It's very easy to scoff at Covent Garden, what with its chain stores and grown ...
You’ll have to agree that we’ve been on a bit of a roll of late when it comes to events and our next one looks like we could have another smash hit on our hands. We’re holding it in the already luxurious but now totally done up surroundings of the Cavendish Club, which you may know as No. 5 Cavendish Square, host to many gay goings-on in the past. As well as the usual drinking, carousing, card-swapping and maybe even cab-sharing, this time we are looking forward to welcoming Ivan Massow, who will be talking about developments at Jake (it’s all good!) and other projects he has under his hat. The date for your Smythson/Hello Kitty diaries is Thursday 8th September aka next Thursday and the free welcome drinks will be uncorked at 6.30pm. Click here to RSVP.
We know Tracey Ullman as the rubber-faced star of Girls On Top, The Tracey Ullman Show, Three of a Kind and a fairly dodgy Woody Allen film. Now we will be able to get to know her as a serious actress – sorry, female actor – as she treads the venerable boards of north London’s Almeida Theatre (sidebar: The Almeida restaurant next door really is rather good, you know). The play is My City, it’s by Stephen Poliakoff, it’s about teachers and there will be very few laughs and strictly no funny face pulling. It’s about running into a very influential teacher years later and finding they are actually much darker than you remember. Which we think sounds like excellent stuff. It all starts next Thursday, 8th September and you can get your tickets here.
There’s nothing like a quiet Sunday night in with a glass of something dark and fruity, maybe a delicious bar of something high in cocoa solids and a quality drama on the box. We’ll leave you to select your own high-end snacks and beverages, but we will point you in the direction of Appropriate Adult, a two-part drama that has been smeared in controversy ever since it was commissioned. It’s the story of the social worker who – having just made her kiddies’ tea, the way they do in Gloucester – was assigned a man in custody who, it was felt, didn’t have enough going on in the upstairs department to face the police on his own. That man was serial killer and torturer and general freak of the week Fred West. Starring Dominic West as Fred and Emily Watson as the social worker, it’s a dark, dark thing, the last part in a sort of trilogy that included dramas about The Moors Murderers and The Yorkshire Ripper – and is well worth a watch on Sunday, ITV1 at 9pm. And don’t forget the second part next Sunday.
One of the most gorgeous films of all time, back when Richard Gere was still the handsomest man in the world and director Terrence Malick didn’t feel the need to bore the living bollocks off of us, Days of Heaven is back on the big screen. It’s the basic and brilliant story of a couple who pose as brother and sister to get work on a Texas farm in the early years of the 20th century, but things take a dark turn when the farm owner falls in love with her and… Oh, we don’t want to give it all away. Suffice to say it is visually delicious, has arguably the best soundtrack of all time and performances that make you despair over the fact that Ryan Gosling can be considered a major movie star in this day and age. We really will be the judge of that. See it at the Curzon Soho (we’ll add a link so long as you promise to drop your prices. £3 for a handful of Gummy Bears?!) or as part of the Terence Malick series down at BFI Southbank.
Some people would have it that we only plug the V&A’s new exhibitions because we’re on their permanent launch party list and they don’t ‘alf know how to put on a launch party (the champagne never, ever runs out!). What else is true is that the V&A is just about our favourite museum in the world. We even love the chandeliers in the cafe! And even truer than that, is the V&A‘s next exhibition entitled The Power of Making. This one celebrates, well, just gorgeous things as made by the fair hands of real people going about their business, as well as those who call themselves ‘professional designers’. Featuring over 100 exquisitely crafted objects from around the world, it’s an eclectic mix including a towering prosthetic suit for Stephen Hawking (you can never be too careful!) made of Japanese steel, a high-heeled shoe guitar (multi-tasking!), to a, okay, not quite sure what that is… Anyway, it’s a whole bunch of loveliness, it’s on from 6th September until 2nd January 2012, and we may even stop drinking our champagne to take a look and nod in all the right places.
Peter Ackroyd – variously described as ‘London’s Official Biographer’, ‘The Official Biographer of London’ and ‘London’s Biographer, It’s Official!’ – has a new book out. Which is a big ol’ deal in terms of historical tomes. And an even bigger deal seeing as we’ve had it up to here with David Starkey *reaches very high*, so there’s now room on our bulging shelves for a sturdy work on British history. Enter Ackroyd’s The History of England, Volume I: Foundation (perhaps through a cloud of dry-ice) which covers – with mind-blowing erudition – the history of this green and pleasant and as we go to press warm and sunny land, from the Neolithic period up until the death of Henry VII in 1509. It’s a whopper of a period, but Peter portrays it with such colour, movement, flourish and panache, you’d think it was all for real!
Oh, and there are five more volumes to come. Bang goes our social life!
Oh, and another oh… Peter Ackroyd is giving a talk next Thursday, 8th September at the Southbank Centre, but seeing as that’s the night of the next Jake party no one of merit will be there. Even Peter’s not confirmed yet.
Back when Kate Moss was knee-high to a pop-sock, crinoline was the new black and the name on everybody’s lips was Nell Gwyn, there was a magazine that was actually worth the paper it was printed on. More, even. It was The Face. And when it wasn’t being sued by Jason Donovan for daring to suggest he was same-sex oriented (no, it will never lie), it was producing editorial that people actually remember, and photography that people cut out and stuck on their bedroom walls. Like this one, with said Kate Moss, as shot by the wonderful Corinne Day (and we’re not ones to bandy about ‘wonderful’ like it were a tart looking for a footballer, so you know we mean it). And, just over a year since her death, an exhibition of Corinne’s early work is going on show at the Gimpel Fils gallery, from 1st September until 1st October. It is called Corrine Day: The Face, and all the right people will be going.
The last Jake party was what is known in the business as a smash hit success, with the gorgeous Eight Club fit to bursting with gays-about-town until the latest of earliest hours. And rather than let the grass grow beneath our proverbials, we’ve gone and organised another. This time we’re taking in the sumptuous surroundings of the Cavendish Club (formerly No. 5 Cavendish Square), which has had a whole bunch of money thrown at it and come out the other end even more delicious than ever. And seeing as it’s now all bright eyed and bushy tailed (steady!), they’re throwing open the doors to us lot on Thursday 8th September, from 6.30. Expect free drinks on arrival, all the right gays, and a preview of some of the juicy stuff we have in store for Jake (that’s pricked up your ears, right?).
Oh, and seeing as it’s only two weeks off, best get RSVPing.
You thought London had everything and yet there was a glaring hole right there, staring at us: the over-18s gay pop-up ice-cream parlour! How did we manage without it? What were we doing with ourselves? Put together by The Icecreamists, the jolly japesters behind breast milk ice-cream, which you might have read about, it’s pop-up-ness means it will only be around as the world’s only gay ice-cream bar until the end of September. Expect attention-seeking antics, topless men, nipples and flavours such as Brokeback Mountain, which has two bananas and some crushed nuts and a fruity Glastonberry. We’re not sure whether to recommend the vanilla ice-cream facial or not. Oh, go on, while you’re down there.
You’ll find Queens of the Dessert (what else could it possibly be called) at 15 Maiden Lane, WC2.
A mad plastic surgeon, a woman kept captive, a revolutionary new human skin, an attempted rape, sophisticated interiors, a man kept underground in just his dirty underpants… it can only be the new movie from Spanish enfant terrible Pedro Almodóvar. It’s called The Skin I Live In and quite apart from being right up there with his best (though we still like Pepi, Luci, Bom the best), it also marks his reunion with Antonio Banderas who first came to the world’s (and Madonna’s) attention through his collaborations with Tio Pedro. He’s referred to the movie as horror without the screams but it still has the campiness and the humour that you would expect from our maestro. The Skin I Live In opens today, Friday. Which is tomorrow for some.
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