Lonely emergencies

click on the bleedin' photo and you'll see better!

i might just get something written by tonight! This snow transport nightmare is past unbelievable - unbeluggingevenmyheadpoundsinsidesnowballsable!!


ONE WEEK LATER – Monday 9 February 2009

Struggling to write this blog over the last 2 years, the heartening result is that several hundred people from this earth desperately check the latest posting for intelligent signs of planetary life. (I run a very poor 100 and second in desperation to The Daily Show I defer;) One can barely write when depressed yet as long as you do ‘people’ assume that one must be healthy and functioning.
[Professor Robert Winston explores the relationship between the music and the medical conditions of composers who suffered mental and physical illness on Tuesdays 1.30pm BBC Radio 4.]
So long as the tube train gets there in the end, does it matter the trauma its commuters have to suffer? Yeah, right dude. I’ve lived in London for over 20 years and the apathy, indifference and stupidity of many denizens has reached the point where you wonder if you’ve been cast in Night of the London Living Dead! Yet the other half of Londoners who don’t want the 2012 Olympics are in another movie all together. One can be blacklisted for enlightened sitting in the dark, though. It’s not that the other 50% don’t want an Olympics more that it’s the cost to a taxpayer who doesn’t appear to receive very much in return and the problems that already besiege the city - leaving aside the question of potential transport chaos. The city grinds to a standstill when there’s more than few inches of snow – no buses at all last Monday with all other transport barely crawling along.
Video diary of a snowy journey: ITV London news’ Phil Bayles tracks his trek to work through the snow.
There was a newspaper photo of Mayor Boris on his daily jog- how did he get his streets gritted? No jogging in my streeets- both my political ‘wards’ (areas) have been lethal for days! The city’s unpreparedness lost £1.2 billion in estimated overall business just for that initial day.Weather forecasters predicted “arctic life-endangering temperatures” several days before. Yet nothing was done. Exasperated too, BBC Newsnight’s anchorman Jeremy Paxman had his ‘Chomsky’ moment: only essential travel “what is essential travel”, he demanded like a perplexed extra-terrestrial? And if you thought that was bad, Newsnight unearthed something else the government would rather keep quiet (remember Sovereign Wealth Funds, Credit default swaps) – with its report on insolvent company Pre-pack administration anger where the same debtors can end up managing the same company time and time again. Sounds just like the rest of the country – wholly or partly privatise everything including public utilities and big business walks way with the profits and the public left stranded in icy sludge. Something else the Brit government would like to keep quiet.
Not to mention the question of Torture this week: David Miliband has disputed claims by two judges that the US threatened to stop sharing intelligence with the UK over an alleged torture case. Also Newsnight (Feb 4)
Karen Greenberg details how Guantanamo Bay went from Geneva Convention-ish to Dante's Inferno-ish in The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days.
Dame Ann Leslie, columnist for the Daily Mail newspaper, noted on BBC’s Dateline that “the [British] default position is secrecy and the American is disclosure”. (Hope I got that quote right, but my video’s all wonky). Default position meaning, of course, when everything’s already f***d. Is that the same as pressing the reset button? Writing a fictional Brit spy novel is so much easier than for an American because anything can be deemed ‘a secret’ here and sensitive to ‘national security’. Icelandic birds in migration seized by Brit naval and port authorities as golden droppings seen in sky! Put it on the front of a newspaper though e.g. when Clare Short MP stated several years ago that Kofi Annan’s United Nations office was bugged and there’s outrage – barely a tinge down the spine of a John Grisham novel.
Fantastic debate on BBC’s Question Time and well worth devoting half an hour.
Newsnight (Feb 2) also had spots on: Trouble for Straw and Lords (Jan 29) on significance of the French protests.
This morning’s BBC TV The Andrew Marr Show had Shadow Conservative Chancellor George Osborne and current Labour one Alistair Darling trying to re-assure everyone. Should they have declared their free cup of BBC coffee or was that caffeine fairly worthless?
Don't insure the banks - nationalize them
Key Labour employment plan close to collapse
Bankers must accept the big bonus madness is over
Gordon Brown's VAT cut has achieved nothing, says Sarkozy
Culture clash over Cornish jetty
Dating A Banker Anonymous
Is the SNP's contribution to save a work by Titian a major result for culture
2012 Olympic costs soars to £547m - The Government admits to the spiralling cost of London 2012.
Mark Lawson Talks To: Bill Bryson on an American ensconced in England (not available on the iPlayer but will be repeated soon)

BBC’s latest Panorama dived into the murky waters of tax havens with Tax Me if You Can, BBC iPlayer

If the recent allegations (revealed in the Sunday Times) of buying influence in the House of Lords among Labour peers had been levelled at the Conservatives there would have been outrage. I kept reminding readers of the Sunday Times Labour ‘cash for honours’ front page story from years ago.
Lords for hire, Peers apologise, but deny wrongdoing, as Sunday Times releases audio
But after police investigations no wrong doing was found the first time ‘round and they all went on their merry way. Teflon New Labour: unbescratchevergessenievable (German socio-political term :). (Note that a ‘working’ peer receives £82.50 as a daily subsistence for meals and incidental travel. That’s roughly the weekly Incapacity Benefit rate {your fate decided by an outsourced privatised French company Atos Origin – if you live to reap that princely benefit} while Income Support romps home at £48.40. Enough said, except that the French company has the government stitched up for 100s of £££millions nearing a billion including a lucrative 2012 Olympics contract!) Of course, Labourites aren’t all bloody useless. Sir Ken Robinson (whose new book The Element is discussed on Nightwaves) was a key education advisor to Tony Blair and authored the report All Our Futures. His argument is that education needs transforming not reforming. I’d extend that argument to most of England’s woes. Robinson wants to encourage creativity, something he defines as “original ideas that have value”. But who decides the value? Value to whom? You can very easily witness this in action observing the eager, eagle-eyed young primary school kids at a gallery education event versus the stolid, bored, curiosity bludgeoned secondary school kids. Why won’t anyone make the necessary paradigm shift?

The same goes for economics – governments have spent almost $1 trillion propping up the edifice of a failing world economic model. Most extraordinarily and unbelievably is the Treasury Select Committee inquiry into whether leading UK financial journalists were in any way responsible for the country’s banking collapse. For a government who’s spent zillions on an illegal Iraq War, privatising everything in sight, and bailing out financial institutions that they the government encouraged in their exploits – it’s a bit ‘rich’ to blame a bunch of journalists, n’est pas? Has the government been watching Mary Poppins on high-def LSD? Is the taxpayer footing the bill for this enquiry? Does the New York Times theatre critic and his cohorts get raked over the coals by Mayor Bloomberg for negative reviews when Broadway sales slump? (By the way,
West End defies recession to post record theatre ticket sales, up 3% on last year’s figures . What about the leading estate agent interviewed in the Financial Times who’s predicting a massive downturn in high-end property prices? Is he a conspirator as well? What about ex Conservative Chancellor Kenneth Clarke who stated years ago his fears that the UK couldn’t continue functioning under its mountain of debt? Or indeed New York wiz Nouriel Roubini? Did someone say WMD (Wobbly Mandarins of Deflection)?
Bank bonus culture
It’s a bit late for that ‘keeping world financial markets erect’ video on Expert Village (thanks to BBC’s Click for the link)
Tripartite remedy for banks carries $1,000bn of purchasing power
Concern on cost to consumer of broadband-for-all plan
Preparing the UK's digital infrastructure for the future
We've been here before: John Harris asks past holders of the purse strings.
Commons Speaker Michael Martin has rebuked a Conservative MP amid a fresh row over police entry to MPs' office Daniel Kawczynski

Nightwaves (Tues 3) has Richard Layard on why our children are unhappy, A Good Childhood.
And the economist Dambisa Moyo very bravely defends her book Dead Aid: Why Aid is Not Working and How There is Another Way for Africa, also a spot on Nightwaves.
Alan J. Pakula’s Julia Roberts 1993 vehicle The Pelican Brief is out on Warner Blu-ray.
Or another John Grisham conspiracy adaptation from the late great Sydney Pollack -The Firm (1993) (not re-released just mentioning) with Tom Cruise.
Or Peter Sellars’ Being There (30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition) [Blu-ray] (Hal Ashby, 1979) Warner (23rd Feb in the UK)
Peter Sellers 5-Film Collection (Lionsgate R1 in the States)
And of course the riveting Frost/Nixon is still on release, arguably director Ron Howard’s most accomplished film to date realising pitch-perfect performances from his cast.
Sir David Frost on Frost/Nixon
Frost/Nixon: Peter Morgan on a change of perspective
Restoring some faith in the democratic political process is the bio-pic of 70s San Francisco gay rights activist Harvey Milk with one of Sean Penn’s finest performances. Robert Epstein’s Academy Award winning 1984 documentaryThe Times of Harvey Milk (just re-issued on DVD by Drakes Avenue) wasn’t that well-known outside gay circles so it’s great to see his life promulgated through Gus van Sant’s fictional film to a wider audience glowing with Harris Savides’ period cinematography.
Film Comment article
Met chief orders gay pride flag to be taken off station

Isobel Armstrong (her most recent book Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination 1830-1880) Wednesday night gave a fascinating lecture on Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl that of course included many references to his philosophical brother William James. In relation to my own argument are James’ ideas on thought and consciousness and the intrinsic connection of our body and our mind. One needs attention to think “when the identical fact recurs we must think of it in a fresh manner, see it under a somewhat different angle...no mental modification ever occurs which is not accompanied or followed by a bodily change.” “Risky instability is kept at bay by habit,” noted Armstrong. Governments deem paradigm shifts of thinking ‘risky instability’ which is why change if at all grinds almost to a halt. Scientific enquiry is based not on answers that will always be pre-existing but on questions. Young kids see the answers very clearly though they may not understand them. That’s why most ask why?

On BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week (Feb 2), Jonathan Miller was discussing his new production (set in 1930s depression Paris) (live broadcast on Sky TV with Werner Herzog’s short film take on the opera ) of Puccini’s opera La bohème and the importance of detail.
Jonathan Miller returns to opera for La bohème
What is it that we are looking at he always asks? Conventional wisdom is often not that wise. I assisted Dr. Miller on a staging of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and what excited him was that no matter your faith or non-belief, here was a story of a man’s life with the kind of details that only someone rapt with interest and attention could possibly have written. And for decades and longer, Bach’s oratorio had been shrouded in the rather dull inattentivness of conventional wisdom. “The world is totally insignificant until we actually have an attitude and a relationship with it – that’s entirely what theatre is about, noticing what Flaubert noticed, getting people to pay attention,” said Miller in his Sunday Times interview.
La bohème Front Row review (Feb 5)
Werner Herzog's short film of Puccini's La bohème – set in Ethiopia.
Opera Shorts: Behind the Scenes on Feb 21 and other dates in February on the Sky Arts 2 channel
Werner Herzog: My films are certainly not art
Also on Start the Week, Steven Berkoff discusses his notions of time in the theatrical space with a new production of On the Waterfront.

Why are there always snowmen never snowwomen? When a tiny 5 year-old tip-toed by my snow-alien (unable to make the Tate’s fourth Triennial, Altermodern preview [Front Row Tues 2] I fashioned my own socio-political work) she knew that the sculpted mound of snow was something she equated to a snowman. “He doesn’t have any eyes,” and she proceeded to deliver an entire impressive recipe for designating facial features. I relented and gave my snow creature one tiny black eye of bin-liner.
The Daily Show new book on the planet Pluto
Wyat Cenac on the Washington church battle to win the new President’s posterior on their pew, Obama's new church.
Jonah Goldberg ’s book on Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning
Soda Pictures have out the DVD of El Baño del Papa (The Pope’s Toilet)

The devil was in the details of the new Royal Academy show Andrea di Pietro della Gondola a.k.a. Palladio: His Life and Legacy his first in London for 30 years and celebrating the 500th anniversary of the architect’s birth. The influence of Palladio’s synthesis of beauty and purpose is everywhere, New York, Washington, C20th great Le Corbusier - The Art of Architecture (he whose influence is somewhat wrongly blamed for those hideous tracts of social housing) and Britain’s own Sir Christopher Wren dubbed Palladio the Virgil of architecture. But if you’re not an architecture groupie or practitioner is the Academy’s show going to fire your interest? Yes and no. It’s difficult to know just how else the show could have been mounted short of expensive high tech ‘build your own villa’ gadgetry.Yet Palladio’s progression through life is fascinating: poorly educated, starting as an ornamental stone mason, meeting his mentor the poet and scholar Giangiorgio Trissino who gave him his name and whose interest in reforming linguistics (no standard form of written Italian existed in the early C16) led Palladio to create his own architectural language. The show’s models, plans, paintings – all standard fare. And though not immediately gripping – perhaps the show and otherwise excellent audio guide could have initially emphasised more Palladio the amazing architectural social reformer (low cost housing etc) – one’s attention is rewarded by the final room, “[his] books use accessible language and juxtapose text with legible illustrations”. Alas, the Palladio inspired Lord Burlington's Chiswick House (recently beautifully restored) is inaccessible as is the entire surrounding park until spring (so they promise). Could they not have left a little bit of park open to soothe souls in search of solace? Admittedly, the park has waited a long time for its facelift.
The stonecutter who shook the world from The Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey.
The Perfect House
The polite truth about Palladio

Detail becomes spookily subsumed in the photographs of
Axel Hütte . At the opening this week he spoke to me of space and perspective’s magic and of the other-worldliness of Stanley Kubrick’s lenses in The Shining. His photos usher one through the wardrobe door into another dimension with such exquisite gossamer you’d swear they’d been manipulated or printed on a special paper. But they ain’t. The detail is all there but it’s hard to distance oneself from the forest, the ice crevasse or the cave mouth – hypnotised you enter in.

Iranian-American painter Tala Madani’s Dazzle Men at Pilar Corrias is inspired by WWI ‘dazzle ships’ – camouflaging ships in brightly coloured distortions, and her paintings immediately grab one’s attention through the artists’ astute calligraphic simplicity and contemporary resonance. Her work is also in the Saatchi Gallery’s new show Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East that I haven’t had a chance to see yet (her New York gallery is Lombard Freid).
The Independent review of Saatchi show and
Guardian review
Pilar Corrias on opening her new London space
The remaking of Iran: empire of the senses
New series on BBC Iran and the West
And Rageh Inside Iran (iplayer) is a fantastic 90 min doco on Tehran and navigating the red lines of censorship.
Henna inspires computer animation
Nurse suspended for prayer offer

Lily Allen is a Pandora’s box of emotions compared to Iranian pop marzipan heart throb Benyamin. Her new album’s out with it’s single Fuck You Very Much. I’ve only undone the ribbon of Lily’s box and my sense is that though the music is catchy clever rather than mucho inventive, her real strength is as a cosmopolitan poet: the Tracey Emin of pop. Moreover, she never seems to distance her listeners with the sense of ‘I wish I had Lily’s creative simplicity’ – her songs make you want to get composing on that computer and say ‘this is what my ffffffffffff life’s like too, f£!*^FF£ the bullshit I hear every night on the news, that useless boyf and girlf, those useless niceties, all the useless petty Hitler’s in the world - we are LIVE (Lively Intelligent Vegetations on Earth)’. Edith Sitwell’s Facade rattles teeth with rap.
Lily’s MySpace
Lily Allen: uncertain smile
Tecnobrega beat rocks Brazil

Jackie Mason - The Ultimate Jew (Arrow DVD not yet listed on their site yet) will also cheer up many of us as well as pissing off a few others. And it’s surprising how the younger Brits know comedienne Sarah Silverman but not Mason. He could so easily play safe given his huge fan base in America but never does. Instead he simultaneously perpetuates Jewish stereotypes whilst also admonishing them, liberally anchoring his anecdotes with reality expletives. This DVD is of his farewell date last year in New York is so cutting-edge even the cockroaches would stay out of his kitchen else they keel over in fits of laughter never able to right themselves. His comic technique is so effortless it’s as if some ordinary guy just started a conversation at the bus-stop and before you know it you’ve paid his fare gone to bed with him. The world will always be the same but Jackie Mason at least makes a new one for that 80 minutes and maybe longer if the bus doesn’t run over your little improvements in humanity.

A crisis in British comedy?
Brit comic Frank Skinner: Panorama: Have I Got Bad Language For You?
Carol Thatcher's golliwog remarks ‘made eyes roll in the green room

Fuck is
an American doco directed by Steve Anderson about the F word. Probably its greatest achievement is in making former President George W. Bush seem like a regular, cool guy
who’s able to give F and a finger with the best of them. The film’s packed with the usual suspects - Billy Connolly, Steve Bochco, Hunter S. Thompson, Janeane Garofalo “we move 1 step forward and 2 steps back” and of course F godfather of the all Lenny Bruce, “every age needs a Lenny Bruce and every age will try to [kill] him,” the great Brit theatre director Peter Hall is quoted as saying. It’s a fun ‘Feelgood’ doco (800 F’s in it, their count not mine) that ultimately proves just a little thin for its 93 min. We learn about the American FCC (broadcast regulator) history, that according to an Oxford Dictionary interviewee the word originated in 1475 England, but we never get anything but an American perspective. There’s clever animation by Bill Plympton, one of which illuminates the grammatical use of the word, but no discussion or illustration of the legality of grammar – the F sexual act vs F you, me, them the world!–in different world contexts.

The ICA have a great line-up for its Feedback events series: Peter Greenaway, Mike Figgis, artists from the new label City of Quartz – every one sounds good.

Glenn Ligon's second exhibition at the Thomas Dane gallery Nobody and Other Songs centres around the video The Death of Tom (shown at the Toronto Film Fest last year) and is based on the final scene from Uncle Tom's Cabin and Edwin S. Porter's 14-minute silent film made for the Thomas A. Edison studio in 1903. Shot on 16mm black and white film, Ligon sought to recreate Tom's death scene and his visions but after the footage was developed, he found the images were blurred, decided to use them anyway and added a piano soundtrack. It’s a shame one’s not banned from hearing this blurb until after seeing the film because the film takes on a life of its own - for me, as if the blurred lines were musical overtones. Nothing new here given the history of abstract experimental film (cf Len Lye) but nonetheless a worthwhile visit.

Australian Aboriginal art

Renowned 70s Brit sound sculptor William Furlong has two shows, the other Possibility and Impossibility of Fixing Meaning at Laure Genillard’s ‘eco’ gallery in London: “the TC Mach heat pump is air-source (new generation) and generates heat and hot water from a fan taking air outside (just like an air conditioning unit). Other eco bits include using recycled everything from card /stationary to loo paper to ink in our biros. No chemicals in cleaning or drinking products, i.e organic beer and wine only,” says Laure.
The inspiring ‘I want to run away from civilisation and build a new one’ Garbage Warrior is out on DVD.

Anyone familiar with HBO’s Mad Men (new series on BBC TV) will already be savvy with the disillusionment of post-WW2 American surburban upward mobility in Revolutionary Road. Based on the 1961 novel by Richard Yates director Sam Mendes uses the camera to observe these creatures while always keeping his audience at a distance. Perhaps too much so. “No one forgets the truth, they just get better at lying,” says April (Kate Winslet) to Frank (DiCaprio) and John Givings (a superb Michael Shannon) is so glad to hear the couple voice life’s “hopeless emptiness”.
Matthew Weiner: Mad Men after the break

Barry Lyndon is part of the BFI’s Stanley Kubrick retrospective and is full of more disillusionment as its doomed outsider hero ascends society’s ranks. It really is an amazing film and a must-see on that National Film Theatre screen. I didn’t catch it this time around but I remember the chilling duelling pistols scene (with a young actor in a small part who later to become Kubrick’s right arm) and the elegant, slow, classical, tragic inevitability of that Schubert chamber piece on the soundtrack.You need some Jackie Mason after seeing that I tell you.
There’s also an installation by acclaimed British artists Jane & Louise Wilson, based on an unfinished Kubrick project about the Holocaust, in the BFI Southbank Gallery.

Tokyo Sonata
is a strange, elegiac art-house film from ex-horror genre director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no relation to his better known namesake) and will be released on Eureka’s Masters of Cinema DVD label in May. The film starts simply, beautifully photographed in classic Japanese distanced, observant ‘Ozu’ style about a corporate man losing his job and masquerading the fact from his family. 80 min in and just as you think all the family strands are winding up, things begin twisting faintly surreal. I’ve twice seen this film and while it’s not revelatory, the director’s experience in the horror genre subliminally leaves humanity’s trace elements eddying in the mind.

The ICA’s 6-film season Reality Fiction: Japanese Films Inspired by Actual Eventsincludes Kaneto Shindo’s 1970 (B/W) Live Today, Die Tomorrow! (Hadaka No Jukyu Sai) about a 19-year-old Norio Nagayama (changed to Michio Yamada in the film) in 1968 who used a stolen gun from the US troops at Yokosuka and shot four people at different locations. Really quite radical given the film’s date.
Who’s Camus Anyway? (Kamiyu Nante Shiranai) directed by Mitsuo Yanagimachi (2005) is based on the May 2000 stabbing of an old woman. The murderer, a high school boy, said ‘I wanted to experience a murder. I wanted to experiment and see what happens if I kill a person’. A group of college students making a movie based on the incident, find themselves struggling with issues raised in Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger. The Japan Foundation is touring the season of films throughout the UK.
Damages begins on Sunday 15 February on BBC One
Glenn Close Front Row (Feb 2)
And Edmund White’s Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel about the ‘hotel trashing’ French poet who you probably wouldn’t want as a house guest.
Some suggestions for staying home and pondering life on DVD–

The Dardenne Brothers Collection (R2 UK Artificial Eye)
Import Export from Trinity
Unrelated (New Wave Films)
Louis Theroux - The Strange and the Dangerous is out on 2Entertain DVD including his hit TV shows:
African Hunting Holiday, Louis goes inside California’s San Quentin, Louis and Gambling. These will open minds to the world.
Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa (Paramount in the States) and their reality buddies-
A depressed locust hides alone
Those poor bumble bees: Plight of the humble bee
Newsnight on the bee.
Born to be Good - new book on the social functions of emotions
and Animals make Us Human
And don’t forget Wall-E that last night earned a Best Animated Film BAFTA. Ewig..........

Or watch more humans battle it out in Lakeview Terrace and
the Coen Brothers Burn After Reading> (Universal)
I've Loved You So Long (trailer) from Lionsgate who also have the fascinating
Angel (no images on their site at the moment)
Unanimous Pictures have The Visitor and from the same label The Girl in the Park
Criterion in the States have some great new DVD’s:Ikuru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
Simon of the Desert (Luis Buñuel, 1965
La Strada (Federico Fellini, 1954)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger, 1943)
Or Moses and Aron (Danièle Huillet + Jean-Marie Straub, 1975) will really test your cineaste stamina.

Eureka’s DVD first for Carlo Lizzani's Last Days Of Mussolini is really only of cineaste interest due to its amazing Italian dubbed cast of Rod Steiger and Henry Fonda and the Morriconi score. Bernardo Bertolucci subtlety of The Conformist and 1900 this isn’t.
A better buy at mid-price (no extras) is Man of a Thousand Faces (1957, B/W) with the classic performance of James Cagney as silent film star Lon Chaney along with Dorothy Malone and Jane Greer.

Reality doesn’t come much more hard-bitten than the life of French singer Edith Piaf - The Perfect Concert and Piaf: The Documentary. At £16.69 for 2 discs (9 songs from different archive sources at 50min and the 1 hour 2003 Arte France doco) it’s not too bad value. And no matter how many times one hears Piaf’s rags to riches fraught with tragedy life story, it’s always deeply, deeply moving. She rose the hearts of her listeners to the rafters but always struggled to keep her own heart of malleable iron afloat. Because of union rules, Piaf asked her regular composer collaborator Monnot to sing the song Piaf composed La Vie en Rose on her behalf but she refused as she thought Piaf’s lyrics “too silly”. Just goes to show how wrong you can be.

Hearts are being tossed Spanish style in Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. A return to form everyone is saying. Well, sort of. The performances are great but you’d almost wished Allen had done the voice-over himself. Everything is a bit light, detached, breezy. And you’d wish it wasn’t so ‘picture postcard’, the wonderful crazy architecture Gaudi etc. What about Manhattan I hear you cry? But there was an emotional connection to the city, its architecture, an umbilical link to its characters’ emotions in the same way that art and literature became emotional metaphors in Hannah and Her Sisters. Co-incidentally I went to a lecture on Spanish cellist Pablo Casals after the screening and wished Vicky Cristina had embodied some of the opposing musical and sociological forces of his music. Allen gives us post-Spanish classical guitar seduction but it’s as balmy as the Barcelona breeze that night. Still, great performances all round and it is a gentle funny film. But is that sting in the tail so unique to Woody Allen films like Crimes and Misdemeanours still there? Hearts that sink forever? Penelope Cruz won a Best Supporting Actress BAFTA last night for her manic stings in Vicky Cristina.

Fun spaghetti Western spoof in Korean Kim Jee-Woon’s The Good, the Bad and Weird set in 30s Manchuria. Clever enough to keep one’s attention over 2 hours plus? Just about. Would be interesting to see the director helm a contemporary thriller spoof.

And I had great fun at Peter Sollet’s comedy Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Chemistry casting, comic direction grounded in truth, teenage love – aaah, but it certainly doesn’t get any easier with age.
The Broadway hit musical of Wedekind’s play Spring Awakening has just hit London.
Period drama plus teen angst makes hit show
Or Sir Roger Norrington (from BBC TV hit conducting series Maestro conducts Joseph Haydn’s The Return of Tobias (10 Feb). The score is somewhat more sophisticated than that of Spring Awakening I hear.

More art anyone:
Deutsche Börse Photography Prize
From Fashion And Back: Hussein Chalayan's latest exhibition
Hussein Chalayan: 15 years of experimental projects
Six Tuesdays After Film as a Critical Practice
Andres Serrano’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Last weeks of Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery

Adam Kirsch’s New Yorker article Hannah Arendt and the power of the impersonal should be read by all as we consider the power we have over our this mortal coil, our attempts to understand it, and if we can ever be happy on or within it. (Direct quotes of that article hereon) [Arendt turned to Zionism as an “escape route from illusion into reality, from mendacity and self-deception to an honest existence.”]
[No one has argued more forcefully than Arendt that to deprive human beings of their public, political identity is to deprive them of their humanity-and not just metaphorically...
In ancient Greece, she writes, “the polis was permeated by a fiercely agonal spirit, where everybody had constantly to distinguish himself from all others, to show through unique deeds or achievements that he was the best of all. The public realm, in other words, was reserved for individuality; it was the only place where men could show who they really and inexchangeably were.”]


[This is the insight that makes Arendt a thinker for our time, when failed states have again and again become the settings for mass murder. She reveals with remorseless logic why emotional appeals to "human rights" or "the international community" so often prove impotent in the face of a humanitarian crisis]

[At times, Arendt's love of the public and the political, and her fear of the private and the psychological, becomes almost neurotically intense. As she wrote to McCarthy, "the inner turmoil of the self, its shapelessness," must be kept under strict quarantine: "It is no less indecent, unfit to appear, than our digestive apparatus, or else our inner organs, which also are hidden from visibility by the skin."]

[...for “it was precisely the soul for which life showed no consideration.”]Kate Winslet deservedly won a Best Actress BAFTA last night for her role in The Reader. And I wrote last blog of my troubles with what I felt was the film’s ‘closure’ on the subject of moral guilt and responsibility. Danny Boyle in one of his many Slumdog Millionaire BAFTA acceptance speeches, quoted a line from Howard Barker’s play Victory directed at the Royal Court theatre (Barker will be unearthed in the next century or two as one of the great Brit dramatists of his century): “there’s nowhere to go except where you’ve come from”. As humans we are each ultimately alone in that search for destination. Destiny. Family, friends try to direct us or perhaps no one can. Nonetheless, the answer will always be there. There lies my agreement with Arendt's work. For what we have is the power to change the questions. The last note of a Schubert piano sonata, the last word of a Flaubert novel, will always be the same. But we as humans have the extraordinary power to change the journeying to that final resting place. To have a unique relationship with the soul of that journey. As a performer, writer, reader, teacher etc there’s often a large amount of public ego to show off that questioning but in doing so don’t we usually abolish doubt in favour of prestige? Perhaps that’s what The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is all about. There’s a line in the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story that wishes Benjamin were black. Schubert can give you musical markings, Stevie Wonder, Bach too, but only a Pablo Casals can dance like Casals. Only Wonder can see as Wonder. Yet they all share some of each other’s pain and beauty. Of Edith Piaf. What every one of us can do is find the dance within ourselves. Its different colours, the ones we can call our own. But to what extent do we share that with others? If we are hard-wired into an ‘ism’ from birth would it help or hinder to share? For Rageh Omar one of his proudest journalistic moments seemed to be getting his article on his Tehran experiences for an Iranian music magazine through the censors and onto the front cover. A journalist who’d prided himself on freedom of speech. As Isobel Armstrong notes, in Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl, in order for the heroine to gain something of her lover in total freedom she must sacrifice her freedom through the bonds of ‘public’ marriage.

There are ‘isms’ everywhere that governments use to try ordering the world. Culture may not make us better people but it helps us to dance, to find an order and a road within ourselves one that is not Arendt’s ‘public political face’.The Reader does seem to suggest that as understanding humans we can somehow prevent evil through enlightened political will. But as Hannah Arendt believes we cannot. The world financial meltdown has many villains but the sad fact was that so many people believed in a dream not of their own. A dance they could never keep pace with in maintaining their public appearance. Or a dance hall they wanted to close down because they were too lazy even to discover what went on inside. Scared of ‘the personal’ if they did. In the end, Kate Winslet’s character in The Reader did find her own rhythm, her own path, which is why she had no need to enter the outside ‘political’ world ever again. She retreated once and forever more into the most private realm that of death. Ralph Fiennes character did not, though. Like Jacques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It he sold his own lands to see another’s while needing to keep his ‘public face’. He helped someone to dance whilst always regretting his own cowardice. He will never dance now though the film suggests with closure that he will. He will always keep his public life devoid of the emotional.
BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week (Feb 9): 20 years after a fatwa was imposed on Salman Rushdie, Andrew Marr and his guests discuss the consequences for freedom of expression.

Much of the human race learns very little from its historical evils precisely according to Arendt’s argument. It has no need to. It’s a collection of books that one never needs read, a piano that never needs to be played. Yet there are humans intent on evil who do read, play and listen. They want not only to own their experience but that of others as well. Stalin was a case in point. We can choose to dance in the lines of fire and risk the consequences, or never to return the letter, the phone call, never to risk looking foolish. Or like Terry Gilliam (who won an honorary BAFTA last night fffffffing all the way home)’s film The Fisher King (1991) we can dance the line between illusion and the reality but it will always fill us with joy while simultaneously disappointing us. The answers were there for the Slumdog Millionaire but for many they seem illusory. Gravity and Grace. “The worlds revolve like ancient women/ Gathering fuel in vacant lots.”