The Single Man

Paradoxically, the single man spends more time looking over his shoulder than the coupled. Looking at the past, at what has passed, and what passes. The single struggles to hold on to things, to stop and enjoy anything, to really be anywhere - he has no anchor. He drifts onwards, forwards, sideways - a spectator of the passing of time and experience. The predicament can be likened to the inability of one eye to take the measure of distance or appreciate dimensions, and the way we become tired if too long is spent looking one-eyed through a camera lens. What he may feel he has is opportunity, the opportunity to choose to grasp something. Being adrift, he can stray into another vessels wake, clunk together with another hulk in harbour due to his singular mass. His lack of perspective allows him to telescope in close to a target subject at the blink of an inclination. And he can imagine the target to be as large or small, near or far, or one dimensional as he wishes. He can draw and arrange his world, what is in the fore, what is in the rear. But the ties are weak, and at any point the currents may carry him off or leave him behind, unanchored as he lies.

Les Bonnes Femmes

The film excels in its representation of a sinister violence of the everyday, and of the gross irresponsibility of a new, individualistic and thrill-seeking post-war European society. There may also be the suggestion that the very kind of romanticism stimulated in this oppressive and frivolous social context is ill-fated, somehow formless and apocalyptic. Ultimately it is the disillusioned dreamer that is murdered, arguably having been driven to a dangerous margin in search of a more meaningful alternative to the everyday froth and stasis of parisian life. And it is there at that margin that she is eliminated. She is eliminated in the same way that the life of the animals at the zoo has been eliminated - they have had their essence throttled out of them by being put behind bars, and for Chabrol there is little doubt as to who are the more primitive in the scene where the women and Jane's companion taunt the monkeys. The film's depiction of this sort of animal hedonism are uncomfortable and dizzying. At the same time, the girls sit out their time in the shop like animals in a cage. The idiotic dunking at the pool is childish and cruel - it is the way in which the characters infantilize themselves and others, the women literally held under water and stifled. Crucially, it is at this point that the murderer sees his opportunity to intervene at what is for him a particularly favourable, suffocating moment. The murderer is the predator waiting to pick off the straggler from the pack, following at a distance on his motorcycle steed, and his victim hangs back because of the vacuousness of the pack and its pastimes. There is a parallel to this sinister pursuit - the overweight, past-it companion of playboy Marcel rather scandalously tries to cop a feel of Jane whilst she petts with Marcel - a little bit out of order, but harmless and pitiful overall, even amusing, we might think. However, this is the very same sinister game. It is the amoral pursuit of a kind of wreckless pleasure in a world where faith in higher human morality has been lost. The superficial comedy of him holding in his stomach takes on a dark, symbolic significance in the light of the physical violence of the film's climax. What seems an embarrassing lack of dignity is actually the enforced conforming to a tyranny of pleasure-seeking youthfulness. The murderer also suddenly reveals behind the composed and seemingly adult exterior a totally juvenile and inappropriate sidew when he blows raspberries in an elegant restaurant, similar to the garish Marcel. The murderer's manner of seduction is childish trickery, and his repertoire of talents displayed at table rapidly descends into crude obscenity. In the opening scene of the film, there is effectively a stand off between the motorbike murderer and the automobile dandies - they are all equally salubrious predators who only differ slightly in tactics, whilst the violence of their intent is the same. They are equally culpable in their lack of responsibility. And fused into the film at the very outset is the theme of the new materialism, a manifestation of empty physicality at the level of society. The Cadillac, the motorbike, the brands of domestic appliances displayed in shop windows. It is a society of the image, of the material. Note also the supposedly 'good catch' one of the girls lunches with, whose parents she meets, under strict instructions of exactly what to say about what according to a set of rigid petit bourgeois social conventions. Her fiancee maybe more serious, more safe, but she must become an automaton to fulfil his family's social expectations. The fiancee himself rattles off the lines about Michael Angelo like some kind of deranged, compulsive incantation - symbols of high culture have been reduced to inflexible tokens of class etiquette. Implicit, then, is responsibility in Chabrol's cinema, as he declines to make work of pure entertaining spectacle, using his spectacle rather to disconcert, both thematically and through visual discord and excess. See how we enjoy ourselves, he says, it is the pleasure of selfish exploitation and animal savagery. The final scene echoes a warning, the glazed eyes of a woman fixed looking into space over the shoulder of a besuited man, with his plump neck penned into a shirt collar, but seen as faceless, animal flesh all the same, dancing with his lobotomised prey under the alluring mirrored glint of the revolving disco ball.

Sport et Vie: Une femme est une femme

"This is a masterpiece." She wants to be both animals in the book. She wants to be two. She wants to have a baby. She reads the aesthetics of Hegel. There are three levels of representation fused in the film: the first is the film in full musical flow, which is also the life of the film, the action, walking down the street, dancing the cabaret, the egg cooking (and breaking) - performing the scenes. Then there is the uncertainty of the plot, the doubts in the moments of silence, when she wants to know her time of maximum fertility with scientific precision. And lastly, there is the wink to the camera, the self-consciousness directed at the viewer. This is a sort of carnival of form resulting from one of the best attempts to represent the problems of representation. To reiterate these 3 principal levels of the film - first there is the film's cinematic form, music, action, acting, cabaret, reference to hollywood and other predecessors, comedy, tragedy. The event that is blessed. Blessed with meaning invested by the viewer. The viewer's blessing. Then there is the film's plot, the 'meaning', the problems of making a film with a plot, the attempt to define the frame that sustains the action, without music, with serious conversations, and indecision, indifference, and uncertainty. One of the lovers lights his cigarette with two matches, drawing them back and forth across the cigarette tip. The blessed event. The event that comes about from desire, and, as an event, blesses that desire. Then finally there are the flashes of playful self-consciousness, where the actors look, smile, or wink at the camera. It can be seen as a kind of continuum: cinematic intent>meaning and plot>action and form>cinematic intent>meaning and plot>events and form, and so on. All three aspects are interdependent and sustain themselves by their interdependence and a continuous reference from one level to another and back again. At the level of plot, the female protagonist wants to have a baby. We can say that what she actually wants is to make herself real by creative reproduction. This is the central theme of the film. When looking at the picture book of animals, she states that she wants to be both animals, she wants to be two things, her own suggestion and answer, making herself real by a re-presentation. Singularity is meaningless. The film is concerned with the relationship of the 'real' and 're-presentation'. Nothing can be said to be real until it is re-presented, until its meaning is made transcendent by being repeated. To 'say' something, is to represent it. But of course the representation is not the real thing, but the real thing is nothing without the representation. Angela thinks she will feel more 'real' if she is two things, if she is mother and baby. It is also the relationship of reality and desire - they define one another - reality is not comprehensible without the desire for it to be something else - she is nothing without her desire to be other than what she is. And in the middle of all this, between the desire to know with scientific precision, at the level of plot, when her days of maximum fertility will be, and, at the level of action, her chasing her two lovers in an attempt for one of them to give her a baby, there is the wink to the camera, the recognition of the real and the represented as a kind of game, where the flitting between the two, the ability to represent the real, is what constitutes whatever reality there is. The film borrows famous scenes and cliched scenarios, picks and chooses it's identity from other identities before it has one itself, playfully, inconsequentially, but in a way that seems to give it substance. How is it possible that empty repetitions give the film a unique substance? Because as representations we invest them with our desire for them to be real. Godard gives us representations that are realized through intent alone, with no explicit, clear, underlying reality (which, the point being, it is suggested, there cannot be). The film represents the notion that reality is essentially a desire for the 'real', and that this desire is what gives it, and us, flesh. Therefore, in a way, reality takes the form of our desires. Godard has his character say "this is a masterpiece" to the camera. It is, because it is a film that winks at the camera and says 'this is a film', and is one.

Safety and Security Ballet Drones

It looks as though she is guiding the plane in to land with a series of strange arm signals. Marking out everyone's most feared runway. But she herself is on board. The air hostess performs her emergency exit dance like a human music box figure. A doll of fate. Lusted after or resented or idealized in passenger's minds, ignoring her actual function. And why does the male member of the cabin crew seem so emasculated? Is this a service industry, an instruction service, a safety team? No safer, wiser, or well-equipped than anyone else on board... Prototype passengers. The psychopathology of, flght, height, and risk, or should we say, ambition? Taipei 101. From how high up do we wish to lose? Pent up in the penthouse sweet, stomach acid churning from the degree of elevation, mind spinning from the view, knock it bakc with a whisky, while away the american psycho time, to pull it off, fire it out, missile use, misuse, abuse, choose and choose and lose.

Victory Over the Sun

Club Ponderosa 176. To put on an unperformable play, written in futurist cubo-jibberish, originally envisaged with impossible suprematist Malevich costumes, and to do so in translation, is an ambitious project. The participants were very effectively present and partially in-role as the spectators filed into the auditorium, mingling, offering tea and... Vodka! An excellent touch, although a constant circulation of fresh shots during the show could have been good (personally I had the hip flask, of course). The impression of the performance overall was one of having walked into a theatrical workshop in full flow, indifferent to the audience's presence - this is simply what the troop was doing anyway, watch if you wish. All well and as it should be. Good. But what actually left the performance lacking was not a language gap, but a dearth of imagination of how to represent the themes. There needs to be more movement in a piece that has essentially been pared down to mime. Of what there was, the choreography was good, the songs were effective, but there was little of dynamism, and often a state of stasis flavoured the rambling scenes. If the piece cannot be performed on a grand scale as some kind of allegorical ballet, then perhaps it should be effectively paraphrased into a serious of symbolic sketches, interspersed with musical or poetic refrains for flavour. Where was the conscious mechanisation of man once the Victory over the Sun was won? Meyerholdian Biomechanics would have worked a treat here. Where were the displays of mass enthusiasm or quiet, common reticence? Ultimately there were several gulfs that correspond to the gulfs between spectator and performer, performer and performance, performance and piece. Though the troop had attempted to internalise the performance, the regular stasis of it meant this was not very apparent - it was as though the frigidity of the bewildered spectator won over, as though the leap taken by the performers into the performance had not been great enough to jerk the audience into life and carry them along. We should have been dragged into such a performance, swept up by it. The piece itself had barely been brought to life because there were not enough limbs to its thematic interpretation. The piece provides the perfect opportunity to break down these barriers - indeed that is a principle theme - Victory over the Sun, dominance over the divine, democratisation of creative possibility, godmanhood, human self-determination. And yet like good capitalists we watched the performers put on a performance of a piece to be performed. A piece about creativity, fixed and defined like a heirarchy of cultural capital. There was no real victory over the sun here, just mute performers and blind spectators in ecstatic awe of the oppressive god of creation.

Uncanny Street and Schulz's Crocodiles

A significant bridge, from the realm of everyday to the future, to freedom, fusing possibility with the present, the meeting point of East and West, Hampstead and Hackney, work and play, the back way, site of secrets and desires, a shortcut instinct street, where the bike blocks the cars going uphill or beats them on the way down, which is also the way out, newly smooth with that fresh black well-marked tarmac and slick circumnavigable speed bumps, road of revelation and reincarnation, self-medication and the demarcation of boundaries, and or also their transgression, vain white van aggression, single-decker bus frustration, hand-me-down pushchair abuse, fast-food affliction, fashion addiction, and whatever dose you decide to take, depending on your direction and the inclination of your injuries and drive. An extraordinary street where the dead gather to clamour their cases, the mad congregate to talk to themselves, doctors, shrinks, artists, dealers, the unemployed, lost youth, and passers by passing by. A lilac purple house near the top. This straight-on only road, the immense weight on this road, the lonely waiting on this road. We have all seen each other and been along there.

They will be heard!

The more you push them down, the more they shout in different voices. There are no such things as accidents. There are things we seek to explain by not explaining them. Why forget one thing on one particular day in a particular place and context, and not another? 'Let us contemplate without fear the extent of our innocence ...' (Rimbaud). What is really extraordinary is when the glass of wine fails to be knocked over and spill onto a particular person, an example of uncommon restraint (rarely tolerance). Or if it is knocked but misses its target due to some freak positioning or quality of the table, or character of the glass. Usually, one way or another, we find a form to say and do what we want to mean. So many injuries are self inflicted - the housewife who cuts her finger preparing dinner, the husband who stubs his toe on the bed - these are the babies that cry because someone is watching, or because they want someone to watch. Little accidents happen when we are largely safe. Always be suspicious of people who discount interpretations. Car accidents are the result of a calculated carelessness, just as non-accidents are the product of concentrated care. Misfortunes feed into themselves, because the misfortunate are prone to misfortune, as they seek to prove their unfortunateness and snowball into the safe realm of the undeniably deserving of sympathy. What a coincidence! That we are least able to look at what means most. The relationship of anger and pain. We cannot look round our own corner, but we can catch ourselves turning it. And examine that step. We know how to make ourselves heard, and hurt.

On Hampstead Heath

There is a certain kind of light on the Heath, washed out, always, whatever the weather. It's what the sky looks like when the city has been taken out of the way, cloudy or clear. Still chalky with the dusty trace of metropolis. Sunday millions of people who wish for immortality but don't know what to do with themselves go to walk, crossing expanses of grass, with twisted trees. The Dwarf Birches and the Birch Clearing, Esenin and Iwaszkiewicz, benches 'in memory', and swimming ponds sometimes. Even magnolia explosion muffled by our looking on. Can we take the Heath seriously? Ourselves?! What a joke! Better take a dog and a ball, a tool to launch it, an extendable lead for holding. The terrestrial aviator flying kites. The runner, or jogging. Maybe even sports-walking with sticks, and those ring shaped liquid bottles like shackles upon each arm. Lycra telling the elastic truth about bodies, and the onus of their owners. Their noses and arses. A beautiful light on the Heath; perfection in the realm of the imperfect. Fills the head at least.

Collection Messager

The problem of seeking to protect yourself by adornment with the debris of your persecution. Formulating the self from its anti-matter - what else is there...? Repetition, reformulation. The febrile minutia of of stimula; trauma. Gender composition, genital exhibition. In contrast to Rothko's binary genital repetition. This was reproductive, at least. Fertile too, in an apocalyptic copulative way. Prolifically femenine. A mesmerising red silk blood surge from the bird baby, leaving deposits of respiring cells. Against the clock, in time. And the scale and quantity of it, so voraciously composite, a demonstration of the impossibility of accident, and the eloquence of the most mute intent. Toys multiplied into nightmares; delirium of a thousand crayons.

Lizard Lover

A man stood over a lizard hole, waiting until the moment at which each lizard felt confident enough to show itself fully, then he stamped on it, to teach them to be more wary of emerging, he thought - forcing them to become more successful, to survive. He is in fact a tender-hearted lizard-lover, and the lizards are the emissaries of his emotions.

Chopin's Consumption

Achievements of inconceivable greatness and beauty are massacred every day in their own name, their desirability exploited not to inspire admiration but to feed a force of possessive greed. They are defiled by this desire, which sees the mindless consumer chewing gum and grinning inanely whilst sitting alongside the consumptive Chopin for a photo opportunity. Chopin’s weak, rattling cough is met with a clumsy slap on the back by the inhabitant of five star hotels who has driven him to his damp and draughty garret.

Smoke and Flowers

Le jour se leve - Marcel Carne. Jean Gabin, making a middle out of the margin. The central outsider, his mouth muscular from keeping those sharp lips pursed, he is the taciturn trumpeter of self-integrity. Helped by the frame of the screen, and the will of the eye to encompass, he defines the surrounding order, flushes it out, through a strongheaded opposition. The cinema of poetic realism is a cinema of resistance, of the misunderstood murderer, who killed to battle corruption.

Einstein Conscious

Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it, says Einstein. He’s right. It would constitute a mortal blow to self integrity, and you would as likely then be absorbed by the state entirely, as remain in a state of limited acquiescence. It would open the floodgates of capitulation, and the conscience would go on, considering each little complicity a pragmatic treat, justified by some blind instinct of self preservation.

Suffolk Ate Nothing for a Day

The golf course backs on to the graveyard /Outside Maryland Station /Plinths and crosses watch stroke play rehearsals /Of putting into holes; /Repeated petitions to perfection.

Spider (to its enemies)

If you will fly... /There are webs in the chain, thickening, /And jewelled weavers that feed. /The spiders crawl, from link to link, /Trying their thread round the corners of circles.

Bacon 'n' Rothko

"That maroon - I just find it depressing. If I want to be depressed, I just go to that room with all that maroon... It's awful." (Bacon-Bragg: on Rothko) There were a lot of people who wanted to be depressed, apparently. Reverent public amongst the giant canvasses. Quite serene, nervously excited, looking. Rothko gives little and asks a lot. A sort of maximum minimalism. A paired down problematic of our basic position, binary, the background and the form, a representation of the membrane. Rothko is trying to characterise the core dynamic of perception, stripping his vision down to the principle of apprehension. In doing so he stands before us naked, like Gormley. At some point, as many, I became uncomfortable with this self-exposure, but not because of a problem with confronting the naked vision. There is a limit of how much interest a genital full frontal can arouse, again and again. But even here, especially here in fact, he eludes assimilation with his canvas mirrors. While he gives nothing, he provides a canvas that reflects the gaze of the looker, a photo-negative of the mind. A sort of nadir of the looking-seeing spectrum, where the two are nearly one, in the subject. The paintings were all of naked people. Lost souls and marooned minds. Bragg: "What are you optimistic about?" Bacon: "I'm optimistic about nothing. But I'm optimistic."