Remembrance of Things Past

Just been to see ‘Patience (After Sebald)’ a documentary based on the W.G.Sebald’s  ‘The Rings of Saturn.

I’d like to say it does the book justice but unfortunately it doesn’t.

Mind you that would be hard because ‘The Rings of Saturn’ is a masterpiece and extraordinary genre twister that is part travel book, part memoir, part biography and part fiction.

Ostensibly it’s a book about a man’s walking tour of East Anglia, the flat landscape of South-Eastern England which most closely resembles Holland.

As he walks he observes landmarks and places, which trigger some seemingly unrelated digressions. Our traveler is reminded of everything from the last days of the imperial Chinese empire to Joseph Conrad’s childhood exile in Siberia to an unrequited romance between two nineteenth century poets.

All the while the book intersperses grainy black and white pictures found or taken by Sebald himself during his trip, making this strange literary journey stranger still.

Soon it becomes apparent that there is nothing random about the authors ‘detours’. In fact they are the heart of the story, telling us of the endless tragedy and barbaric cruelty that litters human history. A fact we are all to keen to forget.

This is rather downbeat reality is offset by the amazing grace of the writing. It’s translated from German but Sebald, who lived much of his life in England, closely supervised the superb translation.

Of course, the elephant in the room is the holocaust, which is never once mentioned in the book but is somehow omnipresent.

Sebald was of that German generation who spent their childhood in the aftermath of the Second World War and grew up with what he describes as ‘a conspiracy of silence’ around it.

In books like ‘The Rings of Saturn’ he performs a kind of act of remembrance for tragedies passed, reminding us of the reality of human history in the most engaging and moving way possible.

William Christenberry: Southern Man.

If you’re a fan of William Eggleston, my guess is you’re going to like William Christenberry’s photographs.

They feature images of decaying buildings and signs in and around Hale County, Alabama, which was also the place where Walker Evans took his pictures of dirt-poor farming families during the Great depression.

Indeed Evans accompanied Christenberry on one of his trips to the county in 1973, the only time he ever returned to the area since 1936.

The images that Christenberry takes with a large format camera have a quiet beauty to them and speak of the inevitable passing of time and it’s ability to slowly take away the familiar objects of our youth.

Bird Man

They say obsessive compulsive is a personality disorder. I beg to differ. People who obsess about certain subjects often produce some stunning results.

Jean Luc Mylayne is one such person. The French photographer has taken pictures of nothing but birds for 30 years, often using magnificently expensive lenses for the purpose.

The results are fascinating, not least because Mylayne was originally trained as a painter and brings a colorists eye to his wonderful shots.

 

 

 

Child of God

 

I just tore through Cormac McCarthy’s ‘Child of God’. I can’t think of the last time I stayed up to finish a book, let alone read it in one sitting.

It’s a deeply disturbing portrait of a serial killer, Lester Ballard, that aims to make him a sympathetic character while in no way making us feel any less for his victims.

Often in books and films when an author or director wants us to feel for a murderous protagonist they will make those he kills unlikeable or flawed.

McCarthy doesn’t let himself off that easy. His victims are innocents who don’t deserve the cruelty and barbarity inflicted on them by Ballard. Yet Ballard is strangely innocent too.

He is lonely, ugly, stupid and uneducated but still has burning desire to relate to another human being. Unfortunately, the only humans that want to stick around are the corpses of those he’s murdered.

It’s not as if he is the only cruel thing in this bleak southern landscape. In one of the most horrific scene in the book, he gives an idiot child a robin. This act of kindness results in the child biting off the legs of the bird in order to stop it leaving him.

Anyone hoping to rely upon the kindness of strangers in this world will be waiting a hell of a long time.

It will come as no surprise that the author of ‘The Road’ should create such a bleak place. Nor should it come as any surprise that the book is beautifully written. Not in an overly elaborate or showy way but with economy and grace of a master storyteller.

The description of Ballard’s death is particularly poignant. It’s so matter of fact it’s almost as if an animal has died rather than a man.

A minor masterpiece by a major literary force of nature.

Human

Once again another terrific photographer has somehow slipped under my radar.

Mohammadreza Mirzaei is based in Tehran and has done a wonderful series of images that takes minimalism to an extreme

Called ‘Humans’ and released in 2006 they have been praised by no less than genius landscape photographer Michael Kenna, who wrote the forward to Mirzaei’s book in which he says the following,

‘Mr. Mirzaei, with reserved sensibility, kindly provides us with an opportunity to quietly reflect and consider the reasons for our existence. It is a worthy subject to ponder, and this is a worthy group of photographs’

I wholeheartedly concur. The courage to take an extreme distance from his subjects and show their tiny insignificant frames trying to live life, in no way detracts from their humanity. If anything we feel more pathos for these miniscule figures, who like insects, threaten to disappear before our eyes.

Above all though it’s a very neat and distinctive look and feel that I’ve not really seen before.

Even better I see from his Wiki entry that Mirzaei was born in 1986, which means we could have many more great photos to look forward too in the coming years from this talented Iranian.

 

 

Puddle Perspective

What better way to look at London than through a puddle? The Kingdom of Rains suits it. As an ex-resident I know this only too well.

Gavin Hammond has come up with a series based on this fiendishly simple idea. It just goes to show that if you just stick to a theme, over time you can put together some nice images.

It strikes me as a great idea for a photo safari. Provided you live in London or maybe Seattle.

Animal Lover

Ryan McGinley’s “Fawn (Fuchsia),” 2012.

Not content with having one show opening in New York, Ryan McGinley has two at Team Gallery. One ‘Grids’ features images taken at music festivals all over the world. While the other ’Animals’, continues his interest in pairing critters with nude models. Only this time the emphasis is more on the animals.

“Barn Owl (Pale Gold)”

“Lemur (Lilac)”

As usual there’s something memorable about what he does, which feels like a mix of nature, fashion, portrait and documentary photography. Perhaps it’s the fact that his pictures are so hard to classify that makes them interesting. It’s that whole thing of playing with/mixing genre’s to create something wholly new.

I found an interesting interview with him in the New York Times where he said it takes a look an image and thinks ‘Would this be a good album cover?’ which makes total sense when you look at a lot of what he does, from his series on Morrissey to the ‘Moonmilk’ images of a couple of years ago which I love and include here.

Tuol Sleng Portraits

Take a look at these images.

If you’ve never seen them before what do you think is going on? Mug shots maybe or perhaps communist area portraits from some far away Asian country back in the day.

Well they are portraits of prisoners at Tuol Sleng Prison in Cambodia taken just before the people where executed by the Khmer Rouge.

There’s something utterly compelling about them once you know this.

There’s the disturbing nature of how many of the images are so well composed, as if the photographer was more interested in framing than humanity. But then again what else could they do? The chances of saving the condemned must have been nil at this point.

Then there are the looks on the faces. Less a fear than a blank resignation, as if they can’t quite believe what is happening to them. Or believe it only to well and have just given up.

Pictures of young mothers still holding their babies and young boys too young to understand what death means are particularly harrowing.

I saw them many years ago while doing a photo class at ICP in NYC and just came across them today on the very excellent ‘American Suburbia X’ site.

I think they are among the most powerful images I’ve ever seen and a warning to the world of what happens when fanaticism and ideology run wild.

Molto Bella

Carlo Mollino was a show off. Not content with being a brilliant architect he was also a highly talented set designer, furniture maker, race car driver and skier. He also very generously took time off from his busy schedule to create these porno Polaroids, which in the mind of many men at least are his highest achievement

Ciao Carlo.

 

 

 

 

The Whitney Biennial: Art Overdose

Just what is the point of the modern artist? Such an individual has to compete with a multitude of media, from the Internet to film and appear relevant to our lives. All while using a medium, the art gallery, that seems often to be as much fun as a church.

The Whitney’s Biennial attempts to shake us into viewing things in new ways be it through an animatronic boy or the use of an old magnetic liquid called Ferro fluid invented in the late sixties.

They try live video from Charles Atlas, test patterns courtesy of Lucy Raven and underground films from the late George Kuchar.

They even have an artist, Dawn Kasper, who makes part of the gallery her studio and produces work while we watch.

'This could be something if I let it', Dawn Kasper

And even though it all promotes thought and is obviously trying hard, none of it quite makes it for me.

This is partly because of the sheer scope of what we are trying to take in. Biennials by their very nature tend to be a loosely themed mish-mash of everything. They require us to think about documentary photography one minute and sculpture the next.

Trying to review each individual work is impossible and also a little unfair, as there’s no way we can really get to grips with even a small portion of the work.

Of everything I saw I was most intrigued by the Giselle Vienne’s animatronic boy, who engages in a creepy unsettling dialogue about evil with a hand puppet. Yet even this, while it provoked reaction and drew a crowd, somehow wasn’t quite there yet. After all we belong to a society brought up on amazing technical innovation and seeing something deliberately low-fi and expecting us to be deeply disturbed by it is a big ask.

I’m glad I went and I’ll go next year but the format of the Biennial makes it rather like a big music festival. Loads of acts but only 1 or 2 you actually want to see.

Kanaval

Released last year but only just coming to my attention recently Leah Gordon’s ‘Kanaval’ is a photography book worth checking out. Published by Soul Jazz, It features images from the streets of Haiti during Kanaval in the town of Jacmel.

 

It was picked by PDN as one of the best of the year and it’s easy to see why. The pictures are visceral rather than academic and the presentation is very lo-fi which suits the images.

The photos themselves are some of the most disturbing and exhilarating you’re likely to see. When you consider the brutality of Haiti’s history that is hardly surprising

Facing the Past

Every so often I come across an old fifties American film that I was previously unaware of that blows me away. Previous examples include such classics as ‘Night of the Hunter’ and the ‘Sweet Smell of Success’. ‘A Face in the Crowd’ is right up there with them. Directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulburg, the film is eerily prescient.

It’s the story of Lonesome Rhodes, a drifter who is recorded singing by a local radio station and becomes a national sensation in a matter of months. With his homespun wisdom and his just plain folks shtick, Lonesome makes people believe he is just like them.

Nothing could be further from the truth. He is an arrogant, egotistical individual that says of his audience ” This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep!”

Pretty soon he is not just content to have his own rating topping show. He wants to use his power to mould politician’s, maybe even one-day hold high office himself.

Remind you of anyone? If you thought of Glen Beck or Sarah Palin, congratulations you’re right in my headspace.

The film is a warning from the past to us in the present never to forget just how easily the incredibly confident and incredibly stupid entertainer can suddenly become our master.

Bon Iver, blue-eyed soul singer

I’ve been listening to the new Bon Iver album on and off for a couple of months now.

I wasn’t crazy about their first ‘Emma forever ago’ release but the second interests me because it feels like a riskier proposition.

Because in it Justin Vernon has revealed a hither too concealed side of him. Justin Vernon, the soul singer.

I note in an interview I read recently he named checked a Donny Hathaway track ‘Song for you’ and if you listen to some of the singing on this album, quiet, breathy, sensitive folk is swapped out for soul singer emotional breakdown with good effect. Just listen to Beth/rest to see what I mean.

Maybe Justin Vernon is as much Al Green as Eliot Smith/ Dylan.

Street Life

I find it fascinating the current revival of street photography courtesy of services like instagram. It’s a subject close to my heart as in the past I’ve been one of their number and probably will be again.

I note a couple of books are coming out featuring two old time street photographers who have been recently discovered – Vivian Maier and Fred Herzog.

Both were amateurs who spent years pounding the streets of their adopted cities; in Maier’s case Chicago, in Herzog’s case Vancouver.

They probably didn’t imagine anyone would consider their efforts worth looking at but there’s an incredible romance about an artist just laboring in obscurity that appeals to everyone. In the case of the street photographer they are literally getting nothing for doing it, so we know it comes from love. And love and obsession with a subject often lead to incredible beauty as their images show.

 

American Original

Just finished watching American: The Bill Hicks Story. As an aside, I always find it funny when figures who are seen as critical of America like Hicks, are pictured with large American flags as some kind of salve to right wing ‘Love it or leave it’ types

They should picture him grinning manically next to a burning flag, in my opinion

Now I’ve got this off my chest, I’ll turn my attention to this fascinating documentary. Fascinating not because of the way it is made but because of the drive and focus of its main protagonist, Mr. Hicks.

The guy was a force of nature, doing stand up from the age of 15 and getting into see Hollywood agents at the age of 19.

What comes through clearly from this film is that Hicks was extremely intelligent and insightful. More than just funny, he was a truth teller in the mould of Orwell, and Defoe. Perhaps this explains his popularity in my native land England. They immediately recognized a non-conformist thinker of their own ilk.

His remarks about how our institutions are failing because they are becoming irrelevant and we should just let them go, was something you’d expect to come out of the mouth of a Harvard professor not a mere stand up.

I also hadn’t realized just how badly Dennis Leary had ripped him off. It explains why Leary has done nothing of merit since Hicks died. No one around worth ripping off, I guess.

Suicide Song

Over the summer, I discovered the 1967 hit song ‘Ode to Billie Joe’ by Bobbie Gentry.

It won a Grammy for Gentry, one of the first female country singers to write her own material.

What is fascinating about this song is that it’s basically about a mother casually announcing at dinner that a friend of the family, Billie Joe McAllister, has killed himself by jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge. The daughter describes the complete non-reaction to this news around the dining table. People ‘pass around the black-eyed peas’ and talk about how his death is a ‘shame’. Through acutely observed descriptions of what people do and say, Gentry shows people struggling to come to terms with the death.

No clichéd ringing of hands and melodramatic laments for the nearly departed here. This is a thoroughly modern and brilliant depiction of how we often receive such news.

The song ends with the daughter standing on the very same bridge Billie Joe threw himself from dropping flowers into the water below, while the strings that back this deceptively simple ditty, eerily mimic their fall.

It just got me thinking if anyone was to try and make a song like that to day, with the aim of getting it to sell 3 million copies worldwide as Gentry’s song did, what chance would they stand?

The Great Unplayed

Every collection has got them; that box set of Mozart symphonies that we would ‘grow in to’, that bizarre late John Coltrane album that would ‘open our minds’, that whim purchase of Blood Sweat and Tears that we only brought because we liked the name, the Trojan Ska compilation that would show our ‘musical breadth’. I could go on.

We can have these artifacts sitting there on our hard drive gathering cyber dust or leaning against the wall at the back of our burgeoning vinyl collection.

Then one day, one album breaks free from its month’s, even years of neglect and we actually deign to play it.

Most of the time this reprieve is short lived and we soon discover exactly why we haven’t been playing it. A musical sixth sense that was telling us that what dwelt inside this album was something terrifyingly experimental or stupefyingly mundane.

Yet occasionally, just occasionally, we discover that we have made a heinous, unforgivable error.

Such is the case with Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse’s mighty fine ‘Dark Knight of the Soul.’. It’s awesome.

I hang my head in shame. 

Beard Love

While crate digging for vinyl over the last year, I’ve noticed I often pick up a reissue to note “ah yes….of course …. 4 men with beards’ 

This is not because I am mad but because ’4 men with beards’ is the label behind some of the more interesting vinyl re releases of recent times.

Be it Serge Gainsbourg and Bridgette Bardot’s  ’Bonnie and Clyde’, Fairport Convention’s ‘Unhalfbricking’, ‘Dusty in Memphis’ or Nina Simone’s ‘Here comes the sun’.

I’m interested to know how they got the rights to these records but I’m guessing for cheap from music companies who didn’t spot the vinyl trend coming.

Whatever the reason I’m grateful to these hirsute taste makers for their catalogue.

You can check out their site here.

http://www.forcedexposure.com/labels/4.men.with.beards.html

We need another hero

It’s been along time since I’ve come out of a film raving like a lunatic. Maybe it was the long brooding silence’s or the extreme violence or simply a man crush on Ryan Gosling (though his eyes are too close together) but Drive did that to me.

It has a superb array of performances from the aforementioned Gosling (doing a fine McQueen-ish turn) to Albert Brooks as an unlikely Jewish gangster. The superbly named Dane, Nicolas Winding Refn, also expertly directs it.

However, what really caught my attention was that its one of the few indie films that has a genuine hero at its heart.

Usually more intelligent fare tends to have an anti-hero like say the Tyler Durden character in ‘Fight Club’. Not so ‘Drive’, for though Gosling is a part time getaway driver he is extremely moral and has a definite sense of right and wrong. Indeed it’s worth noting that the characters in the film that don’t share this character trait end up dead.

Carey Mulligan, who seems at first miscast as the wife of a recently released convict, actually helps to define the films moral compass. She is someone that brings out our protective instinct, a damsel in distress if you will. This makes Gosling the Knight in shining amour, with his car as his steed.

It got me thinking that maybe we are entering an era when people once more need heroism. That in a time of mass fraud and corruption it’s no longer going to do to be morally ambivalent and cool. Today you have to stand for something.

Classic Schmassic

Like many I am the proud possessor of several Criterion Collection DVD’s. I was quite prepared to pay over the odds for the beautiful package design and extras.

Who could argue with a label that included such classics as ‘Peeping Tom’, ‘Days of Heaven’ and ‘Breathless’ in its back catalogue? Indeed if someone said classic cinema, Criterion is one word that would immediately spring to mind.

Then things went a bit pear shaped.

They started releasing films that were made a couple of years ago like ‘Benjamin Button’ and even last year like ‘Carlos’.

Now don’t get me wrong, both films are good, serviceable contemporary fare…but classics? Films that will stand the test of time? How could we possibly know? Maybe the people at Criterion possess a time machine that allows them to see that  ‘Benjamin Button’ will be the ‘Citizen Kane’ of its era but failing that I think including them just cheapens ‘the brand’.

Also it seems like a sales play, now that everyone has the back catalogue of French New Wave and Italian Neo-realism that they started off doing.

Even worse, because their DVD are so well packaged its going to encourage me to spend money I haven’t got on contemporary films as well as old ones. Maybe that C stands for something else other than Criterion…

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Mondo Danger Mouse

A couple of months ago I was re-acquainting myself with Ennio Morricone through the ‘Mondo Morricone’ compilation. Its pretty special stuff and has a melancholy and melodic beauty that you don’t here to often in soundtracks these days.

(Just reading that sentence back makes me realize the truth is you don’t get it many soundtracks of any period)

That’s why I find the Danger mouse and Daniele Luppi ‘Rome’ project fascinating.

Both are big fans of Italian soundtracks of the sixties and early seventies and have endeavored to do their own version with help from Jack White, Norah Jones and an assortment of other notables.

On first hearing it I felt it to be a reasonable stab but not something I wouldn’t revisit.

Now of course, I’m listening to it on a regular basis and loving it.

The signature tune of the soundtrack, a refrain that is repeated through out and called ‘Her Hollow Ways’ is very Morricone-esque but still retains something of Danger Mouse too.

I can’t get it out of my head. Hopefully I can now put it in yours.

Catvertising

Not content with ruling the internet, cats are now making a play for advertising……

Just Say Meth

They say shock tactics don’t work when persuading people to give up drugs. I’m sure they’re right. However shock tactics can lead to powerful, conceptual advertising. Unfortunately this not what has happened  in  these spots by Darren Aronofosky for Meth.

 

The problem is that they’re not telling me something I don’t already know about Meth addiction. So Meth can make you steal from your own family can it? No shit.

And it  can make you self-harm? There’s a surprise.

There must be other far more surprising pieces of information you can get out of this subject. Also if you’re going to do ‘real’ documentary-style spots, please go the extra mile to make them feel that way.

Finally, good public service spots come out of great strategic insights like the Anti-smoking work Crispin did a few years ago . The insight in this case was that kids like to feel rebellious and go against ‘the establishment” so make cigarette companies that evil corporate ‘man’ rather than a symbol of youthful rebellion.

 

A History of Edgar

The problem with Edgar is surprisingly not Leonardo DiCaprio. He’s actually very good as the FBI founder and chief. Though if J.Edgar was alive he’s be very flattered to see they’d chosen a pretty boy to play him, as the man had ‘a face like a bulldog chewing a wasp’, as we say in my homeland.

The issue I have with this generally engaging and serviceable film is that this story would be better told as a mini-series. There’s simply too much packed into a 2 and a bit hours and too much left out. Hoover was a fascinating and complex character but because we’re always lurching from one epoch to another we never get a chance to delve into the inner recesses of his mind. I was grateful to know that in his youth anarchists had attempted to blow up his boss. This helped explain his fierce anti-communism but I would have liked to have seen a whole film devoted to this because it’s new to me, as I’m sure it is to many in the audience.

Similarly the battle with gangsters and invention of the G-men was another topic to make a 2 hour film on, albeit one that I have kind of seen before in one guise or another.

The same could be said of his battle with the Kennedy’s and his relationship with Clyde Tollson. I’m not sure what the solution is, possibly  to make a film called ‘Young Edgar’ about his early days battling radicals. Or a film about the ‘Last Days of Edgar’ when Nixon came to power.

It reminds me of why a film like Frost /Nixon works better than Stone’s ‘Nixon’ biopic with Hopkins. One attempts to tell the life of a man, the other an episode in his life.

Candid Camera

Street photographers have a certain romance about them. A race of men and women who without any hope of financial gain just wander the city streets sneaking shots of unsuspecting passers by.

No one wants them to be doing what they are doing but some strange compulsion possesses them; the desire to capture that small seemingly unimportant moment that most people miss. The way children play, the way hair blows across a face, the way a man waits in a shop entrance, the way someone smokes a cigarette; all can be immortalized in a click .

Even stranger the work of these odd loner’s is often more lasting than that of all but the most famous fashion and portrait photographers For every Weston and Steichen and Penn is a Maeir, a Levitt and a Winogrand.

Clean Up New York. Or Else.

The recent Meth commercials by Darren Aronofosky got me thinking about other public service ads directed by A-list Hollywood directors. The best is undoubtedly this old Anti-littering spot from the late 80′s/early 90′s (I think) by none other than David Lynch

 

The Trip

 

Like last year’s ‘In the Loop’, ‘The Trip’ shows British comedy at it’s finest. Directed by the prolific Michael Winterbottom, it stars two Brit comedy favorites Steve Coogan, star of 24 Hour Party People and Rob Brydon, a welsh impressionist and comedian who is rather less known outside the sceptered isle.

The way I would describe it is like a British take on the movie ‘Sideways’. Rather than take a tour of Californian vineyards, our two protagonists take a tour of upmarket British eateries in the windswept North of England. Neither Brydon nor Coogan stray two far from their real life personas, which give the film a certain authenticity. Both exhibit professional rivalry and compete with each other continually to show their comedic skills, from who has the best Michael Caine impersonation to who has the best way of appreciating the landscape. Which is good news for the audience, as it makes the film very funny

 

Where’s the revolution?

At a time where you have Occupy Wall Street, mass unemployment and general disillusionment with society you’d think you’d also have the sound of rebellion. Young groups full of vim and vigor, screaming their displeasure with the powers that be. Then it occurred to me, actually those things only occur when the economy is good not bad. Think about it. The golden age of the 50’s saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, the consumer boom of the 60’s and 70’s saw The Rolling Stones and then The Clash

The early nineties tech boom on the West Coast saw Nirvana and Rage against the Machine.

Anytime there have been really severe downturns you tend to get Busby Berkeley musicals (Great Depression) Wham (early eighties recession) and Lady Gaga (now)

It seems all most people want to do when times are bad is escape to a good time.

Hating Unhate

Years ago Benetton, the Italian clothing firm used to run controversial ads. They started being in some way relevant to the product. Benneton sold bright colored clothing and the ads reflected a loose colors theme. For example, one campaign featured The Queen retouched to look like she came from African descent, another a Chinese Pope Jean Paul.

I could logically work back the connection from there, ‘Ok yes… United Colors of Benneton… we’re all the same under the skin… bringing people of different races and colors together …” I’m sure the campaign was offensive to old religious people and monarchists, which is exactly what you want if you’re selling clothes to teens and twenty something’s. Then the connection became more tenuous. I remember one poster featured a man dying of AIDS surrounded by his family.

It seemed gratuitous. If Benneton really wanted to show how it brought people together ,why didn’t it back an AIDS awareness campaign? Or put large amounts of money into AIDS hospices in Africa? Maybe they did but I never heard about it.

Now they’re back with a new ‘controversial’ campaign featuring famously opposed leaders like Abbas and Netanyahu or Obama and Hu Jintao kissing, under the campaign theme ‘Unhate’.

They also have an online Kissing wall you can upload yourself kissing someone and guerilla media street teams hanging ‘Kissing Leaders’ posters all over major world cities.

OK Benetton, well all you’ve succeeded in doing is making me angry. You don’t want to change things or stand up for something. Why not do something actually radical like donating money to charities dedicated to bringing people together every time someone upload something to your ‘kissing wall’ ? That’s still going to appeal to your target. It’ll still sell sweaters but it won’t seem quite as empty as this campaign. In fact, ‘Unhate’ has done the reverse of what it purports and turned me into a hater.

Marathon Man

Ever wondered what it’s like to run at a marathon runners pace? To coincide with the New York Marathon San Diego agency Vitro created a video wall for Asics, featuring the marathon runner Ryan Hall. It challenged all-comers to race against the athelete for 60 feet. I thought this was kind of cool

Credit MacDaddy

Sometimes you see an ad that is so good it’s almost art.Other times you see the Credit MacDaddy…

 

Keep it simple

Perfect end for REM’s career. A simple song and two super simple one take videos

 

 

 

Being and nothingness

 

It’s along time since I’ve read a novel that’s actually made me want to write anything. Then along comes Alexander Maksik’s ‘You deserve nothing’

If I say the book is very philosophical (there is much discussion of Sartre and Camus) and delves into the very idea of what it means to be human, you may decide that sticking hot pins into your eyes is more desirable than reading it. Well you would be very wrong because the way these themes are handled by Maksik makes them easily understood and genuinely engaging.

 

 

The hero or should we really say un-hero of the book, Will Silver, is school teacher in a posh expat school in Paris whose passion for philosophy and literature helps instill a new found idealism into all but the most objectionable of his pupils.

Before you say ‘oh no…Dead Poets Society’ let me add that the author cleverly avoids making this go all mawkish and Robin Williams by exposing Silver as deeply flawed.

Here is a man who has abandoned his wife to come to the City of Lights and slept with one of his pupils, getting her pregnant in the process.

What’s more when he is asked to live up to the moral stance he takes in the classroom at an Anti-War Rally, his courage fails him.

Yet for all that we still love him because in the end we see that at least he tries.

He may fail in being a hero to his pupils but he succeeds in being much more than that – a human being.

 

 

 

Raw Meat

A tribute to the NYPD…is probably being made by someone …but not by this band

 

 

Real Estate Rising

No, unfortunately not that real estate. The kind I refer to is a band from New Jersey who have a front cover of this month’s Fader, as well as a best music plug by Pitchfork.

I caught them recently at The Crocodile in Seattle and whereas I love the laid back, mellow nature of the album (in fact I’m listening to it as I write) I have to say that live it wasn’t exactly Nirvana.

I mean the namesake of this venue was home to some of the biggest acts in grunge. Indeed, I’ve seen ‘The Melvins’ here last year  and they exude a certain attitude a sense of strangeness and danger.

The trouble with Real Estate is your mum would like them. As cool as the tunes are, they exude all the danger of a cub scout convention.

Face it, no middle aged family is going to cross the street if they see this lot coming. They’re more likely to ask them if they’ve done their homework.

Does that matter? Well yes if there are no bands that take up the banner of rebellion.

In this era there’s no Clash , Rage against the Machine or Public Enemy. Nothing that seethes with an intelligent rage.

Considering the state of the economy you’d think there would be. Instead we are invited to tap our feet while Rome burns

The End of the World is Trier

Be it ‘The Walking Dead’ or ‘Take Shelter’  it seems the modern world and in particular America, is full of apocalyptic visions. The latest addition to the genre comes courtesy of Danish director, Lars Von Trier.

His film ‘Melancholia’ concerns a planet of that name, which is about to give everyone a very bad hair day by possibly colliding with earth.

The title of the film not only refers to the planet but also to the mental condition of one of the two women at the heart of the film, Justine, played by Kirsten Dunst.

Justine is a depressive who finds it hard to cope with everyday life and relies upon the support of her seemingly sensible sister Claire, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg.

However, as the film develops we see that Claire is in fact extremely neurotic. Her calm exterior hides a nervous temperament, which goes into overdrive once Melancholia looms large on earth’s horizon.

By the end of the film ,as they await the apocalypse with a Wagner accompaniment, their roles have been effectively reversed.

I have to say that despite the fine acting and the interesting premise, the film dragged for me and only started becoming more engaging once the doomsday scenario really took hold of the narrative.That said I’ve took the time to write a review of it and I certainly won’t be doing that for Mr.Popper’s Penguins.

http://www.melancholiathemovie.com/

Brain Dead

There are two villains in the modern world that we are allowed to hate without reservation, Nazis/racists (boo! Hiss!) and zombies. Vampires, shape shifters and werewolves have all been made cool and sexy by True blood.

Zombies however are stupid, smelly and one-dimensional. All they want to do is eat brains. This gives us license to shoot their asses.

‘The Walking Dead’ takes full advantage of this, gleefully chopping, blasting and blowing these suckers to bits at the slightest opportunity (though it’s noticeable that some of the audience felt the early part of the second season wasn’t doing that enough…which tells you what kind of audience it’s attracting)

Whereas a show like ‘True Blood’ promotes tolerance and uses the fantastical nature of its scenario to make you see things from several vantages points (human, vampire, shape shifter, fairy) The Walking Dead simplifies everything down to a brutal truth – kill or die. In this world there is no room for perspective when there’s a herd of zombies coming at you.

 

 

In that way ‘The Walking Dead’ is as much like an old school western as it is a zombie film. In fact, I’d argue that the zombies are really a PC version of Indians for our ‘cowboys’ to shoot. This has become very apparent in the second season as the survivors increasingly take on the lifestyles of cowboys by living on a ranch, riding and shooting guns. The whole atmosphere is very pioneer America. It’s also the kind of world that the average Tea Party supporter would love. Everyone gets to own a gun, no one pays taxes and there’s no government.  I can almost hear them give a collective orgasmic sigh.

Which brings me to the conclusion that in its violence and simplification, ‘The Walking Dead’ is actually quite right wing. Just like the average John Wayne western.

It wants to drag us back to a time where men were men. And so were the women.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

50 Words for Eccentric

If I said someone was making an album about the hunt for the abominable snow man and asked you to choose the artist, there would be very few candidates for you to guess from

Basically, Bjork or Kate Bush

If you guessed Kate Bush you win nothing but the satisfaction of being right.

But at least now you are aware of this strange and puzzling work.

I have to say on first listen ‘50 Words for Snow’ passed me by. Outside of ‘Wild Man’ there seemed no obvious tunes and with some tracks lasting a wapping 13 minutes, that’s a long time to wait without a melody

 

 

However, as I put in the effort and listened to it a couple of times a day over a long weekend it began to get under my skin like a very pleasant kind of frostbite.

At points it can get a bit show tune for my taste. Several times during the epic ‘Misty and the duet ‘Snowed in at Wheeler street’ I imagined a Broadway musical replete with elaborate arctic stage set. But maybe that’s just me.

In a way however this is the very strength of the album. It takes risk and does things no one else would do. How many other art rock artists would choose to do a duet for Elton John for instance? Or get the actor Stephen Fry to read out the names of different kinds of snow?

It’s also interesting that this is another highly ambitious concept album from a female artist. Earlier this year PJ Harvey treated us to an anti-war epic ‘Let England Shake’ and recently Bjork released the pioneering ‘Biophilia’.

Consequently, I hereby pronounce 2011 the year of the female concept album.

Criminally Minded

Quite why Scandinavia has become a world center for crime fiction is, if you’ll excuse the pun, a mystery.

The region has some of the lowest crime rates in Europe and on of the face of it some of the world’s most liberal and socially cohesive societies. Hardly fertile ground for crime fiction

The very idea of the gritty streets of Copenhagen or murky underworld of Gothenburg is almost laughable. What are the stories about we might wonder? Herring smuggling?  A reindeer massacre?

 

Well park your cynicism. Having read a few, I think the secret of the Scandinavian success in the genre is very much to do with their commitment to liberal ideals.

Whereas American crime writers like Raymond Chandler and James Elroy expose corruption in their novels, they also tacitly accept it as the way life is. One might also say they revel in the sleazy streets their characters inhabit.

In Scando crime novels by the likes of Henning Mankell and Stieg Larrson, the reverse is true. The detectives or protagonists of these novels are fighting dark forces that threaten the creation of a fairer society. Often the villains are fascists, racists or exploiters of women.

There’s no way they can accept what they find as just ‘life’ and leave it at that. They must question how and why these evils exists, along the way to destroying them.

It’s this committed, explicitly political viewpoint that gives a fresh angle to the genre.

 

 

 

Assault and pepper

It seems all you have to do to get your own meme is to pepper spray some protestors. Officer John Pike is now everywhere….

See more of this soon to disappear bit of social media at Buzzfeed …

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/the-pepper-spraying-cop-meme

Fleurs du Mal

Ever had a dream where you’re being surrounded by hot, half-naked women wearing revealing lingerie? So has the director of this spooky and erotic commercial from Agent Provocateur

Iceland wants to be your friend

It’s been a while since I’ve seen an online campaign that has a bit of wit and charm.Too often you see things that use the bells and whistles of new technology but have absolutely zero personality.

The campaign for the Iceland Tourist Board shows how it should be done by utilizing multiple social media outlets, from vimeo to tumblr, in a smart and easily understood way.

And yes, it does make me want to pay the land of Bjork a visit.

http://www.icelandwantstobeyourfriend.com/

Dancing by myself

You can’t beat silly dancing, as this video for The Black Keys latest single proves.

Sign me up for Santa Fe

Maybe it’s because I just went to Santa Fe. Or maybe i’m just alarmed by my medical bills. Or maybe I’m just a sucker for the story style music video. Whatever the reason, I really enjoyed this

The Sense of me Missing Something

 

 

I’ve just finished Julian Barnes ‘The Sense of an Ending’ and am somewhat mystified as to the critical plaudits heaped on this novel. I’m not saying it’s a bad book or that Julian Barnes isn’t a very skilled writer who has written several books I’ve really enjoyed (‘Arthur and George’ and ‘A History of the world in 10 ½ chapters’ spring to mind) I just don’t see why this rather slight volume is considered the year’s literary apex.

 

 

 

The basic plot involves Tony Webster, a 70 year-old-man who gets an unexpected bequest from the mother of an old girlfriend.

 

This causes Tony to re-examine his relationships with old friends and beaus from the past. As he grapples with these we begin to realize that Tony is not quite a s honest as he first appears. In fact, his repressed English nature make him the classic unreliable narrator.

 

The problem for me with the book is that others have mined this territory, notably Kashuo Ishiguro in ‘The Remains of the Day’, as well as many other renown authors from Waugh to Greene to Ford Madox Ford, and personally I think they do it better. I feel for Stevens, the butler narrator at the heart of the ‘The Remains of the Day’. His delusion is more directly caused by the class system of the day that he is wrapped up in.

 

Tony Webster by comparison is privileged and has the freedom to make a different life for himself -he just doesn’t. Even when it is revealed to him the enormity of his delusion he remains strangely impassive. You could say this is in keeping with his character and I would agree but it doesn’t make for very revelatory fiction.  I just get served the old truism that the English are rather repressed and this can make them rather sad characters, particularly in matters of love.

 

Just Annoyingly Good

I hate Patti Smith. Really I do.

I’m not saying she’s not talented. I’m just saying she makes me weep for my own sorry life in comparison with hers.

The bitch.

It’s not enough for her to have written some classics albums. No, now she has to write an excellent memoir as well.

‘Just Kids’ chronicles her relationship with the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in New York in the late sixties and seventies.

It was clearly a magic time. Or rather it was if you were Patti Smith. Anything that was happening in that era seems to have involved her. Whether it’s CBGB’s, Warhol’s Factory or the scene at the Chelsea Hotel, turn around and there’s Patti, befriending every one from Allen Ginsberg to Tom Verlaine to genius archivist Harry Smith.

We can’t even use the excuse that she came from money. She didn’t. She came from a poor, blue-collar family in Pennsylvania that struggled to make ends meet.

One moment she’s working in a factory, the next she’s on a bus to New York with nothing but a few dollars to tide her over. Within a decade she’d turned herself into an artist and feminist icon.

Even more annoyingly she writes about all this in a clear, concise, almost matter-of-fact prose style.

I’m happy to report that occasionally it does get a little pretentious. Very happy, because that means it’s not perfect. I don’t think I could have coped with her having a perfect book on top of everything else.

Of course there is tragedy at the heart of the book, namely the death of her friend Mapplethorpe from HIV. She handles this exceptionally well, showing her devastation at his death but turning the book into a celebration of their lives together.

It’s the sort of book that if I were a young teen bohemian I would want to read in a single sitting and treasure forever. Who knows? Maybe there’s someone out there reading this book before they set on an adventure that turns them into someone else I’ll be very jealous of.

Anna Calvi

Anna Calvi live at The Crocodile, Seattle

I was lucky enough to see Anna Calvi live in Seattle earlier this year. She was a performer with real presence, a great voice and a clutch of memorable songs.

The Killing versus The Killing

If someone was to have told you thirty years ago that Scandinavia was going to be home to the world’s best crime fiction, they would probably be arrested for crimes against common sense.

Yet here we are with Jo Nesbo and Stig Larssen all over the airport bookstores and Wallander all over our TV screens.

The trend has become so pronounced it has actually entered the home of the crime genre itself – America.

The Killing (Forbrydelsen), a Danish crime drama, has actually been remade in the US and by now many of us have had a chance to compare and contrast the copy with the original.

The obvious conclusion any one with half a brain cell would reach is that Forbrydelsen is better.

One very large reason for this is time. The 1st Danish series lasts for 20 episodes whereas its US counterpart only gets 13. The result is the finely wrought characterization that is one of the strengths of the Danish series gets compressed and thwarted by time constraints in the US version.

It means that a times the characters in the US version skirt cliché, not because of the relative skill of the actors involved but because there is no chance to bring out other more complex aspects of personality that surprise us. People are rarely all bad or all good. Too often in US TV they seem to be. In most series this doesn’t matter, in ‘The Killing’ it very much does.

The other thing that is very noticeable is the lack of tension in the US version. Whereas the slow build works for Forbrydelsen, for ‘The Killing ‘it’s less effective. Maybe this is due to the fact that US TV is not too familiar with the slow build model and when it has to do it gets it ever so slightly wrong.

You might point to a series like ‘The Wire’ as an example of a slower paced series that the US has done brilliantly, but I would say in response that there is still a fair deal of action in ‘The Wire’ and ever-present threat of violence hangs in the Baltimore air.

 

I’m still interested to see how the US version develops mainly because Seattle where it is set, is a city I have lived in and know well but I don’t think I’m going to change my opinion of their relative merits.

 

 

Rock ‘n’ Roll Addict

Who’d be a rock critic? Having to hang around with mega stars doing vast quantities of drugs as they screw and jam their way round the world. It’s a hard life.

Nick Kent is such an unfortunate. In his riveting autobiography ‘Apathy for the Devil’ he tells tales, anyone of which, would get the teller free lunches, dinners, snacks and drinks for life.

Among them are doing coke with Led Zep during their heyday, hanging with Bowie in America, befriending Iggy before he was a superstar, going out with Chrissie Hynde before she was The Great Pretender and doing heroin with fellow junkies, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.

Yet the way Kent tells it, this enviable state of affairs quickly turned into a living nightmare, owing to his debilitating drug addiction.

The most unfortunate part of the whole thing according to him was having to spend any time with Sid and his girl. Kent has not a good word to say about either and we’re inclined to believe his depiction of them owes more to accuracy, than some hidden vendetta.

Even though Kent’s tale has a happy ending, as he kicks his dependency, finds god and gets a girlfriend with an apartment in Paris, within in it lies sadness.

That of the critic who, however insightful, can only comment on the greater glory of others.

One poignant scene sees him comforted by Chrissie Hynde after a particularly vicious verbal assault by disgruntled musicians before she rejoins the ‘stars’ on the opposite side of the room.

There is in the scene this sense of Kent as a perpetual outsider to a world, which as a musician himself, he must have longed to be a fuller part of.

In the end though it is Kent’s honesty, revealing things about his life that others may have chosen to keep to themselves, that make this such a compelling read.

Saint Ayrton

If you’re a sports champion , it’s not enough to win game after game, race after race or title after title.

You must also be handsome, charming,sexy, exotic, fight back from adversity and if you wouldn’t mind die young so your memory is not sullied by the banality of middle-age.

That is all us spectators want. Just your life.

Ayrton Senna obliged us by doing everything anyone could ask of a sporting hero. Consequently he’s the subject of the unsurprisngly named ‘Senna’, a gripping documentary which uses nothing but found footage to piece together the life of Formula One’s most gifted star

The film charts the rise of Senna from Go-Kart world champion to his demise on the track at Imola at just 34.

Maybe he kicked dogs or taunted the homeless off camera but as far as this footage is concerned he  was a latter day driving saint, a depiction helped by his own strong religious belief.

Of course every hero needs a villian and this is provided in the form of bent-nosed, gallic troll Alain Prost, who’s Machiavellian, intensely political nature is exposed during the film.

It’s this meeting of opposites that gives the film a narrative arc that ends in the tragic death of Senna, due to the mechanical failure of his malfunctioning Williams car.

The scenes of weeping crowds meeting his coffin in Sao Paolo make us realize the Senna was more than just sports star, he was a national hero who emboided the spirit of Brazil in both the way he lived and the way he drove.

Life in a small town

The fact that Larry McMurtry was name checked by no less an intellectual powerhouse than George W Bush as his favorite author, has for years prejudiced me against him.

On seeing the revival of ‘The Last Picutre Show’ earleir this year my interest was peaked and I ordered the source material, the McMurtry novel the film is based on.

I have to say it was one of my better decisions because in my opinion it’s a rather unjustly overlooked minor classic.

I would describe it as beautifully written but when people write that they’re normally talking about rather high-flown, self-conscious prose with plenty of literary allusions, which is the very opposite of beautiful.

McMurtry’s writing style by contrast is conversational, plains poken, occasionally poetic,often very funnyand frequently touching. His prose struggles, not to impress but to communicate the lives of his characters.

He also manages to address quite depressing material, from unhappy marriages to death, in a way that doesn’t have us reaching for the razor blade.

I suppose there is nothing particularly different about the book. It doesn’t play with structure or write from the point of view of a bison or something. It’s just too straightforward and honest to be feted in the way some far lesser books are.

Yet for me it’s left an impression and even though I’ve never lived in a small Texas town, I feel that this book gives me a very good idea of what it might be like.

The film is justifably famous but the novel equals it in many regards.

Kill List

If you’ve ever watched Get Carter and thought ‘You know what this film lacks? Some weird mask-wearing occultists with torches’

Or watched ‘The Wicker Man’ and thought ‘If only there were some hired killers in this movie’ , then I think ‘Kill List’ might be the film for you.

The plot: a hitman, scarred by his last job is press ganged into doing another ‘kill list’. Unbeknown to him the job is being bankrolled by a sinister, occult sect who see human sacrifice as part and parcel of everyday devil-worshipping life.

To add to the mayhem, with every kill our hitman becomes increasingly deranged, until the film’s weird and crazed finale.

This film comes with a lot of lavish praise and I have to say it’s one I will probably see again.

My only criticism is that tension that is so expertly built up in the first hour or so is brutally sacrificed for the final twenty minute gorefest. With the result that the ending doesnt quite have the shocking impact that was intended. There’s only so much killing and entrails a man can watch before becoming comfortably numb to it.

Still I can’t think of another film where hit men and occultists live side by side, which makes ‘Kill List’ one of the more interesting genre twisters of recent years.

Brighton Revisited

When people announce their going to remake a classic film most people’s response will be ‘why bother?’ After all your chances of producing something that’s even half as good, bearing in mind the complexities of making the average film, are nil.

Your only chance is to update or alter the original in such a way that we are not reminded overly of it.

This is the tact taken by the makers of the beautiful looking remake of ‘Brighton Rock’

Instead of being set in the 1930’s the film has been updated to 1964, the year of mod versus rocker riots in Brighton (quiet prescient considering the riots that occurred in Britain this year).

This is a smart move as it allows us to reference a period of modern culture many are already familiar with, as well as lets us see a lot of very nice looking vintage scooters.

Unfortunately, the period piece details and set design are about the best thing the film has to offer.

 

With a gangster film the most important thing is the believable sense of menace emanating from the lead gangster in your tale. Whether it’s Bob Hoskins in ‘The Long Good Friday’ or Ben Kingsley in ‘Sexy Beast’.

Sam Riley doesn’t as yet have that quality. He’s a very fine actor but I don’t really feel his threat. When I look into his innocent face, that’s all I see – innocence.

Consequently what I’m left with when I watch ‘Brighton Rock’ is a well-directed, visually stylish gangster film that feels rather flat.

Granted it’s hard for any young actor to make us feel he could kill but I’m sure the young De Niro could have managed it.

I also notice the tendency for a lot of British exports to be high on style but rather low on content. There is an obvious delight in getting Riley to steal an electric blue Lambretta and ride it through the streets of Brighton a la Quadrophenia and clearly a lot of time has been spent on the décor for rival gangster Corleone’s hotel suite but a moviegoer can not live by art direction alone.

We need characters that we care about, and in ’Brighton Rock’ frosty style keeps us at a distance. So we are constantly aware of how cool it all is but have no interest in the people that inhabit this world.

 

 

Darkness Falls

For a few years in the nineties I lived in Hong Kong and I can still remember the incredible thrill I got from waking up and realizing ‘I’m living in a different continent!”

But I can also remember the sense of distance I had from local people, who even if friendly would only be so friendly. There appeared to be something almost unknowable about them, not to make them sound like alien beings, but you were sometimes aware of a thought process that was very different to yours.

What goes for Hong Kong goes double for Japan. A strange rather insular society with its own idiosyncratic ways of doing things

Most of the time this just leads to funny misunderstandings a la ‘Lost in Translation’. In the case of Lucie Blackmon the subject of Richard Lloyd Parry’s book ‘People Who Eat Darkness ‘it leads to death.

Former BA stewardess, Blackmon worked as a hostess in Tokyo in the 1990’s.

Her job involved keeping Japanese salary men company while they drank in bars.

If a girl was liked, the businessman might invite for a date known as a dohan. Nothing sexual was expected, just companionship.

As Lucie’s sister Sophie remarked ‘the only difference between being an air hostess and a hostess is altitude’.

Yet clearly going on dates with men you don’t care for in any way is in itself a kind of moral grey area.

Where does companionship end and prostitution begin? It all depends on the mind of the man who is with the girl.

Unfortunately for Lucie one of these men was Joji Obara, an uncaught serial rapist who had kept videos of the hundreds of women he had raped while they lay unconscious from drinks laced with rohypnol. He ends up giving her lethal does of the drug and dismembering her body.

Joji Obara

When hearing these kind of horrific tales it is hard not to use it as a metaphor for the way Japanese men in general think of western women. But as Parry himself points out a Japanese women was missing in Britain at the same time as the Blackmon case.

We would be rather miffed if the Japanese used this as an example of western degeneracy.

Yet there is still an uneasiness I feel when reading about this case.  There is a sense that there are many Japanese men who still view western women as drunken, promiscuous drug addicts. Racist? Maybe but when cultures clash the more dominant will always seek to label the others differences as immoral, be it British whites ripping on Asians or Japanese criticizing westerners..

In both cases their attitudes are severely misguided for they see difference as inferiority and substitute judgment for understanding.. If they didn’t there’d be far fewer cases like Lucie Blackmon’s in the world.

Don’t go into the mountains

I’ll give you a tip. If you happen to be walking in the Scottish Highlands and come across a child hidden in a hole in the ground, leave her there.

It may seem heartless but I promise you, no good can come of saving her.

I know because that’s what the characters in ‘A Lonely Place to Die’ do, the fools.

Before they know where they are, their kindness is repaid by being chased by throat-slitting, heavily armed psychopaths.

They don’t even have time to enjoy the breathtaking scenery that surrounds them because they’re too busy dodging bullets.

Happily we can watch their predicament from the safety and comfort of our armchairs and be thoroughly entertained, if not overly surprised, by this British thriller.

The action is neatly directed, the tension nicely brought to boil. If had one criticism I’d have liked more of a ‘twist-in-the-tale’ ending but frankly the dearth of any other decent thrillers this year outside of ‘Hanna’ makes it stand out like a mighty Highland mountain.

Sarah Lund, bitch with a badge.

One of the many things you need to avoid in life apart from steamed broccoli and any show that encourages celebrities to dance, is being the partner of Detective Lund of the Copenhagen police force. It seems everyone around her either ends up dead or fired.

This would be fine if she made up for it with her winning personality. Unfortunately, to add insult to injury, she’s also a pain in the ass. She even walks out of her mother’s wedding. That’s the mark of a Grade A bitch.

So why exactly is she so likeable in spite of her shortcomings? Well, if there’s one thing we respect in life it’s people who have integrity and conviction because so often it’s what we lack.

Lund has these qualities in spades. It’s what makes her so objectionable to many around her. She’s prepared to ask the mother of a killed soldier if she’s mind digging up his body (it could help give them a new lead in the case) or walk into a shower full of naked men to insure an interview with a recalcitrant soldier. (Come on …there’s some things she needed answering)

If she were a maverick male cop such things would not be tolerated. Maverick cops ruffle the feathers of their bosses and follow unorthodox ‘hunches’ but brazenly disinterring someone would be a bit much. As a female however, Lund can get away with more and takes full advantage of the fact.

This is great if you’re detective, not so good if you want to take her on a date.

 

Submarine gives me that sinking feeling

One of these days I’m going to see a coming age movie where the protagonist is a burly 6ft beer-drinking rugby player who has a crush on a hot blonde girl who really likes him. They shag like rabbits and live happily ever after.

It’s about as likely as hen’s teeth but sooner or later I will be rewarded by something other than the rather annoying quirkfest that is ‘Submarine’

In this amazingly over-praised ‘comedy’, and the word really does have to be put inverted commas or perhaps come with a legal disclaimer, we have all the stock clichés. Shy, awkward, duffel coat wearing, sensitive type Oliver, attracts the attention of smirky, quirky indie girl Jordana.

They awkwardly kiss and awkwardly have sex and awkwardly break-up.

Around them is a cast of dysfunctional adults like you’ve seen in every coming of age film from ‘The Graduate’ onwards.

Of course, you know that the makers and writers are very similar to our protagonist. Or like to think they are. I always doubt just how ostracized the makers of ‘Submarine’ or for that matter ‘The In-betweeners’ really were at school.

30 Rock did a funny take on this idea for Liz Lemon’s high school reunion, where her belief that she was shy and socially awkward are found to be totally fraudulent as ex-classmates expose her as a snarky bitch who said cutting things.

Now that’s clever; taking a premise that I’m familiar with and turning it on its head. No such luck with ‘Submarine’, which continues down its well-trodden path to the bitter end. For some reason, the end involves our protagonists fully dressed, up to their knees in salt water smiling at each other. But then hey, they’re quirky. They do that kind of thing.

What’s Danish for sophomore slump?

It pains me to say that as much as I love Lund and her Copenhagen policing colleagues, I have to report that I found the 2^nd series of The Killing not a patch on the first.

Really the issue is one of originality. You kind of feel you’ve seen the ‘corrupt politicians covering up murder angle’ a few times too many. Combine this with a plot twist that encompasses the war on terror and Afghanistan and you really have you work cut out to take it somewhere the viewer is not expecting.

Usually films or TV shows that have a political theme are left leaning (see ‘All The Presidents Men, ‘The State of Play’ TV series or George Clooney’s  ‘Ides of March’) which can be problematic when you’re making a thriller because right away people are presuming certain things will or won’t happen based on your political beliefs.

For example, if a character appears who is an immigrant and a Muslim we know he won’t be the guilty party, whereas if a character appears who is military…well he’ll probably have something to do with it

Which means however good the acting is (and its excellent) we’re already going to be several steps ahead of the story. Not good news if you’re aim is to keep us on the edge of our seats.

Still The Killing is still light years ahead of its competitors because it’s still not afraid to develop character in places where others choose to go for high-octane action. And in Lund, it still has the best protagonist since D.I. Tennison.

Hoodies 1 Aliens 0

Following on from the big South African hit ‘District 9’, that showed you could make a lo-budget special effects sci-fi film as long as you had a story worth investing in, comes ‘Attack the Block’

The basic premise: aliens start beaming down to a tough, inner city London housing estate. Ensue shit fight.

Like Shaun of the dead, ‘Attack the block’ is a genre twister – part-comedy, part sci-fi part-kitchen sink social realism, in a weird way.

The main protagonists in the film are mainly black teens, hoodies who roam the London streets in a gang, mugging poor unfortunates who cross their path. It’s a dangerous territory to tread because you can end up seeming pretty racist if you’re not careful. However, the makers neatly get round this by using the very skills that demonize these kids, a propensity to violence, as an undoubted plus point when fighting extraterrestrials.

 

Pretty soon we are on board with the idea that anyone who can survive the mean streets of London can deal with outer space invaders.

As for the aliens, well lets just say the special effects budget was probably not of Avatar proportions. Not that it matters. When you have a few characters you care about and a decent premise, you’ll forgive quite a lot.

They may riot occasionally but after watching ‘Attack the block’, you’ll be very glad we have inner city kids.

 

U.F.O. discovered

Just when you thought every last obscure 60’s/70’s pop masterpiece had been rediscovered comes Jim Sullivan’s U.F.O.

My favorite reissue of last year, it’s a laid back country rock-ish album that eases it’s way into your affections.

However behind it’s mellow vibe, for those who listen carefully, is a world weariness and pain.

These are the songs of a talented musician and songwriter who never made it. The songs of a man who was happening enough to hang out with the famous but never quite happening enough to be famous himself.

To add to his legend his demise was as mysterious as his album. While on a road trip to Nashville he checked into a hotel in Santa Rosa, New Mexico and was promptly never heard of again.  His car was found abandoned 26 miles away by the side of the road. Almost as if he’d walked off into the desert or been abducted by the aliens he sings of in the title track.

If this is the case they were clearly aliens with impeccable taste, who are probably enjoying all the subsequent recordings of Mr. Sullivan denied to the poor earthlings too stupid to appreciate his talent when he was among us.

 

‘Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Snore’

 

 

When it comes to writing about spies John Le Carre knows his stuff. So when he raves about the latest adaptation of one his most famous novels ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier spy’ this reviewer was really quite keen to see it.

If only I’d contented myself with imagining how could it might be.

I’m sorry to report that like the life of the spy itself ‘Tinker Tailor Soldier spy’ is actually quite boring.

There are lots of frosty scenes with lonely isolated men, living in a shadowy secret world where everyone is a potential traitor. Their profession makes it impossible to have a relationship of any kind with anyone. After all if trust is the basis of any bond how can men taught to trust no one as a matter of survival possibly connect with anyone?

Here lies the problem of the film. What the director has decided to do is make this the focus of the story rather than the plot, which seems in this adaptation almost inconsequential. This is less a thriller and more of a drama, full of fine actor-ly performances from the likes of Gary Oldman and John Hurt.

However, a cinema-goer can’t live by acting alone. We need a bit of tension, a touch of the whodunits to put these performances in some kind of context. Sadly, we don’t get it. The action feels episodic and strangely disjointed meaning that we are totally uninterested in who is the guilty party by the time the film reaches its climax.

 

 

 

 

The Future is Past

Something has been worrying me. Am I living in a present which has completely given up on the future?

Pretty much, according to Simon Reynolds in ‘Retromania’ his superb dissection of western societies current obsession with ‘retro’ and ‘vintage’.

The brave new world of the sixties, where unless something was modern and new it simply wasn’t happening, has given way to a world where all that matters is either the atemporal or the past.

The main thrust of Reynolds interest is music but he manages to tie his thesis into similar trends in everything from banking to manufacturing to space exploration.

The overall effect of his erudite study is both exciting for its intellectual vigor but unsettling. Why have we given up creating content that looks forward rather than back?

Possibly it’s just exhaustion following on from decades and decades of innovation in the twentieth century, as Reynolds hypothesizes . For example, the first decade of the 21^st century brought nothing as startlingly new as hip-hop or techno or house.

Maybe, as Reynolds states simply, this lack of belief in change is because it’s time for ‘the west …to rest’.

Life Below

 

I love it when i come across a new street photographer previously unknown to me. Such a man is Chrisophe Agou, a French photographer based in New York . From 1997 to 2000 he took a series of images from the New York Subway collected in a book called ‘Life Below’. The last time such a project was done successfully was by Bruce Davidson in his superb book ‘Subway’ which I urge anyone interested in the medium to check out immediately. Agou has not let his illustrious predecessor intimidate him and has created a series of black and white images which perfectly reflect the ambiance and mood of the city I know so well. Here are just a few samples of his work.

 

Johnny Got his Gun

Why aren’t there more books like Johnny Got his gun? It’s a page-turner that is by turns socially conscious, imaginative and emotionally engaged.

To often a book will have only one of these essential qualities.

If a left wing tome it will have the socially conscious thing in spades but it will usually be in the form of a tirade against the modern world that makes us feel we’ve been held captive in a room while someone shouts in our faces for 3 hours.

Or if they are imaginative it will be for no purpose other than just too be imaginative (Wow, aren’t I creative?) No point is really made, so while we are entertained we are also not engaged at a deep level and the book is swiftly forgotten as soon as it’s put down.

And if emotionally engaged it will be in such a way that makes us feel for the unfairness and sadness of life without walking away with an idea of how to make that life better. The result is a feeling of vague depression that hangs around us for the rest of the day.

‘Johnny Got his Gun’ falls into none of these categories. Yes it’s harrowing and yes it will make you angry but it’s also pretty sure about what you should do to avoid such a fate as its main protagonist Joe Bonham, who wakes up in military hospital to slowly realize he has lost all of his limbs.

In a sentence, Don’t believe their shit. Don’t fight for ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ because Joe Bonham will tell you it’s not worth it. And all the dead of every war there has ever been if they could come back to life would tell you the same thing.

You might say “So what? I knew that already” To which I would say ‘Well done for your profound self-awareness’ but you should still read ‘Johnny Got his Gun’ anyway because of the way the story is constructed and told.

Joe Bonham drifts in and out of consciousness sharing with us episodes of his life that make him who he is. Or perhaps we should say who he was because with each passing hour he comes to realize just how badly he is hurt. First he realizes he can’t hear and then that he has lost an arm and then his sight and then his legs, until we are not sure of what is left of the man.

He feels that he is reduced too just a mind…but that mind is frequently unsure of whether what it feels is real or a dream. Is that a rat gnawing at his open wound? Or did he imagine it?

Is that the touch of a nurse washing his wounds? Or is it another apparition of his unreliable conscious?

The fact that this is written in the first person puts us in the Bonham’s horrific position and we discover with him the extent of his bodily destruction.

This emotional punch is aided by the ordinary remembered episodes from Joe’s life in Colorado. The girl he loved but who went with his best friend, the fishing trip he took with his father, his time in California working in the bakery. Things we can all readily identify with and understand but that are now as removed from Joe Bonham as his legs.

Author Dalton Trumbo

One of the things that struck me as I read this book was that we’re living in a time of war where young men are coming back wounded everyday and yet I can think of no modern day equivalent of  ‘Johnny Got His Gun’.

Why is that? Is it perhaps due to the fact as a society war is kept from us? There are no horrific war images of the type that were shown in newspapers and magazines during the Vietnam War. There is no conscription as in Vietnam or WWI or WW2, so the chances of someone we might know becoming involved is reduced.

War appears like it happens to other people somewhere in the Deep South or out in the low employment badlands. We can ignore it and the consequences it has on ordinary lives.

Dalton Trumbo’s powerful book is a wake up call that let’s us know we do so at our peril.

Metzker

Most world class street photographers have several books in print celebrating their work. For some reason Ray Metzker’s isn’t one of them. If you want to get a copy of his ‘City Stills’ book you’d have to spend up to $650 on Amazon marketplace (gulp) Which is a shame as more people need to see these beautiful, haunting images from  a master.

 

 

 

Route Brouws

Maybe it’s because I recently completed a cross-country road trip from Seattle to New York but Jeff Brouws photographs speak to me.

Whether it’s his ‘Language of the Landscape’ series or his images of abandoned factories, rail tracks and bars that litter the American landscape.

There’s something that reminds me of Joel Sternfield, Ed Ruscha and Stephen Shore in his images.

In fact, it makes me want to jump back into my car and travel out into the vast American landscape once more…

 

 

 

Burtynsky v Hine

Looking again at the great shots of China’s manufacturing by Edward Burtynsky, I sort of got to thinking about Lewis Hine and his pictures of American manufacturing taken a century earlier. Hine was using his camera to effect social change. In fact his images were instrumental in changing child Labor laws in America. His photos feel personal, often featuring just one vulnerable subject.

Burtynsky’s large format images by contrast, reflect the mammoth scale of China’s manufacturing and the dehumanizing effect of such a world, where people are just small components in the manufacturing process.

Too different approaches both yielding the same result – sympathy for the human being stuck in the machine.

 

 

 

 

Every dog has his day

 

 

Sometime ago I visited a house in Florida. On the wall of this very up market residence was an enormous oil painting of the family Spaniel. They clearly loved the furry fellow but perhaps this wasn’t the best way to express it. It was ghastly. No matter how much we like our pets immortalizing them in pictures or words can be a difficult business .Too often our love effects our judgment and we end up with something mawkishly sentimental or sickeningly cute.

Which is why I love Tim Flach’s dog portraits so much. He manages to capture the essence of each breed by creating portraits that are worthy of their owners. By turns beautiful, characterful and charming.

 

 

Falling

 

The recent Mad men advertising posters that caused such ‘controversy’ by reminding many locals of 9/11 have received the ultimate accolade. They have been the subject of some quality graffiti made by people clearly funnier and smarter than those that came up with the ads in the first place. Here are just three fine examples.

 

 

 

Wide-Open West

I’ve just finished a 3-year stint on the west coast. One of the things that struck me was how powerful the wide-open landscape of the west is and how much that affects the pictures and art created. If you look at Ansel Adams or a painter like Albert Bierstadt, it’s all about the majesty of nature.

'Mount Rainier' Albert Bierstadt

Even a real New York photographer like Garry Winogrand when he’s out west has a greater distance from his subjects and places them in a wider landscape when compared with the super close up nature of his NYC street shots.

New Mexico , Garry Winogrand

Robert Adams from 'The New West'

The images of people like Robert Adams too give a sense of people isolated. More recently you might look at Richard Misrach’s ‘On the beach’ shots where people are just specks on the coastline.

Richard Misrach from 'On the Beach'

So whether people are doing beauty shots, reportage or fine art images, the power of the environment their photos are set in is palpable.

For New York, my current home, the reverse is true. It’s all about a world that closes in on you

The Perfect Moment

From the 'Women are Beautiful' book

This is one of my favorite street photographs. There’d be other contenders but there’s something about this one in particular that truly captures what it means to roam the streets with a camera.

What is special about this moment? Nothing really. A young woman is coming out of a building, probably. We can’t be really sure.  It’s summer and a slight breeze catches her blonde hair. In the background, two men in what we might now term ‘Reservoir Dogs’ suits, walk together. The contrast between the blackness of their suits and the blondeness and lightness of the girls clothing is stark and only serve to emphasize her unattainable beauty.

It’s like an angel has dropped to earth and these two gentlemen are her bodyguards.

There’s a lot you can read into this image, maybe others have a different interpretation, but the point is were it not for the street photographer it would be a lost moment among billions of others that happened and went unnoticed.

The fact that it exists for us to look at again and again is a gentle reminder that even the inconsequential in life is truly beautiful, if we can just open our eyes and see it.

Belle France

 

 

Just been looking at Corinne Mercadier’s beautiful painterly photographs again. They clearly owe a lot to the French impressionist and post-impressionists, even the surrealists at times but that doesn’t stop them being unique and beautiful in their own right.

 

 

 

I posted a few on my tumblr the other day too , a link to which you can find here

 

http://ngpopgun.tumblr.com/

 

Lucky Lartigue

“It’s marvelous, marvelous! Nothing will ever be as much fun. I’m going to photograph everything, everything!” Jacques Henri Lartigue.

The first photography book I ever brought featured the images of Jacques Henri Lartigue.

It was an impulse buy but it was one that I still love to this day.

So much appealed to me about it.

The humor evident in many of the pictures, the tremendous sense of fun that everyone seemed to be having, the gorgeous women and of course the sickeningly luxurious lifestyle depicted.

In fact, if I’m ever asked which photographer I would most like to have been I would unhesitatingly say Jacques Henri Lartigue. Other photographers may have been more celebrated but no one seems to be enjoying themselves as much as him.

Angels in America

Having just relocated to New York I’m always amazed at the street life you see as you wonder the streets. Just the other day I saw a man riding a BMX wearing a statute of liberty costume. Later I spied a homeless man who had a suitcase stuffed with Barbie dolls, heads poking out at bizarre angles. Earlier in the year, I remember seeing a gay couple kissing on the streets of Chelsea while behind them a Muslim had rolled out his prayer mat and was giving it some for Allah.

Endless juxtaposition and strangeness; a street photographers dream in other words.

It reminded by of a day back in the early part of the century when I emerged from my apartment with my camera to see a man dressed as an angel just leaning against a lamp post. There was no explanation for his behavior. It’s not as if it was Gay pride week or a fancy dress party was happening in the neighborhood. He was well …just dressed as an angel. Like you do.

Or when I was out in Long Beach and stumbled across a wedding taking place on the beach . Nothing particularly unusual about that but when the party broke up I was able to capture this strange contrast between a white tuxedoed figure and a young black guy in a white toweling robe.

It’s these strange random moments that make me love the city and keep me coming back for more.

The Documenter

I saw the Atget exhibition at MoMA the other day. Atget is one of those photographers I know I’m supposed to like but up to this point had no genuine feeling for.

However this exhibition gave me a new appreciation of the man.

 

I had always associated Atget with images of architecture but the exhibition introduced me to his shots of people. In particular, I found his shots of gypsies fascinating. To think these were taken 70 or 80 years before Koudelka did his famous photos of the same subject.They reveal a fine eye for composition and a good connection with his subjects

 

 

Also his shots of street sellers where intriguing, simply because many photographers who followed him have chosen this subject. For example, you might say that Irving Penn in his ‘Small trade’ series owes something to these images.

 

Then there were the pictures of mannequins in department store windows. This was probably not an obvious choice to shoot at the time but they definitely have a surreal quality (interestingly Man Ray was a fan of his work and brought several prints)

Even the images of statues in the Luxembourg gardens on closer inspection have a mood to them that I hadn’t fully appreciated until now.

 

 

Atget thought of himself as a mere documenter of the present, who created images that might be used by more artistic types as inspiration. On the evidence of this exhibition he underestimated himself.

 

 

Disappearing acts

I have to confess that viewing ‘Broken Manual’, the new work by Alec Soth ‘online, I was unimpressed. They seemed to me to be a rather less successful versions of his series ‘Sleeping by the Mississippi’

A visit to the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea to see them in person made me realize how wrong I was.

Soth’s work features those who have decided to live off the grid; be they hermits, loners or survivalists.

A documentary ‘Somewhere to disappear’, which accompanies the exhibit, shows Soth driving around the country in pursuit of these outsiders. The people he finds are a motley crew. One man lives alone in a cave with just a dog and his gun for company, another lives in the desert and calls himself ‘God’. Yet another hides out in a home with boarded up windows waiting for the government to come and get him.

As Soth uncovers these men (and they are all men) he reveals a suffocating paranoia evidenced by one man’s collection of books and videos featuring titles like ‘Imminent Military takeover of the US’, ‘Waco: the rules of engagement’, ‘Avoiding Armageddon’ and most tellingly ‘How to Disappear and Never be Found”

These artifacts become a display in one room of the exhibition and they tell of the palpable sense of unease that inhabits the photos themselves.

Many of the images show these alienated individuals disappearing into the landscape, almost willing themselves to vanish from the face of the earth.

It’s almost as if these men are an embodiment  of a future America, losing its power and sense of self. Maybe ‘Broken Manual’ is not merely a document but also a prophecy?

Saul Leiter’s Street Art

I kind of get the feeling from looking at Saul Leiter’s artful and beautiful street photos that he is more comfortable keeping his subjects at a distance. They are often shot from behind glass or surreptitiously from across the street.

Normally when I see this kind of distance from the subject I think of Robert Capa’s maxim ‘if your pictures aren’t good enough you’re not close enough’ but clearly Leiter’s fine images are good enough.

 

It’s just that he hasn’t gone the route of a Klein or a Winogrand in reflecting urban anxiety.

His work is non-confrontational and fixates instead on the creation of visual beauty in a world of chaos, rather than getting up in the faces of his subjects. Whereas in the work of a photographer like William Klein we’re very aware of the characters of the people being shot, in Leiter’s work it’s unimportant in the way that the fruit in a still life would be.

 

Incidentally, found a great interview with the man on ‘Photographers Speak’ that’s worth reading.

http://photographyinterviews.blogspot.com/2009/04/saul-leiter-quiet-iconoclast-saul.html

Naked Weegee

Some photographers are very firmly attached to the DNA of certain cities; Fred Herzog to Vancouver, Roger Mayne to London, Brassai and Robert Doisneau to Paris and most definitely Weegee to New York

The fact that there are currently two exhibitions in town featuring his work, tells you everything you need to know about his eternal attachment to the city’s visual history.

His real name was Arthur Fellig and his nickname Weegee was given to him by a local cop. It is in fact a phonetic rendering of the word Ouija because of his spookily prescient arrivals at the scene of a crime, only minutes after it had occurred. I seem to remember reading somewhere that this was due to him having a portable police-band short wave radio letting him hear the news of crimes at the same time as the police.

He was self-taught and his camera was nothing fancy, just the standard for the day, but Weegee had something more valuable than the best equipment. He had a uniquely humorous and cynical point of view that gave his images an edge.

It’s not hard to see his influence on other New York photographers that followed him. Everyone from Gary Winogrand to Diane Arbus owes him a debt.

Unlike a street photographer, a press photographer like Weegee had access and could get to shoot things denied to others; be it tigers jumping through circus hoops, a burning building being hosed down by fireman (note the simply add boiling water ad on the side of the building. You can be sure Weegee did) or shot men bleeding out on the hot city streets

Weegee took full advantage of this, whether showing us the titillation of the crowd at the scene of a murder, the vanity of the rich at a Gala event or the venal appetites of kissing couples in the dark.

He is no saint and has no moral point to make with his images; he merely shows us the unedited reality of ourselves in the naked city.

Blow Up

Artfully arranged Flowers are all very nice. But don’t you ever feel that what might make them more interesting is if someone was to get some explosives and blow the shit out of them? No? Maybe it’s just me and Ori Gersht then….

 

 

 

 

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer.

Born in New York in 1926, Vivian Maier was a Chicago nanny who went out in her spare time and took street photos without seemingly telling anyone. Following her death in 2009, there’s been much interest in her work bringing her posthumous critical success worldwide. I went to see a showing of her images at the Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea.

I had seen some of her pictures before and been impressed but many of one’s in the Kasher show were new to me and revealed the depth and range of Maier’s work. I always think that it’s seeing the little things, the seemingly inconsequential, that make for a great street photographer. Maier certainly has that quality.

A couple in violently checked clothing embrace in a park and Maier is on hand to see the comedy of the moment.

An old homeless man sits on a park bench, his head lowered at a weird angle but his gaze fixed on the camera.

A black man crosses his hands behind his back and Maier is on hand to record the stark cleanness of brightness of his nails.

A school bus with the words fuck you scrawled on the glass in between the words ‘STOP ON SIGNAL’.

All are fantastic street images and all are unlike anything else. Yes her work at times is reminiscent of Helen Levitt but what is interesting is that I don’t think you’d necessarily guess a woman had taken most of these images.

I think we can talk now of something being Maier-esque. The images of the sleeping man on the beach and crumpled drunk on a curb seem to be uniquely her.

 

 

Murder is my Business

Having recently seen one Weegee exhibition at the Steven Kasher Gallery, it seemed I hadn’t got quite enough of the man.

So I went to see another exhibit of his work ‘Murder is my Business’ at the ICP Gallery in midtown.  This proved to be one of my better decisions.

The tile is a bit of a misnomer because the exhibition doesn’t just focus on his images of murder. Really it’s all his presswork, plus a couple of documentaries shorts he made.

You tend to forget sometimes that Weegee was a tabloid photographer. If he was around today he’d be working for Murdoch but it’s this that gives his images a raw punch. They need to ‘grab you’ by the throat if they’re going to sell papers.

Interestingly it turns out that Weegee was an unlikely member of the ‘The Photo League’, a radical left wing group including such luminaries as Helen Levitt and W. Eugene Smith.

I say unlikely because Weegee doesn’t seem to be making any political point with his photos. In fact, I would go as far to say he is quite non-judgmental about everything he shoots. He makes no point about poverty when he shows young kids at the scene of their first murder and no comment on the cops that stand over a newly killed mobster.

Weegee just records the murders and arrests like Brassai records the hookers he sees in Paris.

 

 

For all the cynicism and dark humor of his images (see the picture of a murder victim outside of a cinema showing the film ‘Joy of life’) there is humanism too. The face of a cop looking moved by a car crash victim or another holding two rescued kittens in the palms of his hands.

Then there is his ‘Coney Island’ film. It is starkly beautiful with a love of the subjects it shows, while at the same time there’s also a leery quality, as Weegee’s camera ogles the bathing beauties and kissing couples on the jam-packed beach.

 

 

I suppose right there is the odd dichotomy of the man. On the one hand, sleazy tabloid snapper and on the other, empathetic man of the people.

 

Whatever the truth, there’s no doubt Weegee never did what he did to get rich. A recreation of the small bedsit he lived in for much of his life, with nothing but a radio for company is strangely moving. For a second we imagine what it must have been like to be him, laying on his bed waiting patiently for the next murder to be lit up by his flash bulb.

 

 

 

 

Bill Cunningham: New York

How would you like to spend your life living in a bedsit with just a bed and a dozen filing cabinets?

How would you like to have no car, just a Schwinn bicycle that you ride everywhere, even though you’re over 80 years old?

How would you like to dine on cheap food and wear cheap clothes?

How would you like to be an octogenarian facing the prospect of being kicked out of your home?

 

If you’re Bill Cunningham you wouldn’t mind at all because you have something you treasure more than money or status, you have the ability to do something you truly love every day.

Bill Cunningham is a photographer who for forty years has recorded the fashions of the New York streets for the NY Times.

In the fascinating documentary ‘Bill Cunningham: New York’ we get an insight into the very private life of a man who seems a mystery even to his friends.

Here is a man who lives for what he does; photographing fashion trends. Anything that stops him from doing this in the way he wants, he dismisses. When people offer him free food at social events he declines (after all he wouldn’t to feel beholden to his guests and photography them in a dishonest way because of it?) when people add cruel captions to his photos he resigns( how can he earn the trust of the women he photographed if they are betrayed in a such a way?) when people offer him money to sell out his vision he declines( after all without integrity you have nothing , right?)

The result is a person who, even though he has never had a romantic relationship, seems convincingly happy. Proving that the most important thing above all else is staying true to your vision.

He may not be Horst or Penn or any other great fashion photographer but he is clear about what he wants to do and what he needs in order to do it well.

I would bet that 30, 40 or 50 years time you will continue to get exhibits of his photos depicting street styles of New York during its heyday, in the way you get exhibits of Atget depicting the buildings and courtyards of old Paris.

Bill Cunningham is the fashion documenter par excellence.

 

Neil Krug

I don’t imagine Neil Krug’s images will prove as timeless as Irving Penn’s but I do like the visual style he injected into his fashion photos

He’s recently been used by ‘The Horrors’ for the cover of their ‘Skying’ album with a great effect.

Hip and cool rather than classic but great stuff nevertheless.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Divine St. Aubyn

What do you get when you cross drug addiction and child abuse with the upper class world of an Evelyn Waugh novel?

Why Edward St. Aubyn, the British novelist who I feel more than any other of his generation will stand the test of time.

This is strange for a number of reasons. Firstly, he’s writing about a dying almost irrelevant upper class world that seems completely at odds with the subject matter of a ‘modern’ novel

Secondly, the style in which his books are written owe more to the first half of the twentieth century then the beginning of this one.

And finally, it’s hard to write autobiographical/confessional work without it seeming painfully self-indulgent.

Yet perhaps because St. Aubyn combines to estranged formats together, the confessional and the comic novel of social manners, he creates something truly original

The hero of the novels, if hero is the right word, is the deeply flawed but charming Patrick Melrose. Patrick has been the victim of a vicious father, who amongst other thing sexually assaulted him.

His maltreatment leads to a drug addiction that sees him trawl the streets of 80’s New York for cocaine and heroin in ‘Bad News’.

Here lies the key to the success of the books. The wounded Melrose becomes empathetic. He begins, beneath his cutting remarks and withering disdain for practically everyone not least himself, to think about how to deal with what has happened to him. He also realizes during his Narcotics Anonymous meetings that however comic the notion of people standing up and confessing their addiction is, it’s making him feel.

A writer like Waugh would have just exposed the ridiculousness of such an ‘American’ concept as the 12 step program. St. Aubyn understands, probably first hand its value.

In the wrong hands such material could get rather earnest and sentimental but St. Aubyn uses his gift with the bon mot to undercut any such tendencies brilliantly.

Indeed throughout all of these wonderfully entertaining books there are some staggeringly good one-liners and superb set pieces, notably the dinner party held for the late Princess Margaret in ‘Some Hope’, which is even better than Evelyn Waugh.

I could write much more about these books but I won’t. I would just encourage anyone who has a love of British fiction to get the hold of them.

 

 

 

Birth of Cool

Dexter Gordon

Looking through the ICP bookshop they other day I came across a book of Herman Leonard’s pictures of Jazz icons. I’ve always been a fan not just because of the people he shot but the way he shot them. You can tell he was a fan of the music and his enthusiasm and understanding of the Jazz medium translates into the shots. See for yourself……..

Ella Fitzgerald, Paris

Lester Young's hat

Miles Davis

Pearl Bailey

Sonny Stitt

James Moody

Dizzy Gillespie

Bossa Jazz

I’m a big fan of Soul Jazz records and in particular of their new Brazilian compilation Bossa Jazz. It focuses on the period of Brazilian music from 1962-1973

I like Tropicalia the Brazilian movement that was more psychedelic in feel and featured such artists  like Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and Milton Nascimento but I prefer this. It’s super cool and exists in a state of mind where everywhere is a summer beach in Rio.

If only…

 

 

Pretty in Pink

 

Using old school infrared color film, Ireland’s Richard Masse took images of soldiers from militias and rebel groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo

The contrast between the rather pretty and feminine looking backdrops and the gun-totting soldiers is interesting and challenges our idea of how a conflict should be depicted. But does it belittle the violence of what is occurring?

I’d argue that it makes us look again and something that is very familiar to us. We’ve all seen many images of conflict but how any of them have been pink?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Unforgettable

If I have any regrets when I die apart from the tax evasion, embezzlement, loan sharking and murder, it’s that I had a chance to see Richard Avedon speak about his seminal book ‘In the American West’…and I forgot about it.

It just completely slipped what’s left of my mind. Unbelievable. The following year the chances of attending an Avedon lecture were greatly reduced by him suddenly dying. So I am now left with imagining how good it might have been to have seen him.

The only recourse I have left is to make up for this irreversible piece of imbecility by posting some of those great images.

I’ve heard people say ‘What’s so great about just holding a white backdrop behind some one and shooting it ?’ I’d advise you to ignore these people. They know no what they say.

These pictures are beautiful, elegant, simple, touching, soulful, unsettling and thought provoking by turn and represent some of the finest work of a photographic icon.

Here come the freaks

 

Looking at the work of one great New York photographer, Weegee, has made me read a book about another.

‘Diane Arbus’ by Patricia Bosworth is a fascinating look at one of post war photography’s most influential figures.

Born to a wealthy Jewish family that owned a furrier in Manhattan, Arbus spent much of her life as a wife and mother to photographer Allan Arbus. It was only during the last 10 or 15 years of her life that she branched out as a photographer in her own right.

 

 

She had one of those lives that make you curse the fates that you weren’t in New York in the 1960’s.

Stanley Kubrick would come to dinner, Richard Avedon was a close friend, and Lisette Model was her mentor.

It would be easier to list who she didn’t know than who she did.

In spite of this, it was interesting to see how few magazines were prepared to use her work. In the end it was only commissions by the London Times and Esquire that kept her going.

Most people would turn away from her freak portraits, viewing them as distasteful. When they were displayed at a prominent gallery the attendants would have to wipe the spit off the images each evening, hurled from the mouths of unappreciative viewers.

 

 

Now of course so many have followed her path, be it Mary Ellen Mark or Nan Goldin, that we are used to seeing such images. So why do they still have a strange hold over us?

Lisette Model is quoted as saying ‘Never take a picture of anything you’re not passionately interested in’ and you can see the passion/fascination that Arbus has for her ‘freaks’, who she often got to know over many years.

As a person she seems drawn to live at the margins. She told an English lover that she had once sat on the back of a greyhound bus at night and let a complete stranger have sex with her. This was by no means an isolated piece of sexual exhibitionism.

Maybe this quality in her, the desire to push things to the limits, is what we see in her obsessive identification with people who seem very much outside societies norms. Be it the tattooed man, the boy with his hair in curlers, the Mexican dwarf or even the triplets that gaze out of us from their bedroom.

 

 

 

 

The $1000 Wave

I’m a big fan of Australian photographer Trent Parke’s work. In particular the images from his book ‘The Seventh Wave’. It’s a book I would love to own but according to Amazon marketplace to do this would mean me parting with over $1000 dollars.

Now I like his work but a $1000 dollars??? I had set my heart on eating this month. So somehow I don’t think I’ll be seeing Mr. Parke’s opus in my collection.

It’s something I’ve noticed about photography books generally. Even if they’re really good, they’re printed in small runs and once that run is over that’s it.

The result is that just a few years after the initial publication many of the better works are rare to find and very expensive to buy.

The Lesson. Buy immediately. Or face the financial consequences later.

Anyway here are a few of the images from that now exorbitantly priced book Trent Parke book for those that don’t have a $1000 just lying around…

 

 

 

 

 

 

War: Pink in tooth and claw

I went to see Richard Mosse (pronounced like a regular Moss with a silent e’’, in case you were wondering) give a lecture on his’ Infra’ series of photos last night at the Aperture gallery in New York

Richard Mosse

Considering it was a freezing cold night in NYC the attendance was impressive and reflects the buzz created by Mosse’s pictures

Among the many things I learned during the talk was that the film used to create the images is Kodak Aerochrome, which was developed for use in aerial photography by the military in the 1940’s.

As Mosse himself pointed out, its military origins are rather ironic considering he is now using to breathe new life into the war photography genre.

Mosse talked lucidly about the desire to break away from the old macho war photographer image first created by men like Robert Capa.

What better way to do this than use a film that turned much of what it touched the very un-macho color of pink?

This collision of different worlds is what makes the images so interesting to us. A hard-bitten and despotic warlord is turned into a girly gay icon with the click of a shutter.

Of course in doing this Mosse is making us question the veracity of war photographs generally. Just because a photo is blurry, gritty and black and white does that really make more ‘truthful’ than the infrared images?

Indeed what does truth and reality mean when applied to photography.

Mosse is the kind of photographer who doesn’t just ‘take’ pictures he thinks about why he is taking pictures. Which make his images both stimulating and challenging.

All in all, a good reason to brave the winter winds of the Chelsea.

Ghost in the Machine

Just went to see Matthew Pillsbury’s ‘City Stages’ at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery on 57^th street.

For those unfamiliar with his work many of his large format black and white shots feature blurry ghost-like human beings in the midst of monumental cityscapes, be they the interior of a museum or an apartment in a skyscraper.

It’s almost as if the people in his shots are fading to nothing before our very eyes.

For me, this newer work is not quite as strong as his ‘Screen Lives’ series of a couple of years ago. This might be because he’s pushed the whole long exposure thing as far as it can go. That said there is something about some of his work that gets under my skin and I would be interested to see a mid-career retrospective of his stronger images.

From the 'Screen Lives' series

The Brooklyn Flea, Williamsburg Savings Bank

The Places we wouldn’t want to live

The latest photography book to be added to my burgeoning collection is Jonas Bendiksen’s The Places Where we Live’

It’s a really beautiful series of images that highlights the plight of many of the world’s slum dwellers, from Caracas to Jakarta.

A visit to www.theplaceswelive.com gives you a great overview of the subject and features Bendiksen’s photos to stunning effect.

What I love about the series is it shows you don’t necessarily need to be unremittingly brutal in your depiction of poverty to get people to notice the issue. Like Alex Webb before him, he uses color and natural lighting to great effect without prettifying the subject.

 

 

 

 

 

Mountain Man

Just discovered these wonderful early landscapes of mountain ranges taken by Italian photographer and mountaineer, Vittorio Sella.

He was lucky enough to know the Duke of Abruzzi, a man who seemed determined to visit every great mountain range in the world. Handily for Sella, he needed an expedition photographer for these trips and Vittorio happily obliged.

The results are very Ansel Adams-ish. Or perhaps that should be Ansel Adams is very Sella-ish, as Vittorio predates him by several decades.

 

 

The major difference between the two is the appearance in many Sella shots of intrepid climbers negotiating the vast glaciers and rock faces of the world. Which in 1900 must have seemed something awe inspiring.

I keep thinking how difficult it must have been to lug a large format camera around in sub zero temperatures.

Put it this way, you’ve really got to love photography to attempt such a thing in 1899. Luckily for us, Sella seems to have dealt with it rather well and left us with these stunning scenes from a bygone age.

 

 

 

 

 

Undefeated

 

It’s a very long time since I went to the cinema and found myself welling up. Oscar winning ‘Undefeated’ does that to you. You don’t want to respond to this tale of an inner city football team battling to beat the odds but the characters are so compelling and the story so touching that you can’t help loving this documentary to bits.

On the surface it would appear to be your classic triumph over adversity story. A group of inner city kids from North Memphis under the tutelage of their white coach Bill Courtney turn abject failure into a winning season

In fact, Undefeated is an exploration of what happens when people act out of love for one another, not personal gain.

 

 

As Coach Courtney keep saying throughout the film ‘Sports do not build character, they reveal it’ and what is revealed about players like OC Brown, Chavis Daniels and Montrail ‘Money’ Brown is that they have character to spare.

The reason that we see this potential at all is of because of the sacrifice of men like Bill Courtney, who don’t help their young charges out of a desire to get some kick back from a big college team but because they genuinely care about them.

That is the key to the film. It’s not about sports but an attitude to life and our fellow men that in adverse times we do well to remember.

Evidence

Mona Kuhn’s large format photographs of French naturists are some of the best and most interesting nudes I’ve seen in recent years. The large format prints are much sort after by collectors and it’s not hard to see why. They have an easy, soft lit languorous quality which makes the nude figures that populate the image seem as relaxed as if they were fully clothed.

I’ve found an audio interview with the artist on my travels around the interweb and I leave a link to it here.

kuhn.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

An Artist in his Studio

I have a confession. I feel asleep during the first 15 minutes of ‘Gerhard Richter Painting’. I was tired but also if I’m totally honest I was expecting a bit of a snorefest. The very idea of seeing it seemed to have me overcome with drowsiness and was not helped by the use of minimalist classical music a la John Cage. It was looking like this would be the kind of film people would satire when wanting to extract the urine out of art house documentaries.

Then I woke up. And little by little I began to enjoy what I was seeing.

Gone was the slow ponderous and rather pretentious feel of the opening and in its place poured, like so much fresh paint, the personality of Gerhard Richter. My dad always used to say ‘the German sense of humor is no laughing matter’ but Gerhard Richter has a lovely dry and self-deprecating wit, which makes him someone we are happy to spend time with.

He is a philosopher who can laugh at his philosophy, an artist who is not afraid to relate stories of how people described his work as ‘bullshit,’ as if it were the funniest thing in the world. A man who has the humility to let us see him attempt to create beautiful works of art and fail.

In the end I got so much more out of this film than being herded around the Richter exhibition at the Tate Modern in London recently.  Just seeing him working in his studio or driving around Cologne or staring at a garden fence seemed to throw new light on the work.

Woodman at the Guggenheim

Words like haunting, ethereal, spooky, eerie spring to mind when viewing the ghostlike images of Francesca Woodman. Indeed that is the kind of language that pops up in all the reviews I have read, turning her into a cliché – the doomed romantic icon.

Diane Arbus and Sylvia Plath belong to the same canon.

The trouble with this is that it takes away from serious consideration of the work on view, and Woodman deserves better.

If you’ve ever tried to do self-portraits, you’ll quickly discover how difficult they are. It’s hard to shoot yourself in an unselfconscious fashion and to think of new ways to capture your image that don’t seem tired.

Woodman used all of her considerable technical acumen and imagination to create a series of constantly stimulating, beautiful and sometimes disturbing portraits.

There’s an element to her work that is almost like a child playing imaginary games by herself. In many hands this would have seemed nothing more than childish but Woodman allies it with an old world, almost Victorian sensibility. One of the things I kept thinking of when looking at certain images was Alice in Wonderland, a book that was Victorian but strangely surreal like much of Woodman’s work. (Interestingly, while spending a year in Rome she discovered some surrealist texts in a local bookstore and become an avid fan.)

Of course, when looking at a room full of self-portraits its hard not to see someone who is totally self-absorbed. Or perhaps, considering Woodman choose to live away from her college in Rhode Island in an abandoned dry good store, a sense of someone who is a bit of a loner.

However, I tend to feel her portraits are more to do with the nature of identity than with any sense of self-love. The questions she asks with her work seem to be ‘Who am I?’ ‘What am I?’’ What is it to be human?’

Tragically she never got a chance to explore these questions for very long. At 22 she committed suicide by jumping out of a New York loft window.

I’m sure many men who viewed the work felt like me on seeing this young vulnerable, often naked and isolated person, a feeling bordering on love. ‘If only we could have been around to save her’ we think to ourselves. This is of course is at once sexist and vaguely ridiculous but also at the same time poignant. It speaks of someone reaching out to us, affecting us, touching us, and perhaps even accusing us with their art.

In the end she is forever beyond our help, trapped in the body of her work, a 2-D image long since vanished from the face of the earth.

The Hunger for a Story

At a loose end this weekend I joined the throngs of people who decided to watch ‘The Hunger Games’.

Now I’ll always try and watch at least one blockbuster a year but one thing that usually strikes me is how noisy they are. Just watching the trailers advertising the latest round of big budget mega flicks like Spiderman gives me a migraine. Its wall-to-wall booms, bangs and crashes. And that’s just the soundtrack.

How refreshing then to see a film that instead uses not explosions or masses of special effects but simple story and character to drive the narrative.

‘The Hunger Games’ in that respect is a surprising hit. It has no big name actor, no big dramatic end of the world style ending. In fact there is no attempt at all to be big

Because really the film is about displaying what a person needs to do to survive in the world. Which means it has to develop character.

It also taps neatly into contemporary American psyche with a disgruntled, poverty stricken mass venting its anger on a rich, spoilt, manipulative over class.

It’s hard not to see the parallels between the capital city where the games are held and Washington. Or in the pastoral home of the heroine, Katness Everdine, not to see a parallel with pioneer America.

Indeed Kat’s main weapon is a bow and arrow, playing with old western imagery but turning it on its head. She is not a cowboy but the hunted Indian.

This is not the only stereotype the film plays with. The hunky boyfriend is not the hero; he is just the eye candy. The male rival to Kat in the games, Cato, is brutal and strong but imbecilic and very emotional and no match for the wily heroine.

Jennifer Lawrence, who was great in ‘Winter’s Bone’, plays Kat and in so doing creates a character that I’m certain most young women would want to identify with. Tough but tender, smart yet moral, she is no fashion plate (and in fact the women in the film that are, are figures of fun.) and doesn’t conform to the size zero style of the leading ladies favored by Hollywood these days.

Occasionally the film panders to its adolescent audience by becoming a little sappy, but that’s a pretty minor criticism.

I hadn’t expected to enjoy this film but I did and more than that I also enjoyed its philosophy, which questions the whole notion of competition and what it does to people.

What would you rather have a 16-year old watch? This or X-men? I know my answer.

Tokyo Limited

 

Born in Venice in 1983, Renato D’Agostin is a young photographer I can get behind. His beautiful abstract series of street images from Tokyo really succeed in taking an overly familiar subject and making it seem fresh.

 

 

Legendary photographer Ralph Gibson, for whom D’Agostin assisted during his time in New York, puts it best when he says in the forward to the ‘Tokyo Unlimited’ series

“These images are the thinnest possible slices of inconceivable urban density. Slices so thin that they must be measured in fractions of light, tiny microscopic moments of DNA in time taken from the huge archeology of a true metropolis.”

 

 

 

 

Hengki Koentjoro

A couple of weeks ago I posted some images from one my favorite photography books, Trent Parke’s ‘The Seventh Wave.’ Seems I’m not the only one who’s seen it. Indonesian photographer Hengki Koentjoro clearly has too, judging by this series of underwater images.

It may not be that an original a thing to do but even so, they’ve got their own feel and show taste and skill.

Judging by other images I’ve seen by the same photographer his work is very polished (perhaps too polished) with a talent for black and white imagery.

Who is Cindy Sherman?

Writing a review of the new Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA proved to be surprisingly difficult. For a long time I wrestled with exactly what it was that I felt about this generally excellent exhibition. At the center of it was Miss Sherman. She features in every shot. And yet she is not really there. Seeing her show is a bit like attending a birthday party where the guest of honor is absent.

Sherman is merely the blank canvas on which the art is created. So in the absence of the artist, what about the work?

Looking at her complete ‘Untitled film stills’ it is hard to believe that she has created some of the most expensive photographs ever sold.

The series feels almost playful. There is that element of the little girl dressing up for the camera, acting out a fantasy for herself and the viewer. Yet at the same time there is also a sense of unease in many of the portraits, as if the women she depicts know they are being watched by some unseen voyeur. Or even worse, by people like us.

A lot has been made of the fact that Sherman is challenging the stereotypes of women created by the male art and film world. Though I can see this, her assertion that she wanted to make men feel ‘like violators’ in the face of some of her ‘Centerfold’ images, falls flat to me simply because men already know in viewing porn that they are exactly this. And it hasn’t stopped them looking at it since the dawn of creation.

Perhaps, and I struggle to articulate this, that is another feature of the work. It highlights the differences in the way men and women look at things. When I see some of her portraits of female characters, be it the aging ex-cheerleader or the society woman, I am aware that what I see and what a female viewer sees will be rather different. A woman will pick up small cues from dress and posture that I will miss. I will always be left with a feeling of not quite getting it. Like an outsider to a close knit groups in-joke.

Yet somehow this doesn’t matter and is even refreshing in a way. After all, if you don’t quite get it you are forced to think about why. And thinking is always good.

Perhaps too we are helped by the fact that there is something about Cindy Sherman’s work that is extremely accessible and ‘pop’. She plays a lot with existing stereotypes that many are already keenly aware of. Whether it’s old masters, as in the ‘History Portraits’ series, centerfolds or fashion iconography. So there is no need of a degree in film theory and fine art to understand what she is on about.

Then there’s the fact I touched on at the start of this piece, that the images always feature her. It’s almost as if we feel we are getting to know her and yet disconcertingly, like a person who offers friendship and then stands us up, she is strangely absent when we look closely.

We sometimes want to ask the question ’Will the real Cindy Sherman step forward?’

As has been said about her work, it’s almost as if she ‘disappears’ inside the images she creates; they are a mask for her to hide behind. In the same way that a rapper or a rock star create an alter ego that allows them to show themselves, while remaining unknowable.

Maybe it’s this mystery that keeps us hungry to see more of her work, in the vain hope that we will finally see the real Cindy.

Lights, Camera, Action.

 

I’m so excited for the new Alex Prager exhibition at the Yancey Richardson gallery on 22^nd street.

She’s a young, self-taught photographer who was inspired by attending a William Eggleston exhibition to buy her first professional grade camera.

Like Gregory Crewdson, she creates scenes from her imagination that seem very cinematic. Unlike Crewdson, her work feels colorful, vibrant and as melodramatic as the very best Hollywood films.

Cindy Sherman had a series called ‘Untitled Film stills’ but we don’t wonder what has happened or is about to happen in those images in the way we do when we look at Alex Prager’s work.

Indeed she has gone so far as to make short films telling the before and after of some of her pictures.

It will come as no surprise to anyone to learn that the home for this photographer is L.A., a city that often feels like a gigantic film set.

For more on what makes her click, it’s worth checking out this informative 10-minute interview I found on YouTube

 

 

Nice video. Shame about the song.

OK Go specialize in creating talked about videos. This is the latest. Not quite as unique as others I’ve seen but arrestingly simple and graphic nevertheless.

 

Dance Dance Dance

I have a fear of Wim Wenders. I’ve tried medication and therapy but nothing seems to work. It all started as a teenager. I went to see ‘The State of Things’ at a local art house cinema. It’s a film about running out of money to make a film and sitting around the set waiting for finances to arrive so they can resume making their, in this case, post-apocalyptic drama. Or something along those lines. I can’t be sure as I think I fell into a deep coma about two thirds of the way through. Since then I have somewhat enjoyed ‘Paris Texas’ and liked the premise of ‘Wings of Desire’, though apart from the stunning visuals I wasn’t as crazy about the overall film as many I know. Yet in spite of this I still approach his films with a feeling of trepidation, a fear that I will be bored rigid and not have the gumption to walk out if the going gets tough, therefore subjecting myself to two hours of tedium.

Thankfully with ‘Pina’ he goes some way to redeeming himself. It’s not going to be a favorite of the year or anything but the visual set pieces created for this 3D documentary about Pina Bausch stick in your mind. Of course, there is that adolescent part of me that wants to spoof some of the strange dance sequences Bausch creates for her troupe but that’s a bit like laughing at the dance sequences in musicals because ‘that would never happen in real life’. Sometimes you just have to go with it.

At times I drifted off a little, purely because there isn’t a traditional narrative arc to take us through the loosely connected dance sequences. It’s as impressionistic as Pina Bausch’s choreography, creating mood pieces that suggest certain emotions to us, which is as it should be. The only thing I found a little disconcerting during this visual feast was the sight of the dancers bodies, hard and lithe, which drew my attention uncomfortably to my own porcine state. Maybe I should take up ballet.

Compulsion

One of the best things about viewing ‘Compulsion’ the new series of photos by Alex Prager at the Yancey Richardson Gallery are not the bizarre and cinematic photos but the short film that accompanies them, ‘La Petite Mort.’

Titled after the French term used to describe the female orgasm, the film is full of the phallic, transcendental and melancholic images that such a title would suggest.

Take this sequence for example.

A young girl stands in front an oncoming steam train. A pussy crosses her path (wink, wink) before the engine hits her and she is flung into deep water. She swims around in wonder and ecstasy before submerging from her dreamy state. As she breaks the surface a crowd of onlookers, possibly passengers from the stopped train, confronts her. They stare at our damsel, who has emerged miraculously unscathed and totally dry. She walks from the water into the crowd towards a handsome man in their midst. She walks onto land and faints before a handsome man.

The camera cranes and swirls away viewing the scene from a distance. Bunuel Hitchcock and David Lynch would be proud. Though I can imagine given a free reign to make a film, and with the right story to work off, she might create something completely unique.

Maybe one day we will refer to a film as Prager-ian or Prager-like.

I’ve also taken the liberty of making the film seem a little more narrative driven than it actually is. What you notice more is less a story, although the human mind will always want to create one whatever it is shown, but the beauty of the images.

This is particularly apostate when one of the themes of the show is the spectator and the whole act of looking.

Indeed many of the images in the show are accompanied by close-ups of human eyes, as if the artist is making a comment on us the ‘viewer’ and our relationship with what we see.

However, I don’t want to get into all that. All you need to know is her new set of images is strong and adds nicely to her work.

All that’s missing is the feature film.

Sidibe

I never thought I’d go to Marc Jacobs for books but the fashion designer has opened a bookstore on Bleecker, opposite Magnolia bakery.

If you’re not too busy stuffing yourself with cupcakes, I recommend dropping in.

It’s chock full of well-chosen design, art and photography books. It’s introduced me to a host of new names from Hawaiian photographer Henry Wessel to Malick Sidibe. The Mali based photographer has become a particular favorite. His studio portraits of his fellow countrymen from the sixties and seventies are superb. They have a sense of playfulness, using background stripes and other patterns to contrast or mirror the outfits of his subjects. Which somehow makes these black and white images feel as vibrant as the most vivid color work.

 

 

 

 

 

The Raid.The action movie redeemed.

It’s not very often you go to your local multiplex to find an Indonesian subtitled film on the bill. In fact, it’s never. At least I can’t remember it ever happening before.

Does this mean we’re all becoming incredibly sophisticated and art house?

Nope. It means that someone in Asia has come up with an interesting way to frame endless scenes of mayhem and high-octane violence and called it ‘The Raid: Redemption.’

The plot is pretty simple. A police raid a rundown Jakarta tower block with the aim of arresting the evil drug lord that lives there.

Unfortunately, a gang member blows there cover and alerts his boss who proceeds to unleash the buildings lowlifes on the hapless officers.

After the twentieth guy gets his brains blown out of his head at close range, we realize this Asian movie isn’t exactly Kurosawa. And we’re very glad of it because it is hugely entertaining.

It uses the limitations of its one location to great effect, getting some highly imaginative kills in the process. Yet still manages to have enough down time between the fight sequences to create some drama and narrative thrust.

It’s also choc-a-block with clichés.

The mammoth Kung Fu action sequences, brothers on different sides of the law, the corrupt cop, and the psychopath henchman, ‘The Raid’ has them all. Yet such is the body count we hardly have time to think about it. Nor should we.

The action is handled with such panache and visual style that we forgive ‘The Raid‘ its deficiencies.

 

Henry Wessel

Always on the look out for photographs old and new that have somehow escaped my radar. Henry Wessel is one of them. He seems to have taken many of his shoots around the late sixties onwards, concentrating on Southern California, New Mexico Arizona and Hawaii. My research indicates he’s a resident of San Francisco, having moved out to the West Coast in 1970.

Having lived in southern California I appreciate what Wessel has done.

If you’re shooting on the streets of New York there’s always something happening in front of you. Your only problem is how to make sense of the ever-moving chaos, as people turn and move and jostle and generally ruin your composition in the blink of an eye.

In southern California you’re problem is the reverse. It’s an absence of people and a distance from the subject that can lead to you just trying to find artsy ways of shooting bleached white buildings in harsh sunlight and cactus.

Wessel has a few of those shots but he also has a good eye for humor and extracts the maximum from the minimum he has in front of him. Bikini clad airheads are contrasted with hunched elderly folks. Aging, short shorts wearing men power down beaches with no self-consciousness, shirtless bodybuilders stare out from behind dark glasses. It’s a world instantly recognizable as California but not one the tourist board are going to use. These are the images of man who takes a wry distance from what he sees around him.

The Hawaiian shots are also stunning, mixing a kind of Edward Weston-esque interest in form with the wit that features in his Californian work.

Trees of Life

Anyone visiting New York probably hasn’t come for the trees. So Mitch Epstein’s new photographic project, the trees of New York, seems puzzling at first. Even more so when we see these images are in black and white, not normally the choice of a photographer known for his color work .

However, on viewing the pictures at the Sikkema Jenkins and Co Gallery on 22^nd street first hand, they become quite intriguing.

For a start their taken with a large format camera and are big, at least 6 ft tall maybe larger, which naturally encourages us to look more closely at them. I’m afraid my thumbnails are not going to really do them justice but in real life they are very beautiful and more importantly, thought provoking.

So often we view nature as a backdrop for something, be it animals or human beings and their creations.

Rarely do we see trees in an urban environment as ‘the stars’ as we do in Epstein’s work. In this series, the silent trees shelter the tiny people underneath their branches. They feel almost as if they are holding our world together, just by the nature of their longevity.

The black and white helps stop the jarring colors of an urban environment (think shop awnings and garish clothing) distracting us from them. While at the same time making the trees feel more interwoven with their urban setting.

In short these images are a great tribute to the cities silent witnesses.

I’d just like to add a thank you to the excellent Sikkema Jenkins & Co Gallery, which kindly allowed me to use these  images in this post.Incidentally, I found an interview with Epstein where he elaborates more eloquently than I about how he came to create these pictures.

http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/11/mitch-epstein-tree-stalker/

If you wish to see more of Mitch Epstein’s work you can at  http://www.mitchepstein.net/

All images copyright Mitch Epstein / Black River Productions, Ltd. Courtesy of Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York.

Oh the Agony of Luxury

It was a hard life being middle-class in California in the mid sixties. Your parents buy you an Alfa Romeo Duetto as a graduation present. Your have to spend weary afternoons floating around in your pool with your sunglasses on. People are constantly harassing you to go out on dates with beautiful college women. And to make matters, even worse attractive middle-aged woman are seducing you without so much as a by your leave.

Naturally such a state of affairs would promote and existential crisis in any spoilt, rich kid and Benjamin Braddock is no exception.

He desperately wants to find away to escape from all this shallow hypocrisy, while being immaculately dressed in a fine and very contemporary-looking preppy wardrobe (somewhere between Gant and APC) and driving very fast in his shiny red sports car.

Yes it’s hard to have a lot of sympathy for the led character in Mike Nicholls adaptation of Charles Webb’s novel, which I viewed again recently at ‘Film Forum’.

At the time we would be encouraged to contrast Benjamin’s quirky awkward persona with the self-deceiving and morally compromised parents. Yet as we grow older we recognize the parents for what they are, people to whom life has happened, who have made bad decisions or even, in the case of Mrs. Robinson’s shotgun marriage, been forced into them by society.

Ben is right to want to break with this past but if we think about it, if he had an affair with a married woman is he likely to always be as upstanding and moral in the future? Isn’t it highly probable he becomes like his parents but worse? I like to imagine him married and living in Laguna Beach in the early seventies but attending key parties and swinging to escape his latest malaise.

In the end Dustin Hoffman’s brilliant portrayal of this anxious soul, helps illuminate the darkness that lives in him. It’s noticeable that many of his actions; from beginning the affair with Mrs.Robinson to going to Berkley to try and get her daughter to marry him, always end up meeting with success because rather like the old TV detective Colombo there is something very smart underneath all that bumbling.

Charming Benjamin Braddock knows how to get what he wants and has been brought up with the sense of entitlement that makes it very likely he gets it.

Street Smart

Doug Rickard is someone who has shamefully escaped my attention. A recent visit to the ICP website hipped me to this interesting new photographer.

His series ‘New American Picture’ is particularly impressive. It features areas of America with high levels of unemployment. These desolate, hopeless-looking places are found remotely by Rickard, using Google street view.

The artist then composes images based on the Google technology on his computer screen and photographs them.

You might ask why doesn’t he just go there and take a picture? To which I’d reply that would only produce another series of images detailing with poverty in America in a manner we’ve seen many times before.

This method puts an interesting twist on traditional street photography, while not shirking the responsibility to bare witness.

It also draws our attention to the lack of privacy in our lives. In the modern world it would seem there’s always someone watching you. However, be comforted by the fact that if it’s Doug Rickard, at least you’ll get a cool image out of it.

Hockney v Hirst: Let battle commence.

‘A Bigger Picture’ is a slight, if interesting look, at the painter David Hockney. It focuses on his return to his native Yorkshire to paint a series of landscapes that form part of the recent exhibition of his work at the Royal Academy.

I had wanted to see this show when I was over in London but tickets were sold out which goes to show the immense popularity of this art world titan.

The landscapes in this latest series are influenced by Chinese scrolls, which unlike western art, try to see a scene from no fixed point of view. Hockney points out the Chinese idea is more like the way we truly see; with our eye constantly moving across the landscape, scanning it .The unrolling of the scroll kind of mimics this action.

Indeed to continue the oriental theme, Hockney repeats a Chinese dictum which states to create great art you need “an eye, a hand an and a heart”, before adding ‘Two out of three wont do’. As the film continues we see this not just a neat quote about his own work but also a not so subtle attack at rivals like Damien Hirst.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the whole film is when the film maker Bruno Wollhiem, almost mischievously shows Hockney’s latest work to Hirst, the great pretender to Hockney’s greatest living artist throne.

Almost the first words out of Hirst’s mouth are ‘well I wouldn’t want to own one’ before begrudgingly admitting that they ‘work.’ He naturally notices the presence of death in the work (not surprising for an artist obsessed with the subject) but describes the images as ‘annoyingly dark’.

It’s a great example of the ego of the artist when confronted with another talented practitioner. Not that Hockney is a man lacking in a healthy self-regard.

He has a go at Hirst by creating a poster to advertise his own work entitled ‘A Bigger Sensation’, a sly dig at the Sensation exhibition from the late nineties that Hirst took part in.

It all seems very stage-managed; as if both artists like two boxers mouthing off before a fight, know that such a showdown only adds to their own reputations

It’s Ali versus Frazier all over again …but with paintbrushes.

 

Hell Hath No Fury

 

I picked up Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment’ absent-mindedly while in McNally Jackson in Soho. At first it seemed an unlikely choice. A book about a Neapolitan woman living in Turin who is told by her husband that he is leaving her for another woman.

This news is devastating enough for any person but for the heroine of Ferrante’s novel it is cataclysmic and sends her into a spiral of hatred fear and self-loathing.

 

What’s makes the book so fascinating is its coruscating honesty and passion. Ferrante doesn’t put a positive gloss on her heroine’s collapse. Olga attacks her husband in the street; she is spiteful to neighbors, her old friends, even her children. She seems at times almost overcame with bitterness or too distracted to actually function in the real world. At one point her daughter stabs her in the leg with a pair of scissors but she is too out of it to realize until she sees the gaping wound.

There is something monstrous about her, as if the love she felt for her husband has been eviscerated and replaced by pure hatred. She is poisoning herself with her feelings and seems to be powerless to stop it. Perhaps her most terrifying fear is that she becomes like the’ poverella’, a woman she remembers from her Neapolitan childhood. The ‘poverella’ was so-called because she suffered the terrible fate of having her husband leave her for another woman. Eventually she becomes a sad and dejected object of pity and takes her own life.  She haunts Olga, metaphorically and literally (at one stage she starts hallucinating the woman in her apartment)

Yet as the novel progresses we come to see that all this emotion is not self-destructive but cathartic. It’s almost as if she has an illness and her anger is the fever that needs to work itself out of her body for her to be cured.

Indeed this idea physically manifests it self in a scene near the end of the book when the family dog is poisoned and her son suffers a severe virus.

The dog dies, the son recovers and from this point so does Olga. For once the love she felt for her husband has vanished, the hate can leave too and she can move on with her life.

In the end the novel is upbeat. The ending sees her find not just herself but love in the form of her neighbor, a musician.

It’s one of those happy endings that is totally justified by the previous action. After all Olga has won. She has beaten her demons and those of a sexist society by facing them like a mighty warrior. It’s noticeable how fearless and combative she is during much of the novel, almost as if she were a mythical Homerian hero defeating magical creatures.

I can imagine this would be a very popular choice with any woman who’ve been through a traumatic break up but as man I still found it to be a compelling, if sobering, read.

Old School Surf

Whenever I see any color film from the 70’s I’m always amazed at the richness and quality of it. Jeff Devine’s 70’S surf portraits are no exception. I’m not sure if this is Kodachrome or just color film he’s using but whatever it is the results are outstanding. Admittedly it’s hard to go wrong when you’re backdrop is the coast of Hawaii or California but still there’s something crisp, clean and inviting about these surf scenes that makes a non-surfer like me want to reach for a board.

On reflection I think what makes the color in these shots cool is that it doesn’t mimic reality, it heightens it in someway. Modern digital processes and film seem obsessed with the idea of making it look ‘real’ and at the same time through use of Photoshop ‘pristine’, thereby taking the guts and the art out of the picture.

For more cool surfing shots check out his site at http://www.jeffdivinesurf.com/

Hello Sadness

The French Riviera, Givenchy, Hermes and Cartier all come together beautiful to create the wardrobe for the 1958 film ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ which I saw at the film Forum yesterday. Indeed if we’re being catty we might argue David Niven’s wardrobe has dated rather better than his acting style.

Luckily there is a little more to ‘Bonjour Tristesse’, which translates for those like me who don’t know French as Hello sadness, than it’s panache and location.

It’s interesting for the fact that the male figures in this film occupy the position normally taken by female characters, that of the ornamental and narcissistic.

Indeed Raymond played by the ever debonair Niven describes himself as ‘a vain and silly man’

As such he finds himself a pawn in a power struggle between the possessive daughter, Cecile (Jean Seberg) and the controlling wife-to-be, Ann (Deborah Kerr). It’s a game, which in this case, has tragic consequences as Cecile engineers an affair between her father and his ex, which she cruelly allows Ann to witness. Ann responds by committing suicide, an act that devastates the lives of Cecile and her father, making all of lives pleasures empty and meaningless for them.

As an example of the lengths women will go to in their battle for control over the men they desire, it has no filmic equal.

The fact that Cecile’s relationship with her father is also borderline incestuous, make her actions doubly disturbing.

 

I haven’t read the book by Francoise Sagan on which the film is based but I very much want to having seen this. In fact in the process of writing this I found the opening line to the novel which sums up the mood that pervades the whole film

‘A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness. In the past the idea of sadness always appealed to me, now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I had known boredom, regret, and at times remorse, but never sadness. Today something envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, which isolates me.’