Top films of 2012

The move to London precipitated an increase in my cinema-going during 2012.  Being a local of the charming Brixton Ritzy Picturehouse, I feel compelled to try and experience even more of the filmic output in 2013.  Omitted from this round-up are the re-releases I was fortunate enough to see over the year which included classics such as 'Eraserhead', 'Jaws', '2001', and 'The Shining'.

5.  'Led Zeppelin - Celebration Day' (Dir. Dick Carruthers)
Shouldn't really qualify, falling as it does in the ambiguous sub-genre of musical concert film, but regardless of this, it was one of the most enjoyable cinema experiences of the year.  Disorienting as it was watching such an exhilarating concert in a darkened cinema screening, the production and direction perfectly captured both the bombastic spectacle and the intricate nuances of the individual performances that are inevitably lost in so vast an arena as the O2.

4.  'Argo' (Dir. Ben Affleck)
With little-to-no pre-existing knowledge of the true life events regarding the mission to smuggle embassy hostages out of 1970's Iran, I found 'Argo' both a gripping and entertaining thriller.  Affleck has certainly demonstrated his worth as a director and his admirable fondness for 70s-era movies (think 'All the President's Men', 'Marathon Man', etc), mimicked here with the gritty tone and texture of the film stock, even going so far in its homaging intentions as adopting the out-dated Warner Brothers logo.  Whilst the film understandably spirals into a more generic Hollywood climax, it didn't devalue it's potential for suspense with a very well-handled final set piece.

3.  'Skyfall'. (Dir. Sam Mendes)
After the utterly forgettable 'Quantum of Solace', Daniel Craig's third outing as James Bond deserves all the hyperbole and accolades that have been accorded it.  Despite the hype, in my view it is far from perfect - the idea of it being qualitatively comparable to the 2 best Bond films 'Goldfinger' and
'You Only Live Twice' is disingenuous.  This modern humanistic Bond (in this ultra-personalised  society we even require our superspy's to be lumbered withs emotional foibles) is such a different 
animal from that of Connery or Moore that it is surely useless to try and compare them.  Reassuring 
though it is to see Bond achieve a Lazurus-style comeback in the era of Bourne and Batman, the 
producers face an undesirable task of maintaining the high before surely the inevitable plummet into 
the mire of 'Die Another Day' territory.

2.  'Take This Waltz' (Dir. Sarah Polley)
The purest cinema experiences are the ones you embark on with minimal expectations or awareness
of the presentation.  So it was with this charming and engrossing portrait of dramatic realism from
Sarah Polley, about a young married couple veering into the barriers upon the arrival to their
neighbourhood of an attractive and mysterious stranger.  On paper, the familiarity of the storyline is
undeniable, yet the intricacies of the script and a stunning performance from Michelle Williams, push this film onto a higher plateau with some genuinely affecting set pieces and a number of jolting plot
developments that brilliantly dislodge the film from any potential predictability.

1.  'Shame' (Dir. Steve McQueen)
Steve McQueen's second film from January was easily the most powerful new film I saw in 2012.  A harsh, uncompromising representation of sex addiction, it tackled the subject matter in a head-on and frank manner free from distraction or unnecessary stylisation.  Michael Fassbender gives an incredible performance - surely he must be close to being his generation's De Niro? - as the man teetering on the brink of self-control and collapse into despair, a situation mirrored by his emotionally fragile sister, played by the only slightly impressive Carey Mulligan.

'Shame' is the kind of film that makes me proud to be a cineaste; a reassurance as to the capacity of film - often existing in the overlooked slipstream of franchises and remakes - to possess the hard-edged grip and composure to succeed in challenging an audience.

Tearing the city at the seams #3 - My journey to work

Coming from Brixton on either the #159 or the #3, it takes the us around 45 minutes on a smooth-flowing morning to stagger its way through South London and onwards to Oxford Circus.  The way the double-deckers lumber and lurch along the streets brings to mind a basking shark around which shoals of cyclist minnows daringly swirl and dart.

Although habitually immersed in a book during the journey, without fail I will pause upon reaching Westminster Bridge to gulp down the still surreal sight of Big Ben, Parliament, London Eye and the grey-brown Thames that unequivocally ground you in the physicality of London and continue to defy any blur of blasé.  The global icons that embody London are largely here in this short sprint of the bus across the bridge and the immediate panorama open to the eyes.  The cultural tourism route doesn’t dry up prematurely though; for the bus bends its way up Whitehall, past Downing Street, around Trafalgar Square, across Piccadilly Circus and the final furlong of Regent Street.  In terms of world-renowned symbols of a particular locality, this route must surely rank pretty high amidst everyday commutes that people embark on all around the country.

Like a voyager from the mothership I spring forth towards the top of Regent Street, directly opposite the aircraft hangar that is Apple’s flagship emporium of gadgetry.  For a  company whose wares seem to be progressively concerned with the diminutive, it seems strange to me that they should require such a gargantuan warehouse in which to display them, aligned and mounted on their sparse plinths to be goggled at and fondled .  What seems equally strange is the routine sight of hordes of people eagerly waiting for the doors to this magical kingdom of apps and gizmos to be opened at the stroke of 9am.  The small army of sales staff are positioned in formation along the expansive floor and grand staircase of the shop, waiting for the rush and fondling frenzy to begin.

It all serves as apodictic, the deified status that Apple has in our society, the mythology that has sprung up regarding these palm-sized jujus of data that we covet.  If religion has been replaced by consumerism, then Apple is surely its high priesthood; so ingrained in the belief system of popular culture are its technological commandments.  For many it seems like a trip to this iVatican is like a kind of pilgrimage such is the symbiosis between the way one relates to their iPod, iPhone or iPad, and more out-dated spiritual codes and guidelines.

Further along I reach the intersection of Oxford Circus, where the manic consumerist river of Oxford Street splices its way across Central London.  As I cross over this junction an head upwards towards Portland Place, my attention is momentarily yet routinely caught by a small elderly man, of an uncertain ethnic persuasion (although I believe he may be Turkish or Eygptian), who stands around on the lip of the mouth where tube commuters are burped up from underground.  He holds a tatty laminate A4 sheet labelled 'INTERNET' in one hand, and holds out flyers - presumably for a nearbly web cafe - in the other.  I feel a sort of kind-hearted bemusement whenever I see this persistant yet quite obviously futile commercial venture; a lone vessel bobbing up and down amidst the raging waters of the titanic marketplace all around him.  I also feel a sense of hopeless endeavour considering the omnipotence of the internet nowadays, rather as though he were trying to flog items from his car boot outside Harrods.

Moving up towards Portland Place, one passes a smattering of generic outlets and franchises that homogenise the country, cut-and-pasted throughout every town centre shopping district.  A Caffe Nero, a McDonalds, a Garfunkels restaurant (a benile tourist feeding trough), a Pizza Express and a bland All Bar One (a car showroom of a place) with wine bottles stacked around the wall as though waiting to be dispatched from a warehouse.

At the apex point is the conical spike of All Saints Church that you move towards past all the tyrannical consumerist fluff as though it were the tip of the Enlightenment triangle, perfectly positioned to lure shoppers towards their dematerialising redemption.  A perception eroded somewhat as you curve around alongside the Langham Hotel to reveal the real source of enlightenment - the BBC Broadcasting House.  Its mock-radio aerial seeming to callously mimic the lesser point of All Saints before it.  Like the forces of Apple technology animating the aspirations of the many, it is the all-powerful presence of the broadcast media that has long usurped spirituality in the role of being the predominant beacon of our times. 

Sunk here in his canyon of commerce, purchase power and avarice, this modest church looks as redundant and forgotten as the small man peddling the internet to the tide of the connected, all of whom are already in compulsive servitude to his product.

Culture - November

Books Read:

Andrew Marr - 'The History of Modern Britain' (non-fiction)
William S. Burroughs - 'Interzone'
Ian Fleming - 'Casino Royale'
Friedrich Engels - 'The part played by labour in the transition from ape to man' (non-fiction)

Films Watched:

'The Shining' (Stanley Kubrick) (at BFI Southbank)
'Room 237: Being an inquiry into The Shining in 9 parts' (Rodney Ascher) (at Empire Leicester Square)
'Argo'  (Ben Affleck) (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Twilight - Breaking Dawn (Part 2)' (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)

Albums Played:

Tricky - 'Maxinquaye'
Black Sabbath - 'Black Sabbath'
How To Destroy Angels - 'An Omen (EP)'
The Fall - 'Middle Class Revolt'
The Fall - 'The Marshall Suite'
Brian Eno - 'Lux'
Clinic - 'Free Reign'

Exhibitions:

'Henri Cartier-Bresson - A Question of Colour' (at Somerset House) (photography)

Gigs Attended:

The Walkmen - at HMV Forum, Kentish Town, London

Events:
'The Shining: Horror's greatest achievement?' (at BFI Southbank)
'Longford Lecture - Mind-bending behind bars' - Will Self (at Westminister Church Hall)

Tearing the city at the seams - city hike #2

On a Saturday that seemed determined to hurl itself into wintry depths from milder autumnal shallows, I set off on another city hike that would in the end prove as frustrating and laborious as the concept might, on the surface, appear to be.

Having recently read Joseph Conrad's seminal novel 'The Secret Agent', I set as my target destination the Greenwich Observatory.  To get there I plotted my course down Vassal Road and northwards apace along Camberwell Road before slicing a route through Burgess Park.  A recent slash-n-burn council project apparently revitalised this sizeable public park, but having only seen it in its current manicured state I couldn't be in a position to judge the merits of the redevelopment (although I understand it was trumpeted proudly by Mayor Boris Johnson).  It seemed to me however, that the local authorities' fingerprints were left all over it, smudge marks left as a residue of where they'd mangled and moulded the topography into some kind of aesthetically appropriate public space with all the necessary boxes suitably ticked.  There are carefully delineated pathways, allocations of trees and shrubs, designated sectors of leisure - tennis courts here, cycle lanes there, a fishing lake yonder.

This brings me on to another leisurable pasttime that I have often found beguiling - amateur fishing.  As I skirted around the lake edge there were a scattering of tents laid out at a few-metre intervals like some kind of protest encampment.  All the angling paraphenalia was laid out - the bait buckets, the flasks of hot tea, the assorted hooks and lines like a dentist's table.  To some extent I can understand the appeal to someone adopting fishing as a solitary activity, an esconce into the wild to be left to their own thoughts and relationship with their natural environs.  But I'll always remain puzzled by those who spend hours in a manufactured public space bordered by hulking lumps of residential concrete, staring into a man-made lake in the hunt for what surely must be a meagre quota of fish?

Misgivings about the leisure pursuits of others aside, I left the far side of the park and struck a hard right onto the Old Kent Road.  I'll admit my fair intrigue about this iconic highway and its apparent connotations of a pre-modernised London; the cheapest 'paving slab' on the Monopoly board embodied by its mucky brown colour allocation.  I expected a smattering of ye olde pie & mash shops and spit & sawdust boozers.  As I trudged along the traffic-weary road, I realised this was just another nostalgic fantasy; the kind of which London might happily indulge in the centre, but out here the illusion had been shrugged off without remorse.  The road now is lined with industrial complexes and cloneable retail parks such as an ASDA superstore that, since it was the first one I'd seen in London (and as a former employee), I was lured inside, deviated from my chartered course as though against my will like one of the consumerist zombies in Romero's 'Dawn of the Dead'.

By the time I had tramped along New Cross and up the slope of Greenwich Park to the observatory, the weather had plunged into a dismal raining bitterness with cold winds billowing around the turret of this observation point.  The view from which, across to Canary Wharf, the City and the strange inverted-crater that is the Millenium Dome, was nonetheless striking.  The hordes of people descending on the shelter and warmth of the observatory and posing for photos with legs bestriding the 'assumed' Meridian line quickly began to grate and I decided to head back downhill.

Conrad's novel 'The Secret Agent' had been inspired by a true attempt of a mysterious failed terrorist attack (perhaps the first such attack in Britain) on the observatory in 1894.  A French anarchist had detonated the bomb he had been carrying, apparently accidently.  It is intriguing how the aims of Conrad's anarchist protagonists to strike a blow in the belief systems of the populace mirror those of recent terrorist spectacles.  The belief system under threat in Conrad’s novel is that of science, mathematics and discovery; with the Observatory – being the apex point for time itself – being the geographical monument to that faith, the Vatican of science in effect.  Such a harrowing motivation was transposed into the 21^st century when Al-Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center, thereby condemning the physical embodiment of modernism, commerce and capitalism to ruin and dust.  By attacking the United States the terrorists were seeking to puncture the ingrained beliefs of its people and those of the wider western world; their faith in economic order, wealth hierarchies and the infallible strength of America.

Down the hill I observed the newly redeveloped tea-clipper Cutty Sark, frozen afloat on a window pane of solid sea.  From there I descended down into the Greenwich Foot Tunnel, an eerie subterranean lamp-lit corridor beneath the Thames linking Greenwich with the Isle of Dogs.  It was oddly displacing to duck under a millenia-old natural feature and in the process temporarily become an eutechnical tube train.  Whilst the novelty value of traversing the Thames underground is worthwhile, I did lament the fact that I had stranded myself so far from home next to that mysterious and intriguing dot on the extreme edge of the central London tube map – Mudchute.

By now after nearly 9 miles, my feet were beginning to kick up a fair protest and so I increased my pace towards the skyscraping sentinels of Canary Wharf.  As I trudged through the achingly dull surroundings of residential housing and playing fields, as though a non-descript London suburb had been up-rooted and re-planted into the squashed Docklands province, I admit to having slight reservations about the value of the lengthy hike I had just undertaken, wearying my way to a disappointing destination and then struggling to find my way to the Canary Wharf tube station.

But it is a compelling pastime nonetheless, one that I very much feel drawn to undertake from time to time, as a means of plotting the physical coordinates inside my head of the map of this vast city in which I live.  Even if I admit that to some, the worth and the merit of such a pastime may be as dubious as… I don’t know, urban fishing?!

Culture - October

Books Read:

Italo Calvino - 'If on a winter's night a traveller'
Roald Dahl - 'The Twits'
Kurt Vonnegut - 'Slaughterhouse-Five'
John Gray - 'Straw Dogs - Thoughts on Humans & other Animals' (non-fiction)
John Wyndham - 'The Day of the Triffids'

Films Watched:

'Led Zeppelin - Celebration Day' (at Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton)
'Skyfall' (Sam Mendes)
'Antichrist' (Lars Von Trier)

Albums Played:

Tame Impala - 'Lonerism'
Godspeed You! Black Emperor - 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!'
David Bowie - 'Low'
Elliott Smith - 'An Introduction to Elliott Smith'
Grimes - 'Halfaxa'
Jake Bugg - 'Jake Bugg'
Mumford & Sons - 'Babel'
The Walkmen - 'You & Me'
The Walkmen - 'Heaven'
The Walkmen - 'A Hundred Miles Off'

Gigs Attended:

Tame Impala - Brixton Academy, London

Theatre:

'Carnival of Crows' (part of London Horror Festival) - Etcetera Theatre, Camden

Events Attended:

'Intelligence Squared - Will Self' at Bloomsbury Publishing, London
'Shrinking England' - Will Self in conversation, Kings College, London

Other:

London Aquarium

Led Zeppelin - 'Celebration Day'

I had a rather strange and disorientating experience recently whilst viewing Led Zeppelin’s ‘Celebration Day’ film of their 2007 reunion gig, at my local Brixton cinema.  Stunning though the spectacle and performance was, it felt profoundly surreal to be seated in the dark comfort of a cinema, gazing raptly at a rock & roll concert blaring from the big screen. 

Somehow it feels fairly perverse, to watch such a visceral live experience – which is what, in essence, the best music concerts are – in such sedate and refined conditions.  If there is any synergy between the customary rock concert abandon – cheering, fist pumping, singing along – and the cinema-house, it strikes me as being both uneasy and far from naturalistic. 

The best rock concerts I’ve attended are the nearest to a spiritual experience as I’m likely to encounter; they are euphoric, rapturous and the perfect vent for a collective out-pouring of joy and emotion, the thrill of people celebrating that rarest of things - mass consensus in an appreciation of those performing.  Cinematic experiences on the other hand, by the very nature of the film medium, are not at home to similar levels of abandonment.  Films may excite, scare, amuse or even move us to tears, but they exist as representations of events carefully designed to inspire particular emotional responses from their audience.  It is the physicality and spontaneity of live music events and the very proximity to the architects of the entertainment (in the same way as theatre), that demands a different level of engagement and often provokes a different level of reaction.  The more I thought about these strange juxtaposing strands being reluctantly entwined, the more even innocent foot-tapping and head-nodding felt faintly ridiculous. 

That was until I noticed something about the filmed audience in attendance at the O2 Arena that skewed my perception.  For the most part the audience were a gleaming constellation of handheld recording devices, each one capturing that precise moment in time as their own unique and personal concert film.  As the opening notes of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ chimed out, so the crowd illumined like the nightly sprawl of a major city.  As Jimmy Page posed with his trademark violin bow during ‘Dazed and Confused’, the allure of this ‘photo opportunity’ was lost on no one, as each clamoured, sprouting a forest of arms, to gain an unobstructed shot.  Indeed I half expected the cinema attendees to whip out their own devices such was the occasionally photogenic splendour of the big screen representation.

This, of course, is the usual run of things for mostly every concert I have attended in person.  It is a very real curse of the technological times, and one I have been as guilty of propagating on occasion.  In Manchester seeing Roger Waters, I was asked to edge to one side in my tiered seat as I was obscuring the carefully-poised camera of a man behind.  Seeing U2 in New York, I noticed one or two people in my vicinity actually watching the concert whilst filming through their mini-screens, hypnotically drawn to the far-more cogent spectacle they were personally capturing.

In actuality then, my cinema viewing of Led Zeppelin’s historic gig, was the perfect arena in which to gain an accurate – or perhaps hyper-real – interpretation of the audience experience.  Instead of the pristine professionalism of the film, the intricacy of the edit, and the slick direction; a better and truer transmutation of the night would have been to produce a spliced-together amalgamation of the audience footage wrenched from the cavernous vaults of YouTube.  A grainy, wobbly, occasionally-obscured hodgepodge of angles and views that might have served as a closer rendering of what it meant to have been part of that legendary night’s audience.

Culture - September

Books Read:

Will Self - 'Umbrella'
E.M. Forster - 'The Machine Stops'
Guy Debord - 'Society of the Spectacle' (non-fiction)

Films Watched:

'The Last House on the Left' (Wes Craven)
'Anna Karenina' (Joe Wright) (at Odeon, Leicester Square)

Albums Played:

The XX - 'Coexist'
Alt-J - 'An Awesome Wave'
Bob Dylan - 'Tempest'
M83 - 'M83'
Muse - 'The 2nd Law'
Liars - 'Drum's Not Dead'

Theatre:

'The Thirty-Nine Steps' - Romsey Operatic & Dramatic Society - Minack Theatre, Cornwall
'Private Peaceful' - Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London

Events:

'The Digital Essay and Contemporary Literature' - Will Self - London Review Bookshop
'Will Self - Umbrella book launch' - Southbank Centre
'Open House London' - Lloyds of London building
Will Self book event - Clapham Books, Clapham High Street

Tearing the City at the Seams - London hike no.1

The city reclines as a vast uncontrollable vista, open-armed with opportunity and ripe for exploration.  Having lived in London for close to 4 months, I thought it was time I started to stride forth, with the intent of a contemporary urban flaneur, and grasp the geography, the scale and the ordinance of this swollen conurbation.  Of late I have become increasingly amoured with the concept of psychogeography; intrigued with the theories involved with shaking the rigid confines and systems of the city into flux like a snowglobe. 

The urban dweller exists in a defined, orderly system of geography, a series of pivot points between work, home and miscelleneous forms of leisure and social activity.  The links between each are like a chain, heavy and compulsive in their application.  We are psychologically land-locked into these habitual modes and methods of orientating and navigating ourselves in our relationship with the city.  I have come to subscribe to the psychogeographer's credo that the personal perambulation of the city over long, un-determinated distances can serve almost as a kind of therapy in terms of how we view ourselves in relation to our environment.  In effect, a way of liberating ourselves from the physical rigidity of routine.

By spending several hours on foot, progressing through the urban landscape at random or with an end destination in mind, we temporarily re-model the city for ourselves, translating the purpose and conformities of the city into a better-suited language whose native tongue is your's alone.  This is my attempt to shrug off the straitjacket of the urban, the comfort of the familiar, to tear the city at the seams.

I began on an ashtray-grey Sunday lunchtime, leaving my apartment on Brixton Road, South London, and heading towards Stockwell.  Down Landsdowne Way I passed the London Bus Garage - a building that acts as the refuge for all the city's double-decker shepherds that seal so many of us into the convenient routine of daily life traversing this city.  The building itself is shaped with a humpback arched design like rising and falling concrete waves, or the ribs of a large whale, in and out of which flow the buses like shoals of red plankton.

Overpowering the far end of the garage is a tall 1960s tower block of the brutalist style, with balconies jutting out here and there like enormous Jenga pieces being edged out from behind by a wary finger.  Teetering right down Guildford Road - a curious juxtaposition between a concrete migraine of cracked council flats on one side and quite elegant Victorian terraced townhouses on the other - one of the latter dwellings being home to Will Self.  A towering intellectual and himself a keen psychogeographer, Self has played a pivotal role in my own fumbling orientation within this idea-set of city hiking and walking, and more generally as a thinker, of civilisation and its discontents.

Progressing along Wandsworth Road, two different structures flirt for the eye's attention.  On the right hand side is a breathtakingly drab industrial tower with pipes and vents sprouting off at all angles like an abandoned plant left to grow unweildy and out of control.  Two anorexic pipes scale one side acting as the crutches upon which the rest of the building staggers; a decrepit remnant to the industrial decades gone before.  Meanwhile on the left, the new St George's Wharf tower hurtles upwards like a glass cigar stood upended.  Similarly devoid of any apparent human interaction, it almost seems as though it too has been left to grow entirely at its own volition, fuelled by a structural photosynthesis towards the sky.

I walk across the great River Thames over the Vauxhall Bridge and through the upmarket enclave of Victoria; all wide pavements, white-wall terraced townhouses and private gardens sealed off for each of these gated communities.  From there I headed into Hyde Park from the south side, cutting across Rotten Row, the world's first major bridleway - in a sense the King's personal motorway - and also the first to be lit at night in an effort at deterring highwaymen intent on muggings.

I was reminded of the time, some 5 or 6 years ago, when my Dad and I came to Hyde Park to see Roger Waters play an exemplary concert and then, because it was one of the hottest days of the year, sleep under a tree along the perimeter of Park Lane.  At dawn the next morning I remember we walked through the park past a panoply of wasted people, collapsed revellers who had not made it home and had given in to exhaustion; casualties of their own excess.  Strolling around Embankment and Buckingham Palace at that early Sunday morning time provoked scenes eerily cut-and-pasted from the opening of '28 Days Later' - a city abandoned for indiscernible reasons.

I completed this first hike by blazing on up through the park towards the Paddington Basin area, and from there along Regents Canal and Euston Road to my final destination of the British Library.  The reason I wanted to end my walk at this hulking red-brick monolith of words was to attend their current exhibition – ‘Writing Britain:  Wastelands to Wonderlands’.  It presented a glut of well-known writers and their works that had been directly inspired by or written as reflection of the British landscape throughout the centuries, from Milton’s dark satanic mills of industrialised Britain, to Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’, Ted Hughes’ poetry and JG Ballard’s urban dystopias. 

It served as a stark reminder of the hallowed names that have moved through the city of London in the times gone by, plundering it for metaphor and rhyme, allowing the prose to absorb the vibrant environment like wet sand.  Escaping the rigid confines of the city’s order, defying its constricting logic is the modest aim of these hikes across London.  I lay considerable hopes on them facilitating, to some extent, the pulling back of the veil on new realms of inspiration and possibilities of perception.

Culture - August

Books Read:

Luke Rhinehart - 'The Dice Man'
Joseph Conrad - 'The Secret Agent'
Andrew Marr - 'The Making of Modern Britain' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'Vermillion Sands' (short-stories)

Films Watched:

'Oldboy' (Park Chan-Wook)
'The Talented Mr. Ripley' (Anthony Minghella)
'The Mist' (Frank Darabont)
'The Sixth Sense' (M. Night Shamalyan)
'Hunger' (Steve McQueen)
'Encounters at the end of the world' (Werner Herzog) (documentary)
'London - A Modern Babylon' (Julian Temple) (documentary)
'RoboCop' (Paul Verhoeven)
'Take This Waltz' (Sarah Polley) (@ Ritzy Playhouse, Brixton)
'Tenebrae' (Dario Argento)
'Synecdoche, New York' (Charlie Kaufman)

Albums Played:

Blur - 'The Great Escape'
The Beatles - 'Rubber Soul'
Bob Dylan - 'Bringing it all back home'
Robert Fripp & Brian Eno - 'The Equatorial Stars'
Neil Young - 'After the Gold Rush'
Nick Drake - 'Pink Moon'
Wire - 'Pink Flag'
This Will Destroy You - 'Young Mountain EP'
Belle & Sebastian - 'The Boy with the Arab Strap'

Exhibitions:

'Travel Photographer of the Year Award' @ Royal Geographic Society (photography)
'Damien Hirst - Retrospective' @ Tate Modern
'Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands' @ British Library

Culture - July

Books Read:

Jim Thompson - 'The Killer Inside Me'
Marshall Berman - 'All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity' (non-fiction)

Films Watched:

'Shrooms' (Paddy Breathnach)
'Rec' (Jaume Balagueró & Paco Plaza)
'Insidious' (James Wan)
'The Eye' (David Moreau & Xavier Palud)
'2001: A Space Odyssey' (@ Prince Charles Cinema, Soho) (Stanley Kubrick)
'Teeth' (Mitchell Lichtenstein)
'Ten Things I Hate About You' (Gil Junger)
'Annie Hall' (Woody Allen)
'Drag me to Hell' (Sam Raimi)

Albums Played:

Four Tet - 'Rounds'
Deerhunter - 'Cryptograms'
Liars - 'WIXIW'
Grimes - 'Geidi Primes'
A Place to Bury Strangers - 'A Place to Bury Strangers'
U2 - 'U22: The Best of the 360 Tour'
Aphex Twin - 'druqs'
M83 - 'Hurry up, we're dreaming'
Sonic Youth - 'Goo'
Carter Tutti Void - 'Transverse'
Cliff Martinez - 'Drive' (OST)
White Hills - 'White Hills'

Concerts:

Prom 20: BBC Philharmonic Orchestra @ Royal Albert Hall, London

Exhibitions Attended:

'The Rolling Stones: Fifty Years' @ Somerset House, London (photography)

Culture - June

Books Read:

Fyodor Dostoyevsky - 'The Idiot'

Films Watched:

'Funny Games' (Michael Hanake)
'Videodrome' (David Cronenberg)
'Jaws' (Steven Spielberg) (at the Ritzy Playhouse, Brixton)
'Dreamcatcher' (Lawrence Kasdan)

Albums Played:

Crocodiles - 'Endless Flowers'
The Walkmen - 'Heaven'
Grimes - 'Visions'
Hot Chip - 'In Our Heads'
Sleep Research Facility - 'Nostromo'
Pond - 'Frond'
A Place to Bury Strangers - 'Worship'

Exhibitions:

'Oil' - Edward Burtynsky - Photographer's Gallery, London (photography)
'Brains - The Mind as Matter' - Wellcome Collection, London
Damien Hirst - 'For The Love of God' - Tate Modern

Theatre:

'The Phantom of the Opera' - Her Majesty's Theatre, London

Culture - May

Books Read:

Will Self - 'My Idea of Fun'
Stephen Hawking - 'A Brief History of Time' (non-fiction)
Ray Bradbury - 'Fahrenheit 451'


Films Watched:

'The Dictator' (Larry Charles)

Albums played:

Beach House - 'Bloom'
The Brian Jonestown Massacre - 'Aufheben'
Sigur Ros - 'Valtieri'
The Walkmen - 'Bows and Arrows'

Gigs Attended:

The Fall - Coronet Theatre, Elephant & Castle, London

Culture - April

Books read:

J.G. Ballard - 'The Drought'
Friedrich Engels - 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific' (non-fiction)
Franz Kafka - 'The Castle'

Films Watched:

'The Hunger Games'

Albums Played:

Orbital - 'Wonky'
Esben and the Witch - 'Hexagons EP'
Spiritualized - 'Sweet Heart Sweet Light'
Jack White - 'Blunderbuss'

Culture - March

Books Read:

Aldous Huxley - 'The Doors of Perception' (non-fiction)
Aldous Huxley - 'Heaven and Hell' (non-fiction)
Ernest Hemingway - 'For Whom the Bell Tolls'

Films Watched:

'Recount' (Jay Roach)
'In Bruges' (Martin McDonagh)
'A Night to Remember' (Roy Ward Baker)
'The Blue Max' (John Guillermin)

Albums Played:

Bruce Springsteen - 'Wrecking Ball'
Paul Weller - 'Sonik Kicks'
Gotye - 'Making Mirrors'
The Soft Moon - 'Total Decay - EP'

Culture - Febuary

Books read:

Friedrich Engels - 'The Condition of the Working Class in England' (non-fiction)
J.G. Ballard - 'Miracles of Life' (auto-biography)
Will Self - 'The Unbearable Lightness of being a Prawn Cracker' (non-fiction)
Charles Dickens - 'Great Expectations'

Films Watched:

'Eraserhead' (David Lynch) (@ the BFI Southbank)
'The Woman in Black' (James Watkins)
'Saving Private Ryan' (Steven Spielberg)

Albums Played:

Trentemoller - 'The Last Resort'
Lana Del Rey - 'Born to Die'
Cliff Martinez - 'Contagion OST'
The Album Leaf - 'In a Safe Place'

"We are currently experiencing severe delays on the London Underground..."

...so intoned the announcer, with a regret that was smeared on like cosmetics on an over-zealous teenage girl. The exhalation of irritance reverberated around the crowded platform like a Mexican wave. Sensing the collective brewing of discontent, a toddler in its mother's arms began to wail, whilst a man further along the platform swore loudly before diving back inside the pages of his Evening Standard as though ashamed of his uncharacteristic coarseness. There followed an advisement to seek alternative modes of transport but, it seemed, this time the people's patience had begun to seriously fragment.

The quotidian nature of the tube, so much a reluctant entity burrowing its way through people's lives, had been reeling in almost perpetual paralysis since the descent onto London of the world and their personal trainers for the duration of the Olympic Games. Now, 9 days in - with the stench of anti-climatic disappointment palpable in the air - it seemed like finally the people had had enough; all apparently operating on some kind of mass telepathic apoplexy.

Ignoring the tannoy pleas for passengers to find solace on additional bus routes being provided, the people across the network - from Elephant & Castle to Maida Vale began to rise up and barricade themselves inside the stations, easily overriding station officials who were only too happy to surrender their posts and clock off early.

The people, growing from initial hesitancy into unabashed enthusiasm, quickly formed distinct factions, adopting their own roles and responsibilities as part of this improvised subterranean lock-in. Women and young children gathered together food supplies from the various newspaper stands and vending machines, whilst besuited City types took charge of the distribution and allocation of resources. Burly men fought off the immediate attempts by police to bring an end to the unfolding subway seige and gain entry, but these efforts were hastily pacified by higher authorities.

Indeed, government, eager to avoid drawing attention to the civil disobedience whilst the spotlights were brightly trained on the city, declared a media blackout on the event and all attempts to coerce information from them were met with feigned ignorance and dismissal. And so the decision was made simply to contain the situation and wait for it to reach its own conclusion, as if there had been an outbreak of some malignant virus which needed to be isolated in quarantine.

Once everyone became aware of their prolonged confinement it was intriguing to note the effects that manifested themselves in this new submerged community. Initially, realising the loss of online connectivity was total, many lapsed into states of withdrawal sickness, hugging themselves tightly, sweating without exertion, and compulsively checking electronic devices in the vain hope that their feeble signal may have been received and beamed back. Tourists, who were from the outset rather alarmed at this development sending their plans awry, slowly came to accept the situation; perhaps considering it to be some kind of underground carnival that their guidebooks had omitted to mention.

Everyone waited on the platforms for the next trains to roll on through; everyone melted through the doors like grains of sand in an hourglass, but people chose to depart from their normal routes, sensing almost that they had been liberated from oppressive routine and were now free to stretch out across the network. They chose to ride the Northern line instead of Circle, Waterloo instead of Piccadilly, or stayed on until Zone 4 instead of normally disembarking in the frontier land of Zone 3. Ingrained habits were still evident - there was still the furtive surveillance of the carriage in an effort at locating a vacant seat, and many still raced for the closing doors, apparently unconcerned with the fact that they no longer had any appointments to keep. Slowly, people began to tire of the free newspapers - which were after all, several days old - and began to interact with one another, as nervous and shy as couples on a first date.

Once this major milestone had been reached the underground began to resemble an ant colony of collective high spirits, almost harking back to the times of the Blitz (only this time the only horrors being evaded were equestrian or synchronised swimming heats). The tunnels echoed with the joyous sounds of open and unlicensed busking from every white-tiled alcove; and children wore themselves out racing up and down escalators. Each station was alive with a celebratory kinship of the kind that government had been so desperate to invoke nationwide; each train running between stations was like patriotic bunting being draped all across the city.

Of course such solidarity could not last for long. Like phosphorus the glow would burn fast and fade faster. News seeped down into the network that the Olympic torch had been lowered and cradled off by the next nation, the structures dismantled and packed away, and the swimming pools drained. The sense of melancholy and slight embarrassment was pervasive amongst the community; they had stayed at the nightclub right until the end, with the music stopped, lights brightened and the awful feeling that they should have left several hours ago. Eye contact began to drop, glances were lowered and hands nervously twitched at gadgets once again.

Slowly but steadily the people began to rise up from the underground like a defeated guerilla army, blinking aggressively at the daylight glare, shoulders weighing heavy as they foraged for excuses for their rebellion like guilty teenagers returning to the parental home. Normal life could now resume its delayed course.

REVIEW: A Life During Wartime - Don McCullin exhibition 'Shaped By War'

Don McCullin - 'Shaped By War'
(Imperial War Museum, London, 19th Jan 2012)

There is something about photography, some innate sense of actuality - a moment plucked from reality and frozen within the frame - that lends it an almost helpless objectivity. You may be forgiven for breezing through a gallery of artwork waiting for that revelatory discovery of brilliance to launch itself at you from the periphery, or for feeling disenchantment on viewing a painting held in lofty esteem by the masses. There is a certain element of self-investment in viewing art; what you get from it is often tangential to the mentality you approach it with. Because what we are viewing is purely the artist's representation of his private reality, rendered through skill and technique to canvas, it does require a certain amount of subjective engagement with the artist's vision.

Art leaves itself open to ambivalence and misconception. Photography, on the other hand, by its very nature cast in concrete verity (and therefore also because of the lesser demands on the viewer's own imagination in tandem with that of the artist's), demands a reaction.

Indeed it would be impossible to be ambivalent about the work of Don McCullin, photojournalist for 'The Observer' and 'The Sunday Times', and purveyor of some of the most visceral and harrowing war images of the 20th century. Sent to cover some of the most dangerous places in the world - from the Cypriot civil war, to Vietnam, the Londonderry riots, to Cambodia - the exhibition is perfectly encapsulated by its title. It is as much a study of the man behind the lens, a life well and truly 'shaped by war'.



The horror and the intensity of the situations are scorched across every one of McCullin's well-crafted images. At times you can actually sense the panic and the chaos, the bullets flying overhead, the mud and the stench of fear. You stare at the photo of the shell-shocked soldier in Vietnam and you can almost hear the bombs punctuating the air around him like morse code. You stare at the famous image of the distraught Turkish wife (which won him the World Press Award in 1964) and can almost taste the bitter despair crystallised in a moment of raw human emotion.



Of course no photograph can capture the sheer terror of the situations as witnessed first-hand. Watching the accompanying documentary film, McCullin admits to an 'uneasy enjoyment' of his time spent in such hostile environments. In a way this is perfectly understandable. The level of tension and adrenalised energy that must be exerted and relied upon whilst immersed in a war zone, where the next bullet or mortar blast could be the one that claims you, must be undeniably potent and surely have intoxicating agencies. In the same way as the motor-sport driver, stunt pilot or daredevil straddles the boundary of mortality, the thrill of emerging on the other side alive must be as compulsive as any drug.

As with any member of the armed forces, constantly exposed to such extreme situations from which they may not survive, the succumbing to combat neurosis and the readjustment process once back home must be disorientating and harsh. Indeed, McCullin once said - 'when I was at home away from war, I was unhappy'. This must have invoked his obsessive urge to dive back into the ferocity of the front line, to re-engage with danger time and again; and perhaps elucidates his anger (alongside obviously a sense of professional pride) when refused a press pass to cover the Falklands conflict and his regret at having visited but 'not seen any action' in the Gulf war.

This is not to suggest any perverse revelling in such situations, but instead demonstrates a burning desire to be at the epicentre of the event, thereby capturing it as accurately, honestly and unflinchingly as possible. It is only natural that one's psychology be permanently altered by the exposure to murder and destruction on such a grand scale. By comparison, normal everyday life must forever after assume a kind of removed and faded tonality, akin to underdeveloped photo film in a dark-room.

One of the pervading emotions McCullin expresses throughout his story is of a sense of guilt. A guilt at being in such close proximity to men killed for their country, and being forced by professional duty to stay emotionally detached, remain partisan and capture the moment as truthfully as able. As he says, 'what a way to make a living!' His yearning to 'do his bit' is emphasised in moments such as when, embroiled in the Battle of Hue, he carried a wounded solider out of the firing line. He also described feeling like 'a Judas to both sides' when covering the Londonderry riots in Northern Ireland.

Ultimately though, this is misguided guilt, albeit also perfectly understandable. The overriding lesson to be gleaned from the exhibition is just how necessary and vital photojournalism is in terms of throwing bright light on the darkest of human endeavours. With the rise of 21st century 'citizen journalism', where anybody with a camera phone can assume a McCullin-style role, the importance of responsible and unbiased representation cannot be understated.

However they enter the public domain, we must feel an obligation to view these images, regardless of how distressing, in order that we might be afforded a more salient understanding of the events as they happened, but never allow them to lull us into complacent acceptance, thereby neglecting to ponder the reasons why the events had to happen at all.

Culture - January

Books read:

William S. Burroughs- 'The Naked Lunch' (re-read)
F. Scott Fitzgerald - 'The Great Gatsby'
Christopher Hitchens - 'God Is Not Great' (non-fiction)
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels - 'The Communist Manifesto' (non-fiction)
George Orwell - 'Critical Essays' (non-fiction)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (and other poems)'


Films watched:

'Come and See' (Elem Klimov)
'The Wind that shakes the Barley' (Ken Loach)
'Pickpocket' (Robert Bresson)
'DIal M for Murder' (Alfred Hitchcock)
'About Schmidt' (Alexander Payne)
'Network' (Sidney Lumet)
'Of Gods and Men' (Xavier Beauvois)
'Shame' (Steve McQueen)

Exhibitions:

'Don McCullin - Shaped by War' - Imperial War Museum, London (photography)

Albums played:

The Big Pink - 'Future This'
Saul Williams - 'The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust'
I Break Horses - 'Hearts'
M83 - 'Saturdays = Youth'