-Intermission - my equivalent of popcorn and ices

Channel Four TV's Bremner, Bird and Fortune's new series is now more biting satyr rather than playful satire given the fact that England's daily newspapers are these days inescapably satirical and comedy has an inability to make what is already bellyaching into bon mots. The Chancellor's new budget did offer help to small businesses in the economic blight. Bit late for those upon whom the locusts dined.
Lead Balloon: Series 3 is deadpan comedian Jack Dee's take on upwardly deflating middle-class London. And it's still very funny and woefully accurate. Think The Office meets a Royal National Theatre play about it's audience. Meowwwwww...
Amélie antidote shocks cat lovers
Steppenwolf heads for the National Theatre

What's Art Doc? Festival(18 November - 8 December 2008)
And the German Film Festival.

Andrew Neil interviews journalist, academic and former Labour MP David Marquand, who was a senior adviser to Roy Jenkins as President of the European Commission, and has recently published a widely acclaimed history, Britain Since 1918.
Keynes and the Financial Meltdown from an Oz radio station
John Carlin returns to Reykjavik to find the broken Viking nation banking on its women to bail it out
Björk writing in The Times: After financial meltdown, now it's smeltdown

The Fallen a an amazing three-hour BBC doco about all the British recent war dead. The film may have read like 'duty' to watch but it became totally compelling and almost unwatchably voyeuristic as we hear of how differently parents cope with the losses of their children. One mother had never even opened the returned crates trying both to contain the grief and memorialise it. One sibling frequently went to her brother's grave and talked to him. Another daughter almost hated her father for committing suicide on his return. One journalist's contribution, who'd been posted to cover the helicopter ambulance crews, spoke of the boy soldier that he saw rescued and dying. "People don't care unless related to them, [the names we see in the papers every week mean very little]..that's a shame, what's for breakfast...but I saw this boy and knew his name."
Officer spoke of kit shortage before death

The latest of London's local councils' disgraces: Ministers told to come clean about Haringey
A three-star report - and a tortured child

Apologies for the wrong link in the last posting for Paul O'Grady's autobiography At My Mother's Knee. Far more than just a tea-time talk show host, he's crawled through the grime and sewers of show-business himself over the years so knows what he's talking about and a huge genuine love and compassion for his guests.

BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour: Here's Kenny: Kenny Everett one of the not so sung heroes of Britain in the 60s and 70s. Fair Play Chaps assesses whether or not modern sport has lost its way and if the era of sporting fair play has gone for ever.

Interview about the children's/adult novel now opera Skellig on
BBC Radio 4's Front Row (Fri 21 Nov) - the composer Tod Machover is better known for doing weird and wonderful experiments in new music technology at MIT (Massachusetts Institute for Technology).

Requiem for a Beast: Matt Ottley's picture book(Lothian Press) won this year's Children's Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year prize, and the Young Adult Book Award at the Queensland (Australia) Premier's Literary Awards dealing with shameful aspects of Australian history and culture.

ITV's The South Bank Show aired a doco on Brit artist and art world 'IT girl' Sam Taylor-Wood. Downstairs at the White Cube's central London space is a compelling multi-screen video installation Sigh by Wood. Musicians are seen playing a score by Academy award winning composer Anne Dudley with invisible instruments using only their musle memory.

BBC Radio's Front Row also a spot on Carsten Höller's new work The Double Club - a working nightclub, bar and restaurant opening in North London. And on Tues 18 Nov
Jools Holland and his Rhythm & Blues Orchestra (he of the BBC TV show who's a fantastic musician in his own right).

The campaign to save Titian's two masterpieces Diana and Callisto and Diana and Actaeon (Front Row 19 Nov) - the latter on display at the National Gallery in London until Sunday 14 December.

Hana Makhmalbaf's timely and compelling Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame is now out on DVD (though not on the Contender distributor site!)

The really intriguing recent installation work of Maya Hewitt's seen recently at East End gallery Bischoff/Weiss

The London Jazz Festival ended on the weekend but for those who missed some or all try BBC Radio 3 jazz links.
'Tis Autumn - The Search For Jackie Paris is a well-worth seeing documentary about a jazz singer who in his time was on the same top 5 list as Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Mel Torme and even toured with Charlie Parker for six months. The film's denouement though intending to show that he mightn't have been as nice as one would liked to have remembered him does rather seem to smack of biographic balance rather than 'art'.

For a taste of Left Bank memories, Martin Ritt's 1961 Paris Blues is out on DVD in a great print and with a great cast including Mr. Louis Armstrong himself, though I don't think that's Paul Newman actually blowing his own 'horns'. Every one of these 'kids' just oozes sex appeal - Mr. Armstrong having his own flavour apart of course. The film's racial issues may seem dated i.e. Sidney Poitier not wanting to return to the States because in Paris he's just a jazz musician not a black jazz musician. But when you see a film such as Barry Jenkins' Medicine for Melancholy (one of the unsung highlights of this year's London Film Festival), you realise that the soul searching never just goes away. And though colour is of course is the issue, it goes far deeper than just pigmentation. Can you love two people at the same time? Can you love both sides of yourself equally? Both colours within yourself? Sublime sepia-esque cinematography from James Laxton.
Other Ritt films just out on DVD:
Criterion's The Spy Who Came in from the Cold-1965 (US-Reg.1). Kino Films have Sounder(1972)
and one of the few books available on the director: The Films of Martin Ritt: Fanfare for the Common Man.
UK conductor Hickox dies, aged 60

One of West London's great retail therapy hopes (from an Oz firm):
Westfield: big projects, big jitters
This is your first big test, Boris - so don't blow it
Centre 'will bring traffic chaos'
Crunch bites into Olympic stars' living space
Rule change 'abolishes' overcrowding on trains
Rail users launch a sardine protest

Or just out to cheer us all up and prove that the world wasn't any better back when, there's The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus Collector's Set (R1)
Monty Python's Personal Best
Monty Python Complete
And Global Sex: A conversation about the effect of globalisation on sexual desire. This conversation was first broadcast on 2/8/2001.

Some timewarped post-prandial video from this year's Times BFI London Film Festival. (My pensées are coming. Trust me, I'm a film geek.)

London Film Festival -Day 1: Frost/Nixon premieres in Leicester Sq at the Opening Night Gala.
Day 5: Paul Morgan and Steve McQueen''s Hunger is screened.
Secret Life of Bees: Sophie Okonedo shows her excitement at premiering the film at the LFF.
Day 9 W. premiere, Secret Life of Bees with Thandie Newton and Paul Bettany.
Day 7: Penelope Cruz, Il Divo, Anvil and Keanu

Ropeladder to paradise

British polymath Stephen Fry in his BBC series Stephen Fry in America,roped in to address Houston’s glitterati assembled for a charity benefit,quoted Oscar Wilde: “All art is useless,” thence adding his own epithet “but so is love and wine but [we wouldn’t want to be without those either]”. Such uselessnesses make life not only bearable but human or indeed humane. Such thoughts have been swimming round my addled brain for weeks stirring the memories of 68 films I’d seen in this year’s London Film Festival, art fairs, exhibitions of Babylonian and Byzantine, DVD’s and heavens knows what else. Young, attractive aspirant journos suggesting how this web-site could be zipper, zappier and zoppier. Wise mortals suggesting that I change the site’s title, change my attitude, be calmer, be less me and moreover - more like them. I even heard a contributor on last night’s BBC Radio 3 Nightwaves (Tues 11 Nov) suggest that “we have to forget to still be open and go on living our lives.” The very quality that Brit documentary filmmaker Molly Dineen believes harbours the seeds of England’s demise.

The latest Bond movie Quantum of Solace hit an all-time UK box office record for its opening weekend. Obviously ‘normal’ people haven’t given up going to the cinema. Did they find solace in the ‘reality’ of the film? Did they learn the meaning of the word quantum? The new Bond is a ‘real’ Bond. Craig’s Bond rarely smiled in last year’s film. Now his face is like a stone. The franchise has started resembling a recruitment film for the SAS. Yet even they manage to share a laugh in ‘real life’. Bond’s Achilles' heel in Quantum is that he can’t forget. Can’t forget his lost and murdered love. Can’t forget the reality. Director Marc Forster is clearly attempting to inject mega-psychology into the veins of the Bond franchise. But if it goes any deeper, we’ll be watching something akin to Righteous Kill rather than James Bond. And given the opening weekend gross perhaps ‘people’ (the demos) don’t care about Bondness. The thrill is all the thing and being the first to see it the bling. When will James start swearing: ‘forget the shake, hand me the f**king bottle’?
Soviet diehards see red over 'betrayal' by 007 girl Olga Kurylenko

The ICA have released Michel Hazanavicius’ Bond spoof OSS-117: Cairo, Nest of Spies that is more Bond than Bond and even pre-dated him by four years (created by Jean Bruce in 1949 and the hero of 265 novels). Would Bond work if it were more like the Get Smart remake? OSS plays as if Steve Carell was Bond, though in fact it’s the fantastically funny suave dimness of Jean Dujardin. Shot in Cinemascope period colours it is very funny indeed including some politically incorrect jokes that wouldn’t seem out of place in a Bob Hope Road to movie. And there are ‘real’ Bond girls. Though Quantum’s demure yet quietly racy Miss Fields (Gemma Arterton) did make a modern day Bond girl most members of the public could relate to and long to get up close and personal with at the office Christmas party.

Quantum’s Bond girl is Olga Kurylenko who can be seen in her full feminine glory in Diane Bertrand’s French art-house movie The Ring Finger(L'Annulaire), made in 2005 out on Second Sight DVD, I did initially wonder whether they were just ‘cashing in’ on Kurylenko’s sudden Bond ‘fame’. After seeing this intriguing film I regret ever having the whisp of such an idea. Second Sight do as their name implies and with it have had a world-class reputation for the thought they put into re-presenting a film. Though no extras on this disc, it’s almost better that there aren’t given the film’s haunting mnemonic nature. A bottling factory accident slices off part of Iris’(Kurylenko) ring finger but accidentally she stumbles upon a receptionist job at a chateau converted into a clinic for preserving and closing memory’s door for a client on anything from a piece of music to the bones of a pet sparrow and things even more bizarre. The film’s simple eroticism is refreshingly enthralling and its subject will live to haunt you. Beth Gibbons original songs and score are well worth getting hold of.

Mr Bongo Films, distributor of Wojciech Has’ The Saragossa Manuscript, now releases on DVD his Hourglass Sanatorium (DVD) based on the writing of Bruno Schulz. If there’s a deja vu about this film it’s only because it was a Polish precursor to the imaginative film worlds of Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton and the Quay Brothers. A second ‘date’ DVD for us more weird mortals.

More conventional and less enthusiastically welcomed than their Oscar hotcake No Country for Old Men, the Coen Brothers Burn After Reading is such a quiet, subtle, finely tuned and outright funny pic, that it’s take on Washington goings on and the Iraq war becomes almost a subliminal whisper in you ear as you sail along in its screwball comic breeze. A performance we’ve never seen from George Clooney, nor Frances McDormand, and a John Malkovich whose left-over cold-plate middle-management CIA angst he’s never shown us. If our own real lives aren’t quite like this they often almost approach it in their own way. No wonder then that the world’s still stuck in the shitter reading the sports pages for some modicum of comfort!
O Brothers! The Coens in Context

If it’s real reality you’re after then Hunger by artist Steve McQueen is it. Much praised at this year’s London Film Festival (and Cannes Film Fest winner) it’s a film that boldly makes one question the place of art in our society. Hunger’s tasteful buff brown posters prevalent on the London Underground catch your attention but bear little relationship to the film’s wall ‘art’ of dark excrement made by imprisoned IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands or the pools of eddying urine sculpted by the prisoners to piss off their guards. The MOD (Ministry of Defence) took offence last year at McQueen’s art work For Queen and Country - philatelic drawers of stamps depicting dead British soldiers from the Iraq war. I can’t imagine the British establishment is too pleased by McQueen’s new film either. So, does it only preach to the converted? Or is it asking a bigger question of what drives ordinary people to do extraordinary things? Is this urge the same for those like Sands who break and tear at our moral laws desperately trying to show how immoral are some of our governments’ other laws? The same urge stemming from the same bodily core as those humans who defy the laws of normality and are then later lauded for their actions e.g. Man on Wire? All artists are filmmakers of some kind but not all filmmakers ever become artists. Some art provokes us quietly like the Coens new film; McQueen’s is quiet, intense rage. One may disagree profoundly with the content of Hunger, of making Sands out to be some sort of hero. But the film is never simply that. It’s asking you to deeply consider what your relationship to this world really is, rather than go along with the one you’re continually told is ‘good for you’. And that as we all now is a deeply unpleasant experience but oftentimes a transfiguring one.
John Pilger Heroes - The Films of John Pilger 1970-2007 out on DVD

One of the most important DVD releases (also Blu-ray) of recent years is the BFI’s Salò, Piero Paolo Pasolini’s final film from 1975 with an orgy of debauchery so provocative that the film only received UK film board certification in late 2000 after being banned and censored throughout the world over the years. The title derives from the tiny lakeside town on Lake Garda, northern Italy and the last place where Mussolini held power. On the 2-disc set there are three versions of the film: the complete re-master, the original Italian and the original English and a plethora of extras that once viewed won’t be easily forgotten. Here are a few extracts:
The film is about “the way we fall silent in the theatre of power”-playwright and director Neil Bartlett.
“Let’s look at what happens to the human body and consumption, of false values”
“Pasolini spoke of a corruption whereby culturally speaking the consumer society has an interest in destroying all popular culture in order to sell more. In a desert everything is a mirage. What are the perversions of a society that considers itself free but which on the contrary is dominated by dark forces.”
David Forgacs (UCL Italian prof): “the visible face of democratic society. Everybody having free access to consumer goods was the acceptable face of something very unacceptable: concentration of power in a few hands which needed the consent of the ordinary people through consumer society to keep itself going.”
Chomsky: “by WW1 the power could no longer control the population by force...drive them to consumption, drive them anywhere, just keep them out of our hair it’s none of their business,” and Chomsky quoting from a leading sociologist: “you impose necessary illusions on the people to keep them in line.” “Goebbels was very impressed by American commercial advertising that repeated the same slogans over and over.”
Pasolini never really aligned himself to any party or cause over the years: neither gay, nor Communist, nor Fascist, nor the student revolutions of 1968. He was simply a humanist and poet. And interestingly he sided with the young carabinieri in the ’68 riots – young, vulnerable, working men who weren’t representing any power structure just eeking out a living.
Criterion's American Region 2 DVD

Several photographic shows this week make you consider the notion of captured ‘reality’. How do you photograph buildings and what in fact are you photographing when you do are questions raised at the Architectural Association and Iwan Baan. Formalism versus ,say, the pics of sculptor Richard Wentworth.In the East End, Flowers East have beautiful photos from Nadav Kandar. One can’t escape the feeling of beautiful ‘exoticism’, though, and some photos follow through that dialectic of the observed reality more than others particularly on his website.
Financial Times article
Frith Street Gallery have colour photos by well-regarded Dayanita Singh showing how the night transforms what seems ordinary by day. She is better known for her B/W work of less obvious Indian life published by Steidl. Samit Das has created intriguing montages and marquettes at Delaye Saltoun exploring notions of a city’s topography. The sub-text city feel is full of shadows, missed opportunities and possibilities. This central London gallery is always finding a show that is just that extra bit different to the rest around it.

Optimum have released a special edition DVD of Akira Kurasawa’s classic Rashomon with its differing versions of the same story and there’s a comprehensive hour long documentary featuring many of Kurasawa’s collaborators on the project.

So how do you represent the biography of a civilisation? Babylon: Myth and Reality at the British Museum is a sort of living Wikipedia guide. And that’s not meant to be a put down by any means. At the launch, the show’s curator enthused about the ‘audio showers’ that visitors, standing beneath, can very clearly hear (even in the crowded tiny corridors) English translations of the clay inscriptions. One of these is the Cyrus Cylinder from 539BC purporting to be the world’s first declaration of human rights – a copy of the original has been on display at the United Nations in New York since 1971. Nearby is an extraordinary tiny tablet no bigger than a large broach with 4 columns cataloguing all the plants found in The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. When I first saw the glazed brick panels of lions from the Ishtar Gate in Berlin’s then Pergamon Museum in the days of the Berlin Wall and grey Eastern Germany it was quite an extraordinary experience. But within the pre-fab walls of this exhibition they lose a lot of that out of place/out of time lustre. The show sits in the ‘attic’ with the grandeur of the Hadrian show below. If you manage to find a quite time without crowded corridors then Babylon could be quite edifying and the catalogue is tremendous value. Roughly 40% of the exhibits are from the British Museum itself (for free) and I’d urge anyone to enjoy the museum’s downtime and seek them out if the show’s not your thing. Given the context, the final room showing examples of contemporary artists, musicians etc influenced by Babylon seems somewhat ‘crowdpleasing’ and superfluous. Investigations into the damage and problems created by the Iraq War might have been more useful.

Byzantium at the Royal Academy of Arts has to cover a period from AD330 when Christian Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) was founded through to 1453 when the Ottoman Turks swapped it over to their religion. Art historian and critic Andrew Graham-Dixon offered a fascinating new way to see the icons and mosaics of the Byzantines in the BBC’s The Art of Eternity. While the Academy’s show may fall short of a revelation, it’s one of the most stupendous museum appraisals (some 350 objects) of man’s need for an art that does more than simply glorify in an image. This was Graham-Dixon’s argument too. Many of the pieces are difficult enough to get to see in their original museums at the best of times and for many this will be the last time they ever travel abroad given their fragility. It’s been argued by many that Emperor Constantine made one of the savviest political moves in history by legalising Christianity in AD313. Yet Byzantium culture has had an woefully bad press over the centuries- as if lumping all America’s foreign policy blunders and ‘barbarism’ and religious fervour over the century into one pot and claiming all its citizens shared these views and that there’d been no significant art as a result. The icon on wood Virgin Hodegetria and the Man of Sorrows (the Virgin who shows the way) overwhelms by what seems to be her premonition of her son’s death. An incredible plea for tolerance and non-violence. Other objects in the exhibition are simple pieces from daily life or incredibly intricate work by artisans. The famous ‘Holy Grail’ Antioch Chalice from New York’s Met Museum somewhat pales into the rather simple silver cup that it is alongside the dozens of extraordinary examples of craftsmanship. Unless you’re a scholar, to get the most out of the show you really need to purchase the very comprehensive audio guide or indeed catalogue. How do you depict Christ when you don’t know what he looks like asks the greatest Byzantine art? Is this what art is for, to go far deeper than a depiction of an imagined reality? In a sense the more savvy Byzantines knew that art was useless too. If Christ is within your soul, why the need for depiction? The final room has the priceless treasures from the monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai. The late C12 Icon of the Heavenly Ladder of St John. Even the strongest and most faithful of the human race gain strength from their mind being reminded or challenged - the contradiction of the Divine and the mortal.

Particularly in Britain, but in many other countries too, there’s a desire that celebrities be both normal as well as ‘divine’. A desire that ‘we’ can reach the top of that ladder too. As PR guru Mark Borkowski said recently when promoting his book The Fame Formula, it’s “a manufactured heaven”. No one is a saint goes the saying. But some people are clearly more saintly than others. Either ‘manufactured’ by the press to be so or in the true sense of the word, naturally so. We are asked by society to be ourselves yet not ourselves whether celebrities or mortal office workers. Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott raised this debate as well with his TV series Prescott: The Class System And Me. Prescott (or Prezza as the tabloid newspapers dub him) is in a no-win situation. If you wear the ‘dickie’ bow-tie to the cocktail reception you’re viewed as a traitor to your class and if you don’t, not really aspirant enough or disdainful of the ‘other’ class. “7.5% of the privately educated take 70-80% of the top jobs,” he noted. And that was the downfall of New Labour in spite of best intentions. That it offered not equality for all but achievement for all. But for many achievement just isn’t a possibility and remains a quality sitting uncomfortably with English ‘socialism’ let alone American ‘can do-ness’. The UK housing market crash was a direct result of this (made worse of course by the American market fall but not because of). Most people who had any means to do so, bought into the achievement myth. And the most prudent most certainly did well out of it. But in Borkowski’s words it was a “manufactured heaven”. Some celebrities who are savvy and prudent can survive even if their only talent is being a celebrity. Of course a love of the spotlight helps. So does the realisation that the spotlight offers no real love or security. Much of the housing boom was based on nothing more than mountains and mountains of debt both private and corporate.

Talk show host Paul O’Grady's book is out and so is Michael Parkinson's.
A bit Parky - Michael Parkinson interview
Visitors to www.michaelparkinson.tv are eligible to win a Parky Pod; an i-Pod pre-loaded with 40 tracks from the My Life in Music album.

The world financial meltdown would have come as no surprise to Patrick Creadon director of the American documentary from last year I.O.U.S.A.
Dubbed by Reuters as “the next Inconvenient Truth” it outlines the history of America’s accumulated debt and the future that indeed happened. After viewing this, you’ll think twice or thrice before believing that ‘you too can have it all’ and ignoring the meowing cat.
Thomas Friedman on The Daily Show

The London Film Festival proves to be somewhat a microcosm of the ‘heavenly ladder’ debate. The fest is sponsored by The Times (London) who have a fairly independent editorial board, but the paper is nonetheless owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News International conglomerate. Now to probably 80% of artists and filmmakers Murdoch is their bête noire. There’s also a strong non-Hollywood feeling brushing one’s shoulders throughout the festival. Yet the festival proudly associates itself with UK, European and sometimes world premiers of Hollywood product while the majority of the festival’s fare are small, low-budget often ‘making the world a better place’ films. And many wonderful films never see the dim English light of darkness again after their festival screenings. Personally, I don’t have a problem with this ‘seeming’ contradiction of the festival. But you do feel, for want of a better phrase, ‘the winds of socialism’ swirling around you. The John Prescott dilemna.

One very outspoken voice in British cinema is Terence Davies, a self-confessed “born-again atheist” whose new autobiographical film about Liverpool Of Time and the City was much talked about. I’ve always maintained that it’s a national disgrace that he’s not helped more to finance his films. Though I don’t always agree with him he’s one of the few people in Britain brave enough to speak their mind with talent in abundance to back up his opinions. If Ken Loach were a dancer then he’d be in Terence territory. For Davies’ films glide within the celluloid lifting their hopes and dreams in a pas de deux as if King Lear was carrying his dead Cordelia. When Loach made The Wind that Shakes the Barley about Ireland, he hit the socio-political British nail on the head. People are so afraid to lose what little ground they’ve gained up the ladder that they’ll stop at nothing to retain that rung. Even if it means killing off those dissenters who forged the journey with them. Though it’s an anti-crime to say it, Of Time and the City wallows in Davies’ love of Mahler and his ‘Resurrection’ symphony as Davies’ shows us just what became of Liverpool’s glories. But if he wants to use Mahler let it be so. For who else in this time of false hopes shouts the truth at us, questions the government PR of how Britain is being successfully re-juvenated? The housing boom that went bang. We want to dance on that cinema screen with Davies, be part of something that far more resembles a reality for us than the one we are constantly asked to live. We know one of those swans will probably die that we’ll be left to swim the pond alone because we’ve mated to our belief for life. But there were some great times and the music soared. “We leave the place we love and spend a lifetime trying to regain it,” says Davies, “It was always Christmas at the movies.” He quotes Chekhov: “The golden moments pass and leave no trace.” Except of course in Davies’ films.
The Long Day Closes (BFI DVD)
Terence Davies Trilogy (BFI DVD)
Terence Davies: Merseyside and me
From distant voice to great British director


hopefully my conclusion and lots more LFFing soon....

It isn't easy being gr......ee...:}---:}

While I continue trying to pluck my cyber-pheasant for a half-way decent quill, here's more than enough to keep a brain alive:
though Thursday's Regent Street Christmas lights bling with a blinging celeb is best left for very social beings.
On the first Thursday of every month, First Thursdays, 100 galleries and museums of East London open their doors late.

Or try some opera outings in the cinema with relays from New York's Metropolitan Opera House:
John Adams' Dr.Atomic (originally directed by my old pal and mentor Peter Sellars and re-envisioned by Brit director Penny Woolcock) is first up on Saturday either at BFI's IMAX or at Cineworld Fulham Road, West India Quay or Wood Green as well as cinemas through out the country. Theatre guru Robert Lepage's production of La Damation de Faust is next on 22 Nov (same cinemas including IMAX) and Thais (20 Dec).
And Tim Albery directs a new production of Musorgsky's opera Boris Godunov conducted by dynamic ENO Music Director Edward Gardner. With Albery you know you certainly won't be sitting through 'a dry rot' production. A much anticipated event.

Josiah McElheny's Island Universe is still at White Cube's Hoxton Square space, and his Super 16mm film upstairs is a fascinating ballet for the Lobmeyr-designed chandeliers in New York's Metropolitan Opera (before curtain up at every performance they rise heavenwards). McElheny, who collaborated with cosmologist David Weinberg, links the experience with the Big Bang. The film is more enthralling, though.
Sculptor Sir Anthony Caro talks (17 min) about his latest work transforming a ruined church into his "Chapel of Light".

BBC Radio 3's Discovering Music (2 Nov - 5 days online or podcast)
explores composer Peter Maxwell Davies' music theatre work Eight Songs for a Mad King written originally for South African actor Roy Hart and one of the most thrilling pieces of contemporary music in the repertoire. Even if you don't dig the music, you'll be fascinated by the programme.

BBC Radio 4's Front Row (03 November)interviews Ken Russell making his debut as a theatre director in New York. Mindgame is a thriller written by the British writer Anthony Horowitz which stars Keith Carradine. Russell used a Maxwell Davies' score for his film The Devils, though everything was heftily cut by the Hollywood studio.

UK Jewish Film Festival opens this week.

One of the forerunners of Brit dance-theatre DV8 are at the Royal National Theatre with To Be Straight With You
And Royal Ballet of Flanders bring William Forsythe's Impressing the Czar to Sadler's Wells Theatre (it played Edinburgh last year). Another of the world's great choreographers.
[Addition: oops, forgot to mention also Mark Morris Dance Group's Romeo and Juliet (Prokofiev's score performed by the London Symphony Orchestra).
And: Jan Sverak, film director, and his father Zdenek, actor and scriptwriter get a retrospective at the Riverside Studios. The very funny as yet unreleased Empties from last year's London Film Festival is showing.
Also, a retrospective of films by rarely showcased Italian director Valerio Zurlini who worked on de Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. Vittoria de Sica's last film made the year before he died The Voyage (Il Viaggio, 1974) is out on Optimum DVD. Antonio (Ian Bannen), Cesare (Richard Burton) and their love interest Adriana De Mauro (Sophia Loren). Though the film print often looks as if lensed through Vaseline it's very pleasurable watching these great screen actors in a Visconti-esque melodrama based on a Pirandello short story. Sophia Loren is starring in the film version currently in production of the musical Nine. Haunting music and lyrics by Maury Yeston.]

BBC Radio 4's In Our Time has loads of great listening: Aristotle's politics this week, Simón Bolívar, Dante's Inferno, The Vitalists who aimed at unlocking the secret of life itself - one may feed the brain and never need never leave the sofa listening to all this.
And in this week's Start the Week (3 Nov), Andrew Marr is joined by Niall Ferguson (The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World), also a Channel 4 series starting Nov 17, Susan Jacoby (The Age of American Unreason: Dumbing Down and the Future of Democracy), Lawrence Goldman (The Federalist Papers) and Linda Colley, curator of an exhibition at the British Library Taking Liberties: the struggle for Britain's freedoms and rights.


BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves has a scary debate from the Free Thinking Festival in Liverpool asking Is Privacy Dead? And the ever coruscating and illuminating Will Self gives the opening lecture for Free Thinking 2008, arguing that the way the mind is portrayed in novels is preposterous.
BBC Radio 4's The Archive Hour (1 Nov): Saigon Songs - The Lansdale Tapes tells the story of American general in Vietnam Ed Lansdale who taped sessions of GIs singing their war songs alongside Vietnamese colleagues at his villa in Saigon.

And Picture Book on BBC Four is rivet ting and beautiful programming on the art of children's literature.