Am I the only one who found this rather wonderful and oddly touching? The shot was taken in the Olympic Park to recreate Georges Suerat’s ‘Bathers at Asnieres’ and uses construction workers from around the project with the bathers replaced by landscape gardeners, engineers, designers and security staff.
The original iconic painting was created in 1884 by the French post-impressionist and is housed at The National Gallery.
It bodes well for more elliptical ideas loosely attached to the Olympics in the months ahead, hopefully based on people, buildings and art. I vote for giant Sooty and Sweep puppets behind placed over the Gherkin and the Shard, Captain Pugwash in the olympic pool and Bill and Ben the Flowerpot Men at the Chelsea Flower Show. I’m sure we can find places for Beryl the Peril, Professor Quatermass, the St Trinian’s girls and Barbara Windsor somewhere.
And before anyone points out that they’re not donkey jackets, please note that I am paraphrasing from another national treasure, Victoria Wood.
With Netflix and Lovefilm, Sky and Virgin filling our screens with movies, the more choice we have the less of any interest we get to see. Sky is particularly slapdash about its scheduling, which is filled with no-hoper rom-coms and US flops.
It’s not just our attention spans that suffer but the fact that the fourth ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ movie, which was slated by critics, dominates the schedules while the kind of monochrome staples one used to see on TV (largely with Robert Mitchum or Bette Davis) are now invisible.
And a great many films remain unviewable anywhere on any format. Lucky we have barmy Evrim Ersoy to tell us about ‘Maldoror’,'the holy grail amongst film collectors, matched only by ‘The Day the Clown Cried’ (a film in which Jerry Lewis cheers up kids going to the gas chamber). Although he points out that finding a copy would be, in the words of the director, as “beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.” Wha – ?
If you’re not yet a fan of Evrim’s – and haven’t visited his excellent film club – try here.
After much perseverance I’ve struck a deal for the Bryant & May graphic novel – and the result could not have been a better one. It will be published here in the UK by PS Publishing, as their first modern comic. PS are the producers of the great big beautiful ‘Red Gloves’ volumes – this will be less expensive but will have lots of fun stuff as added value. It means that Keith and I will be able to ensure that the delicate watercolours of the original are reproduced properly. Pete Crowther at PS is a comics lover and the quality will be assured.
It’ll be out in plenty of time for Christmas, like the Beano annual!
I’ve mentioned documentary maker Adam Curtis here before, and over the last year I’ve managed to track down all of his extraordinary polemics-on-film that seem to have a very polarising effect on his viewers (argument is a good thing – there are too many tentative opinions on websites).
Now he’s assembling a vast amount of BBC footage from the war in Afghanistan, here. He’s particularly interested in the material we haven’t seen that helps to expand our ideas about the situation. These are US soldiers having their nails done in a Bagram beauty salon. Go to the site and check out some of his extraordinary finds. I warn you, though – if you go back to his main site, you won’t get any work done for the rest of the day.
Curtis has a lighter side, too. He created a fascinating documentary here about the way ghosts moved from castles and historic homes into the suburbs. It’s funny, bizarre and rather poignant, here. Another warning; it contains examples of extreme wallpaper.
Okay, it’s a tad too long but this fake trailer makes the point nicely. I particularly liked ‘Wot’s all this space over my head?’ ‘It’s overly stylised.’
This is Cuckold’s Point, Rotherhithe, at a sharp bend on the Thames near the church of St Mary and the Angel pub. The name came from a post with a paid of horns on it that marked the starting point of the riotous Horn Fair, a carnival that end from here to Greenwich. Carnivalesque events are still held pin the nearby green.
But there’s confusion about the name – traditionally a cuckold is a cheated-upon husband, but it also referred to the god of winter being cuckolded by the incoming season. The story gets more complex when we consider that the Green Man, or Horned God (about whom I’ve written in ‘Bryant & May on the Loose’) is strongly associated with the area.
According to tradition, the fair was started after King John seduced the wife of a local miller, cuckolding him. King John gave the miller all the land from Rotherhithe to Charlton as recompense. Cuckolding is also connected to the rutting of stags, so it may be that this was simply a good place to catch deer. There is still a cave at the edge of Blackheath Common (‘The Point’) on the carnival route which supposedly has a carving of the Horned God at its entrance. It was sealed up in 1905, and remains unopened.
Horns are still a symbol of sexual power, and the English expression ‘getting the horn’ is still very much in use!
I wanted to post this after reading the depressing remarks on YouTube that accompany films of old London streets about ‘how nice London looked when all the residents were white’.
London is famous for its churches (and its pubs) but people rarely talk about its mosques. Historically, London has a strong connection with the Islamic faith.
The London Central Mosque stands at the edge of Regent’s Park near the top of Baker Street. It had been founded during World War II in recognition of the British Empire’s substantial Muslim population and their support for the Allies during the war. The Churchill War Cabinet requisitioned the site and King George VI opened an Islamic cultural centre. A mosque was the crowning touch, but it was delayed for decades by planning objections and irregularities. It can hold five thousand worshippers, and was given as an unconditional gift to the UK Muslim community, although the land was donated in return for a site in Cairo for an Anglican cathedral. Finally opened in 1978, it added a golden dome to the London skyline.
One of the best things about the mosque is the spectacular view inside, because the floor-to-ceiling windows overlook mature trees which fill the interior with a view of greenery. It’s well worth a visit.
It might surprise Muslims to know that there had been calls to build a mosque in central London from 1900 onwards, and that the oldest Islamic organisation in London dates back to 1886. London now has more mosques than any other country in Europe except Turkey. The one nearest me is a converted Victorian pub. The difference with these adapted mosques is that they re-use old buildings rather than being raised as separate new structures, and are almost invisible – although there’s one with a shiny new spire in Brick Lane.
First we had this at dawn the other day in Trafalgar Square (it turned out to be advertising something), and now we’ve got the Aurora Borealis visiting for a few days, although I sat out on my terrace last night and failed to spot it. Presumably when it does appear it will be accompanied by a copyright logo saying it was brought to us by 02.
Givenchy were rightly fearful of menswear from Paris Fashion Week being ridiculed. This outfit wasn’t even the silliest on the catwalk, but it did have the most hilariously understated caption, which read:
‘It’s difficult to imagine Givenchy’s latest looks making the transition to the high street.’
Although if you’re intent on looking like a cross-dressing Albanian clog-dancer, it’s definitely the look for you.
After years of following fashion trends it looks to me as if London males are creating their own separate looks area by area. A walk between boroughs is enough to show you how local chaps are combining clothes and hairstyles, or – as in the case of the area around Brick Lane – buying from local independent clothes stores. Weird clothes seem to be less in evidence in the US, but in Finland they’re a common way of expressing creativity – and why not?
The design house styles no longer have anything to do with major city clothes. Broad themes filter through in the media world, though. Recently I was in the Phoenix Artists Club and saw what I thought was a row of little old men in cardigans, tweeds and flat caps, but they turned out to be twentysomethings in Fashionable Clothes. Don’t think of doing this if you’re above a 32 waist, though, as I swear European sizes are getting smaller. I’m happy to live in jeans and a T-shirt until I die, and let my personality make up for my deficiencies in fashion!
There are so many quotable lines in the voiceover of this gruesome Rank ‘Look At Life’ short, suggested by Mark Valentine, one hardly knows where to start. This one’s about London members’ clubs, and how depressing were they? How badly lit, dull and vaguely grubby everything was!
Watch any of these short films on YouTube, though, and you enter an alternative reality where mad people go on about the loveliness of London before immigrants arrived. Are they blind? Can they really not see how much more enriched our lives have become with other cultures breaking London’s straitjacket of school dinners and snoozing gents in armchairs?
