I must confess: I had planned on politely refusing to write this review. I saw The Tree of Life two days ago and left the cinema electrocuted, carrying away an array of contradictory reactions, thinking I had finally discovered the unreviewable film. I still think that is probably the case, but I’ve decided to try to say something worthwhile anyway. The reason? With every passing hour, this out of this world, visionary piece of cinema is growing and growing on me. It touches a nerve, and it would be a sin not to try to explain why.

A second confession: I very nearly walked out. About half an hour into the film, by which stage it has already done its best to liberate us from convention through a minimal use of dialogue, countless shots of nature, and the introduction of an unexplained but pivotal event, it takes an even more daring turn. What follows is what must have been at least 20 minutes of prehistoric visuals, whereby director Terrence Malick dishes out carefully crafted footage taking us from the Big Bang to the dinosaurs. It plays out like a very special and serene episode of Planet Earth in slow motion, filmed by a true artist, and with the help of a masterful touch of music it becomes the most oddly moving of experiences. It’s the vision of Kubrick’s 2001 with the beauty barometer at bursting point.

Yet I nevertheless nearly left at this point, because at the time, when the sequence begins, it’s like you’ve been dropped into a Black Hole, completely lost and spinning in this void of seemingly random sounds and images, however stunning they are. And having experimented with Palme d’Or pretentiousness last year with the utterly stupid Uncle Boonmee, it was a significant struggle to let myself be taken in. I didn’t know if I could hack another 2 hours of indecipherable art house claptrap, which is exactly the scent The Tree of Life seemed to be giving off.

To get out of this attitude, and to see the film properly (and if you can do this in advance rather than during your first viewing, as I had to, you’ll be the better for it), the best preparation available is to watch that extremely intriguing trailer a few times, and to realise just how representative of the film it turns out to be. This is no ordinary storytelling. It’s more like a sprawling, effortlessly smooth and calm series of scenes, and you can only appreciate the greatness of it once you understand this is how the whole film is going to be, and when you accept it isn’t going to live up to the term ‘film’ in any sense. The style of the project is so indescribably unique and eventually moving that it creates a new category of art. For this to be shown in rooms next door to the likes of Bridesmaids up and down the country is hilariously absurd.

The film’s metaphysics, and subsequent imagery, is deeply Christian and pantheist. The early sequence I mentioned may be loaded with acceptance of science, but the startlingly normal family we end up focusing on for the rest of the film makes clear Malick’s religious roots, paving the way for a finale as spiritual and aesthetically profound as I can recall. Sean Penn barely says a word in his fifteen minutes of screen time, and it speaks volumes that this most established of actors is willing to play such a minor role in Malick’s masterpiece. He just walks around wearing that characteristically deep-looking expression, complimenting, and often constituting, the stunning visuals.

I need to see this again, and probably a few more times after that too. You need to see it for the first time, and then join me in multiple repeat screenings. For to try to evaluate the extent of this film’s genius after one viewing would be hugely disrespectful to its ambitions. It really is, quite simply, something else.

A recurring image in Haegue Yang’s first major UK show is the strangely humanlike figure of a clothes-horse: with protruding ‘arms’ outstretched, it crops up as contorting, childlike, and even maternal. Yet it would be misleading to view Yang’s work merely as an attempt to vivify her materials. The knitted coverings worn by various tin cans in Can Cosies may hint at the foods they contain, just as the objects hung off yet more clotheshorses in Non-Indépliables suggest differing personalities. But focusing on these superficial features masks Yang’s more complex efforts to make her sculptures seem both knowable and unfamiliar.

The sculptures exhibited in ‘Teacher of Dance’ often work best when approached obliquely, treating them as part of the fabric of the building itself. Suddenly, initially inscrutable works come to life – Manteuffelstrasse 112 benefits particularly, a series of lightbulb-filled boxes covered by Venetian blinds (both recurrent materials). Modelled on the radiators in Yang’s Berlin apartment, these prove largely unremarkable when considered individually. Yet when seen out of the corner of the eye (just where ‘real’ radiators would be expected), their bounded play of light, shade, lines and shapes combine, blooming satisfyingly on the wall. A newly commissioned Venetian-blind installation for the Piper Gallery is similarly transformed against the gallery skylight, changing from stark and unwieldy to an enveloping, even graceful object when viewed on the move from directly below.

If the show’s ‘white box’ environment feels a less fertile setting for Yang’s work than the site-specific environments she has used previously, her film Doubles and Halves goes some way towards redressing this. Shot mainly in the run-down Seoul suburb of Ahyun-Dong, the film is accompanied by a repeated monologue meditating abstractedly on the lives of its inhabitants. Given the unoriginal premise and uninflected, observational tone, Yang distinguishes herself in varying the film’s imagery just enough to ensure it remains compelling. A number of the objects Yang dwells on elsewhere – lightbulbs, structures covered in incongruous sheeting – are also prominent here, and afterwards it’s hard not to picture Ahyun-Dong’s seemingly depopulated buildings when examining Yang’s Venetian blinds. The result is that the film almost becomes an internalised backdrop to the rest of the show, operating, like its own monologue, as a set of preoccupations cumulatively playing off the images at hand.

The importance of movement – across the gallery or, shot by shot, across Ahyun-Dong – to achieving a transient moment of illumination (a pregnant term given Yang’s liking of lightbulbs) in turn reflects the ideas of the Armenian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff, the ‘teacher of dance’ of the show’s title. This is perhaps encountered most explicitly in the companion pieces to the Piper Gallery installation. Also employing Venetian blinds, these can be entered into and wheeled around, forming an unexpectedly light and mobile exoskeleton on the edge of vision. Standing beside the structures the effect is a hostile one, the blinds suggesting windows looking neither inside nor out. Yet within the structures this paradox is overcome, imbuing a feeling of resolution.

Such resolution is, however, hard to come by across the show as a whole: overall, Yang’s concerns are abstract ones which remain difficult to bring out in sculpture and engender variable results. Her visions of Ahyun-Dong in turn cast a long shadow, perhaps as the film’s (albeit elusive) internal logic is still starkly presented. Yet it’s also refreshing that Yang avoids overtheorising, preferring her sculptures to shoulder the burden of communication despite their economy. Take the time, and it’s possible to be won over by her quiet, unhurried and understated approach in addressing difficult and unusual concerns.

‘Teacher of Dance’ is showing at Modern Art Oxford until 4th September

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Brandenburg Gate.

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Holocaust Museum: Concrete Temple Mount.

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Inquisitive. 

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Rejuvenation.

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Into the distance: Gleis 17, Grunevald, where 50,000 Jews were herded onto trains to begin their journey to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt during WWII.  

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Blanked Wall. 

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Meditation. 

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Trainers. 

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Skateboarding in East Berlin. 

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Bubbles. 

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Bursting. 

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Wet shock. 

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Stalker. 

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Love or lust?

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Rudeboy and the Romantics. 

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Ew!

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Love and pretzels. 

Though improvisation is by no means a novel concept to musical performance, and has been recorded in recitals as early as the 9th century, no genre other than jazz has relied on it so heavily as a means of self-definition. Despite the origins of jazz, and even the definition of jazz, being widely debated, the turn of the 20th century saw many freed slaves taking up “lower-class” entertainment jobs in the brothels and bars of New Orleans. Many had learnt to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music, gradually introducing the rhythms and idiosyncrasies of the African oral tradition they had brought with them. And thus began the notorious catwalk of the hallmark American genres, from ragtime to swing, bebop to Latin jazz, all of which are loosely classified under the umbrella term jazz. Throughout the 1900s, the likes of Miles Davis and Charlie Parker dedicated their lives to the harmonious (and disharmonious) creation of spontaneous melody, always conscious of the emotion they were purveying through their instruments. Their fast-paced lifestyles and revolutionary harmonics awarded them global reputations as improvisational mavericks.

However, on the southern side of the Equator, improvisation was already a highly developed art form. A full 30 years before the turn of the 20th century, the Brazilian genre choro had surged into the popular sphere, rousing up its listeners with its upbeat and passionate improv sections. Why is it then, that, of the two genres, both of which lean heavily on the expression of a fleeting moment, it is only jazz that has really gained global renown?

Although superficially the pacy clarinet or saxophone leads of choro sound a world apart from the swung, moodier renditions of jazz standards, the two genres are born of very similar parentage. What gave rise to these two genres was slavery, and more importantly, its abolition. In Rio de Janeiro, the abolition of slavery in 1888 created a new social class, that of the postmen, the public employees, minor business owners, generally occupied by those of African origin. Many ex-slaves had migrated to Rio de Janeiro from the state of Bahia in search of better opportunities, where the African rhythm of samba was beaten out through the bars of these Bahian “Tias”. With their flutes, saxophones, guitars, cavequinhos (a sort of ukulele), and the essential tambourine, these public employees gathered after work to play polkas, waltzes and square dances by ear. They began playing at parties, bars and in the street, gradually gathering respect and recognition, much as the first jazz musicians cruised the bars of New Orleans.

And though the creation of this genre was very much a popular one, its compositional sophistication cannot be readily denied. Its rigid rondo form, regular key changes and absence of vocals might classify the genre purely as a musician’s music. However, according to the popular Brazilian singer, Aquiles Rique Reis, ”Choro is classical music played with bare feet and calluses on the hands.” Despite its relative age, choro remains a popular and well-known genre throughout much of Brazil. Meanwhile, jazz in the United States is seen very much to be an intellectual’s taste, restricted to parents’ living rooms and the headphones of precocious adolescents.

Mário Soares, a violinist of the Bahian Orchestra, who also plays in various contemporary music groups, is keen to emphasise the importance of choro in his popular repertoire, as a result of him listening to the genre as a child and throughout his adolescence. According to him, though there are many genres which serve as influences for contemporary Brazilian music, choro is particularly influential in modern day sambas. Hermeto Pascoal, for example, a highly respected Brazilian musician, described by Miles Davis as “the most impressive musician in the world”, drew heavily on traditional choros to compose ‘O Calendário de Som’, in which he wrote a song for every day of the year.

Why is it then, that choro remains a vital influence for Brazilian contemporary music, while jazz influences are little to be found in the pop and electro music of the American charts? The answer could well be found in Brazil’s most renowned genre: the notorious samba.

Samba, under the Vargas dictatorship in the 1930s, was heralded as a vital symbol of national identity which constituted the notion of ‘Brasilidade’, or Brazilianness. The advertising of this music of both European and African origins was not just aesthetically appealing, but useful in its ability to forge multiracial and class alliances. In short, nowadays, samba and patriotism go hand in hand. And while choro was subtly nudged from the foreground, it was never lost from sight; rather, the two genres seem to have established a mutually symbiotic relationship, feeding off and influencing the other, thus ensuring the other’s popularity. Jazz, on the other hand, was positioned as a reaction to racism in the United States, emphasising the racial divide.

And though Brazilian popular music is ever evolving, and more fusion genres pop up in music magazines than their fans can keep up with, samba, with its upbeat rhythm, lyrics which narrate the everyday life of the people and essentially define what it is to be Brazilian, will never go out of fashion. And choro, as its more erudite cousin, is sure never to lose sight of its samba roots, basking in the publicity it brings this more obscure genre. As long as popular instrumentalists such as the clarinettist Paulo Moura and the guitarist Paulinho da Viola continue to compose and arrange traditional choros, all the while maintaining the unique danceable samba rhythm, choro will maintain all the zest of its humble street side origins.

The contagious buzz perpetuated by the spontaneous improvisation of both genres will indisputably continue to excite and entertain their faithful fans. However, despite the fact that jazz currently enjoys a more widely spread global success than choro perhaps ever will, the genre’s significance on its home turf might well become increasingly marginalised. Choro, on the other hand, having been promoted as a music of the Brazilian people, rather than just a “black man’s music”, will most certainly continue to enjoy a widespread national popularity for many generations to come.

A novel can be a lot of different kinds of philosophical tool. It can build meaning up, or tear it down. It can sew meaning together, or prise it apart. It can be a stage, that puts something in view, or a scaffold, that both hides something and helps it stand. The question novels are always concerned with is, what matters? That could just as easily be nothing, or one thing, or everything. Because we don’t have any default answer to this question, now, a novel must always begin here. If it is successful, it may be because it goes somewhere, or it may be because it shows us where we are.

In her Booker Prize-winning Possession, A.S. Byatt gave a tender, ruthless depiction of scholars and semioticians whose lives are defined by meaning in texts; but is that meaning found, or made? Byatt’s parallel stories seem to argue that falling in love is just as ambivalent: both a discovery and a creation. Is love, then, what matters (Possession is subtitled “a romance,” but who can say how ironically?), or are the texts – the world, the act of engaging – as important? Clare Morgan’s book bears more than a superficial resemblance to Byatt’s. Hers too asks, how central to life is love? Is there one thing in all the world that matters, or does everything… or nothing?

A Book for All and None finds scholarly protagonists Beatrice and Raymond delving into an unlikely, secret love affair between Freidrich Neitzsche and bohemian socialite Lou von Salomé. Like Roland and Maud in Possession, the intersection of their academic interests leads them predictably into each other. Like Byatt, Morgan late in the day establishes a blood link between scholar and subject. It was all along all in the family, as if genes rather than interest, affection, passion, are where meaning is located. What matters here seems to be love. Even Neitzsche, who has been handed down to us beyond all human passion, is here led to his final madness by the failure of an affair. But in this novel, unlike in Possession, there is no ironic embrace of romanticism, no triumph of love, no absolute or really any ending at all.

That is because A Book for All and None is a realist novel. Bravely, it tries to occupy a larger space than does Possession. Byatt nodded to the mechanisms of contemporary global capitalism in her sinister and ridiculous American academic Mortimer Cropper. But Morgan’s construction mogul Walter Cronk, contracted to build an Iraqi detention centre, serves to link us directly to the world we usually see only through rolling news channels. In fact, A Book for All and None fits into a specific, genealogically traceable realist tradition, one that James Wood once labelled ‘hysterical realism.’

Wood coined that term in a 2001 review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, which compared Smith’s book to a tranche of other turn-of-the-millennium novels including David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Actually, he coined it less than two weeks before 9/11. When he wrote that “there’s something essentially paranoid in the belief that everything is connected to everything else,” it was an unintended prophecy. The twenty-first century hysterical realism of A Book for All and None (as well as, for example, Ian McEwan’s Saturday) is filtered through the lens of global terrorism.

As she veers from country churches, through Oxford, to Baghdad and Dubai, from Virginia Woolf’s lighthouse to a detention centre in the desert, Morgan seems to be trying to capture something ambivalent about this paranoia of connectedness. The brand of literary scholarship practiced by her protagonists is a project of forging connections between people, texts, and times. Is the uncontrollable drama of terrorism and insurgency a symptom of the same interconnectedness, out of control? If one moment Walter can fall in love with an Iraqi woman, and see her assassinated in the next, then how can we tell what is meaningful? Is it really possible to say that an affair between two dead people, or between two aging academic types, deserves as much of our attention as the collapse of a country, as bombs and murders and riots? Does everything matter, or matter equally? Or does nothing?

What troubles Morgan’s book, as it has other examples of hysterical realism, is that as Wood wrote “the characters in these novels are not really alive, not fully human.” Raymond, Beatrice, and Walter all seem like familiar acquaintances, whom we have no wish to make into close friends. We see too little of what drives the intellectual quest of the former (the passion and anxiety that animated Posession), or the acquisitive campaign of the latter. Walter is, simply, driven: that’s how he would describe himself, but without knowing why. During his breakdown he says, “Don’t you ever get to feeling, Rafi, that nothing’s real any more? Everything’s virtual. Everything’s a parody of itself.” In this novel the characters, and their connections, and their situations, are all virtual.

So are their reactions to the world. What is impressive and beautiful in a book like Infinite Jest is the time and depth it gives to observational thought. Hal and Don are real characters made real by their unique and complex subjectivity. There are no glimpses of this here, but only surfaces. Sometimes they speak in vile commonplaces: “If you ask me, the Axis of Evil cuts right through middle America.” Sometimes they are aware enough to see how commonplaces speak through them: “What price freedom? Walter Cronk thinks, and then almost at once wonders why he is thinking it” (an echo of Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay, who says to herself, “we are in the hands of the Lord. But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that…”). We end up wondering how anyone could fall in love with any of them.

Which is a problem when we try to find what matters in this novel, for what Morgan presents us with is a mixture of surfaces at different angles. Surely her own interest, her own desire to explore the terrifying paradoxes of war, politics, and ideology, has led her to pour all these themes into her book. This is the attitude of the new maximalist novel, the post-9/11 novel, and it is admirably ambitious. But her characters don’t seem to share that interest, or that ambition. They’re a myopic, self-centred, drifting set. Through their eyes, in this novel, we see nothing but vague shapes and meaningless connections. Is that, after all, where we are now?

Punters looking for a festival in Britain are spoilt for choice these days: alongside the bastions of Glastonbury and Reading/Leeds, an army of medium sized events has sprung up over the last few years offering similar peace, love and overpriced food experiences, with the added draw of big headline acts. Hop Farm Festival in Kent, celebrating its fourth anniversary, boasts its lack of sponsorship and branding in an effort to adhere to the hippie, ethical ideal that always draws the florally bedecked teenage brigade, yet Saturday’s line-up also attracted an older crowd, deckchairs filling the main field to honour such golden oldies as Iggy and the Stooges, Lou Reed and Morrissey.

Newton Faulkner made the most of his early slot, encouraging audience members to pretend they were ‘pirates with rabies facing barbarian hordes’, and rousing the crowd by shouting, ‘Just because I’m one man with a guitar doesn’t mean I’m not allowed…jumping!’ Over in the next field, Graham Coxon of Blur fame entertained with music from his seven solo albums.

Back on the main stage Patti Smith, accompanied by Patrick Wolf on violin and harp, performed many of her old classics interspersed with strongly voiced political messages, finishing on a lively Gloria. Despite some technical problems, Guillemots, led by the flamboyant Fyfe Dangerfield, got the crowd going with an excellent set, including old favourites from their first album such as Made Up Love Song #43, introduced as ‘a song that’s vaguely about love’, and Through the Windowpane, alongside more recent hits.

Lou Reed is not someone you’d expect to please a crowd at a big festival, but few fans expected a set as self-indulgent as the one he provided. Barely acknowledging his audience, Reed led a large band through an odd selection of songs, shunning major hits such as Walk on the Wild Side and Perfect Day, and omitting tracks from seminal album Berlin altogether. Clearly reading his lyrics from screens at the bottom of the stage, each song was filled out with hefty introductory and concluding jamming, which grew tedious after the first few pieces. Towards the end of his hour he softened to include a stunning Sunday Morning and an uplifting Sweet Jane, but the inclusion of such songs as the obscure Temporary Thing from such a wide and acclaimed back catalogue at a festival sent a clear message of Reed’s lack of need or desire to win fans over.

As the sun finally went down, we were treated to a strange video on the side of the main stage, before Morrissey appeared to thunderous applause. With endearing humbleness (‘How do I follow Iggy?’) he launched into the first of many Smiths songs, I Want The One I Can’t Have. Over his long set we witnessed two shirt changes as well as a popular cover of Lou Reed’s Satellite of Love, making up for this song’s earlier no-show (speculation as to whether Reed himself would appear was disappointed). There is a Light that Never Goes Out got the whole field singing along, and This Charming Man and even controversial Meat is Murder, which apparently bombed at Glastonbury, were received rapturously. ‘It’s the most civil, most sensible, the best music festival in the country!’ cried Morrissey. His more recent solo work also went down well, with hits such as First of the Gang to Die and Irish Blood, English Heart performed to perfection.

Leaving the main stage we stumbled across the end of Carl Barat’s set and were enticed into the Bread and Roses tent by the chords of Libertines classic Don’t Look Back Into The Sun. Halfway through, this song turned into Time For Heroes, before Barat gave up on this and announced his last song, So Long My Lover, which he began to bawl out without his microphone, teetering on the edge of the stage. Civil and sensible it may usually be, but Hop Farm Festival can always surprise.