Yesterday evening we strolled along to the opening of Change of Signature, billed as a multimedia installation, at Testbed 1, a local exhibition space that I hadn't come across before. And it proved to be a fascinating show. The venue is a large, stripped out industrial space: uneven concrete floors, distressed iron girders, ceramic tiled …
Category: London
spring fever
At last, at long bloody last, spring seems to have arrived. I'm wearing footless tights, for only the second time this year. I've opened the bedroom window - not wide, but enough for a gentle waft of London air and London sounds to permeate the flat. The heating's been off for a couple of weeks, …
big up for a little mag
Issue Fifteen of South Bank Poetry magazine is a bit of a cracker. The strapline is 'London and Urban Poetry', and the current issue features many Scottish themed poems alongside the London contingent. A fitting blue and white cover, and just under 40 pages of fine poems, given room to breathe and interact with each …
muses aplenty
Thursday 4th April. Outside, the bitter easterly wind continued to savage awnings, umbrellas and most people's spirits. We'd had snow flurries and sleet all day, and London's pavements spattered a thin muddy muck on everyone's boots. In the downstairs bar of Cotton's Caribbean Restaurant in Exmouth Market, nearly 30 women writers, plus friends and supporters, …
a packed week off – part two
I think this packed week off is catching up with me. Deep breath... So, Wednesday night to Loose Muse at the Poetry Café. I wavered, feeling tired and a kind of non-specific low-level anxiety, and then the intermittent flurries of snow did little to improve my mood. But I convinced myself to go, and the …
a packed week off – part one
which began, on the evening of Thursday 7th March, with a trip to the Barbican to experience The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns. Quite a mouthful. The exhibition focuses on Duchamp's interaction with and influence on four key American creators after he moved to New York in 1942. The main …
Well Done Bryan!
To the British Library on Friday evening for B.S. Johnson: His Life and Legacy. The event, marking the 80th anniversary of B.S. Johnson's birth, also tied in with the publication of a new collection of his prose and drama, Well Done God!, edited by Jonathan Coe, Philip Tew and Julia Jordan. The evening began with …
cut and paste
What a revelation the current Tate show, Schwitters in Britain, is. Although the main focus is on late work by Schwitters, made after his arrival in Britain as a refugee in 1940, the exhibition does include work from earlier periods in Germany and then Norway, and highlights the breadth and inventiveness of his art throughout …
demolition blues
I'm feeling sad this morning. Just learnt that the Adventure Playground in Battersea Park was demolished yesterday, despite all the campaigning, protesting and petitioning by local people, huge support from the wider community, and the recent brave occupation to try to prevent the council's bulldozers going in. The sun is shining, but the playground's been …
magic, danger, fear
magic, danger, fear: the first words I jotted down last night, sitting in the hushed gallery space of the Parasol Unit, listening with intense concentration to Ian MacFadyen talking about the Third Mind. We were there for On beat, an event billed as exploring 'some of Beat culture's most evocative moments and its ongoing legacy …
Hilaire 