Sheffield is fast becoming the cultural city of the North. Not only do we have the spectacular Winter Gardens and Millenium Gallery, we also host the Cannes of the documentary filmmaking world, Sheffield International Documentary Film Festival,  as well as hosting Sheffield's growing comedy festival, Grin Up North.

I'll be blogging about some of the films from the Doc/Fest but as I'm getting married in just over a fortnight and organising it all myself,  you'll have to give me a bit of slack on the blogging front!

In the meantime here are The Everly Pregnant Brothers, one of the country's foremost Ukulele bands. They supported Eddie Izzard and Ross Noble recently at the Sheffield City Hall for Ross Noble's charity gig in aid of  Riders For Health. This charity manages and maintains motorcycles for health workers delivering lifesaving healthcare to remote communities in Africa. By ensuring health workers have access to vehicles that never break down, this charity is making sure millions of people across Africa receive regular reliable healthcare.

I filmed The Everly Pregnant Brothers busking outside Sheffield City Hall one Saturday lunchtime during Grin Up North, and here they are...

The internationally acclaimed Sheffield Doc/Fest kicks off again from the 4th to the 8th of November for its fifteenth year.

One thing I particularly like about this year's programme is the highlighting of docs having been produced as a result of previous Sheffield Doc/Fest Meetmarket pitches, where filmmakers meet commissioning editors. The Meetmarket is now one of the those industry must-attends for documentary filmmakers trying to get their films off the ground. A bit like a sweetshop for documentary filmmakers. Rows and rows of jars of commissioning editors. Yummy.
Another highlight to this year's festival is the screening of R.J.Cutler's acclaimed documentary The September Issue.


"Fashion is a religion. This is a bible." The fashion industry cannot be serious. Oh woops, it is. Well, it's not a great big secret that religion is responsible for mass brainwashing, war and self-delusion, not to mention unhappiness, so the poster says it all really.

All the way through viewing The September Issue online here I kept thinking that this film should be called "Portrait of a Sad Lady." Anna Wintour looks perpetually sad, grim, bored and unfulfilled. But then I reminded myself that this is not an intimate portrait of the inner life of a human being, as you will find in the  documentaries of Sundance award-winning documentary filmmaker Sean McAllister for example, but a portrait of a person in a powerful career position, at work.

Anna Wintour heads a huge organisation in the most bitchy industry on earth. Of course she's got to be seen to be cold and hard. She spends her working life being scrutinised, criticised and under constant attack. Any chink in the armour and she'll bleed. I don't believe for one minute that off duty she doesn't occasionally put her feet up on the sofa and roar with laughter at something funny on the tele. And even sometimes dribble food down her chin when she's eating. She's a human being for god's sake. I would have liked to have seen more of that human being, but this wasn't the documentary for it. This, as it says on the tin, is about the production of The September Issue, not an intimate portrait of Anna Wintour, human being.


Vogue Artistic Director Grace Coddington, who does come across as a much warmer, artistic person in the documentary, at one point says to an underling, "You must demand or you will be blamed." Yeah it's dog eat dog in the Vogue offices. There's more warmth between a bunch of starving children living in the slums of Jakarta than amongst these people in this supposed glamorous industry. But since when did glamour ever equate with happiness? Anna Wintour defends herself by stating that the fashion industry gets criticised by those who feel left out of the "cool group":

"What I often see is that people are scared of fashion — because they're frightened or insecure, so they put it down. On the whole, people who say demeaning things about our world, I think it's because they feel in some way excluded or not part of the "cool group." Just because you like to put on a beautiful Carolina Herrera dress of a pair of J Brand blue jeans instead of something basic from K-Mart doesn't mean you're a dumb person. There is something about fashion that can make people very nervous."


 
As TatianaTheAnonymousModel points out in the best article I've read yet about The September Issue,
"It's often those who themselves are most desperate to be taken seriously who are quickest to project "insecurity" onto others."

Just what I was thinking, Tatiana. I'm not scared of fashion. I've modelled, designed and made my own clothes, am fascinated by fabrics and can spot a Matthew Williamson from the other side of the ground floor of Debenhams, as I did with my wedding dress. But the fashion industry, whose laws are decreed not only by body fascist women like Wintour but also by gay men who want every woman to look like an adolescent male, is unhealthy and leads to millions of women being uncomfortable and unhappy with their bodies. That fundamental problem is what attracts criticism fuelled not by petty teenage jealousy through wanting to run with "the cool crowd", but genuine criticism from women of all ages. Jesus, Anna, I was a stay-at-home mother of three and now I'm a granny. You don't get cooler than that, love.

Hold on, Anna's got her work head on. She doesn't really believe in a cool crowd and she isn't really  a body fascist. She's just a burd who cares about her job and to do that well, has to keep the armour polished. We can all breathe a sigh of relief. She's just like all the rest of us workaholics, only with an expensive face.*

* Ouch, that sounded bitchy. Which article am I writing again? Oh yeah. The one about the fashion industry. That's OK then.

What I loved about The September Issue apart from all of it.

The editing. Just gorgeous.
The shot of the gold fringed flapper dress.


The focus pulls.
The model laughing as she ate the tarte aux framboises.
The music. Ladytron's Destroy Everything You Touch was perfect.
Bob and the jumping model.
Grace Coddington getting the public recognition she damn well deserves. 


I will be on the information desk at Sheffield Doc/Fest from 8.30am until 1.30pm for the duration of the festival, wearing my signature black Kangol beret with a different coloured swansdown bobble on it every day.

Below: Trailer for The September Issue.








Sheffield Doc/Fest site
September Issue site
The Gawker - How Grace Coddington Stole The September Issue from Anna Wintour
The Huffington Post - edited transcript of conversation between Vogue Creative Director Grace Coddington and Vogue editor Jay Fielden at a New York Public Library event ("Close-Up on Grace Coddington") on October 20, 2009.
Sheffield Doc/Fest on facebook
September Issue on facebook
Pixelwitchpictures (who took the Heather/Vivienne shot) Shipley Harley Davidson Club Calendar 2010

Sheffield and Berlin DJ, and general all round superstar Ralph Razor recently celebrated his birthday at Penelope's in Sheffield City Centre, under the Academy, formerly the legendary Roxy Disco.

I say all round superstar. That's because Ralph is one of those people who is famous by default even though the world outside Sheffield and Berlin may not know it yet; a bit like Robbie Williams was already famous before he joined Take That.

Ralph's 30th birthday party and portrait unveiling, heralded in Sheffield's Autumn Season in true Bohemian Burlesque style. Here are some pics and an interview with the man himself.









Ralph Razor DJing at the book launch for my erotic novel Mother-in-Law, Son-in-Law, Sheffield, 2009.

Robert Kirby: "I'm a bit of a luddite, I'm a bit old-fashioned. I studied classical music in the sixties and I read music at Cambridge University...I still write with manuscript paper at a table, not at an instrument. I write like, I was going to say like Beethoven but nobody writes as good as Beethoven in the same way, and I'm not dead."

Robert Kirby, who passed away this week, was an old friend of Nick Drake's from Cambridge Uni and arranged the majority of Five Leaves Left, as well as touring on keyboard with The Strawbs and working with Paul Weller and Elvis Costello.

"The first strong memory I have of Nick was at the second or third session for Five Leaves Left. Richard Hewson, a well known arranger, and a fifteen piece orchestra had been brought in to arrange Nick's songs. Nick started getting hotter and hotter under the collar. He was very young and he had struck me as a person you could push about -- some people in a recording session will do whatever you tell them -- but he was getting quietly more and more aggravated, and in the end he dug his heels in and dismissed the arrangements. He said he'd get this friend at Cambridge, Robert Kirby, he thought would be much more sympathetic to what he was doing. Robert had never before done anything in his life in a recording studio. But two weeks later we booked him together with a bunch of musicians- a smaller bunch than the first time, I remember... We were flabbergasted. He was so good."

John Wood, sound engineer for Five Leaves Left.

Further from Robert Kirby's Wiki entry:

"On 2 July 2005, Kirby conducted an 18-piece orchestra in Manhattan's Central Park for a show of Drake's music, using his original scores. Five Leaves Left was performed in its entirety as well as excerpts from Bryter Later and Made To Love Magic. The show starred guitarist Josh Max and singer Julie James of the Manhattan-based group The Maxes, and was attended by 3,000 Drake fans from all over the US."

Below: Interview with Robert Kirby. (If you shot this firstly thank you and secondly please email me so I can credit you and give you a link.) 







Below: Recording session for the string parts of the song "This Life" from Luke Jackson's album "...And Then Some" at the Aerosol Grey Machine recording studio in Sweden. Robert Kirby conducts the October 2nd strings - nine players from Malmö's Opera Orchestra. Christoffer Lundquist is producing. More about this occasion on Luke's MySpace blog.








Further reading:
Interview with Robert Kirby by nickdrake.com's Matt Hutchinson
The Guardian Obituary