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.