Greet­ings, and wel­come to my blog!

Here’s where I intro­duce the theme of my blog, fol­low­ing which, depend­ing upon whether or not your curios­i­ty is suf­fi­cient­ly whet­ted to con­tin­ue read­ing, I will meet you again at the end of the week with my first post prop­er!

So, what’s it all about, and what’s with the title? Let me explain…

In the his­to­ry of aes­thet­ics, the idea of “the sub­lime” has a long pedi­gree, and its mean­ing has been debat­ed through­out the cen­turies by gen­er­a­tions of artists, writ­ers, poets, musi­cians and crit­ics. These days, how­ev­er, the word “sub­lime” has a pret­ty straight­for­ward def­i­n­i­tion; in every­day lan­guage it sim­ply means “excel­lent” or “excep­tion­al” and can be applied to almost any­thing that can be refined to the high­est point…such as a per­fect­ly exe­cut­ed goal in foot­ball, or an exquis­ite­ly cooked meal.

In this blog, I will take as my lead this mod­ern sense of “excep­tion­al”, and apply it to the var­ied worlds of art, music, film, tele­vi­sion, the­atre, opera, and lit­er­a­ture (any­thing you can see or hear and which I can embed or link to, basi­cal­ly). I will choose exam­ples that I think stand out from the crowd (“occa­sion­al glimpses”) by virtue of their excel­lence or cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance, and write about them, hope­ful­ly in an inter­est­ing way, and by so doing, share them with you.

To give you an idea, here are, in no par­tic­u­lar order, some sub­lime cre­ations slat­ed for upcom­ing posts: Bar­bara Bon­ney’s ren­der­ing of Schu­bert’s Ave Maria; the use of Rach­mani­nof­f’s 2nd Piano Con­cer­to in Brief Encounter; Jan Van Eyck­’s Ghent Altar­piece; Ten­nyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade. How­ev­er, the sub­lime is rep­re­sent­ed in pop­u­lar cul­ture, too: also upcom­ing are pieces on Jack Nichol­son’s por­tray­al of Badass Bud­dusky in The Last Detail; Jimi Hen­drix’s influ­en­tial per­for­mance of The Star Span­gled Ban­ner at Wood­stock; and Cook and Moore’s com­e­dy sketch Pete and Dud at the Zoo!

Of course, such things are sub­jec­tive and you are under no oblig­a­tion to agree with me! We all have our indi­vid­ual opin­ions and tastes, after all. How­ev­er, my selec­tions will most usu­al­ly be tried and trust­ed gems of high artis­tic qual­i­ty that are wide­ly admired or acknowl­edged. Join me in my “occa­sion­al glimpses of the sub­lime”, and see if you agree…