Much has been said about the 20th anniversary of Nevermind by Nirvana.  Yep, it was influential, it ushered in the mainstreaming of Seattle culture, and without it we would never have had the pleasure of getting to know Courtney Love.  Repeatedly.  I love[d] it.
But, was Kurt Cobain ever capable of wearing white speedos in a music video about Club Tropicana?  Was he ever one of the first white guys to rap in a Wham! Rap???
Did he ever sniff his arm pit from under a leather jacket on a record sleeve?  Did he ever bring hope to an entire generation of woggy guys?  He most certainly did not.
It's coming on 24 years now since George Michael released Faith.  Twenty four years on from I Want Your Sex, Faith and Father Figure.  He had already had amazing success with Wham! but more importantly, he had already established himself as a major songwriting talent;  he wrote and recorded Careless Whisper and watched it become a global smash by the time he was just 21. 
Six of Faith's nine tracks were singles, a seventh was released in a remix form and they were all corkers; all different, and famously he became the first white artist to top R&B charts with  his pretty white boy soul. 
Kurt Cobain was a troubled soul; amongst his issues were those with the relentless recording industry machine, but lest we forget that  by the time Cobain kinda took on that battle, Yorgos had already been there and done that; using supermodels in his videos instead of using his own face to promote his product was the first of his retaliations against the machine; but he must have been devastated at the fallout of his lawsuit with Sony who turned away the mighty support and promotion they had previously furnished, which had helped produce four or five US #1s from Faith.  Talent doesn't do that alone kiddies.  But he seemed to have a good sense of humour and his later reference to Prince  being ''daft'' for scrawling ''Slave'' on his cheek seemed to suggest he hadn't yet lost perspective. 
George, like Cobain, didn't always handle his fame  well; his was one of the most spectacularly documented falls from grace during a particularly puratanical time, after all, the 1990s were not all about Starbucks lattes and emancipation, and they most certainly were not supposed to be about propositioning hotties in public bathrooms.  But at least he had a sense of humour about it, and hell, he even landed another hit with the tongue in cheek Outside. 
George Michael has never come across as a slave to his commercial desires; at least not since the 1990s when he seemed to genuinely question the desire to be in the spotlight.  Listen Without Prejudice Vol.1 was a pretty remarkable offering, not quite as accessible as Faith, and later releases Older and Patience seemed to define sophisticated, adult pop, but by then any reference to George seems more concerned with making note of his social transgressions and of how his life seemed to be going off the rails. 
In recent  weeks my Facebook newsfeed has been full of updates and photos of concert goers; Georgie has been touring European cities and staging his music with the assistance of assorted symphonic orchestras across the continent.  Photos of the concert goers paint an audience of mixed ages, and by all accounts, its been a successful and well executed show.  Interviews and reports suggest he is off the grass and back into functioning mode.  
I'm always gonna be fighting the fight for GM.  I think he is exceptionally talented, has an  incredibly soulful voice, and whilst he is prone to a bit of indulgence and that dammed inclination towards heavy balladry, I've always felt the love for him, way back to those first posters I put on my wall; you know the type, him and Andrew Ridgely sitting on a plinth against a photo backdrop that looked like an eighties inspired camoflauge print.  Those daft poses, the blonde tips and the  white knitted jumpers.  Man, if you can make that look sexy and stylish, overcome the speedos and get away scot free from the responsibility of later inspiring every second european guy to maintain a goatee (guilty) AND occassionally get  your ass into a studio to make some of the best pop around, then you get my loyalty! 
Oh Georgey, you don't know it, but I've been in a relationship with you almost as long as I have been with Madge.  And that's been pretty much all my life.  And here I was always thinking I was afraid of commitment.  I think its amazing.  I think you're amazing.
So I'm not going to mind the fuss about Nevermind.  It deserves it, but, as autumn sets in and I get to start thinking about wearing my leather jacket again, I'm gonna be all about the faith.

Visitors to the FotoGrafia festival at Macro Testaccio would be best advised to visit the international pavillion after the Italian, for it is here that the unfortunate disparity between the local and the international offerings are most evident.
Here, photography is again exciting, moving, and artists use it as a medium to tell stories, share experiences and clearly articulate concepts in a way that unfortunately doesn't happen often enough in the adjacent pavillion.
Willem Popelier's __and Willem (2010) gets the ball rolling in a complicated, yet visually simplistic style.  Here, Popelier constructs a photographic genealogy of twin brothers separated at birth.  Relationships become hard  to follow, convoluted and impossible to keep track of; its a conceptual process brought to life in a cold, scientific, yet graphic way, augmented by the more thorough accompanying book which further delves into the subjects and takes you beyond the often hilarious headshots that you cling to as you try to follow the upheaval of relationships and family over the years.
Mizu no Oto (The Sound of Water), curated by Rinko Kawauchi, features the work of Japanese artists, broadly linked by a tribute to the power and symbolism of water.  Beyond the catastrophic potential of water which we have seen the worst of in the past year, Asako Narahashi delves into a world in which sight is still possible, but sound is distorted by submergence in water; images in which the photographer documents the shore from deep water are powerful and atmospheric where the horizon line is no longer relevant, orientation is distorted and our sense of involvement is heightened.  Elsewhere, Kawauchi's Illuminescence images seem to be in line with this year's theme at Venice, though thankfully they seem to belong here.
Elsewhere The Place Where I Belong, curated by Marc Prust convincingly spells out the dualities and difficulties of those who have grown up in bicultural environments.  In particular, Katherine MacDaid and Rania Matar's photo essays on life in the  Middle East are beautiful excursions into texture, pattern and design, whilst at the same time offering up intimate portraits  of life and the subjects that make up their second worlds.
Datascapes by Matthieu Bernard Raymond switches the direction around, using GIFs to integrate our obsession with graphs and  charting into environmental settings.  Here natural phenomena become living charts plotting everything from productivity to profit; in these modified black and white images we are forced to contemplate our modern life and its often diammetric opposition to the environment and our surroundings.  The temptation to fill the large space with an elongated series is resisted; the point is clearly made with the half dozen or so images that are chosen for the exhibition.
Leaving this second pavillion with the same friends I left the first with, the conversation became one of confused jubilation.  This is what a good international photographic festival should leave you feeling.  Here, the objectives of the exibits were clear, their  execution sharp, and the  images varied  and compelling.  In short, this half of the festival was a celebration of photography and not an excuse to be self indulgent or to treat audiences with a form of contempt in which its simply enough to plaster walls with images as if they are some kind of wallpaper.
Exhibition runs into October, so if you are in Rome, make sure you head there, but follow my advice!

FotoGrafia, the International Photography Festival is on again at Macro Testaccio in Rome.
This is  the tenth edition of the event, presented at one of Rome's most evocative exhibition spaces, Macro being the site of the ex slaughterhouses of the city.
As I am an absolute sucker for good photography, I felt I simply had to attend, pushing aside the underlying concerns I have in regards to photographic festivals that seem to be in every city, every town, every village of the world these days.  My initial concern that such a spread of events spreads the talent even thinner seemed to be borne out at first when I visited the first of the two pavillions, that being the work with predominantly Italian pieces in them.  It was a sense of dejavu that made me recall my visit to the Venice Biennale where the Italian pavillion left me decidedly underwhelmed, and a little frustrated.  Here again are works which may be occasionally strong at a technical level, but in terms of aesthetic and ambience are lacking.  There are two overwhelming problems in the Italian pavillion; the separately curated exhibits don't sit well with each other and there seems to be no interplay here; the exhibits make for uncomfortable bedfellows.  The other problem is editing.   Unfortunately, even the curated pieces here are lacking in editing; curators in this section of the festival seem unwilling to help their artists in thinking about what is vital, what fits, what will a viewer need to walk away with visually? 
In one exhibit, Giorgio De Finis gets so caught up in his concept of the Space Metropoliz that we are left with eighteen (!) images that even in their entirety fail to capture the heart and soul of the project's stated aims.  The project instead relies on the didactic text to explain that the photos were taken at a centro sociale on the Casalina, a district in the impoverished Eastern region of Rome, in a bid to document not only the trying conditions in which the immigrant subjects of this piece live, but to also achieve the photographer's aim of bringing the (faded) lustre of space iconography to the commune in order to elevate their spirits.  What we are left with are too many large format images on a single wall that are only linked because of their repeated use of the lunar icon and a few well placed astronaut outfits.  What's lacking are real studies of the subjects and a visible documentation of the effects of the visit, and what could have been better said with perhaps six images is instead spread too thin across eighteen.
Much better in this pavillion is Salvatore by Lorenzo Maccotta (curated by Giovanna Calvenzi).  Here, an attempt by Maccotta to better understand his father, with whom he has a strained relationship, takes him on a six month journey to the north of Africa, across Sicily and the southern islands of Italy.  At the end of this, Maccotta and Calvenzi choose no more than eight or so images, each striking, simplistic and evoking the dry, arid areas in which Salvatore's life has played out, and the gradual warming of the air between father and son.  It's a well thought out and deeply personal project which bears real fruit.
An underwhelming series by Pablo Lopez (in Rome) and a hit and (mostly) miss affair by Alec Soth compound that tendency to over populate exhibitions, but the same approach is more successful when adopted by Valentina Vannicola, whose elaborately staged and produced L'inferno di Dante, imaginatively brings to life fifteen of the differing hells  espoused in Dante's Inferno, a text with which all Italians are familiar with due to the required reading and study courses that even elementary school students here have to take.
Overall that first pavillion is very underwhelming.  As I left it with friends, they told me that they didn't know how to feel, given that they normally were accustomed to visiting artist specific exhibitions.  I explained, a good collective exhibition should leave you feeling challenged; challenged in the sense that your feelings should be competing with each other to help you determine which works you felt most strongly about, rather than leaving you feeling tired, apathetic and wondering why you mostly bothered when there were a handful of really touching and provocative works in a stable full of otherwise voiceless images.

I'm being trialled out for a new gig here in Rome, acting as a sort of Rome correspondent for a European website. 
It's a good opportunity for me to seek out and explore some of Rome's more under rated and lesser known art spaces.
Last week, I met with one of the curators of the Museo Nazionale d'Arte Orientale who is charged with the management and promotion of one of Rome's little gems. 
It's a small collection, a boutique kind of space, but one of the very few in all of Italy to focus on international art.  There are a handful of boutique spaces that grew out of private collections in Genova, Milan and the North East of Italy, but this space is the only one that I know of in Central or Southern Italy which is completely comprised of Asian Art (it too began as a private collection which was later bequeathed to the state).
It's a little bit of an underdog, competing with other Roman spaces; oriental art is not something you probably have in mind during a visit to Rome, but  its well worth a visit, especially as a respite to the endless array of Roman art and archeological sites that are already on offer in the city.

Sometimes I wonder if these days the Americans are the new  Romans.
In their day, the Romans had a political hand in almost every geographical area they touched, and because of this they were in equal parts feared, respected and despised.  Their presence was always felt.
In recent weeks, a lot of the international media's coverage has focused on America's culpability in the international arena.  Time magazine recently published an article in which it posited that the US must bear some responsibility for the famine that is crippling Somalia, borne of its policies in the war against terrorism.  Its foreign policy in the wake of prolonged campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, its uneasy relations with China and the still felt repercussions of 9/11, as we near its tenth anniversary, have absolutely hurt its international standing. 
Tariq Ali's column for the Guardian makes a lot of valid leftist points, that, along with the Time article, along with the usual China Daily coverage, just goes to show how now we are far quicker to our criticisms than we have been for a long time. 
Generally, culpability is something that has been widely protected with Freedom of Information acts that have sought to insert decades between documentations being made, and documentations being made available.  Under the prism of Wikileaks, the empires are falling, and the information is increasingly cynical, sharpened, published. 
I abhorr politics.  I find it nauseating, repetitive and stagnant; more an arena in which politicians are serving themselves and their re-election hopes than the people that voted for them.  That said, I find international politics fascinating, because unlike domestic politics, international politics is not very forgiving; new world orders rise and fall in the blink of an eye, and it can be like watching the zeitgeist, basically trying to plot where the energy, where the mood, where the new interests and power are going to be.
The price of a high profile is increased scrutiny.  Check out the Guardian's 9/11 coverage to see what I mean.