It Is Biutiful..

Just watched Biutiful – the story of a dying conman played by Javier Bardem. Set in a Barcelona that rarely graces our screens, dark and flawed, seering your emotions from high to low with wonderful intensity with Bardem at the centre, pulling you along through his dark life in a fractured city. Director Inarittu’s view of this Barcelona is more akin to the slums of South America than the picture perfect rose tint of Woody Allen who also took Bardem and Barcelona as his muse.

I don’t know when I’ll next be in Barcelona, a city that always felt like a home, but I’ll certainly look at it with fresh eyes when I do. Surely the mark of a great film.

Gig: The Franklys @ The 100 Club

In my usual, inimitable style, here’s a link to my pics from the excellent Franklys gig at the 100 club a few weeks back, plus a few extras of the after party when I was playing around with my off camera flash. The Franklys new line-up rocks, and their latest songs are off the hock – so check them out soon. Skol!

The End of a Course

Last week was the final week of my Portrait Course at Central St Martins. It’s been a great ten weeks. Not only have I learnt a lot, gotten to play with a lot of proper studio lighting kit and had lots of willing people standing around having their photo taken, but it’s also been a lot of fun. Bonus! Big thanks to everyone on the course and of course to Peter for teaching.

Street Art: Space Invader @ The Outsiders, London

Space Invader invaders The Outsiders gallery, London.

Space Invader currently has a show at The Outsiders, in Soho. It’s not quite as epic as his 1000th Parisian Invader show earlier this year – but you can get Invader waffles.. Mmmm. There’s also a cool video of the artist at work in the basement along with an invaded disco ball. Or you can drop a cool £5000+ to buy an official alias on one of his many works. Hint: It’s getting close to Christmas and the show’s on till Christmas Eve… Click here for a few pics.

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Self-Selective Amnesia

Sorry, I seem to have chosen to forget what I was going to say.

A Moment In History

While I was over in New York this Easter it was reported that Osama Bin Laden had been killed. I was in a bar in Williamsburg when it happened, everyone seemed to pick up on it pretty quickly even though no TV was on. Such is the way of news in these modern times. Later I was asked why I hadn’t rushed down to Ground Zero to witness the ensuing celebrations, the end of the long search for the perpetrator of the atrocity that happened almost ten years ago. The answer was simple, his death didn’t really mark anything any more, in fact his death rather than capture made things arguably less clear.

Spin forward to today, and the whole of England, if not the world, is heading towards a real sea change. Arguably one of the people who really put the ‘terror’ in the ‘war on terror’ was facing his own trial of sorts. Rupert Murdoch and his son, answered questions from British MPs regarding his newspaper’s apparent repeated and callous disregard for the law in the pursuit of a story. The owner of the biggest propaganda machine in the US if not the world, Fox News, sitting front and center as the story himself. This may not seem like much, but the number of influential people this looks to be impacting is fascinating and disturbing. It shows that with our modern, connected, social media rich communication there is no way for a story to be kept under wraps, under the control of media cartels who only seem to answer to their bottom line not the public’s best interest.

So as I got ready for my usual run along the Thames Embankment this evening, I thought maybe I should avoid Parliament. Stay away from the melee. Then I realised that this was a moment in history that I did not want to miss. One of those times you remember always and tell your grandchildren about. As I ran through the crowds gathered around the streets, and the media tents brightly lit on the lawn, I could feel the sense of excitement and anticipation. A buzz as people saw the moment happening, when a brighter future emerged.

A Memory of Gerard Smith

A few weeks ago Gerard Smith, the bassist from TV on the Radio, died from lung cancer age 34. I found this out in New York, sitting in the flat of my friends who live above Union Pool – the very place I’d first seen TV on the Radio play with Gerard in a small, intimate, sweaty and fun filled gig. Sad news at any time, but especially so in that situation, and my thoughts immediately turned to his friends, family and bandmates and the shock of someone dying so young.

Like most TV on the Radio fans, I never knew Gerard as anyone other than a member of the band, playing wonderful music that made us smile, dance and sing. but one moment will stay with me that I wanted to share. In July 2009 TV on the Radio played Brixton Academy, shortly after playing a more intimate gig at Shepherds Bush. In coming out from the plastic cup strewn hall, we found a crowd of people gathered around a t-shirt vendor on the street. The t-shirts, bad knock offs of official merchandise, were laid out on the ground to catch happy fans on the way out of the gig. What made this scene so different from every other time, was that this time two of the band members themselves were helping sell the t-shirts. Jaleel and Gerard were laughing, smiling and trying to convince their fans that these were the best t-shirts ever much to the enjoyment of everyone around, especially the t-shirt vendor. A beautiful moment. Gerard, sorry the photo isn’t worthy of it, but the memory you left is one of the very best. Happy travels.

Misty Black Mountain Hop

Weekends round here seem to oscillate between fun adventures outside of town and homebody sessions. This weekend is very much homebody, catching up with errands and geek activities such as installing new computer operating systems, watching the entire extended edition of Lord of the Rings (classic being ill recovery movie) and finding out that Crucial seem to have run out of MacBook Pro memory right now – what with that? Guess my ageing laptop will have to wait for its final upgrade. All this is in stark contract to last weekend, where a group of us headed off to celebrate Miette’s birthday at the lovely Castle Farm in Capel-y-Ffin right in the Black Mountains.

Castle Farm is a lovely location, pretty much in the middle of nowhere, although as we arrived on a windy, almost moon-less night it seemed less than idyllic – no small thanks to Tom suggesting a recently escaped psycho from a local prison and the wind trying to throw everything at our windscreen as we crawled up pitch black, windy country lanes avoiding fallen branches. All this city-folk fear subsided once we were inside the large, but cost house and had a roaring fire lit. Oh, and after a few drinks. A few hours later, everyone else arrived and the weekend’s party began in earnest with many more logs being burnt.

The next morning was still overcast and windy, but we could now see the epic view out the windows. Nestled in a valley between two spurs of the Black Mountains, the farm has a stunning outlook, green fields dotted with windswept trees and sheep. Although it was less than perfect walking conditions we took a ‘brief’ (four hour) constitutional up to Lord Hereford’s Knob where the wind tried its best to blow us off. The hill that is. Mountain scaled we pushed through the wind, back down in the rapidly fading afternoon gloom to the warmth of the fire, where everyone else was enjoying Britain’s Got Talent, pretty much in the same place we’d left them four hours earlier. For some reason they all seemed pretty sure this was the better choice… The evening passed in a haze of good food, cake, board games, possibly some vino and enjoying a roaring fire as the wind howled outside the window. Perfect.

Weekend’s away, whether in Britain or abroad, are always so much fun – and though I’m sitting here somewhat wishing we had a roaring fire to enjoy, or a new place to explore, it’s the contrast of the two states that really make things pop in my mind. Every weekend enjoying the comforts of home can become deathy dull, conversely spending every weekend somewhere new is rapidly over-whelming so it becomes hard to fully appreciate the new wonders in front of you. Creating your own perfect preferred blend of experience and reflection is arguably part of what life’s all about. Or maybe just having an open fire everywhere you go. Mmmm… burny.

The New York Glow

Another marathon session of going through photos clearing the backlog. Always fun to look at photos you took over three years ago to work out which are ‘good’. When I filter photos I’ve just taken I always find it really hard to abstract my emotions from the event as opposed to what’s there in the photo. As Terry Gilliam says, if it’s not on the screen it’s not on the screen. Given the number of photos still to go through I should be pretty good at it sometime soon – or at least I’ll be more brutal about it.

In Memoriam.