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.
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