Fairy, fairy, quite contrary.

What could be more festive than an evening down by the river in Greenwich sprinkled in fairy dust? Deborah Hyde (aka Jourdemayne), editor-in-chief of the Skeptic, was at Greenwich Skeptics in the Pub to talk about fairies and she began with a little bit of audience participation, asking the assembled to throw out some words they associated with fairies.

'Delicate', 'kindly folk', 'wings', 'female', 'androgynous', and 'crivens' (something to do with Terry Pratchett apparently) eventually gave way to the slightly more sinisiter 'tricksters' and 'baby stealers' and this warmed Deborah to her theme as she announced with no small glee of our titular heroes "they're a bunch of bastards" and the reason that fairies are a bunch of bastards is because, like all Gods and monsters, we invented them and we can be, when we want to be, a bunch of bastards ourselves.

From the peris of Persian and Armenian mythology and the Arabian jinn most cultures have spoke of some kind of Pagan spirit of the dead or of the Earth. As Catholicism took hold it syncretized and assimilated Paganism and polytheism into its belief system (think of all the different saints looking after different aspects of life) to popularise Christianity.

Protestantism didn't take so kindly to such ideas, denouncing polytheism as demonic as it rejected the primacy of God. The Protestants decided fairies were evil or even Satanic and if it hadn't been for the work of the 19c Brothers Grimm (Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin) in Germany and the lesser known Charles Perrault (responsible for Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty) in Paris nearly two centuries earlier categorising these stories this folklore may've been lost to Europe.

The Romantic movement also saw something of a comeback in fairies and folklore as we can see in the works of John Anster Fitzgerald and Richard Dadd (this one was used in a poster for a psychedelic club night me and a couple of friends put on about ten years ago called Cuthbert's Morning Off).

The Cottingley Fairies have long since been debunked and now look utterly ridiculous but in 1917 the hoax fooled many, not least Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. The process of bowdlerization that would result in the current Disneyfication of fairies had begun. Fairies were now fit and proper child's entertainment and had completed an almost complete U-turn worthy of Theresa May.

The regular habits of proper, real fairies were not so sweet as those of Tinkerbell & co. They drowned people, often by disguising themselves as 'water horses' who would offer you a ride into the river before forcibly dismounting you and as soon as you'd drowned, few could swim in those days, eating you. Some water horses were said to be able to extend their backs so they could process multiple victims in one fell swoop.

Jenny Greenteeth, known as Peg Powler on the Tees and elsewhere as Nelly Longarms, was another dangerous fairy like creature. A water hag that would pull both children and the elderly into the river and drown them. It's unsure if, like the water horses, she then ate them.

Elf-shot too was another clear and present danger. Now satisfactorily identified as bronze or stone age arrowheads the people of the past didn't have the skills or understanding to recognise such things so, of course, medieval folk believed these were weapons made by fairies (or elves - or pixies, goblins, sprites, it's an absolute minefield the nomenclature) that could strike you with a curse that would soon leave you dead.

It's generally understood that this is how people rationalised tuberculosis and strokes, things that science had yet to understand, but when the fairies weren't getting the blame for it witches were. The Pendle witches of Lancashire were charged, in 1612, for the murder of ten people. Of the eleven who went to trial (nine women and two men) ten were found guilty and hanged and one was, quite bizarrely, exonerated. But that's a whole different blog for the future (hopefully).

Fairies, like some witches, also specialised in seduction and 'draining' and their favourite victims were often poets, minstrels, or the artistically gifted. It's believed that the somewhat wispy nature of these fey boys was what made them ripe for a draining but it's far more likely that poets and minstrels lived in poverty, possibly malnourished, and were more likely to be struck by disease than others.

Alp-luachra wouldn't have helped much. The 'joint-eater' of Ireland would wait for their victim to fall asleep by the side of a stream, seemingly standard behaviour of the time, before mutating into a newt, crawling down the throat of their prey, and eating the half-digested food inside their body. The cure for this, apparently, was to eat huge amounts of salt beef whilst consuming no liquids whatsoever and then run to the water where the Alp-luachra would, horrified, jump out of its hosts body. In some cases there wasn't just one Alp-luachra living inside a human's body but up to twelve of them, a whole family. It's good when the family gets together at meal times, isn't it?

When fairies weren't stealing food they were stealing breast milk. Pregnant women, midwives, and, one presumes, wet nurses found themselves regularly subjected to milk raids by the fairy folk. Worse than stealing your food, or even your baby's food, is stealing your life but that's what characters like the Washer by the Ford did. If you were to be walking down by the stream and, just for a change had decided not to have a little nap, and caught a glimpse of her washing your clothes this meant you were soon to die. It's a similar deal with a banshee although banshees were said to merely presage your death as opposed to cause it like the Washer by the Ford. For aristocratic houses these life takers were seen as a sign of status!

Changelings ain't so sweet either. The particular fairy trick here was to swap a new born human baby with an old and wrinkled knackered old fairy often replacing them in the cradle. Fairies knew humans cared for their babies so it was a way of getting their elderly looked after while at the same time bringing some vim and vigour into the fairy realm.

Martin Luther, the German monk who became one of the leading figures of the Reformation, recommended a changeling that he believed had come into his circle be drowned. Of course this changeling was merely a disfigured child so Luther had simply justified the murder of a toddler by dehumanising them.

Deborah posited that the subconscious desire to get rid of unwanted children, children that didn't really work properly, played a big part in the mythos of changelings. It gave harassed and stressed parents a get out of jail free card. They could kill their children, they probably had too many anyway, and nobody really cared. I've been warned off using the phrase 'cold blooded old times' too often but fucking hell, it's necessary here.

As well as being drowned by over zealous religious reformers changelings could be starved or put on red hot shovels until they burned to death. It was a socially acceptable, if not legal, method of infanticide for mentally and physically impaired children and it's about as far from Cinderella's Fairy Godmother as you're likely get.

The Q&A session that followed the talk covered Icelandic belief in trolls, the Cunning folk and their low magic, and a hierarchy of folkloric creatures (the fact that it's always very similar to the hierarchy of the human world it runs parallel to suggests that SPOILER ALERT it may all be made up) but at the end we could easily return to Deborah's words (and she really is a fantastic speaker - go see her if you get a chance):-

Fairies, "they're a bunch of bastards".

Fleapit revisited:Wonder.

I don't know what it's like now but when I went to school some of the kids could be pretty merciless. If you were taller than normal, shorter than normal, thinner than normal, or fatter than normal you could find yourself subjected to endless ribbing. If you spoke in an unusual voice, if your ears stuck out, if you had a big nose, if you weren't good at sport, any difference essentially could be mined and weaponised by a bully or two rendering the entire experience of education a living nightmare.

So it's easy to imagine just how tough school would be for a kid with an obvious facial deformity. That's the premise of Stephen Chbosky's new film Wonder and it's one that, with a few caveats, works surprisingly well.

August 'Auggie' Pullman is a young kid growing up in Manhattan who was born with 'mandibulofacial dyostosis'. As he's spent most of his early life undergoing a seemingly endless succession of surgeries he's been home schooled by his mother Isabel (Julia Roberts), an illustrator. Auggie's a bright kid, science is his big thing, and he's funny too but people's reaction to his face have seen him take to covering his face with an astronaut's helmet.

 

The film shows Auggie during his first year at Beecher Prep, a private school that clearly has a good reputation but nonetheless contains its fair share of bullies. Some of the kids call him a freak, they call him Barf Hideous, and they say he's got the plague. We see Auggie eating lunch alone in the refectory as other kids point, stare, and laugh at him.

 

It is, of course, heartbreaking and it is, of course, schmaltzy. The thing with 'weepies' is that you can feel a little bit manipulated by them, Marcelo Zarvos's string-soaked score almost cues your tears in here and there's a few overtly treacly scenes of sermonising and kids saying earnest and emotionally intelligent things that kids just don't really tend to say in real life.

 

Where the film works much better is in the way it chooses to tell the story. It's broke, roughly, into a few chapters that tell the story from different perspectives. After Auggie tells his story we see events from the angle of his sister Via (a wonderfully understated performance from Izabel Vidovic). Via's a sensible, intelligent girl who knows that Auggie is the sun and she's just one of the planets that orbit him. She secretly seeks validation from her parents while quietly getting on with her studies and developing a touching relationship with boyfriend Justin (Nadji Jetter).

 

More surprisingly still we also get to see events from the angle of Via's best friend, Miranda (Danielle Rose Russell). Miranda seems to have gone a bit wild since returning from summer camp (she's dyed her hair, taken to drinking, and doesn't seem to want anything more to do with Via) but what seems initially like the selfishness of youth is revealed to have deeper resonance.

 

It's a great strength of the film that each repetition of events serves to cast light, rather than shade, over the story. Chbosky is so naturally conciliatory that even school bully Julian (Bryce Gheisar) is fleshed out with a back story rather than allowed to operate as a cartoon baddie.

 

Performances are excellent throughout. Jacob Tremblay plays Auggie as a mixture of defiance, weary resignation, and despair - a human with a range of emotions basically. Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson as Auggie's parents are solid and seem realistic, and Vidovic and Jetter sketch out the burgeoning stages of a teenage relationship tenderly, but even the more minor roles are allowed dignity and depth, permitted to breathe.

 

At the school we meet principal Tushman (Mandy Patinkin), English teacher Mr Browne (Daveed Diggs), and science teacher Ms Petosa (Ali Liebert). At times they seem almost too nice but it's a sweet touch that they get their moment to shine and aren't reduced to Peanuts style mwah-mwah voices in the background, stressed out incompetents, or grizzled old grumps.

 

Auggie's friends Jack Will (Noah Jupe) and Summer (Millie Davis) are fine child actors who put in performances worthy of, or even better than, their adult peers. Both their characters get to go on their journey of learning and acceptance as the film develops too - as we all must as children and probably should continue to do as adults also.

 

The film makes great use of The White Stripes 'We're Going to be Friends', it's neatly edited so there's no fat on it, and if the scene with Sonia Braga as Via's grandmother seems to only be in the film because Sonia Braga was available and the ending ties up a bit too neatly they're fairly minor criticisms. It would be a grand claim to say that artistically this is one of the year's finest films but it was touching, enjoyable, and it did make the cinema feel all warm. What else do you want in December?

Thanks to Valia for the tickets, the company, the input into this write up, and for not laughing at me when I got 'something in my eye'.

Fleapit revisited:Battle of the Sexes.

On the 20th September 1973 in the Houston Astrodome in front of an audience of over 30,000, still the largest crowd ever to watch a tennis match in the USA, 55 year old former Wimbledon champion Bobby Riggs played current Wimbledon champion (and already holder of ten Grand Slam titles) Billie Jean King (aged 29) for a purse of $100,000 and, far more importantly, to decide, once and for all, if men are better than women.

Husband and wife directorial duo Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris's new film Battle of the Sexes tells the story not just of the match, but the events that lead up to it and the events that made it inevitable that it would eventually happen.

Dayton and Faris's most famous film up to this point is 2006's Little Miss Sunshine. Couple that with the fact that screenwriter Simon Beaufoy's CV includes The Full Monty and Slumdog Millionaire and you'd be correct in assuming that Battle of the Sexes is less hard hitting political satire and more acceptable date night fodder. A few laughs, a few tears, some genuinely tense moments, and a feel good factor to warm even the coldest of hearts. It's a consoling arm round the shoulder rather than a wagging finger in one's face and it's all the better for it.

 

We begin with Billie Jean (Emma Stone) and founder of World Tennis, Gladys Heldman (Sarah Silverman) getting in a stand off with old school sexist and partriarchal promoter Jack Kramer (Bill Pullman) over the fact that female tennis players are being paid only an eighth of the money the men get. With Kramer unwilling to redress this, Heldman, King, and eight other leading female tennis players break away from the establishment to form their own circuit, the Virginia Slims, for women only.

 

For the first half of the film the action switches between Billie Jean King's hectic life at the top of her game to Bobby Riggs, a retired pro frustrated at the boredom of life away from the spotlight and battling, unsuccessfully, his overwhelming compulsion to gamble. You can tell it's the seventies by the voice of Richard Nixon on television, the shit brown furniture of Riggs's office, and by the fact that gropey 'unwanted hugs' seem to pass without mention from anyone.

 

Riggs, essentially an overgrown child, is equal parts loved and tolerated by his wife Priscilla (Elisabeth Shue). She despairs of him, she dumps him, but she keeps coming back to him because he's essentially a lovable rogue. Although he clearly has some chauvinistic tendencies the line that most neatly encapsulates and defines his character is the one he delivers at the press conference before the big match when he claims he's "putting the show back into chauvinism".

 

At heart he's a hustler and this male chauvinist pig schtick is just an angle, a way to make some money and keep him in the spotlight. Billie Jean King knows this but she's a much more secretive, serious character and she's got enough going on in her own life as it is.

 

On the court, her rival, the phenomenal Margaret Court has overtaken her at the top of the women's game and off the court she's starting to fall in love with another woman, her hairdresser Marilyn played by British actor Andrea Riseborough. A lesbian romance would be scandalous enough in the era but it's further complicated by the fact that Billie Jean is already married. To Larry, a handsome and solid man whose quiet supportive nature appears almost anachronistic in the decade of dolly birds, leering, and locker room banter about bra burning.

 

As both King's and Riggs's complicated internal lives are played out circumstances edge us closer and closer to the big match. In the first battle of the sexes Riggs takes on, and easily defeats, a clearly flustered Court. Court may be King's equal physically but it's in the mind games where King is stronger. She knows she simply has to beat Riggs or never hear the end of it.

 

So Billie Jean trains and she trains hard. Montages of her out jogging and hitting balls late into the night are contrasted with those of Riggs larking about with sheep, having pool parties, and playing tennis in fancy dress outfits. He's taking his opponent for granted and his choosing to wear a heavily sponsored Sugar Daddy (a candy bar) jacket that limits his movement and makes him sweat profusely in the Texan heat seems equally ill advised.

 

Emma Stone is great as Billie Jean King. She manages to convey the subtle nuances of someone torn between a man, a woman, and a sport with just a pensive glance or a furrowed brow. Steve Carell has the advantage of even looking like Bobby Riggs. He's absolutely the right actor for this role. His startled face, his weird hair, and his tiggerish manner all seem to suggest perfect casting.

 

The supporting cast are superb too. Riseborough and Austin Stowell (as Larry) play King's alternate love interests as kindly and concerned for Billie Jean. It's remarkable how civilized they manage to be in each other's company even when the penny drops as to what's actually happening. In one heartfelt exchange on a hotel forecourt Larry tells Marilyn something she already knows, that neither of them will ever be Billie Jean's true love. Tennis will always hold that distinction.

 

Sarah Silverman is good in a role that doesn't ask much of her other than to imagine what a seventies Sarah Silverman would be like, Elisabeth Shue manages to imbue both patience and dignity into the trope of the long suffering wife, Alan Cumming gets to camp it up fabulously as fashion designer and King confidante Ted Tinling, and, on the circuit, Natalie Morales plays former US Open double finalist Rosie Casals as a cute, but no-nonsense, advocate of women's liberation both in sport and in the wider world. She's great.

 

In some ways Jessica McNamee's Margaret Court is more the real baddie than Riggs. A conservative heterosexual whose motherhood stands in stark contrast to her fellow professionals, she never seems to fully get behind the women's tour and it's suggested she's only joined it for mercenary reasons. It seems likely that Court's rather unpleasant character has been incorporated into the story to punish her for her rather unpleasant views on homosexuality which came to light when she wrote a letter, earlier this year, to a Perth periodical protesting Qantas Airways decision to become a corporate sponsor of same sex marriage and threatening to boycott the carrier. Of course it's possible, even likely, that Court always held these 'Christian' views but vile as they're understood by most to be now it seems likely that forty plus years ago she'd have not been alone in holding, or expressing, such sentiment.

 

It's a minor, absolutely titchy, complaint in a film that has its heart, undoubtedly, in the right place. The soundtrack makes brilliant use of Elton John's Rocket Man, Hugh Masekela's Grazing in the Grass, and Crimson and Clover by Tommy James and the Shondells, the tennis scenes, although appearing incredibly slow to those of us used to the modern game, are so thrilling that I nearly applauded one particularly impressive drop shot (the girl sat two seats away from me did), and the skilful way the two narratives weave themselves effortlessly together all make Battle of the Sexes a film that manages to be simultaneously historically illuminating and great fun.

 

People always told me be careful of what you do but I'm very glad I made the trip out to see this movie. Tennis matches always start with love but this managed to sustain it for a full two hours and on that rather soppy note - new balls please!

Motherland:No job for a lady?

It's hard to put your finger on exactly why BBC2's recent sitcom Motherland wasn't better than it was. The subject matter (focusing primarily on the mums, much less so the dads, and hardly on the kids at all) was long overdue and ripe for comedic potential. The writers, all four of 'em, had pedigree. Sharon Horgan created Pulling, Graham Linehan is hugely acclaimed for Father Ted, The IT Crowd, and Black Books, and Holly Walsh has written for Mock the Week and Never Mind the Buzzcocks which is, admittedly, less impressive. Less is known of Linehan's wife, Helen, but presumably she was brought on board to offer further female/maternal perspective. The cast too was uniformly good.

But over one pilot and six episodes the average LOL per half-hour was somewhere between two and three. That's not terrible but when you're dealing with the comedy of cringe, which Motherland was, you need to make sure the comedy outweighs the cringe, which Motherland didn't always manage.

The show revolves around a group of mums (and one stay-at-home dad, the ever eager to please Kevin played by Paul Ready) living in a reasonably affluent part of West London, their meet ups in Tea Bags coffee house, their parenting dilemmas, and the intricate complicated network of one-upmanship played out between them that seems to dominate almost every social occasion.

Anna Maxwell Martin's Julia is the selfish, stressed out star of the piece and most of the sits in this sitcom come from her agreeing to do something she doesn't really want to do (hosting a party, looking after other people's kids, organising a fundraiser, and, by the end you suspect, actually being a mother) in order to impress other mums or curry favour at work.

Her own mum Marion (Ellie Haddington) has clearly had enough of being taken for granted and blackmailed into looking after her grandchildren (to the extent that she hides behind her sofa when her daughter calls round) and her husband Paul seems pretty useless (a running gag is that Paul is always busy - busy drinking beer before an Arsenal match, busy choosing a croissant, busy necking Pimm's on a stag night, or busy go-karting) so Julia's in the process of interviewing a series of woefully unsuitable nannies.

These interviews are amongst the show's funniest. Though a lot of the laughs go to Diane Morgan as Liz, an anarchic single mother unbound by the unwritten conventions most of her fellow mothers adhere to. As the brilliant Philomena Cunk there's a lot of goodwill in the bank for Morgan and, though Liz could never compete with the genius of Cunk, she doesn't squander it.

Liz's singledom and disregard for the rules don't endear her to the other mums but her calamitous attempts at motherhood and housekeeping probably make her the character most viewers are likely to side with. Witness her cut the end of her finger off trying to knife open a frozen block of cheese, make a human centipede of caterpillar cakes, and eat a fifteen year old packet of onion ring crisps. Her suggestion for how to run a children's party, give them undiluted squash and put Gangnam Style on repeat, is priceless.

Julia and Liz form something of a triumvirate with drippy Kevin. Kevin's an unfortunate example of male domesticity as almost everything he does seems to have been coated thickly with the brush of soppiness and then given a topcoat of unfortunateness. His well meaning thumbs up for breastfeeding, asking the kids at a party if they'd like 'a peep on the carrot flute', and his obviously failing relationship with his wife are all mined relentlessly.

The other mums are, for the most part, more lightly sketched. Except for alpha mum Amanda (Lucy Punch) and the 'emotional storm drain' that is Anne (Philippa Dunne), a neurotic Irishwoman whose home is plastered with motivational slogans but still gets drunk on Cava and accidentally exposes her left boob at a kid's pool party.

Amanda is the self-appointed boss of the mums and something of a bully to boot. She's totally self-obsessed yet completely without self-awareness and she's never short of a humblebrag. If men don't actually fancy her she certainly wouldn't make the mistake of realising that. Of course her perfect house, her perfect husband, and her perfect kids are just a veneer and one that, towards the end of the series, is stripped away quite masterfully.

Many of the jokes are similar to the ones that mums you know will regularly make on Facebook and, for the most part, they're no more or less funny. How soon in the day is it acceptable to have that first glass of wine? Check. Road rage on the school run? Check. A spectacularly crap Minion cake? Check. A child puking up as if in The Exorcist? Check.

None of these are likely to have you in stitches though all are well observed. They elicit a smile rather than a laugh in most cases but there's one or two occasions when the joke falls completely flat. Julia's slapstick fall into the pool at the pool party is distinctly unfunny and seems to belong more in some crap like Miranda than here.

Much better are the hilarious parents evening, Julia's hapless elderly in-laws, the racist Animal Man whose rubbish animal show consists entirely of cats, and Anne's memories of her father-in-law who used to enjoy two to three bottles of Cava per day. 

There's some great lines too. Julia to her mother - "I've been busy looking after your grandchildren" - and in answer to the request "you must give me the recipe for that omelette", again from Julia, Amanda's deadpan response "eggs".

It's an eminently watchable show, it's well-observed, every single person in it puts in a great performance (so much so that to single any actor out would be a disservice to the others in what has to be considered a great ensemble piece), and the balance between plot development, comedic situations, and one liners has been struck just right. But, alas, it just isn't quite as funny as it should be. Whatever it is that some mothers do 'ave it would appear it's sadly not all the best jokes.

It's not a case that only a mother could love this sitcom but, alas, Motherland turned out to be a place that was pleasant enough for a day trip but unlikely to inspire repeat visits.

Nest in Show.

Andy Holden and Peter Holden's Natural Selection at the former Newington Library was a peculiar, fascinating, occasionally confusing, and oddly life affirming experience. I had no idea what to expect when I walked, from Elephant & Castle tube station, along Walworth Road past a selection of uninviting looking pubs and takeaway chicken franchises into the site of the former library (and former Cuming Museum) that was gutted by a fire in 2013.

Artangel are well known for their site specific locations and for commissioning art that's very different to what you normally see, art that makes an impact. In the past they've been responsible for commissioning Rachel Whiteread's Turner Prize winning House and Break Down by Michael Landy in which said artist destroyed every last one of his possessions down to the clothes on his back, as well as works by the likes of Steve McQueen, Christian Marclay, Brian Eno, Scanner, Jeremy Deller, John Berger, Jem Finer, Miranda July, and Matthew Barney.

It seems unlikely that any of those listed artists would give off quite as distinct an Open University lecturer vibe as father and son duo Andy and Peter Holden. Andy's got the long hair, beard, and skinny tie of your 70s vintage OU man and dad Peter dons the more sober attire of a post-war social housing advocate. Let's just say he's no stranger to a cravat.

 

It was when Andy was back with his parents that the first seeds of an idea for this show appear to have been planted. Andy had finished art school and had returned to his folks 'nest' for a while when he found himself captivated by a blackbird building its actual nest. As his father Peter was a well respected expert on birds (he'd run the RSPB's Young Ornithologist's Club for thirty years, wrote several guide books to British birds, and appeared on Blue Peter as the 'bird man' alongside no lesser mortal than Bill Oddie) Andy's new found interest gave father and son a chance to meaningfully reconnect.

 

Soon they were giving joint lectures around the country about an oft-overlooked aspect of bird life, the nest, and if that sounds like it might in any way be a bit dry then the truth, as lucky visitors to this free exhibition will be fortunate enough to find out, is anything but.

 

It's a nice touch that the curators have paid tribute to the site's former use as the Cuming Museum by putting on a father and son exhibition (the Cuming's collection of archaeology, anthropology, and natural history was put together by Richard Cuming and his son Henry Syer Cuming) but it's an even sweeter one that Natural Selection appears to riff on and develop some of those very themes.

 

You walk in to a selection of nests collected from the natural world mixed in with others created in the artist's studio. It's almost impossible for a non-twitcher like myself to identify which is which but it's quite a fascinating selection. The huge bower bird nest (first photo) takes up the bulk of the exhibition space and is flanked by Andy Holden's Song Posts (Dawn Chorus), some spray painted telegraph poles whose inclusion in the exhibition is baffling but aesthetically pleasing.

 

In the corner of the room there's a glass case which contains nests of (in descending order in the photographs below) the weaver bird, the sparrow, the blackbird, the song thrush, the great tit, the oven bird, and the wood pigeon.



 

It takes only a cursory glance to see the great variety of nests that different birds build. From the barely there pile of twigs that make up the wood pigeon's nest to the almost solid home of the oven bird which looks like you could cook a pizza in it.

 

There's another, even more dramatic, weaver bird nest in the case and a guillemot egg. Placed there because the guillemot simply lays its egg on to a hard surface. The eggs have evolved to take on a slightly unusual shape that stops them rolling off the cliff and crashing on the rocks below. Also, so that guillemots know whose egg is whose, each individual female guillemot lays an egg with a pattern as unique as a snowflake. You've gotta love nature. 



 

All of this sets you up for the first of two really rather wonderful films. Over two screens both Andy and Peter talk about birds, nests, and all things related. It would've been nearly impossible for me to retain all this fascinating information imparted but some nuggets of information stuck with me.

 

Most nests are built by one solitary bird, either male or female, but swans build as a couple. So romantic. Grebes, too, aren't averse to a little romance but whereas humans may like to build a nest together they'd probably not be so enamoured of the grebe's 'weed dance' courtship ritual where Mr and Mrs Grebe fill their mouths with weeds to impress each other before doing a little shimmy, throwing the weeds away, and then going on to do what comes most naturally to them.

 

Most nests host a solitary family but in Namibia communal living has become all the rage. Some of these 'tower blocks' host up to 5,000 nests in one single colony. The raw materials of nests are not as standard as you may think either (in fact it's quite a surprise that the solitary word 'nest' suffices such is the huge variety).

 

The chaffinch nest is made of moss, feathers, and spider's webs. The tailor bird goes for the even more ethereal media of leaves which they painstakingly lace together. Less pretty pretty is the cave swift who place their nests in dark caves and make them from their own solidified saliva.

 

Cuckoos, as we all know, don't even bother. We're shown a film of the dysfunctional relationship between a baby cuckoo and a reed warbler. When the baby cuckoo hatches in the guest nest the first thing it does is push all the other, much smaller, eggs out of the nest so they crack open on the floor and the baby birds inside die.

 

While this is macabre in the extreme what's weirder still is that the mother reed warbler simply watches it happen. You'd have thought she'd notice the much larger cuckoo eggs weren't her own and done something before but it boggles the mind that instead of chasing out the intruder she feeds it as if it was her own. Women do love a bastard. 

 

Roman author and naturalist Pliny the Elder speculated that the art of nest building would later inspire humans to build their first homes and certainly some African mud huts don't look too different to the oven bird's nest. Although Pliny felt the swallow's nest was the more likely model.

 

Talking of the nest as art brings us back to the bower bird. The bower bird's nest doesn't function as a traditional nest at all in that the female doesn't lay her eggs in it. Instead the male bird uses it to impress potential mates. It's a work of art designed for just one set of eyes and it's not just the elaborate nest that impresses but the 'garden' as well. The male will collect objects and then lay them out around the nest using a strict system of colour coding (blue is a favourite so lots of water bottle lids). When people have moved the objects the bower bird has returned to place them back in their original place proving that it's not random but a very precise, specific, design similar, of course, to a piece of abstract art.



 

Down in the basement there's another film narrated by an on screen animatronic, and incredibly knowledgeable, corvid about the history of egg thieves. As the crow flies across a series of well known landscape paintings by the likes of Constable, Hockney, and Turner he tells us the story of the eggers, or oologists if you want to get technical about it. They're a strange breed of, almost always, men who have been risking life and limb climbing trees to steal valuable eggs for well over a century now.

 

In the early days there was good money to be had and borderline illegal groups were formed but as law, and attitudes, have caught up nobody can really live off the proceeds of egg theft. The few men who continue to clamber up trees to steal eggs now resemble drug addicts or alcoholics. They say they want to stop but they just can't seem to. We see an old film of a legendary oologist who fell to his death from a tree and we see an interview with an egger, Matthew Gonshaw, who hopes his collection of stolen eggs will impress a woman enough that she'll fall in love with him.

 

Gonshaw is a white working class male and represents the complete opposite end of the social spectrum to Lord Rothschild who gifted the Natural History Museum his collection of pilfered eggs and rode around in a carriage pulled by zebras but it's here that the exhibition, which has already encompassed so many seemingly disparate strands yet managed to tie them together neatly, perhaps outstretches itself a tiny little bit. I'm normally happy to shoehorn politics into anything but here it doesn't seem as good a fit as everything else in this marvellous collection of oddities.

 

Of course these eggers are deluded, but there's something very fascinating about them and the insights they offer into vast unknowable territories of the human mind. An area as fertile as nests, art, the social architecture of SE17, and father and son relationships. The fact that this show managed, somehow, to touch on each of these subjects in a kind, gentle way made it one I'm very glad I attended. Some exhibitions seem to have their wings clipped but this one soared.

Sophisticated Boom Boom:The Life and Art of Jean-Michel Basquiat.

"He ate up every image, every word, every bit of data that appeared in front of him and he processed it all into a bebop cubist pop art cartoon gospel that synthesized the whole overload we lived under into something that made an astonishing new sense" - Glenn O'Brien on Jean-Michel Basquiat.

He may've died at just 27 years of age but Jean-Michel Basquiat crammed more into his life than many who live three times as long. There are moments in the Barbican's excellent Basquiat:Boom for Real retrospective where it feels like the New York's artist's head is literally unspooling, as if it's so full of thoughts and ideas that he simply has to unload some to make some space.

In some ways he's reminiscent of David Bowie in that he was influenced by everything and went on to influence everything.  If you're looking for someone in his own primary field, that of the visual arts, to compare him to how about Pablo Picasso? Huge praise of course but it seems that what the Spaniard did for the Paris art scene when that city was the world's art capital, Basquiat did for New York when that city took over that role.

New York City in the seventies and eighties was, surely without doubt, the cultural centre of the world. Cheap rents, thriving punk and hip-hop scenes, mass immigration, and copious amounts of drugs all fed in to the edgy, experimental, twenty four hour feel of the city - and Basquiat lived, loved, drew, wrote, fucked, drugged, and eventually died there - right in the heart of it. In many ways his story is that of those glory days of New York - and, like his art, it's often a messy one.

 

Self-Portrait (1983)

 

Born in 1960, in Brooklyn to a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother, Matilda Andrades, who took the young Jean-Michel on regular trips to the museums of Manhattan and Brooklyn where he not only developed an interest in, and appreciation of, a wide range of art but also started to show a talent for creating his own work. A precocious child, Basquiat could write by the age of four, he could speak English, French, and Spanish, and was a decent athlete to boot. If they'd had The Krypton Factor in the US he'd have been a contender.

 

Leaving school aged 17 he developed an alter ego, SAMO, and began to write cryptic, or often plain baffling, graffiti around the city. Slogans like "Plush safe he think' and 'SAMO as escape clause' didn't necessarily mean much but their ubiquity, and how they stood in counterpoint to most other graffiti, piqued people's interest and soon, like Banksy after him, there was a hunt on to find out just who this SAMO person was.



 

Jimmy Best (1981)

 

Hollywood Africans (1983)

 

In his late teens and early twenties Basquiat could often be found collaborating (SAMO, originally, was a collaboration between Basquiat and childhood friend Al Diaz) and crossing media borders with abandon. He wrote poetry, acted out performance art, decorated fridges with the face of Fred Flintstone, and even released an early electro record - Beat Bop - with Rammellzee and K-Rob. He even made a guest appearance in the video to Blondie's Rapture.

 

When The Village Voice exposed Basquiat and Diaz as the men behind SAMO it was time to move on to something new. Keith Haring delivered a eulogy at Club 57 and Basquiat wrote 'SAMO IS DEAD' in various familiar haunts before resurrecting SAMO almost immediately for live cameras on the invitation of British artist Stan Peskett and Michael Holman (of glam rockers The Tubes). There Basquiat met, and befriended, Fab 5 Freddy as well as Jennifer Stein, Peskett;'s apprentice, with whom Basquiat would go on to produce a series of postcards that they'd sell outside The Museum of Modern Art for a dollar a pop.



 

Fun Fridge (1982)

 

Evenings would find Basquiat hanging out at The Mudd Club listening to Brian Eno play an eclectic mix of funk and punk to a mix of hipsters, outsiders, and the plain curious. Live music would come courtesy of Kid Creole and the Coconuts and The Lounge Lizards and other regulars included the baroque Bavarian disco don Klaus Nomi and an up and coming unsigned young singer who'd rolled in from Bay City, Michigan. Madonna Louise Ciccone and Basquiat would soon end up lovers.

 

Fab 5 Freddy and Deborah Harry got Basquiat immersed in the hip-hop scene and on a trip to California in 1983 Basquiat and his friends, the experimental rapper Rammellzee and the graffiti artist Toxic, took to calling themselves the Hollywood Africans. You can see his portrait of the trio, in strikingly bold blues and yellows, above.

 

Another friendship that Basquiat cultivated was with Andy Warhol. Warhol reciprocated. It seems like this was a mutually beneficial relationship in which Basquiat got an 'in' with the art establishment and Warhol proved he wasn't some stuffy old guy from the past, but a vibrant observer, and participant, in New York's street life. Besides this their friendship seemed pretty genuine even if some snippy commentators spoke of Basquiat as if he was Warhol's puppet, or even his 'mascot'.

 

Dos Cabezas (1982)

 

Andy Warhol & Jean-Michel Basquiat - Arm and Hammer II (1984)

 

They created work together, they appeared in portraits together, and they had their photographs taken for joint exhibitions as if they were promoting a boxing match. Their initial encounter dates back to 1979 when Basquiat spotted Warhol having lunch in a SoHo restaurant and boldly marched in to show him one of his postcards. While Warhol's lunch date, curator Henry Geldzahler, dismissed Basquiat as 'too young', Warhol happily bought that postcard for a dollar.

 

Three years later Basquiat finally visited Warhol's Factory and so enthused was he by his visit he immediately painted the iconic double portrait Dos Cabezas. By 1983 Warhol was leasing Basquiat an apartment and the Italian artist Francisco Clemente had joined them in a collaborative triumvirate.

 

Untitled (Football Helmet) (1981-1984)

 

Famous (1982)

 

Basquiat became more interested in the creative possibilities of identity. References to the black experience ran through his works of the time ranging from Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus and the brother of Moses in the Old Testament to the baseball player Hank Aaron who, in 1974, beat Babe Ruth's home run record.

 

Though many of his paintings were clearly self-portraits they show Basquiat in a number of different guises. As if to play different roles, it's almost as if in making a portrait of himself he's also making a painting about something else entirely. This duality became one of the key strengths of his art as his career developed. He mocked the art world's tendency to reduce artists to a series of dates and statistics (birth, death, race, schooling, influences) yet at the same time his own paintings are absolutely peppered with such self-referential details. He was a contrary fucker, that's for sure. 

 

Self-Portrait (1984)

 

King-Zulu (1986)

 

As well as paying homage to Picasso, Matisse, Leonardo da Vinci, and many other of the major art-historical names of all time Basquiat liked to give props to his musical heroes. He may've hung round with punks and rappers but he reserved his highest regard for jazz players and most specifically Charlie 'Bird' Parker who'd died of a heart attack, probably brought on by his gargantuan drug intake, aged 34 in Manhattan five years before Basquiat was born.

 

Basquiat rarely worked without music blaring away. Cultural historian Robert Farris Thompson recalls Basquiat creating a single collage while listening to 'four styles of jazz - free, mambo, inflected, and hard bop' and although the bebop sound of Parker remained his favourite music he was happy to branch out into anything from Donna Summer to Bach to Talking Heads.

 

He'd somehow managed to accumulate over 3,000 LPs as well as a library of books (many displayed in the Barbican) devoted to jazz and if, considering his short life, that's impressive we need to remember that alongside that he'd manage to immerse himself in huge swathes of art history too. From obvious influences like Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg right back to Leonardo, Manet, Titian, and Caravaggio, Basquiat had sucked it all in and now it was all coming out.



 

Self-Portrait (1981)

 

Young Picasso - Old Picasso (1984)

 

Alongside these more mainstream concerns was an abiding interest in African-American art and other marginalised styles that had yet to be fully accepted in to the 'canon'. This manifested itself in huge, sprawling, works covered in lists, intentional spelling mistakes, crossings out, and weird faux-naive cartoonish daubs. Some of these could stand in for Fall or Fela Kuti album covers.

 

Sometimes the lists, the writing, makes sense. On other occasions it's utterly bewildering but it's never less than fascinating. They're sphinx-like puzzles from an era not so long ago that remain almost impossible to decipher. Their near impenetrability only adds to their mystique. I could stare at them for hours on end as if they're some kind of Rosetta Stone and fail to ever unlock their secrets.

 

Untitled (Titian) (1982)

 

Matisse Matisse Matisse (1983)

 

Untitled (Pablo Picasso) (1984)

 

Boone (1983)

 

It wouldn't really matter. Lists of Greek philosophers rub shoulders with defaced Renaissance icons, body parts, cuttings from newspapers, clouds, and tributes to black jazz musicians and iconic black sports starts like boxer Jack Johnson and sprinter Jesse Owens. All of this is presented simultaneously matter-of-factly and in ways that give optimum aesthetic pleasure. It's hard to take it all in so you end up just letting the general vibe of the work wash over you. In that sense you can see how all those years listening to jazz went on to inform Basquiat's work.

 

Basquiat himself said "I get my facts from books, stuff on atomizers, the blues, ethyl alcohol, geese in Egyptian glyphs" and went on to explain how he delighted in mixing supposedly high and supposedly low arts together. A passion so intense and a fiery desire to consume all knowledge available often suggests an addictive personality and, sure enough, Basquiat was soon, like his hero Charlie Parker, to develop a heroin addiction so severe that it would end with him dying before his 30th birthday, yet another member of the depressingly well subscribed to 27 club.

 

Plastic Sax (1984)

 

King of the Zulus (1984-1985)

 

Jawbone of an Ass (1982)

 

Jack Johnson (1982)

 

Semiotics, symbols, and signs saturated the work Basquiat made in the eighties. A work like 1982's Jack Johnson stands out because of its starkness yet still contains Basquiat's trademark crown, something that acted both as his tag and his signature - a small, but typical, way in which he continued to blur the lines between the art hanging on the walls of the gallery and the graffiti sprayed on the walls outside the gallery.

 

Towards the end of the exhibition there's a room full of pages ripped from Basquiat's notebook which contains such gnomic inscriptions as:-

 

AN EVIL CAT WITH A TOP HAT COMING OUT OF A SEWER WITH AN M-80

 

or

 

A MICKEY FINN WITH FUZZ ON IT IN A TURKISH BATH

 

followed by the legend ROACH EGGS written seven times in full

 

or, simply

 

PEEL

 

written once alone in the middle of the page.

 

What can all this mean? Does it even mean anything? It reminded me of Captain Beefheart's introductory line to Trout Mask Replica's Pachuco Cadaver, "a squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?" or something from Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer as much as it did the coneptual art of Duchamp and the Cabaret Voltaire. It was as if Basquiat was in love with words. In love with the way they sounded, in love with the way they looked on the page even. It explains some of his more outre spelling. He's trying to make you think about a certain word in a certain way, make you say it in your mind the way he wants you to say it. For an artist who on the surface appears so messy, so cluttered, there seems to be an overriding need for clarification underpinning his work.

 

Piscine Versus the Best Hotels (1982)

 

Jesse (1983)

 

Leonardo Da Vinci's Greatest Hits (1982)

 

Basquiat sometimes appears like The Man Who Fell to Earth, jazz records and television blaring, watching Apocalypse Now ten times in a week, soaking up anything from Popeye and Felix the Cat to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea and Alfred Hitchcock, and developing an obsession with the 1927 film The Jazz Singer which featured Al Jolson in 'blackface'.

 

It seems remarkable that, with all this going on, he even found time to work - and it's even more remarkable that he was able to create such mind-bogglingly complex yet immediate works as Moses and the Egyptians, Ishtar, and Piscine versus the Best Hotels that, even now - more than three decades down the line, still look like the epitome of modernity.

 

Moses and the Egyptians (1982)

 

Ishtar (1983)

 

Untitled (Charles Darwin) (1983)

 

If Jean-Michel Basquiat was alive today he would be 56 years old. That's a time when many visual artists are just starting to make their best work. It's impossible to know how Basquiat's art would've developed or what direction he'd have gone in but on the evidence of this show it seems unlikely that an artist so creative, a force so compelling, would have simply slowed down or fizzled out. Basquiat's tragic early death was a huge loss but he put so much of himself in his art that in some small way it feels like he's still with us.

 

Thanks to Sanda. Both for sorting tickets and for being such great company.

 

A Panel of Experts (1982)