March 9, 2012•Feeling My Age•Comments Off on Boethius and His Wheel
From the movie 24 Hour Party People: Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan) encounters a beggar (Christopher Ecclestone).
B: Spare 20 pence mate, please, for a cup of tea?
TW: There you go – keep that.
B: Ta, mate. I’m Boethius, author of The Consolations of Philosophy. It’s my belief that history is a wheel. “Inconstancy is my very essence” says the wheel.
“Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don’t complain when you’re cast back down into the depths. Good times pass away, but then so do the bad.”
“Mutability is our tragedy, but it is also our hope. The worst of times, like the best, are always passing away”.
A few years ago Child A and I became intrigued by a monochrome canvas we saw at the Tate Modern gallery in London by the French artist Yves Klein.
The name meant nothing to me at the time, but according to c4gallery.com “he is generally considered the progenitor of Minimalism and Conceptual Art. In Klein’s short life he singlehandedly managed to redefine the foundation on which the entire generation of the 1960s avant-garde stood…” [read full article here ]
In 1958 he developed his trademark, patented, colour International Klein Blue which he claimed had a quality “close to pure space – a Blue in itself, disengaged from all functional justification”. Conveniently for dealers in fine art, the colour allegedly lies outside the gamut of computer displays, and can therefore not be accurately portrayed on webpages. That said, international-klein-blue.com gives it a shot anyway. View the page in fullscreen mode on your browser and you’ve got yourself a DIY 20th Century modernist masterpiece right there on your desktop.
According to Tate Modern Klein made around 200 untitled monochrome paintings using IKB and, after his early death at the age of 34, his widow assigned a number to each of them. The one my son and I saw was IKB 79 painted in 1959. [More]
Ideals of physical attractiveness are bound to change from culture to culture and generation to generation. Strolling through Berwick Street market in Soho this afternoon, I happened across these wares on display in a shop window – to see the individual pieces in closeup click here.
For someone of my generation it’s hard to imagine most of this stuff being anything other than excruciating to fit and deeply unattractive once in place. Which brings to mind John Travolta’s immortal question in Pulp Fiction:
Lance: Hey, whattya think about Trudi? She ain’t got a boyfriend. You wanna hang out, get high? Vincent: Which one’s Trudi? The one with all the shit in her face? Lance: No, that’s Jody. That’s my wife.
Possibly my favourite three and a half minutes of animated film, ever. Lunatic surrealism, oh so gently understated in this 1988 cartoon classic from Japan.
