Does art ever really force us to look at ourselves? Or does it simply cajole? Tempt? Tease? Tame? Taunt? Torment both artist and viewer?
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset wrote in
The Dehumanization of Art (published in 1925):
“Perception of ‘lived’ reality and perception of artistic form, as I have said before, are essentially incompatible because they call for a different adjustment of our perceptive apparatus.”
When visiting an exhibition of children's drawings, Picasso remarked: "When I was their age I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them." (quoted in Penrose’s Picasso: His Life and Work)
And of course probably the most famous Picasso quotes: “Art is a lie that makes us realise the truth.”
The National Gallery’s Picasso: Challenging the Past follows not the usual curatorial chronology but has six rooms each exploring Picasso’s ‘debt’ to art history “as a source for energy and innovation” states the catalogue. The show most certainly achieves its aim (there’s also additional influences in the main gallery’s Room 1), moreover though, this approach frees Picasso from all those boring Blue/Rose etc art historian dubbed periods and shows just how great, prolific, fun and spontaneous an artist was he. It’s so bleedinly obvious this approach yet not one that’s been much taken up by galleries. Seen in the same room, 18 years separates Girl in a Chemise (1905) and Portrait of Olga (1923) showing Picasso really could ‘paint’ more traditionally and not just as a ‘student’. Yet the childlike Van Gogh influenced 1938 Man with a Straw Hat and an Ice-Cream Cone hits one straight off in the exhibition’s first room. There’s no message in this art simply childish joy and childish frustration of life and many of his female nudes. In fact, the show’s curator was at some pains to distance Picasso from his politics when I broached with her that issue. And though I don’t agree with her, quite honestly, the National Gallery show proves all the more arresting, involving and intriguing for that decision.
Paris police unveil Picasso files
“When Pablo Picasso applied for a visa to the United States in 1950, it threw State Department and FBI officials into full alert. The purpose of the artist's visit—his first ever to the United States—was to lead 12 delegates from the Congrès Mondial des Partisans de la Paix (World Congress of Peace Partisans) to Washington in an effort to persuade President Truman to ban the atomic bomb. The peace congress, which had been founded a year earlier in Paris and Prague, had already been identified as a powerful Communist front.”
Gertje R. Utley’s Pablo Picasso: The Communist Years is published by Yale University Press.
Unbelievable nowadays (of course) but so popular was Picasso’s dove image in the 1950s that the CIA–backed Paix et Liberté movement targeted it for caricature in anti–Communist propaganda campaigns.
Dave Borling’s first novel Guernica tells the story.
BBC Culture Show special
Costa Gavras is interviewed on the 40th anniversary of his landmark feature Z (1969), “about an incorruptible judge investigating the killing at a peace demo of a reformist politician, played by Yves Montand. Z was an indictment of the US-backed coup in Greece, and banned under the 1967-74 military junta.” His latest film Eden Is West opened London's Human Rights Watch film festival last month.
Picasso tapestry on show in London
BBC’s series The Lost World of Communism (out on 2 Entertain DVD)
Across the Thames at the Hayward Gallery is French artist Annette Messager’s The Messengers. Her use of everyday objects has made her very collectable by the world’s major galleries. Justifiably so - if you saw any one of her works individually the response would be wow, so collectively imagine. Many seem effortless but you peep through slots to see her early 70s work in The Secret Room and this play of hide and seek (at times a horrific Grimms fairy tale) continues throughout the show: 1973 -“We are multiple, contradictory and ungraspable, up to the moment we cease living. I am undoubtedly always wanting to be someone else, somewhere else, and to avoid being restricted to an ultimate form, lacking contradiction, before that time has come.”
The following Messager extracts are from an interview with Natasha Leoff in Journal of Contemporary Art:
“In order to be touched by a work of art, it must first refer to the person who made it, a strong personality, and it must touch the collective, everyone must find something in this order.
Artaud is a good model for this. He made his drawings for himself only and we can all find ourselves in these portraits, his auto-portraits or his manifestos. It is precisely this back and forth between the individual, between the inside and the outside, the private and the public, which makes a work of art stand out, because it touches both worlds at the same time.”
The Messengers is probably a great show for kids more because of its honesty than its ‘kiddyness’. The Boarders (1971-72) is 3 cases of taxidermied sparrows (some real some fake) displaying their ‘life cycle’. Once again the prison and freedom of childhood.
“When children are asked to draw their house, even if they live in an apartment, they will always draw a traditional house with an attic and a basement. When we ask a child to draw clothing, he will always draw a traditional piece of clothing. This is what I like, for example in what we call Art Brut, which is always outside of trend, of fashion. Obviously I come from a specific generation of artists, but let's say by using the kinds of timeless materials-cloth, paper, crayons-that are not directly linked to today's technologies, I am interested in transcending a certain temporality. I would love to work with video, but somehow I feel incapable of using that kind of material today. I would like to use video as easily as I use a pencil... Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley engage in child-games, what we call in French "pipi-caca." In my work on the other hand, the colored crayon becomes a weapon, it is pointed. I stab with it; it keeps the formal aspect of the pretty colored pencil but is lethal, deadly.”- Journal of Contemporary Art
Coloured woollen yarn, soft toys, gloves, dresses (“part fairy tale princesses, part coffin”), pastel painted parachute ‘sea-anemone’ bouncy castles (Inflated-Deflated,2006), finally lead the exhibition’s visitor to her large 2005 Venice Biennale room Casino – undulating fabric: is it resting, waiting and if so for whom and to what purpose? Things get bigger, more restless - mirrors Them and Us, Us and Them (2000) “an entertainment for bored long-dead Popes”, until finally fabric automatons Articulated-Disarticulated her response to ‘mad-cow disease’ and the heart of her forest - Dependence-Independence (1996). I guess the kids have to learn sometime. What’s frightening is that nowadays they probably know it all already. A range of design and giftware for the gallery shop has also been specially commissioned from leading designers. Your fear after seeing the show though is that they may literally fly off the shelves or worse still stealthily stalk you home.
Upstairs at the Hayward is - Mark Wallinger Curates: The Russian Linesman - Frontiers, Borders and Thresholds – not quite as exciting as hoped for (and no where near as fun as Messager) but many of his selections of mostly other artists work are always worth a gander.
How Mark Wallinger finally won the hearts of the British public
Tate Modern extension go ahead
Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History with Jigsaws is just out from Atlantic Books. Pieces and edges. Hmmm...
The Paris Review interview
There's now a Front Row archive with a link to each episode (without expiring after a week)!!! Better late than never I guess.
Radical new plans by the Government to regulate psychoanalysis . Where would that put pioneers in the RD Laing vein one wonders?
RD Laing: The abominable family man
(More 4 news)
Start the Week
has Michael Portillo examining what drives people to violence and whether any one of us has the potential to become violent.
How Violent Are You? will be shown later this month as part of BBC 2’s Violence Season.
Dr. Jonathan Miller reviews the new exhibition Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900 at the Wellcome Collection in London, which examines the relationship between mental illness, the visual arts and architecture in Vienna during the period 1890-1914.
[Addition: Madness and the artistic imagination]
Did I Leave The Gas On? on sufferers of obsessive compulsive disorder
Some would say the eponymous journo hero of Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (narrated by erstwhile fan, Johnny Depp) would have benefited from more therapy. Yea: consider the final paragraphs of his obit in The Economist (Feb 24th 2005)-
“In 1964 he had made a long journey to Ketchum, Idaho, to the grave of Ernest Hemingway, one of his models and heroes. He wanted to understand why Hemingway had killed himself in his cabin in the woods, and concluded that he had lost his sense of control in a changing world:
It is not just a writer's crisis, but they are the most obvious victims because the function of art is supposedly to bring order out of chaos, a tall order even when the chaos is static, and a superhuman task when chaos is multiplying...So finally, and for what he must have thought the best of reasons, he ended it with a shotgun.”
Optimum’s Gonzo DVD is great, but by the man’s very nature could probably never have been revelatory even with all the interview outtakes as extras and an audio commentary from director Alex Gibney: “[His] contradictions embodied the central contradictions of the United States – being a country of great idealism and possibility but also possessed with this dark side...the fear and loathing as Hunter called it, and a really mean violent streak.” “[He was] a novelist in a journalist’s body and it allowed him to get to a kind of deep ironic truth that was beyond a recitation of the facts.” He ran for office - initially as a joke - for Sheriff of Aspen, but one that became serious.
On the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention riots: “Two fractious sides that were beating to death the American dreams, and that’s what was really horrifying [Hunter]; there was no middle way, no sense of dialogue anymore and that the extremes had won.”
He supported McGovern’s ’72 campaign (no surprise) as the Senator described Washington as “I’m sick and tired of old men sitting around in an air-conditioned rooms here dreaming up wars for young people to die in.”
Hunter was lauded for being against ‘the system’: by the Republicans (though he loathed Nixon) for his gun-toting gun lovin’ life-style and by the Democrats for his sincere belief in social change giving it ‘hip’ appeal. Thus becoming a victim of his own success and a ‘darling’ of the Vanity Fair magazine crowd. He was the guy everyone knew was inside himself. The guy they would never admit to being. The guy women loved to hate and hated to love. Somewhere in the middle of that water elevated, across the lake his favourite Great Gatsby something the crazy ‘Wild Turkey’ man on the other side had become part of whilst trying to destroy it. The fly on the gateaux hovering ‘Christ-like’ over the water.
The Gonzo Tapes
State of Play
Hunter was sent to Zaire in 1974 to cover the fight between George Foreman and Muhammad Ali (travelling with Ralph Steadman, his Rolling Stone illustrator)but he remained by his hotel pool awash with marijuana never filing his report. Gibney’s doco doesn’t tell us whether he made it to any of the 12-hour, three night long concert (The Rumble in the Jungle) held concurrently in Kinshasa with James Brown, BB King, Bill Withers, Celia Cruz, Miriam Makeba, the Spinners and on and on? Jeffrey Levy-Hinte edited the Academy Award® winning When We Were Kings about the Ali-Foreman fight and has collated the hitherto unseen concert and behind the scenes footage into Soul Power (nabbed by Sony Pictures Classics for North American and Latin American) and very cannily by Eureka in the UK (they hope to prem it at Glastonbury this year, later theatrically and then on their Masters of Cinema DVD series). It is an absolutely extraordinary 93 minutes. Documentarians today are spoilt by light, portable DV cameras, so marvel, just marvel at how effortless the great Albert Maysles and Paul Goldsmith (Rust Never Sleeps), Kevin Keating (Harlan County USA) and Roderick Young make it all seem with a old celluloid cameras (16mm). The footage has been restored in HD (High Definition). The ‘Gonzo’ irony was that the concert was made possible by a Liberian investment group with dictator Mobutu Sese Seko still in power. Or as James Brown puts it: “No black man ever got liberated by being broke”. And there’s a great line from Ali himself as he swaps a fly: “The flies here stay hungry and fast, in America they’re overfed so they move slower.”
blogspot mention
Q&A: Jeffrey Levy-Hinte
YouTube
Toronto Film Fest prem last year
A conversation with Bill Withers (just ‘cause he’s great - not from the film)
Making of
Tyson is released by Revolver. (Front Row)
“If you can’t satirise yourself you have no identity,” says one of the top funny people in More 4’s 100 Greatest Stand-ups (as voted for by the public). What happens when great comedians start doing the ‘talking dog’ movies of Hollywood, though? Thankfully, some still remember the kennel.
The Omid Djalili Show - Series 1 is out on DVD.
His No Agenda - Live at the London Palladium
Russell Brand on sex, Sachs and self-improvement
Richard Curtis about his new comedy The Boat That Rocked on BBC Radio 4’s The Film Programme (April 3).
Richard Curtis admits he took some liberties with his pirate-radio homage.
Armando Iannucci's debut feature film In the Loop discussed with Alastair Campbell.
And the series that spawned the film: The Thick of It: The Specials (out on 2 Entertain DVD)
The dark art of spin (More 4 News) – couldn’t have and died and gone to heaven for better Westminster publicity for the film.
Michael J. Fox’s sense of humour is always inspiring - The Daily Show
Elizabeth Warren depresses even Jon Stewart with details how much taxpayer money has been sent to Wall Street and what they've done with it. (The Daily Show)
Clown therapy puts the smile back on faces of children whose lives were shattered
Cindy Sherman’s new show opened last night in London.
I'm every woman (Sunday Times) interview
The DVD of Not Quite Hollywood is out and like Gonzo is another Optimum ‘must-have’, moreover, an important document in cinema history given its exhaustive commentary by director Mark Hartley and contributors. This is the side of Australian cinema ‘Ozploitation’ that wasn’t promoted by the tourist board – ‘Tarantino’s Oz’ (an early affectionado of the genre). And this doco really is quite revelatory – an untold story and balanced in telling at that - these are not films “as engines for social change” but ones harking the audience back to the “Nickelodeon days of laughs and gasps”.
Senses of Cinema article on Alvin Purple
Front Row
spot on whether film classification is too lenient: film director Stephen Parsons explains why he asked the British Board of Film Classification to give his film Wishbaby a more restrictive certificate - changing it from a 15 to an 18.
There’s commentary on Optimum’s The Signal DVD too
(US site) that’s probably more inspiring for aspirant indie filmmakers (all shot on Canon XLH1 HDV video) than Joe Public. Fans of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, they are funny guys though (as is reflected in the film’s black comedy). “You don’t really need verisimilitude when you have crack jay-walking zombies,” says one of the three directors who in turn direct a third of the movie ‘on the fly’ in Atlanta - hence the jaywalking joke. (A prominent UK historian on his way to a conference was even arrested doing it, so beware). “Justin is my Atlanta Klaus Kinski,” they quip again. Yet the directors do exhibit a moral questioning of the horror genre whilst espousing the entertainment value. Once again, the monster may well be within us.
This wonderfully titled cult blog muses on ‘shock tactics’ in cinema (March 02, 2009 posting)
Tony Manero (ICA)(Youtube) is
director Pablo Larrain’s second feature and looks amazing shot on 16mm blown up to 35mm. Set in 1979 Santiago Chile during Pinochet's brutal dictatorship, aging Raul Peralta (Alfredo Castro) is obsessed with the John Travolta charcter in Saturday Night Fever, hence the title. At times it’s almost Robert Bressonian in its brutal, unflinching (Raul casually murders several innocents) observation of everyday detail as he sets about constructing a minute flickering dance floor and mirror ball in order to practice for a TV Manero lookalike competition. Macabrely funny and deeply disturbing, it’s a totally engrossing film exhibiting all the expertise of Abel Ferrara at his best.
eye for eye film
French site
Vertigo article: The Dance Macabre of Tony Manero
Let The Right One In (Låt den rätte komma) (trailer) was the discovery of the 2008 New York Tribeca festival and is what the ‘reality’ Dardennes brothers would make if they went ‘Vampire’. This quality more than the shades of Stephen King and Anne Rice allow Swedish director Tomas Alfredson and writer John Ajvide Lindqvist (adapting his own novel) to explore the pre-teen world of the outsider that though horrifying is exquisitely redemptive. Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) lives with his single mum in 1982 Stockholm social housing, and new girl next door Eli (Lina Leandersson) is a bit odd - "I'm twelve, though I've been twelve for a long time." Giving Oskar confidence to fend off his violent classmate bullies, Eli is inextricably drawn to Oskar into revealing her secret. It’s a magnificent, haunting film that photographed by Dutch-Swede Hoyte van Hoytema in anamorphic widescreen like a Renaissance painting forever frozen in ice always seems to whisper. A crucial character trait was changed from the novel, probably for the better, as it distills the essences of the character’s human needs and the essence of the vampire as something within oneself yet purged and manifested in an external genre construct.
the book
Tomas Alfredson reveals the secrets of his gory sound effects and poet, publisher, painter, photographer and actor Viggo Mortensen (star of Lord of the Rings) speaks about his new film
Magnolia thinks bloggers should chill out about Let The Right One In’s subtitles on the US DVD and Blu-Ray.
Andrei Molodkin wants your body
Andrei Molodkin: black gold, blood red
BBC Radio 4 Remembrance of Smells Past
Eureka DVD have Carl Dreyer’s Der Vampyr
Ludwig Koch and the Music of Nature on BBC Radio 4: A German refugee from the Nazis who pioneered nature broadcasting in Britain. He became the first person to harness new technologies to record the sounds of birds, mammals and insects.
Boys held for ‘torture’ of children were in care
“I was no longer afraid of things I could not see,” says Frankie (Lukas Haas) who got bullied too, being locked in a cloakroom on Halloween. Frank LaLoggia’s 1988 Lady in White (Director's Cut)
(trailer) out on DVD, is somewhat more subdued and ‘Hollywood’ than Let the Right One In. But as LaLoggia explains on the audio commentary (originating from the Sony DVD issue) his was a forerunner (in John Carpenter spirit) of indie filmmaking. With his cousin’s help, the production budget was raised from 4,000 investors many of whom lived around where the film (set in the 60s) was shooting.
This murder/ghost mystery “is a film about loss and coming to terms with loss,” says LaLoggia. With camera work from Russell Carpenter (who went onto bigger and ginormous things, Titanic), it’s an uneven film but one that’s held in enormous affection by people. And the DVD proves why -36 minutes of deleted scenes on the disc too.
(Part 1 on Youtube)
Beating the System -an Interview with Frank LaLoggia
The Winslow Boy (out on Optimum DVD) is a 1948 melodrama directed by Anthony Asquith from a script by the oft underrated Terence Rattigan (based on his original successful stage play). A young upper middle-class lad accused and convicted of petty theft is helped by his father Arthur Winslow (Cedric Hardwicke)beating his head against legal bureaucracy in order to clear his son’s name. Sir Robert Morton (Robert Donat) takes on the case and wins. But what is the price paid by those involved?
Five Minutes of Heaven won the prestigious World Cinema Directing Award and World Cinema Screenwriting Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival and was screened on BBC 2 TV a few weeks ago. Director Oliver Hirschbiegel(Downfall)'s film is fact based(writer Guy Hibbert). In 1975 Joe Griffin’s (James Nesbitt) 19-year-old brother James was murdered by the 17-year-old Ulster Volunteer Force member Alistair Little (Liam Neeson). Aged 11, Joe Griffin was an eyewitness. The men are brought back together decades later by an interview ‘reality’ TV show. One can easily pick holes in this film but its simplicity and directness is breathtaking. Questions of morality are framed as ‘what ifs’. What if young Joe had stopped kicking his ball against the wall as asked and gone inside 5 minutes before the shooting? What if the cameraman hadn’t faltered forcing a retake of tracking Joe down the stairs to meet first-time face to face? What if the production runner hadn’t been such good listener to Joe? What if...?
Martin McGartland police agent in IRA , disowns Fifty Dead Men Walking
Jim Sturgess takes on role as IRA informer
“That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.”
Terence Davies’ Of Time And The City (BFI DVD and Blu-ray) is a melancholy meditation on his homeland of Liverpool. "I thought at one time, when I started making my films, particularly the early autobiographical ones, that I would reach some catharsis. But I haven't. All it has done is highlight that which has been lost," he said in an interview with Greencine’s Aaron Hillis. (Strand Releasing distributed in the States)
BBC's The Culture Show
“If you opened people up, you would find landscapes, if you opened me up, you would find beaches.”
“Si on ouvrait les gens, on trouverait des paysages. Moi, si on m’ouvrait, on trouverait des plages.”
Distributed by Cinema Guild in the States, Agnès Varda’s docu-fantasy “self-portrait at 80” Les plages d'Agnes (The Beaches of Agnes) (trailer) screened at last year’s Times BFI London Film Festival and the Venice Film Festival but hasn’t been seen much outside the festival circuit - yet to be released in London. And that’s a great shame.
If you like Terence Davies then you’ll probably like Varda’s film. They share honestly, wistfulness, a love of becoming. Varda is French cinema royalty - associated in one way or t’other with every great French artist in the last however many decades. When she looks at you she really notices. But a glint in her eye masks what she’s actually seen. Hence the use of mirrors on the beach: “Varda, in casual deconstructionist mode, also films people in the act of setting up the mirrors, stressing the image as collective creation. The entire film consistently unfolds within this binary focus,” noted the Variety review from Venice last year. While Terence Davies elevates reality to the sublime, Varda elevates the sublime to the real. If you really wanted to dance in the streets you could but we always danced in the streets. Remember, she seems to ask? Transfixed we agree. Davies goes the other way, he waves his magic wand and life is what it meant to be only sort of never was, “the land of lost content”. Varda sees Los Angeles (where she spent time with her then husband Jacques Demy) as “a very sad fiction. When I go back the beach is where I meet my friends again.” But she convinces us there was a Michel Legrand song there in our step. Davies’ Liverpool ‘reality’ is sad too. The sobbing is the hushed ppp of a Mahler symphony but he chooses the heavenly climax of the composer’s Resurrection Symphony for the film’s penultimate moments.
We look in the mirror and wish we were something other, glimpsing a firefly that is probably all too real indeed.
Agnès Varda’s European Graduate School Lecture 2004. 1
The centrepiece of Ron Arad’s show at the Timothy Taylor Gallery is an enormous shelving unit (Arad is a sculptural designer) in the shape of the United States of America Oh, the farmer & the cowman should be friends. Individual states constructed of stainless and Corten steel – one state seeming to mirror another, mirroring the observer, but each obscured by itself and whatever books find there way into that particular shelf. The idea’s simplicity is just stunning. How many books could it hold? Would it ever collapse? Why didn’t I see that idea myself, you ask?
good photos on Designboom
Artinfo interview
[Addition: Crossing the divide between art and design]
and my photo of Ron Arad at the show’s opening. Is he communing with the cows, the farmers or some unknown force?
My Dinner with Andre (youtube) out on DVD last month, is a 1981 film classic written by and starring André Gregory and Wallace Shawn, directed by Louis Malle. What do audiences make of it now? In its day it was quite radical simply to film two people talking in a restaurant (mostly Gregory). Now with the internet and mobile phones perhaps not. But the power of storytelling probably still holds sway here as Shawn gazes awe-struck at Gregory’s tales of working with his director friend Jerzy Grotowski and his actors in a Polish forest, his visit to ahead of its time ‘climate aware’ Findhorn in Scotland where beach stones were placed on the roofs that never seemed to dislodge in a storm, and his trip to the Sahara to create a play based on The Little Prince. In the age of reality TV do people still become enthralled? Gregory suggests to Shawn that what passes for normal life in New York is more akin to living in a dream than it is to real life. “I could always live in my art but not in my life,” says Gregory. It’s strange to hear them moaning about finance and living in New York from a quarter century ago when those days now seemed oh so good as theatre companies that’ve struggled for years become victims of the credit-crunch. For anyone obsessed with a particular art form there’s an exquisite beauty to this film; something almost sacrosanct in the treasuring and questing for culture, knowledge and the search for an internal enlightenment that can cast its glow upon at least some people in the world.
In 1994, Gregory's voluntary 3 year work with an acting troupe on Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya (the English translation by David Mamet with Shawn in the lead) was filmed again by Malle, Vanya on 42nd Street -it would be his last film.
André Gregory’s 2007 book
Bone Songs
Wallace Shawn interview
Her Drawings With André
podcast
Shawn is in London for the season of his plays at the Royal Court that run until June: Aunt Dan and Lemon, The Fever and Grasses of a Thousand Colours (directed by Gregory).
As some of the contributors to these programmes note, there’s something very Chekhovian about Alan Ayckbourn's plays: the petit-bourgeois may be the milieu but the still waters of humans run very deep.
The Broadway run of The Old Vic's production of Alan Ayckbourn's The Norman Conquests has begun at Circle in the Square marking the playwright’s 70th birthday .
BBC Radio 4’s Front Row
And BBC Radio 3 has A Small Family Business and
Man of the Moment about reality TV culture.
Sir Michael Parkinson has hit out at the media's treatment of the late reality TV star Jade Goody.
Britain’s Got Talent Youtube sensation Susan Boyle: “47 and that's just one side of me” Demi Moore apparently Twitter’d about her according to the BBC.
Peaches: sex and the seminal woman
The UK's only dedicated Sci Fi and Fantasy film festival Sci-Fi London opens next week with Eyeborgs ( links) produced by
Crimson Wolf
Of Aliens and Astronomers Royal
International Year of Astronomy
BBC Radio 4's Archive on 4 on
Carl Sagan - A Personal Voyage , a man way head of his time.
Anousheh Ansari made headlines in 2006 when she paid $20m (£14m) to become the world's first female space tourist.
Electric Dreams (DVD) is an entertaining oddity from 1984. Geeky architect buys all-encompassing, all-controlling computer Edgar that unwittingly woos for him the beautiful female cellist neighbour. 1982’s Tron this even isn’t and many may find it just too cheesy for words let alone music. Cue Phil Oakley’s Together In Electric Dreams that became somewhat of a hit single for Richard Branson’s pubescent Virgin Records along with Giorgio Moroder’s synth soundtrack. But remember this film is pre-ring tones, though well over a decade past Kubrick’s 2001 Hal. I loved every minute but I can’t say it ‘guided my soul’.
Radio 4's In Our Time has a discussion of Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World. No money in people liking nature, inciting people to say YES, state intervention into daily life. How very, um, dated!
A deeper peeper
Internet privacy: Britain in the dock
Slow Down London gives city time to relax
a little bit more to come...will someone water my diodes...
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