The picnic_meme was realised. I want to emphasise its unorganised nature with a still more impersonal construction like 'it picnicked'. Unorganised but not disorganised: simont had printed sticker strips for our usernames, letting him estimate the attendance at 94. I don't know if several very small children count as one choice, but it was a pleasure to meet mockduck ( Read more... )

So, 9 Snogs: a bold attempt to portray the sterility of early 21st century guitar bands through the parallel of nine sex scenes. It opens with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club playing at the Brixton Academy, where boy meets girl and brings her to his dingy flat for an encore. Indie rock alternates with sex for the rest of the film in exactly the way it ( Read more... )

I'm giving up not drinking coffee. Beer, too, but it's harder to find beer that doesn't taste of beer, whereas Starbuxen sell excellent stealth coffee. It's a substitute for coherence after weekends spent burning my candle at both ends, and trying to last the night.

( 'Reconstruction' )

After your ribald response when I confessed to having been taken up the Oxo Tower, it may be for the best that I was unable to mount the Gherkin yesterday ( Read more... )

A secret cinema has been discovered in the Parisian catacombs.

There was an open-air screening of Koyaanisqatsi, an exhilarating damnation of the life and scale of cities, in the heart of London last weekend. We applauded as the credits came up.

There's something appealing about the formality of clapping in the cinema. Maybe I once read that it was the practice of cinéastes in France and wanted some of that ( Read more... )

On Monday I visited the ICA with tkb to see an acclaimed film about the war in Iraq. No, not that one: Control Room is a fly-on-the-war documentary about the independent Arabic news channel al-JazeeraThe film is set in the Qatari capital Doha, which even-handedly hosts both al-Jazeera's headquarters and the Coalition Media Center. There are three ( Read more... )

[crossposted to london_film]

Kultureflash alerted me to the National Theatre's 'Waterloo Cines' season. Classic silent films projected on its brutalist tower with live accompaniment:

2230 31-07-04 The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog
2230 07-08-04 Koyaanisqatsi
2200 14-08-04 Metropolis
2230 21-08-04 The Cabinet of Dr Caligari

The Stella Artois Screen Tour ( Read more... )

The sun came out for the Ashton Court Festival in Bristol, a weekend of bands in a country estate for a fiver each day. Saturday's showers stopped only as I arrived, unprepared, and sat before a stage with the sun on my right for a few hours. The burn isn't so pronounced that you could demarcate it with a single line through my nose and chin, which ( Read more... )

I live with a web designer who comes home every day after sweating blood on some minor detail to make her employer's website look perfect in every browser, on every system, to everyone. She takes special care to comply with the Disability Discrimination Act, even taking advice from the Royal National Institute of the Blind ( Read more... )