COVERING ALL THE BASES
On Tuesday I went to a small studio off Albert Bridge Road, by Battersea Park in London, to see an exhibition opening, Hipgnosis: For The Love of Vinyl. Hipgnosis were a design studio in the Seventies and Eighties who created the covers to many of the decade's most iconic albums including Led Zeppelin's Houses of The Holy, Presence and Coda, Pink Floyd's Dark Side of The Moon and 10cc's Deceptive Bends, to name but a few. I admit I'm not a fan of all of the bands that Hipgnosis designed covers for but I am an admirer of their design ethic and one of the main players from Hipgnosis, Aubrey Powell, was there surrounded by copies of new book Hipgnosis: For The Love of Vinyl and prints of many of Hipgnosis's best-known album covers. It took place in a small studio and the prints looked fantastic framed. It's an art that hasn't quite died out but is less commonplace these days so it was a very enjoyable evening. The exhibition runs until 18th January 2010. We also walked by the Albert Bridge, lit up in all its glory.
www.albertstudiogallery.com/exhibitions

COMICS AS ART
As it's November, it's time for the month-long festival of Comica at the ICA in London. Each year, curator Paul Gravett manages to gather together a diverse mix of comic creators, publishers and those associated with the industry and the form. There are too many events to go to all of them but I went to two of them the Saturday before last: Dark We We Were and Golden-Eyed, hosted by Mike Lake, which looked at the history of the British comic shop, and Grandville, a talk complete with slides by Bryan Talbot, which revealed the influences on Talbot's Grandville graphic novel. On the comic shop panel were Derek 'Bram' Stokes, the man who ran Dark They Were and Golden Eyed, the first comic shop in London, Phil Clarke, who started British comic shows in Birmingham, Mike Lake, the co-founder of Forbidden Planet and Titan Books, Judge Dredd and Batman artist Brian Bolland and the aforementioned Bryan Talbot, who filled in for an ill Dave Gibbons. It was interesting to delve into the past and find out a little bit about what the scene was like in the days long before Forbidden Planet and Gosh but it was quite a bit before my time so it didn't have any personal nostalgia. It was also intriguing to see fanzines by Bolland as a kid and the first UK Comic Art Convention flyer from 1970. Talbot's talk on Grandville was very well organised and Talbot showed why he is one of the most erudite and intelligent comic creators currently working in the English language as he draws influences from places like Edwardian and Victorian children's illustrators and from Europe. He held our attention like an old pro and it was eye-opening to sit through this after reading Grandville.
I also popped in on the Thursday after to the opening of a Robert Crumb exhibition at the Scream Gallery in Mayfair, R Crumb Uncovered, which was also under the Comica banner. But it was too crowded and packed with the sort of people that Crumb would run a mile from. However it is good to see a comic artist getting that sort of attention from the mainstream art world.
Comica continues to be a must-visit destination each year for the comic and comic art aficionado and long may it continue…
I intend to go to at least a couple of other Comica events so I'll post from them too but here are a few photos including some rather grainy ones from the comic shop talk and the Grandville one…
http://www.comicafestival.com/

MY FIRST PHOTO ESSAY
My initial City of London photo essay is up at thecity.co.uk website. I'm very chuffed with my photos so feel free to check it out: http://www.thecity.co.uk/blog/01057-city-of-london-bridges-photos/.
I'll be doing these on a regular basis with the next one on City of London churches.
It's very exciting to be doing stuff like this and to be getting paid for it is absolutely incredible.

A PACKED WEEK
The last few months have been fairly quiet but things have started to pick up. Although subbing has been absolutely dead for me, I've started to make money from my photos and I've been doing a lot of features and writing. It's very satisfying that the photography, something that I started doing just to get reference for a comic project, may well turn into something more substantial. It also looks like possibly one of my other book projects may become a reality and if it does, it will be an amazing book to work on. The past week has been a little bit crazy: on Monday, I went to the launch of London History Week at Kensington library, where I saw history writer Simon Sebag Montefiore talk about visiting archives in Russia to research his books on Stalin, which was fascinating. Before that, I went into town to interview director Jake West and writer/ comic artist Dan Schaffer at the Groucho Club in Soho about British horror comedy Doghouse.
On Tuesday I was lucky enough to go to the launch of the Viz 30th anniversary exhibition at the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury (and for the Americans reading this, this is not the manga publisher but the very British humour comic that started life as a fanzine and at its peak sold over a million on the newsstand over here). I have written a piece on Viz's anniversary for Big Issue In The North, which is why I was invited. I got to get quotes from BBC's Charlie Brooker (Screenwipe) and newspaper illustrator Martin Rowson and I also got to meet Simon Donald, Graham Thorp and Davey Jones, the past and present people behind Viz, which was very cool. On Wednesday, I got to see Up in 3-D at last, which was very enjoyable as it was a film with a heart.
Thursday I got to go up The Gherkin in the City of London for a meeting with the deputy head of PR for the City of London to talk about one of my book projects. The Gherkin, or 30 St Mary Axe as it is officially known, has amazing views across the whole of London and we were lucky enough to sit in the cafe at the top, on its 40th floor. It was days like this that made me realise how lucky I am doing what I do. Then, because we had time to kill and my friend Andy Colman had not been recently, we popped to Spitalfields, where they've done a great job of maintaining the feel of the market while modernising what is there and again because he had never visited, we ended the day at Borough Market and took a look inside Southwark Cathedral. The day was all about London because I spend my time travelling around the country and admiring churches in places like Bath and Wells but Southwark Cathedral is easily a match for the most exquisite churches anywhere else in the UK.
Then on Friday I did an interview with Genndy Tartakovsky (Samurai Jack, Star Wars: The Clone Wars and Dexter's Laboratory), something I've been trying to set up for a few months. I have three or four features I'm currently working on, a couple of book projects, some fiction (something I've not tried in years) and a number of photo essays, so long may it continue…

WRAPPING UP THE LONDON FILM FESTIVAL
I've had a fairly crazy ten days, so this post is a little bit behind schedule. The last two films I went to see at the London Film Festival were An Education and A Serious Man. The former was a fictionalised version of journalist Lynn Barber's book on her life, adapted by best selling author Nick Hornby while the latter is the latest effort from the Coen Brothers. Thematically they couldn't be more different: in fact the only thing they really have in common is that they are period pieces of sorts, both set in the Sixties. But An Education looks at London while A Serious Man is set in the Coen brothers' native Minnesota.
So let's start with An Education, which has schoolgirl Jenny (played brilliantly by Carey Mulligan) take up with seemingly unsuitable older man David (Peter Sarsgaard). It's London in the Sixties and Teddington girl Jenny is swept off her feet by the bohemian David and his friend Danny (Dominic Cooper) and his girlfriend Helen (played by Rosamund Pike). It shows off a fascinating picture of London and England in the Sixties before it became 'swinging' and Jenny's predicament shows off the dilemma that women faced when they had very few options open to them in terms of career and a life of their own. Mulligan is enchanting as Jenny while there is good screen chemistry between her and Sarsgaard as the ultimately sleazy David. It does have serious points to make and while there isn't a lot to An Education really, it is a likeable and well-made film with a cast that is enjoyable to watch, that passes time very pleasantly indeed…
A Serious Man is a return to the sort of films the Coen brothers used to make in the Nineties. While No Country For Old Men, the movie that garnered them their Oscar, was extremely good, it was a different sort of picture for the brothers. A Serious Man deals with a Jewish man, Larry Gopnik, and his wife, Sarah, who live in Minnesota in the Sixties and looks at the personal trials and tribulations that Gopnik and his family go through. But since this is the Coen brothers, this is no ordinary nostalgic drama: Gopnik is a physics professor with a deadbeat brother and a wife who decides to leave him for a friend of theirs. Only the Coens could open a film with a sequence entirely in Yiddish and set in Poland at the end of the 19th century and make it work. A Serious Man is one of their first films that isn't a genre piece but a surreal drama examining and questioning the role of religion in society. It dips into their childhood in Minnesota as the children of Jewish academicians and so it means that the film is their most 'Jewish.' But this lends it a verisimilitude that may have been lacking. As a black comedy drama, A Serious Man contains all of the best flourishes that a Coen brothers film has to offer: a slightly literary feel to proceedings with a superb cast and some moments that make you laugh with others that make you think. Michael Stuhlbarg as Larry Gopnik commands the screen while the rest of the cast are equally mesmerising. Apart from Richard Kind, who plays Larry's feckless brother and has been in The Producers on Broadway and in Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, there are familiar faces but no stars. It means that there are no names to detract from the overall experience. They create a picture of Sixties Jewish middle America that is unique and captivating. It is heartening to know that, even after over decades in cinema, the Coen brothers can continue to surprise cinemagoers. One of the highlights of the LFF…

FESTIVAL BEHAVIOUR
It's October and that means that it's been the London Film Festival. I've been going to the LFF for a number of years and I have gotten to see some fairly impressive films (and some that have been eminently forgettable). In 2009 I have been a little more selective than in past years but here are my capsule reviews for the films I've seen in the last three weeks:
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a 'reimagining' of Abel Ferrara's 1992 film Bad Lieutenant that starred Harvey Keitel as the drug snorting, nun raping cop. This time around it's Nicolas Cage and it's directed by Werner Herzog. If you were hoping that Cage might break his Eddie Murphy-like run of atrocious films, then I'm afraid you'll be rather disappointed. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans plays like a bad pastiche of a terrible Eighties movie with a particularly poor script, a strange and incompetent turn from Cage (whose strange wig continues to sit on his head like a dark brown omelette) and a film that doesn't really amount to anything at all…
Fantastic Mr Fox, adapted from the Roald Dahl childrens book, directed by Wes Anderson, is a stop motion animation film with the voices of George Clooney, Meryl Streep and Jason Schwartzman. Normally I find Anderson's films twee, annoying and deliberately arch but his style suits Fantastic Mr Fox with its jerky style of animation refreshing after a diet of bland CGI. Clooney and Streep are good value and the story of Mr Fox, a reformed chicken house thief, who falls foul (if you'll pardon the pun) of three evil farmers, is told likeably and in a visually engaging way. Anderson moved the action from England to a fictionalised US but it does work. My only criticism is that Fantastic Mr Fox may be too surreal and unsettling for children. But it uses the director's quirks to unusual and memorable effect…
The Men Who Stare At Goats is yet another George Clooney film, but this time it's a comedy loosely based on Jon Ronson's book about a bizarre US army unit who believed they had special powers. Directed by Clooney's friend Grant Heslov, The Men Who Stare at Goats also stars Ewan MacGregor as journalist Bob Wilton, Jeff Bridges in wonderful form as Bill Djanjo, the insane head of the US Army's First Earth Battalion and Kevin Spacey, who plays Larry Hooper, the psychotic failed science fiction writer. Clooney is Lyn Cassady, the member of the battalion who draws Wilton into the web of strangeness, taking the journalist on a quest that doesn't really have a point. Bridges is hysterical as the naive hippy head of the battalion who falls from grace and disappears for years. MacGregor as the straight man holds it all together on screen while Clooney displays his continuing adeptness for comedy. The Men Who Stare at Goats is a film that deserves to be seen and contains a number of laugh-out-loud moments including the scene where Cassaday and Wilton drive over a landmine, stranding themselves in the middle of the Iraqi desert. A rare treat…
The Informant!, about corporate whistleblower and starring Matt Damon, is Steven Soderbergh trying to make a Coen Brothers film. The problem is that the execution isn't very funny and there really is nothing here. Damon is horribly miscast, his character is a bumbling sociopath and the supporting cast like Scott Bakula couldn't be more wooden if they tried. Add the annoying Marvin Hamlisch score to the mix and you have a comedy that just doesn't work on any level with nothing to recommend it…
The Road, adapted from Cormac MacCarthy's enervating novel about a world after a terrible disaster and the father and son who try to survive, is very well-made but staggeringly depressing. Director John Hillcoat, who helmed the brilliant western The Proposition, has created a world literally without colour: everything on screen is grey. Viggo Mortensen as the father of the boy does acquit himself well on screen but, apart from the very end, this is a place without any hope. There are some genuinely disturbing moments but you leave the cinema totally drained. Unlike something like Children of Men, where the viewer does get the odd break from the futility of it all, The Road is pure, undistilled misery…
Up In The Air, the third film with George Clooney here, is a light and fluffy comedy about Ryan Bingham (Clooney), a man who works for a company whose job it is to fly around the US and fire employees from other companies. But everything changes when Natalie (Anna Kendrick) is hired and the place he works for chooses to ground Bingham and force him to reassess his life and career. Clooney is enjoyable to watch on screen and his casual girlfriend Alex, played by Vera Farmiga, is gorgeous but there really isn't a lot here. I will say that Up In The Air doesn't have a pat happy ending…
I did go to the press conference for The Men Who Stare At Goats, where I got to see Clooney, Spacey, Ronson and director Heslov…

PICTURE OF THE PAST
I've written about the Chris Beetles Gallery here before as they've shown some fantastic illustration work from the likes of Edmund DuLac, Mervyn Peake, Quentin Blake and many others. But they are becoming almost as well known for their photography so I thought I'd put a small plug up for them. Running until November 7th is their Duffy exhibition and Duffy was a fantastic London photographer and a contemporary of David Bailey and Norman Parkinson, shooting people like Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Sammy Davis Jr and many more. It was thought that the negatives to much of his work were destroyed thirty years ago but they have been unearthed and you can see a selection of his magnificent work at the Chris Beetles Gallery on Ryder Street, just off St James's Street in London. So if you're passing, you should check it out…
www.chrisbeetles.com