Monday 13 April 2009

The DVDs

The DVD rental service has sent me the first four episodes from series 1 of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the vehicle of Larry David after he left Seinfeld.

Strangely enough I had seen the first episode long ago on TV in Paris. It is cringingly clever and the plots are reminiscent of Seinfeld at its most acutely brilliant.

There isn’t the ensemble exuberance that made Seinfeld’s egocentric characters palatable.

A colleague who stayed in the apartment in Paris a few years back and who noticed the boxed sets of Seinfeld has given me Curb season 2 and I shall watch away before perhaps buying the boxed set of them.

The boxed set I have harvested though is 400 Coups and the other tales of Antoine Doinel.

This was on special offer via the DVD buying site. It is 50 years since the Nouvelle Vague unleashed their iconoclasm on an unsuspecting world.

The British Film Institute here on the South Bank is holding a retrospective of the finest creations from that period.

Seems de rigueur to dip in later.

It would give a filmic symmetry to the day.

The Gallery

The art of life confounds me at times. The Bank Holiday Monday meant that the starting time at the Guardian was a bit later than usual.

What better way to spend the extra hours than by going to see my dad and then heading up to the Hayward Gallery.

I wanted to go to the newly refurbished Whitechapel Gallery but they don’t do Bank Holiday Monday opening.

So the sunny South Bank was all mine.

Mark Wallinger is curating the Russian Linesman, Frontiers Borders and Thresholds while Annette Messager is doing The Messengers.

And the message? Seinfeld.

I thought of a line from George in Seinfeld where he said something like: “I don’t get art.”

It might even have been: “I don’t get modern art.”

Though I persist in trying to get modern art, I often think about the Woody Allen character in Annie Hall. In a gallery with Annie Hall he says: “It has a wonderful otherness.”

Perhaps I should have extra shots of caffeine to transport me to the spatial mentality where I would really get it.

I usually have the coffee as a reward for trying to expand my mind.

Not good for the gallery but might be good for the headlines at work.