Lux Laze is a new short film by the incredibly talented Daniel Swan. Time-travel, cartography, pangaea ultima and the neo-brutalist architecture of a merged transatlantic super-city I would describe it, but I’ll leave it for you to decode it from that. You can watch the trailer here. And purchase it here.

Everyone loves the cinema right? And the outdoors? So, outdoor cinema! What a winner.

By Maksymilian Fus-Mickiewicz

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While Alexander has a roster of internationally acclaimed accounts he always maintains a strict ethical code which all members of the Distil Ennui studio abide by. The issue for him is authenticity, never cropping or editing his work – exhibitions take place in abandoned spaces. Like his photography he aims to find the overlooked and the displaced; asking us to engage critically with subjects we may find ordinary. Contrasted as a minimalist Gregory Crawson (of the White Cube) and ‘Man Ray meets Jet Lee’, Alexander James is a man of strong belief who should be taken seriously. As soon as I saw his Organic Studies I knew I had to investigate further. It mattered deeply that the images had had an immediate impact on me without the aid of context or gallery captions. These emotionally charged moments where manufactured chemicals meet delicate flower bouquets transcend language. A fascinating aesthetic that burns the issue of the current oil crisis into the eye of the beholder, refusing to let photography become irrelevant and stale.

How did this project come about? What were the steps you took?

We have had an idea to shoot burning flowers for a while now but couldn’t find a relevant thread or meaning which delayed production. Then the globe concept came about, a planetary sphere which instantly gave us the meaning we were looking for – it evolved over a period of about a week before we got on set, only then did we really have the chance to experiment.

How were the images captured?

These images were shot on Hasselblad medium format equipment on both film and digital mediums. The beauty for me is supported by the in-perfections. I perform no post production whatsoever on my personal works either traditional or digital; always presenting my works ‘as-shot’.

Even on the most planned shoots there are always little accidents. These accidents or imperfections are what suggest the possibilities of developing the image further in a way that I had not thought of. It can however prove very difficult when aiming for such deep blacks with rich detail and tonal range.

What was the chemical process behind these?

We used a chemical compound which anyone with basic chemistry knowledge can do. This was shaped and inserted into the heart of the globe which when lit, started an irreversible burn process where shards of energy engulfed the sphere until it’s inevitable collapse. For me this was just thrilling to shoot. There is something mystical about the moment when light crosses through a lens, things can be very different from one side to the other, especially in this case it all became so magical on film.

Is there a particular reason why you chose flowers which are often associated with femininity?

The flowers specifically in the form of a sphere or circle for me is perhaps a reinforced suggestion. The circle being the most profound and the most common symbol in existence. With the infinite billions of stars, planets, moons and galaxies full of the same. A circle, having no beginning or end, representing infinity, eternity, wholeness and femininity. The floral subject focusses us more on it’s positive symbolism representing the beauty and spiritual power of our environment. We wanted to represent the spiritualized Mother Earth or sacred environment.

Is destruction, raw energy seen as a masculine trait?

No not at all, it is a male doctrine to consider a physical effort to prevail destruction… but I believe that this is baseless, and genderless. I believe that every action has a direct and opposing reaction, we all fade to dust. Whilst now I consider myself a mid-late career artist, it is something that grabs my thoughts more and more these days and I use my work to help express this.

When seeing these images I immediately thought of the BP oil spill, the heat of the chemical explosion with nature. Would you say the crisis had an influence on you?

I am absolutely thrilled that you picked up on the BP driving force behind these images. As an artist I am always looking to engage art with key artistic, intellectual and political issues of our time, I have a responsibility to do so. Whilst I am not making a comment on BP themselves this is very much a series based on our hunger for consumerist destruction. I want to re-engage only but a thread of thought into the wonder of our environment, perhaps making the viewer consider the concessions that they could make to stop this stupidity.

What role did Davy Pittoors have in styling?

Davy only recently joined the team but is already finding his groove. He has a clean, discerning and extremely detailed aesthetic which was a direct influence on the series. He was Instrumental in effecting the styling and concept brief both before and during the shoot. He was a great help accomplishing the aspired quality of work I had in mind.

The image represents a fleeting moment. Do you think the oil crisis will be forgotten about quickly?

I think it’s legacy will live on for a long time to come, and rightly so. Now we can all see that essentially we are tapping into something buried deep under water for a reason. Hopefully this series will be a reminder to err caution. Those who so readily forget the past are likely to repeat themselves.

You work with a lot of commercial clients, has the crisis made you think twice about working with un-ethical companies?

It has re-affirmed the belief certainly, although for the past eight years we as a studio have had a strict suppliers & client ethical policy in place. During that period we have sourced all our energy from renewable sources, we all bike it around and have a hybrid studio runaround car in London for when we need it, we also offset our carbon emissions on every travel booking and our office supplies come from green sources provided by ethical companies wherever possible.

That includes our client rosta I have refused major projects to the great detriment of the business, because I have strongly disagreed with an ethical position on the business model. I remember just recently a major hotel client that we had worked with for years, were just about to fly us to Dubai to shoot their latest property prior to opening. It was a big job which we had been planning for months, when we discovered that the client had a monstrous idea to refrigerate 4 acres of beachfront – yes you heard me right… literally cooling the sand so that guests did not burn their feet. Imagine the power consumption of a four acre fridge in the middle of the desert – and leaving the door open.

I am already a serious doubter of all that goes on in Dubai after spending a lot of time out there. Things like paying construction workers $25.00 a week and housing them in squalid conditions with minimal equipment or regard for their safety, all whilst working on some of the most expensive real estate in the world. If they are injured at all on site, their work visa is canceled and they are unceremoniously thrown out of the country as they are now unable to work.

It took no time at all to reject the brief, it sounds foolish now as I know there would be ten suitably qualified photographers ready to take over the job within minutes, but that’s just it really – I wouldn’t be doing it.

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Maks is freelance journalist. He has contributed articles to Don’t Panic, FACT, USELESS and AnOther Man as well as managing his own arts and culture website Haus Digital. Maks is interested in photography, graphic design and instillation as well as the relationship between cultural, gender and sexual identity in relation to art and architecture. He will be regularly contributing articles to the Off Modern blog.

East London’s finest festival is back for it’s fourth year with yet another spectacular line up; The Fall, Atlas Sound, No Age, These New Puritans, Fake Blood, Joker, Memory Tapes and Mount Kimbie are all playing, even the fantastic OFF MODERN DJ TEAM are set to grace the Blogger’s Delight stage with a life changing, show stopping, weekend defining set.

To celebrate this once in a lifetime opportunity we are going to give away two free tickets to whoever can answer this simple question; what is the best song you heard at Off Modern last year?

Send your answers to contact@offmodern.com - the winner will be the person we agree with the most.

By Digby Warde-Aldam

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…And so, in sync with “Austerity Britain”, as promoted by our dear new leader, I have taken the plunge; I’m mucking in just like everyone else. We’ve all got to do our bit, don’t we? The point of this Big Society is that we’re united, empowered, ennobled by the fact that we… can’t afford a bus ticket.

That’s right. I’m skint. I, who have boldly been going to shit films just so you don’t have to, can no longer afford to support my three movie a week habit. I’m down to £4 per day, not counting booze and fag allowances, and believe me, it’s fucking horrible.

I mean, I don’t actually do much but watch films, be they budget DVDs or opening nights at the Barbican. It’s not pretty. If I have to watch Breathless again, I will steal a car, drive to Paris, and start hitting on underage American girls, all the while attempting to collect nonexistant debts…

Seriously, though, there is a huge, screen-shaped hole in my current existence. I’ve been trying to fill it by simply reading about the new releases. This makes it slightly difficult to write a film column for South East London’s premier culture blog; Greenberg seems to mirror my own predicament rather too closely for comfort. The new Resnais movie looks like the same ol’ quirky wank that any self-respecting nouvelle vague director phones in at every two year interval, and all this Israeli/Palestinian cinema that seems to be gaining more column inches than the Middle East conflict does lives is all a bit too political for a simpleton such as I.

However, one imminent release HAS caught my eye; l’amacoeur, or Heartbreaker, a “charming and smoothly executed” (thanks, imdb) French romantic comedy, which seems to be scene-for-scene apeing the plot of the almost-unfortunately-named David Mirkin’s 2001 comedy Heartbreakers.

It may surprise you, since in the past, I have written about, like, y’know, serious films, but I LOVED Heartbreakers. As a romcom, it was up there with the very best. Now, I know the average OffModern reader will groan at the very thought that a romcom can be good, let alone tolerable, but I think this much maligned genre is one of the most refined and delicate art forms in existence.

Please, I beg you! Let me explain myself; I was raised on the chick flick. Between 1996 and 2004, I sat through every major romcom release. Whenever a Meg Ryan title arrived at the local video rental store, it was big news for my family. We’d gather around our TV set, and see the same old story played out on what seemed like a fortnightly basis. What I began to realise after a while was that, as a sonnet is to poetry, a romcom is to mainstream cinema.

Much like Racinian tragedy, pretty much every romcom follows a very narrow plot. I shan’t even bother explaining this plot, as every human being over the age of three months in the western world has seen a romcom. Oh, alright, then; handsome boy meets cheesecake girl to mutual indifference. But wait! Fundamentally, they are both similarly misunderstood and, like, deep; it must be love. Or is it? Inevitably, some dreadful misunderstanding occurs, which leaves both parties heartbroken… No! Wait! Cue mad rush to whatever unlikely scenario is enabled by the preceding drama.

Anyway, the modern romcom follows these rules. It has to. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a modern romcom.

There are the good (Heartbreakers, Four Weddings and a Funeral, the much underrated Down with Love), the bad (How to lose a guy in ten days, Martha, meet Frank, Daniel and Laurence) and the unwatchable (almost everything else, particularly if it stars Jennifer Aniston), but the first category refines this narrow spectrum of narrative opportunities into something truly wonderful.

I know it’s easy to slag off Four Weddings (I have. In this very blog…), but it truly is one of the finest films of the last twenty years. It is a comedy of bourgeois manners unrivalled by anything else I have seen, bar, perhaps, the more artsy-fartsy oeuvre of Whit Stillman. The tired format is vehemently adhered to, yet it is of little consequence. The little embellishments, the sub-plots and auxiliary characters are so engrossing and well-observed that the central drama, and indeed, Andie MacDowell, are rendered as totally secondary to what occurs elsewhere. I have always though of Hugh Grant as the last great English filmstar, and this is the film which seals the deal. The fact that the gay characters in the film are fully formed personae rather than a bunch of screaming queens or tragic Earls Court inhabitants (as sadly, almost any celluloid homosexual has been before or since) is yet another reason to reclaim this truly wonderful film from cuddly religious festival-repeat ubiquity.

There. I have just sacrificed my dignity in public. Kill me now.

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Digby is a journalist, student and film fanatic from South London. He writes for his local newspaper, drinks cider and eats chikpea based soups, followed by entire packs of smuggled Russian cigarettes. He contributes monthly film columns to this ‘ere blog. Enjoy.

Following on from the Astral Pain issue comes the Power issue of internationally adored cult magazine FUN. Focusing, as ever, on people and ideas that you might not find elsewhere, issue 5 covers satanic ritual abuse, bomber-jacket ripping fetishists, and a mundane day out with Britain’s crappest racist, as well as much more super fun stuff including an exciting look at the world of steroid fuelled murder and an in depth chat about The X Factor with Anjem Choudry.

The issue will be launched at the Alibi on Kingsland Road on Thursday the 15th of July. As well as giving away copies of the magazine, there will be free Jägerbombs, and music provided by international jet-setting DJs like Black Rod, Iwillfuckingkillyou, Ray Cyst, Ronoyjoy Dam, Feeding Time and Off Modern. If you want to come to the party RSVP to hiya@greatenjoyment.com, because they have a very strict guest list policy and only want A-list famous people reading our magazine.

The death of J. G. Ballard presents the modern writer - the writer of modernity - with no small stylistic and thematic barrier. The dominant imagery bequeathed by Ballard being dystopian and apocalyptic, how does one write, in his wake, the post-apocalypse (after his predictions have come true, as has often happened)? One way, perhaps, is that related by Iain Sinclair in London: City of Disappearances: ‘Ballard, in an essay on the director Michael Powell, suggested that drama in the “serious” novel of the future would “migrate from the characters’ heads to the world around them.”’

Sinclair is one great living writer whose focus is on place, the world around, yet his corresponding focus on the effects of place upon its inhabitant(s) means that his work stops short of Ballard’s predicted aesthetic. Sinclair is as interested in the subjective experience of place, by him or by others, as he is in the objectivity of place. Subjective romanticisation of place, or for that matter subjective unromanticisation, has awkward implications for fiction. Handled badly (that is, Sinclair very much excluded), subjectivity is vanity - why should a reader necessarily care how a person or persons experience a place? This last stand for the vanity of postmodern self-conscious narration could become a literature bearing little resemblance to the actual experience of living in a modern city.

It has resulted in what is being called faction, the grounding of personal perception in more reliable fact. Since any text will comprise elements of both fiction and fact (language itself belonging to both states), faction is a non-genre, and is a lazy route for fiction to take. It is insufficient to merely refer to a place; without verbal mimicry of the experience of place, which is the experience of living in the world, a street name will suggest nothing.

More positively, and paradoxically, contemporaneous to the rise in popularity of the heritage industry and of environmental awareness, the memorialization of place, through this very subjectivity, is leading to a more democratic and objective romanticisation of place. In short, were everyone to tell the story of a place, every place would find its narrative, which is objectivity- place takes over from people, as in the suggestion of Ballard’s fiction that nature will regain control over man. Unexpected architectures are enjoying reconsideration, Brutalism in particular a source of new nostalgia. Part of this trend must surely be recession, which has created through the act of uncreation a stasis in building, and correspondingly in demolition. The pre-built goes out to meet the un-built, the new and the old are each structurally empty, are frameworks. Aesthetically, future and past look no different. How we experience cityscapes must take account of the city as it stands at present, in the immediate. At a static time, it is inappropriate to try to give narratives to places.

In any case, the city will outlast its inhabitants. The current sense that we are living in a London that is “after London,” a term derived from Richard Jefferies’ book of that name, must be reconfigured- we are living both after and before London, in a static city. Writing about London should now take account of an aesthetic of stasis- no more grand narratives- and by taking account of shapes and colours of a confused cityscape, should not narrate, but give- show, not tell. If fiction, as Sinclair says, is that which has not happened yet, then the city is always fictional, not factional. Styles and techniques beyond the prosaic are required to meet the city experientially. One architectural theory suggests that to change a place, one should not build upon it, should make it better by making it the same. A new fiction will take a similar stance.

This article is taken from the first issue of the Off Modern Journal, which you can buy here. William Shutes is contributing to a forthcoming book about Syd Barrett to be published by Essential Works.

Hello everyone, a quick message here, Peckham’s Area10 is currently fighting for survival, as Southwark Council have given it till 15th July 2010 to find new premises. This is pretty awful, Area10 has been around for 8 years, hosting some wonderful exhibitions and very fun parties in its time, it’d be a sad day for South London if it were to close it’s doors forever so that the council can turn it into a massive car park or something. YOU can help try and save it though, you can sign a petition here, or write to Harriet Harman, MP for Peckham and Camberwell. You can also email these Southwark Councillors and tell them what you think; peter.john@southwark.gov.uk, veronica.ward@southwark.gov.uk, fiona.colley@southwark.gov.uk, althea.smith@southwark.gov.uk, sunil.chopra@southwark.gov.uk.

“Termination of our lease means that all future workshops, events and exhibitions are canceled, including partnerships with Battersea Arts centre, Thames Festival, Edinburgh Festival, London Design Week, Jeunes Talents du Cirque and the Wallis Gallery. AREA10 has helped to bring nearly a million pounds worth of investment to the local area through grants, arts funding and in-kind support, this investment will cease. So to will its educational partnerships with The Royal College, Goldsmiths, University of the Arts, Camberwell College, London College of Communication, Wimbledon, Central St.Martins and the educational opportunities it gives to so many young and unemployed people in the area.”

You may know James Kirkup as the guy who does all the poster designs for Off Modern, but is also part of the creative collective Fragment vs Division with fellow graphic designer Ken Moore. They are currently working towards the first issue of a new arts newspaper, but first they are going to through a fantastic party at the Social on Little Portland Street. Its free, we are djing, no excuses.