First up was For Your Consideration, from the Spinal Tap/ Mighty Wind/Best in Show people. You won’t believe me based on what I am going to tell you, but it really was a mighty let down - not enough decent gags, and the plot sagged due to the lack of impetus towards a big finale such as the dog show in Best in Show. The film mockumented the trials and tribulations of the cast and crew of a low budget film: “Home for Purim”; about the dysfunctional Pischer family, which picks up some Oscar buzz. Best line, and one of the greatest lines in the history of cinema, is the director shouting something like “this time I want an extreme close-up on the kugel”. See, you are laughing already, and the film within the film is fantastically silly, but that makes up about ten minutes of it. Not enough. Still for those who worry more about Jewish continuity than artistic values, I did find myself surprisingly nostalgic for a good old family Purim.
To reset myself for the second movie, I toddled over to the Wallace Collection. I’ve been meaning to go there for donkeys years (how long is a donkeys?). It is the sort of stuff that makes me feel like a bull in a china shop (would a donkey fare better?) – lots of porcelain and ceramics and delicate artefacts, and a fine collection of Roccoccocco (CocoRosieCleoRoccos?) painting. Being a plebeian Northerner it wasn’t really the sort of art / objet d’art that I can appreciate, although it was pretty mindblowing, as well as pretty and mindblowing. In particular there was an exhibition of work by maiolica (yeah, a type of pottery) painter Francesco Xanto Avelli (c.1486-c.1542), very lovely. Mostly fine scenes of classical mythology, but my favourite was one called something like “Dick Head” (I kid you not) which was a face made up of about thirty cocks, including one with a spectacular Prince Albert. Imaging eating your supper off that!
I also took in Brian Eno’s installation “77 million paintings” at Selfridges (see picture, left), which comprised self-generating art projected onto plasma screens with a nice ambient soundtrack, set in a darkened room mostly filled with snoozing office workers. I didn’t quite manage to reach a chilled out enough state. As Eno would say, “what are the sections sections of? Imagine a caterpillar moving.”Then off to the second part of the double header – My Name is Albert Ayler at the ICA. It was a sell out in the small cinema, and my goodnees there were some smelly people there – it smelt liked boiled tramp. Ayler (check out http://www.myspace.com/albertayler) was the most out there of the out there free jazzers of the 1960s, dying sadly young at the age of 34 (did he fall or was he pushed?) by drowning in New York. The film was intense, meditative, peopled by weird and wonderful characters. It left many more questions than answers – one suspects that Ayler had many demons which the film chose not to explore, and the question remains as to whether he was a genius or a bluffer.
Meanwhile big Ol has come down after the Juana Molina gig.
Talking of which, check out this genius animated blog with interview and concert footage of the lovely Juana: http://www.woebot.tv/
Toodlepip.
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