The witching hour

Billie Burke as Glinda in The Wizard Of Oz, 1939, dir. Victor Fleming

Christmas just wouldn't be Christmas without The Wizard Of Oz, and, despite an initial panic attack that the big day came and went without me so much as giving a passing thought to the plight of Dorothy and co trapped on the other side of the rainbow, I've done a bit of digging in the schedules and have discovered that, thankfully, I've not missed this festive fixture, which will be aired on Five tomorrow at 3.50pm.

Letting your imagination run wild in the glorious Technicolor land of Oz should provide the perfect anecdote to a New Year hangover, although I'm not so sure that the two slots scheduled to precede the film fit that particular bill. Firstly, there's The Muppets' Wizard Of Oz, made in 2005 and featuring Ashanti, Quentin Tarantino and Queen Latifah among others; then there's one of those "making of" programmes, this one patronisingly (I'm sure) hosted by the shrill Angela Lansbury. Even doped up on Pepto-Bismol and Co-codamol, I don't think I could cope with those.

The Wizard Of Oz was made in 1939, so it turned 70 some time in the past year; one reason alone to check it out now if you haven't caught it in a while. Another, for me at least, is the recent resurgence in interest in the back catalogue of film director David Lynch, whose oeuvre is patchworked with references to The Wizard Of Oz, from Blue Velvet (Isabella Rossellini's character is called Dorothy and wears red shoes) to Mulholland Drive (the jitterbug opening credits mirror the jitterbug scene deleted from The Wizard Of Oz - although it appeared in the stage version I saw during last year's panto season and had me confused as long as it took to get to a computer and look it up on the oracle of the internet).

Wild At Heart, itself 20 years old in 2010, is littered with The Wizard Of Oz imagery, not least in the penultimate scene, when the Good Witch (played by Sheryl Lee, aka Laura Palmer from Twin Peaks) floats down in a bubble and urges Sailor Ripley not to turn away from love: "If you are truly wild at heart, you'll fight for your dreams."

Just like Dorothy Gale, eh?

Sheryl Lee as Good Witch in Wild At Heart, 1990, dir. David Lynch

Cheerio-ho-ho for 2009!

Words & Fixtures is taking a short break for the holiday season, but would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone everywhere a fantastic festive foray.

To see you through the snow and baubles, here's a suitably Christmas-related picture; La Vierge et l'Enfant (Madonna and Child) by kitsch French artists Pierre et Gilles. (When we were stuck in Lyon last year waiting for the waters to subside, we found a really great little cafe where the barman took a shine to us and proudly showed off a portrait done of him and his husband by P et G. On another occasion, we stumbled across an establishment where everyone was absolutely ratted and screeching along to Edith Piaf. I like Lyon. Or Lyons.)


Anyway, this Pierre et Gilles installation - which features French actress Hafsia Herzi as Mary, decked out in a frock by Christian Lacroix, and which could probably be construed as virgin (sorry) on the inappropriate or controversial - was on show earlier this year in l'Eglise St Eustache in Paris. Me and the Exquisite Corpse gang mentioned earlier this week used to walk past this Chatelet church (it's the one with the giant head and hand sculpture outside) to get to Le Chat Noir, complete with a traditional zinc horseshoe bar and Turkish toilet for true French authenticity, then later in the evening ran back again to catch the last RER home.

Pierre et Gilles, La Vierge et l’Enfant, 2008-2009. Modèles : Hafsia Herzi et Loric, Robe : Christian Lacroix. Tirage pigment sur toile, 200 x 134 cm. Coproduction Centre national des arts plastiques et les artistes. Courtesy galerie Jérôme de Noirmont.

Such a bookish girl...

It's my birthday, so I've been buying myself presents. No, I didn't wrap them up; that would be stupid. I got a nice stripy Christmas jumper (you get used to it, this Christmas shit), some angora over-the-knee socks, the Florence & The Machine album, tickets to see Blithe Spirit at the theatre, and The Gum Thief by Douglas Coupland. Happy birthday, me.

Regular readers among you will perhaps remember that Douglas Coupland is my favourite author. What you may not know is that I have every one of his novels (plus Polaroids From The Dead, which is classed as non-fiction), except Generation A. I was pleased to just happen upon this one random copy of The Gum Thief knocking about in Fopp as somehow it had totally slipped my mind. So, just because I can, may I present each work in backwards chronological order. The covers of Coupland books seem to change with the seasons; these are the versions I have.



(I'll let you in on a secret: I haven't read them all. I like to drip feed myself so I don't run out.)

Looking at art from all angels

Angels Of Anarchy: Women Artists And Surrealism was free at the weekend, for one day only, so I took advantage and ploughed my trusty steed through driving blizzards towards Manchester Art Gallery. You'll have to wait until after the festive break to enjoy the exhibition yourself, and pay up to £6 for the privilege, but it reopens on Sunday 27 December (then shuts again, briefly, on 31 December and 1 January) and runs until 10 January.

There are plenty of works and all media represented, by a number of women including Frida Kahlo and Claude Cahun, Dora Maat and Dorothea Tanning. There's a lot of phallic symbolism, melons of various shapes and sizes, and a whole lot of nudity. I don't quite know why naked bodies equal surrealism, but someone's obviously decided they do. There are dream sequences and fantastical scenes, queer landscapes and weird portraits, and Exquisite Corpse works (where an artist or writer draws or writes on a piece of paper, folds it over and passes it around a group so the finished item is a composite of everyone's crazy ideas - my friends and I used to play this on cold boozy evenings when we didn't have enough money to go out).

Somehow the show doesn't quite gel as a whole, and I do question this whole "women" thing. However, it does have its moments, and I very much enjoyed seeing the many photos by Lee Miller, including Portrait Of Space (1937), which was pictured above but which has been removed for copyright reasons. Intrigued, I've been looking her up, and have learnt that she she was discovered in 1926 in Manhattan by the founder of Vogue magazine, Condé Nast, who transformed her into a modelling sensation. In 1929, she went to Paris and hooked up with modernist photographer Man Ray, hanging out with him, Pablo Picasso, Paul Éluard and Jean Cocteau until 1932 when she returned to NYC and set up as a photographer herself. See the similarities between Miller's Nude Bent Forward from around 1930 and Man Ray's Violin d'Ingres of 1924 by checking them out in Google images as I can't publish them here any more thanks to my contravening copyright laws if I should.

Gosh, well isn't that a fucking dull blog post without images?

Flash point

Bumbling around in the snowy dusk on my way back home from the Cornerhouse on Saturday, I decided to take a slight detour to check out CUBE artist-in-residence Andrea Booker's off-site installation; the SOS sign I was telling you about last week. Plugged in and slowly flashing away, it will be sending a subliminal message to drivers fighting their way along the Mancunian Way until 5 January. I was slightly underwhelmed, but now I hark on't, I must've seen it before as I seem to remember thinking it was a bit odd. And then instantly forgetting about it. Subliminal, indeed...

Entitled Apollo Theatres (for why, I can't say), it's up near the top of the squat white Art Deco-style box that used to house web company Moonfish and is currently undergoing a "rebranding" as part of the seemingly stalled First Street development to become EASA HQ; headquarters for the European Architecture Students Assembly 2010. So now you know.


This isn't my pic, by the way. It is neither snowy nor dusk.