I recently paid a visit to Trieste in Italy, on the border with Slovenia. I didn't particularly go on a font safari, but as soon as I got there I was struck by the amount of cool-looking graphic design on display around the city. Every shop and restaurant seemed to boast a different font from what appeared to be something of a golden era for this kind of thing. Here is a taster, but for the full collection, please have a look at the set on my flickr page:
 

What a talent:




http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2012/04/new-cut-book-illustrations-by-thomas-allen/

http://thomasallenonline.com/

and TV had been around for 150 years, people would be absolutely mindblown by the idea of going to watch a film in an auditorium, with other people, on a massive screen with luxurious sound.

1. When I told a good friend not long ago that David Bowie was not made of flesh and blood like the rest of us, he answered "Of course he is, get over it". I don't know whether David Bowie actually is descended from another planet, and in fact if pushed I'd say the likelihood is he's human, but I still want to believe he's made of something rather more mysterious. At the very least, I'm still prepared to believe - even now in my mid-40s - that David Bowie is in some way not like you and me.




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2. I saw in the newspaper today that Lygia Pape's work is currently on display at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The Guardian has gone big on it with a video guide to one of the works entitled Livro do Tempo (Book of Time). However, looking through the other works in the exhibition on the Serpentine's website, there was one that caught my eye and made me really sad I won't be able to get to the show. It was the strangely named Tteia C Web and it looks like this:



It is absolutely the kind of thing I want to go and see and immerse myself in when I go to an exhibition.

It's kind of reminiscent of Anthony McCall's gorgeous light columns (which we went to see last year in London)



...only this time it's not the illusion of something tangible, it's something physical (golden threads) masquerading as something decidedly intangible: Pape's threads certainly look like something you could happily walk through, like shafts of light coming into a building. One thing I would love to have done with the threads (if i'd had the chance to go to the exhibition) is to have debated in my mind whether to touch them or to preserve the uncertainty as to what they would feel like and the possibility that they were not a physical thing.

I like the whole stand-off in galleries between the work, the viewer and the attendant saying 'don't touch', especially when it's clearly something that it would be great fun to touch, or when it's an installation containing a narrative that's frozen in time. In the latter case, you know that you could - at least in theory - wade in and move things around but you don't because, even if you're so tempted your hand starts moving towards the work, you know it's an illusion that, like an image on a screen, you can't tamper with. 

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3. It's a similar debate to that of going to the theatre as opposed to seeing a film. I've seen so many more films than theatre plays that on the rare occasion I go to the theatre it seems such a shock that there are actual people on stage acting in front of me. I loved Complicite's staging of the Master and Margarita when they came to Luxembourg towards the end of last year (as well as other stuff I've seen them do). Part of the thrill of their work is the way the actors change the scenery simply by altering the angle at which they're standing. At the other end of the illusion-creation scale, they use images on screens of live action taking place on stage.

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4. When I go to concerts I often get into arguments with people over whether the performers should chat to the audience [I don't raise the subject - I just hear all too often the accusation that the show was disappointing because the singer didn't say a word to the audience all night]. There are no hard-and-fast rules about these things, but, singers, unless you're a witty fellow like Jarvis Cocker, who is able to enhance the crowd's appreciation of the next song with his repartee, then please do not bother talking to the audience. Some of my favourite gig experiences have been when artists say absolutely nothing to the audience, choosing instead to let their music, their work do the talking. When, for example, the band is playing dreamy, ethereal music the last thing the audience wants to hear is that the drummer made a fool of himself by getting way too drunk after last night's gig and missing the plane/train/bus etc. There are plenty of other ways to connect with your public without telling crappy anecdotes.

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4a. The bottom line is that I prefer not to hear about musicians' human shortcomings (or perhaps more pointedly what dickheads they are - Thurston Moore "amusingly" waving dollar bills at Czechs back in 1994 comes to mind).

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5. Which brings me back to Bowie. Would you like him to go on stage and make some lame joke about being inebriated or tell you what a nice city you live in? No. Because it would break the spell, that unspoken pact between audience and performer. With music, as with all types of art, I'm happy to keep an illusion going, whatever form that illusion takes.

Just a word in praise of the delightful Colossal, linked to in my previous entry. Discovering it feels like a 'what I've been waiting for' moment in terms of my Internet use. One classy, beautiful, mindboggling entry after another that seems to be right up my street.

One of the coolest I've found so far is the Rainbow Toy Car Installation which caught my eye because I'm a bit of a sucker for colour-coded artworks.


Ah colour... I love the pantone collection and their website is full of amusing colour-related oddities.

It doesn't have to be an artwork to tickle my colour buds. I love going to shops selling artists' materials, paint, shirts





and, of course wool and cotton.













I went through a phase of really enjoying shopping at American Apparel. They boasted that you could get t-shirts in I-don't-know-how-many colours. The only problem was when you took your garment home and found it tremendously boring on its own. It was the presence of all the other colours that made it fresh and vibrant. Maybe I'm just a terribly conventional bloke but I love the order of colour schemes, their logical progression. There's clearly something harmoniously satisfying in my head when people get colour waves right. I'm sure there are times when they don't, when the order isn't quite as it should be and I know this disturbs me. Maybe I should take notes in future and analyse what works and what doesn't.

Another cracking post on Colossal features the scary Yayoi Kusama, albeit in more playful mood than some of the harrowing tributes to madness I've seen before and written about on this blog. This sticker project is simply delightful. Maybe the old girl is mellowing.

Elsewhere, Great Little Place in London recommends aerial photographer Jason Hawkes. Pitched somewhere between Andreas Gursky and Yann Arthus-Bertrand, I'm very tickled by this fellow's work. I love photography that messes with dimensions and makes things look like what they are not. It's so much fun when real things are reduced to abstract shapes...

Or when you have to go up close to a fairly conventional picture to find something you're not expecting, as in these amusing date-stamp artworks, also from Colossal.

Writing this post was interrupted by an episode of the BBC's Earthflight series, in which they give you a bird's eye view of the world. In other words cameras literally follow birds around the globe and, quite apart from being a standard nature programme, the joy lies in the photography, the best bits of which are when you can't properly make out what's down below or where the landscape is reduced or should I say elevate to a mass of rich colours.

Simply beautiful music video by a band called All India Radio. I can't begin to say how much I love light painting. Check some of these out, for example: http://www.thecoolist.com/light-graffiti-10-masters-of-light-painting-photography/. You can't begin to imagine the painstaking nature of putting together all of these images, one by one:

Rippled from Oh Yeah Wow on Vimeo.

Credit to http://www.thisiscolossal.com/ for the link.

I love tourist attractions that you can climb on.

I love tourist attractions that are daunting but inviting.

I love tourist attractions that offer unusual shapes.

On Sunday we went to a mad one that covered those three criteria in abundance, the Völklinger Hütte - the Voelklingen Ironworks. Here are a few things I enjoyed about it.

- it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site, normally the preserve of caves, archeological digs, churches and pretty views. This is not pretty or old, but clearly UNESCO feels the need to ensure respect for industrial heritage. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen pictures of mad blast furnaces or foundry works and thought 'crikey that's an unusual shape'. I've seen from the motorway the extraordinary industrial landscape of Saarbrucken. I’ve gawped at the amazing blast furnaces opposite the Rockhal in Luxembourg and wondered how cool it must be to be allowed round (it's fenced off). I've read the accounts of Cabaret Voltaire in England and Pere Ubu in America growing up near mad heavy industry and incorporating the sounds of the outlandish machinery into the blood. Yes, UNESCO have industrial heritage in its sights and that is crazily great.



- its sheer size. We spent about two hours wandering round there taking photo after photo, with every turn revealing yet more humungous, odd machinery. Mental. After those two hours, as it was pouring with rain, we decided to head for the exits only to realise that we'd just covered about a third to a half of the site.

- photogenic, and how



- imagining what it must’ve been like to work there: the noise, the smells, the hard graft, the steam, the heat, the smoke, the toxic waste, the attempts at being heard, the banter, [sorry but] the accidents, the swarms of people heading to and from the works. I was chatting with a colleague about this place today and he imagined a nightmare in which you’re innocently wandering around and then suddenly all the machinery cranked into gear again. It’s a scary but amusing thought. How it must’ve appeared back in the day that the whole place had a mind, a logic and a life of its own.

- health and safety. I don’t want to come across all reactionary, and I promise not to use the word ‘brigade’, but there really are some times when I’m happy that the health and safety… people are not doing their (probably very valuable) work. I loved being in India, where the steps around the monuments were not always in a good state of repair and where there simply wasn’t a fence to stop you from falling if you got too close to the edge. I loved being at the Voelklinger Huette, where the walkways and staircases were very slippery in the rain but I enjoyed the sense… not of danger (not good) but of doing something that is just slightly wrong.



- art exhibitions. Think of all the times you've been to great art spaces and gawped at your surroundings and only paid cursory attention to the artworks. We didn’t particularly need to focus on the artworks on display at Voelklingen because, after all, we’d come to see the ironworks, but it was good they’d had the foresight to realise that this is a fantastic place in which to host artworks. Personally, I’d have liked them to go further and break out of the dedicated exhibition spaces now in place in the ironworks and spread installations, sculptures and video works all around the whole site, hidden behind these chains or in that recess behind those machines-I-don’t-know-the-name-of.

- the German language. It has become something of a cliché, but the long words and sharp sounds seem so well suited to the industrial environment. To me all of the signs dotted around the place look exotic - the font is also very of its time and uniquely German - and the language definitely deserves its place in this list.




- hardly anyone around. We were able to walk for several minutes at a time without seeing another human being. Where else do you get to do this, especially in a large tourist attraction?

One of the great things is that, as I said above, despite spending a full two hours there, we really only scratched the surface and there is unfinished business for us at the Huette.

We've often passed a bunch of outdoor sculptures on our regular cycle route into the countryside. This is Schlaiffmillen, an artists' colony by the River Alzette and last Sunday they had their open day. They certainly have an idyllic spot in an old mill, but don't think this is some cutting-edge counter-cultural hub - the art was mostly quite old-fashioned and the patrons of the older variety, presumably loaded with cash. We inquired about the price, just out of curiosity, of a really beautiful glass sculpture by Rita Sajeva, and were quoted 5,500 euros! It may well have been worth it - I know nothing about the art market - but it still took us aback and the thought crossed our minds that people might have come there not to imbibe themselves in the atmosphere of new and daring art but rather to go shopping for something comforting and familiar. 

In general, then, we weren't too impressed though there was one artist who caught our eye, a certain Rafael Springer, who made lovely maps using thick 'tubes' of paint to represent streets, rivers etc. It was playful, accessible and, to us at least, original.

The really joyous moment of the afternoon came when in one studio we saw some percussion instruments lying on a table. I asked whether they were an installation or actually to be played. The girl said she was a percussionist and that was her collection of instruments. She'd deliberately chosen them for their tone as she was playing a piece composed by Vinko Globokar (no I hadn't heard of him either) to tie in with her mum's exhibition. To our surprise, she offered to perform for us. 

The purpose of the piece was to tell a story - in this case a text by Bertolt Brecht about Galileo - through percussion instruments following the voice's intonation. Each instrument, she told us later, represented a different French vowel sound and she told the story at natural speed with her fingers scraping and banging at the instruments as she went. French has a large number of vowel sounds, certainly more than English at least, and she had to find a different tone for each one, sometimes using different parts of the same instrument for, say "u" as in "tu" and "ou" as in "vous".

I thought to myself that in music the words usually follow the rhythm and flow of the music. Sometimes the lyric actually forms the rhythm - take LKJ's wonderful Reggae Sounds, for example. (Which begs a question I think I've addressed on the blog before - where does poetry end and lyric begin? Take a poem by Allen Ginsburg and try to read it without getting swept into a rhythm) But in this case it was the other way round: the instruments were at the mercy of the sound of the words. It reminded me of a piece I once saw by bonkers Brazilian experimental musician Hermeto Pascoal. He once recorded a piece of football commentary - and remember, Brazilian commentators are incredibly expressive - and made music that went up and down using exactly the 'notes' of his intonation. It was an academic exercise but cool.

The performance was three minutes of playful, teasing, experimental fun that took us away from the thick, stodgy paint of much of the work on display in the studios.

And I loved being asked the question "shall I play for you?"