Tate Modern extension gets green light


Network Rail fined £4m for Paddington rail crash

Jack Smith gets a blog of his own

Jack Smith was an amazing artist. See this if you get the chance at the 21st London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival(I did at last year's London Film Fest) Hopefully, it'll get a wider release in the future.
Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis
Flaming Creatures
Documentary website
And an article about Jack Smith I researched back in 1993 (I think) for Hybrid Magazine. Page 2 is now ready!

...THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC CALLED LOVE.

The trouble with a lot of the English is that they always feel gratitude is an essential element of London living. I'm not going to do a Desmond Morris gesture mapping here but have you noticed how many Londoners thank the motorist for stopping at the pedestrian (zebra) crossing? It's usually when they're half way across and not before. Deity forbid that I should sound like a misanthrope, but if the driver had half the chance..... If one doesn't adhere to these rituals you're deemed rude. Yet my misanthropy is clearly in evidence when commuters try to board crowded London trains. Letting people off a vehicular conduit before letting others on would seem to have more in common with physics and logic rather than politeness. Disregard for this science is so widespread though that recorded 'big brother' announcements are necessary. Years ago at the Royal Courts of Justice, people had queued for hours to witness Tony Blair give his evidence to the Hutton inquiry. One queue for journalists, another for the others. When the gates opened it was like a dam bursting and the initial security so laksadaisical that a library card would suffice for a journalists' NUJ card. Maybe that's democracy. If you trip on one loose footpath be thankful they're not all like that. Same with the trains, although the natives are getting a bit restless. Loads of closed tube lines this weekend due to essential engineering works. Ok, but were they prepared with their science diplomas? The Piccadilly line was running to a lot of the destinations denied by the closures but were the commuters told that? Of course not. At Turnham Green underground, the Piccadilly line usually only stops late at night as it's serviced by the District line. Was the public told that this weekend it would be stopping all day because of the other line closures? Of course not. This was probably the best and safest station to change at for those having to take onward bus routes instead. If you read the fine print I suppose it was perfectly clear. The indicator boards at three stations on the District line were totally confusing. Fair comment I think.

What we should be grateful for is the talent of filmmaker David Lynch. I'd just sat through his new 3 hour movie Inland Empire before my underground nightmare. The DVD of Mulholland Drive: Special Edition has also just been released. "Who wants to go and see movies where everything's spelt out to you?" says actress Naomi Watts in one of the many fab extras on the DVD. All who are part of Lynch's dreams speak of it as if being spiritually converted. After Inland Empire I'm still one of the congregation. I can't say it's the film chapter I'd go back to regularly but it looks amazing. It's shot on the same tiny Sony PD150 digital cameras Lars von Trier used for his Dancer in the Dark musical sequences. If you don't get held up on the Eurostar for one reason or another, Lynch also has an exhibition of his art at the ever-enterprising Fondation Cartier in Paris.

Lynch's Eraserhead was one of the classic Midnight(cult thereafter)Movies in America, and if you're unfamiliar with this era, see the documentary still playing at the ICA. There's also one midnight screening of John Waters' Pink Flamingos. More on Jodorowsky, including a great DVD set release,in a week or so. It was a surprise to see how Lynchian (or is it Lynchesque: you know you're doin' something right when you become an adjective) is Paolo Sorrentino's film The Family Friend (my esteemed colleague Jonathon Romney also noted this). Dub a Lynch like soundtrack to many of the scenes instead of Teho Teardo's and you'd be hard put to tell the difference. Teardo's is great, I hasten to add, and I had visions of thousands of Italians all transmogrified by his use of Elgar's Cello Concerto. How very EU.

Usury and desire are Sorrentino's themes, as they were in his brilliant debut The Consequences of Love. Geremia is a local loan shark and looks like the evil dwarf Loge out of a modern dress Wagner's Ring. His only friend Gino dreams of living in Tennessee. "You were given the world on loan," he wryly retorts to the big boys when he's overreached himself, "I lend the world to you when you happen to lose it." The same outré distributor Wild Bunch supported Satan released on DVD this week through Tartan Video. I reviewed its limited ICA cinema release. It's a shame some of the collective's music videos that won a Golden DVD aren't included as extras. But I guess these are available elsewhere and the interviews are good and an inspiration to young filmmakers. "Contrary to what you might think, you don't need experience to be good in film," says Vincent Cassel. "All that is required is to be receptive, fresh, creative and a little humble."

If there's one DVD you must get, and definitely skimp on buying booze for your significant other, it's Optimum's release of Peeping Tom. This is one of the most important DVD releases to date. The scandal over its 1960 release put an end to director Michael Powell's career in Britain forever. The only work he could find was in Australia. The film's been championed by Scorsese among many others, and in the words of Ian Christie's superlative audio commentary, "is a classic meditation on the filmed image". The character of Mark (KarlHeinz Böhm the son of legendary conductor Karl Böhm) is a product of his father's experiments in infantile 'behaviourism' psychology akin to Watson/Pavlov/Skinner et al. "I never knew a moment of privacy," he says. With his movie camera, Mark is trying to produce impossible pictures. Helen (Moira Shearer) is Brünnhilde to Mark's Siegfried and is writing a children’s story about a 'magic camera'. "Never confuse the improbable with the impossible," says Geremia from The Family Friend.

Also out on DVD, and following in Powell's brave footsteps, is one of the best British, or should I say Scottish, films in a long time, Andrea Arnold's Red Road. She has more in common with Lars von Trier’s films than the Danish new wave of Per Fly and Susanne Bier. It’s let down by its extras, though. A shame Wasp (2003) which won Arnold the Academy Award for Live Action Short 2005 isn’t included. The interviews are thin too. But for the visually impaired (I guess) there’s a purely descriptive commentary.

I gently smiled when I read Biteback: Richard Brooks (Sunday Times) about former BFI (British Film Institute) head Alan Parker not being invited to last Tuesday’s opening of the revamped National Film Theatre. I wasn’t invited either Alan. Some very interesting politics going on down there I could tell you. At least they do have space for a decent party now rather than cramming everyone into a Marx Brothers room as before. And while we’re still on the subject of movies that can get you in a whole lot of trouble, the DVD of Mary Harron’s The Notorious Bettie Page is just out. Haven’t seen this DVD, but I can recommend the film, and my old colleague Cara Seymour’s pretty good in it too. What’s conflict of interest when it’s not at home?

If none of those things interest you, Mr.Bean's Holiday will leave you smiling. Bean makes a Lynchesque appearance at the Cannes Film Festival (Fest 2001 winner Lynch’s press conference is included in the Mulholland Drive extras). My Cannes antics were Bambi compared to Mr.Bean. (The Paris police bully boys there for the Fest almost strangled me in front of a crowded late night train) Not kidding! One of my fave Rowan Atkinson skits is his virtuoso performance of Beethoven’s Pathetique sonata (or is it the Moonlight I keep forgetting) on invisible piano. In Mr.Bean's Holiday he does Mozart’s Ronda alla turka together with many Jacques Tatiesque capers (but on caffeine) that he documents on his mini-DV. Even the brass-necked 10-year olds in the cinema were enjoying this film. Maybe they’ll grow up to be the next Ricky Gervaises.

And if you’re totally bloody skint, you can learn to lip-read and stand outside the electronics shop to watch Bremner, Bird and Fortune on Channel Four tele. Ooops, you can’t have TV’s on standby etc nowadays what with energy conservation can you? It’s still the fun-ha-ist, best scripted programme since the days of That Was The Week That Was. I’m too young to remember those years, thank goodness.

no laughing matter

Saw a TV interview this morning with this comedienne Tate's DVD sets record... no bovver. She made an unusually sexy guest star in Dr Who too!

And justice for all? Robber wins fight over phone calls

the best of all possible worlds...

This is still my favourite clip of all time (allow me a little American hyperbole please...)Beats the sleepy kitten You Tube video paws down

And following on from yesterday's 'is London great' theme....

Tom Teodorczuk, until recently, was the Evening Standard Arts Correspondent. He now lives in New York and mentioned in a Standard piece yesterday, this New York Magazine article. (searching recent article links on The Standard's site ain't easy)
London is the World Capital of the 21st Century. The article is subtly different to how he describes it though....

And U.S. fashion firm Abercrombie & Fitch is opening a London store tomorrow. This Daily Mail link has a little soft pawn for those readers who are London depressed (I let them use one of my younger photos :)))))

The man behind Abercrombie & Fitch (Free article but you may need to sit through a car ad first)

If you fancy some appropriate modern art to get back at your other half for dragging you through clothing stores Keith Wilson, The Gallery Socks is at Matthew Bown Gallery around the corner in the real Savile Row. (Don't get confused with the other Keith Wilsons on the web) It's on the first floor at No.11 and easy to miss. Matthew Bown, who as part of the hard bargain struck for the show, will go sockless for its duration. Quite fun really. And if the socks don't grab you, the antique Spanish table is covetable.

VJing and the art of vile jelly

What does Tony Blair’s New Labour and Peter Greenaway’s The Tulse Luper Suitcases have in common? Answer: both would like to be seen as the new Enlightenment. This morning in Hackney, that borough a lot of London denizens find hard to get to, Hackney anybody?, New Labour unveiled its Public Services Policy review with all the cabinet’s big guns on stage.

Push for 'personalised' services

Blair kept repeating that it’s all too easy to “focus on the negative”. Well, before moving onto Blair and Greenaway, let me recap a few experiences. The review is not about transport but the same criteria for reform applies. Personalising service, choice, focussed on people at the receiving end etc etc. My experiences of travelling to Hackney on the Silverlink overground train on time and unstressed have not been good, to say the least. I vividly remember, from some years ago, waiting the best part of an hour for a train, late into the snowy winter night. (No waiting room open- other stations often close them too to avoid vandalism I guess.) I hear things haven’t improved much.

THE UNBEARABLE DAILY NEWS
Dispatches: Britain’s Commuter Nightmare

On Saturday, around 19.00h, I was trying to board a Piccadilly line train homeward bound. All packed, the platform overcrowded and on a night with a sporting event and St.Patrick’s Day celebrations. Minor delays for some reason, but at this time of night on a Saturday it has always seemed the case in my experience. Does anyone put 2 + 2 together? We are at “the foothills of major educational advance,” said Chancellor Gordon Brown this morning. Certainly true of many quarters of the transport delivery sector. The Tubes are crap today too.

“Radicalise education in our classrooms,” was another of this morning’s New Labour quotes. After ground-breaking films, Greenaway had to decamp to Europe to find funding for his projects where he’s stayed ever since. I was met with the same disinterest, on my return, after working with Lars von Trier in Denmark.

The Times Online UK. Business Editor James Harding on why London is the new capital of the world London calling
It’s cool, classy, cosmopolitan — and it should secede from the UK. Business Editor James Harding on why London is the new capital of the world.


“New York defines the metropolitan, London the cosmopolitan” Cosmos meaning people from all parts of the world. Well, that’s certainly become truer than ever over the last 5 years. “And the reason for this is that foreigners in New York are, always, just that,” Harding goes on to say. But I never felt that. I always felt welcome in New York and for that matter every other American city I’ve visited over the last 20 years. The trouble with England and London, in particular, is that there are so many people trying so hard to show how liberal, democratic and humane they are: please keep quiet, ‘things will get better’ mentality. People should be thinking for themselves. I’m afraid I don’t see this New Enlightenment but I wish well those in Blair’s government that do really want to make a difference. I don’t wish to focus on the negative either Prime Minister Blair, but that’s the daily experience inflicted on my eyes. And as I don’t have any kids I shan’t dare comment on education. But after doing without a single NHS (National Health Service) visit in 10 years, I was viewed on my first encounter as a bludger. So much for self-reliance.

And further down the Times Online page: The New Yorker in London Erica Wagner ‘NY is cheaper and more convenient’ but London never ceases to fascinate me, perhaps because I know that I’ll always be a stranger here. But maybe everyone is a stranger in London; only London truly knows itself.”

“London is absurdly expensive. New Yorkers point out that the cost of living in their city is nearly half what it is here. Yet Charles Alexander, who is in charge of the UK operations of General Electric, America’s biggest company, says of his American colleagues in London: “They don’t want to leave.” They like the life, the schools, the style of the city.”

Bob Wigley, who runs Merrill Lynch in London, was at the meeting. His chief concern, he says, is complacency. London needs to worry about its transport infrastructure (in particular the long-stalled construction of Crossrail); it needs to be vigilant about its tax regime and defend its system of regulation. But, more than that, Wigley gives warning that “London needs to look east, towards the competition coming from Dubai, Singapore, Hong Kong”.

Tulse Luper is the life in 92 suitcases (92 being the atomic number of uranium) from 1921 to 1989 of Henry Purcell Tulse Luper, a writer, traveller, archivist and professional prisoner. “You have a loose tongue!” “No,” retorts Luper, “it’s firmly anchored to my best interests.” “There is no such thing as history only historians,” says the film. “Most games end in a draw.” The film is in 3 parts (DVD’s) and the Luper Network Site was under construction for 1001 days like Scheherazade. If it’s the last thing you do before throwing off your mortal coil, SEE IT. There’s plenty to read about it on the web and the best grapple with New Enlightenment concepts you’ll ever likely to see.
London Time Out Greenaway interview
Video interview with Peter Greenaway (May 2006)

Time Out London Optronica

While still in newspaper tabloid recommendation mode, another must see site is Centre for Visual Music

Yesterday’s National Film Theatre lecture by Cindy Keefer Projected Light and Color: Early Visual Music Color Organs and Light Shows showed just how devant-garde always was the avant-garde with powerbook sound and light shows dating back to 1734! There are a couple of DVD’s available too including the work of Oskar Fischinger At last! Fischinger on DVD! Keefer claims was the first VJ (Video disc jockey). What a fantastic Sunday afternoon.

And you need to listen to this: BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves

Seems as good a time as any to mention this: Hacking Democracy opens at London's ICA April 20. If they can get away with it they most certainly will!

Hang on a minute; I’ll be here a moment ago

Optronica transforms the BFI IMAX into a cauldron of sound and vision,” says the National Film theatre brochure. It’s indeed a very seductive brochure. Flicking through it really makes you desire cinema. And that’s coming from moi who’s supposedly jaded from watching Fassbinder, Visconti and Wertmuller as a teenager. Peter Greenaway is featured - screenings of all the Tulse Luper films, a lecture by him, and his live video disc jockey performance where he mixes Tulse Luper stories. Over the road, the South Bank Centre has its 100 Ideas talks about how culture can shape our life. Hayward Gallery’s new director Ralph Rugoff gave a talk elsewhere the other night about the exhibition A Brief History of Invisible Art he curated at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco November 30, 2005–February 21, 2006. On the same day I read this article by Robert Lanza:
“The central mystery of knowledge is that the laws of the world were somehow created to produce the observer. [Life creates the universe not the other way round.] There is something very unusual about them [time and space]. We can't put them in a marmalade jar and take them back to the lab for analysis. Space and time are not objects or things -- they are forms of animal sense perception.”
...........and if that grabs you...2+2=5 Can we begin to think about unexplained
religious experiences in ways that acknowledge their existence?

In his San Francisco exhibition, Rugoff had a roll call of guilty invisible pleasures. Yves Klein’s ‘air architecture’ - houses with roofs of air jets alongside a fountain of fire where his Five Fundamental Acts (Life, Education, Ceremony, Love and Death) could be experienced directly. There was Mauricio Cattelan’s Italian police report documenting the theft of an invisible sculpture from his car before a 1991 exhibition. Or Gianni Motti’s national telepathy event organized in Colombia in March 1997, in Bogota, to urge President Samper to resign. The artist also staged his own burial in July 1989, after announcing his death in a local paper and then parading the streets of Vigo in an open coffin. Sounds like Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa who not only faked his death but being an avid astrologer he predicted his real one to within a day. (I had a commission to evoke Pessoa for a South Bank Centre audience some years ago and became hooked). ‘Life is the hesitation between exclamation and a question. Doubt is resolved by a period,' he wrote in The Book of Disquiet. Or rather Bernardo Soares did, one of more than seventy other identities that Pessoa called ‘heteronyms'. These ‘heteronyms’ not only published their own poetry and prose, but also interacted with each other in their philosophical work. Pessoa invented them not as pseudonyms, but as real characters not needing an author. Alvaro De Campos, another one of Pessoa's heteronyms writes: ‘Fernando Pessoa, strictly speaking, does not exist.'

US Life: In the Berkshire Hills, globalisation faces a challenge

Germans get by without the euro

Is French philosopher Baudrillard permeating the Berkshire hills I wonder?
“It [globalisation] is pitched as the endpoint of the Enlightenment, the solution to all contradictions. In reality, it transforms everything into a negotiable, quantifiable exchange value. This process is extremely violent, for it cashes out in the idea of unity as the ideal state, in which everything that is unique, every singularity, including other cultures and finally every non-monetary value would be incorporated. See, on this point, I am the humanist and moralist. The universal values, as the Enlightenment defined them, constitute a transcendental ideal. They confront the subject with its own freedom, which is a permanent task and responsibility, not simply a right. This is completely absent in the global, which is an operational system of total trade and exchange. I think that human rights have already been integrated into the process of globalization and therefore function as an alibi. They belong to a juridical and moral superstructure; in short, they are advertising.”(From a Der Spiegel interview in 2002)

The Illusionist doesn’t have the panache of The Prestige, (DVD out today)but both films concern the illusory nature of power. The Illusionist unfolds like an opera, the die’s been cast and there are no surprises. And there’s that Philip Glass music again incessantly pushing the narrative to the cliff, much more subtly here than in Notes on a Scandal. Edward Norton’s self-knowledge is that his rags to riches life of creating stage illusions has existed only to win back his childhood soul mate from the aristocratic world she now inhabits. It’s not a perplexing film by any means but writer (based on Steven Millhauser's story)/director Neil Burger (his latest) really knows how to illicit the best from a top notch composer and cinematographer (Dick Pope). There’s a strangeness as if an opera’s characters have stopped singing and some invisible force conjured by Glass’s music has taken over the proceedings. Time dissolving - a cross between a Glass opera production from theatre director Robert Wilson and Visconti. (Glass’s Satyagraha opens at English National Opera in April). Also, there's an uptodate radio interview with him BBC Music Matters.

The first feature from indie American filmmaker Andrew Bujalski Funny HaHa opens this week, having taken two years to get here. To say it’s like fellow indies Cassavetes or Richard Linklater doesn’t say much at all. Strangely, if anything, the confined space created by Bujalski’s slices of life is more European than American. (I’m sure he could create the same effect on 35mm as on 16mm film) Even when the characters are having lunch in the middle of a park they seem confined and in a state of stasis. Bujalski is writer/director/editor and the latter talent for timing really shows. The framing’s great too. Beautifully observed has become such a film poster cliché but it’s exactly this film. The kind of ‘much ado about nothing and everything’ film so many film school students and indies try to make and end up botching. His second film Mutual Appreciation opens in May.

“There is enough metaphysics in not thinking about anything”
writes Pessoa’s shepherd character Alberto Caeiro:

What we see of things is things
Why would we see something if there were something else?
Why would seeing and hearing be there to deceive us
When seeing and hearing are seeing and hearing

What matters is knowing how to see,
Knowing how to see without stopping to think,
Knowing how to see when it is obvious,
And neither thinking when it is obvious
Nor seeing when it is thinkable
Translated by Keith Bosley (Carcanet Press)

..........you must be exhausted now dear reader and long to sit on a hill grazing with the sheep............................

the smartest guy in the room....

Ambassador Chas Freeman on America's 'Diplomacy-Free' Foreign Policy They've taken the audio off, alas. Read his speech though.

...Hackney anybody?

Getting beyond Old Street and Hoxton Square in London has always been a traumatic experience for me (transport of course!). I don't want to sound like one of those downtown New Yorkers who gasp, 'you go to the Upper West/East side!' or vice versa 'downtown' as if it's a hiking trip to the Sierra Madre but...If only there was one of those non-stop buses to London's East End like they have in LA e.g. West Hollywood-Santa Monica. Loads of great galleries around Bethnal Green area too.

If you're interested in Hackney listen to...

Bea Campbell talks about her new play, 'Blame', which explores what's happened to the working class in Britain Available to listen for a few weeks and as a Pod download.