Alan Read

Packing my Library. In a reversal of my favourite essay by Walter Benjamin images from the Performance Foundation Archive before it moves: “a relationship to objects not emphasising their functional, utilitarian value but studied and loved as the scene, the stage of their fate”.

Nobody got on with ‘Parthenope’ but the return of mesmerising Toni Servillo as the beating, elegaic heart of ‘La Grazia’ reminds us what Paolo Sorrentino can do with a Roman image of longing. Gravity, grace, fashion, politics, law, opera & the levity granted by space, float away.

Alan has never been a popular name in the UK and is extinct now, despite Greta Gerwig’s support for us in ‘Barbie’. I was due to be John, but my father (Alan) died before I was born, so my mother went for it. The French philosopher Alain chose the pseudonym as it was so “banal”.

Bush House @KingsCollegeLon was a haunting venue for a brilliant book launch from our resident expert on illicit markets and extortion crime Anja Shortland. I’ve long thought Anja’s work compelling but with the recent capture of my voice by the dark political economy, I’m hooked.

Modern Soul ‘leeching into Disco’ as Hermione puts it on the decks at the ‘Broadway Boogie’ in Deptford on Friday 13th. There isn’t much of the Bermondsey hinterland I now recognise from my decade at 107 Rotherhithe St in the 80s, but this scene has escaped sanitised ‘Docklands’.

The 30th anniversary of Kieślowski’s death was marked @ifru_london as only they know how, with Kinoteka, a lovely ‘Talking Heads’ short, the radiant ‘Véronique’ Irène Jacob wishing us well, the premiere of a new Quay Brothers biopic, & that heart-stopping film weaving its spell.

Cork St has really perked up since Sadie Coles HQ added their gorgeous townhouse boards to the Goodman’s poured concrete expanses. Two institution-worthy shows with Laura Lima’s touching ‘Communal Nests’ hanging in 26 and the Wildean group-show ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime’ at 17.

We haven’t come as far as we might imagine in the 40k years between these two plays @royalcourt. And in a wonderful day with students @KingsCollegeLon moving between Laura Lima @ICALondon & Sloane Sq, from constructions of the Contemporary to the Prehistoric, London feels newold.

Wonderful to read this essay but Flusser has surely enjoyed more than ‘scant attention’ as it suggests. The Flusser Archive in Berlin, the glorious ‘Flusseriana’, the Flusser Club, & our previous monarch’s high-regard at the opening of the Performance Foundation @KingsCollegeLon

Back in the acoustic envelope of the Anatomy Museum @KingsCollegeLon to listen carefully to Ellie Armon Azoulay whose work on sonic landscapes of genocide is sobering and serious. We’ve always cherished the echo of voices archived here, and today’s sounding out of alarm was felt.

I’m not sure I ‘got’ “Country Joe” McDonald’s set at Woodstock when I saw the film in 1970 but it was the 10 of 185mins I remembered & it prompted me to go-south hitching I5 to Berkeley where he began when I turned up on the West Coast as a postgrad student with guitar in hand.

Open Studios at TURPS in Elephant & Castle invites us to explore the work of current group with Hermione Read whose influences are shared amidst some beautiful geometric surfaces. Always wonderful to see the images of Helen Levitt and here in especially good colourfield company.

It’s hardly surprising for as long as the 45yrs we’ve lived nearby Shepherd’s Bush Mkt has been threatened with ‘development’. Arch 156 was busy tonight celebrating stoicism in adversity, Tom Hodgkinson talking Diogenes with Flo Read, & ukelele duets with George Wyndham on harp.

The Anatomy Museum @KingsCollegeLon was developed to host explorations between performance and its adjacent rhetorical disciplines. Tonight the ‘King’s Players’ produced a complex meditation from Lloyd Gash and team on the legal status of ‘Accident’, ‘Insurance’ & ‘Manslaughter’.

There was a dense Dickensian mist descending on Strand as we gathered for the inauguration of ‘Lost Landscapes of Print’ at ‘The Curiosity Cabinet’ curated by the modest, marvellous master of this square-mile Brian Murray, @kingsartshums. A heaven and haven for font aficionados.

Moving @kingsartshums from the Virginia Woolf Building to the beauty of Bush House came with the welcome caveat ‘office sharing’ would become a thing. I’m lucky to room with Declan Ryan & Benjamin Wood (‘Seascraper’) as their work reminds me of worlds way beyond theatre thinking.

@BBC I started the day booking tickets for the self confessed ‘Drunk Professor’ who is gracing my favourite venue @RoundhouseLDN in the Fall. I’m looking forward to hearing Bill on ‘Why do Men Sing’ but hope he escapes the mimic singalong. He’s got some thoughts on AI and voices too.

If there is anyone in ‘commissioning’ @BBC or beyond who would be interested in what I call ‘AI Ventriloquism’, that is the much longer history of ‘stolen speech’ by the prosthetics of performance, from ‘prompting’ to ‘possession’, then you know where I am. It goes back to Plato.

No lies detected in this useful correction from Daria ⁦@BBCNews⁩ who guessed I was unlikely to share the sentiments being assigned to me. I’m described here as ‘seasoned’ which I prefer to ‘senior’ and am now heading off to find who ‘stole’ my voice. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

It is well known that the extraordinary cinéaste Werner Schroeter was compelled by the ‘Callas Complex’, but it’s only in the presence of his remarkable suite of 1968 ‘Shorts’ @ICALondon that the compulsion for Maria becomes realisable: in its repetition and chromatic rapture.

When you teach as actively as we do @kingsartshums every so often a few days come along that are called ‘Reading Week’, for students to, well, read. We used to share a reality at Roehampton that to read was becoming increasingly rare. A sun-lit carrel @SenateHouseLib is a haven.