Carte d’Enfer Podcast: Nourishment Blackspots

Today, I spoke to four different well-to-do people about the grimmest and most alienating bars and restaurants in London.

Get the podcast here! (or stream online from the box.net box on the right)

Check out the ever-expanding map here!

G20 protests at the Bank of England

A cultural event for us all to be proud of: flag-waving, shouting and oodles of idealism. However, when Will Daunt and I went down to find some anarchists, we got more than we bargained for….

You may feel seasick whilst viewing as the entire thing was shot on a camera the size of a fag packet. For this I can only apologise.

No Messages: Annette Messager

As you enter Annette Messager’s touring retrospective ‘The Messengers’ (in French: ‘Les Messagers’), the first thing to meet – or rather, rush up to and introduce itself, with a firm yet clammy grip, to – your eye is a cartoon bat pasted onto the opposite wall of the ante-room. Its eyes are two breasts; its black, paint-bespattered wings spread six feet across in naïve, drastic triangles. Next to it, some brethren: avian gremlins who confer on a miserable black branch. The opposite corner is crammed with photographs of biro drawings of women, apparently reproducing scenes from pornography.

Object: Contradictions in Cyberspace

the internet: ushering in a new age of enlightment

Error Report: The Guardian’s ‘How To Understand People’ freebie

The Guardian/Observer’s attractive ‘How to Understand People’ pamphlets this weekend failed to help me understand anybody. To add insult to injury, its authors carried off this grotesquely inverted accomplishment whilst consistently spelling ‘extravert’, ‘extrovert’.

Any professor of philology can  tell you that ‘extravert’ derives from the Latin for ‘extra’, meaning ‘outside’, and ‘vertere’, meaning ‘to turn’, from which we also get ‘vertex’, ‘vertigo’, ‘pervert’ (=turned completely=turned the wrong way) etc etc ETC.

There is no need to turn ‘extra’ into ‘extro’. We certainly don’t do it elsewhere: ‘extraterrestrial’, ‘extramarital’, ‘extracurricular’. So I think we can safely say that the only reason ‘extrovert’ gained currency as the opposite of ‘introvert’ is that people, ordinary ignorant people like you and I, assumed that its rather nondescript second vowel sound (the ə, if you must) would be spelt the same way as ‘introvert’’s.

I don’t mind, really. But it is a bit of a shame.

‘Wendy and Lucy’: losing, losing, lost.

Wendy and Lucy is a very slow, elegiac film about a young woman, Wendy, whose car breaks down whilst she is travelling across America. She is arrested for shoplifting and loses her beloved dog Lucy. She spends most of the film looking for her and trying to get her car fixed. It’s a peculiar, gentle piece of work which benefits from – and falls down on – its narrow scope.

W&L is the second feature film by Kelly Reichardt. It’s already been a critical hit, the first film since There Will Be Blood to receive a six-star review in Time Out, who called it “a small miracle”. The New York Times identified it as “a lucid and melancholy inquiry into the current state of American society” as well as “[a] short, simple, perfect story of a young woman and her dog”.

Yes, “perfect”. This is, of course, inaccurate. It is certainly neat and tidy. What’s more, it appeals to a niche audience prepared to empathise with its main character: these people are doubtless glad to welcome Wendy into their lives (characterised, one suspects, by occasionally dismal introspection).

Ultimately W&L is not an ambitious picture, and Reichardt exploits this to make the smallness of her subject the greatest asset of the film. It means that her camera can spend two rather sad minutes dollying past caged dogs in the pound where Wendy looks for Lucy, that she can invite the eye to linger on empty streets and railway yards and, most of all, she can concentrate on the mundane details of waifish Wendy’s life.

Michelle Williams gives a strong and convincing performance in the title role, but it can’t bring the film any more dramatic traction than its deliberately humdrum script will allow it.

The film’s story is skinny and its minor characters transient. Its perspective lock-steps with Wendy’s to an extent that makes the environment she moves in seem almost like a dream. The heavy price Reichardt pays for all her melancholy space and contemplation is that the whole thing is ephemeral.

If one does not identify with Wendy (and one can’t be blamed for not wanting to), one shouldn’t expect to be sucked inexorably into her world. For those who are already interested, sympathising with her will be an unusually enjoyable, if slightly strained, experience. For those who are not, this film will be an utter waste of time.

5/10. See me after ‘The Class’

As the banlieuex burned in the wake of the student protests in Paris in late 2007, they turned the city into a beacon for France’s seemingly intractable social difficulties. The notoriously poor integration of immigrant communities into the mainstream of French culture has been the subject for films before – most famously La Haine, a drama which took the temperature of France’s turbulent youth culture at the end of the 1990s and found wit and vigour still mixing in the shadow of terrifying violence.

Lauren Cantet’s The Class, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes last year, offers to bring us up to date with the Parisian problem

Drunk Musicians >> Rubbish Music

Orchestral Organiser of the Musicians’ Union, Bill Kerr, appears in today’s Guardian recalling some memorable and “regrettable” instances of orchestral musicians getting so drunk they cannot play properly. Amongst a few anecdotes about legless brass sections, drunk percussions toppling  from the stage etc etc he offered this analysis:

For musicians there can be so much captive time – a lot of time and not many distractions. Frequently the only place to go is the pub, everywhere is closed because it’s a Sunday, there are no facilities backstage.

These are the professionals. But there are also, sadly, amateurs, and with no Bill Kerr to stand up for them. They play in pub backrooms,and they can expect to spend a good four to five hours between soundcheck and stage already ensconced by the bar.

The band are the first to suffer. The next, of course, are the audience. Antics, and attaining a balance of obnoxiousness and self-confidence generally known as ‘being rock and roll’ have been (erroneously) encouraged as desirable qualities in a musical outfit.

A glance at this morning’s rerun of the NME awards on Channel 4 offered zero evidence to the contrary. An appalling cover version of ‘Suspicious Minds’ was proffered by the derivative and anaemic Glasvegas, which lacked momentum, pitch, or elegance to an extent that was embarassing to watch. Delightfully, the coloured lights blinked and the TV cameras swooped as through this were an event worth witnessing.

The teetering PR machine of the industry is ever threadbare. These ‘music’ awards – their celebrity attendees handpicked from magazines, their TV audience identified from market demographics,  their TV reporters utterly uncritical – were banal and cynical, scraped together like a line of cocaine on an industry man’s mirror.

It cannot be long – or can it? – before the veneer of acceptability crumbles too much, the music becomes too dreadful, and somewhere in the great throbbing mind of the music industry, a little voice of conscience sings out that this just isn’t good enough. Until that day, the art will suffer, beanfeasts like the NME awards will prosper, and would-be practitioners will continue to trot obediently to the bar for their sedatives.

Object: Guardian Toilet Paper Article

spelling. name. terror.

Error Report: The Daily Express, 24th February

Daily Express, 24th Feb 2009

The Daily Express rails at the government for treating Binyam Mohammed “LIKE ROYALTY” by flying him home in a private jet. Binyam probably doesn’t feel too privileged, though – as a victim of extraordinary rendition, the Americans ferried him from one torture chamber to another in just such a vehicle. O Express.