Robert Hughes' The Mona Lisa Curse that examines how the world's most famous painting came to influence art, gets a blog from me all on its own. Watch the programme and you'll see why.

His eight-part exploration of modern art The Shock of the New (first shown on BBC Two in the 1980s) gets an airing on BBC Four this Saturday. DO NOT MISS.

(P.S. I feel very like Robert about British social housing (not even remotely as interesting as art and no canapes! [let me fix something, break it, and fix it again so I can make a profit sub-contracting...or let me make your life a misery because you don't buy into the 'socialist/capitalist' dream type of social housing] ...in particular my experiences over the last 6 years...one of London's and Britain's largest social housing associations Dominion Housing Group. What can I put of them in formaldehyde and make a profit? [hommage- no offense Damien]

F*** them! ...onto Mark Rothko. [I shouldn't have bothered wasting my paint on my housing association walls]. They painted over Goya too didn't they....
Plus ca change...
{I don't press the send button unless I know what I'm doing....)

See some glorious architecture not normally open to the public through Open House this weekend. (Don't know how the wrong link got there - but there wasn't a downloadable venue list on the site anyway if it makes you feel better). Make sure you pick the ones that are rarely open not the ones (and there are quite a few) that are normally easy to gain access. And remember many have long queues. But the sun's out today.
And Elephant and Castle's free annual festival returns...Elefest

Really good interviews with directors of two of this week's highlight films Unrelated's Joanna Hogg and Linha de Passe's Walter Salles on BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme. (19 September 2008). Hogg is also on BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves (17 Sept)
And TCM's Crime Scene 2008 film fest has, amongst other goodies, a retrospective of the great (and still living) French director Bertrand Tavernier. He'll be in attendance.
Optimum's Bertrand Tavernier DVD's (my blog review of them all towards the end of posting)
Really good Newsnight spot on Karadzic's broken Bosnia endures.

And BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves (18 Sept) has a discussion of Philip Hoare's Leviathan book about whales and talk of economics and morality.
6 days left to watch Hoare's Arena: The Hunt for Moby-Dick and BBC 4 have Whale Night on Sunday:The Whale in the Museum, an archive-based Arena documentary telling the story of the construction of the much loved blue whale at the Natural History Museum.
Arena: Philip Hoare's Guide to Whales
And Captain Ahab (from last year's London Film Festival) is still seeking the love of a distributor.
The Times BFI 52nd London Film Festival line-up has been announced.
Metallica special on BBC's The Culture Show.
Composer Mauricio Kagel died on Thursday, at the age of 76. A spot for him on Radio 3's Music Matters and a piece on London’s newest concert hall, Kings Place.
Nicole Atkins describing her sound as "pop-noir made a great Brit television debut alongside Metallica and Carla Bruni (2 days left to watch) on Jools Holland's show.

The temporary ban on short selling in the stock market is understandable, but short selling and hedge fund management are basics of the current stock market and a lot of very influential people have made money legitimately by trading in them. Hmmm...A bit like banning the buying and selling of houses because speculators are making too much money. That is something no one would allow. You can see where my argument is going....although many in government and potential home owners couldn't see it a few years ago. There's a certain Conservative treasurer who did, though.
Tony Blair on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. He's got himself another day job teaching at Yale Uni in order to pay for his mortgages.

And a really fascinating Radio 4 prog from The Archive Hour The Voices in my Head: Julian Rhind-Tutt explores how actors archive the sounds of their own voices. Delicious sounds that will last you a lifetime.

...a bough quiet for us...(Part 2)

The quiet, gentle, wryly comic Sweetland from director Ali Selim (an advertising Gold Lion award winner at Cannes) has taken sometime to get a UK release but thankfully it did thanks to Revelation Films. As you'd expect from skimming Selim's resume it looks fantastic (1920's Minnesota). But what is even more fetching is his grasp of directing and casting actors - (some familiar faces such as Alex Kingston, Alan Cumming [also exec producer] are here in roles they wouldn't get elsewhere) - and sense of dramatic pace. Inge (the dove eyed Elizabeth Reaser) arrives in America from Germany knowing no English but firm in the knowledge of her unseen husband-to-be the Norwegian Olaf (Tim Guinee). This is not to the taste of the village's post-WW1 Lutheran community even if "Luther was a German". Though a period film, it gives the viewer a good sense of a timeless small town America's by turns generosity, bigotry, insularity and anchored gaze into the future. "Banking and farming don't mix," says one. Farmers around the world will certainly relate to that now more than ever. A lovely film.
Junket interview with Elizabeth Reaser, Trailer

Partition set in the last days of the British Raj and Pakistan's partition from India in 1947, plays more like Bollywood tackling serious issues than an indie film. Gian (jimmy Mistry) and Naseem (controversially the 'white American' Kristin Kreuk) are a latter-day Romeo and Juliet so plugs the press release. The tragic story of a friend of writer/director (former doco filmmaker) Vic Sarin's father - a Sikh gentleman who loved a Muslim woman - became the film's inspiration. Unlike, say, Bandit Queen, everything in this film is just that bit too beautiful (Sarin is alo cinematographer). It's a beauty that one easily falls in love, though, including white colonial Margaret Stilwell (Neve Campbell with an entrancing Buddhist like tranquillity). Production Designer Tony Devenyi played a crucial role in recreating India in Canada's British Columbia for six weeks location shooting. And ultimately the film pales because of its charms. And that's a shame because the characters one really ones to believe in. Nor is the film really helped by Brian Tyler's lush John Barry-esque 'Out of Africa' score, the composer conducting the Hollywood Studio Symphony.
Vic Sarin speaks at the Partition Advanced Screening
A Sikh teenager who was excluded from school for wearing a bangle wins her court battle.
Building prejudice? Switzerland's minaret row (Channel Four news)

Another kind of partition without any romanticism can be found in the film of Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas Linha de Passe - four fatherless São Paulo Brazilian brothers and their mother who is pregnant with a fifth child. Vinicius de Oliveira (star of Salles' Central Station) is the only one of the five main actors to have previously worked in film (though they'd all done various forms of theatre). Miramax's City of God hit spurned quite a few films about the Brazil's class divide. But Linha de Passe really engages you afresh. The camera work by relative newcomer Mauro Pinheiro is stunning -not overtly, but quietly, insidiously when a slight little camera move makes all the difference in edging an audience into the drama. And Gustavo Santaolalla's electric guitar licks (he scored 21 Grams and Amores Perros) are never over-kill. (Can't wait to see his Cafe de los Maestros(2005) uniting tango's greatest living legends.) This is a film that should be screened for all London's schoolkids so relevant and unpatronising is it's impact.
Downloadable interview with Salles.

Morton Rhuhe's novel The Wave has been classic compulsory reading material in many German schools for over 20 years. Based on a real experiment conducted by an American history teacher Ron Jones in 1967 Palo Alto over a week, Dennis Gansel's film (based on Ron Jones' short story) updates events to a contemporary German setting with teacher Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) illustrating over a week how easily totalitarian governments are accepted by requiring all his students to wear white shirts if they want to be members of their group The Wave - complete with sinewy hand gesture. The results are devastating. Like Linha de Passe, this is a really important film for teenagers with the questions it poses having far wider resonances. Being any sort of teacher, carer anyone with responsibility over other people often inevitably involves some form of ego on the part of the 'leader'. What the film chillingly demonstrates, though, is the willingness people have to be part of the group - to be disciplined, "The Wave has made us equal...we can help each other". But of course while the group itself may purport to be equal those outside aren't.

The experiment begins with a discussion on autocracy, "we have to stand up and speak it's good for our circulation," says a student. Ron Jones began his in response to a student's question, "How could the German populace claim ignorance of the slaughter of the Jewish people?". Many years ago Julian Jaynes wrote a book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976): "At one time, human nature was split in two, an executive part called a god, and a follower part called a man. Neither part was Consciously aware." The Wave also brings to mind Chomsky's moral posit of whether the person who orders the gun to be fired is as guilty of the murderous act as the one who actually pulls the trigger. Wenger imposes discipline (so do most leaders/teachers) but he never commands any of his students to commit evil or harm. Nor does he ban the non-conformists from his class, it's the students themselves that do that. And his questions are really rhetorical ones.
Brit comedienne Katy Brand parodies indie bands that look all the same in Ting Tings - We're All The Same
The Guardian tracks down Ron Jones and his students

The British Museum's Hadrian: Empire and Conflict raises many questions too. Hadrian took the strife-torn Roman Empire by the horns restoring much needed order. He withdrew troops from the overreached Iraq, lower taxes, abolished corruption and extortion throughout the provinces and built magnificent things - when he started designing himself his architect told him to stick to drawing vegetables. He sort of promoted gay rights - though it was actually against the laws of marriage- through taking his Greek lover Antinious in addition to his wife. This really is a must see show and surprisingly you take it all in within the hour at a leisurely pace. Positioned in what was formerly the famous Reading Room where Karl Marx scribbled Das Kapital it's a fitting stage for Hadrian with its cavernous imperial dome above. And the lighting and positioning of the exhibits has really been thought through thoroughly so you never end up with ancient artefact fatigue. Even if you've seen the buildings 'live' on visits to Rome - his Villa, the Pantheon - the show remains thought-provoking and awe-inspiring. All those achievements and seeming sensibility yet he massacred and burnt to the ground hundreds of Jewish villages renaming Judea, Palaestina. A translucent glass plate radiates its fragility and defiance through history in its case, completely intact from its journey up to the hilltop Jewish hideout caves. Yet equally there's an incredible aura about the tiny papyrus fragment further on in the show from one of Hadrian's speeches.
Laughter Roman style
Hi-tech future for ancient Roman town
Why Britain's broadband is among the slowest in Europe.

I could just imagine Hadrian and Antinous reclining to watch Les Amours d'Astrée et de Céladon directed by the 87-year-old French arthouse 'auteur' Eric Rohmer who's adapted the pastoral C17th romance of Honoré d'Urfé set in C5th Gaul.Dosen't sound promising I know! And if I told you that there was a Druid cross-dressing Celadon (Andy Gillet) to win back his girlfriend Astrea (Stephanie Crayencour)? It is quite long-winded stuff but immaculately detailed. It took me back to the days when I'd immerse myself in the entirely un-British theatre of Racine, Claudel and Marivaux in Paris - hours and hours of French text that transported one to a different universe through its nuances of gesture and inflection. "Love desires only itself," - things hotting up in the dialectic debate of the last 45 minutes. "The several virtues of one God...junior gods..one God for many" and so on.
Rohmer interview
Koch Lorber Films released at New York's Anthology Film Archives in August.

Brit TV soap/primetime director Joanna Hogg's first feature Unrelated (LFF and winner of the 10th FIPRESCI International Critics Award) has quite a Rohmer sensibility and couldn't feel less British (though it's shot in Italy). Her acknowledged influences are more the likes of Ozu and Japanese cinema. "I'm not interested in plot," she said over breakfast, "in each moment there's a little story. The complete antithesis to the Robert McKee school of screenwriting that I feel patronises audiences." There are only two small camera moves in the entire film; the rest are static set-ups with no music score. Fortysomething Anna (Kathryn Worth) goes on holiday to an Italian village finding a motley bunch of Brits. There is a plot, of sorts, but what I found more fascinating was watching these characters exist within the film frame. Even if you know no English, there is a universality in their reactions that would speak in those tiny 'moments' Hogg referred to. This is the first release from new distributor Next Wave films formed by ex-Artificial Eye founders Robert Beeson and Pam Engel.

Chris Marker, only really known for short still photo fiction La Jetée and Sans Soleil, is given his due with Icarus Films in the States releasing The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (26 min-1967), The Last Bolshevik (1993), Remembrance of Things to Come (42 min-2001) and The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004). One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, Three Cheers for the Whale, The Embassy.
San Francisco Film Society

The ICA Auction (in collaboration with Sotheby's) celebrates its 60th anniversary and has some really fantastic pieces by luminaries of the art world - Peter Blake, Robert Mapplethorpe, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Struth to name but a few.

More much awaited DVD releases arrive from Eureka's Master of Cinema series and Georges Franju's Judex (B/W 1963) and Nuits Rouges (colour 1973).Franju is better known for Eyes Without A Face while Judex, a re-make hommage to Louis Feuillade's 1916 film, is his much talked about but rarely seen film retaining the spirit of the old film serials such as Feuillade's Fantômas. Fellow director Jacques Rivette quoted from Eureka's 40 page booklet: "Franju is at once the one who, through science, rediscovers the secret [at the origin of the cinema], and the modern who knows it is lost - astonished at its power, spying on it and affirming it, finally, in that doubt." Franju was also co-founder with Henri Langlois of France's equivalent to the British Film Institute, the Cinémathèque Française. Franju: "You have to have faith in appearances. It's what I wanted to do in Judex. I found myself in Florence recently, at the house of our friends from the Institut Français who had organised a retrospective of my films. I presented Judex and we were trying to put our fingers on it. Here's what we found to be most true: Judex is an illusion that happens to overturn a prowling realism." Starring a real magician of the time Channing Pollock the plot revolves around a wicked banker, his helpless daughter, and a mysterious avenger. "The incarnation of evil is more seductive than the incarnation of good" says the director. Feuillade's grandson Jacques Champreux gives an interview extra on both DVDs giving the viewer a good insight into Franju's world. Note the Maurice Jarre (Lawrence of Arabia) score from early in his career.

Nuits rouges (Red Nights) is the companion film to an eight-part 1975 television series pilot called L'Homme sans visage (The Man Without a Face) about the Knights Templar with Franju collaborating with screenwriter Jacques Champreux. "In Nuits rouges there is no emotional conflict since there is no fluttering victim and therefore no melodrama, and its style derives not from the fantastique but the insolite [a Franju term explained in the booklet]. Nuits rouges exercises the latter, and should therefore be approached rather like those carnival sideshows which require you to rediscover your innocence. This quest for fascination is a fascinating business. Fascination implies a certain resistance, but also an awareness, in the person being fascinated." If this all sounds very Cahiers du cinéma French intellectual, the films themselves play easily as pure entertainment. Especially for Nuits rouge, Franju wanted the film to have the feel of American pulp TV serials like Zorro and it certainly has an uncanny resemblance to the Get Smart series. But Franju was the ultimate perfectionist with no detail left to chance.
Get Smart: The Complete Series just out on Sony DVD
The deadpan casting of Steve Carrell opposite Anne Hathaway in the recent movie version really works by the way.

More of that 'deadpan' acting style in Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (1969) out on DVD and written by Thunderbirds Gerry Anderson. Interesting to compare this with the futuristic Logan's Run (1976) and Michael Crichton directing his own Westworld (1973) a few years later, now out on Warner DVD. The tone and style of Journey has the perfection of Franju and needs a very deft hand to bring it all together. Behind the sun is discovered a doppleganger (double) of planet earth - except everything is reversed as in a mirror image. As with experienced mask and puppet performers, abstract stylisation can often produce surprisingly 'real' emotional results - what Franju was really all about. And it works for Gerry Anderson in this film too. Beautiful digital transfer (compare to the disc trailer) from Universal as well at bargain price.

In 2004, Spanish writer/director Guillermo del Toro brought Mike Mignola's comic-book hero Hellboy to the screen showing what the 'indie' director could do with a Hollywood budget. He amazes again with Hellboy II: The Golden Army leaving perfectly adequate entertainment fair like The Mummy sequels crumbling for mercy in the cosmic dust. While never quite stepping into the darkness of say Batman's The Dark Knight it treads a thrilling thin line between entertainment and the perils of greed. You'll want to own the DVD but don't wait deprive yourself of the big screen WOW. And there really was a clandestine NAZI paranormal bureau way ahead of anything President Roosevelt concocted in 1943).

The Boy in Striped Pajamas, based on John Boyne's book, is a sort of Life is Beautiful about two 8 year-old kids on opposite sides of the electric fence of the Nazi Jewish death camps (the striped pajamas) not fully comprehending the adult world. Director Mark Herman (Brassed Off) continues to show his work's acute knowledge of when to nudge actors in the right direction and knowing exactly when to hold a scene and when to cut. And the film (as in Heavy Metal in Baghdad) shows that daily life really does exist in the most horrific circumstances. This may seem a touch naive or off-putting for some but it ultimately proves a heart-breaking cinematic experience and a rare one that young kids can actually relate to rather than being fed the bullshit of London 2008's pious, social, consumer and political bling. And though there's more than a touch of 'we've seen it all before', there's never a false note in this film right down to the last notes of the score.

The Girl Who Leapt through Time (TokiKake or Toki o kakeru shôjo ), also based on a novel, and another film for both adults and kids and one of the best Japanese animés around. Makoto is a school girl who finds a time travel device and with it she learns about grappling with the concept of moral responsibility in trying to be a change for good in the future. At the end of the day she learns that it must reluctantly and inevitably always be 'our secret'. 私の秘密

Three of Australia's most distinguished professionals in the film and writing industry got together at the Adelaide Town Hall in June 2002 for a discussion in front of a live audience to discuss which tells the story best, the book or the film? Does the film necessarily destroy the book? Should it stick religiously to the plot or should it aim simply to capture the essence, the feel of the story?

CERN's earth-swallowing black hole experiment begins in Switzerland

If the world indeed seems to be about to end for you then one might as well savour those last moments with some indie produce form London's recent Speciality and Fine Food Fair 2008. The Ooh La La Chocolate girl started her business (and creating her logo) having been commissioned by a friend (March of the Penguins film fan) to design a large chocolate penguin. Thus emerged her little silver and black boxes of seasonal fruit chocs, some of the fruit she actually grows at the bottom of her garden. Try Jasmine Tea, Elderflower and even Earl Grey. The idea being that one should buy chocolate fresh just as you purchase bread and milk? Raw Intent (a hit for me from last year's fair) continues growing strongly. (When most other businesses are struggling, commercial 97 year-old giant Thorntons had nearly a 20% surge in profits for the year to 28 June.) The husband (he designs the packaging) and wife (she didn't like raisins) of Muddy Cook have some great organic muesli for the kids coated in Mexican agave cactus nectar. Something to discuss over breakfast aside crashing stock prices.

Claire Lettice' business card bills her as the company's Director of Yumminess. And Stephanie Bond's company Knobbly Carrot organic (£200,000 annual turnover) won an EDC (Welsh Assembly Government initiative) one-off ecodesign and support package along with three other much larger companies. The company also won the highly coveted Great Taste Gold Award this year for its Luscious lentil and Country Vegetable Soup. All products are 100% organic and certified by the Soil Association.

Nikolaus Geyrhalter's doco Our Daily Bread
A herd of goats has been hired by City officials in Los Angeles to clear wasteland earmarked for development.
Channel Four's Dispatches: What's in your wine? isn't palatable viewing.
Time Magazine calls Sunita Narain 'India's most influential environmentalist
Australian botanical artist Ellis Rowan amassed over 3,000 paintings But very few people have heard of Ellis Rowan or seen her paintings which are largely hidden from view in drawers.
Australian geographer Griffith Taylor(1880-1963): Visionary, Environmentalist and Explorer who was virtually hounded out of Australia for his denunciation of the White Australia Policy and his controversial stance on the limits to Australia's growth potential at a time of unprecedented nationalism.

Over the same period the Brits were needing help understanding how to use a telephone and post a letter. But it gave artists a great outlet for their talent (not to mention rent payment). Some great shorts in this bunch.
Love Letters and Live Wires: Highlights from the GPO Film Unit(1936 - 1939)
Legendary Brit theatre dirctor Peter Brook on the so-called Cultural Olympiad, leading up to 2012 Games in London.
The Telegraph's 50 reasons to love Britain (not that fashion guru/icon Vivienne Westwood is at all British!..the very reason she became what she was)

Abadadabada, abadadabada, abadadabada, abadadabada - that's all folks :) ;).........................

...a bough quiet for us...

I was hoping to ‘go live’ with this latest opus a week ago but I’m still scraping myself off my bedroom wall – I can now understand why painter Francis Bacon spoke of his impulse to throw a lump of paint at the canvas but opted for organised chaos instead. London has been in Sprautumn for the last 3 months – a bit humid, neither one season or another and just as the world both natural and human seems to be in free-fall the ‘real’ sun falls gently upon the denizens of London. Maybe this is the living hell for a bee. Maybe that’s why they’re dying out rather than dining out (cheap joke, sorry;). Or maybe they don’t give a shit. Maybe it’s the flies who are dying but there are so many of the buggers it’s hard to tell. It’s hard enough to tell who’s friend or foe in the human world:

MET’s most senior Muslim police woman claims, Yasmin Rehman follow’s Ghaffur’s claims of racism in police
Tarique Ghaffur ''relieved of duties'' Met''s most senior Asian police officer is on open-ended leave
Tarique Ghaffur: The full statement of assistant Met commissioner on the race allegations.

Makes Barack Obama’s ‘lipstick’ comments seem like mutterings not utterings:
Obama Smears McCain-Palin As Lipstick On A Pig - "You can put lipstick on a pig it's still a pig..."
Should pigs and their farmers be pleased or offended given that the pig is naturally a very clean animal?
New footage of John McCain's Release From Vietnam

BBC's Newsnight went onto London's streets to talk to those carrying knives and those trying to stay away from them.

Channel Four’s report on the Channel Tunnel fire
Thousands stranded as Britain’s 3rd largest tour operator XL blames collapse on fuel costs and the economy
The collapse of XL and how it's affecting passengers at Gatwick.
What happened to XL Airways and where it leaves passengers.

BBC’s Straight Talk (with full listenable archive) had Liberal Democrat President (great title but not their actual leader) Simon Hughes this week (for those unfamiliar with UK politics, LibDems are the middle-ground blokes trying to woo disillusioned Labour voters. I won’t make any jokes agin them here, as they’ve finally emerged into the sun after many many years of being stuck in the tent down the bottom of the country garden, now glimpsing for the first time the big old house squatted by what look like dublious, rather well-heeled opportunistic travellers. And why are those people in the attic throwing their gloves out the window and shouting at those on the ground floor?
Wild West Kentish Town councillor claims £700 a mth allowance despite moving to U.S

GCHQ 'monitored Omagh bomb calls' . Democracy and The Matrix : discuss. Omagh DVD
MoD bags another windfall from £250m QinetiQ sell-off
Now there’s a nice little money spinner for shareholders even in the Depression. Taxpayers won’t see any of that (if they ever did in the first place). ‘Seek and ye shall find’ as Chomsky would say.
Barbet Schroeder's Terror’s Advocate DVD out now so is California Dreamin’.

Twenty years ago my first artistic impressions of Britain were the eerily serene, black and white photographs of Fay Godwin (something seemed to lurk behind every object) and Tate Britain’s last great Francis Bacon retrospective - humans “bound by their wheel of fire”. So I thought at the time. A parallel experience to art critic Richard Cork’s remembrances of his first Bacon encounters. Popping my head into the annual British Art Fair (Royal College of Art) the other day as it oozed with well-acknowledged great, though internationally relatively unknown artists, one could only be amazed that for the price of one Bacon (in May that wealthy Russian football manager [and to be fair art sponsor – Rodchenko this year at the Hayward] paid £43 million in New York for Bacon’s ’76 Tryptych): one could buy pretty much the entire great oeuvre of any of the Brit Art Fair artists. They prefer the word British to Brit as their’s is art as opposed to New Brit Art. Waving a Robert Raushenberg flag there probably wouldn’t be welcome. A bit like waving the wrong flag on the Last Night of the Proms. But many exhibitors weren’t interested in flags. I’m only observing not taking sides.
We know Dasha Zhukova as Roman Abramovich’s girlfriend. But in Moscow, she is revolutionising the Russian art world
Cold war spy mystery's 30th anniversary: Georgi Markov died in hospital, stabbed with a poisoned umbrella

Delaye Saltoun continues to find a niche in the London market with exhibitions of always rewarding and relatively forgotten Brit artists.

BBC Radio 4's Profile on Damien Hirst who auctions a smidgen of his oeuvre at Sotheby’s tonight and tomorrow.
Hirst works to preview in India

“The finest painter this country has ever produced since Turner,” concluded Richard Cork from his first Francis Bacon experience. Artist Maggie Hambling on BBC Radio’s Front Row Tuesday 09 September described the paintings as “electric” and I’d agree with that too. They have such a simplicity and presence that it’s like watching a giant plasma screen – the organic shit of paint itself - it’s very origin and nature revealed in unbearable splendour. Bacon wanted his work to invade one’s nervous system and oftimes one feels like some David Cronenberg film character morphing into one of his crouching, screaming, distorted, contorted figures. Experiencing the inept wonders of London transport for the umpteenth time the morning of my viewing it was exactly how I felt. And having lived with those Bacon images for 20 years, seeing this 2008 Tate retro was as if a dream had burst into life. What makes Bacon so awesomely compelling is his clarity of vision. Sectors of Bacon’s work seem to deride from other painters but Bacon is like some soothsayer holding his palette to your forehead producing crystal clear images of future understanding in your brain. It’s the final scene of Kubrick’s film 2001 without the serenity – Bacon’s lenses forcing the perspective of his constantly repeated lines and curves as they vector his subjects into a final open or muted cry of ‘there must be something more than this?’ There’s a certain irony to Bank of America sponsoring this show as it survives these tumultuous economic times. ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ or as alcoholic American playright Tennessee Williams once wrote for Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire that for a fleeting moment “Sometimes—there’s God—so quickly!” The Bacon show tours to Madrid’s Prado and thence in the spring to the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Horrible! (art critic Robert Hughes on Bacon) and on Damien Hirst.
BFI DVD of John Maybury’s Bacon pic Love is the Devil out now.

Will Self’s new collection of Short stories Liver
BBC Radio 4’s Front Row Friday 12 September centres around his experiences of Bacon’s watering hole in London, The Colony Room.
Also on Front Row Tuesday 09 September is a report on The Sun newspaper’s experiment in offering its readers tickets to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden for £1.
And the Arts Council's Own Art scheme allows you to borrow up to £2,000, or as little as £100, and pay back the loan in 10 monthly instalments - interest free.
The 20 participating London galleries. Rollo Contemporary Art have an interesting young Chilean artist. Democracy and Art: discuss. (Remember English exam boards even give you points for F***)

And what of Damien Hirst’s Sotheby’s auction that fills its every single viewing room? (Interview) I don’t think even Man Ray’s estate was blessed with that treatment. Will these works haunt me in 20 years time as much as Bacon’s? The latter was impressed enough to recommend Hirst’s Saatchi show ‘a Thousand Years’ to the world shortly before his death in 1992. I admired Hirst’s ‘formaldehyde sculptures’ when they first appeared and still do. Many others leave a lot to be desired in decorative appeal. The Sotheby’s extravaganza doesn’t so much affect the nervous system so much as one’s dialectic mind. Skim your eyes across his cabinets of diamonds and you do feel like one of those avaricious movie villains in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull not knowing where to look next. If Bacon was responding to the post-war effects of anti-Semitism, life’s daily ‘rationed’ existential grind and the nature of identity in a seemingly godless world then Hirst thrusts 2008’s dialectics of celebrity, fame, wealth accumulation, the dead vs living museum and lack of any correlative values right in your complacent gobhole. And the ultimate question is would one’s attention still be caught if you didn’t know some were a Damien Hirst? I think my answer is obvious.
“I want to try and make art for people who haven’t been born,” he said on a recent BBC Radio 4 interview.
Beauty and the beasts (FT on Hirst)
Painted screams

Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a doco co-directed by Eddy Moretti and Suroosh Alvi and co-produced by Monica Hampton (with Spike Jones as an exec producer) fly-on-the-walling Iraqi heavy metal band Acrassicauda (Latin for Black Scorpion). “This is what life looks like here today,” says one band member brandishing a ‘hell on earth’ Iron Maiden CD case. “We got used to seeing dead people everywhere...Nobody here can grow long hair ‘case they’ll think we’re the bad guy!” They’ve been a lot of Iraq war films but this doco proves to be one of the few that comes anywhere near to giving an outsider any sort of perspective on the war’s impact on civilians. Do we learn much about the band? No. Do we learn much about the war itself? Not really. But the band’s experience is so surreal it’s almost not real and probably the only way to even imagine what daily life must be like. And it’s a film that ill-informed youngsters might actually want to watch. I remember a meeting I had with The Guardian war correspondent Maggie O’Kane around the time of Sarajevo’s conflict and we turned to the subject of theatre. She said that the hippy musical Hair was playing there. Just the idea of that gives one a far better angle on war-torn daily life than any action film. Of keeping one’s sanity. “The nights were so hot it was like someone was holding a hair-dryer to your face the whole time,” says a band member. I’m not making up that quote either!! The heavy metal band was even banned from the head-banging gesture because it suggested Jewish prayer. Becoming Rock ‘n’ Roll refugees in Damascus they couldn’t put ‘metal’ on the posters because of Satanic implications so were billed as an R & R band.
Metal in Baghdad - New Theatrical Trailer
Iraqi metalheads rocks Istanbul (22 Dec 07)
VBS TV video, more

David Lynch’s first feature Eraserhead (1977, The Elephant Man was 1980) is one of cinema’s most extraordinary creatures. Shot entirely in black and white (Frederick Elmes), if you’ve never seen this film, then get your butt down to the ICA and see it on a big screen because it will just blow your mind. And it really is like being within a moving work of art. The sound design initially seems to plonk you inside an aircraft lavatory with a man pulling some lever until when you realise there’s a world outside that doesn’t sound so healthy. Henry Spenser’s (Jack Nance) apartment seems to exist on the edge of an industrial precipice and he seems to have fathered a baby with his girlfriend Mary. But this is a baby to end all babies – the mutant in Total Recall, Alien etc etc. Eat that foetus! Lynch designed his creature that though gradually becoming hideous still harbours E.T. charm - if you could call it that. Would Kubrick meets Francis Bacon be an appropriate tag line for this movie?
Eraserhead - in heaven everything is fine
Eraserhead Dream Sequence
Lynch himself, part2
David Lynch Collection on DVD

Straight to video in the UK director/writer Sion Sono's EXTE-(Ekusute) (Revolver DVD) is a really great Japanese horror based on their youth’s obsession with hair. No Warren Beatty here.

At Anthony Reynolds’ gallery is London based Japanese sculptor Nabuko Tsuchiya. Well worth a lunchtime visit to re-balance one’s existence -
Paul Black’s interview with the artist explains all
Worth checking out the DVD of I’m a Cyborg but that's OK if you missed Tartan’s cinema release and haven’t already.

Tag Gallagher’s ‘video essay’ DVD extra on Max Ophuls’ Caught (1949) points us to an Ophuls’ world very close to Bacon in it’s closed claustrophobia. Second Sight have again lived up to their name giving us a very comprehensive insight into a director who Todd Haynes acknowledges as an influence and “an idol” for Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia). Both Caught and La Ronde have scholarly audio commentaries, the latter a tour de force non-stop 89 minute dissertation read by Susan White author of The Cinema of Max Ophuls. Some may find it a little too like a university lecture, which it is, but you learn a helluva lot about Ophuls. I once directed Schnitzler’s play on which the film is based so know it well. White doesn’t mention that the young Sigmund Freud found the play so blisteringly accurate a dissection of “the pulse of sexual attraction..inside or outside the bonds of marriage” as White puts it that Freud sent Schnitzler a letter informing him, that in one single play Schnitzler had summed up all of Freud’s theories without reading any Freud!

Caught derives from Ophuls last years in Hollywood exile - well explained in Lutz Bacher’s commentary. La Ronde is the film that became a huge hit re-establishing the director’s reputation in France. Another great extra is Rutgers’ professor Alan Williams 37 minute Circles of Desire that explores what he describes as Ophuls’ “long take envy” he got from seeing Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. He also mentions how Ophuls’ son thought his father might have editing/symmetry and directional disabilities that might explain his obsession with the long non-edited take. Fascinating DVD releases.
Le Plaisir (1952) Criterion Collection in the States and
The Earrings of Madame de . . . (1953)

“People acting out their own lives as if they were acting parts in the theatre,” says one of Ophuls' commentators. That’s certainly the effect of watching The Duchess, an adaptation of Amanda Foreman’s biography of the C18th Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (the Princess Diana Spencer family – a link used to attract PR but disowned by the author) and played by Keira Knightley. Though the actress’ detractors don’t think of her as ever ‘acting’, this is one of her best roles to date. Mostly I think because she shares many similarities with Georgiana. In speaking of working with Jack Lemmon and casting his production of Eugene O’Neill’s play Long Day’s Journey into Night, director Jonathan Miller thought that actors are really only ever good at playing ‘relatives’ to themselves. Someone, even remotely genetically within them. And that’s what I mean about Knightley. Her character is a young girl (not woman) from a not particularly wealthy though distinguished family thrust into the society/celebrity spotlight through marrying the realm’s most powerful man the Duke of Devonshire (also one of Ralph Fiennes best performances). The film was initially to be directed by Danish ‘character driven’ film director Susanne Bier (hence Anders Thomas Jensen’s script contribution) but ultimately went to Saul Dibb (Bullet Boy). The result is by no means the ‘period frock swishing’ film some have lampooned. And in fact all the performances are so good (if it weren’t for commercial demands) you could dispense with Rachel Portman’s soundtrack (no criticism intended) except for title and credits and the film would still hold together.
How do you solve a problem like Georgiana?
The meteoric rise of actress Hayley Atwell
Former tabloid editor Piers Morgan has a fascinating BBC One series The Dark Side of Fame.

Thanks for delaying me again this morning Transport for London! Just saw a preview of the wonderful Francis Bacon show at Tate Britain. How apt his remark comparing life to a piece of dog shit. Listen to the aural obituary on BBC Radio 4's The Last Word(Friday 5th September) of comedian Ken Campbell about his approach to dog shit.

BBC Radio 4's Sunday breakfast show Broadcasting House has Speeds of Time is a live sound sculpture by the Californian artist Bill Fontana using sounds from London's Westminster. And Andrew Marr's BBC breakfast TV show has him supporting the 'couch potato liberal' agin Conservative David Cameron's plans for hard-working Brits.

And this Barack Obama Daily Show spoof really is funny:
Barack Obama: He Completes Us (August 28, 2008)
The Republican one's funny too: leadership races to the Gulf Coast to show their empathy, their delegates are left abandoned in the Xcel Center.

Obama nomination: the end of America's racial divisions? (Channel Four news)

Vogue India's controversial feature: poor villagers in designer clothes

Author David Lebedoff argues that Evelyn Waugh, the eccentric party-loving social climber famed for his biting wit, and George Orwell, a dour socialist, were in many ways 'the same man'.

And spare another thought for the bees, who've already figured on these pages, as their populations in Britain massively decline.

BBC's Newsnight science editor Susan Watts joined a team studying Arctic plant and animal life as the ice melts away.

Severe delays are occurring to District line due to a person under a train earlier at Hammersmith. (That scenario is becoming more and more common - once a month maybe).

A reminder of transport legacy for commuters.
Fare increases to cover financial black hole: Mayor Boris announces 6% rise in bus

For transport fanatics, you can buy London tube signs and other memorabilia in an auction to aid the London Transport Museum.
Tube is awful, says minister (the government and I agree on that one.)
And former Mayor Ken Livingstone to advise Chávez on urban issues

Jobcentre threw me out for feeding baby
I even I find it hard to believe the unbelievable when I read stories like this. And I set up the bloody website!

Ken Campbell, experimental writer, theatre director and improviser has died. A true mad original this man. If Spike Milligan had a brother, Ken would have been it. And he was certainly more than the equal of New York one-off's like Wallace Shawn. His askew view of the world well fed by his love of science e.g. Six Experiments that Changed the World.
Brainspotting YouTube clip

Middle East: comics and conflicts on Channel Four news

And the ICA scraps admission charge to have a happy 60th birthday

Millionaire prepares to launch first eco-cinema

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Hackney teenager stabbed to death: 14 year-old becomes 25th teenager murdered violently in capital. And you thought gangs were only found in Los Angleles hoods!
Home Office Guidance for parents to spot if kids are in a gang
Government website

Many people were 'pissed off' this morning (Monday 1 September) by tube closures. Not supposition nor presumption but weekly London fact. Question is, will any one ever solve those problems? Twitter links are probably the most reliable sources of info: District line, Piccadilly line, Jubilee line, Circle line, Victoria line, Metropolitan line

And Norman Lebrecht talks to the great opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli. Another fascinating interview.