I love the films of Jacques Audiard - Rust & Bone, A Prophet, The Beat That My Heart Skipped and most recently Dheepan - though they also trouble me. Often in his films the hero has a moment of ecstasy or transcendence through violence. Violence is glamorized, aestheticized, even sacralized - moments of ultra-violence are moments of redemption for the hero, as in the bloody showdown at the end of Dheepan.
Read MoreCult is sacred, secret and always the same. Culture is public, irreverent, and strives for originality and innovation. Yet the two are intimately connected. Culture feeds on cult, and cult feeds off culture. Our society today lacks a cult, and as a result our culture wearies itself in empty innovation.
Read MoreI was obsessed with Twin Peaks when it was first shown in 1990. We all were. Every Sunday after lunch at boarding school, we piled in to the TV room, pushed in the VHS cassette of that week’s episode, waited for the first note of Angelo Badalamenti’s tremolo guitar to sound next to the opening shot of the wren, and that was it, we were in heaven.
Read MoreImagine if the Nazi regime was still in power - perhaps with the leadership changed, perhaps slightly less murderous and more pragmatic - but with no reconciliation or recognition of former crimes. Imagine if the Holocaust was celebrated, with aging veterans of Auschwitz wheeled out for public adulation, to show their medals and tell stories of the killings.
Read MoreI managed to get out of bed to run a London Philosophy Club event last week, where the philosopher John Gray gave an interesting talk about his new book,The Silence of Animals. He seemed a very nice guy, who gave up his evening for free, and the audience (the biggest we've ever had at an LPC meeting) seemed on the whole to like his humility and humour, bar one lady who said 'if I'd written your book it would have been very different', and then left!
Read MoreHow do you...fill your days?’ =My editor was looking at me with a hint of concern, in a cafe on Portland Street. She was worried I was losing my edge. It had been almost a year since my first book had come out, and still I hadn’t started working on another.
Read MoreWe've all hallucinated during sex, haven't we? Or...is it just me?! Well I have anyway, on a couple of occasions. Once was back in 1996. I had just left university, and broken up with my girlfriend in the clumsiest and most insensitive way imaginable.
Read MorePaul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, The Master, tells the story of drifter Joaquin Phoenix’s relationship with the head of a New Age sect, which looks suspiciously like Scientology. The group, called The Cause, aims (like Scientology) to clear its members of the karmic traces of their past lives, and return them to their inherent perfection. They do this by hypnotising their members to retrace their past incarnations, or by subjecting them to a b
Read MoreHere are some quotes from my favourite living artist, David Lynch, about the creative process. They're from Chris Rodley's book, Lynch on Lynch:
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