Busy?

It turns into a catalogue - I can't write about it all. Thursday night went to see Kicking a deaad horse in the Peacock with Stephen Rea. I liked the horse. I bought the play to read it afterwards - I kind of missed what he was saying towards the end. I think he was knackered. Whenever I break my rule about seeing plays in the first two weeks I'm disappointed. Most people found his performance compelling but the play shit. In the pub on Saturday they were saying it was written in the 80s and sat in his drawer - he knew it wasn't good. So I didn't pop over to Sam Shepard in the pub and say hi, I mean if I'd loved the thing I would have.
Friday went to see Indigenes at the IFI, about Algerian soldiers fighting for France in WWII. Afterwards had tagines and Alsation riesling in respect (the film ends up in Alsace, they are fighting alone for a French village where the inn is called Sonntag and the snow is coming down). Fine film, very emotional.
Saturday evening went to see Joanna Newsom live in the Olympia and she was absolutely phenomenal, I think it's the first night of her current tour with a small scale band. All of whom were annoyingly young and gifted. Everything she does from playing the harp, to singing in an 'ickle gurl voice (she talks like that too) to using words like 'spelunking', 'dirigibles' and 'ledger' (though in fairness it does rhyme in the song...) should annoy me but I think she's a genius. Actually, I love the word dirigible. It's a privilege to be in the same room as someone when they turn it on like that. A real fucking privilege. She totally blew me away. Did a good long show too. After went to the pub and everyone had seen the play... that's when we saw Sam in the pub by the way.

Sunday went to seen Nanni Moretti's new film The Caiman about which nothing should be said and in the evening on to Sunshine Danny Boyle's pastiche of 2001, Solaris, and Event Horizon. Did I mention Silent Running? That too. I loved it. Particularly the bits where not much happened, but then I think that if Solaris was twice as long, and half as much happened, it would be four times as good. Which is kind of the opposite of most people's opionions. But it was kind of ruined at the end when Sam Neill's character from Event Horizon turns up all burnt skin and the movie briefly follows slasher conventions. I find them tedious in the extreme. There is not a film that I have seen where the baddie defies logic, physics, and good writing to repeatedly return from the dead to terrorise the people in the movie that I haven't despised as I was watching. Think of something like Cape Fear where that gurning oaf masquerading as an actor won't just fuck off and die... Anyway, I liked the film's abstract noise, liminal images, and grand gothic doom laden aura. I found it gripping and frightening. I found the acceptance and even craving for death believable and refreshing for a film such as this. The people I was with were less enthused.
Caught the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition in there sometime too. It was alright.

Walk on by

I had meant to discuss Adam Curtis's fascinating and fun documentary The Trap: what happened to our dream of freedom but to be honest I spent most of it counting the music and going "got that". And anyway the most powerful artistic experience that I had this weekend was from a Dionne Warwick record . I just bought some kind of 60s greatest hits (by Dionne Warwicke as the record has it) and the first song is "walk on by". I've never been a fan of the song itself particularly. But oh the production. And her voice wrapped around you, warm and full. Kind of quite the opposite kind of performance to the shrieking divatrons catterwauling through their autotuners. Oh so hysterical with the soul they got baby, sounding like a Japanese robot doing vocal warmups while grudgefucking an overweight golf-playing samariman. And filing its nails. You ain't got soul baby. If you don't know what I mean have a listen to the vocal histrionics in that cover version of "Lady Marmalade" that was used to promote that sparkly turd "Moulin Rouge".
I digress, I digress
I concentrate less, and less
Let us speak no more of such things. But "walk on by" in its original production and arrangement is beautifully sublime. The mix makes no attempt for everything to sound as loud as everything else. This is an edit. There is a really loud guitar chop at the beginning, barely audible acoustic guitars and her voice. The piano kicks in for the chorous and the famous piano figure is played quieter here than in other versions: they were aware it was facile and didn't overplay it. The orchestra swells, swooning backing vocals drift in and out of the mix, suddenly it all drops out and her voice is present in the room, with a more live room reverb than all the other sounds - she is there with you, suddenly intimate and shocking. The whole thing glides on to the end, with the drums really only kicking in during the fade out. This sounds like nothing that could be played live. It is pure electroacoustic music. A product of recording technology being used inventively to create something new rather than echo something else. Mature use of technology. And you need it on record. A mature technology. I don't know what it would sound like on mp3 and don't want to know.

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.