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~ Posted by Rebecca Willis, February 7th 2012

Today's British press carries colourful photo spreads of the horses of the King's Troop parading down St John's Wood High Street in north London. In full regalia, and pulling 13-pounder guns, the Troop was processing to Hyde Park to take part in yesterday's 41-gun salute that marked the opening of the celebrations for the Queen's diamond jubilee.

But the crowd that packed St John's Wood High Street was there to say goodbye. The barracks where the Troop has been quartered for 65 years has been sold to a property developer to be turned into a mixture of luxury and affordable housing. For those of us in the crowd, there were lumps in our throats and tears in our eyes. We residents have been sharing our neighbourhood with over 100 horses. We have long been woken by the percussive sound of metal hooves raining down on roads or the distant blast of a bugle. Driving a car often involved waiting for a stream of of magnificent, glossy-coated animals to pass by in the middle of the road. And the pungent smell of their droppings used to be a sign that we were nearly home.

The horses had a good send off. There were pearly kings and queens. There was the obligatory, inaudible PA system over which a couple of speeches were made. And choirs of local children sang the wartime songs "Goodbye-ee" and "We'll Meet Again", which of course meant nothing to them.   read more »

~ Posted by Robert Butler, February 2nd 2012

Visitors to Makkinga, a northern village in the Netherlands, are greeted on the outskirts by a nice joke. After a road sign that announces the 30kph speed limit, and another that says "Welkom", there's a third that says "Verkeersbordvrij". That translates as "free of traffic signs". It’s a sign that tells you something you can work out for yourself.
 
As Tom Vanderbilt explains in his book "Traffic" (2008), the sign captures the philosophy of Hans Monderman, a Dutch traffic engineer, who overturned years of bossy thinking by arguing that the fewer road signs there were in social settings, the safer those places would be. (Motorways were another matter.) When car drivers use their own intelligence, and interact with others who are sharing the same space, they slow down, and there are fewer accidents. 
 
The latest example of this counter-intuitive thinking was unveiled in London yesterday. Exhibition Road runs half a mile from South Kensington tube station to Hyde Park, and passes entrances to the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum. It has cost nearly £30m to redesign this stretch of road and the best bit about it is the stuff that's not there.  read more »

Mark Rylance is a god. That’s not meant in some slobbery, fan-speak sense, but more literally. In the final scene of “Jerusalem”, Jez Butterworth’s violent, comic modern pastoral that recently came home to London after a returns-only run on Broadway, Mr Rylance undergoes an extraordinary physical transformation: in the final seconds, what you see under the green arboreal light, bloodied, sweating, eyes bulging white from his sockets, is not an actor, but Pan, the god of misrule himself.
 
Usually theatre achieves its magic through trickery—misdirection, trapdoors, smoke and mirrors. But occasionally there’s something more arcane at work. In “The Way of the Actor”—a must-read for drama students since the late 1980s—a British professor of psychology called Brian Bates drew parallels between tribal shamans and the most compelling contemporary actors. With the help of hallucinogenics such as peyote, plus long sessions of repetitive drumming, stamping or clapping, these men and women would appear to change. They might “become” animal totems, ancestor spirits, gods, whatever. But it would always be something greater-than-human, something fiercely compelling that would bind together the group watching.
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Every year hundreds of buildings in London open their doors to the public for one weekend in September, allowing visitors a glimpse under the skin of the city’s architecture. Open House London, which takes place this weekend (September 17th and 18th), will grant access to over 700 offices, homes and civic monuments. The entirely free event also includes dozens of neighbourhood walks, boat and cycle tours, talks and debates all over London. Giovanna Dunmall offers her top-five picks for where to go:

1. The former Commonwealth Institute building (pictured above), a Grade II-listed structure on High Street Kensington, is renowned for its curvaceous green copper roof. The Institute is a prime example of 20th-century modernism, designed by Lord Cunliffe in 1958. It is about to be renovated by John Pawson and Rem Koolhaas, so this is the last chance for the public to see the original project before it re-opens as the new Design Museum in 2014.

2. Make a trip to the Hermitage Community Moorings in Wapping for a glimpse of what it is like to live on the water. HCM provides berths for historic vessels that have all been painstakingly restored and converted into homes. These boats now make up a permanent moored community, but the boats are navigable and can explore other waters. There is also a Pier House, a floating space for local events.  read more »

When Alexander McQueen, a British fashion designer, committed suicide last year at the age of 40, the fashion world mourned. The public could gauge his brilliance by watching the reaction of those in the know. Still, many did not fully understand the extent of his talent. A recent exhibition of McQueen’s work in New York has made it abundantly clear. 

“Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been a runaway success. Between May 4th and August 7th it drew over 660,000 visitors, making it the museum’s eighth most popular exhibition ever, up there with shows dedicated to Tutankhamun (1978) and Picasso (2010). Such was the demand that the exhibition’s run was extended by a week and it stayed open until midnight on August 6th and 7th in order to let the hungry crowds feast their eyes. This despite the rise in the museum’s suggested admission fee, from $20 to $25, which took place on July 1st.

Yet there are no plans for the show to go on tour. Imran Amed voiced his disappointment on his Business of Fashion blog, which inspired Melanie Rickey, a journalist at Grazia magazine, to start a petition and a social-media campaign (#bringmcqueenexhibitionhome on Twitter) to bring “Savage Beauty” to London.   read more »

A “strange ‘non-place’ that we are usually eager to leave”. This is how Alain de Botton, a pop-philosopher and author, described airports in “A Week at the Airport”, the book he wrote after his stint as Heathrow’s writer-in-residence in 2009. Hardly complimentary. Nevertheless Heathrow has decided to repeat the experiment: Tony Parsons, the 57-year-old journalist and author, began his stint as the airport’s official writer earlier this month.

It may seem strange that the world’s busiest airport is getting writers on board at all. But it is something of a trend; writers now reside in all sorts of unlikely places. Eton, an English private school for boys, has collected a few, as have most prisons and the Savoy hotel in London. “My most arduous job as writer-in-residence”, mused Kathy Lette, an Australian-born novelist, “was selecting a dish to be named after me on the Savoy's menu.” She settled for the Kathy Ome-Lette.

What is Heathrow hoping to get out of the scheme? Publicity, certainly. But the airport is also attempting to inject a little glamour back into the experience of flying. Travelling by plane usually conjures up images of a few too many hours spent twiddling thumbs in chairs with unsettling stains. Or worse, a stressful stumble from one bottlenecked queue to another, and then the dreary fumble to collect one’s shoes, belt, bags, computer and other detritus.  read more »

A bristly, knobbly kneed, naked giant walks endlessly in circles. He trudges in heavy boots as though he has the weight of the world on his shoulders. Maybe he is exhausted because for all his movement, he never seems to get anywhere. Rather, like Sisyphus, he simply carries on, without end. Sometimes he turns and stares, plaintively, maybe vacantly, and then he groans like an anguished cow. Occasionally he swallows back a belch, and then carries on.

This is David Shrigley’s "Walker", an animated film projected on to the vast cylindrical curtain at the centre of Ron Arad’s new installation, "Curtain Call", at the Roundhouse performance space in London. Arad, a London-based Israeli designer and architect, invited 12 artists to make work that uses his curtain as a stage or a screen. Shrigley—the only artist Arad didn't already know personally—is joined by photographers, animators, film-makers and musicians, among them students from the Royal College of Art, where Arad has taught.  read more »

Rioting and books share a stormy history. Think of the so-called Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497, when Girolamo Savonarola and his band of religious followers roundly collected and set fire to mounds of “pagan” literature. Centuries later, torch-lit parades of right-wing German students burnt pillaged books in protest against what they saw as the creeping stain of Jewish intellectualism on national culture.
 
In London in 2011, however, bibliophiles can breathe easy: despite the riots, books have tended to stay safely on their shelves, their subtle power blithely overlooked. When it comes to targets for looters, books are losing out to high-end jeans and Apple-made gadgets. One waggish employee at a Waterstones in Manchester reportedly declared they would remain open despite the ruckus. “If they steal some books they might learn something,” he said (a quote that has circulated widely in the twittosphere). But he seems doomed to disappointment: as yet no Waterstones and only one WH Smith have been targeted. As Patrick French tweeted yesterday, “The only shop NOT looted down the road from where I live was Waterstones.”
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“It is a phoenix that rose out of the ashes of Grosvenor House,” says Geoffrey Munn, managing director of Wartski, a London jeweller. He is talking about the Masterpiece fair, which has just finished its second year alongside the river Thames. When Grosvenor, the grande dame of London’s annual art and antiques fairs, shut down in 2009, Masterpiece was one of two new fairs to have emerged, along with Brian and Anna Haughton’s Art Antiques London, which took place in Kensington Gardens in early June. After maiden voyages last year, both improved in 2011.

Art Antiques London is pitched to mid-range collectors with an emphasis on exceptional ceramics. Masterpiece is a bigger and glitzier bird, which aims to exhibit the best of the best. A visitor to this more ambitious fair, which closed on July 5th, could have taken home some 18th-century scenic wallpaper (at Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz); a sleekly sensual, modern white sofa (Ciancimino); a series of four Commedia dell’Arte paintings by Giandomenico Tiepolo (Dickinson); a sapphire blue Rolls-Royce (pictured); or a Spitfire plane. The stands are generously proportioned, the colours soothingly neutral and the aisles thickly carpeted. For the peckish, there were outposts of the fashionable Le Caprice and Harry’s Bar.

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It is quite an experience to walk into the Museum of Modern Art on a carefree summer’s day and be confronted with Boris Mikhailov's photographs. Nineteen larger-than-life pictures surround the viewer. A man lies sleeping, possibly passed out, a striking figure in a black coat against the white snow. Another man faces away from the lens, his bare back revealing blood gathering in the sores. A thin young girl with sallow, translucent skin, shorn hair and a pink shirt, is captured in an odd, distant gaze.

Born in Ukraine, Mr Mikhailov shot these photographs in Kharkov in 1997 and 1998. He visited this industrial Ukrainian city after the fall of the Soviet Union and found that many people, including those who were previously middle class, had been displaced and were now homeless. Mr Mikhailov was disturbed that despite the “shiny wrapper” of Western modernity, people were starving, suffering from disease and resorting to prostitution. He spent a year taking the pictures that would eventually become “Case History", a 400-photograph series and book. The MoMA show is the first time these pictures have been exhibited in the America. Some of the series, shown at a much smaller size, are also on view at the Tate Modern in the show  “Photography: New Documentary Forms” until March 2012.  read more »