ARTYFACTS

Degas: pre-photography Richter – post-photography artist

2011-11-28T23:25:00.001Z

Degas – pre-photography artist

Degas is seen as a master of movement but I’m not so sure.By far the best paintings in the Royal Academy show are of dancers at rest. Itwhen they’re off guard, sitting, tired and relaxed, that they come alive. Ballet’sa classical construct and is dead in still images, whether they be paintings, photographsor sculpture. In fact the Little Dancer is a dancer at rest, in a fixed pose. Musiciansin the Orchestra has those extra dimensions, faces and instruments, that givethe painting complexity and depth. There’s not a dancer image in the show tomatch it. I’d also liked to have seen some of the racing horse paintings asthey’re far more lively. Of course, the bourgeoisie will always prefer balletover the racecourse. Painting, in particular, is rarely a medium of movement. Thenalong comes photography. It disrupts his faith in painting – what’s more, he’sa lousy photographer. Degas is a pre-photography artist.

Richter – post-photography artist

So, off to the Tate Modern to see the Richter show –Panorama. Now Richter is the ultimate post-photography artist. He’s wholly atease with the medium and uses it to prime his painting. He’s happy to tryphotographic realism in paint, or blur, distort and recreate photographic-likeimages in paint. There’s no clash here only admiration. His mirror work, I’mnot so sure about. It has none of the innovative form of Kapoor’s mirrors. TheReader is a Vermeer-Iike image of great beauty as is The Farm, cold, still andempty. To be honest, I much prefer the paintings shown a couple of years ago atthe National Portrait gallery, especially his beach snaps. This time thecurators want to show a complete range of his work (is there any artist who hasattempted such a wide range?) but breadth is not always matched by depth. He’snot consistent. Some of the abstract work can be hazy.

As for the Tacita Dean work in the turbine hall, it’s dulland trite.

Tyrannosaur – a dinosaur

2011-10-11T20:11:00.002+01:00

Listen, I’m Scottish, but I’m not a violent drunk or dosser.So I’m not often amused to see yet another unshaven, drink-soaked Scot on a cinema screen. Granted Scotland does enough to promote this image of itself, but I’vehad my fill of this stuff.

So I’m not sure that this movie deserves the plaudits it’sreceived. A grim tale of relentless violence it simply plods, like its maincharacter, through episode after episode of drink, desperation and death. Therearen’t any shades of grey, only dull, depressing darkness. Neither does it followthrough as tragedy, as the ending is an optimistic afterthought. Granted the performances were good but where was the writing. The characters are class clichés; the drunk Scot, the loquaciousIrishman, the thug with dog, the English housewife. Just no surprises.

Drive - nothing to do with cars

2011-10-08T15:08:00.000+01:00

He arrives and departs like a comet, enters from whateverdarkness he’s come from and speeds off into that blackness when he leaves.Played like an automaton, there are no clues to what’s going on inside hishead. He’s at one with the cars he drives, as mindless as a machine, doesn’t dodialogue and has eyes like headlight – he rarely blinks. It’s a littlederivative in that No Country From Old Men is the character inspiration, but itworks.

This makes the relationship and violence all the more brutaland unexpected. He accelerates from zero to a hundred in the split of a second.The film has a series of harrowing scenes where the violence is pure venom withabsolutely no dilution or glamour. Strangely enough, this is what gives thefilm its tragic depth. He acts in a moral manner but only against those whowant to hurt others. Like Frankenstein, he protects those who shows him kindness.But he has to go all the way and they all must die.

This could have been a truly awful car chase movie but it’sthe opposite as it has very little to do with cars and everything to do withinstinct and ‘drive’. What drives people to be as they are and do what they do?Ultimately, it’s the drive to survive. I know this sounds a little contrivedbut it I suspect it is an attempt at a tragic metaphor for life itself. He’sborn from nothing, gets entangled with the struggle of a family and thebrutality of a Hobbesian world, but there’s no real resolution, the strugglecontinues.

Tinker, Taylor, Soldier, SPY!

2011-09-19T18:51:00.003+01:00

I was brought up in this era, and travelled widely in theSoviet Union as well as visiting Budapest, Prague and East Berlin when the wallwas up in the 70s. Curiously, I also knew an Eastern bloc spy – very well in fact, he was my mate, literallysharing a room with him at University. This has given me a sharp interest incold war espionage.

So how was this movie? First the 'art direction' was superb,creating that muted, limited palette, sombremood that is as important as the plot. Then there was the 'direction', a little confusing at times, but he stretchedthe spring slowly and steadily until it finally broke and the bits went flying.This was a masterclass in pace, barely a gear change in the whole film, just slowly, rising tension. It’sgood to experience a spy movie without a single car chase, macho pose or blazinggun. Everything was finely measured and therefore all the more menacing.

There was a curious government funded advert before the filmwith a talking baby abusing its teenage mother. It was repulsive and an unnecessaryattack on teenage mothers. In any case, there wasn’t a soul under the age of 25in the ‘arthouse’ cinema (so hardly a hotbed of teenage sex), so it was acomplete waste of money. No wonder targeted online advertising is thrashingthese idiots.

Anthony Kenny (Edinburgh Book Festival) - masterful

2011-08-27T19:11:00.003+01:00

When Kenny retired he was asked to write a new History of Western Philosophy. As he said, Russell was inaccurate but readable, Coplestone accurate but boring. His is an attempt to be accurate and readable. (Hard to understand why Russell got the Nobel Prize for Literature, for his book.)

He took us on a quick journey through Western Philosophy, starting with Plato and Aristotle - Plato asked more questions, but Aristotle gave more answers. St Augustine was criticised for his later theological strictures and Aquinas praised as one of the greatest mind of the Middle Ages but a Gulliver held down by Lilliputians (the clergy and Aristotelian physicists). Duns Scotus’s scepticism he saw as an enduring and destructive force stretching all the way to Hume. The problem with the Middle Ages was reverence for sacred books, so Aristotle became an unquestioned orthodoxy. It was only when this reverence for Aristotle was overthrown that philosophy could progress.

After a quick run through Early Modern philosophy from the Continental Rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza), against the British Empiricists (Locke, Berkeley and Hume), we get the great unifier Kant. He seemed to have a soft-spot for Bentham but found the Greatest Happiness principle suspect. Interestingly, he saw the mutual antipathy between the Anglo-American and Continental philosophy rather false and destructive. Nevertheless, the only passage he read was a diatribe against Derrida, who he accuses of simply being a deft user of rhetoric in the form of puns, the bawdy, sneers and sniggers. For Kenny, Wittgenstein is, for him, the greatest of the 20^th century philosophers.

Philosophy, for Kenny, was a personal journey, which is why he is sceptical of lectures on the subject and in favour of dialogue and tutorials. He thought that much modern philosophy had become trapped in institutional behaviour with far too many journals and obscurism. Given his view that Aquinas’s genius had been thwarted by the Church and modern philosophy thwarted by academia, I asked whether he though Hume was a better philosopher for being outside academia. He admired Hume’s moral philosophy but thought little of his analysis of causality (the opposed position was a view that few held) or basic empiricist theory of impressions.

The book itself is indeed readable and HUGE. Having read a few passages in the bookshop - it's on my next Amazon order.

Steve Bell (Edinburgh Book Festival) - superb

2011-08-27T13:36:00.002+01:00

Steve Bell lives about 200 yards from my front door so it was a little odd having to go all the way to Edinburgh to see him. However, it was a full house for Britain’s best loved cartoonist (at least for the left-leaning), who delivered a stonking show narrating the story behind the creation of his best known characters; Thatcher (plain mad), Major (underpant ordinariness), Blair (Thatcher in disguise), Bush (chimp), Charles Kennedy (angry eyes), Ming Campbell (geriatric), Gordon Brown (chin laden), Cameron (young, gifted and plump), Ed Miliband (strange, stary eyes) and Murdoch (mad).

He swore like a trooper throughout, describing Margaret Thatcher as “completely fucking mad” and Murdoch as a “mad old fucker”. But what was fascinating was the methodical observation and sketching of the characters before settling on the caricature. You imagine him sitting at home, pen in hand, but no, he attends Party Conferences, sketches and takes photographs, even scanning cartoons in on his laptop for submission the editor.

Cameron approached him recently, and said, “Hi Steve. What’s this condom thing all about?” What he thought but didn't say was, “because you’re a dick”.

Marc Almond: Ten Plagues (Traverse) - like a bad X-factor audition

2011-08-27T13:22:00.004+01:00

What would someone who had never heard of Marc Almond made of this? A guy who can’t sing and can’t act, camping up the Black Death. Like a ‘bad’ X-factor audition it was comically bad, at times almost unbearable to watch. His faltering singing voice was not up to the task of a sustained performance of this length and if you thought the singing was bad, the acting, really just strutting about throwing exaggerated gestures, was laughable. You can’t just stick your chin out, look into the air and throw your arms out. At one point Marc sings a dialogue with a silent projected, black and white figure in a kilt. I swear the projected image was more realistic than Marc.

You could have been forgiven if you had seen this as some sort of weird, comic and ironic take on musical performance. Melodrama is wearing, so I was relieved when he eventually exited stage right but my heart (no my entire body) sank when he strutted back on for yet more histrionics. The good news is that, in the end, I survived, unlike the many songs I heard, massacred by a plague of plonking piano notes, out of tune singing and poor acting. If he had had some support singers it may have been salvageable, on the other hand a singer of any talent would have shown him up. Zero stars!

Beginners - ill-formed and laboured

2011-08-01T11:39:00.001+01:00

A listless, tired movie about Oedipal relationships, complete with fancy dress Freud (just in case you didn’t get it). Let’s admit that Freud is dead (conceptually), and all that ‘four people in a relationship’ stuff has had its day. Oh and there’s also dollops of eros and thanatos, just in case the Oedipal stuff doesn’t get through. OK, maybe I’m in denial, so what about the performances?

Where to begin? First up, the phony relationship with the French actress (tempted to say clichéd), has no depth. She’s scripted to be enigmatic but ends up tedious and annoying. But she’s nothing compared to the Dad’s lover, who’s as flat and wooden as a parquet floor. Christopher Plummer makes the best of a bad role, namely a terminally ill, finally out of the closet man, who laughs at death. The mother looked the most interesting of them all, but we got little from her in the flashbacks, just some bohemian set pieces and think about it – the dad lied to her until the day she died. McGregor’s accent also slips badly in one of the bedroom scenes, where he sounds as Scottish as my mum.

Then there’s the cute dog stuff, with subtitles, that brings a Disneyesque dimension, and I don’t mean that in a kind way. It’s just bad film making, all tell and no show. As for the cuts to coins, colours and objects, that’s like getting ‘hundreds and thousands’ on your ice cream; colourful but in bad taste. As for the graffiti idea – plain embarrassing. This mess of a movie is ill-formed and laboured.

Baubles and bones at British Museum

2011-07-08T21:45:00.002+01:00

I’ve always been puzzled by miracles such as the virgin birth, water into wine, resurrection and raising the dead. That such miracles are performed by God and Jesus is one thing, but Saints? You need only read one essay on the subject to be clear on the issue, Hume On Miracles. His big argument is, 'That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish....' But I prefer his more straightforward argument in the second half of the essay. 1) Wonder: People have a natural sense of wonder when they hear about miracles. 2) Witnesses: they have reason to believe as they are often religious believers.3) Gullible: People are gullible and credulous when they hear such stories 4) Barbarous: Miracles often arise in the distant past when nations are less educated.

So first up, these are objects of folly, gullibility and stupidity. Now miracles are stories and I can see how people can get carried away, but these are baubles and bones. What made people venerate bones? Christ’s relics I can understand as a visceral link with divinity but Saints are league division 2.

The openings section had a stab – Roman Christians had to hide and bury their dead in catacombs, here feast days were held. This led to a veneration for the bones of one’s ancestors and famous Christians. A visit to the catacombs south of Rome confirms this.

But it was Byzantium, and Constantine’s mother Helena, who turned relics into an international trade. She went to Jerusalem, and in what must have been a Time Team spectacular, found the True Cross (and alongside the other two!), crucifixion nails, his tunic, head of thorns and rope. This is 300 years after the events happened!

And so an industry was born, as Saints relics were found or collected after they died; fingers, hands, entire arms, heads, femurs, shins, toes and other bones came to be collected and shown in reliquaries. Some saints seem to have been preserved several times over. Thereafter Constantinople became relic central and Constantine and other Emperors used them as political gifts.

When the Christians sacked Christian Constantinople, in one of those christen v Christian wars, the world’s greatest concentration of relics was dispersed throughout Europe. Relics and reliquaries are now to be found throughout Europe.

Calvin, Luther and the reformation put an end to this in Northern Europe, but the counter-Reformation made relics even more venerated and associated with pilgrimage.

Of course, it’s not just Christianity that reveres relics. I’ve seen Buddha’s tooth carried on the back of an elephant through Candy, which was spectacular, been in a crowd of intense Muslims in a mosque outside Byzantium’s walls at the footprint of Mohammed, a tooth, hair, coat, sword and letter in the Topaki Palace in Istanbul. I’ve also seen Shia place their head in a casket that held Hussein’s head in Damascus. Which only goes to show that people of all nations are gullible and stupid.

Cables from Kabul by Sherard Cowper-Coles

2011-07-04T16:55:00.002+01:00

SCC has been presented as an intelligent dissenter, a man in touch with the reality of Afghanistan. In fact he comes across as a man obsessed with his own little diplomatic world. It’s a world of groupthink in which the Foreign Office and Military protect their own little worlds, at the expense of the nation, and worse, the lives of young men. He has little contact or feel from the lads dying on the ground.

Groupthink 1 - Military intelligence (self-contradictory)

The bottom line is that after ten years, billions spent, thousands of coalition deaths and many more Afghan army and civilian deaths we have failed. Civilian deaths in particular have negated most of the effort. We failed because the truth has been constantly denied, primarily by a military machine that wants to fight and sees this as a means of survival and budgetary protection, especially in the UK, where the old-school tie and educational contacts remain the most powerful method of lobbying.

Military intelligence (sic) is provided by people with an interest in expanding their sphere of influence, fighting wars, mixed with loyalty to the military itself. It results in an insidious groupthink and optimism. We are told that badly written papers from the MOD, full of acronyms and dense prose, repeatedly avoid costings and that when such costings are promised they never appear. Use them or lose them, Sherard” says a senior MOD bod. What on earth do they think they’re doing?

Even on the ground, the rotation of entire brigades on a six monthly basis reduces continuity and effectiveness, as does the generous holidays and rotation of embassy staff. New Brigadiers do what they’re trained to do – launch a new offensive and get some action. In the lack of a clear political strategy, the military are making it worse not better.

At least the British were sensitive to some local needs patrolling with care, not destroying crops, as opposed to the gung-ho Marines blasting their way across the land driven by loyalty to Corps, not country. SCC saw them as practising a form of military colonialism, a role they were ill-equipped to deliver (in this he shows his fondness for British colonialism, which we could presumably deliver).

Groupthink 2 – Old-school

SCC wrote the book in a fit of pique, as he had been denied the job he had been promised by his boss, who took the job himself. So much for integrity in the Foreign Office!. He constantly drops his little references, “my old prep-school friend…been in Pony club with my brothers…Labradors and prep-school lawns…our time together at Oxford…Oxford don..Scottish Dowagers…my club in St James…once examined me for All Souls..official visit to public school in India (Why?)…been at the same Oxford College as me…farcical Prince of Wales visit…graduate of Balliol..” It reaches levels of absurdity when he invites his ‘old school friend’ to deliver an ‘Ain’t Half Hot Mum’ cabaret to squaddies, who were clearly unimpressed by a bunch of aging, public-schoolboy queens delivering daft ditties in Helmand, while their mates were being blow up. They found it ‘poncey’ – what a surprise Sherard.

Groupthink 3 –Foreign Office

The FCO (Foreign Office), of which he is a part, comes across as mired in protocol, obsessed with Royal and VIP visits (27% of all helicopter trips on VIPS!), old-school, public school, Oxbridge hubris. It’s an unreformed colonial office. Thanks god for the politicians. One of the odd aspects of the book is his admiration for Gordon Brown and David Miliband, who had a grasp of the detail, politics and a good relationship with President Karzai. Chris Mullin has already uncovered the absurdities of the Foreign Office in his wonderful memoirs but SCC does it by accident, betraying his ridiculously old-fashioned approach to foreign affairs. No wonder the Americans see the Brits as an out-of-date, toothless bunch of amateurs. The Foreign Office comes across as drawing its credibility from a colonial past, rather than creating the future.

Groupthink 4 –Afghan conference circus

The conference circus is an industry in itself, often in places clearly designed for delegate holidays, rather than practical travel and access. This is a world of policy and planning by Powerpoint. But there’s no sense of challenge to either method or message. His attitudes compare badly with the more honest Europeans who say things such as “What the fuck are we doing here?” SCC gives us a good account of this process but is also complicit in the crime. After a particularly optimistic military presentation by the MOD he says, “to have questioned it would have seemed ill-mannered” (p26). This is a world in which manners matter more than the lives of young men. Later still, on hearing the same old, over-optimistic plans, he “keeps most of his reservations to himself” (p144). Are we really paying him to keep quiet at such events?

Groupthink 5 - journos

Embedded journalism is also a problem, cleverly designed to skew realistic, investigative journalism towards a sympathetic view of the fighting men, who are being injured and killed. The sympathies of the journalists drift towards the soldiers and not the issues. No real sensitivity for the critics of the Afghan policy only a sycophantic approach to old hands like John Simpson, Max Hastings and Sandy Gall.

What to do?

I’ve used the work ‘groupthink’ because it’s so very obvious that the Foreign Office, editorial class and military leaders are all drawn from a narrow group of public schoolboys who all seem to know each other, but show little in the way of innovation objectivity.

The last two short chapters of the book are by far the best, as he gets down to some clear analysis. If only he had briefed the politicians so strongly when he had the job. All he was after in the end was a cushy job heading towards retirement. In a sense I was pleased that he was done over by his boss.

In its favour, the book gives real insights into Afghanistan, the current decade of war and its failures. His final attack on the British military establishment paints them as little more than buffoons, the Americans are playing a game they are ill-equipped to win and the political strategy is flawed. Rather starengely, he does not mention the corruption within Afghanistan (the word doesn’t even appear in the index). No mention of the massive Kabul bank fraud. Why these omissions? In the end this is a book that says much about what is wrong with our foreign policy in Afghanistan, but as an unintended by-product, says just as much about what is wrong with the people who are in charge.

The passion of Joan of Arc – with Portishead and Goldfrapp musicians

2011-05-29T23:39:00.003+01:00

Joan of Arc, the 1928 film, closed the Brighton Festival, and it was a fine and fitting ending. In a Festival that had human rights at its heart, a movie that showed a young woman being martyred at the hands of old men in power, was entirely relevant.

As we speak young women (and men) are being imprisoned, tortured and killed by ‘old men’ regimes across the globe. Just before leaving the house I saw the police in Barcelona cruelly beating young people in a sit down protest against the ‘old order’. The woman in Libya who had been gang raped. In Bahrain women have been imprisoned and tortured, Berlusconi and Strauss-Kohn have behaved like grubby, old, priapic abusers. But it’s the sexual and violent actions of old leaders clinging onto their own ill-gotten gains, that resonates. Think Burma and the remaining despots in the Middle East.

As a silent movie, the music didn’t clash with any dialogue. The film with its upward looking camera angles at the old priests, judges and army is pointing the finger of scrutiny. But it is the actress playing Joan’s, that is astounding. Mostly big close-ups, her expressions are a language in itself. Throughout the film your mind brings up parallels and contemporary issues. The live choir and musicians rose to the occasion and the finale, when Joan is burnt at the stake, was intense. Well done Brighton Festival for bringing some real politics into art.

Izzeldin Abuelaish - electrifying talk

2011-05-29T16:43:00.003+01:00

It was electrifying. The audience was transfixed by the emotion of the event and the power of his arguments and the tragic story of how three of his daughters were blown up in front of his eyes by an Israeli tank shell. You may remember that this was broadcast by a brave journalist on Israeli TV. At times heart rending, he moved from stories about his mother and upbringing as a refugee in Gaza, to his struggle to become a Doctor, the bulldozing of his house, the loss of his wife then daughters, to a strong and well-argued appeal for the September recognition of Palestine as a state.

His moral authority obviously comes from the events he has been through but it’s subtler than that, as he decries those who ‘live to fight’ in favour of those who ‘fight to live’. To be clear he sees the Palestinian problem as a man-made disaster that needs to be rectified. He is clear about not labelling people by nationality or religion, not universalising but sticking to a moral code grounded in the simple ethics of reciprocal respect, dignity and help. To be clear, however, he thinks the Palestinians have been dehumanised by the Israelis (not all) and have lost their basic rights to be safe, secure and healthy.

But his talk really came alive when he addressed the political issues head-on. It is time, he thinks, for the west and Israel to learn from the courage of young people in the Arab Spring. Today the Rafah Crossing was opened and this is the first step in opening the way for a two state solution, based on 1967 borders, with land swaps and East Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine. The General Assemblyl, especially the US, in September, must ratify the Palestinian State. The map is there and if the US is ‘marketing’ justice, they have no choice.

The problem here is the Likud Party, the swing to the right in Israel and Netanyahu’s hard-line policy of settler expansion and no compromise. The key, therefore is a brave move by Obama to deny Israel US support unless they negotiate. To continue, as they are, in the Jordan valley and further settlements is the politics of hate. However, there are voices from within Israel such as former attorney general Michael Ben-Yair, ex-foreign ministry director Alon Liel, former parliamentary speaker Avraham Burg and Nobel Prize laureate Daniel Kahneman, who want the west to push for a UN resolution. Obama has a choice – the future of the region as a whole or propping up and ever more aggressive Israel. The Arab Spring could turn into an endless summer or a winter of discontent, depending on the outcome.

I have seen N Ireland solve its differences, with the help of Clinton, the Balkans have calmed down and despots are falling across the Arab World. It is surely time that this problem be solved. I bought his book I Shall not Hate to give to a young Palestinian friend of mine and shook his hand. He recognised the name as Palestinian and all he asked was that I personally back this cause. This is no sentimentalist. He’s a smart, hard-headed man, who has a clear goal and is devoting his life to seeing it through, so that his daughters did not die in vain. This is integrity and courage at its best.

Miro – man who branded a nation

2011-05-21T12:39:00.002+01:00

Long ranging retrospectives give you a trip through an artist’s life in an hour or two. It cuts to the bone by shaving off the peaks of achievement and presenting them in some sort of chronological and/or thematic order. It also throws to one side all the prattle-prattle, gossip and personal stuff. Art history is the history of the work, not the lives of artists. That’s why Tracy Emin’s such a bore and Miro's such a genius.

I’m not an outright fan of surrealism in painting and sculpture, as I’m not sure that two dimensional work often captures the restlessness of dreams, the unconsciousness or consciousness itself. I always feel as though surrealist signs and objects are like lapel badges trying to represent complex concepts.

However, Miro strikes gold (or blue) in later life when he produces his simple blue, yellow, white, and red palette pieces. Here we have beautiful images stripped of the halfway house imagery of the early work (peasant faces, guitars etc) and the awful, amateurishness of the burnt canvases. This is a man in search of a palette. The copper and masonite works, and constellation works, are the big steps on the way to his masterpieces and by far the best rooms in this large show leading up to the big Blues in Room 10.

Where the show fails is in missing the point that Miro was an artist who actually branded a nation. The progenitor was his postage stamp image shown in Room 5. But where is his famous ‘espagna’ image in red, black and yellow? This symbol that became the symbol of modern , post-Franco Spain. The Barcelona Olympic symbol was also Miro inspired. To miss this point is to miss his major achievement. Miro became Spain and Spain Miro.

Lee Scratch Perry - reggae zombie for 3 hours

2011-05-21T11:55:00.002+01:00

What is it about reggae and ska that makes you want to dance, even when you’re sitting down? It’s completely involuntary. Last night Romeo and Lee Scratch Perry pulsed a sound system that nearly lifted the lid off the Dome. I used to go to reggae clubs a lot when I was younger and still love this simple, old school stuff . It’s slow like a strong heartbeat and when it’s loud and vibrates through your inner organs, it sort of takes your body over, so it was great to be a reggae zombie for three hours. These two old-timers just sang, danced and joked their way through the set, while the crowd went bananas. Highpoint was Lee pointing out that tomorrow was the ‘end of the world’ day, recommending a night of reggae as the best way to go out! If there is a God and a heaven, I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s called Jah and it’s a non-stop reggae and ska party.

Midsummer madness

2011-05-19T13:17:00.002+01:00

It’s Midsummer and two mid-thirties people have mid-life crises. Sparked off by a drunken night’s sex (hilarious) the weekend explodes in an orgy of spending, drugs, bondage, chases and fun. Cora Bissett is brilliant as the luscious, blonde, vamp lawyer and Mathew Pidgeon nails the feckless drifter, although a Dostoevsky reading car-salesman/crook doesn’t ring any bells with me.

It’s a simple morality play in reverse, where dodgy characters and dodgier temptations lead the couple to reject the banality of their lives and jump into a Dionysian frenzy of a weekend that ultimately changes their lives. They both reject the habits and conventions of their lives for a little adventure.

I revelled in the language and swearing as it’s the two worlds I know best, a clash between Scottish working and middle class cultures. I knew every single street, pub and geographical reference and every single character. As I said, Medium Bob is not as developed a character as the lawyer, but that’s a quibble. Having a profession (lawyer) is as much a trap as having no profession. Both are stuck in separate grooves and just happen to come together in a bar.

A few people left because of the swearing but why on earth do these cretins go to the theatre? Is all theatre to be a reflection of their own, limited, polite worlds? Didn’t they see that the play was about THEM, middle-England’s dull, petty and average expectations? In any case, the rest of the audience loved it and the three encores were well deserved.

Kemble’s Riot - what a hoot!

2011-05-14T13:17:00.001+01:00

What a hoot! A melodramatic snippet from The Scottish Play (actors actually mentioned real name twice – no wonder the theatre burned down) is followed by audience rabble rousing. Based on a true incident of 55 days of riots at the Covent Garden Theatre over prices, the play touches upon, greed, money, nature of theatre, role of the actor, role of the audience and mob behaviour and no doubt several other things I missed. That’s some achievement for a Fringe play in a small venue like the Old Courthouse. Then again, the venue has a disputational provenance.

Audience participation can be a bit forced and hokey but here the audience really do get to contribute. The English are a bit reticent in these situations but we all got into gear and clapped, hooted, sang and abused the actors, time and time again. Then the twist! Won’t go into detail, all I’d say is, get along to this. These guys deserve full houses and a longer run. Actually, they deserve a bigger venue. I’d love to see this in the Theatre Royal, a good, old real theatre.

Oh and great to watch it with Pete and Lisa, followed by fun conversation in the Collonade Bar afterwards. What a fine evening.

Peter Taylor – Talking to Terrorists

2011-05-11T11:37:00.002+01:00

Big turnout for BBC journalist Pater Taylor promoting his new book ‘Talking to Terrorists’. No doubting his long experience but I’m not sure that he told us much that we didn’t know already. His portrait of Martin McGuiness was fascinating but there was no real psychological insight or revelations about terrorism or terrorists.

‘Paradise’ as a driver for Islamic suicide bombers, is torture counterproductive, state terror, virtual terrorism – there’s dozens of interesting topics to be unpacked but all we got were some anecdotal descriptions of his BBC interviews.

It was, nevertheless, an interesting evening if only for the probing questions that came from the Brighton audience. One questioned his lack of reference to religion in Northern Ireland. In fact, his claim that ‘religion’ played no part on Northern Ireland’s ‘troubles’ seemed downright naive. Both Protestant and Catholic clergy played significant roles in the troubles (paisley et al), and the segregated schools lie at the root of the problem. Another brought up the interesting point of gender politics in terrorism – Peter’s reply was wishy-washy. Yet another brought up the Hamas Fatah agreement – something Peter hadn’t touched upon. Brighton audiences can be quite feisty and it would have been great to have continued with the audience participation stuff. We should be allowed to tweet questions prior to the session or the chair pick up tweets during the session.

Peter Taylor is a reporter not an analyst. That’s fine, but it doesn’t give us that deeper insight. A BBC card can get you interviews almost anywhere in the world, it takes more than reports to get to the truth. I’d much rather have had someone like Louise Richardson who has written an in-depth, scholarly book on the subject, or a terrorist – there’s plenty of ex-IRA guys around.

Mesopotamian Dramaturgies – damp squib

2011-05-10T11:18:00.004+01:00

I rarely look at the blurb on handouts or labels on artworks before looking at them. So what does one make of these two works with little or no prior knowledge? Few would have guessed that there was kufic script in the Su piece, with its Sinan symmetric inversion. Fewer still would have seen any real relevance to national borders, identities and ideas in any of these works. They could just as easily have been interpreted as modern day Romanticism, images of nature, abstract video art, even some Briget Riley reflection on form.

In fact, as the artist’s sidekick explained (he was there but puzzlingly chose not to speak) it’s about the fluidity of borders, ideas and people. That’s fine, but these precise representational goals are at odds with the vagueness of the art. I know a little bit about this area and stood on the Euphrates Dam just a few weeks ago, where the problems of water shortage, border disputes, colonialism, Kurdish identity, religious schisms and many other complex political issues were discussed in detail. Ataman uses the word ‘narrative’ a lot, but these works contain little in the way of narrative, that’s for other art forms that use language, in its widest sense. My beef is the fact that we have to second guess or read too much to ‘get’ the representational message. Once you’ve got the water & fluidity message, you’re left with little more.

Mayhem

The new piece, Mayhem, simply lacks the power it promises. It’s dwarfed in the huge space that is the Old Municipal Market, and when it comes to rushing water, lacks that most vital of ingredients – SOUND. It’s the size and roar of a waterfall that makes it terrifying. Inverting the waterfall also emasculates its power. You no longer feel that you could be pulled over its edge. I went back for a second time to see if I had missed something. I’m not sure that I had. This time, oddly, the roof had leaked, leaving puddles everywhere, including on the artwork itself. People’s footprints were appearing on the floor projections. The images are too small to have the desired effect i.e. the disorientation when standing between the screens or the feeling of danger with plunging water into the floor. If they had been four or more times larger, all of this may have worked, especially the floor projections. ‘Mayhem’ it is not.

As for the background narrative of Israel having nearly been in Argentina and so on – it’s just reinjecting a narrative into images that say nothing much about that issue. I heard him espouse this ‘narrative’ on Radio 4 this morning and remain unconvinced by his aims and achievements in this work. Ataman has a habit of hyperbolic inference. For example, when describing his work in relation to history, ‘all history is fiction’. In this case ‘all borders are fiction’. He’s given to this sort of statement. But this rush to relativism is an easy option in art and often fatuous. The philosophy of history, and geography, is a complex subject not easily reduced to extreme platitudes. This is representational art where the representational narratives have to be explained on handouts.

Jardin Flambeau - stunning saturnalia

2011-05-09T17:12:00.003+01:00

The French love a good flame-fest, but they so often verge on the wrong side some second-rate street party with underwhelming performers doing things with diesel. So imagine my surprise - this was stunning. Over several hours from dusk til late we wandered through the trees to discover a saturnalia of fire. It was the sheer scale of the event that made it work, everywhere you looked there was more fire, more music.

The place was jammed with families, teenagers and oldsters like me, just relaxing and enjoying the sights and sounds of a garden transformed into a world of fire and flames; vertical tubes of charcoal glowing, chimneys puffing flames, balls of fire hanging from trees like burning suns, huge fairground shapes made of fire, talking trees and live musicians. No aggression, no problems, despite the potential for fiery mischief. I’m often disappointed with open-air events like these, but this was something that all those kids will remember for the rest of their lives. Great also to bump into people we hadn’t seen for a while. That’s what a festival does for a city.

Lead Pinter The New World Order – feel the fear

2011-05-09T13:39:00.003+01:00

Few well heeled art lovers have experienced any rum dealings with authority or the police. They tut tut at the behaviour of rioters in London but state control and violence is the stuff of TV and the Sunday newspapers, not their lives. Having been kettled this month and had my photograph taken, without my permission, by the police, I've become a bit angry about their role.

This full on production can come as a bit of a shock to passive theatre goers. You don’t get to sit and gawk, you’re pushed, cajoled and forced into the action. Actually, it is quite refreshing to watch people who are used to telling others what to do being controlled in this fashion – they don’t like it one bit. Middle England’s middle managers are a smug lot, so well done to the cast who make them feel uncomfortable. You literally see and hear people complaining about the actors being rude!

Seriously, apart from these whiners, who clearly didn’t understand what was going on and see audience discomfort as having no place in theatre, this work sits perfectly in this festival. Andrew Comben and his team have brought politics into the cosy art world. It’s a brave move and it’s about time. The festival has too often pandered to middle England types with its cosy Radio 4agenda.

Burma and its oppressed, elected and imprisoned leader has been chosen as thespringboard, but freedom, fear and human rights are the big themes. This is Pinter territory. As Aung San Suu Kyi said ‘real freedom is really freedom from fear’ and you have to experience fear to understand this form of freedom. So get yourself along to the dank cellars of Brighton town hall with its corridors and police cells and feel the fear.

40 Part Motet by Janet Cardiff

2011-04-07T20:42:00.001+01:00

Wandering back through Brighton I popped my head into Fabrica and saw an ellipse of 40 speakers on poles all pointing inwards towards the centre. They were playing choral music. So in we stepped and sat down. All I can say is go hear this. It’s about fifteen minutes long. Wait until the piece starts then sit as near the middle as you can. 40 voices, one from each speaker, sing a 16^th century piece by Thomas Tallis. It’s absolutely sublime.

I always feel uncomfortable when made to look at a cliff of choristers’ faces. All those lawyers and accountants in one place, they look so smug that it puts me off the music. All those jolly, over eager expressions. So for me it was a delight to listen to a choral piece without the men and women in black. Here you can sit, on your own, in a small church, with the sun streaming in from the windows on three sides, and just listen.

First, the music is just beautiful, second the movement of the voices round the ellipse, as well as deliberate contrasts across the space, makes the whole thing seem just very alive. When all rise up into full crescendo, it overwhelms. I genuinely had a tear in my eye.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams - a Cro-Magnon cinema?

2011-03-28T01:52:00.004+01:00

Although I can’t be doing with 3D, and this movie just confirmed by views, this was a fine film. Herzog reaches across the abyss of time to these 32,000 year old painters with his usual eccentric aplomb. We’re taken inside this low ceilinged cave but it’s really a journey into the minds of Cro-Magnon man and therefore ourselves. I watched it from the balcony of the Duke of York's, our local arthouse cinema, which resembles an old cave. The screen's a little small, so it was like watching a cave from within a cave. Now I could get all Platonic here and talk about epistemology and the representation of representation, but that's another cave story entirely, or is it? At one point that's exactly what one of the narrators does, pointing out our need to represent, the film camera being nothing more than a species of cave painting. So don't expect some polished and superficial BBC Attenborough documentary. This is Werner Herzog, thank God!

Years ago I ventured into the Altamira cave in Northern Spain, and had my own mind blown wide open by these beautiful, coloured, full perspective paintings set at the back in complete darkness. It was truly moving to stand in front of hand prints tens of thousands of years old, formed by blowing saliva and ochre across a hand pressed to the rock. I also swam into the darkness of a cave in Belize this year to see the sacrificial victims of the Maya. This cave, the Chauvet cave, discovered in 1994, has images and contents that are much older, at 32,000 years. It had been hidden by a rock fall some 20,000 years ago.

Deep in the cave, only where it’s dark, lie these exquisite paintings, in black outlines, mostly of animals, but also the silhouetted hand of a man with a crooked pinkie. The faces of the lions in particular, are those of animals on the hunt. Their world is carnivorous and dangerous. Man was clearly both predator and prey. Like Altamira the artists used the contours of the rock for effect, cleaned the surface before painting and overlain one image on top of the other.

Sexuality and fertility

Interestingly, there’s only one human figure, and that’s of a women’s bottom half, a strange image of a woman having sex with a bull, painted on a rock that hangs from the ceiling like a huge phallus. My own rambling thoughts on cave art, associate them with sexuality and fertility, although this wasn’t mentioned in the commentary. It is possible to see these images as the earliest examples of the evolutionary theory of aesthetics that sees them as symbols of sexual power, non-utilitarian expressions of power through excess. The animals are often in pairs, with male and female represented. But in the end it’s all speculative.

Pre-linguistic minds

Nicholas Humphreys even posits a theory that these images came from minds fundamentally different from our own, simpler, pre-linguistic and symbolic. He draws on evidence from the drawings of autistic children with little grasp of language to suggest that these painters were not thinking artists but the last of the innocents. Their lack of language gave them the focus to draw these naturalistic images, without conceptual and categorical interference. This explains the naturalistic realism of the paintings, something that was to be lost until the Renaissance. The deliberate art of the Assyrians, Minoans and Egyptians is very much the product of conceptualising minds. This is a fascinating hypothesis and explains the naturalism, overlapping and repetition. It also explains the lack of human figures, as what language did exist was probably social.

Most of all it gets us away from the shamanism of Williams in The Mind in the Cave, and many of the 20th century musings around mystical, spiritual and reigious meaning and rituals. Most of the commentators in the film are children of the 60s, and love a bit of spirituality. I much preferred the down to earth palaeontologists, geologists and scientists, with their carbon dating and careful hypothesising.

Inside the cave of your own mind

In any case, watch this film, laugh at the wonderful eccentrics, then think deeply about what it all really means, for the cave is the inside of your own mind. It’s convoluted, dark, dangerous, lustful, quirky and largely unknown. Sometimes you have to sit still in the modern cave of the cinema to experience the strangeness and wonder of your own mind. When I emerged into the night, having gone in when it was light, it did feel as though I had literally been in the cave. Was that cave really a Cro-Magnon cinema?

Afghanistan – history runs backwards (British Museum)

2011-03-13T19:17:00.002Z

Afghanistan is history in reverse. As a country its culture seems to have been obliterated by war and religion. Fundamentalist Islam places little or no value on events before Year zero, when Mohammed was born. The 6^th C Buddhas of Bamiyan were blown to bits in 2001 and the contents of the Kabul Museum smashed and stolen. Sites have been looted and little money, care or scholarship has been possible.

It’s fate was to be a crossroads country, always in the way of someone else’s path to glory. Alexander the Great was the first to sweep through and much is made of the Greek city of Ai Khanun, but what has been excavated here shows a minor Greek outpost a year’s march from Greece. It had its theatre, statues, gymnasium, temples and stoas. They spoke Greek, worshipped Greek Gods, and built Greek architecture. Vines were plentiful and appear as motifs on everyday objects. The other influence was India from the South, with its ivories, lascivious, melon-breasted women carved on chairs, playing music, dancing. All a far cry in time and culture from the Taliban or Islamic norms of today.

But isolation meant obliteration. The indigenous culture was nomadic, and the women buried in tombs festooned with gold showed vestiges of Greek and Indian culture, but little in the way of real art, beyond beaten gold.

This is an idiosyncratic little exhibition that picks on a few bits and pieces from Afghanistan’s long history, but isn’t wide enough to say much, other than the usual Silk Road references and outside influences. Indirectly, however, it shows a history that may have regressed rather than progressed, with regression/progression still in the balance today. The most telling object was a book in the now compulsory ‘enter through the gift shop’ experience. It was a volume called ‘War Rugs’ and showed carpets with helicopter, jets, drones, AK47s etc. in beautiful motifs, woven by hand in those rich colours you only find on oriental carpets. Now that would have made a great and more relevant show.

Brighton Rock doesn't rock me

2011-02-04T19:54:00.002Z

This was a bit of a chore. A clumsy film, weakly directed, that skates across the surface of Brighton, the Book's its characters and its underworld, never really connecting.

First, it doesn’t know what era it’s in. The interiors are either 20s chic hotels, 30s grime rooms or 60s cafes, so it doesn’t hang together. It jerks along with this series of disjointed interiors and exteriors with the director trying too hard to create ‘atmosphere’.

Second, this was 1964, the year of The Beatles and Stones, yet all we heard were bursts of swooping, over-engineered, film score. The music flooded into and overwhelmed scenes, destroying what little emotion was being created. What a missed opportunity.

Third, the mods and rockers setting isn’t used to any good effect, merely a backdrop for the violence. Pinkie swans around on a moped but there’s no connection between him or any of the other characters and these youth movements, so what was the point? Another opportunity missed.

Fourth, the Catholic theme, rampant in the novel, is also crudely inserted into the plot and the final scene has none of the real absolution and horror of the ‘confession box’ in the book. It’s like a series of ads inserted into the film.

Fifth, Helen Mirren, as Ida, is at worst miscast, at best she simply plays it wrong; far too posh to have any heart, as if Ida was a sophisticated, demur lady of means, rather than the tough, feisty, battlehard woman she had to be. Why ruin the 'star' opportunity by having her downplay the role?

Lastly, the criminal underworld is strongly represented in the original book and movie, but here they’re sanitised. The hardmen never swear and the dialogue between them has no humour, no heart. In fact it’s not really dialogue at all, only a series of crude exchanges, as the plot rolls along. And that’s the problem with this film; it’s rock ‘n roll without the ‘rock’.

7 reasons why I won’t pay to see ‘The King’s Speech’

2011-01-19T17:19:00.001Z

Jonathon Freedman wrote a stunning piece in the Guardian today about the true meaning of this hagiographic film. It’s an old tale, no doubt well told, beautifully filmed and well-acted. But so were Nazi films like Triumph of the Will. It’s not enough to have high production values; you must also have real values.

Myth of the commoner

In fact, the Australian did not live in a terraced house whose door opened straight out into dirt poor children playing in the street, in what looked like the East End. He actually lived in a 25 room mansion on Sydenham Hill with five bathrooms, five acres of garden, a tennis court and a cook! His offices were on Harley Street. The Lionel Logue character is a lie. In fact, they had to pull back from an even cruder depiction of the speech therapist as commoner, when his grandson pointed out that he was in fact, a rich man who moved in aristocratic circles. This is not dramatic licence as it destroys the very premise of the film, Royal and commoner all in this together (sound familiar). It is a scripted lie.

George VI was anti-Semitic

George V showed anti-Semitic tendencies, as his telegram in 1939 to Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax showed. He wanted the Jews, who were clamouring to escape, to stay in Germany and got Halifax to make these feelings clear to the Germans. Let’s be clear about this, many lives could have been saved if there had been a more receptive attitude to the plight of the Jews at this crucial time.

Brother was a Nazi

George VI was only King because his hapless brother had to abdicate. Edward VIII, his brother, and King in 1936, was clearly a Nazi sympathiser. He abdicated because of establishment views on marrying an outsider but remember that the first thing he did in 1937 was tour Nazi Germany, against the advice from the British Government. There he gave Nazi salutes and even during the war his houses in France were guarded by German troops. There is even evidence that he leaked war plans to the Germans.

Royal Family was for appeasement

The Royal family was for appeasement. In blood terms, and that’s all that Royalty is, they were as much German as British. Edward VIII had no problem in touring Germany because he had so many relatives there. Hitler famously claimed that, “If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.” As Ian Jack points out, the crowds that appear in the film didn’t appear at the gates of Buckingham Palace in 1939. People at that point were a bit sick of the wayward Nazi tendencies of the Royals.

Dianification of our culture

That old myth of the upper and lower classes having a lot in common. Why do ‘Royal’ films like these continue to get funding, to the detriment of emerging talent and films that should get made but don’t? Remember that every one of these Royal movies sucks funds away from other projects and pushes other movies out of the schedule. It’s the Dianification of our culture. They know their market, a fawning, older, middle-class audience that wants the certainty of old structures and hierarchies. It’s no accident that the film was released hard on the heels of the Royal Wedding announcement. We have, through the BBC and our film industry created the Royal propaganda genre. That’s where the Director Hooper cut his costume drama teeth.

Affected Colin Firth

Then there’s the sales potential of that most ‘Mills & Boon’ actor, Colin Firth, who even in real life (watch his Golden Globe speech) affects that brooding Heathcliff manner. He’s made a career out of making the miserable appear thoughtful. The man truly has hidden shallows, and don’t imagine for one minute that sultry silence means depth.

Honours not Oscars

Our film industry has its eyes not on film awards but honours. The hideous Julian Fellowes, swanning about in ermine, being put in the House of Lords, was perhaps the most disgusting image I’ve seen this year. The man who dishes up an endless loop of second-rate, country house, costume drama, finally gets his Lordship. Putnam went all gaga, and never did a damn thing after he was made a Lord. Dame Helen Mirren has morphed into some sort of Royal proxy, holding her head as if she were royalty itself. Helena Bonham Carter, will, of course, inherit her tiara. They know, Directors and actors alike, that a gong and garden party, will allow them to die happy, when in creative terms, it’s the kiss of death.

The King’s Speech will not triumph at the Oscars, as the American’s know that films should be in some sense relevant. The Social Network is a stunning commentary on our modern world, Inception a wildly imaginative piece about the mind. In the end the Americans know that we like nothing more than to chew on the sickly toffee of nostalgia. While they have an eye on the future we’re still looking backwards.

Bridget Riley: National Gallery - Painter who doesn't paint!

2011-01-08T16:57:00.003Z

Thought I’d see the Bridget Riley fims first before her exhibition but was shocked to find that the paintings I was about to see in the gallery weren’t painted by her at all, but by some flunkies. Sure artists have always had studio assistants, but can you claim to be the painter if you haven’t painted a single stroke on a painting?

Riley works at the edge of perception, where perception starts to fail and make mistakes. Her paintings induce perceptual errors. That’s interesting and challenges any romantic view of art being ‘truth’. Unfortunately, this is an area in which science and philosophy excel, and art stumbles around thinking it’s relevant. The recent Horizon documentary produced more stunning examples than Riley of this perceptual edge. You can push abstraction to this level, but then it falls apart as the brain’s expectations take over. That’s Riley’s point I suppose, but there’s other ways to play the perceptual game.

To what extent this is art and not geometrical puzzles is an interesting question. I was left underwhelmed by this small collection as there’s no real aesthetic hit from the two wall paintings or the others. The circles cover a huge wall and the eye struggles to resolve the foreground and background planes, but this is a simple and old illusion. When painting is reduced to ‘painting’ alone, it’s a cold medium. Rileys are like cold salads, colourful but not really full meals. There’s a little room with two films by Riley, one on her own work, the other on colour in the history of art.

There was an interesting second film on the use of colour by Titian, Veronese, Rubens, El Greco and Poussin is excellent. I’ll never look at these artists again without being aware of the lines created by created lines of colour coding, especially in Poussin. Indeed, when we walked to the Wallace Collection later, the luminescent skin in the Rubens and famous Poussin were like different paintings, confirming the role of knowledge in the interrogation of painting. She was also perceptive on the limitations of these artists..

Early Vermeer (Edinburgh) - three is not an exhibition!

2011-01-03T17:33:00.004Z

When does an exhibition cease to become an exhibition? When it has so few paintings that they fit into a small bathroom. The first problem here, is the paucity of works – only three. The second problem, is that even these three works are placed in too small a room, so that you’re bunched together trying to find a space to look and reflect. There’s another problem, in that it’s almost impossible to find, as the signage leads you on a labyrinthine journey round the galleries. I’m sure many people just give up. In any case, I came this far, so what of the three paintings?

The Procuress

Best of the tiny bunch with its clever focal point (the glint of the coin), reminiscent of the most wonderful point of focus in the history of art, the point at which the milk pours from the milkmaid’s jug. There’s also the yellow bodice and white blouse, an early hint at what was to become Vermeer’s hallmark palette. But it’s all a bit moralistic (the intention of course), with the hand on the breast, grinning older man, and greedy Madame. It’s all about the moral dangers of alcohol, public houses and brothels, and all a bit staged. No doubts about the authenticity of the painting as it appears in the background of his later paintings.

Diana and Her Nymphs

The composition is fine, with that sense of stillness that the later Vermeer mastered, perhaps because of his dependence on optical devices, but the broad brush strokes are too diffuse and the work lacks action and therefore impact. There’s some dispute about whether this is a Vermeer or not. For my money, it’s not. Compare it to the two other paintings in the room, and the difference is stark.

Christ in the House of Martha and Mary

Sorry, but this is a work of such poor quality that it diminishes rather than enhances Vermeer’s reputation. The Christ figure is badly composed, with its narrow trunk, odd arms and big hands. It’s a hideously distorted figure. The colours are banal and the soft focus only makes the image muddy and indistinct.

Conclusion

All of this really does make you think that Vermeer could only really paint with the aid of optical devices (see Secret Knowledge by David Hockney). These paintings are larger than the later Vermeers as the optical devices he used could not project at such a size.These three were painted 1653-1656. The paintings after 1657 are so much smaller, more precise and of such a stunning compositional and atmospheric quality that they make these early works look amateurish. It’s al wonderfully revealed in Philip Stedman’s Vermeer’s Camera.

This could have been so much more, if the curator had contrasted these works with his later masterpieces or at least included is next picture with a lone woman in a room – a sort of transition into his later work. As it stands, it’s three immature and not very good paintings, masquerading as an exhibition.

The Rediscovery of Highland Art (Edinburgh) - sham of a show

2011-01-03T11:59:00.003Z

‘The Rediscovery of Highland Art’ at the City Art Centre in Edinburgh, is a sham as it shows there is nothing to ‘rediscover’. This is a ragbag of images that would be laughed out of any gallery outside of Scotland. There is no common artistic thread. Some of these artists lived in the Western Highlands, some didn’t live there but painted scenes of the highlands, others are simply not worthy of public exhibition. It’s a Highland toffee mess.

Imaginary movement

The show’s nadir is a card, clearly written by some sort of Gaelic activist, which patronises and expenses the stupidity of the theme at the same time. Three names are put forward as the vanguard of some imaginary movement: Keith Hendry of Barra, David Forrest of Islay and Donald Smith of Lewis. We are told they “MUST be given the attention they deserve”. Then, in a sentence that is actually quite funny, as it turns on itself and cuts its own throat, “Smith’s achievement has still not been fully assessed, although his work has become widely available on book covers”. Finally, a feeble instruction, without any evidence whatsoever, “A history of art must be restored to the Gaidhealtachd (no idea what this is) as a contemporary culture. These works area a symbol of the need to restore that history of art”. Oh yeah?

The truth of the matter is that Scotland came late to the visual arts, then hung around on the sidelines with a series of largely derivative efforts. Even its minor major schools, such as the Glasgow Boys and the Colourists, were in no way part of a Highland movement, although there’s a pretence that the Colourists were. The Glasgow boys were rich city boys who could afford lives of leisure and sojourns to France. They had no interest in the industrial Glasgow, preferring the rural scenes of a fast disappearing Scotland. They had technical talent but often lacked a true subject sensibility.

Art north of the Highland line is famously maudlin and reeks of romanticism. It was used to create an alternative reality of Highland heroes in their faux Highland dress, a world where stags and highland cattle had more status than the people who lived and worked there. There’s a good exhibition to be had here, by someone brave enough to show how art has been used to hide, rather than reveal the real Scotland. In any case, an artistic movement is not geographical, it’s about the artists and the aesthetic style they choose as their means of expression. In this ‘Highland Art’ there’s only geography, not unity of purpose, people or style.

Art has always been, to a degree, a politicised process, but this show is a thirsty man clutching at a mirage. It is blatantly nationalistic, a return to that romanticised, Ossian view of the Highlands as a God-made landscape. This is the worst of Scotland, not the best. As Scotland stumbles around for an identity, it could do better than dig up old clichés and hang up third rate daubs to force itself into believing that there’s some sort of unrecognised art movement here. It has a smell of desperation.

Scotland is a Calvinist culture and had to embrace Romanticism to tilt the see saw and lift its heavy self into lighter air. We move easily from sober judgement to dreamy drunken extremes and so in art we invent another Scotland that hides itself in the clouds.

Less than 1% of Scotland’s population speak Gaelic, yet 30% of BBC Scotland’s budget is spent on Gaelic programming (largely because four of the senior staff are Gaels). This is a linguistic dog’s tail wagging the cultural dog. Art, however, is different as it is a visual medium, disengaged from the language. The exhibition wants to look at art "with particular reference to the Gaelic language". Well, where's the language, other than on the labels? Only a tiny fraction of Scots can read Gaelic, most don't care, so this is a category mistake of gigantic proportions. This is a visual art exhibition, not a literary event. The obsession with Gaelic explanations and titles in the show is laughable, as many of the featured artists did and do not speak Gaelic, and some were not from the Western isles. As usual Scotland looks to the past not the future, and an imaginary past at that.

We have art and artists which we should exalt, but NOT at the expense of realism. The Glasgow Boys and Colourists were trained and talented, but even they failed (with a few notable exceptions) to show Scotland for what it was in their day. Our one internationally renowned artist Macintosh, was spurned by his nation and had to flee to France. At heart, Scotland is a Calvinist nation. We were possibly the most devoted iconoclasts in Europe, which prevented any real artistic flourish until the portraiture of the Enlightenment and a few groups and individuals who managed to escape their Calvinist clothing. Some of these are laughable, such as the Glasgow Boys attempt to make dull Scottish towns and landscapes look like Provence. We’ve never really had artists of real genius who could show us for what we are, the cultural soil is just too barren. Scotland is just not a visually sophisticated culture. You see this in our chocolate box approach to painting, the dull domestic architecture of our towns, the dourness, simplicity and even garishness of our shopfronts. That’s OK, we have other talents. The danger is in thinking we are good at everything, that most dangerous of Scottish traits.

Blackwatch – Barbican - you WILL be moved

2010-12-12T17:08:00.001Z

A lot of theatre is just damn parochial and irrelevant. We actually have 'Calendar Girls' on at the Theatre Royal Brighton. Who watches this stuff? So let me praise something that’s jackhammer powerful, brilliantly staged and relevant. I don’t mean relevant in the sense of some poxy, after-theatre, wind-down conversation. I mean something that makes you rethink the current Iraq/Afghanistan war, something that gives you insight into a world you have never had any contact with, something that stays in your mind for days.

I was brought up in the sort of place that produces Scottish soldiers, where a few from every class went to join the army (never navy or airforce). It was part tradition, part escape from limited opportunities, part comradeship. ‘Join the army and see the world’ was the slogan when I was at school. Loads did and never saw further than Northern Ireland, which is really Scotland with guns. So I know that they got the dialogue real and right, the pub talk, the bravado, but also the matey support.

The play rightly focuses on the boys and their regiment, and isn’t sentimental. The Blackwatch were founded to ‘watch’ the highlanders, and as the writer reminds us, also fought, during the first World War in Mesopotania, namely Iraq. But the smart young squaddie, ‘I had you marked down for sergeant Major’ saw through the futility of the campaign, the suicide bombing, the fact that we’re invading THEIR country and fucking THEIR day up. The device of using a journalist to interrogate the lads works as a lightening rod for their anger at being ‘used’ as well as a conduit for their views.

It’s a brave play, as it transforms the limitations of Scottish, working-class dialogue through unspoken acts – sign language on reading letters from home, choreographed violence among themselves, dance, song and music. You bounce between the pub and Iraq, between all the noisy bravado of the pub and noise of war. Most of all you feel the pain of the lads who saw their mates die. They’ve barely begun to live a life, when they see their closest friends blown to bits in a suicide attack. It’s harrowing and heartbreaking. I can barely write this sentence without being overcome by sadness, and anger. Go see this – you WILL be moved.

Blackwatch – Barbican - you WILL be moved

2010-12-12T17:08:00.000Z

A lot of theatre is just damn parochial and irrelevant. We actually have 'Calendar Girls' on at the Theatre Roya,l Brighton. Who watches this stuff? So let me praise something that’s jackhammer powerful, brilliantly staged and relevant. I don’t mean relevant in the sense of some poxy, after-theatre, wind-down conversation. I mean something that makes you rethink the current Iraq/Afghanistan war, something that gives you insight into a world you have never had any contact with, something that stays in your mind for days.

Anselm Kiefer – Baltic centre

2010-11-27T15:43:00.002Z

The snow fell carried by an icy wind that blew down the Tyne as I walked across the eye of the bridge to the Baltic, a perfect adjustment of mood for that most northerly of artists, Anselm Kiefer. Anselm – were his parents so into the ontological argument? I always see Kiefer as being about imperfection, not perfection. Both he and his religious namesake specialise in huge thought experiments, but Kiefer’s post-Nietzsche, and God is in his grave.

Parsifal

Nietzsche saw this opera as a betrayal, a capitulation by Wagner into weak, Christian mythology. I suspect that Kiefer’s puts Parsifal into the same attic category, locking the myths up into a claustrophobic wooden loft (his own apparently). The crude images of a crib and swords, reduced to mock symbols. He locks it down even further with a grid of decreasing perspectival rectangles that have no vanishing point structure. Myths exists in the attic of consciousness as crude, causal catastrophe’s.

Pyramid

The pyramid is the Platonic form, forms transformed into God by Augustine. But there isn’t a single straight line or regular line in Kiefer’s whole painting. The man is in the same from beneath the pyramid, crushed by the transcendental pressure of the invented realm. What’s more, he’s half dressed. It’s an attack on the transcendental metaphysics that started with Plato, through Augustine to modern theological concepts of God, what Nietzsche called the 2000 year aberration. Even the messy ill-formed blocks of the pyramid are in opposition to the perfect mythological forms of Egyptian and Mayan forms, and the pyramid has collapsed in places and the horizon unclear.

Palette

The palette hangs on a burning rope or the primitive representation of that early religious symbol, the bull? All of this against a battleship grey background. Kiefer drains his canvases of colour not to let his art benefit from artifice. Kiefer at his un-impressionist best. I’m impressed.

Lilith

Classic Kiefer; a baked grey and brown bird’s eye view of a skyscraper cityscape with wires for clouds. Not a natural square centimetre in this image, a created, built, concrete world, represented by the its own muck and detritus.

Palm Sunday

A huge palm tree, mud-brown, devoid of colour lies dead in front of 39 images of palm fronds and clothes. There is no resurrection, only death and decay. This is a brutal attack on Christianity through the de-deification of Jesus himself.

The Norns

A corbelled arch with a fire is reminiscent of railway arches and roman ruins, and the cold, limitless realm of death. The fire is the only sign of life, soon, like life, to extinguish itself.

Battleships (Velimir Chlebnikov)

Two submarines and five battleships hang on a vertical plane, all rusted hulls, twisted guns and ruined radar. Weary of war, the wrecked warships lie on a cracked seabed. All of that spent effort. The futility and waste of war at sea, above and beneath the surface of the sea. War on water – think about it – how strange.

Book of the Dead: British Museum (out of this world)

2010-11-13T16:40:00.004Z

Decided to bite the bullet and become a member of the British Museum, as I spend so much time there. So it was nice to go straight to the front of the queue, and linger for ages in the labyrinth of this amazingly detailed exhibition and know that I can return for a repeat visit. I go to Egypt every year, mostly to Luxor, which is where most of the exhibits in this show originate, as it's the centre of New Kingdom tombs and temples, the period during which the Book of the Dead came into its own. The pyramid texts of the Old Kingdom and Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom were its precursors. Now I though I knew a thing or two about the Book of the Dead, in fact I knew next to nothing, other than the general intent, names of the Gods and the process. As you walk through the sheer complexity of the phenomenon is revealed step by step, taking you through the process of mummification, mourning, weighing of the heart, tests and the afterlife. The documents and objects are stunning, as art, but it's the meaning that matters.

Egyptian metaphysics

Egyptian metaphysics is a complex set of, what seems like, odd ideas. Because of their inward looking culture, their cosmology was primitive leading to a sun driven concept of life and death. Death, of course, would have been ever-present, as life expectancy was around 30 with disease and ever present, and lethal, threat. Then there were snakes, scorpions and crocodiles to contend with. Egyptian art distorts and idealises their world, as it presents ideal forms. You don't see age, illness or disability in Egyptian art, as its functional purpose was to represent ideal forms and activities. All men and women are shown as perfect and youthful, as are scenes of eating, hunting and enjoyment.

Judeo-Christian dichotomies

No surprise, then, that the spells in the book of the dead protected you from very possible mishap and obstacle. It was a passport or contract that ensured a safe journey into the afterlife, with sub-clauses covering every imaginable problem, warranty after warranty. There is none of the Judeo-Christian dichotomies; body and soul, good and evil, God and devil, reward and punishment, heaven and hell. Everything is much more practical and complex. There are distant early echoes of what we now know as religion, with the heart being weighed against a feather before Osiris, and a world beyond death, but the trick is to start afresh and drop all preconceptions as things are much more complex.

Sure, there's a judgement, but the spells in the book allow you to cheat your way in by protecting yourself from real scrutiny. There's a wonderful case of a woman who had two policemen killed, cheerfully exonerating herself. Each spell protects you from the various pitfalls, creatures and Gods that may impede your progress. This is a religion of recitation. You say something and it works. Life in heaven is the same as life on earth, you work, play and do all the things you did on earth, hence the shabtis, complete with little bags of tools that accompanied you on your journey. The soul is not a simple concept in Egyptian philosophy. There are four or more manifestations, including Ka and Ba. The journey is a complex set of transformations or metamorphoses via doppelgangers and attributes that are given life after death.

Not a book

You can see this exhibition as a set of artifacts but the Book of the dead is not really a book, but a collection of spells used in all sorts of selections, sizes and styles. The practical side of commercial production, blanks for names and reuse is also of interest. Far better to shed your existing ideas around religion and let your mind rebuild ideas from scratch. Be prepared to enter the room and die. then understand what meaning was attached to each stage in the process and you go through a process of rebirth. If you're lucky, you'll come out feeling enlightened, resurrected and ready to learn more.

Treasures of Budapest – Royal Academy

2010-10-11T15:47:00.003+01:00

Not so busy blockbuster as it’s about a collection, not an artist or movement, but well worth seeing. You get used to seeing familiar paintings by familiar artists. Here, however, everything is familiar but new. Tucked away in Budapest, most people will not have seen these paintings, drawings and sculptures.

It is, in essence a representative sample from the history of western art but the whole show really comes to life in Rooms 6 & 7 with the drawings and portraiture. There are some really stunning paintings - a couple of magnificent Goyas, Jan Lievens Half Girl, a magnificent Franz Hals (more restrained than usual in pose but wild, wild brushstrokes) and the final surprise– Two Women Embracing by Schiele. The two Leonardo drawings are worth it in themselves, studies for the famous Battle of Anghiari. The three faces are in extreme poses in the heat of battle, mouth ajar and eyes full of aggression. Mid-morning on a Monday, the gallery had no more than a scattering of people - bliss.

The Surreal House – The Barbican

2010-09-03T14:00:00.000+01:00

Always a bit of a hoot walking round a Dadaist or Surrealist show, as the Dadaists, especially, were anti-art, and hated the sort of conventions that gallery curators adhere to. These ‘shows’ should really reflect the work, with at least some attempt at anarchy and disruption. Instead, we get solemn environments, carefully lit to exude ‘seriousness’ and audiences guided through like the walking dead. It’s all so humourless. Give me Cabaret Voltaire, a little dangerous performance art or at least a laugh. The Dadaists and Surrealists would have swept through this ‘exhibition’ pissing on most of it, tearing it apart and cursing their legacy.

One bright spot was the tiny cinema, where we sat and watched Tati’s Mon Oncle. This is one strange film, with a messy soundtrack and anti-modernist sentiment. It’s only now that it seems surreal.

Edinburgh Fringe - 2010

2010-09-01T14:19:00.003+01:00

64th Edinburgh Fringe was a roaring success with just short of 2 million tickets sold for 2600 shows. It’s settled into a good mix of comedy, theatre, music and exhibitions. The good news was the weather – not a raindrop over my entire five days. Another improvement is the food – had an excellent minced spiced lamb wrap at Underbelly Courtyard as well as excellent nosh at Dogs in Hanover Street, Scottish Whisky Society and a late night Chinese at the Rendevous.
Ovid’s Metamorphosis – Pleasance (Edinburgh Fringe)
Fresh from reading Ted Hughes brilliant ‘Tales from Ovid’, I was oven-ready for this performance and loved the inventive use of music, physical theatre, dance and stagecraft. They gave it large in what is one of the Pleasance’s tiniest theatres, with one spot of sheer genius, in the Io myth when the cow characteristics interrupt her song and she jigs like a heifer.
Kafka and son – Bedlam (Edinburgh Fringe)
Harrowing hour as Kafka writes a long letter to his father trying to untangle their famously estranged relationship. It rips into the usual Freudian themes as well as the father’s failed business and his contempt for Kafka’s attempts at writing. What’s touching is the more enduring father-son conceits, misunderstandings, suspicions and battles. This is a moving piece for any father with a son. I speak as someone who’s been on both sides of this fence.
Poland 3 Iran 2 – Thistle Bar (Edinburgh Fringe)
Two guys slug it out with a family tale woven around a football match. OK but could have been better written, rehearsed and performed. Heartening to see some theatre about football in a real bar with some real (if not bemused) Scottish drinkers.
Jeremy Lion goes Green -Pleasance Dome (Edinburgh Fringe)
Peter Crisp put me on to this guy, a large gent in a too-tight suit and a dash of rouge. The character is a drunk and chaotic ‘children’s entertainer’ but it’s a polished chaos. The running gag is his drink problem, as he downs a can of Carlsberg Special Brew at the start and continues to drink miniatures throughout the act, ending with his ‘Ten Green Bottles’ finale, where he downs the contents of the bottles for the purpose of recycling ‘boys and girls’. Throwing in a half bottle of Buckfast was a touch of localised genius. Hilarious.
Lee Nelson (Edinburgh Fringe)
Nelson may be the most interesting comedian in the fringe this year, as he’s an outlier in a flood of once alternative, now mainstream comics. Sticking to a character (London chav) he avoids cockney clichés but knocks out a show that is high energy and relentlessly funny. Funny how quickly the lazy TV comics forget this basic rule. None of that cute observational stuff or whimsical gags, just plain ‘tell it as it is’ street humour.
The club beat is ratcheted up to full volume for a full ten minutes before he appears high fiving everyone within reach up and down the aisle. He ain’t afraid to mix it with the audience and this audience is an unusual mix of Scottish neds (all drinking pints of lager in the queue), Fringe strays and a few foreigners, who clearly haven’t seen his TV show. It’s not so much audience participation a as audience assault and abuse – but that’s what they’ve come for. They’re not coy, this lot.
First gag, “My sis just got pregnant, it’s OK though she’s 15. Problem is the age difference with the dad (6 years). Pause – he’s only nine!” Ho joshes with the disabled guy on the front row, claiming he’s just bought the gear to get into disabled parking spaces, then tells a cracker of a joke, “I parked in a disabled spot last week, policeman came up to me and said, ‘you’re not disabled’. Yeah I am, I said, I’ve got Tourettes……you fucking cunt!” The poor French girl got a ribbing, as did the family of four with two teenage daughters and the guy from Senegal. I laughed like a hyena for the full hour but it was the finale that took the show into the realm of dangerous theatre. The audience had to vote on a humiliating act for someone who had volunteered to go through with this game. Of course, it was a rough, shameless lad who stuck his hand up. Chosen act – to strip to his underpants and dance to ‘I like big butts and I cannot lie’. He did it with gusto, miming the old arse slaps like a pro.
Nelson’s real because he takes things right to the edge, sometimes beyond, then comes back again with ‘I’m only joking’. At last, someone who’s giving life to a tired old genre.
Camille O’Sullivan (Edinburgh Fringe)
My third outing to see Camille as I love her choice of songs and the cabaret highs and lows, from the bawdy and raucous to songs of the heart. Brel’s Amsterdam, Cave’s Ship Song, Bowie, Cohen…… I wish, however, that she’d go back to the Darker, more intimate Assembly theatre on the mound. The George Street venue is dull and cavernous.
Philip Blond (Edinburgh Book Festival)
Blond looks like a fat Robert Burns but Red Tory is a book worth reading, even if you don’t agree with the ideas and recommended policies. This is the book that has shaped current Conservative policy to such a degree that you spot key phrases as you read. His position is that the left bankrupted us through the expansion of the state and the right through a fanatical belief in the free market. In addition, he sees liberalism as having eroded our values, creating a context for both.
Blond’s an old-school conservative rooted in ‘civic values’ and ‘tradition but innovative on policy, looking towards a fairer society based on recapitalising the working class. This involves mutualising finance, smaller government bodies and encouraging local supply chains. He is a fierce critic of a system that pools all savings and money then gambles it way on lost causes. The centralisation of wealth is the problem. We need smaller banks, mutual societies and the post Office, not RBS.
I rather like this message. The problem is twofold. First cost: fragmenting delivery means higher costs, as you don’t get economies of scale. Secondly, relying on ‘tradition’ is a problem, as it cannot be readily created. Tradition emerges over time. Creating tradition, as has been done in Scotland, with a phoney history of tartan, clans and romantic heroes just doesn’t wash.
The other speaker focused on the ‘editorial class’ claiming that most people in society have been squeezed out of the equation through a cabal of publishing, journalism and politics that represents a narrow social class. Yip – and most of them are at the Edinburgh Book Fair.
Polly Toynbee (Edinburgh Book Festival)
Fine list of successes and failures of the Labour, delivered as a double act with Frank Walker, Polly Toynbee’s writing partner. They were pretty much spot on with the failures; Iraq, inequality, intrusive state, kowtowing to finance, housing bubble, abolition of 10p tax rate, faith schools etc. But they scored them 6/10. My own view is that the flaws were flaws in leadership, both Blair and Brown. Many of the above listed flaws can, I think be attributed to flawed leaders. These are two people who are on top of their game, and in a good position to deliver a verdict. It makes a change from these awful Mandelsson, Blair memoirs that simply repeat the errors, without any signs of remorse or real reflection.
Frank Close & Ian Semple (Edinburgh Book Festival)
Great talk on Anti-matter (it’s used in PET scans – P stands for positrons) but can’t be stored or used in weapons. Particle physics is going through a renaissance with the work at the LHC at CERN. Close gave a layman’s overview of anti-matter, taking a swipe at Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, but more importantly, showing that this area of physics is unfolding as we speak. The money’s on the Higgs-Boson particle being found around 2014. Some think there’s evidence in the data already. What I didn’t know is that there’s a squabble between three groups concerning the badly named ‘God particle’. It’s important, as there’s a Nobel Prize at stake. Semple told a nice physics joke, when he visited one of these octogenarian physicists, he asked to take a photo, and the physicist rplied, “Of course, it’s only photons!”. Another, when asked about the controversy said, “It’s a bit like having your mother-in-law driving your brand new BMW over a cliff – I have mixed feelings over it”. Funny folk these physicists.
John Lanchaster (Edinburgh Book Festival)
Lancjaster’s ‘Whoops’ is my favourite financial meltdown book. He’s a novelist, and therefore writes well, he’s also a layman, so not representing any side of the story. He emerges, however, as a critic of the stupidity of bankers, regulators and auditors. The book is full of incisive observations and his point here was that ‘finance’ is swept under the carpet as a subject, not taught in schools and ignored by adults. When do quiz shows ever have questions on ‘finance’?
This was Edinburgh, so there were a few banking apologists in the audience. However, the guy who lost his job was pretty angry as were most of the audience. This anger is still swishing around, waiting to erupt. My bet is that another bank will fail, probably Lloyds, and that the brown stuff really will hit the fan. On the bright side, it will give Lanchaster a chance to write a sequel. ‘Whoops I did it again!”.
Harlequin (Edinburgh Fringe)
The Harelquin story is a strange tale of unrequited love and comic ridicule and this group kept the strangeness going by not being too polished or straight in their direction or performance. It was a weird, rough, unclean version and that’s exactly why it worked.
Irish Comedy (Edinburgh Fringe)
Traditional three acts and a compere. Maybe this is the luck of the Irish but all four were excellent, with not an awkward moment in the entire set. First up was a loquacious Irishman with a few choice tales, second the gay Irishman (his dad always thought he was ‘funny’) and the third, and best, a hard hitting guy from Belfast (Al Queda – they come over here, taking our jobs). Glad to see that Irish comedy hasn’t sunk completely into it’s own clichéd maudlin world
Christan Kobke Scottish National Gallery
A small collection from this resurrected Dane. The portraits are middling to good but the landscapes are really something, with their unusual compositions from roof ridges or oblique views from river banks and across bridges. The landscapes have people with their backs to the viewer, so that the subject is the landscape and not the people. The image of the two women on the boat landing with their backs to the viewer and the receding boat is the masterpiece.
Surrealism - Dean Gallery
The Dean Gallery is a former orphan’s home, a strange Victorian pile, with high ceilings, iron railings (on the inside) and a claustrophobic feel. Many of the paintings are from the galleries own collection, which is world class. I have mixed feelings about this as I prefer the Dadaists, seeing Surrealism as a backward step, with it’s attempts at capturing the unconsciousness and dreams. They were slaves to Freud, whereas the Dadaists were slaves to no one. There is one exception here and that is a Dali drawing in the corridor that shows just how good a draughtsman he was, all flowing lines and tension.
Martin Creed - Fruitmarket Gallery
Much as I love abstract art, this show is just shallow. The fact that these banalities are placed in a bright, white-walled gallery with all the seriousness that a posh girl with a History of Art’ degree can muster, doesn’t hid the fact that this is pure, adulterated shite. It is so consciously designed that you can see the stupid thoughts of the artist behind each and every piece. Plodding piles of chairs and tables. Sequences of felt tip pages, piles of wood. A lego brick tower. It’s not shocking, it’s not ironic and it’s not funny.

Edinburgh theatre live in Brighton!

2010-08-24T00:28:00.003+01:00

I'm almost the perfect spectator for this event, as I hail from Edinburgh but live in Brighton. Every year I troop up to Edinburgh and gorge on the Festival. So what did this combination of theatre and cinema achieve? Does 2+2 = 0,1,2,3,4 or even 5? I went with an open mind, as I love both art forms but was surprised, and excited, by my reaction (see conclusion later).

All Is Vanity by David Eldridge

This was a well written small piece and sitting 4 actors opposite each other heightened the antagonisms and claustrophobia. The four cameras were placed behind each actor to shoot the person opposite. This worked well enough but the director wasn’t good enough to cut on time, so the spell was often broken by a failure to switch from one angle to another or by someone getting in front of the camera, and one of the mike’s didn’t work (technical rehearsal guys!).

Another oddity is the live audience in the Traverse, so that we’re watching them, watching them. This is odd and unnecessary. In fact one of the nice things about watching theatre like this is the complete absence of all that ‘luvvie’ stuff – plummy accents, applause, encores etc. If this had been executed properly (technically), it would have been a brilliant piece of theatre, as it stands it was merely excellent!

The best piece of the five, and the Traverse audience were either not there or not on camera (woopee). It worked because the camera focused on the actress. The monologue format worked perfectly as we cut between close-ups and longer shots, depending on the descriptions of the actress. It was a startling and emotional performance, showing that the real impact in theatre comes from the writing and performance. It’s all in the eyes and for an intensely personal and emotional tale like this the camera got to her eyes and the movements of her mouth. She was there right in front of you. This is something that cinema and TV do well. There was also a little bit of camera work reflecting her uplifting finale. It was quite clever and showed how a little effort at theatrical effect through camera work can go a long way.

Quartet

The problem here was just poor writing. I just couldn’t engage with this rather tawdry tale of four unappealing people and their relationships. It was also rather poorly lit, again technical incompetence, as it is clearly being filmed by amateurs. And again, seeing the audience was just a distraction, as was them standing up at the end, bowing and milking the applause. If you’re going to show this stuff in a cinema then dispense with these theatrical conventions. You don’t see the actors in a movie, come together and bow to the audience.

Interval

The Duke of York excelled again at customer service. This was a 3 hour show and I was desperate for a coffee. I went to the coffee and cake spot in the foyer but the till was shut and there was nobody there. So I went upstairs, where I queued for what seemed like an eternity (the one sullen girl was glacial in her movements) and when I got there, she told me there was no coffee as the machine was broken. I returned downstairs to find that the coffee place was now open, and so ends my customer service complaint!

This is Water

An odd piece this as it was a series of confessions about life and uncertainty, from real people, recorded, originally, somewhere in up-state New York. Now some of these were funny, some tragic, some quirky and some dull. In general, the theme of ‘certainty/uncertainty’ was punched home, but it was bit like being jabbed repeatedly in the face for 30 minutes without respite. I’m not convinced that this was really theatre but appreciate that it was an experiment and the actors’ performances were good, especially the wonderful Meg Frazer.

My Friend Duplicity by Edna Walsh

I lost my focus on this as the writing seemed overworked and the theme a lazy reflection on the imagination, along with clichéd spells of ‘we’re Irish and we can say what we want and you’ll think it’s wonderful’. I’ll leave it at that, as it was the fifth of five plays and the caffeine was wearing off.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed this and it made me thirsty for the theatre I’ll be seeing in a few days at the actual Edinburgh Festival. The big plus is the possibility of opening up theatre to larger audiences. Theatre's weakness is that it is location-bound and as it is expensive to deliver, this cap on revenue means relying on public funding. Expanding your audience opens up a great opportunity for changing the finding model by expanding the audience.

It has huge potential if it’s done more professionally on the video side, with carefully chosen material. The essence of theatre is the intimacy of the actors’ performances. In some ways this is enhanced in filmed theatre, as you get multiple viewpoints from different cameras, as well as close-ups. This is important, as live theatre often fails to deliver that intimacy, as many of the audience are just too far from the action or the actors can’t project well enough. There’s therefore no doubt in my mind that it could, in many instances enhance the real experience of being in a theatre, through close-ups, good sound and the intensity of an actor’s delivery. 2+2 can equal 5!

The downside is that arts are dominated by a small coterie of technophobic types, who will defend the 'sitting' in the 'live' theatre model until it eventually shrivels, dies or gets swallowed up by musicals. The smug dismissal of all things digital by the arts world is holding it back. This is a small step to take but moves us a little into the 21st century.

Rockshop - nothing fake about these kids

2010-08-11T19:54:00.001+01:00

Sometimes you go along to a live music event, not knowing what to expect, and you’re just blown away. This happened to me last week but none of the artists were professional musicians. All were young people who had been thrown together for just three days to write, rehearse and perform over 40 songs. I still can’t believe what I saw and heard.

The maestro behind this idea is Herbie Flowers, famous bassman who played for Bowie, Elton John and Lou Reed. Just play back, in your head, the opening bars to ‘Take a Walk on the Wildside’ – that’s the man.

But back to the show. It’s not often that you can keep me in a state of attentive rapture for 4 hours, but these teenagers did just that with a rolling series of rock, rap, blues, beautiful ballads and jazz. Lots of different combinations of musicians and musical styles but the whole thing swung and hung nicely together as we moved effortlessly (with the help of Herbie’s hilarious but genuinely admiring link speeches) through the set list.

One thing that really impressed me was the quality of the lyrics. How could people so young write song after song of such sophistication? Several of the songs gave me a lump in my throat, one (written and sung by a young lad with a ukulele) made me laugh out loud, others made my feet tap and others that buzz you get from good rock. And how professional (and brave) they all seemed, as they entered stage right and left stage left.

These were not ‘groomed’ stage school kids. There was nothing fake about any of this. They were individuals, clearly glad to be there, devoted and talented musicians who wanted to perform to the best of their ability. Rock on Rockshop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9DPJ3X-4C8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZRm2P_KsVQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS7SWxPTqos

Tomoko Takahashi: Junk Junkie

2010-07-31T13:23:00.001+01:00

I didn’t like Gormley’s Critical Mass on the roof, but even worse is the Tomoko Takahashi work on the floor below. She’s a junk junkie. The website claims that she recycles detritus into ‘illuminating’ works of art. I think not. There’s little that’s ‘illuminating’ and much that suggests an artist who values her own process over the final goal. The problem with junk is that it is ugly. When put together in collages, they’re even uglier. Then to add a layer of cliché she uses montaged photographs as a backdrop. This technique is so hackneyed (or should I say Hockneyed) that it’s laughable.

Now there is one interesting exception to this and that’s the wooden room with the photocopier. The idea that a machine in the corner produces represented images that cover the internal walls of the entire room is getting somewhere. Again, however, it’s a good idea gone bad. The actual images are dull, repetitive and irrelevent.

Anthony Gormley: Can’t figure it out?

2010-07-31T13:21:00.001+01:00

Bexhill’s De La Warr Pavilion is a beautiful building, enhanced by its position on the shore and its sharp, simple lines. Inside it’s bright and clean, on the roof, however, is an installation by Gormley that doesn’t, in my opinion, enhance the experience.

Am I alone in thinking that we’ve had enough of these cast metal figures from Gormley? What more is there to do or say with the technique? In this case we have sixty figures in twelve basic poses lying on the roof. At first they look as though they’ve been placed at random. However, they have actually been placed on the metal crossbeams of this Grade 1 listed building. Built in 1935, from a welded steel frame, the heavy solid figures had to be carefully laid onto the metal girders to prevent the roof from collapsing. Now there’s something odd about an aesthetic spectacle driven by the necessity of a building’s internal structure. It's a matter of convenience not art.

The figures are fine but the artist’s references to ‘sky burial’ are bogus, as the piece was made for an internal setting, a Viennese railway shed. This is typical of an aesthetic view that says, make of it what you will, art is just a trigger for any old tosh that you want to imagine or verbalise. The view from the roof is stunning, especially on a sunny, windy day from Beachy head along the pebble beach and the turquoise sea. These figures just lie there lifeless, inert and irrelevant. Gormley’s in danger of becoming a one trick pony.

Magnificent Maps - British Library

2010-07-30T20:16:00.002+01:00

I love maps, my wife hates maps. I’d like them on our walls, Gil rips them off. So, when I arranged to meet a friend at the Magnificent Maps Exhibition at the British Library, I expected lots of men pouring over the detail. But, no, there were more women than men and a surprising number of kids.

It’s loosely themed, but the real joy comes in interrogating the maps themselves. Where is Britain, Jerusalem, Constantinople? What are those red areas, like scarlet fingers on so many of the maps? Hey it’s the Red Sea! We spent nearly three hours in the exhibition, as many of the maps had 2D treasures that needed to be hunted out. What was nice was gthe way people shared their discoveries, two or three on any one map.

We assume that north should be at the top, but it was not always so. Many early maps, such as the Mappa Mundi, had East at the top or other ‘orient’ations. The Mappa Mundi dates from around 1300 and has Jerusalem in the centre, and East at the top. The Med, Nile and Red sea are all clearly visible.

The maps from the 15^th and 16^th centuries are representations of European voyages of discovery and are coastal fading off into great swathes of the unknown. It is in later centuroies that maps are used as political representations and tools of war.

Geological and other maps with a specific significance were absent. It was a shame that William Smith’s famous first geological map The Map that changed the World, was not here.

There’s maps on vellum silk, tapestries and paper but I was disappointed that there was no final room on digital maps as there’s been a revolution over the last decade with Google Earth, Google Maps, Google Streetview and Satnav devices. The whole world has been captured on one huge realistic map in Google Earth. That’s the bird’s eye view. Dynamic maps on TomTom, Google Streetview turn maps into tools. GPS is creating crime maps and social networking such as Foursquare. In other words, screen-based maps are vastly more functional and useful than print maps.

Inception - is it for real?

2010-07-19T21:34:00.007+01:00

A dream within a dream is an Edgar Allen Poe poem with the famous line, ‘Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?’ and Shakespeare was doing it 400 years ago. Movies have used the ‘dream theme’ often enough, especially as an opening gambit or play within a play, then cut to with the character wakening up or the word ‘CUT’ as we pan back to show that the scene was being filmed for a movie. Nested dreams have been used in Nightmare on Elm Street and An American Werewolf in London. But it was in The Matrix that the nested dreams/reality theme became the main plot context. In Inception, it’s taken to whole new level, or levels.

Smart art direction

Christopher Nolan wrote the script and so the dream levels are written to be filmed and the dimension of time captured through cutting. Each dream-level has its own unique aesthetic. Note that each level gets more abstract, cleaner and brighter. Clever cinematic, art direction.

Level 1 – Interior of

First Class cabin in a 747, the most perfectly controlled and disengaged from reality environment than man knows, a tiny capsule of luxury moving at over 500 mph at 35,000 feet above the earth. This is the pinnacle of Nolan’s dream structure pyramid and already plays with the reality theme.

Level 2 – A classic gritty blue/grey NY car chase look and feel, with fast cuts, crashes, shoot-outs and bridge scene. We cut from tight car/taxi/van interiors to street exteriors and the wonderful idea of a freight train ploughing through it all from the unconscious of the dreamer.

Level 3 – A warm, classy, cream/brown claustrophobic hotel interior, all smart bars, rooms, and corridors with dim lights and lifts. We’re meant to feel a little uneasy in this world, where we’re never at home, always on the move, in the limbo of hotel-land. This is echoed in Di Caprio’s personal dreamland where his wife takes her suicidal leap.

Level 4 – We’re way out here in a simple, stripped down, bright, white, remote exterior. By shifting to a classic Nordic, cold-war, computer-game inspired, shoot’em up in the snow, with lots of camouflaged soldiers and a slightly unreal fortress/hospital, Nolan gives us a world that seems a bit unreal but slams into us with its guns, grenades and explosions. He’s playing with us here.

Level 5 - Cobb's dreams. These are perhaps not strictly a fifth level. The glacial, coastal, crumbling city is perhaps the most stunning and most dreamlike visual in the whole movie - truly surreal. His other worlds are the most ambiguous and tantalising. We have the tangential test-run aesthetic of Paris, its Hausman streets being folded over like an omelette and café scene exploding all around them. The dreamlike 8mm sequences of his kids and wife's world are much more psychologically sophisticated that the others.

Nested dreams

The movie is a Cartesian experiment, what if all we perceive is a dream and that we can dream within a dream, then dream within that dream and so on. Not a new idea but the idea that you control the process to create dreams and steal memories is novel. Indeed, this is a movie that has to be read like a novel, as it makes you think back, reflect and has lots of clever narrative structure and revelations. Dreams, memories and time are all telescoped out and back again with the mind playing spoiler tricks on itself through unconscious desires and real memories. The cleverness of the movie is making each radically different world seem real. To do this, each world needs to be needs to be believable. The real wonder of the movie is the fact that cinema can create so many worlds in one movie and that suspension of disbelief clicks in immediately. The director realy is playing with the audience here and plays his big creator's card at the end.

Falls

Falls, the sense of falling which triggers waking, is used as the recovery device. People are tipped off chairs, fall in lifts, fall in vans crashing off bridges and ‘falling’ and gravity are used to question given realities. Another idea brilliantly realised in the movie, as it allows unreal scenes of fights in environments where the physics is changing. Planes, trains and automobiles are all used to literally create environments in which gravity shifts and we can dream being cut off from the normality of the real world. Again the real/unreal theme is explored.

Freudian memories

The Freudian concept of the unconscious plays God in creating a dreamworld’s people. They are projections of the dreamers mind and can work with him or against him. These constructs appear in the movie as extras or as a revengeful destructive rioting mob, ambushing gunmen. This sense of shared space but one dreamers world is, perhaps, the most difficult idea to grasp as there’s no evidence that it’s possible and therefore seems illogical.

Repressed memories are stored in safes that have to be unlocked. This is a clever visual device and although a little literal, provides psychological surprises. If this movie has a fault it’s in sticking to conventional Freudian theories or repression, Oedipus complex and the unconscious. They’re taken as givens. I’d have preferred a less romantic and more contemporary interpretation of dreams, perhaps a more honest look at extreme anxiety, sexuality and recurring dreams. But hey, this film has enough on its photographic plate.

Soft time

Time is logarithmic in nested dreams, so a several second fall of a van telescopes out into minutes and hours elsewhere. To watch this movie you must hold the complex concept of variable time in your mind, corresponding to the different levels. Slow-mo and cuts between the levels do this well. We jump between different dreams and rates of time. That’s clever.

Appearance and reality

The big theme is not the cod-Feudian psychology but the appearance/reality distinction, an abiding theme in philosophy. There is this strong idea going back to Plato’s cave, our perceived reality a representation of reality, from the pure idealism of Berkeley to the unknowable in Kant. It takes a lot to get a philosophical theme across in film, but Nolan succeeds, albeit at a superficial ‘life’s a dream’ level. But he was brave enough to leave the issue hanging at the end. This is a rarefied theme and if more 12+ viewers are exposed to the ideas, so much the better.

Nolan has been building towards this with Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Dark Knight. Like computer games, you can die but respawn on waking. And Nolan at 39 really is a Gen X game playing director. Some critics don’t like this aspect of the film, but dreams and much more like computer games than TV or movies. Dreams are often disturbing and not romcom material. Those that complain about the 'computer-game' dimensions 1) exaggerate the role of games in the movie 2) misunderstand his interpretation of the unconscious.

That ending

Nolan invites the audience to reflect on whether you the viewer is always dreaming (at least viewing an appeared/represented reality), have just experienced a dreamlike creation through a cinematic projection, have seen the dreams of a Director and his creative team, the dreams of an acted reality, Cobb's dreamworld or the dreamworld of several players. For me, Cobb is dreaming.

Ultimately we have the movie as a dream experience, and when it ends you feel disoriented and just a little bit more sceptical about what you call ‘reality’. Then whole movie collapses into Cobb's solipsistic perspective and that's the beauty of the film. The deep, deep sense. that we're all alone living within our created consciousnesses (and that includes dreams).

Fiona Banner - Tate Britain

2010-07-10T22:19:00.004+01:00

Forget Rude Britannia, go straight to the free show in the foyer. A Harrier hangs like a dead pheasant from the roof by a single cable; dead, inert but absolutely beautiful. The fact that it’s in such a non-functional pose makes it all the more powerful. It hovers tightly in the narrow hall the antithesis of its natural habitat, screaming over the Welsh or Scottish mountains, erect but impotent. Impossibly sleek, part shark, part ray, it's a form shaped by the necessity of overcoming gravity and air resistance. The art of speed.

There were group of kids just staring at it, literally with 'wonder'. It's nose is only a foot or so off the ground so lots lay beneath its nose for camera phone snaps. Remember that this was the plane that could hover – no one quite knew why this mattered, as we had helicopters, but it could. Nose down that's the trick - no one has ever seen it like this as nose down is death,the point just before it's destruction by the earth and gravity it is designed to escape.

The Jaguar further back, lies on its back, still, silent and vulnerable. It’s polished stainless steel body stripped of camouflage, it’s jet engines empty and hollow. This had a different ambiance, that of something shot down, abandoned. The polished steel made you want to touch and stroke the surface. Surely this is a work that would have benefited from allowing us to touch the structure. Most of the kids did, as soon as the official turned her back. Who can blame them. I did the same.

These are outstanding works by an artist with a huge imagination.

Rude Britannia – Tate Britain

2010-07-10T21:56:00.002+01:00

I’ve always found British self-judgement of its humour and satirical talent exaggerated and sure enough, this was a hotch-potch of a show that takes itself too seriously. It was in desperate need of some laughs. The show also lacked focus. Was it satire? Cartoons? Humour?

Much is made of Hogarth but I find his work too literal and the Rake’s Progress a set of clichéd images. What was interesting about the earlier 18^th and 19^th century material was its obsession with arses and farts. There were people kissing bare arses, exploding farts and no end of metaphorical puffs. In some ways, they were way ruder than the modern proponents.

Cruikshanks The Worship of Bacchus is described by the Tate as a work of genius – it is not. Crudely executed, it is a laboured work of Victorian moralising. It is given a sort of religious status in a room of its own, when what it deserves is an attic.

The modern stars were VIZ (two fat slags) and Steve Bell. VIZ was, and still does, have the ability to make you laugh out loud and read bits out to your wife on the sofa – that’s class. Steve Bell, who lives round the corner from me, has been canning politicos in underpants and bell jars for years. He deserves a Tate show all on his own. The seaside postcards were fine, but there were not enough of them, and the attempt to caricature them as sexist and racist was modern moralising.

But is it art? One problem with satire is its need to be explicit. Art is implicit, meanings are often hidden, subtle and have to be sought out by the viewer who interrogates the work. Satire has to be immediate and obvious. The tension between the two often means that first rate satire is second rate art and vice-versa. The final room was a good example of this, where the attempts at art meant that the works were neither rude, funny.

The Heresies of Text Art - Dave Beech

2010-06-01T22:17:00.002+01:00

Long lectures are bad enough but when simply read from pages of typed text, they’re simply recitation. Yet academics seem to think this is acceptable. This was a public lecture, paid for from the public purse, delivered by someone who shouldn’t really have the title ‘lecturer’ or ’teacher’. That’s not to say that what he read was uninteresting – it was just wrong-headed.

Text Art has always bothered me. All those moralising epigrams, slogans, words and, even worse, childish wordplays. Why do visual artists assume they have the skill to please us aesthetically with language? Dave Beech, who teaches at Chelsea College of Art, tried to convince us that it was a reaction to linguistic philosophy and bandied about names like Wittgenstein and Austin. This, of course, is nonsense. The idea that visual artists in the 60s were swatting up on books like Philosophical Investigations and Speech Acts is preposterous. Text Art has a pedigree in Soviet Art, something EVERY art student in the 60s was familiar with. That perhaps explains their fondness for banal sloganeering.

If anything, visual artists have an antipathy towards philosophy. I have always found it very difficult discussing the philosophy of art with artists as they react by seeing it as a personal attack. Very few artists have read Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant or anything on 20^th century aesthetics, especially evolutionary psychologists such as Pinker, Dissanayake, Dutton etc. The idea that many are immersed in deep philosophical inquiry is therefore unlikely.

Text Art often suggests that visual artists have a deep dislike of language. It’s all they can do to juxtapose, colour or come up with what they regard as meaningful, but is in fact banal, wordplay. The usual refuge is ambiguity – they want to suggest ambiguity or interesting thoughts in the mind of the viewer but if they enter the world of text they need to have the words to back it up, not state the slogan then run for the hills.

We ended on a spirited discussion of his own piece - PROTEST IS BEAUTIFUL - for Paul a wonderful statement pregnant with meaning. For me a simplistic and somewhat stupid phrase.

Day 23: What is art?

2010-05-24T09:59:00.000+01:00

Brave to end a Festival you’ve curated with the question, ‘What is art?’ but this is a 2,500 year old issue that requires some philosophical acumen, and not just personal reflections. Like the debates at the Festival (apart from Stern) this lacked academic rigour and depth.

Darwin

His first argument is an argument from analogy, that art should be seen as biology post-Darwin, with no hierarchy. The ‘all inclusive’ argument is fairly well established in aesthetics as a reaction against the Kantian absolutism of the 18^th century but it bears no real analogy with Darwin, which is an explanation for the life we observe through genetic variation and natural selection.

A more fruitful line of inquiry would have been the various evolutionary hypotheses put forward for aesthetic behaviour. So what is ‘adaptive’ about art? Our taste for landscapes and parks suggests our origin in Savannah grasslands. Puzzle-solving, status markers, sexual selection, fitness indicators that are difficult to fake; these are all candidates for discussion and a lively area of aesthetic theorising. Eno either hasn’t read any the many books and papers in this area, or forgot to mention it.

We’ve had John Carey at the Festival in the past, and his book ‘What good are the arts’ was mentioned then dismissed on the grounds that he saw ‘literature’ as true art. He caricatured Carey, who actually argues for Eno’s position and does not believe in absolute values in art. The problem here is that Eno simply presents a description of what he regards as ‘art’. What aesthetics tries to do is establish both a definition and explanation. It’s the ‘why’ that’s so puzzling.

Surrender

He tries, but fails, to establish an explanatory theory through his theory of ‘surrender’, the process whereby humans willingly surrender consciousness through sex, drugs, art and religion. The word ‘surrender’ is suspect here as much art appreciation is active participation and inquiry, not a passive ‘suspension of disbelief’ or dream-like mental state. If pushed, he’d have real difficulty in defining art in these terms. In fact, it ultimately leads to an aesthetic view that is similar to Marx’s view that ‘Religion is the opium of the people’. The surrender theory posits art as the opium of the people, a form of escapism. Now this is an interesting and dangerous line of inquiry, that goes all the way back to Plato. In the end his definition was a weak version of the historicist view of art, as u by Levinson and others. Armchair theorising is fine, but you expect more at a ticketed event in a Concert Hall.

Conclusion

To be fair, it was interesting to hear someone who is in a position of some power in the arts question its meaning and purpose. In my experience, those involved in the arts are repulsed by aesthetic theory. Art, for them, is an absolute good and those who engage in this debate, simply philistines looking for an excuse to with draw their subsidies. In that sense, well done Eno.

Day 16: Ian King

2010-05-23T10:54:00.002+01:00

Fist, a lanky Scot singing folk songs that had contemporary lyrics. I'm a bit removed from Scotland and it's folk,even though I'm Scottish, but the audience loved him. I was really there for Ian King, one of a handful of people trying to inject life into a moribund English folk scene.He succeeded, because he favours a good song and backing band over tradition for tradition's sake. The quiet, but wailing, electric guitar lifted many of the sings but Ian King was in the driving seat with his strong voice and good taste.

Day 17: Political Mother

2010-05-23T10:45:00.002+01:00

Modern dance pays too much attention to its classical roots, so I was delighted to see Hofesh Shechter rock the roof off the Dome with a performance tat literally stunned the audience,with a wall of sound, from four guitars and four drummers. But the real genius was the lead singer who roared out meaningless political slogans. He was the spear tip that jabbed at the audience. You couldn't keep your eyes off him, even when the dancers were on stage. It had all the trademark Hofesh choreography, reaching for objects above the dancers heads, groups being washed around the stage. Andrew Comben,the Director of the Brighton Festival brought them to Brighton as the resident dance group, gave them space for rehearsal, and with this performance, Andrew has made his name. It's on tour now - go see it.

Day 18: Roy Haynes - legend

2010-05-23T10:40:00.004+01:00

Legendary drummer attracts drummer crowd at the Komedia. Great for me as my son is a drummer,so he, his drummer mate and their drum teacher, along with hundreds of other jazz and drummers went to pay homage to the 83 year old who wasn't even out of breath after the performance. Accompanied by sax, piano and bass, then his friend's son,popped up onto the stage to play 'When the Saints'. Audience loved it. Greta to see these musicians honoured in the best way possible, by young people turning up to see them.

Day 21: Rimini Protokoll – Best Before

2010-05-23T10:38:00.003+01:00

Strong idea – audience has game controllers and ball avatars, while guided through a series of decisions,some of which affect your future action. Take heroin and weed early in the game and you’re debarred from political life. Don’t go to University,you earn less. Even cheating is explored. So far,so good, it was fun, especially for those who had never played a computer game before. I enjoyed seeing Polly Toynbee choosing to take heroin.

But, and it’s a large but, the presenters were low key Canadians who couldn’t carry it. Why have live theatre and edgy decision making, fronted by amateurs? It still defaulted to the old theatre idea that the performers were primary and audience secondary. In games, it’s the audience that is primary. To be fair this was about as good as I’ve seen in terms of technology and theatre, but it still had that element of ‘dads dancing at the disco’ feel.

Day 21: This is the Afterlife

2010-05-23T10:38:00.002+01:00

If this is the afterlife, then give me oblivion. It didn’t warrant a huge concert hall experience. A series of ‘readings’, and that was the problem with most of them, they were ‘read’ not ‘spoken’, wasn’t enough to carry the event. With the exceptions of the Geordie, Glaswegian and kid at the start, these were like those awful Radio 4 plays you get in the afternoon, before you reach for the off button. The music was neither complementary nor enough in itself to arouse interest. Eno has been a brilliant curator and director, I’m not so sure about his performances.

Day 20: Women Dream Horses

2010-05-23T10:36:00.002+01:00

This was far removed from the normal Anglo-Saxon idea of theatre, which is why I liked it. I’m tiring of British theatre with its inward looking, petty cultural obsessions. ‘Yes Minister’ at Chichester, is a good example. Clearly playing to retired, countrified, Colonel Blimp audiences; a retread of a TV series on the stage.

This group of Spanish misfits took the edgy theme of women, horses and sex to rip open the psychological guts of a family. The three couples fought, sparred and joked with Chekovian reverence for off stage action and events. The drinks that were never drunk, the meal that never came. The killing spree at the end meant no respite for an audience looking for resolution. There was courage in the writing and the action.

Day 15: This is reasons for optimism

2010-05-16T23:54:00.002+01:00

Grammatically dodgy title for a debate that turned out to be a dodgy debate. Brian Eno gave us his reasons for optimism – various global organisations that keep the mail, and the internet going, fluidity of knowledge on the internet and our children (If we understood them, we’d be fucked). No mention of any of the problems just some examples of where things do actually work.

Eno was right, this was a purely Panglossian session. What he seems to have missed is that Pangloss was a ridiculous character. Leibniz's philosophical excuse for the existing of suffering was a mathematical artifice that required looking at a metaphysical fix for the existence of God. Philosophically, it's a bizarre solution, and, of course, didn't last the test of time. When pop producers turn philosophers, you've got to put your bullshit alarm on to full volume. I was half expecting Bono to appear with a U2 theodicy.

The 'Panglossian' disaster continued. Some Quaker, who had an interest in Nuclear proliferation, explained that although Iran hangs young homosexuals from cranes, they’re alright really. Then, a psychobabble expert who was neither pessimistic nor optimistic, put forward her delusional ideas about ‘psychotherapy’, and how it can save the world (although it seems to focus mostly on Camden and Brixton at the moment). She was truly and magnificently awful – total lightweight. Finally a lawyer who was a Zen Buddhist priest. It was all very ‘Brighton’ and as such, lacked depth, academic credibility and at times, good sense. Inside my head, I'm sure I heard Voltaire laugh from his grave.

Day 14: Electric Hotel

2010-05-16T01:21:00.004+01:00

Only the headphones stopped my head from freezing and my mind numbing with boredom for the first 30 mins of this show. A dull sequence of dances is repeated, doubling the boredom. No doubt some smart ass choreographer will say that the audience have to place their own meaning on events, but I hardly cared. Ambiguity is often an excuse for the banal. Then, literally out of the blue light, it exploded into action. It was a bit like 'Noises Off' at times (I hate farce) but the scene with the white-suited singer on the top floor and fighting dancers was worth the wait. This show simply needed some serious editing.

Day 14: Nick Kent

2010-05-15T20:14:00.003+01:00

Having witnessed the drug banalities of John Harris and John Niven yesterday, I feared the worst with a second music journalist today. Fear not, Nick Kent was on a roll. He’s likeable, articulate and knows how to tell a tale.

There was the usual hagiographic description of Keith Richards (exaggerated methinks) but funny. I look forward to the biography coming out later this year. He was incisive on Iggy Pop (complex man) explaining that he was at times rather nasty, middle-class boy, who likes the American Dream (hence the ads). ‘Raw Power’ is still his favourite album. Malcolm Maclaren was ‘and interesting bunch of guys’, but fundamentally an unpleasant egomaniac. Interesting take on the Sex Pistols, as 'thugs'. But there was the honesty and tenderness of a man looking back at his life, his lucky breaks, his loves, his friends. Came across as a nice guy. It would be interesting to get someone who knows him well to give us an opinion, someone other than the bitter blimp that is Julie Burchill.

His final observations about contemporary music were worth hearing – gadget driven, with no shared sensibility, an industry redefined by the internet. But there was a note of optimism around the creativity that the technology offered artists. His point about music journalism having become the ‘nostalgia’ industry, was apposite (he I suppose is an example). When the lights went up he gasped, “Fuck me, there’s a lot of people here!”

Day 13: John Harris & John Niven

2010-05-15T00:15:00.004+01:00

The music industry chronicles itself through music journalism, biogs and the occasional novel. But it’s all a bit seedy and dishonest, as the journos get paid by the record companies to go on tour, a bit like travel journalism. But I expected more from John Harris, as he seems to have moved beyond this in his other musings.

The session got off to a bad start with a rash of dull and predictable stories about drugs – we went through the whole gamut; weed, cocaine, E, heroin. Drugs are like dreams, deeply solipsistic, and therefore dull in the telling. This didn’t stop them droning on about being GAKED (slang sounds better when old men are trying to impress a young audience) out of their heads.

It didn’t get much better when they were discussing Brit Pop, which was boring then, never mind now. Harris only started getting interesting near the end when he hinted at the idea that the music industry is essentially delusional, and needs to be, as they peddle teenage kicks to young and expectant minds.

Julie Burchill floated in, sat in the dark in her sunglasses, occasionally squeaking out a comment, and the first question from the audience was, ‘Did someone really get fisted by a Brit Award?’ Oh the glamour of it all!

Day12: Koyaanisqatsi & Philip Glass

2010-05-14T11:50:00.002+01:00

Koyaanisqatsi is a Hopi word meaning ‘life imbalance’. I had just attended a workshop on that remarkable building, the Dome, and had what I regard as the best seat, visually an acoustically, in the house - A39 – bang in the middle in the Circle. This really is a great venue, although you can’t see the Dome from either the outside or inside, it’s a huge octagonal domed edifice, originally a stable for the Prince Regent, then a barracks, then a hospital for Indian soldiers wounded in the first world war.

Anyway, back to the performance. Philip Glass was there along with an ensemble that played his score top the movie live. It’s largely time lapse or slowed down, so that the music sets the real tempo. It starts and finishes with beautiful Hopi rock paintings, but it’s opening sequences are huge panoramas of the US landscape devoid of people or signs of habitation and rolling clouds and rivers. But not for long, as the Saturn rocket looms into view and huge trucks and cranes extracting minerals. Cityscapes and people soon appear, along with huge housing projects, demolitions and poverty. It’s nothing but ambitious this film. The problem is that the visual and musical narrative isn’t quite sophisticated enough. The clever juxtapositions aren’t there and although most of the scenes are truly beautiful, the speeded up cars on roads and people on escalators have since become clichés.

For me the landscapes were transcendent and the shots of the hydrogen bomb tests as frightening as they’ve always been. We never see these images now, except trivialised in pop videos. They’re far more frightening than any horror movie.

One aspect of the film that limits its scope is that it is essentially an American movie with nothing but American images. This reduces its universality somewhat. Nevertheless, it’s visually stunning.

"If we dig precious things from the land, we will invite disaster." "Near the day of Purification, there will be cobwebs spun back and forth in the sky." "A container of ashes might one day be thrown from the sky, which could burn the land and boil the oceans." You’ve got to take these things with a pinch of salt as they have an oral tradition, altered by the Spanish and later cultures. Curiously, the Hopi now make most of their money from opencast coal mining!

Day 10: Macbeth

2010-05-14T11:30:00.004+01:00

Curious opening witches scene where static actors simply recite the words in the darkness. The problem, however, was the incredibly 'posh' pronunciation. It was like three ladies from Roedean in an elocution lesson. This was a problem throughout the play. Macduff had an authentic Scottish accent but Macbeth sounded like David Cameron. The 'Porter' scene was smart in that he became a she, but again her Scottish accent was weird. I'm Scottish but could hardly understand a word. One last word on the cast; Lady Macbeth was something else, a tall, blond figure looming over Macbeth.

But let's put accents to one side for a minute. Macbeth can suffer from a surfeit of blood and be smothered by contemporary interpretation. This is a pared down, skeletal version on a simple dark set with no props. It works because the tale and language is strong enough to sweep you along. It's basically a bloody, murderous, gangster movie, with characters right out of some brutal Mafia clan - the murderous moll, the tortured gangster, the cheeky doorman, dodgy doctors and blood and bodies galore. It's Shakespeare's thriller, full of action and twists. My good friend Ronnie is actually the modern Thane of Fife, as Chief Exec of Fife Council; he would have enjoyed this.

Day 9: The Books, Anna Calvi

2010-05-11T10:11:00.002+01:00

'Next big things' is the black spot in music. One minute the next Meatloaf, the next dead meat. I didn't really see the core talent in Anna Calvi. She plucks a fair, but unpolished, guitar solo and has a voice that is almost there, but not quite. Altogether too shouty and the drummer needs to calm down. Far more interesting was the young lad who came on with a poncho, harp and guitar before her. He had a fine voice, quirky songs and did a ballsy march off the stage through the audience.

The Books, however, showed stunning originality, stage presence and charm. They are unlike anything else you may have heard with their cello, guitar, bass instrumentation, backing loops and quirky videos.

Day8: This is Scenius

2010-05-10T12:40:00.003+01:00

To rechristen these concerts 'This was Tedious' would be a cheap shot, but there it is. I can't for the life of me see what was worthy in this triplet of concerts. I sat through all three hoping for a revelation or epiphany - it never came.

Eno had a nice line in self-depreciating theory, pretending to be an academic delivering the last lecture of the year to us, his students. The course was Module 4 in Cultural Reconstruction and , as all digital music had been destroyed in the Great Pulse in 2038, the group were trying to reconstruct the lost genres. The first was North American Pedagogic; music designed to keep students awake in lectures, as it was cheaper than Ritalin. Unfortunately, the music was as tedious as most lecturers.

A fair number of the audience left well before the end and all three concerts were thinly attended. I suppose this was because there aren't enough Eno fanboys out there and the whole enterprise was a bit vague. But what surprised me was the lack of energy and surprise. It was billed as a, free-flowing exercise in group composition but there was little or no communication between the Eno and the band. They had tea set up on a table with a sofa and chairs but no one had a cup of tea.

I've got to give Eno the benefit of the doubt here and blame my lack of musical sensitivity - but telling it straight, I felt it was lacklustre. At times it felt as though early 70s prog rock had returned.

Day 7: Kim Noble Must Die (five letter review)

2010-05-09T10:44:00.002+01:00

he did

Day 7: Local or global? Debate - not really

2010-05-09T10:44:00.001+01:00

Ask the right question to get the right answer. This was a vague question and therefore a muddle. It fragmented into a lot of sub-debates about foreign aid, financial markets and the current election. Indeed the opposing parties, two on each side ended up supporting each other and flipping back and forth on the issue. What we got was a series of journalistic observations, which is hardly surprising, as that, essentially, is what the panel consisted of. There was no academic analysis of the issue(s) no heavyweight thoughts, no depth. The debaters were like 1% fat milk, they looked like the real thing but were as thin as water.

One sub-debate did take off, and that was on foreign aid. The World aid budget is actually quite small at $120 billion, about the same amount that the US spends on Botox, breast implants and vaginal realignment. Our aid budget is about 8 days of the interest we pay on our national debt. Then there’s the recent analysis of aid in terms of feeding corruption, fuelling wars and fuelling dependency. Aid spends on education, health and women’s rights, but fails to recognise that health, educated people need jobs. The solutions are therefore political and economic. It’s as if we give them ladders then swipe the ladder away from them when they’re on the bottom rung and send them bandages and soup. Aid in this sense will never stop as it reinforces itself.

The only other interesting observation was on the nature of protest. He gave a withering critique of carline Lucas’s statement after being elected, to the effect that she’s would first and foremost protect the interests of Brighton and her constituents. Not the world, Europe, UK, England or even Sussex, but Brighton! Then came the attack on the NO-sayers. We Brits love a little march to say NO to something. We’ll trivialise politics by saying no to cuts, no to the closure of the most inefficient of schools and hospitals, NO to Tesco, No to anything. We rarely say YES to anything and that’s the problem.

Day 7: This is Acapello

2010-05-08T12:29:00.001+01:00

Bran Eno said this event would be a surprise. Eno’s an acapello fanboy and sings in his own acapello group. But nothing prepared me for how astonishing a experience this turned out to be. I had a taste of Reggie Watts during the week and was hungry for more. He was the perfect compere defying every convention of formal concert performance. He was surreal, funny, jammed with the artists and gave his own hilarious looped, acapello songs such as Caucasian Spiritual. Then five guys from New York who gave us soul, blues and, just for Brighton, a fantastic version of Under the Boardwalk. The Brighton crowd, probably sick of election talk, were really up for this. Finally we had Naturally 7, secen young guys from New York, who gave a jaw dropping show. They produce a wall of sound, including drums, guitar, bass, wind and string instruments. The guy on drums took us through each piece, snare, bass, high-hat, crash and toms. My son’s a drummer and I’ve set drum kits up dozens of times and I swear that if you closed your eyes, you’d think this these were the breal deal. It was almost beyond belief what these kids were doing with the human voice. When they attempted George Harrisons, ‘When My Guitar Gently Weeps’ I thought they’d bitten off more than they could sing – but it was a wailing masterpiece. I’ve seen some great things in the Dome over many years but this was different, as it was so unexpected. Give it up for the Eno man.

Day 6: Rokia Traore

2010-05-07T12:52:00.002+01:00

Rokia really rocked the roof off the Dome tonight with her brilliant band but was also true to her roots with traditional songs. From this beautiful, lithe, wiry figure comes this HUGE voice who also danced for a solid two hours. From this beautiful, lithe, wiry figure comes this HUGE voice who also danced for a solid two hours. Got to say something about the band. The lead guitar was fiendishly good - at points the band got into heavy rock, Cream like sounds but he switched with ease from rock to African sounds. The drummer, did some magical things with percussion instruments, while at the same time, knocking out the rhythms. The bass player boomed away and the Xalam player knocked out some great solos. Whole place on its feet at the end.

Day 5: Reggie Watts

2010-05-06T10:58:00.005+01:00

What do you make of this? Packed house for this huge, ‘fro, bearded, box-shaped guy in red sweater who beat boxes out some fantastic looped songs which he creates as he goes. Not only does he have a voice that does everything, full range, soul, hip-hop..... he’s a comic. But this ain’t no stand-up routine. Reggie likes to riff off wherever the thoughts lead him. It’s improv with songs and beats. Shockingly good. Really looking forward to This is Acapella, where Reggie also features.

Dat 5: Loin

2010-05-06T10:55:00.002+01:00

Precision performance from this mixed up chap, and I’d love to see it again, as it threads projected text, dance, music and film to present his fractured identity. I’m sure I missed a lot on first sight. It starts with a cyclical movement where he’s crushed to the ground, reflecting the torture his father endured? Violence is always the driver here and explodes from the dancer on several occasions and violence dominates the memories of the witnesses. The past rips up his present and there is no clear narrative. The dance sequences where he lets rip and the most thrilling as if the past is electrocuting him; in stark contrast to the precise control of the opening dance. Life is not a story, it’s a bad meal with some old and foul tasting ingredients. Intersecting real video from his mother was a powerful finale.

Day 5: Eno's 77 million paintings

2010-05-06T10:50:00.002+01:00

People lounge back on huge red sofas to watch huge luminous images morph to the music. It was like walking into a church from the back and seeing lone, silent worshipers pray. I sat for over and hour, but there were some who were clearly there for longer and no wonder. Huge screens (TVs?) are arranged to show a slowly changing set of mixed images, generated by a piece of software, I presume. Set at the working end of the church, the apse, it was like a huge, constantly changing, stained glass window, but more Islamic than Christian, as it’s primarily geometric. The music’s generated from multiple CD players overlaying tracks on each other. Generated art and generated music. Go there and contemplate. Honestly, it's brilliant. This Eno guy’s starting to impress me.

Day 4: Stern stuff

2010-05-04T22:22:00.001+01:00

Cool, calm and certain; Stern delivered on the, science, economics and politics of climate change. Hope you’ve all read the report (700 pages). It’s just damn fine to see someone soaked in the science, deliver a talk that cuts to the beating heart of the matter. He sees it as a risk management problem and that the risks are ENORMOUS i.e. a 50/50 chance that we’ll see temperatures 4/5/6 degrees hotter, temperatures the Earth hasn’t seen for 30 million years, something that lies outside of human experience. Consequences; Bangladesh and Florida among and many more under water, Southern Europe as hot as the Sahara desert, mosquitoes and malaria in major African cities, tundra melting and methane release, all leading to the migration of billions of people and on-going resource wars.

Evolutionary psychology

He pulled in evolutionary cognition as the explanation for our short-termism. Note that the election has barely mentioned climate change. We’re hopeless at dealing with 30-50 year problems, as our political systems cater for short-term goals. But, as Groucho Marx said, “Why should I care bout future generations, what have future generations ever done for me?” The point is that politicians have to start dealing with probabilities, not certainties.

Realistic optimist

He had some praise for China, who he thought was one of the few nations capable of taking the long view. Their 12^th five year plan is vital for the success of the Copenhagen Accord. He has grown more optimistic that Copenhagen will work, with 100 countries signed up and other conferences planned in Cancun and s Africa. At just 2.5 pages and 12 paragraphs, it’s a start, with a 100 billion promise for poorer countries.

Do we need a disaster to waken the consciousness of mankind? The Australian bush fires have altered opinion in that country, so there’s something in that hypothesis. Are fossil fuels becoming so unaffordable that the boat will self-right? In the end he had a rather surprising saviour here – business. It was here that he saw lots of immediate activity and saw the pension funds as the key to green investment, as they take the long term view. The pace of innovation, he thought, was immense and investors, he thought, would start to shun high carbon investments. Unfortunately, it was the US and China that most of these opportunities are coming from. Entrepreneurship is key.

Epilogue

I spoke to Nick Stern afterwards, and asked a question, “Lovelock was here in this very room two years ago, and would describe himself as a realistic pessimist, what probability do you attach to his catastrophic outcome?” Stern replied, “Of course, he’s really more into the science than the economics, but there is a probability.” He wouldn’t give me a number. That’s the problem with economists, they’ll only tell you the probabilities of their favoured outcome!

Day 3: Seeing Things

2010-05-03T19:03:00.004+01:00

As the late, great Kurt Vonnegut said, “There must be more to life than blow-jobs and golf”. So off I set to surrender my creaking, old, Calvinist frame to the will of some performance artists. The show was Seeing Things, which has an audience of exactly one – and at 1 pm today, that one was me.

The blurb asked me to turn up 15 minutes early. I did and after reading a short disclaimer, sat there for ten minutes in silence. Now here’s the tease. I danced a waltz in complete darkness with a stranger, looked down at my feet to find they were someone else’s feet, ate a strawberry in the dark, went eyeball to eyeball with a bearded, Indian transvestite in a sort of homoerotic lapdance, was spun round in a dark room, walked up a long corridor towards a living Vermeer painting (I think) and, finally, had my feet washed, and kissed, by the lovely Adrian.

Like lots of performance art projects that try to use technology, it’s usually dated or the wrong technology. In this case an iPOD and projector glasses were a little weak. They didn’t really do the VR thing, as so brilliantly described by Daniel Lanier in WE ARE NOT GADGETS. The work has lots of potential but this was a work in progress. The artist should team up with some serious geeks to get this going as it has loads of performance potential. The Vermeer thing had similar potential. I really did like all of this but the solemnity puzzled me. We need a dose of New Your chutzpah. The performers seem to very 'English' assuming that stillness and seriousness of tone is 'art'. This tends to strip the emotional impact from pieces. Let rip guys and take a few risks.

But it was Adrian who had most impact. We took seven deep breaths together, he then washed my feet in warm water, rinsing them with hotter water. His first question was “What is your relationship with your feet?” At times like these I’m tempted to be facetious, but he did make me think, as my feet are literally the foot soldiers of my body; used, abused and ignored. They must hate my brain, as they’re always being pummelled on some half-baked trip that my mind demands. We had a nice chat and that was that. It was the footwash that still lingers as the most relevant memory - a lesson in humility.

Day 3: Judging a book. What makes good writing?

2010-05-03T18:34:00.003+01:00

Five apparatchiks from the book world show how antiquated, inefficient and downright unmeritocratic the book industry can be. Nothing really new here – an audience of aspirant writers and same old, same old system. The greatest statement of self delusion is surely the phrase, “everyone has a novel in them”. They do – but it’s invariably a bad one.

Posh girls

So what did we learn? The most dispiriting statement from the audience was a posh mum whose posh daughter had been asked to read and select manuscripts on her work experience. That’s how much publishers value authors. The panel reiterated what everyone in the audience knew, that manuscripts arrive in piles, that there’s a slush pile (almost everything) and that you need a lot of luck and maybe some contacts to get through.

What was more worrying for me was that publishers seem to have some weird recruitment policy, whereby they only hire posh girls who surely have a limited, public school, cosseted, London-based experience of life.

Planet paper

It all went awry when technology was mentioned, which the panel confused with self-publishing. Technology has already shaped publishing. Amazon is one of the most powerful forces in the book world (remember Brighton Borders anyone?) and Apple promises to take a major role in publishing. Like a bunch of dodos they threw out some disparaging remarks about self-publishing and e-books. People read from screens all of the time, on laptops, mobiles, e-book readers, and with the iPAD we may see this exploding (I have my doubts here). Nonetheless, this bunch were about as knowledgeable about the future of their industry as an average 12 year old. Biblophilia goes hand and hand with technophobia.

I did learn one positive thing, that one of the winners of the West Dean prize. Check out her work online – it’s pretty good….http://www.kirstylogan.com/

Day 2: Kevin Johansen

2010-05-02T23:35:00.003+01:00

No idea who this guy was but gave him a shot. Turns out it was a double act - Kevin and a cartoonist (Liniers). Kevin sings, Liniers, splashes paint about and they do a weak Morcombe and Wise routine. The songs were good and the evening was fun, but I'm not sure I'd want to see it again. What really puzzled me was the lack of virtuosity in the drawing and painting. They were, to be blunt; dross. It's an act that falls between three stools - songs, painting and comedy.

Day 1: Festival Blast off with Eno!

2010-05-02T13:54:00.004+01:00

Brian Eno’s a charming, self-effacing chap but he introduced tonight’s event with knowledge and some passion. Landing a man on the moon is surely one of man’s more wondrous and extraordinary achievements and Eno was so enthralled by the event that he wrote an album about the Apollo moonshot. Rooted in the adoption of Nazi rocket scientists it was, nevertheless, JFK who, on discovering that the Russians were streaking ahead, promised to get a man on the moon before the end of the decade (60s). He wouldn’t live to see that day, but if Martin Luther King had a dream, JFK had an outrageous vision. It took until now to realise Martin Luther King’s dream through Obama, but JFK got there first.

Spaced out Country music

We’ll probably not see another man on the moon, but at the time it was one of the few events that galvanised the whole world, satellite TV had just been made possible and it felt as though we all participated. I, like anyone else over the age of say 45, all remember where we were that night, and those fuzzy images on our tiny TVs, with no remote control and dodgy reception. But Eno had a surprise. How many of us knew that the astronauts took music with them on their trip to the moon? Country music! So the album he created was a form of Country music free of gravity, free of the crass lyrics and leaden melodies -lighter and airier, even airless - spaced out.

Film

6 million feet of film (the digital age was a long way off) condensed into 50 minutes. Panning up the side of the Saturn rocket showed the majesty of the rocket when earth bound, with a beautiful shot of it lit up by Hollywood spotlights , then the take-off and nail biting in the control room. The two sub rockets peel off and we see the earth recede into the distance.

One problem with a movie like this, is that you don’t get a sense of time. It took two and a half days to get to the moon but seemed to take minutes. Poor Michael Collins never really got a look-in, he was the guy who was looping round the moon on his own while all the world and his dog was goggling the moon guys. He would later describe how he felt like the loneliest man in the universe on the far, dark side of the moon, further away from home than any man.

Another omission is the key sounds and phrases – the roar of the rocket on take-off and ‘The Eagle has Landed’. I would also have liked to have heard some of that ‘good ol boy’ country music they had in the claustrophobia of the capsule.

I’m not sure but I think that though the film was about the first moon landing, there seemed to be lots of footage of the later landings, when the moon buggies came into their own. These buggies were to shape the future of all space travel, as manned missions dropped off and little robots were zapped off to other planets, like Mars, capable of doing far more for far longer than any human machine.

Later, I walked away thinking that this experience, fantastic though it was, reflected the world's reaction to the moonshots. Art doesn't cope well with science. We'd rather 'surrender' to the pleasures of the concert hall, theatre, cinema or TV, than do the hard work necessary to understand the physics, astronomy and technology of the missions. The danger, an argument that goes back to Plato, is that art appears to enhance but actually smothers the real experience. On the other hand, I'm happy to do both - on that note I highly recommend Moondust by Andrew Smith - a brilliant account of the Moonshots with a focus on the astronauts.

Eno’s encore

The little man gave us a few songs at the end. It wasn’t genius but the songs were in line with his calm, reflective approach to music. The audience loved him, with chants of ‘Eno, Eno, Eno’ rising up at the end. What I loved about this was, that as the guest Director of the Festival, he was getting up there and giving it his all – talking and performing. Couldn’t get ENOugh of the man – so I’ve book up for the six hour This is Pure Scenius session on 9 May.

To see interview with Eno on this event click here.

Jerusalem - Apollo Theatre

2010-03-14T13:13:00.001Z

Is Jerusalem is a dysfunctional Midsummer Night’s Dream? Comic, set in the woods as deliberate antithesis to city/town, youngsters who see the woods as freedom, lawlessness versus the law, fairies, characters driven by potions and drugs. There’s even the rude mechanicals who come in at the end, but with violent intent.

Rooster Byron is the larger-than-life Oberon, who lords it over his young acolytes. As someone who is not English, it seemed to me to mine a rich and true vein – that being English means a fond attachment to the past and the countryside. More than any other nation I know, its natives dream of a ‘green and pleasant land’. From the Archers to the National Trust, the English love the idea of England as arcadia. Even rock stars, from the Stones to Blur, aspire to buy a country pile and play the Country Squire.

But this play moves that well worn debate on. The woods and Rooster Byron are not ideals. The real mythology of the woods is of the paganism, Woden, the bogeyman. England is a place torn between town and country, politeness and drunkeness, empire and little England. Each character is therefore gored on the horns of a dilemma. The pub landlord (brilliant performance by Gerard Hoden) is forced to be a Morris Dancer and feel demeaned by the fact that he’s having to play the fool for commerce. In other words, forget that crap Victorian veneer of Englishness, the truth is very different. Being English is to escape from the stifling formality of politeness into the revels of drink and drugs. Mackenzie Crook is the aspiring DJ, England’s musicians reduced to miming US culture. The others are lost souls, who have nothing at their core to believe in or aspire to.

I may be wrong here but the title and resonance of the song and lyrics Jerusalem suggests to me that Rooster Byron was a sort of English Jesus, a second coming. He preaches, speaks sometimes in parables and is crucified by the authorities and people. He dies for England’s sins – branded with a cross-iron, the cross of St David across the whole set.

And did those feet in ancient time.
Walk upon Englands mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God,
On Englands pleasant pastures seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land

Beneath this poem Blake inscribed "Would to God that all the Lords people were Prophets"

Is Roostser Byron that prophet?

It really is Blake’s message of an England that recoils from the brutality and banality of industrialisation, which has extra resonance today.

If I were English, this play would disturb me, as I’m not, I was more of an observer. However, this is England, and nobody shows their emotions. I’d have liked to have seen this play at the Globe, with the pit full of non-theatre types with a bellyful of beer.

Mariza - not a passing fado!

2010-02-08T01:38:00.003Z

More than a passing Fado for me, as I've loved her work for the last five years and was pretty excited about this concert as I've wiped away many a tear listening to her at home - she didn't disappoint.

She is a stunning spectacle in herself, half African, half European, very tall with cropped blonde hair - like an elongated Elizabeth 1, without her wig. You just can't keep your eyes off her extraordinary shape.

But it's her voice and command of an audience that tells. She's been singing to audiences since she was five and knows exactly how to handle the ebb and flow of emotion - for Fado is extremely emotional. I preferred the pure Fado songs, but also enjoyed the other world influenced numbers. I literally can't listen to O gente da Minha Terra without the tears welling up (I'd pay £25 just to hear that one song live), Primavera being a close second. From heart rending Fado to roof rousing ballads, she had the entire concert hall on their feet clapping away. No better way to spend a Sunday night. Plenty of Brazilian and Spanish people in the audience tonight but for one evening at least, we were all Portugues.

Van Gogh was a blogger

2010-02-05T19:30:00.002Z

The Van Gogh show at the Royal Academy is unusual as it has as many letters as paintings. He was a habitual letter writer. Like a blogger, he felt compelled to pour out his thoughts and plans. Fascinated by the process of becoming an artist his letters, like a blog, includes sketches and watercolours in the letter itself, sometimes among the text. The work was not enough, he had to verbalise the process.

You hear about the sheer effort he put into learning his craft, slowly mastering drawing, perspective, watercolours, portraits and landscapes. There was no quick spurt of divine inspiration, only the long march to competence. Van Gogh’s work would have been unknown if he had gone to Art School, as it was the inner struggle, against the odds, that made the man and his work. He was free from the groupthink of other schools, even that of Paul Gauguin.

As the show, and blog, unfolds through his letters, you also get a peppering of surprises. I never knew that he was a teacher in London, an avid reader (even painting books) or that he worked in watercolours. And as he drifts south, the palette and subjects change. That’s the key to the show, the geographical influence in terms of light and colour. Ultimately it’s nature and its organic forms that matter most, in palettes of green and yellow. There’s no water in these images and the clouds seem out of place – it’s the earth and its crops, grasses, flowers and landscapes; and the cycle of growth. The landscapes are alive with colour.

Nick Drake - Way to Blue

2010-01-23T13:47:00.002Z

Deserved 4 star review in the Guardian for one of my favourite British singer/song writers. Everyone in my generation has ahd a few mellow moments listening to Drake's metronomic guitar and plaintive voice. Black Dog is a masterpiece of a song, one of the last things he wrote before his death. I literally can't listen to it without a tear coming to my eye. It is so thoroughly nihilistic, greeting death with tragic resignation. It's not often the art of true tragedy is encapsulated in one song, but this is as profound a song as I've ever heard.

Anyway, enough of this melancholy. Lisa Hanngian took this song and imbued it with a rousing form of anger. This could have been a disaster, as the original is quiet and soulful, but it worked - full of resignation but defiance. Krystle Warren sang Time Has Told Me and the audience, like me, had their gut wrenched with this soulful version. She's on in London at the end of February, and I'll be there. Green Gartside's (Scritti Politti) gentle, sweetest girl voice, was entirely suited to Fruit Tree. I'm a fan of Teddy Thomson and still can't see why he isn't seen as a major artist.

Overall the show was a bit ragged round the edges, but that's OK. Who needs an overpolished, over-produced rendition of Nick Drake. It was just a wonderful way to spend a January evening.

The Road to nowhere - disappointed

2010-01-09T03:08:00.003Z

On the issue of what caused the apocalypse, causes are left out of both book and film. This is generally seen as a strength in both, but I’m not sure. It makes a great deal of difference whether the disaster was man-made (nuclear, climate change) or natural (meteorite, volcanic activity). The two premises are diametrically opposed and really do matter, unless the movie is not about this at all, but about human nature under stress.

So if we turn to human nature, what are we to make of the wife walking out on her husband and son? Is she a victim of depression, despair or nihilism, or, as the line about her ‘cold gift’ suggests, somehow altruistic. The ambiguity here is plain puzzling.

At the heart of the movie is the father-son relationship, but the film doesn’t have the emotional depth of the book. There’s too much hokey dialogue and the boy actor doesn’t really carry the role. The boy is older on the film than in the book, I think, and it was McCarthy’s newly born son, born when he was 70, that inspired the book. Apocalyptic movies always seem to need this man in search of son/daughter theme e.g. The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds.

Way above most Hollywood fare, but I still have problems with both the book and movie. They held great promise as harrowing Hobbesian tales but in the end they walk down a more predictable ‘good versus bad’ road. It's fundamentally an 'all American' tale where brutish, marauding males hunt down good, clean-living, God-fearing folk. The US fear of the underclass is ever-present - give these guys a chance and they'll rape you, your children, then eat you! The film fails to address a serious moral issue that's been around since Hobbes. Are we primitive and brutish at heart, needing laws and restraints to curtail our animal instincts? Or are we mostly good at heart, with a mix of selfish and altruistic instincts? The movie, less so the book, gives the usual Hollywood answer. There's good guys and there's bad guys. In the end, the ‘good guys/bad guys’ dialogue was excruciating and the ‘meet the Walton’s’ dog and all, ending, a contrived ‘happy ending’ and confirmation of redemption through the family.

So, in the end, the film says nothing about our role in destroying the planet and nothing significant about human nature. It's just another US apocalyptic, road movie that has its origins in simplictic, US bible belt 'end of days' moralising. Having seen where this road comes from, I'm not sure that it goes anywhere.

The coca-cola scene looks like product placement, but it’s in the book and is actually one of the best scenes in the film. It’s a Tarkowski moment, with the red can and slow drink – you can taste it as it goes down. The film needed more of this and less of the stilted dialogue and obvious moral messages.

Ed Ruscha – Hayward Gallery

2009-12-10T00:26:00.002Z

I’ve only ever seen one or two Ruscha’s at a time, and have never been wholly impressed, but I had my eyes, and mind, opened wide at this retrospective. When you see his work progress, along with his wonderful single sentence explanations, all is revealed – well a lot is revealed.

“I used to say that art was firstly visual and you’re not supposed to go and dig deeper into messages. But now I believe it all has to do with tantalising your memory” – now that's interesting, that was the key for me. Memory isn’t one thing, it’s lots of different but connected things. We have semantic memory and episodic memory and several others for that matter. But Ruscha plays with these first two titans of memory. Paintings pull at the episodic or visual components of our memory, but the cognitive interrogation of a picture draws in semantic meanings, words, phrases, descriptions. Your internal semantic voice adds to the perception of contour and colour. This is what the words and images do here.

Ruscha does something very interesting here. He plants a word(s) right in the middle of many of his paintings and so forces you to draw on both the semantic and episodic portions of memory. It then creates a third, forced act of interplay between the image and the word. Either or both can also draw out nostalgia and other nuanced feelings. You need to stand in front of these paintings for some time to move beyond the initial visual hit. In the earlier work the word is the word but in his later work words are the word, or more accurately, words and images are the last word. You switch between the word and image like Necker's cube then see the relationship and even the unity.

Car windscreens

Then you realise that much of what Ruscha sees is seen through the windscreen of a car. He was brought up in the mid-west and then worked for his whole life in LA. He literally saw the world from the inside of a car. And what you see through a windscreen is a clean and silent world of abstract shapes, buildings, landscapes, sunsets and billboard words. It’s a stripped down, side of the road world.

Movie screens

And if it’s not a windscreen it’s a widescreen. The Paramount mountain or 20^th Century Fox image are both here and the big foreground titles of the movies against a technicolour background is another way of seeing.

Aeroplane windows

Or in another set you see the world in an isometric view through the window of an aeroplane. The LA grid of roads and street lights overlaid by words.

There are no people here, only observed shapes, landscapes and words. There’s buildings, mountains, small objects, even the entire world, but not one living soul. Only in some later canvases do we see a young girl, howling wolf and horses but vague and out of focus.

Memory. I can sit back, close my eyes and see those paintings still. That’s the achievement.

Sacred made real - National gallery

2009-12-02T00:59:00.002Z

Spanish Taliban

The counter-reformation needed some shock tactics as the chilly iconoclasm of the north crept south and when cornered in the Iberian peninsula art took on a form so extreme that, at times, you feel like averting your gaze. Like a wounded, cornered dog it barks back.

Shock tactics were needed to keep the flock in line so the horror of decapitation, crucifixion and torture is made real. Words were not enough in a semi-literate world, paintings were to flat, so painted sculpture was used to show wounds, blood and fear in three dimensional 17th century technicolour. Hollow cheeked, sorrowful and serious men, and the virgin Mary, were re-created to remind you of the consequences of sin. It worked in a way, and stemmed the tide of protestantism, allowing fanatics like the Jesuits, a sort of Spanish Taliban, to conquer the new world. Martyrdom is venerated and there's no room for doubt.

What of the works on show here?

You know you're in starnge territory aesthetically when you see The Miracle of Lactation in the first room, a painting where the statue of a saint has come alive and squirts milk from her breast a full six feet into the mouth of St Bernard. It's disturbing and debased. In the same room we have the sculpted, wooden, painted, decapitated head of St John th Baptist, with full anatomical detail on the exposed neck.

In room two the painted statues are superb. But this is where we see the fanaticism of saints such as St Francis Borgia and St Ignatius Loyola (founded the Jesuits). You can look them in the eye and let he who is without sin, blink first. Then there's the bitter and twisted Mother Jeronima by Velasquez.

Room three has the Zubaran monks. Not all of his images are of hooded monks, but these are dark and mysterious. In the next room is the true masterpiece, the almost classical Ecce Homo, with his slight twist but strange expression and bloodied and bruised back. The Dead Christ is as shocking as the show gets with his unwashed blood covered body lying prostate.

I was, in the end, relieved to get out of the gallery!

'The Places In Between' by Rory Stewart

2009-11-20T01:37:00.000Z

You may have seen Rory Stewart on Newsnight and other programmes whenever Iraq or Afghanistan is discussed, and it was one such appearance that made me buy this book. This guy has walked unaided across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal. This book is about the Afghanistan walk, where he followed in the footsteps of Moghul Emperor Babur.

As he walks, he unwraps the geography and history of Afghanistan, as well as Islam. Tribal, poor, fundamentalist and repeated invaded or controlled by foreign powers, we get to meet this nation at war with outsiders as well as itself. We have the Northern Alliance on one hand and the Pashtun (Taliban from this group) on the others but within these, the four main ethnic groups, there’s lots of other groups who swap allegiances. It’s complex and difficult to see how any form of government can work in a nation that really isn’t a nation.

Stewart takes us into villages, houses and mosques and he focuses on the people he meets, many illiterate, some curious, some not, some violent, others hospitable. But it’s his exposure of fervent Islam that is of most interest. Afghanis constantly quiz him about the cost of a wife in Britain, whether you can marry your first cousin (very common) and so on. This is not anthropological, it’s religious. Islam is the political and social frame for all discussion. He explains why the Koran is not seen as being capable of translation and describes Bush using his unclean hand to pull a Koran (gift) across a table, upsetting the entire Islamic world.

Culture is another theme. He discovers a rare archaeological site being looted, a rare miniaret and describes the various cultures that existed in this region. Many were more liberal and very different from the rule ridden, forbidding rule of Islam. There’s a fine section when he walks past the dynamited Bamiyan Buddas.

He has little contact with westerners, troops, UN personnel etc, and avoids this topic as the book is about the country and its indigenous people, not the temporary invaders.

A lovely sub-story is his relationship with a mastiff who accompanies him for the most of the journey. Afghans regard dogs as unclean and won’t touch them. It’s truly touching.

Afterthoughts on Anish

2009-11-19T14:14:00.002Z

The Year of Anish was, as they say ‘interesting’, a word that can mean lots of things. First the noise. Anish, Yentob and the gallery owners, administrators have those annoyingly posh accents that make you want to turn the programme to mute. Anish himself, is incredibly inarticulate about his work. He’d say that was deliberate, I’m not so sure.

But then there's the positives. Kapoor understands that art is a ‘process or experience’. He’s Humean in his aesthetic. An aesthetic experience takes place in time with expectations, the experience and its aftermath. The Sky Mirror, at the Brighton Festival, was an ever-changing reflection of the real world, the sky, the Pavilion Gardens, the people who drift by, stop and look. and the landscape, even sheep of the Downs. Its limitation was its small size and limited access. These restrictions were removed at the C-Curve, and what a difference in the aesthetic experience. It was open, unrestricted, panoramic.

One major dimension of his work is light, as reflection and colour. His ‘mirrored’ pieces take you beyond the normal perception of light to its scientific beauty. To understand the effects you need to understand that light travels in straight lines, that it is observer-dependent and that colour is a complex absence. Yellow means that the other colours are missing from white light. He works in simple, often single or contrasted pairs of colours. Their purity is a paring down.

His fondness for ‘red’ gives us a bloody, corporeal experience. It’s too simplistic to say it’s dangerous. Red unbalances the viewer, puts them on edge. When do you normally SEE red – blood, meat, lips, vaginas, roses. It’s a phobic colour, like seeing a snake or spider. It induces intense interest and attention. However, his ‘yellow’ piece in the Royal Academy, had a similar, but different effect. Yellow is the colour of the sun, cheese and daisy hearts, an optimistic colour and being flooded by an expanse of yellow, is like drinking Red Bull, it’s invigorating.

Then there’s the ‘flips’. The sudden contrast in your experience, between the inside/outside, front, back, right/left, upside down, right way up. It takes away your normal perceptual reference points and depth cues.

Remember, he’s a sculptor , and the exploration of light and colour, is best dealt with in 3D. Colour has luminosity and intensity, and varies as the light source and observer moves. This can only be explored half-hearted in 2D painting. He’s a philosophical artist in that he understands that perceptually we recreate the world from our sensory input. Note that WE create the world. The artist creates the stimulus for this experience, but ultimately it‘s the viewers brain that constructs the experience in consciousness. I love the ‘Bean’ in Chicago, but dislike the fact that you can’t touch anything in England.

What I really like about Kapoor is that he doesn’t settle for art as it is. For him it’s a process, for us it’s a process. Shooting into a Corner is extraordinary, painting by gun, what an idea!

But let’s not be too hagiographic. Kapoor has the capacity to literally churn out rubbish. His concrete squirts in the Royal Academy, are second rate.

Anish Kapoor - Royal Academy

2009-11-09T19:31:00.012Z

We commissioned Kapoor for this year's Brighton Festival, and it was a huge success, indeed the focal and talking point of the entire month. So I was looking forward to this retrospective.

Balls of steel
The RA courtyard has a huge tower of atomic, steel balls, but randomly piled to produce lots of unique reflections, not only of each other but of the buildings and viewers. As they're spheres, nothing remains of the expected perspective. All straight lines become curves. The top few blazed away in the winter sun. The only piece I've seen surpass this in the courtyard was Rodin's Gates to Hell.

Pigment piles

I like the colour rather than the forms. They seem far more intense than paint. Red, black and yellow. But this is like a predictable starter. You already know, with Kapoor, that piles of pigment are on the menu.

Mellow yellow

This huge square is painted in a uniform yellow colour but as it has a deep hollow the light gets progressively weaker and the centre darkens. What really works is getting up and close, so that your peripheral vision is flooded. It's like being in a yellow universe. In this position, as the eye has no depth cues, it's seen as a flat expanse of gradated yellows. It's like walking into colour.

Cannon of colour

A simple steel cannon is primed with pressured air, by a rather serious looking RA bod, then fired every twenty minutes. First time round, we simply saw a sorry slug drop like a slow dogshit from the end of the cannon - a misfire apparently. He reloaded and it was fine. You can see the cylindrical slug of wax move through the air then hit the back wall of the joining room. Our third shot hit the back wall high and hard. You can hear the roar of approved laughter throughout the gallery. Definitely cathartic. This was fun and the mess in the room was true chaos, an absolute cannon up the backside of the stuffy RA.

Mirror magic

Kapoor excels at mirror works and this room allows you to see yourself distorted in a thousand ways. It's fun, and surprising, to work out why you appear upside down, fatter, or in a repeated pattern across a huge concave surface. You forget that light travels only in straight lines.

Vaginal openings

The huge rust-coloured form, that filled the next room, has a vaginal opening at one end, through which one peers into the iron darkness. One then steps through some rather disappointing piles of hardened clay forms to another room with a similar red, crystalline opening and an intestinal tube coiled around behind.

Wax train

This is the centrepiece, a huge block of red wax on rails moving through three doorways across five rooms, being shaped by the doors. The building becomes the sculptor and the form is dictated by the door template and scrapings.

One great frustration is not being able to feel the stuff. You long to stick your fingers into the wax and rub the pigment. For £12, I'd have given everyone a small tub of the stuff to take home and do their own sculpture.

Turner Prize 2009

2009-10-22T19:20:00.002+01:00

Usual weirdness in the Turner Prize rooms, but hey, that’s what these turns are all about. If they didn’t surprise, I’d be surprised.

Lucy Skaer seemed lightweight. The whale’s scull is yet another ‘watch through aperture’ experience. I get the idea that she's hiding to slow the perception of the object down, but don't see why this enhances the aesthetic of the object. I’m fresh from seeing Spymonkey perform Moby Dick (see previous review) so am getting mightily sick of seeing whales used as fodder for crap art. As for the chair and sculpture in the centre, language/chair print and book pages were trite, and made no aesthetic impression whatsoever.

YES – Richard Wright was a revelation. Painting, printing directly on to the walls, Wright “challenges the marketability of art”. His works are transitory and are usually destroyed with the surface upon which they are placed. I love this idea, that visual art becomes part of the fabric and architecture of a space. It’s art of the present, not the future. This is an artist with ideas and not just well executed work. The gold wall was a huge, beautiful image against a white background. He’s bound to win (the cards in the hall suggests he should).

Enrico David’s surreal images and sculptures are not only just plain ugly, his verbal exposition on the video was the worst type of reflective tosh. It's all very forced. If he wins, this will be my last Turner Prize visit.

Roger Hioris has a mess on the floor, a liquefied jet engine, apparently. This was interesting, but I liked his bedsit full of copper sulphate, although after seeing his engine covered in copper sulphate at the Hayward some time ago, you could say he’s playing this one out a bit.

Turner and the Masters: Tate Britain

2009-10-22T19:19:00.000+01:00

Boat along to the Tate Britain to see the two Turner exhibitions. First Turner himself, and a comparative exhibition, pitting him against other painters. He fancied himself as an old master forgetting that one has be old, and judged, before you get the title. So, as he was so competitive, let’s have some sport.

Turner v Velde England 1 Holland 1

Turner v Rembrandt England 0 Holland 4

Turner v Wilkie England 1 Scotland 1

Turner v Raphael England 0 Italy 5

Turner v Watteau England 1 France 2

Turner v Bonington England 1 England 1

There’s some real disasters here.

Art of darkness? Tate Modern

2009-10-22T19:17:00.001+01:00

This is impressive from the outside, as you face a huge rectangle of blackness. It is genuinely frightening, and I really did bump directly into the black, back wall. But, here’s the thing, it was a transitory and brief encounter. The place is packed with people taking photographs, looking around with their mobile light on, and generally being loud and obnoxious. So much for art bringing out the best in people, in this case it infantilised. Ian Jack’s piece on Saturday was spot on. The turbine hall has become a fairground.

It could have been so different. the piece could have been deeper and more frightening, and curated so that you're free to enjoy a personal and not a social aesthetic experience.

Spymonkey dick about

2009-10-18T23:41:00.002+01:00

Spymonkey’s Moby Dick is like an extended Goon Show. The whole gamut of funny voices, sexual innuendo and awful puns/jokes is rolled out like a third-rate 'Carry On Whaling' script. There’s that old English favourite; the Spanish waiter voice (for Ishmael read Manuel) the rather forced clumsy oaf (Stephan Kreiss), the Barbara Windsor dolly bird (Petra Massey) and the posh bloke (Toby Park). All of this dicking around the stage like am/dram idiots is just wearing. The writing is that of a second-rate extended sketch and when one of the cast finally shout ‘There she blows!” I couldn’t wait for Ahab to sink without trace. Some of the audience seemed to be having a whale of a time, but let’s be honest, middle-class theatre goers are easily pleased these days. By the end I’d had less of a bellyache from laughing than a bellyful of this nonsense. What was the point of it all?

Brighton & Hove Council have given this lot money and they've received 100% of the Arts Council money they applied for. What's going on here?

I have a half-baked idea on this. The reason this company are so popular down here in the south east is that they're quintessentially middle-England in avoiding politics, controversy, seriousness and, to be frank art. It's like resurrecting Brian Rix and farce - all that physical theatre, puns, confusions - signifying nothing. This is why middle-England just loves the Goons, Cleese and Noises Off. They're inoffensive and unthreatening. You don't have to think.

As You Like It - Globe

2009-10-18T12:52:00.000+01:00

Spur of the moment decision but well worth it. Touchstone was hilarious with Eddie Izzard inspired facials and asides. Jaques was just as good. His seven ages of man soliloquy was really moving and got spontaneous applause. Just read this......

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

A bit of a rom-com, as are most of his comedies, and the gender switch is very, very odd to modern eyes.

It was great to just sit back in the sun and let the language do its work. The Globe's often criticised for being too 'heritage' in outlook, but I find the performances thrilling. In fact I'd like them to be even more authentic with drinking and audience heckles. The stewards are like puritan police. I even saw them ask some girls to put their notebooks away!

The groundlings are not what they used to be - as two collapsed because of the heat and had to be carried out!

Love's Labour Lost - Globe

2009-10-18T12:51:00.001+01:00

Second play in two days but this is a difficult play, full of tortuous wordplays and difficult to follow, which is why, I presume, it is rarely performed.

It does something quite brave - takes the piss out of schooling and teachers. They're portrayed as boors, full of themselves, producing knowledge filled students through rote learning. Nothing changes then. It's probably the best argument against the teaching of Latin in schools I've ever seen.

The Spaniard is the play's saviour, with his accent and sense of naive fun.

TOBIAS PUTRIH & MOS: Baltic Centre

2009-09-03T23:50:00.002+01:00

Now the leaflet says, 'For this installation Putrih has used Styrofoam blocks and stack structures according to the basic rules of equilibrium and ‘maximum overhang stacking’ to produce a lightweight structure that appears on the verge of collapse.'

Now, look at this picture. Sure this huge pile of finely balanced foam blocks, looks on the verge of falling over and is delicately balanced. However, I asked the gallery girl who was sitting there whether it was all glued together, really as a joke. She said 'Yes, the whole thing is glued'. What a con! I felt like knocking the whole thing down.

A Duck for Mr Darwin: Baltic Centre

2009-09-03T23:03:00.003+01:00

Take a bunch of artists, give them money to do something thematic, and you have a mini-evolutionary process, where some succeed, some have little or no real effect and some fail.

Charles Avery

Avery's imaginary Island has its moments, but like most people's dreams, ultimately a bit dull. EXTINCTION

Marcus Coates

Sort of comic, reversal film, where Marcus goes around town in the Galapagos dressed as a Booby bird, cracking jokes about the human species. A bit of fun, but art it is not. EXTINCTION

The tortoise film is just as bad. Why does he think the mating is futile and imperfect - that's how they got there. EXTINCTION

Dorothy Cross

Now we're getting somewhere. This film of her naked body being caressed by jellyfish in a jellyfish lake is entrancing. These barely sentient, primitive organisms, encountering our species by touch only. SURVIVAL

Mark Dion

Collector's junk on a beach - didn't provoke a single thought in my head about Darwin or evolution. EXTINCTION

Mark Fairnington

Hey, something really thoughtful, with a virtuoso touch. This life size drawing of a bred bull is finely drawn and as artificial as the real thing, a product of refined breeding, something darwin drew upon when feeling his way towards evolutionary theory. SURVIVAL

Ben Jeans Houghton

Yet another dull, derivative, room full of collected stuff. EXTINCTION

Tania Tovats

A wormery - art no. EXTINCTION

Conrad Shawcross

Interesting but irrelevant collection of balls from a river trip in a boat with a camera. EXTINCTION

All in all, in this show, art has little or nothing to add to the wonders of evolution, a truly startling and idea. A more interesting approach would have been half hte gallery devoted to the reverse proposition, that evolutionary theory has something to say about art. In the last 20 years we've had some wonderful ideas in aesthetics, based on darwinism and evoltionary psychology.

Art as cognitive training

Art, especially literature, allows you to imagine, practice and prepare for the real dangers in life.

Art as propoganda

Storytelling, literature and narrative may be a way of improving memeory and passing down useful knowledge, but it is also a way of gaining power over others.

Art as sexual selection

Look ate me, I'm an artist, and lay bare my talents therough good works. Miller and others have championed the idea that art is basically a good way to get your rocks off.

Art as evolutionary artefact

Stephen Pinker put forward this interesting idea, that art is a by-prodcut of other evolutionary useful features, such as language.

Now an exhibition that made art look at itself through evolotionary eyes would be something!

Fiona Crisp: Baltic Centre

2009-09-03T22:55:00.003+01:00

I've always liked underground spaces; Rome's Christian Catacombs, the Paris Catacombs, caves, crypts and my favourite - the stairs down into complete darkness at Mycenae. Crisp photographs these spaces and captures their absolute stillness. The big prints allow the viewer to feel as though they're in the place and with the mine and catacombs, its the idea that the architecture is formed by removing something, not building.

MOON

2009-08-29T13:08:00.002+01:00

Based on a preetty clever sci-fi short story, this clever little plot turns this into a beautifully formed little movie. The exteriors, the vastness of space and the lonely greyness of the lunar landscape, contrast with the claustrophobia of the interiors, station and vehicles. But it's the unfolding of this tale of future identity that makes it special. A film that makes you think for days afterwards. Thank god someone's decided that British films can avoid phony gangsters and costume dramas.

Edinburgh Festival: Restaurants

2009-08-26T19:05:00.000+01:00

Mother India - tapas style Indian food - tasty and cheap - great service - Infirmary Street.

Tony's Table - Desperate Dan Cow Pie (complete with pastry horns) and chocolate soup - good value and good service.

Edinburgh Festival: Marcus Brigstocke

2009-08-26T18:59:00.002+01:00

Forget art, I’m off for some laughs. Brigstocke had a good set on the theme of God and religion, injecting some serious commentary between the jokes, but doesn’t deserve the 5 star reviews. It’s smart, attacks Islam head-on but falls short on real belly laughs. He did, however, ahve one superb techie joke 'To the people who've got iPhones: you just bought one, you didn't invent it!

Edinburgh Festival: Tao

2009-08-26T18:53:00.002+01:00

Japanese Drummers bang their way through an hour of almost non-stop drumming. Our son's a driummer, so loved it all, but they got a deserved standing ovation as it literally blows you away - the sheer noise and variety fo the show. Sure it's mostly drums, but as they bounce notes across seven drummers from drum to drum and bash the hell out of the big boys at the back, it's impossible to lose attention.

Edinburgh Festival: How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse

2009-08-26T18:44:00.000+01:00

Fun theatre event, where the audience are put htrough a training exercise on surviving an Apocalypse. It was learner-centric, so we had to come up with questions. I like these.....

Can Zombies swim?

If you're bitten by a Zombie with false teeth, are you infected?

If you have sex with a Zombie, are you infected?

If a mosquito bites a zombie and then bites you, are you infected?

If Zombies go to the movies, what genre do they prefer?

Do Zombies go to the toilet?

Edinburgh Festival: Ian Jack and identity

2009-08-26T18:31:00.002+01:00

Strange Book Festival event looking at national identity. Ian Jack, for a long time, my favourite journalist, started by saying that Great Britain had lost its 'Greatness' leading to a rather weak, nebulous idea of Britishness. He preferred concrete instances of Britishness, rather than general, abstract rules, but then went on to give us a series of abstract principles - 'an intimacy averse people' and so on. Five minutes into this debate I felt that the whole identity thing was bogged down in an old-fashioned nationalist frame.

His US partner in crime was Sarah Lyall, who has published A Field Guide to the English. She was more anecdotal with stories of British men who had picked up what little they knew about sex from awful videos at school, for example two horses copulating (he did it from behind for ages). The double Nobel Prize winner who described himself as ' really just pottering about in a lab'. The fact that people would easily talk to you only if you had a dog. The ludicrous snobbery of the Royals and their friends, as they derided Harry's girlfriend because her mother had been an air hostess and used the word 'toilet'. I had no idea that the word 'toilet' was a class marker. She said that her editor at The Sunday Times could only use the word 'toilet' in print when it was frenchified 'toilette' (remind me never to read that rag again). Apparently, Harry's friends would shout 'Doors to manual' whenever this poor girl walked into the room. I know that the British are famously non-revolutionary, but personally, I'd be happy to see that whole crop of aristocratic shitheads shot through the back of the head.

In one odd interlude, Jack was strangely reactionary, describing youth culture as 'debased'. He just sounded like a sad old man mouthing off about the next generation. In truth, this whole nationalism issue is a bit of an 'old folks' obsession, especially older politicians who have to cope with devolutionary politics. Young people don't really care much for all of this soul searching around identity. The internet has opened up far richer forms of identity than mere nationality.

Place identity

In terms of identity and place I'm a Scottish, British, European, Brightonian. There is a sense of me feeling primarily Scottish, as I have a strong accent I have a sort of sports identity that I don whenever Scotland or Andy Murray plays, which makes the experience much more intense and interesting, but I despise the whole tartan, Braveheart, SNP movement. My two 15 year old sons strangely see themselves as being Scottish, English and British, but don't really care that much about this side of their identity.

Political identity

My political identity is shaped by heavy doses of Calvinism (I'm no materialist), libertarianism (I hate moral prescriptions) and socialism ( I vote for egalitarian policies).

Online identity

Online, I have no accent, so being Scottish, doesn't show, or matter. In fact, it does show, as my online identity is quite reflective, but oft contrarian and combative. I do think online debate should not shy away from contention and find 'English' society, on the whole, 'contention-averse'. Being online allows me to escape from the rules of the English 'dinner-party' or 'conference chat'. This online identity exists in three blogs (learning technology, travel, art), Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, podcasts, videocasts and email. In the real world, strangely, I have never joined anything, even the Scouts. I simply don't like clubs, and have always enjoyed a more personal sense of independence. But joining Facebook or Twitter is not like being in a club, it's much more nebulous, open and continuous.

I'm pretty sure that being online expands, deepens and enriches your sense of identity, mainly because writing so much exposes and develops your identity, along with the feedback from people who come from all sorts of countries and cultures. I've really enjoyed reading comments from Rina in India, Howard, Jay and others in the US and innumerable English posters. It's widened my perspective on the world and ideas. It's weird to see almost the entire globe coloured green in Google Analytics and seeing yourself in a much wider, global community.

Inner v outer circle media

Younger people don't generally use Twitter or Blackberries because their online world is shaped by their immediate peer group, not by work. Texting, MSN and Facebook are inner circle media, Twitter, blogging and email are outer circle media.

In terms of identity, younger people are establishing and consolidating their social circle, not using media in an instrumental way. Older people have established their social groups and social identity, and want to widen their sphere of influence. This is why young people don't want their social peer groups polluted by 'dull' adult twittering. They don't want seriousness - that's a serious point. As Cindy Lauper says, Girls (and boys) just want to have fun.

Inner circle media are used to explore social boundaries. Older commentators obsess about cyber-bullying and what they see as the trivial nature of the communication. This is to ignore its true value at that age - discovering how to communicate. That means making mistakes, going over the top and sometimes nastiness. That's life folks. Most settle into a normalised, sensible, practical and fun online life that enriches their social skills and friendships.

Older curmudgeons stereotype young people as being stuck inside some sort of online bubble, increasingly separating themselves from the real world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Most inner circle online communication is about offline, real world events. Where are you? When shall we meet? Where shall we meet? Fancy doing something? It's adults who tend to get trapped into limited bubbles of work, staying at home and fixed circles of friends.

Journalists

Journalists get infantile and paranoid when discussing social media. They don’t get it because they clearly haven’t even tried it. So much for the journalistic virtue of research. They condemn the behaviour of tens, even hundreds of millions of people in terms of their own, narrow, print-based biases. In truth, they’re worried and this exhibits itself in frustration, not objective reporting. They’ve lost their high and mighty status as top-down commentators and had to swim in the much larger ocean, where everyone’s can be a journalist, as fewer and fewer read newspapers.

Politicians

At an another Edinburgh festival event I heard an MP stand up and decry Facebook. “Why can’y my constituents just use email – it’s easier for me.” He missed the point twice. First, it’s not about him, it’s about us, the people, the voters – that’s what democracy is about – him representing US. Second, he didn’t understand that different social media have different purposes. Email’s fine for direct, purposeful communication between him and a constituent, but it’s hopeless for larger groups or taking the temperature of people’s views. Twitter could really re-establish trust if politicians would just take a few minutes a day to simply tell us what they’re up to and thinking. I’d certainly follow my MP if he/she opened up a little.f

Curmudgeons

But it’s not just journalists. Most older people will come out with banalities about the media they haven’t tried. ‘Why would I want to say ‘I had a cup of tea’ today’. Yes, why would you? That’s not what people on Twitter, Blogs and Facebook say. It’s full of rich exposition, links and useful information. Sure there’s trivial, social stuff, but if one person finds another’s life interesting, why not? It’s up to you.

Edinburgh Festival: Cable, Fry and Hattersly

2009-08-26T16:38:00.002+01:00

Book Festival event on Rebuilding Trust after the recession. Cable was OK, Fry was a large waste of space but Hattersly was absorbing. Cable gave his account of the causes, personal debt became aceptable, property obsession then poor banking. Fry, in an odd and irrlevant five minutes, had a go at the EU and the Human Rights Act. It was Hattersly whp traced the causes of the breakdown in trust much further back to 1) a more cynical and less deferential attitude towards authority and public officials 2) politicians have lost a lot of their power (public ownership not now possible) 3) end of idealogical or 'ideas' based politics. This was smart and addresses the issue directly.

When it came to the future, Cable suggested 1) schemes for youth unemployment 2) public sector cuts 3) scrap Trident. Fry waffled on saying a lot but suggested nothing. Hattersly wanted 1) single European Currency 2) campaign on a more equal society 3) retrun top the radical alliance 4) PR. However, Hattersly admitted he was gloomy, as it was likely that the Tories would get in on a low turnout with a slim majority leading tp polarisation and strife.

Hattersly was fascinating on Blair, who worked for him for four years, claiming that he was likeable but never really believed in Labour values, never really being a social democrat. He also thought that oliticians had become more professional, but in both a good and bad sense. All agreed that public sector pension problem had to be solved, while protecting the low paid.

Edinburgh Festival: Living Stones

2009-08-26T15:38:00.002+01:00

Chance to see sculptors chizel, grind, sand and polish rock in this open exhibition at the Edinburgh Collge of Art.I loved seeing them using their callipers, lists of numbers and templates. It's a rough old game stone sculpting - lots of hard work interspersed with moments of calm measurement and reflection. Some of the work was stunning and would make a fine sculpture park. From the limestone and sandstone there was a purely geometric right-angled boxy shape, a rectangular chasm in the side of a large glacial boulder, nodules left standing on the surface of a round, chizelled rock, rock tubes sprouting from one side of a boulder, the other left untouched, a sheep and slabs of pink sandstone. Great idea and free!

Edinburgh Festival: Camille O'Sullivan

2009-08-26T15:30:00.002+01:00

What a night! We sat in the front row (me, Gillian and the twins). Gillian got her head thurst into Camille's breasts,and my sons cowered as she prowled, eyeing them up. But what a performance.Much more than just the beautiful songs she sung - Nick Cave's Ship Song, Water Song and God is in the House, Bowie's Rock n Roll suicide and Five Years. Cash's Hurt and Brel. It was a beautiful blend of tear-jerking tragedy and burlesque laughter. Check her out on YouTube. Better still go see her as soon as you can.

Edinburgh Festival: Paul Zerdin

2009-08-19T18:06:00.002+01:00

Zerdin's a ventriloquist with a twist, several twists. He starts with a rude puppet, Sam but quickly moves on to voices in his head to a doctor, to his wife from the Sat Nav, From a foetus to its mother, from a lift to others in hte lift and finally to an audience member with a mask on. It's smart, convincing and fun. He's so ggod he can quip with the audience about how stupid they are in falling for his talents.