Wastrel, Interrupted

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

It Was The Monkeys That Killed Him

You hear the oddest things on the Tube. In a moment of travel resignation, I was using the Northern Line the other day, sandwiched uncomfortably between a hygiene-challenged gentleman of the old school and a twenty-something Vladimir Putin lookalike who was convincing his female companion that he was now totally clean, when just after Charing Cross Road the pleasant seeming WAG-wannabe standing in front of me came out and said it. Given the circumstances, my interest was piqued (an escape from the grimly immediate physical surroundings of an impromptu staging of The Jeremy Kyle Show in which I had apparently found myself). And at first I really had no idea where the conversation with her almost identical friend was going as they clung on to the yellow pole in the central part of the carriage. The rattling, screeching and howling noise of the train combined with the odd 'No!' interrupted the flow and sense, but she was unfolding the story of the unfortunate deputy mayor of Delhi, SS Bajwa who has died of head injuries after a fall from a terrace during an attack by feral Rhesus Macaques. I had been away from newspapers, TV and the radio for a few days so this was all genuinely new to me.

Some hours later, the opportunity to go online revealed a more disturbing context for this peculiar vignette from the subcontinent. As well as being an unfortunate week for Mr Bajwa, who leaves behind a wife and child, it was really an unfortunate week for monkeys as a whole (exposure of monkey criminality aside). A new report from the International Primatological Society and Conservation International has listed 114 primate groups that are on the verge of extinction. Hunting and de-forestation, especially in Asia, are the primary causes for this dire situation. The Golden-Headed Langur, the Horton Plain's Slender Loris, and Miss Waldron's Red Colobus are all among the likely casualties. Even two of man's closest simian relatives, the Cross River Gorilla of Cameroon and the Sumatran Orang-Utang, make the top twenty-five list of endangered apes. Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, outlined starkly the scale of this man-made catastrophe, 'You could fit all the surviving members of these twenty-five species in a single football stadium'. Despite the success of some conservation schemes, one of the report's authors, Eckhard Heymann, argued that the fundamental problems of habitat loss simply increase with each passing year. So, while we are drawn to the outlandish sad end of Mr Bajwa, let's also spare a thought for the plight of our distant relatives.

The Big Frieze

Well, it's October and the visual arts have customarily hit London with all the subtlety of an American of a certain age visiting a restaurant. Amid the gaucheness, intemperate language & noise of the various fairs, auctions, museum and commercial shows, it's the Frieze Art Fair that still reigns supreme after five years of operation. In spite of falling stock markets and the credit crunch, it is thriving as the most influential fair in terms of cultural and monetary prestige. While the commission of Richard Prince's hand-built gleaming yellow Dodge Charger provided uncomplicated pleasure, this year neon was obviously where it was at. From Tracey Emin's sold out 'hand-written' sculptures to Pierre Huyghe's more wittily astute piece of 'I Do Not Own 4' 33'. The carbon footprint for these artists must be more than a little dizzying. Perhaps Gianni Motti's yoga-practising policeman could have offered them stress relief. However, it was the Chapman Brothers who again provided the headline-grabbing wheeze, this time by providing 'free' art for attendees - defacing portraits of the Queen on whatever value sterling notes were presented to them, in a variety of typically intricate & horrific ways. Of course, they only actually did this on the preview day for the great and the good, the hip, the happening and the hedge-fund manager. Although self-proclaimed practitioners of 'bad art for bad people', Jake and Dinos undoubtedly know where their bread is buttered. Far more democratic and running for all five days of the Fair was Rob Pruitt's Flea-Market exhibited by Gavin Brown's Enterprise. Here a collective of artists organised by Pruitt (including Elizabeth Peyton and Peter Doig amongst others) showed all manner of found & fabricated ephemera from caustically defaced newspapers and celebrity magazines, vintage clothes, drawings, chocolate brownies, woollen sculpture, badges, TV remote controls, and even haircuts, or polaroids taken posed with Sam Taylor-Wood. The wittiest and waspish of these offerings were Jonathan Horowitz's 70s kitsch figurines declaring variously, 'Jihadists are People too', 'Junkies are People too', or more challengingly 'Guy Ritchie is a Person too'. In a year in which the dealers on the whole played corporately safe, Pruitt's daily-changing stand was constantly bustling and bright, bringing a much needed sense of joie de vivre.

As always it's not just the art that was fun to browse. The people were just as compelling, from an intense Dennis Hopper going undercover in tweed and flat-cap to a domestic Jarvis Cocker with his family. Two bright young things in regulation spiky haircuts, 80s jackets and Michael Caine glasses earnestly commented on how pretentious everyone was; while an ageing hipster crossed uncertainly between Jay Jopling and Joe Pasquale valiantly tried to control his more spontaneous designer-clothed offspring; and less established gallerists from Germany or Spain stood forlornly as the crowds resolutely ambled past towards the more recognisable names; at White Cube one client was even treated to his own impromptu show of various Gary Hume American Tan paintings. The air was heavy with aspiration, money & sometimes even art. And still it was the most fun you can have in a tent in Regent's Park.

A Jet Tone Production

Four words from the late nineties that laid out a thrilling paradigm of city life soaked in the neon-lit photography of Chris Doyle & a tantalisingly eclectic pop soundtrack. For me, the films of Wong Kar-Wai still represent those potential possibilities of urban living. And although I've yet to meet a hitman who's the object of unrequited passion, a cop so quite obsessed by tinned pineapple, or even a Chinese femme fatale in a blonde wig, I'm still holding out for such encounters. The city is where it happens. As Dylan Moran once said, it's just a much more likely place for conversation and cafes. Galleries, cinemas, theatres, museums and delicatessens too, come to that. That's not at all to say the countryside is bereft of meaning (it's sublime in Poussin's history paintings, the recent films of Zhang Yimou, and glimpsed fleetingly in dappled roseate sunlight through the dusty windows of a high-speed train), but all that implied hiking & shorts-wearing feels like a strange lack of imagination when you can have 37 types of falafel and browse insouciantly in a record shop. And when you can eat ice-cream with strangers in the wee small hours as The Cranberries pump out from a 24-hour cafe. Yes, those four words show the way it can be.