Urban Wastrel

Saved...

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 12:50:00 +0000

Fantastic news from the National Gallery / National Galleries of Scotland. It was finally announced today that the necessary £50 million had been raised to secure Titian's Diana and Actaeon for the nation. The original deadline of 31 December 2008 had been extended to allow complex negotiations between the two galleries and the Duke of Sutherland in order to secure the additional long-term loan of the prestigious Bridgewater Collection. £7.4 million was donated by public giving with the rest coming from various heritage, government and art institution sources. The full story can be found here.

One for the Road

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:40:00 +0000

Deservedly lauded since the news of his death was announced on Christmas Day, friends of Harold Pinter in the theatre have uniformly mourned their loss of a generous companion who happened also to be a genuine literary giant. Influenced by the purity of language found in the prose and dramatic writings of Samuel Beckett, Pinter became, in retrospect, his only real theatrical equal. While literary movements came and went, he had that rare allusive gift of contemporaneity.

What was astonishing about Harold Pinter was that right from his first play, 1957's The Room, he seemed ready-formed as a devastatingly incisive and individual voice. Both in the spare, halting, guarded nature of his dialogue and the observation of the underlying menace in the everyday. Pinteresque. That adjective described his impact on a culture far wider than theatre and film, but its flattering coinage had already become a burden by as early as the mid-1960s (as a recently republished interview with The Paris Review from the era touches on). Stubbornly, his writing fought on regardless against such labels of containment that hinted at mere artifice and cynical mannerism.

Until the publication of Michael Billington's 1996 biography, we never realised just how much Pinter drew personally on his own experience to create comedies of such existential menace. A Jewish boyhood in pre-war Hackney and a post-war life spent in digs as a repertory actor provided much of the starting points for his creations. Similarly, his latterly regular appearances campaigning for human rights and a stunning denunciation of US and British foreign policy in his 2005 Nobel Prize acceptance speech revealed his ingrained forceful use of metaphor and a precise construction of language. Never less than impressive, he was the real deal who left us with a call to arms that was implicit throughout his mature work:

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

Strange News From Other Stars

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 12:35:00 +0000

No good comes from a black hole. Or so I believed. One only has to bring to mind government borrowing requirements or Disney's ill-conceived eponymous 1979 blockbuster. Not even an infinitesimal pin-prick of light can escape from their Stygian depths. They mark the cold end of things. To borrow T.S. Eliot's subtly menacing lines from 'East Coker', 'O dark, dark, dark. They all go into the dark. / The vacant interstellar places, the vacant into the vacant'. So the news scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics have proved that a black hole approximately four million times the size of our own sun lies at the centre of our galaxy, was pause for thought. It had long been theorised so, but now it is fact. The sheer scale, even in typically massive astronomical terms, is impressive. And yet, in a self-revealing glass half-empty way, I was seeing the implications for the Milky Way: the eventual cannibalism of any nearby matter as it is drawn in by the terrific forces of gravity. Which was plainly silly. I mean, that would take trillions of years to happen. Long after our sun had consumed the Earth in nuclear fire. Long beyond the life-span of the human race. Or even what the human race becomes. As Robert Frost sensibly proclaims on the matter, I say 'They cannot scare me with their empty spaces'.

My own intimations of mortality and fondness for our stellar backyard momentarily obscured the wonder of the news. Far from being merely agents of destruction, this research (along with a study on early galaxy formation by Durham, Cardiff and Caltech scientists) suggests black holes were integral to the formation of stars and galaxies by allowing high density environments
where atoms could gain substance. Thus from them flowed smoked salmon, the Renaissance, weeping willows, Groucho Marx and Tuesdays. At this time of year, where season and myth collide in a mish-mash of consumerism and festival, this is the really glorious news for all of us to celebrate and marvel at. Demonstrably, as Joni Mitchell sang, 'We are stardust / We are golden'.

Open Rhode

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 20:45:00 +0000

Imagine if Buster Keaton had worn a beanie and studied at Goldsmiths College and you get something of an idea about the works of Robin Rhode. Over on the upper floor of the Hayward Gallery, high above the temporary mausoleum dedicated to Andy Warhol, his first major UK exhibition showcases a visual intelligence, wit, and pathos shared with that enduringly sublime icon of silent cinema.

Like Keaton, Rhode's theatrical works utilise a subversion of medium, but the South African-born artist is more drawn to contemporary political notions of public space and the ephemeral by taking the tradition of fine art into the urban environment and allowing the articulation of the passage of time to interrupt the 'frozen moment of art' (to borrow Hayward director Ralph Rugoff's words).

So not only does Rhode's performance/creation become an intrinsic part of the work itself, but also the Keaton-esque interaction with the two dimensional chalk and charcoal drawings he produces. In series' of photographs and films Rhode is seen drawing his own jazz trio instruments upon a wall and then enthusiastically acting out a musical performance ('The Score'); drawing a candle and gratefully warming himself from the resultant creation ('Candle'); drawing a payphone on a pair of warehouse doors and cunningly making a phone-call ('Nightcall'); performing yo-yo tricks with a chalk representation of its complex movement etched on a concrete wall ('Untitled, Yo-Yo'); difficultly hauling a chalk-drawn anchor along a slipway wall ('Untitled, Anchor'); spinning a vinyl classical record on a chalk-drawn turn-table ('Wheels of Steel'); and, photographed against the ground, illusionary waving a flag composed of bricks ('Stone Flag'). Rhode implicitly comments on street culture, race, and poverty through these playful works with a real sense of ingenuity and freshness. And though Rhode himself abjures such comparisons, as the curator Stephanie Rosenthal aptly puts it, 'he manhandles this knowledge like a light-footed clown with gigantic shoes'.

In more recent works Rhode employs more abstract chalk interpolations into his work (drawing on Russian Constructivism), such as in 'Promenade' which unfolds to passages from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. In form it resembles a beautiful HD stills-projected ballet, in which a solitary masked and suited figure (Rhode himself) is entranced and then contained by diamond-like forms which spread and retreat on the wall behind. Its origins lay in a commission for the Lincoln Center, but its seductive power as a visual rendering of musical structure has thankfully led Rhode to exhibit it more widely. Achingly sublime, it takes the viewer far beyond the quotidian and is easily one of the finest contemporary works of the year.

However, if one thinks Rhode may be moving away from his political roots, a companion show at White Cube called Through The Gate is there to reassure us: exploring the troubling heritage of his native South Africa in pieces such as 'Fast Medium' where an arm made out of charred poplar rises out of a charcoal pile in the act of bowling a cricket ball. Rhode's sense of invention and witty flair shows no sign of letting up. Coming after a rather lacklustre year for contemporary art, these two exhibitions powerfully announce the bold arrival of a major international talent.

Robin Rhode: Who Saw Who
Hayward Gallery,
Southbank Centre,
Belvedere Road,
London SE1 8XX

7th October - 7th December 2008:
Mon-Sun: 10am - 6pm; Fri until 10pm.

Includes entry to Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms

Robin Rhode: Through The Gate
White Cube,
48 Hoxton Square,
London N1 6PB

26th November - 10th January 2009:
Tue-Sat: 10am - 6pm.

When Your Blackening Shows

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:30:00 +0000

Our Broken Garden on the Bella Union label is a remarkable music project from Efterklang member Anna Brønsted.* With a crepuscular sound, evocative of that certain magical time just around 6am (as the day is slipping into its ending or blinking into its beginning), these songs have a cinematic, yet sonically lo-fi, organic grandeur. Brønsted's voice shimmers bewitchingly over the surface of moog, drums, mellotron, strings and guitars conjuring compositions originated from a paradisal period in her native Denmark when she moved into a rural abandoned school with friends. There she was able to write elegiac pieces that explore human optimism, fragility and doubt in resonant images drawn from the elements of water and air.

At times reminiscent of Portishead, Sigur Rós, and Cranes, these songs linger in the mind long after their hauntingly mellifluous notes have evaporated. Recently playing live in the UK, 2008 has seen them release their Lost Sailor EP and their first full-length album When Your Blackening Shows. They make life richer, sumptuously poetic and full of an epic beauty.

*backed by Søren Bigum (guitars & keys), Palle Hjorth (organ & keys), Moogie Johnson (bass), Poul Terkildsen (drums) and guests Lise Westzynthius (vocals), Robert Karlsson (strings) among others.

Licence to Kill

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:30:00 +0000

So. Charles Moore, Noel Edmonds, and an ex-presenter of One Man and His Dog are uniting in a campaign of civil disobedience against the payment of the television licence fee. This, it has to be said, is a supremely moronic and reactionary campaign par excellence. The unfortunate Brand/Ross affair has undoubtedly provided moral ammunition for the deregulating ex-editor of The Daily Telegraph (who famously resigned to spend more time with Margaret Thatcher's family), but the BBC is not merely a provider of entertainment and information content, it is also one of the last unifying hubs of civil society in a increasingly fragmented culture and a fundamental guarantor of political liberty.

Eccentric personal grievances may make up a large part of their motivation, but are Moore et al seriously advocating that the likes of Rupert Murdoch and his corporation-owning ilk be left with completely free reign over the UK's mass media to push their own agenda? No other media organisation beside the BBC has the ethic of political impartiality and broadness of programming outlook so surely etched into its very constitution.

The argument that advertising-funded content is freely available elsewhere whether it is HDTV, radio, or internet based is a fleeting happenstance. Laying aside the sheer variety of public service broadcasting not covered by these other sources, we are living in the pioneer years of the net, digital radio and HDTV. With increasing concerns over bandwidth, the commercial structure of advertising funding and copyright issues, elite enclaves of closed systems and pay-per-view is looking like a frightening possibility.

Digital radio has only survived as a medium in the UK because of the presence of the BBC's ten national stations and its World Service. Channel 4, the only other public service broadcaster, recently ditched their plans for ten new digital radio stations and is struggling with a downward spiral in revenues. Already ITV is taking an axe to its regional news structure. Far from being outdated as an idea and superceded by these new providers, the BBC is actually now more necessary than ever to offer free, wide-ranging, non-partisan services. We cannot afford either politically or culturally to reduce, never mind lose, such a vital institution.

Last Chance To See

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:50:00 +0000

*UPDATED* The showing of Titian's Diana and Actaeon at The National Gallery in London where it is paired with its companion work The Death of Actaeon has been extended to 14 December. Believe the hype and treat yourself to one of western art's most intelligently beautiful paintings.

The campaign to keep the work in Britain has been given considerable impetus by a £10m grant from the National Heritage Memorial Fund and a £1m pledge from The Art Fund. £50m has to be raised by 31 December or its private owner, the Duke of Sutherland, will sell the work on the open market.

Room 1, The National Gallery,
Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN.

Mon - Sun: 10am - 6pm; Wed until 9pm. Ends 14th December.

The Focus On The Specific

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:30:00 +0000

'Girl in a Dark Jacket' (1947)
© Lucian Freud

Demurely present among this autumn's art blockbusters comes a loan exhibition of considerable power and rarity. Lucian Freud - Early Works 1940-1958 showing at Hazlitt-Holland-Hibbert, presents around 35 paintings and works on paper (all hailing from private collections) that showcase the beginnings of our finest living figurative artist in his preferred genres of portraiture and the still-life. Though, as the art critic of the Evening Standard in a rather confrontational review points out, this is very much an authorized version of the Freud story (overseen by his long-standing studio assistant / model / fellow artist David Dawson) this cannot help but be an a illuminating, surprising and intimate jewel of a show. Illuminating in that we can see Freud's origins in German expressionism and surrealist art; surprising in that nearly all the works here haven't been publicly seen for over fifty years; and intimate in the miniaturist concern and scale of the pictures. Avoiding a narrowness of view that can come with chronological hangs, juxtaposition and difference instead provide this show with an invigoratingly eclectic momentum.

The Freud we encounter here is not the well-known master of the corporeal, but the warily ambitious young man who was keen to set himself apart from his English and European contemporaries. Whether we believe that, as Catherine Lampert observes in her catalogue note, 'Freud tried to overcome what he regarded as a lack of natural ability by concentrating on very local description and by enforced stillness that aided the linear bias', that singular direction of his eye and hand into minute close-up observation immediately created a unique style. With distended heads, eerily wide eyes and an ivory pallor to the skin, his portraits to 1948 have a graphic, almost expressionistic sensibility, isolated as they so often are within the picture. Not depiction but the drama of essences. Freud told Sebastian Smee in 2006, 'It's to do with the feeling of individuality and the intensity of the regard and the focus on the specific'.

One finds no sentiment in the later pictures of his lovers, children and friends, but this stylistic manner brings an additional coolness. The portraits of Kitty Garman (the artist's first wife): the oil on canvas 'Girl in a Dark Jacket' (1947) and the ink and crayon on paper 'Head of a Girl' (1947), while hauntingly supreme compositions, betray no intimacy other than that of their small scale and microscopic finesse. An almost ruthless detailing of the stray hairs around her face gives the air not just of personal anxiety but of a larger post-war malaise. Similarly mesmerising is the pen, ink and conté work on paper, 'Man at Night (Self Portrait)' (1947-48). A technical labour of ruthlessly self-examining intensity that squares up to the void. Not for nothing was Freud christened the Ingrès of Existentialism. Anyone familiar with the commanding etchings produced by Freud since the early 1980s will be fascinated to see the beginnings of their gravitas, precision and composition here.

'Man at Night (Self Portrait)' (1947-48)
© Lucian Freud

The show also highlights a rarely credited dry humour that manifests as a genius for original and quirky subject matter. Birds in cages, birds in taxidermists cases among cacti, and birds spread-eagled on a flat surface - the 'Dead Heron' of (1945) - are not only meticulously handled, but have the heightened quality of animated characters. The latter oil has such a sense of depth that you hardly credit its two-dimensionality, a quality it shares with the astonishingly vivid conté, pencil and crayon on paper 'Gorse Sprig' (1944).

'Dead Heron' (1945)
© Lucian Freud

Towards the end of the show's chronological period, visitors familiar with Freud's 'Girl with a White Dog' of 1950-1 in the Tate's collection will be especially rewarded by the display of its large companion oil on canvas 'Girl in a Blanket' (1952). This naked portrait of Henrietta Moraes uncannily captures the interior drama of its subject. By far the largest work in the exhibition, its subtle colouring and composition belie the feelings of unease and discord a lingering view finds. Literally exposed to us, the young Moraes is tensely hesitant in her role of Muse (although it was a role that she was to spend the rest of her life growing into for Bacon, Maggi Hambling and others). Both revealed and constrained by her blanket, Freud pictorializes the centuries-old complex relationship between artist / model.

'Girl in a Blanket' (1952)
© Lucian Freud

Man in a Mackintosh (1957-58), a bonus to the show and ex-catalogue (along with a fascinating mid-fifties unfinished self-portrait and several early expressionist works) is the highlight. It has long been one of my favourite early oils (until now only experienced through reproduction). At just 61 x 61 cm, it is painted in the thinly applied strokes used before Freud switched to the hogshair brushes recommended by Francis Bacon and the application of paint became thicker, looser, open. However, in the comprehensive portrayal of flesh and other textures, it spans the transition towards Freud's mature style. In format the picture resembles a passport photograph: simply the head and shoulders of a man in middle-age. Here he is set against a tongue-and-groove wooden panel, but it is his posture and dress that lifts the image into one of profound psychological insight. As so often in his portraits, the subject is right up-close to the picture plane: Freud dispenses with distance and allows us no objectification of the sitter in a traditional pictorial way. The eyes are downcast as if recalling an especially haunting moment of regret or maybe caught in present despair; the head lowered to reveal slightly unkempt thinning hair; spindly dark round spectacles that somehow imply an intelligence faded into disillusion, and the mackintosh itself: the crinkled khaki collar and lapels a lovingly depicted emblem of seediness and the demi-monde. The depiction is unyieldingly frank, the flesh wearing its shadowy contours of tiredness, the sitter constructs no artifice in his dress or bearing. And yet in its way it is overwhelmingly generous: in its openness and in its candour, and the way in which Freud bathes his subject in such a warm sense of light sees to that. In this one moment the man becomes illuminated in every sense.

Rare, intimate, strange, moving, full of variety, and just so darned good: this is a truly one-off exhibition. Enjoy.

Lucian Freud - Early Works 1940-1958
Hazlitt-Holland-Hibbert,
38 Bury Street,
SW1Y 6BB.

9th October - 12th December 2008:

Mon-Fri: 9am - 5.30pm; Sat 11am - 4pm.

The Sultan's Elephant

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:30:00 +0000

Given that it is now very gloomy of a night, and the richly coloured leaves are deserting their branches, what better way to cheer the soul than recall a rather magical summer's day in London when a girl travelled by rocket and met a time-travelling elephant...

Meh.

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:20:00 +0000

Today is good news for everything dismissive, lame or second-rate. 'Meh', the three-letter descriptive standby used by Lisa Simpson for such things not worth expending any more breath, language or time upon, has been accepted for the 30th anniversary of the Collins English Dictionary.

So, meh? Well, once again it displays the enduring flexibility and evolving character of the English Language. Which, let us remember, unlike French is free from ossifying academic regulation and codification.

Plus, the fact that the use of meh has grown democratically, through web articles, blogs, texting, e-mail, and finally the print media, demonstrates that our linguistic culture is just as potently alive and ingenious as it was back in 1538 when Sir Thomas Elyot established the tradition of a dictionary in English. So, yeah.

W.

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 10:15:00 +0000

What can I say? After the history-defining achievement of Barack Obama on November 4, the era of George W. Bush seems not just ideologically irredeemable but also passé in broad cultural terms. For a European liberal living through his period in office, at the time it seemed like a bad farce scripted by a committee of reactionary Hollywood hacks who cared little for consequences, reason, and nuanced arguments in the grand American tradition of Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson. Not so much the End of History to borrow Francis Fukuyama's notorious phrase, but the end of empire. That familiar fetid odour of decay and indifference that we have been living with these past eight years rises strongly in Oliver Stone's film W.

Though the hanging chads of Florida helped him steal the election from Al Gore, the very fact that George W. Bush was close enough in terms of votes to do so was almost inexplicable to those of us east of the Atlantic. Surely, even Republican voters held the Office of the President in some kind of respect and dignity? Admittedly, Clinton had both literally and metaphorically despoiled it for them during his second term; but Bush himself appeared not much more than a marginally brighter brother of Forrest Gump. His grasp of the English language was poor, his communication skills crass, his conceptual and historical knowledge limited, and his manner snickeringly boorish. Stone's W seeks to pinpoint such a dreadful eventuality on the well-argued premise that middle America preferred a buddy to a leader, uncomplicated gut instinct to shades of grey, and confidently unwavering faith to secular openness. John McCain tried to use Sarah Palin to repeat the trick, but the voters by then had all seen the results of that choice.

Surprisingly for an Oliver Stone film, there are no JFK-style revelations, no Nixon-style corruption. George W. Bush merely meanders back and forth through the Proustian structure of his own biopic, a wounded brash moron (I use that term without insult) working through crippling Oedipal issues and preyed upon by the three Neo-Con Furies of Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rove. A few critics feel Stone pulls his punches, but he works with what's there. Savage satire or dark tragedy no longer feels appropriate. There is nothing at stake in the film: the time of influence has passed. Bush has had his day. Ennervation and the awkwardly comic is the prevailing tone. So 9/11 is felt only in its aftermath, not in the infamous shock and lack of direction on the dreadful day. Condoleezza Rice perhaps comes out of it the worst: in a remarkable physical transformation Thandie Newton nails her as diffident, simpering and entirely without the geo-political steely nous that she is alleged to possess. The Neo-Cons ogle, cow and dominate her in what you pray has to be traductions of Oval Office strategic meetings. Rice's reputation suffers more as we are unsurprised by their craven, sexist, empire-building nature: like the narrative of the Bush years itself, weary familiarity has somehow dulled our outrage.

At the centre, Josh Brolin is disturbingly good as Bush. Empathetic, he struts and frets his time upon the screen, embodying this tragic tale of an idiot who successfully battles alcoholism, paternal disapproval, and his own direction-less indolence, but simply cannot cope in a role that he is entirely unequipped and unsuitable for. Reinforced by the final image of him in an empty stadium waiting to catch a baseball that never comes, Stone says that in effect is the reality of the Bush years: an unfortunately devastating cosmic joke played upon us and him.

Tellingly, the trailer for Frost/Nixon which preceded W somehow seems much more urgent, much more weighty and even contemporary in a way that W really isn't any more. The lessons of a weak President and the bankrupt philosophy of the Right have hopefully now been well-learnt.

Remembrance

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 12:30:00 +0000

As this week has rightly been devoted to remembrance of those killed in conflict, perhaps a fitting way to end it is with a typically subtle & moving poem by Thomas Hardy which sees from a perspective outside of time and yet is rooted in the very essence of humanity. The composition, though in inspiration dating back to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, was written and published during the First World War.

In Time of 'the Breaking of Nations'

I
Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

II
Only thin smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

III
Yonder a maid and her wight
Come whispering by:
War's annuals will cloud into night
Ere their story die.

Chairway to Heaven

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:35:00 +0000

Debbie Lawson - 'Chairway to Heaven' (2008)

Economist Plaza,
25 St. James's Street,
London

17 October—28 November.

Freudian TV

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:45:00 +0000

The importance of the The National Gallery and National Galleries of Scotland joint campaign to save Titian's Diana and Actaeon for the nation has led to a brief but remarkable coup for Channel 4: Lucian Freud's first television interview for over twenty years...

Review of the current exhibition of Freud's early work on at Hazlitt-Holland-Hibbert in St. James to follow soon...

Irony

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 19:08:00 +0000

Yes. All right, I hold my hands up. The irony of that now infuriatingly prescient title to my previous post isn't in fact lost on me. In spite of one's best blogging intentions - you know how it is - life goes its merry own way without so much as a simple tweet to let you know what it's up to. Irresponsible and carefree as the teenager who schedules drunken house parties through the Facebook 'Events' application, or the brilliantined hedge-fund manager who doesn't bother to check if Porsche are inexorably building up a stake in Volkswagen. What can you do, apart from sigh, shake your head & determinedly push on with things? Exactly. Not much. So, dear reader, without recrimination on any side, let's dust ourselves down & get right back to business.

Allons-y!

Wastrel, Interrupted

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:40:00 +0000

There are many joys to be had in working (or procrastinating) from home - plentiful coffee, unrestricted access to Facebook, and the Mediterranean freedom to take forty winks around that sluggish period of the day, say between 2-3pm, without the potential danger of waking up dribbling and surrounded by a gaggle of colleagues who have written the word 'eclectic' in magic-marker upon your forehead. On the other hand, you are suddenly faced with encounters from people that you would never otherwise face. Cold-callers. You know, meter-readers, postmen, window-cleaners, gardeners and the most pernicious of all, travelling salesmen (yes, they still exist).

Far away from the Arthur Miller stereotype, many of them strangely offer passports as a form of identification and claim to be unemployed miners from certain towns in Nottinghamshire. Yet, something about their youth and demeanour make you not entirely convinced and you want to say, 'Aha, but those mines have been closed since before you were born and that particular town has been the subject of massive European regeneration and is noted for full employment, rainbows, and an abundance of toffee'. But you don't, as you're not an arsehole or living in a 1950s detective story, your great-grandfather was actually a miner himself, and so you um, ah, feel guilty at your fortunate position and eventually spend £5 on a fake chamois leather that looks as though it's been torn from the well-loved blanket of a Romanian orphan.

Apart from that awkwardness, you can guarantee that callers always turn up at the most inopportune times - in the middle of a sandwich, in the middle of a phonecall, or even in the middle of a particularly tricky Scrabulous game. Yoiked out of your moment, you become even less well-disposed for the social niceties. So, to save myself from contracting the symptoms of a Daily Mail reader, I have adopted a preventative rule of wastrelism: never ever answer another suspiciously unsolicited bell-ring or caller-withheld phonecall. After all, life is just far too short for that awful feeling of solipsistic Frenchness.

the stage of fancies tragedye

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:18:00 +0000

I succumbed. Despite the reviews, the poor American box office, and even my own judgement, a moment of nostalgia for the literature of the Elizabethan period (and my erstwhile academic career) prompted me to catch Elizabeth: The Golden Age, the second of the Cate Blanchett-starring MTV-ersatz biopics directed by Shekhar Kapur. While the 1998 film dealt with the young Elizabeth I grappling with her new role as queen and the internal politics of a theologically-divided England, this latest project concentrates on her late middle age and international relations.

This time Kapur plays even more fast and loose with history, as William Nicholson and Michael Hirst's script seeks to draw a parallel between the contemporary western clash with Islamic fundamentalism and the 16th century Catholic anti-Reformation. However, its lack of seriousness is typified by the laughably creepy Philip II of Spain (complete with a ludicrous spindly walk stolen wholesale from John Cleese) as the film makes no real attempt to explore the complexities of the theological and ontological dialectics, other than position Catholic Spain as a sinister reactionary foe against which Elizabeth must test herself and secure English freedom. Mary Queen of Scots fares little better, being reduced to a duplicitous and rather snide cameo in which the wonderful Samantha Morton frankly steals the film. There are a few attempts to touch upon the uses of torture, internment and the business of national security in the Machiavellian dealings of Sir Francis Walsingham (played again by Geoffrey Rush), but they are brief, under-developed and instead work much better to portray how families of the period were brutally divided by these issues, forced into betrayals, exile or cowardly silence.

Perhaps what disappointed most was the reduction of Sir Walter Ralegh (Clive Owen, gamely channelling The Horse Whisperer) from a guileful, scholarly, politico-adventurer to west country bit of rough and inventor of the baked potato. In keeping, his considerable poetic skill is now no more than feeble chat-up material which Elizabeth (55 years-old at this point) cannot resist. It's a sad fate for the cunningly imaginative writer of the 'Ocean to Scinthia' and The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtifull Empire of Guiana, and a seriously misguided attempt to replicate the narrative of Elizabeth and Leicester's romance in the earlier film, doing major injustice not just to the historical figures but the actors as well. Ralegh's far more intriguing relationship with Bess Throckmorton (see instead the excellent biography of her by Anna Beer) that broke taboos of status, court and contemporary religious ethics is also now sidelined into the minor part of a ménage-a-trois. History necessarily tweaked, we have the further head-scratching occurrence of sea-dog Ralegh charging in, like Bruce Willis from the Die Hard series, to guide Sir Francis Drake when the Armada eventually appears (despite playing no part in the actual engagement). The CGI battle that provides the climax to the film is admittedly a stupendous spectacle, but at its heart is an absurd and wholly unexamined jingoism that leaves a very peculiar taste.

One was just left with the feeling that there were several great films here: unfortunately none of which actually got made.

Deli Shop Singlet

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 16:49:00 +0000

Have you ever been sung at by a shopkeeper? It goes without saying that you don't really expect it when you go in to a deli. Interesting cheeses, chutneys and olives, yes. The Terpsichorean Muse, no. M (the owner of my regular lunchtime haunt since September) suddenly burst into a hybrid Flight of the Conchords/English folk composition that built around what personal details I had exchanged over the period and went on for a worrying amount of time.

Startling, yet surprisingly not without merit. I've kept the restraining order in my back-pocket for the moment as not only is M one of those innately likeable people, but his granary bread has addictive properties similar to crack-cocaine. The latter fact is not idle hyperbole, either. With my own eyes, I have frequently witnessed stick-thin women (the sort one sees in paintings by Stella Vine or imagines loitering backstage at Babyshambles gigs) queue just to come away with a single unbuttered slice.

The Bugs are Taking Over

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:33:00 +0000

London's arachnophobics have had a trying month. The arrival of the Louise Bourgeois retrospective at Tate Modern, and two smaller commercial shows of her more recent work at Marlborough Fine Art and Hauser Wirth Colnaghi, has sent them scurrying out of the galleries and averting their eyes. 'Maman', in particular, must be causing special difficulty. 35-feet high, made of bronze and guarding the Southwark end of the Millennium Bridge, it serves as the perfect symbol of the 96 year-old Bourgeois's art - patient and cunning, while simultaneously tender, playful and dangerous. Spiders recur this way throughout her work in various etchings, drawings, and sculptures, suggesting not just that fierce power of motherhood but also the darker shadows of human psychology.

It is salutary to contrast Bourgeois with Dali (subject of the previous Tate Modern exhibition). For though he looms large as the twentieth-century's documentarist of the unconscious, Dali simply pales in comparison with Bourgeois. He simply tries too hard, like an eager-to-please schoolboy, piling Pelion on Ossa in evermore elaborate imagery. Bourgeois, meanwhile, sticks to a carefully limited library of images - spiders, ladders, the female anatomy, hands, flight, maisons and escaliers by which she has consistently defined, dreamt and re-imagined her own relationship with the world over the course of seventy years.

And the use of such a range of materials in her sculptural work - marble, rubber, plaster, cloth, bronze, and wood - enables a fresh, tactile and insightful body of work from these repeated symbols. Her larger installations operate in similar ways; rooms of the mind formed from mirrors, grills, guillotines, drab bistro-brown doors and human ephemera harking back to a mid-twentieth century anguish that is at once personal to Bourgeois and yet universal. They suggest repression or containment, fear and labyrinthine evasion. These remain urgent and yet humane works, representing as Bourgeois puts it, 'a guarantee of sanity'. So, please do yourself a tremendous favour: go to this show and let the bugs take you over.

Louise Bourgeois Retrospective:
Tate Modern, London - 10th October 2007 - 20th January 2008
Centre Pompidou, Paris - 5th March 2008 - 2nd June 2008
Guggenheim, New York - 27th June 2008 - 28th September 2008
Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A. - 26th October 2008 - 26th January 2009
Hirschhorn Museum, Washington DC, 28th February 2009 - 7th June 2009

Louise Bourgeois, New Work:
Hauser Wirth Colnaghi, London 10th October 2007 - 17th November 2007.

First Curse

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 14:40:00 +0000

By no means is this a confessional blog. Nor is it a diary in any conventional sense, but more a collection of ruminations, comment, anecdote and sheer, as the French would say, 'Quois?'. Yet, I've noticed in blogs of those other genres that while you sometimes find almost unhealthy levels of intimacy, you never come across the one rite of passage that secures entry into a far richer world. Yes, I'm talking about swearing. That delicious, satisfying, almost primal use of language that in one vivid utterance gives healthy vent to anger, relieves stress and pours soothing balm on pain. Without it, how could we express outrage so succinctly, or be so fully, extraordinarily human? Ignorant people (including but not limited to: the US Federal Communications Commission, OFCOM & the writers of the books of Genesis and Leviticus) all fail to grasp the profound nature of swearing, perceiving it within narrowly moralistic and literal confines. Yet the science behind swearing reveals it to be far more complex. In his wonderful new book, The Stuff of Thought, the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker observes that swearing comes from a different part of the brain to that of our articulate language and reasoning system, believing it to originate from a much more ancient part of our emotional centre and possibly located in the amygdala organ in the frontal lobe of the brain (yes, it does sound like a character from one of the less successful Star Wars films). Certainly what reinforces this is that victims of strokes who have lost their linguistic facility are often found still able to curse. It is a fundamental and hardwired part of our existence.

So, seeing that swearing is such a vital part of our human lot, I hope to start a trend by revealing my first obscenity (which surely ought to be as memorable as all our other significant 'firsts'). Summer 1983. I was eight years-old and walking with my mother and younger sister to my grandparents' house. The sun was glorious, the trees on the seaside hill verdant, and so I felt completely at ease to tell the joke I had innocently heard from DW and CR at primary school earlier that week: A boy was watching his father (who was in a hurry to get to work) shave, one morning. The father was late and rushing and inevitably cut himself with the razor. 'F*ck', he said. Exiting the bathroom and in a bad mood, he lost footing on the stairs and hissed, 'Sh*t'. The father left, and the boy, perhaps an instinctive practitioner of journalism, ran excitedly to his mother to report, 'Mom, mom. Guess what happened? Daddy just cut himself with a f*ck and then he fell down the sh*t'.

Stopping suddenly and without explaining, my mother firmly told me never, ever, to repeat that joke again. I still laugh, no longer at the joke of course, but just at the beautiful irony of my innocent self telling it, and at my sterling mother's composed surprise.

Health & Safety

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 15:39:00 +0000

The successful HSE prosecution against the Metropolitan Police for the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes was better than nothing, I suppose. What has continually shocked me though, about all this, is the idea that an innocent man can be executed - lets make no bones about it - on the streets of Britain, by those ostensibly engaged in law-enforcement, and that there are no legal sanctions whatsoever. The Met is seemingly above the law and citizens are apparently incapable of redress. This conviction does not change that, and neither has it brought about a sense of personal responsibility that in this affair seems notably lacking in all ranks of the Met. The judgement found 'systematic failure' throughout the organisation. How on earth do they think that we can have confidence in them?

Blame It On Fidel

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 14:05:00 +0000

Amongst the many film offerings of this bountiful season, one small gem currently playing at the Renoir and ICA outshines nearly all. The feature debut of Julie Gavras, Blame It On Fidel. Set in the Paris of 1970-73 (from the death of de Gaulle to the murder of Chilean President Salvador Allende) it is ostensibly the coming-of-age story of nine-year old Anna, as her family transform themselves from privileged bourgeois professionals to radical leftists. Based on the novel Tutta colpa di Fidel by Domitilla Calamai and filtered through the childhood experiences of Gavras herself (daughter of noted political auteur Costa-Gavras), what sets the work apart is not just an astonishing central performance by Nina Kervel-Bey as the implacable Anna (defiant at the unwanted changes to her comfortable lifestyle), but the very human way in which political theory collides with personal reality. Shot entirely from Anna's perspective, the film subtly documents the clash between her own self-regarding catholic conservatism and the effects of her parents' new liberal passions for the Allende cause in Chile, the anti-Franco movement in Spain and the rise of feminism within France. At times comic, poignant and indignant, the film never mocks Anna's concerns, nor stoops to ridicule her parents as feckless individuals, but gently teases out their individual flaws and their individual longings as Anna grows towards a greater wisdom and knowledge of the world. The film's political heart is just as sure, negotiating the complexities of idealist Chilean revolutionaries with refugees from Castro's Cuba (from which of course the title derives). Beautifully photographed and with terrific period detail, this astute work deserves wide attention. Go see!

Beyond Belief

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 13:37:00 +0000

The Today Programme, Radio 4. Recently. Another of those perennial laments about how Britain is an increasingly secular nation (made, as customary, by a venerable selection of bearded men who skirt credibility somewhat in wearing frocks so much of the time). Avoiding the instinctive response of, 'well what's so bad about that, then?', the thing that really occurred to me was that, on the contrary, there is in fact an awful lot of belief going on out there. Think about it. More people than not decide that it's actually worth getting up in the morning (managing to disregard poor BBC sitcoms, the "music" of James Blunt, Hazel Blears, sprouts, The Daily Mail, and that nagging fear of inevitably dying at the hand of bird-flu); nearly 1.5 million Britons bought The Da Vinci Code in the firm conviction that it was worth spending hours of their lives upon and that it was not, as Stephen Fry put it, 'loose stool-water of the highest order' (I myself make no judgement here); even Virgin Trains' customers still arrive on time at their chosen railway station in the charmingly sweet belief that there may be, despite all empirical evidence to the contrary, an actual train on which to depart (hopeless romantics all).

So clearly then, there's belief. Lunatic, optimistic, eccentric, necessary, thoroughly individual & so wonderfully human, it is belief nevertheless and it functions to bind us all together into a ramshackle, free, generous, liberal, diverse and, generally on-the-whole, pleasant nation to be. It's just that for these bearded men in frocks, who let us acknowledge here, generously set aside so much of their valuable time to visit radio and TV stations for their lamenting on our behalf, it's the wrong kind of belief that we as a nation are all engaging in. In other words, not theirs. Hmm. I think their slips are really showing there.

Websites That Should Exist

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:09:00 +0000

Catching up with a friend in Oxford over drinks, a moment of nostalgia for The West Wing led our thoughts by way of the fictional thingsthatarewrong.com (apparently debunking urban myths & bad science) to websites that are absolutely necessary yet so far unrealized. Here's what we came up with...

wheredidileaveit.com
Suggestions for the absent of mind.

doesntholdacandleto.com
A place that prepares you for disappointment with new work by Dylan, Bowie, The Stones, Neil Young, Philip Roth, Martin Amis, Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola, Godard, Tarantino etc.

theyareouttogetme.com
A place for those on witness-protection programs.

aretheyabunnyboiler.com
User-generated content for all orientations and genders to vet potential dates.

idontrememberthatfreckle.com
A place for health reassurance.

youremymate.com
A social-networking site for drinkers.

ithoughttheyweredead.com
A compendium of public figures doing substantially less well of late.

didileavethegason.com
A place for the obsessive-compulsive.

aretheyreal.com
A place devoted to the aesthetics of plastic surgery.

William Hazlitt, Blogfather

noreply@blogger.com (Urban Wastrel) — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 19:04:00 +0000

It is all Hazlitt's doing. I realised this when walking through Soho after a lunchtime showing of Michael Moore's Sicko. I was in search of caffeine, and suitably fixed with a curiously orange/pink-cupped latte from the nearby Patisserie Valerie, I found myself in a contemplative mood at the north end of Frith Street. The effects of the healthcare polemic & invigorating beans had nicely left my synapses fizzing when I stumbled upon the one-time residence of the aforementioned radical journalist (currently a bijou hotel offering "intimate charm and old fashioned hospitality").

Now, I adore Hazlitt. His muscular prose and unabashed enthusiasm for both demotic and high culture is one of the few high points of English literature in the nineteenth-century (if you mention Wordsworth then I'm afraid that we really can't be friends). I never tire of reading his essays on Gusto, Indian Jugglers, walks in the country, boxing-matches, painting, sculpture, theatrical performances, common-sense, well-thought prejudices, even the sketches of contemporary figures from every conceivable field of life. And in a buttoned-up politically suspicious age, he was honest enough to map out his own revolutionary beliefs and romantic entanglements (a 4-volume work on Napoleon and the reputation-destroying Liber Amoris).

After a legendary encounter with Samuel Taylor Coleridge at the height of his powers in 1798, it probably could not have been any other way for him. Ingrained with a palpable sense of wonder, Hazlitt's writings also delight in the very pleasure of ordering and expressing that wonder. And so it was, hovering on that Soho pavement with a north-westerly wind whipping round my ears, it occurred to me that not only is Hazlitt the father of journalism in English, but he is the father of Web 2.0 as well. For when he wrote, 'Give a man a topic in his head, a throb of pleasure in his heart, and he will be glad to share it with the first person he meets', he was actually articulating the very notion of blogging. I raised my cup on behalf of the capital's 48,000-plus blogger members and continued on my way.