As soon as there were VHS home-movie cameras, there were people remaking their favourite films at home. Maybe people were doing it before video, though no examples come to mind (tell me if you know of any…), but my hunch is that it’s to do with youth and timing. Home-movie technology on film was usually […]
Just a quick heads-up about a piece I did for the Guardian online earlier this week about the adaptive possibilities of cabaret compared to more conventional theatre models – special forces rather than regular army, if you like. Here’s the opening: Dripping with rococo ornamentation and covered in mirrors, the Café Royal’s Grill Room in […]
Review of a galvanising and heartbreaking performance lecture by Mat Frasier at the Science Museum about the historical representation of disability in museums
J.M. Tyree and I reviewed the Coen brothers’ latest film, Inside Llewyn Davis, for the February 2014 issue of Sight & Sound. Josh and I co-wrote the BFI Film Classic on The Big Lebowski in 2007 and have covered a bunch of Coen pictures for S&S since then. (Here’s our take on No Country for […]
And so Jarmania 2014 begins! This year, the twentieth anniversary of Derek Jarman’s death, sees a whole bunch of events dedicated to the artist and filmmaker. First out of the traps is Pandemonium, an exhibition by the Cultural Institute at King’s, where Jarman studied from 1960 to 1963, at the Inigo Rooms in Somerset House’s […]
Not that we needed one, but there’s a whole new reason to love the Royal Vauxhall Tavern: a life-size street-art stencil of Britain’s fave Olympic medalist/smiley twink/Speedo-model/same-sex-love poster boy, Tom Daley, brandishing a groin-level declaration that ‘All We Need Is Love’, complete with rainbow-hued love-heart. Created on Friday (January 17, 2014) by street artist Pegasus, the […]
I do love a bit of music hall. It’s a form that’s often seen as a bit cheesy – those nudge-nudge euphemisms and all those Victorian collars and frills – but there’s so much to cherish in its rampantly eclectic line-ups of disparate talents, beautiful spaces and assured audience rapport. (That side of things […]
This is my review from the January 2014 issue of Sight & Sound of Beth B’s documentary Exposed: Beyond Burlesque, about the NYC alt performance and burlesque scene. It features Bambi the Mermaid, Bunny Love, Dirty Martini, Julie Atlas Muz, Mat Fraser, Rose Wood, Tigger! and World Famous *BOB* and plays at the ICA […]
To the Crazy Coqs in Piccadilly last night to catch the international debut of Carole J. Bufford, a young American songbook performer who hadn’t even left the US before this week. Under artistic director Ruth Leon, Crazy Coqs has rapidly established itself as arguably London’s leading showcase for classical cabaret acts from the States, and as […]
“To talk about Camp is…to betray it,” wrote Susan Sontag. Chance would be a fine thing. There wasn’t a whole lot of talking about camp at the ICA’s Notes on Camp panel event on Wednesday night. By rights, it should have been called Notes on Neo-Camp, since it offered ruminations on the recent exhibition of […]
