se. xxi

damn daniel, it august and you ain't even done your spring clean yet

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Hands up if your weekend brunch hankerings are now starting as early as 4pm on a Monday. Hands up if you just really wished that London would fix up and dedicate an entire weekend to brunch. OK everyone with their hands up can bloody well HIGH FIVE each other because the FIRST EVER BRUNCH FESTIVAL is coming our way on the 1st September. I ain’t sorry.

Also Frank Prisinzano is doing his annual food tour around Italy at the mo and his IG story-hopping between Lake Como and the outskirts of Tuscany is making my gallbladder - which I suspect is of Italian descent somehow - ache with longing. It’s a crying shame but I have a feeling Covent G’s Bancone is gonna sort it all right out. There are clams with seaweed butter on the menu and what that means is I don’t even need to finish this sentence.

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A paper outlining exactly how much we are cannonballing ourselves and our rapidly changing climate straight into ‘Hothouse Earth’ has had us sweating like Theresa in Brussels. And if for some barbaric reason it hasn’t, Al Gore’s coverage of the Mendocino Fire Complex - now California’s largest wildfire on record with an area measuring LARGER THAN FKING DALLAS - sure will. If you’re now burning with a need for action then check out the Climate Coalition and in particular Speak Up Week, where you can get your MP to sign the cross-party letter backing a zero emissions target by 2050, and also find or organise events near you. Do the right thing, violator.

HEAR

GAIKA is the latest in the “I’m a creative director of everything I touch” series (notable alumni include everyone on your IG feed rn) boasting songwriting, performance art and a recent lookbook collection called ‘Armour in Heaven’ featuring Flohio and Mista Silva as models. He’s also political editor of Dazed, and I’m not sure if this is more of a joke than Dazed having a political editor in the first place. Sneeriness aside, his new album ‘Basic Volume’ isn’t half bad, and his multidisciplinary talents continue to manifest themselves through an interactive musical experience (jargon points thru the roof) at Somerset House, commissioned by Boiler Room and focussing on the irrepressible power of sound system culture - focussing on and coinciding with August Bank Hol’s Notting Hill Carnival, which I hope everyone is putting on their happy hats for!!!

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THEEEE ULTIM8 LDN LOLS EXPERIENCE is back, you know what it is sons, itz Secret Cinema A.K.A a secret film (it’s Romeo & Juliet tho everyone knows that by now) in a secret location (I’m smug at where it is so 3 guesses which part of London we’re talking) with sooo many more secrets that you and your crew gonna feel like the human embodiment of Chinese Whispers. Snap up some tix for various dates throughout August. No one ever regrets.

SEE

Considering he was a complete giant in fashion, you probably never realised just how physically little Mr Azzedine Alaïa was. This exhibition at the Design Museum celebrating the late Tunisian designer features photos of him next to towering elastic supermodels that read almost like a series of comedy double acts. Next to these humorous bursts and the spectral dresses floating around in his signature sculptural style, what really breathes life into the show is the ‘Film Room’. Featuring a fashion short starring Linda Evangelista teasing males like it was 1986, and old runway recordings featuring (how could it not) the one who called him ‘Papa’: Naomi Campbell. It’s in these screenings that you get a real sense of “the Alaïa girl”, with all her sensual spontaneity and feminine invincibility. She’s happy-go-lucky but with a deep vamp pout and it works wooooonders.

@larabaxter 

se. xx

#garethsouthgatewould patiently read this whole post and promptly go about ticking off every item on it. so be like gareth and you'll win the world cup too, guys

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Raf Simons set up a permanent camp in my admiring heart not just via the anemic pastels and shoulder pads with albatross-sized wingspans in his Fall 2018 show back in February, nor through his “dad shoe” (heavy Audi edition) collab with Adidas, and NOT EVEN with CK 205W39NYC’s latest collection taking preppy to the next level with all its shameless Ivy League branding. It was, in fact, in his appearance the film Dior and I. Spoiler alert: he cries, I cried. The documentary followed the designer’s first collection as creative director at the major French label we all know and love, founded by one serious Anglophile. Anyway, this emotional journey of me and Raf is all but a precursor to the V&A’s announcement that they will host the largest Christian Dior exhibition IN HISTORY next year. So we’ve got a long time to gnaw on our nails in anticipation - tickets will be available in September. Make sure you bag ‘em.

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The summer vibes are falling on us heavy like a plague of flying ants. Oh wait that’s not even a simile that’s ACTUALLY HAPPENING IN ZONE 1 RN. Ignore the sensation of bugs on your face with another scent o’ summer which is everyone’s favourite kitschy 70s apéritif - NO, not YOU, Aperol, we’ve had more than enough of you - Campari!!! Get a sensible dose of Red Passion at this new exhibition of the Italian bevvy’s classik advertising posters dating from the 1920s all the way through to hippie-era 60s. Down it, fresha.

HEAR
BBC Radio 4’s Reith Lectures for 2018 have begun, kicking off with historian Margaret MacMillan exploring humanity’s twisted and complicated relationship with war. If you’re not the type to listen live on ‘the wireless’ then download the talks instead. Makes for more educational listening than jamming to Juice Wrld on the Victoria line AGAIN, with all his cheap samples and melodic rap A.K.A. everything people will tell you is wrong with hip hop today. But give yourself ten mins anyway to enjoy the vid for it by Cole Bennett, the animator famous for backing lo-fi Soundcloud traxsters, like Natalie or Black Papa. If you’re the type who likes <500 plays on your music then you about to cream, son. And if you’re not careful you gonna end up with Famous Dex. Music wormholes ftw.

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Mortadella parties!!! Who knew entire soirées could be devoted to the pale pink foodstuffs that kinda looks like salmonella on a stick but other people have said it’s edible sooooo away you munch! (gotta love social norms, right?) Bright Restaurant, the new very well-received opening up in London Fields, is gonna be kicking back this Sunday with Federico Orsi for some meaty plundering on his Romagnola pigs that are fed on barley, fava and wild herbs. Meat taste guuuuud.

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Clips from the K hole? On second thoughts, no thx, but if you want to get pretty damn close check out the selection of moving image works by artists from visual arts society The London Group in a series entitled ‘Altered States’. Someone cue Ron Trent. If you missed it during the Waterloo Festival that just passed then no fear, because you can catch up on the action on their Vimeo.

@larabaxter 

se. xix

tired? you can't be Crashing as hard as Lee Bul at the Hayward Gallery though, get down to the immersive fancies there to prove me wrong

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A big floating thing has appeared on the water outside the Serpentine Gallery. It’s a new piece from Christo A.K.A one half of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, up there with the Coolest Couples Of All Time and famed for their monumental outdoor art. 20 metres tall and weighing in at 600 metric tonnes, this 3D trapezium of scaffolding-esque piping barrels is already sending LDN into a spin, exhibit A being the Serpentine swimmers who are complaining that the sculpture’s shadow has left them ‘doing lengths in the gloom’. Yeah, that’s what you get from the type of people who exercise in Kensington. Go down to Hyde Park ends to (a) see the sculpture (b) hopefully feel at total peace and (c) throw eggs at said swimmers.

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Booma Booma Booma Booma, I want you in my rooma. Yes, cheap Vengaboys fun always go down a treat. Knew you’d like that one. This Brixton establishment pairs modern Indian füds with ⅓ pints of craft beer, ooh whee we are smiling WIDE. In other newz, Night Tales is back, and it’s biting hard. Their new, permanent venue will open in July on Hackney’s Bohemia Place, and I got exhausted just reading about all its new features/bars/restaurants/DJs. Watch this space for empty house beats, people drenching their souls with prosecco, fusion food parading as something original and a general stifling air of pretension. I genuinely can’t wait.

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Around this time last year, supercomputer AI extraordinaire IBM Watson learnt what it meant for a sporting moment to be “worthwhile” just from being fed past data, and then managed to create a Wimbledon highlights video all on its ownsome. Nice one. But just touch wood the machines aren’t taking over soon, because this year, they’re learning to answer back. Watson just took part in a debate club in San Francisco, and was not too shabby at all. General consensus was that the delivery was shit (think they just need to reprogram the voice to sound like ) but the content had a lot more  So you can stop abusing Siri now, her - his? are machines gender fluid or neutral? - comebacks are gonna beat yours to a pulp. Probably already are tbh.

HEAR

So I guess 2k18 is the year of the 23-minute album. Nas’ new wun NASIR, Pusha T’s DAYTONA, Kanye’s infamous ye and collab with Cudi on KIDS SEE GHOSTS, The Carters’ (pushing it at 38 minutes) Everything is Love. We're drowning in the half-hour hip hop. And the general opinion - spread wider than butter on a Turkish carpet - of the eternally snarky public is that these releases all, comically, somehow happen to be each artist’s most mediocre work, EVER. They’re all so average, so wildly average that you can’t help but wonder whether maybe they’re all in cahoots. Maybe they’ve all purposefully made TV-show-length work to try and tell us that no art was made in a 30-minute episode. Or maybe they’ve had enough of being these borderline musical genii and are taking a stand to show that they’re people too, and they’re allowed to make 5/10 average shit. Or maybe, we all just need to sit back and relax a bit, because not every rhyme needs to go where no rhyme has gone before, and you should be allowed to sing about certain themes but forget to mention key refs, and this loop is allowed to be as catchy as Taylor Swift, and yes, you CAN re-use samples from 7 years ago. I think we all know what happens when we get too angsty about giving a good performance, and if you’ve somehow forgotten then England playing in the World Cup is here to remind you. So consider the Era of Fucking Average royally christened, which is not quite a Dark Age of lyricism but definitely somewhere in the Dull Taupe region.

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Croissants? Croisette? Are you frolicking in Cannes, or just with a can of La Croix in your PJs at home, watching Sasha Lane’s IG stories, eating Richmond chicken sausages and begging someone to come over to help nurse your hangover? In that case make sure you keep UTD (an abbreviation I’ll leave you to work out) with watagwan at this year’s Lions festival, as well as watching everyone on the YDA shortlist and Saatchi & Saatchi’s New Director’s Showcase. But start off with this interview with Sir John Hegs that does that unusual thing that only the advertising industry seems to do, which is continuously talk about how everything needs to change, but shows no significant shifts in any direction… the baton is yours, friends. Take that mother and beat the shit out of advertising.

@larabaxter

se. xvii

we had a brief and flirtatious summer weekend just there, but it's over now, and you know what that means? it's time to start drafting your ideas for PARODY CHRISTMAS CAMPAIGNS (obviously) because, as in AdLandLife, these will take 6+ months to perfect (using the word 'perfect' liberally)

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Do those eye bogies need scratching? No fear. Thomas Mailaender exhibits his contemporary photography at Michael Hoppen Gallery - he was taken on by Louis Vuitton a while back and he developed the ONLY existing method of printing leather within the fabric, as opposed to simply on the surface. Dat’s some deep dye. His “fun archaeological” objects are on display too; they read like physical meme humour and will genuinely make you lol a lil. Also not to be missed are rounds of Peckham’s current shows - Alastair Levy at Lily Brooke, ‘Instant Excess’ at Rod Barton, Magali Reus at SLG and Caterina Silva at Bosse & Baum.

Caterina Silva.

Thomas Mailaender.

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The glittery giant otherwise known as awards season is almost upon us, and things are kicking off this week with D&AD, whose famed pencils always find their way to work that’s both killer creative and slightly off the big-brand beaten track. With the first wave of winners announced on Monday and more on the way this week in tandem with the festival, there’s going to be plenty of creative brain candy for you to induce indigestion with. And if you didn’t manage to get your grubby hands on tickets (or a pencil), the coverage will come in thick and fast on social media, and make sure you check back to their site regularly to get some award-winning inspo. Studio Hato’s ace identity for this year is also worth a cobbles.

HEAR

From the 2015 album ‘Theory of Flo’, Auntie Flo proves that although 3 years in music is tantamount to a lifetime in genre evolution, there is such thing as a timeless classic these days, and no better example than this banger with Anbuley. If you’re rendered speechless by those beats as well as the dystopian stylings of Chloé, bag yourself un billet to Printworks this Saturday for a line-up that rivals the South-East London establishment’s light system in terms of blinding. DJ Koze will be spinning tracks from his upcoming LP ‘Knock Knock’ which, if the first release from it is anything to go by, you’re gonna have a stamping good night.

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Since somehow managing to exhaust all the food options at Pop Brixton, Flat Iron Square, Dinerama and (easily enough) The Prince, and now being in dire need of that sweet heaven of washing down hot, fresh munch with overpriced draught beer, nirvana has been found in the sprawling Elephant & Castle space Mercato Metropolitano. They do miso ramen, sourdough pizzas and steak & chorizo on sweet potato fries that will catapult your eyes to the size of NEPTUNE. If only yalls’ stomachs were that big. Also just opened is Mare Street Market up in ol’ Hackers, but good luck finding a seat among the “creative industry clones” and adorbz dogs that are only ever held in the crooks of arms.

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Fashion reeks of guilt. Guilt of encouraging twisted beauty ideals, guilt of nurturing unhealthy, stressful and ostracising work cultures, and - perhaps one of the most recent revelations - guilt of destroying the planet through questionable production processes and widespread child labour. Then what better way to address this through a blunt, exhaustive and informative exhibition at the V&A? Atta girl, fashion.

@larabaxter