Where's Olive?

Only a couple of months after the initial release 'Little Miss Sunshine' finally limps into the Watermans for a Sunday afternoon matinee. You'd think this would be prime funny, liberal, faux-indie (financed by Fox in fact) fayre, that the Ealing middle classes would lap up. To be honest it was a very pleasant afternoon, even though it seemed to be a bit of a box-ticking excercise at times: Wacky grand-parent - check, cute kid - check, dysfunctional family - check, post-modern road-movie - check. That said I do like a film that has the balls to kill off it's best character half way through.

Goin' Back

One thing we missed when Guy and Ali were here was the re-launch of John Williams' new book. We dined with Jen and Sid instead. I bought a copy on Amazon though and read it on the way to and from Wales this weekend. It's a revised version of his first book, with 5 new chapters written on a trip last year around around the time of hurricane Katrina. It's good stuff, part travelogue, part crime writer interview/biography, and a soupcon of autobography mixed up with some pithy observations on pop culture. He's also set up a site which contains additional relevant material.

Espers @ Bush Hall

Went to see Espers with Hywel at The Bush Hall on Wednesday. Sadly it clashed with an Evan Parker gig at The Vortex that Julian was coming up for. Billie went along to that and met up with Adam there. Ironically Hywel has been trying to see Evan Parker for years. After buying a poster, which I told him would get crumpled (it did), we went upstairs and endured the support acts, at least up there we could lounge around on the leather sofas and not risk upsetting anyone with our bitchy gabbing, as it was almost empty. First up was a solo geezer going by the name of Hush Arbors, I'd probably slag him off something rotten if he'd done anything that made his performance remotely memorable. Next was Edith Frost, who's been around for years, and had more merchandise available than the headliners. Sadly the monotony of an adequately strummed electric guitar, and a voice ordinaire coupled with utterly forgettable songs, with seemingly no variation, modulation or syncopation, meant that no one else had a go on the sofa.

We went downstairs and mingled for Espers, maybe we'd been two remote for the first acts, and if we'd only come downstairs perhaps....no, no they were rank. We were hardly set up for a mind-blowingly lovely evening, but we got one anyway. They are six piece, with a droney cello to the fore, and one of the most beautifully ethereal female singers I've ever heard. She was counterpointed by the occasional vocal from Greg Weeks, the guitar player, his vocals were weedy, but in a good Canterburyesque sort of way, and his guitar playing, fuzzed up with oceans of reverb, was basic but sublimely appropriate. There were predictable points of reference, a more acidy Fairport Convention, or a more folky Velvet Underground, but as with any talented band they were able to transcend those and establish their own unique sound. It's very rare and extremely refreshing these days, I think, to find a band really playing together as a band and enhancing each others contributions in a more than the sum of their parts sort of way. And in a year of great gigs, this was definately up with the best.

Room For One More Waffer Theen MP3 Meester Eyechoons?

Another iTunes milestone (iStone?) as track number 30,000 is welcomed aboard. An old Velvet Underground song rather weedily re-done by Lou Reed on his 1972 debut. That's 76.1 days worth now, enough to listen to more than 5 hours every day for a year without hearing the same track twice. When will it be ENOUGH!!!

Careful With That Act Eugene

The second outing with G&A was to the Old Vic to see A Moon For The Misbegotten. My first trip there. The seats we had were pretty rubbish, in the top balcony at the side, so we had to strain forward to see half the stage. The play was so engrossing though that it didn't really bother me too much. The first act was a lot lighter than I expected. I thought Eugene O'Neill was a by-word for interminable angst and dread, but this was played as broadish comedy. Superb performances from Eve Best as a penniless Southern farm girl with a bad reputation, and Colm Meaney as her conniving Pa. The seond act was a lot darker, with an awe-inspiring performance from Kevin Spacey as a gulit riddled alcoholic, based on O'Neill's brother. At one point someone in the crowd was giggling at Eve Best's speech. Not too surprising as even the tragic denouement was being played for the occasional laugh, but in this case Spacey obviously felt it was inappropriate, and still reacting to Best, held his hand up to the audience. I did a double take as I realised he was breaking the fourth wall and communicating directly with the crowd. A tricky stunt to pull off, but one that actually paid off as it was obvious that Spacey was just trying to get the piece treated with the respect he felt it deserved.

Hit The Rodin Jacques

This was the first event in a culturally cluttered weekend with Guy and Ali who'd come up from Cornwall for a few days. Classical sculpture has always left me cold, the quest for perfection and the flawless application of technique with all individual expression seemingly drained from the work. I'd kind of lazily lumped Rodin in there too, but was utterly gob-smacked at this show. Here technique was used as a jumping off point to satisfy a hungry desire to capture the human form in all it's imperfection, even grotesquery. The famous pieces, The Kiss and The Thinker were maybe a little too well known to really pack a punch but the epic Burghers of Calais was awesome. For the first time sculpture seemed to be able to offer way more than painting with it's puny two dimensions. You could walk around these pieces and every time you stopped there was a brand new masterpiece to take in.

There were a number of pieces where a similar pose was cast and re-cast in an obsessive attempt to get to it's essence. The preparation work was mightily impressive too, though some of the sketches were little more than back-of-fag-packet jottings, which should never have seen the inside of a frame, a series of watercolours with a woman half wearing a pair of pyjamas radiated pure sensuality. Stunning.

Beware Two Floppy Queens

Deluxe Poker time again, got off to a good start winning a big hand within the first 10 minutes, and another decent hand shortly after, and then settled in for a long period of gradual decline. I Was getting decent cards but failing to get anything on the flop. When I finally caught a hand this is what happened:


Before the river Matt went all in, he was already well into the whiskey by this point, and I thought this was an inebriated attempt to push me off the pot, but sadly not. He went on to win the next 3 hands all of which were equally huge.
That cleaned me out, and so I bought in, making the foolish mistake of buying in for £10 only. Doh! Twenty minutes later the roles were reversed:


Andy C. was counting out a £20 bet, but I only had about £7 left by then so that was all I could bet against him. I could have been back in profit if I'd had more. So next time "I must not buy in for £10", that really is pointless. If you get a hand you need to have the cash to back it up and most games revolve around a couple of crucial hands, when other people have also got good cards, and if you can't maximise your winnings in those situations you can never expect to win.

White Riot

Our weekend's final cultural outing featured a smorgasbord of dance pieces. This took place at The Atelier just off Bond Street, which is a small dance studio that a couple of times a year puts on shows by dancers who use the facilities. Morne's friend Renato was dancing which is why we got hooked in. There were six separate sequences.

Waiting On Thin Ice
The first of three boy/girl duets, this is everything I thought modern dance would be jerky angular body-popping, aggressive and confrontational. I can't say I understood what it was that was being acted out, but I did get some narrative sense of a couple in turmoil, which was quite powerful.
Lively Night, Dying Dawn
A solo piece by an unhealthily skinny ballerina. Meant nothing to me, I could as easily have been watching somebody warming up, as watching a finished piece. The act of standing en pointe has always looked agonisingly painful, and seems to be part of the masochistic self-denial of the dancer.
Unwrapped
This totally baffled me. Three dancers, one in her fifties, pranced around with a 'magic' cane, while an oriental lady tinkled on percussion, or blew (quite prettily) on a harmonica. This was the longest piece, and seemed to go on for ever. At some point dance intersects with the Avant Garde, and becomes challenging and transgressive, but this was just wilfully obscure.
The Phoenix And The Turtledove
This was the second duet and featured Renato, in an adaptation of a Shakespeare poem. It seemed to me that this was the most classical piece, and this was confirmed by R later. He's a very entertaining chap, and told fascinating bitchy stories about dancing with Nureyev in the '80's.
Reflections
Another solo ballerina piece, though why she was draped in a piece of old net curtain I couldn't fathom. Supposed to be a 'dance essay on the many meanings of reflection', gawd!
Rain Check
The final piece was another duet, and pitched mid-way between the two other duets, less classical than the second, but more romantic than the first, it was probably the most accessible piece.

I can only repeat that I just don't have the vocabulary to interpret this stuff. If a dancer moves to the left and turns, and then raises a leg and an arm, what difference would there be if he moved to the right, and only lifted an arm. Just seems too random for me.

How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live

Our second cultural excursion of the weekend was a Saturday night trip to Wembley Arena to see Bruce Springsteen and the Seeeger Sessions Band. This is a big band he put together to record his last album, which was a tribute to the songs popularised by Pete Seeger in the 1950's. Seeger is pretty right-on but in a slightly nerdy Sunday-school way, it is alleged that he wanted to cut the power to Bob Dylans electric performance at the Cambridge Folk festival in 1965, which as a reaction to what is considered to be a major turning point in the development of contemporary music is less than radical. The band was huge, waistcoats, neck-scarves, braces and boots, trombone, banjo and accordians galore. This was an American musical history lesson: New Orleans dixie-land jazz, western swing, baber-shop harmony, blue-grass, big band boogie-woogie and slave ship spirituals, and that was just the first song.

In fact the first song was a re-invention of 'Blinded By The Light' as a bluesy/jazzy rocker. Not only did Bruce bring new life to the song, but it seemed that if he wanted to he could have changed the course of his career, and re-tooled his entire back-catalogue in the same style, without losing any it's Springsteenesque qualities, such was the power and glory of this band, and Springsteen's belief in these traditional musical forms. One of Springsteens strengths is the powerful dynamic arrangements his songs take on in a live setting, where the climaxes are held and drawn out with an almost unbearable tension before a sublime release. Applied to the wide variety of a 35 year back catalogue this approach puts Springsteen at the peak of the list of live performers of rock music. However applied to this much more limited repetoire the musical build-up occasionally seemed histrionic, and the lack of tonal/textural variety began to show. He threw in some more re-interpretations of old songs, 'Atlantic City' was excellent, but 'Growing Up' felt a little forced, but the set cried out for a solo spot, or at least a stripped down section. At one point, at the end of 'Lay Me My Money Down', he led the band off-stage, and I thought this would happen, but then they all trouped awkwarldy back on? Just another theatrical gesture.

There's no doubting the timeless power of some of these songs. In 'Mrs. Mcgrath' the lines 'All foreign wars I do proclaim, live on blood and a mothers pain' may have been written about the Napoleonic war, but are equally applicable to Iraq, or when Seeger would have sung them, to Viet-Nam. It is that transferrability that is the best thing about this 'experiment' of Springsteen's, that songs written many generations passed, are still relevant today, and still have something to offer an audience in 2006, albeit a rather long in the tooth crowd such as us. Not all of the songs had the same degree of resonance, 'Froggy Went A Courting', however passionately it is performed is still a nursery song.

There was also a great sense of optimism following the mid-term election results, and hearing this band and this musical history, actually gave me some hope that there may be enough decent folk in the US to turn things around.

Mark Y Marc

Went to see Mark in Art last night, the first in the trio of this weekends cultural adventures. Driving out of London on a Friday evening is sheer folly, and I was cream crackered after driving to bleedin' Banstead for two hours. Luckily the theatre (a very cute converted stable) was close by. The production was very slick and professional, the acting was excellent and the staging was smooth. The play itself was rather unsatisfactory, it didn't really deal with the my two major bug bears about modern art, it's trading as a commodity, and its descent into another sub-genre of celebrity culture. It skirted around the idea of high fallutin' interpretations being applied to minimalist work, but didn't really dig deep enough. The other theme of the play was friendship, but as none of the three characters were particularly likable, I didn't really care very much if they ended up as friends or not, they were probably all better off splitting up and finding new mates.

Mark was very good, as usual, and considering problems he's having with the house sale and at work, and the fact that he'd been sick all day shows what a 'show must go on' trooper he his.

The View From Her Room

Sunset over GSK.

Late at Tate: The Turnip Rise

This years 4 contenders:

Mark Titchner - a wierd array of hand carved contraptions, and wall-sized digitally produced slogans. Tate says: "His installations questions both our blind faith in science and our obedience to authority". ADT says: at least he's got a few ideas, and his stuff made me smile, hard to accept the weighty significance ascribed to it though. Needs to lighten up.



Rebecca Warren - A combination of hamfisted light boxes, with stray bits of wood and a crude twist of neon, and large lumps of unformed clay, mainly painted gold. Tate says: "The unfired clay sculptures project a sense of unleashed creativity, appearing to explode out of and merge back into the amorphous properties of the material". ADT says: If that clay is unfired, chuck a bucket of water on it and let somebody else use it. Those light boxes belong in a skip.


Tomma Abbts - Rectangular piantings, all 48 x 38cm, varied colourful geometric designs and patterns. Tate says: "As the internal logic of each composition unfolds forms are defined, buried and rediscovered until the painting becomes congruent with itself". ADT says: cute 4th form doodles in oil.


Phil Collins - A series of filmed interviews with people who had appeared on Turkish reality TV shows, and a life size reality TV production office. Tate says: "Addresses the discrepancy between reality and it's representations". ADT says: a bit too clever clever for my liking, really just an excuse to make rude remarks about the other Phil Collins on the comments cards.



All in all the usual mixture, of mildy interesting stuff and huge piles of stinking cack. Titchner to win, and a special award for the most pretenciously twaddlicious catalogue yet.

After that we saw Grayson Perry discussing a Victorian painting 'The Death of Chatterton' by Henry Wallis. This was part of a series of presentations on London:City of Disappearances. Grayson had made an effort and was dressed in a nice shiny black satin dress, in keeping with the Victorian theme. Thankfully he isn't an academic, but knows what he thinks, and communicates his opinions in a confident, entertaining and amusing way. Probably the highlight of the evening.

Satisfaction in Chalk Farm

Went to see Cat Power at the recently re-opened Roundhouse in Camden last night. It's all very shiny now, lots of new wood and stainless steel, and is a bit of a rock'n'roll heritage venue. As a result during the first half of the show, which consisted of a very full band version of most of the new album 'The Greatest' my mind wandered to previous performers, and I imagined Jim Morrison's between song banter filtering up into the conical roof space back on the 6th September 1968. Or Robert Wyatt, cheeky grin in place, fag dangling out of his mouth, beating out those syncopated jazz rhythms with Soft Machine on 31st May 1969. What was I doing on those evenings, playing football in the park until it was too dark to see the ball? Watching Blue Peter - only 4 days after The Softs played, the famous Elephant poo episode was aired. A month later I'd be gathered in the school hall with my Waunfawr Junior School chums watching the moon landing...

...Anyway the thing is 'The Greatest' is easily CP's most polished, confident and professional outing thus far, and with a super competent backing band, it was threatening to turn into a fairly regular gig. Then after 40 minutes the band trouped off and Chan/Cat returned on her own, sat at the piano and produced a breath-taking version of 'Who Knows Where The Time Goes' which segued into 'Wild Is The Wind'. This was the fragile, delicate, seemingly damaged performer of legend. She'd been joking all the way through the evening, putting on a Lahndahn accent and waving her hands around in a bizarre fashion, very literally acting out the lyrics, and is obviously mentally very healthy these days. She can still get in touch with her dark side though, and her voice is that rare thing truly original and instantly recognisable. Listening to the album the night before Billie had said she reminded her of Sinead O'Connor, and I can hear some of the smoky breathiness of Dusty Springfield, but it's the technique I think she shares, rather than the voice. She picked up the guitar and launched into a languidly rambling 'House Of The Rising Sun'. No one should be able to do the 'House Of The Rising Sun' in 2006, it's beyond cliched, and yet because of the emotional investment she makes in the performance, and the fact that she's taking a folk song and making it new, by adding words and phrases it becomes timeless, renewed and totally relevant.

Like Patti Smith, who likes to un-pick sections of rock's rich tapestry, and weave them into new, but familiar shapes, Cat Power can align herself with the R'n'R ley lines and tap into the tradition without becoming mawkish or hackneyed. On 'The Covers Album' she does a version of 'Satisfaction' that is stripped beyond the bone, to its very DNA. She just sings the verses, and doesn't sing one of the most recognisable chorus's ever written. Tonight the band re-joined her for a stormingly rocking version, and again she makes the dis-satisfaction that the song is actually about more powerfully pronounced by denying the audience the release of the chorus, brilliant.

The whole band lined up to take a final bow, and she launched into, what seemed, like, a totally unrehearsed version of 'Tears of a Clown'. Some of the band grabbed their instruments and picked out elements of the tune, and I had tears in my eyes at the sheer joy that she has in singing these songs, a joy which she is so disarmingly able to share with her audience.