Some Songs In Green And Purple

Listening to Beauty and Crime by Suzanne Vega

I’m still buying these albums and still go and see her. Not sure how to describe that her music goes beyond the normal waify singer-songwriter stuff – maybe just because she was the first I knew but there is some definite depth to the words even if there is no punch line as it were. She tells these strange stories in between songs when she is on stage – none of which have any point other than to provide background to the songs or even just interest while somebody fixes a string or changes a sample disk. Something surreal in there as well. This album is about New York but then again I suppose that is like saying that War and Peace is about Russia. Not sure it will keep everyone happy.

Apropos of something, this week I have been mostly thinking about architecture. There is a lot of it in Alice in Sunderland which you may have gathered was my Fathers’ Day present yesterday. It sometimes reads like a straight local-history book and yet the interest it generates is multiplied ten-fold through the jump-cut, post-modern story-telling and fantastic mixing of media throughout. It changes from ssurreal Bash-Street-Kids style version of Henry V, through Boys-own adventure to a dreamy walk through Sunderland’s Riverside sculpture trail with the real-life creators. All the sly references make this one to start again once you have been through it the first time.

We don’t look up enough. I was in Liverpool for years before I noticed some of the special things that were visible above eye-level. There are small staircases in some of the streets that must be a hundred years old and yet look like they were created as part of some modern building. Buildings jump around in time, creating a consistent whole in space but making a strange, disjointed things if you try and undo them like trying to work out the order of scenes in Pulp-fiction. (Damn! I’ll get in Pseuds’ Corner one day.) I have nearly always been very unfortunate with the locations of the offices I work in. I started out well with my first job on the second floor of the Bristol and West Building right in the centre of that fair city (My bit was the shorter bit on the right of this picture) but since then I have had brick walls or anonymous industrial parks as the view that I get during my working day. I hope one day to get an office with a view that matches my desires. However, with the non-stop rush to complete buildings for the Capital of Culture in Liverpool, any view that might once have been is rapidly being destroyed in order to put up sheds which look like vertical Nissen huts. We used to have one of the most distinctive skylines in the country and it is now just a grey version of every other city in this country. We do not take our planning regulations seriously. How permission is granted for these things is beyond me save for the simple understanding that it involves money and lots of it. They do love their numbers.