I write poems when I can be bothered. This one came to me in a dream. Or something.

Evil

Evil insinuates
Itself into our lives.

Its shadow grows longer
In light. Evil survives.

Good folk just do nothing.
Evil triumphs that way.

There are evil people
Throughout the world today.

All of them like Coldplay.

“Mais les ouvrages les plus courts sont toujours les meilleurs.”
(Jean de la Fontaine 1621-1695)

Sacking and Red 1954

Alberto Burri (1915-95) was an avid footballer who played for the Umbrian first division, a qualified doctor who worked for the Italian army during the Second World War and for the final 18 months was interned in Texas. His first picture, made with canvas and paints supplied by the YMCA, was a view of the desert he could see from the prison camp.

The great postwar pioneer Alberto Burri blazes a trail of sackcloth and ashes in this long overdue UK retrospective, writes Laura Cumming

Alberto Burri: Form and Matter is at the Estorick Collection, London N1 until 7 April 2012

What, precisely, is the role of photography today?

Ten years ago we all thought the answer was pretty self-evident. It was a method of recording an approximation of what the eye saw for various purposes ranging from holiday snaps to high art via advertising, prison mug shots, and camera club material, etc., etc. There was a limited scope for embellishment in the processing and printing but on the whole film was a fairly faithful medium. Then along came digital.

Digitalization of photography was not an isolated phenomenon, it was part of the great IT revolution and cannot be considered outside of that context. Moving from chemical film to electronic sensor had many repercussions from the obvious practical ones like reduced dynamic range and increased sensitivity to the slightest variation in light levels (this meant that cameras had now to be smarter than the operators to ensure a reasonable exposure, a reversal of the former position), but there were also the wider implications such as the viewing process no longer being the fixed and controllable event that looking at a print was.

This electronic tsunami has now, I believe, peaked, and what we see is a new landscape where the process of recording an image has become not only easier but far cheaper. Such empowerment should be welcomed, cautiously, for there is much of value that the waters washed away in the rage. The first and most obvious casualty is that quality (however defined) is now considered a function of camera expense rather than operator skill.

A second and less obvious perversion of the old order is that the multitude of pictures now created has changed the way in which they are viewed. No longer are carefully prepared prints studied at leisure but images are flicked through on the monitor, a device which cannot display the wealth of detail, tonal values, subtlety of shade or colour and effects of light that the old-fashioned wet print can. Not only that but the wet print was an unreproducible article in its own right. Variations in chemical concentration as prints were developed ensured that each picture was unique. Another detrimental effect is that every monitor is different and so the photograph will appear differently on each device that is used to display it. LCD screens for instance will lighten areas of pictures that we may wish to remain black, ruining an effect that was carefully built into the original picture.

I could go on listing the changes that digital has brought but I’d like to make one further point and that is the camera has now become little more than an extension of the home computer and although I have been part of the camera club movement and learnt a great deal from it I fear that it has moved on to the web in such a way that editing and censure of the results is not encouraged, indeed it is considered the height of rudeness to suggest deficiency in another’s work. This leads to the general acceptance of poor quality imagery being used in places where those responsible really should know better.

I’m returning in 2012 with more idle thoughts about culture, food, and music … until then enjoy this cool performance of my favourite song composed by Jerome Kern … please note the Maltese falcon on the piano … cognac … cigarettes … way too cool …

The composer’s friend and biographer Anton Schindler affirms that the idea of a heroic symphony came to Beethoven as early as 1798, and there is ample evidence that when he wrote it Beethoven had Napoleon Bonaparte in mind.

There is also the statement of Ferdinand Ries, one of Beethoven’s favourite pupils and another biographer, that the original title page bore the name of Bonaparte at its head and that when Beethoven heard that his hero had proclaimed himself Emperor he exploded with rage, saying “So he too is nothing but an ordinary man. Now he will trample on the rights of mankind and indulge only his own ambitions; from now on he will make himself superior to all others and a tyrant”.

Bonaparte’s name was violently erased form the score (see picture), and on his death 17 years later, Beethoven commented that he had already written a funeral ode, referring to the second movement of the symphony.

(Alfred Hickling, Guardian, 10 November 2011)

Fifty years after his death, it is hard to conceive how great a celebrity the Australian composer, pianist and folk-song collector once was. Widely acclaimed as one of the most gifted concert pianists of his generation, he earned the equivalent of £60,000 per week, befriended Grieg, Gershwin and Duke Ellington and got married on the stage of the Hollywood Bowl before an audience of 20,000. Yet Grainger, born in Melbourne in 1882, never quite lost the taint of an outsider – a loose cannon whose personal eccentricities threatened to overshadow his achievement.

Grainger was, by any standard, unaccountably odd. He favoured garish, towelling outfits of his own design, was known to mount concert platforms at a running leap, and pushed his favourite piano stool round in a wheelbarrow. In 1945 he devised his own composer-rating system and ranked himself ninth, below Delius but above Mozart and Tchaikovsky.

Practically all of Grainger’s compositions are miniatures, between two and eight minutes in length, and often feature unconventional forces such as harmoniums, banjos, theremins and ukuleles. His disdain for classical form extended to a rejection of Italianate terms for tempo and dynamic markings – Grainger’s scores indicate “louden” rather than “crescendo”, or instruct the player to interpret a passage “with pioneering keeping on-ness”. His rejection of the symphony, sonata and concerto was deliberate, but contributed to the impression that he was merely a dilettante or a purveyor of light music.

Grainger was the first to use a phonograph to record folk songs, and held untutored musicians in high esteem. “These folk-singers were the kings and queens of song!” he declared. “No concert singer I ever heard, dull dogs that they are, approached these rural warblers in variety of tone quality, range of dynamics, rhythmic resourcefulness and individuality of style.” In 1912, he travelled to the Pacific islands to notate native songs whose random combination of musical elements anticipated John Cage’s experiments in “chance music” by some 40 years.

Though his music is rarely solemn, there is a darker side to Grainger’s personality that is difficult to ignore. His views on the superiority of blue-eyed Nordic races are not easy to accept, and he made little secret of a violently aberrant sexuality: in the 1930s, he endowed a museum in his birthplace of Melbourne, and entrusted it with a large collection of whips, pornography and blood-stained shirts: “Music is the art of agony,” he noted. “It derives, after all, from screaming.”

Grainger established the museum – which is still in operation – as part of his lifelong aim to become recognised as Australia’s first significant composer, though he left the continent as a teenager and spent the majority of his life in London and the small town of White Plains outside New York. He died of cancer in 1961, convinced his efforts had been in vain: “All my compositional life I have been a leader without followers … Where musical progress and compositional experiment are discussed, my name is never mentioned. Can a more complete aesthetic failure be imagined?”

Photographer James Kendall was rooting through his wife’s 90-year-old grandmother’s larder when he discovered packaged foods dating back to the 1950s. Some canned items were covered in rust.

“She doesn’t really believe in sell-by dates,” explains Kendall. “She holds on to everything, and sees it all as eventually having a use. I think it comes from her living through the war, and being used to rationing.” Among the ageing items were dried onions, smoked cod liver, canned corn, a jar of tartare sauce, and a pack of KP nuts, complete with vintage logos.

Kendall was so excited by the hoard that he took it back to his studio to be photographed – and hopes to exhibit the resulting series at next year’s Brighton Photo Biennial.

“I still daren’t open them,” says Kendall. “They’ve been wrapped in cellophane over the summer, so they’ve had a bit of a baking. I’m not exactly sure what state they’re in now. Probably worse than ever.”

Well done to Niamh over on Eat Like a Girl for winning the Observer Food Monthly award for best food blog. My Blog of the Month (not for the first time).

Observer Food Monthly awards 2011 winners

Tchaikovsky’s score for The Queen of Spades is an extraordinary thing. At once expansive, excessive and opulent, it’s also strangely interior; the real action of the opera takes place largely inside one man’s head. As heroes go, no-one is more solitary, more at odds with his world, than Herman. At key moments in the show, I’ve chosen to sweep all the glamour of the 19th century setting aside and present him with brutal simplicity.

The second act of the show opens with a grand masked ball – a scene that could easily drown the music in frocks and glitter. The task here was to connect the disconcerting theatricality of the masquerade with the deeper themes of obsession and fatality that run through the music.

A chorus is much more than just a group of people – they’re a team who can act as one, amplifying an emotion or gesture on stage to a scale that a solitary performer can never dream of achieving. Put the simplest action – knocking back a drink, in this case – in time with music as theatrical as Tchaikovsky’s – then amplified by the number of people you’ve got in the chorus, and the gesture can acquire an extraordinary kick. The simplest tricks are the best.

In my own experience, most people do not destroy books, but will pass unwanted books on to someone else and that to destroy a book is unthinkable.

Which leads me to the questions:

Why is destroying a book apparently taboo?
Has anyone here ever destroyed a book and why?

I read a newspaper article a while ago by someone whose name I’ve forgotten who works for a publisher. One of the jobs she had was to dispose of unwanted books and she described the qualms she had when they were being destroyed. I can’t quite remember but I think she said they burned them; you’d think they could recycle the paper.

I assume that the “taboo” goes back to times when books were more precious than they are now and the contents could be lost forever by destroying a few copies. Now that books are mostly easily available and well archived in libraries, worrying about destroying them, apart I suppose from symbolic acts like burning them in public, seems like sentimentality. Having said that, it does seem wasteful to destroy a book when someone else might be able to get something out of it. I’ve only disposed of mine by giving them away. I wonder what charity shops do with their excess books?

Of course, millions of books are destroyed every day which are unsold copies. I believe they end up in all sorts of processes, including motorway surfacing, believe it or not.

I do think it’s wrong to destroy out-of-print or rare books, and especially to withdraw them from public libraries where they might be the only accessible copy for the public in a certain area.

I used to visit an excellent public library where they had lots of rare books, particularly out-of-print full scores, such as the original edition of Petrushka and Walton’s Viola Concerto. I went back there a few years ago and all the music library had been cleared away to make space for internet terminals for teenagers to play with.