Kevin Ayres

So the sardonic king of sunshine has left us for good. A founder member of Soft Machine, he also led The Whole World (lead guitarist Mike Oldfield) and managed to record a string of charming, quirky and avant-garde albums although he claimed to be work-shy, and had a tendency to vanish between albums or tours. He told me once that he used to think living the easy life in the sunshine was the way to live. "Now I'm fucking sure it's the way!"

Ken Loach unbanned



The unlikely venue of Bath City Clubhouse hosted a rare showing of three banned Ken Loach films on Friday 1^st February, just the job for your blogger, who is a bit of a Loach completist. After the director identified himself as an unequivocal supporter of Bath City FC, the night opened with a trip back to the black-and-white 'sixties; a documentary made with Tony Garnett for Save The Children and London Weekend TV which turned out to be a call for an end to the injustices that put children in harm’s way, and the relationship between class politics and and charities; more polemical rather than the expected celebration of the Charity’s fiftieth anniversary; simultaneously an unintentionally funny exposure of the charity workers, no matter how well-intentioned they were, as upper-class and patronising. Also one made for LWT during the Miners’ Strike, which inescapably included lots of footage of police brutality. This was too hairy for Melvin Bragg and his fellows at the TV station; More embarrassing for them might have been the question implied: ‘If the police were only following orders, who gave the orders?’

The Great Survivors

Peter Conradi

ISBN: 978-1-84688-234-0

Alma Books

Peter Conradi, by being a kind of insider and by attending to his research, made quite a success of The King’s Speech, the best-seller that as a film won an Oscar. He returns to the territory with this look at the entire phenomenon of European monarchy, in an attempt to understand the archaic anomaly; and why and how it survives in post-industrial democracies where unearned deference is otherwise strictly a thing of the past. We aren’t just dropped in it, though: the book starts off with a race through the history; the rise and fall and rise again - opening with the highly visual Final Walk of King Louis-Auguste, followed by his wife Marie Antoinette. This might equally be the way to open the story if you were telling it as a film instead of a book. It could have been the beginning of the end for European monarchy(if Cromwell’s men hadn’t already done that in London a long time before), but in fact after this, whenever a country was faced with a choice of options including having an unelected toff as head of state they (including France after the revolution) tended to re-establish, and even newly created countries like Belgium wanted one, too. Today the subject has been mooted in Scotland (not entirely unseriously) as independence is news again.

We know, though, why newspapers and the rest of the news media pay so much attention to the royals. It sells. But the rest of it remains a complex puzzle. This book makes very good sense of the reasons for monarchy's survival into the twenty-first century.

New Gallery in Clifton, Bristol

Could this be the early flowering of recession's end? Yet another art gallery has just opened for business in Bristol, adding a nail in the coffin of the City's "reputation", which was only partly earned through it being contrasted with the city-state of London.
The new gallery is right in the middle of Clifton Village, which in some ways is Bristol's equivalent to Hampstead Village.  It's a small place, and the opening show reflects this - mostly small domestic-sized paintings and prints, in a fairly broad mix of styles and media. The gallery is called after its address: 11 Portland Street; not a bad piece of Bristol for a gallery. I hope it will be joined by others.

2nd Bristol Palestine Film Festival

The second BPFF got off to a strong start at the Watershed Media Centre, with a large sold-out house showing Leila Sansour's '5 Broken Cameras'. (read the review here)The film, not only a joint Palestinian/israeli production but jointly funded by the protagonists too, was followed by a Q&A session with the director and guest Ken Loach. This tale focuses on the two-way pull artists who are political activists must deal with on some level, sooner or later, but never more viscerally than when the artist is behind a movie camera on the field of battle.
UPDATE: The '5 Broken Cameras' co-director, Imad Burnat,  on his way to Hollywood where his film was up for the 'Best Documentary' award, was detained with his family at LA airport and had to call  Michael Moore to help establish his credibility. Unfortunately, after the trauma, he didn't get the Oscar.http://journomania.net/culture/38-art-and-culture/806-imad-burnat-the-palestinian-director-of-the-5-broken-cameras-on-the-red-carpet.html

How Palestine art goes to public

Palestinian artists have been invited to show their work in Jordan. It's always good news when an artist gets the chance to go public, although this one will involve the inevitable waits at checkpoints and The Bridge

Source: Today in Palestine!

http://www.middleeastmonitor.com/blogs/culture/4202-palestinian-artists-invited-to-present-their-work-across-the-bridge-that-both-connects-and-separates-them-from-jordan

Pussy Riot set free

The punky protest girl group that bravely stood up against the Mr Lupin culture in Russia has been let out of jail, partly as a result of world-wide support. This is good news for anti-authoritaran activists everywhere; and as you probably weren't in Moscow at the time, here is what the fuss is all about: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grEBLskpDWQ
And if you would like to support them, go HERE

UPDATE 24 OCTOBER:
The most likely background to the above is that it was a PR stunt intended to demonstrate Lupin's 'leniency'. On 17th August 2012 Maria Alyokhina, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Yekaterina Samutsevitch were sentenced to two years imprisonment for their involvement in the Pussy Riot action at a Russian Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow. While Yekaterina Samutsevich has been released, the struggle continues.