This week in books: Jonathan Franzen to Drinking and Thinking

Please welcome new literary correspondent Jon Davis to Snipe. Davis will be covering all things bookish in London, beginning with his weekly picks for readings.

One Year On: A Night for Haiti – Friday 7th Jan
One year on since the disastrous earthquake in Haiti this fundraising event looks to raise much need cash. There’s live music and spoken words from those poetry slammer’s Jacob Sam La Rose and Ben Mellor, as well as home homemade food.
Union Chapel, Compton Avenue, N1 2XD. Tickets £10

ELS Book Club – Sunday 9th Jan
Join this monthly book group to discuss Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom. Yes, he’s the one who recently had his glasses kidnapped, but he also knows how to write a book or two. This, his most recently novel has been heralded by some as the novel of the decade, of course you’ll have had to its 570 pages first.
Bar Music Hall, 134 Curtain Road, EC2A 3AR. Free

Kid, I Wrote Back – Monday 10th Jan
Hear from word slingers new and old at one of London’s freshest open mic poetry nights. Whether you like your poetry with a slice of humour, a fist of irreverence or a banana of surrealism there’s plenty here for everyone. But that’s if you can pull yourself of Bar Kick’s table footy table.
Bar Kick, 127 Shoreditch High Street, E1 6JE. Tickets £3

Drinking and Thinking: Interrobang – Tuesday 11th Jan
Drinking and thinking go hand in hand at Old streets’ The Book Club and Interrobang celebrates the power and diversity of the humble word. Marcel Lucont supplies the comedy, Josienne Clarke the music and the Riding the Valkyrie the operatic sideshow, whatever that may be.
The Book Club, 100 Leonard Street, EC2A 4RH. Tickets £3

Book Slam – Thursday 13th Jan
One of the big guns on the spoken word scene plays host to the Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson, the web geek, poetry spouter Jacob Sam La Rose and the award festooned Jackie Kay.
The Grand, 21-25 St John’s Hill, Clapham Junction, SW11 1TT. Tickets £8

Tearist [MPFree]

LA noise-goths Tearist have just released a new EP on PPM, “S/T” and today’s mpfree, ‘Headless’, is easily the most accessible of a highly experimental six-song set. Channelling Siouxsie Soux and late 70s/early 80s electro, Yasmine – who’s previously worked with Former Ghosts – and Will make the sort of music Crystal Castles would make if they existed solely on a diet of Ketamine and Fanta Orange.
Live shows involve Yasmine writhing around on the floor like a disorientated crab.
They should be huge.

London agenda for Friday 7 January

1. The London Short Film Festival kicks off with with a free launch party in the bar with DJS, and screenings of events Funny Shit and Lo Budget Mayhem [Le Cool]

2. Celebrate the most compelling contemporary artists working in Chile at Tectonic Shift [Run Riot]

3. Be the first to see Tennis and Lonely Galaxy at the Lex [London Gigs]

4. See a play about swimmers in a swimming pool at Offstage [Spoonfed]

Vivian Maier: A Life in Shadow

Living in the shadows of history, the life and work of Vivian Maier has only surfaced thanks to an unremarkable day in the life of Chicago born real-estate agent John Maloof. In 2007 he stumbled across a box of negatives at a local auction house, he hoped to find some images he could use for a book he was compiling on Portage Park but what he found revealed a wealth of incredible black and white photographs taken in and around the Loop in downtown Chicago. Maloof began archiving the work and obtaining other boxes in search of the identity of the mysterious photographer until one day 2009 he found an envelope with the name ‘Vivian Maier’ scrawled across it. A quick search revealed an obituary from the Chicago Tribune, dated only days earlier: Maier had passed away at the age of 83.

Having only just scratched the surface of the 100,000-strong collection (a lot of it still in undeveloped film rolls), it is already overwhelmingly clear that this woman, revealed to be an eccentric free spirit and nanny, was indeed a ‘photographer extraordinaire.’ The compositions, the haunting anonymity of the subjects and the delicate moments of a private life revealed to the public make for immensely compelling images. Honest, breath taking and arresting these photographs reveal snippets of American culture from the 1950s and 1960s; kids play in the streets, dapper men and fashionable women go about their business and poverty stricken people stoop in front of shops. With her first solo exhibition running at the Chicago Cultural Centre from tomorrow until April how long will it be until Maier is perhaps considered amongst the greats?

The verdict is in on autism-by-vaccination theory: it's all made up

Cowpocks by the anti-vaccine society

Remember those debates about whether autism can be caused by vaccinations? The British Medical Journal has come out with their report. In summary, it was basically a fraud.

Kitsune 'Happy 2011' EP [MPFree]

Kitsune kick off the new year in style with their ‘Happy 2011 EP’, available as a free download and featuring, amongst others, Digitalism, May 68 and Black Strobe. Re-mixing duties fall to the likes of Villa and Tomb Crew and the EP is available in full from Kitsune’s website.

In February the uber-hip French label release the long awaited ‘Kitsune Parisien’, a compilation of new Parisian music so effing cool, there’s likely to be a pleb screening process even when buying online.

London agenda for Thursday 6 January

1. Visit 1960s London in 1820s surroundings at The London That Nobody Knows at Wilton Music Hall [Le Cool]

2. Verify Young & Lost club’s impeccable taste with Luna Belle and Stealing Sheep at the Lock Tavern

3. Discover your future at Mysteries [Tired of London]

127 Hours [Film]

… in which Danny Boyle gussies up the true story of Aron Ralston, adrenalin fiend and extreme sports enthusiast, who got himself stuck under a rock for 5 and a bit days.

The vacant, feature-length hip-hop montage that is 127 Hours begins with an ill-advisedly selected Free Blood track (‘Never Hear Surf Music Again’), a failed attempt at excited and perhaps knowing ‘hipness’ that admittedly does fit the purpose, as the utterly nugatory feel of the subsequent experience soon amounts to another shining example of disposable, blunderbuss cinema.

Yet this is essentially what Danny Boyle does these days. Any semblance of interest in seeking truth or making art has completely vanished into a small gap between his laughing teeth. Even highly infectious (and possibly metaphorical) rage-filled lunatics have fallen by the wayside in his fast lane pursuit of sugary popcorn shifters. All has given way to flash and loud noises.

How to get over this, sitting there in the darkness with 127 Hours ahead of you?
Answer: You can’t. All the bombast up Boyle’s long, flowery and probably rolled sleeve couldn’t stop one fellow viewer snoring his way through the majority of the video. Which was confusing, as it isn’t so much that it’s boring, just that it’s annoying to almost be able to hear the grunts of thought that have gone into making every moment quite so agonising, and not in the way that Ralston must have felt, his arm lodged between a boulder and a cave wall, recycling his piss into a water bottle, hallucinating a history of regret, but agonising in its excruciatingly contrived ‘originality’.

Thus, in said manner, we’re given the brash, all-American Aron, hopping about from rock to rock, pedalling on his bicycle, regularly whipping out a video camera to capture himself on his escapades along the way. (Is this likeable behaviour?) That is all until a rock decides to land on him and his arm. And so the mystical journey of the self begins. Well, not really. Instead we’re fed this unconvincing melange of flashbacks, fantasies and apparitions that all lead full circle into one of those ‘it all makes sense now’ moments that are so fantastic and unexpected in cinema nowadays.

Every smash cut, every split-screen moment, every CGI effect with their typically Boyled-over mixture of strong colours, exaggerated framing and over-editing, only draw attention away from a probably compelling storyline, and a probably convincing performance from the chameleonic James Franco. We quickly lose sympathy with Ralston, if we ever had it in the first place, not because of his situation but as a result of the movie taking on a kind of airless sheen, empty of atmosphere and taken over by its ‘style’, becoming a form of trick itself, manipulating us into giving a toss. Which we don’t.

You’d get the same, less expensive, but probably more harrowing effect flicking from MTV every half-second to MTV Base and back again. But I wouldn’t recommend that either.

Stupendously enjoyable levels on the SEGA Megadrive [Top 5]

In the early to mid nineties, two empires were locked in a titanic struggle for world domination. Head to head they went, trading blow after bitter blow. First came the 8-bit console, then 16, then 32. Surely, we tweenagers thought, surely they will stop now before this madness destroys us all? Ha, they scoffed, and presented the N64. And so Nintendo saw off Sega, and a beautiful rivalry was dead. But as so often, conflict begat creativity, and us proud Master System and Megadrive owners were treated to one hell of a ride. Here are five levels from games of the era which make Snipe come over all nostalgic for the days when Left, Right, Up, Down was the start of a cheat taking you all the way to level 12.

Sonic the Hedgehog, Level 1

Snipe received the Megadrive + Sonic package one frosty Christmas morning long ago, after years of begging and months of threats. The crunchy noise the cartridge made when pushed into the console, the flashing Sega logo, the feel of the controller nestling in our palms…it was a special day. Even withstanding that in my ignorance I didn’t know you had to press start to begin the game, and so spent the first half hour watching the demo in the mistaken belief that I was controlling the little blue creature myself. Come back to me, childhood! All is forgiven.

Aladdin, Magic Carpet

Disney’s second Golden Age coincided with the rise of the consoles, and when the two combined it was magical. Aladdin was not the best film, nor the best game from this period. But it was damn good. This level still thrills – genuine danger at every moment, heart in mouth all the way.

Earthworm Jim, Level transition

The attentive among you will note that this level is in essence identical to Aladdin’s magic carpet ride above. I confess, I like speeding through air and collecting strange objects. It’s a thing I have. In the game you were a space earthworm who could lasso enemies with your own body, or something. It was brilliant. I never got past level 3.

The Lion King, Just Can’t Wait to be King

See Disney Golden Age comments, above. The Lion King is one of the best five films ever made. There is no argument with that. Snipe invites anyone to point out a flaw. The game is impossible. But just listen to the music! Enough to put a smile on even the grumpiest Zazou.

Brian Lara Cricket

Snipe makes absolutely no apologies for a.) including a game that doesn’t have levels and b.) uploading a YouTube video the first minute of which is someone navigating menus. This game was incredible. For years it was the only way a young Englishman could dream that the Aussies would ever lose a game of cricket. How times change. Snipe used to love bowling 5 overs of yorkers which our impatient friend couldn’t resist trying to slog out of the ground, then embarking on a gritty Atherton-inspired chase, filled with leg glances, elbows over the ball and nudges into the gap. Bliss.

Geotic [MPFree]

Geotic is the ambient side-project of California electro-pop whizzkid Baths, a.k.a. Will Wiesenfeld. Maintaining the lo-fi aesthetic but eschewing the scatter-gun beats of his day job, he’s recorded an album of fuzzy, guitar-led instrumentals called ‘Mends’ and made the whole thing available for free via his website. Recorded in four days over the xmas period (in a toilet presumably), Mends wraps itself around you like a warm towel, as all records legally should at this time of year.

Website www.angelfire.com/indie/postfoetus/geotic.html
MySpace www.myspace.com/bathsmusic