"Things have got awfully tidy recently. There is a lot of finish on things. Clingfilm gloss and the neatest of hospital corners."

Got really sucked into the Serpentine's Derek Jarman show put together by Isaac Julien the other week. Though I have a soft spot for The Last of England and Jubilee I was never really a huge fan of the films (bar Blue I guess) but then liking the work never seemed all that important about Jarman. It was always about something else -  his pursuit of a space outside the mainstream,  political anger, beauty, gay sex and the weird meeting of classical and homemade aesthetics. There was always a whiff of the pantomime, someone says in Julien's recent Derek documentary. Yes, that and the home-movie and the home-porn shoot. Serpentine for this show is mainly slowed down and dispersed video and film - Blue from floor to ceiling in one room, a very dreamy five (?) projection installation in another, Julien's movie in the third space. It was such a good place to spend the afternoon - a lot of people leant against the wall in the half light or sat curled and soaking it in. Thatcher crops up once or twice in the Julien film. That fucking voice and those eyes are going to stay with me to the grave. Hard to comprehend the psychic impact that person had. Ughh. Jarman's more than a good antidote though and there's so much of him, he's practically seeping out of the walls - warm and dark and funny and dying and generous with his brilliant eyes - you can find some kind of exemplary strength and dignity there.

"Maybe now it is as bad as you and I used to say it could possibly get.. " Tilda Swinton's letter to Jarman, written after his death, portions of which are used as a narrational frame in the film, got slagged off for its hypocrisy somewhere I read at the weekend, because of all its' anticommerical talk. I liked the letter though and just found a link to a version of it online here. Anyone who wants to talk about "the dead hand of good taste" has got my ear, especially if they've got eyes like Tilda's.

"The dead hand of good taste has commenced its last great attempt to buy up every soul on the planet, and from where I'm sitting, it's going great guns. Art is now indivisible from the idea of culture, culture from heritage, heritage from tourism, tourism from what I saw emblazoned recently on the window of an American chain store in Glasgow - "the art of leisure". That means, incidentally, velours lounging suits by the ton."

I came out of Serpentine into a different London, thinking we need to be angrier. And kinder.