon never visited it himself after falling out with its money men. He continued to design beautiful, extraordinary buildings which both incorporated and distanced themselves from Modernism (and its horrible offspring, Brutalism). Most of these buildings were never built; they proved too expensive or perhaps too startling to imagine in real life. Utzon retired from architecture in the late 1970s and became a recluse.

I cannot resist posting this youtube clip, filmed on the steps to Utzon's Opera House: "There's a battle ahead, many battles are lost / But you'll never see the end of the road / While you're travelling with me".

As for my own folly, my own indulgence of NaBloPoMo? It has been a pleasure rather than a chore to post every day. As the holiday season approaches, I will be unable to keep up my work blog ethic, but I do hope to maintain a certain sense of regularity. Thank you all for reading.

Vintage Buttons

Sometimes you get lucky. Before David's birthday dinner, we went walking around Glasgow's West End and eventually dipped into our favourite second-hand shop.

Dave spotted a tin filled with old buttons and asked the owner how much they'd be. "Oh, I have plenty more.. haven't really looked through 'em. So many, you know. Was going to throw most of them out," the owner said, in his characteristically abrupt way. And a few seconds later he emerged with three more tins and a big shopping bag.

You know what happened next.

At first I reckoned I had scored maybe 200 vintage buttons but I was way off the mark. I have tentatively sorted maybe half of the buttons (the big 'uns first!) into three boxes. The large plastic bag remains uncharted territory. You can see some of the already-paired-up buttons in the picture on the left. Judging from the style and a few Canadian(!) coins I found, the button collection appears to have been amassed between mid-1930s to late 1970s: a few buttons have a distinct late Art Deco feel to them, some are definitely made from Bakelite and some are still on the original cardboard.

An early Christmas gift from me to me. How much? You wouldn't believe me..

Birthday Boy

Other Half celebrates his thirty-something-mumble-mumble birthday today. Happy birthday, David. I managed to finish a pair of fingerless mitts (a male variation upon these in Artesano Alpaca Aran) last night whilst at the knit-in at Sith Café. I wouldn't say I was knitting frantically, but I didn't pet the resident dog as much I usually do. Dave's wearing the gloves today so no photos, alas. Last year I attempted a Dalek Cake with .. interesting results (as you can see, I fail spectacularly at cake decorating) so having knitted successful mitts = a much better birthday already. Fewer hysterical laughs anyway.

Other presents include a card wallet, Swedish vampire fiction, an awesome Death Star t-shirt (his favourite present, I think) and posh art supplies. I'm mildly jealous.

Now off to swanky dinner at our favourite restaurant.. thank you everybody who has contributed to making this a great day for the skinny indie kid.

In-Between Days

My old flat in Copenhagen was on the third floor of an old building. Looking back, my life there felt like a big gulp of air waiting to be exhaled. I had finished university and was waiting for the rest of my life to begin. I liked the place, although I couldn't afford to live there on my own and had to rely on lodgers to make the mortgage. I had two tiny rooms to myself which overlooked a waste land (now part of the Copenhagen Business School emporium), I had a wall of overflowing bookcases and I had a fancy Italian stove which I still regret having to leave behind. And my flat had wonky old floorboards which a previous owner had stripped bare. I loved walking across them in bare feet: they were wonderfully warm and soft. They'd creak. Every so often my belongings would disappear into the ever-growing cracks between the floorboards. I'd joke that sometimes it felt like I disappeared between the cracks too. The joke of someone fed on fairy-tales and folk tales.

Yesterday I felt as though time had fallen between my old creaky floorboards once more. I cannot tell you what I did with myself yesterday for I have nothing to show for it - not even five knitted rows, a watercolour sketch or an article half-read. I sometimes wonder what I did during the years in my old flat - oh, I don't mean the heartache, the worries or the delights - and looking back at yesterday I wonder the same. I am someone who lives an incremental life. Perhaps it time to embrace the betweens as well and recognise that just because something gets lost in the cracks, it does not mean it is without value.

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Thoughts of a Dry Brain in a Dry Season.

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"It's a shocking piece," [Miles] Hoffman says. "It's still startling to us today when we hear it, but it is not a confusing piece. It's compelling. We're hearing irregular rhythms, we're hearing instruments asked to go to the extremes of their capability, but we're also hearing patterns that we recognize, with pacing, contrast, fascinating harmonies, continuity — all the basic principles of what makes a piece of music work are all there.

I have treated myself to a concert ticket for one of my favourite pieces of classical music: Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring).

I have long been a convert to Modernism - by that I mean, that vast array of strange and deliberately disconcerting art forms which emerged in the Western part of the world around 1908-ish and which petered out towards the end of the 1930s. Shklovsky's definition of остранение (ostranenie or 'defamiliarisation') describes my favourite art works so splendidly: they unsettle the readers/listeners/spectators by forcing them to acknowledge the artifice of art (and thereby making a clean break with the naturalist tradition of art).

Kasimir Malevich's suprematist paintings (not pictured although the image on the left is by Malevich) and Gertrude Stein's marvellous Tender Buttons are great examples: Malevich seeks to figure out how to paint the very act of painting (and how to communicate the unnaturalness of this act to his audience): Stein plays with the building blocks of her trade - grammatical units - and attempts to uncover the act of making meaning. Stravinsky's ballet is not as ambitious and is vastly less subtle in its use of defamiliarisation - but his use of fertility rites ties in well with the Modernist preoccupation with primitivism and anthropology (Picasso, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot). Wwwwroaw.

So, yes, "I can connect / Nothing with nothing. / The broken fingernails of dirty hands / My people humble people who expect / Nothing." I'll be swept away once more.