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!
Friday, November 30, 2007
Thursday, November 22, 2007
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!
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!
Tuesday, November 06, 2007
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.
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.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
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.
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.
Saturday, November 03, 2007
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 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 StracheyThe 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 eveningIn 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.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
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.
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.
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