Call For Papers

Extremity & Excess: An Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Conference. University of Salford, S

8th + 9th September 2011
University of Salford

This conference seeks to explore ideas of extremity and excess through the full range of disciplines in the arts, media and social sciences.

To deem something extreme or excessive is to place oneself in a position of implied moderation, and suggests an affiliation with other concepts such as temperance, discipline, familiarity, normality, balance, proportionality, sufficiency and rectitude. The extreme and the excessive, on the other hand, can be characterised as what is disproportionate, intemperate, unbalanced, uncontrolled, abnormal, undisciplined, radical and Other.

We welcome proposals for papers that engage with any aspect of extremity and/or excess. These could include, but are by no means limited to: the aesthetic challenges of representing excess and extremity; aesthetic experimentalism; excessive and extreme behaviours; such phenomena as mass hysteria and mass grief; the grotesque and the spectacular; concepts of centrality and marginality; the so-called ‘Death of Affect’; the representation of extreme historical events; equality and justice; political and social responses to extreme threats; political extremism and fundamentalism.

Papers are welcome from fields such as politics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, religions and theology, geography, sociology, history, classics, translation studies, linguistics and social linguistics, visual and screen studies, new media and communication studies and the performing arts. Interdisciplinary papers are very welcome.

Keynote speakers TBC.

Abstracts of 250 words are invited for presentations of 20 minutes. Proposals for performances, screenings etc. are also accepted. The conference intends to publish an edited volume of the best papers presented.
Abstracts to be received by 31st April 2011.
Abstracts to: extremityandexcessconference@gmail.com

http://www.famss.salford.ac.uk/pgconf_2011

The Renegade of the Riviera: Pablo Picasso, Peace and Freedom. Tate Liverpool, to August 30th.

The life and work of Pablo Picasso is rich with paradox. In one version of the Picasso legend, he is an arch-bohemian; a Breton-shirted womaniser living it up on the French Riviera; the first true artistic celebrity. Yet there is also Picasso the genius; the lightning conductor for the spirit of his age, whose 1937 masterpiece Guernica seems to thrill in every atom with the agony and horror of an entire continent about to be plunged into the abyss. Guernica, like Picasso himself, has become public property.

Tate Liverpool’s new exhibition seeks to offer a third view of Picasso: as a serious and committed political thinker and activist, whose artistic production is inextricable bound up with his engagement with politics.

It begins with a relative of Guernica, The Charnel House. Painted in 1944-45, this is a portrayal of the aftermath of war. Where Guernica depicts a massacre taking place – and suggests the potential endlessness of suffering – The Charnel House is a vision of lifelessness. A family lie massacred in their kitchen, beneath a table of food indicating that violent death has intruded permanently into the private realm. A rotund, blank-eyed baby seems to jam its hand into its mouth; an arm reaches rigidly upwards, open-palmed; defensive rather than defiant. Where Guernica screams, The Charnel House is terrifyingly silent.

The exhibition takes the end of the War as its starting point and proceeds chronologically through the remaining decades of Picasso’s life, tracking the moods and phases of his work against the political landscape. But with this approach, subtlety is often lost. The works grouped together as Still Lifes may be more complex than they are given credit for. The many skulls that feature in the works of the decade following the War’s end are interpreted as being memento mori, symbols of death that elegise the millions killed. Certainly, the large bronze human-like cranium, with its misshapen eye sockets and raddled texture, seems to meditate on mortality. But in the painting Still Life with Skull, Leeks and Pitcher, March 14, 1945 the skull seems to be roguish and essentially comic. The humour intrinsic to a work like Lobster and Cat (1965) is also overlooked – the cat trapped between fascination and fear, hissing and arched; the lobster scuttling, claw triumphantly raised – in favour of a political explanation of the cat as tyrant whose greed ultimately brings him into an encounter more powerful enemy.

The curators’ need to extract a fixed political code from Picasso’s shifting, enigmatic visual vocabulary only becomes more pronounced as one moves through the exhibition. This is a vast show (nine rooms in total), and it is hard not to feel that the inclusion of very late works such as those in the ‘Mothers and Musketeers’ room was more for the sake of completeness than for cohesion, particularly when the accompanying text tells us that “The women, especially mothers, represent peace; the musketeers represent war.” This seems unsubstantiated and simplistic, a symptom of the determination of the curators to make their political point even when the evidence is shaky.

At the heart of their argument – and this show does feel argumentative – is the room devoted to the Dove of Peace and its life as a political symbol. While it is made clear that it was the poet Louis Aragon who chose the image for a poster for the World Peace Conference of 1949, not Picasso himself – who declared that “I never could understand how one could make it into a symbol of peace. It is an extremely cruel bird” – the ubiquity of the image in Leftist literature of the time seems to be presented as evidence for Picasso’s commitment to the political left. That his image was used as propaganda does not make Picasso a propagandist. More generally, I would say that the vast amount of newspapers, handbills, posters and other ephemera is simply too extensive and too repetitive to hold the interest of those more interested in Pablo Picasso than in Leftist French media.

This show, impressive in its scope and ambition, is marred by a heavy-handed didacticism. The interpretations offered are frequently too emphatic: The Rape of the Sabines series (1962) is read as a response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the nature of this connection is far from obvious. The series could be read as a burlesque on the clash of civilizations, and an anti-war statement, but to read it as an allegory of a very specific moment of political history is tendentious to say the least. The curators continually tell rather than suggest; given the wealth of contextual material assembled here, the viewer could be allowed more space to draw their own conclusions about its influence on Picasso’s work.

There is, it must be said, plenty to enjoy here, if one allows the works to speak for themselves: I could have spent much more time enjoying the deceptively simple vibrancy of Composition 1948, or the unnerving stare, both mischievous and piercing, of Owl With Chair, Ochre Background (1947). But too often this exhibition tries to fix meanings in political terms, terms which inevitably fail to encompass the rich ironies, the troubling ambiguities and, indeed, the sheer strangeness of Picasso’s genius.

What We Pretend to Be: Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Mother Night’

Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, first published in 1961, is a morally troubling but also morally troubled book. The meaningfulness of moral reasoning, indeed the possibility of morality in a world that demands duplicity, is its theme. It concerns one Howard W Campbell Jr., who calls himself “an American by birth, a Nazi by reputation, and a nationless person by inclination.” An American émigré and sometime playwright, he spends the Second World War in Germany as a master propagandist, producing radio broadcasts expounding the virtues of the Third Reich to the English-speaking world. While doing so, he claims to have been recruited by the Americans as a double agent, and weaves into his broadcast a subversive code comprised of coughs and pauses that transmits intelligence to the Allies. This is the substance of the defence he makes, telling his story from a postwar prison cell in a “nice new jail in old Jerusalem.” He claims that he never believed in the Nazi ideology he was instrumental in disemminating. Although he considers himself to be someone unerringly capable of distinguishing right from wrong, he doubts the usefulness of that ability.

In prison, he meets (and discusses literary practice with) Adolf Eichmann, “the bureaucratic Ghengis Khan”; his opinion of Eichmann is simply that he has an undiscriminating mind: everything passes through his thoughts unchecked, “like birdshot through a bugle.” Campbell, on the other hand, “could no more lie without knowing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone”. The significance of this capability, however, is shrugged off: the only advantage he finds in being able to tell right from wrong is “that I can sometimes laugh when the Eichmanns see nothing funny.”

Truth is of questionable value. Everywhere there are reminders that in war the choice is between unconscionable behaviour and death – and of the absurdity of suggesting that the choice between them is morally significant. One of Campbell’s guards in jail is a man named Arpad, who rails against the “briquets” who did not save themselves when the Nazis took over Hungary. “Arpad, faced with the problem of being a Jew in Nazi Hungary, did not become a briquet. On the contrary, Arpad got himself false papers and joined the Hungarian S.S.” “What’s so noble about being a briquette?”Arpad asks. This is Campbell’s defence too: considering the fact that history will brand him a Nazi regardless of his motivations, he asks “How else could I have survived?” “That was your problem” he is told. “Very few men could have solved it as thoroughly as you did.”

Whether any sort of absolution can inhere in the fact that Campbell (a playwright of some skill) was, according to his word, only acting a part is the novel’s most engaging moral question. Considering his record as a Nazi propagandist, he claims “I can hardly deny that I said them. All I can say is that I didn’t believe them, that I knew full well what ignorant, destructive, obscenely jocular things I was saying”. Is it better to be an opportunistic demagogue or a fascist ideologue? Is it worse to believe lies or to willingly spread them? Campbell describes the totalitarian mind as a “snaggle-toothed thought machine”; a “system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random.” Thus, thinks Campbell, the fascist mind has periods of apparent functionality interspersed with periods of fearful lunacy. But this insight is tempered by the feeling that such knowledge is of little practical benefit, nor is it good in itself. Some minds are made one way; others, another. So it goes, as they say.

The reader is told a tale by a master propagandist, and is therefore under no obligation to believe a word he says. Only three people believe that he was an agent working for the Allies, and they are nowhere to be found. One may be inclined to think that truth, particularly historical truth, is not a matter of concensus, but Howard W Campbell Jr., finds that, placed against the postwar need for a particular type of justice, his story, cast into doubt by his aknowledged genius for demagoguery, is of little interest. He offers only his continued survival – “my unbroken, lily-white neck – as evidence for the truth of his tale.

In his Introduction, Vonnegut notes several morals that his novel demonstrates. One is that “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Another is that “when you’re dead you’re dead.” Only those that survive can tell stories, true or otherwise. The stories of virtuousic liars like Arpad and Campbell get told. Those of the “briquets” do not.

But even the basic desirability of survival gets challenged. That the price he has paid in order to survive has been too high dawns on Campbell through the book. At one crucial moment, he is unable to provide a single reason to continue to stay alive. Life over death;  knowledge over ignorance; morality over exploitation; truth over lies: none of these preferences is granted the status of absolute good in Mother Night. The novel is both a sharp satire on the moral confusion that pragmatism generates – on the one hand, we recognise the need to do anything to survive, on the other, we want to condemn the sort of ‘going native’ Campbell engages in – while refusing to suggest that any other strategy practical. Faced with the problem of survival in extremis, one can only try not to solve the problem as “thoroughly” as Howard W Campbell, Jr.

Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night. London: Vintage, 2000.

Fiercer Than Tigers: Rex Warner, ‘The Aerodrome’

I’m never too sure about the idea of forgotten classics; I think some of the ones I’ve subjected myself to weren’t so much forgotten as dumped like toxic waste off culture’s coastline in the hope they’d just go away. Yes, I am talking about Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead here. But publishers recycling their lists occasionally stumble on a gem.

But what kind of a gem is Rex Warner’s 1941 novel The Aerodrome? A kind of comic-allegorical coming-of-age-tale; a dystopian melodrama; a love story; a religious parable; an anti-fascist satire – it has elements of all of these, but manages to elude them all as well.

Even at the level of plot it’s a crafty beast. The novel’s protagonist, twenty-one year old Roy, begins the novel lying face down in a muddy field on evening, “drunk, but not blindly so, for I seemed only to have lost the use of my limbs.”  He has just discovered that he was adopted. Except he wasn’t, quite, but more of that later.

As Roy’s disillusionment with the complacent, adulterous and oft-inebriated life of the Village grows, he becomes enamoured by the idea of the Aerodrome, a kind of model of  militaristic order that sits on a hilltop overlooking Roy’s home. He becomes friends with one of the airmen, known only as the Flight Lieutenant, who spoils a pleasant day at the Agricultural Show by first taking Slazenger, the prize bull, for a ride, and then ‘accidentally’ shooting Roy’s adopted father, the Rector, in the face, an incident he recounts with the excellent line, “I say, Roy, something rather horrid has happened. I’m afraid I’ve potted your old man.”

Not being quite sure what you’re laughing at, or even if you should be laughing at all, is part of the book’s unsettling capacity.

As the Aerodrome expands into the Village, enforcing its own ideology – a kind of Nietzschean exaltation of the Will that creates an endless present through the negation of past and future – Roy eventually becomes an Airman, as the old guard of the Village die off, Dickensianly, of shock and grief (apart from the Squire’s Sister who gets shot in the face at church by the Aerodrome’s charismatic chief, the Air Vice-Marshal). Roy’s marriage to the Pub Landlord’s daughter, Bess, is apparently doomed after he is told she is his half-sister – and that his adopted father is his real father after all – except he isn’t, of which more later.

The understandably confused Roy retreats to the apparently well ordered certainty of the Aerodrome, and ends up in  the arms of a mysterious femme fatale, Eustasia.

The remainder of book is mostly concerned with Roy’s discovery of the truth about himself via the very gradual revelation of a maddeningly convoluted family history emerges: almost nobody is related to one another in the way they seem to be, and the incestuous and improbable network of relationships is at times bewildering. Murder, lies, illegitimacy, patricide all feature with absurd frequency. Whether the reader has patience with such melodrama probably depends on whether they think Warner aims at realism or allegory: reading purely allegorically, such elements are simply concentrated siginifiers for human nature at large, and their frequency and improbability isn’t problematic. But there are too many realist components at the level of character development and psychology to dismiss Roy as simply a type or an example.

In keeping with other anti-fascist texts of the late thirties, Warner suggests wounded male pride is at the core of the drive to power as represented by the Air-Vice Marshal’s creation of himself as cult leader. His eventual demise is symptomatic of the self-destructive circle at the root of totalitarianism.

The message that the Aerodrome and the Village are intertwined by common histories of lust, murder and deception, and Roy’s eventual return to the Village refreshed by that knowledge, has its obvious political overtone: the latent fascist tendency wrapped within the yearning for order and a “clean world,” the general need for a revaluation of tradition and attachment at a time of threatened apocalypse; but there is nothing didactic about The Aerodrome; Roy’s epiphany is not political but enigmatic and quasi-religious: he says of the world he now returns to, “clean it was and most intricate, fiercer than tigers, wonderfully and infinitely forgiving.”

Kafka is mentioned in the blurb, but there are all kinds of echoes in Warner’s work: a touch of Patrick Hamilton in his ear for lunatic pub banter; Dickens or Wilkie Collin in the plotting; Orwell, inevitably; there are shades of Robinson Crusoe here and there, even the Pilgrim’s Progress would need to be mentioned. But in the end this is a brilliantly, hilariously strange book, alluring and allusive, that might, and certainly should, find an audience at last.

Colour Chart: Re-inventing Colour 1950-Today. Tate Liverpool, 13th August 2009

In taking the colour chart as exemplar of the incursion of technology into the traditional processes of visual art, Tate Liverpool’s current show seeks to engage with wider questions about man’s relationship with the machines that surround him, and about the possibility of originality. But this show becomes a far more intriguing and ambitious affair than you might expect from its premise. While there is plenty of abstract work taking its cue from the codes, sequences and number matrices of the industrial world, most notably Gerhard Richter’s beautiful 4096 Colours (1971), and in On Kawara’s anxious, sinister Today series (1966-present), which takes the obsession with order lurking behind industrial process to its conclusion in a series of huge bound volumes of dated colour samples, to my mind the most compelling work here exists on the troubled surface between man and technology, and does not attempt to eliminate the human dimension of creation. The methodological exactitude of Kawara thankfully finds an engaging counterpoint in Edward Ruscha’s Stains (1969), a playful series that mixes order and anarchy: the stains are the result of meticulously catalogued combinations of commonly occurring substances like parsley, Coca Cola and bacon grease. There is a kind of glee in the unpredictability of the resulting colours which stands in stark contrast to the terror that Kawara’s work exudes.

If Karawara’s work, and to some extent Richter’s, exhibits a desire to remove the human element and the unpredictability it entails, other work on show emphasises the human element of technology. Jan Dibbets’ Color Studies (2007), a series of close-up photographs of car bodywork, accepts the uniform nature of commercial design, but it also serves to remind us of how such items become objects of personal expression.

Skin colour is a recurrent theme. In one cabinet, a medical chart of skin tones is displayed, while Byron Kim’s Synecdoche (1991-Present) is a series of panels, the colour of each matched to the skin of a different model. The effect is an arresting combination of the intensely personal, even the intimate, with the depersonalised format of an industrial colour chart, and by extension with the dehumanising connotations of identifying people purely by skin tone. Carrie Mae Weems’ Colored People series, meanwhile, presents a different response to the same problem by emphasising that colour is property of light, not of people.

Meanwhile cabinets display examples of industrial colour manuals, along with volumes on theory of perception and aesthetics, an addition which neatly and unobtrusively situates the show in its theoretical background without making heavy weather of it. Word-spotters will enjoy noticing how the publication of colour charts required a sometimes fanciful expansion of the language of colour into such combinations as ‘billiard green’ and ‘red maple’. Yves Klein’s Peintures (1954) provides a flash of much-appreciated wit: a booklet of colour samples masquerading as a catalogue of full size monochromes, funny as well as prematurely postmodern.

Human and machine; order and chaos; terror and mischief… the coexistence of all these forces makes this show a treat. If there is a weak spot, I would have to point reluctantly to the most recent pieces; Jim Lambie’s ZOBOP! (2006), for example, while intriguing in passing, seemed to have little to offer beyond what the earlier pieces in the show had already investigated. Angela Bulloch’s Ideation and Reflection (2003) feels to me more like updating than genuine innovation. But these are minor quarrels; Colour Chart overall is brilliantly conceived and maintains a warmth and humanity that belies the technical nature of its premise. Perhaps most impressively, it is a show as relevant and enjoyable to colour-mad toddlers as it is to scholars of Theodor Adorno. And it’s not often you can say that.

Lighten up, it’s just a bit of harmless fun: Lars von Trier’s Antichrist

If you walk into the cinema expecting to be shocked by Lars von Trier’s already infamous Antichrist, then you will be. I didn’t, and wasn’t.

I was certainly engaged and at times moved, but I couldn’t ignore the niggling suspicion which accompanies me every time I encounter such divisive work that I am being asked to praise the emperor’s new clothes. Everyone concurs that Antichrist is beautifully shot – the natural environment is captured with nothing short of rapture, but this is von Trier’s 13th feature so technical aptitude is to be expected, not applauded with awe. It also irritates me that this film, which tries so hard to provoke its audience, is incoherent in such a blustering, ponderous way that it will inevitably be hailed as a masterpiece by people for whom complexity of texture is more important than form. It certainly is a densely layered film in its employment of a symbolic vocabulary; as well as the Manichaean Christian implication of its title and the recurring references to Satan, there are also nods to German forest magic, tarot, witchcraft and astrology. Students of mythology will find plenty to occupy them here; however the use of these references is rarely surprising and always confused. For example, the unnamed couple’s son is called Nick, which gives us a hint of Saint Nicholas, patron of lost children, but also (admittedly with rather nice ambiguity), Old Nick/ Satan. But this never develops in any meaningful way: is the child actually a malign being, preternaturally capable of punishing his mother? Or is he some kind of saint, standing for pre-lapsarian innocence in the Eden that becomes Hell? Or what?

Meanwhile the motif of the Three Beggars seems original (it’s the title of a WB Yeats poem, but I can’t find any connection), yet to me it resembles a corollary of the three wise monkeys translated into the figures of the doe, the fox and the raven. The fox wears a bell, suggesting the blind beggar; the doe encountered by Willem Dafoe’s character as it is miscarrying its fawn appears deaf to his approach; and the raven… I’m not sure about the raven. The use of these animals does suggest a genuine mythical basis, a submerged allegory, but I just don’t believe it’s there in any coherent form. The fact that the fox speaks in a comedy-gremlin sort of voice doesn’t help because, even though talking animals are common enough in north European fables, in this context it’s a distracting intrusion of the supernatural into a treatment of nature which is otherwise both gothic and believable (nature’s deceptions – like acorns mimicking footsteps on a roof – are creepily present throughout).

That said, it is possible to identify some interesting questions posed by Antichrist. First, and most generally, is the question of whether myths describe reality or whether they mould it in their image. For example, does the structure of grief that the psychoanalyst describes come from the experience of grief, or is it an attempt to give that experience a shape? Furthermore one can ask, is the treatment an attempt to control Charlotte Gainsbourg’s character’s increasingly psychotic behaviour, or is it the discrepancy between the pattern and the experience that is at fault? This is, I think, part of a more general order/ chaos (and possibly art/ chaos) problematic. Consider constellations: Gainsbourg’s character finds the constellation of the three beggars on a star chart, and while there may be ‘no such constellation’, isn’t she simply imposing order shaped by experience onto chaos? And if that is the case, is the terror of the natural world she experiences a reaction to the cruelty and irrationality of the natural world, or is it a projection of her own cruelty and unreason?

As I said, this film could keep you busy, but only if you can suppress the suspicion that there really isn’t that much to Antichrist beyond headline-grabbing violence and a clutch of mythological references easily mistaken for a complex tissue of meanings, but which ultimately amount to very little.

The Middle Class Goes to Paradise: Latitude Festival, Suffolk, July 16th-19th

Unlike some reviewers I’m not going to indulge in the any tortuous hand-wringing over the question of whether Latitude is too middle class or not. It is middle class because the arts are middle class. I know, I know, and I’ll get round to writing something about it in due course. But before I do: wordiness. I’ve noticed that my reviews aren’t exactly concise. Or is it that this format makes them look longer? Either way I thought I’d try and be a bit more breviloquent for this one. So. This is Latitude in a series of more or less chronological one adjective one word a couple of word reviews.

La Reve Human Music Box: pretentious. Ben Goldacre: star. Doves: turgid. Robin Ince: Giant Crabs. Robyn Hitchcock: good banter, lame songs. Johnny Candon: should be famous, won’t be. Orwell – A Celebration: Badly scheduled, well adapted. Pappy’s Fun Club: naked. Andrew Motion: undervalued, amiable. Josie Long: Kurt Vonnegut T-Shirt. Jeremy Hardy: confused, angry. Nick Cohen: pessimistic, angry. Mark Thomas: inventive, angry. Mark Steel: angry, angry. Gary Le Strange: crack and jewels. Catastrophic Sex Music: catastrophic; possible victim of scheduling; more likely victim of bad writing and hubris. Nick Harkaway: must read. Tree of Lost Things: sweet. Pet Shop Boys: miming. Jon Ronson: neuroses and demented bravery. Magazine: proficient but kind of pointless. Grace Jones: stellar. Instigate Debate: Ben Bradshaw looked like he had no idea where he was. Laura Dockrill: ubiquitous. Wasps: bastards. Compost toilets: hell. Nick Cave: Nick Cave.

Does it sound like I had a good time? No? Well, I did. Next time I go I’ll try and venture outside the literary tent for a bit, unless my fear of wasps or my new found enchantment with songs about crabs as big as beach donkeys prevents me from doing so.

Know Your Enemy: Nick Cohen, ‘Waiting For The Etonians’. (London: Fourth Estate, 2009).

This collection of Cohen’s reportage, spanning May 2003 to October 2008, focuses on misdirected blame and anger. His wrath is directed at the ‘leftish’ commentators and politicians whose crisis of ideological confidence has led to a peculiar moral paralysis, the main symptom of which is to blame the West in general and American foreign policy in particular for all the world’s ills. He registers his fury at the propensity of his former allies on the left to indulge in the kind of victim-blaming the treats those blown up in London and Madrid as mere collateral damage sustained in the fight against western imperialism; understandably appalled by the “reckless brutality” of the Bush administration these liberals take the side of its opponents, yet in so doing end up “excusing or endorsing the far right” in the form of Baathist insurgents and Hamas. That they cannot scrape together the moral substance to condemn the killing of innocent civilians is shaming, and the old platitude about terrorists and freedom-fighters is a nonsense in these circumstances. Cohen singles out for particular contempt the Respect party’s attempt to forge a coalition under the anti-war banner that included a number of ultra-conservative religious groups: “the party’s paper tried to reconcile anti-capitalism with religious fanaticism by calling on the comrades to protest against Spearmint Rhino lap-dancing clubs.”

But Cohen is sensitive to the predicament of intellectuals that gives rise to such bizarre contortions, even as he condemns their cowardice. (Although his patience meets its match in the form of Ted Honderich, whose determination to distribute the blame for terrorism at the feet of everyone except terrorists is more than Cohen can stomach). This is symptomatic of what Cohen regards as the vacuity of the left. He argues that “today’s left cannot tell its friends from its enemies because it has no programme for a better world”. Faced with the collapse of communism, and the apparent refutation by Russia and China of the assumption that only liberal democracies can succeed in the global market, a relativism has set in that sees democracy not as Cohen does, as a necessary condition for a flourishing civilisation, but as a western affectation. While “pseudo-leftists” continue to argue against democratic deficits and the infringement of civil liberties at home, “their principles flip as soon as they leave Heathrow.”

Cohen is no ideologue, and this collection offers no map for the future; indeed he rarely comments on the specifics of policy. And there are inconsistencies. For example, he objects, rightly, to the spurious use of labels like ‘neocon’, ‘imperialist’ to discredit the perceived political apostasy involved in supporting intervention against repressive regimes. However when Cohen wonders why Oxfam, rather than campaigning against the rampant corruption and illegitimate governance responsible for so much starvation in the developing world, lobbied wealthy governments for debt cancellation instead, he suggests that it is a reflection of an “almost colonialist” worldview. This is consistent with his identification of a tendency by the left to misplace blame, yet it has a whiff of the propaganda slur about it, especially since the section begins with an epigraph from Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden’. What’s more I think he underestimates the intelligence of Oxfam’s supporters; it may be true that the “blood-drenched dictators” and “kleptomaniac families” responsible for much of Africa’s suffering were not mentioned at Live 8, but that is not to say that those who attended or watched at home were not aware that they existed. I don’t think anyone seriously believed debt cancellation was a panacea that would transform Africa into a land of plenty. It was instead a necessary breakthrough. Cohen seems concerned about the simplistic, fragmented tendencies of the new single-issue, lobby-dominated politics; however he may misjudge young people’s ability to negotiate with plurality (after all, we’ve never known the ideological certainties that once sustained the 1968ers).

The main problem with Cohen is that he focuses on the reprehensible silences surrounding touchy subjects, but skirts around the difficulties of tackling those subjects head on. He rails against the lack of interest in the starving of Zimbabwe and Darfur, a lack of interest from governments as well as from the commentariat and the public at large, yet offers no suggestion as to how interest could be made into action. This is reportage, not policy-making – let’s be fair – but to lambast the developed world for its callousness without giving any thought to the potential catastrophe that could be invoked by military intervention (given his criticism of “the aid movement” it’s hard to see how he could approve of any other kind) in a country already on its knees is a half-formed argument. It’s not clear from the evidence here that Cohen has any clearer idea about how to handle the religious dictatorship of Iran than anyone else; it is admirable to demand that liberals commit themselves with more ardour to the principle that “any democracy is better than a dictatorship”, but without any suggestion about how that maxim may be put into practice it is really just a demand for vocal unanimity. That is clearly not what Cohen wants, but it seems to be what his argument amounts to. His consistent support for the war in Iraq is well documented, but that cannot (financially, ethically or strategically) be the model for foreign policy across the world. The defense that Cohen is a commentator not a policy-maker is belied when it is the left’s lack of practical strategy that is the target of his fury.

Although Cohen proclaims himself an optimist, there is little cheer here. The Britain that emerges through his reports is rent with increasingly insurmountable class barriers and governed by and for the super-rich elite (his pieces on class are superb); it is a country in which the poor are denigrated and immigrants ruthlessly exploited while the “mind-boggling bungling” of chief executives is handsomely rewarded; a country held in thrall by maniacal, nuclear-capable regimes that its intellectuals could not find the guts to condemn; a country in which the high arts are incapable of providing critical reflection, choosing instead to revel in the trends and consensus of the moment (Mark Wallinger, Damien Hirst), while popular culture merely degrades and infantilises its viewers and participants (Little Britain, Shameless). And then there’s David Cameron, whose metamorphosis from archetypal Tory-boy throwback to polished PM-in-waiting is recorded in all its astonishing detail in this collection. Nick Cohen’s writing may not point the way to the future, but it at least strives to see the present accurately, to identify the real enemy. He does not always succeed, and some of his strength as a commentator comes from his ability to change his mind and own up to the fact (see his 2002 piece on Anti-Americanism), but this remains a vital collection of reporting, a courageous and thoughtful work.

The horror, the horror. Macbeth @Royal Exchange, March 31st.

This new production of Macbeth presents the Classical motif of the pervasive, uncontrollable cycle of violence through a very contemporary vocabulary of symbols and references. The audience enters to a tape loop of white noise and the sound of helicopters and tank fire, encircling a scene set as a child’s bedroom. This juxtaposition is the one of the production’s hooks: the three Witches begin as little girls who, brutally violated by soldiers, return as vengeful weird sisters, a conceit that maintains its power throughout thanks to admirably intense performances. The toning down of the supernatural enables the madness rampant in war to maintain a solid foothold in reality.

An unsettling dimension of voyeurism is always present: every brutal killing or violation is filmed on mobile phones and watched back on laptops, suggesting the way that violence is perpetuated through the reproduction of its images, as well as raising questions about the purposes of viewing in an image-saturated society. The old role of the theatre as a place where the unspeakable, the uncontrollable, could be brought into viewable space and thus understood, is embattled in a culture of pornographic violence and the raw flow of information.

The use of weapons, bulky combat gear, white noise and white light seems to draw on Kubrick and Coppola; while no allegory is sustained (a good thing, in my book), the production draws on the images of Vietnam, Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan. There are incongruities; Hilary Maclean’s cocaine-snorting Lady Macbeth seemed to belong in a David Lynch film, particularly since Nicholas Gleaves’ Macbeth seemed excessively callow and hen-pecked in the first act, making his moral crisis and near-madness at first seem less than convincing. I assume this was intended to enable his stature to grow through the production – which it did, to impressive proportions – but the weakness displayed at first seemed rather too thoroughgoing.

The whole maintains an unnervingly contemporary feel, although some moments feel a little heavy-handed, such as the soldiers carrying Starbucks Styrofoam cups. This is a production whose facility with contemporary images culminates in the metamorphosis of John Macmillan’s Malcolm from battle-scarred soldier to slick politician: the final image of him on a television screen about to address a cheering crowd deliberately simulates the inauguration images of Barack Obama. I found this unsettling and unexpected; others may find it a little clunky.

As one expects from the Exchange, Macbeth is a slick, well-designed and innovative piece of theatre, making great use of its space and minimal, well-judged sets. Not for the fainthearted, nor for those who prefer their Shakespeare without the politics, but for those looking for a version that really gets to grips with the violence of vengeance and the madness of warfare, this production is not to be missed.

Blood, Sweat & Shoes: Frost/Nixon

I went to watch Frost/Nixon at the AMC last night. It’s one of those few films that feels really necessary, not least as a masterclass in narrative craft. This feeling of necessity is all the more surprising given that the concept – a film about a TV program – sounds like a definition of redundancy. There are so many moments where I half-expected the film to come unstuck: the potentially tedious need to fill in the contextual detail of the end of the Nixon premiership for an audience a generation on was handled impressively, though with some rather heavy-handed dialogue in the opening few scenes.

The use of staged interviews with the  characters provided some neat insights – Nixon’s advisor Jack’s admission of his inability to watch the final interviews, for example – but sometimes felt superfluous. As these were interviews with the characters rather than the real participants, the film didn’t stray into the dreaded docu-drama territory, but there was a feeling of purposeless that I think can be attributed to the fact characters interviewed were of the same era as they appear in the drama, thus making the retrospection seem false.

Both leads are superb: Michael Sheen’s note-perfect Frost, with nasal tone and slightly manic charm, and Frank Langella’s lugubrious, wounded Nixon are the vital ingredients in what could otherwise be an exercise in political camp. Sheen/Langella often make an eminently compelling double act. Sheen’s frustration at his lack of purchase on Nixon in the early interviews is shared by the viewer, but the irritation is mediated by the scenes of Frost’s desperate fundraising efforts and off-camera antics – though how enjoyable these are depends on one’s Michael Sheen tolerance level.

The infamous final interview is where the Langella’s ability to capture vulnerability and defiance comes into its own. Lingering close-ups as he watches, apparently for the first time,  footage of razed Cambodian villages provide some genuine drama and point to a complex -and unexpected – undercurrent of tragedy that culminates in the closing shots of Langella, outlined against the Pacific and looking mystified by a pair of Italian shoes given to him by Frost, fading out with a touch of melodrama.

Frost/Nixon deserves the garlanded reception it has so far been given. Despite its faults, it is an impressive account of an unlikely confrontation between the man out of time and the man of the moment, a film that rises beyond social history to provide moments of startling revelation.