‘Cafe in the Crypt’ of St Martin-in-the-Fields

“A cafe church is a Christianchurch centered in cafés. These edifices are associated with alternative worship and the emerging church movements, and seek to find new forms and approaches to existing as a church in the 21st century. These churches are often focused on relationship aspects of Christian fellowship and outreach to their local community, and use the modern gathering place of a café in their ministry. … Churches using the cafe as a model for their organization can take different forms. Some cafe churches maintain a permanent cafe or restaurant, which offers the local community a high-quality array of coffee, sandwiches, and food, and provides a venue where the members of the church fellowship meet. Church members may also volunteer their time to support the enterprise. Other churches simply use the cafe model as a way to build community

This year’s Giornate del Cinema Muto had the strongest programme for several years. Among the pleasures was this selection of six films:

“To honour the 50th anniversary of The Parade Gone By… we gave Kevin Brownlow carte blanche to select six films he wanted to see at the Giornate.” [Festival Catalogue).

The Programme notes included tributes to the book and to Kevin by a range of l8 luminaries from the silent archival and study areas. The major introduction was by David Robinson who remembered being asked by the Editor at Secker and Warburg to read and offer an opinion on the book. He added the other achievements by Kevin,

“There was much more to come. Winstanley, Hollywood, Thames Silents, Unknown Chaplin, and all the documentaries, Photoplay and all its restorations and productions and new books to go with them. In 1980, with the collaboration of David…

A brief overview of 4 days in a New York recording studio in 1974 when Bob Dylan commenced work on his masterpiece album, Blood on the Tracks. The full story of these sessions, take by take, is told in leading Dylan historian Clinton Heylin’s monograph No One Else Could Play That Tune: The Making Unmaking of Bob Dylan’s 1974 Masterpiece, a perfect companion to the Bootleg Series release More Blood, More Tracks. Get your copy here.

Monday 16th September 1974

‘It looked like old times at Columbia’s A & R Studio September 16th. John Hammond Snr. was there. Phil Ramone was working the board. Eric Weissberg and Barry Kornfeld, two old Gaslight regulars, were unpacking their guitars. And sitting out in the cavernous studio … practically hidden behind a battery of six microphones, Bob Dylan was creating another album. And it was almost as if…

“Preface to the Situationist International Anthology.In 1957 a few European avant-garde groups came together to form the Situationist International. Over the next decade the SI developed an increasingly incisive and coherent critique of modern society and of its bureaucratic pseudo-opposition, and its new methods of agitation were influential in leading up to the May 1968 revolt in France. Since then — although the SI itself was dissolved in 1972 — situationist theses and tactics have been taken up by radical currents in dozens of countries all over the world. In this anthology I have tried to present a useful selection of situationist writings while at the same time illustrating the SI’s origins and development. Thus some early texts are included even though they express positions that were later repudiated by the situationists. But even the later texts reveal mistakes, contradictions, projects that never materialized, problems that remain to…

Hallucinogenic Liberty Cap mushrooms, picked near Pulborough, West Sussex. Psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in these and other ‘magic’ mushrooms, has therapeutic potential.

“On 5th May, 1953, the novelist Aldous Huxley dissolved four-tenths of a gram of mescaline in a glass of water, drank it, then sat back and waited for the drug to take effect. Huxley took the drug in his California home under the direct supervision of psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, to whom Huxley had volunteered himself as ‘a willing and eager guinea pig’. Osmond was one of a small group of psychiatrists who pioneered the use of LSD as a treatment for alcoholism and various mental disorders in the early 1950s. He coined the term psychedelic, meaning ‘mind manifesting’ and although his research into the therapeutic potential of LSD produced promising initial results, it was halted during the 1960s for social and political reasons. Born in Surrey…

“Fritz the Cat is a comic strip created by Robert Crumb. Set in a ‘supercity’ of anthropomorphic animals, the strip focused on Fritz, a feline con artist who frequently went on wild adventures that sometimes involved sexual escapades. Crumb began drawing this character in homemade comic books when he was a child. Fritz became one of his best known characters, thanks largely to the motion picture adaptation by Ralph Bakshi. The strip appeared in Help! and Cavalier magazines. It subsequently gained prominence in publications associated with the underground comix scene between 1965 and 1972. Fritz the Cat comic compilations elevated the strip into one of the most iconic features of the underground scene. … Fritz the Cat was created in 1959 by Robert Crumb in a homemade comic book story called ‘Cat Life’, based on the experiences of Fred, the family cat. The character’s next appearance was…

My heart skipped a beat, and my chest swelled with pride, as Leicester took the world stage with the discovery of King Richard III’s rickety, old skeleton in a council car park bang in the centre of the city, just the other week.

Even though the bones were discovered in a car park, the tragic death is not thought to be the result of a motoring accident. He is believed to have been killed at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, quite some time before the invention of the motor car, which was invented almost exactly four hundred years later by Karl Benz in 1886 (funny that, isn’t it?) Nobody has turned up to claim the bones so far.

I was born just a few miles from Leicester, so took huge pride in the opportunity to bathe in such an historical moment of great glory.

Global recognition…