Staircase wit

The cold snap that traditionally accompanies paddy's day has just ended, proof that while god doesn't exist he does hate us so very much, and the spring birds are singing merrily. And is that early chicks I hear in the attic space above me? And we just discovered that the only way Ireland would win a cricket game against a test nation is by foul means. Not necessarily ours - but this is the foulest, most sordid sports story I have ever encountered...

Anyway, watched "the consequences of love" the other night and really enjoyed it. It had a sedate, hypnotic pace and only became less good in the last third when things started happening. The director wasn't so good at that. Then again Tarkovsky was no John Woo and that's no bad thing. Other people have compared it to Sophia Coppolla, and my Beloved and I both thought of lost in translation but it was far less crass than that film. And deliciously morbid too. And a powerful argument for the quotidien blandness of days going by, endlessly, pulling you into the future.
Perhaps we enjoyed it so much partially as it began with pictures of escalators (or more properly moving sidewalks) and blank industrial spaces and bland hotels and we had just been to see Thomas Demand's L'esprit d'escalier exhibition at IMMA. He makes sculptures out of paper, mdf, plastic and photographs these sculptures into luscious huge prints. The subjects are frequently semi-industrial bland areas: a stock office in a warehouse, a stock room for a shop, a lift, an indescribable yellow machine in a factory. At first the pictures look like the real thing and then you notice that the steel stairway spiralling around the machine is painted on; that while the untreated MDF shelves are real the office is in fact largely paint, and the phones sitting on the desk lack buttons and numbers; the balconies coming out of the building are simply corrugated cardboard.

Don't bother with the Alex Katz New York exhibition on at the same venue - NY toffs drawing pictures of each other. They should print them in the New Yorker. Or something. In case you didn't know I despise as contemptible the graphic style of the New Yorker and it old world pretentiousness "from our correspondant in Tallinn". Ick.