A senior police surveillance officer who admitted tampering with his evidence during the inquest into the death of Jean Charles de Menezes was cleared today by an official investigation.

Ingrained arrogance in the police leads to miscarriages of justice

i never do anything twice i.

Charlotte Gainsbourg Antichrist video interview in The Guardian. Willem Dafoe is on BBC Radio 4's The Film Programme (22 May)

[Addition: Your country needs you: the artist Steve McQueen on what Britishness means to him
Ben Lewis' (Hammer and Tickle out in paperback next week) The Great Contemporary Art Bubble on BBC Four tonight and repeated hopefully some time in the future.
Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery.
Manchester Museum has hired its very own hermit, to lock himself away in one of its towers and ponder the problems of the modern world]

Richard Long's Heaven and Earth is at Tate Britain.
Interviews: The Guardian, The Telegraph
: free spirit of the hitchhiker generation
The Tate's first interactive exhibition by Robert Morris is back this weekend– 40 years after injuries forced its closure. Bodyspacemotionthings is part of The Long Weekend at Tate Modern this weekend, from Friday 22 to Monday 25 May.
BBC Radio 4's Front Row

Alice Neel 27, 30 May at the ICA, Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine, and Painters Painting-
the definitive 1973 documentary on the New York art scene from 1940-70. All three titles will be released on Revolver DVD.
Alice Neel's selected works are given breathing space to haunt David Zwirner in New York.
Francis Alÿs: Fabiola jogs your memory into considering what is 'a portrait' at the National Portrait Gallery.

Kashmiri artist Raqib Shaw, born in Calcutta in 1974, came to the UK in 1998 studying at Central St Martins School of Art. Absence of God is at White Cube, Hoxton Square
Jade Goody's death inspires controversial new work by British performance artist Mark McGowan.
East London art gallery stages its own Russian revolution

Past, Future, Perfect is the inaugural show at Calvert 22
Michael Raedecker line-up is at the Camden Arts Centre
Luke Fowler's films Dreams of a tortured soul at the Serpentine gallery
And until June 14 Gerhard Richter's The Photographic Object at The Photographers’ Gallery
and the retirement after 31 years of ITV television's The South Bank Show

Udderbelly, a giant, purple upside-down cow chews the cud from next Wednesday with 40 comedy, music, cabaret and theatre events over 2 months on London's Southbank. Joan Rivers is first off the cuss.


[Addition:
While my mind was on another planet, this blogger reported from the earthly MCM Expo (held at the Excel complex) with "all sorts of Movies, Video Games, Comics and Anime-based nonsense, as well as an attempt to break the world record for the most video game cosplayers in one location."
And Star Trek really is as surprising good as 'they' say (thrilling on the big screen) but also get the chance to catch Justin Lee Collins' Bring Back Star Trek doco in which he hunts and eloquently seduces down the former cast members of the TV series. Familiar format that boded only 15 minutes of my attention but his passionate, persistent dishevelness wooed me till the end.

Alex Cox is interviewed by the Financial Times
10,000 Ways To Die: A Director’s Take on the Spaghetti Western (Kamera Books)
How digital image-making affects children
Philip Pullman (author of His Dark Materials)discusses judging Off by Heart, the BBC's national poetry recitation competition for primary schoolchildren.
Is a degree in homeopathy a sick joke?
Is Life under Labour: the worst of worlds?

Quack your troubles away: duck house cost Tory MP Sir Peter Viggers his job.
An American banker rescues trapped ducklings as they throw themselves off a building in search of a more appropriate riverside home.
The Whale: A history (BBC Radio 4's In Our Time-Thurs May 21)

[Addition: BBC Radio 4's Start the Week- Michael Sandel, who gives this year's Reith Lectures on A New Citizenship, addressing the 'prospect for a new politics of the common good'; Bruce Hood on our propensity to believe in the supernatural; Giles Foden’s (Last King of Scotland) new novel Turbulence; and astronomer Carolin Crawford on the science and beauty of nebulae. A very fat-free breakfast. But then dimensions are always relative. BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves on the leading thinker of the 20th century, Sir Isaiah Berlin and his arguments on our freedom.]

..what more could you want for a jour de holi

not dead just wrestling my flippers

Lars von Trier's Antichrist at Cannes 2009 - Telegraph review with a gorgeous photo from Anthony Dod Mantle's cinematography and it sends The Guardian's Xan Brooks "into a vortex where the line between the real and the reel has ceased to exist". Most other critics didn't experience such transcendence.
Economist Robert J Shiller (on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week)argues that finances are not led by mathematical formulae but by our 'animal spirits': Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism

The World Cinema Foundation's first line-up of several restored films can be viewed for free on The Auteurs website.

45 min conversation with novelist AS Byatt on BBC Radio 3's Nightwaves (13 May).

Nightwaves (14 May):
Samantha Morton's directorial debut The Unloved, a television film based on her own experiences of growing up in children’s homes and Charlie Kaufman on his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York.
Philip Seymour Hoffman talks on Radio 4's Front Row (13 May)

Mariah takes off make-up for Cannes role in Precious, a grim tale of a teenage girl, abused by her father in Harlem.

Glyndebourne at 75 on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters

2009 Turner prize nominees including the amazing copper sulphated South London council flat.
Tracey Emin is: 'I’m more interested in ideas than sex'. Those who suffer Love opens Thurs.
The Independent article
'Kryptos' and Dan Brown: Inside the CIA's code of secrecy through sculpture
The London gallery scene is going through an interesting period of transition

Art’s a scream at the Tate Modern but i think i kinda got there first...
House of Fairy Tales and Luigi Nono's music for tape and soprano for Tate's UBS Openings: The Long Weekend 2009

William Forsythe interview with video from his dance piece Scattered Crowd

more soon,,,