The naked dance and sexual politics show Trilogy was an Edinburgh fringe hit
FILM
A Prophet On general release from 22nd January
Movie watching is so fractured these days. There’s the teenage world of High School Musical, the art films on the festival circuit, the blockbusters like 2012 whose posters are plastered on bus shelters, and the indie pics that rely on viral marketing.
But every now and then a film comes along that delivers on the whole palette of cinema’s pleasures: the sensation of action cinema, the contemplation of art cinema, the relevance of social cinema and the transcendence of the spiritual filmmaker. A Prophet is such a film. It is the sixth feature directed by 57-year-old Parisian Jacques Audiard, whose last movie, The Beat that My Heart Skipped (2005), was like early Scorsese. A Prophet is the best gangster picture since Goodfellas, but because its central character Malik is a young French Arab, its social scope is broader. Malik, played by Tahar Rahim, is sent to prison for six years (we don’t know why). That setting distils the drama; the scene where he hides a razor blade in his mouth to kill another inmate is fascinating, and an encounter with a deer is numinous.
Violence usually has a steroid effect on film, pumping it up artificially, but here the testosterone in front of and, presumably, behind the camera combine to deliver a powerful, controlled, torque. If the movie playing field were level, A Prophet would win five Oscars. It’s the kind of stylised masculine movie that Michael Mann should be making.
Mark Cousins is a film critic
ART
Gabriel Orozco Moma New York, 13th December-1st March, www.moma.org
Deep winter is a bad time for grand openings, but New York, bracing and beautiful at new year, has come up trumps. Gabriel Orozco is a genius who transforms whatever he happens upon—a Citroën car, a ball of Plasticine, an entire whale skeleton, a billiard table, his own unmatched socks—into something surprising. The Museum of Modern Art gave this Mexican artist his first solo museum show in 1993. Now it is offering a mid-career retrospective, which promises to be an international phenomenon of 2010: travelling on to Basel (18th April-10th August), Paris (15th September-3rd January 2011), and reaching Tate Modern on 19th January 2011.
Just as he refuses to live in any one place, lodging alternately in Mexico City, New York and Paris, so Orozco evades all categories. His quizzical scrutiny of an idea or object may issue in a drawing, a photograph, a sculpture, an installation, or a painting—but always as something provocative, playful and, if you care to dwell on it, profound. Geometry, maps and games—systems in general—fascinate him, as do the random spontaneity and free flow of chance that defy them. Visitors to his Serpentine show in 2004 will remember the skull covered in a graphite chequerboard of black and white squares, named Black Kites. This and other key pieces of the last 20 years will be on show.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
FICTION
Generosity Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
Forget about doing the other five things and read Richard Powers’s Generosity at least twice. I hadn’t heard of Powers until I was given this novel—the latest in an oeuvre of fictional explorations of scientific themes that includes The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2 and The Echo Maker—and now I wonder how I managed to remain ignorant of him for so long. Generosity has many themes: the promise, threats and limitations of science and technology; the interface between biotech and big business; celebrity in a digital age; trust; the boundless sea of information and mediated experience—shallow but shark-infested—in which we live. But these are all subordinated to a profound meditation on the nature and origin of happiness and on what it is that makes us human. At the centre of a cast of unforgettable characters is Thassa Amzwar, a refugee who has escaped to Chicago from an Algeria rendered hellish by endless civil war. She radiates an unaccountable happiness, an intense joy at the ordinary things of life, and the seemingly banal question of whether she carries a happiness gene is the motor for an immensely subtle and witty fiction. Each page of Generosity carries enough brilliant metaphors to furnish an entire volume of verse and the novel teems with insights that science fiction and fiction about science rarely achieve.
Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, writer and clinical scientist
POP CD
IRM Charlotte Gainsbourg with Beck (Because Music/Warner)
Musicians today spend as much time worrying about the public stealing their work as they do creating it. The result is a covetous, paranoid industry more akin to Scrooge & Marley than a purveyor of musical cheer. Beck Hansen, on the other hand, is one of a few artists to avoid such attitudes, happily feeding his fans free, inspirational and (dare I say it) educational content through a refreshingly cranky website. His Record Club, run very much in the spirit of music rather than commerce, invites notable guests to team up and record covers of favourite vintage albums (The Velvet Underground and Nico, Skip Spence’s Oar), posting up the rude but meaningful results for public benefit.
Lately, his collaborative genius has extended to a new project with Charlotte Gainsbourg, the Anglo-French daughter of Serge, and winner of Best Actress at Cannes in 2009 for her role in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Having suffered a minor brain haemorrhage after a waterskiing accident two years ago, Gainsbourg was repeatedly stuffed into a magnetic resonance scanner, the clunks and beeps of which inspired a kind of music in her. Together with co-writer and producer Beck, whose cut-and-paste innovation is evident in the pre-released tracks, “IRM” and “Heaven Can Wait,” she has translated this life-threatening experience into music of a surprisingly liberated and experimental nature, which—though pop enough to be considered mainstream—may yet, like her acting, win her left-field acclaim.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
THEATRE
Trilogy BAC, 12th-16th January, Tel: 020 7223 2223; Barbican Theatre, 22nd-23rd January, Tel: 0845 120 7511
Nic Green is a Glasgow-based performance artist whose naked dance and sexual politics triptych, Trilogy, an acclaimed sensation at the Edinburgh fringe last summer, is revived as a winter non-warmer at the BAC in Battersea, and as part of the Barbican’s Bite10 programme.
Green divides her three-hour staging into an allegedly non-exploitative skin show, as 50 nude women express their relationships with their own bodies. There’s a recreation of the 1971 New York “Town Bloody Hall” debate in which Germaine Greer, famously squaring up to Norman Mailer, accused male art of sapping women’s vitality and breaking their hearts; and a gruesome “nothing’s changed” broadside focusing on medieval and superstitious practices of genital mutilation and death sentence stoning, leading to a defiant and joyous sing-along finale to “Jerusalem.”
The show has been variously described as heartfelt, rigorous and “radiant with hope,” and people in the audience are invited to throw off their clothes and join in. As a complementary extra at the Barbican, there’s a screening of DA Pennebaker’s 1979 Town Bloody Hall film on 23rd January, bringing audiences back to the original Mailer-Greer stand-off. Will the force of feminism be reappraised in the naked body politic?
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for Whatsonstage.com and an author
TELEVISION
Africa Cup of Nations 2010 Angola, 10th-31st January; BBC2, BBC4, Eurosport
With the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, it’s time to do a little homework on African football. The task should be made less arduous by January’s Africa Cup of Nations—the continent’s biennial international football tournament, held this time round in Angola. Five of the six African teams heading for the World Cup will be on show (South Africa failed dismally to qualify). However, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have been drawn in the same group, and expect good things from the other qualifiers Nigeria, Cameroon and Algeria; with squads overwhelmingly drawn from leading European leagues, their matches should be the pick of the opening stages. But such is the power of African football that familiar faces will be playing for almost every team in the tournament.
The competition will offer a rare moment of exposure for Angola on our screens. We may not see much of the country, currently being transformed by the explosion of oil money, but the stadiums are worth seeing. Architecturally spectacular by comparison to many African arenas, they have all been built with Chinese money, contractors and predominantly Chinese labour. Angola is one of 18 African countries receiving this kind of largesse. The tournament promises to be a window on African football and a terrific competition. Look a little closer and it might also be a window on a whole lot more.
David Goldblatt’s report on Mathare United won Sports Story of the Year at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards 2009
FILM
A Prophet On general release from 22nd January
Movie watching is so fractured these days. There’s the teenage world of High School Musical, the art films on the festival circuit, the blockbusters like 2012 whose posters are plastered on bus shelters, and the indie pics that rely on viral marketing.
But every now and then a film comes along that delivers on the whole palette of cinema’s pleasures: the sensation of action cinema, the contemplation of art cinema, the relevance of social cinema and the transcendence of the spiritual filmmaker. A Prophet is such a film. It is the sixth feature directed by 57-year-old Parisian Jacques Audiard, whose last movie, The Beat that My Heart Skipped (2005), was like early Scorsese. A Prophet is the best gangster picture since Goodfellas, but because its central character Malik is a young French Arab, its social scope is broader. Malik, played by Tahar Rahim, is sent to prison for six years (we don’t know why). That setting distils the drama; the scene where he hides a razor blade in his mouth to kill another inmate is fascinating, and an encounter with a deer is numinous.
Violence usually has a steroid effect on film, pumping it up artificially, but here the testosterone in front of and, presumably, behind the camera combine to deliver a powerful, controlled, torque. If the movie playing field were level, A Prophet would win five Oscars. It’s the kind of stylised masculine movie that Michael Mann should be making.
Mark Cousins is a film critic
ART
Gabriel Orozco Moma New York, 13th December-1st March, www.moma.org
Deep winter is a bad time for grand openings, but New York, bracing and beautiful at new year, has come up trumps. Gabriel Orozco is a genius who transforms whatever he happens upon—a Citroën car, a ball of Plasticine, an entire whale skeleton, a billiard table, his own unmatched socks—into something surprising. The Museum of Modern Art gave this Mexican artist his first solo museum show in 1993. Now it is offering a mid-career retrospective, which promises to be an international phenomenon of 2010: travelling on to Basel (18th April-10th August), Paris (15th September-3rd January 2011), and reaching Tate Modern on 19th January 2011.
Just as he refuses to live in any one place, lodging alternately in Mexico City, New York and Paris, so Orozco evades all categories. His quizzical scrutiny of an idea or object may issue in a drawing, a photograph, a sculpture, an installation, or a painting—but always as something provocative, playful and, if you care to dwell on it, profound. Geometry, maps and games—systems in general—fascinate him, as do the random spontaneity and free flow of chance that defy them. Visitors to his Serpentine show in 2004 will remember the skull covered in a graphite chequerboard of black and white squares, named Black Kites. This and other key pieces of the last 20 years will be on show.
Emma Crichton-Miller is an arts writer
FICTION
Generosity Richard Powers (Atlantic Books)
Forget about doing the other five things and read Richard Powers’s Generosity at least twice. I hadn’t heard of Powers until I was given this novel—the latest in an oeuvre of fictional explorations of scientific themes that includes The Gold Bug Variations, Galatea 2.2 and The Echo Maker—and now I wonder how I managed to remain ignorant of him for so long. Generosity has many themes: the promise, threats and limitations of science and technology; the interface between biotech and big business; celebrity in a digital age; trust; the boundless sea of information and mediated experience—shallow but shark-infested—in which we live. But these are all subordinated to a profound meditation on the nature and origin of happiness and on what it is that makes us human. At the centre of a cast of unforgettable characters is Thassa Amzwar, a refugee who has escaped to Chicago from an Algeria rendered hellish by endless civil war. She radiates an unaccountable happiness, an intense joy at the ordinary things of life, and the seemingly banal question of whether she carries a happiness gene is the motor for an immensely subtle and witty fiction. Each page of Generosity carries enough brilliant metaphors to furnish an entire volume of verse and the novel teems with insights that science fiction and fiction about science rarely achieve.
Raymond Tallis is a philosopher, writer and clinical scientist
POP CD
IRM Charlotte Gainsbourg with Beck (Because Music/Warner)
Musicians today spend as much time worrying about the public stealing their work as they do creating it. The result is a covetous, paranoid industry more akin to Scrooge & Marley than a purveyor of musical cheer. Beck Hansen, on the other hand, is one of a few artists to avoid such attitudes, happily feeding his fans free, inspirational and (dare I say it) educational content through a refreshingly cranky website. His Record Club, run very much in the spirit of music rather than commerce, invites notable guests to team up and record covers of favourite vintage albums (The Velvet Underground and Nico, Skip Spence’s Oar), posting up the rude but meaningful results for public benefit.
Lately, his collaborative genius has extended to a new project with Charlotte Gainsbourg, the Anglo-French daughter of Serge, and winner of Best Actress at Cannes in 2009 for her role in Lars von Trier’s Antichrist. Having suffered a minor brain haemorrhage after a waterskiing accident two years ago, Gainsbourg was repeatedly stuffed into a magnetic resonance scanner, the clunks and beeps of which inspired a kind of music in her. Together with co-writer and producer Beck, whose cut-and-paste innovation is evident in the pre-released tracks, “IRM” and “Heaven Can Wait,” she has translated this life-threatening experience into music of a surprisingly liberated and experimental nature, which—though pop enough to be considered mainstream—may yet, like her acting, win her left-field acclaim.
Nick Crowe is a music writer
THEATRE
Trilogy BAC, 12th-16th January, Tel: 020 7223 2223; Barbican Theatre, 22nd-23rd January, Tel: 0845 120 7511
Nic Green is a Glasgow-based performance artist whose naked dance and sexual politics triptych, Trilogy, an acclaimed sensation at the Edinburgh fringe last summer, is revived as a winter non-warmer at the BAC in Battersea, and as part of the Barbican’s Bite10 programme.
Green divides her three-hour staging into an allegedly non-exploitative skin show, as 50 nude women express their relationships with their own bodies. There’s a recreation of the 1971 New York “Town Bloody Hall” debate in which Germaine Greer, famously squaring up to Norman Mailer, accused male art of sapping women’s vitality and breaking their hearts; and a gruesome “nothing’s changed” broadside focusing on medieval and superstitious practices of genital mutilation and death sentence stoning, leading to a defiant and joyous sing-along finale to “Jerusalem.”
The show has been variously described as heartfelt, rigorous and “radiant with hope,” and people in the audience are invited to throw off their clothes and join in. As a complementary extra at the Barbican, there’s a screening of DA Pennebaker’s 1979 Town Bloody Hall film on 23rd January, bringing audiences back to the original Mailer-Greer stand-off. Will the force of feminism be reappraised in the naked body politic?
Michael Coveney is a theatre critic for Whatsonstage.com and an author
TELEVISION
Africa Cup of Nations 2010 Angola, 10th-31st January; BBC2, BBC4, Eurosport
With the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, it’s time to do a little homework on African football. The task should be made less arduous by January’s Africa Cup of Nations—the continent’s biennial international football tournament, held this time round in Angola. Five of the six African teams heading for the World Cup will be on show (South Africa failed dismally to qualify). However, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana have been drawn in the same group, and expect good things from the other qualifiers Nigeria, Cameroon and Algeria; with squads overwhelmingly drawn from leading European leagues, their matches should be the pick of the opening stages. But such is the power of African football that familiar faces will be playing for almost every team in the tournament.
The competition will offer a rare moment of exposure for Angola on our screens. We may not see much of the country, currently being transformed by the explosion of oil money, but the stadiums are worth seeing. Architecturally spectacular by comparison to many African arenas, they have all been built with Chinese money, contractors and predominantly Chinese labour. Angola is one of 18 African countries receiving this kind of largesse. The tournament promises to be a window on African football and a terrific competition. Look a little closer and it might also be a window on a whole lot more.
David Goldblatt’s report on Mathare United won Sports Story of the Year at the Foreign Press Association Media Awards 2009
