Harry’s Place Arts

When you heard that Julie Walters was playing Mo, in the eponymous bio telly pic about the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland you knew Maureen Mowlam was going to be warm, and human and dead loveable and out-spoken and Northern, with an adoring husband.  Similarly in Wide-eyed and Legless, where Julie Walters was playing Diana, with the strange illness and adoring husband, she was warm, and human and dead loveable and outspoken and Northern.  And in Calendar Girls, Julie Walters was bereaved of her sweet adoring husband, and she was so warm and human and dead loveable (and outspoken and Northern).   She even made Mary Whitehouse warm and human and outspoken with a nice husband.  Can someone please give her the role of Margaret Thatcher? Or Elizabeth the First?  Or Boadicea?  Or even Ilse Koch? and see if she will make them warm; human; dead loveable; outspoken; Northern.  Right from her days in Educating Rita she has been played such women and she must be sick of it.

Actually her brilliant friend Victoria Walters did feature her as a silly, egocentric actress in Victoria Wood’s Midlife Christmas where she played someone who was bloody annoying and a total pain in the neck, so she’s got it in her to get away from those warm etc parts which haunt her like the Furies. 

Have there been any sightings of Julie Walters where she played a nasty cold bitch?

This is a cross post from theartsdesk

Amongst all the musical benefits for the victims of the Haiti earthquake, one club event which took place on Wednesday night in London stands out as a small, but powerful, beacon of hope. Not because it could rival Jay Z and U2 for levels of funds raised, but because it represented levels of commitment, self-motivation and unity among the capital’s multi-ethnic youth subcultures that flies in the face of scare stories about gang violence, drugs, educational failure and all the rest of it. Raising well over £10,000 for Haitians, the entire event on Wednesday night at the club Den/Centro was pulled together in a mere three days by journalist and activist Chantelle Fiddy, and DJ Stanza of the Watford based dubstep and grime label True Tiger, and went without hitch despite featuring on its diverse bill many grime rappers and DJs who find it difficult to perform in London due to police pressure on promoters. The Arts Desk spoke to a dazed but happy Chantelle Fiddy yesterday to discuss the ramifications of the event.

JOE MUGGS: Everyone else is amazed by how quickly this came together, Chantelle, but are you? Were there any times in the last few days when you thought it wasn’t going to happen?

CHANTELLE FIDDY: Never. I wouldn’t have got myself or [youth activism organisation/magazine] Ctrl.Alt.Shift involved if I didn’t trust that somenight, True Tiger and ourselves could all pull it off. And once I set my mind to something I give it everything I’ve got as I don’t want to disappoint myself, as well as others. Having a good team around you helps too, of course.

What has been the biggest thing you’ve had to overcome? I’ve seen discussion on Twitter that suggested managers were a bigger problem than artist egos - is that true?

There were literally a very few people whose attitudes were surprising, but never the artists. We often forget how many bad decisions are made on behalf of artists, who are often none the wiser. Thankfully we were able to rely on the personal relationships all of us had with the DJs, artists, agencies and management to make this happen in just a few days. The biggest problem was sleep - I think Stanza and I managed about three hours sleep a night from Sunday to Wednesday.

Apart from the sheer magnitude of the carnage in Haiti, why do you think this has siezed the imagination of the club music community when other disasters haven’t?

bucket_rapperA natural disaster of this magnitude isn’t commonplace, and in the same way we couldn’t quite fathom the devastation cause by the Boxing Day tsunami, it reminds us of our own mortality and the helpless feelings we have at times like this. Anyone who’s seen the news or been on the internet can’t have avoided been touched by it in some way. Another answer is that some people talk, other people do. Everyone’s busy but if you get the right people, with the right work ethic and intentions, as we did, you’re able to provide people with a platform on which to offer support. Targeting people who may not necessarily be aligned to a charity or make donations makes sense too. Ultimately, that’s what Ctrl.Alt.Shift is about, breaking down conventional models to bring about global and social change. I think a lot of the acts saw they could help reach out to the clubbing community and make a difference by donating their celebrity and time, as well as money, in getting as many people as possible to realise this urgent need to get financial aid to Haiti. And we made a point of only asking for five pounds minimum donation on the door. Some people think that’s cheap, but it was deliberate, because we wanted to be inclusive of people who might not be able to give as much as you or I, to make everybody realise that they could be a part of this effort.

The urban music world in London is traditionally seen as quite factional and competitive, especially since the violence and media panic that dogged So Solid and then the grime scene; do you feel that there’s a flag to fly for the idea that the scene can actually actually more unified than people might think?

While, yes, admittedly there is an element of competitiveness, there’s always been an unspoken togetherness as urban music has been the underdog of the music world for so many years. However, with few club nights to display this togetherness and fewer and fewer media outlets, only those who really absorb themselves in the scene would see where the bonds lie. But I definitely think since the grime boys like Tinchy and Chipmunk have gained commercial success there’s been a consciously greater show made to be supportive and to shout about people’s successes. Negativity just breeds negativity after all.

Likewise the dance and urban scenes are generally seen by outsiders as materialistic and hedonistic; is this a chance to prove that they’re more than that?

Like any scene it’s different strokes for different folks. I’m into this music but I wouldn’t consider myself materialistic or hedonistic, unless three red bulls after midnight counts. That’s like saying everyone into house music lives off MDMA. There was definitely a realisation amongst all the promoters that doing this event would look great for the scene and prove yet again that this music doesn’t equate to shoot outs at dawn.

I’ve been noting lately and particularly over the last 2 years how the barriers between “dance” and “urban” appear to be dissolving - do you think that’s fair to say? And do you think this event represents that?

bucket1Definitely, I’d agree. When I did the club night Straight Outta Bethnal [a successful club that ran for two years before it was closed due to police pressure in 2006] the point was to provide a setting for grime which was both authentic and accessible to those who wouldn’t go to a strictly grime rave, which lets face it can prove daunting. But to get the fashion set and newbies in we mixed up the music over different floors. Around this time the VICE pub [the Old Blue Last in Shoreditch, owned by VICE magazine] opened too and they did a similar thing, heavily supporting grime as well as every weird and wonderful genre under the sun. With it proving very difficult to throw strictly grime nights in London it became the norm to mix it up. This was when the scenes really started to cross-polinate, with MCs hooking up with producers they might not have otherwise. On the flipside grime producers were seeing the commercial viability of these tunes. Why lose all the MCs to dance producers if you can produce a money-maker too? The rave for Haiti felt to be like a real snap shot of what’s going on in grime, dubstep, indie electro, drum and bass and the rest right now. Call me greedy but in terms of what I hear on a night out, I’d much rather a bit of everything anyway.

Aside from funds for the people affected in Haiti, what do you think you can take out of this club night?

We had so many young people volunteer their services via Twitter that it doesn’t take a genius to work out that this generation want to play a role in making things better, you just need to present it in a way that’s creative, inspiring and boosts their position too. I also think once people feel they’ve been involved in making a difference they’ll look, in varying degrees, for more opportunities to do so in the future. We’ve already had loads of new members sign up to Ctrl.Alt.Shift’s website stating they’re doing so because of the rave experience. Likewise, we’re not short of artists wanting to get involved. We’ve had Tinchy Stryder, who’s one of the biggest pop stars in the country, protesting outside the Russian embassy at 8am before, so anything’s possible right?

I watched a TV adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, heard the word “parenting” and winced.  “Parenting” has become a common word since about the 1990s, but it wasn’t round much in the 1890s and it doesn’t occur in the text of The Turn of the Screw. It is a gender-neutral term that we need as our ideas of what constitutes a family have changed.   I started doubting the scriptwriter’s historical knowledge and her ear for language, and in fact the programme was a crude and sexed-up version of a famously ambiguous story. 

All right, you can end up being one of those bores who complains that a film about the Battle of Waterloo had the Kent Greys rather than the Suffolk Blues on the left flank, and the piping on their uniforms was white when it should have been yellow but there are only so many anomalies, impossibilities and anachronisms that a film or book can carry without collapsing.   Frederick Forsythe’s review of The English Patient is a classic summing up of a film getting so much so very wrong:-

We start (according to a flash-up on the screen) in October 1942 with a young man taking off somewhere in a howling wilderness of desert. Amazingly, he is flying an uncamouflaged, silver-painted Tiger Moth trainer with the registration number of a British flying club. (A minor skirmish called the Battle of El Alamein was in full flow that month in that place.)

A glamorous blonde seems to be asleep in the front seat. Within minutes he flies over the world’s most isolated German machine-gun nest, a small foxhole without any life-support system, stuck in a sea of sand miles from anywhere. But these Krauts are real aces; though they can never have seen a Tiger Moth (there weren’t any at Alamein), they recognise it at once and open up with heavy machineguns. In mid-air the bullets turn into cannon shells, leaving clusters of black flak over the blue sky. Disdaining to take evasive action, our hero is shot down.

(It’s an entertaining piece.  It may be unfair on The English Patient but I can’t say because every time I’ve tried watching it on the telly I’ve fallen asleep after 10 minutes).

The Matrix had me wondering that if you are making this elaborate scam against humanity so as to use their bodies’ heat as a power source, why choose humans out of all the mammals?  They take nine months to gestate and they grow up very slowly.  Why not use rats, which, can have five litters a year and grow to maturity in eleven weeks?  However, the film really seemed about having people jump from building to building looking cool in long black coats.

So when I caught The Road the other night, I was distracted by a statement at the beginning that some disaster – evidently natural as there are earthquakes – has killed every animal except for human beings.  Not a rat or a mouse is left.   Cockroaches would die in such cold weather, but what about the parents of the maggots that ate all the corpses that leave the skeletons that the two main characters stumble over? But they don’t come across any flies, nor mosquitoes in the pools.  Nor do they have fleas or lice in the rags they wear.  Presumably the bacteria in their digestive tracts and the mites that eat our dead cells haven’t been wiped out otherwise they wouldn’t have lasted the nine years that they have so far.  They come across one beetle, and that is meant to be a little ray of hope in an otherwise bleak world.

Anyway, The Road is Samuel Beckett meets horror films.   The Father and the Son walk from place to place scavenging, visiting the kind of houses that you know from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre would be best avoided and poking round cellars which every slasher movie warns you that you should give a wide berth.  (Those bits did have me on the edge of my seat, as the Hallowe’en films do, when you know something horrible is going to happen).  Other people represent an extreme form of stranger danger, since they are likely to be rapists, murderers or cannibals.  Everyone’s clothes and skin are filthy.

Now, it’s reasonable that the Father and the Son should be filthy, as they are vagabonds.  When they get a chance they heat up water and have a wash and hair cut.  But the cannibal groups they find, who lead more settled lives, are also filthy.  These are Americans, whose culture worships the bathroom and who despise foreign countries’ showers and plumbing.  There is no shortage of fuel – the whole terrain is covered with dead trees and felled forests.  There is no shortage of water – it’s always raining when it isn’t snowing.  They have time on their hands except when they’re hunting and torturing other human beings so why can’t they heat up some water and have a wash?  It’s not true that just because people are cannibals they don’t have standards.  There have been cannibal societies that produced fine art and oratory.

Well, on they trudge through the wasteland scavenging away, and it’s reasonably compelling, waiting for their next brief and nasty encounter with other people. There are dramatic landscapes of deserted flyovers, drunken power poles and beached ships, in every shade of grey. It’s watchable, has some effective moments of real scariness and doesn’t go on too long. Viggo Mortensen ( the Father) is good at being serious and noble, as he was as Aragorn in Lord of the Rings, and the Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is fine as well.  But all the while you know that the makers want you to think that they are dealing with elemental questions about humanity, morality, survival, fatherhood and so on.  It’s the cheap portentuousness that you get in stories set in concentration camps (eg Sophie’s Choice).

I haven’t read Cormac McCarthy’s book that the film was based on, so can’t compare the two.  Steven Poole has fun with its attempts at not sounding horror-cheesy here. The world as presented on the film is a rubbish-dump without seagulls shrieking or the smallest weed growing, or any glimpse of regenerating nature that has happened after the worst catastrophes in the history of our planet.  I did think that maybe McCarthy didn’t want to make the kind of post-apocalypse world where nature burgeons and the few remaining human beings live the simple grow-your-own life in small groups which can look attractive to the Green in many of us. The gang of kids in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome who live in an oasis and have evolved their own religion and language are having a great time, much more enjoyable than being an office drone paying the mortgage.  The destroyed world in The Road is a place where you live in fear and misery, chased by thugs and haunted by memories of happier times.  It looks like he wanted a place of hopelessness and despair but that’s a hard thing to create without falling into easy nihilism.  The film ends on a slight note of upbeat – the Boy goes with strangers and they turn out to be friends after all.  They also have a dog, the only one left in the solar system.  How it survived when there aren’t packs of cross-breeds roaming the stricken land, we are not told.

“As Lord Mandelson’s anti-piracy Digital Economy Bill begins its uncertain journey through parliament, John Tatlock investigates the music industry’s most troubled decade yet and says ’stop whining, it’s only a scratch’.”

Read the full article at The Quietus and see how Tatlock demolishes four music industry myths.

Meanwhile, The Register notes that grassroots opposition to the Bill is muted at best;

Nobody - not even those who support the Bill - is entirely happy with the procedures. Yet there is no great grassroots outpouring of opposition. While 500,000 people may have paid 79p in one week to register a protest vote for the Christmas Number One single, fewer than 500 have signed up to the Open Rights Group’s “Message to Mandelson” campaign - and some of those are supportive. We spotted one ‘Go Mandy’ from a major record label staffer and another urging his Lordship to bash the ‘freetards’.

A guest post by de Bentvueghels

Previous episode here

“When Alfonso entered Naples in 1443, he was met by a procession in which moved a large tower. Its gate was guarded by an angel, and from its top four Virtues sang to the king. This is placing Virtues in a castle container just as one might today put celery stalks or dahlias in a bowl or vase.”

George Kernodle, From Art to Theater: Form and Convention in the Renaissance. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1944, p.81.

Hitchcock’s four Virtues, understood as the components of a signature system which traverse all his works, may be defined as follows:

1) Cameo - “The indignity of being a ham is thrust upon me.” Hitchcock answer to a question about his cameo appearances in What’s My Line?, 1954.

2) MacGuffin - its self-cancelling logic where what a MacGuffin actually is, is never explained.

3) the ‘bar series’ - “The view is through the bars of the banister, and the frame is dominated by the bars in the foreground. I call this pattern of parallel vertical lines Hitchcock’s //// sign. It recurs at significant junctures in every one of his films. At one level, the //// serves as Hitchcock’s signature: it is his mark on the frame, akin to his ritual cameo appearances. At another level, it signifies the confinement of the camera’s subject; we might say that it stands for the barrier of the screen itself. It is also associated with sexual fear and the specific threat of loss of control or breakdown.” William Rothman, Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1982, p. 33.

4) A combination of the preceding three effects, which when combined produce the delayed time bomb of a master saboteur - a fragmentation bomb which never stops exploding in the consciousness of what we might call the global media network. See Tom Cohen’s Hitchcock’s Cryptonymies, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis and London, 2005, for Hitchcock as arch saboteur.

Alfred Hitchcock appears as the mystery guest in What’s My Line?

“[M]oving shows devoid of either action or dialogue, or at least only employing their aid by way of supplementing and explaining the living picture.”

A Ward’s definition of a pageant, quoted by Robert Withington, English Pageantry: An Historical Outline, 2 vols. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, London, 1918, I, p. 3.

This is a crosspost from MoreMediaNonsense

The latest Coen brothers film really is a tour de force but it’s as bleak as you can imagine and definitely not a feel good experience.

The story concerns a middle aged Mid West physics professor and the disasters that beset him seemingly out of the blue in mid Sixties Minnesota. The action is all set within the local Jewish community so much so that the only non-Jews are peripheral (sometimes red neck) outsiders.

The customs and ceremonies of immigrant Jewish life are observed with (to put it mildly) a jaundiced and humorous eye to such an extent that it could be said to approach mockery. Think Woody Allen on turbo charge.

But this is also a philosophical and intellectual study on religious belief, causality and morality at an engaging and complex level. Its also (delightfully) a meditation on Jefferson Airplanes’ “Somebody to Love”.

Quite a film in other words. Definitely one to see.

See also here, here and here for some of the UK reviews.

A guest post episode by de Bentvueghel

Episode two is here

In his work of theory-fiction, Pacific Wall, Jean-François Lyotard describes an imaginary notebook found in the foreign manuscript acquisitions of the University of California. He reproduces the text of the notebook and comments that it is “little more than a collection of syntactical and lexical approximations, far-fetched metaphors, unexpected linkings, gross errors and misconceptions, and delirious reasonings.” It includes a discussion of Ed Kienholz’s Five Car Stud, a piece with some similarity to the one currently on show at the National Gallery, The Hoerengracht. Similar in that both installations take place in cave-like enclosed spaces lit by light sources which form an integral part of the exhibit.

Here are excerpts from the notebook:

Second Group [of axioms]

Empire is indefinite expansion. A limes or limit to Empire is set, for the time being only, by exhausting your forward flight and your concern for exclusive appropriation.

Third Group [of axioms]

Some “nations” don’t succeed in settling down into the Empire and are put on reservations. They’re displaced to border areas or destroyed.

[...]

If the heavy tent of dark green canvas, with lighting independent of daylight illumination, wasn’t a trap for visitors, then at least it turned out to be an impasse - since you were required to go out the same way you got in. As big as a circus tent, this dead-end was just as moveable. The crime it concealed could be set up anywhere. So that in a short time its moveable nature made it an act of revenge on an imperial American Roman Germanic name by wandering nations. This totally contradicted its contents - a tableau representing a “final solution” of the Negro (migratory) question.

[...]

So you tried to get closer to the scene to make it out. When you did find out it was too late - since you were part of it now. The light from the rear came from converging headlights of a number of cars stopped in a circle.

But you couldn’t misunderstand the clothed plastic sculptures Kienholz placed at the convergent point of your vision and the headlights: the three men who held the Negro spread-eagled and the fourth concentrating on cutting off the black man’s cock couldn’t even for a second be taken for real. Their immobility went beyond what’s seen in ordinary tableaus because, declining to continue the deception, where a victim’s belly would be expected, Kienholz placed a rectangular pan, a pan in whose black water individual letters floated, letters (read American English here) which should occasionally drift into position to spell out N-I-G-G-E-R. The liquid was fed by nothing less than the man’s black cock trussed up like a terrifying faucet by the left hand of the castrator, who with his right hand sank in a knife. For Mrs. Greenstone and her friend, the letters swirling in the stream of liquid falling into the pan seemed to evoke some elusive feeling about black nationhood, a thing white imperialism in the tableau was unsuccessfully trying to eradicate.

They [Mrs Greenstone and her daughter] imagined, instead of the six letters swirling around in the water of the pan, that there were four different ones making the word JUDE. And that Klan disguises were replaced by SS uniforms. They looked on the visitors as monsters, carefully monitoring their reactions, secretly watching their emotions - visitors like the well-dressed mother who gathered her children together quickly and pulled them to the exit so they wouldn’t understand the horror. Or like the young couple who just stood there looking dazed. Or the old man they suspected of feigning attention better to conceal a Nazi past. In their minds, whoever approached was guilty. Each had the tell-tale mark of crime laid bare, a crime that spread continuously from the scene in question to visitors through the intermediary of a history that wasn’t just the history of the destruction of American blacks or even European Jews but was as well the history of an Empire that could be victorious over itself only at the price of destroying all those partial drives known as minorities.

[...]

So what were our friends doing when they cast their suspicions on these visitors? Weren’t they themselves involved in the perpetuation of imperialist delirium? It’s now they who, at the heart of a new but continuing Empire, expel the Germans around them from the Empire, thus relegating them to the status of a minority contained at its borders. They perfect Western Caesarism at the very moment they discover it everywhere. They’ve reinstalled a repulsive whiteness.

[...]

Pimp, whore, customer: these three roles set up their stage, their theatricality, their voluminousness on uninhabitable white surfaces.

[...]

Oh, the familiar jealousy theme! laughed the Greenstone girl and Andrea, quite unimpressed. In fact, yes - their friend insisted.

He also maintained that this is proof the time is ripe to write a history of drives, a history more cruel, less exact, but more precise than a history of interests or trivial enthusiasms. Faced with Jewish wandering, not every Empire contains in its backlogs of jealousy a Final Solution. For it to go to this extreme its métèques (here, Jews) must quietly refuse to allow themselves to be defined as minorities, even oppressed ones. They have to persist in calling themselves a chosen people of the Kingdom, an Elect against which claims of Empire will now seem forever ludicrous. It’s possible this Empire also wants to be a Kingdom. Sheer deception. So this strange impulse has to be added to the pot, that the Empire declare itself marked by election and destined to be Kingdom. When Titus ordained the Diaspora, the political idea hadn’t come that far yet. This is because Titus wasn’t a Christian and Rome didn’t yet have the terrorist claim of being simultaneously Empire and prefigured Kingdom of the Elect.  Final Solutions require a strange conjunction, election and conquest. The Biblical model of election doesn’t give you a thing to conquer, only a request to be heard. And you don’t receive Empire. The exclusiveness this people would like to deserve is one of justice, one that doesn’t expropriate anyone. A possible implication of this exclusivity is that a people remain forever métèques.

It seemed to us that Nazism’s sole motive was to wipe out that election and appropriate its advantages for itself. It wasn’t enough just to conquer. They had to feel destined to conquer by an elective and transcendent force, the only power to be able to get these humiliated Franks back on their feet.  The threat of an exclusive promise to others had to be extirpated so the narration of an incomparable blood would become credible. We know the consequences of that deception.*

* Merlin Vachez’s notebook ends here

Jean-François Lyotard, Pacific Wall. Translated by Bruce Boone, The Lapis Press, Venice, California, 1990. First published as Le mur du pacifique, Éditions Galilée , Paris, 1979.

Here is a list of Mike Leigh-directed films which I have watched and, to one degree or another, liked:

–High Hopes
–Life Is Sweet
–Naked
–Secrets & Lies
–Topsy-Turvy
–Vera Drake

Here is a Mike Leigh-directed film which I watched for ten minutes on DVD, stuffed into the Netflix envelope and mailed back:

–Happy-Go-Lucky

Can anyone convince me I made a major mistake?

A guest post by de Bentvueghels

Previous episode here

“De Hooch’s grotto-scenes are strange interiors with tombs or remnants of ancient sculptures, often with female bather, and always with a view out of the mouth of the cave into the distance. They are difficult to describe as landscapes, being interiors; the feeling is weird and moody, rather opposing the rationalism of his landscapes.”

James D. Burke, Jan Both: Paintings, Drawings and Prints. Garland Publishing Inc., New York and London, 1976, p. 54, n. 23.

Disconcertingly the Kienholz exhibition at the National Gallery has a fairy tale or Christmasy aura to it, as if, standing at the threshold to the cavernous darkness where only twinkling as well as stationery red lights are visible, one might expect to see scenes of jovial merriment and child-like wonder were one to advance any further.

Such is not the case, however, as Ed and Nancy Kienholz in their work The Hoerengracht [Whore's Canal] have recreated a scene from Amsterdam’s red light district, showcasing prostitutes sitting or standing for prospective clients, either behind the glass of their uncurtained room-windows or on the street itself. The work was created between 1983 and 1988 and has been shown at a number of museums and galleries before now taking up residence at the National Gallery until 21 February 2010.

Cigarettes and associated paraphenalia are ubiquitous: packets of cigarettes, cigarette lighters, butt-ends in ashtrays. Some of the mannequins hold cigarettes the tips of which have been painted to simulate that they are alight. Some well-known international brands are represented (Rothmans, Pall Mall, Marlboro), and some which are obscure, possibly restricted to Holland such as Roxy cigarettes. It may be surmised that the inclusion of the latter brand was of particular interest to Ed Kienholz as it would have provided a direct link to one of his previous tableaux, Roxy’s (1961).

On a window ledge - the one that has the pair of ceramic dogs - there are three cassette tapes, only one of which can be identified, in this case a recording of Olivia Newton-John’s If Not For You (song-writer Robert Zimmerman).

However, it is not Olivia Newton-John that one listens to as one peers into the rooms slowly absorbing ephemeral details, rather the radios, two or three - it was not quite clear, are tuned to London November 2009 and Lady Gaga’s Poker Face and quite possibly a discussion on education on BBC radio 4? As if the exhibition were not already sufficiently disorientating suddenly one is confronted with the sensation that one is here and now in the present - a particularly clever if perhaps not entirely intentional ploy of the artists to remind participants of the show of the contingent nature of what they are experiencing. Or the suspended tableau requires the presence of an audience to set it in motion - patchwork art carrying patchwork people?

Here is Jacques Brel singing Dans Le Port d’Amsterdam, followed by Iggy Pop and the Stooges - The Passenger - which seems an appropriate place to end this tour.

Guest post by Jon D

Dead at the age of 79.

For many he’ll doubtless be remembered as ‘The Equalizer’. British horror movies cultists will recall him as DS Howie resisting the charms of Britt Ekland in ‘The Wicker Man’. But I’ll remember him most fondly for a role most obituarists seem to have entirely overlooked (with honorable exceptions): Nev the privatised binman in the mid-90s BBC comedy drama ‘Common As Muck’– a hidden classic of British TV that didn’t get the audience it deserved. Great ensemble acting with amazing writing. Funny, often moving, but without sentimentality. Perhaps not clicking immediately into any comfortable genre pigeonhole, it was canceled after a second series that was years in coming.