Arab Strap are off. We've had 10 years of these two fellas spilling autobiographical about an existence sodden with drink fuelled feckless abandon and put against a backdrop of stunning slowcore arrangements. With Arab Strap it's about the heroic attempts not the successes or the failures and about attempting bravely to forge some significance and beauty out of their lives. For a decade they have chosen to name names and share anecdotal sketches from their lives. With more nerve than a million death metal bands, Malcolm Middleton and Aiden Moffat have hung it all out there for us to have a good gawp at. Many, sadly, may have perhaps found parallels and startling coincidences with our own mortal coil. This is where the kernel of their brilliance surely lies. Using Falkirk as a geographical marker for much of their work, Arab Strap have achieved nothing less than to grow a Lotus from the mud. See them live at a venue near you on this, their farewell tour. Absent Sincerity is always missed.

After starting out directing the first big reality TV series Sylvania Waters, since the beginning of the '90s British filmmaker Brian Hill's documentaries have consistently received critical acclaim. Covering topics as diverse as farming (It's A Cow's Life), poetry (Killing Time: The Millennium Poem), prison (Feltham Sings) and Robbie Williams (Nobody Someday), Hill has developed unique ways of exploring documentary. Often examining social problems from unexpected and alternative perspectives (Drinking For England), Hill's films have evolved from the conventional documentary approach to a more radical type of work. A pioneer of the "documentary musical" form (Pornography: The Musical), Hill mixes factual content with poetry and musical conventions to produce a totally different hybrid format that consistently provokes debate -- this masterclass will trace his route from straight documentary to his unique signature style.

If all that dancing business has grown a little tiring of late, you need to head over to KOKO this Thursday. As part of the Camden Happening, Adventures In The Beetroot Field present their second Seated Club, a night of films, live performances and DJs mixing electronica with contemporary classical music. Headlining the night are Alexander's Annexe, the latest signing to Warp Records, comprising of David Sheppard and Sarah Nicolls from the London Sinfonietta and established Warp artist Mira Calix, whose first LP Push Door To Exit has just been released. They will be joined by PowerPlant, an exploration into electronic soundscapes and explosive percussion, and Mr Hopkinson's Computer, the first act to take the inevitable step of removing the often unnecessary human element from the electronica live show. In between there are DJ sets from Luke Vibert, Ed Handley from Plaid and Mira Calix, who will all be doing their best to get the crowd up and out of their seats.

If it was "art month" in October, maybe it's "theatre month" now: Forced Entertainment and Richard Maxwell's NYC Players, both opening in London this week, are the two great forces in contemporary, English-language theatre. Maxwell's signature style is something people have great difficulty in describing. "Numb", "deadpan", "hyper-realistic" are all cheap options -- there's so much more going on. "The uninflected delivery... seems to magnify and dissect," writes Ben Brantley in his great NY Times review on The End Of Reality, which now comes to the Barbican. We were lucky enough to meet with RM and his crew in Paris a fortnight ago [and see their sublime love-story Good Samaritans] where he explained that, for The End Of Reality, stage combat will "replace" the usual songs. It isn't hard to imagine this working; if before he gave us songs infused with the kind of yearning that doesn't care how it sounds, now he exposes a mix of violence and apathy that might, like the songs, be something ever-present in our minds -- and indeed towns, houses, newspapers...

NB: The End Of Reality runs from 08/11 till 18/11. Catch Richard Maxwell in two post show discussions on both 09/11 and 14/11 and also in a panel conversation on 18/11 at 3pm with Tim Etchells (Forced Entertainment's director) and Phelim McDermott (Improbable's director) at Riverside Studios.

The labyrinth underneath London Bridge station that is home to masters of spectacle Shunt has recently opened its doors to guest performers with weekly sessions on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. This week Shunt welcomes electroacoustic improvisation provided by the joint efforts of Interlace, ONGAKU:enjoy_sound, and Not Applicable (aka Icarus), each associated with the innovation of free improvisation through a satisfying combination of tech savy and musicianship. The Friday event, a particularly generous one, begins with Belgian bricolage improviser Olivier Pe, followed by a series of short collaborations between electronica artists Ollie Bown and Isambard Khroustaliov, better known as duo Icarus, trumpeter Tom Arthurs and percussionist Maurizio Ravalico from the F-ire Collective, and bass clarinetist Lothar Ohlmeier, with live film improvisers Squint and Brittski. The bar will party on with Brazilian beats and minimal techno from DJs Mr M and Antek. Ongoing installations by Susanna Dietz, and Britt Hatzius, and Fred Labbe round off this mini AV festival.

NB: Thursday's Interlace and ONGAKU:enjoy_sound event includes David Casal, electronic and acoustic improvisations from quartet Tom Chant, Ross Lambert, Sebastian Lexer and Mat Milton, trio Jamie Coleman, Mark Wastell and Seymour Wright, and a reunion of the exceptional AMM. For jazz fans make sure you check out the London Jazz Festival (10/11 till 19/11).

It's rare in previewing a gig that the event can be legitimately described as a "world exclusive", but this is one of those occasions. DJ Scotch Egg, the chiptune genius and KFC Core maestro, for the first (and maybe last) time forms the screaming nucleus of a band with three drummers (sourced from grindcore merchants Trencher and indie math-rock legends I'm Being Good). Most will be familiar with Scotch Egg as the one man Nintendo Gameboy provocateur, known to antagonise the audience with noisy beats, risky banter and occasionally pelting the crowd with scotch eggs. It's an awesome live experience and the added percussive elements should add an extra layer of intensity. In support will be a rare appearance from Atom Truck, Adaadat co-founder and musical visionary; whilst the Cambridge based Small Lights Collective offer Um, Man From Uranus and Ascoltare. One Man Army's Loz Koleszko comes down to London for another rare performance; he should conclude the night with a flourish with his exceptionally executed Aphex-esque acid techno. The whole night has an air of freshness and originality about it and at only £5 entry makes it ridiculously good value.

Having slipped slightly off the radar for a while, 93 Feet East has re-emerged into impolite society the last year or so, thanks to some astute bookings and forward thinking club nights. This Friday they've scored the biggest coup of all with an obscenely rare (on these shores anyway) DJ set from New Yorker James Murphy, front-man of LCD Soundsystem and one half of uber-producers DFA. The disco-punk kingmaker is joined by the first British signings to his label, Prinzhorn Dance School, whose minimal Neanderthal rock stylings have been making enough waves to cause a stir across the Atlantic, and Leeds-based Hadouken, whose Gameboy grime sounds like the perfect soundtrack to a night of stage diving. And if it all sounds like fun but you're put off by 93's ridiculous 1am licence, fear not, an afterparty at some nearby dive will be keeping it all going till the sun comes up.

As a reader of KultureFlash you have most certainly attended events described as dance, live art, visual performance or durational piece. Sometimes it's fairly obvious that you are watching dance but most times and particularly when you are not just going to the ballet the boundaries between live art and dance become very blurry. Not that it really matters as far as the viewer is concerned; the relevance is more to do with the training, the funding and the resources required. Not forgetting that a dancer needs to go to classes every day in order to stay in shape. The Chisenhale Dance Space presents the first in a series of events exploring the "space between" dance and live art, a space which many artists working at Chisenhale have helped open up. The event will bring together artists and audiences for a packed programme of live performance, film, installation, documentation and debate throughout the space. And if you are not a practitioner this is nonetheless a great opportunity to discover or see again great work in a very relaxing environment.

Fabric continues to programme forward thinking line-ups in its Saturday night slots. A shame it is always so crowded... a victim of its own success? This week should hopefully be a little less rammed but that is not to say that the line-up isn't stellar, the highlight being Berlin based BPitch Control holding court in Room 2. Label boss Ellen Allien will be performing live with Apparat, so expect gorgeous analogue electro in the vein of their excellent collaborative album Orchestra Of Bubbles, whilst label mates Sascha Funke, Ben Klock and Zander VT will be bothering the decks with various strains of electronic noise. Elsewhere, artists of note include Rex The Dog, who in a previous life produced top ten bothering ritzy house as JX ("Son Of A Gun") but now prefers to bang out chrome plated electro house, and Konrad Black aka Todd Shillington, who's two contributions to his and Mathew Jonson's Wagon Repair label have been exemplary exercises in maximal house.

Looking like a corporate lobby gone wrong, Herald St has been transformed by German artist Klaus Weber into a vast indoor fountain, with an array of figures using unlovable bodily functions to spout water everywhere. No dancing Cupids these, Weber's statues -- sculpted heads attached to bulky blocks of granite -- projectile-vomit torrents of water, drool like winos in Piccadilly Circus, and lift their armpits to shower the floor. Weber likes his spaces mucked with -- for Frieze Projects in 2003 he installed a public fountain with homeopathic LSD streaming through the water, and at Cubitt in 2004 he destroyed the floor with mushrooms sown underfoot. This installation might be Weber's best yet -- it has ambition and panache in spades.

NB: runs till 26/11.

Forced Entertainment's new epic, The World In Pictures, is a joy principally because it's everything Bloody Mess wanted to be but never quite achieved. The chaos is familiar by now, but this time the balance between untamed energy and an almost painterly orchestration creates a tension unique to this company's best work -- something akin to the dreams you might have while asleep at a gabba party. But above all there's a sense, excruciatingly evoked by Jerry Killick, that this absurd recounting of everything we know of human history is nothing other than "our life flashing before us" before we finally hit the ground. The rehearsal process, related with great candour by director Tim Etchells, has been difficult so it's astonishing the extent to which the show holds its nerve as it teeters on the edge of an amateur-theatrical abyss. The action kicks off with a re-enactment of the volcano scene from One Million Years BC -- no Raquel Welch, but plenty of cavemen, some of whom never quite manage to change costume as the years pass... Almost unwatchable, definitely unforgettable, this marks a real return to form.

NB: The World In Pictures runs from 08/11 till 18/11. On 18/11 at 3pm catch Tim Etchells in a panel conversation with Richard Maxwell (NYC Players' director) and Phelim McDermott (Improbable's co-director).

Helmut Lachenmann is one of the true visionaries of 20th-century music, as revered on the continent as his mentors and teachers Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Listening to his music, it's easy to see why he is held in such high regard. Unlike so many contemporary composers, his approach is one that is fundamentally dictated by the gesture and logic of sounds themselves, an approach which he terms "musique concrete instrumentale" in that it derives in part from a recognition of the early tape work of Pierre Schaeffer and Luc Ferrari. However, Lachenmann's instrument is the orchestra and not the tape machine and he combines a rich understanding of sound with an unrivalled mastery of musical notation, often re-inventing the art in order to elicit the sounds he requires. In this sense he has almost single-handily turned the academic stagnation of contemporary music on its head, re-awakening the spirit of discovery and intrigue that was its initial guiding light.

NB: Transcendent: The Music Of Helmut Lachenmann runs from 13/11 till 20/11 at the Royal College Of Music and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. On 14/11 (7pm) catch Helmut Lachenmann as he both introduces and gives a Q&A at the Goethe-Institut London in conjunction with the screening of ...wo ich noch nie war.

In this post-post-modern age of creative solutions, viral promotion, borrowing, quoting and referencing, where does art begin and advertising stop? Creative Chain Reactions uses Peter Fischli and David Weiss' The Way Things Go (1986-7) as the starting point of a discussion aiming to deconstruct these processes that transcend the barriers of genres and purposes. A screening of films and videos is followed by a discussion of creativity in 21st century media culture and the viral spread of visual images. Anson Harris of MEME London, the warped minds behind the 118 118 pastiche, Joan Gibbons, author of Art And Advertising (2005), and copyright expert Jaime Stapleton from Birkbeck College, University of London will attempt to deconstruct the many ways in which what goes around comes around... and around, and around.

NB: this event has been programmed in conjunction with the Fischli and Weiss Tate Modern retrospective (runs till 14/01/07).

"London is a roost for every bird," said the 19th-century politician Benjamin Disraeli. Creative talents have always flocked from across the country to make their names in the heart of the city. But, today, does inner London still host the cultural high flyers of Britain? And, are the suburbs full of magpies that once eyed up the good life? Or, as the think tank Davos suggests, is the periphery of town the new frontier of creativity? Debating this topic are five panellists who've found inspiration amid inner London streets and the hinterlands. Literary explorer Iain Sinclair (whose latest book is London: City Of Disappearances) speaks alongside designer and artist Susanna Edwards, with whom he has collaborated on the visual narrative Lost To View (on display). Singer / songwriter Billy Bragg, who has published The Progressive Patriot, joins artist Richard Wentworth, whose radical approach of using "found" objects to convey urban realities has led the wave of New British Sculpture since the '70s. And, leading contemporary writer, Tobias Hill, returns to his native north London to chart its surreal colours in his poetry collections Nocturne In Chrome & Sunset Yellow. The event is chaired by RCA architectural history tutor Joe Kerr and author of London: From Punk To Blair.

Resfest reaches the ripe old age of 10. The festival continues to showcase the world's most innovative and exciting filmmakers. This year 30 countries are represented along with a six continent, 45 city tour! Not bad for a festival that when first launched only visited five cities in the US. Nothing has changed in terms of programming and resfest continues to be a smorgasbord of shorts, promos and feature films. Below are our picks:

Shorts One: State Of The Art
Tue 14/11 at 8:45pm
Resfest's flagship showcase of the best of best of shorts. Whether you are into animation, documentaries, live action or motion graphics there is something for everyone. Keep an eye out for Richard Fenwick's The Box. (After the programme catch the Coldcut DJ party in the NFT Film Cafe.)

Cinema Electronica
Fri 17/11 at 6:20pm
A showcase of the best promos in the world of elcetronica and hip hop. (Videos for tracks by Jamie Lidell, Venetian Snares, Tiga, Vitalic, Psapp, Massive Attack and Gnarls Barkley among others.)

A Decade Of Resfest: 10 Seminal Short Films
Fri 17/11 at 8:30pm
What it is says on the tin!

Shorts Three: Fear And Trembling
Fri 17/11 at 8:40pm
A programme consisting of shorts that are dark and scary! One of them being Moloch by Polish director Marcin Pazera (featured on this week's header).

Radiohead, The Visionaries: 10 Years Of Breaking New Talent
Sat 18/11 at 4pm
The best band in the world and their best videos. (Works by Jonathan Glazer, Michel Gondry, Alex Rutterford, Sophie Muller, Johnny Hardstaff, Mike Mills and Ed Holdsworth among others.)

Videos That Rock
Sat 18/11 at 6:20pm
Promos for songs by the likes of The Knife, Mogwai, Beck, Death Cab For Cutie and Hot Chip.

Sweet Talk 16: Airside, D.A.D.D.Y., Shynola and Universal Everything
Sat 18/11 at 6:30pm
Design gurus get together and reveal their secrets. (Other guests TBC.)

By Design
Sun 19/11 at 3:50pm
Want to see what's going on in the world of motion graphics, computer-generated imagery and innovative animation techniques? Then this is a must.

NB: resfest 10 London runs from 14/11 till 19/11.

The exotic allure of an Egyptian temptress, the provocative sexuality of a vampy Salome; in the multiple guises of Theda Bara the first star was born, one whose mystique existed on and off the screen, expertly cradled in the arms of the powerbroker producers of a 1900s Hollywood. In a career that spanned over 40 films, acres of disintegrating film reels remain a testament to her career and the inherently fragile construction of celebrity. Artist Georgina Starr's absorbing enquiry into Theda through remaining footage, plot synopses and scripts is to be shown in its first manifestation in a triptych-structured film. The delicate image of Bara, and embodiment of Starr in the performance of her, are brought together on screen, telling of vanity and loss and overlapping and collapsing identities. In a re-enactment of the performative nature of early cinema, the London Improvisers Orchestra will accompany the silent film. In what will be their first view of the film, the musicians will react to the ebbs of drama on screen, responding to the expressive performance of Starr. The character of the performance hinges on the creative mood that occurs on the night, reintroducing a notion of liveness and spontaneity to the experience of film. From this first performance, future showings and varied musical collaborations are proposed, both here and abroad, conceived as a series of metamorphic episodes in the film's lifespan.

One of the more fascinating and telling aspects of men in "high office" everywhere is the company they keep -- the shadowy individuals leaders have invested enough trust in to help them advise and steer a smooth course through difficult times. Every possible decision is met with almost psychic prowess to predict consequences which may emerge. Sidney Blumenthal was almost a second skin to Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001. He helped the 42nd president navigate his way out of a political firestorm which saw his last four years in office mired in sexual and financial scandal that resulted in his impeachment by the Grand Jury. Blumenthal displayed what an agile political opponent he was when called as a witness over the Lewinsky affair. He subsequently wrote the bestseller The Clinton Wars published in 2003. Other books by Blumenthal include The Permanent Campaign, The Rise Of The Counter-Establishment, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign Of The Cold War and How Bush Rules: Chronicles Of A Radical Regime. On 17/11 The ICA plays host to this complex individual where he talks with Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times.

Guillermo del Toro's latest film comes as something of a welcome antidote to the reams of Christmas cinema schmaltz heading your way fast. Pan's Labyrinth is a fairytale that unwittingly leads you into the dark heart of imagination. Ofelia is a young girl taken to the remote Spanish hills so she and her heavily pregnant mother can join her stepfather, who is leading a military operation to quash rebels following Franco's triumph in 1944. In her unhappiness she retreats into the world of gothic fable. Here the eponymous Faun promises her an escape from reality into the labyrinth (of which she is destined to be queen) if she completes three tasks. The tasks have a brilliantly choreographed inventiveness, the kind that rests on the sinister underbelly of the imaginary. Each task is risky, climaxing with the threat of a hideous child-eater, waiting for his next meal at a banqueting table behind a door Ofelia draws in chalk. This is a nightmare vision of epic proportions. Despite this, the film's fantastical magic lends the adventure (if you can call it that) an ethereal beauty and seductive appeal. It's a strange film with no neat conclusion -- take advantage of this director's talk, we urge you.

NB: Pan's Labyrinth is released in London on 24/11.

Painting seems to thrive on the perpetual crisis of its impending extinction. Since the first monochrome, and probably well before, artists and critics alike have battled for and against the proclamation that "painting is dead". However, the result of such a polemic is the continual reinvention of the medium, as demonstrated in the work of Christopher Wool, an artist who has explored the physical properties of paint -- often alongside printing techniques -- since the '80s. The show at Simon Lee consists of several new works on paper and new paintings. In these works, Wool uses silkscreen and black enamel spray paint, which is built up in layers and then partly removed. As a result of this procedure, the paintings are records of erasure as well as articulations of graffiti-like markings. With a limited palette, Wool draws attention to the consistency of the medium, and the flatness and illusory depth of the canvas. Spend some time with this show and you will definitely have a new conception of what painting can be and do.

NB: runs till 22/12.

KultureFlash is a free, weekly newsletter covering contemporary culture in and around London. Each week we track down some of the more unusual and interesting events taking place in the capital and deliver them straight to your inbox. Featuring art, gigs, films, talks, clubs and more -- we are committed to bringing you an eclectic mix of the most stimulating events in London.

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