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Huffpost

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How many times a day do you use the word "should" in reference to yourself or other people? I don't know about you, but I used to use it a lot.

The word "should" has become a fixture in our everyday dialogue. We use it in conversation with others, as a way of motivating ourselves or keeping ourselves in check, and to express a myriad of feelings, including frustration, guilt, and regret.

As I've become more interested in my internal dialogue and how it affects the way I feel about myself, show up in the world, and live my life, I've started to realize just how insidious the word "should" can be.

Although I used to "should" myself about a variety of things, many times each day, I realized that telling myself I should be doing more or being more wasn't actually helping me do more or be more, and it left me feeling like I'm not enough as I am.

Equally, I realized that when I told other people they should or shouldn't do something, I wasn't respecting their ability to make the best decisions for themselves. That didn't fit with my personal philosophy (that people are free to do what they want as long as they're not harming others), and I knew I wasn't being the best friend or partner while I was using "should"-based vocabulary.

Since I had these realizations, I've been on a quest to replace my "should" with alternative vocabulary that is healthier and more accepting -- both of myself and of other people. The longer I'm on this quest, the more I realize the damage the word "should" does to our self-relationship and our relationships with others. Here is what I've discovered so far:

Two Major Problems with Using the Word "Should"

When we use the word "should," we're not accepting reality. We're talking about things that we wish were so, but aren't (or vice versa). Whenever I used the word "should" when talking to myself, it was motivated by a lack of self-acceptance rather than encouragement.

As Dr. Shad Helmstetter explains in his book What to Say When You Talk to Yourself , when we tell ourselves that we "should" be doing something, we're implicitly reinforcing the idea that we're not doing it.

If we say to ourselves "I should really meditate more often," the unspoken follow-up to that sentence is "... but I don't.

Equally, if we say, "I should really be exercising this morning," the unspoken ending to that sentence is "... but I'm not."

In the long-term, when we tell ourselves or other people that we should or they should be doing something (as well-meaning as we might be), we're reinforcing the negative, and the fact that we or they are notdoing it.

Alternatives to "Should"

I won't pretend that removing the world "should" from my vocabulary has been easy, or that I've arrived and currently inhabit a "should"-free existence. I used to use the word "should" a lot and, in truth, I think it's something I'll have to keep an eye on for the rest of my life.

For now, however, I've found some alternatives helpful in overcoming my habit of "should"-ing myself and other people.

Instead of telling myself I "should" be doing more of something, I try to focus on why I want to do that particular thing.

Instead of saying "I should do more yoga," I remind myself of why I want to do this: "I feel great when I do yoga a few times each week," "I enjoy feeling myself relax and stretch out when I do yoga," or "I feel a greater sense of self-connection when I make time to connect my body and my breathing in yoga."

2. Focus on how the activity fits with your values.

One of the biggest things I used to "should" myself about was being on time. I struggled to turn up on time for work, appointments, meeting up with friends, and pretty much anything that was due to start at a set time. It was a constant battle with myself and, of course, telling myself "You should be on time" or "You shouldn't be late" did nothing to change my tardiness.

Instead, I started reframing this from the perspective of my values. I started telling myself "It's really important to me to be on time," or "I want to live with integrity and do what I say I'm going to do, when I say I'm going to do it."

3. Focus on accepting and exploring reality.

I used to think that I shouldn't feel angry or jealous. I had heard they were "unhealthy" feelings to experience and had the belief that there was something wrong with me for feeling that way. No matter how much I told myself that I shouldn't feel these things, however, they didn't go away.

Now, I focus on accepting my experience. Instead of telling myself "I shouldn't be feeling/thinking _____," I take a step back and say "Okay, I'm feeling/thinking _____. I wonder why that's happening now?"

Removing the word "should" from your vocabulary will take time, patience, and practice. But it is possible, and it comes with great rewards. Replacing "should" with more helpful dialogue will lead to a kinder relationship with yourself, and better relationships with the people around you too.
Hannah Braime is a coach and writer who teaches people how to have a kinder relationship with themselves. She is the author of The Ultimate Guide to Journaling and From Coping to Thriving: How to Turn Self-care Into a Way of Life. You can find her at becomingwhoyouare.net, on Facebook and Twitter. This post was originally published on tinybuddha.com. You can find the original post here.

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How many times a day do you use the word "should" in reference to yourself or other people? I don't know about you, but I used to use it a lot. The word "should" has become a fixture in our everyday dialogue.

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link to PDF 'Being and Time'

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Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 - 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.

Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.

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Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 - 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art.

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Wild Wild Country | Netflix Official Site

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Free love, deadly schemes and the world's largest collection of Rolls-Royces. Say hello to the new neighbors. (A true story.) Watch trailers & learn more.

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Philippa Perry

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how to be a surrealist with philippa perry

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How to Be a Surrealist with Philippa Perry - BBC Four

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A playful journey into the unconscious to discover the deep roots of surrealism.

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Angela Nagle

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Bruce Conner Crossroads

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A beautiful day on the atoll. Water lapping at the beach, ships out on the water. Sea birds screeching, a light breeze mussing the palm in the foreground of a black-and-white view of the lazy Pacific. Then the bomb goes off.

It is 25 July 1946. "Things happened so fast in the next five seconds that few eyewitnesses could afterwards recall the full scope and sequence of the phenomena", wrote the physicist WA Shurcliff, in the official report of Operation Crossroads, a series of US nuclear bomb tests held less than a year after bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And then it happens again, and goes on happening, time after time in Bruce Conner's 1976 film Crossroads, recently restored in high definition and now the sole exhibit at Thomas Dane Gallery, in London.

We see the explosion from cameras mounted behind lead and concrete shielding on a specially constructed tower on the Bikini atoll. We see it from ships and from drone planes, and from high-altitude cameras. We see it filmed with high-speed cameras, developed by the US Department of Defense, that could shoot up to 8,000 frames a second.

The reason observers at the 1946 Baker test at Bikini atoll had so much trouble recalling and describing what they had witnessed, Shurcliff adduced, was the inadequacy of language itself. "The explosion phenomena abounded in absolutely unprecedented inventions in solid geometry ... No adequate vocabulary existed," he wrote. The phrase "inventions in solid geometry" sticks, and sounds less like an event, more like a sculpture. How can one adequately review an atomic explosion?

Dome. Fillet. Side-jets and bright tracks. Cauliflower cloud, fallout, airshock disc, water-shock disc. Base surge, water mound, uprush, aftercloud. The words have a chilling poetry. Shurcliff, who had worked on the development of the atomic bomb for the Manhattan Project and went on, in later years, to be a vocal critic of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme, describes how these terms were arrived at and agreed upon "after two months of verbal groping", during a conference convened especially to create a terminology. Language has its limits. Words fail, and feel almost entirely inadequate when faced with such enormity.

Conner studied Shurcliff's report as he planned his film. Watching Crossroads is still a horribly compelling experience. Conner petitioned for the unreleased but declassified footage, some of which had, even just after the explosion, been shown in gung-ho government documentaries about the necessity of atomic tests. They had great propaganda value. The test was broadcast on radio around the world. A kind of awe surrounded the event, which saw the enterprising Parisian engineer Louis Réard give the name of the Marshall Islands atoll to his controversial swimwear invention, the bikini, later that same year.

Footage of the explosion was also used at the end of Stanley Kubrick's satirical 1964 movie Doctor Strangelove, as Vera Lynn sang We'll Meet Again, which became perhaps the most redolent song of Britain at war.

Cauliflower cloud, fallout, aftercloud ... the words have a chilling poetry

The ship from which the bomb had been suspended underwater was completely atomised. No trace of it was ever found, after what has been described as the most photographed event in history. An array of more than 70 ships had been positioned in the atoll around the site of the test. Of these, nine of the biggest aircraft carriers and submarines, some captured from the Japanese forces in the preceding years, sank. Sixty-five others were severely damaged and contaminated. Dozens of pigs, sheep, goats, rats and guinea pigs had been positioned on vessels to study the effects of radioactivity. The pigs - put there because their mass, skin and hair provided an approximate substitute for human beings - died instantly.

In many respects, Crossroads is a found film. "All I added were the splices", Conner once remarked. Although we witness the explosion 15 times, from different viewpoints and at different speeds (the footage from a high-speed camera extends one second of real time to more than three minutes of screen time), the pace of Crossroads is almost sedate and elegiac.

Presented in two unequal halves, the film allows us to witness the event both as a sudden, wrenching unleashing of power - the association with the male orgasm is unavoidable - and as a slow eclipse of the world. Sometimes, we are lost in the cloud (just as we are lost for words) and in a sublime meteorological event, then we are homing in on huge battleships tossed vertically in the upsurge of a great column of 2m tons of water, rising in an instant over a mile and a half into the sky. The cloud column rose over eight miles above the earth. The scale is hard to grasp.

All this, Conner orchestrates at an almost funereal pace, even though he didn't tinker with the speeds of the footage itself, only looping the opening sequence, to prolong the wait for the first explosion. As the film progresses, our view becomes more elevated, punctuated by moments where the screen is either totally black or totally white. Even these moments of blankness are dizzying. An image of a cross in a circle appears: the Crossroads of the title, the crosshairs of a telescopic sight, a plus sign, or perhaps even a reference to the crucifixion, as one commentator has noted.

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Viewed from every angle ... ships surround the explosion at Bikini atoll. Photograph: Bruce Conner

To begin with, the sound seems to be a live recording - sea birds, a white noise akin to the sea, a shock wave and the blast of the explosion itself, aeroplane engines. All produced on a Moog synthesizer by Patrick Gleeson, sound and image are out of sync with the footage itself - and with the judders and swerves of the cameras when the shock waves hit them, sometimes quite long after the visible explosion itself. Gleeson was originally commissioned to collaborate with the composer Terry Riley, but the two eventually worked on music for the film independently. Sound and image sheer together and apart. Riley's bubbling, repetitive tape-looped and delayed rhythms creep in, and accompany the second part of the film. All we see is an oily, flattened sea with a smudged horizon, a ship silhouetted on the left of the screen, disappearing and reappearing as a radioactive tidal surge overwhelms it, like fog rolling in. I think I see other vague ghost ships beyond.

Every time I have watched Crossroads, since first encountering it at the Berlin Biennale in 2006, I have seen - and remembered - different things. Repeated watching, compounded by memory and mental replay, gives it a cumulative power. You want to watch the explosion. You want to watch the front of the shock wave rush across the water, and the perfect circle of white that expands behind, overtaking it. The fall of the water, the expanding, towering uprush, the fillets, the side jets, the base surge and the fallout are compounded in an awful nuclear sublime, from which it is hard to drag oneself away. You just want to watch it again.

Conner makes us dwell on the incommensurable. Unavoidably, we somehow collude in rapture of the image. He was fascinated by the bomb, using footage from Operation Crossroads several times, both in his first film A Movie (1958), and in the Report (1967), another film using documentary and news footage about the assassination of John F Kennedy. Conner spent most of his career in San Francisco; he argued with Allen Ginsberg over the efficacy of militant anti-Vietnam War protests (believing such solemn events should instead be celebrations, replete with floats and costumes); he worked on underground concert light shows, and went on to advise his friend Dennis Hopper on the filming of Easy Rider. He also made early pop videos, including with the band Devo.

Conner, who died in 2008 at the age of 74, was an assemblagist, a sculptor and photographer as well as a film-maker, and is only now receiving a long-overdue reassessment. Engaging us despite ourselves, Crossroads remains a difficult, unmissable film. You dwell on it, and it dwells in you.
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Horribly compelling: Bruce Conner's nuclear test film still holds us in rapture

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A beautiful day on the atoll. Water lapping at the beach, ships out on the water. Sea birds screeching, a light breeze mussing the palm in the foreground of a black-and-white view of the lazy Pacific. Then the bomb goes off. It is 25 July 1946.

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Theatre of the Absurd, dramatic works of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early '60s who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus's assessment, in his essay " The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942), that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose. The term is also loosely applied to those dramatists and the production of those works. Though no formal Absurdist movement existed as such, dramatists as diverse as Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Genet, Arthur Adamov, Harold Pinter, and a few others shared a pessimistic vision of humanity struggling vainly to find a purpose and to control its fate. Humankind in this view is left feeling hopeless, bewildered, and anxious.

The ideas that inform the plays also dictate their structure. Absurdist playwrights, therefore, did away with most of the logical structures of traditional theatre. There is little dramatic action as conventionally understood; however frantically the characters perform, their busyness serves to underscore the fact that nothing happens to change their existence. In Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1952), plot is eliminated, and a timeless, circular quality emerges as two lost creatures, usually played as tramps, spend their days waiting-but without any certainty of whom they are waiting for or of whether he, or it, will ever come.

Language in an Absurdist play is often dislocated, full of cliches, puns, repetitions, and non sequiturs. The characters in Ionesco's The Bald Soprano (1950) sit and talk, repeating the obvious until it sounds like nonsense, thus revealing the inadequacies of verbal communication. The ridiculous, purposeless behaviour and talk give the plays a sometimes dazzling comic surface, but there is an underlying serious message of metaphysical distress. This reflects the influence of comic tradition drawn from such sources as commedia dell'arte, vaudeville, and music hall combined with such theatre arts as mime and acrobatics. At the same time, the impact of ideas as expressed by the Surrealist, Existentialist, and Expressionist schools and the writings of Franz Kafka is evident.

Originally shocking in its flouting of theatrical convention while popular for its apt expression of the preoccupations of the mid-20th century, the Theatre of the Absurd declined somewhat by the mid-1960s; some of its innovations had been absorbed into the mainstream of theatre even while serving to inspire further experiments. Some of the chief authors of the Absurd have sought new directions in their art, while others continue to work in the same vein.

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Theatre of the Absurd | Definition, Characteristics, Examples, & Facts

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Theatre of the Absurd, dramatic work of certain European and American dramatists of the 1950s and early '60s who agreed with the Existentialist philosopher Albert Camus's assessment, in his essay 'The Myth of Sisyphus,' that the human situation is essentially absurd, devoid of purpose.

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Sonny Vincent And Rocket From The Crypt - Vintage Piss (Full Album)

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Madder Lake Ed. #11: TOWARDS THE UNDERGROUND by JAMES MERRIGAN

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Lying somewhere near the graveyard of art criticism is Madder Lake Editions, where twisted tales from the artworld are told. This week JAMES MERRIGAN takes the plunge into the murky depths kissed red-red at the shore with his 'Towards the Underground' address to the artist💀💀

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“rbma radio” how to produce how to dj music do...

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film 1972-1976 by cary loren music by: Destroy All Monsters (Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw..)

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The award-winning Paris Is Burning has been igniting audiences and critics across the country and all over the world with record- breaking box office performances. An unblinking behind-the-scenes story of fashion-obsessed New Yorkers who created "voguing" and drag balls, and turned those raucous celebrations into a powerful expression of fierce personal pride.

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The 26th annual Tompkins Square Park's Police Riot Reunion with The VOLUPTUOUS HORROR OF KAREN BLACK / TSP / LES / ALPHABET CITY / KEMBRA PFAHLER / AUGUST 3, 2014

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The late late show

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Why they burnt a million quid

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Bill Drummond Of KLF Talks About Why They Burned A Million Pounds

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K Foundation Burn a Million Quid was an action on 23 August 1994 in which the K Foundation (an art duo consisting of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty) burned cash in the amount of one million pounds sterling in a disused boathouse on the Ardfin Estate on the Scottish island of Jura.

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KLF

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It was towards the end of August 1994 that burnt, tattered and waterlogged scraps of £50 notes began to wash up on the shores of Jura, the mountainous, sparsely populated island in the Inner Hebrides. A few locals tried to piece together bits with visible serial numbers in order to claim replacement legal tender; others told the police and the papers. What drug deal or criminal payoff could have possibly gone so wrong that the perpetrators would need to burn all the money? And why Jura?

In the event, the trail led not to the Scottish underworld, but south, and to a stranger source. These were the ashes of the most improbable, audacious and ruinously expensive art statement in the history of pop, an anti-publicity stunt carried out in a remote location under conditions of ritual and total secrecy: the time the KLF burned a million quid.

Mick Houghton, the dance duo's longtime publicist, fielded increasingly angry calls from members of the public who wanted to know why this money couldn't have gone to kidney machines, children's hospitals or their mortgages.

"It could have been worse," Houghton recalls. "Jimmy and Bill had talked about torching the money in Trafalgar Square, or hiring Battersea power station for some huge event and then burning it in front of the crowd. Can you imagine?"

Conceived as a symbolic exorcism of what the KLF had become, Jura irrevocably froze Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty in the public mind as the "money-burning pop pranksters". But they had always been a more complex and subversive proposition than that.

Drummond and Cauty stole from the Beatles and Abba, then sneaked illegal-rave culture on to Top of the Pops. They memorably hijacked the 1992 Brit awards as a symbolic massacre-suicide for the entire music industry. In using and abusing graffiti and money as contestable art objects, they anticipated the work of Damien Hirst and Banksy. The raw material of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's esoteric Illuminatus! trilogy fed into their alter egos, the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.

Now as we reach the symbolic 23rd anniversary of the cash-sacrifice on Jura - 23 being a totemic figure in Illuminatus! numerology and thus in JAMMs lore - the KLF are back. Gnomic flyposters promise a KLF book and an event in August "unearthing aspects of the 2023 trilogy across Liverpool", where Drummond's career began. The Illuminati, once a private fixation for Drummond, Cauty and the 1970s counterculture, have become a pop-culture obsession (see Beyoncé and her pyramid hand gestures). The KLF, AKA The Justified Ancients Of Mu Mu, were always agents of chaos. Now the world they anticipated is here.

Lasers, strobes and house beats might have defined the KLF but they are perhaps better understood as a 70s arts lab time-warped forward to the late 80s. Bill Drummond's formative years were spent as a carpenter and set-builder; the avant garde actor and director Ken Campbell recruited him for his alternative Science Fiction Theatre of Liverpool in 1976, hiring him to design and build staging for a hugely ambitious, 12-hour-long adaptation of Illuminatus! As it happens, Drummond was 23 at the time.

"Don't bother doing anything unless it's heroic," was Campbell's advice, and Drummond carried that with him as he moved on to manage Echo and the Bunnymen. The previously introspective Scouse band gained mystique and press acclaim as Drummond had them play tiny dates on the Scottish islands (on a route that mapped out their own logo's rabbit ears), travel along ley lines and stage their own ambitious Crystal Day festival in Liverpool. "This was typical Drummond thinking," says Houghton. "It's the Ken Campbell idea that any idea is achievable: you just go and do it."

A brief stint as an A&R man at Warner followed, where Drummond's only real success was goth-pop duo Strawberry Switchblade. "He had a romantic idea of what an A&R man should be," says Houghton. "Bill had this tiny office with a piano and guitars in it, and he thought people could come in off the street and play him a song. That's how you discover talent, he thought. It didn't work of course."

One ignominious signing was a dance-pop act called Brilliant. Their Stock, Aitken and Waterman-produced album cost a reported £300,000 to make, only for it to limp to number 58 in the charts. But it did introduce Drummond to Cauty, Brilliant's keyboard player. Cauty had already made one improbable fortune as a teenager when he drew a poster of The Hobbit which sold in its thousands from Athena.

The two realised they were of a similar worldview. When Brilliant foundered - and after Drummond recorded an odd folk album called The Man - they determined to do something that flew in the face of everything that expensively produced major-label music represented. The washed-up 33-year-old former manager and the failed pop star would make a hip-hop record, purely from samples, recording it on New Year's Day 1987.

The DJ, and future KLF collaborator, Tony Thorpe remembers hearing All You Need Is Love by the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu on John Peel one night in January 1987 and being outraged. "I was into sampling, too, but you were supposed to find obscurities; things that people didn't know: James Brown, Roy Ayers, Funky Drummer, all that," he recalls. "I turn on the radio, and I'm like, Oh my God, some idiot has sampled the Beatles. And it's all out of time. I was amazed that anybody could be so blatant." The British weekly music press, the "inkies" - then at the height of their powers - fell on the band as providers of good copy, and The JAMMs were on their way.

A series of stunts followed - including spraying posters of Manchester police's homophobic chief constable James Anderton with the JAMMs slogan "SHAG SHAG SHAG" and travelling to Sweden in an attempt to hand over copies of their album to Abba (whose management had forced them to withdraw the record from sale because it used samples from Dancing Queen). Thwarted in that, they handed over a gold disc to a sex worker before burning the last of the stock in a field. It would all culminate in the biggest scam to date when, in June 1988, the JAMMs secured a No 1 single as t he Timelords. Doctorin' the Tardis was a magnificently crass novelty record that somehow managed to be nauseating and wonderful at the same time. "Doctorin' the Tardis started out as a laugh," says writer-producer Nick Coler, who had played keyboards for Drummond off and on since The Man and would later become part of the Xenomania songwriting factory.

Muffling the drums with tea towels and pairing octave guitars with saxophones for glam verisimilitude, they created a grotesque yet lovable masterpiece.

"They just wanted to do something dancey with the Doctor Who theme," says Coler. "My friend Dominic Glynn had just redone the TV theme for the BBC, so he had all the original samples. When the BBC asked us where we got the Tardis noise, we said, oh, yes, we scraped a house key down a piano string, just like the original ..."

Needing a frontman for a record supposedly "sung" by a car called Ford Timelord, they recruited the yet-to-be-disgraced Gary Glitter. "It was gloriously over the top, and we had this terrible, cheap, tacky video with a homemade Dalek," remembers Houghton. "This was when they realised they didn't have to front anything or behave like a pop band. They could go the whole hog and do what they wanted."

A bizarre Top of the Pops appearance followed, with Drummond and Cauty in top hats and capes, wielding sceptres.

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The Doctorin' the Tardis record cover.

Doctorin' the Tardis also introduced another facet of the KLF saga: the boom-and-bust cycle of making a fortune - often accidentally - and then contriving to lose it all. Cauty and Drummond spent the single's estimated £500,000 earnings on filming The White Room, a free-form road movie directed by Bill Butt, which featured Ford Timelord driving aimlessly around rural England and Spain. It has never been released. A "proper" KLF single, a Pet Shop Boys-style track called Kylie Said to Jason, was intended to replenish the coffers but flopped. "They had a complete rethink after Kylie ...," says Mark "Spike" Stent, who worked with Drummond and Cauty on the mix of Doctorin' the Tardis and would go on to become one of the world's most in-demand engineers. "That turned out to be exactly the right thing to do. The rave scene was starting to kick off. People were running to phone boxes to find out where the party was. It was a huge, huge change in music and the KLF were made for it."

Giving up on pop hits, Drummond and Cauty began to issue abstract electronic 12-inch records under the Pure Trance banner. The first, using an imperious electronic riff that Cauty created at home and which proved so difficult to reproduce that to make future versions they had to sample their own record, was entitled What Time Is Love?

It's hard to imagine a less auspicious birthplace for such a tangent in pop than Cauty's south-London squat, which the KLF had romantically christened Trancentral. "It was in a bombed-out Victorian mansion with a police car in the front garden," says Stent. "I walked up railway sleepers to get into the front door, and when I went upstairs for a pee, I could see right through the floor into the kitchen. It wasn't anything like a studio but they were brilliant to work with, total anti-pop stars. Their energy was always good. It was: we can do what the fuck we want. And in all the madness there was a genius pop sensibility going on."

The Pure Trance recordings began to evolve into louder, larger, more confident versions that The KLF would later call "stadium house". Stent recalls Drummond as providing "big concepts and insane ideas" while Cauty was "literally a musical genius. He had a brilliant electronica-sensibility plus a riff thing. The records we started to make were essentially rock records with synths doing what guitars would have done."

With Tony Thorpe joining to provide breakbeats from house music's never-ending torrent of new 12-inch releases and a rotating cast of vocalists and rappers, KLF tunes began to mutate. All those trademark shouts of "Mu Mu!" and "Justified!" and "Ah-ha!" from past JAMMs and KLF records became a private sample library to be raided and rebuilt into giant beasts fit for radio - making the new sound familiar. Cauty began to create sonic signatures such as the metallic dingadingadingadinga on Last Train To Trancentral and Justified and Ancient which came from hitting a dismantled Triumph Bonneville motorbike with an iron bar. The guitar riff on Justified and Ancient, on the other hand, came straight (but heavily disguised) from Jimi Hendrix.

Stent remembers the nightmare of getting state-of-the-art digital technology to work with Cauty's primitive kit that was "falling apart, old Akais with fag ash and crap all over them ... but they had a vibe". Chains of machines would trail out of the studio door while Drummond and Cauty sat on the floor like schoolboys working out a video in one of Cauty's sketchbooks. "You would hear them say: 'Let's get a submarine!'" says Stent, "but the thing was, they would actually make it happen."

"It was like a music factory," says Thorpe. "They'd have three studios going at once and they would let you get on and do whatever you wanted. You'd hear Mark's mixes on the radio and, bam, they would just leap out. That was probably the best couple of years of my life, certainly the most fun. Those guys treated me better than anyone in music has ever treated me."

By the end of 1991, the so-called Stadium House trilogy had made the KLF into the world's biggest-selling singles act. But the weight of success had begun to take a toll on Drummond and Cauty. "They had been able to do what they wanted for so long because they felt outside the music industry," says Houghton. "Once they became that successful, the industry embraced them and started to consume them." Nothing was to say more about the KLF's relationship with the music business than their manner of leaving it.

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Bill Drummond at the Brit awards. Photograph: Rex Features

By 1991, Glenn Hughes, the Staffordshire-born powerhouse vocalist who cofounded Trapeze and twice fronted Deep Purple, had reached a parodically low ebb for a rock singer. Addicted to alcohol and crack cocaine and ballooning in weight, he struggled to complete a solo album. "I lived alone in Laurel Canyon with the curtains closed," he recalls, an echo of the late 70s when his Los Angeles housemate David Bowie descended into his own cocaine-induced permanent midnight as he made Station to Station. "By the end of 1991, I was isolated and very alone," he says. "Typical cocaine psychosis." Then the KLF called.

Cauty and Drummond (a Trapeze fan) had conceived of a final version of What Time Is Love?, a guitar-driven, full-metal racket with a shrieking rock vocal. "I felt I was destined to do it," says Hughes. "They wanted a [Roger] Daltrey or [Robert] Plant kind of sound, so when that Motörhead riff came in, I started singing falsetto: the Glenn Turbo Voice." Nick Coler remembers Hughes blowing out the microphone with his screaming. Spike Stent says: "With all the choirs and orchestras and craziness, we ran out of tape machines."

The video, shot back to back with a re-recording of Justified And Ancient with country matriarch Tammy Wynette, (Tony Thorpe: "I don't think she had a clue what she was singing about. None of us did.") was believed to have cost £500,000. The KLF flooded the James Bond stage at Pinewood with water and brought in a custom-made Viking longship and submarine. "It was take after take - a very draining video, and it was bloody freezing," says Hughes. "I wasn't drunk or high that particular day, but I was in a bad way at that time. And there's that voice in your head saying: maybe you've got to make a change."

Hughes went home to Los Angeles and, on Christmas Day, suffered a heart attack. On leaving hospital, he checked into the Betty Ford clinic; when he left rehab in February he discovered he was in the UK top 20. "I'd love to say that Bill and Jimmy got me off drugs," he says, "but the truth is I did it to save my own life. While I was in Betty Ford, I kept thinking about this incredible opportunity and how maybe I could represent something again. It was a complete honour for me and a great time in my life."

This final KLF single coincided with darker times for the group, especially for Drummond. They began recording nihilistic thrash-metal material with Ipswich grindcore band Extreme Noise Terror, for a record that was provisionally entitled The Black Room. "I got this message saying, "Bill from the ALF called,'" says Dean Jones of the band. "I thought, 'Oh fucking hell, another benefit for hunt sabs.'"

In a climactic act of public self-destruction, Drummond and Cauty decided to perform a KLF/ENT speed-metal version of 3am Eternal (one that Christmas Top of the Pops had turned down) at the 1992 Brit awards. The performance was brutal enough, with a kilted Drummond stalking the stage, supported by a crutch, barking the lyrics over ENT's barrage of noise, and finally machine-gunning the audience with blanks. ("They cut our guitars right down," says Jones, "but at least we made Noel Edmonds cry".) In the aftermath, they dumped a dead sheep on the red carpet at the Royal Lancaster Gate hotel adorned with the message, "I died for you - bon appetit".

But what they originally planned was even worse.

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The KLF sheep. Photograph: Rex features

Vegetarians all, Extreme Noise Terror refused to slice up the sheep on stage. Plan B was that Drummond, Cauty and the band would throw a fermentation bin full of pig's blood over the front row of dignitaries. "Jonathan King sat us down," says Jones, "and said that we could get time if we did this." The machine gun replaced Drummond's final idea: that, at the climax of the song, he would chop off his hand with an axe and throw it into the audience. "I really believed he was going to do it," says Houghton, who pretty much scuppered the stunt by leaking the story to the Sun. "They were behaving as if they would have done absolutely anything at that stage. Bill was basically experiencing a nervous breakdown around that time, I think. They couldn't face becoming a self-parody. They felt they had to make a statement."

Even the watered-down, blood-free version was - as intended - impossible to walk back from. The final words heard after the KLF's Brits performance were those of their radio plugger, Scott Piering: "The KLF have left the music business." In subsequent months, the band deleted all their back catalogue in Britain, cutting off millions of pounds in future revenue. It was to be as if the KLF had never existed. But there was a further twist in the tale.

Having spent the KLF millions on longboats and submarines, burning through ever-more ridiculous sums on ever-more ridiculous projects in order to expel the poisoned money, Drummond and Cauty realised they had failed to take account of their worldwide royalties. Another million pounds was waiting for them. Some of it they awarded to the artist Rachel Whiteread in the K Foundation award for the Worst Artist of the Year in 1994. Some they tried to exhibit as Money: A Major Body of Cash.

Ultimately, in Jura, they would use it to build a fire.

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Return of the KLF: 'They were agents of chaos. Now the world they anticipated is here'

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Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty hijacked pop in the 1980s and 90s with outlandish antics involving lasers, house music, a Viking longship and a million-pound bonfire. Andrew Harrison revisits the chaos - and talks to their former partners in crime

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Live in San Francisco

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Dead Kennedys - Live in San Francisco, 16-06-1984.

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Dead Kennedys - Live in San Francisco, 16-06-1984.

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Live

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Siouxsie and the Banshees - The Lords Prayer - Live 1978

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Recorded in France, the quality is not great but this is a great version of the first song the Banshees ever performed.

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Performance Duo

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Music Video

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Go to siyakaka.com to see more of FAKA's work.

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Price of Parsnips

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The way things go

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Retrospective Guggenheim

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Peter Fischli David Weiss: How to Work Better

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This retrospective brings together over three hundred sculptures, photographs, videos,and installations to form the most complete overview of the Fischli and Weiss's work to date.

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For years, the Syfy Channel was home to a range of space-opera TV serials like Andromeda, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Stargate SG-1. But after a 2009 rebranding, Syfy moved away from space shows. Three years ago, the network's programming returned to space with three new shows: Dark Matter, Killjoys, and The Expanse.

Dark Matter and Killjoys promised a return to traditional space opera: a drama following a small cast of characters as they travel from world to world. While several prestige genre stories (think American Gods, Game of Thrones, The Handmaid's Tale, or Man in the High Castle) are currently on the air, shows like Dark Matter are a bit less serious, and a bit more action-packed. Syfy recently released a trailer for the show's third season, and it looks like it'll be a blast.

With Dark Matter returning this week, let's catch up on why it's worth checking out.

Dark Matter was created by Joseph Mallozzi, who used to be in charge of Syfy's S targate franchise back when the network was called the SCI FI Channel. The show's premise is simple: six people wake up from stasis on a starship called the Raza, find they're missing their memories, and set out to learn who's responsible, who they are, and what they should do next.

Do they learn what happened?

They do. This show doesn't drag out its big mysteries for long - the crew figures out their identities in the first episode. They quickly learn they're a group of criminals assigned to strong-arm a mining colony that recently had a falling-out with a company called Ferrous Corp. They ultimately decide they don't have to be bad guys or lawless enforcers any longer. They just want to get away and figure out what happened to their memories.

Who's on the crew?

The show has seven main characters: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, and Android. Since the characters didn't remember their names, they named themselves for the order in which they woke up.

Eventually, they learn about their original identities. One is Jace Corso, a criminal who was part of the Raza crew. But later, he discovers he's really Derrick Moss, a wealthy tech CEO who stole Corso's identity. Two is a synthetic human named Rebecca who escaped an experimental facility and became a criminal named Portia Lin. Three is Marcus Boone, a mercenary (think Jayne from Firefly). Four is Rylo Tetsuda, the heir to the Emperor of the Principality of Zairon. Five is Das, a teenage girl and tech wizard who stowed away on board the Raza. Six is a terrorist known as Griffin Jones, but actually named Kal Varrick. He's an undercover agent working for the Galactic Authority, trying to take down the crew of the Raza. On top of that, there's Android, the ship's android, who is developing her own personality as she spends time with the crew.

Season 2 introduced a couple of new characters: Nyx Harper, a Seer who joins the Raza crew after they escape from prison, and Devon Taltherd, a medic who joined the crew during the same prison break.

It really can be, but the show is largely about identities and who people truly are. Most of the characters have their own agendas, but once their memories were wiped, they found a unique opportunity to reinvent themselves. They come together into a crew because they're comfortable with one another, or at least more comfortable than they are with the wider world.

W here does Season 3 pick up?

In the first season, the crew largely figures out who they are, and get used to the general state of the universe. There are a lot of political factions, as well as really powerful private companies they work for, or are on the run from. The crew also discovers that they own a fantastic piece of technology called a Blink Drive, which could upend the power in the galaxy.

In season 2, the crew escapes from prison and split up. They eventually meet back up with some new friends, and try to figure out what they want from their new life. By the end of the season, Four essentially instigates a war, leaving the season on a cliffhanger when he abandons the Raza 'screw to die. From the looks of season 3's trailer, they aren't going to take kindly to that.

How long is the show supposed to run?

Mallozzi says he planned out a five-year arc from the beginning, plotting out the broad beats of each season. It's not clear where the show's going to go, but some hints have been dropped along the way.

Is this show based on anything?

It launched from a comic book, which was based on Mallozzi's original pitch for the show. When Stargate began to wind down, he came up with Dark Matter 's premise, but didn't have any luck selling it as a series. He realized he would have more success if the series was based on an existing story, like a novel or a comic, so he turned to Dark Horse Comics, which picked up his pitch for a short, four-issue series.

Then he used the comic as a basis for his TV pitches. In 2013, Syfy green-lit the show for a 13-episode season. The series is actually pretty different from the comic: Mallozzi noted that the comic wouldn't dictate the casting or appearance of the show, but there are some similarities. The comic also only covers the events of the pilot episode.

Aside from the fact that Syfy was overdue for more spaceship stories, what I find most appealing is how it resembles pulpy, entertaining shows like Farscape, Firefly, and Stargate. It has a cast of wildly different characters, each with their own motivations and agendas, and the show manages to cram an impressive amount of story and world-building into just a couple of seasons. This show, like Killjoys, fits in everything that makes a space-opera series fun: lots of action, fantastic worlds, interpersonal drama, and interstellar drama. It's not on the same level as The Expanse, which has some really impressive sets, acting, and story, but it's still enormously accessible and entertaining.

What else is coming with Season 3?

Syfy is jumping on the aftershow bandwagon with a companion series, After Dark, hosted by Zoie Palmer, who plays Android. It'll be available online each week after every episode.

The two seasons are currently streaming on Netflix. Season three begins on June 9 on Syfy.

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Syfy's pulpy space opera Dark Matter is back - here's why you should watch

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For years, the Syfy Channel was home to a range of space-opera TV serials like Andromeda, Battlestar Galactica, Farscape, and Stargate SG-1 . But after a 2009 rebranding, Syfy moved away from space shows. Three years ago, the network's programming returned to space with three new shows: Dark Matter, Killjoys, and The Expanse .

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Fear of Fear Vimeo

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Margot, who lives in a comfortable middle class apartment, fears that she is losing her mind after having had her second child. Her husband Kurt, who is busy studying for an exam, does not understand her situation. Her mother-in-law and sister-in-law Lore are openly hostile to her.

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Article NY Times

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the controversial and furiously prolific film maker most responsible for the resurgence of German cinema in the 1970's, was found dead yesterday at his home in Munich, West Germany. He was 36 years old, and had made 41 feature-length films - the best known was ''The Marriage of Maria Braun'' - in an erratic, iconoclastic screen career lasting only 13 years. The cause of death was unknown, and an autopsy will be performed today. ''We do not know if he killed himself or if he took too many pills or too much whisky or something similar,'' a police spokesman said. ''The only thing we are ruling out is murder.''

Mr. Fassbinder was working on a new film at the time of his death. He was found by the friend with whom he lived, the film editor Juliane Lorenz. A video-cassette machine that he had been using was still running at 5 A.M., Munich time, when Miss Lorenz discovered his body. Wolf Gremm, a director for whom Mr. Fassbinder had acted in the as-yet-unreleased film ''Kamikaze,'' was also present elsewhere in the house. He said Mr. Fassbinder had been working intently on the new film, and that a notebook found near his body contained ideas Mr. Fassbinder planned to incorporate into that work. Mr. Gremm expressed doubts that the death was a suicide.

Vincent Canby, movie critic for The New York Times, called Mr. Fassbinder ''the most original talent since Godard.'' David Denby, writing in The Times, said, ''Fassbinder's films are undeniably irritating and a little strange; they are also completely alive.'' Other critics, while acknowledging the overall importance of his work, assailed the slow pace and stylized quality of some of his lesser efforts. The one response he never provoked was indifference. In films such as ''The Marriage of Maria Braun,'' ''Fox and His Friends,'' ''The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant,'' ''Effi Briest,'' ''Ali: Fear Eats the Soul'' and ''Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven,'' Mr. Fassbinder demonstrated what the critic Manny Farber called a ''radical mix of snarl and decoration.'' His Technique Varied

But he seldom demonstrated it in the same way twice. The range of Mr. Fassbinder's work was nearly as extraordinary as its abundance. ''If his films have any recurring theme at all,'' the critic Andrew Sarris wrote, ''it is the theme of power. 'Ali' may seem to be about race relations, 'The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant' about the problems of lesbians and 'Fox and His Friends' of male homosexuals, but these works and all his others treat life as a bitter and unending power struggle.''

Mr. Fassbinder, who appeared as an actor in some of his own films, sometimes behaved like one of his own icy, chameleonlike characters. Granting interviews in New York in 1977, the year of his greatest international adulation, he on more than one occasion announced, in perfect English, that he didn't speak English. That said, he would quibble with his interpreter about every English phrase.

And he often produced differing opinions on the same subject. That year, he told The Times: ''I was lucky, growing up in a family where close relationships didn't exist. When I was a child, I suffered a lot from that, but today I'm kind of happy about it. It makes me freer than people are in general.'' Several months earlier, he had told The Washington Post: ''The terrible quarrels of my parents in my early years have warped me forever. A child is born into a marriage that gives the illusion of working. But the parents are playing false roles, and the child copies these mechanisms and is warped. We all practice Ibsen's life-lie. No authentic relationship is possible. The answer: abolish first marriage, then all society based on property and the desire for possessions, the root of our ills. Till this happens, individuals and classes will go on corrupting each other forever.'' Dressed in Picturesque Way

The paunchy Mr. Fassbinder, who often sported suspenders, T-shirt, motorcycle jacket and scraggly beard, was a committed leftist as well as an avowed homosexual. While his work reflected these aspects of his personality, it never marked him as an ideologue, because he was too mistrustful of organized politics for that. Besides, the subtext of his work was often greatly at odds with its ostensible subject. ''Fox and His Friends,'' which starred Mr. Fassbinder in the story of a homosexual love affair, was described by him as a film about one class exploiting another. Of ''Trash, the City and Death,'' a published but unproduced Fassbinder play that was widely denounced in Germany on grounds of anti-Semitism, he said: ''The charge of anti-Semitism was used as a pretext by those people who really objected to what I was saying about the way cities work.''

''I see film as a political instrument,'' he said on another occasion, ''in the sense that it can describe and expose the underlying problems of society.''

Mr. Fassbinder was born on May 31, 1946, in Bad Worishofen, Bavaria, West Germany, the only child of middle-class parents. His father was a doctor. His mother, a translator who rendered work by Truman Capote and others into German, appears in some of his films under the name Lilo Pempeit. After his parents divorced, Mr. Fassbinder was raised by his mother, and spent much of his time watching American movies, such as those of Douglas Sirk, whom he greatly admired. At 16, he left home and drifted into acting, working in theaters in Frankfurt, Berlin, Nuremberg and other West German cities. He joined the Munich Action Theater in 1967, and soon broke away to form the Antitheater. The troupe performed in bars and unused movie houses, and its actors lived communally together. Wrote Very Quickly

Describing Mr. Fassbinder in those days, a friend recalled in 1977: ''Rainer would dash off the script over the weekend, sometimes taking a classic play and reworking it totally, setting it in present-day working-class Munich so as to make a critique of the cruelty of society. As an actor, he had a fierce, fresh magnetism. His casts were mostly nonprofessionals, some brilliant, some lousy - the kind of dropouts and psychopaths he's always been fond of.''

In 1969 Mr. Fassbinder made his first feature-length film, ''Love Is Colder Than Death.'' Between then and 1970, when he made ''Beware of a Holy Whore,'' there were 10 Fassbinder films in all. He described this as a group of films about private things, devoted to ''the pure passion for movies.'' At around that time he was briefly married to Ingrid Caven, an actress who appears in a number of his films.

In 1971, ''The Merchant of Four Seasons'' was shown in West German theaters and on television there. It subseqently was shown in America, and helped establish Mr. Fassbinder's reputation among arthouse moviegoers. Many of his films were well received from that point on, but he did not achieve much commercial success here until 1979, with ''The Marriage of Maria Braun.'' In 1981, his ''Lili Marleen'' was released in Germany and was close behind ''The Empire Strikes Back'' in revenues there, even though the film's distributor described its reviews as ''about 90 percent awful.'' At a cost of $5 million, it was a far more lavish project than anything the swift, economical Mr. Fassbinder had done before.

Other recent films, including ''Querelle,'' starring Jeanne Moreau, and ''Berlin Alexanderplatz,'' a television serial, have not been released here.

Neither Mr. Fassbinder's admirers nor his detractors ever ceased marveling at his astonishing productivity. His speed, he once said, owed something to economic pressure. But, he added, ''it also depends on my psyche. I must constantly be working.'' He also said, ''I cannot work in a more subtle way than I am working already. Even if I had more time, my films wouldn't have been different.''

Illustrations: photo of Rainer werner Fassbinder

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RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER, 36, FILM MAKER, DEAD

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Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the controversial and furiously prolific film maker most responsible for the resurgence of German cinema in the 1970's, was found dead yesterday at his home in Munich, West Germany. He was 36 years old, and had made 41 feature-length films - the best known was ''The Marriage of Maria Braun'' - in an erratic, iconoclastic screen career lasting only 13 years.

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Article Guardian

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A lot has changed for Rose Wylie since Germaine Greer first praised her vast and blissfully unruly paintings in the Guardian seven years ago. Then the late-blooming artist was a new discovery and her unsold, unstretched canvases were stacked from floor to ceiling in the 17th-century Kent cottage that's been her home for 50 years. When I arrange to meet her there, just before her new solo show opens at the Serpentine Sackler this month, I worry that there won't be anything to see.

Over leftover birthday cake - Wylie has just turned 83 - she says that when it comes to the day-to-day business of creating drawings and paintings, little has altered. "I have the same carpenter making the stretchers. I put the glue on myself and cut the canvas. Everything is the same. They just used to pile up. Now they don't."

Paintings have recently gone to art fairs in France and Shanghai. What she's currently working on in her studio, a converted bedroom upstairs, is destined for an exhibition next spring with the blue-chip American dealer David Zwirner. Waiting to be shipped out, in a shed abutting the kitchen, her new commissions for Quack Quack, as the new Serpentine show is called, draw on memories from her time in Kensington as a child during the blitz, as well as observations of the park's present-day visitors - a mix of fighter planes, cavorting dogs and resting migrants. Pinned on the side of a bookshelf in the dining room is a list of older works for the show, their titles describing the everyday, accessible subjects she loves, from olive oil labels to Choco Leibniz biscuits, from Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill to Arsenal and Spurs.

Birdlike beneath a sharp, choppy bob, Wylie is by turns mischievous, serious and frank. Her work, meanwhile, is striking for its spontaneity, energy and freedom. Like Philip Guston or Jean-Michel Basquiat, her figures seem crudely wrought. If something goes wrong, she'll happily just cut it out and patch over the canvas. "You do a bit and it's horrible," she says. "And you take it off and try it again."

Often, a painting's content is described on the canvas in blocky handwriting that is as much a part of the picture as the figures the words snake around or run into. Yet in both thinking and making, the process is slow and considered. "You can go on for about five hours doing just one little bit. It really can be hours." Wylie recently had a stint of eight-hour days, navigating round her studio in chunky black work boots. After four hip replacements, she explains, she's had to ditch her beloved trainers for something she can slip on.

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'You can spend about five hours doing one little bit' ...Wylie with her new work. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Covering an entire wall of the workspace, the painting she's currently working on does different things with women's bodies. Set against what looks like graph paper drawn freehand, its figures include a reclining nude whose pipe-cleaner limbs recall Matisse, and a heavily outlined yellow woman with stumpy pins, wearing a red mini-skirt, bikini top and ankle boots. "I like the way shoes and boots often cut off women's legs in a rather awkward but incredibly endearing way," she says. "I know that certain women do not and cannot see them as good legs. I think they are. Keep everything open. I don't like mean attitudes."

The drawing from which this figure evolved lies in a paint-spattered plastic sleeve on the floor. "She used to live across the road, these are their cars," says Wylie, adding purposefully: "Nothing pretentious, nothing expensive, nothing old-fashioned."

This is one of the mantras Wylie (sort of) sticks to in her vigorous, anything goes approach to art. Behind this ex-neighbour is a profile with long eyelashes and a Desperate Dan chin: it's based on a picture of the French actor Catherine Deneuve. She likes the visual language of faces from magazines, movies and TV, although the stuff that catches her eye has included portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, as well as art from antiquity and the early Renaissance.

I like escalators. You can really stare at people. On a train, that's asking for trouble

One thing that's irresistible about Wylie is how both her art and life overturn expectations. Although living in a rural idyll, where vines sprout picturesquely through the kitchen roof and ceiling, she is anything but removed from the cut and thrust of contemporary culture. The notes pinned thickly to a cupboard door include references to Judith Bernstein, who made massive phallic drawings as a protest against the Vietnam war, and Nate Lowman, the "extraordinarily fashionable" New York artist and scenester, who is part of the loose group once dubbed Warhol's Children by New York Magazine.

Wylie appreciates Lowman's kind of work - "fling it on" - but she's more interested in his looks, and those of his ex-girlfriend Mary-Kate Olsen, the fashion designer and former actor. She calls them "so special and very stylish". Acutely alive to detail, Wylie is an inveterate people-watcher. "I like escalators," she says. "You can really stare at people. On a train, you're asking for trouble if you stare - but on escalators, they're going the other way."

Then there's the story of her discovery, well beyond the usual age of retirement. "It shouldn't be about age or gender or anything," she says. "It should just be about the quality of the painting. That's what I'd like to be known for. Paintings. Not because I'm old and the climate has changed and old people are welcomed."

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Fling it on ... Queen with Pansies (Dots), 2016 Photograph: Soon-Hak Kwon/Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London

Wylie's first encounter with art was on a childhood trip to Europe. It was 1948 and her mother took her to the Prado and the Louvre. "She thought culture was a nice thing, particularly for girls. I thought it was very boring." Nonetheless, she went to art school in the 1950s when the bold expressionism of such groups as Der Blaue Reiter or Die Brucke still cast a shadow.

She met her late husband, the painter Roy Oxlade, then, returning to study art in her 40s after raising their family. There are, she thinks, advantages to such a break. "You can get sick of the relentlessness. But if you've had time out, maybe you don't have that. You do one, then start again with another."

Wylie's studio suggests hard work and energy. The floor is dense with newspaper and stacks of paint pots, while the skirting board is encrusted in years of smeared pigment. It's like a walk-in expressionist painting or a collage. "I'm very uninhibited in the studio," she says. "Have you seen my palette knife? I clean the knife bit but not the handle. It's like a potato."

When her husband was working downstairs, he would rarely venture up. "Whatever I'd done, he managed to get something on his trousers." Indeed, within moments of entering, there is paint on my jeans and Wylie, charming and forthright, is instructing me to clean it with turps. "You're not doing it properly," she says. "Rub it harder. Can I do it? It is quite funny to be rubbing people's thighs."

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Ray's Yellow Plane (Film Notes), 2013 by Rose Wylie. Photograph: Soon-Hak Kwon/Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, London

Around the house, Wylie's drawings hang on every other wall. The bookcases hold tomes by the artists she most admires, from American punk cartoonist Raymond Pettibon to the German provocateur Sigmar Polke, as well as her own exhibition catalogues and piles of handwritten notes. It's easy to get pleasantly lost among the many references and source materials as the conversation slips around, from the moments in films Wylie has translated into paintings (alongside Tarantino, Werner Herzog is a favourite) to Proust's interest in the concept of ekphrasis, art about other art forms.

Yet she cautions me not to get too hung up on the references. "The painting isn't about something. I think lots of people don't understand that. They think it's the message, which it isn't. The message is the painting. The painting is the painting."

Perhaps what Wylie's art most strongly communicates is the rebellious possibility of simply seeing things differently. She watches as the endless stream of films, news stories and magazine pin-ups parade past, taking something back and making it, uniquely, her own. Throughout her home, even the smallest details defy conventional order. Stems of bramble bushes are carefully positioned in vases. Bugs drop from encroaching vegetation into the crockery. Outside, the garden is full of beautiful weeds. In the summer, if Wylie wants to sit down, she flattens the foliage in her boots.

* Rose Wylie: Quack Quack is at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London, 30 November to 11 February.

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Rose Wylie: 'I want to be known for my paintings - not because I'm old'

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She didn't get her break until her 70s, but the world now can't get enough of Rose Wylie's blissfully unruly paintings. On the eve of her solo Serpentine show, the artist shows our writer round her Kent cottage - then dabs her down with turps

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Tate Shots

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From the Queen of Sheba to John Terry, welcome to the work of Rose Wylie

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Wylie takes inspiration for her paintings from film, literature and even the scraps of newspaper articles on her studio floor. Often arranging her large-scale paintings in book formation, so that they take on the angles found at the corner of a room, Wylie's use of familiar imagery allows her to tell stories and explore themes of representation in narratives already in the public domain.

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I do like big work. I like billboards. I like very early decorated churches where the paintings go from floor to ceiling and up arches and round the door. I've always thought it's a very convenient way of using spaces in galleries and spaces anywhere. I find it more exciting and it can expand, stuff can expand as you go on up and you're not quite sure. There was a lot of storytelling in The Queen of Sheba and I read about it in Marina Warner's book. Solomon sent the djinns out to research whether the Queen of Sheba was as beautiful as wise and whether she was, rather importantly, as rich as he'd heard. She was and they came back and they said, she is excessively beautifully, she is hugely rich and she's very wise but she has cloven feet. As the Queen of Sheba approached Solomon's palace there was a little river and they took the bridge away so that she would have to take her shoes off and lift her skirt up so they could see whether she had cloven feet.

From that one to that one and then including these two and then they came to be this in the painting at the end which is in the Tate, so that's the final one where I introduced John Terry for what symbol of money, instead of Solomon on the corner in the Tate. You do get a good view of John Terry's head as you come in one of the doors because it's straight across the room and opposite you and it's a strong image and it comes... it's very dark, black and white, and it comes over strongly.

I find myself putting my paintings into book formation at an angle where... how the walls of a room go. I can see one drawing with another and as you flick a page over you can see a new combination. I've taken that process and simply continued with it into larger pieces of canvas. I think Matisse once said, go for it try to get it as it as it is and it won't be right anyway but that's fine. The whole arrangement and grouping is very fluid. They're very collaged. I can put any canvas together; cut a piece off, add a piece. It's all just out there and can turn out anyhow, anyway. They're sort of slightly casual. Misfits. And, it all helps the object quality and the threads, the glue, the hardboard sticking onto it. The lines of registration become very much your own piece of work. It becomes very a part of you.

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From the Queen of Sheba to John Terry, welcome to the work of Rose Wylie Wylie takes inspiration for her paintings from film, literature and even the scraps of newspaper articles on her studio floor.

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It's late August, and Pierre Huyghe is running out of time. For the past two months he has been working without a day off on a solo show for Hauser & Wirth in London-his first with the powerhouse gallery-and it is set to open in about two weeks. Each time I call him in Paris, late at night, his preferred interview time, he's either still working or sounds exhausted. He's editing sound on a new film, pushing to finish it for the show. "I'm a bit tired," he admits on one call, "and my brain is washed by the rain of work."

On the last day of the month, a Sunday, Huyghe rings from his Paris studio and he sounds almost giddy. "In the studio we have computers, printers-we have right now, as I talk to you, a plastic box with albino frogs in it and two water tanks containing samples of water lilies," he says. He speaks quickly and with a thick French accent, but he's perfectly understandable. In photos he typically sports a sly, knowing smile, and you can almost hear it as he's talking, but then he turns serious. "This is not a place where I produce. Never," he says. "This is not a place of production-it is a place of research."

Over the past 30 years, that research has resulted in one of the strangest and, perhaps, least understood bodies of work in contemporary art. It is certainly one of the most eclectic. Huyghe has ventured on a science vessel to Antarctica in search of an uncharted island and its albino penguin, directed a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), planted a temporary (and very unusual) garden in Madrid, filmed a documentary about the early New York hip-hop scene, invented holidays, created a weather-generating machine, taken students on vacation, and used bees, dogs, ants, spiders, and an art dealer infected with the flu as living readymades.

Actual objects are something of a rarity for him, though he's recently been building sophisticated, uncanny fish tanks, and populating them with various kinds of underwater plants and sea creatures, such as a hermit crab that lives inside a model of Brancusi's 1910 sculpture Sleeping Muse. As he often does in his art, he sets up the situation, drops in the ingredients, and lets nature and time go to work.

A new series of fish tanks that he made for his London show are based on the landscape around Monet's Giverny studio. "He diverted a river to create a pond," Huyghe says, positioning the Impressionist as an unlikely forebear. "He took water lilies that probably could not have survived in the local climate and crossbred different types to get the kinds he wanted." Huyghe replicated that ecosystem in the tanks, working with scientists to artificially reproduce the weather conditions, light, and humidity of Giverny 100 years ago.

These projects share certain concerns-how natural and artificial systems operate, how media affect memory, and the relationship between humans and animals. In spite of these commonalities, his work also displays an almost-frightening randomness, and a desire to operate at a number of different points on the very edge of art. Huyghe was interested in science when he was young, he tells me, but gradually shifted into art. "I was reading that as a place of freedom, a place where I could work on things that I was passionately in love with," he says. "It was the most welcoming place for this love to be."

Huyghe graduated from Paris's École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 1985. He first gained attention about a decade later, as part of the gang of artists-which also included Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carsten Höller, and Philippe Parreno-whose work was grouped by curator Nicolas Bourriaud under the banner of "relational aesthetics." Bourriaud's 1996 show "Traffic," at the CAPC musée d'art contemporain, in Bordeaux, France, defined the movement, focusing on art that took the form of live events and interactive situations that often involved members of the public. For his own contribution to "Traffic," Huyghe showed Singing in the Rain (1996), a work that involved a performer atop a white pedestal singing the eponymous song on February 2, the anniversary of Gene Kelly's death. For the rest of the show, the singer's shoes and raincoat lay on the scuffed platform unused.

Three years later Huyghe released what many regard as his masterpiece, The Third Memory (2000), a film about the 1972 robbery of a Brooklyn bank that inspired Sidney Lumet's movie Dog Day Afternoon (1975). By allowing the robber, John Wojtowicz, to re-enact the crime, Huyghe demonstrates how media representations of the event warped Wojtowicz's recollection of what actually happened.

Though Huyghe is arguably France's most acclaimed mid-career artist-he represented the nation at the Venice Biennale in 2001, won the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize the next year, and has appeared in editions of just about all of the important international biennials over the past two decades-a retrospective of his work always seemed fairly improbable, given the site-specific, and often-ephemeral, nature of his art.

Nevertheless, a survey show has come about. It started at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in September of last year, traveled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne in April, and arrives for its final stop, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, on November 23. Some are surprised that Huyghe agreed to it.

"I remember when we had this discussion about the retrospective, and at first everybody who knew Pierre would laugh," Michael Govan, LACMA's director, says. "They'd say, 'Oh, Pierre can't make a retrospective, because everything's so specific to the situation, it's almost the absolute opposite of his practice to make a retrospective.' But Pierre was very serious. He said, 'No, no, that's exactly why I need to make a retrospective and not make a new work but try to make sense of my works and what I've done.' "

Huyghe has been adding new pieces and altering the exhibition as it travels-it is, in effect, as in flux as many of his artworks. "He can only do things that are a little off in that way," Govan says of how Huyghe has embraced the survey. "For him, I think, [agreeing to] the retrospective was a contrarian gesture."

That may be an understatement. Huyghe has been doing almost none of what one would expect an artist to be doing for his or her first major survey show. Rather than demand a carefully laid out series of walls, for instance, he simply used those from the exhibition before his (the Mike Kelley retrospective), cutting holes through some and moving others. When he added walls, he left them unpainted.

"I didn't want to have a meta-narrative, or a mise-en-scène, or box things in," Huyghe tells me. "You can get lost in those aspects of an exhibition. I guess that's why I usually don't like to have the floor plan of the museum-I don't care."

There were almost no black boxes in the show when it was presented in Paris and Cologne. Huyghe wanted there to be "porosity" among the works, he says-and so films were screened on walls not far from sculptures and installations like the black ice rink that was intact during the exhibition's first iteration and shattered during the second.

When the show traveled to the Ludwig, the artist cut up and rearranged the Pompidou's walls in the galleries, and for LACMA he's grafting the Ludwig floorplan into the museum. "I drag the exhibition-it's like a kidney stone," he says. "It is a foreign body that acclimates-or not, actually!-to each new place."

The week I talk to Huyghe, almost three months before the opening in Los Angeles, the show's curator there, Jarrett Gregory, is already starting the installation process, trying to get a beehive to grow around the head of a cement sculpture that the artist produced for 2012's Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany. Once the sculpture is in place, Gregory says, "we introduce the queen into the hive, and then we have a beekeeper come and look at it about every other day until the show opens." By mid-November it will be fully operational, and it will still be growing. A dog with one of its legs dyed bright pink will complete the outdoor installation.

In Kassel, the piece was hidden away in an off-trail section of the city park littered with compost heaps and cement blocks. Visitors felt as if they had wandered into a hidden underbelly of the manicured grounds, and the installation quickly became one of the most-discussed artworks in the show. "I thought it was a really interesting engagement with a lot of issues around nature, the environment, landscape traditions, Romanticism, melancholia-some of Pierre's big subjects," says Lynne Cooke, who organized a 2002 show of Huyghe's work at the Dia Art Foundation in New York and is now senior curator for special projects in modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

A new film, which appeared in Huyghe's London show, will also have its U.S. premiere at LACMA. "I discovered that there was a monkey in a restaurant in Japan serving towels to the clients wearing a mask of a young woman," he says. He ended up visiting that restaurant, which is near areas irradiated by the Fukushima nuclear power-plant disaster. Drones with cameras visit the wreckage now.

"I got very interested in these two things-machine replacing man, animal replacing man," he adds. The film imagines what the monkey does when it is not playing the role of human. "It's nature that has lost its naturality, and there's no way to go back," he says. "I see that as a kind of Greek tragedy."

"I think his resilience is amazing," Cooke says. "He builds teams of people who are very devoted and committed, and his willingness to hone a project over a long time and really stay with it is deeply impressive and critical to the multilayered complexity of the finished work."

In 2009 and 2010, Huyghe spent more than a year with actors and members of the public in the shuttered Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris, staging private performances-a scripted trial, an orgy, improvised scenes. Details are sketchy because he would only rarely invite a few spectator-participants to visit. He recorded bits and pieces of the goings-on for what became the film The Host and the Cloud (2009-10), which is included in the retrospective. "I think there were only 50 people who saw what I did for two years-the live aspect," he says. (His galleries sometimes pre-sell his films to finance such projects, and an institution is frequently involved in helping to secure funding.)

Huyghe has periodically talked about obtaining some sort of land or space to work like that again, out of sight, without the constraint of having to show his art-"to grow the work to the condition I want it to grow," as he puts it to me.

"The museum is a place of separation, in a certain way, and I need a place of continuity," he says. "That's why I need that site-whatever that site is." He mentions that it could be somewhere outside Paris or maybe even New York, where he has lived off and on since the early 2000s. (He also mentions his fascination with Michael Heizer's seemingly never-ending work on his piece City, 1972-ongoing, out in the Nevada desert.)

"I'm trying to make work that is indifferent to the public," Huyghe adds a few moments later, when I press him for details. "It's not that I'm indifferent to the public, but the work has to exist in itself, with or without the gaze. It's like the mole. You know the mole? The animal that lives in the earth?" Sure, I say.

"Yeah, so you can't see it, but it's still living, it's still copulating, it still has children. And then once in a while it surfaces, and you see it, and you say, 'Oh! The mole.' And then, five seconds later, it disappears again.

"The retrospective, in a certain way, delayed my research because of the amount of work," he says. "But I am working on it. I haven't found the site, but let's say that's the next thing I'll be doing."
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2014 issue of ARTnews on page 100 under the title "Traveler of Both Time and Space."

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Pierre Huyghe: Traveler of Both Time and Space

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It's late August, and Pierre Huyghe is running out of time. For the past two months he has been working without a day off on a solo show for Hauser & Wirth in London-his first with the powerhouse gallery-and it is set to open in about two weeks.

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at the Tate

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Pierre Huyghe Celebration Park: - Exhibition at Tate Modern | Tate

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Pierre Huyghe Celebration Park exhibition at Tate Modern 5 July - 17 September 2006

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The other side of hope trailer

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THE OTHER SIDE OF HOPE (2017) - Official HD Trailer

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© Palace Films 2017 http://www.TheOtherSideOfHope.com.au WINNER - FIPRESCI GRAND PRIX - BEST FILM OF 2017 WINNER - 2017 BERLIN FILM FESTIVAL - BEST DIRECTOR Winner of the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2017 Berlinale where it topped the prestigious Screen International critics' poll, and selected as Best Film of the Year by the International Federation of Film Critics, the hilarious and poignant new dramedy from Finnish master Aki Kaurismäki (Drifting Clouds, Le Havre, The Man Without A Past) is a hugely enjoyable tale of the friendship between a young immigrant and an Helsinki restaurateur.