Poplar
On Daniel Bedingfield, Leonardo da Vinci and 2021
I always put too much emphasis on the first song I listen to in any given year. It needs to be something I already like, and then it feels like a barometer for what will happen over the next year. This never has any bearing on reality.
The first song I felt an urge to listen to, away from the Hootenanny, was ‘Gotta Get Thru This’ by Daniel Bedingfield. Despite, or perhaps because of, the optimism around, and the whole ‘you got through 2020!’ vibe, I feel like 2021 is the year I have to get through, at least initially. At least until things do whatever things do. Yes, you got through 2020, a tricky year, but there are many other things that can, and will go wrong, and you have to get through those too. You have to get through everything.
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Last night, playing Word Lanes on my phone, it asked for the wood the Mona Lisa is painted on. I didn’t know this, but worked out it was a poplar panel, making Leonardo da Vinci’s oil painting the most famous work of art solely on poplar. I always want to learn something new every day, something that might come up in a quiz somewhere. That’s what the Mona Lisa thing felt like. Then again, I’m terrible with predictions. Probably the most positive thing to come out of new year is, if I fear it, and I’m usually wrong, then we probably will get through this. But at this point, who can tell?
There’s 1.17 million Google hits for ‘Mona Lisa poplar’, even though that’s the wood it is on, and 189 million hits for ‘Mona Lisa popular’ as people try to grasp its fame. When I saw it, I preferred Paolo Veronese’s The Wedding Feast at Cava, a behemoth of a painting which was on the wall opposite. Is this a metaphor, where everyone ignores the big thing on the other side for the small poplar thing? Like I said, I’m frequently wrong.
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I watched the music video for ‘Gotta Get Thru This’, directed by Director X, and the narrative chronology doesn’t add up. Maybe I just know east London too well. Maybe it is jarring to switch between walking around, cars, the canal and being on the DLR. There’s a Coronavirus analogy here, but if you’re looking for metaphors from someone who spends New Year’s Day watching Daniel Bedingfield videos, you’re even more lost than I am.
Anyway, across Canary Wharf in the early 2000s, as well as everything else, part of it is filmed, and the narrative eventually ends, on Poplar Station. This makes ‘Gotta Get Thru This’ the most famous work of art partially on Poplar.
Happy new year, I guess.