Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.

...Are men still, catch a wheel within a wheel,
See more in a truth than the truth's simple self,
Confuse themselves. You see lads walk the street
Sixty the minute; what's to note in that?
You see one lad o'erstride a chimney-stack;
Him you must watch—he's sure to fall, yet stands!
Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.
The honest thief, the tender murderer,
The superstitious atheist, demireps
That loves and saves her soul in new French books—
We watch while these in equilibrium keep
The giddy line midway: one step aside,
They're classed and done with. I, then, keep the line
Before your sages,—just the men to shrink
From the gross weights, coarse scales and labels broad
You offer their refinement...

British novelist Graham Greene said of Browning's poem "Bishop Blougram's apology" that it could be the epigraph for his life's work. And it was a doco on Greene that lead me to this poem in the first place many years ago. It once again sprang to mind while reading Mike Davis' latest book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb: finally, after it had sat quietly on my desk for many months eyeing me with unread review copy guilt. I'd wanted to review it because of the almost daily reports of car bombs in Iraq over the years and how these reports somehow became nothing more than items in a long list of other news. The car bombs in London and Glasgow last week highlighted the fact that unless things happen to 'us' directly or they're thrust down our retinas, people tend not to care. And even then, a few days later, the streets and transport seem unbothered by the attacks except for slightly more ground police presence, the nearby National Gallery barricading its entrances and introducing security checks. (The government demanded it but I bet they didn't pay for it!, and of course more summer chaos at the airports.) I wonder how much right-wing flak hit Davis for writing his book. But essentially it's no different to his others on urban development. I'd urge you to read his history of Los Angeles City of Quartz, a history of the have-nots and the 'haves and have mores' to quote current President Bush from an address to New York's powerful Carlyle Group some years ago.

In Buda's Wagon, Davis uses his urban theory to trace the car bomb from the Italian anarchist Mario Buda and his horse drawn wagon attack on Wall Street in 1920 to the present where it "has become the hot rod of the apocalypse". He quotes from Greene's The Quiet American in the Saigon chapter: "A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat." And I thought of the Breughel (mid C16 Flemish) copyists who subtly sanitised the master's depiction of village invasion by painting away a dead child with something slightly more decorative and peasantry. Davis also covers (by no means decorously) the terrorist collusion of various world governmental elements over the years. No surprise there. Overall he is saying that the car bomb has become and will continue to be part of the fabric of urban life for many major cities rather than just a 'foreign' anomaly.

The explosive ending of The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970) is off screen. What we do see is a close-up of Peter Cook's opportunistic glance as Rimmer, the PR guru turned Prime Minister. It's a strange and fascinating British film previously unavailable on DVD or video. Comedian Peter Cook, famed for his deadpan line delivery, plays Rimmer as a kind of Nick Leeson (he of the Barings Bank demise). Like Leeson, the political old guard of the film are only too happy to have the smiling, youthful, presentable, resourceful Rimmer sought out their problems while watching the money roll in. Cook delivers his lines as if reading an auto-cue of what people want to hear. This is exactly why he’s rising and rising. "He's ruthless, opportunistic, dishonest, shallow, evasive and unprincipled but I'm still not sure whether he'd make a good leader,” says one of the selection committee. In the illuminating commentary by director Kevin Billington he stresses how they wanted the 'newness' of everything by using top notch production values to emphasise the seriousness of the satire. Now does that ring any current political bells? Loads of classic Brit acting talent here: Harold Pinter (the playwright), Ronald Fraser as PM, Ronnie Corbett waylaid by John Cleese and a busload of opinion poll riggers as they all pretend to be Buddhists, and Arthur Lowe as Mr. Ferrett (Dad's Army) who's reduced to menial duties in Rimmer's new world order.

Channel Four's The Insider: Should You Trust The PM? Sir Alistair Graham, the former Chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, argues that changing the fundamental political culture and the way MPs behave must be absolutely central to Gordon Brown's premiership.

In Thomas Sutcliffe's The Independent Friday opinion column What the people really want, he reflects on audiences wanting more BBC programming innovation, and publisher Simon and Shuster's new democratic publishing collaboration with the Media Predict website: ProjectPublish. Read, in particular, paras 4 and 7: the latter in which he quotes HL Mencken "no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." And remember a lot of the greatest artistic endeavours were shunned by the world at birth.

A 'descent' movie for the week is Edmond, adapted by David Mamet from his play. William H. Macy's corporate man of the title begins questioning his life after visiting a fortune teller. He is an innocent of the inner city who gradually takes on its character eventually murdering a waitress and discovering the ways of prison. "When we fear things I think we wish for them." If you don't know Mamet's work you might be transfixed by this film's distillation of experience. Having seen the brilliant National Theatre production with Kenneth Branagh back in 1993, I found it hard to divorce the film from that stage experience. When Mamet directs his own screen adaptations you become immersed in his dialectic of filmic rhythm and language. The director of this film, Stuart Gordon, is versed in the horror movie genre, most notably for his cult classic Re-Animator. And getting him to direct Edmond was quite an inspired choice. He began his career in theatre and more importantly in Chicago where Mamet's verbal rhythms were born. But the trouble with the film is almost that Gordon hasn't stamped enough of his own rhythm in addition to Mamet's. For example, from memory, the opening fortune telling scene was longer on stage than in the film. Mamet's choice, I guess, but the theme of 'can we control our own destiny' doesn't quite gain a filmic equivalence. Monday's Nightwaves has a spot on Edmond (not listed on the website)as well as a discussion about the myth of the northern England, and a not so glowing review of Katie Mitchell's Glyndebourne St.Matthew Passion.

Still unreleased in the UK is Day Night Night Day (last year's Times BFI London Film Fest)directed by American artist Julia Loktev, having opened in New York a few months ago. As Robert Bresson's French classic Pickpocket showed its subject with documentary accuracy, Day Night scrutinises the preparations of a young unnamed female suicide bomber before her failed mission in New York's Times Square. It's another haunting, harrowing unforgettable film "on the dangerous edge of things" that the rulers of our urban environment wish wouldn't be made. But why is this subject any more or less taboo than abortion, serial killers, or paedophiles? Could it be because of the dictum in Mamet's Edmond? 'When we fear things I think we wish for them'. Or in the case of Loktev's film and Davis' book perhaps understand too much and begin to fear and condemn too little. It was the same with John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer when I covered it for the BBC amidst the protests in Brussels accusing the work of sympathising with the cruise ship's Palestinian highjackers (which it didn't). Glyndebourne Opera, one of the co-commissioners, never staged it here. It was directed by American Peter Sellars, who's in London next week at the Barbican (New Crowned Hope season)with slightly less controversial material, but no less a controversial protagonist, Simone Weil: Kaija Saariaho's opera La Passion de Simone with a libretto by Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf. Bill Viola video work as well in the foyer.

Similar to Day Night in tone and just released on DVD is the remarkable US indie film Keane about a schizophrenic man (Damian Lewis)who finds calm and meaning when asked to mind a near-stranger's child (Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin)staying in the same 'down at heel' hotel.

And while we're on the subject of the effects of children, Les Petites Vacances (director Olivier Peyon's first feature) opened last week. Grandmother Danielle (Bernadette Lafont) plans to take her grandkids to their father's for Easter holidays. When Dad doesn't turn up, she 'borrows' them for her own holiday. This is one of those many beautifully observed French films where little happens but everyone's lives change. Another is Olivier, Olivier (1992) by writer/director Agnieszka Holland out on DVD through small distributor Bluebell Films. Based on a newspaper report, Serge Duval (Francois Cluzet) and Elisabeth (Brigitte Rouan) have two children, 10 year-old Nadine (Faye Gatteau), and Olivier (Emmanuel Morozof), 9. One day Olivier goes missing from their farmhouse never to return. Six years later in Paris, a street boy claiming to be Olivier is found by police. It's a little like Depardieu's character in The Return of Martin Guerre where the husband returns and the wife, though suspecting pretence, goes along with it because he's nicer than was the real one. The details of family life are engrossing and original as is the portrayal of father/son, mother/daughter bonding. Bluebell have also just re-issued Jean-Charles Tacchella's L'Homme de ma Vie (The Man of My Life) also from 1992. A bookseller Maurice (Thierry Fortineau) ,about to be evicted from his shop, is waylaid by the irresistibly cute Aimée (Maria de Medeiros) who realising he's not the financial catch she thought, befriends him and makes him her wedding's best man. "He's a bit basic. Like a removal man in bed, all over the place. Sometimes I'm almost flattened," she confides to Maurice of her new hubby. It's all quite slight, filmed in fading pastel colours and reminds one of unrequited love walking in the rain along the Seine only to get more than kissed the next morning. It really does cheer you up, though, this film.

More urban dilemma now with two architects. Sketches of Frank Gehry is Hollywood director Sydney Pollack's filmic sketches of his long-time architect friend, he of the Guggenheim Bilboa. One reason for their bond is "bemoaning the difficulties of trying to find personal expressiveness within disciplines that make stringent commercial demands. You find that small percentage of space in that commercial world where you could make a difference" Gehry's only detractor in the film is Hal Foster who wrote a book Why all the Hoopla?, 'genius or mess'. Gehry found more in common with artists than architects when starting out. Pollack recalls one of his own teachers who said, "talent is liquefied trouble...a frustration with something that exists that you try to improve on". Gehry's therapist notes: "When an artist comes to me he wants to know how to change the world." Gehry has quite a lot in common with Brit trained Zaha Hadid through architecture give them a glimpse of another world" who was the subject of Sunday night's South Bank Show. Both have designed one of the Maggie cancer care centres in Scotland. And both had recent retrospectives at New York's Guggenheim.
Frank Gehry Guggenheim exhibition
Zaha Hadid exhibition
Guggenheim Exhibition (New York Times review)

Zaha's career has been even rockier than Gehry's. Her winning design for the 1994 Cardiff Bay Opera House was pulled, re-instated after a board review then finally denied Lottery funding getting caught up in arguments of elitism. It was the Americans who got up her first building up with the Cincinnati Art Gallery. She even designed the 2001 Pet Shop Boys tour, currently is designing the 2012 London Olympics Aquatics Centre and has an exhibition running at the Design Museum.
At the peak of her powers (Financial Times,June 29 2007)
FT (2004)

And what of London's big summer art shows? Well, they're pretty impressive. Firstly, Tate Modern’s Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Colour (in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), a Brazilian artist who died in 1980, aged 42. A relatively obscure figure of the 20th century art world (a 1969 Whitechapel Gallery show) it's a good exhibition for the Tate and the gallery has bought some of Oiticica's work for its collection. And he should, indeed I feel, be up there with the modern art greats. The horrible word that pops out is accessible. But, like most Brazilian artists he wanted to be an artist for the people rather than the studio. Oiticica trained as a dancer and wandering through the show you certainly feel colours and shapes surging you around. There have been some criticisms of the Do Not Touch of some pieces but that's usually inevitable. Beginning with his Malevich inspired paintings, the exhibition moves through the strange and striking dimensionality of the black, white, red and blue Metaesquema to his White Series paintings of the late 50's and ceiling hung white double-sided Bilaterals. In the 60's he bursts into colour "a supreme order similar to the supreme order of architectural spaces," as he wrote in his 1960 Colour, Time and Structure creating spaces akin to gardens of colour. He then moved on to construct a fantastic series called Bólides (Fireballs), large jars containing pigment, everyday materials, little houses of colour, all with the cumulative effect of being in a perfumery of colour. This leads to the room for the Grand Nucleus, an architecture garden of hanging colour and finally his Parangole of wearable (though not for the exhibition, would copies have been possible for the children?) materials for the samba dance. "The body is not a support for the work, it is total incorporation". If you feel a touch of modern art déjà vu after the show, check the permanent galleries, compare the dates of the famous American artists working with similar ideas and you'll see that Oiticica was just as groundbreaking. It's just that he didn't live in the commercial arenas of America or Europe.

One of Oiticica's Bólides is a 1965 Hommage to Mondrian. In 1960, Salvador Dali poked fun at Mondrian's grids in Chaos and Creation, the first time an artist had used video (I guess the Tate is right). In collaboration with photographer Philppe Halsman, he built grids that housed four Pennsylvanian pigs, a motorbike and a woman. It's the last room in the Tate's Dali and Film show that also has Dali's screen-tests for Warhol. The sound on Chaos is so poor, though, that you might need to read the catalogue just outside to get the jist of it. Dali too is a great show for the Tate and much of this material is rarely if ever seen such as made for TV (1975) Impressions of Upper Mongolia - Hommage to Raymond Roussel. But you have to be dedicated to stay the 70 min course. Could the logistics have worked out to have free screenings in the cinema? There are the popular, familiar works such as Sleep, the melting clocks of The Persistence of Memory, the Bunuel collaboration Un Chien Andalou where the eye gets slashed by the razor, and Dali's segment for Hitchcock's film Spellbound. And one that could easily be a You Tube hit is his Disney foray Destino (1946) with animator John Hench, revived in 2003 using computer technology. It repays repeated viewing. Room 1 has an example of the early Dali that fascinates me, a 1928 untitled oil, white except for simple black shadows at the edges of the canvas reminiscent of spooky De Chirico. There was a pen and ink (if I remember rightly) from the same period up for auction a few years ago with a tiny angel at the edge of a vast lake, like the quiet ppp dynamic marking in the universe of a Mahler score. Dali may have been an unashamed self-publicist but, boy, did he have a genius and wit to crow about. The scenarios for his 1937 Marx Brothers collaboration Giraffes on Horseback Salad are here too, along with his cheeky present for Harpo: a sketch of him playing a barbed wire harp.

Over at the National Gallery is Dutch Portraits: The Age of Rembrandt and Hals. In 1579 the Dutch provinces began declaring independence from Spanish Hapsburg catholic rule, but not officially recognised until 1648, and a new social structure started emerging. The idea that portraiture was now opened up to social classes hitherto excluded such as doctors and wealthy merchants is well argued by the juxtapositions in the exhibition. What is extraordinary about the show for the non art historian, though, is how Rembrandt seems centuries ahead of his time. One of the first pictures to hit you with this is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicholas Tulp (1632) painted when he was only 25. The visceral contemporary nature of the cadaver with almost a modern lamp illuminating the corpse, the unearthly glow of the surgeons’ faces, and of course, devilish Rembrandt detail. The fine previous picture Nicholas Pickenoy's The Osteology Lesson of Dr. Sebastiaen Egbertsz (1619) alas gets left behind in the memory after the Rembrandt. His The Syndics (1662:5 years before his death)who were the powerful board of the clothmaker's guild, loaned by Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum, has us looking up towards the fore grounded table covered with a painted cloth that on closer inspection could be abstract expressionism. Rumour has it that people at the time thought it wasn't decently posed and was allowed to gather dust. Room 5 has the National Gallery's own Rembrandt's, the 1661 portraits of Jacob Trip and another of his wife Margaretha de Geer equally out of their time. Frans Hals' fast and loose brushwork is argued to be indicative of a more relaxed social domesticity as the new century wore on. If you thought Old Master portraits a bit of a chore to pretend and enjoy, this exhibition will really change your mind. There is also a series of £4/3 screenings Virtue and Vice (often they've been DVD projected in the past, but finely so - I'll check this out) of films influenced by the C17 masters, including The Godfather, Visconti's gorgeous The Leopard and the contentious Black Narcissus (1947) of Powell and Pressburger that won the 1948 Oscars for art direction and Jack Cardiff's cinematographic re-creation of India in Pinewood studios.

Another taboo subject was spotlighted on TV in ITV's Tonight last week.
Tonight: Immigration Housing Row
A lot of people who are absolutely not rascist are getting very angry, especially when the government tries to massage the figures by 500%.

Lastly, there was a tube derailment this morning near Bethnal Green on the Central Line with 800 people having to evacuate through the tube tunnels.
Tube derails after hitting loose tarpaulin in tunnel
ITV local news coverage and video
Metronet warned in May over derailment danger
But no one was killed; only one injured leg (as of Friday 11 taken to hospital), so it'll fade away even though they've been previous warnings about this stretch of line. Never mind the psychological stress that for some will never go away.