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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.

Hideous configurations of clothes, toys and rubbish adorn the walls and floors of the Hayward’s lower level, which contains half the floor-space of the whole exhibition. Early on, you are invited to peer through a series of horizontal slots into a sealed white room containing an artful arrangement of boxes and scrapbooks, which lie open as though prepared for a museum. These are elements of Annette Messager’s artistic life, advertised as bits of personal documentary introduced into the art show, half-hidden in the enclosed space. In short, a bald cliché. Messager, apparently conscious of this, counterbalances it with some rather more exciting work on the walls of the sealed space: Voluntary Tortures, a wall-full of black-and-white photos of women undergoing beauty treatments. Side by side, they look like travesties. It’s a funny, if rather sour, joke.

Around the corner, the playful Approaches documents the approach of three mens’ crotches at the eye-level of a sitting woman, through a short series of black-and-white photos. Hidden in an alcove, the Pensionnaires (‘Boarders’) series sees Messager knitting utterly inappropriate garments for, in La Repos… (‘The Rest…’) , 75 sparrows (or facsimile sparrows made out of feathers and wire). Each bit of knitwork unfailingly binds its wearer’s wings. Next to it, La Punition… (‘The Puinishment…’) sees nine birds bound pronely onto metal stands with plastic wire.

These pieces give an impression of adolescent angst extruded rather awkwardly into a ‘proper’ subject. Laying out the birds in plaintive ranks may pay them a certain ceremonial respect, but one senses a sarcastic smile as the Pensionnaires are installed. The ghoulish grin that Messager invites is depthless and undesirable, because it seems to mock nurture without seeking to understand.

On the next wall, the grubby skins and limbs of soft toy carcasses hang like cuts of meat in a butcher’s shop. On the next wall, large close-up pictures of body parts are illustrated with oriental drawings, what look like figures out of Blake, and roving, henna-like patterns. A few heads on sticks and heaps of mouldy toys later, what may be the most nightmarish scene in the whole thing: a roomful of inflatable body parts made from stitched silk, each one sporadically inflated by an automatic pump. They threaten to come loose, in order to overwhelm and assimilate you. Sour grey light spills on them out of a fixture. Behind you there is what can only be described as an altar of rubbish bags. The experience is exhilaratingly unpleasant.

Upstairs, Messager has a broader canvas to work with, and the effects at first are proportionally more powerful. Dividing the same amount of space into just three sections, she creates a monstrous kind of museum. The infernal Casino is a fifteen-minute show in which a silken crimson cloth,which seems to flow from a bloody portal at the back of the room, ruffles like seawater over a series of will’o-the-wisp lights. The silk is a blubbery entity that seems stupid, vulnerable, and indifferent.

Next door, stuffed animals hang on platforms above head-height. The bottom of each platform is a mirror. Each creature has had its head replaced with that of a soft toy. Some will enjoy this piece’s overtones of the traditional mutilation of dolls by children who want to badge – or even precipitate – their maturity. For those (the majority, I fear) who won’t, it is hard to sympathise with Messager, who by now seems bent on appealing to her audience’s nastiest proclivities.

In the last room, machines push about fabric mannequins and stuffed limbs from cables strung in the rafters. An inert, semi-animal shape is dragged around the floor. A figure hangs at the end of an indifferent rope. Gawp you must.

Annette Messager: The Messengers is at the Hayward Gallery until 25 May

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.

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 by taking a prurient look into the conflicts that exist in French society at a mundane level. He chooses students from different social groups interacting with one another in the classroom, whilst a teacher attempts to teach them French. It’s a laudably simple idea – a dispassionate peep into the environment of an inner-city classroom (that some reviewers assumed it was set in the banlieuex is testament to the expectation that this film is an update on exactly that rather awkward situation that La Haine dealt with).

To achieve verité, The Class was assembled from hours of footage shot over a series of weeks. Real thirteen and fourteen year-olds were put in a classroom for several hours and a teacher (in fact, a retired teacher, François Bégaudeau, also the author of the novel/memoir on which the film is based) attempts to teach them French. Et voila!

To keep the interest alive, the film injects some simple dramatic elements into the ‘documentary’ – a new student arrives ; a problematic pupil finds a chance to excel; a student sullenly rejects her teacher’s help. The action takes place over the course of a school year. But where Lars von Trier and his Dogme cohorts might have used this as an opportunity for some grand guignol psychodrama, Cantet and Bégaudeau are content to linger on the process of teaching.

Apparently torn between making a documentary, which they could have made in a school (and would, doubtless, have been fascinating), and a drama, the makers end up diminishing the impact of both elements. Dialogue that engages with the film’s avowed theme of ‘multiculturalism’, for instance when a student asks the teacher to not ‘use those whitey names’, too often clangs with the hollowness of ventriloquism. When, towards the end of the film, a loudmouthed student reveals that she has spent her spare time reading Plato, you have to laugh. So much for verité.

The only ears, perhaps, to which The Class does not sound contrived are those which wish to hear the manifold problems of modern-day French society being played out in such simplistic terms. There is certainly little enough of plot or drama here to justify this film’s existence as anything but a social comment.

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.

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.

This chap twittered the Schiphol Plane Crash this morning. A moving insight.

twagedy (n.) a tragic event made to seem trivial by a surfeit of real-time media coverage by casual observers