Talking Heads

Helvetica suffers when seen soon before Urbanized, because of the distractions of sets in an endless parade of selfconsciously designed offices (of typeface and graphic designers), and the ever-present risk of nerdish obsessing over micro-detail. It's most successful interviewees are Erik Spiekermann, whose spiky and arch asides mark him out from the faintly childish miasma surrounding most of the designers (Paula Scher ludicrously attempts to align a comfily boho 60s New York cultural touchstone with opposition to the war in Iraq; David Carson talks like a shambolic surfer) and the relaxed yet rigorous commentaries of Dimitri Bruni and Manuel Krebs. They are the only interviewees who actually reach the point of saying what a few others hint at or do not have the language to say: You can only say what your typeface will let you say, or wants to say.

Urbanized repeats the structure of Hustwit's earlier film (talking head followed by scene-establishing or atmosphere-generating still camera shot) but draws its commentary from a much wider population, and never quite drifts into picture-postcardisms for it's cinematography. The sequence shot from the front of an over-ground train on a weekday in central Detroit, clearly and shockingly empty of people is as arresting as 'Day of the Triffids'. Each section (Bombay, Detroit, Stuttgart, Phoenix, Cape Town, Bogota) is a little too self-contained, and the final thought (city as an idea) might just as well have been a starting point (though for a very different documentary).

Table Manners

Sometimes concerts take some time to actually settle in your head, as if there's about 90 minutes of your life one evening missing, simply un-processable, un-critiqueable.

Simon and I bumped into the force-of-nature that is Carla Bozulich outside Cafe Oto after the show, and in our role as gushing fanboys, gave BAFTA-worthy performances. I think I actually said "we've had our musical hard-drives thoroughly cleaned and de-fragmented", and with a straight face too.

We had seen Evangelista turn in a performance that managed to be at once extremely casual, with moments of what might in other circumstances have been tiresome nerdiness and cutesy shambledom (which song to play next, is the bass in tune, etc), suddenly ghosting into phases of restless, frosty testifying, and thence erupting into chilling gouts of certainty and focus ("... and the wind knows my name!") before collapsing like a knackered leopard.

This would have been merely exceptionally arresting if Bozulich hadn't performed a couple of the verses of her encore kneeling on top of our table, having kicked the objects on it all over the place to position herself, for all the world as if she'd have been happier there all along.

Young People Nowadays

These are two gloriously cinematic films, which certainly wouldn't have justice done to them on a television screen. Andrea Arnold puts an astonishing weather-beaten array of natural greens, greys and russets into the frame, and even squares off the frame itself to heighten the sense of claustrophobia and to avoid opening up the film to an easily-delivered vista-of-nature. Her camera follows Heathcliff from beating to hillside to stable, punctuating the barely-imaginable journey Arnold charts for him, from act of charity, to dark obverse, to return of the repressed, with sudden, harsh, raw panoramas.

It was a crying shame that a gruesome pluck-fest of a track by Mumford and Sons was allowed to spray itself over the final few frames and reduce my memory of parts of the film to nothing better than an impressionistic folk music video styled by Toast's Moorland Farm aesthetic.

Lynne Ramsay (maker of the gloriously drifting film of Alan Warner's novel Morvern Callar) seems to get a lot more value out of her punctuations of curtains, diffused light, passers-by seen from cars, spacious-yet-ugly interiors. As far as I know, Tilda Swinton has never given a bad performance in a movie, and here she’s given more than enough time to put the viewer through the wringer with some desperately effortful mothering and blank, exhausted stares.

Life and Death

To my eyes, these are both films about the very thin line between life and death.

In Romero's gloriously low-budget, brutally trimmed schlocker, there's no explanation of the source of the Zombie manifestation. Soldiers (ignorant, coarse, desperate) and scientists (flaky, egg-headed, nerdy) are trapped underground, harvesting Zombies occasionally from the surface for the boffins to experiment on, and fruitlessly speculate over. At one point, one of the Zombies, called "Bud", is essentially being trained to be human again, as if death, or un-death, is nothing worse than a very severe case of amnesiac learning difficulty.

The survivors at the desert-island finale, in terms of representing that which in living humanity might be worth sparing a munching (and Romero certainly threw a good proportion of his dollars at the fake-flesh and blood FX department), are a white female scientist, who alone has managed to engage with the slouchingly violent and sniggering soldiery, a black philosophizing Caribbean helicopter pilot, and an alcoholic Irish radio operator. The ethnic and sexual economy of all this is pretty two-dimensional, but Romero should get some credit for a radical re-scaling of human value.

Conversely, in the Ring, the abrupt and terrorised deaths of a variety of young Japanese are found to be the result of a century-and-a-half old curse visited by the daughter of an unjustly persecuted female psychic. The moral economics are similar but on the other side of the life/death divide. The long-dead "mad" woman (or scientist, as she might have been seen in the mid nineteenth century) holds the ethical burden of an un-avenged, un-remarked death (the suicide of her mother). I don't have the cultural focus to interpret the precisely Japanese significance of the mother's suicide on the daughter; however the character able to reach across the life/death border here is a dead young woman, trying to drag others back across with her.

In Romero, it is the Zombie "Bud", in shooting the deranged soldier, who travels in the opposite direction, trying to follow the human escapees.

Post-Industrial Graceland

Sean and I went to Birmingham in search of noise recently. We found it initially in the caustic hum of City Centre area kebab-joint fridges, and the very loud night-club attire of the Black Country's teens in search of joy at the various Vudus, Rages, Wasteds that litter the mainstream club map of the Digbeth- Bullring borders.

The Supersonic festival is set in a cluster of partially-reclaimed old warehouse and manufacturing buildings, under a vast redbrick railway arch. The vibe was almost embarrassingly relaxed and cheery, given the preponderance of devilry and gothdom on the t-shirts of our fellow noiseniks.

Essentially the discovery that the Capsule ladies have made is that Doom Metal is a folk music form and should be approached with the same taste for simplicity, repetition and and the re-telling of barely-acceptable stories below the mainstream media radar.

So we were treated to Wolves in the Throne Room purveying icy monolithic dirges, Orthodox taking the Latin liturgy and subjecting it to a statuesque and purposeful pummelling, and Electric Wizard essaying some old skool flourishes and some headbanging stylings straight out of the NWOBHM.

Pekko Kappi played a primitive Finnish 2-stringed wooden block, wailing to wonderful effect and introducing every second song as "another prison song"; the Secret Chiefs 3 staged a blinding hour and a half of hectic Balkan rocked-up prog-folk; Cloaks managed to siphon all the naff Funkyisms out of dubstep and slow the results right down; Mike Watt's gurning, restless and chafing 'opera' was compelling, and the gorgeously retro Warp electronica of Modulate showed just how great it can be to watch a bunch of 40somethings stare at their laptops and tone generators.

ATP's gonna have to step up to beat this.

Music for Films

I've had a mixed time of it with German films recently.

Yesterday I finally got around to seeing 'Run Lola Run', which seemed to have been incorporated into recent European film history as a sharp existential crime thriller.

What I saw looked more like a dance music video, with a plot as restless, repetitive, autistic and twitchy as a mid-90's commercial techno track. Characters are too busy keeping pace with the 110 beats per minute, and the frenetically paced circular in-jokes and moralising flash-forwards to come alive. Lola herself looks fabulous in a vest and industro-red fright-hair, though resorts to shrieking her head off at several points at which some decent dialogue or character acting would move the film forward.

All this reminded me of the tone and effect of The Edukators, which pressed the button marked "Indie-Grunge Emoting Soundtrack" far too frequently to establish anything close to a living character on the screen; and likewise tried to cash far too many cheques on the account of Smouldering Youthful Libido to establish motivation and history believably. It's theoretically-interesting theme of lost idealism was completely vapourised by a relentless focus on the political thrashings and jealousies of three self-regarding twenty-somethings who have not lost enough of anything to be worth the attention the film gives them.

Even more tragic was the case of "Goodbye Lenin", which spent a heart-rendingly huge amount of effort and attention to detail in recreating the design and appearance of immediately pre- and post- Berlin Wall falling Germany, and then only remembered where the emotional centre of this would be for one brief shot (the mother accidentally leaving the apartment block and discovering the 'new' world). Before and after this, a slapstick freneticism and fast-cut 1-second attention span style predominated.

The German movies I've seen recently that really grabbed me were about older, more compromised people: Downfall, and The Lives Of Others. But that's another story.

Bonne Vacances

This is a seaside-destination holiday film that has a beautifully judged scent of torpor, emptiness, drift, dog-day, and inconsequentiality.

A believable teenage girl (why do French actresses effortlessly do Teenage, while their Brit equivalents are struggling to be any more convincing than Byker Grove) visits a tatty seaside town with her paralysingly beach-ready and hopelessly self-regarding cousin, on the rebound from a brief failed marriage. Men notice them. There is flirting and posturing from the adults, already far too attached to their dramas.

The most wonderful element to this is the disregarded, unhip, virtually deserted town all the heaving sexual gamesmanship (and gameswomanship) plays itself out against. There's literally no audience worth the mention for the adults' arch, bored manipulation of eachother. Beautifully judged stuff.

Family Snapshot

"Tokyo Story" is a static and glacially paced film, with the camera consistently below the eyeline of a person sat on a mat on the floor. Slightly dowdy, dusty interiors, shot from the disregarded far sides of rooms, lit by diffused sunlight and un-shaded bulbs predominate.

I've never seem Kabuki theatre before, but assume that the quietly effective use of the almost unchanging expressions on the mother and father's faces, is what gives the power to their responses to the bumptiously, offhandedly graceless behaviour of their children, whom they've travelled a long distance to Tokyo to see.

There's genuine heartbreak in the moments when the preoccupation of in-laws and high-minded social probity mean that the elderly parents are essentially homeless for the night, and simply work out for themselves where they might best be housed.

It's a very simple moral universe, but a wonderfully restrainedly drawn one.

Kitchenette

It's a brilliantly titled play, as even the characters don't have surnames; they're identified only as 'Peter, grilled fish', 'Hans, fry', 'Gaston, grill'. The set is a cluttered dance-floor of a space, with some wonderful choreographed moments of stirring, whisking, spooning, and triumphant pouring and a celebratorily deranged act-ending danse-culinaire.

The pan-European staff lapse into French and German, East-End slang regularly, giving the dialogue a smorgasbord texture, and Tom Brooke as Peter, the German fish cook is noisily the best of the cast: aloof, arch, stagey and very fragile.

River's Edge

Wonderful stuff from Lesley Hill and Helen Paris, taking a group of Stratford-Upon-Avon locals' stories of their relationship with their locality, and weaving a hallucinatory Tourist River Trip around them.

On board the boat, our tour guide quickly began to unravel in terms of her relationship to our locality, seeming to see Venice and the Nile where the Avon Rowing Club and a slightly foxed riverside restaurant stood. People on the riverbank began to further tear open the fabric of the screen between the audience, the stories and the 'real world' we had quite definitely left behind.

Curious' productions always seem very graceful in achieving these quite shocking shifts away from the comforts of the quotidian world, and the comforts of the audience seat; we are spirited to a disturbing Elsewhere but always in very good humour and fine style.

The production achieved the unlikely feat of transforming a sleepy stretch of the Avon into a re-enactment of Odysseus' life-and-death sail between Scylla and Charybdis, and of the always-arresting moment when characters appear of whose 'reality' we are genuinely unsure.

Excellent cocktail-pouring technique too, which we don't see nearly often enough, especially on a river boat that's about to run aground.

Repetitive Acts

Definitely not to be filed under "shows" or "entertainment". Sean H and I hit the arches under the Elephant and Castle mainline station last week for Craig Clouse (of Shit'n'Shine) to tweak, prod and interfere with a table full of tone generators and FX boxes to very similar effect achieved by S'n'S. Ugly wrenched bricks of rhythm, tortured every few bars into a new(ish) posture, and a continuous reel of 70s/80s hardcore penetration porno flickering on a white sheet where I guessed the bands usually play. It wasn't any old random porno either; each sequence had a glassy inevitability to it that only the most industrially mass-produced stuff would have, and Clouse had selected only close-up penetration of the most mind-bombed Workmanlike facial expressions. There were a very small handful of woman in the audience, and strangely the atmosphere was slightly less nasty as a result.

Die Munch Maschine (I'm not certain whether that 's' is really supposed to be there. I'm likely superimposing it to make my memories of the music appear more attuned to the group's sense of itself) did well to even find cultural space for themselves after Clouse, but a bracing sequence of nicely-fluctuating distorted Hammond motorik attacks, propelled by some outrageously far-flung drumming did the trick.

Tourist Trap

Even harder, this one. Even though it's technically a documentary, it looks like a 90 minute MTV gangster rap video- endless posturing, threats, platitudes, empty promises set against a relentlessly bleak stage of the grinding poverty of a shanty town. There's no sense of hope or community at all here, which makes for a deadening, empty movie.

The interjections of political and news footage is oddly natural; the stagey, cliches of network news reporting from a comfily distant warzone, the evasive pronouncements of the corrupted politician sit completely naturally with the ethically bankrupted aid worker and slurred moralising of the heroes.

By the end of the film, it's possible to see the threads of manipulation and advantage-taking that hold each take together.

City Of Tiny Lights

This is a properly difficult one.

It kept bringing to mind "Bus 174", a billiant, cold-eyed documentary about a compulsive, truly nerve-jangling horror-stricken hostage scenario in a bus in Rio de Janeiro. The documentary film that comes with the DVD of City of God is similarly gripping, unarguably real. "You might say it's not a job, but it is" says one guy about his life in the favela.

"City of God" itself is too awash with flashbacks, cheeky captions, crowd-pleasing music, self-consciously knockabout comedy, stagey changes in film stock, and lengthy chase scenes to build up real menace or engagement with "Rocket", the likeable kid who wants to be a photographer.

There are a few moments when it comes alive: Little Ze stalks the nightclub, genuinely out of control, needing to take revenge on any figure he can pin his rage on. In some ways, the film is too small for anything but this 18-year-old's volcanic anger, and in trying to capture another personal story or deliver an impression of a community the film simply gets too diluted.

The Gentle Art Of Keeping It Simple

The always-inspiring Union Chapel on Upper Street in Islington was our venue for John Hopkins and King Creosote, playing a jointly recorded LP venture.

As is my wont recently, I pitched up for this entirely on the strength of a general liking-the-idea of it, and the enthusiastic recommendations of Chris and Sean, who'd actually taking the trouble of listening to the songs beforehand so that I didn't have to.

This was incredibly fragile music, with none of the robustness of verse-chorus-verse, or anything you'd call a beat. The vocal melodies were almost choral in their repetitiveness and undemonstrativeness. Even when KC's content is ostensibly emotional, there's very little emoting about it.

The electronics-enthusiast in me kept hearing the empty spaces where the Hopkins bounce of joyfully complex techno would normally be; the longer the songs went on, the more apparent it became that this would overload the show with unnecessary musical detail. Hopkins ended up playing more of his upright piano that he did the computer.

Halfway through the show, Chris told me that the ambient sound at the start of the first track was the field recording of dinner-table talk at someone's house: clattering, indistinct chatter, room air and the sound-scape around a house. This immediately placed everything in an almost painfully-intimate domestic frame, and the Talking-Heads-esque restraint in how much each person on stage did made for a genuinely magical gig.

Baest Foot Forward

Our friends Baest were in sparkling form at an almost-cabaret bill in aid of a shamefully-forgotten charity at the Old Boy's Club near Gillett Square in Dalston a couple of weeks ago.

Dense sheets of guitar texture did that is-it-a-wave-or-is-it-a-particle? thing and kept the ebb and flow of the tracks running without ever really having to do anything as crass as sound like there was the hitting of a chord or picking an arpeggio.

There was an even denser world of Laptopiary; I was hearing the carefully-judged breakbeat techno of Finitribe and laser-guided pop dynamics of 'Technique' for the first track or 2, until the electronics and guitar began to speak to each-other properly and the sound became it's own.

Lovely stuff!

Dreams Come True

These two films, which I watched back-to-back today in an influenza haze, are both about sojourns in dream-spaces; both almost sermonizing in their lessons about the education of a more-or-less deliberate journey to a radically different reality. Both holiday films, more or less.

Stalker (on both watchings; I saw it, mesmerised, 3 years ago) has lost none of it's war-reporter power. Everything in the film is cracked, flooded, rotten, decayed, abandoned, broken, deserted. The dream-destination is alive with shards, a silent and oddly benevolent dog, crumbled objects, bird-sound, drips and splashes of unseen water, the occasion far-away train, leaving the complaints and dissatisfactions of the seekers-after all the more isolated and pathetic.

The breathing-in of the three men, particularly the Stalker himself, is raspy, laboured, shallow, a festival of effort and dried, cracked discomfort. Travelling toward something as undeniable and burdensome as everything-they-ever-truly-wanted at the centre of the Zone, the effort of speech is difficult to muster up. It's striking on a second watch, how little there is to say about the relationships between the three men, given that they spend more than 2 hours of screen time in the same, long shots together.

If Stalker is a film about desire and locality, then Spirited Away is it's sister movie about rite of passage and social locality. There are the apparently-obligatory ectoplasmic monsters and preposterous plot holes but a ghostly and hallucinatory visual imagination at work; the submerged train tracks, Kumajii's arachnid limbs, the almost nauseatingly plummy bath-token manager Aogaeru.

The theme of submerging as a transitory device is common to both; one of the few still, slow visual moments in Spirited Away that isn't ruined by truly dreadful American dubbed dialogue or brutal plot gear-changes is the over-the-sea train, it's tracks a couple of feet below the surface, station platforms rising out of the water like dreams of their own. Tarkovsky uses languid pans across detritus drowned in low pools, usually sunken tiled surfaces, mildewed and cracked, as staging posts within Stalker. His very-slightly-hokey loudly Oriental wind instrument is heard here too, signalling a respite from the brutal visitation of the unknowable within the spaces the men inhabit.

Both travellers come home, both to their families (weirdly after the passages they've endured), and neither seem likely to return.

Test Transmission

This was a quietly delirious farrago of scratching, hesitation, desultoriness, repetition and heart-breaking regret.

As Michael Chion puts it, "when we dive into our memories, we are diving not into our past, but our present".

The voice from Krapp's 'past', is almost painfully dislocated from the man we see on the stage, shambolic and frail, though it speaks for him more plainly than his 'real' voice ever does. His fiddling and frustrating attempts to get the correct tape from his archive and into the machine beautifully stage our faltering and fragmented relationship with our memories and the fruitlessness of trying to get those same memories to speak or live for us in the now.

The sparse room in which the 'action' takes place is almost an antechamber or waiting room for forgetfulness, in which Krapp's number is never called.

Swan So Long

I hear Natalie Portman got a gong or two for this, which is believable enough; it's a florid and hysterical marathon, with more than enough Feelings to make an American film panel feel like it had been hit by a train.

Portman does a good job of having the sheer stamina to deliver a drama queen with no life skills; the bulk of the film away from then dance sequences has all the electricity of a desultory early rehearsal for a dance routine nobody gets yet.

The characters are without exception manipulative, preening, self-serving, hackneyed, and living at a fever pitch of performativity.

The central theme of transformation and duality ends up imploding, as the credible character required to act out (and when I write Act Out, I mean act out) these processes is completely absent.

Any of my (few) readers who gave this vomit of a film any house room needs simply to be directed to the glorious drama and globally choreographed "The Red Shoes". There's even a full review of it earlier in the blog.

TV Sky

The gangways and cobbled dockside spaces at Liverpool were almost spectrally quiet, even at the weekend; I flicked my eyes over my shoulder regularly, waiting for the packed throngs of gallery-shufflers who just never appeared. Like Tate After The Triffids.

There's a genuinely meditative air around some of the pieces, particularly the candle being CCTV'd and re-projected on the walls of the space it sits in, surrounded by the paraphernalia of camera, tripods, wiring.

At moments it all looked very dusty and old, the battered instruments that he disembowelled and jury-rigged with barged wire and glued-on detritus appeared as if they really belonged in Paik's garage, as they carried only a very poorly mediated folk memory of the incidents they lived and were destroyed in.

As if the Aktion, performance, Moment that was constituted by the physical violence visited on them necessarily meant their uselessness as Memoriae of that event. The pianos, especially, were almost bathetic, only ever gesturing at what was absent from them.
The 'family' of robots, even though apparently the most recognisable of Paik's work, were quite sad specimens, museum pieces, garden-shed approximations of an idea.

Disco Drizzle

I could have sworn that I saw Holly Johnson in the crowd for this. My mate Mark had some commitments abroad that meant he had to give away tickets for Hercules and Love Affair and very kindly punted them my way. Holly (if it were indeed he) was a in splendid shape, almost rotund, very sharply turned out in a rubbery black jacket and thick-soled low boots; a slicked back Offizer hairdo completed things nicely. I saw him again, drifting away from the stage about the time I left, and can only imagine what he was thinking: "Good God, I could swear me and some ropey Scousers in moustaches and iffy brickie drag were whipping up more of a libidinal frenzy with bad equipment in patchy L3 clubs in 1982. These people have all the computing power Apple can provide and a very forgiving and very naive audience of Shoreditch poseurs; all they end up sounding like is a high-end provincial gospel-house karaoke. Dance music glissandi cliches from 1987 rain from the skies."

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's what Holly was thinking. Don't worry Mark, you didn't miss much, and it's a hell of a way from Reading to Hoxton.

Ruins and Nation

We saw the final instalment of the magical 'Robinson' sequence by Patrick Keillor, at the Rio in Dalston. There was a dreadful burden of excitement on my part, having been entranced and suffused with my own and multiple other histories during "London" and particularly "Robinson In Space". Keillor again tries to weave obliquely traumatic commentary on the entanglements of an itinerant, sexually complex researcher; this ticker-tape of news is now planted within a painfully slow, politically incontinent narrative of localised and architecturally located protest. The tear-jerking timing of the cuts from Vauxhall Park to the Thames, Reading town centre to Aldermaston, that propelled the gradual realisation in the first films that these are distracted, obsessional, admirable, lonely people making the film, are here in the third part sadly absent. Multiple longeurs of mould on signs, dusty flora, lose faith with the momentum needed to keep us caring about the reportage of these landscapes.

It's the Queen's English, Innit?

The first and most unnerving thing about this film are the scenes that feature 6, 7 or eight year-old princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. It is completely impossible to see them without feeling jarred and second-guessed by our own memories of the dessicated, pinched, cornered vision of Englishness that the Windsors have come to represent.

It's a wonderful piece of drama in spite of the protagonists. Deceitful, fraudulent Australian 'therapist' hoodwinks desperate, pompous Royal into bizarre theatre-based treatment regime for his stutter. You'd think it would be hard to make anything dramatic or engaging cinematically with this. By the simple expedient of using a chilly, foggy, dusty lighting and design aesthetic (thereby side-stepping the emetic heritage visual cues that get these films flogged to death abroad) and getting brilliant actors in close-up like Rush and Bonham-Carter to, well, act, and not do anything to distract from this, it works rather beautifully. Guy Pearce is pallid, acidic, petulant, honest and thereby blends into the film excellently.

Wasp Lights

This 25 minute short film only came up on my radar when it found its way on to the bonus features of a DVD of Andrea Arnold's gob-smacking "Fish Tank".

It's a torrent of a film, plunging us down stairwells, plonking us on the pavement outside council-estate pubs, unceremoniously dumping us on the scrubby grass between residential tower blocks as vindictive rows play their joyless way out over our heads.

Within about 45 seconds of the film starting I knew I cared about this woman and her children, and about what would have happened to them by the end of the day, and about whether the simple business of finding some food and going on a date would be too much for her.

It just goes to show that the Oscar committee might not be completely dominated by star-struck cheese-merchants that "Wasp" won an award for best live-action short film.

Heart-rending and brutal in the same frame.

All-Day Hollywood

A 10 hour flight from Seoul to London, living in the non-time, non-place of the (very decent) Korean Airlines Boeing. This non-experience in a non-environment is exactly the right time to watch Hollywood films. The place where time drifts confusingly and illogically; where people behave very consistently but completely insincerely; where workers in the most unhealthy and grindingly repetitive, toxic jobs retain first-class skin care and make-up; where camaraderie is forced and dictatorial; where the network lives on completely independently of the people in it.

All three of these films were completely preposterous: Oliver Stone tried to shoehorn a family drama into his torrent of stable-door moralising and his film's credibility drowned early doors; Clooney remains very watchable on a big screen (though this is a very poor re-heating of the leftover excitement from "Michael Clayton") but the story here vanishes in the vastly-cinematographed Italian hill-scapes; "The Town"'s producers could afford to supply enough excitement for a crime caper, but ran out of cash when they had to buy some character-development and writing talent.

All that sounds harsh, but I'm dreadfully jet lagged.

Fractured Languages

At the Sejong Centre Special Exhibition in Seoul, there is a very digestible retrospective exhibition of the work of Ungno Lee (이응노), 1904-1989, a painter with tapestries and collage.

Being as I am beginning to learn to write and read Korean, these strange agglomerations of forms and vocabularies made a lot of sense.

The real skill was in making sure that there was nothing that really reminded us of an actual letter from the Korean of English alphabets in there. Vertical and horizontal suggestions, scatterings of punctuation, mountains of characters unfettered by page-lines, are presented on carpet-textures, hessian materials. The colours are very undemonstrative, very carefully chosen to not get in the way, such that the colour is always there, but isn't the point at all.

In some of the pieces, the characters almost melt into the the texture of the fabric, such that forms and ground are unable to resist each-other, or language and page cannot remain differentiated. Furry art should also be strongly encouraged.