Wednesday May 23rd 2012
“We should work for simple, good, undecorated things”
What with us showing at this year’s Clerkenwell Design Week for the first time, it seems right to honour one of our favoured architect/designers here at Albam Towers: Alvar Aalto.
Born in Finland (and so inherently imbued with that special Scandic vision that we love) Aalto is someone we admire for his …
Posted by Alex at 3:25pm
Monday April 30th 2012
“Robert Evans is an outrage. He has no more right to be where he is than a burglar. He has no credentials, none of the requirements for membership. Robert Evans has never even produced a film, doesn’t know that about movies, and so why should he be a boss of Paramount, with control over 25 pictures a year, costing $100 …
Posted by Alex at 9:34am
Tuesday April 24th 2012
The product of a broken home, his mother in and out of institutions, a teenage run-away, school drop out and dead at 27. Basquiat’s life reads like so many black Brooklyners except for the fact that he never became just another stat. Instead his precocious talents as an artist projected and propelled him further than most and into worlds that, …
Posted by Alex at 2:12pm
Tuesday April 17th 2012
“It sounds like a winter record. If you wake up in the middle of the night, and you go out in the garden, everything’s going on out there that you wouldn’t know about. That’s the mood I’m trying to get”
This is what Bjork said of her 2001 album, Vespertine, a record that instantly become one of my favourites, still …
Posted by Alex at 5:05pm
Monday April 2nd 2012
“Climbing is a very creative, artistic thing” says Chris Sharma, “as well as being an athletic sport it’s also about finding beautiful things in nature and interacting with them.”
But Sharma is something of a spiritual brute, a Fauvist of the mountains. An aggressive, primal style is launched upon any cliff he scales. The quiet reverence of a colossal mountain …
Posted by Alex at 9:09am
Monday March 26th 2012
This is a wild man of words but one who manages to write them and, perhaps more importantly, think, in a delicately off-beat manner. Within his pages, filled with his blend of plain-talking impressionism, petrol stations, graveyards and sunlight itself become kaleidoscopic tropes of social interest and poetic rumination.
Like all good writers, Stasiuk has an attractive history of unconvention: …
Posted by Alex at 9:14am
Monday March 19th 2012
June 1996 was a seminal period of my formative years: I was just 13, it was the European Championships and football was coming home – until it was brutally mugged and kidnapped by the Germans. Life was never quite the same.
Prejudicial feelings were swiftly asserted but it’s not what you might think. When the shattered dreams were swept up, …
Posted by Alex at 3:57pm
Monday March 12th 2012
For Anton “Tony” Krupicka, running is all about purity: purity of the moment, purity of life. For him running helps to strip-back the complications of an increasingly complicated world.
This pared-back ethos also defines Krupicka’s very iconic running style, which is to run with as little baggage as possible – so that means no shirt and, ideally, no shoes. Or …
Posted by Andy at 3:39pm
Tuesday March 6th 2012
Depending on your view, the exploits of Alex Honnold (namely, free solo climbing) makes him either an athlete of boundless ability and nerve, or crackpot who’s more machine than man.
Free solo climbing is the scaling of mountains (regularly taller than, say, the Empire State Building) with absolutely no ropes. Indeed, without anything that would mean you weren’t dashed into …
Posted by Andy at 4:05pm
Monday February 6th 2012
Here in The Big Smoke, it’s always important (we think) to remember that there is a whole world beyond the window, that outside the hum and drum of city and suburban life there is a whole world to be discovered and, more importantly, to be enjoyed.
Roger Deakin was just such a person to help remind us city-folk just what …
Posted by Alex at 9:16am
