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It's getting harder and harder to know what to say about London. And perhaps many would deem this blog to say very little about the current state of the nation's capital. But probably the only thing worth living for in this city is the culture - and London certainly has that. As does this blog;) We look forward to certain cultural/architectural assets of the 2012 Olympics - the floating barge sounds great in that rather dead space (though not for those in the know of London space) across from the Tate. But the city's daily grind growls on with no let up from transport woes and other dilemmas. The city appears clinically obsessed with tweeting, twotting, twatting and all manner of trivia and irrelevancies. No-one can do anything, say anything, think anything without some idiot reaching for an electronic device. The same morons who continue their pretense of 'socialism' whilst itching to have the celebrity (albeit synthetic) of another and of course who are just as avaricious as those they mock.

I feel akin to the Brazilians who extolled racing car champion Ayrton Senna in Asif Kapadia's documentary as "the only good thing about Brazil". David Beckham fulfilled that role for England. But it's not a happy state of affairs for arts organisations who received funding cuts. Yet that problem is a far more complicated one than just 'agitprop'. Britain has a welfare state that no longer has the funds to support that ideal. Yet to scrap the ideal would mean betraying some of the only true voices left of Brit humanity.

Senna would probably just be an interesting motor racing doco if it weren't for Senna's extraordinary tales. The film's crux is Senna losing out on a Formula 1 championship because of ludicrous regulations that essentially meant that he had to drive backwards against the prevailing cars out of a 'siding'. The extraordinary tale is sealed by his death in 1994 and the subsequent rules that resulted in mechanical checks and not a fatality since. For Brazil the wonderful ruthless reality truly was 'there but for the grace of God go I'.

I intended to write at length about Danish director Lars von Trier's comments at last week's Cannes Film Fest so perplexed was I about how his comments could possibly be deemed anti-Semitic at all (he was made persona non grata by the festival chiefs). I was even more dismayed when many of my critical film fraternity colleagues (normally rapacious in devouring such things) hadn't even bothered to watch the 35min press conference in its entirety. But in fairness, I doubt anyone in London's streets would have the foggiest idea of what the debacle was all about. Von Trier's film Melancholia doesn't open here until late-Summer so perhaps I'll wait to air my arguments until then. I'm not 'hedging' my bets, I know who my winners are [sic]. Maybe Lars even will grant me an interview.

Suffice to say that the only comment 'thread' on the net that bore any resemblance to what I saw and heard of the press conference was: Zachary says on May 20, 2011 at 2:17pm. I'll quote in its entirety:
No one who’s seen Bruno Ganz play Hitler in Downfall can deny feeling sympathy for the man. But what I think is key: This situation with Lars cannot be adequately judged in black and white. Refn’s remark and Cannes’ decision to declare him persona non grata—they’re calculated and precise in a way that Lars is not (in either his work or in his public performances). His work notoriously navigates gray areas. He prods, he explores, he feels out a subject. In this way, he expels the concept of black and white. The world we live in, which moves at high speeds and allows us limited time to give thought or care to any one event or idea, detests what cannot be explained in a sentence. Sound bytes have become three words in quotes: “I’m A Nazi.” The press and much of the public will not tolerate the time or care it takes to consider the complexities of any given situation. So Cannes responds in a way that there can be no doubt of their stance; as does Refn, as do some others. They understand how they will be perceived. They know not to include a single false word. They know not to meander in their response to Lars’ comments. Get to the point, is the point. And look good.
Lars doesn’t operate this way. Those who are seeking to understand why he would say these things, are finding the human inside him. Those who are reading the headlines and watching the three-minute clip, and posting Facebook statuses about him being an “asshat,” well… They believe the person is the sound byte, the sound byte is the person. And that, to me, is tragic. Bravo Zachery!

So: back to, ah-hum, liberal London (lots of latent ancien German aestheticism over here Lars). Last week I raced over and up the Royal Academy stairs to try and catch the tail-end of the Richard Long opening at Haunch of Venison- making a joke about being sure I was too late. One of the bevy of young male-blooded invigilators (the females tend to be more chilled out in my experience) stood in his ad hoc line and commanded that I had to leave - "it's either us or the police". Whoa...I hate to imagine the result of pleading artistic license before them. I can just imagine our young friend in an August Sander photo brandishing a stick and dreaming of a more ordered way of life for the C20th. I guess he'll stick me with a 'twot' instead.
Giuseppe Penone is downstairs.

Wim Wenders' photos preceded Richard Long in the same space and Wenders' Pina doco preceded Dancing Dreams in the cinemas. A hard act to follow. But this doco charting the rehearsal process of Pina Bausch's dance piece Kontakhof with a bunch of local teenagers is almost more moving than the Wenders. Not really fair as Wenders' 3D film is in a different realm altogether. And although Bausch used fully trained classical dancers in her company these untrained teenagers exhibited the very soul of this choreographer's work - why should we ever dance?

Vogue editor Carol Woolton and students of Central Saint Martins and the Royal College of Art have the right idea of making friends, rather than smashing the windows of the Bond Street jewelers - cajoling them into using their designs to complement their window displays. (Part of UK Vogue’s ‘Street Lights’ initiative). Holition’s interactive window display at Garrard (who supplied the Royal Wedding ring - one very similar is in the window).
The motorbike smash and grab window raids of designer stores continue.

Is Blitz a 'fair cop' on London's policing methods? It opened the week of an Irish bomb scare in the Mall. And reading the newspaper headlines one couldn't help but feel skeptical about whether the story we were being told was the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Or rather, the fear that nowadays one is rather alone in such skepticism. Blitz (adapted Ken Gruen's novel) isn't a bad film at all which isn't to say it isn't quite a good one oftentimes. Brant (Jason Statham, mean and gritty as ever) is a cop that gets the job done by not always playing by the rules. A cop killer (Aidan Gillen, forever smirking as if straight out of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange) is rampaging. Brant despises most of his superiors but not the new bloke (Paddy Considine's gay designer-pad sincerity). The film's denouement may be politically incorrect but it makes a refreshing change from the boringly obvious police swarming street maneuvers the day after government increased policing newspaper headlines. Give a few days and alas it's all back to old business.

10 Vyner Street hosts a very brave exhibition by Greek artist Xenofon Kavvadias displaying manuals of various terrorist organisations. All the books have cleared exhibition permissions from the Metropolitan Police etc. to the extent that many reside in a an enclosed room where photography is strictly forbidden. It's the boldness, simplicity and clinical nature of this gallery show that most impresses and awes. Perhaps far more so than any photograph of an actual victim or perpetrator ever could.
Audio of Geoffrey Robinson QC's opening speech on the website (downloadable podcast)

Down the road at Wilkinson Gallery is something far less perturbing. Upstairs a 45 year-old tortoise from London Zoo has his own penthouse suite replete with room service and sunbed (it's a different local tortoise for each new city). Shimabuku's art is deceptively simple and pays off with close attention.

"Liberty is about our rights to question everything." - Ai Weiwei's (the imprisoned Chinese artist and he of the Tate Modern's ill-fated painted porcelain sunflower seeds) So Sorry (2010) referenced "the thousands of apologies expressed recently by governments, industries, and financial corporations worldwide in an effort to make up for tragedies and wrongdoings – though often withhout shouldering the consequences or the desire to acknowledge let alone repair." By comparison the Lisson Gallery's show is a rather sedate affair. Exquisitely crafted objects and a video installation. Even Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads in the Somerset House courtyard seems to yearn for a full circle of centrifugal force rather then just half a one. These are copies of the C18 heads ransacked by British and French troops from Beijing's Old Summer Palace in 1860.
"Without freedom of speech there is no modern world, just a barbaric one."- Ai Weiwei

Whitechapel Gallery has a retrospective of Paul Graham's photos - many of 80s/90s deprived Britain. Over at his Soho gallery Anthony Reynolds has Graham's incredibly simple and captivating photos of enlarged film stock emulsions that appear to be world in themselves.

Apocalypse Now has been re-issued in cinemas preceding Optimum's 3-disc Blu-ray release. In the Whitechapel's cinema "Vietnamese artist Dinh Q. LÍís split-screen film simultaneously shows clips of Charlie Sheen in Platoon and his father, Martin Sheen, in Apocalypse Now. Sheen junior watches his father deal with the posttraumatic syndrome of the Vietnam War and illustrates the complexities of family relationships, the repetition of war and history, and the emphasis on masculinity in Hollywood."

Philip-Lorca diCorcia at Spruth Magers Lee simply aligns little Polaroids on a continuous ledge around the gallery. At the opening he likened them to the old dye-transfer processing that gave them a simultaneity of both distance and immediacy. Another American artist Matthew Day Jackson's Everything Leads to Another at Hauser & Wirth is a fun show replete with his own designer lounge and televisual entertainment. "In my work there is no past. History is a part of everything. Everything leads to another. As the sum of history moves out in 360 degrees from its center ñ which does not exist ñ it envelops the present. Perhaps you could say I am interested in moments of sublime beauty which carry their counterpart, otherwise known as terror, so closely that it is difficult to delineate one from the other."

But Day Jackson does have a sense of humour. Standing beside him at the opening with his Axis Mundi - a huge life-size sculpture re-purposing the cockpit of a B29 - I asked if it was in working order and could "get us out of here". "Absolutely!" "Do we need to take the coloured skeleton that resides in the rear cockpit," I asked. "No, we can get rid of him." Such is the ruthless pragmatism of the art world;)

Superficially, Kutlag Ataman's new video work of Istanbul street beggars at Thomas Dane may seem condescending. But the longer one gazes the more disturbing and mesmeric these scenes become. Everything is not what it seems. Literally because many beggars are 'rehearsed' in their manipulative, theatrical gestures by their 'pimps'. Ataman's feature length film Journey to the Moon is also worth seeking out on DVD.

Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern's Mammuth starring Gérard Depardieu as a depressed motor-biker abattoir worker is according to its directors "a film that is funny and moving. Funny because we’re confronting a “socially disabled” man with a modern society that is beyond his reach. Moving for the same reason. A bit like a mammoth in a world of foxes. Who flails away in the face of a multitude much sharper and livelier than he." As I wrote after last year's London film Festival it is quite simply melancholically and movingly bonkers. Their dark comedy Louise-Michel was also recently released by Axiom. If the Dardennes brothers films just that bit too 'real' for you then Mammuth may suffice knocking one sideways and inside-out.

For some horror, Spanish Julia's Eyes won't disappoint though it takes a while to get gripping. And Angels of Evil on the life of real life 70s/80s Sicilian habitual crim Renato Vallanzasca (Kim Rossi Stuart), though predictable, is all round very impressive filmmaking.

Quieter and subtler as you'd expect is Tom McCarthy's 3rd feature Win Win with Paul Giamatti as a New Jersey lawyer who opportunistically takes on the $1,500 a month legal guardianship of an Alzheimer's client. As in life, the script (Joe Tiboni and McCarthy) isn't at all as clear cut as that, though few are the lucky ones in suburban life for whom things work out as reasonably as they do for these characters. Acutely cast actors such as these do, however, restore one's faith in a life full of promise if not devoid of pain.