Culture - August

Books read:

Tom McCarthy - 'Tintin and the Secret of Literature' (non-fiction)
Mark Twain - 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'
Richard Whittle - 'Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution' (non-fiction)
Sigmund Freud - 'The Unconscious' (non-fiction)
George Orwell - 'The Road to Wigan Pier' (non-fiction)


Films watched:

'I Stand Alone' (Gaspar Noe)
'Eyes Without A Face' (Georges Franju)
'Throne of Blood' (Akira Kurosawa)
'Dead Ringers' (David Cronenberg)


Albums played:

Loscil - 'Plume'
Loscil - 'Endless Falls'
Loscil - 'Submers'
Carbon Based Lifeforms - 'Hydroponic Garden'
Burial - 'Burial'
Burial - 'Untrue'
Rodriguez - 'Coming from Reality'
Burial - 'Rival Dealer EP'
Bob Dylan - 'Blood on the Tracks'
Bill Hicks - 'Philosophy: The Best of Bill Hicks'

Culture - July

Books Read:

Honore de Balzac - 'The Atheist's Mass' (short story)
Philip Merilees - 'Predictability: Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?' (essay)
Dilip Hiro - 'Islamic Fundamentalism' (non-fiction)
Ayn Rand - 'Atlas Shrugged'
Will Self - 'Psychogeography' (non-fiction)
James Lovelock - 'Gaia: A new look at life on Earth' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Every day is like Sunday' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'The Innocents' (Jack Clayton)
'Magnolia' (Paul Thomas Anderson)
'50 First Dates' (Peter Segal)
'Breaking the Waves' (Lars Von Trier)
'Ran' (Akira Kurosawa)


Albums Played:

Tame Impala - 'Currents'

Culture - June

Books read:

Voltaire - 'Candide'
Voltaire - 'Miracles and Idolatry' (non-fiction)
Grégoire Chamayou - 'Drone Theory' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'Super-Cannes'
Virginia Woolf - 'To the Lighthouse'
Adam Rothstein - 'Drone' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'More Than Honey' (Markus Imhoof) (documentary)
'Manhunter' (Michael Mann)
'Switchblade Romance' (Alexandre Aja)
'The Power of Nightmares' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'The Trap' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief' (Alex Gibney) (documentary)

Albums Played:

Peter Gabriel - 'Us'

Examining four-dimensional life: In Conversation with Laurence Scott

Prior to the release of his debut book 'The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Being in the Digital World', I met with Laurence Scott to discuss the ideas and themes that inspired and shaped his thinking.

Read my review of the book here.

MJ
Jean Baudrillard famously said ‘we live in an age of more and more information and less and less meaning’ – what I sense you are saying in your book is that this information takes on new meanings that can only have real resonance with those living within this four-dimensional realm. How far would you see your idea of the ‘four-dimensional human’ building upon Baudrillard’s ‘hyper-reality’ or Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’, or do you think they are now quite outdated?

LS
I think that all of those philosophers who were getting more and more aware of increasing mediatisation were really on-the-money; my book is just a hyperbolic version.

Where I really love Baudrillard is in the image of the desert space, that is a great metaphor for this really strange blankness... he saw the desert space as a big projection screen onto which we, and America particularly, project an image of itself. The desert is one of the most potent images of contemporary life.

MJ
I thought that was a really interesting section... particularly regarding the Google Mapping of the desert. I read recently that they are now considering mapping part of the bottom of the ocean. They’re almost creating in reality that short Jorge Luis Borges piece ‘On Exactitude in Science’ in which the professional geographers create a map to exact scale of the territory and covers the entire area.

LS
I think that’s a new lament now actually, but look back at the Romantics against the material brutality of industrialisation for the loss of the pastoral. In a world of service industries it’s enough for us to sense this in the categorisation and slicing up of everything; we see a marked increase in that in terms of our loss of the pastoral.

MJ
Throughout the book you adopt the ambivalent, almost celebratory, tone of J.G. Ballard. In the epilogue though you worry whether you’ve been too ‘alarmist’ and are keen to ward off the ‘Demon of Melodramatic Prophesies’ – why did you choose this strategy?

LS
I was very cautious, as I mentioned in the epilogue, because I’m at the perfect age to be very nostalgic for a kind of ‘lost world’, writing this in my early-30s. But I think that’s been true forever and so I wanted to be careful not to create another predictable lament.

But also, I hate the idea of generalising people’s experiences online, I couldn’t think of anything worse. I look around and tend to write perhaps more about the uneasiness and some of the strange anxieties mainly because that’s an easy thing to write about... ecstasy is a lot harder to grasp. But I also look around and see people really brimming with joy, connections, solace, comfort, and just pure wit... I know a lot of the stuff I read online really enriches me.

So there couldn’t be one single moral guide and it isn’t even that interesting a proposition.

MJ
I suppose the success of the book for me lies in that you aren’t taking a firm moral standpoint. Nicholas Carr’s book ‘The Shallows’ as an example - a good book, but there’s almost the increasingly resurgent cry of the neo-Luddite about it.

This leads to another question – the sensation of Google stifling particularity or the presumption of original thought. Do you see the creative arts as facing a real dilemma in terms of how they incorporate the digital dimension? Might we see (or are we already seeing) a heavy reliance on nostalgia and pre-Internet time periods?

LS
Yeah, that’s a really good question. There was a section of the book, which I didn’t end up including, looking at dramatic irony. I was thinking that you could define dramatic irony as something’s ‘being on stage’ and another thing’s ‘being off stage’, that are loaded with meaning. It’s all about the imbalance of knowledge; if everyone is disclosed how do you get these levels and that’s a big part of where we get tension from.

I just wrote a review of ‘Unfriended’... I found it really interesting because what they did was to make the connectivity the drama, whereas people had been saying something like ‘Romeo and Juliet’ would never have happened if they’d had cell-phones because they could’ve just texted each other!

So digital life collapses a lot of dramas, but with ‘Unfriended’ the horror was that everyone was being pulled closer and closer together and being forced to reveal things about each other. That’s been one of the first examples where I’ve seen a creative dramatisation of this claustrophobia and breathlessness.

But it is a huge problem, you can write any line down as a writer, Google it and find out it may already have been said; it is the dictionary of absolutely everything!

MJ
From what you were saying about ‘Unfriended’, it just reminded me of a Japanese horror film from a few years ago ‘Pulse’ which I found really intriguing... it reflected the generation of young Japanese becoming hermit-like and living entirely through, at that time, the very new technology of the internet.

LS
I think a commenter on the article mentioned that it was derivative of ‘Pulse’.

Regardless, that hermitically-sealed room will be where the future drama will come from and the horror genre is really good at that because the big irony of [‘Unfriended’] is that whilst they are apparently all together when, as it were, the blade hits the skin, there’s no one actually there to help. I’d say the artists of the present have to deal with the intense melancholy.

But that isn’t altogether that new when you think about the 19th century emotions and the rise of modernity and people being gathered together in cities and the atomisation of that.

MJ
Just as the Camp Grounding slogans such as ‘the most important status we’ll update is our happiness’ would have meant nothing to the original boy scouts, my sense while reading the book was that no one born today as very much a ‘digital native’ would grasp its investigatory quality or forensic examination given that all this is just their world/their normal, would you agree?

LS
I’ve taught bits of this to students in their early-20s and they seemed to totally get the ironies of it... anyone younger, I’m not sure what they’d make of it, maybe it does rely on at least a 1980s-childhood just to get a sense of what we’re missing that they never had. Though they must have different fantasies about where they get their escape from or where they get their sense of peace, isolation or remoteness.

MJ
The book refers to the Savile scandals – ‘the broader cultural mood that feels the proximity of its past, its accessibility, a sense that it has been preserved for our moral re-evaluation’... do you see this as something that can only continue now, especially post-Snowden, in an age where anonymous apps are targeting young people under the auspices of offering privacy?

LS
That was quite a careful theory I put forward. With digital life there is the sense that nothing is ever really lost, things leave traces and old crimes deserve to be reconsidered and morally re-evaluated.

The flip side of that, where there isn’t actually grotesque criminal activity involved, is this relentless presence of the past in peoples’ lives. All this tainting of Hollywood actors who you’ve quite liked and then you hear they’ve done something in the past; it’s almost as though this has been a piece of radiation at the bottom of the sea leeching stuff out.

It does give a strange sense that we’re hauling our pasts behind us all the time and asked to be accountable, not necessarily in a sensational way, but the way nothing can be off-the-cuff, there can be no such thing as misspeaking.

Remember that beautiful time when you could wake up feeling a bit icky about what you might’ve said the night before at a party, whereas now everything is on record. When I think about that too much that’s when I get dreams of desert-scapes..!

MJ
I get the impression now as well that this ‘haulage of the past’ is directly related to the imbalance of demographics, the ‘grey generation’ that have saturated our cultural lives with their produce... the Rolling Stones constantly on tour, that sort of thing.

LS
It is incredible. But that’s the real oedipal thing isn’t it? That’ll be the big affect to deal with, the simulacrum of everything being a copy of something else...

MJ
People like Umberto Eco and Baudrillard were writing about the Disneyland culture and the simulacrum of that... the problem is that this was perhaps only at one or two removes from ‘the real’ whereas now, like you say in the book, there’s almost this endless hall of mirrors of replication.

LS
I agree, and there’s a dreamy ‘wonderland’ quality to it, but at the same time, cutting through all that is quite a brutal solidification in terms of privacy and anonymity.

MJ
Early on in the book you touch on the internet’s early promotion as an egalitarian realm free from hierarchy and property power. I wonder how you see that as having fared in light of the Occupy movement that you suggest was stalled by a lack of progressive movement.

Also, the Arab Spring which was lit by the touch paper of social media but quickly dissipated under the very three-dimensional pressures of control, ideology and violence?

LS
We shouldn’t be too surprised when utopian visions don’t quite pan out how we wanted them to! It is quite stark that the manifesto was a kind of disembodiment, a move away from the corporeal self, and what’s happened is that it’s been literally incorporated.

The students I teach and those younger are coming up with the sense that they’re mini-corporations who have their own publicity departments, PR departments, when they study abroad they have to be their own tourist board, etc. It feels as though the celebrity culture of the 90s and 00s was setting us up for this, teaching us what celebrity-dom means and allowed us to then transplant that. I wonder whether the idea of celebrity has been eroded because everyone has that possibility now...

MJ
I’m sure it’s due to the celebrity culture of the 90s morphing into the ‘celebrity of everybody’ in the 00s with reality TV as the vanguard...

LS
And everyone’s meeting in a strange middle where an aspect of celebrity is now revealing the domestic space, and I wonder at what point in the algorithm is it decided that this is where they’ll share a child’s birthday party or whatever...?

MJ
The economic claustrophobia you describe, whereby it seems you can’t do or buy anything without fuelling or legitimising forces we might otherwise object to... do you get the sense that this tacit knowledge exemplifies our personal insignificance and lack of power and influence to change and assists with the growing weight of apathetic inertia?

LS
Yeah, when the best expression of morality is an economic one it’s a very dreary state of affairs! Because it relies on the fact that there is a moral competitor all the time and that isn’t necessarily the case. So unless you’d rather not buy anything and just not participate in a consumer society at all, you’re stuck!

Thinking about this in terms of just the morality of people’s ‘digital brands’, the culture of life which is its own currency – you have to get so many followers or so many ‘likes’ – there’s a real moral question to that because if we load that with value and currency then it has all sorts of ramifications on the examples I give, such as the ‘click farms’.

MJ
I found that quite astonishing. Those must surely be an incarnation of some kind of Marxian hell!

LS
It’s just so satirical! Its sweat converted to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and that constant jubilation. That’s one of the awful things about it all, this cynical commoditisation of smiles.

MJ
Reading that section reminded me of a friend of mine who worked a few years ago on helping produce an independent film. He told me that one of his tasks during the marketing stage was to sit on YouTube and refresh the trailer over and over again just to ramp up the viewing figures.

LS
Exactly. We’re living in an age where almost every technological breakthrough has been already imagined.

When you were talking about the stifling older generation – even our innovations have a retro quality to them and datedness. Captain Picard had an iPad in 1989! I remember watching The Simpsons in the 90s and them joking about picture-phones and Skype, so it’s one thing to say it’s hard to write a story that hasn’t been done before but now even our gadgets have a slight passé feel to them.

MJ
I certainly sensed that last year at the Barbican's big digital technologies exhibition. There were all these interesting futuristic displays and yet the thing you couldn't get near for the crowds were the old-school Pacman and Space Invaders arcade games machines!

There is certainly the sense though that we’ve seen all this before isn’t there? The oppression and control metamorphosing into new forms, like Edward Bernays and his ‘happiness machines’ which was all about engineering positive thought to keep the masses docile and happy through consumption.

Now we have moved on to charity as a commodity in itself with things like the ‘ice bucket challenge’ and ‘clicktivism’...

LS
Yeah I meant to write about the ‘ice bucket challenge’ actually, and the sense that other charities then had to compete to come up with something equally gimmicky to capture the viral imagination like that.

It does us a great disservice I think, there’s a lot of anxiety, the idea that we won’t be able to engage with anything unless it’s instantly amusing or we’ve already seen it before in some variation.

MJ
Charity campaigns might almost become pastiches of themselves...

LS
Don’t you think that absurdism of pouring the ice over the head does come at times when it seems increasingly oppressive? There’s a Jean-Paul Sartre novel [‘The Age of Reason’] - WWII is approaching, the Spanish Civil War has just begun, France is in complete paralysis. It’s a very melancholy novel, two lovers, in a very Sartre way, meet in a bar and they have a game where they stab each other in the hand.

There is a sense of the ‘ice bucket challenge’ being like that; this shock to the system as the purer form of sensation that we were craving in some way, or something that hadn’t been done before, having to turn to the body.

I’ve not read much of it but the book ‘My Struggle’ by Karl Ove Knaussgard... the first few pages are these descriptions of the innards of the body and imagining the organic life of the body as this vast Russian landscape... so there’s no real space anymore, even at the cellular level you had to magnify that up to get the vistas.

MJ
Do you foresee a gradual rise in wilful ascetism, a rejection of the ‘fourth dimension’? Or, as you touch on, has ascetism as a ‘thing’ or lifestyle choice already been colonised by the digital, with mindfulness podcasts and meditation apps, etc.?

LS
That’s one of the big terrors of the claustrophobia, even the exodus choice is also somehow internalised.

I think there will be, it’ll be interesting to see what people tolerate, there’s these two quite mutually exclusive strands where there seems to be this complete reliance – what would my social life be like without it? What would my business be like without it? – especially since people are becoming freelance and not embedded within the mechanisms of an institution, to survive in that milieu we’re forced to have this digital presence, even for romance.

At the same time it’s hard to find people with a pure sense of enthusiasm for it and that’s putting it too mildly – it’s hard to find someone without some degree of panic or weariness or a sense of ‘get me out of here!’

MJ
Which is amazing after something like the Snowden revelations, which were met with just a chorus of shrugs...

LS
It is about what you can bear and it’ll depend upon the next generation to see how weird they think this kind of interaction is and whether they can put up with the ghostliness of it or whether they won’t even notice.

MJ
Lastly, what do you plan on working on next?

LS
There’s a book of essays which I’ll be doing. And also a novel that I had in mind before writing this book, but it’s very inchoate at the moment.

Culture - May

Read:

Owen Jones - 'The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It' (non-fiction)
Laurence Scott - 'The Four-Dimensional Human: Ways of Living in the Digital World' (non-fiction)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - 'The Sorrows of Young Werther'
Steven E. Jones - 'Against Technology: From the Luddites to Neo-Luddism' (non-fiction)
William Shakespeare - 'The Merchant of Venice'


Watched:

'Amour' (Michael Hanake)
'Made in Dagenham' (Nigel Cole)
'Ivan's Childhood' (Andrei Tarkovsky)
'The Mayfair Set' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'The Century of the Self' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'Melancholia' (Lars Von Trier)


Listened:

Swans - 'The Seer'
William Basinski - 'Melancholia'
Ash Ra - 'New Age of Earth'
Stars of the Lid - 'The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid'

Attended:

Swans (live at the Roundhouse, Camden)
'The Merchant of Venice' (Globe Theatre, Southbank)

Culture - April

Read:
Jonathan Swift - 'A Modest Proposal'
John Gray - 'The Soul of the Marionette' (non-fiction)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The Brothers Karamazov'
Russell Brand - 'Revolution' (non-fiction)
Heinrich von Kleist - 'On the Marionette Theatre'  (short story)
Will Self - 'Shark'
Will Hutton - 'The State We're In' (non-fiction)
Nikolay Lestov - 'The Steel Flea' (short story)


Watched:
'Pineapple Express' (Judd Apatow)
'Grizzly Man' (Werner Herzog) (documentary)
'The Living Dead' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'Cropsey' (Joshua Zeman & Barbara Brancaccio) (documentary)
'Three Colours Blue' (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
'Three Colours White' (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
'Three Colours Red' (Krzysztof Kieslowski)
'Food, Inc.' (Robert Kenner) (documentary)
'The Way of All Flesh' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'Terms and Conditions May Apply' (Cullen Hoback) (documentary)


Listened:
Godspeed You! Black Emperor! - 'Asunder, Sweet and Other Distress'

Culture - March

Read:
Ray Kurzweil - 'The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology' (non-fiction)
John Gray - 'The Immortalisation Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Defeat Death' (non-fiction)
Ted Kaczynski - 'The Unabomber Manifesto - Industrial Society and its Future' (non-fiction)
Franz Kafka - 'The Complete Short Stories' (short stories)
Rene Descartes - 'Discourse on Method and Other Writings' (non-fiction)


Watched:
'All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'25 Million Pounds ' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)
'Pandora's Box' (Adam Curtis) (documentary series)
'Pulse' (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
'North by Northwest' (Alfred Hitchcock)
'Nymphomaniac' (Lars von Trier)


Listened:
Swans - 'Filth'
Disasterpeace - 'It Follows' (OST)
Tinariwen - 'Aman Iman'


Exhibitions:
'Francisco de Goya - Witches and Old Women Album' (at Courtauld Gallery)


Attended:
Tom McCarthy in conversation (at Foyles, Charing Cross Road)
John Gray in conversation with Adam Phillips (at Daunt Books, Marylebone High Street)

Culture - February

Read:

Nicholas Carr - 'The Shallows: How the Internet is changing the way we think, read and remember' (non-fiction)
Victor Verge - 'The Coming Age of Singularity' (essay)
Evelyn Waugh - 'The Loved One'
Ray Kurzweil - 'The Age of Spiritual Machines' (non-fiction)
Alan Turing - 'Computing machinery and intelligence'  (essay)
Jean Baudrillard - 'Simulation and Simulacra' (non-fiction)


Watched:

'Lost Highway' (David Lynch)
'Bitter Lake' (Adam Curtis) (documentary)


Listened:

AFX - 'Chosen Lords'
The Beatles - 'The White Album'
Swans - 'Young God/Cop'
Trent Reznor - 'Lost Highway' (OST)
Buena Vista Social Club - 'Buena Vista Social Club'
Claude Debussy - 'Images'
Joy Division - 'Still'
Transglobal Underground - 'The Best Of'
Van Morrison - 'Astral Weeks'


Theatre:

'Closer' (at Donmar Warehouse, London)
'The Nether' (at Duke of York Theatre, London)

Culture - January

Read:
Michel de Montaigne - 'Essays' (non-fiction)
Ken McGoogan - 'Fatal Passage: The Story of John Rae' (biography)
Nicollo Machiavelli - 'The Prince' (non-fiction)
Gerald Scarfe - 'Monsters' (art)
Saimon A. King - 'Accepting Reality: The University Years' (short stories)
Dave Eggers - 'The Circle'
Thomas More - 'Utopia'



Watched:



'Awakenings' (Penny Marshall)
'Nekromantik' (Jorg Buttgereit)
'Mulholland Drive' (David Lynch)
'How I Ended This Summer' (Alexei Popogrebski)
'Dallas Buyers Club' (Jean-Marc Vallee)
'Reds' (Warren Beatty)
'A Most Violent Year' (J.C. Chandor) (at PeckhamPlex, London)



Listened:
Marilyn Manson - 'The Pale Emperor'
Belle & Sebastian - 'Girls in Peacetime Just Want to Dance'
Aphex Twin - 'Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments Pt.2'



Attended:
Stewart Lee - 'A Room with a Stew' (at Leicester Square Theatre)
'Neon Lights- God's Own Junkyard', Soho

Culture - December

Read:

Primo Levi - 'If Not Now, When?'
Naomi Klein - 'This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate' (non-fiction)
John Molyneux - 'The Future Socialist Society' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'Rushing to Paradise'


Watched:

'Interstellar' (Christopher Nolan) (at PeckhamPlex, Peckham)
'Blackfish' (documentary) (Gabriela Cowperthwaite)
'Inland Empire' (David Lynch)
'Selma' (Ava DuVernay)
'The Purge' (James DeMonaco)
'Sleeper' (Woody Allen)
'The Sorrow and the Pity: Part 2 - The Choice' (documentary) (Marcel Ophüls)

John Pilger documentaries:
'The Most Powerful Politician in America'
'Nobody's Children'
'Mr Nixon's Secret Legacy'
'Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia'
'Burp! Pepsi vs Coke in the Ice Cold War'
'The New Rulers of the World'
'Stealing a Nation'
'Utopia'


Listened:

'Inland Empire (OST)' - David Lynch & various
Gazelle Twin - 'Unflesh'


Attended:

'The Institute of Sexology' (at Wellcome Collection)

Culture - November

Read:

Eric Schlosser - 'Fast Food Nation' (non-fiction)
William Gibson - 'Neuromancer'
Noam Chomsky - '9/11' (non-fiction)
Noam Chomsky - 'American Power and the New Mandarins' (non-fiction)
Samuel Beckett - 'Waiting for Godot' (screenplay)


Watched:

'Dazed and Confused' (Richard Linklater)
'The Babadook' (Jennifer Kent) (at PeckhamPlex, Peckham)
'The Corporation' (Mark Achbar & Jennifer Abbott) (documentary)
'Get On Up' (Tate Taylor) (at Greenwich Picturehouse)
'Transsiberian' (Brad Anderson)
'About Time' (Richard Curtis)
'Citizenfour' (Laura Poitras) (at Prince Charles Cinema)
'The Woman in Black: Angel of Death' (Tom Harper)
'The Sorrow and the Pity: Part 1 - The Collapse' (Marcel Ophüls)

John Pilger documentaries:
'Vietnam: The Quiet Mutiny'
'Conversations with a Working Man'
Vietnam: Still America's War'
'Guilty until Proven Innocent'
'Thalidomide: The 98 We Forgot'
'An Unfashionable Tragedy'


Listened:

Damien Rice - 'My Favourite Faded Fantasy'
Asaf Avidan - 'Different Pulses'
Asaf Avidan & the Mojos - 'The Reckoning'
Robert Plant - 'Shaken n Stirred'
Pink Floyd - 'The Endless River'


Attended:

Asaf Avidan (at Islington Assembly Hall, Islington)
Robert Plant & the Sensational Space Shifters (at Roundhouse, Camden)
We Are Z (at Tooting Tram & Social)
Noam Chomsky in Conversation (at British Academy)

Culture - October

Reading:

Charlotte Bronte - 'Jane Eyre'
Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky - 'Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media' (non-fiction)
Will Self - 'Junk Mail' (non-fiction)


Watching:

'Frontier(s)' (Xavier Gens)
'McLibel' (documentary) (Franny Armstrong & Ken Loach)
'Gone Girl' (David Fincher) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Taken'
'This Is Where I Leave You' (Shawn Levy) (at Odeon West End, London)
'Shivers' (David Cronenberg)
'La Grande Illusion' (Jean Renoir)
'The Red and the White' (Miklós Jancsó)(at Calder Theatre Bookshop)

BFI London Film Festival 2014:
'Macondo' (Sudabeh Mortezai) (at Odeon Covent Garden)
'X + Y' (Morgan Matthews) (at Odeon Covent Garden)
'A Girl Walks Home At Night Alone' (Ana Lily Amirpour) (at Odeon Covent Garden)
'Gente de Bien' (Franco Lolli) (at Odeon Covent Garden)
'The Town That Dreaded Sundown' (Alfonso Gomez-Rejon) (at Vue Leicester Square)


Listening:

Jon Hopkins - 'Opalescent'
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - 'Gone Girl' (OST)
Dearly Beloved - 'Enduro'
Royal Blood - 'Royal Blood'
Wooden Arms - 'Tide'
Brian Eno - 'Ambient 4 - On Land'
The Amazing Snakeheads - 'Amphetamine Ballads'


In attendance:

Covent Garden Comedy Club
'Antenora' (at Etcetera Theatre, Camden)
Dearly Beloved (at Windmill, Brixton)
Wooden Arms (at Old St. Pancras Church)
The Amazing Snakeheads (at Electric Ballroom, Camden)


Exhibitions:

'Witches and Wicked Bodies' - British Museum
Tracy Emin - 'The Last Great Adventure Is You' (at White Cube, Bermondsey)

Culture - September

Reading:

Albert Camus - 'The Fall'
Ernest Hemingway - 'Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises'
Guy de Maupaussant - 'The Best Short Stories'
John Gray - 'False Dawn - The Delusions of Global Capitalism' (non-fiction)
Fredy Perlman - 'The Reproduction of Daily Life' (essay)


Watching:

'The Phantom of Liberty' (Luis Bunuel)
'Wetherby' (David Hare)
'Two Days One Night' (Dardenne brothers) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'La Haine' (Mathieu Kassovitz)
'The Fog of War' (Errol Morris)


Listening:

Van Morrison - 'Astral Weeks'
Esben and the Witch - 'A New Nature'
Richard Strauss - 'Four Last Songs'
Aphex Twin - 'Syro'
U2 - 'Songs of Innocence'
Robert Plant - 'Lullaby...and the Ceaseless Roar'
Goat - 'Commune'
This Will Destroy You - 'Another Language'


In attendance:

Live flamenco at Las Tablas, Madrid
Xavier Coll - 'Masters of the Spanish Guitar' at Basilica Santa Maria del Pi, Barcelona)
Rachael Dadd at St.Pancras Old Church, London

Culture - July

Books Read:

Stanislaw Lem - 'Solaris'
Iain Sinclair - 'London Orbital' (non-fiction)
Marcus Aurelius - 'Meditations' (non-fiction)
George Bataille - 'The Story of the Eye'
Martin Empson - 'Marxism and Ecology' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Boyhood' (Richard Linklater) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'The Borderlands' (Elliot M.D. Goldner)
'Before Midnight' (Richard Linklater)
'Good Morning Vietnam' (Barry Levinson)
'Trouble Every Day' (Claire Denis)
'Norte, the End of History' (Lav Diaz) (at the ICA, London)


Albums Played:

Black Sabbath - 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath'
Black Sabbath - 'Paranoid'
Morrissey - 'World Peace is None of Your Business'
Manic Street Preachers - 'Futurology'
Family of the Year - 'Loma Vista'
Yo La Tengo - 'Fade'
Swans - 'To Be Kind'


Gigs Attended:

The Brian Jonestown Massacre (at Roundhouse, Camden)
Black Sabbath (at Hyde Park, London)

BBC Proms - BBC Philharmonic Orchestra playing Mahler (Royal Albert Hall)


Events:

Marxism Festival 2014 (at Institute of Education, Bloomsbury)

Culture - June

Books Read:

Mikhail Bulgakov - 'The White Guard'
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'Notes from Underground' (re-read)
Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The House of the Dead'
Tony Benn - 'The Benn Diaries' (single volume edition) (non-fiction)
Will Self - 'Psycho Too' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'No End' (Krzysztof Kieślowski)
'The Ploughman's Lunch' (Richard Eyre)
'The Battle of Chernobyl' (Thomas Johnson)
'The War Zone' (Tim Roth)


Albums Played:

The Orwells - 'Disgraceland'
Kasabian - '43:13'
Lana Del Rey - 'Ultraviolence'


Theatre:

'Titus Andronicus' (at Globe Theatre, London)
'Carmen' (at Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow)

Gigs:

Ollie Howell Quintet (at The Vortex Jazz Bar, Dalston)

Culture - May

Books read:

Nikolai Gogol - 'Dead Souls'
Sun-Tzu - 'The Art of War' (non-fiction)
Iain Banks - 'The Wasp Factory'
William Powell - 'The Anarchist Cookbook' (non-fiction)
Noam Chomsky - 'Interventions' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Blue Ruin' (Jeremy Saulnier) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'The Candidate' (Michael Ritchie)
'The Two Faces of January' (Hossein Amini) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'La Jetee' (Chris Marker)
'Everything you always wanted to know about sex (but were afraid to ask)' (Woody Allen)
'Concussion' (Stacie Passon) (at Cornerhouse, Manchester)
'Before Sunset' (Richard Linklater)
'Before Sunrise' (Richard Linklater)

Albums Played:

The War on Drugs - 'Lost in the Dream'
Coldplay - 'Ghost Stories'
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Revelation'
Leftfield - 'Rhythm and Stealth'
Little Dragon - 'Nabuma Rubberband'

Gigs:

Nine Inch Nails at O2 Arena, London
Nine Inch Nails at MEN Arena, Manchester

Events:

Irvine Welsh at Southbank Centre
'May 1968, Spring Revolution. A Tale of two cities' (Atlas Gallery)
'Under the influence: John Deakin and the lure of Soho' (Photographer's Gallery)
David Lachapelle - 'Land Scape' (Robilant + Voena, London)

Culture - April

Books Read:

Noam Chomsky - 'Occupy' (non-fiction)
Thomas De Quincey - 'Confessions of an English Opium Eater'
Jorge Luis Borges - 'Collected Fictions'
Jean Baudrillard - 'The Spirit of Terrorism' (non-fiction)
Joseph Conrad - 'Lord Jim'
Hunter S. Thompson - 'Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the 80s' (non-fiction)


Films Watched:

'Love and Death' (Woody Allen)
'Dead End' (Jean-Baptiste Andrea & Fabrice Canepa)
'Martyrs' (Pascal Laugier)
'Match Point' (Woody Allen)
'Barry Lyndon' (Stanley Kubrick)
'Calvary' (John Michael McDonagh) (at the Phoenix Cinema, East Finchley)
'Irreversible' (Gasper Noe)
'The Parallax View' (Alan J. Pakula)
'Candyman' (Bernard Rose)

Calvary is the Latin term deriving from 'Golgotha' which denotes the location of Jesus' crucifixion. Acknowledgement of this precursory fact should serve as an adequate primer for the dark, misanthropic narrative terrain on which John Michael McDonagh's new film unfolds.

Brendan Gleeson gives a lithic performance as a priest in a rural Irish town who is given a week to live by an unknown assailant as revenge for sexual abuse inflicted whilst a child at the hands of a separate priest. The film then proceeds to count down the seven days as Gleeson attempts to uncover his prospective assassin.

The central tenet of the film is the constant tug of war between maintaining religious faith and the atheological forces being bombarded from all sides. It serves as a reflection of a very modern crisis of faith that many must battle to reconcile in the face of so many examples of venality and greed, as personified by the pantheon of periphery characters, all of whom vary in their degrees of detestability.

Despite the serrated subject matter, there are some genuinely funny moments; and in fact, it treads the same blackly comedic path as 'In Bruges', with only slightly less success. The script is acerbic and full of bile, clearly inspired by vintage Tarantino, with lines like "I always thought anyone who signed up for the army during peace time would have to be slightly psychotic".

It is far from flawless however, there are several scenes that appear to hang quite awkwardly before dissipating into little of real value. The characters of the adulterous woman and the male gigolo are honkingly stereotypical, and provide an unfavourable counterweight from Gleeson's nuanced relationship with his suicidal daughter.

Despite its flaws, 'Calvary' is a very worthwhile watch, in that it escalates tension to a satisfying conclusion and cleverly examines the resilient faith and conviction in the Stoic individual when all that seems to surround him is a cumulus of apostasy.


Albums Played:

Philip Glass - 'The Essential Philip Glass'
Marvin Gaye - 'What's Going On'
Kraftwerk - 'Tour de France Soundtracks'
Damon Albarn - 'Everyday Robots'
Lykkie Li - 'I Never Learn'
Tune-Yards - 'Nikki Nack'


Theatre:

'12 Angry Men' at Garrick Theatre, London
'Let The Right One In' at Apollo Theatre, London


Exhibitions:

Richard Mosse: The Enclave (at The Vinyl Factory Space, Brewer Street Car Park)

A human skull lies cushioned amidst the velvet grass; a pubescent soldier sits upon a tree stump, clutching an automatic rifle with a proud resilience; camera footage paces along a dirt road passing over the body of a man left lying by the way side as perfunctory as though it were a sleeping dog.

Down beneath the Brewer Street car park, the intestinal tract of Soho, is a new video installation/photography exhibition by Richard Mosse, documenting his travels to the Democratic Republic of Congo, a country ravaged by tribal conflict and widespread poverty. To capture his images he used an outmoded infrared camera that was employed by the military to detect camouflaged combatants in the field of battle.

The effect is to create images of lysergic candy-floss pink splendour that embody the destabilising contradiction between the undeniable aesthetic appeal on the one hand, and the unsettling realism on the other.

There is a literal interpretation of the images which is that they vivify the land scorched by the blood of countless civilians spilt through angry divisions that reach back generations; any discernible root cause being long since mired in intractable discord.

There is a certain logic to the placement of this exhibition, whether by design or accident. The subterranean, heavily-urbanised setting stands in stark contrast to the expansive tracts of open grassland, agriculture and shanty town settlements that arouse in the Western observer perhaps a modicum of profound sympathy but predominantly just a hopeless ambivalence; aware as we are of the impenetrable geopolitical and tribal fissures that seem to defy any rational attempt at resolution on the part of the international community.

If Mosse's work achieves anything, it might be that it presents a simple yet radical revisualisation of a landscape saturated of any emotional registration through journalistic coverage that compresses regional turmoil into a news-friendly 'spectacle', reinforcing the intraversible gulf that persists between our lives and theirs.

Culture - March

Books Read:

The Invisible Committee - 'The Coming Insurrection' (non-fiction)
John Milton - 'Paradise Lost'
Adam Smith - 'Wealth of Nations' (non-fiction)
Neil McCormick - 'I Was Bono's Doppelgänger' (non-fiction)

This month I waded through the classic economic text 'Wealth of Nations' by Adam Smith; a challenging and absorbing tract that stands as a cornerstone of Enlightenment thinking and one from which society, often unwittingly, still draws influence.

Whilst some of the sections relating to the merits of agriculture over mercantilist policies suffer from an arcane dryness, there are some wonderfully clear-minded expositions as to the historical nature of feudal systems, trade agreements, the folly of colonialisation, the division of labour, and of money itself.

Whilst often being cited as a pivotal text in the promotion of free market economics, international trade and the movement of people, Smith is equally unambiguous regarding the negative influence of monopolies and the balance of trade falling disproportionately in the favour of affordable foreign imports. In this sense, at times it almost reads as a book seeking to legitimise left wing anarcho-syndicalist ideals as opposed to the modern age in which capital is employed chiefly in the creation of yet more capital for those few of plenty to keep from the many in want.

I was particularly struck by the following quote, that even after the 238 years since 1776, stands as a cynosure of appositeness:

'Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defence of rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all...'


Films Watched:

'Hannah and her Sisters' (Woody Allen)
'Her' (Spike Jonze) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Quartet' (Dustin Hoffman)
'Under the Skin' (Jonathan Glazer) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Sleepless in Seattle' (Nora Ephron)


Albums Played:

The Men - 'Tomorrow's Hits'
Eagulls - 'Eagulls'
Temples - 'Sun Structures'
Real Estate - 'Atlas'
Goat - 'World Music'
Elbow - 'The Take Off and Landing of Everything'
The Concretes - 'The Concretes'
Liars - 'Mess'
Foster the People - 'Supermodel'
Nine Inch Nails - 'Things Falling Apart'
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - 'B.R.M.C.'
Band of Skulls - 'Himalayan'
Mica Levi - 'Under the Skin' (soundtrack)


Gigs Attended:

Cassels + Escapists at The Shacklewell Arms, Dalston

Culture - February

Books read:

George Orwell - 'Homage to Catalonia'
Rudolf Rocker - 'Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism' (non-fiction)
Kingsley Amis - 'Lucky Jim'
Bruce Robinson - 'Withnail & I' (screenplay)
J.G. Ballard - 'The Drowned World'
Glenn Greenwald - 'How Would a Patriot Act?: Defending American values from a President run amok' (non-fiction)

Whilst large swathes of Southern England reclined beneath parasols of floodwater this month, I thought the timing too opportune to miss to dive into J.G. Ballard's debut novel 'The Drowned World'.

Written in 1962, Ballard sets out his prescient stall with eerie accuracy, telling of a world in which global warming has caused a melting of the ice caps and a catastrophic rise in sea levels, leaving the cities of the West submerged as a new aquamarine seascape in which the few survivors find themselves gradually reverting back to a kind of savage primacy.

It is fascinating, the way in which Ballard expostulates on the notion that this marine environment, the endless lagoons, archipelagos, and the feverish sun, serves as the psychological trigger for the return to deeply sublimated motives and desires within the psyche of humankind as the modern age revolves around again to a second Triassic period.

Ballard's truly exceptional prose style bursts with the effervescent imagery that would enrich all his subsequent work, and certainly you get a very definite sense that here is a fresh literary voice bursting out of the gates, teeming with an imagination that would sustain such a long and prolific writing career.


Films Watched:

'The Thin Red Line' (Terrence Malick)
'My Beautiful Laundrette' (Stephen Friers)
'Groundhog Day' (Harold Ramis)
'Annie Hall' (Woody Allen)


Albums Played:

Mark McGuire - 'Along the Way'
Eluvium - 'Nightmare Ending'
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - 'Let Love In'
Led Zeppelin - 'Led Zeppelin II'
Portishead - 'Third'
St. Vincent - 'St. Vincent'


Exhibitions:

David Lynch / William S. Burroughs / Andy Warhol (at Photographer's Gallery, London)

Read the review here


Gigs:

Fuck Buttons at The Forum, Kentish Town

Standing at opposite ends of an equipment-laden table, facing one another as though they would at any moment break into a game of ping-pong, the two components of electronic act Fuck Buttons delivered a consummate and quite often hypnotic headline set.

Their choice of opener was the astonishing 'Stalker' from 2013's 'Slow Focus', a track with an expansive, almost cinematic scope that spans an epic 10 minutes and yet could comfortably last double that. The rest of the set does well to try and maintain such early heights, but the duo's accomplished amalgam of influences from Aphex Twin to Mogwai to Squarepusher has resulted in a dense and mesmerising sound that is uniquely their own, as captivating in a live setting as on record, and holds them in place as one of the most interesting electronic acts of recent years.

Culture - January

Books read:

Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'
William Shirer - 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' (non-fiction)
George Orwell - 'Burmese Days'
Jean-Paul Sartre - 'Existentialism and Humanism' (non-fiction)

The last two-and-a-half months of my reading has been taken up with wading through William Shirer's mammoth tome 'The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich' which, at 1150 pages, stands as easily the most imposing book I've ever approached.

That said, the scale of the book is easily justified by the vast weight that the subject matter imposes upon the world in which we live today, and with Shirer's insight you have just about the most engrossing and comprehensive chronicle of Nazi Germany (he was a foreign correspondent in Germany throughout much of the Reich and attended the Nuremburg Trials).

I was often completely captivated by the clear-sighted documentation of all aspects of the Third Reich; from its psychological and philosophical underpinnings through German history; to Adolf Hitler's meteoric rise from the Viennese gutters, a disaffected soldier of WWI to the embodiment of megalomaniacal Fuhrer. I was often blindsided by the level of sheer political genius that Hitler demonstrated in managing to brainwash not only the entire German nation but also most of the world to accepting and acquiescing with his twisted ideals. This is a staple historical text that, despite its intimidating heft, really should stand as essential reading for all generations.


Films watched:

'Moon' (Duncan Jones)
'The Castle' (Michael Hanake)
'Primer' (Shaun Carruth)
'Blue is the Warmest Colour' (Abdellatif Kechiche) (at the Prince Charles Cinema, London)
'12 Years a Slave' (Steve McQueen) (at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Harold and Maude' (Hal Ashby)
'The Third Man' (Carol Lombard)
'The Wolf of Wall Street' (Martin Scorsese) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Midnight in Paris' (Woody Allen)

I went to see 'Blue is the Warmest Colour' knowing little about it apart from that it was the '3-hour French lesbian film' that had won the Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Perhaps it was the resonance with my own emotional state at the time, but I can scarcely think of another film I've seen that captured so accurately the exhilarating high of falling in love, and the suffocating low of subsequent loss.

The two lead actresses were completely believable, and the set-pieces fine-tuned to perfection - the heady cocktail of mutual attraction slowly diluting as the inevitable doubts and antagonisms drift to the surface.

Much has been made of the explicit and prolonged sex scenes; in particular, the actresses' lasting hostility towards director Kechiche who they accuse of exploitation. My own feeling on the matter is that, undoubtedly, the main scene could have been considerably shortened and probably others omitted entirely.

However, in my view the explicit nature of these scenes was not the result of lecherous intent, but instead served as the passionate primer for the gut-wrenching emotional torpor of the café scene in which the girls are reunited after a couple of years apart. They so nearly yield to the overwhelming physical desire that persists between them, and yet the ice of painful reality and circumstance resolutely refuses to thaw.

I just wonder whether the pivotal potency of the scene - demonstrating the heart's love held back by the mind's restraints - could have been quite so total had the earlier scenes of unbounded love been subject to those similar restraints. It is a scene of unparalleled heartache and, I admit without any shame, I found myself joining them with my tears.

This month I also went to see Steve McQueen's '12 Years a Slave' and Martin Scorsese's 'The Wolf of Wall Street'. Some might see it as specious to do so, but I actually see them as being oddly aligned in some fundamental ways.

Both are films holding a mirror up to the despicable practices that humans have inflicted upon one another; the worst facets of humanity taking centre stage - on the one hand, subjugation and barbaric cruelty, on the other, excessive greed and self-indulgence on a morally-bankrupt scale. Both are excellent films, whilst not being particularly enjoyable.

'12 Years a Slave' is necessarily tough, relentlessly so. Last month I wrote a piece about 'Come and See', a film in which the most unspeakable horrors of Nazi Germany are laid before you as an affectless tableau, with the audience being invited to literally 'come and see', and draw their own conclusions.

The only slight detraction I had with McQueen's direction, as scene after scene of sickening brutality unfolded, was that it wasn't quite affectless enough; it felt at times too well-primed for a precise and unambiguous emotional impact.

It set me wondering afterwards as to whether it was as good a film about slavery (a universally-acknowledged evil), as 'Shame' was about sex addiction (a relatively unexplored personal affliction)? It's a quandary I'm still mulling over now.

'The Wolf of Wall Street' on the other hand, layers orgiastic vice upon sickening wealth upon moral decrepitude like some awful calorific lasagne to such an exhausting 3-hour extent that by the end of it I felt like I myself had taken an overdose of Quaaludes.

It forces you to wallow in the filthy excess of it all with little-to-no remorse or redemption offered. Unlike the mafia gang in 'Goodfellas', DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort and his pals are hilarious whilst also being quite impossible to warm to on any human level.

With such an illustrious canon of films behind him as Scorsese does it's impossible not to hold anything new up to scrutiny against them; and whilst it more than punches its weight, it can't touch the likes of 'Taxi Driver', 'Raging Bull' or 'The King of Comedy'. That said, it's enough that he's still capable of producing work of this standard, that ruffles so many feathers, and long may he continue in the same vein.


Albums played:

John Grant - 'Beyond Pale Ghosts'
John Grant - 'Queen of Denmark'
Blanck Mass - 'Blanck Mass'
Mogwai - 'Rave Tapes'
I Break Horses - 'Chiaroscuro'
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - 'From Her to Eternity'
Broken Bells - 'After the disco'
Bruce Springsteen - 'High Hopes'


Theatre:

'American Psycho: The Musical' (at Almeida Theatre, Islington)

It is a curious place that Bret Easton Ellis' modern classic 'American Psycho' resides in the cultural firmament. With its all-surface-no-feeling sheen, graphic depictions of ultra-violence and long monologues on the artistic merits of Genesis and Whitney Houston; it's a work that, 23 years since its release, still startles with its immediacy and penetrating resonance.

In the internet age, where hardcore sex and violence are omnipotent and only the merest of finger-clicks away, perhaps we have all become a kind of pseudo-Patrick Bateman, the digital embodiment of the shallow abstraction he proclaims himself to be.

The morphing of the book into a stage musical seemed, at face value, to be misguided, and yet as soon as it got under way it all seemed like a perfectly logical progression. The Almeida Theatre on Islington's Upper Street is an intimate one, and the use of the tight stage was expertly choreographed, as were the numerous dance numbers that were often incredibly funny (the 'business card song' in which various font types were set to lyrics was a personal highlight).

As Bateman, Matt Smith did a creditworthy job, however, since Christian Bale gave such a consummate portrayal in the film version (so much so that I think he might actually be Patrick Bateman!), you can't help but feel Smith's performance to be anything more substantial than an accomplished and honed impersonation.

The first half was excellent, lively and fun, but once it got into the second it quickly began to flag. At the same point in the novel, the notoriously violent sequences begin stacking up, and whilst the movie was a great screen adaptation it did much to dilute many of the most excessive sequences. Limited to the physical time-and-space of the stage, the play had no option but to dilute the violence still further which caused the narrative to stagnate and veer off into the embellished side-plot of Patrick's relationship with his secretary Jean, before limping to an insubstantial conclusion.

Overall, it was well worth seeing; a valiant and brave attempt at a tough source novel, and probably did the best it could within the confines of a stage musical, which, although providing a fresh interpretation, failed to elevate the source material to a veritable stand-alone piece and instead seemed content to honour it as a persistently relevant cultural artefact.