Top Ten New Things in Art & Writing
The winter has been here for more than three months now, and it's becoming clear that there's been a whole range of interesting effects on writers, musicians and artists. Some of them are looking inward, some outward, and some are going in entirely new directions. Here, I'm presenting my summary of the best new movements, groups, and ideas that I've seen in the literature and in person.
10: The Still Surface - Not everyone has left Bael Areen. There are still enough artists in the city for a new artistic and literary movement to take off over the winter, and it's concerned with the metaphors of water - the idea that beneath a smooth, unruffled surface, there can be swift currents and unknown depths. This simple idea has been expanded upon greatly, and an exhibition held on the ice of the Blackwater Canal just after Midwinter showed the movement at its best.
9: Stark - Stark isn't a new style of music; it's been out there as a contrast to the complex compositional work that's currently popular in most of the courts. Hitherto, it's been the province of those who want quiet music to think and write to, or indeed to stare at the slow-moving illusions that go alongside the music. But with the winter all around us, more and more people are finding that Stark music suits their mood. I was at a concert here in New Hult before Midwinter, and I can tell you that there's something strangely comforting about being in a room of two hundred people all staring at the falling snow while the spare sounds and slow rhythms of Stark surround you.
8: Skettering & Sansalom - I'm not sure who or what these two writers (or one writer under two names, or a collective) are. But they've exploded into the North New Kingdoms literary scene in the last three months with no less than seven books, each more popular, debated, and read than the next. They're practitioners of a style of extreme realism, one that's being called examination by the critics. The books depict short periods of time in the lives of their protagonists in extraordinary detail. All of them except the last are set in summer, and the latest is set in an autumn golden enough to count as part of summer.
7: Legorie's Attunement - The Attunement is a public work, an installation of sorts, in Ilby. The artist is a goblin, Integument Benediction. The structure itself... well, go and see it. Any description of mine of the way in which it uses focused flames and moving parts to sculpt and re-scuplt ice into new and different forms, reacting to changing wind directions and weather can't do it justice. It's massively hypnotic, and well worth spending an afternoon watching, ideally from the comfort of one of the cafés that surround it in Gnomon Square.
6: Daikiso - it's an elven dance form, they tell me, which consists mostly of slow movements with a faster movement within. It's coming out from Fury, of all places, and it's not a performance so much as a practice. I haven't tried it myself; my days of new dance forms are well behind me. But it's fascinating to watch, and apparently it's very good for the circulation. It gets mentioned here, though, because it is everywhere, east to west and north to south; I had a letter last week from someone in Perisaes-in-the-South who says it's getting popular there.
5: Garmin Skelling - Skelling is a poet from "somewhere in the north", according to her biography. She has recently published a small volume of poems, and they've become the accessory of the day for the modern courtship across the Central Kingdoms. One cannot, apparently, be taken seriously as a suitor if one cannot quote her, and ideally, her book should be visible in your pocket. I have to confess, I am forcing myself to include her here. She is new, rising, popular, and may even be very good, but by all the Gods, I hate her work as I have hated little else. And on the other hand, to get that reaction from a jaded habitueé of the art world, she must be doing something right.
4: Glass - Glass hasn't been a popular medium for years, not since the time when Ghissie Tamber's lamps and windows were the necessary detail of the day in your townhouse. But there's a new interest in the stuff, spreading out from Perjoint Yard and Ibraer - the latter of which had a glorious Glass Garden in its ice carnival. A druid - or possibly a member of the Oath of Myre - called Airbhe Caivyre seems to be one of the main sources of this, but she remains something of a mystery in every other way. If you've any skills in glassworking, this would seem to be your time.
3: Sattario Metteric - Metteric is a lutist, which is a rather old-fashioned specialisation, as such things go. He doesn't play anything else, he doesn't have any gimmick, and he doesn't play anything controversial. I'm pretty sure, in fact, that he doesn't play anything that was composed after he was born, and he's well over two hundred. What he does do is play so astoundingly well that it's clear what he's spent those two hundred years doing - working on the lute. He's currently playing wherever he's invited, but I predict that the entry fees will get higher, and rather soon some noble will make him an offer of patronage that cannot be resisted. See him while he's still out there.
2: Altered State - The Altered State is a small group of artists in the Southern New Kingdoms. They're part political protest, part weather-inspired, and don't seem to hold things like sleep or moderation in any regard. They produce oil paintings on vast canvases, a mix of careful representation and allegory, but all produced at great speed, in the heat of the moment. Rumour has it that they come in from riots, still limping or bleeding, and set to painting before the blood dries. Their work is well-worth seeing, and some of their pieces - bought for a song, it seems - have been resold in the Central Kingdoms for high prices. They're officially not popular in their home area, but again, that's as much political as anything else; they could well be seen as supporting the riots for no end other than violence.
1: Staddish - I have to say that I never expected a cartographer to be a rising artistic star. Staddish Brwc is a Pennic boy from an old-fashioned farming family, and he never really had an interest in maps until just after the equinox, when he took a trip on a CASC ship, and saw the landscape of his home from above. He had some experience of drawing, it seems, and turned that into some of the most beautiful, precise, calligrahed maps I've ever seen. He works constantly on them now, seized by the kind of artistic impulse that many a garret-dweller would have you believe they experience. An original Staddish is already going for thousands in Top Gold, and the prints are an absolute necessity for any study. I have three; I've spent hours staring at them already, and have every intention of spending more.
Simone Catchcall is a literary critic, translator, and scribomancer. She lives in New Hult, and works by correspondence only. Her Top Ten lists are compiled via careful analysis of literary and artistic magazines, discussion, exhibitions, performances, and other factors, topped off with a liberal application of common sense.