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I think we eat wrong.

I don’t just mean the actual food, which is often bad enough – destroying our world, local culture, local industry – heck, even our own bodies.

I mean the WAY we eat.

Latitudinal Cuisine is a new way to dine and bring strangers together

We seem to have lost the idea of what it means to eat together. We fuel in private, too often alone; perhaps with a partner or a token friend, but rarely in groups – and very rarely in a way where we meet strangers. How did our most social mechanism become so isolated? And how did the idea of socialising lose all relation to food and become so focussed on drinking alone? Drink’s great – drugs too – but a culture that needs it to relax enough to finally socialise – and then often tips over the edge into oblivion – is in need of some major help. Looking in from outside it might look like we are somehow stressed at the idea of meeting others – especially strangers – and thus need to inoculate and anaesthetize ourselves against the pain.

Google trends says London is the sixth loneliest city in the world. Apparently 30% of us are lonely. Kensington and Chelsea is the loneliest borough – perhaps because it also has the highest proportion of people living alone. We lack connection, and we lack ways to compensate for those real geographical distances that keep us apart.

Some of us live here under duress – for work or the sake of a partner or child or other family member; but surely most of us choose to live in places like London for all the brilliant benefits it brings us. So how come so many of us never see that benefit, and never swim with this great sea of humanity that surrounds us? Why live amongst all these people if you never meet them? Why pay a fortune to live in a city amongst folks you’ll never talk to?

In 1930, on the brink of great global strife, Siegfried Kracauer wrote a brilliant account of “the Salaried Masses” and their unfulfilled quest for distraction and meaning. He noted that the very act of their continuous public display – like (his comparison) the “purloined letter” in Edgar Allen Poe’s short story – ensured their invisibility and anonymity, noting that the capitalist system had effectively made its slaves “spiritually homeless”.

Too little has changed in the 81 intervening years. Too many of us still seem to feel traumatised and shell-shocked by the imagined havoc of the city, stressed and retreating, out there yet ultimately alone.

We have two dominant ways of social eating – and they’re both deeply lacking.

Those that can afford it feast in restaurants, but these are simply privatised public spaces where broad interaction is mostly unwelcome. You don’t go to most restaurants to meet other people. They’re more like extensions of your own personal dining room, with hired-in servants. Nothing much changes except your waistline.

The more generous amongst us might choose to host a dinner party, though this will often be deeply assymetrical – time-consuming, stressful, socially limited, expensive and generally unsustainable. The more ambitious we are, the more enslaved by our kitchens we feel; dinner parties aren’t things we’d host regularly after stressful days at work. Collective arrangements where the burden is shared are all too rare, as are the dinners themselves.

One of the reasons I started Latitudinal Cuisine was to bridge these spaces and that gaping gulf at the heart of London, and to carve a space for strangers to meet in a spirit of trust and pleasure and exploration and co-operation. I wanted to find not just new foods to eat, but new ways to eat. And it has utterly transformed my experience of London.

I used to travel a lot more than I do now. Yet though the rigours of running my own architectural practice now keep me busier at work than ever, I also find myself travelling more. Because I travel at home, on my doorstep, across the city to new homes every week and into the thicket of whole new landscapes of people and personalities that I would never have otherwise met if life had continued as it once did.

"Latitudinal Cuisine is a potluck dinner club, open to everyone, where we ask people to cook and think about food from the entire world"

Latitudinal Cuisine is a potluck dinner club, open to everyone, where we ask people to cook and think about food from the entire world. We scan all 360 longitudinal degrees of the world in 360 days, a degree a day, starting in London and heading East until we return home, cooking food from all the countries we cross. It has been running every week for almost three years and it has always been different. It has broadened our collective horizon, but it has also opened us up to the wonders and flavours and endless diversity of our own host city – as well as many others. As Capitalism cracks and falters, the global Occupy movement offers a glimpse towards an alternative future of solidarity and collectivity that resonates deeply with what we seek.

Come join us, wherever we are, to eat and meet the world.

Alex Haw latitudinalcuisine.com

Boris and Sergey's Puppet Cabaret

In the last month I have paid good money to see a two-foot-high furry puppet without a face doing an interpretive dance to Kate Bush’s ‘Wuthering Heights’; one man methodically throwing fruit at another man’s blindfolded head; and a sketch show in which Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson go to America and fight Al Capone.

Am I mad? Not really (although what you think of this may depend on your taste in amusements). I just live in London. I moved here three months ago, and I am slowly discovering that, when it comes to entertainment, if you can imagine it, someone has already made a show out of it – and if you can’t imagine it, then someone has made a show out of it anyway. We’re talking about a city, after all, that currently has a hit musical centred around an animatronic pig and amuses itself each winter by going to watch octogenarians swim laps across a frozen lake. London, in short, is a very strange place.

Part of it, I’m sure, is that London is simply big enough to provide an audience for anything. No matter what the entertainment is, from interpretive body piercing to extreme darning, at least 25 people exist who genuinely want to spend an evening watching it. But what I discovered in the course of recent MA research (at least it started as research, then I just got interested) is that there’s a particularly strong tradition in London, even in comparison to other big cities, of bizarre sights and odd goings-on in the pursuit of amusement.

Londoners have always displayed a very well-developed appreciation for the downright weird, especially if it involves explosions, scantily clad ladies or animals that do amusing tricks. Wilton’s Music Hall, for example (which was, aptly enough, where I went to see the puppet show), boasted in its heyday such niche delights as ‘poses plastiques’, an entertainment that involved several girls, not wearing very much at all, standing still for a while. If they moved, of course, it would have been officially obscene. This is the sort of logic that only works in England.

In 1827 Londoners could have gone to Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens to watch an enthusiastic and faithful re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo involving 1000 ‘soldiers’ and real explosions, and in 1852 (I can’t tell you how much this delights me) another pleasure-garden, Cremorne, played host to a woman called Madame Poitevin as she made a balloon ascent dressed as Europa and riding on an actual bull (the bull was dressed as Zeus, and did not much enjoy the experience, leading to several accusations of animal cruelty from concerned viewers).

Animal cruelty did not worry eighteenth century pleasure-seekers quite as much – one of London’s most popular attractions was the Menagerie at the Tower of London, where (I am quoting from Wikipedia here, because this is an unbearably wonderful sentence): “…the price of admission was three half-pence or the supply of a cat or dog for feeding to the lions.” In 1829 the talk of the town was a play called The Elephant of Siam and the Fire Fiend at the Adelphi, highlights of which involved the (very real) elephant of the title opening a bottle of wine with its trunk and then drinking it, and in 1856 a (somewhat edited) Richard III was presented that turned Richard’s horse Surrey into the star of the show. Kevin Spacey, eat your heart out.

Even when animals were not involved, London could still produce some bizarre sights. In 1871, for example, the Covent Garden Theatre showed a production of Blue Beard (as their Christmas pantomime, to make things even more weird) that included a chorus of twelve decapitated women, carrying their heads under their arms and singing ‘Three Blind Mice’. As a dirge.

I could go on. Once you start looking into it, there seems no end to the oddness of London entertainments. Everywhere people gathered, strange things went on. In the 1700s you could have joined the No-Nose Club (ex-members of the Unsafe Sex Club, I assume), the Surly Club (its members met up each week to be rude to each other) or even (if you were that way disposed) a Man-Killing Club, all of which make present-day social groups like Vedanta World London and The London Android Group seem positively ordinary. So, if you think your idea of fun is weird… well, history, as ever, proves that you could always be weirder. I hope I’ve given all you extreme knitters out there a confidence boost.

Oh, and by the way, if you were interested in any of the three shows I described at the beginning of this blog, they were Boris and Sergey’s Puppet Cabaret; The Alternate Comedy Memorial Society at the New Red Lion and Max and Ivan are Holmes and Watson, and all of them were marvellous. I’d definitely recommend them to anyone, or at least anyone who likes puppets, fruit or literary-detective-themed stand-up. And if you don’t, you’re sure to find something else that appeals to you.

After all, this is London.

Robin Stevens

Last week I attended the 19^th Raindance Film Festival in London, watching six films out of the 12 days. Looking back, I wish I had gone to more screenings, but alas, there were only so many films I could process in a single day (it’s not advisable to hermit oneself away in a dark room). The Apollo Theatre in Piccadilly had been specially transformed for the festival – the waiting foyer was artfully arranged with posters, flyers and Raindance programmes.  A wall of Polaroid photos (nostalgic) showed who had attended already: directors, writers, actors etc. from all over the world.

The films I watched ranged from the ridiculously low budget (‘Days Gone By’) to art council funded projects (‘X’ and ‘By Day and By Night’). The biggest audience was for ‘War Games’ – it was almost completely full in the theatre – although that might have been because nearly all of the cast and crew attended the screening and each brought along their family and friends. Being an independent film festival, several of the films ran with some problems (ear-splitting volume, frames freezing, giant watermarks on the reel itself), but all in all, it was an extremely successful week that saw a 62% rise in box office this year.

Here were the award winners for this year’s festival:

Best International Feature: Just Between Us / Rajko Grlic – Croatia/Serbia/Slovenia
Best UK Feature: Stranger Things / Eleanor Burke/Ron Eyal – UK
Best Debut Feature: Tilt / Viktor Chouchkov Jr. – Bulgaria
Best Microbudget Feature: Monk3ys / Drew Cullingham – UK
Best Documentary: How to Start A Revolution / Ruaridh Arrow – UK
Best International Short: Words /  Sven Vinge – Denmark
Best UK Short: Love At First Sight / Michael Davies – UK
Film of The Festival: Reset / Nicolangelo Gelormini – Italy

I shied away from these award-winning films, however, and instead hand-picked an eclectic mix to watch – there were a few misses but there were also a few surprising hits. That’s the best thing about festivals like Raindance – you could end up watching a film you would have never heard about.  My personal favourite (although the films I chose greatly differed in genre) was ‘LiTTLEROCK’ by American director Mike Ott, a film about two Japanese siblings – Atsuko and Rintaro – whose rental car breaks down in rural America en route to Manzanar. At first glance, the town holds little fascination: it’s full of lazy drunken rednecks who sit on their porches all day smoking and drinking. But Atsuko soon attracts a few admirers and she decides to stay there for a few more days, by herself, while Rintaro continues to San Francisco. Nothing really happens in this film, but it has a really good cast, an incredibly soundtrack (the Icelandic Amiina and local band ‘The Cave Singers’) and touches on interesting themes: homophobia in small-town America, language barriers, and the real reason the Japanese siblings travelled to Manzanar – to find a little piece of their own history deep in the centre of America.

Still from LiTTLEROCK

Other notable films included ‘X’, an appropriately titled (it was very graphic) Australian thriller about two prostitutes on the streets of Sydney. One of them is about to retire, the other has just started. They witness a murder and it soon turns into a game of cat and mouse – or cop and prostitute – filmed with incredible clarity and pace. A special mention has to go to young actress Hanna Mangen Lawrence, who played down-on-her-luck newcomer Shay. ‘By Day and By Night’, a Mexican film, was also incredibly powerful. The ridiculously beautiful cast (all Aquiline profiles and liquid eyes) pulled off the film perfectly, showing how the world was split into Day and Night shifts – basically, scientists developed an enzyme to alter people’s body clocks, so if you’re a Day person, you fall into a coma when the sun goes down and wake up at sunrise. One of the protagonists, Aurora is missing a child (Luna) who used to live with her in the Day night. Unbeknown to her, Luna has been switched to a Night Person (seemingly impossible) and is hidden from the authorities by doctor Urbano, who himself was switched when he was a child. There are some absolutely heartbreaking scenes where Aurora pines for Luna, never knowing that she is safe – just not awake when she is. The closing sequences are devastating and yet beautiful. What struck me about the film was its subtlety in handling this particular subject – there were no explicit ‘this is the year 3500, we are all night and day people’ slogans or messages. Instead the audience was left to slowly process and understand the strange future world the director had created.

Still from 'X'

Dates for next year’s Raindance has already been released – 26^th September to 7^th October 2012 – see you there!

London’s first Storytelling Festival launches on Saturday (1^st October), and promises to celebrate the collaborative exchange of tales through a diverse series of events hosted at the Leicester Square Theatre. The festivals programme includes three individual shows from New York’s acclaimed writer and performer Martin Dockery, as well as a storytelling workshop run by the man himself, an evening of music and comedy in the form of Story Jam, plus a closing-night Gala featuring appearances from comic yarn spinners Mark Thomas and Phil Kay, as well as The Simpsons and Spinal Tap legend Harry Shearer. I spoke to artistic director and performer, Sarah Bennetto, about what we can expect from the first Storytelling festival.

What made you, as a team, decide to organise the festival, and how did it come to be?

Coming at storytelling as stand-up comics, as myself and the other organisers do, means that this is an exciting experiment for us. In the past, there wasn’t anything in the way of comedy clubs that celebrated ‘story’. You could certainly sneak a tale or two into your comedy club set, but until I started Storytellers’ Club, there wasn’t a place where comics could regularly come and tell stories as the rule (as opposed to the exception). The London Storytelling Festival feels like the logical next step for the movement. I’ve seen so many powerful and funny raconteurs pass through our club, and witnessed some really breathtaking narrative-based Edinburgh Fringe shows. So we wanted somewhere to celebrate it all in earnest, under one banner, so that more people could join in and see what’s been going on.

What made you chose to focus on oral storytelling?

The London Storytelling Festival is a week of live events, giving a voice to performed storytelling, and we hope to bring a really intimate ’round the campfire’ feel to proceedings. We even have a faux log fireplace, which if anything lends a late-night romance to the shows (plus an enviable 80′s tackiness).

Which part of the festival are you most excited about?

All the shows & workshops excite us, obviously. But the closing night gala show (on Monday 10th October) will be a right royal party. We have some of the most amazing performers from the world of comedy, film and music coming to show us a different side of themselves. This is Spinal Tap‘s Harry Shearer, Mark Thomas, Phil Kay, Judith Owen, Martin Dockery: they’ve all planned a special story about their lives to bring to the night. I am genuinely giddy with excitement, and terrified as hell (myself and Deborah Frances-White will be hosting the whole spectacular shindig). Come watch it all explode on stage. I can’t wait.

What do you hope the festival will achieve?

If the festival brings people together in celebration of shared stories, then that’ll be brilliant. The thing about the story projects we’ve run in the past, is that people always rave about the friendly and sometimes magical atmosphere. An evening spent in the tales of another human, is a really wonderful experience, so we’re hoping a week of such events is an unforgettable joy – one that people may want to repeat next year!

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Elizabeth Sankey of pop duo Summer Camp was also kind enough to let us know a little about what audiences are in for when she and Emmy the Great will appear at Story Jam to pay tribute to the much beloved Sweet Valley High books. The evening will also feature performances from comics Isy Sutie and Gavin Osborn. Here’s what she had to say:

Emmy The Great and myself will be performing as our alter egos The Wakefield Twins. We come from a town in California called Sweet Valley and we’re forever stuck in the 90′s. So, as you can imagine, we’re quite overwhelmed to be on exchange this summer in London, Paris. I’m Elizabeth Wakefield. I’m a really serious journalist who completely adores books (I own over 7), so for me this is a great chance to influence some super clever book people with all of my knowledge about Shakespeare. My twin, Jessica, isn’t that interested in Literature but she’s an aficionado of fashion and culture – she’s just bought a new leopard print jumpsuit from a shop called ‘Out There’ so she’s really excited about wearing it at the festival. She had a question though – where should she put up her tent?

I personally can’t wait to sit amongst loads of fellow literary gems, and just imbibe the knowledge and cleverness that will be seeping from their pores. It’s going to be so fun for us to watch loads of other shows and see if they’re as hot/clever as us, and if they’re not judge them for it. I think Jess is most excited about seeing the Backstreet Boys. What day are they playing?

London Storytelling Festival runs from 1^st-10^th October.

The Wakefield Twins

Rob Fred Parker