Make Your Own Damn Film #5

Tomorrow sees the ‘world premiere’ in of my documentary Make Your Own Damn Art – the world of Bob and Roberta Smith in the East End Film Festival. It’s 3 years almost to the day that I started filming – first at the Portman Gallery in Bethnal Green then damn the next morning as Bob created his mobile brownfield site to sit on the forecourt at the Royal Festival Hall.

The prospect of the post-screening Q&A has forced to me think again why I made the film in the first place. In truth, the possibly unexpected answer can be found on this blog – it came from my fascination with Leytonstone and wanting to learn about the place I had just moved to.

I’d seen a poster for the Leytonstone Centre of Contemporary Art and wanted to learn more about it and the artist who created it. The film in a way is the result of that curiosity. So although it’s about a unique voice in British art and the importance of art in society it is also as much about localism for me personally.
I wonder how that will go down at the Q&A tomorrow.

In the afternoon tomorrow I’ve got the huge honour of hosting the discussion and Q&A with Andrew Kotting and Iain Sinclair following the screening of their film Swandown.

I’ve been following this project – a psychogeographer’s dream ticket – ever since I first heard it mooted in 2007. So tonight I’ll be skimming back through my Iain Sinclair archive and re-watching Andrew Kotting’s short films in preparation – what a hardship.

Lea Valley in 2005 before the Olympic Blitz

Bob Stanley presents this great look at the urban wilderness of the lower Lea Valley for the Culture Show before work on the Olympic site and the big shopping centre began – includes interviews with Iain Sinclair and Richard Wentworth.

It’s well worth seeking out Stanley and Paul Kelly’s film, What Have You Done Today Mervyn Day? set around the locations in this video – it’s a real gem and brilliantly captures the area at a moment of transition.

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Walking With Attitude

It is seven years ago today that I headed out with my father across the Templar Lands on the eastern edge of High Wycombe, picking up a ley line that I had optimistically identified running from the holy well through the Iron Age encampment of Desborough Castle to the Hell Fire Caves in West Wycombe.

Above is the super 8 document I made of this vaguely psychogeographical walk which had been inspired by Iain Sinclair’s idea of ‘nodules of energy’. It was part of the Arts Council funded Remapping High Wycombe project that I did with Cathy Rogers and was my first real foray into the practice of psychogeography

Today at 7.45pm is the broadcast of Walking With Attitude on Radio 3 – a documentary about psychogeography presented by travel writer Ian Marchant. I was interviewed for this (mainly about the Remapping High Wycombe project) alongside such psychogeographic magi as Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Stewart Home (the people who introduced me and many others to the subject). Nick Papadimitriou also appears, no doubt refuting the usefulness of psychogeography and further extolling the merits of his very own ‘deep topography’.

Maybe December 4th should be declared National Psychogeographic Day.

You can download the Remapping High Wycombe book from Issuu or Lulu

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Landor’s Tower on Sunset Boulevard

Went wandering this morning and ended up in Book Soup Bookstore on Sunset Boulevard.

The first book that caught my eye just inside the door was Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle. I took this as a sign to have a further rummage.

I held Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon in my hand for a while – it has a nice feel to it – but eventually put it back.

I flicked through the pages of Mike Davis City of Quartz but with only two days left in LA I can’t see me cramming much of this opus of Los Angeles cultural history into my still jet-lagged head.

On my third circuit of the shop, at the back, on a bottom shelf in a dark corner where the discount books are hidden, I find Iain Sinclair’s Landor’s Tower, priced $4.98. It was meant to be. The book genie had led me here to one of the few Sinclair works I don’t already own.

I purchase the book (along with a copy of Knoedelseder’s history of the golden era of 70s stand-up in LA – partly as a momento of the brilliant team of comedy writers I’ve been working with here).

Back in my room, now, I open Landor’s Tower at the page where the shop assistant has placed a bookmark – a message from the book genie will possibly emerge from the page:
“The world had been stood on its head: landscape was a scum of dancing particles, rocked in a soup bowl.”
A description of Los Angeles and a reference to the shop where the book was found.

Never lose faith in the book genie.

Swandown

Iain Sinclair Andrew Kotting Swandown

My sister Cathy Rogers took this photo of Andrew Kotting and Iain Sinclair enjoying a well-earned pint beside the river Medway as they make their way along a series of inland waterways from Hastings to Angel Islington in a Swan shaped Pedalo. The project is called Swandown and had already began to garner a mythic status before they plonked their vessell in the water in late September – two of our great topographers on an epic crazed quest – I’m just waiting for Joblard to emerge from the Medway mist.

There’s more info, pictures and video on the Swandown website http://swandown.info/

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