Most of us would agree that the world is unfinished, but Graham Sutherland with his ‘working and reworking of familiar landscapes’ seems to have brought the finishing as near as possible in his lifetime. For all curator George Shaw’s optimism that ‘Sutherland is an artist as much rooted in the past as in the world before him, a world forever unfinished’, his world, when before us, seems to have totally finished, marching off as it did along with the soldiers towards the Second World War. Sutherland seems to be ‘one for the experts’, rooted in a specific time and place. This could well be just a quirk of unfinished history, but there is something about the look of the paintings that consign him to the England that stretches back to Boudecia and didn’t survive the 50’s.

Sutherland possesses a Larkin-like sense of earthly propriety, evoked in his dark-tinted, non-brilliant shades. All his works (especially the pre-war Welsh landscapes) have that slight ‘30s’ hint of brown, no matter the prevailing colour. He wears his age on his sleeve.               
Curator Shaw seems to have drawn  most heavily on Sutherland’s strongest, more abstract work. Sutherland is a painter of line, not colour. Shape and contour are his tools, and it is from these tools, that his subjects take figuration. From close up Sutherland’s paintings suffer from perspectival flaws; his best paintings are the ones that can withstand the inevitable “flattening out” of the gouache upon the viewer’s approach.            

Consequently, the pictures in which he allows himself freer rein with the relations of colour and shape on canvas are his best work, when he allows the sun (or anything movable for that matter) to act as counterpoint, as in Sun Between Two Hills. He never quite dispenses with figuration, but his strength is in taking the landscape in front of him and letting imagination take hold, laying on the Welsh hills in that signature sloping arc of the brush.

Sutherland then manages to get these small-scale works to open up, to unclog themselves, and defy the restrictions of their own scale to throw us open to the vast landscape. His best pictures open out for us, giving a sense of space that is not to do with perspective but is all to do with an abstract form of expression. Something not wholly organic but slightly and carefully found. The landscape must be in harmony and compromise with the artifice, just like Welsh Standing Stones. The joy is in almost seeing something that you recognise

.               
These Standing Stones are a poetic summoning of the Celtic,  instinctive people-land relationship, but as we move into Sutherland’s paintings executed during his period as War Artist, the sloping arc, the smooth earthiness of the Standing Stone, is pushed aside for ruler-straight line. Never such innocence again. Bombed buildings are not made of ruler-straight lines, but the association of the mechanical, un-feeling line with the destruction the machines of war have caused is a dramatic poetic gesture. Such gestures can be noted in a glance and as such are moving haikus as much as they are paintings.

In the finishing comes the assertion that all is unfinished. Sutherland’s late work doesn’t maintain its earlier promise of Romantic harmony. His wartime work is all past participles: ‘twisted’; ‘fallen’; ‘blasted’. For Sutherland, what lives on is certainly an unfinished world, but it is damaged and leaking oil.

Luke Wright is dangerously close to becoming the poetic voice of a generation. His poignant, sardonic, and satire-drenched lyrics have led him to become one of the biggest names in contemporary performance poetry. And after his witty, caustic performance at Corpus Christi this week, I’m inclined to agree.

Wright’s poetic epiphany came when watching Manchester punk poet John Cooper Clarke aged 16. ‘All I wanted to do was put words together and rhyme’, said Wright.  He later went on to form the poetry club Aisle16 in 2000 and toured a show with the group called ‘Poetry Boyband’. Like all boy bands, the magic had to come to an end, and Wright left to pursue a solo career. In the style of an X-Factor contestant or Dick Whittington, Wright says he moved to London and ‘decided to give myself a few years at it. It took me 15 months till I’d become a poet – until it was my day-to-day job.’

Nowadays Wright has written poetry for films (watch the charming and a slightly weepy Seven Ages of Love on 4od), organises the poetry line up for Latitude festival, and performs at Edinburgh every year.  His obvious involvement with the more public side of poetic life led me to ask if he felt himself carefully surveying the divide between performance or ‘proper’ poetry. But Wright calls himself a ‘performance poet’ despite its reputation –  ‘there is some lazy stuff on the scene because you don’t have to cross the ‘t’s and dot the ‘i’s – because poetry is a sonorous experience. There are two types of poetry: the stuff that’s self-referential with posh language and the stuff that’s trying to tell stories, and I’m definitely in that second bracket.’
Nevertheless, Wright quotes Andrew Motion, saying that ‘poetry shouldn’t have to make people like it. Poems should hit you in the gut the first time you read it. I like to have an emotional connection with a poem but, more than anything, I love a great line.’  

Wright was also employed as the poet in residence for Radio 4’s Saturday Live where he has recently written on Christopher Hitchens’ death, the race for the American presidency, and his dad’s crush on Twiggy. Does Wright find it easy working on commission or is it the cross the modern artist must bear? Wright admits that he doesn’t ‘have a real love for these [commissioned] poems. I never hand in something I’m not happy with but there’s no truth or heart in those poems – there’s something genuine that you lose from it.’

From his latest work in progress – an epic called Revolt! that twins narratives of the peasants revolt in 1381 and the recent riots – to his new show, entitled Jeremy, Who Drew Penises On Everything (and other poems), it’s clear that Wright, undoubtedly, is a poet of the people.

Japanese prints aren’t an art form that many are familiar with. I was correspondingly in the dark when I dropped in to have a look at the Ashmolean’s exhibition of twenty woodblock prints of Kubuki actors armed only with a passable knowledge of the artist Hokusai, a guide book, and the rather reassuring admission of a staff member that even she ‘hadn’t a clue how to pronounce any of the names’.

The prints belong to a Japanese tradition of stylized representations of much-beloved Kabuki actors, whose dramatic theatrical style has been wildly fashionable, entertaining and notorious in Japan ever since the 17th century when a former prostitute and Shinto shrine dancer performed with her troupe to great acclaim in 1603. Woodblock prints of the actors were a hot commodity amongst the large fan base and depict the actors in costume and in character.

The older prints are dynamic and colourful: the actors faces contorted into grotesque caricature for the ‘villains’ and heroic bravado for the ‘heroes’. ‘The Catfish Priest’, a print depicting one play’s evil denizen, almost makes the exhibition worth seeing singlehandedly: his long sideburns and amusingly sinister characterisation are brilliantly evocative.

Along with the older, largely nineteenth-century prints, there are several prints by a contemporary Japanese artist, Tsuruya Kokei, whose work continues the Kabuki tradition. These are unmistakeably modern with simple but effective colour schemes, spare and static composition, and a quality of stillness which is completely different from the wild movement of the older prints.

Kokei’s work has been very popular both in Japan and abroad for several decades. Although he has since retired from his artistic career, these prints are well worth seeing as an example of a contemporary artist who combines specialization and popularity to make him an alternative ‘favourite’ to ‘discover’.

This is an exhibition for the non-pedant. With only twenty prints in the exhibition, and filling a space equivalent to half a seminar room, it is the perfect go-to place for students with a tight schedule. But be warned: there is very little explanation of an art that for many is quite alien, although the little that is explained is enough to make you eager for more.

Visit the bookshop and pick up a copy of The Art of Edo Japan which has enlightening references to the art you will have encountered, expanding into a general discussion of Japanese art over the few hundred years that Kabuki prints were most popular. This is a useful surrogate to the inadequate contextual detail provided by the exhibition itself. For the true enthusiasts, the Ashmolean’s Curator of Japanese Art, Dr Clare Pollard, is offering a tour of the exhibition in second and sixth week.

How do your academic and your creative pursuits cross over?

In some ways I see them as very separate. I certainly have to work on them completely separately. It’s like having an easel and a set of paints in one room and an easel and a set of paints in another room. But I’ve always seen my creative work as itself post-colonial. It asks tough questions about authority and power, which are post-colonial questions. So my creative work, to a certain extent, brought me to the whole area of world literary studies.

Did you ever feel that you might go down a solely creative career path?
Absolutely! At the time I took my first permanent academic job it was a little as though I was, speaking from an Irish point of view, taking the Queen’s shilling. I think there was a particularly grim moment when the new head of department at my job called me into his office and said, ‘All these junkets are all very well but you have got to understand that you are now a serious professional literary critic and teacher. You have to knuckle down and start churning out academic stuff.’ It was a bit of a crisis actually because there are only so many hours in the day and the week and so you have to do the one thing rather than the other.

Could you tell us about your recent short-story collection, Sharmilla, and Other Portraits?
Almost as a bona fide finger exercise, the writing of short stories has always been enormously interesting to me. I’m particularly a fan of Katherine Mansfield who only ever, because of her circumstances, wrote short stories. So I’ve written them and published them as I’ve gone along for actually, about twenty years. The first short story in Sharmilla I probably wrote in about 1984, but it sat around for a while before I published it.

Is there any advice that you would give to aspiring novelists?
Point one: keep on. And point two: keep on keeping on. Every day is very solitary because you have to go back; you’ve got to thrash it out again. The right word in the right place is a very difficult thing to achieve, but it is achievable, as long as you put in the work.

Could you tell us about the creative project you are currently working on?
I have been writing a fictionalised version of my father’s early life. He was fifty-three when I was born and therefore, to my young eyes, a very old man. He was something of a colonial officer; if you know your Conrad, a sort of a Lord Jim or even a Marlow figure. He had been in the Far East before the Second World War. And very helpfully for me, he left literary but still quite useful sketches of his times in the 1930s and the 1940s. And I’ve been using these as a kind of cord for the fictionalisation of his life. So I’ve been writing that up but inevitably the story of one’s father, remote a figure as he was, is a story of oneself.

Age? Then, now and more to come.

Like, who? It’s rooted in early electronic music from the 60s by the likes of Brian Eno, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler.

So it’s that ambient stuff? Pretty much, except not quite as uplifting.

Sounds boring. Sell it to me. Well that’s kind of the point. Most of the genre is built around long tracks of a single note.

A single note? Often, but sometimes there are too many layers to count. It’s not static. The sound is constantly morphing, just enough to hold your interest.

Errgh. Yes. But, it’s perfect chill out music, except for the extreme noise stuff. You probably want to avoid people like Prurient, Russell Haswell and SUNN o))) unless you like whole albums of screaming and guitar feedback.

Check out our selection of five bona fide bangers:

‘Hatred of Music I’ – Tim Hecker

‘Relocation.Reconstruction’ – Yann Novak

‘Sovereign’ – Yellow Swans

‘City Nightlights’ – relapxych.0

‘Mass Transit Railway’ – Monolake

Hear all these tracks, and more, on the accompanying Spotify playlist.

Like most Apprentice fans, there was one guarantee that kept me watching week after week. It wasn’t the stupidity of the contestants, nor Alan Sugar’s poor attempts at wit. Rather, it was the assurance of a look (sometimes many) of sheer disdain at the contestants from Lord Sugar’s faithful aide (and sidekick), Nick Hewer. Imagine, then, my delight, when I learnt that everyone’s favourite cynic was to take over as the new host of Countdown in 2012.

This excitement was, nonetheless, soon marred by a few slight worries. Would Hewer’s disdain be ever present during Countdown? Would he, rather than being liked by the Countdown team, be regarded as an aloof and unfriendly presence on an otherwise ideal show for grannies to watch over a cup of tea and a biscuit? Worst of all…would he actually ruin both his own career, and a loveable programme, by being a poor match? Thankfully, my fears were unfounded. Rather than being disdainful, Hewer has been mostly rather charming. Admittedly, that could also have been disastrous…but Hewer manages it wonderfully. His charm, believe it or not, is utterly genuine. He doesn’t overdo it and make the viewer feel queasy. Indeed, he’s certainly happy to let contestants know how he feels. I recall watching him chastise an otherwise very successful contestant after his poor attempt to guess the conundrum as “Mosquited” (It was actually ‘misquoted’). He responded with the air of disappointment that a teacher feels when their top student says something stupid in class: “Don’t be ridiculous…coming from a champ!” and three tuts. As if this wasn’t enough, he then appealed to the audience for the answer by claiming that there was “abject failure” on the contestants’ part. The man takes no prisoners.

Throughout the past two weeks, Hewer’s been slowly trying to settle in. He gives the audience regular updates on what number show he’s at, how much he’s still enjoying it, and how he’s getting to know the mechanics of the show. His introductions and goodbyes in every show take a little longer than they should (indeed, one never really knows when he’s finished with them!). He awkwardly tries banter with Rachel and regularly flirts with her (when Rachel recently claimed she’d have to take a numbers game home, for instance, he responded with “you can take me home!’). 

And…it works perfectly. The past three presenters have been good. Their chat was less awkward, they said the right words and they kept things professional. But the yardstick for any long-term Countdown fan is the late Richard Whiteley. Whiteley was neither polished nor ‘showbiz’. Whiteley appealed to people because he was genuine, likeable and that little bit mischievous. Hewer shares these qualities. Between his slightly awkward banter that brings an inevitable smile, and his cheeky comments to his female colleagues, Hewer is like the granddad everyone would visit and enjoy having at home for Christmas. For students and OAPs alike, then, Nick is just the ticket. Long may he reign!

If Blur had put down their guitars, acquired some synthesizers, stumbled upon a pitch-modification tool, and tried their hands at house music, it might have sounded a little like The 2 Bears.

To my mind, The 2 Bears, otherwise known as Joe Goddard and Ref Rundell, might just be the next big thing in the world of what has come to be known as (fairly or otherwise) indie electronica. If you haven’t heard ‘Bear Hug’ yet on a night out, undeniably a dance anthem as ridiculous as it is brilliant, then you surely will soon.

Anything Joe Goddard (of Hot Chip fame) turns his mind to comes out as an eclectic mix, to say the least: be it the chilled, summer’s day vibes of ‘The Birds and the Bees’, the atmospheric house of ‘Take A Look Around’, or the funky, country feel of ‘Time in Mind.’ Be Strong, their first full length EP, is no exception. If anything can be said of The 2 Bears, it is that they’ll work with any sound that tickles their fancy, as long as it gets people moving. That said, Goddard and Rundell are undoubtedly on their best form when they lay down an uncompromising, unashamedly pop-laced house track. ‘Be Strong’, a winning floor-stopper, sets a high standard right from the off, and marks the beginning of a record that, albeit with a few drastic diversions, becomes an increasingly subtle and sophisticated take on house music throughout.

While ‘Bear Hug’ is a track likely to find itself knocking shoulders with Hit 40 UK, the likes of ‘Take A Look Around’, ‘Faith’ and ‘Church’ seem more suited to the underground house sounds of Maceo Plex, Maya Jane Coles and Deniz Kurtel (with an obviously more pop oriented slant). This, for me, is why Be Strong is such a successful album. Joe Goddard and Raf Rundell have an honest, all-embracing approach to dance music that allows them to at once produce catchy, eclectic floor-filling anthems and the sincere, intelligent house music that characterises the album as a whole.

3.5 STARS

If anyone’s entitled to have old ideas, it’s Leonard Cohen. His first book of poetry was published in 1956; his first album eleven years later. At seventy-seven, the Methuselah of Montreal could be forgiven for hanging up his trademark fedora; but his humour and humility remain intact.

Attendees at the listening party for this, his twelfth album, are greeted with typical self-deprecation: ‘I won’t be facing you during the playback, so you don’t need to guard your expressions’, and its lead-off single is a hymn of self-abasement. ‘Show me the place where you want your slave to go,’ Cohen begins over gentle piano, speaking more than singing these days. Redolent with the biblical imagery of stones and suffering, it has the complete exhaustion of a weary supplicant at the end of a long pilgrimage, laying an offering at an altar.

Many of the songs here are concerned with the imagery of conclusion, from the slow shuffle of ‘Going Home’ to the bluesy ‘Darkness’, its insistent three-note riff advancing like the footsteps of a monster in a horror movie. Cohen has always sounded like he’s writing his own epitaph; these days, he could use his voice as the chisel. What’s most striking here is its intimate centrality: it’s lacquered mahogany, and the production lets you see every grain. At the launch, his interviewer Jarvis Cocker comments on the feeling that the singer could be in the room with every single person listening. ‘I intend to,’ Cohen responds.

It’s this wit that rescues the work from morbidity; that allows it to be what it’s always been: ‘a manual for living with defeat’. Bathetic turns of phrase undermine grand conceits: ‘I dreamed about you baby/You were wearing half your dress/ I know you hate me/Could you hate me less?’ The sacred and the profane rub shoulders, and rather more besides.

Old Ideas is exactly the album you’d expect it to be; it’s not a title that promises novelty. ‘How old exactly are the ideas?’, one journalist asks its author. ‘About 2614 years,’ he deadpans back. Like most of Cohen’s work, it’s funny because it’s true.

4 STARS

In the past, Tim Hecker’s pieces have been described as ‘cathedral electronic music’. Ravedeath, his sixth solo album, is a direct response to this. Its foundations are a series of organ recordings from Fríkirkjan í Reykjavík, with the ‘overt spirituality and traditional theological elements’ of the sound removed. Hecker used to be ‘very wary of working with acoustic sounds. I thought it was a ham-fisted way of dealing with the real aesthetic issues: the limitations and insufficiencies of digital based music.’

In previous works, all acoustic instrumentation was pummelled beyond recognition, the source smothered. ‘I’m becoming more and more comfortable with letting traditional instruments not be cloaked in reverb. I’ve slowly brought in organic instrumentation over time but tried to do it in a way that keeps the potential for abstraction and sound transformation, and that liminality between being discernible, and not.’

Ravedeath, clocking in at 52 minutes, ‘buttresses up against contemporary penchants for short, digestible pop material; the alleged shorter attention spans of modern youths.’ The album functions as a continuous piece, but is subdivided ‘into shorter movements that keep the work’s integrity, but index it.’ Even so, ‘I always find the tracks a little underwhelming when taken out of the context of the work. I always want a piece of music to stand on its own, whether it’s a short piece or not. It needs to have an immediately suggestive quality to it that holds up outside of the context of the record.’

‘I’m not the kind of person who lines up my ten best tracks and presses burn on the CD player, album finished.’ This is the point at which Hecker starts to create an album, ‘which is a process of revisiting, layering and working the record like a composition.’

Hecker’s upcoming organ concert in London on 6th February ‘sold out in five days, still two months before the date. We try to make it work better for us since it’s so expensive setting everything up, buying the PA and miking up the organ, so for the first time in my life I decided to do two gigs in one night.’ For all the preparation, ‘you can’t really expect anything from the concert because there are so many unknowns. It relies on a sensitive feedback system between the organ (which runs through a computer and goes out of the PA system). You have both the organ filling the space in the traditional way, and the processed sounds being played through the PA system. The live space is associated with a lot of errors and things aren’t ideal, but there are also fleeting moments that are gone. I enjoy that aspect of it.’

The venue, St. Giles-in-the-Fields church, strikes me as an interesting one, as are most of the places Hecker is invited to play at – theatres and gallery spaces, for example. You rarely find him on the bill of the local O2 Academy. To him, ‘space is always an important consideration. Inappropriate places can ruin a concert.’

‘I would prefer the concert not to be in a religious space. It’s not saying that I’m going to deliver a spiritual experience just because the concert is in a church. I prefer secular spaces for that because they are stripped of any spiritual expectation.’ The spiritual connection is an obvious one for me. The density of the sound and the seemingly infinite layers envelope you. Although the message isn’t a spiritual one, there are ‘people who say they had a moment; a really great moment of loss of self, which is as much as you can ask for. I’m happy however people take it and try not to be too prescriptive about the correct way to digest my music.’

It’s tempting to think we might have seen and done with film-noir. One term bandied about is Chiaroscuro, a word to describe those blacker than blacks and whiter than whites. Or ‘femme fatale’, the deadly women with Jennifer Rabbit sized swinging hips. We shouldn’t fool ourselves in thinking we know the hard-boiled detective just because we know his name. It’s like only half-remembering a picture-book. 

‘Neo-Noir’ (Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Blue Velvet) certainly owes a great deal to the violent crime films of the 40s. The pseudo-philosophy babble of the Joker in The Dark Knightresembles closely the amorality offered by Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949). Atop a ferris wheel, Welles gives us an anarchic vision, offering his friend a hypothetical 20,000 dollars for every person he would kill: ‘Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever … Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare’. Yet our familiarity with noir’s obvious descendants can make us seek out the stereotypes and prevent our discovering more surprising films.
 
Parodies can grant us something of a side-ways perspective. Beat the Devil (1953) is director John Huston’s camp reworking of some of his earlier films like The Maltese Falcon(1941). The actors can’t take their roles seriously, as if film noir had already hardened into a cliché. Wide-eyed Jennifer Jones, sick of her dull husband, implausibly suggests to Bogart that ‘you could have him done away with’ or later, utters the unintentionally laughable: ‘I think you’re doctors, evil ones I mean’. Leaning in for the kiss, Bogart and Jones suppress a giggle just as the camera fades. It’s only a short step from here to Leslie Nielsen accident prone detective Frank Drebin of The Naked Gun, who spoofs the smart-talk of noir films. Without a badge, Drebin worries: ‘Just think; next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.’ 
 
The only way to really discover noir is to go back and watch a medley of the films. The Maltese Falcon is one of the most entertaining. Sam Spade churns out one-liners faster than a bag of fortune-cookies: ‘I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble’, ‘When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it’. Noir can be funnier than we expect. It can also be more brutal than Tarantino’s colorful homages, riddled with wanderers, addicts and implausibly violent veterans. Detour (1945), ends with Tom Neal tugging on a telephone cable winding under a locked door, inadvertently strangling a drunken Ann Savage to death.
 
Instead of referring to the manual, you’d be wise to follow Philip Marlowe of The Big Sleep (1946) and throw away the book which gives us ‘diagrams on page 47 of how to be a detective in 10 easy lessons’. Instead, pursue the Marlowe of Murder my Sweet into a drug induced nightmare, into the dark heart of the hard-boiled genre: ‘I dived in. It had no bottom.’