Beetroot with Zata’ar Labneh at Rootdown on Lower Clapton Road
Growing up in the nineties, I found the term ‘Californian cuisine’ bemusing, as it seemed vague but pretentious, denoting a lifestyle rather than a cuisine, and evoking images of temperate al fresco dining with Chardonnay. But extra virgin olive oil was a luxury item back then and sun dried tomatoes the height of sophistication. Now, with the internet, food programmes on television and the cult of Ottolenghi, we are all food experts.
Which brings us to Rootdown, a small restaurant opened by siblings at the top of Lower Clapton Road, serving carefully selected fusion dishes described as ‘Californian’, a descriptor I find both archaic and endearing in a city awash with ‘Modern European’ menus. The restaurant prides itself on seasonal, small-scale food. I did note Growing Communities as one of their suppliers, suggesting this was not just lip-service to sustainability, and upon further investigation, Rootdown smokes its own salmon, makes pickles in-house, serves its own beer, and mixes up carefully crafted house cocktails, all at very reasonable prices.
For starters we had pan-fried squid with pickled turnips and smoked almonds, a Japanese bonito broth with raw tofu, and some homemade foccacia with zata’ar. All delicious, although the delicate bonito broth unfortunately was too wan up against the strong flavours of the other dishes. To follow, we opted for polenta with wild mushrooms, asparagus and truffle oil, and the bewildering onglet steak with padron peppers, potatoes and taleggio.
These were rich dishes, not for the faint of heart, but the taleggio and steak combination proved to be a winner – we devoured it. Becca, the owner, swore the polenta’s silkiness was chiefly due to whipping rather than heavy cream, but I didn’t entirely believe her. Even though truffle oil is frequently reviled by chefs as being fool’s gold, I would certainly order this dish again.
We finished off with a flawless grilled peach and meringue combination before tottering home. The only thing I would reproach Rootdown for is its friendly but disorganised service, a small crime given it certainly delivers on the promise set by its inventive and enticing menu. It’s a shame it hasn’t had more press coverage, but maybe you should visit before it becomes impossible to book a table. I certainly will.
East London street artist Stik has complained of “commercial exploitation” after a community mural he painted in Poland was discovered in pieces and on sale for £10,000 at a West London gallery.
Stik and a group of local children from Gdansk in Poland painted the Children’s Community Mural on a shipping container in 2011.
The public art work went missing from the Polish city in 2014, only to resurface at Lamberty Gallery in Belgravia, where individual pieces of the now dissected mural were found on sale for £10,000.
“I want to see them returned to the community who helped paint them,” Stik told the East End Review.
“My intention was to give a gift to that local area and that is what I agreed with the gallery who commissioned the mural. We agreed it was for educational purposes only and I would like them to remain what they were contracted to be.”
Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, the Polish gallery that commissioned the 2011 mural, has confirmed it went missing “in circumstances unknown” and that Polish authorities are investigating the disappearance.
Andrew Lamberty, director of Lamberty Gallery, did not respond to a request for comment, but has released a statement attempting to “put the record straight”, stressing that the work was purchased legally.
“Lamberty purchased these containers from a recreation ground beside a canal after viewing them in autumn 2014,” the statement reads.
“We commissioned a Polish agent to find and pay the owners and beneficiaries, who we understand were the Canoe club and the Director of the local school.
“We have recently been contacted by an arts institution called Laznia that was involved with Stik to create the project in 2011. Laznia did not notice that the containers had been removed until Stik contacted them a year later.
“Lamberty legally purchased these works with full documentation. We removed them from a harsh outdoor climate and prepared them for indoor instalment.”
Talking to the East End Review, Stik was tight-lipped over what he could disclose about the case, which is now in the hands of lawyers.
He did reveal, however, that a dialogue has opened between the two galleries.
“I am assisting them but as it stands Lamberty has the pieces and has given no indication that he’s going to return them but we are optimistic,” Stik said, adding that he will not authenticate remains of the art work.
Stik describes himself as “duty bound” to help the people of Gdansk retrieve their mural.
“Local residents have written to me asking what’s happening and I have promised them I will get it back for them,” Stik said.
“I feel a good sense of solidarity with that community. Really this piece has not been stolen from me – it’s not about me – it’s about that community and the artwork that the young people created in 2011.”
My Beautiful Black Dog at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015. Photograph: Richard Davenport
Bestowed on her during a Greek baptism ceremony involving a cauldron, a frightening priest and a lot of olive oil, Brigitte Aphrodite’s eccentric moniker is in fact her real name.
The self-styled feminist showgirl took ‘Aphrodite’ as her own name at a baptism ceremony that she describes as a “kind of torture”. It was originally the name of her grandmother, and after the ceremony Aphrodite set about imbuing it with its classical connotations of love, beauty and pleasure.
Aphrodite is bringing My Beautiful Black Dog to Hackney Showroom this month, her musical play whose title went through a similar process of re-appropriation.
“I always see the beautiful in life, and I’m bloody ambitious, so all that time that I wasted in bed, I was so angry and guilty, and self-hatred and worthlessness and all that stuff – the frustration of the wasted time – it became something that I had to write about,” Aphrodite says.
Part gig, part theatre show, part tidal wave of glitter, My Beautiful Black Dog is based on Aphrodite’s own experience of depression (originally referred to as the ‘black dog’ by Winston Churchill), which she says is still hard to talk about. But she is determined to open up the conversation.
Brigitte Aphrodite. Photograph: Olivier Richomme
“People really want to talk about mental health,” she says. “So if it’s in a way that is palatable but also makes you think and feel, the more we’re going to help everybody as a nation to accept it, and probably save lives.”
Mental health was a theme at this year’s Edinburgh fringe, with a number of performers and comedians deciding to tackle the stigma that surrounds it.
Coupled with Jeremy Corbyn’s recent appointment of a shadow minister for mental health, the issue that affects one in four people in the UK every year is becoming less of a taboo subject.
Many have described Aphrodite as brave for making the show, though for her it was an integral part of her recovery.
“Part of the process of beginning my recovery was making it, because I’ve always expressed myself through poems and songs, so it was the best way,” she says. “And the rewards have been massive. I understand myself much, much better.”
Aphrodite is a keen supporter of emerging artists. She mentored a student at Clapton’s BSix College a few years ago for the charity Arts Emergency, and even did a fundraising gig for them on the second highest peak of Mount Kenya, huddling up to comedian Josie Long, her tent-mate, to endure the extreme conditions at high altitude.
As for this show she says: “It’s like watching a gig but it’s a piece of theatre, it’s sweaty, it’s messy, its totally rock’n’roll.” Tracks from her forthcoming studio album Creshendorious will be released to accompany the show’s tour.
My Beautiful Black Dog is at Hackney Showroom,Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT from 18–20 November. hackneyshowroom.com
Nadya Tolokonnikova at the opening of So it Goes at Stoke Newington’s Hang Up Gallery. Photograph: Russell Parton
“We have a new challenge and a new injustice to fight,” declared Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, standing on a box to address a tightly packed crowd at Hang-Up Gallery in Stoke Newington yesterday evening.
The Russian punk singer and activist flew over from Moscow to premiere the video of ‘Refugees In’, the new Pussy Riot single, at the opening of the Connor Brothers’ exhibition So it Goes at Hang-Up’s new gallery space on Stoke Newington High Street.
The Connor Brothers, London artists Mike Snelle and James Golding, got to know Pussy Riot following a lecture delivered by Tolokonnikova at Cambridge University last year, and collaborated with the band by producing their concert at the closing of Banksy’s Dismaland in September.
Now they have started an NGO with the band to tackle the refugee crisis, and part of the exhibition details the artists’ experiences in ‘The Jungle’ refugee camp in Calais.
A swarm of art buyers, artists and the odd celebrity spotter filled the gallery space, discussing the art works and quaffing flutes of Prosecco whilst waiting for the main event of the evening.
Gallery goers at the So it Goes opening. Photograph: Russell Parton
Aired towards the end of the evening, the video showed members Pussy Riot members caged and masked whilst a battle ensued between protesters and riot police.
In a speech before the screening, Tolokonnikova, who went on hunger strike in a Russian prison whilst serving a two-year sentence for performing a ‘punk prayer’ inside Moscow’s cathedral, called the refugee crisis “the defining issue of our generation”, and quoted Gandhi, saying: “Whatever you do [in life] will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”
Apologising for having to read from a piece of paper, Tolokonnikova added: “This crisis is not something to be afraid of, it’s an opportunity to remind ourselves what humanity is capable of.”
“Innocent people are fleeing war, hunger and persecution by brutal dictatorships.
“They have undertaken epic and life-threatening journeys from their home countries in the hope of finding refuge and safety.
“We cannot and must not turn our backs on them, we cannot allow our elected representatives to place a monetary value on human lives. It is our ethics and not our economics that must be our guiding principle.”
After visiting Calais in August and witnessing the living conditions of refugees, the Connor Brothers subsequently sold an edition of prints in collaboration with Hang-Up to raise money to provide aid.
The artists now plan to sell a third limited edition charity print this month to raise further funds to build additional shelters when they return to The Jungle with Pussy Riot in December.
So it Goes is at Hang-Up Gallery, 81 Stoke Newington Road, London N16 8AD until 6 December hanguppictures.com
‘Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself’ by The Connor Brothers
Psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Illustration: Paul Coomey
It is 50 years since the Philadelphia Association housed itself at Kingsley Hall in Bow, and 45 years since the Hall closed its doors amid local residents’ discomfort and a sense that things had got out of hand.
For the five years in between, the East End was witness to a radical experiment in treating mental illness, orchestrated by a charismatic group of doctors who eventually attracted the name ‘anti-psychiatrists’ for their rejection of mainstream psychiatric practices, most especially the use of drugs in treatment and the traditional power relationships with patients that characterised the profession.
Doctors and patients lived under the same roof at Kingsley Hall, and were collectively known as ‘residents’. Non-doctor residents were encouraged to make symbolic expressions of their illnesses through art, especially painting, and through talking to doctors in long conversations that respected the way patients used language, and engaged with it on its own terms. In the psychiatric world outside, lobotomies had only recently ceased to be the rage and it was not yet unknown for civil rights activists and feminists to be compulsorily confined to asylums.
The driving force behind the Kingsley Hall institute was the Scottish psychiatrist R. D. Laing. Born into a poor family in Glasgow in 1927, he was successful at school and went on to study medicine, qualifying as a psychiatrist in 1951. Called up to National Service, he served as an army psychiatrist for two years before returning to Glasgow, where he first worked with schizophrenic patients. He developed new approaches to treatment, which laid less of an emphasis on controlling patients and more on doctors and nurses spending time with them.
Having moved to London to study psychoanalysis, he published The Divided Self, an account of his new theories, in 1960. The book presented case studies of some of his patients and argued that mental illness could be seen as the outcome of a struggle between a ‘true’ inner self and a false self presented to the world, and that madness, far from being a medical condition, could be a logical response to the contradictions of the surrounding world. It’s still in print.
“Is love possible?” he asked in a BBC interview. “Is freedom possible? Is the truth possible? Is it possible to be one’s actual self with another human being? Is it possible to be a human being anymore? Is it possible to be a person, do persons even exist?”
Kingsley Hall was to be a place where people could live without these contradictions. The most famous resident was Mary Barnes, a prolific and accomplished painter who developed her artistic career at Kingsley Hall in the sixties and continued to produce work until her death in 2001. With Joseph Berke, her therapist, she produced a book, Two Accounts of a Journey through Madness, and Laing contributed copy to her exhibition catalogues.
“There was a lot of colour there,” says Patrick Marmion, Daily Mail theatre critic and author of a new play opening at the Arcola this month about the closing months of the Kingsley Hall experiment. “Laing styled himself as a Glaswegian street fighter almost, a really colourful, charismatic person who was ferociously bright. And he gathered around him some extraordinary characters,” explains Marmion.
Joe and Shree by Mary Barnes, painted in Kingsley Hall. Image courtesy of Dr. J Berke. Photograph: Ollie Harrop
Marmion’s play is set in the Hall’s last crisis days, Laing’s administrative headaches exacerbated by the return of one of his colleagues from “an acid trip to the future” in which he has seen how low the reputations of everyone involved are to sink. Laing became a symbol for a new counter-cultural approach to mental illness throughout the sixties and seventies, and it is as a symbol that his legacy has been judged.
Despite distancing himself from the term, it is he who has become most closely associated with the label ‘anti-psychiatry’, although better candidates might be his colleague David Cooper, who coined it, or Thomas Szasz, the American psychiatrist whose books include The Myth of Mental Illness. Anti-psychiatry has been widely and justly debunked, most forcefully by the left-wing academic Peter Sedgwick in his 1982 book PsychoPolitics, in which he pointed out that the movement’s critique of established mental health services was being used to justify huge cuts to funding. By the eighties, mentally ill patients were at much greater risk of neglect than of over-zealous medical intervention.
However, the symbol of Laing is changing again and being disentangled from anti-psychiatry. He is increasingly celebrated now as an early champion of compassionate treatment for the mentally ill, and also as a poet (his book of dramatic verse Knots was made into a play in 2011, while the half-centenary celebrations have recently seen live performances of his other well known collection Do you love me?). Marmion’s play is in this mode. His favourite Laing quote, which appears in the play, is Laing’s saying that patients were “not objects to be changed but people to be accepted”. The time may have come for us to again accept R. D. Laing.
The Divided Laing is at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL from 18 November – 12 December. www.arcolatheatre.com
Mercury Heart (l-r): Mai Goya Nguyen (bass), Craig Stronach (drums), Simon Hardeman (guitar, vocals)
With albums recorded in the studio certain things you can guarantee. Each note and every frequency will have been pored over – typically by more than one person – so that what the listener hears is polished to perfection.
But with live albums, a different type of perfection is reached. James Brown Live at the Apollo, The Last Waltz by the Band or Nirvana’s Unplugged in New York are all examples of albums where the energy generated by playing in front of a live audience leads to something transcendent and unique.
Hackney three-piece Mercury Heart had been in the studio for about six months recording their debut album when they took some time out to play a gig at Oslo in May. Well rehearsed from spending time in the studio, the band wowed the Oslo faithful as they hared through a set of original modern day rock ‘n’ roll numbers.
Afterwards, sitting down with a celebratory beer, the group put on a recording of the gig snaffled from the mixing desk. “We were amazed,” guitarist and lead singer Simon Hardeman recalls. “We couldn’t stop saying to each other ‘this is just amazing, this really rocks’, and we knew it was something we hadn’t been able to capture before.”
There seemed little point going back into the studio when the band already had a recording that, in Hardeman’s words, “nailed the songs with an energy we could never recreate in the studio”. And so Heart Attack was born, an album of punchy, original garage rock – clearly modern, but in a tradition that can be traced back through Jack White to the early Kinks. Apart from some mixing and mastering, the album is exactly as it was played, with no overdubs.
“There’s a great history to live albums,” Hardeman says. “The Who, Dr Feelgood, Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, James Brown… they all released wonderful stand-alone
live albums in the days before the multimedia box-set, when these could really break a band. I like to think we’re in that tradition.”
But what do we gain from listening to a live album over one recorded in a studio? “I think it’s all about that energy, and anyone who’s been to see us know we’re
all about energy,” Hardeman replies.
“You ought to be able to record this stuff live. We’re a three piece, and we’re not old fashioned in the sense that we’re playing sixties stuff but it is a fairly pretty timeless type of music – just guitar bass, drums, vocals and, I hope, good songs.”
Barbara Windsor in the recently restored Sparrows Can’t Sing
Mother of modern theatre Joan Littlewood’s only foray into film came in 1963 with Sparrows Can’t Sing. It was an adaptation of a play of almost the same name – simply replace ‘Sparrows’ with the Cockney translation, ‘Sparrers’ – penned by Stephen Lewis, who would later find TV fame with On the Buses and Last of the Summer Wine. Newly restored for Blue-ray and DVD, it is a masterpiece of early East End cinema and a gorgeous record of everyday life in post-war London.
Littlewood, whose theatre credits include a successful 1955 production of Brecht’s Mother Courage and Her Children, directed the play in 1960 at her renowned Theatre Workshop at Stratford East. Well received, Sparrers found its way to the West End in 1961, before the director took her talented cast into the streets of Stepney, Limehouse and the Isle of Dogs to remake it for the screen.
The film stars James Booth, a year before his iconic turn as Private Henry Hook in Zulu, and a 26-year-old Barbara Windsor, whose sprightly performance garnered the only BAFTA nomination of her career to date. Roy Kinnear, Murray Melvin, Avis Bunnage, George Sewell, Lewis himself and the Kray Twins – who reportedly hung out on set – also feature, albeit a fleeting appearance by the notorious gangsters.
Booth is Charlie Gooding, a cheeky boozer with a penchant for playing the field. Sparrows begins with Charlie’s return from two years at sea and follows him as he marches home to reclaim the beautiful wife he left behind. He finds his old house in rubble on the ground and learns that Windsor’s character Maggie has relocated but is still about.
What he doesn’t know is that she and her young child are shacked up with a local bus driver, enjoying a rare spell of domestic bliss in one of the new high-rise tower blocks that have begun to pepper the skyline.
Charlie settles down in the Red Lion pub while news of his arrival spreads over town, and soon enough Maggie is on her way. Their re-acquaintance is fraught with complicated history, and as the husband works his charm on his estranged and resistant wife, an underlying control, even violence, unsettles the comedy – which is considerable throughout. Charlie’s chirpy, larger-than-life exterior is chipped away to expose a deeply flawed, real character within.
What follows is a disarmingly bleak, occasionally warm and always brilliant portrayal of a knotty romance. Littlewood prods at the absurdity of the decisions we make and at the same time immortalises a diversifying, fun-loving and morally-questionable community of a bygone era.
Scene from Columbian documentary Soy Negra, Soy Marica, Soy Puta
An on-the-job video of a peep show girl and a documentary about a transgender sex worker who takes in an abandoned young girl are among the films to be screened at the London Sex Worker Film Festival this Sunday.
The festival, to be held at the Rio Cinema, seeks to challenge an “intensely whorephobic society” with a programme of films made mainly by current or erstwhile sex workers.
Shorts and longer features address topics such as migration, border control, race, gender and violence.
Highlights include the feature Red Umbrella Diaries, a 90-minute documentary telling the individual stories of seven New Yorkers who work in different sectors of of the sex trade and the Columbian documentary Soy Negra, Soy Marica, Soy Puta (I’m black, I’m gay, I’m a sex worker) that follows a sex worker and lawyer who campaigns for and represents trans people and sex workers in Colombia.
Shorter works include the self-shot Diary of a Peep Show Girl, the award-winning Roxanne, in which a transgender sex worker’s life is thrown into question after she starts looking after an abandoned girl, and Becky’s Journey, about a Nigerian woman who attempts to go to Europe to sell sex in the hope of changing her life for the better.
Now in its third year, the festival will be looking to mark the 30-year anniversary of the sex worker occupation in Lyon, when sex workers occupied a church for eight days to draw attention to their lack of rights in French society.
London Sex Worker Film Festival is at Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street, E8 2PB on Sunday 8 November.
In Search of Mary by journalist Bee Rowlatt is a love story inside a love story. In actual fact, it is part travelogue, part biography; a history of groundbreaking feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and a walking in her shoes. Rowlatt was inspired by Wollstonecraft’s own book – Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, first published in 1796 – which narrates her intrepid travels, spurred on by a mission to recover stolen treasure for her lover, Gilbert Imlay. Rowlatt’s book, in turn, is testament to her admiration for Wollstonecraft. Or, as she admits, her outright ‘groupie’ status.
I meet Rowlatt at BBC Broadcasting House, in the midst of her busy press schedule and on the day of the book launch. Rowlatt is proud to call her own relationship with Wollstonecraft is “a full blown love affair”. A love affair which, like Wollstonecraft’s own, led her to embark across lands and seas – but in search of Mary, rather than of stolen treasure. And like Wollstonecraft, Rowlatt travelled to Scandinavia and beyond with a baby on board.
Before her overseas explorations however, Wollstonecraft’s home of Stoke Newington provided fertile ground for her radical roots. “It was absolutely critical in the making of her,” explains Rowlatt. Living in the then radical village allowed Wollstonecraft to tread new paths in more ways than one: she was a young woman living from her writing – “virtually unheard of at the time”. She also founded a school whilst living in the area, and came under the radical wing of the publisher Joseph Johnson and the Reverend Richard Price at the Unitarian Chapel on Newington Green.
The chapel today, which proclaims itself ‘the birthplace of feminism’, is still “remarkable, full of interesting people,” says Rowlatt – and it boasts perhaps the country’s only atheist minister. Rowlatt is a strong believer in honouring “these pockets of radical history, in a time when London is being increasingly scooped out and turned into luxury flats.”
What would Mary think of the area today, I ask. Rowlatt looks concerned and replies after some thought: “I think she’d be pretty appalled.”
“Wollstonecraft came from inequality and dragged herself up, so she really cared about the 99 per cent… it was the fundamental injustice that made her angry.” She eagerly adds though, that Wollstonecraft was “an inveterate optimist – it was in her DNA – she believed in the perfectibility of mankind.” And womankind, certainly.
Rowlatt was surprised to find that her attitude to motherhood and feminism changed significantly during the trip. “I started off from a position of outrage and ended up realising how bloody lucky I am,” and has come to believe that even a “toehold on both worlds” – of work and motherhood – is worth celebrating. I ask her if she thinks the same is true for men. “Don’t compare men to women,” she says, “compare them to their dads.” Like Wollstonecraft, Rowlatt’s belief in the perfectibility of mankind seems to prevail.
Nevertheless, Rowlatt is outraged that Wollstonecraft’s legacy as a pioneering feminist and influential author “hasn’t been commemorated in the way she deserves”, and is involved in the Mary on the Green campaign, which calls for a memorial statue of Wollstonecraft on Newington Green. Rowlatt continues to be in awe of the spirit that led Wollstonecraft to embark on her juggernaut of a journey, and her own was in large part a eulogy.
In Search of Mary: The Mother of All Journeys is published by Alma Books. RRP: £12.99. ISBN: 9781846883781.
An image from Phoebe Unwin: Distant People and Self-Soothing Objects at Wilkinson Gallery
Rhapsodies of colour usually characterise the work of painter Phoebe Unwin, but a series of new work on display at Wilkinson Gallery marks a departure from the 26-year-old’s signature style.
The artist, who has been shortlisted for the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, used only sprayed black ink of varying density, occasionally scrubbing or massaging the black pigment. The resulting images resemble a type of pre-photography, using layers of sensory data.
The open space in the pastoral scenes is suggestive of the body melting into the summer heat, lost in the breeze and scents of memory; while the smaller paintings touch on an internal and absorbing relationship to music.
As the viewer’s eye shifts from the back through to the mid and foreground of the paintings, it creates a filmic effect, a slow revealing of details coming into focus, satisfyingly collecting into a single image.
Unwin maps cognitive space in her work. “At the core of this work is my continued interest between material, mark and subjects of sensory experience – pursuing a kind of invented figuration,” she says.
Francis Bacon spoke of “the speed of paint” through which an artist can direct the viewer’s attention, control detail, sensory load or meaning. These works on show certainly have that slow mystery to them.
Powdery, smoky, floating, the solarised silhouettes of grass or flowers shine from the field of energised spray paint, while the worked porous surfaces of the clay board and raw canvas add a softer touch.
Phoebe Unwin: Distant People and Self-Soothing Objects is at Wilkinson Gallery, 50-58 Vyner Street, E2 9DQ until 22 November wilkinsongallery.com
