Arts

As we pass the 70th anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death - or rather his work - has remained dear to me, one way of another, for nearly 40 years, from his poems, through the biographies I consumed at Edinburgh and subsequently, a profile on Great Lives and an excellent BBC commentary on Under Milk Wood.

During a guided "green meditation" in the summer of 2023, while focusing my attention on the beauty of a nearby plant, I was reminded of Thomas' The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.

My favourite films (text credits below to Far Out magazine), include the following:

All That Jazz (to follow)

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975)

So come, my friends, be not afraid.
We are so lightly here.
It is in love that we are made;
In love we disappear

28th June marks the anniversary of the funeral services of someone very dear in my own life, and in the lives of many others.

As people tried to terms with the passing of HM Queen Elizabeth II and on the 21st anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I was reminded of this earlier post on legacy...especially the words in bold.

In the last months of his life, a physically weakened Christopher Hitchens travelled to the Texas Freethought Convention and while there, an eight-year-old girl asked Hitchens what books she should consider reading. Intrigued, Hitchens spent 15 minutes chatting with the youngster and sketching out a reading list (below). His last words to her? "Lots of love...remember the love bit..."

I was relatively late getting into Dylan properly...into my early 20s - although before that I'd appreciated individual songs, such as Lay Lady Lay, Like A Rolling Stone and others.

However, when his force finally it hit me, it hit me hard. Chimes of Freedom, To Ramona and Ballad in Plain D all affected me on a deep emotional level in different ways, while the likes of One More Cup of Coffee had a beguiling exoticism.

See also:

In 1883, Antoni Gaudí began working on the Sagrada Família in Barcelona and before his death managed to complete the crypt, apse and part of the Nativity facade. Work slowed during the 1930s and 40s, then picked up again in the 1950s and a series of architects carried on Gaudí’s work, completing new towers and facades.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment topped Open Culture's crowdsourced list of Books Intelligent People Should Read. I certainly enjoyed its narrow intensity, a stark contrast to the broad sweep of the same author's equally magisterial The Brothers Karamazov.

To Bozar in Brussels in 2016 for the final days of the Facing the Future exhibition, which shed light on about 180 works created between 1945 and 1968 by artists from Europe and the former Soviet Union.

Notwithstanding the tensions between Eastern and Western Europe in the years following the Second World War, artists on both sides of the Iron Curtain experimented in similar ways: from media art to action painting, conceptual art and sound art.  

See also:

• Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is not just a radical kind of art. It’s a philosophical dialetheia: a contradiction that is true.