First published on AOL Asylum.co.uk (April 6th 2011) //
Word to ya mother: The literary folk are back, or just more highly concentrated from next month at the London Word Festival.
This LWF is a peculiarity though in that it has strived to separate itself from the kind of stuffy, celebrity-oriented literary festivals found the world.
First published on AOL Asylum.co.uk (February 24th 2011)
First published on AOL Asylum.co.uk (February 4th 2011) //
Asylum’s investigative reporter Declan Tan takes to the streets, and then a job interview waiting room, in an effort to become a private detective.
First published on AOL Asylum.co.uk (January 28th 2011) //
Asylum’s roving reporter Declan Tan headed to the National Theatre to give its Angel Headed Hipsters exhibition of private photos from the Beat Generation’s most famous poets the once over.
Continue reading “Angel Headed Hipsters at the National Theatre”
First published on Little White Lies for Raindance Film Festival 2010 //
The 18th Raindance Film Festival launched last Wednesday with an impressive opening night screening of Jackboots on Whitehall but closed out this year with an affecting feature from Iraq. Already an award winner on the festival circuit, Son of Babylon is an ode to the disappeared of Iraq; a film about a Kurdish boy and his grandmother travelling across the country – in post-Saddam 2003 – in search of the boy’s missing father, conscripted then missing since the first Gulf War. Already chosen as Iraq’s official entry for the 2011 Academy Awards, it also won Best International Feature at this year’s Raindance.
First published on Little White Lies (October 18 2010) //
As if a companion piece to Bronco Bullfrog, with both films sharing the youthful struggle for social and personal freedom, British filmmaker Barney Platts-Mills released his second feature Private Road in 1971, transporting the focus of frustrated youth from working-class East London to middle-class Surrey.
First published in DotDotDash (Issue 4, Winter 2010; Australia) //
“Take it out of the bag”, one of them whispers, as a small mountain of Bolivian marching powder unfolds from the wrap. Forming peaks where it piles on the surface, the small patch of black bin liner is emptied into the soft light of the room. They lean in; throats dry with a fiendish desire, pushing pure uncut white to and fro with an out-of-date health insurance card from some place far, far behind them now. Racked up with two fat lines sat side-by-side along the blackened edges of a bootlegged copy of Appetite For Destruction, some stranger nearby leans in and assuredly urges: “Don’t use the straw, use this”, as he carefully hands over a softened and tightly rolled 10 Boliviano note. The newcomers eye their bounty, savour a last intake breath as they lurch down, and begin judiciously disappearing it up their snouts, chattering and grunting between disjointed monologues that they might later call conversation.
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