onionbagblog

Digital Footprints

“We live in a narrow slice of human history where we have the resources to do more than just survive.”

@adders on life, death and clutter, via @tedxbrighton. A rallying call for *ahem* anyone pondering what to do with all those CDRs in the loft capturing over a decade of digital memories.

Shooting the Messenger

“Boredom, amusement and revenge are among the main reasons for trolling. People bully people, not platforms.”

Work hat on for what is a rational position. Would you BAN the postage stamp if you received hate mail?

BECOME KING KONG

“Tell us about the solutions, Chunky. Beat your fucking chest. BEAT YOUR FUCKING CHEST.”

The Artist Taxi Driver Tells It Like It Is at 8:40 in. Worth watching it all, mind.

TROOPER.

Sky - Believe in Better Bicycle Rides

“…plenty of evidence about how families had arrived at the event – with bikes strapped to cars. Several families we spoke to at the event had arrived by train. Southampton’s roads did not seem to be a particularly appealing prospect for those with children.”

@AsEasyAsRiding on the sterile circus that is a city Sky Ride.

The Neoliberalism of Football Tactics

Reading the prose of the tactical hipsters, via @ThisisDeepPlay.

NOISE

“Events and noise, events and noise; everything was starting to resemble nothing but events and noise… I’m selfishly uninterested in conducting any kind of meaningful dialogue with humankind in general.”

Brooker on reducing word emissions.

Wot No Legacy?

“The Haringey Hawks are being forced to disband due to lack of funding and the loss of their coach, so their victory in this game was a final outing, a last hurrah, and all the players now need to find new clubs.”

@DiamondGeezer returns to the Copper Box in search of #2012 sporting legacy [URGH]. Good to see the space is being run by Greenwich Leisure Ltd. The organisation has a half-decent track record at managing public sporting facilities in the face of an *ahem* apathetic #localgov paymaster.

When Localism Goes Wrong

“If communities secretary Eric Pickles thought localism was a get out clause, then he might find its real meaning a shock.”

Making a Bus Station “economically and culturally vibrant”

Oh Lordy.

Knickerless Girls on Dutch Bikes

Bicyclist watching in Dalston.

#DavidBowieis inspiring the Great British art form of queuing at the V and A. #DavidBowieis masking the multi-media myth that an interactive [URGH] exhibition is the cutting edge of contemporary art. #DavidBowieis not in the building.

And so To the V and A! …on Friday morning for the much hyped #DavidBowieis retrospective. EVERYTHING that I have encountered about #DavidBowieis has been offered up as a eulogy. The stars aligned for the unauthorised exhibition, coinciding with one of the creative periods when it is considered to cool to wear your Bowie badges with pride once again.

To offer up dissent is to be disdainful. The V and A has managed to hitch a ride along the fading coattails of the Bowie costumes. This is one of those rare London exhibitions that are an EVENT in itself.

Balls to the art. #DavidBowieis, well, David Bowie.

You’re buying into this, right?

I really wanted to buy into the whole costume circus. I’m not so blinkered as to boldly declare that Bowie can do no wrong. Each generation enters the Bowie Universe at its own entry point. You feel the landscape around you, and then look back to see how yer man made it to here and all that went before.

Let’s Dance [gosh] was my first Bowie fumbling’s in the summer of ’83. He didn’t stir any hidden sexual arousing’s as previous generations declare from a decade earlier. He did however lead me to a misguided fashion faux pas of wearing a white suit as a 13 year old.

Whoops.

Buying into the Bowie myth at the V and A is a similar costly mistake. £15.50 for a ticket treats you to a glorified MTV Hard Rock Cafe wander around two exhibition spaces with little coherence or sense of time.

Which is a bit like the second half of the 80′s for the artist.

I’m being particularly harsh. There are possibly many wonderful insights and artefacts to explore at #DavidBowieis. The online buzz and myth making of the past few months have seen to that.

It wasn’t possible though to explore these properly on Friday morning. The V and A had oversold the exhibition to such an extent that you had to queue three deep just to look at a bloody Bowie fan club keyring.

#DavidBowieis fobbing off fans.

It’s the cut and paste title that works every time.

Part of the hype for the exhibition has been the use of headphones. Once you have queued for almost half an hour to receive a pair, the audio recognises your location in the two spaces and plays a suitable soundtrack.

It leads to a bizarre Silent Disco style appreciation of the art. Are exhibitions meant to be an insular experience where you need to be isolated and withdrawn? Or should global artists such as Bowie be best shared and celebrated as a communal gathering?

#DavidBowieis leading towards a bizarre conversation between the gallery staff and a number of punters regarding the exhibition etiquette of carrying of rucksacks:

“Could Sir please place his rucksack on the front of his chest.

“What? I can’t hear you…”

“Please could Sir not carry his rucksack on his back.”

“WHAT?”

“You are not allowed to walk around with a rucksack on your back.”

Blimey.

It seems that #DavidBowieis not a fan of rambling.

No photography and STRICTLY no sketching is allowed either. Which is a shame, seeing as though #DavidBowieis / was the inspiration for my CSE Grade 3 in art back in the day. I probably should have looked back rather than forwards following Let’s Dance.

Queues, headphones and rucksack woes aside, once inside the exhibition and you have two loosely themed gallery spaces. The first covers the London Bowie and his character creations; the second is more concerned with live performances.

Time - he flexes like a whore… or something. No such SEXINESS in the chronology of #DavidBowieis. This is an artist whose story can only be told through time. A structured attempt is made starting with Stansfield Road in Brixton and then the Bromley / Soho boy.

But then random artefacts clutter up the timeline. No sooner are you reading about the early SW9 experience and you are then presented with the song lyrics for Outside (Millennium spelt incorrectly, Dave. Whoops.)

Those bloody headphones create a Bowie mash up as you walk back and forth between each exhibit. They probably would serve the purpose if you were able to take in #DavidBowieis from start to finish. The volume of people lurking to have a look at a Bowie key ring means that you have to choose your rare spots and move in.

The soundtrack stops and starts. Yer man is a great believer in the cut and paste approach to songwriting, but mixing it with Underneath the Arches to Hallo Spaceboy doesn’t really work.

The detail of artefacts on show is as expansive as the items available in the gift shop. The mass of bodies jostling to oggle at a bottle of Bowie piss (I think?) means though that you need to go for the BIG BUSTERS.

It is the BIG BUSTERS that steal the show. The Starman jumpsuit from *that* TOTP performance is a genuine WOW factor. It is positioned in front of a giant convex video screen, looping out *that* TOTP performance.

This is the moment that the world changed. This is the moment that #DavidBowieis almost justifying the £15.50 in the face of the crass commercialism of the oversold operation. You can watch Starman again and again and again, and it tells you all that you really need to know about #DavidBowieis.

No such fascination for the Screaming Lord Byron costume from Jazzin’ for Blue Jean.

A recording studio wall laid out with every Bowie album cover is also impressive. You can plot the rise and fall and rise of the artist, isolating the trajectory where the glory period started, and then the slow burn out that led to the Album of Which We Do Not Speak It’s Name (which I kinda like…)

The Periodic Table of David Bowie is also an interesting idea, not to mention a big seller in the gift shop.

This is an over critical review for what is a farce of an exhibition. I’m pretty sure that there are some incredible items and ideas to be explored. The crapness of the queues, and the hit and miss headphones meant that I could only concentrate on the few areas where the crowds didn’t flock. You could learn a lot more about Bowie by simply watching the BBC4 film.

#DavidBowieis is coming to a close at the V and A on 11th August.

Please from an orderly queue.

Palaces for the People - a photography exhibition by Elizabeth Blanchet at Photofusion looking at the history of prefab houses - resonates well around Brixton right now. Prefabs were the State response to a post-war housing crisis. The 2013 obsession with property before community can be brutally observed around the corner along Rushcroft Road.

Prefabs fostered community through quirky structures. The forceful eviction of the Rushcroft Road short-life tenants shows how we seem to have regressed back to an age where housing ownership rules strong over the very concept of society.

Comparing and contrasting some of the stunning images shot by Blanchet with the shocking scenes captured along Rushcroft Road, shows just how housing priorities have changed.

Winston Churchill pledged 500,000 prefabs to help house the returning heroes following the Second World War. 150,000 were eventually built in the age of austerity - last Century, not post-capitalism meltdown.

Michael Caine and Neil Kinnock were both brought up in prefabs. With indoor toilets and the white revolution in the kitchen, prefabs were viewed as a luxury style of living. They had a projected lifespan of only a decade. Some sixty years later and a few thousand are still standing.

This is where Elizabeth Blanchet enters the story. Her grandparents lived in prefabs on the other side of the Channel. The photographer explains in the Photofusion exhibition how happy childhood memories led her spending eleven years searching and photographing the remaining prefabs in the UK.

Peckham, Nunhead and Dulwich all feature. This is a dying generation, both in terms of house and occupants. Palaces for the People lovingly offers an insight into the homes and the people that live in prefabs. It is part portrait, part Ideal Homes.

It is so easy to mock prefabs. The exhibition addresses the attachment that the residents have to their homes over half a Century since they first took occupancy. Blanchet found that a sense of community emerges through the close-knit layout of the prefab sites.

Many of the original prefabs are now Grade II listed. You get the impression that various local authorities rather wish that they weren’t.

But as Rushcroft Road has witnessed in the past week, housing per se will always come before people.

Palaces for the People exhibits at Photofusion, Brixton until 2nd August.

Ticckle-ing the Modern Interweb Trolls

“They lurk under the articles, blogs and YouTube clips, revelling in some weird sense of power their malice and spite engenders.”

Walk it like you talk / type it, etc.

Oval and Out

“After four long years and over 700 posts I have decided to hang up my blogging boots.”

There goes the only reliable source for Surrey Cricket knowledge and analysis. News was often broken online before the club even knew about it.

Cheers, Josh.

Shit Royal Babies in Tooting

Not for sale, natch.

And so how was your Lambeth Country Show 2013? Dub, randy ducks and dodging kids from the day job all around Brockwell Park.

In other words: ACE.

Same as it ever was, Comrades. Same as it ever was.

Back in the traditional July spot, day one of the Lambeth Country Show once again brought out all that is good in the Borough and beyond. The headline artists and DJ’s are half-decent. But the real reason that so many folk make the short walk from Brixton to Brockwell is to catch up and share what is happening.

Which for five glorious hours on Saturday meant Chucklehead Cider. Surveying the scene from the Main Stage to the Village Green, a Country Show acquaintance re-christened Brockwell as Chucklehead Park, shortly before queuing up for another four-pint container.

Chin chin.

It’s the body fuel upon which South London legends are made. It also helps to bash out a blog post that would have otherwise got a little lost on facts.

Saturday got off to a good start at Herne Hill station. The weekly market was the Lambeth Show within the Lambeth Show. Artisan bread was coming out of my backside. You couldn’t move for cupcakes.

The lustful South London smell of jerk chicken and sweet corn first filled your nostrils when the lido came into view. You can recreate this aroma anywhere in the world, close your eyes, yet still find yourself transported back to Brockwell for all the BONKERS-ness that is there to love at the Lambeth Show.

Bucket shakers did their shakey shakey thing at the gate - we’re all in this together Comrades. Local authority funding may be stretched for the periphery services but it would take a brave local politician to suggest that the Lambeth Show is anything but a frontline service.

Funding is tight, and for the first time the Country Show is taking a *ahem* co-operative approach in asking folk to fork out what they can afford. You can’t put a price on the experience of stroking an owl to the soundtrack of heavy dub. I dug deep.

The combination of a South London heat wave and Chucklehead Cider could have been… lively. Everything in moderation however, which is the exact same approach that the sun took. Thankfully no Phew a What a Scorcher, but the sun had its hat on at all the right moments.

Etiquette dictates that EVERYTHING at the Country Show needs to be experienced. My approach was to systematically take in all the stalls, tents and stages leaving nothing unturned. The many local societies that make Lambeth such a supportive place to live and work were represented. You could wander from Brixton to Herne Hill to Streatham, all in the space of half a dozen gazebos. Test Match Cricket updates were provided over the PA as you perused the brick-a-brack of the 22nd Streatham Scout Group.

Away from the hyperlocal activities, the larger tents were proving popular. The Cultivate Kids area looked a lot of fun for ankle bikers and adults alike. No coincidence that both Brixton Blog and Made in Lambeth were located here. Big kids at heart, etc.

Vauxhall City Farm remained as popular and amusing as ever. This is the true heart of the Lambeth Country Show. You simply can’t beat the annual joy of seeing a goat recently shaved of a winter coat spread his little legs and take a number two, right in front of Dulwich Yummy Mummy set who had a little explaining left to do.

A randy cock then had something of an aborted copulating moment. You try explaining that over your toasted egg soldiers come high tea time, Madam.

You needed a slightly less literal approach to understand the BRILLIANT and BONKERS vegetable sculpture entries in the Flower Tent. It’s the family friendly pun of Baldrick’s thingumajig that is shaped like a large turnip. Subtly is called for; extra points are awarded for paying attention to the news agenda.

Arty Choke - it’s never OK… was a stunning piece of artistic visual social commentary on our patriarchal society, as interpreted through the medium of vegetables. Potato head Boris lost a few pounds in the artistic process. Bet he’s got a thingumajig shaped like a turnip.

The Scarecrow Competition had a musical theme. Michael Jackson was scary enough even without the Worzel Gummidge makeover. Bob Marley and Davie Crowie [aha!] made for good cornfield companions.

A stroll up to the Main Arena and a dog display was soon to be followed by some camel racing. It is this attention to the running order that makes the Lambeth Show so special.

Lee Thompson’s Ska Orchestra brought some skanking to Saturday afternoon, just as the queue for Chucklehead started to reach silly proportions. The queue for the Labour Party tent couldn’t compete.

Finally a wander down back to the Kids Cultivate area for a catch up with the good folk of Brixton Blog. Here was another Lambeth Show within Lambeth Show. A brilliant workshop of events had been put in place for the afternoon. Developing young journalistic talent within Lambeth was the ethos.

Ace.

Keeping it young were the musicians from the SE17 day job in the tent next door.

Whoops.

A Chucklehead hop, skip and falling over was required, before a final return to the Main Stage just as the power went a little wonky.

Or maybe that was the Chucklehead?

Chin chin.

Full flickr feed.