Chaps Choir at Union Chapel with Choir With No Name, 17 December 2013

Ever wondered what 50 blokes singing a Georgian Wassling song sounds like? Well now you know! 

A huge thank you to the wonderful Choir With No Name who invited us to support their Christmas Extravaganza at Union Chapel on Tuesday.What an incredible experience and what a brilliant project to be involved in. The choir - which now counts chapters in Birmingham and Liverpool, as well as North and South London - has been established to provide people on the edge of society with all the positive support that I've discovered since joining Chaps. It's an exciting, positive project to feel involved in, it provides a strong sense of community and it gives you the simple, uplifting pleasure of singing in harmony with other people. The Choir With No Name also share a meal after every practice, which is a lovely idea. 

Between the two London and Birmingham choirs we were treated to a very merry medley of Christmas classics, tender carols and even a festive version of The Specials. There was humour, There were brave soloists and there was plenty of tinsel. Before the finale we were introduced to Suzanne, who became homeless after struggling with her drinking but has now been with Choir With No Name for five months. She said, “the more I think about going there, and concentrating and doing what I’ve got to do, the better I feel. So the best thing I ever did is join the choir”. Here's their website where you can sign up to support the charity as a 'groupie': www.choirwithnoname.org 

I volunteered to run the Chaps Choir social media for the evening and was over-whelmed by all the Chappreciation from the audience. I think we can now count Janet Street Porter as a fan, as well as quite a few other women who apparently want to grow beards so that they can join us. Not bad for our second concert! Here's the Storify:

Future Human: Meme Control

"You wanna get deep?" asks Watkins Tudor Jones of zef rap group Die Antwoord in a 2010 interview with The Times of South Africa. Their 2012 music video for the track Fatty Boom Boom - which combines an irreverent Laga Gaga parody with shots of rappers Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er dancing frenetically in white and black body paint - has amassed over 15 million hits on youtube since it was first posted. Along the way it's sparked accusations of racism and prompted scathing attacks from Lady Gaga’s fans, while Die Antwoord have been head-hunted by everyone from advertisers to Hollywood.
The video was also one of the internet 'memes' up for discussion in a Shoreditch basement at  Future Human's 'Meme Control’, the last salon of 2013. 

So what is a meme and how deep do they get? Are they just time-wasting internet distractions or do they say something profound about the human condition?

The term was originally coined in The Selfish Gene, a 1976 book by Richard Dawkins in which he proposes that genes, like viruses, rely on humans to be passed on. “Genes are the replicators" Dawkins wrote "and we are their survival machines.” Towards the end of the book, he goes on to suggest that perhaps culture could be seen in a similar way. He created the word ‘meme’ from the root 'mimeme', Greek for ‘imitated thing’, to describe "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture”. Since then, the word has been appropriated by internet culture to explain the ‘viral’ proliferation of cat videos, animated gifs and anodyne quotes which seem to take up so much of people’s attention online. 

So what are the links between the two, and why do people share these things? Future Human’s Jack Gwilym Roberts opens the evening, updating Dawkin’s theory with some thoughts on evolutionary psychology. This is the idea that all behaviour can be traced back to primal urges - to mate, to eat, to ship our pants (20 million views). So are we, as Dawkins suggests, controlled by our memes? Does sharing demonstrate altruistic behaviour, which helps us to work and survive together as a society? Do we copy and share because we want to look good to potential mates? Or in sharing internet memes are we just breeding idiocy? Are they, like religion, just a way for us to simplify the world, to rationalise experience and relieve stress in a complex environment?

Basic emotion is a critical factor, says Holly Clarke, a former 'meme scientist' at Unruly media, who admits partial responsibility for the T-Mobile Dance (38 million views) and the Evian Babies (72 million views). Viral ads, she tells us, rely on feelings such as surprise, anticipation, fear and disgust, to stimulate a physical reaction. But it seems that as we find ourselves exposed to ever higher volumes of 'content', we quickly become numb to these provocations. It’s all about "being more epic than the last epic thing". Your viral ad needs to have “a wtf?! factor” to survive. This certainly seems to be something which Die Antwoord have understood. 

Tony Sampson, author of 'Virality', thinks that this leads less a case of survival of the fittest and more a reign of the idiot. 

'Cognition is the enemy of marketing,' someone tweets to the screen. 

“Exactly,” says Tony.

The internet is still in it's infancy, says Holly. We're still learning what to read, what to look at, and what to share. Effectively, we’re still learning how to manage our attention online. "The BBC still has lots of awful things at the top of it's most read,” she points out. Ideas which are simply ‘wacky’ quickly dissipate though. “Who’s going to care about the Evian Babies in a few years time?” asks the woman who created them. Whereas people used to share things just because they were “a stupid internet video”, now, says Clarke, people are looking for something real. Hence the increasing use of hidden cameras and user generated content in mainstream advertising. Think Kevin Macdonald and that Sainsbury’s Christmas advert. 

Maybe this is a sign that the internet is growing up? So the question is, as it matures, is the internet is going to become more responsible? Perhaps it already is, says Holly, it just depends on who's using it. She points to open data culture, while in his opening presentation Jack cites Avaaz, an online campaigning organisation with over 30m members worldwide, as an example of using the rules of memes to do good. 

One person who takes his responsibility very seriously is Stuart Calimport, founder of The Human Memome Project (great name). Stuart, who comes across as a very earnest member of the Quantified Self movement, has begun to create metrics around his own response to memes, in the Dawkinsian sense, and to compare his results with others. Unlike most marketing companies, he says his primary motivation is to look for the health and longevity predictors which they might reveal. Stuart wants to live forever and is interested in the ideas and behaviours that are going to help him get there (and you too - for the right amount of money). He believes that everyone has a 'memome', a sequence of constituent ideas and influences that has shaped their personality in a similar manner to DNA. If only we could work out how to shape them in the right way… This links back to an idea Jack mentioned in his introduction. If the brain can be seen as hardware, for the software of the mind, then perhaps memes are the code? 

Not in the eyes of Sampson, who thinks that all of this is founded on pseudo science. "Culture is not biologically determined," he tells us, and "meme is a dodgy theory… a control mechanism for a certain system of belief". The question of how ideas spread is an old one, Tony says, which can be traced back to the development of crowd theory at the turn of the 20th century and the rise of socialism and popular fascism. The transfer of ideas is really about society and about networks. Computer viruses such as ‘Melissa’ and ‘I love you’, are spread socially. 

"People will only share if they think they're the influencer" says Holly. It's about having content which engages and provokes, but it's also about seeding this content with the right people at the right time. It's about finding those key influencers who everyone else copies. 

Again Tony disagrees. Read 'Is the Tipping Point Toast?' he urges us. This is a Fast Company article by Clive Thompson, which outlines research by Duncan Watts seemingly discrediting Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that a small number of very cool people dictate the trends that everyone else follows. Gladwell based his theory on a famous 1967 study in which a sample group was asked to pass letters to a certain individual through their personal networks alone. It was found that the average number of links from sender to the recipient was six, hence the degrees of separation, but also that the majority of letters went through the hands of three key individuals. 

Interested in these ideas, Duncan Watts, a network scientist, set up a number of much bigger computer simulations to test the theory. To cut a long story short, he concluded that while the six degrees finding held true, a trend or meme could in fact be started by anyone in the network. Although it was true that those started by key influencers spread wider and quicker, there was statistically more chance that a trend would come from elsewhere. Trends, he concludes, are more akin to wildfires than viruses. Hundreds of fires take place in forests, but they only turn into wildfires when the conditions are just right. "If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn't, then almost no one can," Watts concludes. 

So it's all about creating something to match the public mood, which is exactly what Holly claims to have achieved with her viral successes - deploying retro music, rollerskates and cuteness as a killer combo. At the same time, though, I don't think we can discount the need to disseminate ideas in order for them to take off. While Watts’ computer generated results did show that an idea can start anywhere, and be carried by word of mouth, it also proves that it’s when people with large networks or audiences pick up on them that they really spread. For each of her campaigns, Holly sent the videos to people with large online followings at just the right time for them to create a surge of interest which quickly snowballed. 

I think the confusion here is with how we see these people. Yes, they are influencers, but, as with all of us who create, curate and share content online now, they are also now publishers with audiences to entertain (shows us those thumbs! Bask in the reassuring glow of those retweets!). Hence a desire for exclusive content which will spread quickly, rather than something which takes too long to digest and think about (like this blog). Which brings me to a comparison with pre-internet media. Which newspapers sell the most copies? In the UK it’s the The Sun and The Daily Mail. How do they do it? By getting exclusive stories which provoke basic emotional reactions and harness the public’s mood. 

So perhaps things really haven’t changed that much after all, and maybe it’s not the internet that needs to grow up. You might even suggest that the best way to improve our Human Memone is simply through a good education - the most effective form of memetic engineering (to extend a metaphor). I strongly believe that basic secondary education should include critical analysis (ie. thinking for yourself), media literacy (ie. being able to understand how the media works) and some understanding of the power structures of society (ie. the agenda behind it all and how to play the game). But then I guess we can’t all be as earnest as Stuart, or as pessimistic as Tony, and those cat videos really are much funnier than homework... *

*Besides, Michael Gove thinks education should be more about mnemonics than memetics, and he's in charge now.

Wrap Up London

Every morning last week I set my alarm for 5.30am and arrived at Waterloo station two hours earlier than usual to volunteer for Wrap Up London. Why? We were asking fellow commuters to give us their coats. Not literally the clothes off their backs - although a few generous and impulsive souls did just that - but old coats, unwanted ones, long forgotten winter warmers, tucked away in the backs of wardrobes or buried beneath layers of new fashion.

We spent two days telling people the plan: you donate unwanted coats on the way to work, we pass them on to London's most vulnerable so that they can keep warm this winter. It's an easy ask. All you have to do is spend five mins rummaging when you get home, then the next day carry your toasty treasure halfway to work. If you forget on Wednesday, you've still got two more days to remember. Many people got involved, often bringing bags full of ski-jackets, parkers and overcoats which they'd collected from house-mates and family members.

It's a great system. The ask and action are both simple and tangible, while the small lift of feel-good achievement experienced by donors is quite palpable. The whole transaction feels like a kind of magic. You can spot the givers in the crowd.  They're often carrying an extra bag or just moving towards you with purpose. You meet their eye and smile as the bundle is trust toward you. There's often a look, either a smile of happy benevolence or a quizzical 'is that it?'. This is the point at which I think it's my responsibility as a volunteer to convey gratitude on behalf of those who will be unable to do so themselves.

In a way it's all quite detached, because none of us meet the people who benefit at the end of the chain, but as the cold, wet weather sets in it's good to know that there are over 10,000 coats now ready to be redistributed to London's most vulnerable in shelters and refuges across the capital next month. This is all thanks to Hands on London, the organisation which manages the 100+ volunteers for Wrap Up London each year. It's a great way to volunteer because it's rewarding, it's flexible and you don't need any qualifications.

When I speak to people about volunteering, many don't know where to start. Others cite lack of time or a need to prove experience as barriers (unpaid volunteers should never require a qualification). Talking to volunteer managers, the biggest problems are often retention, finding the right people for the role and reaching new groups.

I joined Wrap Up London last year after a colleague told me about his experience. Since then I've been volunteering one evening every other week with my local Mencap. Hopefully some of the thousands of people who donated coats last week might now be inspired to look up Hands On London and give it a go.

handsonlondon.org.uk

Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer

By the time this collection was first published in 2003, the idea of ‘going travelling’ had become a middle-class cliche and gap years were big business. Geoff Dyer seems to have made rather a habit of it in his late thirties, flitting from New Orleans, Miami and Chicago to Cambodia and Thailand, via Amsterdam, Paris, Rome and Libya. 

The romantic notion of travel is that you go ‘to find yourself’. Dyer certainly visits a lot of the places this is supposed to happen, Buddist temples, the Santury on Ko Pha-Ngan, full moon parties, Burning Man. He also spends a fair amount of his time getting stoned, but as the titles suggests he’s not your typical new age type. He’s got more literary pretensions.

By focusing solely on moments of travel, Dyer is able to give the impression that he spent this part of his life meandering from place to place, doing not much else other than pondering deep questions of civilization and antiquity. More often than not, this takes place in the company of a beautiful, intelligent girl with whom he enjoys witty exchanges and insightful observations.

Sounds idyllic doesn't it? At this point, it's probably worth noting the proviso in the intro: “All of the things in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head”. I suspect that this includes the dialogue, but it doesn't matter because the exchanges are eloquent and the writing is excellent. A fair amount of it even manages to achieve the goal of being both thoroughly entertaining and profoundly astute.

Dyer's at his best when he elucidates some of his more abstract thoughts, the kind that I suspect we all often have and never quite grasp, and weaves them as themes throughout the book. In the end I’m left more jealous of his writing than I am his exploits. Based on how much fun he seems to have had, this can only be a good thing.

Rating: ***1/2
Read: On return from Burning Man. Mostly in bed and on trains. Left in bag on train to Newcastle, recovered a month later and finally finished.

Fortunately, the Milk . . . by Neil Gaiman and Chris Riddell

Gaiman claims this might just be the silliest book he's ever written. He's certainly had fun writing it, letting his imagination run loose through children's genres, as a boy recounts his father's story of an unlikely adventure on the way home from the shops. The result is a classic tall tale, full of memorable characters, brought wonderfully to life in Chris Riddell's cartoon illustrations. Kids should find the silliness thoroughly entertaining, while there are plenty of good jokes for Mums and Dads too, all delivered with impeccable timing. While the story has a shaggy dog element, it's perfectly formed, having fun with the twists and turns of time travel and memorably punctuated by the eponymous catchphrase 'fortunately, the milk...'

I can't wait to read it to our kids.

Rating: *****
Read: I had the great pleasure of having it read to me first by Neil himself and a cast of his friends, along with with a few thousand other people in Westminster Central Hall. Then I read it immediately again on the train home, with all the voices still in my head. Then again to my wife as a bedtime story, with a comedy attempt at some of the voices. 

Un dépaysement à la mode

“How was Burning Man?” Everyone keeps asking me. “I bet it was epic…” 

Well, yes, it was thank you. Especially the 24 hour journey to get there; the nine hour queues in and out; the seven days living in a dust bowl; the incredible landscape; the amazing art; the music; the dancing; the people; and, of course, the giant burning spectacle at the end. But it wasn't just epic. 

When people are asked about their Burning Man experience, “I can’t put it into words” is a common response. For those who haven’t been before, this might imply smugness akin to condescension – ie. “If you’ve not been, you just wouldn’t understand” - but I think that’s rarely the intention. In fact it's often quickly followed by a string of fantastical stories. We want to share, not out of boastfulness, but because it’s human nature to tell others about our experiences out of the ordinary. 

So what is this experience that’s so hard to explain? It’s hard to say. It’s different for everyone. It’s different every time. It’s not just one experience, but the culmination of months of preparation, days of travel and a whole week of living in an extremely beautiful, yet exposed, natural environment, as part of one of the most creative and thought provoking social ecologies that you’ll ever be part of. It’s a festival guided by principles which permeate every interaction and experience that you will have there. It has its ups and downs. It is what you make of it. 

The most intimidating barrier for many people thinking about going to Burning Man is its location in the kind of environment that most of us would look to avoid rather than spend any length of time in: a flat dry lake bed in Nevada known as ‘The Playa’. The heat and dust take their toll. There are no natural structures for shelter. The alkaline dust coats everything you can see with a fine film and somehow manages to work its way into everywhere else too. The desert sucks the moisture out of you. Water and shade are the most valuable resources. On top of this you’re expected to practice radical self-reliance. You are responsible for your own water, food, shelter and survival. You have to take all this with you, or at least make provision for it before you arrive. 

If this all sounds rather off-putting, it’s because I’ve missed out the most important factor in the environmental equation: people. We’re social animals. The best way to do the festival is to join a theme camp, or to find a group to start one. You don’t have to get through life alone, and you don’t have to survive Burning Man alone: we do it together. That’s right at the core of the experience, and, to bring out the best in people, there are a number of guiding principles in play.

One of the most widely known principles of Burning Man is the gift economy. This means that you cannot buy anything there, with the notable exceptions of ice and coffee (both luxuries definitely help). The mistake people make is to think that this means it’s a currency free economy of barter and trade. It’s not. It’s a gift economy, which means that you are encouraged to give freely to others without expecting to receive anything in return. What can you give? It doesn’t have to be a ‘thing’. It can be a skill, a story, some food, shelter, time, friendship, compassion. Of course people take some incredible gifts, creating moments of magic as you give or receive the unexpected or the essential. It could be just what you need: a bloody mary, an ice cream, a toothbrush, a tampon, a shoulder to cry on or ear to bend. In fact the best gift can often be yourself. The attitude to adopt is “What can I do for you?” and the more thought you put into that, whether before, during or after the festival, the more you’ll get out of it. 

So we’re all responsible, not just for ourselves, but for the experiences of those around us. We’re all participants. Nothing exists in Black Rock City unless it’s taken there or created by us. There’s no such thing as a punter at Burning Man, there is no separation between the crew and the audience. The crew is the audience and vice-versa. Although there are plenty of opportunities to spectate, there are just as many chances to participate, to help make something happen. You're encouraged to express yourself and to be creative, to open yourself up to others, whether through art, interaction or discussion. You're given the freedom to be yourself, and the opportunity to discover who you could be. If you want to do it, say it, or make it, then go for it. If you don’t know what you want to do, then help someone else. 

To counteract any impulse to judge all this self expression, there's the principle of inclusion. For those who think that Burners form some strange clique or cult, you couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone's welcome. You just have to take part. The desert could be a lonely place, especially if you're caught out in a dust storm or have an arguement with your camp mates, but the willingness of others to invite you in often redresses the balance. Don’t sit over there on your own, come and join us. Let’s be sociable. Let’s do this together. I’ll help you. 

The upshot of all this is that it creates an open and engaged social environment that is quite different to the privacy and detachment of our day-to-day lives. Throughout the week you’ll find yourself depending on others you’ve never met before, supporting strangers who need you and talking to new people about things you’ve never even told your close friends. This will all be happening in an atmosphere of riotous creativity, fantastic costumes, incredible artworks, wonderful performances, surreal moving sculptures or art cars and wild music played at earth shaking volumes. It’s an inspiring place to be and many of the experiences and conversations you have will continue to inspire you for some time afterwards. 

Such an accepting and free environment is, as you might expect, conducive to the lowering of inhibitions. Certain by-products of this attract more attention, in the way that the slightest hint of titillation excites most people, but what inhibitions you chose to lower are entirely down to you. You don't have to take all your clothes off and run around naked, but no one's going to stop you if you want to. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that while it’s a great place explore your boundaries, you still need to respect those of others. Going to Burning Man doesn’t mean abandoning your consideration in a hedonistic free-for-all. You won't make many friends if you act like a dick and you won't find yourself popular with your campmates if you don’t pull your weight. 

But then work, with the right attitude, doesn’t have to be a chore. Contributing to the domestic well being of your camp can be one of the most rewarding forms of participation. The principle of immediacy encourages you to cherish every situation, even the washing-up. See a bad luck as a challenge, see a mistake as a learning experience. 

Like responsibility to others, a responsibility to the environment is built into the mind-set. 'Leave No Trace' or LNT is a constant mantra. No litter is to be left. Everyone in attendance has a responsibility to collect Matter Out Of Place (MOOP) whenever they see it. This is good practice at any festival, but it's more of a challenge when all waste, including water, must be taken home with you. You have to plan your disposal and recycling, which makes you acutely aware of just how much you generate (toilets are thankfully provided, and kept in great condition). With water in limited and precious supply, you realise just how much of it you normally waste, and how little you can get by with when you have too. It’s perfectly possible to have a body wash instead of a shower, and if you do take a (solar) shower you’re mindful of how much grey water you might be producing. Once the festival’s over, it’s your responsibility to clear your own camp, which you’ll be graded on by the crew who stay onsite to sweep the whole area of any human trace. If only every festival crowd could be so conscientious. 

So how was my Burning Man? 

Well, it was my honeymoon. I proposed to my wife the last time. The experience inspired to embark on life's greatest adventure with her. Our plan this year was to make sure that we enjoyed everything together and we did. 

As in 2011, we joined The Fireworks Collective, a group of fire performers formed each year from the UK to take part in the fire conclave before the man burns. It was the first year the collective has created its own theme camp, Albion - quite a feat for a group of people who live at opposite ends of another country. The camp experience brought the group closer together, bonding through shared endeavour, and we performed some of the best fire shows I’ve been part of. 

Although we helped out at Albion, setting up camp, cooking meals, training and hosting an English Tea Party together, Danielle and I actually camped with our long-term playa family at Pink Heart. Now one of the most recognised landmarks on the Esplanade, the inner circle of camps around the man, Pink Heart embodies the ethos of the festival. At its most simple the purpose of the camp is to provide shelter - shade, cushions, sofas – and to gift water – ice cold and flavoured with refreshing cucumber, which we serve to all comers 24/7. Whilst it might seem seem simple, the gifting of the two most essential commodities in a desert environment is immensely rewarding. The interaction opens you up to the whole festival, as people arrive seeking respite and stay to talk about their experiences, to share their stories. Through these conversations I find that I experience far more than I could ever manage on my own. Oh, and three afternoons of the week we also gave out vegan coconut-milk ice cream. A whole truck-full in three different flavours. You've never seen so much joy.

I’m sitting out the front of Pink Heart one evening talking to a Belgian guy who I’ve just met. In front of us the dark expanse of the desert is animated by a thousand neon lights. All manner of possibility is out there. "This really isn't like any other festival," I declare. “Why do you think that is?” “I don’t know the word for it in English”, the Belgian guy replies, “but in French I guess we’d call this a 'dépaysement'. A relocation to a place that gives you a different perspective on your life.” A change of scene, but also a change of mental state. And that's the part that's hard to explain to someone who's not been here. But I realise that the people who inspire me the most are the ones who don’t only make amazing things happen in the desert. They take what they find here, apply it to their lives and introduce it to the lives of others. That's really what this is all about.

Review: Estuary – responses by contemporary artists @ Museum of London Docklands until 27 October 2013

Between the glass cube offices, new footbridges and luxury flats, you can still see the ghosts of industry etched into the regenerated landscape surrounding the Museum of London Docklands. A pair of navy gray cranes tower like dinosaurs over the dark, placid water of India Quay, cabins level with the Docklands Light Railway that sweeps past from Canary Wharf to Limehouse. 

Leaving the train, winding down the ramp to ground level, I get the first taste of the estuary that I’m here to discover. A rusted barge bloats like a dead whale under the stout, round legs of the overhead rail, seemingly incongruous, beached out of time. 

I walk along the quayside, past the cranes, to the end of a Victorian warehouse conversion, bikes chained to balconies above wooden loading ramps, a row of chain restaurants offering the same bland choice as every dockside redevelopment from Portsmouth to Liverpool. By the water sit a gaggle of branded deckchairs, a small tent and a man with a guitar attempting valiantly to bring some cheer to this strangely sterile space.

The Docklands museum itself is at the end of the row. It’s a beautiful building, outside and in. Heavy wooden roof beams brace the ceiling, propped up by near-petrified pillars and bare,  sandy-coloured brick walls. Through the gift shop entrance there's an open-plan café, with plenty of comfortable leather arm chairs. It’s full of families, here for the fun-looking kidzone signposted with cartoon graphics that lead away to the right, and a youth group watching videos on laptops. 

The exhibition I’ve come to see is 'Estuary – responses by contemporary artists', in gallery space to the left of the café. The low-beamed ceiling echoes with the sound of waves, seagulls and clanking iron; video soundtracks ebbing and flowing in a gentle wash. 

I’m drawn directly to Jock McFayden’s horizon spanning landscapes, which seem to open out directly onto the estuary itself. Barley rippling foregrounds mirror equally blank skies. Caught between them, skeletons of cranes and concrete buildings squat the horizon, denying the flatness. Next to these Michael Andrews appears to have transplanted a section of the estuary onto the wall, stained with river sediment and washed with tides, hazy figures fishing from a groyne at the waters edge, boats blending into the land. The whole exhibition embodies this blurring convergence of land, sea, sky and industry: channeling that strange liminal zone between Greenhill and Whitstable where London meets the sea. 

My reverie is interrupted by a cacophony of clanking iron to my left, where I discover '51 29'.9' North - 0º11' East' by the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, documented on video in 1985. Amid a boneyard of rusted barge hulls, three artists in sou’westers bang, clang and blow torch a variety of makeshift objects, detritus reclaimed as percussion. The tide rises around them and darkness falls. A glorious temporary reclamation from atrophy.

Andrew Kötting’s ‘Jaunt’ is a jolly bricolage of the sounds and scenes encountered on a riverboat from Southend Pier to Westminster in 1995.The voices of locals characters intersperse with the commentary of the captain, stories told in estuary accents, giving us context to cognitively map the length of the river mouth.

The journey is reversed in William Raban’s ‘Thames Film’. It overlays original film shot in the 1980s with archive footage and photos of the shipping industry, breathing monochrome life into the ghost that haunts the rest of the exhibition. Engravings, paintings and maps extend our vision further back; to the cuckold hangings along the 17th century riverbank lined with watermills and Peter Bruegel's hellish vision of death by shipwreck, beyond ‘hope’ (the actual point at which ships returning to harbour would deem themselves as beyond harm). There are also visions of leisure, bathers past and present paddling below the concrete wall of Canvey Island funfair.

Contemporary visions of industry are to be found in Peter Marshall's Thames Gateway, photographs of telegraph poles, new-build housing estates, scrap yards and short stretches of road. This absurdity of everyday banality is echoed in Simon Robert’s Southend Pier, palm trees lining the road in throwing long californian shadows over the asphalt car parks, the coloured loops and spindle metal towers of a fun-fair, pier stretching away into the distance.  

Distance is also the focus of John Smith's 'Horizon (Five Pounds a Belgian)', a mesmerising seascape projected in HD onto the entire wall of a beam-lined screening room. The camera, our view, is looking out to sea, water, sky and their division the only defining features. A soundtrack of waves washes in, the same wave on loop or continuing waves in the same spot, it's hard to tell from the regularity. Every so often the film changes with one of these waves, not the frame or viewpoint, just the time of day, of year, of tide. The soundtrack bears no relation to the agitation of sea on screen, whether dark and white flecked or mill pond calm, it washes on like clockwork. Intermittently the shuffle pauses to allow a scene to unfold: the slow passing of a cargoship on the horizon; the playful tacking and jibing of a fleet of dinghies; a man and his dog on the invisible beach between us and the sea; a seagull emerging from fog; a lifeboat crew laying flowers, heads bowed in respect, before breaking the spell of voyeurism as they wave directly to us. How long did Smith spend on the beach to get this footage. Could one tiny stretch of coast really be so entertaining? It certainly held my attention for a good long while.

Relaxed, like I've had a day at the seaside, I leave the gallery in search of a coffee, feeling as if I've travelled much further than Canary Wharf this afternoon.

How do I do more than simply twitch in the wind?

Ahead of tonight's Social Media Week Off the Page, I thought I'd re-share Tom Chatfield's brilliant "philosophical mood music" for the Mobile Culture edition in the summer.

"How do I take back control?" Tom asked us, "How do I do more than simply twitch in the wind?"

Rage Against the Machine might have had the answer to this back in the pre-social media world of 1992, but it's funny how, in an age of self-empowered publishing, we now need to ask ourselves this question. As the number of mobile phones on the planet overtakes the increasing number of human beings, the cacophony of content can often seem overwhelming. Navigating and curating this avalanche of information becomes the key to making the most of the opportunity that it offers. Tonight's presentations should hopefully provide some insight into how this might be achieved.

If you can't make it, the good news is that you can watch past presentations from Four Colman Getty's Off the Page here instead.

Chaps Choir début at the Union Chapel, Islington

 The performance begins with a huddle of men in dark t-shirts, not-so-subtly assembling near a platform that might be a stage. There’s definitely a bulk to the group, but I’d like to think that we carry a certain nonchalance which will take our assembled guests off-guard. With a huge grin on his face, ready to burst from the excitement of the last few months, Dom raises his arm and mouths to the count of *one, two, three, four….*  

“ALLE” we chant, swinging our fists in a jovial, encouraging fashion, bringing conversation around the room to a stand-still. “ALLE” we repeat, bumping, shuffling and drifting our ways towards our prearranged positions in front of the stage. “ALLE” we boom, growing more confident now that this is actually happening. “A-LE” we echo, settling into position: a large group of tenors to the left, a thin slice of baritones in the centre and a gruff wedge of basses to the right.

Here we are, Chaps Choir, on the cusp of our first performance less than three months after we all first met. It's a début at the Union Chapel no less, albeit in the second room. The main space is currently being filled by rapturous applause for a pint-sized youth choir in red t-shirts.

I think it’s fair to say there’s some apprehension amongst the Chaps at this point. Many of us have never sung in public before - at least not whilst sober or in tune – a fair few have only made it to about half the sessions and, although no-one had said it out loud, the pre-show rehearsal was pretty awful. To top it all off, those kids next door are sounding pretty good. Now we have a room full of 150 friends, family, wives and girlfriends who have turned up to see what we've been up to every Thursday night since April. I've even invited some friendly clients along. Oh, and there are members of at least two other choirs here to support us. No pressure then.

We can’t really mess-up the Finnish reindeer chant so long as we all keep a close eye on Dom, our beat-boxing choirmaster. It‘s a nice number to warm up with and we’re re-assured by the surge of applause that greets its final notes. We can do it! We are doing it! Huzzah!

The real challenge is the first lyrical song of the set, a harmonized version of The Logical Song by Supertramp (yes, Supertramp). If you don’t know it (where were you in 1979?), the verses are essentially lists of four syllable words that end in –cal, -ble and –ful; all easily confused and bloody difficult to remember. We also have the task of expressing the increasingly unhappy sentiment of the song’s lyrics, from the gentle a optimism of youth to the crushing disaffection of adulthood - all followed by a breathless ahhhhhhh--ah-ahh-ahhhhh-ah-ah-ahhh in the chorus.

As we hit the second verse I realise that we sound better than we've ever sounded before. Something’s just clicked. I can feel the resonance of our voices working together in harmony. We've nailed it. The crowd goes wild. This feels great. We ease into How Soon is Now with confidence, slowly building the energy as we creep towards the angst-ridden chorus... “I am hu-man and I need to be lo-o-o-v-ed” (Chaps can have feelings too, you know).

There’s a moment in the audience participation section of Cry Me A River when I question the wisdom of inviting members of two other choirs to watch us, but we pull it back with a powerful and very male sounding ending. The final triumph is a gentle but powerful rendition of The Book of Love by The Magnetic Fields, prompting a guffaw of giggles from the largely female audience after the first line - “The book of love is long and boring” - but rapturous applause to follow. We've done it!

There are cries for more, which we don’t have, so we sing Logical Song again with gusto: “Please tell me who I a-a-a-m, who I a-a-a-m”. More applause. We shake hands, we congratulate, we slap each other on the back. Some of us even hug. My wife (aka my greatest critic) who has banned me from singing in the house, tells me that we sounded brilliant.

We all arrived at Chaps in different ways, some through MeetUps or Facebook, a few through other choirs and many just through word of mouth. When we first croaked, clapped and squawked our way through Under the Bridge, I don’t think many of us imagined that we’d be performing to an audience by this point, but we did all enjoy the experience from the get-go.

I’m usually skeptical about jumping onto the latest bandwagon (choirs were so 2011 aren't they? Gareth Malone and all that), but for someone who doesn't know how to control his vocal chords the idea of learning in a safe environment (a huddle of other blokes behind whom I could hide if things went wrong) was very appealing. The revelation that everyone was so friendly and keen to talk about the challenges and rewards of singing together made it a highly enjoyable social-bonding experience. The fact that The Craft Beer Company has a pub on the other side of the road was the icing on the cake.

None of it would have been possible without the energy, enthusiasm and optimistic ambition of our choirmaster Mr Dominic Stichbury. I went to school with Dom many years ago and used to play in bands with his little brother Jim, so it’s been a real pleasure to reconnect with him at a point at which he’s realising his potential to make things like this happen. I hope we've done him proud and eventually go on to sound like a choir who people might like to listen to.

The week of our first performance I saw two reports in the news that affirmed my own positive experience. The first, reported in The Independent, showed that singing in harmony with others actually has a positive effect on our heart rate in a similar way to yoga breathing. Having tried both, I have to say that singing is much more fun, so that’s good news. The second, from a group called Vocality claims that bringing people together to sing can foster cohesion and better understanding in divided communities. Chaps, as you might expect,  is mostly made up mostly of middle-class media types at the moment, but it is open to all and it's definitely brought us together. Now if only there were enough choirmasters to go round...

Chaps Choir is open to all with a Y chromosome. It reconvenes in Islington to learn a new batch of songs from September 19. If you’d like to give it a go before then, Dom’s also running day-long workshop with the Chaps on 17 August. For more info visit chapschoir.wordpress.com

The Murders in the Rue Morgue: And Other Stories by Edgar Allen Poe

Poe was a literary pioneer, one of the first American writers to make a living from his work, during the 1830s and 1840s. Known for penning gothic tales of the macabre and some of the first known detective mysteries, his influence extends through the penny dreadful fiction of the Victorians and weird tales of the 1930s right through to the best horror and crime writers of today. Although I'd like to report that I was dazzled, thanks to Poe's peculiar early nineteenth century style of writing and rather long-winded method of storytelling I found this collection to be more of an enjoyable exercise in literary archaeology than a revelation. Most of the classic tales are in there, including ' The Pit and the Pendulum', 'The Masque of the Red Death' and the eponymous title, but it's a shame that his most famous story 'The Raven' isn't included. If I were to pick a favourite, 'The Masque of the Red Death' manages to convey a brilliantly original idea with more flair and brevity than the rest. Worth reading for literary completion.

Read: In bed before lights out.
Filed alongside: Wilke Collins, HP Lovecraft

View all my reviews

BBC Your Paintings - art history for all

"If there's something that needs to be done, and no-one else is doing it, you damn well get out there and do it yourself"

Fred Hohler on why he founded the Public Catalogue Foundation, in 2003, with a mission to photograph the entire UK national collection of 210,000+ oil paintings and archive them online for the world to enjoy.

10 years later and I have had the the pleasure of publicising the completed BBC Your Paintings website, celebrated with a month of events and exhibitions at galleries and museums across the country this February. It was very much a return to my art history roots. Much of our time was spent contacting local galleries and museums about the stories behind paintings in their collection, then reporting the news to various media.

They included the discovery of a new painting by Anthony Van Dyck at the Bowes Museum in County Durham. Having been photographed in storage, the picture was originally thought to have been a copy until it was spotted on the Your Paintings website by art historian Dr Bendor Grosvenor who is an expert on the Dutch 16th century painter and court favourite of Charles I. The process of correctly identifying the artist formed the basis of an entire Culture Show special, broadcast on 8 March 2013. You can read the full story on the BBC website here. 

The next step for Your Paintings is to tag all 210,000+ paintings with information that will enable people to easily search the archive. To speed up this lengthy process, the Public Catalogue Foundation has decided to crowd-source the work with an innovative 'Tagger' website developed in partnership with Oxford and St Andrews Universities. Whether you think you like art history or not, I can highly recommend you give it a go. It's like a having a free lesson in how to think about a painting, by just taking the time to look at it more closely that you might do otherwise. The clue is often in the title; just through searching the name of a sitter in a portrait or of an artist I've had great fun unraveling pockets of history about which I'd never have known. You don't have to go to this depth of analysis though, at the most simple level you can just label everything that you see. 

As with Google image search, there's also great fun to be had thinking of a word - such as moustache or umbrella - and seeing what comes up when you search the Your Paintings database for it. The more paintings are tagged, this better this resource becomes.

This brings me to the real stroke of genius in the whole project. By partnering with the BBC to host the archive, Your Paintings has given itself a huge advantage in search engine optimisation. It won't be long before this website will be in the top 5 results every time that you type in the name of an artist.

So what does the Public Catalogue Foundation do now? As well as an education programme allied to the website, there's talk of a national collection of statues to be archived, and with the current advances in 3D imaging technology and photography. I can't wait to see how that turns out. 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/

http://tagger.thepcf.org.uk/