Hypnotic Control
As a theatrical hypnotist, John-Ivan Palmer will make you crow like a rooster and chug like a wash machine. He will suspend a lady by her nape and Achilles tendons between two folding chairs and sledge-hammer a cinder brick on her tummy until her navel fills with grit. Simultaneously, with the other hand, he memorizes a complete issue of TIME Magazine at a glance, and is quizzed on specific pages by awestruck folks in the audience.
By Tom Bradley.
47 Sanford Road
I chose Sandford because of a photograph I once had. In it, I’m standing outside number 47 with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other; my attention has been taken by something out-of-shot and I’m looking to one side, at a cabbage white butterfly perhaps or neighbour sitting on her doorstep. I’m impossibly young, louche, invincible; I have the look of someone who has just struck an exclusive deal with the world that has left them impervious to the buffeting vicissitudes of life. I hadn’t seen the photo in years but that wasn’t the point: I’ll always remember it, just as I’ll always remember tying my partner to the futon in the red-bulbed attic at the top of 47’s narrow stairs or freewheeling past the mosque as we rode to feed the geese by the goose-shitty bandstand in the park; just as I’ll always remember buying handfuls of fruit and veg from the market on a Saturday morning – once we mashed a bowl of blackening avocados and had it on buttered toast – or visiting friends on afternoons that stretched round the earth like sun-warmed light or love.
By Charlie Hill.