Film, Music And Cheese
April 28, 2008
 It's been an eventful couple of weeks what with Jake's three consecutive weekends of Birthday partying. Well, you're only 18 once!
Went to the Rob Carter private view, Travelling Still, at The Gallery a couple of weeks back. My those pictures were shifting well. I was mentally totting up the sales on the way round and stopped around the £250,000 mark.
Then there was Chris' visit. During which we met up with Neil [who I haven't seen in donkeys years] and Emma and a couple of late nights ensued... with Kev and Karol popping round for jerk chicken, rice and peas and flambed bananas on Saturday. Good stuff, even if I do say so myself! Better still was Tuesday's meal at the lovely Lindsay House [still not sure how I found room for the blue cheese mousse] followed by Friday, when we went along to the Real Food Festival at Earls Court, hence the picture of Alex James above. He was there talking about his cheeses, Little Wallop and Farleigh Wallop.
Last weekend was the final third of the Jake birthday trilogy upstairs in the Railway, before heading back to Kev and Karol's and partying through till Sunday. Been paying for it today mind... but headed off to the Ritzy for a preview of Grant Gee's Joy Division tonight. Good film. I haven't seen Control yet but I'd imagine they are a million miles apart. I wasn't sure the old footage and the interviews would be enough to hold it together but with a bit of judicious editing and the odd effect Grant has put an engaging documentary together. Some of the sound is obviously ropey, coming from very old video footage and it's a bit of a roll call of the deceased... Apart from Curtis, it features Martin Hannett, Rob Gretton, Tony Wilson and bit of John Peel, all sadly no longer with us. But it justifies its existence.
Categories: Music, Art, London, Photography, Food & Drink, Film
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The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other
April 10, 2008
The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other, at the Lyttelton Theatre, is a play without words. It's by no means silent but there is no dialogue. It's People Watching as an allegory of innocence and loss, space and time, love and death, wisdom and experience, war and peace; with a bleak grey set after De Chirico and lighting suggesting the passing of time.
I wasn't previously familiar with the work of Peter Handke or the history of this play but apart from the annoyingly untidy fact that it is 45 minutes longer than an hour it is surprisingly engaging. I was only once tempted to try to count how many of the cast of 27 were on stage at any given time. Maybe several times I wondered how many costume changes there were. There are apparently 450 characters, but some of them appear more than once. For something that sounds like it is being overly pretentious for the sake of it it is actually pretty funny in parts. An old lady cuts up another with her shopping trolley at one point and another couple of old folk have an impromptu "sword fight" with their sticks.
There is a lot more here about Handke's work and lectures but the site isn't very user friendly but it may explain some of the odd characters that appear amongst the everyday residents, workers and tourists in this fictional square [or is it more than one square?]. Charlie Chaplin, Tarzan and Moses spring to mind. The biblical references I can understand, characters from different era's I can understand [assumingly passing through the square at a different time?] but the fictional characters and the buffoon in the yellow tank top that mimics many other members of the cast were lost on me!. I'm not sure if this is James MacDonald's interpretation or whether they were there all along.
Any road up! It finishes on the 12th if you want to give it a try. I liked it. I can't say I fully understood it but it beats going home and watching Eastenders! Try the mezze in the Lyttelton Terrace Cafe as well. Very good! Spotted Brian Murphy on the tube on the way home too!
Really want to get to Sheffield to see Stefanie Posavec's On The Map series of works. On until mid June and top marks to the BBC for the trail for the new Medieval Mind Trip series on BBC 4. Looking forward to the Gutenberg Press and How To Build A Cathedral programmes.
Categories: Art, London, Food & Drink, Theatre
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Small Mercies
April 06, 2008
 The social whirl huh? Only one night in last week and I spent all of that going through the pictures that I took of the Small Mercies [pictured] at the Windmill in Brixton on Tuesday. A good night out but, bless them, the Mercies were up against it trying to impress on the same bill as The Scrape and The Computers [especially the latter]. Drummer, Sarah, was hacking and coughing her way through their set like a TB out-patient and it was only their second gig since parting with their vocalist.
Now sharing the vocal duties between them they put in a spunky performance and the vocals were too low in the mix to notice any shortcomings in that department. I felt a bit guilty for liking The Computers but they are an impressively tight outfit.
Is all this stuff really punk though? It all sounds like common or garden Rock'n'Roll to me. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
Other than the couple of nights of "enforced" drinking its been a relatively cultural week really. Taking in the excellent Vesturport adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis at the Lyric; which was faintly disturbing and emotionally exhausting towards the end. Bjorn Thors perpendicular performance as Gregor was hypnotic. Even when he didn't have any dialogue he twitched and convulsed all the way through. Body Politics, I imagine, wasn't discussed as publicly when Kafka wrote his novella 90+ years ago as it is today. Yet the treatment and ultimate neglect of Gregor and the dark secret that a seemingly "normal" family keeps locked in an upstairs room would keep any tabloid editor in sales for a week or more these days.
We also saw Instructions For Modern Living, at the Barbican, this week. Which was a lot more light hearted than I expected. That's not to say that it detracted from it but I kind of expected it to be a lot more of an "arty-farty" affair! Well, maybe light hearted isn't quite the term I'm looking for. Any humour was as dark as the "CCTV" footage that Duncan Sarkies narration accompanied. Duncan recently wrote an episode of Flight Of The Conchords [New Fans] and that humour was evident throughout. The spoken parts, bemoaning the Pursuit Of Happiness and futility of life in general, were accompanied by Nic McGowan who layered ambient loops of electric piano, synths, xylophone, theremin and vocals behind Sarkies effected voices. It's not like nobody has made these observations before but it's always nice to be reminded that you may not be the only one that thinks these things... Isn't it?
Two very different but extremely entertaining bits of theatre which tempts me to try Contains Violence and Have Box Will Travel, also at the Lyric and The Hour We Knew Nothing Of Each Other at the Lyttelton Theatre.
Categories: Music, London, Theatre
See my flickr set: Small Mercies
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