Zola Jesus. In it. For real.
It’s hard to imagine Zola Jesus, aka Nika Roza Danilova, in her new home city of Los Angeles, dressed in her outsiderish proto-gothic outfits, driving and strolling and loitering between the palm trees and paved boulevards and rollerbladers.
She’d be better suited to the spiked towers of Prague, or the architectural melee of Berlin, or at least the weeping trees and hulking blocks around Central Park in autumn; somewhere you can gaze mournfully or lurk meaningfully amongst buildings with weathered headstone facades.
But, as always, it’s a mistake to identify an artist too much with their work. Why should the recently married 21-year-old star be anything but cheerful with the state of her life?
02 Nov 2010
DIARY: Icelandic singer in London, Snorri Helgason
I didn’t mean to hurt you – I’m Snorri that I made you cry.
I learned English from TV and reading Blur lyrics with a dictionary. I have a pretty good vocabulary and can hide my Icelandic accent pretty well when I’m sober.
I’m a musician and so I get to travel a lot. I go to lots of different places and pick up the little differences in the mannerisms and vocabulary of each place. Right now I’m in Newfoundland and I find myself saying things like “oh yaah?”, “fur sure” and “eh?” all the time. I was in Austin, Texas for a couple of days last year and was throwing “y’all” around like crazy. Weird.
I recently moved to London and the first thing I started picking up there was that whenever I’d order something from a bar or a café or something I’d always get these weird looks from the staff. I was being chatty and smiling and everything but no matter what I did I’d always get that look and that feeling of guilt. It took me a while to figure out what it was. Actually I didn’t figure it out—it had to be pointed out to me by a rather pissed-off waitress that I had forgotten to say the magic word—“PLEASE”. Now you see… you don’t learn that from TV and Blur lyrics. OK.
Lesson learned.
That waitress got me so paranoid I started saying, “please” at least twice in every sentence. “Can I please have pint of Guinness, please… sorry”. And that’s another magic word ain’t it?—“SORRY”. What’s with you English and yer sorries?
Going to a market or walking down a busy street in London is like sorry—heaven. “Imsorry… Imsorry…Imsorry”. I was talking to an English friend of mine the other night and she said; “I’m sorry I’m saying sorry to much”. Riiight.
I mean—being nice and courteous is fine. Makes the world a better place. Just don’t overdo it. (Cliché alert!) It’s like the boy who cried wolf; what are you going to say when you really are sorry or your really need someone to do something for you?
So my preachy preach preach is; Britons! – just… relax. Stop apologizing for your existence.
And to London newcomers like myself – just start firing out sorries and pleases all over the place and you’ll be fine.
02 Nov 2010
Jai Paul
Confirmed, official details are few and far between with Jai Paul, but here is what we suspect/have heard: he is twenty-one years of age, comes from NW London and has been courted by XL Recordings. His only original work available, ‘BTSTU’ might be named after legendary Argentinian footballer Gabriel Batistuta and includes a sound around the 2:00 mark which sounds like a pixellated rocket taking off. He supports Chelsea (who are not based in NW London, so he might be a glory hunter.) He might have an EP out at the end of the year, he might just have been conceived backstage at one of Prince’s London shows of the Lovesexy World Tour in 1988 and he might be the little brother of the speccy one from Hot Chip. (These last two things might not be 100% truth serum, but IT WOULD EXPLAIN A LOT). What we know for certain is this: ‘BTSTU’ is an addictive earworm, all laid-back sass with Jai’s gentle falsetto vocals over meaty synths explaining “I know I’ve been gone a long time but I’m back and I want what is mine.” We don’t know where he’s been, but we sure as hell like where he’s going.
02 Nov 2010
Big Deal
Big Deal? Yeah, so what, big deal. Or, you know, maybe a blinging-through-the-airport Beckham-style NO PHOTOS big deal. Or maybe a Mad Men sweating-round-the-boardroom-table dotted line big deal? Or maybe the second hand guitar store in Wolverhampton. Who knows which type of big deal Big Deal are named after. They sound a bit like the formerly-quite-a-big-deal duo The Kills, but stripped back and more subtle and less bombastic and annoying. Just nice, personal, low key songs rather than all that sloganeering. Maybe it’s just the boy-girl dynamic that’s the same, and the vaguely Americana feel. It’s almost reassuring to hear two people singing over some guitar, and for it to be really great. Sometimes, it feels like all the combinations of notes have been written, and all the lyrics have been sung before in all the different ways. And maybe they have. But as Big Deal prove, that doesn’t mean someone new can’t come along and make something honest and strikingly simple, that sounds like it was always written somehow, that makes everything seem fresh again for a minute. This is nice stuff.
Big Deal, or no deal.
Big Deal play the Lock Tavern, 7 November, and the Lexington, 15 November
02 Nov 2010
Blasted, A Moment of Silence
THE HOLY GRAIL is the holy grail of knights on a grail quest. The rest of us are just trying to get by. To those living in a world of perpetual gloom and despair the dream is often just to see tomorrow.
For some, it’s to not have to see another tomorrow, an altogether darker quest, yet whether it’s because there is no such thing as tomorrow, or due to fear, or to a very subtle kind of courage, the sun usually rises again. A kernel of optimism, of fantasy, a skewed logic involving statistics and karma keeps everybody going. We’re all on a grail quest. It’s just a matter of personal scale.
02 Nov 2010
Millions Like Us: Nicky Coutts
Nicky Coutts ‘Film Still’ Courtesy of artist and Danielle Arnaud
Coutts’ previous works have investigated the relationship between found images and materials, experimenting with how they can be used to reshape memory and narrative.
In her second exhibition at the Danielle Arnaud Gallery she presents dream-like, off-key interpretations and re-enactments of feature-length films. ‘Eastern’ adapts a key scene from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. An actor is shot down in a Tokyo park by a toy gun as people walk by oblivious and regardless. Coutts amplifies the tension of the original film by cutting to characters played by locals chosen on location as they pace awkwardly, sizing each other up. 5 Nov – 19 Dec. Danielle Arnaud Gallery, 123 Kennington Park Road, Lambeth North, SE11 6SF
02 Nov 2010
Throwing Shapes
Vanessa Jackson ‘Throwing Shapes’ Detail, 2010 Courtesy of the artist and Cafe Gallery
Curated by Rebecca Geldard, Throwing Shapes is a group exhibition presented by Coleman Project Space and Café Gallery Projects. The exchanged dialogue between the works of Vanessa Jackson, Clare Goodwin Alastair Duncan, Kilian Rüthemann and the two different project spaces are one of colourful abstract shapes, modernist notions and dance. Speaking in sharply defined symmetries formed by geometrical systems this exhibition explores and shatters language barriers. Until 7 Nov. Cafe Gallery Projects, 1 Park Approach, Canada Water, SE162UA www.cafegalleryprojects.com
02 Nov 2010
SuperUnknown
Rosie Wiesner, Room. Courtesy of Edel Assanti Gallery
As societies in decline become a focal point in pop culture and cinema, SuperUnknown presents the work of 12 artists exploring the fringes of dystopia and apocalypse through image and sculpture. The tonal range of the varying investigations is impressive from Rob Sherwood’s pixelated explosions in ‘Nothing to Fear, Nothing to Doubt’ to Ed Payne’s bleak mathematical experiments. Rosalie Wiesner’s ‘Room’ is a light box depicting a glowing ethereal miniature interior within a woodland landscape. Whilst Gordon Cheung’s ‘Minotaur II’ portrays an exquisite candy-coloured bull frolicking across a polycarbonate landscape painted over stock listings. Until 13 Nov. Edel Assanti, 276 Vauxhall Bridge Road, Victoria, SW1V 1BB www.edelassanti.com
02 Nov 2010
Louise Bourgeois: The Fabric Works
Untitled’ 2007 © Louise Bourgeois Trust Courtesy Hauser & Wirth. Christopher Burke photo
Louis Bourgeois is known for her Freudian oeuvre, which is often accompanied by abject representations relating to women, maternal relationships and notions of femininity. This show features over 70 fabric drawings made between 2002 and 2008, as well as four large-scale sculptures. Made from clothes and other domestic effects accrued over decades, Bourgeois’s fabric drawings are abstract yet acutely personal works, retaining allusions to the materials’ past incarnations. The morphing geometries of her fabric patterns are supple and embracive: the stitches holding life’s threads together, protecting Bourgeois from her fear of abandonment. Until 18 Dec. Hauser & Wirth, 23 Savile Row, Oxford Circus, W1S 2ET www.hauserwirth.com
02 Nov 2010
Exhibition of the month: Full Fat or Semi-Skinned?
Image Courtesy of the artist and Next Level
Andrea Hasler’s installation presents a radical intrusion into the audience’s space as the artist confronts her own feelings of attraction and repulsion through the abjection of the female body and breast milk.
Central to the installation stands a hospital trolley that appears to be the basis for an organic-based contraption. On the lower level of the machine lies a repulsive, lumpy and seemingly oozing organ from which the breasts of the machine seem to feed. Despite the initial repulsion that greets the audience near to floor level, the overt breast-based imagery draws the audience in through its unique and varied connotations from comfort and fertility, lust and attraction, to motherhood and fetishism.
Constantly challenging the viewer, Hasler’s seemingly fleshy representations of the breasts initially appear inviting and vulnerable but are conflictingly studded with diamonds. The extravagance and exclusivity are emphasised by the use of silicon implants; plastic surgery is usually a luxury indulged by those who can afford it. As possibilities of modelling and perfecting the body’s surface have become endless as well as financially affordable, the question arises: how exclusiveness, decadence, wealth or the desire for an individually controlled and designed physicality can be expressed.
Hasler’s sculpted body parts conflate usual appearances as inner parts are turned outside and outwards parts are turned inside as she exerts power over her sexuality, over anyone that would objectify and fetishise the female body. This exhibition is thought provoking, and compelling in its psychological complexity. Until 10 Nov. Next Level Projects, 58 Hanbury Street, Liverpool Street, E1 5JL www.nextlevelprojects.org 020 7655 4350
02 Nov 2010
Snipe Highlights
Some popular articles from past years
- Silencing the Brick Lane curry touts could be fatal for the city's self-esteem
- A unique collection of photos of Edwardian Londoners
- Only 16 commuters touch in to Emirates Air Line, figures reveal
- Random Interview: Eileen Conn, co-ordinator of Peckham Vision
- 9 poems about London: one for each of your moods
- An interview with Desiree Akhavan
- Margaret Thatcher statue rejected by public
- Hope and despair in Woolwich town centre
- Number of people using Thames cable car plunges
- Diary of the shy Londoner
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