Gimpel the Fool

Gimpel the Fool at Spiro Ark

The final cultural event of the year and somehow it is fitting that it takes place in a small basement room, which by the power of art is transformed into a Polish shtetl; the transformation is attained by the accumulation of simple things done well– props, sound, lighting, clothes, and of course fine acting.

Howard Rypp of the Nephesh Theatre of Tel Aviv brought remarkably subtle gradations of meaning to his adaptation of Saul Bellow’s iconic translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s story, playing Gimpel as part Shakespearian fool, part the simple son of the Haggadah, part an almost Christianic innocent, part wide eyed Ancient Mariner. Marvellous and magical.

On the bus home, a man in a big brown hat and big brown coat and a leopard print scarf took out a harmonica and started playing Christmas tunes in a soft, understated, swampy kind of way, not for money, but because he too was a wandering troubadour, cursed to travel the globe telling his tales. It is the sort of thing that happens when you open your mind to the power of art.

who was the mysterious troubador on the bus?

Grudgemonkey, Tutankhamun, Madness and the Dome

There’s a title.

So Friday I was down the Dome – my goodness what a G-dforsaken place that is. It must be built on an old plague burial pit or something, it just feels so dead there, even the air is dead. Cold and soulless.







Inside the Dome, it feels like any other identikit plastic retail and leisure destination environment experience, save that you have to go through airport style bag and body scanners, before being confronted by masked ranks of merchandise stalls trying to sell you fez’s. At first I thought it was a bizarre tie in for the King Tut exhibition, but it soon became apparent that Madness were playing that night, and attendees were obliged to buy either a fez or a cheap felt imitation Blues Brother’s style hat in black. It must have been obligatory because everyone we saw gathering in the malls before the gig had purchased one. But more of those sad fuckers shortly.

I love Múm. I love my mum. But I don’t care much for mummies. For this reason I was somewhat reluctant to go the Tut exhibition, or Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs to give it its full title. But Big Dave was in town and wanted to go, and in that spirit of saying yes to everything I had agreed to come, even agreed to get the audioguide thingy. The words “My name is Omar Shariff” were whispered softly in my ear, in the way that only an old man with a moustache can, and I promptly fell off the escalators. Apart from Omar, there were no mummies, not even the famous death mask. Thankfully.

I enjoyed it, then got a bit bored. As with the First Emperor, the objects were amazing, the effort, the hubris, the Ozymandias effect, all powerful, that same ambiguity that these things were done because of a belief in a living god set to rule the afterlife, and had succeeded, ironically, in creating some kind of immortality, had willed immortality into existence.

Then back out to face the behatted hordes of Madness fans. I’ve commented before about the curse of my generation, namely that at every house party I will now ever go to, there will always be a bloke, probably with no hair, loudly getting drunk on cider, waiting for his moment, his moment being the playing of a Madness song. He will then spring into life, claim his rightful place on the dancefloor (ie area of carpet cleared of furniture) and do the Nutty Boys Dance. This is the only exercise he will ever get. Each year it gets more difficult for him to raise his legs to the requisite height. Each year his heart and lungs hurt more. Each year he aches more and worse on the morning after. But he can never let us down by not doing the dance. Never. He is destined to die doing it. Quite literally.

And here they all were, like cybermen out of Doctor Who when they gather for the final battle, the hordes of the Nutty Boys, in their silly hats. I’ve nothing against Madness per se, they entertained me in my youth when I didn’t know any better and some of their songs were actually all right. But it is their moronic fan base that I object to. These can only be people who hate music. It’s a Pavlov’s dogs thing - hear music - dance badly - behave like twat.

Compare all this with the Adelaide Pub in lovely North London the previous evening and the live debut of Grudgemonkey. It was through the Grudgemonkey myspace page that I finally go back in touch with Ollie P. Probably the highlights of my university days were listening to records with Ollie P. 17 odd years later and Grudgemonkey were channelling all this stuff into one of the most powerful and passionate sets of the year. I could taste electric period Miles Davis, “Is It In” period Eddie Harris, Mizzell Brothers, various Hammond Organ grinders in this very tasty soup. No Acid Jazz light was this, but heavy and funky, honest and authentic, even aggressive and muscular. I can see big things for them in 2008.

Múm - the Scala - 11/12/07

When I saw the latest (re)incarnation of Múm back in August I felt it was very much the start of something,a slightly messy rebirth, band and fans getting used to life post–Kristín. Now, after touring the USA, they’ve developed and honed themselves into an awesome and spectacular unit, though sadly Ólöf Arnalds seemes to have gone missing now too.

This feels a very different band to the one fronted by Kristín – the fragility of her personality has been replaced by something more robust, her playful seriousness has flipped into serious playfulness. Live, there is less electronica – just some samples used for colouration and a bit of knob-twiddling in some of the instrumental numbers, and no fiddling about with strange sound generating devises or digital manipulation. There is less of the brooding sweeping strings, more guitars and drums, and much more melodica. There are some tango like patterns, throbbing beats, and unashamed passion. The sound is more global, and warmer for it.

They mostly play the new album and some reinterpretation of older instrumentals. They don’t play any of the Kristín vocal numbers.

A sold out crowd at the Scala were on impeccable form, quiet during the quiet numbers, crazed in the louder ones. You could tell the band were blown away by the response. It is this feedback loop between audience and band which marks the legendary gigs out from the just great. And the set draws to a stupendous finale – three flutes, then (as members of the support acts rush on) there are five flutes...

then a dozen harmonicas

and finally a fifteen or so kazoo salute. A great encore builds into blistering throbbing sinewaves and everyone goes mental.

This was (heaven!) - an all Icelandic bill, support coming from Seabear (Múmsy but a bit more folky in a fiddly kind of way) and Benni Hemm Hemm (a touch hysterical in a Sigur Róssy kind of way but with brass rather than strings) – both are great and warmly received by the crowd. There is much intermingling throughout the night of members of the 3 bands.

What can I say? Gig of the year, no question.

Loss, An Evening of Exquisite Misery

With some excitement, if not trepidation, armed with noms de guerre and a range of costume strategies, myself and the lovely Persephone and Michelangelo found ourselves in the curiously wonderful world of The Last Tuesday Society.

Persephone and Michelangelo, scaring the tourists and Christmas shoppers

Loss, An Evening of Exquisite Misery, is London’s, if not the world’s, premier crying club. On arrival at the Art’s Theatre we were reminded in strict terms of the official no smiling policy. A pigs head hanging from a noose above the stairs reinforced the message. The place was decorated with tables overflowing with fruit, turnips, onions, water pistols, deceased game birds and plastic bugs. Abused and battered children’s toys sought new, caring owners. A lady in funereal weeds was selling off the family jewellery.

Virtual deguerreotype of Persephone

We took our place amongst Victorian gentlemen, veiled Victorian widows, Victorian gothics, Goths, the undead, clerics, flappers and slappers, tiller girls and landgirls, 50’s rockabillies, romantics, new romantics, old romantics, sad poets, boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys, motorcycle Burlesque performers, and who knows what dressed as who knows what.

We were entertained by divine pixie dj’s and djs in full Marie Antoinette costume. We danced (or attempted to) to big band swing, gospel, tango, and I can’t remember what else but it was marvellous and seemed to cover every period of recorded music ever made. We enjoyed poetry readings, a tantric violinist, a singer songwriter telling bible tales, a ska-punk-Balkan band doing Prodigy covers, and an excellent blues/jazz/dub combo. I’m sure there was a lot more if only I could remember.

Divine pixie djs

We drank too much gin.

Gin Drinkers

We found ourselves wearing too much make-up (again).

I found myself back home at 4 in the morning feeling very weird indeed.

some people say I'm a dreamer. but I'm not the only one.

The Masque of the Red Death 4

Red Death IV

On the way to Red Death 3, I was worried about how much more there was for me, whether there would be too much repetition, whether I could face all that traipsing up and down.

Well how much amplified were these feelings on my fourth trek to Battersea, after the extraordinary experience of Red Death 3, probably as full a Punchdrunk experience as it possible to have. And I had had a full on PT session in the afternoon, so I was feeling pretty knackered.

Well I guess the thing about Punchdrunk is that it just never stops surprising you. True I was feeling a bit crowdaphobic and spend as much time as possible lurking in the shadows, mostly in the cellars. And also true that there seemed to be a lot of downtime searching for things to happen. But the scenes I caught were as incredible as ever.

Befitting a man who has just had two gruelling sessions at the dentist, I kept finding myself in the Berenice storyline, about a man obsessed with his new wife’s teeth, so much so that he kills her and extracts them. I had seen the wedding /death dance on the bed before, but it made much more sense to me now as part of the story line and the dancing seemd more dramatic. I caught (twice) the scene were Berenice is carried into the dungeons for further extraction work before being buried alive, follwed by her wonderful resurrection from her subterranean pit.

I spent some time following Ligeia - I think it was her because of a lovely three-partner dance, which I think represented her haunting return to her husband by possessing the body of his dead second wife. Following Ligeia alone in the basement, she turned on me and started to throttle me with the cord of my cape (I thought they were meant to keep you safe) before sniffing my neck and telling me that she recognised my scent, knew it was me before I walked in the room, would carry my scent with her on her journey. It’s Decleor I thought. Good job I had shaved. She also said she could feel my heart beating, which she may have literally been able to do since it was beating so much from her initial attack. Hopefully that’s all she could feel.

I finally found Pluto, the BAC’s black cat, basking by a fire – one time when I popped in it was crouched on the top of one of the armchairs, backlit by the fire, sharp green eyes blazing at me.

Also caught the end of the murder scene in the attic, as the narrator of the Tell Tale Heart wrapped up the body; found her later in the bar still clutching the heart she had removed.

I only caught one of the in-show specials – the Kneehigh Theatre who made a wonderful presentation based on Poe’s poem Annabel Lee. It was staged in a black room, the walls scribbled on with chalk; in the centre was a small beach with candles surrounded by buckets stuffed with sand and the clothes and shoes of the dead Ms Lee. In the corner a troubadour strummed a banjo (I think) and sang the poem. On the beach a man pulled the artefacts from the buckets and laid them out to suggest the body of the deceased, occasionally writing manically on the walls, things like "today I believe in ghosts", before lying down besides the body as the poet does in the poem. He then ripped out his heart, superbly rendered in the form of a rose attached to red streamers - in the violence of the act, the streamers took on a visceral, liquid form. This was superb theatre, the ability to conjure up the sense of a beach and the sea, of a body and a distraught lover, from minimal ingredients in a tiny black space. My only quibble was that the distraught lover was wearing a hoody and jeans, but at the same time it gave the piece a contemporary feel.

The Prospero’s Ball finale was as wonderful as ever, although I sensed that the cast were getting pretty knackered. Some were looking particularly gaunt, and most of the leading ladies were sporting bruises and (non-costume) bandages. All of which of course only made them look more like characters in a Poe story. If the show does my head in so consistently, I can’t begin to imagine what it must do to the cast, physically and mentally. And the run extended til mid April. God help them!

So I had another amazing time. This visit seemed to offer the strongest sense of narrative, and to be the most Poe like. There was a lot more death, a corpsly rather than spectral feel.

Despite it not being as full an experience as the last visit, it was as intense in its own way. I left exhilarated, with a sense of completeness. Not that I had by now seen everything there was to see, but that I had seen most things, or at least had caught as much as it was reasonable to expect. That I had reached a point of diminishing returns.

But I also learnt the joy of repetition. Seeing Berenice married, killed and resurrected twice in one evening, connecting it to the fragments of the same story seen on previous occasions, developing a theme of the inevitability of tragedy, of the endless repetition and recycling of stories that make up narrative art, maybe even suggesting Nietzsche’s idea of Eternal Recurrence.

From wikipedia…

"Eternal return (also known as "eternal recurrence") is a concept which posits that the universe has been recurring, and will continue to recur in the exact same self-similar form an incomprehensible and unfathomable number of times"

"Heinrich Heine wrote the following passage which is said to have been where Friedrich Nietzsche first encountered the idea:

For time is infinite, but the things in time, the concrete bodies are finite.... Now, however long a time may pass, according to the eternal laws governing the combinations of this eternal play of repetition, all configurations that have previously existed on this earth must yet meet, attract, repulse, kiss, and corrupt each other again.... And thus it will happen one day that a man will be born again, just like me, and a woman will be born, just like Mary."


Will I return to the Red Death? Inevitably!

3 Classical Concerts

3 Classical Concerts

Like buses aren’t they?

Monday was Lang Lang at the RFH. I thoroughly enjoyed it, especially the first half which featured Mozart’s Sonata in B Flat and Schumann’s Fantasie in C, the latter being my highlight of the evening, its soft haunting melodies transporting me somewhere very nice indeed. The second half began with 6 traditional Chinese pieces. It was interesting to see the different ways the arrangers had tried to adapt the Eastern scale for the Piano, but the pieces lacked the meditative otherworldliness of the real thing. Then we had some Granados, extracts of Goyescas – I was hoping for something a little it more Death In A French Garden, but this was a bit too dramatic, rather than mellow. To finish were two Liszt pieces, Isoldens Liebstod: Schlufszene aus Tristran und Isolde, which I tried not to listen to, it being a transcription of Wagner, and Hungarian Rhapsody No 6 in D Flat, which was ok if a bit bangy. Then much ecstatic applause, especially from the contingent of pretty Japanese and Chinese girls. Overall it was an exciting, stimulating, even refreshing event, rather like popping a couple of Smints for the brain.

So I was surprised when the reviews came in to see that the critics hated it, especially the Schumann. Shows what I know. I could see their point when they complained that Lang Lang only operated in very very quite mode or very very fast and banging mode, and I agree that Lang Lang’s mannerisms, curling his non-playing hand, exaggerated body movements, and much gurning, were a bit OTT and didn’t quite ring true, but I couldn’t quite see how they could say that he massacred the pieces, or that his playing was “empty”. He is a bit of a superstar of the Piano world, and his fanclub get a bit over-exuberant, and I suspect that this has as much to do with his mauling as his playing – you know the British press, they love to try and drag people down to their own sordid level.

Maybe Lang Lang plays with a “pop sensibility” which might explain why I liked it so much?

Wednesday and back to the RFH for the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Beethoven’s Piano Concerto 3 in C Minor with Richard Goode on Piano and Mahler's Symphony 4 in G.

It began with the National Anthem, presumably because there was a Duchess in attendance (no it wasn't Mademoiselle de Latte Days, it was a real Duchess, of Gloucester I believe) . It was great! When I was a lad any night at a theatre would begin with the National Anthem. No singing unfortunately. And you bastards on the platform who didn’t stand, don’t think we didn’t clock you! What with all this talk about integrating people into our English/British identity, I tell you what to do – every public event should begin with the Anthem. It’s great.

Another very enjoyable concert, and I even found myself smiling a few times for no reason other than that I was enjoying the music. But somehow I didn’t enjoy the Beethoven quite as much as the LSO / Kissin version I saw earlier in the year (in fact looking it up I was amazed to see that it was the same piece of music, I thought it was a different Concerto!), nor the Mahler as much as Mahler 2. Maybe the venue has something to do with it? At the Barbican you are somehow closer and it is all much louder. Certainly the song bit at the end of the Mahler wasn’t as in your face as it had been in the Barbican. Maybe it was my mood, maybe it was the piece, maybe it was the Orchestras/Soloists/Conductors. All very perplexing!

Last and least was the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican with an event called “Seeing Debussy, Hearing Monet”, a blatant an attempt to get ignoramuses like me into the place with the promise of a multi-media audio-visual performance. Instead of a full on synesthesiatic experience, what we actually got was the conductor , David Robertson, blathering on for ages, and giving quite a technical analysis of the Debussy, using ideas from Monet as metaphors for describing the music. So certain phrases were said to ‘float like Monet’s water lillies’ or one phrase on flute was echoed by another on oboe, ‘like a shimmering reflection in the water’. Rather than being a way in to the music for a novice like me, it was a bit of a turn off, it was just too much like hard work trying to follow it all, and when we finally got to hear the pieces, Prelude a L’Apres-midi d’un faune, Jeux and La mer, they didn’t do an awful lot for me. I’m not sure quite how much I got from the visuals. I was just beginning to get somewhere with the water lillies, that magical moment when the eye settles and different sections of the painting come to the foreground, just trying to work out whether there was any synchronicity with the music, when the image started to move, it being a triptych, so it was displayed from the point of view of a camera panning across it, so that the eye couldn’t settle. The very nice lady sat next to me, who told me she had been lecturing for 35 years on Monet and Debussy, fell asleep for most of the first half, waking up at the interval and declaring the whole thing to have been marvellous. And she had probably discovered the best way to enjoy the event, asleep and most likely pissed!

the Masque of the Red Death - 3rd Visit

My third trip to the Masque of the Red Death, and by a long long way the most extraordinary; the first which gave me that extraordinary feeling of crossing the threshold into another reality, the first to burn out some of the few remaining wires in my head keeping me grounded in what some people call “reality”.

Even before I got there it was turning into an odd evening. Standing at the bus stop, a car pulled up and a youngish bloke got out talking very loudly into his cellphone in that annoying and self important way. He comes up to me and says he’s on the radio and its ‘world hello day’ and would I mind speaking to the presenters? He presses the phone against my ear but I have two layers of woolly cap over my ears so the conversation is a bit disjointed. Did I know it was world hello day? No I didn’t, I thought it was world no music day. Yes it was world no music day. What radio station are they? Sorry say again. Still couldn’t hear. You say hello, I say goodbye.

Even before then, appropriate for a Punchdrunk day, I spent the day trying to clean traces of infection off the computer and defragmenting the hard drive. Norton Ghost is playing up.

At Battersea on a wet windy night, I head straight for the actual entrance. There must have been a problem with communication at the front of the building (where most people go first before being sent round to the side) because I am on my own, and go straight in. It must have been about fifteen minutes into the performance before I saw another member of the audience. This must be every Punchlover’s dream – completely on their own in the building with the actors, but at the same time it is really really freaky, this sense that the whole thing is for you, the awkwardness of the intimacy, Bon Bon insisting that I go down the stairs into the cellar, Roderick Usher ( I think) running down the stairs to whisper something very very fast in my ears and running back up, whilst Madeline Usher drifts by, ghostly faced, staring at me from the other side of the staircase.

The whole experienced seemed to be ramped up from previous visits. I was constantly being brushed, stroked, tickled, by the characters. Veiled weeping women muttered in Latin or Italian as they sought solace in my arms or on my shoulder. In the attic, Madame Salsafette performed an extraordinary dance before scaling ropes up into the rafters. Up there was a hidden backward message - something about Poe and the Red Death - and a mirror which she used to direct blinding light into my face.

Much is made of the famed one on ones and I found myself in two very intense situations. First was the nurse, weeping and clinging to me, stroking my face, and asking if I believed in God, before telling me she could no longer believe in a just God with all the death and destruction in the world ( I felt something very similar in rereading Deuteronomy 28 just the other day).

Even more intense was a scene in the cellar where a spectral lady hanging from the rafters ushered me into a tiny alcove before performing an exquisite dance, using me as support. We sat on a tiny bench whilst she stroked my face before removing my mask and pointing to a mirror; we sat holding hands and staring into each others eyes. She dug a necklace out from a pile of leaves in the corner of the room and wrapped it around our hands, all the time whispering in Italian. She then hung the necklace on the corner of the mirror. At the end of the necklace was a white cross.

I followed her next door into the room where Montresor had been “bricked up”, where she danced across the stonework before taking out the wooden panels and, leaping over into the pit, and digging body parts out of the sand, possibly teeth.

She was definitely not the main Berenice, but maybe she was a ghostly trace, a faint echo, of Berenice – I noticed that the narrative strands seemed to be carried across different members of the cast, regardless of who their designated character was - several members of the casts whispered to me about staring eyes, which comes from The Tell Tale Heart, possibly fused with the Black Cat.

Other great scenes included the Jester’s dance down the stairways, and the marriage scene at the top of the stairways, a fight between Black Cat Husband and another man, culminating in Black Cat Husband (but he will always be Mephistopheles to me) making me crouch down and press my hand against the other man’s forehead, telling me not to let him wake up ( I fail of course!).

Backstage at the Palais Royale I caught the Brothers Barnsby’s crazed sawing dance, whilst in the changing room another character tried awkwardly and failingly to make advances on the equally awkward dresser. Out front I finally caught Roderick Usher’s frankly astonishing mind reading act.

I have been slightly underwhelmed by the guest mini-performances within the show – they have tended to be a bit fey and too jolly - but one of the installations last night was tremendous – two women in full black Victorian widow/mourning wear, in a white room where the walls and floors were smeared in blood. One of the women was painting her legs with theatrical make-up to look like she had been the victim of a most gruesome murder in the Rue Morgue, whilst the other was methodically probing the wall with a metal spatula, pulling away a thin plastic skin-like membrane, then walking over to a metal surgical bowl of “blood” which she sucked into a syringe before injecting the blood into the wound she had made in the wall. All done silently, intensely, slowly and methodically. It was genuinely very sinister!


The grand finale seemed louder and longer than before – maybe my imagination, but added to my sense that the show had been ramped up.

As with Faust, I am finding last night very hard to get out of my head. I am still haunted by the smell of lavender, sweat and blood, and by the spectres swinging from the rafters. Can’t wait for visit no. 4!

Still Catching up

My October KultureFest came to a glittering and glamorous end at the weekend.

On Saturday I was at the Barbican for the culmination of MichaelClark Company (as it seems to be called now) ‘s 3 year Stravinsky Project. Previous years' O (Apollo) and Mmm (Rite of Spring), were complemented by a completely new work, I do (Les Noces). This left no time for angular scary dancing to the likes of Wire and Sex Pistols, as in previous years, and left one with a distinct feeling that perhaps the enfant terrible of British Dance, as it is obligatory to call him, may actually not be quite so enfant any more. He barely dances now, and may be growing into his role as choreographer a little, could I say, too gracefully. For the two older works had noticeably improved from previous years, and Les Noces looked great and serious. The stage was flanked by the New London Chamber Choir, and to my ears the discordant and violent score was every bit as frightening as say Laibach (to who’s protofascist hardcore metal Clark danced in the 1980s.)

I’m not happy with the way this review is going – I sound a bit of a tosser. And my syntax is well weird today. Too much stimulation I fear.

Anyway it was great, with some maverick touches, such as the bride in Les Noces being dressed in a giant lacy loo-brush cover. I worry for Michael Clark – last year he was all but destitute until a celebratory artist auction raised some cash for him, and with his 3 year relationship with the Barbican coming to an end, he had to come up with something which suggested he still had the capacity for greatness. And he did.

On Sunday it was the opening of the UK Jewish Film festival, and Shira Geffen/Etgar Keret’s sublime Jellyfish.

Query – would this film have felt any different if I had manage to catch its (sold out) screening at the BFI London Film Festival?

Answer – No.

In fact it probably had more in common with the films showing at the BFILFF than the UKJFF. Jellyfish is a subtle, meditative, swirling film, much closer to my new favourite director Apichatpong Weerasethakul than to films such as “My Nose” and “Kike Like Me” showing in the UKJFF.

It felt so refreshing and so radical to have a film treat its Jewish/Israeli (and other) characters as rounded, complex individuals, often quiet and dignified, with none of the histrionics and stereotypes prevalent in modern Jewish art and art about Jews. Yes the BIG THINGS were here, “we are all second generation [holocaust survivors]” says one character, another has been scarred in conflict, but neither characters nor film are defined by these things, they are in the background, not ignored, but contextualised, in a film about people getting on with their lives. It is a film about relationships: parents and children, husband and wife, a possible lesbian romance – the stories interweave and resonate, whilst a magical/symbolic metaphorical system connected with the sea and boats develops in the course of the film. There are some beautiful moments, my favourite being a picture of “the ice cream man” in a photograph album, the man’s shirt moving gently in the seabreeze (it reminded me of David Lynch’s story about how some of his paintings started to move – you mean they looked like they were moving said the interviewer – no, they were moving corrected Lynch). It’s a film about people, not about Capital J Jews, and it is terrific.

So that’s the end of my Oktober KultureSplurge (I know its dragged on into November) and in a way I am a little relieved to get my life back. The next couple of months are a bit quiet, although there is a mini ClassicalMusicSplurge at the end of the month, and a couple of trips to the Red Death to look forward to. Oh and Múm at the Scala. And Gimpel the Fool on stage. And then there is Mime Fest in Jan. So maybe not so quiet. More importantly, I hope I can make some progress on the book. It wont write itself you know.

Mathew Barney at the Serpentine

Before the craziness of Friday evening, I finally managed to drag myself down to the Serpentine for the Mathew Barney exhibition. In preparation I had watched “The Order”, the only commercially available part of his Cremaster Cycle, both without and then with Barney’s commentary. Finally I all but finished the excellent A Very Short Introduction to Postmodernism by Christopher Butler. Barney is not an artist you can approach without doing your homework (this I suspect is not a small part of the reason why he is considered so significant).

In the Serpentine were…

some faint but impressive drawings, close drawn lines of metamorphosising humans, often with a fishy theme, or depicting his three stage analysis of the artistic process, Situation, Condition and Production, Situation being symbolized by ingestion, Production by excretion (an apt metaphor some might say);

videos of his work, often him attempting to draw under conditions of physical difficulty, such as using a trampoline to make marks on a ceiling;

objects, some small, some large scale, particularly those used in the Drawing Restraint 9 film;

a central room, with foot and hand holds built into the corners, and markings on the ceilings above those corners, and in the centre, the restraints used to hold him back whilst attempting to make those markings.

Barney’s voice-over in The Order gave me the best path into understanding his work; despite the masculine/physical posturing of the work, all that stuff about hypertrophy training etc, in speech here was all the weasely anxiety of classic postmodernism, talk of gestures, interventions. I lost track of the number of times he said “I wanted to think about…” without ever telling us what it was that he actually thought about. The other classic symptom of chronic postmodernism is here too, art about making art.

But there is something more here as well, which explains why he is feted by sections of the art world. Most postmodernist work is weasely in content as well as idea – often reductivist, minimalist, posing a trite question with a single banal or obvious answer – take the crack at the Tate – its about, says the artist, the haves and the have nots. How tedious say I. It is as though the artists of postmodernism have lost the ability, or the confidence, to say anything other than the very simple and the very trite. But Barney produces work which is complex, multi-dimensional, large in scale – big budget films, huge sculptures, a prodigious outpouring of the stuff, about the act of making art, the materials of art, the process of production, the quest for metaphor.

But ultimately it is work which is cold and for me does not satisfactorily repay the effort required to get a foothold on the greasy slippy vaseline coated self lubricating slope of understanding. The postmodernists say art doesn’t have to do anything, but for most of us, it does. I still prefer aesthetic art, but am happy with purely conceptual art if the concept excites or stimulates. Ultimately, very little of Barney’s output stimulates me in any way, other than to admire the sheer intensity of his world.

Outside the Serpentine Olafur Eliasson (the man who did the wonderful shimmering sun thing at the Tate a few years ago) and Kjetil Thorsen have built this year’s temporary pavilion and what a wonderful thing it is too. You go round and round a ramp, before realising that by some optical magic, on the way up the string supports are open, but on the way down they are closed. Weird lights seem to hover inside and outside the building. It is a wonderful stimulating space, in sharp contrast to the stuff inside the gallery next door.

Crazy Night

Even by my standards, Friday was a crazy night!!

I had chanced upon an event by the Last Tuesday Society entitled An Evening of Phantasmagoria, held in subterranean Victorian vaults on Chiswell Street. It could easily have been another Punchdrunk installation – the barely lit vaults were decorated with gloriously overflowing bowls of fruit, rotting pheasants, blood stained severed dolls heads peaking out from tiny battered sackcloth bags, assorted animal skulls, and a wide range of tempting sweets. In the toilets, surgical gloves and water pistols had been carefully laid out. The audience included various intellectuals and believers, members of the London Institute of Pataphysics in resplendent Lytton Strachey beards, Oxbridge drinking club types yearning for the good old days of Empire, glamourous ladies, Goths, thespians, decadents, romantics, fantasists, and me.

i didn't feel it appropriate to take pictures of the attendees, so here is a picture of Lytton Strachey

The evening began with a talk by Marina Warner on the quest from the Age of Reason onwards for the understanding of the soul/lifeforce, or at least how the imagination has devised certain metaphors and images for the soul, taking in Phatasmagoria, Magic Lantern shows, waxworks, automata, and the performances of various mediums.

I then donned 3D glasses to watch an extraordinary film by Zoë Beloff called
“Shadow Land or Light from the Other Side” based on the 1897 autobiography of Elizabeth DEspérance, a materialization medium who could produce full body apparitions. All I could think whilst I was watching it, surrounded by gorgeous ladies in costume varying from Victorian to Gothic rubberwear, with many and varied gashes and wounds and injuries about their personages, was that this was fucking insane! The intensity of the effort that went into the film, and the evening as a whole was staggering.

this is a picture I borrowed from the Last Tuesday website which i think captures the mood of the evening

In another room Professor Mervyn Heard, a leading authority on such things, presented a Magic Lantern Show using a genuine and beautiful golden projector and original Victorian slides, including some wonderfully ghoulish images, a bit of psychedelia, and a touch of the bawdy.

By the end of all this I was certainly in an altered mental state, for a mad-cap dash across the City to the Roundhouse for the Super Furry Animals. It was like being transformed from gas to solid, vapour to liquid, walking in on this gig (SFA had been on for 20 minutes). I could only circle the outer perimeter of the performance space, taking in the spectacle of a superb band at full throttle and a gloriously inebriated and ecstatic crowd. SFA rocked hard and loud, looking and sounding great. I caught just under an hour so it was worth the effort, but the circumstances meant I was somewhat removed from the core of the gig.

What a night. In many ways it sums up this blog – the growth of my appreciation of SFA frontman Gruff Rhys from something of a running gag to a musical genius, the search for sensation, the rise of the mind-altering performance space. These conflicting yet somehow connected (by their crazed protaganist) worlds, of the ghostly Victorian gothic and the manic son et lumiere power of the rock gig, are at the core of my novel-in-progress and this crazy night may yet serve as the ultimate expression of it all.

BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL

I have had mixed results with the BFI LONDON FILM FESTIVAL.

DOES YOUR SOUL HAVE A COLD? was a documentary about people suffering from depression in Japan. The subjects all impressed with their honesty, bravery and dignity, which is more than can be said for the film maker, who throughout kept making snide insinuations in a pathetic attempt to prove his Michael Moorish credentials – he desperately wanted to have an anti-American, anti-Pharmaceutical Companies agenda, but produced nothing to back up the little snide comments he threw in from off screen. Did the woman who learnt about depression through a website know that it was sponsored by Glaxo? No she didn’t. But so what? The question is whether or not the website was misleading , but this wasn’t asked. Similarly some of the sufferers said they were now much worse if they stopped taking the medication, but there was no clinical analysis of whether they were on the right medication and whether it was helping them There may well be legitimate questions to be asked, such as whether doctors are too quick to prescribe drugs, whether marketing encourages more people to think of themselves as depressed, but this film had no expert of clinical viewpoint and hence was manipulative and underhand.

MID-AFTERNOON BARKS was a peculiar film from China. Three parts in which not a lot happens to a variety of small town / rural people. Little dialogue, even less action, save for the mysterious telegraph poles which featured in all three parts, a symbol of changing China. I went because it sounded a bit like Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethakul’s work, but it wasn’t really. There was no particular resonance, nor an overall sense of mystery or relationship, between the parts. It was enjoyable if a bit slow, idiosyncratic, charming, and a little flat.

THE PERCIPIENT IMAGE was a selection of short 16mm experimental avant-garde films. The first 4 were totally silent leaving everyone in the cinema a little uncomfortable, especially me, tormented by gurgling stomachs, aqueous swallowing noises and a ticking watch from the row behind! Lots of grainy close ups of shadows and plants, but noting really beautiful or breathtaking.

Best of the bunch by far was FAR NORTH, a dark folk-tale filmed on Svalbard (Spitsbergen) and starring Michelle Yeoh and Sean Bean. A mother and her adopted daughter struggle to survive in the frozen wastelands. One day, a mysterious walks across the ice. There was much that felt familiar about the film, until its final descent into the heart of darkness. In hindsight there was a sinister thread running throughout the film, but it stays just below the surface until the end. Unbelievably beautiful cinematography.

The Masque Of The Red Death

me, masked

i 'ave caught the plague

anything can happen

Late October pics - gigs and shows

tunng

laub

the stage after the Shen Wei Dance Arts Company

Late October Catch-up - Part Two

My bro and sis-in-law and my 7 year old nephew were in town. We went to MADAME TUSSAUDS and the NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM. Being half term, both were unpleasantly heaving. I remember being underwhelmed by MT’s as a kid and I still feel the same way now, but what a sad indictment of our society this place really is: plastic images of plastic people; when their time is up, melt ‘em down and reform into the latest celebrity. It is the museum of modern living. The Natural History Museum is great for kids, and we managed to sneak into the Dinosaur section the back way, avoiding the hour plus queue.

THE COUTRY WIFE at THE THEATRE ROYAL HAYMARKET is a tremendous piece of work, acted in a delightfully old fashioned, exclamatory, actorly style which works much better that the naturalistic mumbly style which ruined the National’s go at the Man of Mode. CW is a filthy, wonderful play and they do it justice, albeit going for a revolving doors French farce kind of vibe which buries some of the darker and more cynical elements of the play. And it is really really funny. Acting is superb all round except for the poor dear playing the Country Wife who could not hold her awful Yorkshire accent together, often drifting over to Ireland via a number of European countries.

At the LONDON JEWISH CULTURAL CENTRE I caught the famous 1937 film of DER DYBBUK. Yiddish expressionism anyone? It really surprised me in the imagination of the camera work and the intensity of the on screen world. A silly girl behind kept sniggering at the manneristic acting (lots of hand over eyes and trembling going on), but this was part of its charm.

Finally I caught a band I have loved for a long time now, German electronic tunesmiths LAUB. It was a real thrill to hear the songs played live, and their absurdly talented enigmatic singer, AGF, seemed to really enjoy herself on stage. The gig was put on by THE WIRE, celebrating 25 years of pompous and often incomprehensible, but always essential reading. The main act were MATMOS, who I didn’t enjoy as much as their gig on the South Bank; not as much variety and little sign of the percussive and contemporary classical strains that made that gig so good.

And then there was my second visit to THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH. It was great fun, but I am still not convinced that it is quite as spectacular or rich as Faust, but it was a great night out. I managed to get into some of the secret rooms - a band and paper puppet show of an obscure Poe story, and an improvised invention of a lost Poe poem in the library. I narrowly missed out on one-on-ones about 4 times, each time the actor or actress selecting someone else. My theory that I would be more likely to be chosen if I was in black tie proved fatally flawed! Then on to RED DEATH LATES, the weekend only after show party during which masked maidens regularly poured strong liquor down my throat from a big old brown bottles, a fortune reader told me I was starting out on a new path as a writer, and to be wary of gossip ( I think they area great band) and a make-up artist painted two bleeding pustular boils on my forehead and announced that indeed I had caught the plague. I was well hammered by the end I can tell you.

Pictures of all this madness will follow… in time

Late October Catch-up - Part One

Well what a couple of weeks it’s been – seen and done so much. No time for the usual in depth psycho-cultural analysis!

It all began with CONTROL, Anton Corbijn’s film of the life and death of Ian Curtis. I wasn’t at all a Joy Division fan, nor did I have high hopes for the movie, but it was really good, crucially avoiding making Curtis out to be a tortured genius/martyr/saint. At times hypnotic, and moving, and a film which has stayed with me.

I spent a lot of time at the BRITISH MUSEUM. THE FIRST EMPEROR exhibition is an amazing thing to see, although not quite living up to the politically motivated hype (and how the fuck can they sell Chairman Mao pin badges in the shop?). It told the Emperor’s story well – how he created unified systems of money, language, weights and measures etc to keep his empire together - and despite the lack of numbers of terracotta figures, you got a sense of the scale of the folly of his tomb complex. But the queues and excruciatingly slow snake of people working their way around the exhibition were painful. But much better was my return to the CRAFTING BEAUTY IN MODERN JAPAN exhibition – the pieces seemed even more extraordinary second time around, and they had some lovely new kimonos on display. I also went to a free lecture given by one of the potters on his life and aesthetics. Still at the BM they had a great little room with a display of KOREAN MOON JARS – huge pots of white china made in two separate halves then joined together before firing – only about 1 in 10 pots survive, but those that do have the most extraordinary undulations and bulges around the join.

TUNNG are on the road again promoting their excellent new album, Good Arrows, and played at the 229 Club. They just keep getting better, having developed a richer and more interesting sound since I last saw them You feel they just need to shake their booty a tad more to really fire up the crowd. They finished with a superb cover of Dancing Naked In the Rain.

At the BARBICAN, I went to SEDUCED, ART AND SEX FROM ANTIQUITY TO NOW. The most damning thing I can say is that, by half way round this overtly serious exhibition of explicit sexual material, I was well and truly bored. The highlight was the last room and had nothing really to do with the exhibition, it was the soundtrack to a Nan Goldin slide show, and was the piece that John Tavener wrote for Bjork and the Brodsky Quartet, a simply stunning piece of modern re-imagined choral music.

Still at the Barbican I saw the SHEN WEI DANCE ARTS COMPANY and a work called Connect Transfer. Some of the dancing was a bit twee for me, a bit birdy hopping like, but most was mesmerising and meditative. Their thing is that the stage was made of canvass, and the dancers dipped their hands or feet in paint, painting the stage as the work progressed. Afterwards the canvas is cut up and sold to the audience. I bought a bit on the basis of the woman on the desk saying that Shen Wei has been commissioned to choreograph the opening of the Beijing Olympics, so the “painting” will hopefully increase in value. Standing around at the end whilst members of the company signed the work, I felt more like a groupie that an art collector.

The Masque of the Red Death: some further thoughts.

As Kylie would say, I can’t get it out of my head.

On my way up to Waitrose, I found myself ruminating on some of the criticisms and negative comments about the show. Here’s what they are and what I think…

That it is irredeemably middle class, to wit the preponderance of public schoolboys:

I have no problem with reviewing the audience, I do it all the time! My justification is that I am reporting on my experience, and the audience can heighten or dampen my enjoyment, And I suppose if you are a class warrior, the make-up (as opposed to behaviour or glamour or otherwise) of the audience could lead you to have a bad time. But I would observe that last night, there were more black faces in the audience (underneath the white masks of course) than I have seen at any of the theatre I have been to in recent years. And as I have discovered from my exploration of classical music, sometimes the perception of certain kinds of art as elitist turns out to be completely false. The biggest barrier to art is cost, and the tickets are pricy (last night was £30) but in keeping with most major London venues. And even if on the whole it is attracting a middle class audience so what – we who shop at Waitrose are entitled to get excited about stuff!

That it is all sensation, it has no emotional content:

This is partly to do with plot and characterisation (see below), but in the room where the man was beating up his wife, I can tell you I had plenty of emotion, just as I did in the abortion scene in the forest in Faust. Largely it is a sensational sensory experience – that doesn’t diminish it. It also provokes profound mental stimulation. These are enough in my view to mask any emotional deficit.

That it is a themepark experience:

What is it that is pejorative about the term themepark? That it is a plastic experience, corporate, Disneyfied, synthetic, commercialised? Certainly none of that applies here – the depth of the experience, of the detail, is breathtaking. Yes you wander through the space, but you do that in an art gallery.

That there is no narrative:

There is a narrative, but it is one that is received, by each audience member individually, rather than given. It is the journey of the audience through the space. It is the accumulation of experiences. It is not a linear narrative, nor a full one. It is fragmented and frustrating. As such it reflects contemporary life much more closely than the traditional linear narrative. In particular it draws on three strands of (post-post-)modernity

1. The structuralist/post-structuralist/post-modern movement’s explosion of the stability of the building blocks of text, art, and even consciousness.

2. It reflects contemporary experience, such as computer games, the flash zapping of multi-channel TV, t’internet, you tube etc. The lives we lead are increasingly made up of accumulating chunks of information technology, and it is right that art should find itself reflecting this.

3. Art whether consciously or unconsciously is a product of the society and culture in which it is made; a broken and fragmentary art suits our time.

Regular readers will note a recurring theme here, so I wont blather on any more about fragmentation – see A Disappearing Number below, somewhere.

That the actors are slaves:

A weird one this, but yes, they do work bloody hard, and being surrounded by the audience, especially those who go right into personal space, or for whom this experience is a substitute for a visit to a lap-dancing club, must be a challenge, but then many are repeat performers - most were in Faust, and almost all have worked for Punchdrunk before. Working for the most exciting company on the planet in really challenging environment must be a reward in itself.

That it is all hype:

Absolutely not, Faust was a huge word of mouth success, and many of those who fell in love with the show signed up to the mailing list and bought tickets for Masque on spec. Almost all tickets were sold before any reviews, and maybe they were for the most part favourable because that it was the reviewers actually thought, rather than them succumbing to some PR voodoo. In fact there has been very little publicity – none was needed!

Why Punchdrunk when there have been so many great site specific promenade performances before:

I can’t really comment on other companies, but I will say that I will now check out any of the other artists working in this form in the future, so I think everyone will benefit. After reading Cees Noteboom’s excellent novel “Lost Paradise” I really wish I’d caught Deborah Warner’s Angel Project (featured in the book). As to why Punchdrunk, all I can say is because Faust was amazing, it was a perfect storm. It was more than just site-specific or promenade, it was an art installation, it was dance, it was full on sensory experience, it was emotional, it was filmic, it was multi-dimensional, the building afforded a perfect opportunity. And Masque is forming itself in my mind along similar hyperbolic lines.

Punchdrunk - The Masque of the Red Death

My first of four (count ‘em) scheduled visits to the Battersea Arts Centre (and you know how nervous I get going south of the river).

It might seem an odd thing to say about a Punchdrunk performance, but this was a remarkably subtle production, by which I mean that its genius crept up on me slowly; only after a bad night’s sleep and by gathering my thoughts for the blog did I come to realise quite what a thing this thing was.

It is not as immediate as Faust, as visceral and thrilling. I didn’t mean to compare it to Faust, but when you enter a Punchdrunk world, you lose any control over your mind and senses (any one who says the experience of Punchdrunk theatre is democratic, that the individual audience member “chooses” what to see, gets it so wrong - one can no-more choose than one can stop one own’s heart from beating or lungs from breathing - all you can do is go with the flow, accept that you have lost control over your own body, brain, senses and all).

So for a lot of the show I was in compare and contrast mode. The show made be do this, by too often not being different enough from Faust – the smell of mothballs, the rumpled beds, the dances in confined spaces, the feather-light whispered dialogue, the shouty dialogue, the meaningful slapping and posturing of rugged bearded men, the imperilled beautiful women, the big set pieces – but without ever managing to be quite as thrilling as Faust – there was nothing here (that I saw) to match the scenes in the Diner, in the end Bar, in the Pine Forest, and in the Basement at Wapping. It also lacked the demonic energy of Faust, and I missed the changes in tempo offered by the mid-show Hop and Mephistopheles' conjuring tricks. There seemed to be a lot of similar scenes – for example at least three man/woman physical theatre/dance erotic/violent routines in tiny bedrooms, a saminess of atmosphere through the piece.

Where The Masque of the Red Death excelled was with scenes which felt completely fresh – the woman playing the piano becoming tormented by a ghostly echo, and the fabulous Palais Royale Music Hall, especially walking through the changing rooms to view the acts from the wings – not just a play within a play but a sense (an illusion) that the play within the play was more real than the play, watching the person manning the curtains flying up into the air to use their weight to pull the rope down, watching the actress pacing nervously and muttering to herself before going on stage, acting not being an actor in other words, a symbol of the swirling realities and psychological inversions to come if you spend too long in here…

Let’s being again at the beginning. I don my mask and think how happy I am to be back in the world of Punchdrunk. It’s like a drug of course, altered states, addictive. I quickly find the outfitter and don my cape. A large man with Victorian moustache whispers in my ear, do I ever wonder why nothing happens when you die? In a small room with framed butterflies on the walls I find a weeping woman – “all is lost" she wails. She is dipping her hand in a bowl of water, her wet hand holds mine and leads me down to a parade of the character up the main staircase. I am alone in a room with a man and wife, petting and stroking alternates with horrific abuse, she is slapped around, made to drink from a bowl like a cat, then hung up from the roof, hanging like a limp rag doll. Thereafter things get blurry. Different rooms, different scenes, a constant sense of imminent sex and violence. Mr Usher seems to be everywhere. Women in peril slink behind doorways. Screaming and anguished cries coming from somewhere unidentifiable.

No stories as such emerge from these fragmented shards, little pieces of Poe, sampled and remixed into something different. Yet something, a theme rather than a narrative, congeals, a consistency of deadly sins, lust and avarice, drinking and gambling and debauchery. The saminess starts to feel less like a weakness and more like something musical, the way classical music uses repeating refrains and sonic motifs, variations, resonances.

And all these doors and rooms and curtained tunnels, following an actress under and through a fireplace into a small curtained area where, for some time, we are all compressed, too close, but not close enough. Something, an idea, starts to niggle away at me. At first I think the whole experience is (metaphorically) sexual, squeezing yourself through these red corridors and into tiny spaces, the whole production reeks of sex. But overnight another idea comes, it stems from that extraordinary experience of being backstage at the Palais Royale, what it reminds me of, what it feels like, is not so much parallel universes, but rather like being able to travel down portals into different people’s minds – it makes me think of the troposphere in Scarlett Thomas’ “The End of Mr Y” or the portals into John Malkovich’s mind in “Being John Malcovich”. This is an experience about consciousness, about what it feels like to be in someone else’s mind, and of course, what flows from that, is that the overreaching theme is madness. Many of the
Poe stories on which the piece is based depict madness of some sort, but “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" becomes central. We see it in one of the big set pieces, about a dozen cast members around a dinner table, things becoming increasingly strange and out of control. In the Poe story, a narrator visits a lunatic asylum and dines with the doctors. As the story progresses, we learn that they are not the doctors, but the patients, who have revolted and taken over the asylum, the sane made mad and the mad made sane. And this becomes the central metaphor for my experience. It is an insane experience. In everything you see and do, the delicate membrane between sane and insane seems to have torn. Including your own grasp on reality. In the mask, in this atmosphere, your own sense of self dissolves. How else to explain why, in the bar at the Palais Royal, I order a shot of tequila. I never ever drink shots. I might have a tot of whisky at home, but I haven’t had tequila for at least 10 years. As I said at the beginning, any sense of choice is an illusion. You go mad, you are possessed. This is insane.

I go back in a couple of weeks.

Happy Mondays - Brixton Academy - 6/10/07

It is difficult to know what to say about this gig. After all, the Mondays themselves, or what is left of them, which in essence means Shaun and Bez, are riddled with contradiction, enigma and puzzle.

Take Bez. On the credits for Pills Thrills and Bellyaches, after the usual vocals, guitars keyboards etc, is listed “Bez – Bez”. So the Bez that now appears before us, working up the crowd, jigging laterally from one side of the stage to the other like a demented Space Invader, or doing his trademark bent over shuffle, is it the real Bez that was, or is he now just playing Bez, or was he always just playing Bez?

Bez

And Shaun, demented genius. We demand of him that he is permanently fucked. Anything other than a Shaun who is smacked off his skull and incapable of standing, let alone “singing” (or what approximates for it in the Ryder universe) for more than ten minutes, as in the legendary debacles at the height of Madchester, leaves us feeling bereft of the real thing. We want to pay £30 to see a band that are too fucked to play. That they manage to play for close on an hour and a quarter is wrong. That the audience politely observe the no smoking ban is wrong, let alone the almost total absence of the sweet grating smoke of a forest fire of weed.

the ghost of the memory of Shaun Ryder

Yet it doesn’t feel like simulation either, nor pantomime. The band are loud, and get pretty close to the demented concoctions of the classic works. Rowetta is dynamite; her voice has grown more powerful, richer and deeper over the years. Without her the show would descend into farce, she covers for Shaun, she belts her lungs out, and it sounds, for the most, part tuneful, soulful even.

Shaun remains barely there, a black hole in the centre of the stage, dressed in black, with a black hat at a jaunty angle, black shades. Often we only know he’s there because of the shadow he casts over the back lit stage.

Bez plays the Bez as only Bez can, a crazed Figure from the Commedia dell'arte, the Mancunian Marcel Marceu.

Bez as Pierrot

The crowd are full of southerners pretending to be Mancs, civil servants and librarians pretending that they are on E, everyone fancies themselves as some dodgy geezer.

I write a review pretending to be Paul Morley, arch observer of Mancuian inflected pop culture.

What can never be denied or forgotten is that out of all this came something incredible, an album, Pills, Thrill and Bellyaches, of such wonder, of such extraordinary beauty. And ultimately this is a celebration – of how amazing those tunes were, of how amazing it is that Shaun is still alive and now solvent and maybe straight, that Bez won Celebrity Big Brother, that Tony Wilson was actually right about something, namely Shaun’s genius. Shaun's most celebrated line, from Kinky Afro, opens the show, everyone in the crowd singing along: “son, I was thirty, I only went with your mother cos she’s dirty”. Thereafter people don’t know and can’t hear, but it doesn’t matter.

Another thing about the Mondays, despite all the obvious associations, with Manchester, with Factory, with flirting with physical, mental, and financial disaster, is that they never played the tortured artist, never blamed anyone, never asked for sympathy, They just accepted what life threw at them and lit another spliff. And another. Maybe it is this attitude, so in contrast to the angular jutting attitude of a Gallagher or a Brown or the manic jerkiness of a Curtis, is why people love them so, why we want them survive, why we celebrate their survival.

Syndromes and a Century

Back to the NFT for Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethaku’s latest film, Syndromes and a Century. Like Tropical Malady, this is a film in two parts, but the parts to this film are more closely aligned, in a strange way making it much harder to relate the parts than the more distinct halves of Tropical Malady.

Both parts of Syndromes are set in hospitals, with largely the same cast playing the same characters (or at least characters with the same names).

The first half focusses on Dr Toey, her hopeless suitor and her unreciprocated love for an orchid collector who in turn loves another from afar. We first see her interviewing a Dr Nohng for a job. There is a subplot featuring a singing dentist infatuated with a monk who wants to be a DJ. The tone is lighthearted and gentle.

The second half begins in a different hospital, possibly a different time, certainly a different place, maybe a different world. It begins with the same job interview, but thereafter we focus on Dr Nohng and discover his relationship with girlfriend Joy is doomed. The tone is much darker, with Lynchian flourishes and menacing moments of camerawork and offscreen sound.

The NFT notes kindly summarises some of the dualities between the halves: female/male, country/city, natural light/electric light, but this hardly begins to make order of the ambivalent and ambiguous relationship between the halves. They are not versions of the same story, and to talk of parallel or alternative realities doesn’t seem to fit either. It is much more complex and elusive than that. There is talk in the first half of past lives, and in the second of future lives, yet the second half seemed to me to suggest not another life but another plane of existence, maybe a spirit world, or something akin to limbo or hell, especially the scenes in the basement of amputees, and grotesque women staring out the camera, and a fantastic swirling thick smoke slowly moving towards an extraction pipe so wonderfully filmed that I thought that I cold smell the acrid smoke.

Which made me wonder whether Buddhists believe in hell, or maybe the film was setting up another duality – eastern vs western. But a quick google seems to show there are Buddhist ideas of heaven and hell, and even (a quote that seems to fit Joe’s worlds very nicely) “the Buddha's Teaching shows us that there are heavens and hells not only beyond this world, but in this very world itself”.

The film ends back in full colour and outdoors with a group aerobic session – I got from this a sense of souls reborn and the joy of living.

Another reading of the film is that in the first half the relationships are ones of delicious(ly) unrequited love; the bridge between the sections has the monk asking the singing dentist to follow him, suggesting a relationship is about to begin, but the monk disappears and we see the dentist alone in his surgery; in the second section the key relationship between Nohng and his girlfriend disintegrates, and there is hint that Dr Toey and her nebbishe suitor are going out for lunch, and a shot of her looking forlornly and desperately at her desk – so perhaps there is a comparison of the exquisiteness, the hopefulness, of love not yet declared vs the hell of dying or loveless relationships. Or maybe it is just a case that Dr Toey in the first half is an optimist and Dr Nohn in the second a pessimist.

These are all ifs and maybes. The wonder of the film (along with some incredibly powerful visual moments) is that its meanings remain outside and beyond the viewer, as though being channelled directly into the viewer’s unconscious, challenging the brain to see patterns but always remaining elusive. As Browning put it “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?”

Tropical Malady / Drawing Restraint 9

Over the next month I will be turning some attention to film, what with the London Film Festival opening and all, and there being some interesting stuff about.

When I was a lad, the term Indie or Art House cinema really seemed to mean something, artists producing work far from mainstream Hollywood fare. Now Indie cinema is too often just a brand for something maybe low budget but which in many ways does the same kind of stuff as big budget films, reinforcing the myth of consensus reality as Rudy Rucker put it in the Transrealist Manifesto (see my review of a Disappearing Number). Here though are two films way way away from the kind of stuff we are normally fed.

First up, Tropical Malady by Thai director Apichatpong 'Joe' Weerasethaku. It passed me by when it came out a few years ago, but he has been getting rave press about this film and his latest, Syndromes and a Century (which I am seeing this week). Both films come in two parts, two separate stories which may or may not be variations or possibilities of the same story; maybe male and female, or yin and yang versions.

The first half of Tropical Malady is a gentle gay love story, between a soldier and a country boy. They hang out, hold hands a bit. Everyone is very tolerant. Whilst the soldier is looking at pictures of his boyfriend, another film bleeds into this one, with a folk tale of a shaman with the ability to change into the shape of animals. The edges between the folk tale and the second half of the film are blurry. In the second half, a soldier in the forest is hunting and being hunted by a ghost/man possessed by a tiger spirit/tiger possessed by a man spirit. Each hunts the other but also yearns to be consumed by the other. The film becomes dark, hypnotic and mysterious, its meaning(s) elusive. It finishes with soldier and tiger locked in a stare.

There was that wonderful sense at the end that the audience were united in a collective state, of glorious bewilderment, of so much unsaid and unsayable, of possibilities. So subtle and elusive, I left in an altered, hypnotised state. Outside the NFT, on the beach underneath the festival pier, someone had set up a rave: vintage reggae blasting out over the river, people feeding a bonfire with pallets. I wondered if Joe had put me in a trance.

On one level the film is contrasting the etiquette of polite courtship with the animalistic nature of sexuality, but to try and put a unified meaning on it does not do it justice.

I woke up still thinking about the film, remembering details which resonated between the two halves, like the odd scene towards the end of the first part where the lovers lick each other’s hands. At the start of the film, a group of soldiers find a body, which we don’t see – was this the soldier of the second part? Shortly after we see a naked man running across the forest – the ghost/spirit? The body is wrapped up, a character comments on the body shifting as the spirit is released. The resonances between the two halves continued to haunt me, until blasted away by…

Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9 is an even more difficult piece to describe. I’m not even sure it is a film, although it is much too expansive to be called video art. Barney talks about “narrative sculpture” but whilst there are actions and things happening, it has no plot as such. Perhaps its best considered as a manifestation in video form of Barney’s ongoing Drawing Restraint series (see Richard Dorment’s comments, again in A Disappearing Number.) In the course of the piece, various things are made, cut up or dissolved, remade, often in the form of whales. There is much use of petroleum jelly (to remind myself of Dorment’s interpretation – “for [Barney], what is valuable in art is not so much the finished product as the tension between the desire to create and the discipline required to funnel that desire into the making of art. This is why petroleum jelly is such an important symbolic material for Barney. Being formless, it can be heated or cooled, shaped and transformed, restrained in a mould or allowed to flow free like molten lava.”

The ‘film’ is set on board a Japanese whaling ship. Onto the ship come two “Occidental Guests”, Barney and (his real time partner) Bjork. After undergoing grooming, dressing and tea rituals fusing Japanese tradition with something marine and sea-salty, they embrace and proceed to cut each other up and are remade into whales.

Knowing what (little) I do about Barney, there is much more going on than this, but I suspect it will take me some time and further research to get to the bottom of it.

For a long film, with many slow moving scenes which defy immediate understanding, it was surprisingly watchable. Although many of the actions involved were not immediately yielding of meaning, nonetheless it had a conviction and a kind of forward propulsion which kept me going.

Of course the soundtrack by Bjork was wonderful, but I already knew that having bought it a few years ago when it first came out.

Before DR9, I caught the trailor for Atonement. There was a time when the trailers were the best bit, but this trailer left me feeling utterly contemptuous. The fast cutting and constant manipulative sweeping and soaring (and clichéd) strings of the soundtrack repulsed me for their blatant, unashamed manipulation of emotion. It’s as corny and fake as Yentob’s nodding to interviewees that he has never met, doctored Reuters photos, phone ins that you can never win etc etc, - abusive manipulative spin. More and more I feel that we live in a time when our emotions are being blatantly exploited, in advertising/retail, in language, in politics, in print, on tv and in the cinema. I keep going back to that Rucker quote about reinforcing the myth of consensus reality. We must stand up for ourselves, people! The revolution will not be televised!

Art has the power to move us, to transport us, as LSO/Kissin did to me, as Tropical Malady did to me, to a place that is not defined, that is elusive, difficult, contradictory, stimulating, confusing. This is for me becoming the standard by which I judge the things I do, see and create.

The KAOS Dream (A Midsummer Night's Dream) - Arts Depot - Finchley

Heading up the road to the Arts Depot see this “adaptation” of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by KAOS Theatre, renamed The Kaos Dream, set in an “urban underworld of strip-clubs, pimps and pole-dancing”, I reckoned that it was either going to be very good or very bad. Or as the heroine of Angela Carter’s Shakespeare-infused masterpiece “Wise Children” puts it, “hope for the best, expect the worst.”



Well, not only did I thoroughly enjoy this production, but I thought it was touched with genius.

The “adaption” took the form of heavily editing the text rather than re-writing it, and although in principle I am not a great fan of cutting down the great man’s work, at the same time I was relieved not to have to face three hours of Bottom’s tedious rehearsals for the grand finale etc etc.

If you are going to set a play, especially Shakespeare, in a time or place other than its natural one, then there has to be some reason, it has to illuminate some aspect of the work, not merely be a gimmick to get the punters though the door or to try and make a play more “relevant”. And perhaps against expectation, this really worked. There is a dark side to many of Shakespeare’s comedies – bad things often happen. If not exactly killing, the gods certainly put the characters through the mill for their sport. They are comedies in the sense that the resolutions at the end are happy, rather than tragic. The seedy East End strip pub setting brought out a sinister edge to the play (but without falling into the clichéd tropes of Eastenders and Brit Gangsta flicks) at the same time as fitting in nicely with the bawdy aspects of the play. It was in parts gloriously and shambolically filthy. Another touch of genius was to make the fairy queen, yes, a dragged-up fairy queen. And it did that rarest of things with a Shakespeare comedy, it made it funny.

Of course there were flaws, some of the acting a bit too camp, the stage set a bit wobbly in places, the grotesque rectum of the arse (rather than ass) placed on Bottom’s head, but I think that what this showed is that if you do something with real gusto, if the decisions made as to how the stage a play are backed up by its contents, if you entertain an audience, they will forgive the rough edges.

I couldn’t help feeling that what I was watching was in many ways a more authentic experience of Shakespeare than the prim and proper stagings of the RSC or at the Globe. Contrast for example the ultimately disappointing Indian version of a Midsummer Night’s Dream earlier this year at the Roundhouse (http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2007/03/sore-bottom-funny-bottom.html) where the production values seemed to be grafted on rather than shed light onto the play.

Looking again at that earlier review, I see that the production was also trounced by something at the Arts Depot. Which only makes me more angry about the disgraceful state of play at the AD. The audience for The KAOS Dream was woefully thin (and I’m not talking about waist size). I am on their mailing and emailing list but got no flyers about the play. In fact, I haven’t had any literature from them for ages. And if it’s a 90 minute production, why start at 7.30, a difficult time for anyone working in town or who needs to sort out babysitters, when they could easily have started at 8? And the play having finished at 9, we wanted to stay and have a drink there, but the bar was shutting 15 minutes after the end of the show. And as we discovered, this part of Finchley is hardy overflowing with sophisticated wineries of the type where the members of the Latte Days’ salon can sit in the comfort they/we require at their/my age and discuss important issues of the day without the fear of being knifed by some feral dope-smoking adidas wearing ASBOnik. Shame on you, Arts Depot.

London Symphony Orchestra – Barbican - 27 September 2007

My current explorations into the world of classical music were partly inspired by my trip to the Barbican some time ago to see the Icelandic production of Peer Gynt when I was taken by the excitement of the audience heading into the Barbican Hall to see a solo piano rectital by Evgeny Kissin (see http://robingrebsonsguidefortheperplexed.blogspot.com/2007/06/maurizio-pollini-barbican.html). I researched Kissin and was rather taken by his extravagant bouffant, and clear signs of crazed genius. At two he was playing by ear, by 12 he was performing Chopin’s Piano Concertos in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory with the Moscow State Philharmonic. Oh and did I mention his hair?






Kissin wasn’t lined up for any more solo recitals, so I booked this concert instead.

It was a game of two halves.

The first half featured Kissin with the LSO (conducted by Sir Colin Davis) performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3. I have to say, I was blown away. It did something to me, the way only music can – my brain seemed to expand beyond the confines of my skull. The music took me somewhere physically and mentally. I felt very trippy. It was achingly, almost unbearably, wonderful.

In the second half, piano, Kissin and hair were gone, and we had the LSO performing Beethoven’s Symphony No 3 (‘Eroica’). I didn’t really enjoy it. I missed the contrast of the piano with the strings, and the lack of a soloist gave me nothing to focus on. I was missin’ Kissin. Whereas in the first half there seemed to be an abundance of tunes (for the first time I started to see how pop music has sampled and expanded so many melodies from the classical canon), in the second half there seemed to be no tunes, just stabbing phrases. I couldn’t find a hook to hang my concentration on. And the symphony was very long. The last movement had some drama, but overall I was hanging in a bit there. Sir Colin shook his big grey hair about as best he could, but it didn’t have the follicle excitement of Kissin’s coiffure.

The audience didn’t seem quite as funky as on at that Peer Gynt night: lots of buffers in musty pin stripes; some dressy women, including a few designer-clad Russians, but generally a bit older and uninteresting.

As Meatloaf put it, you took the words right out of my mouth; must have been when I was Kissin you.

Complicite - A Disappearing Number - Barbican

First and Second: two warnings.

1. This review contains plot spoilers. But nothing is quite as spoilt as the plot of this show.

2. Maths. Not a lot of people know that I got an A in my Pure Mathematics with Statistics A level, back in the days when A levels meant something. At school they wanted me to do a maths degree. In a funny kind of way I wish I had. I have been thinking a lot about maths of late. When I was a kid, I got into a book called The Joy of Numbers by an Indian maths genius called Shakuntali Devi. I’ve been re-reading it of late, working on developing a character who has an intimate relationship with numbers. It works into a lot of ideas I’ve become curious about, like symmetry, chance and coincidence, the appearance of mathematical sequences in nature, string theory and quantum physics, which as things stand lead to the extraordinary conclusions that matter can be in two different places at the same time, the existence of parallel universes, and that time, rather than being linear as we take it to be, with distinct past present and future, is, as Doctor Who put it, “wibbly wobbly”, that everything is taking place at the same time, all the time.

Or as TS Eliot put it in Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

I am not the only one following this path. The new age fraternity have leapt on this area and fused it into their own belief systems: for example saying that this wibbly wobbly concept of time is in effect the same as that of Native Americans and Aborigines, although this is disputed by those who have studied those cultures.

All of which is a round about way of saying that I came to this play with a certain amount of knowledge which would not be shared by most of the audience. And despite what I thought was lukewarm applause, all those around me were saying how fantastic they thought the play was. I didn’t. I thought it was fundamentally, artistically, flawed. And I found this deeply worrying. Because in many ways the flaws were failures to find solutions to the problem of making art out of this stuff, problems I am wrestling with as well. I was hoping for inspiration, but came away troubled.

The key issue for plays (or any art) like this is how to make ideas led art, rather than narrative or character driven art. The starting point for Complicite was the “real life” relationship prior to WWI between Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy and a self-taught maths genius in Madras called Srinivasa Ramanujan. But the majority of the play was based around a fictitious modern day relationship between (guess what) a maths lecturer and her soon to be husband (of course of Indian extraction) who did something in the futures market, oh and there was a string theory chap who the husband meets on a plane to India – characters entirely concocted to solve the problem of how you explain the maths to the audience. So we had maths lectures from the wife, and the string theorist explaining how some of Ramanujan’s theories turned out to support or be supported by string theory. This might have worked, were it not so obvious that the characters were foils for their speeches, having no credibility as characters in their own rights. So as bad things happen to the wife, a miscarriage, and ultimately an early death, you do not feel that they have grown organically from the plot, you feel emotionless. It is too blatant that the play is gratuitous in manipulating your emotions.

This is especially annoying as in the relationship between Hardy and Ramanujan offers great material. Hardy considered his collaboration with Ramanujan as the “one romantic incident” of his life (quoting the programme) but whether platonic, sexual, intellectual or whatever, this does not come across in the play.

The narrative weaves shards of the Hardy/Ramanujan and husband/wife string theorist narratives together, neither following chronological order – the point being to demonstrate within the fabric of the piece the idea of time present time past time future. This was more like the sort of approach I am advocating for art after quantum physics, but I was underwhelmed by the execution. For example the sequence where the deaths of Ramanujan, Hardy and the wife follow one after another seemed contrived. Too often the shards of narrative failed to coalesce or resonate with each other. It felt as though the company was searching for a key to unlock the material and give it shape, but that the key remained elusive.

And it didn’t help that the depiction of India and the Indian diaspora was so clichéd. The gratuitous arms in the air dance sequence. The tabla player on the side of the stage, when the rest of the music is recorded. And did they really do that conversation? The one where an Anglo Indian woman is asked where she comes from and she says London and he says no before that and she says Ealing?

It is no co-incidence that this fractured narrative technique is one which all significant narrative art is struggling with at the moment – it is the necessary consequence of the conversion of (a) the modernist (and all the stuff that came after it) dismantling of the “realist” art form, and (b) the fundamentally altered conception we now have of “life the universe and everything” post quantum physics (and my doesn’t that Eliot quotation seem prophetic!) So we have the multiple strands of films like The Fountain, and Pan’s Labyrinth, or the extraordinary INLAND EMPIRE which is designed out of David Lynch’s Maharishi / Transcendental Meditation philosophy that everything is connected because it comes from the oneness of (un?)consciousness. In theatre we have Faust, the (coming soon) Masque of the Red Death, the Wonderful World of Dissocia, all riffing on fragmentation, multiple colliding parallel narratives, the uncertainty of consciousness and psychology and (and this should in some ways have been a (c) above) the fragmentation of society. And although the linear structure is abandoned, they work in a way which still produces a sense of pattern. Which this show should have done, given one of the key quotes from Hardy: “Mathematicians are only makers of patterns, like poets or painters.”

This is maybe the fundamental flaw in the production, the failure to find a satisfactory pattern to its structure, one that feels organic, and natural, as maths is, rather than contrived.

Which is not to say that there weren’t great ideas lurking here. The fact that the husband works in “futures” is never explored, save for a great line that he believes that if he says something it is much more likely to come true (cf Auster – Oracle Nights and the Music of Chance). The “numbers are all around us” stuff is good too, the digital clock, the computer code projections, although there is quite a lot made about ‘phone numbers which gets a bit tiresome.

Back to reality. You will have noticed I only got as far as films and plays 3 paragraphs ago. Well at the start of the play something terrible happens. The string theorist tells us that nothing we see on stage is real. They are only actors. The set is just a set. Only the maths is real. And the tablas. So far so modernist, although in my view the play never recovers, or more to the point I never recovered my suspension of disbelief; I just didn’t believe the characters. Why you might be thinking am I carrying on so? Because I believe that this issue (reality) is fundamental to what is going on at the moment in all narrative artforms (fiction, film and theatre), fundamental to the book I am trying to write, fundamental to the explosive arguments which are inevitable coming to a Latte Days Book Group near you sometime soon. The realist form is dormant, very possible dead. Because realism doesn’t reflect reality, or should that be realities. The genre of literary fiction has played itself out. It doesn’t work anymore.

That’s why literary fiction has become more about writerly style – eg John Banville’s Booker Prize winning “The Sea” , a book which takes the “show not tell” obsession of the objective correlative to an ultimate position. The phrase objective correlative was, ironically, perhaps, coined by TS Eliot. He said that the only way of “expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding…a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.” In The Sea what happens is that every inanimate object, every piece of clothing, every blade of grass, every grain of sand on that damned beach the narrator is obsessed with, is animated with meaning, to express the interior psychological condition of the narrator. All the inanimate objects are animated, but the problem is that the characters themselves are totally inanimate. Of course I may be doing Banville a disservice, in that I can conceive of a counter argument that the tension between the animated inanimate and the inanimate characters is deliberate, creating an internal critique of the characters and the objective correlative and the genre of literary fiction. But my gut instinct is not.

Another technique that literary fiction has adopted is to try to head off the reality problem by writing about stuff which is really important, like Darfur (I am thinking of Dave Eggers “What is the What”). They make a pre-emptive strike against the argument that they are redundant as fiction because of the worthiness of the subject matter. I admit I am straying into dangerous territory here, in that I don’t read this type of work, a priori because I have already dismissed it, so I can’t give specific evidence other than the fact that I have no interest in it. My gut feeling though is that it is reportage, journalism or fact dressed up as fiction. I have read some Eggers and he is a terrific writer, but for me books like this inhabits the same territory as docu-dramas; I cannot conceive that it can get away from the fundamental problem that whatever the factual background is it has to be shoe-horned into the realist genre, by artificial plot devices and neat narrative tricks.

And don’t get me started on all those books about three generations of lesbian sisters growing up in a remote treehouse on an island somewhere foreign”

Compare and contrast the energy and excitement of the postmodern none-literary scene. The explosion of graphic novels where words and pictures combine, contradict, resonate, vibrate. Or that very hard to label thing that is a kind of fusion of magic realism and postmodernism – Murdoch, Carter, Auster, and Murakami to name but four, but much much more is coming – Steven Hall’s “The Raw Shark Texts” or Scarlett Thomas’ “The End of Mister Y”, wherein narratives are constantly remixed, and genres mashed-up. Weird Fiction some people have called it. Toby Litt tried to coin the phrase “Slipstream”. But Scarlett Thomas prefers “transrealism” and pointed me and other attendess at her book launch to Rudy Rucker’s superb “A Transrealist Manifesto” (get it at http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/transrealistmanifesto.pdf). Here are the first three paras (though it is worth reading the whole thing):

“In this piece I would like to advocate a style of SF-writing that I call Transrealism. Transrealism is not so much a type of SF as it is a type of avant-garde literature. I feel that Transrealism is the only valid approach to literature at this point in history.

The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF — time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc. — are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded.

The characters should be based on actual people. What makes standard genre fiction so insipid is that the characters are so obviously puppets of the author’s will. Actions become predictable, and in dialogue it is difficult to tell which character is supposed to be talking. In real life, the people you meet almost never say what you want or expect them to. From long and bruising contact, you carry simulations of your acquaintances around in your head. These simulations are imposed on you from without; they do not react to imagined situations as you might desire. By letting these simulations run your characters, you can avoid turning out mechanical wish-fulfillments. It is essential that the characters be in some sense out of control, as are real people — for what can anyone learn by reading about made-up people?”

And this is what he says about form:

“The Transrealist artist cannot predict the finished form of his or her work. The Transrealist novel grows organically, like life itself. The author can only choose characters and setting, introduce this or that particular fantastic element, and aim for certain key scenes. Ideally, a Transrealist novel is written in obscurity, and without an outline. If the author knows precisely how his or her book will develop, then the reader will divine this. A predictable book is of no interest. Nevertheless, the book must be coherent. Granted, life does not often make sense. But people will not read a book which has no plot. And a book with no readers is not a fully effective work of art. A successful novel of any sort should drag the reader through it. How is it possible to write such a book without an outline?”

And maybe this is the crux of the matter:

“Transrealism is a revolutionary art-form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a “normal person.”

There are no normal people — just look at your relatives, the people that you are in a position to know best. They’re all weird at some level below the surface. Yet conventional fiction very commonly shows us normal people in a normal world. As long as you labor under the feeling that you are the only weirdo, then you feel weak and apologetic. You’re eager to go along with the establishment, and a bit frightened to make waves — lest you be found out. Actual people are weird and unpredictable, this is why it is so important to use them as characters instead of the impossibly good and bad paperdolls of mass-culture”.

And lets face it, its not just people that are weird, the universe(s) is/ are. Rucker was writing in 1983 and we all know things have gotten a damn sight more weird since then. Look at quantum physics. Look at the internet and the way it has screwed up so many people’s ability to differentiate truth from fiction, although this phrase is of course loaded with prejudgement, for if we have learnt anything from the parlous state of the world today, it is that one person’s reality is very different from another person’s.

At the heart of A Disappearing Number lies a nexus of anxiety about how to mathematical weirdness and the weird nature of its universes, without losing the audience. It adopts a number of strategies. For example there is much use of projections and an ever fidgeting stage set to try and introduce an overreaching aesthetic to the play. But, spectacular and sometimes lovely though the visuals were, they again seemed to be a gratuitous layer that didn’t successfully integrate themselves into other aspects of the play. At one point I was thinking to myself how the visuals were full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, when there was a loud, unexplained, and deliberate bang. I could see no purpose to this other than to wake up any one who had nodded off what with all the maths stiff that was going on. If this was its purpose, it succeeded, judging by the number of people who jumped out of their seats.

And the irony of all this is that the maths was the best part of A Disappearing Number. I had no trouble following it (there were some deliberately obtuse equations for easy laughs). What I resented was the usual conduit of communication – ie mock lectures, and stilted conversations. In one section, the maths was acted, eg possible divisions of 4 represented by movement of an actresses two legs and two shoes, and this was so much effective.

Towards the end of the play we learnt that mathematicians have recently got excited that Ramanujan’s last scribblings may hold the key to unlocking the holy grail of physics, the grand universal theory of everything from the very smallest to the very largest. And I wonder whether there is a grand universal theory to this piece. I think there is, namely that narrative art is about communication, and that contemporary narrative art is suffering from acute anxiety as to how to achieve this, and art being a mirror held up to nature, we are riddled with anxiety about communication, about language, about ideas. Looking back at Eliot’s definition of the objective correlative, I still think that what he said holds true, and that the challenge of contemporary art is to wholeheartedly commit to his formula, not holding back, not dumbing down, trusting the audience or reader, not feeling the need to interrupt the art with its own explanation. Coming soon to London is an artist who does just that, Matthew Barney. He makes art entirely constructed from his own private system of symbols and meanings. No concession is made to explaining itself within the artwork. He picks up the mantel from Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Joyce’s “Ulysses” and “Finnegans Wake” – imagine trying to read those without having access to the copious footnotes that accompany the texts, and you get somewhere close to it. His films and gallery installations make David Lynch’s work seem entirely limpid (dictionary definition: “1. characterized by transparent clearness; 2. easily intelligible; clear; 3 calm and untroubled; serene) by comparision. Luckily we have excellent interpreters like Richard Dormant (writing unfortunately in the Daily Telegraph). Here’s an extract (read the full article at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/09/18/babarney118.xml) :

“Working in the North gallery, the high ceilinged central space under the cupola, and wearing a harness around his waist and thighs, Barney first attached himself via a flexible elastic cord to two heavy oil drums filled with petroleum jelly (Vaseline) on the floor. He then climbed each of the four gallery walls, on each ascent making a drawing in the triangular spandrels in the corners under the ceiling.

Strapped together to increase their weight, the drums of Vaseline acted like an anchor, pulling him back towards the floor, forcing him to ever greater exertion because the higher he climbed, the more the resistance increased.

What is hard to convey in words is the sheer physical strength and mental focus required for each ascent. Not only are the cleats or footholds embedded in the walls for the climb very small, but once at the top he had to work with one hand, using a large piece of graphite in a long bamboo holder to reach the top of each spandrel.

As if that weren't difficult enough, the length of time he is able to work before becoming exhausted is limited. Throughout, I could hear him panting and grunting, winded with the effort required to stay at ceiling height long enough to complete a drawing while simultaneously struggling against the tremendous force pulling him backwards. In the rest periods between each ascent his body language was just like a top athlete's. He hunched his shoulders, shifted his weight from one foot to another, and paced back and forth, concentrating on what he had to do next.

Through the extreme physical exertion used in making these drawings, Barney is here making an analogy between the great artist at work and the biological phenomenon of hypertrophy whereby weightlifters and athletes make their muscles grow bigger by placing them against resistance. Just as a muscle is weak until it meets an external force, so too at its highest level art needs to encounter resistance or constraint if it is not to become facile.

This is why Picasso always fought against his own facility as a draughtsman and why other artists have endured extreme physical constraints to create some of the greatest works of art – just think of Michelangelo lying flat on his back for years to paint the Sistine Ceiling.

And so, at one level, the first part of Drawing Restraint 16 is a symbolic enactment of the process of artistic creation. For Barney, the making of form begins with what he calls "Situation", a state in which raw energy is unstructured and lacking in direction. This is symbolised by the petroleum jelly.

In the second stage of creation, which Barney names "Condition", the artist uses discipline and restraint to channel and give structure to that energy. This is the climb. Finally, in the "Production" stage of the creative process, form begins to emerge. This is the drawings in the spandrels.

For him, what is valuable in art is not so much the finished product as the tension between the desire to create and the discipline required to funnel that desire into the making of art. This is why petroleum jelly is such an important symbolic material for Barney. Being formless, it can be heated or cooled, shaped and transformed, restrained in a mould or allowed to flow free like molten lava. The elastic tether is an umbilical cord that ties the artist to the formless and often destructive chaos of pre-creation.”

What is going on here is classic post-modernism – art about making art, but the idea is fused totally with the art itself, rather than sitting apart from it, the adoption of a private mythological system used without compromise. The exhibition is on at The Serpentine Gallery very soon, with related cinema showings of Drawing Restraint 9, a 3 hour plus film of slow, total, visual symbolism. I will let you know whether I love or loathe.

You should know that Barney’s most famous work is a series of films called the Cremaster Cycle. They are named after the cremaster muscles which cover the testis, their function is to raise and lower the scrotum in order to regulate the temperature of the testis and promote spermatogenesis. No doubt his detractors deride his work as a load of old bollocks.

So there you have it. I thought that A Disappearing Number was a flawed piece of work. I am troubled, because what it tried to be was in some ways very close to my own work, and its flaws are those I am trying to and so far failing to overcome. So this is far from being a malicious review, I am just trying to work through what I think, develop my wn theory of what I want my work to be, to identify the pitfalls. Writing this was easy, what is hard is turning the ideas into functioning art, finding the formula in Eliot’s terms.

In summation: A Disappearing Number, a play about maths which failed to add up to more than the sum of its parts.