Sorolla and Vallotton

Sorolla and Vallotton

A couple of London exhibitions (overlapping in just the first week of July) have brought merited recognition to two largely overlooked artists (overlooked in Britain). Sorolla and Vallotton were contemporaries, living and working in the late C19 and early C20, both dying aged 60 within 2 years of one another. Sorolla was Spanish; Vallotton Swiss-French. Both enjoyed success in their lifetime, Sorolla the more conventionally (he sold well in the US).

The Longest Day (film) Revisited

The Longest Day (film)

June 2019: the remembrance of the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 – the D-Day landings (“D” stands for Day; as “H” in H-Hour (the moment of attack) stands for Hour).

I have been thinking of the 1962 film The Longest Day (henceforth TLD), certainly a very long film, about the invasion. It was supposed to be a faithful representation of principal events, and boasted, as military consultants, a long list actual participants  (the distance between event and film was only 18 years).

Balletic Prowess

Balletic Prowess

There are some sports in which any participant (under certain fairly wide parameters) can achieve sublimity, if only once, and that fleetingly. 

Take a middle-aged, fundamentally unfit, park footballer, who, by happy coincidence of many factors of time and physics, and none to do with his skill, apart from an ability to swing a leg, hits a dipping 30-yard volley into the goal. A feat he’ll never repeat, but always remember. Or a weekend tennis player, whose flailing and hopeless lunge at the ball somehow produces the perfect fizzing topspin lob, landing on the baseline with utter untrievability behind her opponent.

The Illusion of Free Will - Hold it Fast

The Illusion of Free Will – Hold it Fast

We need to exercise our free will. What else can we do? It’s determined….

I’ve reached the conclusion, partly out of boredom, partly out of frustration with the pointlessness of the traditional debate, that the concept of “free will”, so long clung to, can be let go without much damage to our sense of self, but with implications, very probably beneficial, for criminal justice systems.

J G Ballard at Club Med

J G Ballard at Club Med

[I wrote about the novelist J G Ballard in April 2016. He was a writer preoccupied with what he saw as the frailties of the structures holding modern civilisations together, and the chaos and savagery that have the potential to emerge if those structures bend or collapse. He also detected in human nature a disturbing tendency to be drawn towards such anarchy. His fictions explore these themes in imagined closed, or closely-linked, communities that “go wrong” in horrible ways. Much though I enjoyed my stay in a Club Med resort, it immediately struck me as fertile ground for the Ballardian imagination…]

LORCA - CASA NATAL

Federico Garcia Lorca – Casa Natal

The life of Federico Garcia Lorca began only a short distance from where it ended. He was born just to the west of Granada and was killed and buried somewhere just to to the northeast of that city.

There was an ironic reason why he found himself, fatally, in the midst of one of the few successful Francoist uprisings in Andalucía in the summer of 1936. He returned to Granada from what he thought was the insecurity of Madrid on the verge of civil war, also to celebrate his and his father's name day. In Granada, he wrongly supposed, he would be safe among “his people”.

Flying Uncertainties

Flying- Small Moments of Uncertainty

I’m reasonably content to fly with Easyjet. On balance, one is given a friendly and efficient service on the plane. The EJ Airbuses land fairly gracefully – unlike the Ryanair Boeings, which, in my experience, thump down hard. Perhaps the notoriously disgruntled workforce are on a mission to wreck undercarriages (and now there are more sobering reasons to prefer Airbus to Boeing, for the time being).