Thursday, September 08, 2011

Lofty Thoughts

Up the wooden ladder I went, looking for an old fan heater of my Grandpappy's to recondition after looking for vintage ones on eBay and then wondering why, when I had one already. It clanks and whirrs and sends showers of sparks out alongside its gusts of warm air, but I am sure an electrician will be able to sort it out.
Summer shoes up, winter jumpers down... and there was an uninvestigated box from two years ago with some rare Freight Train smoky-vinyl singles which I shall take to the Jazz Caff.
The loft is amazingly empty, because I am frightened of putting too much stuff up there and making the house fall down! That may sound very silly, but a friend was told by a surveyor who had come round to investigate mysterious cracks, that he had too may books stacked up on shelves on the first floor of his house.
This autumn, I shall have yet another purge of Stuff and when I have halved everything, the remains will be piled up the wooden ladder into the loft, and floor space downstairs will double.
Yesterday I went to the Watch Me Move exhibition at the Barbican. This is an exhibition of animation (finishes on Sunday) and I found it absorbing. I liked the vintage stuff the best, closely followed by the Modernist abstract animation, especially Viking Eggeling's Symphonie Diagonale:

I am a real sucker for Georges Melies as well and I loved this, Le Melomane:

Modern films were well represented and my faves were Zou Xiaohu's The Gooey Gentleman and Zbigniew Rybczynski's Tango.
And of course, there was a Merrie Melodies section, which reminded me of the fantastic subtle colourwork of analogue animation.
Animators fascinate me, for of course, their world is silent for a very long time as they prepare their visuals before the sound track is added.

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