This is surely one of the most ambitious lists currently on Wikipedia. Personally, I’d be more interested in seeing a list of all the films that begin with a montage of “real life” footage before segueing into the fictional world of the film. I watched Dark Blue earlier this week, and in that, the director, Ron Shelton, used the footage of Rodney King being assaulted\beaten\subdued by the Los Angeles Police Department to open his thriller about corruption in the LAPD. There must be hundreds more (I’m fairly sure JFK opens with “real” footage, and of course Stone weaves a great deal of archive material into the body of the film).

Another interesting list would be a list of novels directly inspired by actual historical events. I was thinking about this while listening to an audiobook of James Ellroy’s American Tabloid because I found myself trying to figure out who was fictional and who wasn’t. There are thousands of historical novels, of course, but I’m thinking specifically of novels that build themselves around recognisable “events” or “points” in history (The Cold Six Thousand, the sequel to American Tabloid, opens just after news breaks that John F. Kennedy has been assassinated). I can’t find a list that does what I want, though, and I’m not in the frame of mind to make one. But books and films that use historical events (or narratives) as texture, or as structuring elements, are on my mind.

Over the last few weeks I’ve mean mulling a little excessively on the question of verismilitude and art, and I need to mull some more, form up some thoughts.

I have mulled some more, but not enough. Will return to this in the future.

[Kenneth] Clark made it possible for a chap in a pub to appreciate Francis Bacon, and Reich-Ranicki for a hausfrau to persuade her neighbour in the butcher’s queue that Günter Grass was a more important writer than Hermann Hesse. Kenneth Tynan and Pauline Kael added repertoire tips and quality control to their remit. Their successors attempt to mediate between a bewildered public and the debate about conceptual art. The role of the critic is in constant evolution, a work in progress, a creative necessity.

Yet, in 2010, the critic is an endangered species, almost a write-off. The onslaught of the internet on newspaper economics has ravaged arts journalism. Across the United States, from Miami to Seattle, newspapers have slashed budgets and sacked critics, leaving the New York Times, which is similarly under siege, wielding an unhealthy near-hegemony.

In Britain, the Telegraph and the Times cut review fees to ￡40 and ￡60, a disincentive for all but the utterly desperate and the academically tenured (who else would write all night for the price of a cheap pair of shoes?). The mechanism for succession has gone to rust. The average age of classical music reviewers on the nationals is over 55; theatre critics are not much younger. Atrophy is setting in.

After talking for a time about people laid off and dwindling coverage of the arts in mainstream media, Lebrecht also recommends a couple of interesting websites: theartsdesk.com (all and electricsheepmagazine.co.uk. Both are worth a visit. This seems to be the natural trajectory for criticism to take, although some will ask where the money comes from, how they can remain sustainable. Personally, I think they’ll all just make a salary selling t-shirts and taking voluntary donations (I’m half-joking).

Lebrecht sounds a positive note in his final paragraphs:

How can we rescue criticism from the brink of extinction? Some of the best minds in the arts are turning over that question without, at present, much by way of a solution. My feeling is that we have to start from small beginnings, training a new generation of critics in the traditional method and hoping that they will show the resourcefulness to achieve continuity. The New Statesman’s search for a young music critic will be widely supported — and not only in this country, as the arts are a global business, but one that, unlike the banks, will never be too big to fail.

The critic of tomorrow will probably tweet a first review in the interval and submit a voice file from the top deck of the homeward-bound bus. The tempo has quickened and the technology has got slicker, but the imperative of bearing independent witness to the arts is unchanged. When the last critic signs off, it will be curtains for civilisation.

Yes. (Although you can argue “tomorrow” is already here.)

There have been times in the history of mankind when the earth seems suddenly to have grown warmer or more radioactive. Well, I don’t put this forward as a scientific proposition, but the fact remains that three or four times in history man has made a leap forward that would have been unthinkable under ordinary evolutionary conditions. One such time was about the year 3,000 BC, when quite suddenly civilisation appeared, not only in Egypt and Mesopotamia, but in the Indus Valley. Another was in the late 6th century BC, when there was not only the miracle of Ionia and Greece — philosophy, science, art, poetry, all reaching a point that wasn’t reached again for 2000 years — but also in India: a spiritual enlightenment that has perhaps never been equalled. And aother was around about the year 1100. It seems to have affected the whole world — India, China, Byzantium; but its strongest and most dramatic effect was in Western Europe where it was most needed. It was like a Russian spring. In every branch of life — action, philosophy, organisation, technology — there was an extraordinary outpouring of energy, an intensification of existence.

The whole series can be found on YouTube, which is excellent. And here is the video that corresponds with the passage I quited above.:

There is a time for single malt, and a time for rough Swedish vodka; a time for exquisitely marinated steak (cooked on a flaming barbecue in a USAF base in South Korea, preferably — but that’s another story), and a time for canned peaches. Films are similar: some are like single malts, others like canned peaches. Tonight I felt like a can of peaches, my brain too weary, too fatigued with nonsense, to appreciate anything else, and so I watched The Crazies, a film about a sherrif struggling to survive as the town he serves goes insane around him. It was good, in its way, and ended on an pleasingly open-ended note (there might be sequels?). Also, it starred Timothy Olyphant, an actor best known (I would imagine) for playing Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood. There was someone else from Deadwood in it, too, but I’ve forgotten their name (one of the dope “fiends”).

I feel the same about photography, in a way, right now. Part of it may just be my own personal lack of inspiration; but a bigger part, I sense, is an unwillingness to immerse myself in photography of a really high quality. There is an issue with consumption, not just creation. Music, yes; literature, yes; but photography, no. Sometimes a fine single malt is great; but sometimes you just want to get drunk; and at other times, alcohol just doesn’t appeal at all. With photography, for me, I either want to be completely inebriated by what I see, or just not see anything; I’m not in the mood to savour a huge amount of subtlely constructed, delicately composed, deeply meaningful work. This troubles me, at moments, but not enough to want to do anything to remedy the situation, most probably because I feel very contented. So, other obsessions are to be found. Painting, maybe. Or carpentry. Or BMX biking. We will see.

Exploring today: found some delicious speakers, but decided they were probably too expensive; also found some very cheap in-the-ear headphones, but decided they were probably too cheap; bought some apples and had a bizarre exchange with the apple-seller; was told by a lady in a DVD store that I was pretty, then told her that she was pretty too (there was blushing); tasted a nice syrupy cake; wandered around and thought about whether or not I needed a digital camera (pretty sure I don’t, but…); met some amusing, lively people at work, one of whom used to study in Xi’an (“I miss the food”, she said); chatted with a wise lady who remembered being given candy by US soldiers when they liberated Germany (and last night that same lady talked about how once, while living in Paris and missing home, she had listened to Gounoud’s Faust; her description of some of the closing scenes — the depiction of The Brocken? — has stuck in my mind). More exploring tomorrow.

If a camera is within prison walls we should always be asking; How did it get there? What are/were the motives? What are the responses? I consider the photograph as social document, therefore, what social and political powers are at play in a photograph’s manufacture? And, how is knowledge, related to those powers, constructed?

It’s implicit, I think, that these are questions we could — should, even — direct at all photography, not just the photography of “sites of incarceration”.

On the first day of this fresh new decade, I read something that lodged itself in my mind and promptly began gnawing:

[…] I think photographers are talking pretty much to each other with their photos these days. Does anyone else really even notice photography these days, much less whether it is good or bad? […]

I think other people do notice photography, and I think that some will notice the aesthetics, others, the content, and others still, an product of the two. But I do wonder if a large amount of contemporary photography (and likewise contemporary poetry, contemporary fine art, etc.) is created solely for appreciation within a quite insular, self-contained, elitist milieu.

Today Picasso’s own face is leathery, seamed and wrinkled, illuminated by big dark eyes which sometimes sparkle but more often stare off into the distance. He is old and fat, but still powerful: his chest and belly, bristling with white, goatlike hairs, are mahogany-tanned. At 68, he still dominates the whole canvas of modern art.

The internet, today, is full of stars.

A portrait of Pablo Picasso by Gjon Mili. (Source)

No one really expected Painter Henri Matisse to bother to answer the attack that British Royal Academy President Sir Alfred Munnings had made on his work (TIME, May 9). But last week Matisse did. Sitting up in bed in his suburban apartment at Nice to talk to a TIME correspondent, the 79-year-old master gently contradicted Horse-Painter Munnings’ views on modern art in general.

“If you want to paint a tree,” gruff Sir Alfred had snorted at a recent R.A. banquet, “for heaven’s sake make it look like a tree!” Matisse’s La Forêt (in London’s Tate Gallery) did not look a bit like trees to Sir Alfred. Argued Matisse, why should it? Such “material truth,” he said, might as well be left to photography. The truth modern painters like himself are after is something else again; it “comes out of the mind of the artist… the sentiment of an artist moved by the spectacle of nature.”

“There are always two kinds of paintings,” Matisse went on. “First there is the kind that introduces something new. Such paintings begin by being worthless but eventually they ascend the heights of value. Then there are those which are accepted at the outset because they offer nothing new but simply flatter the public taste. They are later found to be worthless.”

The story of Matisse’s own career clearly made him an example of the first kind of painter. Could he think of an opposite example? “Charity commands me,” said Matisse with a smile, “not to name any artists who do paintings of the second sort.”

The original Time article is here. And a little more background:

[Sir Alfred] Munnings was elected president of the Royal Academy of Art in 1944, a post he held until 1949. His presidency is most famous for the departing speech he gave in 1949, attacking modernism. The broadcast was heard by millions of listeners to BBC radio. An evidently inebriated Munnings claimed that the work of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso had corrupted art. He recalled that Winston Churchill had once said to him, “Alfred, if you met Picasso coming down the street would you join with me in kicking his… something something?” to which Munnings said he replied “Yes Sir, I would”.

Wonderful.

This great evil — where’s it come from?  How’d it steal into the world?  What seed, what root did it grow from?  Who’s doing this?  Who’s killing us, robbing us of life and light, mocking us with the sight of what we mighta known?  Does our ruin benefit the earth, aid the grass to grow and the sun to shine?  Is this darkness in you too?  Have you passed through this night?

Dialogue from Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line

The first Terrence Malick film I ever saw was The Thin Red Line, the second, the The New World; and after I had seen those I was left wishing for there to be more: more swaying grass, more dithering sunlight, more soulful characters, more elegiac dialogue.  Malick’s films mesmerised me, and it was jarring to wake from the trance.

Up until a week or so ago, Days of Heaven was a film I had heard about but never seen, a mysterious entry on Malick’s filmography that I hadn’t been able to find in the local DVD store.  But then I found it, and now I have seen it, and I’m glad I did as it is a beautiful and inspired me to find fields to photograph.  The still below, the first in what will be an ongoing series of film stills, is from a scene towards the end of the film.  Thinking about these films brings a poem by Ezra Pound to mind:

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Life does not slip so much as ebb and flow in Malick’s films; and the grass does get shaken, does sway, if only a little.

Fields of corn in Days of Heaven.

Saint Catherine’s Monastery (Greek: Μονὴ τῆς Ἁγίας Αἰκατερίνης) lies on the Sinai Peninsula, at the mouth of an inaccessible gorge at the foot of Mount Sinai in Saint Katherine city in Egypt.  The monastery is Greek Orthodox and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  According to the UNESCO report (60100 ha / Ref: 954) and website hereunder, this monastery has been called the oldest working Christian monastery in the world — although the Monastery of Saint Anthony, situated across the Red Sea in the desert south of Cairo, also holds claim to that title.

[…]

The oldest record of monastic life at Sinai comes from the travel journal written in Latin by a woman named Egeria about 381–384.  She visited many places around the Holy Land and Mount Sinai, where, according to the Hebrew Bible, Moses received the Ten Commandments from God.

[…]

The monastery library preserves the second largest collection of early codices and manuscripts in the world, outnumbered only by the Vatican Library.  Its strength lies in Greek, Coptic, Arabic, Armenian, Hebrew, Georgian, and Syriac texts.  The Codex Sinaiticus, now in the British Library, left the monastery in the 19th century for Russia, in circumstances that are now disputed.

Dust and sand, time and history: these things have been all been on my mind quite a lot of late.

Many of Lemoine’s photographs evoke, for me, the end of the world (or could it be the edge of the world, the fringe: world’s-end?); even the photograph on her site of the singers — a choir, I think — feels ominous, somehow.  She is photographing in the present, visualising the future; and the futures artists visualise are always conditioned by how they interpret the present.  I would like to know more about Lemoine, about her philosophy, her hopes, her fears.

This photograph certainly suggests a journey towards closure, a trip to the edge of somewhere, something:

And when I saw this photograph my first association, strangely, was On the Beach, (a purely arbitrary association, a connection of “sand” and “beach”, as I’ve not actually read Shute’s novel):

My second association was The Quiet Earth, the opening scene of which feature (if my memory is correct) a beach, and waves.  A cataclysm has occurred, and only a few people have survived.  There is heat (a very Ballardian heat, now I think about it) and loneliness, the narrative tracking a survivor’s exploration of his newly barren world.  Lemoine’s photographs do not always depict a barren world, but they do hint at approaching cataclyms.

(On the subject of films about the end of the world, Knowing, the latest film by Alex Proyas, director of the exquisite Dark City, is a mighty thing, and I can’t understand why it didn’t receive better reviews when it was first released.  Well, I can, in a way, but still: what flaws it may have are greatly outweighed by its ambition, its ideas.  If you get the chance, watch it: it is all that good science fiction films should be, but so frequently are not.)

[…]  Woody Allen wooed his wife’s adopted daughter, and may well be a child molester.  But I think Bananas makes me laugh.  Mike Tyson is, among other things, a convicted rapist.  But I had not lived until I saw him demolish Trevor Berbick.  And so on…

I guess I could peel these people out my life.  I guess I could stop seperating [sic] art from men.  Regrettably, I think, I wouldn’t be left with much art worth admiring.  Sometimes awful people, do beautiful things [sic].  One doesn’t cancel the other.  And mourning the loss of human life, does not excuse the sins of that life.

People who don’t feel that way are welcome to their opinions.  I’m not sure why they insist that others share them.

I think the first time I had to grapple with this was when I studied T. S. Eliot at university.  I had read Eliot since secondary school, but during that time I had had only a passing awareness of his darker side.  It was while I was preparing papers on Eliot for my literature degree, a time when I was looking harder and closer at his work, and at the life behind the work, than I had ever previously looked, that I saw sides of the man (the man who was also the poet) that I found abhorrent.  At that time, young and full of fire (for reference, I am older, now, but still very fiery), I wanted my essays to critically eviscerate Eliot, to lay out on A4 paper all of the nastinesses I’d been told (told, in some cases, by critics who quite possibly had their own personal nastinesses lurking in the background) about this complicated man, this famous poet.  I wanted to tear into him because something about what he was, something about his beliefs, his ideologies, made me angry.

And yet the poetry and the drama (and even, at moments, the literary criticism) still stirred me, still provided me, on a daily basis, with new and powerful ways of seeing and feeling and thinking.   The literature created by T. S. Eliot has been a lodestone in my life, much of what I read or see or make pointing back, in some way, to that rock.  (And here it might be worth noting that the name of this blog, “erhebung”, comes from a line in a poem by Eliot.)  The picture I saw of the man was not the picture I saw of the poet; somehow there were, and there remain to this day, two Eliots in my mind: the one, glittering and evanescent, whose art is transcendent, uplifting; the other, dark and hard, whose views are unpleasant, cruel.  I had to reconcile myself with the fact that these two Eliots were irreconcilable; or, as Coates’ might put it, I had to content myself with the reality that sometimes beautiful things are made by awful people.

(via Tiffany Jones)

If you have a few minutes to kill, you might want to take a look at an interesting audio slide show that’s just been published on the website of The New Yorker.  It’s a commentary by Peter Schjeldahl on some of the work, and some of the artists, featured in The Pictures Generation, 1974–1984, an exhibition currently showing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Many of the artists discussed were completely new to me, including Dara Bernbaum, the artist behind the Wonder Woman video still at the top of this post.

Ballard was a writer who I had never imagined dying.  I think there was something about his vision of the future, and of the here and now, that seemed to place him outside of human concerns like illness and death.  It is sad to think that we will now never see any new words from the mind of a man whose mind had such an intimate, fascinating relationship with the future.

Iain Sinclair, author of Lights Out for the Territory and London Orbital, spoke to The Times about Ballard:

“Everything that everybody else was bored by or appalled by, he was excited by.  He wasn’t really interested in English literary parties and kept himself outside that.

“He was bored by the heritage of Central London and, unlike other writers, never wanted to talk about what he was writing.  He preferred to talk about ideas, or some weird news cuttings he had brought along.

“Living out in Shepperton for so long, he was one of the first to undersand that the psychosis of suburbia was a fascinating thing to pursue.

“He loved the edges of cities: shopping complexes, motorways and airports.  He was very taken up with Watford because of its multi-storey car parks.

“Where other people were terrified by the consumerist culture he saw it as exciting, something he could manipulate, shredding it and making his own world out of it.”

Slashdot links to a site that places Ballard’s ‘Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ alongside Alfred Jarry’s ‘The Crucifixion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’ — a very interesting read.

The BBC’s obituary is here.

A long time ago I wrote short reviews of Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, and Millennium People, each of which can currently be found here, here, and here, respectively.  I’ve not read those reviews for a while, and looking at them now they seem rough around the edges, and louder, brasher, than I think they would sound if I wrote them now; but if you’ve not read Ballard and are intrigued, they might convince you to venture into his strange but unnervingly familiar urban landscapes.