"I am screaming you just don't hear it"
It took two decades for Douglas Sirk's 1957 WWII love story A Time to Love and a Time to Die (one of Godard's favourite films) to be re-discovered. His 1956 Written on the Wind was also trashed on release: its ending could not be more appropriate for modern times with the child of an oil magnate caressing an oil well statue. In the final moments of BBC Four's Time, an aerial shot of the Tate Millenium Bridge pulls back with the presenter meditating on "man, a tiny speck" - ironically on a bridge it took London man several structural engineering goes to get right before unleashing. A bridge linking one of London's most visited tourist attractions the Tate Modern to another St Paul's and high finance in the City of London.
Sacred Made Real (National Gallery) moves to the National Gallery of Art in Washington while Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective in Philadelphia travels to the Tate Modern.
We know (as history has proven on countless occasions) that at least for a while, most provocative art is always destined to stay outside the comfort and commodity of gallery walls and that much of what is most celebrated in the present is also often the most forgotten in decades to come.
Michael Landy's Art Bin (South London Gallery)
Michael Landy’s destructive instincts (FT)
A new decade has dawned but are we on the brink of a new world or its precipice perhaps as a US broadcaster might drawl? The Daily Show's Jon Stewart (having despaired 8 months ago after hearing Elizabeth Warren's home truths on the US government bank bail-out) was now so ecstatic interviewing her again (over hopes that President Obama might just be able to wring at least some long-lasting economic change) that he had to control his love-making desires towards Mrs. Warren in front of a studio audience.
Ten years on from actor Kevin Spacey taking reins at the Old Vic theatre, he revives American playwright John Guare's 1990 Six Degrees of Separation (until April 3), in which he believes "this dream of being drawn towards the lives of the rich and famous..I think it's increased rather than decreased since the play was written." (The Culture Show interview, (BBC 2, Jan 28). [Alas for my staging of Guare's equally prescient Landscape of the Body (1977) in the old Spitalfields Market that never materialised back in the 90s.]
And who'd have thought but Brit boxer Alex Reid (not the dead footballer) having entered the final ever Celebrity Big Brother (Series 7) house a month ago to resounding boos (and a newspaper 'tabloid' rating as low as a rat's arse) exited Friday night cheered on as the winner (beating to everyone's surprise with 65% of the public vote even fellow hot-tip housemate Vinnie Jones who'd affectionately dubbed him 'Rocky' Reid). "My whole agenda in here is to be myself," said Reid.
Moreover, Alex was a guy brave enough to have zits of pus on his back squeezed by fellow housemates on prime-time telly. Could that ever be so in the States? (Channel Four were the ones who screened that doco on women surgically altering their labia) One of the reasons for Big Brother's demise is, of course, the internet. Yet what is so intriguing (cultural snobbery not allowing, of course, such an adjective for such a show) about Celebrity BB is that although most members of this house are so used to being surveiled 24/7 in the real world, they are nonetheless human and naturally seek interaction (or not) with each other- many having made ties that will long bind after the show. The irony being that there is far more 'humanity' in a show like this than the seeming 'democracy' of the internet where human connections are often tenuous to say the least, let alone ever able to approach the word 'family'. Auditions as we speak for the final ever series of the 'regular' Big Brother this summer. Perhaps more internet interactivity might have saved the show.
Eric Cantona is acting on stage in Face au Paradis (Facing Paradise) at the Theatre Marigny,Paris (BBC Radio 4's Front Row reported)
BBC 2's The Virtual Revolution (a 4 part history of the internet) began Saturday Jan 30: "how has the web affected us in 20 years...and re-making our world...and how the dream of leveling is played out". "Social misfits who wanted to go on being social misfits" versus "our innate desire to profit and control". "Not a cure for human nature but an amplification of [it]" When in 1989 Tim Berners Lee submitted Information Management: A Proposal, his boss at CERN returned the memo with a note scribbled on the top "vague but exciting" and allowed him to work on it in his spare time: 6 August, 1991 the first website went online at CERN.
Berners Lee: "I think it would be very wrong to assume that if you connect a country it would become equal." "Its early supporters," says presenter Dr. Aleks Krotoski "believed that a space without rules and regulations would be more equal" the paradox now being "the very lack of regulation means those with the most resources can shout the loudest and impose their brands and authority". Lee Siegel (Against the Machine) "You can shatter hierarchies but once you become known you have to sign up with one of the recording studios. The old hierarchies are still there they're just scrambling to adjust themselves to this new situation." Andrew Keen author of The Cult of the Amateur on The Huffington Post: "[Huffington's] an interesting woman but about as revolutionary as my dog", i.e."re-establishing the old hierarchies". The programme also points out that "of the more than 130 million blogs active since 2002 it's estimated over 90% are now dormant.
The 3 year-old LUCRESLONDON blog can most certainly testify to the outright hypocrisy and jealousy with which many still view blogs. And the constant pressure (in Andrew Keen's words) to become nothing more than a dog. [I hasten to add a spoiler alert that a recent BBC Horizon doco showed that some dogs have the spatial awareness potential of a 2 year-old child]. I often think I hear my paragraphs breaking into a teeny distant whine.
Will chimps at Edinburgh Zoo be soon replacing Big Brother contestants (BBC's Natural World: The Chimpcam Project)?
Endomol's Big Brother far scarier 1999 precursor We Live in Public is out on DVD.
Immodesty Blaize, the producer (and one of its stars) of Burlesque Undressed quotes Oscar Wilde: "be yourself because everyone else is taken". It's taken several decades for the art of burlesque dancing to get legit whereas being gayly flamboyant in Hollywood still requires discretion. Way back when Brit pop art artist Sir Peter Blake wrote his Royal College of Art grad thesis Don't Point It's Nude he was awarded the lowest possible grade.
Dita von Teese at Crazy Horse Le temple du nu chic (Optimum DVD Feb 8)
On the West End The Little Dog Laughed
This week also saw the death of adolescent angst author J.D. Salinger aged 91. Living in seclusion the past 50 years his reputation primarily rested on Catcher in the Rye (1951). "Most of us never write one great book," said Paul Morley in a BBC Newsnight's The Review Show discussion: "the invention of the teenager...he branded himself so brilliantly that he could withdraw and still be famous". "He's the last in line where the book - a book - would be important." Newsnight the evening before had authors Jay McInerney and Will Self rather less enthusiastic about an author lacking a true body of work, "the writer's non-writer". However, Salinger's Catcher remains in Amazon's Top 200 monthly list.
We learnt also this week that the UK poverty gap is the widest since the 70s and annual growth slowest since 1921 (according to the BBC). Is there really that much difference between Celebrity Big Brother and Westminster politics cynics might ask? Former Prime Minister Tony Blair spent 6 hours (finishing at 17.10pm) on Friday being questioned by The Iraq Inquiry. (60 countries were represented at Afghanistan: The London Conference on Thursday) Blair slipped in 2 hours early through a back door, as there were rumours of a possible 'citizen's arrest' by demonstrators. The somewhat symbolic protest outside The Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre numbered 200 according to police, 300 estimated "generally" by the BBC, and 500 by organisers.
The inquiry panel (2 of whom Jews) had been criticised by a columnist for The Independent as being too pro-Zionist) and therefore putting in doubt impartiality. In actuality, though, it was all rather subdued and insubstantial fare. This was not a trial and none of the panel are lawyers. And at the end of the day one had made notes of which none were very startling - only a longing for a more forensic approach to proceedings. The thrill of legality and the Brit invention of habeas corpus 'beyond reasonable doubt' was the crux of first ep in American legal series The Good Wife. A re-trial proved just how fallible are humans (a lazy security guard) when crucial indisputable security camera footage showed the same plastic bag blowing across the parking lot at exactly the same time code on three consecutive evenings.
The Iraq War and Blair's case was different. As he said himself it was a matter of "judgement" rather than mere fact: the perception of threat was growing rather than an actual one. Blair saw no distinction between disarming and removing Saddam. "The Cabinet weren't interested in becoming part of the legal debate,” said Blair, although the Iraq Inquiry panel seemed to think otherwise. He used characteristic self-deprecation when asked about last year's BBC Fern Britton interview "I would have thought it right to remove him [Saddam]” In summing up the former Prime Minister cited emotive arguments - how Iraq's monthly child mortality rate had vastly improved in the years after Saddam's removal. And how a leader who'd gassed his own people was clearly a danger to the international community.
Twenty relatives of soldiers killed in the war were allowed into the public seating via ballot: "Be quiet please," asked inquiry Chairman John Chilcot as one audience member quietly heckled Blair in his final moments saying he felt "responsibility but not regret" with the world better as that result. Although not visible on the one-minute delay live feed the BBC's Nick Robinson reported a "come on” as Blair got up to leave and "you are a liar" (2 woman?) "and a murderer". One woman was apparently in tears after his exit.
The [quiet] heckler was James Sandry (Farsi speaker) who'd just returned from the Middle East. He believes Tony Blair has a "paranoid interpretation of Middle Eastern politics...not even one regret?!!" "I wasn't really planning to heckle...[the event was] something so removed from the reality of the situation...Blair has such incredible ignorance about what is thought in the region." One father in the audience who'd lost a son said Blair just recited "lines he's practiced...he had the opportunity [for]soothing balm to the open wounds....the world maybe a better place with the absence of Saddam...[but] the incompetence...the local darts players at the pub could have told him that ". And that is the problem of the war and the inquiry. The Kosovo intervention (without legal backing) is cited as precedence for the Iraq invasion. The panel members ask for the reflections of its interviewees in summation but the ground between humanity and legality is bedrock for some and quicksand for others. As Britain's Prime Minister Blair became the consummate 'performer' he'd always dreamed of. Even perfecting the impossible double-act with the United States.
If in a decade or more Iraq proves stable, then Blair will be seen by many as a liberator rather than the present villain. I wonder whether as a lawyer Mr. Blair ever saw a Michael Douglas film The Star Chamber (1983)? Ever frustrated by a plea-bargaining system, a panel of 'law lord' Supreme Court judges meet sporadically in total secrecy to meat out justice to those whom they feel were truly guilty but whom the law has let slip. The 'Supremes' are rarely wrong. And if they are does it matter because the culprits are scumbags anyway and there is no collateral damage?
Julie Walters plays Mo Mowlam in Mo (Channel 4, Sun Jan 31) - the female politician (former secretary of state for Northern Ireland) no one dissents as an extraordinary (and fun) politician.
One commentator on the televised proceedings of The Iraq Inquiry was Carne Ross (Iraq expert on the British delegation to the United Nations) who felt that the panel failed to dig deep enough under Blair's claims in "a much more intrusive adversarial way" exploring the breach of "fundamental trust between public and government". Ross was also interviewed on the BBC's two-part The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia (the T.E. Lawrence of David Lean's 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia) and shared the programme’s overall admiration of the man and disillusionment at the way his promises to the Arabs were broken by the British and the French. In 2002, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed "A lot of the problems we are having to deal with now, I have to deal with now, are a consequence of our colonial past...The Balfour Declaration and the contradictory assurances which were being given to Palestinians in private at the same time as they were being given to the Israelis - again, an interesting history for us but not an entirely honourable one." Straw is also referring back to French diplomat François Georges-Picot and Briton Sir Mark Sykes who drafted the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 between the two governments arbitrarily carving up former Ottoman Arab territories.
Hannah Arendt in The Imperialist Character writes of Lawrence: "Never again was the experiment of secret politics made more purely by a more decent man. The Imperialists destroyed Lawrence until nothing was left except some inexplicable decency." Lawrence was never forgiven by the Arabs and never forgave himself ending his life in self-imposed menial chores as a provincial army soldier back in England. He wanted "our first brown dominion not our last brown colony". He returned to Oxford after the Paris Peace Conference a broken man "his mother spoke of him sitting for hours on end unmoving with his face frozen, staring at the ground". Lawrence embodied the very 'old-fashioned' qualities of language skills, diplomacy and a human understanding of cultures alien to ours that made the British Foreign Office second to none. Gazing high or low into that magnificent Foreign Office internal courtyard often our only choice nowadays is to bow our heads to the ground in abject silence.
BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears on how to re-produce the world's most debated stage direction of "the distant sound of a breaking string" in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (Вишнëвый сад or Vishniovy sad) (1904). The 150th anniversary of his birth.
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