Mothership Connection:Lauren Halsey @ Serpentine South.

"Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip and come on up to the mothership" - Mothership Connection (Star Child), Parliament

The Los Angeles artist is inspired by the funk, the whole funk, and nothin' but the funk. Well, she is inspired by some other things too but funk is where she's at and for her Serpentine South show, Emajendat, she has converted the gallery space into some kind of futuristic acidic vision of a funky Los Angeles. Which is quite an achievement on a grey drizzly day in London.

Halsey, in her own words, became a hardcore 'Funkateer' as a teenager and now, as an adult, she's dreaming up future possibilities that revolve around community building, equity, love, and neighbourhood pride. To her:- "all things funk".

On entering the gallery a friendly attendant tells you which direction you have to walk in and you find yourself on a journey into Halsey's imagined alternative LA. The neon signs advertising 'positive energy', playgrounds, rims, and braids look familiar enough. The faces staring out of little Stonehenge style rocks less so, and the pyramids and other unidentifiable stuff seem quite otherwordly, a little uncanny.

Which is, surely, the intention. Halsey's rare in her city in that she likes to walk round it rather than drive everywhere and on her perambulations she often repurposes things that she finds, things that the everyday folk leave behind.

So there's basketball players, Tupac Shakur, toy cars, giant hands, pharoah heads, and even - I think - a self-portrait of Halsey herself at work. None of it has, it seems, any great meaning. Most of it is lots of fun. And that's fine. Sometimes art can just be fun. Lauren Halsey's art is fun. Definitely the better of the two exhibitions I attended today.

Hark! The Herald Robots Sing:Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst @ Serpentine North.

AI. It's the future. But it's not just the future. It's the present too. Some people think it will be wonderful, others things it will be diabolical. It's likely to be both - if you think of how much unsuspected damage social media has done to the world and to our brains since its advent then you can multiply that hundreds or thousands of times for AI. 

Geoffrey Hinton, the 'Godfather of AI', believes there's a 10%-20% chance that AI will lead to human extinction within three decades. It seems like pretty important stuff so why is so much debate about it so dry, so academic, so unappealing and uninteresting to the layman? Maybe Matt Dryhurst and American composer Holly Herndon's The Call, currently on show, at London's Serpentine North could make some sense of it.

Maybe not. Art seemed a good way of exploring AI and, keeping it seasonal, The Call features festive sounding choirs. But, alas, it's nowhere near as interesting or as enlightening as one would hope for it to be. Herndon and Dryhurst view AI as a creative instrument and the latest in a series of coordination technologies that allow individuals to work and build collectively.

This, they suggest, is not dissimilar to group singing (hmmm) which also serves a similar purpose of creating meaning in social and civil life. To demonstrate this, the artists put out a call to various British choirs asking them to perform a songbook of musical exercises and hymns which were then fed into AI. There's even a room, haughtily called The Oratory, you can go into and add your own voice to the AI's data set. There's a promise your voice won't be used so I don't quite get how that works.

There's also another room you can go into to hear the AI singing. There's a few speakers hanging up, some musical notation, and some history on composers that have been utilised for this installation. The only name I recognised was Pauline Oliveros.

But that's it - apart from some model thing at the front that I couldn't make head nor tail of. I suppose we're supposed to be awed or frightened by the power of AI to create its own songs but surely we all know AI can do, and has been doing that, for years. It would be far more interesting if Herndon and Dryhurst looked into issues like morality, ecology, and theft of intellectual property that will undoubtedly arise with the inevitable rise of AI.

Regulation too. But there's nothing of that. If I hadn't been told the music being played was made by AI I wouldn't have guessed. I would have thought it was pleasant enough, if unremarkable, choirs singing Christian sounding songs. It all seemed a bit of a wasted exercise and I still await art making far more interesting, and pertinent, points about AI than this disappointing and underwhelming show. AI may be many things in the future but underwhelming is unlikely to be one of them.

Energy Providers:Industry S3.

When the staff of Pierrepoint & Co aren't shagging each other, taking drugs, or calling each other cunts you can normally find them getting in and out of lifts. When someone learns something that causes them to fume, they fume in the lift, when somebody double crosses someone else (which happens often) they'll probably end up in a lift together, and when someone comes to work sporting a thousand yard stare then that will almost certainly be illustrated by showing us that thousand yard stare in, of course, a lift.

It's a fitting metaphor for a show that has as many ups as it has downs. Primarily in the lives of the various characters who make up the third series of Industry (BBC1/iPlayer, written by Mickey Down and Konrady Kay and directed by Isabella Eklof and Zoe Wittock with Down and Kay) but also in, for me, the appeal of the show. Season three of Industry was good, but like season two it didn't quite hit the heady heights of the absolutely majestic first season.

I don't think that's simply because there are virtually no characters that are likeable or that you can empathise with but if you spend too much time immersed in the listless ennui of the hyper privileged it's hard to get emotionally invested. That's probably a bit harsh as a series that began as anything but gripping improved immeasurably as it went on but I tend to glaze over when people talk about equity, due diligence, shorting, assets, micromanagement, and momentum and there's plenty of those business cliches doing the rounds here - as well as far too many minor characters who are hard to tell apart in their Charles Tyrwhitt suits and diamond quilted gilets (sometimes green, sometimes black).

Industry is at its best when it rotates around its core cast of regulars and in the third season we start with Yasmin (Marisa Abela) on her father's yacht. A yacht that's named after her. Did anyone say nepo-baby? Yasmin walks in on father Charles (Adam Levy) just as he's licking out a pregnant woman in Yasmin's cabin. Problematic Charles is later exposed for embezzling and then goes missing. Which only causes Yasmin further problems as she's pursued by paparazzi and finds herself hiding in a skip and worse.

Her colleagues ask if her head is in the game. Particularly Eric (Ken Leung) who has been promoted to partner and sacked pint size pisspot Kenny (Conor MacNeill) but seems to be undergoing his own crisis of masculinity which results in inappropriate sexual requests, a night with a prostitute, and demanding an answer to the question "do I fuck like a young man?".

Harper (Myha'la Herrold) is now working for some outfit called FutureDawn. Her boss, nominally, is the infantile Anna Gearing (Elena Saurel) but instead she's taken under the wing of the dynamic portfolio manager Petra (Sarah Goldberg). Robert (Harry Lawtey) is tasked with taking care of the hotheaded Sir Henry Muck (Kit Harington), the CEO of green tech energy firm Lumi whom Pierrepoint are looking into taking public. Robert and Henry get on but Henry's erratic behaviour will sorely test their relationship. Another 'job' that Robert's on, however, ends very badly.

Then there's Rishi (Sagar Radia) whose violent temper, "unadulterated" language, and mysteriously itchy back are quite at odds with the new values that Pierrpoint are pretending to have. An entire episode is dedicated to Rishi's life unravelling. We see him gambling, getting beaten up, bullying colleagues like Sweetpea (Miriam Petche) and Anraj (Irfan Shamji), being pursued by his loan shark Vinay (Asim Chaudry), and speeding round his local village in his Ferrari. He's not a nice man but the Rishi episode was, for me, when the third series of Industry really got going. It reminded me of Bojack Horseman's bad trip.

It's not just Rishi who's in trouble. Pierrepoint itself is (hardly surprising considering the way they all carry on) and the vultures are circling - often in the form of familiar faces, faces that may be friend or foe and are often both. To a fantastic soundtrack (Pet Shop Boys, Wu-Tang Clan, Duran Duran, Rage Against The Machine, Carole King, Francoise Hardy, NWA, Low, Hudson Mohawke, Brian Eno, Fred Again, Simple Minds, Electronic, Grace, Three Dog Night, Jimmy Somerville, Pastor T.L. Barrett, and, er, Gustav Mahler) we're taken on a rollercoaster ride that incorporates a trip to Davos, an ayahuasca ceremony, a psilocybin trip in Wales, more than one inappropriate proposal, more than one nepo baby, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's red cabbage biryani, golden showers, a man being attacked with a soft toy in a child's ball crawl pit, and even the possibility of a murder.

There's also a guest appearance from Amol Rajan, what feels like product placements for the likes of Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Mitsubishi, and Red Bull and lots of talk about greenwashing, diversity, and ethical investment. It's quite exhausting. It certainly looks like an exhausting world to work in - and a macho, cut throat, and sometimes depraved one too. Though some bits dragged, I found myself Googling how to spell the word 'longueurs', other times the action was compulsive and never more so, in my mind, than when the tension is ramped up between Yasmin and Harper who are, it seems, the centre that everything in Industry revolves around. 

The heart of it. Even if sometimes it's an ice cold heart. Industry makes powerful points about class divisions and the transactional relationships of the rich and powerful (as well as the nefarious takeover of sports, entertainment, and banking by the Gulf states using an imperialism they learned from the West) but more than that it's a compelling, if sometimes confusing, drama. For season four, I'd kill off a few of the unnecessary background characters and, maybe this is too bold, introduce at least one character who's inspired by morality rather than filthy lucre. I've always harboured a suspicion that most bankers are cunts. Industry suggests that not only is that true but they know it - and they're proud of it.

Wounds of the Universe:Mire Lee @ Tate Modern.

"Behind all human actions there is something soft and vulnerable such as sincerity, hope, compassion, love and wanting to be loved" - Mire Lee

 

Nice sentiments, Mire Lee, and ones you'd think almost everyone could get behind but how they relate to her current Tate Modern Turbine Hall installation, Open Wound, I'm not sure. I went on Saturday (narrowly avoiding a serious number of pissed up pub crawling Santas on the South Bank - and a few horses to boot) and although aesthetically the art was quite pleasing I had no idea what it was all about or why it was there.

Apparently, the South Korean artist who works out of both Seoul and Amsterdam, is reflecting on the building's former use as a power station and reimagining the space as some kind of industrial womb that spews human desires out from some kind of sprawling mechanical system.

For which read a large slowly rotating industrial gizmo that drips some kind of oozing rusty water down into a pit below. Surrounded by what Lee calls 'skins':- fabric sculptures hung from the ceiling at various heights (but not so low you can touch them) by metal chains. These skins are, I read, 'birthed' from that industrial rotor and that rusty oozing water. Which I suppose is an impressive feat of production if pretty pointless.

The work, I read on, "considers the physical and emotional labour of people living in times of precarity and decline" and witnesses individual people getting caught up in larger systems. It is supposed to inspire in us feelings of awe and disgust as well as those of compassion, fear, and love. But I'm afraid it inspired in me something somewhere between curiosity and indifference. I started wondering if there'd be any nearby pubs not full of pissed up Santas where I could enjoy a quiet pint afterwards.

Her attempts to recreate the melancholy of an abandoned building site are honourable and interesting but if I'd wanted to experience melancholy of an abandoned building site I could have probably visited an abandoned building site. That does at least mean that Lee's art is actually quite traditional. She's seen a thing she likes and she's made a copy of it for people to look at.

Other than that though, there wasn't much for me (or, looking around, others). All the references to the South Korean poet Kim Eon Hee, how it "sometimes hurts to love" (no shit), and individuals being rendered autonomous and even unnecessary by technology weren't, for me, reflected in the not at all unpleasant art and served, simply, as yet more superfluous word salad.

The ideas are interesting, the art is interesting. The concept, however, is weak. The two don't really work together. I found a Santa free pub.

Theatre night:The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

I've never read the 1922 short story about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and neither have I seen the 2008 film. In fact I didn't even know the tale had been written by F. Scott Fitzgerald and I thought the film was directed by Tim Burton which it isn't. It's David Fincher. So my visit, last night, to London's Ambassadors Theatre to see the play, in the form of a musical, was my first encounter with Mr Button and his curious case.

Of course, I knew the basic premise. A man is born old and then grows younger and younger, living his life backwards. A magical realist tale if ever there was one. But that's all I knew about it. I didn't know if it was funny or sad or both (spoiler alert - it's both) and I had no idea how it ended or what happened along the way. Turns out - quite a lot.

Jethro Compton and Darren Clark's musical reimagining of the story has been transferred to a Cornish fishing village (cue an impressive stage set of nets, rigging, rotting piers, and various others items of nautical paraphernalia and cue a couple of product placements - though one was for Proper Job IPA from the St Austell Brewery and they had a special offer on at the bar so it seemed rude not to) and moved forward a few decades from the original story.

Our Benjamin Button (played, brilliantly, by John Dagleish) is born, fully clothed - with glasses and a hat, in 1919 to parents who, to put it lightly, aren't exactly overjoyed by their new arrival. Benjamin's a resilient sort though and once he leaves the room he's basically been imprisoned in he goes to the pub, gets excited about space rockets, buys his first television, falls in love, gets married, has kids, runs away to America, fights in World War II, and learns a lot of lessons about life and love.

It could be twee and in some places it is. But at other times it is genuinely moving. I even felt a tear forming in the corner of my eye at one point but then I am, at heart, a complete and utter softy. The music, a kind of Cornish folk created with guitars, trumpet, organ, and tin whistle, as well as a drummer on a very impressive riser), is rousing in places and mournful, reflective, in others. It's so well sang that I could hardly believe so few people were making such a powerful sound.

While the story tackles themes of war, unrequited love, and even suicide it does also take in the very specific problems that may arise if you find yourself older than your own father and younger than your own children (even grandchildren) and it handles these questions very adroitly. Benjamin Button is a good man who only wants the best for those around him but because of his uniquely peculiar predicament it seems inevitable he will end up hurting those he loves the most. 

Will there be anything he can do about that? That will be his life's quest and as he grows younger and younger it seems he's beginning to find the answers. Just as those around him grow older and older. What is both interesting and touching is that, despite his own unique narrative, he experiences things in much the same way as the rest of us and snatched moments of joy - holding his child's hand, sitting on the beach with his wife, a joke with a much loved friend - prove the key to life's happiness. For a tale that is unsurprisingly tragic in places, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - at least in this musical iteration - is a hugely positive, if bittersweet in places, experience.

 

 

 

Fleapit revisited:Conclave.

The windows in the Sistine Chapel are high. When the bright Roman sun shines through them they bathe some of the fantastic Renaissance frescoes of Michelangelo, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio in glorious light. But they leave other sections obscured by darkness. Men, too, are composed of light and dark and even supposedly pious men, even extremely powerful clerics, are still men. Mortal, doubtful, conflicted, capable of both good and bad.

Edward Berger's new film Conclave (adapted from a 2016 novel by Robert Harris) is such an enjoyable watch because it leans into this side of humanity and doesn't shy away from it. The elderly pope has died and Cardinal-Dean Thomas Lawrence (an excellent, as ever, Ralph Fiennes) has been tasked with presiding over the conclave that will appoint the next pontiff.

Not an easy task. A global 'College' of Cardinals (so that's the collective term) arrive in the Vatican where they are sheltered, or 'sequestered', from the outside world and its goings on while they decide, via voting and politicking and - occasionally - the odd sharp practice, who will become the head of the global Catholic church, one of the most important jobs in the world presiding over a 'flock' of well over a billion people.

We're introduced to the runners and riders. Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci) is an American liberal and very much the continuity candidate - Lawrence backs him. The Italian traditionalist Cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto) is Bellini's nemesis. His views on women and Islam are, to say the least, unreconstructed and Bellini sees it as his job to stand against Tedesco and try to prevent what he believes would be a hugely regressive step for the church. Even if Bellini is clearly being disingenuous about his own ambitions.

Is Lawrence himself also being disingenuous? He insists he has no interest in taking the papacy, instructs his followers to vote for others, expresses doubts about his faith, and we even see him vote for Bellini several times. Yet a nagging suspicion remains that Lawrence, the man very much at the heart of the drama, may not be showing his full hand. His real motives may also be shrouded in the cloistered darkness of the Vatican's gilded chambers.

Other contenders come in the form of Cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), Cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), and rank outsider Cardinal Benitez (Carl Diehz). Mexican Benitez has been serving in Kabul (hardly a hotbed of Christianity) and was unknown to even the other cardinals before the conclave, the Nigerian Adeyemi has views on homosexuality that make him completely unpalatable to Bellini, and the supposedly moderate Canadian Tremblay is under suspicion regarding his own shaky relationship with the previous Bishop of Rome.

Lawrence, with the assistance of Monsignor O'Malley (Brian F O'Byrne), has to unravel all the different threads of these stories as he tries to do the right thing by himself, by his fellow cardinals, and by God. The direction of events is changed more than once following a series of very clever twists (some you could just about see coming, others completely wrongfooted me) and a vital intervention by Isabella Rossellini's Sister Agnes whose understated curtsy had the audience in the Peckhamplex, myself included, guffawing.

There were a couple of other funny moments but unlike Succession or The Death of Stalin (which tackle similar themes to Conclave - just without the ecclesiastical dimension) nobody could mistake this thriller for a comedy. In a world of scarlet cassocks, crucifixes, rosary beads, prayer, and, er, turtles there are a group of men who are as weighed down with ambition, hubris, and moral uncertainty as any other men and these men must choose, from their own number, a leader who will become 'infallible'. It is imperative they choose the right man. But will they choose the right man?

Fleapit revisited:Deliverance.

"Sometimes you have to lose yourself before you find anything" - Lewis Medlock.

"Squeal like a pig", "he got a real pretty mouth", Dueling Banjos. These are things you probably think of when you think of John Boorman's 1972 southern gothic movie Deliverance (shown recently on BBC2 and still, for a couple more days, available on the iPlayer) and, to be fair, they are some of the most dynamic moments of the film - but they are not the whole film.

What the whole film is is hard to tell. Is Boorman, a Brit, being rude about people in the Deep South? Is he making a point about the patronising attitudes of urban folk? Is it a story about how city dwellers underestimate nature (and those that live in it)? Is it parable about man's hubris? Or is it just a good old fashioned thriller and I'm reading way too much into it?

Four Atlanta businessmen are heading to the Cahulawassee river (actually the Chattooga, a tributry of the Tugaloo which is, itself, a tributary of the Savannah) in northern Georgia with a plan to canoe down it before it is damned for eternity. It's very beautiful out there but, inevitably, it's very dangerous too.

Lewis (Burt Reynolds) doesn't worry about the danger. He's a risk taker, an alpha male who smokes cigars, spears fish, and sets himself up as the leader of the group. Ed (Jon Voight) has joined Lewis on adventures before - even if he doubts his own wisdom in doing so - but is more circumspect when it comes to making major decisions. He's a pipe smoker. Both actually and metaphorically.

Bobby (Ned Beatty) and Drew (Ronny Cox) are novices. Law abiding Drew likes nothing more than to play his guitar and Bobby, whom Lewis calls Chubby - he's a little more rotund than the others, is really not the outdoors type in any way. It seems inevitable that he will either regret his decision to join the others on the trip or he'll end up the hero of the piece.

Maybe both. On arriving at a small town near the river, the foursome (particularly Lewis) manage to insult the locals. Locals who are already poverty stricken and highly suspicious of city slickers. When the Dueling  Banjos scene arrives, much earlier than I remembered, Lonnie the banjo boy (Billy Reddon) smiles with glee as he duets with Drew but refuses to shake his hand or even acknowledge him afterwards.

That's the least of their worries. A trip that starts off looking idyllic (and even fun if that's your bag) soon becomes far more treacherous and I don't just mean the white water rapids and the parasitical mosquitoes. Mountain men with guns ('Mountain Man' is played by Bill McKinney while Herbert 'Cowboy' Coward gets to play a character called 'Toothless Man'), being tied to trees, and those uncomfortable, unforgettable, scenes of a man squealing like a pig as he's anally raped.

This incident, understandably, changes the whole tone of the trip but it also drastically alters the dynamic of the group as one man's authority is questioned and others rise. It's not, however, the end of their problems. Further perils await. Some natural and some of their own making. Mostly a combination of the two. On more than one occasion you find yourself wondering if the Cahulawassee will become their watery grave.

It's a good yarn, exciting and tense in places with some fantastic hillbilly dancing on show, that reminded me a little of Ted Kotcheff's Wake In Fright which came out one year earlier. There are some vertigo inducing scenes and some that are unpleasant for very different reasons but, ultimately, I didn't find myself caring for, rooting for, or empathising with any of the characters. Maybe that's baked in with the southern gothic genre but I don't see why it should be. No doubt about it, Deliverance has earned its place in the pantheon but the caveat is it could, and should, have been even better. You better pray good.