BE KIND, REWIND 4

me-ac’s random round-up…

FEVER RAYS

It’s been a strange few days at me-ac central. For one thing we’ve seemingly lost the very core of our being – our appetite – replaced by a suspected case of swine flu (which makes sense when combined with the extraordinary tiredness and sore throat also in situ). But it could be us being overdramatic (regular readers will attest it wouldn’t be the first time) and just an excuse to kick around in bed all day watching dodgy old horror flicks (strictly in the name of research for Halloween week, naturally). Whatever, it’s also that time where we check back on our last five musings with any additional thoughts, corrections and what-have-you…

TALK OF THE TOON

It’s just over a week since we dusted the cobwebs off our retro Newcastle United scarf at Portman Road. And as the deathless cliché goes, that’s a long time in the football. That 4-0 away win doesn’t look so hot in the light of Ipswich’s continuing knack of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, while Newcastle have flatlined; eschewing the chance to haul themselves seven points clear at the top with home draws against QPR and Bristol City. While hardly atypical, like many me-ac suspected NUFC would be toiling miserably in mid-table after our summer fire sale, history suggests we’ll rue this clear failure of nerve later in the season.

But it’s not events on the pitch that concern us here ­– this is Newcastle United after all – no, it’s last week’s off-field distraction, the Kevin Keegan tribunal. Now like most Newcastle fans me-ac has an enduring affection for Special K, and would begrudge him very little, especially in a head-to-head with our oleaginous owner Mike Ashley – a man whose blundering naivety and prevarication largely secured our demotion. However, neither emerged with much credit from last week’s judgement.

While the dirty laundry raised in the tribunal hints that Keegan’s stance against Dennis Wise’s signing of Ignacio Gonzalez was just the tip of a very grubby iceberg (and please don’t even get us started on Wise), the sheer breadth of Keegan’s claim was startling. In effect he was asking for £25 million – an extra £8.6 million for the remainder of his contract plus £16.5 million for ‘stigma’ damages – for “income, which he would otherwise reasonably have expected to receive up to his 65^th birthday”. Say what? It’s an outlandish amount and one Keegan seemed to ‘reasonably’ back off from after his eventual award of £2 million for constructive dismissal. Mind you, it’s not the first time Keegan has spotted a potential money-spinner and grabbed it with both hands. Here’s a four-pack of previous raids…

1. Kevin Keegan’s Soccer Annual

Keegan was one of the first football stars to truly capitalise on his celebrity. And on the back of the popularity of boys’ mags like Match and Shoot emerged this 1978 Christmas hardback. You could read its 64 pages in an hour, if pushed, but who wouldn’t want to learn the mercurial soccer maverick’s thoughts on travel, striking partners, even how to be a prize-winning poet? And that’s not to mention John Toshack’s gung-ho tribute to his erstwhile Liverpool strike partner.

2. Superstars

Keegan’s pluck and courage was certainly the highlight of his profile-boosting showing on the BBC’s sporting series. Competing in a 1976 cycle race in Bracknell, Keegan fell off at high speed – watch it here – suffering severe burns, cuts and abrasions for his toils. Yet despite his injuries he insisted on going again, clocking a second place finish and even winning the show’s final steeplechase.

3. Head Over Heels In Love

The inevitable pop single arrived in the summer of 1979, and by Christ was it a stinker. Keegan could hold a tune, just, but wasn’t helped by his wayward choice of collaborators – Smokie members Chris Norman and Pete Spencer – and it was always going to be an uphill task turning this rejected Rak B-side into chart gold (it stumbled to 31 in the UK, but hit the German top ten).

 4. A Little Bit Of Brut

Alongside boxing legend Henry Cooper, and pre Barry Sheen, the essence of Keegan was an amalgam of citrus, lavender and sandalwood divined from that popular scent ‘with muscle’, Brut 33. The pair showed their guns and took homo-erotica to the masses with their gym-and-shower based ad and its enduring slogan: “Nothing beats the great smell of Brut”. Gertcha!

THE FULL PACKAGE

Amid me-ac’s bout of dewy-eyed nostalgia for The Very Things colossal non-hit The Bushes Scream While My Daddy Prunes, was a small shot of the sleeve of The Cravats’ last single, Rub Me Out. A startling black and white image, with stencilled titles in the established Crass house style, rendered as a fold-out sleeve on poor quality yet resilient paper stock, it’s wholly distinctive and emblematic of a time when the packaging meant nearly as much as the music. John Peel and a few sympathetic stores aside, there were few very opportunities to crane your Britney Spears around the more outré sounds of the time. And me-ac, like many others, would often take the purchase plunge stone deaf – either on the basis of some half-remembered review in the inkies or, more often than not, purely on the artwork’s graphic appeal.

Visual identity was something Crass embraced from the start, and there’s little doubt that their impact would have been muted, if not negligible, were it not for the anger and impact of Gee Vaucher’s distinctive artwork (fully documented in Crass Art And Other Pre Post Modernist Monsters). The mad font foreplay on the inside sleeve of that Crass-released Cravats single (above) is another provocative reminder of the bang you got for your buck in those halcyon days and me-ac, for one, finds it more than a bit rich that Apple/iTunes are currently celebrating sleeve artwork when they’ve done so much to practically ensure its obsolescence.

GIFT RAP

The Turner Prize exhibition opens today at the Tate, as previewed here last week, and me-ac will be wobbling on down for a proper look as soon as we’ve got through our recommended dose of Tamiflu. It can be a bit of a dry and underwhelming encounter when busked solo, so we recommend tagging along on one of the Late At Tate tours with a glass of plonk. Back in 2005 me-ac thoroughly enjoyed a quixotic tour of the exhibits preside over by bequiffed film critic Mark Kermode. Anyone familiar with the Marcus Tandy lookalike’s work will know he’s never short of an opinion or 12, and so it proved on this vastly entertaining sortie – taking less than 20 minutes for a reference to his beloved The Exorcist to creep into proceedings. Way to go. 

  

RED OR DEAD

After finally catching up with Andrea Arnold’s feature debut Red Road on DVD, me-ac was not only wowed (for the second time in a month) but also struck by how structurally similar it was to this year’s Fish Tank. That’s no bad thing by any measure – cogent plotting seems to have gone the way of the dodo in many recent blockbusters – but perhaps surprising given the film’s genesis. Filmed as the first of a trio of films for the Dogme inspired Advance Party, it was conceived under the following rules, as dictated by Lone Sherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen:

“The scripts can take their starting point in one or more characters or they may be subjected to an external drama. The characters can also participate in a form that is governed primarily by neither characters nor plot.

“The films take place in Scotland but apart from that the writers are free to place them anywhere according to geography, social setting or ethnic background. Their back-stories can be expanded, family relations can be created between them, they can be given habits good or bad, and secondary characters can be added if it is proper for the individual film.

“The interpersonal relationships of the characters differ from film to film and they may be weighted differently as major or minor characters. The development of the characters in each story or genre does not affect the other scripts.

“All of the characters must appear in all of the films. The various parts will be cast with the same actors in the same parts in all of the films.”

Rules is rules and all that, and we’ll be intrigued to see how the second in the trilogy turns out. Currently in post-production, Morag McKinnon’s Rounding Up Donkeys is due in early 2010, though the status of the third and final part (originally conceived by Mikkel Noergaard) is still the subject of speculation and a prolonged gestation. me-ac would also like to apologise unreservedly to anyone offended by us invoking a union of Mick Hucknell and PJ Harvey – as we did with the main characters Jackie and Clyde in Red Road – which, even taken on purely platonic terms, would be akin to a Late Junction session cooked up in the seventh quadrant of hell.

CHILD IN TIME

Precocious, fast-burning child film stars have always been a casualty of the American Dream. But few, bar Bette Davis’s spectacularly batty turn in Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, have really featured in its fictions, so me-ac takes off its hat to the masterful creation that is Baby Brent in Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. Brent is the epitome of the deluded and spoilt, trading off his one iconic moment as far into perpetuity as possible, rather like a Big Brother contestant still attempting a northern nightclub tour five years after their series ended. Clearly threatened by the emerging talents of inventor Flint Lockwood, it’s testament to the story’s wider vision that the pair eventually see eye-to-eye and, indeed, that Brent finds a fluffy new incarnation totally suited to his gifts. Point yourself at your nearest multiplex pronto for more…

MANNA FROM HEAVEN

Let it come down…

One of the reasons for starting me-ac was for it to be a sort of impromptu diary of those cultural events one attends or absorbs, but often fails to record. There are obvious reasons for this – the most startling being a lack of any real time to process or even fully immerse in the distractions that make the daily grind palatable. We hear it, watch it, read it, maybe even eat or drink it, but we rarely savour the essence of what we so avidly consume, we’re so busy needlessly chasing our tails or racking up second-hand opinions as our own. Now I’m no exception to these rules by a long chalk – peering into the cavernous abyss of my finances (or their startling absence) is frankly terrifying, and getting worse by the nanosecond – but I’m choosing, temporarily, to delay my descent onto skid row by allowing myself to wallow, even luxuriate, in ignoring those age-old time-is-money dictates.

And, since me-ac cranked into inauspicious being, nothing has brought more simple joy or so swiftly sped through 90 minutes than an early afternoon, deliriously childfree, screening of Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.  

Adapted by authors Ron and Judi Barrett from their well-received book of the same name, Cloudy… kicks off at a relentless pace and barely steps off the gas for its duration. It centres around Flint Lockwood (voiced by Bill Hader), a young inventor on the small sardine-tinning island of Swallow Falls. While different from his peers he’s also desperate for their approval, pouring all his energies into his lab work, with varying degrees of success – from self-spraying shoes, to rat birds and his malfunctioning Monkey Thought Translator. And despite his despair at his earlier failures, and his father’s seeming indifference to them, Flint pursues his increasingly ambitious dreams thanks to his mother’s tireless encouragement.

Almost before the viewer has had time to process the news, we learn with a jolt that Flint’s adored mother passed away sometime in his early teens. And with adulthood looming, Flint is under increasing pressure to abandon his inventions for a role in the family tackle shop; though father Tim (James Caan) and son have clear communication problems, the thickset mono-browed dad only able to converse in oblique fishing metaphors (with very acute, if accidental, similarities to Eric Cantona’s infamous “When the seagulls follow the trawler…” press conference).

Flint’s last gasp attempt to stave off living a humdrum life in Nowheresville is his invention of the Mutating Dynamic Food Replicator – a machine that, quasi-Biblically, transmutes water into food. And it’s while plugging into his community’s central power supply that he comes into contact with the film’s other central characters – the avaricious Mayor Shelbourne (Bruce Campbell), cop Earl Devereaux (Mr T), former child star and town bully Baby Brent (Andy Samberg), glamorous weathergirl/love interest Sam Sparks (Anna Faris) – as a controlled rainfall of cheeseburgers delight and entrance the previously fish-fed locals. 

The unhinged, capacious Shelbourne seizes this chance at making a real name for himself, his blandishments and the previously obscure charms of local celebrity persuading Flint to sing to his tune, only for his weather demands to get increasingly anarchic, super-sized and out of control. Already palpably strong, the animation really comes into its own here, with sustained hails of giant foodstuffs descending onto Swallow Falls with increasingly catastrophic consequences.

Add some terrific dialogue – “That spaghetti twister is just an amuse bouche compared to what’s on the way!” – to a taut, killer script and some surrealist touches (like the knowing nod to Eraserhead, and more explicit allusions to the entire disaster movie genre) and it’s clear directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller are having as much fun with their source material as the viewers are with the fruits of their toils.

And while I rank Toy Story 2 up there with the best of Hitchcock in terms of nerve-jangling suspense, I also spit on those insipid twits who somehow equate certain children’s movies with high art statements worthy of Tolkien. Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs has no such lofty pretensions. It may be a prescient parable about the perils of over-consumption, but it’s also an easily digestible, self-contained treat. Time well wasted, whatever any errant clock-watcher protests.

SEEING RED

Voyeur’s delight…

Andrea Arnold is clearly a burgeoning talent. If last month’s Fish Tank was something of a revelation, her feature debut, 2006’s Red Road – which I finally caught up with last night – proves it’s far from a flash in the pan. Like Fish Tank it was both written and directed by Arnold, but this time under a whole series of restrictions imposed by the Dogme-inspired Advance Party. In short, this was for three writer-directors to make separate films featuring the same nine characters, played by the same actors. Major characters in one film turn to minor figures in another, with no restrictions on tone or genre. Oddly, but no matter here, the other films in this series have failed to materialise.

Red Road’s plot centres around the withdrawn and skinny CCTV operator Jackie (Kate Dickie, a sort of Caledonian PJ Harvey). While not manning the massed banks of video screens for City Eye Control, her life seems broken, almost in stasis, her work a buffer from the real world, save for occasional bouts of loveless sex in the Land Rover of a married colleague. Hints of the bigger darkness engulfing her slowly begin to emerge when she attends a relative’s wedding and engages in a stilted, slightly cryptic exchange with an older man whose significance is, initially, frustratingly aloof.

The humdrum, vicious circle of her life is split asunder when a working Jackie spies a girl she suspects is about to be sexually assaulted on some wasteland. She’s about to phone it in but stops in her tracks when she realises the act is consensual. As she zooms in for the close-up a dim hint of recognition crosses her features. It’s clear she knows who the ginger male chugging gleefully away is, but she’s also spooked and rendered incredulous by it.

Tracking ginger quickly becomes Jackie’s obsession. She has a leap on her quarry through all the surveillance techniques at her fingertips, though almost at the expense of her job – at one point missing a near fatal stabbing. She eventually traces the man we have now learned is Clyde Henderson (Tony Curran, a sort of Caledonian Mick Hucknell) back to the titular Red Road flats, where she follows and eventually, excruciatingly, confronts him.

Arnold keeps the viewer on tenterhooks throughout. The full story only unfurls in dribs and drabs, and she piles on the darkness to ensure the viewer feels the full electric snap and crackle of tension when Jackie and Clyde finally confront each other face-to-face. As with Fish Tank, Arnold’s flair for seemingly natural dialogue shines through – the script is sparing throughout, with zero flab but bags of gristle. And as with her social realist filmmaking forbears the sex scenes are raw and unflinching (although best to not extend those earlier Hucknell and Harvey comparisons without first packing a voluminous sickbag).

And if all this sounds somewhat grim and far from dinner at the Ritz, none of that was advertised on the brochure (indeed, there’s a beautiful simplicity and almost calming solemnity to the American fly poster for the film – see top of post). Arnold coaxes credible, cogent performances from Dickie and Curran – with strong support from Clyde’s hair-trigger sweetie/psycho pal Stevie (Martin Compston) and dim-witted girlfriend April (Natalie Press) – somehow managing to fashion a cathartic coda from a seeming impossible premise. That triumph would elude lesser talents and is further proof that all eyes should stay trained on this fiery, precocious filmmaker. 

TURNER SYNDROME

Mind the crap…

Cold mechanical, conceptual bullshit? Annual farce and ongoing national joke? Yes it's Turner Prize time again – exhibiting from Tuesday at the Tate Britain – and you can put your mortgage on politician Kim Howells, art critic Brian Sewell and controversial art group the Stuckists being less than impressed with this year’s nominees. It was ever thus. Yet despite all the bleating and carping – itself whiningly predictable to the point of tedium – my biggest complaint with this year’s selection isn’t the artists or even their work, it’s glorified press officer Mariella Fostrup somehow inveigling herself onto the judging panel (after previously whoring her way through the Booker Prize and British Film Awards). As a result all sensible bets are off and I’ll need a few stiff ones from this year’s sponsors Gordon’s to steady myself when the winner is announced on December 7.

Half the fun of the Turner Prize lies in the acres of newsprint it annually chews up – be it for the art itself, its critics, or for some tragic misdemeanour at the award ceremony itself. It’s a gas. And before looking at this year’s fresh-faced contenders there’s no harm in taking a swift trip down memory lane of my five favourite past Turner controversies…

1. BILL & JIM FLASH THE CASH

A year after dumping a dead sheep at the Brit Awards after-party, pop pranksters Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond of the KLF entered the Turner fray with their Anti-Turner Prize for the “worst artist in Britain”, awarded to real 1993-winner Rachel Whiteread. A bit of a damp squib as art pranks go (the reluctant sculptor accepted the dosh but gave it to charity), it’s resonant, as it presaged their trip to the remote Scottish island of Jura for the self-explanatory ‘action’ K Foundation Burn A Million Quid, something Drummond himself has rued in recent years. It was the first of many alternative Turner awards including Trevor Prideaux’s Turnip Prize, the Stuckists’ Real Turner Prize and posh boy foodie Tom Parker Bowles’ Alternative Turner Prize. 

2. MAD TRACEY FROM MARGATE

Two years before she was shortlisted for the Turner in 1999, a positively refreshed Tracey Emin achieved her first real infamy in a Channel 4 debate on the awards, insulting her fellow guests and mumbling that “no real people” would be watching. Emin hit the headlines again for her widely derided Turner installation, My Bed, after artists, Yuan Chi and Jian Jun Xi jumped onto it, stripped to their underwear and had a pillow fight, calling it Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey’s Bed. She didn’t win (though had the last laugh with Charles Saatchi snapping it up for a paltry £150,000), that was Steve McQueen for a short celluloid Buster Keaton pastiche a million miles removed from last year’s bracing Bobby Sands biopic Hunger.

3. MAD MADGE FROM MICHIGAN

2001 was a bit of a rum year in all respects. Winner Martin Creed’s The Lights Going On And Off was just that, prompting at least one egg-based protest, but overshadowed by judge Madonna’s legs-in-mouth speech at the ceremony: “At a time when political correctness is valued over honesty I would also like to say right-on motherfuckers!” Be prepared to die for Madge all over again by clicking here.

4. MAD FIONA FROM MERSEYSIDE

In 2002 the media’s unswerving gaze was trained on Fiona Banner whose wall-size text piece, the delicately titled Arsewoman In Wonderland, described a pornographic film in detail. The Guardian memorably invited Britain’s self-styled biggest porn star, Ben Dover, for his considered views. “I think it’s clever,” he said, after a long perusal. “It’s very cynical. Porn attracts publicity, everybody knows that.” But when asked if Dover thought it was art he was much more damning? “Art? It’s basically shite. I think the best that can be said for it is that you can probably read it and have a good wank.”

5. BROTHERLY LOVE

Another sleazegate followed next year when The Chapman Brothers unveiled two new works anachronistically titled Sex and Death (pictured above). Sex showed three dismembered corpses hanging from a tree in a heightened state of decay, but was well trumped by its companion piece. On the face it, just two blow-up dolls placed on top of each other in the 69 position, Death was carefully painted to disguise that it was cast in bronze. Great attention to detail and all that, but wearyingly puerile and still no win for the tiresome les enfants terrible.

THIS YEAR’S MODELS

While 2008 was generally regarded as a bit of a low in the Prize’s chequered history – a case of arch pretension overriding craft – 2009 is a brighter beast with far less emphasis on the conceptual, not that the Stuckists are so easily appeased: “The nominees are someone with a chemistry set, a Habitat designer, a maker of insipid patterns, and an illustrator for John Lewis card department.” Judge for yourself with this small preview of their Turner exhibits…

ENRICO DAVID

One for the traditionalists, figurative painter David is obsessed with questions of gender and sexuality, using imagery gleaned from Commedia dell'arte that bridge the worlds between art and fashion. Surprisingly elegant, his use of vivid backgrounds renders his work both perverse and provocative. 

ROGER HIORNS

The nailed-on favourite, last year ‘modern alchemist’ Hiorns transformed a condemned bedsit in south London into a magical cave of copper sulphate crystals for Seizure (see top of post). Another solo show at Corvi-Mora consisted of just one work – a jumbo jet engine ground down into powder. The sculptor uses an array on non-traditional materials from soap bubbles and fire to detergent and perfume.

LUCY SKAER

Glasgow-based conceptualist (she once hid butterfly pupae in criminal courts in the hope that they would hatch during a trial) whose drawing roots are increasingly realised through sculpture. Her 2006 installation Solid Ground: Liquid To Solid In 85 Years won fulsome praise for being “a sort of three-dimensional version of a Rorschach test”.

RICHARD WRIGHT

Not the ball-fumbling Ipswich goalkeeper, but an abstract painter that, like the late Sol LeWitt, specialises in making intricate, mathematically precise webs of geometrical patterns to make site-specific paintings. Think baroque volutes, geometric minimalism and Islamic decoration.