we have a full cast and creative team for polar bears (which opens at the donmar warehouse on 1st april)
http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl109cast.html
http://www.donmarwarehouse.com/pl109crew.html
i've been writing an article for the telegraph about the joys of writing drama, not least among which is actually getting out of the house and working with other human beings. rehearsals begin tomorrow...
apropos miroslaw balka’s how it is (see tate 1 below) and other works which seek to mimic external environments inside a gallery... it wasn’t until i was travelling home that i remembered james turrell’s deer shelter at the yorkshire sculpture park, a semi-submerged room of concrete seats tilted backwards so that one looks up at a square opening in the roof, the edges of which are so thin you are looking at a square of suspended sky, constantly moving and changing and pouring light down into the room.
the first proper run since a chaplinesque fall while running over an icy bridge before christmas (legs up, arse down, codeine, hobbling etc.). god, it's good to be properly outside again: the big sky, the flooded river, the space, the quiet, the... well, i don't know the word. and i think not knowing the word is the probably the point. a less grandiose version of wordsworth's presence that disturbs me me with the joy of elevated thoughts... a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, and rolls through all things...
[barnett newman's who's afraid of red, yellow and blue, 1966 - not the painting mentioned below, since the tate are not generous when it comes to reproduction rights, though this is partly due to the parsimony of some original copyright holders - certain artists' estates for example - who can be vicious in their pursuit of copyright infringement; some won't even allow their paintings to be glimpsed in the background of phtographs and videos of other works]
[photo by fairlybouyant @ flickr under creative commons]
from my inbox this morning:
'dear mr haddon,
we invite you to join 150 of britain's leading thinkers, doers, creators and catalysts for a very special evening in london on wednesday february 10th, 6.30-9.30pm. gathering at a location in central London, you will be joined by conservative leader david cameron presenting his first ever TED talk, an 18-minute idea worth spreading.'
i read this when it came out and it was clearly brilliant, but i'm now listening to it for the first time and i'm coming round to thinking it's a masterpiece, wholly authentic without being in the least antique. i'm struggling to think of any translations of long poems which come close. i keep rewinding and listening to passages because they're almost physically pleasureable.
why is there not a statue of this man on the fourth plinth...? i have just been listening to a backlog of podcasted editions of in our time (the samurai, the geological formation of britain, pythagoras, the silk road, sparta...). time and again a subject which seems unpromising in advance just comes alive. challenging, unpatronising, unashamedly intellectual, a little scruffy at the corners (i alway love hearing the chink of tea cups on the studio table).
thinking about logicomix... perhaps my only criticism is that it perpetuates a myth that one finds more commonly in the arts, that engaging in these kinds of activities (especially ones as demanding and frustrating as the attempt to provide a sound logical foundation for mathematics) can drive its practitioners insane.
