CRWM happens on the last Friday of every month at Cottons Caribbean Restaurant on Exmouth Market, and is a great evening for all food and poetry-lovers. Open Mic slots get the taste buds going, opening the stage to any poet desiring the chance to serve up one short poem. A stirring starter poet, a heavier main poet and a lighter dessert poet then take to the stage, concocting a verbal banquet of verse, anything from political, touching, empowering, and dark, to comic, playful and lustful.

But the structural genius of CRWM doesn’t just lend well to terrible punning. As with CRWM, London Liming is sure to see the material and accolade of each poet fit perfectly to their course of the meal. At London Liming, Dean and Deanna will co-host with Melanie Abrahams, and begin the evening with pre-planned appetizers, followed by the usual courses of spoken word. Special guests James Massiah and Dougie Hastings are sure to take the appetizer slots, whilst Inua Ellams will surely take the main course, heading the Liming line-up. Expect to see FLOetic Lara and Jasmine Cooray step up to the dessert and starter slots, a level of exposure that would be a great blessing to any upcoming poet.

The CRWM structure (a conceptual masterpiece) is the brainchild of Dean Atta and Deanna Rodger, who curate the evening together. Dean is a huge performance poet who began his extremely successful career after reading at the Poetry Café in Covent Garden, after which he was immediately asked to read on BBC Radio 4 programme; Bespoken. He has since been a part of the Roundhouse Rubix Poetry Collective, has been named “the iPhone poet”, and has won awards, commissions, feature slots, and done readings just about everywhere in London. He is also probably one of the most wonderfully welcoming people I have ever met. From our brief meeting, I could tell that where he goes in poetry, we should probably all follow.

Deanna Rodger is equally exciting and is leading poetry in innovative directions. Having won the UK SLAM! Championships at her first attempt in 2007 at the age of 18, she has since partaken in the World Cup of Slam, hosted the Lyric Lounge, and was a finalist in the BBC Radio 4 Poetry Slam Competition. Both Deanna and Dean are accomplished spoken word poets, and they have such a rich stage dynamic together that London Liming will be more than worth the £5 entry, even if they were the only features. The diverse voices of the Come Rhyme With Me setup means Deanna and Dean will bring with them a polyvocal evening of poetry.

Don’t Think is an attempt from Adam Smith to capture the unique collision of the audio and visual elements that combine to form a Chemical Brother’s Show.  It was filmed with over 20 cameras and is all done at one performance, the 2011 Fujirock festival in Japan. He mixes a documentary style, to capture the show and audience unawares, while also implementing a narrative element to give the film a dream like, or rather psychedelic, feel.  The film captures the ambiance and feel of the show offering a subjective look at it as seen from the eyes of the audience and as Smith says captures their “emotion”.

Adam Smith has been collaborating with the Chemical Brothers since their early days playing gigs in 1994.  Because of this the visuals have always been an extremely important if not inseparable part of their shows.  Indeed they work very much dependently.  Rather than the visuals merely aiding as an accompaniment to the music the two have a symbiotic relationship.  Many of the visuals standing alone are pieces of avant-garde art.  These include masks of light flying across the screens, scary profiles of clowns, people shaped cut outs dancing symmetrically and flashing sirens.  All these images build with the music rising to a crescendo on the drop that is met with the thousands of hands shown waving in unison completing the congruous triumvirate.

The shots of the crowd are as impressive as the screened visuals in many ways.  The many small cameras allow an intimate access to the audience.  The high definition and bright lighting allows a clear view of the audience’s reactions and we can follow their thoughts through a number of emotions ranging from joy to expectancy, fear, and through to complete ecstasy.

One of the crowd members that the film repeatedly cuts to serves a narrative role.  The camera follows her as she leaves the concert and roams the festival in a stumbled confusion of blurred backgrounds and flashing lights.  The visuals we have previously seen on screen jump off it and become part of her world.  The white cockroaches scuttle along the floor and the marching robot wanders in the outside world.  This is where the film goes beyond merely documenting the concert performance but attempts a psychological insight into the minds of those in attendance.

If surrealism is concerned with the logic of dreams then Don’t Think seems to offer up the logic of a psychedelic trip either by narcotic substances or perhaps the similar feeling that is created by the Chemical Brother’s intoxicating music accompanied with Adam Smith’s imagery.

What is so interesting about the reality that Smith and the Brothers have tried to create with this film is in the way that they have chosen to distribute it.  Considering the height of technology that the chemical brothers utilise in their production and shows and the futuristic visuals that Smith creates it is interesting that they have chosen to release it in such an old fashioned medium as the cinema.  Why not release it for internet stream or download via youtube or itunes or other such media outlets?  But this is why the film can be so effective.  Because it would surely be impossible to feel as if one were at a festival while enjoying the experience alone.  But in the confines of the cinema the experience is a group one, admittedly very different from the group interaction at a festival, but one is a part of a group none the less.  Furthermore, the film has been released “for one night only” to play at over 100 cinemas around the UK at 10pm on 3^rd February.  This not only increases the numbers that will be viewing the show simultaneously, bringing it up to a festival sized audience, but recreates the feeling of exclusivity experienced at a festival.  You were either there on the night or you were not.

It would be hard to argue that a festival can be recreated through sitting in the dark and watching a 2 dimensional screen.  However, Chemical Brothers fans can delight in the fact that the film is in fact the first to be made in 7.1 Dolby Surround Sound meaning that the quality should be as good as, if not better than, many live performances.  This means that you can experience their sound as loud and equalised as they were originally intended as opposed to quiet, distorted, and with too much treble, as many people now a days enjoy music from laptop speakers that play it off youtube.

Tonight, for one night only, don’t miss it.

I wanted to write and thank you for writing. I do not yet have your poems, but I have them already by heart, and I will murmur them to myself in muffled sounds, until you speak some words on my behalf. Following is a list of competitions where you can most likely reach me with your words. There is nothing that I do not await in these correspondences. There is nothing that I will not reward with some response. I hope you realise that what you are doing is vital for my existence, and I cannot reach you unless you reach me first. Do not let anything stop you doing what you are doing; realise the importance and validity of what you have made.

                                              Yours,
                                                           Penny Newell

Kent and Sussex Open Poetry Competition
First Prize: £800
Submissions: £5 per poem
Poems should be no more than 40 lines
Closing: 31st January
Reader: Mimi Khalvati

The Lumin/Camden Poetry Prize
First Prize: The winner will have a collection of their poems published in a 20 page pamphlet, and will be invited to read at the ‘Camden and Lumen Open Mic’ Events and ‘Friday Night Writers’, in London
Submissions: £2.50 per poem. All proceeds go to London Homeless Cold Weather Shelters. Poems should be no more than 40 lines.
Closing: 14th February
Reader: Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy

The Stafford Poetry Competition
First prize: £1000
Poems should be no more than 40 lines
Offering an extra prize of £100 for the best poem entitled either Arcadia or Olympics
Closing: 28th February
Reader: Michael Hulse

Cardiff International Poetry Competition
First Prize: £5,000
Submissions: £6 per poem
Poems should be no more than 50 lines
Closing: 2nd March
Readers: Patrick McGuinness, Sinéad Morrissey and Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Poetic Republic Poetry Prize 2012
1st Prize: (Single poem) £2,000
1st Prize: (Portfolio) £1,000
Submissions: £7 per poem
Poems should be no more than 42 lines
Closing date: 30 April 2012
Readers: the entrants themselves judge this online competition. The poems with the best response are featured in an eBook publication, alongside comments on the poems, as chosen by the writer.

The Bridport Prize
First Prize: £5,000
Submissions: £7 per poem
Poems should be no more than 42 lines
Closing: 2nd May 2012
Reader: Gwyneth Lewis

Troubadour International Poetry Prize
First Prize: £2,500, public reading, season membership at the Troubadoour
Submissions: £5 per poem
Poems should be no longer than 45 lines
Closing: 15th October 2012
Readers: Jane Draycott and Bernard O’Donoghue

A tale of a superhero conspiracy to end the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction; Watchmen subverts the genre and tears the masks off of the psychotic personas that are drawn to the essentially crooked street-justice of superheroes. The book causes a rereading of the likes of: Captain America, Batman and (the almost nietzchean fantasy) Superman as vigilante-thugs with mental health problems that are lionised because they serve the law. In an interesting sign of the times a recent Batman Future strip showed the caped crusader breaking a strike at Wayne Industries with chemical weapons.
Despite the attention of literary critics and film-makers to Watchmen, the format is comic strip, not the book that the literary critics view it as, or the gigantic film that was adapted from it: “I turned the corner on the soundstage and the owlship was towering above me 25 feet high” Gibbons told me the story of his visit to the set of The Watchmen. Designs that he had drawn some two decades ago were recently built by an army of filmakers for millions of dollars. Gibbons humbly  suggested that the experience was “a bit surreal”.
While Moore was opposed to the adaptation Gibbon’s sees that comics could be rescued from its slip into the hands of a small niche of fandom, and hopes for the restoration of film to a popular audience through cinema adaptations.
Gibbon’s described how the slow frames between frames and the subtle elements of each story are more important then the “money shots” that younger, university trained, artists tend to focus on. The “muscly superheroes and voluptuous superheroines” that fanboys present to Dave at conventions are only a small part of the craft. “I’m far more impressed when someone shows me how they tell a story.” It’s only through a more widespread understanding of the form, theory and practice, that younger artists and writers can begin to learn how distinctive the needs and potential of this form really are.

Dave Gibbons will be talking at the Comics Passion festival this Saturday

At the Institute Francais this weekend the BD and Comic Passion Festival is going into bilingual warp-drive.

This party boasts space cocktails, a musical drawing event, vinyls are being spun by DJ Sacha Dieu and earlier in the night there is a screening of the Erotic SF Cult Classic.

Buy tickets at www.institute-francais.org.uk

To win a pair of tickets to this insterstellar party just answer this SF related question:

Which brilliant writer wrote the books that were adapted into the movies… Blade Runner, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly (amongst many others)?

And send your answers at the speed of light to:

play.editor@london-student.net

Titled ‘From Facebook to Nassbook’, the exhibition draws on the popular revolution in Egypt earlier this year and explores the presence and role of twenty-first century technology in helping to shape the struggle.

Whilst the role of social media was instrumental, the protesters were soon forced to find another avenue of communication after the Egyptian authorities clamped down and disabled internet access across the country. Hence ‘Facebook’ was supplanted by ‘Nassbook’ – ‘nass’ being the Arabic word for people, representing how word of mouth became the primary source of communication.

The exhibition is co-curated by Sara Raza (co-editor of Ibraaz) and Reedah El-Saie (Mica Gallery).

As well as the main exhibition, there are several other events at the Mica Gallery, ranging from a Mica Iftar gathering August 6th to a Mica Edit Reception on September 7th. The full programme can be found here: http://www.micagallery.com/calendar.html

The exhibition runs until September 8 2011.