Unbelievable Unbearable London: January 2009

Photo and site-specific installation copyright 2009 Andrew Lucre

No God say ads on yonder London bus
A new twist on the self-immolating ‘bendy’
(the long articulated diesel snake Mayor Boris to extinguish )
The bane of commuters’ lives
No Siegfried/Brunhilde connection there.
Boris pays no heed as Labour elite groom for bigger Heathrow
More Brit businesses ‘going to the wall’,
The big Brit freeze reported as if aliens had zapped us all,
But it ain’t so new or rare
Nor the klutzen who on frozen ponds stand and stare
In democracy we trust.
Crunch, crunch, crrtch
The No.10 Berkeley Hunts.
Methinks I have Big Brother’s Coolio in mine head
But prying governments wish the likes of us well dead.

Atheist bus campaign spreads the word of no God nation-wide
Ad watchdog to make divine ruling
New powers for police to hack your PC: Civil liberties groups raise alarm over extension of surveillance without warrant.
Call for safeguards over Big Brother database
Democracy hard at work there...
The Guardian looks at the state and history of British pensions
Federal Reserve slashes interest rates to nearly zero
UK bank plans lowest ever interest rate
Economy in sharpest fall for 30 years
Foxtons stuck in housing market slump
What does Parliament mean when prime ministers ignore it?
Iceland drops legal threat over bank
As BBC economics correspondent Robert Preston
put it: “the prudent to bail out the feckless”
The rise and fall of Wedgwood

Protests against Heathrow expansion: Government decision on new runway is imminent.
Virgin demands rail reliability
Further delays on west coast line
Oysters for all trains unless you take SWT
Shane Meadows’ Eurostar channel tunnel funded Somers Town just out on DVD. He made their short film budget go a very long way indeed for his melurbancholy London vignette.
Great to see Happy-Go-Lucky’s (my blog review) Sally Hawkins receive a Golden Globe award in New York on Sunday. And of course Mr. Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire. But more of him later.

Not released until April 17 (T.S. Eliot’s cruellest month of the year, and always proving to be so weather-wise in England), Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor’s film Helen may well prove to be one of 2009’s highlights in the way that Joanna Hogg’s very still, very European film Unrelated was for 2008. (Both are distributed by the same company, New Wave Films formed by former Artificial Eye boffins Robert Beeson and Pam Engel).Helen (produced by the wonderfully named company desperate optimists and a UK/Ireland co-production) began as nine short films known as the Civic Life Series made over the past 5 years. All were shot on 35mm cinemascope, on relatively low budgets using mostly locals with little or no acting experience. “[We wanted the audience] to feel this tension between the slickness of 35mm production values and the rawness in the performances allowing for something admittedly flawed but ultimately human and honest to come through,” said the directors. “Normally the editing process allows the filmmaker to eliminate or disguise mistakes but with Civic Life the imperfections and flaws have become one of the defining features of the works.”

Given that, Helen from start to finish looks stunning, more of an art work –perfectly framed, sculpted, painterly (Ole Birkeland, camera) – bringing to mind Antonioni films, Pirandello playwrighting, the recent London Film Festival ‘scope film Afterschool or Anton Corbijn’s black and white Control. 18 year-old Joy is missing and another girl (Annie Townsend) Helen, currently in a care home, is asked to ‘play’ Joy in a police reconstruction of her last hours after being selected from her schoolmates. The next 80 minutes doesn’t as much narrate a story as leave space for its audience to blend these emotional colours for themselves. Very European and yet quintessentially the whispering death and emotional renewal of English landscape.
Interview
This [fictitious] interview
Dispatches: Britain's Challenging Children
The horribly brilliant Brit horror Eden Lake now out on DVD. Not a film for the faint and ink-hearted.
Britain's police community support officers

Optimum has released on DVD some of the great British Classics from the 60s ‘New British Cinema’:
Ken Loach’s Poor Cow
John Schlesinger’s first feature A Kind of Loving (1962).(his Sunday, Bloody Sunday is just out too on DVD)
Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey
A Touch of Love

The early sketches of Bridget Riley (artist of the psychedelic stripes) show her painstaking desire to create paintings that “release light as you look at it”.

Back in 2000, Billy Elliot was such a ‘break-out’ film for the UK industry that its director Stephen Daldry received an honour from the Queen - an ‘export’ award just like The Beatles. Arguably it could be said, I gave Daldry his first major break in London back in the 90s with my hit production of a neglected Ödön von Horváth play Judgement Day - its subject of train derailment eerily prescient. Daldry’s great skill has always been finding designers to make a big audience impact and an ability to tease incisive performances from actors. At the heart of Horváth's play, and indeed all Horváth's work, was an exploration of moral guilt and responsibility in the inter-war years of Europe. Daldry’s film of Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader (Der Vorleser)
adapted by playwright David Hare) wades in very similar Horváth waters. A teenage boy (David Kross) has a pre-WWII affair with a woman (Kate Winslet) who later becomes a concentration camp guard thereafter standing trial. And the boy is privy to unearthed evidence that will haunt him through later life (Ralph Fiennes). Not having read the book, I don’t know whether this adaptation is good or not but it doesn’t make for vital cinema. In its favour, though, the film’s emotional tugging might allow for wider audiences in America.

Unfortunate for Winslet that she did an episode of comedian Ricky Gervais’ Extras some time ago in which she played a Holocaust nun - the sure-fire route to wining an Oscar quipped Gervais. If Daldry’s hands weren’t tied to the book he’d probably have made a better film about say the Nazi policy of Gleichaltung (levelling / bringing into line) where individuals were weaned from family, neighbours, community and any social support network except for the state - very much like Philip Pulman’s idea in his novel His Dark Materials – a total undermining of the parent child relationship. In spite of wonderful performances, there’s far too much a sense of closure in The Reader. But some people like closure. Whether or not that’s healthy is another matter.
Ralph Fiennes on The Reader and Oedipus
On The Reader set with Kate Winslet
'I did have moments where I'd say, Oh my God ...' -Kate Winslet
Hitler's secret library (New York Times, The London Times)
The Wave (Die Welle) DVD (under coming soon) (My blog review)Nightwaves (Jan 14) interviews Holocaust survivor Thomas Buergenthal, whose memoir describes his experience in Nazi death camps and his subsequent career as a human rights judge at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Keep looted Nazi art, says Rosenthal

FilmMuseum has issued The Complete Alexander Kluge (15 2-disc DVDs) a different cinematic world all together.
8 2-disc DVDs The Films for Cinema
Kluge: “For instance, the title Abschied von Gestern [the German-language title for Yesterday Girl] provokes a contradiction. Because you never can say goodbye to yesterday. If you try to, you get as far as tomorrow only to discover yesterday all over again.”
In Cuts in Time and Space (Schnitte in Raum und Zeit)(a 2-disc set of interviews with German film editors) he elucidates further: “No direct reality exists in cinema yet direct reality is all that counts and is all the cinema can record. A person wants to see what is and at the same time wants this to satisfy him subjectively. He seeks reality but it must hold the promise of happiness. And as our reality doesn’t hold this promise of happiness, or too little of it that can be shown, the feature film emerged that is a terrible corruption in fact of what cinema can do...The viewer is not in search of truth unless you promise him a treasure trove. He wants to be rewarded for his won sake...there’s the will to look further and to have an eye for what isn’t negative...the viewer has both feelings at once, he has curiosity and an alert eye that peeps through the keyhole to see reality, that wants truth, and yet he also wants to hang onto the illusions and he basic trust he was born with.”

Wolfgang Widerhofer, editor of Nikolaus Geyrhalter films such as Our Daily Bread: “I don’t dissolve time, I leave it in the picture, that another form of time emerges; a time that goes beyond the moment, beyond the surface; when the information in an image steps back, and the time of looking remains, another image suddenly appears that isn’t there.”

Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure that examined the incidents of abuse and torture of suspected terrorists at the hands of U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib prison is now out on DVD with director's commentary and deleted scenes. (My blog review)
On 26 January the BFI DVD Manufacturing Consent explores the political life and ideas of the controversial author, linguistic scholar, radical philosopher and activist, Noam Chomsky.
And Lotte Reiniger: The Fairy Tale Films

Interesting discussion of Kluge’s film Part-Time Work of a Domestic Slave in a 1974 Film Comment interview: “the real film is the one in the spectator’s mind...the fundamental incompatibility of family values and social values—the impossibility of what we might call social loyalty existing in a social structure where family loyalty is the priority...happiness for themselves [the family unit], and neglect for anyone else [society].” “I think cinema has one possibility other arts don’t have. Because it’s rather trivial and derives from the fairground. It has more to do with Punch and Judy than with a serious art. And it hasn’t been developed from the viewpoint of a small, educated society; it’s made for the plebeian people, for the proletarian component.”
New gallery for Clocks and Watches (Room 38–9) at the British Museum

With sales of Marx's Das Kapital soaring, this will be Kluge’s next project.

FilmMuseum also have Hedy Lamarr: Secrets of a Hollywood Star
And also interestingly, though the artist Francis Bacon collated some Nazi images for his early work, he wanted to play down any of these references later so that the work could resonate on its own terms.

Over the decades, indie American writer/director Jim Jarmusch has concocted a very distinctive ‘reality’ magic act. Optimum issued his early work in Volume 1 last year on DVD and have just released Volume 2 with Mystery Train (1989), Night on Earth (1991) and Dead Man (1995) - films that cemented him as an American auteur. There’s no director quite like Jarmusch. His films weave a cinematic spell - their characters stranded with wry humour threading their only path. “I can’t say enough good things about Jim Jarmusch,” says Gena Rowlands in a short interview extra on Night on Earth – five taxi driver stories across five cities throughout the world. Mystery Train has a teenage Japanese couple - one who’s mad about Elvis the other on Carl Perkins - visiting Memphis in a film inhabiting a twilight of time dimensions. Dead Man opens in late C19th frontier America quoting French poet weirdo Henri Michaux “It is preferable not to travel with a dead man”-William Blake (Johnny Depp) in a “clown-suit from Cleveland” spiralling into another existence after his account’s job in the backwater-ville Machine falls through. John Hurt notes in the interview extra that it’s “a little odyssey without being a moral tale”. William meets a well-impressed native American Indian named Nobody (Gary Farmer) whose esprit was transformed by reading William Blake’s poetry under English confinement:
"Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight."

Tigrero, released a few months ago on Bluebell DVD has Jarmusch tag along with veteran director Sam Fuller as they follow an Amazonian trail Fuller left some 40 years ago.
London International Mime Festival
The 6th London Short Film Festival

Alfred Hitchcock’s B/W 1946 Notorious re-released as part of a BFI Ingrid Bergman season was his 9th Hollywood film with a great script from Ben Hecht. So accurate was the uranium ‘MacGuffin’ of the plot that the FBI kept the director under surveillance for three months (this was 1944 the year before Hiroshima and even the film’s producer was sceptical of the plot’s plausibility). I’m never satisfied with the ordinary. I’m ill at ease with it,” said Hitchcock in his famous interview with French director Truffaut. With one of the sexiest kissing scenes in movie history (and the longest according to the original publicity), like all Hitchcock, it repays repeated and careful viewing.
Iranian trailer, in 11 parts on YouTube if you must!

Less exotic than the world of Jarmusch is ‘mumblecore’ - the New York indie film movement exampled by Hannah Takes the Stairs (London Film Festival 2007 now released by the ICA). Same director Joe Swanberg showed his latest Nights and Weekends at last year’s London Film Fest - a film that captured my attention slightly more than Hannah. Oftentimes there’s a very delicate almost ‘European’ intimacy between the characters in Swanberg’s films. But for many this will prove an acquired taste.
Azazel Jacobs’ (son of NYC avant-garde film pioneer Ken Jacobs) Mommas Man that also played last year’s London Film Festival, has quite a different musical time signature to Swanberg while exploring similar emotional timewarps. Using his real parents and their apartment, Jacobs fashions the slow narrative of mid-life crisis Mickey (Matt Boren) who leaves his wife and kid in Los Angeles while outstaying his welcome on what was to be a brief parental pit-stop in New York.
Another more romantic indie flic Midnight Kiss (Contender DVD) is worth seeking out too.

More ‘reality’ from the 2008 The Times BFI London Film Festival that will take a while to get UK release (if at all):
Liverpool a film in which almost nothing happening manages to cast a spell -
Presentación película Liverpool por Lisandro Alonso
Festival de Cine de Limaated
Sight and Sound interview
and Parque Via in which a little somethings lead to one big something for the caretaker of a mansion in Mexico City. This film never seems to use force in making us look at reality but that’s exactly what it does with great stealth.

A world apart is Baz Luhrman’s Australia, a director who certainly reaches his Gone With the Wind dream. We all wish (as I’m sure he probably does) that it all went one step further into the romantic darkness of his Romeo and Juliet. And though one can be cynical about foisting Australia’s aboriginal concerns into mainstream cinemas across the world, better they were aired by Luhrman than not at all, which is usually the case.

Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974 Trailer) is re-released by Park Circus as part of a
BFI retrospective this month. Excellent piece in
The Independent article
How Sam Peckinpah shocked Hollywood with Alfredo Garcia
Peckinpah’s films never really veered away from the redemptive ‘road movie’ nature of his early Deadly Companions - the camera hanging on the faces of these men who in turn hang lovingly and voraciously on their women - “men out of time” as Macnab writes in his Independent article.
“If the film is active, the spectator becomes passive; that’s a very general rule,” says Alexander Kluge. Always cited agin Peckinpah is the violence in his films rarely the inertia of his characters: “Something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give, something’s gotta give” as the classic song goes. “But not for me,” retorts another mellifluous urban ghost.

Slumdog Millionaire has just won its director Danny Boyle a Golden Globe award and justly so for his great storytelling: the 18 year-old Mumbai call centre kid whose rags of life literally turn him into richness. The “feelgood movie of the year” shouts the publicity. The truth of the original source novel is debatable but Boyle’s fable reaches into the darkness of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale aided by Anthony Dod Mantle’s as ever exhilarating cinematography. Again, one can be cynical about this film but that’s hard to sustain when the film so clearly cries out with the “to thine own self be true” of Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt.
Interview (31 min): director Danny Boyle More4 News
The film's producer Tessa Ross interviewed by the Financial Times
Dev Patel hits the jackpot
BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme interview with Danny Boyle (Jan 9)
BBC TV Culture Show special
Vikas Swarup 's book (Black Swan Press).

“The realistic result, the actual result, is only an abstraction that has murdered all other possibilities for the moment. But these possibilities will recur. Which is why I don’t believe too much in documentary realism: because it doesn’t describe reality. The most ideological illusion of all would be to believe that documentary realism is realism.” – Alexander Kluge.

I get even stranger looks than normal when I mention watching Celebrity Big Brother . I don’t frequent the ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They’ of the ‘uncelebrated’ Big Brother shows but there’s something fascinating, intriguingly boring, and indeed revealingly beautiful watching humans in a ‘caged’ environment who would normally roam in the artificial larger confines of a nature reserve, all their wants catered for. And many of these celebrities have lived in reserves that allow hunters in, though the animals are very well cared for (BBC’s Louis Theroux did a great programme on that). The ones on Celebrity Big Brother have obviously survived that ordeal (or are about to enter it!). Just as in real life nobody really wants to shoot the giraffe or the flamingo. And the bigger the animal the more expensive the kill. Obviously I’ll give no equations. Some celebrities seem savvier than others though that may well just be a ploy. One housemate noted jokingly about Coolio the American rapper that he was probably expecting the beach babes, sex and hot tubs of American reality TV. Instead he got 2 cans of larger, polite conversation, and ‘I think it’s time for bed’ said Zeberdee [Magic Roundabout kids show for the uninitiated US readers] ) English treatment. Coolio himself confirmed the glamour of the American shows.

There are wheels within wheels within wheels for this TV show and like life, as much as the producers and the celebrities themselves attempt to control matters, the unpredictable will always arise - not forgetting the democracy of the viewers themselves in the equation. Unlike the show’s would-be un-celebrities (auditions this month folks for the next one!), the ‘real’ celebrities have acquired if not thicker skins then certainly a means of camouflaging their softer underbellies. And sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you’re watching a giraffe or a leopard. Reassuringly, you feel you could at least trust this year’s selection with your first and second born, your house, your car and quite possibly even your loved one. Not what one’s used to from American TV reality shows. But as one housemate said yesterday “the house amplifies feelings and irritabilities” and as with animals when deprived of sleep, food, quiet (and in this case even hot water) they become acutely “aware of other people’s traits” bordering or sometimes acceding to obsession.

Compared to what’s repeated in the UK press (or indeed amongst housemates themselves) seeing the events in context usually gives a different meaning. And to fully appreciate this, one has to sit through the long hours of streaming live footage often with swathes of ambient ‘tweety bird’ soundtrack blocking out potentially slanderous remarks. Did the tabloids mention that Terry Christian quoted the philosopher Boethius at one point? So used to manipulating situations are these celebrities that when innermost feelings (rather than ‘knee-jerk’ reactions) do peep out it is rather like witnessing the revealing moments in an indie ‘mumblecore’ film. Ah, the fishbowl of life! Is it better than the beauty and vagaries of the open sea or stream? Just hope for no cat owners, earthquakes, clumsy kids, drunken moms and dads, faulty fish food, sadistic teenagers, and you stand a ghost of a chance in that fishbowl. You might even end up in San Diego Zoo. Madagascar anyone? Celebrity Big Brother starring in alphabetical order: Former TV presenter Terry Christian, rapper Coolio, pop stars Ben Adams, Mutya Buena, Michelle Heaton, and LaToya of the Michael Jackson family, TV presenter and former weather girl Ulrika Jonsson, loud-mouth Shameless actress Tina Malone,page 3 glamour girl Lucy Pinder, Scottish political activist Tommy Sheridan (jailed in real life for his anti-Poll Tax stance), Austin Powers Mini-Me Verne Troyer.

Silence, please (Financial Times reviews books on silence)
Winged wonder: Young snowy owl lands in Cornwall
BBC One's The Secret Life of Elephants

Photographer Milton Greene's Wife Pays Tribute
BBC 4- Mark Lawson talks to household name Brit actress Maureen Lipman: “They’ve left this baby with me and I don’t know what to do with it! That’s what fame is.”
BBC Radio 3's Music Matters talks to 50 year-old Thomas Quasthoff probably the most successful German singer of his generation aware now more than ever of the importance of unique relationships with each of his audiences.
Also a piece about Skin Deep a satirical operetta about society's obsession with staying young and beautiful receiving its premiere at Opera North this week. Music by David Sawer and libretto by Armando Iannucci (the scathing writer of TV series such as The Thick of It).
Nightwaves (13 Jan) Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor discuss happiness and a discussion of the influence of French writer Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, seen by many as the first ever anarchist thinker.
And BBC Radio 4's Start the Week (Jan 12)

Kluge: “I think one should show what one notices...The difficult thing about taking sides is that it means a lot of reality; and having the possibility of recognising reality sometimes damages your ability to take sides; and you have to accept this dialectic. The more practical a person’s activities are, the more faults will emerge. The less practical the activities...the fewer faults. The only possible way to avoid mistakes is to do nothing.”

“What interests me most is showing that people don’t react to these false choices. And I think it’s necessary to have in your nerves a sense of what constitutes a false choice. I mustn’t invent it. I can simply notice the inertia. People have false choices in their minds and in their feelings, and they know these choices are false. So they don’t react. The German soldiers march to Stalingrad, they’ve no reason to be there, and therefore they’re defeated. And that’s a very realistic attitude. People are more clever, and societies are more aware than they think they are. Which is why I’m so interested in this inertia. It’s an unconscious protest against a false structure.” “If you have a conception of film that means that it’s the spectators who produce their films, and not the authors who produce the screenplay for the spectators, then you have a materialist theory.”

Patti Smith mentions observing simple human existence.
Bet you think this song is about you - people who inspired pop songs.
Vashti Bunyan: From Here to Before is a riches to rags and back to ‘normality’ doco about the 60s pop star, and directed by Kieran Evans (known for music promos and performance films himself from a poor Welsh background). One of Vashti’s songs recently rang out again and again in a mobile phone cinema ad campaign but for years she and her boyfriend travelled round England in only a horse and cart with only the kindness of strangers. What is your definition of failure asks the film? While social change and the Paris riots rocked, Vashti was doing her own thing.
Brit director Giles Borg of 1234 (LFF) “loves the freshness of ‘mumbecore’.” Nothing new in this aspiring band makes good pic but it feels fresh because Borg has allowed a natural mountain stream of talent to gently flow: “a film for people who still dream it might happen, even if they don’t really know what ‘it’ might be.”
Anvil! The Story of Anvil is a heavy metal band rags to success story directed by screenwriter Sacha Gervasi (released soon in the UK) and was justly hyped and praised at last year’s London Film Festival. More sociologically stirring is The Posters Came From The Walls a documentary study of Depeche Mode fans. For a group of young female Russian fans the band’s music gives them a reason to live. And a guy in LA collects every band T-shirt ever produced. Beats taking prescription drugs that’s for sure!
Astoria cancels its closing party

A R T W O R L D:?

Beautiful Losers LFF (official site) encourages artists to “have fun and make it for your friends” rather than feeling dragooned into the art market.
Art critic and broadcaster Waldemar Januszczak derides art market hedonism in Time for a cull in the art world . He seemed deliriously happy seeking out the American land sculptures of Robert Smithson et al in his recent Channel 4 TV series on sculpture.
BBC Radio 3's Sunday Feature: Inside the Art Schools explores why people go to art school and what they expect from them. Arts guru John Tusa warns of romanticising the art school past.

Cameras roll at Tate to put works on film, Tate website
Check out the brill temporary Photographers Gallery space with the transsexuals of Katy Grannan’s show. “In The Westerns, dreams and reality exist in awkward parallel. Expectations are thwarted and an unforgiving sunshine illuminates both the abject and the joyful in equal measure.”
Graham Norton reveals his La Cage aux Folles alter ego
Felix's Machines looks worth a visit at the spivvy, spiky Gasworks Gallery that nestles in the ghostly shadows of south London’s Vauxhall.
Stephen Friedman Gallery has intriguing ever so unsettling interiors by Swedish artist Mamma Andersson.
Sean Scully reinvigorates abstract painting in posh Mayfair.
Saul Steinberg down in leafy south London Dulwich.
Victory for baroness in art feud
Bohemian Berlin's coolest landmark to be sold off to the highest bidder
Squatters evicted from one Mayfair home move into another

The traditional New Year’s Day concert in Vienna was this year conducted by somewhat controversial Daniel Barenboim (who founded with the late Edward Said, the East West Divan Orchestra promoting peace and understanding in the Middle East.) In addition to bravely asking for peace and justice at the concert he also conducted, chastised and cajoled the clapping of his captive audience in the Radetzky Marsch and had a rare chance to air his comedic skills on the podium as he berated and begged his musicians to remain in Haydn’s jokey ‘Farewell Symphony’ - a curtain raiser for the composer’s 200th anniversary celebrations.
Links to the DVD/CD and YouTube on this classical music blog.
David Frost talks to Barenboim (2008)
The Berlin Phil - live in your own front room. Sounds like a pretty good deal.
Busker to appear in Salome at Covent Garden's Royal Opera House
In a world of its own: Classical crossover

Channel Four's Christianity: A History began with Howard Jacobson's, a Jew himself, Jesus the Jew with future programmes from Tony Blair’s legal other half Cherie Blair and politician Michael Portillo.
Daughters of the desert: Bedouin women who officially do not exist
BBC 4's Science and Islam has physicist Jim Al-Khalili travel through Syria, Iran, Tunisia and Spain to tell the story of the great leap in scientific knowledge that took place in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th centuries.
BBC Radio 4 celebrates Charles Darwin
Natural History Museum exhibition. Channel Four has more as well in a week or so.
Morris's suicide-bomber film gets green light
Robert Fisk: Today's despot is tomorrow's statesman
Who killed Mr Lebanon?: The hunt for Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri's assassins
Onward thespian soldier: Swapping bullets for Broadway
Israeli comedy show satirises Gaza violence

Tales of the unexpected celebrates a 20th season of dance at The Place.
From this Friday, French choreographer Xavier Le Roy: Self Unfinished (1998), takes the audience on a journey of metamorphosis as Xavier Le Roy transforms into an extraordinary hybrid creature – part machine, part alien, part human and his 2007 Le Sacre du Printemps .

Last word to Kluge: “I believe very constantly and with good reason in Utopia; and I’d be a traitor to Utopia if I didn’t show it in reality. I’m not pessimistic at all. The more I believe in the possibility and the reality of the imagination and of Utopia, the more realistic and conservative I must be about Utopia. I agree with Leni Peickert [in Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed] : the longer we wait for Utopia, the better it gets.”

Unbelievable Unbearable London

Thursday 15 January 2009

Wednesday 14 January 2009

a queer, divine, dissatisfaction

Wednesday 7 January 2009

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