Look, we made a rag rug! A rug made of our rags…
It’s one of the best things we’ve ever thought of doing -all those fallen-apart pants and t-shirts, all those ripped shirts you never wear go into something you can sit on, stand on, and entertain on for the rest of your life. And it looks nice and colourful.
It took a year of sitting watching TV, listening to records and talking (mainly about how long it was taking) but we did it, and it’s thick and it’s cute.
Good to see The Times engaging with documentary , even if it is harking back to a supposed golden age (I mean, it totally was a golden age in the 30s to 50s but all ages are a bit golden to me) of British docs.
But really people, that is a pretty lazy article. Documentary never died, but if it did have a rebirth, it certainly wasn’t last week, it started at least 5 years ago when the possibilities of digital video came to fruition for all purses, and we’re still a-going on with it. And whats this with the list? Four random filmmakers - great. That sums it up totally. That represents all documentaries being made in the UK. Yep.
And four is the internationally recognised number for a good list, isn’t it?
Silly. You want 4 top British doc-makers? I do like all those 4 a lot but it’s not them. My money is on:
Andrew Kotting
Molly Dineen
Morgan Matthews
Daisy Asquith.
Easy as bloody pie… (that’s not someone’s name)
I was very into ‘zines when I was a young Charlie. But in the silly ol’ digital age, I’d lost touch. But the London Zine Symposium on Sunday showed they’re thriving. Lots of lovely anarchists with vegan cakes and good ideas for changing everything. It’s a counterculture where people get off their arses and do amazing pretty and intelligent things. And even more than ever the world needs ‘zines as a personal antidote to the identical worlds of mass media. It sounds like a cliche but it’s true.
My favourite is a guide to anarchist football - I haven’t read it yet. I bet it involves Luther Blissett
Saw Beautiful Losers just now at HotDocs - a lovely inspiring thing, with all the ramshackle artists of New York’s Lower East Side giving testament of how wonderful things can be when you do what’s most special to you. It’s not the most focussed film, but they all truly made the prettiest things they could, and that includes Harmony Korine before he ate himself - there was a remarkable clip from one of his earliest raw shorts, plus a glimpse of Gummo, reminding me why I spent my university days paying homage to a mental shrine of him hour after cinema hour.
But it also makes you feel proud of all the outsider artists there have been and always will be, and for once, we’re just as strong in the UK I reckon with our equivalent East Endy wandering wibbling minds making pretty little things and making me thrill. So I’m thinking Rob Ryan, king of the delicate and poetic, Mark Pawson, whose show just gone at the Horse Hospital was a party of little creatures, slogans, badges and cabinets of silly and profound curios, and of course the lady (and girlfriend)-laden shop where they’ve shown (and Rob R is at the moment), Tatty Devine, which pirouettes at the art-commerce end of things which Beautiful Losers slightly-melancholilylyly concludes on.
And that don’t cover it all. There’s the party party party ace Bob and Roberta Smith , of whom you might want to ignore that wikipedia record if you don’t want your art heroes crushed into an easy-to-understand box (which lifeless people write these thing?) and everything going on at the Sartorial Contemporary, which is very closed indeed in spirit to the B.Losers Alleged Gallery, albeit without the skating and (I think) more balding.
Sorry for a list. I just think it’s all really lovely.
I’m in Toronto for HotDocs - it’s ace. But what’s really ace are the streetcars and the generally old-fashioned transport system that relies upon trust and a strange metallic artdeco beauty and tiny little tokens…
More Steetcars! Less Cars! Chant with me!
Ace…
Ladyfest London Films - what an ace programme. Don’t Need You looks particularly superb. Argh, you never get to see movies like that normally. Revolution girl style and indie cinema style now is what we need.
(although I’m away that weekend for my Dad’s 60th, so mmmm, I’ll be revolting in absentia)
Went to the Imperial War Museum on Sunday. I’d wanted to go there for a long time, ever since I developed a fascination with the 40s as a time of simultaneous personal misery and communal togetherness (the ideal state to be in). I didn’t want to see the guns, I just wanted to explore the Home Front, and I wasn’t disappointed.
I should point out the short-term catalyst for this visit was a new haircut. The less eagle-eyed amongst you (or those who don’t know me in the real world) may think I’m still sporting the indie fringe of yesteryear, but no, I now have codebreaking hair, with a sharp side-parting that allows me to crack codes, look stylish and fight a war on both domestic and international fronts. It’s really very exciting.
I learnt a very lot at the IWM. There was a wonderful drive to recycle and make-do-and-mend, driven along by strange little characters and wonderful posters. Everyone seemed to love homemade food and people genuinely helped each other for a greater cause - and I don’t mean the nation, I mean each other. Look at this amazing image.
Abram Games - a great utopian designer.
This day trip felt very important - my new hair might be a fancy, and of course there is no poetry in poverty and war, but there remains a sophistication in the forties which I find fascination, a defiance and an ignorance of the disgusting political atmosphere. A real time of public liberation, and of self-sufficient independence. The War gets all the headlines for its strong leaders and its big bombs, but what really wins my heart is every single story in the streets, and that crystallises in the making something out of nothing that rations made essential.
I’d always marveled at how my favourite documentary-maker, lovely wide-eyed Humphrey Jennings, had brought surrealism to the darkest political times, and it had always made total sense to me, but here at the IWM were scenes after scenes of domestic surrealism, making hats from leaflets, making toys from bins, making communication through wires and string. It was a revelation. This is the message that’s so strange and beautiful about ecology - not that we can save our climate (or not just that) but that we can fashion isolated objects into something new and meaningful, making beauty from scraps.
Cos this was a time of total and utter ambiguity and impermanence, so you just made it marvelous. I know I feel entirely detached and repulsed by the ‘big’ things on the evening news, so I feel similar - building tiny moments of wonder literally from the ground up - a revolution in miniature. A revolt through a side parting, and more more more.
Went to see the show about him at the Serpentine. What brilliant art - feels revolutionary and new today, like nothing else you ever see. Why didn’t people all follow his example and do something totally new? It’s a tribute to him that a lot of it still feels shocking.
I liked his montages the best - under the pressure of soviet bureaucrats., I felt like his photos got sedate and sad, although still beautiful. But I like him being rough, not beautiful.
I made a few good montages when I first started university - I made one using this picture and some silly headlines. I spent years regretting it, because the person I gave it to hated it, but actually, I now think it was interesting. Shame I’ll never see it again.
I didn’t really know computers then - it’d be so easy to photoshop a bad version now, that would be really sad.
I’m building up a stack of National Rail compensation vouchers - I’ve made two big complaints in the last 6 months and got well-rewarded for doing so. If you don’t answer back, you don’t get anything. That is my moral.
They’re good stories too…but they’ll have to wait for another time.