We were sat in a cafe in Burnham Market and two old posh duffers turned up and sat on the table behind us. They were quite loudly rambunctious individuals with a lot of 'Good god man! You never beleeve the price of a sandwich in the Glandford cafe - ten pounds! Takes your breath away. So that's why I've brought you here! They ordered a glass of wine each, which came in a small bottle of plonk with a metal twist cap. So no great vintage. But you'd have thought it was the highest quality, matured for half a century. Veritably did they explode with 'Crikey, that's got some grape in it!' 'Yes, a very strong taste of green' And so they went on happily Guffaing and Grr..ing. One of them started talking about a close friend of his ' Do you know Guy,?No? Well he's thoroughly decent, a bit of a quirky sort of fellow, but I like his quirk, if you get my drift' Oh, we did have a good laugh at that one, once we'd left the cafe of course
Whilst wandering round an uninspiring exhibition of printed artwork in Cromer Art Space I noticed in many of the descriptive blurbs written by the artists on what their artwork process was all about, included the same word. Having had to write such explanatory paragraphs myself, there is a tendency to over inflate the language to assert the magnitude or importance of what your trying to achieve. Well, lets just say it's irresistible to most folks egos, mine too apparently. Whilst reading and looking at the actual work, one word in the explanatory blurb attracted my irritation. There was a lot of talk about exploring 'Materiality' or the 'Materiality' in their work or of their work. I have to say I found the use of this word particularly annoying. Mainly because it makes what they are doing sound uniquely special and a rarefied sensibility. Materiality appears to be the latest vacuous art buzz word. But just to provide you with clarity Materiality means very simply the materials - i.e. the materials you make things from, like paint, paper, the brick dust from your imagination - and of course your level of pretention.
One of the things one becomes accustomed to in Norfolk is how there are pockets of it, where villages are not really villages, but quiet out of the way small hamlets. Where the names of places become quite matter of fact, simple and unadorned. They are the remnant echoes of a time when no one moved much outside of their own immediate area, a few miles in radius. So you could refer to The Street, The Hill Road and the Wall Road and everyone you met would know exactly what you were referring to. Today, when our mental maps and sense of scale are so much bigger imaginatively in the area they can encompass,.Seeing several places not many miles apart called The Street, seems not to make much sense and is definitely on the edge of being spookily weird.
That you could have country roads called Old Woman's Lane ,in Cley next the Sea, with its implied derogatory association, whether from the past or present, would once have been totally understood. You are left asking who was she? Why did she have no name? Was she not liked, if so, why? Did she keep herself to herself so no one really knew what her name was? Was it that there were a number of old women who once lived on or walked down that lane? So not referring to one individual at all, but many, a particular local occurrence only folk from round here would recognise? The mind proliferates more speculative solutions even as I write. There is no definitive historical reason. Even historians only makes suggestions. It might be a corruption of Old Wain's Road, or that it was the sort of lane you'd see old ladies toddling along or some reason, or the land on Old Woman's Lane was owned by a Miss Knott from Cley Old Hall who provided some of it for council housing in the 1930's. But the latter seems rather too recent to me, for such a deliberately generalised opaque lane name
I've recently rediscovered the joys of Lambertland by Tasavlan Presidenti. As a consequence I've relaunched a blog series, that I never got round to fully filling out when I first started it - My Most Loved Albums. I just want to share the love a bit. I''m limiting myself to around ten, maybe twelve, otherwise this could just go on and on. Once I started looking, hearing and selecting them, and what's more started writing about them, I've been surprised by how much depth of emotion and fond feeling I've suddenly tapped into. All the albums have in someway stood the test of time for me, so most of them are from the seventies. They've often accompanied me for over fifty years. And I've repurchased them in new formats from the original vinyl to tape, CD and download.
From the moment I bought my first album Simon & Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Waters in 1969, I began a lifetime of musical enthusiasms, of loving new and interesting music, whatever the form. And getting to know a new artist is still a delight to me. Gone are the days when I'd surreptitiously listen to the John Peel show under my bed pillows. Being introduced to some wacky band, only available on import, who'd release this one peerless disc and then died out. I must have spent literally thousands of pounds on music over the decades. And you know, I don't regret any of it.
I did go through periods, when from some misjudged notion of purification. I purged myself of heavy metal during punk, ( I spent a gleeful evening with friends physically smashing up my vinyl records with hammers ) Or when I first became a Buddhist, I sold the albums by artists who I thought explored the darker side of the human condition (Sorry, St Nick !) In a misguided attempt to preserve my mental states from being irrevocably poisoned by rancorous murder filled ballads. That I emerged from all of this with my music collection and my tastes broadened, rather than narrowed, is nothing short of a miracle.
I've never been that interested in the view that pop music will not survive the test of time. Why should it? And more importantly why should that remotely bother me? The whole notion of music out lasting us, is the conceit of some overweening pricks ego. I wont be here to take pleasure from how Coldplay's oeuvre has been criminally forgotten - unfortunately. But that's how it should be. Pop music is inherently transient, and it being of the moment is its central quality and golden virtue. My music preferences should not need to out live me. My funeral should be the last hurrah for some of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment