so long, dream well....

So what London experiences will linger in Viva's addled brain: what music will be bourne long after it's been heard no more, to paraphrase Mr. Wordsworth? In many ways the "detail of life" that Henry James wrote of a century ago is still ever present. London may be simulating New York in cosmopolitan and commercial attire but if one veers off the main thoroughfares it really is a different city all together. There's a quiet strangeness even in broad daylight. Perambulating along the Thames just is nothing like a jog along the Hudson or the Tribeca promenade- to state perhaps the very obvious. The air is now devoid of last century's coal smoke but remains mellifluous with Turner's brushstrokes. The juxtapositioning of Tate Modern's turbine hall opposite St. Paul's is rarely if at all equalled elsewhere in the world. But street-markets such as Brick Lane are essentially not that different from downtown New York on a weekend. 

Nor are the bars and cafes, except you'll probably get a more decent glass of house red or Chardonnay for $5 than the Brit pound equivalent. And everything is so horribly expensive! Unless, of course, you're an Arab prince buying up real estate. You wouldn't think for a moment there's a financial slowdown with all the London folks swirling out of the pubs onto the pavements outside. Not something allowed in NYC - unless its the Chelsea gallery district with few passers-by. Quite how do they all fit inside those tiny watering holes when winter blows?  

Still nursing my 'Viva flu' and sipping more of my friend's 20 year old malt, Viva listened on BBC Radio 3 to Proms pianist Paul Lewis devilishly dexterously, delightfully sail through Beethoven's Emperor piano concerto. It seemed spontaneous and almost impressionist as if if one were boating the notes down a quiet, sunny stream. The classical point of departure and return so obvious yet all those little eddies taking us someone entirely different. A few Proms (62) before, conductor Herbert Blomstedt with the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester (all under 26) weaved through every reef of Bruckner's unfinished 9th Symphony - a work when badly played may seem to suddenly drop dead of a heart attack at any moment. Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil (Prom 65) melded Mahler's First Symphony roar and glisten as if it really were the very first Rolls Royce out of the Mahlerian 'worldwerk' while on Saturday (Prom 66) proving they could equally needle the microscopic thread of Webern and Berg. And at very short notice Gil Shaham stepped in for Berg's Violin Concerto - a deeply dark threnody on the death of Manon Gropius with the Minnesota Orchestra inspired by great futures under Osmo Vänskä.

All this talk of the Proms isn't only because it's such an extraordinary music event but supping my malt (missing all the gaiety of the Notting Hill Carnival) and reveling in Prom 58, I mused that one could be quiet happy in London in the warmth and privacy of one's castle in a way (albeit eine kleine) something quiet improbable if not impossible in New York. Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducted the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra - a very different world to"aclimatise" as he described, and a very particular "local dialect of sonorities", he said, when they're reminded not to sound like an international orchestra. Martinů's Fantaisies symphoniques (Symphony No.6) (1953), composed for the 75th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was full of this surging inner and outer search of experience (the composer having relocated to NYC to escape the war). In his case literally because he fell of a balcony severely injuring his head. Eliot Gardiner noted how you could practically hear the tinnitus ringing in the almost microtonal sections of the symphony. Many parts sound like an Aaron Copland hoe down sunset on the wild open plains then splintered by alien abduction. A very different sound world to Leonard Bernstein's at the time (the only Martinů symphony not to use piano)  but sharing that composer's ultimate optimism. There's even a hint of the Beethoven 9th's Adagio slow movement in Martinů's final movement (a nice parallel to the Eroica taste in Dvorak's 8th). He was thrown out of the Prague Conservatoire for being too individual. So that most certainly gives us all hope.

Oftentimes, Grieg's famous Piano Concerto (1868) is underrated as just one of classical music's 'warhorses' but Eliot Gardiner and soloist Lars Vogt resurrected every morsel of youthful excitement and vigor in the 24 year-old's composition. Again, more surging, struggling, grappling between major and minor keys - the initially jejune captain, now calm and prosperous after the long voyage proudly helming his great ocean liner as it sweept into harbor. It was to be Grieg's last large scale orchestral work. We even got Chopin's C sharp minor Nocturne as an encore!

Dvořák's Symphony No.8 was the last he wrote before arriving in NYC and nicknamed his English symphony given the composer's Brit connections (he received a Cambridge University doctorate). The work was to be premiered on a tour of Russia with Tchaikovsky but Prague was blessed instead. Oftentimes exquisite as if Verdi had laid his head down upon the grass to dream (end 1st movt), the clarinets seemed hewn from the forest trees and one wished we'd gone on all night without end. The brass in the finale can sometimes be mistaken as joyfully raucous but with Eliot Gardiner and the Czech Phil it was more the gentle end of a fairy tale - as if a tiny carpet of wildflowers had transported one home. And no my feelings weren't simply due to the malt I'd supped! There was even an encore of the Slavonic Dance No.1 and some Janáček!! I don't think I've been so blissfully surprised in a concert in quite some time, such a wonderfully thought through programme was this journey.

Eliot Gardiner conducts on Friday what has been more his early music trademark and passion over the years the Monteverdi Vespers of 1610. 

Not having been allowed any guilt over my magic carpet Prom, Radio 3 followed with the more sobering Sunday Feature (The Art of Noises)  exploring Italian avant-gardist Luigi Russolo- a 7 bar fragment is all that's extant of his compositions. Debuting in 1914, Stravinsky and Prokofiev attended a performance at Marinetti's house the next year. Apparantly Diaghilev's audible response was like that of a startled quail.

All tickets to see Jimi Hendrix's Mayfair duplex are now gone (Sept 15-26 - normally now used by the Handel House Museum staff as offices) in celebration or rather in memorium of his death 40 years ago. But access to the downstairs exhibition in Brook Street's Georgian town house is still available - many of the objects originating from a Seattle museum.

But now, Viva must fly, try and avoid the voracious eagles and return on wings of song to her tiny cube in Mondrian's Manhattan. But she's grinning from ear to ear. Stay tuned to find out why....

be in water writ

Performing the duties of a foreign correspondent methinks is not Viva's forte. More a collator of city experiences, leaving them all spread out on a work bench to air and dry and returning to them later. Or is that too much like Beckett's play Krapp's Last Tape in which the older man (though could easily be a woman) scoffs derisorily as he listens to his recorded thoughts eons earlier? (Michael Gambon hits the West End with a production from Dublin's Gate Theatre). If you've never seen the San Quentin 'lifer' prisoners do Beckett then you should.

Remember when joking last post of avoiding a marriage like the Duchess of Devonshire? Well, the umpteenth Duke is having an Attic Sale at Chatsworth (Sothebys, Oct) with loads of all the original fixtures and fittings - all catalogued (by size) and preserved. The original Devonshire House is now Green Park tube station and instead of the once dry cellar floors you tip toe into the ticket hall for fear on a rainy day of slipping head first past the plastic warning cones.

Lost London, FT article

And perhaps my life has been a sheltered one and animals avoid me like the runt of the litter. Yet never in all my days of sitting in Central Park has a squirrel, as one did under a quiet tree in Green Park, come so close it practically ate the few crumbs left in my hand. NYC squirrels, however, scrutinise you as if being offered swamp land for breakfast. nIf I hadn't caught 'Viva flu' and snuffled through the Bank Holiday weekend at home watching the buckets of rain alternate with the blazing sunshine, investigations would have been made into the 3-day Carribean inspired Notting Hill Carnival.

Just read that there's been a TV reality show on Channel Four (the station that hosted Big Brother) shot on location around Notting Hill streets. Lordy, lordy. While one-half of London scoffs at the 'celebrification' disease, the other half (or is the other three quarters) hungers for it: Seven Days will air Sept 22. Viva will no doubt attempt to watch 'TiVos' of Bravo's  Work of Art reality show. Brit TV had something similar a while ago on the 'Saatchi" Beeb but with celebrity art mentors. Will it all never end? Viva will just have to show them all how it's really done.

Wander up through nearby Campden Hill where many a now famous and many dead creatives live eg Harold Pinter, Richard Branson, Hanif Kureshi and into Holland Park and through the serene Japanese garden. Will the Notting Hill TV show encourage those gorgeous peacocks roaming the park into celebrity as well? Now David Attenborough doing animal reality TV - for that's worth cancelling a human date.  I didn't make it to any of the operas staged in the open air theater there (they even had a pay what you can night for one opera! and several theaters seem to do that too). Organic, make-shift theaters are also popping up such as The Oikos Project in Southwark on the South Bank. And though there aren't a lot of free summer movies in London alternatives are springing forth all the time: cineroleum, secretcinema, the deptford project, openaircinemas.

America is quick off the mark to withdraw its favours if you err in the public eye, but Britain seems to delight in raising you on high only to knock you down at the first available opportunity. (More allegations that former News of the World tabloid honcho Andy Coulson- the Conservatives new Director of Communications- was fully aware of his newspaper journos tapping phones of those in the public eye). One dating site declared recently that the English are far more open in discussing money than their American counterparts. Well, methinks that's true only in so far as they either pretend to have or pretend not to want those shekels when they clearly crave them (probably why their economy is in such a mess: why should the Americans always take the blame for everything?). Sometimes it's a cross between the guy mistakenly fawned upon at the restaurant as the Inspector General in Gogol's play, and the embarrassed Hugh Grant at the dinner party in Notting Hill when he innocently asks Julia Roberts (the unbeknownst movie star) how much she earned thus turning bright red at her reply.  

Musing back to the old Duke and his chattels, an apparent Brit irony (all the more so under a Conservative coalition government) is that the upper classes (though their stately piles are crumbling while plumbers constantly investigate the cash flow) are the ones most at ease with money - and are often the most honest. For want of a better word 'socialist' i.e. maintaining a balanced society if not exactly an unattainable 'fair' one. We've all read about crazy aristocratic offspring but they're no different to the errant New York ones. And before everyone starts deserting me in droves for sprouting such seeming nonsense, all and sundry would be urged to see the restored version (this year's Cannes Film Fest and Vanity Fair party) of Luchino Visconti's film  The Leopard (1963).  "The middle-classes don't want to destroy us, they want to take our place," says the Sicilian prince (Burt Lancaster) whose son (with his blessing)  - the delicious Alain Delon - has joined Garibaldi's revolutionary forces of Italian unification last century. French existentialist Albert Camus in Myth of Sisyphus wrote that absurd men are like princes only "they have this advantage over others: they know all royalties are illusory." 

What is so enrapturing about Visconti's film is that one is shown the minutai of nature vs capital. There's a wry scene where everyone, noble and not, arrive at the church - their faces and clothes powdered with dust blown up by the wind. The director used Technirama whereby the negative was filmed 'on its side' horizontally using an 8-perforation frame and then squeezed down to the size of CinemaScope allowing the film to capture incredible detail. Of course, in every decade there are the wealthy and the obsequious hangers-on who wouldn't know 'reality' if it hit them between their zonked eyeballs. Visconti shows them too in all their cloying, clotted glory. 

Little known outside America, artist Alice Neel (1900-1984: great show last year at David Zwirner) is receiving an East End retrospective Painted Truths (60 paintings) at the Whitechapel Gallery. Her early life was a tumultuous unhappy one, finally driven to a suicide attempt when left by her husband who also took their 2 year-old daughter. She inevitably became left-wing and a Communist sympathiser. After viewing the gallery work, it really is worthwhile sitting through the entire 90 minutes of her grandson Andrew's documentary and then taking another look at the canvases. Her so-called realism was way out of fashion with 40s and 50s abstraction. And though the more realist (for want of a better word) and spontaneous portraits she painted when living in Spanish Harlem (1938-62) are marvellous, it's the more abstract ones either side those dates that are truly breathtaking: still 'realist' but almost sculptural in her use of color or as one admirer observed "she has to be an open nerve to make those paintings". Pregnant women and children lay bare their souls through their naked bodies; Andy Warhol literally showing saggy bullet scars from his assassination attempt by Valerie Solanas. Yet there's never a feeling of voyeurism simply a peace and tranquility. Perhaps something she herself could only ever truly find in her art rather than the politics of life.

Last few weeks after which the show will tour to Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden (10 October 2010 - 2 January 2011).

Just opened at the National Portrait Gallery, Camille Silvy: Photographer of Modern Life (Baudelaire's  bon mot as subtitle) is the extraordinary previously unsung work of this mid C19th French diplomat and amateur photographer turned professional. In so many ways Silvy prefigures modern photo techniques. Jeff Wall's choreographed scenes spring to mind or indeed Helen Levitt (though her photos of New York streets are 'real' and were'nt posed as are Wall's) they nonetheless manipulated social realism in her mind's eye. What were drawbacks for other photographers using the low light sensitivity of the wet collodion process proved a virtue to Silvy allowing him to experiment in manipulating images. Four different negatives were used to create Studies on Light: Twilight (1859) or as Henry James put it "the thick detail of London life". Working out of his Bayswater studio between 1859-67, Silvy funded his fascination for the light effects of London's streets by becoming one the the city's most sought after portrait carte de visite snappers - painting and photographing actors, royalty and costumed parties. Bearing in mind the furore over Annie Leibovitz's photo of Miley Cyrus or Richard Prince's 'Brooke Shields', the naked torso of Mrs.Holford's Daughter (1860) proves another interesting Silvy modern parallel. 

For Silvy never stopped experimenting. The last gallery room of the exhibition's modest four (curated by Mark Haworth-Booth, formerly of the V&A- panel discussion Sept 16) shows him archiving manuscripts: as the paper photo negative recorded yellow as black, the faded yellowing print therefore appeared legibly as black, anticipating the modern use of filters and color correction. He also proposed a soldiers' clip-on continuos cartridge roll to record panoramic views of the battlefield. He went on to fight in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 before being diagnosed with folie raisonnante (manic-depression) aged only 41 and spent the last 30 years of his life in an insane asylum. A terribly sad end for such a great innovator. 

Sally Mann's always fascinating investigations into older photo techniques continues at the Photographer's Gallery and the show includes the rotting corpses from the University of Tennessee forensic Anthropology Center. Worth squeezing into the tiny viewing room to watch the documentary on her life.

Darren Almond's (his nocturnal Buddhist monk walk was recently at Matthew Marks Gallery) latest multi screen video installation Anthropocene: The Prelude proves to be a good 'chill out room' . He's very cleverly manipulated video of cracking ice and a wintry railway line to immerse the viewer in another world. Another great free show is Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries at the National Gallery. For an art historian it may all be second nature but to the uninitiated one leaves the exhibition seriously pondering the iconic nature of art and its presentation. How far does it matter whether Rembrandt actually painted a particular work himself as opposed to a very talented pupil from his studio? If a fake elicits the same emotions in the viewer as the original is art therefore always somewhat polarized between commodity and appreciation.

For those in a more pro-active Leftish vein, the Russian collective Chto delat?  (What is to be done?) pervade the ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts) for the next 2 months - appropriate as the venue is losing its director and cutting costs left, right and center. And the new version that premiered at the Berlin Film Fest and at this year's LA TCM Classic Film Festival of Fritz Lang's classic 1927 silent Metropolis (96 extra fragments) opens on Sept 10 at the ICA. Bit of interesting trivia (though not of course to network TV execs ;) that the film's cinematographer Karl Freund developed what became known as the 3-camera method for shooting TV shows initially with Lucille Ball's I Love Lucy.

Meanwhile in New York:

Last week of Jennifer Dalton's Making Sense including her by now infamous graph of art critic Jerry Saltz’s Facebook friends. 

And in Union Square Park, filmmaker and everything else creative Miranda July shows her 2009 Venice Biennale Eleven Heavy Things. Check out the full article on public sculpture art (didn't Viva pitch that idea?...only jesting ;) sort of...) in the the New York Times (Pondering Sculpture Under the Trees) that includes Stephen Vitiello's bell sound sculpture  A Bell for Every Minute. Just missed (methinks) Leslie Thornton’s (of the groovy snake scales trailer for Anthology's Migrating Forms 2010 fest) Peggy and Fred in Hell still haunts at MoMA PS1's Greater New York show. 

The Barbara Hammer retrospective opens at MoMA midtown Sept 15 with the world premiere of her new film Generations (2010)- she'll be present for audience discussions. And the techie minded can now access the museum’s offerings through iPhone and iPad touch.