School Of Seven Bells

The School Of Seven Bells may or may not be a real place; it’s the name of a mythical Columbian pickpocket academy. It sounds like a setting Hayao Miyazaki might dream up for one of his fantastical animations; or indeed, one of the lucid dreams of Alejandra Deheza, who along with ex-Secret Machine Benjamin Curtis and her identical twin sister Claudia, forms The School of Seven Bells.

Their new album is a textured sonic tapestry, curiously entitled ‘Disconnect From Desire’. “The album’s title is actually an ‘oblique strategy’,” explains Deheza. “It’s from a set of cards Brian Eno created. Each card has a kind of creative solution on it. I pulled this card that said “disconnect from desire”, and it happened to resonate like crazy with everything I was writing.”

This kind of gentle mysticism seems to run through School Of Seven Bells, right from the name through their approach, the shoegaze production values and semi-abstract lyrics. “It’s part of our daily lives so it has to come out that way,” Deheza elaborates. “If something resonates with us or inspires us to do something new then we pay attention to it.”

The School Of Seven Bells may or may not be a real place, but this band have created an immersive synthesis of their ideas and influences that’s every bit as intriguing.

Wilson by Daniel Clowes

If Larry David could draw he might come up with something like Wilson, the new graphic novel by Ghost Town creator Daniel Clowes.

The milieu of Wilson is familiar to anyone who has seen Curb Your Enthusiasm. Our anti-hero is a white, middle-aged man growing old and miserable in world as disappointed in him as he is in it.

He’s a failure as a husband, as a son, as a father, as a man. His pregnant wife left him to seek a better life as a prostitute and he’s never had a proper job. But that doesn’t stop him berating strangers he meets at airports when they tell him they work in consulting. “Listen brother,” he says, “you’re going to be lying on your deathbed in 30 years thinking ‘Where did it all go? What did I do with all those precious days? Some shit-work for the oligarchs?’” Ouch.

Such episodes punctuate a larger story, as Wilson ages and confronts the landmarks of a 21st century life—things that await us all if we haven’t suffered them already: the death of a parent, partial reconciliation with an ex, the moment your estranged adopted daughter whom you tried to kidnap finally provides you with a grandchild.

The tone is darkly comic, the restrained illustrations complementing the deadpan prose. Human relationships are held together by selfishness, necessity and the fear of dying alone. The death of Wilson’s father provokes a bout of inarticulate self-absorption: “I’m all alone”, he moans, sitting in a playground in the middle of the day, drinking and heckling the kids for daring to interrupt his silence with their joy.

By contrast, the death of his dog produces a 200 world eulogy: “My love for you was always tempered by the inevitability of your loss,” runs a typical extract, “but in contemplating that unthinkable vacuum, I am better able to grasp my own finite trajectory, and by extension that of all things.”

It’s these moments of wider perspective which elevate Wilson above the simple comedy of the Grumpy Old Men, and perhaps even the more sophisticated work of David. “I wonder if progress always felt like this?” Wilson asks of the disillusionment he feels at his growing reliance on computers, while the pathos of an online video chat with a grandson who can’t be arsed returning his love brings a shock of sadness to the novel’s final pages.

Doubtless Wilson would call comparisons with David a bit of fucking lazy journalism from someone who was too ignorant to judge the novel on its own merits. But if, like this reviewer, you’ve never read a graphic novel before because you suspected they were the preserve of a bunch of loser gimps, you might find his misanthropy a pleasant surprise.

Wilson by Daniel Clowes is published by Jonathan Cape. RRP £12.99

Things that go bump in the night: Hotel Medea and Ghost Stories

Shortly before midnight, a group of confused travelers disembark on the wharf to be processed in stages by strangers. Under the jolly, slightly menacing eye of our ferryman host, Jorge, we are alternately cajoled and scolded. Suddenly we find ourselves in a mythical land, dancing, singing, conspiring to bloody war and witnessing the betrayal of a people by their queen. Having been thus initiated and assimilated we become children, change our sex, turn spies, are war refugees racing in confused gaggles under a dawn sky, clutching our favourite toys. We are a wounded people, and when revenge finally arrives it is ours, on behalf of our queen, Medea.

Medea is one of the bloodiest of Greek myths. Jason of the Argonauts lands on the shore of Colchis, ancient Georgia, to claim what he sees as his birthright, the Golden Fleece. The “barbaric” people living there with their powerful witch queen, Medea, see things differently. Medea falls for Jason, however, abandoning her people to be with him. Killing her own brother who protects the Fleece she gives it to Jason to found his political empire. He’s a cheating prick, though, and Medea’s broken heart revives her devastating power with disastrous consequences.

Hotel Medea, a joint project between Para Active, Zecora Ura and Arcola Theatre, is a five or six hour epic (time becomes vague after the first four hours) in the far east of London, and quite unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. The Greek myth is kept loose and given a uniquely Brazillian twist, producing images and emotions impossible in a traditional play because the audience are living the story. Extremely loose. Given the impenetrable accents of the performers and the lack of concrete narrative, the evening is a series of lived moments rather than a coherent play. It felt a little like being a character on Lost. Am I still a visitor? One of the Others?

The production is presented as a trilogy in two uneven halves. I recommend leaving your fears and egos at home and stay for the whole evening/morning. The first act, Zero Hour Market, is a whirl of Brazillian energy and colour, and nearly incomprehensible, but you get to dance, sing, wash a naked man and have a bad cup of coffee at the end. The second half is when the adventure truly begins, culminating finally in a subdued breakfast at sunrise amongst friends across from the O2 Lump, or whatever it’s called.

The fear of death is universal, but it doesn’t stop us climbing into the Drop ‘o’ Doom at the funfair, a rickety contraption maintained by inbred, transient carnie folk, and letting ourselves fall hundreds of feet to the ground, passing our own vomit as we plummet. Why? Why pay good money to shit yourself and waste all those overpriced hotdogs, clods of cotton candy, and greasy donuts by puking over yourself from on high?

***

We need to be scared, as a way of dealing with the unknown. Going to Alton Towers 13, watching horror movies like The Grudge, or just sitting round a campfire telling ghost stories are ways of exploring our fear of eternity, of oblivion. When I was a kid we had parties in which we watched six scary films in a row until numb, scratching up a body count but hardly caring if those dumb cheerleaders and jocks are decapitated under the bleachers. Serves them right! Stupid kids. Now, how do we break into the parents’ liquor cabinet?

Ghost Stories, playing at the Duke of York Theatre, employs brilliantly all the archetypal devices of the shock flick, plus basic crowd psychology, to deliver cheap thrills and barely stifled gasps. On stage, Professor Phillip Goodman expounds upon his research as to why people, who ought to know better, still believe in the paranormal. Gradually we are drawn in, lulled by long periods of quiet inactivity, until—BANG! Flash! Monster! Weird… thing… I can barely make out! Scream! Shit myself! There go the hotdogs! Why did I climb in this damn contraption in the first place?

Ghost Stories is pure crowd pleaser, but I came away disappointed. Written by League of Gentleman co-creator Jeremy Dyson, and Andy Nyman, the mentalist collaborator of freaky Derren Brown, I was expecting something more subtle and menacing than a mere live-action The Ring. I wanted my head genuinely fucked with, and fucked with permanently. Having said that, the play definitely delivers, judging by the delighted shrieks of the audience. Employing bright lights and loud noises to spark a thrill might be lazy, but it works, and chances are you will get everything you desire out of the show. You won’t learn anything about the nature of fear, but if your date (female or male!) hops into your lap you won’t care. Just don’t go to some damn dark park afterwards to make out under a full moon, for Christ’s sake, people! Jesus!

HOTEL MEDEA
QE II Pier, Greenwich
Until 14 August , 2010

GHOST STORIES
Duke of York’s Theatre
To 7 November, 2010. Dark Mondays.

The Marquise Went Out at Five O’clock

Edel Assanti Project, 276 Vauxhall Bridge Rd SW1V 1BB

There are so many parts to this exhibition’s press release, an enticing bundle including three jpegs, one pdf press release and an invitation. I’m enticed, but also slightly intimated before I even arrive at the Edel Assanti Gallery in Victoria.

Anyway, the gallery itself is a stripped office building located over three L-shaped rooms, a form which lends itself perfectly to the narrative theme of this group show. Edel Assanti is like a logical, central, lucky art tombola.

RCA Neomie Goudal’s photographs capture incomprehensible scenes, the unsettling settledness of a chair covered in fluff or unraveled twine. Stuart Bailes’ photographs are similarly epic and subtle, hinting at an unseen tension.

Adam Thomas’ carved book’s juxtapose an moment of text with the process and method of presenting it.

Meanwhile Jorge De la Garza’s collages investigate shape and representation in the most thoughtful and careful way.

Walking along the Vauxhall Bridge Road later, I see London’s scariest man foaming at the mouth with pupils like abysses. Some venues would charge for this experience.

The Marquise Went Out at Five O’clock continues until 5 September

Savage Love: Crusty

I was recently told that I am being puritanical and self-righteous because I can’t get over the fact that my partner spends a good deal of time seeking out pictures of very young girls to masturbate to. Nothing illegal, he says, but still…

He admits to having a 20-year-plus addiction to porn, and with that particular addiction, he says, comes the need to continue upping the taboo factor in order to get off. I can understand the natural escalation from traditional porn to something more risqué, and I’m fine with him watching chicks with dicks defecate in each other’s mouths until his eyes bleed, because those she-males are consenting adults.

Eight-year-old girls, however, are innocents preyed upon by pedophiles and people with child-lust disorders, in my opinion, and I think a rational adult, even in the throes of sexual whimsy, should recognize that boundary and not cross it. My question is this: Is it considered typical sexual behavior for a guy who’s really into porn to seek out YouTube videos of 10-year-old ballerinas without having any kind of pathological inclination toward pedophilia?

He Says I’ve Turned Into My Born-Again-Christian Mother

Daily MPfree: Murder

Four years ago, Danish duo Murder were an unlikely pop hit in their home country – their entrancing debut single “When The Bees Are Sleeping” was a number one single on the Elektriske Barometer, the national radio chart voted for by listeners. They’ve recently returned with some new songs, starting with “Providence”; hear both strands of their darkly beautiful folk below. The new album, “Gospel of Man”, is out in Denmark on October 11th via Good Tape, and will be available for UK residents to buy online.

Murder – Providence by snipelondon

Murder – When The Bees Are Sleeping (Good Tape Records) by brainlove

Mayor Livingstone, you presume?

Could Ken Livingstone or “Comeback Ken” as the Evening Standard have dubbed him surprise us all by returning to City Hall?

At first glance it seems unlikely. Politicians rarely return to the seats they have lost and almost never in order to replace the people who have succeeded them.
And yet Ken has made a career out of confounding expectations, most famously when he took on the best efforts of Tony Blair in order to become London’t first Mayor in 2000.

Like then, Ken still faces fierce opposition from big names on the right wing of the Labour party and like then they still seem incapable of beating him.

But unlike then Ken faces an incumbent Mayor who is well known and enjoys a dogged loyalty from his supporters. So while Ken looks more likely to win the Labour nomination than Oona King, his chances of beating Boris appear far more distant.

However, for all his charm, there are signs that Boris is far more vulnerable than is commonly believed.

There has been very little polling since 2008 but the recent Annual London Survey shows that many Londoners are deeply non-plussed by Boris’s performance as Mayor.

Asked how he was doing in the job, just 26% said they were satisfied with him, down from 44% for Ken three years ago. More telling was the huge amount of people who have little or no opinion of Boris’s performance at all, up to 63%.

So while Boris is clearly a less divisive figure than his predecessor, he is also making far less of an impact on Londoners. And with the government cuts set to hit London hard in 2012, Londoners may well decide it is in their interests to turn to Ken.

The current Mayor’s performance aside, another factor that could stop Ken is the choices made by the smaller parties.

At the last election the Lib Dems feel that they underperformed and are now holding out to see who Labour selects before choosing their candidate.

However, I’m told that both the Lib Dems and the Greens are unlikely to go for the kind of celebrity candidate that could take a big chunk out of Ken or Boris’s vote.

London Lib Dems tell me that they are looking for somebody who would improve the showing of their Assembly candidates rather than concentrating on gaining the Mayoralty itself.

“We’re not going to win it realistically” one source told me candidly, “but we do need somebody who can go up against Jeremy Paxman.”

The Greens too are looking for a solid performer who will raise the party’s profile rather than their own. “We don’t want the tail to wag the dog” one said.

On individual names I’m told that former Green Mayoral candidate Sian Berry is not in the frame this time and reports that Lembit Öpik would run were described to me as “total bollocks.”

Yet the deciding factor for the main parties may well be time. By 2012 Ken will be approaching 70 and may struggle to find the energy needed to take back City Hall.
But for Boris too the clock is ticking. And as each month goes by, Londoners will increasingly ask just what if anything he has done for them.

In the next two years Boris will have all the advantages of incumbency to secure re-election, and it would be a fool who underestimated his political skill.

But in opposition Ken also has many advantages, and it’s how he uses them which will ultimately decide whether he has one last comeback in him after all these years.

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Diving for dollars: Where there is Bill Clegg’s muck, there’s brass

For a glimpse at the eye-watering hypocrisy inherent in British culture pick up a newspaper and flip to the book reviews. Headline stories can, and sometimes do, pay lip service to allegedly shared values like fairness, equal opportunity, progressive politics, etc but the truth leaks out where you least expect it.

Case in point: the fawning coverage of Bill Clegg’s ‘Portrait of the Addict as a Young Man’. The Guardian ran a 3200-word excerpt from the book (5 June) alongside a hagiographic portrait of the blond, square-jawed author gazing pensively into the middle distance. Eager readers can order their very own copy from the Guardian bookshop at a discounted price of £11.99. Independent reviewer Julian Hall writes: “you’d be hard pressed not to be captivated” (20 June) and calls the book “addictive and masterful”.

What is the substance of this literary masterpiece? High-living New York literary agent Clegg (“[My boyfriend] Noah and I have moved into a beautiful apartment that Noah’s grandmother paid cash for, and we’ve filled it with vintage photographs and furniture and expensive Persian rugs”) gets addicted to crack, runs his agency into the ground, goes to rehab, and – yay! – he’s better now. The sheer, forehead-slapping stupidity of it boggles the mind. ‘Portrait’ is not the soul-searching of a man who genuinely plumbed the depths. “We’re turning a profit,” he writes, recalling business during the heyday of his rock habit. “A number of books that I am selling are reviewed well everywhere. There will be one, a cherished one, that becomes a finalist for the National Book Award.” Along with hitting the pipe, he hits shops for $3,000 Gucci suits, flies to Sundance to the premier of his boyfriend’s film, and goes to the cash machine every night “taking out batches of $200” to pay for his drugs.
“From a distance,” he chirps, “it looks like an enviable life.” Correction, you self-
absorbed prat: it is an enviable life.

What’s more, it’s a life Clegg is able to parlay into celebrity for the simple, sickening reason that he is white and wealthy. Imagine if the face in the author photo was black. Holy moral panic Batman! The scribes and Pharisees would swarm like locusts, howling to the heavens about the irresponsibility of ‘glamourising drug use’.

Editorials would question the ethics of rewarding Clegg’s crack habit with a reported $350,000 advance (New York Observer, 8 Sept 2008). The Daily Mail would run a series of lurid articles about crack babies, illustrated with grainy, irrelevant photos of people shooting up in stairwells.

I don’t blame Clegg for being an opportunist. If someone offered me a few hundred thousand dollars to write about the idiot things I’ve done, I’d take the money and run. What I can’t get past is that we live in a media culture where someone did offer him that money. It would be nice if there were at least a moral to the story but Clegg seems strangely unreconstructed, untouched by it all:
There is a time, much later, when I will imagine what it was like for everyone else: the employees at the agency who lost their jobs; the writers I represented who depended on me… family; friends; Kate. Noah. At first, I’m consumed with shame and guilt and regret, but slowly, and with help, these feelings evolve into something less self-concerned.

“At first”, he’s consumed with shame and guilt but “these feelings evolve”? Into what, pray tell? Into thinking: actually, it’s totally okay to screw over everyone in my life?

Clegg writes: “After I collapse and am taken to hospital, after a spell in a psychiatric ward and a successful period in rehab… I will be offered a job at another literary agency.” Because hey, as long as you’re white and middle-class being a crack addict isn’t bad. It’s a career move.

cilwarncke.wordpress.com

Random Interview: Dom: Lover of cheese and Cheese Stall Owner, Borough Market

Wandering through Borough Market in the late evening June sun is a warming experience. In the soft summer light office workers, with ties askew, unwind outside the pubs with pints in hand. The smell of cooking sausages drifts through the air, trains rumble overhead and the atmosphere is buzzing with post-work cheeriness. In all the bustling I met a man who has managed to turn his enthusiasm for cheese into a successful entrepreneurial adventure.

SNIPE: How did you discover your enthusiasm for cheese?

Dom: Well my earliest memories are of cheese. There was an old couple I used to visit. We would go round to their house for cheese and crackers. I still remember the flavours vividly, after that taste I continued to yearn for cheese. I also grew up on a farm and remember the churns of milk that were brought up from the cows.

S: How did you break into the cheese industry?

D: I came to London and saw an advert in the Ham and High that said “Do You Like Cheese?” and something twigged and so I responded and ended up working at Neals Yard Dairy serving cheese over the counter. I remember coming in on my first day and being hit with this over-powering repugnant smell and thinking—I don’t know if I can stand this, but it tasted delicious. Nine years later and I am still doing it.

S: How did you end up breaking out and selling cheese yourself?

D: It was never really the plan, I did a Master’s in philosophy but a friend had an idea of going to France and selecting a cheese to sell. He had the cash and I had the time. We only serve one cheese called Comté. We take a trip there every so often for five weeks. We try the cheese and try to enjoy all the local flavours the local area has to offer.

S: It must be a bit of an adventure. Any tales from your trips?

D: Well, now we go so often that we are quite efficient now. We fly into Geneva and hire a car. I do remember a time I was bought a drink in a bar. I thought it was a bit cloudy looking, and I found out after I drank it that the bottle had a huge black dead snake inside that had been drowned in there in the 1940s.

S: Were you annoyed about not being told about the snake?

D: No I was just in shock, trying to analyse how I felt.

S: Does cheese really give you nightmares or is it just a myth?

*D: Well if you take the Freudian approach, dreams are the guardians of sleep and if we have bodily disturbances our imagination creates a story around that feeling, but with good quality cheese you don’t get that indigestion or bodily upset.

S: What are the physical effects of eating too much cheese?

D: It has made me happier.

S: What do you like about working here in the market?

D: The freedom, there’s always a buzz here, but in some ways it has changed. There are more people coming through but less being bought. Borough Market has become very sucessful and in some ways success feeds itself. The products start being packaged in smaller sizes and the innovation gets a bit lost. In many ways it’s like a person. Initially at the beginning, people have boundless energy and then as you get to middle age, the energy and ideas become more managed and you become complacent, then you start to go a bit senile.

S: But surely the life of the market can go around in a circle and start getting back to the initial innovation?

D: Yeah, I still think there’s lots of life left in it, the raw ingredients are still in place, no pun intended, and there are still innovative traders here, like the guy who sells sausages.

S: Is it fair to say that cheese is your passion or has dictated the course of your life?

D: it is fundamental to my life. I get a bit disturbed if I know there isn’t any cheese in the house. I hesitate to use the word passion. It is a trite adjective that says nothing. People applying for jobs say “I have a passion..” but this is more like a love affair. There is so much more emotion going on in a love affair than just passion. I can’t imagine a a life without it. It is a temporamental thing, sometimes good, boring or interesting but it has a social aspect and that is vital.

S: Do you think we are losing touch with these social tools, like the importance of certain foods that help bring us together in a communal way?

D: Definitely… mass production is reducing products to numbers and quantities. We are not experiencing them. Cheese is a vital ingredient. It’s in so many things and is part of our everyday lives. It can invigorate our palates but also add to the enjoyment of life. So much of life can pass by without any peaks, and for me cheese is one of the peaks.

S: Do other people in your life love cheese as much as you?

D: Not as avidly, well except those who work in cheese. My young son doesn’t like cheese at all. If I give him a bit of cheese he just laughs. I am not sure why.

Visit Dom at his stall— The Borough Market Cheese Company, Borough Market, Southwark Street and try some cheese

Going on and on and on and on …: After Human Centipede, where can humanity drop next?

As you read these words, somewhere in the lovely summer light of this great and cultured city, one actress is miming having her lips sewn to the anus of another. As civic honours go, London is cleaning up. First we win the right to host the Olympics, and now we win the right, no, the honour, of hosting the filming of Human Centipede II, which started this month.

For those of you who have spent the last few months on planet decency, Human Centipede I was a film about a surgeon who creates a monster by sewing three people together in the manner described above.

How to top that in the sequel? The makers are understandably keeping tight lipped. One can only hope that once the cameras start rolling, the actors manage to do the same.

Rumour has it that rather than the three components of the original, the Human Centipede II will consist of twelve people joined together ass to mouth to form a perfect circle. I think the technical literary term for this is ring composition.

It’s pretty sick, for sure. But for all the comment the film has attracted (this column included), I can’t shake off a sort of shrugging feeling as I read the plot synopsis. Ass, mouth, shit: it might disgust, but does it really surprise? Generation X might have been shocked by this sort of thing. but we’re Generation Meh, haven’t we seen it all before?

Which asks the question, where are the next generation of artists going to turn for controversy? Oh there’s bestiality of course, or trusty old paedophilia. And I guess you could say no one has yet written the scatological incest novel, although Ian McEwan will probably get round to it sooner or later.

But these things are already available on the internet, right now, on Redtube, Youporn, Xvideos, Dudetube. And it spills over into real life. Time was when there was a ripple of excitement over whether you’d get a kiss on the fifth date without a chaperone. Now if you don’t fuck on the third, you can find yourself in court over breach of contract, and unless you’re a black belt in dildo you can’t help but find your performance inferior to the stuff you’ve seen online.

And then comes Chatroulette, an idea so theoretically pure and wholesome you could sell it in Waitrose. Here is an opportunity to communicate directly with anyone in the world. Imagine, to choose two nationalities completely at random, an Israeli child and a Palestinian, divided by their religions, their ideologies and their people. One day they chance upon each other in this great meeting place of the world and they talk, as children do, and their talk is unmediated by rancour, censorship or propaganda. They discover that for all that divides them, what unites them is so much more, and a beautiful friendship blooms. Chatroulette teaches them what their parents never could (and I’m copyrighting this slogan for when the film comes out): “you can’t put a blockade on love.”

And now think to what use Chatroulette is actually put: wanking. Why? Because there are no repercussions, and this means there are no rules.

In Freudian terms (yeah, snipe can do deep), Chatroulette is the unfettering of the id, the removal of the civilising force, the return to the wild. It’s also a parade of men wanking over each other in the desperate hope of stumbling across a woman, but that doesn’t sound nearly so impressive.

Think about it: humans disappearing into a darkened space, crouched alone round a small spot of light and heat, thinking only of sex, food and bodily functions. It’s like we’ve gone back to living in caves, only now they have wifi.

So stop using it people! Re-fetter your id! It’s stupid, it’s inane, it’s as unshocking and as vacuous as the Human Centipede. It’s also profoundly boring. And as all Generation Meh-ers know, there’s nothing worse than that.