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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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