Took this on the way to get the papers this morning...

Only just catching up with Don Letts' two part special on Rastafari broadcast on BBC Radio 6 Thursday 13th and Friday 14th February. Wonderful trip down memory lane which had me reaching for some old vinyl including this Trojan compilation of late-Sixties and early/mid-Seventies tracks by Dennis Brown, Big Youth, Peter Tosh, I Roy, Junior Byles, The Heptones and many others from this "golden period of roots reggae". The album cover still has the price sticker on it: $14.95 from Cool Runnin' in New York - a shop I used to frequent in the mid-Eighties. Classic cover!! 

Another beautiful day in Connemara.

Fantastic night last night at the St. Patrick's Dalkey Annual Table Quiz. Thirty three tables but only one winner! Great to be on that table - and look at the loot!

Magical light here... and everyday it's different.

A special place in Connemara.

New story just published in the March issue of Town & Country.

On a recce in the Wicklow mountains. Always magical here.

I've been studying Sight and Sound's Top 100 films of all time, as polled by critics and directors (two separate lists) in 2012, and have decided to try and watch them all - even though I've seen many of them before. Might make more sense to watch the Directors' Top 250 as this should cover the critics' list as well. Started on New Year's Eve with Billy Wilder's 'Sunset Boulevard'. What a wonderful film - on so many levels. Check out the Sight and Sound lists: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/2012/critics/

Aother great Christmas gift was the catalogue for the upcoming Saul Leiter show at the House of Photography, Hamburg which runs from 3rd February till 15th April 2012. If you don't know Leiter's work then get yourself a copy of this - as well as his only other book, 'Early Color', which is edited by art/photo historian Martin Harrison and published by Steidl. What I love about the catalogue is the broad range of work on show: fashion images from late Fifties/early Sixties Harper's Bazaar, early black and white photos, his personal colour 'street photographs' and many of his paintings - in the early days he had shown alongside de Kooning, but his work never caught on commercially - as well as a homage to Soames Bantry, his muse and partner. Interestingly, there are some images of Soames from a fashion story shot in Ireland for Nova magazine circa 1967. Although there was a show in 1996 of the early colour street photos at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, Leiter remained virtually unknown. And his colour images were, for the most part, looked down upon - it took near on ten years to find a publisher for his work. It's hard to believe that in the mid-Nineties "the photography world still looked down on color as a commercial device - slick and superficial". How the art world has changed! As Martin Harrison writes in the introduction to 'Early Color': "The evocative, painterly images on these pages vividly demonstrate that in the second half of the twentieth-century Saul Leiter's photographic language of fragmentation and contingency was extending the boundaries of the medium". Definitely worth checking the show when it opens in February: Click Here