Coming up in London this September is a season of all Werner Herzog’s feature films, around a third of his documentaries, plus the two Les Blank documentaries about Herzog. The latter form part of a weekend conference on Herzog’s work, which also includes the UK premiere of the director’s most recent film The Wild Blue […]
Cultural Calendar
Blog of Forced Entertainment new show re-starts
As performance company Forced Entertainment have re-started ‘R&D’ on their next project, the blog documenting this work — previously mentioned here — has also got under way again.
An American ballad collection: Playlist #3
A few weeks ago, I started reading the collection of essays The Rose and the Briar, which re-imagines America through the lens of its ballads — mostly from the twentieth century, though the origins of some go back much further (and to parts of the British Isles). As soon as I started reading, I realised […]
Slow walk for longplayer on summer solstice
I’ve written a few posts recently (1, 2) related to the Longplayer 1000-year-long piece of music, and here’s one more, including a request for your credit card contribution. On 21 June, Ohad Fishof will be doing a fundraising slow walk across London Bridge and back, a total distance of 563.8m. For a contribution of £5 […]
Incense and Playlist #2
An anecdote from yesterday evening’s Twisted Folk gig. Arriving a few minutes early, and alone, I went straight to my seat rather than hang around in the bar. There were only four or five people in the stalls when Devendra Banhart jumped down off the stage, and criss-crossed the rows of seats carrying a smoking […]
Doris Lessing and Laurie Anderson: rough notes
Here are my notes of last week’s Artangel Longplayer Conversation 2005, which I previewed a few weeks ago. Michael Morris of Artangel introduced the event by saying that, after five years of Longplayer — just 995 to go — they’re instituting conversations like this as an annual event. Doris Lessing and Laurie Anderson hadn’t met […]
Playlist #1: Neil Young celebrity playlist
I’d lay a large bet that Neil Young doesn’t have an iPod. He’s been waging a war on digital compression since the early days of CDs, and is on record as saying that MP3s are even worse than CDs: “MP3 is a dog; the quality sucks. It’s all compressed and the data compression — it’s […]
Old singers, old songs
Yesterday I went to see the first of Linda Thompson’s three-night series of music-hall revue shows, which cited the Cole Porter quote, “strange how potent cheap music is”. Not just potent, but — at least in some cases — much more persistent than the disposable, ephemeral stuff it was thought to be. This comes at […]
The Roots of London Calling
A few weeks ago, I advocated the creation of ‘imaginary’ celebrity playlists, which could become an interesting form of musical essay on both the celebrity and the acts in his/her playlist. I’m working on one for Neil Young, which so far may include tracks from The Shadows, Roy Orbison, Otis Redding’s cover of Satisfaction, Bobby […]
Time and Timelessness: Laurie Anderson, Doris Lessing, Jem Finer
Alongside her performances at the Barbican next month, Laurie Anderson is participating in a public conversation with Doris Lessing on the theme of Time and Timelessness (26 May, at the Royal Institution). The blurb for the event proffers: Since the year 2000, the lighthouse on Trinity Buoy Wharf in London’s Docklands has been home to […]