It’s hot. So hot it’s hard not to spend a lot of time just staring out the window at the big swaying tree over the road by the Fruit and Wool Exchange. I don’t really know much about tree breeds (is ‘breeds’ even the right word? I doubt it) but it’s one of those classic proud ones you find in the grounds of stately homes and in the backgrounds of BBC period dramas as some white-wigged cad trots past on his trusty steed. It’s too hot not to have a glass of water here next to me but too hot to walk down two flights of stairs to get one. It’s really hot.

I moved to East Dulwich in 1988, at the precipitous age of 11. In those days, depending on where you were standing, the area was either a poor cousin to the dreaming mansions of Dulwich Village, or a rich aunt to the hulking estates of Peckham. But it had a homely charm, and there was a sense of community among our liberal-leaning, baby-boomer parents. They’d take it in turns to heave us forth in the giant tyre swing of our rickety local adventure playground.

Twenty years have passed and I’m living there once more. The parents with 11-year olds have stayed the same age - which is a bit closer to mine now - but the magic spell of gentrification has transformed things. Most of the knackered old boozers have been tamed and turned into gastropubs kitted out to evoke the spirit of knackered old boozers; there are delis, posh kitchen supply shops, organic butchers, wine tasting cafes, ceramics cafes, a Gourmet Burger Kitchen, a branch of The White Stuff and I’m sure that the tyre swing will have been slashed down on health and safety grounds.

It still feels like home though. Gentrification is an easy target for harumphing but sometimes, you know, I like being able to buy a bit of nice cheese and some of those boozers had a genuinely terrifying clientele. And the community? Well you can see for yourself. It’s passionate, active, obsessed with the minutiae of local life, and it’s online: www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk.

It’s fascinating.

I stumbled across this little beaut’ of a short film whilst hunting the internet. The Cuban Missile Crisis, the Gulf War, WWII, England as Fish and Chips, the USA as burger and fries. Here bagels rocket, pretzels fire, kebabs self destruct, and sausage and sushi take their place for the biggest food fight the world’s ever seen.   Must have taken them years.   

If I wasn’t sat behind this desk right now i’d quite like to be riding a horse through Jordan. Or maybe watching polar bear cubs paw each other on the ice. I could hold a tea party for my favourite art teachers - if I could track them down. Or maybe I could just find a nice big field and swing around really, really fast with my arms wide open. Ahh…

I always think it’s great when you people do something unexpected and off the cuff, so I was quite intrigued to hear about Mr and Mrs B’s adventure. The two newly-wed Londonites have just (last week) left their jobs and upped sticks to Spain to start a world music night (having no experience, but a blazing desire to do it).

They’re writing all about it on their blog here.

What would you do?

Glasswerks presents:
Richard Godwin
Wednesday 2nd April at Tommy Flynn’s, 55 Camden High Street, NW1
Doors 7.30pm (on stage 9.30pm)

A startlingly original voice, capable of provoking hilarity, bliss and/or abject terror in audiences, Richard Godwin will make an unusual mark in 2008. Most often compared to an English Jacques Brel, he has developed a confrontational, dramatic performing style, and has created a canon of compositions which tell the tiny tragedies of repressed butlers, cracked vaudevillians and Houellbecqian clerks (tales often inspired by his day job as a journalist). His louche baritone recalls the tones of Bill Callahan, Nick Cave and Leonard Cohen, while his rich, melodic guitar echoes Elliott Smith and Nick Drake. The admixture of influences, however, is rather unique.

£6, £5 adv
myspace.com/richardgodwinmusic

Also on the bill at Tommy Flynn’s are:

Alamode - www.myspace.com/alamodeband

Alex And I - www.myspace.com/alexandimusic

Magic Bullet Band - www.myspace.com/themagicbulletband

http://www.glasswerk.co.uk

Frauke Requardt presents…
ROADKILL CAFE
A dance work in two parts set to a searing jazz score from John Zorn, performed in full for the first time on 18 & 19 April 2008 at The Place



“And then the Prime Minister approaches me and says ‘Daniel, you’re jazz. What do we do? There’s a war on. We need to win it.’ I think and then I say ‘Just play man, just play.’”

In ROADKILL CAFÉ Frauke Requardt thrusts us into an unworldly, jazz-fuelled meeting place. Here we encounter a ukulele man and his kooky cowboy sister, twitching twins who swing in, play out psycho-sexual dramas and disappear, and a sense of secret trauma that threatens to meander its way to the surface.

Produced during residencies in Venice, Portugal and London, this is a darkly humorous, surreal piece of mimicry and mayhem, seduction and shock with superbly choreographed fantasies.

The piece is Requardt’s second full-evening work, coming after JAMMY DODGERS, which was seen first at The Place in 2006 and was also performed at the Royal Opera House. In that piece Requardt and her dancers collaborated with some of London’s most acclaimed jazz musicians, using live performances by The Ingrid Laubrock Quintet and Leafcutter John in an exploration of identity, entertainment and invention.

Roadkill Café takes these themes in a new direction, exposing a Lynch-esque world of both self-consciousness and wild abandon. We see a dog doing a dog dance, a tale of jazz overcoming the military, a tale of paranoia overcoming jazz and a round of subverted line dancing.

The piece was made during three residencies: one in a rural Portuguese town, at Rui Horta’s space O Espaco do Tempo, one in a foggy and mysterious Venice at the intimate Teatro Fondamente Nuove and most recently one in London at Greenwich Dance Agency and The Place, as part of Choreodrome. In each location there was a work-in-progress performance, introducing the work to a new audience and inviting comments and discussion. Each residency has served to enrich the work and leave its own individual fingerprint on the final result, turning it into a truly international work.

Frauke Requardt is a choreographer and dancer based in London. She completed her Masters in Choreography at the London Contemporary Dance School in 2003 and went on to be an Associate Artist at The Place until 2006. Earlier this year Frauke created work in Bogota, Colombia as part of a three-month residency organised by Visiting Arts. Together with dancers from Danza Cumon she created ‘Pequenas Delicias’, a piece made especially for restaurants. She was also commissioned to make a piece for a special fundraising event at Sadler’s Wells, ‘Back to Front’ where the auditorium was reversed with the stage for a three tiered chase scene.

Requardt has also been a dancer in Lea Andersons’ ‘The Cholmondeleys’ since 2004. She is really very German.

Listing information:

April 18&19 2008
as part of Spring Loaded

The Robin Howard Dance Theatre
The Place
17 Duke’s Road
London WC1H 9PY
Box Office: 020 7121 1100

For more information, guest list, images etc please contact Seb at Seb & Fiona: seb@sebandfiona.com

A load of new artists have been confirmed for the End of the Road Festival 2008, taking place from 12 – 14 September at Larmer Tree Gardens in Dorset.

They are: Low, Dirty Three, British Sea Power, American Music Club, Billy Childish, Akron/Family, Kimya Dawson, Darren Hayman (Darren and Jack Play Hefner Songs), FM Belfast, Laura Marling, Devon Sproule, Angelo Spencer and Kelley Stoltz.

They join an already stellar lineup at the relatively intimate (5000 capacity) event, which won Best New Festival at the Festival Awards 2006 and was last year, for many of those who attended, the highlight of the festival calendar.

Bands also confirmed so far are: Mercury Rev, Two Gallants, Micah P Hinson, Mountain Goats, Sun Kil Moon / Mark Kozelek, Jeffrey Lewis, Jason Molina, A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Bob Log III, The Wave Pictures, Woodpigeon, Friska Viljor.

THE END OF THE ROAD FESTIVAL 2008 - Ticket Prices / Details:

The End of the Road Festival 2008 takes place from 12 – 14 September at the Larmer Tree Gardens in North Dorset.

Adult weekend (incl. camping) = £105
Children 13-16 (incl. camping, must be accompanied by an adult) = £105
Chidren 12 and under (must be accompanied by an adult) = £15
Children 5 and under (must be accompanied by an adult) = FREE
Live-in Vehicle / Campervan / Caravan = £30
Car park = £5 (cash on arrival)

(GO WITH ROUGH TRADE! - Perfect for those based in London, package includes festival ticket, return coach travel from Rough Trade East, in-coach entertainment, festival programme, CD and plenty of other goodies. Strictly limited tickets available. Email: eotr@roughtrade.com if you wish to receive further details.)

Tickets are available from endoftheroadfestival.com

I noticed something strange about the restaurants in Venice. Not once did a waiter offer to grind some black pepper onto my food for me. There would be a mill on my table, and I would just grind the pepper myself. No awkward moment, no need for an overlong polite smile: it felt great.

Sooner or later, London will look back on the current plague of service pepper and feel both sheepish and bemused. We’ll sit in fructose bars, or something, and reminisce incredulously about this and other discontinued oddities - mullets, cold winters, Magners with ice, chorizo, pilates, London Fields, gastropubs, digital radio.

Can anyone think of any more?

Teatro Fondamenta Nuove is a small performance venue in Venice. It looks out over the north east perimeter of the city towards an austere-looking island called San Michele. I was there last Thursday, during a fascinating five-day escapade, and as I didn’t take a picture of the theatre, here’s a gratuitous one of San Michele, which is also known eerily as ‘The Island of the Dead’ consisting as it does entirely of a cemetery.

On the Thursday, I saw an unfinished version of choreographer Frauke Requardt’s new piece ‘Roadkill Cafe’.

The culmination of a two and a half week residency, the performance was to unveil the latest stage in a creative process that will come to fruition later this year. I already love it. It’s like the cheese-fuelled dream of an alternate David Lynch (this one a jazz critic rather than a director). There’s a mysterious pair of twins, a dog who does a doggy dance, a tale of jazz overcoming the military, a tale of paranoia overcoming jazz and a round of subverted line dancing. A soundtrack dashes from experimental jazz to screwed up country and western, but it is all by John Zorn.

For anyone interested in jazz music, it is a synaesthetic treat. For anyone at all, it’s a brilliant show. It’s on in London on 18 and 19 April, at The Place in Euston.

Seb

A CONTEMPORARY ART AUCTION IN AID OF ST JOSEPH’S HOSPICE
At Christ Church Spitalfields (Liverpool Street tube just by Spitalfields Market)
28 February - 1 March, 10am - 5pm daily
Patron Victoria Miro

Over a hundred artists including Peter Doig, Jake And Dinos Chapman, Chris Ofili, Wolfgang Tilmans and Grayson Perry are taking part in this art auction. Paintings, drawings, photography, prints and sculpture by will all be up for grabs.

A silent auction dear reader means that you can make written bids anytime from the start of the auction on Thursday, February 28 until it’s end on Saturday, March 1 , - highest bid wins, naturally.

All proceeds will go to St Joseph’s Hospice the hospice for the East End and its five surrounding boroughs. The money will be used to fund care of the terminally ill at home.

Here’s more about the great work they do: www.stjh.org.uk