Libertines: There Are No Innocent Bystanders

My review of The Libertines documentary DVD release for Cinevue can be read here. Hmm… maybe I was expecting too much? Still, there’s some great live footage and nice pictures of the band by their main photographer (and director of this film). I am giving this a ‘meh’ out of five.

Cinema of Transgression exhibition at the KW, Berlin

I wrote a feature piece on the Cinema of Transgression exhibition at the KW in Berlin for Cinemart.

“There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression – to convert, transfigure, and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves”.

Nick Zedd, “The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto”, 1985 (originally written in his fanzine The Underground Film Bulletin under the name Orion Jeriko).

All photos taken by me of the exhibition and book apart from the last three film stills

“The Best of Everything” (1959)

I wrote an article on 50s film “The Best of Everything”, Don Draper’s bookshelves and the “Mad Men Effect” in publishing for The Spectator arts blog. Czech it!

Yooo

I love this. This image, from a Russian elementary school textbook called The Miracle of Life, is (natch) from best blog ever 50 Watts. Brains definitely look like that, all squiggly and crammed with crap in various compartments.

So…. my brain is as ever filled with crap, and here is some of it.

* A rather tongue-firmly-in-cheek review I did of Jessica Edwards’s 1940′s style A Midsummer Night’s Dream over at The Spectator Arts blog
*A short article on occult magician and general pervert Aleister Crowley over at Dissocia Zine
* General feelings of confusion at what the hell I’m meant to do with this accumulation of crap post-university, otherwise known as The Quarter Life Crisis.

WOOO!!!
‘The morning after the night before’- taken by Hapsical

Jenny Boyd and Lord Kitchener’s Valet

Photos

Some photos wot I took. Some of these are over at Dissocia Zine, along with plenty of other people’s articles, poems, photos and illustrations. We’re looking to expand so send us an email if you want your work to feature here. Happy summer!

Pattie Boyd: Wonderful Today

Pattie Boyd is far and away one of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest muses. The wife of both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, Pattie was also a succesful model, one of the key faces of the Swinging Sixties and immortalised in the (now impossibly rare) photography book of 60′s female icons Birds of Britain. She was the inspiration behind some of the greatest songs of all time, like Harrison’s “Something”, “I Need You”, “For You Blue” and “Isn’t It a Pity”, and Clapton’s “Layla”, “Wonderful Tonight” and “Bell Bottom Blues”. She is also a photographer, and recently had an exhibition in SF called Through The Eyes of A Muse. Her autobiography Wonderful Today is well worth reading, though in my opinion not a patch on other female memoirs of the period – such as Marianne Faithfull’s unrivalled and achingly beautiful Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Wonderful Today is a harrowing read, and unlike Faithfull’s autobiography, it lacks the lyrical beauty and pathos that makes her story so readable. It’s stark, and at times desperate, and tells of her problems with alcohol addiction and anorexia, and the difficulties of living in the limelight as model and muse to two of rock’s greatest stars. I speed-read it in a day and absolutely loved it. It was only really much later that I felt its emotional effect, and now, I find myself looking at those fabulous 60′s shots with a different eye. Well worth the read.

Luminescent Jellyfish

Ahhhhh…. I could stare at these all day. Look at those colours! Wibble wobble wibble wobble…

So I’m revising for my finals (in case you can’t tell). And as of today, “shit gets real”. I’ve deleted facebook. Cancelled potentially boozy evenings. Disabled my phone. And stopped staring at jellyfish (well, not just yet… I have entire Flickr galleries of jellyfish to explore). While I loathe revision, am regularly convinced I can “hear” silence in libraries, and get the sporadic urge to make HUGE amounts of noise or laugh really loudly whenever I’m in there just because the tempation is TOO STRONG, the reality is that I probably have to knuckle down *grumble*. Three years of university boiled down to about a week and a half of exams – the thought is insane. Saying that, I don’t know what’s worse, staring at jellyfish and learning Shakespeare quotes, or being flung out into the real grown-up world… o dear, jellyfish it is.

Frank Habicht – 60′s photographer

Frank Habicht is one of my all-time favourite photographers, if not for his series of Rolling Stones photos (salivate, salivate) and 60′s Portobello Road, then purely for the first photo at the top of this post! Born in Hamburg in 1938, Habicht began his career as a photographer in 1960 when he attended the Hamburg School of Photography. Habicht has worked for Top of the Pops, and worked as a stills photographer for film directors, such as Bryan Forbes, Roman Polanski and Jules Dassin (1965-68), and as in-house photographer for the Playboy Club in London (1970). This is probably how he got to photograph some of the most creative and influential people of the sixites. Habicht has photographed *everyone*, from the Rolling Stones, to Serg Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin, Vanessa Redgrave, and Christopher Lee, to name a few. His book “Young London, Permissive Paradise” includes many of the photos in this post, and is invaluable as a social document on London’s youth. Also, check out the titles for some of his photographs: “Lost In A Dream”, “Live to the Hilt”, “Amazed to Be” and “Leaving Tomorrow Behind”…far out, man!
Check out his website here.

Robert Mapplethorpe