Marley’s Ghost

My favourite picture of Bob

I was lucky enough to get a last-minute ticket from Kevin Macdonald this week for his new documentary on Bob Marley. It was a coming home for me of sorts as it was playing at The Tricycle in Kilburn, whose cinema entrance is on Buckley Road where my other half used to live (No. 16) in the wake of a string of Irish sisters in exile. London was the place Bob headed for in the wake of an attempt on his life in December 1976 when he made the mistake of getting too mixed up in Jamaican politics – it was a place he had some special affinity with and  where he recorded some of his best work. I’ve written about the making of Exodus in punk London in 1977 here. There’s a good story in the film about how he and the Wailers crossed the Thames to Battersea Park on a regular basis to indulge his love of soccer, on occasion taking on a National Front team and whupping their arses at the beautiful English game. Questions of racial identity and Tough Gong’s status as a mixed race boy is brought to the fore in ‘Marley’, highlighting his rejection by black and white alike. One of the most moving moments of the film is when the song Cornerstone is played to two same-generation relatives on his despicable white father’s side, each listening intently on their ipods.

The stone that the builder refuse
Will always be the head cornerstone
(Sing it brother)
The stone that the builder refuse
Will always be the head cornerstone.

You’re a builder, baby
Here I am, a stone.
Don’t you pick and refuse me,
‘Cause the things people refuse
Are the things they should use.
Do you hear me? Hear what I say!

Don’t refuse me, don’t you refuse…

We hear how he went to visit his father’s brother, a prosperous white builder on the island, and, well aware of who he was, he refused to see him. The fecker only got in touch again years later when Bob was famous and playing a US stadium. Bob knew he was destined to be the Marley who would be remembered – the Cornerstone of the family. Macdonald attributes the rejection from both sides as a major driver for a singer who of course drew together back and white. Ironically for a fair while his US audiences were white dominated. That’s why he took a gig supporting The Commodores. His management told The Commodores’ people that the group should have been opening for Bob but Bob took the gig because he wanted to tap into their black soul audience. Coming on after Bob Marley – gotta be the toughest support act to follow – ever.

The amount of music contained in the story is very well judged – in no way a concert film, it gives insight into the music (especially live) but sends you off in search of more. The documentary captures a number of moments when Bob is clearly immersed in his music to a transcendental degree. At the Smile Jamaica concert, designed to reunite a politically riven country, just two days after the shooting (and the very reason for the assassination attempt), he shows up, a few hours late, the track of a bullet across his arm and chest, shows off his bandages and then launches into song oblivious of the hurt. We see this again as he performs Exodus at the famous Lyceum concert which sealed his reputation. And most notably at the gig he did on Zimbabwean Independence Day (April 1980, part of his homecoming to Mother Africa) when a tear gas canister clears the stage and much of the auditorium, people weeping and a’wailing, but he is left alone singing away, away, beyond the power of the throat burning eye stinging fumes. His power is again evident in the way he, towered above by the opposing politicians, evidently not a tall man, brings about the handshake between Prime Minister Michael Manley (People’s National Party) and opposition leader Edward Seaga (Jamaican Labour Party) at the One Love peace concert in Kingston in April 1978 after the year of exile in West London (not a million miles from Buckley Road).

The way he tours the States and beyond with cancer secretly worming its way through every part of his body is testament to his amazing energy. Those moments when he loses himself in the music and reaches a place beyond the trials and tribulations of the every day, beyond the petty rude boy politics, the heartless rejection, the shadowy disease, the loneliness, the black and the white are the high points of ‘Marley’ – naturally mystical moments where we see him coming home to peace, love and oneness.

It’s a film made with love and patience and is best enjoyed in that spirit, settle back in front of a big, loud screen for a carefully paced circular journey from his birthplace in the hills of Nine Mile, Saint Ann to a mausoleum just a stone’s throw from his childhood home there.

Here I am, a stone.

Stoned immaculate: a unique energy

Son of a Beach – Picture of the Month: Joie de Vivre – Picasso (1946)

I’m writing this post on a Mediterranean beach in Greek Cyprus as that is the essence of this painting: Mediterranean light and sensuality, Classical culture, family fun and frolics. It is the beating heart of the Picasso Museum in old Antibes, the single work which captures the spirit of the collection based in a beautiful grand old house overlooking the sparkling sea.

The Musee Picasso in the Marais of Paris is a wonderful collection cutting across the great man’s lifetime of work (I consider Picasso alongside Bacon as the greatest of 20th Century artists). This collection is far more specific, capturing a brief period after the war when Picasso was in effect artist in residence on a floor of the Chateau Grimaldi, which in 1966 was renamed the Musee Picasso, Antibes. This month was my third visit – I was hooked by the vibe of the place when I first visited about a decade ago with my other half. I was back again last year when I walked over the hill from Juan Les Pins whilst over for the International Digital Emmys. I was back again for those and a speaking sesh at MIP this year and spent a marvellous Sunday there. As I walked up the hill from the old covered market I coincided with the Palm Sunday congregation exiting the resonant ochre church opposite the museum, carrying a variety of symbolic, palm-related plants including woven crosses of palm. I sat myself down on the stone bench in the square separating the church and the Chateau Grimaldi, a stoney canyon giving on to the sea between high walls and blocks of shadow, and sketched the view from the sail-boats flowing across the waves to the students sitting looking out to them, bathed in the bright Mediterranean light.

Without having done any biographical research, I get the impression Picasso was recharging his batteries here after the war, delighting in the Simple Pleasures, from fish to music, from sea urchins to women in all their complexity, from good food and wine to friendship. The photos beside his studio floor by Michel Sima show him with Francoise Gilot, mother of his children, with Paul Eluard (Surrealist poet) and Nusch Eluard (his wife, Surrealist muse), in local restaurants along this bit of coast, working away in the cool shadows of the top floor of this building in sandals, bare torso, bullish like his Minotaur characters who seem confounded, in the line drawn illustrations on display, by the naked women in their lives and their own hairy nature.

The painting depicts a scene from the Classical age of the Mediterranean. It is part of a process Picasso seems to have been going through to extract the essence of the Classical past for his modernist age, to reinvent it for a world post A-bomb, post-Holocaust, post-Guernica, post-mechanisation and industrialisation, to use it to reconnect with the Simple Pleasures and the world of light.

The scene is centred on the family, with a nuclear family of the average 2 point whatever kids cavorting on the beach. The colours are the muted earth colours of Mediterranean pottery, a not too distant relation of the five earthy colours of ancient Egyptian tomb art which were picked up by Bridget Riley in the late 80s (I was fortunate to attend a lecture by her in Cambridge in about 1986 when she talked through her process of adopting that ancient palette, then I saw them for real in tombs along the Nile to Aswan the following decade).

At the centre of the picture is a woman with big knockers. So far, so Picasso. She’s suitably distorted/multi-angled though well beyond the Cubism – she’s Cubist plus 1920s Classical phase plus a sprinkle of Blue Period, all simplified towards Klee territory. Not only are those big bazookas symmetrical but so are her legs and locks so she is very much the centre line of the composition. To her left are the kids (literally – half goat) and a musician with ancient Greek pipe thingies – again, child-like in Klee style, fat fingers and circle head. To her right is a musical centaur, perhaps the Great Man himself in his combination of animal passion and artistic sensitivity. With his bestial four legs he’s that bit smaller than the woman. But it’s all pretty tension free, music, dancing, Mediterranean fun and frolics at the seaside. Those two vertical halves are divided into thirds horizontally – land / sea / sky – dominated by blues which are the hues of peace and infinity. The earth and ocean are a collagy style of painting, direct descendants of his Cubism. The sky is dominated by a classic sail boat in Vermeer blue and yellow. It’s pretty big in the greater scheme of things and for me represents Picasso’s escape route and back-of-the-mind sense that fun and family, luxury and high life by the Med are all well and good, but he has other stuff to go out and explore…

I’m finishing writing this post a couple of weeks later back in London with a print of Guernica as reimagined by Pure Evil on the wall behind me. As far as that Paphos beach is from this North London suburb, so is this Joie de Vivre from the explosive hell of Guernica – separated by a monstrous war and yet in the forms and techniques, the animal imagery, the faceted design, they are not that far apart. Under a decade separates the two (9 years) – by road 9 hours or 900 kilometres (an almost straight line through San Sebastian, Bayonne, Toulouse, Montpelier, Nimes, Cannes; a gently undulating line like the horizon of the ocean in the painting). The son of a beach would really have had the feeling that time heals all wounds.

Guernica to Antibes

Previous Picture of the Month: Portrait surrounded by Artistic Devices – David Hockney (a huge Picasso fan)

Heddonism

copyright: Brian Ward, courtesy of Des Shaw

It’s 08:45. I’m dripping wet, just out the shower, drying off by Whitey (our trusty old iMac) with Twitter open. I notice a tweet flow by: ‘Ziggy Stardust plaque being unveiled at 9:45 just off Regent St, if you’re in West End come by’. I’d heard about the plaque earlier in the week from Des Shaw at Ten Alps, the TV indie set up by Bob Geldof. He’s making a radio programme about Bowie and we’re working together on a couple of multiplatform developments – one to do with music, the other about waste – so we’d been chatting on the phone a few days before about Bowie and he mentioned the impending event. 60 minutes – just doable if I didn’t mind venturing forth a bit moist. I took off, kept up a decent pace, the Northern Line behaved and I walked into Heddon Street, powered by Ziggy on the iPhone, with a minute to spare. I positioned myself behind a TV crew and texted Des to check he was there. The ceremonies were opened bang on time by a fella from the Crown Estate who gave us a brief history of this backwater behind Regent Street, personalised by his own memories of the record. He handed over to Gary Kemp, formerly of Spandau Ballet, who was the prime mover behind the project, much inspired in his music career by the album. He spoke with great enthusiasm about the record and tipped the hat to the two Spiders from Mars who were among the small but perfectly formed crowd, bass player Trevor Bolder and drummer Mick Woodmansey. Then the little curtain was drawn back to reveal the elegant black plaque – one of only two in London to a fictional person (the other being Sherlock Holmes at 221b Baker Street). It reads: Ziggy Stardust 1972 This marks the location of the cover photograph for the iconic David Bowie album ‘The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars’.

40 years before, outside the office of Bowie’s management which was located for a while at that time on Heddon Street W1, Brian Ward took the iconic photo of the newly created Ziggy character outside the warehouse-looking entrance of K. West. It was a black and white shot subsequently hand coloured by Terry Pastor, who switched on the light and pulled out that resonant name. So Brian Ward’s original photograph was black and white, one of twelve 10 x 8s submitted to Bowie’s artist pal, George Underwood. George passed the one selected for the front cover to his colleague Terry Pastor. It was Terry who airbrushed the cover – he decided on the colouring of Ziggy’s hair, his costume, the lights and so on – very much a joint effort taking it to icon status. Des Shaw has a print of one of the other original 10x8s [above] which gives a good insight into the shoot and what the street looked like back then. Des brought me in to the special reception area where a six foot square print of the cover hung [below]. At 12″ x 12″ its magic and mystery are even more powerful through concentration.

The doorway in question has changed over the years and the whole street is far more salubrious and tamed through pedestrianisation. Less clean cut and tamed than when I first saw him perform To Cut A Long Story Short on telly when I was still immersed in punk and new wave was Gary Kemp who Des introduced me to – he was all a-flutter with the event and went off after a few moments to do another radio interview.

I think the original record was recorded at Trident Studios across Regent Street in Soho (certainly some of Bowie’s 70s classics were recorded there) – I recorded a voice-over a few years ago at Trident and was suitably impressed with the trophy album covers on their wall. Des told me a really interesting story he’d uncovered in the making of his radio programme: at one point around this time Bowie was rehearsing in an innocuous basement in Greenwich with his Spiders from Mars and was joined by Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. The basement studio space was called Underhill and was chosen because it was within walking distance of Haddon Hall where Bowie was living in Bromley, his old manor. After Bowie met Iggy Pop and Lou Reed in the States he invited them to England where he then produced Iggy’s Raw Power album (after he’d produced Lou’s Transformer). So at one point in the tiny basement rehearsal space there were David Bowie and The Spiders from Mars, Iggy Pop and the Stooges, and Lou Reed and his post-Velvets band, three of the most influential groups of the early 70s – all playing in a tiny subterranean space under what is now a pharmacist on the corner of Lewisham Road and Blackheath Road. This city, beneath the surface, behind out back, has a music goldmine rich like no other.

Ziggy Stardust impressed me when I first heard it but was never an absolute favourite. Although I remember Starman in the pop background as a little kid – and V2 Schneider (B-side of Heroes) entered my life briefly on board the SS Uganda on an educational cruise to the Baltic sharing a dorm with a bunch of skinheads from Romford – Stage was the first Bowie album that crossed my path in full consciousness.

Probably the three most significant Bowie records for me were:

* Aladdin Sane – I got totally bored by the monotony of school in the 6th Form and retired to a room at my dad’s house for a few months with Aladdin Sane and a pile of Jane Austens – it just chimed in perfectly with that most fucked up of teenage times

* Lodger – Bowie did a radio programme/interview about it during which he mentioned the Austrian painter Egon Schiele, who I’d never heard of and who was much less well known at that time – within a couple of years I found myself in Neulengbach on the outskirts of Vienna on the trail of Schiele (thanks to the Morrison Travel Scholarship from Girton College, fair play to them, it was one of the things at university I probably learnt most from)

* Let’s Dance – the soundtrack for my year living in France, culminating in seeing a very smooth Mediterranean Bowie (he’d been at the Cannes Film Festival that year with Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence – the tanned, light suits, dyed blonde floppy English hair era) at Grenoble, from the front of the auditorium with all the energy of a young man who had just cut the umbilical chord from home.

The other records over the years have pretty much all come to win their places in my heart and life, and one of the key endearing aspects of them is that resolute voicing of the Anthony Newley style London accent. You can take the boy out of London but you can’t take London out of the boy, however much you swing him.

Fanboy Gary Kemp showing off his Ziggy badge

Freudian slit

An amusing iTunes listing from BBC Radio 4 In Our Time thanks to an unfortunate character limit

Venceremos

From The Independent today…

France and Spain back down on fish discards after internet campaign

MARTIN HICKMAN    MONDAY 19 MARCH 2012

France and Spain today backed down over a plan to carry on throwing dead fish overboard after an internet campaign organised by a television chef.

Prior to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s social networking campaign, the two countries had been hoping to persuade fellow fisheries ministers to sign a declaration opposing a ban on discards, when trawlers exceeding their allowable catch throw back fish into the sea dead.

More than 130,000 Twitter and Facebook messages were sent to ministers urging them to oppose the draft declaration and France and Spain did not insist on a vote. Britain’s fisheries minister Richard Benyon went into the meeting saying he would oppose France and Spain. The EU fisheries commissioner Maria Damanaki now looks likely to phase out discards over four years, by reforming the Common Fisheries Policy in a way that ultimately kills fewer fish.

Last night Fearnley-Whittingstall told supporters: “I’m coming back on the Eurostar and it’s been a satisfying day. Discard disaster has been averted as the French, Spanish, Portguese and Belgian revolution just didn’t happen. Maria Damanaki led from the front and seems to be building consensus among the ministers. Everyone agreed that the amazing Twitter and Facebook activity over the weekend made a real difference.”

***

136,000 tweets were published between Saturday and when the EU Fisheries Ministers gathered in Brussels on Monday morning, addressed directly to each Minister in his/her own language.

To top off a moment of victory, this evening Hugh’s Fish Fight won the RTS Award for Best Popular Factual Programme, the citation [below] highlighting the importance of the multiplatform element. Hugh was delighted and is raring to move on with the follow-up series this year which will cover events like yesterday in Brussels.

“An interesting, watchable and accessible series of clever and effortless campaigning. The presenter is an amazing advocate, demonstrates admirable tenacity and gains unbelievable access. The series is also distinctive in terms of online innovation and activity.”

This is the second time this year a resolutely TV-centric awards has picked up on the multiplatform dimension of Fishfight, indicating the increasingly mainstream character of Multiplatform. Last month Fishfight won the Best Popular Factual Programme category of the Broadcast Awards, run by the industry’s tradepaper. The citation included:

“A passionate, uncompromising programme that made a potentially dull subject fascinating – and with superb use of multiplatform.”

Tipping the hat to Hugh’s previous campaign, Chicken Out, I conclude with a traditional little joke: Why did the Belgian chicken cross the road?

(Because there’s fuck all else to do in Brussels.) Not like the London chicken then.

{Article reproduced courtesy of The Independent.}

China links for Philip

The Sexperience 1000

China: Triumph and Turmoil – current Niall Ferguson series

My MoleChecker – first of 3 new Embarrassing Bodies apps

Live from the Clinic – the primetime show which span off of Embarrassing Bodies [see next] – saved the National Health Service over £400,000 to date through innovative video-based symptom checkers

Embarrassing Bodies: Live - a live switchover show, the first to switch from main TV channel to the web instead of a  multichannel digital channel – linked to the main Embarrassing Bodies site which is a hugely popular health site (the main rival and referrer to the official National Health Service site)

My Healthchecker - an aggregation of health self-tests which gather and use data in an engaging way – app version about to be released

The Sexperience 1000 – an attempt to liven up data visualisation and make data playful and entertaining

(linked to Sexperience – a sex education site driven by peer-to-peer learning, focused on experience as opposed to theory or opinion)

The Big Fish Fight  iPhone app - listed in Top 5 Lifestyle apps of 2011 by Apple

The Great British Property Scandal Empty Homes Spotter iPhone app

Cast of thousands

Why is this particular photo the most popular one among my pictures on Flickr?

Links for Ritva

Mary and Dina like playing imaginary twins and dressing trash-chic

(All Channel 4 unless otherwise designated)

Channel 4 Digital Personas

Multiplatform metrics

Street Style – a pilot: photoblogging street fashion (2006) – this is simply the vestiges of the site with no backgrounds/design stylesheets

Style the Nation – second screen aspects can be spotted in this vid (see background here and here, plus show here)

Fashion House - Euro fashion design

How to Start Your Own Country (BBC – Danny Wallace)

Chop or Not - game to cut the budget deficit

Sell or Not – variation for Selling Off Britain Dispatches documentary

X – youth election site (2005) – Election Machine (based on manifestos, matching user preferences to parties) – no longer online

Meet the Natives - viewing a nation from outside

Groovy Fellas (1988) Jools Holland wrote and performed in a six-part comedy documentary series with Roland Rivron, The Groovy Fellas, about a Martian visiting Earth. Basically the same premise as Meet the Natives. Not online.

Train Journeys from Hell – UGC listed on this page, also see YouTube presence

I’m Feeling Lucky – The Story 3

To Thine Own Self Be True (Tom Watson)

I was in Rottingdean the other day with the Enfants Terribles when we passed a small shop called Serendipity. I asked them whether they knew what it meant and I ended up explaining it in terms of the Google ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button (which I have to admit I’ve never quite got and always struck me as a bit of a lack of imagination on the part of the presser – it really isn’t difficult in the era of the Web to go on your own random or serendipitous journey).

The Wikipedia entry for Serendipity (which Google freakily informs me Aleks Krotoski shared on tumblr.com on 29 Apr 2011, Aleks having appeared at The Story #1 in February 2010) is one of its more charming entries:

“Serendipity means a “happy accident” or “pleasant surprise”; specifically, the accident of finding something good or useful without looking for it. The word has been voted one of the ten English words hardest to translate in June 2004 by a British translation company. ^{[prime wikispam]} However, due to its sociological use, the word has been exported into many other languages. Julius H. Comroe once described serendipity as : to look for a needle in a haystack and get out of it with the farmer’s daughter.”

Meanwhile, over on the other side of Brighton… towards Hove/Portslade my former colleague at Channel 4, Matt Locke, was busy putting the finishing touches to his The Story conference, like the programme for the day which was etched into bars of dark chocolate. When Matt started this one day gathering in 2010 it was a labour of love alongside his day job at C4. I thoroughly enjoyed that first iteration and recorded 4 things I learned from it on Simple Pleasures part 4. It’s interesting looking back at that entry today: the first thing I learnt was:

1) The best conferences (like this one) have only two outputs – Inspiration and catalysing Connections between people.

The same held good for #2 last year featuring the likes of a controversial Adam Curtis, writer Graham Linehan and photographer Martin Parr. I think I was too indolent to write up last year’s.

Connections, inspiration and creativity are the meat and two veg of this blog and what the Web is wonderful at catalysing. Straight after exiting Conway Hall yesterday I met up with Karyn Reeves who was waiting just outside, a statistician from Perth, Australia who specialises in analysing mathematical patterns around AIDS infection. Karyn is only the second person I’ve met in real life through having made contact online. The first was Sandra, a street art aficionado from Jaffa. Karyn writes a lovely blog about vintage Penguin books, which she collects and reads weekly, and I came across her in the wake of reading an old Penguin I picked up at random in my local bookshop, Black Gull, about the trial of Roger Casement. By chance Casement’s defence lawyer, I read, had his chambers at 4 Raymond Buildings from where my best friend now operates. What a tangled Web we weave. So Karyn and I headed back from The Story 3 to Black Gull where she picked up a few more P-p-p-enguins.

Meanwhile back at the start of the day… Meg Pickard of The Guardian, with whom I got into a lively online discussion at one of the earlier two The Story s about where The Guardian should gather their user-generated photos of Antony Gormley’s One and Other  (which we were discussing here and he was explaining here), kicked off the proceedings with a quick update from The Ministry of Stories, the excellent local children’s literacy project based in a Monsters Supplies shop in Hoxton and championed by the likes of Nick Hornby. Part of the ticket price for The Story goes to the now thriving, volunteer-driven project. It’s great to see such a thing burgeoning in Hoxton – when I was a teenager my step-dad would drive me past there on the way to Petticoat Lane where I worked on the market stall outside his shop, he’d point past some grim Victorian estate and say ” ‘Oxton, arse-hole of the universe, never go there, son.” How it has come on over the years…

Next up was Matt Sheret of LastFM in discussion with producer Simon Thornton of Fat Boy Slim fame about telling stories through the album form. Simon was the fella behind the brilliant remix of Brimful of Asha (way better than the original) as well as the marvelous Turn On Tune In Cop Out by Freakpower. The whole debate about the patterns of music consumption in the Web/On Demand age and the relationship between albums and single tracks is a fascinating one still, and particularly for me at the moment as I’m working on a development to do with a classic album with Bob Geldof’s gang at Ten Alps and Universal Music, very much shaped around a carefully constructed sequence of 9 great songs which may or may not now be a thing of the past (I take Simon’s side, but I would wouldn’t I).

At this point Channel 4 wove back in in the form of artist Jeremy Deller, currently setting up his one-man show at the Hayward on the South Bank and the prime mover of Artangel’s The Battle of Orgreave, commissioned and funded by C4. He sees the ’84-’85 miners’ strike as a critical moment in British history (it gets  its own room in his soon-to-open retrospective) and that programme/artistic re-enactment as a way of “exhuming a corpse to give it a proper post-mortem”. He spoke about how everyone of our generation remembers where they were when the miners took on ‘The Iron Lady’ (in spite of the fact I’d voted for her [Streep not Thatch] Meryl Streep’s apology [in the Miltonian sense of explanation/justification] for the strange politics of that movie at the BAFTAs the other night is still bugging me)  – my other half was up in Ayrshire making her graduation film about the miners’ wives with a dodgy old University of Ulster camera, while I was visiting my oldest friend at Baliol where a furious debate about how to support the strike was erupting in their common room, featuring toffs in donkey jackets as well as more grown-up, committed people than me, who was still relying on the likes of Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello to give me some political insight). Deller’s still- image only presentation was one of the highlights of the day for me, centred on one iconic photograph of a miner father and his glam rock showbiz son.

Next up, blogger Liz Henry who told the fascinating story of A Gay Girl in Damascus, a murky tale of hoaxing and fictional blogging (an area I find fascinating as an emerging writing form and which formed a substantial part of the now traditional annual Story lunch with Tim Wright and Rob Bevan, the former in particular much interested in this territory [and the person who taught me the value of the image-only presentation when I helped host the launch of his outstanding In Search of Oldton project at Channel 4 HQ a few years ago]).  I learnt a lovely new word too ‘Sockpuppeting’ – to comment on your own blog both positively and negatively as a way of stimulating interest/activity. One of the interesting facts that emerged was that The Guardian published the initial story without establishing proper (off-line) sources based on people who had actually met the Gay Girl in question in real life (shades of Karyn above and Tom/Emily below).

Late on Thursday afternoon, the eve of The Story, I met for the first time Anthony Owen, Head of Magic (arguably the best job-title in the business) at Objective TV, home of Derren Brown. We were kicking off a project to do with consumerism. Lo and behold within 18 hours he’s up on stage before me doing a magic trick and explaining the role of narrative within that art/entertainment form. Particularly interesting for me as the youngest Enfant Terrible has recently become obsessed with performing magic, daily learning tricks off of YouTube and practising them with his chums over Skype (before posting them back on YouTube and Facebook). Anthony singled out the quality of encapsulating “something we’d love to have happen” (e.g. being psychic, becoming immortal, etc.) as the defining characteristic of a great trick – so sawing a woman in half only to reunite the two still living ends is a story about immortality which also has the key quality of being sum-upable in a sentence.

Coincidence and serendipity came to the fore again in the afternoon when Emily Bell, formerly of The Guardian online and now teaching at Columbia (who I first had the pleasure of hanging out with on the panel of judges she lead at The Guardian Student Journalism Awards a few years ago, in The Ivy so clearly a former era) interviewed Tom Watson MP about the phone-hacking scandal whilst: Meanwhile across town… in Wapping Rupert Murdoch was entering the newsroom of the Currant Bun and sticking two Aussie fingers up at the British establishment and public, who momentarily humiliated him last summer, by announcing the impending launch of The Sun on Sunday. The audience was riveted by the recounting of events from both the MP and Guardian perspectives, and the interview typified the rich and perfectly balanced mix of contributions making up the day’s programme. Watson predicted that there was a massive PC/Data hacking dimension to the scandal still to break.

Vying with Deller for highlight of the day was Scott Burnham. The last time I met Scott was in the back of a Nissan Cube in which he was filming me spouting on about why I love London. At this year’s The Story he spoke vibrantly about design in the city and urban play through a classic tale of 7 Coins, the last vestiges of a beautiful public art project in Amsterdam. He told of the construction of a Stefan Sagmeister piece made up of 250,000 one cent pieces and its subsequent thoughtless destruction by dumb cops who were trying to protect the raw cash (still held as evidence in the police station). His conclusion was that we’ll always have Paris… I mean, we’ll always have Amsterdam… he means, we always have the story if not the creation itself. He took the 7 coins, painted blue on one side, out of his pocket to show me and the Royal College of Art’s Bronac Ferran as we chatted outside the hall during the tea break.

Also up in contention as a highlight was artist Ellie Harrison, author of Confessions of a Recovering Data Collector. She started her work focused on gathering everyday data on her life or ‘life tracking’ at Nottingham Trent university art school and then later at  Glasgow School of Art (where our host Matt once studied). An early such work was ‘Eat 22′ in which she recorded everything she ate for a year  in 1,560 photos. At the start of her talk she positioned herself firmly as a Thatcher’s Child (a resonant link back to Deller’s earlier session) and was sporting a Bring Back British Rail T-shirt (a campaign she champions, also resonant as my aforementioned best-friend above worked on that Kafkaesque privitisation). So food and beyond, Ellie’s obsession and the thread through her work seems to be with Consumption – she spoke about her development with great humour and insight (including into her own compulsions). From ‘Eat 22′ she went on to record all her everyday actions in a spreadsheet, in turn converted to colour-coded graphs, which is when the addiction kicked in. I was sitting in a brainstorm at an indie production company a couple of weeks ago discussing mental health and happiness when a colleague I have know a long time revealed he’s been keeping a numerical record of his mood on a precise scale of 1 to 100 every day for well over a decade, with the last five years available likewise in Excel form. So art/fiction are no stranger than life.

Preloaded I have known since they were born, as I worked with founder Paul Canty, as well as Rob Bevan and Tim Wright, on a game called MindGym way back when. Paul’s colleague,  Phil Stuart, and writer Tom Chatfield talked us through the game of self-discovery, death and philosophy they made for Channel 4 Education – The End.  This rounded off a fine day, alongside Karen Lubbock and Jeremy Leslie on mags and Karen magazine in paricular, ‘a magazine made out of the ordinary’, and a lively turn from Danny O’Brien on josticks, hacking, anarchy and the universe. And where can you go from there…

Among these 250,000 are 7 coins with a story

Best of 2011

[a work in progress]

So no triple A rating makes him feel like this big?

Film:
Midnight in Paris

The Gold Rush with orchestral accompaniment (Festival Hall)

(2010 [reluctant] winner: Toy Story 3)
(2009 winner: Inglourious Basterds)

Actor:
Owen Wilson (Midnight in Paris)
Runners-up: Ryan Gosling (Drive) and Michael Fassbinder (Shame)

(2010 winner: Jesse Eisenberg (The Social Network))
(2009 winner: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds))

Actress:
Carey Mulligan (Shame)
runner-up: Michelle Williams (My Week with Marilyn)
Meryl Streep (The Iron Lady) [2012]

(2010 winner: Julianne Moore (The Kids Are Alright) )
(2009 winner: Carey Mulligan (An Education) )

Supporting Actor:
Corey Stoll (Midnight in Paris)
Jude Law (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows)

(2010 winner: Mark Ruffalo (The Kids Are Alright) )
(2009 winner: Brad Pitt (Inglourious Basterds) )

Supporting Actress:
Shailene Woodley (The Descendants)

(2010 winner: Rebecca Hall (The Town) )
(2009 winner: Kristin Scott Thomas (Nowhere Boy) )

Director:
Woody Alllen (Midnight in Paris)

(2010 winner: Ben Affleck (The Town) )
(2009 winner: Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds) )

Script:
Woody Alllen (Midnight in Paris)

(2010 winner: The Social Network)
(2009 winner: The Hangover)

TV:
Hugh’s Fish Fight (Channel 4)

Gig:

Michael Franti & Spearhead – Bush Hall
Lisa Hannigan – Bush Hall
The Cure – Reflections – Albert Hall
Bob Dylan – The Feis – Finsbury Park (and Hothouse Flowers)
Mike Scott & The Waterboys – An Appointment with Mr Yeats – Barbican
Pharoah Saunders – Ronnie Scott’s
Sinead O’Connor – St Johns at Hackney church
Patti Smith – St Giles in the Field church
Gregory Porter – Stoke Newington Town Hall (BBC4 recording with Carole King)

(2010 winner: Gil Scott Heron – Somerset House
(2009 winner: Hothouse Flowers – Community hall, Baltimore, West Cork)

LP:
Johnny Boy Would Love This – various

(2010 winner: Praise & Blame – Tom Jones)
(2009 winner: Sea Sew – Lisa Hannigan)

Single:
Small Hours – Robert Smith
1960 What? – Gregory Porter {courtesy of Practical Psychologist}
Movin’ Down the Line- Raphael Saadiq {courtesy of Practical Psychologist}

(2010 winner: What good am I? – Tom Jones)
(2009 winner: Glass – Bat for Lashes)

Book:
The Sisters Brothers – Patrick de Witt

(2010 winner: Freedom – Jonathan Franzen)
(2009 winner: The Great Lover – Jill Dawson)

Art:
Angelheaded Hipsters – Allen Ginsberg (National Theatre)

(2010 winner: Paul Nash – The Elements – Dulwich Picture Gallery)
(2009 winner: Dream – Jaume Plensa)

Play:
Frankenstein (NT)

(2010 winner: Jerusalem)
(2009 winner: August: Osage County)

Sports event:
Ireland beating Australia in the Rugby World Cup
Ireland beating England in The 6 Nations lead by Brian O’Driscoll

Website:
Instagram
(2009 winner: Posterous)

Saddest loss:
Gil Scott Heron

Fine FIN

Best of 2010
Best of 2009