London agenda for Friday 20 July 2012
1. View an exhibition of photographs and paintings of Muhammad Ali at different stages of his life along with audio, poetry and memorabilia, recording his contribution to sport and charity through the decades in Hackney Wick [Le Cool]
2. Spend the next 12 hours with Hotel Medea [Run Riot]
3. Warm-up to the he Hoxton Soundgarden with a showcase featuring Two Little Boys, Dirty Nelly, Refuge for the Meeks [Don’t Panic]
4. Listen to Janie Hampton’s meticulous research on the The Austerity Olympics: London 1948 [Ian Visits]
5. Wonder at Lobb’s boots [Tired of London]
20 Jul 2012
Interviewed: Iain Sinclair and Andrew Kötting on their Olympic pedalo film Swandown
Why?
Director Andrew Kötting and his co-star Iain Sinclair explain themselves below. In the process they discuss swan sex, the Olympics, and Mayor Johnson’s plan for an estuary airport.
The whole interview carries a swan-sized SPOILER ALERT.
Snipe: How do you explain this swan pedalo journey?
Iain Sinclair: [It came from] Andrew’s practice of deepwater swimming, my practice of urban wandering in edgelands, and how these two worlds coincide…we fixated on the idea of taking the swan and doing this trip…The amazing thing was that it became a film. It would have been a project anyway because it’s something we both really wanted to do.
Snipe: The swan is central to it…
Iain Sinclair: The swan is central. It’s a perfect symbol and it was also a very absurd reality.
Andrew Kötting: It was through happenstance that it was a swan. If it had been a badger on swan lake in Hastings I don’t think the two of us would have been quite so keen. And it’s also ridiculous. Edith [the name they gave their craft] has taken on a life of her own.
Iain Sinclair: The swan might now have a home in Hackney…someone wants her on the Mill Pool at Three Mills Island.
Snipe: She’s become a star.
Andrew Kötting: She’s a star.
Snipe: I saw swans mating recently on Regent’s canal, have you ever seen that?
Andrew Kötting: We have indeed.
Iain Sinclair: Have we?
Andrew Kötting: We have.
Snipe: It’s a very violent act.
Iain Sinclair: They are violent animals. They attacked our smaller swan decoy [a miniature swan pedalo, Edith’s familar, which they called Sitwell]
Andrew Kötting: On one of our walks. They took its head off.
Snipe: Swan on swan?
Andrew Kötting: Swan on swan action.
Iain Sinclair: They would puff themselves up enormously. One of my favourite moments [in the film] is the dead swan. There’s an elderly woman in cycling gear standing beside the river and this dead swan lying beside her and she doesn’t even notice it.
Iain Sinclair: Ironically sInce the city’s been so much a territory I’ve [dealt] with for years, at the point we arrive I have to leave. Andrew becomes the voice of the city and he goes through territory I see every single day of my life.
Andrew Kötting: Not to have him there [at the end]…there was this sense of yearning. Loneliness.
Snipe: It’s a sad ending.
Andrew Kötting: Sorrowful. Melancholic.
Iain Sinclair: [Swandown] also links with a film which has just been released by the BFI called Wonderful London which is a documentation of a journey through Limehouse basin in the 1920s – they relate so beautifully. From the working canal to this other space as it is now.
Snipe: The swan pedalo is a symbol that the canal has become a leisure space…the industry is not there…
Andrew Kötting: They’ve removed so many of the inhabitants, the indigenos…[the film’s] about drift…
Iain Sinclair: …and memory.
Andrew Kötting: It’s not meant to be prosiac, it’s not meant to be a lecture, it’s not an essay in anything…it’s an impression. You have to be in the landscape to experience this.
Snipe: It’s not a prosaic film but issues intrude, the Olympics is one.
Iain Sinclair: A big issue for me. Part of my wanting to do it, my insistence that it was done before the Olympics…I saw it as a counter act to the huge overweaning invasion of the territory.
Snipe: In the film you use the word enclosure.
Iain Sinclair: The enclosure of territory that meant so much to me…where I’d worked when I started out doing labouring jobs, where I’d roamed…through this edgeland which was a mixture of grunge pastoral and recovering industrial…that was enclosed and gone, and bringing a swan there for me was an act of transformation…to redeem this landscape from the invasion. I had this vision of lots of swans appearing, other people were going to get swans, and and the whole brown poisoned river being covered with white swans drifiting in…
Snipe: We’ve been covering the idea of the Estuary airport recently…
Iain Sinclair: Yes I’m horrified by that.
Snipe: There’s a moment when you’re in the estuary, at the Isle of Grain…
Iain Sinclair: Yes, that feels like the last free space, the last wilderness, because this other area has been eaten away…there’s nothing left but the Isle of Grain and the Isle of Sheppey. If you whack an airport in there…
Andrew Kötting: It could work perfectly because the London Stone could demarcate where the arrival terminal is. In 20 years time that will be an atrium, and plastic trees.
Iain Sinclair: In Ghost Milk, which I wrote with the Olympics hanging over me, one of the big things I wanted to do was to get to the London Stone because it’s the marker where the tidal Thames starts. But you can’t get to it by land because it’s all on military land. I spent four days trying to get in and I finally did it on a kayak, so going there again on the pedalo was like a salute to beating the enclosure.
Andrew Kötting: Iain read from his book Down River as we passed the London Stone…it was elegiac…but occasionally the wordsmithery would get a little bit too much so I would just climb overboard.
Snipe: Swandown also works as a buddy road trip movie.
Iain Sinclair: [laughing] Apparently so.
Andrew Kötting: A gay love story.
Iain Sinclair: The feet washing scene is very funny. It does have a false and real sense of being moving at the end because I’ve gone, and I took the story away with me.
Snipe: That felt like a classic plot point – the breaking up – and you were going to come back and you never did. It reminded me…I don’t know if either of you have seen the film Dumb and Dumber with Jim Carrey, they travel across America in a dog-shaped van…
Andrew Kötting: And you were reminded of that?
Snipe: I couldn’t stop thinking…
Iain Sinclair: Well that was the other title we could have chosen.
Andrew Kötting: Clever and Dumber.
Swandown is on show at the following cinemas:
ICA, 20-22 July
Curzon Soho, 20-26 July
hmvcurzon Wimbledon, 28-29 July
The Aubin Shoreditch, 5 August
There’s also an installation at Dilston Grove, Bermondsey, until 29 July.
20 Jul 2012
The London Eye Olympic happiness index illustrates everything that's wrong with everything
“The mood of the British tweeting public during the Olympics and Paralympics will dictate what colour the London Eye turns every evening at 9pm, in the world’s first social media driven light show.”
I’m so depressed by this paragraph in the Telegraph that I’m setting my personal London Eye happiness index to “blacker than a crow’s armpit”.
The tweeting, the branding (it’s for EDF), the transparent falsity of the whole exercise…the tyranny of imposed happiness…
The urge rises to tweet something really grim, a dismal Graham Greene novel say, in its entirety, to keep the torch of misery alive in these troublingly cheerful times.
The Telegraph – Happy Olympic tweeters to light up London Eye
Follow Mike
Twitter: @Mikpollitt
Email: michael.pollitt@snipelondon.com
19 Jul 2012
London agenda for Wednesday 18 July 2012
1. Spend the night at Stokey’s Birthday for Cerebral Ballzy [Le Cool]
2. Watch a gorgeously restored collection of 1920 London travelogues launched by the wonderful magazine Smoke: A London Peculiar [Run Riot]
3. Inaugurate FarmFestival at the Hoxton Grill with The Boy Least Likely [Don’t Panic]
4. What London has been waiting for: Morris Dancing Along the South Bank [Ian Visits]
5. Do some sport at the Hub [Tired of London]
18 Jul 2012
In-depth interview: Stratford filmmaker Winstan Whitter
“Everybody thinks it just was. But there’s a beginning to all things. A story that never got talked about, that got lost.”
Winstan Whitter tells lost tales. He likes to begin at the beginning, because that’s the part people later forget. There’s a shiny new block of apartments in Dalston, called Dalston Square, where one of these lost stories used to be. But more of that later. Let’s begin at the beginning ourselves.
Who is he?
“The biggest reason for wanting to put stuff to film is misrepresentation or underrepresentation”
Whitter is 38. He was born in Ghana, is late of Hackney, and now based in Stratford. He started in the film industry 12 years ago as a camera grip, and has worked up to become a director of photograpy on adverts, film and TV. In his spare time, he films the stories that are getting away.
First there was the skateboard scene. He started filming it from the inside in the 1990s, and in the early noughties began work on Rollin’ Through the Decades [trailer] [DVD]. It’s a documentary about the beginnings of skateboarding in the UK, when kids showed off their tricks in the nooks of the city, on concrete wasteland no one else wanted, while no one else was watching on.
“There was never a documentary that explained skateboarding to people outside,” he says. “Vicars in churchyards used to swear at us. In England it was looked on as a fad.”
In time the vicars stopped swearing and the fad caught on. Feet that had never touched a board started slipping into Vans. Tony Hawks’ video game character became a household name. It started making people, some people, very rich indeed.
Skateboarding went mainstream. Suddenly everybody knew what it was, and nobody cared how it used to be. That’s the lost story Whitter’s film seeks to pin down.
The lost club of Dalston
“What Hackney Council did will never be forgotten”
And so we come to Dalston Square, a newly risen apartment complex in the heart of Dalston. It’s built on the site cleared by the demolition of a Victorian theatre, which became a second hand car showroom, which then shared space with the Four Aces reggae and soul club, which both later became a dance club named Labyrinth. If you know Dalston now, and don’t know this, then do you really know Dalston at all?
Making Legacy in the Dust: The Four Aces Story was “like doing a history Phd,” says Whitter. He used to work at the club, as did his father, but his film goes back much further, before the post-war waves of immigration which buoyed up the Four Aces through the 1960s and 70s, and filled it til the early hours. He reaches back to the turn of the century, to the Victorian theatre and the Edwardian middle class. It’s the story of a hundred years.
The OPEN Dalston website was created in part to save the buildings threatened by development. In 2006 that blog set out the case against demolition and provided a focal point for local opposition to the change. In 2007, the building came down. Footage of that demolition opens and closes Legacy in the Dust.
The resentment rumbles on. Last week OPEN reported that the bus stand which formed a key part of the development proposal will serve no extra purpose during the Olympics, despite promises made at the time of its commission. It serves just one bus route, for £63m. Too late, now, anyway. It’s there, and the old buildings are gone.
Whitter’s is a sad film, in subject. An elegy for an abolished place. But it doesn’t watch like one. The editing is slick and witty. The clip above, in which contributors ranging from the Four Aces’ owner to members of the Prodigy try and fail to list the name of every band who played there, is a perfect comic viral.
And it isn’t new. Whitter finished the film in 2008 and showed it successfully at the BFI, at venues in Dalston, and at various festivals and events across the city. The Hackney Hear podcast was just getting underway back then, and their fifth episode reported from the film’s premiere.
People who have seen this film like it, but it’s never been widely released. Why not? It’s those two old partners, never far from each other’s side: lack of money and lack of opportunity.
What makes it hard?
“Copyright is a black hole”
Whitter would like to release Legacy in the Dust more widely, as he did with Rollin through the Decades, But there’s a £50,000 problem. Rights.
His film contains archive news footage which is needed to fill in the context as his story moves through the 20th century. Permission to use those clips in giving the film a wider release, he guesstimates, would cost him £50,000.
“Big corporations have got all this archive footage and no one us using it. There is an uphill struggle with that and something needs to change because all of this stuff is just sitting there and a lot of people have got great ideas for [it].”
The industry itself also seems, to Whitter’s eyes, a closed and cliquey place, interested only in a certain type of tale. He talks of a season of reggae films which illustrated the growth and impact of the West Indian music scene with clips of UB40. You sense a frustration. He’s been making films, good ones, for a decade now. He’s a successful independent filmaker. But he’s still pushing his work on his own, and as any artist or artisan knows, that’s not an easy task. “It takes time,” he says, with the tone of a man who has expended a lot of it on an uncertain hope. But his efforts and his belief may be about to pay off.
What’s next?
“Now people are knocking on my door”
Whitter has been approached to direct a feature film set against the Ska Wars music of 1968 Dalston. On the side he will keep pushing Legacy in the Dust, but he clearly relishes the prospect of being wanted by others. It’s been a long time coming. He also wants to make a film about Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president whose proposal for a united Africa was used as a prototype for the EU.
“He’s another pioneer,” Whitter says, a passion rising in his voice. “It’s another story a lot of people aren’t being told.”
Winstan Whitter’s work:
About the replanning of Dalston – Save our heritage
Skateboarding doc – Rollin through the decades
The story of the Four Aces Club – Legacy in the dust
In defence of Shoreditch’s strip clubs, by the women who work there – Handz Off
Winstan Whitter – Showreel
OPEN Dalston – The demolition story
Follow Mike
Twitter: @Mikpollitt
Email: michael.pollitt@snipelondon.com
17 Jul 2012
London agenda for Tuesday 17 July 2012
1. View works by Claire Halifax, Trinidad Ball, Richard Burel and Mike Edwards at Icons [Le Cool]
2. If a crime is committed by someone with a brain tumour or genetic condition, should we hold them responsible for their actions? Plus live music. Cosy Science at the Exmouth Arms [Run Riot]
3. Spend the night after spending the night with Madonna at the BarFM aftershow [Don’t Panic]
4. Watch an interactive show-and-tell with some of the more curious objects that has been uncovered in the storerooms of the Grant Museum [Ian Visits]
5. See the BAPS Mandir Haveli [Tired of London]
17 Jul 2012
New in London: A car showroom without cars
There’s a car showroom opening in Mayfair which contains only a token car. The rest of the range is visible on giant screens lining the walls. Brand interaction, it seems, is now reason enough to hire an expensive space in an exclusive district. You no longer need a real car in order to sell cars.
Some people might think this mad – another step on the road to the apotheosis of the brands, where objects cease to exist, and we crave only the visions of their abstracted forms.
But I think of it as progress. It takes us one step closer to the time when physical cars are a thing of the past. Virtual cars will roam virtual roads, humans will travel through fibre-optic cables, and the ferns reclaim the motorways.
Motor City – Audi launching new ‘Audi City’ retail concept in London
17 Jul 2012
Correatown - Further
Latest on the current (chill) wave of Enya-ish hippy music, and following lessons taught at The School Of Seven Bells, Correatown’s is a wholesome, rich, poppy sound that takes baby-steps into the arty domain of The Cocteau Twins. This catchily repetitive single is taken from their album “Pleiades”, which we failed several times to pronounce without falling into a fit of giggles.
16 Jul 2012
Foul Weather Fare by Mode Moderne
Today’s MPFree is a none-more-aptly named track from Canadian five-piece Mode Moderne. It’s a pulsating, barely disguised ode to the likes of OMD and assorted other early 80s synth pop giants and it unfolds at a thrillingly breakneck pace. Foul Weather Fare is taken from their second album Strange Bruises, out September 3 on Light Organ records.
16 Jul 2012
Boris and Ken's donors hidden from public
The names of donors to Boris Johnson and Ken Livingstone’s election campaigns will remain hidden after donations to their campaigns were funnelled through their political parties, it was revealed today.
The election spending totals for candidates were released this morning by London Elects, but the names of individual donors for most candidates were not.
The Conservatives had previously attacked Ken Livingstone for using this practice in 2008.
Tory MP Greg Hands told the Evening Standard at the time:
“It is outrageous that London voters do not know who is funding Ken Livingstone’s expensive campaign for reelection. The whole point of these rules is to allow transparency yet Livingstone hasn’t declared a single donation given to him”
In the run up to this election Boris asked potential donors for at least £2012 in order to join his “Club 305” private members club.
Some donors were given the chance to “meet with Boris and personally share their priorities for London.”
Boris’s decision to funnel these donations through central office means that we do not now know exactly who these people are, or how much they gave.
In 2008, Boris Johnson did release details of his donations to London Elects.
Amongst those giving to his campaign were hedge fund chiefs, private hire company Addison Lee and controversial private equity executive Edmund Lazarus.
Boris later gave Lazarus a job on the board of the London Development Agency.
Boris’s decision to funnel his donations through the Conservative Party followed the collapse of his party’s own complaint against Ken Livingstone for using the same practice.
Independent candidate Siobhan Benita did release details of her individual donors today. Benita receieved £22,000 worth of donations, over half of which were an “in kind” donation from PR company Zoo Communications.
The rest consisted of a small number of cash donations from individuals, none of which exceeded £500.
16 Jul 2012
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- London has chosen its mayor, but why can’t it choose its own media?
- Peter Bayley has worked for 50 years as a cinema projectionist in East Finchley
- Punk brewery just as sexist and homophobic as the industry they rail against
- Number of people using Thames cable car plunges
- Diary of the shy Londoner
- A unique collection of photos of Edwardian Londoners
- Could red kites be London's next big nature success story?
- Only 16 commuters touch in to Emirates Air Line, figures reveal
- The best church names in London, and where they come from
- The five best places in London to have an epiphany
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