The Blues Bar. Hidden away behind Liberty & Hamleys, this is the kind of place you’d never find except by chance or word of mouth. Not only has it got live Blues every night, but its free every night bar Friday & Saturday! When I visited on Monday evening, it was nice relaxed atmosphere & not too crowded in the early part of the evening. Then come about 8.30 it is transformed as people started filing in ready for the live music from about 9ish onwards. All in all, a brilliant discovery.
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Well I’m sorry but I’m not
interested in gold mines,
oil wells, shipping or real estate. What would I like to have been? Everything you hate.
Last night, the NFT started off a season of Orson Wells features with unquestionably the best film of all time – Citizen Kane (1941). I’d only seen it once before on TV, so I jumped at the chance to see it on the big screen. The larger picture makes the final 20 minutes of the film, set around Xanadu, look truely awesome. Its hard to capture the sheer scale of the set in a single shot, but if I had to pick one, it would be of Kane dwarfed in front of the 7 foot high, by at least 20 foot wide, fireplace. While we talking about the camera work (even without taking its age into account) there are some fantastic scene tranisitions, such as the shot that starts off above the roof of a bar, moves through the skylight & down into the room to focus on Susan Alexander.
Superficially, the story may appear to be just another rags-to-riches tale, but the style in which it is told puts every other comparable movie plot to shame. And lets not forget that it gave us Rosebud, inspired an entire episode of The Simpsons, and The White Stripes song, “Union Forever” – hearing the lyrics on screen brought a smile to my face.
Having pondered over which lens to get for another few days I decided to go the classic route with a fixed lens. So I headed off out and picked up a Nikon N80 with a 50mm f/1.8 lens (I briefly considered the f/1.4 version, but couldn’t justify an extra 150 GBP for a single additional stop). Having spent 2 days shooting off pictures I can honestly say there were very few occasions where I found myself wanting a zoom – its amazing what you can achieve by just walking towards / away from your subject ;-)
Aka, another dose of musical genius from the artist known as Beck. His Albert Hall solo gig, back in April, was an intimate & restrained performance, drawing heavily on tracks from the melancholic “Sea Change“. Things couldn’t have been more contrasting at the Brixton Academy. Supporting act ‘The Ravonettes’ were nothing to write home about, but hey, we’d come to see Beck, the support act is just there to get the audience cranked up. And with their punishing guitar riffs, they certainly got things moving.
From the moment he appeared on stage, with a menacing grin, you could tell it was going to be a fun night. Starting things off were a pair of songs from Odelay (Novocane & The New Pollution), then closely followed by from my favorites from “Midnite Vultures” – Get Real Paid & Nicotine & Gravy. Ever the performer, at one point he was dashing around the stage with a roland keyboard. A brief slowing of tempo for a few songs from Sea Change was the only respite to more than 1+1/2 hours of music, which finished with a cover of White Stripes classic ‘Black Math’.
For the record, here’s the set list