If you’re an England supporter, you’ll be in need of smile. So here’s a couple of weekend World Cup treats: two Dave Henson parody songs recently played on Radio Five Live.

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Ali Farka Touré and his beautiful lament Savane. Pretty much somes up my night. Who’d be an England fan?

Lucy of Heaven Is A Cupcake, TFAD’s cupcake queen, has baked these awesome cupcakes in England’s honour. Let’s hope England’s game tonight is a cakewalk and we get the chance to savour the sweet taste of victory. And, when we do win tonight, Germany losing this afternoon will have provided the perfect icing on the cake.

I have three major debts to Roger Ebert. The first is obvious and freely declared. Once the most famous film critic in history started following me on Twitter, and occasionally mentioning reviews I’d written, I suddenly had appeal. I would still write film reviews without Roger Ebert’s e-patronage; I’m just not sure they’d be read by anybody who didn’t give birth to me. When Mr Ebert educated me about American marshmallows in a couple of off-hand Twitter messages, I’m certain it brought me more readers, web hits, Twitter followers and all-round acknowledgement than any of my efforts in self-promotion or any article I’ve written. Indeed, even though my Twitter handle is ‘ScottFilmCritic’, I had privately always suffered intense ‘Imposter Syndrome’ about being considered a ‘film critic’ – but then Roger Ebert called me one. If Roger Ebert deems me a film critic, I can (almost) accept I’m a film critic.

My second debt to Roger Ebert is broader, though just as obvious. It’s a debt anyone who’s written about films in the last fifty years, in any capacity and any language, owes him. It’s the debt of thanks for teaching writers and, just as importantly, those who publish them, that there is an audience – an enormous, loyal and hungry audience – for film criticism that covers, with equal sincerity and attention, the work of Michael Bay in the morning and of Yasujirō Ozu in the afternoon. Of course, those of us who aren’t Roger Ebert don’t attract his readership, but we can attract a tiny fraction of it, and that makes it viable for us to write.

The third debt I owe Roger Ebert is more personal than even the thanks due him for his promotion and encouragement of my articles. I have ME, an illness, I never know whether or not to acknowledge in print, that has kept me … well … out of the world for much of my life. Writing for magazines and the Internet gives me a voice that would otherwise not be heard – and Mr Ebert is a daily example of the power of refusing to be silenced by something as ultimately insignificant as ill health. Roger Ebert lost the ability to speak and became more eloquent, channelling his voice into writing: into Tweets that educate and amuse as much as any public service programming, and into online journal entries that do a great deal more than that. Now, with his example instructing me every day, I have no excuse to think that not being able to get out of the house much is any kind of reason for believing I can’t, or shouldn’t, make myself heard.

So, on his birthday, here’s a threefold ‘thank you’, and a hearty ‘Happy Birthday’, to the king of critics. To mark the occasion, I’ve embedded one of my favourite videos of him. In it, he discusses his picks as the four films of the 1990s with a certain Martin Scorsese, who has four picks of his own.

My friend Maria Stenfor’s new gallery has just opened in Kings Cross, and she is exhibiting the new work of an exciting young artist Matt Calderwood. I went down to see Maria, and the exhibition, last week.

I really enjoyed Calderwood’s work but unlike film or contemporary music, where I’m steeped in the culture and the language, with cutting edge art I’m flying blind – so I hope Maria will be my guide through the LDN art scene over the next few month, and that I get the chance to visit some cool East End artists’ studios, as well some more high-profile exhibitions, in the company of a real expert. – Simon

Over to Maria to describe Matt Calderwood’s new work:

This will be Calderwood’s first London-based solo show in three years, and a continuation of Matt¹s exploration of the turning point where power and strength flips into catastrophic failure. Often, the focus is on the point just before the crash when thought and suspense hang in the air. The gallery space will be divided into different sections and show installations of sculpture, video and photograms.

In the darkness of an improvised photographic darkroom a standard red wine glass is placed on a piece of photographic paper. It is stamped upon and smashed. Shattering across the paper, shards of glass cut and indent the paper, recording the violence of the action. The resultant mess is exposed with a camera flash and the developed image is a surprisingly photographic proof of the shattering. The OGlass photogram was shown for the first time in 1999 in ‘Contemporary Magazine’ as an artist project. Matt has revisited this work over the years since but this will be the first time it has been included in a solo exhibition.

Nine identical, large, black rubber objects are stacked like a puzzle, interlocking and tessellating in three dimensions, recalling minimalist sculpture by the likes of Robert Morris, Sol Lewitt and Tony Smith. The humorous and fetishistic associations of rubber and the transient nature of the resulting sculptures temper the apparent austerity of minimalism. Only when the rubber objects are placed and put together, working with the forces of friction and gravity, does the sculpture manifest itself. From a philosophical standpoint, we are ultimately dealing with the concept of power where power only exists when exercised against something (or someone) else, and underpinned by structural conditions. As an ongoing performative work, the sculptures will be dismantled and reconfigured at random intervals throughout the exhibition.

These works straddle the fine line implicit in the title of the exhibition. ‘Shatterproof’ is, on the one hand, robust and invulnerable to stress and, on the other, more tenuously, it could be evidence or proof of a shattering, a total collapse, and a failure. Glass versus boot.

I want to share something with you that I was recently disgusted by while watching a DVD special feature.  A very famous and much respected movie director (let’s call him ‘Robert Altman’) was being interviewed about the making of ‘Vincent and Theo’, his 1990 film about Vincent van Gogh’s life.  Mr. Altman said that in preparation for making the film, he read the letters from Vincent to his brother Theo, and that it was obvious from this that Vincent van Gogh was a bum and a reprobate and completely self-serving, and all he was interested in was wringing his brother for money.  And that is how he portrayed his character of Vincent in the film.  Mr. Altman’s quote follows…

‘… we found out that he had written all these letters to his brother, to Theo, and they were all saved, but there weren’t any letters of his [Theo's to Vincent] because Van Gogh didn’t care about him.  Every letter he wrote he was asking for money or support of some kind and it finally just came down to the fact I think that Vincent just wasn’t very interested in anything but himself.  So I kind of took that position in making the whole project, that Vincent was just mad as a hatter and he was scrambling to keep alive and to be able to paint, keep painting.  And he would do anything and his brother is the one he hustled.’

Well that explains a lot.  It explains why the first time you see Vincent in the film he is in an argument with his brother, and when his brother admits that the money Vincent has been receiving from his father is actually from Theo himself, Vincent grins broadly showing his paint stained and rotten teeth.

Now here I was thinking that smile meant ‘I am surprised with joy that my brother so deeply cares for me that he would support me in such a selfless way; I am truly loved’. But no! What the director of the film was really saying with that grotesque grin (which only became grotesque to me after I heard his comments) was more along the lines of ;Aha, I have you exactly where I want you, you fool!’

Now I admit I may be stretching the interpretation a bit to make a point and to hopefully add some humor to what could be considered a pretty insulting article, but there is it.  Clearly I disagree with Altman about van Gogh’s motives and, really, his entire relationship with his brother and even his essence as a person and an artist.  And I do not think that is stretching anything.

It is true that I have not read van Gogh’s letters extensively, but I have read some, and essays on said letters, and I have read quite a few biographies that do have some variance in opinion as to the artist’s personal intentions and motivations.  I have viewed and felt his work and have let all of this personal research, as well as common ‘knowledge’, melt into my own opinion of a man who I have only recently come to very much admire and identify with.

When an artist puts his priority on striving to create because it is all he has found that can give him even a small amount of satisfaction, and because he sincerely believes that it is his calling, money can often become a problem.  Not only that, but many of us creative types also do not have support in human form.  I mean emotional support.  This is especially the case when an artist is so focused and driven to communicate something unformed through his art, that he leaves society behind, either geographically like Gauguin, or mentally like van Gogh.

As you probably are aware, it is very difficult to live in this world without money and without emotional support, let alone without just one of these things.  These are not things that people give up lightly.  Again, Gauguin and van Gogh are perfect examples of this, because they each knew another life before becoming obsessed with creating art.  Sure, we could talk about ‘how much money does one really need?’ all day long, but van Gogh was a man who lived in strict poverty after he began painting, which came after some time spent as an art gallery manager, then a teacher, and then a minister.  He was never wealthy, but he had choices, and I see a man who was always reaching to find his purpose, not a bigger bank roll.  And I do not see a man who was so mentally unhinged or selfish and hateful that he gave up his previous life just out of some kind of lunacy, laziness, or spite.

It turned out that Vincent came to combine his knowledge of and appreciate for art, his natural creative talent (not only as a visual artist, but as an amazing letter writer), and his vision of sharing something true and sacred with other people to become the great artist whose influence was, and is, indispensable to the art world.  I for one am thankful for people like that who seek out what they should do and try their best to do it, no matter what the cost.  And I am equally thankful for Theo van Gogh who loved his brother and helped him attain his goals and accomplish all he was able to do in less than ten years of painting.

If this is what it means to be a selfish bum, I really do live in the wrong universe.

In gentler times characters suffering from ‘biliousness’ in films were seen to dash to an off-screen bathroom, cough politely, flush and then return looking pale. Not any more. Barely does a new film go by without the obligatory projectile vomiting scene. What’s changed? ow come the censors are untroubled by it? And, most importantly, what do the effects guys use to make the puke?

A very good friend of mine is quite phobic about scenes involving vomiting in films. Despite his aversion he’s able to recount a long list of instances in movies that he’s seen where characters are shown graphically parting with their breakfast, almost as though, despite his phobia, he’s magnetically drawn to these instances. Maybe he’s compiling a mental catalogue so as to avoid seeing them in the future, or maybe he’s trying out some kind of self-imposed systematic desensitization. Whatever the explanation he really doesn’t like it, and he’d like a bit of advance notice from the censors please.

I doubt he’s on his own. Those viewers with an aversion to blood and gore are wrapped up in cotton wool by the censors. The recent fashion for qualifying a film’s certificate with a rambling ‘contains strong, bloody violence including gore, blood, entrails, blood, innards, blood and a bit more blood’ leaves one able to avoid such things as might displease the eye or mind. If on the other hand, like my friend, you happen to have a hang-up about chunder, you’re stuffed. There isn’t much to forewarn you of impending scenes of gastric evacuation in movies. It doesn’t help that blowing chunks is now regarded as a surefire money shot in most modern comedies. My friend seems genuinely shocked that audiences aren’t shocked by such sights. How can they watch somebody bring their ring up on the screen and happily continue stuffing popcorn and pick ‘n’ mix down their own throats? At least one renowned critic is in full agreement.

I guess my friend’s thinking is: if it was coming out the other end people wouldn’t be laughing (well, actually, maybe they would) but the change in audience tolerance for this kind of thing is interesting. Perhaps it reflects wider changes in the behaviour of youth audiences; the cast of binge-drink Britain are arguably much more used to the sight of somebody publicly spewing than previous generations would have been. In the good old days one simply kept it down old chap. Neuroses aside, the depiction of vomiting has undoubtedly become an easily exploded sacred cow for the lazy filmmaker, a laziness carried over into TV productions seeking an easy shock. Look no further than David Walliam’s emetic racist WI lady in ‘Little Britain’. Why bother writing an engaging scene exploring social mores through the medium of dialogue when you can film a guy regurgitating his lunch in order to make your audience sit up and take notice?

Effects technology has helped directors push the puke envelope down the years. ‘The Exorcist‘’s pea-souper set the benchmark in the 70s and the emptying of Mr. Creosote’s capacious guts in Monty Python’s ‘The Meaning Of Life’ meant that the olden days of low-tech ‘mouthful of minestrone’ offerings just didn’t cut the mustard any more. Vomit could no longer simply dribble or be spat out as an afterthought, it had to erupt with the force of Old Faithful, practically showering the audience with all manner of matter (have we had a puking scene in a 3D movie yet?) and, once they figured out how to fire gallons of stunt sick out of an actor’s mouth, seemingly nothing less would satisfy.

Sometimes the fun is in trying to spot just how they did it. I’m guessing they used some kind of sleeve-located tube for the ‘Jim’ll Fix‘ It boy scout-inspired rollercoaster scene in ‘The Parole Officer’. (Ten out of ten for protein spill realism with that one. by the way.) It looks just like the sort of stomach contents that the school caretaker used to get his bucket of sawdust out for. Nice.

Just occasionally (well, maybe once) vomiting scenes have reached the level of art form. To my mind there is a curious poetry to the pie-eating scene in ‘Stand By Me’: the torrent of undigested fruit filling unleashed by Lardass and its knock-on effect through the crowd of onlookers is in my opinion rather beautifully choreographed.

It took a Trey Parker offering to hold the new formality of projectilism up to the light and send it up to hilarious effect. The small lake of bile produced by puppet Gary after a heavy drinking session in ‘Team America: World Police‘ deserves to have the last word on the matter. Quality: check. Quantity: triple check.

I think I’d better stop right there. There may be one or two of these examples that my friend hasn’t seen yet and I don’t really want to provide him with more reasons to get up in arms about the lack of protection the censors are providing for his sensibilities. Besides, I’m not feeling too well myself. Somebody pass the bucket…

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Aeroplane : We Can’t Fly
Aeroplanes eagerly anticipated new single comes across like a balaeric / reggae soundsplash. Summer has finally arrived?

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Wild Beast : Hooting and Howling
This is the first single off Wild Beasts new LP ‘Two Dancers‘. The singers crisp falsetto voice and those spiky Krautrock beats create a mesmerising track. Essential listening.

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Staple Sisters : Slippery People
Just thought I would put this in as well. I played this on Saturday and just forgot how good this Talking Heads cover actually was .

(’Self-Portrait (in cupboard)‘ by Claude Cahun)

“I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like”

I was raised to believe that the use of cliché in critique was a sin worthy of social banishment, and the above phrase was one of many, along with the likes of ‘I always think champagne is rather overrated’ whose use would have you jeered into recognition of your hideous descent into the trite and unoriginal.

Reading extracts from the catalogue for ‘Newspeak: British Art Now‘  in this week’s Guardian, however, it is hard not to conclude that there are times when verbal sins committed in the name of originality can, at times, be more deserving of damnation that the worst excesses of cliché-speak.

Surely the purpose of the catalogue is to inform the viewer about the context in which the art was produced, to feed into the process of interpretation the reviewer’s own, hopefully intelligent observations, even to educate or entertain on a broader level, using the art as a basis for comment? If so, then the reviewer in this case appears to have written not so much a catalogue, as an unintentional parody of highbrow cultural criticism. A cursory scan of the first few google results from the search “extracts from art exhibition catalogues” produced numerous examples of catalogue entries that do all of the above, for example:

“…..By contrast, the experience (or perception) of confinement has provoked a more anxious response on the part of a number of Surrealist and contemporary women artists for whom the bourgeois home is seen as a constricting straitjacket. Some have sought to escape the rule-bound adult world by reverting to childhood. In the self-portrait photographs for which she is best known, the Surrealist photographer Claude Cahun appears often to be play-acting or dressing up for the camera. Recalling a children’s game, for Cahun these strategies allow for a searching interrogation of gender and sexual identity. In ‘Self-Portrait (in cupboard)’ Cahun takes a nap on the shelf of a capacious wardrobe that dwarfs her, making her look like a small child. It seems probable that she is laying claim to the less socialised, correspondingly freer space of the child.”

or this, from the University of Dundee site:

“Before there was any earth or sea, before the canopy of heaven stretched overhead, Nature presented the same aspect the world over, that to which men have given the name of Chaos…” So begins Ovid’s Metamorphoses, with its mythical tales of the magical transformations of gods and men into animal, vegetable and mineral forms. No classical text has had greater influence on the Western literary and artistic imagination than this collection of sometimes savage stories exposing the existential chaos beneath the surface of civilisation. The fact that we no longer read them could mean one of two things: either we’re too civilised to need them, or we’re in denial. The Greeks had an answer to both in the story of Pentheus, the priggish King of Thebes who doubted the power of the god of wine, Dionysus, and was torn apart by the god’s frenzied followers, led by his mother. Appropriately, this story is the subject of a painting by Paul Reid, the young Scottish artist described four years ago by Guy Peploe as “one of the most exciting painters to emerge from the primordial broth of postmodernism”. For the past eight years, Reid has been painting mythological subjects left untouched for more than a century. While his contemporaries, crushed by the weight of art history, have chosen the postmodernist way out, Reid has opted to play Atlas and shoulder the burden – a decision which, in art critical terms, makes him as much a freak of nature as the prodigies he depicts.”

Context, education, interpretation and comment, and not a juxtaposition of vomit and surf in sight.

(’Theseus and the Minotaur‘ by Paul Reid)

(‘Odysseus on the Island of Circe‘ by Paul Reid)

TV dramas are my staple alternative to the deluge of reality shows, soaps and makeover programmes that passes for entertainment these days. Or at least they used to be.

TV drama seems overly wallowing in nostalgia. ‘Ashes To Ashes‘, Mad Men‘, ‘Minder and ‘The Prisoner‘ remakes, or that interminable Sunday evening shiny, happy people fare like ‘Heartbeat‘ and ‘Ballykiss Angel‘.

To my mind, this is simply the product of that generation growing up in the late 70’s and 80’s now assuming control of the commissioning departments. They cast back into their minds for “inspiration” and delve into their childhoods for programming ideas. It evidences a lack of vision, awareness and originality. And an assumption that their nostalgia is the same as mine or yours. It represents an infantilisation for all of us, once their babies get made and screened. Here’s why in my opinion.

I ask myself why they cast back into their childhoods for material? Why cannot they reflect on our modern times for inspiration? Because there is something comforting in their pasts, an escape from these troubling, complex times we live in now. There is an unstated wish fulfillment happening here, a yearning for a simpler, purer age. The people in power in TV, probably had fairly privileged upbringings. But now threatened by the instability of the world economy, together with the stress of an explosion in alternative media challenging TV’s hegemony, such folk reach back into more unruffled and cosier times in the amniotic embrace of their original childhoods. A return to the womb warmth and numbness. Please don’t offer me ‘Skins‘ as a counter-argument, that in fact executives ARE trying to engage with the here and now. Talk about infantilisation… Adults probably shouldn’t be allowed to produce programmes about teens…

In the late 1960’s and 70’s, TV was still a new enough medium to be in touch with the vision of its founding fathers. Of genuine public broadcasting, albeit of the patrician kind, but these patricians took their duty seriously. ‘Play For Today‘ ran for fourteen years and boasted or launched the careers of writers such as Mike Leigh, Alan Bleasdale, Dennis Potter, Willie Russell, Stephen Poliakoff et al. Writer-led drama, unlike the appalling scripts of ‘Ashes To Ashes’ or the Sunday evening bromides.

Now admittedly these were one -off dramas not series, though ‘Boys From The Blackstuff‘ emerged as a series out of the original screenplay. For some reason that format fell out of favour. Their treatment of contemporary issues, with an artistic, metaphorical flourish, has now been replaced by the plodding literalism of the Soaps when they turn their hand to address a ‘hard-hitting’ issue. I for one feel short changed by such a trend. But it seems pretty irreversible. Into the drama vacuum has emerged the glitzy, surface appearance of ‘Ashes to Ashes’ and its ilk. High concept, low end execution.

You may argue that ‘Pennies From Heaven‘ drips in nostalgia, albeit for the 1930’s. Similarly ‘The Singing Detective’ invokes noir detectives and again Potter’s love for 1930’s music. But the latter has a contemporary setting as a man looks back on his life from his sickbed and both are far from cosy nostalgia as they seek to unravel the present dystopia stemming from childhood anxieties and trauma. Such works seethe in subtext and what is going on emotionally under the surface, in a way that soaps, and surface detail-obsessed nostalgic trips like ‘Ashes To Ashes‘ lamentably fail to do. This is the difference between light entertainment and serious drama. This is what happens when you have half an eye on international DVD box-set sales and where the key artistic decisions revolve around what songs to put on the soundtrack. If you want to rediscover the music of the age, go back and download the albums. Don’t weave a specious drama around it.

I liked the first series ‘Life On Mars‘ with John Simm. It had some decent writing that gave the actors something to work with to inject credibility into what was after all a fantasy plot. But as far as recalling what life was like in the 1970’s, revisiting MY childhood, I would rather watch reruns of ‘The Sweeney‘ on ITV4, with real locations, and a real period feel because it was actually shot in the 1970’s. I look at the cars and how primitive and boxy they seem. I marvel at how the Cops are forced to locate a telephone box to phone any live information in, pre-mobiles, computers and Satnavs. I see how much the architecture and geography of London, my London, has changed as I grope for dim recognition of the locations. It says more about police corruption than the meandering storyline throughout the recent ‘Ashes To Ashes‘ series ever could. I don’t want my recall structured and furnished for me by the creative eye of TV set designers casting their minds back 30 years. I already have an established bank of memories from the time itself. I can indulge my own nostalgia, not have others presume to do it for me. I don’t want to pay homage to how great a series ‘Minder’ was by remaking the bloody thing with ‘Eastenders‘ cast offs. I’ve got the original showing every week on digital TV.

Nostalgia, it just ain’t what it used to be.