“If you asked anyone to name five film directors, they’d inevitably be men,” Ms. Millward said, “so we decided to create a platform for our peers.”

The full blog post, on London’s Birds Eye View Film Festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES, and also continues here after the jump

The 2011 Birds Eye View Film Festival will run for the seventh time March 8 to 17 at three sites: the BFI Southbank, the Institute for Contemporary Arts and the Southbank Center. It will begin on the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. To commemorate that, the festival will highlight a century of women filmmakers, from Lois Weber, one of the first women to direct a feature film, to Lucy Walker, whose “Wasteland” was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

The 2011 festival will also host a “Bloody Women” retrospective that will highlight women’s contributions to the horror genre. Artists like the Grammy winner Imogen Heap and Micachu, an English experimental composer, will premier live music scores alongside silent horror films at the Southbank Center’s Queen Elizabeth Hall.

“I think in part exploring horror and gothic cinema feels very relevant because it’s having a huge surge in popularity, with films such as ‘Twilight,’ so it’s natural for an organization like Birds Eye View to think about what this means as a cultural shift,” Ms. Millward said. “It’s also always interesting for us to explore a genre where there are such strong gender stereotypes.”

Last year the festival looked at blondes on screen, and a few years ago at women in comedy cinema.

The 2011 festival will include panel discussions, short-film screenings and master classes. The feature-film roster includes films like “Meek’s Cutoff,” with Michelle Williams; Kathryn Bigelow’s “Near Dark”; and Susanne Bier’s Golden Globe-winning, Oscar-nominated “In a Better World.” There also will be several screenings and discussions devoted to the German New Wave filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta.

Photo: A scene from “In a Better World,” one of the films showing at the 2011 Birds Eye View Film Festival in London. Image courtesy of Birds Eye View Film Festival

The shortlisted poets for this year’s prize, a prestigious award for the best poetry collection of 2010, are Simon Armitage, Annie Freud, John Haynes, Seamus Heaney, Pascale Petit, Robin Robertson, Fiona Sampson, Brian Turner, Derek Walcott and Sam Willetts. Eight of the poets will attend the Jan. 23 event, with guest poets reading for Mr. Heaney and Mr. Walcott.

The full story, on the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize Readings, is at the NEW YORK TIMES and also continues here:

The event at Southbank (Belvedere Road; 44-20-7960-4200; www.southbankcentre.co.uk), which begins at 7 p.m., is open to the public, and is presented in association with the Poetry Book Society, which Eliot helped to found in 1953.

The Internet, said Rachel Holmes, head of literature and spoken word at Southbank, has proven to be a huge boost for poetry, providing new platforms and outlets for poets and fans.

“It’s not just the fact that digital grows the market and people’s access to it,” she said. “Poetry suits online, being short, pithy and a piece of thinking you can read and then carry in your head.

“The increase in social networking and people engaging with culture through virtually mediated platforms means that there’s now a renewed hunger to experience unmediated live events. Simultaneously virtual networks are making it easier to reach more diverse and niche audiences widely and quickly.”

Southbank has seen rising interest in all of its literary events, according to Ms. Holmes. Ticket sales have more than doubled in the past three years, and the center doubled the number of seats available for live literature events. In 2009 Southbank sold out the 900-seat Queen Elizabeth Hall with appearances by Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy and Benjamin Zephaniah.

But although poetry is treated like a national achievement much like football and cricket, Ms. Holmes added, it’s not funded at anywhere near the same level. “Poetry is highly valued in Britain, it’s our great national art form. But it needs the support proper to a national art form and it’s just plain silly to suppose that poetry can be run within the model of free market economy.”

Photo of TS Eliot: Courtesy of Southbank Centre

On the belief that poets, not politicians, can help bring about tangible political change, London’s Southbank Center will again host its biennial Poetry International festival, nine days’ worth of readings, music, translations and new poetry commissions.

The festival, which runs from Oct. 30 to Nov. 7 in various venues within Southbank, has political roots. Ted Hughes, Charles Osborne and Patrick Garland created the first Poetry International as a space for artistic dialogue in 1967, a time of “radical political change and transcultural revolutions,” said Rachel Holmes, Southbank’s head of literature and spoken word.

The full blog post, on London’s Poetry International Festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES. The post also continues here, after the jump.

The 2010 version will continue in that political tradition, by focusing heavily on poets and poetry from the Middle East, including Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Syria, as well as work by Iraq war veterans.

This year’s festival will also, according to Ms. Holmes, feature more women poets, and place a greater emphasis on a range of styles in aesthetics in poetry, drawing from ancient tradition to multimedia innovations in both print poetry and spoken word.

On Nov. 5, the Brooklyn-based performance poet Suheir Hammad, who mixes narratives of Palestinian displacement with hip-hop, will collaborate with Tashweesh, an audio-visual artist’s collective. On Nov. 6, the composer Michael Nyman will perform a suite of songs based on Paul Celan’s post-World War II poetry, set to backdrops of extracts of Mr. Nyman’s films about Auschwitz, as writers and actors read Mr. Celan’s work.

“As I witnessed recently at the Palestine Festival of Literature (Palfest), poets are at the forefront of shaping the future,” Ms. Holmes said. “Saying the unspeakable, envisioning the unimaginable, and in the great tradition of poetry actively confronting illegitimate authority

“While politicians re-engage in fractious talks toward political settlement in the Middle East, Poetry International 2010 holds out not only the hope of imagining peace beyond the apparently intractable present, it is a creative and defiant congregation to build the future.”

Photo: Vietnamese poet Da Thao Phuong performing at the Poetry International festival in 2008. Courtesy of Southbank Centre

Since the middle of last month, the Mexican-born artist Damián Ortega has been in London gathering up bits of news — newspaper stories, photojournalism, graphics — from local, national and international publications. He’ll now spend the next three months repurposing his stash as art, in the form of sculpture, installation and prototypes for future projects.

His free exhibition, “The Independent” (a reference to the British publication), will be on display from tomorrow through Jan. 16 at the Barbican Art Gallery (Barbican Center, Silk Street; 44-207-638-4141), and will continue to change and evolve on a regular basis.

The full blog post, on Ortega’s London exhibit, is at the NEW YORK TIMES. The post also continues here, after the jump.

Using news as artistic subject matter is nothing new for Mr. Ortega, who during the 1980s was a political cartoonist in Mexico City. As an artist, he’s been known for addressing and critiquing social and political issues, including capitalism, poverty and immigration, through sculpture that is both minimalist and eye-catching. In more tangible terms, he seems to enjoy taking things apart and reassembling them in visually explosive ways.

For his 2002 piece “Cosmic Thing,” he pulled apart a Volkswagon Beetle and suspended the pieces and parts in mid-air — almost like a life-sized do-it-yourself assembly instruction manual. In “Controller of the Universe” from 2007, pictured above, he took tools found at local junk shops and suspended them from the ceiling in an explosive form.

“For this project he explodes the form and function of the newspaper, transforming the ephemeral nature of the news into sculptural form on a daily basis,” said Alona Pardo, the exhibit curator. “The newspaper takes real situations and compresses them into digestible two-dimensional sound bites and column inches, and in ‘The Independent,’ Damián reconverts these two-dimensional stories back into three-dimensionality. In this way, Ortega questions and examines the role of the media in their representation of the truth.”

Given the site-specific nature of “The Independent,” many of the works will ultimately be destroyed, but some will be distributed throughout galleries in New York, Mexico City, São Paolo and London.

Kris Kuksi’s first artistic creation was a miniature model of a Winnebego, complete with tiny bathrooms made from construction paper. Growing up in rural Kansas in the 1970s and ’80s, imagination and glue were his tools for entertainment. He developed a knack for constructing intricate miniatures made from model kits, mechanical parts and toy soldiers. He discovered a taste for the mystique of the Baroque and Gothic periods.

His fascination with tinkering and his old-world tastes have earned him a fan base within steampunk, a subculture that blends Victorian-era steam-engine aesthetics with modern technology.

The full story, on Steampunk, is at INTELLIGENT LIFE and also here, after the jump.

Inspired by the early science-fiction writings of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, steampunk has a romantic, fantastical sensibility. Or, as Kuksi describes it, there is “a touch of technology with a pinch of antiquity and perhaps a dash of the macabre. There is humanity…and even a bit of social rebellion and transgression.”

Kuksi was among 18 artists from around the world whose work was on display as part of “Steampunk”, an exhibition dedicated to this quirky genre at Oxford’s Museum of the History of Science earlier this year. This was yet another sign that steampunk is creeping into the mainstream, in music videos, iPhone applications and all over the internet. In Northern England a number of secondary schools even introduced some steampunk-inspired art programmes over the past school year, funded in part by an Arts Council England grant. Called “A Fantastic Voyage”, the project saw local designers, sculptors and artists offer steampunk workshops to thousands of students. The results will be on view in an exhibition at the Discovery Museum in Newcastle this July.

“There is a lot of steampunk culture at the moment,” said Judith Cashman, a project coordinator for “A Fantastic Voyage”. “It’s a way of engaging young people in Victorian design and literature.”

Steampunk is like cyberpunk’s retro cousin. Its art, fashion and trinkets are lavishly anachronistic, like what you might find on the submarine in Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”. (Perhaps inevitably, there’s now talk of Sam Raimi directing a remake of the 1954 film.) Old clocks, gas lamps, dirigibles, submersibles, goggles, helmets, compasses and small machines are common items produced by its artists, usually made with brass, mahogany, leather and rivets. Steampunk inventions don’t always work; aesthetic often trumps function.

Comic books introduced the look in the 1980s. But the internet has opened the floodgates, letting people share their inventions and socialise with fellow fans. The British blog “Brass Goggles” and the Steampunk Tribune are forums for all things steampunk, and Boing Boing posts regularly on the subject. Steampunk has more than one Facebook page and its own hash tags on Twitter. One Canada-based feed regularly updates more than 9,000 listed followers with tweets such as “Steampunk leather mask with a breathing tube beard” and “My Grandfather Clock Key Choker featured on Antique Clock World.”

The sepia-toned steampunk style mixes an obsession with the past with a geeky sense of romantic heroism. Fans are often both earnest and knowing. The Britain-based Steampunk Magazine, around since 2007, puts its finger on the shtick:

Before the age of homogenization and micro-machinery, before the tyrannous efficiency of internal combustion and the domestication of electricity, lived beautiful, monstrous machines that lived and breathed and exploded unexpectedly at inconvenient moments. It was a time where art and craft were united, where unique wonders were invented and forgotten, and punks roamed the streets, living in squats and fighting against despotic governance through wit, will and wile.

Even if we had to make it all up.

The Oxford museum exhibit came about when Art Donovan, an American steampunk artist, contacted the museum’s director, Jim Bennett, to show him a sculpture he had made based on one of the museum’s ancient brass astrolabes. The two got to talking and agreed that since steampunk derives a lot of its technical and aesthetic influences from the 19th-century Victorian sciences, an art exhibition would complement the scientific devices in the museum’s collection. The museum appointed Donovan to curate the show.

“Ok, many of its practitioners are not very interested in the science,” Bennett said. “But when we see a movement that is using this cultural capital in original and attractive ways, we want to be part of that. From our point of view, it is a creative movement in the arts that has a currency and popularity.”

The exhibit featured lanterns, wall clocks, non-functioning steam-powered devices, watches and rings, stereoscopes, a twin-plate electrostatic machine and a copying press from the late-19th and early 20th centuries. Many of the contraptions were whimsical and bizarre, such as a “Pachyderm Mask”, a breathing device attached to a leather elephant-shaped helmet (pictured).

During my visit, the overall vibe was giggly. “That’s kinky,” one older man said to his wife while inspecting leather goggles adorned with brass tentacles. Considering the same item, a father said to his young son, “Imagine meeting someone wearing that? I think you’d run.”

Speaking as the exhibit was closing in late February, Bennet said he was amazed at the “sheer volume of interest” it had generated. “It doubled our visitor figures,” he said. Donovan has a theory for this fascination. “Steampunk promotes an individual’s interest and involvement in the traditional, physical sciences,” he explained. Perhaps in a time when so much culture has gone virtual, there is something satisfying about imaging an age of swashbuckling explorers and kooky inventors, of heroes and steam-blowing machines.

Tobias Slater works for White Mischief, a London-based group that now regularly curates steampunk parties and events for die-hard fans of rocket packs, wooden rayguns and compasses. “Every day I check my Facebook profile and find another two or three friend requests from neo-Victorian, brass-goggle-wearing folk, some sporting the most incredible moustaches (and that’s just the women!),” Slater wrote in an e-mail. Still, he predicts the aesthetic will remain niche. “Can steampunk cross over and become mass market like the original 1970s punk? No. Absolutely not. Whereas any suburban kid could be Johnny Rotten with a ripped T-shirt and a safety pin, the steampunk look takes a lot of time to recreate.”

Yet steampunk is clearly not just a look, but an embrace of a nearly mythical era of mad science and weird contraptions at a time when most people rarely use their hands to make or discover anything. It is a subculture that uses virtual tools—blogs, Flickr photo pages, Facebook, Twitter and iPhones—to honour the more crude and tangible kind. “Steampunk is not about being on trend or in fashion,” Slater observed. “It is about “geeky, scientific types with an eye for detail and a lust for the craft rather than a sense of how skinny one’s jeans should be in 2010. It manages to be both conservative and progressive, backward-looking and forward-looking at the same time.”

“It’s about helping people to read their environment so that they can enjoy it more and, in this era of consultation and debate about environmental issues, be better informed,” Festival chairman Peter Murray said. “A city is an ongoing holistic design problem.”

Previous festivals have drawn as many as 15,000 people, according to Murray. Herds of cows and sheep have also made appearances.

The full blog post, on London’s Festival of Architecture, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.

“These films produce knowledge and they form opinions often about the weakest and most vulnerable people in society,” said Patrick Hazard, festival director. “They comment on places and situations that their audience may never come across directly. So we like to unpick these messages, develop them and also critique them.”

The full story, on London’s International Documentary Film festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.

“I think the best thing today is the acknowledgment that flamenco has come out of Spain and is now recognized on a worldwide scale as one of the top dance forms,” Miguel Marín, the festival director, said.

The full blog post, on London’s annual Flamenco festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.

Pumped up after taking a 2003 course called “Drawing the City” at the Prince’s Drawing School in London, a few members of the class decided to branch out on their own. Dubbing themselves the Drawing London Group, they started exploring all facets of London life — alleyways, cathedrals, cafes, pubs, markets — depicting the capital through sketches and watercolors.

The full blog post, on London’s “Drawing London” group, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.

“Visual theater” is a succinct explanation of what’s included in the festival’s lineup: the world premiere of “The Mill,” a show performed in a wheel of wood and steel suspended in the air; the bearded lady Jeanne Mordoj, who will juggle egg yolks and bamboo and perform with badgers and a mountain goat; and Circus Klezmer putting on a real-life wedding.

The full blog post, on London’s annual mime festival, is at the NEW YORK TIMES.