Wednesday 7 January (Wed 07/01, Thu 08/01 & Fri 09/01 at 7pm)

@ Water Rats Theatre, 328 Gray's Inn Rd., WC1X (020.7837.7269) Tube: King's Cross

The Track and Field organisation excels in promoting honest, soulful, underground pop of the indie/alternative variety, and have done so obsessively since 1999. Named after a song by alt-pop flag-flyers Belle and Sebastian, the label, who also have various club nights and a fanzine in their retro gym kit empire, present the fifth annual Winter Sprinter three-day showcase, which once again looks to warm up January with a delicious array of '60s-inspired entertainment. Highlights include the first gig of 2004 from NYC's Essex Green, touching vocals from Neil Young to Jeffrey Lewis-inspired anti-folkers Herman Dune (Wed 07/01); The Ladybug Transistor, who release their first album on T&F this month, and "Jesus, sex and booze" singers The Broken Family Band (Thu 08/01); plus old-school indie band Tompaulin, T&F's first live show stars (1999), Kicker, and new signing The Loves, whose Welsh rock 'n' roll has caught the attention of the likes of John Peel and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

NB: This mini-festival lasts three days, starting on Wed 07/01 and ending on Fri 09/01.

Thursday 8 January (6:45pm)

@ Calder Bookshop, 51 The Cut, SE1 (020.7620.2900) Tube: Waterloo/Southwark

Probably more renowned for providing Third Reich soldiers with kindling and being a poster boy for Existentialism, it's so easy to forget that, like Marx and Freud who are today completely assimilated, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche's (1844-1900) ideas were once extremely radical. Organising our world and understanding our relation to it is but one of philosophy's tasks, not to mention that meaning-of-life gobbledygook, but the Nietzsch offers so much more. Though Kant, Hegel, and more importantly Schopenhauer possessed style, it took a trained philologist and theologian to turn style into substance. With appropriately anarchic headings like "Why I am so clever" and Beyond Good and Evil, the way his thinking overturns thought -- through its writing -- challenges us to reorganise our world at every turn. Now John Calder -- publisher of Samuel Beckett, another thinker through words -- will outline this particular philosophical argument with a talk and actors reading from his texts.

NB: Ticket inlcudes a glass of wine after the event.

Thursday 8 January (8pm)

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

Imagine becoming a cult filmmaker just by following your daughter and gran round the country with an old camera? Ahh... but it is really Gallivant's heart that touches us. Travelling round the English coast with his handicapped daughter, Andrew Kotting is now gonna grab our minds as well with this special ICA multi-screen remix of Gallivant outtakes, with live music provided by Jem Finer and Kino Club's David Leister adding projection. Expect the cheek and mischief to be carried from the film through this special format; a throw-back perhaps to them olden days of cinema. Bearing in mind that Kotting has declared that a director's statement should include something useful -- a recipe, furniture-making instructions -- bring paper and expect a lesson...

NB: Fans of this remix series take note that the bar remix session will be of filmmaker Sarah Miles -- known for her Western-themed work in Devon -- vs. remix-kids Redux.

Friday 9 January

@ Various cinemas across London

Ever wondered about those Hollywood Stars who sneak over to Japan to earn a few hundred thousand bucks selling products... well Sofia Coppola may be the worst actress that Hollywood has yet spawned, but she certainly is a worthy director. Her debut feature -- The Virgin Suicides -- became a sleeper hit and laid a stylish but firm foundation for the success that is Lost In Translation. And it deserves every piece of praise showered upon it since its release. It is indolent -- almost lethargic as anything led by Bill Murray should be -- and all the more delightful for it. It is melancholic -- almost heartbreaking -- and all the more funny for it. More than anything, it is simply beautiful, and leaves you feeling good. It reminds you the world is a beautiful place -- both visually and otherwise. And if that doesn't convince you, Scarlett Johansson should. A remarkable young woman who carries more personality in the bridge of her nose than does any other actress of her generation, she is superbly supported by Murray and Giovanni Ribisi. If you only see one movie this year, this should surely be it.

Friday 9 January (7:45pm)

@ Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, SE1 (020.7960.4203 or 4242) Tube: Embankment/Rail Waterloo

If you go to this performance YOU MAY END UP ON TV. Aha! See how we've hooked those of you who stay well clear of the Classical section of HMV, Virgin, Mister CD etc. You may well say when asked about your musical taste, "Well yah sweetie, I love all types of music", and then cite Edith Piaf as a classical musician. Well, Bach (and that's JS Bach) was a proper, bonafide Baroque musician, and if you need to liberate your CD collection, open your iPoded mind and look smarter than your friends, you should really give the guy a go. Especially when some of his most beautiful and exciting secular work, The Brandenburg Concertos, are being performed by consistent over-achievers, the Feinstein Ensemble. And if things work out like last year, these tickets are gonna go like Princess Anne's Dottie after a plump corgi (allegedly). Playing on original instruments intended and directed by Martin Feinstein in the resonant RFH, you will be treated to work with centuries of historical acclaim performed by internationally acclaimed musicians, and hear powerful, beautiful and smart music, that's un-deconstructed and longer than three and a half minutes. Oh, and yes, TV cameras are filming the performance as part of the RFH Early Music season.

Giveaway: We have a pair of tickets and two Feinsten Ensemble CDs to give away. They'll go to three randomly picked Flashers who can tell us how much Bach got paid for the Brandenburg Concertos.

Friday 9 January (Fri 09/01, 16/01 & 23/01 from 8pm - 2am)

@ Jazz Cafe, 5 Parkway, NW1 (020.7916.6060) Tube: Camden Town

Ty proved to be a revelation last year. His second album, Upwards, smashed any idle preconceptions about UK hip-hop (or a lack of it), and this resulted in an articulate and meaningful album which still remains deeply funky and dancefloor friendly. The album is unafraid to embrace a variety of musical flavours, and Ty happily affiliates with an impressive spectrum of musicians including afro beat drummer Tony Allen and vocalist Michelle Escoffery. The music has soulful and jazzy leanings at the same time as retaining an often harder edge with a constant flow of reflective and erudite vocals. Ty also happens to be flavour of the moment in the music press with his album being voted best of the year in numerous quarters. Whatever the case, it's all about brushing aside the cobwebs and embracing the future sound of urban London (and the rest of the world for that matter). Ty will be playing at the Jazz Cafe on consecutive Fridays throughout January (09/01, 16/01 & 23/01): come and see if you think the hype is justified. There can be few more intimate and informal venues to check out a rising star.

Giveaway: We have three copies of Upwards to give away. They'll go to three randomly picked Flashers who can tell us where Ty's family originally hails from.

Saturday 10 January

@ Various locations

KF could silently act out this entry in whiteface and a flurry of hand gestures but that would only reinforce negative stereotypes. The London International Mime Festival blurs the lines between dance, performance art, installation, painting and stand-up comedy. That'll put an end to your notions of funny Frenchman sniffing imaginary daisies! It all kicks off with miss, did it hurt when you fell down from heaven, a startling investigation of the emotions we hide courtesy of Brit performers A2. Originally performed in '99, the piece will be revised annually for the rest of the artists' lives. (That's a long-term commitment!) Next up is Spain's Joan Baixas, famed for creating paintings live onstage, most notably with Spanish Surrealist Joan Miro. This time Baixas performs Dopamine Suite drawing on colour, image, energy and projection to paint a journey through cycles of life and death, love and loss -- all to live DJ accompaniment. UK wunderkinds Ridiculusmus try out a few new ideas in How to be funny. Expect surprising and intelligent lunacy from one of the most consistently challenging UK performance companies around. Finally, catch Breath[e] -- an eerie, innovative performance that happens to you and 26 others in a darkened theatre. Inspired by Samuel Beckett's famous 30-second drama, Breath, this unforgettable journey is brought to you by the arts council of a suspiciously quiet Canada.

NB: This year's MIME festival runs from Sat 10/01 till Sun 25/01.

Saturday 10 January (4:30pm)

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

Like comics and surfing, skating is beginning to come in from the cold, that is its outlaw kulture is being sucked into the mainstream. Sure, some will hate losing their own particular cult and true insider values, but on the other hand we daytime Flashers will grow a little. And them kids will have some new clothes to show off. With Lucia Helenka -- who has made the 15-minute short The Fat for Channel 4 and arranged various skate events -- and Phil Young putting together the best of recent film shorts about the activity, expect to relive your skatehood and for the likes of Dogtown and Z-Boys to be purely out-manoeuvred. But if you don't know your 180 (one eighty) from yer 50 (five-0h), or skating Goofy from air, then perhaps you should just beef up a tad before sinking yourself into this particular warm teen haze.

NB: This is part of the ICA's four day festival of experimental films... odly called the Halloween Film Fest (Thu 07/01 till Sun 10/01).

Saturday 10 January (9pm)

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

It's a New Year, you can keep smoking, eating shit, and sleeping with the wrong people, but if there's one resolution to be made it's to support new UK bands (good for the economy, your soul and will make you more cool and sexy). If you haven't been to see Kaito or Klang already, you are part of the problem; and if you haven't heard of them... oh deary dear. Kaito sprouted from Norwich and Brighton, and while in New York they could conceivably be mobbed, in London we seem too concerned with those damned Americans, and whether Jack White will go to prison or Britney married for lurve. Well thank baby Jesus that the ICA are keeping their eyes shaved. Their new ArtRocker night presents the punk pop gems that were NY Time Out's ones-to-watch in 2003 (and recent Playlouder EP of the week), along with Zone 1's very own Klang. If Kaito are a rather demure Bo'selecta's Kelly Osbourne, addictively sweet while inciting riot, Klang is the bigger sista. Donna (ex Elastica pin-up) sings airily about what ya do when getting fucked gets boring over a rhythm that you could easily mistake for your own heart beat. Go, it's more fun than Slim Fast.

Giveaway: We have two copies of Kaito's EP to give away. They'll go to two randomly picked Flashers who can tell us how many members the band comprises.

Monday 12 January (7 - 9:30pm)

@ Dana Centre, 165 Queens Gate, SW7 (020.7942.4040 ) Tube: South Kensington

One of our fave X-men (not as in movie) is the ever-loving Beast. Both hairy and ape-mannered, the constantly evolving one is both scientific genius and soft-hearted romantic. Unfortunately "real life" seems to denigrate our hairy ancestors. Thus the Dana Centre's Demonic Ape event -- a Beeb Horizon documentary -- with professors Richard Wrangham (primatology) of Harvard and Robert Sussman (anthropology) of Washington University in dialogue with Sanjida O'Connell (producer and director, The Demonic Ape), is out to find out if our aggressions come from our animal nature. Focusing specifically on male aggression, which is statistically higher than the female's, Wrangham and Sussman will duke it out "for" and "against" the male being more aggressive because of our primate link, while O'Connell takes a more sociological approach. With the documentary being screened before the talk and the possibility of "audience participation" -- though the activities are yet to be announced (intrigued?) -- expect your buttons to be pushed and your limits to be tested! Remember: Ape shall not kill ape!

NB: The Horizon programme will air on BBC2 Thu 08/1 at 9pm.

Thursday 15 January (7:30pm)

@ Barbican Centre, Barbican Centre, EC2 (020.7638.8891) Tube: Barbican

Where British period film tends to fill cinematic space with tediously witty dialogue, this film -- a period piece set in Holland in the seventeenth century -- is certainly the Dutch counterpart, substituting silence for dialogue at every possible opportunity. The outcome is a moody and visually evocative description of the circumstances surrounding the creation of Vermeer's most famous painting. Scarlett Johansson (The Horse Whisperer and Lost In Translation) plays Griet, a sensitive, though almost painfully quiet, maid in the artist's house and lends a particular subtlety to the film. Griet's character is afforded a prevailing authority by her unmistakeable likeness to the girl in the original work. Vermeer is played by a characteristically stiff Colin Firth (Bridget Jones' Diary and Pride and Prejudice) who is commissioned to paint the young maid -- much to the distress and dismay of his family, in particular his perpetually pregnant wife. The success of the story is in its narrative minimalism and its refusal to become entirely tangled in the complexities of explicit relationships between characters and their emotional turbulence. The story is ambiguous and intriguing, and the film is beautifully shot. A formidable beginning for director Peter Webber.

NB: After the screening the director and screenwriter (Olivia Hetreed) will discuss the film. For those Flashers that are intrigued and tempted to see the real thing there are two Vermeers on view at the National Gallery, and there'll be short gallery talks on Thu (08/01) at 4pm, Tue (13/01) at 1pm, and Thu (15/01) at 4pm.

Friday 23 January (7:30pm)

@ Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, SE1 (020.7960.4203 or 4242) Tube: Embankment/Rail Waterloo

Another incredible chance to catch the reunited Magic Band since the retirement of the legendary Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, from the greedy music business. The band has recorded Back to the Front on the ATP label, attended both the UK and the US edition of the 2003 ATP festival and also performed at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London. John "Drumbo" French on incredible vocals (along with drums and harmonica) is joined by Mark "Rockette Morton" Boston on bass and Gary "Mantis" Lucas and Denny "Feelers Reebo" Walley on guitars. John's effort in attempting to re-create Captain Beefheart's astonishing and unprecedented four and one half octave range has been so overwhelming that many people still mistake his voice with the original artist influenced by the Mississippi Blues and free/avant-garde jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Mark E. Smith, frontman of The Fall, was the Magic Band's first choice to open their concert in such a big venue. The British post-punk legend is a great fan of the Captain and the combination of these two landmark groups is certainly not to be missed!

NB: This event will sell out so get your tickets fast.

Ends Thursday 29 January

@ Various cinemas across London

A new adaptation of Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street set in modern-day Los Angeles, Bartleby delivers a baffling description of an apathetic riot inside (for once) an almost entirely sympathetic environment. The story, that of an already drearily discombobulated public records firm who takes on a promising new employee with quite unexpected results, is a moderate criticism of the middle echelons of business management and bureaucracy, as well as a Kafka-esque description of the terminal suffering of individual resolve. Although it may be a far cry from the black satire that was Terry Gilliam's Brazil, Bartleby tackles similar issues of human will and functionality within the context of an impossible social contract -- the office. Bartleby, played by a well cast Crispin Glover, begins with the most uncomplicated rejection of the tasks presented to him, and poses a curious portrait of passive aggression. The perfect employee becomes an unlikely and immovable affront to the pleasantries of administrative labour, and finds the single thread that, if pulled, can bring the whole world of clerical administration (not to mention complacent human nature) to its knees...

Ends Saturday 31 January

@ Cabinet, 20a Northburgh St., EC1 (020.7253.5377) Tube: Farringdon/Barbican

London-based artist Mark Leckey's new video Parade, recently exhibited at the Brighton Photo Biennale, recombines the artist's fascination for music, fashion and dandy poses in a circular rhythm. Leckey's videos such as Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore famously feature the rituals of teenage dances, high street label fixation and rave subcultures. The underground elements of nightlife, hi-fi shops in Tottenham Court road, West End designer shops and ambiguously dressed males are this time blended with a visual parade of cover stars; this diorama-like shot is reminiscent of Proust's magic lantern projecting the shadows of his heroes onto the bedroom's walls. Leckey's references hop from high to low culture through invisible leaps, such as the four movements that divide Parade's succession of label fetishes via the strict schema of classic symphony. His love for decadence and its mythological male figures (including Des Essentes or Ludwig of Bavaria) is effortlessly combined with street life, the hallucinogenic nature of dancing and identity articulation through a glittery outfit. Leckey's performance last January at Tate Britain, Big Box Statue Action, included a breathtaking wall of noise that gave his fans unforgettable shivers...

Friday 6 February (7 - 11pm)

@ The Forum, 9-17 Highgate Rd., NW5 (020.7344.0044) Tube: Kentish Town

Spiritualized bring their unique brand of boing-zorp blues back to London's best dirty rock venue tonight. If you like your guitars served fuzzy, your beer served flatly quaffable and your toilets served overflowing, then this is for you. Having pushed their "avant" to far up its own "garde" on recent outings, Jason Pierce's band of merry space rockers have clocked the success of upstart back to basics merchants like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club and embraced the wilful simplicity of their Spacemen 3 roots. The latest long player, Amazing Grace, abandons the intrusive sound effects that marred 2001's Let it Come Down, concentrating on great tunes and raw impassioned playing. A no-frills Spiritualized well suited to a gloriously scuzzy gig pit like the Forum.

Ends Thursday 12 February

@ Various cinemas across London

Cold Mountain almost never got made due to a lack of faith in the project and it is really thanks to the ferocious Harvey Weinstein that we can enjoy this epic production. A period romance, the film also focuses on the atrocities and futility of the American Civil War. For those of you who might be turned off by the idea of another Civil War flick (The Patriot) this film is a chance to see Oscar-worthy performances by Jude Law, the enchanting Nicole Kidman and the chameleon-like Renee Zellweger (she steals the show). Even though the romance is based on a few precious, fleeting moments between Kidman and Law, the film -- despite the somewhat contrived ending -- keeps you engaged all the way through the three and half hours.

NB: The director of Cold Mountain -- Anthony Minghella -- also directed The English Patient and The Talented Mr. Ripley.

Ends Saturday 6 March (Mon to Fri 6 - 8pm; Sat 2 - 6pm; Sun 10am - 6pm)

@ parade ground , London Institute, Millbank, Atterbury St., SW1 (07775.794.080) Tube: Pimlico

Toilets and scatological references in general have made appearances in the oeuvres of the most distinguished artists of the past century: think Duchamp's urinal and Piero Manzoni's cans of shit for starters. Monica Bonvicini -- whose first UK solo show was recently held at Modern Art Oxford -- has, however, gone a step further: a fully functioning "public" toilet. The loo is surrounded by one-way mirrored glass, so that one may discretely survey one's surroundings from the comfort of one's throne. Positioned on the edge of the construction site of what will be Chelsea College of Art and Design's swanky new HQ -- and what once was Millbank Penitentiary for criminals awaiting deportation to Australia -- and opposite the new entrance to Tate Britain, Don't miss a sec makes allusions to both spaces. Mimicking Minimalist sculpture, the silver cube/toilet can easily be read as an irreverent gesture towards the Tate; a wry acknowledgement of the popular opinion that "modern art is shit". On a more serious note, the structure's origin as a prison toilet harks back to the site's more unsavoury past and Bonvicini's interest in exposing the oppressive aspects of architecture, as well as dignifying members of society whose contribution to visual culture is often undervalued -- in this case, construction workers.

NB: The toilet is intended for use by both construction workers and art folk, although given the limited "opening hours", one might well be advised to seek less enlightening pissoires in which to spend one's pennies (hint: the Tate's loos are perfectly decent).