An amazing moment happened last night during the finale of the Hackney Film Festival, ran by friends of mine, which has taken place all this weekend. The evening saw a number of short documentaries being showed, after which a feature-length documentary called Swandown was screened, directed by Andrew Kötting and starring himself and Iain Sinclair (author of London Orbital and Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire). The film, essentially a ‘psycho-geography’ 

travelogue, involves Kötting and Sinclair (who also took part in a Q&A in person, pictured left) pedalling a swan-shaped pedalo (pictured below) all the way from Hastings to Hackney in east London along various English Thames estuary rivers which connect the sea with London. As with London Orbital, the characters they encounter en route are as much a part of the story as the ride itself. What’s significant is that the film ends as Kötting arrives, still pedalling on the river, at the Olympic site, where sinister recorded voices tell them that he has to leave (Sinclair himself has remained hugely ambivalent over the Olympics). The screening took place in an open-air square in Hackney Wick, surrounded by luxury flats and owned by an adjacent venue called Carlton London – just across the water, incredibly enough, from the Olympic Stadium, which just happened to be hosting the closing ceremony of the Paralympics at the same time, and thus the ending to the whole summer of London 2012 Olympic/Paralympic events. We could hear Coldplay echoing across the water as they played their usual lighters-aloft anthems. Near the end of the film, before Kötting’s arrival at Olympic Park, Sinclair takes leave of the pedalo, presumably because he was near his home (he lives in Hackney). At the moment Sinclair left the screen, the stadium erupted in a riot of fireworks, along with the rest of the Olympic Park. And what a display: it must have lasted for a good five minutes. Hence the pictures above that I managed to capture, and which should give you some idea of what an amazing moment it turned out to be. Another detailed account of the night can also be viewed here, by one of the HFF founders. 

Photo above taken from Swandown's website

 And in the meantime: goodbye to London 2012 and an incredible summer.

I’ve been in some weird-looking toilets in my time, but this one is truly something special: upstairs in The Old Crown on New Oxford Street in the men’s toilets, the trough-like urinal features engravings of assorted dictators and political figures (along with, inexplicably, some bunny rabbits and sunflowers). So when you pee, you’re doing it on Vladimir Putin et al. You have to hand it to any pub that stumps up something like this; it comes as a surprise after a few pints, that’s for sure…any help with who the dictators are indicated with a question mark below would be much appreciated. 
 

Top row: Saddam Hussein, ?, Kim Jong-il, ?, Adolf Hitler, a bunny rabbit, Idi Amin.

Middle row: ?, Leon Trotsky, Imelda Marcos, Josef Stalin, Muammar Gaddafi, Pol Pot.

Bottom row: a bunny rabbit, Vladimir Putin, another bunny rabbit, Yasser Arafat.

The pub is also worth visiting for checking out the huge murals on the wall of the adjacent street. One seems to depict the Queen with an incendiary device in her hand (or can of spray paint), an illegible (to me anyway) slogan above her, while directly underneath it The Beatles are depicted covered in terrorist-style face scarfs. Topical, you could say. 

Really enjoying the current issue of the BFI's Sight & Sound magazine, with its 2012 poll of 'The Greatest Films of All Time'. I normally hate 'Top 100 lists' but this one is pretty interesting. There's actually two polls, the first of which involved "more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles" submitting their ten favourites, from which the top 100 films were compiled according to number of votes; the other a top ten list polled by 350 directors. You can view the lists for both here, but what’s most of interest is seeing Citizen Kane not topping the list this time – a film that I only managed to get round to seeing recently, and which seems to be beyond reproach. While it’s a great enough film in of itself, somehow it doesn’t strike me as any more special than any of the other films on S&S's list.

As many of the contributors of the first list mentioned themselves, compiling a list of ten has meant just as much about what’s been left out as kept in. Being limited by only ten choices has meant an almost agonising process of leaving out almost equally important films for this writer. There's four key London-set films which really should be on there somewhere, given the name and nature of this blog (Blow-Up by Antonioni, The Long Good Friday, Mona Lisa by Neil Jordan, and Performance by Cammell/Roeg); instead I ended up settling for Blade Runner, a film I've always loved since adolescence (as with the Coppola, Malle, Scorsese and Kubrick choices - so there's slightly selfish reasons for my list), and which is still as great a dystopian vision of a future city as it gets. There's also directors such as Kurosawa, Buñuel, Bergman, Vigo, Greenaway, French new wave cinema, Metropolis, Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Herzog's Nosferatu and Fitzcarraldo…not to mention more well-known classics such as Alien, This Is Spinal Tap, Taxi Driver, The Shining, The Blues Brothers and Apocalypse Now. All magnificent in their own way. Then there's more recent cinema, from which highlights include Darren Aronofsky's Pi and Requiem For A Dream, Todd Solondz, British productions such as Children of Men and Never Let Me Go, and films from as far afield as Iran to Australia. The more you think about it, the more you realise that limiting to just ten is a near impossible task.

My list (below) is in no particular order, with the exception of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is the one film that I’d take to a desert island. Why? Because it’s simply perfect, visually and thematically. No other film asks as bigger questions of humanity. Any suggestions for reader's own top tens?

1. 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)

2. Raging Bull (Scorsese)

3. Andrei Rublev (Tarkovsky)

4. Stalker (Tarkovsky)

5. The Holy Mountain (Jodorowsky)

6. Three Colours Triology (Kieślowski) *

7. The Godfather Part II (Coppola)

8. Au Revoir Les Enfants (Malle)

9. Blade Runner (Scott)

10. Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog)

* Actually three films, so technically cheating – but what the heck…

So the London 2012 Olympics are now with us. I enjoyed the opening ceremony, from the astonishing angel-like winged bikers floating around the stadium during the Arctic Monkeys’ cover of The Beatles "Come Together", to hearing Fuck Buttons on the soundtrack, to the sheer Spinal Tap nature of the opening sequence, in which a morris dancing-filled green and pleasant land makes way for industrialisation under the watchful eye of Kenneth Brannagh, playing Isambard Kingdom Brunel. You almost expected Stonehenge to appear.

Unlike the stately, all-powerful, slightly totalitarian nature of Beijing four years ago, the London 2012 ceremony felt like a much more alive and vibrant event, celebrating individuality as much as the collective (even if the text messaging bit did feel slightly naff, as if trying to “get down with the youth”). The whole thing was a truly hallucinatory, lysergic affair, what with the flying Mary Poppins, giant Lord Voldemort, cauldron-like rings lifted into the air, fluorescently clothed dancers, aforementioned winged bikers, and a huge house in the centre of the stadium turned into a giant graphic equaliser. God knows what it must have looked like on LSD. Director Danny Boyle’s uncompromising vision included a brief snatch of a lesbian kiss from Brookside (no doubt a two fingers up at Saudi Arabia, where such footage is banned) and the NHS (a two fingers up at, well, Cameron and Clegg, with their plans to dismantle it), as well as a brilliantly varied celebration of British music – from rock to disco to grime to indie.
More generally, I always enjoy the procession of athletes too, with a parade of grinning athletes from frequently obscure countries such as the Federated States of Micronesia or Turkmenistan or Nauru. Perhaps I’m the only one who enjoys this section of every opening ceremony, as going from A to Z with nearly every country in the world is a length progress…
As I write, it’s day six, London transport is holding its own despite huge worries, and Team GB have just leapfrogged up to fifth place in the medals table, with my rooting for teams in sports that I’ve never even watched before, never mind cared about – so who knows what can happen next? All I can say is that I still, despite the euphoria, reserve the right to find the Olympic mascots deeply sinister looking (looks like I'm not the only one), as I mentioned a while ago. You can image them from a John Wyndham sci-fi novel. There’s just something about those evil CCTV-like eyes… 

Photo by Slate.com; photos of Olympics ceremony at top of post courtesy of guardian.co.uk

Here's some events coming up at Arbeit, an art gallery and performance space (it also rents out artist studios) that I've been involved with, located just off Old Street. Sorry for the short notice with the Spontaneous Combustion event!

The gallery can be located at:

4 Helmet Row

(Opposite LSO St. Luke's Church)

EC1V 3QJ

Some more details directions, including a map, here.

More info on Spontaneous Combustion: here
 

More info on De-Construct / Re-Construct / We-Construct: here

Great areas of London slightly under the radar: Part 1

Every time you think you know London, you discover new areas which hitherto you had little inkling about. I'll be commanding a regular section on these places (don't expect Brick Lane or Portobello Road). So it is with Lower Marsh (there's no Road or Street in the title), a market strip in Waterloo right near the Southbank Centre where I've been volunteering. Far from the hype of East London's decidedly well-known nooks and crannies, Lower Marsh seems to live in its own detached, hermetically-sealed reality. Where else would you get this slightly sinister-looking secondhand bookshop that looks like it's stepped straight out of 1972? 

There's also a nice vegan cafe and shop called Coopers Natural, which seems to be brimming with endless flyers on yoga classes and tantric sex (well OK, I made the last bit up). They also do a mean vegan soup. But the street's real jewel in the crown is the double-whammy - if I can call it that - of What The Butler Wore and What The Butler Saw, presumably owned by the same people.

The latter, on the right, is a spooky 60s-style boutique clothes shop, similar to Pop Boutique in Covent Garden. The left shop, though, is really quite something: hardly conspicuous to the street outside (it doesn't even have a name on the shop front), a step into this cafe reveals an extraordinary garden of delights (well, there is a tiny garden at the back, but I mean metaphorically, obviously).

You feel transplanted back to Paris in the 20s or Soho in the 60s (or Berlin in the last ten years), with an extraordinary attention to detail in the adornments, junk (junk in a good way, mind) and nostalgic accouterments hanging from the wall. Well worth checking out.

Finally, there's also the 'graffiti tunnel', a long railway arch tunnel which connects the street to the back of the Southbank Centre, and where - as far as I can tell - graffiti is legal, and thus a magnet for young street artists. You can glimpse tantilisingly into The Young Vic theatre while you're there too, as it has a (usually open) back door half-way down the tunnel leading into the venue. The open door reveals winding passages with walls full of painted winding black lines, snaking into the belly of The Young Vic.

(Mosaic image above from Lyn Atelier's site; image of Undercroft below by T.Frewin; all other photos by me)

For the last few months, I’ve been involved in a project at the Southbank Centre called Festival Village, initiated by architectural and design practice Lyn Atelier in association with the SC and Studio Tilt. For those who’ve walked on that stretch of the Southbank promenade in-between the BFI and the RFH, you’ll recall a darkly-lit industrial-looking zone nicknamed The Undercroft, where teenagers ply their skateboard and BMX tricks on concrete slopes while onlookers watch against a backdrop of urban graffiti (pictured). Behind those walls, and under the Queen Elizabeth Hall (which is on the level above) a hollow space previously used for storage has been transformed into a bar, café and exhibition space in conjunction with the SC’s Festival of the World taking place at the moment. This has included housing bands - the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra from Venezuela among them -  from all over the world playing in the main venues of the SC, as part of the FOTW. Over five months, I’ve been one of the volunteers helping out from the start, from initially discussing the plans for graphics and wayfaring to helping get involved with the physical work of demolishing walls; installing a bar; making, painting and varnishing furniture; creating walls; and who knows what else, all of which has been a fun and involving experience. One of the most rewarding experiences was seeing the end result at the opening party, after five months of development. The pictures below document the changes that have taken place in the site as it’s been developed over five months leading up to June 2012. Here's what the site looked during construction...

...and here's what the finished product looks like...it's even featured in an issue of The Late Show recently. All that sanding, lifting wood, and other physical exertion was worth it in the end!