So much to do and see this year that it's hard to resist the temptation to sprint from one event to the next, pausing occasionally to ponder on the nature of sustainable urban communities (green is this year's theme). After all, only shallow, list-obsessed media types would try to suggest that you could pick out ten "must see" events from the rich spread on offer.

So here's ours...

Wind To Light (installation)
15/06 till 01/09
Commissioned by RIBA and onedotzero, light man Jason Bruges plans to have mini wind turbines powering hundreds of LEDs on the South Bank. On 21/06 (7pm) at RIBA catch Bruges as he and other speakers discuss the project.

The Building Futures Debate: This House Believes London is Full
Wed 20/06 (6:30pm)
Full, as in a Northern Line Tube at London Bridge in rush hour. Or not full, as in Greenwich Park at dusk on a winter's evening. More London debate, in case you couldn't get enough.

21st Century Architecture
Wed 20/06 (6:30 - 8:30pm)
Not only a debate worth going to, but a chance to see Allies and Morrison's new observatory makeover.

Guided Tour Of White Cube, Mason's Yard
Fri 22/06 (10am)
Forget art and trophyism, as in anything Damien Hirst makes is an automatic commodity, but do think of his lack of humility and of an adolescent with a God complex. Back to architecture... new minimalism and Jay Jopling's rather OTT penthouse office and roof garden.

Brave new world? The Barbican And Golden Lane Estates (tour)
Fri 22/06 (6:30 - 8pm)
If you pride yourself on your knowledge of London's architecture, sooner or later you need the lowdown on Chamberlain, Powell & Bonn's Barbican, and its forerunner, the Golden Lane Estate. Now is good.

Architecture In A World Of Climate Change
Wed 20/06 (6 - 8:30pm)
Ken Shuttleworth, Foster's former designer-in-chief, now head man at Make, will talk about his practice's eco-leaning work, rather than how he designed the Gherkin. He's not bitter.

Bartlett School of Architecture Summer Show 2007
Fri 22/06 (6 - 10:30pm), Sat 23/06 (10am - 8:30 pm), Sun 24/06 (10am - 5.30pm)...
Strictly speaking they'd be doing this anyway, but always worth going along to check out the work of budding young Alsops and Allfords.

Debate London - The Architecture Foundation Presents Five Major Debates
Fri 22/06 till Mon 25/06 (7:30 - 9pm)
A stellar line-up of highly opinionated folk, including Zaha Hadid, Zoe Williams, David Adjaye and others. Will our Ken be scandalous? Will Nigel Coates be arcane? Will Jacques Herzog be asked about his unsightly extension?

NB: Architecture Week 2007 runs from 15/06 till 24/06.

Perennial experimental music curators Sprawl return with another chapter of their infamous mini-festival of Interplay collaborations. Over the past four years Interplay -- supported by the Goethe Institute -- has been a who's who of electronic, impro, dub and off-beat acoustical music; a sonic playground, each artist playing off another, creating a unique audio duet. This year the legendary media artist and Porter Ricks member Thomas Koner collaborates with Max Eastley, while Staubgold artist Ekkehard Ehlers (whose last album A Life Without Fear featured guitarist Joseph Suchy) will be working with Brian Duffy (of Modified Toy Orchestra), and fresh from Tate Modern's Long Weekend, soundscaper si-cut.db blends with (co-Sprawl instigator) Iris Garrelfs' vocal digital manipulations. All unmissable combinations of twisted technology: a veritable melt-down of cutting edge sonics. Plus support films by D-Fuse and others early in the evening. The last Interplays were sell outs, so booking advised.

Sometimes, when the summer sun burns through after weeks of heavy rain and the trees burst with lushness, there is a sense that nature is rewarding your stoicism. Lush, post-rock dream-team The Sea And Cake have emerged from four years of barren silence to warm the sonic void with their seventh album Everybody. Cargo hosts the UK release of this barbecue-ready offering, which in many ways sticks to the band's well mined blend of art-pop bossa nova, but on closer listening shows Prekop and co to be in a more playful mood. The tightly produced electronics of their last album One Bedroom have progressed into a more live and improvised sound, while the ageing Prekop's gentle creeks and croons tie it all together with his usual cryptic lyrics. Don't listen to those who dismiss it as "pleasant-but-dull" ear candy. It's easy to criticise a band that appears to play safe but in uncertain times it's good to have a dependable friend.

The Roundhouse's circus season showcases the most inventive talent and mind-boggling stunts in contemporary circussing. The four title acts have grown out of exotic and different circus traditions: from France, the Collectif AOC (21/06 till 25/06), with their bizarre and hybrid forms of breakdance and juggling; from Morocco, the seven-generation- old family circus Collectif Acrobatique de Tangier; (28/06 till 04/07); a minimalist (and a little bit nudist) show from Australian three-man troupe Acrobat (06/07 till 14/07); and a series of deranged characters from Wales' NotFit State Circus (24/07 till 05/08). The main space of the Roundhouse feels like a big top where you're dangerously close to the action. The season is also running a programme of alternatively freakish/beautiful side shows and free events. Any night you choose to go will leave you oooh-ing, aaah-ing and wanting to buy a trapeze (or at least a really bouncy trampoline).

NB: Circus Front runs from 21/06 till 05/08.

With a bit of luck, the weather will be clement from June 20 to 22 so Michael Atavar, nomad poet and wise man, can put the warm tones of the sunset to good use in the context of his Dusk performance. Coinciding with the summer solstice, Dusk will be a quiet celebration of the season from the rooftop of the newly refurbished Toynbee studios as part of Artsadmin Summer Season. Choosing the form of a collective meditation aiming to allow the audience to access the twilight within, Atavar will use shamanic techniques, astral magic and all forms of mystic poetics. What could be better than an exclusive rooftop ceremony over the City to mark the start of a mellow London summer?

NB: Dusk is performed on 20/06, 21/06 and 22/06 and is part of Artsadmin Summer Season (runs till 30/06).

At a point quite early on in Olivier Dahan's moving biopic of the troubled life of Edith Piaf (a remarkable performance from Marion Cotillard), the 10-year-old Piaf (the excellent Pauline Burlet) is waiting to collect donations for her street-performer father, Louis Gassion (Jean-Paul Rouve), when she finds herself forced to sing -- in order to save his less than spectacular contortionist's act from falling flat on its face. By this age, Piaf had already experienced more suffering than most do in a lifetime: abandoned on the streets of Paris by her mother Anetta (Clotilde Courau), who dreamed of being a great singer; dumped in a Normandy brothel by her father, who went off to join the circus; and narrowly escaping brushes with severe malnutrition and near-blindness. So, when the young Piaf opens her mouth to sing for the first time in public she lets rip with a powerful rendition of "La Marseillaise". It's a blast straight from her anguished and tormented soul. She has found a way to purge herself of all the misery and wretchedness already visited upon her fragile life. She has found her voice. It's a great moment in a well-observed and skilfully crafted film.

NB: La vie en rose is released in London on 22/06. Also of note is Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder, which screens at the ICA till 01/07, and the John Cassavetes season at BFI Southbank, which runs till 30/06.

Talkin' bout my regeneration, London is once again topical. As Lily Allen confirms, LDN is topos of the pops. Debate London, presented by The Architecture Foundation and hosted by Tate Modern, is a series of five major debates about the city's future at a time when the urban fabric is undergoing accelerated development in a bid to make the Olympic deadline. Seven years of urban development will be the cinematic backdrop for four weeks of television. The monumentality of an enduring Olympic architecture is an oxymoron to the ephemerality of its greatest spectacle -- the men's 100 m sprint final is all over in 10 seconds! Anyway, if not solely for the twin reasons of housing and transport, LDN needs regenerating and for this any LDN discussion is laudable. If presentations by the likes of Saskia Sassen, whose book The Global City would undoubtedly be impenetrable to most LDNers, are to truly offer "a platform for all Londoners to debate what kind of London they really want" then Debate London must break the academic conventions of the bourgeois lecture and become a more accessible open source for dialogue and exchange amongst LDN citizens. What you have just read should thus appear not in a kultured listings magazine but on page 3 of The Sun!

NB: this event runs from 22/06 till 25/06 and has been programmed in conjunction with London Architecture Week 2007. Also of note is Tate Modern's exhibition Global Cities which opens this week on 20/06.

Bill Aitchison has a tendency to make performances that look on first appearance derivative of every performance art and experimental theatre piece that's happened over the last 30 years, yet he puts these influences together in such a way that finally his performances are unique and rewarding. 24/7/52, his latest piece, made with Boris Kahnert and James Dunn, gets its London premiere ahead of an Edinburgh run and European tour. The performance sees him multi-tasking by trying to perform four or five different actions at once with surprising and often very funny results. The piece is a meditation on time, which moves too quickly to ever become ponderous for it has him running around like a man possessed. Amusing and intelligent in equal measure, 24/7/52 is an engaging piece that looks all too much like real life.

NB: 24/7/52 runs for two nights on both 22/06 and 23/06 (it is part of the Sprint festival which runs till 01/07).

Championing the spoken word has been at the heart of American artist John Giorno's work for over 40 years. In 1963 he was the reluctant star of Warhol's eight-hour film Sleep and in 1965 he established Giorno Poetry Systems, connecting poetry and performance, which has continued to this day to profile and release seminal works by Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Glenn Branca, Frank Zappa, Diamanda Galas and his associate in visionary exploration, William Burroughs. Dissolving the lineage that runs from beat, through hippie to punk, it's gratifying to find him placed within the Barbican's Panic Attack! Art In The Punk Years gallery show, as his anarchic spirit has liberated the word from the page, mirroring the attitudes of other fiercely independent artists of the punk years. As he once wrote: "Just / do it, / just don't / not do it, / just do it."

NB: Panic Attack! Art In The Punk Years runs till 09/09. On 27/06 catch Mark Sladen (co-curator of Panic Attack!) and Michael Bracewell (co-curator of The Secret Public) as they discuss both exhibitions.

Giveaway: we have three pairs of tickets for Panic Attack! to give away. They'll go to three randomly picked Flashers who can tell us the title of the recent ICA show that covered similar themes.

A veritable Vasco da Gama of modern music, Pedro Amaral is a little known figure in this country, but on the other side of the small but significant cultural curtain imposed by the English Channel, he is gathering a formidable reputation as a composer, conductor and explorer of the inner depths of modern music. Having begun his voyage in Lisbon he swiftly moved to Paris, where over the last few years he has plotted a whirlwind quest through the pantheon of contemporary music, receiving a litany of accolades and rubbing shoulders with the many faces of the European cultural aristocracy. This is his first appearance as a conductor and composer in London, for which he has enlisted the most highly-regarded musicians the capital has to offer and put on a programme that makes virtually no concession to the usual minimalist fare to which audiences are generally accustomed in order to clear their palettes. Make no mistake, this is a no holds barred conquest of our small 51st state, a shot across the bow of our lethargic predisposition for pastoral romanticism, a swift upper cut into the soft underbelly of nostalgia! People of London prepare to repel this would-be cultural invader!

It can't be easy to have a messiah complex in Brixton where preachers jostle of the elbow on the high street in order to reach the misguided souls who have not yet heard the good news... Recognition is as hard to come by as a pedestrian willing to stop and listen. At least it is for Omo, a naive and confused young man freshly plucked out of prison by a congregation fishing for new converts on Coldharbour Lane with promises of a moderate God willing to take orders for new cars and buckets of KFC. But Omo has reforms and miracles in mind and will go to great lengths to be recognised as the "chosen one". Representing Brixton without resorting to the cliches of drugs, violence and gentrification can prove tricky and Oladipo Agboluaje's play doesn't quite eschew this but rather pokes fun at it with variable success. Nonetheless, the Pearson Playwright in residence has a great eye for the vagaries of the human soul and writes with compassion and humour. The direction and set design are spare and don't detract from brilliant performances by Jimmy Akingbola and Dona Croll. Not quite a miracle but an enlightening piece of contemporary theatre.

NB: runs till 23/06.

In a world obsessed with the "Next Big Thing", it's a brave curator who makes a case for nostalgia in contemporary art. An even braver one to title a show after a Kylie song, although, given the V&A's recent Kylie retrospective, you'd be forgiven for thinking she was the only avant-garde artist alive. For the last day in the exhibition (after all, exhibitions don't last forever, and even the most dedicated art-follower is likely to miss some of the hundreds of contemporary art shows in London), the SLG has asked curator Andrew Renton, Programme Director of MA Curating at Goldsmiths, to discuss the idea of nostalgia in relation to his curiously chosen exhibits that include an octopus and an electric tree, in addition to the more obviously poignant bouquet of flowers memorialising the death of artist Jeroen de Rijke. Renton's choice of guests, ex-Design Museum director Alice Rawsthorn, and Michael Bracewell, Britain's top pop-culture historian, suggest a more cultural studies debate on the nature of objects in relation to memory and mourning. Bring along your favourite cuddly toy for support.

Directed and produced by the Hong Kong film making institution known as Johnny To, this is a beautifully choreographed shoot 'em up and hang 'em high spaghetti (maybe noodle) western, updated and set in the Portuguese colony of Macau in 1998, just before it returned to mainland China. Former hit man Wo (Nick Cheung) is hiding out on the island with his wife and new born baby, while Blaze (Anthony Wong), Tai (Francis Ng), Cat (Roy Cheung) and Fat (Lam Suet) all meet on the street outside his house. Two of them have been sent by a Hong Kong crime boss to kill him while the other two are there to protect him; and all five were childhood friends. A full on bloke film that expends more bullets than The Wild Bunch, features less women than The Warriors and has its tongue nestled well and truly in its bloodied cheek, this is a cracking turn with more than a hint of political satire that, somewhere between Infernal Affairs and Reservoir Dogs, is fun for all the family.

NB: Exiled was released in London on 15/06. Also of note is La vie en rose, which is released this week on 22/06, Werner Herzog's The Wild Blue Yonder, which screens at the ICA till 01/07, and the John Cassavetes season at BFI Southbank, which runs till 30/06.

British-American entrepreneur Andrew Keen believes that new developments in digital media pose a genuine threat to our civil liberties. Keen, a former Silicon Valley pioneer and now controversial critic, cites Communism as the closest social model applicable to the online "cult of creative self-realisation". In his first book on the subject, The Cult Of The Amateur, Keen suggests that most web content is simply "user-generated nonsense", preventing information of real value to surface, while the internet is a narcissistic platform used by corporate giants to amass and profit from our personal details. Journalist and writer Bryan Appleyard recently added to this debate in The Times technology article "The Web Is Dead Long Live The Web", identifying a growing critical trend towards the blogosphere and beyond. This informal discussion between the pair should cover some interesting territory between the concept of data equality and the social ramifications of commercial misuse.

Jason Molina's a busy man. In addition to solo work, collaborations with the likes of Alasdair Roberts and leading Songs: Ohia, his latest and greatest vehicle for his songwriting, Magnolia Electric Co, are back in the UK after impressing at the Dirty Three curated by ATP. Hailing from Chicago, Magnolia Electric Company are Molina's rock band, taking his songs out of their formerly intimate acoustic setting and making them bigger, louder and, well, electric. Their music seems to follow on from an American tradition of making music which doesn't have any kind of novelty factor; it's just solid, hearty and good -- think Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty and later REM. However, don't expect this gig to just be meat and potatoes -- the support looks to be some more exotic fare including improvising loopmaster David Thomas Broughton and traditional Sami yoikers Adjagas, bringing their extraordinary vocal techniques down from the frozen north.

Continuing to defy categorisation, with The Wild Blue Yonder the inventive Werner Herzog has turned his hand to science fiction -- of a sort. A wild-eyed and cranky Brad Dourif plays an alien from the Andromeda Galaxy, who travelled to Earth when his own planet -- the Wild Blue Yonder of the title -- began to freeze over. Amidst the unexplained wreckage of an anonymous and deserted town he recounts the story of a secret journey undertaken by NASA astronauts after the Earth suffers contamination during the Roswell incident. Combining '80s archive film, shot by the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis of the disorganised -- and comically dull -- daily routine life in zero gravity, with amazingly beautiful footage of scuba diving beneath the Antarctic ice, Herzog creates an alternative to the usual shiny, futuristically hi-tech sci-fi formula. Interviews with deadpan scientists, including one explaining the marvellously arcane "Chaotic Transport Theory", makes it seem more factual than fantastic. However, the film's real strength is not the story, but the combination of the sublime surreal images and the wonderfully haunting music.

NB: The Wild Blue Yonder screens at the ICA till 01/07 and is part of the Werner Herzog Season of films that runs till 01/07. Also of note is La vie en rose, which is released this week on 22/06, and the John Cassavetes season at BFI Southbank, which runs till 30/06.

The Arcola Theatre is one of our favourite Off-West End venues and it is great to see that under the artistic directorship of Mehmet Ergen, it is constantly trying to find its own distinctive voice in the Turkish enclave of London. Pera Palas by Sinan Unel is presented as part of the Orient Express Season (29/04 to 07/07) featuring theatre, music, film, dance, photography and paintings from Turkey. A room in the famous Pera Palas Hotel in Istanbul is used as setting to explore three relationships spanning nearly one hundred years of Turkish history. It is definitely a history lesson, a bit less of a great production. Unel's play is an over ambitious take on the modern epic. It is a shame the production generally lacks directorial integrity and at times slips into silliness. However, it still deserves credit for trying to bring new ideas to the London stage. Recommended with an excellent kebab from just opposite on Arcola Street, and Efes beer afterwards in the newly refurbished Arcola bar with live Turkish accompaniment to make the evening complete. And then you really feel like you're on a little journey to Istanbul.

NB: runs till 07/07.

Andrew Upton's version of Maxim Gorky's Philistines is an absolute joy from start to finish, perfectly capturing the tragic-comic character of the work. One of the first examples of Socialist Realism it uses the disintegrating relationships within a petit-bourgeois household to comment on the fraught socio-political situation of pre-Soviet Russia. It is set entirely in a large, very atmospheric room, with windows that look out onto a continual downpour. The story is simple, but although there is little "formal" action, the psychological passages are so real, that one remains utterly captivated. Vassily, the father of the household, is the embodiment of narrow petit-bourgeois mentality; having climbed a hard road to money and success, he is disillusioned by a false and destructive sense of power. Pyotr, his son, a passionate student who's been expelled for political activism, has lost faith in the socialist movement and their ambitious reforms, and is drifting. His sitter Tanya is a depressive school-teacher, in love with the adopted son, Nil, a "lowly" metal-worker (embodiment of the spirited and defiant proletariat) whose love for the maid slowly destroys Tanya. But, although there is much sadness here, Gorky's script is full of humour, and the audience was often in peals of laughter. A play that can generate laughter and tears in equal measure should not be missed.

NB: runs till 18/08.

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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