a n d r e w's c h r is t a s r
........e i x

There's been a lot of bit ching (Chinese discussions on new media film) the last few days among those lucky enough to attend one of the tiny handful of Avatar preview screenings. And one wishes many things about the film - that the story was more intricate, that the music score was weirder, wacky and wouldn't so resemble, oftentimes, a certain 'hug the world' airline ad. But to see Avatar 3D in an IMAX cinema is truly awesome. One can be cynical about spending $230 million on 'just' a movie but if in so doing that can help the world see itself just that tiny bit more differently then just perhaps it surpasses the criticisms of 'just' pure entertainment. Director James Cameron has many friends (including family) in the US Marines. And Cameron's vision of the world/universe is probably one that will be shared by many who've survived war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) is a wheelchair bound Marine war casualty from 2154. "Fresh meat...meals on wheels" colleagues taunt as he disembarks onto the planet Pandora - a luscious earth-like moon 4.4 light years from a beleaguered earth rich in unobtainium (if you think that name's the nadir of originality check out the Extremely Large Telescopes, ELTs) - a mineral this mining outpost hopes will save Earth. If that weren't enough woes for Jake, he's even despised by the Avatar Program scientists led by Grace (Sigourney Weaver) who only want him because he shares the DNA of his dead twin brother. If Jake's avatar (his mind linked to a test tube body) succeeds in intelligence gathering on Pandora's indigenous Na’vi tribe (11-foot and blue), head of the moon's private military Colonel Miles Quaritch (Stephen Lang) promises his legs back on earth (social welfare obviously hasn't changed in 144 years).

Forget the cynics. Avatar is a film full of beautiful things. At times one wishes for more of the human warmth of Where the Wild Things Are but their world is a Utopia, and as Max learns, as flawed as the Fourier vision. Avatar is a Darwinian world where only the strongest strains survive. And though that's something very distasteful it's the way the world is. Or as James Cameron would have us believe the way any world would be. To be an athlete one must train. To be a writer one must write. To be a warrior sometimes one must kill. To truly love sometimes one must die. The film resonates with the ideas of John Boorman's The Emerald Forest released around the time that Al Gore's warnings about climate change were unheeded echoes in empty cathedrals. Humans linking their minds to an avatar are a corollary for Pandora's organic neural network where tree roots are synaptic electro-magnetism: Deleuze's rhizome ideas and his book Le Pli (The Fold). Kids will love this movie - it's both scary and adventurous (6 legged horses, a flying creature called the Ikran where reins and stirrups are the folding and twining of animal and Na’vi hair) and a world that (certainly in IMAX) seduces you to inhabit and dares one to escape. On a regular 3D screen the forest scenes can tend to remind us of a florescent UV nightclub. This is far less so in IMAX where Pandora's animals and vegetation pulsate into our eyes (The Lord of the Rings WETA animators) just as James Cameron's Fusion Camera System (a single camera that shoots live action in stereoscopic 3D) and a head-rig captures the actors including their eye movement. Tomboy girls will love the kick-ass female characters.
Interview (10 min) with Sigourney Weaver on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour (Dec 14)

Decode: Digital Design Sensations at the Victoria and Albert Museum:
"The exhibition will be centred in the Porter Gallery with a series of interventions throughout the Museum and garden as well as a number of specially commissioned one-off performances. For the first time, the V&A is also commissioning a digital work for its website and will provide remote access to some of the works on display."
Tim Gardner has a solo show at the 303 Gallery, New York. "As man continues to exist amidst a constantly shifting landscape, Gardner's watercolors imply a quiet resignation to the impossibility of a harmonious existence between man and his current surroundings."
In 2007, Gardner participated in a residency and had a solo exhibition at London's National Gallery.
Gladstone Gallery presents a new body of work by Sharon Lockhart:
"the workers of Bath Ironworks in Bath, Maine: consider both the plastic and psychological terrain bound up in structures of labor. The soundtrack to the film Lunch Break is designed in collaboration with composer Becky Allen and filmmaker James Benning."
Fred Holland Recent Works: 2007-2009 (Tilton Gallery, New York thru Dec 24) - part of the NY art scene for decades- explores the frailty of our human existence.
Krysten Cunningham's (a former Los Angeles physics lab techie for 8 years) Tangental just closed at the tiny Dispatch gallery in New York.

"You are an alien, you're an extra-terrestrial, you are captured by another planet, you are no longer a member of the human race: you're not breathing earth's air, not subject to earth's gravity - you have divorced yourself from what you can relate to as your own human existence. On the moon time takes on a totally new meaning," says Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan on the audio commentary for For All Mankind (Eureka's Masters of Cinema 88 DVD). Most of the material is the same as Criterion's Region 1 US release (the commentary from 1999). Director Al Reinert: "What we've seen for years and years as the public are copies of copies of copies of copies of copies. What we wanted to do was go back to the original film magazine...unfreeze it (3 days) and blow that up from the 16mm original to big screen 35. That [NASA] film gets the care that no film ever gotten [on the earth]...It was taken not because it was beautiful...but to diagnose problems." Much of this footage has never been seen before and amazing to remember that this picture quality came from film stock that survived Earth re-entry in its heat shield capsule, plucked from the Pacific and then developed.
"Going to the moon on that Saturn V - one world stops and another begins...not just an extension of normal aviation...Most of us didn't know how to react, quite frankly. Some took it to heart and hung a sign around their neck saying 'hey world I went to the moon'. And others of us sort of backed off and said gee, we were pretty lucky to be able to do something unique and special. There was so much competition in the programme among and between us for flights and so forth that none of us ever wanted to let our guard down. Even after it was over. "They've never objected to the fact that we don't treat the astronauts as individuals, we treat them as one group of people wearing space suits," says the director. "Part of the 'right stuff' is not being full of yourself," says Mike Gentry (NASA Lead Librarian).

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained and new rights to be won. and they must be won and used for the progress of all mankind," President Kennedy's address. Eugene Cernan: "The important thing is that we need to put a goal out there for the future in the country to grab a hold of and then build the infrastructure and the education system that it's gonna take to get [to Mars]. In order to give kids ownership of space we need to get them in space. If we can send a 77 year old into space why can't we send a 17 year old into space." Paintings from the Moon is a fascinating 45 min DVD extra on the photo-realist paintings of Apollo 12's Alan Bean in which he incorporates remnants of his space mission. There's a Blu-ray version as well - hard to go wrong with this as a Christmas gift.

On Boxing Day, Guy Ritchie's fans won't be disappointed by the release of Sherlock Holmes, and those who weren't may re-consider him in light of his latest film that returns Arthur Conan Doyle back to his "action novel" roots. London 1890 and "There's a growing engagement in technologies of the near future, and this sense of wonderment," says Robert Downey Jr (Holmes). "Using moral theory I have created order out of chaos," says Holmes after playing violin to a tube of fireflies and observing that music changes their direction. Original story author Lionel Wigram likens Watson (Jude Law) to "a war veteran": "just back from the Afghan war; he's been wounded and has been through hardship. He’s a strong, physical man and he knows how to handle himself. Although he's not a mad genius like Holmes, he's a very clever man." With its Knight Templar plot line Sherlock Holmes is Dan Brown for those who don't particularly want to like Dan Brown - Robert Downey Jr's eyes burning and thirsting for truth.

Ealing Studios'low-budget 1949 B/W adaptation of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades directed by Thorold Dickinson (Gaslight) has The Red Shoes' Anton Walbrook as Herman Suvorin who dreams of one day "grabbing life by the collar and making it give him what he wants". Similarly to The Red Shoes, Martin Scorsese has loved the film so much over the years "a masterpiece" that he's recorded an introduction to the short cinema release before Optimum 's DVD on Jan 18 along with Secret People. Dickinson's High Command follows later in 2010. The gnarling reality of Russian winter is amazingly crafted in studio and Suvorin's gnashing avarice through the director's cinematic melodramatic conjuring in order to belie a truth. As in Avatar, the film likes to believe that there is a better world. At least for some.
Screenwriter Rodney Ackland's plays are highly recommended.
Thorold Dickinson: A World of Film, article in The Guardian
The darkness of Disney's A Christmas Carol in 3D would make a curious double-bill with Sherlock Holmes. Released early in November to coincide with the powering up of Regent Street's Christmas lights it's still fairly luminous in the memory and it's scary Dickensian take on social reality may well dwell in the minds of kids.
At West London's Riverside Studios, actor Simon Callow performs 2 little one-person Dickens plays that haven't been seen for 150 years, Dr. Marigold & Mr. Chops - "they exhausted him, in fact they killed him".

Up is also fairly impressive (though one wishes that the 3D would let the balloon swoop into our eyes as they tried to do with the chandelier in the stage musical Phantom of the Opera). And a good moral for kids in making them think about false idols and what being a hero is all about. Chris Atkins's doco Starsuckers dishes the dirt on just about every dodgy practice in entertainment. To his credit Atkins is quite fair handed (if not downright infuriating to his subjects) but the director couldn't resist being part of the Matrix and having his film included in The Times BFI London Film Festival, part funded of course by his bête noire News International. Perhaps even Atkins wanted a bit of glamour and acknowledgement of his talents. Giuseppe Tornatore (Cinema Paridiso) made a great overlooked film The Star Maker (L'uomo delle stelle) (1995) in which this conman travels round the Sicilian countryside pretending to be a talent scout for Cinecittà and stealing people's dreams on camera. The sadness of the film is that he was actually talented enough not to have had to lie in the first place.

For some, Alvin And The Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel might be akin to Alex in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange physically restrained and being force fed his beloved Beethoven. In this case the chipmunks chanson squeak might equate to that guy who kept falsetto-ing the "you're beautiful" song on the radio. No dys-family-functionality here. "There's no 'I' in the word team, but there is in Alvin." Meow! I guess the 'save our music department' is a good Christmas message. Can't say i hated this film as much as everyone else seemed to. Dare I say it was possibly more fun than Brit artist darling Sam Taylor-Wood's Nowhere Boy - essentially a biopic of the dysfunctional Liverpudlian childhood of Beatle John Lennon. But in fairness, many will relate to the earnestness of this film. Taylor-Wood's White Cube video installation Sigh of classical musicians miming (using muscle memory) a specially commissioned score from film composer Anne Dudley was intriguing, though. (Interestingly, Chipmunks cinematographer Anthony B. Richmond worked his way up through the industry to lens some of Britain's most seminal films including those of Nicolas Roeg, the Rolling Stones Sympathy for the Devil and The Beatles Let it Be).

Given added resonance by last week's Copenhagen climate change conference, Earth: Art of a Changing World at the rear of the Royal Academy presents the response of 35 of the world's leading artists. None of the work is new except for United Visual Artists (the guys from the Wellcome's Identity show) Burlington Arcade light-based intervention Onward, and Tracey Emin's embroidered calico I Loved You Like the Sky. Seen in the context of this show, the work's naivity casts a strange spell amongst the show's mostly deliberate pieces. Semiconductor: Ruth Jarmen and Joe Gerhardt's fascinating Black Rain uses HD video from NASA's raw visual data of solar winds and coronal flares but lacks the human power of Bill Viola's video work on the same scale. There's an Iceland Sophie Calle piece, the vagabond chilling simplicity of Cornelia Parker's burnt Floridian forest remnants in Heart of Darkness (2004), Bill Woodrow's alluring cloth map palimpsests, Chris Jordan's 1.14 million brown paper bags (used every hour by American supermarkets), Keith Tyson's unwitting alchemy, Daren Almond's hypnotic 567 digital wall clocks Tide and the thousands of clay figurines in Antony Gormley's 1992 Amazonian Field. Are they praying, lemmings, secretly sprouting in that room? Are the Beuys Acorns alive in the London winter on the gallery's balcony? Tracey Moffat's Doomed (2007 in collaboration with Gary Hillberg) - is a 10 minute edit moments of impending disaster movie destruction and one of the most astute exhibits in the show. If all that proves just too much Sketch restaurant's designer Mark Lawson Bell has designed a downstairs cafe based on the idea that there is just too much knowledge in the world. Replacing it with chi chi food I guess alleviates the pain before Soylent Green sets in.
Peter Campus' video work on at the BFI gallery with a couple of screenings of his other work in January.
Microcosmos in special edition out on Second Sight Blu-ray

"Camouflage is the last form of classical landscape painting. It represents not this tree or that field but Fields and Trees," said deceased Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay whose sculptures and prints Camouflage just closed at the David Nolan Gallery.
Mrs.Delany and Her Circle is at the Yale Center for British Art (thru Jan. 3) - 18th-century English botanist and friend of Handel, and Jonathan Swift.
Seraphine review and a few more to come before the magic Christmas pudding runs away with us all....or at least some. Thankfully.

You have made me indestructible, for I no longer end in myself

In New York, as part of MOMA's Modern Mondays: An Evening with Dara Friedman (yesternight Dec 7, 7:00 p.m.)
Miami artist who presents and discusses her film Musical (2008), which was recently acquired by MOMA. Friedman invited about sixty ordinary New Yorkers to suddenly, surprisingly break into song—seemingly in mid-stride, whether in the middle of a block or inside a building."
MOMA also has the Tim Burton show.

Sophie Calle retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery in London
The Artur Zmijewski show of Polish video maker is at X Initiative and Projects 91: Artur Zmijewski is at MOMA.

When decrees start raining down from the Englishman's castle - or rather would-be moat jumping politicians - on how best to eat biscuits in order to avoid coughing and spluttering or even worse the increasing and easily misused over-use of surveillance on citizens. Perhaps time to take another look at our meager existence. Psychoanalyst and psychotherapist Robert Bosnak: "it is becoming more or less recognised within many sides and fields and schools of psychoanalysis that we are a very dissociable collection of states. This used to be seen as abnormal psychology but we begin to see more and more that that is more or less the norm. If it becomes extreme then you get people with what used to be called
Multiple personality. So then the states are completely disassociated, they have
no contact with each other. In the normal way the states are relatively
independent and autonomous and there is contact between them, but it is not that
I am a single self that over/during my life fractures. No, I am as far as I can
see it, a multiplicity of states that is in a constant state of
interaction."
Cyberdreamwork -an internet dream network
Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel (Routledge, 2007)

Bosnak is now a European émigré residing in Australia. American director Spike Jonze, rather than using studio sets to create another world, chose to shoot Where the Wild Things Are on location outside Melbourne. This adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s 1963 kids' story book translates oddly as a film and some adults attention may wander: those who've outgrown stories and fairy tales. Along with the kids, though, those who still harbour wonder won't wane in the film's beauty and naïveté. "Each ‘wild thing’ represents specific emotions, echoing Max’s relationships in the real world," said Lance Acord (ravishing widescreen Super 35 cinematographer and DP on the director's other 2 features Being John Malkovich and Adaptation).

Architect Le Corbusier wrote in The City of Tomorrow and its Planning: “nature presents itself to us as a chaos … the spirit which animates Nature is a spirit of order ”
Barry Patten's famous design for the Myer Music Bowl (1959) in Melbourne.

"Inside all of us is...everything we've ever seen, everything we've ever done, and everyone we've ever loved." 18 of the story's 338 words.
The gentleness of Spike Jonze's large beasts (actors in costume while the CGI of the creatures’ faces was done at Framestore in London) is all the more poignant when the scary roar arrives. De facto leader of the pack Carol (voiced by James Gandolfini) is somewhat secretly a frustrated architect (other beasts being more adept at demolition) and creates a tableau vivant for the young boy (or rather King Max manqué) to pop his head through. Overtones of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg's film Karl May about the prolific and popular C19th German author who wrote adventure tales set in America's Wild West without ever leaving his desk or prison cell. More so, as later in Where the Wild Things Are, Carol has overseen the building of a communal village for Max and the beasts. But when the hippy-ish beast KW returns with two adopted owls (well, more like kidnapped as she pelts them down from the sky to Max's befuddlement), Carol metaphorically hits the roof over this extended family. The scary part comes when Max (quite humbly) asks Carol whether, as King, he can have a small private place within the new structure. It's a scene akin to that in Mike Leigh's film Happy-Go-Lucky when the pent up driving instructor goes berserk almost strangling his student Poppy - and for the first time ever she looses her contagious smile. These many pellucid moments of human ennui allow Where the Wild Things Are to succeed in being far more than just a trip down memory lane.

To be away from home and yet to find
one's self everywhere at home, to see the world, to be at the centre of the
world and yet remain hidden from the world.
Charles Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life (1863)

"Dreaming's not a luxury I allow in my company," barks ballet impresario Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook) in The Red Shoes (1948-based around Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale: a biography well-worth a Christmas read). And in spite of all the melodrama and wondrous artifice of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's now legendary film, or perhaps precisely because of their use of fantasy, this exquisitely digitally restored film (the Technicolor has to be seen on the big screen) still packs an emotional punch and in film historian Ian Christie's words "strike a blow for art and beauty amid post-war austerity". Even the opening minutes of audience members taking their seats is a choreographed swell. In our psychotically obsessed decade of celebrity there couldn't possibly be a more relevant film or one that pleaded so eloquently the defense of following one's star.
Martin Scorsese's The Film Foundation "that combines the best of the past with our digital present"
Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-1962 at the Courtauld - New York Times and Sunday Times interview

"Why do you want to dance?, "Why do you want to live?" is Lermontov's exchange with his new ballerina protégé. And he's not without worldly advice: "It is far more disheartening to have to steal than to be stolen from," encouraging his new young composer. Advice no doubt heeded by the 17 year-old dancers Irlan and Isabela who transcend the favelas of Rio de Janeiro for life in the world of classical ballet - Beadie Finzi's doco Only When I Dance (originated by producer Giorgia Lo Savio).

Marketing the film with The New York Times quote "...a real life Billy Elliot", there isn't much in this doco that hasn't been seen before, though, that doesn't lessen it's power, conviction or necessity. Potentially, Irlan really is a young Carlos Acosta (the Cuban Royal Ballet principal). However, this doco skirts interviewee potential on many of the questions it raises.
Frederick Wiseman's doco La Danse, The Paris Opéra Ballet (London Film Festival) is released by Soda Pictures next year.
In her review of New York City Ballet’s The Nutcracker, New York Times critic Roslyn Sulcas referred to W. H. Auden's essay Ballet’s Present Eden: "All real ballets take place in a world where there is no memory and no anticipation; the joys of life are those of the immediate and eternal present."
The Habit of Art plays at the Royal National Theatre

Philosopher Herbert Marcuse writes about the social meaning of biology - history seen not as a class struggle, but a fight against our civilisation's repression of our instincts: "Sex produces the energy, and it is repressed so the energy can be channeled into progress - but the price of progress is the prevalence of guilt instead of happiness."

Admirers of Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause (1955) will be drawn to another struggling youngster in the Eureka!/Masters of Cinema DVD release of rarely seen La tête contre les murs (Head Against the Wall, 1959), Georges Franju's (Les yeux sans visage) debut feature after making his name directing documentaries.A rebellious son is incarcerated in a mental asylum by his father (like the source novel's author Hervé Bazin). The film's lead actor Jean-Pierre Mocky was originally to direct the film having originated and organised the entire project: "psychiatry itself was a dreaded subject for filmmakers [at the time]", says Mocky in the short DVD extra and "an argument that persists today", over whether patients on the road to recovery should be released. Always value for money with Eureka - great print transfer and 47 page booklet with a non-sycophantic 1968 essay from Brit critic Raymond Durgnat and a 1959 interview with Franju: "The transformation of the 'natural' into the 'artificial' is definitely a question of angle and light." What may sound obvious bears closer inspection:
"only sick people dream of escaping" (44.01)
"society is a game and you have to learn how to play it" (57.57)
Many, many other great reasons to see this film: singer Charles Aznavour's brilliant first foray in front of the camera and Maurice Jarre's (Lawrence of Arabia) score, Schuftan's cinematography
Jean-Pierre Mocky's Les Drageurs
Frederick Wiseman's Titicut Follies

Le Corbusier’s first theoretical statement on Urbanism begins with the straight line and the right angle as the means by which man conquers nature.

At the Fifth European Psychoanalytic Film Festival (epff5) screening of Simple Things director Aleksei Popogrebsky (Koktebel, 2003) on (Artificial Eye DVD) wanted to avoid what Sidney Lumet termed "rubber-duck syndrome...that we should present the origin of his [a character's] trouble...the reasons he was depressed as a child...the minute he realises the 'muscle' is atrophic he does stupid things the minute he thinks." Ian Christie compared the film to Nikita Mikhalkov's Five Evenings (1978) describing Simple Things as "the prose of everyday life, unexceptional lives in unexceptional places". The film's cinematographer was experienced in documentaries and by continually framing foreground the central character, context drops away and is re-fashioned by his position in the film frame. This festival's theme was Screen Memories of Eastern Europe - Bernardo Bertolucci is Honorary President and there was a discussion of The Conformist (1969) and it's character's yearning for normality and its wake of destruction and Last Tango in Paris (1972). A presentation on film editing proposed three journeys in the process: that of the viewer, the actors and the director/editor. "Every cut is a question," explained NFTS (National Film and Television School) lecturer and filmmaker Asher Tlalim.

Aleksandr Petrov (Александр Петров) kicked off the festival (though arriving a day late) with his painted glass animations: The Old Man and the Sea (1999) (Academy Award for Animated Short Film), The Cow, Корова (Korova) (1989) and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Сон смешного человека (Son smeshnovo cheloveka) (1992) - "what takes seconds on the screen usually takes years [to animate]...compared to Freud I'm a complete amateur...it helped me with my own dream that I hadn't properly remembered...Dostoyevsky (The Dream) used to say we can't love without tormenting ourselves." Petrov's process allows for the disintegration of the definitive edge forever in the world of actual fictions not actual fact.

Romanian director George Dorobantu's Elevator shot on DV over 18 days for less than $500 (Chicago Film Fest entry this year) is based on a true story of two teenagers stuck in a London lift for 4 days and fashioned into a play by Gabriel Pintilei (staged next spring in London)- "a long relationship in a very short space of time" says the director "...a kind of 'stuck' road movie for me...I'm a fan of road movies and how this can change a person's life". The film resonates with the question of what happens when imagination is not enough in relationship to the reality - Michael Brearley (President of the British Psychoanalytical Society) suggested Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale and Perdita's 're-birth' - "an escapist magical answer in relation to a larger loss". Other films and much else was packed into the one and a half-day festival including a discussion on censorship with Maggie Mills (18 years with the British Board of Film and Video Classification) and the controversial rape scene in Gaspar Noé's Irreversible (2002) -a film new to most of the delegates and Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

Félix Guattari's posthumous 1995 Chaosophy: capitalism will keep enforcing neurosis as a way of maintaining normality.
Inconspicuous consumption

"Memories are not history but original creations by the unseen artist. The diverse colours scattered about are not reflections of the outside world but belong to the painter himself, and come passion-tinged from the heart- thereby making the record on the canvas unfit for use as evidence in a court of law...So it is as literary material that I offer my memory pictures....." Rabindranath Tagore

Is Jim Jarmusch incapable of ever making a film one resists seeing to the end? The Limits of Control (William S. Burroughs 70s title) teases and tempts the viewer: perhaps all just being a slight of hand wafted over one's eyelids, the second fleeting dream between falling back to sleep for an extra hour and waking. Burroughs: "Suggestions are words. Persuasions are words. Orders are words. No control machine so far devised can operate without words."
"among us there are those who aren't among us"
Most people say "Each one of us is a planet spinning in eternity...I say each of us are molecules spinning..."
"nothing is true, everything is imagined"
"Life is a handful of dust/dirt"
"The best films are dreams that you're not sure have happened," muses Tilda Swinton's character The Blonde. The Lone Man (Isaach de Bankolé) often frequents the art in Madrid's Reina Sofia. Bill Murray (The American) seems to be seen dying quickly in quite a few films lately (Zombieland). We know how he feels.
Christopher Doyle's cinematography (having honed his craft over the years in an Asian aesthetic).
Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre
The Jim Jarmusch Collection on Optimum DVD, Vol 2

A quote from the introduction to a new book on parametricism (the digital modeling of self-organising architecture - settlement patterns and connectivity of individual elements) - intrinsic to the work of Frei Otto and Zaha Hadid.
Digital Architecture: Passages Through Hinterlands
"Peter Cook [architect] colourfully described London’s architecture scene as having Englishmen too often “trying to be as cool as the Swiss, as coy as the Dutch and as straightforward as the Americans”. For half a century, away from the polite modernism of the larger London scene, a few schools and visionary architects have made London a leader in the theoretical and technical developments of an architecture that embraces digital speculation and conjecture."
Kostas Grigoriadis (Shampooo)
Parametric Urbanism: Clusters by Shampoo
Urban Reef

Boom! (Second Sight DVD) is Joseph Losey's 1968 screen adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here - "the shock of each moment of still being alive". Easy to see why it's one of camp director John Waters' favourite films. Wonderful John Barry lesson in film scoring and lighting, Douglas Slocombe (cameraman). Losey reimagines Wiliams' Southern decadence of body and mind on a private island off Capri. Wealthy, boozing and woozy and wailing Ms. Gosforth (Elizabeth Taylor) partakes of no breakfast to interfere with her "serious comments on the meaning of life" that she haphazardly fails to fashion into a memoir with the help of a young bereaved secretary. But along comes Chris Flanders'Angelo -Angel of Death' (Richard Burton) oozing insouciant sex appeal. Prowling round each other like animals in some luxurious island zoo they are fed and watched by African servants and a midget in military thigh leather boots wielding a Lugar. Noel Coward unexpectedly arrives like an unwanted boatload of Darjeeling tea and smoked salmon and is soon sent packing back to Capri. Reflections of Capri's Casa Malaparte where Mussolini exiled his architect. Angelo strides the parapets as if walking Malaparte's flat roof, a seamless edge of land and sea. Of Godard's Le Mépris (Contempt, 1963). Exiles of the mind and spirit tempting the last fatal boom! The disc includes subtitles for the hard of hearing.
Optimum's Joseph Losey Collection DVD set

Unmade Beds is an impressive line-up of young talent on a small budget from writer/director Alexis dos Santos. Is this London mumblecore? Is what you're searching for really what you want? One tries to ignore the golden windows on the far distant hillside but one is beckoned by them anyway. Through the valley and up that hillside. Seeing nothing, you turn around and there they are golden windows that surrounded you in the first place. What took place in the valley?
Guy Debord's Psychogeography (1955)
Merlin Coverley's Psychogeography (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials)
Will Self's book with drawings by Ralph Steadman (Bloomsbury)
Paper about a form of networked urbanism for East London:
"Embedded with self-learning behavioral and responsive systems, it allows for an intelligent choreography of soft programmatic spaces to create new leisure experiences, negotiating the changing effects of time, weather, programmatic, and crowd dynamical inputs, extending parametric processes to drive urban performance."

At the Wellcome Gallery is Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives - part of a 6 month project on identity. As one interviewee on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week (Nov 23) explained the show questions our "base identity defined by our genetic code...our disposition to be victims" the opposite of being a 'human', "how society sees us, how society uses information - the political and moral choices...religion shaping our identity". At first glance the bright green dividers and unadorned wooden structures resemble a piece of modern installation art semi-circular to the spiral staircase ascending to Henry Wellcome's collection. You soon discover, though, that each room is packed with brain food. Lucky Fiona Shaw has had her work chosen as representative for the 'actors' room. Michael York displays his personal bathroom mirror and David Garrick his C18th actor's equivalent. Hereafter by United Visual Artists uses a high-speed camera creating ghostly mirror effects of any subject in its path.
Clive Wearing, a subject in The Mind Machine (BBC, 1988) is in the Samuel Pepys 'Diary' room. And though he had no short-term memory of daily life he could still continue work as a choir master even remembering music indicated by repeat signs in a score.

New to many will be the Surrealist photographer and writer Claude Cahun of whom Andre Breton wrote: "You are well aware that I consider you one of the most curious spirits (among four or five) of our times."

Disavowals (Tate Publishing)
The show is free so you can choose a room per week if such is your measured desire. Many interesting associated events, too.

If ever an actor uniquely branded his identity on a project it was Orson Welles. Adapted from a novel by Robert Kaplow, Richard Linklater's movie Me and Orson Welles centres around his 1937 Fascist interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar- his Mercury Theatre's first Broadway show at the age of 22. Egotist, philanderer, great actor, though disputed genius, this film of Welles is rather genteel as no doubt was the persona he presented to the world. A craving to be liked, to succeed, to make up for his childhood? It's also very romantic - who wouldn't like to meet a girl amid the antiquities of New York's Metropolitan Museum and run like the wind? In fact you almost feel like you oughta dislike Me and Orson Welles in some way. But perhaps the reason one can't is that one would be disliking oneself. The urge to be Mr. Welles. To be that kid on that Broadway stage. The memory of resisting at the last moment the bed of that older and beautiful woman you've been courting. And blissfully succumbing. Becoming foolishly besotted when all along you knew she would keep fucking the career success of an Orson Welles. Of flying too close to the sun and wondering, if indeed one's wings grew back, whether flight would ever again be on the agenda. How strong am I really?
Welles even steals the show sitting in an armchair with his back to you and appearing only briefly in Trent's Last Case (1952)
Citizen Kane was recently re-issued by the BFI.

In The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (Basic Books) Thomas Meitzinger argues that there is no such thing as a self - that doesn't deny a "selfy thing" that we feel but "owning the body as a whole..we identify with this image of our body because we cannot recognise it as an image". As with phantom limb syndrome "the map in the brain has to reorganise itself". Neuro-ethics.
The Matrix.
Diablo Cody's TV series The United States of Tara starring Toni Collette and directed by Steven Spielberg.

Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself (Prenez soin de vous) first aired at the 2007 Venice Biennale and was extended through last summer at The Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and now downstairs at the Whitechapel Gallery: 107 women from all professional walks of life including American composer Laurie Anderson, the fado singer Mísia, the singer Camille a parrott, and a ballerina play their part in a video wall alongside the gallery's photos, texts etc. in forensically examining the break-up of a relationship. Jeanne Moreau reads the text in French, Miranda Richardson in English:
I received an email telling me it was over. I didn't know how to respond. It was almost as if it hadn't been meant for me. It ended with the words, "Take care of yourself.” And so I did. I asked 107 women (including two made from wood and one with feathers), chosen for their profession or skills, to interpret this letter. To analyze it, comment on it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it.  Exhaust it.  Understand it for me. Answer for me. It was a way of taking the time to break up. A way of taking care of myself.
The upstairs gallery has Calle's earlier work including including The Bronx (1980), with Calle courting south Bronx-ites in New York to escort her to somewhere they'd never been and/or would like to go. She became a fictional character in American novelist Paul Auster's 1994 Leviathan. In response, Calle tried to become the character and Auster responded with the project Personal Instructions for SC on How to Improve Life in New York City (Because she asked... ) She also collaborated with Damien Hirst, who wrote her a long passionate love letter in 1989. "Do I love you? Of course I do, your breath in the mornings, the way that your feet curl around mine when you sleep... ". Upstairs are the workings (and a video - which she says, like her, no-one will watch to the end) of a failed ATM camera project commissioned by a bank.
No one seems to like the new Hirst work on show in London: Wallace Collection and the White Cube. He was spotted late the other night taking Blackberry photos through the window of a Mayfair primitive/antiquities gallery.
Walid Raad's Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World/ Part I_Volume 1_Chapter 1 (Beirut: 1992-2005) is at The Paula Cooper Gallery

Like Calle, Raymond Pettibon (Whitechapel Gallery 2001) did not start out with intentions of being an artist. New and old work is on show at Sadie Coles. The Guardian's Adrian Searle:
"But as Pettibon has said, his art - if art it is - is not comics, nor is it literature. (He also admits that it is not in the first rank, as drawing goes.) It is something harder to define, perhaps a record of a sensibility expressing what passes through it and shapes it, grasping moments (lived, seen, read, imagined) as they make their way through the artist."
Michael Kimmelman New York Times interview

The first major multimedia Man Ray show at a New York City museum since 1974, Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention is on at The Jewish Museum and considers how the artist's life and career were shaped by his turn-of-the-century American Jewish immigrant experience and his lifelong evasion of his past.. "Relatively few people know that he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky to Russian Jewish immigrants. In fact, he spent a lifetime suppressing his background to the point of denying he was ever called anything but Man Ray.
The accompanying catalogue is co-published by Yale University Press

The Whitney Museum has Roni Horn aka Roni Horn that showed at Tate Modern earlier this year and travels to The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in February. Horn is interested in doubling and identity: "I want to make the meaning of a work people's experience of it." Since 1990 Horn has been publishing To Place - photographs of lava, geysers, glacial rivers, and hot pools in Iceland.

If the second advent came to Coney Island are we ready?

the directorspective: joseph strick
2012
You'd think with all those insights into human nature tumbling, cajoling or glacially infiltrating us from all those zillions of films and works of art and culture that surely the world is exponentially becoming a better place. If not now, when? What is a God telling me? What am I telling myself? "I've tried to be a serious man. I've tried to do right," laments physics lecturer Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) in the latest Coen brothers flic A Serious Man. Ethan Coen recounted in an interview how "Bob Hope said to Charlton Heston after he met him on the lot, and [Heston] was bitching about how he'd spend three hours in makeup to be Moses, “Yeah, it’s tough being a Jew.” Director Wim Wenders defended Israeli films this week in the wake of Ken Loach's comments earlier this summer that, in light of Gaza, a rise in anti-Semitism is "understandable".

Now Loach is one of the very few English Left left that one could even consider trusting. And his comments beg the question of his film The Wind that Shakes the Barley and the rise of socio-political struggle up the ladder as to whether there ever really is another upward rung worth the sacrifice of those allies whose beliefs now are divergent.
The Jerusalem Post: Asked about a line in his latest film, Palermo Shooting, in which a character says you should take the world seriously, but shouldn't take yourself too seriously, Wenders said, "That's good advice. Directors often have very inflated egos - it's a dangerous job, but somebody has to do it."
Jackie Mason's The Ultimate Jew still available on Arrow DVD

Stephen Poliakoff, in his first full-length feature film in 10 years Glorious 39, considers how tough it is simply (or complexly) to be human. A teenage descendant wends his way through the muse alleyways of contemporary London and into the capacious flat of a couple of aged gentlemen in a quest for family history. He is warned that ‘it’s not always a good place to go, Michael, the past.’ But Poliakoff is always going there. Jonathan Freedland (The Guardian) on Shooting the Past: "He is fascinated by history and memory and where the two meet, never more intensely than in a family. A single image triggers a hunt for another and then another, until a sequence of pictures combine to exhume a piece of vanished history - or a long-buried family secret." Glorious 39 explores a rather frightening strategic cultural essentialism, ever present today, as the machinations of certain members of the English elite conspire with Chamberlain's government in appeasing Hitler, prevent Churchill's iron will approach, and maintain a very British Garden of Eden.
The Stephen Poliakoff Box Set (Collections 1 and 2) available on BBC Worldwide DVD.
Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

As the 1967 Minneapolis suburbanite Larry Gopnik (A Serious Man) grapples with social constructivism desperately clinging to an objective scientific reality while the subjective winds threaten to scatter him thither, elsewhere and meanwhile in another tiny Minnesota town of the future called Devil's Kettle, Jennifer's Body is being satanically sacrificed by the upwardly mobile downbeats of the band Low Shoulder. Alas, she wasn't the virgin they hoped for. Thence, Jennifer (Megan Fox) seduces and reduces boys to "lasagna with teeth". This is a Diablo Cody (Juno) script tossing upon high seas with Karyn Kusama (Girlfight) reeling at the helm. Barnacles are lasered from their reality masthead "Hell is a teenage girl," existentially snorts Jennifer's best buddy Needy -short for Anita- (Amanda Seyfried who seduces in the forthcoming Chloe from Atom Egoyan). Cody: "This movie is a commentary on girl-on-girl hatred, sexuality, the death of innocence, and also politics in the way the town responds to tragedies. Any person who dares respond in an unconventional way is branded a traitor. It's also just about fun- I wanted to write a really entertaining popcorn movie."

Far less cynical of humanity is The Twilight Saga: New Moon - the second cine installment of Stephenie Meyer's best-selling books that reduce and induce teenage girls to scream raucously even as the screen titles unfurl. For the uninitiated this film may feel a rather elongated 130 min, more naively soul searching than the bursting energies of the initial film. Teenagers feel that their emotional outpourings are worthy to be considered adulthood and indeed the predicament of Meyer's characters is just that. Director Chris Weitz: "As Bella [the mortal] says, she's not afraid of Edward because he's a vampire, she's afraid because she's so in love with him." By deliberately and literally endangering herself (her passion for motorbikes) in that moment of fear she's able to conjure the image of her departed Edward.

And in a way there's a parallel to Poliakoff's Glorious 39. Actor Robert Pattinson refers to his character of Edward as a "reluctant vampire". Whereas the Brit establishment of 1939 wanted the status quo maintained at any cost to the point of cold blooded murdering a loved one, the ruling class of vampires the Volturi (led by Michael Sheen) never forget that once they were human (will that power ever go to their necks) and that "when they see a human [Bella] who says she loves Edward, they want to believe that can happen, and that's essentially what saves him." On the periphery of the last film, the hunky werewolf Jacob (Taylor Lautner) is leader and defender of the Quileute tribe against the vampires. There are now debates on the internet between Team Jacob versus and Team Edward - those who fall in love instantly and those who begin with requited friendship. Bella is the lynchpin in the eternal triangle. Stephen Poliakoff's Glorious 39 angers provoking screams at the screen. But whatever side of the political fence Poliakoff's on, if indeed there is any fence at all, the film gnaws away with unpredictability and impermanence: "what would you have done in that situation?" is how you feel -and how the director has guided one to feel. That love is never simply saying that you're sorry and that true love and reconciliation will only blossom in the glimpses and glances of death. And preferably we live to stare them in the face.

Harry Brown (Michael Caine) lives another day whether we the audience like it or not. Filmed in London, "one of the biggest problems we have," says Caine "and I am not just saying it because I am making this film, is the rise of violence and drug-related crime in this country. It's a huge problem. Let's all pretend that the biggest problems we have now are banks. That is just bullshit." People who've experienced the social problems faced by Caine's 76 year-old council estate vigilante will empathize yet also be deeply perturbed by Harry's actions. Martin Ruhe's (the stunning B/W Control) widescreen cinematography abstracts these urban environments in contrast to the 'reality' script as part of the film's dialectic on violence. The beauty of this urban landscape is an optical illusion. Harry's gun is emblematic of an empiric estate's new flag, lauded for clothing the bodies politic and as naked as the gung ho violence of the police crack down. The trouble with a film like this is that many will see only their reflection in that high street window. Absolution where it could never exist. Art house cinema only a suburb or two away. Those who consider, caught in the crossfire.

For those who cross that river, some may find salvation and a healthier relationship in the automobile. "Cars are living entities you can develop a relationship with, that's what non-car people just don't get," says an interviewee in Love The Beast (Tribeca Fest 09 and Metrodome in the UK). "The unnerving certainly of machines...mistakes make it human," says BBC Top Gear car TV guru Jeremy Clarkson who ministers about mechanics like a medical doctor to Eric Bana after his crash. "A spiritual enjoyment...a betrayal if you [just] put the parts in a box," says US life guru Dr Phil. For a non-car human this self-directed doco on movie star Bana's nutritional 30-year hobby and the 5-day Targa Tasmania Rally proves oddly fascinating - 'the beast' being his 1974 Ford XB Falcon Couple. The yin of that yang may be found in J.G Ballard's novel Crash.
Ray K. Metzker: AutoMagic

Theories have abounded over the decades around the 1937 disappearance of Amelia Earhart's plane in the Pacific. But the pivot of Mira Nair's biopic is the extraordinary actress Hilary Swank. In spite of a rather mediocre film, she is like a sculpture whose organic futuristic engine one keeps circling in awe. Curtain up - "I had to fly," we see her flying with glee (DP Stuart Dryburgh magnificent as always) and in sweeps the John Williams-esque score of Gabriel Yared. Never a dull composer, what the film longs for is a main theme for Amelia or rather Hilary Swank playing Amelia. For the spirit of her is the film. Her neck juts out both defiantly and apologetically; Her butterfly smile expands and contracts. Revealed shoulder bones in her gala black dress hover like compressed angel wings. We see in Swank's eyes the dark compassion for the alcoholism of Amelia's father and that of her navigator, Fred Noonan (Christopher Eccleston). We don't see but sense in Swank Amelia's time in hospital, her acute sinusitis, an iron will to triumph over what others saw as debilitating inevitable. Great chemistry with Richard Gere.
Emily Jacir: dispatch and the short film Lydda Airport

My Suicide (3 years in the assemblage) at this year's Raindance Film Festival in many ways spoke more directly to a young audience about perceiving the precipice of death than recent release Afterschool (Network in the UK and IFC in the States). While the latter was fascinating, arty, solipsistic, My Suicide was funny, rambunctious, and more obviously 'out there' in pushing away the politically correct boundaries while revealing a deep-seated concern for its subject.

The 16 going on 17 Raindance was more than ready for prom night escorting this year's audience into the plush ambience of the Apollo Cinema proving it could never be seen as a festival from the wrong side of the tracks in opposition to this year's The Times BFI 53rd London Film Festival (LFF for short). Erstwhile festival director Elliot Grove, the kinda guy who might try to get away with selling you last year's T-shirt as an antique, said box office had doubled from last year. And that certainly seemed true most nights. Moreover, no horrible messy queues or wrong format projections as happened last year. Fantastic resolution on the Apollo screens- everything befitting the high aspirations of festival filmmakers. Even the Raindance cafe (in the basement of The Vinyl Factory) was spacious, cool and groovy with the festival (more sensibly and flexibly) in charge of both the bar and space. Alternatively, passes could be used at the private members Phoenix Artist Club

As in previous Raindance years, you'd hope many of the fascinating documentaries wouldn't have to beg to see the light of a screen again. The Narcotic Farm is the untold story of how the CIA from the 1940s to 70s tested drugs on the prisoners who were doing cold-turkey time- the first US prison for addicts. Hundreds signed up to voluntarily participate (including many jazz musicians) and were rewarded with heroine at 'The Bank' "doin' time and stay loaded". LSD was tested for 2 decades at The Farm hoping that the CIA could use it as a truth serum.
Breaking Rocks follows Billy Bragg's initiative providing guitars for prisoners while in the LFF; Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo accessed Oklahoma State Penitentiary (one of the highest female incarceration rates in the US) and preparations for the annual rodeo (since 1940).

Similar dangerous doco ground with Until the Light Takes Us digging into the roots of Black Metal - the Californian filmmakers trekked all the way to Norway spending 2 years getting close to their subjects (initially 350 hours of footage), the post-modern idea of simulcrum/simulcra embodied in Black Metal music as the doco's impetus. And a somewhat controversial ending that sparked a little debate after the screening. Harmony Korine (with the fascinating or loathsome Trash Humpers in the LFF) is a huge black metal fan.
I Need That Record! charted the collapse of vinyl shops in the US and two very different LFF music docos, Julien Temple's Oil City Confidential (hopefully released next year) while Trimpin: The Sound of Invention is soon available on DVD and a must-see.

Llik Your Idols (a riff on Sonic Youth's Kill Your Idols) again explores a relatively undocumented slice of 80s downtown New York art. The Cinema of Transgression and No Wave music. Filmmaker Richard Kern speaks slightly melancholically about his current work being less provocative and his original ideas now dry-cleaned and co-opted by the mainstream, Here are the precursors of photographer Nan Goldin et al. - though the likes of Lynda Benglis and Dorothy Iannone (their recent New York shows mentioned a few posts ago) were pushing limits a decade or more earlier.
Hauser & Wirth show

The Raindance winners were:

very soon some more to ponder.....

The Informant!
The White Ribbon
Taking Woodstock
Starsuckers
Film Ist
An Organisation of Dreams
The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life (Le premier jour du reste de ta vie)
Simple Things and Elevator

One example. Just one of how unprepared is the transport of this city. Even on a Saturday morning let alone an Olympic Games. You'll think I'm exaggerating. But anyone who's lived in Richmond will know that a reliable tube link just doesn't seem to be on any government agenda. If one attempted to board a rail replacement bus service at Turnham Green this morning one would be very disappointed to use a euphemism that barely describes people's frustration. Waiting in the rain, no signage as to where the bus actually stops and when the transportation does arrive it's completely full. These engineering works have been known about for weeks if not months. And still TFL (Transport for London)is insufficiently prepared. Is this your department Mayor Boris? Are the people of London just supposed to grin and bear it all? Believable and excruciating. No politician was ever voted in by making his electorate suffer. Make people like me happy. And be quick about it.
It bores me even to have to waste my time writing about such nonsense. And give me one good reason why it does make NO SENSE? No sense to keep being unprepared. Are the engineering works going to overrun on Monday morning (as has been the case at many stations over the years?) making everyone's life a misery?

Perhaps a visit (if one still has any concentration left after catching much public transport) to the London Transport Museum' new exhibition Suburbia will allow one to dream of faraway days - transport days that many of us are never likely to see again. Well designed for kids too with many bits of the display at their eye level.
There's also a flickr site where you can upload photos.
London's first air-conditioned Tube train will arrive in 2011. Alas too late for those who've suffered decades of hell. (TFL site)
An irony (if that could be) of London transport over the years is that Americans have played a crucial role. Recently there was Tim O’Toole and back at the turn of the century Charles Tyson Yerkes transformed the Chicago railways and moved to London in 1900 to take over the Metropolitan line and the unbuilt Baker Street and many other familiar stations. He even has a crater on the moon named after him. And the world thought my suggestions were out of this world ;)

a long way to the top when you wanna roll a rock

Computer gremlins conspiring to overthrow my blog the last week. But we will triumph over little creatures who hide under rocks! Or on asteroids. So here's a very rough guide to few things that may turn your life in a slightly different orbit.

The problem with The Men Who Stare at Goats is that the truth is so much stranger than fiction in Jon Ronson’s non-fiction book (and TV doco)about the US military’s 1979 psychic experiments to kill animals. At the press conference Ronson admitted that he didn't "believe in it at all...it's all nuts" and that the reality hamster staring footage was "an inconclusive snuff video at best". Kevin Spacey when quizzed about his own psychic experiences turned to George Clooney smiling "working with you is about as paranoid as I've got". In spite of the fact that there's no real trajectory to the story it's a fun film and feels right in having taken the route of comedic rather than dramatic adaption.

A very deft dramatic comedy at The Times BFI London Film Festival (LFF hereafter) this weekend is David Kaplan's Today's Special with a central performance by Aasif Mandvi (also co-writer) - better known from Jon Stewart's The Daily Show for his spoofing political interviews. Samir is a top Manhattan sous chef who winds up 'slumming' at an Indian restaurant in Queens but finds a palace. Like Peter Sellers, Mandvi shows just how strong drama can be when acted by a comedian who's not playing for laughs. Some may find this film a little insubstantial while others will relish the taste of its low key tone, performances and direction.

Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot) (the director of French classics The Wages of Fear and Les diaboliques) is a gem of the this year's festival. Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea have constructed a doco about Clouzot's ill fated 1963 film L'enfer combining original material (the sensual Romy Schneider) with studio actor reconstructions (the strong, arresting Berenice Bejo and Jacques Gamblin in Schneider and Reggiani's roles). Clouzot had 3 camera crews on call during the shoot but in the end his obsessive, controlling temperament meant he barely used just one of them. The doco also uses make-up and colour tests that were way ahead of their cinematic time, all in all creating a film that's probably more fascinating in its ruins than any original. Park Circus releases Nov 6.

For those who want to torture themselves with the apocalypse The Road screens on Monday. Javier Aguirresarobe offers breathtaking widescreen cinematography while we meditate on the survival of the fittest.

The comparatively subdued mood of this year's Frieze Art Fair relative to previous times, did for once, instead of being wowed, make one really contemplate what on earth the f**k we're doing even looking at all this stuff. For the uninitiated there's still enough to make a visit worthwhile. But go to the Tate Modern's John Baldessari retrospective Pure Beauty, and here's a guy back in the late 60s and 70s asking us to look at that colour more closely, listen to the language of that line, that soundtrack. What could be more relevant as we zombie through the new millennium decade when the proliferation of digital images is numbing and onanistic. Returning to Baldessari is life-enhancing. 'Ear Sofa; Nose Sconces with Flowers (in Stage Setting)' at Sprüth Magers gallery. (Wish they'd get their site working properly)
Rosalind Nashashibi is at the ICA with many associated events.

Zombieland has Little Miss Sunshine's Abigail Breslin as a 12 year old shooting up zombie mumffers in a very fun movie. While that seems OK in a studio pic (and I have no problems with that) Annie Leibovitz photographing Miley Cyrus and revealing a tipple of tit just wasn't OK. Nor was a photo of Brooke Shields in the Tate Modern's Pop Life: Art in a Material World (photo on this site) and shown in the Guggenheim show Richard Prince: Spiritual America
The Guardian's Adrian Searle on the controversy and last year's Serpentine gallery show.

Co-curator of the show Jack Bankowsky feels that in a modest venue some of the images may be more appropriate than in "a major public forum. [We wanted to] to capture the provocative experience that made it challenging." Bankowsky didn't feel he was compromising by placing warnings to the public about three rooms (now 2) and Cosi fan Tutti's corridor. Though all visitors are warned they have the right to decide themselves whether their children under 18 should be admitted. "[We want to] keep it an exciting challenge and re-telling history in a shifting context." The show's final room is very appropriately given over to Takashi Murakami - he of the limited-edition Louis Vuitton handbags. The show won't be revelatory to modern art lovers but given the Tate's broad attendance base it does put works in a proper context that, to some, may in isolation always seem just plain crude and pornographic.

Getting his break with the stills for Trainspotting,Lorenzo Agius: In the Mood ushers out the quirkiness of his celebrity subjects being true both to the celebrity artifice and the public's need for revelation and gossip.
Beyond Text seems a very worthwhile use of taxpayer's money (£5.5 million) on the strength of today's Sight and Sound in the Street forum at the Courtauld Institute. Fascinating, thought provoking day but this blog is not one for gossip.

Anish Kapoor at the Royal Academy of Arts, stressed at the opening that it wasn't a retrospective of his work, rather a continuum. Those familiar with his shiny reflective meditative sculptures that entice one into another world, that for some may be that of the Narcissistic present, will be surprised at how all the works in the show somehow seem brand new. Svayambh (from a Sanskrit word meaning ‘self-generated’) is an extraordinary work in red wax spanning the entire breadth of the back galleries. Is one travelling towards something on those tracks or is it coming to get you. Is it keeping something in or something out? Shooting into the Corner has a man firing a cannonballs of wax into the wall of another gallery.

Vampire pic Thirst is another extraordinary escape from the mind of South Korean director Park Chan-Wook (I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK to name but one). Perhaps too long but then again perhaps not, this film never at any point ceases letting go of you. The final scene is really quite grotesquely moving making one feel a tinge guilty (possibly complicit). What vampire films are about really. And Brit director Christopher Smith's Triangle treads the mindfield of Tarkovsky's Solaris giving the 'stranded in a boat at sea' scenario an interesting twist by having co-exisiting multiple time dimensions. Could be a lot better but more interesting than most of the genre pics. And Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium Of Doctor Parnassus is very uneven but there are wonders to behold with model Lily Cole stealing into your eyes for the entire film.

Fashion designer Tom Ford's first foray into film A Single Man (LFF) based on a Christopher Isherwood novel, is far from the vanity project many expected. And not simply someone with clout assembling a A-list team around him. Ford transcends the story into the realm of asking questions about what is it to be the presentation of a man? The female relationship to clothes and facial image has often been explored on film but rarely has the male image except in obviously gay genres. Ford's eye chooses a cool, detached approach that oftentimes is quite moving.

Watch out too for this quality in Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl and The Portuguese Nun.

La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet is world-reknownd Frederick Wiseman's latest doco. What's interesting here is that Wiseman style is allowing the footage to speak for itself with no narration. Yet his subjects are usually normal working people. Of course the case is true for this ballet troupe as well (the camera exploring the building from roof to sewer) But much of the film inevitably deals with the human body speaking abstractly. For viewers familiar with a dance vocabularly this is fascinating but does it work for non dance affectionados? You can decide as Soda Pictures will release in the UK.

And spare a thought for the honey bees (they're thriving on the Paris Opera roof but dying off most other places) in Vanishing Of The Bees.
[My original blog posting]
And for the past year, the eagle-eyed will have seen growing mentions of the honeybees dying off - CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder). Who Killed the Honey Bee? on BBC Four TV came to the conclusion that there was no one cause (exploring the possibility of a parasite) whereas The Vanishing of the Bees to be released in the UK on October 9 by Dogwoof and The co-operative felt chemical pesticides to be the real culprits. The BBC doco used Wagner underscoring as swathes of the empty hives resembled coffins. And both docos pointed out that one in three mouthful of our food is dependent upon the survival of the bee. You also learn that it was an English (or was he Scottish) clergyman who stopped the 1,000 year-old practice of murdering the bees for their honey and substituted the idea of harvesting honeycomb frames.

There's a whole few paragraphs on last week's 17th Raindance Film Festival that I'll either finally extract from the gremlins' grasp or have to rewrite. It's a festival worth doing that for. And there were all these great links to galleries in New York. Grrrr....

Trimpin: The Sound of Invention (LFF) a doco about the West Coast sonic experimenter, a combination of inventor, engineer and composer should inspire anyone into listening to the world differently.

And Ramin Bahrani's Goodbye Solo (last year's LFF) is a film everyone can relate to in finding their place in the world. Even a gremlin.
And last but not least, there's always Ricky Gervais in The Invention of Lying. Even a '''

molto e cantabile

Bit of a 'work in blogress' the next few days as blogs nowadays are demanded to have been written even before yesterday to be considered part of the evolutionary chain. So what is the world asking of us pixelphiliacs? How's London Mayor Boris doing - smoozing in New York after falling foul of planning laws by erecting an illegal shed on his balcony? Most probably not the subject on everyone's lips. But always fun to see our Mayor Johnson up and about - easy to imagine him in a cameo on Broadway. But there's still signal failure on some underground tube line every second day to the point where it's so frequent you wonder whether the Tannoy announcers are just making up all this. Money is poured into engineering upgrades but the mind still boggles at the thought of those 2012 Olympic Games passengers. Often it takes a bus 15 min (at around 10am) to crawl the short distance between Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus. Let alone other shenanigans. Tortoise Circus. But one can't really blame Mayor Boris for all that.
Funding fear as Tube passenger numbers fall
UK museums should adopt US-style 'voluntary' fees, says Boris Johnson
Investment in Infrastructure on the Mayor's website
The new map of the London underground hasn't got the river Thames on it. How wrong is that?
Bailey's mobile phone portraits
(he was so inspired by mine that,,,)
Opening night for the Twitter opera

The world is chattering about President Obama commanding the world stage again with a fantastic new script while Colonel Gaddafi (addressing the UN) had housing problems not being allowed by authorities to stay in his tent (apparently on land owned by Donald Trump). The President certainly got the attention even of those who escaped into virtual reality boffindom long ago. But what the boffs and bifflings really wanted to know this week was is the Surrogates movie (adapted from Robert Venditti's graphic comic novel set in 2054) any good? So much anticipated that a security guard patrolled the aisles at Wednesday's preview screening. Unheard of excitement for a London film preview. The morning skies in Sydney began reddening with outback dust the following day. If only we could convince the Martians to visit London and sort out the transport woes. Any chance Mayor Boris?

Go expecting Blade Runner or any number of great classic sci-fi movies then you'll be disappointed with Surrogates. But the story's premise is so strong it still keeps hold. Much maligned and feted Brit director Nicolas Roeg let it be known in a Front Row BBC Radio 4 interview that he'd love to film a graphic novel. And this film cries out for less linear direction. Venditti's inspiration came from people losing their spouses and jobs due to their addiction to the internet and online personas. In the original, Lionel Canter (James Cromwell) had designed surrogates (remotely brain controlled robots) specifically for the physically disabled, but like most inventions, ordinary citizens throughout the world began using them while lazing at home. This could have been a fantastic film but just isn't - and that's no fault of Bruce Willis. But it ain't all bad and what's interesting is that you don't feel it's spoilt the chances of a sequel based on Venditti's latest The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone. Venditti was immersed in literary classicists such as Hemingway rather than comics and began by stacking boxes for the company that a few years later published his work. Here's a normal guy with big, sweeping, interesting ideas that really start eating into our marrow of contemporary society.
Good audio interview on Comic Book Outsiders (about 18 min in)
The teen bloggers who took over the internet

All that red dust over Sydney suddenly makes sense of the manna from heaven. In the 3D animated Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs every food imaginable falls from the sky when kid inventor Flint Lockwood's machine designed to turn water into food goes haywire. Originating from a 1978 children's book, this film is not only enormous fun but will get kids thinking about science, climate change, genetic mutation, bullying and whether bigger really is better. Great designed 3D glasses as well so cool you want to wear them home.

There's more than a scary hint of Robert Venditti's idea that everything can be controlled in The Soloist. Initially, the broad cine brushstrokes used to paint this true story of ex Juilliard classical cellist mentally ill genius now homeless Los Angeles streetperson Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) make one queasy. The feelgood story of how LA Times columnist Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) buys the guy a cello, finds him a room, introduces him to the LA Philharmonic and turns his life around. All beautifully and ingeniously photographed by Seamus McGarvey. But Brit director Joe Wright has cleverly made a film that while having commercial sweep also seems to question whether interfering in someone's life is ever the right move.
We are back in Wright's Pride and Prejudice territory here - how frequently people mis-perceive others through social convention. Nathaniel's story isn't an isolated one. In fact quite common. Only a few years ago a bass player who'd worked with all the jazz greats and dropped off the map was found in a Skid Row hotel. He'd not played a note in decades.

And Lopez in many ways is no hero; more veering towards the self-righteous career journalist as his colleagues are being made redundant. Downey gives Lopez complexity. He cares but pulls himself back to society's yellow line. Nathaniel began as just a possible story lead as other ideas got crossed off his shopping list. Does Nathaniel really need or want medication and accommodation questions the head of the homeless unit. Tom Hollander's LA Phil 'let us pray' cellist may seem characatured but he steps into Nathaniel's world from somewhere else completely. Beethoven string quartets are made to sound like Beethoven symphonies in Dario Marianelli's very clever film score. Does it matter the film seems provocatively to ask so long as it sounds good? Quite clearly for Nathaniel it does. He ended up playing Beethoven on the street because he wanted to hear the buzz of the world not the fleeting gossip of music school students and critics. He examines the dead fly in his new room fearing a similar fate. As the LA Phil's real life conductor Esa Pekka Salonen plays out the film with the extraordinary slow movement of Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' 9th Symphony, Lopez's voice-over stresses loyalty and friendship "believing without question that it will carry you home". It sounds sentimental when quoted but so can the simple malady of a distant shore.
Los Angeles Philharmonic website
Daily Telegraph interview with Joe Wright
Steve Lopez on the film

FRIDAY 25 September:

Friendship and loyalty from another side of society in the magnificent digitally remastered print of The Godfather (1971). One forgets Mario Puzo's book and the subsequent film showed how resistant this patriarchal figure was to entering the world of narcotics or indeed a world of betrayal and bloodshed. Brando's Godfather is a warrior who in defending his people, made them happy and for that expected undying loyalty in battle and in maintaining 'the family'. He was never meant to be representative of the Mafia network as a whole. Al Pacino as the son Michael initially tries to maintain a love for his father whilst keeping 'arms length' from the family business. One forgets that Nino Rota's famous music score 'theme' doesn't arrive until half way through the film when Michael must temporarily exile himself to his native Sicily. The ever painful ties that bind. One of those ever more rare films that are both commercial and a work of art.
Very useful Twitter site for the film's UK distributor Park Circus.
The other side of the Mafia in Gomorrah.
BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme has silent film score pianist/composer Neil Brand on The Godfather score plus other items: Sally Potter on her new multi-media platform film Rage and Joe Wright on The Soloist.

Legendary though not so widely known American photographer Steve Schapiro was stills photographer for the film and were shown at Hamiltons gallery in London earlier this year (photo of opening here). (my initial post) His photos for American Radioworks, more, and more.
Woody Allen dressed as a sperm in Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.
Vanity Fair, Taxi Driver film stills
The Making of The Godfather

Chevolution is a fascinating and revelatory doco on that single iconic photographic image of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. Taken by Alberto 'Korda' Díaz Gutiérrez(originally a fashion photographer) at a memorial service in Havana for victims of an explosion in 1960, it was only one of many photos taken - most showing Guevara brandishing explosives rather than a dove of peace. The photo without which, many believe, the Cuban revolution would never have happened. In fact Korda's previously best known image had been of a young girl clutching as her doll a piece of wood, La Ninja. What makes this doco so interesting for an audience in 2009 and the age of image proliferation, is not so much the politics but more the larger question of how a photo is used and not what it is: the moment separated from history and freed from the moment. BBC Four showed some months ago, as part of their photo season, a doco about the famous Dorothea Lange 30s Depression America 1936 Migrant Mother nestling her two kids. In fact the photo had been cropped from one showing her with a family of seven. Not as tugging at the heartstrings. According to one interviewee in Chevolution: "if we don't have heroes we construct them...Che became the face of Icarus, the boy with wax wings who dared fly close to the sun." "The very thing he [Che] tried to bring down [capitalism] is perpetuating his image."

Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler (1502-1520) at the British Museum uses parchment codices as a vital source "in inviting an interrogation of how history is constructed," according to the show's curator - an exhibition that doesn't so much dazzle as intrigue. "We're not rehabilitating such a tyrant," stresses the curator but investigating "the practice of leadership and comparing this to other traditions" as part of their great leaders series (Hadrian: Empire and Conflict was in here before). "Here no one fears to die in war" is a slide projected poem from the city of Tenochtitlan. Wind, birds and other sound effects eerily waft through the exhibition and upwards to the great dome of the former British Library reading room (Marx ironically wrote his Das Kapital here). Bizarrely, it wasn't until recently that scholars began using the codices to reexamine the divergent interpretations of Moctezuma's death at the hands of the Spanish.
The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH, National Institute of Anthropology and History)
Aztec art website

Creation is the intimate domestic story of Charles Darwin based on the book Annie’s Box by Darwin’s great great grandson Randal Keynes. Not the usual bio-pic. Did the filmmakers succeed in being more than that though? Almost. Images and premonitions of death (including his own child), water, rebirth, are the bedrock of this beautifully lensed film (Jess Hall). As committed as Paul Bettany is to the character of Darwin one still can't get away from an actor acting the man who wrote the controversial On the Origin of Species. And that's no fault of Bettany's. Perhaps if the film went further down the road it's taken into the mind of Darwin and his wife this mightn't seem such a problem. Nonetheless, there's much to admire in Jon Amiel's film.
The Linnean Society of London and their Darwin celebrations.