Some earthlings are so stupid (sorry, ‘sat nav challenged’) that they cause themselves injuries by bumping into lampposts while text messaging: Lamppost 'cushions' for clumsy texters. What would we do without nannying?
Humans will make contact with aliens within two decades, say astronomers.
The influential and relatively unknown Brit artist John Latham who died recently has a small but wonderful show from his 50’s work, The Spray Gun And The Cosmos, what he called ‘process sculpture’. More than equal to his American counterparts of the period while his widow continues to light up a gallery event like a meteorite
And I really do have to side with our unelected PM Brown in the following: PM praises Proms after minister's attack after his own culture minister Margaret Hodge attacked the annual summer BBC Proms (Royal Albert Hall) for being too elitist. I concede that the ‘Promenaders’ have things a little out of perspective practically starting a riot when someone as ‘popular’ as Michael Ball (of West End musicals) is given a whole evening (27 Aug). But when the Proms does try to broaden its appeal they do it not only in great style but with great musicianship e.g baroque specialist Sir John Eliot Gardiner’s French evening (Prom 3, 15 July) last year mixing dance and South African performers (Buskaid Soweto String project) or, of course, the jazz events and Nitin Sawhney (10 Aug) not forgetting the unforgettable Simon Bolivar youth orchestra from Venezuela (19 Aug). And Claudio Abbado/the Lucerne Fest Orch doing Mahler’s Symphony 3 (22 Aug) – one of the greatest musical experiences one will ever have. £5 to stand and hear the greatest classical musicians in the world sounds bloodlessly democratic to me. The weather’s nice, though, isn’t Ms Hodge: Sunshine winter brightest ever - daffodils in mid-Feb and all that.
Austrian composer Johannes Maria Staud’s Apeiron (sample MP3) based on the Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander who posited that the indefinite (or apeiron) was the source of all things as opposed to the determinate and order. And BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music profiled a symphony by the even now little known (outside contemporary music circles) Henri Dutilleux who created music in revolution as opposed to his rival Pierre Boulez’s revolution in music.
There’ve been ‘Black’ seasons on Brit TV so BBC2 is provocatively airing a White season. It’s a subject that is reasonably still taboo in this country for obvious reasons. But like the machines in the underground perhaps the details still aren’t that obvious. One shopkeeper being interviewed vehemently stressed he had no problem with ‘colour’ only with an immigration policy unsupportable by the country’s current infrastructure and one ultimately to the detriment of its existing citizens. There most certainly are Richter scale tremors in Britain of ‘this is our country now’ from many groups, understandable of course given the repressive ‘colonialist’ policies of almost every major player on the world scene time immemorial. But there’s neither victory nor honour in taking from the ‘haves’ simply because you’ve been a ‘have not’. People assimilate into cultures in their own fashion. When Peter Sellars took the reins of Los Angeles’ hitherto ‘European culture’ International Arts Fest back in the early 90s and invited cultural groups from the Pacific Rim instead, what astounded was the uniqueness of different cultures not their qualities of assimilation and homogeneity. my Times article, another, originally commissioned for the Financial Times
Australian PM Rudd says sorry to Aborigines' stolen generations (YouTube vid), LateNightLive
Mark Lawson Talks to Rabbi Lionel Blue will cheer up the non-conformists, he says on nationalism: “you end up loving your own more and others less”. (BBC Four often repeated and available on downloadable BBC's iPlayer for 5 days).
London Nobody Knows / Les Bicyclettes de Belsize is a DVD of two shorts and with no extras admittedly not great value. But the first from 1967 based on Geoffrey Fletcher’s book, is narrated by James Mason who, though becoming a Hollywood star, was still genuinely interested in the fate and future of English cities. There’s a wonderful 1 hour extra (on Optimum’s Mason set) with Mason exploring the history of Huddersfield (northern England). Interesting how Spitalfields in East London went from prosperity to poverty in the 60s and back to prosperity again nowadays. Back in the 90s I tried to arouse interest in creating a flexible, temporary performance space in the Old Spitalfields Market now, of course, thriving again as a market. And I wanted a Busby Berkeley style performance art piece with hundreds of tap dancers in the eerie nightime emptiness of the Broadgate office block windows opposite. Hard to imagine now given the area’s renaissance.
Richard Rogers Inside Out (BBC1-Imagine) was also inspiring for non-conformists particularly for his tales of how his Lloyds building went from being lampooned to, if not quite loved then certainly caressed by its visitors.
And Rogers’ Heathrow Terminal 5, photos, is officially opened by the Queen this week.
John Virtue’s London - Venice, National Gallery photo at < Marlborough Fine Art offers up a ‘Turner-esque’ London of complex blacks that many will recognise if not applauded by the tourist board. These were a trial run for a project in Venice (also in the show) using only monotypes – painting on a metal plate then pressed onto absorbent paper for only one print. His brushstrokes seem to collide trying to overtake each other in their dark recesses while still retaining their secrets.
Around the corner at the Stephen Friedman Gallery is American Wayne Gonzales’ first solo UK exhibition. Using only one or two colours he takes familiar images from the internet painting them in neo-Seurat fashion but with brushstrokes not pointillism as if on a pixelated screen. The closer you approach the image the less ‘real’ and more abstract it becomes as if watching a crowd from a distance and then becoming a part of it.
Humanity’s darkness is omni-present in Four Minutes (Vier Minuten) written and directed by German Chris Kraus. The light shines from former pianist Traude Krüger (Monica Bleibtreu) who’s taught piano in a Luckau women's prison since 1944. Her latest is the young convicted murderer and prodigy, Jenny von Loeben (Hannah Herzsprung), “I can help you be a better pianist, but not a better person.” There was a chilling French film some years back The Beat that My Heart Skipped (De battre mon coer s‘est arrêté) about the forces of man’s darkness trying to destroy a similarly distraught pianist’s male musical beauty. Chamber theatre of insidious psychological passage. Krauss’ film almost goes one better, though more operatically so, with Annette Focks’ dark ‘Scott Walker’ score and Judith Kaufmann’s (16mm-blown up to-35mm) cinematography using Visconti’s palette but different brushes “the frighteningly silent abyss into which the others fall” wrote the poet Rilke. “Beauty's nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible.”
Céline Sciamma's Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres) opens this week: (Facebook page), my blog review and interview with Sciamma last year.
Birds Eye View - film festival of emerging women filmmakers.
French Film Festival, most of these films haven’t even found a UK distributor. And there’s the annual Australian Film Festival at the Barbican. Pop into the Martian Museum while you’re there as an aperitif.
While we’re out in Oz space, Roadgames (1981) is out on budget DVD with Stacey Keach as the harmonica blowing, poetry spouting, existential truckie driving meat across the Oz desert to a Perth on strike. His pal is a pet dingo “an aristocrat like me” appropriately named Boswell (funny if you know Boswell’s life). Oh, and he reads Hitchcock magazines and the New Yorker. Jamie Lee Curtis is the gamine escaped diplomatic heiress hitchhiker in Richard Franklin’s very clever, accomplished film. This is the era of wonderful, weird films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Mad Max (1979) before tax concessions introduced to rev up the industry meant that every shyster nailed ‘film producer’ on their door and made crap.
Cranach at the Royal Academy caused a recent stir with its poster on the London Underground argued as too sexually alluring - the credits for Desperate Housewives open with an animation of Cranach’s Adam and Eve. Apart from being the court’s (Elector John Frederick) favourite painter, and later mayor and richest man in Wittenburg, he was even their chief decorator (in sort of savvy modern-day TV fame mode). He was no stranger to controversy being both a friend and advocate of the Protestant Martin Luther going so far as to supervise the woodcuts and printing of propaganda pamphlets while still working for Catholic patrons. Apart from the London underground, Cranach (c.1472-1553) himself hasn’t had much press at all over the centuries. So should we still be interested?
The response is a resounding yes going on what this exhibition has to offer, and you’re unlikely to see most of the paintings on one’s travels unless you’re a Cranach geek. What immediately struck me in the first room was the movement in his work, the Stigmatism of St.Francis (1502-3) and the top left putti of the Mystic Marriage of St.Catherine. One reviewer (BBC’s Nightwaves conjectured that the eyes of his figures conveyed an uncertain world in contrast to the certainty of the prevailing Catholicism. What we see, without conjecturing though, is Cranach’s total fascination with the human race. He was more than simply a supremely talented artist (he had a Damien Hirst like studio of talented assistants too). There’s a wonderful tiny watercolour of the Head of a Peasant (1520-25) that seems plein air (outside on the hoof) in its simplicity and instantaneity compared to the craftsmanship and detail of his Luther portrait (1525). The small Hercules and Antaeus (1530) wrestling nude in the last room beside the Adam and Eve and Venuses is very Oliver Reed and Alan Bates in Woman in Love and a huge contrast to his stunning ‘blockbuster’ commissions like the Triptych with the Holy Trinity (1509). The greatness of the show is that it begs so many questions about Cranach. Was he a Democrat or a savvy, astute Republican? What was his attitude to women? What was his sexuality? As Bertrand Russell wrote, the answer will always be there. The purpose of philosophy is to help us ask the right questions.
Norman Rosenthal, who is stepping down as Exhibitions Secretary at the Royal Academy talks to Nightwaves.
Behind the Academy in Savile Row at the James Hyman Gallery is Hughie O’Donoghue’s The Geometry of Paths . Even if you hadn’t read the gallery blurb you’d feel these paintings were sucking the viewer into a vortex of mind and memory so magnetic is O’Donoghue’s use of paint. At first they don’t seem revolutionary at all but ever more slowly one is compelled towards the edge. The Yellow Man re-imagines the lost Van Gogh painting of the artist walking along a road. “Van Gogh is a man in a hurry or perhaps a man who knows he is running out of time. Sometimes he makes two paintings in a day. He doesn’t really understand all the theories about modern painting or perhaps he understands them too well in any case he is constantly in fear. Yet the paintings seem to stare this fear down,” writes O’Donoghue in the catalogue.
Overlord DVD is out now with director’s commentary
Hughie O’Donoghue’s exhibition catalogue preface is from Czeslaw Milosz’s 1946 Child of Europe: “The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.” Just released on DVD is one of, if not the most important docu-drama in British filmmaking (perhaps even more so than Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home), Bloody Sunday (2002) written and directed by Paul Greengrass (prior to his United 93 and Bourne Ultimatum). On January 30th 1972, civil rights protesters defied the British Army’s order not to march in Derry resulting in the shooting of 27 people 13 of them killed. “It was our Sharpeville, our Amritzah massacre,” says Ivan Cooper, the parliamentarian who led the march (played by James Nesbitt) and the film’s central character. It’s a mind and gut-wrenching experience watching this film. There are two separate audio commentaries: one with Greengrass and Nesbitt, the second with Don Mullen the 15-year-old eyewitness to the event and author of the book. “It’s uncontested now that all of them who were shot on the day were unarmed, innocent people,” says Mullen who “if I’d been a few years older” would probably have joined the IRA. “They lost all faith in due [legal] process and many made an understandable and rational decision...The way to fight this was to take up arms. I don’t agree with the decision but I understand the decision that many of my peers made at that time.”
Recently released documents between Lord Justice Widgery who headed the initial ‘whitewash’ enquiry and Brit PM Edward Heath show that Heath urged Widgery to remember that “we are also fighting a propaganda war”. “Bloody Sunday handed the initiative to the men of violence on all sides,” notes Mullen. Paul Greengrass is at pains to point out that for the British soldiers (most of the soldiers seen in the film were professional Brit soldiers not actors) it was “another day at the office” and that the real conspiracy occurred after the killings. “War is normality punctured by random violence,” he says, “there was an instinct to cover up from the very bottom to the very top.” None of the soldiers who opened fire were ever disciplined and the Queen later decorated the officers who planned and led the operation. It’s taken 30 years of campaigning to bring about the current Saville Enquiry. Greengrass: “This idea that how do you reconcile conflicts between groups of people who inhabit the same land...you can only do it on the basis of developing shared rights not contested nationalism. That is why the peace process in Northern Ireland is such a [world] inspiration.” Nesbitt: “Paul once said that he hoped Bloody Sunday would be a pebble in the wall of peace. Five years later there is peace and I’d like to think we’re all pebbles on that big and multi-coloured [wall].”
Omagh (2004) is also written by Greengrass but directed by Pete Travis whose Vantage Point is currently on cinema release. This is the Omagh high street car bomb of August 15, 1998 exploding in the wake of the Good Friday agreement. “There’s something very chilly about how ordinary this is,” says Travis on the commentary with Michael Gallagher the father who led the victims’ families’ quest for justice. In April this year their civil action will finally be heard in court. When Optimum’s Peeping Tom DVD was released last year I wrote that it was possibly the most important DVD release for many years. Well, Bloody Sunday and Omagh are unarguably the most important docu-drama DVDs thus issued and required viewing for every human on the planet, not to mention any aliens that might catalogue our species under ‘cult cinema’.
Susan Faludi and her new book The Terror Dream.
My blog review of Mike Davis' latest book Buda's Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb
Chatting with Hughie O’Donoghue at his opening I was still reeling from seeing Garage directed by Lenny Abrahamson, his second film after the successful Adam & Paul. (Trailer) Written by Mark O’Halloran, Abrahamson describes the film as ‘slapstick tragedy’. (French trailer)Pat Shortt, who first came to attention as one of D’Unbelievables physical comedy group, plays the ordinary, solitary bloke Josie doing the daily round of his tiny garage in a tiny Irish town. Slapstick just isn’t the right word to describe the beautiful bloke Josie, though. The films runs to only 80 minutes and has the simplicity and restraint of a late artist’s work resisting the ‘hardship’ of Agnès Varda’s glaneuses (French gatherers of food scraps). O’Donoghue recalled seeing those single colour field canvases of New York artists leaving such a lasting impression on him. But Josie is Cranach’s peasant, always cheerful, always sporting his ‘Australia’ baseball cap with unwitting irony - too quiet to even figure in a larger Cranach canvas, a shadow of an Arthur Miller Willy Loman figure who never meant no harm, no wrong, no incident. A man somewhere subsumed in the canvas’ densities of colour. He is in front of your eyes and yet not. The more you think about Josie the more you weep for a world that could destroy him. “No such thing as us towns anymore.” The town would no doubt view Josie as the dead animal by the side of the road, momentarily thought of, loved and forgotten within a world where nothing proves particularly wise about conventional wisdom and in which the cliché is one’s last remnant of the truth.
A Donmar Warehouse revival of Arthur Miller’s storm-grey play The Man who had all the Luck (Nightwaves discussion)
Bernard Shaw’s Major Barbara, gripping polemic complete with on-stage swimming pool has just opened at the Royal National Theatre, (Second Sight Major Barbara DVD), My blog review. David Lean co-directed that film and directors Hugh Hudson and Mike Figgis join Alan Parker musing on David Lean's caustic character in BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour (listenable for a week). (The David Lean Foundation funds the Royal Academy schools programme)Hudson and Parker also feature in BBC4’s The Rise and Fall of the Ad Man about the non-establishment new boys giving a ruffing and sprucing to 70s Brit advertising. Remember the Cadbury’s ad with the aliens for their canned Mash potato?
Kneehigh theatre company’s Brief Encounter has overtaken the big picture palace auditorium at the Cineworld Haymarket cinema (Nightwaves, Thurs 14 Feb) (YouTube vid of a 2005 performance of theirs)
And Jeff Goldblum et Kevin Spacey continue sparring like a wicked married couple in David Mamet's play Speed-the-Plow at the Old Vic .
A little bit more tomorrow...
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