Search Results for: Tim elkington

  Sunset 1: View from my room

Arrived in Naples, Florida, late on Tuesday, after a flight from Gatwick via Charlotte, NC.  Hurricane country – and when I got to the beachfront Ritz-Carlton in Naples, there was a warning that work would begin at 09.00 Wednesday morning on hurricane hardening of the hotel.  It did, right on the dot.  But before that, I arrived in my room to find the most spectacular sunset in progress, after a number of storms that has passed through earlier in the day.

Was in Florida to speak at a conference organised by Novo Nordisk, a company that I have worked alongside since 1989 – and which I enormously admire.  Apart from anything else, they are one of the leading global champions of the triple bottom line, a fact around which I built my presentation for their US sales people on Wednesday. 

But the high – or at least most memorable point – in the trip was on the Wednesday evening, when the conference participants split into four separate groups to get involved in community projects.  I elected to take part in the repainting of a sheltered housing complex, partly because one of the other speakers — Flemming Junker —  was part of that group.  He was an employee-elected Director of Nordisk at the time of the merger with Novo Industri and he and I had met many moons ago when SustainAbility was helping organise and run early stakeholder engagements sessions in Denmark.

Turned out that a bus ride that I had been told would take around 30 minutes took closer to an hour, which might well have put me off had I known what to expect – I have antibodies to buses, from childhood.  But the journey did give me a chance to see more giant egrets and herons than I have seen in a very long time.  And the speed at which our group of some 50 folk repainted rooms at the Immokalee Friendship House was amazing.  See my post Repainting Poverty in Convivial Yellow on the Volans site.

Then back home, via Philadelphia, and in to the office with a day alongside Sam, pondering the way in which the invitations to speak are now piling in – in part, perhaps, because we have featured our activities in this area on the Outreach part of the Volans website.  Then home to a cold house, because Elaine is off with Hania at a film festival in Dinard.  Tired.

Sunset 2   Sunset 3   Sunset 4   We are one

Campbell’s Soup I: Tomato, by Andy Warhol (1968)

Elaine in high excitement because her verdict on Warhol’s Tomato soup image appears in today’s Times 2, page 5.  “For me as an adolescent,” her entry admitted, “buying a can of this favourite soup was like buying the key to another glamorous world which I knew existed elsewhere and which I desperately wanted to be part of.”  She concluded: “Warhol understood human nature and its pitfalls.”

 confess I never very much liked tomato soup, Campbell’s or anyone else’s.  They tasted clonal.  But there was something about the very clonal quality of Warhol’s work that tickled my fancy, in the same way that the current clonal pink figures (mainly self portraits) painted by Yue Minjun do.  But they both also speak to an underlying malaise, to a deep unease, to the diseases of consumerist cultures and, ultimately, to existential angst. 

Oddly, I hadn’t realised until I Googled Yue Minjun that he had done at least one version of Francis Bacon’s papal imagery, which I have long seen as some of the most profound art of the last century.  Yue Minjun riffs on Bacon, but – to me eye at least – doesn’t take things much further forward than a cartoonist might, let alone quantum jumping the deep meaning of the imagery as Bacon did when he riffed off Velazquez.

Yue Minjun goes papal

Last week, Elaine and I went to the Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain.  Three highlights, for me, were the painting of Pope Innocent X which the artist apparently disowned for many years (shown below), the small triptych of Bacon, head and shoulders, as you left the gallery, and the atelier area brimming over with his sources, sketches and refuse. 

A lot of Bacon’s work has the rancid flavour of old bacon rind and once again had the same sort of effect on my aesthetic sensibilities as lemon juice does on live oysters.  Still, underneath it all is something that I suspect will help Bacon’s work and reputation live for another 500 years.  Velazquez, after all, painted his Innocent in 1650, some 400 years before Bacon followed not so gayly in his wake.

Bacon study after Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)

  This evening we watched one of the most beautifully shot films I have seen in a very long time, Mongol.   The Genghis Khan story.  Or a version of it.  Must read up on him, particularly since his genetic legacy in European – and then presumably wider – populations was inordinately large.  The framing and the colours were out of this world.  Can’t wait to see the next two films in the sequence.

Replica bazooka might work just as well

Quite day, starting off with a session with Charmian (Love) at Accenture, then on to Generation Investment Management for lunch at The Fishmonger with David Blood, Colin Le Duc, Peter Knight and Lila Preston, then back to Volans, and then by train to Cambridge for the twentieth anniversary for the Cambridge Programme for Industry, held in King’s College.  Lovely to see people like Tim O’Riordan and Polly Courtice, but my bat’s ears meant that I couldn’t hear people over the sound of the band – and took off home relatively early.  Very much enjoyed reading James Benn’s WWII novel Billy Boyle as I went.  Felt 120 by the time I got home, around 23.30, but finished off the book before falling asleep.

Was once again amazed to see Cambridge cyclists at night with no lights.  There ought to be a law.  People from Volans saw a great deal of blood in the street near the office earlier in the week: it turned out to be from a female cyclist who had been knocked off her bike and killed by a bus.  The number of altercations I have had with buses in that stretch of road, from Tottenham Court Road through to Holborn, is legion.  It is as if bus drivers pass through some sort of personality warp there, ignoring cycle ways and cyclists.  Have often meant to fit a bazooka to my handlebars, but somehow haven’t yet got around to it. 

And, in intemperate old age, I found myself wondering whether , instead of dancing the night away in King’s College, we oughtn’t to have a more open discussion about the industries and technologies we would happily bazooka – or dynamite – to ensure a more sustainable world?

Homo volans in moat

Flew to Schipol on Sunday – then train to Leiden – for my first Board meeting with the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI).  Held in a little castle with a moat.  Outgoing Board members included Born Stigson of WBCSD and Judy Henderson, who I first knew when she was with Oxfam.  Jacqueline Aloisi de Larderel, long an ally when she ran the UNEP’s trade, industry and economics department in Paris, was also due to step down – but has mercifully agreed to stay n for a year until the new head of the Paris office has the time to take over.

I confess I was feeling fairly down about the prospects of such initiatives to survive the impending financial storm, let alone thrive and drive the level of change needed in the world.  But an impending KPMG survey suggests that the GRI approach to sustainability reporting continues to make major inroads around the world.  And I have been asked back in September to explore new business models for GRI, which could be interesting.

More positively still, the moat had a wonderful statue of a birdman, a combination of a heron (my lucky bird) and a human figure.  Homo volans, whatever the sculptor may have labelled the piece.  I got my shoes very wet creeping around through the grass to catch a picture of a real heron that had alighted behind the statue, but maned the trick. 

Later, I had to wait 7-8 hours at Schipol to catch a flight home, because my rock-bottom fare tied me to a late night flight, but I used the time to read I bought in Schipol, The Nuremberg Interviews, by Leon Goldensohn – an American psychiatrist wh interviewed two dozen leaders of the Third Reich who were charged with carrying out genocide.  They included Hans Frank, Hermann Goering and Joachim von Ribbentrop. 

A very different form of accountability, but absolutely fascinating.  And sickening how George W. Bush, Dick Cheney et al have managed to undermine the legacy of those who fought to ensure new forms of global justice.

Spiral at gate   Equine reception   Reflection   Guinea fowl in conference   Homo volans 1   Homo volans 2   Homo volans 3   Light and sunset