Human Flower Project
Art & Media
Santiago, MEXICO
Cairo, EGYPT
Austin, Texas USA
Sunday, August 08, 2010
On the Way to a Prom
Memory and the Proms—Royal Albert Hall’s eight weeks of daily concerts—bring John Levett to London. Happy birthday, with rose ‘heps.’
Diana Princess of Wales Memorial Fountain, Hyde Park
Photo: John Levett
By John Levett
Last Thursday was my birthday. I answered mail until noon. It never used to be like this.
The group of photographers that I have the privilege of working with is having its annual show, opening next week and going through to September. We’ve got seventy-five entries this year, our largest number since we began back in 2007. It’s a fine group. We never get bogged down in the technicalities of the process; we’re just there for the images, for the back-story, for the sharing. We’ve got enough energy & enthusiasm for the first timer as for the old pro and sometimes you’ll not know the difference. People keep coming, people keep coming back; that’s always the best judge that something’s right about a group. The mail box keeps growing too.
I once knew the secretary of my local Labour Party in south London. He kept a large bag of pennies & ha’pennies in the bottom draw of his desk. Whenever anyone new came in and asked if they could help out he took out the bag and said: “People keep dropping their small change into our collecting boxes & I never get around to counting it. Do you think that’s something you could do for me?” It never failed. Everyone wants to be useful. So the mail keeps growing and the jobs keep getting done and the show opens and we all wonder at how it got to look so wonderful. The mailbox is the bag of pennies. Everybody gets to be useful.
That’s why you answer mail ’til noon on your birthday.
I broke. Sun was up; I hadn’t noticed. I took a mug of nuclear-strength tea and my book of the month (Austerity Britain by David Kynaston: social history without compare) out to the deckchair under the now-ripening heps of early-aging summer; a chapter read thence to the station.
I can’t read histories on the train. Too many conversations, too much mobile-phoning. Currently my ‘train books’ are re-reads of post-war fiction: Flight into Camden, This Sporting Life, Room at the Top, A Kind of Loving, the ‘London’ trilogy by Colin McInnes. Strange reads; reminders of how much time we spent trying to keep warm; how long London stayed a bomb-site; how we courted. Now King’s Cross: Larkin’s walls of blackened moss still visible in parts.
Art & Media • Culture & Society • Gardening & Landscape • Permalink
Friday, July 23, 2010
‘Ritmo, Tambo’ y Flores’
Transported to a Caribbean garden by horns, flowers, drums, and a voice—we remember Celia Cruz.
Celia Cruz
Queen of Salsa
Photo: via David Byrne
“Tu Voz!”
Your voice, Celia Cruz. What an instrument, what a trumpet flower!
The late Cuban singer did more to spread the radiance of Latin music than anyone we know of—or can imagine. The one and only time we heard her live was at “La Noche Latina” preceding the New Orleans Jazzfest (1988?). In the ballroom of a riverboat anchored in the Mississippi, Willie Colon and his band opened, then wizard of percussion Tito Puente took the stage for several numbers, and finally Celia was ushered in, dressed in shiny aquamarine.
The crowd sighed in reverence and screamed with elation before “The Queen of Salsa,” shouting their requests from the moment she picked up the microphone. Flashing the gap in her immense Martha Rae smile, she bowed and, one by one, sang every number they asked for. Celia wasn’t just a performer, she was a provider!
Friday, July 09, 2010
Totality
Overcoming alienation: John Levett furthers the revolution thirty minutes a day.
Bobby James and Félicité Parmentier
Photo: John Levett
By John Levett
There’s an oft-quoted passage of Karl Marx that goes as follows: “as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming fisherman, herdsman or critic.”
It’s a passage about human creative potentialities where the human being “...does not reproduce himself in one specificity, but produces his totality…Strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming.”
They’re fine passages omitting only the recognition that hunting, fishing, cattle rearing, criticizing and becoming are also available to women.
Saturday, June 12, 2010
Rerouting and a Spotless Rose
From the bridge, John Levett sees the hallmark of gardening—effort. At home, persistence brings a banner year for a pesky yellow rose.
Elizabeth Way Bridge, built 1971, over the River Cam
Photo: John Levett
By John Levett
I have entered the buggersome years. The years of forgetting the date of so-and-so’s birth or death; the name of a book, the name of an author; the road that leads into that other road; an artist, a sculptor. They all come back at some time but at the time when they’re no longer needed.
Until last year I was giving was a ten-session course on Marx and Marxism. I loved it then as I loved it when I first gave it. It took in the whole broad sweep of the intellectual development of a continent; there was nowhere it couldn’t go—art, literature, philosophy, history, political economy, insurrection, failure, defeat, death. Nothing was too small to be attended to—the name of the editor of an obscure north Prussian periodical; the correct title of an Austrian grand duke; the name of a street in St. Petersburg; a character in Balzac. I needed to research these things; someone might ask; I might not know; my credibility in shreds. Each week resembled the desperate last-minute revision of a final-year student on the morning of a final exam. And if nobody asked? I slotted it into an aside somewhere. Nothing of my research was wasted. Diderot’s running dog.