Summary:

Chris Eigemann plays Jake Singer, a well-liked middle-aged English professor to a group of privileged students at a posh high school for precocious young white men with floppy hair styles and ironic disdain, located somewhere in New York City. Having just discovered that his ex-girlfriend is engaged, Singer begins a psychoanalytic treatment with an Argentinian analyst, played with relatively understated gusto by Ian Holm. Singer meets Allegra Marshall (Famke Janssen), a woman whose deceased husband was a benefactor of the school; she is now the single (and rich) mother of two adopted children.

They fall in love, complicated slightly by Singer's father, a curmudgeonly heart surgeon, and a rather strange plot contrivance involving Marshall's failure to tell the adoption agency that her husband had died even though the biological mother had insisted that the child go to a family with a mother and a father. In one other plotline, left satisfyingly unresolved, Singer has clearly been the mentor to a young African American student, who self-sabotages at this otherwise all-white, all-privileged academy.

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Set in Sweden in the late 1950’s, around the time of Ingemar Johansson’s world heavyweight boxing championship, "My Life as a Dog" tells the involving story of a precocious boy, Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), who gets into trouble, entertains his mother (Anki Lidén) with his antics and plays with his dog, Sickan. As his mother becomes increasingly sick with a terminal illness (almost certainly tuberculosis), he is sent to live with relations for the summer in a small rural community. After an eventful vacation, he returns to his mother but she soon dies. He stays with family friends who, unable to cope with him or his behavior, send him back to his relations, where he is again welcomed, but somewhat less enthusiastically.

Throughout this, Ingemar maintains his sense of perspective by comparing his own situation to the tragedies he reads in the newspaper. In particular, he returns to the story of Laika, the Russian dog launched into space. Laika was sent into orbit in a capsule with no expectation that she would return, and it was believed that she eventually starved to death or ran out of oxygen (although recent reports, decades after Laika’s death and several years after the film was made, have acknowledged that she probably died within a few hours of launching from overheating and stress).

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This painting comes from a panel in the predella of Duccio's Maestà, his famous altarpiece; it would originally have been one part of an enormous collage of images from the Bible. Today, the Maestà has been largely dismantled. Most of the pieces remain in Siena, but some have been distributed far afield. This piece is housed in the National Gallery in London, England.

At the centre of the painting, Jesus stoops slightly to touch the eyes of a blind man. A cluster of twelve men look on from behind Jesus. To the right, the blind man appears a second time, with a fountain at his feet. He is dropping his stick and looking up to the heavens in appreciation. According to the story, Jesus had placed mud in his eyes and told him to wash it off at the fountain of Siloam for his sight to be restored.

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On New Years Eve, four strangers go to the rooftop of "Topper's House", each planning to jump to his or her death. There, rather begrudgingly, they manage to convince one another not to commit suicide. The story follows them over the next few months as they forge a type of friendship, try to re-build their lives and decide whether or not to go ahead with suicide.

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Gilbert and George's work over the past three decades has largely consisted of grid-like photomontages - note, they consider their work to be "sculpture". These often massive works are at once easily identifiable as part of Gilbert and George's oeuvre (in part because they often have Gilbert and George in them) and unflinchingly referential: to the manufactured sheen and unnaturally bright neons of Warhol, to the confrontational exposure of Mapplethorpe's photography, and, of course, to cathedral stained glass. They draw upon these same influences in their creative self-creation, their transgressive aesthetics, and their repetition and reworking of religious and secular motifs intertwined with abstractions. Gilbert and George are insistently doubles: original and derivative, repetitive and evolving, reactionary and visionary.

The Fundamental Pictures consists of a series of some 39 scultptures, most involving juxtapositions of bodily execretia - sputum, tears, urine, semen, feces - in monumental close-up; the tears, urine and semen are captured through a microscope, dessicated and crystalized. The sensational titles of the individual works, such as 'Piss Faith' and 'Spit on Shit', are fairly accurate in describing the central themes of each work. In some of the montages, Gilbert and George appear, pink and naked, against a kaleidoscopic backdrop of bright, magnified bodily fluids; in others, they are dressed in their familiar suits. They were exhibited at the Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, in 1997.

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One of Gilbert and George's very few specific portraits, this is a collage of images culled from their photographs of their friend David Robilliard. Its title, "A.D.", can be taken to mean "Anno Domini" or "After David" or, as the artists suggest, "AIDS David". It is at first an extraordinarily ugly piece, even by Gilbert and George's standards: the uniform flesh tone with pearly globules of moisture (sweat, semen), broken up by the black of shadows, the black bristles of stubble, and the black grid. The image looks like it emerged from one of William S. Burrough's novels, a nightmarish combination of mouth, orifices, bodily cavities.

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21 butter-hued felt canvases, each with a lithograph of a wig; accompanied by a number of much smaller felt canvases with slogans imprinted on them.

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When shooting a music video in Cuba, director Carlos Macovich chooses a young Havana jintera to dance opposite the model Fabiola Quiroz. Several years later, he returns to find out what happened to the pretty, feisty girl they picked off the street to dance in their video. The documentary explores Yuliet's and Fabiola's relationships with the families, their fathers, and each other.

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A severe synopsis of Foucault's first major work might show how Foucault charts the journey of the mad from liberty and discourse to confinement and silence and how this is signposted by the exercise of power. He starts in the epoch when madness was an "undifferentiated experience" (ix), a time when the mad roamed the countryside in "an easy wandering existence" (8); Foucault shows the historical and cultural developments that lead to "that other form of madness, by which men, in an act of sovereign reason, confine their neighbors" (ix), challenging the optimism of William Tuke and Phillipe Pinel's "liberation" of the mad and problematizing the genesis of psychiatry, a "monologue of reason about madness" (xi).

Central to this is the notion of confinement as a meaningful exercise. Foucault's history explains how the mad came first to be confined; how they became identified as confined due to moral and economic factors that determined those who ought to be confined; how they became perceived as dangerous through their confinement, partly by way of atavistic identification with the lepers whose place they had come to occupy; how they were "liberated" by Pinel and Tuke, but in their liberation remained confined, both physically in asylums and in the designation of being mad; and how this confinement subsequently became enacted in the figure of the psychiatrist, whose practice is "a certain moral tactic contemporary with the end of the eighteenth century, preserved in the rites of the asylum life, and overlaid by the myths of positivism." Science and medicine, notably, come in at the later stages, as practices "elaborated once this division" between the mad and the sane has been made (ix).

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The story itself commences after the vituperative dedication to Robert Southey and several stanzas mocking contemporary heroes, with Don Juan's birth in Seville to Donna Inez and Don José. The adventures begin with his affair with Donna Julia, his mother's best friend. Donna Julia's husband, Don Alfonso discovers the secret romance, and Don Juan is sent to Cadiz. A shipwreck along the way sees him stranded, the lone survivor; there he meets a pirate's daughter, Haidée. Expelled from this paradise by Haidée's father, the pirate Lambro, he is captured, and sold into slavery.

Gulbayaz, one of the Sultan's harem, has him purchased and smuggled into her company dressed as a girl; after he spends the night in the bed of one of her courtesans, Gulbayaz threatens both with death. When next we see Don Juan, he has escaped. He joins in the Russian attack on Ismail, where he fights valiantly and rescues Leila, a Muslim child. They are taken to St Petersburg, where he impresses Catherine The Great and joins her entourage. Due to illness, he is sent to London, where, as an ambassador for Russia, he joins the Court and finds for Leila a suitable governess; the final cantos see him amongst the Lords and Ladies of British aristocracy, in particular Lady Adeline and the mysterious Aurora Raby.

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