That wedding frock

That frock. Just two words: Alexander McQueen. McQueen's protegee and successor, Sarah Burton, designed this wedding dress but it looked as if McQueen had cut the fabric himself. The attention to detail. The precise tailoring. The understated romance. 'Alexander McQueen's designs are all about bringing contrasts together to create startling and beautiful clothes and I hope that by marrying traditional fabrics and lacework, with a modern structure and design we have created a beautiful dress for Catherine on her wedding day.Catherine looked absolutely stunning today, and the team at Alexander McQueen are very proud of what we have created,' said Burton.

Who would have thought that it would be the label of the enfant terrible bovver-boy that would parade in front of the English establishment and leave them open mouthed?

Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost

The first time I heard the jagged, fractured rhythms of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was at a Siouxsie and the Banshees concert. The following day I bought a tape (that shows how long ago it was) of the modernist ballet score and it still remains with me (although I did upgrade to a c.d. at some point). Wim Wenders opens his film documentary, Pina, with an arresting excerpt from the German choreographer Pina Bausch’s version of The Rite of Spring.

Bausch interprets Stravinsky’s music with the confidence of a master. Dancers move in synchronised unison or singly. Men are stripped to the waist – their torsos muscular and hard. Women wear gossamer shifts that give them an added fragility and softness. Together they stomp their terrors, longings and violence into brown earth as the sacrificial ritual of the music unfolds through the primitive blockbeats. The physical tics and visual silhouettes that are so much part of Bausch’s dance language are all contained in this opening sequence.

Pina is also in 3D. Let me immediately confess that I am unconvinced by 3D films. It seems to me that the technology does not meet the expectations of the audience. There are always images that remain blurred at the periphery of one’s vision, items on screen that float when they are not meant to and are disconnected from the canvas of the screen. With Avatar the technology did take a quantum leap forward, but not enough to make one believe that films in 2D were on the way out.

The use of 3D in Pina is the most successful that I have seen. In part, this is because the 3D is not there to heighten a visual CGI effect. It is not a piece of cinematic cabaret. 3D in Pina aims to place the dancers in space. It has a specific and refined function. The physicality of their movement is given a proper depth. Here, 3D is not used as a cinematic gimmick but as a vital expression of how we encounter dancers in motion. It accentuates, rather than detracts, from the beauty of the performance.

Five days after being diagnosed with cancer, Pina Bausch died on 30 June 2009. This film is a tribute to her work. She, in fact, appears in brief documentary footage only a couple of times in the whole film. We are to approach her and her unique sensibility, through her sublime and, at times, disturbing choreography. Wim Wenders has decided that the work is the thing and not the personality or biography. In the 1970's Bausch’s work began to make an impact on a wide audience and was critically applauded. The Rite of Spring and Café Müller became her signature pieces and they provide the main substance of Wim Wender’s film.



Though we live in increasingly hypersexualised societies, our bodies are becoming more alien to us. We view them as additions to who we are, appendages rather than as integral to the reality of our being. We risk seeing ourselves and others through a pronographic lens. The work of an artist such as Pina Bausch challenges this view more eloquently and persuasively than any lecture or learned article. She shows that our bodies and what we do with them speak of the mysterious depths within us. They differentiate gender and in turn, exhibit different characteristics that are both complementary and together create a convincing integrity.

But this is no mere biological reductivism or simple gender stereotyping, because what Bausch is concerned with is the human body in motion and flight. She captures those moments - the scratch of a nose, the awkward tilt of a head, the collapse of a physical position - when the male or female body hints at that within us which normally remains hidden. “Pina made us feel more than human,” says one of the dancers in the film.

What would feeling more than human look like? This remarkable film offers some tentative answers to that question. Don’t let the idea of a film about contemporary dance put you off. Don’t let the prospect of wearing 3D specs put you off. Go and experience a film that will shift your understanding of what it means to be an embodied person...and, maybe, even make you want to dance.

Source Code

The director is Duncan Jones. That is not his real name. His real name is Zowie Bowie. Who? He is the son of David Bowie but Duncan Jones doesn’t want you to know that he is the son of rock 'n' roll royalty. He wants you to think something else, to have you relocate his identity elsewhere or as far away as possible from his famous father. By the way, David Bowie (aka Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, etc) once starred as an alien in Nicolas Roeg’s 1976 sci-fi classic, The Man who Fell to Earth.

And if you are beginning to think this introduction is unnecessarily head-scrambling, then that’s nothing compared to Duncan Jones’s time-warp, sci-fi thriller, Source Code.

An American soldier, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaall), wakes up on a commuter Chicago train. Sitting opposite him is Christina (Michelle Monaghan) who relates to him as if she is his wife or girlfriend. He, however, has no idea who she is. Eight minutes later, the train explodes. Gyllenhaall wakes up in an isolation booth where through some impenetrable quantum-physics babble he is sent back to the train using “time reassignment” technology. Each time, he is given a task (find the bomb, find the terrorist) by his handler. He must complete the task within eight minutes before the train blows up again. So far, so confused? Imagine Speed and Groundhog Day as if written by Professor Stephen Hawking....and that probably won't help.

Unfortunately, for Duncan Jones, his film has none of the popcorn thrills of Speed nor the wit of Groundhog Day. The riffing on a familiar scene does have a hypnotic quality as new details are revealed to the audience but this is at the expense of real race-against-the-clock white-knuckle tension. Source Code exists in two parallel cinematic universes. On the one hand, it wants to be a mainstream audience pleasing thriller and on the other, it wants to be an intelligent character study of a man who comes to knowledge of himself through endless repetition. Familiarity breeds self-knowledge might be the film’s existential premise.

In fact, the film does not exist in two, but three universes. It also wants to be a brief encounter romance and to tease a romantic lead performance from Gyllenhaall. With each eight minute trip to the train he becomes more attracted to the mysterious woman opposite him. However, while the train has no trouble igniting, their relationship fails to produce a believable spark. Gyllenhaall is condemned to running up and down the train aisle in a wild-eyed fashion until he snatches a final kiss from his true love and the audience are left with some Chinese cookie philosophy to choke on.

Source Code is slick and stylish. It is also very silly and not as clever as it would like us to believe it is. Unfortunately, it was just eight minutes too long for me.

Let England Shake

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. The singer-songwriter, P J Harvey, has reinvented herself as a contemporary Wilfred Owen on her eighth album, Let England Shake. After eighteen months of research, Harvey has crafted a suite of ambivalent, beautiful songs about war and imperialism. In a bold statement of intent, Harvey chose to premiere her new album not, as you might expect, on Later with Jools Holland, but on The Andrew Marr Show, where she sang in front of an unimpressed, Gordon Brown.

Such promotional antics could have become another rock star’s desperate attempt to be taken seriously as a political animal. Yet, there is no political posturing in these songs. There is never a moment when Harvey sounds like a would-be soap box preacher rather than a singer at the very top of her creative game. Using a mesmerising range of vocal registers, she inhabits her descriptions of man’s inhumanity to man with a shocking lyricism.

With creative audacity, Harvey can, for example, combine English folk music and nursery rhyme to devastating effect. Hummable tunes are skewed by shrapnel rhythms and unpredictable stresses that leave one disorientated as if caught in the mist of a musical gas attack. At the same time, the lyrics oscillate between an opaqueness (I live and die through England./It leaves sadness) and a gut-punching directness (What is the glorious fruit of our land?/Its fruit is orphan children).

Songs do reference particular conflicts, especially the Gallipoli campaign or a survivor’s account from the First World War (Walker’s in the wire/limbs pointing upwards./There are no birds singing/ “The White Cliffs of Dover”). Yet, there is a universal quality to these songs. They could be about any historical battle zone from Thermopylae to the Somme to Basra. This remarkable collection of songs and lamentations sound as if they are echoing down through the centuries of violence. All this is achieved with a voice so contemporary and unique that Let England Shake is evidence of P J Harvey's claim to be a national musical treasure, but one that has the power to make us collectively uncomfortable.

On Grief

In a recent blog post, I wrote about grief and quoted from Christopher Reid’s collection of poems, A Scattering. A number of people contacted me to tell me how moved they were by the poetry. A Scattering comprises four poetic sequences that chart the illness and death of Reid’s wife, Lucinda Gane, and his resulting grief.

Poetry is especially suited to the blankness, aching emptiness of bereavement. “I didn’t know what to say,” “What can you say?” are common expressions of impotency in the face of someone’s grief. The language of everyday discourse is not supple or honest enough to articulate a profound sense of loss. However, the best poetry combines both an expressive elasticity and fierce lucidity that can drive language into those hurting places that would, otherwise, remain shut to us. Poetry translates those emotional states that appear to have effaced language into something that is recognisably human.

The smallest associations with his deceased wife – a bottle of perfume, the garden, favourite songs – allow the poet to exercise that creative voice with which to sound his anguish. The internal howl of pain finds a metre and rhyme, a disciplining principle that makes some tentative engagement with loss a possibility.

The fact that a person once loved is no longer physically present sets in motion a nuclear series of transformations and adjustments. Life has changed not ended for Reid. Faithless, life for his wife, he believes, has ended. Walking past the hospital to which he has donated her body, he consoles himself with the thought that she is “doing practical work...educating young doctors/or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her.”

Yet, for all Reid’s practical atheism, one senses in this poetry a yearning to break free from the gravitational pull of scientific fact. This collection begins with the word “Blessed” and ends with the word “blessing”. Deeply embed in his verse is a kind of secular benediction. A blessing on all those who have died and on all those who grieve. Here is some acceptance that the language of clinical pathology will never suffice, that the human instinct is to find a religious vernacular. This is poetry that brings his wife back to life. While the innumerable air kisses/we exchanged in passing/remain suspended to this day,/each one an efficacious blessing.

Flowers in Wrong Weather

Snowdrops, crocuses and hellebore,
which last year must have done their shy, brave thing
unobserved by me, are out again this year.

I was in the garden bagging
tree-trash the gales had flung down the week before.
No gardener, even I could tell the job needed doing.

Now it was a too-mild February morning.
The flowers looked misplaced, without some ice in the air
or bullying wind to give them their full meaning.

Or was it just that there was nobody to share
the annual miracle with? Crocuses piercing
the soil with a palpable pang: the dear

droop of snowdrops; hellebore
stoically averted: all missing the welcome and blessing
of the one who had planted them there.


A Scattering, Christopher Reid, Areté Books, 2009

Last of the Country Gentlemen

After Sunday Mass, I was given Last of the Country Gentlemen by a visitor who works for Mute Records. I had never heard of it or Josh T. Pearson. His photo – half cowboy, half Old Testament prophet – didn’t make me want to run to the c.d. player. But, a couple of days later, I did slip the disc into the machine and sat back with minimal expectations. The slow realisation flushed over me like some sort of ecstasy that I was listening to music with an absolutely unique aesthetic. By the time, I had finished listening to the seven love songs my eyes were moist, my heart was racing. These are songs that take an x-ray of all the fissures, shadows and splits in the fragile heart as it attempts to love. I am certain Last of the Country Gentlemen is one of the all time great albums about love.

There are two states that require a heightened artistic response. The language of the quotidian – the language of cleaning the cooker, going to the office – won’t do. The music of the shopping mall and pop charts won’t suffice. Love and death need a language and music that rises to the occasion, that speaks in a biblical fashion. Josh T. Pearson has found both the language and music to diagnose the cause of his love sickness.

The immediate cause was a failed relationship with a girl in Berlin - although it could be almost any failed relationship. Pearson captures the distinctive way that men grieve a lost love: masculine emotion tightened to a thick knot. This grief is spare, picked clean to the white of its bones. Loss is expressed with no taint of hysteria but with just a few guitar parts and the occasional addition of mournful strings. The language is measured, weighed in the scales of sadness. I ain’t your saviour or your Christ or your goddam sacrifice/And when I said I’d give my life, I weren’t talking suicide/ And I’m so tired of trying to make it right, for a girl who just won’t come to the light/night after night after night after Christ haunted night.

Josh T. Pearson’s voice could make desert stones cry. It’s as if he is placing his finger in the maggot infested decay of this relationship. He crawls with a sense of his own complicity in its death. Woman when I’ve raised hell, heaven knows you’re gonna know it/ Don’t make me rule this home with the back of my hand. At the same time his autopsy, eats him up from the inside out. He’s brought to his knees as he performs his own improvised funeral rites over the relationship’s carcass. Requiescat in pace. Amen.

Last of the Country Gentlemen is a little work of art.

Clybourne Park is a winner

I wrote recently about the play, Clybourne Park, now on at the Wyndhams Theatre, London. A number of people have contacted me about this blog post and it seems to have captured people's imagination. Well, last night Clybourne Park won a prestigious Olivier Award for Best New Play...and it is.