If you missed the Frieze art fair this year in London, you can live vicariously through this year's Art Basel Miami Beach on my Planet Lucre.

NYC's Hurricane Sandy report HERE.

Dance at MoMA

Go HERE to see video of Some sweet day: a three-week program of dance performances by contemporary choreographers in MoMA's Marron Atrium.

All the thrills from the 50th New York Film Festival can be found HERE.

Borders and gravity

Signs of life on PLANET LUCRE here...

Strange times, that weep with laughing, not with weeping!

Why did it take an American museum to honour great Brit alternate institute the Quay Brothers with their first retrospective? They've certainly won many a gold over the years in the animation Olympics. And if you have to ask who 'they' then presumably you haven't been a die-hard reader of this blog.

Go HERE for video of the MoMA press conference.

...and with a good wind behind me rather than within me;) there will be some more words here very soon....

Sunday September 2, 2012 (you'll just have to trust me on that…)

about time this post finished writing itself! So, let's start with a petit obit for American lyricist Hal David (of the Burt Bacharach team) who has just passed away. While so much light shone out of David's lyrics, out of necessity they came from knowing what was the darkness in our lives:
The Windows of the World (sung by Dionne Warwick) and We Have All The Time In The World (1969, John Barry's music) recorded by Louis Armstrong for the Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
Hal David had two musical adventures on Broadway, the 1968 Promises, Promises (revived a few years ago, based on the 1960 Academy Award-winning Billy Wilder film The Apartment) choreographed by a young Michael Bennett and introducing a young Donna McKechnie. In 1974 there was the ill-fated Brainchild. Now is the time to check out the original cast recording to make up your own mind with songs such as, Everything That Happens to You, Happens to Me and the sombre I've Been Waiting For Tomorrow (all Of My Life)  - interestingly revamped on Matt Johnson’s (of the Brit multimedia group The The) second album Soul Mining (1983).

Tuesday September 4, 2012

We hadn’t ignored the 2012 London Olympics on this website, btw, it was just so hard to know what to say. How did the city’s transport infrastructure hold up? There used to be a Protest page in the London Evening Standard paper where folk could voice their experiences! Alas, no more. I guess the world will never really know now. Was all that tax-payer Olympic money worth it? Time only will tell. UK was 3rd in the medal table with 29 Gold Medals. Bloody impressive! I’m sure the winners will be diplomatic and lobby for better training facilities in the UK rather than state the past facts. After all, freedom of expression may be a right in Western democracy but as we all know is severely relative to just how accurate you are in your critical expression. Opening last week’s Para-Olympics disabled scientist Prof Stephen Hawking spake: "The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance - it's the illusion of knowledge." Surely not truer than in the protests against Atos sponsoring the IT of their Games.
Tom Greatrex, Labour MP for Rutherglen and Hamilton West said: "It is a cruel irony that the company causing so much distress to thousands of disabled people across the country is now sponsoring the Paralympics.
The Independent
Apart from the Department of Work Pensions assessment contract worth £110m a year, one of French company Atos Origin (ATOS.PA)s' other largest contract was as Worldwide IT Partner of the International Olympic Committee- Atos Business Technologists designing the IT systems and infrastructure for the Olympics' site in East London and the Games' 94 venues across the UK. So no conflict of government interest there! Read this blog’s older posting for the innocent l’histoire.

One commentator on the BBC noted that Britain's Richard Whitehead in the Para-Olmympic 200m won in a new world record of 24.38sec  behind Usain Bolt's able-bodied gold medal time of 19.32 seconds, and compared to Eric Liddell's 22.2sec (on whom the 1981 film Chariots of Fire) was based) in the 1924 Paris Olympics.

A trio of Blu-ray classic releases (Sept 10) certainly makes us consider our mortal coil: Orson Welles’ The Trial, Luis Buñuel's That Object of Desire and Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) a 1938 French film directed by Marcel Carné. First off. Seeing these films in their jumpy, grumpy old prints with wobbly sound and wonky visuals just never did them justice. Whatever ‘they’ may say about digital technology it serves nothing but to release from these films from historical celluloid decay. A Quai des Brumes Blu-ray extra explains the difficulties of giving these creatures the ombre they once shed. And seeing The Trial’s B/W photography puts most indy films of the last few decades to shame. And like most of the other extras in the trio it is newly commissioned by Studio Canal for this release. The Quai des Brumes screenplay was written by poet Jacques Prévert (based on a novel by Pierre Mac Orlan) and almost never saw the light of day were it not for the stalwart support from the film's star Jean Gabin, director Marcel Carné and Prévert. The producer and production manager didn't have faith in the project and moreover the film was subject to the WW2 Nazi censorship: no violence, talk of suicide etc. And it's interesting when one thinks of the criticisms frequently lobbed at director Henri-Georges Clouzot agreeing to work under the French Nazi regime at the same time. Another important point raised in one of the disc interviews is that Carné's films were "social fantasy" rather than the oft repeated academic description "poetic realism". " [Carne] preferred the heart's movements to a camera's" notes one interviewee.

The interview extra on That Object of Desire with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière is alone worth the price of admission for its pellucid insights into the nature of desire, the director/actor relationship, and many, many anecdotes such as a dinner they all attended in Los Angeles with the director luminaries of the time. Alfred Hitchcock analysed one of Buñuel's films to his face with Carrière translating. And admitted his most favourite director after himself was Buñuel. There are equally worthwhile interviews with two of the three actresses who played the one female 'obscure object' and how the idea transpired. It's obviously unfair to compare actress/writer/director Sarah Polley's film Take this Waltz (already released by Studio Canal, Aug 17) with Buñuel.  The film's somewhat penultimate scene set to Leonard Cohen's song of the title (based on lyrics by poet/playwright Federico García Lorca). (Old Ideas a 10-song collection of new material was released this Jan.) And though some may find the film gilds far too often the cinematic and emotional lily, there's a heart beating ever so strongly in this story that is very hard to shrug off.

It was recently revealed in one or two Brit papers that a promising young fashion journalist/blogger/tweeter committed suicide. This is but a random sampling of his of his writings but as with Sarah Polley's film there is something so exacting and honest and downright infuriatingly sad that such a talented soul could take his own life.
One female supporter of James Andrews and some selected pages from his blog: sample 1, sample2, sample 3, and a take on the the London riot.

Depression is so much written about, so much misunderstood, so much misdiagnosed. Why did Hollywood film director Tony Scott kill himself? Often there just isn't an answer though our culture would love for one to exist. One very brave doco of recent years was The Bridge exploring the lives of Golden Gate Bridge suicides.  The world for many is not a happy place nor will it ever be: no amount of pills will change that without side-effects. During one Broadway Tony Awards telecast (ironically the year of the 'mental health' musical Next to Normal), every second advertisement was for some anti-depressive or another - with the Tolstoy like prose warnings of - if side-effects seek your doctor).

Patricio Guzmán's Nostalgia for the Light is one of the simplest most haunting documentaries of recent years. It very humbly concludes that we humans are just atoms albeit very special ones. Guzmán is best remembered for his 3-part The Battle of Chile (La batalla de Chile, 1977-1980). As important an historical document that was, his latest film is an extraordinary distillation of past. present and future. Archaeologist Lautaro Nunez notes that the Atacama Desert in Chile is home to both astronomers and archaeologists, "The past is more accessible here…It is devoid of life, yet full of history." The site of a former mine, it became the Pinochet government's political prisoner concentration camp. To this day, relatives still scour the rocky expanse for clues and indeed one woman found the tiniest bone fragment that ultimately proved her right. Guzmán juxtaposes this material with interviewees from the giant radio telescope also there. American astronomer George Preston explains how calcium is used to identify stars. "A little bit of the original Big Bang atoms may be in your bones." Luis Henriques, a former prisoner of Chacabuco, relates how he formed a group in captivity who regularly studied the night sky with a home-made wooden quadrant. Another inmate Miguel believes that he and his wife Anita (with Alzheimer's) are a metaphor for Chile: "He is remembering, while she forgets." The 'present' is only a concept that exists in the mind. Astronomer Gaspar Galaz: "There will always be some delay between an event and its perception/observation, whether billions of years in the case of an astronomical event or milliseconds in the case of a thought translating into an action or a stimulus producing a response. This time delay is the tool of the astronomer. They only study the past." Guzman narrates, "Memory has a gravitation force. Those with it live in the fragile present moment. Those without it are nowhere. Each night, slowly, impassively, the centre of the galaxy passes over Santiago."

Emad Burnat makes a virtue out of mishap in his documentary 5 Broken Cameras (Oct 19) as he is witness to the erection of barriers separating the lands and communities of Palestinian town of Bil’in. It is almost a surreal finale moment when an Israeli court rules that the barriers should come down. All one sees is barren land and uprooted olive trees where once a community flourished.
American musician Rodriguez supposedly disappeared after his 70s Detroit albums were bootlegged and made him a superstar of the anti-Apartheid movement. Like a detective director Malik Bendjelloul tracked down the man to his current job as a roofer and Searching for Sugar Man is the result. Truth stranger than fiction for sure. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (of recent A Separation fame also uses drama to seek not the truth but the truths in About Elly (Sept 14). Without giving the game away, the film's final moment is indicative of how humans the world over never learn either from their mistakes, history nor their own foibles. The house where the disappearance occurs is right by the sea. The car has got stuck before in the sand. Once again, the men try to prise the machine from nature's inevitability. (Official trailer) During the 2011 New York Film Festival post-screening Q & A, Farhadi explained the film’s appeal: “I believe we’re in a period where the audience needs to decide for themselves who’s good and who’s bad. It’s not for the director to determine.”

The same can be said of Robert Guédiguian's films and his latest The Snows of Kilimanjaro (Sept 21). His trademark simplicity of direction and ensemble acting is hard to fault. And the 'forgiving spirit' of the film seems to have a certain ironic jab at noblesse oblige. But you may disagree.

Isn't conforming to the norm one of society's biggest problems given the irony that IT is what drives capitalism rather than the niche. Discuss. A Brit film that cineaste historians have barely mentioned and was years ahead of the more well-known 'kitchen sink' dramas is Woman in a Dressing Gown (released on DVD). Film historian Michelle Williams jokes on the excellent DVD interview : "this film did for dressing gowns what Psycho did for showers!" (BBC's Film Programme) Director J Lee Thompson's films for the most part had women at their centre e.g. Yield to the Night, and then strong parts in Ice Cold in Alex and Tiger Bay. Williams goes onto explain that the writer Ted Willis was influenced by a quote he'd read of American screenwriter Paddy Cheyefsky: "the marvellous world of the ordinary". When Jean-Luc Godard reviewed the film he apparently dismissed it feeling that it should be a comedy rather than another serious Brit film. But tragicomedy is what leaps out to the viewer. Amy (Yvonne Mitchell) is a lovable scatterbrain suburban housewife and mother who does the puzzle in the paper in the hope she might win and mostly finishes the housework. Anthony Quayle whose practically immobile face (once jovially made fun of from memory by Alec Guinness or the like as two sides of condemned veal) is perfectly cast as provider-husband Jim. He's having an office affair, so one day Amy decides to pawn her wedding ring and treat herself to a make-over to impress hubby. But everyone that could go wrong does. And it's comic in the way that is true comedy- equally desperately, desperately sad. Don't miss. Another Brit classic (not so oft seen) It Always Rains On A Sunday from 1947 gets a BFI re-release on Oct 26.

Studio Canal released a couple of rarities on DVD recently: Outcast of the Islands a 1951 Carol Reed film based on Joseph Conrad's novel. Stellar cast on top form lead by Trevor Howard's dissolute layabout who is blinded by a social standing that he will never attain. Giovanni in Vittorio de Sica's 1963 economic boom satire Il Boom literally opts for blindness rashly hiding his poverty from socialite wife Silvia by selling one of his eyes as a transplant for a rich property developer. Hasn't dated much at all.

Woody Allen’s latest To Rome With Love (Sept 14) addresses celebrification of the anything-nothing of mundane existence. Bombarded by the new in every section of the media and the aggregation of the most read and most talked about, Allen’s film takes a light-hearted and most affectionate, loving gaze at peoples’ fascination/obsession with the everyday that could but will never be but just possibly -  if they stand upside down and squint their heads -  be them as the chosen one. Allen’s greatest conceit is to have the ageing reluctant father (Woody Allen – very believably not quite playing himself) of the bride to be, instantly needing  to promulgate the ‘Carreras’ voice of his daughter’s fiancee’s father- a mortician by day but operatic tenor whilst showering. Allen’s follow through is really both clever, endearing and quite a wonderful satire of the operatic world and the macrocosm of society. So too his use of Roberto Benigni as the hapless ‘normal guy’ who suddenly becomes Rome’s latest fad.

Brave: "How one selfish act can tear a rift in our kingdom."
"Our fate lived within us you only need to be brave enough to see it."
The Dark Knight Rises: "Maybe it's time to stop outsmarting the truth and let it have its day."
Ruby Sparks out on Oct 12.
Guy Maddin creates yet another world entirely of his own in Keyhole (Sept 14)

Maya Hewitt's new show opens Sept 5 or catch up with Tony Cragg's sculptures at various Exhibition Road venues thence Thursday 6 September (Royal Albert Hall BBC Proms) is Beethoven’s 4th Piano Concerto with pianist Murray Perahia and the Vienna Philharmonic under conductor Bernard Haitink with one of the world’s great symphonic masterpieces, Bruckner’s 9th Symphony after the interval. A concert that will be the envy of the classical music world. So queue early.

Bruckner left substantial sketches for the Finale of his 9th Symphony, with the entire movement mapped out. Some fully orchestrated, some in sketch. The supposedly final version with an entirely new coda had it's world premier on October 15th, 2010 and at Carnegie Hall on February 24th, 2011 by the Berlin Phil under Simon Rattle. A terrifying prescience heaves itself from the bowels of the orchestral earth warning of the C20th century's horrors to come. Is the ending indeed a Hallelujah? Mahler's 9th Symphony, rather, steadfastly wades slowly forward into an unknown light without flinching, grimacing or even trembling. Deeper, shallower, then deeper again until finally there seems nothing to separate man and the universe. From those initial proud steps, we have come to experience what is total unending freedom, peace and tranquillity- the eternal lightness of being. But wouldn't it be wonderful if they played Mahler's 10th Symphony - (summer 1910, written as he contemplated the light embracing the mountains of Toblach, devastated by his romantic loss of his young wife Alma), and completed by Deryck Cooke using the composer's sketches. Perhaps it is an older human's symphony rather to be stared at by the young. And yet maybe not at all, for their hurt is just as real. Not nearly as sophisticated as Mahler's 9th but quite simply a heartfelt farewell to human life. There is no immortality. But indeed, perhaps, an afterlife. And if at many times the symphony presages many a Hollywood film score (or perhaps homages Richard Strauss' Salome of 1905! an opera Mahler was forbade to conduct in Vienna) then it just shows how magnificent are the influences on those film composers. A flautist would die happy being able to play the symphony's finale, or the few notes of the harpist or lay one down to rest -  the brass section. If there is a God then it inhabits Mahler's 10th. It's like a scene from a Hollywood movie. For example's sake, Humphrey Bogart and Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina: "No man walks alone by choice".
           
Chris Marker (29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) (this blog para 13): “Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

also at the Met Museum

Tomás Saraceno on the Roof:Cloud City

Go HERE for video of the opening

Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations (Metropolitan Museum, New York)

Last day of London's Sci-Fi Film Festival tomorrow (Monday May 7). Go HERE for an interview with the creative team behind Journey to Planet X (Tribeca Film Festival).

As the world starts thinking about descending on London for the Olympics, LucresLondon is now going global! Life is never quite where you expect it to be ;)

Go HERE for coverage of New York's Tribeca Film Festival 2012

.. ..deep order...

We always try to put on a good show don't we? A good spread. Don't let the side down. Make an appearance but don't outstay one's welcome. Not so always, of course. Not so much so that we do not dare do throw ourselves off the nearest parapet in fear of landing on an adjacent ledge. "Once we had anarchy in the UK. Now all we have is monarchy in the UK" is the title of Julie Burchill's latest Observer article. Yet there was almost the Spanish Armada on the Chiswick Thames when a lone protestant swimmer propelled himself into the path of the annual Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Oars were broken, tears spilled and David Beckham's peg-leg was no where in sight;)
Jerry Rothwell's documentary Town of Runners (April 20) has its world premier at New York's downtown Tribeca Fest (April 19th) charting the course of two teenage Olympic hopefuls. The rural Ethiopian town of Bekoji having a track record in champions.

Was the Thames rowing incident some sort of sign? A premonition of a 2012 Olympics to come? Helas. Non. That event's greatest worry is that a purely pragmatic problem of logistically challenged infrastructure just may rear its head if one ailing cog falls out of place. What the boat race intervention did presage is precisely what all but those who were socially antennae challenged didn't catch onto in the recent London riots. That many people don't have what you have and want it! It has bugger all to do with elitism or political agenda. Why else would citizens burn down their own neighbourhood if not out of some Freudian trauma of the Fatherland not delivering even a whiff of the Garden of Eden?

Is the Fourth plinth rocking horse in Trafalgar Sqare's regression to childhood security/ uncertainty a gateway back to the future? How one human can catch the attention, if not of the world, then at least the world of England. Very easily. “England,” declares German artist (Serpentine Gallery) Hans-Peter Feldman, “is the biggest kitsch country in the world,” in a recent Financial Times interview. Gilbert and George seem to be making their v challenging work in recent memory at the White Cube gallery elevating ordinary faux extraordinary newspaper headlines into iconic status. Eureka DVD has just re-issued The Gospel According to Matthew(Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964) where 'ordinary' people rather than actors prove that what happened all those millenia ago was in fact possible of being extraordinary. Meanwhile filmmaker Patrick Keiller (Tate Britain) rattles the bones of our being with what lies beneath in our fair British isle. And Dexter Fletcher's impressive Wild Bill is a tale truer than most about surviving and finally being eaten by London reality. Even more impressive as a debut is Breathing (April 20) with a slightly more happier outcome relative to the road it must first travel.
Joachim Trier's Oslo, August 31 is out on DVD.

What British cinema has always done best is show how resourceful under fire can be the little cogs in that un-oiled greater wheel of fire - Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (April 20)being an example in the vein of Bill Forsythe's Local Hero. It's unashamedly Hollywoody in many regards, and all the better for that yet never sacrificing dialogue (Simon Beaufoy) and character detail. Its politics are more In the Loop vein and damn close to how the game of Westminster is really played. Money talks and if a Yemen sheik wants to throw 50 million pounds into UK government coffers to make salmon fishing a reality in the desert it's no slap in the face with a wet one! The sheik's foe miss the bigger picture and his vision of a very modest Garden of Eden. So too the Brits. Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt's roles are pawns in the sheik's chess game but as if a fairy tale they blossom into a king and queen on their very modest stage.

If onlyMirror Mirror had half the tongue in cheek wit and sophistication of Whit Stillman's Damsels in Distress. Tarsem Singh owes his Hollywood directing career to creating wondrous production design to spin a tensile web around his often less than resilient plots. And while Mirror is an enjoyable 110min it is certainly no Enchanted. The dwarfs have edgy comic bite, Nathan Lane's enormous talents are never allowed to make the prince very memorable beyond his sculptured torso. Julia Roberts sends her (not so) aging image up rotten with comic nuance, while Lily Collins acts as a delightful jejeune foil to all of them.

Damsels in Distress (April 27), however, (New York director Whit Stillman's first movie in a well-over a decade) is - like all his films- a fairy tale much closer to the world of Grimm. Suicide is a plot line, anal (consenting?) rape is as calmly declenshed as a Latin verb."What the world needs is a large mass of normal people," opines Violet (Greta Gerwig) the film's lynch-pin among the university students of Seven Oakes College. Violet together with her dorm-mates rather than carelessly watching Rome burn fervently believe that they can be a United Nations ameliorator to the rather uncouth smelly soap- challenged boys who will make a boozy attempt at the Ides of March. What's fascinating about Mr Stillman's world is that it could be easily equated to an honest-to-goodness bourgeoisie in any country not just America. Violet and her friends may superficially eek of noblesse oblige (which in a very true sense are their actions) but, ironically, it stems from a deep rooted concern for the common good. Not so much 'let them eat cake' rather 5-star cooking classes are free and available to all who enter in.
Minnell's The Bad and the Beautiful gets re-released April 20. Violet would no doubt have cried buckets when she would later in years probably see Some Came Runnning.
US indy hit Tiny Furniture just had a UK release. It's creator Lena Dunham has her new series Girls out soon on HBO in the States.

What's so worrying about a very British coup is that the rabble rouses (from all classes as seen from the riot post-mortem) only know to break in and ransack the larder in favour of sweets and a big Mac. Stillman's film is where so many of us would like to be: problems that are real to us rather than those that crash through our roof like some aerial invasion, completely alien to us. Those of us who have so much higher an aspiration of what a popular culture could be. Doug Emmett's hi-def cinematography gives everything the rose-tinted look of a chocolat ad making every glint of sunshine sparkle all the more and giving Ciera Wells' costumes the look of an Upper East Side New York kasbah!

They almost outshine Ray Aghayan's costumes (CinemaScope) in Caprice a late career (1967) Doris Day vehicle and one that she readily disowned. It's not a bad film by any means and very well suited to director Frank Tashlin's comedic prowess (before working with Jerry Lewis he cut his teeth in Warner Brothers animation department. What's more there's loads of other great talent here. Aside from Richard Harris in his prime, Ray Walston plays an obsessed industrial chemist (a household name in American TV after playing the extraterrestrial Uncle Martin in My Favorite Martian. Lilia Skala as the Swiss perfume chemist - an actress who'd worked with theatre maestro Max Reinhardt, fled the Nazis to New York and penniless, rose the ladder again from menial jobs to Broadway.

Adorning Violet's wall in Damsels in Distress is a poster for Jean Renoir's classic La Grand Illusion (1937 and given a great Blu-ray treatment by Studio Canal this week). Inspired by British economist Norman Angell's book - which argued that war is futile because of the common economic interests of all European nations - Renoir (a bourgeois by dint of his father being the great painter August Renoir) paints a cinematic canvas (in B/W) where the colour of C20th reality keeps bleeding into the characters' thoughts during WW1 officer POW internment. Renoir stated that the film was 'a story about human relationships. I am confident that such a question is so important today that if we don’t solve it, we will just have to say ‘goodbye’ to our beautiful world." Jean Gabin plays the working-class character and it's an illuminating comparison with Marel Carne's 1938 Quai des Brumes (Port of Shadows, re-issued by the BFI May 4) in which Gabin also represents an underdog, the army deserter. "If I see a swimmer, I immediately think he’ll drown, so I paint a drowned man,” says the Le Havre artist in Quai des Brumes. Does he presage his own suicide and is it a fulfillment of fate?

La Grande Illusion could so easily be Stillman's characters a generation on. The youngsters idealism is yet to betray decay. Violet feels it but doesn't know that that is exactly what it is. She loses (to one of her 'gang') her boyfriend who isn't even worthy of the name underdog and goes into what she euphemistically calls "tail-spin" rather than suicide mode. Deep down beneath all her calm cardigans what she desperately seeks is a Jean Gabin to secretly keep alive. Someone to challenge her pre-conceptions. But of course it would only really work in one of her dance sequences. And all would prove futile outside the world of bodily freedom and conform. The real 'Gabin' boy would always be a 'catcher in the rye'. Would always rebel against Violet's philosophical comport. And as much as he truly may end up loving such as her, his yearn for the sea would always prevail. Or just maybe they'd cross the mountains in Sound of Music style.
Aki Kaurismäki's Le Havre is on release as well as Curzon (and the UK art-house circuit) new very good value 'on demand' service for first-run releases.

Does Mondrian Nicholson in Parallel makes us think about the real world or do we remain wandering abstractly? The Courtauld makes a great case for the former in another of its small but beautifully formed gallery shows. Nicholson (Mondrian's junior by 20 years) was blown away by his visit to the then little known Mondrian's Paris studio. The latter then became a Hampstead neighbour of Nicholson's in London. And in so many ways they saw the world in the same vein though on parallel paths. They both sculpted out of the paint with Nicholson going so far as to make minimalist "white reliefs" whose shadows were (very arguably amongst art historians) the equal of Mondrian's vibrant expressways. A conference last month at the Courtauld Institute made one even more fascinated by how these two artists confluenced or challenged each other. Student Vanja V. Malloy delivered an intriguing paper on the physics rife at the time that would have influenced these artists while another student gave what on paper seemed would be a somewhat boring presentation (far from it) on re-creating in 3D the interiors of Mondrian's various studios. Some first hand memories varied very, very widely indeed causing one to consider just how reliable are all those primary source citations in our art history gathering. Moreover, another lecture initiated debate over just how much Nicholson was part of any avant-garde artistic circle in spite of sources claiming that he definitely was.
Gift to Courtauld will make London a world centre of Buddhist art studies.


Somerset House has a spring offering from London-based Chilean Fernando Casasempere who's filled the freshly-grassed courtyard of the Fountain Court with 10,000 rhythmically-spaced ceramic flowers. It's an oasis of calm compared to the dull thudding of real life, crazy traffic, people, cyclists on the Strand. Ah - "to sit upon a hill as I do now" and escape life's battles as Shakespeare's Henry VI did. What drives people to do so many horrible things? They do them even in the quietest of places. 'Crazy' maverick director Werner Herzog goes in search of those on death row - Into The Abyss: A Tale Of Death, A Tale Of Life . He observes, questions, never judges and is openely an opponent of the death penalty. Why do people kill? It's not so much an answer as a meditation on this question in Once Upon a Time in Anatolia. Nothing much happens in this film and yet, of course everything does. One memorable moment is when the police with their suspect in tow, have a break from finding where he buried in the bleak Turkish landscape and at 3am in the morning pop into the local Mayor's house for a bite to eat. The Mayor uses the opportunity to politically lever a request that they get funding for a morgue - for a village in the middle of nowhere.

In Paolo Sorrentino's first English language film This Must Be the Place Sean Penn is an ageing Goth (akin The Cure) who traverses America to avenge his father. It's a beautifully shot film and Penn is tremendous. Yet what made Sorrentino such a fascinating Italian director of this new century was the way in which he harked back to an almost operatic view of history, politics and the personal. His latest film feels like Wim Wenders in America when it really longs to be more in the realm of Puccini's opera La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the West). There's always something cool, detached, inevitable in Sorrentino and the film's final scene is that and operatic. There's never a round of applause at the end of a Wenders movie. But with Sorrentino it's almost as if the whole cinemascape is a show for an unseen hand. An Althussian dialectic perhaps with a cut-away to an imagined audience. There's a finality to life in This Must Be the Place whereas in other Sorrentino the wheel of life trundles on regardless even though the curtain has fallen.

Another prism through which to view life: The Hourglass Sanatorium and the Polish sensibility under censure. So much so that the print had to be smuggled out of the country to make it to the Cannes Fest and win a prize. Jafar Panahi was banned form making any films in Iran and his This is Not a Film was secreted to the West on a memory stick. (Palisades Tartan)

The Deep Blue Sea (Blu-ray) a parallel world perhaps to
Las Acacias [Blu-ray] (Pablo Giorgelli, 2011)
And on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week Peter Carey discusses his new novel The Chemistry of Tears in the context of the world's future past.

..the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living
Damien Hirst at the Tate Modern

a book of disquiet

What is it to be obsessed/obsessive? Is it synonymous with egoism? Clearly not in so many causes as it has more to do with the object rather than the id. And indeed can be either a force for good or ill? I think we all really wanted to like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Stephen 'Billy Elliot' Daldry's) new film about a kid dealing (or not) with the trauma of losing his dad in the 9/11 Twin Towers collapse. But the film engenders anger rather than consolation/hope/imagination. Should the source novel be read? I almost did but at the end of the day thought better of it. A film becomes its own entity. And don't get me wrong. It is very much a film worth seeing if only to discover why so many people are still so very angry about 9/11. Not so much the event. The loss. But about the verboten unspoken. It's worth the ticket price alone to see Max von Sydow's silent performance - an entire film in itself: the 'renter' of the boy's aunt's apartment who lives across the street and who Oskar walkie-talkie's.

The 'renter' lived through an even greater trauma - that of the Dresden bombing and the holocaust. And my instinct tells me that Mr. Daldry made (inadvertently) a great film about not being able to make a sublime film that kissed the horrible flaws of what could have been THAT movie. We know Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks can ACT (as they exhibit here as ever consummately) and that they're constantly ridiculed for sorta not ever being considered as real actors. But they are so peripheral to this movie whose real star is Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn). And probably Mr. Daldry's great skill is in directing young talent/artists. But we sense that Oskar is screaming. Mr Daldry puts the kid on cinematic Prozac instead! Should he have gone further with the adults? It's difficult to say. But you almost feel that Sydow dared Mr. Daldry to force him to speak and that that dare was never taken up.

So much was unsaid about 9/11. To the extent that the prevailing winds couldn't even admit that loyal American citizens could possibly consider jumping out of a window in the face of adverse horror. To the point where film makers were demanded by government to erase images of 'the towers' from their movies to avoid...ahhhh...ummmm what exactly? If that's your starting point you have one helluva a climb to the pinnacle of any truth whatsoever. Does Oskar have Asperger's Syndrome or, moreover, does everybody else in their desperate longing to hug and 'reach out' to this child. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close attempts magic but plumets whimsy. And that makes one angry. How dare you tell me to move on, reach out to me when you've never experienced THAT kind of loss. It makes Oskar furious to the point where he 'steals' the answaphone with his Dad's last messages an places it with a facsimile machine so his Mum (nor anyone else but him) will ever hear them. And the child has finally convinced himself (rightly or wrongly) that the 'you' in that final message relates solely to him. And as we seethe with fury at how his Dad has been told to trust in the 'stay where you are and all will be fine' advise messages. Oskar will see/find the 'missing borough' of Manhattan on the far off hillside (that so oft his Dad mischievously had wafted about his child), traversed the valley, and summitted the mountain only to find that the golden windows of escape were a refection of whence he'd travelled.

In many ways Roman Polanski's Carnage (adapted from Yasmina Reza's play) is a far superior film in depicting the underbelly of Manhattan and yet in so many ways insubstantial compared to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close's soul of seeking enlightenment. It is very funny and very incredibly too close for comfort. The parents of two kids meet at one of their abodes (ultimately disintegrating) after the event of one 'sprog' assaulting the other in a playground. If either parents are anything to go by, the kids had little or none of the sense of life's wonder that Oskar's dad had instilled in him. For all Extremely Loud's frenetic New York actualite, Polanski's studio recreation of those denizen's inner lives breathes a far truer spark.

It's not easy to enjoy Bruno Dumont's films. But if one perseveres, you do feel as if you've touched the hand of some higher power. The real 'reaching out'. Twentysomething Céline (Julie Sokolowski) escaped the bourgeois claustrophobia of her parents, became Hadewijch (after a C13th mystic poet) in a nunnery but was so self-obsessed and devout that she was ostracised back to normality. A kindred spirit to Oskar in many ways in that they both think they see the light but it is merely a reflection of their own obsession. Céline attends a discussion group on “the notion of the invisible” incrementally magnetised to the 'boys' of a Islam group. Sokolowski's face is inescapable on the screen almost succeeding in convincing you that there is something irresistibly beyond. What results is somewhat of a profound understanding of how easy fundamentalism is incubated. Céline is more than a moth around a flame: she succumbs to the gravitational pull of her own reflection. The polar opposite of Simone Weil's philosophical writings/teachings of Gravity and Grace whereby one must empty oneself of the ego to be drawn to the centrifugal light.