Fleapit revisited:The Velvet Underground.

"They were wild like the USA. A mystery band in a New York way. Rock and roll but not like the rest and to me America at its best. How in the world were they making that sound? Velvet Underground" - Velvet Underground by Jonathan Richman

I thought I knew the story of The Velvet Underground. The drugs, the falling out, the making up, the black leather jackets and shades, Nico, Andy Warhol, Doug Yule, the explosion, the implosion, the lack of success, and, finally, the huge huge influence that took in everyone from The Jesus and Mary Chain to U2, from The Sex Pistols to James, and from Nirvana to Joy Division.

There was great music before The Velvet Underground and there was great music after The Velvet Underground but it wasn't necessarily the same thing. Even with that in mind, none of those acts listed above could ever be mistaken for The Velvet Underground. Nobody could. As Jonathan Richman sang "how in the world were they making that sound"?

Todd Haynes' new film The Velvet Underground can't quite answer that question - and neither should it. What it can do is tell the story of The Velvet Underground, how they came together, how they fell apart, how they changed music forever, and how their music changed them, and us, forever.

Not bad for a band of whom Cher once said they would "replace nothing except suicide"! Was she even listening? I'll Be Your Mirror could bring tears to the eyes to even the hardest of listeners, Pale Blue Eyes is shot through with an almost painfully intense sense of romantic longing, Venus in Furs actually sounds like the music you'd hear as you're lowered down into an S&M sex dungeon, White Light/White Heat is an amphetamine fuelled freakout like nothing ever heard before, and the naivete and guile of Moe Tucker's vocals on After Hours gave way to Beat Happening and pretty much the whole C86 scene.

I haven't even mentioned Heroin, Sweet Jane, Femme Fatale, Sunday Morning, Rock'n'Roll, I Heard Her Call My Name, or Sister Ray. You can hear them all during the film but most of you know, and love, them anyway. You know that the later songs were beautiful and often heartbreakingly sad and you know that the earlier ones were more sonically innovative and chaotic, often avant-garde jams worked up into something resembling a pop song, but still burnt brightly with passion and anger.

You could stay at home and listen to the records and get that. But what Haynes gives you is both a feel for what it would be like to have been there at the time (helped by interviews with John Cale and Moe Tucker and recordings of interviews with the now deceased Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison) and some kind of understanding of why The Velvet Underground, of all bands, became the one who would become so legendary.

As Brian Eno once said of their debut album, it "only sold ten thousand copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band". I came of musical age two decades after The Velvet Underground appeared. I'd been brought up on pop and turned myself on to punk, new wave, and two-tone. Initially, I dismissed The Velvet Underground as boring old sixties music.

It was a stupid mistake, one not atypical of teenage boys who think they know it all. Eventually, curiosity got the better of me and I bought the 1985 compilation album of outtakes, VU, and, of course, I loved it. Temptation Inside Your Heart, I Can't Stand It, and One Of These Days became my gateway drugs to a world of Velvet Underground and Lou Reed solo stuff (foolishly, I waited many more years before delving into Cale's back catalogue) and I learned an important lesson.

Or at least half-learned it. Don't dismiss stuff you've never heard just because of some idiotic preconception. Another lesson may have been that if everyone you respect is saying something's good, it more than likely is. Don't put up some kind of weird defensive wall because someone got there before you. Just enjoy the music.

Which I have done now for nearly three and a half decades. So, like I said, I thought I knew The Velvet Underground story and, indeed, I did know much of it. I knew roughly how they formed, I knew Warhol acted as producer but was more figurehead and general chaos conductor, I knew Nico drifted in to the band and soon drifted out again to follow her own muse, I knew Reed sacked Warhol, then sacked Cale, brought the unfairly accursed Doug Yule in to replace him, and then, eventually, pretty much, sacked himself bringing the band to a close, notwithstanding one last album that didn't feature a single original member and that nobody ever talks about anymore.

But I didn't really know how, or even why, these things played out. Haynes' film puts some flesh on the bones of the story and with the help of interviewees like John Waters, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, and the tiggerish Jonathan Richman (among many others) it does so fascinatingly and incisively and with no little panache. A particular high point is hearing a recording of David Bowie explaining how Lou Reed's lyrics reminded him of Baudelaire or Rimbaud.

Classic Bowie namedrop or just Bowie's trademark generosity in giving credit to others where it's due? Either way, it's not important. Others in the film namecheck John Cage, Jasper Johns, Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and Edward Albee but it is the circle of people around The Velvet Underground themselves (Jonas Mekas, Mary Woronov, Danny Flynt, and even Lou's sister Merrill Reed Weiner) whose insights are the most revealing.

Sometimes funny too. Not least when Merrill Reid Weiner dances to Lou's pre-Velvets novelty tune The Ostrich. Quite rightly, the best stories are left to the band members themselves. In archive footage, we hear Reed talking about how an early band of his were so bad they had to change their name after each show to ensure they'd get booked again and Tucker's lost none of her disgust at hippies, not least Frank Zappa, with their 'flowers' and 'hair'.

Even if, for a spell, the band swapped the black leather for paisley shirts and Tucker sported a blouse with a collar so sharp it'd take your eye out. Cale compares the early sound of The Velvet Underground to that of a fridge and gets possibly the biggest laugh of the film when, near the end, he casually mentions that he's never once met Doug Yule.

Nor does he seem remotely interested in remedying that situation. While The Velvet Underground, the Reed and Yule iteration, were a wonderful pop band and Yule had a lovely voice which did justice to some of Reed's more sentimental compositions, The Velvet Underground of Reed, Cale (and, of course, Morrison and Tucker) was a force of nature.

The film tells the story of how a tortured, tempestuous, sexually experimental boy who'd been moved by his family from Brooklyn to Long Island and hated it (Reed) joined with a classically trained avant-garde musician who'd grown up in a mining village in the valleys north of Swansea and endured more than his own share of trauma as a child (Cale) to realise, against all the odds, their dreams.

Cale had been performing eighteen hour Erik Satie recitals and Reed dreamed of becoming a rock'n'roll star despite being average, at best, on guitar and having a voice most unlike a choirboy at a time when the notion of singing in a gravelly New York accent went firmly against the grain of an era that eulogised The Beach Boys and The Mamas and the Papas.

The fact that Reed achieved this dream is testament to his vision but also to that of Cale and, of course, Warhol. That Todd Haynes was able to tell that story in a manner so befitting of the band, experimental in places but still held together by a firm narrative - as Lou Reed's lyrics so often were, is testament to the fact that he has done the band justice.

On a couple of occasions I found this film, and more so the music of The Velvet Underground, so deeply moving I had to wipe tears from my eyes. When Jonathan Richman talks about The Velvet Underground it is from a place of knowledge and a place of admiration but, more than anything, it is from a place of love. To him, as to so many of us, they were our wind, our rain, and our sunset. The light on our door to show us we were home. They were our mirror and because mirrors reflect the ugly side of life too, it feels all the more transformative when the beauty shines through.  

 

Yo! Yo! Spider-Pig:Alvaro Barrington @ the South London Gallery

Black and white images of the New York skyline with vague and blurred shapes obscuring the view, lyrics to songs by Rick James and Toto, a fan with multi-coloured ribbons attached to it, the letters ICU repeated in large fonts, frames made up to look like wooden clapperboard homes - perhaps in the Caribbean, and small inset images of a man and a mic and a woman in a red dress.

 

What could it all mean? If you have any idea please let me know because I left none the wiser than I entered. Alvaro Barrington's Spider the Pig, Pig the Spider exhibition at the South London Gallery was, at least, pleasing on the eye. It was also something that didn't detain me for very long so it was fortunate that it was, also, free and at a location I was able to walk to.

The gist of the show, it took a board on the wall in the corridor you walk down to enter the gallery to tell me, is based on "an idea of a relatively near future in which augmented and virtual reality have evolved to the point that people routinely choose which identity or character to adopt in different social and other situations". A world where our online, and our real, lives are almost completely intertwined.

A bit like they already are, a cynic may add. Barrington was born, in 1983, in Caracas, Venezuela. The son of Grenadian and Haitian migrant workers, he was raised between New York and the Caribbean. So it makes sense that his art should reflect these locations and, in doing so, was rather evocative. But as for the story of augmented reality, it was one I was unable to follow.

I just looked at things, thought they looked interesting, and moved on. It's Barrington's first solo exhibition in London (the South London Gallery has got form with this kind of thing too) so I'd not to want to make any firm decisions about his work except to say I liked it, up to a point, but I didn't really understand. If I hadn't been told he'd replicated the colour scheme of the Barbican's Dubuffet retrospective from earlier this year I'd certainly not have noticed that - and I both went to that show and wrote a rather lengthy assessment of it.

I still don't know why that happened and, for that matter, what's with all the spiders and pigs? When I say what's with all the spiders and the pigs, what I mean is where were they? Where were they hiding? The title of the show suggests there should be at least some pigs and spiders on display in some form and an information panel tells us that we should be able to spot Napoleon from Animal Farm, Anansi the spider from Louise Bourgeois series of sculptures, and no lesser a television star than Peppa Pig herself.

It was to rain quite heavily later that evening. Perhaps Peppa had gone home to change into her wellingtons in preparations for splashing in some muddy puddles. I can't blame her. After a quick pint in the Pelican over the road (and another, just because, in The Grove House Tavern) I did the same. It was certainly wet enough to splash in muddy puddles but I decided against it.

I took the bus. The weather, and a weird sore hand that is already better, occupied my mind far more than Alvaro Barrington's art did. I hope to see more of his work one day. I'm sure it'll look impressive. I just hope that next time I can actually understand it. Or at least see Porky Pig and Itsy Bitsy Spider.

Kakistocracy XXIII:Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic.

"Misogyny is, of course, absolutely wrong whether it's a man against a woman or a woman against man" - Dominic Raab

Last Friday, Sir David Amess - the MP for Southend West, was brutally murdered at his constituency surgery in a Methodist church in Leigh-on-Sea. A terrible, horrific, and inhumane tragedy and one that made me think about what words I use when critiquing the government, politicians, and people I disagree with in general.

I've said things, and thought things, I should not have done and I regret that. I would have found Amess' views on most things (not least religion, abortion, Brexit, and the death penalty) to be almost the exact opposite of mine (strangely enough, we'd have probably agreed on fox hunting). In fact, I would have found many of them abhorrent. But that doesn't mean he was evil or vile and it certainly doesn't justify his brutal murder.

Or violence of any kind. That's where the line is for me. Violence or incitement to violence. A physical attack on someone for opposing your viewpoint is a threat to all of us and it's a threat to democracy. I would respect Amess', and anybody else's, right to hold these views, to state them in public, and to be elected to public office on the back of them and then work to turn those opinions into law.

I would also, however, respect the right of anybody who wishes to disagree, strongly, with them. I would like to think Amess would be questioned on his views which, of course, he no longer can be. Others, in the Tory party and particularly in this administration, however can be and I will continue to do so. 

Perhaps I will mind my language a little more and I will certainly not incite violence but if leading ministers don't even know what words mean, simple words like 'misogyny', then we really have to hold them to account as best we can and, for me, that is in this series of blogs. Now, remarkably but somehow predictably, in its twenty-third edition.

If there are people, like Raab - the Deputy Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Justice, in cabinet who don't even know what misogyny is then how can we expect them to put laws in place that prevent it? Is it likely that someone who doesn't even know the meaning of everyday words will have a firm grasp on governance or even, quite importantly at the moment, basic economics?

Recent visits to my local shops have seen row after row of empty shelves, pigs are being slaughtered before they can go to abattoirs to be slaughtered, and motorists are queuing up outside garage forecourts to panic buy petrol. To any sane person, and by any sane metric, this would look like a government that has lost its grip, a government whose careless Brexit has spun, as predicted by millions, completely out of control.

It looks, quite frankly, that Project Fear was simply Project Truth. Something that Boris Johnson, now - finally, admits is the case. He's now claiming that Brexit would always involve some 'teething problems' and that is what we're seeing. That'd odd because I quite distinctly remember David Davis claiming "that there would be no downside to Brexit, only a considerable upside" and Michael Gove boasting that "the day after we leave, we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want".

Johnson, Davis, and Gove are all known liars so the fact people chose to believe them on a matter of such importance speaks a lot about the way they have gaslit the British public. In ten days it will be twenty-two years since my brother Steven, aged 22, died. Not long before he died he passed his HGV test. A few weeks ago my mum received a letter addressed to him.

From the government. They wanted to know if he'd be interested in resuming his career as an HGV driver as there is, as we all know, currently a shortage. It seems the current government line on lorry driving is they'd rather not get Poles over here to drive our lorries when there are dead people in our own country who can do the job.

I suspect he'll be told he's fit for work next. This deeply insensitive and hurtful level of incompetence is, sadly, not even a surprise. It's what we have come to expect of this government. A government who, at their recent conference in Manchester, paraded failures as successes and a government who almost worship at the altar of King Boris. A government that, to me, looks very much like a cult.

One where every criticism of it seems only to make it stronger. A government where the culture secretary Nadine Dorries (and those four words in a row will never ever look right) can complain of nepotism at the BBC despite employing two of her daughters in her office at a cost, to the tax payer, of around £80k per annum.

Labour's conference in Brighton, correctly - they're in opposition, didn't dominate the news anywhere near as much as the Tory backslapping orgy but at least they spoke, for the most part, sense and formulated some policies (though they need to really tackle the Tories on their lies, their sleaze, their cronyism, their corruption, and their poor governance) but with much of the country still in the grip of the Johnson cult, it looks like a long time and perhaps a new leader, Andy Burnham cuts through the crap - I'd like to see him take over, before any of those policies have any chance of being implemented.

Which is depressing beyond belief - and means that I will probably be writing many more of these Kakistocracy blogs. At least it's not the only thing I do. For the most part, the rest of my life has been pretty good (except not being able to buy things I want and need in my local shops). I've chatted on the phone to Mum, Dad, Shep, Vicki, Adam, Ben, and Bec and even though I had to cancel a TADS walk from Merstham to Croydon through Happy Valley and Farthing Downs I had a lovely weekend shooting the shit, as well as eating curry and pizza and visiting the National Gallery, over a few drinks with Adam and Teresa.

We even went to see Rob run the London Marathon. It was his first ever marathon and he did it in an astonishingly brilliant three hours and thirty-eight minutes. We took him, Naomi, Maya, and Zachary to the Royal Festival Hall for a coffee afterwards and he didn't even look tired. It made me wonder what level my running would be now at if I'd stuck at it. 

I went to see a couple of films at the cinema (Rose Plays Julie at Rich Mix and Gagarine at the Art Deco Rio in Dalston) and attended exhibitions at Tate Modern (Sophie Taeuber-Arp) and Dulwich Picture Gallery (Helen Frankenthaler) as well as an online event about the social behaviour of humans and (some) animals and another about why mathematics should be taught as a humanity.

I also curated, and led, another London by Foot walk from Strawberry Hill to Acton (something which gave me an enormous sense of pride) and had a lovely weekend in North Wales with Michelle and Evie that included take away vegan Chinese food, waterfalls, lakes, pumpkin picking, a maize maze, a trip across the border for Thai food in Chester, and a visit to Plas Madoc swimming pool where Evie went on the big slide on her own for the very first time.

A very proud moment for all of us. Her reading skills have come on in leaps and bounds too and I even felt, as she read me a bizarre story about Rupert and Paddington being kidnapped in Switzerland, that she is close to overtaking some adults I know with her reading ability. She's already way ahead of Dominic Raab in her understanding of words. 

But if you think that the UK is best served by a government that empowers people with less intellect, and less intellectual curiosity, than a five year old it seems likely that you've got the government, and the empty shelves, you deserve. You probably still call Raab's boss by his nickname, Boris, as if he's your friend. He's not and if you haven't grasped that yet maybe you never will. Unfortunately it's not just you who will suffer because of that.

Helen Frankenthaler:Lost in the Woods.

"My work is not a matter of direct translations, but something is bound to creep into your head or heart" - Helen Frankenthaler.

Geisha (2003)

 

Sadly not, Helen. Not for me anyway. Your woodcuts look nice and all that but they didn't creep into either my head or my heart. Halfway home from visiting your Radical Beauty at Dulwich Picture Gallery last Friday afternoon I had pretty much forgotten all about them. I was more focused on what I was going to have for tea, and watch on television, that night.

 

I'm not sure that was your intent when you, no doubt passionately, created these works. Perhaps it's on me. Perhaps I'm not looking properly. Perhaps, after (strictly speaking, still in) the pandemic, I need work that is more political rather than just eye candy. Or perhaps it was the exhibition itself. Woodcuts are pretty niche and the Dulwich Picture Gallery charges quite a lot of money to visit what is actually a fairly small gallery so you can often come away feeling short changed.

East and Beyond (1973)

It's not as if I don't like Abstract Expressionism. I have written admiringly about it in the past. I have even written fondly about your work, not least when I visited, back in 2018, Victoria Miro's Surface Work exhibition to see your work hung alongside other female artists like Yayoi Kusama, Howardena Pindell, Liubov Popova, and Lee Krasner. Your work came out better than many others. 

I'm not sure why I'm writing this as if in letter form to Frankenthaler herself. She died in Connecticut, aged 83, nearly a decade back. Even if she was still alive, it seems unlikely she'd ever read my blog. I have no evidence whatsoever of a single artist reading any of my reviews so far - and I've been doing this shit for over a lustrum now.

That at least gives me the knowledge that I can pretty much say what I like and it won't come back to bite me on the bum (famous last words?). The exhibition's curators begin with a small contention. That Frankenthaler was a 'trailblazer' (to a degree she was, but she followed a path that had been created already by the likes of Jackson Pollock, Krasner, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko) and that she 'defied the limits of printmaking' (which, again, is debatable and probably needs someone far better qualified than me to verify).

Bolder claims, yet, are still made. Frankenthaler, we're informed, was guided by a mantra of 'NO RULES' when creating but her 'abstract exploration of shapes and voids' was not, as we're told in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, something 'that had not been seen before'. Perhaps they had not, or rarely had, in the medium of woodcut but for me to focus on the medium is to ignore the art itself.

Even Frankenthaler herself was initially sceptical of woodcuts, not really attempting them until about three decades into her career. Works like Radius (below) and Geisha (at the top of the piece) are, of course, pleasing to the eye. Maelstroms of colour that radiate and pulsate as we look at them. They are, essentially, pretty - and prettiness is a worthwhile target in art if not the only one available. To pass them off as somehow revolutionary, however, seems to me wide of the mark.

Radius (1993)

'Guzzying' was what she called her method. A way of breaking the unified colour that you would normally associate with woodcuts and move them over to the realm of Abstract Expressionism. Which in itself is quite a trick. Craftwise, she is a pioneer but that doesn't necessarily come across just by looking at the works and as an art fan and admirer I am attracted to the finished product and far less interested in process.

If 'process' had been my concern then this exhibition would have held a lot, well - a little, more for me. I was more interested to discover how Frankenthaler had taken inspiration from Renaissance prints she'd seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from Japanese Gampi paper (something I'd never heard of before), and from the juice of the red berries on a mulberry tree outside the master printmaker Kenneth Tyler's workshop.

Essence Mulberry (1977)

They've been incorporated into the red you can see in 1977's Essence Mulberry which has a delightful, impressionistic, gauzy feel to it that reminds me both of sunrise and sunset. The Grove series of works from the early nineties are said to have something of Edvard Munch about them (which I can just about see - but I also thought of Paul Klee) and 1991's The Clearing is supposed to show Frankenthaler's fearlessness simply because she left a mistake in it. See if you can spot what it is.

Grove, Monoprint IV (1991)

Grove (1991)

The Clearing (1991)

It's a tiny triangle at the top middle left of the picture. How could anyone other than Frankenthaler possibly know that's a mistake let alone commend her for her fearlessness in keeping it in? The trouble when you abide by a mantra of 'no rules' is nobody can tell you when you've gone wrong. You can't have 'no rules' and then claim to be without fear because you're breaking them?

It doesn't work that way. Frankenthaler's works are aesthetically engaging, Cedar Hill reminds me a little of Philip Guston - caught almost halfway along the transition from abstraction back to figurative work and Weeping Crabapple (Frankenthaler's final woodcut made two years before her death) is spidery, nebulous, and intriguing, but these bold claims that are being made for her actually undermine that.

Cedar Hill (1983)

Weeping Crabapple (2009)

That's a shame as the longer the show went on, and it was a comparatively short one, the more engaged I became with her work. But the more I read about its lofty claims the more it irked me. The last room was devoted to Madame Butterfly. Frankenthaler's, apparently, "woodcut masterpiece" shares its title, of course, with Puccini's opera of love, birth, and death and consists of one hundred and two different colours (which is just showing off).

It looks good but if you can see love, birth, and death in it you're doing better than me. The washy pastel shades explode as if in slow motion to create a visual treat that perhaps evokes liminal spaces, hazy desert vistas, and landscapes. Even wood itself, unsurprisingly. But as for anything more than that. That is in the eye of the beholder and my eye was resolutely not for seeing it this time round.

Madame Butterfly (2000)

Madame Butterfly (2000)

 

1-2-3 Red Light:Squid Game

"This is Hell. There are no rules in Hell" - 101

Imagine you had to play children's games to save your life. Imagine that if you fail in games as seemingly simple as tug of war, marbles, stepping stones, making shapes out of dalgonas (sugary snacks), red light/green light (or What's the time Mr.Wolf as we used to call it), and the titular squid game itself that you are summarily executed by being shot in the head by a man wearing a pink jumpsuit whose face is obscured by a black mask with a triangle on it?

That's the basic premise of Hwang Dong-hyuk's worldwide Netflix smash hit Squid Game and it is, of course, an utterly ludicrous premise. But it is also a fascinating one, an enthralling one, and, quite often, a very disturbing and violent one.

Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is a middle aged man living in Seoul who has not been prudent with his finances. His wife has left him and is moving with her new partner and Gi-hun's child to the US and he's being pursued, and violently assaulted, by loan sharks. He argues with his mother (Kim Young-ok), he gambles, and he even obsesses over the 'crane game' in the arcade.

You know the one. The one where you have to hook a teddy bear or some other piece of crap using a panel of buttons on the side. It's a rubbish game but Gi-hun, a kind man, seems to lack common sense. Witnessed quite clearly when he buys his ten year old daughter a gun for her birthday. The fact it turns out to be one of those lighters that looks like a gun makes it only a marginally less inappropriate gift. 

Gi-hun is desperate so when a closing doors moment in the subway leads to him being challenged to a game of ddakji for money by a nameless and slick salesman (played by Gong Yoo) he is, of course, up for it. When he's offered the chance to play an even bigger game, or series of games, for even higher prizes it's an offer he can't refuse. But when masked men arrive to pick him up and then fill the back of the car he's in with noxious gas that knocks him out it becomes clear that the stakes will be a lot higher than he'd imagined.

Gi-hun wakes up in an enormous dormitory with hundreds of identical beds piled high as if to make a huge ziggurat. Like the four hundred and fifty-five others in the dormitory, he is dressed in a dark green tracksuit and he has been assigned a number which is stitched in to the breast of his tracksuit top.

Gi-hun is 456. He soon befriends 001, Oh Il-nam (O Yeong-su) is an elderly man with a brain tumour and not much time left who, it appears, has chosen to spend his final days playing this lethal game rather than bowing out quietly. Other bedfellows are there for various different reasons though all of them, it seems, are in perilous situations financially.

101 is Jang Deok-su (Heo Sung-tae), a cartoonish snarling gangster with a mullet, a face tattoo, and no morals whatsoever. Number 067 is Kang Sae-byok (Jung Ho-yeon), a North Korean defector who's keen not to give too much away for obvious reasons. 199 is Abdul Ali (Anupam Tripathi), a Pakistani migrant worker who has not been paid by his unscrupulous employer for months.

Han Mi-nyeo (212, Kim Joo-ryoung) is a screeching woman with a very loose relationship with the truth, Ji-yeong (240, Lee Yoo-mi) is much quieter but her tranquil nature belies a troubled past, and Byeong-gi (111, Yoo Sung-joo) is a disgraced doctor whose behaviour inside the squid game is unlikely to honour the Hippocratic oath.

There is also Cho Sang-woo (218, Park Hae-soo) who was once an understudy to Gi-hun but whose career, partly due to his intellect, soon overtook that of Gi-hun. Sang-woo has since run into both debt and trouble with the police. Gi-hun treats Sang-woo as an old friend and Sang-woo does the same for G-hun. At least on the surface.

When, very soon in the first game, it become apparent that the forefeit for losing will be life itself, a brutal murder by faceless assassins, the very notions of friendship, loyalty, and trust are put to the sword. Soon the bodies pile high, as Boris Johnson likes it, and the contestants are whittled down very quickly.

Even when the players are allowed a vote on ending the game, it brings out some of the lowest, meanest, most anti-Spartacist of human behaviour. At least in many of the contestants. At its heart, Squid Game is a parable about the evils of faceless capitalism, a meditation on how money corrupts everything, and an elegy for a lost age of innocence. 

It's a satire about a world where no act of kindness goes unpunished, about greed, and about the dangers of selfish individualism over collective endeavour. The fact it's such a highly unusual, downright weird, one only makes it stronger. It plays out like some avant-garde ballet on uncanny film sets with giant playgrounds and pastel shaded mazes of stairways that look like something from The Prisoner.

Not a bad comparison considering the confusing hierarchy of shapes and numbers (the squares appear to have primacy over the triangles). There is a lot of grisly food preparation, plenty of unappetising looking meals (a raw potato and a bottle of water, anyone?), there's a huge animatronic girl in knee length white socks who looks like Dora the Explorer should she ever visit the dark side, the acting is often performatively hammy, and episode two (of nine) is simply called Hell and starts with someone being burned alive.

The whole thing is overseen by a shady character known simply as The Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) who seems to spend his time either on the phone, speaking English, or listening to oddball jazz (the score, by Jung Jae-il, is suitably unsettling of course) and watching mechanical marionettes perform.

What the fuck is going on? Why is this weird shit happening? Where does all the money come from? What's The Front Man's motivation and what's in it for the staff? They live as if in a prison and are forced to become mass murderers. If their identity is revealed they get killed. Either the wages are phenomenally good or something else is going on.

What of the oft-mentioned VIPs? Who are they and what do they want? When Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-joon), a police officer, goes undercover in an attempt to find out what happened to his brother, who had played the squid game some years earlier, things only get more bizarre.

The games, of course, continue and as with most games, the Olympics or the World Cup for example, money remains the driver of everything. The games get ever more cruel (there's a particularly nasty twist when the marbles come out), the stakes remain the highest imaginable, and if the last few players left standing when the games reach their final rounds are predictable that doesn't affect the viewer's enjoyment of this peculiar spectacle.

Don't worry too much about what it all means. Just sit back and enjoy an original and unhinged piece of television (although I would seriously advise opting for subtitles over the dreadful dubbed American English version). Squid Game has all the makings of a cult classic. Yet we now live in such a strange world that instead of that it has become the most successful ever show on Netflix. Should the chance come to make a second series of it you can only imagine the colour of the light shown to Hwang Dong--hyuk will certainly not be red.