Early On-Set Alzheimer's

I haven’t seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but I have seen the trailer. Judging from the trailer, the plot goes something like this:

Scientists are working on a cure for Alzheimer’s disease and stumble across a drug which causes the human brain to repair itself. Great. Naturally, they try it out on chimpanzees first, and wow! - imagine their surprise when their star test chimp actually starts getting smarter. And smarter. In fact, pretty soon the monkey starts getting able to do pretty much everything a human can, and forms a close bond with its scientist owners. One of these guys, played by John Lithgow, actually has Alzheimer's, so there is a nicely poignant moment of ships passing in opposite directions as the chimp gets smarter, whilst the human is actually losing his faculties. I think I’m going to cry at that point. Anyway, for one reason or another, the drug doesn’t get approval. It’s possibly something to do with aggression caused in animal subjects. When our hero chimp violently intervenes in an argument and kills a human, he is locked back up in the lab, and the plug is pulled on the whole project. Enter some Stupid Humans who love taunting animals and want to show them who’s boss. Their recklessness causes the clever chimp to escape, and he administers the smart drug to all the other chimps, who then escape and proceed to take over the world.

Close enough? I’d be surprised if I have veered from the plot in any significant way. The relatively new trend of cutting trailers so that they not only give you a taster of the film, but also give you a taste of acts one, two and three, in that order, before hinting at an inevitable conclusion, all but makes going to see the actual film a mere formality, and a predictable one at that. The only way I'm now going to enjoy Planet of the Apes is if I get Alzheimer's before it comes out, and forget what I saw in the trailer. Needless to say, that will mar my enjoyment somewhat. People used to say “I hope the movie is as good as the trailer.” Now, it’s more relevant to say: “I hope the movie isn’t just a longer version of the trailer, but not as good, like with Iron Man 2 and several other releases in the last year or so.” 

Persona Non Grata

And another one. I see from Wikipedia that Heywood Isham died in 2009 and has officially become a footnote in history, just as he would have wanted, I’m sure. Sheila has a website. 

Sheila and Heywood Isham were staying at the Angleterre Hotel, which is next to the Astoria in St Isaac’s Square. “We find the Astoria so stuck up,” complained Sheila, her nut brown face scowling. Her skin was tanned to the condition of leather after years in hot climates – Haiti, the United States. Her husband, whom she called “Hey!” was a retired US ambassador. She was an artist. For fifty years the couple had travelled the globe, meeting the rich and famous, and now they were back in Russia, “our favourite place of all,” to promote a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Mikhailovsky Castle. I had come early, dressed pretty tidily, because I was aware I was mixing with high-flyers.

I was sneaked up on in the foyer by a venerable old man, mostly bald, but smartly dressed, this was Hey!, who led me to their table, where they were just finishing up their breakfast. They boxed me in and started asking me questions. My first impression was quite positive. Sheila Isham had strong blue eyes and brown highlights in her hair. I took her for around her mid-fifties (she was seventy-six, I learned later.) They told me how pleased they were to be back in Russia and I politely asked questions about their interesting lives. Almost as if I had pressed a button, Hey launched into an anecdote about his early career. He had obviously told it so many times, that he couldn’t remember what the point of it was. Sitting alongside Hey, I had a better chance to examine him. He was definitely getting old. He had the trembling jaw of the third age, and heavily liver spotted, like a piece of corned beef. The story neither gathered pace nor stimulated interest, and I wasn’t sure it was supposed to. Looking at Hey’s misted-over expression, I realised I had been transformed into dinner party guest, strategically placed beside him at the table and listening to the old Russia hand unlock his file-index of dusty anecdotes. It was a dull tale, which I listened to with increasing incredulity – not because I didn’t believe it happened, but because I couldn’t believe that someone could consider it worth repeating. Hey was saying, “ 'and he said, ‘Do you speak any German?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I do,’ and he said, ‘You’re hired.’ ” Hey began laughing gently, and I realised, with sudden horror, that that had been the punchline, and that I had missed it. I belatedly joined in, but felt I lacked conviction. 

It was Sheila who did most of the talking after that. She told me how they had come to Russia for the first time in the mid-fifties. She had studied International Relations but had changed to Art when she met Heyward. He would cover the international relations from there on, as a young diplomat. When he was in Germany (where his anecdote had deposited him, young, smart, and groomed for a great career), she was studying at a famous school there ( I knew it was famous, because of the significance with which she pronounced the name I had never heard of.) “Boy, did they work us hard there. But I learned a lot. I learned an awful lot.” If he was in anecdote mode, she was very definitely in interview mode: no incident was isolated, but was as if neatly labelled for magazine consumption, “influences”, “education”...

“That was where I learned my craft. I had to work hard, but I had talent,” she was saying. (“I’ll be the judge of that”, I thought.) But perhaps this was the first inkling I had that, for those that fame has taken under her wing, or even for those, like Sheila Isham, who are merely clinging to its tail feathers, approbation is already a given, and individual approval can only gloss what is already there, which is a cast iron self-assurance of one’s own ability. Sheila explained how, when they first came to Moscow, they were followed around. “I got into a lot of trouble from drawing bridges. You weren’t allowed to draw anything in those days, and there were a lot of amateur policemen who would inform the authorities if they thought you looked suspicious.”

She was harmlessly patronising: “...but you know that already,” she would add, after telling me something that I knew already. You had the impression that she thought you were flattered when she said this. “I know I know that already”, I kept feeling like saying.

Hey! had been silent for quite a while, but the mention of Khruschev in connection with painting seemed to activate transistor relays in his analogue brain, and he briefly flickered to life, like a fairground fortune teller’s head when you put a coin in the slot, with an anecdote about a telephone call in which dropping the name of a high up member of the KGB to an intransigent lackey had obtained a desired result. We chuckled appreciatively at his savoir faire. His Russian was partially intact: at least he could say 'so l'dom' (with ice) perfectly.

“We were persona non grata here for a while,” said Sheila. “That means we weren’t welcome,” she added helpfully, “...but you know that already”.

They were a remarkable old couple. He was the worldly half of their relationship, discussing international politics at the very highest level, from the horse’s mouth. She, by contrast, took care of the rest of existence: its metaphysical manifestations, in art and the world of the imagination. She spoke of her art, her “work” as if it were something she had no control over, but merely tended, as if it were a garden she were the curator of, or a strange creature such as a dragon, that she was the guardian of. “A couple of years after Haiti, my work became really mythic” she told me.

I would have been happy to leave it at this, but unfortunately, I had been ‘hired’ as some kind of tour guide, translator and gopher before the exhibition. Sheila was beside herself with the lack of preparation by the Russian organisers of the event. It was on the way to the gallery that I found out how old she was, by letting her fall in the snow. If anyone over sixty falls over and you are near them, it’s your responsibility, by the way, for not throwing yourself underneath their collapsing body like an airbag. At the gallery, an hour or two later, Sheila revealed herself to be a true primadonna, with whistles and bells, not to mention a typical American abroad. If she had left the practical side of existence to Hey!, how completely she had accomplished it! Now she was incapable of the slightest improvisation in the material realm. She made the simplest task, that of allocating some thirty or so paintings to five rooms according to some instructions, nearly impossible.

”Which room is this?” she would ask, not revealing to her interlocutors, except through a slow and painful process of trial and error, that she in fact had an invisible soundproof bubble around her head and could not hear a word you said. Paintings would be brought in, “That one goes there. That one goes there. No. Sorry. This is the wrong sheet. Let me get the right sheet. This is the right sheet. That one goes there. That one goes there. Oh. No, this is the wrong room. YOU’VE GOT THE WRONG ROOM!” Three hours later, the job was half done. Hey! had arrived, and when he thought he was unobserved, discreetly loosened his clothing. The public hanging went on. It should have taken twenty minutes. I was in awe of this ancient, brown, wrinkled powerhouse of creativity and incompetence. She was fantastic at pushing people around, and she made people feel it was it was an honour to be pushed around by her. Her steely blue eyes, hardened, no doubt by years of living, and getting things done in difficult-to-live-and-get-things-done places, brooked no dissent. I understood the awesome charismatic power of the catastrophic generals of history. The Somme suddenly made sense.

But what about her paintings? The different ‘phases’ and ‘periods’ of the artist are supposed to denote the restlessness of the imagination, the constant drive to experiment. Sheila Isham’s pictures were the kind that would provoke a Sunday supplement panegyrist to call them a ‘series of departures.’ They were departures, all right, but in the sense of a British railway timetable: none of them actually arrived anywhere. Unlike most artists, who tend to begin with the figurative, and gradually unshackle themselves from the slavish adherence to established forms, Isham had developed in the opposite direction, beginning with abstract expressionist circles and wavy lines, moving through a sort of primitivism to end up at a kind of simple expressionism, or, to put it crudely, pictures of animals in dynamic brush strokes. There might have been three or four different artists on display, so it was difficult not to suspect a touch of wilfulness in all this. Still, whereof on cannot speak, one should remain silent. I was just the hired help (although I never got paid.) 

I used to live in St. Petersburg. In order to 'make ends meet', I ended up doing a lot of 'khaltura' - weird odd-jobs, usually translation based, for just about anybody. I recently discovered a diary entry for one meeting, and thought it would be interesting to post it. I sound a bit Edwardian, which makes me wonder what I was reading at the time. Anyway, here it is...

Elena Beresentsova met me in the meeting room of the Russo-American Chamber of Commerce. A primly dressed small woman, on the cusp of being elderly, with a beaming smile and light brownish hair, there was something amateurish about her which put one immediately at one’s ease. It quickly became apparent that this lady liked to do all the talking. I detected a certain pride in her position and her responsibilities as she saw them that caused her to adopt a slightly false, overly officious manner. I was from England? She loved England so much. She went there every year. She regarded it as a second home. She laughed delightedly. Well, not quite delightedly, but rather, she laughed as if she thought that was a place where a person who laughed delightedly might be expected to laugh. She told me the kind of work she would expect me to be doing. They had a man, Andrei ( I had met him at the door; young, black-suited, side parting, strangely patronising, possibly an android) who wrote letters etc. in English, but it was really…such rubbish! Elena laughed at how preposterous his written English was. Her own English was not bad – heavily accented, but mostly correct- but again one detected this anxiety, really a form of snobbery, that caused her to constantly correct herself and find overly colloquial ways of expressing herself. 


She handed me a letter – an invitation to the head of 'Independent Media' – and asked me to look – just look - at the first paragraph. I was prepared for something pretty atrocious, but nothing could have prepared me for the shock which I got then. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing. Uncertain what to say, I tentatively nodded and said that it could perhaps, on reflection, stand some improvement (first rule of freelancing). After all, everything can, I reasoned. My horror deepened as she then asked me what I would write, if I were to write the same letter. I had no idea. Did I have a pen? Yes, I have one here. “Don’t look at it!” she laughed, referring to poor Andrei’s attempt. “Just tell me what you would write.” 


I was beginning to think this would come to a nasty conclusion and began to stutter something about changing the word order, when she came to my rescue. “I would put it this way,” she said, “though of course I don’t know anything.” It was clear that she thought she did know something, and regarded this as a good opportunity to show me how much. She gleefully butchered Andrei’s English, whilst I hesitatingly offered solemn assent to her changes. “My daughter (she was educated in England, you know, in Oxford), had to do English lessons there. She asked the tutor how to use ‘and’ and ‘the’. He replied, “that’s easy, you just need to live in England for two generations!” A long, drawn out laugh now, which I jogged to keep up with. We finished with the letter, eventually, and she seemed very pleased with my suggestions, though I couldn’t remember having made any. “Andrei is good, but he has been here six months and I just feel his English isn’t good enough…” Was I really hearing this? Was she telling me, who had just walked in the door, that Andrei was heading for the chop? I felt obliged to stick up for him. “Well you know, the letter was perfectly understandable for an English person…” I began. She shook her head resolutely, “…but not good enough. That is our problem, I know,” she finished, misconstruing the intention of my statement. She rhapsodized about England again. She wondered aloud how I could get into her office, since, as part of the American consulate ( a fact of which she tried to appear nonchalant, but was obviously and inexplicably proud) she thought it might present difficulties. She seemed to inflate my worth, strangely, along with the worth of everything else that touched her existence. I felt myself, in her imagination, to be a linguistical expert, or a cultural attaché. I felt that this was a woman whose self-deceptions were too intrinsically linked with her personality to make dismantling them a non-injurious process. We parted on good terms, and I bid Andrei goodbye with more sympathy than I would have imagined on the way in, but with cameras in every part of the building I made sure I didn’t make a face until I was out on the street. 

Hackney Wicked

Went to the Hackney Wicked festival today. Thought I might do some sketching, which I haven't done in a long time, but need to get in the habit of again. The A5 books I use are too small, really, and I bought a charcoal pencil in the shop this morning by mistake, which made a mess. Oh well, it's a start.

Mick McMahon Blog

If you know anything about British comics over the last thirty-odd years...okay, that's just eliminated just about everybody, but if you do, then you'll know the work of Mick McMahon. He's the Picasso of comic art. His early work on Judge Dredd and ABC Warriors, then Slaine, and later on Last American, plus his stunning work on, er, Sonic the Hedgehog - all of it is incredible, not least because unlike every other artist in the business, who spends formative years finding a style, and the rest of the career honing it, McMahon takes his artistic talent to pieces as soon as he finishes a piece of work, then he puts it back together again and creates a whole new style out of the same parts and uses that for a while before getting the sledgehammer out again. Naturally, this sort of experimental approach sends most fanboys running for the hills, but who cares? Now Mick has a blog, and I recommend anyone with an interest in the difference between an artist and a hack, check it out...

http://tuggingyourcoat.blogspot.com

From the Judge Dredd Strip: The Howler

Unto This Last

In the news today, a Norwegian far right Christian has killed at least 84 people by dressing up as a policeman and blasting away at an island youth resort. It's beyond depressing that one person can cause that much misery. Went for a coffee in Cafe Nero - no toilets, so had to visit Liverpool Street. One of the cleaner stations. A plaque on the wall commemorates the successful refurbishment on 1992. Now the trains are hidden away (could they do without them?) and the place has become a hanging garden of commerce with pigeon skewers on all the fixtures. Toilets cost 30p. Number 25 bus to Stratford. Pass the university and a sculpture relief with a person reading a book: “Unto This Last”. It is a line from the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard: “Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee,” referring to Jesus’ equal wage policy. More likely a reference to Ruskin’s 1860 essay of the same name, which dealt with ideas like a basic living wage and the destructive effects of capitalism on the natural world. A nice segue into the utopian folly that is now Stratford Olympic Village. From the bus, we could see a huge stadium, and a spiral tower growing like a plant alongside. Stratford bus and train station are now bigger, but dwarfed, as is the Stratford shopping centre, by the new Westfield shopping complex (biggest in Europe), a giant set of monogrammed boxes (Westfield, M&S...). Iain Sinclair is right: the whole place has been given over to visionless developers to sell back and forth until the land price bears no relation to its value, and noone can afford to live on it any more. That’s the long-term plan anyway. The next stage, post Olympics, is going to be an abandoned sculpture park, with a slowly spreading contagion of graffiti tags and knotweed. Europe’s largest white elephant.

Dodgem Logic

Alan Moore's counterculture magazine, 'Dodgem Logic' has come to an untimely end, or as he puts it:

"I'm sure you'll be as astonished as I was that our initial strategy of paying contributors, high production values, no stinking capitalist advertising and an affordably low cover price seems not to have worked".

Yes, all that, and having a very vague idea of who their target audience was: judging by this issue, I'd guess they're aiming for the 'Northampton-transvestite-socialist-coprophiliac' demographic, which is a notoriously fickle one. Anyway, I'm sorry they're going, without even publishing an interview with Jeff Lint. Nice picture here though, by Alex Musson after someone or other. So long, Dodgem Logic, you mad bastard, you...

Displacement Activity No. 2746

Symposium Response: I Buy to Belong

La Danse d'Argent

I don't know why I bother

EC War Comic Pastiche

Here's my somewhat sardonic pastiche of a 1950s EC 'new wave' war comic. 'Two-Fisted Tales' and 'Frontline Combat' were two war titles edited, written and given layouts by Harvey Kurtzman, one of the few outstanding talents in comics history. The stories range from straight out heroism to more thoughtful tales which far from glorify combat. They were way ahead of their time both in their message, which was that war ain't that great, and in their technical achievements, which have arguably yet to be surpassed. EC were the first comics to allow artists to draw as themselves, rather than in the 'house style'. This approach allowed creators to create their own fanbases, and meant the EC artists vied to outdo each other in artistic excellence. The style I'm going for here is obviously modelled on Harvey Kurtzman himself, though I would need a few more years practice to match his skill with a brush. The fact that I'm working in the computer age means that I could apply zipatone (dots) effect with photoshop and do the lettering very quickly.

Mid Point Review (Part Time Group)

1. Evaluation of my project proposal as part of a self directed programme of study.

I think my project proposal has been a good starting point for my work, but it has changed quite a lot. Originally I wanted to do work which related to immigration detention. As I was doing work which was based on comics, I wanted to see how these could intersect. I later found this idea a bit prescriptive, so I took the ideas that came out of the concept of detention: borders, being stuck, frustration and confusion, and started doing some work around this. This has proved a lot more fruitful for me.

2. Where I need to develop study plans in relation to the Unit 1 learning outcomes

I think I could pin my proposal down a bit more and make it more specific. I'm also interested in being more experimental in my use of materials and presentation. I think before I used to think of presentation as a kind of step that I would take after I finished working, and not a very interesting one. Now I am interested in creating a finished thing, and making the form of that thing influence the content in some way.

Work in Progress

I'm preparing a short book for an alternative press fair at the end of the month. Here's some stuff I'm working on. Any comments would be welcome!

Roughs, Roughs

I thought it might be interesting for the hundreds of people who read my blog to see the byproduct of a day's work. Generally, before I start doing anything, I fill up pages with words and doodles out of which sometimes something interesting comes.

Joost Swarte

I subscribe to the New Yorker, mainly because they sometimes have good cartoons in there which can repay careful study. Joost Swarte's work is interesting. His style is classic ligne claire and very heavily influenced by Herge (well, who isn't?).

In the the strip excerpt below, we can see a joke working on several levels. As the protagonist talks to his (presumed) girlfriend, her body language from panel to panel displays increasing exasperation with his incessant talking, before turning out the light in the last panel. The guy is talking about his penchant for picking up knick knacks  and bringing them home for inspiration. Here, Swarte plays with the idea that in a comic book story it is minor variations in a panel that tell a story. The first time you read the strip, the room seems identical in each panel. But as you reread, you realise that the objects are different in each panel: on the bookcase, the table, above the cupboard. Of course this reinforces the idea that there is a proliferation of junk in the flat. As the artist himself comments in panel 5 "it's hard to concentrate when there's all this stuff around" - possibly leading to the inconsistencies between panels. This is a subtle and perfectly realised comics page, because the visual language is reinforcing the story in a very clever way. It's also a really good example of something which just wouldn't work in any other medium, even animation (where you would not have the luxury of going back to examine previous panels).

Lounge Lizard

Four Films

I often go to watch cheesy Hollywood movies: I probably watch about as many Hollywood films as I do foreign or independent arthouse movies. There’s an unspoken assumption that Hollywood movies are terrible, whereas arthouse movies are somehow more worthy, if occasionally boring. Well, if reading Roland Barthes has taught me anything, it is that any subject matter is fit for scrutiny. I also think that films succeed or fail on their own terms, so  Hollywood movies may be generic, but that doesn’t mean they are all equally good or bad. Often the familiarity with the action/thriller/ sci-fi genre means that it is easier to identify things which are a deviation from the norm, and that’s part of what is interesting. ‘Arthouse’ cinema (an awful term) is usually more original, and Hollywood generally has a parasitic relationship with it. But there’s still an awful lot of poor movies in this category. 

This month I saw two Hollywood movies at the cinema: Limitless and Source Code, and two european films: Les Petits Mouchoirs (Little White Lies) and Essential Killing. 

Limitless was the most enjoyable of all four of these movies, mainly because of its extremely satisfying premise: a pill that allows the consumer to instantly fulfill their potential. Now I can imagine marxists, neo marxists, pseudo marxists and even Karl Marx getting annoyed by this idea: I mean the whole idea of advertising pushing the line that you have unfulfilled potential and are basically unhappy in order to sell you products. All I can say to that is that they already tried socialist realism and it didn’t produce very much good art. Whenever I read a critique of a movie or book or album or whatever that criticizes the politics of the art, rather than the expression of the art, I get a bit uncomfortable. There are people who profess to like The Clash, for example, because it’s supposedly not middle class, and it expresses raw political angst. I suspect these people just like the music and are trying to justify their arbitrary taste by other means.  So politically suspect or not, Limitless is a lot of fun. It’s basically a superhero movie, by another name: a guy finds a way to obtain super powers, and then spends the rest of the movie trying to deal with the positive and negative effects of those powers. The one unusual device I noticed in Limitless was the use of a voiceover to explain the story to the audience. Now I’ve always regarded this as a pretty lazy device, and I think Limitless could have done without it, as it prevents total immersion in the story, as you are constantly reminded that you are being told a story. Another slightly unusual aspect of Limitless was the ending, which allowed the hero to carry on taking a performance enhancing drug in the way he had been doing throughout the whole movie. Now most of the time, Hollywood films come with a strict message: you are who you are and any attempt to better yourself through artificial means will ultimately fail. Limitless breaks that convention, by letting the hero get away with an immoral act that profits himself. In that sense, it’s an emotional heist movie or a comedy.

Source code is another gimmick movie, in this case the gimmick being that a guy has to go back and relive the same 8 minutes of a fatal train journey countless times, until he finds the bomber. It was a slick, well-made, ridiculous movie, which at times got - believe it or not- repetitive. It was all about time travel, altering realities, and parallel dimensions. What’s possibly worth focussing on with Source Code is the backdrop to the movie, which is war in Afghanistan, fatally wounded soldiers, the general exploitative and dishonest nature of the US military and government. We’re back in the 1970s again, post Watergate, in other words. Source Code is an independent movie trying to be Hollywood, or vice versa. It has an incredibly depressing premise, but also a need to leave the viewer with a happy ending. The contortions that the plot goes through to get to this stage might be too much for some people.

Speaking of Afghanistan, I saw Essential Killing, a film which sounds like a Hollywood movie, but isn’t. It’s about a terrorist in Afghanistan, who is picked up by the US military, waterboarded, rendered to Poland (is that the verb) before escaping. The rest of the movie is like a less-good version of Herzog’s Rescue Dawn escape sequence. It’s the familiar trope of man-layed- bare, struggling to survive, just killing and eating and running. I suppose it’s possible to infer some interesting stuff about our common humanity or the necessity of killing for survival, but I got a bit bored. There isn’t any dialogue in the movie either, which doesn’t help. We don’t get to know anything about the hero; we couldn’t really care less about him by the end of the film. Is that the point? Hollywood would have taken this film, stuck another act on the end, cast someone charismatic, thrown in a love interest, and made him turn out to be an undercover CIA guy being framed by his own boss. 

At the bottom of the pile is Little White Lies. I actually enjoyed this film for the first two hours, which follows six irritatingly self-obsessed Parisian friends on a holiday retreat by the sea after a (brutal, predictable) accident which puts their friend in hospital. There were some problems with tone: at times, the director plays it for laughs, with one of the characters running around obsessed with weasels in the attic, and mowing the lawn at six am. But at other times, the film wants to be a realistic drama, with piercing insights into the characters’ lives. I actually got to like the characters after a while, which is quite an achievement, since, for the first hour or so, I was wishing they were dead. Sadly, the last half hour undoes all the good work of the first part of the film, and I wished them all dead again, and since it ends in a cemetery, that would have been serendipitous. The soundtrack, which consists of popular hits, starts to become more intrusive, so that nearly every scene turns into a music video montage. Then the revelations start: the film has about four or five dramatic scenes in which characters confront each other. Finally, the guy in hospital kicks it, and the friends all go to his funeral, hence the cemetery. In a horrific scene, which will live with me until my own funeral, I expect, all the friends gather whilst Nina Simone sings My Way in the background. After lots of moving speeches, one friend races late to the funeral (no explanation given) not wearing a suit (emotions don’t need formal dress) and pushes his way to the front of the crowd. He is carrying a bag. For some reason, i thought it was going to be full of fish. Unfortunately it was full of sand. From the beach where they all used to... Yes, yes. Then the soundtrack cranks up, and all the friends put their differences aside and start crying and hugging each other like some twenty-tentacled emotional octopus. My expression, by this stage, i noticed, had frozen into a rictus of repulsion and I had to leave the cinema lest I vomit on the person on the seat in front. Ghastly.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Probably when reviewing things, you should, by law, have to state how much sleep you've had, how much alcohol you've consumed etc., so that it is clear what other stimulants or lack of such contributed to your experience. In that spirit, I should state from the outset that when I went to see Werner Herzog's film "Cave of Forgotten Dreams' I was so fatigued that most of the human interest of the first twenty minutes consisted of wondering if I was going to manage to stay awake or not. I really liked Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which I think was Herzog's last movie (though I did wonder why there were crocodiles and lizards everywhere, about which more later) but before that, I've often found his movies quite inaccessible, even his collaborations with batshit genius Klaus Kinski. Cave of Forgotten Dreams is about the Chauvet cave in southern France, discovered in the 1990s to contain some of the oldest and most beautiful cave paintings yet discovered, from 35,000 years ago. The film is shot in 3D, although it is never exactly clear why, because it is just a mixture of interviews and straightforward shots of cave paintings for the most part. I guess Herzog wanted to make a point about ancient art and modern technology, but this film would have been just as good in 2D. CoFD has some beautiful, haunting photography, but as a documentary it is really third rate, which is something that most of the newspaper reviews have missed.

As a one-hour TV documentary about cave paintings, larded with a few interviews with scientists speculating about what was going on there, it would have been fine. But then Herzog tries to whip his subject into something more meaningful, with references to Fred Astaire dancing with shadows, and pretentious voiceovers full of cliches like "crossing the abyss of centuries". There was some interesting stuff about how prehistoric man probably viewed the world, and about the lack of separation between man and animal, man and spirit, man and nature. I would have liked to have more of this, but no, hold on, we were off down another avenue of investigation, leading, like most caves, I assume, in another dead end.

Yes, the trouble with speculating about the past is that it's all pure speculation. I laughed out loud at the bit where Herzog says they found the track of a boy and a wolf next to each other: "vere zey frenz? or vas the volf stalking ze boy, or vere dese footprints tausands of years apart? Ve vill never know..." This is the stuff of spoof documentaries, not the real thing. The best bit, if you like,  was when this old French lunatic with a big nose comes on, sniffing everthing. He explains that he is a retired master perfumerer, and now he is trying to sniff caves out, instead of using modern scientific methods of discovery. He sniffs around the undergrowth for a while, and then says, "I'm not picking anything up at the moment..." - I thought I was watching the Fast Show for a minute. The justification for bringing M. le Nez on for ten minutes was that they are, apparently, considering building a replica theme park based on the cave, and they may have to reproduce the smell. So what does the Chauvet Cave smell like, M. le Nez? "Naturally, after so long, the smells are somewhat attenuated" (he can't smell anything) "but if you use your imagination, you can conjure up fires burning, animals, humans..." ...and cheese.

At the end of the film, there is a 'postscript', and Herzog, appropos of nothing starts talking about a nuclear reactor, just downriver from the Chauvet cave, between Montelimar and Avignon, where water used to cool the reactors is diverted to a vast tropical greenhouse where plants grow and crocodiles live. "Boy do dey thrive!", comments Herzog, showing a versatile command of 1950s american slang. Then he mentions how "naturally" there are mutant crocodiles (because of the radiation?), which are albino, and...then he's off again - "are ve just crocodiles, gazing into the mirror of the past...?" No, not really...

Hold on, radioactive mutant albino crocodiles? Now that's a documentary I'd like to see...

Watercolour at Tate Britain

I like the way they are charging £17.50 for this show, which includes a voluntary 'donation' to the gallery. Nice one.

The show has famously been curated under themes, rather than chronologically, which obviously has its benefits and drawbacks. It is interesting to see botanical art grouped together in one room, when you probably wouldn't see it at all in most exhibitions. I also liked the large room in which travel and watercolour were explored - there were fantastic works by John Nash and Eric Ravilious (below) on display here. The breadth of the show ('anything in watercolour) means that it is full of surprises, but it is also a weakness: a lot of the watercolours don't really look like they were painted in watercolour, but rather like imitation oil paintings. In their striving to show the versatility of the medium, they don't have nearly enough examples of what watercolour at its best can do. I would have liked to see a lot more sketch work in watercolour (probably its strongest use), illustration work (Quentin Blake only uses watercolour, but wasn't on show here) and yes, twee, traditional Victorian watercolour stuff, which is what everyone thinks of when they think of watercolour. My guess is the curators wanted to steer well clear of 'what everyone thinks of' and surprise us with Watercolour Where You Least Expect It. What wasn't surprising is Tate Britain rolling out Turner again, their favourite star turn. He's bound to turn up, because Tate Britain has a lot of him, and his preparations, if you squint a bit, look a bit like abstract expressionism, so he neatly straddles the abstract and figurative schools of art.

There was a Watercolour and War room here, which could have been larger. I've seen some excellent James Boswell war watercolours at the British Museum Drawing and Prints Room, and of course Henry Moore used watercolour (with wax and chalk and ink) for his famous subway pictures from the Blitz, surely worth a look, but sadly no sign of them here. What I'm getting at, is that any exhibition that is this broad is laying itself open to accusations of missing out a lot of the best stuff in an effort to pack everything in.

Exhibition ended very badly in a sort of catch-all room about the imagination, which included William Blake and Tracy Emin. Spot the connection - I couldn't. Overall, I really enjoyed the high points of the show, and it was excellently displayed, particularly the room about watercolour materials, about which I already know a good deal, but still found it fascinating. I understand the criticism that this show is going to attract from watercolour purists, but I think it is worth looking beyond that. This show has something for everyone. It brings in the punters and goes a good way towards destroying the reputation that watercolour has as the medium of choice for old ladies on 'Watercolour Challenge' and the Prince of Wales. That's quite an achievement.

L'escalier truque

I don't know much about Jean-Pierre Duffour, apart from what I've been able to glean from Wikipedia (fr) and the most useful Lambiek encyclopaedia of comic creators. Apparently, he works in advertising or something. He doesn't publish many books, though he has worked with a couple of big names in French comics, Lewis Trondheim (Lapinot, Donjon) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis). His drawing style is very naive, but precise and clinical at the same time. His stories are like if Kafka wrote children's books. The characters are all simple, often based on animals, and have very basic motivations, but they seem to be caught in frustrating and surreal situations which they can't escape from.

All the stories in L'Escalier Truque take place in a depressing concrete building with a seemingly infinite number of floors. We start with Floor 352: The Noise under the bed, in which an Elephant hears a noise under his bed and before long is being pursued through his flat by shadowy monsters. On floor 298. a mouse with a briefcase is trying to get back to his floor after work, but the lift is broken, so against the advice of a supernatural gatekeeper, he takes the stairs, which get higher and higher, until he is barely able to scale them. The stories can be read as just stories, or as existential metaphors, or as visualisations of some kind of psychological state. Are the shadows that pursue the elephant from under his bed his own fears? Is the mouse engaged in a futile struggle against the natural order of things, by refusing to wait for the lift to be repaired?

Elsewhere, on other floors, stories pit the individual against authority (as when a cat tries to see his boss to ask for a raise, but his feet grow so heavy on the way that he cannot continue) , or seem to hint at the ultimate pointlessness of existence (as when a dog jumps out of the 443rd floor on the advice of a phone call and then spends the rest of the story in trivial considerations on the way down). If anyone has seen the movies of Roy Anderson (Songs from the Second Floor; You, The Living), you will be reminded of this.

It's a shame that the book didn't remain in this vein, or even better, try to suggest a philosophy that holds all these strands together. Unfortunately, in the last third, the quality of the stories dips noticeably, as in the 1st floor: Justice, in which an all too familiar scenario, the Kafkaesque trial takes place.  If you've read Kafka, or Koestler, Orwell or Chesterton, you'll find the story here, the longest in the book, retreading old ground without very much visual interest. Still, the rest of the book was excellent, and I really wish M. Duffour was a little more prolific!

Drawing to Music 2

So we decided to try the drawing to music for a second time. On this occasion, I was drawing straight onto a Wacom graphics tablet, which was then projected onto a wall through a projector. Then we filmed the thing on the webcam of Ergina's computer. The quality isn't that fantastic, but this should give an idea of what we were doing. This video is of the third drawing we did, a bit more lighthearted than the other two.

Pig

Spent most of yesterday drawing a pig using some of the techniques I learned in my illustrator workshop a couple of weeks back

Drawing to Music

Something I've wanted to do for quite a while is improvise a drawing to music. Actually, this isn't hard to organise, since you just have to switch on a stereo and start drawing. But it's a different thing if you are doing it with a live musician. The idea is that both the musician and the artist draw inspiration from each other and form a proper improvisational group in different media.

I was drawing in ink with the dropper from the top of the ink bottle on white paper. Ergina was using a keyboard set to 'electric piano sound'. For the first occasion, we didn't want to do anything elaborate, so unfortunately the sound isn't recorded. Next time, we hope to use the house projector (currently being mainly used for Streetfighter IV) so that E. can see what I am drawing, rather than just my movements. Then we can record the music and drawing simultaneously and I can post it up here.

These are the pictures from the first session:

Picture 1: Ergina made quite random, atonal sounds on the keyboard. Occasionally these would cluster into themes, like light, short trills, or slower, darker riffs. I ended up matching the force of my strokes to the sounds I was hearing. The theme of the picture just came out of nowhere, as marks started coming together.

Picture 2: I asked Ergina to do something different, and play with chords (the first piece had been entirely single notes. This resulted in more of a 'mood' piece, with one particular ambience, which I would describe as quite melancholy, hence the rain and sad theme of the picture. There were no individual sounds to match my pen strokes, so I was freer to draw at my own pace.

Isotype

Isotype (V&A)

I stumbled across this exhibition at the V & A - it only occupies 2 smallish rooms, but is really fascinating. Isotype (International System of TYpographic Picture Education) is a system of showing complex information in pictorial form. It was originated by Otto Neurath in Vienna in the 1920s and was quickly exported to the newly formed USSR and to other countries, including Britain.

Isotype involves creating a self-explanatory chart, in which images represent items (such as workers, cars, factory outputs etc.) but without increasing the size of the image for the size of the output. Thus one ‘man’ image might mean 50 workers, but instead of a bigger man for 100 workers, two men would be used. The beauty of this approach is that information is not only easy to understand, but also easy to mathematically convey, without the need for lots of figures and so on. 

Isotype developed into a whole system, and because everyone at that time loved the idea of simplifying everything and making it more mechanical, it was only a short while before the makers of Isotype met the makers of BASIC (British American Standard International Commercial) English, which had reduced the dictionary to 850 basic English words. The resulting work: Basic by Isotype is no doubt a classic, but costs £858.85 on the internet, which would be represented by quite a lot of little round coins on an Isotype chart. 

Isotype spread around the world and has had immense influence in graphic design and information design. My favourite chart in the exhibition, which I can’t find on the internet, sadly, was the one which depicted animal lifespans by using a long curvy line from the top of the page to the bottom. At the start of the line was a mosquito (the most dangerous creature on earth) and midway was man. Right at the end of the line, as if winning a very long race (150 years), was the tortoise.

This exhibition had some really fascinating exhibits, and I think anyone would find it interesting. The ability of Isotypes to convey information in an interesting and accessible way does half the work for the curators, really, so very little extra information was needed. I did wish, however, that the gift shop sold reproduction charts etc.

JEM by Frederick Pohl (1979)

Bit of a strange book this, and by a unique author. How many writers did their most famous book sixty years ago (Space Merchants, 1952), was still putting out really good books 30 years ago (Jem, 1979) and is still going in 2011 with a regular blog at the age of 81? That’s Frederick Pohl, the last surviving dinosaur of the Golden Age of science fiction.

Jem is the story of the colonisation of a planet - the planet Jem, to be precise.  It’s an odd novel. For a start, it doesn’t have one central character; rather, the indirect narrative viewpoint shifts throughout the book, from Danny Dalehouse, the nearest thing to a hero of  the story, to the ruthless, ambitious and thoroughly unlikeable Marge Menninger, but also to sundry other minor characters, including, with mixed success, three of the alien species to be found on the planet. 

It’s no mean feat to imagine an entire planet and populate it with three distinct species of alien that are entirely believable, but Pohl does this without breaking a sweat. I loved the description of the balloon aliens’ language, as well as the psychology of the Krinpit, who call humans ‘Poison Ghosts’, since they aren’t good to eat. The colonisation of Jem is described in a way that is not only highly plausible, but also, in a sense, tragically inevitable. I would argue, however, that the lack of a central protagonist or group of protagonists makes the narrative rather disjointed at times, and means that the story lacks a proper narrative arc. You could argue that Tolstoy does the same thing in War and Peace, but Fred Pohl isn’t Tolstoy. Without a strong central character to root for, there isn’t a proper narrative arc - it’s just ODTAA  - One Damn Thing After Another. 

That criticism to one side, Jem is a highly enjoyable sci fi novel.Regular Pohl readers will recognise his obsession with political alignments of the future based on the scarcity of earth’s resources. They will also recognise his strong satyrical tendencies, as man’s propensity to rivalry, greed, and ultimately, destruction, are transplanted to an alien planet. Jem is quite shocking, actually, with the casual brutality of man's treatment of alien races, both for the purposes of 'scientific research', and also, survival.

It’s quite common, I think, for science fiction writers to fall in love with their own ideas, and forget that, at the end of the day, they are still telling a story. Also, many sci-fi writers find it difficult to sustain an idea over the length of a novel, without the concept getting out of control. For this reason, I think that the short story format is the best for science fiction, and I would recommend anyone who wants to read Pohl to begin with his short fiction before venturing as far as Planet Jem.

Man at Sink

Sometimes I just have images sitting around in my sketchbook with no real idea what to do with them or why I drew them in the first place. Sometimes I hope they will coalesce into a story of some sort.

King Lear LIVE!

Cultural Experience no.21593

King Lear at the Donmar Warehouse, Covent Garden
Displayed live in HD at the Richmond Curzon Cinema
Derek Jacobi in the title role

It took over an hour to get to Richmond from East London. Compared to Hackney, it seems like a quaint village about to be taken over by vampires in a Hammer horror film. The Curzon Richmond is down a narrow lane opposite a pub staffed by a woman with no voice, another horror element thrown in for free.

We collected our tickets and took our seats. We were treated to a 10 minute documentary with interviews with the cast and director about what an epoch-making event it was to transmit live theatre AROUND THE WORLD to HUNDREDS OF CINEMAS so that EVERYONE COULD ENJOY THE MAGIC OF SHAKESPEARE. Looking around at my fellow audience in the cinema, I was dismayed to see the average age was at least 55, and that Shakespeare was dwindling in popularity among younger people.
Then the live camera showed us the audience in the Donmar Warehouse LIVE, picking their noses, kissing, laughing... Most of them were young people, for some reason. It was like one generation watching another, in HD, live, as an anthropological research.

The play started abruptly, and I think I have been conditioned by cinema going to expect adverts, build up, titles etc.

The set was bare, distressed boards, like a fashionable restaurant these days, with almost no items like tables, chairs etc. This had the effect of focussing on specific props like: a throne; a map; the stocks.

The acting was excellent, especially Jacobi, and his fool, who were far better than the rest. Gloucester also good. Lear is a play of fantastic, overblown emotions, and this cast carried it off. Goneril and Regan were very convincing in their flattery turning to exasperation at their father's antics, and then sternness, and then finally cruelty and madness. There are themes of justice in Lear which are quite pronounced: when does just (as in righteous) revenge and tip into unjust revenge, and then, well, just revenge...? Edmund begins the play as the neglected bastard, and we feel his pain at the cruelty of his father. Likewise the partiality of Lear for Cordelia at the expense of his other daughters strikes us as unfair. So to begin with, we take the part of the villains, but become increasingly uneasy with the volume of their actions. Firstly with Edmund, who is basically pretty unprincipled, and then with Regan and Goneril, whose realpolitik starts to look extremely unattractive. Another theme: Edmund and Edgar, the brothers are both man stripped bare of all trappings of civilisation. The first as an ambitious animal, willing to do or say anything to get power. The second, hounded out of his life becomes a beggar, but for Edgar it is compassion that separates him from the beasts and ultimately redeems him.

What is pleasurable about Shakespeare is the depth to which he works on his themes and language, so that at every level - character, plot, language... the themes resonate back again and again.

The climactic scene of the play in many ways, is where Gloucester goes to the top of Dover Cliffs and throws himself onto the ground, believing he is committing suicide. He did this, and then froze for 15 seconds. Then he carried on. Lear enters, talking to himself. Then he freezes. It goes black. Then Lear is on the other side of the stage, in the middle of a speech. We were experiencing technical difficulties. A voice came on: the performance would be suspended until they fixed their satellite.

It was an exquisite embarrassment. All over the world, football matches are broadcast without a hitch, week in, week out. The epoch-making broadcast of King Lear to cinemas ALL OVER THE WORLD is marred by technical difficulties. Typically British.

The action started again, from the beginning of the scene. You couldn't help feeling sorry for the actors, who had to do it all again - all the pacing gone, the climax botched, as well as the audience in the theatre. From one point of view, it was useful as an illustration of the problems of broadcasting theatre 'live'. Theoretically, you can't just 'do it again'. It is done, once, and the moment has passed. Try to do it again, and you ruin it, as they did.

I think by the end of the play, most of the audience had forgotten the fiasco, and remembered the play. It will probably cause the producers to have a good think, however, lest they turn more tragedy to farce in the same way.

Website Design

I had a session with the most helpful Adamina Turek yesterday to help with designing my website. It turns out, unsurprisingly that I have been doing it all wrong.

I had used a tutorial  (http://www.thesitewizard.com/gettingstarted/dreamweaver1.shtml) to build my website on dreamweaver, which was very useful as far as it went. But when it came to uploading a web gallery, I had used Adobe Bridge (again following an online help page) which worked on a couple of browsers, and then broke forever.

Adamina instructed me that websites are usually designed in Photoshop first, which is exactly what I am doing, and then 'built' on dreamweaver. This obviously saves time in the design stage and a lot of messing about with coding.

There appear to be several levels on which you can design a website: using HTML code, which is a direct interface, using Dreamweaver design mode, which is a simple interface for non-experts, and CSS (cascading style sheets), which allows for complex stuff to be done quickly. Adamina has recommended a workshop if I wish to learn any HTML or CSS. I may do this, although I am not a programmer, so don't want to study more of this than I need, as I don't have that much time!

Review of Ringworld

One of my hobbies is posting overlong reviews that nobody will read on Amazon for books nobody has heard of. The latest is 'Ringworld' a sci-fi novel by Larry Niven.

What the Tanj...?

First of all, a disclaimer and an apology: I didn’t get very far beyond page 100 of Ringworld, and so my review is of those pages only. My sole motivation for getting that far in the book (aside from pride - I rarely put a book down, once I have started) was to get to the Ringworld of the title, and see what that had to offer. By the time we reached Ringworld, however, I so thoroughly hated all the characters, and most of all the style of the writing, that continuing wasn’t even an option.

Ringworld is the most annoying book ever written. Although it is ostensibly about a giant alien artefact which is explored by the heroes, for some reason the author does everything in his power to take this quite exciting premise and, page by page, scientifically syphon off any element of fun. 

The first aspect of the no-fun is the characters. Ringworld's characters consist of: a giant cat from a race of warriors (ludicrously) called “Speaker to Animals”; a hairy Clingon, if you will. Speaker has the tedious characteristic of taking everything anybody says as an insult. You can imagine how quickly this gets boring. Then there is Nessus, an unconvincing alien with 3 or 5 heads ( i cant remember), who is terrified of everything. You can imagine how quickly this gets boring.  Next up is Teela - a vapid girl whose only role is love interest for the hero. Ah yes, the hero, possibly the flattest character in all literature, including Anna Karenina after her train accident. He is called Louis Wu, he is 200 years old, and beyond that, there is nothing you could say about him. I think actually, we have, just now, dwelt on his personality for longer than the author did when thinking him up, that’s how thin he is.

No Fun part 2 - the pace. The first 40 pages is spent meeting the characters. They all agree to go on a mission to find the Ringworld (a mysterious alien artefact which there is a picture of on the front cover). Unfortunately, the artefact isn’t reached until page 100 or so. This would be justified if the journey to reach the artefact was loaded with an ever-increasing feeling of suspense, or if disaster met the expedition at every turn. Unfortunately not. In fact, the journey to Ringworld goes exactly to plan. It is true that the book surprised me in this respect. In fact, if you are expecting any excitement or drama in the voyage to the Ringworld, the author cleverly confounds your expectations by giving you 100 pages consisting of the four ‘characters’ described above airing their party quirks in place of personalities, whilst they change spaceships, discuss flight trajectories, express mild surprise at each other’s cultural differences and heat up TV dinners. 

No Fun part 3 - the prose. Amazingly, considering how bad the characters and pacing are, the author’s real weak point seems to be writing prose. Here, the writing is as flat and lifeless as a Volvo care manual, only a good deal more irritating. The irritation comes from affectations such as the decision to use the made up swearword ‘Tanj’ to add an element (I suppose) of verisimilitude to the future scenario. “Tanj!”, exclaims the hero, every couple of pages, “What the tanj!” You can imagine how quickly this becomes boring. Tanj is irritating, but not as bad as “By the mist demons!” (page 80). Aside from the Tanjing, I also found irritating (as another reviewer has here commented) the immature and prurient attitude to sex that seems to pervade the novel. It is cringingly embarrassing to read a paragraph where the characters talk about the ‘straddle position’ before the author fades to black. In Ringworld sex is so important it has to be mentioned, nearly all the time, but it’s always a joke or comes with a raised eyebrow, and ironically, for a book whose title could easily come from a top shelf publication banned everywhere but Sweden, sex is ultimately something so terrifying it can’t be shown. I’ve no problem with not showing sex, but then why bring it up in the first place, in such a sniggering schoolboy fashion.

It is niggling things like this that make Ringworld such an uncomfortable read. It belongs, no doubt, in the same category as Arthur C Clarke’s ‘revelatory’ style of sci-fi, where most of the excitement and suspense derives from delivering small revelations that beg yet another mystery to be solved later on, as in “Rendevous with Rama”. In that book, Clarke’s skill at storytelling makes you really care what the biopsy of an alien crab will reveal about the species that built it. In Ringworld, Niven seems to have achieved the opposite. He takes an interesting concept of an inconceivably big piece of engineering encircling a star, and manages to kick all the fun out of it, so that by the time you get to the artefact itself, you no longer care what the tanj is inside it. 

I wish someone would reply to my review and convince me that I should hold on and read the rest of the book because it gets a lot better and fully justifies it’s great reputation. If so, could they please tell me on which page this acceleration of pace occurs, so I can be sure not to miss it.

Harmonic Series

Saw interesting concert last night put together by a cellist called Oliver Coates at the Southbank Centre yesterday.


Small room. Fifty people or so. Started with a tape recorder playing speeded up electronic sound for about two minutes. A lady came and switched it off. She then started playing violin, alternating with recording herself on the tape recorder and playing it back. She played very well, but the piece was very modern and atonal and difficult to listen to. 
Following this, a woman dressed in black danced slowly whilst a white line of light played about her body. I liked the idea, but the execution was a little sloppy. Next, a woman sang a Britten song. Really nice voice. Later she performed a song accompanied by a pianist and herself, on a saw. Really good singer, and good pianist. Four recitals by pianist followed, post romantic stuff, quite slow. Darkness. Exit woman with light on her back. More violin, better than the first time. Another song by Mara Carlyle. Decided to check more of her stuff out later. 
Finally, a film by Streetwise Opera, in fact the trailer they have on their website for their 'fables' opera, based on an Oscar Wilde story.


Found this concert overall very rewarding. Interested by the attempt to pull together very disparate material into a working whole. Some parts worked better than others. Overall it was the mood that the pieces had in common: a sort of romantic melancholy, with slightly terrifying overtones. Did quick sketch of people on tube coming back home.