Dotty

The Kusama Yayoi exhibition at Museo Tamayo ends this weekend. It has been a sensation: the most visited exhibition in the Museum's 30+ year history. The queues stretch hundreds of metres; people camp overnight; it is beyond 'trending' on Twitter; it has become the background for selfies.
It's funny how some - a very few - exhibitions progress from being simply successful, satisfying the usual crowd... to mega-hits, through clever marketing  word of mouth and, these days, social media buzz.
But I don't really get this one. Kusama does dots. Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of dots. Some other things too. But mainly dots. It has prompted a similarly dotty response.

TOTP

Court jesters

Got home from work today and thought: 'It's Thursday, good, Top of the Pops...'. Once I got over the fact that TOTP effectively finished in 2006, that I hadn't watched it since the 90s and that I'm currently living in Mexico, the moment of madness passed.
However, it made me think how strangly essential a part of the week it was. You'd get home from school, or even work, and on it would go. The chart rundown, the miming, the gems mixed with garbage (or even Garbage), in the 70s the slick moves of Pans People contrasting with the shuffling around of a flared, limp-haired audience, in the 80s the trying-to-be enthusiastic presenters contrasting with the piss-taking of Peel & Kid Jensen as the Rhythm Pals…
I once appeared on TOTP, in 1990. Not as a performer (ha - now that would have been interesting), but because I knew someone on the staff and was intrigued enough to see how it was produced. It was quite a good episode actually: 808 State's Cubik, EMF's Unbelievable, Julee Cruise's Falling, Chris Isaak's Wicked Game, and probably some embarrassments. 
Speaking of which, at one point the exuberant floor manager forced me onto the stage with Anthea Turner who was wearing what appeared to be a court jester's outfit, and I had to jig around as if I really meant it, as if pop was all that mattered. There were times when that wasn't far off the truth, though this moment wasn't one of them.

Farewell 19th Century

As we begin a new year, we are fast approaching a time when there will be no-one left alive who was (verifiably) born in the 1800s, whose lives effectively take in three centuries.  I believe there are only five left, all of them female: Misao Okawa (Japanese), Gertrude Weaver (USA), Jerallean Talley (USA), Susannah Musshat Jomes (USA) and Emma Moran-Martinuzzi (Italy), all born in either 1898 or 1899.
Just think, to be born before airplanes, domestic fridges, the Olympics, WWI, radio, telephones, television, computers. William McKinley was the US President, Emperor Meiji was at the height of his powers in Japan and Queen Victoria was still on the throne in Britain. Wilde, Mahler and Dvorak, Toulouse-Laurtec and Zola, were all still alive. Streets were full of horses and electricity was still a way off from being domesticated.

Graham Greene, John Peel and Tim Butcher

Following one foreign foray by Graham Greene (see this post a week ago), I'm now reading about another - though not by his hand. Greene's first trip outside of Europe was to Sierra Leone and Liberia, of all places, in 1935, three years before his Mexican trip. Ostensibly it was to write a travel book (Journey Without Maps), but on the quiet he was reporting back to a charity - and the government - on the continued practise of slavery. He brought with him his cousin, Barbara Greene, and together they ventured deep into the heart of both countries by rail, foot, road and boat.
But I'm not reading his book, I'm reading a contemporary account by the journalist Tim Butcher who retraced Greene's footsteps in 2009. This was actually a more dangerous task now than in Greene's time, thanks to the chaos that persists there even after war of 1990-2002 ended.
I visited Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, in 1989, just before the country plunged into anarchy. It was for work, bringing with me an exhibition about pop music, plus John Peel, his wife Sheila and a BBC World Service producer. It was a fascinating trip: partly because Freetown was so very different from anywhere I'd been before, but also simply to hang out with someone who'd been a long-time hero. The exhibition proved popular, but it was really context for working with some local musicians and donating a portastudio so they could record their own music. Butcher's book is very good and exactly traces the Greenes' adventure. Must read his first book, Blood River, which follows in the footsteps of another intrepid explorer, Henry Morton Stanley, in the Congo.

NT at 50 (Slightly Delayed)

Tonight, a year after the event, Liz and I watched a DVD of the National Theatre's 50th anniversary celebrations: the recording of the 50 Years on Stage all-star show which took place in the Olivier in November 2013 plus the Arena documentary which coincided.
The NT seems to go from strength to strength. After starting off life in its temporary home at the Old Vic in the 60s, it finally moved into the Denys Lasdun building in the mid-70s with Peter Hall at the helm. I read his Diaries of the time and they were turbulent years: full of delays, industrial disputes, funding cuts and trying to win over a public which took a while to warm to both the institution and (especially) the building. Even the Queen seemed not to be amused when attended the opening play, Il Campiello, a rare dud. 
But Richard Eyre, Trevor Nunn and Nick Hytner all continued to steer it in the right direction  and now it can seem to do no wrong. A mixture of crowd-pleasers and experimentation, keeping ticket prices low (every play is a sell-out) and reaching audiences beyond the building - including Mexico - with NT Live all adds up to a success story. Rufus Norris takes over in April. It'll be interesting to see where he takes it. 

An Evening of Poetry

Andrew Motion, Owen Sheers & co

So, after a long and welcome break, it's back to work - and, lest I forget, the start of UK in Mexico 2015. Tonight we had our first event: a poetry evening with Sir Andrew Motion and Owen Sheers. I'd met Motion once before, in Tokyo over ten years ago, when he was Poet Laureate, but Sheers was new to me. He's Welsh, brought up in Abergavenny but now lives over the hills near Talgarth. He also writes novels and plays. Expecting nothing, I said that my father was from that part of the world and I spent a few holidays in the hamlet of Llanthony where my uncle and aunt Jim & Gaynor Elliott still live. 'Oh really', he said. 'I know them'. Turns out he wrote a play in their holiday cottage a little further up the valley. Small world.
Anyway, it was a pleasant evening of both of them reading selected poems and a conversation afterwards with a surprisingly large audience. I say 'surprisingly' because poetry, at least in the UK, does not have the mass-appeal that prose (let alone other art-forms) enjoys. But poetry figures quite prominently in Mexican culture, a point backed up by the fact that the poet Octavio Paz is, so far, the only Mexican to win the Noel Prize for Literature.

From Hot to Cold

Back to a cold capital. Strange that the temperature gap should be so wide between Huatulco (32C) and Mexico City (7C), a distance of only 250 miles.