Like a motif from a Thomas Pynchon novel or an Alan Moore comic book, the letter V keeps cropping up this week: Violas, Vauxhalls and Van Sant all feature in our survey of the best London has to offer the pauper over the next seven days.
Friday: Viola player (viola-ist?) Eniko Magyar and pianist Tadashi Imai are performing a selection of classical pieces written for their respective instruments. It'll be good inspiration for the forthcoming Street Piano project. At Regent Hall, 1pm, free.
Saturday: Up at the Boogaloo in Highgate, it's all about user-generated content with an old-school twist: they're celebrating the 5th Bring & Share birthday, with punters invited as usual to bring their favourite vinyl for spinning by resident DJs Helix and Rapture, the Camden Slags, and Brett Maverick. From 6pm till late, free.
Sunday: A car boot fair with a slight difference at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane today. The Vauxhall Art Car Boot Fair features affordable art flogged out the back of car boots, with pieces by the likes of Sir Peter Blake, Gavin Turk and Bob & Roberta Smith to be snapped up. From 12pm, £3 entry.
Monday: Milk, Gus Van Sant's overwrought melodrama on the life of Harvey Milk, America's first democratically elected gay politician, pushed all the right buttons with the Academy, and against all expectations Sean Penn beat Mickey Rourke for the Best Actor gong. Catch it tonight at the Roxy Bar and Screen and see if they made the right choice. 8pm, £3 / free to Roxy members.
Tuesday: Such are the times we live in, that respected academics are jumping on Marx's bandwagon and heaping more dirt onto capitalism's casket. Yet what comes after this crisis? In a lecture snappily titled Capitalism 3.0, Prof. Dani Rodrik will speak on the development of capitalism's first two great periods, that of Adam Smith followed by JM Keynes, and explore how it needs to be reinvented for the 21st century. At the London School of Economics, from 6.30pm, free.
Wednesday: This summer's heavyweight history tome is D-Day: The Battle for Normandy, Anthony Beevor's remarkable dissection of that historic day 65 years ago, a book so rich in depth and detail that Max Hastings, who has written extensively on the subject, has admitted that his own corpus was now obsolete. Beevor will be discussing his work at Waterstones Piccadilly tonight at 6.30. Tickets are £3, but are refundable against a copy of the book.
Thursday: The Iris School's Greek Drama Project, part of the Fringe festival down at the Scoop in More London, will see local primary students tackling a triumvirate of Greek plays: the comedic pair of Clouds and Birds by Aristophanes are a perfect lunchtime treat at 1pm, while Bacchae by Euripides will be performed at 6pm. Free, but get there early, and as always in the (not unlikely) event of rain, the performances will be cancelled.
