Sign Language

Why can't I be you?

2011-12-05T18:46:00.002+11:00

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.

— Maurice Sendak

I wonder whether young Jim was Catholic. It seems a peculiarly religious thing to do. I hope he was an older kid, performing the ritual deliberately, and not a toddler. Maurice doesn't say.

Reading this, I was reminded - in the undisciplined way such thoughts often are - of one of my favourite Cure songs: Why Can't I Be You?

Robert Smith can barely express what he feels for his beloved, a longing so intense that notions of possession or even just intimacy are exceeded until nothing short of complete identification - the total abrogation of physical and psychic barriers - will do.

You're so gorgeous, I'll do anything!
I'll kiss you from your feet to where your head begins
You're so perfect, You're so right as rain
You make me, make me, make me
Make me hungry again

Everything you do is irresistible
Everything you do is simply kissable
Why can't i be you?

Ginny Grayson

2011-11-03T20:45:00.008+11:00

It's so rare to come across a 'straight' drawing show these days that it provokes comment for that reason alone. So my attention was drawn immediately to the invitation to Ginny Grayson's show at Place Gallery in Richmond, which starts on 9 November.

It also helps that I am a sucker for drawing which is contingent and exploratory, an approach which is always associated in my mind with Alberto Giacometti.

Such a way of drawing, rather than making the statement "This is what I see", continually asks itself "Is this what I see?"

I see this approach ultimately as having serious philosophical implications, about the nature of sensation and perception, about the limits of our ability to perceive the world, and maybe the ultimate question "is there a world to perceive at all?"

Some of the observations of phenomenological philosophers like Maurice Merleau-Ponty actually have a great deal to teach practicing artists, those who face the perceptual gulf between all that is you and all that is not-you every time they front up to the white page.

Another great moment in graphic design

2011-02-08T17:08:00.003+11:00

Spotted at this fast food outlet in Wheelers Hill: the rare and possibly endangered Chickenfish.

Old Master Cheese

2011-01-28T07:29:00.000+11:00

When asked what kind of cheese he would like, my son Sweeney (two years old) stipulates "Old cheese. Like a grown-up". This must be what he means: Old Master cheese.

Manchurian Melodrama*

2011-01-19T07:00:00.001+11:00

My daughter recently returned from a study trip to Shanghai. In honour of her return, we sat and ate Pocky and watched the Hong Kong wartime and martial arts drama 'Ip Man' (2008).

While the historical accuracy of the nationalistic narrative, set in Foshan under Japanese occupation, was obviously complete bollocks, the martial arts sequences and choreography were supurb and I enjoyed it all hugely.

At the same time, I'd been absorbed in 'What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting' by Marc Norman, and a comment he makes early in the book about the popularity of melodrama as a dramatic form in the 19th Century popped into my head. Here surely, I thought, is pure melodrama.

The dominant theatrical narrative form at midcentury - the one everyone enjoyed rather than admired - was melodrama. No longer the inner torments of giants from Shakespeare or Goethe, not even the brittle one-set comedies of Sheridan - the zeitgeist had taken a lurch and moved on. Melodrama, at its simplest, was high conflict resolved by fierce confrontation. ... It was fundamentally about justice. No longer the ambiguities of a Macbeth or a Faust; with melodrama, the dark angel on one shoulder and the white on the other of internal conflict were exteranlized into hero and villain, white hat and black. ... Melodrama, as it evolved on the English and American stage in the mid-1800s, was not about aspects of character or inventions of narrative - it was about action; action was its given, and from that action, the pleasure of tension.

These comments intrigue me, because I've been taxed by the vagueness of my understanding of this still-common term 'melodramatic'. Here is as good and clear a definition as I've ever read, "high conflict resolved by fierce confrontation" with dramatic tension founded in action rather than character.

By that definition, this movie was completely melodramatic - no shame in that of course, most action movies by that measure are utterly of a piece with 19th Century melodrama as Norman depicts it, even down to an emphasis on the mechanics of the spectacle (CGI, 3D, etc). Many a theatre company bankrupted itself trying to provide ever more astonishing spectacle and realistic action for the theatre-going public in the 1800s.

'Ip Man' is a melodrama in this 19th Century sense because the drama is founded in action, while ambiguity is avoided. Tension is created and released after a dramatic situation is created - Ip Man, a wealthy family man who has devoted his time and energy to perfecting his martial arts, is confronted with several choices after the Japanese invade and enslave his community. The tension is created over the question of action: what will he do? There is an 'arc', a transformation, but it is only subtley registered and not dwelt upon; what sort of choices will the hero take and therefore, what sort of a man will he become? It is melodramatic because there is never any question about the outcome; his action is inevitable because he has no real conflict, nothing to lose. We know what he will do as soon as the situation becomes clear.

Similarly, the Japanese characters - to the extend that you can call them 'characters' - are presented without ambiguity; there are simply shades of evil. One is simply a stupid sadist while the other is a less stupid sadist.

This prompted a question for further research. Every Chinese film I've ever seen - and I am a long way from an expert - has been a melodrama in this 19th Century sense to a greater or lesser degree. Does China have another dramatic tradition that I've missed?

An equivalent comparision that occurs me would be India, a similarly developing country with a huge film industry. But while Bollywood's products are certainly melodramas, there is always Satyajit Ray, so at least in India's case the answer is a firm no. What about China?

(* Yes I know... A bit geographically imprecise but you can't go past alliteration in a headline.)

Just another taxi driver

2010-12-20T18:26:00.000+11:00

Paul Schrader encapsulates everything a reader needs to know about his central character.

"TRAVIS BICKLE, age 26, lean, hard, the consummate loner. On the surface he appears good-looking, even handsome; he has a quiet steady look and a disarming smile which flashes from nowhere, lighting up his whole face. But behind that smile, around his dark eyes, in his gaunt cheeks, one can see the ominous stains caused by a life of private fear, emptiness and lonliness [sic]. He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold, a country where the inhabitants seldom speak. The head moves, the expression changes, but the eyes remain ever-fixed, unblinking, piercing empty space.

Travis is now drifting in and out of the New York City night life, a dark shadow among darker shadows. Not noticed, no reason to be noticed, Travis is one with his surroundings. He wears rider jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid western shirt and a worn beige Army jacket with a patch reading, 'King Kong Company, 1968-70.'

He has the smell of sex about him: sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless. He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the inevitable. The clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun, Travis Bickle moves toward violence."

Paul Schrader's Taxi Driver, written in 1972, published by Faber and Faber, 1990, page 1.

Reading the script, it's striking how literary and ambitious it is. This shouldn't be surprising I suppose, since Schrader had been an incisive film critic steeped in the most serious European modernist and Japanese cinema for many years, and the survivor of a particularly muscular Christian upbringing. Surely, the anti-Tarantino.

It is also unconventional in format, lacking the usual scene and location cues and divided into titled chapters, which only increase the intensity of Travis' deterministic downward spiral. The sense of surprise comes from the disjunction between the pulpy subject matter and the tone of thematic seriousness; Travis as a 1970s Raskolnikov.

Reportedly, De Niro flew back to New York from Rome during breaks on 'Novecento' and drove a cab for several weeks in preparation.

The Marshalite

2010-11-17T18:21:00.004+11:00

Down at Bicentennial Park in Chelsea the other week, I came across this blast from my past: a mechanical traffic signal.

I was extremely taken with this sign when I was a child, whenever we drove through a particular Edithvale Road / Nepean Highway intersection beside the railway line. This would have been in the mid to late seventies. The sign was still functioning then, its jaunty white arrow eternally making its way round and round, no longer actually signalling traffic since that function had been taken over by traffic lights. It was like a heritage building that no one could bring themselves to tear down.

It has something over the current equivalent in that it clearly shows the driver exactly how long they have to wait. It puts me in mind of the failure of digital speedometers in cars. Drivers want a visual reference and the radial clock is infinitely better for the purpose than the digital display. Take that, technological determinism!

The Bat Computer tells me it was called the Marshalite, designed by Charles Marshall in 1936 and is an Australian original, utterly of its time. The last one running was on the Nepean Highway so no doubt the one I enjoyed as a kid was the last of its kind in the world.

Museum Victoria has a fully restored one on display.

Jeeves & Wooster

2010-11-05T17:52:00.004+11:00

Watching the TV series 'Jeeves & Wooster' which completely passed me by and I'm keen to fill in a cultural blank. I'm not sure it aired on Australian television at all and the first I heard about it was glimpsing a VHS copy at my local library.

I'm struck by a couple of things about Hugh Laurie's performance as the bright young thing Bertie Wooster. It's not the least surprising that he is a great and gifted comic actor. That was obvious since his turn as the idiot Prince Regent in the second series of Blackadder, but just how good he is is a constant revelation, particularly doing pure physical comedy. At these times, his resemblance to Stan Laurel is amazing, especially while doing a certain gormless, self-satisfied smirk.

I'm reminded of Stephen Fry's comment during his recent Sydney appearance that he was surprised, upon meeting young Hugh during their Footlights days, by his assured comedic chops. Laurie was a natural comedian who seemed to have been born with a full comic toolbox at his disposal.

The Right Hon. was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say 'when!'

Bertie attempting to describe a Member of Parliament upon making his acquaitance in Wodehouse's 'Jeeves and the Impending Doom'.

The Weight

2010-11-04T08:14:00.000+11:00

Cartoonist Alan Moir in the Sydney Morning Herald, Monday 25 October.

Ayn Rand's inner fruitbat

2010-10-20T17:18:00.004+11:00

Marieke Hardy attempting to review Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged':

Rand is batshit crazy. By all accounts she used to swan about wearing a swooshy velvet cape adorned with silver dollar signs which may be considered a charming sartorial quirk on someone like Flavor Flav but is less appealing on a Benzedrine-addicted old fruitbat chewing her face off and squawking about objectivism. That she's still considered so 'influential' by a few raving lunatics who seem unable to fathom that Shrugged's gun-toting erection for deductive logic go hand-in-hand with its rather firm anti-Jesus beliefs says more about her followers than it does about the work itself.

Readers might also like to follow up with a viewing of 'The Fountainhead' (1949), which is surely one of the funniest serious movies ever made, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that Gary Cooper, playing Rand alter-ego Howard Roark, takes the whole thing utterly seriously.

Its striding, clench-jawed phallocentrism gives Freudians everywhere something to laugh at as Gary Cooper struggles vainly against the nonentities who surround him to achieve an erection (he is an architect) on his own terms.

So stand with clenched fists, feet apart, lift your chin, look to the horizon and repeat after me (keeping in mind that this is movie dialogue!):

Howard Roark: The creator stands on his own judgment. The parasite follows the opinions of others. The creator thinks, the parasite copies. The creator produces, the parasite loots. The creator's concern is the conquest of nature - the parasite's concern is the conquest of men. The creator requires independence, he neither serves nor rules. He deals with men by free exchange and voluntary choice. The parasite seeks power, he wants to bind all men together in common action and common slavery. He claims that man is only a tool for the use of others. That he must think as they think, act as they act, and live is selfless, joyless servitude to any need but his own. Look at history. Everything thing we have, every great achievement has come from the independent work of some independent mind. Every horror and destruction came from attempts to force men into a herd of brainless, soulless robots. Without personal rights, without personal ambition, without will, hope, or dignity. It is an ancient conflict. It has another name: the individual against the collective!

Irma La Douce (1963)

2010-10-19T17:55:00.002+11:00

Pottering in the Woodend Bookshop the other week, I found a copy of the 'Irma La Douce' screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, published in 1963.

It appears to be a cheap movie tie-in paperback, badly typeset, a Midwood-Tower Book, "First printing anywhere". Other books under that imprint appear to be almost exclusively 'naughty books' of the early sixties, the kind you still find in Opp shops, with titles like 'A World Without Men' in illustrated covers in garish colours. Which makes me think that perhaps the primary consideration for the publishers was the film's subject matter and the opportunity to put Shirley MacLaine in a transparent blouse on the cover.

Opening it at random, I came across this exchange. Irma the streetwalker is complaining to Moustache, the wordly barman, of her money troubles.

Irma: If only Monsieur Camembert were still around. You remember Monsieur Camembert, don't you?
Moustache: Do I? Big spender.
Nestor: Who's Monsieur Camembert?
Irma: That's what we called him - he was a cheese wholesaler at the market - used to see me twice a week - always gave me five hundred francs - so I didn't have to see anybody else. I had lots of time then - went to cooking school and I knitted sweaters and I played solitaire - he was such a nice man.
Nestor: What happened to him?
Irma: His wife died - so he stopped coming around.

That is why I love Billy Wilder scripts so much. Even with collaborators, that sweet but sour Viennese Jewish sensibility is always there.

It been years since I saw the film, but I remember it to be only a moderately good Wilder of that strange mid-sixties period, where the things he did so well before didn't seem to click anymore and good scripts were let down by poor casting and a general air of uncertainty. He wasn't alone in that, of course. Hitchcocks of the same period often have similar problems.

It is reported that Wilder originally wanted Marilyn Monroe, who he had worked with on 'Some Like It Hot', for the part of Irma. She died before the production began, as did Charles Laughton, who was first choice for Moustache.

There are, as always, some great jokes.

The pimps' union is called the "Mec's' (tough guy's) Paris Protective Association" (MPPA), which is also the acronym for Motion Picture Producers Association.

Irma: A painter once lived here. Poor guy, he was starving. Tried everything, even cut his ear off.
Nestor: Van Gogh?
Irma: No, I think his name was Schwartz.

Other Billy Wilder posts: The Front Page, Billy Wilder: A little bit less and Stalag 17.

Tom Waits, an aesthetic credo

2010-08-30T16:00:00.003+10:00

"What I do is kind of abstract. I break a lot of eggs. And I leave the shell in there. Texture is everything." Tom Waits

Toy Story, with Buzz and Woody (Allen)

2010-06-28T17:41:00.003+10:00

The model for this stuffed toy appears to be another person called Woody...

At the Reading Cinema in Sunbury, Victoria.

Louise Bourgeois 1911-2010

2010-06-01T17:48:00.008+10:00

Louise Bourgeois (the last great artist of the twentieth century?) is dead.

Holland Cotter in the New York Times:

Ms. Bourgeois’s sculptures in wood, steel, stone and cast rubber, often organic in form and sexually explicit, emotionally aggressive yet witty, covered many stylistic bases. But from first to last they shared a set of repeated themes centered on the human body and its need for nurture and protection in a frightening world.

Protection often translated into images of shelter or home. A gouged lump of cast bronze, for example, suggested an animal’s lair. A tablelike wooden structure with thin, stiltlike legs resembled a house ever threatening to topple. Her series of “Cells” from the early 1990s — installations of old doors, windows, steel fencing and found objects — were meant to be evocations of her childhood, which she claimed as the psychic source of her art.

But it was her images of the body itself, sensual but grotesque, fragmented, often sexually ambiguous, that proved especially memorable. In some cases the body took the abstract form of an upright wooden pole, pierced by a few holes and stuck with nails; in others it appeared as a pair of women’s hands realistically carved in marble and lying, palms open, on a massive stone base.

Sure she was an extraordinary 98 and apparently making art until her death, but she was a great soul, and should be mourned.

Best Films of the 00s (that I've seen): part three

2010-04-20T17:05:00.003+10:00

Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain (or just Amelie) (2001)
The very definition of joie de vivre. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's style is kinetic, the camera whipping about to follow any subjective whim of the central character (or whoever happens to narrating that particular bit). It's tone is whimsical, romantic, often grotesque, taking place in a magical 'Paris' of the imagination rather than a real city. Some found the mix too rich and sweet, like a cake with too much icing. I wasn't one of them.

Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003)
Might as well consider them as a whole since their qualities are common to all three. Peter Jackson took the subject up like a personal crusade to convince the rest of us that Tolkein's world was not just for hippies, and he did it straight, without a hint of irony. Could have been kitsch in the extreme (and it sails close to the edge at times), but is delivered with such bravado and conviction, I couldn't help but be swept up in its epic wake.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006)
Sure, it was uneven and I sensed a lack of certainty about the tone, but that's because Sacha Baron Cohen and Larry Charles were blazing a trail, which doesn't happen too often, especially in comedy. Basically a mix of prepared sketches and seat-of-the-pants situational improvisation around a connecting theme, one is constantly astonished at Cohen's preparedness to put himself in danger (literally and comedically) and "go where no man has gone before".

Michael Clayton (2007)
Its finale should be taught in screenwriting 101: 'The Forgotten Art of the Perfect Ending'. Written by Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter of the Bourne films. A political thriller that just about restores one's faith.

Grizzly Man (2005)
The other great documentarian of the last few decades (see Errol Morris, below) is Werner Herzog, whose fact-based films are as important as his features and whose themes are a direct continuation of his particular obsessions. This displays many of them: nature as an implacable, and often malevolent, force; a visionary central character bordering on madness. Unforgettable.

Gosford Park (2001)
Robert Altman goes at the country house murder mystery with his typical dry and ironic disregard for the conventional trappings of genre. Instead of the hollow figures which usually inhabit these kind of things (Colonel Mustard in the hall with the candlestick), he furnishes the film with insightful, wry and funny observations about character and class. Various esteemed character actors have the time of their lives.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)
Errol Morris's signature interview technique of placing his camera so that the subject speaks directly into it has an almost painful intensity and gives the traditional 'talking head' a confessional quality. This has been demonstrated nowhere better than this film about the life and career of Robert McNamara, the highly controversial former U.S. Secretary of Defense. We witness a man attempting to make sense of the moral ethical choices he made, choices which may have lead directly to deaths of thousands, and come to appreciate the chiasm between intention and consequence. A film whose philosophical consequences are immense.

The Lives of Others (2006)
Successfully gives the uninitiated a taste of life as it was lived by innumerable millions under Communist rule across Europe until about 1990. Sure it's wish-fulfilment, and someone like the Stasi agent either couldn't have existed in the first place or wouldn't have survived long enough to perform the transformation depicted here, but it sure looks and feels like a genuine slice of the DDR, a 20th century panopticon.

The Others (2001)
An old fashioned horror movie, in the very best sense. So effective and skillfully told that it earns comparison to the best of the 1940s and 1950s. Nicole Kidman's nervy brittleness as an actor has never been better utilised. Underrated.

Almost Famous (2000)
It's neither as sharp or as funny as it probably should be, but has a grace and warmth that is memorable. Manages to feel perfectly credible without a line of coke or defiled groupie in sight. Owes a big debt to Billy Wilder, particularly 'The Apartment'.

Other 'Best films of the 00s' posts here and here.

Welcome, America

2010-03-22T18:23:00.003+11:00

"Welcome, America, to the world of universal health care. It will be alright. Really. Trust me. We've been there. We've had it for years, and we're doing well, thanks very much."

- The Rest of the World

X-Ray

2010-02-17T07:32:00.001+11:00

It’s difficult not to be curious
about this bone-man under the skin:
to think how he’s carried me over the years
without malice or contempt. In return
I’ve fed and clothed him of course,
shared the same bed, been shaped by his will,
but even after a lifetime together
I can’t say I know him, not for real . . .
apart, that is, from a broken wrist
when he once came peeping through.
And now there’s this inner-map of his ills,
that ageing stoop, those honeycombed hips,
the thinning tail-end bits. But what
really appals is his Model-T look.
He’s indistinguishable — except to the nurse —
From the millions like him who’ve come and gone
since one of us first stood up. Perhaps
it’s time to applaud his ancestral support
and keep this negative by the bed. Even then
it’ll be tough to view that crumbling master-plan
without a more personal sense of loss.

By Peter Bland

From Best New Zealand Poems 2003

The Banquet of Cleopatra

2010-01-28T17:40:00.003+11:00

The Banquet of Cleopatra by Giambattista Tiepolo (1743-44)

The episode represented in Tiepolo’s The Banquet of Cleopatra is drawn from the Roman historian Pliny’s Natural History (written in AD 77). Here Pliny recounted the tale of a famous contest between the Egyptian and Roman rulers (who became lovers), whereby Cleopatra wagered that she could stage a feast more lavish than the legendary excesses of Mark Antony. Tiepolo’s painting shows the dramatic moment at the end of Cleopatra’s sumptuous repast when,
faced with a still scornful Mark Antony, she wins the wager with her trump card. Removing one of a pair of priceless pearls that adorn her as earrings, Cleopatra dissolves the pearl in a glass of vinegar and drinks it, an extravagance that causes Mark Antony to lose his bet.

From a text by Ted Gott on the National Gallery of Victoria's website.

A billboard off Smith Street, Fitzroy.

Lord of the Fries

2010-01-27T18:54:00.000+11:00

Elizabeth Street, Melbourne, 2009

Best Films of the 00s (that I've seen): part two

2010-01-06T18:19:00.001+11:00

Children of Men (2006)
Manages to be both an utterly convincing depiction of a terrifying near-future and at the same time look like a rough-and-ready, low budget, hand-held record of events by a doco film crew on location. The Christian allegory in the last reel had me gasping for its fearlessness. For me the last couple of minutes were a disappointment, but boy, while it lasts it's a wild ride.

The Man Who Wasn't There (2001)
A right-angled look at Film Noir. Puts the implicit sadness, loneliness and fatigue of those classics front and centre. It's not perfect, but the result is strange, funny and unsettling.

Punch Drunk Love (2002)
A movie that grows in effect each time you see it, undercutting expectations at all times. It is short, strangely cast with Adam Sandler in the lead, with odd, unexpected musical cues and sound design, together with a preference for those empty void-like spaces we often find around shopping malls, car parks and bad motels, and yet it's animated with an unmistakable spark of life - a love story, for all that.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)
Shouldn't have worked at all: take a story about the reduction of action and human potential down to the merest flicker and give it to Julian Schnabel, one of the biggest egos in movies. He invests the plight of its main character with a furious will to live, and what should be pure schmaltz is actually quite stark and unsentimental. It also goes further into the use of the subjective camera than any movie I can think of. Orson Welles wanted to do the same thing with Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' in 1940 but the technology defeated him.

Memento (2001)
Its reverse-time scheme should be a gimmick but it works seamlessly and feels completely intrinsic to the story. Audacious, in a word.

Zodiac (2007)
I would happily agree that this film feels like a failure, that it takes a long time to arrive nowhere in particular, but its steadfast refusal to give easy answers stays in the mind long afterwards. Several scenes are extremely disturbing, not for explicit violence, but for the ordinary banal way terrible things can and do happen anywhere, anytime. For an American film, it most resembles the enigmas of Michael Haneke, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that he might have been an influence on Director David Fincher.

Lost in Translation (2003)
A rarity in American cinema, a film which resides more in silences than in action. Against a situation of cultural dislocation for the characters, a kind of inter-zone, where normal codes of behaviour don't need to apply (and they are free from social constraints), the decision not to act has consequence. A film for adults.

28 Days Later (2003)
A creepy, believable zombie movie set in a near-future London, beautifully realised on a very low budget.

Amores Perros (2001)
Films with intricate multi-story structures were flavour of the month in the early decade, but this is the best of them, even if the pitfalls are not always avoided. Like the best Latin cinema, it is bold, broadly drawn and intensely emotional.

The Bourne Identity (2002), Supremacy (2004), Ultimatum (2007)
You can take your pick of the Bournes, their virtues are common to all. Exciting, kinetic action which is also cinematic and coherent, unlike so much contemporary action footage ("Put in a dozen cameras from every angle and we'll make sense of it in 'post'"). Thoughtful story in a 1960s paranoid geo-political thriller vein but which is constructed to feel plausible. Bourne himself is a sympathetic character played with restraint by Matt Damon.

Eating eyren in Kent

2009-12-24T10:47:00.002+11:00

William Caxton, the first person to print a book in English, noted the sort of misunderstandings that were common in his day in the preface to Eneydos in 1490 in which he related the story of a group of London sailors heading down the 'tamyse' for Holland who found themselves becalmed in Kent. Seeking food, one of them approached a farmer’s wife and “axed for mete and specyally he axyd after eggys” but was met with blank looks by the wife who answered that she “coude speke no frenshe.” The sailors had traveled barely fifty miles and yet their language was scarcely recognizable to another speaker of English. In Kent, eggs were eyren and would remain so for at least another fifty years.

From Bill Bryson's 'Mother Tongue: The English Language'.

Best Films of the 00s (that I've seen): part one

2009-12-22T18:17:00.004+11:00

It's the end of the decade* - time for a list.

One of the interesting things about doing this is to surprise yourself with which films linger in the memory even after the passing of years. It's a good test too, to check out which films remain good even after their cultural moment has passed. This is why second viewings are so important.

I intend to keep adding to these lists as I catch up with the decade. Just titles and a thought or two that comes to mind, in no particular order.

Adaptation (2002)
Wonky in places, but Charlie Kaufman's screenplay is so startlingly original, you wonder how it works as well as it does. Self-referential, self-reflexive. Examines its own turning gears even while the motor's running.

Mulholland Drive (2001)
Starts out like a brightly coloured parody of Hollywood visual syntax, then lurches sickeningly to the left, revealing a related, but tonally different alternate reality. Like an optical illusion: disorientating, but makes perfect sense when looked at from just the right angle. From David Lynch, a true original.

No Country For Old Men (2007)
Cool and unsparing. Otherwordly performance by Javier Bardem, who stands in for the Coen brothers' recurring character of the personification of objective evil.

Spirited Away (2001)
Marriage of masterly traditional animation and a bold story, with the halls bedecked in some obscure and very weird Japanese cultural and religious references.

The Incredibles (2004)
Smart, funny and jaw-droppingly well designed in retro-futuristic style. The pace never slackens for a moment and themes of family, talent, potential and validation are touchingly explored. A movie for outsiders everywhere.

Infamous (2006)
Suffered from a badly timed release, but this is a superior depiction of the events related in Capote's 'In Cold Blood', his research of the disturbing murders, their historical and cultural context, and the effect of all this on the unusual personality of its author.

Star Trek (2009)
Smartly resuscitated a moribund cycle of films by looking at the familiar themes with an outsider's eye. Energetic and often exciting.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
An apparently low budget, lots of simple hand-held camera, in unemotional washed-out colour. Just the right approach for such knotty, emotionally fraught subject matter, which, despite it science fiction premise, has the emotional predicament faced by the characters at its very centre. A typically ambitious, thematically rich screenplay by Charlie Kaufman.

Burn After Reading (2008)
Widely underappreciated and misunderstood. A comedy that is also an utterly bleak rendition of human nature, a kind of vanitas in 35mm, something that is rarely depicted in art but familiar in life: petty maleficence - if not actual evil - of the kind found in every newspaper and the consequences for those caught up in its banal grip.

Ratatouille (2007)
Breathtaking design and superb animation of the kind that would have made Walt Disney stand up and applaud, combined with an affecting story about the critical importance of art and the path to self-actualisation. Despite the cutting-edge technology, its virtues are classical.

* Of course, I know that technically we are still a year from the end of the decade, but everyone else is doing it...

'Basterds' the best film of 2009? Not bloody likely

2009-12-20T14:03:00.000+11:00

So radio Three Triple R's 'Film Buff's Forecast' program has just brought down its listeners' votes for the films of 2009, and I'm not happy.

Every year since I was about 16 I've been listening to the show's annual votes for best, worst, most overrated and most underrated films of that year. I go back to when John Flaus and Paul Harris were the only voices heard. These days it's a whole gallery of voices, which is fine when they engage in constructive disagreement but not so much fun when some nameless voice, whose authority I have no way of assessing, goes on at length with opinions I disagree with! So I particularly enjoy the discrepancies between the critics' films and those voted by listeners.

Some think lists are childish but I'm a sucker for lists of all kinds. In my worst moments, I've resembled John Cusack's character in 'High Fidelity': "Ten best album tracks, side one, track one..." They're a kind of intellectual chewing gum, designed to get the juices flowing.

But jeez, 'Inglourious Basterds' as the best film of 2009? God help us. The critics and listeners were united on 3RRR and I'm appalled.

Okay, so it was stylish in that swashbuckling Tarantino style that he does so well. Bravura, I think it's called, and ten points for sheer balls. Very few film makers of any generation have the strength of their convictions to such an extent as to back themselves and their intuitions against what was, I imagine, widespread scepticism that such a bizarre idea would ever get made.

But its juvenile brutality and fascism is harder to forgive. It's certainly not the only film of the last couple of years to show an almost autistic lack of appreciation or understanding of the experiential weight of violence in cinema; 'Pan's Labyrinth' comes readily to mind. But while that film also had a historical setting (or in the case of 'I.B.' an alternative-historical setting), it took place in a fictional space that relied on the Spanish Civil War only as a contextual frame for the hard-edged fantasy that was really the interest of the movie.

'I.B.' on the other hand, doesn't make sense without the emotion and moral heft that the Holocaust subject matter brings with it. Tarantino relies on that historical and cultural burden to charge the events he asks us to experience with significance. What at first annoyed me and then by the end of the film made me angry, was that he uses the faith that we the audience place in him that he won't exploit a historical truth (whose significance doesn't need to be expanded upon) cheaply or to no good end. But that's exactly what he does do.

There is no necessary connection between the events of history and their cultural reflection in this universe. The Holocaust, the Second World War as a whole, is nothing but a set of cultural tropes he can move around and play with with a grin on his face. This war movie is not a film about war, but a film about films about war. The difference is crucial. There is therefore no debt to experience, to life.

But the film has it both ways. To a large degree, it misleads badly with the first scene, which introduces the main character, the anti-hero Col. Hans Landa, as he interrogates a french farmer on suspicion of harboring Jews, who we are allowed to see cowering under the floorboards. The scene unfolds slowly, with discipline, resulting in great suspense. Nail biting, as they say. It ends badly, but its emotional kick is not just a mechanical function of the classic techniques of suspense, but also an extratextual response to the affect of the subject matter. We know what is at stake for the innocents under the floorboards because we know that their fate will be to disappear into ashes.

This scene leads an attentive viewer (I believe) to frame an expectation that what we are about to watch will keep faith with that stock of memories, images, stories we have all inherited as children of the twentieth century. This faith, having been set up, is gleefully torn up in the subsequent spectacle.

This early discipline is also jettisoned for the rest of the film. I have not heard a single critic notice how interminable is the central key scene in a cellar bar, where allied soldiers impersonating Nazi officers attempt to make contact with a resistance figure in the French underground. An English officer with a proficiency in German attempts to maintain the mask, but his unusual accent gives him away to his audience. This would have been dealt with by a classical director like William Wellman or John Ford in a few minutes of tension, but instead it drags on and on, pointlessly. What is worse, during the whole scene, one of the other impersonators remains mute - yet he is the only authentic German in the bunch! Why?

Finally, Tarantino has his English officer give himself away by making a typically English - not German - hand gesture. The only problem is that when it happens we don't know what it means until it is explained to us by one of the characters later! A moment which should be tense beyond endurance for the audience is thrown away in sluggish editing and sloppy writing.

Lovers of the film will no doubt object that I am guilty of a lack of appreciation for Tarantino's use of ironic self-reference and intertextuality. Maybe I am. Maybe the subject matter just doesn't lend itself to merrymaking in the playpen of ironic detachment. It is plain that the final third of the film, which is an extended revenge fantasy where Hitler and all the members of the Nazi High Command perish in a burning cinema (oh the jolly irony!) while the fleeing audience is strafed with machine guns held by the 'good' guys. You can tell they're good guys because they're Jewish. If this sounds dumb, it's because it is dumb, beyond words.

After this, it hardly matters any more when the brutal but charismatic Landa has his forehead slowly carved up with a very large knife. By that stage I was numb, which I suppose means that this movie was not for me. I figure I was supposed to enjoy this, feeling that the villain got his comeuppance, just as I was supposed to cheer as the cinema audience (shot from above) screamed as they were being machine-gunned to death. Instead I felt as if I was being made complicit in a bloodthirsty spectacle without moral reference point. A film that had started out doing everything it could to evoke an emotional response for the oppressed and against the oppressor, reversed the poles, asking me to cheer indiscriminate murder on the basis that it was being perpetrated against the 'right' enemy. There's a name for this. Goebbels would have recognised the technique, since he virtually invented it.

This is not the first time a blindingly stupid and immoral film has been lauded by critics almost universally, but I'm mainly disappointed because people whose judgements I generally respect have either been so easily fooled, or don't care.

Minor atmospheric disturbances

2009-12-14T17:53:00.002+11:00

In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx --- or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it --- and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.

From Bill Bryson's 'Mother Tongue: The English Language'.

Black and Weird

2009-12-08T12:50:00.003+11:00

From Black and WTF, "A photoblog of really strange black & white photos".

Zombie mathematics

2009-12-06T12:34:00.000+11:00

“An outbreak of zombies is likely to be disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead,” the authors wrote. “It is imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly, or else we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

From Wired, 'Mathematical Model for Surviving a Zombie Attack' by Betsy Mason

Design for Obama

2009-10-31T14:59:00.004+11:00

It was an experiment in linking grassroots activism with the political machine using new technology, and it is being studied by wonks around the world.

Hundreds of artists and designers expressed support for the Obama candidacy by designing posters and submitting them to designforobama.org for free download. Many of these were actually taken up by the campaign, and others just travelled the superhighway as viral emails, making their point on their own.

Taschen is publishing Design for Obama. Posters for Change: A Grassroots Anthology This selection of the best, curated by Spike Lee and Aaron Perry-Zucker, is a visual document of this most inspirational U.S. presidential campaign.

Guard of honour

2009-10-30T08:42:00.002+11:00

Staff of the Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Centre let the chimps watch the burial of Dorothy, an elderly chimpanzee, so they could come to terms with her loss.

From Times Online.

Shorpy

2009-10-19T18:59:00.008+11:00

Michael Leddy coined the wonderful expression 'dowdy world' to describe glimpses of bygone times that occasionally pop up in old movies, television shows, or anywhere at all. His definition: “modern American culture as it was before certain forms of technology redefined everyday life”.

Well, ‘Shorpy’ is the dowdy world on rollerskates.

It is one of the handful of websites I can't live a week without visiting at least once, and I love it with an ardent passion.

My favourites are the bizarre pics from from the archive called the National Library...

...and the breathtakingly detailed images of turn of the century city architecture, like this one of the Philadelphia Post Office in 1900.

The site describes itself: "Shorpy.com: History in HD is a vintage photography blog featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago."

It appears to be a shared site where a very select number of contributors upload images in very high definition. They appear to have been scanned from the original negatives. This is astounding because the site has a large collection of truly classic images, including many pictures by the greats Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Lewis Hine.

Most of these pictures are not the recogniseable classics from photographic history, but the now vast collection is a more comprehensive picture of each photographers’ working practice than would be possible in even the biggest survey exhibition. In the case of Lewis Hine in particular, I've had to reassess my view of his significance to the medium.

When I was taught photography, the conventional view of Lewis Hine I intuited was that he was a great documentarian but whose credentials as an artist were somewhat in question. A view was that the haunting quality his pictures so often had was more to do with the heartbreaking subject matter of child labour and exploitation that he did so much to reveal than any completely conscious and expressed aesthetic intention.

Certainly the subject matter is compelling (and there is art in that), but there’s clearly more here than just the handprint of a great documentary photographer. Very frequently, too frequently to be an accident, he invests an apparently utilitarian image with the grace and insight of a true portrait.

The achievement becomes all the more awe-inspiring when we consider the circumstances under which many of the images were taken. His period of greatest activity in the social documentary field was the first decade of the century, when he worked for social activist magazines and for social documentary projects like the Pittsburgh Survey. He also worked for the National Child Labour Committee for eight years and published two books of his pictures, 'Child Labour in the Carolinas' (1909) and 'Day Laborers Before Their Time' (1909).

Taking these images often involved working under great pressure. To gain access Hine sometimes hid his camera and posed as a fire inspector.

In 1916 Congress eventually agreed to pass legislation to protect children. Owen Lovejoy, Chairman of the National Child Labour Committee, wrote that: "the work Hine did for this reform was more responsible than all other efforts in bringing the need to public attention."

Hine had great difficulty earning money from his photography. In January 1940, he lost his home after failing to keep up repayments. Lewis Wickes Hine died in extreme poverty eleven months later on 3rd November, 1940.

Here’s to Shorpy Higginbotham and to Lewis Hine, who sought to record his existence, reflect his experience, change the conditions under which he worked and to create art.

Histoire des races maudites

2009-10-08T17:07:00.001+11:00

Sitting in her little house near Tarbes, in the French Pyrenees, Marie-Pierre Manet-Beauzac is talking about her ancestry.

For most people this would be agreeable, perhaps even pleasurable. For the 40-something mother-of-three, the story of her bloodline is marked with a unique sadness: because she belongs to an extraordinary tribe of hidden pariahs, repressed in France for a thousand years.

Marie-Pierre is a Cagot.

From Sean Thomas in The Independent.

Steamer trunk office

2009-10-04T15:21:00.001+11:00

I'm calculating what I would have to sell to get my hands on one of these.

This is the Mayfair Steamer Secretary Trunk, made of "Vintage Cigar Leather", whatever that is.

The blurb reads:

Crafted by antiques dealer and furniture maker Timothy Oulton of London, our oversized steamer trunk armoire is configured as an ingeniously designed secretary.

- Reproduction antique steamer trunk
- Handmade of distressed vintage cigar leather over a solid wood frame
- Aniline-dyed leather has an antiqued, vintage look
- Accented with over 3,000 hand-hammered brass nailheads
- Features a pull-down desktop and multiple drawers, cubbies, wire management and bookshelves
- Lined in leather-edged canvas
- Stands on wheels for mobility and closes for storage and privacy
- Leather-bound corner brackets, leather-wrapped handles, oak slats with a tobacco finish and cast-metal antiqued hardware
- No two are exactly alike, making each trunk truly unique
- Leather is resistant to scratches and becomes softer over time and with use, contributing to its antiqued patina
- Dimensions: 39"W x 29"D x 76"H

Now all I need is the New York loft to put it in.

'Cold Comfort Farm'

2009-09-14T16:00:00.011+10:00

I’ve just had a thoroughly good time reading Stella Gibbons’ ‘Cold Comfort Farm’, and marvelling that a satirical novel published in 1932 could still be so much fun, long after the sources of the joke have faded or disappeared entirely.

It was intended as a satire of the fashionable rural novels of the time, sending up authors who are mostly forgotten or of interest only because she did them over. The exception is D.H. Lawrence, who was only the most self-consciously highbrow exemplar of the style.

For a first novel by a young woman in her twenties, when most novels were not by young women let alone those in their twenties, it is astonishingly self-assured and full of energy. She was a journalist and book-reviewer at the time and I can imagine the implied pressure not to burn bridges with those she might bump into at the next cocktail party, not to mention those who might employ her in the future. What a gamble.

In a strange, knowing flourish, she even flags paragraphs with an asterisk when she’s being particularly naughty, on a scale from one to three. Hence:

*** The man’s big body, etched menacingly against the bleak light that stabbed in from the low windows, did not move. His thoughts swirled like a beck in spate behind the sodden grey furrows of his face. A woman… Blast! Blast! Come to wrest away from him the land whose love fermented in his veins like slow yeast. She-woman. Young, soft-coloured, insolent. His gaze was suddenly edged by a fleshy taint. Break her. Break. Keep and hold and hold fast the land. The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his…

Phew! And the punch line:

He stood at the table facing Flora and blowing heavily on his tea and staring at her. Flora did not mind. It was quite interesting: like having tea with a rhinoceros.

I have seen the more recent film of the book, directed by John Schlesinger and featuring Ian McKellan and Eileen Atkins. Even after reading the novel, I still think it is extremely good. It actually adds something to the experience of reading the book. I heard their broad rustic accents in my head as I went.

Some juicy bits. McKellan as amateur preacher Amos, discovers his gift move the humble folk of the Church of the Quivering Brethren with terrible enthusiasm:

"Ye miserable, crawling worms, are ye here again, then? Have ye come like Nimshi son of Rehoboam, secretly out of yer doomed houses to hear what’s comin’ to ye? Have ye come, old and young, sick and well, matrons and virgins (if there is any virgins among ye, which is not likely, the world bein’ in the wicked state it is), old men and young lads, to hear me tellin’ o’ the great crimson lickin’ flames o’ hell fire?"

. . .

In novels, persons who turned to religion to obtain the colour and excitement which everyday life did not give them were all grey and thwarted. Probably the Brethren would be all grey and thwarted… though it was too true that life as she is lived had a way of being curiously different from life as described by novelists.

I kept wondering what George Orwell would have made of Stella Gibbons. As, I suppose, a good journalist, her prose showed all the virtues of concision and clarity that he regarded so highly. As a novel with a political heart, he would have found its lack of class consciousness highly questionable, and her feminism just a little beyond his definition of progressive, as limited by his time and place as that was. I searched the index of the ‘Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters’ without result. A pity, but she would have found his asceticism a bit much, not to mention his lack of a sense of humour. Cheer up you earnest old socialist and have a glass of champagne!

They would have bonded over a shared disdain for literary and cultural pretension. Here is Mybug, a sexually obsessed intellectual, as he attempts to engage in fruitful conversation with a visiting Hollywood talent scout, a Mr Earl P. Neck, on the lookout for the next matinee idol.

“’Have you ever seen Alexander Fin?’ asked Mr Mybug. I saw him in Pepin’s last film, ‘La Plume de Ma Tante’, in Paris last January. Very amusing stuff. They all wore glass clothes, you know, and moved in time to a metronome.”

The heart of the novel is Gibbons’ heroine (and alter ego, given that she was herself a smart go-getter under thirty) Flora Poste, a new woman, one of the bright young things, wilful, assertive, with a very low tolerance for self indulgence and a passion for tidiness in all its forms:

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while you were eating an apple.

One of the advantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one’s favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown.

All the inmates of Cold Comfort sustain themselves on various fruits of misery, which each of them invokes to justify their refusal to engage with life and its real potential. “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” screams the gothic Aunt Ada from her refuge and throne at the top of the house, where she is the master of all she can see.

The wordly-wise, sophisticated busybody Flora Post sees her mission in tidying up the place, which means making herself the catalyst for change and emotional resolution for each character in turn. This is framed at the beginning of the novel as Flora simply concocting something to keep herself busy, but the author's intention is quiet serious.

When she’s not being witty with extreme prejudice, Gibbons has a point to make, which she stitches seamlessly into the novel. It is something to do with life and way it should be lived in the shadow of the grave, which is to say, not in the shadow of the grave, but in the light. Life is other people.

A little later, as she sat peacefully sewing, Adam came in from the yard. He wore, as a protection from the rain, a hat which had lost – in who knows what hintermith of time – the usual attributes of shape, colour and size, and those more subtle race-memory associations which identify hats as hats, and now resembled some obscure natural growth, some moss or sponge or fungus, which had attached itself to a host.

An added bonus: it comes in the beautiful new/old Penguin Classics, in all their lovely orangeness.

finsmal's disciplined eye

2009-09-02T08:42:00.002+10:00

Originally uploaded by finsmal...Low & Slow.

A quality I sincerely admire in photographers is something I call "a disciplined eye".

I suppose I mean an ability to seek out and find pictures in the world, even in the most unremarkable and apparently chaotic places. By 'pictures' I don't just mean images, since anyone with a finger can make an image. I mean something with structure, whose features amount to an aesthetic argument of some kind, the evidence of a discriminating consciousness.

It's a quality that is so easy to miss in others, since our landscape is saturated in images so that we come to think that such things are part of nature. But they're not. They have be constructed from educated sensation. If you don't think it's difficult, just try it.

I found this person somewhere in the photographic dumpster that is Flickr.

'Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire'

2009-08-22T15:39:00.010+10:00

I will shell out an exorbitant amount of money to see a Dali exhibition (there seems to be one every five years or so), based on an assessment of how many pictures it contains of that period before 1940, before his thirty-fifth birthday, when Dali’s corrupt imagination burned with a peculiar, stinky intensity.

The good news is that ‘Salvador Dali: Liquid Desire’ at the NGV contains many choice morsels and a good many even older pictures when the little creep was just a teenager. There is bad news, but more of that shortly.

It contains a number of juvenilia, pictures done as he was chewing his way through diverse influences as a teenage prodigy.

It seems that he landed on a selection of Renaissance and Mannerist painters, especially Caravaggio with his ability to concentrate the eye on symbolically loaded detail with deep shade and theatrical light; and Velasquez and his bravura technique (that Dali regarded as a personal challenge) and domestic surfaces picked out in raking light, rendering them su(per)real, like the crustiness of peasant bread, the lustre on a terra cotta milk jug, and the ancient ruin of a crumbling block of cheese.

And of course the peculiar mix of sacred subject matter and perversity found in artists like Parmigianino, whose ‘Madonna with the Long Neck’ (1534) he imitated in an early self-portrait.

Wall texts in blockbuster exhibitions are always slightly dubious. There is often a sense of a curatorial barrow being pushed, or else I sometimes suspect pressure has been brought to bear by lenders to stick to an approved line. (I have no proof of this, and I’ve never even heard it complained about, but then if it was happening, the borrowers aren’t likely to complain too loudly.)

The man’s peculiarities were evident from an early age but the text in this exhibition is often coy about the nature of the imagery. ‘Portrait of My Sister’ (1925) and ‘Girl’s back’ (1929) both fetishize his sister’s hair, an obvious erotic trigger for him. The latter is a peculiar inversion of a salon portrait, the subject is turned from us, her suggestive ringlets hanging down and rendered in expert chiaroscuro. 'Portrait of My Sister' has a hard-edged eye for detail, like the early Miro, set in an uncanny de Chirico space, but those ringlets over the subject's shoulder are pure Dali.

The text plays a straight bat, waffling about their neo-classical pedigree, with the names of Ingres and Vermeer invoked, but the weird intensity of focus is already Dali’s own, and its nature is unmistakeable. The paintings virtually throb with it.

Later, the game gets funny when attempting to say something apropos about ‘Atmospheric Skull Sodomizing a Grand Piano’ (1934). Needles to say, things are kept nice.

I’ve always appreciated Robert Hughes’ comment that Dali had a mind “like a gland, irritated by constant scratching.” It neatly suggests the sense of morbid pathology that the early paintings radiate. That is their lasting power as works of art, and what makes them key objects of the 20th century – objects of any kind.

The work ‘Suez’ (1932) is strange and unsettling, maybe because its restraint is so unlike his hysterical signature style. The famous canal was being constructed at the time and perhaps the idea of a huge trench linking two continents had some unusual connotations for him. An elongated spoon, liquid as if hot from the forge, reaches out from one wall of the canal towards an odd arabesque object, which emerges out of the other wall, the two forms forever in an unconsummated coupling. The image is suggestive and pathetic at the same time.

He was constantly registering new objects as fetishes loaded with unlimited sexual potential no matter how unlikely the resemblance. I was keeping a mental list while moving through the exhibition, which included:

Bones, beans, crutches, spoons, pianos (soft), violins and cellos, ants, knives, skulls, lamb chops, shoes, keys, lobsters, watches, keyholes, telephones, milk, trees, cannon, wheelbarrows. The list is evidently limitless and unconstrained by any obvious (to the rest of us) sexual connotation.

I was stopped in my tracks by a picture so unlike what had come before it, ‘Telephone in a Dish with Three Grilled Sardines at the End of September, 1939’.

This sombre image, heavy with grief, represents a path not taken. Again the mesmeric concentration on domestic objects but this time stripped of artifice, carrying their symbolic load with dignity. I was put in mind of Picasso’s paintings of the war period when he was shut up in his studio, the curtains drawn, anxious and cut off from his supporters and seemingly at the mercy of the occupying Nazis (who never in fact came knocking). He turned to still life in browns and greys, pictures of skulls and bulls’ heads, bizarre disjunctions of imagery telling their own suggestive story about what was going on outside.

For me this was the point of eclipse for Dali, after which he descended into mediocrity and confusion and an increasingly desperate chase after celebrity. By the late 40s he was already a full blown reactionary. His stated ambition was to be a ‘Renaissance painter’, whatever that meant, when he left Europe for the US, claiming he was leaving surrealism behind.

Needless to say he came back to it shortly after; that’s where the money was of course: baguettes and circuses. There was no way the American media or art establishment was going to let him get away with that. “So what kooky surrealist outrage are you going to foist on an art-hungry (and newspaper-buying) American public now, Mr Dali – walk down Broadway with a leopard on a chain? Give a lecture dressed in a diving helmet? Oh, Mr Dali, you are a card!”

And so the moustache grew in inverse proportion to any actual artistic achievement until it looked like a pair of tusks; classic sublimation, which as a good Freudian, Dali should have realised.

The only objects worth a damn in the latter part of the show (which goes on forever) were a couple of the jewels he made in the late 40s, just as I had given up hope and thought the show had hit a new low, with crude rehashes of his best imagery done in gold as indescribably tacky brooches and pendants.

There is only one object that for me suggested he still had his sense of humour about him. A ridiculous beating heart in rubies and gold, for the new Queen Elizabeth II, which actually throbs by means of a tiny motor, hitting just the right note if he was attempting to perpetrate an elaborate joke, which I’m not at all certain was his intention.

There is a section of the show dedicated to ‘Destino’, the animated film on which he collaborated with Walt Disney, left unfinished but completed (I assume faithfully) by Roy Disney in 2002. What a natural collaboration Dali and Disney turned out to be, Disney the entertainer anxious for high artistic credibility, and Dali the freak European aesthete who after all just wanted to play to the gallery.

I have my doubts about the success of the finished film. It’s hard from this distance to know how surprising it would have seemed to an audience at the time, but I doubt it would have really have satisfied anyone. It is too formless and lacking in narrative for a general audience, and too ‘Disney’ to satisfy the art crowd.

Given it was never finished, it looks like the evolution happened anyway. Less than ten years later, Terry Gilliam had started to make his surrealist cut-out animations for British TV, with a similar stream-of-consciousness (lack of) logic, and certainly advertising was well on to Dali much earlier than that. The fact that none of this would have happened had it not been for him is no criticism, but merely to say that he had anticipated himself way back in the 1930s. The rest was repetition.

I left the show feeling slightly sad and deflated, and the usual tacky merchandising outside the entrance was for once not a great break from what had immediately preceded it.

Pump that Expressionist bass!

2009-08-14T08:23:00.002+10:00

"If they were alive today, what speakers would Max Beckmann or Edvard Munch buy"? I know I've asked myself this questions thousands of times.

Question no longer. The Altec Lansing Expressionist Bass FX3022 Speaker has arrived.

Forget about bass booming at your shins. The Expressionist Bass features twin desktop speakers with subwoofers built right in the base of each one. Separate 1.5-inch drivers deliver mid and high frequencies so vocals and details come through with brilliant clarity. And an auxiliary input gives you the convenience of connecting any MP3 player.

And what sound should I play through my Expressionist Bass speaker? Why, a scream, of course.

Phineas Gage: wonders are always fascinating

2009-07-24T17:05:00.004+10:00

A daguerreotype made public last week is believed to be the only known image of Phineas Gage (1823-1860).

Gage was a 25-year-old foreman, fit and well-regarded. His crew were digging a railroad bed near Cavendish, Vt. Late on the afternoon of Sept. 13, 1848, he wielded a specially made iron - it measured 3 feet 7 inches long and weighed 13 pounds - to pack blasting powder into rock.

An explosion erupted. “And we think the tamping iron went all the way through the skull - like a missile,’’ said Dr. Ion-Florin Talos, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
A close examination of the object clutched by the man in the picture shows an inscription matching the engraving on the tamping iron, which reads in part, “This is the bar that was shot through the head of Mr. Phineas P. Gage.’’

He has had enduring fame as the index case of an individual who suffered major personality changes after brain trauma. As such, he is a legend in the annals of neurology, which is largely based on the study of brain-damaged patients.

“It’s kind of a wonder,’’ Dr. Talos said, “and wonders are always fascinating.’’

From the Boston Globe.

Another fascinating account of the case appears at Neurophilosophy.

Ballard Street: Troy

2009-07-13T16:28:00.002+10:00

Another glance at Jerry Van Amerongen's Ballard Street.

Other Ballard Street posts here.

Classically white

2009-07-12T17:01:00.005+10:00

When we use the adjective 'classical', we mean to suggest certain qualities possessed by the classical Greek and Roman worlds: restraint, symmetry, clarity and seriousness of purpose, harmoniousness of proportion, a lack of excessive ornament. Whatever image we conjure up to accompany the idea, whether it's a building or a piece of sculpture, one thing is certain: it will be white.

I had read before that those ancient buildings and statues were originally not white at all, but brightly coloured. It's hard to keep that it in mind while contemplating the corridors of marble white sculpture in the Vatican Museum, though. The whiteness of them seems to accord with very deep cultural prejudices and is hard to shake.

The New Scientist reports that a team at the British Museum has found the first evidence of coloured paints used on the Parthenon, built in the 5th century BC. Researcher Giovanni Verri has developed an imaging technique sensitive to Egyptian Blue, a pigment known to have been used in ancient times. Shining red light onto marble, the pigment absorbs the red spectrum and emits infrared light. Through an infrared camera, any area that was once blue will glow.

Traces of the pigment have been found on statuary and on the building itself.

Ian Jenkins, a senior curator at the British Museum, says the temple would have looked "jewelled" and "busy". Judging by similar Greek sculptures, the pigments used were probably blue and red beside contrasting white stone, and liberal use of gold leaf.

Seeing evidence of this kind of painting for myself at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples was an aesthetic shock. The realism of ancient art was something I just wasn't prepared for, keeping in mind that the statues were so often painted as well as sculpted with astonishing fidelity to life.

The annoyingly conscientious guards stopped me from taking pictures, but this one, of Scipio Africanus the Elder, is floating about the internet. It has painting on the eyes still intact, but is plain otherwise. My memory is that others still had bits of flaking paint attached to them.

The figures I saw came from the Villa of the Papyri, the house of a wealthy and cultured lover of philosophy and the arts who lived at Herculaneum, the less famous neighbouring town of Pompeii. Unfortunately the town and the villa met the same fate as their sister city in 79 AD.

Still, had they not been subsumed in rock and ash on that terrible day, these breathtaking sculptures would not now be in a museum upsetting the smug preconceptions of twenty first century folk like me.

Ballard Street: Sparky's portraits

2009-07-08T17:09:00.003+10:00

From Jerry Van Amerongen's Ballard Street.

The ironic revolution

2009-07-08T08:47:00.003+10:00

It was socialists who saw the dangers of Communism first and most clearly. In 1918, at the dawn of the Soviet era, Karl Kautsky, who had personally known Marx and Engels in his youth, wrote a diatribe against Lenin's use of the vague Marxist term "dictatorship of the proletariat."

Kautsky insisted it had been meant metaphorically, and that genuine class struggle presupposed genuine democracy. The so-called dictatorship of the proletariat "always leads to the dictatorship of a single man, or of a small knot of leaders" and to a situation where ordinary people "only become instruments for carrying out orders."

From Andrew O'Hehir's review of 'The Rise and Fall of Communism' by Archie Brown, in Salon.com.

One thing was not a historical fluke or accident, though: the fact that a political system based on some half-baked utopian musing by Marx and Engels, and their bogus claims of scientific certainty, was not going to work out well for anybody.

There's room for argument about whether it had to turn out quite as badly as it did, and plenty of room for discussing the continuing validity of Marx's insights into capitalism. But there's no denying that the works of a philosopher who championed human creativity became the basis for a social system devoted to crushing it. It's the platonic ideal of historical irony, to which other historical ironies can only aspire, and suggests some very dark possibilities about human nature.

Sculpture is in the eye of the beholder

2009-07-07T17:05:00.001+10:00

A piece of urban sculpture or just a heap of pallets left in the street?

Whatever. It's lovely nevertheless.

Seen outside a factory off Sydney Road, Brunswick.

Babytalking

2009-07-02T08:35:00.005+10:00

gibber /jibbr/ • v. speak rapidly and unintelligibly, typically through fear or shock. n. such speech or sound.
gibberish /jibbrish/ • n. unintelligible or meaningless speech or writing; nonsense.

My son Sweeney is walking around the house talking to himself and anything or anyone who will listen. He speaks a most incredibly fluent gibberish. I'm astonished at the sheer variety of sounds coming out of his mouth.

I've tried to imitate him but it's the aural equivalent of an adult trying to draw like a child: close, but somehow missing that special something that makes the original so fascinating.

This morning we speculated that he might have been speaking Russian all this time and we've never realised it.

Transformers: the cinema of spectacle

2009-06-30T17:08:00.001+10:00

A real zeitgeist piece in the New York Times:

Assembling the “Transformers” creative team took more convincing. Like [Director Michael] Bay the screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (“Star Trek”) were reluctant to be involved. “There’s no win in a screenwriter for this,” Mr. Orci said. “It’s going to be a giant toy commercial no matter what we do.”

You're not kidding, Roberto.

I admit I saw the first 'Transformers' movie on DVD with my son and I enjoyed it. I loathe Michael Bay films (like 'Pearl Harbor'), but here at least was a perfect meeting of sensibility and subject. Unlike, you know, history and stuff...

I hesitate to be too cynical about this kind of filmmaking, if only because I know that it's close in spirit to the motives of the Lumiere brothers and innumerable other showmen who came after them, who hawked the Cinematograph, the newest wonder of the age, around theatres, pubs and circus tents all over the world. Cinema as pure spectacle. Roll up, roll up! See the bearded lady, the snake man, Siamese twins - and pictures that move!

While I haven't seen the sequel, all reports so far indicate a non-stop collage of explosions and kinetic energy with non-existent plot or characterisation. In other words, a TV commercial.

Appropriately, the projects have largely been driven by toy manufacturer Hasbro.

Hasbro meanwhile is continuing to expand its presence in Hollywood. Last year it announced a deal with Universal in which at least four more of its best-known brands, including board games like Monopoly, Battleship and Candyland, would be turned into movies by industry heavyweights like Ridley Scott and Gore Verbinski. Under this same deal Mr. Bay’s company, Platinum Dunes, is developing a film based on Ouija, Hasbro’s ghost communication game, and Brian Grazer is producing a film about Stretch Armstrong, the company’s goop-filled, elastic-limbed superhero.

I can't wait. Yet more movies costing more than the GDP of several nations exploring the dramatic possibilities of board games. I look forward to the movie version of 'Tiddlywinks' directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Someone should put the idea to the English Tiddlywinks Association. They could be on to a winner.

Es-Presso

2009-06-26T20:46:00.005+10:00

Psychologists tell us that we unconsciously favour the physically attractive. Beautiful people earn more, are more likely to be employed in an interview, get better service in shops, are smiled at more than the rest of us, and generally preferred in innumerable ways every day of their blessed lives.

I have a similar prejudice about inanimate objects. I think beautiful things are going to be better, more efficient, easier to use than ugly things, and I want this to be true and will maintain it against all evidence to the contrary. (I seem to remember reading something along the lines that useful things are necessarily beautiful, but that's a different matter).

So it is that I want this to be the best coffee maker in the world.

I've never tasted a cup of coffee from this machine, but I want it to be perfect. The design is so starkly brilliant, so simple, in contrast to the overpriced contraptions that look more like Victorian steam organs than something that might make a decent cup of coffee, that I want it to be good.

It is called the Presso, and it was designed by Patrick Hunt, of design consultancy Therefore.

There are several nifty videos of it being demonstrated on youtube.

Can you tell I've been enjoying my coffee lately?

Coffee is a fresh food

2009-06-18T08:01:00.001+10:00

Freeman pointed out that coffee is a fresh food product. "We've forgotten about that in the past 50 years with the invention of instant coffee," he said. "You go to the supermarket and buy something with a three-year use-by date. But coffee really is a fresh food. So if you can get it recently roasted you're well on your way to getting great coffee. There's no comparison.

Andy Freeman, online coffee retailer and operator of the Coffeesnobs website (buy the best grinder you can afford, he suggested).

From Gordon Farrer of The Age.

The hand-made thing

2009-06-16T17:41:00.007+10:00

Almost all the time, the objects we use in daily life - the door handles we turn, the glasses we drink from, the pens we write with - were made by machines. At most, someone somewhere has simply screwed a few pieces together never touched by human hands.

Further down the scale of economic fortune, down to the bottom, where life is a daily struggle of subsistence as it was for our ancestors, the fewer machine-made objects you will find in their original state.

Down there among the people whose lives resemble the rag-pickers and mudlarks of Dickensian times more than they do yours or mine, the machine-made objects have already been used and discarded by others.

Lately I spent some time in our quirky local shop 'Just Planet' in Sunbury, created by my friends Lee and Norman. They sell all sorts of objects with an implicitly internationalist agenda: things like Fair Trade coffee and chocolate, toys for children, organic this-and-that, all in a happily cluttered space. But apart from the excellent coffee, I like to go there to see the large range of hand-made things.

Recently, my wife bought me a little tin guitar, only a few centimetres high, to go on my keyring. The strings are made of wire, the face of the guitar is from an aluminium drink can, while the clips holding it together and the sides and back of the guitar are made from an old sardine tin. I'm amazed how hardy it is. It will certainly last for years.

It is also ingeniously designed.

I'm sure no pencil ever touched paper, but it is design nevertheless. Done in the mind and the hand.

I've since bought a tin car, made from an insect repellant can, with working tin wheels, a steering wheel, seats, and even a transparent windscreen.

Appropriately it looks like a Volkswagon. I say appropriately because the VW spent the longest time in continuous production of any car. It will run on just about anything including banana skins (I saw it in a documentary), and it was for decades the car most likely to be owned by the working poor around the world.

Here's to hand-made things.

'The Front Page'

2009-06-02T17:18:00.005+10:00

An evocative opening montage to Billy Wilder’s film of ‘The Front Page’, the great play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur. Under the opening credits, a newspaper of 1929 is composed, set, printed and distributed. Men arrange lead type on scales, engravers engrave, compositors composit, enormous spools of paper are unloaded from trucks and set on huge industrial machinery that lurches into life.

As so many of the newspapers of the world breath their last and expire, I’m filled with nostalgia.

The production design is also spectacular, an evocation of a lost world, down to the candlestick telephones, desk spikes, industrial typewriters, dusty ceiling fans and heavy oak filing cabinets.

I will gladly spend a couple of hours, anyplace, anytime, in Wilderland.

Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer, a noted psychiatrist from Vienna (of course), is examining the putative cop-killer and communist Earl Williams, watched by Sherriff Hartman:

Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: Tell me, Mr. Williams, were you unhappy as a child?
Earl Williams: Not really. I had a perfectly normal childhood.
Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: I see. You wanted to kill your father and sleep with your mother…
Earl Williams: [to Sheriff Hartman] If he's gonna talk dirty...
Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: When you were in grammar school, did you practice self-abuse?
Earl Williams: No, sir. I don't believe in it. I would never abuse myself or anybody else. I love people. I love all people.
'Honest Pete' Hartman Sheriff of Clark County: I suppose that cop committed suicide!
Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: Let us get back to masturbation. Did your father ever catch you in the act?
Earl Williams: Oh, my father was - was never home. He was a conductor on the Chicago-Northwestern.
Dr. Max J. Eggelhofer: Very significant. Your father wore a uniform, just like that policeman. And when he pulled out that gun, an obvious phallic symbol, you thought he was your father, and he was going to use it to hurt your mother.
Earl Williams: [to Sheriff Hartman] He's crazy!

Ben Hecht, for whom the word ‘legendary’ seems barely adequate, worked as a Chicago newspaperman in the early century. His reminiscences were published in ‘Gaily, Gaily: Memoirs of a cub reporter in the world’s wildest city’, which is a pretty good description of the contents. I believe it’s out of print, but I found my battered paperback copy at a church fete.

Together with Charles MacArthur, he wrote a play set in this world called ‘The Front Page’, which was wildly successful on Broadway in 1928. It was made into a screwball comedy in 1931 with Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brien, and again in 1940, when it was transformed into ‘His Girl Friday’ with Cary Grant and the original male character’s part taken by Rosalind Russell.

Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond went back to Hecht and MacArthur’s play and made the film of ‘The Front Page’ and set it back in 1929, when the newspaper was arguably at the height of its influence.

When dialogue between Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon actually name-drops Ben Hecht, we are in an intertextual forest:

Walter Burns: Kid, I woulda thrown you a little farewell party...
Hildy Johnson: Oh, no, no, no! I know your farewell parties! When Ben Hecht was leaving for Hollywood, you slipped a micky in his gin fizz. It took four of us to get him on the California Limited.

Awkward family classics

2009-05-15T17:26:00.005+10:00

Sometimes, words just aren't enough.

There's plenty of room on the couch.

From the joyous awkwardfamilyphotos.com.

Daily Telegraph story on Awkward Family Photos.

Madness & Modernity

2009-05-06T17:26:00.001+10:00

'Madness & Modernity: Mental illness and the visual arts in Vienna 1900' is an exhibition curated by Leslie Topp and Gemma Blackshaw at the Wellcome Collection in London.

It is not your usual art gallery, but has several exhibition spaces concentrating on matters medical and mental.

'Portrait of Heinrich Mann' by Max Oppenheimer, 1910.

Max Oppenheimer seriously rivalled Kokoschka as a portrait-painter. In 1911, rows erupted between the two artists over who could lay claim to the invention of the ‘psychological portrait’. Oppenheimer’s depiction of the German novelist Heinrich Mann in a state of nervous enervation, with flickering eyelids, rigid limbs and splayed fingers, was declared a ‘Kokoschka-copy’. Heinrich was Thomas Mann's brother, who continually engaged with themes of mental illness, incarceration and freedom in his fiction.

There is an interesting video discussion with the curators on the website.

Artists At Work

2009-02-26T08:37:00.001+11:00

Move along. Artists at work. Nothing to see here...

Parliament House, Canberra.

Freehand wall drawing

2009-02-16T08:52:00.003+11:00

I was diverted by this freehand drawing on a wall of a lane off Gertrude Street recently.

I was struck by how rarely you see a freehand drawing on a wall, as opposed to the kind of rarified, cultish typography that usually constitutes 'graffiti art', at least in Melbourne.

It isn't rare elsewhere, though. Thanks to the Wooster Collective website, I see that everyone is not a wannabe rapper, least of all in Europe, where stunning public art of an original and even provincial kind is being made.

This is by David de la Mano.

This is by the Canadian artist OTHER.

Inferno

2009-02-10T08:18:00.000+11:00

Last Saturday was the hottest temperature I have ever experienced. At our house, it reached 47 degrees, which I see is over 116 degrees in the old fahrenheit scale.

In the afternoon, after abandoning the house when it hit 30 degrees inside, we walked a hundred metres from the car to the entrance of a shopping centre looking for shelter from the heat, and I covered my little boy as if radiation was falling from the sky, which it was. Hot wind like a blast-furnace swirled around empty carparks. The sky was yellow and we could smell smoke. I had an intimation of armageddon.

Looking at the images of Marysville and Kinglake, armageddon is about right.

I have been preoccupied by thoughts about the effect of these public disasters and my reaction to them. I've been working in the federal Parliament this week, and the sense of despair has been overwhelming as the sheer size of the destruction and the number of lives lost rolls out over the media across several days.

I'm not one to emote very much when the public join in with these festivals of mourning over some dead celebrity, or even when lives are lost in natural disasters. Mostly, I've thought my reaction was reasonable and civilised, as these events are part of a larger picture of birth and death, creation and destruction, and a long way from me. And it's true, they are, but sometimes I have cause to doubt the self-satisfied veneer of my response.

Yesterday, on the plane, I felt an uncontrollable welling in me, a heaviness in the heart that I had to struggle to control. On the video screen, a shot from a helicopter of a large area of burned out grassland, then following a car's tyre tracks clearly discernable against the black earth. Pulling out to a wider view, a white car, pathetically abandoned at the very edge of a large dam still full of water. It was not known, said the voiceover, whether the person in the car had survived.

The last few days have been spent with the constant din of the television and radio news, cycling and recycling the same stories and bits of information that really aren't information at all. It's hard not be cynical as the commercial stations mine this disaster like a seam of gold, as they interview anyone with a story to tell or just an anecdote that will become worn with age and repetition, an emblem of an experience.

I haven't read anything as thoughtful as David Tiley's contribution, so I will link to it here.

Barista: 'We lived again but life was different.'

The curious case of 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button'

2009-01-14T17:45:00.000+11:00

Photography, direction, art direction, special effects: 'crafted' to within an inch of its life. CGI will do a lot, but it is no replacement for creative makeup and a solid performance. Which is not to say that the makeup is not astonishing in places. The aged Cate Blanchett is completely convincing, but the attempt to make a forty year old actress appear twenty by Photoshopping out the wrinkles in real time makes her face look like a mask.

The film is deeply unsatisfying in the end. Every emotional point is flagged, so it doesn't give the audience's imagination anywhere else to go. And the character of Benjamin gets emptier and more irritating longer the film goes on, which is very long indeed. I knew the film was too long because errant thoughts kept popping into my head. Like, does anyone else notice how the old Benjamin looks exactly like an aged Robert Redford?

Brad Pitt, an actor I like, simply doesn't have enough to do. His requirements amount to standing around looking gormless. If someone had said "Life is like a box of chocolates", I wouldn't have been in the least surprised. I suppose it's no accident, as the film has the same scriptwriter as 'Forrest Gump'.

I'm most disappointed by the fact that a film which put all sorts of thoughts into my mind about mortality, death, time, memory, how much I miss friends who are gone, simply didn't deserve the emotional attention it wrought from me. I resented the film for that.

And now, predictably, there are Oscar nominations in the offing, including Best Picture. It just goes to show (switching to Grumpy Old Man mode) how low critics' expectations can be, and even more depressing, how apparently low is the standard of film culture at present.

W's tragic combination

2009-01-05T08:38:00.000+11:00

Luke Davies anticipates a new Oliver Stone film and in asking whether he would give us some insight into George W's character, manages to answer himself in a way I found strangely compelling:

"Would [Stone] give us some insight into a man known, in personality at least, only through his comportment at press conferences? I had always thought that anyone with a competently functioning human radar would spot in Bush, in any given press conference, that unmistakeable mixture of feckless arrogance and happy-go-lucky thickness that would be priceless, were it no so tragic."

From "Big Thoughts, Empire Burlesque: Luke Davies on Oliver Stone’s 'W'" in The Monthly, December 2008.

A modern tulip mania

2008-12-22T21:44:00.007+11:00

Like the tulip mania of the Seventeenth Century, the contemporary art market, as it has come to be in recent decades, has lost connection with whatever set of aesthetic or cultural values that might create a lasting sense of value.

Ben Lewis and Jonathan Ford writing in Prospect, think the end is near for another galloping, unregulated form of financial speculation that has jumped the fence and headed for the horizon. Put the nag down, is what I say.

"Over the winter of 1636, the tulip mania reached its peak. One kind of bulb sold for 900 guilders (three times the price of a small town house), up from 95 a year before. The peak prices of Dutch tulips were achieved when the bulbs were snug in the ground, and were based on futures contracts—a form of leverage that allowed investors to place an enormous price on a bulb without actually laying down the cash. On 3rd February 1637, the tulip market crashed. There was no particular reason for the panic—except that spring was nearing and, on its arrival, the bulbs would be dug up, cash settlement sought for futures and the game would be up.

"We have surely reached the same point in the world of contemporary art. One of the emotions that has driven its boom is the narcissistic belief of the rich in the greatness of the age in which they are living. They thought they were buying masterpieces. But like the Dutch merchants and their tulips, the obsession of the new rich with contemporary art is likely to be remembered as the epitome of the vanity and folly of the age. The bulbs are still in the ground but the spades are poised."

Never take a bad picture again!

2008-11-24T08:26:00.001+11:00

Something about the more things change? George Eastman pitched the first small portable camera to the world in 1888 with the slogan "you press the button, we do the rest". It was given the onomatopoeic name 'Kodak'.

Samsung are trying the same message, taken to the most extreme, unbelievable lengths with their latest lines of digital cameras. We are informed that the NV100HD contains a feature called 'Beauty Shot':

Make every photo perfect. Improve the way you look - without surgery. The quick and easy way for a better-looking you. The Beauty Shot feature is like having your own make-up artist-right in your camera. It automatically identifies imperfections such as blemishes and dark spots on the face, and retouches them so that faces appear brighter and smooth. And with different level settings, you can control the amount of retouching that takes place - it's that simple!

History according to Life

2008-11-20T08:55:00.001+11:00

"Soldier holding tattered flag of the Eighth PA Infantry, during Civil War, 1864."

An enormous archive of Life magazine photographs has gone online at a certain famous search engine. They are available to view by decade, but I couldn't go past the 1860s; surely the most remarkable decade in the history of the United States.

We are told that the collection contains images dating back to the 1750s. I suppose they would be drawings and etchings, since the invention of photography was only announced to the world in 1839.

Errol Morris for Obama

2008-10-29T08:44:00.000+11:00

This is a very recent ad by the film maker Errol Morris for Barack Obama. You might know Morris as the genius behind films like 'Vernon, Florida', 'The Thin Blue Line', 'The Fog of War', 'Standard Operating Procedure' and so many others.

This ad again uses Morris' unique method of shooting through plate glass, which in concert with a large mirror, allows his subjects to be looking directly at him, while also looking directly at the camera.

Economic irrationalism at Radio National

2008-10-16T17:44:00.000+11:00

Nine’s ‘Sunday’ program axed, Fairfax cutting staff, one university after another announcing staff cuts and cuts of subjects, the latest: La Trobe University.

It reminds me of the counterintuitive line pedalled by several of the major banks years ago when they started cutting suburban branch numbers, informing us that it was to “improve customer service.”

I am further depressed by the news that the same dead hand is hovering over important programs on Radio National, including the Media Report. Without doubt, the best current affairs commentary to be found in this country is on Radio National’s World Today, AM and particularly, PM programs.

As Andrew Dodd, the Media Report’s founding presenter, wrote in Crikey today:

The Media Report has popped up in Hansard, the indexes of books, the curricula of university courses and the ipods of listeners. It has kept on keeping on for fifteen years with informed intelligent debate about the state of the nation’s media.

Not bad for a half hour show that’s staffed by one and a half people and costs much less to produce over a year than just one episode of almost any TV program you’d care to mention.

He concludes:

We are looking for media that starts where current affairs reporters finish and which challenges us with new ways of thinking about issues or which introduces us to ideas that we’d never thought to consider. These wonderful Radio National programs did this regularly and their loss is a huge blow to the diversity of our media.

It's rare that I agree with The Australian's editorial writer about anything, but I concur with every sentence of today's piece, except one:

The paradox of this media-abundant age is that the thirst for quality has never been greater, as the growing circulation of newspapers such as The Australian shows.

Yyyeeeeesssss.......

Head of skate

2008-10-16T17:22:00.000+11:00

Say it ain't so!

Cliche of the day

2008-10-13T17:34:00.001+11:00

A cliche that lives in our media at the moment, like an infestation of vermin, is "going forward" when the speaker simply means "in the future".

It nests in ordinary speech, especially when an otherwise sensible person has a microphone in the vicinity.

Signalman

2008-10-13T08:05:00.001+11:00

Driving back from Adelaide last week, we stopped to feed a hungry baby at the truck-stop town of Tailem Bend, on the Princes Highway. This is the first time I've ever been there when it wasn't 40 degrees*, which was nice.

Highlights of Tailem Bend include a magnificent bakery. I particularly enjoy eating whatever I've bought there while sitting in the park and admiring Tailem Bend railway station. This time it was open and I saw that it included a little 'museum', which was a room dedicated to a collection of objects straight out of the dowdy world, when railway stations were objects of civic pride. I can't begin to describe the architectural style of this building. It seems to occupy some Edwardian category all its own.

I tried to pick a favourite object, and my heart beat with desire when I clapped eyes on this lovely signalman's cap. Most of all I was touched by the beauty and pathos of its crest. I'm not sure what a signalman actually did. I suppose he was an important man, but this was a time when even council street sweepers wore crisp uniforms and peaked caps.

What a beautiful thing that crest is. What an object of enduring style. It signifies pride in one's job and position, no matter how lowly. It has the flourish of fine copperplate handwriting; official but not stuffy in the least. The opposite of stuffy, it's almost jaunty.

*For international readers, forty degrees is very hot.

Christopher Hitchins

2008-10-05T18:15:00.002+11:00

A question occurred to me in the middle of the night:

Would Christopher Hitchens have supported the US invasion of Iraq if, instead of a military dictatorship, Iraq had been a communist dictatorship?

Given his political and intellectual history, and his attitude to US anti-communist misadventures in the past, I think probably not.

Pete's arsenal

2008-08-20T17:04:00.005+10:00

Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam describing Pete Townshend's guitar playing:

He's got a lot of weapons in his arsenal. He can play beautifully, he can do finger-picking, he can slash and burn away... And then he can solo until this guitar - really, you just think the guitar wants to be rescued.

I spent a couple of evenings in intimate contact with 'Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who' on DVD, and it was very satisfying. I've had the riff from 'Won't Get Fooled Again' on continuous replay in my head ever since.

Certain quotes begged to written down. This is Pete trying to describe his early guitar playing, all adolescent gesture and fingers-down-the-blackboard feedback:

[My] electric style was this slabby machine gun style, kind of a post-war, macho, male, don't-interrupt-me kind of noise.

Which I think is as good a description of rock 'n' roll as I've ever heard.

Artists hand craft your face!

2008-08-10T20:28:00.000+10:00

I want one.

Bec spotted this in Mother and Baby magazine.

Narcissus in the bathroom

2008-08-06T16:49:00.003+10:00

You know when people look at pictures of themselves and say "that doesn't look like me"? Well...

In a report titled “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Enhancement in Self-Recognition,” which appears online in The Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Nicholas Epley and Erin Whitchurch described experiments in which people were asked to identify pictures of themselves amid a lineup of distracter faces. Participants identified their personal portraits significantly quicker when their faces were computer enhanced to be 20 percent more attractive. They were also likelier, when presented with images of themselves made prettier, homelier or left untouched, to call the enhanced image their genuine, unairbrushed face. Such internalized photoshoppery is not simply the result of an all-purpose preference for prettiness: when asked to identify images of strangers in subsequent rounds of testing, participants were best at spotting the unenhanced faces.

How can we be so self-delusional when the truth stares back at us? “Although we do indeed see ourselves in the mirror every day, we don’t look exactly the same every time,” explained Dr. Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. There is the scruffy-morning you, the assembled-for-work you, the dressed-for-an-elegant-dinner you. “Which image is you?” he said. “Our research shows that people, on average, resolve that ambiguity in their favor, forming a representation of their image that is more attractive than they actually are.”

So I'm even less good-looking than I think I am. Great. I hated mirrors already, I just never suspected that they were lying to me.

This is from an article by Natalie Angier in the New York Times.

Andrew Curtis, nocturnal emissions

2008-08-01T17:11:00.005+10:00

Andrew is best known for his figuratively and literally dark images of the industrial landscape and its antique vestiges. At first glance, his new show ‘Cell’ at Christine Abrahams Gallery is a departure, but despite appearances these new pictures are recognisably the products (emissions?) of the same hand.

They recall Andrew’s earliest works, of industrial hulks and ageing bits of machine effluvia shot at night with long exposures, caressed by a soft hand-held light source that gave many of them an unearthly glow, collapsing notions of scale or context in the process and energising them with life. These new pictures have that same sense of discreet action illuminated by pools of hot light, a palette of primary colour against blackness.

Young women out on the town, in their natural habitat, stare longingly into the screens of their little electronic avatars, while they are watched, apparently without unease but without the slightest sense of obligation, by us, the impotent observer.

‘Katie’ reminds me in a strange way of Toulouse-Lautrec’s ‘At The Moulin-Rouge’. They have a similar wide view of a nightclub scene and they evoke the same lonely disconnection that can come upon us in a crowded night club, a feeling of desolation, that I could only ever be a voyeur in such a space, a watcher and never a participant.

Andrew’s pictures capture that sense perfectly.

There is no mistaking these for the work of a woman, or not a heterosexual woman at any rate. These young women are palpably desired. There is no equivocating about the ‘male gaze’ here, they unapologetically embody it. But the smiles that play about these glossy mouths are not for the middle-aged bloke behind the camera, no matter how cool he might think himself to be (and Andrew is very cool). That boat has sailed, as it does for all of us, even if the most we ever did was gaze longingly from the pier. Desire, such as it might be, is for the love object on the other end of the text message, or for the device itself.

Greg Neville observed that the experience in the gallery was "like looking at tropical fish in an aquarium", a perfect analogy. It captures the exotic nature of its subjects to the observer, but more importantly the sense that we are somehow separated from the world we observe, like gapers on one side of a sheet of glass.

I have a feeling that the subtext of specifically masculine desire might be a problem for some; I have already heard some critical voices along these lines. However, the pictures themselves are more subtle than such dismissal often allows. Several of them hint that the relationship between observer and observed is more ambiguous than a casual glance might suggest. Sometimes the picture contains other silent watchers within the frame, a blurred hand of indeterminate gender holding a lit cigarette, a shadowy profile in the foreground, one photo taken from the car's passenger seat looking back at a woman in the back, implying the presence of at least three people. The expressions of the women themselves are ambivalent about the presence of an observer, and I suspect there are many potential readings of those expressions possible.

I love the ambiguity of the word ‘Cell’. It is most obviously the name for the object of desire itself, the cell-phone. But it is also a prison cell – of the single consciousness, at a remove from all that might be going on around it while that thin line is still connected.

A single frame of cinema film is also called a ‘cell’, and these images are certainly cinematic, in that they each have a highly constructed mise-en-scene complete with character actors and background extras. A single frame of cine-film is only a one-twenty fourth section of an unfolding event but these pictures are in another category. They are complete in their stillness, there is no sense that anything significant has proceeded either before or after the action.

My only criticism is that the presentation doesn’t really add anything that is not already there in the images on the gallery website. The hanging is a bit crowded and unnecessarily traditional with big prints under glass. Such furtive, nocturnal subject matter could have done with low lighting, on darkly painted walls.

Andrew’s elegant website contains the whole current series as well as examples of former works both commercial and otherwise

Fashion and the art of motorcycle maintenance

2008-07-18T17:01:00.000+10:00

I have never actually driven (as opposed to been driven on) a motorcycle. I imagine it's wonderful and exciting, but I'm frightened to death of... well, death. I like the idea of several inches of steel and glass around me as I hurtle down a highway at speeds likely to result in mutilation should I come suddenly into contact with a stationary object.

But this stuff is so damn sexy I would get on a cycle just to have an excuse to wear it.

An outfit from France called Les Ateliers Ruby make these vintage-style helmets that are things of beauty. Their website is also a thing of beauty.

Thinking that there couldn't possibly be a retailer in my country I was surprised to find that there is in fact a stockist in Sydney, Deus Ex Machina, who fill in the rest of the picture; the kinds of jackets, T-shirts and indeed motorcycles that provide an excuse to be seen in the street wearing a gorgeous helmut without frightening small children.

Great Ideas, great design

2008-07-15T14:53:00.011+10:00

I have mentioned Penguin's release of the Penguin 70s before. I had a vague feeling that they were connected with the very differently wonderful 'Great Ideas' series as part of some festival of republishing Penguin were indulging in.

The Penguin 70s were commissioned from many different designers, reflecting the eclectic nature of their unmatched back catalogue. While the Great Ideas are extremely diverse in style, I never knew the whole series originated with the same company, David Pearson Design.

Thanks to Daniel at Nevolution, I've been introduced to David Pearson's website which is itself a paragon of elegance, economy and simplicity, exactly the values the best Penguin book designs embody.

The first surprise for me was that there are two more 'Great Ideas' series (Blue and Green)...

...but there are also German-only editions with beautiful covers.

There is also a stunning series of 'Great Loves' editions, which are breathtaking. For an idea that could have been so corny, the result justifies the entire rerelease project. I want to see them and hold them in my hand, but most importantly, I want to read them.

I agree with Daniel, Tschichold and Lane would indeed be proud.

Court cites Lewis Carroll as precedent

2008-07-02T18:47:00.005+10:00

It's not often you hear Carroll's 'The Hunting of the Snark' quoted in open court, but it's a habit that should be encouraged.

An American federal appeals court found that accusations against a Guantanamo Bay detainee who had been held for more than six years were based on slim, unverifiable claims, the New York Times reports. A three-judge panel said the government was affectively contending that its accusations against the man should be accepted because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.

The court compared that to the declaration by the Bellman in Lewis Carroll's 'Snark': "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

The Justice Department declined to comment. It is known, however, what Lewis Carroll would have thought.

Maugham and literary ambition

2008-06-16T17:09:00.006+10:00

Lately I saw the film of W. Somerset Maugham's 'The Painted Veil'. Completely against my initial prejudice, I liked it very much and found that the landscape, the oppressive sense of heat and lack of air and its studied atmosphere hung with me for several days afterwards.

I especially liked the way its unpromising plot kept eliding my expectations and going places that were unlikely and surprising. I wondered about Somerset Maugham, who I've never read, and why no one seems to read him any more, when at one point in the Twentieth Century he was one of the staples of any enthusiastic reader.

I had his 'Cakes and Ale' on my shelf. I read it with relish and it is funny and dry and flattered me into thinking that I too would know a literary poseur when I saw one.

The narrator is an apparently successful author who is unexpectedly contacted by Alroy Kear, an old acquaintance and social climbing literary figure in London. He leaves us in no doubt about Kear's lack of talent:

"Though I have finished few of his novels, I have begun a good many, and to my mind his sincerity is stamped on every one of their multitudinous pages."

The urge to add italics to that withering second-last word is difficult to suppress.

Sincerity is of course a necessary precondition for the creation of kitsch. Lovely. A joy on every page.

Snobs and snobbism

2008-06-10T08:04:00.001+10:00

In an irritating article on Gore Vidal that I found on The Independent's website, I came across a word I couldn't forget:

"In his memoirs, rarely for a North American, it is sometimes possible to discern snobbery – or as Vidal prefers to say, 'snobbism' – of an almost English intensity."

Does this mean a person indulging in snobbery is a 'snobbist'?

Bill Henson: Let’s have ourselves a hangin’!

2008-06-02T17:24:00.005+10:00

"WHEN the forces of public order march into art galleries and walk off with exhibits deemed to be offensive, two things are certain: one, that images which the vast majority would never have seen or wanted to see will be made famous and will be looked up on the internet by slavering hordes, and, two, a great deal of nonsense will be talked by a great many people."

- Germaine Greer

My first reaction to the latest artistic moral panic was sadness and disappointment. Disappointment because the abduction of several Henson works by police was an extreme overreaction to a complaint, and sadness because I knew that when confronted all parties would scurry to occupy mutually hostile sides of the argument, neither side engaging with the valid arguments of the other. This has proved to be the case.

I have extremely mixed feelings about this latest episode in the intellectual life of the nation. Firstly because I dislike Bill Henson’s work. Unlike Sebastian Smee who published a defence in The Australian last week, I find it unconvincing, empty and pretentious, the very definition of mannerism.

I remember as a photography student reading a profile of Henson in a weekend magazine. This is probably unfair to him, but the thing that struck me the most at the time were the terms in which he chose to describe and discuss his work: parallels with classical music were evoked, with romantic poets of the past. I thought, oh dear…

This was an impression that only solidified with Henson’s career retrospective at the Victorian National Gallery I saw a few years ago. So much depended upon the massive scale, the all-enshrouding darkness of the photographs, with bits of pale flesh peeking out here and there from the gloom; large slabs of torn black photographic paper to no apparent purpose other than superficial visual effect, and most irritating of all, the generalised aura of sweaty ennui.

I came away with the feeling that what I had just seen was a contemporary equivalent of a Royal Academy exhibition of the 1880s; grand, very large, but equally cut-off from the currents of artistic history that really matter. We have seen this sort of thing before. Henson’s work echoes some of the most cloying and sentimental Victorian Academy painting, especially that which dealt with the ‘fallen woman’ and the sanctimonious claptrap of Victorian sexual hypocrisy.

Secondly I feel uneasy about this because I am a parent to a daughter and I find the assumptions his work appears to be based on extremely questionable. As images, they seem to me to belong to a rather unsavoury history of adult men musing at their leisure about the sexuality of adolescent or pre-adolescent children. At best, this mode of image-making is self-indulgent and at worst a kind of exploitation based on fantasy that at its extreme margins includes sexual assault.

That’s not to make the category mistake of saying that all art belonging to this history is itself a form of assault. It may be exploitative or it may not. Germaine Greer was admirably precise in unpacking the assumptions of gender and the (sometimes) unconscious habit of making allowances for no other reason than that something was painted and not photographed, coming with the patina of art-historical credibility, when its intention was sometimes literally pornographic.

In my opinion Henson’s work is not and could not be seriously confused for actual pornography. Not by either its dictionary definition or by the widest practical use of that word. To call it pornography is simply wrong in fact. However, it is, at least in my view, exploitative.

I have mixed feelings thirdly because I defend Henson’s right, and the right of artists generally, to explore difficult or contentious territory. In fact, I think artists have a moral responsibility to do so.

But since we’re talking about morality, I think artists have the same duty to operate morally in the world as everyone else does. That is, I do not think art occupies a special zone exempt from the moral precepts that bind the rest of society together.

This is an important point to make because many who dispute Henson’s right to operate in such an ethically complex territory (like, I suspect, the Prime Minister), apparently apply a burden of proof that doesn’t seem to apply to everyone. I mean that we accept different kinds of images in different contexts, without dispute. Society doesn’t seem to have a problem with sexually explicit imagery per se (we have censorship categories to deal especially with it) but we would not accept that imagery in all places at all times.

Henson’s work operates in special contexts. The first most important is that it is ‘art’. It is usually encountered in a gallery where people have to make a special effort to attend. It is a certain size, has certain characteristics, etc. That is, even though they are photographs and are reproducible, the artwork itself is the print, not the reproduction of the print. By endlessly reproducing the work or part of the work on websites, television screens and so on, the work is stripped of its qualifying contexts and presented as something else. This has important effects on what it is that we are arguing about. When the Prime Minister is presented on a morning TV interview where the discussion has strayed onto child pornography and the media’s creeping sexualisation of children, he responds that it is ‘disgusting’. It is entirely predictable that he would do so, no matter how much we might like him to be aware of its special contexts. The context has changed, and the man who is anxious to be seen to represent the population as a whole, reacts as the population as a whole reacts when such an image is seen in a new context. He might have responded very differently if he had been standing in a gallery before the work itself.

It is not pornography but unfortunately Henson’s work may still meet a legal definition of an offence at some point in the future. I have heard various legal authorities over the last few days make the point that he could be legally vulnerable if one of his models retrospectively decided to lodge a complaint. This seems to me to be credible and Henson is also morally vulnerable on this point. To what degree can a child give consent to participate in the making of an image that will have a life of its own forever afterwards? Henson’s work is freely reproduced without reference to anyone but him. This has been demonstrated to an almost ridiculous degree as the contentious images are endlessly reproduced on every newspaper website, the hypocrites claiming that the issue is one of ‘child welfare’.

It strikes me that there is an absence at the heart of artistic debate in this country, at least regarding the visual arts, and that is the artists themselves. I totally respect Henson’s decision to remain out of the controversy while he is burned in effigy by talk-back callers and tabloid TV (I think of what the 1943 Archibald Prize controversy did to the health and peace of mind of William Dobell). However, I can’t help but yearn for a visual artist at least as publicly articulate as so many of our writers. Celebrity is the language of the mass media, and while the subjects of the discussion remain absent, the wolves will go on playing with the corpse of their reputations. Artists don’t have to be celebrities to regard themselves as public intellectuals, just as writers so often do, with a role to play in informing and educating the public and fostering discussion. The result is that artists are regarded as little better than perverts and kiddie-fiddlers.

Believe me that I agree with John McDonald when he fumes that the Prime Minister should be aware of the name of one of his country’s premier visual artists. Where we diverge is that I think that visual artists are at least partly to blame. Visual artists (unless they are populists like a Ken Done or Pro Hart) will always be marginal with reference to the mainstream of popular culture, just as classical musicians are. The responsibility is not with the popular mainstream to understand how special we are and to respect our priorities; if we want acceptance, the responsibility is on us to explain, interpret and participate in cultural discourse in something other than a precious, resentful, condescending way.

Many of the defenders reveal their bad faith when, like John McDonald in the Sydney Morning Herald, they deny that ordinary people don’t have the right to an opinion at all. He said:

"It is no secret that rank populism is now a fact of life in Australian politics. But in an age when every message is refined and spin-doctored to avoid offending anyone's delicate sensibilities, it appears to be OK to pronounce judgments on unseen works of art in the name of public morality."

I can’t say whether he finds it worse that people can have an opinion about works of art in the name of public morality, or that they can have an opinion when the work is unseen. At any rate, the Prime Miniser was looking at an image when he gave an opinion (not, I add, the work but an image of the work), and he prefaced his remark with the words “I think…” My point is that he has every right to have an opinion, just as every talkback caller has the right to an opinion. They are not informed opinions, but then whose fault is that?

Most defensive discussion of the work has largely avoided facing the fact that while we so often denounce ‘corporate paedophilia’ and the creeping sexualisation of children in the media, the onus is on those who defend Bill Henson’s work to explain how or why it does not belong on this continuum.

A few things need stating, that despite the special art-context and all that that implies:

1. The images frequently depict children, and

2. The images are frequently sexualised.

These are almost statements of fact, rather than interpretation. The images are ‘about’ sexuality in a sense that includes adolescent sexuality. That is why they are so edgy. It is part of their power as images, it is also why so many find them disturbing, including some that were so disturbed they took their complaint to the police. For curators and the general art mafia is disallow this as part of the conversation is irresponsible and intellectually dishonest. This is why I find so much of the defence of the works unconvincing.

I find other artists and photographers don’t often have much to say about Henson’s work apart from noting his obvious technical mastery. Those that crow the loudest in his favour tend to be curators and the sort of people who get done for tax evasion. You would be mistaken if you thought that Bill gets down to the seedier parts of Darlinghurst to look for models, even though that’s just how he makes them up. Oh no. These are private school boys and girls, their parents the art equivalent of wealthy stage-mothers, lining up to pimp their kids for the social cache of being part of a ‘Bill Henson’. These parents have Henson’s work on their walls anyway – they can afford it. If you had any doubt, the Shadow Treasurer and wealthiest person in the federal Parliament Malcolm Turnbull had to ‘fess up the other day and admit that he quite liked Bill Henson’s work and in fact he had some on his walls at home. Was he hounded in the parliament as a pornographer? Of course not, he’s a Liberal and a toff and we expect that sort of thing from people like him, but woe betide any Labor politician who evinces any sympathy for the arts. Latte sippers! Elitists! Witness the abuse heaped on Kevin Rudd for the expressions of support directed his way by the ‘Creative Australia’ segment of the 2020 Summit.

I have heard talkback callers state simply that to photograph a child in any context without clothes is wrong. I can sympathise with those who hold this view without agreeing with it. This would include any image that is taken of an unclothed child for any reason whatsoever. It would also sexualise images that are in no way sexual, imposing such an interpretation on any image regardless of the context. We should avoid this extremism no matter how shrill public moralists like ‘Bravehearts’ may get.

To simply say that art can never intrude upon some aspect of life is a principle that we should never embrace. It is a statement like “No comedian should ever tell a joke about cancer, because cancer is never funny.” That statement is wrong not because cancer is funny, but because it remains to be seen whether a joke about cancer is funny. That is, we need to hear the joke first.

Similarly, art about adolescent sexuality may be smut or it may say something original, something affecting, something worth saying about that aspect of life. The point is, we need to see and judge the art first. Does Bill Henson’s art say something original about sexuality? In my opinion it doesn’t. This doesn’t preclude the possibility that it might say a few interesting things about adolescence, for example, and I have no doubt about Henson’s seriousness of purpose. Certainly he thinks it does and many people (Sebastian Smee, for one) believe he does. That should be enough for any community to tolerate its existence.

Henson’s work must also be seen in the context of his reputation, even though it doesn’t insulate him from criticism. He has represented his country at the Venice Biennale. His bibliography is several pages long and the list of institutions that own his work includes many of the premier art institutions in the world and in Australia. By anyone’s estimation, he is one of the nation’s most senior visual artists in any medium.

I have no doubt that the courts will find against the complaint. Henson’s work is plainly not ‘obscene’ in either the legal or the usual sense. More explicit images of adolescents can be seen on many newsstands and on television. This makes the whole affair potentially embarrassing for any politician or other public figure who may still have something even more inflammatory to say about the work, sensing that there is now a competition on about who can denounce pornography the loudest.

What we are left with is a sense of sadness that the climate of intellectual debate in this country is the loser. Bill Henson is a loser. Kevin Rudd is a loser. The only winners are those like commercial talkback radio, tabloid current affairs television, morals crusaders and media proprietors whose economic interests are served by a good old witch-burning.

Please, a real, 1940s, Cold War James Bond!

2008-05-13T17:04:00.000+10:00

The 28th of May is the centenary of Ian Fleming’s birth.

I read a few Bond books in my callow youth but I’ve never felt that they were as necessary a piece of pop-culture as, say, Raymond Chandler, whose books are a lot more fun.

The James Bond films on the other hand, are unavoidable. Even when they’re terrible, as they so often are, there is something effortlessly comfortable about the formula. I noticed this recently when local TV was running a season, and I watched most of them, but only up until the opening credits. As anyone familiar with the oeuvre would know, these are the bits containing a pointlessly thrilling action vignette which sometimes sets up the plot, and sometimes not.

By far the most pointless and irritating thing about Bond films is how they attempt to maintain the relevance of this sexist relic into the present day. To get a sense of what I mean, just try and imagine James Bond sitting in front of a PC trawling through hours of blog and Youtube posts for intelligence material, which is what most modern intelligence agencies spend a great deal of their time doing.

Watching one of the recent films (except Casino Royale, which is quite good), I often wish the ghost of Graham Chapman, in his Colonel’s uniform, would stride into shot waving his riding crop: “Stop it! Stop it! This is silly…”

Remember that Fleming's first Bond novel opened with the sentence: "The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning." If the producers had balls and really wanted to inject some life into the whole franchise, they would put James Bond back in the 1940s, where he belongs.

I want to see a real Cold War Bond, who fights shady Russian spies while Senator Joseph McCarthy rails on black-and-white television. A Bond who has a martini for breakfast, who is getting closer to the wrong side of forty. A slightly seedy Bond, who wakes up smelling bad, still in his crumpled tuxedo. A Bond who drops into MI6 headquarters for a briefing to find ageing military men lounging around on leather sofas in clouds of cigarette smoke and alluring secretaries behind big wooden desks with filing cabinets and pencil sharpeners. A Bond with a sense of cruelty around the eyes, capable of shooting a double agent without a hint of regret.

Think of the possibilities! We could still have the silly gadgets, but they would be elaborate mechanical listening devices that fit behind the face of a stylish vintage airman’s watch. Bring back the Walther PPK and code-breaking, shots of Stalin on the television, spies searching grimy hotel rooms for mechanical bugs, trading ration vouchers for information. James Bond in the dowdy world, when people still dressed for dinner. Bond in Graham Greene’s post-war Berlin, crossing over into the Russian zone like a character in The Third Man.

Someone, indeed, like this fellow:

Jason Isaacs, the perfect James Bond?

A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932

2008-04-28T08:17:00.001+10:00

I picked up the third volume in the multi-part series of Picasso biographies by John Richardson with much excitement. It is very heavy and very expensive, not usually qualities that I look for in a biography but the first two were landmarks that I often turn to.

Unfortunately, the series is starting to get a little cranky and opinionated and Richardson’s interpretations of the works themselves a bit redundant, his grasp of the theory obscure. He uncritically accepts, for example, the greatness of the relatively short-lived ‘neo-classical’ period, when I believe Picasso himself quickly came to regard them as a dead-end. Whenever I’ve come across them in travelling shows, they have always looked overblown and empty compared with what came before. They look like battery-recharging exercises to me. Richardson intimates that they might have been done to impress his new conservative and socially ambitious wife, which chimes with Picasso’s ingratiating behaviour at the time.

There are several annoyances. Jean Cocteau was a constant figure in Picasso’s circle, often to his irritation, especially during the 1920s and the long association with Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes. Yet Richardson never lets a mention of Cocteau’s name go by with attaching a derogatory adjective to it. Now, it is incontestable that Cocteau could be an annoying, craven, social climbing little greaser, who was constantly trying to ingratiate himself with any passing member of society with a healthy bank balance, a bit of talent or a good arse. But let’s not forget people, that we are also talking about the author of La Belle et la Bette and Blood of a Poet. I, the reader, am quite capable of coming to my own conclusions about Cocteau’s behaviour without the author’s constant editorialising.

And why the squeamishness when it comes to Olga’s illness? This is not an unimportant detail. Picasso’s apparent horror at her symptoms was exploited in the vast canon of works dealing explicitly with Olga throughout the 1920s and 30s, so I would say the question is a critical one. Several times, Richardson insinuates that it was a gynaecological condition that remained uncured or inaccurately diagnosed following Paulo’s birth. He suggests it was something (he won’t say what) that resulted in haemorrhages, hence the frequent depiction of Olga in the later works as a screaming harpy clothed in various permutations of blood red. Is it a fault of research? Or does it reflect Richardson’s own prejudices? The reluctance to ‘go there’ seems disappointingly sexist, if that’s what it is. By all accounts Olga was a difficult customer and probably a nightmare to be married to, whether one happened to be a self-obsessed macho like Picasso or not. She certainly seems to have been mentally fragile, but Richardson’s persistent habit of connecting this to her ‘woman’s problems’ seems to reveal an odd Victorian-era connection between the uterus and ‘hysteria’. Whatever, it is not good enough.

Still, Picasso is vividly present on the page. This volume covers his famous ‘sell-out’ period when he shunned his grubby bohemian friends and took up fine clothes, socialising on a big scale, grand villas both in the country and the city and a very big car for the sake of Olga and her social pretensions. Probably his social pretensions as well, as this wasn’t a brief moment in Picasso’s life, but a fertile couple of decades.

Olga Khoklova the former ballerina is the big hole in this volume. Her personality remains remote. We get very little sense of this strange woman’s qualities, the qualities that a man as complex as Picasso found so captivating. Richardson just seems to note Picasso’s friends’ dismissal of her as a blank without trying too hard to dispel the impression, which was surely wrong.

Picasso was a complete shit to the women in his life, but then that is hardly news. He did, however, have a few saving personal graces. I particularly liked Picasso’s habit of getting about in his enormous town car with its Erich Von Stroheim look-alike chauffeur while dressed in paint-spattered work clothes. As far as I can tell from the picture, we’re talking about exactly the kind of car Norma Desmond got around in in ‘Sunset Boulevard’. That’s class you can’t fake.

It’s interesting that we are talking about Picasso now at all. Certainly his life, his art and his career are absolutely at odds with our era’s preoccupation with the political consequences of identity. Interesting because one can’t separate Picasso’s identity from the art for long. To even begin discussing Picasso’s constantly anthropomorphic work of the late 1920s and early 30s is impossible without unpacking his idea of sex, which is deeply antifeminist. Reading the book, I kept imagining myself standing in front of a class of eighteen year-old shrinking violets saying things like “Notice the internal rhyme between the female figure’s mouth and her vagina”, and “See how the sleeping Marie-Therese’s profile becomes the artist’s penis”. I shudder to think of it.

Is it definitive? Certainly not. There is much to be thankful for, but still questions that remain unanswered.

Orange Crate Art

2008-04-24T16:17:00.005+10:00

In honour of Michael Leddy and his blog Orange Crate Art, here is a selection of real, honest-to-goodness orange crate art.

These are my favourites. Enjoy:

I found these at the amazing BoxOfApples.com.

The site contains this helpful description:

BoxOfApples.com is the online museum (and gift shop) of fruit crate labels from the early 1900s to 1950s. Back in the days of our grandparents and their parents, people did their produce-shopping at markets that were more like a farmer’s market than today’s grocery stores. The fruit and vegetables would be displayed in their shipping crates somewhere near the railroad tracks, probably under a big shed. Each crate would have a label (up to a foot square) showing the name of the packer, and a colorful design to differentiate the brand. Fruit crates disappeared with the advent of self-service supermarkets and cardboard boxes, but thousands of vintage labels have survived in mint condition, rescued from warehouses and print shops, mostly on the West Coast. Beautifully printed by stone lithography with eight- or twelve-color inks, they are now collectors' items with a big following on eBay. On this site you can see dozens of different designs, and buy large-format, high-quality reproductions for home or office.

It includes an article on the history of crate labels.

A different kind of election?

2008-04-23T17:31:00.002+10:00

Michael Leddy's comment to my previous post made me think that despite all the distance and the word-bites that constitute almost our entire picture of the American election, maybe it is possible to get the sense of it about right.

In what I have read and seen, I've been surprised and discomforted by the cynicism of the Clinton campaign, a kind of scorched earth policy that would bring the house down so no one else can live in it.

Yesterday, Guy Rundle was talking about the appearance of Hillary on Good Morning America, in which she apparently promised to "obliterate Iran". I'm surprised I missed it actually, as it's on at about 5.00am on our television and I'm usually up trying to get young Sweeney Payne, aged six weeks, back to sleep.

I can't imagine what she thought she was doing saying crap like that on morning television. I can only imagine the context, but it seems to me she often rushes to occupy the vacuum the failure of neo-conservatism has opened up, something Obama seems loath to do.

Hillary is angling to make Golda Meir look like a Geelong regional office special needs coordination program conflict resolution officer and part-time reiki masseuse, with an incredible ad which appears to suggest that Bin Laden started the War in the Pacific using Hurricane Katrina against Pearl Harbour, and the only person who can stop him/them/it is a pants-suited terminatrix from the future.

I was recently surprised to hear left-leaning friends of mine all enthusiastically endorsing Hillary, including Doug, whose passion for American politics and history should not be doubted. Even amongst informed people working in politics, the feeling seemed to be almost universal. I put it down to the powerful pull of the gender question. Does it look like a woman President is a more momentous leap into a progressive future than a black one? Given the economic and (there's no better word) moral state of America at present (I'm thinking of Iraq, Guantanamo, waterboarding etc, etc), it seems to me that Hillary the insider, behaving as she is, is not so much a step backwards but pretty much the status-quo, same-old same-old candidate.

In a comment, Michael says:

Here in the States (United, that is), the ABC moderators have been widely criticized for focusing the first half of the debate on distractions and nonsense — e.g., flag lapel pins. No one on the stage was wearing a flag lapel pin!

...And neither were most people watching the telecast! Surely that's the problem with the supercilious question: If a flag lapel pin denotes patriotism, and the lack of a pin suggests a lack of patriotism, then patriotism is in short supply on the streets of America given the woeful lack of flag lapel pins everywhere!

We could say a lot about the strange fetishization of the American flag in that country (without it, Jasper Johns didn't make any sense), except to note how very strange it looks to the rest of the world, if I can speak for the whole world for a moment. I'm trying to think of a flag that carries a comparable weight in the national consciousness - maybe the French? Certainly the tricolor is as symbolically loaded, but nowhere near as evident in their popular culture.

I say this as an inhabitant of a country whose flag is an image that is constantly under dispute. Statements of a Republican nature (yes we are still a nominal monarchy) always quickly lead to discussion of the flag. Personally I find the presence of the Union Jack on our flag bizarre. I'm always reminded of something my grandfather once said, that his Irish policeman father refused to acknowledge a flag that had the symbol of his enemy in the top corner.

There's no doubt that American political commentary goes some strange places. Yesterday 'The Australian' reprinted an op-ed piece of puffery by P. J. O'Rourke, who has at least the benefit of being funny, even if he often mistakes flippancy for wit.

Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honour, duty, valour, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilisation, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based.

If you got through the second sentence without feeling nauseous, you're better than I. It follows that if you're Liberal, you must be dishonorable, cowardly, unpatriotic, irresponsible, with no sense of duty and so on and so forth. This is civilization?

Debates of the living dead

2008-04-18T14:49:00.005+10:00

As usual, Guy Rundle's column in Crikey today made me laugh out loud. The zombie Barack and zombie Hillary as an old bickering couple, airing their ancient greviences in front of the guests. This is not a particularly original observation, but he sure knows how to spin it to comedic effect.

So was it really the last debate? Barack Obama seems to think so, saying in last night's Philadelphia slugfest that he could deliver Clinton's lines and "she, I'm sure, could deliver mine". That's sure what it felt like – the last arguments of a couple who are over, a couple whose dinner parties start tense and collapse into the recitation of ancient wrongs.

First time it happened, it was buttock-clenchingly embarrassing – boy these two either really really like angry makeup sex, or genuinely hate each other. You didn't know where to look, thought of setting fire to the tablecloth, made your excuses. But the years have gone on, and now it's got tired. You just wish they'd split up, or that one of them would clutch their chest and fall over.

'No Country For Old Men'

2008-03-04T17:40:00.000+11:00

It’s sometimes the way that a filmmaker's best or most characteristic work is overlooked by the Academy Awards, and everyone knows it. So when the same director comes up again with something a little weirder or less likely, the Academy gives them the gong out of sheer embarrassment. Something like this has happened to the Coen brothers’ ‘No Country For Old Men’.

It is an exceptional film, to be sure, but its qualities are a little more remote from easy apprehension than, say, Fargo’s were. It is the sort of film that needs to season in the memory before coming properly into focus. I suspect it has more to say on repeat viewings.

There are several memorable scenes that will be discussed on the way home by those who have seen the film, including the opportunity the existentialist murderer Anton Chigurh gives an uncomprehending gas-station owner to save his own life with a coin toss. One of the reasons it is terrifying is that this dim character barely registers what is actually going on. It’s enough that we the audience know. “Call it” says Chigurh. “I need to know what I stand to win”, says the gas-station owner. Chigurh replies, “Everything”.

But there are other less celebrated scenes that I’m sure will reward repeated and careful viewing. One of these for me is the confrontation between Chigurh and the bounty hunter (played by Woody Harrelson) stalking him. It takes place calmly, while sitting in a motel room, and the discussion remains civil even though these men have history and one of them is holding a large weapon at the others’ chest. Harrelson is extraordinary, his face a concerto of emotions as he visibly sweats over the inevitable outcome, while playing out the possible scenarios in his head of how this (how he) will end. We later learn that Harrelson, who we know is a Vietnam veteran, is actually a former Colonel. Suddenly the scene retrospectively seems charged with suggestive possibilities of how these men might have met before, under what circumstances. It is just one of the many moments that add up to a very rich experience in the cinema.

Several parallels with the Coen‘s earlier masterpiece ‘Fargo’ suggest themselves. For much of the film’s length, it looks like we are going to get a confrontation between Chigurh and the sadly bewildered good cop Tommy Lee Jones. This possibility almost, but does not, occur, in a particularly suggestive way. Chigurh is the latest in a long line of Coen characters who are utterly, almost transcendentally, evil. They seem to be mainlining some cosmic current of supernatural malice. Dialogue can even suggest such inspiration. At the conclusion of ‘Fargo’, when the pregnant policewoman faces down the hitman and he flees, it is like matter meeting anti-matter.

I suspect the Coen’s are aware of how outlandish Chigurh is, a kind of absurd, murderous clown, with his hairdo and his low sing-song voice. The risk was great that audiences would simply laugh at him, and they might have if not for the strange relentlessness Javier Bardem gives him. It helps that his motives are inscrutable. Just when we get used to his willingness to murder on a whim, he chooses not to act on the impulse and we are never sure exactly why. Several times he almost shrinks from those who resist him, as when he encounters a beehived receptionist at a trailer park who won’t co-operate and he withdraws without use of violence. I suspect there is a pattern with such behaviour, but it might take another viewing to crack it.

One of the things that every person I’ve spoken to mentions (and this is a movie that need to be talked about afterwards), is the strange, suggestive ending.

There are films that end prematurely out of an inability to resolve whatever issues the film itself raises in the lives of the characters. This isn’t one of those. It has a sudden, abrupt ending, incorporating a truly fearless plot ellipsis, which only seems appropriate after contemplation. It’s perfect in its own way, only seeming abrupt because we’ve been so thoroughly convinced of the independent existence of the characters over the last two hours, like they could go on living after the lights have gone out.

Poor Heath (Poor Gilliam...)

2008-01-24T08:36:00.000+11:00

Like everyone else, I was quite shocked at the news of the death of Heath Ledger yesterday. Looking over his filmography, I was surprised how few of his films I have actually seen, and yet, at least in recent years, the guy seemed to be everywhere.

He certainly had ‘star quality’, whatever that is, and a refreshing willingness to choose roles that continually pushed him, often to the edges of his range. I can’t believe it was easy for an up-and-comer with a lot to lose to select ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as a vehicle, considering the censoriousness that often accompanies the choice of gay roles in the American entertainment industry. Still, he did it and had the last laugh, because despite what seemed to me to be an excessively mannered performance, Ledger had no trouble conveying a vivid sense of the humanity of the man, allowing multiplex audiences everywhere to relate to a gay character. One, what’s more, who was actually depicted making love to another man. No wonder he was so apparently loved by the gay community. They recognised what a gift that film was in their quest for acceptance.

I first saw him in ‘Two Hands’, opposite veteran Brian Brown, and his performance had that wide-open, effortless quality that really gifted actors can convey. It would be interesting to contrast that film against the more mature actor in ‘Candy’, which had the same quality with more skill and ambition.

I almost shook my head in disbelief when I also heard that he had died while still shooting a film for Terry Gilliam. Is this man the most unlucky film maker in the world? I don’t know whether enough of the film had been shot for the project to be saveable, but I hope so.

A brief glance at his record is probably enough.

The studio producing ‘Brazil’ hated the ending and the convoluted story structure. They delayed releasing the film for a year, preferring a version with a happy ending. Gilliam won after waging a bloody media campaign, but the studio's cut was shown on TV.

‘The Adventures of Baron Munchausen’ was delayed by a budget blow-out and production problems. New management at Columbia Pictures decided it didn't like the film and it was given a very limited release, effectively sinking it.

‘The Brothers Grimm’ was made in a hostile environment after the Weinstein brothers imposed various compromises on the director, documented in the book ‘Dreams and Nightmares: Terry Gilliam, the Brothers Grimm, and Other Cautionary Tales of Hollywood.’

‘The Man Who Killed Don Quixote’ ground to halt after the aging star developed a back injury and could no longer ride a horse. Freak storms wiped out the production after only a few days of shooting with Johnny Depp. It was abandoned but a fascinating documentary called ‘Lost in La Mancha’ came out of the experience.

And now this. No word yet on what will happen to ‘The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus.’

I understand the movie was made with $30 million of independent financing based largely upon the strength and popularity of Heath Ledger. Those investors may still cut their losses and take their money back. Sad for all concerned.

A school for disenchantment

2008-01-11T17:30:00.000+11:00

Looking at Modernism: the Lure of Heresy from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond by Peter Gay, I came across this passage in a discussion of Proust and what Proust called "the intermittences of the heart":

The expression tersely epitomises one of Proust's most disheartening, and most irresistible, conclusions about the vicissitudes of existence: the human heart fails when its endurance and judgement are most needed. Life is many things, to be sure, but most conspicuously it adds up to a vast array of mistakes, of mismatches, of sentiments out of phase with realities, of experiences not reflected in feelings. We get experiences wrong; everyone gets experiences wrong... Life therefore, is a perpetual act of revising, of correcting, what we think we know; it is a school for disenchantment.

Somehow I think Michael Leddy might agree.

R. B. Kitaj 1935-2007

2007-12-18T08:42:00.001+11:00

Every so often one hears about the death of another of the 'great souls' as I like to think of them, and the day discolours a little, with an odd sense of generalised grief for someone you never met. I felt this strongly a couple of weeks ago when I heard of the death of Ronald Kitaj, surely one of the greatest artists of the late century, even if most have never heard of him.

Kitaj was a 'literary' artist, if I can use the term that his friend Francis Bacon regarded as the worst insult that could be hurled at a painter. Bacon meant that kind of art which was reducible to the written word, or which didn't aspire to anything beyond a description of itself. He put much self-consciously postmodern art in this category.

I use the word to mean that Kitaj's painting had a unusually intimate relationship with the written word, but also that it frequently aspired to intellectual significance in a kind of discursive continuum that might include written texts. He was a thinker, with the thinking frequently embodied as art. Examples might be the long series of works featuring the "cafeist" Joe Singer, a character Kitaj made up to embody the notion of the wandering Jew, after Auschwitz, a picture of anxiety.

This is the first of that series, 'The Jew, Etc.' (1976). Joe Singer is Kitaj's image of compromised survival. The Jew in a train compartment visualizes the physical and psychological restriction of the Diaspora. The cramped composition presses in on the man who also physically holds himself in. A hearing aid heightens the isolation. Being on the move, travelling on a train, is Kitaj's metaphor for the state of restlessness Jews are heirs to. The only safe place to escape is the world of thought.

This mirrors Kitaj's own situation, since he was American by birth and a wanderer in his youth (as he might have put it), serving as a merchant sailor and in the US Army before settling in England. Before his death, he returned to America. I think of him as a man in that tradition of displaced Americans, a man's man like Hemingway and a compulsive builder of structures like Eliot.

His extensive writing on the situation of the Jewish artist, not to mention the works themselves, are a self conscious attempt to engage with the tradition of Jewish thought and to take a place in it.

I've seen people wince at this title ['The Jew, Etc.']; sophisticated art people, who think it's better not to use the word Jew. Kafka, my greatest Jewish artist, never utters the word once in his work, so I thought I would. This name-sickness, which many Jews will recognize and understand in different ways, is so touching to me, that I've also given my Jew a secret name: Joe Singer. Now it's not secret anymore.

His writings were an increasingly important aid to this enterprise and they had a fascinating, often independent relationship to the paintings themselves. Sometimes, they amounted to a commentary on them, an exegesis of their themes, sometimes even a contradiction of them.

An example is a work called 'Two Brothers' (1987), that appeared accompanied by a text of subtle literary ambition.

Kitaj wrote a text to accompany the image. He begins with an epigraph from Camus:

The whole art of Kafka consists in forcing the reader to re-read. His endings, or his absence of endings, suggest explanations which, however, are not revealed in clear language but, before they seem justified, require that the story be re-read from another point of view. Sometimes there is a double possibility of interpretation, whence appears the necessity of two readings. This is what the author wanted.

I'm intrigued by the implicitly Talmudic nature of the request: Before you look at the painting, it implies, read the text. Before you read the text, read this bit of Camus. Before you get into this Camus, refer to Kafka. But before you come back to the text, you must re-read Kafka! The meaning, he warns us, is not revealed in "clear language" (like the language he is using), but must be read from other points of view - that is, from the stand point that what we are reading is never the final word: "there is a double possibility of interpretation". "This is what the author wanted", Camus (and Kitaj) tell us. We're entitled to ask: which author, since we're already in a room full of authors?

Got that? Right, on we go:

For many years, this painting was called ‘Bub and Sis’. It depicted a lesbian couple and was inspired by a picture story about Times Square, which I’ve kept from the old Life magazine. Then I painted it over in black.

The new picture is about two brothers I got to know almost 30 years ago. I was a student at the Royal College of Art and I used to lunch now and then at a cheap Polish restaurant at South Kensington called Dacquise. It’s still there and still cheap. One day I sketched two men at a nearby table speaking Polish to each other. They noticed me and after a while, as they were leaving, one of them came to my table and asked if I would show him my sketch, which I did. He said he loved art and gave me his card which said ‘Count Martinus a Grudna Grudzinski’ and under that: ‘Fine Art Consultant’. They were quite old brothers, remnants of Ander’s army, who lived (and died) a few doors from the restaurant. To make a long story short, the Count appeared at my degree show and bought a life drawing. I visited them irregularly in their large dark flat. The Count lovingly kept a picture collection including Sickert, Corinth, Menzel, Polish painters I didn’t know and and unknown artists like myself. His brother kept small birds - he is clutching one in my painting while the Count is looking at a Matisse-like Polish painting.

Without pausing, the author (whoever that might be), double takes and simply ploughs on:

For many years, this painting was called ‘Bub and Sis’. It depicted a lesbian couple and was inspired by a picture story about Times Square, which I’ve kept from the old Life magazine. Then I painted it over in black.

The new painting is about two old brothers I knew almost 40 years ago. They lived together in the sam rooming house, in the 18th district (Wahring) of Vienna, as I did when I was a 19-year old student at the Art Academy in the Schillerplatz. The fat one was a poor painter who had a Matisse-like style as you can see in my painting. He had been a student at my very school along with Schiele, whose work he hated. Somehow, through thick and thin, he had survived as a painter. They painted and lived and kept small birds in a single large room. My landlady told me they were Nazis. I didn’t tell them I was a Jew because my landlady, Frau Hedwig Bauer, was a dear old (Gentile) friend of my grandmother and I didn’t wish to cause her trouble so I ignored the two old men. I was courting a Christian girl and my life was overflowing. The awful thing was to have to share a bathtub with the bastards.

So here we have it, a demonstration of the double interpretation. Does it make any difference to the painting? Of course it does. The image itself is ambiguous. What is happening and who are these people? Context creates meaning. Meaning is never completely free of the artist's intention, but what was his intention? To make it quite clear we are in a hall of semiotic mirrors, he tells us this painting has another painting underneath it. He doesn't tell us why he "painted it black", obliterating it - a telling phrase. We can't know if that's true, but how closely does this image parallel the one under it? Closely, it's implied, since it wasn't just any picture but a picture of two women, two figures, just like we see here. It suggests that meaning in art is malleable and contingent while the artist still works on the painting, since figures can be men, women, or whatever the artist wants to suggest.

But, but... After all that, Kitaj was a visual artist of power and daring, a magnificent draughtsman and a bold colourist of great ambition. Have a look at 'The Oak Tree' (1991). A drawing-in-paint I want to call 'supple', but also a work of surpassing strangeness. I don't know where that colour comes from, but what a powerful, memorable image.

UCLA's Centre for Jewish Studies is about to open an exhibition from 8 January: "Portrait of a Jewish Artist: R. B. Kitaj in Word and Image". This will be held in conjunction with the Skirball Cultural Centre exhibition: "R. B. Kitaj: Passion and Memory, Jewish Works from His Personal Collection".

Terrorism Claus?

2007-12-17T12:33:00.000+11:00

Buying a car insurance policy on Friday, I had one of those zeitgeist moments. You know the sort of thing. You're trying to open a website for your eight year old son to play games online, you can't work it out, minutes go by, and then he calmly hits the return key. Presto! You feel the tide of history has suddenly risen up around your nostrils...

Anyway, I'm reading through the fine print and come to this:

TERRORISM EXCLUSION

This policy does not cover loss, damage, liability, injury, illness, death, cost or expense arising directly or indirectly out of or in any way connected with:
a. any act of terrorism arising directly or indirectly out of or in any way connected with biological, chemical, radioactive, or nuclear pollution or contamination or explosion; or
b. any act of controlling, preventing, suppressing, retaliating against, or responding to any act referred to in (a) above.

An act of terrorism includes, but is not limited to, any act, preparation in respect of action or threat of action, designed to:
a. influence a government or any political division within it for any purpose, and/or
b. influence or intimidate the public or any section of the public with the intention of advancing a political, religious, ideological or similar purpose.

I note that under the second section, clause b, I would have been guilty of an act of terrorism by handing out How To Vote cards on the 24th of November.

I find this difficult to respond to without simply shaking my head in disbelief. If ever a claim was made on these therms, I can just imagine the fun to be had in the courts over the definition of "terrorism."

Please forgive me, I've been away...

2007-12-05T01:06:00.000+11:00

Please accept my apologies for neglecting you, most grievously. Let's just say that my professional obligations rolled over the top of every other aspect of life (almost), but I'm happy to say that the outcome was rather positive. Like, pinch me in case I'm dreaming positive.

Anyway, that's all outside the mission of this blog, and cultural life does not grind to a halt just because of a measly election. "On", as Beckett might succinctly put it.

For no reason other than that I like it and I want to see it on this page, here is a stunning caricature that appeared in The Australian's Literary Review this morning. It is of course V S Naipaul, who is called "a prig, a prick and a pig" by Peter Craven, a man not generally given to beating about the bush, as you might tell from the headline.

Anyway, it's by Eric Lobbecke, and it is a stunningly dynamic drawing, especially the hair and the confluence of features around those doleful eyes.

Big Heads 2

2007-10-18T15:04:00.000+10:00

Here is the next in a series of large scale drawings I've been a-workin' on for some time. Last time I posted a drawing as a progressive sequence, but here is the finished article.

It started life as the top half of a toy my son likes to play with. Actually, he appears to enjoy playing with the top half more than he ever played with the complete toy.

An extraordinary thing. It's a crude transformer-type toy which begins as a black rhino. By moving the hinged pieces about, it transforms into an extremely angry muscle-bound man with a very suggestive yellow horn on his head. I was hit between the eyes with the metaphorical significance of this bizarre thing. The man's rage seemingly provokes his literal metamorphosis into a rhino. A depiction of raw Id if I've ever seen one.

The other odd thing is that he seems to have already possessed animal attributes before the transformation had begun, with this bizarre phallic horn on his bullet head, as if the first stage was taking place when this first impression was made.

Pan’s Labyrinth (El Laberinto del fauno)

2007-10-10T12:07:00.000+10:00

This film is highly original, a very Grimm fairy tale. I’m not sure this is a legitimate literary parallel, but it was very much in the Magic Realist style of latin novelists like Marquez.

It presents reality very much as the child Ofelia sees it, while still allowing us to see outside and beyond her view to include events as they might be objectively. The lovely thing is that it is not ever apparent whose eyes we are seeing with: Ofelia’s, whose world is filled with mythical creatures or the adults’ that act around her, whose reality is fascist Spain, 1944.

I loved the design of the film, especially the faun itself and particularly of the Pale Man, who places eyeballs in the stigmata in his hands. We are very much in the territory of surrealists like Jan Svankmajer or the Brothers Quay.

Nevertheless, for me the experience was marred by its luxurious (and eventually deadening) brutality. It bothered me very much that a film that is so solidly for the importance of the imagination, and places such a high value in the purity and innocence of the child Ofelia can be so frank about its very impure lust for violence. I’m not talking here about the characters’ lust for violence, but the film’s itself.

It is important, for example, that we register what a sadistic monster the step father is by hitting us between the eyes with the kind of violence he’s prepared to dish out to partisans or even just those suspected of sheltering them when the children are out of view. Did we need to see him smash in the face of a suspected partisan with the end of a wine bottle in a long take? Possibly not, but at least a point was being made.

I thought this apparent strategy was clever. Shock the audience early and every suspenseful situation thereafter is filled with dread. We’ve seen what he is capable of and so we fear the same end for characters we have grown to care about.

But shortly after, writer/director Guillermo Del Toro seems to dispense with such bourgeois restraint and gives it to us in bucketloads. By the time I got to Capitan Vidal stitching up his own razored face in the mirror, I started to feel like I was watching a movie directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis. This was clearly a moment intended to create pandemonium amongst the teenagers in the back row, and it worked in my loungroom, let me assure you.

It’s not violence per se I object to, but the bad faith. I am very much in the minority here, since the film has received almost universal praise, but by the end of the film I felt like he was having a lend of me and I intensely disliked the sensation.

Banksy's easel

2007-10-04T10:18:00.001+10:00

Trying to encapsulate why I think Banksy is important, I couldn't do better than this little contribution. Hilarious and - I hesitate to say it but it's true - profound. It is called 'Blue Period'.

Whenever I come across another article in my local media calling for hanging to be reintroduced to deal with 'vandals', I understand the underlying concern with property damage, illegality and so on, but I think "And yet, and yet...".

This is nothing less than a redefinition of the concept of public art. Illegal most of it may be, but it is public art nevertheless. The best of it, at least. Is it right to condemn a medium because of its worst manifestations rather than its best?

More of his work can be found at Wooster Collective.

Big Heads

2007-09-12T17:04:00.000+10:00

Making good on a threat I issued some time ago, here are some more of my drawings.

This is the first of an ongoing series I'm doing in collaboration with Greg Neville, which we are tentatively calling 'Big Heads'.

A bit different from my usual subject matter, the intention here is satirical (not exactly ripped from my very soul, if you know what I mean). It consists of a series of very large drawings in charcoal and mixed media of disposable plastic toys intended for children, some of them originally no larger than a couple of centimetres tall.

The drawings are massively expanded in scale, like the muscle-toned body of male aspiration, yet their sources are often quite tiny figures from throw away bits of consumer ware. These plastic mass-produced objects both embody and grotequely distort the classical ideal and the ideology of the Olympic stadium, which was itself a mortal echo and a tribute to the acts of the gods themselves.

The figures themselves depict rippling hyper-masculine supermen with expressions of extreme aggression and strain, in a display of extraordinary excess.

I hope the drawings will have a commanding physical presence as objects, drawn in vertiginous perspective, with an ironic nod to the tradition of classical statuary. The disposability of the objects both embodies and mocks the long tradition of Western figuration that informs them.

I thought it would be interesting to record the evolution of the drawing, so here are progressive shots of the first one under way. This is quite big, about a metre and a half high. Others I am working on will be even larger whole figures, but I thought I would start with details, see how it went, and work my way up.

The last shot is the finished article. The original for this one is a small plastic candy-dispenser, with a ring at the top. It has a hinge at the back and you flip it open to get the little candies. It would be about six or seven centimetres high.

Observations on ‘The Jammed’

2007-09-05T17:07:00.000+10:00

No thanks to myopic film distributors in this country, I saw ‘The Jammed’ recently at the Nova.

This very strong Australian film was comprehensively ignored by distributors and rejected by the Melbourne International Film Festival, despite being Melbourne born and bred. I hope the film’s obvious success causes the festival directors to take, as we say, “a good hard look at themselves.”

While it starts out as a social-realist style expose of an illegal trade in human beings, it edges closer to the thriller form towards its conclusion. The overlay is quite subtle, but when it locks into that set of genre conventions, it gives the story a definite shape and propels the characters towards a satisfying conclusion. It works because the marriage is so apparently natural. By the time we notice, we’re already hooked.

The performances are authentic without being showy. Emma Lung and Saskia Burmeister are especially good, showing what actors can do when they’re given material like this to work with. Veronica Sywak won’t get the same attention, but she is equally fine.

I first heard some buzz about this film when my friend Jill Johanson told me a little about it. I might be biased, but I thought Jill's costume design underlined character perfectly without calling attention to itself. A good deal is wordlessly said about the humanity of the characters when we see them sleeping in a locked room wearing Cottontails and tank top, while during working hours they get about in ridiculous leopard-print knickers and high heels.

An observation the film makes which I especially appreciated is that the brutal Dyce, the brothel owner who first makes it clear to Crystal what she is in for, is at the same time in fear of the brutality that will be meted out to him in turn if he fails. This elicits - not sympathy exactly - but understanding, which is quite an achievement.

My only quibble with the picture is that the writer hasn’t quite owned up to the story’s true nature as a thriller and allowed that to guide her to the degree that it would be helpful. I notice Writer-Director Dee MacLachlan has complained that editing sucks the life out of her scripts, and that here she shot “essentially the story I wrote. It’s almost unchanged from the first draft.” If this is a first draft, then it’s better than many other peoples’ finished scripts, but it still seemed there were many unresolved issues that sensitive editing might have ironed out despite that.

In the third act of a good thriller, the pieces of an apparently disorderly set of circumstances come together, revealing themselves to be part of an exhilarating whole. Hopefully we leave the cinema gratified that we have been fooled so thoroughly. This is the compact between audience and film-maker. If there are loose ends or if characters behave against their natural motivation for the sake of a neat story, if the pieces don’t fit together in a believable whole, we feel cheated.

In the last minutes of this film, bits of plot fall start falling off. The assertive Russian prostitute Vanya crashes a swanky exhibition opening of the woman she knows owns the illegal brothel in which she has been imprisoned. She confronts her pimp, the gallery owner’s husband, in front of the crowd, who don’t know where to look. She smashes a glass, makes a scene, begins to take her clothes off, demands her passport back. Why?

I know why the screenwriters need it – they need to show the tightening circle connecting the brothel keeper with his society wife. It’s a good and necessary idea to show how close these things are, in the movie as they are in life. But why does Vanya go there? It is simply unbelievable that she would believe her pimp has the passport on him when she couldn’t find it in his office, as indeed he doesn’t. So when he confirms this and the two women leave the gallery, we the audience are left in the dark as what purpose the previous few minutes really served.

An even more serious issue is why it is such an incipient threat to the women that they will be deported. This is mentioned repeatedly as a potential fate, and we are led to think that the characters fear it. This is perfectly understandable under the circumstances, but what I don’t understand is why the reality conforms so completely with the girls’ fears.

They have come to the country on what turned out to be false pretences, leaving their families, friends, language and culture behind. Why would they want to stay in Australia after what they’ve been through? What sort of life do they think they can lead in this country without passports or visas, hiding their identities, taking unskilled cash work? It is likely that at least some of them would end up in exploitative jobs, maybe even sex work again.

The women’s captors make it clear that if they try to escape, they will be caught by Immigration and end up in detention. I understand why and how this would be used as a threat, but what I don’t understand why the reality, once it happens to Crystal, is presented as a dark, squalid prison, just as the pimp said it would be. Unless this was meant to be a moment of pure subjectivity, but I saw no evidence that that was intended.

Certainly immigration detention is horrible. Our fearless government makes it horrible as a matter of policy, but surely it is a clean, antiseptic horror of unrelieved boredom, depression, helplessness, overcrowding and bright fluorescent lights that never turn off, not something out of Solzhenitsyn.

Having said that, when Crystal is held down and forcibly sedated at Immigration, given all that has preceded this event, the needle in the arm feels like a violation, like a rape. The moment is a suitably brutal bookend with the earlier actual rape which introduced Crystal to the world she was about to inhabit.

I don’t mean to be petty. My criticisms are not meant to outweigh the film’s obvious strengths. It is well-made, timely, and it should be seen.

Billy Wilder: "A little bit less"

2007-08-27T13:15:00.000+10:00

I’m having a ball reading Cameron Crowe’s book of interviews with the great Billy Wilder. The book is a fount of hilarious stories and sharp observations from one of the funniest and sharpest men who ever worked in Hollywood.

This from a man who was then past ninety years old. He sounded like he still had a few films in him even then.

He is talking about Jack Lemmon, who was one of the great comic actors but whose broad, busy style is out of fashion now. Young Jack is working on his first movie with old pro George Cukor, and he’s trying a bit too hard.

His first day on a sound stage, with George Cukor directing, he’s all revved up. He rattles down half a page of dialogue – and then there’s “Cut!” and he looks at Cukor. Cukor comes up to him and says, “It was just wonderful, you’re going to be a big, big star. However… when it comes to that big speech, please, please, a little less, a little bit less. You know, in the theatre, we’re back in a long shot and you have to pour it on. But in film, you cut to close up and you cannot be that strong.”

So he does it again, less. And again Cukor says, “Wonderful! Absolutely marvellous. Now let’s do it again, a little bit less.” Now after ten or eleven times, Mr Cukor admonishing him “a little less,” Mr Lemmon says, “Mr Cukor, for God’s sake, you know pretty soon I won’t be acting at all.”

Cukor says, “Now you’re getting the idea.”

Ana Pollak wins the Dobell

2007-08-24T17:56:00.000+10:00

Ana Pollack has won the Art Gallery of New South Wales' Dobell Prize for Drawing. It is difficult to find a decent photo of the winning drawing, but there is a beautiful gallery of images from the same series at her gallery, Sara Roney.

I've not encountered her work before, but the drawing has a large scale, whole-body sweep to it. It enfolds the viewer's field of vision like a distant daughter of Monet's late waterlillies, with a stripped-back, stark quality. The marks are free, spontaneous but concentrated; the result of real looking at a certain place in all its particularity.

Close up, the architecture of the work across the picture plane might not be immediately obvious, but it is there nonetheless. Her strategy becomes more obvious looking at a whole gallery of pictures of the same motif, the variety of different approaches: in one, perspective shifts across a clear receding horizontal; in another, she simply varies the size of the oyster poles jutting out of the surface of the shiny late afternoon water, anchoring the whole thing around a central, dark vertical in the foreground.

In a similar way Jackson Pollock anchored his own kind of chaos those many years ago.

Head of Ivan Pochitonov?

2007-08-21T12:19:00.000+10:00

A fascinating suggestion in yesterday’s gossip column in The Age. Daniel Ziffer has reported the remarkable resemblance between the NGV’s ‘Head of a Man’, formerly attributed to Van Gogh, and ‘Portrait of Ivan Pochitonov’ by Nikolai Dmitrievich Kuznetsov (1882). I have mentioned the recent controversy about its attribution before.

Apparently someone called Bill Rawlinson tried to alert the NGV to his long-held concerns about the image on the front cover of the Wordsworth Classics edition of Dostoevsky's ‘The Idiot’. The painting is in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow.

The gallery's Sue Coffey said curators commented that it was an "interesting comparison" but the two works had distinctly different noses and coloured eyes.

Nevertheless, the resemblance could be a solid lead in what should be the most pressing question before the curators of the NGV, namely, who painted ‘Head of a Man’, in what circumstances, and why does a painting apparently done in 1885 without reference to the contemporary Van Gogh so resemble his style?

Vandalism

2007-08-20T08:56:00.000+10:00

Who said graffiti artists have no sense of irony?

This is by Eine, in London.

Via the excellent Wooster Collective.

Happy Birthday Philip

2007-08-10T15:11:00.001+10:00

Happy Birthday to Philip Larkin. No doubt he would have hated birthdays, miserable bugger that he was.

The great poems like ‘The Whitsun Weddings’ and ‘Aubade’ no doubt recommend themselves without any mention from me, but here is one of my favourites, a poem not often mentioned but great in its own exquisite way.

First Sight

Lambs that learn to walk in snow
When their bleating clouds the air
Meet a vast unwelcome, know
Nothing but a sunless glare.
Newly stumbling to and fro
All they find, outside the fold,
Is a wretched width of cold.

As they wait beside the ewe,
Her fleeces wetly caked, there lies
Hidden round them, waiting too,
Earth's immeasureable surprise.
They could not grasp it if they knew,
What so soon will wake and grow
Utterly unlike the snow.

A more interesting question

2007-08-08T17:02:00.000+10:00

I find the ill-informed commentary about the NGV’s Van Gogh revelation extremely irritating. Crikey have kept it up by taking the tabloids’ lead and referring to the painting as a ‘fake.’ This is nonsense. The painting has been found to be mis-attributed. It is not fake. There is a difference.

The piece by Geoff Maslen is called ‘Melbourne's other big fake wasn't a Rembrandt’ and he tells us the actually very interesting story of how the NGV handled its last attribution crisis. He is quite right to point out that Patrick McCaughey and now Gerard Vaughan chose to spin the story differently.

In his characteristically flamboyant style, in 1984 Patrick McCaughey was showing newspaper and television reporters around a newly refurbished section of the gallery when he stopped before the gallery’s only self-portrait by Rembrandt and admitted it was not actually by Rembrandt and was probably done by someone else.

McCaughey assured everyone that the NGV still had two genuine Rembrandts: "Two indispensable masterpieces. The real things."

Yet he made the self-portrait still seem like a significant gallery asset, which it was.

Roughly a year ago, the NGV was in the headlines again over claims in the London Sunday Times that the gallery's only painting by Vincent van Gogh, then on loan to an Edinburgh exhibition, was not by him.

Last Friday, current director Dr Gerard Vaughan called the media in and announced that extensive testing by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam had proved ‘Head of a Man’ to have been painted by someone else. It had been in the NGV collection since 1940 and labled as a Van Gogh since then.

There is no evidence that anyone ever attempted to pass it off as a work by van Gogh, except perhaps those who sold it. As he pointed out, Van Gogh had been largely ignored in his lifetime and only became famous long after his suicide. Although it might not be a forgery, Vaughan admitted the news made the picture almost worthless in money terms.

Maslen says:

“It is uncertain whether another crowd of sticky-beaks will turn up to marvel at it and ponder how simply changing the artist's name could drive its value down from $20 million to a few dollars.”

This is the almost dumbest thing he could have said. Imagine this: I hand you a pistol and say this is an old target pistol my grandfather gave me. What are your feelings after you learn this information? Imagine how different they would be if I handed you the same pistol and said this is the gun that John Wilkes Booth used to kill Abraham Lincoln. What are your feelings now? Are they changed? Of course they are. The context has changed and context alters meaning.

This also ignores one of the central reasons why the picture was so valuable as a Van Gogh. As a Van Gogh, it was unique (and now we know why). There simply wasn’t anything else around like it.

The horizontal format was not found elsewhere in his portraits, and various people speculated that it might have been cut down from a larger work. The colours were more in the earlier, earthy social-realist style he favoured, but the brush strokes are broader, the impression more like the later work. It is rare three-quarter profile and so on and so on.

We now know the decision on the attribution: these qualities were so rare (or unique) in Van Gogh, that it has come down on the other side of the ledger.

But where I think Vaughan slipped up, is in the obvious question to asked now. If Vincent didn’t paint it, then who did? When was it painted, if the previous date is not accurate? Is it indeed a ‘fake’, or is there some other fascinating reason why someone was making pictures like this in 1885?

Checkmate Bergman

2007-07-31T09:43:00.000+10:00

Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest of all film artists, is dead.

I remember when I was a teenager hearing about Bergman from my elders, and I was intrigued by the almost hushed tones they used when speaking his name, as if coming into contact with one of his films was some kind of rite of passage.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached my first Bergman film - 'Wild Strawberries' I think it was. I had seen a few minutes of 'Persona' on television and what I saw perplexed and frightened me. It seemed deeply mysterious and even dreadful. So I was expecting something like a dose of medicine when I encountered 'Wild Strawberries', something that I might find painful but which was good for me, like swallowing cod liver oil.

But I was astonished by what I saw; by its warmth, its gravity, and its deep deep sense of humanity. How wrong I was. These are sensations I've associated with Bergman ever since, and I'm always deeply disappointed when stupid people use his name like a punchline for a kind of cinema they imagine to be pretentious and bloodless.

His seriousness and intellectual ambition is unfashionable now, which is a pity and a loss for the cinema. With any luck, now after he has gone, his name might be on people's lips again and it will be an excuse to get out the prints and show them to audiences and others might come away from the cinema feeling like their emotional range has somehow deepened just by seeing it, just as I did.

Now he has met Death, I can't help but wonder if He treated the director to a game of chess, for old time's sake.

Food of the Gods?

2007-06-19T14:09:00.001+10:00

My son Tom, who is eight, has an unusual way of looking at things. Listening to him is always amusing and occasionally I learn something.

He is very fond of the computer game ‘Age of Mythology’. I loathe computer games on the whole, but this one has led to intense discussions among the two kids about obscure details of Greek and Roman mythology, which I encourage. Occasionally it gets a bit surreal.

Tom and our friend Anna were discussing the attributes of various gods: Poseidon, Thor, Neptune, Zeus.

Anna: And do you know what the gods eat, Tom? What's the food of the gods?

Tom: I dunno… Olives?

'Stranger Than Fiction'

2007-06-15T17:08:00.000+10:00

Spending some time getting to know my couch over the long weekend, I had the opportunity to see a few good films that had otherwise escaped my notice.

The best was probably ‘Stranger Than Fiction’.

“Everybody knows that your life is a story. But what if a story was your life? Harold Crick is your average IRS agent: monotonous, boring, and repetitive. But one day this all changes when Harold begins to hear an author inside his head narrating his life. The narrator it is extraordinarily accurate, and Harold recognizes the voice as an esteemed author he saw on TV. But when the narration reveals that he is going to die, Harold must find the author of the story, and ultimately his life, to convince her to change the ending of the story before it is too late.”

This is a film that reminded me of a story by Borges – not any particular story, I should say, but a kind of narrative about narrative, disguised as something else entirely.

It has predictably been called ‘Charlie Kaufman lite’. This is both a slight on Charlie Kaufman and on the film’s scriptwriter, Zach Helm. This is his first feature, and on this evidence I look forward to his next which he also directed. The script’s refreshing sense of freedom with space and time is reminiscent of Kaufman, but it doesn’t have his caustic quality; it goes for sentiment more often than not. This is not a criticism, as sentiment has a place in every story; what’s happily lacking here is mawkishness.

It occurs to me that it is the second film which owes its genesis to Robert McKee’s book “Story”, being in many clever and interesting ways, essentially about the hold that stories have over us. The other one is Charlie Kaufman’s ‘Adaptation’, where the book almost becomes a character all on its own (as does Robert McKee himself).

I should say though, that this is an example of a writer and a director at variance with each other about what the film should be, and probably what it means.

Director Marc Forster has gone for a slightly slick visual stylization, which often dilutes the film’s emotional strengths, leaving it ungrounded, not located in the real world of partitioned offices and coffee breaks. It threatens to become the film that Jim Carey (in comedy mode) never made, which is a mistake.

The visual style often threatens to overwhelm the content, especially early on when borderline obsessive-compulsive Ferrell begins to go about his day, counting toothbrush strokes and steps to the bus stop. He didn’t need to work in an office that looked Joseph K’s in Orson Welles’ ‘The Trial’ for us to get that he works in a grey, featureless world without prospects of emotional release. And did all the staff literally have to wear grey – so that when Will Ferrell comes to work in a red sweater he looks like an anarchist?

When Ferrell counts his steps and does elaborate calculations on the spot, figures appear over his head, graphics elaborate themselves across the screen, appear backwards and flip around when he passes from one side of the screen to the other. At first this appears witty, and I suppose it is in a self-conscious way, but it begins to look like a commercial for insurance. I’m glad that it only appears at the beginning of the film. For no apparent reason, it ceases to happen after the first ten minutes. The viewer asks what did it mean? And that’s the trouble. It is simply a cosmetic smear; a device that distances us from the drama. As the action begins to accumulate some emotional stake for the audience, it disappears. Someone should have told Forster to lose the idea.

Emma Thompson’s performance is beautifully judged, and near-perfect. Intense, but never giving in to the temptation to go for comedic caricature. She leaves the humanity of her character’s predicament intact, no matter how attenuated the concept. The expression on her face when she stands on a precipice above the city streets, taking in the delicious possibility of death, eyes closed with hands extended to feel the rising warm air from the street. It makes sense that such a sensualist should embrace life and not give in to the temptation. She says it’s “research”, but we don’t doubt that a few more degrees of disenchantment with life might see her confronting the temptation for real.

It was the sort of performance which reminded me of Toni Collette, especially in ‘About A Boy’, where she’s supposed to be the main character’s comically eccentric and unbalanced mother, but she’s so convincing she threatens to upset the whole trajectory of the film.

Watching the ‘Making Of’ feature on the DVD, I was struck by how perfectly uninteresting a person Marc Forster seemed to be. I apologise to his mother if she ever reads this, but during the interminable interviews with cast and crew, he fails to say anything that sheds the least bit of light on his creative motivations. There’s not a joke to be made, not an observation even the laziest couch potato couldn’t have made for him. The fact that the crew spend a lot of time telling how “great he was to work with” makes it worse.

If there’s one aspect of the screenplay which might betray Zach Helm’s lack of experience, it’s the matter of the wristwatch. The film begins with Emma Thompason’s author intoning “This is a story about a man named Harold Crick and his wristwatch”. I get the feeling that the wristwatch might have featured prominently in the original pitch. In the film however, having established itself it quickly gets in the way, so that when the narrator feels compelled to keep referring to it for no necessary reason, it becomes confusing and then irritating. Somebody should have told him to leave it in the second draft.

The cast are uniformly good; all of them showy by temperament but with their usual intensity turned right down, including Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman and Queen Latifah.

Kay Eiffel: I went out... to buy cigarettes and I figured out how to kill Harold Crick.
Penny Escher: Buying cigarettes?
Kay Eiffel: As I was... when I came out of the store I... it came to me.
Penny Escher: How?
Kay Eiffel: Well, Penny, like anything worth writing, it came inexplicably and without method.

The font that ate a planet

2007-05-30T16:35:00.000+10:00

It might have skipped your notice, or not, but this year is the anniversary of a typeface. The typeface, actually. It is fifty years since the birth of Helvetica.

Designed by Max Miedinger in 1957, it has become easily the most ubiquitous form of type of any kind in the world. Originally it was called 'Neue Haas Grotesk', but the name was thought to be too foreign and cumbersome by the parent company, the Haas type foundry, and was changed to the latin name for Switzerland in 1960.

There's an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. There's a nice slide article from Slate, demonstrating its world wide ubiquity, and now, there is a film.

I'm told that the movie features many of the living legends of graphic design all expanding on why they hate it so much. Can't wait.

This is the official film poster:

But I much prefer David Carson's characteristic attempt:

Careful Tarzan, that forest is full of anachronisms

2007-05-24T10:44:00.000+10:00

Part of the charm of getting out of the city for most Australians is the chance of hearing the extraordinary call of the Kookaburra, an indigenous species of kingfisher.

But if you’re not Australian, you’ve probably heard it anyway – certainly, if you’ve ever seen a Tarzan movie. No sooner are the sweaty pith-helmeted hunters making their way with difficulty through the tangled African jungle, than an indigenous Australian bird, many thousands of miles out of its natural habitat, is clearly heard on the soundtrack.

Little did I know that the same anachronism works in reverse, only this time in real life.

My son and I are in the Dandenong Ranges, walking back to the car, when a familiar, thrilling sound rings out.

Me: Do you hear that? That’s a Kookaburra.

Son (8): No. It’s not a Kookaburra... It’s monkeys.