Yahoo News On my radar: Chris Steele-Perkins’s cultural highlights
Photographer Chris Steele-Perkins was born in Burma in 1947 to a British father and a Burmese mother, then moved to England aged two and grew up in Burnham-on-Sea. He studied psychology in Newcastle before turning to photography, which has taken him all over the world, from Afghanistan, where he spent time with the Taliban, to Japan, which he visits regularly with his Japanese wife Miyako Yamada. Closer to home, he has documented teddy boys, for his seminal 1979 book The Teds, and extreme poverty in Troubles-riven Belfast. His series The Pleasure Principle is on display at the Leica gallery, W1,, London W1, until 23 March.
1. Radio
In Our Time (BBC Radio 4)
This is such an eclectic dip into so many different subjects – where else in the world can you learn about solar winds one day and Tennyson’s In Memoriam the next? Melvyn Bragg behaves like a rather bad-tempered schoolmaster with the experts he gets on, but he manages them very well – and to get praise from Melvyn at the end is obviously an achievement. I was very interested in the In Memoriam discussion – Tennyson is the poet I go back to more than any other, but I hadn’t realised that his friend Arthur Henry Hallam, the subject of the poem, was a cultural figure in his own right.
2. Film
I don’t go to the cinema much: my film-watching either happens at home or on planes. Coming back from Japan recently, I watched the latest Tarantino film and I was impressed by it. Tarantino gets a lot of stick for gratuitous violence, and there’s certainly some of that at the end, but it’s hyped up to comic proportions. The film is set around the Charles Manson murders and features real people like Bruce Lee, who is portrayed as arrogant and unpleasant, but it mainly focuses on the relationship between a fading TV star (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman, played by Brad Pitt. I found it really enjoyable.
3. Festival
Orchid Festival at Kew Gardens
Even if you’re not into gardening, this annual festival at Kew’s Princess of Wales Conservatory is fantastic – a psychedelic flower show. This year it’s celebrating the Indonesian rainforest, but the stars are the endless varieties of orchids. I’ve been spending more and more time at Kew – they do a lot of festivals and exhibitions. My own garden in East Dulwich isn’t quite on the same scale: I have a 3x3m patch of grass with flowerbeds around it, but I’ve come to enjoy gardening over the past 20 years – and I have an allotment as well where I grow vegetables and fruit.
4. TV
I try to avoid Strictly because there’s so much shouting and screaming and people calling each other “darling”. There’s quite a bit of that on this TV dance competition too, but instead of celebrities falling on their arses, it’s generally people who are unknown, and some of them are tremendously talented. One young woman, Hannah Martin, used to be a rhythmic gymnast but has converted herself into a contemporary dancer. She’s got the most extraordinary body – it’s like liquid – and the liquidity seems to be channelled into some greater purpose. Even if she gets knocked out before the final, I think we’ll be seeing more of her.
5. Book
Café Royal Books – Homer Sykes
Café Royal Books is a publishing venture looking at British documentary photography from the 1960s, 70s and 80s, a very fertile period. The guy who runs it, Craig Atkinson, takes work that isn’t really big enough to be a book and publishes it on a weekly basis, kind of like a zine. One that stands out for me is by the photographer Homer Sykes, covering the 1979 funeral of Blair Peach, who was killed in a racially charged attack in Southall. It’s great that this has been made available as a record – and put together, it’s a really fantastic archive.
6. Cafe
Dulwich Cafe
Lordship Lane in Dulwich, where I live, has turned into a real foodie street. Some of the places to eat are very good and usually fairly expensive. But the Dulwich Cafe continues to be the Dulwich Cafe. It looks like a Wimpy bar from the 1950s, with red seats and bacon and eggs on the menu. I go to Japan a lot, because my wife is Japanese, but when I come back, one of my first pilgrimages is to the Dulwich Cafe for an all-day English. It’s the sort of place where you sit down and a little old lady will tell you that she’s got cataracts, which actually happened to me today.
