Tag Archives: Brighton

Brighton, Brighton Life, Cinema, Film, Francis Ford Coppola, Megalopolis

Film – news, views and reviews by Ruby Ephstein

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The Whistler kicks off its new Arts section – coming soon to a website near you – with a new film column. To start, our new columnist Ruby Ephstein looks forward to Francis Ford Coppola’s new opus Megalopolis and looks back at his greatest hits.

YOU WOULD THINK he’d had enough masochism for one lifetime, but no. Nearly half a century after shooting began on Apocalypse Now, a brutal three-year marathon during which he almost blew up his career and killed himself (never mind several others, including his long-suffering wife Eleanor), the godfather of modern American filmmaking is still hellbound on the trail of his holy grail. 

 That I feel compelled to identify Francis Ford Coppola as Papa Coppola – in deference to Sofia, herself an extraordinary director, and Roman, Wes Anderson’s favourite co-scripter – confirms how long it’s been since the chef behind the juiciest slices of prime Hollywood beef and dripping devoured by multiple generations concocted something meaty or beaty, or even merely big and/or bouncy.

 Happily, Megalopolis, a dish nearly half a century in the prepping and blending and revising and reheating, will finally be served this year, quite possibly as the main course for the Cannes opening gala on May 14.

 Has there ever been a more quotable screenwriter? Not unless you don’t have the foggiest what napalm smells like in the morning, don’t consider making offers that can’t be refused or don’t prefer cannolis to guns. Like Van Morrison, Papa deposited enough, early enough and in enough memory banks, not to have to fret overmuch when muse deserted and magic fizzled.

 Yet still that soul-naked ambition burns inside Papa like no filmmaker since Orson Welles, the fellow rebel colossus he resembles in too many ways for his own comfort, not least a Jupiternian ego and an obsession with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the legendarily unfilmable novella that thwarted Welles and confined Nic Roeg to a TV movie adaptation yet sired Apocalypse Now, perhaps the most audacious and purely cinematic of all Oscar winners (for sound and camerawork).    

 The vast cast for Megalopolis, oft-characterised as “a Utopian parable”, ranges from the tried and trusted (Talia “Connie” Shire, Laurence “Mr Clean” Fishburne) to old masters (Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, Ratso and Joe Buck reunited) and new (Adam Driver, Jason Schwartzman, Shia LaBeouf). The woman around whom that hefty pack of chaps revolves, Nathalie “Missandei” Emmanuel, is Julia, a sow in the middle tugged between father pig and lover pig, the latter an idealistic architect designing a post-disaster NYC, played by the ever-noble Forrest Whitaker. Then, inconveniently, came 9/11.

 For rather more enlightening insights, dig into Sam Wasson’s terrific The Path To Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story (2023). Note that disarmingly honest and indefinite “A”. This is but one Papa story.

 It spins around Zoetrope, Papa’s utopian dream factory, which collapsed under the weight of hubris and what most punters saw, wrongly, as a gossamer-thin romantic musical: One From The Heart, a lavish, adventurous project that suffered most from one of the few times Eleanor wasn’t so tolerant of the philanderer whose agonies birthing Apocalypse Now in the Philippines she chronicled so brilliantly and compassionately in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

 By May 2021, Papa had plunged $120m of his own money into Megalopolis, plus a fair chunk of that Napa Valley wine empire. Even this February’s release of the title card was an event. So tightly have the wraps been kept, I can’t whet your appetite any further, although the principals’ names (Caesar, Cicero) might just indicate the script’s origins. Instead, let’s consult Papa himself.

 “I am vicino-morte,” Wasson relates him saying while poring over one recent “final” draft, the sense of déjà vu presumably acute. In the vicinity of death. Just as it was in the days of Kilgore and Kurtz.

 How can you not love the smell of impending triumphant resurrections in the morning?     

Papa’s Primest Cuts

  1. Apocalypse Now
  2. The Godfather II
  3. The Godfather I
  4. The Godfather III
  5. The Conversation
  6. Rumble Fish
  7. Tucker: The Man And His Dream
  8. One From The Heart
  9. Gardens Of Stone
  10. The Outsiders
Brighton, Cafe culture, Gail's Bakery

More than just a breadhead

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The very word Gail’s got the armchair grumpies and keyboard warriors out in force, but slow down. Put away your prejudices. Just because somewhere has more than one branch doesn’t meant they’re the bad guys. Gilly Smith reports

Once upon a time in Brighton, you could gauge the feel of a neighbourhood by whether or not it had a Tin Drum. The family-run chain of bars and eateries, latterly serving charcuterie boards from the owners’ home-raised pigs, first opened on Dyke Road, home now to The Cow, and became a badge of gentrification. These days, it’s a Wolfox. Or maybe a Gail’s.

The number of Gail’s opening across the south east has long exceeded a bakers’ dozen. Our new one in the Dials will be the 130th to opens its doors since the first bakery over 30 years ago in Hampstead High Street. The new Gail’s set up shop in Night Shift, formerly the collaboration between Flour Pot, Curing Rebels, Curio Wines, and local artist, She Paints, which has camped out there since the demise of Brighton-born Small Batch. And it’s already had a pasting. It was daubed with graffiti declaring it ‘boring’ before it had even opened, a spray-painted penis summing up the outpouring of anti-establishment feelings all over social media. 

Which is odd really, as Gail herself was a bit of a radical.

Gail’s began with a mission to do things differently. Back in the early 1990s, it created a bit of a rise in the restaurant industry by taking the values of sour dough – slow, crafted, natural, like bread used to be, as bread should be. 

At its helm was artisanal baker, Gail Mejia, whose ironically named Bread Factory had been a wholesale retailer in Hampstead. She and her tiny team of bakers quickly realised that what they were making for top notch restaurants just wasn’t available in most neighbourhoods. They decided to fix that, and Gail’s Bakery was born.

Thirty years later, Gail is a biodynamic farmer in Portugal, as Tom Molnar (pictured), Gail’s CEO tells me as we chat about the new opening in The Dials. “She spent 10 really hard years before I met her, putting together the bakers, working with some top chefs, and building the thing that I fell in love with.”  A disruptor, a visionary, she was part of the Slow Food movement that has been so influential in making us rethink our relationship with food.

“She represents a whole bunch of hippies in food who changed so much,” says Tom. He means chefs like Rose Gray, Alistair Little and Sally Clarke who came back to London from America in the 80s and 90s with a dream of a simpler way of eating fresh, organic food, as  championed by restaurateur and food legend, Alice Waters. Fermented sour dough was just part of the mix. ‘When everything was becoming mass (market), they just stuck to their guns and said, ‘Look, that doesn’t make sense’. It wasn’t the engineers and the business people that got it right” says Tom, a former management consultant who recognised the potential for Gail’s back in 2005, “it was the hippies and the food pioneers.”

Now 130 Gail’s bakeries are quietly changing the food industry, not least by working with Natoora, a distribution hub on a mission to fix the food system by building direct relationships with small-scale growers and independent producers.  Gail’s distributes its surplus food through Neighbourly, a network of over 29,000 charities and community groups and an award-winning giving platform “that connects company funds, surplus and volunteer time with local causes to make a positive impact.” But does any of that matter to the customers? 

Presumably it doesn’t to Juliet who wonders on Instagram how they justify £5 for a pain au chocolat in a cost-of-living crisis. Or Laura on Seven Dials Facebook group who’s boycotted Gail’s since they stopped taking cash. “Maybe not all of them”, concedes Tom. “Maybe there’s 10-20% that do care.”  So who tells them about the spirit of Gail that’s still stirred into every loaf of bread so long after she left the building to sow her own seeds.  “Yeah, it’s tricky”, admits Tom. There’s no messaging in the shops, and you’d have to read the website to get any real sense of what Gail’s is all about. Tom says he struggles with how loud the revolution should be. “You don’t want to be the person at the party who talks all the time, and you don’t want to be that person who doesn’t say anything. You’ve got to be somewhere in between to be heard. And I don’t know if we found the right balance yet.”  

I think he’s missing a trick; give me some blackboards in a café telling the back stories of growers and carbon reducing mission statements, and I’m in. Tom doesn’t think it would have been Gail’s style. “She’s still one of my teachers’, he says. “I’m just trying to do my best to keep her view on food alive. I didn’t want to destroy what she had built. My job was to just let it flourish, I guess.”

Like a good loaf of bread, one might say.

l Gail’s in Seven Dials is opening soon 

In the meantime, you can sample their wares at: 

93 North Rd, BN1 1YE

Mon – Fri: 7.15am-5.30pm; Sat: 7.30am-6pm; Sun: 7.30am-5pm

Andrew Clover, Real Junk Food Project, Table tennis

Andrew Clover at The Real Junk Food Project

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In the first in a new series, Andrew says “Yes” to volunteering
at The Real Junk Food Cafe. But first, table tennis was calling

As a boy, I was obsessed with table-tennis. I dreamed of competing at high levels but a career stopped in its tracks at the Shropshire Under-13 tournaments, where I was dumped out 11-0, by the eventual champion. A once promising career never recovered, and like so many other once promising careers, I hadn’t really thought about it since. But then, out of the blue, The Whistler called. 

“Do you want to come to a night of table-tennis at The Fitzherbert Cafe?”

“Yes.” 

I was in a bit of a swamp after the failure of a dramatically difficult project,   dithering about the right way out, so this was perfect timing.

 The Fitz Café is in Bristol Road in the St George’s Rd bit of Kemptown, right beside The Brighton Table-Tennis Club. Inside, I was warmly greeted by Tim, the club’s inspirational Head Coach, who proudly introduced me to Harry, who’s apparently the UK’s top ranked player with Downs Syndrome. He was smacking down backhand drives to Bly, who he assured me, would soon be a World Paralympic Number One.

I just knew he’d ask me to play, and I knew I would – I can’t refuse to do anything!] – but for now I felt shy, and ducked into the café.

The Real Junk Food Project was set up in 2014 by Adam Buckingham, who would visit supermarkets, and allotments, picking up surplus, or almost-off food, which would be cooked to cater for a Pay As You Feel Café, where the richer diners – who want to eat delicious food, while doing some good – help to fund a community of people who might be rough sleepers, or just hungry.

Café Manager Kathy loves this element. “I used to help run a soup kitchen in Florida, and we’d turn hungry people away, since they couldn’t prove their credentials. The mix of people makes everyone feel good. You should come and volunteer!” I said I would, and came back the next day, when…

I started with Front of House, which basically means chatting to people. I  sat with DJ and Rob discussing addiction. DJ’s been five weeks sober; Rob has gone 12 months without crack or smack. 

“Wow,” I said, “I hear they’re quite more-ish!”

“That’s why I’m here!” he said. “It distracts me. Most days I volunteer somewhere, but here I just come for the chat!”

“It’s same for me,” said DJ, “I love that you meet rich people, poor people, sober people, street people, famous people, but also it’s incredibly good food.”

“Who’s famous?” I asked. “You’ll have to work that out, yourself!” he said. 

In the kitchen, I met Jimmy, who was making Dauphinoise. “I worked in the music business, which can be all about ego and solo glory. I love that here, you turn up, you’re part of a team, and you feel you’ve done something. Plus the food’s amazing!” 

I met Elodie, Head Chef, who’s worked in Michelin-starred restaurants. ‘But I prefer it here. You work with the ingredients that turn up, so it’s creative. Try!”

 I sat down with Anna, who was beaming the room’s warmest smile. An Arabic woman, recently moved from Italy, she was with Voices In Exile – an organisation that helps refugees with food or toiletries or legal help. “I love to come so I can practice my English.” I smiled at her friends. 

“You need to play table-tennis,” commanded Wadie, a Syrian refugee.

There was no putting it off, and, when you haven’t played ping-pong in 38 years, your game’s rusty. But four minutes in, he hit a ball high, and I thwacked back a backhand topspin. “Good shot!” said Tim, and I could see why his club’s so successful. It’s not just that the guy’s got skill: he takes an interest. 

And suddenly there I was, playing doubles with Tim (former UK Number 8), against Wadie and Harry. I barely hit a good shot, but it was as Jimmy said: success is not about solo glory; it’s about being in a team; and sometimes you’ve just got to step up, and stay in the point. We won two games to one, and I left feeling connected and content and proud.

I went outside where I’d been invited to help plant a new tree, but it was on a slope, so the water was draining away. But this is the thing about volunteering: you find you can offer something. 

“I know what to do here,” I said, and dug a moat around the tree. That’s how they taught me in Haiti. 

“So what was your dramatically difficult project?” asked Deb, Head of Gardening. “I sailed the Atlantic, and I persuaded 1000 Caribbean kids, to plant 1000 trees.”

“So what was a failure about that?” 

“Well,” I said, “I haven’t told anyone about it!” 

“Well, you have now!,” said Tim. 

God, I felt good about the whole day, and would urge anyone out there who’s vaguely thinking about it, to volunteer. Or just to get down to the Fitz Café, where if you pay for lunch, you’re paying it forward. 

I’m now looking to volunteer for something else. So if you know of a community project, and wonder if I can join, you know what I’ll say. 

Mrcloverthefamoussnail@gmail.com

l The Real Junk Food Project Brighton’s Community Cafe is now open at St John the Baptist parish hall, 2 Bristol Road BN2 1AP

Opening times:

Mon: 11.00-15.00 (lunch from noon)

Tues: Fri: 10.00-15.00 (lunch from noon)

Sat12.30-14.30

Brighton Life, Coffee grinds, sustainability

Surface appeal

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We wanted to revamp our kitchen. New surfaces, new worktops, new doors. We wanted something stylish, individual, sustainable and didn’t cost a fortune, something a little more “us” than going into a kitchen store and buying something off the shelf. How hard could that be? 

Actually, we tried that, went to the usual places and saw the usual stuff. Things with names like Nordic Noir and made of granite or Corian. Nice enough, but a bit uninspiring. It started to become a little bit of an obsession. Eventually, we decided on a radical, if familiar, course of action. “Let’s go for a drink and something to eat”. 

We went to Fumi, the new Japanese in Circus Street. The food’s great there and it’s been designed beautifully, a very stylish clean aesthetic. Sitting there, we couldn’t help notice the furniture. The tables looked like marble, but clearly weren’t. 

“We had them made for us. They’re really interesting, they’re made from used coffee”. 

What? 

Two days later I was talking to Jani Lemut in, obviously, a coffee shop. 

“It was just an obvious thing to do. I was working with an interior design company who were importing all their furniture from India, but wanted to be more local and sustainable and so on, so they contacted me. We started talking about new designs and what we can do and what different materials to use, local materials. I started thinking ‘What else can I use?’ And coffee was very obvious, because it was just on the table. It was just there”.

How many cups of coffee get thrown away?

“Probably a lot”, said Jani. “I heard a statistic, I don’t know whether it’s right or not, but the average person in UK spends £25 pounds a year on coffee. In Brighton, it’s £75”. 

Apparently there are more coffee shops here per head than anywhere else in the UK. And in Seven Dials… 

“Yes. Most probably. Yeah, and it’s still gaining popularity. It’s quite incredible”.

Jani is a “classically trained furniture maker” from Slovenia who came here after the war in Yugoslavia started in 1990.  “I made wooden children’s toys and we had quite a nice steady business, but then after three or four months, the war started and that was it. Lost everything. The country came to a standstill and basically that’s what brought me here. “I came to see a friend of mine in Gloucestershire and I just loved it. Absolutely loved it. I love the freedom of expression here. When I got to London, I just loved it so much. I said to my friends, ‘Look you go back. I’m staying here’. And that was pretty much it.” 

He moved to St Ives and “had a really good time, doing mainly designing and building furniture, cottages. I was doing lots of artwork as well, art exhibitions and so on. Everything was always based in recycled materials. I was always fascinated by what gets thrown away. What can one do with the challenge? I still feel excited by the idea we can turn objects into a different life. So that’s my main motivation”.

Had you seen coffee used before? 

“People have tried using coffee in all sorts of products, but only as an additive. People have tried make composites are made of coffee and thermoplastics…” At this point Jani started talking about binding processes and chemistry. I ordered another coffee and waited for him to start speaking English again.

How long did it take you to work all this out?

“Two years”. 

And you kept going with it? Because you were certain that it would work?

“Well, I wasn’t certain certain, but there was a promising sign. The problem with it was stabilising the coffee because it’s organic it moves, it does all the the things that any organic stuff does. So to bind it in organic way, it’s quite difficult, but this is exactly what we were trying to do, to make a plastic free component”. 

And you have now?

“Yes, we have. Yes.”

The results are really lovely, but it doesn’t only look lovely, it looks real. Organic. 

“Of course, because all the ingredients that we use are purely by-products of different materials. marble dust, copper, dust, metal. Then you’ve got spices, natural pigments and so on and so forth, all sorts of stuff like charcoal”. 

You could make something beetroot colour?

“Yeah, we do that”.

Could you make something that blue? 

“Yes. Turquoise oxidize copper dust, a very intense turquoise”.

There are other uses for the materials but “I’m a bit wary of mixing too much either plastic or any chemicals with our product, because then it’s difficult to recycle further. So wherever we create, we try to create in such a way that is easy to dispose of or reuse later on. This is the main point of doing this. At the moment, our product, if you leave it out in a field for a couple of years, it will just disintegrate and it will go back to where it came from. That’s pretty much it”.

Everything here is about sustainability. On their website (below) they say “We are carbon neutral. We plant a tree for every sale we make. Our materials are sourced locally and much of it from waste”. They are “a circular business. Everything gets recycled, everything gets re-used”. 

We had the worktops done, the kitchen island and the dining table, and went for a copper sheen finish that looks great and always gets comments. It’s hard-wearing, waterproof, almost completely heatproof and can be made to any size or shape. It also cost about a third of what we were quoted in the high street. 

“Why make something that will be extortionate? Why make something nobody can afford? If you can make something that’s beautiful and accessible and sustainable, then what’s not to like?” 

https://tomasandjani.co.uk

07930 944906

info@tomasandjani.co.uk