I don't go for political art per se, but this looks good because it looks like it's making art not just diatribe! Steve McQueen's other work is always incredibly strong. Turner-prize winner's true portrait of war
There was also a discussion on BBC3's Nightwaves 28 Feb that almost makes one want to make the trip to Manchester. The discussion still hasn't been listed on the website however. Show arrives London in July.
McQueen and country
And more from Mr. Banksy...Becoming the establishment
Art or Asbo: Banksy is a big enough man to fend for himself (half way down page!)
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
Tuesday, 27 February 2007
Rail safety
It's official! Faulty points to blame for Cumbria rail crash
Inspection train spotted faulty track before crash
Network safe, rail bosses insist
Christian Wolmar's official website
He wrote a revealing article in Tuesday night's edition of The Standard, Network Rail bosses should pay for this but I can't find a link to it. He bemoans the fact in olden days points were inspected by local teams who knew their area backwards. An ex-railway worker told him , "My boss would take me down to a set of points he had maintained which were so accurately calibrated that putting a cigarette paper between the blades would cause them to fail safe." Like most other public/customer services in England such dedication and familiarity seems no more.
Some train operators improve, but more to be done
Read Louise Christian, the solicitor who represented victims of the 2002 Potters Bar crash, half way down page.
Jarvis admits liability for Potters Bar crash
Inspection train spotted faulty track before crash
Network safe, rail bosses insist
Christian Wolmar's official website
He wrote a revealing article in Tuesday night's edition of The Standard, Network Rail bosses should pay for this but I can't find a link to it. He bemoans the fact in olden days points were inspected by local teams who knew their area backwards. An ex-railway worker told him , "My boss would take me down to a set of points he had maintained which were so accurately calibrated that putting a cigarette paper between the blades would cause them to fail safe." Like most other public/customer services in England such dedication and familiarity seems no more.
Some train operators improve, but more to be done
Read Louise Christian, the solicitor who represented victims of the 2002 Potters Bar crash, half way down page.
Jarvis admits liability for Potters Bar crash
Sunday, 25 February 2007
Catch me when, my crumpled angel
Did you hear the news this week, oh boy....
Gun crime and London shootings
Blair pledges action on gun crime as toll rises
"I have trouble acting normal ‘round here,"- the Counting Crows song (Across a Wire, Live in NYC '97)
Dito Montiel has written and directed from his published memoirs of growing up in Astoria, Queens during the mid-80s.A Guide to Recognising Your Saints. "We live here, you die here," shouts the local graffiti.
Art or Asbo: Banksy is a big enough man to fend for himself (half way down page!)
The film flashbacks between Robert Downey, Jr. and Shia LaBeouf as different ages of Montiel. "Everyday there's something different,” says his dad Monty (Chazz Palminteri) who will never understand why his son wants to leave the place he knows and grew up in. The only enlightenment comes from Scottish outsider Mike (Martin Compston, Red Road), and Dito taking his advice ends up a writer living in Los Angeles finally coming home to see his ill father. "I dreamt of farms," said Dito in an interview about his youth. Foreign realms too for the urban youth cast of Kim Chapiron's Sheitan (Satan) who go clubbing and end up adventuring to an isolated farmhouse for Christmas only to wind up in their own horror movie. "You think your shit doesn't stink," says one, staking out his emotional turf. Like the kids in Saints they also take their aggression out on small retailers. The dialogue of Saints smacks of the local deli, and in Sheitan of raw garlic. Dito works for a gay dog walker who warns "the owner checks his ass to see if he's crapped!"
Sheitan is a stunning debut – camera angles, editing, rap music, the works. What begins with street cred La Haine turns into cross-genre comedy/horror (Vincent Cassell of La Haine heavily twisted). It doesn't quite bring that ending off, though, more clever than astute. Saints is raw too, just a tad tame in comparison, which isn't really fair I know. Dito said of actor Channing Tatum’s character "He brought a guy who breaks your neck and then tries to put it together because he didn't mean to do that." And that's true of the rest of the film. Just sometimes you feel you've visited this territory before. Maybe it's that Dito knows his turf too well or maybe his film wiles not enough.
Lawyer falls to Death at Tate Modern
Eric Steel's doco about suicide on San Francisco's Golden Gate The Bridge opened last week in London to respectful reviews. All except Andrew Pulver from The Guardian. "This could be the most morally loathsome film ever made. [Eric Steel] failed to be honest [his] methods are thoroughly despicable." I wonder what he'd make of Norwegian Jens Lien's The Bothersome Man (Den brysomme mannen)last year's London Film Fest) or Goran Dukic's Wristcutters October's Raindance Fest) both awaiting a UK release? I've known several people who've committed suicide. I didn't watch or take their last phone call, but I strongly felt this doco gave the 24 2004 Golden Gate victims incredible dignity. Steel is another first time director who's given us something quite impressive. The idea derived from The New Yorker's Tad Friend article Jumpers and it remains a subject that's icily taboo. When a regional American newspaper ran a picture of 'the falling man', a jumper from the burning 9/11 Twin Towers, there was outrage. Nobody wanted to believe or moreover own up to the fact that this is how someone chose to die. Steel has compared his film to Bruegel's painting "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. "In the corner of the painting, a pair of legs disappears into the water with a splash so small it is hardly noticed by the other people in the picture, much less by someone in the museum." I remember too an early Dali painting where the angel in the landscape is so small it's like the ppp (absolute pianissimo- the quietest sound you can) marking in a Gustav Mahler score. "One camera would be fixed, at wide angle to record the bridge and the water beneath it, as if it were a postcard. The operator simply had to change tapes every hour and press record. The other camera was fitted with an extreme telephoto lens – strong enough to see individual people as they walked across the bridge." Steel did always try to warn the police of an impending leap. While the dod lacks the detail of Friend's essay, it's the old problem of translating the literary to the screen. And Steel opted for the simplist, boldest and most visually arresting option possible. For that he should be applauded.
In The Bothersome Man (pipped at the post by Reprise as Norway's Oscar entry, although it did win the top prize at last year's 14th Hampton’s International Film Festival), Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvaag), an office worker throws himself under a subway train (as does one of Dito Montial's friends) only to wake up in a city with a perfect home, perfect job and a perfect girlfriend into all things designer. Probably why he committed suicide in the first place. Only nothing has any taste or touch. Suicide is impossible in his new environment as we see to great comic result. Wristcutters is the flipside: Zia (Patrick Fugit) slashes his wrists speeding him to a desert nowheresville populated with everyone wearing their suicide scars literally on the wrist, head or whatever. In the United States there are almost twice as many suicides each year than homicides. The beautiful hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossaman) is the normal odd-girl out (passport mix-up).
"I thought if I watched enough people, I would be able to spot the outward manifestations of their interior demons," said Eric Steel. Scots Jock Mooney has a show in Gimpel Fils's emerging artists' space downstairs Funland Was No More. In the corner cornice a painted cloud is pricked by a tiny pair of struggling female legs while diagonally below Pooh Bear licks blood not honey from his pot. Monney had no need to paint the title. "The vulgar excesses of disposable contemporary culture are replicated in Mooney's work...highlighting the horror of our Ikea society," goes the press release. Mooney builds hundreds of tiny figures to populate a trestle table Inventory and a black painted floorboard Drying Rack erupts bulbousing tiny creatures. Quite disconcerting, impressive and not an easy act to pull off.
The buildings of French architect, interior designer and artist Thierry W. Despont would probably never be visited by any of the characters mentioned so far: the restored Frick family mansion in Pittsburgh, Dorchester Bar London, Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum interior, and houses of Calvin Klein, Oscar de la Renta and Bill Gates. Except perhaps the Statue of Liberty in New York for which he was associate architect for the 1986 centennial restoration. In 1916, Gutzon Borglum, Mount Rushmore's sculptor, was commissioned to cut out most of the copper and install six hundred pieces of yellow cathedral glass into Liberty's torch. It certainly glowed, but it's never been waterproof since. An irony perhaps lost on most of her citizens.
London's Marlborough Gallery has an exhibition of his warrior-like masks constructed of kitchen chopping boards and other bibs and bobs. There are his Planets paintings too. For once, the gallery walls have been painted a grey/black creating quite a different space. Nothing wrong with the masks but you somehow wish he'd stopped at the walls perhaps creating a critique of the milieu in which he normally works. He speaks of the masks being neither good nor evil and as if of another world. To have done that purely through the gallery's fabric would really have been something.
Another Frenchman Michel Gondry, writer/director of Science of Sleep never seems to have succumbed to the American success of his music videos, commercials and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, longing more for the land of early French animator Melies. Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) has a touch of Donnie Darko with his ‘Disastrology’ drawings of earthquakes and plane crashes. His dreamlife is the only illumination in his humdrum job making headers for calendars. In his mind he has created ‘Stephane TV’ an imaginary studio of cardboard cameras reflecting on his life. Then he falls for his neighbour Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) trying to disguise the proximity. Stephane is the type of boyfriend needed by the girls in Eric Zonca’s Dreamlife of Angels (another suicide pic). “I pushed [Stephane’s crudeness] a little further,” says Gondry, “because I was afraid people would not understand why a girl like Charlotte would not be attracted to a guy like Gael. One of the reasons is he’s a little insane. I think insanity is unattractive. Being down-to-earth is a more attractive quality for woman.” Some have found Science too whimsical hankering after Eternal Sunshine’s screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. But there isn’t much in the cinema world these days that’s like Gondry, unashamed French romantic rather than David Lynch that he is. And if we were encouraged and medicated to fly more there’d be a lot less people jumping off bridges.
Gun crime and London shootings
Blair pledges action on gun crime as toll rises
"I have trouble acting normal ‘round here,"- the Counting Crows song (Across a Wire, Live in NYC '97)
Dito Montiel has written and directed from his published memoirs of growing up in Astoria, Queens during the mid-80s.A Guide to Recognising Your Saints. "We live here, you die here," shouts the local graffiti.
Art or Asbo: Banksy is a big enough man to fend for himself (half way down page!)
The film flashbacks between Robert Downey, Jr. and Shia LaBeouf as different ages of Montiel. "Everyday there's something different,” says his dad Monty (Chazz Palminteri) who will never understand why his son wants to leave the place he knows and grew up in. The only enlightenment comes from Scottish outsider Mike (Martin Compston, Red Road), and Dito taking his advice ends up a writer living in Los Angeles finally coming home to see his ill father. "I dreamt of farms," said Dito in an interview about his youth. Foreign realms too for the urban youth cast of Kim Chapiron's Sheitan (Satan) who go clubbing and end up adventuring to an isolated farmhouse for Christmas only to wind up in their own horror movie. "You think your shit doesn't stink," says one, staking out his emotional turf. Like the kids in Saints they also take their aggression out on small retailers. The dialogue of Saints smacks of the local deli, and in Sheitan of raw garlic. Dito works for a gay dog walker who warns "the owner checks his ass to see if he's crapped!"
Sheitan is a stunning debut – camera angles, editing, rap music, the works. What begins with street cred La Haine turns into cross-genre comedy/horror (Vincent Cassell of La Haine heavily twisted). It doesn't quite bring that ending off, though, more clever than astute. Saints is raw too, just a tad tame in comparison, which isn't really fair I know. Dito said of actor Channing Tatum’s character "He brought a guy who breaks your neck and then tries to put it together because he didn't mean to do that." And that's true of the rest of the film. Just sometimes you feel you've visited this territory before. Maybe it's that Dito knows his turf too well or maybe his film wiles not enough.
Lawyer falls to Death at Tate Modern
Eric Steel's doco about suicide on San Francisco's Golden Gate The Bridge opened last week in London to respectful reviews. All except Andrew Pulver from The Guardian. "This could be the most morally loathsome film ever made. [Eric Steel] failed to be honest [his] methods are thoroughly despicable." I wonder what he'd make of Norwegian Jens Lien's The Bothersome Man (Den brysomme mannen)last year's London Film Fest) or Goran Dukic's Wristcutters October's Raindance Fest) both awaiting a UK release? I've known several people who've committed suicide. I didn't watch or take their last phone call, but I strongly felt this doco gave the 24 2004 Golden Gate victims incredible dignity. Steel is another first time director who's given us something quite impressive. The idea derived from The New Yorker's Tad Friend article Jumpers and it remains a subject that's icily taboo. When a regional American newspaper ran a picture of 'the falling man', a jumper from the burning 9/11 Twin Towers, there was outrage. Nobody wanted to believe or moreover own up to the fact that this is how someone chose to die. Steel has compared his film to Bruegel's painting "Landscape With the Fall of Icarus. "In the corner of the painting, a pair of legs disappears into the water with a splash so small it is hardly noticed by the other people in the picture, much less by someone in the museum." I remember too an early Dali painting where the angel in the landscape is so small it's like the ppp (absolute pianissimo- the quietest sound you can) marking in a Gustav Mahler score. "One camera would be fixed, at wide angle to record the bridge and the water beneath it, as if it were a postcard. The operator simply had to change tapes every hour and press record. The other camera was fitted with an extreme telephoto lens – strong enough to see individual people as they walked across the bridge." Steel did always try to warn the police of an impending leap. While the dod lacks the detail of Friend's essay, it's the old problem of translating the literary to the screen. And Steel opted for the simplist, boldest and most visually arresting option possible. For that he should be applauded.
In The Bothersome Man (pipped at the post by Reprise as Norway's Oscar entry, although it did win the top prize at last year's 14th Hampton’s International Film Festival), Andreas (Trond Fausa Aurvaag), an office worker throws himself under a subway train (as does one of Dito Montial's friends) only to wake up in a city with a perfect home, perfect job and a perfect girlfriend into all things designer. Probably why he committed suicide in the first place. Only nothing has any taste or touch. Suicide is impossible in his new environment as we see to great comic result. Wristcutters is the flipside: Zia (Patrick Fugit) slashes his wrists speeding him to a desert nowheresville populated with everyone wearing their suicide scars literally on the wrist, head or whatever. In the United States there are almost twice as many suicides each year than homicides. The beautiful hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossaman) is the normal odd-girl out (passport mix-up).
"I thought if I watched enough people, I would be able to spot the outward manifestations of their interior demons," said Eric Steel. Scots Jock Mooney has a show in Gimpel Fils's emerging artists' space downstairs Funland Was No More. In the corner cornice a painted cloud is pricked by a tiny pair of struggling female legs while diagonally below Pooh Bear licks blood not honey from his pot. Monney had no need to paint the title. "The vulgar excesses of disposable contemporary culture are replicated in Mooney's work...highlighting the horror of our Ikea society," goes the press release. Mooney builds hundreds of tiny figures to populate a trestle table Inventory and a black painted floorboard Drying Rack erupts bulbousing tiny creatures. Quite disconcerting, impressive and not an easy act to pull off.
The buildings of French architect, interior designer and artist Thierry W. Despont would probably never be visited by any of the characters mentioned so far: the restored Frick family mansion in Pittsburgh, Dorchester Bar London, Los Angeles' J. Paul Getty Museum interior, and houses of Calvin Klein, Oscar de la Renta and Bill Gates. Except perhaps the Statue of Liberty in New York for which he was associate architect for the 1986 centennial restoration. In 1916, Gutzon Borglum, Mount Rushmore's sculptor, was commissioned to cut out most of the copper and install six hundred pieces of yellow cathedral glass into Liberty's torch. It certainly glowed, but it's never been waterproof since. An irony perhaps lost on most of her citizens.
London's Marlborough Gallery has an exhibition of his warrior-like masks constructed of kitchen chopping boards and other bibs and bobs. There are his Planets paintings too. For once, the gallery walls have been painted a grey/black creating quite a different space. Nothing wrong with the masks but you somehow wish he'd stopped at the walls perhaps creating a critique of the milieu in which he normally works. He speaks of the masks being neither good nor evil and as if of another world. To have done that purely through the gallery's fabric would really have been something.
Another Frenchman Michel Gondry, writer/director of Science of Sleep never seems to have succumbed to the American success of his music videos, commercials and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, longing more for the land of early French animator Melies. Stephane (Gael Garcia Bernal) has a touch of Donnie Darko with his ‘Disastrology’ drawings of earthquakes and plane crashes. His dreamlife is the only illumination in his humdrum job making headers for calendars. In his mind he has created ‘Stephane TV’ an imaginary studio of cardboard cameras reflecting on his life. Then he falls for his neighbour Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg) trying to disguise the proximity. Stephane is the type of boyfriend needed by the girls in Eric Zonca’s Dreamlife of Angels (another suicide pic). “I pushed [Stephane’s crudeness] a little further,” says Gondry, “because I was afraid people would not understand why a girl like Charlotte would not be attracted to a guy like Gael. One of the reasons is he’s a little insane. I think insanity is unattractive. Being down-to-earth is a more attractive quality for woman.” Some have found Science too whimsical hankering after Eternal Sunshine’s screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. But there isn’t much in the cinema world these days that’s like Gondry, unashamed French romantic rather than David Lynch that he is. And if we were encouraged and medicated to fly more there’d be a lot less people jumping off bridges.
Saturday, 17 February 2007
The usual suspects
Africa's top film festival opens
If you thought you'd seen Casablanca, think again! There's a new digitally remastered print out this week by Park Circus and TCM (Turner Classic Movies) and it's just bliss. Some may still prefer the scratchy prints and wonky sound from yesteryear, but if you love the cinematic image you've no choice but to go. Try this out on your plasma screen next week (25 Feb 3pm) but preferably find a cinema that has digital projection e.g. Curzon Soho in London. The lighting by Arthur Edelson is as detailed as the characters. What an experience it must have been on a miserable January evening in London in 1943 to see this on the big screen. The question for me has never been whether or not Bogart was a good actor. What fascinates about his characters is where have they been and where are they going something extending far beyond the script itself e.g. In a Lonely Place.
At last year's Times BFI London Film Festival, there was a contemporary Casablanca film What a Wonderful World by Faouzi Bensaidi that I wish I'd had time to see. And tomorrow, Africa on Screen shows A Letter from My Village. Bamako, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, centres around a trial in Mali's Bamako against the World Bank and the IMF. African countries spend almost £10 billion annually on debt service. The preview audience seemed rapt in the proceedings, but it was all a bit too didactic for me. (I was tired and grumpy so make up your own mind).
IMF told to stay away from World Bank's turf
The trouble when Hollywood gets its hands on Africa is any failure in political representation is used as a stick with which to beat the left of Tinseltown. Blood Diamond about African diamonds funding war and repression is a case in point. The film's Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Connelly, said in an interview with The Independent
"Africa made me feel like I really don't do enough. We tried to do what we could when we were there. I think just making the film there was a great thing. We all felt good about putting 40 or 50 million dollars into the economy. We created this fund which was then matched by the studio [Warner Brothers] to help the very local communities in which we worked. I called Amnesty when I got home and asked them to put me to work whenever they can. But you do leave there thinking, 'Gosh, I wish there was more I could do'. And I'm sure there is."
But the night scene where Connelly and Dicaprio reveal their life history back stories just doesn't have that Bogart wonder or ombra. DiCaprio is pretty impressive nonetheless, as he was in Scorsee's The Aviator and The Departed. You just wish Scorsese had got his hands on Blood Diamond or even Spielberg (don't shoot me dear readers!). Director Ed Zwick loves grand sweeping films (Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai) and this film is no exception with fantastic cinematography by Eduardo Serra. Phillip Noyce's Catch a Fire, released in a few months, about ANC (African National Congress) fighter Patrick Chamusso fares better I think. An action film with lots of character subtlety. And if these films put political and social awareness into the multiplexes that can be no bad thing.
These thoughts from BBC Radio 4 on Conrad's Heart of Darkness are interesting too.
If you thought you'd seen Casablanca, think again! There's a new digitally remastered print out this week by Park Circus and TCM (Turner Classic Movies) and it's just bliss. Some may still prefer the scratchy prints and wonky sound from yesteryear, but if you love the cinematic image you've no choice but to go. Try this out on your plasma screen next week (25 Feb 3pm) but preferably find a cinema that has digital projection e.g. Curzon Soho in London. The lighting by Arthur Edelson is as detailed as the characters. What an experience it must have been on a miserable January evening in London in 1943 to see this on the big screen. The question for me has never been whether or not Bogart was a good actor. What fascinates about his characters is where have they been and where are they going something extending far beyond the script itself e.g. In a Lonely Place.
At last year's Times BFI London Film Festival, there was a contemporary Casablanca film What a Wonderful World by Faouzi Bensaidi that I wish I'd had time to see. And tomorrow, Africa on Screen shows A Letter from My Village. Bamako, directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, centres around a trial in Mali's Bamako against the World Bank and the IMF. African countries spend almost £10 billion annually on debt service. The preview audience seemed rapt in the proceedings, but it was all a bit too didactic for me. (I was tired and grumpy so make up your own mind).
IMF told to stay away from World Bank's turf
The trouble when Hollywood gets its hands on Africa is any failure in political representation is used as a stick with which to beat the left of Tinseltown. Blood Diamond about African diamonds funding war and repression is a case in point. The film's Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Connelly, said in an interview with The Independent
"Africa made me feel like I really don't do enough. We tried to do what we could when we were there. I think just making the film there was a great thing. We all felt good about putting 40 or 50 million dollars into the economy. We created this fund which was then matched by the studio [Warner Brothers] to help the very local communities in which we worked. I called Amnesty when I got home and asked them to put me to work whenever they can. But you do leave there thinking, 'Gosh, I wish there was more I could do'. And I'm sure there is."
But the night scene where Connelly and Dicaprio reveal their life history back stories just doesn't have that Bogart wonder or ombra. DiCaprio is pretty impressive nonetheless, as he was in Scorsee's The Aviator and The Departed. You just wish Scorsese had got his hands on Blood Diamond or even Spielberg (don't shoot me dear readers!). Director Ed Zwick loves grand sweeping films (Legends of the Fall, The Last Samurai) and this film is no exception with fantastic cinematography by Eduardo Serra. Phillip Noyce's Catch a Fire, released in a few months, about ANC (African National Congress) fighter Patrick Chamusso fares better I think. An action film with lots of character subtlety. And if these films put political and social awareness into the multiplexes that can be no bad thing.
These thoughts from BBC Radio 4 on Conrad's Heart of Darkness are interesting too.
Wednesday, 14 February 2007
I've paid a price, and i'll keep paying
A reader chastised me for quoting Sondheim and not something more hip well, I think the Grammy Award winners the Dixie Chicks song is appropriate:
Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting
I'm through, with doubt,
There's nothing left for me to figure out,
I've paid a price, and i'll keep paying
I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should
I know you said
Why can't you just get over it,
It turned my whole world around
and i kind of like it
I made by bed, and I sleep like a baby,
With no regrets and I don't mind saying,
It's a sad sad story
That a mother will teach her daughter
that she ought to hate a perfect stranger.
And how in the world
Can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Saying that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over
I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should
I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should
Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting
So anyone who wanted to be my Valentine would have to agree with this (and Sondheim)and this...
Outcry after Unicef identifies UK's 'failed generation of children'
UNICEF
And this...
By the way, the London Underground is hell again today: severe delays, if a service at all, on several major lines. My Valentine to the current government is this: you give the public a crap free transport service everyday for at least 3 months and I might, just might consider agreeing with your 2012 Olympic Games. They even want to bid to host the World Cup in 2018 or something. Well, they've learnt to crawl. How about learning to walk before you run!
And if you do manage to get somewhere on time the wonderful, erotic Eartha Kitt has pounced into town at the Shaw Theatre. Her new CD is out live from New York's Cafe Carlyle. I was there, well, another night. Sensuous and sublime.
Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting
I'm through, with doubt,
There's nothing left for me to figure out,
I've paid a price, and i'll keep paying
I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should
I know you said
Why can't you just get over it,
It turned my whole world around
and i kind of like it
I made by bed, and I sleep like a baby,
With no regrets and I don't mind saying,
It's a sad sad story
That a mother will teach her daughter
that she ought to hate a perfect stranger.
And how in the world
Can the words that I said
Send somebody so over the edge
That they'd write me a letter
Saying that I better shut up and sing
Or my life will be over
I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should
I'm not ready to make nice,
I'm not ready to back down,
I'm still mad as hell
And I don't have time
To go round and round and round
It's too late to make it right
I probably wouldn't if I could
Cause I'm mad as hell
Can't bring myself to do what it is
You think I should
Forgive, sounds good.
Forget, I'm not sure I could.
They say time heals everything,
But I'm still waiting
So anyone who wanted to be my Valentine would have to agree with this (and Sondheim)and this...
Outcry after Unicef identifies UK's 'failed generation of children'
UNICEF
And this...
By the way, the London Underground is hell again today: severe delays, if a service at all, on several major lines. My Valentine to the current government is this: you give the public a crap free transport service everyday for at least 3 months and I might, just might consider agreeing with your 2012 Olympic Games. They even want to bid to host the World Cup in 2018 or something. Well, they've learnt to crawl. How about learning to walk before you run!
And if you do manage to get somewhere on time the wonderful, erotic Eartha Kitt has pounced into town at the Shaw Theatre. Her new CD is out live from New York's Cafe Carlyle. I was there, well, another night. Sensuous and sublime.
Tuesday, 13 February 2007
Of cabbages and kings through a glass darkly
BAFTA awards (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) or the Orange British Academy Film Awards were on Sunday night. The Royal Opera House no less, trying to show some cred to that Oscar ceremony. Quite a few strained celeb faces in the audience, though, but that may have just been professional scrutiny, the cold weather, or transport problems of a different kind; public transport being something most would like to forget I think. And to be fair at least most of them have experienced what that is like when they were starting out unlike the people I meet at some parties! This is what makes The Queen quite interesting: its exploration of British aloofness, egalitarianism and guilt. Now, I can actually claim (is that a tautology? anyway...) to have worked as an actor for The Queen director Stephen Frears. And I was reminded of the Managing Director's example I quoted in my last blog about Anglo-American enthusiasm and oomph. To quote myself:
I found a kindred spirit in one UK Managing Director yesterday who said if you have two rooms with couple of identical basic DIY resources and put the Americans in one and the Brits in the other, the former will make something regardless, and the latter will keep discussing the problems that may arise.
Watching Frear's acceptance speech for Best Film, or rather shambolic non-speech, I can imagine Frears slipping unnoticed out the DIY prison door he discovered unlocked and returning 10 minutes later with some biscuits, extra odds and ends and a map not dissimilar to that in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits. Meanwhile, the Americans would be diligently toiling away. Now on the surface, The Queen seems like the archetypal very well made BBC film (and Frears did cut his teeth at the Beeb), of course with a captivating performance by Helen Mirren. While Frears is unlikely to ever go down Gilliam's worm holes, he does; however, seem to be up to something in the undergrowth. As if he understands what it is, if not exactly to hide, then to want to be left alone - a quality often mistaken for aloofness.
I paid a visit to that island of blooming bouquets, trinkets and cards left for the deceased Princess Diana. The silent eeriness was an island of the dead. Diana had become a Christ-like figure or Yus Assaf for many. Each bouquet a cross and offering forming a collective outpouring of silent confession. As Australian poet Les Murray once wrote in his poem Noonday Axeman "Men must have legends else they will die of strangeness". Opportunistic pragmatism ruled the week for Prime Minister Blair at Westminster, unerring Royal protocol from the other side, and fascinating e.g. the Royal Standard above Buckingham Palace only flies to denote the Queen being in residence and nothing more. Yet the moment in the Scottish highlands when alone the Queen admires the stag destined to be her husband's prize kill, becomes a beautiful and unsentimental metaphor for the problematic pragmatism, protocol and compassion of much more than just the Diana affair. To many the answer to such problems will always be an easy one. Frears and scriptwriter Peter Morgan convince you that strangeness is much more the powerful and much more the painful than legend.
Andrea Arnold certainly knows that and received the special Carl Foreman newcomer award for writing/directing Red Road even though it was a little dispiriting upon her championing Glasgow to get only a lone cheer from the amphitheatre. Brit films such as London to Brighton and This is England are by absolutely no means bad, it's just that a film like Red Road where voyeurism and silent confessional collide is so different to anything else by never posing any easy answers.
With one of The Last King of Scotland's producers Andrea Calderwood accepting the film's Outstanding British Film of the Year, I was reminded of a panel discussion she was on last year with Kevin Loader and others. It was titled 'You think you want to be a Producer' or something to that effect, and very un-American-like. I know we're famous Brit producers, they were saying, but often we can barely afford to buy a round in the pub! With Kevin loader (Venus, The History Boys) adding, “you die of encouragement in America”. Let's hope they see some of the film's profits from distributor Fox Searchlight (20th Century Fox's more 'indie'arm)before they become octogenarians in the local pub of Venus. Fox Searchlight is also behind Little Miss Sunshine winner of Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Alan Arkin (Little Abigail Breslin's risqué choreographer). Searchlight also backed The History Boys, and Notes on a Scandal. An amazing Judi Dench who creates a horrible character you can empathise with, but the Philip Glass music makes it all a bit OTT, though. You certainly can't accuse Fox Searchlight of pandering to the masses.
I found a kindred spirit in one UK Managing Director yesterday who said if you have two rooms with couple of identical basic DIY resources and put the Americans in one and the Brits in the other, the former will make something regardless, and the latter will keep discussing the problems that may arise.
Watching Frear's acceptance speech for Best Film, or rather shambolic non-speech, I can imagine Frears slipping unnoticed out the DIY prison door he discovered unlocked and returning 10 minutes later with some biscuits, extra odds and ends and a map not dissimilar to that in Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits. Meanwhile, the Americans would be diligently toiling away. Now on the surface, The Queen seems like the archetypal very well made BBC film (and Frears did cut his teeth at the Beeb), of course with a captivating performance by Helen Mirren. While Frears is unlikely to ever go down Gilliam's worm holes, he does; however, seem to be up to something in the undergrowth. As if he understands what it is, if not exactly to hide, then to want to be left alone - a quality often mistaken for aloofness.
I paid a visit to that island of blooming bouquets, trinkets and cards left for the deceased Princess Diana. The silent eeriness was an island of the dead. Diana had become a Christ-like figure or Yus Assaf for many. Each bouquet a cross and offering forming a collective outpouring of silent confession. As Australian poet Les Murray once wrote in his poem Noonday Axeman "Men must have legends else they will die of strangeness". Opportunistic pragmatism ruled the week for Prime Minister Blair at Westminster, unerring Royal protocol from the other side, and fascinating e.g. the Royal Standard above Buckingham Palace only flies to denote the Queen being in residence and nothing more. Yet the moment in the Scottish highlands when alone the Queen admires the stag destined to be her husband's prize kill, becomes a beautiful and unsentimental metaphor for the problematic pragmatism, protocol and compassion of much more than just the Diana affair. To many the answer to such problems will always be an easy one. Frears and scriptwriter Peter Morgan convince you that strangeness is much more the powerful and much more the painful than legend.
Andrea Arnold certainly knows that and received the special Carl Foreman newcomer award for writing/directing Red Road even though it was a little dispiriting upon her championing Glasgow to get only a lone cheer from the amphitheatre. Brit films such as London to Brighton and This is England are by absolutely no means bad, it's just that a film like Red Road where voyeurism and silent confessional collide is so different to anything else by never posing any easy answers.
With one of The Last King of Scotland's producers Andrea Calderwood accepting the film's Outstanding British Film of the Year, I was reminded of a panel discussion she was on last year with Kevin Loader and others. It was titled 'You think you want to be a Producer' or something to that effect, and very un-American-like. I know we're famous Brit producers, they were saying, but often we can barely afford to buy a round in the pub! With Kevin loader (Venus, The History Boys) adding, “you die of encouragement in America”. Let's hope they see some of the film's profits from distributor Fox Searchlight (20th Century Fox's more 'indie'arm)before they become octogenarians in the local pub of Venus. Fox Searchlight is also behind Little Miss Sunshine winner of Best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Alan Arkin (Little Abigail Breslin's risqué choreographer). Searchlight also backed The History Boys, and Notes on a Scandal. An amazing Judi Dench who creates a horrible character you can empathise with, but the Philip Glass music makes it all a bit OTT, though. You certainly can't accuse Fox Searchlight of pandering to the masses.
Friday, 9 February 2007
Get real, dude!
Why does every week in London feel like living in a Monty Python movie? The biometric chip in new British 10-year passports was announced to be unguaranteed to last beyond two years. Heavy snow yesterday and eight underground tube lines had severe delays. But there always are whenever there's winter snow and judging from past years it's unlikely to get any better. At least the walkways were gritted, a concept that was slightly alien to parts of the city until a few years ago. And yesterday's demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament by those who'd paid into their compulsory pension’s schemes over the years only to find they'd receive virtually nothing after the companies had gone bankrupt. I found a kindred spirit in one UK Managing Director yesterday who said if you have two rooms with a few identical basic DIY resources and put the Americans in one and the Brits in the other, the former will make something regardless, and the latter will keep discussing the problems that may arise if they do. An American comedian once quipped that until coming to England he didn't realise that Fawlty Towers (the classic Brit sitcom) was a hard hitting social documentary. Having said that, watch the BBC's Alchemists of Sound for the positive side of the Brits.
And speaking of real grit, Sundance 2006 hit A Guide to Recognising Your Saints opens UK in a few weeks. Horror reality hit the screens recently in Them. Like the Oz pic Wolf Creek it too was based on a true story. While the latter is more gruesome and visceral like Saw, neither are the sort of DVD you'd particularly want the disaffected youth getting hold of as they both deliver what's promised on the can. And violent crime is on the increase in London. But is the effect any worse than say the Oscar nominated United 93, Paul Greengrass's docudrama memorial to the 9/11 hijacking? Critics were vitriolic about Michael Powell's serial killer Peeping Tom in 1960. We are all voyeuristic by nature and surely it's healthier to acknowledge that and confront it rather than to champion denial.
The Mexican press 10 years earlier were the same when Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned or literally those forgotten and in oblivion) opened, and now restored in a new print by the UNAM film archive in Mexico as part of Bunuel's retrospective at the BFI National Film Theatre in London. It's a film that could have been made yesterday by Ken Loach, and the sort of film about disaffected youth that Shane Meadows yet to be released This is England just isn't, alas. The accompanying BFI Film Classics book by Mark Polizzotti is well worth a read too. Amongst the film's wonderful poetry, championed by Octavio Paz among many others, is a scene where the kids, for a few pesos, have to push the fairground merry-go-round rather than ride it. In 2003, the original negative was incorporated into UNESCO's 'Memory of the World' programme.
That's what I like about Little Miss Sunshine: allowing and facilitating people to be who they are. As Stephen Sondheim coined it in his song, Everybody says Don't.
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't, it isn't right,
Don't, it isn't nice.
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't walk on the grass,
Don't disturb the peace,
Don't skate on the ice.
Well I say do, I say,
Walk on the grass, it was meant to feel.
I say, sail, till to the windmill
And if you fail you fail.
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't get out of line
When they say that then, lady that's a sign
Nine times out of ten,
Lady you're doing just fine.
Make just a ripple, come on be brave
This time a ripple, next time a wave
Sometimes you have to start small,
Climbing the tiniest wall -
Maybe you're going to fall
But it is better than not starting at all.
Everybody says no, stop,
Mustn't rock the boat, mustn't touch a thing
Everybody says don't
Everybody says wait
Everybody says can't fight city-hall
Can't laugh at the King.
Well, I say do, I say,
Laugh at the King, or he'll make you cry
Lose your poise
Fall if you have to, but lady make a noise!
Yes!
Everybody says don't
Everybody says can't
Everybody says wait around for miracles
That's the way the world is made
I insist on miracles
If you do them, miracles, nothing to them
I say don't...
Don't be afraid!
Or as on the Sunshine's yellow merchandising badges "everyone pretend to be normal". After much lobbying from renowned artists, Los Olvidados screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951 losing out on First Prize to Vittorio de Sica's Miracle in Milan about poverty and hope. Harry Potter has nothing on those flying broomsticks at the end of De Sica's film!
Germaine Jackson in a post Celebrity Big Brother interview spoke of how some American Muslims in the 9/11 aftermath began denying who they were. A children's clothing company was banned from using pictures of children in sexually suggestive poses though I haven't had a chance to see the all the campaign. Yet Abigail Breslin's provocative dance at the end of Sunshine is deemed okay in the Cineplex’s.
The anthropologist Malinowski was revered for his notion of functionalism, the fact that primitive cultures all share the same basic needs, as we do. My former and wise arts editor Thomas Sutcliffe hit the bone on the head after seeing Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. I once interviewed Brazilian film director Hector Babenco (Kiss of the Spider Woman) when South American 'magical realism' was all the rage in the 'West'. What he found funny was that if you walked the streets of Rio or Sao Paolo, the 'magical realism' was 'real realism'. I was reminded of these matters watching a new Turkish film Climates (Iklimler)em> released in London today by Artificial Eye (whose founding father Andi Engel died recently). And it's a shame no UK distributor co-ordinated a release of another Turk film Times and Winds (Bes Vakit)em> seen at last year's Times BFI London Film Festival with wonderful screen debuts from the three 12, 13 year-old children in the tiny Anatolian village of Kozlu. Both films are visually sumptuous to the point where you feel you're bathing in the light of the landscapes. Climates, shot on High Definition video is essentially middle-class existentialism with even a rape/rough sex scene. The director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (an exibition of his photos is concurrant at the Royal National Theatre) and his wife Ebru Ceylan play the film's protagonists' relationship break up. At times it has echoes of Antonioni's alienated figures, but Ceylan’s film has more a sense of seductive ennui than dialectic. It could almost be that the kids from Times have grown up, moved to Istanbul and lost their rhythm of the land so powerfully evoked by Times director Reha Erdem who says so much more about the human condition than the let's save the world film Babel. For all its commercialism, I think Little Miss Sunshine does a much better job of doing just that too.
More Turkish delight (sorry..) arrived with art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon's BBC TV series The Art of Eternity about early Christian art and the Byzantine - much loathed by Voltaire and Vasari. What's so engaging about Graham-Dixon is that you feel he's lost none of the excitement and passion he had when he originally pitched the idea, an 'I knew this would be exciting' feel, even if he does sometimes emphasise every word in a sentence. The investigation of the use of perspective, completely the opposite of the Renaissance view, is fascinating. How it reaches out to involve and almost choreograph the participant in an active contemplation reminds one of Francis Yates and her books about memory spaces in Renaissance art. Tai Chi for the Byzantines even!
And speaking of real grit, Sundance 2006 hit A Guide to Recognising Your Saints opens UK in a few weeks. Horror reality hit the screens recently in Them. Like the Oz pic Wolf Creek it too was based on a true story. While the latter is more gruesome and visceral like Saw, neither are the sort of DVD you'd particularly want the disaffected youth getting hold of as they both deliver what's promised on the can. And violent crime is on the increase in London. But is the effect any worse than say the Oscar nominated United 93, Paul Greengrass's docudrama memorial to the 9/11 hijacking? Critics were vitriolic about Michael Powell's serial killer Peeping Tom in 1960. We are all voyeuristic by nature and surely it's healthier to acknowledge that and confront it rather than to champion denial.
The Mexican press 10 years earlier were the same when Luis Bunuel's Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned or literally those forgotten and in oblivion) opened, and now restored in a new print by the UNAM film archive in Mexico as part of Bunuel's retrospective at the BFI National Film Theatre in London. It's a film that could have been made yesterday by Ken Loach, and the sort of film about disaffected youth that Shane Meadows yet to be released This is England just isn't, alas. The accompanying BFI Film Classics book by Mark Polizzotti is well worth a read too. Amongst the film's wonderful poetry, championed by Octavio Paz among many others, is a scene where the kids, for a few pesos, have to push the fairground merry-go-round rather than ride it. In 2003, the original negative was incorporated into UNESCO's 'Memory of the World' programme.
That's what I like about Little Miss Sunshine: allowing and facilitating people to be who they are. As Stephen Sondheim coined it in his song, Everybody says Don't.
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't, it isn't right,
Don't, it isn't nice.
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't walk on the grass,
Don't disturb the peace,
Don't skate on the ice.
Well I say do, I say,
Walk on the grass, it was meant to feel.
I say, sail, till to the windmill
And if you fail you fail.
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't
Everybody says don't get out of line
When they say that then, lady that's a sign
Nine times out of ten,
Lady you're doing just fine.
Make just a ripple, come on be brave
This time a ripple, next time a wave
Sometimes you have to start small,
Climbing the tiniest wall -
Maybe you're going to fall
But it is better than not starting at all.
Everybody says no, stop,
Mustn't rock the boat, mustn't touch a thing
Everybody says don't
Everybody says wait
Everybody says can't fight city-hall
Can't laugh at the King.
Well, I say do, I say,
Laugh at the King, or he'll make you cry
Lose your poise
Fall if you have to, but lady make a noise!
Yes!
Everybody says don't
Everybody says can't
Everybody says wait around for miracles
That's the way the world is made
I insist on miracles
If you do them, miracles, nothing to them
I say don't...
Don't be afraid!
Or as on the Sunshine's yellow merchandising badges "everyone pretend to be normal". After much lobbying from renowned artists, Los Olvidados screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951 losing out on First Prize to Vittorio de Sica's Miracle in Milan about poverty and hope. Harry Potter has nothing on those flying broomsticks at the end of De Sica's film!
Germaine Jackson in a post Celebrity Big Brother interview spoke of how some American Muslims in the 9/11 aftermath began denying who they were. A children's clothing company was banned from using pictures of children in sexually suggestive poses though I haven't had a chance to see the all the campaign. Yet Abigail Breslin's provocative dance at the end of Sunshine is deemed okay in the Cineplex’s.
The anthropologist Malinowski was revered for his notion of functionalism, the fact that primitive cultures all share the same basic needs, as we do. My former and wise arts editor Thomas Sutcliffe hit the bone on the head after seeing Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. I once interviewed Brazilian film director Hector Babenco (Kiss of the Spider Woman) when South American 'magical realism' was all the rage in the 'West'. What he found funny was that if you walked the streets of Rio or Sao Paolo, the 'magical realism' was 'real realism'. I was reminded of these matters watching a new Turkish film Climates (Iklimler)em> released in London today by Artificial Eye (whose founding father Andi Engel died recently). And it's a shame no UK distributor co-ordinated a release of another Turk film Times and Winds (Bes Vakit)em> seen at last year's Times BFI London Film Festival with wonderful screen debuts from the three 12, 13 year-old children in the tiny Anatolian village of Kozlu. Both films are visually sumptuous to the point where you feel you're bathing in the light of the landscapes. Climates, shot on High Definition video is essentially middle-class existentialism with even a rape/rough sex scene. The director Nuri Bilge Ceylan (an exibition of his photos is concurrant at the Royal National Theatre) and his wife Ebru Ceylan play the film's protagonists' relationship break up. At times it has echoes of Antonioni's alienated figures, but Ceylan’s film has more a sense of seductive ennui than dialectic. It could almost be that the kids from Times have grown up, moved to Istanbul and lost their rhythm of the land so powerfully evoked by Times director Reha Erdem who says so much more about the human condition than the let's save the world film Babel. For all its commercialism, I think Little Miss Sunshine does a much better job of doing just that too.
More Turkish delight (sorry..) arrived with art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon's BBC TV series The Art of Eternity about early Christian art and the Byzantine - much loathed by Voltaire and Vasari. What's so engaging about Graham-Dixon is that you feel he's lost none of the excitement and passion he had when he originally pitched the idea, an 'I knew this would be exciting' feel, even if he does sometimes emphasise every word in a sentence. The investigation of the use of perspective, completely the opposite of the Renaissance view, is fascinating. How it reaches out to involve and almost choreograph the participant in an active contemplation reminds one of Francis Yates and her books about memory spaces in Renaissance art. Tai Chi for the Byzantines even!
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