CUTS

Documents of what built London’s street culture (for want of a better term) seem to be dropping as if an embargo on nostalgia just got lifted. You can expect a couple of films on the city’s role in creating fashion cliques that dipped into hip-hop, skatewear and high fashion with Zelig-like ease (well, the magazine coverage made it look effortless) and a couple of books on related topics too. Another series of spots I read about in The Face time and time again were the Cuts hair salons (that name seemed to switch with each successive move) — Kensington-based until 1984’s Soho opening, where shifted three times, resulting in its current Dean Street location. Cuts founder James Lebon’s contribution to the culture is colossal (this obituary offers an overview of his achievements) from celebrity hairdresser status to early retirement from the scissors to get behind the camera and make films and music videos (trivia: if you watched Channel 4’s Passengers, then you definitely saw his work at some point). Now there’s film made of archive footage of Cuts’ history — which includes a heavy role in defining Buffalo style and creating the much imitated and maligned ‘Hoxton fin’ in the early 2000s — with the in-production Cuts the Movie documentary by Sarah Lewis. Taken from 18 years worth of film, and with access to Mark Lebon’s archive, it should show the changing face of Soho (which managed to alter significantly in the few short years I worked there) and, with Crossrail’s Godzilla steps, seems to be rapidly changing for the worse. In Cuts the Movie’s late 1990s footage, it’s pretty much a different world (bar the invincible Bar Italia). I can’t wait to see this one and the obligatory crowdfunding appeal (this time using London’s Phundee) kicking off in mid-April.

I horde books on sports footwear for both work and my personal curiosity. Some are good. Most are wasted opportunities. Largely it’s down to the writer not knowing anything about the subject matter and covering what a cursory Google search would yield, or a lack of any cultural context and academic approach. As somebody whose vision of brands and their output is completely clouded by years of obsession, I’d love to read something that really told the history of the performance shoe from the beginning to the billion pound industry we see today. I’d go nuts for a 128 page book on the history of designer brands and their forays into sportswear to be honest. I know I’ll end up grabbing Out of the Box: the Rise of Sneaker Culture, which releases via Rizzoli this July for completists sake, but I’m expecting something a little better than the same old same, because shoes have been shot from Toronto’s Bata Shoe Museum (where the original Out of the Box exhibition ran from April 2013 until June last year), the objects on display date back to the 1800s and it promises some all-important (provided you didn’t sign up to look at the same set of Jordans and Yeezys that everyone owns). As the writer of the best book on this topic ever, Bobbito Garcia knows and Elizabeth Semmelhack knows about footwear to a scholarly degree. As obnoxious as the cover is, it seems like a fair reflection of the horrible state of things right now.

FOOD, SHOES, FOOTBALL & HUMANOIDS

I got tardy with blogging this week. Apologies. More freeform nonsense today—I can’t think of single running theme, so I felt inclined to up whatever’s interesting to me at this hour in time. Football magazines, meditations on a Japanese family, Bobbito and humanoids are floating around somewhere up there, and it all makes a sort of sense somewhere in my psyche. Hunger leads me to ponder the Criterion edition of Kore-ada’s ‘Still Walking’ next February. I have a fragmented relationship with films like this—one part of me wants to watch Jeff Speakman in ‘The Perfect Weapon’ and the other wants to let slow-moving, periodically powerful films like this wash over me. To be honest, it could bore me to deep sleep some days, but with the right removal of distractions and at least 9 hours sleep prior and I’m lost in this day in the life of a family still in a state of mourning. But as with ‘Tampopo’ over two decades before, I’m infatuated with the food. Sweetcorn tempura? Pork belly kakuni? Delicious. I just watch it for the food. The Blu-ray even comes with a new essay on the film featured in the film—that ritualistic, painstaking preparation is hypnotic. ‘Still Walking’ is one of the ultimate moments in gastro-cinema.

Just as being teetotal is a guaranteed route to tiresome conversations based around provincial British expectations of how one should carry on, not being preoccupied with football has been the bane of my smalltown existence for years. Yet I am preoccupied with the sport’s nature of obsession and sadder stories…or Edmundo getting a monkey drunk…or Carlton Palmer’s appearance in the Guiness Book of World Records as part of a Cub Scout hopscotch team. ‘The Green Soccer Journal’ is both hardcore, wonderfully presented and—at £5—it can’t be accused of being the publication of the Rolex and prawn sandwich brigade. The articles on the sad story of Justin Fashanu and the apparently mad yet brilliantly sane John Portsmouth Football Club Westwood are brilliant, appealing to my taste for the darker and more eccentric side of the game. Mr. Neil Bedford and Mr. Stephen Mann’s work in there is good—kudos to Adam Towle and James Rope for getting ‘The Green…’ together.

Taken from the blog of Haunted Fire Studios. Their work is excellent and this sums up the film perfectly.

Trailers From Hell keeps on bringing it too. I loved Piranha 3D. Alexandre Aja answers the Cramps’ question ‘How Far Is Too Far?’ with a Gallic shrug and just turns more and more teens into mincemeat. the propeller scalping was a work-of-art and while it’s a remake of Joe Dante’s (who started Trailers From Hell in the first place) ‘Piranha,’ I think there’s a substantial influence from the ultimate Roger Corman production—the gloriously named ‘Humanoids From the Deep.’ It’s one of the most distasteful films I ever saw, yet it delivers on female nudity, splatter and absolute mayhem, forsaking plot for relentless limb tearing. If you want more of a sell-in on this b-movie masterpiece from the fantastic New World stable, Mick Garris commentates on the trailer here. Rape monsters aren’t to all tastes, but it’s too relentlessly trashy for me to sit back and ponder the non-PC nature of the production. Doug McClure—who inspired Troy McClure—has a substantial role too. Slime, Doug and exploding bellies. What more can I say?

From initial reactions, I’m not convinced by Sneakerpedia—it’s not the exhaustive nerd search engine I’d been hunting for. At all. Woody upped the ante with his Sneaker Museum site, which at present, appeals to my personal level of strangeness (I need all those Air Apparent colourways—did they all make production?) but at least, via Foot Locker folks, I got to talk to Bobbito about his mysterious gold swoosh AF1 highs from the Source feature back in 1991 yesterday for Crooked. Check it out here. Bob is a good guy.