easy spanish

 easy spanish is a great way of just listening to spanish people (with a wide variety of accents) actually speaking. there's spanish and english subtitles should you need them plus it's a good way of stepping away from that constant tense learning and looking at the way people actually speak! i tend to listen more to the podcast these days than watch the youtube channel but both are equally handy in their own ways 

improving swedish

not for beginners but, if you can follow along, andreas issa's channel is, i think, just about the best for content for swedish improvers. watch and learn! 

dylan eakin

 

i love watching someone really hitting their game. representation, hyperrealism are about as far away from what i do as it's possible to get but i love these pencil images from dylan eakin, not least for their sheer craft. would love to see one of these in the flesh

middlemarch

i got a beautiful folio society copy of middlemarch (it's the same one as in the vid) this week as part of a wee indulgence where i buy lovely reading copies of my favourite books to see me in my dotage. i'm on a classic literature discussion group and middlemarch has evinced a variety of views some number of which focus on the perceived difficulty of the text. i don't share this view though i can see why people might think that. as ever the internet has a video for that and here it is. there's a bunch of good essay writing on middlemarch (or, if you prefer, some funny writing on why people hate middlemarch) online and, in my opinion, it's a great jumping off point for some contextual reading - the reform act etc

patti smith

i read an interview with patti smith years ago where she described being asked by her son what her advice was about being a musician. get a job, she said, get a job. it's stayed with me for whatever reason and i've been grateful for that quote. i do have a job, fortunate enough for it to be a decent one where i can afford to pursue my artistic practise in any direction i want, pay for publication, pay for exhibition, buy all my own equipment/space, be beholden to no-one.

i'm not even a big patti smith fan but i've picked up her books here and there along the way. i just like the patti smithness of patti smith, her willingness to do, to be who she is.

i'm really grateful for it, this freedom. when i look back to when i was younger i see a time when i was preoccupied with notions of success. i've been pretty fortunate with that too, altho i never made any money! that said, i hate all that so i don't miss it. being able to encourage others tho, that's a blessing. and all we can hope for.

here's another video, just for all those angsty types worried about their legacy. when you're dead you're dead and you're going to be forgotten. be more concerned with your day, right now! 

yoann bourgeois

 one of my time vampire habits is trampoline videos. i'd so love to be able to do that but i think these days it would take me about a nanosecond to get a severe musculoskeletal injury! and then there's yoann bourgeois....

clearly tho, he's not just about the trampoline. here's something else, which strikes me how little dance i have on here. i need to address that....

anosmia

i don't have a sense of smell so here's a video about it. it's not great but there are definitely things in this

that i recognise. i can't lie, there are times, mostly at work when no sense of smell is a great advantage

if something's really stinky while others flee i can usually feel it in my eyes!

my sense of smell isn't totally absent but it's so truncated that if it pings i usually have to ask someone what i'm smelling. what this video doesn't address is the lack of language for smell. equally tho if you can pin someone down who will try to describe smell to you it is like drifiting off into some sort of poetry.

i am not like some of these people who lost their smell suddenly. i have no memories of smell, no means of dreaming about it, what i don't love is the routine dismissal of its lack, as if smell is somehow a minor scent. or people who think it's funny. i would like to be able to have a conversation with a dog or some other scent based animal to hear what their world feels like!

which is my way of saying stop a moment and, quite literally, smell the roses. i had a recent eye scare where there was a possibility of losing vision in one eye. i didn't love it but in the mean time i'm loving depth perception. it's the small things! lol 

    

chomsky and foucault have a conversation

imagine two philosophers on tv these days. imagine having different points of view and being able to discuss them. changed days! (plus dutch and french practice!) 

terry riley

i've a long association with the young gods but had assumed they'd just become too old or retired, but no, here they are giving terry riley's in c a go (subtitles for englush speakers). it's lovely to see musicians at their stage of life being so enthusiastic, still trying new things. riley was a huge influence on me, first for dance music but latterly as a means to interpret found sound and spoken word (and, for various reasons, saw the end of my involvement in poetry as a direct result). it may be you don't like this version - it doesn't matter because there is always another one. plus, and this video really captures this, with relatively accessible technology you can make your own! you can find the sheet music here.

french tenses

i'm going to start posting a bit more about language, in part to give me wee reminders on my own language journey, but also useful stuff along the way. so, for starters, here's this, a basic intro for french tenses. obvs, for english speakers but, both for me and in my experience, our grammar knowledge is so dire that keeping it simple is almost a prerequisite. plus, for adult learners, diagrams and pictures are a superhandy means to learning.

again, it's not the whole story, but if you're getting stuck, drawing a line and using post its, whether it's tenses, sentence structure (i'm looking at you swedish!) or whatever, it's a good tool.

the sutton hoo helmet

now this is interesting! as is loads of stuff on this channel. that said, while i spent a load of time in the british museum in my london days i got more and more uncomfortable with the sheer amount of stuff that had arrived there in likely dubious circumstances, if not by the standards of the time, certainly by ours. it's nice to have the sutton hoo helmet in england. it comes from there. imagine if it was somewhere else. make copies, make films and send everything else back where it came from!

olafur arnalds

 it's nice to see which words i recognise as well as those i completely don't! lol 

søren solkær

 

i have a vague memory of seeing murmurations as a kid. now there's not enough birds left for them to be something i'd expect to see. maybe that's part of what makes søren solkær's images so arresting

sam lee & elizabeth fraser

 missed this first time round. what a rare treat to see elizabeth fraser singing again 

more fabric chat

 i was out at the weekend at one of my favourite bars, where i hadn't been for ages, where they made a big fuss of us because we hadn't been out for ages, which was great. what did we talk about? life in the cocktail lane? no. sourcing tweeds? yes, but not not the main event. surprisingly, and most pleasingly, we got into it around recent events in the company patagonia, the use of petrochemicals in outdoor clothing manufacture and what can be done about it. great chat! and in a scottish bar! and, as if my phone was listening, today this..... 

i don't go out much these days and it's true that much of my remaining waterproofs can't be considered environmentally friendly but one of my favourite bits of gear is an old cotton based cagoule style outer shell type, that's 70+ years old, that i inherited from my dad. i wouldn't wear it in the rain now, nbut it'll still take wax if i wanted to, but it's still one of the best bits of kit for wind that i own - look after your gear and it'll look after you!

the french dispatch

 i don't watch a lot of films these days it's true. there's loads of reasons for this but, worse, i realised the other day when i was watching the french dispatch, i don't have anyone left to talk about films with.  step up youtube! what a joy to find this in my algorithm

kraftwerk

 this is just an outstanding video re the kraftwerk album man-machine. not just for gear nerds, there's some lovely bits of music theory stuffed in there. but most of all it's just joyous and a great encouragement to really listen, and muck about with your keyboard! 

sofi thanhauser

at last i appear to be on the mend but still keeping myself diverted with podcastery! on from monday's guardian vid and the subsequent post on circular design, i found myself, again, listening to garmology via well dressed dad, but this time with sofi thanhauser talking about her book worn - a people's history of clothing. 

so far, so fascinating. i'm unconvinced with the (to me) reductive nature of all the identity shenanigans whirling about at the moment which (to me) seem like an inevitable product of late capitalism rather than any move to actual equality. thanhauser upends all of this by looking at objects rather people and the processes by which they arrive, and in doing so achieves the neat trick of an intersectionality (sic! lol) between capital, colonialism, exploitation, forced labour, climate, identity etc.

and again, i'm really grateful, again, for my brief island childhood and the appreciation it gave me for not wasting anything, being able to fix things and knowing where they came from.

circular design

i'm still sick, just not as sick, and well enough to appreciate both just how long my not as young as it used to be body shakes off its troubles but just how deep set was my assumption that i lived in a society with access to health care. those concerns being set i was interested (as i'm fit enough for making, more or less) in the following podcast via garmology about the notion of circular design.

it throws up some interesting issues. moths for one! but, for me, along with all the stuff about sustainability, like the healthcare above, just how grounded in capitalism and consumption, everyday decisions are. it's not so very long ago i realised that not everyone had the advantage that i did as an island child of being able to sew, darn, stitch, repair, knit and crochet. but also, having had a textile business, as the podcast points out, these very simple things, for a community at that time, have now become a pastime of access and privilege*. 

further, that question i'm unfailingly asked about my visual art - why don't i sell it? because i don't want to. because i want to share it, the means of making it, the joy of doing. and also, because i got off that wheel of selling/exhibiting/publishing i really started enjoying my practice again. then, the interactions i've had since have been so lovely - not arty types, nor poetryland - where i can gift my work, or better yet, show someone how to do it themselves. and music! art/literature collaboration always seemed like such an effort, so much talking and so much ego, but music, despite my awfulness, brought an instant kinship, a communication of play.

and all because i wasn't feeling that well! it's a bit of a listen it's true (and i'm not going to lie, i've been reading a fair bit of montaigne recently) but it's an interesting entry point into the question of how to live.

*a case in point. watching bernadette banner the other day and thinking i could fair give a go to making a waistcoat for myself when it struck me just how much such an endeavour would cost, even assuming i got it right first time - reasonably likely but not guaranteed. currently i have scissors and pins and that's about it (not forgetting i actually have space to work!). no thread, no button stash, no measuring stuff, no chalk, no sewing machine! and that's before buying cloth. if you can't get into clothes making consider joinery. i'm not a complete idiot when it comes to working with wood but currently, given the cost of materials, project work is just prohibitive