Silk is undeniably associated with elitism, elegance and expense. But according to biological engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto, it is in fact “the ancient material of the future”. In his brilliant TED Talk, Omenetto demonstrates how this “sustainable natural Kevlar” can …]]>

Can you think of a better use for 1.2 million spiders?

It’s whispering down the catwalk at Somerset House for London Fashion Week. It’s caressed by every tourist nipping into Liberty’s for an iconic paisley scarf.  And it’s the star of the current exhibition at the V&A, in the form of a shimmering golden cape that took 1.2 million Madagascan spiders, eight years and a team of expert handloom weavers to create.

Silk is undeniably associated with elitism, elegance and expense. But according to biological engineer Fiorenzo Omenetto, it is in fact “the ancient material of the future”. In his brilliant TED Talk, Omenetto demonstrates how this “sustainable natural Kevlar” can be used to create holograms, optical fibres, dissolvable body implants, microneedles and LED tattoos. Far from being a heritage fabric, he believes that this “new old material could profoundly impact high technology, material science, medicine and global health.”

Silk’s ability to weave together the past and the future is beautifully evident at the Golden Spider Silk exhibition, which exemplifies the coming together of traditional extraction and weaving techniques with the bold vision of British textile artist Simon Peers and US designer entrepreneur Nicholas Godley. The cape itself could equally be a Madagascan antique or the latest piece of McQueen couture.

Indeed, the ancient silk industry has helped to shape modern London. But the history of silk and the city is one of violence, folly and persecution that belies the fabric’s refined image.

Silkworms, silk goods and the skills of sericulture first came to Europe thanks to a series of brutal conquests of Asia and Persia, from sixth century Romans, seventh century Arabs and medieval Crusaders in turn. France and Italy quickly developed strong silk industries, but our island lagged behind. And so in 1609 the aesthete king, James I, attempted to develop a native sericulture in England, by purchasing and planting 100,000 mulberry trees, partly on a plot beside his own Hampton Court. Unfortunately, James had ordered the black variety. Silk worms feed off white mulberry leaves. The experiment failed.

It wasn’t until 1681, when Charles II offered sanctuary to the Huguenots being oppressed by the Catholic Louis IX, that London really embraced silk. The trickle of French refugees became a river when, in 1685 Louis XIV, revoked the Edict of Nantes, forcing all remaining Huguenots to convert to Catholicism or face persecution.  From 1670 to 1710, 40-50,000 Huguenots, many of them wealthy and highly skilled weavers, sought refuge across the channel.

Most of them headed to Spitalfields, which became the centre of London’s silk trade, otherwise known as ‘weaver’s town’. East London was an ideal destination for the new arrivals, as food and accommodation was cheap, and the area was relatively free from the strict economic control wielded elsewhere by the guilds. By 1700 there were nine Huguenot churches in Spitalfields alone.

Once you know what to look for, it is hard to wander around modern Spitalfields without seeing the shadow of those French silkmen everywhere.

CONTINUE READING AT LONDON CALLING…

Bear with me. I’ll get to the ridiculously talented accapella guys in a minute.

Alexa and Timon couldn’t make it, so instead they sent a best-wishes video from Berlin for us to watch on the day, featuring a whole host of AEG colleagues too. None …]]> Surprisingly, my husband manages to fit in a job other than me. He works for AEG, proud owner of the O2 and other impressively echoey sports and music venues around the world. Pre-husbandisation, he invited his lovely colleague in Berlin, Markus, to attend our wedding with his equally lovely wife and son Alexa and Timon.

Bear with me. I’ll get to the ridiculously talented accapella guys in a minute.

Alexa and Timon couldn’t make it, so instead they sent a best-wishes video from Berlin for us to watch on the day, featuring a whole host of AEG colleagues too. None of them could pronounce our name. It was very moving. The room got a bit dusty. And then, because they were playing the O2 World Berlin and Markus had collared them in the lift, seven super-energetic black dudes in co-ordinated bad-boy outfits popped up to say congratulations.

They were Naturally 7. It took me a while to realise, jumping and squealing like a girl who just happened to find some old Facebook shares in her handbag at their show at the Barbican last night, that they were them. I was too busy having fun watching them coax a Barbican audience  - majority middle class, middle aged and fed up from wandering for hours trying to find the bloody place – to full ovating, yelling, booty-busting splendour in a blistering old-school feel-good feast of a gig.

Naturally 7 produce their own R&B songs, as well as covers by everyone from Phil Collins to DMX to Simon & Garfunkel, using nothing but their voices. Every instrument, DJ effect and sample loop is created vocally. Sure, it’s a stunt, but when its executed this well it never gets dull. You can keep your retro 50s barbershop boys and soulful 60s acousticians. These guys have classic technique and musicality galore but they also have a bouncy, heartfelt playfulness and enthusiasm that has nothing to do with being cool and everything to do with giving your audience a damn good time.

So a belated thanks, boys, for the marital blessing – I had no idea you were this awesome. Everyone else, catch them when you can. Wear something that soaks up sweat and a big stupid 2012-style grin.

Sure, watch the adaptations, but be selective. Lean is mandatory. Andrew Davies’ exemplary 2005 Bleak House for the BBC beautifully balances the epic and the intimate, the poignant and the rambunctious. But Sarah Phelps’ humourless Great Expectations screened this Christmas was an emo Burberry ad of a flop. Good thing Mike Newell’s 2012 film would appear very difficult to fuck up, despite his controversial …]]>

CHARLES!

What to write? He said it all, literally. As we celebrate Dickens’s 200th birthday, this is definitely the year to go back and remember why Charles really does deserve his hype.

Sure, watch the adaptations, but be selective. Lean is mandatory. Andrew Davies’ exemplary 2005 Bleak House for the BBC beautifully balances the epic and the intimate, the poignant and the rambunctious. But Sarah Phelps’ humourless Great Expectations screened this Christmas was an emo Burberry ad of a flop. Good thing Mike Newell’s 2012 film would appear very difficult to fuck up, despite his controversial ending-change – with Helena Bonham Carter as Havisham , Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch and Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers, you’d have to do some pretty bad directing not to enter ‘instant classic’ territory.

Absolutely, dip into one of the biographies: Claire Tomalin and Simon Callow are deservedly hot right now, but Peter Ackyroyd’s 1990 tome is still a classic.

And if you get a chance to watch Callow do him, go.

But above all, read the damn books. When dug out from under the layers of expectation and assumption, which begins with the curse of the curriculum; continues through ubiquitous and vague application of ‘Dickensian’ to anything fat, cockney and frock-coated; and peaks with Gillian Anderson going full retard, it is always surprising how funny, sophisticated and ambiguous they truly are.

Go on then: which one’s your favourite and why?

However, this very dichotomy is probably the reason why sports and fiction make such a …]]>

Fiction's favourite pastime

If you were searching for a pastime that was the opposite of reading, you might well hit on sport. Burying your nose in a book is a primarily sedentary and intellectual activity (although proponents of the bizarre discipline that is extreme reading might disagree); sport is of course hugely energetic and physical (although some of us might argue that golf, boules and an arthritic middle-aged kick-about buck that trend too).  The former is an insular and private experience; the latter an extroverted and communal event.

However, this very dichotomy is probably the reason why sports and fiction make such a successful partnership. Confined to their desks for most of the day, it is no surprise that writers fetishise a world of sweat and sociability. Bringing such a tribal activity to life on the lonely page is an intriguing challenge, and sport is in itself a language with a rich seam of jargon to mine. It is also a cultural looking glass, through which issues of class, race, sex, violence and transcendence can be refracted and explored. And however deep the metaphor becomes, the everyman accessibility of sport allows a novel to retain an aura of unpretentious authenticity.

Of course, for all the fancy philosophising, a good chunk of sport fiction is driven by publishers’ bottom lines. The flawed reading/sports division also translates into a classic gender cliché: she snuggles on the sofa with a novel while he plays ball in the park; she talks Austen at the book club while he talks Arsenal down the pub. In the most basic marketing terms, adding a spot of muscle to your novel can help pull in the guys, and many canny authors combine sporting subjects with ‘masculine’ adrenalin-pumped genres such as crime and mystery.

The last four novels in Harlan Coben’s Myron Bolitar series, fast-paced thrillers starring a basketball pro turned sports agent, all debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. John Grisham has successfully combined his high-stakes taut plotting with American football inBleachers and Playing for Pizza. Ex-jockey Dick Francis’s racing crime capers have been bestsellers for four decades. And Nick Hornby’s autobiographical novel Fever Pitch helped ease a generation of non-fiction lads into the joys of well-written, stealthily meaningful bloke-lit.

But sport-saturated fiction is as likely to crop up on an awards shortlist as an airport paperback carousel. Highbrow state-of-the-nation epics have a notable tendency to pin eight hundred pages of philosophy on the whack of a ball.

CONTINUE READING AT BOOKDIVA…

From Winchester’s New Minster charter, which dates back to 966 and shows King Edgar worshipped alongside Christ by adoring angels, to Henry VIII’s personal psalter, complete with illustrations of the hirsute king posing as David, these manuscripts admirably achieve their aim – …]]>

So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by...

This season, the British Library is all about the manuscripts. The gorgeous artworks in ‘Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination’ – its big winter exhibition charting 800 years’ worth of illuminated medieval and Renaissance manuscripts collected by English kings and queens –bring a feast of glimmering gilt, holy lapis lazuli and rich royal crimson into a grey January.

From Winchester’s New Minster charter, which dates back to 966 and shows King Edgar worshipped alongside Christ by adoring angels, to Henry VIII’s personal psalter, complete with illustrations of the hirsute king posing as David, these manuscripts admirably achieve their aim – which is to dazzle us with the magnificence of the monarchy whilst furthering its religious, political and social ends. The exhibition is the result of three years’ research undertaken by the Library in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute of Art on 2,000 ancient handwritten books, which give deep insight into the motivations, aspirations and imaginations of our ancestors. Its stated aim is to “to make them as well known as landmark medieval buildings linked to the monarchy, such as the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and Windsor Castle”.

Seriously stirring stuff.

But when you’ve finished marveling at these parchment peacocks, don’t hit the Euston Road straight away. Our In Residence series is all about uncovering some of the best artistic gems nestling in the permanent collections of London’s museums and galleries – gems that are totally free to visit and prone to be overlooked in the age of the expensive blockbuster show.

So before you head back out into the rain, take a detour to the Sir John Ritblat Gallery on the Library’s upper ground floor and seek out an altogether less flashy manuscript. This book more closely resembles something you might have made for a school project: pages stained with tea, edges crisped on the hob, ye olde calligraphy carefully pressed on in sepia Letraset. But to me it is more moving and magnificent than the finest bestiary.

CONTINUE READING AT LONDON CALLING…

But when Tim Plester premiered Way of the Morris, his documentary about “the origins and impulses behind Morris dancing and its place within enchanted England’s ongoing story”, alongside the Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Source Code …]]>

Way of the Morris

It was an unlikely pairing. You wouldn’t expect the sort of edgy, urban international hipsters that attend SXSW – the music, film, and technology festival and all-round trend-spotting mecca that sprouts from the desert of Austin, Texas each year – would have much interest in a bunch of bobbing blokes from a small Oxfordshire village with bells on their legs and hankies in their hands.

But when Tim Plester premiered Way of the Morris, his documentary about “the origins and impulses behind Morris dancing and its place within enchanted England’s ongoing story”, alongside the Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Source Code and Jodie Foster’s The Beaver, their reaction suggested quite otherwise.

“We certainly didn’t come close to breaking any box-office records,” Plester laughs, “but we did succeed in attracting several small but perfectly formed audiences who, I hope, left the screenings with their notions of Old Weird Albion sufficiently shaken and stirred.” The film want on to scoop awards for ‘Best Independent Documentary Feature’ and ‘Best Documentary Film’ at the 2011 Southern Appalachian International Film Festival, was selected by the UK Film Focus as one of their ‘Breakthrough’ British films of the year, and both the British Library and The British Film Institute requested copies of the film for their archives.

Plester’s success is not as surprising as you might think, and not just because nostalgia for the bucolic good life is a timeless cultural trope. A new strain of gritty, unsentimental and forward-looking rusticity has been bubbling away over the past five years or so. And to its disciples – in music, fashion and technology, as well as film – native traditions are a way into the future, not a relic from the past.

CONTINUE READING AT FUTURESPACE…

A century and a half later, we’re still deluding ourselves. A recent survey shows that four out of five people will fail to keep their vows of self-improvement over the next twelve months, but we don’t need ‘research’ to tell us that New Year’s resolutions suck. Just maybe, if the calendar year started in spring, we would be up for abstinence and avocado; as it is, our serotonin-starved brains …]]>

2012: Year of the Novel

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions”, wrote Mark Twain in Nevada’s Territorial Enterprise on January 1, 1863. “Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

A century and a half later, we’re still deluding ourselves. A recent survey shows that four out of five people will fail to keep their vows of self-improvement over the next twelve months, but we don’t need ‘research’ to tell us that New Year’s resolutions suck. Just maybe, if the calendar year started in spring, we would be up for abstinence and avocado; as it is, our serotonin-starved brains are still craving carbs, cashmere and television programmes featuring either Benedict Cumberbatch, a Labrador, or both.

This does, however, make January the perfect time to upgrade your literary habits. Now is not the time for Norovirus-marinated gyms and desperate two-for-one bars. Now is the time for a quiet night in with a book, while grazing on leftover pigs-in-blankets and coffee creams. It’s frugal, it’s carbon neutral, it’s retro, it’s smug: in short, it’s so 2012.  Anyway, according to the British Liver Trust detoxing in January is futile, and Antony Horowitz’s new Sherlock Holmes novel is even better when you’ve got half an unfinished bottle of Advocaat propped beside the armchair.

So, what will yours be?

To come up with mine, I started by looking at what did and didn’t work last year. In my January 2011 Bookdiva column, I vowed to escape my fiction comfort zone and explore books I don’t naturally gravitate towards – more American and Japanese writers, more biographies, more debut novels and more science. Have I succeeded? Sort of. I’ve certainly scaled up my debut reading – Justin Torres’ We The Animals and Karen Russell’s Swamplandia! have been two of my recent favourites. I also did well with the Americans, once Franzen and Egan got me started on a transatlantic roll. And I’ve gorged on neuroscience – David Eagleman’s Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain rather appropriately blew my mind. But Japanese writers and biographies? Not so much. Although Christopher Ross’s Mishima’s Sword: Travels in Search of a Samurai Legend looks good, so maybe I can make up for both shortfallings in one go.

CONTINUE READING AT BOOKDVIA…

Admittedly, the RSC’s new winter show, The Heart of Robin Hood, had signalled from the start that we weren’t in for wholesome derring-do amid dappled sunshine. Within the first few minutes our ungallant hero had shot dead a monk with an arrow through the eye. Shortly after, soldiers threatened two blubbing children under the revolving toes of their hanged father. A realistic decapitation drew a few gasps but was swiftly topped by a brutal de-tonguing, in which the ravaged appendage was gaily waved about as the victim’s mouth frothed with …]]>

The Heart of Robin Hood. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

It was the blow job joke that did it.

Admittedly, the RSC’s new winter show, The Heart of Robin Hood, had signalled from the start that we weren’t in for wholesome derring-do amid dappled sunshine. Within the first few minutes our ungallant hero had shot dead a monk with an arrow through the eye. Shortly after, soldiers threatened two blubbing children under the revolving toes of their hanged father. A realistic decapitation drew a few gasps but was swiftly topped by a brutal de-tonguing, in which the ravaged appendage was gaily waved about as the victim’s mouth frothed with blood. But it was when King John started to make bobbing hand gestures, pantomiming his lascivious nature, that I saw several adults around me pursing their lips.

The kids, of course, were oblivious – and ecstatic. And so they should have been. Gísli Örn Garðarsson’s deliciously visceral production rips through the cliches of our over-worn national tale to touch its anarchic, acrobatic and deeply moving heart. It feels far more authentic than the versions of Flynn, Costner and co, and full of the morbid weirdness that characterises old British myths.

But some grumblings surfaced among the parents as we filed out into the night. Wasn’t it, well, a bit much? There is a “suitable for age seven +” disclaimer on the RSC website, but this is being touted as a family show and there were many under-sevens in the audience. “It was the same with Toy Story 3,” said one mother. “That bit in the oven. It was far too scary for me, let alone her.”

This response amazes me. Don’t grownups remember what it’s like to be a child? The success of the Horrible Histories franchise reminds us that kids love bloody, messy nastiness, but the Histories are pure Blyton compared with the best of children’s literature. From the moment we’re introduced to the kinky cruelties of the Brothers Grimm, things get dark. Then come Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl, Alan Garner … these are the twisted keepers of our childhood imaginings. Even JK Rowling’s Death Eaters tap into the tradition.

CONTINUE READING AT THE GUARDIAN…

Back in May, the Guardian’s Stephen Moss asked ‘Is the blockbuster exhibition dead?’, citing the Tate’s recent Gaugin exhibition – which took record sales …]]>

Giovanni Bellini, Madonna del Prato, 1505

Perhaps the recession makes us eager to feel we’re getting more for our money. Perhaps James Cameron, Peter Jackson and the other masters of the CGI epic have led us to expect nothing less. Or perhaps the arts marketing industry has simply got really good at fuelling the hype machine. Whatever the reason, we are most definitely in the era of the arts blockbuster, where every new exhibition has to come packaged as this year’s ‘major event.’

Back in May, the Guardian’s Stephen Moss asked ‘Is the blockbuster exhibition dead?’, citing the Tate’s recent Gaugin exhibition – which took record sales but suffered brutal overcrowding – and the National Gallery’s current star show Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, for which the number of admissions has been reduced from 230 per half-hour slot to 180. He was responding to comments by Colin Tweedy, the chief executive of the Prince of Wales’s charity Arts & Business, who in March called on gallery bosses to innovate new, less troublesome models for showcasing great artists.

It seems that nobody was listening. Right now we have, to name but a few, John Martin: Apocalypse for Tate Britain and Gerhard Richter’s Panorama for Tate Modern, both pulling in breathless critical acclaim as well as ticket sales; Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement at the Royal Academy of Arts trying to reinstate the painter as a revolutionary rather than a sentimental obsessed with little girls; and Grayson Perry’s joyful, subversive and sprawling The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman, a curation of objects for the British Museum. And in the run up to the Olympics we are being promised a slew of blockbusters that will demonstrate London’s cultural greatness – even though all they may end up demonstrating is our lack of decent crowd control.

CONTINUE READING AT LONDON CALLING…

Ian Rickson‘s new Hamlet at the Young Vic contained a lot of firsts for me. It was the first time I’ve been scared in the ghost scene. Thefirst time I’ve felt genuine danger in the Players’ mouse-trap play. The first time I’ve believed that Hamlet was a neuron-flick from suicide, not just once but several times. The first time I’ve given a shit about Ophelia.

It made me realise how much I put up with in other Hamlets. And this has been a glorious decade for the Dane; Simon Russell Beale, Sam West and  

James Clyde as Claudius and Michael Sheen as Hamlet © Simon Annand

Ian Rickson‘s new Hamlet at the Young Vic contained a lot of firsts for me. It was the first time I’ve been scared in the ghost scene. Thefirst time I’ve felt genuine danger in the Players’ mouse-trap play. The first time I’ve believed that Hamlet was a neuron-flick from suicide, not just once but several times. The first time I’ve given a shit about Ophelia.

It made me realise how much I put up with in other Hamlets. And this has been a glorious decade for the Dane; Simon Russell Beale, Sam West and Rory Kinnear are just three who have hit my solar plexus hard. But I have always assumed that even a fantastic Hamlet necessarily contains moments of slackness and snooze. Who can make every one of those lines matter in such a dense play? Don’t we all know that the Ophelia madness stuff is just a bit, well, embarrassing? Isn’t Horatio basically a prop? And doesn’t all that introspection, now and then, even with the best actors, tip into over-familiar emo whining?

So it’s a very rare Hamlet that makes you resent the interval.

Rickson sets his production inside a secure mental institution; a bleak 1970s hellhole complete with stained carpet tiles, guttering strip lights and clanking metal security doors. Burly guards in velcro shoes strip-search newcomers. The court converse on a circle of wipe-clean chairs like a therapy group. Bodies are discreetly slipped into a sandy pit beneath the floor. James Clyde’s Kilroy-Silk Claudius, a menacingly smooth supervisor and jailor in his blue three-piece and bouffant hair, smiling slips pills into palms.

But is Claudius really in control? Are the others really the victims? Rickson’s conception has divided the press, with many critics finding it gimmicky or reductive. I feared, before I saw it, that I would share their view. In fact, I think they’re mad.

Yes, Rickson takes a stance. And boy, does that stance illuminate the play with new urgency. Every mention of madness (and you realise how many there are) shines anew. The sense of human instability, threat and vulnerability animates every moment with an almost unbearable tension and poignancy. The stakes are heaven-high.

But the ambiguity remains. It is uncertain whether Michael Gould’s nervy Polonius, armed with a dictaphone yet apt to moments of paralysing confusion, is Claudius’s crony or captive. When Hamlet himself transforms into his father’s brutal, enraged ghost with the help of a coat, a knife and some seriously good acting, we are unsure whether this is a collective hallucination, a bout of schizophrenia or a piece of genuine demonic possession. We are still not entirely sure whether all of them or none of them or some of them are mad. The context makes us question their insanity as much as accept it, and highlights how ordinary emotion makes nutjobs of us all. This could be a dream; a suggestion; a reality. Whatever it is, it works.

Taking one stance does not destroy the others inherent in the play.  All the other possible interpretations of Hamlet are layered behind this production like shadows, as they always are. But what this thoroughly conceived vision does for sure is make every image and every word dagger-sharp and new. It made me realise how bored I am of the humble, white-space, the-verse-makes-the-imagery productions I thought I loved.

Fuck it. Let’s be bold.

And Sheen carries it all with heartfelt originality, scrubbing at his corkscrew curls as if he can draw his thoughts to the surface for examination. Manic, he is a brilliantly funny, physically explosive Rik Mayall. Depressive, he is a coiled snake, flicking his tongue to taste the bitterness of the world and staring out from the prison of his consciousness with over-bright, yearning eyes.

This show deserves queues round the block akin to Rickson’s other big theatrical statement currently playing in London, Jerusalem. Get in line.

Postscript

There is a fantastic episode of Radio 4′s Great Lives in which Sheen describes the influence of Philip K. Dick on his performance. Well worth a listen. Thanks to the lovely Toby Field, the producer, for pointing me to it.