Chateau La Coste is a vanity project created by multi-millionaire Paddy McKillen on a 600 acre estate just north of Aix-en-Provence in the south of France. It is internationally heralded as a paradise for lovers of wine, architecture and art. The wine is eminently enjoyable; the architecture and artworks not so much.

Jill and I visited last week on a day when temperatures were in excess of 40o and the rarest commodity on the domaine was shade. I eventually found some solace in a rail car, overlooking a vineyard and a couple of structures designed by Richard Rogers.

The rail car in question is an art installation by Bob Dylan. It’s a collage of iron pieces, and it’s life-size, set on rails along the perimeter of the vineyard. It’s a couple of miles from the main reception of the estate, all uphill. It’s not on the map that you are given, and it’s un-signposted. I, and a Bob fan from the States whom I met randomly when we both asked each other where it was, found it by accident and perhaps that is how it is intended to be found. A kind of serendipity.

Bob says that it “represents perception and reality at the same time. All the iron is re-contextualised to represent peace, serenity and stillness.”

It does.

From across the vineyard it is monumental. Massive. But come closer and one sees that it is also delicate, with the motifs - tools, wheels, ladders - intricately positioned to create a form a tracery of branches, veins, offshoots. It’s a form of topiary I guess, with Bob inspired or at least prompted by the location on the old Roman road that meanders through the forest at La Coste.

Alongside the rail car (alongside in terms of time rather than geography - the two are on opposite sides of the huge estate) is an exhibition of a couple of dozen original paintings from the Drawn Blank series.

Most of us know these from viewing or owning the prints. To see the originals is to see that Bob is a very painterly painter. His works are shown with works by Monet and Matisse, Chagall, Pissarro and Picasso.

The hanging is a brave thing to do, even for Bob. But the love of the Provençal landscape exhibited (literally and figuratively) by all these painters made a show which, collectively, works. As does the rail car itself. Part Bob, part Provence. Part nature, part fabrication.

"Part perception, part reality."
​
It was well worth the schlepp. And to prove it, go to www.halcyongallery.com and watch the professional video.

Today from the everysmith vaults: ​Shadow Kingdom, the on-line show that Bob put out during the pandemic to keep us sane. Just seems appropriate.

There can be few of my generation who remain immune to the works of Joni Mitchell and David Hockney. I’m not saying you have had to love them, or even like them; merely that you must be aware of them and respect them. Joni’s songs, Hockney’s paintings and drawings, have measured out our lives. They are legends.
 
The image is from 2019, when it apparently “commandeered the internet”, but my politics, baseball and Dylan-obsessed Twitter feed failed to alert me at the time. So it was only this week that a random re-tweet brought it full screen on my iPad. It was minus four outside at the time, and the weather as bleak as our mood. We were in the middle of a pandemic and in lockdown. We were desperate for some colour in our lives.
 
This remarkable picture, a snapshot really, provided it. I printed it out for Jill to frame so that we could have a constant reminder of the happiness and contentment it epitomizes. (A thing of beauty is a joy forever.)

It is about ageing, about life, about colour.
 
And this despite the fact that Hockney has recovered from a stroke and Joni is suffering from Morgellons Disease and had to learn to walk again after a brain aneurysm.
 
So it is a powerful representation of optimism, of determination, of commitment to living. And of friendship and companionship and shared interests.
 
I re-post it now for those who haven’t seen it and need to see it. Which is all of us.

Today from the everysmith vaults

​Coincidentally, on the morning after I had first seen it, I came across a website which was featuring the original demo takes of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni’s 1975 album which eschewed the confessional voice of earlier recordings and introduced jazz, rock, sampling. But the demos were acoustic: her beautiful voice, piano and guitar. It came to me with the title The Seeding of Summer Lawns which I love. I commend it to you.

In Lost, Stolen or Shredded, published in 2013, my pal Rick Gekoski gave us fifteen stories of missing works of art and literature, ranging from a juvenile poem by James Joyce (lost) to the Mona Lisa (stolen) to Philip Larkin’s diaries (shredded).
 
I wonder if Banksy read it.
 
His Girl With Balloon, which self-destructed minutes after selling for a million quid (the Sotheby’s estimate was £200K to £300K) is now believed, in its shredded state, to be worth twice what the anonymous buyer paid. Or at least, what he or she bid because we await confirmation that the buyer has paid or will pay for the artwork.
 
I’m pretty sure that he has or will. After all, the result of this coup de théâtre is a new, unique artwork.
 
There is a parallel here. Back in the early 1950s, Robert Rauschenberg performed an equally audacious act. He ‘erased’ a drawing by Willem de Kooning and in so doing, over a period of two months, he created a new piece which he exhibited under the title “Erased De Kooning Drawing”.
 
He said that it was not destruction, nor negation, but celebration. And de Kooning colluded in this by providing “something I will miss”.
 
Rauschenberg had experimented with erasing his own work, but concluded that “If it was my own work being erased, then the erasing would only be half the process, and I wanted it to be the whole,” he said.
 
Judged by this criterion, Banksy has only achieved half the process. His next move, perhaps, will be to approach a de Kooning of today with a request for an artwork which can form the raw material for a total erasure.
 
I nominate Damian Hirst.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: To my eternal regret, I missed Luna’s couple of gigs in the UK last month, so grateful to nyctaper for a great show from Industry City in “deep Brooklyn”. Highlight (for me) a terrific version of the Velvets’ Lonesome Cowboy Bill. What NY lacks in baseball, it makes up for with a great music scene.

We saw a crane on Wednesday night. I was watching the Sox Orioles make-up game. We were 15-3 up when I heard Jill scream.
 
“A crane’s just flown past” she shouted. We rushed to a window in time to see this beautiful creature – long of leg and neck - land on a TV aerial and look around, down Clarendon Crescent and across Clarendon Square.
 
Cranes are unusual in the UK. Even rarer in Leamington. We know that there are just 10 breeding pairs of cranes in the UK, in two locations: one to the east, in Norfolk; one to the west in Somerset. So this one was presumably on his or her way from the Scandinavian breeding grounds to Spain, Portugal or Morocco.
 
We also know that, when migrating, they are gregarious, often flying in a massive flock called, variously, a “construction", a “dance", a “sedge", a “siege", or a “swoop" of cranes. So many collective nouns would certainly suggest that, even in the UK, they are more often seen in numbers than individually.
 
But this one was alone, and seemed to be in no hurry. It stood proudly on its perch for about ten minutes before launching itself head first to the south, its neck suddenly longer, its legs straight back, its wing span vast, its under feathers black as pitch.

We watched it out of sight and I returned to the ballgame. We had won 19-3.
 
I am not a subscriber to the Greco-Roman (faux-) science of ornithomancy or, indeed, any other kind of -mancy. I do not believe in augurs, or messages from non-existent gods.
 
But something about this crane – our crane – insists on being symbolic and remaining so in my mind.
 
I find that the augurs claimed a bird flying from left to right, as our crane was, means that we will achieve our goals with ease; that because it is a crane, it has a species-specific meaning also: that we should use all the wisdom at our disposal; and because our crane was gray, it presages peace and contentment.
 
All of which I will take happily. But the image that remains with me from this sighting is of the single individual, divorced from society, but pursuing his goal with commitment and determination, obsession even.
 
It’s the existential moment: Lear on the heath, Ahab on the quarterdeck, our crane on his/her TV aerial, contemplating the thousand miles he has come and the two thousand miles to go.
 
“ … and I just said, ‘good luck’”.
 
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I’ve been revisiting one of the great years of the Never Ending Tour, 1999. It’s a four seasons year, four different sounds. Of which, having seen some of them, I tend towards the spring in Europe.

An interview on Radio 4 this morning, with Antony Gormley, reminds me that Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge is about to re-open after being closed for ‘refurbishment’.
 
I confess I am always a little apprehensive about these programmes of refurbishment in general and this exercise has caused me not a little concern, because the Kettle’s Yard I remember was not an art gallery. It was a home with some great art.
 
For a time, back in the late sixties, I would walk past Kettle’s Yard a couple of times a day, on a journey between my rooms in college and the digs of a girlfriend in Castle Street. In those days, there was no signage to invite one inside. It was all word of mouth. And it was from a friend that I heard that Jim Ede and his wife Helen would hold open house most afternoons, offering tea and guided tours to those who were lucky enough to knock on the door at the appropriate time.
 
On a couple of occasions, I was one of those.
 
I wasn’t totally visually illiterate then, but the art I liked was almost exclusively figurative. Paintings that told a story. Narrative art if you like.
 
The work that I saw on my first visit was revelatory, despite - or more probably because of - the fact that I was stoned. Very stoned. I doubt that I would have ventured to knock had I not been.
 
Helen Ede – it was just Helen on that day - must have realized this, but I was treated with courtesy and respect, given tea and shown round the collection. I was told stories of Ben Nicholson, David Jones, Miro. I saw sculptures by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.
 
But I also saw odd stones and pebbles and bits of coloured glass and weathered wood.
 
In my normal, unintoxicated, hard-line rationalist state, I would have paid little heed to these found objects. But on that day, they were wonderful. Not for what they were, but for how they appeared. How they balanced and complemented the art, how the domesticity of the rooms seemed to be the ideal environment for their display.
 
There was no shop, no café. There were no little typewritten notes telling us what to think. Just a couple welcoming you to their house and sharing their love of art.
 
I felt completely at home.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: Yesterday was Shostakovich String Quartets, all of them, from the first to the fifteenth. Today, it’s studio outtakes from Dylan’s Desire sessions. As ever, I am unable to understand Bob's decisions to take one cut and abandon others. 

It took me a while to get Rothko.
 
I have never seen his early, mythic, figurative work outside the pages of catalogues and art coffee table books. The Rothko I and thousands of others ‘know’ are those extraordinarily massive slabs of darkness, through which float almost untraceable hues of tone, texture and colour, the Late Series.
 
As he intended, I was overwhelmed, in awe, when I walked into the Tate a decade ago. And I thought of Dylan ten years earlier acknowledging that “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there”.
 
It was clear that, for Rothko, it had already got there. He was re-working over and over again this sense of imminent tragedy, which we may infer or deduce, was to end in his future suicide.
 
I have known three suicides: a writer, a painter, a scientist. Each was, in their own way, brilliant: clever, intelligent, funny even. I cannot know, no-one can know, what despair drove them to believe that they were better off dead.

I have also known many more people left behind by the suicide of someone close to them; left behind with the guilt that they should have seen it coming, that they somehow failed their lover or friend. Suicide is not painless.
 
Rothko spoke often of suicide apparently, particularly that of Jackson Pollock – suicide by alcohol and a car crash. He told his assistant that “if I choose to commit suicide, everyone will be sure of it. There will be no doubts …”.
 
There wasn’t. He over-dosed on anti-depressants. And slashed his wrists with a razor blade.
 
This was no cry for help. This was no psychosis. This was not even a philosophical desire to die and take control over a life which was failing physically and intellectually.

​I don't get it.
 
Half an hour ago, I had no intention of writing this or anything like it. But first thing this morning, I found myself staring at a Rothko print on our kitchen wall as I waited for the coffee machine to fire up. It is not one of the final pieces. In this one, it is not dark yet, but it’s getting there. I have looked at this many, many times but today, as I sipped my coffee, I was reminded of one of those quotes which I collect in my commonplace book.
 
It’s from Rothko. And it is this:
 
“There is only one thing I fear in life, my friend: One day, the black will swallow the red.’

​Now that I understand.
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: A family illness has caused the cancellation of the Atrium String Quartet’s appearance in Leamington a week tonight. Their place is being taken by the Brodsky who will perform the Shostakovich #12 which was to be the centrepiece of the Atrium gig. I was looking forward immensely to seeing the Atrium again, but listening now to #7 is more than fine.

A brief addendum: Back in 2010, when this blog was conceived, I split the posts into Lettres d'Uzès (my hommage to Racine) for those written in France and, thus, Leamington Letters for those written in the UK. Lifestyle changes make this distinction inappropriate, so all posts will now come under the (highly appropriate) Not Dark Yet banner. Numbering of the posts henceforth is as if both were in fact one. The blog itself will now be titled MS for reasons which should be self-evident. The new profile picture was photo-shopped by my late great friend Bill Keningale for my 50th birthday. Er, that's it.

Jill and I decided to take a break from what was becoming an obsession with endless news updates to enjoy some of the things that Europe has to offer. We needed an away day without wi-fi and iphone notifications pinging into our consciousness. So we drove south.

We started with Chagall and the presentation of his works in a multimedia exhibition held underground in an ancient (since Roman times) cave-like quarry. This is Les Carrières des Lumières at Les Beaux, near St Rémy de Provence.
 
Chagall: Midsummer Night’s Dreams is a spectacular creation. All the famous masterpieces have been digitized and projected onto the columns, walls and the floor of the quarry. Initially, the experience is disorientating, even disturbing; within moments, however, one eyes and ears adjust: one is inundated with colour, close-ups and creativity.

Every phase of Chagall's life and work is here in one form or another: 100 projectors showing his works from the love paintings and landscapes to the stained glass windows which brought Jill to tears when seeing them for the first time a decade or so ago.

Accompanying the imagery is an eclectic but sympa soundtrack, put together by a friend of Chagall, Mikhaïl Rudy. Through 27 speakers, it moves from circus music to grand opera to Janis Joplin and back again.
 
We were entranced and enchanted; in awe and in thrall. We were tempted to remain for a second run. But we had to return to St Quentin-la-Poterie because, that evening, Stéphane Reynaud was opening his new restaurant, La Cuisine de Boucher, in St Quentin and we had coveted tickets to the launch party.

​Stéphane’s new venture is in a large and imposing building overlooking the market square. It has been empty and à vendre for many years, and as each summer passed without a new owner, we speculated that its refurbishment would become even more difficult and even more expensive. I suspect it was both. But miracles have been achieved and the party did it justice, with the great and the good of St Quentinoise society – including the Mayor and the council – turning out for fine wine and delicious canapés.
 
It was a great day, a day during which we almost forgot the strife back in the UK and our own concerns and misgivings over the implications for us and our business, and for the future of our children and grandchildren.
 
Almost, but not quite.
 
Turning one’s back on Europe is not something for which we voted and not something that should be done frivolously, although that is what has happened. let's be clear: it should not have been done at all. But it has and somehow we must live with it.

How? No idea. But when I've worked it out, I will let you know ...
 
Today from the everysmith vaults: I am continuing my exploration of Indie Pop with the carefully nuanced and tuneful work of Ultimate Painting, a UK band which owes much to the Velvets, and to which I was introduced by a show in New York recorded by the exemplary nyctaper.

Arles makes few concessions to the tourist.

Its 2000 year history embraces the Phoenicians, the Romans, the Jews, the Gypsy Kings and, of course, Vincent van Gogh, who lived here between February 1888 to July 1890. But although there is a defined tourist area, centred on the Forum, and although it attracts thousands of visitors every year, it remains defiantly a communist town, with a working class ethos. There is nothing pretty or twee here; Arles is as gritty and uncompromising as the dust which the Mistral blows around its streets and squares.

The excuse for our most recent visit was the new Fondation Vincent van Gogh, in which some 50 or so drawings and prints are on display in a beautiful hybrid building – half 15th century and half 21st century – located in a small street between the forum and the amphitheatre.

It is a refreshing exhibition, because none of the famous, iconic paintings are here – a fact which provoked an American family buying tickets ahead of us to cancel their visit (“You’re telling me you have no originals at all?”). Instead, we are encouraged to focus on his draughtsmanship, his printmaking and his subject matter. Appropriately for a resident of a communist town, van Gogh’s early ambition was to create prints which could be bought at an affordable price by the working class, showing activities inspired by their working lives. In Arles, he cut and trimmed reeds to make pens which which he drew peasants, artisans and labourers at work and at play. Many are poignant; all are dignified and none more so than the gravediggers in Cemetery in the Rain.

Because the work is unfamiliar, at least to me, it commanded more time and attention than we expected. So much so that by the time we passed through the exit, it was time for lunch. Serendipitously, the same street which hosts the Fondation, also boasts a restaurant which is one of our favourites.

At Le Galoubet, one dines underneath the vines on a beautiful terrace and eats from a small but perfectly formed carte. On the day in question, it featured œuf mollet on a bed of ratatouille to start and suprême of pintadeau to follow. Perfect. And the demi pichet of red to accompany the meal was from Estézargues, wine I first drank in Terroirs in King William IV Street in London. We decided quickly that this would be our new house red and left Arles, raced down the autoroute and arrived in Estézargues (midway between St Quentin la Poterie and Avignon) within the hour. Another hour later, our degustation came to an end and we were cruising home with a boot full of sublime CdR – including an unfiltered Cinsault which I commend to all you fans of natural wines.

With the Mistral keeping the clouds at bay, we spent the evening in the company of this wine, sitting in the courtyard and looking up occasionally to admire our very own Starry Night.

A good day. Vin and Vincent is a great combination.


Today from the everysmith vaults: another great combination, thanks to Wolfgang. Jim Hall and Tal Farlow in Central Park back in 1973. Only a short set but every bar is exquisite.

PS. For our American friends, I should point out that there is an 'original' in the Fondation. Here it is - A Pile of French Novels.

It is, of course,  “a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition” – aren’t they all? – but it left us distinctly underwhelmed.

Jill and I had braved the tube strike to schlep to London. Our objective was the Tate Modern and the new show of Matisse’s cut-outs which he produced after his illness, sitting in his wheelchair and directing his young assistants as to placement and colour

There are 130 of them in the Level 2 gallery at the Tate Modern, and they have provoked extraordinary reviews and even more extraordinary praise. “For many people” said Nicholas Serota, “the Cut-Outs will be the most evocative and beautiful show that London has seen.”

Well, it isn’t. And, as my English teacher remonstrated with me, “evocative of what?”

Granted, the work is attractive and decorative. But that isn’t enough. I can get that anywhere at any time.

Granted, there is some interest in seeing the originals, discovering those little bits of paper that have been pasted over a mistake or on a whim. They add the texture that is missing from the reproductions.

And granted, the colours are vibrant and vivid and slightly vulgar in their flat obviousness. Significantly, there are no organic colours here; they are all synthetic, lacking in depth and naturalness.

But those familiar images are all here – the Dancers, Jazz, the Blue Nudes, Oceana and the chapel at Vence.

One can imagine their Provençal provenance: slight strips of colour and form hanging from a drawing pin axis on the wall and fluttering in the breezes from an open window. Matisse spoke of the way in which the easel became redundant and his work released from the constraints of a frame. He regarded them as a kind of wallpaper, even if he subsequently claimed that they constituted "my real self: free, liberated.”

Perhaps.

But in the exhibition they are framed and they are constrained. They have borders and edges. And as such they are merely conventional graphics; even - perhaps especially - those iconic images with which we are all so familiar, which one can buy as a poster and which hang in a million bed-sits. I mean the Blue Nudes, the abstracted Snail and Icarus (above).

So if the exhibition is intended as evidence that, in old age, “he did not merely create a new style, he created a new medium”, it fails.

More importantly, it fails to hold the attention. It’s more of the same from room to room. 

I think the issue – my issue – with these works is that they are … well, not paintings. What we saw was a great painter not painting. Not print-making either, although these work so much more immediately as reproductions.

I really wanted to be be impressed, to relish the sensual colours and shapes. But I wasn’t. I really wanted to love the artist that my wife loves above (almost) all others. But I couldn't. And I really wanted to learn about how complexity operates in simplicity. But I didn't.

All I can say is that they were, mostly, pleasing to the eye.

But not as pretty as a picture.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Free flowing jazz and rock improvisation from the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Santana and McLaughlin in a series of gigs from Concert Vault: each manifesting elegance and lyricism and weirdness. After Coltrane, this is where to go.

 

We chose to follow the advice of Elizabeth David: an omelette and a glass of wine. I was in the French bistro Angelus, with Rick Gekoski, having an all-too-infrequent and, on this occasion, all-too-brief lunch. We were talking books, because Rick is a Booker Prize judge, rare-book dealer and writer, and I would like to be any or all of those.

At some point, Rick mentioned that he had enjoyed a particular blog of mine, which concerned a restaurant which we had both frequented many years ago. And digging it up from the archives on the train home, I noted that I had announced my plan to blog about Rick's last book, Lost, Stolen or Shredded, as soon as I had given it due consideration. By which I meant as soon as I had read it again, because one reads Rick firstly for entertainment and secondly for education and elucidation. Or I do.

I realised that I have never honoured that promise. So I will do so now, because it is almost a year since publication and Rick is already well-advanced on his next book. And because I realised this weekend that a couple of works were missing from my shelves. And yes, I did read the book a second time.

The sub-title of Lost, Stolen or Shredded is Stories of Missing Works of Art and Literature. This is not, I suspect, merely to attract the attention of internet search engines, but because each chapter is, in fact, a great story told by a great story-teller, with a wonderful turn of phrase.

Consider the opening sentences of the foreword: “He collected absences. For him they were more intense, vibrant and real than the presences that they shadowed.” I remember reading this to Jill on the train back from the launch party, and remarking that it was worthy of the subject, who is, of course, Franz Kafka, and the  story concerns his visit to the Louvre to gaze not upon the Mona Lisa, but at the space that the painting had occupied before being stolen.

“He collected absences.” There is no way one is not going to read on after that. And so one does, learning about the stolen Mona Lisa, the destroyed Churchill portrait by Sutherland, the burned manuscripts of Byron and Larkin's diaries and Joyce's juvenilia, Et Tu, Healey, and the bejewelled copy of the Rubaiyat which went down on the Titanic. All are written as he talks - with eloquence and fluency and wry humour. 

I doubt whether the transformation from Radio 4 talks to book required too much editing. In both forms, he tells stories, each of which addresses the general (the art or literature and its place in the world) and the particular (Rick's individual relationship with it).

Absence, caused by loss, theft, shredding or sinking, is the theme. Does the absence of a poem, a diary, a painting leave the world a worse place? Rick mentions his inability to look at the work of Eric Gill without "a shudder of remembrance" of Gill's activities with children. I share that revulsion. I also care little about the destruction of Larkin's diaries, for example, and think that everything else the man wrote is diminished by the fact that those diaries were once written and did exist, that they were part of the 'complete works' of Larkin and that one's response to a Larkin poem now is informed by the knowledge of those diaries and their contents.

Today of course those diaries could probably have been erased not by the ceremony of ritual burning, but by the simple click of the delete button. And Rick's current preoccupations include the life and death of the book itself. Like me, he reads primarily on the Kindle, buying the real thing only for writers and volumes of particular importance. (I bought an actual copy of the reissue of Keywords by Raymond Williams this morning, the first such purchase for some months, probably since Lost, Stolen or Shredded, come to think of it.)

But for Rick, as a publisher of beautiful books and a dealer in rare ones, the convenience of the Kindle medium must be also a source of regret. We do not own an iBook or a Kindle book; we merely have the right to read it. (Nor do we own an iTune: Bruce Willis is currently engaged in a law suit to enable him to leave his iTunes music to his children.)

This is what we have lost, or had stolen from us. Our sense of direct, proprietary involvement with our books and our music. Our ownership, on a personal level, with both the artefact and the intellectual content.

I know this is not on the same scale as the loss of the library in the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, another of Rick's stories.

But is for me. As well as my missing first edition of Keywords, inscribed to me by Raymond Williams, I discovered yesterday that my cassettes of Dylan and the Dead rehearsing in San Rafael in 1987 are also gone, baby, gone.

To paraphrase Stalin, which I do seldom, the loss of thousands of scrolls in Herculaneum is a statistic. The loss of that book, and those tapes, is a tragedy.

Today from the everysmith vaults: Miles Davis, opening for the Dead at Fillmore West in April 1970. Here's Phil Lesh in his autobiography, Searching for the Sound, “As I listened, leaning over the amps with my jaw hanging agape, trying to comprehend the forces that Miles was unleashing on stage, I was thinking, 'What's the use. How can we possibly play after this? We should just go home and try to digest this unbelievable shit.”