Tuesday 11 March (6 - 8:30pm )

@ Counter Gallery, 44a Charlotte Rd., EC2 (020.7684.8888) Tube: Old St.

It is definitely war mentality in the London artworld. Time to batten down the hatches and open more galleries. Matthew Slotover, yes he of freize fame, was a player with countereditions.com, but since his departure partner and more importantly Britwriter/curator Carl Freedman -- of Minky Manky (1995), Modern Medicine fame -- has taken over helming both countereditions and its real world incarnation: Counter Gallery. Counter Editions provided a special venue for the more-expensive Britartists to expose their wares, however with luminaries such as Ofili, Lucas, Emin and Hume already allied to bigger galleries, Counter Gallery should be an interestingly spicy mix of old and young. Their inaugural show will be of Simon Martin, who has promised a painting, a sculpture and "something half-way between the two". Thus with a highly polished monkey head, a gigantic bird-on-branch relief and bird photograph, this should be an interesting space to watch. (Show ends Sun 20/04.)

NB: Private view Tue 11/03 from 6 - 8:30pm.

Tuesday 11 March (7:30pm)

@ Cine Lumiere, 17 Queensberry Place, SW7 (020.7073.1350) Tube: South Kensington

In 1972 the Russians and the Americans were battling it out in true Cold War style, with "my rocket's better than yours" competitiveness. The Ruskies were the first in Space, the Yanks the first on the moon. It all ended in tears years later when senile actor Ronald Reagan convinced the Soviets he was on the brink of realising his Star Wars fantasy with anti-nuke laser systems that would make Han Solo blush with inadequacy. The Russian attempts to emulate Reagan bankrupted Russia for the next 20 years. However, before it got to all that, and at the very beginning of the '70s Sci-Fi obsession, which has left us all with the sensation that flares, 'taches and pre-feminist ideals are de-rigueur in space, the battle of ideologies was fought appropriately on the silver screen. Tarkovsky's Solaris is the Russian 2001, but it must be said that in pure entertainment terms, the capitalists have it. Nonetheless, for real Sci-Fi buffs, or fans of the more obscure reaches of European cinema, Solaris is well worth a watch. And the long lingering shots give the viewer plenty of time to ponder the significance of the unknowable alien at the films heart, an alien which for 21st century viewers may be the communist system which spawned it.

NB: The film will be presented by David Gillespie (author of Russian Cinema) and Tarkovsky's friend and PA Leyla Alexander-Garrett.

Wednesday 12 March (7:30pm)

@ Dingwalls, Middle Yard, Camden Lock, NW1 (020.7267.1577) Tube: Camden Town

With Moving Up Country James Yorkston created an album of simple, beautiful music. Witty and unpretentious, it's a folk/Celtic album with not a pan pipe in sight, Badly Drawn Boy without the "Bad", it's a revelation. It was also Rough Trade's album of last year. No mean feat considering the amount of beard stroking involved. Nick Drake and early Van Morrison may be the most obvious jump off points, but Yorkston has created something truly unique: a timeless album of rare beauty. Live, he promises to be a rare treat, get ready with that knitwear.

Wednesday 12 March (10:30pm - 3am)

@ The Ghetto, 5-6 Falconberg Court, W1 (020.7287.3726) Tube: Tottenham Court Rd.

Are you ready for some White Label heaven? If so, then get ready for DJs Are Not Rock Stars -- the biggest mash-up molotov cocktail since 2 Many DJ's collided with The Avalanches. The masterminds behind the concept of four turntables and no fear, are DJ Alexander Technique and the former Concetta Kirschner, Princess Superstar. Her first DJ release, Princess Is A DJ, pitted Black Sabbath against Lucidris, Fabolos and Lynyrd Skynyrd in a bloody celebrity deathmatch of a bootleg. Unsurprisingly, it sold out faster than you could say "Last Night A Rap Superstar Turned DJ Saved My Life." With a forthcoming album of mixes (featuring the car crash concoctions "Like A Big Virgin" and "Danger! Sex Shooter (But You Can Relax)" ) to promote, DJs Are Not Rock Stars come to Nag Nag Nag following appearances at The Love Parade's Gigolo Party with Ms. Kittin and Tiga. To paraphrase another blonde with music and ambition on her mind: "Hey, Mr DJ put a record on, I want to dance..."

Giveaway: We have three copies of the soon to be released Do It Like A Robot single by Princess Superstar to give away. They'll go to three randomly picked subscribers who can tell us the name of her record label.

Friday 14 March

@ Various cinemas across London

Clooney's directorial debut takes a look at whether Chuck Barris, creator of the US version of Blind Date and presenter/inventor of the Gong Show, was a CIA assassin on the side. After years of watching Mulder & Scully in action, quite frankly, if you told us that Cilla Black was a member of MI5, who on her days off is out hunting down Sadam, we'd believe you. So it's completely probable to us that the man the US critics called the "Ayatollah of Trasherola", was doing his bit for the Cold War by heartlessly murdering a few commies. For a first film it's good and when it's darkly comic and writer Charlie Kaufman is doing what he does best -- exposing the humour of our neuroses and lack of self-worth with a surreal magnifying glass -- the film is fascinating. Yes, ultimately it does all feel a little bit so what? and there are some spectacularly dodgy spy-scenes -- Julia Roberts is particularly misscast in a Mata Hariesque role and Clooney's government spook character seems to be dwarfed by his moustache -- but Sam Rockwell's performance deserves all the hype and there's no doubt that, as you'd expect from Clooney, it's a real good-looking film.

Friday 14 March

@ Various cinemas accross London

Le Fils is arthouse film-making in its purist form. Reminiscent of the Dogme 95 Digital films and in particular of Festen, as with the Dardenne brother's (Luc & Jean-Pierre) award winning film Rosetta, it's easy to see these Belgian film makers' documentary roots. It's viciously naturalistic, using no music and a hand-held, verite-style camera-work. To describe the plot would spoil the film as it's revealed very slowly. However, it is safe to say that it's a three-hander focusing on Olivier -- a carpentry teacher at a vocational school for juvenile delinquents (played by Dardenne regular Olivier Gourmet), his ex-wife (Isabella Soupart) and Francis (Morgan Marinne) -- and a boy who comes to join Olivier's class. All the performances are totally believable and Gourmet rightfully deserves the best actor award he won at Cannes last year. Inventive in its simplicity, the filmmaking is humane -- making a tiny story about forgiveness and grief feel allegorical (it's no accident that Olivier is a carpenter). The camera work pushes you hard against the characters' emotions, with the ending feeling a little abrupt, showing the extent to which the style absorbs. Definitely not everyone's cup of tea but for those who like their movies raw, this is a must.

Friday 14 March (Day 1: Fri 14/03 2pm; Day 2 & 3: Sat & Sun 15&16/03 10am - 6pm)

@ Atlantis Gallery (ground floor) Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane, London E1

Art's work can take many forms and media, one of which is voice, or more precisely discussion or congress -- as Jospeh Beuys has so effectively demonstrated -- as part of the nomadic artistic collective T1&2's anarchistic activities, they have organised a 3 day congress around Gustave Metzger, and only the father of auto-destructive art would generate a conference with the word "fork-lift truck" in it's title. T1&2 have invited every major Museum director in London (Nicholas Serota (Tate Boss), Andrea Tarsia (curator -- Whitechapel) Julia Peyton-Jones (Serpentine Director) Norman Rosenthal, Phillip Dodd (ICA)...) whether they'll show up, we'll soon see... and that's just Day 1. As the title suggests, all speakers will be provided with a Fork-Lift to speak from -- as it's a "symbol of the real world... a tough multi-purpose instrument."

Day 1: Fri 14/03 (begins 2pm)
Speakers have been invited from all major London museums to speak about recent projects.

Day 2: Sat 15/03 (10am to 6pm)
Devoted to a range of speakers including Gustave Metzger, a new film on him will be screened by Ken McMullen. Sultan Barakat will talk on war and society, and Dominic Jenkins on Terror and democracy.

Day 3: Sun 16/03 (10am to 6pm)
Will center around uber-curator Hans Ulrich-Obrist in discussion with Metzger, followed by talks and events by various artists.

Friday 14 March (5:15pm)

@ National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 (020 7452 3400) Tube: Embankment/Waterloo

Collateral Damage, not the movie, is the acting community's and The National Theatre's response to the current political climate. Our Tony may not approve, and increasingly, as each day passes, more and more in this land are standing up and protesting, yet as everyday passes it seems we are moving closer to a crisis situation. Sure, we have cringed through enough embarrassing "celebrities against war"... It's like ya boss trying to get down with the kids by mentioning random words s/he's overheard, like; "yeah I dig ElectroFlash man, like Ladyprong and that night at Fag Fag Fag". However it's a free land (unless you're subject to council tax, want to retire, wrote a book about MI5 or want an education) and a free event, and we all love a bit of subversive behaviour, especially from the likes of Alan Rickman, Vanessa Redgrave, Terry Jones and John Sessions! Oh and next week, there's Dame Judi and the newly single Jude Law. Catch 'em, then read the Medact and IPPNW paper of the same name exploring "The Health and Environmental Costs of War on Iraq" and power be with you. Peace.

NB: For some lighter entertainment at the NT after Collateral Damage, check out Semi d-datched at 10pm. This week sees Simon Lee (Faze Action) join up with host Ben Osborne.

Friday 14 March (6:30pm - 8:30pm)

@ Anthony Reynolds, 60 Great Malborough St., W1 (020.7439.2201) Tube: Oxford Circus

Richard Billingham (33) had always intended to be a painter. While at Sunderland, he photographed his family with the intention of turning them into large-scale paintings, but found the snapshots in themselves to be far too engaging. It's painting's loss but Britart's gain. With the publication of Ray's A Laugh, a charming series of tragi-comic, shoot-from-the-hip, images of his family in various states of comfortable dishevelment, the Billingham family took the artworld by storm. What he's been performing is very much in sync with painter's such as Karen Kilimnick and Elizabeth Peyton, recording aspects of their lives in a spontaneous manner. Just as Impressionism responded to photography, Billingham has been working in that space between life, art and culture. Since then, he's shifted away from portraiture to more pastorial work. In this show, mainly of landscapes, Billingham has not moved away from the personal. They are images of his travels and places reasonant to him. Like a Chinese painter digesting the moment, he has described his activity as meditating upon the event before quickly taking a snapshot. Unlike the Rothkoesque sublime of Hiroshi Sughimoto, Billingham is now working at a more English understanding of nature à la Constable. Perhaps it's painting's gain afterall. (Show ends Sat 17/04.)

NB: Private view is Fri 14/03 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

Friday 14 March (8pm)

@ ICA, The Mall, SW1 (020.7930.3647) Tube: Charing Cross/Piccadilly

As part of the ICA's ongoing Full Length series (live music performance against the backdrop of a film), this week no. 24 challenges J-Walk with La Planete Sauvage, not Roots Manuva vs. Terminator 2 this will still Schwarzeneggerize your KFsoul outta that afterwork blues. Manuchian soulsters and production duo Martin Brew and Martin Desai take on this cult classic of French Sci-Fi animation. Rene Laloux's 1973 La Planete Sauvage (it won the Prix special in '73 at Cannes) with it's subjugated humans -- the Oms -- revolting against 40ft blue aliens -- the Draags -- on the planet Ygam, should provide appropriate funkadelic grit to J-Walk's big beat sound. With their trancy-synthcore-funky-bigbeat debut, A Night On The Rocks (East West), prepare to be blown through a world of twisty planets and scary landscapes... and get your groove back!

Saturday 15 March (6pm)

@ Astoria, 157 Charing Cross Rd., WC2 (020.7434.9592) Tube: Tottenham Court Rd.

Over firty years of funk, Tower of Power have been a perpetual gigging and recording machine churning out a discography longer than the Bay Bridge with little variation in style. That's because they're a Soul band, and by their own admission, that's what they do. In fact, that's all they do. However, with this experience, this has to be the cream of the crop. Promoting the forthcoming release of their album The Oakland Zone, this event is the only UK date on their tour of Europe and Amercia. With such a clear musical remit, there's little point in formulating a description of their music, suffice to say that we can expect only the tightest performance of clean, crisp Soul. ToP's tried and tested formula plants lovely, bubbly organs in with a tight bass and funky drummer, punctuated by the occasional stab from the big brass section. All in all a silky Soul Funk fest.

Saturday 15 March (Sat 15/03 & Sun 16/03 7pm)

@ 291 Gallery, 291 Hackney Rd., E2 (020.7613.5676) Tube: Liverpool St./Old St./Bethnal Green

Ant Hampton of ROTOZAZA has teamed up with writer Glen Neath to produce romcom -- the story of a relationship between a man and a woman, from their first meeting to its messy conclusion. The 'twist' is that the performers, including Shunt's David Rosenberg and Gemma Brockis, have no idea what they will be saying and doing to each other until they are in front of an audience, hearing the story for the first time through a set of headphones. The words they'll be asked to repeat, and the actions they'll be asked to carry out, have been pre-recorded onto cds, as has the soundtrack and the film projected behind them. It might sound like an audacious attempt to control everything that happens on the night, but the quality of the actors, and the fact that they're learning the plot at the same time as the audience, will provide moments of shocking honesty and surprising synchronicity.

Saturday 15 March (7pm - 2am)

@ Notting Hill Arts Club, 21 Notting Hill Gate, W11 (020.7460.4459) Tube: Notting Hill Gate

The Batmacumba and Jinga! club nights regularly emanate samba shockwaves from The Mall to Shoreditch. The Barbican, Royal Festival Hall, and Jazz Cafe showcase this cream of classic artists. The V Recordings, Trama, Mr. Bongo and Soul Jazz labels bring gems -- ancient to future -- to new ears. Brazilian ex-pats re-kindle some of that old country musical magic at weekly throw-downs. And you know at least one person who's a Capoeira (the Brazilian martial art/dance form) convert. To state the somewhat obvious, Brazilian music is BIG in London. Patrick Forge (behind the long-running BLA club night) and Joe Davis (behind Far Out Recordings and the BLA compilation series) are, alongside Talkin' Loud's Gilles Peterson, this scene's pioneers. The first BLA album appeared in 1995, featuring a smorgasbord of Brazilian legends and young bloods, was gushingly described by The Independent as "one of the summer's most effective soundtracks". Much in the same vein, BLA4 brings together a triumvirate of meshed perspectives from '70s heroes (including Joyce and Marcos Valle), leftfield luminaries (4 Hero and Osunlade), and new funkateers (including Jairzinho Oliveira and Patricia Marx). This launch party is going to be a steamy fling -- don't forget your Havaianas!

NB: THE DATE IS WRONG ON THIS EVENT -- THIS PARTY IS ACTUALLY TAKING PLACE ON SAT 19/04 AND NOT SAT 15/03. AS AN ALTERNATIVE CHECK OUT JINGA! AT BRIDGE & TUNNEL ON SAT 15/03 FOR INFO SEE BRIDGE & TUNNEL WEBSITE.

Sunday 16 March (Plug and Play 6pm - 12am; Vectors sessions 6pm - 12am )

@ Public Life, 82a Commercial Street (020.7375.2435) Tube: Liverpool Street

The digital age is opening up new levels of experience for us and reshaping a totally different youth culture. We have grown up with technology all around us: Star Wars, Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, Manga, computer games and Playstation. All have had an intense impact on us, played an integral part in our childhoods, and thus technology has become nature to us. Electronic music has been "the norm" for more than a decade and we now link DJ/music culture with technology, so the desire to have a go is rife. We can now become producers as well as consumers, computers programmers and computer users, video directors and spectators, the performers or the audience.

Catch this wealth of new talent this Sunday evening in East London:

Plug and Play
The laptop guys are once again showcasing their pioneering "math rock" down at Public Life in Spitalfields. Sets from: Ardisson, Adadaat and Eviltwin & Monstatruk (both on the Underconsctruction Records label). Video input: screening from the new Staalplaat DVD and Belflix's visual glitches.

Vectors sessions
At Cargo: VJ's, film-makers, animators and projectionists from the microchunk label: AvinIT + the Anyone Collective (a/v duo VJ Anyone and DJ James MacDonald) + v-chunk + Sapo. DJs: Sate of Bengal and DJ Lulu

Ends Saturday 15 March (Tue to Fri 10am - 6pm; Sat 11am - 5pm)

@ Stephen Friedman, 25-28 Old Burlington St., W1 (020.7494.1434) Tube: Picadilly Circus

The White South African artist Kendall Geers (now based in Brussels) once greeted Nelson Mandela in Germany dressed as the eponymous SA president with plastic Mandela face mask. While Mandela was pleased to be recognised in the traditional African way of greeting one's God, other's were not. This enfant terrible is frequently described as a political and conceptual artist, but what gives his work its ooomph is not its politic but its cheek, and total lack of high moral tone. Here, one is greeted at the glass door with a red, devil-horned and spiked-tailed, letter "G", his self-portrait. Inside, two domes of a security mirror have been joined to make a whole orb -- a tranformation into less security and maybe... one-mirror ball. A corner has been demarkated with yellow paint and "Armed Response" signs -- protecting empty space perhaps? On the other side, one of his standards: statues of Christ and Mary wrapped in red-striped, "Warning" tape -- warning or protecting? A participant at Documenta XI, what these pieces proffer are teasing questions, witty opportunities to quizz day-to-day object and re-understand our world.

Tuesday 18 March (6:30pm)

@ Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 (020.7887.8008) Tube: Southwark/Blackfriars

Most artists are just happy to have earned a handfull of articles through their careers, let alone museum shows and catalogues. Art & Language not only have a stack of those, but even their very own journal, the eponymous Art-Language (first issue: May 1969!). Formed in 1968 by Michael Baldwin, David Bainbridge, Harold Hurrell and Terry Atkinson, and key players in the Conceptual art scene -- even Joseph Kosuth was a player early on -- like Star Trek's Borg, they have operated as a loose collective of artists. Inspired by '60s politics and trying to out-flank painting, their highly policitized artivity has spanned performance, sculpture, painting, indexes, publications (much of which was theorized with Charles Harrison). Today Michael Baldwin and Mel Ramsden maintain their most recent incarnation and have been making "paintings" over the last decade. As part of the Tate's Painting Present series, they will be speaking on painting after Conceptual art. Resistence is futile.

Wednesday 19 March (7pm)

@ ICA, The Mall, SW1 (020.7930.3647) Tube: Charing Cross/Piccadilly

Los Angeles means the City of Angels, yet the only angel is really the one played by your favourite Hollywood actor, certainly it is a multi-cultural, melting-pot of a megalopolis or interconnected series of hardassed, fast-driving urban villagers, and yet some Angelenos truly love it like no other place on earth. Traffic, Blade Runner, LA Story, Repo Man, The Fast And The Furious were all LA movies, not to mention half the Hollywood flics with freeway scenes. Mike Davis is to urban theory what Raymond Chandler was to hard-boiled fiction, what Brian Wilson was to surf or real music in general. Not since Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The architecture... has any book on the City redefined it's sense of place as Davis' City of Quartz: Excavating... Since then, the LA-based, Sci-Arc lecturer and MacArthur fellow has been theorizing his "apocalyse theme park", his new book Dead Cities: A Natural History is an exploration of terrorism, global warming and runaway capitalism. At the ICA, he'll be speaking about the desert, paranoia, city planning and Las Vegas. Where most travel the earth with cartographies of the past, visionaries negotiate with maps of the present; making order out of chaos is what most creatives do, some like Mike Davis seem to order out of thinking chaos. Catch him now, and see how the land lies...

NB: In conjunction with this talk the ICA is screening a series of short, eclectic films including Antonioni's The Desert (Fri 21/03 to Sun 23/03) and Lynch's Mulholland Drive (Mon 24/03 to Wed 26/03).

Friday 21 March (7pm)

@ Brixton Academy, 211 Stockwell Rd., SW9 (020.7771.3000) Tube: Brixton

Turin Brakes head the line-up for this extra date at the Academy after the total sell-out of their Thursday night show -- so before you go out and buy any hot cakes make sure you pick up your tickets for the Brakes gig. This extensive tour of the US and Europe promises to turn out dynamic and powerful musical performances which nestle beneath wavering vocals akin to Radiohead and Muse. The resulting combination produces a deep, warm, sound that is mellowing in the way that purple is mellowing; let your mind sink down and melt away. This gig also puts well selected support I Am Kloot out on the big stage -- their weapons of choice: a wry Mancunian wit and some thoughtfully written, soft indie tunes. Along with extra support from the shaggy retro-pop of The Thrills this evening looks like a good one for lovers of that progressive indie sound with a showcase of songwriting ability.

Ends Sunday 23 March (Daily 8:30pm; Sun 6:30pm)

@ Battersea Arts Centre, Lavender Hill, SW11 (020.7326.8200)

Aah! Lights go down on a stage twinkling in the fragile light of a firmament of stars and blazing torches. Hang on! A representative of the theatre is halting proceedings asking some banal marketing questions, which, come to think of it, have turned a bit weird. "How would I describe my sense of humour?" Do staff here really wear feathers in their hair and wild looks in their eyes? On with the show and yes, this is more like it, crashing chords and sophisticated dance routines involving carrots. Carrots? Into the first trick and the person next to me is having his mind sucked by a rather enthusiastic assistant. It seems familiar, there's the over-sexed magician and competitive assistant but something's wrong between these two. Things are getting out of hand, not to mention the increasing bizarre nature of the tricks. On the brink of catastrophe, there's a reconciliation of sorts. Is this how magicians make up or have these two totally lost the plot? It's a magic show, it's theatre, it's comedy and it's thinly varnished glamour with some decidedly appealing cracks and a very, very odd soundtrack...

Ends Sunday 18 May (Daily 10am - 6pm; Wed - Sat 10am - 9pm)

@ National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, WC2 (020.7747.2885) Tube: Charing Cross

It is so easy to be gob-smacked and outraged by a flayed body, a shark in a tank, a penis-headed boy, but to reconnect with our sense of awe is far, far more difficult. The first proper Titian show in this country should rectify this plenty... Tiziano Vecellio (approx. 1490-1579) arguablely one of the most passionate painters of the Renaissance, and the greatest Venetian painter. If you've ever been halted, slack-jawed between the NG's own Bacchus and Ariadne and The Death of Actaeon -- an early work next to a late one -- then prepare to be fully drawn into his embrace. It is not only his technical growth from the early, cold modelled portraits to the late, painterly paintings like his The Flaying of Marsyas which created that classic trajectory of how we imagine painters maturing, but the shift from intense classicism to romantic passion. With Manet from whom we gained one aspect of Modernism, who looked at Velasquez who in turn worshipped Titian. Just remember, it is not good 'cause it's old, it's good because... well frankly it's just remarkable.

NB: Titian After Dark occurs Wednesday to Saturday in evenings (last admission at 8:15pm) with Thursday for special events such as discussions on single paintings, a studio visit (his studio has been re-created), a Titian Menu, and an Italian film series. On Wed 12/04 Birkbeck Fellow, Paul Hills will speak on Titian's Fire at 6:30pm Tickets: £6/£4 concessions. See NG website for the full schedule of Titian related events.

Giveaway: We have three copies of the catalogue to give away. They'll go to three randomly picked subscribers who can tell us the name of the famous art festival that is held in Venice.