Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern - Art museums & institutions - Time Out London

This is an amazing show. Every room contains something to inspire and delight:

Richter didn’t so much resuscitate painting as submit it to prolonged interrogation - pulling it up by its lapels and demanding it take stock of itself. He was no less forgiving of himself or his family, painting his Nazi-sympathizing father and ‘Uncle Rudi’ (in full uniform) in the same year as his ‘Aunt Marianne’ (1965), who was sterilised and euthanised for being schizophrenic. Why should we not also scrutinise ourselves a bit more, asks Richter’s strange mirrored and glazed sculptures, which blur and distort pictures and viewers alike. The sense of meanings shifting, swelling and dropping away like waves is just as disorienting as the jumps between Richter’s abstract colour charts and his romantic landscapes. His pure, DayGlo abstracts are twenty-first century Jackson Pollocks, but he also makes beautiful portraits. Go figure.

My favourite is “Reader” from 1994, a photo-realistic portrait of Richter’s wife reading a newspaper, with light and shadow dancing reverentially around her features.

I first saw it about ten years ago at the MOMA in San Francisco (though my memory could be deceiving me). It was strikingly beautiful then, and it’s even more beautiful now.

Lloyd's listed: will it make the Grade? | Art and design | guardian.co.uk

Stumbled across the Lloyd’s of London building whilst running an errand. Soon to be Grade I listed by English Heritage, apparently:

Here is a building with glass lifts rising up its steely exterior. Here are stainless steel-clad service towers housing prefabricated kitchen and washroom modules lifted by cranes into place. Here is one of the most impressive of all 1980s atriums, soaring 60 metres up to a barrel-vaulted glass roof and criss-crossed by yellow-edged escalators. Even today, the mesmeric interior seems out of step with the apparently old-fashioned culture of Lloyd’s.

Design shocks follow one another up the building. On the 11th floor, doors from the hi-tech interior open into a perfectly preserved and wholly unforeseen committee room designed by Robert Adam, dating from the 1770s. It reminds me of the final scene in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey when the astronaut, Dr David Bowman, lands – after his mind-bending journey through space – in a semblance of a Louis XVI hotel room: here hi-tech and classicism met face-to-incomprehending-face, just as they do in Lloyd’s.

It’s a remarkable slab of steel and concrete, a giant Transformer masquerading as a tower block. And looming in the vicinity is Norman Foster’s Gherkin, otherwise known as the Swiss Re building. If you squint your eyes, just a little, you could imagine you were trudging through a sci-fi metropolis like Mega-City One.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (15) - Reviews, Films - The Independent

It’s not often I go to the cinema to see the same film twice. This is certainly one of those occasions:

Tinker Tailor is dense, deep stuff, and a mark of its subtlety is that the deceptively mild-mannered Smiley doesn’t utter a word until 20 minutes in. One of the joys of the film is that Oldman, after years playing supporting heavies, has a real role to grapple with, and one of enticing complexity. His Smiley is inscrutably cerebral, seemingly committed to a cause that he can see right through; aware that his calling obliges him to betray the friends who are probably betraying him; and engaged, at long distance, with his own shadowy Moriarty figure in the KGB. Oldman conveys all this with impeccable reserve, while implying in his character a barely supportable weight of pain and tainted knowledge. His weary but ever correct delivery suggests tact, punctiliousness, the patience of a birdwatcher stalking a rare, possibly mythical species. He also reveals an unsuspected ferocity, even cruelty – watch him coolly terrorising a suspect on an airfield.

Tinker Tailor reminded me very much of The Godfather films, where the themes of loyalty and betrayal are played out to dazzling effect. Fingers crossed it wins a similar number of plaudits come Oscar night.

Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape, Tate Modern, review - Telegraph

Sunday afternoon, grey skies, pouring rain. I took refuge in the Tate Modern:

Along with Picasso and Dalí, the great Catalan modernist Joan Miró belongs to a triumvirate of Spaniards who dominated 20th-century art. (Juan Gris was a fluent Cubist, but he didn’t devise his own pictorial language.) Like his compatriots, Miró lived a long and prodigious life – he died on Christmas Day in 1983, aged 90. Famously, he wanted to “assassinate” painting, but he left behind thousands of works of art. More than 150 of his paintings, prints and sculptures have arrived at Tate Modern, for the first important London retrospective since another exhibition at the Tate, organised by Roland Penrose in 1964.

The exhibition covers six decades. There are early masterpieces such as The Farm (1921-22), once owned by Ernest Hemingway. There are mid-career triumphs, including Still Life with Old Shoe (1937), and a room full of exquisite paintings from the Constellations series of 1940-41. There are late flourishes: several enormous triptychs featuring colourful smudges, dark fuzzy blobs and spindly lines, like enlarged microscope slides of cellular life. One set of gigantic paintings should be known as the “Traffic-Light Triptych”, on account of Miró’s liberal use of red, amber and green. The effect is Rothko on happy pills.

These days, though, exhibitions are expected to come up with a “take”, and the spin of Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape is that the artist was a political animal. Where others see joy in Miró’s paintings, the Tate’s curators, Marko Daniel and Matthew Gale, spy “anxiety” about contemporary political events – clapping the artist in the irons of interpretation. As a result, the Miró on view at the Tate has a hint of a limp, inasmuch as it is possible to impede a giant’s gait.

I disagree with this newspaper review. Like most people, my preconceptions about Miró were limited to the effervescent energy of his paintings. This exhibish placed his work firmly in its historical context – the political upheavals of 20th Century Spain – and as such it was a real education. This interpretation is not a set of irons, Mr. Professional Art Critic. It’s basic research.

London Riots: Social Media Mobilizes Riot Cleanup | Mashable

This fair warms the cockles of the heart, it really does:

After days of riots in London, thousands of Londoners and worldwide supporters are taking to social networks to help reclaim the streets of London.

While rioters took to the underground paths of BlackBerry Messenger to organize, the highly spreadable mediums of Twitter and Facebook have shown to be the perfect platforms for mobilizing cleanup organizers and followers in the early aftermath of the rioting.

For the most part, organization has been very smooth, with a few key hubs across social platforms taking root. The @RiotCleanup Twitter page has amassed more than 50,000 followers in fewer than 10 hours and is consistently broadcasting cleanup locations and times, along with other pertinent information regarding the initiative.

As one commentator says, “Last night we needed Batman. This morning we need The Wombles”.

There is a context to London's riots that can't be ignored | Nina Power | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Posted this on my Facebook wall last night and there was a flurry of comment, most of it in disagreement:

Those condemning the events of the past couple of nights in north London and elsewhere would do well to take a step back and consider the bigger picture: a country in which the richest 10% are now 100 times better off than the poorest, where consumerism predicated on personal debt has been pushed for years as the solution to a faltering economy, and where, according to the OECD, social mobility is worse than any other developed country.

I don’t see what’s so controversial about this perspective; decades of improverishment and a dwindling public sector has bought us to this point. No-one is condoning the actions of the looters, what they’ve done is appalling, but their destructive behaviour is a symptom of something greater than a desire to steal a television. It’s about being marginalised, disengaged, and feeling like you don’t have a future.

Out Of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It, British Library, review - Telegraph

This is awesome, you should go:

The British Library’s latest exhibition, Out Of This World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It, challenges the notion that sci-fi is restricted to fanboys. In displaying an extraordinary number of seminal and unexpected texts it reminds us that pigeon-holing this fiction is both incorrect and a shame. Fiction is fantasy in its very nature, science fiction just takes it a little further off-piste. Plus, authors such as HG Wells, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro and JG Ballard have been key players in the genre. Rule out sci-fi and you rule out their work.

There’s lots to savour and enjoy here - original manuscripts, archive audio and videos, full-size martian tripod sculptures. Definitely worth a visit.

St Ali - Farringdon EC1M - Restaurant Review - Time Out London

Mmmmmm, coffee:

It seems that no new coffee house can appear without the words ‘Aussie’ or ‘Kiwi’ arriving in the same breath. But with an opening like St Ali, it’s impossible to ignore. Yes, it is Australian, but it’s a sister branch of an esteemed coffee-focused café established in Melbourne 11 years ago. That the owners chose to open their second branch more than 10,000 miles away in London demands a mention, and says a lot about the way Antipodeans, with their radical ideas on café culture (friendly service, good food, good coffee) view the current possibilities in our city.

I paid a visit yesterday, was most impressed.