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My 5 Favourite French Films

Before Christmas I took French classes at the Ecole Francaise in Chicago as preparation for my recent teaching expedition to Paris in January 2016. It was an upper intermediate conversation and grammar class, and one week we were asked to name five French films that we know. My first response was: Only five!? But here are the first five that came to mind, the sort of films that I can (and do) watch again and again: La Passion de Jean d'Arc, d. Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928. La Grande Illusion, d. Jean Renoir, 1937. Les Quatre Cents Coups, d. Francois Truffaut, 1959. A Bout du Souffle, d. Jean-Luc Godard, 1960. Jules et Jim, d. Francois Truffaut, 1962. If I could take just one to a desert island (the sort of desert island that has a movie projector that is completely impervious to sand and humidity, naturally), I would choose Les Quatre Cents Coups.

Another Picasso Pilgrimage

I've just got back from teaching in Paris for two and a half weeks, and while I was there I had the opportunity to learn more biographical information about the location of Picasso's studios. I blogged extensively about his Montmartre studio , the Bateau Lavoir, after my January 2015 trip. Like last year, the apartment I was staying in is located in Montparnasse, which I knew Picasso had some connections with. But in the 11 months between the 2015 trip and this one, I reread the passages of John Richardson's biography of Picasso relating to Montparnasse, and discovered that one of the studios Picasso rented in Montparnasse was only a five minute walk from my apartment. My apartment is south of the cemetery, Picasso's studio overlooks the east side of the cemetery: This is what the building looked like when Picasso moved there in 1913 with his new companion, Eva: John Richardson ( Life of Picasso, Volume II , p. 285) writes about it as follows: The studio-cu...

More on Music

Something I realised recently: music can be incredibly complex, but basically it is either loud or quiet, high or low, fast or slow, and degrees in between. Listening to and playing music for more than 30 years has led me, perhaps unconsciously, to that awareness. And it's as true for so-called classical music, with its elaborate structures and harmonies, as it is for the harmonically much more simple forms of popular music. Hardly an earth-shattering epiphany, but it probably explains why certain kinds of music that I used to find harder to listen to, like Benjamin Britten, now give me a lot of pleasure. Another reason why I now love the music of some composers that I once found incomprehensible: the voice. Looking back, I realise that I always loved opera long before I became absorbed by instrumental music. Even when I listened mainly to people like Prince, Bob Dylan, The Smiths, or Robert Johnson, what I responded to most was not the tunes or the instrumentals so much as th...

Musical Moments

My musical life: I come from an amateur musical family. Both my father and grandfather were skilled self-taught musicians. My father and his brother played Everly Brothers-style guitar and harmony in the working men's clubs of Liverpool in the 1950s. My mother didn't play an instrument, but she has a good voice, and has a unique condition that has been called Broadway Tourette's Syndrome. Meaning that all through my childhood, she would break out into show tunes at any hour of the day. Because of this, I had a sweet soprano singing voice before my voice broke, and I sang at my local Catholic Church, one time in front of the whole congregation at Christmas, my rendition of Silent Night causing paroxysms of tears among the pious, I've been told. The apartment where we lived in my teens had a rickety, out of tune piano, that I mainly taught myself to play. I had some lessons, and I can read music to a rudimentary degree, but mainly I played pop tunes by ear, tho...

Frankfort High School, Part 2

Kristine Harvey , teacher at Frankfort High School in Michigan, sent me a new batch of monoprints from her class of high school art students, and they're just as good as the first. I've pulled out a few to show in this post, again not to single them out as better than the ones I didn't select, but this time just to highlight the different kinds of monoprint techniques that these young people were trying. First, we have what I think are contact monoprints (where you roll out a thin layer of ink, place a sheet of paper on top, and draw through the back of the paper, the marks being made wherever the paper makes contact with the ink): The next one looks like it was created using a combination of mask and stencil: Then a multilayered print, where it looks like the artist reapplied the same sheet of paper to a surface that had been worked on more than once: Finally, another additive monoprint that has some notably free, loose, expressive mark making: Congrat...

Monoprints by Frankfort High School students

Five months ago, an educator called Kristine Harvey took my week-long monoprinting class at the Interlochen College of Creative Arts. She really enjoyed the class and made some great personal artistic breakthroughs in this medium, as you can see by this print she made: Kristine contacted me recently to say that she had been working with her students at Frankfort High School, Michigan, on making monoprints. With their permission, I am posting images of some of the prints they made. First we have some abstract shapes: What impresses me about those is how comfortable the students are with abstract shapes, how well they organised them around the frame of the rectangle, and how eye-catching is the combination of colours and design. Next we have works in progress: As you can see, there's sensitive art-making happening here, which is why I don't want to single any one image out over any other. In my opinion, everything I've seen so far suggest...

News from the blogging class: 3

Another person who took my introduction to blogging and blogging content classes in the summer has contacted me to say that her new blog is up and running. (Previous posts about this here and here .) This time it's an artist, Linda Gardiner, whose blog is devoted to her practice of textile art. The blog has a great name, too: Pulp, Paper, and Pigment . She's a good writer, and her blog is full of beautiful images, so I recommend that you go ahead and check it out some time.