Poole Lighthouse, ‘East meets West’ mini-festival (27th Feb 2010)
1971, age about twenty, and heading for the south of France with my friend in his open top car. Never mind it rained a lot that summer and the canvas hood leaked badly, never mind the car broke down and we were robbed near Marseilles, never mind the hoteliers thought we were gay, eventually we reached St Tropez, and headed straight for Waikiki beach.
And drank at the beach bar next to bare breasts.
Sexual revolution, or inoculation against sex, something of course not being available on that topless beach, but either way wasn’t it an affront to describe a breast as simply being skin? The nipple, the ducts, the glands, the vessels, and the forms through which things stream, and all those dialectical contrasts of colour and texture (warm, moist, cloudy and so on, like being ‘visceral realists’), none of which seemed to be pre-conditions of commodified desire.
In a word, milk.
Nothing new here, but rather than thinking of a bad start (as in 'book form' to a piece of writing), I was listening again in my mind to the trio of flute, trumpet and celesta playing Valentin Silvestrov’s music, and taking heart from his comments. “With our advanced artistic awareness, fewer and fewer texts are possible which, figuratively speaking, begin ‘at the beginning’… What this means is not the end of music as art, but the end of music, an end in which it can linger for a long time. It is very much in the area of the coda that immense life is possible”.