Culture Diary w/c 01-12-2014
What’s hot this week? Our pick of the listings from around Liverpool and the rest of the UK…
Monday – 2001: A Space Odyssey Reissue (1968, 2014) 8.30pm @ FACT, Liverpool — £10/8
Almost 50 years on from its original release, Stanley Kubrick’s monolith of a movie still reigns supreme at the outer limits of sci-fi, an elegiac waltz through humanity’s evolution from ape to space baby. So much of it has become part of popular culture that it’s hard to imagine what those hippies thought their joints were laced with when they first saw the star-gate sequence, the moon discovery, that ominous red eye. . . Go see it. Go see it now.
Tuesday – Exhibition Opens: Jonathan Langley: Illustrations 1-6pm @ Unity Theatre, Liverpool — FREE
Writer, illustrator and probable-owner-of-a-tea-set John Langley has been delighting kids with quintessentially British picture books for some time now. Liverpool was his artistic launch pad, and he’s returning with a selection of his HarperCollins material. Expect a sterling Wind in the Willows series and more dimpled cheeks than an aunt’s hand can ever hope to pinch.
Silver Apples 8pm @ The Kazimier, Liverpool — £13.95
Longevity is hard to cling onto in the tempestuous waters of the music industry, but New York’s Silver Apples have ridden the waves with style, and tonight grace The Kazimier. A far cry from their early days of jamming with Jimi Hendrix, founder and sole remaining member Simeon Coxe III is still pushing the boundaries of experimental electronica. With the likes of John Lennon, Beck, The Beastie Boys and Portishead as noted admirers of the Silver Apples’ sound, you needn’t expect anything less than the best. Listen to our Playlist: 10 Best Winter Gigs In Liverpool…
Wednesday – Last day: Brian Catling: Antix 2 1.15-2.15pm & 5-6pm @ the Bluecoat, Liverpool — FREE
Well, this should be weird. Described as a “transient room-maker”, Catling is reviving the 2005 London performance piece in which he wanders about various instruments and machines, spontaneously reconfiguring the contours of his environment. Audience members are encouraged not to hold their breath for a swinging bookcase. They’ll be able to observe the man himself transform a specially-built installation that carries each metamorphosis on to the next, challenging our securities about habitation. Part of DaDaFest’s Art of the Lived Experiment exhibition, read our feature here.
Thursday – Peder Balke 10am-6pm @ National Gallery, London — FREE
The National has scored something of a coup with this small but essential collection. Peder Balke’s belayed recognition as one of Norway’s greatest painters (and just the third Scandi to be honoured by the gallery!) has overcome the accusations of radicalism and Turner-ism that dogged his working life. Forever fascinated by high seas and jagged thrusts of rock, his landscapes are in league with a barren divinity best served by the winter months. A must-see spotlight on a 19th century talent dismissed for far too long.
Exhibition Opens: William S. Burroughs: Can You All Hear Me? (main picture) 12.30-5.30pm @October Gallery, London — FREE
“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves…” So begins Naked Lunch, Burroughs’ post-modern nightmare, barely held together by the cover that binds it. Ever since his rediscovery by Greenwich beatniks in the ’60s, the arch contrarian has cast a long shadow over experimental fiction and anti-authoritarian expression of any kind, somehow emerging through the drugs and the scandals with a challenge in the very mention of his name: DON’T LET THEM TELL YOU ANYTHING. The centenary of his birth is celebrated with artworks by Shezad Dawood and Cerith Wyn Evans, among others influenced by the Great Sage and Eminent Junkie.
Philosophy in the gallery: Transmitting Andy Warhol 5.30-7pm @ Tate Liverpool — £5/3 (booking essential)
Arguably inventing contemporary art in the 1960s, Warhol was a master of mechanical reproduction techniques (like Do it Yourself (Seascape) 1962) who embraced and replicated mass media imagery like no one else. Here, PhD philosophy student Joanna Straczowski (University of Liverpool) discusses how Warhol methodically and robotically removed every trace of ‘the artist’s touch’ from his works — leaving the viewer with mere ‘surfaces’– and asks: what happens to art when the artist is ‘not present’ in their work? Expect to think about artistic concepts and production and the staggering influence that Warhol has had on 21st century art.
Friday – First Night: Sex and the Three Day Week 7.30pm @ Everyman Playhouse, Liverpool, £12-25
Relocating a Georges Feydeau farce to blackout-Britain is no mean feat – will there be a place for Pinglet’s rope ladder escape? Luckily, prolific scribe Stephen Sharkey has done the business after cutting his teeth on radio dramatisations and founding The Miniaturists, a cabal of playwrights frequenting London and Liverpool stages. Promises to be as buoyant and crisp as a French soufflé. Mon dieu!
Saturday – Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Expanded Cinema 2-3pm @ Tate Liverpool – £8/6, includes exhibition entry (booking essential)
Just what was the Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI), and what was its legacy? Moving image theorist and historian Dr Glyn Davis (University of Edinburgh) and Gary Needham (Nottingham Trent University) are your guides to Warhol as a filmmaker and band manager. An awesome multi-media live performance experiment, featuring The Velvet Underground and other key Factory stars, the EPI is also our favourite feature of Tate Liverpool’s bumper fourth floor Warhol exhibition. As Davis (see his cool blog here) ran a hugely popular free online course (MOOC) earlier this year introducing the life and works of Warhol (enjoying over 26,000 enrolees in the first three weeks of the course launch and 40,000 streaming views to date), you can expect this illustrated lecture to be entertaining, informative and a great introductory insight into the artist’s obsession with film.
Sunday – Peter Gabriel 8pm @ Echo Arena, Liverpool — £35-45
He just might have passed Phil Collins as the most interesting ex-member of Genesis, or any prog band for that matter, and he’s flying high off the back of an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Word has it he’s been delving back into seminal album ‘So’ on this tour . . . so what, you say? So get your best John-Cusack-boombox-face on, and catch a performer who’s endlessly, effortlessly shifted across the spectrum of popular music.
Bombay Bicycle Club 7pm @ Apollo, Manchester — £28
Speaking of award prestige, it was no surprise that indie stalwarts Bombay Bicycle Club were nominated for the Mercury Prize this year. They play some of the most purely happy tunes this side of Crystal Fighters and, as one of the only survivors of the alt-guitar explosion in the mid-’00s, might just be this generation’s fondest memories of lazy summers and idle six-packs. Latest release A Different Kind of Fix is as urgent and beautifully crafted as anything they’ve ever done, and bloody dance-able to boot.
Joshua Potts
